All posts by Matthew Callan

Life In These United States

This Plan Is So Stupid, It Has to Work!

Years ago, there was an article in the Onion entitled, “Romantic-Comedy Behavior Gets Real-Life Man Arrested”. As with most late-90s Onion material, it was letter-perfect in its execution. Movies routinely depict characters doing things that would get an actual person some serious jail time. Or at the very least, would not be considered brave or charming, but just downright creepy.

The Onion article was the first thing I thought of when I read this story in The New York Times. The “plot” reads like a bad 80s action movie starring Patrick Swayze (I realize this sentence is redundant). Except instead of becoming the most famous bouncer in America, the protagonist of this story gets a lot of people thrown in jail, ruins a whole bunch of reputations, and inspires millions of dollars in lawsuits.

A federal agent calling himself Sergeant Bill showed up in a small town in Missouri, an area plagued by a methamphetamine problem (in your SAT drug analogies, meth : rural
America :: crack : ghetto). Sergeant Bill vowed to clean up this one-horse town, and the town, which had applied for federal law enforcement grants, was grateful for his help. With the help of local police, he used strongarm tactics to put the dealers out of business
(this is where you’d put the montage of bad guys getting busted). Peace and quiet returned to this sleepy village.

Except a few months into his crusade, it turned out that the “federal agent” was nothing of the sort. Sergeant Bill had deceived local police and politicians through a labyrinthine series of ruses, aided by some collaboration and childlike levels of gullibility. Sergeant Bill had no federal connections whatsoever. He wasn’t even being paid by anyone. He just showed up in the town to smash some drug dealers’ skulls, and the entranced local officials followed him merrily as if he were the Pied Piper of Ass Kicking.

Continue reading This Plan Is So Stupid, It Has to Work! →

Baseball, Media Morons

Willie Randolph’s Dismissal Was Totally Unfair to Mike Lupica

lupica2.jpgEven coming from a franchise with a long history of bad personnel moves, the Willie Randolph firing really takes the cake. How could the Mets be so disrespectful as to fire their manager after three am eastern time, when I’m sound asleep?

Maybe Willie deserved to go, and maybe he didn’t. I do know one thing for certain: there was no reason to treat me this way.

If the Mets were intent on firing Randolph midseason, they had numerous opportunities to do so before Tuesday. After losing three out of four at home to the lowly Nationals. After being swept in San Diego by an even worse Padres team. Even after the Billy Wagner-assisted losses to the Diamondbacks. Any of these occasions would’ve been better times to hand Willie his pink slip. Preferably before lunch.

But canning him in the wee hours of the morning shows a disgraceful lack of regard for my schedule.

Sure, firing Willie might turn things around. It might be the wake-up call this team has needed so desperately since the collapse of last September. It might ensure more fannies in the seats when CitiField opens next year.

But did the Wilpons ever stop to think about me, having to drive into the Daily News office on two hours’ worth of sleep? No, they had no thought for anyone but themselves. Just like the inconsiderate jackasses who got into a three-car pileup on the Merrick this morning. Stop-and-go traffic from Trumbull all the way to the New England Thruway. Thanks a lot, guys.

If Mets ownership had given a second thought before bringing down the axe on Willie Randolph, maybe they should’ve spared one for their fans, who’ve been forced to suffer one indignity after another in the past year. Now, after Randolph’s ill-time, badly managed firing, the fans have to contend with yet another wound on their collective psyche.

A wound almost as deep as the one on my index finger, which I got while trying to butter an English muffin this morning. I was so tired I didn’t even know I’d cut myself until I saw the blood on my kitchen countertop. It really smarts.

Willie Randolph certainly isn’t blameless for the Mets’ struggles this year. But not enough fire has been directed at general manager Omar Minaya. He constructed a team with too many brittle veterans, one almost guaranteed to break down. He may have gotten Johan Santana, but he decimated the farm system to do so, leaving the team without serviceable backups once the inevitable injuries occurred.

He’s also the person who couldn’t wait until today to fire Willie. What’s the rush? You could’ve done it first thing in the morning California time, which would’ve been around noon back east. That would give me plenty of time to file my column and get back home before Jeopardy starts.

Instead, I have to fix a pot of coffee at four in the morning so I can stay up and wait for the stupid beat writers to call me back with their little tidbits of info from Anaheim. I hate beat writers. Think they’re so tough just ’cause they go in the locker room.

And there’s nothing to watch at four in the morning either, not even on cable. I’d pop in a DVD, but then I’d have to find the right input on the TV. My kids have, like, seven different video game systems. S-Video, HDMI–I don’t even know what those things mean.

Is Fred Wilpon going to explain to me what HDMI stands for?

Now my editor tells me he wants me to fly out to LA and cover the team in person during their hour of turmoil. So I have to cancel a golf game at Bethpage on Sunday. Bethpage! It’s easier to get a table at Momofuku than it is to get a tee time at Bethpage.

Can Fred Wilpon explain to me how I’m supposed to squash other writers’ stories from the West Coast?

This is the kind of royal screwup that can damage fans’ faith in their team. In 1977, I was fresh out of college and working as a typesetter at a small newspaper in upstate New York. It was just after midnight. We’d just finished setting the sports section, and it was ready to go to press, when news came over the wire that the Mets had traded Tom Seaver to the Reds. That move decimated the franchise for years, and they would never truly recover until the mid-1980s.

Mets fans never forgave general manager M. Donald Grant, and the team’s clueless ownership, for trading away their most beloved player. Me, I’ll never forgive Grant for forcing me to reset the entire sports section all over again. And this was back before desktop publishing, you know! I didn’t have Quark or InDesign to help me!

Maybe what this team needs isn’t a new manager, or a new GM, but new ownership. Owners that know what the fans have been through. Owners who won’t throw gasoline on a burning fire.

Owners who won’t make me have to pound Red Bull at 11 in the morning.

For all he’s done for his city, Mike Lupica deserves at least that much.

Parental Guidance

Self-Imposed Rules for Not Talking About Cats

I don’t talk about The Baby on this site very often. Sure, I’ll refer to certain things that parenthood has exposed me to. I’ll opine on how having a kid gives me new perspectives on things. But for the most part, I don’t like talking about anything she actually does.

The reason is that, whoever you might be, I’m sure you do not give a shit. If being married means creating a series of endless in-jokes that no one else in the world will ever have a chance to be a part of, then that’s what being a parent is like, times a thousand.

Like, when you’re hanging with a friend that you’ve known for a little bit, and he’s hanging out with guys he knows from way back, and they spend the whole night reciting disembodied lines from episodes in their collective past. And they’re laughing their heads off while you think What the fuck are these idiots talking about? So they start explaining it to you, but the explanation has so much back story and footnotes to it that you’d prefer to remain in the dark.

Prime example: last Saturday, The Baby climbed into our bed while we were still trying to sleep. So I pretended I was still asleep with exaggerated, cartoony snoring sounds. The Baby thought this was funny, so she started to imitate it in a way that only a baby can imitate something she doesn’t understand. For a few days, every time I said “Go to sleep!”, she’d make a similar noise. But every time she did it, it was as if she was making a copy of her previous attempt, so after a few days of this, it sounded less like a snore and more like she was clearing her throat of phlegm.

I thought this was hysterical, so I tell her to “go to sleep” every time she’s been around friends in the past week. Of course, these people never heard the several days’ transition between Snore Noise and Weird Hacking Noise. They just hear her make a horrible sound and wonder if she’s feeling okay. There’s no way they could think this is funny, because they would literally have to have been with us the entire previous week in order to “get it”. The payoff is so small that it’s not worth the setup.

Continue reading Self-Imposed Rules for Not Talking About Cats →