Category Archives: Pointless Nostalgia

Baseball, Pointless Nostalgia, Sports

This Week in Baseball Death

ellis.jpg* Dock Ellis, 63, of cirrhosis of the liver. Twelve-year veteran of the major leagues, with most of those seasons spent as a starting pitcher for Pittsburgh. Went 19-9 for the 1971 world champion Pirates. Went to the Yankees in the same deal that brought Willie Randolph to NY, and notched a 17-8 record for the 1976 AL pennant winners. Also pitched for the Rangers, A’s, and Mets.

Oh, and he pitched a no-hitter while out of his gourd on LSD.

Or so he claimed 14 years after the fact. I tend to be suspicious of people who add sexy backstory a decade-and-half later, especially when that backstory involves narcotics. Ex-drug users don’t have the most reliable memories. But Ellis’ story is so good that I want it to be true.

The story goes that during a West Coast trip in 1970, Ellis thought the Pirates had an off day. So he decided to spend it relaxing in his hometown of LA. And what could be more relaxing than mimicking the effects of schizophrenia with lysergic assitance?

Unfortunately, about an hour into his trip, Ellis’ female companion read the newspaper and discovered that the Pirates didn’t have a day off. In fact, they were playing a doubleheader. In San Diego. Oh, and he was supposed to start game 1. Oops! I wonder what on earth could have made Ellis so forgetful?

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Boob Tubery, Pointless Nostalgia, The Funny

The Warp and Woof of Ruining Your Child’s Life

You will warp your children. It’s an inevitable byproduct of the parenting process, just like how you can’t make a hot dog without two or three rat turds finding their way into the mix.

Some warping is a good thing, in the long run. A completely unwarped, innocent child would grow up to be one of those scary, infantile grown ups who’s way too into Harry Potter. If you’re lucky, you warp your child so that they have a healthy skepticism about The Ways of the World. If you’re unlucky, they grow up to collect other people’s skin. But in all likelihood, you won’t know how you’ve warped your child for good.

I can trace my own warping–positive and negative–to a lot of things. But I know that parental TV viewing played a major part. Particularly, my dad’s fondness for Monty Python. He never forced me to watch it, but it was on in the house often, back in the days when Python was a PBS staple.

I remember liking it a lot when I was way too young to know what I was watching. I had to ask my dad to translate certain Britishisms like pram and lorry and explain allusions to historic events I hadn’t learned about yet. But I liked the really weird cartoons, and the fact that in any given episode you’d probably see some boobs (PBS was the best friend to a kid without cable in the 80s).

Was I destined to be a nerd anyway, and annoy the shit out of my friends by repeating sketches they’d never see? Yeah, probably. But the fact that I could recite “The Lumberjack Song” at age 7 definitely sped up the process. Was it my father’s intention to bruise my fragile psyche with anagrams and cross dressing? I doubt it. Still, it happened.

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Baseball, Pointless Nostalgia, Videocracy

Roger That

New Site Update: Them YouTube clips below will totally not work. Not sure who’s to blame, MLB or the Rocket. In either case, this post is provided for historical purposes  only.

When I was an MFA student, one of my workshop leaders, a writer of some renown (brag), told me that villains must be understood. Our class was wondering out loud if there could ever be a Great Bush Era Novel. He said that if such a novel were ever written, it couldn’t be an angry screed or political tract.

Even if you were no fan of George W. Bush (which I doubt anyone in the room was), your book couldn’t succeed on blind hatred. You could not portray Bush as a mustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash-type, or an incurious dolt. For such a book to work, he said, you would have to find some way to sympathize with him. Anything less would both fail as fiction and
trivialize an entire administration.

That doesn’t mean pardoning or condoning The Evil That Men Do. But villains in black hats are boring. Gray is much better, if scarier, because it makes us realize that given the right circumstances, virtually anyone can find themselves doing unspeakable things.

I dredge this up in the wake of the Roger Clemens debacle. Anyone who reads this site should know my feelings on the Rocket. I’ve poked him with a stick once or twice. Several times, in fact. In my mental Hall of Infamy, he’s one of a very select group of people I’d like to go away and never see again. If he became a hermit and lived out the rest of his days in a cave somewhere, I wouldn’t shed a tear.

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