Fantasy trade rejected...

Trade scheme, as "reported" by thechicagodope.com

...because it's way too broad.  Anyway, I have Baja California Sur playing defense/special teams for the Fluttering Horde next season.  Maybe just trade the Texas GOP for Acapulco?

Anyway, here's some amusing snark from the Chicago Dope: Texas traded to Mexico in four-state deal.

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Wearing number two for New York: Anthony Weiner

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY)

Colombian defender Andrés Escobar

It's weird how the human mind works sometimes.  Or maybe it's just my mind.  ¿Quién sabe?

I've been trying to figure out exactly what to make of the case of Anthony Weiner.  At first, I dismissed Andrew Breitbart's charges that the New York City congressman had sent pictures of his crotch to complete strangers.  I figured that it was another sleazy Breitbart mind trick.  Rep. Weiner first claimed that someone hacked his Twitter account and sent the offending picture.  Since I don't use Twitter enough to know much about it, that claim seemed reasonable.  When Weiner later refused to deny that the picture was of his crotch, well, I stopped believing him.

What we have, then, is a congressman who sent a picture of his own genitals to women who may or may not have wanted to see it and lied about it.  In the process, Rep. Weiner didn't prance like a chihuahua puppy into Nancy Pelosi's doghouse.  He didn't just jepoardize own career and possibly his marriage.  He has probably deprived the progressive movement of a voice -- his -- that it could really use in the House of Representatives.

And of what other spectacle did this sorry episode remind me today?  An own goal in soccer.  Check that:  a specific own goal, scored almost 17 years ago.

SB Nation's World Cup Blog has an excellent overview of the tragedy of Andrés Escobar, but here's a short version.  Colombia came to the U.S. as a dark-horse favorite to win the 1994 World Cup, only to open with a shocking 3-1 loss to Romania.  Needing to defeat the host Americans to keep their hopes alive, Colombia instead allowed an overwhelming U.S. counterattack at minute 35.  Escobar, an emerging superstar as a defender, tried to deflect John Harkes's pass out of danger -- only to do this instead:



The ensuing 2-1 loss to the Americans eliminated Colombia, and Escobar got the blame.  [Not fair! The U.S. would have found some other way to win that day.]  Ten days later, some angry Colombian shot him dead outside Medellín.

Colombian football has yet to recover.

The more I think about, the more eerie the parallel appears.  Like Andrés Escobar, Anthony Weiner was a rising star in his field.  Like Escobar's mistake in Pasadena, Weiner's miscues may end in severe damage to his cause.  I just hope some crazy person doesn't decide to make the comparison complete.

It will be bad enough for the progressive movement if Anthony Weiner's career (or his marriage) is all that dies.

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Friday Double: The smell of her own ego

I've avoided discussing former half-term governors on this blog, simply because some of them get far more attention than they deserve.  I can understand why Illinois governor emeritus Rod Blagojevich hogs media attention; he's fortunate to have convinced TV networks to help with his massive legal bills.

That brunette atop this post, however, is another matter.  She's not just a teabagger, she's an outright Dominionist, someone who would have the United States transform into the neo-Crusader theocracy depicted in Julian Comstock.  It's only a remark she made in her attempt to hijack Rolling Thunder this weekend that prompted me to even mention her (or Blago):

I love that smell of the emissions.

Yes, I also loved the smell of those emissions, when they came from my grandfather's well appointed Glastron boat... forty years ago.  It was like sniffing glue.  By the time I turned seven, I realized that gasoline fumes weren't the best thing to be breathing.  Evidently, lady, you never picked up on that.  There are way too many of those gas fumes floating around, pumping out way too much carbon; and, like too many on your side of the aisle, you don't care about that any more than Lt. Col. Kilgore worried about napalm in Apocalypse Now.

On the plus side, the whole episode reminded me of a couple of songs that pretty well capture the most recently failed Vice-Presidential candidate.  When I first saw this hilarious bit of preening from  narcissistic Gaston, the villain in Beauty and the Beast, I knew that the whole movie would be a winner, unlike most of Disney's animated output from the 1990s.



If that described Caribou Barbie so perfectly, I wouldn't have needed this much darker piece from Little Jackie to also describe her.  It's not something I usually let anywhere my playlists -- the music is annoying enough without the lyrics -- but it fits too well today to resist.  Enjoy.

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NBA Finals that suck. Like this year's.

Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images

Let's get one thing straight: this year's Miami Heat is not a championship squad.  They will win the NBA finals, anyway, with what amounts to a three-man rotation.  [Mike Bibby?  Joel Anthony?  Comrade, please.]

In the first place, this season didn't have any championship-level teams.  The Lakers have collapsed, the Mavericks haven't played at full strength for most of the season, the Spurs and Celtics have both passed their expiration dates, and the Thunder are too young.  The same goes for the Bulls, whose bench had the strength to overcome Miami's Big Three until rookie center Omer Asik fractured a leg.

Now that I think of it, none of the Heat's playoff opponents finished at full strength.  Asik's departure left the Bulls too weak to keep up, one round after the Celtics lost Rajon Rondo in their series against Miami.  In the Finals, whose second game tips off tonight, Dallas is missing Caron Butler, someone who's had great success defending LeBron James.

The other reason the Heat will win is that their cynical style of basketball is impressing the referees.  Your offense doesn't need to be efficient if you can trick the refs into constantly calling fouls on the other team.  It works for Miami because, unlike earlier implementations of Pat Riley's "force basketball" stratagem, this one's players can shoot free throws.  To his credit, Riley also remembered to get players who can defend this time.  [For that, Anthony gets my full marks.]  But just because the Heat are better at bullying their opponents than the 1990s Knicks doesn't mean I like them any better.

Not that I'm any fan of the Mavericks.  In the past, I haven't had the energy to detest Mark Cuban, but was it really necessary to stiff Doris Burke after dismissing Oklahoma City?  Maybe I'll like the Mavs better next year, but this just ticked me off.  It leaves me wishing that neither team could win the Finals.  In fact, I rather feel like I'm being asked to choose between the Ku Klux Klan and Westboro Baptist.  At least that matchup is providing some amusement.

Naw, I think I'll catch the Canucks-Bruins series instead.

Update (D-Day + 67y):  Okay, this series may not feature the best teams ever, but it now appears to be a contest between evenly matched teams.  The Mavs may have moved my forgiveness date way up before this comes to a close.

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Late Friday Double: Here, have some popcorn.

I'm not sure what to make of Harold Camping's prophecy marketing campaign for his impressively wealthy radio network has been deafening.  Given that natural disasters just don't respect time-zone boundaries, his forecast of worldwide earthquakes was ridiculous on its face.  If there must be a Rapture, I'd rather see it occur this way.

On the other hand, I did discover this version of "Popcorn" this morning.  Even though the Orquesta Cubana De Música Moderna covered Gershon Kingsley's famous instrumental way back in 1972, it's still a surer sign of the apocalypse than anything Family Radio could put out.


Here's the version that became an international hit, from Hot Butter.


My cat Scooter was watching the Sharks-Canucks game rather intently last night.  That's about as much rapture as I expect to witness this weekend.

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That's no dog whistle

When New Gingrich calls Barack Obama "the food-stamp president," should that be interpreted as a racist dog-whistle, as some cable-news anchors are suggesting?  No amount of GOP standard-issue proselytizing about the benefits of tinkle-down economics can hide the fact that applying the term "food stamp" to a non-white politician is just plain racist.  Yes, white people do use food stamps, but when politicians invoke that term -- or any other phrase that implies poverty -- they're almost always hoping that potential voters first think of African Americans.  It's racist code, and that makes it red meat for racist neo-Confederates who invariably support demagogues like Gingrich.

Of course it's not a dog whistle, you cable-news morons.  Its a f*cking bullhorn, mounted atop a f*cking SUV that's clogging up a busy freeway at rush hour, blaring its f*cking racially-coded message to commuters who'd rather be listening to music.

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Indulgences from TBS (both of them)

Things I should totally hate, but didn't:

Three years ago, in the head offices of Warner Brothers, some people were celebrating the brilliant scheme they had just devised to draw viewers away from Iron Man.  It wouldn't just be an action movie, it would be a live-action version of Speed Racer -- yes, that silly 1967 anime.  Better yet, it would be directed by the Wachowski boys, who would fill the frames with enough CGI effects to rival Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.  How, wondered these WB marketing whizzes to themselves could this plan to beat Iron Man possibly fail?

Um, because no one wanted to watch a Speed Racer flick that looked like a Sky Captain ripoff?  As someone who loved the original anime as a kid, I might have been in the target audience; but even I wanted no part of this.  Not unless someone else was willing to pay for the ticket, the overpriced concession food and the small military unit to drag me away from the screens that were showing Iron Man.  Helloooo, $30 million dollar loss.

Fast forward to this weekend.  I never developed the desire to fork over cash to even rent the Speed Racer DVD, but the movie was airing on basic-cable TBS, good ol' Turner Broadcasting System.  That's not costing anyone any extra, so why not give it a try?

As it turned out, the movie did have its positives.  The casting, especially of John Goodman and Susan Sarandon as Speed Racer's parents, worked nicely.  Corinne Orr, who voiced Trixie in the U.S. dub of the original anime, made an amusing cameo as one of the dozens of race-car announcers, as did real-life play-by-play man Andrés Cantor.  [Sadly, no shouts of goooooooooooolllllllll!.]

Generally, the movie's tone stayed faithful to the anime -- but that turned out to be its biggest problem.  Snake Oiler, the Monster Car, Inspector Detector and several new-for-the-movie antagonists would each have been worth two or three anime episodes, but the Wachowskis packed them all into a 135-minute flick.  Even without the annoying visuals, it was literally too much for even composer Michael Giacchino, normally a terrific film scorer, to handle.  Hell, Richard Wagner couldn't have scored this mess.

On balance, I didn't like Speed Racer, and I can't recommend it, but nor did I hate it.  I did change the channel at one point, to catch the season premiere of Aqua Unit Patrol Squad 1.  That's 15 minutes of my life that I did, in fact, get back.

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Also snaring my attention during a recent channel-surfing sesson:  a Ninja Warrior marathon on G4.  I don't like extreme sports, even though real athletes play them.  And unlike the Speed Racer movie, I refuse to watch embarrassing obstacle-course shows like Wipeout, even on free TV.  The Japanese TBS, the Tokyo Broadcasting System, combined these in 1997 into a biannual special called Sasuke.  The original episodes are three-hour TV affairs in the homeland, but here in the U.S., G4 parcels them out in half-hour episodes of Ninja Warrior.

Ninja Warrior works mainly because the four-part obstacle course is genuine.  Of 100 contestants, maybe ten even reach Stage 2, and they are, to a man, genuine athletes.  [Some are even Olympic athletes.]  If even five of those survivors make it to Stage 3, it's an accomplishment.  Some tournaments don't even bother with Stage 4, because there's no one left to try it.  Every tournament has its pretenders, including Japanese celebrities; but even they are a cut above the poor fools who get humiliated on the likes of Wipeout.  If you want to avoid them, fine; just tune in five minutes late.  I didn't expect to find Ninja Warrior compelling, but now I have something to watch on G4.

New episodes are airing, and that actually sucks.  I'm going to have to choose every Friday between this and new episodes of Discovery Channel's Dual Survival.  Nuts!

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