For Ms. Dee...

From Ms. Dee, in the comments of the last post:

Can you come up with another brilliant blog entry? I really can't stand looking at Carrot Top anymore:)

Is this any better? Weasel asked innocently.

Just a Few Months Until the Grapefruit League...

Thank you, Bobby Kielty, thank you.

Mid Series (?) Musings

Ahh, Boston vs. the house softball team of some anonymous charismatic evangelical megachurch (or at least that's what their uniforms and haircuts suggest). Of such match ups Word Series magic is made...

I see the Colorado fans have decided to adopt the towel thing:

Although to me it looks like a white flag. Nice to see a change from the flags one normally associates with the name "Coors" however:


At this point I hear you ask- "why is he so bitter? His team is 3 games up in the World Series and very likely to close the deal tonight. Why hate on the Colorado fans?"

Because chums, I find it bitterly ironic that for me to get a ticket- 1 ticket- to see Boston involves hours of fruitless labour at the computer, intense travel planning, and an over-the-odds purchase from a scalper. Fenway has been sold out for every game since the 2004 season. Meanwhile Coors Field is half-empty most of the year but now- quelle surprise- everyone in Denver is a Rockies fan. But, please note, not so much of a fan that they brought their own signs in to the ball park but rather gamely held the pre-printed banners that one assumes were created by the Rockies PR team. How lame where those banner-signs? How lame are those fans? 50,000 seats and they were still out-cheered by the small New England contingent. Nothing good has come out of Denver since Mork.

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Tim McCarver and Joe Buck of Fox TV and Joe Morgan and John Miller of ESPN are killing me. Lads, if Manny couldn't field he'd be a DH. If Papi couldn't play 1st base it is unlikely that Francona would have started him there. There is no such thing as a "gyroball"- it is a barely breaking screw ball. Pedroia is actually 5'9" and almost 200lbs- hardly a midget. While all outs are important, to describe the third batter striking out in the first with no runs in and nobody on base as a "crucial out" is a bit hyperbolic, so stop doing it every time. McCarver, I don't who told you to base your on-mic persona on Fred Willard, but I can assure you they were putting you on. Joe Morgan: nobody wants to know about all the work you do for charity during the game, tell us about it afterwards via a press release or something. Buck, you are a puppet who trades on your father's name. Miller, get off the valium- you sound like an avuncular Steven Wright.

And all of you: I know you see a lot of teams throughout the season and therefore may not be up on the intricacies of the Sox and the Rockies, but please stop pre-scipting your talking points before the game, I beg you.

You would think that if Fox and ESPN would muscle out the local broadcast networks we fans have been watching and listening to all season long they would make an effort to be either watchable or listenable, but no.

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Finally, it is wicked odd to be watching a Boston team that doesn't resemble the Titanic for the second time in 4 years. Something snapped in New England back in 2004 and I think I like the way it broke.

This Is Not A Baseball Blog 19: Special Bonus Eve of the World Series Edition

Today's looky-likey, as suggested by my spousal unit:

The surprisingly tall (2 feet, 2 inches) Scout Mouse-Weasel, scrappy brawler with barely any hair;

The surprisingly tall (5 feet, 9 inches) Dustin Pedroia, scrappy brawler with barely any hair.

On an unrelated note, here are some of the most recent keyword searches that lead people to Wisdom Weasel:

i have scrubbed a carpet and ruined it. reptilians king juan carlos. what can i use om my carpet to get rid of human urine smell. flomax ad with the sausage. go see bruce springsteen before he has his accident. east midlands england's new jersey. finger goggles.

And my favorite:

genuine bra tickling beans. Keep on googling, weirdos.

This Is Not A Baseball Blog 18

Nice to see the long lost baseball playing Wilson brother back at Fenway last night to throw out the first pitch:

Why the 2007 Red Sox are a team of Destiny

Some of you may recall that I have been involved in a long and drawn out baseball bet with my chum Bill Norris (late of the 5 boroughs and now in Austin). Bill is a fan of the New York Yankees while I root for the Boston Red Sox. This is a rivalry along the lines of the Tamil/Sinhalese conflict in Sri Lanka, except neither American city conducts naval raids on the other- yet.

Despite beating the Yankees for first place in the American League Eastern Division the Red Sox conspired to lose the last regular season series between the two teams. As per the terms of our bet, Bill thus earned the right to inflict a forfeit on me, to whit:

Weasel still owes me for the final Yanks/Sox series of the year.

I had a hard time coming up with his punishment this time, putting on my Professor Hat, I think what I'd like is a 1,000 word essay on why, exactly, the 2007 Red Sox are a team of destiny, why they are clearly the best team in baseball and why, of course, there is no way they can lose the World Series this year....Hopefully, this will provide the jujitsu needed to actually keep the Sox from celebrating a victory over either Cleveland or the Rockies.

OK:

Why the 2007 Red Sox are a team of Destiny
© Weaselhack, Ltd: Essays to Order While U Wait

Would you bet against the Red Sox? Would you take a chance on the once-lovable-losers-turned annoying-arrogant-New-England-sports-Brahmin's screwing it up? The curse (what curse?) was destroyed in 2004 and Boston were revealed for what they were and are: the second largest payroll in baseball, packed with talent and playing in a ball park more rigged than a Malaysian soccer match. Of course the Sox are supposed to win it all, the same way the Patriots are destined to ruin football for a generation for all Americans who live south of Connecticut and west of Lake Champlain.

Because really what is the Red Sox as underdogs myth but a fantastic piece of marketing? The Sox- by virtue of their wealth and offensive weapons- are the United States. Stacked up against the Soviet Union (the Yankees) people outside of New England were prepared to cheer on the forces of freedom (the Sox). Playing some burned out old tire factory full of boneheaded face painting Indian-minstrels like Cleveland, we don't come off so well (in this tortured analogy Cleveland is Grenada). People like me who live up here among the frosted flakes of WASPy/Ellis Island intermarriage don't give a shit that our team is no longer no better than second place. The same attitude that makes the rest of the country irrationally hate presidential candidates from our neighborhood makes us great sports fans, and makes our teams win (the Bruins and the Celtics are just slow learners but they'll get there).

The rest of the country (poor bastards) has tornadoes, dust bowls, creationism, dove hunting, and forest fires. We have Acadia National Park, the nation's first sunrise every day, cheap lobster, maple syrup, Mount Washington, Marconi Beach, Burlington, Harvard AND Yale, marshmallow fluff, Maaaaahky Maaahk, Sam Adams beer, moose, Florida for winter breaks, and now the winning ways of the Patriots and the Red Sox . No wonder they hate us when we aren't playing New York.

By Bill's reckoning, the enforced yet unfiltered arrogance of the preceding paragraphs should bring out the deus ex machina to punish me for such a display of hubris. But life is not a Greek tragedy (unless you are a Greek person with perpetual bad luck. Then life is a Greek tragedy tinged with irony). And even if it were, and the Cleveland Indians (named in honor of Louis Sockalexis, a Penobscot from Maine- score one more for New England sports) beat the Red Sox this evening, I still maintain that Boston is a team of destiny. For victory takes many forms and while there is every chance the Sox will be denied World Series rings they did achieve another triumph; the toppling of that old fraud Joe Torre.

Torre had the easiest job in sports. As manager of baseball's Blackwater all he had to do was send out the most talented collection of hired hands ever assembled outside the craft services trailer on a Young Guns movie and hope that whatever glimmer of a soul his players had had been consumed by the poisonous power of their Darth Vader-like batting helmets. If Torre was missing a particular talent set, all he had to do was sidle up to Brian Cashman and ask him to go buy him someone: truly, he was the Veruca Salt of baseball management. His sole managerial talent appeared to be walking slowly to the mound so he could shake his pendulous jowls and dog-penis nose at some hapless mercenary of a pitcher, taking the ball so that he could send in a ambidextrous sidewinder with an eye patch the Yankees acquired to solely face batter X or Y but only on Wednesdays and only at home and then only if Don Mattingly had eaten a king cone 2 hours prior to the game.

Despite all of this, and despite Torre's never-ending parade of natty short sleeved nylon cap-sleeved warm up "shackets", the Yankees still managed to lose the division to the Red Sox and their ALDS to a gaggle of cut-rate Venezuelans, the poor man's Torrii Hunter, and a man with the nickname "Pronk". Thus Joe got offered $5 million for 2008 which he promptly declared an insult and stomped off to tend to the "Gulliani 08" signs in the front yard of his Staten Island shitbox. America, you are welcome.

Unlike the Colorado Rockies, Boston is not a made-up team playing in uniforms that appeared to have been lettered by a 1980s shopping mall font designer, sucking down oxygen in the dugout and playing in the discount-rated National League. Unlike the Cleveland Indians' fans, we don't feel the need to rip off the Pittsburgh Steelers' towel thing or Marge Schottenheimer's casual racism. Finally, unlike the New York Yankees, our star player isn't going into a contract year with the label "Mr. April, Miss October" hanging over his head. So come what may tonight I can put my hand on my heart and declare truthfully that the Red Sox, faltering bats and wild pitching included, are the best team in baseball even if we lose.

Believe

October 17, 2004. Down 3-0 in the American League Championship Series, facing a sweep by the New York Yankees. Destroyed 19-8 in game 3, and down 4-3 going into the 9th. Kevin Millar walks. Dave Roberts comes into pinch run. Bill Mueller at the plate; first pitch, Roberts steals second. Mueller singles, Roberts scores, game tied. As shown above, David Ortiz smashes a 2-run homer in the 12th- Sox win and stop the bleeding.

They have done it before. They MUST do it again on Thursday. No matter how banged up, bruised, or bewilldered you are Boston, swing those frigging bats!

From the Boston Globe- On the edge of elimination

This Week....

I promised myself that I would write about both the pending England vs. South Africa rugby world cup final and the raw deal Native Americans seem to get when trying to combat casual racism this week. Two disparate subjects to cover, it is almost Wednesday, and I have a rather busy remainder of the week. Who knows, you might yet be spared. In the interim, here's proof that while your Porsches and your Jags might claim to be girl magnets, real men drive their wives' Subarus:

What looks like Frankenstein attacking an infant is actually me changing my daughter's nappy/diaper.

Peace and Historically Themed Disco Tunes

Proof, if proof were needed, that my love of Boney M is not just a kitsch affectation but rather based in my admiration of novel geo-political stratagems:

Boney M' on Georgia's frontline

Georgia has hired a member of 1970s pop group Boney M, famous for songs like Daddy Cool and Rasputin, in its fight for control of breakaway South Ossetia. Marcia Barrett played a concert in a small frontline village not far from the rebel capital Tskhinvali.

Thousands of people came in cars, buses, trucks and on foot through a mountain pass skirting separatist territory to hear her sing.

Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili told the BBC he hoped the music would persuade people to lay down their arms.

"We hope that we'll lure out people from their trenches, force them to drop [their] Kalashnikovs, come here and dance with the others and understand that nothing is as nice as peace, nothing is as nice as reconciliation," Mr Saakashvili said.....

Ms Barrett said she did not know much about the situation in this remote region of the former Soviet Union but said she wanted to promote peace.

"Because it's a peace festival I really feel honoured to be invited to come and take part," she told the BBC.

The concert took place in Tamarasheni, a village of around 500 people that remains loyal to Georgia. Our correspondent says the event was planned by the Georgian authorities to show the South Ossetian separatists that life would be better and more fun if they returned to government control.... (the rest, courtesy of the BBC).

How can anyone think of succession when Boney M is in town? They were and are disco diplomats, spreading the message of dialogue and discussion through German produced Caribbean mid-tempo dance numbers. As the following video shows, they were easily as instrumental in bringing peace to Northern Ireland as Ahern, Blair, Paisley, and Adams. They were just 20 years ahead of their time:



Now if only there was an easily available and affordable US pressing of any of their greatest hits collections on CD...

87 Year Old Doris Lessing Announced As Nobel Literature Winner....

...It's always the old ones who forget to check the "no publicity" box.

A much younger Lessing prepares to sacrifice for her art by eating a medium sized cat

Hooray for the Beeb!

My affection towards BBC America ebbs and flows dependent on what recycled tripe they have managed to throw up on the telly for expats and septics to gurn at. When they are on top form and running only slightly stale episodes of Little Britain or Dr. Who I'm quite pleased with them. When it is nothing but My Family marathons and pretend documentaries about the royals then I am less impressed.

As the channel has aged the programmers seem to have settled on more of the latter than the former, so I only keep it around for the news- 3 hours of honest-to-goodness, full-on BBC World sat feed in the morning, and half an hour of less useful bid'ness at 7 eastern.

Until last week, that is. The morning stuff is still there but the 7pm broadcast has been replaced by possibly the most fantastic news broadcast I have ever seen. The new BBC America news at 7 is an hour long, and combines the good old fashioned BBC reportage with great chunks of Newsnight style inquisition. Frankly, I love it and consider it worth the price of cable alone. It's like a nightly hour of The Economist.

Hymn of praise over. I'm sure it won't last and will end up being replaced by The Green, Green Grass- quite possibly the worst thing I have ever had the misfortune to be forced to sit through on a visit to the grandparents, ever.

I Should Just Carry the Camera Everywhere

Sometimes one has no other option than to go to "The Worst Place in the World" (™ Country Mouse), especially at 8am on a public holiday when every right-minded local bourgeois shopkeeper is enjoying a bacon sandwich in his pajamas rather than opening his shop. Even at that relatively early hour, the aisles were full of waddling Wal-Martians (™ Country Mouse), shuffling and drooling like the unholy offspring of George Romero and Ronald McDonald.

While paying for my shopping in the "Express Lane" (so named it seemed because the employee manning the register had expressed her brain out her nose at some point in her distant adolecence rather than for any speedy checkout procedures) I happened to glance up at a large cardboard box next to the cigarettes on a rack behind her station. Written on it were the words:

"Expired Tobaccy"
Such is the influence of Wal Mart's Bentonville, Arkansas home office that it even extends to the English language, it seems. I wonder if in internal memos they refer to shoes as "daggun foot leathers"? Just a thought.

Leg Update

>
The story continues... This man is either a true Homo Americanus Rutilus Gutter or one of the most brilliant performance artists to emerge out of the Carolinas for a good long stretch.

What Could I Possibly Ad?

"Its mah leg! Gorn, git! Quit leanin' on me, stumpy!"
This story (reproduced here in its fantastic entirety) was made possible by the North American Goober Stereotype Perpetuation Society of North Carolina:

North Carolina pair feud over leg
A US man who stored his amputated leg in a barbecue smoker that was later auctioned off is locked in a custody dispute with the man who bought it. He wants his leg back but Mr Whisnant says he has a receipt for the smoker's contents and wants to share ownership.

Mr Wood's leg was amputated above the knee after a plane crash in 2004. He asked to keep the leg so he could be buried as a whole man when he died, and stored it at the facility in Maiden after losing his home. But when Mr Wood failed to pay the necessary rental fees, the storage company auctioned the smoker and all its contents.

After buying the smoker last Tuesday, Mr Whisnant looked inside and found a man's leg wrapped in a wire screen. He initially gave the leg to the police, who concluded it had not been removed as a result of a crime and sent it to a funeral home until Mr Wood could pick it up.

But after making money by charging adults $3 (£1.47) and children $1 (49p) to look inside the empty smoker (emphasis mine, WW), Mr Whisnant asked for it back. His request was refused by the funeral home, so he decided to try to persuade Mr Wood to share custody and profits.

"I told him I'd share custody of it..." Mr Whisnant said. "It's a strange incident and Halloween's just around the corner. The price will go up if I get the leg."

Mr Wood, who now lives in Greenville, South Carolina, has insisted he is not interested in using the leg to make money and plans to travel to Maiden as soon as possible to reclaim it.

"I just think it's despicable," he said. "I don't mind having the 15 minutes of fame, but I'm not looking to really profit off this thing. He's making a freak show out of it."

Having had his offer rejected, Mr Whisnant has threatened to begin legal action if the leg is not returned to him by next week. He says he has a receipt showing he bought both the smoker and its contents at the auction.

"Everybody knows it's mine, period," he said. "And if anyone tries to take it, I want everything they got."

Not To Get Ahead Of Ourselves, But...

Let's go Red Sox.



More of this please Mike

We Live in a Cynical and Shabby Age

Exhibit one- the new Maine agricultural license plate:



That child doesn't look like she's accompanying that farmer willingly, that's all I'm saying. Look at the tension in his freakish forearm, like he's really got a grip. And why are they walking away from the safety of the well-lit farm and heading off behind a small hill?

Life Questions

Where's my horn section? Where's my blast of soulful cabaret lounge theme music each time I turn my suit collar to the wind and strut down the sidewalk? Shouldn't it have kicked in by this age?