Man, I love this town!
Wednesday, October 12th, 2005Deli worker dies after being thrown through a window
during a dispute over food.
Deli worker dies after being thrown through a window during a dispute over food.
”Mysterious pink spots” on area lawns turn out to be bird poop. W/ pic of bare hand holding newly demystified droppings.
Philadelphia City Council has finally passed a smoking ban for bars and restaurants. Pending the Mayor’s signature, it could go into effect by January.
If there’s a “guy” gene that drives men to memorize stats, root for the local team and talk trash about the skills of overpaid players, I didn’t inherit it. I find the social and economic influence of professional sports to be disappointing at best, and offensive at worst. With the exception of the occasional football game, I avoid televised sports like the mutant, radioactive, heart-exploding plague.
It’s not like I can escape at least a background knowledge of sports. I listen to news radio and NPR, and they waste precious seconds every hour talking about the outcome of games, the results of trades and the gossip about what drug which player is injecting into his shriveled testicles. Hell, if they took out all of the sports coverage and lumped that time together, I bet they’d have room for another valuable perspective on how Mel Gibson’s batshit insanity is confounding Hollywood.
However, I’m still culturally aware enough that I can be affected by the undercurrent of excitement when the Philly home teams are doing well. When the Eagles made the Superbowl two years ago, I was hopeful; I didn’t exactly climb onto the bandwagon waving a flag and drooling, but I stopped in the electronics section of Target to watch the last few minutes of the NFC championship on the gigantic TVs. It was heartening to see the city pull together, even if it was obvious to the rest of the nation that their hopes were doomed from the start. And kudos to us for not burning anything down when the team lost.
Because this is the level of my involvement with sports, I loathe the end of the baseball season. From my (admittedly detached) perspective, it seems like regular season baseball always follows the same script. The Phillies will struggle most of the season. Sometime around early August, the stats-minders will notice that the Phils, who’ve been out of contention for a division title since May, are nonetheless only a few games behind in the Wild Card race. They’ll slowly inch up in the standings, sometimes getting to within a half game of the leader, and then they’ll suddenly collapse. By the last week in September, the starting lineup will be wandering through the final games of season, while their wives air out their Florida vacation homes in preparation for another relaxing October at the beach.
Even for a guy who equates televised baseball with growing mold on the “really boring stuff” scale, it’s infuriating. I can feel the fans getting their collective hopes up, only to have them shattered like a trick picture window in a cheesy action movie. Seriously, if you’re going to suck, just suck. Don’t pretend that you might have some talent, and then revert back to your usual suckitude when it actually matters. I appreciate consistency, but consistent disappointment is just cruel.
Maybe the city should repossess your fancy new ballpark, and make you play in an overgrown field next to I-95. You can have some hilarious and heartwarming adventures trying to get your ball back from the big, nasty dog who lives on the other side of the outfield fence, and learn a valuable lesson about how baseball is all about heart, passion and love of the game. Oh, and metric craploads of money, especially if you’re the Yankees. You can get your stadium back for your next playoff game.
I don’t have a lot of rules about blogging, but there is one guideline that I try to follow pretty rigorously. I don’t do stupid “the weather was so nice today so I went to the park and I saw a bunny and a puppy and a squirrel and they were snuggling and eating peanuts and it was the cutest day ever” posts. That shit works just fine in your diary by flashlight after Mom and Dad are passed out in the living room asleep, or between Harry Potter slashfic posts on Livejournal. Around here, we blog like we mean it.
That said, I’m going to take my one guideline out for a walk in the woods, hit it with an axe handle and leave it gagged and tied to a tree overnight. Because the weather was amazing yesterday. I got out in it for a couple of hours, and by some miraculous coincidence, I remembered my camera. Praise astronauts!
The sleeves of a grey sweat shirt, neatly cut off and left lying on the sidewalk. Their cuffs were just barely not touching, like star crossed lovers, unable to quite reach each other before their tragic and obscenely romantic deaths.
I am suddenly obsessed with wondering why someone would leave their sleeves lying on the sidewalk. Did you Hulk out, with enough warning that you were able to cut off your sleeves before your newly massive biceps burst out of them? Did you have to participate in an impromptu Flashdance routine? Was the weather so much warmer than you expected that the only way you could avoid massive, lurking pit stains was to open your underarms to the breeze?
This is what happens when I can’t sleep at night. My daytime brain turns mundane littering into something absurdly dramatic.
If anybody asks why I’m grumpy on Thursday morning, it’s because honking horns, whooping drunkards, fireworks (mixed with small arms fire) and sirens of every variety make for a difficult sleeping environment.
At least now we can (hopefully) put the “curse” of William Penn behind us. Now when our teams suck, we’ll have to blame it on poor play and incompetent management, rather than on the outsized phallus skyscraper envy of a century-old bronze statue.
If you’re not familiar with the curse, which ties the fate of Philadelphia’s sports teams to the height of buildings built since 1987, check out the Wikipedia entry. Note that, as of 10:30 pm on Wednesday night, someone has already edited the page to reflect the Phillies’ win. These are truly remarkable times.
Daily News Columnist Dan Cirucci, in his 10/22 piece titled “Just Call It BaseBORE“:
Baseball is an insufferably boring pastime. Except for the pitcher, catcher and hitter, all the players simply stand around waiting for something to happen. Huge amounts of time drift by aimlessly.
Blogger Dan Cirucci, on 10/29, stopped regurgitating whole articles from conservative pundits long enough to say this:
The last time this happened was 1980 and this time is every bit as exuberant if not more so - every bit as joyous and uproarious. It’s exultant; overwhelming.
Actually, you can get in on the confusion if you just read the print column, which starts as follows:
For the first time in 15 years the Phillies are in the World Series. It’s great. It’s well-deserved. It’s thrilling.
What? Is it somehow thrilling that the Phillies get to play for the championship of an insufferably boring game? How can a game be insufferably boring and thrilling at the same time? Have we been warped into some dimension where those terms aren’t antonyms?
Once suspects that Mr. Cirucci is trying to simultaneously play the cranky iconoclast and the everyman populist. He’s writing the cheering Phillies fans a love note, while standing in the corner grousing about the game with the folks who aren’t impressed by the hype. He’s pandering to the fans, while acting like the only guy in a baseball-mad city who’s crazy enough to say bad things about the game.
No wonder Cirucci supports John McCain.
This comment on my post-World Series update got me thinking about sports “curses,” and the relative ridiculousness of said. Sports in general, and baseball in particular, is rife with superstition. Every local newscast has, at one point or another, broadcast a story about the home team’s pitcher, who hasn’t changed his “lucky” socks since his rookie year, and is now under the direct jurisdiction of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Among the most enduring of these false causal narratives is the concept of the “curse.” Some event occurs that has something at least tangential to do with the team. If that team fails to win a championship for a few years, fans and sportscasters experience decide that there’s some connection. The event somehow affects the team’s performance, and it can’t win until the stigma of the event is erased.
Curiously, the way to break a sports curse and win a championship seems to be winning a championship. Think Sleeping Beauty, only instead of needing a prince’s kiss, the only way she could wake up was to set an alarm and go to bed at a decent time. (more…)
