At the Knicks game last night, I was sitting two rows behind a couple of black men that were escorted in by security and were pretty obviously famous. I didn't recognize either of them, but people kept coming up to take pictures, so finally I asked a kid sitting behind me who they were. He told me they were G-Unit and Tony Ya-Yo, and demonstrated Tony Ya-Yo's name by saying it "Yahhh-yooooo."

I have never felt so old.

Kitaen Still Friends With The Husband She Beat With A Shoe

Labels: headlines, idiots

One television with a recent bullet hole in the screen prompted by the Jets' late 4th quarter performance last night.

$5 OBO.

Labels: football, New York Jets, TV

Editor's Note: Let's call this Volume One in a series of writers whom I wish I could more be like in no particular order

The above title of this blog comes, of course, from the great movie This Is Spinal Tap, but it comes to be the title of this blog entry via Joe Posnanski. Joe used that as the tagline of his blog for a while.

Joe is a sportswriter, but to limit him like that is to really not understand what he does. He wrote the masterful Soul of Baseball, which chronicled a year spent with former Negro League player/advocate Buck O'Neill. It's a touching tribute to the man most responsible for keeping the Negro Leagues alive in our memory, through a museum he founded in Kansas City and his tireless work to get former Negro Leaguers enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. His next book is about the Big Red Machine Cincinnati Reds teams of the 1970s.

His blog is a jumble of pop culture references, made up statistics and words, sports, politics and just about anything else that falls out of his head. His writing on the blog is so conversational, so stream of consciousness that reading it makes you feel as though you were sitting next to him and he were reading it to you.

But the main reason I want to be like Joe Posnanski is because the guy just writes. When he's not working on a book, he churns out 3 or 4 coulnms a week, plus several thousand words a DAY for his blog. That's roughly a month's worth of production for me. And no matter what, he's an entertaining read, whether he's writing about the doorman/elevator guy on the Jeffersons or how much he loves Bruce Springsteen or another crazy way to evaluate the best player in the league by combining different complicated statistics into one even more complicated statistic.

Anyway, if you get a minute, make sure you check out JoePosnanski.com to hear Joe's thoughts on things, and to read long wandering passages about who knows what, but also, to marvel in the guy's prolific awesomeness.

Labels: Joe Posnanski, writers who I want to be like

[Editor's note: this will be the last political post for a while. I've got like 16 fart jokes that I've been waiting to publish.]

It's all only just hitting me now.

It's one of the few times in my life where hyperbole was not only apropos, but also not nearly enough to describe what I was watching. And I'm immensely proud that this country stood up and saw through the bullshit, the "Joe the Plumber," the maverick nonsense, Bill Ayers, Rashid Khalidi and Jeremiah Wright, and everything else they tried to use to throw us off.

And here we are. On November 4th, we elected a black President. Now, it's November 5ht, and we all need to realize that we didn't just elect a black man. We elected the best man for the job, period.

I'm not stupid. I know that January 20, 2009 isn't going to come and everything will suddenly be OK: the wars will be over, the economy fixed, the budget balanced, universal health care for all, general peace and harmony all over. There's big problems and we'll need big ideas to fix them, but now I feel like we've got a fighting chance.

Labels: Barack Obama, politics

This is going to be a weird anecdote (and also probably extremely depressing), but it's the first thing that I thought of when I heard that Obama's grandmother died, so I'm going to tell it and you can read what you want.*

*I'm going to preface this whole story by saying that you'd be hard-pressed to find a man that was happier in his life than my grandfather was. From the moment he was born until the moment he died, he was never anything but the greatest man that ever lived.

My grandfather was a Holocaust survivor. He got captured while fighting for the Polish army in 1940, and was sent to a death camp. Incidentally, his first wife and his baby son were exterminated by the Nazis, taken away while he was out looking for some bread to feed them while they were in the Warsaw Ghetto.

In addition to having 5 years of his late 20s and early 30s taken away by Nazis, he also had a pretty rough childhood. He grew up in the poorest part of Warsaw, his mother died when he was young and his father remarried a woman that used to beat the hell out of my grandfather and his sister.*

*So yeah, he had it pretty easy. I mean, I had to go to the cleaners this morning and get this, they won't even get my shirts back to me before Wednesday. What the fuck, right? Is the fucking Universe out to get me or something?

Anyway, this stepmother of his was a pretty awful lady. In addition to beating up innocent children, she also neglected them. She didn't feed them all that often, barely made sure they had a clean place to sleep, and generally did the opposite of what you're supposed to do with children.

She died on September 1, 1939, literally the day before Germany invaded Poland and took all the Jews off to murder them. They managed to kill 3 million Polish Jews and tortured millions more before it was all said and done, but my step-great-grandmother wasn't one of them. And what I've always found so insane about this is that she died never even seeing the war start in earnest. It's not to say that she deserved to die at the hands of brutal killers, but all the shit that happened to my poor, innocent grandfather never happened to her because she died before it could. She died thinking that all the stuff going on in Europe was a small, regional skirmish, not World War II.

And so it is with Madelyn Dunham. She doesn't get to find out the outcome. She dies one day before her grandson (hopefully) is the first non-white dude elected president of the United States. The boy that she raised to believe that he could do anything is about to do something that no one else has ever done before (hopefully). The reality is that she meant more to this presidential race that just about anyone else. Her values shaped the man that could (and should be) president as much as anyone else.

I don't believe in things like "God," but I've heard all the stories. And this one sounds a whole lot like what happened to Moses, bringing the commandments to the people, bringing them right up to the front door of Israel, but not able to cross the threshold himself.

This is going to sound pretty strange, but I think my step-great-grandmother wasn't allowed to live through the Holocaust, because everyone that lived through it came out stronger and more resolute and the Jews got Israel out of the deal. And someone as wicked as her just didn't deserve to see all that come to pass, no matter what she would have had to suffer through to get there.

Why doesn't Mrs. Dunham get to find out the result? I'm not 100% sure, but like Moses didn't get to go into Israel, it's enough that he got everyone else there. For Mrs. Dunham, she gave us her grandson. Hopefully, that'll be enough for us, too.

Labels: sad things for which there are no reason