Hello,

I came onto your site today to purchase my infant daughter a New York Jets jersey to wear while we watch them lose this weekend. I was more than a little surprised to find that the only option for purchase was a Brett Favre jersey. Considering that a) he's not on the team anymore and b) he nearly single-handedly destroyed our season last year, it's a little unlikely that I (or any like-minded Jets fan) would purchase such apparel.

I'm wondering if you will have something else available in the near future, since I'm looking forward to bonding with her, as we share the lifelong pain of being a Jets fan

Please let me know.

Best,
Geoff Wolinetz

Labels: New York Jets, NFLShop

I was watching Airplane the other night, and for the first time in the many, many times that I've seen the film, I asked myself, "Kyle (that's what I call myself), did Manny Mota ever actually bat for Pedro Borbon in a live game or did the writers of the movie just pick a pitcher at random and have the formar all-time leader in pinch hits bat for him in the scenario meant to test the echo in Ted Stryker's head as a goof?"

The first step was determining if the two had ever even played on the same team. I popped on to Baseball Reference and looked up the careers of both Borbon and Mota.

Borbon played 12 years in the majors, the vast majority of these seasons came with the Cincinnati Reds. His last season was the year that Airplane was released (1980).

Manny Mota played 21 seasons, his last 11 with the Los Angeles Dodgers. His career ended in 1982.

So, no, Manny Mota never pinch hit for Pedro Borbon.

But since this didn't take even close to as long as I thought it would, and I'm in the business of extreme procrastination, I went ahead and checked if Manny Mota has ever batted against Pedro Borbon. This seemed significantly more likely, as both of these players played almost their entire careers in the National League.

Once again, thanks to our good friends at Baseball Reference, we're able to determine that Mota did hit against Borbon. In 14 plate appearances, Mota singled 3 times off of Borbon, drove in one run and struck out twice. Man, this is bull. I thought I'd at least be able to look up a home run that Mota hit against Borbon or something. Let's go to Retrosheet and find out when Mota drove in that run.

Actually, Baseball Reference has this information also. It was in the second game of a doubleheader on June 23, 1973. With the Dodgers already up 4-1 in the bottom of the 7th, Mota hit a single to center and knocked in Davey Lopes. Tommy John went the distance and got the win, 3-hitting the Reds. Here's the full scoreboard from that game (this appears courtesy of Retrosheet):

CIN N 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 - 1 3 0
LA N 0 0 0 0 1 3 1 0 x - 5 8 0

Well, this was a complete waste of time (in a bad way). If this demonstrates anything, it's that the InterWeb has turned what could have been a colossal time-waster into a mere distraction.

Labels: Airplane, Manny Mota, Pedro Borbon

Before I went to college, I saw a lot of movies. Tons. I saw just about everything that came out in the theater. Genre didn't really matter. As long as I had popcorn and moving pictures in front of me, I was good. And I didn't really spend a whole lot of time questioning whether these movies were good or bad; I just loved the experience of going.* Why not, right? Frankly, there was just not a whole lot else to do where I grew up with the people that I hung out with. It was either go to the movies or watch Mystery Science Theater 3000 in someone's basement.**

*This is a very 1950s way of looking at things: marveling at the wonder of them, instead of seeing them for what they are. I'm not apologizing for this. I wish I still had it.

**I was tooling around You Tube the other day and I stumbled across a clip from one of my favorite episodes, Mitchell, starring Joe Don Baker and Merlin Olsen. It also happens to be Joel Hodgson's last episode. I don't know why I brought this up.

Until I saw Speed.

It's not really just that Speed is a bad movie (which it is)*. It is a very bad movie that somehow launched Sandra Bullock's career (that may, in itself, explain her career). It's an outright insult to anyone with even a shred of intelligence. Everyone watching this movie should have walked out of the theater and demanded their money back.

*My high school yearbook actually has an inscription from someone saying that they disagreed with me about Speed and that they thought the movie was very suspenseful. I can only assume that person's yearbook has a profanity-laced tirade about how stupid they are.

It starts out OK. Disillusioned cop (played by Dennis Hopper of all people) that's forced to retire goes loco and wants to exact his revenge by killing lots of people. Fine. That's at least the beginning of a plot that I can get behind. But from there, it's all ridiculous. City bus driver knows the name of someone trying to catch the bus and actually stops to let them on. Bomb attached to bus will explode if speed dips below a certain level. Neurotic, crazy, stereotypes on bus make escape difficult. Woman that caught bus creates a sense of brotherhood among them. Snappy one-liners exchanged. Keanu Reeves involved.

It's just stupid insult after stupid insult. I take the bus every single day. Nothing happens. In fact, the only people even talking on the bus are the people on their cellphone that think the bus is their living room.

And the moment that broke my brain was when they get on a highway to keep the speed of the bus at the appropriate level, never mind that the thing is a 1980s-era bus that guzzles gas like my little cousins eat Cheerios and should have run out miles ago, and no one realizes that the highway HASN'T BEEN FINISHED YET. No one among the people that live in the area could think to mention that the highway on which their careening bus was about to go hadn't yet been finished.

That's the point that I stood up and screamed, "Oh, come on!"

So the bus drives off of the unfinished bit of the highway (which also just happens to form a ramp), lands and keeps going. Later on, they rig the surveillance camera on the bus in an infinite loop, gradually move the people off of the bus before Dennis Hopper figures it out, and then Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock open the emergency exit on the bottom of the bus, line up a small wooden board on rollers beneath it at 50 miles per hour, then get on it to slide themselves off the bus, which explodes in the background as they roll to safety. There are no words.

Forget realistic. This doesn't even work in a fantasy. Some monkey on PCP must have written this film. It just forced me to realize that Hollywood will just take any piece of garbage, smear it on a cracker and tell me it's goose liver pate. Not only that, they expect me to smile and hold my nose while I eat it, then make yummy sounds when I'm done. After Speed, I just couldn't do it anymore.

And now, I can't watch any movie the same way. Every action movie is a ridiculous farce, every drama is a sappy mess and every comedy is an unfunny train wreck. I haven't truly enjoyed a movie the same way in 15 years. Oh, sure, I've enjoyed movies, but they just aren't an essential activity for me anymore, because I just don't buy in with the same enthusiasm.

And this, friends, is how Sandra Bullock ruined my life.

Labels: movies, MST3K, Sandra Bullock, Speed