→ October 24, 2008
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The Mailbag of Malcontent returns…

I’ve been digging out from a big pile of reader mail, including some emails from as far back as late July. (I wasn’t able to see new reader mail to my ESPN mailbag for about two months, and then suddenly, there they all were.)

One reader, Scott Moore, wasn’t happy about my on-air criticism of umpire Doug Eddings (I referred to Eddings as “crooked or incompetent”) after Eddings blew a fairly easy obstruction call involving A.J. Pierzynski. His original email:

Your comments on the umpire were way out of line. You had the benefit of Slo-Mo replay. From that guys angle – it appeared the White Sox runner was tripped. Sure he missed the call, but you called him a “crook.” You must have lost money on the game.

My reply:

I said Eddings was either “crooked or incompetent.” Neither one is particularly forgivable – he blew the call, blatantly, and it was the second time he blatantly blew a call in favor of the White Sox and AJ Pierzynski. “Incompetent” is kind.

And no, I didn’t have money on that or any other game this year. Nice try.

Scott (who calls himself “Scooter”):

Crooks are “crooked” are they not? I must have touched a nerve. You’re simply not man enough to admit you overreacted to the missed call. Not to mention the fact that the other player involved didn’t stick to the basics of the “pickle drill” – after you’re out of the play, get to another bag and back up the next guy. Instead he jogged too near the base path.

The other play a year or before that was a mistake by the catcher not to make sure of the out by throwing to first base, he rolled the ball to the mound.

In both cases, AJ made “heads up” baseball plays. You still sound like you lost a bet…
Nice Try – Up Yours!

I like the “blaming the victim” approach he takes, although those are at least sort of baseball arguments.

Me:

I give at least one response to everyone who writes, no matter how childish they are.

Him:

You’re a hack and a pathetic journalist. Dude your days of never being chosen on the playground are over. It’s not my fault, not an umpire’s fault… get over it and try not to be such a prick along the way.

After which I told him to keep the insults coming so I could publish them, to which he responded: “Good luck with that Keith.”

Guess it’s my lucky day. Oh, and Eddings? Still blew both calls, and the fact that they both involved and went in the direction of the same player doesn’t sit well with me at all. Given the umpiring horrorshows we’ve seen the last two nights (the Hamels balk, the Baldelli whiff, the Rollins HBP), I would think fans would be less tolerant than ever of incompetent umpiring.

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→ October 24, 2008
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Unclear on the concept.

I get some pretty funny comments in the moderation queue that I don’t publish, usually things that have nothing to do with the site but are written to look like “normal” comments that slip through the spam filter. This one might be my all-time favorite.

It was posted in response to my writeup of Long Beach restaurants, which started with this passage:

Dessert first: Frozen yogurt is all the rage in southern California, and the most popular chain is Pinkberry, so I felt almost obligated to try it so I could make fun of all of the people who consume the stuff. I was, however, unprepared for how absolutely vile the stuff is.

The user’s comment:

Kieth, if you like frozen yogurt try the Pinkberry in downtown Long Beach off Pine.

Saddest part? The commenter is a lawyer.

Filed Under: Humor Tagged With:
→ October 23, 2008
→ By

Chat today.

Klawchat at the Four-Letter at 1 pm EDT today.

Also, I have a blog entry up on the outsized expectations for a Jake Peavy deal on ESPN.com.

And if you’re in Australia, I’ll be doing another in-game hit or two during Game 2 tonight on SEN 1116 in Melbourne. Still finding it hard to get used to referring to a player by his first name (“Grant”) while on air … almost as hard as it is to avoid lapsing into an Australian accent halfway through the interview.

Filed Under: Appearances, Chat
→ October 22, 2008
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Wednesday radio.

I’ve got a tentative hit scheduled for 6:20 am PDT on KTAR in Phoenix cancelled.

I’ve got confirmed hits on our Baltimore affiliate at 3:40 pm EDT, and on the FAN 590 in Toronto at around 6:30 pm EDT. I’ll update this thread if any more Wednesday requests come through.

UPDATE: Well, the FAN cancelled after the hit time had passed. I will however be on SEN 1116 in Melbourne again during tonight’s game, around 12:15 pm local time.

Filed Under: Appearances
→ October 21, 2008
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The Moviegoer.

Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer (on the TIME 100 and #60 on the Modern Library 100) was a big yawn. Most disappointing of all is that for a book titled “The Moviegoer,” the protagonist doesn’t really go to many movies at all. I sort of expected a heavy list of allusions to classic films of the 1940s and ’50s, but got next to none.

The book’s real subject, title and dust-jacket description notwithstanding, is depression. Both the main character, Jack “Binx” Bolling, and his cousin-by-marriage Kate are struggling with what would now be called depression, although Kate’s affliction is described by her family as a nervous disorder. Binx is aimless; he’s thirty years old, a World War II veteran with a good white-collar job that holds no interest for him, no immediate family to anchor him, and only a love of the movies as anything that animates him. He mentions a search for something – he’s looking for religion, but talks himself out of looking too hard – and instead he … goes to the movies. But again, the movies are an off-page character in this book.

Percy spends most of the book inside of Binx’s mind, but our windows into Kate’s illness are foggy and often closed, even though she’s the more intriguing character. She was about to get married several years before the time period covered by the book when her fiancé was killed in a car wreck that she survived. She’s about to get married again to a cipher of a man who is obviously not equipped to help her deal with her depression. Yet all we get of Kate are her occasional tangents to Binx, which employ a lot of rationalization to cover the emptiness she’s feeling inside (an emptiness that only becomes apparent in the book’s final 20 pages).

Books about alienation are all over most of the greatest book lists I have mined for reading material, but in general, I haven’t enjoyed them because the alienated characters were dull or annoying or both. Here, we have two alienated characters, but the author focused on the dull one rather than giving us more of the interesting one … who may simply be interesting because we don’t know enough about her to call her dull. At the same time, the book’s treatment of depression is just dated, perhaps a reflection of the time period in which it was written; it’s more a description of ennui than a psychological novel that looks into the abyss.

Filed Under: Uncategorized
→ October 21, 2008
→ By

TV today.

I’ll be on ESPN’s Outside the Lines sometime right after 3 pm EDT, and then on the Hot List at around 4:10 pm EDT. I’ll also be on AllNight with Jason Smith on ESPN Radio tonight.

Filed Under: Appearances
→ October 19, 2008
→ By

Radio … in Australia?

Indeed, I’ll be on 1116 SEN in Melbourne, Australia, at around 12:05 pm Monday local time, which is around 9:05 pm Sunday EDT. It looks like you can listen live through their site if you can’t get to Melbourne in time.

Filed Under: Appearances
→ October 19, 2008
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Decline and Fall.

I read lots of novels, mostly ones that are considered by someone to have great literary merit. I find that I enjoy a significant number of these novels, and have discovered many that ended up on the Klaw 100 because I stepped out of my comfort zone and read a book I didn’t expect to like, or had never heard of, or thought too long. But there is no doubt that I’d be perfectly happy spending all of my time reading books like Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. Of course, the problem is that even the entire catalogues of Waugh and Wodehouse and Fforde and Amis wouldn’t get me past a year, so I’ve got to spread them out a bit – usually saving them for bad travel days where I need the distraction.

Decline and Fall is a nonsense novel along the lines of Scoop, with a faint underpinning of seriousness, as opposed to a more overtly serious work like Brideshead Revisited. The story follows Paul Pennyfeather, the bland quasi-hero who serves more as a prop than as a character, serving both as a window on to the lives of the slightly insane people around him and as the unwitting victim to the schemes of those characters. He’s sent down from university after a fraternity prank, derailing his hopes of a career in the ministry, leading him to a teaching job at a small and poorly-run public school in Wales (which is depicted as the backwater of England), where everyone he meets is a little bit dotty. Waugh savages everyone along the way – academics, hypocritical clerics, upper-class snobs, etc. – scoring points both with sarcastic putdowns and comical situations (not least of which are the pair of nine-lived con artists who keep reappearing in Paul’s life). The satire is a little dated, of course, but the dry wit is still fresh.

The serious underpinning is a sort of latent nihilism and futile search for meaning (one character says he walked away from a career in the ministry not because he couldn’t believe in God, but because “he couldn’t understand why God had made the world at all”) and, along the way, a dissatisfaction with the answers one finds. Waugh was a misanthrope’s misanthrope, and it’s not clear what he hated more: the world around him, or himself. Pennyfeather accepts the seeming randomness in his life, although much of what appears to be “random” is actually due to the machinations and screw-ups of the people around him; one might argue he should choose better company, but either way, his reluctant acceptance of whatever comes his way, without ire or desire for revenge, is one way to cope.

For a little more on Decline and Fall, The Guardian’s books blog has a note from March of this year bemoaning the lack of appreciation of the novel today, 80 years after its publication.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ October 16, 2008
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Browned and Braised Asian Carrots.

This is a pretty simple side dish, although it doesn’t scale well because of the sautéing required. You can use other liquids in place of the ginger beer, including chicken broth; you can also add about 1/3-1/2 tsp of butter at the end to turn the glaze into more of a sauce.

½ pound young, slender carrots, peeled and sliced into 3″ sticks
1 Tbsp butter
¼ tsp Chinese five spice powder
¼ tsp salt
½ tsp brown sugar
¼ cup ginger beer
chopped fresh parsley (optional)

1. Heat the butter in a sauté pan (with a lid) until the bubbling stops.
2. Add the carrots and let them brown on one side, approximately 3 minutes. Do not stir.
3. If you’re using a gas stove, turn down the flame. With the lid in one hand, add the salt, spice powder, brown sugar, and ginger beer, and clamp the lid down. Wait a few seconds for the initial violence to stop, then remove the lid, stir once, and put the lid down again. Raise the heat to medium-low and braise the carrots until barely tender, two to five minutes.
4. Remove the lid and allow any remaining liquid to cook away, taking care not to let the carrots burn in a dry pan. Serve with chopped fresh parsley if desired.

Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With: , , ,
→ October 16, 2008
→ By

Winnie-the-Pooh.

Seriously – A.A. Milne’s first book of stories for his son, Winnie-the-Pooh, is #22 on the Radcliffe Publishing Course’s list of the 20th century’s top 100 novels. They’re pushing the definition of “novel” with this one, both because it’s a collection of stories rather than a novel and because it’s very short, but it’s still a fun read and something I look forward to reading to my daughter.

The stories revolve around the familiar set of characters, including Edward Bear, better known as Winnie-the-Pooh, a “Bear of Very Little Brain” who has a series of minor adventures that typically involve a rescue at the hands of Milne’s son, Christopher Robin. The humor is unmistakably English, almost like Wodehouse or even Waugh for children, and the language used isn’t dumbed down. The characters have actual character – Rabbit is bossy, Owl is book-smart but light on street smarts, Piglet talks a good game but is actually a chicken, and so on. Winnie-the-Pooh is a little dim, but can sometimes be clever despite his diminutive cranium. And I have to admit that I share a certain affinity with the bear:

“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,” said Piglet at last, “what’s the first thing you say to yourself?”
“What’s for breakfast,” said Pooh. “What do you say, Piglet?”
“I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?” said Piglet.
Pooh nodded thoughtfully.
“It’s the same thing,” he said.

Speaking of Waugh, I’ve got one more review from my trip, his Decline and Fall, probably coming on Friday.

Also, there is a Klawchat today at 1 pm – HTML page is here but it’s not linked on the baseball page yet.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,