→ January 19, 2009
→ By

I weep for our language, part 7.

Courtesy of Kevin at Fan Interference, we have BC basketball coach Al Skinner:

“I tried to pre-warn them . . . We were capable of being this team and capable of being another team.”

As Kevin points out, a warning that isn’t pre- is kind of useless. Reminds me of the old Bill Cosby routine about the “dip” signs in California. I’m thinking this is roughly as embarrassing as BC’s athletic director throwing a tantrum over his football coach interviewing for a better, higher-paying job.

Filed Under: Grammar Tagged With:
→ January 17, 2009
→ By

Reader blogs.

So someone pointed out that my blogroll didn’t make it through the database export/import, which means the list of reader blogs is kaput. If you’re a regular reader/commenter and your blog was listed in my old blogroll – or should be in the new one – drop a comment here. As long as your content isn’t obscene or highly objectionable, I’ll add it.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With:
→ January 16, 2009
→ By

It’s bad enough…

…to get your tongue stuck to a metal light pole.

It’s worse when the incident makes the news.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ January 15, 2009
→ By

Chat today.

Klawchat today at 1 pm EST.

Filed Under: Uncategorized
→ January 14, 2009
→ By

The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Suck.

I don’t think I have completed and hated a book as thoroughly as I hated Oscar Hijuelos’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. I can hardly decide where to start in listing what I disliked.

    • The two main characters. The Mambo Kings are two brothers who emigrate from Cuba to the United States. Nestor, by far the more interesting of the two characters, is either depressed or just lovelorn, and is dead before the book’s midpoint. Cesar, the older brother, is dissolute, obsessed with his penis, drunk nearly all of the time, and depressing as hell as he approaches his own death.
      The sex. I don’t mind if there’s sex in a novel as long as it’s well-written and not gratuitous, but this entire book was full of passages that would have won the Bad Sex in Fiction award had it existed at the time of the book’s publication. The novel must hold the record for the most uses of the word “pubic” in any publication that isn’t sold with a black wrapper around it. Hijuelous treats us to images like “the head of his penis weeping semen tears;” a woman’s “bad habit of yanking hard on his quivering testicles at the moment of his climax;” almost clinical descriptions of straight-up, oral, and anal sex; and – most disturbing of all – a reference to Cesar thinking about being in his mother’s womb while he performs oral sex on women.
      The story – or lack thereof. This isn’t about the rise and fall of the brothers’ band, called the Mambo Kings. When Nestor dies, the band dies; the book is almost two separate novels cobbled together, although neither would have been much better had it stood alone. It’s not about Cesar’s descent into a physical condition that matches his broken emotional state, or his lifelong struggle to overcome the abuse he suffered as a child at his father’s hands. It’s not about Nestor’s depression or melancholy, since he’s dead before we get much insight into that. It’s about Cesar whoring and drinking and eating his way through middle age into an early death.

    • The best explanation for this awful mess that I could conceive is that Hijuelos was trying to offer some sort of meditation on mortality, how potentially short our lives are (Nestor) or how we might look back when at death’s door and consider and reconsider our actions (Cesar). What we get, instead, is a catalog of Cesar’s sexual exploits and regular references to his acid reflux. Hijuelos even manages to make food boring, with lists of foods at the huge meals the Cuban brothers would eat but none of the descriptive language needed to bring those foods to life – although, given the crude and methodical descriptions Hijuelos gives us of sex acts, perhaps we should be thankful that he didn’t ruin food for his readers as well.

    I have actually seen the 1992 adaptation, The Mambo Kings, starring a then-unknown-in-America Antonio Banderas as Nestor, but the film was very loosely based on the book, and the interpretation of what comes after Nestor’s death bears little relation to Hijuelos’ text. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

    Next up: Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, by Assia Djebar, named one of the twelve best African books of the twentieth century by the Zimbabwe International Book Fair in 2001.

    Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
    → January 13, 2009
    → By

    IBAF rankings.

    The International Baseball Federation has released its first-ever baseball rankings, by country.

    I can’t believe they put Thailand 26th – that’s an outrage – and there will be rioting in Lahore when word gets out that Pakistan ranked last.

    Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
    → January 13, 2009
    → By

    TV today + Raines column.

    I’ll be on ESPNews today at 4:10 pm and 6:20 pm EST, talking mostly Hall with a little Lowe thrown in.

    There’s also a new column from me on Tim Raines’ candidacy that has been a little lost in the Rickey/Rice shuffle.

    Filed Under: Appearances
    → January 12, 2009
    → By

    Technical difficulties.

    I’m still rebuilding the site, so bear with me.

    Filed Under: Uncategorized
    → January 11, 2009
    → By

    The Mailbag of Malcontent, vol. 11.

    From a reader named Dante:

    Your wrong about Rice ,he is most Deserved

    Well that just settles it.

    What I really don’t get is what possesses someone to go through all the effort to find my ESPN mailbag … and then send that message.

    Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
    → January 9, 2009
    → By

    ESPN’s Hall of Fame ballots.

    Eleven of them, all summed up in one table.

    And to think, in January 2019, I might have a “KL” column of my very own, with an “x” in the row for Tim Raines.

    Filed Under: Sports Tagged With: ,