Saturday, August 25, 2007

Danny Tanner gone bad, Nebraska baseball players doing the same and MLB screws fans with a late, late night

- Adios, Danny Tanner. Most of us know Bob Saget as dorky, cleanliness and order-obsessed dad Danny Tanner on the 1990s sitcom Full House. Back then, Saget teamed with Uncle Jesse (John Stamos) and Uncle Joey (Dave Coulier), neither of whom were actual uncles to his three daughters, to form a wacky, zany family that lived in a cool row house in San Francisco. Some of you may also know Saget as a former host of one of the worst hours of teleivision known to mankind, America’s Funniest Home Videos, where in viewers would submit near carbon-copies of the same contrived, lame “accidental comedy” moments that theoretically took place unscripted at their homes, family gatherings, etc. You know, stuff like dads getting blasted in the package with a wiffle ball bat during a game in the backyard, the family cat falling into the toilet, someone getting their pants accidentally ripped off at a wedding reception, that sort of thing. Well, those warm and fuzzy family moments are no longer Saget’s thing, as evidenced by his new HBO comedy special That Ain’t Right. I won't ruin Saget’s act for you in case you’re unfortunate enough to want to watch it, but let’s just say he mixes in nearly every expletive in the book, jokes about farm animals, anecdotes about his ex-wife and former girlfriends and much, much more. “I guess I have some concerns because what I would hate is for parents to put their kids down in front of the television and go, ‘We’re going to go out to dinner tonight. You just watch the dad from Full House,” Saget mused. “They’re going to come home and the poor kid’s head is going to be spinning around.” Right, Bob-O, because that’s what most parents do, go out to dinner and leave their kids home with instructions to watch comedy specials on HBO, where anything goes. Are they going to drop them down in front of a UFC fight as well, or maybe a flick on Skinemax? I know you were only a TV dad, but you have to know a little more about parenting than that, don’t you? Maybe not…………

- There are going to be a lot of very tired Detroit Tigers fans for the rest of the weekend, something you can blame Major League Baseball and the Tigers themselves for. Friday night’s game between the Tigers and Yankees was the start of a four-game series featuring two teams right at the top of the heap in the battle for playoff spots in the American League. The Tigers trail the Indians by 2.5 games in the AL Central and are right behind the Yankees in the wild card race. The Yanks are a little worse off, trailing Seattle by three games in the wild card race and Boston by 5.5 games in the AL East race. It makes sense that even on a night when persistent, heavy rains fall on the field, you want to do everything you can to get the game in. If you have to wait one hour, two hours or even two and a half hours to play the game, you do it. However, when that wait stretches to four hours and a game that was scheduled to begin at 7:05 p.m. doesn’t start until 11:00 p.m., that’s too much. Asking fans to sit around the ballpark for four hours in the rain and then watch a game when most of them are ready to fall asleep is over the top, and the teams should have realized this, as should the umpires and Major League Baseball. Compounding the problem is the fact that the game went into extra innings and didn’t end until the 11th inning, when Tigers shortstop Carlos Guillen hit a three-run home run for a 9-6 Detroit win. The winning run crossed the plate at freaking 3:30 in the morning, greeted more by relief than jubilation by the small number of fans still in attendance. So what were the powers that be to do rather than playing the game so late into the night? Well, seeing as this was the first of a four-game series, there were not one, not two, but three days left to play a doubleheader. I know players hate having two games in one day, but you’re major leaguers, guys, suck it up. You make millions to play a kid’s game, and it wouldn’t have been that tough to play a doubleheader rather than stick it to the fans with an uber-late game. Zero points for playing it out into the wee hours of the morning, next time figure out a better alternative.

- Queen was never the roughest, toughest, grittiest rock n’ roll band. They were known more for their flamboyance and pageantry than a rough-and-tumble, brawling attitude, with lead singer Freddie Mercury being the most colorful and flamboyant of the bunch. My point is that Queen didn’t really subscribe to the hard rock lifestyle and stereotypes, so it’s not surprising that 16 years after the band’s definitive end due to Mercury’s death from AIDS, Queen is still doing things in very anti-rock n’ roll fashion. Guitarist Brian May has finally completed his doctorate in astrophysics at London’s Imperial College, some thirty years after dropping out to pursue his music career. May’s thesis, Radical Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud, was approved by the school and the 48,000-word monstrosity was apparently successful in proving that planets and dust clouds in our solar system do indeed orbit in the same direction. Also, Radical Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud sounds like a great album name, so bonus points for that. But it’s very un-rock n’ roll to be a doctor of astrophysics, because let’s face it, groupies don’t line up to get nailed by a rocker because of his academic qualifications. The Beatles weren’t a worldwide phenomenon because they were a learned, bookish group. The Rolling Stones and Aerosmith don’t owe years of success to the academic degrees they’ve earned. Rock n’ roll is about dropping out of school, touring the country in a crappy van, busting your a** to earn a record contract and ingesting copious amounts of illegal substances in the process. It’s playing in dingy, poorly lit clubs and traveling to remote cities and towns to play for small crowds, staying in grimy motels and drinking cheap beer. It’s not supposed to be about doctorates in astrophysics, at least I didn’t think so. Even so, congrats to May for sticking with it and earning his degree, I hope now he can finally making something of himself…..

- This is a new one when it comes to college athletes cheating and breaking the rules. Normally student-athletes cheat in classes, get busted for underage drinking, steal laptops, get into bar brawls, etc., but three University of Nebraska baseball players took a different angle. Instead of stealing someone else’s credit card and using them to charge massive amounts of gear (as two University of Iowa football players did recently), Andy Gerch, Jeff Lanning and Craig Corriston decided to take some bats from the baseball team’s equipment stash and trade them in at a local store for store credit. Gerch has been suspended for the first 12 games of next season, while Lanning and Corriston will each miss the first six games. Look guys, I know you don’t have a whole lot of extra cash and you want to be able to buy stuff, but you can’t just sneak some gear out of the locker room and pawn it off at a local store for some credit. First, what kind of store takes bats it didn’t sell and gives you store credit for turning them in? Second, don’t you think the coaches and equipment manager might notice when a large number of bats go missing? They’re going to be able to figure out that you were one of the few people with access to them, so they might start asking questions. Signing up for a credit card you can’t pay off and charging hundreds of dollars on it might actually be a better idea. You are college baseball players, so pretty much no one on campus knows who you are or cares, thus you might be able to live this down without much trouble. That being said, you all need to be better criminals from here on out or your plans after college are going to include orange jumpsuits and leg irons.

- Travis Henry is approaching Calvin Murphy territory, and that’s actually not a good thing. Murphy is an NBA legend and one of the better players in the league’s storied history, but nowadays, most people know him for having about 13 different kids with nine different women. Henry is a running back in his first season with the Denver Broncos, and a report is now making the rounds that his prolific procreation skills have resulted in his fathering nine kids with nine different women in four different states. His previous stops have included the Buffalo Bills at the beginning of his career and a short, one-year stint with the Tennessee Titans, plus his college career at the University of Tennessee. He’s been productive at all of those stops, and he’s also been a pretty good football player. He’s rushed for more than 1,000 yards several times in his career, but clearly his best skills lie off the field, not on it. However, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that having those nine kids by nine women in four states wasn’t something T-Henry was shooting for. Assuming that’s the case, how exactly do you make that same mistake nine different times over the course of several years? Do you not grasp the basic biological principles by which pregnancy and conception take place? Are you not aware of scientific advances like condoms and birth control pills? Can you not control yourself enough to avoid knocking up nine different women in a few short years? My man, I know you’re an NFL player and you make crazy jack, but that money isn’t going to go very far when you’re having to make child-support payments to enough kids to form your own T. Henry baseball team. Should you choose to continue getting after it with every woman that you come within five feet of, you have a few options if you don’t want to hit the double-digit mark in illegitimate children: 1) wear protection, 2) make sure your partner is using birth-control pills, 3) have a vasectomy. Any of those three options should work, or you can always go the truly safe route and just not sex up every woman you meet. As always, I’m here to help, so I hope this has been beneficial to you……….

No comments: