- You just can't blame Pittsburgh Pirates players for being angry at the team’s front office. For the second year in a row, the Pirates are jettisoning their best players mid-season, once again running up the white flag on the year before it’s halfway over and telling everyone – players, fans, etc. – that this year just won’t be the one where their team makes a push to be better than terrible. Last season, the team traded star outfielder Jason Bay to Boston just before the trading deadline, getting the requisite slate of young, quasi-talented players in return but ultimately achieving their primary goal: dumping salary. This year, the Pirates are getting an early jump on dumping salary and conceding the season as a lost cause. Even though they were within five games of first place early in the week, Pirate management made not one, but two trades to deal way starting outfielders and valuable young players from a team bidding to give the city of Pittsburgh its first season of non-losing baseball in 18 years. Needless to say, the reaction from the players was less than enthusiastic after the team sent starting outfielder Nyjer Morgan and reliever Sean Burnett to the Nationals and utility player Eric Hinske to the Yankees. "It's not our job to understand the big plan, I guess," first baseman Adam LaRoche said. We've got to do the same thing we did after Nate left, try to keep it together." Not exactly a vote of support for management, eh Adam? Oh, and thanks to my man Adam LaRoche for referencing the trade of starting centerfielder Nate McLouth to Atlanta, almost forgot that one. That trade actually took place last month, so it was obscured by this more recent wave of moves. Shortstop Jack Wilson doesn’t sound like he’s any more enthused than LaRoche, declaring that he was "beyond, beyond tired" of the Pirates' deals the past few seasons. "We know that they're looking to the future, which doesn't say much about 2009," Wilson said. "That's probably what's so shocking. We're five games out, and we lost two or three of our everyday players. They're businessmen. They're trying to achieve winning baseball in Pittsburgh. The biggest question is: When is that going to be? When do things start turning around?” Honestly? Do you really want an answer to that or was it a rhetorical question? Because I think you and everyone else knows the answer and it isn't the one you want, J. The reality is that the “when” for the Pirates turning things around is never, at least not as long as the current group of clowns owns the team. They could not care less that the Pirates are trying to avoid a major league-record 17th consecutive losing season and were just six games out of first in the tightly packed National League Central on Wednesday. They like the idea of owning a team but can’t afford to pay what it would take to be competitive on a regular basis, not in a small market like Pittsburgh. So they’ll continue to jettison promising players in exchange for cheaper ones and hope they can string the fans along indefinitely, good times………
- Attention all Panamanian shoppers/citizens, there is now a sale on both potato chips and federal funding in aisle 4! Okay, so perhaps electing the multimillionaire owner of a supermarket chain doesn’t necessarily mean that Panama is going to turn into one giant supermarket, but a guy can dream. Who wouldn’t love the idea of a double coupon day allowing for a steeply discounted Panama Canal crossing? What’s not cool about a special where buying a 10-pack of Ramen noodles gives you half off on the price of a building permit for your small business? These ideas are all things I’d love to discuss with Ricardo Martinelli, who was inaugurated as president of Panama on Wednesday. The Panamanians do it up right, so National Assembly President Jose Luis Varela performed the swearing-in and placed the presidential sash on Martinelli, who won the election in May and has promised the citizens of Panama who "want things to be done differently" that “an attitude of change starts today.” Exact change, hopefully, to continue the supermarket metaphor, but I digress. In his first presidential speech, Martinelli promised a smaller government budget but raises for public workers. He also vowed to address public safety, which was a huge problem under the previous administration. I’m not quite as pumped up about Martinelli’s pledges to work with Mexico and Colombia to combat drug trafficking in the region, because as you all know, I have scores of pot head, crack head and other drug-using amigos around the world and I’m not for anyone looking to harm them. But who knows, perhaps being chairman of the Super 99 supermarket chain, one of the largest private companies in Panama, is great training for running a country. Lots of success to my man Ricardo Martinelli on everything except is whole drug-fighting idea. I’m here if you need any other ideas, Senor Preisdente……….
- I freaking hate you, American music-buying public, and I have no qualms about saying so. When I touch up billboard.com and see that those freaks the Hack Eyed Peas currently top the Billboard 200 (albums), the Billboard Hot 100 (singles) and the Billboard Hot Digital Songs charts with material from their crap-tacular new album, I’m just angry. Think of any synonym for angry in your handy thesaurus and know that those words all apply to my current state of mind. I warned you about this garbage before it came out, I am sure that you have plenty of evidence as to how gawd-awful the “music” from these losers is based on their previous “songs” and yet you buy it anyhow? People, I am trying to help you here and you are just making my job impossible. Not to rehash all of my arguments, but I can go back over the basics for you. The H.E.P. are no-talent hacks who dress like a blend between aging hipsters, fashion-dense golfers, faux punks and retirement home grandparents. Musically, their offerings are thinner than a sheet of the cheapest single-ply toilet paper, complete with inane lyrics, shallow vocals and more over-production and synthesizing than almost anything you’ll ever heard. They don’t play instruments, they just “sing” their moronic lyrics while dancing around like a bunch of robotic chimps on X and acting like they don’t suck. Whether they are together as a group or doing their own thing as solo acts, their music sucks equally bad. Their music is so bad that I would consider buying a sawed-off shotgun (though I hate guns, have no permit and have no idea how to use one), walking into my local music store and systematically blasting every copy of the album into a billion tiny pieces even though I would head straight to jail or a long time. It would be worth it to rid the world of a few copies of that crap, but with digital music being the main source of distribution and copies being sold worldwide, this is a menace that one man alone cannot wipe out. So I am counting on you to wake up, wise up and do your part. If you see a copy of this album, destroy it. If you see someone listening to it, take their music-playing device and destroy it. It is for their own good and sooner or later, they will realize it and thank you for it………
- In different parts of the world, a simple gesture can be perceived very differently. For example, at a bonfire in the southeastern portion of the United States, throwing a dead pig in someone’s general direction would be greeted with a heartfelt thanks. You would have brought a delicious treat to be cooked up over an open pit, a nice, juicy slab of pork to be consumed and enjoyed by one and all. However, repeat that same gesture in southern India and you just might spark off a massive religious riot. That appears to be exactly what happened in Mysore Thursday after somebody threw a dead pig into the compound of an under-construction mosque. After the pig toss, the entire town more or less broke out into a full-scale riot. Muslims and Hindus went at it like…..well, whenever the last time Muslims and Hindus had a major dust-up over thrown animal remains. City police commissioner Sunil Agarwal and his officers tried to restore peace using some traditional methods (tear gas) and some local twists on riot gear (bamboo sticks, the riot baton of Middle Asia), but more than a dozen people were injured before things settled down. In typical, overreactive government fashion, local authorities responded by banning assembly of five or more people on the streets of the troubled area. For the geographically-challenged among you, Mysore is a city in Karnataka, India's only southern state governed by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. It is also a place where you want to think carefully before choosing which animal carcass you are going to heave into an ongoing construction project……
- Only in the freaking United States of America could things like the International Federation of Competitive Eating and Nathan's International July Fourth Hot Dog Eating Contest exist – and that’s a good thing. Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of “food athletes” cramming ginormous quantities of often-disgusting foods down their pie holes in short amounts of time. Seeing these freaks parade out from backstage in their homemade costumes, sporting their championship belts won in various eating contests and playing to the crowd like they’re freaking Lennox Lewis at a heavyweight title bout is hilarious. Having freak shows like Joey Chestnut pull apart and consume more than five dozen hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes is both sickening and riveting at the same time, but I’m also glad that this phenomenon hasn’t caught on around the world. Today’s Nathan's International July Fourth Hot Dog Eating Contest was fun to watch, but think for a moment what would happen if other countries felt compelled to emulate it. The world already hates us enough for force-feeding our culture down their throats in the form of fashion, language, music, etc. Can you imagine how they would feel if their country suddenly saw a surge of “food athletes” decide to eat mass quantities of food and quasi-food products just for the sake of seeing who could consume the most in a given time period? While we may have ridiculous supplies of food to waste on crap like competitive eating, many places in the world don’t have sufficient food to meet the needs of their people on a daily basis. Second, with America being the fattest nation in the world, I have to think that eating habits like those promoted by competitive eating are at least a part of what makes us so collectively FAT. If other countries embraced the concept of competitive eating as we have, they too might see their national waistline expand rapidly. They would then have the U.S. to blame for yet another blight on their culture and I for one do not want to facilitate that. So while I was right there with you watching today’s festivities emanate from Coney Island, let’s all agree that this is a phenomenon that belongs in the United States of America and nowhere else……
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