Manny Being Manny . . . Being Kind of Stupid

Manny Ramirez’s expensive and turbulent tenure with the Los Angeles Dodgers came to an end in rather embarrassing fashion on August 29, 2010, as he was thrown out of the game for arguing balls and strikes with the home plate umpire.

This is not, in itself, particularly unusual—rarely does a week go past without some player or another objecting a bit too loudly or too creatively about a third-strike call, and ending up getting tossed out of the game. What makes Ramirez’s last at-bat in Dodger blue odd is that he was thrown out for arguing about the first pitch.

Ramirez—for several years rivaled only by Adam Sandler as the nation’s favorite man-child—entered the game as a pinch hitter in the sixth inning, with one out and the bases loaded, down 8 to 2 against the Colorado Rockies, with both teams desperate for a win to stay relevant in the National League wild-card chase. Bernard Malamud could hardly have written a more perfectly crafted clutch situation for a potential Hall of Fame hitter, and the partisan Coors Field crowd, despite booing enthusiastically, recognized the moment as one on which the game may well have turned inevitably to the Dodgers’ favor.

Instead, approximately thirteen nanoseconds later, Manny “ManRam” Ramirez—one of the most respected hitters of the past fifteen years—was out of the game and replaced by Reed “Who the Fuck?” Johnson, who grounded into an inning-ending double play.¹

Ramirez has earned a reputation both for being a prima donna and for lacking mental focus on anything but baseball (or, perhaps more accurately, anything but hitting). Some of his career highlights:

• Remarked, upon learning that he had been claimed off of waivers by the White Sox, that he looked forward to playing with Big Papi again.
• In 2009, was suspended for 50 games for violation of major league baseball’s drug policy, reportedly for taking human chorionic gonadotropin, a women’s fertility drug. He has consistently refused to disclose to the media the name of the father.
• Considers peanut butter to be a mortal enemy.
• On his first day with the Boston Red Sox, decided to walk to the ballpark to familiarize himself with the city; made it nearly three quarters of a mile out to sea before being informed by the Coast Guard that his map was upside-down.
• Doesn’t finish his vegetables.
• In 1999, after seven seasons and more than 800 games with Cleveland, announces to the press that he wished he’d played for the Indians. 
• Once played an entire thirteen-game homestand with his head stuck in a plastic jar.²

Ramirez’s ejection from a single regular-season game is far from a career-defining moment, especially for a hitter as accomplished, mercurial, and downright odd as Manny Ramirez. However, coming as it does at the very end of his Dodger days, it does provide a nifty summary of the end of his time there (and perhaps the end of his time in Boston as well)—as a tremendously gifted hitter who’s worn out his welcome; a guy selfish, spaced out, or indifferent enough to shoot his team in the foot on his way out of town.

NOTES

1. By my calculations, Ramirez made $111,111 for roughly five minutes’ worth of standing around. Good work if you can get it.
2. In his defense, on that homestand Ramirez batted .363 with 6 home runs, 8 doubles, and 22 runs batted in.

Obama is a Muslim, Intelligent Design is Legitimate Science, Elvis is Alive, and We Never Went to the Moon

At least that’s what I hear from the Tooth Fairy, and he’s a stand-up guy.


Sure as hell can’t hold his liquor, though.

Sacagawea: An American Icon

On August 31, 1803, the Lewis and Clark Expedition left Pittsburgh to, in the words of President Thomas Jefferson,

“explore the Missouri River and such principal stream of it as by its course and communication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean, whether the Columbia, Oregon, Colorado or any other river that may offer the most direct and practicable water communication across this continent for the purpose of commerce.”

Among the expedition party—and arguably its most famous member, surpassing even Lewis and, er, that other guy—was the Shoshone woman Sacagawea, who not only served as the expedition’s interpreter and guide across thousands of miles of unfamiliar, unforgiving, and potentially hostile wilderness, but also did everything the other explorers did, except backwards and in high heels.¹

While genuine biographical facts about Sacagawea are limited,² her presence on the Expedition was not only integral to its success but also remarkable in that she joined the expedition while pregnant, gave birth in the middle of it, and carried on until the end with a newborn son, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, in tow.³ It’s known that she later had another child, Lizette, with Toussaint Charbonneau; in 1811 she survived an attack on Fort Lisa, North Dakota, that took the lives of fifteen men; and in 1999 she became, by a wide margin, the least-butch woman ever to grace U.S. currency.
 

The sparse but commonly accepted history suggests that that Sacagawea died of a “putrid fever” on December 20, 1812, at only about twenty-four years old, at Fort Lisa, North Dakota. However, an alternate theory has been put forth that suggests that she long outlived this purported 1812 death, married into a Comanche tribe (after either a separation from, or the death of, Toussaint Charbonneau), and survived into the 1880s. This theory also suggests that, in addition to Jean Baptiste Charbonneau and Lizette Charbonneau, Sacagawea had five children by her second husband, a man named—according to this alternate theory—Jerk Meat.

I’ll repeat that more loudly, for those of you in the cheap seats: Jerk Meat. Please stop snickering—history is serious business.

It’s quite possible that naming conventions in nineteenth-century Comanche society didn’t fully anticipate the prevalence of the Beavis and Butt-head mentality of early twenty-first century American culture, but . . . seriously, Jerk Meat? How much did that poor guy get picked on as a kid?

If this alternate theory is to believed, there’s one trend that Jerk Meat’s parents did fully anticipate, and that’s the urge to give a poor, unsuspecting, defenseless little kid a ruthlessly stupid name. It’s unclear whether famous people gravitate towards this kind of name more than regular folks or it just seems that way, but famous people’s stupidly-named children are certainly easier to track down, so those are the ones I’m going to point out:⁴

• Kal-El: Son of Nicholas Cage, who apparently dreams of launching his boy out into deep space. I guess if you’re going to name your kid after a comic-book character, you could do worse. “Spawn” comes to mind.

• Pilot Inspecktor: Son of Jason Lee, former skateboarder and star of My Name is Earl, a show in which his wife’s son, Dodge, got his name because his (at the time) unknown father drove a Ford. The silly-name theme extends even to fiction.

• Fifi Trixibelle: Daughter of Bob Geldof, singer of the Boomtown Rats’ lone hit “I Don’t Like Mondays,” and later star of the movie version of The Wall. For all we know, he may also have other accomplishments in the last twenty-eight years.

• Apple: Daughter of Gwyneth Paltrow and that dude from that band that wants to sound like U2. No, the other band. No, the other dude.

• Prince Michael Jackson/Prince Michael Jackson II: Michael Jackson, one of his generation’s most gifted musicians and lyricists, apparently met his match when it came time for him to think up two measly boys’ names. So, in a stroke of genius, he named his boys after himself and their mother, Rogers Nelson.

• George Jr., George III, George IV, George V and George VI: Sons of boxer George Foreman. I refuse to mock George Foreman for his name selection, on account of the fact that the guy has been punched in the head more times than I’ve gotten out of bed.⁴ Plus, I’m quite certain that he (at sixty-one years old), any of his sons, and most of his daughters could beat the shit out of me. So name your kids whatever you want, George, I’m not going to say a word.

• Moon Unit, Diva Thin Muffin Pigeen, Ahmet, and Dweezil: children of musician and composer Frank Zappa. When “Ahmet” is the most normal name your kids end up with, maybe you should rethink your priorities. Technically, Dweezil Zappa was born Ian Donald Calvin Euclid Zappa—pretty darn normal, by Zappa standards. He grew up being called “Dweezil,” however, and didn’t learn of his legal name until he was five. He wanted to be Dweezil for real, and had his name legally changed. This is all fine and good, but come on, he was five. Can you really trust a five-year-old’s judgment? When I was five, I wanted to be a train.

• Sage Moonblood: Son, or perhaps daughter, of Sylvester Stallone. This isn’t any sort of commentary on Sage Moonblood Stallone’s masculinity or femininity, it’s just that Sage could be a man’s or a woman’s name, and I’m too lazy to look it up. And yes, I know how easy it is to look things up on the internet.

• Moxie Crimefighter: Child of Penn Jillette, the noisy half of the magician and comedian duo Penn & Teller. If I weren’t in the middle of griping about how awful it is to give kids names like these, I might admit that “Crimefighter,” as a middle name, is pretty fucking awesome.

• Tallulah, Scout, and Rumer: Bruce Willis and Demi Moore. I’m tempted to be complain that the least they could have done was spell “Rumer” like a real word,⁶ but I don’t think it’d do any good.

To be fair, regular unknown folks also do give their kids unusual names, although it’s a lot easier to find them when those kids get famous: Coco Crisp (baseball player), Peerless Pryce (American football player), Soleil Moon Frye (former child actress), Zooey Deschanel (current grown-up actress), Milton Bradley (baseball player/grouch). And Dane Cook, while he does not have children, has considered naming his children “Megatron” and “Optimus Prime.”⁷

While unfortunate names like these can (or did) lead to tough times growing up, these kids can take solace in knowing that their futures are not necessarily dim. History tells us⁸ that their spiritual predecessor, Jerk Meat, may well have led a very meaningful and satisfying life, if he actually existed; married a strong and beautiful woman, unless she’d actually died years before; lived to a ripe and joyous old age, as far as we know; and probably drifted blissfully off into the next life surrounded and supported by his loving children, Horseradish, Dick Head, Ted Nugent, Fatty Fatty Fatpants, and Mortimer Julius Underbuttocks III.

NOTES

1. It’s possible that we’re confusing Sacagawea with Ginger Rogers. You’d be surprised how often this happens.

2. According to a Wikipedia article I just skimmed and essentially plagiarized. Their sentence reads, at the moment, “Reliable historical information about Sacagawea is very limited.” I rewrote the sentence as it appears above so I can pass it off as my own scholarship, which is why you will find no reference or link here to any Wikipedia article.

3. Take that, Meriwether Lewis, you non-childbearing pussy.

4. I got most of these names here.

5. And he’d back me up on this: "If you're in boxing, too; you heard of Muhammad Ali, Kenny Norton, Joe Frazier. Evander Holyfield. They all hit me on the head. How many names am I going to remember?"

6. Roomer, ruler, tumor. Pick one, they’re all real words.

7. This could easily be interpreted as part of a comedy routine, except that it is yet to be determined whether Dane Cook has ever tried to do anything funny.

8. Or it could, if it wanted to.

To the Airport Baggage Handler Who Has My Flash Drive:

    
Kiss my ass.

                                                              Most sincerely,

                                                              Some Guy

P.S. Also, thanks for inadvertently downloading the identity-theft software I’d put on there for somebody just like you. You won’t even believe the car I’m driving these days.

KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNN!

Some Guy’s Adventures Through the Pint Glass, Part 6

Day 6: “I wish it were winter so we could freeze it into ice blocks and skate on it and melt it in the springtime and drink it!”¹

As I sit here poisoning my liver on a warm July night, I can’t help but think that the polar bear has to be the luckiest animal on Earth.

Think about it: name a lazier, more good-for-nothing animal on the planet. Go ahead, try. I dare you. It can’t be done, can it? At the risk of sounding like I’m stealing from someone else’s gig, polar bears are fat, lazy loafers who haven’t had to do a hard day’s work in their whole lives.

At the same time, though, they’ve carefully cultivated a reputation as terrifying, bloody-minded, stone-cold penguin killers. Now, I know what you’re saying:

• “they’re carnivores, killing is in their nature,”
• “polar bears mostly eat seal, not penguin,”
• “there are no penguins in the Arctic, asshole,”²

or even

• “I was with the polar bear that evening, she has an airtight alibi.”

But these trivial excuses become obvious nonsense in the face if incontrovertible photographic proof. Look at the poor little guy—he died so fast, he didn’t even have time to stop smiling.

But take a second look at that photograph. Did you notice the size of the ice floe? It’s tiny—barely the size of an American SUV—and rises little more than a foot or so out of the water. That’s no place to raise a family, and it’s but one small example of a critical global problem: glaciers are receding worldwide, and the Arctic ice pack—the polar bear’s natural habitat—is shrinking and breaking up, leaving these bears with fewer places to loaf and far more time in the water. Less time on solid ground (er, ice) means less time hunting and eating; more time in the water means more drowning and being devoured by MegaShark.

However, the best news of all for these poor lucky bastards is that despite being both lazy slobs and ruthless killing machines, they have somehow retained the ability to be cuter than a whole dump truck full of puppies, and it’s this intrinsic irresistibility that may allow them to dodge a watery doom. People love cute animals—even merciless penguin assassins—and will work their tails off to save them, even if it means shipping ice cube trays up to the North Pole and restocking the Arctic by hand. You really think it’s not about cuteness? Be honest, take a look at the four animals in the following pictures and tell me, if you’re filling up the last three spots on the Ark, which one doesn’t make the cut.

So now that we have this sad polar-bear business wrapped up, I’d like to turn our attention to a subject far more significant and far less publicized: the receding popularity of ice beer, which, much like the polar ice caps, once blanketed vast swaths of the North American continent in chilly misery, turning life into a bleak and perilous struggle for survival.

If you’re too young to remember the Dawn of the Ice Beer,³ ice brewing became popular in the 1990s as a way to increase a beer’s alcohol content⁴ while simultaneously cutting back on that pesky “flavor” thing that, for some brands, was little more than a distracting side effect. Breweries with a reputation for producing complex, flavorful beer—Guinness, New Belgium, Warsteiner, and O’Dell, to name a few⁵—generally steered clear of the “ice beer” fad, whereas Miller, Budweiser, Busch, Natural, and Keystone all jumped in with both feet. So I, despite having avoided ice beer since my college days, have decided to jump in as well by reviewing both

Bud Ice (Anheuser-Busch, St. Louis, Missouri) and
Keystone Ice (Coors Brewing Company, Golden, Colorado).

 

My reaction to Bud Ice was not as negative as I expected, but this is primarily because the details of the tasting are a bit hazy—two bottles of Bud Ice emerged from the Beer Mystery Case on my return from a dinner out with family, and said dinner had involved a couple of 22-ounce glasses of Fat Tire (a beer with a genuine reputation for flavor, courtesy of Fort Collins’ New Belgium Brewery). Upon making it home I poured what I thought were two glasses of water, giving one to my brother-in-law in a display of questionable hospitality, and probably would not have realized my mistake had I not fallen up the stairs a couple of times over the remainder of the evening. Bud Ice is much like Bud Light—and this is not praise—except its taste is a bit thinner, less substantial, and harder to remember the next morning.

On the other hand, my cans of Keystone Ice (motto: “Only 83% as crappy as regular Keystone!”), were my first drink(s) of the evening,⁶ and I was therefore fully aware of my surroundings and in clear control of my beer-tasting faculties. However, that didn’t make all that much of a difference—I left my Keystone Ice experience with no memorable impression of smell or flavor, other than that it tasted sort of like Keystone, but also sort of like Bud Ice. To its credit, though, it did help me get to sleep pretty quickly. 5.9% alcohol content by volume, indeed.

It’s difficult to give an accurate or helpful rating to a drink—in this case, two—that almost completely fails to register in my memory. So instead I’ll give two ratings, because if you’re inclined to buy Keystone or Budweiser in the first place (either their regular or their “ice” versions), odds are your goal is not to slowly savor a tasty beer, but to get a good cheap buzz on and act like a jackass. So, Some Guy’s rating for Bud Ice and Keystone Ice are as follows:

(1) If you’re a grown-up with any sort of developed/sophisticated taste for beer, Bud Ice and Keystone Ice get our lowest rating yet, one (1) happy severed penguin head.

(2) If you’re a college kid on a budget, looking to get loaded on a lonely Friday night without breaking the bank on a high-class beer such as Coors Light, then either Bud Ice or Keystone Ice would be a fine choice. For the sad, sorry purpose of getting you hammered in your dorm room while playing Xbox, Bud Ice and Keystone Ice get three (3) BITTER BEER FACES.

For more of Some Guy’s Adventures through the Pint Glass, check here: Day 1  Day 2  Day 3  Day 4  Day 5  Day 6

NOTES

1. Barry Badrinath (Jay Chandrasekhar) from Beer Fest, a movie about beer drinking that is only barely watchable even when drunk.

2. You poor, stupid, gullible sap—you’ve bought the polar bears’ shoddy alibi hook, line, and sinker.

3. If you really are too young to remember this, you’re probably too young to drink anyway. Come back and finish reading this column when you grow up, youngster.

4. The increased alcohol content has something to do with how the ice-brewing process removes more of the yeast—or removes it earlier in the process—than happens in regular brewing,thus weakening the flavor. To be honest, I didn’t really look into it. If you actually expected to find beer information in this beer review, then, wow, are you ever barking up the wrong tree.

5. You may not have heard of a couple of these breweries (here I’m addressing potential future readers of Bowling in the Dark, not current actual readers), but they make very tasty beer.

6. There’s a third can still in the fridge, for those of you who are counting down the Case. I’ll get to it later, I’m sure, but probably won’t write about it.

Mangled English

Part 1 of a Potentially Infinite Series

“You don’t want to be a draft pick that should have did something but never did nothing.”

—John Wall, University of Kentucky basketball player

While we admire John Wall’s apparent dedication to living up to his lofty status as the first overall pick in 2010’s NBA draft, it bothers us a bit that one of the somethings that he clearly should have did was to pay better attention during English class—especially the parts that dealt with verb agreement and double negatives.

It bothers us more, though, that if John Wall has even a middling NBA career—and from what we’ve read, he’ll probably be a star—his fifteen to twenty years’ worth of newspaper quotes, postgame radio and TV interviews, and locker-room or mid-game Twitter postings¹ will likely allow him to have more of an impact on American English than all his dedicated, learned, and heartbroken English teachers (past, present, and future) put together.

Sigh.

We don’t follow college or professional basketball, so for all we know, Wall is a bright, erudite young man who’s merely gotten off to a rough start as an interviewee. We suppose it’s better to be optimistic than to wonder if  perhaps Wall’s never doing nothing is the best we can hope for.

NOTE

1. We realize that Twitter postings are generally referred to as “tweets,” but for the time being, we’re going to refuse to use that word. First of all, it’s a stupid word regardless of context—stupider even than “cuddle.” Second, Twitter may well be the most pointless and narcissistic activity in the history of the human race—even more so than blogging, although the competition is closer than we care to admit—and we don’t want to show it any inadvertent support by adopting its silly vocabulary.