Mike Bridenstine's Tumblr Thing

Boy, 2012.  What a year, huh?  Especially if you like Jesus and football.  Or (in the case of Tim Tebow) both, which is probably why he’s been a thing so far this year.  We’re half way through January, so I thought I’d give my way-too-early Year in Review.  

Politics

Friday night on Real Time with Bill Maher, they touched on the fact that front-runner, Mitt Romney, is hard to write jokes about.  And it’s true.  You’ve got 1) Mormon, 2) Flip-flopper and 3) Looks plastic.  And that’s about it.  I looked back on jokes I’d written about him for my current events roast show (Plug: Roast the Week with Mike Bridenstine - it’s free on iTunes) and they followed the same formula.  

“Mitt Romney is a Mormon, which is a weirdo religion.  Mormons didn’t allow black people until 1978.  But, to its credit, it’s still 30 years before the Republican party did. “

And

“Mitt Romney won Iowa and New Hampshire.  Which is weird, because I assume the only people who like Mitt Romney are Mormons and people who’s favorite Mad Men character is Duck Phillips.”

And I had something about Mormonism being a religion that bans caffeine, alcohol, consistency and charisma.  So if Romney wins the nomination I’m fucked.  But I still have faith in the political process.  Here’s why - in hindsight, the 2008 Presidential election seemed so much more interesting than this one.  It had Obama vs. Hillary and Hope and Change and Sarah Palin and all kinds of good stuff.  But I needed to remind myself that we didn’t even meet Sarah Palin until August 29th of that year.  If I remember correctly, John McCain wasn’t viewed as a ‘real conservative’ to the base so he had to pick a far right V.P. candidate to shut people up.  If Romney wins the nomination, he’ll need to do the same thing.  Who knows what type of MILFy backwoods dipshit he could find.  Christine O’Donnell recently endorsed him.  You never know.         

Then there are the debates.  This anti-Romney ad that Newt Gingrich’s PAC put Online has been pretty interesting to me.  It’s hilarious, it’s got all of his best gaffes, and it brings up a great point - other than the Evangelicals, most Republicans just want to pick a guy who can beat Obama.  They don’t necessarily care about the issues, but they know that whoever they’re stuck with as a nominee will have to go toe to toe with Barack Obama in a series of televised debates.  And deep down they know Obama is good.  Newt’s argument is that he’s the only candidate who can do it.  My argument to Newt against that would be, “You know you have to like, stand next to him, right?”  Sure, Obama will make assholes out of guys like Romney, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry and Ron Paul.  But if the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy debates taught us anything, it’s that it won’t do the GOP any good whatsoever to have President Cool Black Guy on stage against Slimer from Ghostbusters. 

The V.P. choice and debates are still coming.  Plus, there’s always the chance of a late entry (looking in your general direction, Donald Trump and Sarah Palin).  This one could end up being fun after all.  

Sports

I kinda like Tim Tebow.  I’m not exactly sure why.  I will say that the Broncos’ win against the Steelers was the only good game of Wild Card week.  And who am I supposed to root for - a guy who loves Jesus more than me, or Ben Roethlisberger, a rapist?  When Tebow connected with Demaryius Thomas for a ridiculous 80-yard touchdown pass on the first play of overtime to win the game (and Tebow was seen Tebowing on the other end of the field), Mike Burns turned to me and said ironically, “I really gotta start praying more.” 

And that’s Tebowmania in a nutshell.  I don’t even believe in any of the same religious shit Tebow does, but the guy still somehow feels magical.  Weren’t the Broncos 1-5 before Tebow?  Doesn’t he love John 3:16?  And didn’t he pass for 316 yards in that game, with an average of 31.6 yards-per-completion?  Holy shit.  I didn’t even want to say, “Holy shit” there because it sounds like a bad pun, but HOLY fucking SHIT.  The playoffs still had actual elite quarterbacks like Aaron Rodgers and Drew Brees and Tom Brady, but Tebow still got all the attention because of stuff like this.  Sure, Tom Brady and the Patriots Austin 3:16’d his ass on Saturday, but it was fun while it lasted.   

The National Championship game between LSU and Alabama was exactly what everyone thought it would be - a snoozefest.  It paled in comparison to great games like the Outback Bowl between Michigan State and Georgia, the Fiesta Bowl with Oklahoma State and Stanford and the Sugar Bowl with Michigan and Virginia Tech.  And we arrived at the National Championship match up partially because of the evildoing of Alabama coach, Nick Saban.  Oklahoma State should have been in that game, plane and simple.  Yeah, Oklahoma State shouldn’t have lost to Iowa State in double overtime back in November, but if Alabama couldn’t win its own conference, it shouldn’t be able to win the BCS Championship.  But Saban was one of the coaches who ranked Oklahoma State 4th (behind Stanford) in the Coaches Poll.  Stanford’s David Shaw was another.  And three people in the Harris Poll voted them 6th.  6th!  It’s ridiculous. 

I love college football, but I’m having a harder and harder time defending it.  Especially since the whole thing is decided by a computer system nobody can explain.  The best thing that could have happened on January 9th was a squeaker win by Alabama, where the AP decided to vote for LSU anyway and the whole BCS bullshit was finally blown up.  But that didn’t happen and we’ll see you next year with whatever two SEC teams the computers decide to place in the title game.       

Music

Since I don’t care about LMFAO, I’m over Adele and I’m nearly done with Skrillex and what I’ve dubbed ‘Weight Room Techno’, the story of 2012 in music has to be the birth of Blue Ivy Carter.  As soon as I heard Jay-Z had a daughter with Beyonce, my first thought (after “Hope she gets her mother’s face”) was “Great.  He’s going to rap about his daughter all the time now.”  And sure enough, Jay-Z put out “Glory” right away.  Then he said he was going to stop saying the word ‘bitch’ because of her.  Super!  Can’t wait to hear the new terrible version of “99 Problems.”     

There’re all kinds of theories about what the name Blue Ivy means.  The best one I’ve heard is that she’s named after Jay-Z’s album, The Blueprint and Beyonce’s 4, which in Roman numerals would be IV.  Get it?  But the most simple answer would be that they’re celebrities.  And celebrities name their kids stupid ass shit.  Still, two things confuse me.  1) This was pointed out to me by Ricky Carmona, but in the song “Hello Brooklyn” Jay says, “if we had a daughter guess what I’m a call her Brooklyn Carter.”  And 2) For a guy who constantly likes to remind everyone how rich he is, he sure did pick a trailer park name.  Say “Blue Ivy Carter” in a Southern accent and it sounds like she should be on Toddlers & Tiaras.  Brooklyn is a solid name for a girl.  It would have been just fine.  But now I give her until 2017 until she comes out with her own version of “Whip My Hair” or whatever billionaire kids in the future will be doing.    

Movies

Say what you want about the Prometheus trailer or whatever movies have Oscar buzz, but as soon as I saw the football field get blown to pieces in the Dark Knight Rises trailer, I screamed like a maniac and called my nerd friends to discuss things like whether or not Joseph Gordon-Levitt was going to be Robin.  And I’m going to join a gym and lift weights until I look like Bane.  Or at least like Tom Hardy in Warrior.  Or maybe just to not look like Danny DeVito in Batman Returns.  Whatever.  Everything else this year might as well be called Thing That Isn’t Dark Knight Rises.  I can’t wait.  

Okay.  That’s been 2012.  I’ll let you know if anything else happens between now and the end of December. 

This story is a few weeks old, but I’ve been cleaning up my RSS feed and I read that Barbara Walters’ 10 Most Fascinating People of 2011 special was down 30% in viewers from the previous year.  Then I looked up who the fascinating people were.  The Kardashians, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Eric Stonestreet, Simon Cowell, Donald Trump, Derek Jeter, Katy Perry, Pippa Middleton, Herman Cain, Amanda Knox and Steve Jobs.  No wonder.  With apologies to Jeter and the late Steve Jobs, 2011 wasn’t the slightest bit fascinating. 

Steve Jobs was an amazing person.  He was totally fascinating.  But he took medical leave from Apple in January, resigned as CEO in August and then died of pancreatic cancer in October.  That was his 2011.  He’d had better years.  They picked Steve Jobs because he died.  Was Jobs more fascinating than newly-dead people like Muammar Qaddafi or Kim Jong-Il or Osama bin Laden?  Just asking.      

Derek Jeter didn’t hit .300 in 2011.  He didn’t get any MVP votes either.  But he plays for the Yankees and fucks a lot of actresses.  Is that fascinating?  Sure, but he’s kinda been doing that for a while.  He got his 3,000th hit in 2011, but did Baba Wawa come knocking on Craig Biggio’s door in 2007?  Again, just asking.  On the other hand, Justin Verlander threw a no-hitter and won the A.L. Cy Young Award and MVP for a city that needs a hero a little bit more than New York.  He should really think about fucking more actresses.  I know I am.  High five.           

If Jeter is fascinating for being an athlete who fucks chicks, our next selections were apparently chosen for being the chicks athletes fuck.  The Kardashians are not fascinating.  Not unless it’s 1976 and Bruce Jenner just won gold in the decathlon.  Or unless it’s the early ‘80’s when he actually replaced Erik Estrada on ChiPS.  Or not unless it’s 1995 and Robert Kardashian is an attorney in the OJ trial.  But it’s not.  This list is for 2011.  And Kris Jenner wasn’t even married to Robert Kardashian during the OJ trial.  They got divorced in 1990.  So she’s pretty much worthless.  She’s Second-Hand-OJ-Trial Worthless.  I have no use for the rest of them either.  If you’re fascinated by them… well, then you deserve them.     

And I hope Kris Humphries is happy.  According to polls, he’s now the #1 most disliked player in the NBA.  A guy who’s averaged less than 6 points a game for his career is more hated than LeBron James and Kobe Bryant.  All because of his publicity stunt wedding with a Kardashian.  I guess Bruce Jenner was also an American hero on the cover of Wheaties boxes 30 years ago and now he’s a guy with a face like a burn victim and hair like a lesbian tennis player.  Maybe that’s what will make the Kardashians fascinating to me.  Maybe if we finally find out that those three girls are some sort of Armenian succubi for male athletes and Lamar Odom starts growing Satanic Dark Crystal wings out of his back in the middle of a Mavericks game… THEN I will be fascinated.  It’ll be even better if we find out they inherited the curse from their father, who befriended football star and not-yet-a-murderer, OJ Simpson.  Until then, Kim is basically a glorified rap video chick with a bullshit fragrance line.  And the rest of them are just That Chick’s sister.  The most fascinating people in the whole world shouldn’t be relegated to the E! network. 

Pippa Middleton being considered fascinating hurts my brain.  Try to follow.  Prince William is famous for being the son of Princess Diana and Prince Charles and the grandson of Queen Elizabeth II.  They’re all famous through birth, but that’s how royalty works.  Kate Middleton marries Prince William… and somehow her younger sister Pippa gets all the attention.  This woman is a party planner in another country, folks.  It doesn’t make sense.  She’s a little bit royal and a whole lot of who cares.  She’s a British Kardashian without the curves… or the Armenian succubus curse.   

Herman Cain’s selection doesn’t surprise me.  But at this point he feels like such old news that they could have interviewed Michael Steele instead and my brain would have said, “Yeah.  That guy is Herman Cain.” 

Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Eric Stonestreet play gay dudes on Modern Family.  Ferguson is actually gay.  Stonestreet is gay-for-pay.  I’m sure they’re good, but I don’t watch the show so I don’t care.  Give me Bryan Cranston, Trey Parker and Matt Stone or Louis CK.    

I have to admit that I had to look up who Amanda Knox is.  Is she the same person as Casey Anthony?  Did any Yankees shortstops fuck her?  If not, then I don’t care about her either.        

In 2011, Katy Perry was a voice in the Smurfs.  And she had a lot of hit songs from an album that was released in 2010.  Is now a good time to bring up the fact that Adele isn’t on this list?  Or the most-Googled person with the most-watched YouTube video, Rebecca Black?  Or Charlie Sheen?  Or Tim Tebow, David Freese, Aaron Rogers, Abby Wambach, Ryan Gosling, Jay-Z, Kanye West, the Occupy people, the Arab Spring people, Jack Dorsey or Dick Costolo?  None of those people were more fascinating than the gay couple from Modern Family, a girl who DIDN’T murder someone in Italy in 2007 or a voice from the Smurfs who put out an album in NOT-2011?           

Simon Cowell and Donald Trump round out this awful list.  Like, really?  Are they finally getting the respect they deserved from 2004?  Donald Trump said he’d run for President, then he didn’t.  Then he said Barack Obama’s birth certificate is fake, which it’s not.  He could have just saved us the hassle and just said, “Watch the Apprentice.  Sunday nights at 9 on NBC.”  Trump and Cowell are essentially the same person.  Glib self-caricatures with signature buttfuck haircuts and mean little catchphrases.  It’s too bad Anne Robinson from the Weakest Link didn’t stick around.  Then she too could have been fascinating.          

2011 sucked both balls.  But maybe if you’re 82 and you sit on a couch every day talking to middle aged female comedians, an angry Evangelical Christian cutie pie and a dipshit who thinks the world is flat, then everyone seems fascinating.  Can’t wait until December 2012.  If the world doesn’t end, then we’ll get to see more popular recent dead people, athletes who bang chicks, failed politicians, 5th leads on sitcoms, TV personalities who peaked 8 years ago and talentless socialites who are related to people.  Can’t wait.         

You know what’s fun?  Coming back to Iowa just in time for a University of Iowa journalism professor to write an article in The Atlantic about how shitty and backwards the state is.   The article was written by Stephen G. Bloom, whom I knew as the author of Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America - a book where he pretends Hasidic Judaism ISN’T super fucking weird.    The reason for the new article is ostensibly to criticize the influence of Iowa on the 2012 Presidential election (since 1972, the Iowa Caucuses have been the first major electoral event in the nominating process for President.  And Bloom says Iowa isn’t representative of America).  But mainly the article is a chance for Bloom to bash the state for being rural and then to use the world ‘rural’ as many times as humanly possible.

People are mad about what Bloom wrote.  He probably didn’t think his lofty thinkpiece of an article in The Atlantic (Iowans be stoopid!) would trickle all the way down into the greasy mongoloid fingers of actual Iowans. Personally, I’m not mad that some professor is trying to suck the imaginary dick of intelligentsia by throwing his Podunk state under the bus.  I just think he did a subpar job of doing it.   Not to mention that the Iowa Caucuses don’t really have that big of an influence on the actual Presidential election in the first place, which is something you’d know if you looked up things like ‘results’ and ‘facts’ about them.  Bloom seems to think that if you win the Iowa Caucus, you have a 50% chance of winning the general election.  Since only two non-incumbents have ever won the Iowa Caucuses and then gone on to win the general election, I’m going to hypothesize that Bloom knows so little about how politics work in Iowa that he can’t actually have an opinion about it.  He just wants to make fun of Iowa.  Plain and simple.  He’s just using the Caucuses to Trojan horse his way in with these hackneyed ‘observations.’  

Here’s something I know from comedy - Iowa is not a very easy state to make fun of.  I know this because I’ve watched people try and fail to make fun of it several times.  This article is no exception.  The problem is that Iowa isn’t very pretentious and it isn’t quite hick.  It just doesn’t have a lot of people.  So when most unoriginal people want to make fun of a state as hick, they throw on a thick Southern accent and accuse the people of being uneducated and fucking their cousins.  And embarrassingly, Bloom tries that here too.  He uses, “Them’s fightin’ words” as an expression Iowans would use in reaction to being called xenophobic (which is hilarious to me, since Bloom completely missed the irony of assigning such a hillbilly response to a $10 word).  In other instances, Bloom has a ‘typical’ Iowan referring to Barack Obama as a “Harvard-educated, black city slicker who wouldn’t know a John Deere tractor from a International Harvester combine.”  Cringe-worthy.  As if we all use, as Olson Johnson calls it in Blazing Saddles, “Authentic frontier gibberish.” Bloom also uses a whole paragraph to illustrate how Iowans call soda “pop” (how fucking crazy is that shit?) and refer to boys under 16 as “Bud.”  Then, he says, “The reason everyone seems related in small-town Iowa is because, if you go back far enough, many are, either by marriage or birth.”  Just in case you didn’t think he was also going to call us all cousin-fuckers. 

Besides the fact that I have no idea what an International Harvester combine does, I’ve never heard anyone use the term ‘city slicker’ except in reference to a Billy Crystal movie and that whole thing about ‘Bud’ is made-the-fuck-up, the main problems with painting Iowa into the hick state corner is that Iowans don’t have Southern accents (Bloom even comments on how broadcasters covet the Iowa accent), they’re fairly well educated (Bloom talks about high graduation rates) and… I guess I didn’t realize that everyone seems related in small town Iowa.  Maybe he just means the Ching Chongs.  

Not that facts or consistency matter to the guy.  Bloom seemingly wants to have everything both ways.  He calls Keokuk, Iowa a “depressed, crime-infested slum town.”  But later says that serious crime in Iowa is tee-peeing a high-school senior’s front yard.  He also criticizes Iowa for a lack of cultural diversity and then throws a red-faced shitfit when Iowans say, “Merry Christmas” to each other instead of “Happy Holidays”, which would exclude the whopping 6% of Iowans (read: Him) who don’t celebrate Christmas.   

It’s like he’s trying to shoehorn 20 years of the worst shit he’d seen in Iowa into generalizations about the state and the people.  I lived in Iowa for 24 years.  I could do that too, except mine would be better, they’d actually be true and they wouldn’t include moth-eaten terms like ‘flyover country.’  And I would assume that people knew that ‘brat’ was short for bratwurst, and that shortening the term wasn’t some sort of cultural fucking sacrilege. 

I think that one sentence sums up Bloom’s attempt at an article.  After calling Iowa flyover country he says, “It didn’t rate even a speck in Sol Steinberg’s classic 1967 New Yorker cover.“  Let me get the tuna can casserole barf off of my keyboard.  How transparent is that disgusting, pretentious sentence?  “It didn’t rate even a speck in Sol Steinberg’s classic 1967 New Yorker cover.“  Well, case fucking dismissed!  Iowa is a shithole, officially.  Shut it down.  Shut it the fuck down!  Shut the Caucuses down too.  The great Sol Steinberg didn’t notice Iowa in his classic 1967 New Yorker cover! 

Sometimes when you try too hard, you can’t even get your own side’s presumed argument right.  Bloom means SAUL Steinberg, not SOL.  And the cover he’s referring to came out in 1976, not 1967.  But Jesus Christ.  The incorrect information.  The desire to come off as a brilliant cultural giant in the land of Lilliputians.  And then getting it all wrong.  It took me four seconds to Google some of this shit.  I’m guessing that most angry Iowans were too busy pointing out that Bloom said we hunt turkeys with rifles (instead of shotguns) to notice that he even gets his own shit wrong.  We didn’t come off looking stupid here, he did. And this Tumblr article wasn’t written by a journalism professor.  It was written by someone from one of the “skuzziest cities [Bloom has] ever been to, and that’s saying something.”  Fair enough.  I’ll take being good at being skuzzy over being bad at being pretentious any day of the week.  Merry fucking Christmas, asshole.         

The Gentlemen Scumbags are coming out with a best of album that’ll be on iTunes very soon.   It features Matt Braunger, Kyle Kinane, Sean Patton, Rory Scovel, James Adomian, Pete Holmes and a ton of our other scummy friends.  Here’s a full track listing, which will is hosted by Mike Burns and me, as well as our producer, the hilarious Patrick Melton…   

1. Chub O’Rama (f. Andrew DeWitt)
2.  Mile High (f. Matt Braunger)
3.  Michael Moore (f. Kyle Kinane)
4.  Two Shits a Year
5. The Kabin Story (f. Sean Patton)
6. Tranny Karaoke (f. Cornell Reid)
7. Dick Stories (f. Ari Shaffir)
8. Uncle Micky’s Chicago Tales (f. Mick Betancourt)   
9. Bubblegum Smile (f. Andrew DeWitt)
10.  The Kids and the Suckin’ the Dicks (f. Rory Scovel)   
11. Marie Callender’s (f. Matt Knudsen)
12. F*ck Patrick
13. Kirk Douglas (f. Mike Holmes)
14. Look at that Body, McMahon (f. James Adomian and Matt Knudsen)
15. Do It! (f. Pete Holmes)
16. Porch Pizzas (f. Kyle Kinane)
17. Big Boy Pants (f. Mike Holmes)
18. SmackDown (f. Andrew Goldstein)
19. Very Darrison (f. Kyle Kinane)
20. All Mixed Up (f. Ricky Carmona)
21. Naughty Passion Prop (f. Cornell Reid)
22. Kissin’  (f. Mike Holmes)
23. 15 Minute Orgasm (f. Jonny Loquasto)
24. 31 Days of Hot Sex (f. Matt Braunger)
25. Outro (Don’t Buy This Track)

I’ve heard enough Cubs fans gripe about Ron Santo posthumously getting into the Hall of Fame this year, that I wanted to address it.  Yes, it sucks that he didn’t get to live long enough see his induction.  Yes, his speech would have been amazing.  But isn’t it obvious that Santo’s death was the reason he finally got inducted in the first place?  That’s not just me saying that.  A lot of players get elected shortly after they die.  That’s because there’re all kinds of stories about the guys in the news saying what great ballplayers they were (and Santo totally was), so it gives the players a push in voters’ minds.  And it just so happens that this was the year that Veteran Committee rules had voters looking at guys (like Santo) who played between 1947 and 1972 (the Golden Era). 

I could be a dick and say that if Santo wanted to get elected earlier, he should have died sooner or not been such a marginal choice.  But I won’t.  I could be a dick and remind Cubs fans that his beloved team didn’t even retire his number until 2003 - 16 years after Billy Williams and 21 years after Ernie Banks.  I could attribute his popularity to his work as the Cubs’ radio color commentator.  I could remind people that his first year on the writers’ ballot, he only got 4% of the vote.  I could argue that Jim Kaat would have been a better choice.  But I won’t.  Santo was the best available third baseman out there and I’m happy he finally got in.  Plus, the guy just died for Christ sakes.  It’s not like I’m an animal. 

If you really want to feel bad for overlooked ballplayers, check out next year’s Pre-Integration Era selection, which looks at players from 1871-1946.  Well, I guess the name itself makes them seem like racists (Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947), but you can kinda feel bad for them nonetheless.  I decided to look at the top 25 candidates for the Hall of Fame because I’m a fucking nerd (I used baseballreference.com and Bill James’ Career Standards Test).  And I was surprised that over half of the top 25 were guys from the 1800’s.  I was curious as to why they’d been excluded and this is what I found out…  

Voting on 1800’s players has been a clusterfuck ever since the Hall of Fame began in 1936.  That year, five players from 1800’s were supposed to go into Cooperstown with “modern players” Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Walter Johnson and Christy Mathewson, but a group of old timers couldn’t agree on who to put in.  By 1939, the oldy timers were feeling excluded so three men - Kenesaw Mountain Landis (the Commissioner of baseball), Ford Frick (president of the National League) and Will Harridge (president of the American League) picked a few guys to go in.  They included Cap Anson, Buck Ewing and Old Hoss Radbourn. 

A new Old Timers Committee was made the same year, but they never found time to meet.  From 1939-1944 they never met and did absolutely nothing.  Seriously.  It was getting ridiculous so in 1945, a new Committee was made and they just shoved a fuckload of old players into the Hall.  Then they did the exact same thing the next year.  The main problem was that the new Committee didn’t do their homework.  And how were they supposed to?  Stats weren’t available to them.  Selections were just made by memory and nepotism.  They put in too many players from the 1894 Baltimore Orioles.  And they put in too many guys with ties to New York Giants manager, John McGraw.  In 1945, Roger Bresnaham and Hugh Jennings were the first guys to go into the Hall of Fame, who are obvious mistakes.  But Bresnahan had ties to McGraw AND he’d just died in 1944.  Toofer!  If the Committee had actually given a shit, a lot of the 1800’s guys who are still not in the Hall of Fame would be in today.  But they didn’t give a shit and nobody from the 1800’s would get in again until the 1960’s. 

In 1959, a guy named Lee Allen was hired as the Hall of Fame’s Historian.  He’s credited with starting modern baseball research.  And most of what we know about the players from the 1800’s is because of him.  In the 1960’s, Allen started advising the Veterans Committee on who to select.  And they listened.  But when the old timers began getting elected again, people became fucking outraged.  “If these guys were so great, then why weren’t they elected years ago?”  Well…how do you explain that you’d spent 20 years fucking up?  The Committee began resenting Allen (who’d never played baseball) for being a know-it-all and because of the flak they were taking.  Not that it mattered.  He died of a heart attack in 1969.  Had the Allen selections continued, a lot of the 1800’s guys who are still not in the Hall of Fame would be in today.  And that’s more or less where we are right now.                         

Next year is going to be a wacky enough time for the Hall of Fame with guys like Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa entering the writers’ ballot, but here are 7 guys I would have no problem voting for from the 1800’s if I were on the Veterans Committee next year. 

George Van Haltren

“Rip” Van Haltren was a center fielder, who also pitched.  He had a .316 career average with over 2,500 hits.

Jim McCormick

The first Scotish player in the majors was a good one.  He has 265 wins with a career 2.43 ERA.  He led the league in wins in 1880 and ‘82. He led in complete games from 1880-82.  And he led the league in ERA in 1883.     

Tony Mullane

“The Apollo of the Box” could pitch left handed or right handed, which was easier for him since he didn’t wear a glove.  He had five consecutive 30-win seasons and ended up with 284 wins (including a no-hitter) and a 3.05 ERA.  A suspension in 1885 probably cost Mullane a 300-win career.  He even worked as an umpire. 

Tommy Bond

Bond was the first Irish-born player in the bigs.  He’s a three time 40-game winner.  And in 1877, he won the pitchers’ triple crown.  Bond has 234 wins and a 2.14 ERA.  And his strikeouts per walks ratio is the best in baseball history.     

Bob Caruthers

“Parisian Bob’s” record of 218-99 is the 3rd best winning percentage ever.  He twice led the American Association in wins and led in ERA in 1885. And he played right field when he wasn’t pitching, compiling a .282 lifetime average, and occasionally leading the league in OBP and slugging.      

Bill Dahlen

“Bad Bill” was one of the best shortstops of his era.  He compiled 2,461 hits including a 42-game hitting streak.  

Jimmy Ryan

“Pony” Ryan is a .308 career hitter with over 2,500 hits.  He’s also the only guy to hit for the cycle in a game he pitched.  In 1888, he led the league in hits, home runs and slugging percentage.    He also punched out reporters and train conductors.  You know, because he could.  

First things first - I’m not very cool.  At all.  And I’ve accepted that.  I don’t look cool.  I don’t say cool things.  I actually racked my brain to think of one cool thing about myself and came up empty.  On the other hand, thinking of uncool things was really easy. 

- Last night I talked shit to a professional wrestler from the stage at a comedy show because I wanted to meet him after.    

- I got a $68 parking ticket today for parking on the wrong side of the street during street cleaning. 

- I emailed my mom an hour ago to brag to her that I had an audition with one of the kids from My Three Sons.  And she thought that was ‘awesome.’

- I’m currently wearing a white undershirt that I’d apparently written “BONE ZONE” on in permanent marker.  

See.  Not cool.  And that’s just in the past 17 hours.  I’m also sure I’m leaving out a bunch of other uncool shit I’ve done.  

But here’s the thing, I’m not sure if I even want to be cool.  That’s because I started reading Rolling Stone’s list of the 50 Best Singles of 2011.  And I probably knew less than 10 songs. 

So here’s what I did - I started previewing them on iTunes.  And let me tell you what a load of shitfuck dogpiss and horsecrap all of these songs are.  Let me give you an example…

#39 was “California” by EMA.  Rolling Stone describes it as, “A mesmerizing rant about West Coast youth from a punk-folk firebrand: ‘Fuck California, you made me boring,’ she sings. Boring? No chance.”  Except it IS, Rolling Stone!  It’s totally fucking boring!  I don’t know the first goddamn thing about EMA, but if that’s the 39th best song of 2011, then all of us should suck our own balls and call it a day.  And this was like, the 7th song I’d heard that sounded exactly like this.   

Listen to that fucking song!  Do it!  It’s so goddamn bad.  You’ll check out less than a minute in, I promise.  You have no idea.  Unless you’re some kind of super cool hipster cliche who listens to shit songs like this while you play with your waifish girlfriend’s asymmetrical hair and tell her how much you like her scarves.  Fuck this song.  Fuck it in the face.  “Boring?  No chance.”  I want to barf in your mouth.  Immediately.  And it’s #39. 

I remember when I bought Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy CD in 1995 because I liked the songs “Nothingman” and “Better Man.”  Then I got to track 9, which was “Bugs.”  “Bugs” is a waste of everyone’s goddamn time.  I remember thinking, “Why did they even put this song on the album?”  And I was right.  But if “Bugs” came out in 2011, it would have been the #6 song of the year.  That’s how terrible everything is.   

Luckily Rolling Stone did list “Ric Flair” by Killer Mike at #31 and “Ni**as in Paris” by Jay-Z and Kanye West at #2.  Those are the best songs of the year.  I don’t even know what’s close.  Maybe that Adele person has some jams.  I don’t know.  But put “Ni**as in Paris” on at a party.  People will dance.  Then put “California” by EMA on.  You’ll be murdered. (Unless you quickly put on “Bugs” by Pearl Jam and it’ll sound amazing by comparison)

Hipster music, much like hipsters themselves, are probably much cooler than me.  I just don’t want to be around either at parties.  Okay, that’s off my chest.  I’m gonna go back to sucking now.