The Swamp

bapo!

I can't get myself to post on the Beer Advocate site. I was going to suggest that we join and start posting. We could wreck that league together, as Johnny Manziel would say. But the sheer size of that place scares me. That, and the fact that it's a single-subject forum, which fosters unhealthy lev...

bapo!

I read that ESPN article. It's a very sympathetic piece. (It expertly glosses over the fact that he and his mother were on the same flight, but he left her in coach while he flew first-class.) There are some neat little tidbits, like his hobby of visiting college campuses and taking the guided tours...

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David Carr's addiction memoir That one was really good too, but in the opposite kind of way. ( Have you read the book , or just the excerpt that the Times printed? I'm about halfway thru it, and it's fantastic. He approached it as a reporter, interviewing the people he knew when he a mess, because ...

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My snap judgment is he would be so much better off retiring and continue the hard work of remaking himself as an ex-ballplayer. But easy for me to say - the well known difficulty for 98% of athletes to walk away from their sport/profession. And the $60 million. The path to redemption through anothe...

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Add to that windfall another $500 million worth of handsome, and people were just waiting. Fans will root for a megarich athlete who's also ridiculously handsome (body by Rodin, skin like melted butterscotch, eyes of weaponized hazelness), but the minute he stumbles, just ask Tom Brady, they'll sta...

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This ESPN article , which is actually sympathetic, is sooooooo bad. High school lit dramatic and awful and bad ... "This is a man whose idea of a perfect evening is polishing his bats. He has them custom made -- coal black, 34 inches, 32 ounces, triple-dipped, his name lasered on the barrel --...

bapo!

Serialized storytelling. A cliffhanger, even. I like it. (I don't want to step on your unfinished story, so I'll drop this in parentheses. ((Parentheses make everything forgivable.)) In retrospect, I'm glad that I wasn't good enough in team sports to want to play outside of the school system. Also g...

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When I was typing up the Alex Rodriguez post/thread, I realized that I might be the Swamp's second-biggest A-Rod apologist, behind Mister Dave. Sounds like this also makes you the second most logical swamper. I'll accept that. Logical/clinical/analytical in my sports fandom, hyper-emotional in all ...

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(Sometimes my interests align with the stories that we're being force-fed, tho. I can't read enough about Johnny Manziel, for instance. I've been that way with Rodriguez in the past, but not now.) If you moved to Cleveland, you would tire of Manziel stories pretty fast. Perhaps. But as an outsider,...

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It's so easy to avoid this stuff these days. I have barely seen any of the ARod stuff. I know that a handwritten letter exists. I haven't read it. I try to do that, but then I'll visit a baseball blog just to skim the headlines and see that 3 of the top 10 articles are about him. ESPN doesn't have ...

bapo!

When I was typing up the Alex Rodriguez post/thread, I realized that I might be the Swamp's second-biggest A-Rod apologist, behind Mister Dave. This isn't something to brag about. I'm also probably the second-biggest Billy Joel fan, behind AB. Again, the merits of Joel fandom are dubious. I know tha...

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I've been doing my best to avoid all of the Alex Rodriguez talk. Spring Training hasn't even started yet, but we've already been bombarded with A-Rod stories. An apology! A handwritten letter! Etc. I'm an A-Rod apologist, but even I'm beginning to feel a little bit fatigued. I'm sure that most of yo...

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I read Bruce Feldman's 'The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks' this week. It's about private coaches and 'quarterback gurus' like Steve Clarkson and George Whitfield, and the astronomical amount of money that is being poured into this stuff. The reason I read it was Manziel. Feldman spent a lot ...

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So, first he suspended himself (or was told to kinda/sorta get out of the way) for 'several days.' Now he's been officially been suspended for six months without pay. Wow. Does anybody think we're actually going to see him on-camera in six months?

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Arcobello The wires got crossed here somewhere. The Pens claimed Arcobello a few weeks ago, then waived him today. It's probably a paper move, tho. I expect him to be back. I hope so. But Perron has been pretty great so far. No complaints from anybody regarding that trade. As for the Oilers, Taylor...

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A late-season baseball game with two teams playing out the string. So, why is it worth watching? 1). Harry Kalas. 2). Randy Johnson. 3). Those gorgeous uniforms. I know that everybody likes to fetishize Vin Scully, but Kalas' voice just says baseball to me. I could put a random Phillies game on in ...

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Graig Nettles > Jahlil Okafor. Fact. I think I just threw up in my mouth a little. Maybe a slight exaggeration. Nettles had a good, long career, tho. (You have to look past the fact that he was once caught using a corked bat filled with superballs.) I had originally written 'Graig Nettles > John Ca...

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Well, I just had one of my favorite delusions proven wrong. I thought that the German actor in the H&R Block commercials was schlock-film director Uwe Boll. Turns out it's an actor named Jim Meskimen. A friend and I were watching the Golden Globes a few weeks ago and were actually talking about ...

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Dermontti Dawson is indeed a saint. The sweetest guy. I was a random 12-year-old kid who just wanted an autograph, but he took the time to have a conversation. Asked me what my favorite subjects were in school, etc. And here we are decades later, and I'm gushing about a guy just because he took an ...

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How many points out of a playoff spot is a combined Buffalo + Edmonton team? If you combined their points, they would be near the top of the league standings. Not too shabby. (They'd still be below Nashville, Anaheim, and Tampa.) If you want to combine their rosters and play some sort of hypothetic...

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The Sabres were out-shot 31-10 last night.

I was looking at goal differential, and Buffalo's diff is astounding.

Buffalo -87
Edmonton -56
Glendale/Vegas/Medicine Hat -54
New Jersey -25

bapo!

without even watching the video, I can remember those workplace safety ads. Guy steps on nail, guy gets buried alive, guy falls off a roof. Good times Ontario! At least two of them were aired during the game. This was the tame one. The second one -- I'm not even going to describe it. Here's the 'bu...

bapo!

It's the Home Opener! So much optimism. Can't you feel it? All of this pomp and circumstance, but it's so low-key and not polished at all. The Good Brothers sing the National Anthems. Damaso Garcia picks up the 1982 team MVP award. Other players receive plaques for presumably doing stuff. The cheap...

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no Alcoa Fantastic Finishes? What a waste of three hours. Ha. I was waiting for that, too. Sadly, this is the best substitute I could find. (A site called Adland has a few of them, but I don't feel like figuring what which scripts I need to allow so that they play in Firefox.) http://fasthorseinc.c...

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I think it's fair to say that there was a lot less of people trying to put things in historical perspective in real time during games back then. Even with that, I'm not sure the '85 Bears defense would have felt quite as historic then as it does now. At that time, most great teams were known for th...

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that intro!

'Forged in the heat of The Beaver Valley.' I love that stuff.

Madden's part in the intro is the fucking best

He had a week to prepare for this opening segment. Did he just forget that he had to be on tv that day?

bapo!

rass wrote:Tempestade subtropical Bapo

It's only a matter of time until this storm is downgraded to a depression. (Hey-ooooooh!) And if it's anything like its namesake, it will inflict much more damage on itself than on anybody else, so I don't think that Brazil has anything to fear.

bapo!

Wait, December 14? Wasn't that a Saturday? Yes, it was! I've talked before about how I sometimes go back and watch games from my childhood. But I don't want to see the ESPN Classic stuff; I want to watch forgettable games that have faded from everybody's memory. The more nondescript the teams, the b...

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Johnnie wrote:I guess when you watch your daughter get her ass eaten on an overrated TV show, you'll acquire PTSD by proxy and misremember everything.

That was definitely my favorite scene in 'Peter Pan.'

You are talking about 'Peter Pan,' right? I hope I'm not conflating my memory of that show with 'Girls.'

bapo!

Interesting take on Bud's shot across the bow at craft beer during the Super Bowl. So, does anybody have an opinion on this? We were personally attacked by Budweiser, you guys. That's pretty big news, right? It pissed me off for about 30 seconds. And then I thought, 'Man, Beer Advocate is going to ...

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Thanks for the Billy Joel link, Ryan. Fun read. I could talk about him all day, but I'll spare you and cut straight to the Top 5, after a brief diversion. Favorite deep cut: Surprises. One of the songs from 'The Nylon Curtain' that sounds like a Beatles/John Lennon song filtered thru Joel. It was re...

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I'm drinking Southern Tier's 2XIPA and liking it real good. The brewery is between Cleveland and Buffalo, along the lake, so it's not that far away but it's a new one to me. Any thoughts about their stuff? I'm a big fan of Southern Tier. I've had maybe 10 of their beers, and they've all been very g...

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http://pitchfork.com/news/57746-grizzly-bears-chris-taylor-announces-new-cookbook-twenty-dinners/ I've given a lot of money to Grizzly Bear over the years, but I'll probably pass on this one. You're more adventurous in the kitchen than I am, so maybe you'd get something out of it. Brian, have you l...

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I love when the media begins to eat itself, and this Brian Williams story is a real doozy. He's been anchoring NBC Nightly News for a decade. He's pretty much an institution at this point. Kind of hard to imagine him resigning over this. But this story has momentum. Everything, even his Katrina cove...

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When I started reading this I was afraid you were going to say you liked Crash and that would have forced me to hate you. Thank g-d Keep in mind that I'm talking about the 1996 David Cronenberg 'Crash,' not the 2004 Paul Haggis 'Crash.' I like Paul Haggis a lot because of 'EZ Streets' and the Scien...

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I like to think these four women were so into Bapo that they agreed to what they thought was going to be a fivesome just to get a slice of the action, but that Bapo! was too into the movie to notice. I unsuccessfully macked on one of those women, but I think that everybody else in that office thoug...

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rass wrote:
@RandyJMiller wrote:#Flyers Zac Rinaldo told me after game that he might have saved the season by drilling Letang into boards.
Even more pissed the Pens lost now.

'I changed the whole game, man. Fuck, who knows what the game would have been like if I didn't do what I did?'

bapo!

Malkin came back out late in the second period. The tenor of this game almost makes me wish that he weren't playing. He's either going to score an astonishing goal, or commit an astonishingly bad penalty. sancarlos, I'm sure that a lot of hockey fans would agree with your list. I saw a Windsor/Erie ...

bapo!

I'm waiting for Bapo! to make a trip out to Jersey to pop it open, as Bapo appreciates the perfection that is Old Rasputin. That's very sweet, but I don't drink liquor, so the bourbon barrel-aged stuff is wasted on me. (I did try Victory's Old Horizontal last year, and I didn't like it.) But regula...

bapo!

I'm waiting for Bapo! to make a trip out to Jersey to pop it open, as Bapo appreciates the perfection that is Old Rasputin. That's very sweet, but I don't drink liquor, so the bourbon barrel-aged stuff is wasted on me. (I did try Victory's Old Horizontal last year, and I didn't like it.) But regula...

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