11/30/04: Was Babe Ruth real?

I don't have my good stuff tonight.  As a matter of fact, I have NAH-TING. But y'all need a google image to get you through your respective workdays, days that are otherwise filled with thankless assignments, personal failures, and well-deserved reprimands. So I will do that for you, in a minute. Were I an average man, I would leave it at that.  Just a nice little google image for you, which I'm pretty sure is all anybody cares about anyway.

But like Gaylord Perry, and other Gaylords throughout history, I find a way to compete, even when my fastball is barely breaking the speed limit in a school zone. Gaylord had his Vaseline (it's rare that you get to type that phrase without remorse), I have the scraps of things that I started typing in my free time in the Pre-Verbungle era. There are a couple in there that are real doozies -- long, poorly written, and embarrassingly confessional in nature*.  Sort of like what I write here on a daily basis. These I may post in their semi-entirety someday when I know I have less than a year to live. In the meantime, here are a couple of excerpts from one such story, just to whet your appetite for that dark day.

He knew this was gonna be the last summer of its kind; the signs were everywhere. Roommates had graduated, taken high-paying, adult jobs that you couldn’t just quit if you wanted to, and the few people that were left were working on graduate degrees that would in turn lead to even higher-paying jobs that were even less quittable. Everybody had a plan, except him. In the past, that was something he hung his hat on -- his flexibility, his ability to drop everything at a moment’s notice and choose whatever was the most fun. But now he looked around and there was usually only one fun thing to do, sometimes none. Everyone else had somehow resigned themselves to this somewhere along the way, and he figured it was only a matter of time before he did too.

***

Greg, Eli, and Beth headed to the back of the bar. Beth looked really cute outside of her food service whites. She was wearing a little sun dress, and her short hair looked stylish. What a sweet little body she has, he thought as he watched her walk away. He waited what seemed like an unreasonably long time for Chelios to make his way around the horseshoe.

“Could I have a Leinie’s?” Matt asked.

Chelios held his hand up near his chest with his fingers about three inches apart, apparently asking for ID. Ballbuster.
 

Yeah. There's way more where that came from, friends.  Be warned. Perhaps I will post a sentence a day in random order until someone assembles the entire story. 

Then there are lots of one-sentence notes to self that are equally shallow and unamusing.  Those occasionally find their way on here in the middle of another post...phrases like "so drunk I was in the 3rd person," etc.

Then there are the passages that were supposed to be the start of something bigger but died silent deaths after a paragraph or two.  Those are perfect for the old cut and paste, like:

Was Babe Ruth real?

Recently, a silly little argument has resurfaced in the nerdiest of the baseball geek in-groups: Was Babe Ruth black? I haven’t had the time to waste reviewing the evidence one way or the other, and I don’t think I’ll get around to it any time soon, for one simple reason: I’m pretty sure Babe Ruth never existed. I mean, he exists figuratively, like Mighty Casey, Roy Hobbs, or Sidd Finch. But he wasn’t a real guy, and he certainly didn’t hit 714 home runs.

Claim: Besides official records, film exists which clearly shows “Babe Ruth” hitting mammoth home runs.

Fact: He swings flat footed, and he was probably played by a number of different actors. Lon Chaney, for one, claims to have played the babe more than once.

Fact: Have you, or anyone you’ve ever met, seen him play? If the answer is yes, I will give you 4-1 odds that the person who claims to have seen him is very old, and most likely a little soft in the head.

Yeah, that's it.  Not much, as Mr. McCourt might say, but enough to turn this post from a one-line GISG submission into something bigger and more potent that took you a full 45 seconds to digest. Worth the effort, I'd say.

cW's post about the impending Styx abomination and the article about great covers reminded me of another great one, which I'm sure you'll disagree with: Sinead O'Connor's version of "Nothing Compares 2 U." I remember the first time I heard that song.  I was selling tickets to a women's basketball game at the University of Wisconsin, alone in my little ticket window, and it came on the radio.  She had already been around a few years, but I remember being blown away by her singing in this song. "I went to the doctor and guess what he told me, guess what he told me..."

Thanks for muscling your way through all that tripe.  Now here's TODAY'S IMAGE (#20).  And before you make the joke, I will inform you that no, that is not Hans Bungle in the picture. Answers start at noon.  We feel bad about disallowing Sita's early guess, but the board of directors decided it was the right thing to do.  Rules are rules.

You can, and should, click on the picture above right to make it more legible.  And no, I wasn't the recipient of this note, nor was the guy in IMAGE #20.

* Sort of like that one softball recap way back when