I learned, from reading this item from FJM, that Mike Pagliarulo has a website that offers...well, I'm not quite sure. This is what the "About" section of the website says:
And, apparently, based on the item that FJM linked and commented on, Mike doesn't like Billy Beane or the Moneyball types, and (most notable, to me) lumps Jon Daniels into that group. It is a bizarre piece.
Want to read the item and avoid the FJM snark? Click here.
Moving on...I was really looking forward to see how unabashed Boston homer Bill Simmons was going to react to the Patriots cheating story. And the initial reaction was promising:
So we have Bill obviously in the first step of grieving, while invoking the same "Duke Lacrosse" reference that everybody is now turning to whenever in first comes to light that their player/team/family member apparently did something sordid, illegal or unseemly (Google 'Michael Vick Duke lacrosse' and see how many hits you get). The comparison is now so trite that I was hoping for a Richard Jewell reference, particularly since Jewell just died...
Anyway, Simmons has now stepped up and acknowledged the truth, in a column that consists of lengthy exchanges with fellow Pats fan (and New Media guy) Aaron Schatz.
I'm a little disappointed with the result, though...Simmons reminds me of when Glenn Reynolds has to acknowledge the Bush Administration has screwed something up, but then obsesses over a few outrageous, out-of-proportion reactions to the screwup and shifts the focus to the media reaction and the how silly some of the critics are, and minimizing the impact of what was going on, rather than focusing on the screwup itself.
But if you want a mix of disappointment and self-righteousness, it isn't bad.
My brother Ben sometimes reads books, or watches movies, or talks to people, that he hates, specifically because he hates it/them so much. He says he does this out of "hathos."
I think there's where I am with Jay Mohr's Fox Sports columns. I mean, look at this. Or this. Or this.
I am reminded of a story from my college days. Many of the people I ran with back then were huge Prince fans, the types who could tell you what song was on the B-side of every single Prince released. When Diamonds and Pearls came out in 1991, there was much consternation over the fact that several tracks on the album were befouled by the wretched "rap" stylings of Tony M. There were hours of late night discussions over why Prince had done this, whether he owed Tony M. a favor and thus had to let him be on his album, if he didn't realize how bad Tony M. was, if maybe Prince just hated rap so much he was going to put Tony M.'s crappy rapping on the new CD as a metaphorical flipping of the bird to rap fans, or maybe to show that he could put out a good album even with someone as terrible as Tony M. on it. I remember a discussion about this going on for about 30 minutes one night, at Crazy Chris's nasty apartment (Crazy Chris was sort of a cross between Smokey in "Friday" and Beaker from "The Muppet Show"), that ended with a minute long silence, followed by someone half-declaring, half-begging, "Prince HAD to know. He HAD to know Tony M. sucked."
And I'm having the same internal debate about Fox Sports and Jay Mohr. Fox Sports is Prince, and Jay Mohr is Tony M. They have to know he sucks, right? The difference, of course, being that Prince is a musical genius, and Fox Sports is...well, is Fox Sports.
But still...Fox Sports has to know how much Jay Mohr sucks, right? They are letting him do this out of hathos, right?
And finally, there's a blog post about Wade Phillips and Jerry Jones on Kissing Suzy Kolber that I thought was very funny.
zywica didn't think it was very funny, but I did. And I'm going to link it, but with the caveat that it is an R-rated post with many naughty words, so don't click on this link if that is going to bother you.
Let me just say, I'll never be able to think of Creole voodoo prostitutes the same way again...