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12/24/2004: "Grinching It Up"
Twas the day before Christmas,
And all through the year
A lot of things annoyed me.
I'll talk about them here.
I guess I should know the rest of that poem, and I should be able to parodize it the rest of the way out, but that's a tired old gimmick anyway, isn't it? Plus, my rantings cannot be contained in mere verse. I need free-flowing prose.
Since there's no baseball offseason anymore, one of the things that annoyed me most this year was "Red Sox Nation," for a variety of reasons.
First, Red Sox ownership was cheap and wouldn't pony up the extra couple of million dollars a year it would have taken to finish the Alex Rodriguez deal. Then, when the Yankees got A-Rod, they cried poverty. That's like Warren Buffett whining when Bill Gates gets a new limo.
Actually, let's backtrack a little bit. "Red Sox Nation." Ugh. It makes me sick. I say fine, secede. Either way, anyone who pays $10 for a "citizenship card" should be stripped of their U.S. citizenship.
Was trading Nomar the right move for the Sox? Yes, but they never should have had to do it. Talking about a trade for A-Rod is one thing, but when Kevin Millar goes on SportsCenter and pretty much says how little the team will miss Nomar -- and he's still on the team -- it's pretty low. I don't blame him for not wanting to be there either.
So, basically, they don't get A-Rod, who never would have fit into that clubhouse, then they do have to trade Nomar. Add in the fact that they were unable to get Javier Vazquez, got outbid for Jose Contreras, etc., etc., and the Red Sox fell ass backwards into their first championship since 1918.
So stop acting like Theo is such a damn genius.
Two last things about the Red Sox that ticked me off this year: all the "fans" who were really just people that hate the Yankees. This ties into the other thing: Curt Schilling and his big fat mouth. You couldn't change channels for a month without seeing this guy run his yap as if he'd been suffering with "the Nation" for 86 years himself. Plus the whole drama over his stupid ankle. Then the team fired the doctor who fixed Schilling's ankle, continuing a long tradition of medical mismanagement that goes back at least as far as the submarining of Marty Barrett's career. And if you were rooting for the Red Sox in October and don't know who Marty Barrett is, then shame on you.
Schilling, of course, also got under my skin by aligning himself with another odious character of 2004, George W. Bush. Do I think John Kerry would have been an awesome president? No. But I continue to fear for the future of the world so long as Bush is in charge, even if he does consider himself to be a "good steward" of the environment and assures us that everything will be OK if we just have faith.
Something that Bush and, just to over-generalize, Red America also don't understand is that it's possible to support the troops without supporting the reason they're fighting. Apparently, that's flip-flopping.
Kerry also pissed me off, though, for turning out to be much dumber than I thought he was, Manny Ortez and Lambert Field aside. How he could not fight back with more outrage over the Swift Boat thing was atrocious. And I'll never understand how in an election that was so based on feelings over the incumbent, Kerry didn't go more for the jugular.
Neither Bush nor Kerry would change one simple fact, though: that the people who drive on the street in front of my apartment are idiots. Honking your horn is not going to get cars to move at a green light. They see the green light. Really. But they can't move because the intersection is blocked. Stop honking. Especially at 7:30 in the morning, although I guess car horns are better than the gigantic construction vehicles that used to bang pipes into the ground for hours on end outside my old apartment.
Of course, if you are driving, you don't have to smell the various smells of the New York City subway system, most notably Poo Corner at 34th Street on the A/C/E, the urine stench at 34th Street on the N/R and the postgame mix of B.O., vomit and I don't want to know what else at 161st Street/Yankee Stadium on the D. I think the next Real World/Road Rules Challenge mission might be "Wait for the D train after a Yankee game while breathing normally." If you hold your nose or suppress a gag reflex, you're out.
I'm not annoyed that I've enjoyed the Challenges so much this year, but I am annoyed that the quality of The Real World has slipped so much that a key reason I continue to watch is to know who's who for the next edition of the Challenge. They should just do Vegas every time. Of course, as I noted a few days ago, there does seem to be some potential with the whole "Landon loses it" angle coming up.
Joe Buck still annoys me. So does Major League Baseball, which finally finished its hatchet job on the city of Montreal. Nobody talks about how the last two World Series winners -- the Marlins and Red Sox -- are direct beneficiaries of MLB destroying a franchise that was once a thriving beacon to how to build a rabid fan base in a small market.
I hope Ben Stiller doesn't have 86 movies in 2005. But he didn't annoy me this year nearly as much as Jimmy Fallon, who really needs to go away once and for all.
That, and people who use their valuable time to act like Johnny Bringdown and spend the lovely holiday season bitching and moaning about things that they had no control over for the past year. Man, I hate that.
(Happy holidays!)
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