Baseball!

The Tigers' Jim Leyland is my favorite manager.

To wit:

After all the day’s bad tidings, Leyland jumped at the chance to say something positive. When someone mentioned a recent published report that suggested Cabrera was out of shape, Leyland quickly came to his player’s defense.

“He looks great to me,” he said. “There’s no issue. He’s a big kid. To me, he’s perfect. Maybe shedding a little weight might be to his benefit, [but] I’ve seen too many people that are big guys like him, people say, ‘Oh, he’s too big,[’] they [expletive] lose weight and look like [expletive] Twiggy, and they’re not worth an [expletive].”

Three things:

1) You know Jim Leyland is awesome when he can drop two apparent Fuck-Bombs and one mystery expletive (more on that in a second) in one sentence and the reporter still deems the comment positive. The swearing is simply a non-issue because Jim Leyland could not say "fuck" more casually or often if his name were Bob Fuck and he were running for city council and he had just embarked on an exhaustive door-to-door effort to get his name out there because name recognition is everything if you want to unseat an incumbent as tenured as Cheryl Cunt. Which is a convoluted way of saying that Jim Leyland is cool. If Joe Torre gave this quote in response to questions about Jonathan Broxton's weight, reporters would be tripping all over each other to get the first "Torre (bristles/snaps/chafes/freaks out/plotzes) at question about reliever's weight" article out. I imagine them doing pratfalls trying to get to the rotary phones to call their editors, but I guess they'd just sit there and e-mail them.

2) I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what the last expletive is supposed to be. The first two are, as we've established, easy: "they fuckin' lose weight and look like fuckin' Twiggy". But "and they're not worth an ________" is perplexing. It turns out that not many common expletives begin with a vowel. Assfuck? Astrofuck? Otterdick? Invisichode? Nate suggests commonsensically that the reporter probably used "an" by accident in order to fit with the word "expletive," and this seems like a reasonable explanation. If this is the case, the most likely candidates are the old standbys "shit" and "fuck". I guess "damn" is also a possibility, but I'm ruling it out because I don't think it would warrant censorship. Anyway, I would root for "fuck" in this scenario to complete a pretty hilarious trifuckta. Or maybe he really said "invisichode". I dare to dream.

3) I honestly think that Jim Leyland should volunteer to talk to teenage girls with body image issues. I'm serious. At this point, people are desensitized to being told they're beautiful just the way they are, but I feel like Jim Leyland could get through. He should narrate Dove's "Campaign for Real Beauty" commercials.



Leyland: (voice-over) Fat? What the [expletive] are you talking about? Who told you that? Horse [expletive] Cosmopolitan? Those little [expletive] [expletives] wouldn't know [expletive] beauty if it [expletived] in their mouths. You want to look like those Twiggy little [expletives]? I wouldn't [expletive] those [expletives] if I had cancer of the [expletive] and my doctor told me my [expletive] had 24 hours left to [expletive]. [Expletive]! To me, you're perfect.

On Patriarchy

As I was walking to class today, I found myself alongside a woman wearing traditional Muslim hijab and talking loudly on a bluetooth headset. Naturally, my first thought was something along the lines of "How interesting. An ancient, patriarchal sense of shame meets an all-too-modern sense of shamelessness. This woman is truly a paragon of post-postmodern man's struggle to wed faith and reason...God and science...to exist in that always-vanishing, hyperliminal space between the past and the future. But wait! Now who is being paternalistic? 'Post-postmodern man'? There I go again, phallocentrically using 'man' qua 'human being,' as if women aren't even a part of history. Fie! There I go again! 'History'? As if women don't also have a story to tell? Hell's bell hooks! What is wrong with me? Or is it me? How can we break free of our ignominious past when its vestiges are embedded and insulated at the insidious level of language, which Nietzsche rightly stated is nothing more than an attempt to turn free-flowing ideas into stagnant (and illusory) truths? How can we break these linguistic, inculcated shackles when they're everywhere? And what of religion? Are we any more capable of shedding our seemingly anachronistic beliefs (soteriological or otherwise) than we are of exorcising sexism from our language? And if these changes are possible, can they happen in our lifetimes? And is my desire to see a world in which patriarchy is truly an anachronism simply a reflection of my modernistic desire for instant gratification - the very same shallow solipsism that causes this woman to babble loudly on her bluetooth in a crowd of people? What a mobius-strip world we live in!"

Just kidding. I thought "Man, it's too nice out to be wearing that. Religion is stupid." Then I went to class and doodled boobs.