Friends don't let friends...

Because we know he'd do the same for us …

Mike:
You know, at first I thought it was kinda cool in an ironic or a Dadaesque "found sports" kind of thing, but it has really gone too fah, and, frankly, I'm more than a little worried about his mental state.

 

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Doug:
I know, the guy's got a daily must read baseball blog, and he's a savant when it comes to sabermetrics, so how do you broach your concerns delicately, tactfully, indeed, safely? I mean we don't know just how close to a full breakdown he is.

 

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Mike:
I'm thinking a few of us are going to have to drive out to Springfield and gathah up some of his closest friends and family membahs and stage an intervention.

 

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Doug:
"David, we understand it's been a long off season and you've really been pushing yourself with your probabilistic modeling, so it's only natural that you'd seek a little relief — But the 'live' curling blogging has stahted to frighten us."

 

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Mike:
"David we're not here to bully you. It's just that we love you and your blog and we want what's best for you. You need some help, David, it's going to be OK."

 

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Doug:
It could be worse. I mean we all know curling blogging is a "gateway" to even more harmful behaviah.

 

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Mike:
Right, first comes some recreational curling blogging and then it's onto the biathlon. And when that no longah does it, well, then you're doing whatevah it takes to support your insatiable need to blog short track skating.

 

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Doug:
"Update 08:01:03: They're turning.

Update 08:01:10: They're still turning.

Update 08:01:21: They're still turning. [My God it's beautiful!]

Update 08:01:36: They're bunched up and continuing to turn. Amazing!"

 

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Mike:
First comes denial, then the angah …

 

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Doug:
I saw the best blogs of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the MSNBC channels at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded bloggahs burning for the wi-fi heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the CMS of night …

 

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Mike:
For his family's sake, we pray it nevah comes to that. I just hope that by not speaking out soonah we haven't been, you know, enabling Pinto's curling abuse problem.

 

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Doug:
Hey, this is no time to play the blame game. What's important is for us to focus on the positive and help one of our own.

 

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Author's Notes
Doug's "I saw the best blogs of my generation …" is play upon the opening lines of Alen Ginsberg's poem "Howl."

Comments

[Ryan with a Capital "R"]

I wonder if he'll live blog the intervention.

[Bob]

The Boss is going all Joe Namath on us:

http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/wcStory?contentId=5352264

[Blade87]

The man needs an internenvetion. Sure, those curling pics showed us curling isn't like some bowling League, with brooms, in Green Bay, but Wells needs to refocus in a bad way.

It could be A=adult onset ADD; can't focus much, but when you DO focus, watch out. That porch that always bugged you is coming down, the plumbing will be redone, like it or not, and an obsession with a perfect- truly, golf playing perfect- lawn is on its way.

Pitchers, in particular, are prone to ADD. Focus is everything at the pitch, then your brain gets to go haywire as the ball is in play.

David, David, David. And al this time I thought it was just a weight problem.

[Devine]

Wonderful strip, h.b. Haven't laughed out loud so many times in at least a month.

[da kine]

"[L]ive blog the intervention." That's frigging yularious.

So do interventions actually work? Penn & Teller got me to realize that 12-step programs seem to have the same recidivism rate as any other method, so what about the time-honored intervention?

[Kaz]

Now, I don't have a blog, so I don't know personally how these things go...but curling is really entrapping.

It doesn't hurt that the womens' teams are all attractive and the mens' teams seem like the kind of guys you could go grab a beer with.

[Kluv]

My God, it's beautiful!

[j]

no lost update today or was it a repeat?

[Jason O.]

Kaz is correct: I just wish the announcers would shut up and allow us to hear the strategy conversations between rocks.

BTW, what the hell happened to female figure skating? In '84 I was in 7th grade when Katarina Witt first appeared on the screen -- I almost fell out of the chair...a gift from the Almighty. Now it's anorexic women and borderline midgets...sad.

da kine, I used to like that Penn/Teller show when they were exploding junk science myths and similar specific topics....now they hammer abstractions which are easy for them (and anyone) to twist into a straw man. For example they attack "family values" because how could anyone be so stupid as to have religious faith?? It's a particularly venal and petty form of libertarianism.

[GW]

And i thought watching curling on TV was boring...

[pawsoxpop]

... who threw potato salad at lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently present ourselves on the concrete steps of the Fenway Park Box Office with Manny jerseys and Hispaniola speech of Larrycide, demanding instantaneous tickets, and were given instead the plastic cards of "Red Sox Nation" void of box seats or even bleacher seats electricity hydrothereapy psychothereapy Soxotherapy pingpong and Johnny Damon amnesia....

Ah, Coco, while you are safe I am safe and now we're really in the animal soup at second base with Papi at the plate and two outs ...

Manny! Manny! Robot pitching machines! Invisible Ritz Hotel penthouses! Blind umpires! Demonic newspaper columnists! Spectral curveballs! Invincible Swing! Granite Louisville Sluggers! Monstrous bombs over the Green Monster!

...Carl Yastrzemski! I'm with you in Fort Myers!

Holy! Holy! Holy!...The Sox are Holy! Fenway park is Holy! Spring Training is Holy! My best friend's brother in law's uncle with the season tickets is Holy! Everyman's an Angel! But Nomar's a Dodger!

Let's play baseball already!!!

[NV in SD]

Holy crap pawsoxpop- little to much java this am?

That was "what the?" funny...

[pudge]

I am watching the women's curling final as I read this. So I DON'T THINK IT IS AT ALL FUNNY.

(BTW, the Swedes just did a double-takeout halfway through the 11th end.)

[pudge]

Holy shnikeys, the Swiss lined two inside the 12-foot circle in the 11th with only the Swedish hammer left to play, and the Swedes did another double-takeout to win gold! What a shot!

[pawsoxpop]

NV,
Close. I had to figure out which of my family's docs are covered under this new HMO and it made me want to HOWL!

[George Lake]

FENSON IS GAWD!

[pudge]

Totally. Bronze medal here we come! USA! USA!

[Monty]

Curling, like baseball, is beautiful in the intricacies of outplanning, outguessing and outmaneuvering the opponent....without the ball scratching.

[scott12xu]

Was wondering when "Howl" was going to get the Soxaholix treatment. Funny ass strip, as always. When will W.S. Burroughs' "Naked Lunch" make an appearance? :)

Listening to Black Sabbath right now (Paranoid, side 2)...

[Monty]

Scott, does that mean you have a turntable?...i still love mine..

[Bob]

I love my turntable, too. It's an old Electrohome from the late '60s-early '70s. The turntable sits on top of a polished aluminum stand that looks a little like a 3-foot-high mushroom. A smoked plexiglass dome fits over the turntable to complete the groovy look. VERY Austin Powers.

[Mike H]

This entry is crap. Curling will always have its detractors, but one thing is for sure... the sport has been around much longer than baseball and likely will remain so for a long time to come. There are all sorts of reasons to want to steer the discussion back to the Red Sox, but the rivalries in the old curling leagues date back to before the war of northern aggression. Red Sox fans, bloody-eyed revenge driven zealots that they are, would fall for curling like lambs to slaughter were they to find out about the stories from the old Alpine leagues. Payback did not come in the form of 11th inning home runs, it was 100 kilos of Cod stuffed in your carriage and a debristled broom shoved down your hearth. These guys played like they meant it, and there are hockey rinks in the northern territories with permenant grooves dug into the ice where legends fought it out decades ago.

M

[h.b.]

This entry is crap. Curling will always have its detractors, but one thing is for sure... the sport has been around much longer than baseball and likely will remain so for a long time to come.

As far as I know, nobody said curling was a bad sport or a sport not worth following.

But, as usual, what the fuck do I know. :)

Reader response theory and all that...

[Blade87]

So....Curling is essentially why the Vikings took to the high seas, faced down sea monsters of yore, then, once they reached land, raped, pillaged and enslaved the burly men throughout Scotland, Ireland, et.al? They were in search of men who could settle their private curling disputes?

All that work to expand curling between their rivalaries?

Perhaps they took the few strapping Irish and Scots,then forced them, day and night, to play constantly. If they faltered or fell through the ice, too bad- curtains- and brooms- for the Curling slaves. Those who survived were taken captive over the Atlantic and forced to Curl in Canada until their death, which was somewhat quick.
I wonder- what sort of broom would a Viking have? Did they cut their beards for bristles? Did they steal the broom idea from Ireland?

No doubt they attacked Scotland purely for all its rock formations.

Now it's been reveled why Curling was once called the Cruelest Sport.

Now we know why when they found great places to murder, rape, pillage and take slaves to play out their odd rivaliaries over throwing heavy rocks and sweeping, the Vikings forced the Irish and Scots- and others- to Curl, dammit, Curl- your life depends on it, you bastards.
They curled and curled and curled until it became all about curling and not about fun anymore. Time passed, and now we can relax- curling is more like broomball than the demonic games once played by men with horn hats.

Ahh, civilazation- where curling is now simply an odd looking sport but a lot of the curling women look grand without clothes on.

[Mike H]

Come on, this is just a thinly veiled attack on curling, admit it. It's in your interests for everyone to think it's all brooms and waffle irons so people won't forget about baseball like they did after the strike. For that matter, baseball's lost so many fans to football at this point a big push by the World's Chilliest Sport would ruin it. Imagine being able to get seats to Fenway at face value - would probably scare the hell out of you, bat boy.

Come, have a freshly brushed snow cone and support your local curling league.

M

[scott12xu]

Scott, does that mean you have a turntable?...i still love mine..

Of course. I have a vinyl collection dating back to 1969 (when I first purchased an LP); will not give it up, even when they find another audio format to replace MP3s. Hell, I still have a few 8-tracks (but not the player, though).

[scott12xu]

I once misheard the first line of "Howl," "I saw the best minds of my generation" as "I saw Bess Myerson sing 'My Generation.'"

Which is a helluva lot funnier, if you stop to think about it.

So anybody else out there think the Russian figure skater who got the bronze medal will retire after these Olympics and go into adult cinema? She's already got the perfect last name: "Slutskaya."

[Blade87]

One more curling repeference:
most of you don'r know me, but I have nothing but respect for what seems like nutty sports today that were once amazing contests of conquests.

Plus, if I looked that good naked and was a curler, I would curl naked- cold be damned!