Smythe's World

Tonight the first ever World Series game in Orange County will be played, and for some of the longest-suffering fans in the sport, its not a moment too soon. This article is a heartfelt tribute to those much-maligned folks, written by an Angels fanatic who now lives in Hollywood, and is a must-read for anyone who may be tempted to think of Southern Californians as "laid back" Hollywood types.

The other team to ward off contraction, the Montreal Expos, will probably stay put another season. Unlike the majority of baseball pundits who seem to demand that the franchise move out of Quebec to Washington D.C., I have no great interest in seeing that team move. From the late-70's on through to the mid-90's, the Expos were one of the top draws in baseball, and the city of Montreal has a long history in the sport (Jackie Robinson's career in white baseball started there). Inept ownership, combined with the '94 strike killing off the chances of the Expos' best-ever team, have caused the recent slump. If the team were to move, I would favor San Juan over D.C. (which, win or lose, never supported the Senators) or Portland, Oregon (small media market--likely replay of the Tampa fiasco).

It's times like this when I'm proud to be p.c. Earlier this week, I noted that a prominent warblogger had made a derogatory remark about Jews and the handicapped, either in jest, in irony, or in just plain bigotry, about Charles Krauthammer. Although I disagree with just about everything Mr. Krauthammer has written (he seems to belong to that strain of neo-conservatism that always seems to blame African-Americans first), I would rather get fitted for testicle piercings than refer to him, or anyone else, as a "crippled Jewboy". In any event, I figure that was what "fiskings" are all about, except this time aimed at someone who wasn't Arab, black or leftist, and I decided to get on with my life.

Which was probably a big mistake, since I immediately got e-mail from people who pointed out that the article in question is mostly a defense of Krauthammer, and that therefore calling him a "crippled Jewboy" was ok. Apparently, the belief is that if you actually like and admire someone, you have open season to fire racial or ethnic slurs at them, in much the same way Quentin Tarentino might use the word "nigger" a couple hundred times in one of his scripts. Sorry, I'm not buying. Besides the fact that the slur is only tangentially related to the rest of the piece (in the comments section, fellow blogger Max Sawicky points out that Krauthammer's religion is not otherwise mentioned in the underlying article, and his handicap mentioned only indirectly), there just something about his choice of words that's just so, so snobbish: the writer reminding you of the differentness of the target, even a target he happens to like, while he himself is "normal".

What a relief it must be to Kim Jong-il that his country isn't sitting on a pool of oil.

Giving in to temptation, I finally motivated myself to watch a few minutes of The Bachelor tonight. I have yet to encounter a more debasing, repugnant example of entertainment. Every woman who appears on that show is gorgeous and pathetic; the whole show reads like a wet dream of Steven Bing's. Eventually, some network is going to air a series that consists of nothing more than Kobe Bryant vacationing on an island with at least one groupie from every NBA city. And of course, people will watch.

What might make this a more interesting Fall Classic than most is the fact that the Angels and Giants have played each other with some degree of frequency in the recent past: besides interleague play, the teams see each other a ton in the Cactus League, and probably have played nearly as many games over the last five years as either team has played against New York. I'm going to be working quite a bit the next couple of days on a World Seriesblog that I'm starting, which, like Condredge's Acolytes, will be open to whoever has an interest and wants to post (and, I might add, is able to keep his posts clean; there are children who read these things). It goes up tomorrow, so if anyone is interested, contact me at your leisure, so long as you do so before the Series ends. In addition, I may driving up to enemy territory (ie. Frisco) on Friday to complete my sister's moving arrangements, or I may not; everything is in flux, depending on whether I can make arrangements.

Man, is the Material Girl so over or what? Even Camille Paglia doesn't think she's hip anymore....

I find nothing even remotely amusing about the sad story of Noelle Bush, who has to confront her addictions in the bright spotlight generated by someone else's notoriety. Bloggers of the left who find schadenfreude in her misfortune, or in the sorority girl hijinx of the First Twins, are no different than the warbloggers who moan with pleasure everytime a member of the Islamic faith sets off a bomb.

I was hoping that "Michael Kelly" would have a follow-up to his hilarious attack a few weeks ago on Al Gore, in which he explained how terrorists who were supposedly dead somehow managed to kill a couple hundred people in Bali over the weekend. Incredibly, this week he decides to focus instead this week on that notorious phony and appeaser, Jimmy Carter, and how that former President stole W's Nobel. You know, every time I post a link to "Michael Kelly" people either take him seriously or ask me if he's kidding. IT'S A JOKE (oops, I think I just norah'd Eschaton).

Reading a London newspaper article on baseball is much like listening to a report on same on NPR: it's just a little too high-brow for my taste. To their credit, though, the English do have enough good taste to employ journalists who at least know something about the sport, which is something to respect and appreciate the next time someone like Mitch Albom, Jim Rome or Allan Barra decide to "opine" about soccer, or some other sport that those vulgar foreigners dig.

One of the more intriguing policies that studios follow when they have a really bad movie on their hands is to make it disappear, which is detailed in this article. Just from the description, I would love to be able to see D-Tox before it goes straight to video. Just wondering: since almost everything Hollywood makes nowadays is crap, and you still have to spend over twenty bucks on tickets, popcorn, soft drinks and parking to see it, and since even the best movies are demonstrably worse than the best TV (admit it, what's better, The Sopranos or A Beautiful Mind? The Shield or Gladiator? Alias, or any James Bond movie since The Spy Who Loved Me?), why even go to a theatre?

I may have defamed the late heavyweight champion Sonny Liston last week, in juxtaposing a quote of his with the behavior of the "chickenhawks" in Washington. In particular, even "the Bear" wouldn't have done anything so cowardly as to question the patriotism of a Senator who lost several limbs in Vietnam, particularly when the attacker sat out 'Nam with a "knee injury".

"Comments" are back, at least on a trial basis, for those of you who care. Direct links to posts can be done via the square to left of "comments". If you have any problems accessing this site, then by all means e-mail me with your gripes, and I'll put an end to all that.

Screw the East Coast parasites: all the World Series games this year should start at 7:35 p.m. local time, when night baseball is supposed to be played. I sincerely doubt that Jerrod Washburn or Troy Percival is going to give Bones an intentional pass with the bases empty. Bring on Frisco. BTW, it's neither the I-5 series (since the 5 continues north around 65 miles from the City) nor the 101 series(as that highway ends 50 miles north of Anaheim). C'mon, we have a battle between two California cities that are as politically and culturally different as any two cities in the country: we have to be able to come up with something better than a road to call the upcoming battle.

Check out this classic version of "fisking", in which a conservative commentator refers to Charles Krauthammer as a "crippled Jewboy". Of course, we all know the real anti-Semites are on the left....

The horrific bombing this past weekend in Bali, and the recent reemergence of Osama Bin-Laden should be a sobering reminder to those who thought that the "war on terrorism" was nearing an end, and that Al Qaeda was finished. Unfortunately, the irrelevant sideshow concerning Saddam Hussein and his alleged "weapons of mass destruction" (memo to Bush: a bomb that can kill a couple of hundred people at once is a "weapon of mass destruction", even if seeking out such perpetrators doesn't benefit the campaigns of John Thune or Saxby Chambliss) has returned the nation to its pre-9/11 mindset, when our adversaries were countries and dictators-of-the-month, not moral concepts.

My late granddad always had a soft spot for the Angels: even though they played out in Anaheim for almost forty years, he always referred to them as "L.A.", since that was the old PCL team out here. He's been gone now for a couple of years, but wherever he is, I think tonight he's got a s***-eating grin, and just waiting for "Frisco" or whoever to win the NLCS and get their asses kicked next week.

In a little less than four hours, the Anaheim Angels will attempt to win their first-ever A.L. pennant, and exorcise some of the ghosts that have haunted this franchise since it was created back in December, 1960. Yesterday was the game I thought was most likely going to favor the Twins, with their best pitcher going against an Angel pitcher who wasn't even in the rotation until September, and it turned out to be the most one-sided of the series, although that appearance was deceiving: the Angels didn't score until the seventh, and broke the game open with five runs in the eighth off an unimpressive Minnesota bullpen. As this article reminds us, yesterday was the 16th anniversary of the Fifth Game, the darkest day, at least on the field, in the history of Southern California sports. Attempting to end that jinx will be Kevin Appier, going against first game winner Joe Mays. Go Angels !! Avenge Donnie Moore !! Long live our wise and beneficent ruler the Rally Monkey !!!