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Oct 15, 2009 06:30 PM
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Stu Bykofsky is the Philly Daily News' house lunatic who writes like he's corresponding from prison and who believes another 9/11 is just the thing to put some hair on America's chest. Care to hear his thoughts on Phillies-Dodgers?
To put this in terms Los Angelenos can comprehend, it's Bloods vs. the Crips.
We're red, the Bloods. The Dodgers are blue, the Crips.
An explanation for Philadelphians: The Crips and the Bloods are two mammoth street gangs born in L.A. The Crips, whose signature color is blue, are larger, with an estimated 30,000-35,000 members. Bloods, clad in red, are fewer, but are more violent. Both have branches throughout the U.S. and are composed of cold, conscienceless criminals who deal drugs and have lots of tattoos. They're like Hells Angels without wheels.
An editor here - yes, we do have them, and yes, I do speak with (a few of) them - cautioned me not to make light of street gangs. We know almost all gangbangers are ticketed for an early grave or a cozy jail cell. They're gangbangers when they're young, grocery baggers when they're old because they have no useful trade.
He calls the Dodger Crips "a bunch of Porsche-driving, starlet-chasing, cocaine-sniffing, surfboard-waxing, Armani-wearing, spritzer-drinking, sunshine-soaking, tofu-eating, leg-hair-waxing, sunglasses-wearing weinies [sic]," at which point the column suddenly becomes a bizarre mashup of Boyz n the Hood, Less Than Zero and Gidget. It goes on in this vein for a few hundred words, several of them fully capitalized. If you were to squint and cock your head, the column would begin to look like the sort of thing you could reproduce if you opened up Microsoft Word and slammed your head repeatedly on the keyboard.
As for the sentiment itself, well, it's trying very hard to be offensive, and the most offensive thing about it is that it fails so miserably. There's an old tradition in sportswriting whereby the local newspaper boys would do a little Don Rickles riff on the opponent's city in advance of a big game or series. Jim Murray wrote this stuff better than anyone. He called Long Beach "the seaport of Iowa...a city which, rumor has it, was settled by a slow leak in Des Moines." He said of Cincinnati: "They still haven't finished the freeway outside the ballpark...it's Kentucky's turn to use the cement mixer." Baltimore, he wrote, was "a guy just standing on a corner with no place to go and rain dripping off his hat" and "a great place if you're a crab."
There's an art to the civic-insult column. It was an honorable tradition, once. Today, we get a guy who treats his column like a lengthy YouTube comment and can't even keep his boring L.A. stereotypes straight. Lame.
Stu: Phils-Dodgers as a gang war [Philly.com]
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