Your p.m. roundup for July 21, the day we learned Lady Gaga totally ripped off Grace Jones. Photo credit to the SI Vault. Got any stories or photos for us? Tip your editors.
What we're watching (all times EDT, unless noted): We're wondering why Dan Shaughnessy felt the need to throw a few quips about this newfangled Twitter thingamajig into his column today. To read it is to marvel that Shaughnessy was even able to finish typing without his fingers becoming completely ossified. So let's blow the dust off him, shall we?
Pardon me if I sound like Larry King, but what's up with this Twitter madness? It strikes me as trendy, immature, and entirely unnecessary. What you had for lunch is of no interest to me. Increasingly, tweeting seems to be getting athletes in trouble.
Yeah, because newspaper columnists who begin sentences with phrases like, "Pardon me if I sound like Larry King..." are far more insightful and deserving of our attention than some jagoff who feels compelled to tell his followers he went to Burger King this afternoon. And, as we all know, there's nothing trendy about some high-minded scribe bitching about all that Tweetin' goin' on out there when he's trying to take a nap. Nope. That never happens.
Remember Rashard Mendenhall on Osama Bin Laden? The Raiders and Steelers on Hines Ward? All those players ripping Jay Cutler after the loss to the Packers? It's just too easy to rip off an inane message of 140 characters and hit the "send'' button.
You're right, Dan. It requires far more skill to package nonsensical thoughts into several hundred more words before hitting the "send" button.
I'm with Jon Stewart, hoping the whole thing is a fad. Granted, I thought the same thing about cellphones for a long time - resisting the device while secretly hoping it was a trend that would fade. Alas, the cellphone is here to stay and I caved when the boss made me take one five years ago.
Jon Stewart told you that via carrier pigeon, obviously.
Now Daddy Globe is threatening to make me tweet - at gunpoint. Why? The press box is already full of media folk tweeting instead of watching the game. Tweeting can't be too hard; someone at the Globe sends this column out on Twitter so I have 306 tweets and more than 8,000 followers even though I have no idea how the thing works. Hope I never have to say my account was hacked.
No need to worry about that, Dan. The rest of your followers probably wouldn't know the difference.
If you're looking to watch baseball, MLB Network's got Yankees-Rays at 7 or Tigers-Twins at 8. And NBATV has a pair of WNBA games: Chicago-Indiana at 7, followed by San Antonio-Seattle at 10.
Read Me: Today's Story That Doesn't Suck
The lovable irreverence of Christopher Hitchens: "But most of all, Hitchens recalls another fictional character: one of Wodehouse's finest creations, and the literary personage whom, I suspect, Hitchens himself would most like to resemble (he is known to be a great admirer of Wodehouse). I refer to the Hon. Galahad Threepwood, the younger brother of the Earl of Emsworth, an elegant, witty bon vivant of that earlier fin de siècle. ‘Everything about this Musketeer of the nineties was jaunty. It was a standing mystery to all who knew him that one who had had such an extraordinarily good time all his life should, in the evening of that life, be so superbly robust. Wan contemporaries who had once painted a gas-lit London red in his company and were now doomed to an existence of dry toast, Vichy water, and German cure resorts felt very strongly on this point. A man of his antecedents, they considered, ought by rights to be rounding off his career in a bath-chair instead of flitting about the place, still chaffing head waiters as of old and calling for the wine list without a tremor.'" [The Awl]
This Date In Deadspin History
July 21, 2009: Erin Andrews And Guilt, Imagined And Otherwise
Elsewhere
Dash looks at Hope Solo's options beyond women's soccer: "Because of the size problem, a woman is more likely to break into men's soccer as a striker or a midfielder. (Marta for MLS!) As DiCicco puts it: 'If a midfielder makes mistakes way out in space, the team can recover. If a goalkeeper makes even one mistake, it can mean the difference between a win and a loss.' So, Hope Solo might not help a Major League Soccer club in the standings. But what about the second part of our listener's question—would hiring Solo make for a 'financially successful stunt'? It might sell a few extra tickets, at least in the short term. But that's not the kind of success MLS wants." [Slate]
Owners fuck fans over. Always have: "This dynamic isn't unique to pro football, obviously. It exists across all major sports, but tends to get ignored once work stoppages begin. It seems somewhat arbitrary to be enraged to the point of abandonment at the owners for a lockout that occurred in the offseason, where games aren't being canceled, when owners have been fleecing fans for decades and strong-arming cities into building them stadia with public money. The only difference is that the lockout has been about them trying to bleed the players, as opposed to us, for a little bit more. Not that that's not a shitty thing, but should we really shocked that the owners are horrible people?" [Kissing Suzy Kolber]
The future of women's soccer is...: "The Women's Professional Soccer league does tend to attract a lot of young kids and their families. The question for me has always been if these young fans will grow to become regular fans. Many of us are baseball fans because our fathers and mothers took us out to the game when we were young and impressionable. Will these daughters and fathers be at WPS games five years from now? 10? 20?" [Moderately Cerebral Bias]
Boogaard's brother busted: "Aaron Boogaard, a Canadian national from Regina, Saskatchewan, is being held at the Hennepin County jail on the drug arrest and on a federal immigration hold, according to the jail's website. The police record listing Aaron Boogaard's arrest says that the date and time of his alleged crime is May 13, the same day that family members found Derek Boogaard, 28, dead in his Warehouse District apartment. The incident was listed as 'dead on arrival.'" [Star-Tribune]
Confessions of a former Times Square peep show girl: "Eighteen months of living a double life went by. The week before Christmas, I was working alone at 3 a.m. in Times Square. The store was completely empty, ‘Your Cheatin' Heart' playing on the radio. There was a rustle in the plastic chains separating the peep-show room from the rest of the store. I looked up: An Eighth Avenue street hustler was leading a toothless, drunken geezer into the peep-show area. The hustler pointed at me and whispered to the oldster, then collected money from the man and peaced out. Now, the duped drunk was lurching over to me, reeking of booze, his gray hair sticking up wildly. ‘I already paid $100 for a BJ,' he growled, a Southern twang seeping through his alcohol-slurred voice, ‘and I'm not gonna leave until I get one!' I calmly called for security. My indifference infuriated him even more, and he pounded on the wall in frustration. Two porters appeared and grabbed him by each elbow, hauling him backward out the door. After they'd taken care of him, Basil, one of the porters, came back and grabbed a mop so he could go clean out one of the video booths. We exchanged glances, acknowledging the absurdity of it all. ‘You know,' Basil said, wringing the mop out into a bucket of filthy water, ‘there's gotta be a better way to make a living.'" [New York Post]
Foreign commerical Interlude:
Those ‘dot-commers' sure are a pesky bunch of whippersnappers: "These days, Conlin's current feud is with bloggers, what he calls ‘dot-commers,' as well as sabermetricians. It really is a different world. I'm not sure what kind of newspaper beat man a young Bill Conlin would have made in 2011: wake up, blog, get to the park early, write a pregame notes story for the website, blog, write notes for the paper, Twitter during the game, spend only about 20 minutes in the clubhouse, file the game story by 11 p.m., maybe touch it up for the last edition, shoot a short video, blog. Given the current demands, nobody is ever again going to cover a baseball team for 20 years. And the great irony is that the people who have the best chance in 2011 to do it like Conlin did it in 1971 are the dot-commers, like Stark at ESPN.com, who can stay in the postgame clubhouse forever, searching for that singular anecdote, before sitting down to write." [Philadelphia Daily News]
Doc leaves Devils to do only NBC/Versus: "Since my contracts with MSG, VERSUS, and NBC all expired late this spring, this was another of those times. I discovered that the birth certificate couldn't be changed and it showed me to be 65 in a few days. I've been extremely fortunate to have been able to spend 23 incredible years with the MSG Network channels and 21 equally enjoyable years—including 3 Stanley Cup championships—with the New Jersey Devils. However, considering the long-term significance of this decision, I was able to construct a lighter regular season-schedule and the usual complement of Stanley Cup Playoffs and Stanley Cup Final games for NBC and VERSUS. But that assurance of less travel and fewer games has regrettably led me to end my association with the MSG Network channels and the Devils." [New Jersey Devils]
Cancer not stopping Harvard's Harry Parker: "America's most fabled rowing coach has been diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), a form of blood cancer that often leads to leukemia. But he's still planning to be on the water when training resumes in September. 'Why not?' says the 75-year-old Parker, who will have been at the helm for 50 seasons next spring and has no plans to retire. 'It never occurred to me, quite frankly. The question was, and still is, will I be strong enough and fit enough to carry the full load?''" [Boston.com]
[Editor's Note: Deadspin intern David Roher is a member of Harvard's lightweight rowing team.]
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