…to visit espn.com, which i generally hate.
go there. click on the page (as opposed to say your search bar)
enter the contra code with your keyboard. no i’m not going to remind you what it is.
after you do so keep hitting any key.
feel as though you are part of something.
go on with your life.
UPDATE: It’s over. Here’s what you missed. Never go to ESPN.com again.
If you’re watching the World Baseball Classic you are aware that the plucky Netherlands has pulled off the upset of the year by knocking off the Dominican Republic not once but twice to eliminate the perennial powerhouse, if I may use the term perennial for the second ever WBC.
I wondered what the Dutch papers thought about this, so I surfed over to De Telegraaf, an Amsterdam newspaper. I have long sympathized with Dutch sports ever since they fielded a World Cup soccer team full of names like Wim Jonk and Jaap Stam in the 90s, which names were even more fun to hear pronounced by the Spanish-language commentators because in those days not all games were available in English.
Anyway.
So I had to scroll way the hell down the page to find any mention of the story but I am eternally grateful that I did. This was the headline.
OPNIEUW STUNT HONKBALLERS ORANJE
You have got to be fucking kidding me. This is too good to be true. The Dutch word for baseball is HONKBALL? HONKBALL? Techinally turns out it is honkbal, one L, but nuts to that.
I wanted to confirm that this wasn’t just some sort of folksy nickname for the Dutch team so I checked out Wikipedia in Dutch (de vrije encyclopedie) and sure enough, honkball. The article was surprisingly easy to semi-translate based on context clues and pretending that it was written by this guy:
My first discovery after HONKBALL was the Dutch word for HITTER, which is SLAGMAN. This is particularly great if you are familiar with the British sense of “slag.” The slagman uses his mighty KNUPPEL. Did you know that in Holland, honkballknuppels zijn van hout of een harde soort lichtmetaal, aluminum? Now you do.
I learned about various locations in the ballpark, like third base which is DERDE HONK, as in I would like to get to derde honk with Rebecca Romijn.
Pitchers are WERPERS. They are always trying to hit the SLAGZONE which as you know is directly over THUISPLAAT between KNIE- and ELLEBOOGHOOGTE.
I am pretty sure my favorite word is one I got from the original article about the game. That word is TWEEHONKSLAG which I am fairly positive means double.
While I’m in a honkball mood, here’s a video which I saw a while ago and then was removed but is now back. It’s about a famous derde honkman who kak in his broeken: George Brett would like to tell you about the time he shit himself.
As the year goes on, Cubs fans will want to keep an eye on the health of linksvelder Alfonso Soriano. Will Carlos Marmol keep werping well? Will Carlos Zambrano hit a grand slam, thus scoring all three honklopers? Only time will tell.
May de partij met de meeste punten wint. But then, they always do.
1. Papa John’s pizza
2. Homemade popcorn
3. Babies
My vote goes in for Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.
I’ve been meaning to update the spreadsheets I used for my fantasy football drafts to see how close they were to predicting actual performance. I haven’t done it yet.
I’m in the championships for both my leagues.
I have not yet fully assessed how the fact that somebody in one of those leagues just got charged with insider trading* is going to affect what I post.
*not like in the league; like by the SEC, and by that I don’t ‘ mean that he traded Peyton for Rex Grossman.
I wrote this once for my old complaint blog, and I repost it verbatim after my return to Corner Bakery for the first time in months.
The people at Corner Bakery frequently forget to put croutons in my caesar salad. There are three fucking ingredients in caesar salad. Leaves, dressing, and croutons (maybe some cheese). How brain-dead are you to say, here is a complete caesar salad, even though it is just a pile of damp leaves without croutons.
Corner Bakery today joins Chili’s on my DEAD TO ME list of dining establishments.
I am sitting here on a Sunday afternoon listening to Chinese Democracy. The president-elect is a half-black guy with Hussein in his name. Yesterday I rushed the field at a Northwestern game because we went 9-3 this year.
Thank god the Cubs still suck. If they had won the World Series this year, I’d have to check my BMs for simians.
Awesome blossom complaints notwithstanding, my honeymoon with Obama is sort of over. I think he’s whiffing on his first big policy position, the proposed bailout for auto makers.
I own a Nissan Altima. I like it. It’s a good car.
I did not want to invest $20k of my money in a Chevy Malibu. Don’t invest $50B of our money in GM. Bankruptcy court exists for this purpose – most notably, it would give carmakers the ability to readjust their labor contracts which are some of the sweetest deals you could ever imagine (for unions anyway). Reorganize your business model in the courts and re-emerge, I don’t know, with a chance at profitability, with a chance at making competitive vehicles.
I understand that a shitton of jobs are tied to the auto industry, but a) bankruptcy court doesn’t mean liquidiation necessarily, it means reorganization and b) it’s not like demand for cars will disappear – if one automaker did liquidate, their market share would get tossed on to remaining automakers. Am I anti-union? Not really, unions are critically important to make sure workers don’t get taken advantage of. And as some union members have said to me (not auto unions) – unions deserve the best deal they can negotiate. That’s fine – as long as you stand by that when the deal you negotiated is shortsighted enough to bring your company down. (This is sort of unfair, GM and Ford have many more problems than just labor unions, but it’s a start).
Anyway. Job losses in Detroit are one thing, but job losses in Chicago are…the thing that is going to happen between now and the end of the year, and the thing that most readers of this blog are most concerned about. (see CEOs Tell Mayor Daley They Plan Huge Layoffs In November, December). If you get laid off, ask why your company isn’t important enough, or mismanaged enough, to get government help.
if that IS your real name.
I see that you are part of the blogocracy. The bloggerment. The esblogishment. I know this because you are firing off letters to 7-year old bloggers. And that’s fine, I mean, I’m not the kind of guy to wonder why you are reading about second-rate Hoth dioramas that feature neither wampas nor tauntauns while GM and Ford stock are about to become the latest additions to the McDonald’s Dollar Menu. We all need a break from work. Me, I am always surfing for scuttlebutt on that dreamy Chace Crawford! What lucky lady is going to land him???
All I want to know is, why are you reading about an admittedly more thorough Lego Exo-Force diorama when THIS blogger has reached out to you on the still outstanding issue of the missing awesome blossom? You were clearly CCed on my letter to the chief asshat at Chili’s. And just because I didn’t actually send the letter, that’s no excuse. You’ve got people crawling all over the internets so don’t play it like you haven’t seen it.
If contributing a cool grand to a presidential campaign doesn’t get me the kind of juice to have you reinstate, by Executive Order (or simply because You will it), the Chili’s Awesome Blossom, then frankly I’m not sure I even want to be part of your new Marxist America. I don’t know what kind of insane fried-onion sculptures they have at Spiaggia, but the rest of us are on a budget, sir.
Sincerely,
Oprah Winfrey
BTW if the kid reads this, the Hoth diorama is actually pretty badass and clearly I’m just jealous.
Today’s newspaper can’t be found anywhere except eBay, where it is fetching sometimes $100, as though there were a shortage. There’s one born every minute – especially considering that the paper distributed this morning wasn’t the same as the one distributed last night at about midnight, which I purchased about 15 seconds after it came off the truck, and which I have not seen on ebay at all. This is the real first edition of the Chicago Tribune following Obama’s election:
And yes, this makes me better than you.
In other news, I have added a larger version of the picture I used to make the temp banner to the flickr feed.
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