Daffyd ab Hugh knows everything you could ever want to know about Vulcans. Just drop him a line and I’m sure he’ll help.

Especially if you offer Twinkies.

Expecting a non-Vulcan to write a paper that is precisely 20 pages long is highly illogical. Your paper will more likely be 21.314159 pages long, approximately.

I thought you were going to put out a Jonah Goldberg-like call for anyone who has read the works of Charles Goodyear and could give you an executive summary.

We invaded Vietnam for their rubber. And mangangese.

But mostly for their Communism.

Bet you wished you went to one of the fly-over country edumaversities now, don’t you? Then, you just have to make shit up, and when you get an “F”, you’ve got David Horowitz rushing over to defend your freedom of speech. Then everyone lies about it until the beleaguered prof. gives you an “A.”

The fact is that your 20-page paper will give aid and comfort to the terrorists, because you are a radical leftist.

Seriously though, that sucks. I had to do a 30-pager for my senior thesis in college and it was no fun at all.

It’s all about how you choose the topic.

I had a big senior thesis last winter, and I made sure I set it up in such a way that I could spent vast amounts of ink making fun of Daniel Pipes’ father (who is almost as looney as Daniel is).

The thirty pages flew by, and I actually ended up having to cut it a bit short, just because I was running out of time.

I take umbrage with the gratuitous swipe at Joe Morgan. If you want to go after inane baseball commentary, it’s CLEARLY Joe “I Only Got This Job Because My Daddy’s A Legend” Buck and Tim “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere” McCarver. Not only can Buck not go five seconds during a game without hearing the sound of his own voice, but McCarver absolutely has to be sloshed half the time. He CONTINUOUSLY refers to players by the wrong names (“Brandon” Arroyo???) and he makes no sense whatsoever. Jon Miller and Joe Morgan, on the other hand, are fantastic, and now that Peter Gammons does Sunday nights with them, it’s even better. I’ll give you Karl and Palz on Baseball Tonight, but Morgan is the best color commentator in baseball today (not counting the local guys, although we’re stuck with Buck Martinez here in DC – BLECH).

OH MY GOD, Swank has another “I Believe In Miracles” up, and in this one he talks about how he evaded the police intentionally when they came for him at a methadone clinic!

Then I looked up to see two police cruisers driving into the clinic parking lot.

I drove into the nearby mall parking lot, losing my vehicle amongst the hundreds of others. My heart was beating out of my chest. My head was cloudy. But I knew I had to drive to the county jail where I had a mid-afternoon appointment…

I assume, since we are the same age, that you are in grad school.

So I wanted to ask, do you get to choose your topics? (It sounds like you don’t, why would you choose vulcanized rubber?) We pretty much have to choose ours, and it is harder than it sounds sometimes.

I have to write 20 pages on Beowulf in the next two weeks, and I have no idea what to write. But first I have to finish papers for two other classes; at least I have topics for those.

I totally second the endorsement of ‘Fire Joe Morgan.’ I’ve read their entire archive, and I never laughed so hard at sports commentary. Not only that, but it totally made a convert out of me, even though I still think stats are math and math is for nerds.

Just make sure you write “When the vulcanization process was perfected, it was a very Goodyear.” Your professor will dock you if you don’t pay homage to the classics.

Fire Joe Morgan is as funny as Joe is idiotic .. good stuff.

libsouth — Morgan is OK, but he absolutely refuses to believe that there can be any other way to analyze baseball players than old white guys sitting in the stands with clipboards (scouts). He rants on and on about intangibles and “clutch” when the numbers show that “clutch” hitting is an anomaly for the most part. Since the guy who runs that site is a big “Moneyball” stat guy, I think he’s chosen Morgan as his object of anger.

As far as Buck and McCarver … awful. Buck has the worst monotone of any broadcaster I’ve ever heard, and McCarver only worries about getting the names right if the player is a Yankee. Christ, if I have to listen to him verbally fellate Derek Jeter one more time, my foot goes through the TV. The guy phones in the World Series if the Yankees aren’t in it. What a douchebag.

liberalsouth – the swipe at Morgan is entirely justified.

Go read that site, they give McCarver his due, but you’ll see that Morgan totally deserves all the grief they give him.

I actually like Bucks’ style better than Miller’s, although after reading ‘Fire Joe Morgan,’ I’ve come around to him.

Tim McCarver might give him a run for his money, but Joe Morgan is still a terrible color man.

We invaded Vietnam for their rubber

That seems odd. ‘Cause when I got incountry, the first thing everybody told me is “Hey, FNG–Whatever you do, don’t use the gook rubbers. They’ll break on you and they’re infected with VD. Only use the American ones from the PX.” (Sorry for the racial slur, but in the interest of accurate quotations…)

As to Joe Morgan, I find him HARD to listen to. I suppose I could tolerate him more if he would simply promise never again to try to say the word “comfortable”. When he tells me that the hitter just isn’t “Con Fer Bul” at the plate, I just cringe.

McCarver ruins the world series every year. He’s just the worst, period. I never came to hate Buck ’cause I hated McCarver so bad.

John Miller is, simply, the best there is. Locally, Duane Kuiper is wonderful, a great ex-hippie ballplayer from the ’70s (remember Dock Ellis?), and Mike Krukow is a complete boob. They call themselves Kruk and Kuipe, my sister calls them Crack and Pipe…

mikey

I hear the Catholic Church is changing it’s stance on Vulcanized rubber.

Bad boring joke for a bad boring topic. In other words, who cares? Make a topic on that Swank article, Gavin or someone. You won’t get any donations from me with Brad whining about how you’re too busy writing stoopid essays to make good topics.

Where on earth does Swank meet all these heroine addicts?

I mean, I really like Wonder Woman when I was a kid….but this is ridiculous! I didn’t need methadone to stop.

From the Swank column Yasonyacky, Descriptivist linked us to:One lady in particular was a businesswoman. She dressed like posh. Oh my gosh, maybe she was Posh! Swank knows Posh! Is he implying that she and Becks could be heroin (sic) addicts?

I was hoping we could get a contest going for worst Star Trek joke, but I see this thread has switched over into baseball commentary. Sad.

I never liked Jon Miller because he overhypes everything. A guy gets a double in the third inning and he sounds like the ‘oh the humanity’ guy from the Hindenburg Crash.

I’ve come around to him lately, mostly because I feel bad that he has to work with Joe Morgan, but I still could do with a little less bombast. Also, the sound of his voice bugs me.

Mikey, Vin Scully is still the best there is, although I don’t expect a Giants fan to admit that.

I was hoping we could get a contest going for worst Star Trek joke, but I see this thread has switched over into baseball commentary.

Ahh, c’mon, Kathleen (hey, that sounds like it could be an eighties classic hit!). One of the things most lovable about the Sadly, No comment threads, especially compared to, say, Kos, is they suffer from serious ADD. And no amount of Ritalin can help them…

mikey

I’m running low on Ritalin. How old is Vin Scully?

Vin Scully is right up there with the best–Russ Hodges, Lon Simmons, Vin Scully, Red Barber–those guys understood what it was to broadcast baseball on the radio. I think there will never be guys like that again ’cause TV has ruined them. The radio was a special, fragile thing, and the ability to paint those pictures no longer has value–they all sound like they’re doing a TV game, even on the radio.

Actuall, Ianua, in the early sixties I remember I had a little white Transistor Radio and could get the Dodgers game on KFI. If the Giants game was over I loved to listen to Vin Scully. We didn’t have Farmer John in Northern California, so I couldn’t get the comercials.

mikey

Mikey, you are right about radio, but the best call Vin Scully ever made was on TV:

a little roller up along first…it’s trickling, behind the bag…it gets through Buckner! Here comes Knight, and the Mets win it!!

Ok, you should really go check out Malkin’s new “Hot Air” website. She’s now doing…what, I guess…a video blog.

hotair.com (via TBogg)

Might I add that Bob Uecker is one of the great remaining radio broadcasters? Of course I might. His style and wit have made listening to Milwaukee Brewer radio broadcasts bearable when they shouldn’t have been. His broadcast partner Jim Powell is also a pro and one of the few next gen broadcasters who avoids the TV school of radio sportscasting.

…it gets through Buckner!

Don’t make Brad cry when he’s trying to work.

Ernie Harwell, greatest of all time.

And Tom Cheek (R.I.P.), who didn’t miss a Blue Jays game for about 35 years. The Jays are my team so I got very used to his voice.

About vulcanized rubber – really the modern world would be impossible without it.
Just take a James Burke – “Connections” tack on it.
Pneumatic tires, machine belts, rubber bands, etc. God knows what vulcanized rubber did for just the military.
It’s gotta be interesting – just imagine the world without it. Sure, nowadays we have things like silicone rubber, but vulcanized rubber was the shit for a century.

in the vein of dAVE, I have decided that Brad should write his paper as if his great-grandson has come back from the future to tell Brad about the horrors of a world without vulcanized rubber, a la Dan Simmons. Or maybe it would work better if Brad’s great grandson went farther back in time, stopped the development of vulcanized rubber, and then went forward in the future, saw how horrible it was, and then came back to tell Brad about it?

sometimes I even amaze myself.

I miss Ernie Johnson (Senior). That voice always meant Braves baseball to me. Now Braves fans are stuck with Skip Caray.

Ernie Johnson Jr., aka Charles Barkley’s waterboy? Meh.

Basketball: Chick Hearn

Also, if I haven’t plugged the Fire Joe Morgan blog yet, I’m plugging it right now.

Oh dear god. I just read it for the first time. Snarky robonerds. Of course many of their targets deserve what they get, but still… statheads bringin the snark. It hurts me to think about it. Maybe I should be their troll.

Ianua Ditis: I have to write 20 pages on Beowulf in the next two weeks, and I have no idea what to write.

I suggest gorrowing Brad’s paper on vulcanized rubber with a few key tweaks. Change “Goodyear” to “Beowulf” and “rubber” to “Grendel.” Leave the general framework of the heroic conquest of defiant feminine nature. Voila!

Um, “gorrowing” is, of course, an Old English term. It’s a mix between “goring” and “harrowing.” Barrow, burrow, borrow, harrow, gorrow. Professional bloated faux Welshman Dafydd Sleep ap-Nea will back me up on this.

Flipyrwhig – thanks, I’ll take that under advisement.
Maybe I’ll write about when Beowulf killed the dragon that was gorrowing the Geats.

Retardeau – I thought the same thing at first, but after you read a few of their posts, you will start to realize they’re right. Most of what sports analysts are paid the big bucks to say is really, really dumb. And most of what is conventional wisdom in baseball is even dumber.

Also, you can’t actually comment on their blog, only ‘team members’ can. That is definitely a point against them.

You could troll them through email, although that’s nowhere near as satisfying.

a few comments:

good luck with the vulcanized rubber thing.

uh — live long and prosper?

and watch out for the vulcanized rubber around pon far or spa fon or whatever vulcans-in-heat time is called.

mal de mer, what is a edumaversity? would that be, say, a former teachers’ college now upgraded to a university? if that’s so, i’ve also heard them called directional state — ie, northern iowa, southern illinois, etc.

as for baseball, i enjoy john kruk. he’s unpretentious and he also told a story that shows he doesn’t take himself seriously.

kruk was at an airport when a woman came up to him and asked him if he was an athlete. he replied, “lady, i’m not an athlete — i’m a baseball player.”

Vulcanized rubber made possible the Brazilian city of Manaus, something like 2000 miles up the Amazon and in the middle of a jungle that many miles from any other city in Brazil. Make the paper a description of the development of Brazil, colonial economic corporate intelligence, and the plantation rebellions which developed in Malaysia, Indonesia and Cochin-China when their imperial overlords used smuggled rubber plant cuttings to set up their own rubber industries. It’s a great read.

Write a paper about how Anakin Skywalker is truly the chosen one, since he DID destroy the Sith, but only after becoming one and destroying the entire Jedi Order in the process.

Go.

Kruk makes great baseball points, but he needs to realize he has a microphone on and stop screaming on every show. Other than that, I have no complaints about him.

The best way to watch baseball, of course, is with the local team’s guys and not this national business. Scully is great, as is Uecker. The guy who does Astros broadcasts on the Houston radio affiliate is one of the best I’ve ever heard, but I have no idea who he is (I just caught him listening to the Nationals game on XM the other day).

And Mike – OUCH! Even a supposedly godless, soulless and degenerate Yankees fan like myself has enough respect for people to never bring up the B word around Sawks fans! That’s just evil.

If at all possible, I’d be interested in reading at least the part of your paper dealing with the 1800s sector of VR’s history. Its place in Victorian and “gilded age” society is often underestimated.

I know I had a hunh moment when I read wagon train pioneers employed literal ‘water beds’ in their long treks (the practical side of it was a logically packed reserve of water when compared to barrels) but it goes so well with the early thriving business of condoms.