Ned Bitters

Nothing makes me happier than having something to be pissed off at. I think that’s why I continue to enjoy sports so much. Now, I can’t complain too much, as being a Pittsburgh fan of a certain advanced age has allowed me to experience an unfair amount of sports euphoria in my life.

I’ve seen my teams win six Super Bowls, three Stanley Cups, two World Series and a college football National Championship. I’ve rooted for some of the best athletes ever to play their sports. The sports karma gods blessed me by having my parents reproduce in Pittsburgh. Imagine if they’d have been fucking in Cleveland or San Diego way back when.

Yet I still find so many things in sports to be irritated about. In the past week I’ve screamed at my TV over the following sports-related items, each one of them highly overrated. [Please note that this irrational bitchiness is in no way a result of my Pittsburgh Penguins shitting their playoff bed by losing so embarrassingly to bitter rival Philadelphia. I assure you that my insane ass would find these items vexing even if I were nursing a Stanley Cup hangover.]

Hockey fans slapping the glass when the play is directly in front of them

If you watch hockey, you’ve seen these assbags. Two of the toughest athletes on the planet crash into the boards at a ridiculous rate of speed. They battle on razor-sharp, potentially lethal skates for the puck, pushing and kicking and banging each other with their shoulders and sticks. Throughout the game, they’ve used their legs and feet to block spheres of frozen, rock-hard rubber flying at them at 100 miles per hour. They furiously bang into each other for 60 minutes three to four nights per week. They will occasionally have the stones to drop their gloves and have an actual fist fight, knowing full well they could get knocked cold in front of 18,000 people.

But you, the pasty, twig-armed cubicle schlubb from Technotronics, Inc., are going to show these skating masses of testosterone and muscle how tough you are with your sorry-assed, limp-wristed slaps on a protective slab of 3/4-inch thick, highly reinforced glass. Uh huh. I know I’ve seen a badly shaken Zdeno Chara miss a shift or two after being terrorized by The Fan Hand.

Maybe you think you’re throwing the player off his game, which is even more laughable. He’s able to maintain his focus with 18,000 hostile people screaming at him and a 225-pound goon looking to check him back to Saskatoon, but it’s your feeble glass slaps that are going to throw Alex Ovechkin or Pavel Datsyuk off of his world-class game.

Now, if you do the glass slap with a smile on your face and you’re not too intense about it, then okay, you’re just having a little innocent fun at the ol’ hockey game. Hell, with what front row seats cost these days, you ought to be able to give Jaromir Jagr a handjob if you are so inclined. (Believe me, in the 90s I’d have shown up in Row A with two bottles of Jergens to reward the Great 68 for his world-class exploits.) So a smiling glass slap is cool.

But you faux badasses who pound the glass with rage are just ball-less turds who are showing your cocks in a situation where there is no way in hell you can get your ass kicked. We all see you making a fool of yourself. Well, almost all of us. The players are too busy being truly badass.

Athletes claiming they are “humbled by …” some sort of accolade

If you follow sports at all, you’ve heard athletes say this after being elected to a hall of fame or setting some record. “I gotta tell ya, just being mentioned with guys like Ruth and Gehrig is pretty humbling …”

Explain to me what it means when an athlete says this when he has just been recognized for doing something extraordinary in his sport. I always thought that being humbled meant that you were cut down to size. You hit four homeruns and bat .738 during a weekend series, then you quit dominating the Pittsburgh Pirates and fly across the state to Philadelphia, where you go 0-for-14 against Halladay and crew. That’s being humbled.

But some athlete will get named MVP or perform a feat that puts him in same company as Joe Montana or Michael Jordan, and he’ll say that he his “humbled” by having his name included in such company. He’s either lying or severely lacking in basic word use skills.

Just be honest and say what you are really thinking. “What’s that? Only Bobby Orr and Paul Coffey have done what I just did? That means I’m even more awesome than I thought. If I was an insufferably cocky bastard before, I’m taking swagger to a whole new level now. Okay, interview over, bitches. Now someone send me a clubhouse boy to wash my balls …”

Baseball players crashing into shit

Can we stop lauding Major League baseball players who separate shoulders or knock themselves senseless by crashing into a wall in the third inning of a June game?

I expect pro athletes to give 100 percent all the time, but they do not need to dive over railings or into dugouts or hurl themselves face first into outfield walls unless they’re at a crucial juncture of a post post-season game, and even then it might not be worth it. Risking long-term injury while trying to prevent a fourth inning double just doesn’t seem to make long-term sense.

If you’re on a 25-man roster, you’re one of the best baseball players on the planet. Even the shittiest major league baseball players have immense talent and are of great value to your team. That value is eliminated if you break your ankle sliding into the metal barrier to the stands while trying to catch that foul pop off the pitcher’s bat.

Bill James or some of those other stats gurus need to do a study that mathematically proves that it’s better in the long run to let a ball drop than it is to hurl your body into something made of steel or wood in attempt to gain one out. If superhuman Matt Kemp saves two runs by crashing into the outfield wall but suffers a shoulder separation that ruins his swing for the rest of the season, would those two saved runs be worth it to the Dodgers over the long haul?

Yes, I know teams miss the playoffs by one game, and all teams lose their share of one-run games during the course of a season, and perhaps a gave-saving, wall-smashing catch could have made the difference between October baseball and October golfing. But if the player who saves that one game ends up on the disabled list for a few weeks, chances are his absence from the lineup will lose you more games in the long run.

But most professional ballplayers, even if faced with statistics that prove that crashing into walls is folly, will continue to give 110 percent. Unless we can get fans in the front rows to scare the shit out of them by slapping the box seat railings and outfield walls.

Ned Bitters is, in fact, overrated. You can contact him at teacherslounge@hobotrashcan.com.

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• Overrated – NHL playoff beards
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Ned Bitters

This week’s inductee into the “Overrated Hall of Fame” is … last Friday’s miracle.

Unless your news consumption consists entirely of updates on Snooki’s pregnancy and the latest on The Situation’s alcohol problems, you no doubt heard about last Friday’s Navy jet crash into a Virginia Beach apartment complex. Amazingly, no one was killed. Or should I say, “stunningly” no one was killed. Or perhaps I’ll call the lack of a fried body count “astonishing.”

Any of those words would be more fitting than what a lot of news outlets are now calling it: a “miracle.” I’ve seen several headlines referring to a plane crash and the resulting inferno as the Good Friday Miracle. This implies that the absence of death is not amazing, stunning or astonishing, but instead an act of God.

That’s right. According some of his more idiotic followers, the CEO of Christianity, this being his big weekend and all, decided to remind the world of his omnipotence and mercy by … what, bringing world peace? Ending hunger? Giving the Pittsburgh Pirates the ghost of a chance at playing October baseball?

Nope. He rams a jet into some low-rent apartments and his mindless minions go all weak in the knees thanking His Almightiness for the fact that lives were spared. As miracles go, it was pretty damn lame and terribly overrated. A true miracle would leave no wreckage in its wake, but this one, while not ending any lives, brought a lot of torment and inconvenience to a lot of the unlucky participants.

First of all, despite no one dying, a number of people had to be taken to hospitals. While none of the injuries were said to be critical, people still suffered injuries. Okay, many of them were minor, but do you know what constitutes a “minor” injury? Something that doesn’t happen to you. If you’re the one with some first degree burns, or a broken bone, or an open gash that needs stitches, those injuries don’t seem so minor when you’re in real pain in a real hospital having a real needle being repeatedly poked through that big, very real gash on your forehead. “Don’t worry about that four-inch scar, ma’am. People will only notice it if they are within five feet of you. But thanks for taking a ‘minor’ one for The Big Guy and his incendiary miracle.”

We are also left with one less Navy jet. Why, in the pursuit of performing a miracle, did he have to destroy a plane that costs tens of millions of dollars to build? That’s a gross waste of American taxpayer money, and since we all know (thanks to the Tea Party) that God favors America over all other nations, the fact that he’d wreck one of his favorite country’s jets is either careless or a tad spiteful. Iran has a navy, and that navy has jets. I’d like to know why he didn’t inflict … er, sorry … I mean perform his miracle in Tehran.

The language in all the news stories says that the jet malfunctioned, but a jet doesn’t fuck up on its own. Somewhere along the line, human error was involved, either on the part of the people flying the plane or the mechanics who service it. After an investigation, blame will be assigned and someone’s head will roll, perhaps derailing a promising career and thereby causing him to suffer debilitating self-worth issues, which could wreck his marriage and blow up what had been your standard-issue, semi-happy family. That’s a pretty heavy cost for someone to pay for a little bit of Good Friday showing off on the part of the merciful Almighty.

Let’s not discount the other victims in this miracle. The crash left dozens of people immediately homeless and no doubt destroyed many – if not all – of their belongings. The rest of us voyeurs got to watch cool footage of black smoke and raging flames on the news, but a few dozen people woke up the next day in a strange bed or in a shelter, with valuable mementos and belongings forever lost in that cool-as-hell plume of black smoke that Live at Five Chopper Cam 6 treated us to as we sat in our unburning homes that Good Friday evening enjoying The Miracle. Seems the big guy could have proven his point without sending innocent people to Uncle Herb’s or Cousin Rita’s place for an indefinite intrusion. I mean “stay.”

And let’s be honest. Despite his welcoming attitude, Uncle Herb ain’t exactly thrilled about having his home infiltrated by his whiney sister, her ne’er-do-well husband and their snot-nosed toddler. But hey, when you just gotta pull of that Good Friday Miracle, someone’s gotta step and shoulder some of the costs.

What about the poor owner of the entire apartment complex, who now owns a few dozen less apartments thanks to god’s ill-planned efforts at wowing his flock? While everyone is thanking god for sparing human life, this poor bastard is now faced with insurance issues out the ass, two years of hard rebuilding and an overall major disruption of his life, all so that God could generate get some positive P.R. on CNN this Easter.

So spare me the miracle talk. If god sees fit to shove miracles into his fans’ faces, maybe he should do so with a little less destruction and fewer consequences.

Maybe the next time he shakes the earth under the ocean, he’ll stop the tsunami just before it obliterates a hundred thousand or so Asians.

Or perhaps he’ll take dear old dad, who is in the final hours of hospice care after enduring the excruciating final days of stage-5 pancreatic cancer, and cure his ass right up, delivering him from a Good Friday trip to the mortician to the hiding of Easter eggs for the grandkids on Sunday morning.

So please, let’s end right now this childlike assumption that Friday’s crash was anything more than an all too human fuck up paired with some incredible good luck. If you believe there is an all-powerful deity in the sky who occasionally sends CNN-worthy miracles just for the holidays, keep that discussion among yourselves, or at least keep it out of the news. I know that’s just not going to happen, but until then, I’ll keep waiting for a miracle.

Ned Bitters is, in fact, overrated. You can contact him at teacherslounge@hobotrashcan.com.

Ned Bitters

This week’s inductee into the “Overrated Hall of Fame” is … The Breakfast Club weed scene.

I was showing the movie A Breakfast Club to my students this week. You’d think a 26-year-old teen movie would bore the hell out of today’s high school seniors, but these kids were riveted. I’m not talking preppie little white kids either. I have 80 percent black students and only one honors class. The majority of my kids are the lower level types, which I specifically ask for because those are the very kids to whom a teacher can show A Breakfast Club without fear of any parents calling the principal to report my slacking ass.

Every single kid was engrossed in the movie. Most had never seen it, despite its almost daily showing on some 200-something channel on your local cable package. I’d look around and see the usual sleepers and fuck offs actually leaning forward on their desks. If someone dared talk, he’d get shushsed by six of his wanting-to-fuck Molly Ringwald peers. It’s an amazing phenomenon and it speaks to the timeless genius of that rare piece of 80s culture not deserving of being incinerated at ground zero of a nuclear strike.

But there is one part of this movie that bothers the hell out of me. No, not the fact that Carl the janitor is a good-looking, articulate gentleman with a wry, immediate wit, which I’m sure describes every custodian at your workplace. It’s not the complete inattention to the potential liability issues of leaving five horny high school kids in the library with no direct adult supervision. It’s not even the fact that possessing a firearm in school, or pulling a false fire alarm, or assaulting and injuring a fellow student, would result in a punishment no greater than spending a Saturday in the school library writing a punitive essay.

No, what bothers me most about this movie, what I find the most implausible, is the kids’ reaction to the weed they smoke. Other than the first couple of “high” scenes, the rest of their post-blaze-up behavior rings false.

Of course, being a teacher in a public high school, I must state right here and now that I am basing my judgment purely on observations and extensive research, for I have never, ever partaken of the drug cannabis. My ideas of what constitutes the normal “stoned” (that is the correct word to describe the effects of marijuana, right?) behavior are based solely on what I’ve read, what I’ve seen in movies and what my pastor and fellow church deacons tell me every Wednesday when we volunteer at the Just Say No center. Okay, that should suffice lest anyone in charge of my school system see past this Ned Bitters pseudonym and begin termination proceedings.

That very true confession being out of the way, I will take blogger’s license and write the rest of this as if I have, indeed, actually indulged in the inhalation of marijuana smoke, a.k.a. toking up, getting my high on, getting cheeched, toasted or ripped and other such euphemisms with which I, myself, am not personally familiar. (You got all that, Personnel Department?)

Right after the kids blaze up, their behavior is spot-on high. They laugh too much. They talk too much. They make no sense. That’s typical baked behavior.

But then things take a turn for the implausible. The conversation not only turns serious, but it also makes sense. It’s intelligent and interesting. It has depth. I’ve been around many high people, and I cannot once remember some stoned motherfucker making sense. But these kids are laying bare their greatest insecurities and vulnerabilities with extreme eloquence.

The stoners I’ve known are never eloquent. They ramble incoherently about grandiose plans they’ll never actually follow through on. (“Yeah, man. I’m just gonna quit my job and walk around the southwest for a year meeting Navajos and shit. I wanna get into Indian culture and take my mind to like another plane of consciousness. Or go to Denny’s maybe.”)

Or they discuss, with more seriousness that one might find in national security meeting, the relative merits of Kit Kats vs. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Or they talk about their love of humanity on a grand, all-encompassing scale. In other words, everyone who gets high is immediately full of shit.

But not these kids. Heartfelt, lucid confessions roll out one after another, and even more amazing, the other kids actually listen. When I’m high [note above disclaimer, all you Central Office readers], I’ll do my share of babbling on in nonsensical fashion, and I know my weed-mates are nodding encouragingly while not really listening to the string of inanities coming out of my at-that-point very dry mouth. (Research, baby. Research.). I know I don’t listen to their theories on infinity or the impending zombie invasion. No one listens when they’re high. When stoned, you either talk or wait to talk. But not in A Breakfast Club. Actual conversation ensues, and all tokers know that one of the best reasons to get high is to avoid real conversation.

Then we have the bizarre scene when Emilio Estevez’s character, Andrew L. Wrestler (L. is for Lunkhead, of course), emerges from a smoke-filled room and goes on an aerobicized display of athleticism that would land him a silver medal in London this summer. He’s vaulting book stacks, running up walls a la Bo Jackson (Google it, all you young whipper-snappers) and throwing violent air punches.

If you, dear reader, have, unlike me (take note, Mr. Superintendent), sinned against God and nature by putting a tightly rolled marijuana cigarette to your lips and sucking in the sweet, smoky release said cig offers (so they tell me), then you know how hard it is to believe this scene. Hell, a person smokes weed to stop feeling that way. Instead, Andrew runs around the library as if his dutchie was laced with PCP. No one in the history of highness has acted like that when stoned.

Where was some half-stoned gaffer on the set who should have alerted the people in charge about this obvious error? Where was Estevez brother Charlie Sheen to warn John Hughes that such behavior is more often the result of six snorts of coke and four shots of Jack Daniels, which he could have demonstrated right then and there?

Finally, the high doesn’t last very long at all. Within an hour or so of blazing up, they are back to their normal, whiney selves, bemoaning shitty parents, the travails of negotiating the brutal halls of a public high school and – my favorite – the crushing, soul-deflating pressure of being rich, popular and good-looking in that public high school.

Come to think of it, maybe there’s more overrated stuff in this movie than I thought. I’d go into that right now but, uhhh …I gotta go not get high.

Ned Bitters is, in fact, overrated. You can contact him at teacherslounge@hobotrashcan.com.

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Ned Bitters

This week’s inductees into the “Overrated Hall of Fame” are … eating contests.

I hate that I know the name Joey Chestnut. Of all the ugly acts that make us ugly Americans, the eating contest might squat atop of that dirty, smelly trash heap of ugliness.

I’m not sure if other countries have eating contests. (Hey, I churn out drivel for a blog. I’m not an actual journalist who does research for actual, you know, journalism. You’re reading this online, which means you have Internet access, which means you have Google. If you’re that interested in knowing, look it up yourself, Mr. Woodward.) I’m guessing they don’t. (See how easy it is to blog?)

In countries where food is treated with reverence, such as Italy and France, it would seem sacrilegious to see how many crepes a person can shove into his piehole in ten minutes. In countries where food is not so revered and is instead looked at with the quaint idea of its purpose being actual sustenance, I’m guessing they view the eating contest for what it is: gross obscenity.

I’m not religious, but there is something spiritually perverse in the eating contest. In the history of man, the quest for food has been the hardest part of existence. Natural disasters and disease have kicked the living shit out of us. Religion has caused more wars than all the Bush egos combined. Some day another Chris Christie-sized asteroid is going to thwomp into the planet and put one hell of a damper on humanity’s future. But nothing has caused more death, more suffering and more heartache than food issues.

For the bulk of human existence, back before we had Winn Dixies and Super Walmarts for all your Cheetos and Oreos needs, the acquisition of food has required more time, attention and effort than any other part of life. Growing crops and raising meat animals was why most people got out of bed in the morning. If for some reason you wanted to maintain your boring-assed, Internetless, Comcastless, Blackberryless existence, you had to get up and work the fields and milk the cows and feed the pig and get out on that leaky wooden boat and hope your tattered net bagged a few grouper.

But today, although a large segment of the world lives without food angst, there are still many places where food has actual value. Not monetary value. Life sustaining value. And here in America, we have so much extra food and so little appreciation of this fact that we make rabid, rapid overeating a sport. It’s disgusting and, were I religious, I’d go so far as to call it sinful.

So I can’t stand that I am aware of the most famous of the eating contest participants, such as overrated chicken wing stuffers Joey Chestnutt and that semi-hot little Asian-American lady from Virginia they call the Black Widow and the Japanese guy with the bandana, Kositostitos or Kimhibachi or Sushisucko or whatever the little shit’s name is.

[Oh man, that is so racist! How dare you make fun of his Japanese name like that! Talk about the ugly American! Yeah, you’re right. I’m so sorry. I wouldn’t want to offend the dignity of a man whose popularity rests on his ability to cram 60 hot dogs into his mouth every Fourth of July and who holds world records for eating the most meatballs, hamburgers and Twinkies in a singly setting. All apologies, Honorable Kobayahsi-san.]

While I can’t stand the participants in these contests, my real anger goes out toward ESPN and any other network that covers these vulgar food orgies. The “S” in ESPN allegedly stands for sports, but I could be wrong. (It might now stand for “Shill for the NFL.”) Yet they give actual news coverage to these obscene bouts of overindulgence. Interviews are conducted. Odds are set. Extensive highlights are shown. (After all, we wouldn’t want the nation’s premier college basketball network to devote more time to something a little more substantive, like that Syracuse basketball scandal.)

I can barely get ESPN highlights of all three goals of an Alex Ovechkin hat trick, but I’d bet my last Nathan’s frank that I’ll get two minutes coverage (on the world’s premier sports programming network) of a pained, but victorious Joey Chestnut doubled over and breathing heavily as he tries not vomit 53 hot dogs on the Black Widow’s shoes.

But maybe I shouldn’t rip on ESPN. They’re just giving the bloated masses what they want, which are clips of people doing what they do, only much doing it much better.

You might play hockey, but you watch ESPN to see highlights of Evgeni Malkin, who plays it better. You might shoot a little hoops in the driveway, but, assbag that he is, Lebron James plays it better. You might toss the football around with your kid and enjoy you some pussy, but Tom Brady does both better.

And Americans love to overeat shit foods, gorging our morbidly obese selves on fried, fatty fare until we are relegated to motorized wheelchairs, but Joey Chestnut does it better.

Hey, all your eating contest winners, if you have an open date on your Tour of Indecency calendar, feel free to pencil yourselves in for a contest where I live. All you have to do is show up … and eat me.

Ned Bitters is, in fact, overrated. You can contact him at teacherslounge@hobotrashcan.com.

Ned Bitters

This week’s inductee into the “Overrated Hall of Fame” is … a more innocent time.

I was in a waiting room this week that had not one People or Sports Illustrated magazine, so I had to leaf through some sappy sugar fest of a magazine filled with articles the Reader’s Digest would reject as too saccharine. (Does the Digest even exist anymore?)

This must be a ploy from my dentist, who probably figures that the pain of reading these magazines will make one long for the sweet release of a less painful root canal.

But not wanting to stare across the room at the hot girl half my age (you see, I’m 24), I leafed through the magazine and came across some silly reference to “a more innocent, simpler time.” I think the writer was referring to the 50’s, or maybe it was the early 70’s, or perhaps it the early 80’s? I don’t remember because I immediately discounted her belief in a more innocent time as nothing more than mindless nostalgia for something that never was.

When exactly was this time of a superior simplicity in the world, this era when the world in general had fewer cares or worries and when the world was a better place to live in?

Perhaps it was back when a cancer diagnosis was an almost surefire death sentence. Or maybe it was when a heart attack meant instant check-out because 911 and quasi-doctor EMT’s didn’t exist. Yeah, those were simpler times all right. “Hey, I’ll keep this simple, sir. You’re gonna die of prostate cancer.” (Yeah, yeah … I know, Mr. Statistics. Cancer still kills thousands each year. But one helluva lot more people get cured of it in these allegedly terrible, more complex modern times.)

Maybe the writer was referring back to when cars were built without multiple airbags, antilock brakes and all the other technological advances that make today’s accidents a lot less potentially lethal than they were back when Fonzie was banging every skank in the greater Milwaukee area.

Yes, please take me back to the days before cell phones increased convenience a hundred fold, or when we had no Internet to make us a thousand times more consumer savvy, more world aware, more connoisseur-like in our porn preferences.

Ask any old black man to wax nostalgic about those carefree, simpler days of yore and how easy it was for him to make his affections for a white woman known, and how gracefully said advances were accepted by the nation’s cracker contingent. Hell, I saw an article in today’s Washington Post that referred to a married, interracial Maryland couple who were arrested in 1958 for … yep, being an interracial couple. Ah, yes. Let us all long for those simpler, better times when cracker-assed redneck politicians could write such laws and cracker-assed redneck cops could droolingly enforce them.

Take off the rose-colored retro-glasses and wise up. There was no era in history when life was better because it was simpler. It was only our individual selves who were simpler and more innocent. (And that’s the case only if you grew up without a chronically empty refrigerator, or with a dad who didn’t beat on your mom, or with an uncle whose every third visit didn’t entail a beefy hand down your underpants.)

Everyone who makes it to adulthood has a ten-year period in the in their past that they can look back to as those special years against which the rest of their lives can be measured. And almost invariably, those times, in retrospect, seem better, simpler, more innocent. But it wasn’t the time. It was you.

There was no full-time job, no mortgage, no spouse, no kids. If I may dip into my cliché bin, your whole life lay ahead of you. Your own death was an abstraction at best. No one looked to you for the answers. So of course things seemed simpler and more innocent, because, if you were lucky, things were simpler for you at that time.

But I guarantee you that, while you were living a relatively simple life, there were older people living then who were pining for the simpler times of their pasts, even if those years were during one of the World Wars or the Great Depression. I bet there’s some octogenarians out there right now pining for the carefree childhood days they experienced during World War II.

So enough already with the mindless nostalgia for an era from your past that time has skewed the memory of. Life has always been difficult and complex. You were just too young to know it. It isn’t the world that has gotten more complex. It is you.

Believing otherwise doesn’t just make you sound narcissistic and egotistical. It makes you sound simple.

Ned Bitters is, in fact, overrated. You can contact him at teacherslounge@hobotrashcan.com.