I’ve heard other versions of this joke (substituting Russia or Liz Lemon for ‘North Korea’), but this is the basics. I can’t remember when or where I first heard it, but it’s been years, and it still gets me.

Oh, it still gets me.

Cambridge, MA – Harvard University’s men’s basketball team is the 25th-ranked basketball team in the country, leading observers to assume it’s some kind of sociology study. Harvard’s basketball team is 14-2, with one loss coming against #9 ranked UConn. “Jesus, we were only up two on Harvard at the half,” said UConn coach Jim Calhoun. “Grant money must be just pouring into that basketball team.”

Harvard denies that its men’s basketball team is engaged in anything besides competitive athletics, but observers point to evidence to the contrary. After Harvard lost to Fordham on January 3rd, each Harvard player engaged their Fordham counterpart in a fifteen minute interview on perceived biases. “Maybe it’s a cultural competency thing,” suggested Dick Vitale. “Their grad departments do some wacky stuff.” And the team’s new motto, “Publish or Perish,” is also raising suspicions. But not all observers think Harvard’s new-found athletic prowess points to an ulterior academic motive.

“Harvard’s been moving in this direction for years,” said ESPN’s college basketball analyst Andy Katz. “Everybody knows Harvard undergrad is nothing but grade inflation and TA-led classes. Those kids have more time for basketball than anybody.”

Keep Louisville Weird
support local businesses

I wonder if they sport bumper stickers in Houston, Texas that say:

Keep Houston Corporate
support multinational corporations

Probably not.  I’m guessing oil executives aren’t an ironic bunch.

Wilmington, DE – With President Obama declaring the war in Iraq officially over, Americans breathed a sign of relief that they soon would no longer be able to find Iraq on a map again. “I clearly remember the day in January 2002 when I learned Iraq was a country,” said Norman Griswald, a Wilmington accountant. He and other Americans reflected on the brutal realities of nine years spent knowing about a place outside their immediate lives. “Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali al-Husayni al-Sistani. Al-Falluja. The Ba’ath Party,” Griswald added somberly. “Jesus, I still know what I’m talking about.” Medical experts say the loss of worldly ignorance Americans suffered during the Iraq War might take days or even weeks to recover from, but given time Americans might again know only that Iraq is one of ten countries with four letters in its name.

Papelbon celebrating another 30-minute 1-2-3 inning

Jonathan Papelbon will be the Phillies’s closer for the next four years.  Concerns about the size and length of the contract aside, Papelbon’s arrival brings a larger cost to the City of Philadelphia.

Jonathan Papelbon takes 45 minutes between each pitch.

So that’s an exaggeration, but it is a peer-reviewed non-exaggeration to say that he takes an infuriatingly long time between pitches.

So I did some math to answer this question: How much of our time will Papelbon waste over the next 4 years? I addressed this question by using the Fangraphs’s ‘pace’ statistic which tracks time per pitch.

• As a point of comparison, fast-pitching Cliff Lee took 20.4 seconds between pitches in 2011.
• Ryan Madson, our previous closer, took 23.0 seconds between pitches last season.*
• Jonathan Papelbon took 1,714.3 seconds between pitches in 2011.  No, ok, he took 31.9 seconds.

*The Rules of Baseball (cue angelic choir) give a pitcher 12 seconds to pitch after receiving the ball from the catcher. If every pitcher used 12 seconds, that would mean that Carlos Ruiz takes 11 seconds to get the ball back to Madson, and 8 seconds to get the ball back to Cliff Lee.  Obviously, umpires are not enforcing this rule.

The Phillies signed Papelbon to be what Madson was last year – a very good closer. And they’re paying him based on his past 4 years’ performance. So let’s assume, because to do so is pleasing, that Papelbon maintains his previous 4-year averages for the next 4, and that Madson would have done the same job. Our math is as follows:

Multiply that 9,799.79 seconds by 4 years and convert into hours, and you have 10.89 hours.  This is the amount of extra time that Papelbon will take to do an equally good job of closing as Ryan Madson would have done.

Doesn’t seem like much.  But hundreds of thousands of people are going to watch Phillies games on TV.  This is 10.89 hours stolen from everybody’s individual lives.  To simplify things, let’s consider just Phillies home games, and assume, because we’re on a roll, that half of Papelbon’s pitching time will occur at home.

click for bigger version

236,015.99 hours. This is the collective extra time that Philadelphians (and those irritatingly polite Braves fans who come to games) will spend watching our closer pitch, because it’s Papelbon and not Madson.

Like a villain from a Green Lantern comic, Jonathan Papelbon will suck 236,000 hours out of the City of Philadelphia over the next 4 years.  That is time that could be spent starting small businesses, or shopping local, or hugging children.  Time we will never get back.

Malcolm Gladwell says that somebody else says that it takes 10,000 hours of working hard at something to become excellent at it. That is 23.6 experts we could have in Philadelphia*, experts we could really put to good use.

*Assuming we could somehow donate our collective time to one person, who would use it to work on one specific skill,** but hey, I wrote this in Philadelphia and you’re reading it instantaneously in a cafe in Paris, and if we could invent that magic why not this other idea?

**Hell, let’s donate that time to a kid with a good arm and get ourselves a closer that doesn’t take forever.

But no. Instead, we will all spend 10.89 hours watching a boogly-eyed crazy person stare furiously at the dirt in front of the pitcher’s mound, take breaths like he’s trying to pass a kidney stone, and then throw only fastballs.

November 7th, 2003 – The Seattle Mariners hired Bill Bavasi as General Manager.

January 8th, 2004 – The Seattle Mariners traded Carlos Guillen for Ramon Santiago.

November 15th, 2004 – The Seattle Mariners signed Richie Sexson to a 4 year, $50 million contract.

December 22nd, 2005 – The Seattle Mariners signed Jarrod Washburn to a 4 year, $37 million contract.

June 30th, 2006 – The Seattle Mariners traded Asdrubal Cabrera for Eduardo Perez.

July 26th, 2006 – The Seattle Mariners traded Shin-Soo Choo for Ben Broussard.

December 7th, 2006 – The Seattle Mariners traded Rafael Soriano for Horacio Ramirez.

December 18th, 2006 – The Seattle Mariners traded Chris Snelling and Emiliano Fruto forJose Vidro.

December 20th, 2007 – The Seattle Mariners signed Carlos Silva to a four year, $48 million contract.

February 8th, 2008 – The Seattle Mariners traded Adam Jones, George Sherrill, Chris Tillman, Tony Butler, and Kam Mickolio for Erik Bedard.

*I didn’t know there was such a thing as a ‘raccoon dog.’  Apparently there is.

Anyhow, PETA objects because, you know, corrupting video games like Mario teach kids that wearing fur is acceptable.  Mostly because that fur gives you magical powers in your quest to save the Princess.*

*I can’t wait for the first 60 Minutes exposé on 9-year old Jaden who skinned the family dog and wore its fur so he could jump to the top of the fridge and get his Halloween candy.

So apparently the anti-fur activism is going so well that PETA is now focusing on niche segments of the fur-loving world, like people who confuse Super Mario Brothers and real life.  There are so many things hilariously wrong with this campaign that we could be here all day.

But we’re here to talk about one very special thing.  THIS:

Actual screen shot. Gruesome picture of Mario there. I bet this game will teach me valuable lessons about animal fur.

PETA made a side-scrolling Mario-like game wherein you jump over Mario obstacles like boxes and tubes, and collect coins.  Your character is a skinned “raccoon dog,”* and you collect coins along the way which shave seconds off your time.

*Which is pretty freaky if you stop to think about it.

Anyhow, I’m guessing at some point your “raccoon dog” character will catch the flying Mario in the upper-right corner and get his skin back.  I don’t know, because the game is HARD. I played the game 20 times and this is what happened every time:

I ran into an object and died.

My “raccoon dog” died.  The screen scroll speed increases gradually, and you have to clear the obstacles with your single jump or your “raccoon dog” character dies.  If you mis-calculate a jump, or jump before another obstacle scrolls into view, your character DIES.  At which point, you are told:

I have now killed 20 skinless "raccoon dogs" in pursuit of the flying fur trapper.

So, PETA, how did that Marketing Department conversation go?

Guy A: You know those Mario games?

Guy B: Yeah.  Some of the most beloved and inoffensive video games ever made.

Guy A: Well…yeah…but one of the power-ups is a tanuki skin.

Guy B: What the hell is a tanuki?

Guy A: A raccoon dog.

Guy B: ….?

Guy A: Anyhow, it’s fucked up.  We should protest it.  The game is teaching kids that animal skins give you power, and will thus create a whole new generation of fur trappers.

Guy B: Wow, we can’t have that.  Want to make a mock video game that turns the tables on Mario?

Guy A: Sounds great.  So you’ll chase Mario as a tanuki–

Guy B: A skinless tanuki!

Guy A: Awesome, yeah. You chase Mario and when you catch him, you get your skin back!  It’ll be a side scroller.

Guy B: What happens if you fall in a pit?

Guy A: You die and start over.

Woman A: Um, Jim, Ted…so…that’s a game where you kill a ton of tanukis in your quest to get the skin back.

Guy A: Joanne, leave the video games to the men, mmmkay?

What were we protesting again?  Oh, right, a video game that treats killing animals as an acceptable means to an end.  I played the game for 10 minutes and killed about 25 “raccoon dogs.”

This is so fucking backasswards hilarious I can hardly breathe.  There are almost too many jokes to make about this.  The only way I can see this not being a first-ballot Activism Hall Of Shamer is if PETA intentionally made an impossible game as some kind of meta-commentary on the fruitlessness of wearing animal fur.  Or something.

I mean, come on.  Mario?  ”Raccoon dogs?”  This is why people don’t take animal rights activists seriously.

J. D. Gordon, Mr. Cain’s spokesman and national security adviser, said the candidate had not been at his sharpest in Milwaukee because of a lack of sleep amid a long day of traveling.

“We were all going on four hours sleep, so he was tired,” Mr. Gordon said in a telephone interview. “When he got the Libya question, it took him a while to get his bearings on it, but he got the answer right.”

The Yankees should sign Mr. Gordon as a pitcher, for how much desperate spin he can generate.  But that aside, I find this refreshing.  The reality television show that is the GOP Presidential Nominee race may actually be lurching our nation, in a roundabout fashion, towards a more reasonable expectation of our national political figures.

Video game? Movie? Obstacle course mud run? Does it matter?

Making fun of B-grade special-effects vehicles like this one isn’t a fresh joke.  But I was so thoroughly impressed by every single word I heard in the trailer that I simply had to go into the Spotify history and listen to it again.

If you put every action-fantasy movie and video game into a blender and hit liquefy, the resulting smooth, undifferentiated gray syrup would be this movie trailer. Literally nothing sticks out, except for the fact that literally nothing sticks out.

[The following is the transcript from the ad.  The text in quotes is dialogue from the movie.  Non-quoted text is the narrator for the trailer.]

“Hyperion has declared war on all of humanity!”

When an evil king threatens the world…

“I will end the reign of the gods!”

[explosion]

An ordinary man…

“The gods chose you.”

“I don’t know if I can do this.”

[sword clash]

Will become a hero…

[epic music]

“I have faith in you! Lead your people!”

[epic music gets bigger]

From the producers of 300…

Henry Cavill…

“Seal the gates and prepare for war!”

Mickey Rourke

[battle cry]

“Witness [mumble]“

[another battle cry - or maybe big choir]

Immortals. Rated R. Children under 17 not admitted without parent. Starts eleven eleven eleven.

Notes:

• The best part of the trailer is Mickey Rourke mumbling one of the two words the trailer lets him say. The ambiguity of what he’s saying is the closest this movie comes to something interesting. But I’m 70% sure he’s saying “witness hell.”
• The only proper noun, except for two actors’ names, is ‘Hyperion.’ Interesting character? Unlikely. ‘Hyperion’ is a word used in about a thousand fantasy and sci-fi games and stories, as shown by its really long disambiguation page.
• The movie’s imdb cast page lists a human male named Kellan Lutz as playing Poseidon.  Presumably this is because it’s been four months since someone on the big screen last bellowed the words, “Release the Kraken!”  Honestly, if the Kraken isn’t in this movie, what’s the point.  Also, if the Kraken is not sharing lead credits with actors like Kellan Lutz, the Kraken should have a blunt conversation with its (his? her?) agent.