The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
I’m not sure I was aware that New Orleans even had an NBA team, or that it was called the Pelicans, until I read about its new mascot a few minutes ago. Behold the creepiest damn thing in the entire world of sports, anywhere, on the ENTIRE PLANET.
If anyone needs me, I’ll be sitting in my bathtub, with arms wrapped around my drawn-in knees, rocking back and forth as I weep.
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I’ve “hated” Evgeni Plushenko for years…not really, but in that sense of “hate” in which, if you were a Bills fan during the 1980s and 1990s, you “hated” Dan Marino, or in the way I “hate” Tom Brady now. You “hate” the guy who wins a ton while committing the crime of not being your guy.
But damn, Evgeni Plushenko has been a hell of a skater and competitor for a long time, and it’s a shame that he didn’t get to go out on the ice, but because he was — as many athletes become — just too damned banged up to keep going. And imagine being a football player and realizing you simply cannot go out on the field, minutes before kickoff in the Super Bowl. That’s what happened to Plushenko: he was warming up for his Olympic short program, but realized…it wasn’t happening.
Yeah, I “hated” Evgeni Plushenko. But damn, what a career he had! Good luck to him in the future!
Journalists aren’t thrilled with their quarters in Sochi for the Olympics. Lots of photo of questionable stuff, but this one stopped me cold:
Can someone tell me just what the last panel there is demonstrating, by way of Things They Don’t Want You Doing In Their Bathroom? I cannot figure this one out, folks. Help!
The Houston Texans are supposed to be one of the best teams in the NFL this year, but they’ve had some hiccups, including some very erratic play by Matt Schaub, their starting quarterback. Going into yesterday’s game, Schaub had thrown a “pick-6” — an interception that was returned by the other team for a touchdown — in three consecutive games. And yesterday, the visiting St. Louis Rams jumped out to a lead, so when Schaub got hurt and the backup QB had to come in, the fans in Houston cheered.
The football gods took notice of this.
That backup quarterback promptly came in and…threw a pick-6.
Taunt not the football gods! For they are a spiteful bunch.
I’m really glad to see something like this happen to a Major League Baseball player, because that’s pretty much the nightmare scenario that went through my head in grade school gym class every single time someone hit the frakking ball to my lonely outpost in right field.
OK, there’s a photo making the rounds on the Internet via various sports fansites and gossip whatevers. It’s of a nicely-dressed blond woman making an effort-filled obscene gesture in the face of one of the opposing team’s players at an NBA game. (I’ll put this below the fold, because it is an obscene gesture.)
Here’s the photo:
I really don’t have anything much to say about the act she’s committing, other than this is yet one more example of why I am less and less interested in sports fandom, seeing as how it often leads to this kind of classless rage that’s just ugly and useless.
What gets me about this photo, though, isn’t the lady. Nor is it her date, who is also apparently shouting things whilst holding her to keep her from falling over the rail. Nor is it even the player who has his head down and just wants to get off the floor. What gets me is the black fellow in the suit. I’m not sure what he does there, but he’s clearly an employee of some sort; he has a lanyard ’round his neck. Maybe he’s stadium security or an NBA official or something like that. But with this going on right in front of him, he’s paying attention to none of it. He’s just kind-of staring off into the space between the player and the extended middle finger being offered, and his expression is so blank and hopeless that he might as well be a middle-manager in the office of some company that’s having low-to-moderate sales growth this year.
So in the middle of “I just wanna go the locker room” and “I HATE YOU SO MUCH AGGHHHHH!!!”, there’s this guy apparently thinking, “When this is over, I gotta finish my TPS reports.”
Dear baseball players of the world:
So some dope interrupted the Murdoch family’s stammering and mumbling today by “throwing a pie” at Rupert Murdoch, which actually meant waving a styrofoam plate in Murdoch’s direction as some sort of foam slid off it, till Mrs. Rupert Murdoch jumped up and clobbered the “pie” guy.
Back in 1998, when Bill Gates got hit by a pie, it was variously reported to have been a “cream pie” or a “custard pie,” and Gates said through a spokesperson that the pie “wasn’t that tasty” — suggesting that it was, at least, an actual, edible pie.
The decline from a real pie to a lazily produced plate of foam should be familiar to baseball fans. Over the past decade, the baseball “pie” has stopped resembling a pie at all, till players are content to celebrate victories by smacking the hero of the game in the face with a towel full of shaving cream.
Even a fan of the pie-in-the-face like myself has to admit a certain amount of befuddlement over your adoption in recent years of this lovely ritual. But it’s hard to find it a cool thing when what you’re doing is just using a towel slathered with shaving cream. First off, shaving cream…ewwww. Second off, a towel? Really?
So, if you baseball players want me to take your slapsticky victory celebrations more seriously, stop doing this:
Or stop calling it pie. This is a pie:
Love,
-Me
March Madness explained by invoking Star Wars:
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A few random thoughts on the Super Bowl….
:: This was the first football I’ve watched since week four or five of the regular season. I haven’t watched this little football in a single season since the mid-1980s, and in all honesty, I didn’t much miss it. I’ve also pretty much stopped listening to sports talk on the radio, even as little as I did that (mostly to and from work, and rarely on weekends). I’m just increasingly meh on the whole thing. I find the fans’ mad rush to re-embrace hockey after a completely pointless and avoidable work stoppage pretty disheartening, and I find a lingering unpleasant aftertaste in football each time we learn a little more about long-term brain injuries. And I really find something distasteful and sad every time I hear a fan basically blow all that off on the basis that “They knew they were signing up to play a violent game.”
:: As for the Super Bowl itself, it was a weird game, definitely one of the stranger games I’ve seen. It looked like a blow-out at first, and then there was the power outage, and then the comeback. Ultimately it was decided by four mistakes, all made by the 49ers a fumble and an interception (both of which led to Baltimore TDs), one of the worst instances of goal-line play-calling in history, and the single worst coverage afforded a kickoff in all the time I’ve watched the game. Weird that the game ended up as close as it did.
:: Ray Lewis, when asked about the murders in which he was involved: “God doesn’t use murderers to do His work.” Note to Ray: open your Bible and read a little. Especially the part about Barabbas.
:: The commercials: I was amused by the M&Ms one and the goat eating the Doritos. Other than that, as usual, I paid little attention. The idea of willingly sitting down to watch advertising strikes me as a giant waste of time.
:: Alicia Keys did a wonderful job on the National Anthem. I loved her simple, understated performance.
:: The halftime show nearly gave me a seizure, what with all that flashing of lights. Hated it.
:: Phil Simms is really annoying.
That’s about it. Next up…well, who knows. Like I said, I care less about sports in general each year. The only thing on the sporting horizon to which I am looking forward is actually next year’s Winter Olympics.
