The Weekly for Guys Who Like Weeklies

Category: weekleez

The Weekly for Guys who like Weeklies I
July 31, 2002

hi kiddos,

i mentioned last week that every month that has five (5) weeks would be special in that the fifth (5th) week would be a “weekly for guys who like weeklies” where i would rant about guy stuff like guns, sports, and boobs (ha!) (ha ha!) (three weeks in a row!) anyway, i am a day late but that’s because i had to cook last night and also because i’m a lazy slob. we had BBQ chicken.

it was mighty tasty.

when i was but a wee fleegan, we’ll say somewhere in the ballpark of 8 – 10 years old, i wore hats. well, actually i just wore one hat. all the time. really. it was a new york yankees hat. and it was glorious. everyone told me that i would go bald because i wore that hat all the time.
liars!

so anyway as a kid i liked baseball. and of course, there’s only one team worth rooting for and that would be the new york yankees. now since i was rooting for them in the 1980s that makes me a real fan. i’m not some bandwagon world series yankees fan, the yanks sucked in the ’80s and i was their fan. they came in last place in the AL east EVERY YEAR (well, when the tigers didn’t). and i was their fan. and, as a true yankees fan, i hate george stienbrenner and i think we should sack that manager they have now and bring back billy martin!*
i mean, in the ’80s and early ’90s yankees fans caught a glimpse of what it must be like to be a cubs fan.
not! hahahaha! cubs are lame! chumps!

not only did i watch that sport, but i also collected baseball cards. all of this is buddy’s fault. he’s the one who asked. “you like baseball?” and i said, “what’s that?” and it was all over from there. i was hooked.

i know. i’m a girl. and let me tell you, as a girl it was tough to collect baseball cards. well, not really, every saturday morning dad would come home from work and he would have a pack of baseball cards for my brother and me. that was back when there was a stick of bubble gum in the packs. the stalest, nastiest, powedery-est stick of bubble gum in the world. but of course we chewed it, it was gum. also it was back when a pack of baseball cards cost less than a dollar.
i probably couldn’t afford a pack of baseball cards today. i think they tax them like cigarettes or something.

i loved going to the baseball card trade shows. i would save up my money just to buy baseball cards. and now that i think about it, where did that money come from? i have no idea. all i know is that once in a while some unlucky parent would end up dragging my brother, buddy, and me to a baseball card show and i would spend my money on small pictures of guys in hats and tight pants.

now you have to understand, this was before the players had huge million dollar contracts, they only got paid in the hundreds of thousands back then, and darryl strawberry was a damn met and no one really knew or cared that he snorted more cocaine than david crosby and daivd crosby combined (david crosby is a big man. he snorted a lot of cocaine.) and rickey henderson could run really fast. and dale murphy played for the braves, and the braves would lose or win and no one cared. and the padres were still considered a stupid expansion team that no one liked, ok so that hasn’t changed.

the point is…ok there is no point.
anyway, there was no internet back then so if i wanted to know things about baseball i had to go to the library. ok but the thing is, our library, god bless it…no really…god, bless that library, was horribly outdated then (and like the padres, that hasn’t changed much) so i couldn’t read about all the “great” players of the day. all the baseball books were about the players from the 1960s and reggie jackson.

so basically, as a little girl, i read every team and player biography that i could get my hands on and it was then that i decided that that was when baseball was baseball and that mickey mantle was the greatest baseball player to ever live and if only he hadn’t sprained his knee that one time he would probably have beaten every cool baseball record ever made. ok, so i was slightly idealistic back then.

and now i have a gameshow knowledge about 1960s era baseball and mr. october which is totally useless unless i’m on your trivial pursuit team. if you ever need to phone a friend…

after reading all of those books about all of those players i decided that i wanted to have a baseball card of each of the players that i had read about.
ok, a 9 year old girl doesn’t have that much money y’know? but i did pretty well, for a girl. derp! i mean, it must’ve looked funny, a little girl haggling with old men over tiny pictures of guys in hats and tight pants.

i did manage to get a mickey mantle card. and harmon killebrew, willie mays, whitey ford, roberto clemente, roger maris, bob gibson, etc. and i guess that’s pretty cool, for a girl i mean. sandy koufax, casey stengel, catfish hunter etc. the only ones i didn’t manage to get: sal “the barber” maglie, al kaline and stan musial. but who cares? i have a mickey mantle card!

eventually i grew out of collecting the cards and certainly got tired of seeing the yankees lose to teams like the california angels and the toronto bluejays (canada?! lose to canada?! fall on your sword!) so i stopped watching in 1996. of course, that’s the year that the yanks finally won a world series. it just figures.

anyway, baseball has certainly lost it’s magic. i hate it now. it’s just sad to pine for baseball that you never even saw, i mean, for me to say, “wow, baseball just isn’t what it used to be” is incredibly stupid because baseball is exactly what it used to be. i mean, growing up and realizing that you spent tons of money (where did i get all that money?) on little pictures of guys in hats and tight pants, and finding out that your hero, the “commerce comet”, was a drunken wife beater, well, you tend to get a little bitter.

yeah right!
y’see, my mom didn’t throw away my baseball cards! i’m rich!
baseball cards didn’t teach me about simple times when baseball was the great american pastime. baseball cards didn’t teach me about winning, losing, or sportsmanship. baseball cards didn’t teach me that people choose really stupid things for mascots (padres) ie. expos.
nay nay! i learned that baseball has NOTHING to do with baseball cards! i learned that baseball cards are all about supply and demand! investing! money money money!

i learned a million abbreviations like MNT, NRMT, VG, ERR, RBI, FDR, HR, FBI, TV, AL, NL, FREAK etc.

i learned that it didn’t matter that vince coleman or carlton fisk were solid players, their cards were worthless! everyone wanted jose’ canseco. you know what jose’ canseco is doing now? he’s designated hitter for the chisox. lame.
lame! mr. canseco, fall on your sword!

anyway, baseball cards taught me about money, greed, and world series trivia. and that’s a lot of information to take in when your mind is a sponge waiting to be formed and molded by society. y’see, i could’ve either learned to speak fluent spanish, play flawless piano, or memorize all the borders of Topp’s baseball cards.
sigh.

*billy martin has been dead since christmas 1989. but i figure if they plan on freezing ted williams (and why? why?! so maybe he can play on the 2075 retired ballplayers all-star team with johnny bench? no. it’s so when they wake him up again he can go back on his trade show circuit signing autographs for $40 a pop. see, it’s all about the money.) they can dig up billy and put a jacket and cap on him and of course robotize him, and have him sit in the dugout. and when the blind ump makes a bad call send out the bionic billy and watch as he kicks dirt at the ump’s shoes. and when the ump throws cyber-billy out of the game, watch as the robo-billy grabs the ump in a cyber-chokehold…

also, i never really understood why everyone got so upset when rosanne barr-arnold sang the anthem. i mean, it was rosanne. and hey, can we get some love for pete rose? by gones you guys… he’s really sorry. as for margie shotz, we’ll let cyber-billy handle her.

did someone mention links? no? good! here they are!
professor zim wants one of these: http://www.plustech.fi/Walking1.html because he’s a guy. only guys like stuff like that.
he also sent a link about food but more importantly there was a link that answered the question “what on god’s green earth is a pawpaw?” as in, “way down yonder in the pawpaw patch” and cripes, i’ve been wondering that for years and so maybe you were too. go here: http://www.pawpaw.kysu.edu/KSUstory.htm of course all the info came from kentucky so…

and the faithful atheist created a weblog and you can go read all about it http://faithfulatheist.blogspot.com/

jimmy sent one in about bum fighting where some sick monkeys give bums money and the poor homeless people do stunts and fight each other, but the link didn’t work. damn. there’s a bit of sick monkey in me that would like to see that.

and now for the coolest thing in the history of the weekly:

wisconsin wendy has sent the good word out that the U of WI at MAD derp! has once again grown one of those horrible, stinky, giant flowers! (i gagged about it last year too) someone needs to tell those botonists that there are other huge, stinky incredible phallic flowers out there…er, or maybe not. anyway! go here http://titan.botany.wisc.edu/refresh.html to see the webcam! and maybe you’ll see wendy! you and all your friends can play Where’s Wisconsin Wendy! i’ll give you a hint… she’s in wisconsin!

OMG! look what wendy did! she turned her back to the webcam for me! she is so cool! she owns the spy club!


this is actually wendy. and she actually wrote on a shirt. and she actually is the coolest!

next weekly for guys who like weekleez: is it just me, or does basketball season seem to last 14 months out of the year?
next week’s epitomb: weddings! i hate them!

jaimie “hank aaron eats monkey boogers” pickle

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