Imus has daughters. What's his excuse?

As a former Imus listener, this was my very first thought when I heard of the Rutgers comment - what about those daughters he's so proud of?

I actually cringed for Baldwin when I heard the excerpt. It was just a fraction of a snapshot of eleven years of history we can't know. NOBODY, but NOBODY, can make a normal person lose it and make a total ass of himself like family can. Alex Baldwiin, c'est moi.

Everybody's excuse these days is that they do it because someone else did it. Blacks are "reclaiming" it because whites used it abusively. Now whites are saying they should be able to use it because blacks do. Nobody is responsible. Everybody is saying, "But HE did it!" This is the kind of argument used by kids in my mother's second grade class.

I was lucky enough to be a Mets fan and witness Tom Glavine's three hundredth win. I don't care if he'd rather be on the Braves. I care that he goes about his job and carries himself with integrity. He reached his milestone not at home, but in Wrigley Field-- and he had earned enough respect to get a real celebration in an opposing park, from the opposing fans-- I found that even more moving than if he had won it at home. I can't imagine that happening with Bonds. It was a thorough demonstration of class. Class lives.

I don't care what he put up his nose for some weeks in the mid-80s, I don't care about the stache, and I don't care about Jerry and Elaine. Hernandez turned the most beautiful double plays I've ever seen.

I've had dozens of plays at first by Keith Hernandez floating around the inside of my head for years-- you painted the word picture beautifully. And fielding aside, he was such a good clutch hitter, and such a fierce bastard on the field-- oh, just thinking about those days makes me feel good. And sad.

Have you heard Hernandez on the Mets broadcast now? He's so laid back now that he practically slides out of the booth. Man, life is sure funny.

It turns out I'm not the only one who thought Tucker Carlson was gay. :P

Sports--especially baseball-- is delicate as a flower, open and vulnerable to forces seen and unseen, to butterfly wings beating on the other side of the universe. Why do things happen the way they do when your team has done everything it can to tie the hands of the blind goddess? When you have a team packed with the most able and virtuous men and management to be had-- and yet you still get swept by the f***ing Phillies?!!!!! (OK, go ahead, laugh at me, the season's not over yet :P) How are we to feel, what are we to think, how are we to process such events? O Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi, we are but your playthings.

PS All props to the Phanatick, BTW. He is pure genius.

I'm with you, Joan. Pee-yew.

For one thing-- it's not my personal way into the game, but baseball fandom seems to entail a kind of taxonomic, list-making mentality. Top ten lists seem to be an integral part of the discussion about the game.

For another thing, we've have been hearing a lot lately about young black children not embracing baseball anymore because they don't see anyone in the game who looks like them.

The point here is that Jews have barely ever seen anyone in the game like them. But for some reason, a lot of Jews still seem to like baseball. So they naturally notice when a Jew breaks into big league ball.

Join that to the above-mentioned taxonomic mania, and you have a think-piece that is frankly a bar-stool discussion that I've heard many time over the years, only now it's in Salon.com. And I simply don't see why it shouldn't be.

When we will evolve enough to stop confusing disgust with morality?

Was there ever such a people who could find so many ways to feel bad about enjoying something?

"Shouldn't comment on it?"

We all have the right to comment on whatever we damn well want. Whether or not we do so is at our discretion. Since Mr. Keillor is a writer by trade, it seems that he has the inclination to communicate his impressions to others, and he usually does so in a felicitous way. But even if he didn't, that doesn't mean that he should just STFU.

In fact, the only people who really should STFU are the ones who go around telling everyone else to STFU.