Christmas Came Early for Satan

...or, more specifically, his favorite baseball team.

One bright spot of Teixeira signing with the New York Yankees, however, is that the Red Sox bandwagon should become a lot roomier.

What I Think About When I Think About Soccer

When boiled down to its most basic elements, any sport can seem foolish--"bounce ball, throw ball at iron circle"; "hit ball with stick, run in diamond pattern"; "attempt to cripple people moving in direction opposite you, act surprised when someone gets crippled"--but I firmly believe that soccer stands alone as the silliest of all mainstream athletics. This personal tenet stems not from the fact that the game is foreign to me--as a citizen of a country where millionaires are made by their successful execution of a left turn, I am painfully aware that the bottomless standard for what is considered a "sport" is immune to geographical boundaries--but because soccer is the only widely popular sporting event whose rules explicitly prohibit the use of 50% of its participants' potential limbs.

("Not the goalie!" a proponent of soccer would be quick to point out, but that argument only further proves why soccer will never catch on in the United States: you know what other sport uses a goalie? Hockey (in both its Canadian and alternative-lifestyle incarnations). Goalies mean low scoring; low scoring means low interest among conspicuous consumers; disinterested conspicuous-consumers lead to a demand for a replacement product, which leads to NASCAR. Thanks, hockey.)

While the halving of competitors' available extremities as a fundamental aspect certainly gives soccer a stronger case to call itself "football" than a Sunday-afternoon collision of helmets and shoulder pads can ever claim, it also puts soccer on the level of potato sack racing--yet I sincerely doubt that "$250,000,000 and a Spice Girl" was among the prizes at your last company picnic. It is this irreconcilable contradiction that leaves me confounded by the popularity of soccer, particularly with regard to its small but vocal American fanbase. Whenever I try to argue to my countrymen and friends exactly how asinine is the hands-free game that they love so much, I inevitably end up at a loss for words.

At long last, I have come across a video (thanks to BoingBoing via Defamer) (seen above) that makes my argument for me, through the timeless magic of pictures and music. It's outdated, it's discomfiting, it's seemingly endless...

It's soccer!

You Can't Have Your Offensively-Named Child and Eat His Cake Too

Hillbilly-hipster parents Heath and Deborah Campbell are so hillbilly-hip that they named their son "Adolf Hitler" and now they're hillbilly-hipster-mad that a New Jersey ShopRite refused to put the three-year-old's name on a birthday cake--even without the swastika that they had previously requested.

Mr. Campbell insists that he named his son after das Führer not because he's racist, but because "he liked the name". He goes on to support this iron-clad defense by pointing out that he allows people of races other than the master one into his home (also populated by his daughters, "JoyceLynn Aryan Nation" and "Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie") and that he wouldn't "really care" if his son grew up to hang out with black people.

He wouldn't really care? How progressive. The latter, hypothetical situation is somewhat unlikely, however...given that the kid's freaking name is Adolf Hitler.

Air Baghdads

I wish American journalists would ask George W. Bush the sort of hard questions that one of their Iraqi counterparts did on Sunday.

(By "ask", I mean "throw"...and by "questions", I mean "shoes".)

You Know How I Know You're Gay? Joe Satriani Is Suing You for Plagiarism.

It's common knowledge that anyone who is a heterosexual male over the age of 14 and in full possession of his auditory senses is required to dislike Coldplay if he wants to consider himself hip. This unspoken standard has presented a conundrum for me ever since Coldplay first entered the popular consciousness; while I fulfill all of the aforementioned requirements (especially the one about wanting to be hip), I am bitterly protective of my self-aggrandizing belief that I stand among the precious, enlightened few who know exactly why Coldplay sucks beyond the fact that The 40-Year-Old Virgin tells me so: their songs are shamelessly derivative; their albums are overproduced to the razor's edge of unbreathable sonic mush; their lead singer allowed Gwyneth Paltrow to name his children after a fruit and Charlton Heston, respectively. And yet, at the same time...I also kind of like them.

This seemingly irreconcilable internal conflict would have likely driven me to madness had it not been for the courage of '80s-era cheese-guitar virtuoso Joe Satriani to come forward and demand that Coldplay give him all of their money.

The fact that Coldplay's "Viva la Vida" really does kind of sound like Satriani's "If I Could Fly" is beside the point. What matters is the fact that a musician who hadn't been heard from in two decades--and who was only ever known strictly for playing the electric guitar, not for playing real songs with words--suing a band that is currently quite popular--but who, based on their technical merits, could easily fail to stand the test of time--for plagiarism is super-ironic. Irony is hip; therefore, Coldplay is hip (for a few hours today, at least); therefore, I (with acknowledgment to the same caveat) am indisputably hip.

But only because I don't really like Coldplay, unlike the rest of you losers.

Palin '12!

Goddamn conservative media...

President-elect Barack Obama won't take office until nearly two months from now, and journalists are already trying to blame him for the germ warfare that will theoretically be brought upon America in 2013.

Wait a minute...2013? That would be one year after Obama's first term...

For the sake of his legacy, let's hope that Obama will have become embroiled in a sex scandal before then. If he is not--and America does suffer a terrorist attack prior to that time--let's hope that then-President Obama will at least have the good sense to retaliate towards a country that had absolutely nothing to do with said attack. Recent history has taught has that that kind of behavior pretty much guarantees a second term.

(Woooo! 'MERICA! [double-barreled pistol fire into the air])