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Beau Vine

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by Beau Vine

  1. It is Duke, so there's a strong chance that he just flopped...
  2. Good gawd, Pete Gillen cracks me up more than Walton. He's so bad, he's hilarious. MWC games with Carter and Pete calling are the only must-watch in CBB for me.
  3. Creighton 9-hole hitter had a decent day in a 22-1 win over HCU. Grand slam in the 2nd Grand slam in the 3rd The Jays batted around in the 3rd and he came up again with the bases loaded. Plunked by the first pitch. Nice job, Huskies! RBI triple in 4th 3-4, 10 RBI, 11 total bases
  4. Supposedly, they've flown his parents to DFW, so he's actually going to play tonight... Seguin scratched with LBI.
  5. I watched some of the series last weekend and thought they looked pretty decent. Not supposed to lose to Pitt, though.
  6. Hagen Smith of Arky tonight against Oregon State: 6 IP 3 H 0 R 1 BB 17 K
  7. Pretty sure I've got an autographed copy of this pic around the house somewhere:
  8. Obligatory: 20220611_160543.mp4.250a4f57237fbd60c173fdf036e349e3.mp4
  9. There should be a law against this:
  10. Christ, there are more IVT parents than lawyers on Surly! Who knew?
  11. That book is so terrible that I'm convinced it was written by McMurtry's cat.
  12. Once again, I am writing in response to Joseph Stang’s warnings, and once again, I merely wish to point out that Stang must mend his ways. Let me give you a vastly oversimplified yet still basically true explanation of why I say that Stang loves calling his disparagers ghastly smart-mouths as if this were some magic incantation with the power to ward off evil. The term is evidently an effective, all-purpose slur that stifles discussion and demonizes one’s targets. Sadly, that tactic works well enough in most cases to conceal the fact that our formerly brave populace now lives in fear under the yoke of a pouty Joseph Stang. The fact that this point is obvious to any grade-schooler who has yet to be indoctrinated by Stang’s unfriendly screeds makes it no less anathema to the sensibilities of Stang’s band. As we all know, offending those sensibilities is what leads such improvident spoiled brats to call for ritualistic invocations of needlessly formal rules. I don’t mean to condemn anyone’s beliefs, but Stang says I’m capricious. Well, if capricious means, wants to put an end to Stang’s evildoing then sure, call me capricious. I don’t mind because there are two things we need to do right away. First, we need to bring fresh leadership and even-handed tolerance to the present controversy. Second—and this is critical so get out your highlighter—we need to take action. Once those two things are accomplished we can finally start discussing how you may make the comment, What does this have to do with frightful, uncivilized dissemblers? Well, once you begin to see the light you’ll realize that nothing unites people like a common enemy. That’s why I would encourage everybody to take some shots of their own at Stang by reprimanding him for lowering scholastic standards. Not only have the worst kinds of dim bulbs there are decided to glorify their campaigns of demagoguery and disinformation by dressing them up as moral and righteous prerogatives, but their teachings are being debated as though they were actually reasonable. Why is Stang really so waspish? Is it because his inability to fathom what I am talking about is betrayed by his insistence that he’s a living bodhisattva of peace and nonviolence? Or because before I knew anything about him, I was once an onlooker at a few of Stang’s mass demonstrations, without possessing even the slightest insight into the mentality of his confederates or the nature of his diegeses? I’m sure you already know the answer so I won’t bother repeating it. I’d like to emphasize, however, that Stang is certifiably condescending. Anyone who refuses to accept that fact is abysmally ridiculous, sneaky, and uppish. On a similar note, Stang’s expedients are a logical absurdity, a series of deductions from a premise that has been denied. Speaking of absurdities, there’s no point in engaging Stang in debate. He’s unlikely to display rationality, dignity, or professionalism in any serious confabulation. Stang simply would behave like a skeevy, treacherous barmpot and try to justify packaging and selling exclusivism—and making a huge profit from doing so. While I have no proof that he exhibits certain features that a humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, you should still believe me, as he doesn’t want us to know about his plans to foist the most poisonously false and destructive myths imaginable upon us. Otherwise, we might do something about that. All no-nonsense, clear-eyed people sense intuitively that Stang is a card-carrying member of the Hypocrisy Club. That’s the theory, at least. But in practice, I once told Stang that he indubitably benefits from society’s institutionalized favoritism, structural emotionalism, and the lingering legacy of recidivism. How did he respond to that? He proceeded to curse me off using a number of colorful expletives not befitting this letter, which serves only to show that I know some sappy, obnoxious jackanapes who actually believe that Stang is an expert on everything from aardvarks to zymurgy. Incredible? Those same people have told me that no one is smart enough to see through his transparent lies. With such people roaming about, it should come as no surprise to you that hidebound, chauvinistic buggers like Stang are not born—they are excreted. However unsavory that metaphor may be, I need your help if I’m ever to do what needs to be done. But I’m only one person, you might protest. What difference can I make? The answer is: a lot more than you think. You see, rancorous smell-feasts often take earthworms or similar small animals and impale them on a pin to enjoy watching them twist and writhe as they slowly die. Similarly, Stang enjoys watching respectable people twist and writhe whenever he threatens to prevent people from thinking and visualizing beyond an increasingly psychologically caged existence. There is no contradiction here; even though Stang’s foot soldiers share a different voice and different moral sensibilities from the rest of us, you mustn’t forget that there are two challenges we must face if we wish to repair the perfidious world we have inherited from Stang. The first challenge is to convert retreat into advance. This is only slightly less difficult than the second challenge, which is to convey to people the knowledge that I don’t know if Stang’s rude, irrational bunco games were borne out of arrogance, paranoia, or both. I do know, however, that most people would agree that he shows a curious unwillingness to change the world for the better. But once you’ve admitted that, you’ve admitted that Stang has bats in the belfry if he thinks divine ichor flows through his veins. And it follows inexorably that, except in special cases, where there’s no name for a problem, you can’t see a problem, and when you can’t see a problem, you pretty much can’t solve it. The name of our problem is Joseph Stang, and I feel that the solution is to pronounce the truth and renounce the lies. This will not be easy, and progress will not be instantaneous. Still, I am committed to getting it right, and that’s why I’m telling you that Stang is exceedingly birdbrained, brutal, hectoring, carnaptious, boisterous, lecherous, thrasonical, brazen, unforgiving, and yawping. Sorry for the synathroesmus, but he has been trying hard to separate us off into various, antagonistic camps. I allege we should oppose that effort by encouraging students to be bold, independent, and creative thinkers. There are several valid and obvious reasons why I avow that. Perhaps the most important reason is that Stang gets a lot of perks from the system. True to form, he ceaselessly moves the goalposts to prevent others from benefiting from the same perks. This suggests that Stang’s precepts are merely a stalking horse. They mask his secret intention to attack the very fabric of this nation. Although this has been overlooked or ignored by the established scientific community, Stang wants to violate values so important to our sense of community. Has he gone around the bend? One rarely encounters an answer to such questions, largely because the answer can be surprisingly complicated. Given its importance, though, it is honestly worth discussing. To begin at the beginning, there are people better equipped to cope with life than ribald, debauched plunderers. Still, I recommend you check out some of Stang’s hot takes and draw your own conclusions on the matter. Given that no one is more opposed to obscurantism than I, I can safely state that Stang would have us believe that metanarratives are the root of tyranny, lawlessness, overpopulation, racial hatred, world hunger, disease, and rank stupidity. Yeah, right. And I also suppose that obscurity, evasiveness, incomprehensibility, indirectness, and ambiguity are marks of depth and brilliance? The fact of the matter is that I am perhaps one of the few people who have read his chippy commentaries in their entirety. This wasn’t easy reading, mind you. I was endlessly daunted and halted by their laborious dullness, their flatulent fatuity, and their almost fabulous inconsequentiality. Reading these commentaries convinced me more than anything that Stang believes with sincere conviction that anyone who disagrees with him is a potential terrorist. Providing a cornucopia of evidence to the contrary won’t faze him; he’s immune to any sort of reality check. That’s why if it’s your modest ambition, as it is Stang’s, to introduce more restrictions on our already dwindling freedoms, then you need to eliminate your denigrators. Stang’s denigrators are people like you and me who want to tell everyone around that Stang does not believe in the rule of law. He does not believe in facts. He does not believe in logic. He believes only that he’s a martyr for freedom and a victim of antinomianism. That’s the biggest pack of lies and distortions I’ve ever encountered. What’s more, Stang occasionally writes letters accusing me and my friends of being the most nettlesome rakes I’ve ever seen. These letters are typically couched in gutter language (which is doubtless the language in which Stang habitually thinks) and serve no purpose other than to convince me that I know firsthand the importance of gathering facts and holding them up to scrutiny. In the case of Stang’s abysmal proposed social programs, I have examined the evidence and can say with confidence that conclaves of Stang’s spin doctors have all the dissent found in a North Korean communist party meeting. That’s why no one there will ever admit that ever since Stang decided to pollute the great canon of English literature with references to his balmy ruminations, his consistent, unvarying line has been that jackbooted, arrogant vandals who promote the loopy tirades of contumelious, neurotic varmints are merely misunderstood. I claim I understand them quite well, actually. I understand that they can’t bear the thought of anyone spreading the news about how Stang does not merely lack empathy for those who suffer as a result of his rageful machinations. He relishes his lack of empathy. He glories in his callousness. He is proud of his inhumanity. And as if all that weren’t bad enough, he warrants we should hold off on focusing on concrete facts, on hard news, on analyzing and interpreting what’s happening in the world. Let’s play along with that scenario for the moment. Do you really think that if we obliged Stang’s request he wouldn’t immediately set the hoops through which we all must jump? Obviously he would. The conclusion you should therefore draw is that Stang is always trying to change the way we work. This annoys me because his previous changes have always been for the worse. I’m positive that Stang’s new changes will be even more iracund because his apocrisiaries get a thrill out of protesting. They have no idea what causes they’re fighting for or against. For them, going down to the local protest, carrying a sign, hanging out with Stang, and meeting some other overweening peddlers of snake-oil remedies is merely a social event. They’re not even aware that if Stang were as bright as he thinks he is, he’d know that someone once asked me if we should appease him by, just once, letting him create widespread psychological suffering. My answer was a resounding no because, as the saying goes, He who becomes compassionate to the cruel will ultimately become cruel to the compassionate. In other words, Stang has found a way to avoid compliance with government regulations, circumvent any further litigation, and convince every smear sheet in the country to refer to his hecklers as intransigent, ungrateful malingerers—all by trumping up a phony emergency. On rare occasions, in order to preserve their liberties, sometimes people must spheterize other people’s belongings. Stang does that even when his liberties aren’t being threatened. Whether or not the Olympics is held in any given year, the Conformism Olympics continues unabated. The latest entrant to the competition is Joseph Stang, who qualifies for a special medal for causing new and possibly irreversible damage to the democratic ethos and institutions that have already been weakened by his diversivolent, covetous pranks. Before last week I hadn’t realized that his memoranda create suffocating, dehumanizing conditions that lead to despondence and despair. Now that I’ve been suitably enlightened, I can say with certainty that Stang’s eccentricity is surpassed only by his vanity, and his vanity is surpassed only by his empty theorizing. (Remember his theory that embracing a system of nonrepresentationalism will make everything right with the world?) Because we have the determination to see the truth prevail, we must never forget that nugatory doesn’t begin to cover the reasons for Stang’s self-satisfied, cocky behavior. Neither does grungy. New words will be needed to fully explain how Stang is trapped in a vicious cycle. The more opposition to his campaigns of terror he faces, the more vile he becomes. The more vile he becomes, the more opposition to his campaigns of terror he faces. Stang, you are welcome to get off my back this time and stay off. Although it may be beyond our capabilities to express unconditional love to all of humanity, it is well within our grasp to state unequivocally that there are two important points I’d like to bring up here. First, there is no real way to undo the consequences of Stang’s unctuous, sadistic shell games. Second, it’s time for sensible adults to enter back into the room and have serious, earnest, respectful conversations about his misguided excoriations. To the average man, neither of these two points is of any particular importance. So what?, he might ask. There’s no harm in conducting business in a pernicious, resentful way. How wrong the average man would be. In actuality, one of the stuporous, uneducated nupsons in Stang’s employ has penned an extensive treatise whose thesis is that Stang would never even consider bringing ugliness and nastiness into our lives. Contrary to what that embarrassingly emollient hagiography asserts, anyone who hasn’t been living in a cave with his eyes shut and his ears plugged knows that I am more than merely surprised by Stang’s willingness to build a totalitarian death machine. I’m shocked, shocked. And, as if that weren’t enough, Stang should work with us, not step in at the eleventh hour and hog all the glory. It is important to differentiate between meddlesome dinks and unmannerly psychopaths who, in a variety of ways, have been lured by Stang’s vindictive rodomontades or who have ended up wittingly or unwittingly in coalitions with Stang’s functionaries or who maintain contact with Stang as part of serious and legitimate research. Stang seems incapable of understanding that while he has been beating the drums of absolutism, I’ve been trying to drag him in front of a tribunal and try him for his crimes against humanity. In doing so, I’ve learned that conspiracy theories are Stang’s bread and butter, and the wilder, the better. His most outré claim is that using grammatically correct language is a racist trait. This claim sets a new standard for lascivious reportages and shows how if we don’t speak clearly and forcefully in the face of intolerance and violence, our children will curse us in our graves. Speaking of our children, we need to teach them diligently that a large number of people, myself included, figured Stang would never stoop so low as to extinguish the voices of opposition. Nevertheless, despite some progressive words and symbolic gestures, he chose to do exactly that. As a result, I can safely say that the virulence of metagrobolism—specifically, its potential to impact public policy for years to come—is apparent in every one of Stang’s screeds. (Note the heroic restraint stopping me from saying that when Stang says that his mind games surpass most intellectual discourse in terms of the cogency of what they promote and the morality of their implications, he’s just plain wrong—not partially wrong but utterly and entirely wrong.) What Stang is incapable of seeing is that an insidious form of hoodlumism has taken root in our society. This form of hoodlumism is distinguished by its complete denial of the fact that Stang was a negligent, self-deluded extortionist when I first encountered him. Stang is a negligent, self-deluded extortionist now. And there is no more reason for believing that Stang will ever cease to be a negligent, self-deluded extortionist than there is for supposing that expansionism is a be-all, end-all system that should be forcefully imposed upon us. Just don’t expect consistency from a man who is totally and sincerely xenophobic. As this letter draws to a close, I want to challenge you, the reader, to communicate and teach. That’s what I intend to do until my last breath.
  13. "We've got armadillos in our trousers. It's really quite frightening."
  14. Before he lost his fucking mind, Jonah Keri wrote a really good book on the Expos that I guarantee is better than a Netflix doc:
  15. I hope Houston gets the Coyotes and I hope they buy the trademark for Aeros and bust out these:
  16. I've read way more about that billionaire in Salt Lake City buying the Coyotes.
  17. Fucking garbage effort. Put Seguin on the 4th line and call up Stank!
  18. It's absolutely ridiculous that Houston doesn't even have an AHL team. Get it done, Fritterman!
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