Class of 2012

Ray Guy
RP
Wears a Milwaukee hat

Did you know:

- that Ray Guy attended the University of Southern Mississippi, and was its most famous alumni until Lou "don't shoot until you see the whites" Beesley and some guy named Favor or Furtive or some bullshit?
- that Ray Guy's foot is on loan to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, still incased in the shoe in which it was frozen and then hacked off at the request of Hall curators?
- that Ray Guy backwards is Yugyar, which sounds like a character in some Piers Anthony crapathon?
- that you're not supposed to wear white after Labor Day?
- that Ray Guy would be a good name for those guys in the black helmets who push the buttons and pull the levers to activate the Death Star's laser?- why do they need those big black helmets if they're just sitting at a console pushing some buttons anyway?
- shouldn't firing that laser require some sort of failsafe, like needing to have two top-level commanders turn keys at the same time or something?
- I mean, we do that on submarines, and those can't blow up planets. As it stands, one of those black helmeted guys could just blow up a planet that, say, an ex-girlfriend that cheated on him with a TIE pilot lived on.
- And considering how lax security on the Death Star is, it seems entirely possible that a small band of rebels could sneak into the superlaser control room, turn it on, aim it at, like, a mirror that's positioned some distance away in space and voila, no fuss, no muss, Death Star blows itself up with its own superweapon. The irony alone would probably destroy the Empire.

So, in conclusion, Ray Guy: awesome punter.

Class of 2011

Kilgore Trout
CF
Wears a St. Louis hat.

Kurt Vonnegut's fictional alter-ego, Kilgore Trout is both a brilliant thinker and a terrible, terrible writer. Mostly he gets his science-fiction short stories published in porno mags - he's sort of like Philip K Dick, but without the paranoia and crippling methamphetamine addiction.


Sachin Tendulkar
CF
Wears a Cleveland hat.

Would you believe this guy is Indian, and that he plays cricket? No? You have some attitude, jackass. Well he is, and he does. One of his nicknames is "Master Blaster" which is a game that's always seemed like more fun than it really is. Anyway, Tendulkar is crazy popular in all those loser countries that play cricket like India and Australia where they drive on the wrong side of the road and spell words wrong. Hopefully this will be my last cricketer because I have clearly run out of ways to make fun of the sport and my next bio will simply be a treatise on the book "Life, the Universe and Everything".

Basil Fawlty
SP
Wears a Washington hat.

English people think this show is fucking hi-larious. I saw it a couple of times - some hijinx, a few misunderstandings, some over-the-top physical humor. Nothing ages worse than a sitcom. Okay, Mickey Rourke. Nothing ages worse than a sitcom other than Mickey Rourke.

Class of 2010

Patti Smith
RF
Wears a New York (NL) hat.

There's a story in Legs McNeil's indispensible Please Kill Me where some punk icon is talking about Patty Smith and says something to the effect of "you couldn't tell, because she always wore masculine clothing and baggy shirts, but Patty had really big tits" which stuck with me, for some reason. I guess because it's such a contradictory story about a woman who looks kind of like Susan Sontag and carries herself like a dude, and I like to imagine that Patti would laugh about it.

In any case, Patti Smith is a bad bitch.






William Murderface
SS/3B
Wears a Kansas City hat.

William Murderface is the bassist for Dethklok, fictional band featured in Adult Swim's "Metalocalypse". This show is, unsurprisingly, popular among the young, stoned and unemployable. Murderface has one of those Lou Holtz lisps, is really violent and pisses in inappropriate locations. If you don't think that description can sustain one of the main characters in a cartoon sitcom over 26 (and counting) episodes, you've never seen Adult Swim.


Ben Matlock
SP
Wears a Washington hat.

Andy Griffith is all grown up, and now he's got a law degree and is asleep on the couch in front of "Wheel of Fortune" by 8:00 every night! Despite running for 24 seasons, from 1972 to 1995, and spawning the hit catch-phrase "That's my monkey!", centerpiece of Steve Garvey's successful 1988 Presidential bid, "Matlock" is still probably best-known as the series that spun off hit television show "Jake and the Fatman".


Lily Munster
SP
Wears a Washington hat.

The Munsters seems like the classic example of pitch-as-premise (they're living in suburbia, but they're monsters!) As far as I can tell (and I've never watched this stupid show, so I could be wrong) they pretty much go through all the sitcom motions: weird new jobs, long-lost cousins, double-entendre misunderstandings. Yvonne DeCarlo also played Moses' chaste cipher of a wife in The Ten Commandments - alongside uber-hams like Chuck Heston, Anne Baxter and Yul Brenner, the character she played might as well have been played by a two-by-four with a smiley face painted on it.

Class of 2009

Dilsey Gibson
SP
Wears a St. Louis hat.

This is, of course, a relatively easy bio to write - Dilsey Gibson is the Mammy character from William Faulkner's best-known work, The Sound and the Fury. You can write your own Aunt Jemima joke here (Aunt Jemima herself actually has a pretty colorful history, no pun intended. Look her up some time). The Compson family is privileged, Southern and white, is (naturally) full of retards and fuck-ups, and Dilsey is the black servant who takes care of and observes them.

I learn more from some bios than others. Doing the bio for, say, Duff Man doesn't require a lot of research, but sometimes I don't know a lot about the subject and I try to read enough to give a reasonably rounded portrayal. I've never read Faulkner - I knew him as that guy who wrote all those stories about a fictional Mississippi county (Yoknapatawpha). He grew up during, and wrote about, the post-Reconstruction, pre-civil rights era South, so naturally his books have been studied extensively in terms of their racial politics. There is anecdotal evidence
that suggests he actually had a servant when he was little who he called Mammy, so it's hard to fault him for what might be a less than full portrayal of a central black character. His own view of the civil rights movement (he died in 1962) is difficult to pin down, but near as I can tell it went something like this: full civil rights for blacks is a morally unimpeachable position, but practically speaking it is better for blacks to be slowly or partially integrated into white society, rather than fully and all at once. That seems kind of stupid really, but I would wager that many ostensibly liberal white Southerners felt that way. Faulkner obviously had a lot of affection for Dilsey Gibson, even if it was impossible for him to draw her as a fully three-dimensional character. His writing captures a time, and a place, in American history, and I would guess that he will remain an author that can be enjoyed more than just ironically (yeah, I'm looking at you Harriet Beecher Stowe).

Class of 2008

Lance Alworth
1B
Wears a Milwaukee hat.

Lance Alworth overcame the handicap of being born white to become a pretty good wide receiver, for a white guy. He actually played running back at Arkansas, which will someday be a fact that people view with a mix of shock and amusement, sort of like looking at one of those horrible racist figurines that people who are by no means racist at all collect and display on their knick-knack shelves for all of their white friends to get a kick out of. Anyway, Lance Alworth got to wear everyone's favorite duds for the San Diego Chargers for 9 years, and then unfortunately for him got traded to the Dallas Cowboys (unfortunate since that trade doomed him to eternal torment in the fires of Hell for all eternity) and then some voters felt sorry for him for being so white so they put him in the real Hall of Fame, the football one, but it doesn't matter because everyone gets into that one eventually. So to summarize, Lance Alworth played football and was white, not necessarily in that order, and if he was a shade of paint he'd be eggshell the end.

Class of 2007

Agent Orange
3B
Wears a Pittsburgh hat.

Another weapon that's not an actual weapon, Agent Orange is an herbicide and defoliant, most well-known for its use during the Vietnam War to help clear dense jungle and thus remove concealment for the Vietcong. The problem is that the Agent Orange mixture also contained a dioxin, a nasty chemical which, in high enough doses, causes all sorts of birth defects and assorted health problems. Look up Agent Orange in a google image search and....you'll see. The dioxin poisoning of Victor Yushchenko, the President of Ukraine, made news a few years ago - he used to look like this and then, all of a sudden, he looked like this. Agent Orange was, in other words, not a weapon but a colossal military fuck-up.

Class of 2006

Moritz Bleibtreu
2B/SS
Wears a Chicago (AL) hat.

Moritz Bleibtreu was the dude who totally didn't deserve to have Franke Potente run after his broke ass in Run Lola Run. I don't recognize anything else on his IMDB page...wait, apparently he was in Munich. More on that movie later. For now, let's just chalk this up as another one of drew's bizarre Eurotrash man-crushes. If you want Mr. Bleibtreu's autograph, and you can read German, and you're (probably) drew, check here



Scythe
SS
Wears a New York (AL) hat.

A scythe is a tool that people used to use for harvesting before they invented the wheel or horses or something. I guess people in poor countries still use them. It's associated with Death (who is often pictured lugging it around) because Death is the harvester of souls. It is not associated with Death because he's going to lop your melon off with it. Can you imagine using this unwieldy piece of shit as a weapon, Tom? That's because it's not a weapon. You know how else I know it's not a weapon? Because no matter how many gold pieces you may be lugging around, you will not find one of these fuckers in a weapon shop from Neverwinter to Eastern Shaar. That's right, a D&D reference. You know what else you won't find in a weapon shop? Iron Rations. Have to go to the item shop for that one. But you'd better stock up, because there is literally nothing else to eat anywhere. Well, regular rations, but those are for peasants and blacksmiths and shit, people who don't spend their lives killing dragons and taking their treasure.




Mathieu Kassovitz
SP
Wears a Pittsburgh hat.

Mathieu Kassovitz wants you to know him as a filmmaker - unfortunately, the only English-language film he's made is the Halle Berry vehicle (and all around piece of shit) Gothika. Most likely, you know him either as the weird dude with all the pictures that Amelie inexplicably falls in love with, or the weedy little fucker from Munich who blows his own dumb ass up. Maybe that'll change soon, since he has another English-language movie coming out in 2008; then again, the movie stars Vin Diesel, so maybe not.



Morning Star
SP
Wears a New York (AL) hat.

A morning star is a spiked ball on a stick. Yawn. In Castlevania 2, you can upgrade to the morning star, which isn't really a morning star so much as it is a chain whip with a heavy ball on the end. Castlevania 2 is the black-sheep of the 8-bit Castlevania family, since it's weird and nonlinear and doesn't really have any level bosses. Lots of blocks that are actually bottomless pits though. I happen to like it a lot because I think it's the most evocative and atmospheric - it also has what might be the NES's all-time best soundtrack. The problem is that, without a strategy guide, it's essentially impossible. For instance, there's this one part where, in order to advance, you have to find a certain item, equip it, and then kneel (not stand) in front of a brick wall for like 5 seconds. There are some clues scattered about that indicate you have to do that but they're not terribly explicit - basically, unless you're a genius, you'd never figure it out on your own. There's a lot of Nintendo games like that, because Nintendo wanted to have this really cool system that had lots of difficult titles, but they didn't have the hardware to do it organically, so most of their games either A) are packed with a shitload of enemies, way more than a kid could reasonably be expected to deal with or B) have puzzles that are essentially impossible to solve without a strategy guide. So when you were a kid, and you couldn't beat a game, you thought something must be wrong with you, but in reality it was the game that was fucked. Nobody ever told you that though, so most people my age harbor deep insecurity issues. Fuck you Nintendo.