Class of 2005

Bernie Brewer
3B
Wears a Cleveland hat.

Normally, I'm pretty ambivalent about mascots that involve a dude dressing in a foam rubber imitation of a person. And by ambivalent, I think they're fucking retarded. I mean, isn't this way cooler and less creepy than, say, this? This goes for Halloween costumes too - when you buy a Halloween mask you've basically said to the world, I refuse to put any thought into this costume at all. But I'll give Bernie Brewer a pass because he used to go down his little slide into a mug of beer, and anything that encourages children between the ages of 4 and 11 to consume alcohol is alright in my book.


Fear, Itself
OF
Wears a Kansas City hat.

Franklin Roosevelt once said that the only thing that we have to fear is fear itself. And I guess that's mostly true, unless it turns out that there's a maniac with a knife camped out in your closet, waiting for you to go to sleep so he can eat your eyeballs. In that case, you're probably justified in feeling that there are more immediate problems in your life than fear.


Max, King of the Wild Things
Catcher
Wears a St. Louis hat.

Maurice Sendak's scholarly dissertation on inducing hallucinations in children by temporarily starving them was picked up on by the mainstream media and ultimately made the rounds as the partially dumbed down novel version, "Where the Wild Things Are". Sendak's follow-up, "The Wild Things Experiment with LSD and Peyote", was less successful.


Senator Benjamin Wade
SP
Wears a Detroit hat.

How big of an asshole was Benjamin Wade? When Andrew Johnson was impeached in 1868, he was acquitted by one vote. Now, Johnson was a total asshole. But Wade was an even bigger asshole, and it is said that, were anyone but Senator Wade to take Johnson's place as President (since he was President pro tempore of the Senate, Wade was the first in the line of succession at the time, since Johnson didn't have a VP), Johnson would very probably have been chucked from office. The Senate, ultimately, decided to stick with Johnson's everyday assholery rather than deal with the gargantuan, monumental assholery of Senator Wade. Just look at his picture. You can tell, immediately, that this is an asshole. And he always looks like that in pictures. Like an asshole.

Class of 2004

Ivan Nickolaevich Bezdomny
LF
Wears a New York (NL) hat.

Ivan Nickolaevich Ponyryov (who uses the pseudonym Bezdomny, which means "homeless", as a writer of poetry) is a peripheral character in Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita. A full English translation can be accessed here. Bezdomny appearances bookend the novel, which revolves around the appearance of the devil in Moscow (as a dapper, refined gentleman, and isn't he always these days). The book was written between 1928 and 1940 - Bulgakov died in 1940, having mostly finished his novel, but it didn't actually see the light of day until 1966, when it was serialized, in an edited version, in Moscow magazine. The edits may have softened the blow but it was still a subversive, anti-establishment work, and it quickly became a contemporary classic, passed around and discussed by the Russian intelligentsia. It supposedly holds a particular high place in the psyche of the Russian people - it has been adapted a handful of times into other media, but there are stories (like with Don Quixote) of a curse on them, including one version that was filmed in 1994 and, like the original novel, was buried, this time for copyright reasons, although DVD versions have since appeared.

This is a pretty comprehensive site about the novel, if anyone is interested.

(Mikhail Bulgakov)

Class of 2003

Ian Curtis
SP
Wears a New York (NL) hat.

Ian Curtis, for those who don't know, was the singer/lyricist/Gloommaster General of seminal post-punk band Joy Division. If you've never listened to Joy Division, you should go do so right now. Unless...you've ever thought to yourself, "you know what song I really like? "Proud to be an American" by Lee Greenwood". If that's the case, go kill yourself.

If you're still alive, you're doing better than Ian Curtis, who is definitely not. The answer to this mystery is: Ian Curtis, with a rope, in the kitchen. Most people who write dour, gloomy, borderline suicidal lyrics are really well-adjusted, sane, happy people, right? Well, not this one - he did all of those things, and he was actually totally fucked up. So he put on The Idiot and watched a lesser-known Werner Herzog movie, Stroszek, and hanged himself (Werner Herzog, by the way, is totally still alive and we're all the better for it; Iggy Pop is also still alive, and that one's a mystery to just about everyone). So his band dissolved, but then they said fuck it and reformed themselves as New Order and they added a nice, happy chick and decided to make nice, happy music . Eventually. First they made sad, Curtis-y music. It gives me some amount of pleasure to imagine that yes, "Blue Monday", their biggest post-Curtis hit, is in fact about Ian Curtis, mostly because it would be the most perfectly catty response to someone who did themselves in and left the rest of their band hanging. If the Doors had written a song called, "Go Fuck Yourself You Pompous Fucking Asshole" right after Jim Morrison drowned in his bathtub or whatever "romantic" rock and roll death he gave himself which is actually just another disgusting, fleshy, rotten death, then I would respect them. But instead they help perpetuate the myth of Morrison as some high and mighty rock God instead of the pathetic, self-absorbed, needy junkie that he actually was, so fuck them.

In other words, Curtis made awesome music, but there is nothing in the least bit romantic about offing yourself at 24 because you'd rather live up to some retarded fucking rock and roll myth than get some help for your problems and make more than 3 goddamn albums that we have to play over and over in lieu of, you know, having you still around.

Class of 2002

Jürgen Prochnow
SP
Wears a Pittsburgh hat.

Here are five facts about about internationally-recognized actor Jürgen Prochnow that you may not know:

1) His part in "Das Boot", which made him famous, was originally written as a tightly-wound private investigator in 23rd century New Orleans tasked with tracking down 5 renegade time travelling aliens from the Earth colony orbiting Alpha Centauri. Jürgen insisted that they change it so the setting become 23rd century San Diego, but they butchered it in the editing room and turned it some faggoty submarine movie.

2) He received his trademark pockmarked facial features while tracking down Nazis in the jungles of Brazil and not, as is usually believed, because he went into a plastic surgeon's office and told him to "give me the Edward James Olmos".

3) Uwe Boll has pictures of him raping infants. He passes them around to other filmmakers along what has colloquially become known as the "Prochnow Pipeline".

4) He is the godfather to Shaquille O'Neal's children, but only on Wednesdays and Fridays. The rest of the week, he wanders the streets of Kiel as "Jürgina", a 1920's-era cabaret singer who can bring a sailor to climax within 30 seconds with a single finger. He has never been able to dunk on Shaq but he still tries every time, God bless him.

5) He asked for only one prop from the 1999 Freddie Prinze Jr. vehicle "Wing Commander" - the ship that his character flies in at the beginning. When the producers sent him the scale model used for special effects shots he tracked each and every one of them down and murdered them and their families because he wanted the real fucking ship that flies to the Moon and shit goddammit.

Class of 2001

Reggie White
3B
Wears a Milwaukee hat.

Reggie White was some kind of "football" player who had a whole bunch of "sacks". That was, at one time, what made him famous.

I recently watched the Errol Morris documentary Mr. Death, about a man (Fred Leuchter) who essentially stumbles into the Holocaust denial movement because he is unable (or unwilling) to accept the limitations of his own knowledge, and becomes a pariah because of it. The parallels to Reggie White (and other naifs of the evangelical persuasion, especially in the world of athletics) should be obvious, but in case they aren't let me spell them out - the vast majority of people know Reggie White mostly as that big fat guy who said that Asian people were good at turning televisions into watches and Mexicans were good at squeezing a lot of people into a house, and nasty things about gay people like this lovely gem:

"Homosexuality is a decision, it's not a race. People from all different ethnic backgrounds live in this lifestyle. But people from all different ethnic backgrounds also are liars and cheaters and malicious and back-stabbing."

So Reggie became a pariah, and now there's nothing anyone can do about it because he's dead, and that's too bad because maybe Reggie, like Leuchter, was just too goddamn stupid to realize what he'd done, but maybe unlike Leuchter he might one day have sought atonement for the hubris that caused him to believe he had all the answers.

Class of 2000

Sanath Jayasuriya
2B
Wears a Cincinnati hat.

Sanath Jayasuriya is a Sri Lankan cricket batsman, perhaps the most accomplished in that country's illustrious cricketing history. That's what wikipedia tells me anyway, and who am I to argue? He's also a pretty ugly dude, which wikipedia "forgot" to mention, so maybe it is as untrustworthy as people say.

I think I'm starting to get the hang of this cricket thing. The "bowler" (he's like a pitcher in baseball) chucks the ball towards the batter. His job (the bowler's) is to dislodge the wicket stump that the batter is protecting and not, contrary to popular belief, to throw the ball hard enough to send it back in time from which it will be impossible to hit it. The batter protects the wicket by hitting the ball, but since he has one of those flat wooden cricket bats (descended from American fraternity paddles) he can hit the ball in a lot of directions - forwards (like in baseball) or sideways, backwards and, well, that's about it. But that's still a lot. He then runs between the two wickets and he gets runs based on how many laps he completes. Or something like that. Meanwhile fielders go retrieve the ball and, I don't know, peg it at the runner's head to try to get him out. The game has a hell of a lot of run-scoring and matches only end based on some complicated formula that only people from the Indian subcontinent can understand which, quite frankly, is probably the only reason they love the game so damn much in the first place. It's not so unlike baseball, and even pays tribute to its American cousin with a history of ugly racism.


Squatch
SP
Wears a New York(AL) hat.

Who's the Typhoid Mary of "NBA mascots have to entertain the crowd by performing trampoline dunks between quarters"? I think I read somewhere that it was the Suns Gorilla, but I don't know if that's right. Anyway, Squatch is the Seattle (no longer Super) Sonics mascot, and he looks like Teen Wolf (a movie, incidentally, which I have never seen and which is on my lifetime boycott list for relatively petty and childish reasons).

Squatch in action:


Doesn't it seem kind of sucky that Squatch gets all the glory while the people not dressed in costumes do all the heavy lifting? Plus they have to wear tacky yellow shirts, not awesome chick-magnet costumes.

On his own this time, squatch throwing down in what looks like a high school gym, earning some money on the side as well as scouting prospects for the future (or, I guess, current) Mrs. Squatch:

Class of 1999

Cocky
2B
Wears a New York (AL) hat.

I'm going to let Cocky's official biography tell his story:

Cocky first took action at USC events in 1980 when he came in to take over his father (Big Spur's) place. Cocky soon won the hearts off all the Gamecock fans all over and now is one of the most recognizable figures to young and old at USC.

I'll leave out the obvious Michael Vick joke here, but it's a bit surprising that the PETA people aren't as vocal as the Native Americans when it comes to borderline offensive nicknames like "Gamecocks". Leaving that aside though, the mascot's main claim to fame is probably his association with hats that adorn the heads of douchebag frat boys (and too-old-to-be-frat-boys-but-still-just-as-retarded-men) the world over stating, simply and quite proudly, "Cocks". If that's not enough hilarity for you, another quote from Cocky's official bio:

One of Cocky's trademarks that is highly recognized by all Gamecock fans is his 2001 Magic Box entrance.

No comment.



Harry Truman
2B
Wears a Baltimore hat.

Harry Truman was a little nerd with glasses who hated, in this order, Japanese people, Korean people, people who smoked corncob pipes, other nerds with glasses who wore coonskin caps, and cocksuckers who asked him what the S stood for. He is probably most famous for being absolutely delighted to learn that he had been beaten in the Presidential election by Thomas Dewey, only to learn later that the news had been a mistake and Truman had actually won, after which he went into a deep funk that he only re-emerged from when the Cardinals finally won the Series again in '64. In his later years he became infamous for his crotchety reclusiveness, and he ultimately died, friendless and alone, in a cabin on Mount St. Helens in the 1980 eruption of that volcano (Thanks to Whiskybear for pointing me toward the relevant portion of his biography that discusses his bizarre death).



Rorschach
2B/RF
Wears a St. Louis hat.

Who is Rorschach? Well, he's a guy who wears a weird mask and, sort of, fights crime. If fighting crime involves things like murdering rapists in cold blood. He's an archetype of a certain character, found often in comic books, who uses any means necessary to fight the "forces of evil", and who is supposed to be some sort of hero, at least in the eyes of the reader. He was based directly on The Question, created by Steve Ditko (a noted Ayn Rand enthusiast, and if you can't suss out how I feel about Ayn Rand, you haven't been paying attention), but aspects of the character show up in many, many superheroes - The Punisher is basically Rorschach played completely straight. Which is actually kind of frightening, since it's a book that's targeted at kids.

Anyway, if you think Rorschach's point of view seems kind of right on and you can totally did what this cat is saying, you're probably Michael Savage, which would lead me to ask you why the fuck you were reading my blog, and to suggest that you're almost certainly a closeted homosexual. If you're not a fascist, and I hope you're not, then you are probably repulsed by Rorschach, even while you kind of admire his complete devotion to his absolutist views. Rorschach's decision at the end of Watchmen, and the consequences of that decision (both for him and the for world at large) are the stuff of legend, and have cemented his legacy (in my not-at-all-objective opinion) as one of the great characters of 20th century literature.