HOLLYWOOD, CA -Though he will never be confused for Broadway Joe, Rex Ryan is guaranteeing a Jets’ Super Bowl victory this year. The team has fallen just shy the last two years, they’ve had a decent off-season, and frankly nobody else in the AFC looks like a clear favorite now (so, New England, how are Ochocinco and Haynesworth working out?) so why not? Casey Stengel once said “Never make predictions, especially about the future.” – Did he and Yogi just sit around and make these things up? – But he’s wrong. It’s always easy to make crazy predictions…just make a lot of them and when some come true you can look like a genius, and if they don’t, you can just say, “I was drunk, leave me alone.”
It got me thinking about what I’ve called correctly in my desperate Sunday late night ramblings. First, I think it’s worth an honorable mention that Rise of the Planet of the Apes has been the top movie in the country the last two weeks. Now while a gorilla hasn’t actually played in the professional sports yet, I like to think that Gorilla In the NFL deserves credit (and perhaps back end points) for whetting America’s appetite for monkey movies.
Back in May, I made a few early season predictions about who, hovering around .200, would end up above the Mendozaaaaaa Line. I wrote: “The Braves might be wondering about what exactly they got with Dan Uggla, who has struggled just to get his average up to .207. He’s the exact opposite of Mendoza’s good-glove-no-stick description, though, so let’s go with: McBain.” On July 5th he was batting .173, and if I wasn’t drunk at the time, I might have noticed and been worried. A 33-game hitting streak later, he’s up to a robust .231. Not exactly McBain, but I’ll take it.
Back in January ’10 I made a bunch of predictions about the coming decade. Now none of those have had much of a chance to come true yet, though I still hold out hope, like for this one: “The Pittsburgh Pirates will have winning records throughout the decade, but won’t win the World Series until they start playing in those pillbox hats again.” They’ve lost 8 of their last 10 and are 7 games below .500…I think now would be a good time to break out those hats.
A few years ago I wrote a three part story called The Bad Usher (though, now if each segment had to be 500 words long, it’d be about a twenty part series), about a villainous Dodger Stadium usher, sort of based on Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant, though not as nice. I’ve been wondering how the Bad Usher would be faring in these dark days at Dodger Stadium…and I mean that literally, as in would the Bad Usher be responsible for keeping the lights off throughout the park in order to save the team money? How else would his job be different now? Surely it wouldn’t be so bad that he would be put in charge of collecting foul balls in the stands and returning them to the field, right? Then I saw this…
https://youtu.be/OoO7S7C0KK8
Ooh…nailed it!
Another bold prediction: Grote 2DMax will be breaking little fans’ hearts tomorrow.
