• Consider the age of awkwardness.
• Revisit the world’s first advice column in English.
• Marvel at the gayest fashion ad ever.
• Learn how to have a good relationship with drugs.
• Get on your bike.
• Visit historic Richmond, VA.
• Chat with Julian Schnabel.
• Watch kids shooting guns.
• Go to the opera.
• Stop calling it hipster R&B.;

Photo by johnvsc, from Flickr.

This video that some people who go by the name The Directors Nod made for the Twin Shadow song “At My Heels” makes me laugh a lot. Even on repeated viewings. It’s basically the directors making fun of the “director’s commentary” tracks that you can watch on DVDs of artsy movies. Twin Shadow’s album Forget is one of my favorite things from last year. It’s like A Flock of Seagulls and Human League meet Prince or something. I love it.

There are some pretty amazing pictures of a mama grizzly fighting a male grizzly in an attempt to protect her cubs here. Do click through and look, but let’s nobody tell Sarah Palin about this, okay? I mean, she’ll just get all riled up again.

Remember when I was all, “Hey, you should totally read Javier Cercas’ The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-Five Minutes in History and Imagination, even if you are unfamiliar with its subject,” and you were like, “Whatever, why should I listen to you?” Well, fair enough, you’re probably better off. But now you don’t have to listen to me. Both the Economist (“a persuasive, brilliant and absorbing book that has more contemporary resonance than even he might have imagined”) and the New Yorker (“this remarkable work of nonfiction”) have recently weighed in, and if you can’t trust those guys and me, I don’t know who you can trust. Check it out.

Tracy died, you’ve surely heard, soon after a long-fought civil war. Happened this month. When it snows sometimes. Today is one of those times. Welcome to April.

Five months ago, I argued in these pages (in the comments section of these pages) in support of April’s “standard cheeriness.” I said, in fact, that this month might well be “one of the top three months.” Man, such sentiment seems awfully far away now, as we slog, slightly hung-over from Opening Day beer, through this bullshit half-snow dampening our day. You know what? I take it back: You suck, April!

What do we have to look forward to this month anyway? Taxes. And, of course, death. We can always count on death. There’s bound to be lots of it this month. There always is. Martin Luther King, Jr., Kurt Cobain, Cozy Powell, Saul Bellow, Linda McCartney, Christopher Robin Milne (appropriately enough), Left Eye, Ottawa Nation chief Pontiac, they all died this month. Jesus, too, if you believe in him.

Lots of births, too, of course. Because that keeps happening. (Until the planet reaches some kind of Children of Men state, at least, which seems likelier with each successive nuclear power-plant disaster.) Haley Joel Osment, Mandy Moore, God Shammgod and Posh Spice all celebrate birthdays this month. Hitler was born, famously, on the 20th. And now everything looks like him. Also, crazy people too often mark his birthday by doing something crazy and terrible. (This also happens the day before, the 19th, which is the anniversary of the ATF’s 1993 assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.) And people smoke lots of pot. And giant oil rigs blow up in the ocean and spill out oil that kills more whales and dolphins than we initially realize. And Joey Lawrence was born that day, too, in 1976. Ellen Barkin and the Budhha were born on other days in April.

Then there’s Good Friday, which, what’s so good about it? And Easter. Easter’s all right, I guess. Except for the stupid hats. But the lamb is delicious, with mint sauce, which always seems nice and Aprilly. And Passover seders, which can be enjoyable, as long as whoever’s leading them doesn’t insist on devoting a lot of time to every page in the Haggadah. Like, can we just get the afikomen already? I like singing “Dayenu,” though. And gefilte fish. I like ramps and shad, a lot, too, which come around in April. The food actually starts to get pretty delicious this month. Maybe that’s what I was thinking about when I said how great April was. The trees and plants grow their leaves back, and we can eat them or just admire their pretty green color. And I do love baseball and I’m happy it’s here. There’s something especially nice about the meaninglessness of April baseball games, too. So maybe it’s important to keep the whole April-showers-bring-May-flowers thing in mind today. It is best to try to achieve something like that which David Foster apparently hit on in his unfinished but now published novel, The Pale King, which Michiko Kakutani reviews in today’s Times.

“Happiness, Wallace suggests in a Kierkegaardian note at the end of this deeply sad, deeply philosophical book, is the ability to pay attention, to live in the present moment, to find “second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive.”

Of course, David Foster Wallace was unable to do this himself. And if you suffer from allergies, April showers are really not worth it at all, and only contributing to further misery.

Oh, and you know who else died this month? Harvey Ball, the graphic designer who invented the world-famous “smiley face.” Ten years ago on the 12th. So, yeah.

by Dan Kois

Dan: Claire Jarvis! I really liked Cary Fukunaga’s film of Jane Eyre, starring Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender. But I know next to nothing about Brontë, having read maybe one-fifth of the novel in 11th grade. You’re an assistant professor in the English department at Stanford, a Brontë scholar and a superfan. Tell me why I’m wrong to like this movie so much!

Claire: Dan Kois! I really suggest you read this novel. But, right away, I don’t know if I’d say I was a Charlotte Superfan. I’m more of an Emily girl.

Dan: See, whereas I am like “Oh right, there are TWO Brontës.”

Claire: More, even.

Dan: Coughing fit!

Claire: Don’t forget Anne and Branwell.

Dan: Branwell? Oh. Branwell.

Claire: Well, let me start by saying I have relented a bit on my “This movie sucks” opinion.

Claire: I think it did a lot of things well. Mia Wasikowska is a very good Jane. And, some of the dialogue (SOME of it) is really just pulled from the book. And Brontë, if anything, knows how to write a swoony chat. Wasikowska’s delivery of the machine speech is pretty great.

Dan: Um, remind me what the machine speech is?

Claire: Oh! When Rochester asks Jane if, you know, she wants to be his wife, she takes him to task, asking him if he thinks because she lacks rank, she lacks feelings. So, in the novel, this speech is an important repetition of one of Brontë’s central points: that a poor, unloved governess is equal, as a person, to a rich landowner.

Dan: It’s interesting to me that it’s delivered in terms of “feelings” — something that Wasikowska’s very self-contained performance, up to that point, sort of elided. She wasn’t unfeeling exactly but she managed to keep a stone face through some pretty crazy shit.

Claire: Yes, true. Vampire Madwomen in the Attic, for example.

Claire: But, feeling is really important for Brontë’s novel. It’s the thing that pulls Rochester towards Jane in the first place.

Claire: In the push to make it a ROMANTIC MOVIE, we get a kind of diminution in the class struggle at the core of the novel.

Dan: You mean, Fukunaga was like, “Well, if I have a really dynamite reading of the machine speech, I can get away with skipping the rest of the class-struggle stuff.”

Dan: Which is funny in that his last movie, Sin Nombre — about a Honduran teenager trying to escape drug gangs — was awfully class-conscious.

Dan: Or at least class-not-unconscious.

Claire: And here’s the other problem I have. One of the great things, the truly wonderful things, about Jane Eyre is the narration. Jane’s at once close, really close, and always at a distance from the reader. (“Reader, I married him.”) The director nodded to this sometimes with the shaky first-person camera, but, really, it’s missing from the film.

Dan: But that is so, so difficult to achieve in ANY film, not just a period film, not just a literary adaptation. I’m trying to think of a great period literary adaptation that used voice-over to deliver chunks of novel uncut.

Claire: My favorite 1st person narration adaptation has to be Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy, but only because that novel is wacky about its 1st person, as is the film. It’s notoriously tricky to represent!

Dan: Yes — in that it required basically a practical-joke of a movie (a really, really effective one!) to pull it off.

Claire: And, the result, that Jane is the protagonist of the film, means that, through the whole thing, we’re conditioned into “rooting” for her as the heroine — something which I think is more complicated in the novel, where she’s both the source of our information AND the central figure of her story.

Claire: Also, the movie introduces the St. John stuff wayyy too early.

Dan: Hahaha so many gripes!

Dan: My primary problem with St. John was his muttonchops.

Claire: Part of the grossness/perversity of the St. John proposal is that it’s like a total reinvention of Jane’s life. Using it as a framing device really messed up the narrative patterning there.

Dan: Jamie Bell needs to make better choices in facial hair.

Claire: Like, a cigarette moustache?

Dan: By the end of the movie, during the proposal-ish deal, it seriously seemed like they were going to crawl off his face and do something horrifying in the moors.

Claire: Well, that would have been right: St. John is perhaps the best closeted homosexual in the Brontë canon. Sex with Jane would revolt him — it’s not clear if that’s because of the asceticism or something else.

Claire: Also Rochester: WAY TOO HANDSOME.

Let us pause to gaze upon Michael Fassbender.

Dan: DON’T BLAME MICHAEL FASSBENDER FOR BEING SO HANDSOME. HE CAN’T HELP IT.

Claire: But they couldn’t find an UGLY actor to play Rochester?

Dan: They couldn’t find an ugly actor to play Jane!

Claire: True. They did a good job of making her look like she was ugly, though she’s pretty frigging luminous.

Claire: I know Olivier was hot, as was Pierce Brosnan, but HE IS NOT HOT in the book.

Dan: Like, how not hot?

Claire: Like… UGLY.

Dan: REALLY.

Claire: He is described as UGLY. He’s like UGLY Heathcliff. He’s still nice and chatty in the book, but… hagsville.

Dan: But why? Just to make us feel sorrier for Jane? To make him scarier from the get-go?

Claire: Because the whole thing is love — the love that is the motive force of the novel — is based on character, but a strange version of character. The end of this movie felt super clipped to me. “Oh, right, that’s cool. You tried to bigamize me. No worries!”

Dan: So in the end the movie sort of argues for love IN SPITE of character, I get it.

Claire: Or, in character more broadly conceived than “moral character.”

Dan: Nevertheless: I would be hard pressed to make the argument that looking at Michael Fassbender ever made a movie worse. You don’t think there’s some room for leeway in a movie like this? I know it added bodice-rippery elements, but it’s hardly a bodice-ripper.

Claire: SHE RIPPED HER BODICE.

Dan: Hahaha

Claire: SHE DOES IT HERSELF!

Claire: Brontë’s Jane says she “mechanically” undoes her wedding dress.

Claire: Did that look MECHANICAL to you?

Claire: RRRIP.

Dan: But she just got finished saying she wasn’t an automaton! DON’T CONFUSE AMERICA’S MOVIE AUDIENCES, CLAIRE.

Claire: That is a shirty way of getting to a bigger issue I had, which is about the kind of passion that counts as passion in a contemporary movie. It’s histrionic, while I think the Brontës very well do the tamped down crazy intense passion better than anyone in literature.

Dan: But would that ever read on a movie screen? Or would it just play as dull?

Claire: That’s another side-product of film’s failure to show interior I guess.

Dan: I get your larger point, though, or at least what I take to be your larger point — that just because a novel is old, and written by a lady, doesn’t mean its primary purpose is romance.

Dan: Just because Austen adaptations as fluttery romances work so well doesn’t mean that Brontë requires the same treatment.

Claire: Yes. And my larger issue is that by focusing on the romance, film adaptations get rid of some of the more provocative (and progressive) elements of old novels… Also, Austen isn’t so fluttery.

Claire: I mean, the same issue I have with the whitewashing of the colonial plot on Jane Eyre could be said to hold in any Austen adaptation, even though Austen is by far a more conservative novelist. Don’t even get me started on Emily Brontë. IMPOSSIBLE.

Dan: Sure, but that’s not specific to old novels. I feel quite certain that in focusing on the romance, Hollywood eliminated some of the more provocative and progressive elements of Nicholas Sparks’ The Notebook.

Claire: It’s true. WHITEWASHED!

Dan: They completely removed its militant feminist subplot, and the section about class warfare.

Claire: I wouldn’t ever say this was a TERRIBLE adaptation (though, I know, I did say that, but it was to goad you), but this is more a problem with assuming that books and movies do the same things when they tell stories.

Dan: They don’t! Which goes to the things I liked about this movie, the movie-specific things. For instance. it’s so literally dark!

Claire: I liked that.

Dan: I think it might be the darkest period picture since Barry Lyndon. And I liked those over-the-shoulder handheld shots.

Claire: Why did you like the handheld shots? I’m curious. Those drove me apeshit (technical term).

Dan: They said to me that Fukunaga was working hard to make this movie look different from other period pieces.

Dan: And feel different. Like its willingness to make its characters unappealing at times.

Dan: Rochester may be hot as shit but he is still a deeply offputting character in a way that, say, Colin Firth could never pull off.

Claire: Hmmm. Did you really get that sense? I was trying to figure out how repulsive he was.

Dan: I think those long conversations he had with Jane, where he’s aggressive and demanding, and a dick to his kid, go a long way toward subverting the traditional movie-version of the period-piece starchy leading man.

Dan: Usually he’s sort of priggy, or a little bit stuffy, or the heroine accidentally says something mortifying. But Rochester in this movie is just a douche for a long portion of it. A hot douche, but a douche.

Claire: Right. Ok, that’s a good point. And a drunky douche at that.

Dan: Which I really liked!

Claire: Do you think most viewers read him as douchey, though? I wonder if the force of “HANDSOME ENGLISHMAN” is enough to produce a general swoon, no matter how crappy the behavior.

Dan: Well I think that’s part of the point! In movie-land, that’s a really potent combination. That’s what movies can do so well that books can’t — rub the surface against the interior and see what sparks can fly. It’s different than what Brontë was doing, but I would argue it has a similar emotional effect on me, the viewer.

Claire: I think books CAN do that, though. In fact, I’d say that’s exactly how the first person narration works. We get evidence about these crazy events, but it’s all from the POV of one woman, a woman who is also very, very explicit about the writtenness of her account.

Claire: The novel can do things like this, it’s just that we get used to the medial intervention in film (camera technique v. mise en scene) because they are so obviously different from one another (Victorians didn’t have hand-held cameras).

Dan: Here’s a question: Does Jane Eyre, the book, have any jokes?

Claire: Yeah.

Claire: I mean, not as many as Wuthering Heights, but that’s because Charlotte was kind of a moralizing sadist (oops).

Dan: Cuz Jane Eyre, the movie, DOES NOT.

Dan: Other the visual gag of Adele’s doll stuck up in the attic of her dollhouse, which made me LOL.

Claire: Well, again, that’s like when “Mad Men” winkwink nudgenudges you about smoking during pregancy or something: “READER, YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS.”

Dan: Yes, well “Mad Men” has a narrator, even though he doesn’t say a word out loud: It’s Matthew Weiner, and he’s pissed.

Claire: I would just say: if you liked the movie, give the novel a chance.

Claire: Like I said, I didn’t hate the movie (though I tried), I just think that there are certain things that we can get when reading novels that we can’t get when watching movies.

Dan: You have definitely convinced me to read Jane Eyre and then email you 200 questions about it.

Claire: Have you really never read it?

Dan: I have read more of Wide Sargasso Sea than of Jane Eyre.

Dan: But! I would also caution people who love the book to give the movie a chance.

Dan: Because there are things that movies do well that books cannot! And I think this movie does a lot of movie-things well.

Claire: But WHERE IS GYPSY FORTUNETELLER ROCHESTER?

Dan: (“Does a lot of movie-things well!” -Dan Kois, The Awl)

Claire: And, how come Bertha Mason gets to be hot? Jane totally snarks the real Bertha Mason, I tell you what.

Dan: Bertha Mason IS super hot.

Claire: The novel Bertha is “coarse.”

Dan: Not coarse.

Claire: And there’s the whole Grace Poole plot that gets dropped out.

Dan: Even less coarse. Anyway! Claire, if you complain too much about all the dropped subplots, you start to sound like one of those hobbit people complaining about Tom Bombadil.

Claire: No, no. I think what I would say is: the movie IS better than I said (initially) as a movie. But, when you adapt a novel, you do have to make a lot of choices. I guess I would have made some different choices, but I think anyone would. That’s maybe the pleasure of being able to make a movie of a novel you love.

Dan: One things that movies do well is take complicated, rich, knotty novels, and turn them into swiftly-moving, emotionally potent stories. So when adaptations retain even a semblance of the original’s complexity, I view that as sort of like whipped cream.

Claire: I also like whipped cream.

Dan Kois says if you think Fassbender was hot in this, you haven’t seen Fish Tank yet.

Claire Jarvis is an assistant professor in the English department at Stanford University. She does not care about Tom Bombadil.

by David Roth and David Raposa

Baseball: it is slow, and sometimes you see sexagenarians, who are not necessarily in shape, walking around in pinstriped uniforms otherwise worn by guys several decades younger. It is drowsy and arcane and there are bro-tats and shark’s tooth necklaces and action-less stretches that stretch towards the 45-minute mark. It is during one of these stretches — dudes just kind of milling around, a concerned and mustachioed old grump trotting arthritically towards the mound, the broadcasters maybe a bit tipsy or maybe not — that you should probably imagine the maunderings to follow occurring. Pretend we’re some place that smells like hot dogs and old, soft, translucently fried things. It’ll make it seem more realistic.

David Raposa: So maybe it was something I ate or inherited, but Billy Ripken seems to be a sensible baseball analyst. I did not expect as much from Professor Batknob. Granted, he’s butting heads with Harold Reynolds and Sean The Mayor Casey’s goatee on the MLB network, so the bar to be cleared ain’t that high.

David Roth: It is easy to look sensible when you’re sitting next to a loud n’ bloaty Mitch Williams, but I wouldn’t have expected that from Ripken. I always thought of him as baseball’s answer to Juliette Lewis in “The Other Sister.”

David Raposa: Well, I’m half listening, but just the fact that he doesn’t seem to put much stock into his opinions and seems willing to be wrong — and cops to that — is a plus for me.

David Roth: Yeah, that’s definitely unique and definitely welcome. Maybe that’s the modesty that comes with hitting .230 and being the ballplaying Ripken who probably couldn’t get elected to the Senate with 80 percent of the vote. That and being best known for profanely punking his own self on a Fleer card.

David Raposa: We’ve all been Fuckfaced. (Don’t mind me repeatedly typing Fuckface.)

David Roth: I could never mind that. I guess you’d say that Ripken fuckfaced himself? Hopefully you wouldn’t say it out loud, though.

David Raposa: Though you’ll have to take my opining with a salt lick the size of Utah. I tuned into a Braves game today and (speaking of fuckfaces) Chip Caray sounded good.

David Roth: Oh man. That is the spring fucking with you(r face?). Because Chip Caray should not be sounding good, period. He should be sounding drowsy and distracted. It should be very obvious that he’s reading Men’s Health or something while simultaneously calling the game.

David Raposa: I’ve been watching way too many NBA games. After months of Tom Heinsohn and Eric Reid and Neil Funk and “hand down, man down,” John Sterling turning infield flies into A-Rod A-bombs is gonna sound like Alec Baldwin reading selections from the Best American Erotica series.

David Roth: I will confess to preferring awkward, ineffective ex-players as commentators, though. Big Mike Macfarlane guy. I liked that he spoke like he was in a hostage video. Seemed authentic. That was the real Mike Macfarlane. He was really that uncomfortable talking.

David Roth: The thing I remember enjoying most about MLB League Pass, when I had it, was getting to listen to other teams’ goofy announcers. Like a half-in-the-bag Mark Grace reading some sponsored text — “If you thought that Gerardo Parra bloop-double was exciting, you should really check out some of the deals at Kia of Scottsdale. Because that is some exciting shit… okay, definitely spilled Jim Beam Red Stag on my notes.” I always thought you could hear Grace spitting tobacco into a Snapple bottle on air.

David Raposa: The farther you get from the coasts, the more the broadcasters sound like they’re doing time in a minor league park. I like to imagine Dan Gladden sits in the booth in a toilet bowl costume, practicing his script.

David Roth: I am going to do a Google image search for him right now. Because I definitely want to see how Gladden’s wearing his hair these days. It was just cascading hair-wedge of ill-advised early ’90s excess in his prime.

David Raposa: I’m gonna go out on a limb & say the party’s over, but he’s still doing business (with a reduced work force).

David Raposa: Oh, my bad, he’s a Nickleback roadie.

David Roth: Oh man. Looking good. Someone got some Gary Carter in my Gunnar Nelson.

David Raposa: Though I look like something that’s primed to swallow Don Orsillo, so I should tread lightly.

David Roth: I have never personally met or seen you, but I am very sure that you are above the aesthetic Mendoza Line that is a candid photo of Dan Gladden.

David Raposa: I’m going to go with “off-season Sid Fernandez.”

David Roth: Little chunks of pineapple and ham on all your clothes. It’s not the worst look.

David Raposa: Speaking of the Mets (and fantastic segues), any thoughts on the team using R.A. Dickey to pimp out the 2011 season?

David Roth: Only good thoughts. I know it’s a little goofy that a notionally big-time franchise is using a bearded knuckleballer as a marketing linchpin, but Dickey is just the greatest. He’s writing an autobiography, which would be the first baseball book I bought new since… I don’t know, is there a book called Karros On Karros, or did I dream that? I remember there being a lot of recipes in Karros On Karros. An unconventional approach to lamb. A long chapter about how his yia-yia helped him learn to pull the ball.

David Raposa: R.A. Dickey is writing an autobiography?

David Roth: Yes, he is. He’s apparently a voracious reader. And goes on walkabouts in the country when he needs to think. Got a Tennessee accent that is almost effeminate because it’s so enunciative. He’s basically Jeremiah Johnson, only he makes an amazing/scary face when he pitches and throws my favorite pitch.

David Raposa: OH SHIT

David Roth: I’m stealing this from a Mets blogger, I think, but it’s like he’s actually saying his first name — and pronouncing it “RAAAH” — while he’s pitching.

David Raposa: I’ve always been too busy watching the action on his “heat” to notice the mightiness of his yawp. But you don’t think the Mets using him as a selling point smacks of “The Cleveland Cavaliers — now with more Alonzo Gee!”

David Roth: I mean, yes, it does. But I’m probably too close to really assess this. Anything Dickey-related is basically narrow-casted at me. I am in — and maybe just AM — the demographic to whom a soft-spoken, bearded knuckleballer who reads Faulkner is most appealing.

David Raposa: He’s the spice in the Bloody Mary, though, not the celery stick that you stir it with.

David Roth: That is true. And on a good team he’s the pickled okra in the Bloody Mary that you maybe don’t eat. But these are the Mets. And you don’t want to see Mike Pelfrey in those ads either, really. I’ve seen him do promo videos at Citi Field, and he is not the most naturalistic on-camera presence.

David Raposa: I shouldn’t talk, since my bandwagon of choice (Boston) did some slo-mo, black-and-white, Citizen Kane bullshit to herald the arrival of Carl Crawford.

David Roth: He gave a speech in front of a giant banner of his own face?

David Raposa: That might’ve been more tasteful. (Of course, I can’t find footage of the actual promo, so I might be exaggerating a smidge.) I dunno, though. They’re the Animal Collective of MLB. It’s so depressing (or maybe “depressing”).

David Roth: There are worse things than being the Animal Collective of baseball. Although the “some people like them, many people REALLY HATE THEM” thing is definitely true.

David Roth: This also opens some interesting questions. The Brewers are obviously the Killdozer of MLB, and I don’t think anyone would argue with that. But who is the New Wet Kojak of baseball?

David Raposa: I’ll say the Tigers, because Jim Leyland is the baseball version of Scott McCloud. And not just because they’re both gruff snugglebunnies.

David Roth: So can I ask you to expand a bit upon the Animal Collective thing? (Also if you please which player is Panda Bear)

David Raposa: Bobby Jenks!

David Roth: DUNKED

David Raposa: As far as AnCo goes: for me, it’s just another way of saying they’re the standard-bearer that everyone loves to hate or love and has to talk about if they’re going to talk about This Thing.

David Roth: That makes sense, actually. In the abstract, I like them fine — Sox and Animal Collective, actually — but there are limits. Animal Collective presumably has fewer surly, goateed fans wearing green Youkilis name-and-number t-shirts to bars and desperately trying to start wing-breathy arguments.

David Raposa: Maybe there are also parallels to the way their front office uses non-traditional approaches to baseball analysis to get shit done. Though even Hawk Harrelson thinks paying for Carl Crawford and Adrian Gonzalez makes sense.

David Roth: The only people who seem not to like Theo Epstein are your weirder and more fulminative Boston sports trolls on that city’s (Philly-grade nightmarish) sports radio stations. They want Fred Lynn GMing the team and drinking Narragansetts during press conferences. Calling Josh Beckett a baby for getting blisters and making racially iffy comments about Dice-K.

David Raposa: Yeah, Theo’s the stat nerd that’s bro enough to be liked (PEARL JAM!), as opposed to the DePodestas of the world (SPREADSHEETS!). Don’t hate on the trolls, though; they’re keeping the JETER SUCKS / A-ROD SWALLOWS t-shirt cottage industry alive.

David Roth: There’s a non-friend of one of my Boston friends who basically made his living selling Oxys and Jeter Sucks/A-Rod Swallows t-shirts. Not at the same time, I think.

David Raposa: Why not at the same time? Know your markets!

David Roth: One thing I remember from going to Yankees games when I was a kid were guys selling “Baltimore Blows” t-shirts outside Yanks/O’s games. Which just hardly seems worth it at all. I almost wish I’d bought one, now. Not because I think Baltimore blows — although every American-born player on their team seems pretty reprehensible, and Luke Scott seems a slump away from doing something unwise with an assault rifle — but because it would prove the shirt really existed.

David Raposa: This was back when the Orioles were worth a blow, wasn’t it? Or at least a quick handjob?

David Roth: It was just so witless. Maybe there were “The Royals Are Not That Good” t-shirts for sale, too, and I missed them. These were decent-ish O’s teams, though. They could’ve gone with Deveraux Blauxs. (“Ripken Is A Fuckface” was, of course, already redundant.)

David Raposa: I think they were starting with alliteration and working towards slant rhymes. If Albert Belle’s hip didn’t crumble, who knows what kind of poesy would’ve been unleashed?

David Roth: Horrifying. The prospect. And also Albert Belle in general. It’s always kind of amusing to me how, despite the desultory “Mark McGwire Was/Was Not Robbed of Hall of Fame Honors” columns every year, no one seems all that bothered by the fact that Belle is not in the Hall only because he is an a-hole of terrifying, world-historic proportions.

David Raposa: That would be an acceptance speech worth bronzing. Or maybe not. Unless he went aggro prop comic on Cooperstown.

David Roth: Smashing melons for sure. I imagine Belle crying up there, and then explaining that it was because there were so many people he hadn’t punched yet. “I see Peter Angelos out there. I want to punch him a lot. And all my old teammates, Eddie Murray and Harold Baines. I would punch the shit out of them.”

David Raposa: Maybe he could have Jason Grimsley crawl across the stage and slip him some brass knuckles. And then give Bud Selig a hotfoot as he slithered off, stage left.

David Roth: Teamwork. That’s how you win.

David Roth co-writes the

Wall Street Journal’s Daily Fix, contributes to the sports blog Can’t Stop the Bleeding and has his own little website. And he tweets!

David Raposa writes about music for Pitchfork and other places. He used to write about baseball for the blog formerly known as Yard Work. He occasionally blogs for himself, and he also tweets way too much.

Photo by Kyle McCluer.

I’m Terribly Conflicted About Whether To Tell You What I Found In My Satur Farms Salad Box From Whole Foods

by Daniel Roberts

So I’ve been massively vacillating about whether or not to write about what I found in my Satur Farms salad box this week. (By the way, for those of you who are familiar with this brand, don’t you always think it looks like Satur should be Saturn? Doesn’t it seem like the ’n’ was just left off as some sort of typo?)

Here is what happened: On Sunday, March 27, I bought a box of Satur Farms salad greens at Whole Foods and brought it home, only to find the finger from a rubber glove inside. It was unfortunate; I love Satur Farms products, and wish the company no ill will. I also do not blame Whole Foods in any way, as they don’t make this product, but merely carry it. I’ve made a video of my experience (you’ll find it below) but I don’t know if I should write about it. I’m not sure I should announce that I found a rubber glove in my Satur Farms salad box. First of all, I wonder if I would be screwing myself out of some kind of restitution or reward. If I choose to do this quietly by sending a letter to the company, perhaps they will give me a lifetime supply of salad? If I write about it, then it’s “out there” and they’d have no reason to send me anything. In fact, they’d probably just be pissed.

Then again, that first explanation presupposes an angry company that will be bitter and wish to argue with me. A second possibility, and the second reason I’m hesitant, is that it’s a nice company, this was a rare accident (perfectly likely), and by writing about it, I’d be causing a ‘shit storm’ that may result in bad things for Satur Farms employees. I remember how the woman who claimed to find a finger in her Wendy’s chili made a lot of trouble for Wendy’s, and I wouldn’t want anything like that to happen to Satur.

Speaking of that Wendy’s faker, my third reason for feeling cautious about writing about this is the possibility that people might accuse me of making this up, as she did. I don’t think anything about me screams “person looking to create Internet fame by orchestrating a fake food incident,” but who knows? I mean, who would even think of such a specific thing as the finger from a rubber glove? If I wanted to make up a dramatic scenario, I think I’d find a cockroach. Or dogshit.

Finally, I don’t want to become ‘known’ for this incident. The Internet works in strange ways — zeitgest!! — we never know what will really grab people. There’s a chance that if I write about it, a few people will read it, comment “Gross!” and that’ll be that. And this is the scenario I choose to envision. But there’s also the possibility, however distant, that it would ‘go viral’ and get mad hitz, in which case, God forbid, I’d become “the guy who found a rubber glove in his salad.” I would probably have to go on TV and stuff.

Still, this is hardly comparable to finding maggots in a Big Mac. In a way, though, it’s even more upsetting, since this is a health-food product bought at Whole Foods, whereas if you eat at McDonald’s, what do you expect? I felt so good about myself, buying my salad at Whole Foods with all the other nice-looking health freaks, but now what did I get in return? A rubber glove. And not even a whole one!

I’m going to head to Whole Foods as soon as I can (it’s a 15-block walk and I recently hurt my foot), and when I do, you know what? I think I’ll just return the salad and get my money back. That’s all I want out of this. I think it’d be over the top to write about it and tell everyone. I’m going to keep it to myself.

Daniel Roberts is a magazine reporter in New York.

“One minister tells parliament’s speaker to ‘go screw yourself’, another hurls his electronic ID card at opposition benches and a coalition legislator calls a wheelchair-bound colleague ‘stupid cripple’. Even by Italian standards…”

Watch this one with the volume off, because otherwise you will find yourself filled with homicidal rage against the anchor and his idiot patter. But do watch it, because OH MY GOD AWWW.