You don’t hafta go home, but …

Busy week back, right?

By now, hopefully you’ve told your friends that Mister Faded Glory is back, he’s here to stay, and if this were 2001 – he’d be on the cutting-fucking-edge of blogging.  It would also be nice if you mentioned I’m brilliant.

A few other topics bounded through my brain this week, didn’t make it to Twitter, and weren’t quite up to the task of dampening my ever-souring mood. Now that you’re on the edge of your seat, here you go.

• From our contrarian friends at Slate: American beer sales are flat because the beer is terrible.

I’m paraphrasing of course, but that’s the gist of The Big Money’s assertion, also doffing a cap to the continued expansion and relative strength of “blue-collar” (or blue-collar-poseur) brands PBR and Yuengling. TBM cites their growing market share due to becoming veritable “hipster” beers (and wouldn’t Slate know…) simply by staying true to bursting flavor, chewable  aftertaste, thudding hangovers, and tried-and-true formula. (I remember one year my local college liquor store was liquidating its Pabst Light. Three bucks for a case, and one could easily drink 30 cans in a night. It tasted like pickle juice. Ah, memories.)

Anyway, it’s kind of nice to imagine the crappy brands of American beer suffering as the public grows (gasp!) some taste. (Also, The Big Lead only drinks Coors Light. Judge if you must.)

But it’s even more fun to imagine the Slate eggheads writing this evaluation of the beer market, attempting to snidely choose which brand to turn their noses up.

• “Ugh…Pabst. Disgusting. But I can’t wait to have one. It’s so lame, it’s cool.”
• “I only drink lagers brewed in the west end of Prague. Budweiser? What am I, a Republican?
  
• “I prefer Miller Red, when was the last time you saw anyone drinking that? Exactly.”
• “Samuel Adams would turn in his grave if he (a) drank his tepid lager, or (b) knew that the state of Massachusetts features a governor like Mitt Romney. Bah!”
• “I found a place on the upper west side that serves only two beers: Red Dog in a tin can or Nebraska’s own Hopluia - served out of a Derby hat. Phenomenal!”

• The inimitable John Feinstein, who might even be more cantankerous than me. (Of course, he can easily afford to be more cantankerous than me.) eloquently and pointedly responded to the perfect-game and bad-call circumstances that blew up Twitter earlier this week. Allow me to sum up my thoughts:

The perfect game and bad-call in Detroit turned my stomach. I wasn’t mad; I felt pity for both the no-name pitcher, Armando Galarraga, and Jim Joyce, the Ulysses-writing umpire. The pitcher lost his (probably only) day in the sun, and the umpire gained a day in the sun he couldn’t have wanted. And normally, I roll my eyes at the Twitterati (BOO) and the knee jerk sports talkers, who claimed the Commish needs to STEP IN NOW WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE RIGHT THIS WRONG FIX THIS PROBLEM BUD BRING IN INSTANT REPLAY AND MAKE THIS SHIT MORE LIKE THE NFL.

It was downright exhausting. The commentary and idiocracy made the whole situation more untenable than it really was, which actually served as an uplifting portrait of human nature. Read Pos’ fantastic post if you don’t believe me.

Enter Feinstein, who argues for the best solution in points so eloquent and incisive that it deserves reprint:

“There is NO reasonable argument against this. To those who say Selig is setting a dangerous precedent I say this: fine. Let him declare that at any time in the future if a pitcher gets the first 26 outs of a game and then fails to get the 27th on a clearly blown call by an umpire who instantly says he blew the call, he will do the same thing. There’s your precedent. Now let’s sit back and wait for it to happen again.

Last night, Ken Burns, the noted baseball historian, was on Keith Olbermann’s show. He started going on about ‘unraveling the sweater,’ by reversing this call. He brought up Bucky Dent’s home run [and corked bat] … He mentioned the Giants stealing signs prior to the Bobby Thomson home run and Mark McGwire’s steroid-induced home runs.

Oh please. Those are ridiculous analogies. For one thing, they involve cheating, not an out-and-out honest mistake that has been confessed to by the person who made the mistake.”

He goes on, and it’s worth your time. As for me, I totally agree. John failed to mention, however, that whatever decision “Baseball purists” would make, we should always do the opposite.

I love baseball. But I cannot stand the traditionalist pomp, circumstance and poetry that the self-righteous protectors of the game (like Burns, above) continually quote in order to preserve tradition or soliloquys or baseball sonnets or days of yore. You won’t find a slice of fanhood more pretentious. Not until the World Cup begins, anyway.

• I was going to link to this Procrastination Test (h/t Lifehacker), as sort of a public service. I would take it first, and then inform you all whether or not it delivered an accurate assessment.

However, once I got to the test, it looked sort of long and arduous. So I minimized the window, put it aside, and announced I’d do it later.

(looks around.)

THUD.

Oh, come on. HUMOR LIKE THIS is why you come back to Mister Faded Glory. ADMIT IT.