The Tortoise and the Hare is a tale as old as time, even if it isn’t sung by everyone’s True Grandmother Angela Lansbury. The hare is lean, lithe, and lightning fast. In comparison, it seems the tortoise is loafing, langorous, and locomotively lugubrious. The hubris-pilled hare challenges the tortoise to a race, giving little stock to the tired tenacity of said tortoise. We all know how this ends: The Hare was later found shot in the woods near Tortoise’s home, a large hammer found near his body. The tortoise continues to live a long, fruitful life, having been cleared of any wrong-doing by a court made of moles and squirrels. Perhaps his crime will never catch up to him.

Baby we are back, and if we’re not better than ever, we are every bit back as we better be! While our sentences remain gnarled and cumbersome, the mission also remains: Make my editor squint really hard to make sure I meant to make a grammar error, and more importantly: Find the fantasy baseball blurbs that provide the greatest of chuckles, so that you too may share in the wealth of this silliest of obsessions. Mostly we’re here to gingerly place two colons in one sentence to test whether this crime of punctuation will result in my body crushed under a tall bookshelf of moldy old grammar textbooks.

Can anything be creative if it follows a template? Why does doubt exist as the world’s worst art critic?

All this to say that I will once again spend a Blurbstomp talking about a baseball player getting hurt in his pee pee place.

Somewhere in the mountains of Colorado, you trek through the snow and notice four paw prints. It’s a wolf’s tracks, fresh in the powder. You follow, one foot after the next, as if pulled by an invisible wire, a waking dream that could tip into nightmare at any moment. The night sky billows above you, as the tracks tighten up. The wolf is slowing.

As you reach the summit, the tracks merge. They are the tracks of a man. Your pulse quickens, your shallow breathing pauses as the altitude fights a battle against your common sense. You push forward.

The summit reached, you see him. Bud Black. He stands resolutely, a lumpen totem pole stoic in the face of the savage solitude of his surroundings.

“You’re here to kill me?” he says in a knowing voice without turning. You say nothing.

Once a person is released from the shackles of formal education, they begin to accrue “formers.” One is a former student. After working as a barrista, one is a former coffee shop employee. Some are either cursed or lucky enough to find their path and stick to the plan. As I was sifting through the […]

I am late on this. Rotowire has taken over as the primary source for blurbs on Yahoo’s fantasy baseball page. You may think this passage will not apply to players using CBS, Fantrax, NFBC, or hell geocities, but I promise you this is going somewhere. And if you’re a long-time reader, you know my promises are real and rendered coherently.

Three weeks out from going on vacation, one tends to start making lists. A packing list, a house cleaning list, maybe even a list of things to do (unless it’s one of those all-inclusive resorts I used to hate on until I crossed the threshold of 30 years of age and realized that paying to […]

Some time in the last two weeks, a great schism occurred. It was silent, sweeping in with nary an announcement or erstwhile PR proclamation. The tapestry of our lives, the utter sauce to our specific pasta, altered with the stroke of fingers tapping on the loneliest keyboard: Rotoworld player notes were removed from the Yahoo fantasy baseball website.

This week I daydreamed about what fantasy sports might look like in twenty years. At that point I’ll be close to 60, a fossil more likely to bend your ear to remind you that glaciers were real than ask how your day is going. As soon as one hits AARP Magazine eligibility age, one wins […]

Popularity contests are interesting curios. As someone with a fondness for the science of the most far-fetched lens for criticism, judging anything via “popularity” is asking for a set of results sure to kindle antipathy, if not outright contempt. All data from a popularity contest is anecdotal and drowning in the sweet sauces of Recency and Confirmation Biases. It can also become a beacon for bad-faith bullying conspiracies, where voters band together to award popularity to a person not wanting the spotlight for fear of being mocked.