Duh: Phillies Fans Hate The Phillies

In recent years, the Phillies have made a distinct effort to get fans to vote in the All-Star Game. The Phanatic wears a jersey reminding fans to vote for their favorite Phillies as All-Stars. (Wes Helms and Rod Barajas are surely getting a lot of votes.) The Phils even use oh-so-cute ballgirls to urge fans to make sure Chase Utley gets in. Oh, and ushers collect the ballots, Dan Baker reminds you to vote and the Phillies’ website also urges fans to pop out those chads at the ballpark or vote online.

Too bad it’s not working. An article — not really scientific, since MLB doesn’t announce all of the vote totals — done today by Nate Silver’s Baseball Prospectus attempts to gauge how many votes a player gains or loses by playing for a particular team. (It’s behind a paywall.) It’s based on a player’s VORP, which fans don’t really vote based on, but it’s a fun study nonetheless.

And, gee, the Phillies don’t do all that well. The Phillies’ rank 27th in the league, in front of only the Indians, Rockies and Marlins. A player gets more votes — or, rather, loses fewer — by playing for the Devil Rays. By playing for the Phillies, a player can expect to lose 205,883 votes. If one plays for the Mets, he gains 435,030. From the article:

There are also different types of “homerism” between different sets of fans. Fans in the northeast are very loyal to their clubs, with the notable exception of Philadelphia, a contrarian city where fans will find any excuse to rag on their own players.

Oh, now, come on. We rarely need an excuse; we’re being realists.

Lies, Damned Lies: All-Star Balloting [Baseball Prospectus]

Subject Line Of The Week

Somebody, please, return this guy’s notebook: He had a bunch of notes on how to spell common words in there.

Writer looses Notebook [Craigslist]

The Exciting Conclusion To The Popeye Snuff Comic

Yesterday, every child who’s ever had a dream when watching Popeye that one day Olive Oyl would be portrayed in a snuff comic had the best day of his or her life. (Not that any of these people exist, but let’s pretend.) Yesterday’s Popeye comic strip featured Olive Oyl gleefully laughing as she pointed a gun at her head, ready to end her life.

Today, the story gets weirder, kinda.

Okay, so it was all a joke. What makes this strip almost as disturbing as yesterday’s is this: In today’s third panel, all three characters’ brains (as small as they are) are replaced with dogs’ brains. Popeye is going “Arf,” Olive Oyl with boobs is going “Grr,” and Olive Oyl herself is drinking from a fairly unsanitary location.

You know, fake suicide jokes could be funny, I guess, if they were actually funny. I am interested to see where this dog plotline goes, though. Maybe Popeye will sniff Bluto’s ass!

Popeye 6.28.07 [Houston Chronicle]
Yesterday: Popeye The Sadist Man

Correction Of The Week

Take it away, Camden Courier Post:

A rabid raccoon was found Tuesday on Woodlane Drive in Moorestown. A story Wednesday was incorrect.

But what was the error?

Correction 6.28.07 [Camden Courier-Post]

Philly Loses Meaningless Distinction

Despite the best efforts of, ah, Joey Sweeney and uwishunu, Philadelphia has finally slipped enough in population and has fallen behind Phoenix according to the census bureau. Philadelphia has been rumored to have fallen to sixth about 4500 times since 2000, but the Arizona city has finally “officially” passed us.

The complaint, of course, is that Phoenix can annex its suburbs and soon will be as large as the entire state of Arizona. This was the same complaint Philadelphians lodged over a century ago when Chicago passed Philly to become the second largest city in the country. If you’re scoring at home, that means Philly’s been getting screwed for over 100 years and nothing has changed. (The Phillies sucked then, too.)

The Philly metro area (Philly-Camden-Wilmington) has also been passed for fourth place by the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. It’s probably best to blame Camden here, so that’s what we’re going to do: Hey, Camden! Thanks for knocking us into fifth, you bums!

All hope is not lost, though. While there may be fewer of us, Philadelphia still is fourth in one important category: Time spent in front of the idiot box.

One population category in which the Philadelphia area still can claim fourth place, at least for now, is as a media market. According to Nielsen Media Research, we trail only New York, Los Angeles and Chicago in total potential viewers within range of our local television stations. By the way, Dallas ranks sixth on that score, Phoenix 13th.

Woohoo! Now get us our MLS team so we can stop watching stupid reality shows or whatever. Nah, just kidding, that’s what we’ll do anyway.

Census hits city where it counts [Inquirer]

Abridged ‘Daily News’ Columnists

Stu Bykofsky: Other people like Philadelphia, bitches!

Jill Porter: Rittenhouse is open for all to play music in, as well as do other things! Well, okay, not from 1 a.m. - 5 a.m., when it’s closed.

Alycia Lane Bikini Comments, Part 2

I’ve decided that for the rest of the week — and by “the week,” I mean today and tomorrow — I’m going to edit the words “Alycia Lane” in relation to seeing her in a bikini like I did yesterday.

Today’s winner is Erin O’Hearn, the 6 ABC reporter — who’s quite good, actually — and who is much like Alycia Lane in that she’s a woman and she works on a local TV station.

Yes, I realize I’m “encouraging” the Alycia Lane bikini comments by responding to them, but whatever, now that I’ve figured out how to do a reasonable approximation of scotch tape in Photoshop¹, it’s on. If you’re wondering why today’s change isn’t particularly funny, it’s because I’m just setting youse up for tomorrow. Duh. If you’re wondering why the woman in the photo I chose has big breasts, uh, I’m a guy.²

¹ Make a new layer, fill in a scotch-tape sized box with light gray (#cccccc if possible) and set opacity to about 50-60 percent.

² Only half true. It was also the first match on Google Image Search. Laziness trumps everything, really.

Yesterday: Regarding The Alycia Lane Bikini Comments

Everyone’s Suing Allen Iverson These Days

Although he’s been out of the city since being traded last winter, it’s still nice to see what Allen Iverson is up to nowadays. (Remember him? #1 pick? Led the team to the 2001 Finals? Come on, that wasn’t that long ago! The city went nuts for it! Sigh.)

Anyway, apparently since he left town he’s being sued by everyone who’s been in a nightclub with him. As usual, the alleged problem isn’t A.I. himself, but his goofy entourage, who without Jerry Stackhouse’s posse to rumble with anymore is sometimes down to causing other trouble.

He’s being sued for $20 million in federal civil court over an alleged beating his posse delivered to two men who sat in his reserved seats at a nightclub in D.C. The plaintiffs even wanted 50 Cent to testify because he’s familiar with Iverson’s security crew. The judge denied this, natch, since 50 Cent wasn’t at the nightclub, nor does he live in the DC area.

However, the court may be entertained a bit, since the plaintiffs’ attorneys are asking for the right to show an episode of Punk’d.

It seems the clip shows Iverson being told that he can’t get into a nightclub party until the Bush twins leave — totally not true, ha ha, but a typical gag from the VIP practical-joke TV show — and a friend getting up in the bouncer’s face insisting that he has to get his man inside. This is relevant, lawyers say, because it shows the relationship Iverson had with the entourage[.]

Ha ha, that was a great episode of Punk’d. Then Iverson joined up with the Punk’d crew and got to punk Jermaine O’Neal, remember? Man, that was sweet. If I was a judge I’d totally want to watch that episode again.

Oh, and another lawsuit against A.I. is moving forward as well from a 2004 incident. If he loses both lawsuits, I think he’ll be okay, because I hear he has lots of money bagz.

Can He Handle Defense At This Kind of Court? [WaPo]
Names & Faces [WaPo]

How Many Philadelphians Does It Take To Use A Parking Meter?

At Headhouse Square recently, the Philadelphia Parking Authority did pretty much the first good thing it’s ever done¹, replacing those normal meters that need quarters that you don’t have with a bunch of those fancy new meters that take bills, credit cards and change you don’t have.

The machines aren’t right in front of spaces, but there are six of them for the 44 spaces at 2nd and South. The PPA likes the new machines because it will be alerted when there are problems (with Wi-Fi??) and it frees up sidewalk space for, you know, walkin’.

We Philadelphians hate the machines because we’re too fucking stupid to use them. The Inquirer’s Katie Stuhldreher in my favorite story of the day:

“I’ve lived around here a long time and I just want to know what the heck is going on. What was wrong with the old meters?” said Hilda Schoenwetter, a retired teacher who parks frequently at Head House Square. [...]

Ed Gray, a driver looking for a space, said he didn’t like having to walk over to the meter in the middle of the block instead of having one right at his parking space.

Maryann Dolan, seeking a space so she could bring her dog in for a doctor’s appointment, looked at one new meter and said: “I don’t know what I’m doing here. I think it’s just ridiculous.”

Yeah, those meters sure are hard. So hard that 95 percent of Portland’s meters use the technology and the city has descended into a pit of lawlessness. The real problem mentioned in the article, where a machine wouldn’t take a woman’s credit card, forced the woman to go into Wawa to get change… which is what she had to do with the old meters.

(Oh, yea, the other problem is you now are pretty much guaranteed a ticket if you run over your time limit, since it’s so much easier for the meter maids to write ‘em. So, yeah, that sucks.)

Anyway, that’s not to say the PPA did everything right here.

In order to ease some of the initial confusion about the machines, the Parking Authority assigned “meter greeters” for the first week of operation to explain how the new meters work. But now Philadelphians are on their own.

I think it might be time to just blow up the entire city and start over.

¹ I don’t really know what I’m basing this on, but as a rule, pretty much every government organization does only one or two good things every 50 years, if ever.

New parking meters on Head House Square confuse many [Inquirer]

Road To 10,000 Losses: Larry Bowa, Working Hard To Contribute To All 10,000 Phillies Losses

So, yes, in the paper today I wrote about the 10,000 Losses thing, basically focusing on the historical awfulness of the Phillies. Lest you think I’ve possible exhausted all the bad stories about the Phillies on this blog, ha ha ha. There’s enough awfulness about the Phillies to fill three Wikipedias. My story begins with an 11-year-old boy the Phillies had arrested 80 years ago because he pocketed a foul ball hit into the stands. I’d like to say he’ll be sharing a room with the streaker from earlier this year in Phillies Heaven.

Anyway, we ran a sidebar of local bloggers who wrote their favorite “awful” Phillies stories, and some of them weren’t able to make it into the paper because of length or my Gmail account sucking. As such, here is the amazing account of A.J. Daulerio of Phillymag (and Deadspin) fame at a game following Sept. 11.

I believe it was September 17, 2001 and the Phillies, like the rest of Major League Baseball, had supposedly put together a tribute to recognizing every one lost after 9/11. Most other teams coming back after the week-long break had tasteful tributes with military personnel, flag waving, and heartfelt national anthems sung by either established stars or, at the very minimum, people who could actually sing. The Phillies organization decided to stick with the same entertainment that they had scheduled for that evening prior to the attacks: a middle-aged female barbershop quartet-like group, frumpily decked out in sweatshirts and turtlenecks. After the ladies’ wince-worthy renditions of God Bless America and the National Anthem — which they breezed through in, oh, maybe two minutes — most of the crowd expecting to be uplifted and inspired, appeared to have actually been made to feel worse. Best part? It was one of the first nationally televised games after the attacks. Goosebumps?

Wasn’t this the game where they showed Larry Bowa crying during the National Anthem? Maybe he was actually crying because it was so bad.

After the jump, another long story involving Larry Bowa and, of course, Minor Threat.

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