Earlier this month, ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball presented a Pirates/Cubs game with a debutant by the name of Steven Brault cast in the role of Pittsburgh’s starting pitcher. (Two weeks before that, ESPN had shown a Pirates/Dodgers game. It was less memorable for affording a rare chance to see the Dodgers on television than it was for the Pirates’ rookie making his debut on an MLB mound, Chad Kuhl. Kuhl is a definite 9 I was talking about for theRead more

An extremely poorly kept secret in today’s America is the straight man’s questionable practice of rating women on a scale of 1 to 10. Far from being the product of the current fetishistic quantification of practically everything, I assume the practice either antedates or originated with the movie 10, which, in 1979, made an icon of Bo Derek (and misled white women into thinking that corn rows were a good idea.) Such was the impact of the “10” concept atRead more

The television event of this past weekend was undoubtedly the finale of the sixth season of that most entertaining telenovela-for-dudes, Game of Thrones. While it was diverting for its 70-minute length, one also needs to admit that, while labeled a finale, the episode’s main purpose was to get all the narrative ducks into a row for the coming season. The finale only contained one big piece of action, and one all-important reveal: the dramatic climax of the season turns outRead more