Win On Diagonals

I once saw a documentary on an aging Yiddish Community in Southern California. I saw it for an anthropology class in College. The film itself was half memorable, a fairly interesting account of a moribund community, chock full of entertaining, sometimes engrossing stories from elderly Yiddish speaking people. Well, one quote that has imprinted itself in that chamber of mind that acts as a sort of vessel for information or narratives that don’t have some sort of direct or ‘meaningful’ impact/resonance in one’s mind is the following: “If a man cannot tell a story while he sews, he is lost.”

Ok, sure…why is this at all germane to me, this blog, or of interest. Fair enough. I won’t answer that, but it came swimming into my mind as if just clamoring, near death, without breathe onto a shore of nurturing and revitalization. It came swimming when I did the following…

My dear friend Thomas T is going to stop by my place tonight in Mineola, NY. It’s a slightly dreary late March rainy night. This town, and it’s environs is certainly not the ideal place for one looking for night life, or anything like that, but a quiet pub with decent beer/wine…whatever would do. Tom happens to have his electronic ‘Battleship’ in his Toyota Echo. He mentioned that we should bring the game with us to the bar. That got my brain scrambling for a slightly more interesting place to play such a game. After trawling through a few comma inducing ‘LI Bar/night life’ web sites; I came upon the following: 

Jugs-N-Strokers!

Yes, it’s a crude topic. It came to me on a drive to the local blockbuster…. Why not assign a sex act to each Major League Baseball team. This would assuredly be a topic that would create quite an umbrage storm, as much as it would delight certain fans (casual or otherwise,) of the old national pastime. I won’t pretend that my prejudices and long time eccentric baseball likes and dislikes, long standing diss reflexes, won’t play a part in this. I was a die-hard Yankee fan in the 80′s and early 90′s who’s love of the team died for a variety of reasons, including their Gucci-pink hat corporate, super clean cut makeover…change… Money’s complete dominance in the game changes things for me to. One has to remember, that the first multi million dollar contract did not happen that long ago (historically speaking.) I think it started with Kirby Puckett in late 80′s…but my trivia or general knowledge of the game is not what it once.

My brother and I started riffing on this idea on our way to pick up the film ‘Big Fan,’ with Patton Oswalt.  So, I will try to at least begin this list in the hopes of giving each team a certain sex act that will somehow represent them as an ‘organization.’ Yes, I know this is crude, lewd, idiotic, impossible to substantiate, and might offend the very thin skinned, and humorless… That’s why I’m doing it…well not really….but that may be a bonus… So without further ado… Let us begin.

1. The New York Mets: The drunken blow job of the Majors

2. The Pittsburgh Pirates: The unprotected anal sex of MLB

3. The Seattle Mariners: The ill fitting dildo of the Majors

4. The New York Yankees: The ‘Spitzer’ of the Majors (contribution by Mike G

5. The San Diego Padres: The Testicle Jiggling kings of the NL West

6. The Baltimore Orioles: The boob cock slide that never get’s to orgasm

7. The Oakland Athletics; The lumbering hand job

8. The Philadelphia Phillies: The unexplained money shot

9. The Texas Rangers; The missionary position of the Majors

10. The St. Louis Cardinals: The doggy style of the NL Central

(Ok… I will stop for now. I need some ginger ale. Please, help me complete this list my laudable readers. Go…….find that position that ‘fits.’

“When predators have exhausted the economy, they turn on each other. The result is financial cannibalism. After all, who else is it possible to get money from in today’s negative equity environment?

“If the media are missing anything, it’s that the game is over. The financial institutions are taking their money and running. They know it’s over. And the only source of cashing out is the US Treasury and Fed.

“My solution:There is an easy place to start, that can take only a few weeks. That is to look at the Fed’s $1.3 trillion in cash-for-trash swaps. If these prove to be junk mortgages for which the Fed has given good US Treasury bonds, at the proverbial taxpayer expense, then the Fed and Treasury administrators should have criminal charges brought against them, the accounting firms of the companies pledging these junk mortgages and other financial junk should be closed down and RICO charges brought, and the banks themselves should be wiped out. I have urged the appropriate Washington oversight committee to open an investigation along these lines.”

The financial sector has imposed huge externalities on the rest of society. America’s financial industry polluted the world with toxic mortgages, and, in line with the well established “polluter pays” principle, taxes should be imposed on it. Besides, well-designed taxes on the financial sector might help alleviate problems caused by excessive leverage and banks that are too big to fail. Taxes on speculative activity might encourage banks to focus greater attention on performing their key societal role of providing credit.

Over the longer term, most economists agree that governments, especially in advanced industrial countries with aging populations, should be concerned about the sustainability of their policies. But we must be wary of deficit fetishism. Deficits to finance wars or giveaways to the financial sector (as happened on a massive scale in the U.S.) lead to liabilities without corresponding assets, imposing a burden on future generations. But high-return public investments that more than pay for themselves can actually improve the well-being of future generations, and it would be doubly foolish to burden them with debts from unproductive spending and then cut back on productive investments.