Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Much Ado About Nothing

For four days I've been reading about Angels centerfielder Gary Matthews Jr. getting himself entangled in this internet sting operation on Human Growth Hormone, but today I find in the fine print of one of the stories that he was alleged to have been sent a shipment of HGH in 2004, a year before the drug even made it onto the sport's banned substance list-- and the government investigation will not be pursuing whether or not the substance was even consumed, focusing instead on distributors and producers. Also in the fine print, a team doctor for football's Pittsburgh Steelers has allegedly been implicated. The NFL still has no testing program for HGH, but this is a baseball problem. Next scandal, please.

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A baseball blogger has re-written a passage from George Orwell's "1984" to apply to the Chicago Cubs, substituting the words "party" or "party member" with "Cubs fan(s)," and the word "war" with "rebuilding."

What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the CUBS FANS themselves. Even the humblest CUBS FAN is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of REBUILDING. It does not matter whether the REBUILDING is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the REBUILDING is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of REBUILDING should exist.


Tomorrow, "Tale of Two Cities."

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