The joys of the writing business or, would you pay your plumber $3.50 per job?

Two ads found on Craigslist:

Professional Writers for Book Proposals (Harvard Square)

Prominent Anthropologist and Family Therapist seeks professional writers and journalists in the Boston area for Book Proposals.
Confidential Titles are:
1. Woman Unite! Does America need a Lysistrata like Ancient Greece to stop our Economic and Military Insane Wars?
2. God’s Last Call! Stop Patriarchal Original Sin Insanity; Return to Matriarchal Original Innocence so Earth does not become Planet Necropolis!
3. The Lost Art of Sacred Love- Making! Common in Primative Cultures of Polynesia , Hawaii and Eastern Goddess- based Religions!
4. More Oxytocin Please! Catch and Embrace the Spirit of Honeyfire and Enjoy the Blissful Miracles of an Oxytocin High!
Applicants must share a deep " Reverence for all Life ", and deep passion for the Well-Being of our childrens future!
This represents a great opportunity for the right candidates! Please send a letter of interest and a resume!

If they’re confidential then why are they on Craigslist? The right candidate being anyone dumb enough to respond.

and No. 2:

Writers Needed for News & Current Events

We are seeking talented and qualified writers to join our news team. Writers that are approved for the program will be assigned topics for their articles. This position gives you the opportunity to work from your home or anywhere else you have an Internet connection. Writers will be paid $3.50 per article and we anticipate most writers will earn roughly $10-12 per hour.
Writers that enter the program will go through a brief training process to outline our process and requirements for approving articles. All articles will be at least 250 words long and must be void of any errors.
This is a part-time position with many time slots available and the opportunity to progress into a full-time position with the company.

If the $3.50 per wasn’t bad enough, this is what pushes it over the edge: “We anticipate most writers will earn roughly …” And I anticipate The Cubs will win the World Series.

 

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It’s that time of year

2008: On The Occasion Of The Impending Centennial Of The Cubs’ Futility

Tinkers to Evers to what’s the chance
a hundred seasons could come and go
so fast you wouldn’t celebrate even one

Next year isn’t a mantra
it’s an elegy for wasted time,
wasted efforts, wasted hopes
and, for all those losses,
nothing is really lost
no one died from
heartbreak, no child went
hungry because Ernie Banks
never got his pennant

Instead we grew up
with hopes stunted
or getting ever larger
believing tomorrow will always
hold what today never can

Still going down to that damn
old park because we take defeat
as our due and know the team’s
reach never exceeds our grasp

Their wish – like our dreams – is
not of brazen prizes and spoiling
success but noon on a July day
when the breeze off the lake
might be just a little bit cooler

Three Fingers Brown, someone
asked you once if you could
have pitched better with all five fingers
I’ll never know, you said
So, what’s it like
to win it all?

(Originally published in Elysian Fields Quarterly in 2006)

Japanese baseball fans blame Col. Sanders for losing streak

1n 1985, fans of the Hanshin Tigers baseball team tossed a statue of the Colonel into the Dotonbori River in Osaka when the team won their first Central League pennant in 21 years. (Fans saw a resemblance between the Colonel and the team’s bearded American slugger, Randy Bass.)

The team went on to win the national championship, the Japan Series, that year but has never done so again, prompting some to suggest that the Colonel’s disappearance put a curse on them.

The truth about this curse will be resolved this season as a diver checking for unexploded bombs from WWII found the Colonel’s top half on Tuesday, minus his hands and glasses but still sporting his trademark string tie and grin. The bottom half was recovered today.

"It’s only a statue, but I felt as if I was rescuing someone," a worker told reporters after the lower half was found.

 

Silly Japanese baseball fans! Statues don’t cause curses. Goats do!

10 things a satirist gives thanks for

1. The Bush Administration
2. GM’s “leadership” (What’s the difference between the cub scouts and GM? Adult supervision.)
3. Sarah Palin and her handlers
4. The voters of Minnesota. Jesse Ventura! Al Franken! (someone’s spiked the 10,000 lakes).
5. Jaguar Land Rover for applying for a bailout.
6. Barney Frank: “These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis. The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”
7. The Chicago Cubs
8. Alan Greenspan
9. The phrase “too big to fail.” Econ speak for: About to bite the dust.
10. Joe Biden: “When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, ‘look, here’s what happened.’”

If Mark Cuban is guilty …

The multi-millionaire sports team owner and sometimes amusing loud mouth is under investigation for insider trading. If he’s guilty I say force him to buy The Cubs (something he’s already trying to do). I can think of no more fitting punishment than a task which would make even Sisyphus tremble in horror.

In a time of worry and woe, at least we still have The Mets.

It is reassuring to know that no matter what happens in the world, The New York Mets are working hard to cheer me up. For the second straight year they have committed one of the most impressive chokes EVER. This year they managed not only to lose the division but also blow the wildcard race — ALL IN ONE WEEKEND!

Please forgive my evil chortle over this but you have to understand that The Mets were on the winning end of two of the biggest heartbreaks of my sporting life: The collapse of the ’69 Cubs and the ’86 Red Sox.

Why is this man smiling?

Although I am the son of two Mets fans (former Dodger/Giants fans who refuse to let their allegiance head west when their teams did) this is in no way a knock at either parent. (Although in the winter of ’86 my mother did make a point of wearing her Mets jacket way more than might have been supported by the weather. My father at least had the grace to say, “If the Mets are so good how come God had to give them the Series?”) Nope I just hate the Mets. It would seem to me that the time is perfect for someone to write a sequel to Jimmy Breslin’s wonderful book on the ’62 Mets, Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? That team at least had the charm of being really really bad. (And wouldn’t that be the perfect title for a book about the Fed?)

On an intellectual if not aesthetic level I am sorry to see the end of Shea Stadium. As Breslin put it:

And now it hits you. Now you realize, for the first time, what this is all about. All of it, all of the workers risking their lives, and all of the huge payrolls and all of the political wrangling. There is a reason for it all:

They are building a brand new stadium for Marvin Thronberry.

Thank you to the Mets for giving me cheer on a gray day when the news continues to be supremely unnerving.

As to the playoffs, here is my prediction: Angels vs. Cubs in the series. What happens then is anyone’s guess.

What do Democrats and Cubs fans have in common?

…they assume that something will go wrong until proven otherwise. Great line by Nate Silver over at fivethirtyeight.com.

Despite its unabashed (and clearly announced) pro-Democratic stance, this site is my source of information about political polling. They survey all the polls, weight them for a number of factors and come up with results that to my eyes are the best out there.

The riches of poetry

Got an email this morning asking me if I would be willing to let someone republish one of my poems:

Hi Constantine, This past baseball season, I’ve been running a Cubs literary series at a Mexican restaurant down the street from Wrigley Field. It’s called, “Lovable Losers Literary Revue.” (www.lovablelosersliteraryrevue.com). I’m now putting together an anthology that arises out of the reading series. We’ve had a lot of great guests–Sun-Times columnist Dave Hoekstra, American Skin author Don De Grazia, mystery authors D.C. Brod and Robert Goldsborough, iconic pop band The Cleaning Ladys, WGN Radio’s Rick Kogan, WXRT’s Lin Brehmer, best-selling biographer Jonathan Eig (Jackie Robinson and Lou Gehrig books), humorist James Finn Garner (Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, etc.), Stuart Shea (with Garner, a founder of Bardball.com), and many others. They’re all contributing to the anthology. We’re looking for one or two more excellent additions before deadline and Tom Goldstein alerted me to your Cubs poem that was published in Elysian Field. I was hoping you’d grant us permission to use it in the anthology. It’s a tiny press publishing the anthology (State Street Publishing), and there’s no budget to pay contributors; instead, the press will make a donation in all the authors names to a Cubs’ charity, something that involves giving tickets to underprivileged kids.

I have made no money on my poetry and nearly none on my fiction, yet the joy it gives me is so great that I don’t really care. I was amazed when it first got published, the idea that someone read it and liked it enough to remember it makes that payment exponentially greater.

BTW, Don — any kid who follows the Cubs qualifies as underprivileged.

I must admit that I am having mixed feeling about this year’s Cubs as a result of writing 2008 (On The Impending Centennial Of The Cubs’ Futility) in 2006. I wrote it full of the confidence learned from a life of following the Cubs that they would not win. Now this year they have the best team in baseball and a brilliant manager. It is still concievable that the Cubs will not win it all. The Brewers are incredibly dangerous in a short series and the Angels are nearly as good as the Cubs. But to think that it is the beginning of September and Cubbies are odds on favorites to go to the Series. Part of my entirely self-centered heart thinks that this is yet another way in which the Cubs will thwart my dreams. I know there is a ways to go yet. I remember the collapse of ’69 all too well.

But … but …

And while my other beloveds, the Red Sox, are also good this year, I do not see them getting to the 2nd round of the playoffs. Although a Sox-Cubs series would probably have the highest baseball ratings ever.

Anyone wishing to read more of my poetry can find it at the bottom of the page marked My Writing: Samples.

A final Cub memory:

I moved to New England when I was 9 and so suffered a dual allegiance to the Cubs and the Red Sox. The last time I was at Wrigley (which is a better park than Fenway) was 1988. The Cubs vs. The Mets. The Cub starter was former Sox closer Calvin Schiraldi. In the 9th inning with the Mets up 5-3, Al Nipper (another survivor of the ’86 Red Sox) was brought on to relieve Schiraldi. I got up and headed for the exit. Someone asked me how I could leave. I shook my head and said, “I know how this one turns out.”

As I got in the car I heard Nipper giving up a 3 run homer.

The Red Sox or, when your brand changes underneath you

“You can’t be lovable if you’re not losers!” — Jon Stewart on the Red Sox, 10/29/07

That is exactly what is going on with Red Sox Nation. The brand identity until three years ago was The Cursed Ones. For a while after that we were The Redeemed Ones (until The White Sox took that mantle). Now, we are The Successful Ones. The first two had significant qualities that really differentiated the brand from everyone else. They also inspired huge amounts of loyalty among consumers.

As the (hated) Yankees can attest success also inspires huge amounts of loyalty, but it’s taking some getting used to here in the Nation. It’s not a bad thing to get used to — but it is different.

Before this year, wearing the Red Sox logo generally got you a certain amount of sympathy and even respect in ballparks outside of New York. Other fans recognized you as someone devoted to the sport. Someone who stuck to your team no matter what and — let’s be honest — someone who rooted for a team that always made the other teams look better. It’s easy to sympathize with fans of a team like that — they’re not a threat. This explains why people outside of St. Louis are so fond of Cubs fans. (Outside of the Midwest, most people don’t realize the antipathy between the Cards and the Cubs. A friend once said that a game between those two teams would sell out even if it was held on Christmas Day during a blizzard. That sums it up.)

Now Sox fans — and their seem to be a lot of them everywhere — are going to have to get used to being reviled. So far the team hasn’t employed any True Villains in the sports marketing sense. Sure Schilling is a blowhard, but he blows just as hard against his own team as he does the opposition.

Stephen (Smarter Than Me) Baker, puts it well:

Hey Red Sox fans. Many of us used to love your team. And now that they’re fabulous, they’re a lot less fun. You may find that it’s lonely at the top. I never thought I’d say this, but I may end up pulling next year for those underdog Yankees.

The real problem will be not the team, but the fans. All this winning is stripping Sox fans of the shreds of humility that used to makes us so much easier to tolerate. We are in danger of collectively turning into what New Hampshire residents like to call Massholes.

Oh, how quickly we forget our four score decades of wandering in the wilderness. Well, if that’s the price of success all I can say is WAIT TILL THIS YEAR!

(BTW: Someone pointed out that the Red Sox didn’t become known as the Red Sox until 1908. Last time the Cubs won a World Series? 1908. Coincidence? I think not. So therefor the Cubs won’t win a Series again until the Sox change their name back to the Americans. While the logic is spurious, consider that I have 99 years of evidence to support it.)

Cubs stay true to their brand — lose game 1

Collateral Damage Sr. and I disagree on whether Lou Piniella — who we are both fans of as a player and now — can lift the curse.

Right now I’m winning.

Cubs & Red Sox in the playoffs: 2 of 5 seals of the apocalypse approve!

Frankly, I have a better chance of winning the World Series than the Cubs.

The other seals are all waiting for herring.

Or maybe they are two of the four ponies of the apocalypse?

Never has famine looked so cute.

OK, if they did somehow both make it to the series? Highest. Rated. World. Series. EVER!

The boy who wishes he was named Sue: “Cubs fans name baby Wrigley Fields”

Wrigley Alexander Fields was born Sept. 12 at an Indiana hospital. … His parents are Paul and Teri Fields of Michigan City, Ind. They are — no surprise — fans of the Cubs, who have played at Wrigley Field since 1916. The Fields planned the name for years before their son’s birth.

Someone call child protective services, cuz this is wrong.

This kid will turn the 40-year-old virgin into a reality.

Here’s why I don’t wear funny t-shirts: They’re only funny the first time you read them.

My parents’ names: Ann & Nick. Youngest kid’s names: Aristodemus & Constantine. Further proof that people with normal names have no idea exactly how un-fun these names are in grade school. My kid’s name: Greg. He’s lucky it wasn’t Bob.

Cubs hire Piniella who wants to get ARod

This would be great for ARod. He’d be reunited with his favorite manager, play at Wrigley where he’d hit 50 HRs a year and never again have to worry about the pressure of playing in October.

Follow Ups

• HANOI, Vietnam – After nearly two decades of ridicule, a father has agreed to change his son’s name from “Fined Six Thousand and Five Hundred” — the amount he was forced to pay in local currency for ignoring Vietnam’s two-child policy. To which Discretion Winter and I can only say: WIMP!
• My Brandweek colleague Ken Hein did some actual reporting and found out that the most requested MLB logo for caskets is … The Cubs. No word on how many of these were suicides.
• Further proof that there’s no such thing as bad publicity: Sales of Fluff have skyrocketed since a Mass. state sen. tried to ban the stuff.
• I now know what it’s like to be followed around by 90 lbs. of Play-Doh. Collateral Damage Jr. has really been enjoying the Play-Doh cologne sample that Demeter sent me. Can’t say as I’m a big fan of the stuff but at least I can now find my kid with eyes closed … whether I want to or not.

But I digress…

• An automotive three-way: OK, so let me see if I can get this correct … plans are afoot to discuss an alliance between Renault, GM & Nissan? This is the Axis of Incompetent. Word has it that the alliance is only including Renault because Yugo had gone out of business. Renault doesn’t have a very good track record when it comes to US auto partners — last time it was the entirely forgettable American Motors Corp. and the result was a car called … The Alliance. Actually this could turn out to be a great move for the auto industry as a whole. Put these three companies together and you have overwhelming lead in the expertise needed to lose market share, build unreliable cars and throw good money after bad. This is like an alliance between the Cubs, the Knicks and the NHL. Next up: When the Titanic merged with the Hindenburg. Or a Dukakis & Dole ticket.
  • LATE ADD>>> Here’s another to add to the coalition of the clueless: US Airways. CEO Doug Parker says his co., which is the result of a merger between US Airways and America West (formerly the 7th & 8th largest carriers in the US, now the 15th largest, er 5th largest), would be interested in merging with either Delta or Northwest which are both bankrupt.
• Envy, envy, envy — on my part: David Fine tells of a press release that makes the Diva Cup look humble and understated. Suggestion to Newman PR: SHUT UP.
• Now THAT’S innovation: A sanitary handle for shopping carts that you can carry with you. I feel safer already.