The Complaint Department
Today we take a look at Bally Sports, Wine Snobs and Con Men...
As regular readers might recall I semi-recently did some whining about Bally Sports and how incredibly shitty their Kansas City Royals broadcasts are, a complaint that probably needs to be modified because in the Era of Streaming I’m not sure “broadcast” is the right terminology so I might resemble your alcoholic uncle (coming soon to a Thanksgiving dinner near you) who – after his fourth Irish coffee which was 2/3s Irish and 1/3 coffee – decides to show his horrified nieces and nephews that he knows how to “break dance” which wouldn’t have been cool even when that was a thing people were still doing.
In any case…
I started wondering why and how Bally was screwing up sports of all sorts, so I Googled “why is Bally Sports” and before I could finish typing my question Google suggested I add “so bad” and if you click on that – which I did – you’ll find article after article from frustrated fans trying to watch their favorite teams and the articles were from all over the United States and about all kinds of teams so give Bally Sports credit, they might be shitty, but they’re consistent.
OK, so there’s tons of evidence that Bally Sports sucks and you might think I’m here to complain about them again, but – Surprise! – I now want to complain about what’s left of the news media.
How is this not a story worth covering?
Millions of sports fans are being forced to pay money to an incompetent company and then not getting what they paid for and instead of digging into that huge sports story we get yet another article about Patrick Mahomes and any day now I’m expecting a three-part series on his favorite color which I’m gonna guess is now red.
There have been stories about Bally’s parent company – Diamond Sports Group – declaring bankruptcy and their financial situation, but I haven’t read anything about Bally’s technical problems that make it impossible to watch a game without the screen going black and the picture jumping in and out of focus and buffering that lasts longer than Moses and the Israelites’ Wilderness Road Trip and you’d think somebody from a legitimate news organization would look into all this, but if they have I can’t find it.
All things considered I wouldn’t mind seeing some investigative journalism about Bally Sports and how MLB and NBA and NHL teams climbed in bed with them and yet sports fans are the ones getting fucked.
Expiration Dates
OK, the rest of these items have been sitting around a while and might be past their expiration dates so treat them like that suspicious carton of milk that you think might have gone sour so you take a sip and try to decide if it’s gone bad and here’s a helpful hint about that:
If after taking a sip you’re still wondering if the milk’s gone bad, it hasn’t.
In my experience you can’t get bad milk out of your mouth fast enough so you do an Exorcist spit take and shoot milk across the room at a hundred miles an hour and while we’re on the subject of testing out liquids here’s another helpful hint you’ll thank me for later:
When you order a bottle of wine in a restaurant they show you the bottle to make sure it’s the wine you ordered and then show you the cork so you can see if it’s rotted and give you a sip of wine so you can tell if it’s turned bad and if it has the wine will taste like vinegar and you’ll do a very respectable Linda Blair imitation.
So when you see someone take out their reading glasses and study the bottle’s label like it’s a newly-discovered Rosetta Stone fragment and sniff the cork and take a sip of wine and swish it around in their mouth and maybe gargle it, that person doesn’t know jack shit about wine so go ahead and feel free to make fun of their pretentious and misinformed bullshit.
OK, enough about expiration dates, here are the articles.
Rich People and Triples
According to the internet, football coach Barry Switzer once said, “Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.”
On the other hand, the internet also tells me that millions of people didn’t die from COVID-19, the pandemic was a hoax and getting vaccinated will make me grow a third eye in the middle of my forehead and I really hope that last one is true because the two eyes I currently have need drug store reading glasses with the approximate magnification power of the Hubble Telescope if I want to read a menu and order wine in a candlelit restaurant.
In any case…
The internet also tells me Barry Switzer actually didn’t say that thing about triples first, but somebody said it sometime and the point remains valid:
Donald Trump is a self-made man as long as you consider receiving $413 million from your father pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.
Trump claims he only received a “small” million-dollar loan from his dad to get started (and when you think a million dollar loan is “small” you might want to cut way back on your “humble beginnings” origin story) and you also might question pretty much anything a guy who claims he just shot a 17 on the back nine has to say about anything.
Now here’s a story about how much money Trump actually got from his dad:
https://apnews.com/article/north-america-donald-trump-ap-top-news-tax-evasion-politics
On the other hand, I’m probably just jealous because the only thing I inherited from my dad was asthma and all things considered I’d rather have the $413 million.
Evangelist Con Men
Just in case you grew up in a normal family and don’t know: Leroy Jenkins was a Christian evangelist and my mom was a fan and drug all of us to hear him preach when he came through town and set up a tent and healed people and “spoke in tongues” (which to my ears sounded remarkably like the lyrics on Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti; “a wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom”) which even as a child, made me wonder why God would give people the power to speak in another language, but always chose a “dead language” so the speaker felt free to make shit up and God never chose French or Spanish, both of which I might recognize and if my mom had suddenly asked:
“Donde esta la biblioteche?”
Or: “Sprekense doeutch?”
Or: “Ménage a trois?”
I would have found the whole “speaking in tongues” thing a lot more believable, although I would have found my mom asking about my interest in a three-way pretty uncomfortable.
Anyway…according to his Wikipedia entry:
Leroy sold “miracle water” which was drawn from a well conveniently located on the grounds of his religious compound known as the “Healing Waters Cathedral” but according to the Ohio Department of Agriculture, Leroy’s “miracle water” contained coliform bacteria, so the miracle would appear to be that nobody died from drinking it.
And according to the same article Leroy was also convicted of conspiracy to assault two men and of plotting the arson of two homes. He was arrested for grand theft, but the charges were dropped when he agreed to pay restitution and his marriage to a 77-year-old widow who had recently hit the Ohio Lottery jackpot for $6 million dollars was annulled by a judge after her legal guardian said she was incompetent and incapable of knowing what she was doing when she attempted to marry Jenkins and also, interspecies marriages aren’t legal in Ohio which is worth thinking about because Leroy was clearly a fucking snake.
(OK, I made up that last bit, but the rest came off Wikipedia and we all know how notoriously accurate that is, so believe whatever you like.)
Anyway…
After all of Leroy’s hijinks you might think my mom would swear off Christian Evangelists, but every time one got caught banging the help or embezzling money she just switched her allegiance to another guy with a Porter Wagoner hairdo and the morals of a Great White Shark.
My mom has invested way too much belief into these guys to back out now that she’s nearing Life’s Finish Line and I kinda think the same thing about some of the people who continue to believe in Donald Trump; if you’re going to prison for what you did on January 6th you probably don’t want to believe you’ve been conned and if you fall into that category and want to buy some “miracle water” I have some conveniently located in my downstairs toilet.
Okey-dokey.
Once again that’s it for today, but stick around and I’ll probably have more complaints by the weekend.