OT: RIP George Carlin

Baseball is a 19th century pastoral game.

Football is a 20th century new world order paramilitary power struggle.

Baseball is played in a park . . . the baseball park.

Football is played in a stadium, sometimes called Soldier Field or War Memorial Stadium.

The baseball field is . . . a diamond.

The football field is a gridiron.

Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life.

Football begins in the fall, when everything is dying.

In football, you wear a helmet.

In baseball, you wear a cap!

Football is concerned with downs. What down is it? Oh, it’s the last down.

Baseball is concerned with ups. Who’s up? Are you up? He’s up! I’m up!!

In football, you get a penalty.

In baseball, you make an error . . . oops!

In football, the specialist comes on to kick something.

In baseball, the specialist comes in to relieve somebody.

Football has tackling, clipping, spearing, piling on, personal fouls, late hitting, sacking, and unnecessary roughness.

Baseball has . . . the sacrifice.

Football is played in any kind of weather-rain, snow, sleet, hail, fog, major catastrophe, can’t see, don’t know if there’s a game going on, mud on the field, can’t read the uniforms, can’t read the yard markers-doesn’t matter, the struggle will continue.

In baseball, if it rains, we don’t go out to play. I can’t go out, it’s raining out!!

Baseball has the s e v e n t h i n n i n g s t r e t c h .

Football has the two minute WARNING.

And, of course, the objectives of the games are also completely different.

In football, the object is for the quarterback, sometimes called the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use the shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack which may consist of power plays designed to punch holes in the forward wall of the enemy’s defensive line.

In baseball, the object is to get home . . . safe.

He really was a comic genius. Absolutely hilarious throughout his life.

I saw him at Caroline’s in New York a week before he died. He was very, very high and got lost in his set multiple times with lots of mumbling and slurring. It was sad.

Is true for many my age, Carlin was an integral part of the soundtrack of my life. He was a public figure who truly affected me and my way of seeing the world. He had a good ride; if I make 71, I won’t feel cheated.

George Carlin will always be my favorite comedian. The baseball-football comparison is his best baseball-related bit, but his other sports observations were quite good as well. He had an especially enthusiastic crticism for the sport of golf. Is it a sport to hit something and just walk after it? And then…hit it again? Not only this, but the amount of space we dedicate to the sport in terms of land is outrageous. As a golfer, I liked this joke a lot, because the sport seems really dumb at times.

My favorite non-sports related bit of his was his explanation as to why ‘fuck’ is the most useful and versatile word in the entire english language. Fuck as a noun: I don’t give a fuck/What the fuck was that/He threw the fuck to the ground. Fuck as an adjective: Look at this fucking guy/Hit the fucking ball. Fuck as an adverb: He went fucking apeshit/He fucking moves like Benji Molina. Fuck as a gerund: Fucking is quite a pleasant activity. And so on…

R.I.P. George. Even God, that invisible man you claimed we created with our imagination, thought you were fucking hilarious.

Classic Carlin:

“hey, did you hear? Phil Davis died”. “Phil Davis? I just saw him yesterday.” “Yeah, didn’t help. He died anyway. Apparently, the simple act of you seeing him did not slow down his cancer. In fact, it may have made it more aggressive. You know, you could be the cause for Phil’s Death, how, do you live with yourself?”

One of my favorite comedians ever. I loved, in particular, his rants about the environment (“the planet is going nowhere. WE are going!”) his fifteen minute rant about the end of world, religion (sun-worshipping) and the people should be killed. Sad. Sad. Sad. He will be missed. A great comedian, and apparently one of the good guys.

Oh beautiful, for smoggy skies, insecticided grain
For strip-mined mountain’s majesty above the asphalt plain.
America, America, man sheds his waste on thee
And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea!

That on the day of his death, there would be “Yo! George Ringtones here” ads on sports blogs.

honestly, a lot of his more scatalogical material isn’t my thing, but his incredibly dark perspective was

he did like a 20 minute bit on suicide, IIWC