George's Live Bear Trap + Two Quick Hits

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Note:  I promised a guest article on BaD Radio and it's coming right up.

But this was too good not to post ASAP.

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From time to time a host on The Little One will suffer a bear-trap moment live on the air, but they're rare.  George had one a few minutes ago in the Peter Gammons interview.

First, it sounded like Gammons was hitchhiking on the Interstate for the first part of the interview, and had ducked into a rest-stop men's room to conclude it.  This is not a priority interview for Gammons.  But that's not important now.

What's important is that George was asking a question about Josh Hamilton's theory that he can't hit during the day because he has blue eyes, an explanation that George called -- and I think I'm recalling this correctly -- "ridiculous."  Gammons proceeded to state that he himself suffers from light hypersensitivity with his own blue-green eyes, understands Hamilton's point, and was glad that Hamilton had addressed it. 

These Gammons interviews are proving to be rich sources of Muser mortification.

QUICK HIT #1:  I didn't hear the entire Hardline interview of Dirk, but what I heard was terrific.  Corby had a couple of Sturmesque Iliad-length questions, but overall it was great.  Question:  Has Dirk been doing interviews with other sports radio stations, and is he as good on those as he was with the Musers?

QUICK HIT #2:   Killer si; T.C. no. 

That Third Bear Trap Today Was Fake

The one where the punchline was "you can use what's between your legs to buy beer."  Never happened. 

At least it didn't win.



Time to Send the Bear-Trap Contest Back for Retooling

I know it's just a dumb segment, but the damned thing at least has to have the courage of its convictions.  I think this is my fourth article on how Gordon is screwing up a perfectly good concept with obvious frauds and anecdotes which aren't even bear traps.

There was another one this morning, and Junior even voted for it:  The guy who was going on a hot date and goes to his date's fancy mansion to pick her up.  He is waiting awkwardly with her family and decides he needs to demonstrate his erudition (since he is from the other side of the tracks) by asking if they knew the definition of a word he had just learned from listening to "The Newlywed Game."  The word was "masticate," but -- would you believe it -- instead, he says "masturbate"! 

OK, let's think about this for a minute.  I could complain that this was obviously made up, because (1) hot busty high school chicks who are wealthy tend not to go out with low-lifes like this guy claimed to be, but that at least, could happen.  But (2), in the history of awkward first meetings with parents, has a kid ever, ever asked these total strangers if they knew the meaning of an unfamiliar word as a way to break the ice?  But let's put these credibilty problems aside.

The real problem here is that this is not a bear trap.  This was a mistake.  The guy did not say what he intended to say, which is a minimum requirement for a bear trap.  If the bear trap is expanded to include "stupid verbal errors which cause embarrassment," well, then, you've lost the bear-trap's entire reason for being.

Another Grave Misuse of the Bear-Trap Contest

I've complained in the past that Gordon has reported Bear-Trap stories that were, to my ear, obviously fake.  A couple of them have won.

Today, they introduced another flaw in the process.  They chose as a winner someone who claimed to be a surgeon, one "Blade," who had made a coarse remark to a pregnant woman in the operating room who, it turned out, had suffered a miscarriage some weeks before.  He submitted another instance of whether he berated some colleague in the operating room with the witty "Are you gay, or what?" line, the object of these remarks, of course, being gay.

The problem is not that these stories don't sound real.  The problem is that Blade the Surgeon isn't a bear-trap victim -- he's just a jackass.  Bear-Trap winners must have about them a certain degree of unsuspecting innocence, but Blade the Surgeon is (and, is apparently proud to be) a serial vulgarian.  You can't be a Bear-Trap winner if it is your habit to speak disrespectfully and insultingly.

Hey, this is critical stuff. 

Confessional Quick Hits

Couple of thoughts from the broadcast day:

(1)  20 Generations.  In discussing the new Lisa Kudrow show about searching for ancestors, Corby (jokingly, I think) talked about going back "20 generations."  That isn't so crazy, necessarily, since 20 generations is about 500 years, which takes us back to the 1500s, which isn't that far from when Danny's ancestors came over on the Mayflower, or whatever it was he was claiming.  However, if one really did try to go back 20 generations, he would be examining a large number of people -- 2 to the 20th power, to be exact.  That works out to 1,048,575 people.

(2)  What Were the Rangers Thinking?  In listening to today's conversations about why the Rangers didn't fire Ron Washington, I didn't hear this one (but I usually don't get to hear Norm or BaD Radio, so they may have touched on it):  The Rangers were for sale at that tme.   Disarray and lack of discipline would have made the team (admittedly, only marginally) less attractive to purchasers, and that would have been an issue only if Washington had been fired (since the the whistleblower was not blabbing at the time).  There was no likely successor to Wasington in place at that time.  So it made more sense to stay the course and disclose Washington's issue to shoppers at such time as they were doing their "due diligence" on the Rangers.  

(3)  More Ron Washington.  Gordon sensibly asks, "wasn't the world a better place without HR?"  Sure. But HR didn't explode on the scene in the last 25 years all by itself.  It was compelled by the interference of courts and legislatures in hiring and firing decisions.  Some of this interference has been necessary (ending certain kinds of discrimination), but a whole helluva lot of it has been absolute nonsense (forbidding employers from making reasonable distinctions between good and bad employees and imposing their own notions of "fairness" on the hiring and firing process).  My point here is that you can bet that the Washington situation was far more drenched in legal considerations than HR considerations.

(4)  Another Unbelievable Bear-Trap.  The one Gordon just told about the guy who was holding forth on "Wayne" as a middle name.  It was going fine until the wife says "Didn't I tell you his father killed his mother and went to the chair"?  He said, "no, I don't remember that."    First, if this were true, of course she would have told him.  And this supposedly wasn't the first time they were getting together.  Second, if she had told him about it, one of them would have remembered.  Third, there were very few executions taking place during the time when that mother and father would have been alive.  Fourth, the electric chair was not a common method of execution during that period.  Fifth  .  .  .  hell, it doesn't make any sense and it didn't happen the way the bear-trap guy says it did, if it happened at all. 

The Bear Trap Contest is starting to become like Hypothetical Thursday -- what I call "NPR Moments," because that's when I am compelled to change the channel for a few minutes until the inauthentic broadcasting abates.

(5)  Junior v. Keith.  No, not that Keith.

Junior said he feared Keith Olberman's intellect.  He needn't worry.  Olberman is glib but his intellect is a mile side and an inch deep.  Junior's intelligence is far more subtle and penetrating.  He could hold his own and, after enduring a verbal barrage or two, would prevail in any debate.  Any debate about cycling, anyway.

(6) Baby Doll Ad.  I was really disappointed to hear this ad a little after 5 pm Wednesday.   I've heard other sports-radio stations (other markets) run these ads for "gentlemen's clubs."    The station will run them for awhile, then station management awakens to how awful they sound and how cheap they make the station seem.  And the station stops accepting those ads.  Put aside the content -- the chicks they get to read that copy all sound stupid and amateurish.   Same with The Ticket.   Those smarmy ads never fit in with The Ticket and after awhile they went away.  Then there was the Baby Doll ad yesterday, which was the sleaziest, smuttiest ad for a strip joint I have ever heard.  Same stupid amateur chick reading it.   It came as close to a soliciation for prostitution as you're ever going to hear on the radio.  It almost makes me wonder if, despite the great numbers for The Ticket, the economy has made it hard to get the rates The Ticket needs to pay all the on-air talent.

I wish all Confessors a fine weekend.

Nitpicking This Morning's Muser Errors

Unfair and and entirely unnecessary commentary on this morning's program:

(1)  Junior kept referring to the former heavyweight champ as "Jack Johnston."  His name was Jack Johnson.

(2) Junior mistold the priest/rabbi joke this morning, or read a lame version of it.  The Rabbi is supposed to deny that he's ever eaten pork.  Then the priest confesses to having sampled the pleasures of the flesh.  "I don't blame you," rabbi says, "It's better than pork." 

(3)  I didn't get to hear the end of the Bear-Trap of the Week contest, but I did not believe the story of the blind guy running into the other guy.  Nothing about it made sense.  (a) The guy didn't see some guys playing with hockey sticks a block or so back and think that one guy was following him tapping a hockey stick.  (b) Blind guys with sticks walk slowly.  They don't catch up with normal-gaited people.  (c) People who hear any kind of tapping coming up behind them turn around to look.  (d)  If there was a crowd around to disappear into, the guy would not have heard the tapping.  The story was fake.

Why I Don't Believe the Kopechne Bear-Trap Story

This morning, Gordon’s “Bear Trap of the Week” winner was an account of a guy who was visiting his friend’s family in the late Seventies. Extended family members were present. On one occasion, the guy and the friend (I think the friend was the submitter) were playing ping-pong and drinking some beer and swapping jokes. The guy decides to tell a Ted Kennedy/Chappaquiddick joke. Someone tries to get him to stop telling the joke by giving him the finger-across-the-throat sign, but the guy presses on to the punch line. (Joke not specified.) A silence descends upon the room, and a man and woman leave the room, the man saying that “We don’t appreciate jokes like that.” At that point, the friend tells the joke-telling guy that the couple who left were Mr. and Mrs. Kopechne, Mary Jo’s parents. The name of the family the guy was visiting was not “Kopechne.”

Gordon vouched for this story, saying that he knew some of the people involved.

I believe Gordon believes the story and that he knows someone involved, but I don’t believe the story.

First, someone would have told any stranger to a family attending a family gathering of the presence of persons as historically significant as the Kopechnes, parents of the most famous reckless manslaughter victim in U.S. history.(1)  Not to keep the stranger from making inappropriate references, but because it is extremely interesting. If you visited a home where Marina Oswald was going to be present, don’t you think someone would have mentioned that fact to you?

Second, the story of adults hanging around while young men are playing ping-pong, drinking beer, and telling jokes doesn’t ring true.

Not that it matters much, but a prize as esteemed as the Bear Trap of the Week should be held to the highest standards of likelihood.
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(1) I’m not trying to make a political statement here. There are a few investigators who think Kennedy’s failure to report the accident was nondeliberate, but not many. (These investigators thing Kennedy was not in the car at the time, contrary to his own testimony.) The inquest testimony was that she probably lived for quite awhile after Kennedy guided that Oldsmobile into the pond. For the record, however, the coroner’s verdict was accidental drowning.