OSJ

I saw plenty of Ozzie and recall he was also an offensive threat. Comparing him to Maz is laughable. If I need a guy to get on base and I have a choice of Ozzie or Maz to bat, I don't even have to think about it.

Hey, I'm not the one that put the character clause in that the writers are using to keep Bonds out. Cobb was a sociopath that beat up a crippled fan, is reputed to have murdered at least two people and assaulted countless others. Speaker and Hornsby routinely bet on baseball with each other. Granted, it probably impelled both guys to give t\it their all, but it was still betting on baseball. To that Speaker was in the KKK and Hornsby is the poster boy for arrogant prick that no one could abide being around.

Nice! Reese actually has the stats to merit inclusion if you look at total offense. Luis Aparicio would have been number 12 or 13. Tony Perez was one of my favorite players, but so was Matt Williams and he doesn't belong in either. Jim Rice is my number 11. Laughable road stats. If he had played anywhere but Boston there wouldn't even be a discussion. Roy White WAS better and so was Dave Parker. Bill Mazeroski - Good defense and one famous home run. Joe Carter does not belong in the same breath with Bucky Dent and Aaron Boone, while not quite a HOFr, Joe did hit a good many home runs over his career. Maz being in is as big a joke as Richie Ashburn (most hits in the decade of the 1950s), do we see anyone arguing "most hits in the 70s", "most hits in the 1880s"? What a total crock. Most of his hits were singles, put him in a dress, not the HOF. Bowie Kuhn - A complete tool that paves the way for Selig. Seriously, isn't being Commish sort of an automatic lock? Oh, I almost forgot to add my hate for Jim Bunning... 224 wins is a laughable benchmark. Milt fucking Pappas has more business in the HOF than Jim Bunning. Oh yeah, being a senator from a red neck state doesn't count for much either. Wow that's twenty out without any effort at all. I'm sure we can bring the hate and boot out a few more. ;-)

Had some great matches with Dynamite Kid in the NW. I seem to recall him losing a "loser leaves town" match prior to his advent in WCCW. I could be wrong, that was a long time ago... I do recall people actually thought that silly "super kick" was a for real devastating blow. (Ignoring the fact that he missed half the time.)

Okay, we can all agree that the Baseball HOF has inducted many unworthy individuals. Based on their own rules which include "character", who should get booted out for being a douche? Who should be kicked out for being inducted for being someone's drinking buddy. Limit to ten choices, but this should be fun... Here are mine. 1. Tyrus Raymond Cobb - Arguably the greatest player ever, however the guy was a complete sociopath who is known to have assaulted several people and is rumored to have actually murdered a couple. Out he goes. 2. Tris Speaker - Card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan, out he goes. 3. Adrian "Cap" Anson - First man to compile 3000 hits, also the main reason that baseball closed the door to black players for several decades. A whining, conniving piece of shit who knew that the addition of some superior black players on other teams could reduce his team to irrelevancy. Out he goes. 4. Phil Rizzuto - Spent years whining about not getting voted in a major market where people actually believed the hype. Yeah, he played on a lot of winning teams, but the Yankees won with him and they won without him. Comparing him to Pee Wee Reese is laughable. 5. Rick Ferrell - By all accounts a very nice man, he doesn't belong on a list of douchenozzles, but he doesn't belong in the HOF either. 6. Earl Averill - And I'm a Washingtonian by birth... Too short a career and the numbers just aren't there. 7. Thomas Yawkey - So, being a racist twit and owning an underperforming team gets you in the HOF? Really? 8. Rogers Hornsby - My idol as a hitter. However, he was a racist twit who obviously bet on baseball and skated because Landis didn't want another scandal. Universally hated everywhere he went. 9. Rabbit Maranville - In what bizarro world does Maranville get within shouting distance of the HOF? A guess he was a nice guy that picked up the tab on more than a few occasions, and played great defense. To me that doesn't get you in. 10. George Kell - "We don't have enough 3rd basemen in!" So what? Wait for Wade Boggs to retire. A ridiculous choice. I won't even get started on the guys that the Veteran's Committee put in from the old Cardinals teams or the Negro League guys that were inducted en masse. Sure, they were all good players and didn't get a fair shake, but it seems like every guy that was pretty good for a decade got inducted. That I don't see. They want to keep Barry Bonds out? Fine, let's clear out some others while we're at it. Who else should be booted out? Tabe, Rippa, I'm looking at you guys for suggestions...

Dirty on another level cuz they're actually, you know, against the law. So do we kick out Mantle, Mays, and Aaron for popping "greenies"? Seems to me that non-prescription use of amphetamines was against the law in the 1950s and 1960s...

Somebody voted for Richie fucking Sexson? Rippa, I call for this person to be banned for trolling stat!

Well again Lethal forget him in the initial poll and I didnt notice it till after my first edit. I love Moose as a Yankee but the guy getting fucked by all of you is Tim Raines Folks don't recall just how good Raines was. The sad thing is he gets compared to Rickey Henderson and comes up short. That's like comparing Jimmie Foxx to Babe Ruth and saying he doesn't belong in.

Without us to argue about baseball, the internets would be a poorer place indeed.... We do need to get Rippa to join in... I think I shall go to the baseball thread and post something controversial just to fire things up. ;-)

Known and rightfully reviled for inventing Scientology, Hubbard was a carny from day one. His ridiculous stories of wrestling bears in Alaska and other such nonsense never failed to entertain editors and writers that he hung out with. Sounds like a fun guy to drink with as long as you were prepared to pick up the tab. How was he as a writer? His work ranges from mediocre to great... The great stuff includes things like Death's Deputy, Fear, Typewriter in the Sky, Slaves of Sleep, The Case of the Friendly Corpse, and The Indigestible Triton. The mediocre includes pretty much all of his science fiction, which is pretty clunky today, (if you're nostalgic for space opera, read Edmond Hamilton or E.E. Smith instead). The modern crap, (which I doubt was actually authored by Hubbard), should be avoided at all costs. Now, I've barely scratched the surface, the man generated over a million words a year for twenty years, there are westerns, adventure, war stories, detective tales, and I wouldn't be surprised to find that he did some romances. None of that stuff really appeals to me save for the detective genre and I can name at least 100 pulp authors that I'd rather read than Hubbard. Long and short: You can get cheap editions of a lot of his good pulp stuff (the key is if it was published in UNKNOWN, it's gold, anywhere else, not so much.) I do wonder how much credit we should give editor John W. Campbell for the quality of Hubbard's UNKNOWN stuff, it's so much better than anything else he wrote that I have to think Campbell's heavy hand reined in the crap and made Hubbard write a much more disciplined and coherent story than the stuff he got away with elsewhere. On the other hand, I suppose it is possible that the UNKNOWN format of slick urbane modern fantasy (often with a dose of humor) was just up his alley. Anyway, Fear remains a top ten horror novel eighty years after it was written and Typewriter in the Sky is still one of my favorite fantasy novels. So, despite churning out mountains of crap, Hubbard, like his contemporary Arthur J. Burks did enough good stuff to be numbered among the greats of the pulp era.

Dean, & All: Thanks for the good wishes! I'll pop over to the literary thread and post something on Hubbard...

Matt: Wish I had better news, but according to my docs, once you get cellulitis, you're likely to get it again unless you make major changes in diet, weight, etc. I'm naturally a big guy, but the last couple of years I was skipping the exercise and my weight shot up to close to 300. I'm down to 270 now and need to lose another twenty pounds to get down to my high school weight of 250. That still qualifies me for team chunky, but it's my natural weight for my build (I'm sort of built along the lines of Kevin Sullivan). My only advice, is call for more antibiotics if you aren't completely sure the infection is gone. The good news is sounds like yours is more of an abcess situation which can be drained. If you are over weight start hitting the gym or going for long walks. Long walks is what I do and in a town like Gallup that's all hills, one can burn a lot of calories just walking around.

I'm not trolling, I'm just misunderstood.

Maybe they will replace AJ with Robert Irvine as the Fighting Chef! That will put meat in the seats.

This sounds like the greatest thing EVER!

Something that's great for either the novice or the lazy pro are the Kikkoman mixes for various Chinese dishes. They are like .99 a packet and with a bit of soy sauce and other stuff that you likely have on hand you can make restaurant quality General Tso's Chicken, Mongolian Beef, and numerous other tasty goodies. Needless to say, boneless thighs are usually pretty damn cheap and I find them much more flavorful than breast meat (which is also way expensive). You can also make good Pad Thai from scratch and a big ol' pot goes a long ways...

Hey Jerry: You are absolutely correct, another day and I'd have gone septic and likely wouldn't be here now. The irritating thing is that I've never had a sick day in my life until last year when I started getting recurring cellulites in my legs. When it flares up, it can usually be handled with antibiotics, but continued use of antibiotics has its own deal with the devil attached... Eventually, you run out of different ones to try. Coming out of the hospital, I had another flare up, but the very same antibiotics that didn't work worth a shit two months ago have cleared things up in three days. Go figure. The whole thing is likely caused by my teeth falling apart (six years without insurance will do that), so the long-term strategy is to get what few I have left pulled and get dentures. Problem is, Medicare doesn't pay for such, so it looks like $6000 out of pocket, which I don't have. Hopefully, I'll find a dentist in Albuquerque that offers financing of some sort...

There's a great story idea in there somewhere... Ah, shit... Bradbury beat me to it by some fifty years with "Fever Dream"... Oh, well...

No, that doesn't mean I'm a zombie... (Although back in the day, I used to like to drink zombies). I just had the scariest experience of a life that includes being stabbed a couple of times shot at once and jumped by a couple of thugs that put me in the hospital way back when... Some of you may have noticed my absence from this grand old board the last couple of weeks. What happened was the most bizarre thing I've ever experienced. Apparently the antibiotics I'm taking joined forces with some other meds to tell my kidneys it was time for a long vacation... End result was that all the poison that the kidneys are supposed to dump out backed up and even backed up into my brain. I woke up on a Monday thinking I must have had a stroke, Everything seemed to be in slow motion. I didn't realize how slow, (my wife later explained that it took me two hours to make a cup of coffee and another hour to figure out how to lie down... Suffice it to say that my doc said "Get to the hospital right NOW". I was in ICU getting dialysis for three days and then more or less have bounced back. That's not counting last week, all of which was spent in bed sleeping 20 out of 24 hours. Anyway, I can't think of anything scarier than the body not responding to commands from the brain. Good to be back, good to be alive... Supposedly there will be no lasting effects, and I'm seeing a specialist who is changing all my meds so that nothing like this happens again...

Did he slap anyone while he was there?

The one that has always surprised me was Larry Cameron. I know he had a tryout with WWF and nothing came of it and he went to tour Australia. I can't imagine why VKM didn't sign him as he seemed like exactly the right look for WWF and there was the added bonus of a relationship with Stampede. He must've either stunk up the joint or pissed somebody off. Al Perez was one of those guys that looked great until he got in the ring, then he was all sorts of meh. I recall the Apter mags writing glowing accolades about him, and then I finally got to see him. Hadn't been so disappointed since finally seeing Bruno after years of reading about him....

Because none of those people were The Stuff, obviously. Indeed!

Shaun: When you have such a wealth of cool people to list, (Mineo, Dunbar, Fagen, Thurston, Wiskowski, Benatar, Foreman, etc.) Why mention Buff Bagwell?

I suspect that this is going to turn out to be an abusive relationship that went south...