The_Admiral

So here's my idea for a five-dollars-and-a-dream CCSLC long con: we buy a minor-league baseball team, doesn't have to be AAA, we're not made of money here, Jesus, just the Sally League or Florida League or something. So let's saaaaaay theeeeeeee Dunedin Blue Jays, they haven't been touched yet. So we run them for a year without incident, then we say that we need to rebrand the team, and in comes Brandiose. We solicit some concepts from the good old Whimsy Twins and predictably they're all wack-ass designs with eight different colors and anthropomorphic bat-swinging whatevers and arcane city nicknames that no one's ever heard of on the road uniforms and names so dumbfounding that I can't even come up with examples. They present them to us and then we just say "what are all of you retarded or something this is the dumbest crap anyone's ever seen" and then pull a string that dumps a bucket of rotting fish on them and hopefully the whole experience leaves them so scarred that they take me up on that whole granola bar idea.

Truly a man behind and ahead of his time.

1 hour ago, DG_Now said:

So.....do all those numbnuts from that brilliant Glendale council meeting get to publicly eat or what?

"According to a study by the University of Phoenix, I just stepped on a series of rakes."

15 minutes ago, Sodboy13 said:

Doesn't it feel like purple/yellow/green is a little played out for New Orleans? Speaking from experience, I love the Chicago flag as a design element for the Fire and Red Stars, but then the Bulls slapped it on every available space and the Hawks crammed it into their Stadium Series jerseys and, woof, enough.

I don't mind it for the Bulls because their identity is so minimalist (really, it's just the scripts and the primary) that some civic engagement does help to flesh things out a bit, but I don't need everyone on board with it, and then again, isn't the Bulls logo itself representative of Chicago for a lot of the world?

But yeah this is completely abhorrent as usual for Brandiose, please stop redesigning baseball teams and redirect your efforts to something that does less damage to sports fans, like packaging for granola bars or something, I dunno.

So they're looking for someone to give them $200 million and already singling out the state and city. The train's never late, folks!

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Coyotes president and CEO Anthony LeBlanc told Arizona Sports that there will be “several tranches of money” utilized to build the arena, though team will be the lead investor in the project and Arizona State will provide a large contribution.

“We’re not looking for general funds from any governmental organization, but we need to form a very strong partnership with the State of Arizona and the City of Tempe,” LeBlanc said. “We also have to work with a variety of stakeholder groups such as Goldwater Institute and others so they understand what it is we’re trying to do. These projects have a process.”

This doesn't sound suspiciously vague or duplicitous at all.

I used to like the San Antonio Missions a lot, and I want to note that I got way more pushback than I deserved for saying that you shouldn't italicize a building.

11 hours ago, KittSmith_95 said:

The shtick has rubbed off not because the logos aren't creative, but the fact everything is now formulaic. At 1st, the identities were unique enough to work, but that niche is gone.

Yeah, they're doing EVERY SINGLE TEAM, and doing it the same way every time. Every team at every level can't be the Montgomery Biscuits. Someone has to take someone aside somewhere and explain how and why Yard Goats and Rumble Ponies are word vomit, or that you don't italicize a building, or that nobody within your city, let alone outside it, gives a damn what your "_____ City" nickname is and never will.

Maybe he can take his face for radio and voice for print back over to his fast-fading Medium account and turn it around before that one guy nuts all over a TV showing a Capital One commercial.

If you've been following the politics thread, you know I think Vox is a garbage site for garbage people by garbage people and this slipshod "data" journalism solidifies my point:

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It is truly embarrassing to be fooled into believing something improbable happened, thanks to an unscrupulous scammer and a misunderstanding of statistics. Unfortunately, Manjoo was the one who got scammed, and Romano was the unscrupulous one.

On inspection, Vox’s claim that @RaysFanGio’s work was “an example of a classic confidence scam” contains no evidence that any such scamming took place. 

. . . 

In other words, as Vox sees it, back in 2014, @RaysFanGio seeded Twitter with tweets about future sports events so that he could promote the winning one with a Twitter feature that would not be introduced for another two years. Some people might find that to be a more remarkable accomplishment than predicting who would meet in the World Series.

Vox did not ask @RaysFanGio—who is a real person, a Rays fan named Lenn “Gio” Fraraccio—if he had done any of these things. The article called the tweet a “prediction scam” and assumed that he chose to “bury” the evidence, didn’t provide any convincing proof that Fraraccio had actually done anything of the sort, and made its claims without having tested them by (say) asking him if he’d been up to anything nefarious.

Most of the remainder of the post is padded with background information about confidence artists and the history of people joking about the Cubs winning the World Series. The latter is where Vox inadvertently crosses over from butchering traditional journalism to butchering its own thought-experiment-based neo-journalism. Vox knows that thousands if not millions of people have been making jokes about the Cubs someday winning a championship, but it fails to apply elementary reasoning to that knowledge.

 

Do you know what it takes to get cancelled from HBO? You either have to cost the GDP of a small island nation per episode and not get viewers or put out such a crap sandwich that the "it's not TV" part of the slogan is thrown into doubt. See if you can guess which one "Bill Simmons wears flannel and sneakers on TV and talks about the Celtics" was.

That's a sailboat.

Actually I just realized this is demonstrably false.

1 hour ago, WSU151 said:

Say it real fast, and you end up with "Bronies" (not that I'm saying anything negative about real Bronies).

Okay, then I will. They, uh, some of them want to have sex with cartoon animals. I mean, this board represents a weird niche interest too, but I've never written erotic fiction about pounding a roundel.

"This is a high-energy, impactful, bold move," Babby said Tuesday.

The English language was a mistake.

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"[Brandiose] had a vision, and I think they came up with logos that say what the community is all about.

Apparently the community is about self-immolating amphibians. It's a vision, all right; were they designing frogs or licking them?

http://thecommittedindian.com/predators-spotlight-one/

This blog has never hidden its affection for Pernell Karl Subban. It’s just a shame that the rest of the hockey world, specifically the one that considers itself so polite and understanding (and cold), wouldn’t follow suit.

This is hyperbole, to say the least. Fels needs to be reminded every now and then that he didn't invent hockey because he went to Blackhawks games in 2006.

Yeah, that's just basic incredulity. Some of these little Neil Degrasse Tysons on Twitter could sit next to Jack Buck exclaiming "I don't believe what I just saw!" and say "well, the fact that you witnessed it means you have to believe it, because factually speaking, it happened." "No way he's pitching tonight" looks dumb written out in this context, but if you say it in Harold Reynolds Voice, it makes perfect sense.

I like Harold Reynolds because he always seems to be genuinely happy to be doing what he's doing. I mean, he rarely provides any insight beyond the most superficial observations, but contrast with the insipid thoughts we got from Joe Buck and Tim McCarver all those years without half the joie de vivre.

That Awful Announcing writeup is much more effusive about Chris Cuthbert than I am. He and Dennis Beyak both sound like someone is lightly strangling them. I suppose they're technically sound, I just don't wanna hear 'em talk.

It's so funny that Deadspin is using its Concourse vertical to hide Gawker.com in plain sight. Univision either doesn't care or doesn't know, which is just a higher form of not caring.

1 hour ago, nash61 said:

Utica has one of the smallest (if not THE smallest) arena in the AHL, but as a byproduct of that are rolling with 55 straight sellouts and counting.

Conversely, Albany has one of the biggest arenas among the small-northeast-market teams, something like 12,000, and their attendance is terrible. I suspect apathy toward the Devils and the Devils running a bare-bones operation that doesn't get people in the door. Maybe that's where the Rangers' affiliate belongs, not Hartford or Binghamton. You've gotta imagine most people in Albany are Rangers fans.

23 straight years is an eternity in AHL time. They play to about 90% capacity. As long as 'Cuse doesn't start a hockey program, the Crunch seem to be on solid ground.

They won't, but I can see an AHL where New York State is down to Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany, and that's it. The AHL has already retreated from the Maritimes, and now they're barely even in New England (Bridgeport is in Fairfield, it doesn't really count). The Pennsylvania teams all seem safe because the arenas are new, medium-sized, and in proximity to their parent teams, but you gotta think Utica isn't gonna last much longer with a distant parent team and a small old arena in a small poor town. Hard to feel great about the direction of this league; no one's calling for an all-New York bus league but concentrating on the hockey-fertile Northeast seems like good business for the game at all levels.

Harrisburg isn't terribly far from Washington as it is. It seems like people in that part of Pennsylvania are as likely look to Washington-Baltimore as they are to Philadelphia. The Hershey Bears are as close to a cornerstone franchise as the AHL has. They'll go nowhere.

I say it's time to give Plattsburgh a look. Real northern New York (REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAL HIP-HOP) seems so remote and quaint.