Today marks the twenty seventh anniversary of the day Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon in New York City. For many people, this is a sad occasion. As a sign of what some take as his last gasp of cultural relevance, Howard Cosel interrupted the Monday Night Football telecast to tell the world that sad news. I was just over a year old at the time. And believe it or not, I care less about the life, the times and the tragic death of John Lennon now than I did then.

I have mentioned in this space that I hate the Beatles. So today, in honor of John Lennon's death, I am bringing back my personal favorite feature of this blog, the Random Thing I Hate. I hate the Beatles. I do not hate the Beatles more today than I do on any other day, but it's about time I blogged about it at length. I don't know that I can explain why I hate the Beatles. I just do.

I guess unlike a lot of people, I have no problem admitting that I react to music on a visceral, emotional level. There is very little rational or intellectual thought involved. I like what I like, and have little time for the rest. I can tell you some of the things I don't like about the Beatles, and maybe why I don't like those aspects but I don't think they will add up to a coherent explanation of my overall hatred of the Beatles.

The Beatles burst on the scene singing mushy, trite love songs about holding hands and loving till the end of time (a paraphrase and a Bowdlerization of a line from the film The Commitments). Then all of a sudden, they got into drugs and somehow became a force for positive change in the world. At least that's what I've been told. I don't necessarily buy it.

Then again, I'm the sort of guy that gets mad when I hear or see the History Channel ads for the new show they're running to explore the tumultuous year that was 1968to commemorate its 40th anniversary. According to the History Channel, 1968 was the most explosive year in American History. Somehow, I find that hard to believe when you think about things like the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Or the election of Abraham Lincoln and South Carolina forces shelling the Federal troops at Fort Sumter in 1860. But that's just me.

I suppose, in part, my hate for the Beatles is tied to my lack of respect for the historical import of the 1960s. Outside of the effects of the Civil Rights Movement and equal pay for equal work, there is very, very, very little evidence that the world is a better place now than it was in the 1950s and 1960s. Everything that the hippies, the counter culture and the optimists of that era thought was subverting the Establishment is now a wholly owned and marketed subsidiary of the Establishment.

For instance, there is no way that anything that is legitimately controversial can get air time the way a show like All in the Family did in the early 1970s. But if it's controversial for the sake of creating meaningless controversy over whether or not one can say dirty words like Howard Stern, or arguing the same fringe aspects of major issues without tackling the issues themselves like the ten thousand talk shows on the ten thousand cable news networks, then it's a big hit.

There are certain companies that market themselves as the sort of ironic Fortune 500 companies. On the inside, but still trendy and current and subversive. Like Starbucks. Or Apple. And I hate that. It makes me sick to my stomach that people think they can buy a prepackaged, mass produced product and have it lend them an air of individuality and rebellion.

I'm not saying that this is the Beatles fault. What I am saying is that people point to the counter culture movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s as though it accomplished something, and the fact is that it did not. And whether I am overstating this case or not, I still believe that the Beatles are the most visible and esteemed icon of the counter culture of the late 1960s.

The Beatles came out with a lot of songs with hollow rhetoric about lonely old women and drugged out tools in skies with diamonds and living in yellow submarines. Perhaps they had some tangible accomplishments in there that I somehow missed. Are hungry people all over the world less hungry because the Beatles recorded Abby Road? Are the lonely people less lonely than they were before Elanor Rigby?

Perhaps the Beatles had a role in making Western society a less repressive, patriarchal, hierarchical endeavor than it was. Was that a good thing? Are the streets safer? Are we really freer, or more free or whatever grammatical impossibility best describes the logical impossibility contained therein. If we are more free as a society, it is in the nightmare scenario which prompted Orwell to include the line Freedom is Slavery in the credo of Oceana in 1984. People work longer hours for less and are, in general, less happy than they were in the old days. Maybe we were better off before the counter culture freed us from our social chains.

I am aware that it is not the responsibility of four tools from Liverpool with bad hairdos to solve all the world's problems. Nor is (or was since there are now 1/2 as many of them as there were in the beginning) it possible. But people seem to want to look back and perhaps tell themselves that the Beatles song Back in the USSR caused glasnost and detente and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. But at least people look at Elvis as a quasi-saintlike figure purely as a performer and not as some bellwether figure of a cultural sea change that maybe shouldn't have happened in the first place.

The best thing about the Beatles is that this band that revolutionized music and changed the world in the process was not taken down by drugs or repressive society or some cabal led by Richard Nixon and everybody's least favorite transvestite, J Edgar Hoover. No, the Beatles were taken down by a marginally talented Japanese American conceptual artist of no artistic distinction and an uggo to boot. It might be tragic if it weren't so damn funny.

As for their efforts as solo artists, I think the fact that the first hit any of them had was a dreadful song about pagan gods says a lot. However, George Harrison is only number two of the Beatles I hate. Primarily he's on the list for that song and for playing at his ex-wife's wedding to a dude who slept with her while she was still married to George. I have to tell you, even if my wife left me for Eric Clapton, it would take some sort of miracle for me to go to the wedding, let alone participate in it in any capacity.

Paul McCartney is third on the list, even though he's a giant tool and an outspoken advocate for vegetarian lifestyles. Of the post-Beatle music I think his work with Wings and as a solo artist is probably better than any of the others from an aesthetic standpoint. I like Band on the Run and Live and Let Die quite a bit. I am also inclined to sympathize with him as he is being taking to the cleaners by his estranged wife Heather Mills, who becomes more and more insane with each passing day. I'd hate him a lot less, however, had he not sold out and released his latest album on the Starbucks label.

Ring Starr isn't even on the list actually. I think between his looks and the fact that every one has shown him much less respect than any of the other Beatles for so long that he has reached critical mass in the tool category. So I don't hate him. I suppose it helps that I hate Octopus's Garden the least of all Beatles' songs (excluding covers). And his solo hit Photograph is far and away my favorite of any of their solo projects, even though Paul's body of work is better as a whole. I do realize that George Harrison helped write both songs mentioned above, but nobody's perfect.

There are very few people that I like less than John Lennon (obviously, monsters like Hitler, Stalin and Mao are in a whole other category). I have no time for songs like Imagine. Human nature has changed very little over the years. As the Billy Bob Thornton character in Bad Santa said before I censored it, wish in one hand then defecate in the other. Tell me which fills first.

I really want to know what John Lennon accomplished. Sure the Beatles songbook kept Michael Jackson in business in Neverland for a few years. But other than that, what? When John and Yoko famously took over the Mike Douglas show for a week and called random people to tell them they loved them, there was no tangible result. It was just a couple of oddballs, albeit famous oddballs acting oddly.

So John Lennon died twenty-seven years ago today. It's somewhat sad that a nut job shot him on the stairs of the Dakota apartment building. I just can't bring myself to consider it to have been any more tragic than the 34 or so other murders that surely happened on that day in New York City (God knows, it's like Detroit with a tourist industry there). The one thing that bothers me most about the Beatles is that their achievements outside the musical world are so massively overstated that it obscures the level to which their musical achievements are overrated.

It is a strange thing, for me, with my new found interest in Alice Cooper to rail at the Beatles this way. He's always talking about how big an influence they were on his early musical ventures. I just don't like the Beatles. I like them less with each passing day. And then again, Alice Cooper loves John Cougar Mellencamp, so there is clearly something wrong with him.

I also think the following bands are overrated: Aerosmith (massively, very nearly as big a blight on Boston as Red Sox Nation is), the Rolling Stones (although I do like their music a lot), Chicago (they suck), the Allman Brothers (whom I also like), Skynard (can't say too much about them, since I also fly a lot), Boston, KISS, Metallica and any number of others that I just don't have time to enumerate right now.

Today was a banner day for New England sports fans. Most importantly, the Red Sox basically increased their lead over the Yankees, even though it won't show in the standings. So Steve Phillips and the Mike and Mike crew have jumped the gun by scheduling their discussion of whether or not it's time to press the panic button in Red Sox Nation for tomorrow morning. Tim Wakefield went eight innings and Paps closed it out in the 9th. Meanwhile the Yankees overcame a Rivera blown save to win in the home half of the 9th. For all intents and purposes, the lead might as well be back up to ten, maybe twelve games.

While it may be an impressive feat to hold any given 9 men who are paid to hit a baseball without a hit for 6 solid innings, let's not forget that the Tampa Bay Devil Rays are not exactly the 1927 Yankees. It's true that getting BJ Upton to end the game when you're up by three and there isn't a soul on base is the basic equivalent of fanning Ruth and Gehrig with the bases loaded.

Unfortunately, it doesn't change the fact that they just dropped 2 of 3 to the Orioles. Nor does it change the fact that Eric Gagne looks a lot more like a mistake now than he did when the CHB mushed him with this puff piece. One can only hope said article brings the same magic to KG that it has to the Sox to this point.

The real triumph came in the form of an Esquire magazine piece naming Tom Brady the best dressed man in the world. Call me old fashioned, but who gives a damn? What exactly is the methodology that produces lists like this? Was any consideration given to the day when he was photographed looking like an unmade bed and rocking a Yankees hat? I must confess that I was a little disappointed that they included the pope on the list. Not so much that His Holiness didn't top the list, but it seemed like they were making fun of him a bit. Benedict XVI wears the same papal vestments that Popes have worn for quite some time, right?

Of course, I only bring up this monumental achievement of Brady's to express the hope that this small victory and the fact that the team won the offseason will keep Patriots fans warm when Randy Moss and Stallworth come up short, the thin secondary gets thinner and the inside linebackers get their AARP cards. Of course, I was also the guy who spent much of the spring angry at the amount of hype given to the Lance Briggs holdout while one hardly dared whisper about the Asante Samuel contract situation. So what do I know?

Among the several things I know at the moment: Lance Briggs has since signed with the Bears. Asante Samuel has yet to sign with the Patriots. For me, it's fascinating to watch this situation unfold. Samuel is looking for a massive deal like the one Nate Clements signed with San Francisco, and I can't say I blame him. Why not shoot for the stars? The team certainly seems to need him, since Chad Scott went down for the year in the first week of camp, and defensive back was not a strong point from jump street.

But the team has a valid point, as well. Samuel has 16 career INTs, but he picked up 10 of them last season in his contract year. While ten interceptions is, in the grand scheme of things, a very productive season for an NFL defensive back, one must still temper one's desire to throw bags of money at a guy who broke out in a contract season. One also must temper one's admiration of a ten interception season when 3 of those picks came during Rex Grossman's inexplicable effort to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory on the brand new field turf in Foxboro last November.

Too often, cornerbacks in the NFL have shown flashes of brilliance only to burn teams who sign them to big contracts down the road. However, the Patriots do not have much depth in the secondary. Rodney Harrison is a year older, and his injury history is not encouraging. The rookie from Miami needs to show he can behave like a human being in the event of a fight. Eugene Wilson in adequate, maybe. Chad Scott was old, now he's on the shelf. Randal Gay probably grew up tough as hell because of his last name, but hasn't proved himself over the course of an entire season to the point where he deserves to be the number one cornerback on a contender.

I guess what really bothered me was that the Bears were ripped for not signing a linebacker when their linebacking corps was still in good hands. Urlacher is Urlacher, the overplayed vitamin water ads notwithstanding, and Hillenmeyer is quite good. Jay Mariotti even went so far as to suggest that the Bears should have dealt Briggs to the Redskins for their number one pick and then used said pick to draft Ted Ginn Jr. (in case you're wondering, I will be tracking Ginn's performance as one more way to show my solidarity with the anti-Jay movement).

Of course, Belichick will work some magic, and maybe our old friend Vladimir Putin can get another crack at a Patriots Super Bowl ring. So none of this will have mattered.

I want to end tonight with the first random thing I hate in quite some time. Tonight, it's Carrie Underwood. The other day, I happened to be listening to Mike FM, the station with no DJs and totally random music. They happened to play Carrie Underwood's Before He Cheats. That song bothers me because of the line: "right now, he's probably buying her some fruity little drink cause she can't shoot whiskey."

Every time I've heard that song, I ended up going back over the list of things I look for in a woman. And wouldn't you know, the ability to shoot whiskey just isn't there. Maybe I'm crazy, but what the hell do I want to spend time with a woman who drinks like I do? So I can share a his and hers moment where we both exit through the screen door without actually opening the damn screen?

The sad thing is, there are people in this world who do think that a woman who shoots whiskey is an ideal mate. I could only imagine the horrified looks on my parents' faces if I were to bring such a woman home. I wonder how the introductions would work: "Whiskey-drinking Annie, I'd like you to meet my mother and father."

I have to say that it might be refreshing to go to a wedding and not worry about whether I would be the biggest drunk there, unless of course it were my wedding and the other contestant just happened to be the bride. That would, indeed, be a sad day in my world.

I would like to be a guest at that wedding, though. Especially if I got to sit in the back row and make bets with other guests as to whether the bride or the groom would make the biggest drunken spectacle of him or herself. Imagine that, offering odds or setting up a system of squares to see who passed out first, or who fell into the cake, or who threw the first punch at whom?

Plus, to get back to the song, based on my experience, a woman who shoots whiskey is very likely going to be cheated on at some point in her life. The women I know who knock back a shooter or ten tend not to be at the top of the aesthetic spectrum. They tend to lack polish, sophistication, and, to be frank, manners. So the song becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You warn a guy not to cheat when you're doing something that might drive him to cheat... It seems like you might have missed a step somewhere down the line.

It's been a very long time since I've done a random thing I hate feature. Mostly I've been concentrating on the things that I hate that pertain to the Red Sox these days. And a few bits and pieces devoted to my other mortal enemies like Danny Ainge, Jay Mariotti, Ron Mexico and others. It's getting to the point where I have as many enemies as Richard Nixon. Would that I had the late former President's charm and easy going personality.

Tonight I give you the Random Thing I Hate for June 21, 2007. It's Rachel Ray.



I have always found her moderately annoying. I never watched much of 30 Minute Meals. So she can cook. Big deal. In the immortal words of Hondo Lane: "A woman ought to be a good cook. Hell, I'm a good cook myself." I never believed that she did all the work herself and got the food cooked in 30 minutes. Personally, I suspected that the crew, maybe somebody like the best boy grip or the gaffer did most of the work but she got the credit because she was more telegenic than your average garden-variety fat union guy showing a spirit-crushing amount of ass cleavage.

Also, Rachel Ray is cute. Only this and nothing more. She isn't tremendously hot. Maybe on the Food Network that gets in done, considering the Barefoot Contessa looks like she may have been a middle linebacker in her "prime." Rachel Ray is also perky as hell. I hate perky, energetic people. They make me want to ask them all if they were on dope, as though I were Mr. Hand from Fast Times. Perky people out to be outlawed. Now, if Marvin the Paranoid Android from the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy had a cooking show, that's something I would watch.

I could deal with that when she was buried on the Food Network with that loser Molto Mario (what does a red-headed tool know about Italian food?). But now she's everywhere. On daytime TV. On primetime TV. On late night TV On Demand for the desperately lonely drunks. You can't get away from her. And those damn Dunkin' Donuts spots aren't helping much. I also hate Dunkin Donuts. There's nothing like rolling through a Dunkin' Donuts early on a Sunday morning with a hangover to try to get a bacon egg and cheese and a soda while every family in a thirty block radius drags their terribly behaved little monster-children down to get some damn munchkins and scream their heads off.

Now rumor has it that she's going to open a restaurant. That's what the world needs, another useless celebrity chef charging premium prices for slightly above-average food. One night at Mohegan Sun, I ate at the Jasper Willis Summer Shack. It was not too impressive. I've been to better street vending carts, but since every tool under the sun has heard of of Jasper Willis, he gets to charge 20 bucks for an entree that's worth about 6.50.

At least I'm not the only person out there who hates Rachel Ray. You can read all about the roots of the anti-Rachel Ray movement in this article from Boston.com. The headquarters of the anti-Rachel Ray movement can be found at this blog on LiveJournal. It's where I got that picture of her with the devil horns. I think you should join to offer moral support. I would, but I already belong to a blog site, and I don't really have the energy to join another.

For a change, I thought I would include a note of positivity amidst my customary negativity. Tonight, with my direst of mortal enemies preoccupied in travelling to the West Coast, I was able to venture into the epicenter of hostile territory. I went to Popeye's Chicken and Biscuits to partake of fried chicken and biscuits. In preparation for the expedition, my friend did some internet research, where he came across this site with a smattering of unfavorable reviews of the Popeye's Kenmore experience.

I don't know if the rocket scientists who found the restaurant overcrowded, slow and generally unpleasant were dumb enough to go to the Popeye's in Kenmore Square when 37,000 people assembled in the vicinity to see the Red Sox play. I could see where that mistake could be possible, since the Red Sox like to surprise the hell out of the local populace by just playing random games without any advance notice. For the love of God, the schedules are set out in advance, you can see when there's a game by looking at TV listings in the paper, on digital cable or on the web. You can read the sports pages. You ought to be smart enough to plan accordingly if you want to go Kenmore Square and not deal with headaches, traffic and overcrowding. And if you aren't smart enough, you ought to be polite enough to keep your damn mouth shut.

I found the restaurant to be scrupulously clean, efficiently run and a very good place to eat some fried chicken. I highly recommend it, and I hope that the Red Sox take to eating their pregame meals there. With that I must go. I apologize for tonight's brevity. I am mired in a food hangover from the substantial portions of fried chicken, biscuits (which taste like they're made from real butter, by the way) and rice and beans. I just don't have the energy to go on. Until the next time...

I have a riddle for you. When is a win not a win? When an official goes mad with power, runs amok and ejects the best player on either team with little or no justification. Such was the case last night in Dallas, where the Spurs went into a funk after Joey Crawford kicked Tim Duncan out of the game on a insane power trip and lost to the Mavericks.

After a long silence on the subject of basketball, the Benefactor weighed in on this subject today. Mark Cuban doesn't want you to send him emails complaining about the officiating in the NBA anymore. He wants you to email the owners or managers of the other NBA franchises to stir up grass roots action to change the face of NBA officiating.

Of course, as a blogger who has long been critical of his hypocrisy, I have to wonder whether the Benefactor would have been so quick to bow out because of the severity of any fine the league would levy prevents it from being worth his while had it been one of his players instead of Tim Duncan. I have to think that had Joey Crawford had so much as troubled the serenity of Dirk Nowitzki by mentioning the fact that the German government recently tried to draft a four week old child into its war machine or pointing out that David Hasselhoff's music sucks, the Benefactor would have manned the barricades and screamed bloody murder. But that's just me.

That gets to the root of my problem with the Benefactor. More even than his atrocious personal deportment in the crowd at games, which constantly evokes the image of a spoiled four year old throwing a temper tantrum because another child is playing with his favorite toy, the fact that his concern with the quality of NBA officiating begins and ends with how it impacts the Mavericks.

If Joey Crawford broke a chair over a player from any other team's head, kidnapped his family to force them to participate in some ill-conceived cross-country race or sold poisoned milk to school children, Mark Cuban would keep his mouth shut. But if he misses one call that the Benefactor thinks should have benefited the Mavs, and it's go time. Even if David Stern decided to forgo the standard fine and handed Mark Cuban over to black market organ harvesters to exact punishment, the Benefactor would move heaven and earth to get his two cents heard.

And Mark Cuban doesn't want to be bothered by fans looking for a mouthpiece to articulate their discontent with NBA officiating. It seems like he should have made that call a few years ago, before he set himself up as NBA gadfly to get people to notice him. And if you don't think it's about ego with the Benefactor, then maybe you shouldn't read this little piece about what a tool Mark Cuban is.

I have a solution to his little problem. Email Mark Cuban to complain about NBA officiating. Email him to talk about the umpires in Major League Baseball. Email him to talk about the weather in your town. Email him to ask pointless, unanswerable questions. Email him to talk about sailing ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings as though you were the damn Walrus from Alice in Wonderland. Email Mark Cuban several times a day to tell him no one cares about his opinion on Google and YouTube. Just email him to tell him he's a tool and a hypocrite and wish the Mavericks an early exit from the playoffs when you email him.

I think I have reasonable precedent for this. According to legend, the eminent comedian WC Fields would send Elanor Roosevelt and the IRS letters every day to complain about them. I think you should take the time to complain about Mark Cuban, provided of course that you want to. God knows, if I ever become famous, I'm going to send a letter to remind people (like John Henry, Theo Epstein, Larry Lucchino, Danny Ainge, Wyc, Steve, Irv, the rest of Banner 17, Bill Simmons, the CHB, Bob Ryan, Jay Mariotti, Mark Cuban and others) that I don't like them.

Just do me one favor if you decide to email Cuban, keep it clean and don't do anything illegal. And do not under any circumstances send any complaints to the IRS. That sounds like one hell of a good way to get an audit, and I just don't need that hassle.

Tonight, we have a combined tool of note segment and random thing I hate thing segment for the first time ever. They both come out of that colossal waste of time that is the Boston Marathon. While I hate the marathon, it is not the random object of my derision tonight. Instead, that honor goes to the space program.

Space exploration was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be a giant waste of time and money. So what if we got Tang, Velcro and pens that write upside down. I just don't see how that and all the and a little flag on the moon justifies the billions and billions upon yet more billions of dollars of the next dozen generations' money that the government spent on the space program.

Even if there is intelligent life in the universe (based on what passes for it on this planet, I sincerely doubt that intelligent life exists anywhere), I just don't see how sending people up in rockets to do experiments of little tangible value is going to help us here on Earth. So what if aliens invade the planet to probe rednecks or kidnap people or kill us all.

And among all of the colossal wastes of both time and money in the space program, there is this gem. A woman at the space station was tethered to a treadmill to run the Boston Marathon in spirit. And on both Tax Day and Patriots' Day. The Founding Fathers must have been rolling over in their graves. They revolted against a relatively benign tyranny over a 3 cent tax on tea, and now we have a woman in space running on a treadmill at the expense of billions of dollars of public money.

Even better, the woman was running the Boston Marathon in spirit as a gesture of solidarity with her sister. Aside from the gargantuan waste of money, this struck me as a total fraud. First, if there were gravity on the space station, why did they have to tether her to the treadmill? And if there was less than normal gravity shouldn't she have had to run further? And how does it count, even if she'd changed the incline settings at the appropriate times? It's not like she ran real, honest to goodness, no fooling hills in the rain.

And on top of everything else, the woman was a Red Sox fan. There they were on TV, the banners, trappings and paraphernalia of the team I hate as the woman was wasting an entire nation's money in an exercise that was so obviously fraudulent. A perfect storm, in the metaphorical sense, and with no pun on the miserable weather.

As a special bonus, here is a second tool, with a bizarre infatuation for the terribly pointless UPS whiteboard ads.

Since the Red Sox were supposed to have a double header today, I might as well throw up two posts in one day. This will probably be short, as I have somewhere I am supposed to be in one hour.

RANDOM THING I HATE #2

It's been a while since I posted the first installment of the Random Things I Hate series. These things are random in the sense that they do not pertain to the Red Sox or the Boston sports scene. I should probably come up with another title to distinguish these short segments from the randomness of the things I hate about the Sox, but I am somewhat lazy and not particularly imaginative. This evening, I think it's time to talk about the Dixie Chicks.

I like some country music. I am a big fan of George Strait. I love Johnny Cash. A lot of the old time country music is great stuff. Some of it isn't, but I can put up with it. I don't like too much of what has come out of Nashville of late. The Dixie Chicks are at the top of the list of the acts that I hate.

Unlike a lot of people, or so it seems lately, I don't really care about the politics of musicians. Republican, Democrat, Communist, Nihilist, whatever. If the music is good, I listen. I think that celebrities should probably stay away from their misguided efforts to influence voters. First of all, no matter which side of the spectrum they're on, they should remember that they really aren't smarter or better informed than the average person. Also, they probably do more damage to their own cause than they help.

That said, it's a free country. So they can say and do whatever they want. The Dixie Chicks have every right to say what they want about the President. And people who like the President (few though they may be right now) have every right to react to those comments as they did. I've now gone a long way to say this: the Dixie Chicks, like Mark Cuban, are frauds.

What got my attention was the fact that they compared themselves to Bruce Springsteen. They may have similar political leanings, they record music, and as far as I know they breathe air, but that's about all they have in common with Springsteen.

In the apology one of the Chicks made to the View, she did say that they consider the Boss a role model and not a peer. She said the Dixie Chicks often ask themselves: "What would Springsteen do?" I would offer this as an answer to that rhetorical question: "Springsteen would make good music."

By a conservative estimate, Springsteen has at least 3 songs that are infinitely better than anything in the Dixie Chicks' songbook on the Seeger Sessions alone. "Wide Open Spaces" and "Ready to Run" aren't ready for comparisons to "Tenth Avenue Freezeout" and "Backstreets," let alone "Born to Run" or "Thunder Road." "Earl's Gotta Die" has nothing for edge or power on anything from Darkness on the Edge of Town or Nebraska.

I hate the Dixie Chicks. They were ready to trade on their appearance and their cutie-pie redneck image to make it big, and now they're not ready to make nice, if I can take their recent album title at its word. Not ready to make nice. Would that they were ready to make something approximating music.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I apologize for the delay in updating this fevered dream I call Sedition in Red Sox Nation. I do have my reasons. First, this blog was recently subject to review by the site that hosts it. I did not discover that until I tried to post and my computer crashed. I hadn't saved a draft of the post on which I was working at the time, so I was a bit angry. I didn't get around to redoing it as I had more pressing concerns at the time. After that, I went on vacation for a while. I am back now, and ready to get back to subverting the confederacy of dunces that is the Boston Red Sox.

I know I promised a new feature in one of my posts. I was working on it at the time of the computer crash. Unfortunately, anger and laziness have conspired to delay it still further. I simply am not ready to run with it yet. It does exist, at least on a conceptual level, as I write this. However, in my travels, I got the idea for a new segment which strikes me as more interesting at the moment. WIthout further adieu (and with nothing more than a working title at this point), here it is...

RANDOM THING I HATE INSTALLMENT 1:

I hate a great many things. The overwhelming majority of them are, in the grand scheme of things, trivial. Among them, you might have noticed (provided, of course, that you have read any of my previous posts) the Boston Red Sox, Red Sox fans and Danny Ainge. That is just the tip of the iceberg. I am a small and petty person, a bastion of negativity seeking to make other people unhappy.

This particular segment exists under the working title "Random Thing I Hate" because I can't come up with something better at the moment. It is random in the sense that it is something I hate that is not related to the stated purpose of this site. Basically, every day in my life is Festivus, this blog is my version of the Festivus Airing of Grievances and this particular segment is my way of telling those outside of Red Sox Nation that, in the immortal words of Frank Costanza: "I have a lot of problems with you people, and you're going to hear about them."

The first grievance I have is with the Benefactor. I cannot stand Mark Cuban. He's a fraud. He sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo at just the right time, which was quite lucky for him. I also have to give him credit for that. I will not believe that he's a latter-day JP Morgan until I enter the url for broadcast.com or broadcast.yahoo.com and see something. One cannot help but wonder where he would be if Yahoo held out just a little longer in the wake of the Broadcast.com IP, or he'd played a bit harder to get.

But I must temper my contempt for his business acumen by remembering that he did acquire Antoine Walker from the Celtics for what amounted to magic beans. I imagine that is a little harsh, after all, Raef LaFrentz is probably the best center to hover around the 3 point line and play defense once in a blue moon since Arvydis Sabonis retired. And Jiri Welsch was awesome.

His behavior in the crowd at games bothers me to no end. To put it plainly, I think he looks and acts like a jackass. He runs onto the court after playoff games to criticize officials. He flails and flops around his courtside seat each time a call goes against the Mavericks. For the most part, he conducts himself like a 3 year old in dire need of a time out.

As I watched him in this postseason, I kept remembering something I'd read. It took me a while to dig it up again, but when I did I think the author summed up Mark Cuban quite nicely. The author is George Orwell, and in his essay As I Please 6, he wrote about "the exceptional ugliness and vulgarity of the faces displayed" in the New Year Honours List (which as I understand it is, or was, a document issued in Britain to celebrate people who had recently been endowed with titles).

The particular quote that caught my eye in connection with Mark Cuban reads: "...I saw in Picture Post some 'stills' of Beaverbrook delivering a speech and looking more like a monkey on a stick than you would think possible for anyone who is not doing it on purpose."

I think that sums up Mark Cuban's deportment. He looks like a monkey on a stick. The question then must be asked: is he doing it on purpose? I think he is. After all, he has managed to become a B list celebrity. He had that awful show that ABC mercifully cancelled. He gets to hang out with George Clooney and produce movies that courageously stand up against McCarthyism 50 years after the fact. He reminds me of the little dog from the cartoons who is always yipping and yapping at the bigger dogs to attract their attention.

Personally, I don't care who is on the A list or the B List. Celebreality, in my way of thinking, is one of the worst TV genres to crop up in the last few years. I do not lose myself from my mundane concerns when I see the rich and famous acting with entitlement and avoiding responsibility. But I must confess, I did laugh like hell when I read that Mark Cuban got shut out of a trendy night club in New York. Apparently he even offered the doorman $1,000. Of course that is 3rd hand gossip, picked up from a New York tabloid via Wikipedia. It's not too hard to imagine the Benefactor trying to pass the bouncer a grand while 18 yr old Jersey girls who were on the list breeze past.

It might be possible for him to get in if his team wins the NBA title, but (as we know if we read his blog) the NBA conspires to deny Cuban the O'Brien Trophy. That is the only possible explanation. If the NBA allowed its officials to call the game as Dr. Naismith intended, Dallas would have 3 or 4 rings by now. Of course, based on the way he behaves in the crowd and "writes" in his blog, it seems to me that the only way to properly officiate a Mavs game is to have every opposing player start the game with 3 fouls. Perhaps the NBA could even work in a power play or two for the Mavericks.

I really don't know what to say about his grand gesture on fan appreciation night. It was awfully sporting of him and American Airlines to give the fans plane tickets. I know times are tough for the airlines, but you'd think the Benefactor could have done a bit better than a roundtrip to San Antonio, Houston, KC or St.Louis. Hell, he could probably have sent them all to Maui and not even have to think twice before asking for extra cheese on his next Texas Double Whopper.

I hate Mark Cuban. I am in a difficult spot, though, because I hate the Pistons and the Suns. For now, I draw some consolation in the fact that Antoine and the Heat are up 1-0 on Detroit who looks amazingly mortal. If Ben Wallace could get called for the occasional over-the-back and pick up a blocking foul when his feet aren't set, who knows what might be. I'm not enough of an optimist to believe that Prince will ever be called for 1 handcheck out of three. But maybe the Pistons will lose. There is always a chance.