Ode to Larry King: Iphone, oldness and terrible commissioners

By Dan Nied

Why “Ode to Larry King?” Well in college, I spent many a lonely lunch scanning USA Today, one of the free newspapers offered in the dining halls. My favorite regular feature was Larry King’s column in which he would make totally inane single-sentence statements and link them with an ellipses (or “…” for the punctuation challenged.). So the average Larry King column would read like this: For my money, there is nothing better than watching a bird feed its young…My favorite juice? Prune…World Wide Web? Not if you live in the country of Chad… Dom Deluise once gave me a whole pig as a Christmas gift. That man could butter your bread from both sides… and so on.

Reading King’s column always doubled me over with laughter. The sheer randomness of the whole thing, coupled with the mental image of King barking out those lines was perhaps one of the funniest things I’ve ever thought of. In fact, Norm MacDonald’s take on the column for SNL just made coffee come out of my nose.

So that’s where my Ode to Larry King comes from…

So Apple unveiled the Iphone 4 today. Thinner, longer battery life, higher resolution screen and all that jazz. And you know what? This makes me feel inferior about my place in the technological revolution. See, I’ve been using the Iphone 3G for a good year and a half now. That is already an outdated version, thanks to last year’s 3GS. And because of the way my AT&T contract works, I’ll never sniff the Iphone 4. With 18 months left on my contract, I’ll have to wait until at least one more version comes out to upgrade. So by the time late 2011 rolls around, my current phone will basically be a coaster. And to make matters worse, I am sitting in a coffee shop right now using my beat up HP laptop while the guy next to me has a brand new Macbook. And I can tell that he thinks he‘s better than me. Stupid Macbook users. So now I have to be self conscious about my laptop and my phone?…

I’m two months away from my 31st birthday and life keeps reminding me that I am getting old at an accelerate pace. The latest example came Sunday. I was watching the MTV Movie Awards with my girlfriend and all I could say about Christina Aguilera’s performance was “well, that was pretty tacky.” Then again, the 10-year old version of me thought the same thing while watching Madonna’s performance at the 1990 MTV Video Music Awards (sorry, no sound). So maybe I have just always been a curmudgeon…

There is a serious gap in effectiveness for the four major sports commissioners. Though that is not exactly breaking news, the size of the gap was illustrated from the bottom in the last week. Of course there is the obvious idiocy of MLB head man Bud Selig, who decided not to easily right an obvious wrong (more on that below). But NHL comish Gary Bettman has no competition when it comes to terrible. In his 17 years on the job, Bettman has failed miserably in his quest to Americanize hockey and bring the game to casual audiences in nontraditional markets. Plus, don’t you ever underestimate the Bettman’s ability to waste a gift. This year Bettman and the league got a dream finals: Two big markets (Chicago and Philadelphia), a compelling storyline (Philly’s path to the final, which included making the playoffs on the final day of the regular season and knocking off the top-seeded Capitals in the second round.) to go with a wildly entertaining series. So what happens? The league inexplicably schedules a pivotal Game 5 for Sunday at the same time as Game 2 of the NBA Finals. No, not only the same day, but the same exact time. The result was predictable. The NHL pulled decent ratings, but got doubled by the NBA. In the meantime, NBA commissioner David Stern is still the master at his job, and Roger Gooddell’s tenure in the NFL will ultimately be defined by his ability to prevent a work stoppage next year…

As for Selig, his decision to let Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga’s perfect game remain a one-hitter is appalling, and I don’t care who agrees with it. The simple reality is that Galarraga earned a perfect game, only to have a terrible call from an umpire say otherwise. An hour later, the umpire admitted to screwing up the call. A day later, the batter who initially got the “hit” said he was out. The fallout includes real national outrage at the injustice preventing this rare feat from going in the record books. Only Selig could save the day. And, of course, Selig did nothing. One could argue that if Selig changes this call, he would have to change all of the other obvious blown calls in baseball history. That doesn’t hold weight, though. This is a highly unique situation that hasn’t happened before and will likely never happen again. The call in question came on the final out of a perfect game. Galarraga promptly sent down the next batter to end the game, and umpire Jim Joyce was fully distraught over his gaffe. Overturning the call would not in any way change history or hurt the game of baseball, and it would give Joyce a reprieve from being known for that one error the rest of his career. If it is obvious to everyone (and really, no one is arguing the counter) that Galarraga pitched a perfect game, then why not give it to him? Simply put, this is a big fail for Selig and a black eye for baseball…

My favorite kind of cat? Siamese.

Photo of Steve Jobs from the Associated Press.