So far the smartest thing Dusty Baker has said in spring training is not to think too highly of the $30 million dollar man, Aroldis Chapman. It’s been said that Chapman won’t make the 25 man roster if he isn’t ready, but judging from the past pitchers the Reds have drafted or stumbled across, none of them are ready yet either.

During his last outing against the Dodgers, which the Reds won 3-2, Chapman allowed two infield hits over two innings and struck out two. He threw 35 pitches, 20 for strikes, and demonstrated less command than he showed in Monday’s first outing against the Royals. In his post game interview, Chapman said “Personally, I felt good, I just missed a couple of pitches out of the zone. I was trying to put them in a place, but they went the other way.” Uhhh news flash slick, up where the big boys play, those pitches that “just missed” or “went the other way” usually end up as souvenirs for the fans in the outfield seats because MLB hitters rarely miss a mistake pitch. Just ask the so-called #1 starter Aaron Harang who went 6-14 last year with an ERA of 4.21 in 162.1 innings of work. Not to mention that he gave up 82 runs, 76 of them were EARNED . Or maybe you should ask the previous golden child Homer Bailey what happens when you just miss your spots. The word was he wouldn’t pitch in the bigs until was ready as well, but the front office in its infinite stupidity rushed him anyway and in three seasons Bailey is 12-13 with an ERA of 5.45.

As for the rest of the staff, there’s the wanna be rocker Bronson Arroyo who went 15-13 and an ERA of 3.84. Johnny Cueto 11-11 with a 4.41 ERA, Micha Owings 7-12 and a an ERA of 5.34. Homer Bailey went 8-5 with a 4.53 ERA and Justin Lehr who was 5-3 and ERA of 5.37. That kids come up to a mind numbing record of 52-58 by the starting pitchers with a staff ERA of 4.61. The NL ERA average for 2009 was 4.19. Want to guess why the Reds starters were 52-58?Forget about a World Series Championship this year, the Reds need to be concerned with trying to post a record above .500.  But for that to happen the pitching staff needs to find mental toughness, physical toughness and heart. In those categories, the Reds staff is 0-3.

Remember the old belief that pitching wins championships and the Reds don’t have it and that’s the sad, cold, hard truth.

I’m not one who really follows basketball much at any level. Still, I’ll watch the Buckeyes when they’re on TV and nothing else is.

Thank God that was the case today.

Evan Turner hit a 40-foot jumper as time expired to ruin the day for Michigan fans everywhere. Not only did they lose a game they thought they were going to win, their season is almost certainly over. And it couldn’t happen to a bigger group of dooshbags.

In honor of this momentous occasion, I’m going to start regaling you all with cool facts about Evan Turner.

Evan Turner is Jack Bauer, Chuck Norris, and Superman’s consensus choice for National Player of the Year.

Kobe Bryant was God’s first draft. The finished product? Evan Turner.

Evan Turner is like a more athletic, darker skinned version of Christian Laettner, except that Turner also has a promising NBA career in front of him and far fewer people who want to see him get hit by a train.

Michael Jordan looks at Evan Turner and says, “Man, I’m glad I didn’t have to play against him.”

Most people call a day where you make a game-winning shot against your arch-rival to stay alive in your conference tournament and knock your rival out for the season the greatest day in their playing career. Evan Turner calls it “Friday.”

Americans are frequently criticized (usually by Europeans and American liberals) for being insular people who don’t have any knowledge of the outside world. Well of course we are! If you lived here you wouldn’t see any reason to learn anything about your inferiors either, Frenchy.

Nevertheless, as a public service and a means of handing an olive branch to my esteemed colleagues across the pond, I’m now presenting a primer on geographical anthropology to you, my three readers.

Next up: Belgium, The Netherlands, and Luxembourg. All entries in this series can be found here.

I don’t really know what these countries bring to the table. As far as I can tell it’s waffles, hookers, and a place you can go to legally blaze up the reefer. Oh yes, and a convenient route to use for an invasion if someone has fortified only part of its eastern border.

In other words, they’re like the French only without the history of importance on the world stage. A lot of their land is below sea level, so in another way they’re like New Orleans without the Cajun food. And the successful athletes. Let’s face it, if your national sport is speed skating, you might want to rethink your nation’s athletic future.

But they’re really good at pretending they’re important. The international criminal court – such as it is – can be found here, as can the headquarters of NATO. Although why we’d put the NATO headquarters in the middle of Belgium escapes me. I’m pretty sure the Smurfs were invented here too.

Which leads me to digress. Why is the plural of “Smurf” Smurfs? Shouldn’t it be Smurves? Stupid Belgians. Add in the fact that Michael Caine, as Austin Powers’ father, absolutely hated the Dutch, and I think we can pretty much write off the Low Countries except for the fact that George S. Patton’s most glorious moment occurred there. Sixty-five years ago.

Luxembourg? I’m not sure they actually exist. I think they’re a joke played by France and Belgium on the rest of the world, just waiting to see if anyone would be brave enough to call them on it. I see it going something like this.

Canada: We’re aboot to go on vacation, eh? Whereaboots you think you wanna go, eh? (because all Canadians end every single sentence with “eh”)

Great Britain: I say, dear boy, let’s tarry ourselves away to Luxembourg, I hear they have the most phenomenal tea and crumpets. (because all Brits crave tea and crumpets the way zombies crave brains)

France: Ahhh ha ha, English pig-dogs! Zere ees no Luxembourg! Ahhh ha ha! (because Monty Python and the Holy Grail was the most accurate depiction of the French ever made)

The Netherlands and Belgium are the kids who sit next to the Scandinavians and pretend they’re really important. They’re a member of every single extracurricular activity (not counting, you know, sports) and are in charge of the school yearbook. They do the announcements on the closed-circuit school television every morning and they go out of their way to make life uncomfortable for the kid who sits in the back of the class and gets A’s despite not studying or doing homework. You know, they try to socially ostracize them and tell the teachers about their less-than-studious ways. In other words, no one would miss them if sea levels went up a couple dozen feet and they had to grow gills.

Americans are frequently criticized (usually by Europeans and American liberals) for being insular people who don’t have any knowledge of the outside world. Well of course we are! If you lived here you wouldn’t see any reason to learn anything about your inferiors either, Frenchy.

Nevertheless, as a public service and a means of handing an olive branch to my esteemed colleagues across the pond, I’m now presenting a primer on geographical anthropology to you, my three readers.

Next up: Scandinavia. All entries in this series can be found here.

Let’s face it, when most people think of Scandinavia they think of blonde-haired people riding on reindeer or skiing, possibly with a horned helmet on their heads. And they’re right. That is all they do. But there’s a little more people could learn if they wanted to. For example, did you know that the captain of Sweden’s women’s curling team looks kind of like a blonde and female version of my father? I bet you didn’t.

Also, Scandinavia is where they give out Nobel Peace Prizes to people who haven’t really done anything in the pursuit of peace. For example, someone won one for making apocalyptic predictions that the weather is going to get warmer in the future, and it’s all our fault. Even if he was right, how does that promote peace? But Scandinavians are funny in their own way, else they’d call it the Nobel Druidism Prize or something.

Scandinavians are one of a very select group of people to have inspired the name of an American football team.  Wow. On second thought that’s not all that select a group, is it? Well, I tried. They did give us the band Hammerfall, which in turn gave us the awesome song “Hearts on Fire” from Rocky IV. Upon further reflection, this is probably the most awesome thing Scandinavians have ever done.

To fit the Scandis in with our analogy from a prior post, they’re like the kid who sits up at the front of the class and studies really hard. They suck up to the teacher all the time and everyone sees right through it but no one really cares all that much because they’re nice enough. Plus they tell good stories, even if they’re aimed at a bit of a younger audience. Weirdly, their bikes are missing parts and fall apart occasionally. Plus their sisters are pretty hot. They get along with pretty much everybody which is good because they’re kind of wusses so they wouldn’t bring a lot to the table if a huge fight broke out.

Feel free to comment at this time.

I worry that USA will have to deal with a couple things that could hurt them today. 1 – They kind of embarrassed the Canadians last Sunday. 2 – They only had to play really well for about ten minutes in their last game and the early goals they scored had a much higher luck/skill ratio than most hockey goals.

But what do I know about hockey? Answer: nothing.

Nevertheless, I’m gonna say 7-2 Canada. Let’s hope this prediction is as good as my Super Bowl one was.

update: 1-0 Canada after the first period. Once again, I don’t know anything about hockey really, but the US looked better in the first half of the first period than they did last Sunday. They just didn’t get the good breaks on their shots like they have in the last few games. We’ll see how this turns out.

update #2: 2-1 Canada after the second period. If I were Canada I might be a little nervous that the game is still close, considering the US didn’t play all that well in the first half of the second period.

update #3: Holy crap! The US scores a goal with less than a minute to go in the game and we’re going to overtime. I guess it was only a matter of time before Canada’s goalie ran out of luck, because (at least according to the guy on TV) he kind of sucks.

final update: Sonova! Stupid Canada.

The Democrats and the President keep doing things over which they flipped out when Bush and the Republicans did them. I guess they were just flipping out because they though Bush was doing these things the wrong way and that they could do them better.

Weird, though. I’m pretty sure they thought that these things were wrong on principle. I mean, did I just miss something? It’s almost like Democrat and Republican politicians are all unprincipled pieces of crap who will do whatever they feel like doing when they’re in power, no matter what their stated “principles” are. And people wonder why I’m registered Independent.

I’m horrified by this development, horrified. This kind of thing would never happen if I was in charge.

Sorry I haven’t posted all week. The US Curling teams’ horrible failures really bummed me out. I just came out of my room this morning after four days of being curled up in a dark corner sucking my thumb.

The US-Canada men’s hockey game on Sunday was great, and I don’t even particularly enjoy hockey. I do feel bad though, because after we won on Sunday I said something to the effect of “Sidney Crosby can suck it! USA! USA!” and then after Canada’s women’s team beat us today for the gold medal their fans were like Air Force Academy football fans at the medal ceremony, all cheering loudly and enthusiastically  for the US players as they got their medals. Canadians are better winners than Americans, I guess. Then again, maybe they just haven’t won enough things to be bad winners. Being gracious in victory is something that gets tiring after a couple hundred years of awesomeness. Canada may discover that someday. And in all honesty, if we can’t win something I guess it’s okay if Canada wins, unless Australia can win instead.

I was wondering the other day why I always find myself rooting for Australia if the US isn’t a contender to win something. In fact, I’d rather see the Aussies win than Canada, New Zealand, OR the Brits. We’re not even going to discuss anyone else because I don’t root for people who don’t speak English as a first language. I know, I know, I’m a xenophobic bigot racist, but what are you gonna do? It’s not like I can go back in time to last year and vote for Obama, can I? Of course even if I could, I wouldn’t. Because I’m a xenophobic bigot racist. Also, I prefer a President who can do things other than talk about how awesome he is. If I wanted to hear someone go on and on about how awesome he was, I’d record myself in an everyday conversation and play it back through some headphones.

But I digress. Why do I root for Australia at the expense of the other Anglophones in the world? I think I’ve figured it out. The Brits are like our snotty older brother who used to pick on us when we were little but stopped once we hit puberty and beat their ass a couple of times. Now they’ve got a PhD in sociology or something useless like that and always kind of look down their noses at us, but we know we could always call them if we really, really needed anything. We’d just kind of hate ourselves for doing it, and they’d probably never stop complaining about it, even if we’d bailed their ass out of jail a few times ourselves.

The Canadians are our little brother. They’re always there, sleeping in our room, making annoying clicking sounds when they eat, and getting all the praise from our parents. Of course, we can’t really blame them for resenting us a little, considering we do stuff like set their stuffed animals on fire and “accidentally” push them through plate-glass windows, not to mention that we rarely fail to jump on the chance to mock them when they do something stupid. But we’re so close that we kind of get sick of the sight of each other, and when we fight, we don’t mess around. Hell, we tried to invade them twice and that didn’t really work out. They retaliated by inventing hockey and being really good at it, and we responded by stealing their hockey teams and putting them in places like Phoenix, which is like the opposite of Canada. Anyway…

New Zealand? They’re like a distant cousin who lives across the country and is into weird crap like the Dalai Lama, patchouli, and organic food. They’re nice enough, but we don’t really know them all that well, so we don’t give them much of a second thought. Also they’ve never really done anything with their lives other than make their own bio-diesel and learn to play the acoustic guitar.

But Australia? They’re our cousin who’s pretty close to our age and does all the cool stuff we WISH we could do. You know, they were roadies for Metallica (Speed of Sound Tour) and ride around in bad-ass motorcycles and sports cars and seemingly have hot chick in bikinis around them all the time. We don’t get to see them too often, but when we do we have a damned good time. And we usually end up hung over. And when they’re gone we look in the mirror and ask ourselves why we aren’t as cool as they are. Never mind that they’ve been working as bartenders for the last fifteen years and still live with their parents. They’re still kind of our heroes in a way.

And that’s that. I think I captured the gist of international relations within the Anglosphere pretty handily, don’t you?

The American women valiantly faced off against the dirty redcoats in the most recent reenactment of the Revolutionary War. And just like 230 years ago, the Americans, though underdogs, managed to topple the mighty Brits.

In your face, redcoats!

The US women’s curling team beat the dirty sloots from Russia 6-4 today. IN YOUR FACE, COMMIES!

Today’s results bring the US curlers’ combined record (men’s and women’s) to a gentlemen’s 1-6. But the men are playing the French today and I can’t imagine the French being good at anything other than smoking cigarettes, being conquered, and sneering at anyone who isn’t French.

USA! USA!

update: Burn on France! The only thing they do better than us is suck and die.

…is not a Ferrari, nor is it a Porsche. It’s not a Lamborghini Gallardo or a Bugatti Veyron. Nope.

It’s a 2005 Honda Pilot.

Laugh all you want, but it’s the kind of car that makes women swoon when men drive by in one. It has upwards of 450 horsepower. AT THE WHEELS! It can do a quarter mile in nine and a half seconds, all the while carrying four adults and three infants in car seats. It can tow an M1A1 Abrams tank and still beat a Ferrari Enzo off the line.

YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW!!!

And it handles like a dream too. The other day I was on the way home from work and took the sweeping turn from Powers Blvd. onto U.S. 24 at 75 miles per hour and the car stuck to the road like it was welded to it. I don’t know where all these worries about rollovers come from.

Of course in these trying times gas mileage is a common concern. Well, have no fear, because the 2005 Honda Pilot gets anywhere between 60 and 80 miles to the gallon in the city and 95-120 on the highway. You can actually drive this car from Denver to Pittsburgh without refilling the tank once. Now that’s money you could spend on hookers.

It’s a sport-utility vehicle. Heavy on the sport, yes, but not skimping any on the utility. This car can actually scale rock walls at angles up to 85 degrees. It can drive into water up to 45 feet deep and emerge on the other end, none the worse for wear. Christian Bale actually drove an ‘05 Pilot up to the top of the mountain in Batman Begins where Liam Neeson was waiting to teach him how to be a ninja. They edited it out because Hollywood is fake, of course.

Speaking of bats: the original Batmobile? a 2005 Pilot. They had to go to plan ‘B’ sometime during initial production because Cary Grant (the original Batman) got the Pilot/Batmobile up to 88 miles per hour and traveled through time. To where, we still don’t know, but that was the last anyone saw of Cary Grant. The point is, not only can you smoke some punk in a Civic, you can witness the birth of Christ or see the signing of the Declaration of Independence. That’s a feature European automakers aren’t willing to provide the consumer, and it’s something American manufacturers just haven’t figured out yet.

So if you’re in the market for a totally awesome sports car that will actually increase the size of your genitalia (if you’re a man) or make you twenty pounds lighter (if you’re a woman) you should get a 2005 Pilot. And I’ll totally sell you mine if you have trouble finding one.