I don’t get it

By Rick Morris

Just a few things that continue to elude my understanding …

^ Mature anime. I remember the first time I saw this in a video store a few years back and being a bit freaked out. I’m not much into porn and not much into anime, but I at least understand the appeal of each. But putting them together? Not exactly chocolate and peanut butter making the ultimate combo if you ask me, but as somebody who’s not a perv who enjoys lurid cartoon images of women, I guess I’m not quite their demographic.

^ People who kept putting fresh “Kerry-Edwards” bumper stickers on their cars all throughout the last four years. Living in the greater Cleveland area, I saw quite a bit of this over the past few years, new stickers that kept appearing on cars well past the November 2004 election. How do I know that they were new stickers? That’s easy: in this Rust Belt city, something on your car gets dingy approximately 3.2 seconds after application, whether it be from road salt in the cold weather or windy dirt from construction areas in the warm weather. Clearly, sore loser idiots kept replenishing their cars with these bumper stickers as some kind of statement in their demented minds. Without election results to rebel against, how will these angry misfits continue to live their lives?

^ Morons in SUVs, trucks and vans who don’t realize that not everyone’s tires grip in the wintry weather. The proliferation of monstrosity vehicles has depleted the public’s understanding that not everyone is on a level playing field in poor weather. Just because some yuppie in a minivan is able to drive normally notwithstanding six inches of ice on the roads, it doesn’t mean that other drivers can do the same and it doesn’t mean that said clue-deprived yuppie won’t end up crushed to death at the bottom of a 54-car pileup that he instigated.

^ People who go out of their way to crack on hockey. Hockey haters are about as fresh as Red Sox fan. Yeah, the game has had its fair share of setbacks in the last decade-and-a-half, which these dweebs are more than content to recite at a moment’s notice, but the “nobody cares” take is stale, and by the increasing NHL attendance patterns, quite untrue.

^ The cult of the unwashed masses. “I paid my money, I can [fill in the blank] if I want to” is the stupidest and most played-out take this side of anything spewed by Hockey Hater Guy. There are few more unwashed masses than perennially soused Browns fans, who don’t know how to do anything other than complain about how anything that just happened is worse than anything that ever happened before. For the record, nothing has ever been worse than the antics perpetrated by Art Modell and Butch Davis and ignorance of this fact is anything but blissful for those of us in the fanbase who have to deal with uneducated bellyaching. It’s fine to vent, but have some consideration for your fellow man and at least try to make sense! Please try to criticize where appropriate, try to give credit where appropriate and do something other than vomit some hackneyed drivel that regurgitates the worst of terrestrial radio. Perhaps I’m spoiled by the fact that the FDH programming at SportsTalkNetwork.com attracts a higher caliber of listener and that I can count on one hand the number of times a caller has made me irate in a half-decade, but I honestly don’t understand why all fans can’t be thinking ones along the lines of the STN faithful.

^ The “Lebron’s leaving” hack media weasels. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. With tens of millions of dollars that the Cavs can pay Lebron that other teams are not allowed to match, the ball (as it were) is in their court. He just built an ultimate dream house in the Northeast Ohio area and he’s aware of what bringing a championship to America’s most title-deprived city would mean to his legacy. Granted, he’s on record as identifying as an Akron, not a Cleveland native, so sentimentality will play no role here, but there are reasons far beyond that that give the Cavaliers the upper hand. Other teams may be able to hollow out their salary caps enough to afford him in 2010, but what other assets could they afford? Lebron James’ bottom line is all about winning. If Cleveland continues to take steps forward as the early portion of the 2008-2009 season indicates they have, he will stay. If he’s disgusted with a lack of progress in C-Town, he will go. End of story; your move, Dan Gilbert and Danny Ferry.