"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
"...you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?" -- Steve Gilliard, 1964 - 2007

"For straight up monster-stomping goodness, nothing makes smoke shoot out my ears like Brilliant@Breakfast" -- Tata

"...the best bleacher bum since Pete Axthelm" -- Randy K.

"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (1954-2015), They Live
Thursday, January 24, 2013

Something really, really nice, for a change
Posted by Jill | 5:35 AM
I know we paint the South with a broad brush sometimes here at B@B. And I'm not saying that this happened BECAUSE it is in the South. But when I read something like this, it gives me hope for our future:

UNIONVILLE, Tn (ABC News) -- Three Tennessee homecoming king nominees made a unanimous and touching decision that no matter who won, they would give the crown to a beloved student with a genetic condition.

Students Jesse Cooper, Drew Gibbs and Zeke Grissom were all nominated for homecoming king at Community High School's basketball homecoming ceremony.

The teens got together and decided that the winner would turn over the honor to junior Scotty Maloney, who has Williams Syndrome, a neurological disorder that inhibits learning and speech.

"I've been blessed with so many things," Cooper told ABC News' Nashville affiliate WKRN-TV. "I just wanted Scotty to experience something great in his high school days."

"He's always happy, so he deserves some recognition for who he is," Gibbs said.

Cooper won the popular vote for king, but when the official announcement was made at a Friday ceremony, the principal told the crowd what the nominees had decided to do.

"When they called [Scotty's] name, his eyes got really big and I don't know that he registered exactly what was happening. He knew something was," Maloney's teacher Liz Hestle Gassaway told ABCNews.com. "It was very, very emotional."

The crowd erupted with cheers and Maloney got a long standing ovation, WKRN reported, as he was awarded his "King" medal.

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Friday, June 01, 2012

Nobody But He
Posted by Jill | 10:41 PM

It took fifty years, but if you were a Mets fan, tonight was Davey Johnson striking out in 1969 to give the Mets their first World Series win, Mookie Wilson's grounder skittering through Bill Buckner's battered ankles, Endy Chavez' incredible 2006 NLCS catch and Jesse Orosco falling to his knees in 1986 all rolled into one. Until tonight, NOBODY -- not Tom Seaver, not Jerry Koosman, not Dwight Gooden, not David Cone, not Ron Darling -- NOBODY had EVER pitched a no-hitter for the Mets.





And I didn't even watch. I can't even count how many times I've sat on the sofa watching a Mets pitcher flirt with history, only to find that the minute I had to get up to pee, said pitcher would give up a fat one to some guy with a .214 lifetime batting average. I can't even count how many times over the years I screamed at Tim McCarver to shut the fuck up because every time he'd say that some pitcher was throwing a no-hitter, said pitcher would immediately give up a fat one to some guy with a .214 lifetime batting average. I've even sat in the stands once, watching Bob Ojeda flirt with history for six and two-thirds innings. But while Dwight Gooden and David Cone both went on to pitich no-hitters with the Yankees, of all teams, and Tom Seaver finally got his no-no in Cincinnati. And let's not even TALK about Nolan Ryan, shall we?

But no one in a Mets uniform has ever been able to climb over that hurdle, until tonight. And I knew that if I turned on the game, Johan Santana would join the ranks of guys flirting with a no-no and then giving up a fat one to some guy with a .214 lifetime batting average. Because it always happens that way.

The only possible way I could be happier is if it had been thrown by R.A. Dickey.

But Johan Santana now has his own Story. Santana was always a class pitcher and he's a superstar, which already makes him special among the ranks of pitchers who have thrown no-hitters, who are more often than not guys you never heard of before or again. But Santana's story has all the baseball cliché you could want. He was traded to the Mets for, among others, top prospect Philip Humber, who threw his own no-no earlier this year. He's received some of the worst run support from this team, a record no pitcher of his caliber should have to bear. And most importantly, Santana is a pticher many believed Would Never Pitch Again after what usually is career-ending shoulder surgery to repair a torn anterior capsule. But after missing ALL of last season, Santana has been nothing short of spectacular, which is no doubt making Mets medical director Dr. David Altchek kvell with naches, since this achievement means you CAN come back from this relatively new type of surgery. And if you're Mets pitcher Chris Young, currently rehabbing from the same surgery in Buffalo, you've got to be feeling pretty confident after throwing six scoreless innings against Columbus last night and now hearing this news. Who knows, this procedure may end up being called "Johan Santana Surgery" the way Tommy John surgery is called, well, "Tommy John surgery".

But this is the way this team plays. In a year when everyone had the Mets picked to do absolutely nothing, they're in the hunt, they're playing the kind of scrappy, Put Me In Coach I'm Ready To Play ball that we haven't seen since the early 1980's, when a bunch of guys named Darryl and Doc and Wally and Lenny and Mex and Kid went out every day and played it like they meant it. And now this. The Holy Grail of pitching.

UPDATE: From the great Mike Lupica, who is really the one sports writer you MUST read after a game like this one:
Darling would talk when it was over, about how a Met finally threw a no-hitter in Queens and it was a Queens kid who saved it for him, Baxter of Whitestone and Archbishop Molloy and Coach Jack Curran of Molloy, crashing into that wall, reaching as far as he could, like he was reaching across all the years, catching a ball hit by Yadier Molina, ending up in a heap on the warning track.

Maybe it had to be Molina, who hit the home run that beat the Mets in Game 7 of the 2006 National League Championship Series. Maybe it had to be Adam Wainwright starting for the Cardinals Friday night, the same Wainwright who got the last out of that Game 7, who threw the pitch that Carlos Beltran took for a called third strike, bat on his shoulder.


And maybe it figured that Beltran hit the ball past third that should have been a hit because it hit the line, but was called foul by the third base umpire. Maybe it all had to happen like that on the night Johan Santana pitched a no-hitter.

This, my friends, is Goofball at its finest. Some days you win. Some days you lose. Some days it rains. And some nights Johan Santana, who many thought would never pitch again, throws a no-hitter.

Another update: Also, too.

And yet another: Howie Rose calls it:

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Tuesday, March 27, 2012

On the other hand, there's this
Posted by Jill | 9:31 PM


If you can get through the first 2/3 of this without weeping, the little tail-wag at about 2:50 will do you in entirely.

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Monday, April 04, 2011

Reunions
Posted by Jill | 9:51 PM
I need some of this tonight. How about you?



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Tuesday, June 01, 2010

Maybe this is why women's sports get no respect
Posted by Jill | 1:36 PM
Because women make men look like boors.

This morning I received from a friend one of those forwarded e-mails that we all hate. You know, the ones in 36-point type that tell some story (which usually turns out to be false or at best apocryphal) that's supposed to warm your heart and guilt you into forwarding it along to your own e-mail list, thereby perpetuating the spam forever. It's a lovely story, but it may or may not even be true. Parables are fine, but parables sold as truth are something else entirely.

But sometimes we don't need to rely on the One Percent Doctrine to get all warm and fuzzy. Sometimes the stories are true:
We live in a world where Peyton Manning walks off the Super Bowl field without shaking anybody's hand. Where Tiger Woods leaves the Masters without a word of thanks to the fans or congratulations to the winner. Where NFL lineman Albert Haynesworth kicks a man's helmetless head without a thought.

So if you think sportsmanship is toast, this next story is an all-you-can-eat buffet to a starving man.

It happened at a junior varsity girls' softball game in Indianapolis this spring. After an inning and a half, Roncalli was womanhandling inner-city Marshall Community. Marshall pitchers had already walked nine Roncalli batters. The game could've been 50-0 with no problem.

It's no wonder. This was the first softball game in Marshall history. A middle school trying to move up to include grades 6 through 12, Marshall showed up to the game with five balls, two bats, no helmets, no sliding pads, no cleats, 16 players who'd never played before, and a coach who'd never even seen a game.

One Marshall player asked, "Which one is first base?" Another: "How do I hold this bat?" They didn't know where to stand in the batter's box. Their coaches had to be shown where the first- and third-base coaching boxes were.

That's when Roncalli did something crazy. It offered to forfeit.

Yes, a team that hadn't lost a game in 2½ years, a team that was going to win in a landslide purposely offered to declare defeat. Why? Because Roncalli wanted to spend the two hours teaching the Marshall girls how to get better, not how to get humiliated.

"The Marshall players did NOT want to quit," wrote Roncalli JV coach Jeff Traylor, in recalling the incident. "They were willing to lose 100 to 0 if it meant they finished their first game." But the Marshall players finally decided if Roncalli was willing to forfeit for them, they should do it for themselves. They decided that maybe -- this one time -- losing was actually winning.

That's about when the weirdest scene broke out all over the field: Roncalli kids teaching Marshall kids the right batting stance, throwing them soft-toss in the outfield, teaching them how to play catch. They showed them how to put on catching gear, how to pitch, and how to run the bases. Even the umps stuck around to watch.

More...

In a world where even the gentlest of sports uses metaphors for war, and one in which the arts and even academics often get short shrift in favor of men's school sports that favor players who believe not just in winning, but in pummeling the opposition into a pulp, here's a bunch of girls who take the idea that sports are about teamwork seriously.

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Wednesday, November 11, 2009

What this really needed was to take place in a Trader Joe's
Posted by Jill | 9:54 PM
I needed this today too:




(Thanks, Tata!)

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