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arizona state, saint john's

Second Time’s a Charm

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St John’s avenged Chris Mullin’s 11-point loss in last year’s NCAA tournament by losing to Arizona State University by 13 in a preseason game at the curiously named Airforce Reserve Hall of Fame Tip Off at Mohegan Sun Casino Saturday afternoon, this after blowing a 16-5 first half lead and being outscored the rest of the way by 25 points. Despite having lost now two of their last three this one qualified as a moral victory of sorts, because at least this year they finally have a professional coaching staff that will teach them how to deal with such adversity unlike lazy and shiftless Mitch Richmond.

ASU came out flat – they shot airballs, bounced the ball off their bodies out of bounds and a couple of times just fell over – which I attributed to jet lag – which jet lag allowed SJ’s the early advantage: they led 8-0, 12-2 and finally 16-6 about half way through the first half when the roof caved in: Arizona went on a 14-1 run after the third TV time out: the game was tied four minutes later. St John’s took a small lead into halftime yay! but were punked in the second half and in fact most of the game after the first five minutes, after which first five minutes they were outscored 74-49, which 74 points included a 50 point second half. (Dee fence! Dee Fence!) This marks the third time in three games that the opposing coach’s halftime adjustments (I’m led to believe these are a critical part of coaching) has confounded whatever Coach Third Choice is telling his players, which last two opponents I’d remind you included two America East teams: imagine what’s going to happen when it’s Doug McDermott’s father doing the confounding. It’s also noteworthy that in those three games the opponent’s best player has run amok in the second half; first was Anthony Lamb, then Mike Smith and yesterday it was Remy Martin, who scored two first half points on oh for six shooting and finished with 19 … If Arizona’s slow start was attributable to jet lag, it’s hard to know what would excuse St John’s slow lingering death. They were playing in the their own back yard, in their own time zone and in front of what appeared to be if not a friendly at least a nonhostile crowd and yet they managed only 38 percent from the floor, 18 percent from three, 60 percent from the free throw line, turned the ball over 16 times and had a mere nine assists on 66 shots. My working theory is that they stink. Should you have a different explanation feel free to email me. Regarding the FT shooting I remind you that after the first game of the season against whatever little sister of the poor that was one of CTC’s ball washers on some dumb SJ fan forum said something like ‘Wow! Eighty percent! When was the last time we shot 80 percent from the free throw line, the staff’s really paying attention to every last detail!’ I wish I knew that dummy’s name because since then SJU is 67-109 from the FT line, which is 61 percent. Oh wait I do know his name, it’s Mush … One complaint from Arkansas fans about CTC’s system was that a long bench requires giving inferior players minutes best reserved for better ones. That that might be an issue was evident yesterday when in the first half with SJ up by 10 or so CTC curiously took out his starters and sent in Williams, Cadaver and the rest of the second team scrubs, which scrubs immediately allowed ASU back into the game. (Lest my shitting on CTC be misconstrued it should in no way be considered an endorsement of Danny Hurley’s brother, who stinks. Admittedly I’ve only seen him coach two games, but those were against Mullin and Anderson, and neither of those guys are rocket scientists. All told Hurley’s “forks up” slap in the face to Mike Cragg might be the most important bullet St John’s has dodged since they didn’t ever offer Tom Pecora a job doing anything) … As impressive as SJU front line has been – Champagnie, Earlington and Roberts have all surprised – they were exposed a bit against Arizona, which won the game inside. I wouldn’t want to play this front line in two years, but then god willing I’ll be dead in two years and meanwhile the big east season looms … Fans of irony will note that Hurley’s team was called for a variety of flops in the first half, which if flops were a thing when Hurley was playing college ball he and half of his teammates would have been hanged … The silver lining on this loss is that instead of facing a drubbing by Virginia SJU gets a vaguely winnable game against Umass, which makes sense as UMass is the A10, which is maybe where SJU should be. That UMass beat Central Connecticut State by a bigger margin (46 versus 30) than did St John’s isn’t a meaningful comparison, so I won’t mention it

PLAYERS: LJ Figueroa once again led SJU with 17 points despite once again looking disinterested and dispirited. One wonders whether he misses his mentors Chris Mullin and Mitch Richmond … Also once again the other Champagne brother was the second best player on the court, which is not a good look going forward … Josh Roberts had an eight rebounds and a couple of impressive put backs but a lot of that came early, before Danny Hurley’s brother reminded his team to put a body on him … Rasheed Dunn, who’s supposed to make us forget about Nick Rutherford, had as many turnovers as baskets. This I’m willing to ascribe to rust. It’d better be rust anyway … Speaking of Nick Rutherford … Mustapha Heron had the same game he had against ASU last March when he shot SJ’s out of the NCAA tournament. Hopefully he removes his head from his ass because otherwise the season’s going to be longer than the season’s already going to be … Earlington had four points and seven rebounds … Williams, Sears and Cadaver had no points, one rebound and no assists, which once again does not bode well moving forward if these guys are seven through ten in a ten man system. Maybe it’s time to see what the lacrosse player brings to the table

NOTES: A reader wrote to ask after the Columbia game recap: why so negative bro. (Evidently he’s new.) I’m moved to answer. Dear reader. Human beings are a meaningless carbon-based lifeform hurtling through an infinite godless universe on a pebble upon which pebble their only notability is that they’re the most pernicious species of odious little vermin that nature has suffered to crawl across the face of the earth and their history – an unending panorama of rape, murder, betrayal and barbarity – is a dung heap chronicling the tales of depraved and villainous madmen, scoundrels, sadists and degenerates. That’s the good news. The bad news is that as part of way you and I have decided to fill the three score and ten allotted to us between the void and eternal darkness is to root for the St John’s University basketball team, a perennial laughingstock that has suffered through in the past 50 years of futility rape, women beating, payola, point shaving and perhaps most horribly of all the head coaching tenure of Steve Lavin, a cuckolded mental patient. So excuse me if I’m a tad pessimistic. If you want sweetness and light there’s no shortage of rose colored glasses wearing pollyannas on various fan forums who’ll tell you that prosperity is just around the corner. All I have for you is the truth … Arizona State are the Wildcats, which marks the fourth in a row mountain lion mascot St John’s has faced and only the second to have mauled them to death. Unfortunately that streak will come to an end tomorrow, when St Johns faces the Minutemen [insert premature ejaculation joke here]. Re Umass unless I’m more faced than I plan to be and I usually am I’m pretty sure they’ll be no recap, as two of these in two days is one too many. Or maybe even two. So you won’t learn that Umass’s illustrious alumni include gerbil aficionado Richard Gere, serial sex offenders Bill Cosby and Rick Pitino, caterwauler Buffy Sainte-Marie, Julius Erving (he asked Lou for a scholarship but Lou didn’t think it was a good fit) and former Lion’s quarterback Greg Landry, another in the conga line of losers who’s plagued that cursed franchise in my lifetime.

arizona state, saint john's

Post Mortem Depression

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So once again our long national nightmare has come to an end, and to no one’s surprise – except the maggots – St John’s lost in the first round of the NCAA tournament. To those among you who are too young to remember Lou Carnesecca – or Steve Lavin – this will have come as no surprise. To long time fans like me who are slowly sliding into the grave: been there done that.

Personally I very much enjoyed this season. A 12-0 start that would have been 15-0 had not St John’s been butt-fucked in Jersey by rat-faced Kevin Willard; various quad one wins against Villanova and Marquette; and an NCAA tournament bid: a season termed a disappointment by die-hard fans living in the 1980s, but for me at time thrilling and in the end good enough I guess. I think a part of my enjoyment comprised my resolve to no longer read the faggotry that passes for commentary on various SJU fan boards and especially my decision to no longer rehash every awful loss and pathetic win on this stupid blog: because fuck the pressure I put upon myself to render my drunken day before scribblings into vague thoughts the morning after; and also fuck you, my dear readers.

Rather than rehash what was a what-might-have-been season – and kudos to all those who spent hours and hours minutely examining the OOC schedule and NET scores and RPI and whatever, because you’re not at all maggots – I hereby render the final season grades, and as usual no disagreement will be tolerated. As usual, we grade on a curve, meaning there’s an A and almost an F, which in today’s everybody gets a trophy world is a C minus.

Shamorie Ponds: A: someone’s got to get one. He is no – as I’ve been maintaining since forever – Marcus Hatten, who led St John’s to the post season twice in two years. He is however one of the more supernaturally talented players to have visited St John’s in a while and I count myself fortunate to have seen him play. He does not seem to have it, whatever it means, let’s call it a killer instinct, but he has something, which is more than most St John’s players have had in a very long time. Good luck to him.

LJ Figeroa: B plus: second best player on the team and with crazy upside: size, motor, skills. Looking forward to his second year.

Mustapha Heron: B: despite his 1-12 implosion in the tournament had a nice year and hopefully he returns for another. It’d be an NCAA slap in the face for him to have received a waiver to move back to NY to care for his ailing mother and then a scant nine months later abscond to Turkey or Lithuania to play pro ball, because NBA bound he is not. On the other had, I’d love to see the NCAA – the worst most corrupt organization since Tammany Hall – slapped in the face, so there’s that.

Justin Simon: B: numbers were down a little but his numbers as a sophomore were Dom Pointer’s as a senior. And defensive player of the year is nothing to sneer at. Hopefully he returns as well.

Brian Trible: C: a poor man’s Truck Bryant, he’s seems to be coming along nicely. Hopefully he takes a 1000 threes a day and steps up next year.

Bench (Williams, Earlington, Roberts): C: personally I’m not a fan of freshman and evidently neither is Mullin. Still, they all showed flashes and I’m not willing to give up on any of them and no good can come from any of them leaving, because continuity.

I am Marvin Clark: C minus: unlike on the court, he’s hard to defend. Scored no points in his last two games; fouled out of more than half of his last 10 college games; and was 16-52 from three over the same period. Yes he was playing out of position and yes he’s overcome a lot in his life and yes good luck to him but bottom line I do not care if the door hits him on the way out. Because he folded on the big stage and was the weak link before that.

Sedee Keita: C minus: No telling how much the injury effected him. Lamont Hamilton II: big body, small hands. Hopefully he comes back and gets better.

And now the big one:

Chris Mullin: B minus: on the plus side he won 20 games, won a must win game in the BE tournament and made the NCAAs; he coached a first team all BE selection and the BE defensive player of the year. That’s something. On the minus he’s not much of in-game coach – which to me in game coaching is over rated: bring in superior players and they will beat inferior players all day long. But here’s the thing: Mullin is one of us: a NYer and a SJ lifer and a non-hysteric non mental patient. Imagine what Steve Lavin might have done had his brother been diagnosed with cancer during the season and shortly thereafter died: he’d have donned sack cloth and ashes and taken a bereavement leave and then afterwards mentioned how devastated he was by the loss in every half time interview he did for years afterwards; whereas Mullin never mentioned it once: all he did was visit his brother in the hospital day after day after day and then get up and go to work and then when he died went to the funeral and mourned in private and then went to work. He acted like a fucking man and I welcome him back next year and fuck all the maggots lining up his successors, because that is not happening and your disappointment makes me hard.

Consider:

Subtract the team Norm Roberts left Steve Lavin with and you get this, Lavin’s subsequent record

13-19
17-16
20-13
21-12 (NCAA)

and compare it to this, Mullin’s record

8-24
14-19
16-17
21-11 (NCAA)

and subtract Lovett’s defection, and you have the same coach, except Mullin’s not Lavin.

So there we have it. What’s to look forward to? The Kentucky Derby and the Triple Crown and Saratoga punctuated by sloppy drunken star gazing on warm summer nights and various self-important dopes on St John’s board with insider information and shifting avatars starting vague rumors about how Matt Abdelmassih is moving to Nebraska. Same as it ever was. It’s going to be a long off season, I suggest you all find a hobby. Mine’s masturbation, but as usual YMMV and more cowbell.

 

arizona state, saint john's

Hurley Girly Man

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Somewhat in my cups I wrote a bit of a monkeyshine selection Sunday evening, the gist of which was that there were very many St John’s who were less than pleased with a 20 win season that resulted in St. John’s fourth NCAA tournament appearance this century, because St John’s fans are the worst most disgraceful and stupidest fan base in the history of sports. (One chronic malcontent for example claimed that despite their name being called during the various Tournament Selection Shows as part of the field of 68 St John’s had not actually made the NCAA tournament because they were in the play in game. I had to listen several times because the fact that he had the repulsive Steve Lavin’s dick in his mouth all the while obscured his diction, but I made it out eventually.) During the course of that post I used an unfortunate euphemism to categorize St John’s fans – it rhythmed with maggots – for which I was chastised by one of my seven regular readers, which euphemism I later excised, not because I found it offensive, but because I’d rather have seven regular readers than six. That said, it was absolutely the right word. Because St John’s fans suck.

Which is the reason I resolved several months ago to stop reading the retarded (oops! another forbidden word) drivel written by the chowderheads who populate various St John’s fan boards – all of whom are self-proclaimed college basketball insiders and former coaches and D1 athletes and if not that savants – boards where I had been a regular and much beloved poster for over a decade. I did so because the only responses I could think to compose in reply to the incessant twaddle that passes for discourse in those forums involved liberal use of the word cunt, and for some reason the word cunt is against the rules. Whereas in my world it’s de rigeur. So I just stopped participating and I don’t even really miss it. Because St John’s fan boards comprise in the most part the same 17 morons repeating the same tired 11 talking points over and over and over again, without a scintilla of wit or intelligence or insight: which is not surprising, as these are in the main all St John’s graduates. But I thought this evening on the cusp of a St John’s impending and glorious victory over Arizona State (JINX!) to check and see what the intelligensia were thinking. Here follows a sample and I was not disappointed:

Here’s what they had to say about the best player to commit to St John’s since Marcus Hatten:

“I think [Ponds] checked out a while ago. I hate to say it, but it wouldn’t shock me at all if he stopped showing up to class right after our last game”

“[Ponds] has one last chance to play with some heart in the ncaa tourny. If not … I’ll say good f’ing bye. I’ll never ever respect anyone that plays with no heart.”

“Chris should have benched [Ponds] … and yeah I’m talking about about all damn season”

” his attitude this season damages his legacy”

Another die hard is “not holding my breath” [regarding a St John’s victory]

Another wishes for what might have been: “Imagine this team with [folding chair Frederico] Mussini”

Another says of an NCAA tournament bid that “Ponds, and co had a pretty disappointing season”

Fear not fans, because victory is around the corner, if only HOF’er Chris Mullin heeds this sage advice: “My … point of emphasis would simply be hitting open shots.”

Thanks genius. Maybe Coach St Jean will mention that during a time out.

But I really have a special shout out for one acute imbecile, this guy

a 30 year old Uber driver who lives in his mother’s basement and attends home games dressed up in Halloween constumes, who says of the prenaturally talented Shamorie Ponds that “he never really had it between the ears.”

You sir, are a real maggot.

arizona state, saint john's

Once Upon a Time, in the West

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For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest these: it might have been. What might have been yesterday, had St John’s beaten the sixteenth ranked Arizona State Sun Devils at the Staples Center Friday night – instead of losing 82-70, which is what they did – is that St John’s would’ve probably gotten a few votes in next week’s AP poll. That doesn’t seem like a lot, a few votes in December, but considering where they were this time last December – at 5-6, just having lost to LIU – or god forbid the year before – on the cusp of a 17 game losing streak – that would have been a real sign of progress. Instead they lost a game they might have won had not Justin Simon, having previously tried to throw the CSU game away with a boneheaded pass at half court, and having previously tried to give the Grand Canyon game away with three or four ill-advised in-bounds passes, finally achieved his goal: with St John’s having rallied from a 15 point first half deficit to within one point with about three minutes left Simon threw a pointless pass that sailed over Ponds head into the third row, from which pointless pass SJU never recovered: ASU scored the next 12 points, to SJU’s none. The picture tells the tale.

The bright spot I suppose is that despite how poorly they played on offense – they shot 40 percent from the floor, 30 percent from three and missed nine of 22 free throws – they got back into the game on the defensive end. Considering how porous the defense was last year that’s pretty remarkable, and bodes well for the future, especially when the back court shoots nine for 38, like they did last night … There’s no point rehashing the Grand Canyon State game except to note that St John’s has now held seven opponents to under 61 points – last year they gave up nearly 80, and this year they’re 35th in the country at 64 ppg. I frankly don’t remember too much about the game and my notes look like they were transcribed by Michael J Fox during an earthquake – it started at 11 PM, so I might have had a cocktail – except that Dan Majerle looked like an egg plant … All in all they acquitted themselves pretty well on the trip, playing in a different time zone in front of hostile crowds and without Marcus Lovett. The next two games are at home and presumably Lovett’ll be back. With St Joe’s and Iona having a combined record of 7-8 it’s possible that St John’s can start league play with 10 wins and a top 30 ish RPI. It’s a shame they don’t have a legit big man, because they might turn out to be a pretty good team.

PLAYERS: I don’t want to say anything bad about Shamorie Ponds, but I’m constrained to point out that he’s currently shooting 21 percent from three, which is worse than Alibeowitz. I know that won’t continue – he shot nearly 40 percent last year – but it is worrisome, sophomore slumps being a thing. The good news is that it doesn’t affect the other aspects of his play – last night he had 7 rebounds and assists and three steals – and doesn’t seem to be in his head either … As bad as Tariq Owens was against GCSU – and he was so awful that I remember it – he came back nicely against ASU, scoring a career high 17 points … Marvin Clark had 18 points and seven rebounds and is currently shooting 52 percent from three … Not to be outdone Goat of the game Justin Simon is shooting 66 percent from three. But Jesus the turnovers. It’s unbelievable he was touted as a point guard, he can barely dribble and maybe it’s rust, but again, worrisome … Ahmed did not have a stellar west coast trip – he shot 4 for 20 and committed nine fouls – but he did have 18 rebounds in those two games. The bad news is that he’s essentially the same player he was last year, which means you have to take the bad with the good … Trimble didn’t embarrass himself in Lovett’s absence … Yawke played a mere 16 minutes in two games and Alibeoqitz played 11. Yakwe looked to have turned a corner a couple of games ago, this trip not so much.

NOTES: I watched the game on something called FUBU and was treated to the mellifluous tones of Steve Lavin. Those of you hoping that I’m going to rip him will be disappointed, because he’s not a bad color guy, the requirements of the job – babbling on inanely without saying anything of importance – playing as they do to his strengths. Last night was no exception: he talked about tickling the twine and sharing the sugar and “having the hot hand like a microwave” which Earth to Lavin, microwaves don’t have hands … Before the basketball season started I went back and read my recaps from the previous two years and came away thinking that what I’d read was the best NY sports commentary since Damon Runyon. That might sound a wee egotistical, and maybe it is, but not that egotistical, because it’s not a very high bar: most sport writing sucks. In fact as a general rule the more well known a sports writer is the more likely he is to be a completely talentless hack. Tony Kornheiser for example, sucks. Jowly Bob Ryan, spending his golden years waxing eloquent about the majesty of Tom Brady, he sucks. Balloon headed abomination Mitch Albom: sucks. And just to show that I’m neither a racist nor a misogynist, Jemele Hill sucks too. And so on down the list. Mostly they all suck. There’s probably a bunch of reasons why this is but mostly it boils down to one thing: sports are stupid, and if you spend all your time thinking about stupid things you’ll become stupid too. The fact is that the average sports writer has no greater insight into sports than any vaguely informed mook on the street – imagine if your doctor knew as much about medicine as the average bus driver – and because many of them majored in journalism, they’re shit writers to boot.

I might be a little biased towards my home town, but NY sport writers are the worst. I remember exactly where I was when the appalling Dick Young died: I was in a bar day drinking and high fived the stranger next to me. I remember hate fucking reading Steve Serby’s stupid columns over and over, the ones where he’d repeat a stupid catch phrase every couple of paragraphs – blah blah blah blah CATCH PHRASE blah blah blah blah CATCH PHRASE – which he probably thought of as literary style, which it is, in the same way that if you put shit on tuna fish sandwich it’s mayonnaise. And I defy you to name a worse writer or human being than tortured dwarf Mike Lupica – worse than Steve Lavin even – who I could watch get the Dominick Santoro treatment while eating a shrimp cocktail and not spill a morsel. (Because he’s a dwarf and shrimp is small, geddit?) Not content with being the worst sport writer in America, Lupica has parleyed his Sunday column of vapid thoughts …. about Derek Jeter … separated by ellipses …. from inane musings …. about Bill Parcells …. into a career as – wait for it – a writer of children’s books, books about little runts like himself turning the tables on the big strong bullies and winning the big game. Hooray! Which is fitting, because he sucks and children’s books are perhaps the one literary form that’s lower than sports writing.

Kid’s books used to be written by pedophiles as a form of twisted Victorian pornography – see also JM Barrie and Lewis Caroll – but nowadays mostly are churned out by vapid celebrities as a way of making a cheap buck imparting the important life lessons they’ve learned on the road to fame and fortune. Everyone of them it seems has written a kid’s book, from Madonna (How to Fellate a Hispanic Producer The English Rose), to Keith Richard (The Story of My First Guitar); Hillary Clinton (It Takes a Village to Raise a Village Idiot), her horse faced daughter Chelsea, Bruce Springsteen, Terrell Owens, Spike Lee, George Foreman, Brooke Shields, Sharon Osborne, Billy Joel, Tina Louise, Jamie Lee Curtis. Everyone. When bloated drunken murderer Ted Kennedy wasn’t raping waitresses even he wrote a children’s book (My Senator and Me). In fact I defy you to name a celebrity who hasn’t written a children’s book. Pro tip, you can’t.

Can you imagine being so desperate for intellectual affirmation that you’d sit down at your computer and pump out 200 words a day about a giant talking cucumber that makes friends with a lesbian walrus and saves a turtle from drowning while learning a valuable lesson about tolerance. I’d blow my fucking brains out first. Which is why – like sports writing – most children’s books are shit. Sports writing sucks because the people doing the writing are idiots writing for idiots. Children’s books suck because they’re full of romanticized lies and nonsense and written for idiots by people who wouldn’t know real life if real life crawled up into their colons and died there.

Fact: if you live in a NYC high rise with a monkey called George George is eventually going to get so curious that he rips your face off and eats your genitalia. Because he’s a fucking monkey and that’s what monkeys do. In real life that cute little waif Madeline, bravely wandering the streets of Paris? She’d end up raped by a Persian and her body thrown in the Seine. Am I supposed to believe that any self respecting evil witch with an army of flying monkeys and orcs is going to be done in by a pre-pubescent Kansas farm girl? I think not. In the children’s classic Mr Popper’s Penguins – along with Nausea a fun fave as a tad – Popper receives a penguin (don’t ask) that has so many penguin babies that Popper is forced to take the penguins on the vaudeville circuit to make ends meet except things go awry and he gets arrested and after being gang raped in prison, dies of AIDS. Okay, I made that last part up, but its much more realistic than the real ending, wherein he decides to set the penguins free and so is invited to go to on an expedition with Admiral Drake the North Pole. (The story does have a happy ending though, because the trip takes about two years, meaning Popper doesn’t have to see his insufferable wife and kids for that long.) And I’m not going to mention Harry Potter, the insipid brainchild of a UK welfare slag written in prose that makes Stephen King’s look like Cormac McCarthy: it’s utter garbage. The Little Engine That Could purports to teach children that if they want something bad enough – “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can” – they can achieve it. Yeah, no they can’t. Most endeavors end in failure, degradation and despair. In real life the way you get ahead is to cheat and lie and steal and failing that you have to watch Harvey Weinstein shower and then after your tits start to sag you churn out some shitty kid lit.

My favorite children’s book story though is the story of Molly Bang. Molly is a real person, like Hillary Clinton a graduate of Wellesley who went on to get a a PhD in literature from Harvard. She wrote, in 1983, a children’s book called Ten, Nine, Eight, which is a countdown from ten to one by a little girl getting ready for bed. This book is considered a classic and is on the NY Public libraries list of 100 greatest children’s books: “Ten soft toes are washed and warm. Nine soft friends in a quiet room. Eight square window panes in the falling snow.” That’s as far as I got but I assume the next one is “seven Oxycontin chased with a gallon of vodka and a nice lie down in the bathtub” But that’s not the interesting part of the Molly Bang story. The interesting part is that Bang wrote in 1996 a book called Goose, which in 2016 won the Phoenix Picture Book Award: it was named by the Children’s Literature Association as the best English-language children’s book that had not previously won a book award. And so we come full circle: in a world where every little special snowflake gets a gold star for participation, the adults who encourage the children to remain forever children give themselves their own participation trophies. Hooray!

There is one children’s book that doesn’t suck, and that’s because it’s not a children’s book: Yertle the Turtle. Yertle tells the story of a turtle who acts like a cunt and gets his comeuppance, the moral being don’t act like a cunt. Which is all anybody really needs to know. I have my own idea for a great children’s book, one that imparts similar life lessons, because children are the future. Here it is. There’s this cute little Muslim bunny rabbit called Allah Snuggles who befriends a talking Jewish carrot called Schlomupagus. Snuggles found Schlomo alive in a pile of rubble, the only survivor of a blast caused when Snuggles good friend Fluffy – an adorable jihadist puppet come to life – detonated an explosive vest in a Beirut marketplace. The two new friends set off on a long and arduous journey to bring peace to the middle east, but just when they reach Palestine things go awry and the two are separated: Snuggles gets lost in the desert and is raped and murdered by a tribe of Bedouins and Schlomo is deported to Auschwitz where he dies in the gas chambers. The working title is Kurds and Slay.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking fun, that was fascinating (and hilarious), but what does it have to do with basketball. And the answer is nothing. Because basketball is a sport and sports are stupid and you can write about them for so long before you become stupid too. What I’m trying to do here instead is explain what good writing is, and what it isn’t. And to that end I’m going to impart a very important rule to help you along the way. The rule is, when you write, don’t use too many commas. Because, when you use, too many commas, you sound like, a stuttering, fuck, with brain trauma, and reading your prose, is like watching, a three legged dog, try to climb the stairs: eventually you start rooting for the stairs. And rule two, try not to be too boring, and rule three, don’t go on too long, which last one I’m still working on.