Varsity Black & Blues

Who among us doesn't have a horror story or two about a little league coach? Doesn't matter if you're male or female, tall or short, young or old. It doesn't matter if you played like Mays, and it doesn't matter if, as a baseball player, you were a hell of a science fair competitor. Most of us have dealt with the insanity of some overzealous baseball freak who fancies himself the reincarnation of Casey Stengal, or at least watched others deal with him. Even at the T-Ball level.

Yes, the T-Ball level. That's where coach Mark R. Downs, Jr., of Dunsbar, Pennsylvania plied his trade, coaching a rag-tag bunch of 8 year olds toward greatness and glory... and the title.

Wait, no, that's not right. He just coached 8 year olds swinging at a stationary baseball sitting on a post in front of them. It's how you prepare kids for little league, and it's supposed to be fun. But apparently Downs managed to turn even this assignment into fantasy baseball when he paid one of his players to injure another player so he couldn't play and bring down the quality of the lineup. According to a report on Sports Illustrated's web site, SI.com, Downs...

"...allegedly paid one of his players $25 to hurt an 8-year-old mentally disabled teammate so he wouldn't have to put the boy in the game, police said Friday.

Mark R. Downs Jr., 27, of Dunbar, is accused of offering one of his players the money to hit the boy in the head with a baseball, police said. Witnesses told police Downs didn't want the boy to play in the game because of his disability.

Police said the boy was hit in the head and in the groin with a baseball just before a game, and didn't play, police said.

Just how evil do you have to be to do something like that? It's not just the major news stories like this that make me wonder why there isn't extensive psychological testing required of anyone applying to coach children. Just go to a few games at your local field and in no time at all you'll find yourself cringing at the behavior of a coach. This far over the top? Not likely, but careful screening for the more common "Stengal Syndrome" would probably catch a creep like this guy. You've gotta love the understatement by the police officer in the case, by the way.

"The coach was very competitive," state police Trooper Thomas B. Broadwater said. "He wanted to win."

Downs has an unpublished telephone number and couldn't immediately be reached for comment Friday.

I'm pretty sure that's 666. And I didn't even need a phonebook for that.

Here's the kicker. If convicted, the mandatory penalty within the T-Ball league is a year-long ban from coaching. Call me a reactionary if you must, but if I had the job of coming up with mandatory punishments for the league, mine would be much simpler. Mine would be a blanket law stating that anyone convicted of any sort of abuse of their position as a coach would never, ever be allowed to look at the kids again, let alone coach them.

Better Late Than Never

It seems like I'm always late to every game. My favorite television show? West Wing. But I didn't discover it until Bravo started showing it nightly and did their big "Get everyone hooked" marathon, sometime after the third or fourth season. Same with Buffy The Vampire Slayer. And I never saw The Daily Show until long after Jon Stewart took the helm. Music? I'm a rabid reggae fan, but I climbed on board mid-Marley, not during the Studio One heyday. And while I did catch the earliest wave on the WWW, I seem to have missed the first breaks in this Podcast thing.

For those who are even farther behind than I am, a Podcast is the latest way of broadcasting just about anything, from a "radio" show to an album to a rant or whatever turns your crank. The concept is simple. A huge percentage of the population spends a huge percentage of their day strapped to an iPod. Why not pre-record shows and make them downloadable so that people can import them into their iPods to listen to at their convenience? It gives anyone a chance to be a broadcaster, and believe me, just about everyone's giving it a shot. I've been listening to a lot of Podcasts lately, and I've heard some absolute garbage. I've heard people screaming threats over political injustices, muttering nervously about sexual fantasies and even showing off some really horrific singing voices just in case someone from Idol is listening.

On the other hand, I've heard some things in the pretty good-to-great range. Former MTV VeeJay Adam Curry has a half hour Podcast called Adam Curry's Daily Source Code that's well worth listening to. He's entertaining, he's got a free hand to play music he believes in, and he seems genuinely interested in being a pioneer in this field. So much so that he's doing things like taking a laptop out to a meadow overlooking the ocean and recording his show on battery power just to show how portable (and laid back) it can be.

If you wanna hear something very strange yet addicting and funny, check out Keith and the Girl. He's a stand-up comedian, she's his girlfriend, and they live in NYC. They'll talk about anything. One show was dedicated to discussion of Keith's psychotic father and the way he messes with his kids' heads. How is that entertainment, you ask? Good question, and I'm on board, in principle, but it's the way these two talk; the banter, the delivery, the ability to laugh at themselves that makes for a show you find yourself laughing out loud at. And cringing, at times, but if they didn't dance on the edge like that, the highs wouldn't be so high.

If you're feeling like you need to have a good laugh at the current administration before you wind up crying, may I recommend Whack My Bush? The Podcasts are short at approximately five minutes, and some of the jokes fall flat, but they're firing them at you so fast there's bound to be a dud here and there. It's just what it sounds like it is: a send up of the Bushies, with Condi as the task-master who keeps little Georgie on track, Tony Blair as a whimpering little wimp - oh, wait, I guess that one wasn't such a reach - and, my favorite, Donald Rumsfeld portrayed as Yoda. "Mmm... STUPID, he is." Quite a lot of fun, all in all.

Yeah, I'm late as hell getting started, but not as late as I usually am. And what I lack in punctuality I always make up for in obsessive-compulsive devotion, so look for more recommendations as I plow my way through the... um... Podesphere?

Excuse me, I'm new here. What do we call this land o' Podcasts?

First Post On The Left

There will be more here in a day or so, but I wanted to get an initial post online now. The Debris Field was the name of a section of Cosmik Debris Magazine, an online publication I started in 1995 and we're still doing to this day. The mag itself is mostly about music and politics (decidedly liberal), but The Debris Field was a spot where you could find anything and everything. There might be quotes, jokes, recipes or nasty evidence against some hack politician or school board member. Sometimes there was art, sometimes links to good online radio. It reflected my own short attention span. I miss that section, but it would probably be a much better blog than a magazine section. Something like that should be interactive, don't you think? So that's where we'll try to take it. Hopefully we'll find a niche, but even if it just resonates with a handful of people, that's fine with me, as long as it's good company. See you here.

DJ Johnson
Cosmik Debris Magazine
http://www.cosmik.com