A few years ago I made the rather bold and yet admittedly bewildering claim that former Kansas forward and now longtime NBA journeyman Raef LaFrentz was the greatest athlete ever named Raef.
This sentence makes me think of high school English classes, where I was told to build readers' interest by starting my essays in an unexpected manner. This is certainty that. I GUESS I'm intrigued, against my better judgment ...
You would not expect anyone to care enough about this to disagree,
No ... no, I sure wouldn't. But please, carry on.
but it turned out that Mark Zieman, the former editor and now publisher of the Kansas City Star, disagreed vehemently. He pointed to Rafer Johnson, the former decathlete. I explained that LaFrentz was RAEF while Johnson was RAFER -- that's like the difference between raze* and razor**.
Rafe and Rafer do sound different, I get that. There's no need for Posnanski to belabor the point by comparing the words to another pair of words that are also slightly different. And there's REALLY no need to define the second pair of words, common as they both are ...
*Defined as: To completely destroy something.
**Defined as: Overpriced shaving devices, especially the Mach III. Wow, they created more new and expensive blades for the Mach III. You hear politicians talk about standing up to the oil companies ... big deal. When is somebody going to stand up to the razor companies? You know, I was thinking that maybe when razor companies can afford to have commercials with Tiger Woods AND Roger Federer AND Derek Jeter AND Thierry Henry, then maybe they are pulling in a bit too much profit.
Bored yet, folks?Anyway, when Jed Lowrie got the game-winning knock in Game 4 of the Boston-California series, I immediately decided he had become the most accomplished Jed in American history, surpassing Jed Clampett, who was the only other Jed I could think of.
Um, Jed Clampett wasn't actually part of "American History," you know. The Beverly Hillbillies was not a documentary, but a fictional show using the "fish out of water" motif for comedic purposes. Fictional. Really. And while we're at it, the tooth fairy is actually your mom.
So, being that I only have 204,347 things to do, I decided to look into this Jed situation.
Posnanski sounds oddly passive-aggressive about this, like he's cranky about being forced to look up Jeds.
There has never been an NBA Jed or racing Jed as far as I can tell. For a moment I thought of a pretty famous driver named Jed Narett, but it turns out his name is actually Ned Jarett, which doesn't count.
He left out our 35th President, Jed F. Kennedy, whose leadership helped our nation through the Cuban Missile Crisis, before he was assassinated by Jed Harvey Oswald.
Oh, whoops, I misremembered those names. God, I'm so stupid!
There are a few other Jeds -- including a campus preacher who calls himself Brother Jed and travels around the country abusing people (his real name is George) -- but I would say that Jed Lowrie is now the leading Jed in the clubhouse.
Wait. This is the first thing he's written that actually means something. A preacher who travels around abusing people? How? Physically? Sexually? Do the proper authorities know about this? Is he going to jail? How can Posnanski gloss this over when he wasted several paragraphs on made-up Jeds?!?
From there he goes on to talk about TV shows that people remember as being pretty good that were actually pretty bad. I guess his implication is that The Beverly Hillbillies was one example? I can't imagine someone thinking it was clever in the first place, but who knows.
Anyway, my contention is if everyone is blogging (yeah, I know), and leaving their comments on news stories on web sites, and taught that everything they think is important even when it's clearly wrong ... this is the kind of journalism we'll soon receive. And deserve.
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