Record Breakers
Of course Barry Bonds broke the MLB home run record yesterday and he was asked if the record was tainted. I'm amazed that the baseball junkies ask things like this. The game has a long history of cheating. From throwing world series games, to stealing signs, to spitballs, to corked bats, to too much pine tar, to sculpting the playing field for the home team's advantage, baseball has a always been known for cheating. Obviously the evidence points to him using steroids beginning in the 1999 season, but I don't care. He hit 421 HRs before 1999. He's drawn more walks than any other player in history. In my opinion, his biggest problem is the media regards him as a first class jerk. I remember an usher at Veteran's Stadium telling me the first English phrase Juan Samuel learned was "No autographs kid". I didn't care about that, I still wanted Sammy to hit a home run to beat the damn Mets. The bigger problem w/ Bonds is MLB did nothing to address the growing steroids problem and now the numbers that always meant something to "history" aren't relevant. Still, even Game of Shadows says Bonds got on the steroid program b/c he was pissed Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were getting tons of recognition about breaking the HR record and he was jealous. He didn't originate the steroid problem. He just used it to his advantage b/c baseball wasn't doing a damn thing about it.
The record I'm more concerned about is WUAG dj Johnny Walker trying to break the Guinness Book of World Records mark for longest radio show. You can listen to him here, but I'll let you know the rules as I understand them. He can take a 5 minute break every hour. If he doesn't take the break during the hour he can accumulate 5 minute breaks and use them consecutively as he sees fit (so 4 hours of non-stop dj action gives him a 20 minute break). All songs must be less than 6 minutes. This means my strategy of playing John Coltrane doing My Favorite Things for an hour won't fly. I'm not sure how anybody can stay awake for that long (or why they would want to), but good luck to him.
posted by Dan Smith at
7:45 PM
3 Comments:
Yeah, I heard about the WUAG thing, and what puzzles me the most is why he's trying to break the record by 50 hours?? Why not just break it by 1 hour or by 30 minutes to be the new record holder? Why the need to add so much insult to injury?
10:55 AM
I've gleaned a little more about what is going on w/ this guy. He plays a lot of dance music so I'm guessing it's ecstasy that's keeping him awake for an entire week. I talked to a guy last night who actually knows him and he said it has been an idea DJ Johnny Walker's been kicking around for a few years. Now he actually has the time to do it so he figured WTF. I guess holding this record could probably get him some gigs in clubs and judging by the amount of dance music he plays I think he might be into that sort of thing. That's all just my uniformed speculation and may not contain any truth (except the parts about a lot of dance music on the air and he's thought about doing this for a while).
9:10 PM
I was googling this event and I found some discussion on the Moby message board about if this is a worthwhile endeavor. Most of them are quite supportive, but some think it's a waste of time. That's right there are people posting on Moby's message board who think this is a waste of time. I don't know what to think of that.
6:21 PM
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home