#3: Sports

Sports are great. You know what else IS great? Sports. Grammarians the world over can ponder that paradox while I sit here and jerk off all over my dog-eared copy of The Trumpet of the Swan . I am currently celebrating the acquisition of the talented lefthanded pitcher Cliff Lee by the Philadelphia Phillies, my favorite Major League Baseball (MLS) team. Lee, of course, is famous for having won the American League Cy Young Award just last year (2008 for those who don't remember). Sports awards have a rich tradition built into their hardware, and rituals that would otherwise seem arcane are perfectly normal in this context. For instance, the team that wins the championship of the National Hockey League (NBA) is presented with a trophy called "Lord Stanley's Cup." No, it's not a piece of bell-shaped plastic that a man named "Lord Stanley" wore as a protective undergarment to shield his cock and balls from violent and uppity stick-wielding women jealous of his natural superiority as a non-woman (man), as that joke has been made a thousand times using exactly that same verbiage. It's actually a rather large metal bowl enscribed with the names of all the players on all the teams who have won the championship over the years. To win it is a quite an honor, and, according to tradition, each player on the winning team gets to spend a day with the Cup to do with it as they see fit. Past winners have taken the Cup to a library, picked out wallpaper with their wife while the Cup sat in their minivan, and stared lifelessly into the Cup as they pondered their hopeless future after the end of their poorly-paid career as a 33-year-old man with significant brain damage (from repeat concussions; also, the only people who choose hockey as a career were born with brain damage) and no job skills beyond toothlessly skating in circles and poking at a small piece of rubber with a stick (editor's note: in October 2008 this would have been a Governor of Alaska joke, but I'm just gonna go with the ol' standby).

"Thanks for that scintillating history lesson, Picture Explainer," or, perhaps, "ZZZZZZZZ," you're thinking by now. Where am I going with this? I'll (reluctantly, at this point) tell you. New Phillies picture Cliff Lee, having won the Cy Young Award, which is a personal award and not a team award, is required by longstanding baseball tradition to carry around the decomposed corpse of Cy Young (1867-1955) for a year. Yeah, I couldn't really figure out how to make that brutally long set-up pay off either, and I've got pictures to explain, so let's just move on and forget that ever happened.

First of all, this is a recent photograph. I can tell because it says "7/21" on it and that was just like last week or something. After journeys into the near future and distant past, Ed has decided to get lazy on the third post. This bodes extraordinarily well for the future of this blog. "Hey, look at me, I can take a picture of something I see in present time!" Thanks for the effort, Atlas. Anyway, it looks to me like 10-year-old Tyler Herne caught the biggish fish on that particular day, and his feat was noted on the dry-erase board of a local seafood establishment.

Yeah. That's probably it.

Yep.

Or, of course, Blackbeard is a massive African-American homosexual predator who kidnapped a young white boy, raped him, murdered him, and is serving what's left of his decomposing corpse at the seafood establishment he opened with all the welfare money he received condition-free from the socialist government of the United States, said money having been collected from white blue-collar workers in the form of taxes and redistributed to people like him.

Hey, Ed, I bet our friend Brian would really enjoy this post, as he's an avid fisherman, hockey player, and Phillies fan. We'll have to send it to hi.......OOPS my mistake, he hanged himself last Thanksgiving. Wocka wocka.

#2: Colonial Hijinks

Sorry for the delay; I was busy fucking kind genius-level supermodels (well) and watching my money make me more money. This is a colorized snapshot from the early days of the Roanoke Colony, also known as the "Lost Colony." It is theorized that the colony disappeared due to its inhabitants' obsession with nitpicking the minutiae of the DHARMA Initiative, which prevented them from eating and reproducing (the latter problem is familiar to modern-day "Lost" enthusiasts). Most of their discussions centered around the philosophical dispute of whether Jenna Elfman was an elf, a man, or some sort of freakish hybrid. Those who foolishly suggested she was neither were cast out of the colony and became the ancestors of modern-day Scientologists.

But back to THIS specific photograph. The colonist on the left (wearing the stylish red ensemble) is using a whalebone as a tool with which to carry two buckets of sperm whale sperm. Whale sperm and whalebones can, as all good seamen know, only be obtained by boning a whale. He is carrying the cerulean ejaculate to dump over his unsuspecting friend's head in a spirit of good-humored camaraderie. The other upright fellow is assisting the joke by performing the ancient ritual of misdirection, having buried a fish knowing the kneeling man could not resist the smell of buried fish. Sadly, the aftermath of the joke was not documented (as far as I can tell), but I can only assume it was well-received by all, and probably looked something like this.

#1: Our Future, Underwater and Long-Dead

The untrained eye (yours) probably sees a sailboat on a sandbar. Little do you know (I could put a period there but I'll refrain not out of kindness but out of pity) that this photograph was CLEARLY taken in The Future, once sea levels have risen to heights unimagined by even the likes of Kevin Costner. How can I tell? Look at the light reflecting off the water. The Sun, known as "Sol" to family and close friends, is, as any scientist knows, exactly 4.57 billion years old. As I performed a series of extraordinarily complex but, to me, perfectly intuitive and maddeningly simplistic calculations, it became apparent that the intensity of that reflection was obviously produced by a Sun 4.57000001 billion years old. Those are of course Earth years, which is how the Sun chooses to celebrate its birthdays when it's not too depressed about its age to do so.

The sailboat was Photoshopped in as humans and sailboats will by then have been long ago exterminated by meat-eating robots.

Nice try, Ed. Next.

Modus Operandi

Utilizing his skills as a Board-Certified Professional Picture Provider, Ed will provide pictures. Utilizing my skills as a guy with a blog, I will expertly explain what lies beyond the surface, to you, the hoi polloi. A true professional, Ed has provided me with the first picture, but technical difficulties* have thusfar prevented me from explaining it. "Tune in" tomorrow** for the first installment. Once this begins, we will do it every single day for the next twenty-thousand one-hundred years, or, more likely, until December 21, 2012.

* - I am lazy and distracted.
** - "tomorrow" being "whenever I get around to it"