"Who the hell even thought of doing this? This is so stupid" →

I got mainpaged on AOL.com over the weekend for my NFL hip-hop tributes piece on Asylum. That means I got COMMENTS. Lots and lots of comments from people who think that I am very stupid.

That’s happened just about every time I’ve had a story run on the AOL.com welcome screen, in fact — the Internet is full of angry, annoying people, but the ones who decide to comment on stories that appear on the AOL.com welcome screen are the very worst. Makes YouTube seem like a rational discussion board. They tend to break into a few different categories — the “how is this news” comment, which is often followed up by a request that the energy I spent finding a story about, I dunno, a pizzeria that makes pizzas shaped like the bat-signal or something instead be devoted to proving Barack Obama was born in Kenya or that George Bush blew up the World Trade Center; the “dan solomon is retarded and probably black” posts which just fill the comments section with casual and/or overt homophobia/racism/misogyny/etc, depending on the subject matter (or sometimes independent of the subject matter!); the one that finds a grammatical or typographical error and then insists that I should have no job and that the person posting the comment should have my job instead; people who are mad that I ignored some pet issue/cause/whatever tangentially related to the subject of the post; etc, etc, etc.

On this post — which got people really worked up over NFL hip-hop tribute songs! — I got most of these. Surprisingly, no one gave me a “This is news HOW??” comment, I think because even people who flock to the AOL comments section expecting hard-hitting news are used to half-assed sports analysis and accept it. But here are some other highlights:

See, because “rap music” is an oxymoron!

• Wow I actually listened to all of these. What music I didn’t hear any!
• None of them. They all sound like crap. When are we going to get some real songs to represent our teams. This is nothing but garbage.
• Good God!!! WYF’s with the rap crap? Im so over it.
• Who the hell even thought of doing this? This is so stupid, they are bad, really bad songs. if you can call it music

Because it wouldn’t be football talk on the Internet without some quick homophobia:

• I have one for the Jets, it goes like this: we are the jets…. we suck suck suck
• I have one for you jeff you sucks dicks.

I am so stupid and the people who post the comments are smart and I should have written a totally different article the way they wanted it even though they’d have complained about that too (incidentally, none of the subsequent songs were included because the teams were long eliminated from the playoffs at press time, also because most of them aren’t hip-hop tributes, which is what the post was about):

• Where the HELL is Fly Eagles Fly, THE best, you dumbasses!
• How is the Saints song, “Black and Gold,” by Kgates not on here!!! They actually list and rap the players into the song, unlike almost all of those songs listed. Do some more research!!!
• are you kidding me? Where is Welcome to the Jungle for the Bengals????

And my very favorite, since A)I was writing about songs, not the teams themselves, and B) six hours later the Patriots were humiliated in the most-watched game in NFL playoffs history:

• The Patriots are one and done? What a joke—-and what a jerk. Watch a few football games before you try to pass yourself as knowledgeable. The jets? really? the jets? LMFAO.

Anyway. I used to try, occasionally, to respond to the comments on AOL stories, but I quickly learned that was an exercise in extreme futility. But it’d been a while since I’d seen the AOL welcome screen, and I’d forgotten just how absurd it gets. At least the comments don’t land directly in my inbox anymore.

Brett Favre, sexual harassment, and errrrgh.

My nighttime ritual includes reading my iPad in bed, because it doesn’t wake Kat up like turning on a lamp would. Lately, I’ve been catching up on the fast-shifting world of NFL firings, because the regular season just ended. So I logged onto NBC’s ProFootballTalk.com, which is my favorite of the up-to-the-minute news sites, and learned about the newest lawsuit against Brett Favre.

Here’s the article. In it, you can read Mike Florio — a writer I tend to like, when he’s talking about sports — explain over and over again how the charges are probably bullshit, because the information he had available to him when he wrote it didn’t involve Favre, like, texting pictures of his cock to the women who are suing him. (Which would be an egregious bit of exaggeration, except we already know he does that to women who work for the team he plays for.) I’ve seen Florio on TV, though, and I know that he’s a functioning adult human — who works in the media, no less — so I’d expect that he’d have learned that we don’t always learn all of the allegations in a pending lawsuit until it progresses. But that can wait — first, gotta dismiss the allegations as bunk, because Brett Favre would never sexually harass women who work for his team I dunno, that’s just a reflex that dudes have.

The comments are worse, because this is the Internet and that is how comments work. But — gosh. Golly. Holy cow. There’s apparently zero distinction among those dudes between “massage therapist” and “prostitute”. There’s Very Clever Men who’ve determined that the charges must be a quick cash grab, because if they were legit, they’d have been filed before the Jenn Sterger thing, not after. There’s even the inexplicable — but strangely ultra-common — insistence that this is just the media and the NFL out to get the commenter’s favorite team*. There were 72 comments at the time I read it, and I figured at least one of them had to have been slightly rational.

The closest I got was “Favre’s sleazy because he’s married and he should know better”, which is true and all, but I’m pretty sure it was just posted by a bitter Packers fan.

And — man. It just blows me away, every time, that people think filing a sexual harassment lawsuit against Brett friggin’ Favre would be an easy thing to do, and so the fact that they’ve waited means that they’re just gold-digging whores or whatever. Because, check it out: We already know that Brett Favre texts pictures of his cock to women who work for his team, and we already know that the organization he played for at the time these women say that they were harassed has a terrible track record when it comes to making sure that their players respect women they encounter as part of their job, and no one believes them even now. If you’ve got 72 people insisting that you’re a lying gold-digger after they’ve seen the cock shots, then there’s no way you’d get a jury to believe you that Brett Favre, just a big kid out there who loves to have fun in his Wrangler jeans while his wife looks on in her pink #4 jersey, sexually harassed a massage therapist, which is probably just code for “slut” anyway. So they sit on the case, then the cock texts come out, and it happens anyway.

At some point, I want to understand where this comes from. When I talk to Kat about it, she thinks that it’s a deep-rooted misogyny, that dudes instinctively deny sexual misconduct allegations because at their core, those dudes hate women. I’m inclined to think there’s something else at work — I see a lot of fear in it. Fear that, hey, I might have sent a text message like the one Brett Favre is getting sued for to a girl once, and I don’t think I’m the sort of guy who sexually harasses women, so that must not be sexual harassment. My guess is that there’s a self-identification most men have as a good guy, and sexual harassment (not to mention rape and sexual assault) are such awful things to be associated with that the only way to maintain innocence is to insist that, if they look like things that we might have done at one point, then they’re not really that wrong. But then I read those 72 comments, and I think — shit, maybe Kat’s right. Because that is some hateful shit. 

* This is a widely-held belief among fans of every NFL team, oddly — that the league is trying to pick on your guys because, I dunno, it hates just one of the 32 teams that make it a billion dollar industry, and so the dudes on the team clearly didn’t really use steroids / sexually harass every woman in front of them / intentionally try to give opposing players Parkinson’s by launching themselves helmet-first into a defenseless player’s head.

Best of 2010: Three Rules for Achieving Greatness From Proven Champions →

— Asylum.com, April 28th

I dunno, I don’t like to brag on myself much (not explicitly, anyway — mostly just by creating top 10 lists of my own work like I’m doing now), but I feel pretty good about the fact that I am likely one of the only people who, after spending about twenty minutes talking with Eli Manning, would think — “This guy has so much in common with Seth Mazow.”

Seth Mazow is the two-time winner of Homeslice Pizza in Austin’s “Hands on an Eggplant Sub” contest, which earned him two years of free pizza. I interviewed him a few months before I wrote this story. I was sent to Miami during the Super Bowl this year to talk to Eli, but I didn’t have a story assigned — I was just supposed to come up with something good. When I realized that he and Seth had a few things in common, I pitched it to my editor as a story that would trace the different ways different people succeeded at difficult things, and she went for it. I added Joe Cada, the youngest-ever World Series of Poker Champion to the story, and put it together.

And, yeah, part of why this story means something to me is that it was the first time I felt like I was really validated in what I was doing — I got flown to Miami to talk to Eli Manning, you know? And then out to Vegas to do the same with Joe Cada, in like a three-week span. But I liked the conclusions, and I liked putting Seth in the same context as those dudes, because these small championships are still important, and I can’t think of a better way to make that point than to include him in a story on the same level as a Super Bowl MVP.