The long decline continues for Roger Clemens as the New York Daily News today reports that sources tell them the very married Clemens had a lengthy affair with country star Mindy McCready. The affair is alleged to have begun when Clemens was a 28-year-old star with the Red Sox and McCready was 15 years old.

Yes, you read that correctly.

(Hat tip, Baseball Musings and The Big Lead)

4/28/2008 2:56:43 PM by Ryan Stewart | Comments [0] |  

THE ICK FACTOR
5 years ago
March 21, 2003| While listening to R. Kelly’s new album, Chocolate Factory, critic Jon Caramanica couldn’t get the singer’s recent transgression out of his mind.
“On ‘Ignition Remix,’ for example, there’s some awkward business about spewing ‘venom’ into a lady’s ‘trunk.’ And on ‘You Made Me Love You,’...he leers, ‘You must be one of them top models/Body curved like a pop bottle/Got me sweating like a boxer, baby.’ Kelly has always had a gift for injecting the sacred with the profane, and his predilection for young women has been rumored for years. But his arrest makes listening to a track like the operatic ‘Showdown,’ the latest installment of his mano-a-mano song cycle with Ronald Isley, uncomfortable. The saddest part is that nobody else in contemporary pop has his talent when it comes to recording smooth, sensual slowdances and steamy R&B workouts. Chocolate Factory isn’t a bad album, it’s just a difficult one to listen to.” Read full article

ASSHOLE ALERT
18 years ago
March 24, 1989| Mark Jurkowitz gave a picture of Roger Clemens before he’s accused of anything worse than egocentrism and stiffing little kids.
“About an hour after the Texas Rangers beat the Red Sox...in an exhibition game...young autograph hounds are waiting anxiously near the clubhouse. The big news is that Roger Clemens — he of the Cy Young Awards...—has promised he will sign their baseballs on his way out of the ballpark.

“As Clemens’s car comes into view, the youngsters stream into its path...The problem is that Clemens doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Nope; in fact, he’s cruising right by the pack...like a fullback blasting through a narrow opening in the offensive line...[I]t’s obvious that Clemens has as much intention of stopping as he has of grooving a fastball to Jose Canseco in the bottom of the ninth of a 1-1 game.
...
“Roger Clemens. If there’s one ballplayer who seems to epitomize...what many people perceive as the egocentric and selfish new breed of ballplayer, it is the Rocket in ’89 — a somber, hulking presence around the clubhouse, a guy who would stiff a group of kids who have waited for him after the ballgame, and in this exhibition season, a ballplayer who has enveloped himself in the cone of silence by refusing to talk to the press.

“And to Clemens’s way of thinking, the media are the culprits.”

POETRY IN MOTION
25 years ago
March 22, 1983| Robert Polito rhapsodized on the merits of poet Elizabeth Bishop’s body of work.
“Robert Lowell told an interviewer that ‘he enjoyed her poems more than anybody else’s.’ John Ashbery termed her ‘the writer’s writer’s writer.’ To James Merrill she was ‘our greatest national treasure’...

“The Complete Poems 1927-1979...gathers in one volume the life work of Elizabeth Bishop, the poet most admired and celebrated by our other most admired and celebrated poets. ...

“That Bishop is less well known than some of her admirers is a paradox that floats on a short string above the qualities that make her work so distinctive. Her poems resist even the most supple efforts to categorize them. Despite its slenderness — The Complete Poems 1927-1979 comprises 115 original performances — the identifying mark of this book is its variety...Bishop’s writings ‘dramatize the mind in action rather than in repose,’ as she approvingly described the procedures of some 17th-century sermons. And like her ‘Gentleman of Shalott’ she ‘loves/that sense of constant re-adjustment.’ As a result, Bishop has been difficult to pin down in anthologies. Instead of a handful of agreed-upon, representative, important pieces, what we discover here is almost unequaled range and diversity. In the writing of no other American poet...is there greater amplitude of feeling, tone and attitude, and less repetition.”

SEE NO EVIL
35 years ago
March 20, 1973| Staying for some time overseas in Vienna, Austria, writer Sylvia Rothchild said that the city “suffers from amnesia.”
“Strange to come from a post-affluent society to a pre-affluent one, from post-Freud to pre-Freud as well as pre-youth culture, counter culture, women’s liberation, all the rebellions of the sixties and seventies! Especially bizarre since I always felt that the counter culture...was a response to what went on in Austria and Germany. To be sick of the Vietnam war was not only to be horrified at killing innocent people, but also to be terrified that we were not really different from Nazis. Being at the scene of the old crimes, however only added to the confusion. Vienna suffers from amnesia. It’s a city full of statues and memorials, obsessed with history as architecture and operetta, opposed to dwelling on any ‘unpleasantness.’ No demonstrations, no strikes, no controversies in the newspapers...”

3/20/2008 10:56:26 AM by Ian Sands | Comments [0] |  

Normally, this would be Miliard's domain, but we have a quick baseball note to pass along: the ALCS matchup between the Red Sox and the Indians will be on Fox, and not, mercifully, on TBS. Which does, sadly, mean a steady diet of those paragons of idiocy and self-righteous indignation, Joe Buck and Tim McCarver, but it also means no more ads for Frank Caliendo's TV show, Frank TV, which aired at least twice a commercial break during the TBS broadcasts. And not a moment too soon.

The guy does impressions. Some of them are accurate. Great. We get it. And we know TBS doesn't have a lot to promote. But just last night, we saw his face more times than we saw Eric Wedge, Derek Jeter, Bobby Abreu, Joe Torre, Travis Hafner, Grady Sizemore, Paul Byrd, Chien-Ming Wang, Rafael Perez, Alex Rodriguez, Jorge Posada, and Joe Borowski combined. We don't even think Fox promoted Skin this aggressively in 2003. And here's the kicker: nothing in any of those promos even came close to resembling something that was remotely chuckle-worthy. Also, is it just us, or is it not completely played out in 2007 to be doing imitations of Al Pacino's Devil's Advocate/Scent of a Woman characters and Robert DeNiro's Goodfellas/Analyze This characters? Does Caliendo do Christopher Walken and William Shatner, too? Because that sounds like it'd be fresh and edgy and unique! Watch it, sports fans!

We'd like to believe the guy is funnier than what we saw. But we did some research and saw that his previous credits essentially consist of MadTV, Mind of Mencia, and the Fox NFL Pre-Game Show, where what passes for biting wit is a crack about Jimmy Johnson's hair or Terry Bradshaw's chrome dome. And so we feel comfortable saying this: what we saw in the ads is probably as good as it gets. Just don't tell that to Peter King.

Although, maybe it does get worse: Joe Buck is developing a late-night comedy show.

10/9/2007 4:19:49 PM by Ryan Stewart | Comments [1] |  

8/9/2007 10:40:10 AM by Ryan Stewart | Comments [0] |