Chris Davis sets an all-time MLB record

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… but it’s not a record he’ll crow about.

In the long and storied history of major league baseball, dating back to 1871 or 1876 (historians disagree about whether the National Association {1871-1875} should be considered a major league), no player has ever compiled a worse batting average in 500 or more plate appearances.

He set the record at .168. The previous record was .179.

It looked iffy for a while because Davis was batting .180 on September 5th, and was on a tear, having batted .344 in his last eight games. But he was more than up to the challenge, finishing the season 1-for-37 to crush the record.

Davis also made a run at the record in 2014, when he finished at .196, 14th-worst in history.

He is in the third year of a 7-year, $161 million contract.

Famous geniuses never said these things

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Thomas Jefferson never said any of these things!
It has long been a technique of the unethical and/or the downright stupid to add gravitas to their pronouncements by claiming an origin from an acknowledged genius. Before the internet and cable television, such misinformation was generally confined to discussions between individuals, and it was difficult back then for one person to publish or broadcast misquotations without somebody else fact-checking the claims. The self-publishing capability of the internet, however, has made it a simple matter for a person to promote a personal agenda by merely typing an opinion beneath the solemn visage of an acknowledged sage, then posting the .jpg on a social media site or a blog. Sometimes these misquotations go viral. I hate the word “viral” in this context. It’s actually more of a plague than a virus.

Here are some other examples:

Confucius never said: “Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life.” How could he? Very few people got to “choose” a profession in China 500 years before Christ. In fact, Confucius did say almost the opposite. He argued that the enlightened master should be wise in choosing our work for us! “When the person in authority makes more beneficial to the people the things from which they naturally derive benefit;– is not this being beneficent without great expenditure? When he chooses the labors which are proper, and makes them labor on them, who will repine?”

Benjamin Franklin did not say, “He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither,” mainly because he was a genius, not an idiot. The very essence of “civilization” involves people banding together and surrendering absolute liberty to create mutual security. Before the dawn of civilization, our cave-dwelling ancestors discovered that absolute freedom is not such a good thing, except for the strongest and most violent among us. Franklin did say, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” With those essential qualifiers, the statement becomes indisputable. Without them, it is gibberish.

John Stuart Mill did not say “Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives,” again because he was not a fool. In fact, the LEAST-educated people, high school dropouts, vote overwhelmingly for liberals. Among those with no high school diploma, President Obama beat Governor Romney 64-35. On the other hand, the MOST-educated people also vote overwhelmingly for liberals (55-42 Obama). Using educational achievement as a reasonable surrogate for intellectual capability, it can fairly be argued, at least in the context of modern American politics, that most stupid people are liberals and that most smart people are liberals. (That reality renders the liberal coalition highly fragile.) Everyone in the middle tends to be conservative. Here is what Mill actually said: “I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative.” Get it? Not “conservatives,” but “THE Conservatives” with a capital “C.” He is not referring to “conservative” with a lower-case “c” as a general political philosophy, but with an upper-case “C” as a specific political bloc in 19th century England whose members were, in Mill’s esteemed but pompous judgment, chowderheads, presumably because they often disagreed with him, thus failing to suitably acknowledge his genius to his satisfaction.

Einstein never said, “I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.” If he had said it, an editor would probably have re-worded it to employ a more suitable verb than “surpass” (“suppress,” perhaps?). A movie called “Powder” claimed (fictionally) that the great physicist once said, “It’s become appallingly clear that our technology has surpassed our humanity.” The movie’s version at least includes proper grammatical parallelism, and may even be a wise observation, but I can’t give you a link to the real quote because the real Einstein never said that or anything like it.

Pretty much every aphorism attributed to Mark Twain is spurious.

Happy Giant Pink Japanese Penis Day

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Kanamara Penis Festival, Kawasaki, Japan

On the Scoopy Calendar, this is the second most important holiday of the year, after William Shatner’s Birthday

These are our holidays:

March 14: Steak and BJ Day

March 22: William Shatner’s birthday.

First Sunday in April: Giant Pink Japanese Penis Day

July 31: National Orgasm Day

Sept 19: Talk Like a Pirate Day

Oct 24: Salieri Day (F. Murray Abraham’s birthday)

Dec 23: Festivus

Like Easter, GPJPD it marks the beginning of Spring. I keep hoping they will make the pink peeps penis-shaped to commemorate the convergence.

A repeated word of warning for those who hope to attend: do NOT try to smuggle giant pink penises into Japan from other countries. In addition to the fact that you would face the dire legal penalties for giant penis smuggling (imagine Midnight Express, except with giant penises), there are simply good reasons why you should not do so.

  • First of all, they would not be sacred. Only giant pink Japanese penises have been blessed. That would be like trying to pass off a bottle of Ozarka from 7-Eleven as Holy Water in the Vatican.
  • Second, the Most Honorable Japanese Department of Agriculture and Giant Genitalia is concerned that introducing a new strain of giant pink penises into their eco-system could cause the native strain to mutate or die out. It’s the same reason why you can’t take frogs to Australia.

The main thing to remember is that there is simply no need for you to take such a risk. There are plenty of giant pink Japanese penises to go around, and that means a fun day for one and all.

U.S. Presidential IQ hoax

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The U.S. Presidential IQ hoax was a mid-2001 e-mail and internet hoax that purported to provide a list of estimated IQs of the U.S. Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush.

It was reprinted as if factual by the ever-gullible Guardian, and was cited in a Doonesbury cartoon as if it represented reality.

In reality, we have a good handle on only three Presidential IQs.

JFK was tested at 119 by his prep school.

President Bush the Younger scored 1206 on the pre-1974 SAT, which converts to an IQ of about 129 on the Otis scale. (There was a close correlation between SAT and IQ in those days. The correlation was dependable enough that MENSA accepted a 1250 score for membership at that time. Over the years the tests have been revised, the correlation no longer exists, and MENSA no longer accepts SAT scores in its admission process.)

Richard Nixon was one of the gifted students studied by Terman in his longtitudinal study. Nixon biographer Roger Morris says RMN tested at 143 when he was in Fullerton High School in California.

Al Gore was never elected President (or was he?), but we also have a pre-1974 SAT score for him. He scored 1355, which is equivalent to about 137-138 on the Otis scale, and would place him in the upper 1%, about in the same league as Nixon.