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June 25, 2004

Where Have You Gone, Joe Schlobotnik?

Is anyone else amused that Al Gore -- he of global-warming speeches on the coldest day of the year -- chooses to expose Bush's "lies" about the Iraq-AQ tie the day before the New York Time proves the existence of such a link?

Quiz: Does anyone-- without the help of Google, of course-- know who Joe Schlobotnik might be?

posted by Ace at 12:09 PM

Comments

Maybe Gore hired Bagdad Bob as a speechwriter?

Posted by: WindyCity on June 25, 2004 12:14 PM

Dr. StrangeGore is rapidly reaching escape velocity from reality.

One word, Al: Thorazine.

Posted by: Brian B on June 25, 2004 12:46 PM

Actually, timing-wise, this is just par for the course for the sad sumbitch.

I'm not the first one to make the observation, but Gore is becoming a remarkably accurate weathervane. That is, if he's blowing his hot air, say, eastward on one day, it's pretty safe to say the wind will shift to the west the following day. Or die out completely.

Posted by: ccwbass on June 25, 2004 12:57 PM

Charlie Brown's favorite baseball player!

Posted by: zetetic on June 25, 2004 01:20 PM

Yeahp. And just the sort of baseball player Chuck would like. An indifferent hitter with poor fielding skills who eventually gets traded to an expansion franchise.

Al Gore's similarity to Chuck is uncanny, except that Chuck is grounded, wise, and good-natured.

Nice, Zetetic. I guess you spent your youth paging through Peanuts books too.

Posted by: Ace on June 25, 2004 01:23 PM

"an indifferent hitter"

...you call a lifetime .004 average "indifferent" ?

("I guess you were still excited by your bloop single.")

...err...I think I spent *way* too much time paging through Peanuts books...

Posted by: cadrys on June 25, 2004 01:29 PM

Was his average really that bad?

I figured it was something like .124.

Posted by: Ace on June 25, 2004 01:32 PM

LOL. That shithead Gore just can't buy a break...

Posted by: IdFaciam on June 25, 2004 01:53 PM

Ann Coulter called him the kind of guy "who dives into the mosh pit just as the crowd parts."

Posted by: george on June 25, 2004 02:26 PM

spelled "Shillabotnick" or "Shillabotnik"

Posted by: The Commissar on June 25, 2004 02:31 PM

I knew Joe without Google.

Two other questions:

What was Joe's batting average? (Gold star if you know that.)

Who was Roger Kaputnik?

Posted by: on June 25, 2004 02:32 PM

Oops. Cross post.

The .184 sounds right to me. I though .004 was Chuck's average.

Posted by: Nicholas Kronos on June 25, 2004 02:38 PM

Oh, and Ace? Damn you very much for getting the song "Mrs. Robinson" stuck in my head. And without any cowbell.

Posted by: Brian B on June 25, 2004 02:46 PM

IIRC Kaputnik was the protagonist of Dave Berg's "Lighter Side of..." strips in Mad magazine.

Posted by: zetetic on June 25, 2004 02:47 PM

Aw c'mon, Ace, wrong Joe. You missed the real comic strip doppelganger for Al Gore: Joe Btfsplk, the world's worst jinx.

Posted by: iowahawk on June 25, 2004 03:01 PM

OK...IIRC Joe's batting average was .004. I also remember he was a lousy manager too. (Both Joe and Charlie were player-managers and shared the pain of futility.) In one strip, Joe called for a sacrifice bunt with the bases empty.

Charlie's batting average was higher (or at least his slugging percentage probably was) because I remember one strip where he actually hit a home run that won the game. But as was typical for him, his buzz was immediately when Sally (although it could have been Patty) responded to his feat with the simple word: "YOU???" No idea what his final average was though.

I guess for you sabremetrics fans (Moneyball devotees) that means Charlies OPS (Slugging + On base percentage) was higher than his hero's too, making Charlie the clearly superior player, and a likely addition to the Oakland A's if Billy Beane gets wind of this.

Don't know/remember who Roger is/was.

I now return you to your regular programming, and crawl back under the "useless baseball/comic knowledge" rock from whence I emerged.

Posted by: Senator PhilABuster on June 25, 2004 03:17 PM

In one strip, Joe called for a sacrifice bunt with the bases empty.

Hah! Ol' Joe was a crafty one.

Posted by: Ace on June 25, 2004 03:21 PM

Isn't Joe the guy that invented the internet?

Posted by: cole on June 25, 2004 03:54 PM

"In one strip, Joe called for a sacrifice bunt with the bases empty."

Sounds like Joe is now managing the Mariners.
.

Posted by: Raoul Ortega on June 25, 2004 06:23 PM

It's spelled "Joe Shlabotnik." I especially remember the Sunday strip where CB went through hundreds of bubble gum wrappers to find a Shlabotnik card without success, only to have Lucy find one on her very first purchase of a single piece of gum.

BTW, Ace - you do know Fantagraphics has begun a "Complete Peanuts" 10-year project, don't you? Volume 1 (1950-52) is out now.

Posted by: Christopher on June 28, 2004 10:01 AM

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Dumas picked four names of real musketeers out of a history book, D'Artagnan, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos. So there was an actual D'Artagnan, though he made most of the story up. (Or, you know, all of it.)*

Charles de Batz de Castelmore, known as d'Artagnan, the famous musketeer of Kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV, spent his life in the service of the French crown.
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Easy, no question -- read The Hobbit first. It's actually the start of the story and comes first chronologically. It sets up some major characters and major pieces in play in LOTR.
Also, the Hobbit is Beginner-Friendly, which LOTR isn't. The Hobbit really is a delightful book, and a fast read. It's chatty, it's casual, it's exciting, and it's funny. In that dry cheeky British humor way. I love that the narrator is constantly making little asides and commentary, like he's just sitting next to you telling you this story as it occurs to him.
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I noticed a continuity problem. Maybe. Now, as of the time of The Hobbit, it was unknown that this magic ring was in fact a Ring of Power, and it was doubly unknown that it was the Ring of Power, the Master Ring that controlled the others.
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In another passage, the ring is identified as a "ring of power."
I don't know, I always thought there was a distinction between mere magic rings and the Rings of Power created by Sauron. But this suggests that Bilbo knew this was a ring of power created by Sauron.
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I never noticed this before. I know Tolkien re-wrote this chapter while he was writing LOTR to make the ring important from the start. And also to make Gollum more sinister and evil, and also to remove the part where Gollum actually offers Bilbo the ring as a "present" -- Bilbo had already found it on his own, but Gollum was wiling to give it away, which obviously is not something the rewritten Gollum would ever do.
But I had no memory of the ring being suggested to be The Ring so early in the tale.

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The only bad part of the trilogy are the Frodo/Sam chapters in The Two Towers. They're repetitive, slow, and mostly about the weather and terrain. But most everything else is good. Weirdly, the Frodo-Sam chapters in Return of the King are exciting and action-packed and among the best in the trilogy. (Though the chapters with everyone else in Return of the King get pretty slow again. Mostly people talking about marching towards war, and then marching towards war.)