Take me out to the whine fest

Filed under "call a waaaaaahmbulance":

Barry Bonds would boycott Cooperstown if the Hall of Fame displays his record-breaking home run ball with an asterisk.

That includes skipping his potential induction ceremony.

"I won't go. I won't be part of it," Bonds said in an interview with MSNBC that aired Thursday night. "You can call me, but I won't be there.

I saw this on a soap opera once. We're supposed to run after him, pleading with him to stay and promise to change our heartless ways. Someone's probably already doing it.

"I don't think you can put an asterisk in the game of baseball, and I don't think that the Hall of Fame can accept an asterisk," Bonds said. "You cannot give people the freedom, the right to alter history. You can't do it. There's no such thing as an asterisk in baseball."

History? A baseball is not history, it's an historical artifact, and newsflash: They can be altered (cheap Sandy Burglar joke here), and museums will still purchase them if there is significance in the original or significance in the alteration. If for some reason Cooperstown passes on owning this baseball (they won't), the Smithsonian might take it; if they pass there's a dozen smaller theme museums who'll take it.

Not to mention "altered history" is big business the past few years. Pretty much why I dropped out of school and went back to being a corporate drone--I wanted to work with historical objects and facts, and historians don't do that anymore. They "view the past through a lens" and "re-interpret their significance" via that lens, the lens being feminist, Marxist, African-American, etc. If I'm going to sit around shoveling manure all day, I'm going to get paid decently.

Trying to imagine how a Marxist-feminist historian would view this baseball. It's obviously a symbol of how evil corporate America has kept the proletariat from revolting by distracting them with superficial spectacles, and the branded asterisk is a racist reminder of antebellum slave-holding...that crap writes itself.

Back to the sad part of the story, the part that made me want to blog about it in the first place:

Matt Murphy, a 21-year-old student and construction supervisor from New York, emerged from a scuffle holding the ball. He said he decided to sell it because he couldn't afford to pay the taxes required to keep it.

Something's really wrong with this country when a kid can't keep a free baseball because it's so punatively taxed. Good God.