Another week, another Bay Area ball player tests positive for steroids. Bartolo Colon, whose body type is derivative of Brando’s bad years stuffed with cream cheese, battered, and deep fried in bacon fat, will spend the next 50 games contemplating bad decisions, not the least of which is that weird curly bowlcut he sports.

But there was a lot more going on on the crazy little planet we rent in order to play grand scale house league games. This week, we are joined by Melissa Bull, a Montreal-based writer, translator, and editor. Melissa can be found here on Twitter, and elsewhere in the universe but you’ll have to find those locations on your own.

AUGUSTA NATIONAL ADDS ITS FIRST TWO FEMALE MEMBERS

Bull — But does Tiger Woods think they’re hot? Remember that time Helen Hunt was in a movie where she played a pro golf player? Her character’s name was Bree. One of the punch lines that never took off in the movie was people asking her if her name was Brie, like the cheese. Bree. It’s a dumb name.

Spry — You know, Melissa, I still can’t forgive Helen Hunt for leaving Tom Hanks in Castaway. If I was ever lost after a plane crash, Kelley O’Hara would wait for me.

As for this atrocity of a headline, is it 1948? What in the name of fuck? You know what happens to a society that allows the preeminent Golf Club, hell the preeminent anything, to be exclusive, sexist, exclusionary? You get Todd Akin telling the electorate about what makes for legitimate rape. Someone should’ve burned Augusta to the ground in protest years ago.

Ibeas — You might argue that in the grand scheme of things, there are more pressing concerns than the fact that classism, racism, sexism, and other -isms, are ingrained in golf. That there are other, bigger, more dire wars to fight. But then you stop and realize that Augusta National – a place highlighted every year as one of the cornerstones of American sporting culture – had to be publicly pressured into allowing female members, instead of doing something that would seem, pardon the pun, par for the course in the year 20 fucking 12. Why do we let this stuff slide? If you give people a pass for acting exactly the way you expect them to act, THEY WILL KEEP FUCKING ACTING THAT WAY.

Forbes — How will our masculinity be asserted if we are robbed of our cloistered bastions of solitude where we may freely curse and make sport? Surely these pendulous organs entitle us to certain rights, unalienable, such as the right to swing clubs and make divots in plots of million dollar grasses without the troublesome and distracting presence of beskirted succubi? What’s next to fall? Our right to tell the womenfolk what they can and cannot do with their uterine parts?

Orti — I’ve been drinking and all I’ve eaten is salad so I’ll start with this one word: Jesusfuckingchristreally*? How has something this ugly flown under the radar for this long? With all the balls flying around Augusta for the last zillion years how did no man in all this time find a pair between his own legs to call out this hazard? Has not one golfer called out Augusta about this? Tell me one golfer did. I could do the research but I’d rather get the rest of the wine from the fridge….okay…I’m back now. It’s revelations like this that come in the same week as some Republican dipshit trying to tell the world that women are built with some kind of emergency rape-power-down system in their vaginas that make me wonder if this is really just Hell and I was just a bad man in some past life and I can’t remember and maybe this whole thing called life is just a competition to see who can suffer the least and I’m swimming in a pond of stupid because I was an idiot in a past life and then I think of things like cheese and it makes me wonder if maybe this is actually Heaven and the place just has a shitty doorman.

*The answer to which is a resounding yes…and in Canada too, which boasts men only and women only courses. So..well…there’s that.

PUTIN AND PUSSY RIOT

Bull — Vice magazine staffers recently got the word ‘’hooligan’’ tattooed on themselves in cyrillic to show their solidarity with the Pussy Riot. I wish I had ‘’hooligan’’ tattooed on me. Instead of a dolphin. Maybe I could get the word ‘’hooligan’’ tattooed underneath my dolphin. So it would be like a badass dolphin. Too cool for school. Too cool for pod. Something. Anyway. It sucks bigtime about the jail time for Pussy.

Ibeas — Anyone who can only maintain their power by stifling free expression is either a criminal, a liar, or an idiot. That’s all.

Spry — This is the least fun story involving pussy since my girlfriend left me for a drummer from Edmundston. Then the New York Times came out to say, woah, woah there horses, Pussy Riot doesn’t like the West either. Well, no shit. Look at us. We’re oil guzzling assholes who’ll invade anything with a pulse. We eat Doritos and synthetic cheese for dinner. We worship Kardashians. But you know what we don’t do? We don’t put strong young women in jail for saying what they think. Putin needs to be dealt with. He’s more dangerous than we’re allowing ourselves to believe.

Seriously. A drummer from the Maritimes. I was crushed.

Forbes — There are untold numbers of political prisoners in the world — millions? — and Russia has more than its share because Putin has a portrait of Stalin on his bedside table to which he prays nightly. The women of Pussy Riot — punk rockers, activists, mothers — remain courageous in the face of their unlawful treatment and in so doing command our respect. Free speech is so basic — EVERYTHING depends on it — that it taxes the brain a bit to see such blatant refutations of it (the other, less obvious violations of it are, by design, easier to overlook, though they are, of course, just as socially corrosive). Why aren’t we invading Russia? Why does Sochi get to host the Winter Games? Why in the hell is the international community letting this happen? Here’s hoping PR continue to agitate and to demand that people pay attention to what’s going on. They are not special in their treatment, but they are emblematic. #freepussyriot

(Wow, that got real real, didn’t it? Who chooses these topics?)

Spry — Don’t worry Forbes, we’re getting outta serious soon. Way to hashtag, though. For those who don’t know, Forbes recently joined Twitter. He’s hashtagging the shit out of everything now. I saw him hashtag one of his kids the other day. For serious.

Orti — The International Olympic Committee has an ethics code which, given Russia’s hosting of the next Olympics, ought to be rolled up and crammed deep into Putin’s – oh wait…no – that’s not Pussy Riot – that was in regards to Putin banning gay pride marches for the next one hundred years which seems in line with the verdict handed down to Pussy Riot. There’s no better analysis to read on the Pussy Riot travesty than from Pussy Riot themselves. Do it here and be enlightened and then stupid for not being able to contextualize things this well or being able to use the texts of your accusers in your own defense. In other moments of crystalline hypocrisy, I find it dubious that the US is condemning Russia for a shitty verdict when it’s had Bradley Manning in solitary confinement for the last 800 days without a trial and most of its political prisoners are doing a disproportionately large amount of time in solitary confinement. At least Pussy Riot got a trial – but still – that’s no defense…but seriously…drag your cursor up an inch and hit that link.

ROGER CLEMENS RETURNS TO BASEBALL WITH THE SUGAR LAND SKEETER

Bull — I have this really disappointing thing where every time I eat candy I get angry. And my birthday is on Halloween, free candy day, which makes it ironic or unfair or something. But candies exhaust me. I start out wanting them. So crunchy! So cute! So colourful! So much MORE like a strawberry than a strawberry! So much MORE like a pineapple than a pineapple could ever be! And I’m all like, yeah! Candy’s aces! Crunch crunch crunch. Get me some crunching going on over here! And then twelve seconds later, my tongue is all cut up and my sugar rush drops and I feel all volatile. Angry and wondering if the candy’s already making me fatter. So more like a piqued aggressivity. Or a thrum of discomfiture. So I’ve really had to quit with the candy-eating. And my birthday is on Halloween! Did I say that?

Spry — When’s your birthday, though? Christmasish?

Ibeas — Clemens is obviously trying to rehab his image so that he can get into the HOF. Somewhere, someone is spinning this into the story of a broken man on the road to redemption. Clemens to be played by Aaron Eckhart.

Forbes — We call this “Favreing,” and it’s pathetic and unsightly. If Clemens is trying to launder his reputation, he’s going to have to rescue many orphans and be photographed gamboling with scads of kittens. You could argue that a lot of athletes are tempted, for a variety of reasons but usually including the “love of the game,” to overstay their welcome. The difference is that people liked Gordie Howe.

Orti — Bull, you get Hallowe’en as a birthday? That feels so unjust. Do you know when my birthday is? The anniversary of Hiroshima. Do you see scores of laughing kids on my birthday? No. A whole nation mourns the world’s largest single-day mass murder. I’d love to have a birthday on Halloween. But right, to get back on topic, I haven’t heard the Sugar Land Skeeters but I hope they’re better than Sugar Ray and Big Sugar (no effing way I’m hyperlinking those two).

Spry — If someone could let me know when Bull’s bday is, please. We should send candy. And like Ibeas said, Aaron Eckhart. And like everything else in Clemens’ career, it’s all about Rocket. He used to request that when he walked into Planet Hollywood in Boston, the music was stopped and they played Elton John’s “Rocket Man”. The man is all ego. This start is in hopes of getting into one game with the Astros in September when MLB rosters expand so that his active service time is extended, and he won’t appear on the Hall of Fame ballot this year with other dopers like Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds. Still never gonna happen, Roger. I think it’s gonna be a long long time.

And now, Bill Shatner:

CANADIAN JUNIOR HOCKEY PLAYERS ATTEMPT TO FORM UNION

Bull — I have a very handsome cousin who is the son of the other Jacques Plante hockey player, and he — my cousin — is a Junior hockey player in Texas. His wife is a born-again Christian whose father self-published a book about how Jesus talked to him this one time by appearing at a forty-five degree angle in his staircase. I picture the vision of the stairwell Jesus looking kind of hologram-y, off-kilter, saying, ‘’Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope.’’

Ibeas — I’m on board with this, if only for the fact that unions in general are a good idea.

Forbes — I’d like to read that book, Bull.

Spry — This is a good thing. Junior hockey is fucked up. Kids leave their homes at 15 to live in Red Hat or Medicine Deer or some nowhere town that makes Winnipeg look like Paris where they play for $50 a game plus room and board and a flawed scholarship program. Meanwhile, CHL owners are getting rich. Orti? You’re with me here, right?

Orti — Union? What the hell do the players want a union for? What, they don’t like that they’re asked to surrender their youth for a hockey team that pays them next to nothing, trades them to cities 800km away from their parents, expects them to drop the gloves and fight some goon or never see the ice again, imposes a curfew on them, and leaves them to the mercy of teammates they’ve just met who are going to shave their balls, dye their hair, and then punch the shit out of them at practice. Union schmoonion. If there’s a league that needs a union it’s the NCAA.

FINAL WORD

Spry — Kelley O’Hara. Poems to follow.

Ibeas — Some days are good. Some days:

Forbes — Yes, Twitter. So far it’s proven great for filling those empty hours between midnight and 5:00am. #timesuck #undereyebags #beskirtedsuccubi

Orti — Newcastle United won their home opener last week which means, as of today, they’re poised to win it all and go to the champions league next year where they belong.

Bull — I want poise, and champions, too, Ian Orti. I never get anything.