Beat It Loser

Oh Angelo, oh Angelo. Please do Philadelphia and the surrounding Delaware Valley a favor and leave. We will be so much better off and our mornings will be free of your tired and worn shtick. I honestly cannot think of a single positive attribute about you or your show (alright, you are a decent writer, but that’s about it). I would rather be stuck in a windowless room with no ventilation during a violent argument between Gilbert Gottfried and Fran Drescher than have to listen to the complete and utter crap that comes out of your mouth every morning.

For starters, you are not from here. You have no connection to anything in this area and your clearly contrived passion and loyalty to Philadelphia sport teams is horribly pathetic and completely questionable. When I got my iPhone, I listened to you during my commute to work because I had an app that allowed me to do so (horrible mistake, thankfully after a couple of days, I realized why I never listened to you in the first place) and you were ranting and raving about the Phillies playoff run (2009). How can anyone with a brain listen to your show and take what you have to say seriously? YOU ARE A LIFE LONG YANKEES FAN! Everything that spews from that gutter between your nose and your chin has no merit and is the journalistic equivalent of having Bob Dylan write a review of his latest record.

Now, if you are a Yankees fan, whatever, I really could care less, that’s all well and good, go ahead and root for the team that you grew up cheering for, I seriously have no problem with that whatsoever. But no, in a lame radio stunt, you decided to proclaim your love for the Phillies and abandon your 58 yearlong loyalty to the Yankees. Oh! Even better, you had to include the always fresh and wacky idea of taking a lie detector test to prove this point, sadly I stopped listening to this segment before it started, but regardless, I’m sure hilarity ensued. I know Rhea Hughes will have my back on that one.

That is only one minute instance of your annoyance. You are not funny. You’re just not, so stop trying to be. What you think is witty and cutting edge and dumb and overplayed. You want to be Howard Stern, but you come off about as bloated as Howard K. Stern’s most famous client. “Oh, what kind of zany radio stunt are we going to do this year with the Wingetts, hey Rhea, aren’t they hot?”
On top of everything that you do on your terrible show, you have perpetuated the old and ugly stereotype of the typical Philadelphia sports fan being a complete savage animal when you brought those drunken assholes up to the NFL Draft in 1999 that ended up booing Donovan McNabb. And NO Angelo, he HASN’T gotten over it (I read that half-assed argument in your book).

I was seriously surprised that your show doesn’t have a smorgasbord of silly sound effects that play throughout; I mean after all, you have the always hysterical Z-list comedian Joe Conklin on all the time. “Oh! Conklin is playing at Bonner’s cafeteria this weekend? Sweet! He is really moving on up! This is like his Beatles Shea Stadium moment.” Give me a break, that guy is a total hack who only adds to the awfulness of your already terrible show. So, he impersonates local celebrity voices? Awesome, he is one step above a street mime.

Perhaps the most infuriating thing about Angelo Cataldi is that he makes over $1 million dollars a year at WIP. Really? Even the idea of this bozo making that much money is enough to make me lose faith in all of humanity. I have never met a person who has said “You know, I like Cataldi, he is insightful, knows what he is talking about and most importantly incredibly funny.” His “humor” appeals to the lowest denominator and combine that with Conklin constantly calling in and the blocks of commercials any actual intelligent (using the term lightly here) sporting commentary probably takes up 0.01% of your time spent on air.

I really hope that your contract extension talks fail and that you are run out of town. You are an embarrassment to this fine city and it seriously blows me away that you have been doing this for over two decades. Good riddance I say, get lost and go back to Rhode Island. While you’re at it, be sure to take your moronic crew with you.

The Titanic Theory

Remember the movie “Titanic?” Of course you do, I just had no other way of starting this post. If you haven’t heard of it, eh, well, you’re an idiot. I’m not saying it was a great movie, but it wasn’t as bad as its detractors made it out to be. It was a mammoth display of star power, technology and earnings, it was, titanic (har har).

Aside from the overall cheesiness and the fact that it was essentially a centuries-old love story lazily retold with the ship’s sinking serving as a mere backdrop, I have a major issue with one of the prevalent plot points and themes. I hate when the media and the entertainment industries try to paint poverty and the lower class as these free-spirited and care-free folks who know how to have a good time and are much wiser than their wealthy counterparts. This notion is not only an insult to those struggling to survive with minimal income, but a slap in the face to anyone with a brain.

In “Titanic,” they present the aristocratic upper class as stiff, boring and generally mean spirited. In contrast, they portray the poor people as these dancing goofs who know how to have a good time and are able to not only survive, but thrive while wallowing in poverty. This has been done in many films and countless musicals and I cannot believe that the world hasn’t caught onto the phoniness of this idea. Musicals love this sort of conflict because it can allow for a song and dance scene that incorporates some sort of choreographed trash can and street sweeper scene.

I challenge you to find a single homeless person or someone living paycheck to paycheck who wouldn’t want to trade places with someone who is financially well off. It’s completely ludicrous to believe that a person begging for change at 30th Street in the freezing cold with rain water seeping into their pores initiating the start of pneumonia would not like to trade places with the well dressed man making his way into the Comcast Tower to sit in his warm, plush leather chair behind an oak desk in front of a wide window in a corner office overlooking the city.

It is a juvenile concept and is mockery of the lower class. Now, some would argue that the upper class and the rich are constantly arguing about expenses and vacations while simultaneously going through the excruciating process of seeing which day care is the best for their child to attend once their class day is finished at whatever private and forward thinking elementary school they attend. Trust me, these are the problems that someone at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale would love to encounter. Worrying about what to do with the abundance of money that you have multiplying in your Swiss bank account is a much better problem than wondering if you will be able to place food on your table or if you will have a job tomorrow.

Please, stop trying to force feed us this completely false idea of the lower class being these jolly people who know how to have a better time than their wealthy brethren. It’s moronic and kind of reminiscent of Stepin Fetchit. Everybody wants to have money and nobody wants to be poor, no matter how glamorous the mainstream media strives to make it out to be.

Get Over Yourself

So, The Huffington Post unveiled a new Sports Section this week. What a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea. Here we have Arianna Huffington, the egomaniacal yin to Matt Drudge’s yang, spouting poetically about the game changing sports coverage that her modestly named blog will provide. Of course she has to toss in some cringe-worthy puns in a lame attempt to relate sports to politics so that her snobby readers can understand what the hell is happening to their beloved “news” site and why the barbaric and dimwitted subject of sports is being posted alongside such luminaries as “Carrie Prejean Threatens To Walk Off Larry King” and “Separated At Birth: 10 Politicians With Famous Lookalikes.” Some notable items from Huffington’s introduction include: “This politician really needs to swing for the fences if he hopes to win Iowa,” “It's the bottom of the 9th -- time to send Bill Clinton to the Hill to twist some arms,” and “the case against Saddam is a slam dunk!” There is nothing more annoying and phony than a person who doesn’t care/know anything about sports suddenly becoming Howard Cosell because they feel as if they have to, not because they want to. Ugh.

Okay, so what I am really doing here is kind of laying down the groundwork for the overall awfulness that is The Huffington Post. I stumbled onto the site in the summer of 2008 when the presidential election was just getting underway and at first, I was kind of impressed. Here I am, a pretty liberal democrat who agrees with the majority of the articles and sadly the people posting in the comment sections. Cool.

Then after a week or so, I realized that the entire site is essentially a leftist version of Fox News, the HuffPo community’s sworn enemy (along with Rush and Palin). They spew the same type of hate filled rhetoric that they slam those on the opposite end of the political spectrum for doing. God forbid if you have a differing opinion from any of the sheep who blindly post in the comment sections of an article on that site or if you do not bow down before the Almighty Arianna and kiss her rings. I know that internet commenters are a whole other animal, but on this site you will encounter some of the most self-righteous, holier-than-thou people on the planet. I would love to introduce these loons to Drudge’s loons at a Pot & Kettle Convention.

Back to Queen Arianna, Ruler of the Internets, a complete hypocrite, who according to the internet bible Wikipedia, was a “right-winger” “who supported Newt Gingrich's revolution and Bob Dole's candidacy for president in 1996.” What?! That blows my mind! How did her political ideal$ and ideology change $o dra$tically and $o dramatically fa$t?

Now, we haven’t even broached her privileged upbringing and luxurious lifestyle that she currently leads. How are we (or more specifically, the idiot commenters) supposed to take this woman seriously? She is like the white bread homeboy living in his parent’s McMansion out in West Chester that raps about how tough his life is and what the mean streets of the Thornbury Hunt development are like. She has no idea what it is like to be a member of the lower class or even the middle class and I doubt that she would like to experience either. Give me a break you fraud and go back to your private jets, money grubbing television appearances and keep feeding your minions sensationalized “news” stories from your greasy palms.