Joe Posnanski

Like most everyone, I used to love Casey Kasem’s Weekly Top 40. I loved everything about it. I loved that we were listening to Shaggy from Scooby Doo. I loved that before some songs he would tell these bizarre stories (“And when Gabriele was 3 years old, she got her nickname, Nena, which means little girl in Spanish ...”) and say absolutely nothing at all before others (“At No. 23 in our countdown this week, here’s Robert Palmer with ”Addicted to Love“). ... Read More

So here was how my day began: I woke up in the morning to find that I apparently had sent a spam email to every single person I know and numerous people I don’t really know but have had passing email contact with like Malcolm Gladwell, Thomas Frank, Curt Schilling and StrippersinKC*. *Really, heh heh, don’t know them. Not at all. I contacted them when I wrote a column once about how the stripper market goes up Super Bowl weekend. Well, it’s TRUE. Yeah, ... Read More

A few years ago, I made the rather bold and yet admittedly bewildering claim that former Kansas forward and now longtime NBA journeyman Raef LaFrentz was the greatest athlete ever named Raef. You would not expect anyone to care enough about this to disagree, but as it turned out that, Mark Zieman, the former editor and now publisher of the Kansas City Star, disagreed vehemently. He pointed to Rafer Johnson, the old decathlete. I explained that LaFrentz was RAEF while Johnson was ... Read More

My father’s favorite actor, Paul Newman, died Friday. He was 83 years old. Of course, my father would insist that Paul Newman was not actually his favorite actor, even though as far as I know his two favorite movies rank like so: 1. The Hustler 2. Somebody Up There LIkes Me You will note that they are both movies which star, um, yeah, Paul Newman. My father has watched both of these movies at least 100 times apiece, no other movie is even close (third ... Read More

I’ve always been amazed at the popularity of Jared, you know, the Subway guy. I don’t mean this as a knock -- I like Jared too. I’m just not sure why. I mean, yeah, it’s great that he’s lost like 800 pounds or whatever, and I appreciate the imagination it took to do it by eating lots of Subway sandwiches*, but I mean lots of people LOVE Jared beyond reason. I mean I’ve seen people literally stop and point madly at Jared ... Read More

Sam Harris wrote this fascinating paragraph about Sarah Palin, but I think it is about more than politics. It gets at the heart of something I think an awful lot about .... excellence and how people respond to it. "Ask yourself: how has "elitism" become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical ... Read More

This is amazingly stupid. And yet, as is the case with many amazingly stupid things like the Brickbreaker game on my McCain-berry (I hate when the “Flip” thing falls) and this mind-numbing game I found on the Gore-ternet, it is also oddly engrossing. In case you did not click on the top link,* it is a story showing that in an AP-Yahool poll, a few more more people would rather watch a football game with Barack Obama than John McCain. *And if you ... Read More

Now, maybe I am mishearing things. I definitely could be mishearing things. I’ve listened to the clip below about 12 times, and sometimes I hear it one way, sometimes another, maybe this is like that optical illusion picture where from one angle it looks like a young woman, from another like an old hag. Maybe what you see and hear depends on what kind of dark stuff is bouncing around inside your own mind. (more...) Read More

Well, you may have heard, the Pixifoods thing has kind of taken off. I’m not really sure what to say about that. USA Today wrote about it, the New York Times, countless culinary websites, and so on. We made tons of new friends for this blog, and I can only imagine what happened when Paris-trained chefs and foodies from around the country and the world popped on this site only to see a lot of ridiculous and oppressively long posts about Trey ... Read More

Well, I made it back from Fort Leavenworth. They let me leave on my own. We’ll tell you all about it some point, but in the meantime, here is the beginning of our Pixipedia ... we start with our first installment of Pixifoods, which includes many of your suggestions. * * * Pixifood (PIKZ-ee-food), noun: Any food substance that is highly pleasant to the taste as a child and tastes shockingly unpleasant once you become an adult. Baseball Card Gum As a child it ... Read More