TNR: A Gay Athlete In The World's Most Macho Sport

When I wrote my final "America's Screaming Conscience" column for Gawker, I remember sitting at the keyboard, panicked about how much my world would be upended by simply changing my name. I knew some readers would instantly hate me, while others would resent having assumptions about me so radically altered.

In a frankly very lucky, if not privileged, sense, it was like "coming out" on an extreme micro level. That term just became the shorthand metonym in work emails about what I was writing—"the coming-out piece," "your coming-out piece," etc.—and I wound up using it myself. All the same, it still made me itch. This was all voluntary. Nothing I'd done was hardwired or determined by any biological imperative. I chose to admit to choosing to doing stupid things, and my five years of obfuscating my identity inhibited a little behavior online and virtually none in real life.

Part of my circumspection came from, just months earlier, standing in a locker room with a short man who'd just told the world he was gay before agreeing to a physical confrontation where someone could legitimately beat him, if not do death, then at least to crippling brain damage. No amount of my social or career discomfort—especially from the ether—could compare to his not only living some place where people like him were still beaten to death by other citizens but also going to work at a job where his very selfness could be motivation for someone to legally cripple him. I felt instantly both in awe of and impotently protective of that man. His name is Orlando Cruz, and last October he became the first active, out, male boxer.

I thought about Cruz this week when reading Jason Collins' moving coming out piece in Sports Illustrated, and I thought other people might enjoy reading about him. I was lucky to be asked by The New Republic to go cover Cruz's first fight after he came out, and unfortunately I wasn't able to share it with readers at the time because I had not.

Click the pic above to go to the New Republic article.

Ron Paul Is Dead, Miss Him Miss Him Miss Him

Note: unlike many guest pieces on Et tu, Mr. Destructo? today's article comes from a real, live person: Mornacale, a serious journalist and Brusly High School and Louisiana Campaign for Liberty's 2011 Douchebag of the Year. Despite showing all outward signs of an intelligent human being, he's still a fan of the Pittsburgh Pirates. He has yet to be seriously accused of killing anyone. You can follow him on Twitter.


How I Became Douchebag of the Year
by MORNACALE

Ron Paul died on the night of December 12, 2012. I know because I killed him.

I won't insult you by explaining who Ron Paul is, or detailing the extent of his fame/infamy across the internet. Nor will I expect that you aren't aware that Dr. Paul is (as far as I know) as healthy as ever; I understand he even gave an eerily good showing in the debate last night. This is a story about a hoax. Well, no. This is a memorial of a joke, a celebration of how a few bored strangers can unite the world in mourning over the tragic death of a living man.

Ron Paul was murdered by a Twitter hashtag. It was a nice, quiet one; its neighbors never suspected a thing. But in the evening of December 12, 2011, #MakeRacistJokesNotRacistAnymore began trending. Unable to think of any racist jokes of my own to respond to the amusing ones on my timeline, I chose to slightly re-interpret "joke" and tweeted, "Ron Paul died." (Note: all images below link back to the original tweet.)

CLASSICAL: Tim Tebow, Magical White Person

A few weeks back, I was invited to contribute to a sportswriting startup called The Classical. They liked an article idea I sent in, and rather than respond to an email asking me for a fuller outline, I ignored it for two days and instead submitted a complete and entirely unrelated thing about TIM TEBOW.

Click on the Football Jesus to be taken to The Classical:


Right now, The Classical exists only in preview format, but it should launch next month with full bells and whistles. For now, you should check out the roster of staff writers and Google and track down their back catalogues. It's a pretty fantastic group.

GQ: LeBron James Is a Dickhead—A Taxonomy

Thanks to the good-natured badgering of Bethlehem Shoals (a/k/a @freedarko), I have a piece today on GQ about the various kinds of LeBron hatred and where they seem to come from.

It's peculiar how unwilling many people are to accept the story of a man who essentially did what he was supposed to: take less money, to be part of a team, to win a championship. Those are the sorts of high-minded goals we demand of sports figures, but this time they don't seem to count.

Although there wasn't space to explore the idea in the piece, it's interesting how LeBron's conduct is so readily dismissed as phony; yet, when a former superstar devalues his own play by being lazy, troublesome or a malcontent, then cleans up his act after a low-value trade to a contender, we are often willing to see the act as redemptive. There's a value in preemptively being a cad: it makes the steps of ingratiating yourself seem laboriously insincere instead of slickly insincere. Lie to us if you must; just make it look like work.

Also, for those of you who might panic that this place will be closing shop and the contributors off to seersuckier pastures, in the land of glossy pages and cravat blogging ("SEE THE FALL '11 ASCOTS!"), I own too much Hickey Freeman and not nearly enough Italian stuff to hang out with quartered gentlemen.

Click here to go to GQ.

Twitter Ephemera: Hipster Sitcoms

Ever since receiving critical tweet acclaim on THE Huffington Post, I've been thinking about legacy and impact — the kind of twitcorpus I can leave to my children and yours. (And, if I can get really famous, perhaps the last two will be one and the same.)

In the meatspace, this has meant an investment in more than a few new ascots, as well as those fancy drinking glasses that kind of look like small fishbowls but with stems. You know you've hit the bigtime when you're only lifting soda to your face underhanded.

When it comes to saving things online, though, Twitter does kind of a bad job. It's difficult to navigate friends' feeds to find something more than a few weeks old, especially if you can't remember the wording closely enough to perform a search. Older tweets become unavailable, seemingly arbitrarily, past a certain number or time span. Cached Google searches rarely return anything useful.

Unless you know the exact link to a tweet from a year or two ago, chances are you will never see it again. Twitter claims that all back-content still exists and that a partnership with Google will make all archives searchable, but for such a wildly successful website, it's bizarre that they simply can't show you enormous amounts of the basic text that accounts for their sole purpose for being.

Of course, most Twitter content is pretty terrible and forgettable, and I know that applies to much of mine and my friends' as well. But every now and again, as with National Novel Writing Month Opening Lines, a bunch of people get together and riff on a few jokes that might be worth a second glance and a laugh some time later. The origins of both Shark Hitler — the world's most deadly animal, put inside a shark — and my strange obsession with Stevie Nicks' abuse of monoglot hispanic au pairs are now lost to time. I can't let that happen to such an important sociological document as "Hipster Sitcoms."

Because I am a lazy person, I didn't have the volition to go back and copy any more jokes from other people, but below you can find a list of silly jokes from me (with a few assists from my friend Robert). Also, because he's a funny guy, and because he wrote so damn many of them, I included a bunch from partner in twitcrime, Woodmuffin, who usually outclasses everybody when it comes to finding these trending topics jokes and going off on a spree.

'Glee' Sucks

Today is Black Friday, the day we usually reserve for empty condemnation of consumer culture, usually delivered via something like an iPhone, while watching a college football game brought to us by a beer, designed to make administrations and coaches money and in no way meant to determine which institution has the superior academic program. Then we do half of our Christmas shopping on deep discount on Amazon.com, or we sneak off to the Levi's outlet, getting half-off on the jeans that accentuate our butts and/or packages.

I was searching for a metaphor for protestations of social value ladled over vacantly hedonistic self-indulgence, of prepackaged moral fiber disguising spun-sugar emptiness, and immediately any point I had about Black Friday was derailed by my realizing, "Oh, I'm actually thinking about Glee."

I've written before about Glee, but not in any detail. There's plenty to object to, about the show, but I was primarily stunned that it was nominated for an Outstanding Comedy Emmy despite not actually being funny. I wrote:

What If the Tea Party Was Black?

No giant essay today; just two (or three, depending) strong recommendations for listening/reading.

Satellite High, the guy behind the awesome diss track of the teaparty rappers Wolverines' track "O.T.P. (One-Term President)," hipped me to a really satisfying video today, entitled "What If the Tea Party Was Black?" For politically oriented hip-hop, it's extremely well done, avoiding ponderous and syllable-choked words, elaborate sentences or the unskilled MC's tendency to run back to a chorus every two lines because he's afraid you won't "get" it. The whole thing is perfectly pitched: fun, catchy and devastatingly on-point when it needs to be:

Dan Brown, I'm Putting You on Notice

It's been a full six months since Mr. Destructo last heard from its far-flung correspondent, international best-selling author Dan Brown. He filed a top-notch story from the murder scene where police found a census worker dead with the word "FED" carved into his body, then seemed to disappear.

We didn't worry about his being tracked by the real killers; Dan's too smart for that. We assumed he had gone deep undercover, immersing himself in his topic and preparing to bust a story wide open, determined to shock the world. Instead, he seems to have been determined to slip between the covers with a totally different journalistic organ.

Today, an excerpt from Dan's latest soon-to-be blockbuster novel appeared on Barnes & Noble's website. Under the title, "Barnes and Noble EXCLUSIVE - Dan Brown's New Novel, The Mysterium Artifact," he writes:

Two and a Half Mensch: How HuffPo and CollegeHumor Missed a Fat Comedy Target

Today's piece focuses on an inadvisable tactic. Huffington Post, which cannot generate humor on its own, farmed out the funny to another website. This is a bad idea. When you don't know what funny is, contracting for it is a disaster. It evokes an image of a newly rich and hapless software engineer calling a contractor with only a P.O. Box for an address and saying, "I want new floors in my house and I only have $50,000. Is that enough for floor? It is! By George R.R. Martin's beard, what luck!"

Still, they ran a takedown of the most popular sitcom in America, Two and a Half Men, with a groan track of the show produced by CollegeHumor.com. The only problem was, the track wasn't funny. You couldn't expect HuffPo to know that, but CollegeHumor screwed the pooch. You can't take aim at a beast this big and stupid and then miss. It only draws attention to yourself. Now the beast has something to run at and may also be aroused. CollegeHumor missed.

Pimping in Brief: Cormac McCarthy Goes to a Birthday Party

I've never really subscribed to the idea that blog entries should be about single-paragraph thoughts. It goes against my desires as a reader. When I read someone else's blog, I want something I can sit down and sip a beer through, have a cup of coffee with, see that I've got 10 minutes to kill and can fill them by diving into this text. I accept that I won't get that most of the time, but that's my ideal experience.

That's why I try to post longer entries. This isn't to say that I think of something to write and then wrack my brain finding filler to make it wind up the requisite length. I might indulge in a needless but amusing footnote for the hell of it, but it owes nothing to meeting an assigned word length. No, instead, I try not to write something unless I know it's something I can sit down to, for a while, and something others will be able to spend a little time with. If I think of something and know that it'll just be a paragraph and nothing more, I'll pass on it and hope that maybe later, down the road, another subject will come up that lets me fold that single paragraph into it.