Greetings From Scott Turner: Apex of Weirdness | Only The Blog Knows Brooklyn

Even when I'm on Block Island, Scott Turner, the Pub Quiz man of Rocky Sullivan's I've never met comes through with his weekly missive. This one travels far and wide and promises to be quite zany. Brought to you as always by Miss Wit, the great t-shirt designer of Red Hook. CHeck out her site why doncha. The tees are wonderful.

Greetings Pub Quiz Dog Days Anticipationists…

Maybe it's the middle of summer. Maybe it's the odd weather – May's chilly winds, June's washouts, July's nearly-every-day thunder rumbling over us. Maybe it's the economy, which continues to slip-slide away despite forecasters offering tiny tidbits of hope, the way kids tug at their parents sleeves on rainy days and say "isn't there some way we can still have the picnic? Please?!!"

Or maybe, just maybe, it's Ugly Bat Boy, a cat so unremittingly weird looking, so disconcerting, that all things bizarre seem destined to be his doing.

When good cats go Joan Rivers…

Ugly Bat Boy, lives in a New Hampshire veterinary clinic. He was brought to my attention by Rocky Sullivan's Pub Quiz attendee James Bowers. He's the animal world's version of portraits in thunder-and-lighting mansions, the ones whose eyes follow soon-to-be-victims.

According to the piece James forwarded, Ugly Bat Boy "has a nice disposition and real inner beauty." Which is what separates Ugly Bat Boy from, say, Mayor Bloomberg.

Channeling the mayor: "If I spend enough money running for mayor, people will forget how rich I am."

I'm not saying Ugly Bat Boy is the reason for the Apex of Weirdness currently coursing through everyone's consciousness. But after this bulleted list, we might have to revisit the perfidious effect of those barely moving eyes on the very core of human existence.

As Ugly Bat Boy has emerged onto the national stage, so too have these oddities erupted:

The battle between Cambridge PD's Crowley the Arrester and Harvard's Gates the Alleged has smooved into a beery love-in between the clueless cop, the angry professor and the overwhelmed president. It'd be great if Crowley, Gates and Obama met in an undisclosed dive bar, got hammered — really liver-endangering sloshed — and hashed it all out in an maelstrom of alcohol-induced emotional chaos. No t.v. cameras, no carefully-scripted CYA remarks. Just pure, raw face-to-face-to-face rip-snortin' hashing it out.

Last week's Ugly Bat Boy weirdness on Dr. Gates' front porch wasn't the actual incident. It was Sgt. Crowley's initial response that he couldn't be racist because sixteen years ago, he attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on dying Celtics star Reggie Lewis. You know, the classic some-of-my-best-friends-are-cardiac-arrested-black-NBA-stars line.

“I am not a racist,’’ said police Sergeant James Crowley .
if only Reggie White could be here to see this.

The Mets, who can't do anything right, today fired Tony Bernazard, their VP for Player Development. Bernazard has something of a temper. What kind of temper? The kind where someone chews out a minor-league team in Binghamton, NY by screaming at them, ripping his shirt off, offering to fight anyone, and calling one player a "pussy" — the man with the temper's word, not mine.

You'd think the cutting ties with this guy would qualify as "doing something right." The Mets, so good at rescuing defeat from the jaws of victory. No, in fact, the Mets' general manager, Omar Minaya – himself under fire for the team's performance — blamed Daily News reporter Adam Rubin for the whole thing, inferring that Rubin broke the Binghamton story because the reporter was angling for Bernazard's job. The bad juju at Tarp Field permeates everything, even with the team on a three-game winning streak, at long last scoring runs galore. Meet the Mess, Meet the Mess…

Minaya, Rubin. The scapegoater,. and goat being scaped

U.S. Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY) has announced his retirement. Bunning says he won't run for another term because he can't afford it. Now, I'm no fan of Jim Bunning's — he's as regressive as they come. He once said his opponent was "limp-wristed" and "looks like one of Saddam Hussein's sons." Nuttier still, Bunning famously said "Let me explain something: I don't watch the national news, and I don't read the paper. I haven't done that for the last six weeks. I watch Fox News to get my information."

It's no loss to see one of Time magazine's Five Worst Senators leave office. Rather, It's the reason he's leaving. He can't afford to run. A public servant, even one as bad as Bunning, shouldn't be leaving public life simply because it's too expensive to run for re-election. And the zillions of political hopefuls who never even enter this expensive realm? Each of them a potentially huge loss. Or maybe not — maybe they would've made Bunning look like Lincoln. But we'll never know, and that hurts everyone in a democracy — or what passes for a democracy these days.

(left) Jim Bunning, the only man to toss a perfect game at Shea Stadium
(right) Jim Bunning, demonstrating how much a wrist needs to move to not be "limp"

This isn't weird, and certainly isn't the doing of Ugly Bat Boy. It's just a very, very, very cool photo of Jane Goodall and her dog.

Still don't know where Michael Jackson's body is. There are now a good many websites dedicated to the idea that MJ is still alive. Well, what rock star isn't, right?

http://images.hollywoodgrind.com:9000/images/2009/7/michael-jackson-promethean-casket-pic-1.jpg

Is this what's inside Jacko's casket? Moyt be, rrrrabbbit, moyt be…

Bruce Ratner's point person on the Atlantic Yards travesty, MaryAnne Gilmartin (shouldn't Bruce Ratner be Bruce Ratner's point person on Atlantic Yards, travesty or not?) gave a patently weird, evasive, smug, panicked, confident, in tatters, scripted, flummoxed performance at last week's Community Board hearing in Brooklyn. This was the latest public forum where the government forces local officials to hold a meeting so Atlantic Yards can get some good press. When will they learn that "good press" doesn't find Ratner these days — either because his project is in ruins or because Ratner's minions have nothing truthful or even useful to say. There are other factors, like all the people have been fed up with Atlantic Yards for so long and Ratner's supporters — the ones who actually like the project — being the most-disruptive in the room.

Actually, Gilmartin's lying and obfuscating was pretty entertaining . She was really out of her league, and again, this is the point-person on Atlantic Yards. Gilmartin had dozens of cheat-sheets on the dais in front of her. Sometimes she answered by reading straight off the sheets. Sometimes she made stuff up. Sometimes she heard something good in the audience and repeated it into the mike. Often, Gilmartin just sat there, like the proverbial deer in the headlights, wondering why it was taking so long for that car to get there and wipe her out.

Atlantic Yards' MaryAnne Gilmartin, left, figuring out just why so many people have quit the Atlantic Yards project. (photo by Adrian Kinoch)

This Wednesday — tomorrow — is much bigger, more important community hearing. You're all invited. It's during the afternoon and also in the evening. If ever there was a meeting folks should turn out for — to make your views known, to protest, to really have at Forest City Ratner, government officials or, if you like the project, opponents — this is the one. It's a crucial time — over the next few months, any number of things can permanently sink Atlantic Yards.

Atlantic Yards needs to be sunk. Because it would provide few, if any, affordable apartments, newly-created jobs and union jobs, because it would cost taxpayers (i.e. you and me) billions of dollars, because it's been such a scam and corrupt process it makes Boss Tweed look like Walter Cronkite, and because it's the Ugly Bat Boy of real-estate developments. That's why Atlantic Yards has to be stopped, now, and replaced with a plan that makes good on the promises Ratner can't and obviously won't.

If you head to Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn's website, you'll get all the info you need for Wednesday's big meeting, as well as incredible clips from last week's community board meeting. Want more info? Head to No Land Grab and Atlantic Yards Report.

which side are you on, folks, which side are you on? Brooklyn's, you say?

Here's a photo I'm laying squarely at Ugly Bat Boy's paws — it's baseball, it's Japan, and it's Ugly Bat Boy's doing. That's all you need to know:

really, there're pinstripes under the pitcher's uniform…

So there you have it. Ugly Bat Boy's Pageant of the Weird. As at any juncture in the march of humanity, this has been a tip-of-the-iceberg exercise.

Thanks to James Bowers and Ugly Bat Boy aiding and abetting Weirdsville U.S.A.'s journey from the ether to your e-mail box.

Even money odds that it's even toastier next week.

Serving Park Slope and Beyond