Posted on by Shannon Shark @metspolice

Stick with Food? Nah.

 

“I hear it a lot, you know, ‘Stick with food, man. Stop talking about politics,’  – Anthony Bourdain.

 

I’m writing to you from what I affectionately call “Better Than Wright’s Deck 2.0”.  Long time readers know the origin of the name is that at one point David shared a picture of his deck, and I felt mine was better.  Five years back I did an extensive unplanned remodel after some storm damage, and that’s why the 2.0.

I’ve spent the weekend reading various of Anthony Bourdain’s books.

I was late to the Bourdain party. So late that he had already died. The outpouring of love after his death made me finally check out “that food show” and I was blown away and regretful about how much i didn’t get it.

If you’ve never watched his various shows, they are ostensibly food shows but they are really travel shows or even more accurately shows about the people he meets on his travels.  Each episode a gem of story telling.

I was reading an interview with Tony – apparently “Anthony Bourdain” is the fancy schmancy Author name and Tony how he saw himself – and in the interview Tony mentioned he’d often be told to stick to food.

Bingo!  This resonated with me.

I’ve been pretty political on Twitter this year.  I don’t know if you noticed, but 90,000+ Americans have died. At one point we were told 15 cases would soon be zero, and the country would be open by Easter anyway.

Ah, I can hear a few of you now thinking, “I thought this site was about the Mets?”

Back to Tony. I’m now reading Medium Raw and he’s discussing what he called The Empire Of Mediocrity.   In his case, he was talking about the programming on The Food Network.

The Empire of Mediocrity did very well for The Food Network.  It seems to do very well for SNY.  Hey, David Wright said something?  Let’s splice and dice that into five articles.  Let’s see if Keith Hernandez or Ron Darling will talk about the 86 Mets again? Or maybe 27 articles about black uniforms because Alonso likes them.

We see the Empire of Mediocrity spread itself on the various blogs that I have combined into what I call the Amazing Apple Insiderized Mets Blog Report (the AAIMBR). These are the sites with 75 writers that spam content into Google News all day and then talk to each other on their own message boards and believe that they have five million page views.  Could the pandemic lead to changes in baseball?  Yes, I suppose it could!  Project Pete Alonso’s stats? Sure, why not.

As for my own site, it often sucks. I’ve been blatantly been doing filler, labeled as such, for two months now. And even when it’s not filler the content probably sucks.

Then every now and then I will actually write some words and people seem to like it. Hopefully this is one of those posts.

90,000 people are dead.  And you’re gonna get mad because I tweeted a joke that Obama shouldn’t have traded for Cano and Diaz?   Please, be my guest, let me click unfollow for you.


I’m actually a Republican  – I came of age in the 80s. not hard to imagine – I believe I am the last actual Republican, not whatever this hijacked party has become-  so when you get mad at me critiquing the hell out of this worst president in American history, someone who I did note vote for, remember that I’m not Captain Democrat.   Free thinker here.   You know how I get mad at the Mets over stuff…now imagine that stuff actually mattered or could get people killed.

Stick to food, or the Mets?  No thank you.

Tony, thanks for reminding me how to do this.   Speak from the heart, shoot from the hip, take no prisoners, and fight for what’s right and decent.

I’ve lost a few people along the way but most have stayed. I’d rather be out here off on my own piece of the blogosphere than in the Empire of Mediocrity.

Let’s Go Mets.  There’s no F in that Pete.