My wife, the lovely and talented Aries28, finally decided to have our newest child this summer, after 147 months of gestation. We were of course happy and pleased with this development, for various reasons – my wife was happy to have her uterus back under her own control, and I was pleased that I now had yet another minion to indoctrinate.
(For those keeping score at home, the Tiniest Minion I’ve mentioned in previous threads is now no longer the Tiniest Minion, for obvious reasons. I considered renaming him the Middle Minion, but for consistency’s sake I’ve decided on Tiny Minion. The newest little Minion is now the Tiniest Minion. Because he was more than nine pounds when he was born, my wife is also calling him “The Last Damn Minion That I’M Going to Birth,” but that’s too long and I’m too lazy to keep typing it. Please update your scorecards accordingly.)
Because the new Tiniest Minion is male, naturally I’m teaching him all about sports. He’s figured out the basics pretty quickly – never bet on Alabama’s football team to cover the spread when they’re the favorite, keep your spikes low when sliding into the bag unless you’re playing the Yankees, etc. – but some of the finer points are eluding him.
For example, I’ve told him over and over that the information crawl on the bottom of the screen on ESPN will NEVER show you the one piece of sports information you want. It may be a score; it may be current standings; it may be the latest report on what type of underwear Brett Favre is wearing (because as everyone knows, the entire sports UNIVERSE revolves around anything related to Brett Favre), and how Chris Berman is reacting to it. Whatever it is, ESPN knows that you want this information, and will actively try to keep it from you.
How they do this is tricky. Sometimes they’ll squeeze it in during the list of stats from another game. For example, if you want the score of the Alabama/Clemson football game, you need to read the entire stat line of the USC/Virginia game, because they’ll sneak it in there. “USC: Sanchez: 41-42, 6 touchdowns, 34 tackles, balanced federal budget at halftime, healed leper during timeout, already won Heisman Trophy, Alabama 34 Clemson 10, USC named national champions, all other football teams told to go home and pout.”
Other times, they’ll intentionally plan their commercial breaks to occur JUST WHEN the information scroll is going to show the stuff you want to see. Say they’re scrolling through the American League baseball scores, and the ONLY score left to show on the scroll is your favorite team’s (defined as “whichever team is playing the Yankees”). The INSTANT that score is ready to scroll across the bottom of the screen, they’ll cut to a commercial. Doesn’t matter if they’re in the middle of something important (such as Lou Holtz spitting chunks of saliva large enough to choke entire herds of elephants as he explains why Notre Dame will win the national championship this year even though their entire football team was killed in a freak blender accident), they’ll cut it off in mid-sentence if they have to, to go to a commercial and keep you from seeing the score you wanted. Naturally, once the commercial is over, the scrolling information has started over from the beginning (“NASCAR: Tony Stewart marries Dale Earnhardt; Jeff Gordon: ‘I never loved Tony anyway’”), and the information you want is long gone.
So I’ve tried to explain this to the Tiniest Minion, because I don’t want him to go through the years of frustration with the ESPN crawl that I’ve experienced. I don’t think he’s fully understanding it, though. Or … what’s worse … he may be conspiring WITH ESPN to keep me from learning vital sports information.
See, we’ve now got three children at home, including the Tiniest Minion. Even though I’ve carefully explained to them that I need to watch sports at certain times (“Boys, please understand that I love you, but from mid-February through late January, I’ll be busy”), they insist on participating in activities like homework and eating that keeps me from spending time in front of the television. As a result, my sports-watching has been DRASTICALLY reduced, to the point that I have to depend on the dreaded Information Crawl on ESPN to keep me updated on these important world events. ESPN, of course, loves this, because that means they can just mess with me even more. And I think they’ve got the Tiniest Minion working with them.
Last night, for example. I got up with the Tiniest Minion for his 3 a.m. feeding, and as is my habit, I plopped on the couch and turned on ESPN. I wanted to see if the Red Sox had beat the Rays. SportsCenter was on, but I knew I’d never see the highlights of the game there, because they were too busy replaying a four-month-old Sunday Conversation with some Russian badminton player I’d never heard of. (“Sergei, what goes through your mind when you’re serving the shuttlecock in the Olympics?”) So I’m reduced to watching the information crawl as I bottle-feed the Minion.
And here’s where it gets troubling.
I see the crawl beginning to show the score. I actually SEE the first letters of the words “Red Sox”, but before I can see the actual score, the Tiniest Minion jerks backward, grunts, and fills his diaper with … well, let’s just say it’s even more noxious than Lou Holtz spit. And because he’s a big fellow, he tends to do things in a big way, if you know what I mean. We’ve learned it’s not wise to postpone diaper changes for too long, unless you want a HAZMAT team to get involved…
So I lay him down and begin the diaper-changing process. The Tiniest Minion, until this moment, has been as docile as a lamb, but once the diaper is unfastened and raw sewage is exposed, he begins flailing away like Joe Cocker in concert. It takes all my concentration and dexterity to keep the carpet relatively clean. Finally I get him wiped off, a fresh diaper applied, and the bottle back in his mouth, which is his signal to calm down again. And when I glance back at the ESPN crawl, I see that SOMEbody got a save during the Red Sox/Rays game, but I don’t know WHO. And then the crawl starts over from the beginning again (“BADMINTON: Russian star Sergei Flugenov marries Tony Stewart; Earnhardt: ‘I can’t stand in the way of true love’”).
So I hunker down into the couch. I know the crawl will eventually show the Red Sox/Rays results; it’ll just take some time. The Tiniest Minion finishes his bottle, burps a couple of times, and settles against my chest as he drifts back off to sleep. I figure I’ll lay on the couch for a few minutes, watch the crawl intently, see the score, then put him back in his bed.
And finally – FINALLY – the crawl begins to show American League scores again, after cycling through Bowling, and Archery, and NFL (“Brett Favre attempts to heal Tom Brady’s knee; results inconclusive”), and NASCAR, and Hockey, and NBA (“Kobe Bryant having surgery on pinky; Won’t miss any games or practice; Doctor describes surgery as “routine”; Only reason we’re devoting this much space to a non-story is to upset Sauron”). And we’re going through the American League West, and the American League Central, and the American League East, and finally the only score left to show is the Red Sox/Rays.
And the Tiniest Minion chooses that moment to barf all over my chest.
