Cursing the Fates

Few things in life are more annoying than sports fans who think they're cursed. That is unless they think they're individually cursed, which can be hilarious. If all their breakfast cereal turns into locusts or they gain weight no matter what they eat, I can listen to that stuff all day. But nobody can stand listening to some sorry loser complaining that the Curse of Cheops kept his sad-sack team from winning the big one, and how the gimpy harem of mama's boys deserved better. In ancient times, men were killed for less, usually by fans of more-successful teams.

Baseball fans in Chicago and Boston have gone to great lengths to lament and preserve their teams' curses, and the commune staff has not been spared their pain. This very column is an effort to try and end the "Curse of the commune," which involves having to hear commune reporter and former Cubs pitcher Mordecai "Three Finger" Brown explain the Curse of the Cubs every time somebody makes a comment about baseball, goats, mummies, bears or Chicago-style deep dish pizza.

The Curse of the Cubs, also known at "The Billy Goat Curse" and "Loser's Excuse #42" dates back to the World Series of 1945. Local Chicago tavern owner William "Billy Goat" Sianis wanted to take his goat to see World Series game four, ostensibly because he couldn't find a babysitter. His real reasons were thankfully kept private.

Sianas had been the owner of the Lincoln Tavern for years, and one day a goat fell off the back of a passing truck and wandered into his bar, looking for a place to drop off a batch of road apples. Sianas had the annoying habit of taking nearly everything that happened to him as a sign from God, and in keeping with this quirk he promptly grew a goatee, renamed his bar the Billy Goat Tavern, and began taking the goat along with him wherever he went, to promote his now disagreeably-themed establishment.

Sianas managed to get through the turnstiles at Wrigley Field that day in 1945, after telling the ticket-taker that the goat was his adopted Malaysian son. Thanks to Chicago's admittedly small Malaysian population at the time, the ruse was successful. The goat probably would have been left to enjoy the game in peace if not for the fact that it had just eaten twenty-seven caramel apples during the half-hour immediately preceding the game, and the panicked look in the goat's eyes made all the fans seated nearby extremely nervous. Sianas and his goat were soon ejected, after which the goat promptly ruined a convertible parked outside the stadium.

While he was searching around for a fire hose to clean up after his goat, Sianas cursed the Cubs to eternal postseason futility by announcing "Never again will World Series be played in Wrigley Field!" His pronouncement was met with raucous laughter from Cubs fans, who noticed that the goat had eaten Sianas's pants while he was cursing. Upon discovering his pantsless state, Sianas began to curse in doubletime, most of which was not suitable for historical documentation. It was noted, however, that during his tirade Sianas did pronounce that a goat would never win the Kentucky Derby, a curse that has remained eerily true to this day.

The Cubs went on to lose that World Series, and have never been back because they suck. They did make it back to the playoffs in 1984, 1989, 1998 and 2003, but each year Lady Luck stepped on the Cubs' balls in the most humiliating way possible. Baseballs were dropped, pooches were screwed and somebody ate a cat. Cubs fans love to blame the goat curse for their team's lack of success, but this holds little water for fans in other cities also cursed with teams that suck but are short on rank barnyard animals to blame.

The Boston Red Sox have their own curse, "The Curse of the Bambino," which is just as famous as Chicago's curse but told in a different funny accent. It has also been known as "The Curse of the Big Fat Hot Dog Eating Machine," but is usually shortened to "The Curse of the Bambino." In 1920, Red Sox accountants discovered that team profits were down for the third straight year because star outfielder Babe Ruth was eating the team out of house and hot dogs. The accountants took their plight to tight-fisted owner Harry Frazee, who promptly traded Ruth to the Yankees for a case of beer and a St. Bernard named Lucky. The Yankees went on to win 26 World Championships, while for the Red Sox the trade was a wash because Lucky loved hot dogs almost as much as Ruth.

What lesson is there to be learned from these two infamous baseball curses? In a nutshell, the universal lesson here is this: Don't hire the long-dead pitcher from a team that hasn't won the World Series since he played for it in 1908 to be a reporter for your Internet news site, unless you want to hear a lot of long, boring baseball stories. Amen.

Can You Hear Me Now? The History of Sonar
The next time you're out fly-fishing on the open sea, and out of nowhere a deep rumbling beneath you swells into the thunderous surfacing of a mighty beast, a whale of elephantine proportions that promptly explodes in a cacophony of catastrophic... (10/13/03)

More Fads: The 1960's
I'm not going to shit you, after the fad orgy of the 1950's any other decade is going to leave a little something to be desired in the fad department, even the go-go 1960's. But that doesn't mean the era of civil rights and dirty young people didn't... (9/29/03)

Suck an Egg, It's Daylight Saving Time
Hello readers, we're going to take a little break from the Fad Wagon this week while I write more of that book to excerpt and you learn a thing or two about daylight-saving time. Sound fun? Tough. Many common misconceptions survive regarding... (9/15/03)

You Look Like An Asshole: The History of Fads Vol. 2
The gaudiest fad of the 1950's had to be the 3D movie. The early 50's were a desperate time for Hollywood studios, as audiences were staying at home on their big fat asses in record numbers and movies were faring poorly in competition with... (9/1/03)

You Look Like An Asshole: The History of Fads Vol. 1
Welcome to part one of a very special commune promotional feature (what the powers that be at the commune don't know won't hurt them), a series of excerpts from my upcoming book "You Look Like An Asshole: The History of Fads." Unless the world ends... (8/18/03)