Right now, the best way that I can impact the world is through entertainment. One day, and that day will come, I can impact the world through politics. The great news is that I am American, therefore I can become President.

Even if I disagree with The Rock on every issue, I’ll probably still vote for The Rock just to do my part to push us toward the future prophesied in Idiocracy. Also because it’d be hilarious.

DO YOU SMELL WHAT THE ROCK IS VETOING?

Anyway, sometime not long thereafter I started following the Jets and Knicks (to varying degrees). I’m nominally an Islanders fan, but let’s ignore hockey for the purposes of this discussion because, well… because it’s what people so often do.

2012 will mark my 26th year of following sports, and I have not yet known the glory of seeing one of my teams win its sport’s title. Actually, I shouldn’t even say “glory.” I don’t know if it’s glorious. It seems that way, but really I have no idea. I’m going to be 31 next week and I have been following sports for my entire conscious life, and that feeling — the ultimate reward for following sports — is still foreign to me.

I spent part of this morning trying to determine how many other cities might have fans as unfortunate as I have been these past 21 years. Granted, it’s inarguably better to have a perennially lousy professional sports team than no team at all, but I looked up all the cities with MLB, NFL and NBA franchises to determine if it’s feasible any fan in any city, choosing from local teams, might have it as bad as I do. One of those days.

Boston fans, you know, have seen recent successes from their teams in all three of those sports. Chicagoans who favor the Cubs have not seen an MLB or NFL title in the stretch, but can hang their hats on the Bulls’ unbelievable Michael Jordan run in the 90s. It has been mostly bad for them from Detroit, but they’ve got the lone Pistons championship in 2004 to hold on to. And so on.

Things have been nearly so bad for San Francisco Bay Area natives — likely on the Oakland side — who follow the A’s, Raiders and Warriors. The A’s won the World Series in 1989, but those teams have been otherwise quiet since.

Cleveland has a case: Neither the Browns nor Cavs nor Indians has taken its league championship since the Browns won the pre-Super Bowl 1964. And Seattle’s teams have been silent, title-wise, since the Supersonics took the crown in 1979.

But if you want to pick nits here — and I do, because this is about proving to myself how bad I have it — Mets/Jets/Knicks fans can claim this pathetic distinction on a technicality: The Browns, of course, have not operated continuously since 1987, and Cleveland was without a football team for three seasons from 1996-1998. And the Supersonics moved to Oklahoma City in 2008.

So no fan who came of age after 1987 and has followed continuously operating local MLB, NFL and NBA franchises has it quite the same as the Mets/Jets/Knicks fan. Certainly a case can be made that the Mets’ World Series berth in 2000 and the Knicks’ finals appearance in 1999 mitigate the suffering, but in truth it’s all about RINGZZ and my teams have f@#$ing none of them since I’ve been paying attention.

I imagine a lot of you are in the same boat. Let’s wallow in self-pity!

But I’m wondering where you all stand on this one.

For the purposes of debate, narrow it down to the four “majors” in the US: football, baseball, basketball and hockey. So say for some reason the NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL (and all international leagues) crumble, and you’re named a GM in the new all-encompassing super-league. The ping-pong balls fall your way and you get the top overall draft pick. Who do you take?

Lebron James seems like the obvious call, but a) we have no idea if he can ice skate or hit a baseball and b) then you’d have to have him on your team. Also, how valuable are the most specialized skills — pitching, for example — when they only pertain to 1/4 of the activities?

Oh, and I guess you’re going to have to split that up somehow. Let’s say these teams play four football games, 40 baseball games, 20 basketball games and 20 hockey games — essentially 1/4 of each league’s season — but they’re weighted so that the outcomes in each sport count evenly. So the schedule’d be something like: Baseball, basketball, baseball, hockey, baseball, basketball, baseball, hockey, baseball, football, baseball, basketball, baseball, hockey, baseball, basketball, baseball, hockey, baseball, basketball, hockey. Repeat.

Current players only, or else we all want Bo Jackson.

“That’s why they usually thank God or their moms,” says cognitive psychologist Sian Beilock of the University of Chicago. “They don’t know what they did, so they don’t know what else to say.”

- Nick Bascom, Science News.

Not to belabor the Hoyas’ win last night, but it’s hard to read that Science News excerpt without thinking of Hollis Thompson’s postgame quote about his tiebreaking three-pointer:

Um, I mean, I was open, and my teammates found me…. Honestly, I don’t remember.

The Science News article, which comes via Eno Sarris, is a good one but it mostly presents a bunch of evidence to corroborate things we already know from experience playing sports or from those same seemingly uninformative postgame interviews.

You’ll never hear a baseball player say after a walk-off home run that his secret was mentally running through all the potential ramifications of his at-bat while simultaneously considering the various intricacies of his swing mechanics and keeping conscious of the particular home-plate umpire’s strike zone and the pitcher’s arsenal and tendencies.

All of that information exists somewhere in his mind while he’s swinging, of course, but as the article asserts, it is his ability to process it and keep it in his subconscious during the actual important event that in part allows him to succeed.

Sometimes the cliches are cliched for a reason: You really don’t want to overthink things in sports. That’s for bloggers and experimental psychologists. The elite athletes are the ones who, on top of the physical gifts, have the ability to maintain focus on their tasks in spite of myriad pressures and exterior factors, and it’s really only when they waver that we notice it at all. Until then, we just snicker at the seeming meaninglessness of their postgame interviews without considering how we might gladly give up our presumed eloquence for their unfaltering control.

Enter Flying Jimmy Elvis:

The 2011 [Crash-A-Rama] show, a four-hour extravaganza of demolition derbies, figure-eight school bus races and airborne automobiles, was opened by Flying Jimmy Elvis, whose success in launching a Lincoln Town Car super-stretch limousine off a ramp and into a 14 foot by 65 foot mobile home set the tone for the rest of the evening….

Mr. Elvis said he had knocked down some of the walls of the mobile home and had checked for squatters, but otherwise, there was no preparation, nor was there any rehearsal.

He figured that he needed to hit the ramp at 52 miles per hour, a speed computed by nonscientific methods (“It seems about right,” he said). He had never jumped a limousine.

With white “ELVIS” signs glowing and the 4.6-liter V-8 purring, he drove the Lincoln around the speedway. Just beyond the midway point on the front straight, he steered toward the ramp. As he hit it, there were fireworks and a blinding explosion — the pyrotechnician hired by Mr. Elvis had done his job — and the limousine emerged from a cloud of smoke, in lazy flight, 30 feet off the ground. The nose touched down into the top of the mobile home about 20 feet from the far end. Aluminum, pink insulation, wood paneling and shag carpeting flew as the Lincoln smashed back onto the grass infield, traveling another 150 feet or so before coming to a stop.

The most important thing is that I have to get to the next Crash-A-Rama before too many performers suffer life-threatening injuries and the insurance costs spiral out of control (assuming someone thought to insure these things). It sounds utterly awesome.

The second most important thing is that everything I’ve been led to believe about the widely diagnosed dumbing-down of society being incorrect is probably itself incorrect. Or maybe — maybe! — we’re all now so smart that we don’t even need the crack team of physicists anymore, and Flying Jimmy Elvis can just eyeball a limo jump and accurately guesstimate the appropriate launch speed.

In either case, I realized yesterday that I have more off-days left this calendar year than I thought I did, so I’m taking one today. There’ll be a podcast up later, and maybe some other stuff if I get bored or something big happens. But most likely it’ll be slow around here.

Huge hat tip to Billy Pilgrim for the link.

Steven Hoggett (Black Watch, American Idiot, Peter and the Starcatcher, Once) will handle the boxing choreography. Kelly Devine (Rock of Ages) is choreographer of the more traditional musical numbers in the show that composer Flaherty called a kind of “visceral …street opera.” In addition to offering intimate songs, the show also has its moments of “gladiatorial spectacle,” Timbers said on camera….

The production (to premiere using the German language) is billed on the Stage Entertainment website as Rocky, Das Musical, Fight From the Heart.

- Kenneth Jones, Playbill.com.

Sometimes you just want to excerpt the whole article. Holy hell.

OK so maybe I’m reading this wrong, but please tell me this means there’s soon going to be a production of a musical version of Rocky called Rocky, Das Musical IN GERMAN produced in part by Sly Stallone and the Klitschkos featuring “Eye of the Tiger” and described by its composer as a “visceral street opera.”

You all saw that too, right? This isn’t just like one of those I-swear-I-saw-Sasquatch-in-the-corner-of-my-eye things, right?

Right?

And please, please tell me you have booked me a flight to Hamburg for next November, where we will laugh and sing and eat sausage and drink beer from steins and enjoy the world’s first and foremost Rocky-inspired “gladiatorial spectacle.”

Mmm, Hamburg.

Also, if this is eventually coming to Broadway, they’re going to need a star who can sing in an Italian accent, and preferably in the Rocky voice. I mean, you figure that’s non-negotiable. Some Julliard-trained twit steps on stage as Rocky and belts out heartfelt duets with Paulie in a pitch-perfect but silken Midwestern baritone and half the house is walking out, I promise you that.

No audience is more hellbent on authenticity than the contemporary Broadway crowd. It’s an underreported fact that during previews for The Addams Family a deranged madman fired on Nathan Lane for portraying Gomez with a slight Andalusian accent instead of the traditional Castilian.

Point being, if they’re looking for someone to convincingly sing in an Italian accent, I’m your guy. I’ve only been in two musicals in my life but both times I played a character that sung in an Italian accent. Neither sounded like Sly, but I’ll work on it. And as for the fight choreography, I’m a terrible dancer. But if you mean to make it anything like Rocky, I assume you’ll want your star at the business end of an almost inconceivable number of poorly defended headshots. I can do that too. People love punching me in the face.

Also, if that doesn’t pan out: What about Rocky, Das Musical: The Musical? It’s a musical about making a German musical version of Rocky. Crazy meta. It’ll kill on off-off-Broadway. I can be the guy who plays Rocky in the play within the play. Give me a couple of months to get in shape. If you want to film training montages let me know.

Huge hat tip to Meredith for the news.

“Canseco ruined my career by spreading lies,” said Dykstra in a statement.

The fight is due to take place on Nov 5th, 2011, live from the Avalon Hollywood CA. The event will be streamed live on FilmOn.com.

- CBS New York.

Oof.

Meanwhile, Canseco’s still in steroids shape and Dykstra looks like he’s 75 years old. I’d say Dykstra is about a 30:1 underdog in this fight, but then Lenny Dykstra would probably find me and bet his last seven dollars on himself. And I don’t want to have to be the guy who takes Lenny Dykstra’s last seven dollars.

Via Nik.