Thursday, March 1, 2007
Another Dream? You Know It!
I am in some sort of rogue government medical facility, possibly in some other country. I have been captured for trespassing. My foot is badly wounded, and I am chained to the wall. Across the room, a doctor is sharpening a very long, thin blade. His henchman is smoothing out one of the edges. The doctor begins walking toward me with the sword and breaks off a piece of it from the top. He gets closer and is swinging it at me. I start telling him that I will tell him anything he wants to know, just not to cut me. He stops as he gets right near my face and suddenly drops a large spider out of his hand, onto my wounded foot. He says, "The venom from this spider will heal the wound." I physically feel the "bite" and wake up immediately.
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3 comments:
This scenario has some similarities to the infamous torture scene in Marathon Man. I think we could work this into a sequel:
Dr. Szell is a mad podiatrist...you're a National League umpire. He wounded your foot because he didn't like a call you made on a play at the plate.
"Is he safe?" he asks repeatedly, continuing to torture your foot. You're unable to answer because of the terrible pain.
But Szell then offers you the healing power of the spider, just as he offered Dustin Hoffman the soothing oil of cloves after drilling into his tooth.
All of a sudden, your much, much older brother, played by Roy Scheider and who's an agent of the American Podiatric Medical Association, bursts in, manages to unchain your from the wall, and slips an orthopedic shoe with an anatomically contoured footbed and a wide toe box onto your injured foot so you can run out of there and begin the exhausting chase sequence on the Major Deegan Expressway.
Marathon Manley -- opens this summer!
It's about time a National League Umpire was the star of a movie.
There is, of course, the famous Enrico Palazzo scene from The Naked Gun but he was an American League Umpire.
Hollywood has long frowned on the National League and its traditionally more liberal strike zone. Louis B. Mayer, the mogul who molded MGM Studios into the most prestigious and profitable film company in the first half of the 20th century, was only 5'3 and bitterly resented the National League's larger strike zone, which he called "an affront to every red-blooded American pipsqueak."
A Ukrainian immigrant who spent his early years in Canada before moving to the United States, Mayer worked hard to assimilate into American society and grew to love its national pastime, which he joyfully played between sleeping with starlets and randomly firing underlings. Mayer's pint size made for a tiny strike zone, and his prodigious walk totals resulted in sky-high on-base percentages, which fueled his huge Hollywood ego. ("You cannot get me out, you fool!" he would taunt opposing pitchers and then strut like a peacock to first after the inevitable ball four.) Thus, Mayer's hostility toward the National League's expanded strike zone is obvious, especially in such MGM classics as Kill the Ump, That Was Outside, Idiot!, and the Clark Gable tour de force, Are You &%$*#@ Blind?! I Couldn't Have Reached That With a Broom Handle.
As the most powerful man in Hollywood for a quarter-century, Louis B. Mayer almost single-handedly blacklisted National League umpires from the Silver Screen.
Dying mere days after the announcement that the NL's Brooklyn Dodgers were moving to his home town of Los Angeles, Mayer's last words were, "Damn...that...National...League....[choke, gurgle]."
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