Peyton Manning Hires Ari Fleischer To Ensure No One Believes A Word He Says
would you buy a used sportsball hero from this man?
Over the weekend, a big thing happened in sportsball, which you know we are always on top of here at yr Wonkette. Turns out that the freedom-haters over at Al Jazeera declared jihad on All-American Hero Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning by reporting that he got some sweet sweet human growth hormone from an Indianapolis anti-aging clinic. That is a no-no, Peyton Manning! Did you learn nothing from Lance Armstrong? Do you really want to have to eventually give up your World Series ring or whatever it is your sort of people win?
Needless to say, Manning wants to get out in front of this story, so he went and found the most trustworthy person imaginable, a person whose integrity is so unimpeachable that you will believe, in your heart of hearts, anything the man says. Yes, we are of course speaking of former George W. Bush spokescreature Ari Fleischer.
According to a report from NFL Network's Ian Rapoport, Manning has retained the services of former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, whose company, Ari Fleischer Sports Communications, has previously advised the NFL, Major League Baseball, the PAC-12, and Joe Torre.
Christ on a cracker. It's as if Peyton Manning and all the leading lights of sportsball were somehow asleep for the entirety of 2001 to 2003. You really wanted to hire the guy who comforted Americans post-9/11 by telling them "they need to watch what they say, watch what they do." You figured that the person Americans trust the most is one of the key architects of the whole "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction that he is actually pointing right at your house -- yes, yours! -- right now" falsehood. Seriously, the man was part of the biggest lie of the last 20 years. This is not a man who engenders warm feelings of trust.
Also, his track record on the whole helping out sportsball people thing can charitably be described as mixed.
Sometimes, Fleischer actually helps his clients quite a bit. Fleischer was hired by the Packers in the summer Brett Favre unretired and the team decided to trade its longtime folk hero. He did a pretty good job, as Favre was portrayed as the bad guy in the split.
Sometimes, he actively hurts. In 2010, Tiger Woods hired Fleischer to help rehabilitate his image after his personal life fell apart. This led to articles specifically about how the disgraced athlete shouldn't have turned to the crisis management specialist. Fleischer and Woods parted ways within 10 days, reportedly because Fleischer's presence raised too many eyebrows.
Can't imagine why that would be the case.
The pharmacist at the heart of the story has already sort of recanted the whole thing, so perhaps Manning will escape relatively unscathed. But if he does, it will be no thanks to a shiny-domed craven dickwad like Fleischer.
[ CBS Sports / SB Nation ]
As a fellow southpaw I always hated ballpoints because my hand would smear the greasy ink. Don't even get me started on gel ink. And also because, back in the day, they weren't as reliable as they are now unless you got an expensive premium model like a Parker. Fortunately my parochial school started us out on Sheaffer School Pens and so they were what we used until we moved off to high school after 8th grade. I used to love getting a new pen at the start of each school year. Back in the 1960s you could always pick the Catholic school kids in Detroit out of a crowd because they were the ones carrying those Sheaffer pens along with least one pack of spare cartridges in their pockets.
Since everyone in school used the exact same pen there was a thriving underground market in spare ink cartridges. If yours ran out in class and you didn't have another one, you had to be prepared to haggle (quietly, so the teacher didn't hear) with the kid sitting next to you over exactly what you would give in return for getting one of his spares. (It usually entailed a combination of money - a dime, typically - and the performance of some service, such as fetching a book from his homeroom desk, or the exchange of another commodity like ten sheets of looseleaf paper, depending on how desperate you were.) My school absolutely insisted that all schoolwork be done in fountain pen if you were in grades 4 or above. Woe be the kid who turned in work done in ballpoint.
I don't have any of those old ones anymore (we're talking about a half a century ago) but I have managed to pick up a few pristine NOS pens from dealers online that I keep squirreled away. As collector pens go they are dirt cheap, but nevertheless are valuable to me because they are so loaded with memories and personal significance. We used the version that had tinted transparent polystyrene barrels (opaque ones in the last couple of years), usually with the conical ends for most years. But my absolute favorites are the older version with rounded Balance-style (bullet-style) ends. These were the ones we used in the first couple of years after switching to pens from pencils and I always liked them the best. They are also the hardest ones to find, especially the one with the totally clear barrel. That one is the Holy Grail.
I also have many others, of course, with my faves being my Snorkel and my Pilot Vanishing Point. After getting too many funny looks and weird reactions I stopped using a fountain pen in public. Now I carry an extra-fine point Pilot or Uniball roller ball. They use actual liquid ink and have some of the same feel as writing with an FP.
Well, sort of, anyway. On the increasingly rare occasions when I get to use it ...
BTW I am just blown away by how few people these days even know what a fountain pen is and can recognize one when they see it in the wild. Damned Millennials.