Thursday, August 16, 2007

how long has it been since we made fun of jemele hill?

before i begin, quick shout out to good guy at sports. his partnership with us here at firejay was forged over our mutual hatred for jemele, so anytime we write about her it's appropriate to plug his blog. go check it out; he's like us but actually funny.

ANYWAYS-
like i was saying, how long has it been? waaaaaaaaaaay too long if you ask me. espn.com page 2's resident "stupid bint," as fjm writer eriz describes her, is an absolutely god-awful writer. her latest piece is one in a series of many interviews she conducts with sports personalities while driving around in their cars. the interview itself is mildly interesting... jemele doesn't exactly ask many hard hitting questions, but this is only page 2. plus "the professa" is a pretty interesting guy. however, in contrast, hill's 250 word intro to the piece is a complete travesty. i'm honestly impressed she was able to pack this much crap into so few sentences. check it out:

Riding with … Grayson Boucher

A notable "Riding With" first was established with Grayson Boucher, who most people know as The Professor from the And1 Mixtape Tour, the modern-day Harlem Globetrotters.

run on sentence #1. out of a grand total of 1 sentence to appear in the article overall. we're off to a good start.

Boucher, whose gifted ball-handling has made him a cult celebrity, is the first sports figure to use a rental car in the occasional Page 2 series where we interview athletes in their cars.

uninteresting and irrelevant. i like how the focus of the sentence is on the rental car and not boucher himself.

Boucher's real car is a 2005 Mercedes-Benz E-500. Unfortunately the Benz had yet to be shipped from Portland, Ore. -- Boucher's hometown -- to Los Angeles, his new residence. So we cruised around Santa Monica in a late-model Mustang.

that's right, aspiring streetballers everywhere. if you make the mixtape tour, one day you too can give an interview to jemele hill from a rental car. but apparently you can also afford a benz, so i guess life isn't all bad.

As rapper Biggie Smalls would say, The Professor has gone from ashy to classy.

from the song "my downfall," on the album "life after death." release date: march 25, 1997. way to stay current, jemele. couldn't she have referenced a spice girls song instead? what about the wallflowers? dru hill? sister hazel? savage garden? fucking coolio? ok i'm not going to lie- i googled "top 100 singles 1997" and just started listing stuff. i'm trying too hard, i know.

When the 23-year-old tried out for the And1 team four years ago in Portland, he was a struggling, scrawny college student working at a grocery store.

Today he's still the same scrawny kid with the absurd crossover, but he's known from Australia to Japan, one of the most popular And1 ballers, and a main attraction on the ESPN reality series "Streetball," which chronicles the craziness of the And1 tour.

first off, run on sentence #2 (and a flagrant one at that) out of a possible 8. astounding. second, look at a map. being known "from australia to japan" means you are known in those two countries, plus indonesia, the philippines, and maybe taiwan. that's it. what a terrible choice of two countries to use for that figure of speech; he might as well be known "from england all the way down to france." i'm willing to bet a good 10% of the people who stumbled onto this interview gave up reading before getting to the good stuff due to this intro. it's basically like if a perfectly legitimate and clean supermarket decided to put dumpsters right outside their front door. atrocious.

2 comments:

eriz said...

"it's basically like if a perfectly legitimate and clean supermarket decided put dumpsters right outside their front door. atrocious."

hahahahaha, oh my god I nearly pissed my pants. One of these days I'm gonna make a megapost that covers her entire archive; she is such a fucking bad writer I almost can't believe it

Jarrett said...

As Sister Hazel would say, he's on a Champagne High.

See Larry? Your theory just doesn't pan out.