I’m not even going to explain The Onion as a featured site, because words can’t describe how ingeniously funny this award-winning satirical news source is.

So I’ll just give you their link to see for yourself, as well as an example of what to expect (from their Sports section) if you’re not familiar. Because if you ask me, The Onion has the most talented editorial staff around.

http://www.theonion.com

JUNE 19, 2008

Fantasy Baseball Owner Rips Team In Media

BROOKLYN, NY—Mark Mendicus, 26-year-old Staples employee and principal owner of the fantasy baseball team Beat With Uggla Stick, blasted his underperforming team in the media Monday, going so far as to single out individual players, criticize their recent play, and question their commitment to winning.

“They all suck,” a visibly frustrated Mendicus told reporters following Beat With Uggla Stick’s head-to-head 8-2 loss to division rivals The Mark Currys. “[Alex] Rios sucks, Delmon [Young] sucks, Pedro [Martinez] fucking sucks. Everybody on my team sucks.”

“The Beat With Uggla Sticks have a proud tradition of winning,” continued Mendicus, whose team has made the playoffs the past two years, including a league championship win in 2006. “But apparently that means nothing to this group of players. Apparently they’d rather just lose every single 5×5 category. Apparently my players don’t care about winning the 12-team Yahoo! Plus ‘Mmm…Fantasy Baseball’ league pennant as much as I do.”

Mendicus had high expectations for his team coming into the season, but his players have been plagued by injuries and inconsistency, losing six of their first eight matchups en route to a 22-46-14 overall record. The historically temperamental owner did not hold back his opinions after their latest humiliating defeat, telling the New York Post that Prince Fielder “had better start hitting some fucking home runs already” before making several vicious personal attacks on the first baseman, calling him a “fatass,” a “fat bastard,” and a “fat fuck” in the course of one statement.

“I paid $38 for [Fielder], and this is what I get?” Mendicus said, directing reporters’ attention to Fielder’s “putrid” Yahoo! Game Log. “Twelve home runs. Twelve goddamn home runs. When you pay $38 for a guy, you had better give them a hell of a lot more than 12 home runs through the first half. I got you for your power, buddy, not your walks. This is a batting average league, anyway, not an on-base percentage league, so walks don’t fucking matter. It’s like these guys don’t understand that.”

Mendicus continued his heated rant, calling shortstop Felipe Lopez a “talentless hack whose multiple position eligibility is the only thing saving his ass from waivers,” claiming that pitcher Ian Snell is “killing [him] in WHIP, absolutely killing [him],” and encouraging outfielder Brad Hawpe to “go eat shit.” He then accused the whole team of not stealing enough bases and “not playing like true Beat With Uggla Sticks.”

He did, however, reserve some praise for hot-hitting second baseman Dan Uggla upon learning that Uggla homered twice that day, saying, “That’s you, Danny.”

With his team already down 9-1 in this week’s matchup against Gary Sheffield’s Head Vein, Mendicus issued an ultimatum, claiming that unless his team delivers at least a tie, there will “be some changes around here.” Mendicus said that “no one is safe,” and had particularly strong words for pitcher Chris Young, who three weeks ago was hit in the face with a line drive and has not made a single start since.

“Toughen up, you little baby,” Mendicus said. “You don’t throw with your face, do you? I already got Phil [Hughes] in the DL slot, so you better get your ass back in action.”

Mendicus has a reputation for following his players’ performance with intense scrutiny and personal investment, often to a fanatical degree. It is rumored that he monitors their progress on multiple Yahoo! Sports box score windows on his computer screen, and will erupt into obscenity-laden tirades at work after a mere groundout or caught stealing.

“Fuck you Edwin, you good-for-nothing piece of shit,” Mendicus was overheard as saying while angrily clicking the “Refresh” button on his web browser 14 times after pitcher Edwin Jackson loaded the bases with three straight walks. “Throw the ball over the goddamn plate. I need a win here, you idiot. I’m getting killed in wins.”

For some players on Mendicus’ team, the demand for instant results, the constant threats to be released or traded, and the nonstop verbal abuse is too much. Pitcher Jeremy Guthrie has been dropped and picked up by Mendicus seven times already this season, and he says he doesn’t like playing under such volatile conditions.

“I wish he’d have a little faith in me,” Guthrie said. “I don’t like being picked up the night before my start and then simply dropped the next day. It wears on you as a player. And now I have to explain myself to my kids when they read in the papers that their daddy is a ’shit-for-brains asshole who can’t even get five strikeouts when that’s all we needed to win the category.’”

“I’m sorry, but when I have runners on first and third and one out, I’m going to go for the double play to get out of the inning, not the strikeout,” Guthrie added. “Even though they don’t give out ‘points’ for double plays.”

Some players, however, praised Mendicus for his fiery attitude and desire to win, saying they prefer that to the kind of owners who treat their fantasy teams like nothing more than a fun distraction from their real jobs.

“It’s good that he cares,” said Beat With Uggla Stick catcher Jorge Posada. “Some owners, like Garrett Baldwin of the Smilin’ Joe Randas, or Mike Broberg of Tiny Damon, they just sort of check in every once in a while to see how we’re doing, but that’s it. In fact, I’ve been on the Tiny Damon’s bench since I went on the DL in April, and they don’t even have anyone in the catcher slot. That’s just shoddy ownership.”

“But there’s also a thing called caring too much,” Posada added. “You can only be called a worthless shitbag after popping out so many times before it starts to sting. It’s at the point where playing for Mendicus is almost as bad as playing for Hank Steinbrenner.”

- The Onion

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I’m currently building a new LINKS section and will start to showcase some of my favorite sites.

Let’s kick things off with some images from a humorous site that I recently stumbled upon called:

http://failblog.org/

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I’m currently reading Godin’s book, Small is the New Big: and 183 other riffs, rants, and remarkable business ideas. This isn’t conventional reading tho.

Sidenote: Though is one of the few words that I like to shorten. Not only do I like the way “tho” looks (and the fact that you’re just an R away from Thor), but the word itself is incredibly efficient. I mean, you’re chopping off the last 3 letters of a 6 letter word, yet it’s still pronounced the same as it’s “proper” counterpart! That makes it a pretty sweet word in my book. So don’t fret when you see me drop a tho, because my spelling is usually pretty solid.

Seth Godin warns you not to read his books all at once. He suggests you simply “read a few pages” and “find what you need.” And that’s what I’ve been doing. Here I’ll share with you some of his ideas that have inspired me. If you find what he has to say interesting, I suggest you check out his blog.

Benchmarks = Mediocrity

I can benchmark everything now.

I can benchmark my morning workout. The rowing machine tells me if today’s workout was a personal best. Even better, I can go online and compare my workout to the efforts of thousands of other people.

On my way to work, I can track my mileage. (My record is 89 mpg). Once there, I can watch the status of my books on Amazon, comparing their sales to every other book published in the English language… and then go check out JungleScan.com, where I can track the book’s performance over the last 90 days.

The problem with benchmarking is that nothing but continuous improvement (except maybe spectacular results) satisfies very much. Who wants to know that they will never again be able to beat their personal best rowing time? What entrepreneur wants to embrace the fact that the wait time at her new restaurant franchise is 20% behind the leader—and there’s no obvious way to improve it?

Our interconnected, 500-channel world lets us be picky. We can want a husband who is as tall as that guy, as rich as this guy and as loyal as my brother-in-law. We can ask for an apartment that is in just the right location, with just the right view and just the right rent—and then reject it because the carpeting in the hallway isn’t as nice as the one in the building next door. Monster lets us see 5,000 resumes for every job opening… and imagine that we can find someone with this guy’s education and that woman’s professional experience—who works as cheap as this person and is as local as that one.

In the old days, data was a lot harder to come by. You didn’t know everything about everyone. All the options weren’t right there, laid out in Froogle and compared by epinions.com. We didn’t have reality TV shows where each and every component of a singer’s presentation or a bridal prospect’s shtick were painstakingly compared.

Yes, benchmarking is terrific. Benchmarking is the reason that cars got so much better over the last twenty years. Benchmarking has the inexorable ability to make the mediocre better than average, and it pushes us to always outperform.

But it stresses us out. A benchmarked service business or product (or even a benchmarked relationship) is always under pressure. It’s hard to be number one, and even harder when the universe we choose to compare our options against is, in fact, the entire universe.

Of course, the boomers have this problem even worse (and we’re all boomers, aren’t we? Even if you’re not, we don’t care—it’s all about us). Boomers are getting older. We can benchmark our eyesight, our rowing speed, our memory or even our ability to come up with great ideas at a moment’s notice. As a result, we benchmark ourselves into a funk. We get stressed because we have to acknowledge that nothing is as good as it was.

In addition to the stress, benchmarking against the universe actually encourages us to be mediocre, to be average, to just do what everyone else is doing. The folks who invented the Mini (or the Hummer, for that matter) didn’t benchmark their way to the edges. Comparing themselves to other cars would never have created these fashionable exceptions. What really works is not having everything being up to spec… what works is everything being good enough, and one or two elements of a product or service being AMAZING.

So, I’m officially letting go. I’m going to stop comparing everything to my all time best, to your all time best, to everyone’s all time best. Instead of benchmarking everything, perhaps we win when we accept that the best we can do is the best we can do, and then try to find the guts to do one thing that’s remarkable.

-Seth Godin

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