Former roommate and current Rockiescast host Ted Burke passed along this bizarre article from the Associated Press, and nominated the following for his “favorite one-sentence paragraph ever in a news piece”:

Efforts to reach Christ for comment were unsuccessful.

That’s definitely funny, but my favorite is still the lead paragraph in this piece, which reads, simply:

Say cheese, pervert.

This makes me laugh for the ridiculous gravity of the statement, but also because, if someone actually came up to me and said, “Say cheese, pervert,” I’d definitely respond, “Cheese pervert!”

And every time I think about the phrase “cheese pervert,” I giggle incessantly for the next five minutes or so.

Plus, I can say with some certainty that the Daily News sentence was written in a wholly unironic fashion, whereas it would not surprise me to learn that a bored AP copywriter knew his sentence would be funny when he put it in his story.

I know this because I have been, in the past, a bored copywriter, and I used to try to slip funny things in headlines, blurbs and captions all the time. My best work came on the now-defunct olympic-sports site WCSN.com, when, after some Romanian dude won a gymnastics apparatus event in Europe, I wrote:

Romanian Impresses With Apparatus Showing

You get it? There are multiple meanings.

The photo I ran with it was priceless, too, as it featured the Romanian guy standing on his hands on top of the pommel horse with his back to the camera, facing a big crowd of gasping fans.

That was before I could blog when I needed to entertain myself at work. You have to get through the day somehow.

Over at the Perpetual Post yesterday, I threw in my two cents in a multi-part discussion over the relative benefits of cake and pie.

To me, cake is clearly better than pie. As I wrote:

Cake, at its best, is spongy and moist. It features, almost by design, a rich blend of amazing flavors: the cake part of the cake, and the frosting part of the cake. Both parts are excellent. It’s not like sweet goo in boring crust, like pie. It’s synergy, that’s all.

My colleagues over there all have interesting and funny takes, but several of them are downright wrong.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t enjoy your pie this Thanksgiving, of course. You should. But just do it while considering how much better cake is.

I quoted a friend in the article, actually the fellow who introduced me to the merits of on-base percentage when I was in 10th grade. He is responsible for one of my favorite sayings of all time:

“I’m going to die someday, and when I’m on my deathbed, I’m probably going to say, ‘I should have had more cake.'”

So if you’re looking for something to excuse your gluttony today, say that.

Happy Thansgiving, and enjoy Adam Sandler:

This is only tangentially related to sports, but it’s far too important to ignore.

South African baboons can now open car doors and have taken to raiding unlocked cars for food. Experts fear it will get worse when the World Cup hits Cape Town in 2010.

The most baffling quote in the article:

“The perception is that the baboons are harmless and they’re not. They’re wild animals.”

Wait, who perceives baboons as harmless? It’s not like they’re cute little monkeys. Lock your damn doors.

Good review in the Times today about a new biography of boxer Sugar Ray Robinson. Alex Belth also weighed in over at Bronx Banter.

The Times review mentions how jazz music influenced Robinson’s style in the ring, which I had never heard before.

But it neglects to mention how it was reciprocated.

In his awesome autobiography, Miles, Miles Davis explained how he tried to play his trumpet like Sugar Ray Robinson boxed.

I’ve always thought that was awesome, influence across forms. Long before I ever read Davis’ book or even heard much of his music, my high-school music teacher told me I needed to play less tentatively and more like a linebacker, my position in football. The guy taught me most of what I know about music, but that was by far the best advice he ever gave.

But that was just about playing with confidence, really. The Robinson thing, and the Miles Davis thing, are about style. I touched on this last week in regards to Allen Iverson; some athletes just have some indefinable quality that makes their game feel almost artistic.

What would it sound like if someone could make music like Johan Santana pitches? What if someone could write like Carlos Beltran plays baseball? Does that make any sense?

Here is a blog post about blog posts:

Thanks to the tireless work of Matt Cerrone, there are now buttons at the bottom of every post to allow you to share said post as you see fit.

And — and I’m completely unbiased here — you should do that all the time. In the words of the great Ron Howard, “Please tell your friends about this [blog].”

Also, I’ve added categories to the far right column. I’m trying to keep them as general as possible to keep the widget from growing unwieldy, but I figure there’s no reason naming series of posts if I’m not going to have someplace to aggregate them.

That meant I had to go through all 160-some posts in the history of the blog and add categories, which was tiresome. But it’s done now, so please feel free to use them and justify my last several hours.

Reader, budding stop-motion animator and TedQuarters artist-in-residence AJ admittedly has a lot of time on his hands, but he’s making the best possible use of it.

His latest masterpiece, the Ted Quarter:

That mustache picture, familiar from the header of my Flushing Fussing column, is a bit controversial around here. Some of my co-workers feel I shouldn’t use it anymore, because it makes me look like a 45-year-old weirdo instead of a 28-year-old weirdo.

The conversation usually goes like this:

“You shouldn’t use that mustache headshot anymore.”

“Why? It’s me with a hilarious mustache.”

“But it misrepresents you. It makes you look like a pervert.”

“Maybe, but a pervert with an awesome mustache.”

In truth, I can’t even grow a mustache. It’s massively ironic. My beard grows quickly, but under the nose I just get a few lame, stringy hairs.

I used the fake mustache in the picture above because when I started writing for SNY.tv, I looked about 16 years old (I was 25) and my editor didn’t think anyone would be interested in a teenager’s baseball analysis. I happen to disagree, but I recognized it as a fine opportunity to use one of my impressive collection of fake mustaches.

The guys in our promos department here are some creative and funny people, but sometimes their ideas get rejected for being a little too far out. This is my favorite SNY promo ever. It was meant to air in advance of the 2009 season, but never did:

There’s also this, featuring me channeling my inner Joe Benigno:

For that spot, I was instructed to sit at the desk and just say things that would make for good soundbytes. It was predictably surreal, and I couldn’t come up with anything to say, so I just started repeating all the soundbytes from the existing SNY promos.

I wanted my soundbyte to be, “I don’t speak in soundbytes!” but that was clearly too postmodern to make the air.

Ultimately, I was unable to record even one reasonable soundbyte while keeping a straight face, and they ended up using something else entirely.

When someone is out in public handing something out to passersby, there’s about a 99.99% chance you don’t want that thing.

It’s a real shame, but it is a very rare occasion that someone is just standing on the corner distributing diamonds or nachos or iPhones.

More likely, he’s handing out flyers for something you’re not at all interested in, like suit sales or palm readers or, terrifyingly, discounted dental work.

In Westchester, by the MTA station in advance of Election Day, lots of people gather to hand out flyers for various political campaigns.

And perhaps the Westchester residents are unaccustomed to my jaded big-city ways, but when I refuse them, they often make snarky comments like, “Well I guess some people just don’t like voting,” or “This is your town we’re talking about.”

Now here’s the thing: I do care about voting, but I would never really want to vote in an election in which I’m not familiar with the issues. Plus, there’s no chance I’d ever vote for someone just based on a flyer handed to me unsolicited at the train station. Also, though it technically is the town I live in, it has not been my town long enough for me to register to vote there, so I’m not someone they should actually be targeting.

Anyway, I was unable to avoid one of them even though I tried my very hardest. But I’m pretty glad I got it, and I’m upset I worked so hard to avoid looking at the guy because it turns out he has an unbelievable and, I presume, unironic mustache:

I have no idea what a highway superintendent does nor whether Peter M. Sciliano is qualified to perform those duties, but I’m certain he has my support. That’s a mustache I want making important decisions.