Friday, January 04, 2008

TMS Rants Eloquent: Goodbye Jack Todd, You Suck!!!

The Habs won last night (Ryder’s alive!), and we'll have a review later. Many other hockey games were played. Team Canada heads into the WJHC semis with a goalie controversy. But today, we're introducing a new feature on FHF, wherein TMS, aka HF29, aka me, aka Miguel Sanchez, aka Dr. Noonien Van Fock, rants. TMS doesn't have Panger's ranting skillz, but things do piss me off. Especially in the morning.

I actually like Jack Todd. In a town where the sports media is either sycophantic or just out to lunch, Jack Todd was less so and generally told like it is, and made me laugh with sufficient frequency. His book about fleeing the U.S. Army in lieu of fighting in Viet Nam was one of the best things I've ever read. I even sympathized when I heard he was one of many victims of Gazette budget cuts.

But then he said goodbye.

And in saying goodbye, he chose to shit on me, and FHF, and all of us, when he shit on the interwebs. In a world where the old MSM cabal is being threatened by the new media, MSM'ers may lash out. In his swan song MMQB column linked above, Jack couldn't resist a few last digs at the medium which may or may not have made him irrelevant:

"And to think that at one time I thought sports talk-radio was the absolute bottom of the barrel when it came to sports 'journalism.' That was before the Internet."

I thought that was a nice little joke for his column, but he later added:

"That will teach me to trust that wretched medium, the Internet..."

I think I can speak for the whole Internet when I ask you, Jack – WTF? I’m sensing some bitterness. Now, I’d love to give you an articulate juridically-trained argumentative discourse on the demise of your profession in the face of a new paradigm of information dissemination, but you told me I need to go dictionary shopping.

It’s too bad Jack, you might have made it on the Internet where the rant is king. You should look in the mirror – MMQB was just a blog post with a bigger audience. I hope that hurts. In the meantime, I’ve spent all day labouring away at my laptop to bring forth:

“Todd!!! You Suck!!!”

6 comments:

Habsfan10 said...

And apparently he wrote (or released) the same book twice, because I own a copy of "The Taste of Metal", which is his biography about dodging the draft. WTF?

A Taste of Metal is on Amazon too. It's not just the Canadian title for Desertion.

Todd can be interesting, and that's a great book, but more often than not I want to punch him. This morning? Punch.

Young HF29 said...

Boy 10 I am confused now. In fact, it may have been the other one I read. I looked at the cover and it looked more familiar. Weird.

Young HF29 said...

Alright I think it in fact is the same book, one US, one Canadian. On the taste of Metal page it says "Published simultaneously in the US with Houghton-Mifflin", and that publisher is listed on the other page

But this is taking away from the real point here, which is "Todd, You Suck"

Habsfan10 said...

Agreed. Might be the same book, might be different, but clearly, "Todd, You Suck" is our key message.

Todd = Suck.

Senators Lost Cojones said...

Wow. Todd's last column was probably the most nonsensical pile of excrement I've seen this side of Steve Simmons.

I'm convinced that the hostility MSM, and mainstream sports writers in particular (hello Simmons, Simmons, Todd and Schrutebag Cowherd) hold against the inernets stems from the sudden realization that there are a whole pile of amateurs doing it better than they do, and worse, doing it for nothing more than our love of sports.

In other words, they can't stand the fact that the great unwashed has stormed the sandbox.

Anonymous said...

"To the rest, those who chose to fill my Monday email with illiterate and obscene rants, well, I suspect that you'll miss me more than I will miss you, but I don't really care one way or another.

Jack, if you truly didn't care you wouldn't have used up two paragraphs in your final column to say so. I suggest that he keep that dictionary so that he can look up the meaning of "irony".