George Plimpton- Dead!

[SuperClerk]

Please Lord. Make it stop! (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030926/ap_on_en_ot/obit_plimpton)

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Another WWFallon joint

[FUNKMAN]

he had a pleasant speaking voice...

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[Heavy]

Who the fuck is George Plimpton?

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A proportionate amount of props are equally distributed to my nigga's Fluff, Alexxis, CanOfSoup15, WWFallon and Katylina

[Reephdweller]

What is up with the universe???

btw George Plimpton played Tom Hanks dad in the movie Volunteers. IMDB: George Plimpton (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0687321/)

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<marquee behavior=alternate bgcolor="#FFFFFF">right now you could care less about me...
but soon enough you will care, by the time Im done</marquee> </font>

[SuperClerk]

Well, he wasn't a gay porn star, so you probably wouldn't know him anyway.

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Another WWFallon joint

[Yerdaddy]

No more shenanigans, no more tomfoolery, no more ballyhoo.

Do we need a new forum called "Big-Ass Obituaries"?

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[TheMojoPin]

George Plimpton, the gentleman editor, literary patron and "participatory journalist" whose fumbling exploits included boxing, trapeze-flying and, most famously, quarterbacking for the Detroit Lions, has died at 76.

That really does say it all. I always found him to be a hilarious actor, though he pretty much just played himself...he exposed the public to numerous now-famous writers and did a lion's share of work with his support of modern American literature. Good life, good man, good night.

"Now back to whatever it is that I do!"

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2% << December boys got it BAD >> "You might tell some lies about the good times we've had/But I've kissed your mother twice...and now I'm working on your dad..."

This message was edited by TheMojoPin on 9-26-03 @ 4:30 PM

[squrl]

he pulled off one of the best pranks in baseball history:

April 1, 1985: Sidd Finch
In its edition for the first week of April, 1985, Sports Illustrated published an article by George Plimpton that described an incredible rookie baseball player who was training at the Mets camp in St. Petersburg, Florida. The player was named Sidd Finch (Sidd being short for Siddhartha, the Indian mystic in Hermann Hesse's book of the same name), and he could pitch a baseball at 168 mph with pinpoint accuracy. The fastest previous recorded speed for a pitch was 103 mph.


Finch had actually never played baseball before. He had been raised in an English orphanage before he was adopted by the archaeologist Francis Whyte-Finch who was later killed in an airplane crash in the Dhaulaglri mountain region of Nepal. Finch briefly attended Harvard before he headed to Tibet where he learned the teachings of the "great poet-saint Lama Milaraspa" and mastered "siddhi, namely the yogic mastery of mind-body." Through his Tibetan mind-body mastery, Finch had "learned the art of the pitch."

Finch showed up at the Mets camp in Florida, and so impressed their manager that he was invited to attend training camp. When pitching he looked, in the words of the catcher, "like a pretzel gone loony." Finch frequently wore a hiking boot on his right foot while pitching, his other foot being bare. His speed and power were so great that the catcher would only hear a small sound, "a little pft, pft-boom," before the ball would land in his glove, knocking him two or three feet back. One of the players declared that it was not "humanly possible" to hit Finch's pitches.

Unfortunately for the Mets, Finch had not yet decided whether to commit himself to a career as a baseball player, or to pursue a career as a French Horn player. He told the Mets management that he would let them know his decision on April 1.

Sports Illustrated received almost 2000 letters in response to the article, and it became one of their most famous stories ever. On April 8 they declared that Finch had held a press conference in which he said that he had lost the accuracy needed to throw his fastball and would therefore not be pursuing a career with the Mets. On April 15 they admitted that the story was a hoax.

George Plimpton actually left an obscure hint that the story was a hoax within the article itself (the non-obscure hint being that the story was absurd). The sub-heading of the article read: "He's a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent life-style, Sidd's deciding about yoga -and his future in baseball." The first letter of each of these words, taken together, spells "H-a-p-p-y A-p-r-i-l F-o-o-l-s D-a-y."

In an odd follow-up, a baseball team in Old Orchard Beach, Maine, after reading the Sports Illustrated article, tried to invite Finch to its annual banquet. They received a reply that read, "The challenge is reaching the Eightfold Path of right belief or the ninth inning with the proper relief. May you have peace of mind." They announced that they interpreted the reply to mean that Finch would be attending their banquet. It is not known whether Finch did attend.

[DarkHippie]

I'm the proud owner of a rejection slip from "the Paris Review," the journal that he has been editor of for 50 years until his death. He also wrote "Paper Lion" and the "Bogey Man." One of the greats of modern literature, he will be missed.

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<marquee>"Last night I went running through the screen door of discression, for I woke up from a nightmare that I could not stand to see. You were a-wandering out on the hills of Iowa and you were not thinking of me." Dar Williams "Traveling III (Iowa)"</marquee>

[SuperKarateMonkeyDeathFez]

That better be "The FREEDOM Review", you godless commie animal.

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This message was edited by SuperKarateMonkeyDeathFez on 9-27-03 @ 12:19 PM

[Heavy]

:|

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A proportionate amount of props are equally distributed to my nigga's Fluff, Alexxis, CanOfSoup15, WWFallon and Katylina

[guttersnipe]

I remember the Sidd Finch article, and even thought of asking Mike the Teacher if Plimpton had anything to do with it when he was describing Plimpton's method-style of journalism to me last night. It's the only thing I have ever read in Sports Illustrated. My dad just handed it to me one day and said I should read it, with no further comment. Beautful piece, it was.

~snipe



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