So, The Classical's Kickstarter drive is going swimmingly. Thank you! We may hit 60% of our fundraising goal by the end of today. That's not bad for two weeks, especially since everyone knows that no one will pay to read a website. It's almost as if people want to read sportswriting that doesn't make their brains hurt.

A few things: Check our most recent update for corporate propaganda and news on some fun surprises we have lined up. Also, please consider giving! It will get you fun rewards. Even if you don't care to give, following us on twitter @classical or passing on the word to other people through facebook are ways to help. And more generally, letting us know what you want to see or not see on the site is really helpful, too.

This will be the final post at this site for at least eight months, as my fellowship starts next week, but thanks for keeping up on what I'm doing, and if you follow that twitter account you'll get news on what I'm up to starting next April. Good things are in the offing!

If you're wondering why you should give us money, consider this: Given the talent on board here, and that this is not going to be a dashed off blog but something to which we're all making a real commitment, $50k is honestly not a lot of money. It's the smallest amount we figured we would need to run this as a real concern for a year while attracting advertisers, sponsors and investors. Running it as a real concern means not only that there will be a pretty terrific site where you can read and talk about sports without having news cycle bullshit, SEO nonsense, talk radio shoutiness or editor-demanded timidity affecting things, but that there will also be an example of good writers doing something to control their careers rather than waving their hands about the collapse of everything. That's not a small thing.

This guy, by the way, has a good read on what we're doing (good not least because he gets it) and there are interviews with various of us here, here and here that should flesh out the project a bit more. And even if a donation isn't in the cards, you can help us out by following us @classical, liking us on Facebook, and spreading the word to people you know. It's really appreciated!

UPDATE: Almost a third of the way there after three and a half days! Still a long way to go, though.

So this is in the realm of the reasonably self-explanatory, but the dime version is that Bethlehem Shoals of FreeDarko, David Roth of the Journal and elsewhere, Tom Scharpling of The Best Show on WFMU, Eric Freeman of Yahoo!, Eric Nusbaum of Pitchers and Poets, Lang Whitaker of In the Time of Bobby Cox, Tom Breihan of Stereogum, Pete Beatty of Bloomsbury Press, Fredorrarci of Sport Is a TV Show and I are starting a website. This is going to be full on, not a half assed blog, and if you know my work and their work you know it isn't going to be remotely like any other sports site out there. We already have some surprises lined up that are so deep into underpromising and overdelivering that I grin just thinking about them.

The hang up is that we need money for various things—proper site design, lawyering, keeping a couple of people working on this at grievous wages full time while we turn it into a proper business and so on. So we're asking you for money. In exchange you get cool stuff: T-shirts, essays on topics you choose, fancy art and more. Mainly, you help us get started on what should be a ridiculously good site, the sort that doesn't exist right now and really should. (Click through for more.)

In addition to money, we need you to spread the word. If you like the idea, get on the ham radio or Facebook or what have you and let people know this exists and that they should, in your opinion, support it.

I will, by the way, when I get out of my fellowship, be writing very regularly for this, mostly about baseball and sometimes about fighting and other things. So if you're one of those people who email me telling me to get back to writing about baseball, there's a way to show you mean it!

Oh, and yes, the name of the site has to do with the song of the same name by The Fall. You have no idea how much restraint it took not to quote it in the title of this post. (If you know the song, you know what I mean.)

Update: Hey, so this is going really well! We have cleared $5k in a couple of hours, which makes us feel incredibly good. I cannot emphasize enough, though, that we need your support. We need your money, yes, but we also need you to get the word out through Twitter and Facebook and etc., and we also need your ideas for stuff you'd like to write for the site and so on. This is no kind of closed shop.

I would like to note in particular that at the $250 level you can get any one of us to write an essay on the subject of your choice. That's a steal. If you'd like me to write anything, keep in mind that I will be legally barred from publishing anything until April, and that this consequently means that if you donate at that level and then demand I write about something preposterous, I will wildly overdeliver for want of other things to do.

Interesting news to be announced this week!

You can be as hardcore of a fucking fan as you want, and think you’re Mr. Fucking Mixed Martial Arts—dude, I’ve forgot more about this fucking sport than they’ll ever know. I’m the guy who’s in the fucking trenches every day. I’m the guy who’s in here fucking, you know, building this fucking sport and doing the fucking deals and doing the shit. They don’t know where the sport really is or what’s really going on, until I go out and fucking tell them!

Chicago baseball writer Tim Marchman offers analysis of today's deal: 'Yes, trading Edwin Jackson and Mark Teahen for crummy relievers, a minor league dude and salary relief was a much better idea than trading for Colby Rasmus! No, the Sox don't need a good, cheap young outfielder! They're only four and a half out! You know, if Dunn, Rios and Beckham even start hitting as well as, like, Pierre, they can still get back in this thing! What do you mean they have the fourth-best bullpen in the league? They needed more random dudes!'

David Samuels did a long, great interview with Ian MacKaye recently, which is a pretty awesome fit of interviewer and subject.

My good friend Harry Siegel made his debut as the Village Voice's City Hall man this week with a long piece asking exactly what Michael Bloomberg has done in the last decade.

Grantland sucks, but a hundred articles where some dimwit writes about some bullshit you don't care about is definitely worth the good stuff they've been running, including Colson Whitehead on the World Series of Poker.

The Beatles never did it. (Magical Mystery Tour breaks up the run that starts with Rubber Soul.) The Rolling Stones never did it unless you count Get Yer Ya-Yas Out!, which you shouldn't. Elvis Costello didn't do it unless you count Ten Bloody Marys & Ten How's Your Fathers, which you also shouldn't. Tom Waits didn't do it unless you don't count One From The Heart, which you should. The Kinks came close, but I don't think Lola versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One was great, exactly. (Mrs. Marchman, who loves the Kinks as much as I do, vigorously disagrees.)

De La Soul certainly had the first four in line but fell off at five, and the exact same thing happened to their successors, Outkast. DJ Premier, if you're just counting records he produced in full, would have made it on the back of a string of GangStarr and Jeru the Damaja records, but then there's that pesky Group Home disc. Prince Paul was pretty much juiced-up Barry Bonds for a while there—Stetsasonic's In Full Gear, De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising, Big Daddy Kane's It's a Big Daddy Thing and 3rd Bass's The Cactus Album, all within a year!—but he didn't quite get there unless you want to give Queen Latifah's All Hail the Queen credit for being as good as it should have been rather than for being as good as it was.

Gram Parsons might count if you take the Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo, the first two Flying Burrito Brothers records and his own two solo records, but whether or not that Byrds record should (and could, going by the Legacy edition that shows off a lot of the unreleased vocals Parsons did for it) have been a true Parsons record, it wasn't. Similarly, the Velvet Underground might count if you consider that the sessions that were eventually released in the 1980s as VU and Another View were meant to, and really should have, formed their fourth album, but while I could go either way on both of these, you probably shouldn't count records that were never actually released.

After thinking about it for a while, if we're not counting jazz I can really only think of six runs of five straight truly great records: Bob Dylan from Another Side of Bob Dylan through John Wesley Harding, the Mekons from Fear and Whiskey through The Mekons Rock 'N Roll, RZA from Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) through Ironman, Radiohead from The Bends though Hail to the Thief, Al Green from Al Green Gets Next to You through Al Green Explores Your Mind, and Otis Redding from The Great Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads through King & Queen. Which might be a testament to my bad and/or limited taste, but still shows off why it's a fun exercise. I mean, it's not perfect, but that's pretty close to my Rushmore.