Shyzer.com

Pointless Update #1: Gotta love it you look at your referral logs and see that a few hours after making this post and sending an e-mail to UmpBump pointing out the “coincidence,” Shyzer got a few hits from archive.org. Gee, whatever could they have been searching to find!? Don’t worry though, because I’m a gentleman and love helping people find what they’re looking for. Maybe this snapshot of my archives taken in September 2005 is what they needed to see. Or how about this one taken in November of 2005? Different designs, different formatting that looks like crap in archive.org, same post that was swiped!

Hang with me through this post and I promise you’ll be rewarded with extremely tame and bland photos of some random chick!

This is going to seem like an incredibly ironic post once I finally get around to finishing another post I’ve had in the works for a while where I talk about how I’ve almost stolen stuff from the Internet and passed it off as my own. But today, I came across something that I feel like sharing for no other reason than I’m bored.

One of my favorite daily reads is With Leather, which is basically a site where guys sit around making fun of sports and posting pictures of hot chicks. Fun times all around. Today they had a post linking to another website where a Top 20 Hottest Sports Wives list was recently created. Like I said, this isn’t groundbreaking news or reporting we’ve got going on here.

So I’m perusing through the list when I stumble across #9. HOLY CHRIST! It’s visual evidence of Jamie Kotsay! Cool!

Now I’m sure you’re sitting there wondering just what in the hell I’m getting at, so let me cut to the chase. Almost three years ago, I wrote this post mocking how if you write about popular, and albeit stupid, topics then Google and other search engines will reward you with random traffic. And in that post, I wrote about Mark Kotsay’s wife and how everybody on the Internet swore that she was the hottest chick in the world, despite the fact that A) nobody even knew her effing first name and 2) there wasn’t a single picture of her on the net. I hadn’t really given it much thought since I wrote that, but today I was suddenly staring at a few harmless photos of said hot chick. Yeah, ok, I can see it. Cool, whatever.

But then I remembered that out of all the terms I used in that post three years ago, the one about Jamie Kotsay was the only one to get picked up and drive tons of traffic to Shyzer. And I got to wondering if I was even still on the first page of Google for “Mark Kotsay’s Wife.” Turns out I’m not, but clocking in at #4 is a website called Ump Bump and… Wait a minute, the post on their site looks familiar…

Below are two quotes, the first being what I wrote back in January 2005 and the second being what was written on Ump Bump back in May 2007.

Big Foot. The Lock Ness Monster. The Phantom of the Opera. Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Jessica Simpson’s high IQ. None of these are more mysterious or cloaked then the infamous wife of Mark Kotsay. It’s a well-known fact that men who play professional sports tend to have smoking hot wives. It’s a lesser-known fact that Mark Kotsay has the hottest wife of them all. Except there’s a small problem. There ceases to be a single picture of her on the Internet. You see, for every team Mark Kotsay has played for, his wife has joined the team’s corresponding player’s wives association. They do small public services for the community and basically are used as a public relations tool by the team. Now most teams have jumbotrons or huge televisions or something along those lines in their stadiums. At random times during random games, most teams like to tout that they too have a soft and caring side for the community, so they run announcements for some of the public services they offer, which is where Mark Kotsay’s Wife comes in. For every team that Kotsay has played for, his wife has not only joined the association, but has been the main spokeswoman for their jumbotron commercials. Over time, more and more people have had a chance to see Mrs. Kotsay’s commercial and there’s a general consensus among all those who saw her; she is the most gorgeous woman they have ever seen. Message boards have thousand-page threads dedicated solely to her. Websites are repeatedly spammed in search of a single picture of her. She has become a living legend amongst baseball fans and those who have reportedly caught a glimpse of her swear by their lives that she is easily the most breathtaking female they have ever laid eyes on.

And then theirs:

Bigfoot. The Loch Ness Monster. The Yeti. A Devil Rays fan.

Yes, the world is full of myths and legends about shadowy, elusive, one-of-a-kind creatures who may or may not even exist.

But now you can cross Jamie Kotsay off that list, for we here at umpbump can attest to the fact that she does exist and pretty much everything that has been said about her is true.

It has been well documented that many famous athletes, and baseball players in particular, often have scorching hot wives. But what has been harder to prove was the contention that Mark Kotsay just may have the hottest wife of them all…

You see, it all started back in the late 1990s when Mark Kotsay first made it to The Show. At each city Mark played in, fans of that team would begin to report sightings of his incredibly, unbelievably, scorching hot wife. They said her name was “Jamie.” They claimed that this one time, at the fan convention, they caught a brief glimpse of her between a gap in the crowd, but when they got closer she had vanished. Or that this other time, at this one game, in the 6th inning, she flashed briefly on the jumbotron screen to make a public service announcement or something.

And pretty much everyone agreed she was the hottest baseball wife they had ever seen.

But the problem was, try as everyone might, nobody could find a picture of her! The claims could not be corroborated! Soon message boards with thousands of threads grew up around her legend. Search engines were bombarded with her name. Cults grew up around the fervent belief that she really did exist, and that she really was the hottest wife in the game. And still no picture could be found!

But then finally, last summer, this shot appeared on an Athletics blog!

I’m reminded of when I was in the 8th or 9th grade and we were learning about paraphrasing. During the first few assignments, everybody basically sat down with the text we were quoting and a thesaurus. Twenty minutes later, the quote had been changed to “our words,” but it was still in the exact same structure and format and the teacher was shaking her head saying how moronic we were.

But fine, I can overlook that. The sincerest form of flattery is being copied or something like that. No, what pisses me off isn’t that I had something ripped off, it’s these two things:

First, what the fuck?! That’s what you rip off from me? That wasn’t even a good paragraph! That sucked ass! Why would you copy, of all things here on Shyzer, that? Come on guys, copy my hostage standoff post or the one about The Stand or any other number of halfway decent posts I’ve made here on Shyzer. Don’t copy something I slapped together in 20 minutes while half asleep at 3AM one night…

But even more importantly, I’m pissed off that somebody found photos of Mrs. Kotsay, knew that I wanted to see them myself, copied what I’d written about wanting to see them, and then didn’t even send me an anonymous e-mail about where I could find them! What’s up with that?! If you’re going to be a plagiarizer, at least be a polite plagiarizer!

People today; they have no manners!

Of course, momma taught me well, so click the link below if you want to finally see what the hell Jamie Kotsay looks like. And let this be a lesson to everybody out there who puts things they create out there on the Internet. If it’s even remotely comprehendible and carries with it at least one coherent thought, it will be stolen. In fact, I fully expect this very post to be stolen and copied by somebody else within 12 minutes.

Click on the images for a full sized slideshow.