Full Coverage: Links From All Over (Oct. 31, 2008)

Richard Roeper (Photo credit: Jim Newberry / NBC Chicago)

[NBC Chicago] So even though we know by now that if you get a tattoo — any tattoo, even a small and loving portrait of a family member or a saint or something — you will never get a job doing anything except maybe digging graves for Satanists or lobbying for the tobacco industry, some people have been able to make it work. Like Richard Roeper, he of the now defunct Siskel and Ebert and Roeper!

I thought, If I ever do it, it’s not going to be a woman’s name or a White Sox logo or a stupid friggin’ leprechaun. It’ll be a Celtic cross. It’ll be something that has meaning the next day, and 20 years after the fact. But I waited a few more years before finally getting one. It just seemed so ridiculously trendy for a while there.

My standard line is that I got a religious symbol on my arm because I spend so much time in the company of the devil. I need to counter that by keeping God literally close at hand. It’s a joke. Kind of.

[…] I walked into Howard Stern’s studio, and the first thing he told me was he loved the tattoo. George Clooney nudged me just before we were doing a TV thing. My sleeves were rolled up; he could see the beginning of the tattoo and wanted to see the rest of it. “Very cool,” he said. Nearly everybody is complimentary. Then again, I’m sure there are some folks who have said, “Midlife crisis idiot.” Just not to my face.

After I got the tattoo, I called my mother before coming down for Thanksgiving dinner and warned her that I’d added something permanent. When I told her it was a tattoo, she replied, “Oh, that’s fine. I thought you were going to tell me you’d gone out and adopted a little Maddox.”

If George Clooney complimented one of my tattoos, I would probably hire someone to walk beside me and point to it at all times. Two thumbs way up, Roeper! Ha ha, references.

[Mercury News] According to this sordid tale of intrigue, this Angel Ayala character was getting tattooed by Jose Gutierrez and, rather than paying the $40 he was charged for the tattoo, traded the artist a handgun for the work. That … seems … fair? Except, whoops, that gun was used in a murder two years ago! Ayala was later arrested, though, so, happy ending? Eh?

[STLtoday] If there’s one thing sports fans and athletes alike love, it’s deferring blame that would usually get chalked up to “poor performance” or “stopped taking steroids” to ridiculous superstitions. If a team goes years and years without winning a championship, it’s not due to errors in management — it’s a goddamn curse. Well, when the long-suffering Chicago Cubs mightily defecated their sleeping apparatus a few weeks ago, in a year when it seemed like they were primed for a World Series appearance, it had to have been someone’s fault, right?

Burroughs’s cursed tattoo. (Photo source: STLtoday / Jimmy Burroughs)

Absolutely right, and that person is Jimmy Burroughs, a 26-year-old Indiana resident who, while on vacation in Tennessee, visited a tattoo parlor to get a Cubs tattoo (gotta support the team). But the tattoo artist, some joker named Deke Rivers at American Rebel in Gatlinburg, scribbled “Go Cards,” a reference to the Cubs’ divisional rival St. Louis Cardinals. Except when he covered it up, the ink over top faded, and the “Go Cards” became totally visible. And then this tattoo singlehandedly beat the Cubs in their series against the L.A. Dodgers.

“I lightly scratched it in there,” said Rivers, who has been tattooing for six years. “I wouldn’t have messed with him. I take my job seriously.”

Rivers refunded Burroughs’ $190, but Burroughs decided not to fix his flesh-and-blood endorsement of the Cards.

“This was the weird thing — after I got the tattoo, the Cardinals actually started losing and the Cubs took off,” Burroughs said.

Like the rest of Cubbie nation, Burroughs and his family believe secret forces in the universe control the club’s fate. Could the goat of 1945, the black cat of 1969 and Steve Bartman of 2003 be shape-shifters sent here to test fan loyalty?

“We are very superstitious,” said Burroughs’ sister, Amanda Burroughs, a Cubs fan living in O’Fallon, Ill. “We’re the kind of family where you have to sit in the exact same spot you did last time the Cubs won. So when I heard about the tattoo, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh.’ But then the Cardinals weren’t doing so well, so my family was fine with it. Well, we all know how that turned out.”

Yes we do: hilariously.