One: The Onion’s Our Dumb World should be the first thing you buy when you stop reading this post. It is, miraculously, just as good as Our Dumb Century, which probably had as much to do with the development of my world view and sense of humor as anything else.
Two: this is now my life…
Three: did Tebow deserve it? Ontologically speaking, boobies. Err, yes.
Filed under Miscellaneous, SEC
ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN – After four days of martial law and nearly eight years under former President Pervez Musharraf, the Republic of Pakistan was restored to order by LSU (8-1, 5-1 SEC West) head coach Les Miles, who parachuted into the Muslim country in a daring pre-dawn raid.
“People of Pakistan, you are free!” Miles shouted from the highest step of the Pakistani House of Parliament.
They were the first six words the enigmatic coach had spoken since agreeing to liberate the embattled country at the request of U.S. President George W. Bush and the United Nations Security Council just 32 hours before.
“He’s a man of few words,” said Bush. “In that respects, he’s a lot like me. We’re both doers, not speakers. And he did.”
Miles.
Musharraf declared a state of emergency on Nov. 3, placing Pakistani Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry under house arrest and demanding that the rest of the justices swear an oath of allegiance to him. This was followed by an announcement that the general elections scheduled for January would be postponed indefinitely. Musharraf then said that the elections would only be “delayed”.
The former President and Army Chief of Staff was supposed to relinquish power this year, which may have prompted him to plunge his country into the chaos of martial law.
“It was an outrage. Pakistan was one of the better examples of how democracy and Islam could work in the same country, and Musharraf tore their laws to shreds and made a mockery of the stability of secular rule,” said Mississippi head coach Ed Orgeron.
“He even compared himself to Abraham Lincoln: ‘Lincoln suspended habeus corpus, Lincoln did what he had to do to save the Union and America, etc.’ I have studied Lincoln for nearly twenty years, sir, and you are no Abraham Lincoln.”
Continued Orgeron: “Now Les Miles. You could make an argument about that. Both Lincoln and Miles like big hats perched high on their head, so there is a precedent.”
Eyewitnesses report that Miles parachuted directly onto Musharraf’s motorcade as it left the former President’s residence. The one time Michigan offensive lineman appeared to be holding a hand grenade “in his mouth” said taxi driver Mehmood Khan, who watched from a boarded up residence in the heart of the Pakistani capital.
“[Miles] landed on the President’s car and shattered the driver’s window with his bare hand. Then he dropped the grenade in and leapt off the car, which was on a bridge above the Soan River. I don’t know how the American survived,” said Khan.
Reports of explosions, lightning quick attacks and Pakistani soldiers found tied up in trip wire began flooding in from all over the capital shortly after Musharraf’s body was found. The leaderless army was quickly brought to heel by numerous notes written in Urdu, the national language of Pakistan, and apparently left by Miles.
One such note was translated as saying, “Do you really wanna know what I’ll do if I’m pissed off?”
The Pakistani army stationed in Islamabad deposited its guns and ammunition in front of the empty Supreme Court at 2:30 p.m., and soon after that soldiers stationed throughout the various provinces of Pakistan followed suit and disarmed themselves.
“Simply remarkable. I haven’t seen such audacity since the Auburn game. Or maybe the Florida game,” said CNN chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour.
“I believe Tennyson once wrote that the truly heroic, despite their frailties, were meant ‘to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’ He might well have added that a huge pair of balls is also a necessary component to a mighty constitution,” she added.
Many Tiger fans were unsurprised that Miles would agree to such a daring operation, noting that the third year coach was known as something of a gambler. The victory seemed somewhat bittersweet for some, though, as they were left wondering what would happen next.
Asked current LSU political science sophomore Lydia Bauteaux: “Democracy, elections, that’s all great stuff for Pakistan and whatever. But is he gonna leave us to coach Michigan?”
It really is The Big One, and far more important than the meaning of life (42), why we’re here (to face paint), etc.
Do I go to Knoxville for South Carolina @ Tennessee, or Jacksonville for Florida vs. Georgia? Keep in mind the following:
I am torn. Help me decide. All aspects will be considered.
Filed under One CFB Road Trip to rule them all, SEC
Whatever invisible demarcation between North and South exists – and the Wikipedia entry on Mason and Dixon’s line did nothing to help me decide where or what it is, though it did pique my interest in Thomas Pynchon’s novel of the same name which, in its defense, “makes no claim of being historically rigorous” – I passed it on Monday, September 17 on my way from Marion, Illinois to Murfreesboro, Tennessee. To celebrate I queued up Paul Simon’s “Graceland” and hummed along:
The Mississippi Delta was shining
Like a national guitar
I am following the river
Down the highway
Through the cradle of the Civil War
I’m going to Graceland
Graceland
In Memphis Tennessee
Im going to Graceland
And:
In Graceland, in Graceland
I’m going to Graceland
For reasons I cannot explain
There’s some part of me wants to see
Graceland
And I may be obliged to defend
Every love, every ending
Or maybe there’s no obligations now
Maybe I’ve a reason to believe
We all will be received
In Graceland
I still haven’t been to Memphis, or Graceland. My understanding of Tennessee geography was, literally, short: the state can’t be that big, surely, especially to a Californian. The Humboldt County marijuana mules get leg cramps before they even get to the East Bay, let alone San Diego. Tennessee! I laughed at your physical stature.
At it’s longest the Volunteer State stretches 440 miles, with the cities of Memphis, Nashville, Chattanooga and Knoxville forming a loose parallelogram following the contours of the state itself. I lingered in the Nashville area for the duration of my stay in Tennessee. Why? Lookout Mountain – site of Rock City, the Three Battles of Chattanooga (of which the Third was the most important, signalling the true end of the Confederacy and the start of the Union’s advance into Atlanta) and the climax of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods – is near Chattanooga. The Battle of Shiloh Hill took place about a hundred miles east of Memphis. And Memphis! I tried explaining the significance of Memphis in my mind to a native, who could not come up with a single redemptive quality for her home city.
“Barbeque! The blues! Johnny Cash! Carl Perkins! Sam Cooke! Tennessee Williams! Beale Street! Barbeque! Martin Luther King’s last speech at Mason Temple! Barbeque!” I explained, somewhat quietly and with a strained candor. I had barbeque on my mind at the time, and didn’t want to excite anyone lest they they realize I had come, like a Hamburglar of smoked goods, to rob them of their most prized meat confections.
“Yeah, but it’s a shit hole,” she said. I left it at that, though even now the idea of Memphis pulsates in my brain and I don’t think I will be able to resist a walk along Beale Street. Hard to explain why I never made it there, considering that a few hundred miles were nothing to an odometer whose patience, having been stretched thin for three weeks, emulated the agonies of sainthood and transcended its mortal state to reach a perpetual beatification that said, simply, “Do whatever you must. I have a harp and cloud, and a halo.”
There was also the issue of Murfreesboro, home of the Middle Tennessee State Blue Raiders and my de-facto headquarters for at least four days. The population of Murfreesboro has doubled since 1990 (46,000), making it – at an estimated 92,559 – one of the fastest growing cities in America. MTSU is the largest undergraduate university in the state of Tennessee. The locals were never hesitant to point out these two facts to me, but despite the growing evidence of Murfreesboro’s ascendance the general opinion of those communicating with me via the internet and text messaging was this: “You’ll run out of things to do once you park.”
So how did I manage to not go insane after four days away from the four big cities of Tennessee? Start with those same locals, who began, first, by intriguing me as the first representatives of The South I had met on my travels and moved to the simple acts of kindness, acceptance and blah blah blah that make my bleeding heart ache at the thought of the horrid cliche of it all: Southern hospitality at its finest, and no matter my will there wasn’t an ounce of irony I could wring from that.
(Also helping me not going insane was a tour of Lynchburg, home of the Jack Daniel’s distillery and essentially my Dome of the Rock. From smelling the 140 proof White Lightning to walking amongst thousands of barrels of whiskey, whiskey, whiskey everywhere, I was in heaven for the vast majority of the tour until the end. Moore County, of which Lynchburg is a part, is a dry county and has been for something like a century. The penultimate factoid – 75 million gallons of Jack Daniel’s whiskey in a dry county – erased the serenity imposed by bucolic Lynchburg’s gorgeous scenery and the peacefulness of a small town with one industry and no hurry. One local laughed at me when I asked him where the nearest bar was, which is one reason I returned to Murfreesboro like a man stranded in the desert would run towards ancient Baghdad.)
It started by meeting up with John and Chris, both members of an MTSU message board and both of them loonier than a cathouse full of Cajuns – which is a phrase I picked up at MTSU’s library, incidentally, and seems to convey a generally positive slant.
John contacted me at the beginning of my trip. He was alerted to my project by the miracles of Google’s search algorithms, which allowed him to track me down via the posting of my schedule and, in particular, the MTSU-Western Kentucky game. John extended an offer of tailgating, a spot in his box and a view of Blue Raider football; since then I’ve had more offers, but nothing as generous and earnest as that first. I was horrified.
Let me explain: internet users aren’t all pale, pock marked and fat/or twiggy. That’s just ignorance. And they’re certainly not all schizophrenic freaks mouth breathin’ their way through porn and World of Warcraft potion queues as fast as their right hand can scroll a mousewheel. That is also ignorance, and also maybe a bit of fun at the expense of people who like porn (who doesn’t?) and MMORPGs (might as well make fun of heroin addicts, the poor things). But internet college football fans? The kind who frequent message boards? You can take whatever preconceivied slander you have about internet “eccentrics” and throw out the quotation marks and also the word “eccentrics”, because bat shit crazy motherfuckers who don’t even understand the basic concept of pass protection but nonetheless like to criticize Orlando Pace simply because he was a Buckeye find themselves scared to death when in the presence of your Unrelentingly Awful Internet College Football Fan, and eccentric might as well be a compliment. Have you ever met a komodo dragon? Their saliva produces a virulent bacteria that will almost surely kill you if untreated after a bite, and it looks like they drool blood, and they eat lots of carrion. Komodo dragons would run screaming – at a twelve and a half mile per hour clip – into the warm Indonesian night if they ever came across some of the characters I have interacted with in my three or four years of internet-based college football discussion. And I have met the faces behind some of that interaction, and often times it is a process that leaves me white faced and shaking. This is the result of that internet-old fascination with holding get togethers to put faces to name and other, equally atrocious, behavior that most adults should know better than to partake in.
To put it bluntly, Unrelentingly Awful College Football Fans rule the night. And the day. And, sadly, large swaths of the internet. Particularly in Louisiana. So it was with a good deal of trepidation that I showed up to the Coconut Bay bar off of the Old Fort Parkway in good ol’ M’boro to meet John on Monday night to watch the Redskins lose to the Eagles, or vice versa. (No one present knows who won the game as it was so achingly boring the only consolation we had was that we weren’t paying attention.)
He didn’t arrive for a good twenty or thirty minutes, which gave me plenty of time to eye anyone with a bad haircut, false teeth or questionable genetics and wonder if I’d made a bad choice in casting my lot with Dr. Moreau’s bulletin board children.
John, some thirty minutes into our conversation: Can I be honest with you, Jon? And don’t take this the wrong way: I’m kinda relieved you’re normal.
By the time Chris, John’s compatriot in MTSU message boarding, arrived we were well into discussions of everything that happened to be interesting, which were: the 2007 college football season, past college football seasons, college football recruiting, college football politics, college football in the deep South, women, whiskey, oysters, tailgating, beer, the unsatisfying hole that is pro sports, drunk dialing, white trash jokes, Asian jokes and, during one memorable exchange, the proper way to respond to a text message involving a female proclaiming herself wetter than the hot tub she was in. By the time I left the state of Alabama on Sunday I had met a number of Internet College Football Fans and, without a single exception, they all proved to be exceptionally good at not being serial killers, pathological arsonists, closet playwrights, etc.
Some excerpts from our conversation:
John: You ever been to Woodbury [here pronounced “Wood-BURH”]? That’s country down there. You don’t wanna go there.
Chris: Yeah, that’s Deliverance country. They passed a town ordinance last week. It says divorcees can legally remain brother and sister.
And:
John: You better learn how to pronounce things around here.
Chris: Yeah. How would you pronounce the word L-a-f-a-y-e-t-t-e?
Me: Lafayette?
Chris: Around here it’s La-FEY-it. And Shelbyville. We shorten that [quick slashing motion with both hands to indicate large to small, plus emphatic woosh! noise] to Shelville. Try it.
Me: Shelville.
[Mild but good natured applause.]
John: And Knoxville, we shorten that to Assholes.
And:
Chris, relating a story about the legendary MTSU coach James “Boots” Donnelly (140-87-1 in 20 years in Murfreesboro), after I had described my experience in Lincoln watching USC play the Huskers: We were up in Nebraska one year to, y’know, collect a paycheck: come in, get our butts kicked for the home crowd, go home and use that money. Well our coach Boots shows up on Friday for walkthroughs at the stadium at whatever time it was, probably four in the afternoon. He and the players wanted to get a good look at Memorial Stadium. Except [Tom] Osborne and Nebraska are already there. So Boots goes up to Osborne and says, “I’m real sorry, coach. There must’ve been a mix up. I didn’t know you’d be here at the same time practicin’ to play us.” And Osborne goes, “Don’t even worry about it. We were actually practicing for Missouri next week.” (Note: The only time MTSU and Nebraska have ever played was in 1992 [Nebraska beat the Blue Raiders 48-7], the week before the Huskers lost to Washington’s post-national championship squad in Seattle. This does nothing to diminish the awesomeness of the above story.)
Between the two of them they relate some amusing anecdotes, like the time MTSU beat the pants off of a Roger Staubach led Navy team – Pensacola Navy, that is, four years after the former Cowboy great won the Heisman and just months after a stint in Vietnam. Apparently John’s great uncle or grandfather or someone sacked Staubach, “and he wouldn’t stop talking about it.” Douglas S. Malan does an outstanding job documenting the game here.
John and Chris also segued from a discussion of game day tailgating fare into an explanation of Goat ala WKU, based on a story about a Hilltopper fraternity invaded by police who found a malnourished goat in the chapter’s house. What was the goat for?
“I dunno,” Chris said with the kind of defensive shrug that means Not only do I know, I revel in the knowledge because it is at the expense of my arch-nemesis. “They found, like, used condoms in the closet the goat was in.”
John chimed in: “They brought the goat to the vet and they diagnosed him – are we even sure it was a ‘him’? – they diagnosed him with anal bruising.” After my apparently obvious disbelief, he followed with, “That’s a fact. It’s on the internet.”
So, as Chris put it, “half our jokes involve goat fucking. You’re gonna meet a coupla Western Kentucky guys on Thursday, so don’t be surprised if we start baaaahing at them. I’m gonna cook a goat. They’ll eat it, too.”
John: “They better. You ever had goat? It’s damn good if you cook it right. No goat fucker can resist a properly cooked goat.”
The end of that night was a microcosm of my stay in Murfreesboro: after explaining that I spend most nights in my car, Chris did not hesitate to offer his home and the guest bedroom. He was even kind enough to lead me down a back route away from the main police patrolled streets because, as he mentioned, “I think we’ve both had a few beers.” (Hiccup.)
During the rest of my time in Murfreesboro it seemed there was a roving pack of ninjas whose sole purpose, as far as I could tell, was to wait until I had to move my bowels or leave a table or bar or whatever and, when I was gone, deploy shuriken, smoke bombs and grappling hooks to make my bill or tab disappear. I do not exaggerate when I say this happened to me at least once a day for four days, with some days seeing so many ninjas in the periphery of my vision I had to blink and wonder, momentarily, if I was The Tick.
I think much of the kindness was reinforced by the uniqueness of my story. More so than any other place I had been to, people were genuinely amazed and appreciative of what I was doing. They murmured with their appreciation, and it seemed as if they were constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop when I inevitably realized MTSU-WKU would be a waste of my time, and why not just spend a few nights in Knoxville with that checkered endzone, Rocky Top and all that? Locals found it hard to believe that I had picked MTSU, of all teams, to go see a football game. At one point I wished that it wasn’t a Thursday game, because inevitably I had to explain that it fit my schedule to be in Murfreesboro as opposed to an outright pilgrimmage to one of the great college football venues. This sort of made me feel like a prick, but they still threw hamburgers, beer, ribs, whiskey and the like at me for something like eight hours straight on game day. The surreal nature of our meeting – me, in my first southern state of the trip, them, confused and maybe a little bit happy that I had chosen Murfreesboro – culminated in my being interviewed by a live sports talk station and being featured in The Daily News Journal. It’s a good thing I wasn’t drinking whiskey at the time because a) I didn’t realize it was a live interview and b) whiskey makes me cuss/pee in public/injure my knuckles/etc.
I cannot explain how weird it was to be followed around by a cameraman. At one point I found myself genuinely interested in helping a kid play NCAA ’07 (as MTSU vs WKU, naturally) on a Playstation set up at our tailgate. He just wanted to mash buttons. I wanted him to go through his progressions and always check down to the safe throw if necessary. He was probably three. I nonetheless explained down and distance theory to him. Then I caught sight of the cameraman snapping photos and I wondered if this was indeed a good photo-op, but wouldn’t it look weird if I’m shot manipulating the kid’s hands while he has the controller in his lap, and do they take implied paedophilia as seriously as the British do?, and what the hell, why would you call a draw on 3rd-and-26?! Gimme that controller.
At that point the alcohol was probably peaking in my blood stream.
Next: Sororities, sundresses, and… ‘Bama.
Filed under One CFB Road Trip to rule them all, SBC, SEC
BIRMINGHAM, AL – Southeastern Conference commissioner Mike Slive ended the league’s Spring Media Day by announcing the conference would begin preparations to officially phase out the Pacific-10 by the 2012 season.
Slive stressed that the change “would not happen overnight” and that players, coaches and fans needed to be patient.
“We’re working on this thing to get it right. It’s gonna happen, but not immediately. We’ve been taking steps in this direction for decades. The groundwork is there. We just need to see it through to its proper conclusion,” said Slive.
Even USC, considered by many to be the “black sheep” of the Pac-10, has seen flashes of crazy obsession LSUoverUSC BCS champ go suck it condoms!
Unseasoned, but strong
My armor knows but one kink:
Good hair gel’s pricey.
-Jimmy Clausen
Time returns, wounds heal…
Hah! Next year, your kick returns?
Filed in triplicate.
-Myles Brand
Even four three five
Won’t help you with chloroform
I shall come at night.
-Chan Gailey
QBs turn diamond
Underneath my pressured gaze
Know a good ice guy?
-Dennis Erickson
I bring discipline
Honor, pride and success, too
Plus, army fatigues.
-Randy Shannon
Hail, Persephone!
Thy feet herald our spring game
P.S., I may run.
-Pat White
Late frost burns the bloom
Would a fool not let Springdale
Go fuck its damn self?
-Houston Nutt*
*if you can recognize the haiku this is based on, Mitch Mustain will transfer to your school
Filed under ACC, Big East, Notre Dame, Pac-10, Seasonal Haiku, SEC
This is a direct lifting of The Onion’s American Voices feature, of which I am a big fan.
Anna Nicole Smith posthumous fiasco
The former model, actress and all-around celebrity’s death has not stopped any of the controversy that plagued her in life: following her mysterious passing her will has been contested, a paternity suit involving Smith’s 5-month-old daughter has been brought forth and her burial site is being argued over. Even the judge presiding over her daughter’s case couldn’t hold back tears at the trial. What do they think?
Dennis Erickson
Arizona State University head coach
“Her marriage to that old millionaire was shameful. What kind of a person would attach themselves to another being simply for the prospect of a big payoff after the termination of their relationship?”
Filed under College Football Voices, Notre Dame, Pac-10, SEC, USC
NEW ORLEANS – Both the NYSE and NASDAQ received boosts yesterday as unexpected news ushered in a close to the day’s trading: after mistaking the Sun Belt Conference for a telecommunications company, industry giants AT&T and AOL-Time Warner followed up their error by merging with the SBC in a $1.8 trillion dollar deal, the largest in history.
Above: two teams that are probably in the Sun Belt Conference.
“We are extraordinarily excited at the possibilities of this new partnership,” SBC commissioner Wright Waters said from his Popeye’s Chicken & Biscuits-based office on Canal Street.
“The universities and programs representing the SBC are institutions of excellence. Though we have little traditional history in telecommunications or mass media, we have always excelled at meeting challenges and exceeding expectations. We expect the best of ourselves, and we now have $1.8 trillion reasons to believe our expectations.”
Waters continued: “This is awesome. So awesome. Yes.”
This deal is the first merger between multi-billion dollar corporations and a college football mid-major conference, with far reaching ramifications for both the telecommunications industry and the Bowl Championship Series. Though most experts were hesitant to predict any quarterly or fiscal year fluctuations resulting from the enormous merger, the mood was one of cautious confusion.
Filed under Fake news, Recruiting, SBC, SEC
LOS ANGELES, CA – The USC Dickwads capped their fifth straight double digit win season under head liar Pete Carroll by signing another goddamned ridiculous top-ranked recruiting class on National Letter of Intent to Sell Your Soul to the Condoms Day.
Sources say Carroll, above, uses the same methods for both cheerleaders and blue chip recruits: charm and Rohypnol.
Though the Florida Gators were ranked number one by both Scout and Rivals – two of the biggest recruiting services in the nation – media giant ESPN proclaimed USC’s class as tops. And that means validity for the attention starved and little known Trojans.
“Scout blah blah Rivals blah blah blah. We’re ESPN. [Rivals recruiting analyst] Jeremy Crabtree can lick my sack and grab me a danish, because what we say gets heard by a million people for each of their manic-obsessive recruiting freaks,” Scouts Inc. national director of recruiting Tom Luginbill said.
Luginbill continued: “The Trojans really added firepower offensively and defensively with running backs Joe McKnight and Marc Tyler, and defensive end Everson Griffen and linebacker Chris Galippo. We’re gonna go out on a limb and say that USC is going to be really good at football for the next few years.”
“You can’t stop watching ESPNU, can you you poor fuck? Today you are at my mercy. I laugh at the piecemeal destruction of your soul,” he added.
Louisiana State recruiting website Tiger Rag’s Matt DeVille was not surprised by ESPN’s ranking of Southern Cal’s recruiting class, noting that the list of gullible blue chip recruits foolish enough to sign with Sodom and Gomorrah looked “like a death row of our best, our brightest stars. Those poor fools.”
McKnight, a Louisiana native, chose the Trojans over LSU on signing day.
According to DeVille, “Carroll can lie like a greased up weasel in a corner. I’m talking those Pixar weasels, the really talkative ones. Add that to the knobcockery going on between ‘The Worldwide Leader in Sports’ and USC and you get a top-ranked recruiting class.'”
DeVille cited USC’s running back situation as evidence that the nation’s best recruits appear to be “on fucking crack and glue and illusions made of stupidity and cotton candy, goddamn shitass, what the fuck was McKnight thinking?”, adding that Carroll’s prowess at selling his program’s infernal temptations have damned more souls than all of Hollywood.
“Just think about it,” said DeVille. “You’ve got five star running backs like Stafon Johnson, CJ Gable, Allen Bradford. Add in four stars like Emmanuel Moody and Michael Coleman. And they sign the top two rated running backs in McKnight and Tyler? And another four star guy named Broderick Green? And their starter is probably going to be redshirt senior Chauncey Washington? Is Carroll telling these kids USC gets four balls on offensive plays now? Blue Steel? Ferrari? Le Tigra? They’re the same face! Doesn’t anybody notice this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!”
NCAA officials confirmed that USC’s recruiting day haul makes them eligible for at least three more years of juvenile malpropisms, preserving the nation’s ability to refer to the Trojans as “SUC”, “Toejams”, “Condumbs” and “stupid shithead Gucci fucks”.
Filed under Fake news, Recruiting, SEC, The Media, USC
SPRINGDALE, AR – New polls are showing an abysmal 13 percent approval rating for University of Arkansas head coach Houston Nutt’s latest plan to “surge” 20,000 Razorback supporters into the home of former quarterback Mitch Mustain in an effort to keep the embattled Springdale household from succumbing to sectarian pressures.
Nutt, center, explains the principles behind his “surge” plan.
After former Springdale High head coach Gus Malzahn was fired from his position as Arkansas offensive coordinator, Mustain asked to be released from his scholarship with the Razorbacks. The entire state was thrown into turmoil and, though school officials strongly oppose the use of the term, civil war now seems inevitable.
Filed under Fake news, Recruiting, SEC, USC
82 Sluggo Win 