S14: The Ultimate Fighter Season Two

Look, honestly, I am halfway through the 3rd season of the stupid Ultimate Fighter, and I find it highly enjoyable, like watching assholes I work with hang out in a house none of us could afford, and getting to see their real asses unlocked behind the closed doors of no bosses nor women they think they can prod with their manpokes. But the second season of this show was lacking compared to the first, perhaps because there was no alcohol allowed in the house. I mean, isn't no outside media, no women, and no phones or internet enough? Plus, it's reality TV, and when you take away a lot of things, rule number one is you leave alcohol in the equation to keep it funny. If you're making sure people can't sit around just watch TV all night, that's because nothing escalates from sitting around and watching TV all night. But sitting around and drinking all night? Mad shit escalates from that. Mad real shit that's perfect for TV cheapest forms of entertainment.
Anyways, this year was something, heavyweights and another class that's lighter. I could look it up but the internet wire's not inside my laptop, and I'm enjoying the song on the satellite radio, so I don't feel like getting up and messing with nothing...
#1: Jorge Gugel - Really, the single gripe I have about Jorge is how everybody called him George instead of Jorge (you know, Whore Hay). But his broken English and intense small attitude combining into a pint-sized 21st Century Ricky Ricardo expecting every asshole in the house to have some splaining to do, it was great. I really wished he had won it all, though his questionable friendship with his coach Rich Franklin kind of sucked. Hopefully in all future versions of this show, they either completely avoid coach/camp friendships becoming involved, or they just let two coaches who really hate each other only bring their own camp to the show, for complete gang warfare human cockfighting extended reality television hatred.
#2: Luke Cummo - They played dude out as a nerd, but I dug his half-retarded Red Lobster waiter self-taught Zen student kung fu style. In fact, my favorite scene of the entire season was not even a scene but a shot of him in the back yard of the UFC Mansion punching a bag of rice sitting on top of a rock. That's some 36th Chamber bullshit right there. I know he didn't win against the midget guy, but I hope Luke Cummo parlayed this into some nice celebrity yoga sessions with Ricky Williams, Jeff Goldblum, and Lil Wayne's boyfriend.
#3: Melvin Guillard - He did not show well, but being from a small town in the South who now lives in a white ass liberalized gentrified area of the earthball, I have an affinity in my heart for shit-talking ghetto-assed black dudes. They are fun people who may not smoke weed but will take you to their cousin Buzzard's house to buy a dimebag, and you'll get high and the two of you will drink an 8-pack of Miller pony bottles and some other shit-talking ghetto-assed black dude will show up and talk trash at you for being an unrecognized whiteboy in a Canadian hockey sweatshirt bright red that sticks out like that would stick out in a black community underneath an unlighted basketball goal with bullet dents in the metal backboard, and your boy Melvin stands up for you, like, "Hey man, fuck it, he ain't done shit to nobody. Why you trippin'?" And the other guy indeed stops tripping, but he is watching you with half a violence-prone eyeball, and on one hand, you're like, "Whew... I'm glad Melvin was here," but on the other hand, dirtweed and Miller High Life is an intoxicating combo that can make you say to your insides, "Fuck that guy. He lucky Melvin cooled it down. Fuck him." And it stews and stews, but nothing comes of it because you ain't a gangsta, you a stona.
#4: the Eye Doctor Guy - Having a wife who is a trained herbalist who when I have sickness concocts up some sort of mason jar contained tea for me to drink from the seven bins of bags of herbs we have, I have come to appreciate the weird corner of science style the boxing cut man or MMA stitch guy kicks for this world. I sometimes think of how awesome a life it would be to simply know how to mix crushed yarrow and plantain and vaseline for my own special cut-closing mixture to have a weird, high profile, low-paying job of note. But I'm not. However, watching this season of The Ultimate Fighter, where stitching bitches up was a regular occurence, seeing the Asian eye doctor guy (my apologies, his names was Dr. Hsu I think, and I meant to google it up, but like I said, the wire's not plugged in) do his scientific magic, with the whole notion in mind that he has to make it so this cut doesn't bleed again, it was interesting. The last time I got stitches was when me and my wife had our back yard wedding ceremony. We had been married by justice of the peace (who apparently didn't mind our inter-racial engagement) years ago, but held off on a ceremony until we could have everybody around. That was like five years ago on Beltaine, and a devastating mix of homemade tomato wine super destroyed many of us. But while setting up for the party, I sliced the nerve in my left forefinger and I tried to hide it because I knew my wife would be freaked out, and her brother is a doctor of the medicine, but they saw it and he ran off to the hospital to get the shit to numb my finger and stitch me up. We had the ceremony first, with a giant rag around my hand, but then in the kitchen with an Old Milwaukee in my other hand, wearing my wedding rhinestone overalls, he stitched me up at the kitchen table, like nine stitches to hold my finger together. Fucked up thing is the scar today, I can see how I cut like a third of my finger open that day, and it still doens't have perfect feeling, getting all tingly at times like I'm thirteen and in love, but only in my left forefinger, and you can actually see the holes from the stitches. That's because my bro-in-law was learning his craft, and not a specialist, although probably a top notch doctor in his own right. And that whole story is why the Eye Doctor dude impressed me so much, to be an expert in stitching bitches up, but hopefully not snitches, because snitches don't deserve stitches, just concrete britches, and trips is... to the middle of the lake.
#5: Joe Stevenson - The midget lower weight class dude who won, who was not really all that awesome outside of the circular circle, nor all that annoying either. He was just kind of a guy who was there and was really good at mixed martial artistry, but not crazy and wacky as a personality, nor a dickhead like, honestly, I expect from these types.
#6: Rashad Evans - Rashad Evans was slightly enjoyable, with his bobblehead bullshit, but at the same time, this second season was real lowball when it came to enjoyment. I mean, relative to the white ass fuckfaces he was on a TV screen with, Rashad Evans came across as a halfway chill dude. But honestly, you throw him in with a bunch of Tonk-playing dirtbags, and he ain't that cool. Speaking of which, why the hell don't dudes on The Ultimate Fighter play more cards? And not Solitaire either. That's not for-real cards.
#7: Jason Von Flue - The grungy hipster ready-made to be best friends with that Jessie James motorcycle show dude cat that was added to mid-stream after somebody got injured. I felt bad for him slightly because the guy was getting stitches put in his face left and right. And then at the same time, he was an aspiring ultimate fighter with the last name "Von Flue", which is so fucking goofily stereotypical and disreputable it made me think he was probably boys with that Spencer Pratt spider monkey holograph.
#8: Brad Imes - A big, halfwitted, cornfed, midwestern amateur wrestler. This type of person makes me glad I came from the south and not the midwest because it seems out there they have all the retarded delusions and misguided hatred we have, but without the long sense of history, good manners, and brown sugar walls to make it all more enjoyable as you struggle through another shit life branch off the old family tree.
#9: Keith Jardine - He certainly looked cool, like he might own ferrets and some bootleg Faith No More live shows where Les Claypool joined them onstage. But he never really got a chance to shine in the show. So all he is to me is the dude with the goatee.
#10: Mike Whitehead - This dude was a chump, and became the right hand chump to head chump Matt Harris, which made me not like him anymore. Luckily, he got beat pretty handily when he actually had a fight, and by a negro to boot.
#11: Rich Franklin - A rather vanilla dude who came across as a halfway decent coach probably only because Matt Harris was such a cocksucker. And honestly, the "college graduate, and a really smart guy, but he likes to compete in MMA" angle is already played the fuck out, and I'm only up to season two. Stop trying to make it seem like hand-to-hand combat chess and just let people beat the fuck out of each other already. I mean, that's what Griffin vs. Bonnar was from the first season, and that was the best shit ever.
#12: Marcus Davis - This is the John Cena Boston Celtics fan dude who is like 39 motherfuckers we've all met in bus stations who is running cocaine for his cousin inside of a stereo speaker. But don't tell nobody, yo.
#13: Sammy Morgan - Honestly, it's been a few weeks since I held my wrap party on watching this show, and I can't even remember who Sammy Morgan was. Maybe he was the slightly chubby olive-complected dipshit who avoided all fights and made it to the semi-finals, but I can't be for sure.
#14: Matt Hughes - You know, it's often pretended that a guy like Matt Hughes, who is a complete dick to anyone who does not think the exact same way he does about whatever form of competition he has involved himself in, is not an asshole but just a really intense person who wants nothing more than for the entire world to be as hardcore and serious about what it is he is hardcore and serious about. Except that doesn't make sense, because the dude is such a dick. It is not impossible in this world to be hardcore and serious about something, and make yourself be intensely involved, without being a fucking cocksucking little short Type-A asshole to everyone around you. I would think Matt Hughes' issues have more to do with penis size than intensity, although a lack of penis size is certainly a most intense thing.

Friday Love/Hate

I love how trippy my overalls looked last night at the Nemo on Ice spectacular my mom shelled out big bucks to take all my kids and all to the show, front row style, by luck. When the blacklight kicked in for the tweaky fish costumes to shine on the ice and all the kids could shake their stupid $20 Made in China light doohickeys, the white thread of my overalls front was glowing bright and made me look like a cyborg, but only partially, so like one quarter robot, three quarters human, which is probably about right anyways. Then I saw my pant leg under the blacklight and I was like, "Damn, I'm a nasty motherfucker." Don't know if it was sexually related, piss stains down my leg, chicken grease, or what, but that bama looked filthy in the blacklight. Also made me wonder what it would be like to be high as fuck at a Disney on Ice thing, which in the front row like we were, probably could've been maintained. But if I had to sit behind people and saw little kids in front of me or families or whatever, I would've gotten all tweaked out and sketched and been pretty sketchy looking anyways. I guess that's what they make the luxury boxes for, so you can do hallucinogens at children's ice shows and not scare everybody.

I hate the New York Yankees and hope they not only lose but their stadium falls apart. Now I would normally hate the Yankees anyways just because I'm a contrarian asshole. But they seem to accumulate the types that I wouldn't like anyways. Like that Jorge Posada dude... they always seem to have at least one or two guys that look like him, generic latino jewish guy who would annoy the fuck out of me with talk of how he can't get a good bagel down here in Virginia or some shit. Then there's Mariano Rivera, who I know is the greatest closer or whatever of forever. But that guy looks more like a registered sex offender than I think any other professional athlete ever, especially when he takes his hat off and the same weird stubble pattern on his face goes up over his head but in a balding pattern. He will one day be convicted from a DNA database hit, I am sure of it. Plus Johnny Damon, who I didn't mind so much as a goofy Red Sox guy with longhair, which made him look like a fun-loving fucker by baseball's relatively unfun standards. Now, with the short Yankee mandated hair, he looks like a Chinese caveman. Also, Melky Cabrera creeps me out because I imagine he has contracted STDs from full steezies he shared with Fat Joe at an afterparty of some sort. A-Rod? You don't need to say anything about that guy; he just looks like the type who enjoys looking at himself in the mirror having sex more than he enjoys looking at the person he has sex with. Speaking of that, the Kate Hudson chick seems terribly lost, doesn't she? At one point, Chris Robinson's New Earth Mud CD was a favorite of mine, and a lot of the songs on there were written for her when they were dating at first. Seems slightly red flaggish to me that the same chick that would have a neo-hippie rock star dude's album written about her would be tagging along with A-Rod all the time and pushing his kids in strollers (as seen in Star Magazine! yeah, I be reading that shit at the grocery store). I would imagine she has some serious self-esteem issues. You know who I don't hate though? Derek Jeter, as much as I'd like to. When he first started out, I wanted to hate him, and did so because I can do anything I set my mind to in this world. But honestly, he seems like a mellow guy, one of those yellowboned bi-racial dudes that tap all the asses back in the day, so you kinda playa hate them for a while, but really, they're pretty laid back dudes, and why wouldn't you be when you get to access all the little ethnic sub-cultures of vagina without hassle? So props to Derek Jeter. It's a shame he's been a Yankee his whole life.

Starr Hill Festie Oktoberfest Lager

AFFORDABILITY: It is local, and I guess they have some sort of deal with the Country Blessings place to make their local microdrink slightly cheaper than the hodgepodge selection of other microdranks, so in that sense - the sense of me walking into the nice but expensive boutique country store to buy beer from their fine beer selection since the Food Lion don’t really stock shit since we only have a small scale Food Lion which replaced the IGA which was a gross ass grocery store but if you wanted something like a certain beer you could ask Joe the guy who owned and managed it, “Hey Joe, could you stock a couple six-packs of Newcastle Brown Ale, because my wife really loves it, and I’d buy it from time to time,” and Joe would do that, even tell you when it had come in for the first time. In the today sense of my small town reality, I guess it’s cheap, but ol’ Joe would’ve had it for half a dollar cheaper, and I would’ve got to look at the meat cutting trophies from the 1970s in a display case while I checked out. Plus, they had a claw machine. 2 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: All Starr Hill brand beers have limited destroyability for myself because, first of all, they mostly all taste and look the exact same, with slight variations, like using a computer program to see what your kids would look like should you procreate with women from different regions of the earth. And secondly, Coran Capshaw is the man with his hand behind the plan of these beers, which makes me not want to get drunk, but burn down half of Charlottesville. I can drink them down, but not fast enough to get tore the hell up when I start thinking about Mr. Capshaw and how he owns the whole town and forces his hand into every music club around and is going to take the empty space behind Douglas Avenue where the only honest garage on earth Coles Automotive was located and turn it into condominiums all the way to the Coal Tower where crusty punk kids used to party before that one dude killed that girl, the whole thing makes me sick, and I can't drink 'em fast enough, because if I learned one thing from seeing my dad be a complete alcoholic, it was pouring beer on sadness don't help a damned thing. 1 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: It is a beer bottle label that portends a carnival which I can’t confront upon because me and carnies go back like red and black lumberjacks with the hat to match. The art looks a little too much like a children’s Rupert book drawn by a shroomhead, but still. 3 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: That dude Coran, who owns everything around where I live. I should probably not talk shit in case I decide to sell myself out, but kind of like finger tattoos, I can’t help but sabotage my future to stay true to my present. 0 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: I don't know man, I'm just not a Starr Hill fan, and feel guilty supporting it because I feel like I'm supporting my own demise. I should probably twist my attitude on that front, but my attitude's twisted enough as it is. 0 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 1 & 1/5 STARS!

NFL WEEK 8: AFC North & West teams

Man, we're almost already half way through the regular season, and though football talking heads are all like, "Well, now what we know is what we know and this is how it is," I have to think shit don't seem right all the way through. But let me limit my frame of questioning authority to the AFC West and North divisions this week...

#1: DENVER BRONCOS (6-0, 2nd overall) - Okay, there can be no denying that the Brnocos are better than anybody expected, and that Josh McDaniels is awesome thus far. What I have a problem with is twofold... First off, those throwback uniforms are tight as fuck and screw anybody who's all retarded and Eurosoccertrashy and like, "ewwwww." Secondly, the AFC West is kind of a shit division that only had one quality team, and that team was coached by Norv Turner, which makes them not so quality ultimately, so even if the Broncos storm into the playoffs on the heels of domineering their division, I question their postseason validity. But man oh man, a Patriots/Broncos rematch between Belichick and McDaniels in the snow would be some sort of a thing, would it not?

#2: PITTSBURGH STEELERS (5-2, 7th overall) - You can't stop the Steelers. They're like one of only four teams that will be good any given year. They might coast and lack hunger and flame out in the playoffs, but they'll be back in the Super Bowl next year. And how the fuck do they keep making monster defensive players out of nowhere like they always do? It's frustrating.

#3: CINCINNATI BENGALS (5-2, 12th overall) - The Bengals are still the Bengals, and no matter how good they are, they are doomed. They lost that defensive tackle Odom dude for one, which doesn't help, but doesn't cripple them. But let me remind you of the last time the Bengals finally achieved, and made it to the playoffs, and on like the first play of the game, Carson Palmer's knee got crushed into dust. That is their destiny, for better or worse, because they are still the Bengals.

#4: BALTIMORE RAVENS (3-3, 14th overall) - Something seems amiss, where the defense is not the murderous wolf it used to be, and they're counting on offense. Doesn't seem like standard Ravens style, and I suggest they start feeding Ray Lewis and Ed Reed gunpowder in their creatine again.

#5: SAN DIEGO CHARGERS (3-3, 15th overall) - Oh man, Norv Turner does it again, ruining a perfectly good thing. Years from now, we will look back on this era of San Diego Chargers football, and collectively go, "Wow, they sure fucking blew it, didn't they?" Remember how Ladainlian Tomlinson was the consensus #1 fantasy dude in the Earth JUST LAST YEAR? Now, he's about four months away from sharing panels with Terrell Davis on the NFL Network.

#6: OAKLAND RAIDERS (2-5, 25th overall) - I have to admit I never actually saw a picture of Tom Cable until like the past week. And let me say, that dude looks like he'd break jaws. I see nothing but high comedy in the Raiders future whenever Al Davis decides to throw Tom Cable under the bus to pretend he's still in control of his faculties.

#7: CLEVELAND BROWNS (1-6, 28th overall) - It is testament to how embarrasing the NFL has become this year in its lower tiers that the Browns have actually won a game. And one in which they only had two complete passes and no touchdowns were scored at that. I think the era of free agency parity is purposely being blown up in our faces this year by the owners to make an uncapped year seem all that more likely, to scare the players, even though I think they'd all be mad to let that happen.

#8: KANSAS CITY CHIEFS (1-6, 29th overall) - At least you got to play the Redskins. As a lifelong Skins fan, let me say, your welcome.

Bud Light Lime

AFFORDABILITY: The Bud Light double deuces flavored with lime are quite affordable, as are all double deuce bottles of American alcohol. And they all fit perfectly between your legs on a ride home, plus stick up just enough for your hand to wrap around like you had a porn star penis, and you feel great about yourself as you enjoy a nice intoxicating beverage on your ride home from whatever it is you do with your days. 4 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: I had bought two of these and left them in my truck for a while, but it got cold outside, which meant they stayed kosher in the truck. Me and my wife had tickets and backstage passes for Mattellica and our boys Lamb of God, and hung out and got tore down, and wandered our way back to our trunk in the grocery store parking lot nearby. (Two days later, we found out some blonde-haired chick got abducted right by where we were drunkenly wandering late at night, which is creepy as fuck.) On the way home, we contemplated roadside endeavors, so I took some back roads to do my little trick where I cut across a ford on a gravel road because that makes me feel like a complete man (a ford is a creek that cuts across a public road in case you be sheltered in the dull-de-sac too deeply). But while we road, I pulled out one of the double deuces and my wife twisted the top off and we shared it. It tasted like ass. It tasted like someone had sucked eight dicks, washed the taste out of their mouth with mouthwash, spit it into a bottle, capped it, and sold it to me at a store as an alcoholic beverage. Basically, it is dick mouthwash. -2 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: Clear sticker label on a clear bottle is some tuned-up Honda bullshit, which is not to disparage that type of lifestyle, because there’s a house nearby where the dude of the family cuts the grass with no shirt on and has barbed wire chest tattoos and the ol’ lady of the family stands around in the front yard talking on the telephone while the kids ride around in toy Escalades, and for some reason that ol’ lady intrigues me, probably because she wears sweat pants all the time and looks like she’d have a hairy yoni, yet she’s not that attractive, at least not when flying by in a broken ass pick-up truck with two years of payments still left on it. Nonetheless, I have a strange habit of finding attraction in odd background type things that no one else would notice. The Bud Light Lime bottle does not kick that style, although I can say, with my personal war colors of lime green and black, the packaging of their Bud Light Lime 12-packs appeals to me, except it leans towards regular lime complemented by white instead of hard neon lime complemented by black like I would personally kick. That woman at that house in the sweatpants who I imagine does not shave her netherworld, she has nothing on my ol’ lady, who is buxom and beautiful and drives me mad just by sitting there staring sideways without noticing me watching. I have always wanted my ol’ lady to have some lime green lingerie, but it has never happened. I imagine if it did, I would explode, like for real, and she’d get to cash out our life insurance policy. I don’t know what it is about lime green, but that’s my shit. 2 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: Dude, it’s owned by Budweiser. Bud doesn’t hire people, it buys them. Darfur refugees have their huts burned down by Budweiser, essentially, which is why the red t-shirt charity thing is so ironic, except most people don’t know that. Budweiser can afford Super Bowl commercials for the very fuck of it, even if the entire world is unemployed and not watching, and they run commercials just for the seven newspapers left to talk about it the next day. Budweiser is an industrial tycoon that runs over Chinese folk and doesn’t care. In America, it sponsors theme parks where roller coasters give our children A.D.H.D. without us knowing by rattling their little brains around in their skulls. Budweiser are Hitler, all day, every day. 0 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: I have absolutely nothing positive to say about this alcoholic beverage. I hope its gimmick dies quickly and goes away. Flavored beer? What the fuck is wrong with this crooked ass world? 0 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 0 & 4/5 STARS!

S14: Worst College Football Teams

So yeah, here's the 14 shittiest college football teams thus far, through the past weekend, as determined by the simple formula of no wins, ties broken by highest average margin of defeat...

#1: TEXAS COLLEGE STEERS (0-8, 46.375 avg. margin of defeat, #1 last week) - The Steers came so close last weekend, only losing 31 to 26 at home against Oklahoma Panhandle State, another notoriously not-that-good team. The Steers have three more shots at erasing the goose egg from their W column, and they have been trending towards a potential victory in recent weeks.

#2: BECKER HAWKS (0-8, 41.750 avg. margin of defeat, #2 last week) - The Hawks lost 37 to 0 to Gallaudet, which is the deaf kid college, and was a football team that only a few years back hadn't won a game in like five years time. Becker's best of their two final chances to win a game might be this coming week hosting Castleton, who never had a college football team until this year.

#3: SOUTHERN VIRGINIA KNIGHTS (0-7, 39.143 avg. margin of defeat, #6 last week) - This NAIA recluse's trip down to Carolina to play at FCS team Gardner-Webb did not go well, as the bus ride home to Buena Vista was after a 65 to 0 drubbing, and helped them shoot up the college football Shit List. Still, their showdown against almost equally as inept Apprentice School is only two weeks away.

#4: ROCKFORD REGENTS (0-7, 39.143 avg. margin of defeat, #3 last week) - Best defensive performance of the year last week against Aurora by Rockford, giving up only 37 points. Their offense only added 0 points though, yet still they actually drop a spot in this week's worst team Shit List. And of three remaining games, in two weeks they travel to play Maranatha Baptist Bible College in yet another potential showdown of reverse magnitude from off of this list.

#5: NEWPORT NEWS APPRENTICE SCHOOL BUILDERS (0-6, 37.500 avg. margin of defeat, #4 last week) - They had last week off, but I found a timeline of their football program's history inside the internets. The best three-year block of their existence was 2005 through 2007, when they went 5-5, 7-3, and 5-5. That's their high watermark.

#6: MARANATHA BAPTIST BIBLE COLLEGE CRUSADERS (0-7, 35.429 avg. margin of defeat, #10 last week) - They climb a few spots up (or down?) this list after giving up a season-high 64 points at Concordia, although they also scored a season-high 14 points. Their game hosting Rockford in two weeks might be their only chance at a W.

#7: ANNA MARIA CATS (0-8, 35.375 avg. margin of defeat, #8 last week) - Lost 48 to 0 at Norwich this past week, and only seem to have one more game scheduled on their initial year of playing the footballs, against the totally deaf Gallaudet University. The sad thing for me personally is that both Anna Maria and Becker are in the Division III Eastern Collegiate Football Conference, yet they don't play each other. Seems unwise that the same small conference could offer, at year's end, two of the remaining unwinning teams in college football.

#8: HIRAM COLLEGE TERRIERS (0-7, 34.714 avg. margin of defeat, unranked last week) - After escaping the Shit List briefly last week, Hiram College stepped back up big time with a 63 to 14 loss to Case Western Reserve on the road. Amos Sutton Hayden would be proud. But look at their helmets... it's like Spuds McKenzie.

#9: NEW MEXICO HIGHLANDS COWBOYS (0-9, 34.333 avg. margin of defeat, #5 last week) - A noble road shoot-out loss to Western New Mexico, 50 to 30, helped the Cowboys climb their way down this list, with only two games remaining on their schedule. Their offensive output last week was more than their previous four games combined.

#10: CULVER-STOCKTON WILDCATS (0-7, 34.286 avg. margin of defeat, #11 last week) - A meager 49 to 7 loss to Benedictine College helped the Wildcats climb a notch this week towards being the most inept program in collegiate football 2009. They actually went winless last year as well, and haven't won a game since October 20, 2007.

#11: DANA VIKINGS (0-8, 33.625 avg. margin of defeat, #7 last week) - Lost 38 to 7 at Hastings College last week, to hang tough on the Shit List, though climbing their way out of it. If you google news search "Dana Vikings" the top news items that show up are how Brock Lesnar must be faking his sickness since he was at the Vikings game the other week.

#12: TRINITY INTERNATIONAL TROJANS (0-9, 33.444 avg. margin of defeat, #13 last week) - The Trojans climb a spot on the back of a 48 to 7 drubbing against Taylor, and with only two weeks left in their NAIA season, could be doomed to a 0.

#13: LOCK HAVEN BALD EAGLES (0-8, 32.750 avg. margin of defeat, unranked last week) - When I did this thing last year, though not weekly, Lock Haven was a presence then, as was their conference rival Cheyney. Both of them have been 0 for the year thus far this year as well, but only now has one of them been losing by enough to crack the Top 14 Shit List, after losing 27 to 0 last week and a 45 to 0 showing the week before. Sadly, Cheyney and Lock Haven have not scheduled each other this year.

#14: IDAHO STATE BENGALS (0-8, 32.000 avg. margin of defeat, #12 last week) - Actually moved away from being the worst a little this week, after a semi-respectable 40 to 12 road loss to Northern Arizona. In two weeks, they host one of the top two teams in the Football Championship Subdivision class of NCAA Division I football, when Montana comes to town. That will probably be ugly.

Gone From This List From Last Week: Kentucky Christian Knights (beat Faulkner at home, 22 to 14), and West Georgia Wolves (beat West Alabama in Georgia, 10 to 9).

Harvest Moon Pumpkin Ale

AFFORDABILITY: My wife pulled in more money than I did this week, and she loves the whole Blue Moon aesthetic, so this was affordable as fuck. She used to love some beer they did, I think a honey brown they had maybe, because we’ve forgotten and bought the Belgian White like 17 times, and every time we do it, we drink it and are like, “Ewwww... this shit is nasty.” But she likes their lime summer or spring beer, and she was raised Mormon, which means they used to stack mad cans of food for Armageddon in the basement, so she is very concerned with how labels look. Sometimes I buy weird shit, like generic butter from an off-brand store, just because I know the label will freak her out. But she digs the Blue Moon labels, so whatever this cost at the store tonight, it wasn’t bad, because it was a Blue Moon beer, which I knew she’d like, and it had pumpkin, which we both like because we are festive thirtysomething with children we like to get in the spirit of things, but also a sex drive we like to ramp up with some alcohol, although I think her cycle might be rolling around, but then again, no shame in my game, I wear my red wings with pride. Anyways, as I looked at nice folks 12-packs to buy at the store with all three of my kids with me and no wife, since she was seeing a client, the cheapest of the nice section 12-packs were narrowed down to Red Stripe, this, and Stella Artois, which really wasn’t one of the cheapest three, but I was trying to talk myself into it. I settled on this because it was different, and I could write about it, thus enabling myself to waste time with internet writing and liver depletion, all at once. Our grand total going into checkout was four Reese’s peanut butter eggs from the Halloween display, a 12-pack of budding fauntleroy beer, and a couple Lifewaters for my kids. They always want Vitamin Waters, and if either Vitamin Water or Lifewater is on sale, I’ll let them get it once in a while. Then we went to the playground and I sat there while they played, and a kid on my soccer team named Carlos ran up, tagged me really hard in the lower back, and then ran off, yelling, “BYE COACH RAVEN!” He missed last week’s game because his family went to the White House for a tour. They don’t even speak english to each other, and they proudly toured the White House. It made me want to take my family, but I’m sure I’ve got some sort of file somewhere up there, and I’d hate to have them dust it off and think about it because I was trying to take my kids to tour the White House. I think I’ll just stick with teaching them politicians are all evil. 5 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: I have enjoyed drinking this smartly tonight and it has filled my bloodstream with a screwed and chopped stumble-swagger. The fall is a great time, with youth soccer where I trick my usual mix of Bad News Bears into kicking size 3 soccerballs in the correct direction, and I finally cut the whole yard, and we have bonfires on the back of the compound, hoping to see meteor showers slice the country sky. Times like this I wish I could play the fiddle like an Irish dude, or at least sing mountain songs, but instead I just freestyle my own specialized nonsense, channeling the thoughts of my ancestors bred into my molecules, triggered by the funk twang of my man Boogie Brown, or the pitter patter of my kids’ across the kitchen’s hardwood floor. We just reactivated the satellite radio in the house, for the NFL games for me and music for the kids and radio for the wife, and it has already driven me outside, back to the camper, because fall is not cold nor is it hot, and I can kick it in the camper free from the main house’s technological advances, but a slew of good records and empty beer bottles and assorted things tacked to the wall and an array of diecast cars and my sunburst picture frame of Waylon the dog and my red wrestling mask made by Sadie and Rosie down in Alabama and my wonderful ass 25 cents Willie Nelson velvet painting all surround me, amongst a ton of other things, and it is an environment that makes my gizzards feel good, so I do my thing, whatever I’ve convinced myself at that moment that thing exactly is. The Harvest Moon Pumpkin Ale seems to not dam that thought flow even slightly, or muddy it up with some bullshit, which is all I ask from my intoxicants. 9 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: A bulbous obscene full moon is rising over a field of pumpkins where someone has left a wheelbarrow full of pumpkins there. First off, I cannot stand when my wife leaves the wheelbarrow just sitting around full of something, because it will sit there, get full of rainwater, and turn into tadpole-welcoming muck, that I have to dump eventually, and it weights 300 pounds, pushing it across the yard, feeling myself making the little snowball of heart attack inside my bloodstream. I was so angerfied by this habit that I stabbed a hole in our wheelbarrow with a deer leg one night underneath a for-real full moon while letting Hawkwind play across the backyard through my speaker sitting on a milk crate covered by a blue tarp. Except that's not true, actually I was mixing up some humus and red clay-heavy soil to plant a couple blueberry bushes, and accidentally stabbed a crack in the wheelbarrow with the shovel, but it was a mighty convenient hole to be sure. Nonetheless, beyond the highly personalized wheelbarrow issue this Blue Moon seasonal ale beer label dredges up inside of me, who the fuck harvests a field of pumpkins with a wheelbarrow? I mean, I've watched Mr. Majestyk nineteen times, and know in my heart it's the greatest Charles Bronson movie ever (except maybe that western where all he does is play the harmonica and fuck people up, including Jack Elam, who is highly underrated as a hipster pop culture reference), and he has a watermelon farm with Salma Hayek as his right hand ol' brown lady, and I have to figure, again in my heart, that a watermelon farm is just like a pumpkin farm, just a month ahead on the calendar, and you don't take a wheelbarrow into the field to harvest pumpkins. You hire a bunch of Mexicans who are friends with your girlfriend and you drive some trucks into the field, and you all harvest up the pumpkins and stack them in a giant three-sided shed, and then get sad when the bad guys come and shoot up your whole harvest with machine guns. And then you kick all their asses. 2 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: I am sure, from its pure prevalance, that Blue Moon Brewing Company is owned by something other than themselves, but I do not know the specifics, nor do I care to look it up. I am paranoid but not vengeful, so if they are owned by somewhere outside of themselves, good for them, because they probably got paid. Often times I wish I had gotten paid, but I hadn’t done anything deserving of a paycheck. It’s a not cool spot to be in, but I get there, and I will look around and be like, “Yo, fuck them, this is me, at least for now.” Anyways, an actual “blue moon” is a far rarer occurence than seeing a 12-pack of this beer at my store (blue moon is second full moon in one month’s time), so I have trouble trusting their drama. But they at least portend to be owned by themselves, just as the actual moon does as we blast missiles into it to see if ice chunks explode off its surface. The fact I can buy them in gas stations positioned conveniently off the interstate makes me distrust their wholesome We’s-a-Tiny-Brewery chilly chillness though. 2 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: I can’t complain. I mean I could, but who would listen? That’s the type of shit people say at work together. But honestly, I have no complaints for this beer, although I have no ringing endorsements of it either. It is a beer that most likely in my life I would buy at the store on the way to a get-together for my wife to drink while she talks to her friends, and I would try to find a dude amongst the men who didn’t annoy the fuck out of me, and there’d be one dude who fit that bill, and we’d stand around and drink beer at a rapid rate together, uncomfortably, because neither of us truly knew if the other was a stupid fuck like every other dude at the party. Eventually we’d know each other as solid bros, but by that point, we’d be so sick of all the lying-ass men with soft psychological tendencies that you couldn’t trust to twist a spark plug in a car that we’d stand around together quiet until late at night when we’d trade stories of when we were either addicted to meth or did a bunch of acid. But it would be the end of the night and time to round up the breaking down kids who should’ve gone to bed four hours ago, and the other dudes, all soft in the personality, would uncomfortably be standing around pretending they knew a third Hank Williams even existed. 2 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 4 STARS!

S14: Best College Football Teams

So let us go through the teams that domineer lesser opposition on the often unbalanced field of the collegiate football.

#1: SIOUX FALLS COUGARS (8-0, 47.625 avg. margin of victory, #1 last week) - NAIA's top-ranked team was not challenged at all hosting Dakota Wesleyan, and they stomped through another week of the schedule, 59 to 7. They won't be tested until the last regular season game of the week against conference rival and fellow small college powerhouse Morningside.

#2: MORNINGSIDE MUSTANGS (7-0, 40.429 avg. margin of victory, #2 last week) - Closest game of the year for Morningside, only beating Midland Lutheran, 38 to 27, which was actually a strong comeback as they were down 21 to 6 at half on the road, but the pride of bumfuck Iowa came through yet again, to remain undefeated, hold down their #5 NAIA ranking, and try to set up the showdown with Sioux Falls.

#3: LINDENWOOD LIONS (7-0, 40.000 avg. margin of victory, #3 last week) - A week off for the Lions, and the team they line up against this week, Benedictine College, is not that good at all. Not much change at the top of the Bully List this week.

#4: MONMOUTH FIGHTING SCOTS (8-0, 39.250 avg. margin of victory, #4 last week) - A solid 51 to 14 win on the road at Lake Forest keeps the Fighting Scots as the most super destructive of opposition in NCAA Division III football.

#5: ST. XAVIER COUGARS (9-0, 36.333 avg. margin of victory, #7 last week) - The NAIA Cougars set a record with most offensive yards ever in a game and fucking whoop ass on Iowa Wesleyan, 66 to 6, and move up a couple notches in this useless thing I do on Monday nights.

#6: WISCONSIN-WHITEWATER WARHAWKS (7-0, 34.714 avg. margin of victory, #5 last week) - Beat Wisconsin-River Falls, 38 to 14, as they continue their march through the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference on their way to the NCAA Division III playoffs. Except, the team they play this week on the road, Wisconsin-Stevens Point, is undefeated in the WIAC as well.

#7: WITTENBERG TIGERS (7-0, 31.857 avg. margin of victory, #6 last week) - A solid 28 to 7 win over Carnegie-Mellon keeps them undefeated, but the two-time Division III national champions slide ever so slightly down the Bully List.

#8: CASE WESTERN RESERVE SPARTANS (7-0, 31.571 avg. margin of victory, #11 last week) - A strong crushing of Hiram College, 63 to 14, boosts the Spartans three spots up the Bully List, and also, as you'll see tomorrow if you actually look at all this stupid shit I do retardedly with my sparse free time, helped Hiram College get back on the Shit List.

#9: WESLEY WOLVERINES (7-0, 31.000 avg. margin of victory, #8 last week) - Wesley could only beat Webber, 34 to 7, at home, and slipped a spot here from last week. I have actually invested enough time in these stupid things thus far this year that I'm excited to follow the Division III playoffs (as well as the NAIA ones) once they start in a few weeks.

#10: MOUNT UNION PURPLE RAIDERS (7-0, 30.857 avg. margin of victory, unranked last week) - The perennial Division III powerhouse, and current #1 team, that at one point had won like 105 out of 108 games or some ridiculous shit like that, finally cracks the list this year on the strength of their 56 to 0 rout of Wilmington College at home last weekend. Mount Union is to NCAA's Division III as USC, Florida, and Texas are to Division I if you combined all three teams together. Mount Union hardly ever loses. Whiteboys got game.

#11: NORTH ALABAMA LIONS (9-0, 29.889 avg. margin of victory, #10 last week) -
Riding the high of their first ever #1 ranking in Division II football, the Lions stormed into Valdosta State last week and roughed them up, 62 to 27, to hold down the top of the hill in NCAA second class... well third if you count the Football Championship Subdivision as the second class.

#12: TEXAS LONGHORNS (7-0, 28.286 avg. margin of victory, #13 last week) - By virtue of their 41 to 7 ass-stomping of Missouri, they solidify their spot on this list as the most dominant of college football's major programs, and then have to hit the road to defend that crown this week at Oklahoma State.

#13: OTTAWA BRAVES (7-0, 27.429 avg. margin of victory, unranked last week) - Another NAIA team cracks the countdown on the back of a 54 to 13 win over St. Mary's, which was just enough following their 79 to 6 win over Tabor two weeks ago, to make the Bully List. Plus, they are #8 in the NAIA rankings.

#14: CINCINNATI BEARCATS (7-0, 27.000 avg. margin of victory, unranked last week) - The by default best team in the depleted Big East Conference sneaks into the last spot this week after stomping Louisville, 41 to 10 .

Gone From This List From Last Week: St. Francis Cougars (lost to Missouri S&T, 37 to 39), Florida Gators (only beat Mississippi State, 29 to 19, second close win in a row, thus decreasing their margin of victory average), Lambuth Eagles (beat Bethel, 19 to 16, and slipped off the Bully List radar).

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - October '09

This is the October J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown, for American and Worldwise blog readers. J.J. Krupert is the name my gay ass iPod shuffle has, and I am ashamed I lower cased the “i” and upper cased the “P”, pure branded cattle action on my part. But what I be doing, and you can click the tags below to see the history, is list the 13 most played songs inside my cybertronic tiny music machine that plugs through a cord into my truck stereo and makes the music blare out through raggedy speakers with constant tambourine sounds because I busted up my tweeters with some old school DJ Magic Mike. The rules are simple: I data-tize my gayPod, subtracting the skips from the plays, and list out with commentary the top 13 songs, only one track per featured artist, and once it gets talked upon under this thematic gimmick in this tiny corner of the blogosphere, I never speak upon that song again. But honestly, between you and me, whatever songs leftover on my gayPod that would’ve beat out the last song on this month’s list, I give an extra star in ratings, and if it makes the list it gets a star in ratings, so then my gayPod has retarded star ratings to go with everything else that no one else sees but since this is the internet, I like to pretend my opinions matter. Nonetheless, here be this month’s top firteeny...
#1: “Turn the Page” by The Streets - I have always wanted to like this white British rapper, but never found a song I liked. Some internet dude (what up Tree Beats!) hooked me up with a file download, and I dled it, but didn’t like none of it. Then at some point, I randomly decided, let me try again. So I did. And this was the one song that came up pretty fast, while my 10-year-old daughter was kicking it, and she loved it, and I loved it. I put it on her gayPod, and loaded up the whole The Streets CD on my gayPod, and we share a computerized docking center, so the fact she’s played this song about four times a day has ran it the fuck straight up the charts. I’ve enjoyed it, but eventually deleted all other songs from this dude, except maybe “Geezers Need Excitement” or some darts song or something. But this is easily his best track ever. In fact, it lead to a nice homeschool lesson with my 10-year-old daughter about the power of metaphors and what they insinuate with The Streets’ line about “my crew laughs at your rhubarb and custard rhymes”. She wondered what that meant, so I explained it all to her, and she’s writing a book right now about a nation of sheep ruled by a self-appointed President named B.A. Obama who talks big game but kinda splits and leaves everybody stuck in the mud, literally, so they cut the barbed wire and run up the creek to the top of the mountain, or something like that. My point is, I tried to turn that one line into some homeschool power and get the kid writing some seriously heavy rhymes at a young age. I am the rap Earl Woods.
#2: “Weight of the World” by 1000 Feathers - This has become my favorite lo-fi self-recorded screwed hobo rap done in the camper, with the hook co-opted from an old Charles Manson song, and the rhymes straight self-confidence lacking transient dirtface rhymes. “Longhaired ponytail running with the rat race, metabolism slowed down smiling through a fat face...” that’s my shit, literally.
#3: “Rollerskates (screwed)” by Steel Pulse - You know, nothing makes me sadder that DJ Screw overdosed young than this single solitary track off of a Screwtape. Tony Touch made many mixtapes, and pumped the hip hop reggae, helping to push and create a new form of music called reggaeton in NYC and all. Shit, I’ve been listening to Tego Calderon like a mug lately. But listening to this one track off of some random Screw tape that I couldn’t even tell you what it was, it makes me sad Screw wasn’t around long enough to do a whole reggae screwed and chopped tape. This shit is the best shit ever. Ever. I don’t necessarily like reggae, and enjoy dub, but there’s something about the slurry effect of screwed and chopped reggae that’s so different than straight dub, and it makes me want to tap into the half-left bottle of hydrocodone in the spice cabinet, sitting behind the Advil and unopened bottle of dollar store garlic powder.
#4: “Batty Boyz” by MF Doom - Honestly, I’ve played the fuck out of some MF Doom, but this has gotten mad play because it is my oldest daughter’s favorite Doom song. I play it, pretending she doesn’t understand all the gay references, but she’s old enough I know she probably does. She knows Santa ain’t real and the only reason the Tooth Fairy forgot her little sister’s tooth one night is because me and the wife fumbled our memory one Saturday night. She knows what’s up, but she’s at that tweener age where I, as a parent, pretend she doesn’t know what’s up, and she pretends the same, for my benefit, and eventually, hopefully, in a couple years, we’ll meet on middle ground and be honest as fuck with each other.
#5: “Roll Gypsy Roll” by Lynyrd Skynyrd - Speaking of my oldest kid, this is the song she got her goes-by name from. As she gets older, she hates what she calls “hoedown” music. And yet, that’s where her name comes from. Me and my wife used to ride road out of Richmond, splitting an 18-pack of Budweiser, letting the Skynyrd jams blast out of her Jeep Cherokee, either heading out route 5 east into Varina or south down 60 into Powhatan/Cumberland. Good times, and I’m proud to have a kid named after a Lynyrd Skynyrd song, especially since we didn’t name her “Freebird” or “Breeze” which technically would’ve been a J.J. Cale song, although J.J. Cale is about as stimulating as watching grasshoppers fuck. J.J. Cale was screwed and chopped before screwed and chopped existed, which is why probably the only time I’m like, “Whoa! J.J. Cale is awesome!” is when my head is grown tall with grasses fertilized by painkiller pills.
#6: “The Sad Chicken” by Leroy & the Drivers - Off of a whole passel of Sound of Funk comps I co-opted from inside the internet’s intestines, with the help of my boy Sicknote from Encyclonettia Britannica, and this has easily been my favorite track. I think it’s off Volume 3 of that Sound of Funk series (which most likely is obscure as fuck), and probably having chickens, my Australorps, that look sad because the main flock accepts them not and they are forced to be the subjugated domain of the buff orpington rooster called Dixie, and I know they’re just chickens and expected to peck my backyard into garden beds and lay eggs for my breakfast, but I feel bad. The one Australorp (I can no longer tell the difference between my two Australorps, named Swagger Britches and Fancy Pants) just seems so distraught at times, even flying out the coop today because I had the bird netting pulled back to catch the loose guinea hen yesterday. I had the door opened to go back in, and chased her to that opening, but she stood there, right by my leg, pretending she wanted away but waiting for me to grab her, which I’ve never done, even in the pen, so I did, and she BUH-GAWKED a loud buh-gawk, but held close in my hands, and cuddled as I stroked her back and neck. A sad chicken indeed.
#7: “Mundian to Bach Ke” by Labh Janjua & Panjabi MC - I had wanted this song for years, but honestly never knew who actually did it, and then got a downloading Rough Guides to... kick where the world music alternative to Putamayo was on my internet music stealing brain, because rather than the normal easy-going, white people be happy doing the double slide step hippie shuffle dance party type world music you usually hear, it was actual compilations with the whole spectrum of something or another. I knew this because the Rough Guide to African Rap featured Reggie Rockstone prominently. But nonetheless, I jacked the Rough Guide to Bhangra from inside the internet’s back pocket when it wasn’t looking, and as I played it for the first time on my wife’s super Ipod, it had that song I had been a-wanting from a while back, meaning this song, with the Knight Rider bassline and a Hindu dude kicking his rapidly syllabic Hindu stylings. The whole thing I played over and over and it made me swing cast iron frying pans over my head like The Iron Sheik before breakfast and teach my kids that running circles around the playhouse in the backyard before the sun comes up is a good way to work the negative ionic charges out of your knee and elbow joints first thing in the morning. I have no idea what they are rapping about but I roughly translate it as “Raven is so awesome his chickens lay five eggs a day, work is nothing when it rains but with the sun outside and play, three daughters world order pretends it’s new but it’s same, living chilling because mack millian is the earth given last name” and so on.
#8: “Lately I’ve Been Thinking Too Much Lately” by David Allan Coe - Just a good ass DAC song that should be tattooed on people’s upper backs in Chinese calligraphy except it wasn’t included on the Ten Years For the Record greatest hits compilation, which is a shame.
#9: (the “the ol’ lady” beat) by Blue Globe Beats - Another Josh Boogie Brown Blue Globe hook-up that I’ve been pumping on my J.J. Krupert, and it’s a bouncy ass wide open song that makes big assed women press their rear ends against the windshield while you are sitting inside trying to be discreet about smoking a bowl through an old can of beer with holes poked into it.
#10: “Dixie Chicken” by Little Feat - Our chicken Dixie is most definitely a rooster and has just started this week to try and kick a crow, and it gets all Peter Brady style halfway through, and when he does it, our other rooster Arishkagol kicks a big fat gangsta ass crow while standing on top of their 3-gallon waterer, and sometimes my oldest kid can crow and get the two of them flapping wings at each other. It’s fun stuff. Personally, there’s about seven Little Feat songs I love more than this one, especially “Willin’”, but I have a chicken now named after this song, sort of, so I guess it gets extra play. Dixie is a bitch of a rooster though, and I’ve only held him once, which upsets me because there’s nothing I like more than strolling around the yard holding one of my cocks in my hand. That’s not just a pun, because I really do like strolling around the yard holding my male chickens, with their gangstaly curved tail feathers. Did you know that west coast gangbangers, when they used to break their fingers to make extra-curved gang signs, actually learned that habit from watching the extra-curved tail feathers of fighting roosters in underground chickenfights? Raymond Washington, who was one of the original Crips in the late ‘70s, was a huge fan of cockfights. In fact, the ghetto habit of having pigeons is a watered down remnant of having gamecocks, once cockfighting became mostly illegal in America. For real.
#11: “You Don’t Know the Life” by The Moving Sidewalks - In my internet searching for rare but real bullshit, I came across an album by The Moving Sidewalks, which was Billy Gibbons band before ZZ Top, and it was a good album albeit a very Jimi Hendrix-inspired album, and many of the song were eventually taken off my gayPod one by one, but this track survived to this day, and eventually made my dorkrod blogospheric music nerd monthly list. I can tell you that there are few musical people on this planet that I think of as highly as Billy Gibbons, and it pains me to my soul that most folks only think of ZZ Top in a “Legs” and “Sharp Dressed Man” 1980s synthesized funny video sense, because the ‘70s ZZ Top shit is some of the greatest rock-n-roll to ever be known by drunk people trying to have sex without protection.
#12: “Just to Get a Rep (instrumental)” by DJ Premier - From off of some sort of instrumental collection I collected, but getting more play than other famous Premo tracks like “Above the Clouds” or whatever else. I used to make these mixtapes with one side of one thing and the second side of another thing, and it was my favorite songs from my record collection, like one was the Rolling Cooper Mainline, with Rolling Stones cokehead classics and the other side was everything that could’ve been on Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits if it was a double CD instead of one; and then there was an AC ZZ Mainline with AC/DC trash and ZZ Top trash. But my favorite of all these themed two-sided mixtapes on actual cassette that I played when I owned my grandfather’s Toyota Tercel that I looked like a big old 230 pound clown driving was the Black Premier Mainline, which was one 45 minute side of Black Sabbath jambos and one 45 minute side of DJ Premier produced instrumentals. I didn’t own the “Just to Get a Rep” single then, nor do I now, but I remember going to Boogie Brown’s when he lived alongside the national forest in a silver jellybean camper years ago, and he wasn’t there, so I pumped the fuck out of my Premo side of my Black Premier Mainline mixtape bonafide and drank upon the beer in my car and it was a great thing to piss on the side of a mountain while the remix instrumental to “Ex Girl to the Next Girl” blared from a shitty maroon Tercel, and when Boogie Brown showed up, he declared, “LOUNGIN’!” because that’s exactly what it was.
#13: “Personality Crisis” by New York Dolls - This is a song that is great. The first New York Dolls LP is an LP that is great. It is something that if I had a son, I would hope he could one day understand the beauty of. Being I only have daughters, I hope they never know guys who like this type of music, unless they turn the guy onto this music. As a man who understands all too well the male brain, I would prefer my daughters be ahead of the curve when it comes to menipulation. I don’t want them to be biyotches, but I want them to understand dudes are always in one way or another in conquer mode. If they can use my New York Dolls LP played on cheap turntable to confuse dudes with their unexpected awesomeness to delay sexual interactions once they are grown or at least almost grown, then I will be a happy man.

Kennebunkport Pumpkin Ale

AFFORDABILITY: Trader Joe’s is a white people favorite because you can eat organic on a budget. In fact, when I went by there the other day, I decided it would be a good idea to create a brand of foods called EconOrganics, because white people want to be as healthy as possible for as affordable as possible, even if they’re eating unhealthy pre-processed factory produced foods that are organic only in the sense they were made by a company that could afford to pay the governmental taxes to get through the proper red tapes for the legal label of “organic”. Anyways, I love spending my food stamp money at Trader Joe’s, but only for certain things, like Ak-Mak crackers, frozen berries and papaya chunks, Italian or Greek olive oil, grade B maple syrup, crystallized ginger pieces, and a six-pack or two of Trader Joe’s fake ass beers, completely made up out of nowhere to pretend like it’s some old ass brewery that’s been around forever but somehow, in 2009, only Trader Joe’s has it. The Kennebunkport Pumpkin Ale is just that, and in this season of the pumpkin ales being paraded out of varying qualities but usually high prices, slapping three of these into a make your own six-pack with them clocking in at less than a buck a bottle ain’t bad. (Also props to Trader Joe’s, even though their beer selection is a fraud and small on top of that, for doing a make your own 6-pack pricing philosophy of charging you 1/6th a sixer per the beers you choose rather than like $8.99 a make-your-own, where the store gets over like a motherfucker most of the time.) 5 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: I only bought two of them in my make-your-own deal, but they went down easy as diluted apple juice in a quart mason jar with four ice cubes sitting on the counter for five minutes to cool it down like New Edition when I was ten-years-old. Next time I am in the fake health food store where they ring the bell all the goddamned time as a gimmick and it smells like soybean death tissue yet the white people aren’t quite so scowl-faced as at Whole Foods, probably because they are younger and broker and many lack the aspirations to the change the world that baby boomers have been cursed with, I shall buy more of this alleged beer, should I make it there again before the Halloween beer cycle is replaced by the Christmas beer cycle. What the fuck man? It’s the first week of October and I went into a Home Depot to pay my credit card bill and steal two Norton paint stripping attachments for my grinder, being my credit card payment barely got it below the limit, and there was Christmas shit out and about already. I know times are hard and the economy is bad, but fuck this making Christmas season three months of the year bullshit. That’s a quarter of the year. At least when it was a Jesus holiday, they only asked for a couple weeks in essence, but one day specifically. Capitalist people be squeezing that shit harder than the Christians squeezed it from the pagans. Disgusting. I might go Muslim, so long as I can be drinking and drugging Muslim like Five Percenters, thanks to my fellow Virginian Clarence 13X. In fact, I think I’m gonna speak in supreme mathematics all day tomorrow, breaking shit down syllabically into Dr. Yacub’s trickery. You know, Dr. Yacub was actually a Chinaman, not a white guy. For real. It’s in the Bhagavad-Gita. 5 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: It is a festive, happy label, with a pumpkin patch in the background, and some weird public stock wooden bar with a vine grown over it and what I'm guessing is a barrel of beer hanging from that by some chain. And very subtle behind the colored things I aforementioned is a slight grey and white background of a tilled field where you know them bright, colorful pumpkins came from. It makes my heart warm like I built a fire in there with dried lucust saplings as the fuel. 5 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: It is a confusing thing because they are most likely a front company for cheap fake alternative beers for the cheap fake alternative crowd that shops inside a Trader Joe’s, but on the high label part it says Kennebunkport Brewing Company, but then on the side it says “brewed by Pugsley Brewing LLC, Portland, Maine” so it is hard to know where their hat rests. And it lurks in the back of my brain that the Bush family compound was outside of Kennebunkport as well. I worked one summer up in Maine, but it was rural back road ghetto ass Maine, where we raked big buckets of blueberries for like $4 a bin if we were lucky, and none of us were local so we cashed our meager paychecks at the liquor store after the bank in Cherryfield chased us out, which was convenient because when you only make $43 for half a week’s worth of work, it’s nice to blow more than half of it on two cases of beer, put half a tank of gas in your boy’s Hyundai, and buy a bag of rice and ten cans of beans and hope that holds until next meager ass paycheck. But I am a trusting individual, like when the guy I rode up with to Maine got pulled over for riding the tail of another car in Dover-Foxcroft, Maine, and he looked at me and said, “Raven, I don’t even have my license.” He got put in jail, and I took his car and hung out the night, riding to Bangor to call three people collect to find someone to Western Union me some bail money to get his ass out, and then some local rednecks threw a 40 ounce bottle at me in the Dover-Foxcroft two block downtown, and I slept on the side of the road in the other dude’s car, half awake, with a knife under my arm, open, expecting to have local funny-talking rednecks show up and try to Easy Rider my ass. Next morning, I bail the other dude out and he had a nice night’s sleep, a shower, and watched TV, plus got a bacon and eggs breakfast, and we drove home, and we never got along ever since. He never even paid me back the bail money, and ripped me off on a bag of weed once. So if you know a fake ass Zen Buddhist motherfucker from Suffolk, Virginia, named Noah who used to drive a red Hyundai, yo, don’t trust that dude. But the point is I give fake ass Maine beer the same benefit of doubt I gave fake ass hippie kid Noah, and Kennebunkport Pumpkin Ale never owed me $120 for the rest of our lives. 4 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: Not only did I have no problem with this beer, I actually would actively pursue it again. Mostly lately, my ultimate goal is to be wearing one of my two pairs of overalls with no other clothes on, especially socks or shoes, because socks are so stifling, so tight on the ankles and crushing your toes with claustrophobic Hitlerisms. And it gets even better if I can kick it in said overalls with the side buttons undone, not because I’m trying to be all, “Look at my penis!” but more like just laid back and chilling. I wasn’t raised with religion, but I did go to church with my grandma like two or three times, which was enough to be ashamed of my naked body, so I’m not trying to get all exhibitionistical on yall. But kicking it in my overalls and nothing else makes me feel like a beer bottle should be in my hand. With Buffalo Bill’s Pumpkin Ale getting all high-falutiney and expensive, if you can even find it, it makes me want to just get a whole shit ton of this Kennebunkport Pumpkin Ale, which is not as good as the Buffalo Bill, but it’s better than all the other overpriced pumpkin ales combined, because it remembers the simple fact that you are supposed to be like pumpkin pie, not like thick hops with a taste of nutmeg. I hope when my food stamp card refreshes on tha 1st of tha Month that they still be having this brand of fake for-real beer at the Trader Joe’s in evil Short Pump, Virginia, because I will use my for-real money to buy some of it, and I will snack on Ak-Mak crackers on my ride home. 6 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 5 STARS!

Peroni Nastro Azzurro

AFFORDABILITY: Dude, in the grand scheme of things, none of this beer is truly affordable on my part, and I should be ashamed of myself. 0 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: Straight up, and this may be because my wife and daughters drink that fancy carbonated water bullshit, but this here allegedly Italian beer was okay for me, and it had the taste of slight carbonation, like someone had poured a ginger ale in Yuengling Light. I do not mind that, though I would not go out of my way for that. Italia is not exactly known for their beer, though I'm not exactly known for giving a fuck either. 2 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: It’s got all Italian words and looks like something that would wrap around deli meat. I have no problem with that, especially if it’s either hard or genoa salami. We traveled home through Pennsylvania last year and stopped at a big ass store up there, and as a Southern ass whiteboy, I was impressed by the deli counter of a place where white people still have ethnicity. I’m not no proud ass white guy who would go to jail and tattoo “100% WHITEBOY” on his forearm or anything, but it’s nice to see white people who still know what their flavor is, rather than the Southern-American mutt like myself. Those types, knowing their family history, tend to make better deli meats and sausages and all as well, which is really what motivated my concern most anyways. I don’t give a fuck about history or heritage; I just want some good ass food to eat. Yet you have to be careful, because it just doesn’t mix easily as you want. I have encountered a couple Thai-Mexican restaurants in my spirals, and they always seem to suck. Thai food is great, and Mexicans are the greatest mixed breed underclass the western hemisphere has ever known, yet the two food cultures mixed together don’t go well. It’s like soul food and health food. If you see a “soul food” restaurant that brags about tofu BBQ, that’s bad news. But if it brags about fried chicken, that’s good, especially if they misspell it as “fryed”. 3 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: Oh man, the sideways top of the bottle label says this part I’d expect: “Peroni beer imported by Birra Peroni Internazionale”, which makes perfect sense, except then it claims “Eden, NC” as its home. North Carolina? Eden, North Carolina? I think I saw wrestling there one time, or drag racing, or something. That’s my homeland, Piedmont North Carolina/Virginia, the part where the factories have plywood windows or they manufacture socks, and the stores have a dirty feel but it’s comforting. The fact that part of the Earthball imports an Italian beer makes me proud of it, though the beer ain’t all that perfect for my current life. Still though, 4 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: It is what it is. I can’t feel proud of it, nor can I talk shit upon its name. Mostly I try to think of the Dominic Whatever dude who played Junior Soprano when I drink it because one Sunday night, on the third digital PBS channel that plays international type things, they had an Italian movie that I carbon dated from visual keys to be about 1982 with that Dominic Junior Soprano dude in it, speaking Italian only, and he looked exactly the same as he did in the HBO series, just maybe slightly less wrinkled. 3 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 2 & 2/5 STARS!

Friday Love/Hate

I love having very un-country music like the Tego Calderon I stole from inside the internets the other day, pumping on my backyard speaker that's covered with a tarp, although the tarp is getting a little ragged, and having the music pumping and walking around my big back yard with its various contraptions of passing eyeball attraction, in a pair of overalls with no shirt on even though it's October but warm so the ladybugs are bouncing off my goddamned arms, messing with my chickens. We had caught and repenned four of the five guineas, but one was on the outs still, and apparently he was king guinea of their little flock (aka Tony), so for a couple days, they've been all out of wack. But at least they weren't disrupting the chicken flock, and their egg-laying action. Today, I had decided I'd had enough of the guineas being split apart and making that damned guinea noise, so I set up a piece of bird netting against the chicken tractor, with a scrap piece of plywood against one corner, knowing I could walk around the tractor, with the loose guinea walking around ahead of me, trying to stay with the other four inside. Once he got to the plywood wall, he'd be like, "What the fuck?" because guineas are not smart, and then he'd flutter around, trying to fly through the chicken wire into the tractor contraption, and get tangled up in bird netting, I'd grab an edge, fold it over, and then try to figure out how to untangle his ass. And it took a couple goes, but the third time he got ensnared, I wrestled him into submission, and worked his little retarded turkey looking ass back out of the netting, and put him in the tractor with the other four. Now they can get to laying the groundwork for next year's garden, and make theirselves useful for something other than eating all the goddamned scratch and shitting in their watering can.

I hate the tightness of finances I've dug myself into right now. Life truly is a bitch, and then you die, but I'd like to work a little something more into the in between part. Money-making activites drain me, because the things I've got experience to make money with, they suck the life out of me. Seriously. I'm a coughing ass bitch with foreign particles built up in my lungwings now, plus my knees feel like I travelled the roads as an American indy Hayabusa for a few years. I figure, at the age of 36, certain parts of my body are working like a 49-year-old. But not my yoshi. As solid as sixteen, bro. My brain is too sensitive and feels the pain that it shouldn't think twice at, but my libido is strong. This is because, no matter how stressful the day is, I make a daily practice of thinking of a sexual situation as I go to sleep at night. I don't remember my dreams, so maybe I have awesome sexual dreams every night of my life, but mostly I just think real hard upon as I go to sleep, in the hopes I will wake up and live like Tom Byron all day long. And if Tom Byron got the AIDS in one of the assorted porn industry STD scandals, then I don't want my Tom Byron day to be like that one. I want it to be one in the '80s, when women still had hair on theyselves and a guy could wear longhair and not be required by social law to have some strange sculpted doohickey facial hair.

Redskins 2-4 Positives/Negatives Metasciences Recap

(Once again, this be double posted here and at the amazingly painful Armchair Linebacker blog.)

It doesn’t get any worse this, literally, because when I set up this metascientifical analysis gimmick the beginning of the year, I told myself, “Hey dude,” because that’s how I talk to myself in the mirror, “hey dude, if the Redskins rip and run off a crazy start to the year like you know they just might, don’t ever let yourself not have at least one negative player in your write-up, because balance is always there, even if it doesn’t seem so. And if things go bad like you know they probably will, don’t ever let it not have one positive point in your write-up, because even in the middle of a pile of shit will sometimes be a psychedelic mushroom, bro.” So after that game last weekend, the mockery of the nation, where even The Onion is piling on the Redskins, I slid it one degree south, for 1 positive/1 even/7 negative, and it won’t go lower, no matter how low it gets. In fact, to be honest, at this point I think I am going to hold onto my current serious analysis through next week’s game (hopefully including a game diary of the Monday night one against the Eagles, which might be shaping up to be the ugliest thing in years for Skins fans, like Eagles fans might rape our women and we’ll be stunned into staying medium while they leave with our kids in alternate black Bryon Westbrook jerseys), but after the bye, as we have the perfect storm for the most dysfunctional football season of NFL football in my adult life, I might spin the positive and negative slants to cover who is helping this train wreck wreck more hilariously. I mean, what else can I look forward to as a Redskins fan? Dan Snyder’s young and healthy and rich and unflinching. I might as well get some black comedy out of it.
Anyways, on to last week’s game talkage...
1ST DEGREE POSITIVE: ANDRE CARTER - It is often hyped by the NFL Hype Machine how Albert Haynesworth might not have 39 sacks and 215 tackles at the end of the year, but he makes everybody else around him better. I have noticed Andre Carter putting QBs into the turf with more regularity this year, that’s for sure, and he’s become the imposing presence he was supposed to be whenever he was getting overnights at Dan Snyder’s mansion and rides in the Redskins One helicopter (they actually call it that... even as a lifelong Redskins fan, I’ve got to say that’s stupid as fuck). But what I’ve also noticed is just as often as not, these dominating plays are made while Haynesworth is on one knee on the sideline gasping for breath as he leans on his helmet.
EVEN: CHRIS COOLEY - Cooley got his last weekend, and I feel for dude for having to be loyal to such a retarded franchise. He’d be positive, but obviously when you are the laughingstock of professional football as a collective team, things skew negative.
1ST DEGREE NEGATIVE: JACK KENT COOKE’S CHILDREN - You know the fucked up thing, I started outlining this Sunday night while trying to detoxify myself of the traces of pneumonia trying to sneak into my lungs after fighting off the swine flu, and I was like, “Fuck it man, I’m gonna blame the kids of Jack Kent Cooke for not keeping this team in their control, stupid greedy fuckers.” Then, on Wednesday, there’s a story in the Washington Post about how John Kent Cooke was so bummed he didn’t get the team, how he hates Dan Snyder, and the horrors his father would have felt were he to see all this. It’s a long ass article and I would link it, but fuck it man, the Washington Post has gone to shit and I still shell out a buck a day for their print version and they fill it with crap like twitter comments along the top of the page or dumb shit like that. If you are competing with the internet, probably the best way to fight that is not to mimic the internet but in a really tiny tiny dose. Stupid fuckers. But the gyst of the article is that Jack Kent Cooke wanted to fund a charitable trust and felt he couldn’t afford to do that without selling the team to avoid inheritance taxes and shit, and he was banking on his son getting an investment group to buy it, and they were close, but Dan Snyder did some shady bitch shit and snagged the team. Of course, this was all from John Kent Cooke’s perspective, so it’s probably as skewed as my analysis, but I’m down for believing it. I read it in a newspaper so it has to be true. But Sonny Jurgensen also said that he thought if Jack Kent Cooke thought his son could run the team, he would’ve gave him the team.
2ND DEGREE NEGATIVE: ALBERT HAYNESWORTH - Haynesworth had a monster game against the Chiefs, and had me contemplating giving him some daps. But then there he was pulling a Randy Moss bitch nigga move and jogging off the field to the locker room before the game was even over, in a huff because the rest of the team didn’t play as good as he did. I might buy that if this wasn’t the first game with the Redskins he’s actually played that hard in. You can’t show up for the first time fully committed in week six and expect to get credit for being some sort of team leader in motivational ethics. Supposedly, he was even speechifying his teammates in the locker room after the game. Fucking dumb ass.
3RD DEGREE NEGATIVE: TODD COLLINS - Might as well go ahead and throw the career back-up under the bus now since he played just as pathetically as Jason Campbell for half the game (albeit at a much better price). And to be down at the end of the game, needing a touchdown, and get sacked in your own end zone... not even Jason Campbell is that bad.
4TH DEGREE NEGATIVE: MALCOLM KELLY - This is one of those things that is also skewed by events. I mean, just because most other teams considered this guy a medical red flag and wouldn’t have drafted him at all, much less in the 2nd round, why should I expect Malcolm Kelly to perform like a high 2nd round draft pick at WR? I am almost giving Snyder/Cerrato credit and validation by assuming Kelly should actually be doing what they told me he’d do. But at the same time, whether a 2nd round pick or 6th round pick, you have to have some fire, and Malcolm Kelly has not shown fire at all in his two years here. But I can’t fault the guy for coming. If someone told me they’d pay me $50 an hour to do something I’m probably not qualified to do and wouldn’t have felt I deserved but $25 an hour to do anyways, I wouldn’t say no either.
5TH DEGREE NEGATIVE: JIM ZORN - This will be the last time I speak badly of Jim Zorn. He was brought in to do a job he couldn’t properly do, a stopgap in time until Snyder felt he could convince a Head Coaching heavyweight to come to D.C. and save the team. After the game, he gets his play-calling duties snagged, immediately, and probably should’ve stabbed Vinny Cerrato with his own nose bone at that point, used the blood to smear war paint on his face, and gone into rabid pit bull mode on Dan Snyder himself. But he didn’t, knowing if he quit, his last paycheck was his last paycheck. He came back Monday morning, answered the media questions that someone else probably should’ve had to answer, totally emasculated, knowing that Dan Snyder doesn’t have much, but he does have money, and Zorny might as well get as much of that out of this shitty situation as he can before he’s told to pack his bags. Plus, if he’s fired, he gets even more of it. You are a funny dude, Jim Zorn, and just like last week I said I would talk shit on Jason Campbell anymore, this is my last time speaking negatively of you. Good luck in your future endeavors, especially the ones in the coming weeks while still in D.C.
6TH DEGREE NEGATIVE: VINNY CERRATO - Fuck you, you piece of shit. I wish you had tried to take my play-calling duties after a game. I would’ve made you know what it feels like to be a woman. You stupid bitch. (Note to all women: I don’t hate women, or use sex in place of maintaining power over someone. I am basically referring to a jail mentality where weaker men with less heart and fight are dominated by stronger, more passionate men, and then sex is used as a psychologically crushing final blow to the weaker part of the interaction. In fact, usually I only use the word “bitch” in regards to men I’d have animosity-laced sex with, to teach them a listen, and never in regards to an actual woman. You are noble and beautiful creatures, surely created by the Goddess herself, and I would never disparage you as I would this Vinny Cerrato guy. Come by the house and watch a football game with us; I’ll explain some of the nuisances to you, and you’ll understand.)
7TH DEGREE NEGATIVE: DAN SNYDER - Do the right thing and hang yourself. Do not sell the team and do not get paid. Just die.
ACCUMULATED INFLUENCES UPON THIS FRANCHISE 2009, BEST TO WORST (ties broken by my personal opinion): TE Chris “Captain Chaos” Cooley (+7), MLB London “Fletch” Fletcher (+6), DC Greg “Coach” Blache (+3), SS Chris “Cuatro-ocho” Horton (+2), DE Andre “Contract Year” Carter (+1), SS Reed “Whiteboy” Doughty (+1), P Hunter “the Punter, whose groin is strained” Smith (+1), DE/LB Brian “Wow, this place is fucked” Orakpo (even), DE Jeremy “Jams” Jarmon (even), CB Carlos “Butterfingers” Rogers (even), WR/PR Antwan “5-yards-sideways 1-yard-forwards” Randle El (even), John “Not a Junior” Kent Cooke (-1), HB Clinton Portis “Sheriff Gonna Getcha” Portis (-1), TE Fred “Snooze Button” Davis (-1), FS Laron “Not the Manimal” Landry (-2), FB Mike “Fullback” Sellers (-2), QB Todd “Sudoku” Collins (-3), LB Robert “that Twitter dumbass” Henson (-3), WR Malcolm “Gimpheart” Kelly (-4), DT “Lord” Albert Haynesworth (-5), WR/PR Santana “Juelz” Moss (-5), CB DeAngelo “Team Spokesman” Hall (-6), WR Devin “Wild Child” Thomas (-7), QB Jason “Mushmouth” Campbell (-8), GM Vinny “Mr. Snyder’s Cock Holster” Cerrato (-12), Head Coach Jim “Zorny” Zorn (-24), and Owner Daniel “Dan” Snyder (-27).

October O.C.D. #4: White Quartz Rock Accumulation

We are in the process of cleansing and purging the compound of the psychic and physical clutter that has accumulated and enabled us to lose control. I’m pretty adept at losing control, having been on that path from birth, probably even before so actually, and I’ve learned to navigate that chaotic path with comedic flair. The guineas have been a fucking bane, either confining them to the chicken tractor too sturdy to work on any commonly found wheel, whether from hardware store or off of old lawn mowers at the landfill, or having them disrupt my happy little chicken flock that’s kicking five eggs a day now. Well, we finagled the chicken tractor over to where the sunflower garden this year was, which was planted on top of last year’s burnpile. I want to make key-shaped garden beds circulating around all that, and the guineas can peck it up in two-week increments now, laying the groundwork for sheet mulching and then hay and all that other Gaia’s Garden bullshit.
But to replace the sunflower garden as the gradual centerpiece of this garden upgrade... I have for a long time wanted to build a giant rock cluster of white quartz, and work little by little to accumulate that shit. All I’ve got is a little pile I snagged rock by rock from the hiking spot nearby, but I got to feeling guilty about snagging all those rocks from the hiking spot, so I quitted it. So now I keep the lookout for white quartz wherever I can find it, riding back roads near rivers and hoping to get a pick-up bed load, which is never a full visual load since everything I own is half-broken and hobbled by malfunction. There’s a cutback to Charlottesville that I did some work along recently, and there’s quartz everywhere around there, lining people’s ditches. I need to find a couple folks there that I know to let me get my fill because I know it’s got to be everywhere.
My ultimate goal is to build a pyramidesque structure of carefully stacked rocks, preferably a good twelve feet high, and hopefully nobody ever gets crushed under it. But if somebody does, I hope it’s me, and they make it my grave.