Internet Follies

2006-08-22T14:43:00.000-04:00

NEW BLOG

Sports Blog has moved to Teapot Dome Scandal

Music Blog has become Band Madness

Sorry, Internet Follies. It's not you, it's me. Me not liking you.

2006-01-23T00:39:00.000-05:00

DEADWOOD COCKSUCKER COUNT - EPISODE 4

Just watched epsiode four on the Deadwood dvds, and a strong showing indeed; episode four posted another EIGHT COCKSUCKERS, pushing the Cocksucker Count to a total of 32 through just four episodes.

Can they get to 61 before the season's out? Watch out Roger Maris, you cocksucker!

2006-01-22T22:17:00.000-05:00

STEELERS SEAHAWKS SUPERBOWL XV SPREAD

The internet, which I understand is this big thing with all this stuff, is currently posting a spread of STEELERS BY 3.5 OVER THE SEAHAWKS in the Superbowl.

Bear in mind, the Steelers are the number 6 seed in the AFC, Seattle is the number 1 seed in the NFC. That's how much this "intra-net" respects the NFC.

Stay tuned to Internet Follies these next couple weeks for the ONLY SUPERBOWL COVERAGE AVAILABLE, ONLINE OR ELSEWHERE!

2006-01-18T15:41:00.000-05:00

DEADWOOD COCKSUCKER COUNT

I had never seen an episode of HBO's miniseries "Deadwood" before this year, but from friends that I'd talked to, I had deduced two general sentiments about the show: 1) It's good, and 2) They say the word "cocksucker" a lot.

I have since Netflixed the Season One dvds, and, three episodes in, I have come to two general conclusions about the show: 1) It is good, though that's to be expected from anything HBO, and 2) They say the word "cocksucker" A LOT. Like, a whole lot. Waaaay lots. Cocksucker = lots of.

Three episodes in, my unofficial tally has counted an impressive TWENTY FOUR COCKSUCKERS - 12 in episode one, a disappointing 4 in episode 2, and a nice rebound with 8 in episode 3. I'm hoping this ridiculous and hilarious trend continues, but either way, I will continue to report on this phenomenon as I dive deeper into the series.

Thanks, cocksuckers.

2006-01-16T17:02:00.000-05:00

RE: COLTS CONSPIRACY

Wow, didn't take long for the NFL to admit their mistake. ESPN.com posted this article less than an hour after my blog article went up. I really made a difference! Maybe my next post will be about bringing "TV Funhouse" back to Comedy Central.

2006-01-16T15:43:00.000-05:00

NFL PLAYOFFS: COLTS CONSPIRACY (aka, COLTSpiracy, or ConspirINDY)

Troy Polamalu’s overturned interception was the worst call I have ever seen in the history of football. The play, initially ruled an interception, was challenged by the Colts, and after ten minutes of looking at replays which showed, from all angles, Polamalu catching the ball, keeping possession as he rolled over twice, and standing up with the ball before fumbling and recovering it, the referees overturned the call and gave the Colts the ball back, rejecting a call which would have essentially ended the game.

Joey Porter didn’t buy the NFL’s bullshit explanation and claimed the league had a hidden agenda to get the media-darling Colts into the Superbowl. Not only is Porter definitely correct, but, given the amateurish, Black-Sox like manner in which the fix has played out, I am appalled that no sportswriters are calling the league out.

The NFL wants Manning—their DirecTV rep, Mastercard icon, and nonthreatening Forrest Gumplike hick—in the Superbowl, pure and simple. The death of Tony Dungy’s son in December was icing on the cake, as journalists began prematurely fondling themselves while fantasizing about potential Superbowl storylines. Like some Spider-Man villain who turns to evil after his life’s work is put in jeopardy, the NFL simply couldn’t allow the Colts to lose yesterday, and took it out on the Steelers via their black-and-white striped goons. Anyone notice that Carnage was the line judge?

The season was fixed from day one. The Colts’ rigged-ass schedule included only three games against teams that made the playoffs last year (New England, Pittsburgh, San Diego). The first game of the three, against New England, didn’t come until WEEK NINE, after a murderer’s row of Cleveland, Tennessee, San Francisco, St. Louis, and Houston (a combined 22-58 between them), ensuring that Indy would be undefeated heading into the primetime SI-cover game. They then got Pittsburgh at home on a Monday night in Week 12, so that by the time they played San Diego (at home) and Seattle late in the year, they had already wrapped up home field advantage throughout the playoffs. And, just to compare, check out the Patriots’ and Chargers’ schedules...isn’t that ridiculous?? Meanwhile, the Colts were favored by a touchdown or more in TWELVE of their sixteen games; they were like a college team that managed to play its pre-conference schedule for a whole season. You really think Indy’s schedule was some coincidental mathematical anomaly? Yeah right, and boxing isn’t fixed either, and wrestling is real, and I couldn’t think of a third thing for this list but you’re still a fucking idiot.

Back to Sunday’s game. Forget the ignored 50-yard pass interference penalty inflicted on Antwaan Randle El in the first quarter, let’s focus just on the overturned interception. There’s five minutes left and the Steelers are up by two scores. They intercept the ball, all but ensuring defeat for the Colts. The referee has two choices: uphold the call, and Pittsburgh runs out the clock, or overturn the call, allowing for an exciting last-minute Manning comeback attempt in a nationally televised game and a chance for the darling Colts to stay on tv another week. The replays not only showed no conclusive evidence to overturn the call, but they also showed extremely conclusive evidence—Matrix-360 camera angles, THX quality sound, and even holograms—that Polamalu retained possession of the ball. Then, the ref has the audacity to give this explanation:

“Upon further review, the player’s knee was down when the ball came loose. Therefore, it is an incomplete pass, it will be Indianapolis’ ball, second down.”

The anger with which I responded to this announcement frightened me. I was unleashing profanity like if Twista was just rapping the word “fuck” again and again for five minutes, cursing even my television itself for existing and showing me what I had just seen. His knee was down, therefore, incomplete pass? What the fuck rule is that?? Might as well have had Tommy Boy come out and explain “I was checkin’ the specs on the…rotary…girder… I’m retarded.” During the review, Dan Dierdorf concluded quickly that it couldn’t be overturned and started talking about other things in the game, and when the call was overturned, he just didn’t know what to say. On the postgame show, Shannon Sharpe referred to “The call made by Referee Archie Manning…whoops, I mean Pete Morelli…”

For argument’s sake, EVEN IF THAT RULE EXISTED, which it doesn’t, then why did the review take ten minutes?? If there is a “knee = no interception” rule—hereafter referred to as the Bulllllllshit Rule—then wouldn’t the refs have watched the first replay and immediately said “oh, his knee hits, Bulllllllshit Rule applies, no catch,” and that’s it?

The review took ten minutes because Pete Morelli was on the phone with the NFL’s Marcellus Wallace equivalent, who was warning him, “You give that ball back to the Colts or say goodbye to your family,” only probably something wittier. Result: the most impossibly overturned call in the history of instant replay, yielding, indeed, an exciting finish but a Colts defeat, meaning Morelli will probably get to keep his life but will at least lose his thumbs.

The saddest part of this whole ordeal is that we don’t really need the Colts in the Superbowl. This is football, the Superbowl is exciting no matter who’s playing (unless it’s the Ravens). This isn’t like baseball relying on the Yankees and Red Sox. Why does the league feel it’s necessary to manufacture a champion, especially when it’s a team as undeserving as the Colts? I’ll explain that sentiment in my next post, but for now, suffice to say that Droopy the Dog was right: Cheaters never win. And neither does Peyton Manning.

2006-01-13T11:39:00.000-05:00

RE: MILBURY'S MESS

Way to hop on the bandwagon, Mr. 70s Porn Star Columnist. You're a day late.

My suggested Post headline for today: "All Around the Milbury Bush, Pop! Goes The GM"

2006-01-12T17:42:00.001-05:00

SHITTY EXECUTIVE LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: MIKE MILBURY

New York Islanders longtime General Manager Mike Milbury has agreed to step down this season, ending his ten-year reign of hilarity. If there’s one thing we love more than impotent coaches at Internet Follies, it’s apocalyptic GMs, and Mike Milbury is a man who truly embodies the spirit of the word “cancerous.” Cue Greenday’s “Time of Your Life,” and let’s take a spin back through Milbury’s amazing career on the Island.

1998 – Mike Milbury trades Todd Bertuzzi and Bryan McCabe to Vancouver for Trevor Linden. In desperate need of what he called a “veteran presence of washed-upness,” Milbury sought after Linden; since then, Bertuzzi, despite his misgivings, has scored 161 goals to Linden’s 74, while throw-in Bryan McCabe, now with the Maple Leafs, leads all NHL defensemen in scoring this season (49 points, Linden has 6). Milbury blames the trade on “playing too much NHL ’94,” and swears “I thought Linden’s cheap-ass backhand wraparound was unstoppable.”

2000 – Milbury drafts goaltender Rick DiPietro with the first overall pick instead of Dany Heatley, despite having drafted goalie Roberto Luongo with the fourth overall pick three years earlier. Milbury then trades Luongo and Olli Jokinen to Florida for Mark Parrish and Oleg Kvasha. Now, instead of having Luongo (set an NHL record for saves in 2003, probable starting goalie for Team Canada), Heatley (2002 Rookie of the Year, currently 6th in the NHL in scoring), and Jokinen (Florida’s captain at age 27, 46 points this year), the Islanders have DiPietro (3.45 GAA, as “potential” is not a solid object and cannot stop pucks), Parrish (27 points, but would make a great XFL name), and Kvasha (a big, worthless piece of shit). Worst trade in recent NHL history? Nope. Because…

2001 – Milbury, now sure nothing he can do will get him fired, decides to test that theory, acquiring fellow “cancer” Alexei Yashin from Ottawa for Zdeno Chara, Bill Muckalt, and the 2nd overall pick in the 2001 draft, which became Jason Spezza. Yashin currently has 37 points, is the second-highest paid player in the league behind Jagr, is booed every home game, and has been called a “cancer” more times than the actual disease cancer (which is still less frequently than Terrell Owens). The 22-year-old Spezza has 48 points, the 6’9” Chara was a finalist for the Norris Trophy last season as the league’s top defenseman, and though Muckalt never panned out, he would have had to score about negative a million goals to make this deal even.

January 12, 2006 – Mike Milbury announces his resignation. Subtract 2001 from 2006 and you will get the number 5. That’s five years after the Yashin trade Milbury kept his job, and that is a walking-on-the-moon, polio-vaccine caliber achievement.

Mike Tice, you’re terrific, but you’ve got a long way to go before we hand you one of our lifetime achievement awards of hilarity. In case you're wondering, the award is shaped like Kevin and I looking at espn.com pointing and laughing.

2006-01-07T15:58:00.000-05:00

THE 10 BEST ALBUMS OF 2005
(Actually just my 10 favorite, but I get more Google hits this way, plus it’s so controversial!)

10. Sleater-Kinney - The Woods

I mistakenly purchased this album thinking it was the soundtrack to the musical Into the Woods, and after a couple tracks of saying to myself “Little Red Riding Hood sounds fucking pissed,” I realized that it was actually just a band of angry chicks. The name Sleater-Kinney is derived from the ancient Gaelic for the words “lyre” and “yelling” according to a Wikipedia article that I just made up; The Woods is the band's major-label debut, which is probably a good move for them, given that it's also their seventh LP and they ain’t exactly household names, unless your house is made of music blogs. The album’s pretty much straight-up rock; “Entertain" is quite entertaining and "Modern Girl" is quite modern girling, and there’s really no rotten egg in this dozen (actually ten tracks, it’s a stupid baker). I’ll be damned if they don’t sound like Rush at times (I’m not joking, listen to that bridge in “Wilderness”), only difference is they’re actually females, not just mistaken for females, and only 30% of their songs are about dragons as opposed to Rush’s 100%.

9. Fiery Furnaces - EP

Still running on indie fumes from last year’s 76-minute patience-tester Blueberry Boat, The Fiery Furnaces released EP in January ‘05, an EP only in the sense that a 100-minute Scorsese movie could be called a short film. I decided to give these Icy Air Conditioners one more shot, and I was rewarded…in the form of music! “Tropical-Iceland” and “Sweet Spots” are undoubtedly the group’s strongest songs to date, effectively bottling their synthesizer whimsy and Futureheads-esque vocal crap (suck on that adjective, journalists) into bite-sized chunks instead of albums that would test the patience of Sonic Youth. The lyrical spectrum on EP spans from pretty serious (“He beat me he banged me, he swore he would hang me, and I wish I was single again”) to extremely serious (“I’ve seen enough stray ponies and puffins to get me through to the end of May”), but the record’s constant circus atmosphere prevents anything from being taken at face value. Expect plenty more output from the Watery Water Softeners in the coming years, as the Friedbergers appear to be closing in on Robert Pollard’s ability to release albums that are somehow longer than the amount of time that had passed since the previous album.

8. Junior Senior - hey hey my my yo yo

Junior Senior’s declaration “Put on your pants, ‘cause you just might want to dance” autobiographizes this group with comical accuracy, not just because you might want to dance to this album and have pants on while doing so, but because it’s exactly the kind of obstinate, in-your-face naivety that’ll wear down any resolve you might have to not like these guys. hey hey my my yo yo—an improvement on the Neil Young lyric—is chock full of single-worthy pop freak-outs, though the thundering gayness of Junior Senior’s debut album has been supplanted here with just general absurdity. The duo purchased the Madonna “Lucky Star” synthesizer when The 80s had a garage sale (The Darkness bought a genre there), putting it to good use on “itch u can’t skratch,” and the gals from Le Tigre sound uncharacteristically not pissed as guest vocalists on “we r the handclaps,” the album’s catchiest song. No, this record won’t bring about a new world order, or at least one that’s not based on dancing, but come on, if “no no no’s” doesn’t charm the pants off of you, then loosen your fucking pants, you fucking motherfucker.

7. Beck - Guero

After spending 2003’s Sea Change lamenting his lost turntables and microphone, Beck reunited with them on 2005’s Guero and got back to his roots: mumbling nonsensical phrases over catchy Dust Brothers beats. Some critics took their obligatory shots at Guero, bringing up the usual new album critic clichés and calling the cd derivative, which is true, but Odelay wasn’t?? Dude, it’s Beck. His job is to whirl out easily likable hip-hoppy/rocky songs by the single, not to be some new millennial Dylan with sporadic break dancing in place of harmonica playing. It’s true, on Guero, Beck fails to travel back in time and invent the Delta Blues, and for that he should be held accountable. But in the meantime, take a spin through “Girl,” “Missing,” and “Earthquake Weather,” and if you keep the derivative complaints quiet enough, you might catch something you enjoy. In fact, “Que Onda Guero” has been stuck in my head since I first heard it last May; good thing I didn’t make the list back then, or I’d have had a commercial album at #1! Unlike some people, I’m not a loser, baby.

6. Bloc Party - Silent Alarm

You can practically taste the tea and crumpet crumbs spewing from the mouth of Bloc Party’s Kele Okereke, whose bloody brill-yant vocal chops on 2005’s Silent Alarm earned the singer distinction alongside Lennox Lewis as England’s only other famous black man (Don Cheadle will have to play him if there’s a movie). The immediate public embrace and subsequent hipster backlash that accompanied Silent Alarm reminded me of the Hot Fuss days, but the Killers comparison ends there. Try as dem cri’ic blokes may to toss of Bloc Party’s debut as a couple of singles padded by filler and image—precisely what’s got them (American) Killers in the limelight—the fact remains that this album’s got at least ten ace songs and a right blimey pace (save two sort of ballady things) that makes it an easy listen for even the cleverest of chimney sweeps. It’s a straightforward rock record, but does that mean it counts less? Blimey, these blokes’s’ right knickers, n’iff you don’t agree, then bollocks, I’ll continue to say British things.

5. White Stripes – Get Behind Me Satan

Hey, you peppermint-colored assholes, stop making good records. If you’d quit after White Blood Cells, that album would have been remembered forever as some seminal modern classic, frequenting every magazine’s all-time top anything lists and stockpiling myth for decades. Instead, you embarrassed those of us who fell in love with “Fell in Love With a Girl” by effortlessly releasing two even better albums in four years. Well, “effortlessly” might not be the right word, they were on the cover of Spin a record eight billion times in 2003. On Get Behind Me Satan, Jack White tries a bunch of new stuff to go with his gushing homages to all old, vaguely southern music, and there’s not a clunker in the pack of thirteen, plus the more indulgent White gets—”Take, Take, Take,” “I’m Lonely (But I Ain’t That Lonely Yet)”—the better the songs get. Also, you know what, rest of world? I don’t even have a problem with Meg White’s drumming. Does it really distract people that much, or do they just need that extra layer of cynicism between themselves and a popular band? Get behind them, hype, cause the White Stripes are still batting 1.000 after five albums.

4. Art Brut – Bang Bang Rock And Roll

Art Brut has that irritating Ben Folds habit of not wasting any songs (getting my money’s worth?? Boo!) or throwing away a single lyric (double boo!!) Just about every line on Bang Bang Rock And Roll functions equally well as a celebratory rock declaration and an ironic slap in the face of every self-righteous buzz band, all lined up in a row “Three Stooges” style. On “Formed a Band,” the singer proclaims, “Yes, this is my singing voice, it’s not irony, it’s not rock and roll, we’re just talking to the kids!” He embraces the very sentiment he’s mocking, all wrapped up in a song about rock n’ roll itself that is, itself, a solid rock n’ roll song. It’s roasted irony served on a bed of irony in ironic sauce. The pathetic narrators portrayed in “Emily Kane” and “Good Weekend” are laugh-out loud funny, but don’t miss the impotence lamenting in the deceptively touching “Rusted Guns of Milan,” or the album’s final lyric, “There’s no shame in giving up,” delivered a second before the music abruptly stops. This album is like sweet, sweet candy to my Belle & Sebastian / Ramones loving ears, and when I take that candy out of my ears and eat it, it is tasty.

3. Kanye West - Late Registration

No, this isn’t my affirmative action inclusion on the list, Late Registration is just a flat-out tremendous album. And besides, I hired Frozone as my VP of Sales, so I met those requirements anyway. Music nerds chronically over-intellectualize rap in order to defend its inclusion in their record collections, but when Kanye whips out darkly humorous lines like “When our heroes and heroines got hooked on heroin / Crack raised the murder rate in DC and Maryland / We invested in that it’s like we got Merril-Lynched / And we been hangin from the same tree ever since,” no real defense of the genre is necessary. West blends the tragic with the tragically funny to the point where you can’t choose how to react and just have to accept it; on the particularly emotional “Roses,” West asks “If Magic Johnson got a cure for AIDS / And all the broke muthafuckers past away / You tellin me if my gran was in the NBA / Right now she’d be ok?” The four singles, especially “Heard ‘em Say” (what a voice on Adam Levine, eh?) are as good as most rappers’ top four singles in their careers, to say nothing of the awesome “We Major,” which sounds like a Sonic the Hedgehog level, “Crack Music,” a candidate for a future Kidz Bop, and, of course, a bunch of skits to fuck up your iTunes. Sophomore slump? No Kan-way!

2. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah – Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

People were quick to point out the David Byrne influence in the alcohol n’ helium vocals on Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, but let’s not disregard that white elephant—the singer deserves a “Yorkie” award for out-Thom-Yorking Thom Yorke. It’s not a slight to the group that their warbled lyrics are secondary to the album’s overall sound, which is half unexpectedly epic, half just plain old whiny, whiny fun. “The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth” is the standout, though it ain’t getting on the radio with that 6-minute length or that dumbass title or that any other aspect about it. The opening song (song?) is a must-skip, and the repetition of “child stars” in the closing track is taking up most of my hard drive, but the rest of this album is an absolute blast, from the initial “what the hell is that noise?” when the vocals chime in on track two to the towering “what the hell is that noise and why am I now addicted to it?” on the album’s best song, “In This Home on Ice.” Clap Your Hands is a refreshingly unique and captivating cd, but be wary of listening to it around non-indie-initiates, cause when they ask “what the hell is this?” you probably won’t be able to answer.

1. Spinto Band – Nice and Nicely Done

I’ve heard a lot of albums in my lifetime—I used to own sixteen Jethro Tull cds (funny…joke, right…?)—but of all those cds and mp3s and Fat Boys Pocket Rockers, I’d say no more than four, maybe five albums have honestly “changed my life.” Spinto Band’s Nice and Nicely Done isn’t one of them, but my point is, given that extraordinarily low percentage, I don’t listen to new albums anymore expecting them—or even wanting them—to alter my existence. I want something I can blast on my way to work that I’ll never get tired of listening to, with songs that don’t force me to machete through thick feedback or overwrought poetry to hear a goddamn melody. Whenever I’m tired of new music or just bored in general, the Spinto album will smile and smash a bottle over its head to cheer me up Belushi style. Pick a track. “Oh Mandy,” “Trust vs. Mistrust,” and “Crack the Whip” should get their own XM Station and just being playing constantly, “Brown Boxes” and “Mountains” bring a colorful, snickering sense of humor into play, and “So Kind, Stacey” and “Did I Tell You” could pass as stunt doubles for love songs. As much as I want these guys to get famous, and I’m sure they will, it’s refreshing to see a band clearly having fun and being able to release a song like “Japan is an Island” without Pitchfork and NME dumping opinions on every lyric. This wasn’t even a difficult #1 choice for me, I’ve listened to this cd three times as much as any of the others on this list. Before you go listen to it and say “yeah, it’s good, but it’s not the BEST album blah blah blah doodoo pants,” think of how often you really feel like listening to monumental strings and soul-stirring poetry and how much more frequently your gut just yearns for something that goes “ding” a lot and makes you happy. You think I’m an idiot? I don’t see your name on the top of the list, fatty. Unless your name is Ten. Then I apologize. I apologize that you have such a stupid name!!! HA.

Seriously, though, thanks for reading.

For other 2005 Best Albums lists, check out Pitchfork, Spin, Rolling Stone, Amazon, NME, and my buddy Rick's List. A detailed Colbert-like explanation of why I differed from these lists is coming up later this week, but for now, I'd love to hear feedback on mine.

For information on how to make your own Top Ten Albums list, check out this article.

2006-01-06T14:23:00.000-05:00

CHRONICLES OF COACHING CAROUSEL CONTINUE!

EAGLES OFFENSIVE COORDINATOR BRAD CHILDRESS was named the new head coach of the Minnesota Vikings earlier today (for real!) Does the owner's deliberate mentioning of Childress' "class, character and discipline" remind anyone of Bush's 2000 campaign? At least Clinton wasn't on a boat while getting blown, am I right? (Don't you miss Clinton blowjob jokes? Leno's monologue is eight minutes shorter than it used to be.)

Childress accepted the Vikings job despite Ben Folds urging him to "Try not to think about it, Bra-ad Childress."

Also, speaking of people running out of overused jokes, I will be pissed off if Mike Tice and Mike Martz do not get other jobs. It's up to these remaining coachless teams to hire someone hilarious, and not some boring successful coordinator, I want someone who looks like an animal. Raiders, I know you won't let me down. Wouldn't it be funny if they rehired Norv Turner? Alright, I'm getting greedy. But come on come on, big bucks, Dennis Ericsson, Dennis Ericsson, Art Shell, Dom Capers employed, no whammies, stop!

2006-01-04T01:39:00.000-05:00

***FIRED UPDATE***

It's done, both Jim Haslett and Norv Turner are gone, joining Martz, Sherman, Tice, and Capers, and making my Fired-O-Meter from two months ago complete (at least the NFLers, but the other dominos will fall soon enough).

2006-01-02T13:02:00.000-05:00

AS DONALD TRUMP MIGHT SAY ON THE NFL APPRENTICE, "YOU'RE FIRED, NFL COACHES!"

A month ago, I posted a coach Fired-O-Meter gauging who from various sports were the most likely to be fired. Well, the results are starting to roll in, and by results I mean coaches' heads; so who's in and who's out?

OUT: Dom Capers, Mike Martz, Mike Sherman, Mike Tice, and Steve Mariucci (first to be fired and I didn't even have him on the original list)

STILL PENDING: Jim Haslett (the head of FEMA could have coached that team better) and Norv Turner (the man who's so average, the girl you like should be dating him)

Stay tuned for more firedness updates! Even though espn.com updates a billion times more frequently than we do!

2005-12-19T15:41:00.000-05:00

ALL-TIME TOP FIVE MOVIES WITH THE MOST PLOTHOLES

1. Rollerball (2002)

I used to waste time arguing over what I considered to be the worst film ever made, but when I saw “Rollerball,” my life got easier. There is not one single moment of this entire movie that makes any semblance of sense, be it in terms of story, appearance, or worst-dialogue-ever-written-having. Here’s the dill. Chris Klein is a star hockey player coaxed into moving to eastern Europe to play Rollerball, a sport where, as far as I gathered, the object is to put a steel ball (why are balls in the future metal? Re: “Starship Troopers”) through some Aztec hoop while on rollerblades and some players are on motorcycles and people don’t get penalized for killing each other. The mastermind behind this is Jean Reno, whose all-encompassing accent allows him to count as Russian (as long as he’s shady), who dreams of getting his ultra-violent sport on North American cable, because people certainly wouldn’t be horrified by constant on-field deaths as long as the sport was also completely unfollowable. Compounding this chaos is the fact that the movie was edited by a cartoon samurai who threw the reel into the air and diced it up real fast with his sword, but the technical failures of this film could fill a whole other dissertation, so let’s concentrate on the plo (I just can’t in good conscience call it a “plot”). Reno tracks the sport’s popularity with a futuristic “instant ratings” system; as Roger Ebert puts it, “Whenever something tremendously exciting happens during a game, the rating immediately goes up. This means that people who were not watching somehow sensed they had just missed something amazing, and responded by tuning in.” For the climactic final game, Reno declares “all rules are off,” which I guess is referring to some offsides rule, seeing as murder had always been legal, but furthermore, who the hell would want to play this game anyway? If you could make $6 million as a star US hockey player, would you really rather move to Indeterminate-Soviet-Place and make $8 million in a sport you’ve never played where people get decapitated regularly? Klein scores one goal at the beginning of the final game, the crowd cheers, and the game instantly devolves into people killing each other with bladed motorcycles, then Klien triumphs by killing Reno and some other evil dude with a machine gun (is murder illegal anywhere in the future??) The ending is mercifully abrupt, albeit even more jaw-dropping than the preceding action scenes; Rebecca Romijin (whose ten minute apology to the audience got cut in the film’s final edit) makes a winking pass at Klien about spending the night together, Rob Zombie shouts “Yeah, my Durango!!!”, blackout, this song kicks up, credits, audience standing-O, Oscar nods come rolling in.

One final anecdote to close off this list: When promoting “Deliver Us From Eva,” “Rollerball” co-star LL Cool J was on "Conan" and claimed, “This new movie’s really good, and I mean actually good, cause sometimes you shoot a film then see it afterwards and you know you’re going to have to go on tv and lie to promote it.” Conan responded, “Wait, so you’re saying you’ve sat in that chair and lied to the American people?” To which LL Cool J simply replied, “Rollerball sucked, Conan. It sucked.”

2005-12-14T17:17:00.000-05:00

GREATEST MOVIES

This is a new feature on Internet Follies where I will review the definitive list of the greatest movies ever made. This ain't your AFI's Top 100.

Police Academy 5: Assignment: Miami Beach

The 5th, and best, movie in the Police Academy (PA) series premiered in 1988 to little fanfare. It would take over a decade and thousands of afternoon airings on HBO to cement its status as one of the greatest movies ever created. To the casual fan, Assignment: Miami Beach was just another installment in a tired franchise. No one made a sequel Citizen Kane but thats because Police Academy is better. It took them 5 movies to achieve perfection.

Of course the film maintains some classic dogmas of the series: Tackleberry loves guns, Jones will confuse people with sound effects, Capt. Harris is a dick, Callahan has huge tits, and Hooks will be required to scream through a megaphone at some point, etc. Hey why fix something that ain't broken? But first time PA director Alan Meyerson had the audacity to alter one element that was essential to the previous four films. The infamous Sgt. Mahoney (Steve Guttenberg) would not be making the trip to Miami.

He was replaced by Sgt. Nick Lassard (Matt McCoy), the Commodant's nephew. It doesn't matter that the character was essentially the same person as Mahoney. Some may argue that Guttenberg terminated his involvement in the PA franchise because at this point he had a "career". I, however, think that PA got rid of the Gut (pronounced goot). This was an enormous risk. Casablanca without Rick? Meyerson stuck his neck out and created a masterpiece.

The plot is pretty simple and unimportant. Cmndt. Lassard is retiring and being honored as the "Police Chief of the Decade" at a convention in Miami. Lassard invites the whole force along with him. While at the baggage check in Miami, Lassard accidentally picks up the wrong bag. This wrong bag is full of stolen diamonds! The criminals have a whale of a time trying to sneakily switch their bags back. This movie has more plot contrivances and pratfalls than a Moliere! Frustrated with this unexpected difficulty, the criminals reach the only logical solution. They kidnap the most prominent police officer in the city of Miami! This ignites a madcap series of events that ends up in the Everglades on air boats. The Cmdt. is saved, the criminals brought to justice, and there is a graduation type of awards ceremony at the end. This isn't the one with the hot air balloon though.

WHY THIS MOVIE IS GREAT:

4. Tackleberry scares an enormous great white shark away with only a hand gun, as he says one of the greatest quotes in the history of cinema: "Leave the swimming area NOW, mister."
-This is rivalled by the time he shoots the smiley face when engaged in a bullet shooting competition in the inferior PA 6.

3. Replacement Guttenberg character Nick Lassard writes DORK on Harris' chest in sunscreen while he is asleep on the beach. Harris being the dick he is doesn't realize this and walks around the beach for awhile and has no idea why everyone is referring to him as a DORK, including the mayor of Miami himself!

2. Cmdnt. Lassard thinks the kidnappers are actually policeman practicing a kidnapping simulation! Though they are incredibly inept at kidnapping, Lassard provides them with incredibly helpful tips that help evade the police that are actually trying to save him. This makes the rescue attempt incredibly complicated. But hey it wouldn't be a PA movie if it was easy. If they were real cops, the Chicago fires would still be burning and the South would still be segregated.

1. PA 5 Assignment: Miami Beach is the first motion picture to use sound.

2005-12-13T12:14:00.000-05:00

ALL-TIME TOP FIVE MOVIES WITH THE MOST PLOTHOLES

2. Batman & Robin

I’ve heard people defend “Batman and Robin” by calling it an attempt at a pure realization of a comic book on the screen, a claim which caused the comic to reply “Whoa, hey, do not mention my name, I want no part of this.” Even so, the movies “Casper” and “Richie Rich” were also based on comic books, and dumber comic books, and John Larroquette was in one, and they weren’t half as inexcusable as the fourth Batman film (more like Joel P-U-Macher, am I right?) For starters, the movie opens with Mr. Freeze (Arnold Schwarzenegger) stealing a diamond by having goons in skates slap the diamond around with hockey sticks instead of just grabbing it, and suddenly, there's a tidal wave and Batman & Robin are surfing on disc things. The movie’s two villains are respectively motivated by possibly the two greatest overreactions in cinematic history; Mr. Freeze’s wife is suffering from a mysterious disease so he vows to freeze the entire world, while the half-plant Poison Ivy—who comes to be when a shelf of neon chemicals with dry ice in them falls on her—decides she wants to clear the earth for plants by killing ALL LIVING ANIMALS. Ivy’s only power is pink dust that makes people jealous about loving her (this ain’t exactly Thanos these heroes are going up against), but she does employ the freakish Bane (David Boston) to aid her grassroots campaign against all life. How bad is the dialogue? Bear in mind, The Simpsons used “Ice to see you” as an exaggeratedly bad Schwarzenegger one-liner three years before this movie actually made Arnold say “Chill out,” “Cool off,” “The iceman cometh!” “You’re not sending me to the cooler!” and the topper, “What killed the dinosaurs? The ice age!”, a delicious combination of shitty writing and ecological speculation. I won’t ramble on any further, except to mention that Arnold does freeze the entire city then gets defeated and the city’s instantly fine, but I will tell you what you already knew: this movie’s plot has more holes than a porcupine’s leotard. Yes, I’m running out of these.

2005-12-05T02:12:00.000-05:00

ALL-TIME TOP FIVE MOVIES WITH THE MOST PLOTHOLES

3. Judge Dredd

That’s right, back-to-back Stallone, and if you’ve seen “Judge Dredd,” you know it’s warranted. Stallone plays the titular character, one Joseph Dredd (a judge, no less), the most respected seat in a legal system which, because it’s the future, is inexplicably restructured to be like some mystical Roman senate. The roving judges are “Judge, jury, and executioner in one,” because the future justice system has been based on concise taglines rather than moral principles and logic. Cities also don’t have names anymore; the film takes place in Mega City One, a crammed collection of monolithic space-buildings and streets full of constant riots, cause people are pissed off that it’s the future and are showing it by attacking cars on their own blocks. So what happens? Check this. Joey D gets framed for murder and is found guilty because the gun used in the crime is a special “judge gun” programmed to read the DNA of the gunholder’s hand and if it doesn’t match Dredd’s DNA, it blows their hand off. The perfect crime?? Well it turns out, the one who framed him, corrupt rival Armand Assante, is Dredd’s CLONED BROTHER, so he has the same DNA. He managed to pick up a judge gun at a black market which has judge guns, and he also acquires a giant gold robot, and for the rest of the movie no one notices or cares that Assante has this giant fucking robot walking around with him, even though it’s the only robot in the movie. Fortunately, Dredd escapes from prison with help of Supporting Actor nominee Rob Schneider, and gets his revenge on Assante (that’ll teach him to get a role in anything ever!) to the tune of the one-liner “court is adjourned.” You betcha, this plot’s got more holes than a Whack-a-Mole game full of “Caddyshack” gophers.

2005-12-04T05:35:00.000-05:00

ALL-TIME TOP FIVE MOVIES WITH THE MOST PLOTHOLES

4. Demolition Man

“Demolition Man” provides a gripping glimpse into a dystopian future (that word means “retarded,” right?) where a government made up of one old cleric dude has created a perfect society where guns, swearing, and meat have been outlawed. Shockingly, some people are upset by these rules (in the year 2032, so the world’s going to change and get used to that change in 25 years) and now live underground and are led by Dennis Leary, who doesn’t so much lead them as complain about how difficult it is to order in a Starbucks. Enter John Spartan (Sly Stallone)—is he based on John the Savage from “Brave New World,” you literate movie makers?—whose crass 1990s customs baffle the people of the future, much as people nowadays have absolutely no idea what occurred in the 1970s. Stallone is brought in to battle Simon Phoenix (Blade), a killer from the past hired by cleric dude to kill the revolutionary Leary, cause he smokes and doesn’t care who cares that he smokes! Cleric-o didn’t think too far ahead, cause Phoenix kills him, and Stallone and Sandra Bullock—whose character is named Lenina Huxley, a combination of a character from and the author of “Brave New World”… look at you, you do know books exist!!!—track him to a museum where they each acquire dozens of loaded, ready-to-fire guns in the “Steal Guns From the Past” exhibit. Cleric later invites Stallone to dinner at Taco Bell, which (I’m not making this up) is the ONLY restaurant in the future; lots of movies have product shots, this one’s a fucking product A-bomb. Stallone wins by freezing Snipes, kicking his head off, and quipping “heads up!” even though they’re the only two people in the room and Snipes is frozen, but that's the least of the anyone’s concerns. My biggest concern, however, is that unlike futuristic flops like “Timecop” and the more obscure “XChange,” “Demolition Man” doesn’t have the decency to throw you some nude scenes to distract you from the fact that its plot has more holes than a kitchen sponge receiving acupuncture.

2005-12-02T00:48:00.000-05:00

ALL-TIME TOP FIVE MOVIES WITH THE MOST PLOTHOLES

5. Anaconda

Though its special effects may be special in the same way the Special Olympics are special, 1997’s “Anaconda” has enough script problems to make a snake vomit its prey and consume it again, which is something snakes actually do (this fact displayed on screen is the first thing that occurs in the movie). Jennifer Lopez, Owen Wilson, and a host of superb imdb links comprise a cast of documentary filmmakers who are shooting a film about the native peoples of Snake, a country in Southerner Centrally America. Along the way, they pick up veteran of being grizzled Shades McBackstabb (Jon Voight) from the town of Vagueaccent—birthplace of Ariana Huffington—who calmly imparts onto the crew his wisdom that everything they do near the river will kill them, and also a bunch of giant neon snakes live there. Like all species of animals (i.e., Jaws, the bear from “The Edge,” Bunnicula, etc.) these anacondas constantly attack everything, eating not for sustenance but because they are consciously evil, in addition to being the fakest goddamn things this side of ED-209. Almost every line in this movie is treacherously funny, from the part where a wasp gets stuck Eric Stoltz's snorkel to the part where Wilson betrays the group and decides to hunt anacondas to rake in them big anaconda-huntin’ bucks. To borrow a classic hip hop phrase, my Andaconda don’t want none unless you got plotholes, Hon, and this plot's got more holes than a Tommy-gunned piece of Swiss cheese.

2005-11-29T00:18:00.000-05:00

QUICK THING ABOUT BEING TIRED

Sorry I haven't written in a while, I was busy with Thanksgiving and family and the subsequent updating of my other, Thanksgiving-themed blog, www.morelikeskanksgiving.blogspot.com.

A couple days ago, I had one of those things happen to me where I woke up early in the morning and was really tired and started coming to weird conclusions for no reason. I know I'm not the only one this happens to, right? Well, at 7 am on this particular morning, lying in bed, I was believing that Eagles wide receiver Reggie Brown was somehow responsible for me not being able to completely wake up. Why him, how he was doing it, and how I arrived at that conclusion I still have no idea, but I remember thinking about it later that day and having absolutely no explanation for my having thought this, other than just being really tired and thinking about things for no reason.

This doesn't happen to me often. The most recent occurrence had been about six weeks ago when I woke up at 5 am and couldn't fall back asleep, so I started thinking about things and somehow concluded in my head that Billy Crystal's one-man show "700 Sundays" was probably pretty good.

That's a quality blog article. If you were waiting eight days for that, I appreciate your devotion to our site, and I hope the hype was warranted. This post has already been nominated for a Pulitzer and for several Nobel prizes (Literature & Physics).

2005-11-15T01:29:00.000-05:00

PUN WITH PUNS: ALEX RODRIGUEZ BEATS OUT DAVID ORTIZ TO WIN AL MVP
What will the New York Post headline be?

A-Rod A-God? A-dept A-Rod Wins MVP

Rodriguez Gets A-Nod From MVP Voters

Hey Rod, You're The MVP!

A-Rod MVP: Most Valuable Pinstriper

MVP Voters Spit Out Papi-Seeds

Yankee Doodle Dandy!

Papi Goes The A-Rod! (He Won MVP)

Boston Tea Party, Not MVP Party

Red Sox Fans Get A David Or-cock-tiz

Rodriguez Takes Bite of Big Apple And Says "MmmmmmmVP"

Get "Hitch"ed! Will Smith Sizzles In Romantic Comedy; A-Rod Sizzles On Diamond

A-Rod Roddy, Come On Down! You're The Next Contestant On MVP!

2005-11-11T13:10:00.000-05:00

Where are they WOW!
Christine Lakin Edition

This week's edition takes us again back to the early '90s. I was barely 7 and like everybody from my generation, I watched TGIF on Friday. Alongside Dinosaurs (definitely will be the subject of a future post), I faithfully watched Step By Step. A major incentive for doing this was the fact that Suzanne Sommers was smoking and that Staci Keenan was also hot and had a shore house down the street from me.

The show lasted seven seasons and as I grew up, so did the Lamberts. Specifically, the youngest Lambert daughter Al, played by Christine Lakin. Al was a tomboy. She was very much her father's daughter. Al's early years came in a male dominated single parent household. Frank was a great dad but let's be honest, he knew a lot more about the history of the Green Bay Packers than he did about raising a little girl. But the Lamberts eventually Brady Bunched with the Fosters and Al was introduced to a strong female presence and, in turn, became really fucking hot.

Don't believe me? Maybe you will now. Not only is she really hot, but she also still likes to put her hand on her hip!

Christine, now 26 graduated from UCLA and could recently be seen in Reefer Madness. Shes also been nicknamed Lil LaKim. I have no idea why. But I do know that we can all look forward to 2006 when Christine stars in The Cutting Edge 2! She'll be starring alongside Christy Carlson Romano (who will be the subject of a Where Are They WOW! in approximately 8 years).

Remember hockey players, figure skates have a toe pick!

Lakin managed to not become a linebacker like Danielle Fishel

She is actually in the NFL

2005-11-09T08:37:00.000-05:00

OVERRATED / UNDERRATED

Some things in life are rated better than they should be and some are not rated as well as they should be and it makes me angry and I want to change that!

OVERRATED SENSE: Smell

Do we really need smell? What are we, dogs? Or cats? Or a puppy with a kitten on its back that are both cute and can both smell better than us? As usual, some scienceman probably just threw "smell" on the list to make it a round five for those fatcats in Washington, even though it clearly doesn't belong with the other senses. Maybe his daughter was five or something. But think about it, if "The Miracle Worker" was about a girl who couldn't smell but learned to speak and move, who would have cared? Not me, that's who. But in real life that girl was a hero.

UNDERRATED SENSE: Touch

Sight and hearing are all gumdrops and candy, but could you imagine not being able to feel anything? And not like Haley Joel Osment not being able to feel love, I mean like being unable to really feel like real things? You'd have to, like, keep looking down to make sure you weren't standing in fire! And forget sex, you couldn't feel it. You wouldn't enjoy it anyway, cause you'd keep having to look down to make sure you weren't having sex on a bunch of fire. That would suck! You wouldn't feel the pain though. But you'd still burn, it's not like you're not invincible! I mean come on!

OVERRATED RACISM: That Air Force coach saying that black players run well

I mean come on! What is this, a totalitarnation state like that book by George Orwell about the numbers? The coach just said that black players are fast! He wasn't like "I don't think black players should vote," or like, "Black players I don't like them," or like "Black players AREN'T fast!" He complimented an entire race and if anything it's high time those fatcats in Washington apologize to him! This country needs more truth tellers and less truth sellers, and in my book the Air Force should promote him.

UNDERRATED RACISM: "Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers"

The Black ranger was a black guy and the Yellow ranger was an Asian woman! How'd they get away with that?? This was in the 1990s, not the 1950s, when blackface on television was mandatory (watch the old Dick Van Dykes). I'm surprised the Red ranger didn't have a tomahawk with a secret compartment that held whiskey and smallpox! And the Pink ranger was probably Irish, which is kind of how Irish people are! I'll bet they only had a Blue ranger because the writer thought that Smurfs are real and he was being racist towards them too! I mean come on!

OVERRATED FUNNY OBSCURE PRESIDENT: William Henry Harrison

I'm an American, and to me, some things in life are not funny. A president dying is one of them. Another one was the Dust Bowl. People think it's funny that William Henry Harrison died within a month of taking office because he insisted on having a victory parade even though it was raining and he caught pneumonia and died from it. What if your mother had a parade and it was raining and the president was in it and got pneumonia and died? Then you'd see what it's like up close, and I'll bet you wouldn't be laughing. Plus it would be the 1700s so you'd be dressed all wrong and you'd probably die of embarrassment, then what if the president laughed at you?

UNDERRATED FUNNY OBSCURE PRESIDENT: Zachary Taylor

Now we're talking. Who the hell was this dude? The only thing I know about alleged "president" Zachary Taylor was that he was in a coloring book I used to own that had all the presidents in it and he was next to a horse. I never even colored him in, cause my crayons weren't boring enough (except "Burnt Umber"). Was he the president who put the horse on the senate, or was that Millard Fillmore? It's like, "Hey, I freed the slaves," "yo, I like won this war and everything," "how bout you, Zachary?" "Me? Oh, I stood next to this horse once." How did he get elected?? Millard Fillmore, too. What are we, stupid? I mean come on!

2005-11-07T00:39:00.000-05:00

COACH FIRED-O-METER
The world's most fired people and their % chance of getting canned in the next four months

Norv Turner, Oakland Raiders: 100%
Suggested Headlines for when he's fired: "Job With High Turner-over Rate", "Raiders To Get Back To Norm-al", "To Everything There Is A Coaching Change, Turn, Turn, Turn"

Rick Adelman, Sacramento Kings: 100%
Headlines: "Rick Bad-elman", "Rick No Longer The Adel-man", "Rick's Family Soon To Be Sad-elman When Their Income Stops"

Mike Martz, St. Louis Rams: 100%
Headlines: "St. Louis Partz With Their Coach", "Mike Will Fartz On His Running Backs No Longer", "Martz Heart's Hurting, But Rams Fans' Hearts Aren't"

Jim Haslett, New Orleans Saints: 100%
Headlines: "Jim No Longer Hasl-it (His Job)", "Jim Has-Let The Saints Down For The Last Time", "New Orleans Takes Care Of Birdlike Hassle-it"

Mike Kitchen, St. Louis Blues: 100%
Headlines: "Blues Redecorate Their Kitchen", "Kitchen's Singing The Blues, But Thankfully No Longer Coaching Them", "Blues To Hire Either John Bathroom Or Steve Breakfast Nook"

Dom Capers, Houston Texans: 110%
Headlines: "Smart Houston; Dumb Capers Gone", "Dom To Embark On Great Job Search Caper", "Pop Open The Dom, Capers Finally Fired!"

Mike Sherman, Green Bay Packers: 9990% (went down 10% after Favre announced he might retire if Sherman is fired)
Headlines: "Sure, Man, Your Job Is Safe", "Brrrr, Man, You Look Cold, How Bout We Fire You?", "Mike Will Need A Chirpa-Man To Climb Mt. Notfired"

Mike Tice, Minnesota Vikings: 1,000,000,000,000%
Headlines: "Tice Iced", "Vikings Fire Fat Piece Of Shit Mike Tice", "Mike Tice, You Are An Absolute Embarrassment And I Can't Believe You Lasted This Long You Fat Piece Of Shit"

2005-11-05T10:48:00.000-05:00

"SAW II" REVELATION (SPOILER ALERT!!!)

Don't want to rain on anyone's haven't-seen-the-movie parade, but there's a huge surprise at the end of the "Saw" sequel:

The killer from the "Saw" movies...

...is the mascot for the Jack-in-the-Box fast food chain.

Apparently, he's killing people because he's angry that Sonic is cutting into the market of fast food places that advertise but don't actually exist, a market that ol' Jack (Saw) used to have cornered. If you haven't seen the sequel, I'm sorry to spoil it for you, but the good guys defeat the killer twenty minutes in and the final hour-fifteen of the film is them driving around unable to find a Sonic. The movie then ends with the killer's chilling laughter fading into the credits while a Type O Negative cover of "I Saw Her Standing There" plays (and they scream the word "saw" every time it comes up).

Bet you never SAW that one coming.

2005-11-04T09:23:00.000-05:00

WEEK EIGHT NFL DRUNKPIX

Kevin broke the bank (literally, somehow) with his picks this week, posting a Muhammad-Ali-esque 11-3 mark, despite making the picks at 5 am Saturday night and falling asleep halfway through while still fully clothed and sober. Dan was two behind with an Ali-with-Parkinson’s-esque 9-5 because of the losses by Kansas City and Detroit, overlooking those two iron rules of gambling: 1) KC off a win, San Diego off a loss, so there was a bounceback factor for the Chargers, and 2) Jeff Garcia is absolutely and unquestionably a homosexual. We don’t mean that as a term of derogatory ignorance, just that it’s very clear that he is actually gay. How that got to be an iron rule of betting, we’ll have to look up, but gamblers have been aware of it since the time of Seabiscuit. The horse, not the movie. And not the food either, which came out just weeks after the horse.

WEEK EIGHT RESULTS:
KEVIN: 11-3
Mike Golic: 11-3 [also the height Golic would have to be for his weight to be normal]
Merrill Hoge: 10-4
Chris Mortensen: 10-4
DAN: 9-5
Sean Salisbury: 9-5
Eric Allen: 9-5
Ron Jaworski: 8-6 [even Jaws didn’t take the Eagles, Kev & Dan both did :-( ]

AFTER EIGHT WEEKS:
Salisbury: 78-38
Hoge: 72-44
Mortensen: 72-44
Golic: 72-44
DAN: 70-46
KEVIN: 68-48
Jaworski: 67-49
Allen: 62-54

This race is as tight as the NFC North! And one and a half times as exciting!

2005-11-03T14:40:00.000-05:00

THE WORLD SERIES IS RANDOM AND STUPID

Sorry we haven't posted in a while, we've been too busy lately to find time to tell you what is stupid about sports and music and music used in sports, so I figured I'd weigh in with my two cents on this year's stupid World Series and why it was so stupid.

Baseball, unlike the other three major sports, doesn't actually have playoffs. That is to say, teams don't battle head-to-head to see who's superior with a clear victor emerging. In baseball, eight teams make the playoffs, and one of them just randomly fucking wins. That's it. The level of play in baseball's postseason is barely elevated, it's just games 163-179 on the schedule with one fewer pitcher in the rotation and an occassional starting pitcher coming out of the bullpen. It's not the NHL playoffs, where teams get twice as physical, and it's not like the NBA playoffs, where crowds explode and home court advantage becomes a life-or-death situation, it's just a couple more baseball games.

Everyone knows this, even if they don't admit it. When the Pistons beat the Lakers in the '04 finals, they just plain crushed the Lakers. When Anaheim and Calgary made it to the Stanley Cup Finals in subsequent years, it was because they played phenominal team games and never let up. When the Bucs won the Superbowl, their defense brutalized the rest of the league. But when teams like the Angels, Marlins, and White Sox win the World Series, the world goes "How bout that, that's random." Because they're not playoffs. It's just shit happening and one team happens to win.

Tom Brady, Robert Horry, Patrick Roy? Clutch, clutch and clutch. But when Geoff Blum homers? "What the fuck? How the fuck did that happen?" It's totally random, that's how it happened. I know what you're thinking, aren't Derek Jeter and Rivera and David Ortiz clutch? No. Stuff just happens in baseball's postseason, and it just happened to happen more for those guys than for the Braves the last nine years, players never actually accomplish anything. If you doubt me, I dare you to go back in time and sit through one of those Sox / Astros games in its entirety and find evidence that it's an actual competition and not just events in some order. I, on the other hand, will spend my time watching things where stuff actually happens, like football games, NHL overtimes, and reruns of "What's Happenin'".

2005-10-25T02:40:00.000-04:00

WEEK SEVEN NFL DRUNKPIX

It seems I've made another error. Last week, upon a reader's feedback, I noted that I had been mistakenly thinking that the ESPN analyst making picks was Marcus Allen when it was actually ex-Redskin Eric Allen. Turns out, I fucked up again! Eric Allen never played for the Redskins, I was confusing him with ex-Washington runningback Terry Allen.

So what does all this mean? Last week, I tried to say that I'd made the mistake on purpose because I'm incredibly racist. That wasn't true. The real reason, when it comes down to it, is that I just can't stand people with the last name Allen. I'm tired of all these Allens coming into our country, taking jobs having to do with being named Allen, messing up class rosters by being all early in the alphabet, bein' all rhymin' with the name "Fallon," and confusing people trying to write blog entries about their Allen-ness. It's high time they left us alone and went back where they came from - the wombs of women with the last name Allen.

Nice week for us on the picks. We both went 9-5, no thanks to Eli Manning's sudden goodness, Steve McNair's billionth injury (sprained left pussy, maybe?), and Minnesota's comeback in the battle of two coaches who are so fired, they left the field looking like 40s Dresden. I think we're all done picking San Francisco and Houston for the next couple years, not that we were before this week, but Washington , Oakland, and Detroit might make for some sticky picking in the coming weeks and not just because they're pouring molasses on our picks. Also, since when was Seattle allowed to actually do shit? They better start being less consequential quick or I'm writing an angry letter. I figure, a letter could still probably beat them head-to-head, even though the Rams clearly can't.

WEEK SEVEN RESULTS
Mike Golic: 11-3 (also the ratio of daily meals Golic eats vs the national average)
Sean Salisbury: 10-4
Chris Mortensen: 9-5
KEVIN: 9-5
DAN: 9-5
Ron Jaworski: 9-5
Merrill Hoge: 7-7
Eric Allen: 7-7

AFTER SEVEN WEEKS:
Salisbury: 69-33
Hoge: 62-40
Mortensen: 62-40
DAN: 61-41
Golic: 61-41
Jaworski: 59-43
KEVIN: 57-45
Allen: 53-49

Still plenty of season to play, and I gots an appetite for some Salisbury steak! I am going to eat Sean Salisbury, in the form of picks!

2005-10-22T17:30:00.000-04:00

MLS PLAYOFFS SEMIFINAL MATCH - FINAL SCORE: DC UNITED 0, CHICAGO FIRE 0

It's headlines like this one that continue to pistol-whip that dead horse about why soccer will never be as popular in the US as the rest of the world. How in the hell can a playoff game end in a tie?

Zero-zero ties (or nil-nil, as people who pretend to be sophisticated enough to enjoy soccer call them) are boring enough and already deservedly draw the ire (or the not-giving-a-shit) of Americans. But a playoff game ending in a tie? Come on, MLS! Does that stand for "Majorly Lame Sport?" I know it doesn't, but I'm just saying other words that fit the abbreviation that more humorously describe it!

A 0-0 playoff game, though, even soccer should know better. At least have the game go into pentalty kicks and have nine people score with unexciting ease then have one dude hit the crossbar and go back to his home country and get murdered. Players being murdered and riots causing hundreds of trample deaths are the few things soccer has that US Sports don't, and until the sport learns how to market itself properly, it's never going to grab our country's attention. A good first step would be having playoff games not end in ties.

A good second step would be playing football.

2005-10-19T17:41:00.000-04:00

GIANT HUGE CONCERT REVUE REVIEW – DAY ONE

Last weekend, Kevin and I attended the Across the Narrows festival, a two-day indie-scribable concert event occurring simultaneously on Coney Island and Staten Island (we went to the Coney Island show both days.) Here’s the highlights from day the first:

We arrived halfway through Death From Above 1979, a raucously earsplitting duo that’s essentially a metal band with a name and album cover designed to convince hipsters they’re not uncool for listening to them. There’s only a drummer and an electric bassist, both playing and yelling as loudly as possible, so they basically sound like if the other two Ben Folds Five members just went fucking berserk. The crowd was sparse at 4 pm, but that didn’t reduce the amount of death that came from above; their music was fist-pumping and heart-pounding and pounding-pumping-hearts-with-fists and I’m sure they’d be a blast at a smaller venue. In short, I Death From A-Loved them. ARBITRARY GRADE, to take the fun out of all this: B+

Talk about tough act to follow, after those metalheads came Rilo Kiley, a quirky, folk-tinged crew with a cute female lead singer. They opened with a string of quality tunes off their recent major-label debut, then continued to get more and more country as their set went on, peaking when they played “Boot Scootin’ Boogie,” “Thank God I’m a Country Boy,” and the Dueling Banjos theme simultaneously while drinking moonshine. Actually, they closed with their single that isn’t called “Bad News,” though the fact that their innocent little indie outfit managed to score a major label deal and a hit single is certainly not bad news to the rest of the festival’s up-and-comers. In short, they Rilo Kind-of surprised me. GRADE: B+

The lone black eye of the two-day festival were indie-stalwarts Built to Spill, a mid-90s alternative group that doesn’t so much write songs as they randomly play a riff four times then play another one on and on for six minutes. They sound like if Stephen Malkmus and his talent were divided up into five people. They’re not bad, but I can’t listen through a full album of theirs, and their slothlike live show didn’t change that (I wish actual sloths had been involved.) By the time they were done, more eyes in the crowd were looking at watches than at the stage. In short, they were Built to Kill…the concert’s momentum. GRADE: D :(

After years of telling people and being told “this is a rip off of Gang of Four,” it was sort of surreal to see the massively influential British quartet intact before my very eyes, and to this day, these grown up lads from Leeds pack a punch that completely justifies their past decade of retrospective worship. Yes, they’re influential—you can still hear Franz Ferdinand’s entire career within every one of their effortless riffs—but they’re just as listenable today as they were to stunned post-punk audiences two decades ago. Lead singer Jon King was an absolute lunatic, dancing as hilariously wackily as you’d expect a 60-year-old Brit to dance while constantly dropping the mic, running around the stage, and eventually smashing a microwave with a bat as the beat to a song. In short, they were the highlight of the concert, first and Gang-of-Foremost. GRADE: A+

The headlining Pixies hit the stage with blindsiding punctuality (actually earlier than they’d been scheduled on the bill) and after opening with a blip from “In Heaven” and a ballad version of “Wave of Mutilation,” they blitzed into a one-two punch of “Where is My Mind?” and “Vamos” and the crowd was off and moshing like crazy, instantly reminding me why I don’t like a lot of people that like the same music I do. The band’s pace was sickeningly swift as they cut through more than half their entire catalogue in a little more than an hour; after “Mr. Grieves,” “Nimrod’s Son,” and “Broken Face,” I was prompted to ask the rhetorical question, “does this band have a bad song?” Rhetorical answer: no. The moshing was distracting, particularly this drunk/high dude in a Yankee hat who kept intentionally slamming into people, promping me to steal his Yankee hat and have him immediately start drunkenly pummeling me. Fortunately, I was able to grab his lapel and throw him, and he went down like a Yankee free-agent-pitcher, came back to his feet, shook my hand, got his hat and left. During all this, “Debaser” was playing, which made it surreal to the point where I no longer believe it actually happened. Throughout the set, the band pretty much just stood there, with Frank Black’s Herculean physique in the spotlight and the rest in darkness until Kim Diehl played “Gigantic” as the encore. In short, despite a performance that didn’t add much over the albums, these guys are still my Pix as one of the greatest bands of all time. GRADE: A-

(Stay tuned... Beck, Belle & Sebastian, and the Polyphonic Spree to come, whenever I get around to writing it!)

2005-10-19T02:53:00.000-04:00

WEEK SIX NFL DRUNKPIX

It seems I've made an error. One of our readers graciously pointed out to me that the ESPN analyst providing weekly picks was, in fact, ex-Redskin Eric Allen, not Marcus Allen, as I'd been writing here for weeks. I give everyone my utmost assurance that this was not an honest mistake, but rather a reflection of my intense personal racism which prohibits me from acknowledging the difference between people who are of any race but mine. Therefore, my amazingly racist nature manifested itself in my being racist by racially judging Mr. Eric Allen, resulting in racism. I apologize to all races, particularly Native Americans, and the mistake will be corrected in Drunkpix posts from now on (I'm not changing the ones prior to now, I'm not that not racist).

As for the picks, we did ok, but those lucky bastards at ESPN had a really good week of not picking ridiculously stupid upsets. Everyone had the Seahawks, Falcons, Colts, and Panthers correct, everyone but Kevin and I had the Cowboys right, and everyone also anticipated Tommy Maddox not having the worst game in NFL history except for Kevin, who actually had the Jaguars over the Steelers. The week cleared up some things; the Redskins, Dolphins and Chiefs are just ok, the Broncos and Colts are good, and the Texans, Browns, Jets, Titans, Raiders, Saints, and Vikings are not going to the playoffs.

Also, is Mike Tice not the most fired man in the history of jobs? I challenge you all to prove me wrong.

WEEK SIX RESULTS:
Sean Salisbury: 11-3
Chris Mortensen: 11-3
Mike Golic: 10-4
Merrill Hoge: 9-5
KEVIN: 9-5
Ron Jaworski: 9-5
DAN: 8-6
Eric Allen: 7-7

THROUGH SIX WEEKS, THE JOCK CONTINUES TO LEAD THE NERDS:
Salisbury: 59-29
Hoge: 55-33
Mortensen: 53-35
DAN: 52-36
Golic: 50-38
Jaworski: 50-38
KEVIN: 48-40
Allen: 46-42

(Just wait until the talent competition, Salisbury, our electic-violin closing musical number will triumph over you and the rest of the Alpha Betas once and for all!)

2005-10-17T18:03:00.000-04:00

FOOTBALL AND MELLENCAMP

Did anyone else catch, during Sunday night’s unthralling (what’s the opposite of enthralling?) Seahawks/Texans ESPN game, they once threw it to commercial with a montage of stadium concessionaires while John Mellencamp’s “I Ain’t Even Done With the Night” played? The song, which you’ve probably heard if you’re cognizant that classic rock radio exists, is a powerfully lame ballad in which Mellencamp wails aimlessly over a jingling mandolin. It’s a lame song even by Mellencamp’s lofty standards. And, yet, there it was being used on Sunday night football, instead of “The Authority Song” or “Rockin’ in the USA” or any other song that’s still lame, but that you could at least reconcile its inclusion in a broadcast trying to maintain a moderate level of excitement.

At that moment, while Mellencamp protested to the night that he wasn’t yet done with it, I realized that football is so popular in our country, the NFL is flaunting the fact that it can do anything with the broadcasts and viewers will keep coming back.The NHL has launched a new dramatic ad campaign with a gladiatorial hockey player being dressed for “hockey battle” by his female sex slave in order to get the league some controversial attention, but people still aren’t scouring the four-digit channels to find OLN. Baseball has chosen the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Cherub Rock” as the theme song to their ’05 playoffs, which is pretty dated, but could you imagine if baseball used that damn Mellencamp song instead? You’d fall so asleep, you’d suffer brain damage. Last year baseball tried to be even trendier by using Franz Ferdinand’s “Jacqueline” in their playoff promos, apparently attempting to restore the chic-European-discotheque atmosphere that baseball has lacked since the retirement of Kirby Puckett.

Bottom line, football sells itself. It doesn’t need gladiators or Scottish danceable pop or P.T. Barnum promoting it to keep people glued to their sets. The NFL knows it, too, and it wants us to know that it knows it, sort of like how a girl who knows a guy likes her can ask him to do increasingly unreasonable things for her benefit; the least reasonable of all things, though, is playing “I Ain’t Even Done With the Night” during anything that’s supposed to be exciting. But, like that dumbfounded boy on the other end, I keep coming back to the NFL, only instead of hoping against hope that someday we’ll get together, I’m hoping, against the same infinitesimal probability, that the Steelers will actually win a Superbowl. Yes, they’re now 3-2, but as the soon-to-be motto of the NFL says, they ain’t even done with this night.

2005-10-11T18:10:00.000-04:00

Where are they WOW!

This is a new feature on Internet Follies where I'll select an actor from our childhood, remember them and discuss their influence on us. If I'm lucky enough, we'll find out what they're doing now! This is a completely original idea. I am very glad that I thought of this first!

I recently saw the film "Thumbsucker". While I liked the movie, I was haunted by the fact that the actress portraying the character Rebecca could be Becky "The Ice Box" O'Shea all grown up.

I don't have to remind you that The Icebox is the no-nonsense tomboy from Little Giants who makes Gloria Stenheim look like a misogynist. The character was so influential that it helped pass the Equal Rights Amendment. She was momentarily fooled into thinking that she needed to give up her go kart and the dirt on her face for pom poms until she realized that she should have confidence in herself and accept who she is: a dominating middle linebacker with the prowess of Lawrence Taylor and speed of Dwight Freeny trapped in the body of an unattractive 12 year old girl. This little girl and her Little Giants helped make "The Annexation of Puerto Rico" part of our modern lexicon. Could it really be the Icebox?

Could this:

really be that?

I should have known that the Icebox hadn't melted into a hot pool of water with big boobs. The search for the Icebox continued. The character of Rebecca in "Thumbsucker" was played by Kelli Garner. You might remember her as Howard Hughes' young wife Faith Domergue in "The Aviator." You may also know her by her nickname "Tits McGoo."

So what has become of the Icebox? It seems that Becky O'Shea's real name is Shawna Waldron. Following the one-two punch of "Little Giants" and "The American President" that knocked America off its feet, Shawna struggled to find roles as ambitious as The Icebox. Waldron soon quit acting but kept the nickname. She received a full ride to Miami to play middle linebacker and tailback. Registering 3000 tackles and 10,000 yards as a true freshman, Icebox was on pace to shatter every record set in the history of athletic records. However, Waldron rediscovered her passion for the arts. With a heavy heart, she took off her shoulder pads forever and committed herself to "tackling" films instead of people.

Check out Waldron in her upcoming film, "To Kill a Mockumentary." IMDB describes it as "a hilarious mockumentary following a group of mockumentary film makers as they shoot their first studio film." Starring Jason "I was in Mallrats and Dazed and Confused" London and Mickey Rooney(!), this is a must-see. Waldron even co-wrote it. Hopefully Spike doesn't try to ruin this one too!

The Icebox is a lady now

2005-10-11T16:30:00.000-04:00

WEEK FIVE DRUNKPIX

Another tough week of picks; Philly went down, 4-0 Tampa got beat, 4-0 Cincinnati got beat, Green Bay finally won, the Patriots are still good, the Bears are still bad, and no one now knows what to expect from Jacksonville, Seattle, Cleveland, St. Louis, or Detroit. WOOOO! NFL Football! Catch the fever! (not Typhoid)

WEEK FIVE RESULTS:

Sean Salisbury: 9-5
DAN: 9-5
Merrill Hoge: 8-6
KEVIN: 8-6
Mike Golic: 8-6
Marcus Allen: 7-7
Chris Mortensen: 7-7
Ron Jaworski: 5-9 (OWCH! Jaws!)

THROUGH FIVE WEEKS:
Salisbury: 48-26
Hoge: 46-28
DAN: 44-30
Mortensen: 42-32
Jaworski: 41-33
Golic: 40-34
KEVIN: 39-35
Allen: 39-35

Still plenty of season left to play. Which is bad news for Texans fans.

2005-10-05T17:47:00.000-04:00

DAN'S FANSHMABULOUS NHL PREVIEW

Hockey season is upon us once again, and if you’re one of the people who helped ESPN’s televised rodeos earn higher ratings than their NHL coverage, then you probably don’t give a shit! Fortunately, yours truly is here to explain to you the sport that’s so good, the average American can’t ever follow it. Or, as I call it, the “Arrested Development” of sports.

WESTERN CONFERENCE PREDICTIONS
1. Detroit Red Wings
2. Calgary Flames
3. Anaheim Mighty Ducks
4. San Jose Sharks
5. Vancouver Canucks
6. Colorado Avalanche
7. Nashville Predators
8. Edmonton Oilers
[9. Dallas Stars, 10. Los Angeles Kings, 11. Phoenix Coyotes, 12. Chicago Blackhawks, 13. Minnesota Wild, 14. Columbus Blue Jackets, 15. St. Louis Blues]

We’ll start with the conference that plays its games after the important coast goes to sleep. People are down on the Red Wings this year, which is understandable— Brendan Shanahan just turned 56, Steve Yzerman is 80, and Chris Chelios is the half-formed titular creature from “The Mummy”—but expect new coach Mike Babcock, hardened by his experiences getting laughed at in middle school, to keep Detroit with the league’s elite. Calgary isn’t far behind, boasting the league’s best overall player in Jarome Iginla, and the city’s 335 residents would be ecstatic if they weren’t huddled together for warmth nine months a year. It’ll come down to the Sharks and the Ducks in the Pacific Division, but nostalgia always wins out, and San Jose’s Starter Jackets will be no match for the Niedermayer-Federov-Selanne flying V. If the NHL’s new rules do open up the game, keep an eye on the speedy Nashville Predators, at least until speedster Paul Kariya gets speedily injured. Colorado will still be good, too, but replacing Peter Forsberg with Pierre Turgeon is sort of like an art gallery replacing a Picasso masterpiece with Pierre Turgeon.

ESPN hailed Jeremy Roenick as a perfect fit in Los Angeles, which I understand in the sense that there are lots of loudmouthed assholes on the West Coast, but I didn’t realize people in California also constantly cross-checked one another. Dallas will have a shot at the playoffs after they fire coach Dave Tippett (the NHL’s Mike Tice…I give him fifteen games), but they, like Chicago and St. Louis, just don’t impress-a-me much. Last but not least, Wayne Gretzky is now coaching Phoenix, generating unprecedented hockey buzz throughout Arizona. The state now boasts a rate of two hockey fans per species of scorpion.

This is Arizona. Hockey is played here.

EASTERN CONFERENCE PREDICTIONS
1. Ottawa Senators
2. Philadelphia Flyers
3. Tampa Bay Lightning
4. Boston Bruins
5. New Jersey Devils
6. Toronto Maple Leafs
7. Pittsburgh Penguins
8. Florida Panthers
[9. Montreal Canadians, 10. New York Islanders, 11. Atlanta Thrashers, 12. Carolina Hurricanes, 13. Buffalo Sabres, 14. New York Rangers, 15. Washington Capitals]

The wide-open East is buzzing with bees this year—storyline bees. The biggest of all is the arrival of 18-year-old phenom Sidney Crosby, a prospect with “the skill of Lemieux and the vision of Gretzky” according to the magazine Hyperbole Weekly; he’s essentially a combination of each member from the “Prostars” 80s cartoon. Crosby joins a Pittsburgh lineup which has added Ziggy Palffy, John LeClair, and Mark Recchi, in addition to Lemieux, to form a sort of Russian-dolls-inside-one-another of oldness. Can the Pens go from worst to first? Not likely, as the revamped Flyers have added Peter Forsberg to a lineup that was a win away from the Cup Finals last season. Don’t worry, Flyers fans, Bobby Clarke went ahead and got his big slow dudes too, adding defensemen Derian Hatcher and Mike Rathje after he was unable to sign Warren Sapp and that giant rock thing from “The Neverending Story.”

Also among the league’s elite are the Ottawa Senators, a team with explosive speed and scoring talent in front of goaltender… Dominick Hasek?? Is that a misprint? Sounds to me like some kid in Ottawa is screwing around with trades on NHL 97 for Genesis. The returning champion Lightning lost The “Boulin Wall” in goal, but should be fine with John “The Graheme-lin” Grahame (instead of Kremlin, keeping with the theme of political walled things). I’m sure the Devils will be fine, they’re hockey’s Atlanta Braves minus the playoff chokes, the Bruins are deep enough on offense to make me somehow hate the Patriots even more, and the Maple Leafs will count on drooling vegetable Eric Lindros for some toughness, which might backfire if opponents distract him by telling him about the rabbits. Keep an eye on feisty Florida, now coached by Jacques Martin—the French national anthem plays whenever he enters a room—who complimented a talented bunch of grapes with the ageless Joe Nieuwendyk. I mean "ageless" literally, a number does not exist for his amount of years on this earth.

Can Eric Lindros (top left) make an impact on something other than a brainscan?

My Stanley Cup pick? I’m going out on a limb, and I might just plummet and break my leg like that kid from “A Separate Peace,” but I’m taking the Vancouver Canucks over the Flyers in seven games. The Flyers, up 3-2 in the series, will blow a lead in the third period on a soft goal allowed by Robert Esche, who will have played well up til that point, then they’ll lose game seven and Esche will join Mitch Williams in the Philly Protection Program. Bobby Clarke, like Phillies GM Ed Wade, will never be fired, and Vancouver’s presence will ensure that the Cup Finals draw poorer ratings than Rodeo’s Stanley Cup Finals, a competition to see who wins the spittoon that some hick named Stanley used to own.

2005-10-04T02:41:00.000-04:00

WEEK FOUR DRUNKPIX

Most of the favorites won in week four, so it was a generally good week for prognosticators, except for ones who picked the Vikings to upset the Falcons in Atlanta (Tice pick, Dan). Kevin's faith in the Saints finally came through, but his lesser-of-two-evils choice of the 49ers fell short. Everyone missed the Chargers' upset over the Patriots and the Jaguars' loss to Denver, but everyone did correctly have Baltimore, Tampa, Carolina, Indy, and Cincinnati.

The Redskins may be 3-0, but if this were college football, they'd still be ranked 22nd, they've basically beaten UTEP and Central Florida so far, not even convincingly, and we all know they'll start losing when it counts. But still, with them and the Bengals both undefeated, we've been again reminded that truly anything can happen in the NFL on any given Sunday. Except for the Packers winning. They fucking suck. They are truly, deeply horrible. Man, do they suck.

If you're keeping score:

Sean Salisbury: 39-20
Merrill Hodge: 37-22
Ron Jaworski: 36-23
DAN: 35-25
Chris Mortensen: 34-25
Marcus Allen: 32-27
Mike Golic: 31-28
KEVIN: 31-29

It's early. Once Salisbury and Hodge get their concussions and Jaworski chokes on a cheesesteak, we'll shoot right up to the top.

2005-09-29T17:55:00.000-04:00

CONCERT REVIEW - Q and Not U - Wu Hu!

Last week, Kevin and I made our way out to the Knitting Factory in Tribeca to check out the band Q and not U on their final tour before their announced breakup. Apparently, they have been unable to withstand the incessant media attention that has come with earning a 7.5 on Pitchfork, and I don't blame them; in the indie community, once your record sales hit that sixth figure (known as "going denim") there are fewer people around who can be berated for not having heard of you and thus, your hipster value dries up. This is no reflection on Q and not U's three increasingly pleasant albums, the most recent coming in 2004, and certainly not on their live performances, which Kevin and I were delighted to find are even more be-U-tiful than their records.

The opening band, Super System, was a synth trio in the vein of The Rapture in which every song vaguely resembled The Rapture. That's probably just out of a process of elimination, because only about five synth songs have ever been recorded and they weren't playing "I Just Can't Get Enough" or anything by Kraftwerk named after a somewhat modern appliance. They were an extremely dance-friendly band, but the crowd was in no mood to dance, save the obligatory "I'm hot enough to get away with it" girls sprinkled throughout the pack. I enjoyed Super System, particularly their last couple songs in which the singer on the right kept going wild and screaming his lyrics while his bandmates just sang regularly, leaving us to wonder what the song was about and why it pissed off the guy on the right so much. Turns out, he was ok, and they left the stage to comfortable applause.

Q and Not U came on shortly after for their second show of that evening. The band consisted of two front men and one drummer. The guy on the left, I assume, was Q. I'm not sure what the guy on the right's name was, but I do know what it wasn't. They sprinted right into their first two songs with a pace that was part "let's dance" and part "high schoolers go crazy and mosh," and I'll be damned if the crowd didn't choose the latter. I can't relay all the details of the set, for I kept having people thrown into me while I was trying to nerdily compile info for this review on my adding machine (I was wearing one of those green accountant visors too.) The highlight song, other than their opening one-two punch sturdy enough to knock out Don Flamenco, was their rendition of the second track off "No Kill No Beep Beep" preceded by a synthesizer ditty that closely resembled "Bad to the Bone." The song itself, however, was good to the bone.

My favorite part of the evening was when a twentysomething hipster in a hunting cap and flannel button-down shirt leaped into the middle of an erupting fray and the song ended seconds later, leaving him standing there looking to fight, and he sort of just collected himself and sheepishly returned to the back of the crowd. Part of me wanted to rush outside, purchase a turntable, and run back in just in time to pull the record off the needle in order to hammer his awkwardness home, but I'll leave that for when they make a movie out of this situation. The band wasn't overly theatrical; whereas Iggy Pop may have smeared himself with peanut butter and rolled around on broken glass, most indie bands' idea of a dangerous stunt is setting a water bottle on top of an expensive synthesizer...WHICH THEY DID! Actually, they were quite interactive with the crowd. When someone yelled "what will it take for you to not break up?" the singer responded, "I don't know, a time machine? Maybe if we'd all been born earlier? That's about it." Take that, loyal concert-attending fan!

I won't be broken up when the band members go off on their separate ways, but I won't be happy either. Q is planning to form a tribute band to the Star Trek character of the same name, and his first single "Surprised to See Me, Picard?" should hit the FM airwaves by December. The other singer is starting a band called, simply "Not U," where the band's only gimmick is that whoever is onstage is not you. His album "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTVWXYZ" should be in stores by February '06. Yeah, the breakup will be hard on all of us, but at least we can take solace in the fact that Q and Not U was on the record label "Dischord," giving this whole situation the aroma of delicious irony that the indie-rock community tresures so deeply.

2005-09-29T01:45:00.000-04:00

INJURIES ARE HOT!

Is Favre done? Is Chucky back? Will Cincinnati challenge the Steelers? These are all questions that remain to be answered but there has been one constant of the first three weeks of the 2005 NFL season: Injuries are hot! Fate is often a cruel mistress in the NFL but this past week fate really punched the AFC East square in the dick. Chad Pennington, Rodney Harrison, Takeo Spikes: Out for the season! Did the AFC East walk under a ladder while a black cat crossed its path causing it to drop a mirror made out of the bones of Native American warriors?

Most people have already written the Jets off for the year. The Bills are in a transition year while they try to develop young quarterback J.P. Losman but Spikes is the defensive leader. The Patriots have a very irritating habit of excelling when faced with adversity but the Harrison loss is unlike any they’ve had to deal with. Who’s going to illegally tackle receivers and talk shit now? The most bizarre circumstance of this situation is that the Miami Dolphins remain intact. Not for long. They will lose a key player sometime within the next few weeks if for nothing other than the fact that they’re the fucking Miami Dolphins. So which Dolphin will go down for the season?

Get ready to hear the Dolphins cry.

There's bad news and good news. Well actually it's all bad news for the Dolphins. Zach Thomas blows his knee sometime within the next 3 weeks. This leaves the Dolphins' strength, their defense, with a gaping hole in the middle. Thomas had 17 tackles against the Panthers last week. That is outstanding. Too bad the AFC East decided to go to Egypt and pillage a pharoah's tomb in the offseason. The common theme is that not only are these injuries season ending, but they effect the most crucial components of your team.

The Dolphins will also lose David Boston. This has nothing to do with that time the AFC East ran over a gypsy with their car. Boston has made a career out of injuries. Following break out seasons in 2000 and 2001 with Arizona, Boston decided to devote himself to getting ridiculously jacked and permanently injured. In a recent interview with Sports Illustrated, Boston revealed that he has modeled his workout regiment after the Batman supervillain Bane. Boston plans to have tubes inserted into the back of his neck which will pump his body full of the super steroid Venom. Many are skeptical of his plan and feel that there's been an inverse relatioship between the increase in Boston's muscle mass and his ability to perform on the field.

First year coach Nick Saban has been supportive of Boston's plans saying, "Hey, if thats what it takes to get him off of roster then I'll hook up those tubes myself." Boston has insisted this process will be effective and will enhance his level of play and help him achieve his ultimate goal, "killing Batman."

David Boston by November

2005-09-27T01:40:00.000-04:00

WEEK THREE DRUNKPIX

Decent week for us with the picks. Though we made our picks independently of one another, we only differed on two games; for the second straight week, Kevin's faith in the Saints was tested, as their ability to warm the nation's hearts continued to exceed their ability to put a defense on the field. Dan picked Green Bay for the third straight week, thinking for the third time, each in increasing loudness, "they can't be that bad!" We also both had Arizona upsetting Seattle, because we agree that Seattle is inconsistent and overrated, but it turns out, Arizona is accurately rated and that rating is "shitty." Regardless, we both pulled out 9-5 weeks, so we're keeping pace with the ESPN bigwigs (their wigs are big).

Sean Salisbury: 30-15
Merrill Hoge: 28-17
DAN: 27-19
Ron Jaworski: 25-20
Marcus Allen: 23-22
Chris Mortensen: 23-22
Mike Golic: 22-23
KEVIN: 22-24

(Everyone on ESPN has one fewer pick than the number of games played. I don't know why, I thought we were the comedy makers!!!)

2005-09-21T11:20:00.000-04:00

NFL WEEK 2 HEADLINES

Everything's Lovie in ChiTown – Lovie Smith and the Bears are thinking playoffs after knocking off the Lions to shake up the NFC North

Bengals Would Like Some Fresh Ground Culpepper – The Bengals intercepted the Vikings’ QB five times en route to their second-straight blowout victory

Anthony Wrong as Baltimore’s Offense Balti-Less – The Ravens mustered only ten points in their embarrassing road loss to the Titans

Not Enough Leftwich In the Tank – The Jaguars’ fourth quarter comeback came up short as they fell in Indianapolis, 10-3

McNabb Makes All the Right Reids – The Eagles QB threw for 342 yards in the Eagles’ runaway victory over the 49ers

Cadillac Hits Buffalo – Carnell “Cadillac” Williams rushed for 129 yards in Tampa Bay’s convincing 19-3 victory over the Bills

Belichick Out Those Panthers! – The Panthers got some revenge for Superbowl XXXVIII by defeating the Patriots 27-17

Parker Does Mess With Texans – Rookie Willie Parker rushed for 111 yards in the Steelers’ 27-7 rout of the Texans

Dennis Green With Envy as Cardinals Lose Again – Former Ram Kurt Warner and the Cardinals have stumbled to an 0-2 start after losing at home to St. Louis, 17-12

Caw Caw! Hawks Beak Falcons in Battle of the Birds – The Seahawks avoided an 0-2 start by upsetting Atlanta, 21-18, in Seattle

Schot Through the Heart and the Broncos are to Blame – A Jason Elam field goal in the final five seconds gave Denver a victory and dropped Marty Schottenheimer and the Chargers to 0-2

Romeo Kills Packers Instead of Self; Earns First Victory – Romeo Crennel won his first NFL game as a head coach as the Browns beat the Packers in Green Bay

Dolphins Dive, Jets Soar – The Jets made up for their Week 1 debacle by handing Nick Saban his first loss as Miami’s head coach

Oakland's Black Hole Devoid of Victories – The Raiders lost to the Chiefs at home, 23-17, and fell to 0-2

Giants Don't Coughlin Up Another Lead – New York led from their first possession on, giving the Saints no relief in a 27-10 blowout

United Parcells Service Doesn't Deliver Monday Night – The Redskins scored twice in the final four minutes to defeat the Cowboys in Dallas on Monday night

2005-09-20T00:26:00.000-04:00

NEW FEATURE - DRUNKPIX

We've started a new feature here at Internet Follies (increasing our total number of regular features to 2, the other being not writing shit) where every weekend, we'll make picks for the NFL week on either Friday or Saturday night after 4 am, and compare those to the picks of ESPN's square squad.

Here's how we've fared the first two weeks:

Merrill Hodge: 19-13
DAN: 18-14
Chris Mortensen: 18-14
Sean Salisbury: 18-14
Ron Jaworski: 15-17
Marcus Allen: 15-17
Mike Golic: 14-18
KEVIN: 13-19

Looking through these picks, it is clear who is the drunkest of the bunch. Mike Golic, however, remains far and away the fattest.

Keep reading the blog! Music posts to arrive shortly! And how about some comments, people? Never hurt anyone.

2005-09-14T10:09:00.000-04:00

ILL - FATED AD CAMPAIGNS

American Express launched an extensive advertising bombardment during this year’s US Open featuring an exaggeratedly flustered Andy Roddick and the tagline “Have you seen Andy’s mojo?” Unfortunately, Roddick then lost in the first round of the Open to some guy named Gilles Muller from some country named Luxembourg, turning the cute catchphrase into ironic foreshadowing. It was terrible to watch the rest of the Open and continue to see “Andy’s mojo” commercials, a once tongue-in-cheek endeavor unintentionally turned grim reminder, but we went ahead and did some research on precedent for this topic and found that the Roddick ad campaign wasn’t the first to take an awkward turn for the worse. Recall:

Coca-Cola’s 1988 campaign, “Daryl Strawberry can’t get enough coke!”

Staples’ 2002 “Back to school” sale featuring Willis McGahee, Mike Williams, Carmelo Anthony, and Maurice Clarrett

Rafael Palmiero for Flintstones Vitamins, “10 million strong and growing” (2001)

Schick’s 1996 campaign featuring Michael Westbrook: “I can’t get cut while I’m shaving with Schick!”

Boston Market’s 1986 campaign, “I’m Bill Buckner and I eat at Boston Market.”

Coca-Cola’s 1989 campaign, “Lawrence Taylor can’t get enough coke!”

Mitch Williams for Capital One Savings, declaring “Of course we'll save it, why wouldn't we?” (1992)

Kobe Bryant for Tag Body Spray: “Consider yourself warned” (2003)

Snuggle fabric softener’s 1999 campaign, “Snuggle with Rae Carruth” [arguably, this was ill-fated even before the incident]

American Express’ 1909 campaign, “Have you seen the Cubs’ mojo?”

2005-09-09T01:42:00.000-04:00

NFC EAST: Once the most dominant division in football but could now be renamed, "What Week Will the Eagles Clinch the Title This Year?"

Kevin "He Likes Picking Teams So Much You Might As Well Call Him Pickles" suplexes the NFC East:

1. Philadelphia Eagles
Following their Super Bowl loss to the Patriots, the Eagles had to overcome a few minor distractions. Can you believe Brian Westbrook holding out for so long? Then there was the loss of Todd Pinkston, both a decent #3 receiver and an enormous pussy. Correll "Even I have no idea why people actually think I'll play in the regular season" Buckhalter should be traded to a team in the NFC North. Fredex was overnighted out of Philly in a box filled with his funny hats and the fact that he looks like a grandmom. Corey Simon refused a franchise contract and was released, but should return to the Eagles in three years to accept the league's veteran minimum. Veteran Hugh Douglas was also released. The Eagles have somehow formed a microcosm of the Industrial Revolution and Social Darwinism; Andy Reid actually carries a shotgun in case any of his players get injured and he needs to "put them down." Drafting wisely, the Eagles still boast one of the best defenses in the NFL, featuring Lito Sheppard and Brian Dawkins in the secondary and Jeremiah Trotter in the middle. McNabb is still the third best quarterback in the NFL behind Brady and Manning. And finally, there's TO. Owens has taken on some kind of Voldemort mystique where I don't want to mention him out of fear of fucking everything up. Distraction, smistraction. Ben Franklin might just be cumming cheese wiz while getting fellated by Betsy Ross as he signs the Constitution and lacks a subway system because this is it for my boys. This is their year. E-A-Sorry, I got too annoyed typing this. Super Bowl victory.

Even clichés agree this is the Eagles' year.

2. Dallas Cowboys
America's team. Everyone from the easiest team to hate in the '90s has either retired (Aikman, Irving, etc.) or become fossilized in amber (Emmitt Smith). So what did they do? They brought in coaching legend Bill Parcells a few years ago. Promising at first, Parcells brought in Vinny fucking Testaverde to, I don't know, throw interceptions and get sacked? Well he's done it again this year by bringing in Drew Bledsoe, the difference is Bledsoe will throw interceptions more accurately. Parcells needs to realize this is the NFL and not "On The Waterfront," he doesn't have to prove anything. He's won Superbowls. Luckily, Bledsoe can hand the ball off to Julius Jones until he gets injured. Their receivers would have been intimidating five years ago, but Keyshawn Johnson is a bitch and Terry Glenn has creepy hair (honestly, dude looks like Flat Top from Dick Tracy if he were a No Limit Solider). The most reliable receiver will be TE Jason Witten. Defensively, the Cowboys were a major disappointment last season. Parcells has decided to switch to a 3-4 scheme featuring young defensive ends including the recovering Marcus Spears. The Cowboys have an Asian middle linebacker in Dat Nguyen. Don't forget about Roy "The Dream Crusher" Williams. Though no longer a powerhouse, expect improvement from the Cowboys this season.

Parcells will start Roger Staubach before the end of the season.

3. New York Giants
Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. Giants fans hope Eli Manning can create the "living up to the hype and winning games" gin. Entering his second year, the entire franchise hinges on the success of their young quarterback. They went ahead and signed inconsistent playmaker Plaxico Burress from Pittsburgh to give Manning another target. They still have Jeremy Shockey whose mouth continues to write checks that his play on the field cannot cash. But it's cool, he'll probably just get interviewed by Stuff and say he "likes tits." They still have one of the top running backs in Tiki Barber. The Giants should be commended for legitimately attempting to improve their roster and fill needs. They don't have enough to put them over the top, though. They still have more gaps to fill than Michael Strahan's mouth. (hiyooo!) Coach Tom Coughlin is also a jerkoff. This isn't the Navy SEALS, it's a professional football team. You almost got the Jags into the Superbowl but that was when Mark Brunell was actually intimidating (Yea, that long ago). And back to Eli. Will he live up to the hype? No. Even with the most hickish name I've ever heard, this good ol' boy will not get the job done. Here comes Tim Hasselbeck!

Eli (center) at Manning family reunion

4. Washington Redskins
The return of Joe Gibbs was not triumphant. This is a man who won a Superbowl with Doug Williams and fucking Mark Rypien, the only two non-Caucausian quarterbacks ever to win the big game. The man is a legend. He returned to Washington last year and was given a team that boasted a very solid RB in Clinton Portis and a disaster worse than when the power went out in Jurassic Park at the quarterback position. Ramsey or Brunell? It's a lose-lose situation. At least bring back Danny Wuerffel to make losing funny. Wuerfell falls into the Jason White category of "How the fuck can you justify giving him a Heisman in retrospect?" Good news is they may have a future quarterback in Auburn rookie Jason Campbell, so the writing appears to be on the wall for end of the reign of Ramsey in Washington. Their biggest off-season move was trading someone for themself. Laveranues Coles and Santana Moss are clearly the same person. Somehow, Laveranues Coles, or Santana Moss or whatever his real name is, has secured contracts with the Redskins and Jets. Good thing the two teams don't play one another because Santana Coles would have to keep running back and forth between teams like Jack Tripper from "Three's Company" (Gibbs is totally Furley). Oh yeah, they still have a really good defense. LaVar Arrington should just put himself on injured reserve and get traded. Basically, they're the poor man's Ravens.

Gibbs is shocked when he realizes that Coles/Moss is the same person

2005-09-09T01:41:00.000-04:00

AFC EAST: What does New England have in common with Johnny Tremain? They’re patriots who will overcome injuries to triumph in the East.

Dan "The Guru Doctor" horsecollars the AFC East:

1. New England Patriots

New England doesn't deserve this team. Yeah, I voted Kerry, but I can't stand that culture of blue-blooded Bostonians slapping Pats stickers all over their minivan-bandwagons, blithely shelling out for the league's most expensive ticket so they can go to a game with their 24-year-old son who can't pronounce Rs and his pink-Red-Sox-hat-wearing girlfriend who thinks she understands the game because she can name a player who isn't Tom Brady (i.e., Adam Vinatieri). You already got your goddamn Red Sox World Series, New England, so stop making us hear about how selfless and talentless your players are. Just because they're not Lawrence Taylor doesn't mean they're all shining bastions of gamesmanship. Yes, Bill Belichick and Tom Brady have earned most of the superlatives that sports reporters ejaculate onto them, but enough is enough, and I really hope this is the year someone beats these motherfuckers. They lost their offensive and defensive coordinators, they're without Ty Law, Teddi Bruschi, Ted Johnson, and Roman Phifer on defense, but until New England's season officially ends, they are unquestionably the team to beat in the NFL. Deion Branch turned into Altered Beast in the playoffs last year; if he plays like that all season, this will be one of the league's deadliest offenses. For those of you, like me, that can't wait to see this team go down, don't hold your breath.

Tom Brady is a dreamboat

2. New York Jets

I expect the Jets to take a turn for the worse every year, but Herman Edwards, the dancing skeleton that coaches this team, always points these guys into the playoffs. They're one of the toughest teams in football, a cliché usually reserved for NFL Films about some white linebacker in the 60s who took cheap shots at people, but these Jets really do always hang in games. However, the appendages of Chad Pennington and Ty Law will be of great concern as the season wears, plus I really do believe Curtis Martin will stumble a little this year, so I'm going to go against my intellect and pick the Jets to miss the playoffs. Laveraneus Coles usually produces more stats than substance, plus Justin McCareins is... some guy, so a quizzical task awaits Mike Heimerdinger, the Jets' new offensive coordinator and former German U-Boat captain. All I do know is, the AFC is crowded, and I have to make at least one slightly ballsy pick, so whatever, the Jets are getting slapped by my balls.

The Jets' Mike Heimerdinger: "Ich bin ein coordinator!"

3. Buffalo Bills

J.P. Losman? More like J.P. Loss-Man. Not necessarily, but felt an obligation to get that joke in. The first-year-starter at QB offers a more mobile alternative to the tungsten-footed Drew Bledsoe, who has moved to Dallas to complete the decline of his underwhelming career. Willis McGahee is a top-flight running back, but a fruitless offseason has turned the question marks on the Bills' offensive line into question marks with exclamation points after them. Coach Mike Mularkey, grandson of renowned circus promoter Thatsabuncha Mularkey, hopes to build off a 2004 season in which Bledsoe and Co. squandered more than a couple fine outings by the defense. The anchor on D is Takeo Spikes, a fearsome, mobile linebacker capable of killing Nintendo characters if they touch him, with Lawyer Milloy and Troy Vincent rounding out a superb unit of guys who you forgot aren't on their old teams anymore. If they can get over that Jets hump this season, the Bills could be playoff bound, earning the Loss-Man the title of Boss-Man and therefore making him also able to kill Nintendo characters by touching them.

Mike Mularkey (right) with his grandfather Thatsabuncha, 1937

4. Miami Dolphins

The Dolphins signed Gus Frerotte to be their starting quarterback, but it's likely we'll see A.J. Fiedler in there at some point (does it really matter which?) Ronnie Brown and Ricky Williams will share the carries at running back, which should be an upgrade over whoever the hell their leading rusher was last year. Zach Thomas? Some dude from the Rams? Don't remember, don't care to look it up. Sure, Thomas and Junior Seau can still make some plays, but like all humans outside Narnia, they're not getting any younger, plus they lost their entire secondary in the offseason, so every passing play will result in a Jason Taylor sack or an automatic touchdown. Rookie head coach Nick Saban is reputed as a stern, old-school disciplinarian, but we have yet to see how NFL players will react to having their fingers slapped with a ruler whenever they improperly diagram sentences. The Dolphins will be better this year, but if they manage a seven-win season out of the AFC East, expect their fans to be singing "Buenvenidos a Mee-ami!"

Junior Seau is running out of time to win a Superbowl

2005-09-09T00:27:00.000-04:00

NFC SOUTH: We're going to Disney World! Cause we're all geographically very close to it.

Kevin "He Likes Picking Teams So Much You Might As Well Call Him Pickles" cannonballs the NFC South

1. Carolina Panthers
The Panthers finished 7-9 last season following their Super Bowl loss in 2004. Poised to return to excellence, this team could legitimately dethrone the Eagles as NFC Champions IF they can remain healthy. Currently, the panther has replaced the sea snake/water moccasin as my pick for world's scariest animal. This is good for Carolina. These human panthers are a lot scarier this year following the return of running back Stephen Davis, DT Kris Jenkins and WR Steve Smith. Look for QB Jake Delhomme to have a solid season. Hailing from the movie Deliverance, Delhomme is another quarterback in the line of stereotypical white Southerners. The Browns will actually be starting Southern-Bot Hitch Lee, who is to be formed from grits and threads from the Confederate flag. Quick note: Backup QB Chris Weinke is 33 years old. The Panthers also bring back backup running back and special teams superstar HeHateMe. Panthers fans don't hate the fact that their defense also features Julius Peppers, Dan Morgan, and Chris Gamble. Even though their ability to avoid injuries is crucial, they're my pick to take the NFC South if for nothing other than the fact that I had their Starter Jacket in 7 th grade and it was really awesome.

Take that Charlotte Hornets jacket

2. Atlanta Falcons
Under first year coach Jim Mora Jr., the Falcons were able to reach the NFC Championship game last season. Can they defeat the Eagles and make it to Detroit this year? No, they don't have the quarterback to get them there. Michael Vick is terribly overrated. Yea I get it; he's so fucking "athletic." This isn't Bill Walsh College Football, you can't just drop back and scramble for 30 yards every play. Vick will actually get decapitated this year. He completed more commercials last season than passes over 10 yards. If we've learned anything from his commercials, Vick's accuracy is questionable but he can literally throw a mile, like out of the stadium and into outer space, I've seen the video. Michael Vick is not Donovan McNabb. Hell, he isn't even Paul Blake (Vick couldn't hit that scarecrow with that degree of consistency). They released Peerless Price in large part due to his lack of productivity. The problem is that Vick seems unable to complete a pass to anybody not named Alge Crumpler. Good thing that the Falcons also have an overrated, undersized starting RB in Warrick Dunn. The Falcons return with an above-average defense featuring stalwart middle linebacker Keith Brooking, standout DE Pat Kierney, rookie DE Derrick Johnson, and Eugene Robinson at Strong Solicitor. Robinson isn't actually on the Falcons roster but can be found paying for sex outside the stadium every Sunday. The NFC West will come down to the Falcons and the Panthers. I'm going with the Panthers.

Blakes's totally getting laid tonight

3. New Orleans Saints
This post is about football, nothing else. That being said, the Saints are perpetually a touchdown or turnover out of the playoffs, will this be their year? The Saints have made an art of underachieving and not in a cool "Parker Lewis Can't Lose" type of way but more like a kid with a 1300 in his SAT's going to community college. This team defines the cliché "great on paper." Yea, they have a talented roster, but pieces of paper don't turn the ball over at inopportune times, humans do. As soon as these Saints start marching, they always seem to trip over each other before the grand finale. The Saints' entire season can be encapsulated in a NFL Film featuring Coach Jim Haslett dropping his headset in defeat, sighing and clearly thinking internally, "I can't believe we managed to fuck up again." Schizophrenic QB Aaron Brooks needs to be consistent and make the right decisions. The jury is still out where Brooks stands on the ROYGBIV, somewhere between Donovan McNabb and Charlie Batch. With a solid receiving corps the Saints will contend for the NFC South like they do every year. The biggest problem entering the 2005 season is that the Saints will sorely miss Willie Roaf and his hilarious name, that sounds like olive loaf.

Willie Olive Roaf

4. Tampa Bay Buccaneers
How do you avoid a fourth straight losing season following a Super Bowl appearance? The Bucs apparently have no idea because they're bringing back Brian Griese as their starter. The jig was up for Griese in Denver after a few seasons but he's managed to pull the wool over Gruden's eyes for at least a few games this season. Well at least there's Luke McCown and Chris Simms if Griese doesn't work out…..Well, they can always turn to their running game. Oh fuck, it's still Pittman? But hey, what about Cadillac? Cadillac's gonna turn it around, right? That question is rhetorical. They should probably just return to those flamboyant orange and white uniforms to let the rest of the league know that they're self aware of the fact that they suck. Brooks, Spires, Rice and the rest of the defense will lose another year of their lives. But fuck 'em, they won a Super Bowl 4 years ago and they have a pirate ship in their stadium.

Mike Alstott

2005-09-08T15:40:00.000-04:00

AFC SOUTH: Enthralling quarterbacks and poor geography highlight a division of southern-fried excitement smothered in the gravy of unpredictability.

Dan "The Guru Doctor" notorizes the AFC South:

1. Indianapolis Colts

Already the crème de la AFC South, the Indianapolis Colts picked up Corey Simon during the preseason, but it's unclear where they'll use him in their offense, at least until they've decided which offensive position Dwight Freeney is going to be converted to. Tony Dungy also plans on using nine-receiver formations and dealing with the constant irreversible penalties that will result, or, alternatively, Dungy may just start receivers on the offensive line in case any balls get tipped in their direction. Reggie Wayne took off last year and may even surpass Marvin Harrison this season, plus with the improving Dallas Clark at tight end and the inexplicably unwanted 1500-yard monster Edgerrin James in a contract year, the Colts will continue to make NFL defenses look like they belong in the WAC Conference. The Colts are a lock to make the playoffs, but until Peyton Manning shoots a commercial which somehow defeats the Patriots, the Colts will continue to spend Superbowl Sunday in their respective living rooms, racking up hundreds of offensive yards catching passes from their other family members.

The Colts' third down receiver package

2. Jacksonville Jaguars

Every four years or so, the NFL's salary cap bends a franchise over and just relentlessly reams it, leaving that team to stagger away weary and bleeding into three seasons of high draft picks. By 2004, the Jaguars' sphincter had finally recovered, and in '05, they hope to be the ones doing the reaming to the rest of the NFL. QB Byron Leftwich is considered an extremely athletic quarterback, a euphemism so transparent, the media might as well just call him "urban." Fred Taylor can still be a threat in the open field, but he just got hurt twice as I was typing this sentence, I think my words scarred cartilage in his knee. Yes, Jimmy Smith is back, but he was there and not 40 when this team went 14-2 in 1999 and they still didn't get to the Superbowl. Jack Del Rio's new-era Jaguars are tougher and more balanced than the Coughlin/Brunell teams who consistently collapsed under the weight of their own gaudy stats once the playoffs came. This year, if Reggie Williams bursts out as a legit deep threat, the Jags could scrape another win out of their schedule, reach the playoffs, and Del Rio will be dancing in the sand.

The cover of Fred Taylor's playbook

3. Houston Texans

Now that they're in their fourth season, if the Texans are unable to post a winning record, expect Dom Capers to be fired and to lobby the NFL to add another expansion team so that he can land another coaching job ("I'm serious - the Portland Tealsharks! It rolls of the tongue!") Evaluating the Texans' club is tricky, as most of their players haven't gone through puberty yet, but if QB David Carr realizes there are other receivers on his team other than the act of getting sacked, this offense could take a Texas-sized leap forward. Running back Domanick Davis... or Andre Davis? Andre Johnson. Domanick Johnson? Anyway, running back Johnsonson Davis is an up-and-comer, and former first-round-pick Davejons Andre is blossoming as one of the NFL's premier deep threats, while just plain Andre is still a seal. I don't think this team has the personnel to hit the playoffs, though, partly because adding Phillip Buchanon doesn't address their weaknesses on their defensive front, but mostly because I still cannot fathom that this is an actual, viable NFL franchise. What is that logo? They're the Texans! Are they saying that the residents of Texas are bulls with stars for their eyes?

This team doesn't exist yet, but Dom Capers will be their first head coach.

4. Tennessee Titans

Steve McNair's injury-riddled body may resemble the gameboard from "Operation," but the Titans have to overcome bigger problems this season than butterflies and wishbones. With Derrick Mason gone, Tennessee's receiving duo of Drew "Garbage Yards" Bennett and Youngie McDraftpick is probably the league's weakest, except for whoever the 49ers have. (Maybe Irving Fryar? What ever happened to Tai Streets?) The Titans do have some building blocks: the running back tandem of Chris Brown and Travis Henry will adequately overcompensate for the 1.3 yards per carry that Eddie George supplied his last couple seasons, and rookie Adam "Pac Man" Jones is the team's most intriguing defensive playmaker since Samari "Dig Dug" Rolle and Jevon "Ship From Galaga" Kearse. The youngsters are in good hands with Jeff Fisher, now in his 12th season, and first-year offensive coordinator Norman Chow from USC, but it might be another year before the Titans can chow down on a playoff spot. This year, they'll have to chow down on some rebuilding sandwiches, which should still taste better than the everyone’s-injured salads this team had to eat in 2004.

Steve McNair has been medically cleared to start the Titans' opener.

2005-09-07T11:10:00.000-04:00

NFC NORTH: Lions, Packers, Vikings and Bears! Oh my, they suck!

Kevin "He Likes Picking Teams So Much You Might As Well Call Him Pickles" goes down on the NFC North:

1. Minnesota Vikings
The class (?) of the North. Mike "Donkey Kong" Tice returns as head coach; I'd say the man had a lobotomy, but that would be inferring that he had a frontal lobe to begin with. The Vikings were fortunate that their starters made it out of camp uninjured, for Tice often throws barrels at people when he's hungry. The Vikings are the only team in the division to improve a glaring weakness: Defense! Following the acquisition of players like Fred Smoot and rookie Erasmus James, the defense is remarkably stronger but again, what about the offense? Is there life after Moss? Can Daunte "He really is that fucking big" Culpepper continue to dominate in Moss' absence? Within the paltry NFC North, yes. Coupled with Michael Bennett, the Vikings' offense will steamroll its way to the NFC North title. Then they'll be forced to play real football teams in games that matter, and that’s where this story will end. Minnesota will lose in either the second round or the NFC Championship.

Tice wants meat

2. Green Bay Packers
Brett Favre's swan song? Once the most dominant quarterback to line up behind center is now an interception machine! Some say that Favre's fairy tale career began to go downhill when the Eagles completed that miracle 4th and 26, and I'll wholeheartedly agree. Favre should probably start grooming Aaron Rodgers, but Rodgers is an adult and I'm sure he knows how to wash/dress himself. Ahman Green, Javon Walker, Bubba Franks, Donald Driver, need I say more? Favre has an astounding supporting cast to over/under throw on crucial plays. Playing at Lambeau Field used to strike fear into the hearts of opponents, but now opposing quarterbacks can expect to throw anywhere from 900 (if you're someone like AJ Feeley) to upwards of 1,000,000 yards (Matt Hasselback) against the Green Bay secondary. Scientists haven't made a number high enough to equate how much Manning would put up against them. Just think of an infinite plane of existence, like a Virtual Boy without the lame factor. Expect the Packers to abandon their secondary and instead start Favre as their entire defensive backfield. They’re planning on having Favre throw footballs at opposing receivers to distract them, plus his accuracy should be considerably higher because they're not wearing Packers jerseys.

Virtual Yoshi is less likely to get a penalty than Al Harris

3. Detroit Lions
The Super Bowl will be held in Detroit this year, and it’s too bad Detroit's young rising stars have absolutely no chance of playing in it. The Lions are considering forfeiting the season so they can secure the #1 draft pick to select another receiver. Though currently healthy, I'd suggest we start counting down the days until Charles Rogers breaks his clavicle for the third season in a row. They’re still stuck with Joey Harrington at quarterback, who’s more inconsistent than my ability to withstand from ejaculating; don't expect a breakthrough back-against-the-wall season out of Harrington like Drew Brees' performance last year. Kevin Jones is not LaDanian Thomlinson and I still deeply dislike him for faking injuries in high school and throwing a shot-put effortlessly much further than me in eighth grade. I also don't think he’s durable enough. I think Detroit still attempts to put a defense on the field too. All kidding aside, they have a dude named Boss playing linebacker. That's pretty fucking badass.

Luckily Jones didn't have to break 800 on the SAT's to get into the NFL

4. Chicago Bears
The NFC North should be renamed the NFC Inevitably of Young Offensive Stars Ending Their Season Prematurely or the NFC IOYOSETSP. Like Charles Rogers, Rex Grossman has made a career of getting injured. Grossman has a bonus structure built into his contract that depends on the severity and inconvenience of his injuries. The more "season ending", the better. He already fulfilled his contractual obligation by breaking his ankle in the preseason. Chicago allegedly intends to start rookie Kyle Orton out of Purdue, but expect him to be completely unprepared to handle a starting role. Good thing they signed Mushin Mohammed because he'll have either Mark Rypien or Charlie Ward throwing interceptions out of the Bears backfield by Week 3. Cedric Benson finally signed just in time to get injured; look for a standout year from Kijana Carter. And look at the bright side, there's always Brian Urlacher………I'll now refer to the '85 Bears Defense for no apparent reason. They existed and were good. Can you believe Jim McMahon's brother stabbed him in the eye with a fork?

"Johnny Be Good" starring Anthony Michael Hall and Jim McMahon

2005-09-07T10:40:00.000-04:00

AFC NORTH: Cities in which football is the only deterrent to residents leaving for better jobs.

Dan "The Guru Doctor" scalps the AFC North:

1. Pittsburgh Steelers
Like Old Faithful if it spewed special teams meltdowns and a constant surrendering of big passing plays, the annual collapse of my hometown Steelers in last year's AFC Championship game was more of a "they finally got together" romantic comedy ending than an M. Night Shamalan twist. Nonetheless, there's still plenty of optimism brewing in Steeler country going into '05, just there was plenty of optimism each time Sisyphus began pushing that boulder. Second-year phenom Ben Rothlisberger will feel the pressure with the loss of big-play-nonthreat Plaxico Burress, though the addition of tight end Heath Miller, their first round pick out of UVA (did he get rejected from Wash U and Tufts or something?), gives the QB an even more imposing tight end to never throw to. Pittsburgh's run defense should remain impenetrable with the return of giant fatass Casey Hampton, and the offensive line is strong, if not deep, pending the development of second-year giant fatass Max Starks. Injuries to Duce Staley and Jerome Bettis have pushed obscure third-stringer Willie Parker into the starting role at halfback, but Cowher remains confident in Parker, if only because he has the blackest name in league history. This team won't come close to their 15-1 Cinderella season from last year, but a 10 or 11 win Little Mermaid season is not unfathomable, though until Cowher rescinds his "Mandatory Not Covering Receivers In The Playoffs" Policy, Troy Polamalu and James Farrior might make a dozen more Pro Bowls before they see a Super Bowl.

Deflated Steeler fans filter out of Heinz Field after losing the AFC Title Game last January.

2. Baltimore Ravens
Hiring Jim Fassel to take over the offense was a step in the right direction for Baltimore, though being in charge of the Ravens' offense is like being in charge of the hot food at Dairy Queen. Kyle Boller is no Elvis Grbac at QB, but recall that this team won a Superbowl in 2001 behind Trent Dilfer, the world's least effective human. They'll have more weapons on offense this year with the return of Todd Heap, a 6'5" exaggeration of a high school letter-jacket-wearer, the addition of receiver Derrick Mason, who again had 1100 receiving yards last year without ever affecting the outcome of anything, and the arrival of Oklahoma standout Mark Clayton, their first round pick and likely son of ESPN analyst John Clayton. GM Ozzie Newsome is the league's best drafter, and the defense is still top-notch, so this team has the pieces to overtake the Steelers, but, as always, the Ravens' success will hinge entirely on Jamal Lewis' ability to not have his phone calls overheard. Milestone Watch: Coach Brian Billick needs just two public outbursts this season to pass Buddy Ryan for third on the NFL's All-Time Complete Dick List.

I hear Todd Heap's going to pin you at the sock hop tonight!

3. Cincinnati Bengals
The once-endangered Cincinnati Bengals are finally making a resurgence, much like the actual Bengal tiger species, and they possess two legitimate offensive threats in receiver Chad Johnson and running back Rudi Johnson, like the teeth and claws of the actual Bengal tiger. Coach Marvin Lewis is best known for his defensive mastery, but these '05 Bengals are going to have to rely on their offensive skills, like the '05 actual Bengal tiger if the rest of the NFL were and elephant and the tiger was fighting it. Receiver T.J. Houshmandzadeh is coming off a breakout year, giving the Bengals a third weapon, as though an actual Bengal tiger were holding a spear in its claws, which wouldn't be as deadly as the claws (because they're Chad Johnson) but could still hurt you. After two 8-8 seasons under Lewis, expectations are rising in Cincinnati almost as fast as the crime rate, but if they can win some turnover battles this season, it's conceivable they could grab an AFC wildcard spot, like the actual Bengal tiger if it were trying to get into, like, the wildcard of animals, but it kept having its whiskers intercepted, even though its face was drafted first overall out of USC and paid a lot of money. I'm good at metafords.

Can Carson Palmer (left) take these young Bengals the extra step?

4. Cleveland Browns
The Cleveland Browns are 30-66 since returning to the NFL in 1999, so they've outperformed the actual city of Cleveland during that span, but the 2005 season promises more frown clowns down in Brown town. What Romeo Crennel did with the Patriots' defense last year was remarkable, but in Cleveland, he'll look like a great classical conductor waving his baton at a pile of horseshit. Past draft choices Tim Couch, Kevin Johnson, Courtney Brown, and Gerard Warren comprise a Washington-Generalsesque roster of ineptitude, though opponents won't need to pull down the Browns' shorts or throw buckets of glitter at their fans to beat them. Braylon Edwards can expect to see lots of octuple coverage while the Browns adjust to Trent Dilfer's "Three-and-Out" offensive scheme. Said Crennel on his new quarterback, "It might be a couple of weeks into the season before we can get to third and long before turning the ball over, but Trent runs this system better than anyone, that's why we got him."

Browns fans will have to be patient as their team rebuilds.

2005-09-06T21:09:00.000-04:00

NFC WEST: It’s like those kids that don’t actually want to get in the game but play simply because they don’t want to get made fun of by their dad were given their own division.

Kevin "He Likes Picking Teams So Much You Might As Well Call Him Pickles" Stalingrads the NFC West:

1. St. Louis Rams
The greatest show on turf! A high-flying circus if this fictitious circus lacked bears and funnel cake and instead was a football team! The Rams are more of the Steel Pier at Atlantic City than Cirque de Soleil at this point, only the Rams won’t give you a VD. Well, everyone except Mike Martz. Martz is renowned for his run-and-gun West Coast style offense and his complete abandonment of the running game. Marshall Faulk, arguably the greatest running back in the history of football, was forced to an ancillary role the second Martz took over for Vermeil. Steven Jackson is now the Rams’ starter, which means he’ll get 11 carries a game to Faulk’s 5. They still have Holt and Bruce anchoring a solid receiver corps. Bulger fits perfectly into Martz’s “system,” which essentially means he lines up in shotgun and immediately throws the ball 40 yards downfield. This works within the NFC West because the division absolutely sucks. The Rams will win the division but lose in either the first or second round of the playoffs. Oh, wait, they allegedly have a defense too. I say this only because they signed Dexter Coakley. I guess their only other defensive player, Aeneas Williams, retired or something.

This cat fight occurred at the Steel Pier and has nothing to do with the fact that Martz is a dick

2. Seattle Seahawks
Mike Holmgren was hired to bring the Seahawks back to mediocrity, and he has succeeded admirably - this is the least intimidating team in football. The NFC West playoff race (?) was more like a playoff jog last season. Analysts will probably opt to pick the Rams to take the NFC West because they picked the Seahawks last year and they’re required to alternate every year. Matt Hasselbeck (insert hilarious Survivor/View chick line, even though it's his brother who is on the Giants!) will put up solid regular season numbers again and not be good in crucial games, though Shaun Alexander is still one of the best running backs in the league. Too bad this is irrelevant because the team is missing too many pieces. Darrell Jackson is solid and their fullback’s name is outstanding; Mack Strong is actually not a boss in NARC but is entering his 13th NFL Season. Bobby Engram has actually already dropped the touchdown that would clinch the NFC Wildcard for the Seahawks later this season. Look forward to Holmgren receiving a lucrative contract extension because he won a Superbowl within the past 20 years.

Why did you have to shoot dogs in this game?

3. Arizona Cardinals
Will this team ever stop sucking? Not yet. They don’t delude themselves with playoff aspirations, the Cardinals motivate themselves by clinging to the hopes that they will be able to spoil someone’s (like the Rams) playoff hopes. This is the only way that they’re able to rationalize their existence. Very similar to the Lions, the Cardinals are another team with remarkably gifted young receivers in Anquan Boldin and Larry Fitzgerald. We’ll see if there’s any magic left in Kurt Warner; I hope he wins some games because otherwise his wife will beat him up (she’s actually Gozer). I’m also still convinced that Josh McCown is Cade McNown, even though McCown is more likely to throw a Sonic Boom (dude looks more than a little like Guile). Following the retirement of Emmitt Smith, the Cardinals signed the skeleton of the hominid Lucy to play halfback, but remarkably, Smith is actually older than her. Arizona should have the most dominant defense in football this season because they signed 10 rattlesnakes to start alongside Robert Griffith. There is a silver lining for this story, however. Under the leadership of Dennis Green, expect the Cardinals to make the playoffs sometime within the next few years and begin to lose these games in horribly frustrating ways.

Brenda Warner

4. San Francisco 49ers
At one point this team was the envy of the entire league. They still dominate like crazy…..in Tecmo Bowl. Boy, do they suck in real life though. They’ve made a series of hilarious decisions, the first of which, of course, was replacing Steve Mariucci with Dennis Ericsson. Then realizing the error, they hired somebody’s son (Mike Nolan). I think they interviewed Dennis Green to meet their minority requirement even though Green was already hired as the Cardinals' head coach over a year ago, but Tagliabue OK’d the decision without hesitation. With the first selection of the 2005 NFL draft, the 49ers selected: it doesn’t fucking matter, this team is irreparable. It appears the 49ers will start Tim Rattay then ease into the transition to Alex Smith, but they’re actually just delaying the inevitability of Smith’s first concussion and interception. They should start Ken Dorsey, release Smith and Rattay, sign Jason White and coax Eric Crouch and Tommy Frazier out of retirement to have the most hilarious “island of lost toys” lineup of quarterbacks. Their defense is a laundry list of no-names. They should bring back Dana Stubblefield for my amusement. I like to laugh at his tiny head and enormous body.

Stubblefield actually wore a Dairy Queen derby helmet during games

2005-09-06T20:13:00.000-04:00

AFC WEST: Home of the West Coast Offense, meaning that they throw a football and announcers call it the West Coast Offense.

Dan "The Guru Doctor" shoots the AFC West first and asks questions later:

1. Kansas City Chiefs
The Chiefs led the NFL in total offense last season, prompting Dick Vermeil to break down crying at season's end, but they also ranked second to last in total defense, prompting Vermeil to break down crying at the end of every game. He also cried after every injury, holding penalty, and any halftime shows that didn't live up to his expectations. Priest Holmes and Tony Gonzalez own fantasy football, but this ain't no fantasy, there's more to the real NFL than complaining about your commissioner's scoring system and trash talking via Yahoo message boards. That’s why the Chiefs brought back Gunther Cunningham as their defensive coordinator last year, apparently hoping his archaic first name would instantly make their defense tougher. This year, the Chiefs switched to the "let's actually put dudes on the field" approach, adding D-backs Sammy Knight and Patrick Surtain from the Dolphins and drafting menacing Texas linebacker Derrick Johnson. Trent Green turns the ball over too much, but he always throws for huge yards, so if their defense upgrades from drunken-uncle-on-Christmas embarrassing to mother-tells-cute-story-about-you embarrassing, there'll be plenty of reasons for the fans at Arrowhead to do their Indian-pounding-whiskey-shots gesture, or whatever that's supposed to be. The Chiefs will compete in the AFC West for Surtain.

Dick Vermeil cries after a Rams preseason game in which his second team underperformed.

2. Denver Broncos
The AFC's answer to the Packers, the once-great Broncos are becoming masters of the early playoff exit. Until Mike Shanahan decides that even he could gain 1000 yards rushing in this offense, Denver is deep at running back with Mike Anderson, Tatum Bell, and Ron Dayne, who, interestingly, averaged more yards per carry in college than he totaled in his entire Giants career. Ashley Lelie and Rod Smith comprise a potential top-10 receiving duo, but I refuse to believe that Ed McCaffery is off this team until I see a conclusive autopsy report. QB Jake "The Snake" Plummer, nicknamed "The Snake" because he's capable of poisoning his team with turnovers, or, possibly, because his name rhymes with “snake” and people are clever, is the perfect quarterback for this team's "let's be good, but not Superbowl good" philosophy. The Broncos are still tough at home, likely because opposing teams are distracted by home runs from Coors Field raining on the football field during games, and yes, the Rockies only play til October, but balls still fly out of Coors year-round, they shoot out of the Dante Bichette statue in left field. The additions of Cleveland castoffs Courtney Brown and Gerard Warren should upgrade Denver's defense, though even I can't tell if I'm being sarcastic on that one. Either way, expect a 9-7 year out of the Bronc's (not The Bronx) and fierce contention to be the last team into and first out of the AFC playoffs.

The pressure's on Mike Shanahan to get the Broncos deeper into the playoffs (Artist's Conception)

3. San Diego Chargers
In this era of salary-cap-aided parity in the NFL, only one thing is certain: The San Diego Chargers will not win the Superbowl. LaDanian Tomlinson is the league's best back, and they're far from the worst team in the league, but it won't matter, every Marty Schottenheimer team must choke, it's a mathematical certainty. No, it's more than a mathematical certainty. The constant Pi has a better chance of winning the Superbowl than the Chargers. Schottenheimer choking is the middle star in Orion's belt. It's a more viable alternative energy source than wind. Did you see the Chargers last season? They went into the playoffs 12-4 and lost in the first round on a missed field goal, of which Schottenheimer commented, "All these things are in the hands of the Lord," the Lord, I assume, referring to their kicker. On a non-spiritual level, this team is in trouble. The front office will be quietly rooting for Philip Rivers to get some snaps at QB, tight end Antonio Gates is justifiably pissed about his contract, the team's done nothing to upgrade their 31st-ranked pass defense, and their top receiver is Keenan "Jimmy Smith's Covered" McCardell. Most of ESPN’s analysts have the Chargers making the playoffs, but in my opinion, these guys are all charged out. That's an expression, right?

Schottenheimer's frustrations showed last season after his twentieth straight playoff loss.

4. Oakland Raiders
The Raiders' offense is sick, sick sick. Randy Moss, Jerry Porter, and LaMont Jordan would easily combine for 40 touchdowns even if they didn't have anyone coaching them, but with Norv Turner running the show, they could conceivably reach 25 or 30. Fortunately for Kerry Collins, he won't need to be sober to drive this team down the field; throwing to Moss and Porter will be like bumper bowling, which should well suit Collins, now an eight-year-old at his friend Randy's birthday party (I think his mom bought Moss "Jenga"). If tackle Robert Gallery is healthy for the year, Jordan will outgain former teammate Curtis Martin and will give the Raiders' subpar defense some rest, something which D-linemen Warren Fatt and Ted "Bigger Than The City Of" Washington desperately need, provided Kevin Spacey's character from "Seven" doesn't murder them first. If this team's coach wasn't worthless, I'd see them competing for a wildcard, but until then, the Raiders will trash some opponents but have to settle for a vagabond life in the standings. Ah, to be a raider.

Ted Washington is hypnotically fat.

2005-09-06T20:00:00.000-04:00

OUR 2005 NFL PICKS

NFC DIVISION WINNERS
Dan: Eagles, Panthers, Vikings, Rams
Kev: Eagles, Panthers, Vikings, Rams

NFC WILDCARDS
Dan: Falcons, Packers
Kev: Cowboys, Falcons

AFC DIVISION WINNERS
Dan: Patriots, Colts, Steelers, Chiefs
Kev: Patriots, Colts, Ravens, Chiefs

AFC WILDCARDS
Dan: Ravens, Jaguars
Kev: Broncos, Jets

NFC Championship
Dan & Kev: Eagles over Panthers

AFC Championship
Dan & Kev: Patriots over Colts

SUPERBOWL
DAN & KEV: EAGLES OVER PATRIOTS

2005-09-06T02:22:00.000-04:00

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Love,

Dan & Kevin