Go, Roll to Victory, Hit Your Stride

First, let me apologize to anyone who care nothing about sports. There's nothing for you in this post. Sorry. Ok, moving on...

College football starts tonight and while I'm sure my patriotism will be questioned for saying it, I have to admit that I'm a million times more interested in this than I was in the Olympics.¹ Fortunately, I'm also not nearly as invested in this as I was when I was younger. Yes, I still love the games and follow as much as I can, but time and distance have allowed me to realize just how much insanity there is that goes along with what is really just a game.

For a first week, there is plenty going on:

The University of Alabama (the team I grew up rooting for and actually still root for despite never having attended a class there) takes on Clemson on a neutral field. I love that two teams ranked in the top-25 went out of their way to schedule a ranked non-conference opponent to start the season off right. This does not, however, make up for scheduling Tulane, Western Kentucky and Arkansas State as your other non-conference opponents.

Michigan fans (and you know who you are) will get to watch the debut of new coach Rich Rodriguez against Utah and hope to see Appalachian State (you remember them) can spoil the season of another highly ranked team² (this time, it's defending champ LSU and the guy I thought for sure would come home to Michigan and be their head coach). I don't know if Rodriguez will mean more wins, but the offense will be much more fun to watch.

In one of the other games involving two ranked teams, my alma mater, Illinois³, will try to prove that last year was not a fluke by taking on Missouri. Unfortunately, I'm pretty convinced that last year was a fluke and that the only chance that UI has in this game is that Mizzou may be distracted by the people claiming that they have a shot at the national title and may be overconfident (don't see it happening though). At least the Illini have the quarterback with the better name. Really, Chase Daniel is cool, but how can you compete with Juice Williams?

Then of course, there are all sorts of other games that most people don't care about. But if you happen to be at Miami (OH), there would be an opportunity to see your team take on the university which completely did away with its athletic department a few years ago, moving all intercollegiate athletics to the Department of Student Life, putting them approximately on the level with student government⁴.

There are 120 teams, all with a (theoretical) shot at the national title, and it all starts tonight. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go figure out how to see the Alabama-Clemson game which is not showing on my cable provider.

(Other interesting opening weekend games I didn't mention: Kentucky/Louisville, USC/Virginia, Oregon/Washington, Tennessee/UCLA)

¹ Yes, Michael Phelps was impressive, but I wouldn't watch swimming, track or trampoline any other time, so why would I watch it every four years. Also, you can try as hard as you want, but you're not going to get me to think that winning or losing athletic events against other countries makes my country any better or worse than theirs.

² While it is exciting to point out that this is the match-up of two defending national champions (App State won the Division I-AA championship), I don't think ASU is going to get to sneak up on anybody this year. The fear of ending up like last year's Michigan team, which will be remembered for that first game despite ending up with a pretty good season.

³ Actually that's alma mater II. Alma mater I has the weekend off. One could also argue that they have every weekend off, but that's not true despite the scores seeming to reflect that.

⁴ For those of you not wanting to waste time looking it up, I'm talking about Vanderbilt, one of the schools home to the "That's all right. That's OK. You'll be pumping our gas someday." cheer. By the way, that cheer is second only to the declaration by members of the SMU student body that "our maids went to Texas."

Lost 5.01 "Because You Left" Countdown

I'm not sure if this countdown makes things better or worse, but it looks cool. Perhaps when we get close to time it will start beeping and the numbers will be replaced with hieroglyphics.

They Like Their Cryptids Like They Like Their Coffee...

So, apparently someone found bigfoot? Viral marketing for a book/TV show/movie, or just more nutjobs? I guess we'll find out once they reveal all their evidence. I'm relatively sure I know where I stand on this one.

No Lunch for You

It's never good when you go to grab some lunch and think, "Wow, the cops must like this place as much as I do. There are two police cars in the parking lot." Apparently, they weren't just there for the food.

Still Uninspired

Here we go again.

Something occurred to me the other day. If a vegetarian is someone who eats vegetables, what precisely does that mean when someone claims to be a humanitarian?

Shortly after this, it occurred to me that Gallagher wants his shtick back.

I'm always way behind the times, so most of you have probably already been to this site, but in case you haven't check out Cake Wrecks, which celebrates some of the more disturbing baked goods people have ever paid for.

Are run and ran really that hard to keep straight? If you have problems with which one to use, just remember, "...and I ran. I ran so far away." and the rest all pretty much takes care of itself.

It was Ribfest here this weekend, and one of the vendors was called O.T.'s. They were really good, but I couldn't help wondering if it was going to turn out that they sold barbecue and Scientology.^1,2

Wow, apparently I only thought I hated the faux Breakfast Club commercial. What I feel for that one is nothing compared to the ad (for Kraft, I think) where they add "pure" to everything they say, like "purefect" and "pureka."Then there is the Pizza Hut commercial where the delivery person pretends to be a French baker while people try their new Dunkers. Look, I'm not saying that they may not be tasty, but it doesn't take a genius to identify a breadstick with chocolate chips on top.

This weekend we were driving along the road and saw that some business had their sign alternating between showing the temperature in Fahrenheit and Celcius. It stated that the temp was 23°C, which seemed fairly reasonable, then switched and told us that it was -126°F. I'm not sure which surprised me more: that I had really underdressed for the weather and was going to die within moments of leaving the car or that I really must have been remembering those calculations for temperature conversion wrong. I guess they weren't kidding in school when they told us that if you didn't use what you learned, you'd lose it.

Come back later, maybe I'll have something to say...but I doubt it.

^1. To be fair, their food was incredible and I think that may have been someone's name. I'm not ruling anything out yet though.
^2. Also, I thought it would be amusing to come up with a lyrics for a song about Ribfest using Adam Sandler's Hanukkah Song, but I couldn't really get any further than making jokes about gout, but it's probably all for the best.

Cornbread: Ain't Nothin' Wrong With That

Guess what? I don't have much of anything interesting to say, so you're getting a bunch of uninteresting things that have been bouncing around in my mind.

We have a spam filter at work that filters out pretty much anything that could be spam. It does a good job, but occasionally something will slip through. The other day, a few messages made it past the filter so I ended up with an inbox containing four copies of the same spam message from different "senders." As I was deleting them, I noticed that the first name of the sender for one of the messages was Slartibartfast. Are spammers developing a sense of humor?

Ok, I think I've got this all figured out. If warm chicken tastes good, cold crunchy veggies taste good, a warm chicken-cold crunchy salad tastes good-good then my new chocolate-covered garlic-stuffed shrimp should taste good-good-good. Oh yeah, I'm gonna be rich.

If you're walking around a store like Target, even if you are a pathetic backward-hat wearing frat boy, people should not be able to smell you three aisles away. Seriously Stinky, wearing that much cologne is not going to make women line up for the chance to bear your children. Do us all a favor and ease back just a little bit.

Here's something I don't think I've talked about on here in the past. I was a really big fan of the X-Files for quite a while. In fact, the first movie came out just over ten years ago. Also just over ten years ago, Melissa and I got married and moved across the country so that I could start school in Illinois. One of the very first things we did upon arriving in Illinois was find out where a theater was so that we could go see X-Files. By one of the first things, I mean that when we went to the grocery store for the first time so that we had at least some food in the house to eat (which also happened to be the day the movie was released) we asked one of the employees where the theater was so that as soon as we put the groceries away, we could go see it. Priorities, you know? I've said all that to say this: I don't know if it's that it has been 6 years since the show ended or how the last few seasons went or the fact that the best reviews I have seen have been barely even lukewarm, but I haven't seen the new movie yet. I'm not sure if I will.

Our air conditioner is currently broken. It just so happens that the company that is going to fix it is called Bel Aire. It turns out that if you suggest asking the repair guy if he is The Prince, other people may not think you are as funny as you do. (Note: Only suggest asking this. Don't actually ask or they may leave you to fix it yourself.)

Have you seen the commercial for JC Penney where a bunch of kids far too young to have ever seen The Breakfast Club are re-enacting The Breakfast Club? I am irrationally angered by that commercial.

Is that it? Yeah, that's it.