RAVEN MACK is a mystic poet-philosopher-artist of the Greater Appalachian unorthodox tradition. He does have an amazing PATREON, but also *normal* ARTIST WEBSITE too.

Tuesday, September 30

Homemade Song of the Week: "South 15 Rider" by Prolo

This here "South 15 Rider" song was on the first Prolo CD after we reformed after like fifteen years not making music. We used to be making music back in the boom bap days, shitty ass white dudes, had some sleazy urban manager dude geeking us up that he could get us signed to the label that Domino "Ghetto Jam" dude was on. Man, thank God that didn't happen. There'd be mad stupid youtube clips of me in my flannel and work pants and stocking hat style. Not that there's already plenty of stupid shit with me attached to it inside the internets as it is.
At the time of this, I worked for a guy up in Barboursville, and most of our work was in Orange County, so I rode US 15 from near my house to where we worked every day. I also grew up along US 15 about another hour south from all this. Plus, my first sister moved and lives about another hour south on US 15 in Clarksville. So it only made sense I'd write a song about a fake weekend hobo escape. I had played Brown the beat to "Cadillac on 22s" one night while we were high, as an example of the most perfect beat ever made on earths, and he took that style as inspiration for a few beats, this one being the best one he made. Then we recorded it in the camper behind my house and got my wife to sing background vocals. And this is what you end up with, which for people who know the area, they love it. But for most of you, it's probably off your radar. But every word of it is true.

100 VINYLZ: #90 - Extreme Aggression LP by Kreator


(1989, Noise Records)
There has never been a more perfect form of the metal musics than the original thrash movement. Never. When shit got all fake evil with the hell groan vocals, that shit's kinda stupid and cartoony. And I cannot ever once cosign on all these college town ironic metal bands that emulate the original thick grooves, but are all hanging out with anthropology and art history degrees, drinking PBRs. Pure metal is made with ignorance and hopelessness. Plus long hair. You could always tell back in the day that Rob Halford was gay because he had short hair. Long hair, a lack of hope for anything higher in life than maybe getting a G.E.D., and with twangy hyper-speed guitars. That shit is perfect.
A few years ago, I blew a good chunk of a unearned tax return by trying to re-accumulate a bunch of my favorite records from inside the ebays from my reckless youth. Some of them stood the test of time, while others were not as wonderful as my fifteen-year-old, weed-hazy mind remembered them. But two groups really stood out as being just as fucking powerful and perfect as I remembered them - Kreator and Overkill. But especially Kreator.
I have an 18 foot camper behind my house that a nice gypsy lady brought here to leave so that I'd take good care of it, except I can't have things, so now there's a pile of trash in front of it, it's half tore up, but it's perfectly me. Sometimes - and I'm 35 now - shit gets on my nerves, and I need to withdraw and pull back, and I'll go out to the camper and turn the lamp switch three times so it goes to the red light in the bottom half, and I'll put on this album, loud as fuck. Sitting outside my house in a camper in a red light listening to Kreator. But you see, I've got a college degree and upward mobility, so I know I can't recreate that, not even for leisure. So I sit there and smoke a bowl maybe, and just enjoy the fruits of other's frustrations. And it soothes my minor frustrations. Which is supposed to be the fucking point of music.

(frybread) Family Field Trip to the Science Museum

We took the kids to the Science Museum in Richmond last weekend, to get some science and see the Imaxes movie pictures about the Grand Canyon. I hadn't seen an Imax flick since I was in high school and me and four other dudes skipped school, dropped acid, popped into a small ass '88 Dodge Omni, and went to the Science Museum in Richmond, because we were high-minded delinquents. My 4-year-old was right at the cusp of not being able to handle such a gigantic surround-sound movie, and the whitewater rapids scenes caused her to curl up in my lap and hide her face. The movie was good like most Imaxes movies, except they always have to have some sort of save-the-earth bent, and be like, "You know, the Colorado River is almost dried up because of overuse by man. So now watch us ride through these awesome rapids." And then at the end, they tell you to get different showerheads to save 500 gallons of water a year.
An eventual thing I'm gonna do when I win the lottery, to help expedite wasting my money and being poor, thus pure, again, is buy me a museum with one of the Imaxxes in it, and start hiring people to make hellbent Imaxxes, like instead of awesome whitewater shit, you walk through a ghetto ass neighborhood, and then have to run, camera in first person, because some dude is gonna rob you. Or that really nice space age shit they do at the beginning of Imaxxes to show you how awesome it could be but they only do it for ten seconds? I'd make a whole movie of that, like surround-sound Tron 2008. Because most of those movies are geared towards drug abuse, but then they put them in science museums and confuse the issue. Or Imaxxes porn, but some high concept porn, like about how conventional farming is so wasteful of resources, and then you pick up some hot earth mama in Whole Foods and have sex with her, then explain how organic farming is so much better, a couple hot hippie chicks make out while weeding on a carrot farm or something, or probably zucchinis so they can be used erotically. That'd be a great Imaxxes movie, and would still be as scientific as the Grand Canyon one I watched.
They just banned having a strip club across the street from the Science Museum in Richmond, because a Children's Museum is right beside it, and didn't want to expose kids to that type of shit. But I remember when that shit first opened - the Science Museum - and my school taking a field trip there, to the big city of Richmond, and there was a porn theater right across the street. I guess porn was more acceptable then, not yet so far removed from it's glory days and golden age of Holmes and Seka and the like.
(As a side note, I had an older guy I worked with when I was 16 convince me that I should try acid at least once, just to see hallucinatory things and realize everything I think I know is not necessarily what I know or what it is. I am very thankful for his influence on my life back then. If you are a lost teenager wasting time inside the internets, I encourage you to do hallucinogenics to expand yourself. But don't sit in front of the computer when you do it. Mechanisms like a computer can be too much when realizing reality is totally subjective.)

Friday, September 26

100 VINYLZ: #91 - The World is a Ghetto LP by War


(1972, United Artists)
War is known mostly for their bigger hits like “Low Rider” and “Why Can’t We Be Friends”, but they made a bunch of great full-length records. War, led by Lee Oskar, was a black and hispanic funk ass band, but you probably knew that already. This was always my favorite full-length by them (most notable for the single “Cisco Kid”) because it was a nice concept record, and I’m a sucker for concept records, especially nowadays where everything is downloaded by the tracks or as a whole, unrared, and then you check each track one time real quick and dump half of them before giving any of them a full couple time listen through to truly get into.
I originially copped this on a used cassette when I lived with this hippie chick Lynne that I mistakenly thought I was in love with. She had a steady tendency to flip out on dudes and bail on them for the next guy that came along, even though she fell in love with each one. But I was such a strong upstanding dude, that when this hit her one time, she just wanted some space for a few days to figure it all out, instead of her standard moving onto the next guy mode. So I crashed on a mattress on the concrete floor in the basement of my buddy Scan’s house. The washing machine drained right beside me and the water would overrun and flow into the drain on the floor, like a foot over from where I had the mattress, and there were mice and shit everywhere, and it smelled like a juicy pussy with lots of hair had been kept confined inside of tight blue jeans for three days straight all the time. And I had this shitty little five dollar radio from the ghetto ass five-and-dime store a couple blocks away, that I’d play this cassette in. Being I was all young and introspective, wondering if this girl I loved was gonna love me, and whether I should even bother, sitting in a shitty basement, not far from finishing college, and just really lost as fuck and mired in one of those dirty environments that works like an acid trip and causes you to over-evaluate your life from every angle and not really like any of what you see. This tape was, and still is, the perfect soundtrack for such a freak-out.
We got back together, but it was only like another nine months before she freaked out again, after we had moved across town where she had a car and I had a 10-speed, and she started hanging with some other dude (actually Willie Adler who ended up being a guitarist in Lamb of God and is a good ass dude and I love to this day, mostly because she ended up leaving his dumb ass too, so we bonded in crazy bitch), so I was couch crashing while my dog Waylon lived with her. Actually she went on the road and was supposed to come back a certain day, and I was gone that day, at my boy Scan’s again, with Boogie Brown and Cock Diesel Robby, and me and Boogie Brown and Scan split a quarter bag of shrooms, which meant I took like half of it, and I was booming man. I rode my 10-speed across the nickel bridge at like four in the morning with a blood red harvest moon rising over the James, and I was freestyling at the sky and I remember thinking it was the best freestyle I ever had done ever EVER! but of course, never remembered even half an idea from it, heading back to southside to my house where the bitch ass ex, her new boyfriend potentially, anything could be waiting. Instead the house was empty still, just my dog Waylon who had tore up a bunch of aloe vera plants. I stared at Waylon sitting on the bed, which is what I liked to do when tripping, and to this day I think that’s why we were so close as man and dog, it was some twisted brainwashing bullshit. I think I tricked him into thinking I was part dog, or I accidentally shot human powers into his brain while on shrooms or something, which is why he had to sleep only on beds or couches mostly.
Next morning, I packed a backpack full of shit and hit the road myself, Greyhound riding out west. When I got back, I just grabbed my basic shit, as the ex and Willie were official, and I left a lot of music behind. I called one time back to my old house where they lived, and no one was home, and the answering machine came on and it was a clip from THIS FUCKING TAPE! Oh man, the ridiculousness of it all. I would say that’s ironic, but the term’s been thrown around in so many strange ways I don’t even remember what it’s supposed to mean anymore.
At some point since then, though, I got this on vinyl. Actually, twice that’s happened, because my first copy was scratched up as fuck, so I upgraded one day when I ran across it again, though I think I still have both copies. One of them, I’ve been meaning to tape the cover of to the walls inside the camper, because it’s one of my favorite album covers. Everything so grey yet happy. It is raining outside and I am typing click-clack-clickity-clack shit all over a laptop, tin roof pattering, Statik Selektah mix show on the satellite radio... the world is a ghetto, but filled with such good times blasting horns. Fuck it man, the apocalypse is gonna be a party.

Thursday, September 25

100 VINYLZ: #92 - Woodstock Mountains: More Music From Mud Acres LP by Various Artists


(1977, Rounder Records)
My dad used to play the Woodstock soundtrack, which out of like 200 songs had about 3 that were worth my time, and that was as a young and naive doofus, mostly interspersing the bowl hits he took while it was playing with stories of how his buddy Bozo went there and climbed the lighting rigs and there was a picture of him in the papers. Bozo has a real name and lives not too far from me and I enjoy visiting his waterless cabin on a mountain with no interior walling in half of it. We sit there and drink a 12-pack and compare paranoias. Those guys like Bozo and my dad (aka Tuna) were just as much redneck as they were hippie, and they sort of twisted my attitude towards hippies into something positive until I grew up, went to college, and met well-to-do (meaning pretentious) hippies my age, and learned that they are full of shit, but a really bad type of full of shit where they try to force they bullshit on you because they know what’s best for you better than you do, like conservative Christians, just with bean sprouts instead of Bibles.
Anyways, the whole Woodstock party was okay I guess, although if I wanted to go somewhere and listen to music really loud while tripping balls, the last place I’d want to be is around a hundred thousand other motherfuckers. But I guess a bunch of people ended up stranded there in upstate New York, to this day even, and they turned a couple small towns into Obama sign factories and coffee shops with rural wi-fi, and artisans galore, which is a term who people who aren’t real artists but are fairly pretentious about what they make use. This is an album done by a pack of such settled artists, who held a weekend jam session, but with the recording machines a-running. If Woodstock the festival was the naked, drugged-up freakfest of a Saturday night party, this album would be the post-hangover, mellower late Sunday afternoon back porch music while the womenfolks are cooking up some butternut squashes and roasting a couple of chickens. It’s also probably the type of mellowed-out folksy shit that the loudest parts of the internets would never love. But I got no shame.
The record features Happy and Artie Traum (I have no idea if they’re famous or not, but that is funny pair of names to say; I think they’re brothers, meaning they shared a mother, not a blunt), John Sebastian (the dude who did the theme song to Welcome Back, Kotter), Paul Butterfield (of Paul Butterfield Blues Band fame), and Roly Salley. Quickly consulting the internet, I found out that this record was famous because it is the first recording of “Killing the Blues” by the aforementioned Salley, which I guess became a famous song because some later more famous homos have done the song in the past decade or two. But I dig this record for songs like “Bluegrass Boy” and “Waiting for a Train”, slow-moving, hobo country boy fish out of water songs. I could go sit out in my 18 foot borrowed camper trailer and listen to shit like that spin on the turns table all night long, sipping on some homebrews and maybe smoking a bowl (haha, just like my old man used to... what a fuckin’ loser I am sometimes). I actually just used a three parts of a song off this album to make a weird ass beat for my new alter-ego rap bullshit called The Ancient Hobo with pitch-shifted vocals.
The odd thing about this record is I bought it years ago in Richmond at this now-gone record store called Memory Lane Records that was run by a weird ponytailed guy who would talk to you (or at least me, with my retardar) about the mail wrestling league he was in where you would mail a postcard to another guy you were having a by-mail wrestling match with and it would have your next three moves, and then he would do it. I never did figure out how that would work or why you would do it. I bet the internet exploded that guy’s mind - every record ever for sale and plus all sorts of wrestling dork games. But that’s where I got this bama. And then I never saw it again. Until a month or so ago, when the PSY/OPS told me some dude in Goochland was selling off thousands of records on the side of the road in front of his house for a dollar each. I had to check that out. He was a weird ponytailed guy too, kind of like if me and my dad were brothers and we had a middle brother between us. He tried to sell his shit at Plan 9, but they told him he’d get like a dime a record, and he didn’t want to mess with online selling because he wouldn’t buy anything that he couldn’t see and touch, so he didn’t trust anybody else who would do such a crazy thing. He had thousands of records, and not much I wanted, because he had more records that I also have from my weird redneck/hippie sections than I’ve ever seen. It was disturbing, to the point I was looking at the guy, being all anal about certain records and thumbing through an old issue of Club magazine that I got all freaked out like he was me in the holographic universe, but somewhere where I went right at a fork, he went left, and that’s how it ended up for me/him. He was moving to Colorado and it all had to fit in the back of his Blazer, because it was a one-way trip, so he was selling it all. He had a second copy of this record, that I almost bought to double up my copy of this record, but if I had started buying up doubles of shit that was important to me, I would’ve dropped another $100 at this guy’s place on the side of 522 between Gum Springs and Goochland Courthouse. And plus, there was some half-wit painter following me around, talking about how his older brother used to play with Toby Keith or some shit that was driving me mad.

NFL WK 4: AFC North & East teams


#1: BUFFALO BILLS (3-0, 2nd overall)
Yeah, I should just go ahead and point out that my highly-flawed, completely-mathematical formula really is useless until after like the fifth week of the season, once everything has settled down. How else to explain the Bills being the overall second-ranked team in the NFL at this point? But it shows something too, that with the Patriots Brady-less, and Peyton Manning and the Colts looking battle-worn already, it's kinda wide open where almost anybody can win the Super Bowl this year. I mean, the Cowboys look like the best team, but come on, they're a regular season team, not a playoff team. But the Bills have sopped up everything on their plate thus far. If they can stay straight, and with Marcus Stroud's domineering personality on defense, with the AFC wide open now, they could get a proper chance to lose another Super Bowl.

#2: PITTSBURGH STEELERS (2-1, 8th overall)
The offensive line is in shambles, and Big Ben is being reduced to a taller David Carr/Patrick Ramsey, just with a hamburger named after him... you know, enough of this bullshit. I try too fucking hard to be too fucking soft sometimes. You know why the Steelers are always relevant? Their uniforms. Ominous black to endear mongoloid blood-thirsty linemen and linebackers, yet has that flashy yellow to attract the retard-styled skill position types. Black and yellow. This is why they always end up being remotely relevant, and also why a Patriots tumble could go to the bottom fairly fast, because they have shitty uniforms. Notice the Steelers don't be revamping their shit with new zubaz kwanzaa trim or eurofag slicy parts down the jersey into the pant legs. Straight up black and yellow. Shit, this fact alone makes it impossible for them to ever be worse than like third in their division on their worst years.

#3: MIAMI DOLPHINS (1-2, 13th overall)
The Dolphins are, for me, the Cowboys of the AFC, which mean they are unloveable crackheads, scumbags, and fuckfaces. Don Shula and Bill Parcels make perfect bedfellows... old self-important shitheads sitting around on boats casting lines at wild marlin that they'll never pull in on their own because they'll just get the help to break any sweats necessary. But being the AFC East is kind of the NFL's godless division, with nobody really worth loving at all, I still hope for the Dolphins to be successful.

#4: BALTIMORE RAVENS (2-0, 15th overall)
I've got a homeboy (which is funny to say, because this dude is whiter than fuck) who is a Ravens fan. This is in our circle of anarcho-hippie earth fruits, who never like sports. I guess that's more of my wife's circle, but I don't go out of my way to kick it with nobody, so I end up having these types congregating around my proximity more often than I'd probably like of my own volition. Nonetheless, this dude is an actual football fan, with an actual team he has loved for years (dude was unfortunate enough to be from Maryland), yet we've never gotten up to watch the footballs together. He and his wife rent some land and do some crazy corn stalk maze this time of year, so it's always a couple weeks after Halloween before he's not banking off NoVa white familial discretionary incomes, and after that, fuck it, who wants to leave the house with the wood stove cranking and a hunk of deer tenderloin slow roasting in the oven with some carrots and sweet onions and celery and red potatoes and rosemary twigs to go sit at some other asshole's house all Sunday afternoon?

#5: NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS (2-1, 17th overall)
Oh man, it is so funny to see the Patriots suck. Bill Belichick's unparalleled genius was like the wizard's of Oz's curtain, yanked back by fucking Ronnie Brown, who has thus far been basically Cedric Benson but without all the arrests. The really hilarious thing is their defense is a hobbled together patchwork of aged bodies (I'm sure very familiar with the HGH far beyond just Rodney Harrison) with an expiration date for about the middle of October. And we all know how well Randy Moss plays with others when he's not getting "go long and I'll toss it high" playground patterns called for him, which is not really possible considering their new starting QB never even started in college. It's all really funny to watch, and years from now, when Patriots fans, with their gay-assed accents sounding like cocks poked their tonsils sideways, will be all like, "Yea, but we won 3 Super Bowls," and I can go, "Hahaha, you stupid fuck, you should've won like six but you kept fucking it up."

#6: NEW YORK JETS (1-2, 26th overall)
Man, my stupid fantasy football team (in a league with 20 teams, which means there's NO FUCKING BODY to pick up off the free agent pile) is saddled with shitty QBs. I just dumped stupid Jon Kitna, because I snagged Kerry Collins a couple weeks ago as a back-up to my starter, the Ol' Gunslinger. Favre is usually good for 3 TDs and 2 INTs each week, so being touchdowns score more than interceptions score against, I guess I coming out okay, so long as he can run up some yards too. Favre in New York is like the curtain being jerked back too, in that you can see basically Favre was winging it half the time in Green Bay. This will not be a glorious exit for the Ol' Gunslinger, which is sad, because there probably won't be any reason for NBC to flex schedule them onto Sunday night games later in the year for Madden to give Favre one more verbal fellatio for the road.

#7: CLEVELAND BROWNS (0-3, 27th overall)
Man, the Browns are way shittier than anybody expected them to be. I guess people pretended their no-name QB from last year wasn't really a no-name QB. They should just ride out this year, let Brady Quinn marinate on the sidelines, then come out gunning next year. It's sad, because Kellen Winslow's millionaire thug with a the word thoughts of a poetic encephalitic is being wasted a shithole half-foreclosed upon midwestern industrial wasteland. He should really play in Oakland. The NFL would really do itself a service to have a steering committee in place to make things like that happen. I know parity is great and all that shit, but it would make more sense for certain things to happen.

#8: CINCINNATI BENGALS (0-3, 28th overall)
Okay, I caught a touch of the Bengals/Giants game last week during commercimal breaks to the Skins game, and what I don’t understand is if Chad Johnson is such a closeted homo never-raised-around-grown-men attention douche and he legally changed his name at the beginning of the season, why is he wearing JOHNSON on his jersey? I remember the NFL even said he could wear OCHO CINCO, too. What a fucking pussy. I know inside the internets, retarded dinkery is seen as awesome, much in the same way as college town fags ten years ago wore mesh hats from truck stops, but this dude is fairly sad. And the worst part of it is he’s not doing shit anymore, which is just going to sink him into depression, which he will probably solve with retail therapy, which means after this year when no one else wants him and the Bengals dump him, he’s gonna be just another unemployed black dude who used to have some nice shit back in the day. Now, T.J. Houshmandeeznuts... that dude is the real deal. See, if there had been an NFL steering committee in place, he still would’ve ended up with the Bengals, because some ponytailed Hindu freak playing in Bengal uniforms is just about right. The only thing that could possibly make it better would be some posters and ad campaign with him in like some white tiger bikini shorts with two white tigers on leashes standing in a jungle scene. And of course a couple of fat-tittied bitches in some ragged pelt-like bikinis. But low cut as fuck. Actually, fuck it if we’re gonna imagineer some bullshit, just make them naked fat-tittied chicks, and we can take Houshmandezbollah out of it, and make one of the fat-tittied chicks my wife and the other one the cute dreadlocked chick from Whole Foods who said, “Excuse my big booty” to me one time, but there will be two white tigers on leashes, and it’ll be a jungle scene, but instead of a poster, it will be a home movie. Nah, fuck that too, because if pictures steal indian souls then moving cinemagraphicopy things must rape and pillage indian souls, and we are all indians inside, deep down, so I’d rather just be there to hang and soak it all in, firsthand, and do my best to remember it, rather than cheapen it with pictures or movies.

(frybread) Reading More

I have been reading little parts of books lately, which I haven’t messed with in a while. Mostly this comes from electronic paranoia, thinking too much internets and cell phones have made me a whole lot stupider. Like sometimes I don’t use CAPs when I’m supposed to, nor proper punctuation, because the internets have taughted me this. Actually, I just then put CAPs intead of typing out the word because I have been made so stupid I don’t remember which way is the right way to spell that type of capital/capitol. I guess I did read on in the internets too, but it was mostly quick blurbs of news stories or penthouse forum letters where I pretended I was fucking my biology teacher from ninth grade. I should probably aim for something better with my stupid brain than busting nuts into pink washcloths and then thinking “LOLOLOLOL” at people convinced Obama’s gonna win the election, as if it was as easy as organizing a martini party in a gentrified American neighborhood where everybody has to wear a funny hat.
One of the things I read this week was the dead David Foster Wallace’s (who I’d never read before he died, at least I don’t remember it) thing from Rolling Stone about John McCain’s campaign in 2000, where he was basically doing the Obama thing, just less photogenically. It helped me realize politics is stupid and for faggots, or hardcore Christians, who are just repressed faggots anyways. I love it when people say, “If you don’t vote, you can’t complain.” I had worked up in my mind a good response where I would go, in self-important douchey way, “Well, that’s like saying I have to get shot in a leg and if I don’t pick which one then I don’t get to complain about it. What if I don’t want to get shot in the leg?” And that works once or twice, but mostly it gets boring if you hear it more than that, which no one else would except for me, but I try to live my life in a way so as to entertain myself, and that wouldn’t be entertaining. So I dug out this little BB pistol I had, and keep it in my truck, and try to remember to carry it when I’m around people who tend to proselytize on the political tip, and if that comes up, which it has twice now, I pull it out and point it at them (I put a piece of bright green duct tape on it so they know, sort of, it’s not a real gun) and ask them “Which leg you want to get shot in?” Both times - a 30-something dude who gets arrested over living wages, and an older 50-something woman who gets reiki attunements regularly - they look confused. So I would repeat the question. Second time around would get stammering, and I shot them, dude in the left leg, woman in her right thigh because she’s chunky and was wearing a big ass dress, so I hoped it wouldn’t hurt her too much, and I said, “You’ve got no right to complain if you didn’t pick which leg,” and walked off. The dude fell down, as I hit him on the knee, and I felt bad just walking off like that, but I felt the point needed to be made.

Tuesday, September 23

Homemade Song of the Week: "Dying Breed" by Prolo

"Dying Breed" is another song off of the last Prolo CD called The Long Haired Lounger/The Dread Headed Stranger. At this point, I was into writing hooks for every song before I even wrote lyrics for it. That didn't last long with me because I have a natural indy rapper's distrust of anything fun like a catchy hook. For the underground-happy indy rapper, music is meant to be painful and unenjoyable and involves deciphering and footnotes, not catchy hooks.
Anyways, I dig this song a ton, especially the second verse. Were my father still alive, and somebody told him I made rapping musics, and he confronted me about it belligerently after a fifth of Jim Beam one Saturday afternoon, this would be the song I'd play for him to ease his worried mind.

Monday, September 22

S14: Worst College Football Teams

A lot of hype is given to the college football, and how "EVERY GAME COUNTS" because one loss and you're done. Which, of course, begs the question, if it's one and done then all the games afterwards matter once you're already sitting tight with a goose egg in the win column after the first month of the football? Of course not. But it's college, and a lot of times, small colleges, and it's just local jocks of various reknown playing to stave off their own historical embarrassment. I lived with a guy one time while he was linebacker at a Division III school with a fairly decent sports history, and they went 0-10. It ate him alive, because the school hadn't gone 0-10 in ever, except while he was there.
Well, some schools just don't have much hope, even as we've just actually turned the calendar to fall. They've already been beaten and blundered from goal post to goal post a couple of times, but have to finish out the season nonetheless. Here are your fourteen worst college football programs thus far this season, with the simple criteria being least number of wins (namely, none) and then worst margins of defeat.

#1: Lincoln University Lions (0-3, 47.33 average margin of defeat) - The Lincoln Lions are making their return to college football after a 48-year hiatus, rejoining NCAA Division II's traditionally black CIAA conference. Thus far, it has not gone well, following up a 63 to nothing loss to CIAA powerhouse Fayetteville State with a 56 to 7 whipping at Shaw University this past weekend.

#2: Bethany Swedes (0-2, 46.50 avg. defeat) - The first of five NAIA teams in the list, out of the Kansas Collegiate Athletic Conference. I figured even though the NAIA is like this outlaw organization with everybody mostly thinking the NCAA means everything in college sports, I'd include them, because it's small colleges like any other, and people are putting forth the effort. Well, I guess. Bethany lost to Southwest Baptist University last weekend, 83 to 6. That marked the first time in seven years that Southwest Baptist had won two games in a row.

#3: Indiana State Sycamores (0-3, 44.00 avg. defeat) - Member of the Football College Sub-division's Missouri Valley Conference, getting their asses handed to them directionally. Last weekend, they were 48 to 3 losers to Northern Illinois. The week before, it was at the hands of Eastern Illinois, 38 to 3. And they started the season, dropping one to Eastern Michigan, 52 to 0.

#4: Quincy Hawks (0-3, 43.00 avg. defeat) - Quincy, of the NAIA's Mid-States Football Association, is only a school of about 1200 students. This past weekend, it stepped way over its head to get whooped by FCS (okay okay, Division I-AA) team Central Arkansas on the road, 51 to 6. They got the opening field goal, but that was about it, although they did clock a $25,000 check for the game, probably subsidizing most of their athletics programs for the year.

#5: Newport News Apprentice School Builders (0-1, 42.00 avg. defeat) - Newport News, from Division III's Atlantic Central Football Conference, continues a rich NCAA tradition of maritime trade schools fielding football teams that accomplish nothing beyond ridiculous defeats. The Builders started their season this past weekend with a 42 to 0 loss at home against UVA-Wise.

#6: Tabor College Blue Jays (0-2, 40.50 avg. defeat) - Another member of NAIA's Kansas Collegiate Athletic Conference, which means they will at least get to face-off at Bethany College the second week of October.

#7: Bluffton Beavers (0-2, 38.00 avg. defeat) - Straight out of the Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference in the NCAA's Division III, the Beavers ain't hitting on much. They did scrape together a touchdown in a 34 to 7 loss to Adrian this past weekend, their first score of the year after a 49 to 0 rape at the hands of Alma College to start the season.

#8: Principia College Panthers (0-3, 38.00 avg. defeat) - Principia is a traditional NCAA Division III powerless program, running up terrible losing records year after year, but shifting their league affiliation this year to the Saint Louis Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, in its first year of having a football class since 1999. But things haven't changed much. Opening week, they gave Lewis & Clark their first win in three years. Two weeks ago, the Panthers crossed mid-field against Whittier for the second time in the game, with about a minute left to play. And they got crushed 40 to 0 last week against Crown. Nowhere to go but yadda yadda yadda.

#9: Dordt College Defenders (0-3, 36.00 avg. defeat) - Fielding a varsity level football team for the first time ever, in the Great Plains Athletic Conference, one of the NAIA's power conferences. In other words, the Defenders are unproven bait in a small pond with bigger fish. Like last weekend, when NAIA #6 ranked Morningside stomped Dordt 62 to 0.

#10: Culver-Stockton Wildcats (0-3, 36.00 avg. defeat) - Our fifth and final NAIA representative, from the Heart of America Athletic Conference, playing low quality football in Canton, Missouri, in some sort of bizarro experiment. They also clocked their grip travelling to lose 70 to 7 at South Dakota (another FCS/Div. I-AA team), which I guess was an improvement, as they'd been outscored 45 to nothing their first two games.

#11: North Texas Mean Green (0-3, 35.67 avg. defeat) - The only Division I school on this list, albeit a lowly member of the second-thought Sun Belt Conference. After a double drubbing from LSU and Hurricane Ike two Saturdays ago, they at least got a week off to regroup. This is not a good team though, having lost 15 of their last 17 games.

#12: Lawrence Vikings (0-2, 35.50 avg. defeat) - A Division III school, member of the Midwest Conference, they improved last weekend, only losing to St. Norbert 44 to 18, which was a marked improvement from their first game's manhandling at the hands of Monmouth College, 47 to 2. Having what was probably a gimme safety is almost worst than just dropping a goose egg on the scoreboard.

#13: Lock Haven Bald Eagles (0-4, 33.75 avg. defeat) - From Division II's Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference, losing the past two weeks 45 to 7 (against Indiana, Pennsylvania) and 36 to 0 (against Shippensburg). Again, nowhere to go but you know the rest.

#14: Adams State Grizzlies (0-4, 33.00 avg. defeat) - Another Division II team, from the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference, they are an enigmatic team. Two weeks ago, they scored the first 16 points against Chadron State, but ended up losing 37 to 26. Three weeks ago, against Division I Southern Utah, they had outgained them offensively, 310 yards to 229, but were still down 35 to 0 at halftime. Clearly, they are trying to claw their way out of being a Division II bottom feeder.

Sunday, September 21

J.J. Krupert's September Gaypod Mix

With the American economy hopefully about to collapse upon itself in the coming weeks, I figured I might as well tap out that last fifty bucks on my Best Buy card and get one of those stupid iPod Shuffles (from here on referred to as my gaypod). Actually, I bought it a month or so ago after my stupid satellite radio lighter plug charger burned up the second lighter socket in my stupid truck, and I didn't feel like ordering more bullshit being the set-up, since I got a new satellite receiver less than a year ago, had burned up both sockets, fucked up my factory receiver, plus something else I can't remember... Oh yeah, I tore a bunch of shit up trying to put the new receiver in, out of frustration, because I'm the type of dude who tears shit up when he gets mad. So now I have regular radio and the gaypod. The gaypod holds very little music, considering I have far too much music - couple thousand records, stacks of CDs, plus two external hard drives chock full of bullshit, so basically all I can do is stuff a few things on there, and it's survival of the fittest. So to help justify my financial indiscretions, and just because my brain is retarded and can only think about things and ultimately accept them if there's some alterior word-based result from it, I decided at the end of each month, I would pontificate upon the ten most played songs from it, and dump them from my gaypod forever, but make a mix out of them to have for my truck CD player, and share this dumb unimportant shit all with you.
I named my gaypod J.J. Krupert, because my 4-year-old daughter at the time I had gotten it was really into playing a DJ Z-Trip CD (Uneasy Listening, I think maybe volume 2... it makes a really important deal on the cover about how cutting edge it is and how rare the CD is and how blah blah fucking blah), and she'd be wearing like retarded play clothes outfits of ballet skirts, Mexican wrestling masks and shiny silver chemises, doing crazy dances to DJ Z-Trip's early mash-up stylings. She asked me who it was and I told her, "DJ Z-Trip," but it translated into her insane mind as "J.J. Krupert". So DJ Z-Trip is now just called J.J. Krupert, and that's the title of my gaypod. And here were the top ten most played songs off it in August, though not necessarily in one through ten order, as I re-ordered the bullshit to try and make a sensible mix.
#1: "Angel of Sin" by Hank Williams III - Man, the Straight to Hell double CD that Tricephus dropped in I guess 2006 is one of my favorite shits ever, and probably the last actual CD that I actually bought at an actual store and didn't get pissed that I didn't just steal from inside the internets. He's got a new jambo supposedly coming out next month, recorded entirely in his house, which is good news too because I think the half-screwed and chopped second disc of Straight to Hell is better than the first. "Angel of Sin" is off the first disc, and is some real genetic deficiencient alcoholic ass heartbreak country. Radio country is so sterile and soundalike, and alt.country is so fucking stupid and college faggified most of the time, it's good to know Hank III is out there. Actually, that parallel shittiness is a lot like hip hop too, with mainstream crap being predictable and underground shit being just as predictable just in a different boring ass way. I guess music is just fucked. Thanks a lot greedy record industry Jews. Keep pushing shit ass Shooter Jennings as some sort of outlaw at everybody; I'm sure that'll turn it all around.
#2: "Happy Hour" by Corntooth - Corntooth is a Richmond country group featuring my homeboy and old roommate Matt on vox (who normally plays in a killer ass rock-n-roll band called RPG, who have a new CD out now), and other Richmond music all-stars like the guitarist from Lamb of God and some dude from Gwar too I think. But Matt and his wife Janey do the sanging in Corntooth, and it's a fucking tag team punch of perfect sad country greatness. My biggest problem, as hinted above, with alt.country labelled music is it usually comes across as suburban college kids attempting to act country. I have hated many musics people who know me and know my self-destructive rural roots have tried to convince me properly represents the proud crappiness of past experiences you get growing up in dirtbag places with lawless god-fearers as most role models. Most of those musics miss the fucking point, and are more a Hee Haw skit at a liberal art college than actual experience. "Happy Hour", and Corntooth in general, is some real ass shit, even if it is from trendy ass hipster doofus Richmond town. You can hear it in Matt and Janey's voices. (Janey's is like Janis Joplin if there were no hippies and Janis ended up working as a waitress in a diner for the first fifteen years of her money-earning life.)
#3: "Paycheck to Paycheck" by Corntooth - This is probably my favorite fucking love song ever. My family is broke as fuck (again), using credit card that should've sensibly been cut up when we slipped out the noose earlier this year to buy bacon for Sunday breakfast, but fuck it man. I got beer, I got a sexy ass wife, three good kids, a ragged house in the country, and I'm not dead yet.
#4: "The Mountain" by Steve Earle & the Del McCoury Band - My interest in hearing Steve Earle comes and goes. I think overall he's overrated, and all his stuff is not as great as it gets made out to be, probably because of his truly fucked life story of heroin addiction and shit. But when he is good and I am in the mood for his Kentucky hill williams twang, he can be right on. I guess I got fired up for him again watching the last season of The Wire when it came out on DVD. But I found this whole CD he did with the Del McCoury Band on a hard drive's of music I got from my bro-in-law. This song, the title track off the CD, is just a sad, meandering song, of course being all conscious and talking about mountaintop removal and all that shit. But it's a great fucking song.
#5: "Asleep in the Desert" by ZZ Top - I've probably said it multiple times inside the internets, but Tejas by ZZ Top is one of the all-time great fucking albums. And this instrumental is the best song off of it. I have looped this instrumental and actually just listened to it for 9 hours straight before. Were I to ever become ridiculously wealthy, I would make sure one of my first wastes of money, after the platinum penis sheath with red diamond eyeballs, would be to hire Billy Gibbons to be in charge of keeping my gaypod filled with original theme music. I had been trying to think of anyone alive on this earth more awesome than Lemmy from Motorhead this week (you waste your mind's time in odd ways as a housepainter) and about the only thing I could come up with was Billy Gibbons.
#6: "Country Rap Tune" by Tow Down - I stayed in a hotel room with for-real internet a month or so back, and youtubed the video for this, as it's always been one of my favorite screwed and chopped classics, and I was shocked to see a goofy looking whiteboy with those hilarious-to-everyone-else style little braids, riding around in a Nissan painted up like the General Lee. I guess I had just assumed he would've been black, but I guess everybody sounds black when screwed and chopped with some slurring ass DJ Screw overdubs talking about having DVD screens in your car's headrest. I wonder whatever happened to Tow Down? Is he still doing shit? Or more likely in jail? Or did he cut the braids off and works at his dad's car lot now? Endless questions. Also, it always freaks me out when I listen to that DJ Shadow Essential mix and I hear the regular speed version of this song, as it sounds alien and hyper-speed. Once you go slack, you don't go back.
#7: "Straight Gangstaism" by the Geto Boys - Not so much a Geto Boys song as it was Big Mike and his partner 3-2, who were a group on Rap-a-Lot called The Convicts. They, according to a snippet I think I read in The Source over a decade ago, were roommates with Snoop Dogg the same time Dre was putting together Death Row, and after Willie D left the Geto Boys, part of the way James Prince kept The Convicts from signing with Death Row was making Big Mike the new Geto Boy. Worked for me, as I've always liked Big Mike's style, and honestly, Till Death Do Us Part is, in my opinion, the best Geto Boys CD from start-to-end there ever was. It doesn't have the radio hits like We Can't Be Stopped, but there are no weak segments. "Straight Gangstaism" starts being awesome with that catchy ass funk beat, and then once Big Mike and 3-2 stylishly slur all over the track about the carefree lifestyle of the urban outlaw, it's over. My compliments to the chef.
#8: "Uncle Sam Goddamn" by Brother Ali - I saw Brother Ali on tour last year in a small club (R.I.P. Starr Hill) and it was the best rap performance I ever did done see. I actually buoght his CD (used) afterwards, and for once the CD was lesser than the live performance. It sounded flatter from the studio, whereas most studio shit gets beefed up with overdubs and multi-tracks and protools trickery. Still though, in election season, I enjoy this song a lot. It's standard "the government sucks/can't trust those mother fucks" indy rapper content, but Brother Ali delivers it with such punch. At one point, the esteemed Expert Whiteboy panel of four had been working on a summertime Hip Hop 100 List of the 100 great living forces in the hips hop, and I was pushing for Ali to be high, based purely on potential. After years of indy rapper Rhymesayers Entertainment heavy touring, he did a tour last year where it was just him, Rakim, and Ghostface Killah. It got me excited to see what he cooks up next CD, having the elder example of those two to hang around for a couple months.
#9: "Uncommon Valor" by Jedi Mind Tricks - If this song stopped after the first verse, it would be just another stupid fucking indy rap song, because Vinnie Paz's rhyme, even if he is putting himself into the mind of a Vietnam vet, is very pedestrian. It's what you'd expect if someone was a rapper, distrustful of government, and wanted to do a song about Vietnam thirty years after the fact. But then R.A. the Rugged Man comes in with what I would say is the best rap song verse ever done by a white rapper. Linguistically, he fucks it up more so than I think I've ever heard him do. And the content of what he's saying is ridiculous, especially if you know that it comes from the personal experience of his own father. R.A. has those bighead downs syndrome siblings and shit like that, and is probably pretty lucky he wasn't born half-mutant from the agent orange his pops got showered with.
#10: "Simple Man" by Lynyrd Skynyrd - I love and respect greatly dead Lynyrd Skynyrd, even think of Ronnie Van Zant as a prophetic drunkard voice not given his propers for his redneck taoism. But still alive Lynyrd Skynyrd, playing at those outside ten dollar corporate enclave Wednesday after work shows, is a sad sad thing, kinda like I imagine that Samuel L. Jackson as former boxing champ movie was probably trying to be. I know a lot of people think Skynyrd is just racist fuckery, and others probably don't even hear this song, tuning it out as classic rock radio station overexposed tripe. But this is still one of my favorite songs. I put it at the end of the list, and thus the mix, to make it easier for you judgemental faggots who actually download the mix to skip it though.

NFL WK 3: NFC North & West teams


#1: CHICAGO BEARS (1-1, 3rd overall)
An obvious flaw in my mathematical dorkula is exposed here, as the Bears winning against the Colts on the road boosted their score so high that even a loss to the Panthers leaves them the third highest ranked team on the overall list, and tops out of these two divisions. But the dorkula works itself out after a couple of weeks, and if I were to just do this from self-important opinions, I'd really only move them below the Packers. Thus far, the Bears bumbling general mangerialship has somehow miraculously looked good, with Kyle Orton not acting like a normal Bears QB, and Matt Forte has so smoothly taken over RB duties, that the Bears have not had to dig into the NFL scrap heap deeper than signing Kevin Jones. Still, the curse of the Bears is always in effect, and Devin Hester is already getting MRIs after game two, so almost certainly, they will be doomed like always.

#2: GREEN BAY PACKERS (2-0, 8th overall)
Most new QBs replacing a hall of famer are doomed anyways, but having to start under center after Brett Favre's offseason hissy fits, including text messages to reporters and CNN interviews with ugly bitches, Aaron Rodgers was doubly doomed. And yet he never said disparaging words, and came out blazing. He's made Ted Thompson look pretty smart thus far, to the point if he keeps this up, Packers fans are gonna be like, "I wish we had started him last year, then we might've went to the Super Bowl."

#3: ARIZONA CARDINALS (2-0, 11th overall)
Being the best team in the NFC West is like being the one kid in special ed who can do multiplication tables. Matt Leinart is benched for old ass Kurt Warner, who has been picking apart inferior competition thus far this year. There are only three problems with this formula for success though. Number one, he is still old ass stupid Kurt Warner. Number two, they only have six games against NFC West opponents and one against the Dolphins. And most importantly, number three, this is still the Arizona Cardinals. I can already see them finishing as the first team just missing a wild card berth at like 8-8.

#4: SAN FRANCISCO 49ERS (1-1, 24th overall)
Dude, the 49ers are so far off my radar, I can't even remember if they fired Mike Nolan or not. I know stupid fucking Mike Martz is there, apparently with a leprechaun replacing Alex Smith at QB. I think they still owe Nate Clements like $500 million to play cornerback mired in obscurity as well.

#5: ST. LOUIS RAMS (0-2, 25th overall)
See again, problems with the scientific dorkula, because the Rams have looked like the shittiest team in the league thus far. Actually, I guess a couple of AFC teams are probably worse, but there's a logjam of shitty teams at the bottom of the AFC, and the Rams seem to be below-and-beyond the worst of the NFC. I'm pretending to know shit because I don't know that. I've missed a lot of football this season so far, but I know the Rams have been getting blown the fuck out.

#6: MINNESOTA VIKINGS (0-2, 29th overall)
So preseason Super Bowl favorites have already benched their questionable black QB of the future who had been doing so wonderfully great during the preseason that they didn't even need to admit they really wanted Brett Favre. And the answer is Gus Frerotte. Man, it was like a decade ago when he headbutted the wall and concussed himself as a Redskin QB. I'm no neurosurgeon, but I have found in my experiences that stupid people don't get smarter from concussions. I've had three or four myself, and I'm stupider than ever. I have recently been worried about oversensory stimulation clouding my brain and making me dumber, or clogging up my neurons or some shit. Like, I'll fuck around inside the internets and know seventeen hundred more things about shit that has nothing to do with my real life, and I think I'm more informed, but really, I'm stupider than ever. I've been trying to read more fucking books, but then between shitty work and wasting time with electronic stimuli, it's hard to find the time. I can't even type sentences inside robot machines on my lap without cussing.

#7: DETROIT LIONS (0-2, 30th overall)
Matt Millen must give wonderful blowjobs or something, because there is no other reason to explain why he maintains employment after so much shoddy ass GMering. But Calvin Johnson is my fantastical footballs team, so if that born again dickweed Jon Kitna can manage to wobble a few TD passes his way every now and then, I'll be straight.

#8: SEATTLE SEAHAWKS (0-2, 31st overall)
The Seahawks are terrible. They've crippled all their wide receivers, including their back-up QB pretending to be a wide receiver. Man, I've always hated the Seahawks with their goofy ass colors, coached by a fat ass walrus in a Motorola headset. Their string of winning like 19 NFC West titles by default is probably over if they can't beat the 49ers at home anymore. Could be a long last season for the walrus.

Sunday, September 14

Homemade Song of the Week - "A Crippled Man Finally Rides the Railroad" by 1000 Feathers

This is the first bonafide homemade song I've thrown up, done through a variety of flea market equipment in a camper behind my house. I would say this is probably the style I'm moving towards most, as I don't like most music and don't trust the intentions of most people. I am a split personality between the rapping musics and old outlaw country, but no rap music has spoken to me since the Screw movement first hit my aural canals, and I only really like certain underground hick shit, which is my way of identifying what I like without using that fucking gay ass "alt.country" term which ends up including intense faggotry like Ryan Adams or smarmy ass college kids who wear overalls in ironic manners.
I will warn you - the levels are low on this track, but I did it through a shitty mic with a pantyhose spit guard handheld in place, into a broken 4-track over top a shitty redneck funk loop done with a USB turntable running into a $250 laptop half-crippled by pornography viruses. This may not be the future of music, but it probably is my future, and I will make mixes and leave them in bar bathrooms and mail it to Fader magazine, hoping they bring me in to perform at one of their fancy issue release parties, so I can get drunk inside the evil bowels of the big city.

NFL WK 2: AFC South & West teams


#1: TENNESSEE TITANS (1-0, 7th overall)
I will not to even pretend I watched a ton of football the first week, nor even this second week. I'm watching the Steelers/Browns game as I pretend it was yesterday and do my first week of NFL recaps. I was on vacation, and travelled during last Sunday's games. I do know I flipped on Sportscenter one morning for about five minutes and they were talking about Vince Young's mental stability. I have to admit, I did not expect the Titans to be the one undefeated team out the supposedly dreaded AFC South. But Jeff Fisher is pretty much the new Bill Cowher, and I'm sure the NFL Overlord Committee will toss a Super Bowl ring his way at some point the next five years or so, so as to guarantee him a nice pension as a TV talking head. Still though, it's hard to wrap your head around Kerry Collins QBing a team again. That dude is a fucking quarterbacking cockroach, refusing to disappear from the NFL.

#2: DENVER BRONCOS (1-0, 11th overall)
I do not support Mike Shanahan at all, and beating a inwardly retarded team like the Raiders is no reason to hang your head high the first week of the NFL season. But I'm sure the Jay Cutler - Next Big Thing hype train will continue to gain momentum.

#3: JACKSONVILLE JAGUARS (0-1, 18th overall)
I don't know if that one dude getting shot up over some trifling womenfolk was heavy on the team's head or fucked up their preseason progress or what, but the Jack Del Rio Jaguars were not supposed to lose out the gate like that. Then again, it turned out to be a pretty ass backwards week in the NFL to start the season with, which gives me hope, because the more retarded shit is going, the better chance my impotent Redskins have at the playoffs.

#4: INDIANAPOLIS COLTS (0-1, 23rd overall)
Man, I did get to watch the Colts/Bears game, and was shocked. I had expected the Colts star to lose some luster this season, with Peyton hobbled for the first time in his career, and Marvin Harrison not up to snuff either. But shit man, they've got players dropping like flies AND they're getting old. A good drinking game to just install into your football watching routine right about now is to drink once whenever their play is excused by injuries, and drink three times when "their window is closing" meme is mentioned in regards to them. Oh yeah, drink a double swig when Tony Dungy's retirement is discussed after a play as well.

#5: HOUSTON TEXANS (0-1, 24th overall)
It looks like the Matt Schaub ship may be sinking fast. Sage Rosenfels has been a quality starter whenever Schaub is hurt, but is basically a lifelong back-up in the NFL. But I'm sure a team with no fucking history is going to have fans thinking Rosenfels is the answer to winning right fucking now. I am still pretty convinced that regardless of what they do - like NASA could clone a team full of Jim Browns and Joe Montanas - and Houston would always suck because of the low self-esteem caused by those ugly fucking post-9/11 uniforms.

#6: KANSAS CITY CHIEFS (0-1, 25th overall)
Regardless of whether Herm Edwards' experiment with younger and cheaper players works out well enough or not to buy him a couple more years, they have influenced my NFL viewing season in a positive manner by clipping stupid Tom Brady out of the way.

#7: SAN DIEGO CHARGERS (0-1, 27th overall)
I know Carolina is always a perennial challenger to bring da ruckus, but seriously? A halfway decent NFC South team with its biggest threat suspended for busting up another starter's facebones should not stroll into San Diego and punk a team that supposedly has Super Bowl aspirations. Then again, this is a team coached by Norv Turner, which means they will be punked regularly, not live up to expectations, yet somehow be just mediocre enough with flashes of brilliance to trick Chargers fans into thinking, "Just maybe."

#8: OAKLAND RAIDERS (0-1, 29th overall)
Man, the Raiders game I got to watch too, and they looked like three shades of shit. And being Al Davis is intoxicated with power, yet retarded by senility, it should lead to great hilarity this season. I expect Darren McFadden will lead the league in all-purpose yards, turnovers, and steak dinners on Al's tab, and Lane Kiffin will be replaced by Art Shell who will be replaced by probably Ron Turner before next year, because ol' Al will think that is the best way to replicate the Chargers' successes.

Thursday, September 4

NFL: Preseason Preview Upper Echelon


#1: NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS
PERTINENT DATA: 16-0 last year, won AFC East, lost in Super Bowl to the Giants; 7 to 2 odds to win the Super Bowl this year.
ALL-TIME GREAT: John Hannah was the epitome of blue collar, red-assed, whiteboy back in the day. He changed the way people regarded offensive linemen, in that all of a sudden they could be athletic and not just giant dirtbags who shanked people in fumble pile-ups.
TEAM HOSS: Along the same lines, I really like Logan Mankins, because he looks like a dirtbag white dude, and played at Fresno State, which makes me think of Jerry Tarkanian and his point guards that looked like DJ Quik. And Mankins tends to rock a fu manchu, which only giant 300 lb. scary white guys can rock, or maybe short, stubby redneck dudes, but the short, stubby fuckers have to shave their head for it to work, and wear mirror sunglasses like Dale Earnhardt while driving in their landscaping work truck.
ALL-TIME SUCK ASS: Man, Bill Belichick believes his own bullshit too much, walking around in his stupid ass dirty sweatshirt, as if he exerts himself. He should fellate Tom Brady every day for turning him from a competent coordinator/shitty head coach into a guaranteed Hall of Fame-bound genius of the game.
TEAM ASS: It always seems odd to me when I read the player capsules in my yearly dorkbook and see that Tedy Bruschi played at Arizona. Because he has that Italian mongoloid complexion down pat, and the douchebag speech, and in fact the whole fucking thing. I thought they just found him somewhere in Connecticut, playing flag football better than anyone else in a pair of Joey Buttafucco zubaz weightlifter pants and signed him on as their linebacker. And I know it's not nice to speak bad on the dude, since he had strokes and shit, but really, does ill health in an asshole mean I'm not allowed to call an asshole an asshole?
TEAM TRENDSETTER: Tom Brady, and in the short term, his feet. Long term, they will win as many Super Bowls as he allows them too, hopefully not letting his mind get too caught up inside his dick when parting super model thighs, and staying focused on being Tom Brady. I think somewhere along the way last year was when my patience for Tom Brady finally ran out, mostly because I didn't want to see them go undefeated the whole year long. But after he was all flustered in the Super Bowl, I'm back to tolerating him silently and secretly having a crush on him like a majority of American males (excepting Jets and Raiders fans, who actually do like him, but more in a degraded cuckold way instead of the usual man-crush way).
SENIOR PLAYER: Tedy Bruschi was a third round pick in 1996.
THE RUDY: Stephen Neal not only went from being an undrafted rookie out of Cal State-Bakersfield in 2001 to being a starter, he didn't even play football in college. He was a wrassler.
FORMER HURRICANE: Nose tackle Vince Wilfork, former Hurricane from their last glory years.
VIRGINIA BOY: Lacking a Virginia college days native, we have to travel just across the border into shitty Maryland, where back-up cornerback Lewis Sanders played.
WILD SAMOAN: Well, the Patriots dropped their last Samoan when they cut defensive lineman Steve Fifita this past weekend, but you know how Belichick be calling up vets to come play once people get injured. Expect that once a linebacker goes down, and it's far enough along the season his old ass won't get too tired to finish, Junior Seau will get a call.
THE ICKY: Linebacker Bo Ruud, because his name sounds like what drunk rednecks would affectionately call each other while shooting pool. "Hey Bo Ruud... it's your shot."
INDUSTRIAL OVERLORD: Without a doubt, Laurence Mauroney is the most industrial overlord sounding dude on the team. Even the fact he spells his first name with a "u" instead of a "w"... pure class.
FANTASY JERSEY: Old school red #86 MORGAN for Stanley Morgan, who was their only good player for most of the '80s.

#2: DALLAS COWBOYS
PERTINENT DATA: 13-3 last year, won the NFC East, lost to the Giants in the divisional round of the playoffs; 6 to 1 odds to win the Super Bowl this year.
ALL-TIME GREAT: I will always have an affinity for Nate Newton, being he originally was a Redskin but they cut him. His large, fried egg sandwich eating, marijuana smuggling, goofy ass was hard not to love. I imagine his good timey southern black dude demeanor was a great way to keep the locker room loose when all those other guys were jacked up on Bolivian flake during their Jimmy Johnson dynasty. I have to admit, reading about Charles Haley and his perverse masturbation problems recently almost caused him to pass Newton, but I decided to value the overall body of work as opposed to being such a ridiculous degenerate in one category of human awesomeness.
TEAM HOSS: It is hard for me to like any Cowboy, but I guess Jason Witten's not that bad, running around after getting his helmet knocked off. He's kind of like what Jeremy Shockey thinks he is.
ALL-TIME SUCK ASS: Deion Sanders, because he is the all-time suckiest suck to ever high step his way through the NFL. To the Cowboys credit, they make it easy to hate them, as three of the biggest fuckfaces to ever play football in my lifetime - Sanders, Michael Irvin, and Terrell Owens, all had their glory days in Dallas.
TEAM ASS: Obviously T.O. There is no doubt in my mind that this twinkly-eyed attention whore who over-values his own importance is a closeted homosexual, which is not uncommon when young black boys are raised only around women. It's a tough choice, whether to let your fatherless children be raised in the streets where at least they will be men, albeit alpha male thugs, or do you allow them to become effeminate primadonnas who helped make that term "down low" a common sub-culture?
TEAM TRENDSETTER: Tony Romo, who has been good, but not nearly as great as he's made out to be. Until he wins a playoff game, which probably has to happen this year, although I guess the firing of Ralph Wiggum as coach to give Jason Garrett a shot would buy him another season at QB should he fuck it up right away in the playoffs like the last two years.
SENIOR PLAYER: Greg Ellis was a first round pick and Flozell Adams a second round pick in 1998.
THE RUDY: Without a doubt, Tony Romo. The former Eastern Illinois star went from undrafted schmuck in 2003 to Mr. Jessica Simpson and Pro Bowler in 2007. Nice parlay indeed. Too bad he's probably secretly gay too.
FORMER HURRICANE: Probably out of Jerry Jones' hatred of all things Jimmy Johnson, there's nary a Cane on the Cowboys roster. So in lieu of one, take Brad Johnson, former Florida State Seminole, who is so old he played for the Seminoles when they were as good as the Hurricanes used to be.
VIRGINIA BOY: Defensive end Chris Canty, who played at UVA. I worked at this digital graphics firm where we did an extensive football installation in the athletic department of all of UVA's past stars, full oak frames, UV-resistant glass, double cut mats, real swank set-up, probably a good $30,000 worth of bullshit. Chris Canty had just been drafted and was featured prominently so as to excite the young recruits.
WILD SAMOAN: Samoans are inherently good, honest, caring individuals, who believe in family, tradition, and hard work. This is why none play for the Cowboys.
THE ICKY: Tank Johnson is a great name, even if the Tank is a nickname. It is great when grown men keep their nicknames, because you are trained to cut your hair, clean yourself up, give up your nickname. Look at Adam Jones, nee Pacman, following his lawyer's advice in all likelihood and making himself look like a more normal dude. Not Tank though, he keeps the name proudly. Props to him. I had a father figure whose nickname was Tank, and he was buried in a junkyard. It was a beautiful funeral; the preacher talked about how he knew which cloud everyone was pushing their broke down cars to in Heaven now. That made me laugh, because if it was Heaven, wouldn't people's cars not break down? And also, Heaven... hahaha, that's funny.
INDUSTRIAL OVERLORD: Long snapper L.P. Ladouceur, oil tycoon, purchaser of black souls. Did you know those ultra-rich oil fuckers in Texas use property managers of tenement apartments in Houston, Dallas, New Orleans, etc. to buy up wild ass black teenagers, that they train to fight in underground human cockfights? For real. A Mexican guy I used to work with told me about it.
FANTASY JERSEY: I would get one of those pink #9 jerseys like Jessica Simpson wears, except mine would say HOMO instead of ROMO. And I would never wear it.

#3: SAN DIEGO CHARGERS
PERTINENT DATA: 11-5 last year, won AFC West, lost to the Patriots in the AFC championship; 7 to 1 odds to win the Super Bowl this year.
ALL-TIME GREAT: Kellen Winslow was fucking scary when I was a kid, because he was as fast and pass-sticky as a good wide receiver, but he had an extra forty pounds on his ass. He was a pretty damned good footballer, but obviously not much of a father.
TEAM HOSS: Man, I wanted to pick somebody else just to talk about whatever, but how can you not say LaDainian Tomlinson? I have always said Barry Sanders was the best RB I watched in my football watching days, but I think another year or two and I'll be shifting that to say L.T.
ALL-TIME SUCK ASS: Rolf Benirschke was an annoying Eurofag, long before they started to slowly infiltrate the NFL's kicking ranks. I don't care what diseases or whatever he had and how he can motivationally speak me into conquering my own personal problems.
TEAM ASS: Shawne Merriman is becoming one of those guys where you have to think there's fire from all the smoke. Steroid suspension, but it wasn't his fault. His knee is all fucked up, but he gets multiple opinions to hear what he wants to hear. There is a reason every time somebody has a fucked up knee, you hear the name Dr. James Andrews. It's because he's the pre-eminent kneefuctologist on the earth; you don't need a second opinion after that. Not to mention he has that extra "e" on the end of his first name. Plus, from Maryland. Really, he's one of the worst douchebags in the league now that I add it all up. (I never use that term "douchebag" in real life because I've never seen a douche and no one around me has ever used one. It seems odd to me that there must be either loads of people who actually use and/or see douches as a normal part of their life, or just say that word because it's common lexicon.)
TEAM TRENDSETTER: Easily, this would be all in Norv Turner's lap. Thus far as a head coach, he has been amazingly mediocre - just decent enough to keep his job but consistently shitty enough to eventually be fired. So he is a chronic underachiever as a head coach, leading a team full of star power and Super Bowl potential. Two opposing forces that seem unstoppable... it will be hilarious to see how he fucks this one up though.
SENIOR PLAYER: Long snapper David Binn has been with the team ever since signing on as a rookie free agent in 1994. In fact, he's one of the longest tenured players in the NFL.
THE RUDY: The Chargers are the team of undrafted starters, three of their starters being college free agents, and a fourth one being a college free agent they picked up off waivers when cut from another team his first year. The cream of this crop of blue collar contributors though is Antonio Gates, who went from a nobody kid who played basketball at Kent State University, to the NFL's premier tight end. His star seems to be declining, but still, he is a key part of this offense.
FORMER HURRICANE: No Hurricanes, which is an interesting juxtaposition to how many undrafted college players they have. We will say Antonio Cromartie, who played at Florida State though, because he's my favorite Charger because I accidentally had him in fantasy football last year, and then he fucked up Peyton Manning right smart in that one game.
VIRGINIA BOY: No Virginia players either, probably because most people from this state remember Norv Turner as Redskins coach.
WILD SAMOAN: Following in the rich San Diego Samoan tight end tradition of Alfred Pupunu is Brandon Manumaleuna, who is more of a blocking tight end, but can catch a pass if he absolutely has to.
THE ICKY: Defensive end Igor Olshansky, but only because the Chargers cut RB Germaine Race in the preseason.
INDUSTRIAL OVERLORD: Charlie Whitehurst sounds like the happy type of guy wearing a white sweater vest, playing backgammon at the country club.
FANTASY JERSEY: A throwback powder blue #18 JOINER jersey, because back then when I was a kid, Charlie Joiner was one of the few receivers not wearing 80-something, and he had that old school two bar face mask that not even kickers wear anymore.

#4: INDIANAPOLIS COLTS
PERTINENT DATA: 13-3 last year, lost to San Diego in the divisional playoffs round; 15 to 2 odds to win the Super Bowl this year.
ALL-TIME GREAT: I don't really care for the Indy Colts, and never really cared for the Baltimore Colts either. But when I was a broke ass kid in Meherrin, Virginia, and could never afford a stupid football jersey, I inherited a couple from my cousin Frank, including a Bert Jones Baltimore Colts jersey. I won like 312 Super Bowls throwing a half-sized football over the power line in that jersey, so he is obviously their best player ever.
TEAM HOSS: Bob Sanders seems like the easy pick, just for being a cock diesel black dude who insists on being called simply Bob. But I relate more to closeted racist hunting type big ugly offensive linemen, so I'll go with Jeff Saturday instead, especiall if he grows a playoff beard.
ALL-TIME SUCK ASS: I hate Eric Dickerson so much, I hated him when he played for the Colts, with his Lionel Ritchie in some Kareem Abdul-Jabbar sportglasses ass.
TEAM ASS: Who can it be other than Peyton Manning? Too many commercials, too much innocent hick schtick, way too fucking much overexaggerated audiblelizing at the line of scrimmage. I remember he was on Saturday Night Live and I refused to watch it and people were like, "Yo, that shit was HIGH-larious!" So I watched the repeat, and nope, it was just stupid fucking Peyton Manning.
TEAM TRENDSETTER: Peyton Manning and his feeble body. If he can play another seven years they might win a Super Bowl or two, although I feel Peyton is destined to be his generation's Brett Favre - ol' country boy gunslinger who everyone thinks is the bestest shit to ever play but only really won one Super Bowl and ends up going out like a punk primadonna bitch in the end.
SENIOR PLAYER: Marvin Harrison was a first round pick in 1996. Mr. Quiet Hardworking Unscary Black Guy WR all of a sudden is being a bitch ass about signing autographs for kids and then shooting up people outside his car detailing joint, allegedly. If he can shake the legal haters off his shoulders, reheal his hobbled ass, they could achieve glory again. I don't see Peyton hanging with Reggie Wayne like he did with Marvin, which is why Harrison probably had that whole unscary black guy image anyways, like he and Peyton were playing backgammon together on Monday afternoons and shit.
THE RUDY: Starting middle linebacker Gary Brackett was undrafted out of Rutgers in 2003. Of note as well is perennial back-up RB Dominic Rhodes, also undrafted, out of Midwestern State in 2001.
FORMER HURRICANE: Harrison's replacement as go-to guy on the offense Reggie Wayne. His inherent Miami cockiness was okay as second receiver in cornfed Indiana, so we will see how those racist crackers embrace him now that he's basically the #1 guy.
VIRGINIA BOY: Back-up rookie tight end Tom Santi was a second-rate Heath Miller replacement at UVA.
WILD SAMOAN: Linebacker Freddie Keiaho.
THE ICKY: Back-up wide receiver/special teamster Pierre Garcon, whose name sounds like one Michael Vick would've made up to get venereal disease treatments at a free clinic, probably with a curly mustache drawn on his face with a Sharpie.
INDUSTRIAL OVERLORD: Well fuck, they cut Quinn Pitcock and Clifton Dawson, so I'm forced to settle for Dallas Clark as the fake rich industrialist on this team.
FANTASY JERSEY: No doubt about it, a home white #13 VANDERJAGT jersey, the liquored-up kicker who Peyton ran off. Vanderjagt was like an even better Sebastian Janikowski, as in retarded foreign kicker. You might not know this, but after Vanderjagt ruined his chances in Dallas in the NFL, he returned to the Toronto Argonauts of the CFL, where he is a national legend. Awesome. I wish he was on the Redskins.

#5: JACKSONVILLE JAGUARS
PERTINENT DATA: 11-5 last year, won AFC wild card berth, lost to New England in the divisional playoffs round; 12 to 1 odds to win the Super Bowl this year.
ALL-TIME GREAT: Former Jacksonville Jimmy Smith was always getting arrested for cocaine (in fact, even last week he was arrested), and he shared a name with the King of the Hammond B3 organ. In fact, whenever there would be a Jacksonville game on before or after the Redskins on a Sunday, I'd throw on a couple Jimmy Smith LPs (preferably instrumental... Smith singing wasn't always the best) and just vibe to that B3. Perfect fucking Sunday music.
TEAM HOSS: I am partial to Fred Taylor, because he is a goofy ass RB with a normal ass name, and he tends to get arrested too (like last weekend). I guess now with that one guy all shot up in the hospital, everybody in the sports media is all "OMG, Cincinnati Bengals v2.0, when will the madness stop?" Who gives a fuck?
ALL-TIME SUCK ASS: Mark Brunell, who I think still plays in New Orleans. Fucking homeschooling ass Christian freak has already made plans to run for Senator in Florida upon retirement. What kind of bullshit is that? Also, fuck him.
TEAM ASS: You know, other than their ugly uniforms, I have no ill will towards any Jags players. In lieu of any better choice, I'll say the team ass is Jerry Porter, simply for how much of a bitch he acted like to get out of Oakland. But if he scores like 20 touchdowns and does retarded dances afterwards, I'll probably forget all about that.
TEAM TRENDSETTER: David Garrard. Is he the true black QB, what they thought Byron Leftwich was supposed to be? Or is he just a better shitty QB than them other dudes before him? He looked pretty good last year, not like black quarterback good but moving into that Donovan McNabb realm of being a for-real regular good quarterback. That is not meant to sound racist, it's just people get all caught up in black QBs like crazy. Or maybe they don't and I'm a painful reminder of our past, from like four years ago, when people thought about the color of a black quarterback's skin.
SENIOR PLAYER: Fred Taylor was a first round draft pick in 1998.
THE RUDY: Both Montell Owens (Maine) and Brian Uwuh (Colorado) were undrafted rookies in 2006 that have carved low roster spots out for theyselves through special teams play.
FORMER HURRICANE: No Canes, though they have plenty of Gators, and fullback Fred Jones was a Seminole. I guess it's that whole north Fla. vs. south Fla. thing.
VIRGINIA BOY: Back-up linebacker Justin Durant came out of tiny ass traditionally black college Hampton University, and actually last year as a rookie made solid contributions as a starter when Mike Peterson was injured.
WILD SAMOAN: Guard Vincent Manuwai, who played appropriately at Hawaii. I think all Samoan players should just go there and make it a dominant force in college football, out of ethnic pride, and with June Jones help.
THE ICKY: I still find it hard to believe there is a guy named Cleo Lemon. I find it even harder to believe he's not a white dude.
INDUSTRIAL OVERLORD: Chauncey Washington, with a hunting room that has stuff alligators and white tigers and albino elephant heads and shit.
FANTASY JERSEY: Black #82 HAMMOND B3 in honor of both Jimmy Smiths. You know, this is actually one I might would buy if I had too much spending money in my bank account.

#6: NEW YORK GIANTS
PERTINENT DATA: 10-6 last year, got an NFC wild card berth, won the fucking Super Bowl; 16 to 1 odds to win the Super Bowl this year.
ALL-TIME GREAT: Lawrence Taylor was a coked up maniac that broke QBs careers in half. He is the epitome of what a modern defensive star should be. In fact, knowing all these guys probably do HGH, I have to admit I'm more down with coked up bug-eyed freaks like the original L.T. far more than the muscled-up types you see now. If someone's gonna use drugs to gain an advantage, I'd like them to personally enjoy it as well, rather than just simply profit monetarily. That seems so cold and heartless. Cocaine and hookers though? Much more gratifying.
TEAM HOSS: One reason out of a million I hate Dan Snyder is that he let Antonio Pierce go, and to the Giants. Antonio Pierce is one of the perfect examples why they are letting one defensive player wear head gear radios now, because in today's defenses, a good middle linebacker reads the shit, and alters calls, and has to be pretty quick with the football intelligentsia. Pierce is one of the best at it.
ALL-TIME SUCK ASS: I heard Phil Simms on the Steve Czaban Show the other morning, and he was an annoying douche like he's always been. That guy is such a fucking uptight blowhard, it's almost amazing. When you are white enough to make Greg Gumbel seem like a street negro of Omar Little proportions, you are one white assed dude.
TEAM ASS: I'm gonna have to say Eli Manning, even though he's basically like Peyton Light when it comes to all the Manning annoyances. Still though.
TEAM TRENDSETTER: Mathias Kiwanuka, the roving linebacker put back at defensive end to help offset losses on the d-line, is going to decide the Giants fate this year. They have kind of a shitty secondary, but the intense pass rush usually saved them last year. With no gap toothed dude and no likes to piss on chicks dude anymore this season, it's up to Justin Tuck and Kiwanuka to pick up the slack. Justin Tuck will be alright. But how will Kiwanuka adjust? I hope he doesn't, and tears his ACL in the kick-off game.
SENIOR PLAYER: With Strahan's retirement, the title of most constantly tenured player now moves to Amani Toomer, a second round draft pick in 1996.
THE RUDY: Starting guard Rich Seubert was undrafted in 2001 out of Western Illinois.
FORMER HURRICANE: Well, Jeremy Shockey's gone, and they have Sinorice Moss still, but the best former Hurricane on the Giants is also the oldest former Hurricane in the NFL, in punter Jeff Feagles, who played when Testaverde played and college football uniforms didn't have cybertronic lines on them yet. Just solid color tops and solid color bottoms, like it should be. Fucking frou-frou ass new fangled bullshit.
VIRGINIA BOY: Ahmad Bradshaw briefly played at UVA, before being run out of town for thievery and having to finish his college career at Marshall. He actually did time this offseason after winning the Super Bowl in a jail in southwest Virginia. UVA has a lot of players that get arrested it seems, which is odd because they're not that good. You would think if you were getting arrestable types, you'd be a much better college football program. Stupid fucking Al Groh.
WILD SAMOAN: With no Polynesian, I am forced to go back to the motherland in this category, and say Osi Umenyiora. I don't feel like looking up the link, but when the Super Bowl was going down last year, there was some blog where some anonymous chick talked about how much Umenyiora liked to piss on girls as a sexual activity. Regardless of the validity (it must be true though, because it was on the internet), I will always think of him this way now, much like when I saw the clip of Chuck Berry pissing on the blonde chick in his bathtub. "I'd kiss you baby but you know..." High-pitched, stereotypical dumb blonde voice goes, "I know, I have piss all over me. Hee hee hee." Man, God Bless America. Fifty years ago, black people were getting lynched in the biggest oak trees in town, and now they can piss on white bitches for leisure. Obama '08 baby.
THE ICKY: Justin Tuck's name reminds me of stupid wrestler names like Justin Credible or Justin Gage or Justin Sane. Justin Tuck also sounds like a skateboarder type who is misunderstood in a CW-based teen soap opera.
INDUSTRIAL OVERLORD: Chase Blackburn, Madison Hedgecock, and R.W. McQuarters sounds like a law firm specializing in helping rich entertainment industry Jews sue regular college kids who were downloading music, because the rich Jews have been ripping people off for so many years - on overpriced CDs, as well as stealing publishing rights from musicians - that they feel entitled to their ill-begotten monies.
FANTASY JERSEY: An alternate red #58 PIERCE. Or I could rock a red #17 like Lil Wayne, either way. Am I the only one that thinks even if Lil Wayne was kissing Baby like he was a father, it's still gay? I mean, me and my dad never kissed on the lips, and that seems fucking a weird thing to act like it's normal.

#7: PITTSBURGH STEELERS
PERTINENT DATA: 10-6 last year, won AFC North title, lost to Jacksonville at home in the wild card round of the playoffs; 16 to 1 odds to win the Super Bowl this year.
ALL-TIME GREAT: When he was a biker type scary white guy offensive linemen during his career, Justin Strzelczyk became one of my favorites. The fact he died in a Vanishing Point style wreck into a tanker truck full of acid wihle running from the cops. It would've been cool if he was all hopped up on something great, but it ended up just being brain damage from football, and now people are all worried about concussions. I mean, I get it, they suck, but I'm a regular guy and I've had four or five concussions in my life (one time, I was goofy for like a week - long enough to be afraid I'd forever be mildly retarded and not remember things like which way the bathroom in my own house was), but that's part of life. I think we coddle people too much with science, much like we used to with religion, and like to think science can explain anything and make it better ultimately.
TEAM HOSS: Ben Roethlisberger is a big, lovable oaf. He's a bit more resilient than most modern QBs, making him seem like a throwback type player, probably because he's in that old school looking Steelers uniform, and also because he runs like QBs did before they even timed 40 yard dashes.
ALL-TIME SUCK ASS: Terry Bradshaw is annoying, with his own personal lack of self-worth becoming too obvious all too often. Sad thing is, he's one of the least annoying guys on the least annoying pre-game show in football. Why do they hire such stupid fucks for those shows?
TEAM ASS: Not really actively disliking any Steeler, I'll go with Brett Keisel, since he almost crippled Jason Campbell last year in preseason.
TEAM TRENDSETTER: Mike Tomlin is a great young coach, reminding me of the type of dude you'd see hanging out next to Pete Rock in an old Pete Rock & CL Smooth video on YO! MTV Raps! And what is he, like their fifth coach in their whole history? Thing is, Steelers fans are expecting Super Bowl contention. And they are also a bunch of northern-style coal-mining racist hillbillies who still have German or Polish or Latvian or whatever the fuck accent. So Mike Tomlin better get it done, or be gone.
SENIOR PLAYER: In 1998, WR Hines Ward was a third round pick, and CB Deshea Townsend was a fourth rounder.
THE RUDY: Mushmouthed starting RB Willie Parker was an undrafted gem of a man, straight out of North Cackalacka.
FORMER HURRICANE: Well, they cut Najeh Davenport, so they have no bonafide Miami Hurricanes, so instead we get the pride of the Miami (of Ohio) University RedHawks - Big Ben Roethlisberger.
VIRGINIA BOY: The Steelers actually have a prominent former UVA Cavalier on both sides of the ball, in LB James Farrior, who seems to be the latest punishing elder veteran of their eternal linebacking corps, and TE Heath Miller, who before Chris Long, was the best UVA player they'd ever had in my 10 years of living in this area.
WILD SAMOAN: Perhaps the glamour boy of Wild Samoan football players, safety Troy Polamalu, who refuses to cut his hair and trains with professional wrestlers in the offseason. I think my boy Matt told me that one time when we were out drinking. It's in my head for some reason, and God made me, so I don't remember no junk.
THE ICKY: Tackle Willie Colon has a name that sounds like a jazz sessionist from the late '60/early '70s whose percussion stylings were often sampled by the Diggin' in the Crates Crew.
INDUSTRIAL OVERLORD: See, the Colts cutting Quinn Pitcock sucks even more now, because the best I can get off the Steelers roster is WR Dallas Baker, but that sounds stupid since I just said Dallas Clark up above for the Colts. Whatever happened to that Kimo Von Oelhoffen dude? That was the most industrious overlordly name in football for sure.
FANTASY JERSEY: I was gonna say some stupid James Farrior jersey or whatever, but honestly I'd wear any black Steelers jersey. But if I'm gonna fantasize, I'd get a #73 STRZELCZYK one, because dude was crazy, had two Zs in his name, and 1973 was my born year.

#8: MINNESOTA VIKINGS
PERTINENT DATA: 8-8 last year; 17 to 1 odds to win the Super Bowl this year.
ALL-TIME GREAT: Fran Tarkenton was a goofy fucker, great in the booth on Monday Night Football, and just an all-around benefit to football. He's the greatest Viking ever. His stupid brother Chip has been sportscaster for the ABC station in Richmond for like 20 years now as well.
TEAM HOSS: Being Pat and Kevin Williams are two indistinguishable 315 pound black dude monsters in the middle of the defensive line, they sort of cancel each other out, forcing me to go with overpaid guard Steve Hutchinson, who has helped Chester Taylor, and then Adrian Peterson, seem unstoppable.
ALL-TIME SUCK ASS: I always found Jon Randle to be a little pretentious, with that Road Warrior face paint and over-emphatic pseudo-trash talking.
TEAM ASS: Jared Allen, because he was good for one year, and made a big deal about having a mullet. He looks like a real dumbass too, with or without the mullet.
TEAM TRENDSETTER: Really, this team will rise or fall with Tarvaris Jackson, probably more so than any other team. If he can be Trent Dilfer-esque and not outright fuck up a whole lot, the Vikings can succeed beyond our wildest imaginations. But if he plays like he did the last few weeks of last year, heaving balls into opposing cornerbacks breadbaskets, they will be just good enough to just miss the playoffs, just like last year.
SENIOR PLAYER: Center Matt Birk was a sixth round pick in 1998, out of Harvard.
THE RUDY: Starting guard Anthony Herrera was came in undrafted in 2004, although he did play at Tennessee, so it's not like he was some longshot from Middle Arkansas Wesleyan or some shit.
FORMER HURRICANE: Not only is tackle Bryant McKinnie a former Cane, but he lives up to that reputation by getting into fights outside of night clubs. Also was supposedly a co-coordinator of the Viking love boat hooker show brouhaha.
VIRGINIA BOY: Safety Darren Sharper has played far longer and far better than you would ever expect from someone who went to William & Mary, especially if you ever saw that school. I don't know if it still does, but it used to lead state of Virginia schools in gay students as well as suicides.
WILD SAMOAN: Fullback Naufahu Tahi, another BYU Samoan Mormon. It's like a cult of those fuckers.
THE ICKY: TE Visanthe Shiancoe, because it reads really odd. I'm sure if I heard someone say it, it'd be simple as fuck though, like "Vizan Shanko". But it looks all sorts of complicated in print.
INDUSTRIAL OVERLORD: Jimmy Kleinsasser is a very laid back industrial millionaire type.
FANTASY JERSEY: An alternate black Randy Moss jersey. A couple of years ago when I was hitting up the markdown outlet store, they had some black Daunte Culpeper jerseys, and the purple viking on the sleeve with the purple trim around the neck was pimp as fuck. I think I passed it over though for a red Cadillac Williams jersey with nothing on the front that I was gonna get the airbrush shop to put a Cadillac emblem on. Then the airbrush shop shut down, for selling crack. And so it goes.