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.

Friday, October 31

Homemade Song of the Week: "More Than My Breath" by S.E.P.

I have forever wanted to sample "Tired of Being Alone" by Al Green, because it has always reminded me of cicadas building to a crescendo. It sounds like the woods behind my house, and my raggedy copy of Al Green's Greatest Hits has a permant skip right after the first two measures of this song from where I would always stop it and make it start over. PSY/OPS added a few swirls behind it and I think some drum bullshit too, but basically it's a simple-assed repetitive loop with my wordy ass doing shit like building word towers and finding hope for my future through wordcrafting. "More Than My Breath" is what we ended up with, off the 45s on 33 CD, that if you google it, a dl link comes up. It's actually a pretty decent CD. I always hate shit I do and I haven't gotten completely tired of it yet (although there's a few songs I could do without hearing ever again, though this isn't one of them). I want this shit played at my funeral. Not really, but it's fun to say dumb shit like that and then one random motherfucker might try to make my wife play this, but she'll be all like, "Fuck you man, I was married to him. We're gonna listen to 'Everything's Kinda Alright' instead. Who are you anyways?"

Thursday, October 30

S14: Worst College Football Teams

So yeah, I figured it’s been almost a month so maybe we could revisit the worst college football teams of 2008, thus far, as determined by my simple standards of least amount of wins, with average margin of crushing being the tiebreaker. I have scoured all four ranks of NCAA play, as well as the NAIA, and here is your sour clumps at the top (as opposed to cream)...

#1: Lincoln University Lions (0-8, 45.625 average margin of defeat) - This is the first year of Lincoln reinstituting football as a Division II member of the CIAA (all-black, all-strong) conference. It has not gone well. Last week, they lost to Virginia State, 54 to 0, and the week before lost a long ass road game to Arkansas-Pine Bluff, 42 to 0. That’s just the last two weeks. They didn’t even have decals on their helmets when the season started. I was thinking about this the other day actually, and it must be strange to be on a college football team its first year of re-existence. There are no upperclassmen, unless they are transfers or walk-ons. It’s a fucking brutal mish-mash of characters, because recruiting can’t be that great either. “Hey, you wanna play on a school that never had a team before. You could probably start.” You’re only gonna get the lowest of self-esteem high school kids, and a team full of low self-esteemers doesn’t make for good “Win one for the Gipper” fodder.

#2: Indiana State University Sycamores (0-8, 41.875 avg. defeat) - A football sub-continental divider team in the Missouri Valley Conference that fucking sucks. Last week, they lost their homecoming game to South Dakota State, 49 to 9; and this week they stroll into Fargo, North Dakota (which is wonderful this time of year), to get crushed by #24 I-AA team North Dakota State in the 35th annual Harvest Bowl. They could really use a football-version of Larry Bird right about now to show up, probably kicked off an SEC team for larceny, and save their program from further shame.

#3: Southwestern College Moundbuilders (0-7, 32.571 avg. defeat) - Cellar dwelling members of the NAIA’s Kansas Collegiate Athletic Conference, Southwestern, who used to be the best team in the conference in the late ‘90s. Then, their coach Monty Lewis bolted to coach conference rival Friends College, who is now the cream of the league. Southwestern is so bad that they lost last weekend to a team that was previously 2-6 (East Central), and that team’s coach STILL got fired this week, after winning his school’s homecoming game. Good news around campus as though as the Moundbuilders basketball team is a preseason favorite in the NAIA coach’s poll.

#4: Tabor College Blue Jays (0-7, 32.143 avg. defeat) - Another member of the NAIA’s Kansas CAC, which means they meet... THIS SATURDAY! WINFIELD, KANSAS, MOTHERFUCKERS! If you live within a hundred miles and don’t go out of your way to see this classic showdown, then you are a suck ass and probably deserve to live in the middle of fucking nowhere.

#5: Principia University Panthers (0-8, 31.875 avg. defeat) - I try to look this shit up to have something useful to say, but it’s hard to care about a Division II team in something called the St. Louis Intercollegiate Athletic Conference.

#6: Cheyney Wolves (0-9, 34.111 avg. defeat) - Division II Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference bottom feeders have lost fifteen straight games, this year’s batch of nine under new head coach Jeff Braxton. That’s a tough job right there, to make an obscure college’s perennially shitty football team not be so shitty. I’d like to see how like an Urban Meyer or Nick Saban would do in a situation like that. In fact, that’d be a good reality TV show, like Nick Saban taking over some shitty historically-black college to try and make it good. I wouldn’t watch it, because I don’t watch crap like that. But still, I’d bet there’s mad dumbasses out there who’d watch that. I mean fuck, sports radio is an entire industry, which means ignorant ass barely executed sports-related things must be profitable as fuck.

#7: North Texas University Mean Green (0-8, 33.000 avg. defeat) - Okay, they are the lowest member of the lowly IA Sun Belt Conference, and have not won a game all year long. But on top of that, they had 15 players fail drug tests recently when the coach, Todd Dodge, decided to test the entire team for “recreational drugs”. But at the same time, it seems like a cop-out. I mean, I bet you could test any college football team for weed all of a sudden, and at least that many players would fail the test. Seems like a ploy to pretend you are cleaning up a shitty football program, to keep your job another year or two. Everybody knows that high level football players pretty much just smoke weed and play Madden when they are not actually having to get ready to play football.

#8: Lock Haven University Bald Eagles (0-9, 31.444 avg. defeat) - Another member of the Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference in the NCAA’s Division II, which you would think would mean a showdown with Cheyney for next-to-last. Except the PSAC has two divisions, so they don’t play this year, which hopefully they will both suck again next year and have a pair of two year losing streaks to take into battle with each other in Bumfuck, PA.

#9: West Georgia University Wolves (0-8, 29.875 avg. defeat) - The mighty Wolves of Carrollton, GA, member’s of Division II Gulf South Conference, have probably already lost again this week, being they played tonight against the Valdosta State Blazers, who are a Division II powerhouse. Last week, West Georgia was crushed by Arkansas Tech, so I would imagine a short week against an even better team was pretty ugly.

#10: Concord University Mountain Lions (0-9, 29.111 avg. defeat) - The shame of the West Virginia Intercollegiate Athletic Conference ranks near the bottom of NCAA Division II in defense. I would imagine rural West Virginia Division II football is some good shit, what with there not being that many black people in the state, plus willing to go play somewhere like Athens or Buckhannon or Fairmont, West Virginia. Probably just a bunch of big, mean redneck preps pretending they are athletes. I guess there’s not much pretending going on when you’re 0-9 though.

#11: Culver-Stockton College Wildcats (0-8, 28.000 avg. defeat) - Heart of America Athletic Conference (NAIA) bottom-rungers have come close on a couple of games, but yet to crack that goose egg in the win column. I have top secret dork knowledge about this blog as well, and I know a couple of random motherfuckers have ended up here by googling “Culver-Stockton football”, so hopefully one of them will tell us all what the fuck is wrong with this Wildcats team.

#12: Maranatha Baptist Bible College Crusaders (0-7, 26.714 avg. defeat) - I am a little creeped out by a baptist college in Wisconsin, even if it is is small potatoes Division III level school. I assumed baptist schools were the domain of the south, where black kids too not-book smart to play regular college footbal went to play and run for like 300 yards a game. But Wisconsin? That shatters all my happy stereotypes about small-time baptist college football. Although I guess them not having won a game at all reinforces my alternate stereotype, so I can sleep easy tonight knowing my world has not been challenged at all.

#13: University of Washington Huskies (0-7, 23.429 avg. defeat) - The worst major conference team in NCAA football, and I feel bad for Tyrone Willingham, who was on top of the world when he led Stanford to success. Then Notre Dame got all black coach-happy, only to get impatient with him and kick him to the curb. He lands in Washington, and things have come up shit ever since. The Pac-10 really kinda sucks this year, although I always consider Oregon to be good since they have the best uniforms in all of sports. I know it’s common sports dork thinking to pretend they are ugly, but they ain’t. Not even a little. They got like secret flames on their glow-in-the-dark helmets this year and shit.

#14: McMurry University (0-8, 22.250 avg. defeat) - They almost beat Texas Lutheran last week in their homecoming game, but came up short. McMurry’s team doesn’t even have a nickname. Earlier this month, when they played Mary Hardin-Baylor University, they got 27 yards of offense, total, for the entire game. That fucking sucks, and is probably a good piece of nothing minutiae to wrap up this list with.

PP: Part Twenty Eight


I miss the Polaroid project I was doing there for a while. Polaroid stopped making the film and artphags bought up all the film, driving the price up beyond my means ($15 a pack of film at Wal-Mart, and usually a dollar or two more per pack anywhere else), so this project, which I was gonna run up to 1000 pics is probably stuck in the mud wherever I stopped at, which I think was around 280 or so. But I remembered had some I had already uploaded to photosucket but forgot to write blurbs for a while back. So here I am, catching up on stupid shit that nobody cares about but myself, with fake robot deadlines that mean nothing, wasting my fucking life. I am a fan of older Dodge trucks, especially when they are all dented and dinged because people actually use them instead of riding around in them all shiny with bed covers and chrome flame things and fake nutsacs hanging off the hitch and some little miniature Steve Austin behind the wheel. The guy who owns this truck used to be a tobacco farmer in southside Virginia, but that's not profitable anymore, so he grows wacky organic shit to sell to those types that enjoy spending three times as much for something that costs about the same to grow.

The Greene County fair has a pretty good little demolition derby every year. We actually went with some friends to the one this year, and it was some good stuff. This was an advertisement car along US 33 for the demo derby from last year, probably from the previous year's derby. It doesn't look that fucked up physically, but that crumpled front end suggests radiator breachings. I like the drip paint scheme. Knowing all these cars get destroyed, the paint jobs are always budget as fuck, but it's interesting to see and figure up how much time and energy put into some of these things, meant for nothing more than bashing up into other cars.

There is a town nearby me called the Columbia, Virginia, nestled along a chink in the James River that I try to cleanse my dirty soul in a couple times a year. Last time I swam in it was the night me and my mom and sister went to see Willie Nelson and it was a good drunken time that culminated in me making a loud ass of myself as I'm apt to do once too much alcohol mixes with my bloodstream. Columbia, Virginia, was supposedly going to be the potential capital of the Confederate States of America at one point, it being a booming little assed city, but then modern times plus a couple of devastating floods has decimated it down to what it is now, which looks more like The Bottoms from the In the Heat of the Night TV show than anywhere else I've ever been, but without voodoo princesses (although I don't know that for sure). Last time I ever stopped there was to buy a double deuce at the county line country store (straddling Goochland and Fluvanna on the Fluco side, with Cumberland County right across the bridge as well) because it was raining like shit and I felt like drinking a beer was a good idea. The store owner was some east African dude, and he was watching an east African comedy of some sorts. I wasn't wearing a shirt because I am self-employed (haphazardly) in construction, and if you are living a life where you can go whole days without wearing a shirt, you should embrace that, because most western society miscreants are not so lucky. Anyways, there's a truck driver guy in Columbia who always has old dump trucks that he's fixing up just enough to sell to somebody passing through on their way to Richmond. This one sat there forever and was one of the first Polaroids I took doing this stupid project. Were I rich man, I would be cultivating a feng shui junkyard, and this would be one of my first purchases, although it's gone now. Probably to the scrap yard, as metal prices going high plus economy going shitty have had a shitload of vehicles get rollbacked or towbarred to the scrap yard the past few months. If someone is all like, "I'll take your junk car off your hands, no charge," tell them to fuck off, because if it's old and made of metal, you could get a couple hundred for it at the scrap yard, easy. Newer shit, not so much, because newer shit is plastic as fuck, and that's not me being metaphoric. For real, new shit is plastic as shit, and ultimately worthless.

The Imperial is a beautifully ornamented vehicle, highlighted by the Bocephus eagle as seen in this shitty picture. Just look at that back end, with the chrome circle holding the eagle, and that concaved piece of metal running parallel to the bumper going into that circle. That's quality design that looks pimp as fuck. It's a shame that today, when every second local bartender and third english-speaking landscaper is a graphic designer of some sort or another, that our cars look so much fucking stupider. You slap basically a copycat style of this eagle on the back end of Priuses, and I bet you'd sell like three times as many next year, and little racing clubs would start up that combined souped up goofy speed with how many miles per gallon you could get, and there'd be magazines with sliding scale charts in the back to show whether you win, depending on your mph and mpg. And that would make America a better place in the long run, because then we wouldn't be so dependent on that shit them dudes be talking about in all those commercials popping up all the time all of a sudden while I'm trying to watch TMZ at night.

NFL WK 9: East division teams


#1: WASHINGTON REDSKINS (6-2, 2nd overall) - Again, mathematical defibrillations are proven to be bullshit because there's absolutely no way the Redskins should be considered the second best team in the NFL right now. And I am a Redskins fan! There are two ways you can look at this team within the context of this year's NFL. The pessimistical side, which I'm more attuned to, is to say, man this team sucks. They have gotten lucky against shitty teams the past two weeks, and don't score nearly as much as all the fucking yards they run up on offense would lead you to expect. But the NFL is all fucked up this year, with the wonderful mediocrity of parity, no cream to rise to the top, so the Skins are 6-2. And the second half of the season will expose them as a fraud of the free agency era. But the optimistic attitude would be to say, you know, they haven't really clicked on all cylinders, sputtering in the red zone, but they've shown chemistry and flashes of greatness. If they haven't even hit their stride yet, and somehow managed to be 6-2, once they start clicking completely, it's gonna be the sickness. Of course, they have a ton of minor injuries already (stupid Jason Taylor), and that shit could come to haunt. Although they also have a bye week coming up next week. But then again, they come off that with the brutal blood battle #2 of the year against the Cowboys. Whatever. They are winning and I will enjoy it for as long as it lasts, whether that be eight years or three weeks.

#2: DALLAS COWBOYS (5-3, 3rd overall) - Not only has this been a great year already watching the Redskins actually be better than expected, but watching this slow Cowboys burn has been wonderful. Wade Phillips is the most impotent head coach I think I've ever seen, and it's funny that Cowboys fans are putting all this futuristic hope into Red Jesus aka Jason Garrett. That dude has already shown signs of believing his own hype, which means he stands a decent chance of ending up being like a second-rate Norv Turner. I think the thing I've enjoyed the most, beyond the T.O. impending meltdown, the Pac Man bullshit, Jerry Jones scrambling, is realizing how they've put so much weight behind Tony Romo - it will take years for him to lose his spot. But Romo is very much like Brett Favre in that he gets good fantasy numbers, but tends to fuck up at the worst possible time. There was a reason the dude was undrafted out of college, and it's not like he was off the radar. Dude played Division I-AA, not Division III or some shit. The more he dips his dick into Hollywood pussy and cashes them big fat oil man paychecks, the less likely he is to be motivated to get any better than he already is too. It's a great situation to watch unravel.

#3: NEW YORK GIANTS (6-1, 5th overall) - The Giants defending champion status, combined with their record, would make one assume they are the inevitable elite team to be crowned by the end of the year. But honestly, they haven't been super-impressive. Then again, who has? As much as they punished the Steelers offensive line last week, they wouldn't have won without a second-string long snapper for the Steelers blowing the game. The Giants do have depth on offense, more so than most teams, meaning they have drafted pretty well the past couple of years. Still, I think they are getting early hype this year, before they deserve it, and that can only inflate their heads beyond reality. They would have done much better to float below expectations like last year, and peak at the end of the year.

#4: BUFFALO BILLS (5-2, 8th overall) - An interesting thing I have noted as a nominal professional football fan is how the Jaguars seem to suddenly be a declining team full of potential felons, whereas the Bills are suddenly good enough to be almost as good as the Patriots maybe. The movement of Marcus Stroud from the Jags to the Bills is probably a good reason for this. The Bills have had some hodgepodge of talent in recent years, but without that imposing presence to keep it policed in the locker room, it's hard to make chemistry projects turn out right. Marcus Stroud is just a giant black dude who plays defensive tackle, which doesn't necessarily command respect from the mainstream NFL fan. Unless they can do a funny dance where their big ass belly jiggles like that Packers dude (Gilbert O'Sullivan or some shit like that?), or say crazy things like Warren Sapp, nobody really gives a fuck about them half the time, because they don't sack the QB like ends, and they don't really show their face as much as other players because when they are not playing plays, they are too fucking tired to unstrap their helmets from their swollen ass heads. But Marcus Stroud strolled into Buffalo, cashing a fat free agent paycheck, and has made that defense solid. You combine that with an offense full of questionable potential superstars like Trent Edwards and Marshawn Lynch (who gets Edgerrin James-like props for looking most of the time like he might be an original member of the Boot Camp Clique), and what you have is a team contending to unseat the crippled New England Patriots for an AFC East divisional title.

#5: PHILADELPHIA EAGLES (4-3, 10th overall) - We have a really close family friend and she has a 11-year-old boy. I even went to see one of his fall ball little league games, I think so highly of their family and the kid, probably because he is a Waldorf student with a new age mommy, but he's a sports fan, and it's always bothered me how the arty fruity types seem to shun athletics. What is wrong with liking sports? Anyways, the boy is a huge Philadelphia sports fan, and I have fun talking shit with him over Redskins/Eagles rivalry. There was a story at the Armchair Linebacker blog about Donovan McNabb offering his penis as a sausage to a towelboy, but I figured the kid's not old enough for me to corrupt him quite that bad yet. But I feel bad for the kid too, because on offense, this is basically a two-horse show, with McNabb close to the end of his line I would think, at least in Philadelphia. He's still got that Steve McNair in Baltimore or Joe Montana in Kansas City or Warren Moon in Minnesota late career run for potentially another five years, but it's not gonna happen in Philadelphia, because once they realize there's no immediate Super Bowls left in this roster, they will immediately jettison McNabb to the QB retread pile. And it's pretty much been proven that Bryan Westbrook is the oil that makes this team's engine not throw rods from lack of smoothness. But he seems to be gimpier and gimpier each season, which is a drawback to being the only offensive weapon on a team, allowing the defense to gun for you.

#6: NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS (5-2, 12th overall) - The Pats still be putting it up when they can, Matt Cassel playing toss it up to Randy Moss, and their defense is still old as fuck. They have had a ton of injuries, and to be 5-2 right now either says, yeah, Bill Belichick is a genius, or it says the NFL is fucking a level playing field right now, which will make for scrum city come playoffs. Last year, it was neat seeing the Giants, a lowly wild card team, make a miraculous run, but I don't really want to have that shit every year. I'd like to see teams build themselves up to powerhouses through solid philosophies, and not just have lucky breaks and a couple dudes get hot and they win it all. Then again, the shit is fixed anyways, so right now I'm like some 31-year-old guy in 1985 arguing about how great Ric Flair is and how lucky we are to see him wrestle. Hulk Hogan made more money for others and himself, as will fake ass propped-up Lombardi Trophy hoisters, where an elder statesmen for the team becomes a high profile talking head immediately afterwards ala Jerome Bettis and Michael Strahan. Brady is already seen as a Superman and could probably coast as a wily Joe Montana-ish ol' gunslinger type QB, getting another ring late in his career to solidify his place as a Hall of Famer who can sell tons of Mitchell & Von Dutch authenticated jerseys with holographic pricetags for decades to come and come and come.

#7: MIAMI DOLPHINS (3-4, 21st overall) - Big Bill Tuna revitalize Dolphins no more reverse perfection challenges. Tony Soprano coach with Tuna shoot Big Pussy Zach Thomas to stupid Dallas where hick owner think, “HAHAHAHA! Me so smart! First find rich goop in ground and then own team full of speedy negroes! Fuck Bill Tuna! He no smart like me!” Chad Pennington sound like ‘80s jock QB who get cheerleader and drive convertible from dad’s business, but throw like cunning gimp. Somehow, Dolphins not get first pick next year. Amazingness.

#8: NEW YORK JETS (4-3, 25th overall) - I am in a fantastical foozball league with 20 teams, which means there ain’t shit to pick up off waivers. My auto-draft did good in some aspects, but sucked it up in others. When it comes to QBs, I am pretty much fucked, because I’m completely hitched to Brett Favre’s punk ass. The one week he threw like 19 touchdowns against the Cardinals, it worked good, but every other week, it’s so hit or miss with him. I did snake Kerry Collins off the scrap pile pre-emptively after he filled in that first week, so he’s my back-up. But Collins doesn’t really do shit except hand the ball off and try not to throw interceptions. The Titans pass just enough to make running not seem completely inevitable on every play. I can’t even remember who my original other QB was, but he is long gone now. Oh yeah, it was Jon Kitna. For fantastic football purposes, Jon Kitna was actually pretty damned good. Lucky for the world, for-real games aren’t decided by just heaving the ball downfield and hoping you end up with more yards than anyone else. The Jets might actually be halfway decent if they, you know, ran the ball. Every time I see a highlight, seems like it’s Leon Washington (most 1978 black guy name in football right now, for what it’s worth). You’d think they’d try to run behind all those overpaid offensive line goons they have instead of just letting the Ol’ Gunslinger stand back there and play Nerf.

Friday, October 24

Friday Love/Hate

I love sitting in the local pizza joint the other night with my fam and the guy contending for Congress was in town, hobnobbing and gladhanding it. My wife made him hold the baby, and I told him how I was anti-Republican and anti-Democrat, but liked what he had to say, so much so I might even vote for him. I told him I hoped he won, but more importantly if he did win, I hoped he'd maintain his focus once he went to the cesspool of D.C. He was clearly taken aback, but held himself together. I told him I was from southside, and he said, "Yeah, they all feel like both parties have betrayed them," basically reciting CNN reports about the Montana Freemen. It was great, and something he probably needed after just having some of my daughter's 10-year-old friends tell him how much he rocked. What the fuck is wrong with kids, thinking a politician rocks? My daughter was tripping on her friends doing that. She was all like, "I thought they were gonna ask for his autograph or something."

I hate the fact the majority of human beings either brainwash their fucking children to think like them or leave them to themselves to be half-feral. I teach my kids to think for their own asses on affairs. I guess if I had to choose, I'd rather children be half-feral than act like they know what the fuck is going on. I guess that means I should vote for McCain, but I can't vote, because this is Virginia and I'm a felon. I hate that too.

Thursday, October 23

NFL WK 8: South division teams


#1: TENNESSEE TITANS (6-0, 2nd overall) - Really, the only thing you have to say to show how fucking mediocre the NFL has become, where anyone can beat anyone and nobody is allowed to stockpile players or build dynasties, is that the starting QB of the only undefeated team left in the NFL right now is Kerry Collins. Kerry Fucking Collins. The recovered alcoholic. The dude of questionable uses of epithets towards his own wide receiver in Carolina. The fucking douchebag fratboy-faced fuckwad who was previously known for gunslinging interceptions like AFC West running backs sling fertile sperm into various womenfolks. Kerry Collins. And Vince Young is an afterthought all of a sudden - the young darling of the NFL who was on Madden's cover last year. He is a mentally unstable ignorant (at least according to his wonderlickings) young black dude who may never be the same, because the game has used him the fuck up, sold a ton of $78 jerseys with his name on it, and tossed him aside. Shit, he should've started a dogfighting operation too, to at least get something out of his short stint as future superstar face of the NFL. I would bet, even in prison, Michael Vick gets his pick of the man-pussy.
But let's be for-real here... there is no way a team led by Kerry Collins is gonna win a Super Bowl. And also, it was funny as fuck to see LenDale White have that long ass run last weekend, looking over his shoulder like "What the fuck? Somebody catch me before I have a heart attack."

#2: TAMPA BAY BUCCANEERS (5-2, 4th overall) - It looks like Jon Gruden's giving Jeff Garcia his locket back, and they're going steady again. They're so sweet. I remember last year when I was in Algebra II with them, and sat between them in the same row, and Jeff was always passing notes forward to Jon, and I'd have to pass it with it under my sneaker, sliding it up under Jon's desk and tapping him on his back. It happened so often that he didn't even look back when I tapped eventually, just instinctively reaching down discreetly so that mean old Mrs. Dumminger didn't catch him. But I give him credit, he truly is an offensive genius. He had made some Chinese ninja throwing stars with razor notebook paper and gave them to Jeff before class one time, and she actually caught the passing note, and mean old Mrs. Dumminger opened it up and started reading it, "Dear Jon, Do you like me to be under your center this Sunday? Check one. Yes. No. May..." and before she could get out that last syllable, double razor notebook paper Chinese ninja throwing stars into her eyeballs by Jeff Garcia. He's ambidextrous, you know.

#3: CAROLINA PANTHERS (5-2, 6th overall) - In the Redskins shittiest era (aka Jack Kent Cooke had just died and Norvell Turner was coaching), I had actually contemplated abandoning them for the Panthers. That's how down I was on the Skins. But I never could do that shit. Still though, I have always liked the Panthers at least casually, and them having Steve Smith on their team has just made it better. Although that suffered a setback this week as I heard him on Jim Rome's show, and it kinda ruined it. First off, curses to the local other AM sports radio station for having local suckasses from noon to 3 pm, who actually repeat themselves over and over and over every hour, so that if you listen for more than 30 minutes, it's just a re-do of the same bullshit. It's because of them I even have listened to Jim Rome lately. And other than being forced to out of extreme boredom and desiring sports radio's soothing babble to make the hours disappear at work, I cannot fathom why anyone would listen to Jim Rome. It was bad enough years ago when I listened to him last, but now it's like wacky morning show FM DJ sound bites over and over that I guess is supposed to be funny, except they are against drugs, so I guess you have to be handicapped and into sports. I had no idea there were that many special olympians on the earth though. Anyways, Steve Smith was on there, giving financial advice, being noble by refusing to talk to the media about breaking his teammate's nosebones, all that. And then came Rome talking about how "epic" the interview was and reading 19,000 emails that said "Steve Freakin' Smith". God that shit is so fucking predictable. It would've been much better if they had talked about what airbrush dude did his shoes up every week, or ask how Rae Carruth was doing or something. Fucking white ass Jim Rome.

#4: JACKSONVILLE JAGUARS (3-3, 8th overall) - I guess the Jaguars are still supposed to be considered a good team, but I say fuck that noise. They've had as many people get arrested as the Bengals the past few years, just more quietly in Jacksonville. Shit, their best player all-time, Jimmy Smith, was a perennial cokehead. And Matt Jones just got busted with coke. Who the fuck gets busted for coke in the NFL in 2008? I think it all goes back to Jack Del Rio, who looks more like a family man caught up with bad influences on an old episode of Miami Vice than any other coach in any sport ever. He looks the part so well that you know he lives the part, to an extent. They are a lawless team, where motherfuckers used to chop a chunk of wood in the locker room with an ax, and a reserve O-lineman got shot the fuck up so badly earlier this season that he lost a leg and is paralyzed for life. Gangstas man. Gangstas don't win Super Bowls as a unit. You can squeeze a couple gangstas into the mix, most successfully at linebacker, but you can't just have a team full of Tupacs in Juice and expect to continue on the upswing. I think what we are seeing is the last gasps of a gangsta ass crew that's about to implode, send Jack Del Rio on his merry way, and go back to being a shitty team. Hopefully, Pete Carroll will take an NFL job and Del Rio will get offered the gig at his alma mater - USC, and they'll turn into a college gangsta ass team, like Miami was, which of course will eventually ruin USC's football program, like Miami's sucks now, because they'll be forced to actually make kids go to classes and not get paid openly and shit like that.

#5: ATLANTA FALCONS (4-2, 10th overall) - Oh man, spirits is high in the ATL as Matty Ryan has done far better than ever expected. But wait till that shooting star crashes back to the earth, once the NFL parity curve catches up to Atlanta and their new offense featuring Michael Turner's fast little ass. The Falcons will always suck, because they abandoned those pimp ass red uniforms, and double cursed once they replaced the simple flat falcon for that semi-cybertronic looking ass thing perfect for the XFL. Call it the curse of White Shoes Johnson's Wobbly Legs.

#6: INDIANAPOLIS COLTS (3-3, 22nd overall) - Watching the Colts suck is so fun because I hate me some Peyton Manning. It will be funny because his career will basically be broken into three parts: the first 8 or so years - couldn't win the big game, that one year - won the big game, the last 8 or so years - didn't win the big game again. Jokes on you, you fucking goober.

#7: NEW ORLEANS SAINTS (3-4, 24th overall) - I would say, without doing a lot of research or reading or know-it-all pontification, that the biggest problem with the Saints is that I can name about 9 offensive skill position players they have, and beyond that dreadlocked dude Mike McKenzie who used to play for the Packers alongside Al Harris as the most dreadlocked pair of cornerbacks ever, I couldn't tell you a defensive player for the Saints. I read recently that head coach Sean Payton and QB Drew Brees are great homies, going out together to see movies or bang trannies and shit, and that's all fine and dandy I guess, but when you see those clips of Brees all conniption fitting the team into motivation before games, it seems kind of weird. Kind of like when you have a boss and most everybody doesn’t want to do shit at work because you know, we’re American so fuck it, let’s look at shit online instead, but there’s like that one dude who’s down with the boss and they go to lunch together and pound Budweisers at a BBQ joint, and that dude tries to rally motherfuckers to give a shit and go hard until quitting time. Fuck dudes like that.

#8: HOUSTON TEXANS (2-4, 26th overall) - Man, that game a couple weeks back that Sage Rosenfels single-handedly lost to the Colts was amazing. I mean, the feeble Texan fans had already turned on Matt Schaub, and here ol’ Sage had led the team to a near-defeat of the dreaded Indianapolis Colts in a sign of validation for this young team with horrendous uniforms. Then, just like that, he gave it back, lost his good credit, and is back to being a back-up, and will probably never start a game again anywhere except during family reunions. Just like that. The Texans are one of the most obscure teams in the NFL. I know they have players, and I know of some of the better ones, but they could have like a great LB that goes into free agency and the Redskins pay a jillion dollars for and I’d be like, “Who the fuck is this guy?” I feel kinda bad for Mario Williams too, because he was getting all that Big Draft Bust publicity, then he started playing good and the team faded into the NFL background. At least when he was a failure, he was noteworthy. Now, no one knows who he is. I think the best thing for the franchise would be for TV Johnny Dang to buy them, put diamonds in their face masks, and just be the most over-the-top outrageous team in the NFL. With Andre Johnson and Steve Slaton, they’re already partially equipped to navigate such territory. Really, if they could just pick up Vince Young from the Titans and run an option offense called Super Bling, and then run a wacky reverse bling defense, always in at least nickelback coverage, but with extra strong safeties to blitz and spear motherfuckers, that’d be some great shit to see happen. But I’m just dreaming... dreaming away my last blurb.

Wednesday, October 22

100 VINYLZ: #84 - Eat Out More Often LP by Rudy Ray Moore


(1970, Traffic Records)
I made this list a couple of months ago, and it’s sad that I’m writing about this record a couple days after Rudy Ray Moore died. (I found it strange that Dolemite was born in 1927, though; he was truly ahead of his time.) My folks used to have 8-track tapes back in the day, and they had a couple of Rudy Ray Moore ones, one of which the cover was nothing more than a champagne glass. I knew I wasn’t supposed to listen to it, mostly because no one ever played it while I was around, and it got kept in one of the side cabinets of the actual working Victrola my folks had. But dad also had a stack of a couple hundred Penthouses, Ouis, and Hustlers in a closet that I looked at like a motherfucker when I’d stay home from school, pretending to be sick, so I could masturbate myself silly. I put on the Rudy Ray Moore 8-track one day, expecting like some super-awesome sex soundtrack that was just gonna make my young pubescent dick pop right outside of my body, but no. There were dirty words, and a foul-mouthed lady who sounded like she had fat hips from too many pork chop sandwiches, but nothing to make my dick hard. And I was too young to really appreciate blue humor.
Fast forward a few years, and I’m in college in Richmond, Virginia, which at this point (around 1991 or 1992) was still a run-down piece of shit and not yet rejuvenated by my alma mater Virginia Commonwealth University as well as other projects (but one man’s rejuvenation is another man’s sterile ass bullshit). There were tons of shitty thrift stores, benefitting all sorts of charitable groups (meaning most likely the old couple that ran them), and I was a college student in the early ‘90s, so getting stuff at thrift stores was like the best shit ever. The stupid ebays hadn’t been created yet, so people couldn’t scour the earth for dumbasses to rip off on every obscure piece of crap they had laying around, so a lot of times, you could still find great shit at a thrift store, at a great price. (My best thrift store purchase, really ever, was in this weird little hole-in-the-wall thrift store on Broad Street near VCU where I bought four old Hustler magazines and a really nice satin American flag, complete with the yellow fringe, for $10. I masturbated to the Hustlers, and a few years later, after an all-night session of drinking, me and Eddie the singer from the M-80s who is now a heroin junkie and probably dead and his girlfriend Whitney tied the flag onto a clothesline pulley thing in my Oregon Hill back yard, set it on fire as the sun came up, and pulleyed it out over the middle of the yard, standing there drunkenly laughing. Then my cop neighbor who lived one building over on the bottom floor came out to see all this. He didn’t even bat an eye, we said “morning” to each other, and he drove off in his cop car.) Well, the Salvation Army that used to be on Broad Street down where all the non-white people mill about waiting for buses or jobs or death or whatever, it was a prime ass thrift store. I went in there one time, and right on the end of a stack of records on the floor was a Redd Foxx LP. So I dug. I ended up finding a Reynaldo Rey LP too, plus two Rudy Ray Moore ones, one without the sleeve though, which I just tucked into this one, which did have the sleeve. By this point in my life, I had been corrupted by the rapping musics, so I had an appreciation for the blue humor, as performed by old school darkies who used to do the Chitlin Circuit.
The thing about Rudy Ray Moore’s better albums, and this one’s still my favorite out of the seven or eight I’ve ever owned in one format or another, is the use of a live house band, as well as foul-mouthed singers. Calling himself the Godfather of Rap wasn’t just jive (haha, I’ve been using that word a lot lately, because I’m a stupid fucker who thinks retarded shit like that is funny to do to unsuspecting people, and if I can’t entertain myself in my time on this shitty rock, then fuck you and your judgemental ass nature), because there’s some seriously ass funky shit in there. I am surprised no one has sampled a few of these tracks intros or outros, although then again, there are far faggier whiteboys on this earth nowadays than myself, and they’ve stolen far more electronic Rudy Ray Moore files than I ever bought at shitty thrift stores, so I’m sure these things have been sampled silly by the Swedish and Norwegish and all that shit. But I guess this album is most notable for being where the story of “Dolemite” was first on the wax, and I’m sure three million rappers have sampled lines from that. But their’s isn’t as grainy and poppy as my copy. Which is why I love vinyl - so organic and fucked-up and full of a story. You can pick the seeds out of a big bag of weed on an album cover. I’d like to see you fags do that with your tiny assed ipods.
Actually, I just did some quick research, and this was Rudy Ray Moore’s first LP. His second was This Pussy Belongs To Me, released like a month after his first one, which is the other sleeveless LP I got that day, but I tucked it in some other album at some point for safe keeping and have never remembered where that was. Which sucks, because that album has “Hurricane Annie”. But both made the Billboard Soul charts, making Rudy Ray Moore the first soul artist to have two albums on the chart at the same time. That’s all the internet-based music fag minutaie I have for you though. You can anything else you need on your own. Also, my album cover is the more Salvation Army clean one, not the completely awesome ass one as pictured above.

100 VINYLZ: #85 - Lie LP by Charles Manson


(1974, ESP-Disk Records)
I have always been intrigued by ol' Chuckie Milles Manson, ever since I was a pre-teen. He's on some other-level psychology shit, always just being a mirror back at whoever is interviewing him, which is also why I'd never want to actually interview him, because he'd just reflect how awesome he is instead of the creepy shit that's inside. He comes across as a great mix of new age hippie bullshit from the '60s and jailhouse science. I would imagine if he didn't have the swastika tattooed on his forehead, he and the 5 Percenters would be tight.
I can't remember when I got this, but I it was probably when I used to mail order bunches of shit from Toxic Shock, which later became something else with a stupid name. It's just the folksy shit he was recording when he was hanging out with that one Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, and it's not really that great (kind of like the Beach Boys; man, I was tricked into giving Pet Sounds the grand remastering another shot recently, and that stuff is retarded, like some surfer kid cracked his head open on a conkshell, but his older brother self-medicated the kid after his homemade extreme sports lobotomy with psilocybin tea, and the kid made an album, and everybody said it was genius to make him feel good like Special Olympians getting gold medals). I guess "Cease to Exist" is the most famous song off of Lie, because it has been covered by bands in the past couple decades, but I've always loved "Garbage Dump" the most, because that's the most anarchist hippie song on here. To this day, there are dumpster divers like mad, some of them close friends of mine. I have two or three garbage bags full of bagels in the freezer on my porch from both one of my wife's friends as well as an older couple at what used to a commune down the road. And I know a crazy mountain dude who feeds his yard chickens entirely with thrown out lettuces from two local Food Lions he picks up every Friday around lunch, because that's when they shuffle the lettuces.
I downloaded a ton of Manson's prison recordings recently, off of archive.org, and that's what I've always wanted more anyways. Were I a money-wasting man right now and not just a regular fucking doomed fat American loser like the rest of you, I'd be searching inside the ebays for a vinyl copy of Live in San Quentin, because that's the fucking shit right there. His kookery and cosmic kung fu is far more deeply embedded in that shit than this old second-rate folksy crap. When I was in high school, this older kid Greg who was a huge influence on corrupting me, but in a smart delinquent way, would make me mixtapes of all the crazy underground punk bullshit he bought like mad with his drug dealing monies. Greg was crazy, like he was always proud he never once had his name in any yearbook, and that's why I'd never say his whole name here. He also would get pissed if you copied his mixtapes for anybody because he didn't really like people outside of like five dudes. He fucked up one kid for dubbing some Cramps shit from some other dude he hooked up. Anyways, Greg would slip me tapes fairly often (I still have a few of them), and one had a Manson prison song, which I never knew the name of until getting the shit off the interorgs the other month. "And As I Told You On This Chord Once Before" is the song, and I used to listen to that shit every day in high school, except when I was afraid he might be brainwashing me, because he might be. There's a strange cadence to it all, and weird ways the words roll poetically but then switch up into something different. If I find that album, that shit might be top ten next time around. Still, just on general Charles Manson awesomeness (Air, Trees, Water, Animals yall), Lie sits right here on my stupid pretentious record dork list of doom.

Homemade Song of the Week: "The Deadbeat Heartbeat of a Hobo" by 1000 Feathers

So back to some real homemade shit, done in the camper, mic into broken 4-track machine, RCA cables down to headphone jack into USB turntable into shitty laptop that hardly works because of viruses that shot out of vaginas I looked at with it, into audacity, pitch shift the vocals, and bam, that's a song. I need to get back to doing this shit, as I've been fucking around doing nothing, being a normal fucker half the time, all depressed and shit. I started writing this song one day riding around with my 9-year-old daughter, then quit because I hated it. Two days later, she asked me how it ended because she liked it so much, so I finished it, turning it into a song where I leave an imaginary daughter to be a hobo, feeling bad that I left her behind, sort of. What a great thing to dedicate to my daughter, hunh? Well, here's that song I just spoke of, low levels and all.

Tuesday, October 21

100 VINYLZ: #86 - Lyricist Lounge, Volume One 4x12" by Various Artists


(1998, Rawkus Records)
Man, I'll be honest right up front here and confess that last weekend, I was doing some tune-up work on both the family vehicles, so I dragged one of my monstrous 1970s speakers out of the camper, and threw this record on the turns table. It did not stand the test of time, and that's barely a decade ago. It was hard to get through any one side of any of the four maxi-singles, which is how they break up the hip hop albums so that it has fatter grooves in the vinyl for DJs to tear up upon with diamond-tipped needles. Still, as I didn't go back and revisit any of these records as I made a giant list and culled it down to a final top 100 over the course of a month this past spring, without going through the process of listening to everything like a fucking douche, sitting there and taking notes on highs and lows. I worked from memory.
My memory of this album is of it being the culmination of those early Rawkus years, when I was buying a good $40 to $100 worth of new vinyl every week, as I had no responsibilities otherwise, other than half of the rent on a $200 a month trailer. It was when the indie rap movement first started to creep into my area, and Willie's Records & Tapes (R.I.P.) would have strange white label jams mixed in with all the more commonly known shit. I got into a lot of great shit all at once at that time, with the indie labels popping up with good distribution, plus with rap music being still in the throes of Wu-Tang not yet having sucked shit completely and still having a lot of weird guest spots before guest spots were as common as some sort of stupid shit that's everywhere, even where it never should be, nowadays. And Rawkus was where I first heard Talib Kweli (before he started suffering from The Whispering Rapper Disease aka Bahamadius Suckashitus), Company Flow (when they still had a black dude to temper El-P's over-the-top LOOK HOW DOWN I AM!ness), Punchline & Wordsworth, Saul Williams (who was fucking amazing to me before Def Poetry Jammers became such a ridiculous stereotype), probably more. Shit, the first time I heard Eminem was on the B-side to an L-Fudge single on Rawkus, and he was ridiculously awesome at that point, still fresh and not yet a caricature of his own rhymes.
And this album was great, at that time, because it had a couple of high profile appearances, but it was mostly just underground shit, without the crutch of more famous compadres like the later Lyricist Lounges.
Nonetheless, like I said, when I played this the other weekend working on my truck, it fucking sucked. I plan on doing this every Presidential Election year (or every four years in the case of America hopefully dissolving into tribal bands of warlords and communes), and I doubt this will make it again. Those fond memories of having tons of discretionary income to waste on new vinyl, living in a shitty trailer, making mixtapes as DJ Spinebreaker (I traded one dreadlocked college kid a mixtape for a VHS copy of Master Killer, which I still have), just kicking it with my boy Rob the Black Clever Star... man, thsoe were fun ass days. It's too bad this album is so dated sounded and unfun that it doesn't generate a feel good memory vibe in me. I think that's what's been missing with a lot of hip hop music since like the very early '90s, is that sentimental timeless classic vibe. Not too much shit is timeless anymore; it's all such commercial bullshit that's here today #1 with a bullet and in the budget bins with a notch in the corner of the CD case in three weeks.
I am listening to the Sirius satellite's Soultown station right now actually, because I DJed this past weekend at my mom and her friends' redneck hippie Fall Fling party, and I had only brought three crates of records, mostly redneck funk type shit, to get feet scooting across the grass, but I let people come up and ask for songs, and people was into old soul like crazy, which luckily I had a couple of Atlantic Records comps and three or four Soul Train compilations, so we got 'em moving. That's some timeless ass shit right there. I don't think anyone's ever gonna mistake MosDef for Clarence Carter or Talib Kweli for Wilson Pickett. Or Otis Redding. Man, I wish all those hopeless child soldiers in Africa were into Otis Redding t-shirts instead of Tupac t-shirts, then maybe they wouldn't be raping enemies and having bad days all the time because they had to use their AK all the time.

Friday, October 17

Friday Love/Hate

I love the way a pregnant woman's ass wobbles when she walks in front of me.

I hate the usage of "Wall Street" and "Main Street" in talking about how fucked we all are in this Good Depression (not quite Great yet). Honestly, I've only heard it on media bullshits, but if I hear somebody use it in the real lifes, then I'll know right away they are a dumbass.

Thursday, October 16

NFL WK 7: North division teams


#1: PITTSBURGH STEELERS (4-1, 1st overall)
It appears that at least for this year, free agency-based league parity has set in, and we are in for some January Madness. And yes, according to my completely faulty mathematical calibrations, the Steelers are the best team in the NFL, at least for this week. Their offensive line has looked susceptible though, and poor big ole Ben Roethlisberger has taken a beating - not as bad as helmetless brain skids along Pennsylvania country roads - but nonetheless, the average dude's body is not inclined to stand up straight-right after getting pretzeled into nice grass every Sunday afternoon. And the funny thing is they've got Byron Leftwich backing him up. Remember when that guy was gonna be the greatest thing ever? Man, that one didn't pan out too well. Willie Parker returns to ignorantly yet stylishly start mad dashing for crazy yards again this week, and if they can keep their shit together, they might be able to make a run at home-field advantage in the piecemeal AFC. Of course, shit seems to go awry weekly when you pretend to prognosticate this type of pro football bullshit this year.

#2: CHICAGO BEARS (3-3, 11th overall)
And yeah, the Bears are ranked second. Really, with the NFC East and NFC South being such thickly contested divisions, the NFC North, traditionally referred to by talking head faggots as the Black-n-Blue division, is like a quagmire of mediocrity. Someone might rip off like a three-game winning streak and end up dominating the pack in doing so. Seriously, I would be surprised if the eventual winner has a winning record, as none of the teams are really consistent. One thing's for sure though, Kyle Orton is about a thousand times better than Rex Grossman was. It's a shame that Lovie Smith has decided to fill-in as resident retard when it comes to making stupid snap decisions, and fucking up another year of the Bears allegedly great defense, which I think is actually on the downcline this year and probably last too. And good god, fuck a Brian Urlacher. That stupid faggot should just go ahead and play for the Patriots or Cowboys so he can be surrounded by the appropriate level of gay assed pretentiousness deserving of such a overrated jarhead douchebag.

#3: MINNESOTA VIKINGS (3-3, 17th overall)
Remember when the Vikings season was over? Shit, fans thought it was over last week when it was 2-0 at halftime. When Gus Frerotte can salvage your team's season, in 2008, that's a pretty good sign that there's too much NFL. Maybe the league will downsize during this new depression to like half the teams, or better yet just make 16 A-league teams, drop half the league to a B-league, and create another 12 teams, and the B-league teams only play regional schedules and can't make the playoffs but can move up or down over the course of years depending on their performance. Then maybe the NFL network can have more actual games to put on their channel, which I don't get anyways. But I like Rich Eisen. He seems like a fun guy to have a beer with; I'd totally vote for him. Unless he was running against Bob Odenkirk. In that case, fuck a Rich Eisen. Isn't Eisen married to that slut-eyed Suzy Kolber chick too? I don't know why I ask all these questions to nobody when I should just google it up, but I'd rather not now to be honest. It's fun not knowing things, especially in this day and age when every mother fucker thinks they're an expert about anything because they read about it for 45 minutes inside the internets one night.

#4: CLEVELAND BROWNS (2-3, 18th overall)
Derek Anderson staved off the ushering in of the Brady Quinn era for at least two more weeks with his sudden Madden-like performance against the Giants this past Monday. Braylon Edwards remembered how to catch the ball and Jamal Lewis ran like he hadn't even been to jail yet, and everything was right for the Browns in their throwback uniforms. I found that odd, as basically it's always looked like they've had the same uniforms for a hundred and nineteen years. It must be hard to figure out ways to drum up that extra alternate jersey revenue when you have a boring ass history like the Browns, that you have know-it-all fuckers be like, "Man, they were the pre-eminent franchise back in the '50s." I have found in my short circles upon the surface of this earth ball though, that I enjoy the company of Browns fans. They seem like good people on average, unless you get them riled up upon the Steelers. But even then, it seems like Steelers fans like to shit on Browns fans more than Browns fans really care. They just want to get drunk and win a fucking football game. Who can't get behind that?

#5: GREEN BAY PACKERS (3-3, 21st overall)
Aaron Rodgers has been floating some of the prettiest ass long ball tosses the past couple of weeks in highlight reel material. I haven't seen the whole games, so I can't speak on his overall competence this far into his first year as the starting young gunslinger for the Packers, but he certainly has had some nice Sportscenter moments. Brett Favre has gotten buckwild too once or twice, but he's still throwing interceptions as often as ever. So maybe T-dubble and M-dubble were right in running off ol' Wrangler britches. Really, who the fuck cares though? Their defense, which is supposed to be their Samson's hair, is all matted and fucked-up right now. But remember, this is the NFC North, where not much is gonna be just enough.

#6: BALTIMORE RAVENS (2-3, 24th overall)
Not too much time between being one of the last shockingly undefeated teams left in the NFL, at 2-0, to being yep, that piece of shit Ravens team we expected. Joe Flacco, after looking like he might be a sudden gem at first, is starting to look more like a shitty Division I-AA rookie QB. The defense is still good, but older. I mean, Ray Lewis can still piledrive and cripple motherfuckers (that second string RB dude for the Steelers got fucking CRUSHED by Lewis), but he's one funky pre-game ritual away from having a career-ending torn groin. I'd like to see Ray Lewis become a head coach though. Maybe they should just make him defensive coordinator right after he retires, and he could keep doing his pre-game funky strut for years to come. Ever since he no-snitched (or did he? I can't remember) on that Atlanta stabbing a few years back, he's really settled into Mr. Serious Football Dude Who Doesn't Show Up In Uncle Luke Porns pretty well. Nice adjustment, Mr. Lewis. You should pull that ankle-length white fur back out with the matching hat for when you get inducted in Canton.

#7: DETROIT LIONS (0-5, 30th overall)
Nice move after dumping Matt Millen for the Lions to somehow con the Cowboys out of half of next year's draft. What is it about overhyped Texas kids in the NFL being the basis of ridiculous trades? There was Ricky Williams, who I've always meant to spend an hour googling up the bullshit to see who exactly was drafted with all the picks traded for him in both New Orleans and Miami. Now Roy Williams goes to the Cowboys for a 1st, a 3rd, and a 6th. What a chump move on Jerry Jones end, and also bound to escalate T.O.'s craziness. But I am not hear to gloat over the impending doom of the Cowboys, but to talk upon the shitty Detroit Lions. Man, having your QB take a snap and just run out the back of the end zone like it's no thing, that might have been the funniest and stupidest thing I've ever seen in a pro football game. It is highlights like that that make me think they could possibly do the opposite of last year's Patriots and have a perfectly miserable 0-16 season. But just in that one single trade this week before the deadline, whoever the fuck their new general manager is has outdone everything Matt Millen ever did. He should just trade all their good players and have like 40 draft picks next year and go buckwild, fielding an all-rookie team.

#8: CINCINNATI BENGALS (0-6, 32nd overall)
I kinda hope that Carson Palmer is done for the year so that Bubby Brister Jr. (aka Ryan Fitzpatrick aka Born Loser) can finish out the season, and the Bengals can be completely shitty. On one hand, I feel bad because T.J. Houshmandeeznuts is on my fantasy team, and he only plays good on weeks where I have given up on him and bench him. He is in a contract year, so a shitty season like he's bound to have with a retard Irishman QBing the rest of this sinking ship of Marvin Lewis's head coaching career is not gonna help him get paid. But then again, maybe Vinny Cerratto will throw like a billion dollars and seventeen draft picks at the Bengals to get him on the Redskins roster, although with their high-profile acquisitions of Jason Taylor and Shaun Alexander, I don't think Houshmandezlaa is gay enough to become a Redskin.

Homemade Song of the Week: "Va. Lucha Libre" by S.E.P.

I don't really like calling it Solaris Earth Pipeline anymore because that's a gay-assed name. Then again, being a 35-year-old white guy writing rhymes and having another white guy record it in his extra bedroom of his suburban home on fancy computer bullshit, then mix it all up and throw it into the robot world is pretty stupid too. I should really just be wandering railroad tracks, freestyling with the frogs, and carving rhymes into railroad tyes. But I don't, because I am tethered by brain sculpting.
This is one of the better songs off the last S.E.P. CD called 45s on 33. The song is your average indie rap style "Hey, let me take something I'm a nerd about and just run through a whole song using ridiculous minutaie from that thing I'm a nerd about." The theme is wrestling, and I attempt to explain a bunch of dumb shit that's not true. The greatest thing about this song is how this internet dude xTheSpoilerx who is awesome, sent me a mix CD one time of a bunch of Antiseen songs with weird wrestling promos in between of old Mid Atlantic wrestling. We took one of the Blackjack Mulligan promos, put it inside those new-fangled Scratch programs, and Boogie Brown cut the shit up. This final song is actually about two or three minutes shorter than what we originally did, which had like the longest scratch outro ever known to white boys in a suburban home's extra bedroom, making music with their wealth.
Oh yeah, the song, called "Va. Lucha Libre", which I am yet to be ashamed of yet, which is not very common for me. I am full of self-loathing and usually hate anything I do after like thirty minutes.

S14: Best College Football Teams

I did the worst college football teams a couple weeks back, and I had originally intended to alternate weeks between worst and best, but you know how it is man, time can be a motherfucker. But I got around to doing the top fourteen teams this week, based on amount of losses, then average margin of victory, from all four NCAA levels of football, plus the NAIA (which I think is some sort of satellite structure in New Mexico). So here are your top 14 college football teams thus far this year, without a doubt, better than BCS when it comes to my science...

#1: St. Francis College Cougars (6-0, 41.500 average margin of victory) - An NAIA powerhouse, and one of the most consistently super destructive small college teams in America, the Cougars, fighting out of Ft. Wayne, Indiana, having gone unbeaten the past five regular seasons. They won 102 games in their football program's first decade, which is only in it's 11th year. Mostly, they take the leftovers of prominent Indianapolis area high school players once Division I schools get done offering scholarships, and run roughshod through their conference. They have never won an NAIA title though, losing the title game three of the past four years.

#2: Abilene Christian University Wildcats ( 6-0, 40.833 avg. victory) - Your biggest college football game of the weekend? It is in the NCAA's Division II, where 3rd ranked Abilene Christian travels to Canyon, Texas, to take on the 4th ranked West Texas A&M Buffaloes, both members of the Lone Star Conference's Southern Division. A&M's won two out of the past three meetings, including two years ago in the Division II playoffs. The Wildcats are a scoring juggernaut though, having scored seven TDs on defense alone the past five games. If I had a stupid satellite TV still, I'd probably try to find this game, only to be stuck with like 23 stupid I-AA games from the northeast instead.

#3: University of Sioux Falls Cougars (6-0, 39.500 avg. victory) - The Cougars are ranked second in the NAIA right now, and are a perennial power there. I'm not sure really why NAIA schools are in the NAIA instead of like NCAA Division III. I know the NAIA basketball tournament used to be some sort of grand old thing in Kansas City years ago, where old black men would sit around and talk about triple lindys or double clutch reverses or whatever. I guess I've always assumed it was some sort of God thing, since that's usually why private schools are private instead of public, to get all Godly on motherfuckers. But I'm not sure if that's how it works in the NAIA. It might just be a bunch of NCAA contrarians.

#4: Mount Union College Purple Raiders (5-0, 38.400 avg. victory) - I can tell you right now that most likely by the end of the year, Mount Union will be on top of this list. There has never been a college juggernaut like them. They went for five or six years in NCAA Division III without losing a game, most of them not even close. Well shit, just last week, the #4 ranked team in Div. III came to town, and was smoked 21-0 in the first quarter. Final score was 49 to 7. They just don't fuck around. I think they've actually even got a couple of players in the NFL on practice squads, which, for a Division III school, is amazing. It's odd too, because it's not like Div. III just takes delinquents that usually can't meet eligibility parameters for higher levels; it's mostly just white dudes with no scholarships whatsoever. But them white boys can play some football.

#5: Morningside College Mustangs (5-0, 38.400 avg. victory) - Morningside is 5th ranked in the NAIA, and in the same conference as Sioux Falls, so those two will face-off, hopefully both unbeaten, the second week of November. Sioux Falls, South Dakota's small ass college football team versus Sioux City, Iowa's small ass college football team... I bet there will be hella frat parties with drunk sluts that weekend.

#6: University of Minnesota at Duluth Bulldogs (7-0, 35.429 avg. victory) - 9th ranked team in NCAA's Division II, but more famous for their hockey team, which is one of the NCAA's best. Having growed up in Virginia, it's really odd to even imagine a college hockey team, much less them having actual players who came to that college specifically to play hockey. My buddy Loftin used to play on the Virginia Commonwealth University inter-mural team (or whatever the fuck it was) and they had PBR jerseys and basically just gave themselves an excuse to fight with kids from UVA on top of frozen water a couple of times a year.

#7: North Alabama Lions (7-0, 35.143 avg. victory) - NCAA Division II's #2 ranked team, and another perennial small college powerhouse. They always seem to be in the later rounds of Div. II playoffs. They are actually playing Delta State tonight on some satellite channels in ultra-special Thursday night football action. It is sure to be a thousand times more exciting than preseason NBA, and ten thousand times more exciting than a baseball game. Seriously, who the fuck can sit through a whole baseball game? The cliche is it's like watching paint dry, but I am a housepainter and can honestly say that I would find more joy in sitting there, noticing the subtle shade changes as wet liquid polymers started to harden upon drying, than actually trying to watch 9 innings of a baseball game. And extra innings? Holy fuck. I just hope it goes until the morning and I can catch an at-bat or two while I get ready for work.

#8: Grand Valley State University Lakers (6-0, 34.667 avg. victory) - The Lakers are the top-ranked team in Division II, and pretty much just fuck everybody up. They are, check the theme here, a constant top-tier team in Division II, and oddly enough, they are located in Michigan. I guess it being football and with a name like Grand Valley State, I would've assumed they were from Georgia or somewhere or another in the south. But no, they are Minnetonkans.

#9: Pennsylvania State University Nittany Lions (7-0, 34.286 avg. victory) - Affectionately known as Penn State, they are led by their 112-year-old coach Joe Paterno, who is half-blind, and also half-crippled from trying to teach kids 80 years younger than him how to do an effective onsides kick.There are murmurs that, even though he wants to keep on coaching, Penn State might not renew Joe Pa's contract at the end of the year, just because, fuck his old ass. It seems a shame. When a guy can stay relevant to gangsta thug 2008 football blue-chippers and still wear some old school ass Hank Schram eyeglasses like he's about to drive a truck to go shoot Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, you should just prop him up in the booth upstairs and let him coach until he's clinically dead.

#10: Monmouth, Illinois, Fighting Scots (6-0, 33.167 avg. victory) - I am feeling lazy, and all the stupid Monmouth searches I did came up with some punk ass college in New Jersey, probably because the internet is a form of entertainment, thus controlled secretly by Jews. They did crush a team 69 to 0 two weeks ago though.

#11: Millsaps College Majors (6-0, 33.167 avg. victory) - Another Division III ass-kicker, and this one confused me too with their name. I would've pegged Millsaps as some nice ass liberal arts private school in the eastern midwest, like Pennsylvania or Ohio. But no, it's in fucking Jackson, Mississippi. I have always worked under the impression Division III college football (as well as any sport really) means white boys galore. It's kinda funny to think of a bunch of white guy playing football at a small college in Jackson, Mississippi, and considering themselves good. I wonder if they could even beat like the local multi-cultural (that means everything plus white boys) high school all-stars?

#12: Wabash College Bears (5-0, 32.800 avg. victory) - Wabash is having a good season, but playoffs and all that mean nothing compared to their end-of-the-regular-season game against DePauw University, one of the oldest in college football. They've played 114 times before this year, with Wabash winning one more than DePauw in the history of this game. The winner of the annual showdown on November 15th becomes the proud owner of the Monon Bell - a locomotive bell. It's the oldest rivalry west of the Alleghanies, and before college football instituted overtime, in the event of ties, the previous winner retained the bell. In 1992, when Wabash settled for a game-tying field goal at the end of the game rather than push for a winning touchdown, so that they could hold onto the bell for another year. Shit like that is funny, and why small-time college football is so great. Also, the rural Indiana frat parties with mad drunken sluts attached to it.

#13: University of Texas Longhorns (6-0, 31.500 avg. victory) - You might know of these guys. They beat Oklahoma in a really exciting game last week, and are the new #1 in college football. You are #6. Texas is also notable for their QB being TV's The Fall Guy. Also, a guy named Major Applewhite was their QB, but only like ten years ago, not the one hundred and fifty years ago you would've assumed from his name.

#14: Otterbein Cardinals (5-0, 31.200 avg. victory) - Otterbein, having a great season, is an afterthought in their own Ohio Athletic Conference in Division III. Why, you ask? Because the aforementioned Mount Union dominators are in the same conference. If Otterbein can win their next three games though, they'll get to host Mount Union on November 8th in Westerville, Ohio, and try to unsettle the Kings of Small College Footballs.