A memo from the desk of Arnold T. Pants, Esq.:Illicit affairs, meth-cooking Vikings, and other examples of people being s%$#ty to one another.

· Courtesy of a Twitter (a Tweet? I've been doing Twitter since before Christmas and I still don't know what the fuck these things are called) from the illustrious Dawgter Feelgood (a/k/a DAve), World War III propaganda posters:



· EDSBS's Orson Swindle became Public Enemy No. 1 for a while in the greater Shreveport-Bossier City metropolitan area for this column on Shreveport and the Independence Bowl. (Seriously, peruse that comments thread for a spell. I'm pretty sure there are a couple thinly veiled death threats in there somewhere.) Today, though, he gets at least a small measure of vindication:

In a mother-daughter fight that included pushing, shoving, wrestling, biting and wielding a pan, a woman kicked her mother unconscious and then defecated on her while she was lying on the floor, Bossier Parish sheriff's deputies said.

"It was a donnybrook," Lt. Ed Baswell said of the Tuesday morning brawl at a residence on Chelsy Drive in Benton.

The women -- Destinie Rechelle Duvall, 37, of Willis, Texas, and Patricia Ann Hacker, 62, of Benton were treated at LSU Hospital and then booked into jail.

Sheriff's deputies went to the house after Hacker's 12-year-old granddaughter called 911.

Deputies said they weren't sure what started the fight, but they said the daughter knocked her mother out of a chair and then kicked her in the head, causing her to lose consciousness. While Hacker was unconscious, Duvall defecated on her back, Baswell said.

OK, on the one hand -- and clearly the bigger of the two hands in this situation -- that's unspeakably horrible. But on the other hand, it kind of makes sense as a strategic move. Go big or go home, right? I mean, you're committed enough to this fistfight that you know you're probably ending up in jail one way or the other, you might as well go in there with a story that lets the rest of the inmates know you're not to be trifled with. "What are you in for?" "Robbed a guy at knifepoint." "What are you in for?" "Broke into someone's car and stole a purse and an iPod." "How about you?" "Beat my mom unconscious and then took a shit on her." "Whooooaaaa." That's a woman who doesn't have to watch her back in the prison cafeteria line.

· Yours Truly has two contributions to Dr. Saturday this week: a new installment in the Better Know an Embattled Coach series, this one focusing on Colorado's Dan "GO PLAY INNERMURALS, BROTHER!" Hawkins, and a rumination on bowl games' cockroach-like ability to survive economic catastrophe, nuclear armageddon, what have you. But I don't think Holly will mind if I point out my contributions to her preview of the 2009 UAB Blazers. In particular, I would like to claim credit for directing the Dr. Saturday readership to our UAB Magazine feature on the strange, random history of UAB's mascot.

Personally, I think our dragon mascot is teh r0xx0rz -- the raging-ass fire-breathing helmet/midfield logo more so than the cuter, kid-friendlier fuzzy sideline version -- but even if you don't share that opinion, you have to admit it's a step up from Blaze the Viking:



Supposedly this iteration of the mascot got the ax because he scared little kids. I don't personally find him that frightening at first glance; I think he looks more like Burger King's ne'er-do-well younger brother who's been in and out of jail for a string of petty assaults and public-intoxication charges, finally got a steady job on a construction site but got hurt and has been cocooning in his trailer ever since, collecting workers' comp and brewing up the occasional batch of crystal meth with his good buddy Purdue Pete. In that sense, though, I guess there's a sense of incipient murderousness about him, like if you were taking a walk in the woods and stumbled across his meth lab he'd really fuck you up. Nevertheless, I think we're doing fine with the dragon right now, thanks.

· Finally, we have South Carolina governor Mark Sanford. This is the guy, you'll recall, whose most recent political claim to fame was wanting to refuse hundreds of millions of dollars in stimulus money that had been tagged for his state. Now he admits an extramarital affair with a chick from Argentina, and it's been one full day since this revelation and nobody's made a "stimulus package" joke yet? Come on, people. You disappoint me.

Better know a Georgia head basketball coaching candidate.

The dominoes set up by the firings of Dennis Felton at Georgia and Mike Gottfried at Alabama are a-fallin', and today comes news from Mark Schlabach that Missouri coach Mike Anderson, fresh off a 31-7 season, a Big 12 tournament title, and a trip to the Elite Eight, now has an offer on his desk from UGA. Supposedly we're offering to dump $2 million a year in his lap, a major jump up from the $1.3 million Missouri is offering in the five-year contract extension the Tigers plan to offer.

Is that a lot of money? You bet, particularly for Georgia, given that the total $14-million deal (over seven years) would be, according to Paul Westerdawg, equivalent to all the money we've paid our basketball coaches total over the last three decades or so. But is it worth it? As someone who's had numerous opportunities to view Anderson's teams in action over the past few years, I say yes, with an option to bump that up to a hell yes sometime in the future.

Anderson got to UAB about the same time I did in 2002, and over four seasons with the Blazers, he took us to the postseason every time -- the NIT in his first season, where we advanced to the quarterfinals, and the Big Dance his three other seasons, including a run to the Sweet 16 in 2003-04 (in which we knocked off Washington and #1-seeded Kentucky to get there). He implemented a fast-paced style that became known well beyond the Birmingham city limits as "40 minutes of hell," assembling an 89-41 record before heading to Missouri after the end of the 2005-06 season.

And most of this was accomplished before the Big East raided Conference USA for most of its top basketball programs, meaning Anderson was winning despite having to compete against Rick Pitino, Tom Crean, Bob Huggins, and, of course, John Calipari. After starting off his UAB career 0-4 against those guys, he went 7-6 the rest of the way. The Blazers didn't dominate C-USA, but they were consistently competitive.

And now he's emphatically turned around a Mizzou program that Quin Snyder had turned into a disaster area both on and off the court. So yes, Bulldog Nation, he is worth it. The challenge now is to see whether we can outhustle Memphis for him; Memphis may play in a lesser conference, but the basketball program is their athletic department's main energy source and they'll certainly be prepared to bring in their usual truckloads of corporate cash from FedEx and whoever else to try and lure him in. But the fact that Damon Evans has already put such a big offer on the table is an encouraging sign that we're taking our men's basketball program seriously for the first time in a long, long while.

I'll be following this with interest, and I hope like hell we get him -- and if you're even a casual fan of Georgia basketball, you should, too.

Swear that there'll be murder, tell him that I'm ill . . .

I caught a little bit of heat for my divided loyalties in Saturday's UAB-Georgia game, and not just from my UAB overlords but also from a couple zealous, perhaps overcaffeinated, fellow Bulldog fans. Perhaps it was deserved, and I was duly punished, though not in the way I expected. If you go by The Inferno, my punishment as an opportunist who refused to take sides should have been condemnation to the vestibule of hell, unable to ever stay in one place but rather doomed to run in a circle for eternity, just as my loyalties refused to stay in one place. Somehow, though, I got the punishment usually afforded to virtuous pagans and unbaptized children instead -- an eternity in the first circle of Hell, which is a beautiful and brightly lit castle where everyone sits around being bored.

Yup, that about sums it up. Georgia played about the most conservatively called game I've ever witnessed in person, and UAB obediently responded by doing hardly anything to put the outcome in doubt, not even appearing particularly interested at the very end when they had a chance to ruin the shutout against Georgia's bench players. The score was only 10-0 at the half, and people were indeed muttering to themselves, "Dang, Georgia seems to have dominated them a lot worse than that," but not in a tone that implied panic -- rather, a tone that implied frustration at wondering when Richt was gonna take the ankle bracelet off Stafford and let him launch one downfield already.


I may have broken more of a sweat trying to find a place to park in downtown Athens than Stafford did on the field.

The play-calling was biased toward the run by a ratio of exactly 2:1, and Stafford only tossed two passes that could be classified as field-stretching bombs; one was dutifully dropped (there's the team that suddenly disappeared during the South Carolina game!), while the other had just a wee bit too much stank on it and sailed about two or three yards ahead of the intended receiver. I don't know where I read it, probably somewhere in the AJC, but somebody said to expect more of that since our receivers haven't really experienced the kind of power that Stafford puts on his throws. Given the dropgasms our receiving corps has been having for almost a year and a half now, I'm not sure I completely buy that explanation, but as long as they get it figured out by Tennessee I suppose I'll live. For a while I was a little disappointed that the coaches didn't let Stafford off the leash more than they did, but I suppose it wasn't reasonable to think they would let him go bombing all over the field in his very first start; as I've said before, I trust Comrade Richt implicitly, and if he says the best way to bring Stafford along is dip-your-toe-in-the-water slowly, then that's what we should do.

Evidently, our notoriously jumpy fan base is fine with this as well, and why shouldn't they be if a) we keep winning and b) we keep shutting people out, for as Erk Russell once reminded us, if you want to be confident about winning, not letting other teams score at all is a pretty dependable way of doing that. Good God, our defense is -- I mean, I'm looking for a word here, and "fast" or "strong" or even "brutal" doesn't even quite cover it. I think the word I'm looking for is punitive -- we don't just pound teams and push them around, we make them damn sorry they entered the stadium in the first place and make them think long and hard about what they've done.


ESPN is always on the lookout for "game-changing" plays. I think this one falls into the category of "pants-soiling."

So Georgia has now scored 100 points on the season while only giving up 12. We have shut out two teams in a row. Of our 11 touchdowns, one came on a punt return and another came on a blocked-punt return; the remaining nine have averaged just under 48 yards apiece, and all but three started on somebody else's side of the 50 yard line. Despite averaging a nothing-special 317 yards of total offense per game, we're winning by an average of four touchdowns every week. Does this remind anybody of anything?

It should if you've watched a Virginia Tech game at any point in the last, oh, eight or nine years: The Dawgs have brought BeamerBall to Athens. Basically you've got an apocalyptic defense that thrives on causing turnovers and handing a short field to a conservative, run-first offense that takes care of the ball and doesn't do anything crazier than it has to; throw in special teams that are almost as much of a threat to score as the offense is, stir well, and there you go. Some Dawg fans may like it and some may not, but the fact is it's won the Hokies 72 games over the last seven-plus seasons, so it seems at least somewhat effective. I mean, if you've got a team that inspires "Good God, what a specimen" comments even about your freakin' punter, then you have reason to be confident.


Gordon Ely-Kelso: Loved him in "Rounders" and "Fight Club."

In saying this, I realize two things: One, making oh-my-God comments about one's team is perhaps a little premature when that team's opponents consist of a DI-AA team, a 1-2 C-USA team, and a team that nearly found a way to lose to Wofford. And two, this conservative offense isn't going to stay conservative forever, not if Stafford continues to come along briskly (note that he went from 3 picks against South Carolina to 0 against the Blazers). Again, it's probably best to reserve judgment until we get a little deeper into conference play, but if the defense stays at its current level of excellence while the offense continues to improve . . . look out.

As for the Blazers, well, I said before the game that the defense would be pretty good, and it was; the fact that the offense (particularly the running game) struggled didn't come as that much of a surprise, either. But what did come as a surprise was the fact that Sam Hunt, who looked so cold-blooded against Oklahoma a couple weeks ago, got rattled so early against the 'Dawgs. He finished with 8 rushes for -10 yards, but if you measured how far he ran in actual distance, it probably would've equaled the length of a football field or more, that's how much time he spent running for his life in the backfield. I don't know that I'd call it a "controversy" here in Birmingham, but there definitely is a uuarterback "conundrum," and it didn't get figured out in Athens. Or maybe it did. Still, there's a bright spot, and that is that UAB coach Watson Brown can now lay claim to a Spurrier-style offense.

Kids in America:

· Forgot to mention this earlier, but they honored Columbus's world-champion Little League team at the UAB game, and the team was sitting right across the aisle from my sister, my dad, and me. I got to meet a couple of them, and they all carried themselves like people who were a lot older than 12 or 13 -- even had the firm handshakes of veteran politicians. I'm hoping that Dave Perno snags at least one or two of them for the baseball team at UGA.

· Take the checks and face the facts: The ACC in its current iteration is, as Homer Simpson so eloquently stated, the suckiest bunch of sucks that ever sucked. Miami's blowout loss to Louisville on Saturday pretty much ices it, because the Big East -- that conference that everyone pretty much left for dead after the ACC bogarted what were supposedly their three best teams -- has now taken four out of six head-to-head in matchups between the conferences, and the ACC's two wins are solely due to the fact that the athletic director at Wake Forest was astute enough to put the Big East's two worst teams on his team's schedule. Basically the ACC is down to one team, Virginia Tech, that can still lay any kind of claim to elite status; below them you've got two former elites (FSU and Miami) that'd be lucky to break even in just about any other conference, three more (BC, Clemson, and Georgia Tech) that might be just good enough to make the race for the Gator Bowl a real barn-burner, and . . . below that, nothing. The sexiest team in that six-team bottom-of-the-conference sissyfight appears to be Wake Forest, for cryin' out loud, unless someone knows a voodoo spell that can bring Maryland's offense back. At any rate, I think we can officially put the ACC's ambitions of becoming an SEC-esque "superconference" on indefinite probation, not to mention kibosh any talk of the Big East losing its automatic BCS bid.

· On that note, here's the conversation my dad and I had in the stands at Sanford Stadium when a Peach Bowl (sorry, I'm going to need a fat check before I start voluntarily calling it the "Chick-fil-A Bowl") promo ad came up on the Jumbotron:

Me: So if Virginia [his alma mater] ends up going to the Peach Bowl, will you buy tickets?

Pops: [thinks it over] Yeah, I suppose so.

[pause]

Me: Will you also take my picture on a unicorn? 'Cause I think that's about as likely to happen.

Ian, I feel for you, dawg. Drinks are on me if you ever find yourself back in Athens.

· Bittersweet win for Michigan: On the one hand, they finally won a road opener, and in convincing fashion; they also did college football fans everywhere a priceless service by shutting up the ESPN punditocracy about ND's OMG aw3s0m3n3ss for a few weeks, at least. On the other hand, that fawning will now most likely be showered upon #1-with-a-bullet Ohio State. Oh well.


It's hard out there for a Wolverine.

· Nice to have the old Erik Ainge back, though I doubt anyone's going to be holding the Vols to 2 total yards rushing once Arian Foster is back at full strength. Still, the Georgia-Tennessee matchup is looking more and more winnable by the week.

· That cheer you heard coming from Tuscaloosa last night was not a cheer of victory for the Crimson Tide, since not even the most die-hard Tide fans seriously gave a shit about UL-Monroe, but rather a good old schadenfreude hip-hip-hooray for Dennis Franchione being brought yet another step closer to John Mackovic status as a taken-out-of-the-closet-and-dusted-off-once-every-couple-weeks minor analyst on "GameDay." Sure, they held on against Army, but is "held on against Army" something that should be on the résumé of anybody in a BCS conference other than maybe Duke?

· On the play-for-pay tip, yeah, I'm happy for the Falcons, but I'd hold off on any dynasty talk until they a) finish with a winning season and then b) do it again, i.e. back-to-back seasons, for the first time in team history. Though I guess I'm not one to talk.


I know I'm Catholic, but I'm still calling out a fatwa on this fucker.

Dancing with myself.

With Georgia's second matchup against UAB in four seasons right around the corner, it would appear that the Dawgs and the Blazers are developing quite a little rivalry here. We could call it "The Battle of I-20," except it'd actually be The Battle of I-20, Then Get Off At Exit 72 (Highway 138), Which Will Eventually Merge Into U.S. 78, Which BOOM! Takes You Right Into Athens, Or You Could Always Get On I-285 North And . . . well, you can kind of see how cumbersome that would be. At any rate, with UAB having taken Georgia to the very edge in their last meeting (a 16-13 Bulldog win), this seems like a game the Bulldogs can ill afford to take lightly, and a game that's a perfect candidate for a team-vs.-team roundtable like the one I did with Techie blogger Nathan last November.

Only problem is, there are no dedicated UAB sportsbloggers that I know of, and I doubt any of the corndogs at the Birmingham News would waste their precious time with little ol' me, so . . . what to do? I know: How about a roundtable with . . . myself?

Yup, I've been a Birmingham resident for almost four years now, and UAB is the one who sees fit -- for the time being, at least -- to give me a paycheck. (Not for any of the nonsense on this blog, though. This crap's on the house!) I dare say I've been to more UAB games than the rest of the Blogpoll members combined, so like Dick Cheney, I've taken a good long look at the list of candidates and declared that the best-qualified one is me -- and thus begins Hey Jenny Slater's first-ever Roundtable With Myself. I won't be doing too much of this in the future, though, I hear it can make you go blind.


LSU cartoonist Tom Sylvest Jr.'s reaction to the 2000 UAB-LSU shocker.

The big LSU road upset in 2000, the scarily close games against Georgia in '03, Tennessee in '05, and Oklahoma a few weeks ago -- how is it that UAB manages to give so many big guys a run for their money? Is it just a matter of the big-name teams not taking them seriously, or is UAB really better than we think?

Um . . . "yes"? I guess it's probably easy for teams like Oklahoma or Georgia to not give UAB the attention they deserve, but it's not all lack of focus on their part -- UAB really is a lot better than people realize. Since becoming a full-fledged Conference USA member in 1999, UAB has amassed a record of 29-23 in C-USA -- better than Memphis, South Florida, or Houston, all of whom went to bowls last year -- and 41-41 overall. May not seem like much on paper, but it becomes a lot more impressive when you consider that UAB has only had a football team since 1991 and has only been a member of Division I-A for a little over 10 years. Perhaps that's part of the reason why some people I talk to, even in the Southeast, don't even realize UAB has a football team at all. And many of the ones that do think we're some kind of scrub squad on the level of New Mexico State or UL-Lafayette. No offense to the Sun Belt, but UAB is a considerably stronger program than that. We may not be Ohio State or Texas, but our track record is too strong to be dismissed as, "Ehh, directional school."

Still, you do end up at kind of a disadvantage when your medical center is more famous than your football team. But even in spite of that, UAB has done a remarkably good job of pulling in good talent. Darrell Hackney, for instance, was getting attention from some big-name schools before he got hurt during his senior year of high school; UAB stuck with him, and he ended up being one of the most exciting quarterbacks the conference had ever seen. (You can't tell me that, say, Georgia Tech or South Carolina wouldn't have liked to avail themselves of his services during 2003-05.) Roddy White shattered C-USA receiving records and got drafted in the first round by the Falcons. Now we've got Sam Hunt, a QB who transferred from MTSU and appears to have our passing game in much better shape than we would've thought a year ago. A lot of these guys can go toe-to-toe with the BCS big boys in terms of ability, and everything you've heard about their motivation is true -- when I talked to Roddy White at the Falcons' training camp last summer, he said that he did feel like he had something to prove to the teammates who'd come from the Oklahomas and Miamis of the world.

Now, while UAB may have starting talent that can compete with the big football factories, they aren't able to recruit nearly the kind of depth that those schools are, which I think is the main reason why you see them nearly beating so many big schools but not quite getting over the hump. Still, every once in a while they knock off a player, and their BCS-conference opponents have to take great care to ensure that it isn't them.

If their talent is so impressive, how come they've only gone to one bowl and went 5-6 last year?

The bowl question is really a matter of UAB not managing to have a winning record at the right time. They had winning records in both 2000 (the year they knocked off LSU) and 2001, but Conference USA didn't have enough tie-ins and they stayed home. Even in 2004, when they went 7-4 and knocked off two bowl-bound C-USA teams on the way to their Hawaii Bowl bid, there was some worry that UAB still might not get an invite because they'd never been to a bowl before and people weren't sure whether the fan base would travel. That's probably going to be an Achilles heel for the Blazers for a while, but fortunately C-USA has added enough bowl tie-ins (including a deal with a new bowl right here in Birmingham) that there should be bids available if the Blazers can win at least six games.


Future first-rounder Roddy White hauls in a 51-yard TD pass against Hawaii in the '04 Hawaii Bowl.

As for last year's 5-6 record . . . well, that's a thornier issue, and I think most people would agree that they should've done better. I think a lot of it came down to the expectations game; in '04, UAB wasn't really on anyone's radar, but with that first bowl under their belts and Darrell Hackney coming back for his senior season, expectations were a lot higher for 2005. And honestly, everything was going pretty well in the beginning -- they went toe-to-toe with Tennessee in Knoxville, they dominated their in-state rival Troy, they beat Jacksonville State and pounded Rice -- and were favored to beat SMU pretty handily at home but lost the game on what was literally a last-second TD pass. After that, things kind of fell apart. Our veteran players, particularly on the O-line, started committing silly penalties and making silly mistakes veterans shouldn't make, and Watson Brown fully copped to over-coaching in some areas. SMU was the start of a very dispiriting three-game skid, and while we managed to upset Memphis and UTEP down the stretch, all bowl hopes were snuffed with an embarrassing loss to a lousy ECU team in the very last game.

With Hackney gone, few people figured UAB would do anything in '06, and I think we even got picked to finish fifth out of six in C-USA's Eastern Division in one poll. But with expectations minimal, you're seeing the team surprise people again, and what once looked like a major rebuilding year now holds a lot of promise. I'd say six wins is a completely reasonable goal, though the Blazers end the season with a three-game rope-a-dope of UTEP, Southern Miss, and UCF, all '05 bowl teams, the last two on the road. They may need to have six or even seven wins by that point if they want to be confident about a bowl.

So do you think UAB can play the Dawgs as close this year as they did in '03? What does Georgia need to be on the lookout for?


UAB at Georgia, 2003. Sorry the picture is small -- there weren't many on the Web, which from Georgia's perspective, at least, is probably not an accident.

Repeating 2003's performance is going to be tough because Mark Richt has already been through this once and isn't going to let his team come out flatfooted again. There may be a bit of a hangover from a very gutty road win over South Carolina last Saturday, but Georgia also gets back three very important starters -- O-linemen Dan Inman and Ian Smith and cornerback/punt returner Thomas Flowers -- who had been suspended for the first two games and will be itching to prove themselves. Georgia's defense will have to contend with a very mobile QB in Sam Hunt and a big, strong O-line that only gave up one sack to Oklahoma, but the Dawgs' front seven has straight-up murdered people so far this season, and I don't think even the Sooners brought as much pressure on Hunt as Georgia is likely to.

One of the main things I'd be worried about if I were Georgia, though, is UAB's pass defense. They've improved considerably over the past couple years, and while they've given up 504 yards in their first two games, opposing QBs are only so-so against them completion-wise (34-of-62) and have thrown three interceptions. An impressive number of yards, a mediocre completion percentage, a bunch of INTs . . . does that remind you of, oh, Matt Stafford in the South Carolina game? Stafford is an awesome talent, but he's a freshman, and against the Gamecocks we saw that he's prone to taking big gambles and throwing picks as a result. UAB will take advantage of those mistakes if he makes them, and recall that it was mainly four turnovers by Oklahoma, including two picks by Paul Thompson, that kept that game close. Georgia's offense needs to take care to avoid that happening again.

So if Georgia signed your diploma but UAB signs your paychecks, who are you going to be rooting for?

Uh . . . I know this sounds like a cop-out, but both of them. Obviously I'd like Stafford to have a big game, but I'd like Sam Hunt to perform well too, given that he's got such big shoes to fill. Georgia has more at stake in this game, obviously, but anything that earns UAB more respect is good too, and I'd like to see them put in a good performance. Since it seems like Georgia hardly ever beats the spread in these early-season out-of-conference games anyway, is it OK if I root for the Bulldogs to win, but for the Blazers to cover? Either way, I'll be wearing my red #4 Georgia jersey and a UAB hat, and I'm going to try to have both a UGA and a UAB flag flying from my car, too. If you see me on the road Saturday, be sure to honk.

(Kyle King has more on UAB here.)

The forecast calls for PAIN whoopsy.

Dans des nouvelles sportives, Kentucky ont imposé des impôts à cet âne la nuit passée . . .

Well, that's what I get for pooh-poohing the power of Ashley Judd. UAB fought valiantly against Kentucky for the entire game, and even led for the majority of the first half, but were undone by the usual mediocre free-throw shooting and what seemed like a never-ending stream of spectacularly ill-advised three-point shots down the stretch to lose to Kentucky, 69-64.

Worse, my bracket -- which had looked so squeaky-clean after Thursday's games -- took a major hit as Kansas took their opportunity to politely bow out so that a plucky but unheralded underdog could have a shot at the big one. Which was real generous of them, except I had y'all in my Final fricking Four, dumbasses. It's almost like y'all don't want me to win the $75 or something! ('Cause it really is all about me this time of year, OK?)


What's the matter with Kansas? Their shots from the arc were almost as bad as UAB's, for starters.

Nevertheless, there is still hope . . . but all of it hinges on Boston College and Illinois. (Note to self: Your obsession with #4 seeds is like Jessica Simpson -- cute, but stupid.)

Even if this all comes crashing down around me, though, I still won't feel as stupid as the Dallas Cowboys. Signing Terrell Owens? On purpose? That doesn't even get credit for hubris -- that's something straight out of the old SNL "Bad Idea Jeans" sketch. Of course, for those in Big D who were really gonna miss Me-Shawn, it'll be like he never left.


Well, he's an ex free-base addict, and he's trying to turn around, and he needs a place to stay for a couple of months.

The forecast calls for . . . PAIN!

We've done it once . . . we can do it again.

By the way, if you want to join my Yahoo! tournament pick-'em group, Big Ass Bracket, consider yourself officially invited. Go here and enter group number 65224; the password is "squeaky."

Your picks are your business, but be advised that if you pick Kentucky over UAB in the first round, you will be publicly humiliated on this site when the Wildcats lose. Even if you're Ashley Judd. I'm not kidding around here, people.

Good day.


Sorry, lady -- you're cute, but not enough to earn a full-blown betrayal.

We goin' to Sizzler!

UAB Blazes To Upset Of No. 3 Memphis, 80-74

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) -- The points just stopped coming for No. 3 Memphis -- and so did the wins.

Marvett McDonald had 17 points and UAB held the Tigers scoreless for more than eight minutes down the stretch in an 80-74 upset on Thursday night, sending another top-five team tumbling.

McDonald's jumper gave the Blazers (21-5, 12-2 Conference USA) a five-point lead with 2:47 to go, and UAB made six consecutive free throws in the final 33 seconds to snap the Tigers' 15-game winning streak.

I know there are times when y'all probably expect this to be an all-UGA-all-the-time blog, but I have to give props to the hometown team, and UAB definitely deserved the props last night. It wasn't quite the "Rumble in the Jungle," or even the climactic game at the end of "Hoosiers," but it was a big deal, all right -- I got to watch UAB whack the third-ranked team in the nation and turn what was a likely NCAA tournament bid into pretty much a dead-solid lock. ESPN's "Bracketology," for some reason, had the then-20-5 Blazers listed as one of the "last four out" before this game; I'd expect, at the very least, to see them slotted in as an 11th or 10th seed now, barring a complete bedshitting in the Conference USA tournament.

I hope that the pundits and tournament selectors take notice not just of the fact that UAB won but of the way they won -- rather than the Dean Acheson-like strategy of containment that so many teams (including UAB) have tried, and failed, to employ against Memphis earlier in the season, the Blazers became full-on MacArthurs against UM, particularly in the second half -- blocking shots, going toe-to-toe with the Tigers and forcing ugly turnovers, and basically doing everything they could to get into Memphis's head. In particular, Wen Mukubu, both on offense and defense, was the Anthony Hopkins to Memphis's Jodie Foster, schooling them in the art of true sickness while scaring the crap out of them at the same time.


Don't stand too close to the glass, Rodney Carney.

But props are also due to Marvett McDonald, who pulled down 17 points and, in the critical last couple minutes of the game, was 4-for-4 at the FT line (on what was not a particularly good free-throwing night for the team overall) to put the game away. McDonald, despite being the team's leading scorer, catches what occasionally might be more than his share of shit around these parts for being a very streaky shooter. He's kind of like the Ben Affleck of the team, a talented, likable guy who nevertheless can drive you crazy sometimes with his choices -- one minute he's on a tear, charming audiences as Holden McNeil or the charmingly rough-around-the-edges Chucky Sullivan (which I guess would make Squeaky Johnson his brilliant but haunted pal Will Hunting -- sorry, have I taken this too far already?), the next he's turning out a string of duds like "Pearl Harbor" and "Gigli" that makes you wonder if it will ever end. Be that as it may, though, he was on last night. We've got one more regular-season game to go, a home matchup with Marshall that could be described as "highly winnable," and if we take that then we should have a nice big head of steam heading into the conference tournament and, I would think, the NCAAs.

Anyway, it's nice to be able to enjoy this kind of excitement in basketball, because football certainly isn't giving me anything to be happy about. There isn't much going on at all in college (not until Bloggerpalooza '06 blows up the spot in about a month's time), while in the NFL, there's a labor dispute whose most likely result is the screwing-over-with-extreme-prejudice of a bunch of teams currently in salary-cap trouble, which of course includes the Redskins. I'm anxiously steeling myself for the Washington Post story in a few weeks' time about how the 'Skins have cut Lavar Arrington, dumped Patrick Ramsey's body in a shallow grave just outside Rockville, and enticed Elvis Grbac out of retirement just so they can sign him as the new backup QB. At minimum wage.

Even with that hanging over my head, though, I can't help but laugh about this. I'm quite confident there are thousands, if not millions, of "bobblehead" jokes to be made here -- I'm just going to leave it to y'all to make them.

Tuesday Mystery Meat.

Damn, I should've done this yesterday a.m. -- "Monday Morning Mystery Meat" just sounds funnier. But anyway, this is just a grab bag of too-short-to-waste-an-entire-post-on flotsam, including the Simpsons, right-wing turdwits, and . . . boobies!:

· For the two or three of you who still care, the college-football-teams-as-"Simpsons"-characters post has been updated again -- and given that I finally achieved my goal of cramming UAB in there, probably for the last time.

· This may seem like a suspect topic to discuss right after dredging up the "Simpsons" post again, but has any group of political pundits burned through its 15 minutes quicker and in more embarrassing fashion than the Bush groupies at Power Line? If you're not familiar with Power Line, they're the guys who debunked the "Mapes memo" that purported to prove Bush's non-service in the Alabama National Guard during Vietnam, thereby getting Dan Rather ushered out the door at CBS a few months earlier than planned. For this top-notch job of font dissection, they won Time's "Blog of the Year" award, and have pretty much coasted on it ever since -- between that award and their association with the world-class joke that is "Pajamas Media," they appear to fancy themselves hard-hitting journalists (though anybody who could write this with a straight face is no more engaged in serious journalism than, well, I am). It appears that the Power Tools finally went into the red on the Self-Parody-O-Meter this week in their lame attempt to grill Sen. Dick Durbin over the legality of Bush's secret wiretapping program. Durbin says he's never heard of Power Line or Pajamas Media, and the best the Power Line guy can clap back with is a sputtering "Dan Rather knows something about it!" Dude. You guys have become the conserva-blog equivalent of Scott Stapp, dredging up the one old hit nobody really cares about anymore to try and make yourselves look relevant (or pull some underage tail at a Denny's). Here you are squaring off with Dick Durbin, a guy who cried in front of the entire Senate last year, and he just pwn3d your ass.

· A Danish newspaper publishes an editorial cartoon depicting the prophet Muhammad. Muslims all over the globe go apeshit. An Iranian newspaper retaliates by soliciting cartoons making fun of the Holocaust. Congratulations, Islam, you've fallen hook, line, and sinker for a "You suck"/"No, you suck" sissyfight so lame I can remember witnessing ones exactly like it . . . back in the third grade. "He's gonna make a cartoon about me? Ooooh, I'm gonna make a cartoon about him!" Except it's especially stupid because they're making cartoons about Jews -- they're not even making cartoons about Denmark, who started this whole thing to begin with. Although I have to admit, aside from butter cookies, Hamlet or Helena Christensen, I can't think of anything Danish-specific to make fun of right off the top of my head.


Yes, it's ridiculous, but that's still one more hit than Deion was ever willing to make.

· Look, I'm about as easily distracted by female T&A as any man currently living, but I still have to ask, is there anybody in America who honestly finds this sexy? "We're gonna have models in lingerie!" OK, I'm listenin'! "And they're gonna be wearing pads!" Uh . . . kinda weird, but OK . . . "And helmets!" Um . . . what? "And that black stuff that football players put under their eyes!" OK, I think we're officially done here. Who would actually pay thirty bucks for this? That's more than actual porn. Not to mention you can pay one-fifth that for this at your local Joe Muggs. Or to put it another way, given the choice between watching two hours of the Lingerie Bowl or fifteen minutes of "LCI Matin," I'm willing to read subtitles.


If Melissa Theuriau is taking the field, it could be the Burlap Sack Bowl and I'd still watch.

· On a random perusal through my referral log this morning, I found that the first 20 search-engine queries that brought people to this site included: "sisters naked"; "hot lesbians"; "hot whore"; "jenny and barbara Bush sexy"; "bikini chain gang naked"; "naked news videos"; "whore woman"; "hot lesbians"; "naked sisters"; "naked in shower"; "look my naked ass"; "koran fuck"; and "children pageant winner pictures." Is it bad that the last one was the one that creeped me out the most?

· And finally, for the interactive portion of Mystery Meat, which suit do we prefer: LSU signee Charles Deas, in an item from the Silky Johnston Signature Collection, or Tennessee men's basketball coach Bruce Pearl, wearing a one-of-a-kind creation called "Cône du Trafic" from Emporio Phillippe Fulmér?


Next stop: Player Haters' Ball! (Photos ganked from Paul Westerdawg).