The Friday Random Ten+5 looks back fondly on some good guys.

Over the past couple days, a number of the SBN-affiliated blogs -- EDSBS and Burnt Orange Nation among them -- have been posting about their favorite players from their respective teams. Not the players with the best stats, mind you, or even the players who won the most, just the guys they most enjoyed watching, the guys who put smiles on their faces and made them think, "OK, that dude makes me proud to be a [insert team name here] fan." Particularly at a time when the nauseatingly contrived spectacle of last night's Lebronathon makes us wonder if it's worth it to even call ourselves sports fans at all, it's nice to be able to pick out guys we do like and give them the credit they deserve just for brightening our days.

So I decided to make this week's +5 my own list -- not definitive, by any means, since I only came to UGA in 1995 and hadn't really had anyone indoctrinate me into the ways of the red and black before that. But these are the guys I got most excited about watching, the guys who would put the proudest grins on my face when somebody would ask me, "So, hey, what do you think about . . . ?" Herewith, simple, short and sweet, my Five Favorite Georgia Players:



5. Tony Taylor
Tony never seemed to get quite the same national media attention that, say, Rennie Curran or Odell Thurman got. But he always seemed to have a knack for being in on the play. If you needed a sack, he'd get one. If you needed an interception, he could come up with that too. And if you needed one of the weirdest, wildest scoop-'n'-scores in Georgia football history to flip the momentum of a game -- i.e. the play against Georgia Tech in 2006 seen above -- he'd pull that off, too. Never talked a lot of shit to his opponents, even though he'd usually earned the right to; just worked his ass off every single play, and more often than not had a big grin on his face afterward.



4. Hines Ward
The 2006 Super Bowl MVP did it all, too, just on the opposite side of the ball: He caught passes, he carried out of the backfield, he returned kicks, and just for good measure, he passed quite a bit too, taking over at QB midway through his sophomore season in '95 after both Mike Bobo and Brian Smith got hurt. (As a result, he holds Georgia's record for passing yards in a bowl game, with a 31-of-59, 413-yard performance in the '95 Peach Bowl.) Oh, and he'd block a bitch into the earth's mantle, too, if he had to, a talent he has continued to display with great relish in his justifiably lauded career as a Pittsburgh Steeler. In both Athens and Pittsburgh, he's always seemed to have a big smile on his face as he climbs out of a pile of tacklers, and the smile just gets bigger the harder he's been hit. If this was an "I Hope He Plays Until He's 60" list, he'd probably be at the top.



3. D.J. Shockley
Shock was the perfect story: Hypertalented recruit commits to the Dawgs, ends up having to wait his turn for four years behind the guy who would eventually set a new record for wins by a I-A starting QB, then has an absolute dream season -- 24-5 TD-INT ratio, another four TDs on the ground -- that culminates in an SEC title. He had every opportunity to turn into either a cranky, resentful also-ran or a raging egotistical douchebag, yet somehow it never happened; he was such a good kid that, if someone gave me a time machine but said I could only do three things with it, I'd stop the assassinations of Lincoln and Kennedy, then go back to October 2005 and convince Mark Richt to bench him for the second quarter of the Arkansas game. Seriously, Shock deserved an undefeated season that year (or at the very least deserved to go out with something other than an utter defensive collapse and loss to West Virginia in the Sugar Bowl). I still hold out a glimmer of hope he's gonna break out and do something incredible in the NFL one of these days.



2. Knowshon Moreno
Man, what isn't there to like about this kid. He had awesome moves in the backfield; he bounced right back up after tackles, Hines Ward-style; he pulled off highlight-reel plays like it was nothing; he danced a mean Soulja Boy; he played with Legos. But even with all that, I think my favorite thing about him was how much fun he was obviously having every minute he was out there. Ideally, all our players would be enjoying themselves that much. Do I wish he'd stayed around two more years? Oh, clearly, but I can't quite begrudge him leaving; I'll just root my ass off for him with the Broncos and hope that our paths cross one of these days when I'm wealthy and revered beyond all reason.



1. Champ Bailey
If we'd had one or two like him in the secondary the past few years, even Willie Martinez couldn't have found a way to make us give up points. Schooled opposing wide receivers while playing defense, then turned right around and schooled his fellow cornerbacks while playing wide receiver (and schooled any of those guys who dared try to cover him on kick returns). Wore my lucky number. Dated one of the hottest gymnasts on campus. And then, just to ensure that we would be forever bonded in an irrevocable star athlete/groveling fan relationship, he went and got drafted in the first round by the Redskins. Champ's with the Broncos now, but he's still one of the bigger badasses in the NFL, I still have his jersey . . . and yeah, I named one of my dogs after him. There have been a lot of damn good Dawgs in Athens since I started school there, but he's the damn goodest.

Honorable mention: Jeff Owens (Georgia's own "huggy killbear"), David Pollack, Jon Stinchcomb, Rennie Curran, and Boss Bailey.

And now the (other) Ten:

1. Lifelike, "Discopolis" (Chris Lake remix)
2. Pet Shop Boys, "Fugitive" (7" mix)
3. Hard-Fi, "Hard to Beat" (Axwell mix)
4. Red Hot Chili Peppers, "Sir Psycho Sexy"
5. Underworld, "Born Slippy.TELEMATIC"
6. Dr. Octagon, "3000"
7. U2, "City of Blinding Lights" (Hot Chip 2006 remix)
8. Morcheeba, "Shoulder Holster"
9. Boogie Down Productions, "Jimmy"
10. Pet Shop Boys, "It Doesn't Often Snow at Christmas"

Your turn: Your Random Tens and/or shortlists of favorite athletes from whichever team you call your own, in the comments, please.

The audacity of hope.

Call me naive, but I'd like to think that somewhere, somehow, this actually worked:



(More brave Craigslist windmill-tilting here.)

A confession of treason in the first degree.

I've had this post in my head for what seems like eons now, long before MaconDawg posted his case against Florida's quarterback over at Dawgsports.com yesterday, even before this post over at EDSBS, which would've been the perfect opportunity to purge my soul about this -- but anyway, with the next installment of the World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party coming up just a few days from now, I've decided to get my ass in gear and get it all out there. A lot has been said about Tim Tebow ever since he signed with the Gators, a lot has been said by Georgia fans this week and will continue to be said up until the game on Saturday and certainly after, and not a lot of what they have to say will be complimentary, but you know what?

I think Tim Tebow is awesome. Check that: I think Tim Tebow is fucking awesome.



He's an incredible football player, of course. Has any player carried a team to nine wins as singlehandedly as Teebs did last year? Sure, the Gators' utter lack of a pass defense showed the limits of what even a player as awesome as Tebow could surmount all by his lonesome, but consider that the Gators overcame that deficiency on nine separate occasions by scoring an average of nearly fifty points in those games, and consider, too, that Tebow was directly responsible for more than half of those points. He provided more than seventy percent of an offense that finished '07 ranked 14th in the nation in total yardage. Seriously, it was him, Percy Harvin, and that's it.

But I also think Tebow is awesome in ways that have nothing to do with his performance on the field. He's just a genuinely good kid. The mission trips, the ministry to convicted prisoners? I mean, I do a fair amount of work with charities and community organizations here in Birmingham, but I've never done anything like that. And even the circumcisions in the Philippines that we Dawg fans like to laugh about -- and seriously, it is pretty fuckin' funny -- meant that Tebow had to take weeks out of his life and fly seven thousand miles to go cut some kids' foreskins off. Me, I feel like I've done a great service when I take someone halfway across town to pick up their car at the mechanic.

There's a part of me that thinks I might be highly annoyed by Tebow if I ever met him in person -- by all reports he's super-Christian, all but assuredly a Republican, and would probably chafe at the fact that my description of him in the second paragraph used the word "fucking" -- but he is one of a depressingly small number of prominent Christians in this country who walk the God-fearing walk in addition to talking the talk. He actually gets out there and does the stuff that Jesus instructs people to do in the Bible. And when he's not ministering to people in the Philippines or a state prison or wherever and the cameras aren't on him anymore, there's still no evidence that he's anything but a good, upstanding citizen. All those reports you hear about Gator players getting into trouble with the law for this reason or that reason? Tebow ain't never in 'em. I'll bet you he's in bed every weeknight, like clockwork, by 10 p.m.

And even though he could have his pick of any coed on Florida's campus -- and, even though they wouldn't admit it, Florida State's, Miami's, and UCF's, and more than one at a time -- I'll bet anybody right now twenty bucks that Tebow's a virgin. I'm not saying that to make fun of him; I think that's fantastic. If your personal belief system tells you that you should be saving yourself for marriage, and you resist a daly, if not hourly, dose of worldly temptation to stick to that, then friend, I will not say the first bad thing about you. (Partly because Tebow can't be more than about five months older than I was when I finally lost my virginity myself, but that's really neither here nor there.)

The last reason I think Tebow is awesome, though, might be the hardest to admit: He's awesome because he loves being a Gator. Now, I don't think loving being a Gator is admirable on its face -- mostly, it's quite the opposite -- but the genuine joy on his face when he's running out on the field is something I don't know that I'd ever want to take away from anybody. He's found something he's very good at and he gets to do it in front of ninety thousand people who love watching him; he is living his fucking dream and loving life, and it is so real and beautiful to him that I don't even care that I hate the team he's doing it for. Yeah, we all like to roll our eyes and grouse about what a gaywad he looks like when he's hopping up and down on the sideline or jumping around like a fricking circus act after he scores a touchdown, but admit it, Georgia fans: You wish every player on our team showed the same enthusiasm for being a Bulldog that Tebow does for being a Gator on nearly every single play. Not that all of our players don't, but still, Tebow is the model for showing school pride and loving the colors on his back more than life itself. If I could draw some of Tebow's blood, put it in a centrifuge, separate that enthusiasm out, put it under a microscope and find a way to genetically modify it into something Georgia-specific, I would mass-produce that shit and inject it into every student who walks on to UGA's campus.

Now is probably an improper time to be getting all this off my chest, I suppose, given that this model of a modern-day student-athlete is going to be hurling passes against us in just a few short days. I hope his team loses, of course. I hope they lose this year and next year, and I hope the world scratches its collective head wondering why a quarterback as astronomically talented as Tim Tebow never managed to beat the Dawgs, and I hope that criticism eats Urban Meyer up so much he breaks a toe kicking his file cabinet in frustration.

But I hope the criticism doesn't eat Tebow up the same way, 'cause he's a good kid and I don't want him to feel bad.

Confession over. The executioners may fire when ready.

DUDE DUDE DUDE.

I think this represents that rare confluence of both a) something being every bit as awesome as it's been hyped up to be and b) me having one before everyone else in North America does. Either way, I'm calling this a "win."

Fate: Just another word for the spot where "opportunity" and "humiliation" collide.

This story is apropos of nothing, really, but I just thought you might be interested in what typically happens when something cool almost happens to me with respect to the opposite sex; it kind of makes a companion piece to the almost-cool-but-not-really Jenna Bush story from this past spring.


Fig. 1: Magic City AIDS Walk.

My neighbor Katie and I walked a couple blocks to Brother Bryan Park this past Sunday to go to the Magic City AIDS Walk, just to see what was going on, check out the drag queens, maybe donate a little money. I brought Jenna with me, and as we were walking around we spotted the recently elected Miss Birmingham signing autographs. Jenna ran right over to her, and Miss Birmingham immediately said "What a cute dog!" and started playing with her. And I'm thinking, yes, it's good to have a dog.


Fig. 2: Miss Birmingham.

Now, I should probably also mention that Brother Bryan Park after hours is a rather popular hangout for homeless people and the like, and more than a few of them were hanging around during the AIDS Walk festivities. One of them was a woman I see pretty frequently as I'm taking Jenna for a walk around Five Points. I don't want to be gratuitously cruel here, because this woman's never done anything wrong to me, but she's a little loopy, her face is a bit messed up, her teeth look like what would happen if you looked in every mouth in the British Isles and selected the 32 worst teeth you could find . . . basically, I'm 99-percent sure that she's not a Southern Baptist but rather a Crystal Methodist. But again, she's never done anything wrong to me, and she loves Jenna, as most people do.

So I'm standing there with Miss Birmingham as she's fussing over Jenna, trying to figure out the best way to get some kind of conversation started, when I hear a raspy voice holler "JENNA!!!" and who should walk over but . . . yup, the homeless lady. She scoops Jenna up and starts playing with her. Record skips, heads turn, moment killed. Brutally murdered, in fact.

So that's pretty much how it goes when you're me. Given an obvious opportunity, something always intervenes, and this time it wasn't even my own stupidity and/or social ineptness -- it was a homeless person cock-blocking me in front of Miss Birmingham.


Fig. 3: A referee signals an illegal cock block, which awards the blockee fifteen yards and an automatic first down.

Humiliated by Tennessee on Saturday, cock-blocked by a methhead on Sunday. The kind of weekend that just begs to have a country song written about it.

The unbearable Nice™ness of being.

Sorry, Eddie, the ladies aren't a fan.

Over the past few months I've read a number of posts written by female bloggers calling shenanigans on the concept of the "Nice Guy™" -- i.e., the guys who (outwardly, at least) are polite, gentlemanly, treat the women they go out with like princesses, but can't ever seem to get any of those women to be his girlfriend, much less get laid. This post from Jill at Feministe, a blog that's been a favorite of my sister's for a while now and that I've been reading more and more lately, finally inspired me to spill my guts on the subject.

The reason I'd been holding back for a while was more out of embarrassment than anything else, because for a while -- not so very long ago, in fact -- I was That Guy: the guy who did everything politely and by-the-book and would treat a woman wonderfully, to no avail in terms of actually having a more-than-friends relationship with any of them. Actually, let me back up a bit here: I was, and in some ways continue to be, the latest of late bloomers. I didn't go out on a date, much less have an actual girlfriend, until my senior year of high school; I didn't have an actual drink until graduation night; I didn't lose my virginity until I was 20 and just a couple months from graduating from college. For virtually every "milestone" of a young man's life, I was about four years behind everyone else I knew, and though some of that had to do with the fact that I'd skipped second grade and was younger than everybody else, you could take that out of the equation and I still would've been playing catch-up.


Kind of like this, only less confident.

So as you might expect for someone who was young and inexperienced and feeling like the rest of the world was flying right by him, I got pretty desperate at times. And desperation, I think, is the staple of the Nice Guy™. Girls don't seem to be responding to you no matter what you try, so you get more and more desperate, and there comes a point at which you're not on the lookout for a certain kind of woman, you'll just take any woman (as long as she's hot, of course). And take it from a guy who has been there and made those mistakes: Once you start seeing women as this big, monolithic "hive mind" in which each interchangeable unit is no different from the next, you're setting yourself up to look like a douchebag.

That, I think, is the point where Josh Bass is at right now. Bass is the sophomore journalism major at Southern Cal whose column in the Daily Trojan on "the death of chivalry" prompted Jill's post, and after reading his column, I wanted to close my eyes and find a hole to crawl into -- partly out of embarrassment for him, but partly out of embarrassment for myself, because I know I held some of the same frustrations and laughably mistaken ideas when I was a naive, undersexed, increasingly desperate UGA sophomore 11 years ago. I hope I wasn't as dickish or self-pitying about it as Bass is, and I certainly hope I would never have banged out such a melodramatic, overwritten column about it -- at some point in your journalism training, dude, you're gonna learn that nobody's impressed by extra words for extra words' sake -- but I don't know that I was all that far off, either.

Josh, apparently, wants to hold doors for women. He wants to buy them dinner and pay for their movies. And I'm guessing he wants to have a committed, monogamous relationship with one of them. Which is fine; some women out there want that too. A male who wants those things is a traditionalist but not automatically an asshole.


Or a tricorn hat/tights-wearer.

Josh, however, thinks that every woman out there wants that, or should. His views on male-female relationships are like the gender-role remix of every shitty, derivative comic you've ever seen on "Def Comedy Jam": Men are like this, women are like this. Josh wants to hold doors and pay for dinner and treat his women like princesses, therefore that means all women should want to have doors held and dinner paid for and be treated like princesses. And anyone who doesn't is a Feminazi or a harlot. (Yes, he actually uses those words.)

You know, life would probably be a lot easier if male-female interactions were that simple -- male does X, female does Y, a beautiful relationship blossoms -- and a desire for that kind of simplicity burns in the heart of every Nice Guy™. For whatever reason, they've been caught behind the curve in terms of figuring women out, they don't know what to do, and they want someone to make it easier for them. They're the reason Maxim prints articles on 10 sure-fire ways to get that honey at the bar to go home with you; they're the ones spending money on books and courses on "speed seduction" and the like. They want to have someone else hand it to them; they're not comfortable with taking anything more than a passive role in the whole process, because they lack self-confidence and don't trust themselves to figure it out on their own. And when they get shot down, when something comes along that doesn't jibe with the "tips" or "rules" that they read in Maxim or that goes against their regimented view of how men and women should be, they don't want it to be their fault.

Basically, it sounds like Josh Bass is just sitting back and hoping that a woman will notice his chivalry and will be so impressed by it that she'll just up and jump his bones, without him ever having to do anything more than holding a door or picking up a check. Or as Josh ends his column:

After all, there are women all over the world who have male confidants and close friends, but they never for once take a step back and realize that the person with whom they are constantly sharing their romantic woes is in fact ­- male.

And so to that widow of romance out there, when next the words seem about to spill unbidden from your lips, bite your tongue and look a little harder. You may have to seek, my lady, but ye shall find.

It's ironic: Josh's very traditional view of the world says that men should be the "strong, capable" caretakers in the relationship, while women should be soft, feminine, and dependent on their knights in shining armor, yet he expects the women to take charge and accept the active role in "seeking" and "finding" while he just sits there being gentlemanly and courteous -- in other words, Nice™.


Just keep snoozing, buddy, that plane ain't never gonna come.

And that dog won't hunt. I have a friend (whom I obviously won't call out by name) who, for a while now, has had a thing for a girl at our church. It's been nearly a year, and as far as I can ascertain, he's never actually asked her out. He's had plenty of chances -- she sings in the choir, he plays an instrument, they practice together all the time -- but he just hasn't pulled the trigger yet. After observing this situation for months -- mainly just waiting for him to shit or get off the pot because, full disclosure, I'd kind of like to ask this girl out, dammit -- I really think he's hoping that she'll be so impressed by his guitar-playing ability or how in shape he is or whatever that she'll be overcome and ask him out so that he doesn't have to do it himself.

That never, ever works. You know how I know? Because that's what I did for years, and that "strategy" was pretty much responsible for me staying a virgin until I was almost old enough to drink. Girls just don't do that. I don't care what your dad or Maxim told you, there's no amount of coolness, gentlemanliness, or chivalry that will be so overwhelming that a woman will make an unprompted move on you. Ask her out or don't ask her out, but if you stay silent and you end up sitting around by yourself on Friday night, it probably has less to do with the fact that the female in question is some uppity skank who's too shallow to appreciate your wonderfulness than it does with the fact that you are being -- how do I put this gently? -- a fucking wuss.

On the other hand, if you do sack up and ask her out, and you do so in a chivalrous and princess-treating, pedestal-placing fashion, and things still don't swing your way, you know what? That's life. Some women don't want to be treated like princesses or placed on pedestals, and your insistence on doing so isn't going to bring her around to your way of thinking; it only amounts to cramming a square peg into a round hole, and ensures that your round peg isn't going to get crammed into anything. Again, women are all different and are not required by law to appreciate the same things, so if you go into a given situation convinced that holding doors + buying the movie tickets = poontang every single time, but the female in question isn't down with that, that doesn't mean that she's some uppity Feminazi bitch; it only proves you've done a shitty job of market research.

I know, it seems to defy logic that someone might not want things to be bought, done, or smoothed over for her -- don't we all love stuff to be taken care of for us? But the night I ended up in the sack with a woman who didn't want me to give her oral -- it wasn't that time of the month or anything, she just didn't like it -- was when I officially abandoned the idea that any assumption about what women want, no matter how much of a lead-pipe cinch it might seem, was universally applicable to all women.


Believe it or not, that exit's closed.

The Nice Guy™, though, having reduced all women to one big, anonymous species, is so busy buying or doing stuff for those women that he isn't paying any attention to whether they're things that she needs or wants. A few years back, my sister -- a fiercely independent feminist, though hardly of the hairy-legged man-hating stereotype -- was engaged to a Nice Guy™ who was courteous, capable, and, unfortunately, thick as a bridge abutment. His thought processes operated with the if-A-then-B simplicity of a Texas Instruments calculator: If Ann's TV broke, it meant BUY HER NEW TV, never stopping to consider that maybe she'd want to pick out a TV herself. If her boss had overloaded her at work all week long, it meant COME OVER AND COMFORT HER, even when she only wanted to drink a glass of wine and decompress alone. His heart was kind of in the right place, but not really, since he saw her as an object to be coddled and protected but never actually listened to. She tried to clue him in on this, but it never quite stuck -- and eventually, in spite of the emotional heartache (not to mention the bad blood with his family) it created, she gave back the ring and sent him on his way. That may sound harsh, but it's what happens when Nice Guys™ try to impose their very general, not-terribly-well-thought-out views of opposite-sex relationships onto individual, complex people.

In the interest of full disclosure, I want to dispel any notion that I think I'm some kind of relationship expert here. I'm doing better now than I was when I was a college sophomore who could barely pick a clitoris out of a lineup, but by no means do I have this relationship/attraction thing completely figured out. As a recovering Nice Guy™, though, I do feel like have some sage advice on what not to do that might be valuable to guys who are still sitting around waiting for someone to drop a Playmate in their lap.


Which really only ever happens to one guy anyway.

And that advice boils down to this: Sorry, but the Nice Guy™ shit doesn't work. If you don't have anything deeper than door-holding or check-picking-up to offer, it's time to go back into the locker room and draw up some new plays. Sack up, Josh Bass, and ask a girl out instead of waiting for her to notice and appreciate your chivalrous awesomeness and then writing whiny, bitter columns when she doesn't. If you do go out with her, listen to what she says and find something more than just blond hair and a pair of tits to appreciate about her; don't just go into it thinking HOLD DOORS BUY PRESENTS ROBBLE ROBBLE as if that's all any woman has ever wanted since the beginning of time. And, as Kenneth the page said on "30 Rock," work that vajayjay.

As for me, I've put the nice-guy shit aside and evolved into what I'd call a Laissez-Faire Neanderthal. Yeah, my default position is to hold doors and offer to pay for stuff; that's how I was raised. But if a woman doesn't want that, fine with me. I'm not gonna force it on her, and I'm not gonna take that as a cue to ask why she hates men so much. It takes different strokes to rule the world, yes it does, and if you can't figure that out and make your peace with it, not getting any is going to be the least of your problems.

"You're with me, chino": Powerful douchebags and the women who (outwardly appear to) love them.

About this time last year, Deep South Sports released its list of the Top Wives of the SEC, and among other things, the list made it clear that a lot of Southeastern Conference football coaches have managed to snag women with whom they would otherwise have no shot whatsoever -- they "outpunted their coverage," as EDSBS eloquently put it. Henry Kissinger, of course, was the one who said "Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac," and with some of these guys, you kind of think it'd have to be.

Of course, that's hardly news in other realms, politics in particular. During this campaign cycle, there's been truckloads of gossip surrounding former Sen. Fred Thompson and the 24-years-his-junior hottie he calls "The Mrs.," but Thompson is hardly the first hideous gargoyle who's ever used his Washington influence to snag someone who's way out of his league. And I don't even mean "a hooker."

But who has the greatest power over women who should clearly know better? If power truly is the ultimate aphrodisiac, then which kind of power is the most aphrodisi-riffic? To find out, I bogarted a highly scientific method that Maxim used a few years ago -- back before they completely jumped the shark -- to determine whether rock stars or athletes were better able to outpunch their weight in the wife/girlfriend department. I've compared a number of coaches and politicians with their wives on the usual 1-10 scale, counted up the total discrepancy between repulsive troll and hottie spouse for each category -- or "Spousal Hotness Gap," if you will, and I do -- and used that gap to determine who's using their fame and influence to overcome the most severe hideousness.

The results follow. We'll start with . . .

SEC FOOTBALL COACHES


PHIL AND VICKY FULMER
Phil Fulmer is the only coach about whom I've ever said, "Oh my God, is he wearing Under Armour on the sideline? . . . Oh, no, wait, that's a windbreaker." Anything else I could say about him would simply be gratuitous. As for Vicky, it's hard to find very many pictures of her on the Intertubes, but apparently they have a reasonably hot daughter, and you know that didn't come from Phil, so I'm willing to give her some benefit of the doubt.
Phil: 3.5
Vicky: 6.5
SPOUSAL HOTNESS GAP: 3 points


STEVE AND JERI SPURRIER
Even when the Ol' Ballcoach is in a good mood -- I'm just kind of assuming that it does happen -- he has this twisted-up, cranky look like he's either pinching off a particularly challenging loaf or needs to, bad. Jeri, though, doesn't look half bad for being in her fifties. From certain angles, she almost looks a little like my mom, and Barbara Gillett is a 10, period, end of discussion.
Steve: 5.5
Jeri: 7
SPOUSAL HOTNESS GAP: 1.5 points


ED AND KELLY ORGERON
As far as Ed goes, it's hard to make objective judgments about someone whose name is so closely identified with insanity; all I can say is that even when he's not bellowing incantations to Cthulhu or whatever he does before games, he looks like one of the coaches you'd always see roaming around your high school in inappropriately short shorts with a whistle around his neck, even when he was only teaching a fricking civics class. His wife, on the other hand, looks like a feisty one -- though I guess when you've pledged your life to The Orgeron, you'd have to be. When you put that suckling pig on the family dinner table, you better get your piece quick, because The Ogre has no patience for the meek.
Ed: 6.5
Kelly: 9
SPOUSAL HOTNESS GAP: 2.5 points


MARK AND KATHARYN RICHT
Mark, as has been explained many times on this site, qualifies for Hey Jenny Slater Purely Platonic Man-Crush status. Katharyn, meanwhile, looks like the mom of the kid down the street you were best friends with when you were six, and in your youthful innocence, you interpreted her offering of a second juice box as a pledge of eternal love. Call me a homer, but they're both equally adorable.
Mark: 8.5
Katharyn: 8.5
SPOUSAL HOTNESS GAP: 0 points


TOMMY AND SUZANNE TUBERVILLE
Tubbs isn't a bad-looking guy in the face -- seems like the kind of guy who might have earned the nickname "the silver fox" at some point in his life -- and one of my best friends, who was a Tri-Delt at Auburn, once told me she thought he was hot, but then again she went to Auburn so what the fuck does she know. I think we all know what the problem is here: It's the ears, and no, they haven't been photoshopped in that picture. Those ears singlehandedly drop Tubbs from "well-read country lawyer" to "guy in coveralls who comes out of the backwoods service station to ask if you want your oil checked." In an odd contrast to her husband, who never met a camera he wouldn't jump in front of, Suzanne Tuberville might be the most kept-under-wraps spouse in the entire SEC; apparently some things just need to be kept secret on the Plains, like who the coach's wife is or why the offensive line apparently hates Brandon Cox and wants him to die a slow, painful death.
Tommy: 7
Suzanne: 8
SPOUSAL HOTNESS GAP: 1 point


URBAN AND SHELLEY MEYER
Urban has the fresh-faced good looks you'd expect from one of the youngest coaches in D-IAA, but he's also one of the few coaches in America who have fewer facial expressions than Mark Richt. He kind of reminds me of what Papa John's founder John Schnatter would look like after a frontal lobotomy. Can't say I know all that much about Shelley's personality, but she is cute, and if the above picture is any indication, she's clearly willing to slut it up a bit in the name of school spirit (if only to fit in with the rest of the chicks in Gainesville).
Urban: 8
Shelley: 8.5
SPOUSAL HOTNESS GAP: 0.5 points

PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES


DENNIS AND ELIZABETH KUCINICH
Just to give you an idea of what a way-out-there pinko liberal I am, almost any time I take one of those "Which Candidate Most Closely Reflects Your Political Views?" quizzes on the Web, Kucinich pops out as the #1 answer -- but I'm sorry, there's just something about him that seems a little lacking in gravitas. Honestly, I've seen garden gnomes that are more physically intimidating. Yet somehow, looking like the love child of a Vulcan and Count Chocula didn't keep him from bagging a British hottie who's at least a full head taller than he is. Jon Stewart pretty much summed it up: The dude must be packing some serious rod.
Dennis: 3
Elizabeth: 9
SPOUSAL HOTNESS GAP: 6 points


FRED AND JERI THOMPSON
If you needed any further evidence that the Washington pundit class is completely out of touch with reality, to say nothing of the American people, they think Fred Thompson will appeal to the electorate because he's a hottie. The fuck? Dude, Fred Thompson is about as erotic as the cranky granddad on "Everybody Loves Raymond" -- he looks like a slightly slimmer, even crustier version of Phil Fulmer, and without even the benefit of a national title. Yet apparently he's managed to find at least one attractive younger woman who's willing to go to bed with him, and while I'm not sure America is quite ready for a First Lady who'd look more at home singing "Happy Birthday" whilst hula-hooping at Hooters than she would receiving foreign heads of state at the White House, Jeri Thompson still qualifies as trophy-licious.
Fred: 3.5
Jeri: 9
SPOUSAL HOTNESS GAP: 5.5 points


RUDY AND JUDITH GIULIANI
Even with a different, non-combover hairstyle, Rudy would still look like Nosferatu; if he's getting any kind of regular ass at all, he's playing over his head. Based on his presidential campaign, I can only assume that when he first met Judith Nathan, his pick-up line involved some variation of "You know, I was the mayor when 9/11 happened."
Rudy: 4
Judith: 7
SPOUSAL HOTNESS GAP: 3 points


MITT AND ANN ROMNEY
Mitt Romney is a handsome guy, but in a mid-'80s-game-show-host kind of way; he's not hard to look at, but you wouldn't buy a car from him, either. Ann, on the other hand, is MILF Zero, totally Beverly D'Angelo in the National Lampoon "Vacation" movies. (On that note, Mitt getting seduced by Christie Brinkley during a cross-country trip on the Romney Campaign Bus would be, like, the best political scandal ever.)
Mitt: 7.5
Ann: 9
SPOUSAL HOTNESS GAP: 1.5 points


BARACK AND MICHELLE OBAMA
Like the Richts, they're pretty evenly matched; neither one has anything to be embarrassed about. Michelle looks a little bit like how Condoleezza Rice would look if she weren't constantly wearing that look of dread over Satan inevitably coming to collect her soul, like she promised.
Barack: 8
Michelle: 8
SPOUSAL HOTNESS GAP: 0 points


HILLARY AND BILL CLINTON
I think Hillary catches way more crap about her looks than she deserves to -- though it probably comes with the territory when you're a woman who's dared to run for president -- but let's be honest here: She might not even rank in the top 25 of the hottest women Bill has ever bedded and we all know it. Of course, that says a lot more about Bill than it does about her.
Hillary: 7
Bill: 8
SPOUSAL HOTNESS GAP: 1 point

SPOUSAL HOTNESS GAP TOTAL
Coaches: 8.5 points (1.42 average)
Presidential candidates: 17 points (2.83 average)

And there you have it: Being an ambitious politician has nearly twice the power of SEC coach-hood in terms of attaining arm candy far above one's station. So kids, if you want to pull women who are way out of your league, you're much better off running for president. Leave the coaching to guys who are either already reasonably good-looking or content to spend all their waking hours locked in a film room.

Tuesday Mystery Meat.

· Over at the Crimson Tide blog Roll Bama Roll, they're also breaking down their season opponent by opponent, and yesterday they did sort of a mini-roundtable with me and T. Kyle King from Dawgsports about how we think Georgia's season is going to shake out. Thanks to Todd and the rest of the RBR guys for letting me bloviate -- for some reason, just like food always tastes better when someone else cooks it, blogging is often more fun when you're pontificating on someone else's site.

· As a pinko socialist -- well, compared to 99 percent of the rest of the people in Alabama, anyway -- I'm probably supposed to think poorly of French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who was elected from the right-of-center Union pour un Mouvement Populaire party earlier this summer. Still, even the most conservative French politician is probably more liberal than most American conservatives. And then there's the fact that Sarko would be an absolute blast to hang out with -- funner, perhaps, than even Bill Clinton. Here's Sarkozy absolutely plowed, in front of Vladimir Putin, no less; and, also courtesy of Andrew Sullivan, here's Sarkozy . . . well, being Sarkozy, I guess.



See, that's the great thing about France. If an American president was caught on film doing this, the articles of impeachment would be drawn up before his hand could even unclench the boob in question. But the president of France does it and the country just smiles, shakes its collective head and says, "That's our Nicolas, always grabbing people's boobs."

That said, if he lays so much as a finger on Melissa Theuriau, he'd better find someone else to start his Citroën for him in the morning.

· Britney's back, baby! Via The Superficial, News of the World tells the tale of Britney Spears's new video shoot:

"She was completely uncooperative and left everyone hanging about when she went for an hour's massage -- twice. She just didn't want to cooperate and was snotty and rude to everyone -- behaving like a complete and utter spoilt brat. When she wasn't pissing people off, Britney was smoking like a chimney. She didn't eat or drink anything other than can after can of Red Bull. She could have drank 20 of them all told . . . She had a problem with the extras being about when she did the pole dance. She was shy or embarrassed or something and she really started struggling with the whole thing. . . . "

Wow, we knew she'd forgotten how to dress, take care of her kids, or groom herself, but forgetting how to pole dance? She's really in trouble. But hey, at least she's got her looks back. Tell me this isn't sexy:



Sorry, I just realized I put a typo in that last sentence. I wrote "sexy" when I meant to write "Trent Reznor in drag." My apologies.

· Everything I've been hearing from the media says that the Braves' trade of Jarrod Saltalamacchia for the Rangers' Mark Teixeira was overall a good move, but I can't help but be a little disappointed. I was sitting at a Braves game with my friend Alex a few months back, and we were trying to come up with a fan club for Salty along the lines of "Matt's Bats" or "Sheff's Chefs" from a few seasons back, and she came up with a doozy: "Salty's Balls." So now what are we supposed to do? Are we going to have to sit here and come up with a pun on "Teixeira"? Good frickin' luck.

· In other Braves news, delicate flower Tom Glavine is upset that so many people boo him when he comes back to Turner Field. Here's how you solve that, Tom: Next time you come back here, don't come wearing a Mets uniform. Problem solved! You can thank me later.



· As tragic as the mid-air collision of two news helicopters was last week in Phoenix, I've got a real problem with holding responsible the man who led police on the high-speed chase the chopper crews were covering in the first place. Yeah, the guy's a criminal, but it was the TV stations who made the choice to cover the chase live -- how did the suspect cause the two helicopters to crash into each other? Look at it a different way: Let's say there are a bunch of news helicopters circling around the Shrine Theatre on Oscar night to get aerial views of the crowds and the red carpet, and two of them hit each other and crash. Do you hold the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences responsible for holding a spectacle so big that the various news stations just felt compelled to cover it? Prosecute the chase suspect to the fullest extent of the law for carjacking and evading police, but don't use grief over a tragedy as an excuse to pile a bunch more charges on him just because you don't know what else to do.

· OK, that was kind of heavy, so here's something . . . well, even more disturbing. Here's "Mary Poppins" as a horror movie.



Weirdly enough, I'm now tempted to put Julie-Andrews-as-Mary-Poppins on my Chicks I Shouldn't Think Are Hot But Do Anyway list. What? Why are you looking at me like that?

Wednesday Mystery Meat, smoked for extra flavor.

· This photo probably isn't as dramatic as what I actually saw when I walked out my door first thing this morning, but that usually conspicuous object sitting amidst a thick cloud of smog is Birmingham's Vulcan statue. Apparently the smoke from the forest fires in south Georgia and Florida is blowing all the way up to the B-hizzy, which explains why the whole city smells like a brush fire and I had to put on a painter's mask just to take Jenna out to poop. I don't like to condemn entire states all at once, but for letting your secondhand smoke blow all the way over here and ruin my morning, Georgia and Florida, you guys are a couple of assholes, all right?

· Speaking of which, I don't go seeking this stuff out (honest!), but in the course of my usual Web-surfing I've come across a few more mentions of Eric Dondero, last seen on this blog positioning himself as the ADD-afflicted Brutus to Ron Paul's Caesar. Today, f'rinstance, I found out that Dondero wrote his own Wikipedia page, a fact I learned from this Hit & Run thread in which he compared a commenter to Hitler and left four comments in a row at one point. On this Liberty Papers thread he leaves six comments in a row, among others, all in the service of calling people fascists for daring to oppose Rudy Giuliani's presidential bid, and he also openly states that while his big issues are legalized drugs and prostitution and the elimination of seat-belt laws, he thinks that warantless searches and wiretapping are a "non-issue."

What the . . . ? I think this kind of bizarre political doctrine deserves a name of its own, and I'm taking my opportunity right now: Dondero is a Bread-and-Circuses Neoconservative, someone who claims to be a libertarian but who will cheerlead every last intrusive, liberty-eroding, authoritarian impulse on the part of the Bush administration as long as he can smoke pot and not wear a seatbelt. See also Neal Boortz, Glenn Reynolds, Dennis Miller, et al. The sad thing is, I wouldn't have to come up with a name for them if there weren't so many of them.



· As long as I'm piling on ol' Eric, let me go ahead and also pile on Paul Wolfowitz. The guy scores a 160-something-thousand-dollar do-nothing job at the World Bank for his girlfriend -- hey, don't lie, you wouldn't touch Paul Wolfowitz's dick for anything under $160K either -- and the resulting controversy forces him to resign; now said girlfriend has dumped him. I'm sorry if this makes me a bad person, but I laughed so hard when I read that this morning that a few of my co-workers came into my cubicle to see what was going on. That arrogant prick deserves every embarrassment that's been dumped on him in the last few months and then some; my only regret is that this didn't happen a couple months earlier, so that Bush could've tapped an unemployed Wolfowitz for the newly created position of Iraq War scapegoat "war czar."

· On the subject of actual pimps, let us now (again) praise Bob Barker, who gave the commencement address at Drury University earlier this month, thus earning Drury the title of Most Awesome Commencement Address Ever. Yes, even beating out Jon Stewart's 2004 address to William & Mary, although Stewart might still have him beat on actual content. I don't know. I'm content to call it a draw.

· Britney Spears still just doesn't appear to have this undergarments thing all figured out yet. She goes on stage wearing a bra and nothing over it, then she goes out in public with a shirt but missing the bra. We've already inferred, of course, that her standard attire for religious observance is nothing above the waist at all. Dear Lord, can't somebody have a talk with this girl?

· I will say this for the Bush administration: They may be a bunch of dishonest, power-hungry Macchiavellis who do nothing but stretch the truth until it hangs to the ground, but some of them do look awfully good doing it.


And when you get that fearful, hung-over "Did we sleep together" call the next morning, you can simply say, "I have no recollection of that."

· Georgia won another national title in men's tennis yesterday. (Link via Westerdawg.) I won't bother telling you who won the women's title.

· And finally: Why, God, why?

Farewell to a true playa.

Bob Barker doesn't actually know a single pick-up line; he picks up women with his mind.

We all knew this day would come eventually, but it still stings: Bob Barker will be retiring in June after a half-century in television.

I've mentioned before how much I love "The Price is Right," and it all boils down to Bob. Bob Barker is a pimp, it goes without saying, but did you know he was also a fighter pilot in the Navy? That he's a vegetarian whose charitable foundation gives millions of dollars to animal-rescue and park facilities all over the country? That he has appeared in episodes of both "Futurama" and "Family Guy"? That by renouncing hair dye in 1987 and going naturally gray, he became a trendsetter for other celebrities like Monty Hall and Alex Trebek who would later do the same thing? I think someone needs to put together a Web page of "facts" about Bob Barker just like they did for Chuck Norris.

Bob Barker has served as a body double for George Clooney in "Out of Sight" and Brad Pitt in "Mr. and Mrs. Smith."

To support himself in Los Angeles before he started getting regular TV work, Bob Barker was a professional boxer. His record is 142 victories, 0 losses, 109 knockouts, and 13 deaths.

Bob Barker is banned from entering 17 counties in the U.S. and six countries worldwide because authorities fear the effect he has on their women.

Not only did Bob Barker once land a 747 full of Third-World orphans after the pilot and co-pilot had both become incapacitated, he did it with a blood-alcohol level of .21.

Anyway, I loved this quote from his retirement announcement:

To kick off his retirement, Barker said he will "sit down for maybe a couple of weeks and find out what it feels like to be bored." Then he plans to spend time working with animal-rights causes, including his own DJ&T Foundation, founded in memory of his late wife, Dorothy Jo, and mother, Matilda.

He said he'd take on a movie role if the right one came along, but filmmakers, take note: "I refuse to do nude scenes. These Hollywood producers want to capitalize on my obvious sexuality, but I don't want to be just another beautiful body."

So now the question becomes, who will replace Bob? I think the only person who can even come close to Barker's pimptitude is Larry Munson. If you knew anything about Munson's Movie Group, I think you'd agree.


Munson: Also a total master at Plinko.

Another modest proposal.

In the wake of Georgia's disastrous loss to Vanderbilt (for Homecoming -- did I mention it was Homecoming?), opinions are coming in from all sides as to what exactly is wrong with the team. The distressingly Tennessee-in-2005-like QB rotation is one popular target of fan disgust, and to Mark Richt's credit, it appears that that may have finally ended with the by all accounts definitive naming of Matt Stafford as the starter this weekend against Mississippi State. Others have decried Willie Martinez's flaky zone schemes on defense and made suggestions ranging from a change in scheme all the way up to firing Martinez entirely. Still others have tossed out some rather innovative ideas about player shuffling and substitutions on one side of the ball or another.

But it's something Jmac wrote at The Cover Two in the wake of the Vandy loss that really got me to thinking. Jmac mentioned the apparent lack of passion or motivation from the players during the Vanderbilt fiasco -- something I myself noticed from all the way up in section 607 -- and suggested that it speaks to a lack of motivating forces on the coaching staff.

Jmac is right: One of the things always touted as one of Mark Richt's greatest assets is his ice-veined calm on the sidelines, his utter refusal, maybe even inability, to betray any kind of panic to the players he's leading into battle. That is indeed a terrific thing to have in a head coach; for contrast, look at Mike Shula during his first two years of coaching at Alabama and tell me he didn't look like he expected to be punched in the face by somebody at any given moment. Richt's All-World poker face, I'm convinced, is a big part of the reason we've lost only two true road games during his tenure. But there's a flip side to that coin, and it is that while Richt's steely calm is not a panic-inducer, it's not a huge motivator either. For the first four years of his career at Georgia, that didn't matter, because he had defensive coordinator Brian VanGorder to be the yelling, fist-pumping ball of fire on the sidelines. I don't know if anyone's been head-butted at Georgia since Erk Russell left, but if they have, VanGorder was the one to do it. Exactly as Jmac states, BVG was the highly effective yin to Richt's yang, balancing out CMR's preternatural cool and creating a near-perfect chemistry on that staff that worked well enough to go 42-10 in their four years together in Athens.


VanGorder want to SMASH!

I think a lot of what we're seeing from the Bulldogs now is the effect of VanGorder leaving and not being replaced by someone who is truly his attitudinal equal. Whatever else you can say about Willie Martinez, he's not a fire-breather like BVG, and where there was once a perfect balance of contrasting styles, now it's looking more and more like a CPA convention on the Georgia sideline. I'm no psychologist, but that's got to have some kind of deadening effect on the emotions of the players -- maybe not as much as Iowa's pink visitors' locker rooms, but something. That's an aspect I think the coaches need to do something about.

Let's assume for a minute that Richt isn't inclined to throw anyone under the bus for this season's failures (probably a safe assumption at this point) and that the Powers That Be in the athletic department aren't either (probably also safe, unless Georgia completely implodes down the stretch and stays home for bowl season). So Martinez isn't going anywhere. What about the other side of the ball? Nominally the Dawgs already have an offensive coordinator in Neil Callaway, but any Bulldog worth his salts knows Callaway's primary duty is as the OL coach, since Richt is quite well-known for calling his own plays on offense.

There have been numerous calls for Richt to bite the bullet and hire a dedicated OC (though quite conspicuously not from Jmac, who inspired this idea in the first place). I would have no problem with that, and in fact I have a suggestion as to whom he might hire. Bulldog Nation might not want to hear it, but I'm gonna say it.

Say this out loud and see how it sounds: Georgia offensive coordinator Rick Neuheisel.


No, the other Slick Rick.

Think about it: His Washington teams scored an average of 30 points a game when he coached there from 1999 to 2002, and developed a gunslinging style that culminated in Cody Pickett passing for 4,458 yards as the starter in 2002. In the beginning he might need to be reminded that we do, in fact, have running backs on the team, but hey, he'll get used to that in time.

Perhaps more importantly than mere Xs and Os, though, is Neuheisel's personality, which would be the charismatic, high-energy polar opposite to Richt's Zen tranquility. I've seen Neuheisel's persona compared to that of Bill Clinton's, and unlike most people, I choose not to see that as a liability. He's passionate, energetic, frequently cocky as hell -- in some of his more fired-up moments on the Husky sideline, I remember him looking almost Spurrieresque in that regard. He also has a well-established history of being a fun-lover and a good-timer, but while he has a reputation for connecting very well with his young players, it's not the point of massive discipline breakdowns (like what's happening at Miami right now) or excusing embarrassing slackness on the field (like what happened at Florida under Ron Zook).

And the whole thing with the so-called gambling scandal at Washington . . . well, if every company fired every employee who'd ever took part in an NCAA Tournament pool at work, the office buildings of this country would look like the opening scenes in "28 Days Later." At any rate, Neuheisel claims his UW superiors told him it was OK, which seems to be borne out by the university's willingness to settle with him for $4.7 million rather than seek a verdict in his wrongful-termination suit.


Sometimes I can't even look at myself in the mirror 'cause I'm scared of how fly I am.

I pitched this idea to a co-worker of mine and he wondered aloud where the hell Neuheisel had ended up after leaving Seattle. Turns out he's the QBs coach for the Baltimore Ravens. While the NFL does bring with it a considerable amount of prestige, being the QBs coach for the Ravens is kind of like being, say, wide receivers coach for the Steelers: Given what they do, you may only be the sixth or seventh most important person on the sideline. He's getting paid, what, $250,000 a year these days? Pfft. I say we call Rick up and offer him three quarters of a mil to come down to Athens. It's more money, more responsibility, and plenty of clubs for him to play his guitar in during the off-season.

It's a calculated risk, sure, but so's every play you call on offense. What have we got to lose?


And if it doesn't work out, we can always give him a late-night show.

But it is unusual getting knighted by anyone . . .

Tom Jones has been officially knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. Awesome.

My only question is, why'd it take this long? Tom Jones has been a pimp for at least 40 years now. My mom recalls live performances in the '70s in which women would throw roses, hotel keys, even their panties up on stage for this cat. (She insists she did not participate in any of these shenanigans, and I choose to believe her.) All I'm saying is, at the very least he's a way bigger pimp than Bill Gates.

But anyway, congratulations to Tom. Man, if you thought it was easy for him to get chicks before . . .

If you think it's hard out there for a pimp, try being a conservative trying to act like he doesn't care about Hollywood.

Of course, if I'm going to criticize the Oscars for a Stupid Liberal Trick, it's only fair that I should set aside some abuse for the conservatives who, around this time every year, launch into their boilerplate diatribes about how Hollywood is a joke and the Oscars are meaningless and why would anyone pay any attention to them because they're, like, stupid. Oh, and they hate mainstream America. (I mean, I'm just doing this to be fair and balanced. You guys don't want me to be unfair or unbalanced, do you?)

Those of you who read this blog for the sports stuff may recall the Q&A exchange I did back before the Georgia-Georgia Tech game with Nathan, a GT blogger. Among other things, Nathan asked me what bugged Georgia fans about Techies, and I used that as an opportunity to discuss at length the inferiority complex Techies have with respect to UGA -- and how their repeated denials of same only cement that fact. I illustrated this with a reference to Tech "columnist" Dr. Football, who uses one-third to one-half of his column each week to whine about how Tech doesn't get nearly as much coverage in the Atlanta sports media as UGA does. He bitches about how Georgia gets too much attention, then proceeds to devote hundreds and hundreds of words to Georgia -- Mark Richt isn't that good a coach, Mark Bradley is a UGA homer, on and on and on. The more time and energy people like Dr. Football spend whining about how everyone thinks Georgia is the premier football program in the state, the more he reinforces that perception. The more they complain aloud about how much attention Georgia gets . . . the more attention Georgia gets.

What the tits does all this have to do with the Oscars, you ask? Because Hollywood is Georgia and its right-wing critics are Georgia Tech. Those right-wingers I mentioned earlier, despite claiming to believe that Hollywood is irrelevant and therefore the Oscars are a joke, flocked to the Academy Awards like moths to a flame. Captain's Quarters live-blogged the ceremony, as did Ann Althouse; National Review Online did a roundtable on the Oscars, attempting to be as condescending as possible; even Pajamas Media live-blogged the thing.

Right-wing Hollywoodphobes spend all this time and effort grouching about how Hollywood is out of touch and nobody should pay attention to them anymore . . . and in the process they just end up giving them more attention. At least Pajamas Media, in their liveblogging intro, had the self-awareness to fess up to the fact that, yeah, we do care about all this Oscar crap even if we say we don't, but all the other rightie bloggers apparently completely missed the irony inherent in the idea that if you're willing to pay all this attention and devote all these words to the Academy Awards, then they must not be as irrelevant as the right wing claims they are.

It's especially funny to hear them rail against George Clooney for his "proud to be out of touch" remark. Jeez, are y'all really too dumb to realize he knew exactly how much he'd be pissing you off when he said that? But hey, good job feeding his ego -- I'm sure that right before he falls asleep at night, on his big pile of money with many beautiful ladies, he has a chuckle at all the breath you guys have wasted talking about how unimportant he is. Clooney's kind of becoming the left's version of Ann Coulter in that regard, if you think about it, but we've clearly got the better-looking, wittier, and more talented side of that coin.


Hard out there for a pimp? Oh, I beg to differ, sir.

I realize I may be put on straight-guy probation for this, but I agree with Benjie on this one, despite his opposite sexual orientation -- I'd fuck George Clooney before I allowed my dick within 10 miles of Ann Coulter, and it ain't even close.

Anyway, what I'm saying, conservatives, is don't be Georgia Tech. You can either think that the Oscars are just an irrelevant wankfest, or you can spend 1,000+ words criticizing them, but if you try to do both all you do is sound as dumb as Steve Buscemi's character from the (Academy-Award-winning) movie "Fargo": "Oh, fuck it, I don't have to talk either, man! See how you like it. . . . Just total fuckin' silence. . . . Two can play at that game, smart guy. . . . We'll just see how you like it. . . . Total silence." And we all know what happened at the end of that movie: The other guy in the car ended up feeding Buscemi into a wood chipper. I'm not saying. I'm just saying.

Or, as I told Keira Knightley the other night, "Baby, the more you talk about how you're over me, the more I know it ain't true."


Don't let the smile fool you, kids, she still wants me.

Anyway, that's about all I've got on the Oscars, except to say that while I appreciate the Academy for being groundbreaking and untraditional, I just don't see what the big deal is about that "Hard Out There for a Pimp" song. I mean, Ice-T already told us pimpin' wasn't easy, nearly 20 years ago -- this is news?


Level of difficulty: 4.0, apparently.

"If you really wanted to screw me up, you should've gotten to me earlier."

Yeah, whatever.

Just in case anyone was curious, my dog has already received a Valentine's Day present; I haven't received any. I hope that gives you an idea of what you're dealing with here.

Readers of this blog who know me personally are probably waiting for me to throw up the inevitable fuck-Valentine's-Day-sideways post on here, given that my dislike of Valentine's Day has been intense and long-standing. To be honest, I wasn't sure whether I really wanted to do that, or whether I even wanted to acknowledge VD at all; after all, does the world really need another pissed-off single ranting about how dating is a pain in the ass and Valentine's Day sucks . . . especially since I've already written one?

A few things you should know about that column: First of all, some things were apparently lost in the translation from newspaper page to Web page, specifically important things like paragraph breaks, proper typefaces, correct punctuation, that kind of thing. For any number of reasons, my memories of my senior year are hazy, but I'm pretty sure that column was a lot funnier when it was first published. Second of all, as hotheaded and asinine as the column is, it is directly responsible for what is still the only date I've ever had for Valentine's Day or a Valentine's-Day-related function. A girl from one of my journalism classes whom I'd always thought was hot (she was a dead ringer for "Scream"/"Wedding Singer"-era Drew Barrymore) e-mailed me the very same day the column was published and said she thought it was funny, she thought Valentine's Day was stupid too, did I want to go out sometime. So we went out for a while, and I won't go into all the gory details of how I managed to screw that relationship up, but the point is, if going off on a half-cocked rant about Valentine's Day swung me a date once, it can't be all that bad an idea, can it?

Still, I don't want to a) just drag out old material or b) come off as some misanthropic, grouchy asshat. Let me rephrase that: I don't want to perpetuate my existing image as some misanthropic, grouchy asshat. There are ways for a single person to enjoy Valentine's Day -- the candy, the realization that you're saving a lot of money by not having to buy your significant other a gift or drag her to a fancy restaurant or something, the knowledge that you can go off, get a hooker, and roll in at 6 the next morning without someone waiting at home wondering where the hell you were when you were supposed to be taking her out for Valentine's Day . . . what? Why are you looking at me like that?

Nevertheless, it seems clear to me that this is a holiday that, while not impossible to enjoy without a significant other, is a lot easier to enjoy if you have one. Because without one, you're much more likely to be reminded of all the failed relationships you've had in the past (or lack of relationships period), and what you've done to put yourself in that situation. For some reason this holiday always makes me think of the movie "High Fidelity," and I always see myself as being a lot like John Cusack's character in that movie: kind of a schlub, kind of neurotic, can make a kickass mix tape but, other than that, in the rare instances he does succeed with women he pretty much does so in spite of himself. Oh, and also a one-step-short-of-OCD listmaker. In fact, back when I was working in Atlanta -- I think this may have even been in the days and weeks leading up to Valentine's Day one year, though I may be remembering that wrong -- a co-worker and I were debating over whose relationship history was more pathetic, so we decided to make a list of every relationship, bad date, infatuation, etc. we'd had, compare lists, and determine a winner. When the deadline came, I handed her mine, she took one look at it and said, "Wow. I can't compete with this."


Your first girlfriend in high school dumped you for a guy who was in the marching band? Wow, dude. Just . . . wow.

In the spirit of that project and the five-worst-breakups structure of "High Fidelity," I thought I'd use this opportunity to pick out the stories from my dating record (or lack of same) that are most representative of my history with women as a whole. Everything in "High Fidelity" was done in fives, but I won't bore you with five stories; I think three should suffice.

1.
What better way to start this off than on Valentine's Day '02. I was actually semi-seeing someone long-distance at the time, this friend of my sister's then-fiancee, but what started as a perfectly innocuous Happy-Valentine's-Day phone call quickly turned into her yelling at me for something I'd done or hadn't done, so when Josh and DAve called to ask if I wanted to go up to Druid Hills and drink some beers and shoot some pool, I was more than ready. As I was flying up I-85 to meet them, the girl called again to yell at me some more, and I did two things I'd never done before: 1) hung up on someone and 2) threw the phone into the back seat. It was all very theatrical, not to mention cathartic.

Anyway, I get to the bar expecting for it to just be a night out with the boys, but it turns out there's a ton of girls there. Including a redhead named Megan who's apparently single, good at pool, and incredibly cute. There are some situations where "cute" is not only a more accurate description than "hot," it's actually a more desirable attribute, and this was one of those times. Basically, she was the kind of girl about whom I'd usually just sit there at the bar thinking, "Wow, she's cute, if I didn't have such a low opinion of myself I'd probably go talk to her," but this time -- whether it was liquid courage or the urging of DAve and Josh, I don't remember -- I actually cranked up the balls to go talk to her. We had a good conversation, she was friendly, I finally got to whip out my "I've applied to join the Peace Corps" line (which, at the time, was actually true) and she was suitably impressed. And I actually ended up getting her number. You could probably count on the fingers of one hand the phone numbers I'd gotten from girls at bars over the entire course of my life up to that point.

Anyway, fast-forward to the following week, I've waited the Vince-Vaughn-approved six days so I decide to give Megan a call. We talk for a while, I get around to asking her if she wants to go out and get a drink sometime, we're talking about when to do that when she gets a call on the other line from her mom and says she'll call me back in a few minutes. (For the sake of my own self-worth I'm going to assume it was really her mom and not "Would I like to discuss AT&T's new long-distance plan? God, yes, anything to get this jackhole off the line.") I'm just sitting there, having a beer, watching the Winter Olympics -- I'll just bet it was figure-skating, too, which would match right up with the general lameness of the rest of this story -- and I fall asleep. I wake up about midnight, shake the cobwebs out, and find a missed call on my cell phone from guess who. It's too late to call her back, so I wait until the next day, get her voice-mail, leave a message.

Needless to say, I never heard from her again. Which means I was probably only a single beer or ill-timed nap away from actually getting to go out with one of the cutest girls I've ever actually met in person. Good times.


Here's Reggie Brown shortly after getting a love tap from Junior Rosegreen in the '04 Georgia-Auburn game. Within a few days, I would know a similar feeling (though I at least retained full consciousness, which was nice).

2.
This next story I've alluded to a couple times in my lengthy discussions of the Auburn-Georgia rivalry. Setup: At a Halloween party thrown by my friend Amanda a couple years ago, I met a girl who'd just moved down from New York to start a job at the place where Amanda worked. Blond, funny, another example of the cute-being-better-than-hot phenomenon, an incredibly stylish dresser -- sorry if noticing that makes me gay, Josh -- and made a pretty hot '60s housewife, which was her costume at the party. (In case you're curious, mine was Bill Lumbergh -- suspenders, colored shirt with a white collar, coffee mug. You know the drill.) Anyway, I got her number from Amanda, we went out a few times, it was great. Easily one of the most attractive, most fun, and least frightening girls I've ever gone out with.

Couple weeks later I'm telling her about my plans to head down to Auburn that weekend for the football game, and for someone who went to NYU and has about as much prior exposure to college football as Kevin Federline does to soap and water, she seems pretty interested. I go out on a limb and ask if she'd be interested in going, and she says yes, so I tell her I'll get in touch with my ticket hookup and see if he can find me another one.

Now, before this all went down -- probably before I'd even met this girl to begin with -- I'd been telling my parents that I'd try to pay them a visit when I went down to Auburn for the game, since they only live like 30 minutes away. My guy comes through with the tickets, so I call the girl back, tell her we're good to go, and we start laying out plans for the weekend: "Yeah, we'll drive down Friday night, stay at my friend's apartment, tailgate with her and some other folks on Saturday, go to the game, probably go have lunch with my folks on Sunday . . . "

If you've ever seen the movie "Glengarry Glen Ross," then you know all about the silence that ensued after that: It was just like after Jack Lemmon says "If you're gonna make something up . . . " and Kevin Spacey realizes he's the one who broke into the office the previous night. Here we are, I've been seeing this girl for not even a full month, and already I'm telling her -- without any ulterior motive or anything like that, but still -- that we're going to meet my fucking parents. Not surprisingly, she says she's kind of nervous about that, so I start backtracking like crazy, but she's like, "No, if you've already made plans, then it's fine." We go down to Auburn, we go to the game (which Georgia gets annihilated in -- surely a premonition), we go to Columbus the next day, she grits her teeth through lunch with my family, we go home . . . a week or so later I get the "I think we should just be friends" e-mail. And there you go.

3.
Last year this girl April moved into one of the studio apartments in my building. She had a little dog, I had a little dog, so we'd see each other pretty frequently while standing out on the front steps waiting for our dogs to finish doing their business, and I started thinking I'd like to ask her out. In the meantime, it came out that her reason for coming and going at odd hours and being gone for long stretches of the week was that she was a dancer at one of the strip joints in Atlanta, and I almost didn't ask her out after that, not because I was somehow repulsed by her line of work but because I was worried she'd think I was only asking her out because that's what she did. But somehow I got over this hangup and asked her out, and she said yeah, so we did.

(Now, I know I just said I didn't ask her out because she was a stripper, but that fact did lead to one of the more entertaining conversations I've had with my parents. They asked me if I was dating anyone, I said yeah, they asked what she did, I said "She's a dancer in Atlanta," and then Mom went down the list: "Balllet?" "No." "Jazz?" "Uh, no." "Like, interpretive dance or something like that?" "Keep going." Cue big grin on Dad's face; end scene.)

Anyway. We went out a few times, during which time her apartment becomes the target of an insect infestation -- think "Arachnophobia" but with termites -- and she decides to move out. Over the course of a weekend I help her move all her stuff into a new apartment, and I'm thinking, Helped her move, that's got to be like +100 points or something. But her work isn't done, because she painted the inside of her old apartment while she lived there, and apparently one of the terms of her lease is that she's got to repaint it back the way it was or she doesn't get her security deposit back. So the following week, she repaints the apartment, and I'm unavailable to help because I'm working all day. Guess who is available to help? This guy Jeff who lives across the hall from me, an airline pilot who had either just recently broken up with his girlfriend or was right about to, I can't remember which. Just about every day that week, I come and go during my lunch hour and there they are, having a grand old time repainting her apartment. Being a complete idiot, I think nothing of this at the time.

A few days later, I call her to see if she wants to go out and get dinner or something like that, and she says, "Well, I'm kind of seeing Jeff now. But we can still be friends." Well, of course we can, because isn't that secretly what every guy wants? Fortunately, I still had her on the hook to pick up my mail while I was in Italy later that month, so at least I got something out of it . . . sort of. I guess. Still, this marked the point at which "Do not date girls who live in the building" went from an unspoken suggestion to an official policy.

Of course, this brief sampling barely even scratches the surface of the legion of girls I've gone out with once or twice and who mysteriously dropped off the face of the earth after that, adding to my reputation (as my friend Brian puts it) of "having more first dates than anyone I know . . . and fewer second dates than anyone I know." That list could probably fill a separate blog all by itself, the latest and greatest item being the World-War-III-incitingly hot Slavic chick who, completely unbidden, showed me her boob in a crowded bar, made out with me later on that evening, and only after that decided arbitrarily to stop returning my calls. (Was she embarrassed by her behavior? Or did she merely decide I'd gotten as much of a taste as she cared to dole out and would get no more? I leave this question to you, gentle reader, to decide.)

But still, these three incidents should probably give you a pretty good idea of how I can apparently screw up a good thing either by doing something or not doing anything at all. That's what you call being multitalented, folks, and don't you forget it.

I invite the rest of you unattached malcontents out there -- whether you're single, about to be single, or even if you're in a reasonably content relationship but still resent the yoke of obligation Valentine's Day hangs around your neck -- to throw your best, and by "best" I obviously mean "worst," date/relationship-fuckup story at me in the comments. Most embarrassing story wins a box of chocolates I'll purchase tomorrow when everything has been marked down 75 percent. Fo' really, people! I look forward to hearing from you.