You Are My Minions

Old Loves

2012-01-26T09:11:00.000-05:00

They dedicated the basketball court at Comcast to Gary Williams last night. As I've noted before, my ardor for Terphoops has cooled since days of yore. That doesn't mean I've lost the fire completely, especially not on Duke night (the outcome was the same as ever--Duke pwn3d us).

Opinions on this court-naming thing are pretty consistent. Gary won us a title. But there's one detractor in every bunch, and ours is, of course, Lefty Driesell, who emphasizes that he doesn't think it should be his name on the court, which is good, since his is, as I understand it, already on Georgia State's court. Stupid fucking cracker.

I think I've noted before that I'm not fond of yellow, and these are yellow days at Comcast. That's fucking idiotic. But the students are still there, in spades, and last night they yellowed out:

If there wasn't a turtle, I'd think it was Tech

And the fever hasn't broken. This may be cleaner than "J.J. Reddick Drinks His Own Urine", but it's just as effective.

The noblest of sentiments

My generation notes that J.J. still hasn't issued a denial. Go Terps.

The thing its ownself

Followup Hypotheses Designed Solely To Piss Off My Friends

2012-01-25T16:34:00.000-05:00

Exhibit: Tim Thomas.

Monday, makes a flaming unsportsmanlike jackass of himself, letting his team down. Team patiently--and unnecessarily--doesn't fine or otherwise punish him for putting himself above the team by refusing to visit the White House, then spewing batshit fucking crazy excuses on his FB page. But wait!

Tuesday, gets benched in favor of Tuukka Rask, a goalie with a vastly inferior winning percentage against the opponent of the evening (do you even need to ask?). Coach Claude Julien did not give a reason for Thomas' benching, at least not that I could find, though it may well have been part of a normal rotation (Thomas has played about 2 of every 3 games this season) and Rask has a very good save percentage this season.

But let's not let facts get in the way of flagrantly abusing correlation/causation logic. Obviously, Tim Thomas' politics caused the Bruins to lose 5-3, a humiliating defeat for one of the hottest teams in the league, on a night when the Caps' three best players weren't dressed and a midget named Scrappy snagged his first career hat trick.

What more evidence do you need? Hypothesis confirmed, it's a theory. Just like gravity.

A Three-Way Dead Heat for Asshole of the Day

2012-01-23T19:33:00.000-05:00

In chronological order (of when I saw each story):

Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky and Mars) was not allowed to board his flight at the Nashville airport this morning after he declined a patdown (known in TSA parlance as "secondary screening") to resolve a scanning anomaly. He (and his father) characterized the incident as "detention" and set about making as much noise as they could about it. The noise continued through the day, with nutters claiming he was being illegally arrested en route to Congress (he was heading to a Roe v. Wade anniversary anti-abortion rally in DC), the Pauls repeating the word "detained" to anyone who would listen, and a statement from the Senator implying that white people shouldn't be screened (that wacky, not-at-all racist Paul family!). The capper comes from Sasha, who sent this lovely demonstration of what a total fucking wackjob Senator Paul is: he thinks that TSA has rigged the machines to trigger random false positives to give TSA an excuse to pat people down. Holy fuck, this man is a United States Senator? Fuck you, Rand Paul.

Next up is Boston Bruins' goalie Tim Thomas. Full disclosure: I make no bones about seriously despising the Bruins. That river runs real deep. However, Thomas declined to join his Stanley Cup champion team in a visit to the White House today, because he hates Obama. Puck Daddy Greg Wyshynski gets it as wrong as it can be gotten, claiming that Thomas shouldn't be demonized because this is a free speech issue. Holy fucking crap, Wyshynski. No one's passing a law restraining Thomas' freedom of speech. They're correctly noting that he's an unAmerican asshole, a shitty team player, and a graceless twat. Of course he's entitled to be all of those things, each of which has the consequence of making him look like a fucking jerk. Wyshynski is an idiot (and a unabashed Devils fanboy); Thomas is, in essence, a fucking traitor--by his own side's standards. Fuck you, Tim Thomas.

Finally, the NHL's uberreichsfuhrer of discipline, Brendan Shanahan. In the Capitals' overtime loss to the Penguins yesterday, Alex Ovechkin crushed the shit out of Pens defenseman Zbynek Michalek, leaving the ice by a few inches to do so. No penalty call (it probably should've been called as boarding, and it's stunning that it wasn't, given that midget bitch referee Kelly Sutherland demonstrably despises the Capitals). About 5 minutes later, Michalek crushed the shit out of Matt Hendricks, not quite leaving the ice to do so, but elbowing Hendricks in the head. Two minutes, elbowing. After the game, Michalek admitted that the penalty call was correct and that his state of mind was such that the infraction was related to the uncalled offense of a few minutes earlier. Ovechkin and Michalek had disciplinary hearings today, with Shanahan the deciderer. Guess who got a three-game suspension and who got no supplementary discipline? Fucking Shanahan even admitted that Ovechkin got slammed because he's a repeat offender--even though, under the NHL's rules for administering supplementary discipline, Ovechkin had accumulated enough good behavior time to be outside of the window for increased supplementary discipline. Fuck you, Brendan Shanahan.

Why, How YOU Doin'?

2012-01-19T15:39:00.002-05:00

You want teh kindz, go visit BFF.

I'd have to admit that this pretty much sums up the present crystalline structure of my sociopathy.

Shorter NBC Sports Ice Hockey Broadcasting Crew

2012-01-11T20:33:00.000-05:00

My goodness, the Pittsburgh Penguins' cocks certainly are tasty. Slurp. Yum.

(It's 1-0 Caps at the first intermission, the Pens down on an abysmally dumb turnover by Yevgeni Malkin, whose cock is apparently the yummiest, since poor Cindy Crysby was tragically and brutally struck down in his prime by a Washington Capital, and yet Doc Emrick and Eddie Olczyk still can't shut the fuck up about how fucking primo mega-alpha dominant Malkin is. And don't fucking get me started on that egregious can't-die-hard-enough asshole Mike Milbury. Furthermore, Marc-Andre Fleury has bobbled the puck on easy handles four fucking times, two of which almost resulted in goals, one of which was denied only by the graceless turdery of Alexander Semin, and yet these NBC fucks can't stop picking on Tomas Vokoun--who is wretched and should leave my fucking city on the first stagecoach, but who is playing reasonably well thus far tonight. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck NBC Sports.)

Strangest Days of His Life

2011-12-24T11:09:00.000-05:00

Until the next strangest, of course, but maybe this'll fucking learn him.

Also too because OCD memes me:

Happy Tebow's birthday, bitchez. Or Jewish Civil War commemorativity. Or Buddha Belly Stuffed with Ham. Or SprechenTannenbaumCastleTodenangstNacht. Whatevs.

Words Fail

2011-12-13T11:16:00.000-05:00

Buildings tumble. The ground opens wide.

Alas, poor Burchie. I knew him well. Others, not so much.

Burchie and Blanco, at the Plex. Never forget. Never forget 4ever.

Last straw. Me and Saint Benny, we gonna have words. I could not possibly have imagined, when I wrote that last linked post, how utterly fucking inept that protected list was. Cry all you want that none of the exposed were drafted; what'd Clyde's spot on the list, or Davies' spot, buy? Not even shit.

It's true that the experience transcends the result, which makes the upcoming deadline for season ticket payment less of a big deal than it ought to be, under the circumstances (we don't know where we're playing and we have about four players on our roster). That the outcome of the transaction isn't in doubt does nothing to make paying for this any less galling.

Special for BFF: I tried to get over it. No dice.

What the Fuck My Problem Is

2011-12-09T15:41:00.000-05:00

So about 15 minutes after I hit "publish" on my last post, and about 2 minutes down the road on my way to work, I realized why I'm so fucking pissy right now (in addition to yesterday's anniversary, which stretches into today for me, because I didn't hear about that thing until the morning after).

You see, it's between Thanksgiving and, say, January 5 or so. I hate everything, everything is shit, fuck you you fucking fucks, and have a lovely and peaceful motherfucking holiday season, you fucking butt-pirate leg-pissers. I am the fucking living embodiment of the motherfucking War on Christmas, bitchez, and I'm okay with that, because it's the most fuckawful time of the year and I'm not responsible for my actions, because, and I mean this quite literally, Jesus made me do it. Whatever it was.

So, y'know, fuck you. And Merry Fucking Christmas.

Heh. "Butt-pirate leg-pissers." Don't think you've seen that for the last time.

About Last Night

2011-12-09T07:40:00.000-05:00

BDR and Jim proudly claim the mantle and in good spirits, which is fine. Doesn't make them less wrong, doesn't make me love them less. Thunder's message is different; it appears to be, as near I can tell, "I Am Elmo."*

I have considerable experience with this message, and I'm here to tell you: Don't Fuck With Elmo. It's futile. Self-destructive, even.

There will be those who take my message in a less friendly or loving spirit, and that's fine too, in the sense that I don't give a flying fuck. But here's the point: there are people who aren't unsympathetic to the presumed message, if not to some of the wackier statements from individuals interviewed by the media dolts covering the protests, or simply overheard ("reclaim public space"? What the Fuck does that mean? How is it differentiable from "prolonged vagrancy"?). Making traffic worse is not going to capture their sympathy.

There's another element here, which is a little less kind. #Occupy is about as much about sociopathy as much as anything else, by which I mean occupiers asserting that their sociopathy is no less legitimate than the sociopathy of greed. Blocking K Street highlights that. I hate to give the police such a sparkling idea, but there's something to the notion that an aerosol delivery system for Adderall would be way more effective for controlling the protests than is pepper spray, and without the complications of bad PR. I concede that in a very small number of cases, Thorazine would be more appropriate.

Please don't mistake me; sociopathy works just dandy for me. Personally. Your sociopathy does less for me. Sorry, it's the way the thing works.

It's like I said the other day: don't pee on my leg and tell me it's raining.** Sure, like BFF said in my comments yesterday, it's cool and fun and sophisticated to piss off power, though given all that I'm not sure why he didn't keep smoking like the rest of us cool kids. That gives the lie to any contention that this isn't about sociopathy. But there are sympathetic people out there--me among them--who have as much right to have a day unfucked by other peoples' choices as BFF has to fuck up their day. While my personal day wasn't fucked up, my Wednesday travels didn't take me anywhere near the downtown business district, seeing as I'm smart like Federation (thanks to BFF for triggering that happy memory the other day). Another day, another pattern of geography? I'd be through being cool.

* Yes, while I was not raised on Sesame Street (my brother, 5 years younger, was--that places me pretty precisely, no?), I'm aware that the cited meme predates Elmo, by a lot, having emerged in the halcyon days of original ~~SNL~~ Sesame Street yore, before ~~Belushi~~ Henson died, when Sesame Street didn't suck. Sadly, Bam-Bam is here to tell you, loudly, that Sesame Street equals Elmo. Resistance is irrelevant.

** I am increasingly aware that this admonition applies to every word ever uttered, on the Internet or elsewhere.

Things That Say You're A Fucking Retard

2011-12-08T15:51:00.000-05:00

1. You think that blocking K Street will do anything other than make people quite rightly despise you.

2. You're Obama's Secretary of Health and Human Services.

3. You're Obama.

Other possibilities not excluded.

It's Like This

2011-12-05T17:26:00.000-05:00

Lazy stream-of-consciousness blogging on a few issues of the day:

Work: I've mentioned my work before, and I won't do so with any level of specificity right now, but here's the essence: I am a mid-level tyrant for a government contractor, holding sway over several petty fiefdoms, one of which is concerned with making a Federal agency's Web site go. Once upon a time, in the course of discussing something else, I wrote this about part of what I do:

One of my adorable little gifts--or not, depending on your perspective and the given value of "adorable" and "gifts"--is that I speak fluent Web, understand how things should work, know something about the place of the Web in communications strategies, sort through hours of technical blahrg from actual Webheads, and then distill the whole mess into something that actual Webheads can run with, rather than getting endlessly trapped inside their engineer-like minds.

The other part of that is that I'm really very good--and I sincerely don't mean to be immodest here--at helping nontechnical peeps to understand what technology can and can't do.

This is why it's pretty fucking galling when the buttheads don't even fucking bother to ask. Or worse, when they try to tell me what technology should do. Y'know what? I don't fucking tell you how to cure cancer or prevent heart attacks or whatever the fuck it is you do or research. Don't fucking tell me how to do with the Web what you just told me you wanted the fucking Web to do for you.

#Occupy: I'm terribly sorry you got arrested. I'm really, really glad that BFF didn't. In return for this overwhelming show of empathy, don't fucking tell me you weren't trying to get arrested when you did a fucking barn-raising in McPherson Square. For my part, I won't piss on your leg and tell you it's raining.

Tino: Santino Quaranta retires. Aiyee. Well, I've certainly had plenty to say about old Tino over the years, much of it unkind. To his eternal credit, Tino hasn't sought me out in 232 and beat the shit out of me. Hell, he even had a chance to finish me off in a Popeyes on I-95 one night, and didn't do it. That's gotta be worth something.

It's unfortunate that the competitive fires in Tino didn't drive more than anger, tightness, and 100-mph shots into the mezzanine. He managed moments of beauty during his time here, and I certainly wasn't unhappy to see him on the field this season, especially given the sheer loathsomeness of the options, but I don't want to damn him now with that kind of faint praise. Since his return to the team, he's been as black and red as anyone, and we will miss his energy.

Some selected Tino quotes:

(4/25/2011): Santino Quaranta I already dealt with. He's just a big sack of testosterone and anger. Heart is no longer a problem for him, but he doesn't seem to have any remaining talent to go with it, or at least the intelligence to harness his talent (and experience--it's incredible how long he's been in the league, for his age) in a useful direction. Props to him for getting his ass back on defense, and congratulations to him for being no worse than my fourth or fifth most hated player on my own fucking club.

No one loves like I do.

(3/17/2011) I myself am excited about Tino Quaranta, now that management has seen fit to pick up and retain players equally or more loathsome.

I do love a deathmask retrospective, don't you?

(8/15/2010) Here's what Goff doesn't tell you in his hack: about 90 seconds earlier, Dallas broke free on exactly the same play. They failed to score because Santino Quaranta--hailed as a hero by many in the commenting community, though I'm not sure why--grabbed the ball carrier's (I think it was Ferreira) jersey, dragging him back to prevent the 2-on-1 breakaway. It was a straight red-card professional foul that very clearly and very obviously prevented a goal. Abbey Okulaja ignored it (bless him).

I vividly remember this game and this sequence, which is unusual for me. It's a perfect example of why I'm loathe to kick Tino's slumped body. Well, that and the shabby treatment he got from the team on his way out.

(4/11/2010) The other item: you should never listen to me again, because it's true. I was 10 fucking feet from the unforgiven, but no longer discommodated, Santino Quaranta, and all I did was thank him for a nice goal and speak pleasantly, and briefly. No ranting. No attempt to disembowel him with my greasy Popeye's spork. Just politeness and smiles and thank yous. And that, beloved minions, is the only kind of self-complicity one should waste time whining about.

The aforementioned Popeyes incident, also covered recently by BFF.

(6/14/2008) Tino's discommodation is, of course reversed, with apologies (but not with forgiveness, because Minions has a pretty definite policy on that, too).

I mean, it took his courageous admission of a Vicodin addiction to spur that, but whatever, I manned up.

And the best for last:

(5/24/2008) You see, tonight's Man of the Match, in my book, would be none other than Tino. It was Tino who, through the glory of embellishment that he could only have learned while lapping hungrily at Landon Donovan's pussy, turned a very nice run into a well-earned penalty (in truth, there were two earlier occasions when DCU could easily have been awarded penalties; in this case, there was contact, and Tino was definitely going down, he just made it look better than it was). Minutes later, his run into space with the ball, coupled with a very nice feed to someone (I forgot who), set up the one moment this season when the ball has richocheted onto The New Mister Em's foot in the six-box.

And that last? That's your third problem. Things just haven't been falling for the offense. It doesn't much matter why Emilio isn't the same guy he was last season. Part of it is that some nontrivial number of his goals last season were poached, and he's been so innately lazy about getting into the box this season that his poaching opportunities have dwindled.

So, Tino for MOTM? Sure enough. Apparently Moreno won the text message voting, because he was the guy they flashed on the board at the end of the game. And Peralta had a really fun equalizer, stretching himself out to head a ball two feet off the ground into the net (bDr correctly noted that Peralta might could have just foot-tapped it, but it was a lot more fun the way it happened). Fred moved reasonably well off-ball, and Gallardo's touch and control (as long as he's not kicking a set piece) are a marvel. But Tino ran his ass off and earned it.

No, he did not earn my forgiveness. bDr's brother asked me a pertinent question when he wondered if, should Tino break Jay Heaps in half, spit on the body, and wipe his ass on a Duke t-shirt in front of 25,000 fans, I'd get around to forgiving. Actually, he phrased the question a lot less violently and my answer wasn't terribly affirming. Only when I embellished the violence and emphasis could I get to a place where the possibility of any sort of Tino-warmth could be forthcoming.

Emphasis added.

It's pretty clear that I've had a real complex relationship with Santino Quaranta, at least in my head, for a real long time now. Tino's name and number will never be up on the wall (though he could hardly shame it any worse than fucking Harkes does), but it'll be an oddly painful and incredibly strange thing to see a number 25 on someone else's United kit someday.

Best wishes for a happy and successful retirement, Tino.

But Wait There's More

2011-11-29T09:36:00.002-05:00

If you don't love the Downfall thing, avert your eyes.

Awesome. Wildly misdirected, but really funny. Thanks to beloved friend Purple for sharing.

Jolly Men

2011-11-28T17:46:00.000-05:00

So I was going to say that my penchant for calling for the termination with extreme prejudice of chunky sports coaches didn't apply to Bruce Boudreau, but in doing my self-absorbed research for this post, I found that this would be a lie (first paragraph, "this guy" link). Because, you see, I have no idea what I've said and not said on this blog over the last six freakin' years.

I had a conversation with Sasha some while back about why I wanted Dale Hunter to coach the Caps. I had another conversation with her (and Whispers, I think) on Saturday about why I wanted John Tortorella to coach the Caps ("Because you like the way his cock tastes," chimed in Ilse, which is only notable because it's more or less true), completely forgetting the obviously very realistic Hunter option, which is much better. I was momentarily stunned by the gut-punch of Boudreau's firing this morning--the conversation over the weekend focused on why the Caps probably wouldn't fire Boudreau. But that stunned-parrot reflex passed very quickly. Dale Hunter? WOOOOOT!!!!

I was talking earlier to BFF about the visceral impact of this; he won't get it, because he doesn't get hockey, which is okay. This move asks the whole team--which is slumping, badly, and was acting like it didn't want to play for Boudreau any more--if they've got the balls to be as good as they are. While I suspect that the answer is "No," this move is the one that will out the players once and for all. I don't have a lot of deep analysis on this; let's do a simple but effective demonstration here.

Don't Steal The Puck From Dale Hunter, Then Score:

Don't Be A Flyer. Just Don't.:

Don't Be A Flyer, Redux:

The Undisputed Greatest Goal In Caps History (Also: Don't Be The Flyers):

Read the comments on the attack videos for some extra insight into...well, everything.

I have no more words. Go Caps. Fuck the...well, here you go:

Bonus: Landru's Irrelevant Descending Pyramid of Levels of Hockey Hatin' Codified At Last:

1. Montreal Canadiens
2. Boston Bruins
2.5 Whoever We're Playing Tonight, But Then Again:
3. Philadelphia Flyers, New York Rangers, Pittsburgh Penguins, New York Islanders
4. New Jersey Devils; rest of the Southeast Division (Tampa, Carolina, Florida, and ~~Atlanta~~ Winnipeg)
5. Detroit
6. Ottawa and Toronto (Canadian) and Buffalo (Canadian but too chickenshit to admit it)
7. Anaheim (they're fucking Ducks), Dallas (come on), and the Rest Of Canada
8. The Rest of The West (pointless), Except
9. Colorado, beloved of friend Jon; and
10. The Black Hawks, who I hate because they're an Original Six team, but who escape serious hatin' because Ilse's from the Faux Side of Chicago

Victory!

2011-11-22T21:49:00.003-05:00

One of BFF's favorite stories to tell on me is that, years ago--Planet remembers it as being at a Maryland-Duke womens' basketball game, which puts her at about age 12 or 13--I was so deeply disturbed by Planet's stability, equanimity, poise, grace, and general goody-twoshoesedness that I offered her twenty bucks if she'd say "fuck," just once. She's faithfully refused ever since.

Until tonight. A mere three months in the bower of liberal academia has changed our darling Planet profoundly. It'd make your head spin, how fast the little pottymouth said, "Baby needs a new pair of fuckin' shoes."

Tear to my eye, that, yessir. Rock on, Planet.

Remind Me

2011-11-22T07:06:00.001-05:00

Why I support this futbol team. Our protected list for the upcoming expansion draft, says Goff:

Charlie Davies
Dwayne DeRosario
Dejan Jakovic
Perry Kitchen
Chris Korb
Brandon McDonald
Chris Pontius
Clyde Simms
Joe Willis
Josh Wolff
Daniel Woolard

This imparts some information we needed to know. Foremost, that this team is managed by complete fucking mongoloids. We protected the useless diving pussy Charlie Davies instead of daring the brand-new Froggyfucks to take him? Holy shit, that's utterly bereft of intelligence or character. Chris Korb, the latest in a series of useless midgets? Slow, stupid, Daniel Fucking Woolard, a reject of the fucking Chicago Fire? This what Kevin Payne and Benny Olsen think is the right and left sides of your future defense, wherever it may play.

After the decision to protect Davies, the most mindboggling choice for protection is Clyde Simms. It is very clear to anyone who set foot in RFK Stadium this season, save perhaps Clyde himself, that Clyde's toast. This is sad. Clyde's been an anchor for us. But he's done done done, a perfect example of a player who needs to be exposed to the draft.

It's excusable that the club left Boskovic unprotected. His salary and knee combine to make his selection very unlikely. But we're going to lose either Brettschneider or Quaranta, both of whom are far more useful than tiny ineffectual Chris Korb or slow, stupid Daniel Fucking Woolard, who shines as the worst free agent acquisition by this club since...uhm, Joseph Ngwenya. Here's the thing; Ngwenya doesn't play. Saint Benny seems convinced that Woolard is a starting left back (or, when injuries and malice overtake us, a starting center back).

Are there valid criticisms of Brettschneider and Quaranta? Of course there are. You know I despise Quaranta, and despise that he's so rooted in our club's culture. Brettschneider's no great huge hairy deal--he's young and probably a little too aggressive for his own good, but he's a lot more promising than that diving poisonous punk Charlie Davies.

Fucking disgrace.

Update: Fullback agrees, which is totally expected since he started the discussion a couple of weeks ago and essentially steered me to my position (though I'd never have backed protecting Davies, Korb, or Woolard independent of other intellectual influences, since my feelings about all three are pretty visceral).

Strategy

2011-11-19T13:58:00.000-05:00

Okay, so contra this, Hogeland (actually, Martin Luther King, channelled through Hogeland, and furthered by some logorrhea I read regularly) has convinced me that my thinking was pretty lazy when I wrote that, if assaulted by police for even minor violations of bullshit laws:

your two reasonable and lawful options are to run the fuck away, or put your hands on your head and wait to be arrested. I'm not surprised that some people choose, under that particular stress, to throw shit at the cops, or otherwise resist violently. That they do does not obviate that they were, themselves, assaulted by the state on specious grounds, and it doesn't invalidate the movement.

It's not the first part that's lazy. The lazy and problematic bit is that resisting police instruction, legal or illegal, does constructively invalidate the movement. My problem, in addition to some inherent intellectual laziness, was that I was being far too nice. Hogeland quotes King:

In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Anarchists (I include faux anarchists, pseudo-anarchists, partial anarchists, and mere sophists, without classifying named individuals) will quibble, but King disposes of that pretty neatly; of course they'll quibble. They're against law. I'm so dramatically unconvinced that the answer to lawlessness by power is anarchy that I've just flatly abandoned most of my reading in that realm. I recognize that this puts me squarely in the camp of faith in due process. Is that a religion as dumb as any other? Might it be my downfall, our downfall? Sure. History and math say it's more likely #Occupy's downfall, unless so-called civilization is doomed to fail anyway, and if that's the dilly I'll go apologize to all the faux anarchists, pseudo-anarchists, and partial anarchists if I''m not too busy or too dead. Sophists I'll still shoot, since the collapse of order will leave me free to do so without legal consequence, pretty much the only thing that restrains me now.

A beloved says that all publicity is good publicity. Decency forbids me from going too far with this, but the fatal flaw here is that this maxim goes for pigs as well as for protesters. Would pigs make shit up whether or not protesters are pure? Of course they would. But you have to give them the chance to fuck up thusly, and it's very clear that #Occupy isn't doing so.

To the extent, of course, that #Occupy can be said to be an entity capable of doing one thing or another. But that's a strategic fail that belies more than I'm willing to concede without a fight at this point--and I'm not yet intellectually equipped for that fight, which I might, after all, lose.

Dancing a Fuck-Me Jig While Tripping Balls Because It Doesn't Look Like He's Going To Dance It For Any Other Reason, Now, Does It?

2011-11-11T07:42:00.000-05:00

Let's leave the reporting to the whore Goff, since he usually manages to get the fact-like bits more or less straight. In short, MLS grand poohbah Don "Anschutz Sounds Like Anschluss and That's Good Enough for Me" Garber has thrown down a gauntlet, or pissed in a circle, or some such twaddle, in an effort to bring United's stadium situation to a head. He thinks we've seen our last game on Loud Side, at least in the place that has always been our home. Speculation is rampant about whether this means we're going to the Capital One Boomer Esiason Memorial Helmetball Field at Five Guys Curly Byrd Stadium at Comcast Lot One of the Verizon University of Maryland at M&T College Park, or whether we're gonna demolish a piece of MLK Boulevard up in Bawlmer.

I'm not arguing that DC should give United a stadium. Neither is anyone else, and DC doesn't seem to fucking get that. They never have gotten it, and after the city willingly submitted to the Lerners bending them over and assraping them for Nationals Park, it's decided that "stadium" equals "assrape." DC has a pretty simple choice: single-event-based revenue for RFK, which is large and rusty and raccoon-infested, or that revenue stream plus reasonable lease terms for 18-20 additional scheduled events there each year. Thus far, DC has chosen the obviously retarded route of trying to rape blood from a rock.

No more, it seems. I've done my best over the years to suppress BFF's panicky whimpering over the larger issues here (though he has always been philosophically correct in his pessimism about it, and that's neither new nor changed by Anschluss Don's statement in the State of the League address), but it's no longer fair to call it "panicked." I think the chance of DC agreeing to reasonable lease terms is near nil, because it's a dysfunctional city run by complete fucking retards, and RFK is operated for the city by a contractor that doesn't particularly give a shit. Where that leaves us, geographically, is still equally likely to be okay or horrible. And where that leaves our seats is, as BFF has always argued, in a fucking end zone, unless we end up in Byrd, where there will be a reasonable chance of a Loud Side (at a venue policed by UMD criminal justice grads--yay!).

Or maybe I'm just tripping balls. Again.

Yeah. Remember the good times.

Fuck Penn State

2011-11-11T07:18:00.001-05:00

First, I'm not objective about this for a variety of reasons. I have a just-barely teenager and a tween, for one. I have also, for my entire life, at least that part of it that I remember, despised the Pennsylvania State University with the flaming passion of a thousand trillion white-hot exploding suns. Penn State may well have been my first hate, though that's so lost in the mists of mental disorder that I couldn't say that with certainty. No matter. Not objective. However.

Those valid issues aside, there's a lot to be disturbed about here. Let's not cry for Zombie Joe Paterno. The PSU board had no choice but to explosively cover its ass, and that's putting it mildly; it's real clear that the PSU president handled this--or failed to--in a spectacularly bad way. Criminal charges against Paterno seem a bit of a stretch to me, but it's pretty clear that even a legend should lose his job for covering for a likely child rapist buddy, even if he did it in a Pontius Pilate, not-my-problem sorta way. This is pretty much no-brain (Brains!) stuff.

The more disturbing issues to me surround the community's reaction. Really? You're actually rioting violently over this? Jesus, talk about bad judgment. Why don't you get jobs, you dirty hippies. And while you're at it, find a message, because "We support guys in power who wash their hands of child rapers" doesn't even have the same resonance as "Give us all your banker stuff because we're unwashed Communist slackers." I think you see the problem here. Rioting in aid of Zombie Joe is just kid stuff, right? Fucking assholes (pick an object).

That's all I have to say about any of this, ever, really. The child raper should be in jail. Zombie Joe should be doddering off quietly into the night. What the fuck is difficult about this, beyond the spectre of the violent and despicable act that started it?

Oh, For Fucks Sake

2011-11-07T19:42:00.000-05:00

Twice.

First, there's some lunatic who decided that it'd be fun to hit #Occupy protesters with his car down by the Convention Center in two separate incidents on Friday night. Accounts differ sharply about what happened, though the police are investigating one incident as a hit-and-run and cited or arrested six pedestrians, Occupiers all, in the other. Apparently both incidents involved the same driver. DC Police Chief Cathy Lanier, who is usually a pretty reasonable egg (and her position here is disappointing, though unsurprising despite her usual tendency toward reason), has had enough of this; her press statement today called the Occupiers "increasingly confrontational and violent," belying my earlier conviction that MPD would be smart enough not to engage.

I have no trouble believing that the following things are true:

-Some asshole wanted to commit vehicular assault against Occupiers.
-Some Occupiers were dumb enough to believe that no one was crazy enough to commit vehicular assault against them.
-The Occupiers were in a particularly irritable humor that night, since the event they were protesting at was an Americans for Prosperity dinner gala.
-MPD is pretty fucking tired of this shit, and also, two different sets of cops, of varying levels of sympathy, handled the two different incidents, five minutes and no more than two blocks apart.

Of course, if I'm right, it doesn't negate vehicular assaults. Nor does it negate the consequences of violent protest, if that's in fact what was occurring. To be clear, my opinion is that probably both of those things occurred. My opinion, my asshole, right?

But it's not doing anything to improve my humor about the mass of dickweeds who are expressing unbridled joy that maybe some protesters got assaulted for the crime of creating an inconvenience, or their fervid wish that these unwashed loser hippies would just get jobs, which are of course plentiful, except when we're talking about President Negro. In fact, it in no way makes motherfuckers who need to shut the fuck up a whole lot any less motherfucking tiresome.

Second, there's the growing parade of women who've allegedly been harassed or assaulted by Herman Cain, and the legion of retards suggesting that they're all whores, that Bill Clinton was worse, or that liberals are responsible for the sudden outpouring of information about candidate Cain's behavior as president of the National Restaurant Association. I'll go all in on Dahlia Lithwick; my lede for this item goes way too easy on lying motherfuckers, because what they're really saying is that sexual harassment doesn't exist.

I don't profess to know what happened, but actual legal settlements by the candidate's employer sort of point to some conviction on their part that something did, in fact, actually happen. Contemporary witness accounts--attested by affidavit--also tend to militate toward the notion that this isn't bullshit. Conservatives' conviction that Monica Lewinsky was the last victim of sexual harassment need to be met with punches in the mouth.

I've read a lot about how the shadow of sexual harassment has permanently changed workplace social dynamics. I have something to say about this. I've been wrongly accused of sexual harassment. I've been rightly accused of sexual harassment in one instance, at least in the sense that, while my actual behavior was unthreatening, inoffensive, and irrelevant, I damn sure wanted to do something inappropriate with the accuser, and while I didn't overtly manifest that, my behavior was probably such, in some way, that she picked up on that vibe (I beat the rap, which didn't negate my Carterian heartlust). And in another instance, I was involved in a wildly inappropriate relationship with a colleague that she could easily have perceived as harassment, had she chosen to do so (she didn't, and in fact wallowed willingly in the inappropriateness, but that doesn't change what could easily have been).

This shit's real. It was a long time ago. I was younger. But it's all real. I was a dick. I got better, at least I think I did--my last brush with a grievance was over a dozen years ago (it was wrongful--the righteous one was farther back, and to be fair, I got out of the business of managing people for about 7 of those years). Does the shadow of those happenings affect the way I act now? Fucking A. I examine my behavior in the light of my past. But what casts the shadow is my behavior, not the threat of what people might do if they don't like me. And what that shadow darkens is any intention I might have of being a dick. This cannot be construed as a bad thing. It provides additional internal motivation--as if I need any--to not be an asshole.

My past has convinced me that truth will out. Herman Cain's behavior is a perfect model of a guy who's scared shitless that truth is outing.

It's The Most Stenchiful Time Of The Year

2011-11-04T09:53:00.001-04:00

I hate autumn.

Yah, sure, I see the flaming quality of the leaves as they transform, the heartrending beauty of the cyclical river of nature as it flows relentlessly through death and rebirth, the majesty of 106,000 drunk crackers crammed into a stadium in Knoxville to puke on the visiting Florida Gators, the timeless and eternal suck of the Washington Redskins, and I am, of course, duly moved, in what I am sure is a very profound and spiritual way.

That's all cultural, even the nature parts (because we pile into the wilderness to go take in the flaming quality, poke dead things with sticks, etc.). I hate the reality of autumn.

It's death. It's decay. It's moist bleakness, which has additive properties to the death and decay. It's fungi and molds and spores and allergies that are, for me, as cavity-pressurizing as any spring produce of tree sex. It's cold, but not cold enough to inhibit the march of dank. It's wet, but in a persistent, clinging, stinking way that doesn't wash away sin and corruption, merely lets it fester and brood and molder.

And it fucking stinks. It smells like shit, because it is, in every sense that matters, shit. Every morning this week I have emerged from the house and encountered a different fucking stench of autumnal decay. Seriously, five different seasonal stenches, ranging from simple manure to baby poop to dog poop to something akin to what the pens under the fucking Colosseum must have smelt like.

No vaguely heart-twanging undertone of wood smoke, no piney holiday comfort, nothing reminiscent of food, at least in its pre-digested state. Just decay. Decay and poop.

For the scientifically inquisitive among you, I checked. It's not me. Nor is it Bam-Bam, who is almost always at my side when I emerge in the morning, because the reason we're emerging at fucking 7 AM every day (the boy is eleven; to get him a sufficient night's sleep, I have to chunk his ass into bed at 8:30 each night, and call him to colors at freaking 6:20 AM, which process involves a lot of squirming and stubborn burrowing/nuzzling, and, non-trivially, the eternal stench of morning breath) is to throw his ass on the bus. Nothing died in my garage, or on my driveway, or in the bushes we provide in front of the house for dirty hippies and other unsavory criminals to lurk in. It's just the smell of my fucking perfectly well-ordered suburban neighborhood and the surrounding minor woods on an autumn morning.

I hear you. "Fuck you, Landru," you say, "Fuck you and your whining, and your sinuses, and your allergies, and your magical sensitivity to odors that didn't originate in your own stupid colon, as if there are any other odors."

Yeah, I hear you, and I'm hard-pressed to disagree. But still.Whatever. Fuck autumn.

Hearkening back: I promised you here, right up top, that I'd report on the outcome of some science I did. I am pleased to report that the stimulus provoked the hoped-for response, eventually. In fact, the named individual told me that the very same staff member who forwarded him a link to that very post was the person who had done up the (allegedly) ball-sucking tags. Hans purported gratitude that he didn't have to be a meanie about the tags, that I had done his dirty work for him; sadly, his minion didn't get it, and Hans was lamenting that he'd have to be a meanie anyway. Because, y'know, I'm an actual Web professional and shit, and when I say your tags suck balls, your tags suck balls.

Asserted without warranty for my own ball-sucking tags, mind you now.

Why I'd Really Like Some People To STFU About #Occupy

2011-10-29T11:37:00.000-04:00

I'm not gonna lie; #Occupy annoys me. Not because I disagree or anything. And certainly not because it's physically or logistically inconvenient, though my job will take me to the neighborhood around the World Bank one day this week, which may well be entertaining. But it's not like #Occupy Gaithersburg is on the way. No one's dumb enough to try to occupy Gaithersburg.

Of course #Occupy is intellectually inconvenient: Though I try very hard to leave complicity-whinging to others, how guilty should I feel about the obvious need for massive wealth redistribution? Is my bank evil, and is the bank I'd switch to, if I weren't so fucking lazy, simply less evil? How will my autistic son fare in the new world order, which will presumably include far fewer of the processed crunchy, salty chip-type foods that are, along with pizza and McDonalds, the great mass of his diet? Can I just pay some more taxes and avoid actually getting lined up against the wall like the motherfucker that I am?

But I'm callous, and it's easy for me to give these questions (other than the one about Bam-Bam) only a few moments' thought before I dash off to the next part of the thrill ride that is my day-to-day existence. So that's not it. What annoys me about #Occupy is the massive outburst of fucktardery it engenders.

No Message: I keep reading about how #Occupy is doomed to fail because it has no message. The level of lazy or obtuse it requires to not be able to discern a message here is stupefying. Look. My personal favorite, for reasons known to those of you who know me as something other than a cartoon Internet rock star, is "You Know Things are Messed Up When Librarians Start Marching." Super bonus points to the librarian in question for fucking up the capitalization, not that that's relevant to the matter at hand. "Close Corporate Tax Loopholes, Tax Religious Groups, End the Wars, Legalize Weed, and Bring Back Arrested Development" is also exceedingly awesome.

So the movement is stupid because not everyone is protesting about the same specific symptom of our culture, our economy, our governance? The movement is irrelevant because you're too lazy to read the signs and discern some obvious themes? Get bent, asshole, but more to the point, shut the fuck up.

The same goes for the linked complaint about the movement's lack of discernable leadership. Look, I think the Greek demos style consensus model is pretty fucking lame, and not tremendously effective in the sense of focus. So the fuck what? Friend Jack Crow makes, as a general proposition, some engaging arguments about power (I don't agree with him when it comes to function, but I find it hard to argue with him about the dynamic). What, exactly, is wrong with letting #Occupy experiment with actualizing shared power--especially when all it's sharing is power over how to protest?

Dirty Unwashed Hippies: OMGWTFBBQ, how incredibly fucking dreary. Edroso does a better job with this than most of the other bloggers to whom I pay attention. Hippie-bashing (except as practiced by Eric Cartman) is every bit as massively retarded as it was when Richard Fucking Nixon pioneered it. It's especially totemic for fans of police riots. Like...oh. Nixon. Never mind. I don't know what it is about peoples' hair that makes other people want to shoot them. It's pretty fucking psychopathic, no? Unless you're talking about Kyle Beckerman. Someone hold that useless shit down while I shave his head, please.

The dirty unwashed hippie meme has begot the safety and sanitation meme that many cities are using as justification for their police riots. This is pretty fucking simple to me. The First Amendment does not guarantee the right of peaceable assembly as long as you don't take a dump in the park. It doesn't guarantee the right of peaceable assembly as long as you leave room in the park for mommies and their baby carriages. Camping out at McPherson Square is not the same fucking thing as crying wolf in a crowded theatre. Using some turds on the ground as an excuse to suppress the Constitution is like...well, it's not like anything. It is what it is, and the notion that you're in the wrong if you're attacked by rioting police, that you deserve to be shot or gassed or beanbagged or whatever when you're attacked by the state is simply unAmerican. At least it is if you're the Tea Party, which is peopled by citizens who think that the Second Amendment is there to defend them from the government.

I happen to think that, if you're at McPherson Square and the police attack (they won't--it's not surprising or coincidental that DC is among the places where state-sponsored violence hasn't erupted, because My Local Law Enforcers, for all their flavors and stripes and kit, have Been There more times than I can count, and they're not dumb enough to be provoked, which is both gratifying and scary), your two reasonable and lawful options are to run the fuck away, or put your hands on your head and wait to be arrested. I'm not surprised that some people choose, under that particular stress, to throw shit at the cops, or otherwise resist violently. That they do does not obviate that they were, themselves, assaulted by the state on specious grounds, and it doesn't invalidate the movement.

You're Under Arrest for Closing Your Account: Yeah, really. I got to this at a chain of links that began at LGM and ended with a video from #Occupy Santa Cruz. Two protesters entered a BoA branch in Santa Cruz to close their accounts. No following word on whether, when they left the signs outside the next day, they were allowed to close their accounts, but it says here at Alternet that BoA charges a fee for account closure.

The protesters in that video weren't arrested--in fact, it appears that the Santa Cruz cops, at least the two in the video, aren't stupid. Not so (allegedly) at a Citibank in New York, where Citibank officials (allegedly) locked protesters in and had them arrested as they tried to close their accounts. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with these people? How fucking stupid/arrogant is "I've got your money, shut up, I'm calling the cops"?

My question earlier was not entirely jokified; the money from which our family operates is in accounts at CapOne, which purchased Chevy Chase, a local/metro operation, a little over a year ago. We're credit union members (Ilse is, as you may recall, a unionized public employee), but that's a pain in the arse logistically. I'm also a USAA member, and I could bank there. While I have the impression that it's not in the same class of banking evil as the big fellas, I don't pay enough attention to know.

You're Fired: BFF and many others wrote last week about Lisa Simeone, who got fired by a production company associated with NPR for her #Occupy-related activities. She may or may not have been unfired; I lost track. NPR may or may not have gotten her fired; I'll never know. Lisa Simeone was no longer a journalist; all of her professional broadcast activities were about music.

More laterly, or maybe concomitantly, a journalist named Caitlin Curran went to an #Occupy protest in New York, and held up a sign, and got photographed, and the photo went all Internetty, and she got canned as a freelance Web producer by The Takeaway, a public radio production of, it appears, no consequence or integrity (hint: their Web site features a NYT semen-exchange widget). Pearl-clutching commentary on her piece on Gawker sets a pretty rigid standard for journalists, apparently allowing no research or opinion of any kind. Of course, we could just tell that to Fox News, but TBogg focuses it even better, reminding us that snarky, stupid #Occupy-basher Erin Burnett, of notoriously liberal mainstream newsfeces outlet CNN, is engaged to a Citibank executive.

Oh, snap.

In Conclusion: Of course, this is all just alternately formed, and better-formed, inconvenient intellect, so all that up top was a fucking lie, at the bottom, like it usually is. And of course I still have no desire to blow up our culture to fix anything. Of course I'm willing to have my life changed some--I'm serious about paying more taxes, about redistributing some of my wealth (which is not, to me or mine, substantial, but is far greater than that of a ridiculous percentage of humans) in some meaningful way, and assuming I'm not the only one going up against the wall--it's not like I'm even close to the one percent.

Here's the biggest intellectual inconvenience: Do those limits to my willingness make me a dick? I don't think so. I don't know if most Occupiers think so, either. But I'm watching and listening, because that's sure something I'd like to know. That others, many better off than me, some less so, are so fucking dismissive of the movement, is their poverty.

Hans Riemer Ate My Baby

2011-10-27T22:40:00.001-04:00

Eye-catching, huh? For the record, he didn't. It's science. I'll report back to you sometime on the results.

So, not long after I posted a screed on Walmart Derangement Syndrome, which led to a very pleasant series of check-ins from bloggyfriends, I got a blast email from Councilmember Hans Riemer, of whom I have spoken variously in these pages, especially whenever I write about things local. That led me to Hans' blog, which is now linked off to the right somewhere, mostly so I remember to keep an eye on him. He's a recovering Californian, you know.

There are those of you who will disdain this personal involvement with the system. I do not begrudge your disdain any more than I begrudge Hans' energy for involving himself in the minutiae of government. Is he ambitious? Yeah, he is. Does he want to be one of our overlords? Hmm, yeah, he does, at least at some level of overlording--I've never asked him what he has in mind, and I've no idea if he knows what he has in mind, and if he does, he's sure not going to fucking tell the likes of me. Is he one of the 1 percent? Probably not. He's probably in about the same ballpark as I am, as far as that's concerned, and I really, really promise you that I'm not one of them. What makes him different?

Well, you're not going to like my answer to this, and I'm not going to contend that you should. The answer is: because I know him a little bit as a human. And I said so. So there.

Obviously, it would really be kinda seriously fucktarded for me to scorn any disagreement you might feel welling up at this point in the discourse.

The point? Right. Hans' blog. But first, also too: it turns out Hans is one of the five co-sponsors of the relatively pointless Walmart legislation. I should've figured that was the case. There's just no substantive political downside in MoCo to aligning yourself against Walmart. Duh on me.

So Hans' blog. I wrote him immediately when I saw it, expressing my hope that he was delegating blog production to some staffer. He replied quickly, telling me he does it himself. I believe him. The blog itself is pretty standard stuff, mostly diary, all designed to pump out Hans-centric stuff, as it should be. It's all Blooger-normal, and the tone is probably about right.

The links are local stuff, but...well, one of his links is Just Up The Pike, which I sometimes like and sometimes think is off its nut (as I did with the Walmart post, which started with a link to JUTP, which seems to think that Rockville Pike should be a walkable fake village from Route 28 to the Beltway; this idea is fucking silly). Another is Greater Greater Washington (both JUTP and GGW are linked from BFF's place, so I've never bothered). I've always read GGW respectfully, without necessarily agreeing with its POV, but I see that its most recent post (10/27/2011, and I'm not linking) is an affirmation of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Holy fucking shit. That's one of the most loathsome pieces of legislation ever. And the only thing GGW thinks is wrong with it is that it wasn't sufficiently funded. Holy fucking shit. GGW takes the farthest detour up its own ass when it talks about NCLB's teacher accountability provisions. Sure, it's good to be able to dismiss bad teachers, but NCLB links accountability to test scores. It has done more to dumb down education and water down critical thinking than any other measure since the advent of public education. It is the point source of teaching to the test. The GGW blogger refers to himself as an "educator," which means he's an administrator, not a teacher (if he were a teacher, he'd say so; if he were an administrator, he'd cloud it; bingo). Further, he weasels the issue by saying that he (as a "taxpayer," and like "lots of teachers") supports NCLB's goals for accountability. You might read that as softening his support for NCLB's approach; I read it as weasel shit, because if didn't support the approach, he wouldn't be sleeping with the enemy. Among the parts of NCLB he explicitly likes: allowing parents to pull their children from their local schools that don't meet AYP (average yearly progress, another loathsome and faux-metrics-driven feature of the law), and especially allowing parents to pull their children from "dangerous" high schools (he cites, stunningly, a high school in Prince Georges County--right, I see where we're going here).

I have never before seen a post this contemptible on GGW. It's so awful I won't link to it.

And I digress. Hans gets a cookie for blogging, and for taking the time to do it himself (it's his clock, what the fuck should I care?). The truth is that sources of information about our local locality are limited--even biased sources like GGW (yeah, okay, or me or BFF or JUTP or Your Fucking Washington Post) require some hunting. While I respect the perspectives of some of my bloggyfriends who have no use for government, I think it's okay for people to have some clue what their local overlords are thinking, and for my part, I trust that what Hans tells me in his blog is true, at least for a given value of truth unrelated to whether or not people vote for him.

Well, shit, all that took a left turn from where I started. Whatever. I think I started the post with the intent of picking out dumb shit Hans blogged and mocking it. Sorry, my assault on NCLB left me too winded to mock. My bad.

Update: Oh, shit, I forgot the actual professional criticism (I'm an actual Web professional, you know): Hans, your labels suck balls. Get someone to go through them for you. You got librarians down there at the COB, I know you do.

A Promised Discourse on Walmart Derangement Syndrome

2011-10-18T19:44:00.000-04:00

So it all started over at BFF's place, my godzillan steps into a likely unpopular speculation that makes even me a tad fluttery as I try to articulate it. He linked to a YFWP story about a Walmart going up on Rockville Pike, on the heels of another over in Aspen Hill, the second and third MoCo Walmart-branded legacies of Old Dead Sam (there's a Sam's Club in Gophershole, and maybe another over in Wee-Tone, or maybe it's the other big club box--beats the willies out of me).

I don't give a flying fuck about Walmart any more than I do about any other ginormous retailer. Sasha weeps of a tragedy in that the proposed Wallyworld outlet will glass over a shithole shopping center that happens to contain her favorite bagel joint. Fuck that, it can move across the street to the abandoned former Hooters.

Comments hilarity ensued, all in good fun, and it took blogquaintance Richard (who is, I posit, as literary and thoughtful as I am snarky and reductionist--and if you think I'm overdrawing my credit for snarky and reductionist, then please do me the favor of extending him my overdraft and then some for literary and thoughtful) to crystalize my point; from the perspective of the loosely affiliated community over at BFF's place, what's the difference between Target and Wallyworld? Richard--like Ilse--frequents Target. I surmise that this is, in part, because Richard has a youngish child. From a complicity perspective, Target is a lesser evil for those of us who have to cover little growing humans in textiles--and I think we can all admit that this level of complicity is probably preferable to alternatives like, say, the Division of Child Welfare. I suspect that many of us will admit that it's even preferable to draping our wee folk in homespun.

The point extends, as it did in BFF's comments; unless you're living a life completely withdrawn from our consumerist culture--including your diet--you're not free of complicity in this nightmare. I suspect few of us in that circle are so completely withdrawn. I know Sasha isn't--one of her plaints about the proposed WallyWorld is that it'll increase traffic on her secret back escape hatch into...a nearby Target.

I'm not trying to throw unreasonable stones here. At rock bottom, "I fucking hate Walmart" is good enough, isn't it? I myself dislike asparagus and Exxon and the Dallas Cowboys while buying into all manner of related corporatey goodness. But let's get real. On the merits, Walmart is no particularly worse than any other big box (I'll concede its hostility to unions, though I'll ask if Target, since we seem to have defaulted to them as the comparison, is a UFCW bastion).

The YFWP story points up some proposed legislation by my local county's governing body:

But after the Aspen Hill announcement, five County Council members sponsored a bill that would require some big-box retail stores to sign, or make a good-faith effort to complete, a public-benefits contract with community groups. After its introduction last Tuesday, the legislation drew ire from developers, big retailers and chambers of commerce.

The bill, which has not been passed, would affect both Wal-Marts because they would be more than 75,000 square feet.

Well. I wonder what the fuck that means. Oh, look:

"If these big box retailers want to move in, they have to sign a binding agreement with the community, and the community has a major say in what that store looks like," [Council President] Ervin said.

Community input could include whether employees are hired from within the county and whether the business uses green technology.

So...ginormous superstores already in place are exempt? Wow. Cuz, uhm, there are a boatload of big boxes round hereabouts that easily exceed that 75,000-foot mark. Ervin, a notorious sack of crap, also seems to be using the issue to drive a wedge between two sizeable unions. One of them is a UFCW local. The other is a UFCW local consisting of county government employees--a constituency that Ervin, as noted in my linked post, despises, reviles, and shits on at every opportunity. I sort of think the proposal is reflexive obstruction. On the other hand, I'm not all that sure how much it matters--I reckon Wallyworld is probably capable of conjuring up enough of some shitstorm of corporate responsibility to outsmart the likes of Valerie Ervin.

Oh, right, the point: Sasha supports this legislation. I'll pass on levying (in detail) the guilt by association, at least here.

A final note: No word yet on what poor Hans Riemer thinks of this. But maybe he'll see his name in Google reader (the point, in fact, of this paragraph), blanch when he sees my blog's name next to it, and let us know. That is, if he thinks anything shareable yet (he's a clever lad, our Hans, and one of my favorite things about him is that he typically shuts the fuck up a whole lot and lets other councilmembers duke it out in the pages of the Gazette). Full disclosure: I once ordered a glass of water for Hans at lunch when he was off taking a phone call. I'm told that doesn't mean I have to register as a lobbyist.

Al Davis

2011-10-09T09:42:00.000-04:00

Yeah. It's John Lennon's birthday, life is roasted with turmoil and sauced with grief and regret, I'm still processing whether those occupistas are dirty hippies, slackers, bums, or class heroes, it's the Redskins' bye week and I've no idea what to do about the wide receiver slot in the league where I own both Santana Moss and Jabar Gaffney, and I bought hockey tickets for a night when there's a DCU home game, again, but fuck all that, I wanna talk about Al Davis.

What a fucking genius. Brethren too wrapped up in angst to discuss anything else might label Davis as one of the exploiters (or I might be cruel, and they might be just as likely to enjoy this NFL Sunday as I am). People who didn't like him or the Raiders or his dark glasses or his style are making zombie jokes, and even some of us who liked him only put those jokes in a little box on hearing of Davis' death. I'm not sure what the decent interval for pulling them out is, but I'll get there on the math.

There are a number of salient things to note about Al Davis--a passionate student of the game, an independent-minded coach and owner who loved his franchise and his players and coaches and fans, a man who was the first in our time to hire a black coach, a man who loved to take a giant dump on the chest of the NFL corporate entity (sadly for the angst-ridden, it was mostly in his self-interest to do so). His passion for winning, beyond his passion for the game itself, was hard to match.

Look, when I was a kid, I hated the Raiders, and I sure wasn't fond of them when that little golden prick Jon Gruden was their coach. Sometimes, that sort of historical hatin' holds up under grownup scrutiny; witness my feelings about the Packers, a team from out of my team's division, not a historical rival at all, not even linked in any level of consciousness with my beloved Redskins for anything more than a single game at a time. That's how much I hated the juggernaut teams of the 60s, and it was easy for me to put the Raiders in that bucket.

Eventually I woke up and stopped buying mindlessly into villain narratives.¹ I figured out some of the shit Al Davis did in his time as a professional football icon, realized that the Raiders were doing something very different from what other clubs did (and winning their share by doing it), took a look at the names of some of the men whose fabulous NFL careers were linked to his. Holy fucking crap. Look at the plethora of stories on his passing, the list of NFL names associated with him, the things people are saying. One sports bobblehead lands on a gem of an observation: We talk about the modern era of thus and such a sport or pursuit; with a league with no Al Davis, the modern era begins now.

I admit that I only started to be a good neighbor to Raider Nation late in life, specifically when they acquired a number of players fairly dear to my heart. Today, I'm saddened for Raider Nation and for the league.

RIP, Al Davis. Just win, baby.

¹When it pleases me to stop buying in. Fuck you, I'll villainize whoever I damn well please.

DCU 4-1 RSL

2011-09-25T11:59:00.000-04:00

I was going to let BFF handle it, but I forgot he's more into the taste of his own navel than into reportage, plus he says things worthy of more lengthy comment than I should burden his space with. I fucking hate lazy reporting. Especially on a game without DC-area television coverage (I'm sure that footy blogfriends were all watching the remarkably mendacious RSL feed from their secret lairs in other states).

I attended with Databoy, so I was set for a trying experience, because I'm just fucking Eeyore that way. That doesn't mean I was wrong, but I was able to hoist the little fucker down one row, into a space from which he could see better, babysat by a 232 friend who shares my actual first name. This put D-boy right behind a greasy, diseased, mostly naked chick who actually turned around to talk to him because, as best I could tell, she shared his middle-school sense of humor (I saw it out of the corner of my eye, but I was game-focused and I'm relying on reports from BFF and D-boy himself on these details). I'm pretty sure it was the highlight of his life so far.

I shouldn't pound on the kid. I shudder to think what my Spank Bank must've looked like when I was thirteen.

You're welcome, honey.

I am able to take in stride without bitching the notion that we must listen to the National Anthem before a sporting event. I spent my pre-formative years as an Army brat; years and knowledge and bitterness about civil reality have not erased the instinct to dismount and stand to when I hear the call to colors. That doesn't mean I have to like everyone who sings the song, and there is no shortage of anthem singers who can't sing a lick, can't pronounce the words ("pair-oo-lus"; really? Just die.) or don't know what they mean, can't pick a key, can't resist introducing their own rhythms and rondos, have to move their hands up and down the scale as they sing, and can neither decide on a pace nor get the simple notion that you don't drag out the fucking National Anthem into a four-minute performance. Anything over a minute is evidence of capital self-absorption.

Our favorite, as BFF notes, is Stu Knazik. BFF captured a wonderful and felicitous double image of Stu superimposed over team shots of RSL and DCU during last night's anthem, while he was busy disrespecting the colors (which I hasten to emphasize that he doesn't usually do, though he's not nearly as diamond-shitting about it as I am). We were talking with Seatnine (he has no other name, though I'd probably trust him with my rent check) about the need for a commemorative shirt. Here's my offer:

Stu has a magnificent baritone voice, a perfect sense of self and place and pace, and can sing both "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "~~Blame~~ Oh ~~Calcutta~~ Canada," which is sad but necessary. He can pronounce all the words. He picks a key. He comes in close to a minute (as BFF pointed out last night in a fit of impatience that posed the relatively rare suggestion that he might benefit from a little Ritalin from time to time, as might we all, Stu did slow it down a tad in the last phrase, just this once). He is the perfect anthem singer.

We love Stu.

I did not, by the way, manipulate the image of Stu other than to crop it from something else. That is actually Stu's head floating on the decolletage of assorted young women. Go Stu.¹

See? You don't get that kind of fact-based reporting from the other networks. You see why I have to take time from a busy Sunday to blog this shite? Instead of puking it into BFF's comments?

There was a game? Oh, right. Yeah, uhm, that was fucking awesome, if completely unanticipated. DeRosario is a fucking monster when the spirit moves; he can, in fact, carry a team on his back, given a modicum of surrounding competency, provided last night mostly by Andy Najar, with nontrivial added value from Stephen King. BFF was fond of the header and couldn't stop chanting that it was the goal of the year (another and very different bout of logorrhea caused me to punch his arm, which I probably hadn't done in 35 fucking years; in my defense, he mouth-shat some obsessive-compulsive prediction about Kitchen writhing on the ground, and lo and behold, not four minutes later, Kitchen and Hamid collided at full speed. I know you can't help yourself, but really, wasn't breaking Pontius' leg enough, BFF?). On reflection, I liked Najar's breakaway goal best, especially considering how many times Najar foot-choked later in the game as he felt pressure to keep up with DeRosario. Fuck if I know why.

DeRosario's free-kick goal was pretty, but in an ordinary way. Nicky Rimando--the only RSL denizen who isn't a punkass bitch--misplayed it, horribly and inexplicably. It was the fourth goal, and I suspect Nick was pretty fucking shellshocked by then. None of the others could truly be said to be Rimando's fault.

Usual MLS refereeing bitch: What a fucking moron. I call shenanigans, I point to corruption in the system. That fucker spent the entire second half letting RSL paste DCU players into oblivion, while calling foul on every bit of irrelevant contact on DCU. The capper was Saborio's goal, on which Saborio was clearly offside. I mean, clearly, no fucking question about it. Not even fucking close. On the RSL feed, which provided the MLS highlights (there was no local broadcast), the announcers ignored it ("The flag stays down," and "The referee says he's onside!"--oh, well, that must be determinative, huh? Fuckwits.). Available replays provided no help, because the RSL production crew has no idea how to set up in RFK, and it's not like MLS was going to let us see the full development of the play. But when the ball is two feet off the server's foot and Saborio is eight to ten feet behind the defensive line? And the assistant ref has been masturbating 20 yards upfield? Yeah. I've seen our goals called back by similarly malpositioned ARs on razor-thin margins, and I have to tolerate Hamid getting dooked out of a clean sheet by that horseshit because MLS thinks the fucking Salt Lake TV market matters? Suck it, MLS, you clown-ass punks.

The conversation: BFF captured a postgame midfield conversation between the aging but beloved Clyde Simms and Saint Benny. He speculates that it related to Clyde's gradual and sad breakdown. I think the relationship is more indirect. From the hand gestures, I'd speculate that they were talking about one of two things: the goal that spoiled Hamid's clean sheet, or the difference between how the team held this lead and how they didn't hold the lead on Wednesday night. I was (and am) actually inclined toward the latter, based entirely on the gesturing (which was not all that emphatic, and which is the only clue we have, other than the fact of the conversation--which was, as BFF points out, really unusual).

Maybe I'm being too hopeful; I hope that Benny and Clyde recognize the difference here, that the team kept attacking and didn't drop into backpassing and timewasting until about the 76th minute, that they kept up pressure throughout, and that Marc Fucking Burch started at left back, in addition to the more obvious note of King in the middle and Da Luz at left mid. I'm sick of Burch getting no cred. Yeah, he's slow. Yeah, he orbits the ball before he kicks it. Here's something Marc Burch hasn't done: get cut by the fucking Fire, the worst fucking team in the Eastern Conference. Raise your hand if you've done that. Yes? You, Daniel Woolard?

Is my hope too steep? I dunno. We riffed a little, after the lead grew to 4-0, on whether it would be worse for the club to choke the lead (thus inspiring us to abandon all hope) or to hold on to it (thus propelling our hopes into a shoe-vomiting festivus against Phunions, motherfucking cocksucking shitbird douchatory Fire, the KC Cheese Wiz, and probably even fucking Portland, Zombie Troy Perkins rising from the ashes in RFK, stealing Barra Troy's voodoo hat, cleansheeting us out of the fucking point we'll need to claw into the playoffs).

Inconclusive. Outlook cloudy. Ask again later.

¹Yes. Yes, Goth, it is pretty fucking remarkable, isn't it?

DCU 2-2 Chivas

2011-09-21T23:05:00.000-04:00

I grow weary. I'm tired of writing the same fucking futbol story over and over. Up 2-0 in the 47th minute, United choked two goals--not just to Chivas, but to fucking Juan Pablo Angel (tag line: If you see Juan Pablo, knock him down) to get only a point out of a game that should have yielded three.

I have little to say. The team continues to believe that a lead--any lead--relieves it of the responsibility to possess, to attack. As if by magic, when the Goats equalized, the team started to try to attack again. You cannot attempt to close up shop starting before the 75th minute, especially when you're really fucking inept at closing up shop. This has been a refrain in this blog's futbol writings for nigh unto four fucking years. Through coach after coach, United has tried to sit on leads--or even non-leads--with a smashing lack of success. Just smarten the fuck up, people.

MLS refereeing remains consistently horrible. Michael Umana should've been red-carded for a vicious foul on Tino Quaranta (even Umana was shocked that he only got a yellow card); referee Chris Penso made no call on a play on which Ante Jazic destroyed a defenseless Dwayne DeRosario over the back, leaving both players writhing on the grass; and moments later, in stoppage, Penso attempted to atone for his error by awarding an otherwise ridiculous penalty for Angel's gentle hip check (seriously, it was more like an affectionate dance move) on DeRosario in the box.

Look, the shite officiating didn't really affect the game; DeRosario missed the penalty, laughably, with a weak effort. But the inconsistency, the failure to maintain control, the failure to punish violent play...those are the things that are consistent. Christ, even fourth official Alex Prus, who is a loosely woven sack of dysenteric monkey shit, would've shown Umana the door and made a call on the insanely dangerous Jazic foul.

But that's a sideshow. The real story here is United's failure to capitalize on some awesome set-piece play--which yielded very fine goals by DeRosario and, of all people, Ethan White. I should be raving about that and the two run-of-play goals that United created (not) as it was trying to secure its lead (not). Instead, I'm left to wonder why a fucking saint can't blorp his head out of his ass long enough to figure out that this team can't play defensively. Fuck it. See Fullback for the epitaph (the trademark is his). Wait a minute, he's already up? And that sweet, sweet signature isn't there? Jeebus, Hund, you can't fucking close up shop this early.

Did You Know That BFF Will Ask You Today Whether You Know That DC Has A Professional Soccer Team?

2011-09-21T07:20:00.000-04:00

Well? Did you? I now need a home game worse than I have ever needed a home game, and that includes opening nights.

Also, I tipped BFF to this bit over at Edroso's place, but I wanted to link to it also. Seems conservatives hate postmodernism because it's European and intellectual. I do too, but also because it wears black and likes Derrida (Damn! The Hooded Negro made his Derrida video private! Fucker!).

All The Nod This Shit Is Getting From Me

2011-09-10T23:53:00.000-04:00

There's nearly as much noise about what a pile of shit the 911gasm is as the 911gasm is making itself. Nearly, but different in tenor and still only nearly in quantity. A little while ago (as I write this), United's number 9, Charlie Davies, scored in the 11th minute of a soccer game. Talkybobbleheads went wild for this bit of insignificant random numerology.

Think for a second about how fucked up in the head someone, individually or collectively, has to be to write this:

ON THE 10TH anniversary of al-Qaeda’s attack on New York and Washington, the conventional wisdom seems to be evolving from “We will be hit again” to “Osama bin Laden won by provoking us into a decade of overreaction.”

The feeling is understandable but incorrect, and it would be dangerous if it took hold.

That is a serious contender for the most fucking abysmally retarded thing I've ever read (h/t to Thunder, who linked to this gem of YFWP swill in BFF's comments).

I've never thought that 3,000 people senselessly killed in one day by wackaloons was or is a good thing, and anyone who thinks that the people--American or not--killed in the wars since constitute a good thing is dangerously fucking insane. Apparently, Fred Hiatt disagrees. I'm not going to get all chesty about that part, pretend I'm better because even I can do the pretty simple fucking math here. Nobody of sense or humanity wants fellow citizens murdered. Nobody of sense or humanity wants anyone to die prematurely or needlessly (and I'm not even up for the mental gymnastics of contextifying "needlessly" here). And nobody of sense or humanity could possibly contort the incredibly senseless changes in our national mindset since that day into a good thing, by any measure or in any context. It fails every test of logic, every test of truth, every test of rationality. That's a part I can get chesty about.

But apparently, Fred Hiatt differs, and he thinks I'm wrong. That's why I now call on the President of the United States to use his extraordinary powers--granted by Congress in the past 10 years--to shut Fred Hiatt and Your Fucking Washington Post the fucking fuck up. I'd personally consider that to be an isolated good outcome of 9/11.

Best wishes to you and yours for weathering the next 24 hours; for my part, I dread the afternoon's football games, and the mute button is likely. If you or someone you love lost someone that you or they loved on 9/11, or in the wars we spawned in its name, I am terribly sorry for that, and I respect your right to remember your loss, or theirs, as you see fit. But anyone who tells me that 9/11, or the changes since, are a good thing, and sneers that I'm wrong for thinking otherwise, is certainly a fit motherfucker to be punched.

Labor Day

2011-09-05T08:25:00.001-04:00

It's worth remembering why we have a day off here.

It's also worth remembering, as we mock ourselves and each other for our complicity in electing a man who's either an incompetent sap or an evil mastermind, depending on your point of view (I'm still squarely down with sap, without dismissing the point of view that there's a systemic issue), that we weren't alone.

Or that the question's not all that settled.

Enjoy the day off. Remember how you got it.

Update: Why it's important. (h/t Edroso)

Maintenance and Boredom

2011-09-03T10:07:00.000-04:00

I added more folks to the blogroll to the right, which remains really not so much a blogroll as a navigation tool. Some of them are clearly people who should've been there for some while; one is restored to grace for no reason other than that he is; some are habits or curiosities I've recently acquired. No endorsement of views implied or expressed.

Ilse wants you all to know that she feels really dirty for wearing a Carolina blue shirt to school yesterday. She also wants you to know that the pep rally was excruciating. And I've made her very uncomfortable about the little blue paw totem that rides over her left breast. She did make the cunning fashion choice of selecting only a white polo trimmed with the hated blue, for which I salute her good sense. I'm still wearing only a t-shirt from her last school (which I bought because her theatre kids harangued me into it).

She actually doesn't want you to know any of those things, but I'm really just a total fucking dick that way. And frankly, I'm kinda bored.

Justice was done in the end; her little blue coyote totem school lost to their archrivals (who are, I must admit, far more more worthy of derision), and my big blue condom school beat an ancient enemy, big-time. Sadly, the school in the front yard won, too. I know, because we can clearly hear the play-by-play over their PA system (the football field is quite seriously about 500 yards from our front door).

BFF wants you to know that he feels that his contribution to civilization is insignificant, so he's going to try to shut up for the weekend. I note that it's raining and he can't disk. But I counternote that he's entering the most horrible time of his year, so maybe...just maybe he'll meet his goal. Much more of this and I think we'll undertake a pledge drive.

No futbol, but Labor Day is a big football deal here, with two fantasy football drafts. I will not bore you with further detail except to note that Sasha (who needs to post something, anything, to sort out her RSS feed) and Whispers (who is the ancient Labor Day enemy) will be in attendance, and if we eat anything so yummy that I need to gloat about it, you'll be the first to know.

GAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

2011-08-29T07:07:00.000-04:00

Fucking hurricane. Fucking cancelled DCU game. Fucking destroyed brain cells.

Yesterday (yesterday, dammit!) was his birthday. Wish him happy.

Gratuitous Bump

2011-08-28T22:10:00.001-04:00

I take little joy in writing about anything other than futbol these days, though I'll likely write about football as well, once it gets started. I can no longer manage a semblance of coherence about politics; very little makes sense to me, and my rage is too diffusely targeted to be coherent, entertaining, or relevant. Bunnies are fun, but it's a limiting medium. Honestly, I do my best work in comments any more.

Banal state-of-being news: School starts tomorrow for the rest of the family, despite earthquakes and tropical storms. No damage here from either, and the power was out for only 12 hours; torture for a CPAP user and his spouse, but hardly waterboarding quality. Boy enters grade 8; Bam enters middle school, a transition more transitional that we're used to. Orientation for sixth grade did not welcome special ones, and Bam's faux daddy had to go pick him up, getting abused by an idiotic school administration in the process. Uhm...they sent a letter about sixth-grade orientation, and the bus came for him--the bus that picks him up at the end of our driveway, rather than down at the corner where the purported normals go. I'm not sure how I'm the offender here; I managed not to introduce the administrator's mongoloidism as a conversational topic, and I didn't even explicitly mention the ADA. I met Bam's teacher, and she seems a good egg, so it might be okay. For his part, Bam was unimpressed. There may have been some flapping, and there was certainly a demand for a Nutrigrain bar. Correlation, as always, does not equal causation.

Ilse also starts at a new school, though she's been in her preservice week for...well, a week. Her school is the newest in the county. Their mascot is an animal totem for prostitution. Their school color is Carolina Blue. I know, I repeat myself. Shazam! (Hi Jim).

New add to your right: Susan of Texas. She entertains me sometimes, and she can pick apart McMegan without concern trolls becoming concerned, since she's presumptively, y'know, a chick. They're incapable of sexism, I hear. Also: it appears that Susan may be a teacher, and we like them. Also: some folks in Bloggityville don't like her, which amuses me.

In truth, I'm just sick of having to click through to her from BFF's place.

KC-DCU Tape-Delayed Blogging

2011-08-21T23:29:00.000-04:00

As I write this, the second half is starting. But here on TV, we're just starting.

Starting:

United: Willis, Woolard, Jakovic, McDonald, Kitchen, Pontius, Quaranta, Simms, Najar, Wolff, Brettschneider
KC: Nielsen, Sinovic, Cesar, Besler, Myers, Zusi, Bravo, Espinoza, Sapong, Bunbury, Kamara

I have no idea why DeRosario isn't playing...let's see...he's resting, but in the 18, unlike punkass bitch Charlie Davies, who isn't even dressed.

Your referee is Alex Prus. The first yellow card will come in the 63rd minute, after the game's sixth broken leg. He is, as the idiom goes here, a loosely woven sack of dysenteric monkey shit.

United is wearing the red pajamas. I refuse to puke so BFF doesn't have to (he is, at this writing, somewhere in Pennsylvania, on the way home, and I'm not going to text him while he's driving the fucking Pennsylvania Turnpike).

1': Willis forced to save on Kamara, one of the most entertaining guys in MLS. Hey, look, Alex Fucking Prus was running that game too. Fucker.

2': Willis watches as CJ Sapong sails it over the bar. What a promising start, laying back and letting KC's top three pepper the goal.

3' and 4': Slightly violent fouls by KC.

5': Violent foul by KC against Andy Najar. Bowtie suggests in his keys to the game that DCU needs to play the counter against KC's possession game. Good luck with that.

7': Kei Kamara is eating Woolard's lunch, which isn't hard.

9': CJ Sapong appears to be a punkass bitch.

11': Jeebus, we've got to be the worst possession team since...since...well, since possession was invented.

13': Jakovic commits a filthy violent foul against...someone who isn't Sapong or Kamara or Hispanic. I dunno, it's fucking Kansas City, you want me to be paying attention to this shit? Prus keeps his hands out of his pockets. He shouldn't have.

15': Najar dispossesses Omar Bravo in the box without fouling, cheating, or resorting to hurling all 14 pounds of his incredibly tiny body into Bravo. Who is, by the way, a punkass bitch.

16': I want a Teal Bunbury.

16': Chance Myers, who is a fairy princess badly in need of a haircut, lays in some lovely service to Kamara, who misses with his head, over the bar. Myers is really a fucking sissy punk.

18': Comcast (or whoever's producing the video) can't stop closing up on Myers. He's gotta be part of the All-Sissy team, with Beckerman and Brek Shea also holding down key spots.

19': Violent foul on us. I think it was Woolard...no card...oh, Jeebus, what a strike. Jakovic totally passes out on the play after the restart and lets Kei Kamara drill it by Willis from the 18, after some nice service by Bravo and a little pinball. Well-deserved goal, 1-0 KC. We're gonna get smoked, if KC gets up 3-0 by halftime--as looks likely--I'm going to bed.

21': McDonald punks Bunbury, unkindly. Alex Prus has nothing in his pockets.

22': 50-yard backpass after a throw-in 20 yards into the attacking zone. Jeebus, we suck.

23': By the way, with the name change, KC has changed to Carolina Blue home kit. I've never bothered hating them, because they've never really been worth it, but they're a much better team than they've usually been, and the fucking Carolina Blue could tilt me over into some evil headspace when it comes to them.

24': Simms backpasses. Q backpasses. KC gains possession. Willis has to come out to the 18 to clean up while Kamara charges him. Jeebus, we suck.

25': Bunbury gets destroyed near midfield, Prus plays a silly advantage, we profit. Prus follows the possession change with a really dumb and undeserved foul call against KC.

27': Jakovic commits a professional foul on Bunbury, who goes down. Prus thinks Bunbury dived. Bowtie agrees. I am not all that convinced that a last-man hip-check is something you let go.

28': Chance Myers shoots from distance, earning himself many more seconds of camera time. Someone should dress him up in a pinafore.

29': Another problem with the red kit is that it's low-contract-from distance on TV, it's very difficult to make out our guys' numbers. It's also not a HD feed. Christ, what a whiner. Any poor people out there reading this? Please just fucking ignore me.

30': I really have never liked Chance Myers, and the flowing golden locks are really just pissing me off way out of proportion to anything related to reality. Won't it be an awesome day when he and Shea and Beckerman are all playing for USMNT and I have to blog it? I'll be totally off the hook, yo.

32': Bunbury is totally pwn3ng Jakovic. There will be yellow; I hope for Bunbury's sake (and the sake of future USMNTs, because Bunbury should definitely be in that mix) it comes before Jakovic breaks his bones.

34': Decent service by Q into the box; Wolff almost plays it decently, but he's not really in position.

35': Jakovic turns it over, gets bailed out by a sketchy offside call (at least it looked sketchy at full speed--no replay).

36': Kitchen pushes Sapong down while obstructing him, Sapong punches him in the nuts. Prus gives him a yellow card...for a medium-grade foul in the run of play thus far, and receiving a nutpunch. He deserved it for the foul; Sapong deserved one for the retaliation. Prus is a fucking moron. No, wait...he's a loosely woven sack of dysenteric monkey shit.

37': Willis almost gets lobbed by someone's head.

38': Y'know, if we keep this ridiculous shit together with gum and shoestring, and somehow escape with a point on a gack goal, I'd be really really pissed if I were anyone but me.

40': Either Q or Pontius--I can't tell which because of the crappy picture, and Bowtie and Davey are doing a crappy job (they're in the studio in Bethesda)--drills it at the far post, Jimmy Nielsen makes an awesome one-hand save. Nielsen has a lovely shiner from getting hit in the face with a bobblehead a few nights ago. Really.

41': Nice clearance by Kitchen while backtracking with Kamara hot on his heels.

42': Sapong dances nicely, but what looked like decent service wobbled out and let us clear. Meanwhile, Bowtie and Davey suck off NBC, which is taking over national coverage of MLS next season.

43': Najar carries it out and convinces the AR--who's on top of the play--that it was off some poor KC sap.

45': Hey, look, Josh Wolff sucks. One minute of stoppage.

45'+: Kitchen misses Wolff in the box. Nielsen takes his time with the goal kick. I would too. This is bullshit. Bravo and Bunbury turn a 2-on-1 into a 2-on-4 and gack away what looked, briefly, like a sure nutpunch of a goal.

Shit. Only 1-0. Y'know, I could just flip over to MLSNet and find out what happened and fake the rest. Backpass, backpass, Prus should've booked Jakovic or McDonald or both, Kei Kamara gacks a sitter, Bunbury breaks free on the right and pwns Woolard for one goal, Bravo serves it to himself and uncorks a 22-yard screamer into the upper right postage stamp, 3-0 KC. You'd never know the fucking difference. Unless we filthed out some more defense, with Kitchen moving to the middle after Jakovic's red card for ripping CJ Sapong's testicles out by the roots, and scraping out a 1-1 draw after Najar accidentally bounces it off of substitute Dwayne DeRosario's facial hair.

Guess I'll stay up.

Y'know, I just haven't seen that fucking VW commercial with the kid in the Darth Vader costume enough. Please show it again. In fact, strap me into a chair facing forward, tape my eyeballs open, and show it on a continuous loop. Oh, wait, that's what you're doing already.

Okay, what to do? Should someone--Brettschneider, who's not awful but isn't getting any service, or Wollf, who has reverted to suckage--come out for DeRosario right away? Get Simms' backpassing ass outta there for Steve King? Wait, did Bowtie just suggest Tracey Fucking Chapman? Jeebus. Die, Bowtie.

Yep. Here's DeRosario. Perhaps someone will be kind enough to tell me who's out? Yeah, Brettschneider.

46': Bowtie still wants fucking Ngwenya to come in. This is why Bowtie is unemployed from a coaching perspective.

46': Simms should've been booked for trying to break Espinoza's ankle...no, Jeebus, he fucking kicked him in the thigh and the nuts. Alex Prus is fucking awful.

47': Another nice free kick by Graham Zusi. Cleared, but Bunbury gets fouled on the way out.

48': Sinovic tripped by Najar in the box. No call. I think that's actually okay, but it was sloppy shit by Najar.

49': Prus whistles Q for standing still while Sapong jumps all over him to get at a header. Bullshit. Nice break by Kamara on the restart results in a corner kick off Woolard, who desperately backheels it over the goal line.

50': Wolff can't handle an easy distribution from Willis. Throw-in for KC.

51': Prus lets Pontius have a 20-yard runup on a throw-in. What a fucking tool.

52': Artless backpassing almost yields a turnover to Kamara. Sapong destroys Kitchen going up for a header, gets called for it this time. Simms backpasses to Najar, near-turnover, another near-turnover by Woolard, DeRosario grazes the crossbar after some more clown college possession.

53': I apologize to clowns.

53': Matt Besler jumps all over Josh Wolff trying for a header. Dood. He's a midget, you don't have to go over his back for air balls.

54': Q takes a well-deserved yellow for taking down Cesar from behind with a figure 4 leglock.

55': DeRosario twists out of danger and serves to Wolff, who lets it go because he's 4 yards offside.

56': Bunbury gacks a sitter after Jakovic gets turned and Woolard can't keep up. Actually, on replay, Jakovic got a foot on it.

57': Bravo gacks the ensuing possession after a ball falls to his feet after DeRosario left him unmarked. Good thing they suck too.

58': Again with the Bravo loose in the box shit. Jakovic near-fouls him for the save, corner results in jack shite.

59': Zusi makes Willis save on another 18-yard screamer. This shit has to stop, or we're conceding again for sure. The last five minutes have been totally fucking desperate.

61': Pontius loses a wrestling match with the sissy Chance Myers by fouling the shit out of him. Way to go, Party Boy. That was so dirty I thought, from distance, you were Q.

62': Fucked up a chance there. Q provided a decent ball, DeRosario got hung up in his own giant clanging balls. Bowtie bitches about the team's fussy precision. I have no idea what the fuck he thinks he's talking about.

64': OMFG, now they've got DeRosario backpassing stupid.

65': Be still my heart! Marc Burch for Josh Wolff! What the fuck? Oh, okay, Burchie's playing left mid again, I think Pontius is going up top.

66': For my part, I'm thrilled that the camera is now focusing obsessively on Marc Burch, instead of on the transgendered Chance Myers.

67': Jesus, Perry Kitchen gets spectacularly knocked the fuck down a lot.

69': Najar nutmegs Sinovic on the right wing, ends up with a corner. Too much pinball on the serve in.

70': Brandon McDonald does his Q imitation by skying one into the next ballpark over.

71': Pontius pwns someone, nice theft, Q actually keeps one down from 20 yards, but Nielsen gets to it.

72': Woolard pushes Kamara down from behind in the box on a long throw-in by Besler. No call, goal kick DC.

73': Some guy named Diop in for Bunbury. He's not the famous Diop. Whoever the fuck that is. Sorry, I'd have to look it up. I wanna say Papadou Diop, or something like that? It's not like I know anything about Euroball.

74': Wow. KC backpasses competently, shutting down play and holding possession, without endangering themselves. How refreshing.

75': Davey points out that KC only has 3 shots on goal. That's fucking remarkable, since possession has to be close to 60-40 in KC's favor. I can't believe we're only a goal down here.

76': Espinoza almost pwns Jakovic. Again. Hard tackle. No call. Corner. I can't believe we're only down one goal.

77': Jesus, you can't be shit for possession and shit in possession. Fucking total waste of possession, time and again. And backpassing? Now? They're not fucking chasing you when you backpass into your own half, dipshits. They don't have to.

78': Nice service by Pontius for Najar, who gets a poor touch. Fizzle.

80': Lovely service by Zusi on a free kick, nearly hits Kamara in the head.

80': Oh, shitfuck, Ngwenya for Woolard, Burch back to left back, Ngwenya up top with DeRosario. Abandon hope. Christ Ngwenya sucks.

81': Davey feels like there's a goal in this game. I do too, but I think it's KC who will get it. The remarkably pretty but poorly made up Chance Myers gacks a breakaway. I've seen uglier girls bury that, Chance.

83': Jesus, Ngwenya can't even foul people right. DeRosario had to actually make contact with Sapong, because Tracey Chapman couldn't fucking kick a guy in the ankle from 11 inches away. Asshole.

84': Oh, we've gone to the Q looking to the heavens after fucking up closeup. We're toast.

85': Diop dives over McDonald, no contact, Prus calls the foul. Diop's a punk.

86': Sapong makes Willis save. Willis really looks good, I'm glad his back got better. Who the fuck knows how long Hamid will be hammied?

87': Jesus H Tittyfucking Christ on a Wobblyass Splintered Crutch, DeRosario, why are you dropping back in possession? I tell you, it's a fucking contagion, Tommy Fucking Soehn left some goddamn backpassing anthrax in the fucking RFK showers and they haven't disinfected it yet. Fucking hopeless.

88': Y'know, it's really about time you got your fucking random bounce to pull out an undeserved draw, boys.

89': Oh, the utterly loathsome Michael Harrington comes in for Omar Bravo. Wretched. I mean, what a serious megadick.

89': Three minutes of stoppage.

90': Pontius casually dribbles into the box and lets himself be dispossessed, though he did manage to win a corner.

91': In case you're wondering, we still haven't scored from a corner this year. Fucking wastes of space.

92': Kitchen wins a goal kick off of the loathsome Harrington, but the team wastes the ensuing possession.

Full time: What a suckjob.

That's that. Really poor effort. United is pissing away their games in hand in the playoff race.

Nighty-night.

Chicago 1-1 DCU

2011-08-18T23:19:00.001-04:00

Flatter than an unusually flat thing; Flatty Flatterton laying flat at Flatitty Flats. That is how flat United came out in a game in which they should've destroyed the fucking Fire at Toyota Park tonight.

I'm doing quick hits here, because it's late, and when I wake up, my vacation will be over, which is a very sad bunny, but an annual sad bunny, so I ought not whimper. I'll leave the detailed analysis--which will undoubtedly involve reversion to the mean and the trademarking thereof--to Fullback, who's smarter than I am anyway (though not funnier).

Back in a state of grace: Josh Wolff, who scored the equalizer, and likely only until the next time he steps onto the field, which after tonight will be...next game at KC. Where I suspect he was going to start anyway.

Never really entered a state of grace: Stephen King, whose name was mentioned by the despicable ESPN broadcast team exactly twice, one of them when he was subbed out.

You suck, just die: John Harkes. In the words of a close friend: "What a knob." I'd rather listen to Eric Fucking Wynalda, who's really annoying, but cattier, funnier, and fucked Harkes' wife. Or shit, I don't know, maybe it was the other way around. If you gave me a gun, one bullet, John Harkes, and Tommy Soehn, I'd spare Soehn. When I call Bruce Arena a traitor? It's because that word's too fucking kind for John Fucking Harkes.

Seriously?: Bill Hamid's hamstring. What the fucking fuck?

No, seriously?: Steve Cronin's existence. Oxygen thief.

You were dirtier when you were Julius James' grasshopper: Dejan Jakovic, who really needs to relearn that if you're going to punk a speedy little bitch like Patrick Nyarko, you'd best punk his speedy little bitch ass to the ground.

Shut up, you pouty useless bitch: Charlie Davies.Grow the fuck up, you adolescent punk. Pissed off you got benched? Try actually playing football, you lazy sack of shite.

That's all I got. In fact, all I had was the first two sentences, my fingers just kept moving. Peace out.

DCU 4-0 Vancouver

2011-08-13T23:45:00.000-04:00

No, beating Vancouver at home is still the mean.

It's undeniable that it was lovely to stand in 232 for a win, for a change, and...well, the last time United put up four goals at home was April 28, 2010, though that was a USOC game against the Burn. Searching...searching...wow, this isn't easy...September 30, 2009, five at home against San Juan Wouldjablowme in an ultimately futile CONCACAF Champions League game (aren't you glad we're not playing in those any more?)...Jeebus...June 29, 2008, against the Gals was the last time United put up four in a home league game. I didn't blog the game, but you know the most significant thing about it? I'll bet you don't. It was the last time El Muneco played for United (he scored to bring his price down to a mere $467,500 per goal). It was the last season in which United won hardware (USOC), leading to the hilarious Wikipedia claim, apparently written by El Muneco's wife, that Gallardo is "one of the few players that won a championship or a league in every team that he play[ed]." That's technically true, though Gallardo went down in the Galaxy game, never to play for the team again--two days before the team's first USOC game of the year.

Turn back now. That was the high point of this post.

So yeah. It was fun. It's hard not to have fun beating the shit out of a team coached by a gormless, futile piece of shit like Tommy Soehn. Random keeper Joe Willis was a close choice for MotM (I'd have given it to Pontius, who scored twice, but Willis played very well, earned the permanent backup job in a righteous universe, and relegated Steve Cronin to his place as a third choice who makes Troy Perkins look good--and this on a night when Jay Fucking Nolly was on the field). Najar was fine, Quaranta was okay as long as he wasn't touching the ball, DeRosario was magnificent (but gacked twice), and Stephen King was, for Stephen King, fucking magnificent.

Charlie Davies was fuckawful. The situation at forward is now at about DefCon Three, the nuclear annihilation clock of United's attack sitting at about 11:50 PM. Let's count it out: Tracey Chapman is a loser who should be picked off with a high-powered sniper rifle for putting on any black shirt, let alone setting foot on the field or coming within 10 yards of the ball; Blake Brettschneider is sorta promising and very likeable, but concussed and a kid; Josh Wolff has become utterly fucking useless since his last groin, and wasn't all that useful before that; and the only saving grace of the attack for the last month has been Mr. DeRosario (the chemistry between him and Najar, and to a lesser extent him and Pontius, is very nice). For the money, Davies needs to be fucking useful.

He's not. He's a diving pussy, and everyone knows it. He will never, ever, ever again get a call from a MLS referee; after two or three weak and halfhearted dives tonight, he got fouled, for real, an arguably yellow-card, possibly last-man professional foul on a breakaway when he was held and dragged down...and Hilario Grajeda booked him for diving. To his limited credit, Davies got the message and didn't dive for the rest of the game, which exposed him as utterly lame and unimaginative off the ball, and inept with it. He didn't even show any turn of the speed which is supposed to make him a player. He's done as a national team threat, and he's not worth the money as a player in MLS. United has an option on him for next year; if they have to pay any more than they'd pay for, say, Blake Brettschneider, they shouldn't exercise it--and the question came up in 232 as Davies stumbled his way through failures to make space, failures to beat defenders when in possession, failures to run faster than, say, famous traffic cone Carey Talley: of our DPs, do we keep Boskovic or Davies? The answer's an easy one, even though Boskovic has been plagued by injury and apathy since his arrival (BFF's rendition of this story will likely include a tubercular loogie gobbed in the deserved direction of Steve Nicol).

But fun fun fun to see a home win, and a mild runup of the score. Shoulda been more--Vancouver's the worst team in the league¹, by far, and I'm deadly serious about beating them only 4-0 being, in essence, the same reversion to the mean that Fullback coined and continues to parlay (correctly and successfully, I should add, and I've taken long enough writing this that he may well be up with his game post already, and I may or may not come back and add the specific link)--but still fun.

The most fun--the very most fun ever ever ever--was when Pontius was subbed off. I was mildly bummed, because the boy was set up for a hat trick, and boy was the team trying to get him there. But when Pontius trotted off, in came the man I pay to see, the man whose jersey I now wear, a man who needs no right foot...Marc Burch. Burch was entering only his eighth match of the season--he's been injury-plagued, and for some reason, since his injury he's been behind this jackass on the depth chart at left back. Tonight he was playing in front of the jackass, playiing at left mid as Austin Da Luz--the previous standard for "only plays on the left," as Seatsix cunningly noted--moved to the right.

Lemme tell you about Burch and Woolard. Woolard is a fucking Chicago Fire reject. He spent last year playing for the fucking Carolina Railhawks. He's a piece of crap. He does nothing in offense, his left foot isn't nearly as powerful or decisive as Burch's, and his right foot isn't all that much better than the noodle at the end of Burchie's right leg (which Burch has worked to improve--tonight I actually saw him perform an unheard-of touch pass with the right). Marc Burch has more character in his dick than Daniel Woolard has in his entire career. The night that Burch earned his place in United lore, one of the most righteous nights in this storied team's storied history, Daniel Fucking Woolard was...playing for the other fucking team, the motherfucking Chicago Fucking Fire.

I took a lot of shit when Burch came in and I turned to show my mates in 232 the back of my shirt. A lot of shit. Faces fell moments later when Burch streaked into the left side of the box and beautifully set DeRosario up for one of his two gacks. Confess my vindication, bitchez.

Seatsix agrees--for that night alone, Marc Burch deserves to be up on the wall at RFK. Also...well, shit, I can't find a post to it, but once upon a time, last year, in a mostly empty and quiet stadium in a futile second half of I know not what game, Burchie was in possession, in space, coming over the midfield line, and still had space and possession when he got about 12 yards past the line. 35-40 yards out, there's no noise coming from Loud Side, and I screamed, "Shoot!" Burchie did. Missed wildly, but he obeyed, as Loud Side turned around to stare at me in disbelief. How can I not be gay for the guy?

Oh. Did I digress? Sorry. Fun fun fun. Burchie and Blanco at the Plex 4ever. I'm ranted out now, see you next time.

¹ Ilse gets credit for the line of the night, though: "I was really hoping they'd be wearing little white caps."

DCU 3-3 Toronto

2011-08-07T00:07:00.005-04:00

What a clusterfuck, every bit of it attributable to one person or another, in contrast to the usual team-effort goofiness that has plagued United this season. For its part, the team showed more heart and fire than we've seen in some time (including last week's win at San Jose), despite some lethargy at key points as the game wore on; I attribute most of it to Dwayne DeRosario, who tricked in an epic performance.

Let's break down the misery a bit:

-Bill Hamid well and truly bought his red card. He was outside the box, he made contact with Eric Avila after the ball was well away from Avila, and he sent Avila into a spectacular cartwheel from which Avila was fortunate to walk away. It was a straight red card. I can't prove this next bit, because I didn't mention to anyone before the game (it was the first time I'd seen BFF for over a month, and we were all chattering excitedly before the game started), but I wondered what to expect from him tonight, after his selection to the national team for next week's friendly against Mexico, wondered if he'd be an insufferable prick. Yup.

-Steve Cronin is to blame for all three Toronto goals. He punched one down into his 18, instead of up and away; it was clear he was afraid to handle a wet ball. There were at least four occasions when he punched instead of trying to hold the ball. Then, later, on a hold, he barely clung to the sides of the ball (rather than getting a hand behind the ball to prevent it squirting into the net), leading to a collective gasp from 232. The De Guzman goal, which came when play shouldn't have been restarted, was well within a range where it could and should have been saved; and the third Toronto goal was utter crap as Cronin sort of crumpled up dumbfounded. He's a fucking hoser.

I should note for those listening to me bitch that I thought Andy Iro was offside on the third goal; on replay, I see that Austin Da Luz was guarding the far post against invisible attacking pixies, keeping Iro onside and rendering it irrelevant whether he touched the ball.

The De Guzman goal came while play should've been stopped. Now, things are a little sketchy here. Custom is for a substitution to be allowed to be completed before play is restarted (under the laws of the game, a substitution can only be made during a "stoppage"). Now, bear with me here, because while it was unconscionable that referee Jasen Anno allowed play to restart and this goal to stand, I'm having a hard time justifying that stance by anything other than custom. Here's what it says in the Laws of the Game:

To replace a player with a substitute, the following conditions must be observed:

-the referee must be informed before any proposed substitution is made
-the substitute only enters the field of play after the player being replaced has left and after receiving a signal from the referee
-the substitute only enters the field of play at the halfway line and during a stoppage in the match
-the substitution is completed when a substitute enters the field of play
-from that moment, the substitute becomes a player and the player he has replaced becomes a substituted player
-the substituted player takes no further part in the match
-all substitutes are subject to the authority and jurisdiction of the referee, whether called upon to play or not

The laws regarding the procedure for restarts, ~~free kicks~~ throw-ins, and timing are even less helpful here. It does not appear that Anno was required to let Ethan White (who was being substituted, as duly authorized by Anno, for the injured Brandon McDonald) get reasonably set before the restart. I have never seen a referee allow a quick restart during a substitution. I don't think Ben Olsen (who did his job and got ejected arguing the call) or the team on the field had ever seen it either.

Goff says in his story that "Anno didn't stop play as he was required to do." Goff cites no authority.

Was Anno wrong? Hell yes, and he was a fucking dick about it, persistently. He issued two red cards to DCU and persistently let violent conduct by Toronto pass with just a whistle. Did Hamid and Olsen deserve red cards? Yes for Hamid, and technically yes for Olsen. Did he hold the two teams to different standards of conduct? Very, very clearly so. He belongs unemployed.

What do I make of it all? Fuck if I know. It's frustrating as hell, not being able to win at home, even against clearly inferior opposition. Toronto has fuck-all nothing, just nothing, they're a terrible fucking team. DeRosario picked them apart almost at will (though apparently, he should have willed picking them apart a few more times). Toronto dominated the stats (66 percent possession? Holy crap, what an awesome demonstration of crap possession, then), but I never felt endangered except when the going got weird.

Of course, we can argue that the going's been weird since March.

Update: Fullback, no less disturbed about the outcome, disagrees about Hamid's red, and has unkind things to say about Josh Wolff--which I suspect BFF will echo in the morning. I agree about Wolff.

Update 2: Outrage is legion, and BFF doesn't appear to be up yet, so there's more to come and I couldn't be happier about that, because he'll also say something with which I'll dickishly quibble, and don't judge me, we all need hobbies.

Anno appears to have falsified his match report--White clearly had not entered the field before the restart.

People who should know better get exercised about the very existence of a match report.

USSF's Referee Week In Review comes out on Fridays--this is so weird that it would be pretty unconscionable for it not to be included, but it's hard to predict what USSF will or won't try to cover up. They'll probably get friendly and lovable Mike Kennedy to talk about the Hamid red card instead.

Update 3 (and fin): Bad timing; BFF is up.

San Jose 0-2 United

2011-07-31T08:55:00.000-04:00

Davey and Bowtie--who I believe were watching the game from Comcast Regional Sports HQ in Bethesda--couldn't STFU about several things last night:

Steven Lenhart, who is a fucking freak, missed the game for "personal reasons." If I had a hooker for every time Davey gave us this news, I'd have a whole lot of diseases. Lenhart was a pain in the ass when he wore yellow for Columbus, and he's a pain in the ass now--he got his ginormous blonde 70s-porn-curly-permed body in front of three lucky ricochets back in June, during Bill Hamid's Big Nervous Breakdown, a game the Quakes won 4-2 in RFK, coming back repeatedly to show us that yes, no matter what doesn't suck, DCU does.

DCU had never previously beaten the Quakes in San Jose, although in 1998, they beat the Clash there, during Saint Benny's rookie season, in a game in which Saint Benny had a goal and an assist. From the 67th minute on, I believe Davey said something about this every 52 seconds.

Dwayne DeRosario has played for every football team in the world. He would now like to score DCU goals against every stinking one of them. Furthermore, every single DCU player is connected to every single other San Jose player or coach in some bizarre love triangle (go!) that Davey and Bowtie couldn't STFU about, including...

Frank Yallop. They didn't say anything particularly meaningful or insightful about old Frank, but they sure like saying "Frank Yallop." I don't think I can begrudge this. I like saying "Frank Yallop" too, and he's certainly a good MLS egg.

Oh, the game? Hmm. Let's see. You start a tinkered-up crapheap of a lineup (of necessity), with Dwayne Fucking DeRosario at the top, and there's a pretty good chance that, if anyone in the crap heap is over the age of 14 and the people on the back line have ever defended before, you're going to put up two on a team as appallingly bad as San Jose. Why are they so appallingly bad? Well, for one thing, they're worse than us. That's right. No lie. As much as I bitch and complain, the Quakes, the Fire, the Original Canucktards, and the New Canucktards are all far worse than our beloved Black and Red. Duh on that last bit, by the way.

Possession was mostly pointless except for the sequences where Pontius, Najar, and DeRosario got it cooking. Pontius provided lovely, but mostly accidental service to DeRosario in the middle. Najar's ball on the first goal did have a real purty mouth, but that all got spoilt later on in the desperate race to allow the Quakes 32 minutes of possession in our half. Given the quality of possession and defense from the 75th minute on? We're lucky San Jose didn't equalize.

Let's be absolutely clear, here; while Najar's red card was a little harsh under the circumstances, he had it coming, and MLS referees can't be relied upon to work out the fine detail on that kind of play with any reliability, even with an assistant. Najar fouled, he fouled from behind, and while he wasn't last, he was damn close to it. He was also too busy badgering for an offside call to do his fucking job. So he launched himself into a tackle, got tangled up with Joey Gjertsen, and took the red.

Najar's been begging for this card for two fucking years. Begging for it. He is an insane rabid mechanoid on defense, lacking only a robot voice chanting "Destroy all humans" as he launches back on defense at light speed, paying no fucking attention to what he's doing, bent solely on revenge for the sixty-two times this game he's been punked at high velocity into the earth because he's an 18-year-old midget whose growth has been, apparently, stunted by the effort of keeping up at DCU Academy, where the houses are named "Harkesclaw" and "Etcheverryer" and "Soehnerin" and he didn't even have the prospect of staring at Emma Watson's ass to keep him focused on eating adequately to grow past four feet eleven or whatever ridiculously doomed height he stands.

Wow, that got totally out of control. Lemme breathe for a sec. Okay, the point is that Najar is a wild punkass bitch on defense, and it finally caught up to him. Independent of his behavior in general? He deserved a yellow. Given context and history? Yeah, he earned that red in spades.

Comcast never gave us the right angle to tell whether Gjertsen was offside. I think he had to have been--there's no way in hell Joey Gjertsen gets that far clear after staying on. But--and this is how we learned, definitively, that Davey and Bowtie were in the studio, because they admitted they didn't see it--Comcast (and presumably the San Jose broadcast folks who are also, I believe, Comcast) didn't show it during the broadcast.

Anyway, yeah, I'll take the result, but it's sort of a pinball thing. Against pathetic enough opposition, even incompetent possession will work out for you some percentage of the time, and when the opposition's that pathetic, it makes all your possession look competent.

Pre-publish update: Oh. He posted. He told me to do it. And I obey. Y'know, I only have so many keystrokes in my lifetime, dood. Oh well, I reckon he'll take up the pointless challenge herein and we'll be even.

Germans and Spaniards

2011-07-29T19:28:00.002-04:00

Meh. Once upon a time, I really wanted to fuck this one girl. I mean that was the thing I wanted more than life itself. And she sorta spurned me, and life went on. Five years later (oddly, the amount of time that US Soccer was married to Bob Bradley) she turned up again, by then unmarried, and oh boy did I fuck her, and I lost four years of my life (oddly, the amount of time between now and one year after the next World Cup, one month after the next Gold Cup) to a woman ultimately known to my circle as the Sinister Bitch of Doom, to my family as, "What the fuck were you thinking, you fucking pervert?" and to me as "Thank Ba'al I had the uncommon good sense to not marry her."

While the smart money (among those selfsame friends, and others who never knew her) thinks right now that I'll admit that this story has nothing to with Juergen Klinsmann...they lose. I'm really, really struck by the parallel, and I hope that in four years, I don't have occasion to remember this post.

Truly? I offer no better alternative and have nothing in particular against Klinsmann, although I think we went the wrong direction if we don't want to be as bored as Skeltor made us, and I think I might well have been a more entertaining choice¹. But realistically...I got nothing. Just a really creepy feeling that I will, one day, link to this post for reasons unflattering.

Update: Goff, who is a corporate shill (close friends, please note appropriate contextual usage of the word "corporate") who sometimes lucks into correctness, quite rightly notes that "Bob Bradley always seemed like the interim choice." I was thinking about this earlier (though Goff certainly published it first); the word I was thinking was "caretaker," which makes Goff no less correct. The national team has seemed to me to be in caretaker mode since The Traitor Bruce Arena left, and I'm honestly not sure that Klinsmann feels like the man to end that.

Also: I hope that Sunil Gulati's newfound balls (bolstered, as previously noted, by me) don't lead him to do bad stuff to Pia Sundhage. I can see how a little tyrant like Gulati could decide that the two situations are exactly the same. Of course, he'd be wrong, but he's a fucking dipshit, so it's not like he can be counted on to suss that out.

¹He shaved his beard for the picture that is presently on Wikipedia, but try here for a much better representation of why an Irish drunk in a New York football bar at 10 AM on a Community Shield Sunday walked up to me and asked for my autograph, and why BFF agrees.

Dancing on the Casket

2011-07-28T18:17:00.000-04:00

So, uhm, I did this.

Sure, you can claim that there's no causality. You'd be totally wrong, but you could claim it. I mean, really, some random guy screams at Sunil Gulati from 20 feet above, next to a loud, raucus stadium full of Salvadorenos, and six weeks later Gulati does exactly what the random guy yelled at him to do? Incontrovertible, and you're just a dilettante if you can't see the inexorable logic behind this theory.

I hate dancing on a guy's grave when he's become unemployed, but...oh...wait...never mind. Yeah, never mind.

Japan 2-2 USA (3-1 pen)

2011-07-17T17:54:00.000-04:00

Let's start with some basics. You must, must, must bury your chances. Lauren Cheney, Abby Wambach, Carli Lloyd, Megan Rapinoe, Heather O'Reilly, and to a much lesser extent, Tobin Heath; this game should've been 3-0 USA in the 22nd minute. The one blameless soul in the attack is probably Alex Morgan, who scored one of the two goals and created the other by, essentially, bouncing a ball off of Abby Wambach's head.

USWNT did a fairly good job of disrupting Japan's possession game, but a terrible job of finishing and defending. The choke job at the end is almost irrelevant, because this should've been a dreary and unexciting affair.

It's also basic that Japan played well, something the relentlessly jingoistic and stupid ESPN broadcasting crew doesn't seem to be handling well, able only to babble about the earthquake. Japan's game all through the tournament, knocking off one heavyweight after another, has been to do enough in possession to take advantage of enough necessary moments of brilliance or felicity to do the job. That USWNT let Japan into position to do that is their shame; that Japan, a very skilled, superbly technical, and extremely well-coached team, did it is their beauty and their glory.

I have a lot to say, but I find that's the important part, and the rest of what I have to say is not very nice. I started bitching about Rachel Buehler in print in the footnotes here, but she never should've been in the middle of our defense. BFF complained about Krieger's role in the first equalizer, but who the fuck expects a world-class center back to clear it across the goal mouth to another back in the goal mouth? Buehler is the primary reason the US defense is so fucking slow, so easily picked apart by speed; I'm no Christie Rampone fan, but seriously? A 36-year-old Rampone is less of a liability than Buehler. That's appalling at the national level.

I credited Pia Sundhage in that footnote with being a world-class coach, and of course, she is. But I've had misgivings about her player selection all along. Can I actually sit here and gloat that I'm right and she's not? Of course not. And if Bob Bradley's still the men's coach, Pia certainly deserves to remain as the women's. But damn...I'd really like to be able to find in my heart that I can be fair to her right now. I can't.

Finally: ESPN is horrible. Julie Foudy is dreadfully stupid. She says shit just to say shit, then later says the exact opposite. I think I agreed with her maybe four times in the...Jesus, was it a dozen games I watched with her and Ian Darke broadcasting? In the same span, I said, no less than sixty times, "Jesus Christ, Julie Foudy is fucking stupid."

For reals? Congrats to Japan. Very, very well played. As for our women...thanks for playing. I'm sure whatever I say about it is nothing compared to what you're doing to yourselves right now.

Dallas 0-0 DCU (Updated With Bunnies)

2011-07-17T07:39:00.001-04:00

Not much to say, but I notice that, as of this moment, the usual suspects among my friends have said nothing about last night's match (which is not unusual or bad, given that it's about 7 AM Sunday as I type this). I'm sure they'll get around to it, and they'll do better than I, because I've little to say, and even less that's nice.

The game was dull and listless and had nothing to recommend it. Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was the little itty bitty crowd in a park that was recently enough one of MLS' crown jewels, although a small crowd to watch mediocre football in Texas heat is unsurprising. Maybe it was that neither team is very good, and really, it's quite stunning how little of a fuck Dallas gave at home against a lackluster opponent. Like BFF said last week, four points on this road trip is really quite stunning.

Whether or not Schellas Hyndman could leverage anything against it, our defense was ungood, relying on dire fouls and last-minute heroics by a now-consistently besieged Bull Hamid. Woolard's play was particularly reprehensible, and he could easily have seen two yellows (as could the loathsome Daniel Hernandez). And all credit for the draw, really, goes to some Dallas speed merchant named Chavez who broke through and couldn't put a ball into an essentially open net from 16 or 17 yards in between fits of diving, whining, and inflicting or taking egregious fouls (the referee was hallucinating badly--I think he ate some of the brown acid, despite all the warnings--but not to any particular effect).

Look, I know it was hot, sultry, difficult. Dallas are not pushovers. Our strikers were Tracey Chapman and a guy who's clearly less and less thrilled to be here, the latter subbed out quite early for Fred's last American roadshow appearance. Dallas did a good job of denying DeRosario the ball, Brek Shea is a scary player and will be well nigh unstoppable once he grows into less of a whinging pussy, and while there were guys in 13 and 14 shirts running around on the field, Pontius and Najar were nonexistent. Although the guy in the 13 shirt had to be Pontius, judging from the fact that he glooped into Turnover Junction every time he had an opportunity to shoot.

Lazy and indifferent is a perfectly fine way for me to go through life, but I'm not a professional soccer team.

Update: We have bunnies living in the back yard next door, but they like the food selection better in our yard, since we just let clover and other stuff that's not grass grow without impediment--I suspect the neighbors in our relatively well-manicured neighborhood hate us, but fuck 'em. In a past life and a past neighborhood, I actually had a several-doors-down neighbor who threatened to assault me over dandelions. If your yard is your pride, good on you. If you're worried about agricultural warfare, fuck you, build a wall, poison the Bay, what the fuckever. Anyway...bunnies (the third one is in shade, almost directly behind the bunny on the left--hard to see):

France 1-2 Sweden

2011-07-16T14:27:00.000-04:00

Gratz to Sweden for hanging tough after going down to 10 players after the adorable but otherwise despicable Josefine Oqvist fouled the crap out of Sonia Bompastor after a clean and successful challenge, then tried to kick her in the head after Bompastor tried to get Oqvist's pudgy little Nordic body off of hers. The Swedish players' reaction was admirable--they went up a goal on the porous French defense. The Swedish fans' reaction was predictably shitty, jeering and whistling every time the blameless Bompastor--who intelligently took advantage of the whiny Oqvist's tendency to lose her shit over small stuff--touched or approached the ball. It's not surprising, really--when you think about it, it's a nation of self-serving assholes, possibly even more so than our own, and it's not really any wonder that their national teams (hockey and soccer) are bags of brutish, abusive, cheating shit. This was highlighted by the fans' reaction to Oqvist's perfectly correct dismissal, while the American referee Kari Seitz--who has been uneven throughout the tournament--allowed Sweden two obvious penalty handballs during the course of the game, and allowed the Swedes to break Louisa Necib's knee on a vicious challenge with no foul called. Sorry, folks, merely getting the ball does not make knee-to-knee contact okay, even if it's incidental to the challenge, and especially when the challenger is inserting a foot and leg between the ballholder's legs.

You can rightly say a lot about France as a nation of cheese-eating surrender monkeys, and that's fair. I like their food, I think some of their women are adorable, and I think that their national character is shit. Of course, I love their womens' football team. Go figure.

Now let's turn to the unaccountably more reputable Sweden. During the war that counted, the Swedes managed to retain their independence and remain unoccupied in their zeal to outcollaborate the French and supply the Germans with the wherewithal to imperialize the world, while making much hay out of their humanitarian concern for the Jews, of which they saved many thousands while supplying the Nazis with strategic materiel and denying the Allies much-needed support in Scandinavia out of concern for their own profit-engorged skins. So, y'know, fuck Sweden.

But serious congratulations to them nonetheless--it's not easy to get a winning goal after your team has taken a red card, and Marie Hammarstrom's winner was indisputably lovely. That the Swedes couldn't get a winning goal against the French before that is a bit of a mystery--once again, the French couldn't get it together when it counted, though players other than Bompastor showed up for a change (Elodie Thomis was outstanding, and Elise Bussaglia has howitzers for feet--both feet). Sadly for France, none of them, save Bompastor, was in defense--Laura Georges was wretched in the center for the second straight game, and Corine Franco made me wonder what the fuck the big deal was about her being too injured to play in the Cup up until this game. The downturn in Swedish attacking play against Japan and France is a bit odd, but unlike in the Japan game, they managed just enough this time, and under far more adverse technical circumstances.

So congratulations, Sweden, well done, and fuck you.

Fuck you also: Kate Markgraf, who is remarkably dimwitted for a former national team player, and Adrian Healey, who shows with each broadcast why the appallingly horrible Ian Darke is still the right choice (given the available pool) for ESPN's first string during this event. Your paired ignorant logorrhea made an otherwise interesting game--even one involving the Swedes, who I actually despise even more than the fucking Germans--well nigh unbearable. Fuck you.

Me

2011-07-13T00:01:00.002-04:00

Clock's ticking, Wheezus.
And let's not hear any more of this shit about me and cats:

That's why.

I'll probably mock the Sabbath and be back later with a USWNT-France post. Rules are for rubes.

As Promised

2011-07-11T22:40:00.000-04:00

So it'll turn out that this post is mostly about pics. But that's okay. I have a few things to say about the futbols, then on to the travel.

DCU: Fullback, with whom I tend to agree about football and tactics, and BFF, with whom I do not. In this case...well, I'm not entirely enamored of either of their primary thrusts. BFF thinks that the solution to our problems is to play our defensive line higher and engage the opposition strikers farther from our goal. I do not believe that our defensive line has the requisite skill to do so. Fullback has a complex theory about why Clyde Simms, who is worn threadbare, does better with two holding mids. Since I think that 4-2-3-1 sucks ass unless you're Barcelona and 4-2-2-2 sucks worse when you're a bunch of hailmary assclowns tryiing to play a possession game until you get panicked, I do not entirely agree, and I think that the solution is to get a holding mid who isn't as fucking worn out and used up as Clyde (who is a saint and a proud part of our tradition), and play the 4-4-2 diamond. Fullback is unhappy with the space that creates in our midfield. Or maybe the places the space is created.

Me? I'm gonna position as the simpleton on this one. I like goals. I like attacking. I like people who run after the fucking ball. I like passes toward the opposition goal. I like balls that have direction and intent and get to where they're supposed to go unless someone really, really smart and quick cuts them out. And whatever conclusions we draw from beating the fucking Redscum 1-0 in their park with me there, I like that. A lot.

Futbol pics (photography by Ilse):

Click to actually see Barra up in their corner. We lucked into a better deal through an accident of birth.

Postgame. See a ginger midget, knock his punk ass down. Now more than ever.

World Cup: We had the suboptimal experience of having to try to follow the US-Brazil game on the Web while riding on a train. It is not easy to figure out what happened on an own goal from ESPN's gamecast thingie. It's fairly easy to get a sense of how awful officiating is; on the other, as others have pointed out, despite the maybe-or-not red-card foul on Buehler (who I detest as a choice for starting center back, a perfect example of absolutely having to set aside my own biases and trust in Pia Sundhage, just because¹), the no-fucking-way-in-Hell PK retake (FIFA is way tangled in its own jock on this one, with no on-field indication of what happened, a technical but essentially incidental and likely immaterial encroachment coupled with a lameass explanation that what very clearly didn't happen was in fact the basis of the call), the offsides goal, and the uncalled handball on Daiane--who would've been gone--we got one of our own in that Carli Lloyd (who would've been gone) was allowed to continue playing after an uncalled handball. There are schools of thought that all officiating sucks, that women have less experience, that it all evened out, that the imposition of women officials on the WWC results in too much ineptitude, and that no one can officiate alone in the center because the game's too fast. They're all full of shit, in their own ways, and true in their own other ways. I'm glad we can have the discussion in the context of a U.S. win, instead of a loss that would've been badly tainted.

BFF goes on a gender equality tear--the Brazilian women are every bit as filthy as the men. The commentariat at LGM thinks he's a racist (seriously, read it--fucking hilarious levels of gasbaggery). I think...damn, I really do love Marta, I've had the pleasure of watching her up close a number of times, and she's really fucking amazing. She's also wonderful to the fans, the grownups, the kids, the Americans, the Brazilians. I've seen rent-a-cops decide that they had to drag her away from returning the love as she kicked and twisted and tried to sign one more autograph, to light herself up for one more little girl in soccer kit on a fucking weeknight at a fucking high school stadium in the fucking burbs. I've seen her do magic, I've seen her do violence, I've seen her make the Earth move clean and dirty. I've seen her kill two soccer teams, and the one I haven't seen her kill is in fucking Buffalo. She's fucking fascinating, just an absolute marvel of humanity. I have never seen another player like her, full stop.

I think BFF is right like this: you put young athletes on the field for high stakes, emotional or financial or otherwise, and they get passionate and competitive. It's what sport is about. He and I both bitch mightily when we don't see the passion we expect. I've done it in this post, in fact. I think Marta is a brilliantly competitive athlete, and past that...I'm not sure analysis of what happened on Sunday is meaningful. Set it against Abby Wambach--also an incredibly nice young person with whom I've spoken casually, who I've seen happy and angry and competitive and richly giving of herself to her fans--same deal, different language, different flavors, but same deal.

Would I feel differently if we'd lost? Yeah. I'm a jackass that way. I can live with it.

New York, New York: This restaurant. Yum. This park is real spiff, an outstanding example of urban design and development and reuse and rescue and livability. This museum, which may not do a hell of a lot for you, but, y'know, boys and toys and all that shit. Pics, you say? Sure, why the fuck not?

Walking down the High Line. I took this one, which is why it sucks.

Undeveloped portion of the elevated tracks at the 30th Street end of the High Line (to be developed into more High Line in the future).

Cityscape from the High Line

Lackawanna Terminal in Hoboken, from the High Line.

Things that catch Landru's eye. I took this one, too.

Awesome World War I propaganda from the Intrepid Museum's exhibit on women and the home front.

¹ Becky Sauerbrunn and Cat Whitehill, to name two, and I have good reason to bet that Cat Whitehill has no fucking earthly idea why Pia Sundhage seemingly hates her guts. Hell, Amy Lepeilbet, who's a conversion at left back, while Sauerbrunn plays it like a natural whether or not she is. But...Pia coach. Me? Moron former JV (and fourth-string varsity) keeper with keyboard. Roll your own conclusion.

Odds and Ends Coming

2011-07-11T08:15:00.000-04:00

Lots to brak about, no time. Weekend trip to NYC (with pics), attended DCU-Red Bull game at Red Bull Arena in Harrison, NJ, argued with my stepbrother about whether DCU-Redscum is really a rivalry, and then the capstone of the weekend, desperately following the US women versus Brazil on Sunday afternoon through an Amtrak-based Internet connection, followed by Whispers doing play-by-play of the game-ending penalty kicks as we exited the Union Station garage to come home.

But all that will have to wait a few hours, since I'm back at work this morning and it's no fun. I will post ahead of Wednesday's blog holiday (which is different from most days because I usually post on blog holidays, and on this one to give you a chance to worship me appropriately, and speaking of which, someone really ought to go give the Wheezus 48 hours notice, and I got my eye on you too, Gmoggie).

So laters.

Meet This Week's Game, Same As Last Week's Game

2011-07-02T22:54:00.000-04:00

Y'know, if DCU isn't really going to be original, why should I?

Another disappointing draw, 2-2 at home against ~~Houston~~ Phunions¹. Dax ~~started, still unwilling to fucking attack~~ is gone Daddy gone, and Dwayne DeRosario may end up being the savior of our attack--even Ilse, who barely understands tactics, noticed that ~~he only passes sideways or back~~ DeRosario is a significant difference in the attack, though Seat Five can't bring himself to show any sort of hope because it's uncool or something. Then, after getting up 2-1, the team tried to close up shop with 15 32 fucking minutes left, and failed, ignominiously. ~~Stop putting balls up in the air for short guys.~~ Stop backpassing into possession changes. Stop fucking backing out of fucking attacking. Stop holding up counterattacks to let the other side's defense set. Get the fucking ball forward and create chances. ~~Stop fucking playing Dax Fucking Ginger Midget Pussytouch McCarty.~~ When I'm begging for fucking Fred to ~~come in for Dax and jump for joy when it happens~~ stop fucking dribbling or touching into possession changes, there's ~~a fucking problem~~. absolutely no change from anything I've seen in the three long fucking years since we've seen a fucking playoff game.

Nice stuff: ~~Pontius~~ DeRosario shoots without hesitating ~~for once~~ regularly. His move to assist Josh Wolff was awesome, something we'd never have seen with anyone else in the other center midfield slot. Score!

Perfectly average stuff: small crowd, shite referee, though ~~one previously unknown to me.~~ Abbey Okulaja's shit smells about the same as most MLS referees and it evened out, with no loss of life ~~are just fucking terrible~~. People bitch about referee bitching, but games are going out of control and people are getting hurt because of this shit. I could bitch about Ching's egregious dive for a penalty, but I'll settle for saying that he damn well better get the same fucking fine as Davies got (Davies deserved worse). And l Let's face it, diving like a fucking pussy is about all ~~Brian Ching's~~ Carlos Ruiz and Sebastian Fucking LeToux² have got left.

¹"Phunions" is an unregistered trademark of Himself, who spent the evening not shutting up about the fucking red kit, instead of rejoicing in the brief glimmer of attacking hope that presented itself before Kitchen OG'd, the team unsurprisingly failed to close up shop for 30 minutes, and Carlos Fucking Ruiz banged the equalizer in the 84th minute. By the way, I forgot to collect the fiver you gratuitously horked up for no reason other than...what, alms? Sacrifice? Tithing to the Church of Eternal Fucking Hipster Cynicism? Whatever. I'll leave one letter off the name of your bright red birthday present. Or maybe I'll insert parentheses instead--it'll read "(F)Red".

^{2 From the linked post, for Skippy, if he's reading, which he almost certainly is not:}

There's really not a lot to be said about yesterday's game, in which our boys got pwn3d by Sebastien Fucking Le Toux. I mean, really, what else can you fucking say other than a few feeble parries? We got fucking pwn3d by fucking Sebastien Fucking Le Toux and...? We got fucking pwned by fucking Sebastien Fucking Le Toux but...? We got fucking pwn3d by fucking Sebastien Fucking Le Toux even though Saint Piotr Nowak was in the press box mourning a plane crash perpetrated by Vlad the Impaler Putin? Do we go W.C. Fields? We got fucking pwn3d by Sebastien Fucking Le Toux and all in all, I'd rather be in Philadelphia? Oh. Here's how appalling it is that we got fucking pwn3d by Sebastien Fucking Le Toux: it's about as likely as getting fucking pwn3d, on a fucking futbol field, by fucking Landru. That's how fucking bad it fucking is to get fucking pwn3d, on any fucking futbol field in America by fucking Sebastien Fucking Le Toux, career hoser and all-around player of no particular fucking accomplishment whatsoever. Fucking Seattle left him fucking unprotected. Jeebus.

Things That Make You Say "What the Fuck?" and Then Decide You Just Dropped Some Really Outstanding Acid Because It's Not April Fools Day But Nothing That Good Has Ever Happened To You Even Though You've Ticked "Threesome With Nubile Twin Japanese Girls" and "My Lunch With Jesus" Off Of Your Bucket List and WHOA, This Shit Is Fucking INTENSE, Dood

2011-06-27T20:06:00.000-04:00

This is the second thing I found out a little while ago: DC United gave San Jose some money for Brandon McDonald, which is about the right transaction, and I'll pay green American money transactionally to see the mother and child reunion between Brandon and his bestus friend Jaime Moreno, who remains a DCU employee. What reunion, you ask? You telling me you don't remember that we're talking about that Brandon McDonald? Heh.

But it pales, does the upcoming hug between Brandon and Jaime, it pales like a pasty little midget ginger daywalking pussy, which is a remarkable coincidence, because we just traded one of those for Dwayne Fucking DeRosario! That's MLS fucking legend Dwayne Fucking DeRosario to you, bitchez. This is...I can barely type this, I must really be tripping balls here, because we cannot possibly have convinced a pretty fucking sharp New York Redscum management circle to take a fucking inept ginger midget for Dwayne Fucking DeRosario.

I don't care that DeRo is 33 fucking years old. I don't care if Erik Soler broke DeRo's legs with a fucking hammer before he completed the trade (and as much as I loathe the Redscum, there is a tiny spot of warmth in my heart for Soler for eating a $10K fine to bitch in public about the heinous and craptastically unwarranted red card shown to Thierry Henry the other week). I don't care if DeRo needs a walker to trot out in the starting lineup on Saturday night. He'll still be fucking better than Dax Fucking Ginger Midget Pussy McCarty.

So, uhm, y'all have a nice night, and I'm gonna go wave my hand in front of my face and watch the pretty trails and check out the freaky patterns in my dining room drywall because I must be fucking tripping balls like it's fucking 1979, dood.

DCU Blogging Because Someone Isn't Home, Plus Gold Cup Final Liveblogging (Sort Of)

2011-06-25T23:20:00.000-04:00

Another disappointing draw, 2-2 at home against Houston. Dax started, still unwilling to fucking attack--even Ilse, who barely understands tactics, noticed that he only passes sideways or back. Then, after getting up 2-1, the team tried to close up shop with 15 minutes left, and failed, ignominiously. Stop putting balls up in the air for short guys. Stop backpassing into possession changes. Stop fucking backing out of fucking attacking. Stop holding up counterattacks to let the other side's defense set. Get the fucking ball forward and create chances. Stop fucking playing Dax Fucking Ginger Midget Pussytouch McCarty. When I'm begging for fucking Fred to come in for Dax and jump for joy when it happens, there's a fucking problem.

Nice stuff: Pontius shoots without hesitating for once. Score!

Perfectly average stuff: small crowd, shite referee, though one previously unknown to me. MLS referees are just fucking terrible. People bitch about referee bitching, but games are going out of control and people are getting hurt because of this shit. I could bitch about Ching's egregious dive for a penalty, but I'll settle for saying that he damn well better get the same fucking fine as Davies got (Davies deserved worse). And let's face it, diving like a fucking pussy is about all Brian Ching's got left.

USMNT Liveblogging (except I'll publish at the end, because no one's looking here for live coverage):

After a sprint home from RFK, we are settled in for the Gold Cup Final. Doom and gloom. Cheesed, I tell you.

Pregame: This is for all the marbles, the Confederation Cup berth, our entire national pride and identity. Fuck Mexico. 1846, bitchez. Rose Bowl full of Mexicans.

Wait a minute. Freddy Fucking Adu in the middle? Landycakes up top? Dempsey on the wing? What the fucking fuck? I mean, I knew Freddy would start after the last game (a fellow denizen of 232 swears the ball that became a goal was an accident, but I'm not so sure), but Tex and Landycakes should be switched.

The good news is that this results in a debate about who's shorter, Cakes or Dax? Loathe though I am to say anything positive about Landycakes, he's definitely taller. Lots taller. Not a fucking ginger, either.

2': Why are all these Mexicans in my box?

4': Mexico is fast.

7': Nice sequence with Freddy Adu and Chunderolo in the right corner buys a corner.

8': Holy Fuck! We scored on the fucking corner! Holy fucking fuck me! Cancer Boy Michael Bradley, no less. Holy fucking fuck me!

10': Holy fuck. I am still saying "Holy Fuck."

10': Nasty scramble in the box. Finally cleared for real.

11': Bornstein in for Chunderolo, who appears both injured and pissed to be subbed. Tough luck, you slow old piece of shite.

12': Lichaj shifts right, Bornstein goes left. Announcers babbling about Lichaj's discomfort, but I'm pretty sure Fullback told me that Lichaj is a natural right.

15': Mexico is threatening. USMNT needs to get its defensive shit together. Too many black shirts swarming.

16': Announcers catch up, with the mongoloid Kyle Martino noting that USMNT needs more possession.

16': Aaaaaagggghhhh! Giovani Dos Santos is a scary motherfucker. Breakout barely controlled, corner for El Tri.

19': Dempsey dispossessed and knocked down from behind with a heel tap; no call. Salvadoran referee, by the way, so I'm not exactly concerned about bias here.

20': Jesus, we're having to run way too much here. Mexico is working a very pacey game here (fuck you, Ilse and Whispers).

22': German Jones goes down. I'd really, really like to care.

23': Adu goes down near the end line after some dribbling possession, no call...but HOLY FUCK, LANDYCAKES GOAL, USMNT UP 2-0!!!! HOLY FUCKING FUCK ME!!!! Got the ball back after dispossession, Adu to Donovan, breakthrough at the 18, got behind Talavera, empty net. Holy fucking fuck.

24': Holy fuck. This cannot fucking be happening. Holy fuck.

25': Lots of quiet Mexicans in the Rose Bowl.

26': Adu gets free for another shot. Freddy is actually playing well here. Shades of his old willingness to dribble too much and get dispossessed, but still, working hard and noticeably trying to be a sharebear.

28': Damn, the crowd has really quieted a lot. I think we're outnumbered there.

28': Torres for Salcido. Mexico scores on a total defensive breakdown off of the substitution. 2-1. On replay, Bornstein's the goat. Big-time.

30': Wow, that was deflating. Both teams slowed down, but we're struggling to possess.

31': Guardado fires right at Timmy Tourettes. Fox notes that the goal was the first Timmy's conceded in 349 minutes of soccer. I think that's just because we weren't playing fucking Mexico.

33': Donovan booked on a near-total dive. Referee's full of shit, very little contact, no aggression, Cakes played the ball, the Mexican dived and bought the card. Cocksucker. Note please that I recognized and chastised this behavior in German Jones last week.

35': Slow buildup. Bedoya ends it by running over a Mexican--way worse foul that what Donovan didn't actually do.

36': Another defensive fail after a nice break down the wing by Gio Dos Santos. Close to an own goal by Timmy Tourettes; goal should be credited to Guardado, Lichaj should've cleared before it got to Timmy. All square.

38': Freddy Adu is laying on the ground writhing and moaning. Oh, he got kicked in the head. Owie.

40': Freddy's running around fine now. Bradley takes a blast from about 21 yards, but goes high.

41': Marquez is hurting...taking off the armband, he's going bye-bye.

42': Fox talking heads point out that Red Bull is leaking goals because Marquez is with El Tri and Tim Ream with USMNT. My heart breaks. Not.

43': Reynoso for Marquez.

44': Marquez has a hammy. Gosh, that's unfortunate. On at least two levels. Uhm...not.

45': Dos Santos breaks through again. Fortunately...he misses wide.

47': I'm not sure if Bradley's stupid, the center backs are trying to work the trap, or both, but Mexico is getting way too much traction with springing people over the top.

Halftime: Holy fuck. This is not the half I expected, and anybody who says it was the half they expected is a fucking liar.

47': German Jones coughs up the ball, and a foul that isn't called, and the ball's loose in the box, and...holy shit, Timmy comes up with a lucky clearance.

48': Someone really should have watched some film to see how other teams have dealt with Gio Dos Santos. Because, uhm, he really hasn't caused other people this much trouble.

50': Another total fucking breakdown, Boca fails to clear, then lets Barrera get off a fucking shot. The run of play is now totally Mexico's way.

51': US corner should've begot another corner...no love.

53': Dos Santos loose on the wing, again. Fortunately, it fizzles.

55': Talavera down in the box, writhing. Up quick enough.

56': US not getting through at all here. Dempsey and Donovan have flopped again, with Dempsey up top. Sadly, Kyle Martino agrees with me that this is good. Now I feel stupid.

58': Hey, look, it's German Jones. I wonder if he's been on the field all this time. Useless fucker. Wow, the Mexicans are just beating the shit out of Freddy Adu.

59': Freddy takes the kick, and it's nice, but Talavera snags it.

60': Dempsey crossbar. Ouch. This followed, by several touches, Jonathan Bornstein doing something useful, which I thought was sorta unusual.

62': Guardado writhes around pointing to a spike mark left by Bedoya. Fuck off, Guardado.

63': Jesus, Dos Santos loose in the box again. Cleared by German Jones. Oh look, he's on the field.

63': Agudelo for Bedoya. I think that drops Dempsey back again.

67': We're letting them fuck around with the ball without closing them down. Way too fucking much.

69': Dos Santos clips Bocanegra. Chestiness ensues.

70': Goodson gets a head on Donovan's free kick, but no love.

72': After German Jones holds off a defender for an interminable sequence of ball-holding in the filthiest possible way and gets it clear, US gives it up easily.

73': Jones foul, more chestiness. This is getting way too chippy. We're going down.

74': Bradley long ball to Adu, who can't control it. We need more controlled possession here, this is crap.

74': Sure, some nice control, but then Agudelo fucks it up and loses possession. Mexican sub impending.

75': Mexico sub, Zavala for Barrera, who gets a roaring ovation.

76': Yet another total breakdown after another asshole possession choke on the back line. Howard comes out, gets trapped, Dos Santos bags it in the postage stamp with Lichaj on the line trying to head clear. Toast.

78': Y'know, if starting off 2-0 and losing 2-4 isn't the best argument in the world for firing fucking Skeletor, I don't know what is. And, as Whispers is pointing out loudly, Fox Soccer is up its own ass--Chunderolo going out is not, in any way, the reason we're getting our asses kicked here. Sure, the back line is used to playing with him in the game, but what they're used to is covering for his lame ass.

80': Ohhhhh. Talavera punches clear, fouls the shit out of Dempsey, ends up on the ground, and Bradley misses a wide open net from 22 yards. Talaveras and Dempsey exchange not-very-nice words.

81': I'd like to blame this on the Mexicans being fucking filthy--they are--but that's just not it. Someone booked--Torresilo, maybe.

82': Bradley blocked from the 18.

83': US corner. Fail.

84': Dempsey skies one out of frustration. Toast toast toastie toast toast.

84': Jesus, another Mexico break, shot wide. This is fucking embarrassing.

85': We should be getting a throw-in here, but apparently falling down in front of Agudelo is a foul on Agudelo.

86': Oh, fuck, Sascha Klestjan is coming in, probably for Adu. Why not just walk off the fucking field for the last 5 minutes? I mean, Freddy's cooked, but seriously? Sascha Klestjan is the fucking embodiment of why we suck, and why Bradley should be fired.

87': Sure, Sascha, make me the dick. Nice ball into the middle, but Goodson just misses. Dempsey booked, not sure why, probably mouth.

88': Bornstein gives up a corner to Dos Santos.

90': We're just killing time here. Give me a mercy whistle.

91': Whispers suggest that Fox mention Chunderolo again.

92': Klestjan comes in studs-up, from behind, on someone in Mexico's box. He's lucky not to be effing executed for it.

93': We're done. Fire Bradley.

Honestly: gratz to the fucking Mexicans. Coming back from 2-0? Even against a bad US team? Nicely played. Assholes.

We got cheesed. Fire Bradley.

(Cheesed: Credit to Terry Pratchett. It's like getting creamed, but it takes a lot longer.)

Esta Futbol Sabado Gigantico!

2011-06-25T11:34:00.002-04:00

Huge futbol day, with DCU seeing if it can lose to Houston by slightly less at home than it did in an embarrassment of a game at Reliant earlier in the season. The good news here is that Houston seems to have shot its wad in that game. The bad news is that Daniel Woolard and Chris Korb still play for us.

The bigger futbol thing is tonight's Gold Cup final in the Rose Bowl between the US and Mexico. Everjingo newsies are desperate to find hope for the good guys here, but this awesome discussion over at Fullback, in which I offer to sacrifice a cute furry bunny for national glory, is more telling. We're gonna get cheesed. Cheesed, I tell you.

Of course, bunny sacrifice can be dangerous in its own right.


Not the bunny I plan to sacrifice.

A better choice, perhaps. Besides, the woman looks vaguely Mexican.

USA 2-0 Jamaica and Other Gold Cup Stories

2011-06-19T23:12:00.001-04:00

So Ilse and I attended today's Gold Cup doubleheader today at RFK. Approximate attendance figures (modified somewhat from an earlier private report to BFF):

Salvadorenos: 42,000
Americans: 6,000
Panamanians: 2,000
Jamaicans: 63

Holy crap was the place ever a sea of blue:

We were under the overhang, light was weird

Slightly less screwed up by glare

The theme of the day was diving for fun and profit. Last night's dive by Charlie Davies paled in comparison to the dive that the ineffably horrible Jermaine Jones took to get Jermaine Taylor red-carded in the 67th minute. I thought, looking at it live, that it was fishy; when I got home, we watched most of the replay on FSC and discovered that I was right. Taylor didn't touch Jones at all. There was absolutely no contact on the play, which appeared to the Mexican referee to be a leg-tangling professional foul.

I honestly don't understand why CONCACAF allows Mexican referees to handle US games, but it turned out that the guy was too inept to tilt things the way he clearly wanted to. It was one phantom foul after another against the US, but the biggest phantom of all played in our favor.

That said, Jermaine Jones was undoubtedly the man of the match, between his goal (it deflected off of...Jermaine Taylor, but Jones had too much on it for it to properly be called an own goal) and the egregious, criminal dive that sealed the deal. I'll take it, and it's true that it was Jones' best match of the tournament. That said, he's a fucking horrible person and I hate having him on the squad. His shot had no business going in, and he had an incredible number of bad touches to get to the one good one. I very much dislike seeing him up in the attack instead of Bradley (who has cooled considerably since two years ago), and his bad games have outnumbered his good ones. Hard to argue with his day, though.

The Jamaicans were off from the beginning. They managed a credible threat early, with the help of an AR who couldn't keep up with the play, but Timmy Tourettes saved the deal; after that, their offense was one sequence after another of stranding an increasingly frustrated Ryan Johnson on a desert island. The US was much sharper in every respect, and played a solid game all the way through.

Clint Dempsey, Clarence Goodson, Eric Lichaj, and Timmy Tourettes all looked very, very good; Alejandro Bedoya and Juan Agudelo were decent enough, and Maurice Edu and Landycakes looked very good in relief. Agudelo himself was early relief, as Jozy Altidore went down with a hammy, though we couldn't tell if it was the result of a hard challenge or if he was already hurting when he got whacked.

The ugly: Michael Bradley, who got dispossessed too easily at least a dozen times by my count (and who really, really isn't helped by his cancer patient look); Sacha Klestjan, who's just an assclown; and Steve Cherundolo, who seriously needs to consider a nursing home.

This will prove unpopular in my sect, but I have to say it: I like Bocanegra in the center, with Lichaj on the left. I wish wish wish that we had a right back to solve the Cherundolo problem, but it appears that we don't. Lichaj does a wonderful job of getting into the attack, though his touch from the wing is a tad suspect. That may improve with time.

We stayed for the first half of the El Salvador-Panama game. I will say this: the Salvadorenos are diving, whining, thuggish pussies. They're little fucking midgets with an attitude the size of Jupiter. I'm really glad they lost the game, and I'm really glad I wasn't in RFK when the game ended, because that? Was a whole ginormous fucking shitload of drunk Salvadorans, baby. And I'm really glad we're not playing them in the semis, though the appeal of a rematch with Panama was already huge before I saw the little peckerwoods thug their way through a half against a better Panama squad that couldn't connect.

In between games, I was hanging out on the ramps behind our section (we were on quiet side, not that it was quiet today, under the overhang, and it was fuckall weird--232 is a different planet entirely). From the 300 level, you can see through a chain link fence down into Lot 5, where players and VIPs park, or get picked up in limos. Such was the case with Sunil Gulati's and his family after the US-Jamaica game; as I watched, Mr. Gulati shepherded his wife and daughter into a limo, to be whisked away, while he and his son re-entered the stadium to see the second game. I yelled what I had to at the man ("Fire Bradley!"...I mean, duh...), but he either didn't hear me or didn't want to, so the story's not as awesome as I'd have hoped. Wouldn't I like to be the one that broke the camel's back?

Update: YFWP says attendance was a sellout crowd of 45, 423. Please adjust my figures proportionally.

Revivified and Live RSL-DCU Blogging

2011-06-18T23:01:00.001-04:00

So I should've been liveblogging from the start, because BFF said so. And because he's asleep in Leeds or Staines or Ticks or West Bumwipe or some other shitstain of a place in England, which is essentially one giant shitstain except for London. So here's a little recreation of the first half, followed by second-half liveblogging.

Preview: DCU is missing Black Dogred. Dogred is a passionate gamer with no tactical sense. His replacement, Landru, has far better tactical understanding but is crippled by a seething hatred of all other teams and all MLS referees. RSL is missing a bunch of guys from Central America who still give a shit about the Gold Cup, unlike...uhm, several of us who are attending a quarterfinal doubleheader tomorrow.

1st Half: DCU plays okay for 20 minutes, then sucks. Terry Fucking Vaughn loses control of the game by the 15th minute. From about the 25th to 40th minute, RSL looked more likely, but only scored on a PK after Clyde Simms got his arm in the way of a ball in the box. It was cheesy, but it was the correct call, one DCU should've benefitted from no fewer than three times against San Jose, when the mongoloid Andrew Chapin decided that handballs in the box were discretionary calls. Sadly, it was the only thing Vaughn got right in the half, as he allowed Collen Warner to deliberately kick Bull Hamid in the head, and allowing Kyle Beckerman, who still looks fucking ridiculous, to physically hurl Josh Wolff into Nick Rimando on a long throw-in, resulting in a foul on...Wolff. I shit you not. Also: Vaughn allows Chris Wingert to leg-whip Andy Najar in the corner. There will be blood.

Halftime: In the halftime interview, Jed Zayner actually says "We have to work our balls off here. Oh, I'm sorry, I said 'balls.'" I shit you not.

Halftime Sub: McCarty for Simms. Abandon hope.

Early Second Half (sorry, I was catching up): Terry Fucking Vaughn allows Jean Alexandre to come in studs-up on Jed Zayner. Fortunately, Zayner, who has taken one in the nuts already this game, gets up after some rolling around. There will be blood.

50': Pontius blasts one off the bar from 25 yards. Nice shot.

58': Dax McCarty has no business being on a futbol field. RSL is threatening.

59': Alexandre and Espindola both gangraped, Espindola about 30 yards out and Alexandre in the penalty arc. While both deserved it, both were fouls, no calls.

60': Perry Kitchen saves the day, despite looking like a Cardassian (his joke).

61': Najar lays a free kick right on Wolff's head 8 yards out. The Reverend Nick snuffs it easily.

62': Davies for Wolff. I still don't get why Saint Benny won't play them together.

65': RSL threatening again; bitches mightily as Vaughn and ARs fuck up and give us a goal kick.

66': Brettschneider carded after Beltran dives. First card of the game. As usual, it's the 15th thing Vaughn should've carded, and it's horseshit. Vaughn is a complete fucking retard.

66': Will Johnson for Collen Warner. Johnson is, like all Canadians with the exception of Dejan Jakovic, a pussy. Jakovic would be a pussy if he weren't a criminal.

68': It is possible that, like me, you thought that Ned Grabavoy had long since been boiled down into glue. Like me, you thought wrong; he just touched the ball in this game.

69': Stephen King breaks through on an actual well-place through-ball from NoDax. Sadly, Reverend Nick gets to the ball first.

70': Will Johnson trips Pontius to win the ball. No call.

71': Long ball for Davies. No one home.

72': Bowtie cautions that Saint Benny better not use his last sub right now, with the team down 0-1. Bowtie is often a better person when he shuts the fuck up.

73': Vaughn calls Zayner for a foul 6-7 yards to the right of the box after Alexandre dives piteously. McCarty clears the free kick after a scrum in the 6-box.

74': I swear, Vaughn calculates every fucking puff on his whistle. Beltran destroys Pontius, clearly and immediately dispossessing him; Vaughn waits four seconds, then toots. Asshole.

77': Dumbass quickpassing to no effect. Blind pass into touch, RSL throw.

78': Fred for King. Bowtie applauds. WTF?

78': Will you dumbfucks look before you pass? That's the second blind pass into touch in a minute.

80': Again with the delayed whistle, this time on a foul that wasn't. RSL is seriously dragging ass here.

81': Andy Williams: see Ned Grabavoy @ 68'.

82': Uhm, Terry Fucking Vaughn? I know Nick Rimando is venerable and all that. But count to fucking six, would you, you fucking inept cocksucking dickface?

83': Arthur Aghasayan (Movsisyan's cousin, apparently) for Fabian Espindola.

83': Davies breaks away and dives like Italy. Penalty. Oh my God, on the replay....holy shit, that was an incredibly lame fucking dive, I mean that may have been a red card dive, not that there's any such thing. Jeebus, that was awful.

85': Davies scores the penalty. Rimando guessed correctly and almost got a hand on it, but Davies placed it nicely. Holy crap, that was a dreadful fucking dive.

85': Robbie Russell for Chris Wingert, who was so nauseated by that dive that he doubled over and demanded to be subbed.

86': RSL crowd outraged. I gotta say that the outcome so far is just--Bowtie is equivocating madly, though the Simms call was correct and the Davies call was horrible--but on balance, neither team has earned anything but a jail term here.

87': Beckerman spite-kicks the ball into the DCU bench. No card. Seriously, do MLS refs have any fucking idea about the laws of the game? I contend that they do not.

88': Of the 8 goals scored on RSL this season, 5 have come in the last 15 minutes of games. Bowtie is Dutchdicking that into my ears every 30 seconds, I thought you should hear it too.

90': Najar takes a throw-in deep in RSL territory; Kitchen took an earlier one (the Wolff foul for being tackled by The Asshole Kyle Beckerman). I think we're playing for a point.

92': Olave deliberately knocks down Brettschneider at the edge of the box. He should be gone. Brettschneider is writhing on the ground clutching his shoulder. Olave is a piece of shit who should be cockpunched.

93': Najar kick from left of box to a wide-open Pontius...who drills the fucking crossbar. Holy shit.

94': Final whistle. Ugly bullshit game between a bad team and a fucking pack of criminals. 1-1 is a fair court.

Postgame: OMFG Julie Donaldson is a fucking cow. Dood, she outweighs Chick Hernandez. Bring back Lisa Hillary.

Post CSN Tease: The fucking VW commercial again. Die.

A Very Special Message for Whispers

2011-06-16T14:02:00.000-04:00


Fuck. You. With all the love in the world, of course.

Fucking Bawston.

Feel Good Story of the Year

2011-06-07T14:12:00.001-04:00

YFWP brings us an offbeat story that intrigued me when I saw the headline in an actual paper copy of the rag that I was reading while waiting for a bacon-and-egg sammich yesterday morning.

The Supremes' 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson was one that staid historians like to call a landmark, and that judgmentarian history geeks like me prefer to call a travesty. Homer Plessy, who was what was once called an octaroon back when people tracked such metrics, and what we would now just call a brown person, was arrested in Louisiana for refusing to leave a whites-only rail car. Louisiana law defined octaroons as brown people and limited them to their own damn rail cars. Hilarity did not ensue, as a state judge named Ferguson held that the state could so prohibit brown persons from occupying the same rail cars as those with less melanin. The case advanced to the Supremes, who held on a 7-1 vote that treating brown persons differently did not demean them. The original Mr. Justice Harlan was the lone dissenter, correctly labelling the decision as every bit as ridiculous as the Dred Scott case. The separate but equal doctrine that followed the decision (doctrinally--of course, in reality conditions were far from equal) held for 58 years, until Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954.

Fast forward to Plessy and Ferguson's descendants. Phoebe Ferguson, the judge's great-great-granddaughter, and Keith Plessy, one generation closer to Homer Plessy (his great-grandfather was Homer's cousin; you figure it out) organized a foundation to teach the history of civil rights through education, preservation, and outreach. It's a tremendous example of how we should all just shut the fuck up and get along.

So do that. Uhm, please.

Updated prior to publication: Jeebus, is Anthony Weiner ever a dumbfuck. On behalf of everyone who continues to believe that there is some difference, thanks for the cockpunch, asshole. Thanks for putting such an incredible, no, impossible fucking strain on the good feelings associated with this post (which I wrote about 4 hours ahead of Weiner's admission that no, never mind, he really did twittertwat pictures of his stuffed boyshorts to random babes, scheduled for publication some hours hence--now in the past with the post unpublished, for reasons I don't bloogergrok). Fucking dipshit.

Millstone, Milestone, Milestone

2011-06-06T07:22:00.000-04:00

Who knew this blog's 500th post would fall on one of its ~~three~~ four holy days?

Happy birthday, such as things go, to my good friend William Wallace. Our day will come again, buddy, and I'm sorry my time has been so hideously constrained when you need it most. Hopefully the dark spaces are more and more behind you, and the dark alleys absolutely behind us.

Now go be good minions and read about D-Day, please. Any June 6 post in the archives will do for a start, and you can also never go wrong by checking out the great Wiki in the sky, as long as you only believe bits and pieces and you read the discussion page to find out what Wikitards are obsessing about.

Things To Say

2011-06-03T10:38:00.000-04:00

Not much, but I had thoughts that I had to share. Yesterday was Bam-Bam's 11th birthday, following hard on the heels of Planet's high school graduation, which followed hard on the heels of the weekend from Hell that I circuitously referenced in my last post. Bam-Bam is still awesome, and Planet is so awesome that she's unique in category. She is the sweetest and most unaffected kid I've ever known, and she's going to college at precisely the right place. Looking around at the tramps and punks who graduated with her, I came to realize yet again how lucky I am to be part of her extended family. Congratulations and love, Planet, and see you at the party.

Bam-Bam rocks on, the anchor to which I tether. It's not that Ilse and Databoy are incapable of keeping me from drifting, or that they don't deserve their own satanic attention, but the pull of Bam-Bam is accompanied by its own song, its own weight, its own ferocity. He is also, in his weight class, the sweetest and most unaffected kid I've ever known, a constancy of the unconditional. His aging confuses me. I am unsettled about his future, his adolescence, his growth. It's stress in the light of love. I really don't know what the fuck to do about it. Or anything. Except babble.

I have often said that there's always an 80s dance party in my head (unlike BFF, who always has a New Order song in his head, and he's really better off, I think, because the people dancing take up an assload of room and they're thrashing around and shit). I started thinking this morning as I drove to work and realized that I really am a fucking sucker for idiot power pop, to wit:

That's what I got. Next post is the 500th, not sure when it will appear or what will be in it, but probably soon, because Monday next is an obligatory blogging day.

Because It's There

2011-05-30T13:31:00.001-04:00

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I have a blog. or so I'm told. Work has been in nightmare mode for uncountable weeks now, at least I can't count them. The holiday weekend has turned into a a long stretch of standing by to travel to the usual minor American mini-urb for work on a day trip to accomplish a mission that started getting fouled up a week ago today in the outlying rural area beyond the mini-urb, and has been getting progressively more fucked each day since, necessitating a cancellation of my weekend plans, which did not involve my in-laws Jesus and Jesusina, though my weekend certainly did, and including two fucking false starts on this day trip to do something I can't really tell you about.

So here I sit in a Bucks at the main drag corner in this mini-urb, the one where the American Revolution did not begin, waiting for a guy who's going to hand me something I can't tell you about (it's perfectly legal--I'm a government mule, not the other kind), so I can head back out to the airport and return home and do some more things I can't tell you about.

This life is the very definition of fucked up.

So yeah, there's a soccer team. I got not much to add to BFF. He's wrong about Woolard, who is a loser moron, and a comparison to Burchie is unnecessary and not particularly useful. And he didn't see The Cheater Kenny Cooper coming to a complete stop on his scecond penalty attempt, but it happened. Fortunately, the mongoloid referee realized that after making a circus of Cooper's penalties, he needed to give one back, and he did at the first legit opportunity. But fundamentally--BFF nails it all.

So that's all I got. I've sort of been saving, because Minions is now two posts from a major milestone, or millstone. I'm still convinced that I'll come up with something very special for that. But, y'know, conviction does not equal conviction. Or not. We'll see. I've got to get back to middle America now.

Update: Jesus, what a whiny post. How can you read this shit?

Hump A Teacher

2011-05-15T10:45:00.000-04:00

So I accompanied Ilse yesterday to a grade-in at my not-quite local mall (my local mall is busy dying, though brave teachers were grading there, too).

"What the fuck," you might quite rightly ask, "is a grade-in?"

Well, here's the thing. You probably remember last autumn, when I went briefly insane, currying favor and disfavor (probably, though they're both kind enough not to admit it) with local political figures like Nancy Floreen and Hans Riemer, both of whom have been far more gracious than I have deserved. We're no longer in election mode, and chickens are roosting and suchlike, especially when it comes to money.

Money is coming home to roost in a big way here in MoCo. There isn't enough of it, mostly because shameless huckster fucktard panderer Robin Ficker (whose name, my German-speaking friends assure me, is hilarious) spurred county voters into passing an idiotic charter amendment in 2008 to limit property tax increases to the rate of inflation without a unanimous vote of the County Council. There are competing proposals on raising property taxes within the charter limit--the one I support isn't Phil Andrews', which is a blowjob for the rich fucks in his district (of which I am, technically, one). An attaboy to Hans for publicly trashing The Blowdried Green's gratuitous sex act for his North Potomac and Actual Potomac money. Yeah, Phil. We're onto what green really means for you. Bitch.

First unanswerable question for my friends Nancy and Hans: who's blocking a higher tax increase? Bonus points, of course, for blaming Phil Andrews, though I'd also reward a thorough pummelling of Valerie Ervin.

So, the apostrophe¹. As you found out in the original Val-bashing post, Ilse was surplused at the school at which she's nearly completed her second year of teaching. It's a sad thing, because it's an awesome school and she fits in well there. I'm not telling you which school--if you know me, you already know, and if you don't know me, it would be too much information, and if you know me and you've forgotten, you know how to find me. Lots of teachers were surplused this year because of a dramatic increase in average class size, despite the county's meretricious assurance that that increase equals "one." I'll save you a trip to the Landru English Dictionary: "meretricious" means "lying sacks of fetid shit." The increase was about 16 percent, from an average class size of 29 to an average of 34. A lot of teachers, especially in big academic departments, are moving to other schools involuntarily, and it's not yet clear whether they've all got places to go. I don't have any firm figures on how many--there are 11,000 teachers in the county--but my best educated guess is that something like 5 percent of teachers were involuntarily transferred, and I have no education from which to guess on how many will end up unemployed. Corrections from people with actual data are welcome.

It will cheer you--and, I'm guessing Hans, who can now have lunch with me without fearing my righteous holy overeducated, overcaffeineated (hi, Nancy) MoCo wrath--that Ilse landed at another school, and that the aforementioned possibilities of her remaining at her current school (it's the preference) are not entirely exhausted. So it's slightly less personal now.

But I'm a man of the people, hence the grade-in. Let's talk briefly about MoCo teachers, remembering that Maryland has some of the best schools in the country, and MoCo's are the best in the state, by far:

-MCPS has gone through three years of budget cuts. The BoE has delivered a budget request that cuts per-student spending by about $1K from last year's levels, despite the state's maintenance-of-effort law (which the county has now, it appears, decided to completely ignore--and again, I'll cheerfully accept a cogent and apolitical explanation of how that makes sense, because it's hard for me to understand how the cost of the fines is going to be less than the costs of keeping up with the MOE requirement).

-The county has, for at least two years running, violated its contract with the teachers union.

-Starting teachers in MoCo now make less than starting teachers in DC, an educational cesspool.

-While the Council and the BoE seem to want to pin more sacrifices on teachers by increasing (again) their share of health insurance costs (again breaking the contract), and claim teachers need to sacrifice along with other county employees, the teachers' plan costs the county less per capita than its other union health plans.

-The County is using portions of a $65-million increase in state funding for public education for other purposes.

-Finally, if you dare to speak to me about how teachers are babysitters who get the summer off, I'll punch you in the fucking gob. Ilse busts her ass outside of the school duty day, to her family's detriment, to grade schoolwork and plan lessons for her students. Now, she's a fucking freak, but that's a personal issue and it's mostly between her and me. Almost all teachers work evenings and weekends to keep up, and many (including Ilse) work on professional development in the summer.

People don't get this stuff. So yesterday, the teachers put on a little demonstration of what they do on the weekends. They gathered innocently at local mall food courts, and sat down and graded papers or did planning work. It was actually pretty awesome:

Monkey Mall Food Court, 11:40 AM

Monkey Mall Food Court, 11:46 AM--Note Predominantly Purple Overtones

Two Random Teachers Who I've Never Seen Before In My Life, Hard At Work

You might think it's kind of a cheesy stunt, but reality is like this: these are the same kind of people that Scott Walker wants you to believe are union thugs. These people, easily over a hundred of them at one venue for the grade-in, are the people who keep our longstanding covenant to have the best fucking school system in the state. And the county wants to break its covenants with them? Again and again?

Keep pushing. The last school strike was devastating. I believe that the next one will occur during Ilse's career, and sooner rather than later, given the political and budget climate. These are the people behind the Apple Ballot. Duchy Trachtenburg found out what happens when you try to break it off in their asses.

Second unanswerable question for my friends Nancy and Hans: Whatcha gonna do?

¹ I really don't understand how anyone can not get that lyric. But this probably goes back to my whole Hamiltonian democracy thing².
² By which I mean we should find a way to disenfranchise fucktards without other fucktards using that as an excuse to disenfranchise people who've had limited opportunities. But then, that's the apostrophe³, isn't it?
³ Uh-oh. Recursive loop.

Quick DCU Hit

2011-05-15T09:24:00.000-04:00

I have several things to say about United before I move on to another post that I wanted to do before the team shat itself at home last night. Again.

I was going to say the United stuff over at Fullback's place, because he's a good guy and he needs the traffic that commentary from someone like me brings. Hah! Okay, I was going to say it there because I wanted to focus today's post on something else. But I got bloggered in the comments over there (it's not just his place--copy your text before you try to post comments at any Bloggerblog--I failed to heed my own advice). So I'll play two.

Fullback is a good guy, he's knowledgeable and pleasant and coherent. He's a bit of an optimist for my taste, as I am probably a lot of a cynic for his. But he tolerates, and he is kind enough to reciprocate Minions' link, which is exceptionally kind because I mostly only blog about soccer when I'm pissed off. All that said, I usually agree with his analyses as far as they go, choosing only to polish them up with that special turd-like finish that is my wont.

No exception here, my only disagreement is with Fullback's "glimpses of sunshine." Last night's match against Colorado was fucking abysmal. That the team showed more effort in the second half was mostly a function of the fact that they could hardly have shown less than they did in the first. Sure, it doesn't help when your two best attackers go down early with what we hope are minor knocks (I didn't get that ACL feeling about Davies and Wolff, like I got when Brankovic was hacked to death at the Plex a few weeks ago). But seriously? Must we wait for the defense to get into position every single fucking time before we probe tentatively--and sloooooowly--to figure out the best time for our retreat? If Quaranta and Najar and Pontius aren't fast enough for us to even try to break out, why the fuck aren't we capitalizing on their value and getting in some players who can actually fucking run? And will?

No cohesion on the attack whatsoever. No speed. No brains. A fundamental willingness to dive, accompanied by a first tendency to whine, rather than doing the fucking job. Sure, it's great that Terry Fucking Vaughn gave back his abysmal error and awarded a PK for Pontius' shabby dive five minutes after he allowed the stunningly useless Joe Ngwenya (Fullback and I also agree that the sky is blue, among many other things) to be coldbloodedly murdered in the box. By Jeff Larentowicz, a violent whinging asswipe of a ginger who makes other gingers--even the otherwise unmentioned-here Ginger Ninja--look tender and mild. But Vaughn is fundamentally clueless, atypical of MLS referees only in that he not only makes bad calls and no-calls, he very often gets things precisely the opposite of the way they occurred. But that's hardly worth whining about any more, given the completely predictable nature of MLS officiating. It's going to be wrong. We just have to get the fuck over it, or walk away. Not that I will.

Four quickies:

-Fullback's right, the defense was better structured but still looked vulnerable on quick breaks, especially to Quincy Amarikwa. Good thing the Rapids sucked.

-The exception to that better structure is Perry Kitchen on the right side. Don't get me wrong; I like it. But Kitchen has no fucking idea what the fuck he's supposed to do in transitioning back, and it's going to cost the team before it pays off. Part of the problem isn't Kitchen, it's the rest of the defense, which needs to recognize that when Kitchen's up compensating for Najar's lack of size, they need to tighten the fuck up and play at least two guys deeper. And Jakovic and Kitchen should never be up at the same time, except on attacking set pieces.

-The entire team needs to stop floating high stuff. They're fucking awful in the air, and there are too many midgets on the team, one of them (Najar) being a favorite floatie target. It's just fucking stupid.

-Okay, I lied about not mentioning Ginger Ninja again. Dax McCarty sucks. He really, really sucks. He still has no business being captain of this team. Yes, he was more involved in the second half than we've seen so far. But Jeebus, he's awful, and he's a leading proponent of "whine first." He's also a lazy toucher--last night was the first time this season I've seen him pass crisply. If your captain's a lazy fuck, your team will be a pack of lazy fucks. I haven't seen so many people standing and waiting for the ball to come to them since I coached 11-year-olds who are now 40.

-Oh, I lied again. One more quickie, though BFF voiced it first: Simms is cooked. We disagree about whether Carroll would've been a better keeper (I say yes, he says Carroll's cooked too).

Finally: Fullback, I know you don't get to RFK much, but when you do, please drop by the concourse ramp behind 232 at the half if you'd care to say hi. You'll find me--the cartoon don't lie.

Rebel Leader Killed

2011-05-10T06:25:00.000-04:00

Obi-Wan Kenobi dead after firefight with Imperial stormtroopers, Vader still refuses to release birth certificate.

(via)

Zombie Marie Curie

2011-05-09T06:49:00.001-04:00

Geeks rock.

That is all.

Update: No it isn't. I haven't said anything about this yet because I'm still fuming, and I recognize that fuming unstoppably about the outcome of any sporting event--even a 7-month season that should've been an 8-month season--is not the mark of a great mind, although it's probably the mark of the level of sophistication you've come to expect of this blog. I even uncharacteristically allowed myself to be diverted for a few days by some sad but good news. So I'll keep it brief³, because there are only a couple of key conclusions here.

1. Someone isn't qualified to discuss this, and I am grateful to him for thus far shutting the fuck up about it. I'll give you two clues; he knows who he is, and he isn't Tony Fucking Kornheiser (although to Kornheiser's limited credit, there is something to be said for tradition).

2. I really hate to say this, a lot, but a few days of brain-chewing hasn't changed my conclusion: Fire Boudreau. I hate it hate it hate it hate it hate it. He seems, by all evidence, a great guy, and he seems to be a good hockey teacher. And I can't even articulate the mechanics of how he's a shitty playoff coach. But he is. Math don't lie. And a 4-0 waffle-stomping in a playoff series, by a team from fucking Florida, coached by the youngest coach in the league and manned by some of the oldest, Frenchest, douchebaggiest shitbirds in the fucking league (and truly, I could easily have gone on linking for a dozen more adjectives, adverbs, and nouns, had I only the energy)¹, is powerful math. Fire Boudreau. This is absolutely not forgivable. It is not acceptable. It is slow, miserable choking canine death, it is an abomination, it is a travesty of a mockery of a sham. Fire Boudreau.

¹ Let me be clear about this, because I don't think you've quite got the picture. I hate hockey teams from south of our own with the blazing, blinding passion of a thousand million white-hot exploding suns, and the hockey team from the south that I hate most of all is the motherfucking, cocksucking, douchetard frogface wetfart motherfucking Tampa Bay motherfucking Lightning, especially those two ass-pirate Frognucks Vinnie LeCavalier and Martin St. Pierre. This was so before this year's playoffs, and it will remain so when the sun has risen and fallen its last, presumably completing a cycle of millions of years of setting upon Stanley Cups won by Hurricanes, Panthers, and Thrashers (but not, I emphasize, by Capitals, because the thing I fear most, yes, the little kernel of fucking fascist fear at the core of my tiny little being, is that I will live another fucking 60 years and not see a fucking Stanley Cup in this fucking city, and do you know what that will make me? Do you know? THAT WILL MAKE ME A MOTHERFUCKING RED SOX FAN², or even worse, a fucking Cubs fan, the Red Sox fans of the new millennium, so just fucking kill me now. Jeebus.).
² And I cannot suggest strongly enough, at this point, that certain of my closest friends refrain from math right now. Yes, you know who you are, too.
³ I lied. Get over it.

Lives of Legend, Part the Next

2011-05-06T00:55:00.000-04:00

Things happen fast in My Local Locality. First this, which seems like yesterday rather than like two weeks ago, and then last night I started to wish death of a different sort for this guy, who is the only plausible explanation for Lord Voldemort and a fucking gaggle of Deatheaters swarming My Local Hockey Team in such blitzkrieg fashion. But today broke the barriers of my emotional control. Today, I weep for reals.

Long ago and far away, I was in love with a German film star¹. No, wait. Long ago and far away, I was in love with a college basketball team. Sometime along about 1997, I actually sold my soul to dark powers for a single wish, that one day, during my lifetime, the University of Maryland mens' basketball team would win the NCAA title. I had finished my undergraduate degree at Maryland after 20 years of alternating struggle and lassitude and struggle, and my then-wife Gamara rewarded me with season basketball tickets in legendary Cole Field House, the scene of this watershed college basketball moment and my college graduation and a whole bunch of other stuff.²

They were great days for Terps basketball; the team had recovered from the horror of Len Bias' death and the ensuing nightmare of cheating and probation, and there were exciting and fun players--Joe Smith, Keith Booth, Laron Profit, Obinna Ekezie, Steve Francis, and Terrence Morris, to name just a few--along with a bunch of guys who were just plain old scholarship basketball players. The late 90s were marked by consecutive NCAA tournament appearances (the streak went to 11), many of which ended in flames, prematurely. A personal favorite of mine is the year Laron Profit and Terrell Stokes blew curfew at the ACC tournament in Greensboro, probably chasing cheerleaders, and their subsequent punishment of 10 minutes' benching cost the team an early exit to some hosers like UC Santa Barbara or the College of Charleston. But Gary Williams did the right things, and the team progressed and endured as one of the elite teams in the NCAA.

It was some of the most fucking fun I've ever had, and it got better in 1998, when a young man named Juan Dixon entered Maryland on a basketball scholarship. Juan had a hard-luck story; both of his parents died of AIDS, and he was raised by his grandparents. He was quite a find, and a Baltimore kid, a Terp recruiting dream (it is a shame and a poverty that, historically, limited numbers of Baltimore kids have ended up playing at Maryland). He was skinny--Jeebus, he was a fucking rail--and he took a lot of work to love during his freshman year. He was joined in the backcourt the next year by The Alien Steve Blake, the pure point guard we'd always wanted, the second coming of John Lucas, except really, really gawky. Painfully gawky. Yeah, you can more'n likely break that code.

The 2000-2001 season felt like the time. I believe that was when I first realized that I would, if it were biologically possible, have Juan Dixon's babies.³ The team lost to Duke in the ACC tournament semifinals in Atlanta (Gamara and I attended), and then made it to the Final Four, where they lost...to Duke. This was also the season that made January 27 a dark day on every calendar to follow; leading a game at home by 10 points with 55 seconds left, Maryland choked to send the game into overtime, eventually losing the game. You don't need me to tell you who the opponent was. I think it's the only time in my life I ever thought I'd be trampled to death.

It all came together for the team the next season; they secured a number one seed in the NCAA tournament and cruised through, winning their only NCAA Championship and sealing the permanent loss of my soul. Juan Dixon was the tournament's most valuable player. They were...beautiful, losing only three games all season. I shiver when I remember the passion, the energy, the drive, the Terp-love. It was nirvana. It was bliss. It was Festival. I will never feel that way again.⁴

The program went into decline thereafter, partially victimized by success--Gary was never the same recruiter after his success with that team, particularly Saint Juan--and partially victimized by attitude and circumstance and those damned kids today. I'm talking about you, John Gilchrist. And you, Chris McCray, you stupid motherfucker (so stupid that he couldn't maintain a passing average in Maryland's Criminal Justice program, which basically consists of four years of directing traffic and writing parking tickets--which fall like rain on the Maryland campus, like at so many other campuses; some tickets were so cheap that it was worth it to me to pay for a ticket once every week or two to avoid a half-mile cross-campus walk to class).

And the man has his detractors, among them the unfathomably evil Debbie Yow (you find her) and, when he's in a pissy mood, BFF. To be sure (and to be fair), I've had days where I was no longer in thrall.

But that year...that moment...I know where I was and who I was with, I remember the Final with unbelievable clarity (I have done a fair amount of damage to my memory capacity over the years), and I guard and treasure the memory of those two hours or so with a ferocity that will never flame out. And I'd still have Juan Dixon's babies, and I still feel a warm fuzzy when I see The Alien Steve Blake on the television, even in his remarkably stupid Los Angeles Lakers uniform, and I'll always have that picture of Senior Night (see footnote 3, below). But it was all possible because of one guy, and for that deed, he'll always have me as a fan.

Thanks, Gary. Thanks for all of it, even for the shit. I'll never have a ride like that again.

Oh, and y'all know who you are. Check in down below and do the right thing.

¹ Hi honey.
² The last of which came in late February 2002, on Senior Night against Virginia, a moment memorialized in a panoramic photograph later framed and given to me as a gift by my then-future in-laws (Ilse's parents). When one looks closely at the front row of the end zone, behind the band, the location of my seats, one can pretty easily make out me...and Gamara. Oops.
³ That hasn't changed.
⁴ You might believe this is a bit tragic. You believe wrong.

We Can Has Normal Now?

2011-05-02T06:45:00.000-04:00

I may be a lonely minority of one here, and that's okay. I can't remember anything like such an unbridled orgy of bloodlust over the death of a human being. It's kinda disturbing.

Obviously, this means that the PATRIOT Act will be repealed, the troops will come home (except for going all Vaarsuvius on the entire Gadhafi family bloodline, or whatever the fuck they're doing in the Gulf of Sidra), all the people in Gitmo will receive criminal trials, TSA will back the fuck up, and all the people who hate America suddenly don't, because they were having their minds controlled by that guy the SEALs killed.

Oh.

Don't get me wrong. The evidence is pretty clear that the guy was a bad human being. Assuming he's entitled all the credit he's given, it's still a wimpy little body count, compared to all-time great monsters like Hitler and Stalin and Mao, who all tallied in the tens of millions (and I make this morbid comparison only because of the reaction). This guy was responsible, if we accept the reasoning, for mere thousands, the perspective exponentialized by American exceptionalism. He's really more in the...well, in the George Washington range of terrorism, ne c'est pas? Still and all, greater than one, and we sometimes kill, judicially, for that. To be explicit: I got no argument with the fact of the killing.

Let's not even talk about the burial at sea. I'll be laughing too hard to type. Sure, sure, no martyr's gravesite. Uhm...no body, either, for all our President's carefully selected language, and for all...seriously? You dumped the body in the ocean before you showed it to anybody? People seriously think Elvis and Jim Morrison are still alive, people believe aliens came to Roswell, and you dumped the fucking body in the ocean before you showed it to anybody so you could avoid an inconvenient gravesite and say, strictly within the limits of truth, that you respected Islamic tradition with a fast burial (consisting of, hypothetically, dropping the remains from a C-130 from 10,000 feet)? Who manages this shit, a cabal of fucking sophist 12-year-olds? I mean, are those who hate us going to hate us any less than if you actually pissed on the body?

Look at the dancing in Lafayette Park, on the remains of Pennsylvania Avenue (credit where due--the remains of Pennsylvania Avenue are on Tim McVeigh and Bill Clinton). Then tell me again how about the theory that (a) we're a Christian country; and (b) that's a good thing. This death of a man, however justified by his actions, doesn't return any of what our own government used him as the excuse to steal from us. Not for one fucking second. And we dance. We dance.

On His Knees, Eager To Please

2011-04-28T00:00:00.069-04:00

There are those who question the President's motivation in releasing his archived long-form Hawaii birth certificate, who cannot take him at face value. I'm not one of them. I think it's good that he did it, because anyone who continues to focus on the birth certificate as an issue crawls further out the Limb of Discernable Looniness. This includes those who ask why he didn't do it sooner; the answer to that is simply that he already released his fucking birth certificate, under the law of the state of his birth. No further answer to that fucktarded question is necessary.

It's unfortunate that The Trump has chosen to pursue that line of inquiry, because it just exposes him as dumber and dumber, and I really want that Trump/Palin (or Palin/Trump) ticket for 2012. Yes, I maintain that Obama is better than any (labelled) Republican, and better than anarchy or revolution or civil war or whatever the fuck it is that sophists want, if they even know or can agree. But que sera squared, and all that.

So why is it so easy for me to take Obama at face value on this, to believe that he really thinks he was going to put the issue to rest (or, to indulge WaPo gossips, that he got so pissed at George Stephanopoulos that he paid the twenty bucks to pursue a Hawaii state FOIA request)?

Please. Because he's a fucking dumbass, one of the stupidest theoretically smart people who's ever lived. And because he is one of the most pathetically insecure motherfuckers ever to politic. And the worst poker player ever. He really still thinks that Republicans can be his friends, he really thinks that logic plays some role in their machinations, in their disjointed and clannish and lower-Maslovian thought processes.

In short, he's a Jeffersonian. He'll fuck the slaves, oh yes he will, but he can't bear the thought of them figuring out that it's his cock plundering their holes. He doesn't understand why they can't just relax and be happy, and why the only people who can make them relax and be happy are the guys who not only want to rape the slaves, but break it off in their asses and then rape and gutshoot their sisters in front of them.

Wow. Sorry, Rude Pundit moment there. What I meant to say is this:

He's a Jeffersonian. He genuinely believes in the innate goodness of people. Well, fuck that, and God Bless Hobbes and Hamilton. As long as he wants these inbred, insular, xenophobic mongoloids to like him, he'll continue to be an ineffectual and irrelevant piece of lint in the bellybutton of history. What a fucking waste.

Dear DC United Reserves

2011-04-27T06:21:00.000-04:00

Run, you lazy bags of low-quality meat.

Not that I'm complaining, for reals. The early out from the US Open Cup will relieve summer fixture congestion and ensure that United makes a playoff run, right?

Oh.

Dear Benny Olsen

2011-04-22T00:03:00.000-04:00

Y'know, Red Bull New York (or whatever the fuck they call themselves now) is a seriously loaded club. I didn't expect a result tonight, and I wasn't surprised by a thumping. MLS has made clear that New York and LA are the league's showpiece cities; I referred a few weeks ago to how loaded the Gals are, and RBNY is no less so--Thierry Henry, Joel Lindpere, Duane DeRosario, Tim Ream, Luke Rodgers, Rafael Marquez, Juan Agudelo, to name a few. If we're still able to sing "not a fucking one" to them after this season, they'll have something to be ashamed of.

I also have to admit that if I had to lose one game to New York this week, that would've been the one I'd choose to lose. With last night's incredible (and barely deserved) Capitals comeback over the Rangers and a potential series-ending game 5 approaching on Saturday, a midweek ESPN game (Oops! If you forgot that bit in your assessment of United's chances tonight, shame on you.) against the Red Scum is small potatoes. Sorry, priorities are what they are.

So never far from my expectations, this thumping. What was far from my expectations was the utter lack of heart the team showed. Thierry Henry banged home a relatively early goal (12th minute, says the box score), and it was over, the rest just an exhibition for the appalling number of non-DCU fans in the house on College Night.

When you're down, you attack. Not so, DCU. You've seen me complain about backpassing in this space for 3 years now. The team shows a decided unwillingness to even attempt to gain attacking position--a long probe, some dancing on the ball, and either a turnover or another fucking backpass and reset. It's ugly, it's ineffective, and it's quite frankly pussified. The usual result is a poorly placed long ball after some interminable number of resets.

Saint Benny is learning as a coach, and probably gets more space to do that than anyone else would--after all, he's Saint Benny. But the United teams for which Benny played weren't pussies about getting the ball forward. Possession is nice, but when you treat possession like masturbation, then it's just masturbation.

The lead masturbator was Dax McCarty. He has no touch. He isn't a 10. He won't go get the ball. He dances when he should pass and passes--badly--when he should dance. He can't even get off decent set pieces. He's dreadful. Fullback points out, correctly, that Dax played well in the preseason. He has yet to display any of that form in the regular season, not even once. He belongs on the bench.

What then, Fullback rightly asks? I say the problem is with formation and structure. If you're going to play with two holding mids, you need better attackers (and playing two holding mids needs to improve your defense to the point where there's less need for an attack). Even then, it's a pretty fucking dull way to play the game, especially when the team does, in fact, have some ability to explode up front (in a good way). And United's got some players who can attack (they just seem to have some morbid fear of attempting to finish).

It's a frustrating night, and I don't have too much more to say about it right now. Honor demands that Dax McCarty give up the captaincy--he's a schlemiel. He's not leading the team with his play, and he's got no standing to do anything here, except become better. Common sense demands that Benny give someone else a realistic shot at the 10 job, and that someone is Branko Boskovic (who is advertised on Metrobuses as "The Architect," for crying out loud).

My usual comment on MLS officiating: the guy was inept. Not prejudicially so--in fact, not anywhere near prejudicially, because United was so bad they couldn't have scored even if the guy gave them an outrageous break. Hell, they couldn't even get into the box with the ball to dive for a break. He was just plain inept, best evidenced by his failure to book Luke Rodgers after the guy (who is a serious punkass bitch, as is Joel Lindpere) after he swung his arm, clubbing Chris Korb like a baby seal as the ball ran out of bounds (with RBNY up 3-0). The ref clearly saw it--he ran half the field to yell at Rodgers about it, Rodgers' second verbal warning of the game for violent conduct. But honestly? Why would I have any right to expect that the referee wouldn't be a pussy, when my club put at least 9 or 10 of them on the field its own self?

Really disturbing. I pay for better. I can't imagine this club going into Red Bull Park on July 9 and salvaging a result on the second leg of the Atlantic Cup, or even doing anything but running around in abject terror. Which is discouraging, since I'll be there...

Avenge the Patriotic Gore

2011-04-19T14:27:00.000-04:00

RIP Willie Don

We've been gifted with some awesome governors in this state--some only from an entertainment perspective, some from a leadership perspective, and some from a WTF? perspective. Only one combined the best of all three, and that man, William Donald Schaefer, died yesterday. Melonhead was undisputably the very finest public servant in Maryland history, a four-term mayor of Baltimore (and while we Mocomofos can breed as much as we'd care to, Maryland politics still begin and end in Charm City, and always will), a two-term governor, and a two-term state comptroller (after his terms as governor). For 40 years, he dominated politics in the state, and while many hated him (even those of us who loved him hated him briefly at one time or another), even the haters could not deny that he was a man who moved the state forward after years of moribundity.

I can haz attention?

Thanks to BFF for inspiring my image search with his posted pic of the quintessential Schaefer memory (and for saving me the effort of actually searching for the newspaper link). I chose the pic above, but BFF's black-and-white version would've been the one on the front page of the Sun--and let's not pretend that the Post is relevant to this discussion. He was mayor of Charm City then, and the occasion was the opening of the National Aquarium in Baltimore, one of the centerpieces of the Inner Harbor development, probably the consensus starting point of Baltimore's renaissance (non-yuppie Marylanders prefer other neighborhoods, but money is what money is).

I am the very model of a Maryland major general. Or admiral. Whatever.

The background of the above photo says it all. It's Admiral Willie Don's last day as mayor, his first day as governor. Baltimore's building. Think about all of it¹--the harbor complex, Camden Yards, the revitalization of downtown, the light rail, the righteous ferocity of Melonhead's hatred for the Irsays and fucking twats like Parris Glendening--and then reflect on the words of our current governor (who only serves to boost the enormity of Willie Don:

"I think the legacy he would like the most is that people know that he cared, and there are hundreds of thousands of people all across our state who are remembering today their encounters with Mayor Schaefer or Governor Schaefer when they were looking for a job, when they needed to get a son or daughter into drug treatment, when nobody would come to address the problem of the illegal dumping in their alley or their broken swing sets in the park. And Governor Schaefer cared and he did something about it and he made sure government acted now for the people, government is meant to serve. And I think that is his most enduring legacy, really. I think that will live long after some of the memories of the built environment."

(Emphasis mine.)

Two greats, a convict, a prospective convict, and a twat.

The men who preceded and followed Willie Don, (Harry Hughes, at right above, excepted), only clarified how much the man shone. The exception, who hailed from a part of the state that Melonhead famously (and correctly) called "an outhouse," came on the heels of a pair of convicts, and while Harry is a wonderful man who restored respect for the statehouse, he just didn't have the luster of his successor, and really, I cannot emphasize this enough, his predecessor, immediately to his right above, actually spent time in a Federal prison for crimes committed while governor. It could equally be said that Schaefer benefitted from following a quiet, dignified guy like Harry Hughes, but the fact is that Willie Don had a pretty serious track record for flamboyance even before Harry showed up in Annapolis.

In retirement at Jimmy's

I wouldn't live in any other state in the Union. With Melonhead's passing, a big bit of what makes Marylanders better than you² dies. The man exemplified our state and the notions of leadership and public service and citizen service, notions that politicians of all stripes have left by the wayside in the years since he stepped down as governor. I much prefer to think that, like Louie Goldstein, Willie Don is immortal, and for my own mental health, deep down, I don't really believe he's dead. But I have to nod to the news; rest in peace, Melonhead.

(Pic credit for the two flamboyant Williedon pics.)
¹ Unless you're from Pittsburgh or Kissing Suzy Kolber, in which case you can, at this time, think about going and fucking yourself rather roughly.
² No, I'm not fucking kidding, especially if you're from Pittsburgh or Kissing Suzy Kolber, in which case you can, at this time, think about going and fucking yourself rather roughly.

It Seems To Work When We Bitch

2011-04-16T21:04:00.000-04:00

Brief notes on DCU's 3-0 visit to Toronto's BMO Field. Find your own game story link.

The game aired on Fox Soccer, and the announcers are completely effing retarded. Early stupid comments, before I got distracted by a tornado warning:

Fredsux and Tino give Saint Benny depth on the right wing. Uhm, try again. Fredsux and Tino give Saint Benny suck on the right wing, and Najar is looking like a sophomore (apparently one who was french-kissing Perry Kitchen a whole lot, because he's ill tonight).

DCU is 1-0-0 when scoring first. Uhm...it's one game. And it has little to do with anything when your back line suhhhhhhhcks. Fortunately for DCU tonight, TFC's sucks worse.

Jacob Peterson doesn't look comfortable at right back. Uhm...that's because he's an attacker, you fucking mongoloids. It's also nontrivial that he's a former wunderkind gone bad.

Is that Barra Brava or the Screaming Eagles up there? Oh, there's a guy in a Barra shirt. It's Barra! Uhm..it's both, you fuckwits. They both travel, there's a new Barra splinter group called Ultras, and they're probably there too. We don't get separate seating at enemy venues. Retards.

I stopped tracking after that. The stupid, it burns.

You probably haven't heard this here before, but Dax McCarty sucks. He just completely fucking sucks, and it's galling that he's our fucking captain. He has no touch, his set pieces blow, he attacks the ball on defense but waits for it on offense. He's a greasy, whining, ineffectual ginger daywalker freakazoid, and he can't go away fast enough.

Charlie Davies, who is presently writhing on the ground in the TFC area as time runs out, is a bitch. He's just a little bitch. He dives, he pushes with two hands and whines when he gets whistled for it, he's just a little bitch. That said: our bitch.

Nice to see Pontius show up for the first time since his freshman year.

TFC has some issues--I thought they were supposed to be pretty good, but with no DeRo and no Chad Barrett, they're not very threatening. Empty seats in BMO--lots of them. Shameful. I can only conclude that Toronto is populated by pussies. Of course, as always...good thing they suck.

Also: they have Bud commercials on the sideboards. That's just lame. You have your own Canadian piss, you need to pimp ours?

That's all the thinking--and energy--I got.

Imminent Death

2011-04-13T18:38:00.000-04:00

It's been inevitable since the man pictured below died, but this sucks. It was, for a time, virtually a city ordinance that teenage Gophershole males work at Roy's; BFF and Elric did, for significant stretches, and I did, for about 20 minutes, before Pappy's Family Pub lured me back to my red-and-white striped shirt and styrofoam boater for a 30-cent raise. Good times, right?

I still eat there, and will until they close the doors. Ilse loves it, Whispers loves it, Databoy loves it, and Bam-Bam tolerates it, in a way he won't tolerate most sit-down places. BFF and Planet went there with us a year or two ago, for the hell of it, but I think BFF was too skeeved out to enjoy it. That's just my thought--he'll speak his piece, here or there, I'm sure.

The Late Great Roy Passin

(picture stolen from, and copyrighted by, The Gazette)

In Which I Say Bad Things About A Saint

2011-04-10T00:13:00.000-04:00

You know what's awesome about MLS?

Actually, nothing, it's really fucking rinky-dink. Never mind.

You know what's kind of entertaining about MLS, in a self-flagellating sort of way? There are nights in MLS when I actually pay money to go be afflicted with both Abbey Okulaja and David Fucking Beckham in the same night. Tonight? Was one of those nights.

I must begin with a deserved apology to BFF; I just watched the replays on MLSNet, and Charlie Davies most assuredly did dive for a penalty in the 88th minute. Omar Gonzalez barely touched him. But this ties in with the theme of what follows; United absolutely, positively did not deserve to walk away with a point from its match against the Gals tonight. And as badly as Abbey handled another game (Beckham should've been sent off in the 41st minute for deliberately attempting to injure Josh Wolff; Davies was manhandled from the moment he entered the game; and Quaranta should've been sent off at least twice before he actually was), it was gratifying for the worst of it, the bit that actually affected the league table, to go in our favor. For once.

Most of that doesn't matter, except maybe to the Gals, who should feel aggrieved. But who the fuck cares? They're the fucking Gals. Fuck 'em.

Here's what does matter: United played like shit. They're badly coached and far too many of them don't give a shit. Some key players who do seem to give a shit also seem to have shit for brains, or for talent. Details follow, but the bottom line is that United is still a very, very bad team. They may have enough about them to get a few more points than last year, but they're really fucking bad.

Let's start with the attack. The Gals are best up the middle, anchored by former Terp Omar Gonzalez (who I cannot bring myself to discommodate--he's going to be an awesome USMNT player). So you go to the wings, right? Well, Najar started the game on the bench, as did Boskovic. The starting wide mids were Quaranta and Pontius. Neither played like a winger. The problem here combined coaching and stupid play; Quaranta has become just a giant sack of balls running around the field hurling himself at things. Pontius has simply become retarded. Neither was doing anything to move the ball upfield, and both were far too eager to hold up the attack, back off, and probe for another opportunity.

I attribute this to coaching. Saint Benny very clearly coached the team to a slow tempo tonight. That was fucking stupid. Obviously, Benny was worried about breakaway speed from Gals like Angel and Franklin, and Benny's got no speed to go to on the back line, since the team traded away Wallace and Gray, and since so many guys are hurt (Goff says Kitchen had the flu). But the Gals are too loaded with talent for a team like DCU to break them down with patience and deliberation. The only time United looked to have chances was on the counter, and almost every single time, they were too chickenshit to try to close the counter. Pull up, back out, probe for an opening, turn over the ball--into a speedy and dangerous counter. It's almost as if they were coached that way.

Oh.

There are also serious organizational problems on the back line. It's true that the team has suffered from nagging injuries, and it's a damn shame that Jed Zayner, who looked quite useful until he got whacked, has been hurt for so long. It's also a damn shame that Kitchen hasn't had time to gel, since he was with the soon-to-be-former-coach Thomas Rongen's U-20 US team. But that sort of situation calls for more coaching, more system, more organization. Every enemy attack--and we saw this on Wednesday night at the Plex against the Phunions, too--looks dangerous, every attack is thwarted by individual heroics. It worked tonight, inexplicably; the Gals' goal came, inexcusably, on a set piece. Whoops. More coaching.

Now, I'm constitutionally incapable of being too hard on Benny. For one thing, he's Benny, and for another, it's early in the season. But the team is lazy and stupid, and Benny needs to pull out the whip hand, and he needs to get some help to figure out how the fuck to organize a defense no matter what clods he has to throw into it.

The lazy part is also disturbing. Too many players seem to think they can just touch the ball, direct a deflection to a teammate and let it roll. Their lazy-ass teammates think they can hang out and wait for these lazy and incoherent dribbles to arrive. This has been a problem through about three coaches now. You have to go get the fucking pass. BFF seems to think it's a skill problem; I disagree. This is something you're coached on from youth. If you're good enough to play professionally, you're able to weight your touch. It's simply impossible that they're that technically unskilled. The problem is mental or intellectual.

Really Bad Players Who Should Dive Under A Bus Now:

Dax McCarty tops the list. He plays with some energy, but he has no touch and no common sense. He's the leader of the "let the ball bounce off me and call it a pass" party. He's a shitty on-field leader of the club, and he has yet to do one single thing in a game to give me any inkling of why he was worth Rodney Wallace, let alone why he should be this team's captain. Furthermore: he's a fucking dwarf. And a ginger. Right now, McCarty looks to be a worse acquisition than was Gallardo, and that's saying something.

Chris Pontius is out of chances. His play is remarkably stupid and uncreative, he won't make runs, and he's a Fredsux-quality turnover machine. For a wide mid to be unable to make runs and unable to deliver crosses is just unacceptable. And the number of times he was the one to hold up a breakout was appalling.

Santino Quaranta I already dealt with. He's just a big sack of testosterone and anger. Heart is no longer a problem for him, but he doesn't seem to have any remaining talent to go with it, or at least the intelligence to harness his talent (and experience--it's incredible how long he's been in the league, for his age) in a useful direction. Props to him for getting his ass back on defense, and congratulations to him for being no worse than my fourth or fifth most hated player on my own fucking club.

A number of guys aren't falling into this category because they didn't play. I'm mostly looking at you, Joseph Ngwenya. You fucking suck, dude.

Guys Who Are Going To Piss Me Off Real Soon If They Don't Get Their Shit Together:

Bill Hamid is clearly suffering from his injury layoff, and probably doesn't deserve to be on this list. He's not sure where he's supposed to be, and he's slow to come off the line when he needs to. He has a really poor command of the area. That's one of the few areas where he makes Pat Onstad look good--a confident veteran like Onstad, for all his physical deterioration, knows how to direct a defense. The defense never looks more disorganized than when Hamid is playing. Experience will fix this, and more playing time will increase Hamid's confidence about where he should be. On the other hand, Hamid has a wild side on the field that he can't let out of hand.

Mark Burch is someone I hate to put in this category, for obvious reasons. He's a Terp, and he will always be in my personal Hall of Fame for headbutting the Aztec No-Neck, Cuahatemec Blanco, a couple of summers ago at the Plex. But for the love of God, would some coach please make Burchie do six hours of right-foot drills for the rest of his fucking life? I've flown to the coast in less time than it takes him to run around the fucking ball to hit it with his left foot. And his touch is off, too--his ability to place those left-foot rockets ain't what it was two years ago.

Dejan Jakovic is adorably dirty and was responsible for a good third of the random unexpected heroics I mentioned earlier. He also has a wild streak a mile wide, manifesting mostly in a tendency to try to dribble upfield. This should be rewarded with a newspaper to his nose. Which is undoubtedly cold and wet. I love the guy, but Jeebus can he manage some scary shit.

Andy Najar is our darling. He's also short, and he needs to stop trying to play tall. He also very badly needs to figure out a new trick, because everyone's now seen the dribble-and-dash to the corner, and no one, least of all a wily veteran criminal like Todd Fucking Dunivant, is going to fall for it. He's obviously in the doghouse--he didn't start either Wednesday night or tonight--and when he gets into games, you sort of get a hint of why. It should be unsurprising that a teenager as celebrated as he was last season might cop an attitude problem, and this is one thing I have to commend Benny for--if the kid's too impressed with himself, he deserves the benching.

Inoffensive, Possibly Bland

Blake Brettschneider, Chris Korb, Ethan White

Nice Job

I've made no bones about how much I hate Josh Wolff. He's a dirty little bitch. But I have to hand it to him for his energy and his willingness to jump in and do things that have to be done. He's quickly earning his way into the position of our dirty little bitch, and I think Benny made a huge mistake by naming a permanent captain so early in this team's development. At this point, it would be a disservice to McCarty, as much as I hate him, to hand the armband to someone deserving--and that list begins and ends with Wolff--but Wolff is quickly becoming the guy who exemplifies on the field what the shirt is supposed to be about.

Branko Boskovic came in late, and sparked. It's about fucking time. But be that as it may, he deserves notice for bringing energy and touch and a willingness to move the ball forward--especially since he was the only one in the midfield willing to do that, in a game where the team was down and had nothing to lose by attacking without reserve.

Clyde Simms was responsible for most of the heroics that didn't fall to Jakovic. I counted five solid stops that would've otherwise been dangerous chances, if not run-of-play goals. Clyde was moving the ball well, and showed again why he's the best anchor we have. It remains a shame that the team couldn't find room for both Simms and Brian Carroll; it clearly needs more than one guy who can anchor the defense, and Simms is many shades better than anything else we have.

Charlie Davies is simply a blast. In each home game, he's come on and caused games to take a positive turn. He did dive, and big-time; if Abbey were a smarter referee, the penalty (and the equalizer) would've instead been a yellow card for Charlie. But it wasn't, and it was a much-needed point in the standings, and Davies is by far the most likely guy on the field to make things happen. It's a shame he's not in full-game condition yet, and we'll look forward to that day. He looks especially good up front with Wolff--the combination of Wolff's punkass bitchitude with Davies' speed and technical competence makes the team look more dangerous than it has in years.

Don't get me wrong. I expected a loss tonight, and I'm happy to have avoided it. I didn't know Donovan was hurt, and the Gals are a very talented and well-coached team that should simply mop up the fucking league without breaking much of a sweat. Beckham is a fucking punkass thug, and gets away with it because he's the money. I hope Bruce Arena is crying in Curt Onalfo's flopsweat tonight (Onalfo is the Gals' newest assistant coach). He should be, after getting pwn3d by a few lucky (for us) bounces and Abbey Okulaja's incompetence.

Fullback got up first. He's not wrong, and he's completely right that United stole a point tonight.

Crap Blogging

2011-04-07T08:06:00.000-04:00

I am slowly recovering from the plague to which I referred in my last post. I'm loathe to say I'm recovered, though I am feeling considerably better and my body is not disrupting my life nearly as much as it was when I whined about all the disease vectors in my life uniting to liquefy my digestive tract.

Life advice: the way to rid yourself of an intestinal-tract bug is most emphatically not to get on an airplane two days after onset and take a 500-mile business trip. Just thought I'd let you know I did that science for you. Y'know, in case you were wondering.

I know that you are very happy to read this news, and I'm pleased to report that I'm not even tempted to simply leave this post at a single graf on the state of my bowels. Things happen even while I'm moaning, and many of them cry out for acknowledgment and validation:

-Awesome evening last night at the Plex, where United and the Phunions (TM) played a reserve game that also passed for a US Open Cup match. United won on penalties, having failed to assert a lingering lead after getting the high-school officiating crew to toss a Philly player (he deserved it, as did three Phunions who weren't tossed; we pass no judgment on whether Saint Piotr Nowak deserved to be shown red after Philly scored a tying goal as extra time waned, because we were on the other side of the field and don't know what magic words Saint Piotr said--presumably in pidgin English, as is his wont--to the incompetent boob of a ginger referee who very clearly had a short-man complex).

The Sons of Ben who showed up were fun--I shared smoke breaks with a few of them, a rare pleasure at the Plex, where stormtrooper poe-leece are not usually given to looking the other way over minor infractions--and they were sane, for a limited range of sanity that includes MLS partisans. It was touching that, in defeat, miles from home, they serenaded us with a few bars of "We All Hate Red Bull." It wasn't as much fun as when they were taunting us with "You're Moving To Baltimore" and I replied with "You live in Chester," but still and all, another unifying fan experience that demonstrates that we needn't all be lime-green retard barista-humpers.

Yeah, the game itself pretty much sucked--it looked mostly like an English Sunday pub league, and that may be an insult to pub leagues. But the weather was fantastic (Ilse will tell you her toes froze) and the company was magnificent--Himself, the Hamster, the much-beloved and too-long-unseen Planet, along with Ilse and Databoy, who actually spent long stretches of the game shutting the fuck up.

-On the topic of Planet, I don't recall mentioning this, but she made the right choice and will attend a small liberal arts college that I once half dropped out of (and half got tossed from). I applaud her good sense, good taste, and general sanity. I thought it might be the night that I'd finally start peeling off twenties to reward the kid for a public display of pottymouth, but no such love. I will not abandon my quest, though I suspect that I'll suspend it for our likely next encounter (her high school graduation), out of respect for her mother and her grandparents.

-I may or may not have a week off approaching, depending on how this week's round of congressional taunting and hyperbolizing and blame-shifting and other masturbatory activity turns out. The whole thing is appalling, though a good thing has emerged: Representative Paul Ryan's fiscal year 2012 budget proposal. You wonder why it's a good thing? They finally came out of the closet, for reals. There is no backing away for the Republicans now. Ryan's outlandish rapestand proposal, embraced by certain completely retarded alleged moderates as "courageous," makes it clear that the Republicans are angling for no less than the repeal of all domestic support programs and the total subjugation of the poor to the idea that greater wealth disparity is not only nonproblematic but desirable. The math is clear, and there's no further argument about this. If you support Ryan's proposal and refuse to admit that it's about making the poor more so, you're a lying motherfucker, full stop. And if you can read about Ryan's proposal and continue to believe, for real, that there's no difference in the flavors, then you're a whole lot of things I won't go into, because I have a feeling my BFF is one of those deluded Tinkerbell-lovers, and honestly? I can't even begin to fathom their reasoning here, after months of committed attempts to decipher the sophistry.

-On the shutdown itself, it's more of the same. A minority is asserting itself as the true rulers and insisting that anything short of their way is unacceptable disrespect to a fantasy mandate. Fuck 'em. The appropriate way for this to be handled is thus: punch them in the nose. When they whine, punch them in the nose and tell them that it's their fault that God made you punch them. Repeat as necessary.

What? It's how they're treating you.

Plague

2011-04-02T07:35:00.000-04:00

BFF not-so-secretly loves a good fever now and again. Not so much, me. I get deep chills and menopause-quality hot flashes and I don't get the high-art dreams that BFF reports. We've had a sickhouse for much of the week; Bam-Bam woke up violently ill on Tuesday, and spent three days pooping and moaning, with a couple of false-alarm appearances of being completely healed. Friday, Ilse and I both woke up with it, and Databoy reported fever and exhaustion on coming home. So it's not so much that I'm going back on my promise to post more--it's that dysentery makes posting more difficult that I'm willing to take on. See you.

No, Seriously, Matt Reis Looks Like An Uncircumsised Penis

2011-03-29T00:01:00.005-04:00

Remember? Ilse said it? I couldn't find a pic? Ultraloyal minion Goth says, "No problem, kemosabe¹."

This is Matt's fully erect state.

Ginormous gobs of gratitude to Goth, who had to sit through his two favorite teams playing a NCAA regional final on Friday night, and is now pretending he doesn't really like the one that won. Or, for that matter, the one that didn't. Goth is a fan in the finest Terps tradition, and we salute him.

¹Goth means it this way, of course:

Far Side copyright Gary Larson and used without permission, but if the man actually gives a shit, I'll take it down and link to somewhere else that used it improperly.

Excellent Words

2011-03-28T08:33:00.002-04:00

Parallax.

Tuber.

Defenestrate.

Eschew.

Sports Day

2011-03-27T10:28:00.001-04:00

All in all, if you told me at the beginning of the day that I could have only one win out of the three sporting events about which I cared enough to watch, I'd probably have chosen the win that I got. But the United win should've been laying there, and it's infuriating that an incompetent little prick gave that win a bloody abortion for reasons that need not advance beyond his own incompetence.

But I rush the game. It all started with a college hockey game. This is a pleasure I don't get to indulge a lot, because most of the college hockey on TV is Western hockey, and the college hockey I like is decidedly Eastern. Once upon a time, John the Daftist taught at RPI, when little boy Landru was but an impressionable tyke of 7 and 8 years old. I was learning to like sports, and hockey at RPI is something you can get real close to. In fact, some of the hockey players were in John's classes, and in their desperation to pass a course taught by a man who only gave multiple choice tests authored by Coyote the Trickster, graded on a rigid curve, young Landru acquired a fine stash of official NCAA sticks and pucks. Every kid has his secret post-bedtime vice (oh, stop); mine was burrowing into the covers in the harsh upstate New York winter and listening to RPI hockey on the radio. They were my first sports heroes.

This led to consequences both fortunate and unfortunate. I didn't understand the nature of loyalty in professional sports, and if I did then, I'd still be a fucking Rangers fan. Good thing, eh? When we moved to the DC area in 1969, I left the Rangers behind and reverted to my family's Pennsylvania roots. Yeah, I was a Flyers fan until 1974. I didn't know any better, and I didn't have an alternative. I get this much credit; I learned early on to hate the fucking Habs, who acquired one of their most famous goalies from another, much hated, ECAC school. A delicious hatred of both the Habs and Cornell continues to spice my life.

Anyway, NCAA hockey didn't start to enjoy the same sort of cable exposure as even Australian rules football until shortly after the millennium, and information was hard to come by before we invented the Internet. I drifted from NCAA hockey, because for a long time it wasn't even on The Ocho, and then when The Ocho and its cousins started to show hockey, they were focused on Big Ten hockey, along with its bastard cousins at Denver, Bemidji State, and various places in the Dakotas. The Web made it possible to find out what's going on, but RPI's been in a lull for a number of years, and it's hard to burrow into the covers and listen to RPI radio on my laptop.

This year, RPI finally made the dance again, after a long absence. They lasted one game, against a powerhouse of a North Dakota team, which had them on size and speed and Canadian Midwesternness. It was a bit of a depressing watch, but a thrill to see the RPI logo on hockey sweaters again, and it's not like I was connected to the Engineers like I used to be. So I can take it like a man.

Yesterday's other hockey event was much more uplifting. You may remember last spring, when the Caps vomited on their own shoes and horked up a 3-1 series lead against the fucking Habs, culminating in two games in which the Caps couldn't get a shot that didn't run into somebody. That, of course, did nothing to diminish the hating. Now, a badly injured Caps team (Ovechkin, Green, and recent acquisition Jason Arnott are all down with injuries), backstopped by rookie wonderkind Braden Holtby (gave up 8 goals over 5 games in his last trip up with the Caps earlier in the month, then gave up 8 goals in 2 games upon his return to Chocotown), shut out the froggy fucks. The Caps are setting a nice pace headed into the playoffs, and it does not look like they're planning to win the fucking President's Trophy again (best overall league record), so they shouldn't have to face that curse. And as much time as I spend bitching about referees (those in Ottawa on Friday night were appalling, allowing a Senator to tomahawk Matt Hendricks in the head, with blood drawn, with no call, and calling Matt Bradley for boarding for a clean but solid hit he administered from the bottom of the faceoff circle, essentially a mathematical impossibility under the rules), I'd be remiss if I didn't note that the Caps certainly had the better of them against the Habs. It was a good thing to see, especially after spending two hours on this.

I'll not pretend that United played particularly well against the Rev. They were missing two key players (Clyde Simms and Jed Zayner) from the win over Columbus last week, and Dax McCarty still looked like a very poor personnel decision, showing absolutely nothing for the second consecutive game. Josh Wolff was, according to Ben Olsen, bothered by a hammy, and didn't look anything like the sneaky little bitch that he is (and was, last week). Joseph Ngwenya continued to be useless, and--brace for this--Shut the Fuck Up Kurt Morsink was one of the most useful players on the field, bodying and mouthing up on The Asshole Shalrie Joseph to the point where Joseph wasn't particularly doing the Rev any good. Overall, the team looked lackluster and reverted to the same Hail Mary bullshit that made last year's offense such a massive display of ineffectual pissantry--long balls to the other team, airy crosses to short men, clueless attempts to retain possession with backs to the goal. Meanwhile, there's absolutely no clue about why DP Branko Boskevic wallows on the pine, but he must've really pissed Benny off somehow.

All of that is true. But it's hard for a team to show any luster in the face of early and awful decisions by yet another incompetent MLS referee. Baldomero Toledo is a run-of-the-mill incompetent MLS referee. He's not corrupt, like Jair Maruffo; he's not a pussy, like Alex Prus; he's not simply biased against particular teams, like Kevin Stott (and it remains to be seen how Stott will treat United now that Jaime Moreno, a player Stott clearly couldn't stand, is gone), and he's not even as overarchingly and consistently incompetent as Terry Vaughn. But he sure had a bad day yesterday, aided by his bench-sideline assistant (the other AR seemed to be fine, or at least not impactful).

Toledo started by missing (with the lino's help) an egregious handball by Zach Schilawski, one that clearly helped the kid score a goal; he unmistakably handled the ball onto his foot before firing it past Pat Onstad from close range. This happened in the eighth minute. BFF often (and correctly--and oh, look, he's got a post up, but he didn't see the second half, which makes no difference whatever in his post, actually, but I do wish he'd fucking quit posting images that obscure his fucking links) makes the point that we can't predict what would or would not have happened had a particular call been or not been made. I often (and correctly) counter, that when such a call or noncall puts a soccer team up by a goal, especially early, that the effect is profound. That's what happened here, especially after Toledo awarded the Rev a penalty for Pat Fucking Phelan jumping into a play at the edge of the 18 with the clear intention of trying to draw a foul from the aforementioned soulless Ginger. That was in the 17th or 18th minute, and the geriatric and hairstyle-impaired Onstad actually got a hand on the penalty kick, but to no avail. Down 2-0.

After that, it doesn't matter much. You've already had it broken off in your ass twice by an incompetent sack of shit. What the fuck are you playing for? Benny made what was probably the right move at halftime, taking out the ailing Wolff and putting in Davies, taking out a defender and adding a midfielder (no comment on the man selected--didn't matter, in the scheme of things). Goff tamely noted of the formation change that "United was exposed in the back and fortunate not to slip into a deeper deficit." Well understated, Goffinho.

And Toledo tried to make amends in the 88th minute, whistling a fucking ridiculous penalty on the Rev on a Ginger free kick into a mad scramble in the box that resulted in Ngwenya and Davies piled on top of Matt Reis, who's gotten certificates of merit for far more egregious and impactful fouls--if, in fact, he even committed a foul in this instance. Toledo blew this moment of evenhandedness a few minutes later by red-carding Dejan Jacovic (who very clearly deserved it for lashing out at Matt Reis, who also deserved a red card and didn't get one).

Just another day in MLS, really, at the bottom of it, and a reminder why it's best not to get too fucking giddy about United's future, but to enjoy the moment for what it is--when it is.

Oh--I can't find a still image, but the line of the night goes to Ilse, and you'll see what she meant if you watch some of the highlights here: "Matt Reis looks like an uncircumsized penis." While I embellished with some fluff about disease and scabrousness (because, you see, I really don't fucking like Matt Fucking Reis), she has the fundamental right of it.

News is Fun

2011-03-25T17:38:00.001-04:00

Outside our local nation:

Opposition Brings Down Canadian Government

Huh? That sounds really impolite. But here's my favorite part of the story:

Canadian opposition parties brought down the Conservative government in a no confidence vote Friday, triggering an election that polls show the Conservatives will win.

Oh, wait. This is one of those square wheels things, right?

Not actually; I was being selective. While the Conservatives will likely win a plurality, they likely will not have a majority, and will be even more reliant on opposition parties for votes in their little minority government. Which could lead the Liberals to form their own coalition government with other opposition parties.

It's good that Canadians are emulating our success with minority government, eh?

In other news, My Local Locality's County Council President (oh, Christ...see here and in the same chronological area, if you can fucking stand it, for more background), whose name is Valerie Ervin, went on My Local Shove News Up Your Ass Until You Explode station today and bitched about the school system's increasing budget compared to the rest of the county's budget. What a genius of misrepresentation. For one thing, as noted ad infinitum here and elsewhere, the student population's increasing, and for another, there's a state law that requires the county not to reduce per-student spending on education.

Ervin crawled out on her astonishing slim limb three days after something like 8 to 10 percent of the county's teachers got involuntary transfer notices, meaning that their jobs at their present schools won't be there next year.

I read this, and immediately logged onto my secret Gmail account, figuring I had some chance of catching my very close personal friend Hans Riemer¹ on Gmail chat. I got lucky, and Hans found out about two hours ago what you're finding out now: that the county teachers who got involuntary transfer notices, and whose jobs are threatened, includes a treasured constituent of his, who also happens to be my wife.

It seems that, as a result of planning decisions made by people who are not Hans Riemer (or Valerie Ervin, for that matter), average class size in our schools for next year will increase from 29 students to 34. That's a 17-percent increase, and Newtonian math leads to a 17-percent reduction in teachers. Reality intercedes there--the relationship isn't a straight line (and fractions are harder to deal with in lightly staffed departments--sadly for Ilse, she's in a large department). Hence the 8-10 percent estimate.

It's possible that I protest too much, at least on Ilse's behalf. For one thing, her principal is a seriously greasy operator, and he seems to like her, which is unusual for him and teachers generically. There's a fair chance that he'll manage to slime her back into his budget. For another, most of the teachers cut are lightly experienced. So's Ilse, who is in her fourth year of teaching for real. However, she's got experience at three schools (this isn't the first time she's been surplused), and glowing recommendations from all three. And I mean they glow like Fukushima No. 4--she's a young teaching rockstar. This also means that she's relatively inexpensive. All in all, an attractive prospect for any job for which she applies; the trick is whether there will be jobs that she wants. Or jobs at all.

Anyway, I ripped Hans a little in Gmail chat, and he's a good human, so his response was primarily concern for Ilse (who also did a little work for him during the campaign, and who looks damn good at receptions and suchlike). I mostly ripped Ervin, and Hans is a smart human and didn't explicitly agree with me. Well played, Hans. My white cat and I will make another run at you sometime soon.

For extra giggles, see the comments section of the WTOP article I cited above, where one genius asserted that there are 250,000 "illegal immigrants" in Montgomery County. That would be a quarter of the county's population. I'll tell you what, people who think illegal immigration is an actual problem: I'll support checking peoples' immigration status before they receive government benefits, if you support disenfranchising fucktards.

¹ I have this mental picture of what Hans must look like every time he thinks of the day he called me on the telephone to solicit my vote, and of every email he innocently replied to in the days shortly thereafter, which is probably every time I reach out to him by phone or email. Hans seems to be gracious enough to believe that any publicity is good publicity, and of course he gets beaucoup points for that, as a human and as a pol. But I've got at least 3-4 more years to teach him an awful lot about that little bit of folk wisdom, hmm?

National Pride

2011-03-23T09:00:00.000-04:00

Ethnologically speaking, I am a mutt. My great-grandparents were German, German, German, German, Welsh, Scottish, English, and German (there are rumors of an Irish person in the woodpile immediately preceding, but we discount them). I've found stereotypical things to like about all of my varied ancestries. Scotch whiskey, for instance, and a pathological need to make trains run on time, sometimes by herding them together and shouting at them, if need be. Likewise, my penchant for popping off cap-and-ball firepower at wogs hardly makes me proud.

To the extent I've any nationalist sentiment, I try to direct it toward the country my forebears adopted in stages over the course of the 19th Century, to the extent that doesn't conflict with fundamental human and pacifist impulses. While I've no sympathy for love it or leave it, I'd rather be here, all told, than elsewhere, particularly if elsewhere is a place of crushing poverty or periodic wars against the Rus, the Tatars, or the (shudder) Gauls.

But I'm fond of the places from which my people came (England excepted--our favorite family toast on the paternal side is "Up the Queen"), and Wales is no exception. Given my dualism about nationalism, imagine my delight when I encountered this little number about the Wales national football team, which apparently doesn't know its own national anthem.

"We have been given the Welsh version and the phonetic version. The lady who is singing the national anthem this Saturday gave us a lesson. We all had to get up and sing it on Sunday night."

An English-born Welsh team player whose name probably doesn't matter

Funny bits abound. For instance, "the lady" in question is Miss Wales. Who's singing the national anthem at Wales' upcoming match against England.

I can tell you that the English anthem is easy--we stole it and called it My Country 'Tis of Thee, and good on us. Germany's anthem is officially called Song of the Germans, but any fool knows it is, as it has always been, Deutschland Uber Alles. I've no idea what Scotland's national anthem is, but I'm pretty sure it tracks closely with my present masthead (yeah, I know, you didn't notice).

So I've some empathy for these English-born gits who don't know the anthem of the country they've flocked to, by birthright, for soccer succor because they couldn't make the English team. Welsh is, after all, a funny language, the most dominant letters being "l" and "y", each of them often doubled. I've got family who are sorta into the Welsh thing, and I've no clue how to pronounce "Gwegllyyllanfairgyygwychll," although from the available clues it appears that it might sound something like "Up the Queen."

Yes, I've decided to post more often, even when I don't really have something to say. Love it or...well, don't.

A Thing That Must Be Said

2011-03-22T05:00:00.001-04:00

This keeps coming up lately, again and again. It must need to be purged.

There was a lovely young woman, beautiful in all respects physical and spiritual save a bit of a piggy nose. This destroyed her self-esteem quite thoroughly, of course.

But one young man found her quite attractive. He was a shy fellow, having a wooden eye for reasons not specified when I heard this touching story nigh unto 35 years ago. He thought the young woman was the finest life match he could ever make, and he approached her one day, asking, "Would you like to go to the dance on Saturday night?"

She was excited--no one could ever get past her nose and see her for the flower she was--and replied, "Would I?"

"Pignose, pignose, pignose!"

That is all.

Old. Really, Really Old

2011-03-21T00:01:00.031-04:00

As her father is prone to say, holyfuck. This day was unfathomable 18 years ago, in the way that 18 years off is, from any given moment in time and space. We were not far past 30 years old, her father and her mother and I; the thought of where she would go to college (three big acceptances so far, with more to come, including my personal favorite) was as distant as the sun. Now? Damn, we're geezing.

Happy fucking 18th birthday, Planet. You remain the best kid evar, though the day when I'll have to adjust the noun is not far off. We'll try to see you sometime before you graduate--you're owed something major in the giftie department, as it happens. Maybe someday soon you can knock your uncle Bromark's punkass down and steal his United ticket?

Hating the Things I Love

2011-03-19T23:20:00.000-04:00

Find us. This offer not open to the guy standing next to me, his brother (who's standing next to him), or former blog proprietors.

Hint: We're wearing black shirts.

It's hard to trash your favorite team on Opening Night when it has come away with a 3-1 home win. So I won't.

Nah, just kidding. United came away with a lovely result tonight, against an opponent we despise, but one that's harder to despise right now because it's seen far better days, having lost most of the parts of its roster that are in any way compelling. The Crew still have quality players at some spots--Chad Marshall, Emmanuel Ekpo, not-at-all-discommodated-as-a-traitor-Terp Robbie Rogers, and Will Hesmer, who is a great goalie who literally fell on his face and got open-net pwn3d by Charlie Davies in one of the weirdest moments of the evening--but they've lost a lot of the core that's made them a brutally difficult opponent the last few years. I can't imagine, for instance, willingly giving up Brian Carroll when you haven't got Clyde Simms in your back pocket (to be fair, I couldn't imagine giving up Carroll instead of Simms in the first place, but business is business and no one sane is going to pretend that Kasper and Payne are personnel geniuses).

New toy Charlie Davies bagged two goals in 38 minutes, one the aforementioned open-net pwn3ng of Will Hesmer, and another on a penalty earned by Chris Pontius. He was everything we hoped he'd be, at least for 38 minutes. And yes, he paid appropriate tribute to Loud Side, and then some, walking down the length of the touchline applauding us after the game. Thank you for being our monkey, Charlie.

The defense looked more or less reasonable; BFF may reasonably point out that against a better team, some of the hairier moments would have actually been quite fatally hairy. I wouldn't argue, though I'd add that it was a revamped defense's first MLS game.

Quick hits:

-While Josh Wolff scored exactly the kind of sneaky fucking goal he's scored against us a googlebajillion fucking times, he was also exactly the kind of no-account loathsome diving pussy punkass bitch he's been to us (and everyone) a googlebajillion fucking times. Would I get the goal without the loathsomeness? Prolly not. I hate his fucking guts, and I'm going to have to do some serious metaphysical sorting on this one. Props where due: after scoring (and stripping off his shirt after the goal to show off his abs and draw the stupidest yellow card it's possible to draw in soccer), he dove into the arms of his former Loud Side enemies to soak up the monkeylove. I'd have nutted him, but I think we all recognize that I'm an exceptionally hateful person.

-Boy, did Dax McCarty suck. Bromark and I counted three times where he directly and inexplicably coughed up the ball to Crew players. I counted five really poor free kicks (again, props where due: he made Hesmer make a save on a 40-yarder, his only good set piece of the night). He was clearly trying too hard, and I'm not willing to close the lid on him, because frankly? Your first night replacing Jaime Fucking Moreno as this legendary club's legendary captain can't be easy. Maybe the pasty little ginger midget fuck will calm the fucking fuck down. Or not. I remain unamused.

-Jed Zayner impressed (figures--he may have been injured), and Perry Kitchen wasn't bad, although he needs to make quicker decisions to clear the fucking ball. He will get burned against a good team, and then maybe some learning will set in.

-Joseph Ngwenya (or however it's spelled--I'm too lazy to check) is a hoser--aimless play, failure to shoot, just another fucking stiff in the 11 shirt. We've seen his like half a dozen times over in the last half a dozen years, and the last one actually led MLS in scoring once.

-New back Rodrigo Brasesco, an import from somewhere south of somewhere, is another fucking midget in a long line of South American DCU midgets. Honestly, how hard is it to make sure a guy's taller than 5'5" before you fucking acquire him?

-Mark Geiger, a referee I've maligned (although not, it appears, by name in this blog), had a decent game. He rightly passed on awarding a penalty on an apparent foul on McCarty at the edge of the box; McCarty was jerking off over the ball, and had turned away from the goal to try to find someone to pass to. Dax gave up on his own chance and didn't deserve a call. Geiger correctly awarded a penalty to the Crew when the ball bounced off a DCU player's arm (I didn't see who it was, I had the impression it was Kitchen, but it could've been any of them except Burchie, who consistently locks his arms behind his back in the penalty area unless he's bodying up on someone). And the penalty that he awarded that resulted in Davies' first goal was correct--Pontius was roughed up on a legitimate scoring opportunity.

-Had the referee been Alex Prus, he would've been a loosely woven sack of dysenteric shit.

Of course, we've no clue whether this is a real turnaround or just a good buzz against a shitty team. The club scored more goals tonight than it did in any five games last year--that's positive stuff. It would've been pretty awful had they shit the bed in the opening game of Saint Benny's first full season as coach (and really, DCU Marketing: lose "The General." Just lose it. It's massively fucktarded.), and I'm pretty sure the team had a real good sense of that. And it'll take a little while for me to get warmed up here, because the Caps are about to enter the post-season. Skeptics will predict that I'll be out of schedule conflicts by mid-April; I'm not so sure about that. In any event, there's plenty of reasonable hope for a dramatic improvement over last year, and that's where we should be.

United We Fap

2011-03-17T07:26:00.004-04:00

Well, excitement's building over United's opener on Saturday, and I must say I'm looking forward to returning home to our rat pit and seeing BFF, who I'm not entirely sure I've seen since the last time we left the wretched but homey dump¹, despite our highway-paving good intentions and our unconditional love and all that. I've no faith that this year will come out better than last year; management went out and nailed some new leather on our well-worn soles, but didn't install the heel lifts it promised², though of course we're excited about the golem Charlie Davies, and I myself am excited about Tino Quaranta, now that management has seen fit to pick up and retain players equally or more loathsome.

But it's our rat pit, and we're happy there. We'll always have tradition, the strength, the core, the first last and always of our proud franchise.

Wait a minute. What?

“When you talk about guys like Ben Olsen stepping off the field and really the last player was Jaime [Moreno], kind of that older generation player that was here during the successful part of the club history. Those guys have now crossed the line and moved on so it is new in that sense.”

Dave Kasper

“I have talked about that. To me this is a new chapter. We need to turn the page and focus on creating our own new history of this club.”

Ben Olsen

Hmm. Past is prologue, huh? Out with the bad air, in with the good? New era sorta fing? Right. I'll buy in. So, my new ginger³ captain Dax McCarty, and my new bionic Charlie Davies, along with a bunch of other new guys I've never heard of, are going to bring me more hardware? Despite every indication that this is just more of the same old shit from moneygrubbing assholes? Despite the rock of our tradition, Saint Benny Fucking Olsen, saying pretty explicitly in the above-quoth article that he'll settle for the playoffs?

Sure. Whatevs. I'll give them until the end of April before I go all BFFlyptic on their asses. And you won't hear me screaming for Benny's head--that'll be more of a pity thing. Rock on, lameass beloved futbol club.

¹ United's Web site refers to these qualities as "iconic."
² This is a joke about Ben Olsen and Dax McCarty being short. Thank you, I'll be here all week.
³ While I am quite certain that Dax is a loathsome piece of shit, I cannot yet verify whether he is a daywalker. Opinions welcome.

Broder Dies; Fabricated Americans Mourn

2011-03-09T19:52:00.000-05:00

As you'll no doubt read or have read on more important blogs than this one, YFWP and syndicated columnist and Village medicine man David Broder died today. Broder's special gift as a Villager was to scold anyone for anything, take a contrary position, and pretend he was the moderate and well-reasoned one. It was reported that Broder's last words were, "It's good for America that Gingrich had to fuck interns to bring about the Reagan Revolution and end Communism."

Ordinary nonexistent Americans were moved by Broder's passing. Fictitious taxi driver I. Don Texist wept as he said, "Broder was the best at using his columns to advance the opinions of ordinary invented folk." Other sham opinionators shared Texist's views: "The man had his finger on the pulse of the composite," observed Hemad Emeup, an imaginary Somalian immigrant airport shoeshine stand operator in a city without air service to which Broder never travelled. Broder's sense of grave responsibility in the face of hard times brought on by government and industry rapaciousness also resonated with made-up folk. "Tot" Al Fabrication, a fictive geezer in Springfield, opined that "Broder was right; cat food is good for the elderly."

Meanwhile, Villagers were appropriately respectful. "Give me a bear claw," growled the ghost of Tim Russert, while Fred Hiatt sobbed, "You simply can't imagine how profitable he made the false dichotomy between the dwindling and alleged left and the corporatist right that governs our demise." Maureen Dowd was unavailable for comment, and refused to respond when caught leaving an adult bookstore, where she was watching Al Gore porn.

Blogospheric opinion was widely varied. "hvn't dncd lke ths snce Plly Hrvy tld m t fck ff whle ws rdng ptry by scds," said Blckdgrd. Quintessential feminist ~~Rosa Luxembourg~~ Sasha unleashed a tirade on Broder that included the line, "Even among short men with small penises, he was a midget with an infantile dick." Others made even less sense. "He's exactly the guy I was thinking of when I joined Jack Crow's Punch A Motherfucker Party," said non-notable spittle-spewer Landru. "I don't have a blog," added Landru's wife Ilse. On the spherically semi-antipodal side of the political spectrum, Crow summed it all up: "Kill Noam Chomsky."

Things Literary and Artistic

2011-02-23T21:44:00.001-05:00

First things: it started for reals today, the faraway project that has consumed me and torn me from the loving bosom of my family, and late tomorrow I shall leave this place out by the highway off in deepest America for at least 4-5 weeks, the longest stretch I will have been away from it for nearly 8 months. Joy doesn't start to describe it, fellow East Coast urbanites.

I can also say that not only did it start, it started really, really well, and I am proud of and grateful to the several dozen underesteemed, mostly youngish rural Americans who work for me on this project, for their cunning and tremendously hard work and their motivation and their commitment to a thing done well for an entity I despise, despite that entity's best efforts to queer the deal. Opening Day for a big project is always fraught with little buggy things. Not so today--I can't imagine how, realistically, it could have gone better. By about 10 AM, when it became clear that we shot, we scored, I had secured from battle stations and the adrenaline crash had started, and the magnitude of the crash makes clear that this was one hell of a fucking rush. You're not reading this, mostly youngish rural Americans (and if you accidentally are, STFU, because it's a total coincidence that you think you know who I am, and it's someone else who's not me), but thanks. A tear to my eye, much larger than the one I gave Julius James last week, for reals.

But I digress, and I bore. Funny, if mostly unintelligibly clouded by literary wankitude, discussion of Moby Dick over a post and a couple of posts worth of comments over at BFF's.

I'm with the Dick haters. I learned long ago (see BFF's for cryptic clues if you give a fuck, or don't) that the novel (sperm!) is an extended and dreary metaphor (sperm!) about boyparts (sperm!) and their issue (sperm!). That is to say, it is about sperm, sperm, sperm, harpoons, sperm, sperm, harpoons, sperm, sperm, and sperm. Sure, epic framing story, way better than, say, The Menagerie and far superior to the horrific crap the same folks erected around Harlan Ellison's epic and legendary and beautiful The City on the Edge of Forever. And BFF will tell you that it's melodious, or some such poofy literary shit, and frankly, he's entitled to that sort of poetry because, well, you know, he just is.

But seriously, kids. Sperm. I have yet, in 40 years since, to hear a more compelling explanation, even from BFF, who's about as superior to me at comp-lit stuff as the Federation are to the Pakleds technologically. Hmm. Seems I'm vigorously rubbing a theme here. Oh well. Some say that's my greatest utility, and I have no cogent defense agin that theory. And let's not trivialize the Star Trek/sperm connection.

Let's flip elsewhere for further literary and artistic insight. It says here that some assclown hilariously thinks that Picasso conceived cubism as a misogynistic plot. The punchline, of course, is that the assclown writes this for First Things, a mostly Catholic journal that makes a dedicated pretense of interfaith contributions. Boggle. But read Edroso's post for some awesome commentary and meme-extension on this majestic assitude.

"Why?" you might well wail."Why do you, Landrucutus*, of all people, feel a need to pretend to any fucking substantive insight on literature, art, or really, anything other than sports or farting?"

It's a fair question. The truth is that you know what I think about me, and about Wisconsin and Egypt and admiring, and agreeing in every respect with, a SCOTUS opinion authored by Antonin Fucking Scalia, and rural America, and the ICC, and what My Local Locality's governing legislative body is getting ready to do to my wife and her ilk (which includes BFF's wife). The truth is that, of late, I've mostly used this space to whimper and otherwise proclaim my pulse to beloveds whose primary and utterly understandable reax (of late) are along the lines of, "Oh? You're not dead in a ditch somewhere along I-75, or tied to a tree grunting and squealing? Well, good for you, then, I suppose, sure, why not?"

I gotta say, I've thought about this long and hard (SPERM!) for the half hour or so I've spent writing this, and I'm pretty sure it boils down to fundamental insecurity about BFF's massive superiority in literary appreciation and his considerably less substantial superiority (mostly on account of being married to an artist and having fathered another artist, imhoe) in art appreciation, which is all a shame because we're not at all competitive except that's a lie and we are, totally. That's sort of an astonishing realization (except it isn't and shouldn't be), given that I just started popping this off (sperm!) after I read a couple of things and connected some dots that aren't really connectable except in the stream (sperm!) of my consciousness. Jealousy? Really? Jesus H Fucking Christ on a Wobbly Fucking Dryrotted Crutch, Landru! Get a fucking grip!

Finally: someone in one of the hotel rooms bordering mine is going at it really long and hard (sperm!). I mean, thump thump thump thump thump thump thump, at a really astonishing pace and rhythm, I mean we're talking like Surfin' USA or 52 Girls, sustained for a ridiculously long time. Salud, neighbors. And, of course, sperm!

Just thought you'd like to know.

*My friends call me either Landru or "Hey, Asshole," although my mother still tends to stick with "Dammit" and my wife mostly goes with, "Dood, what the fuck?"

Things My Boyfriend Tells Me

2011-02-18T21:36:00.002-05:00

Om. Eff. Gee.

Metastory first: BFF¹ clued me to breaking news of common interest, as he sometimes does. I source-checked and cross-verified, and established that the astonishing and not actually believeable thing that he told me was actually true. It is a news item so far-fetched, so out of touch with reality that I checked to make sure that six weeks had not sped by and unaccountably dumped me out on April 1. I called Ilse as she was driving home from dumping Data and Bam off for the weekend, an otherwise happy event at most times, and her response was a spontaneous heartfelt, gut-wrenching, blood-curdling, "Nooooooooooooooo!!!!!!", delivered in a tone usually reserved for scenes in movies where some slutburger non-starlet breaks a heel while fleeing from hideous monsters from the dungeon dimensions. Or Jay Leno.

It's one of those cases where information transfer is like an unwanted exchange of bodily fluids. It's...Jeebus, it's just fucking creepy.

So once upon a time, our futbol club traded away part of the farm, and part of the manure, to get the allocation rights to a former player for our club who was returning from his once-lucky break in Europe. The part of the farm that we traded was a draft pick--specifically, our first pick last season, which became the ~~world-destroying~~ very fine young Phunions² player ~~Danny Mwanga~~ Jack McInerney. The former player, Troy Perkins, turned out to be manure, meaning we traded manure and ~~Danny Mwanga~~ Jack McInerney for manure. Troy is now working for the (it is to be hoped) insignificant Portland Giant Chubby Woodies or something, having been blamed for DCU management's abject failure to obtain anything resembling a defense last season.

You're wondering why I'm dancing. It's because I can't say it. It's too horrifying. It's scare-iffic! It makes me fear taking my post in 232 for 17 freaking home games (plus specials) this season. It tells me right now what phrase I will scream this season from my post, even more than, "Shut the fuck up Morsink, you motherfucking punkass bitch!" It is my future hell³, and the future is now.

Jesus H. Tittyfucking Christ on a Wobbly Motherfucking Rotten Bamboo Crutch, we gave up another fucking draft pick for fucking Fredsux. After her blood-curdling scream, Ilse threatened to drive into a bridge abutment, and I can't fucking blame her.

Here's the nicest thing I've ever said about Fred:

Fred? Run, you fucking cocksucker. Stop fucking dancing, pass the fucking ball, and run like my football club is paying you hundreds of thousands of dollars in green American fucking money to actually fucking run like you're a professional fucking athlete, you fucking assclown.

Here's the dumbest thing I've ever said about Fred (though I actually didn't say it about Fred):

...you get points for viciously and criminally clobbering players I hate without getting caught, for entertaining me by actually bearhugging guys from behind on set pieces (again, without getting caught), for fighting to your dying breath on one fucking leg and scoring what would've been a winning goal in a playoff-implications game if fucking Fred weren't such a fucking useless jackass, for your two goals in my team's shirt being as memorable as his two goals in my team's shirt.

Why is it the dumbest thing I've ever said about Fred? Because I fucking said it yesterday.

I officially withdraw yesterday's comment about Boyfriend whistling past our chosen graveyard. Jeebus. Shut the fuck up a whole lot, me.

UPDATE: Kind thanks to commenter Goose for pointing out that I'm dyslexic. The Phunions took Jack McInerney with DCU's pick. The point is significant but the argument holds. Even adjusting for the benefit of hindsight, who would you rather have, one year of Troy Perkins, or the rights to Jack McInerney (or Dilly Duka or Corben Bone or Bright Dike, all of who went later in that draft)? Nonetheless, McInerney ain't Mwanga, and thanks to Goose.

¹Who, incredibly, posted a rare evening post today, but it has nothing to do with this news, but with some plaint about our evil overlords supporting other evil overlords in their soul-and-body-crushing exploits in some forn parts. WTF, dood? Can you drop the train in vain Baba O'Reilly world revolution foolies bullshit for a minute and post about important stuff?
²His.
³Yeah, yeah, his too. WTFever.

Yes. Yes, I Did, In Fact, Know That Our Area Has A Professional Soccer Team And Blah Blah Blah

2011-02-17T20:40:00.002-05:00

So it's actually been a pretty restful offseason, as long as I don't consider real life to be part of the offseason. While I have not been in the most bloggerly of humours, I really would've been, at least on this topic (and think for a moment about the topics I've passed up over the last two months), had anything actually noteworthy happened since the club's shocking announcement that, well, shucks, we guess Benny's our first choice after all, since no one else is fucking stupid enough to coach this team and while even Benny's not that stupid, he's that blindly and dumbly loyal to the shirt. Which of course I can understand, suffering from some bit of that my ownself.

Time comes, though, and things are heating up a bit, and it won't be long before BFF is saying one thing one week and pounding the other hole the next and whistling past our chosen graveyard in between, so I reckon it's time for me to jump in and start saying things about things, because even though we're not at all competitive about this Unitedblogging, that's a total lie and we are, which is sad for him since even though he's a deep thinker and smarter than me about almost all things, this isn't one of them.¹

So they happen, things do, and of course Charlie Davies is one of them. It seems really not very long ago that we stood in the rain in RFK for a national team game, waving printed number nines in the ninth minute of a CONCACAF qualifier against Costa Rica, a couple of days after he was near-fatally fucked up in an auto accident on the GW Parkway. But it was 16 months ago, and Charlie's back, having done poorly in his quest to get playing time with the reserves at his French club. Now, Charlie was an exciting guy back before he had some nontrivial portion of his body smashed up, really fast and prone to both impressive breakouts and boneheaded failure to launch, but on balance, we looked forward then to his run in the World Cup, which never happened. They tell us now, the meretricious pricks who put on this show, that Charlie looks great for a guy who got broken in several spots, none of them good, and who left part of his innards out there on the road by the Lady Bird gardens. I suppose it's all plausible.

Will Charlie Davies save this club from the fate of the last 3 (THREE!!!!!!) years and get us to the playoffs and beyond, which is after all what we expect, being without question the greatest football team, the most storied professional club in North American futbol with not even a shadow of competition for that august title?

Beats the crap out of me. It's hard for me to believe that the club will again be the lowest-scoring side in MLS, at least, and I guess that's progress. Will I enjoy watching Charlie in my club's colors? Sure, totally, although the scars may be a little creepy, and I reserve the right to scorn him if he fails to give Loud Side the ~~love~~ ~~adoration~~ tribute in the form of being our fucking monkey, that we deserve. I welcome Charlie in a way that I do not welcome another forward who signed for us months ago, Josh Motherfucking Wolff, or the non-10 10 we signed right around the same time, CreepyEvil Midget Dax Ginger Daywalker McCarty, both of whom will pollute my team's laundry this season and cause me to actually appreciate the formerly discommodated² and still unforgiven Tino Quaranta.

But Charlie is quite literally yesterday's news and I'm just getting around to it, in accord with my policy of giving you yesterday's news tomorrow. Today's news, and I recognize that I have no business giving you today's news today, is that...well, first, let me revisit another important North American futbol concept:

Alex Prus is a loosely woven cloth sack of dysenteric monkey shit.

Sorry for the digression. These things happen when I review my archives. So today's news is that the team waived Julius James who, I found during said review of my archives, I have variously referred to as "ambitiously filthy," a "fucking hero," and (on the very night he was that hero), a player for whom "I will not shed a tear." I'll miss him, and I actually think I can maybe spare one small tear. Don't get me wrong--I think he's slow and his best skill is that he's magnificently fucking dirty without getting caught as much as the equally filth-soaked Dejan Jakovic--but you get points for viciously and criminally clobbering players I hate without getting caught, for entertaining me by actually bearhugging guys from behind on set pieces (again, without getting caught), for fighting to your dying breath on one fucking leg and scoring what would've been a winning goal in a playoff-implications game if fucking Fred weren't such a fucking useless jackass, for your two goals in my team's shirt being as memorable as his two goals in my team's shirt.

Lots of points, as it turns out, though before today I really wouldn't have thought so, not having had occasion to boil the man's United career down so starkly.

Furthermore: Kurt Morsink is a fucking useless, no-account, loudmouth punk, a punkass bitch to end all punkass bitchery, and I hope he's next, because he'll make me feel how I should feel when a player's waived, and believe me, my summation of fucking Kurt Morsink's United career will not be a kind one.

But I digress. I will miss you, Julius James. You were far better than our last number 2.³ I wish you the best of luck when you get picked up by fucking Kansas City or the lime-green retard barista cockgobblers, or whoever the fuck has a worse defense than we do--and they are out there, oh yes they are.

¹Yeah, Grizz, that breathless graf was for you, as are they all. Did you have to ask?
²And don't think I can't restore that any fucking time it pleases me to do so.
³No. Seriously? He has a motherfucking Wikipedia page? Don't they have notability criteria or something? Jeebus.

Oh, Hello

2011-02-09T21:06:00.000-05:00

No substance, but those beloved may find it cool that today was a good day out in America, and the end is nigh, likely about two weeks nigh. Yes, I'm saying that after one more trip, in two weeks, the frequency of my proctological examination of one exit on a major U.S. interstate highway will decline dramatically. Ilse, Databoy, and Bam-Bam (who yesterday had his first major Landru-separation meltdown of the whole bloody 7-month horror show) are all claiming to be overjoyed. I'll choose to believe them.

Stories, however, will have to be told privately, rather than here.

Okay, one story that won't pinpoint the customer or the job: TSA touched my junk the other day. I mean, I think I'm now bigamously gay married to a TSO at National Airport, though I'll credit him that he didn't seem real thrilled by the idea either. They told me that the body scanner found "an anomaly" in my "private area." I offered to drop trou, but they said we'd still have to have homo handsex. Apparently they were sufficiently unimpressed by the magnitude of my junk that they didn't find it necessary to make me show them the prosthetic.

Rock the Constitution

2011-01-08T22:44:00.001-05:00

Yeah, just go ahead and use crosshairs on a map to delineate your political opponents, former Governor Qutter. Everyone believes that you're not inciting anybody. Instaputz nails the logic.

My hero for today: Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik:

"When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous."

That's one righteously pissed off lawman, there.

It's pretty clear that the guy who shot Gabrielle Giffords was sick beyond measure, in ways well beyond politics (I got a look at the guy's YouTube stuff before they pulled it down--he's a rambling, delusional, incoherent paranoid, and if any of my usual commenters want to pretend I have a sense of humor about this, try me.). Dumbasses like Sarah Palin, who lied about her "sincere condolences" in the wake of her now-successful incitement to criminal acts against lawfully elected politicians, need to understand that being a public figure doesn't grant the right to hate speech, the right to incite criminally insane persons to violent acts that transcend decent peoples' ability to comprehend.

Fuck you, Sarah Palin, you ignorant piece of snowbilly trash, you fetid pile of diseased moose shit. Go to the fucking fiery Hell you deserve, and claim to believe in.

A Must*

2010-12-29T20:06:00.000-05:00

Wow. The Onion SportsDome looks awesome. I mean, really, Colbert and Stewie are getting a little tired. Let's have some fun with Jay Cutler.

* I know the song is just Michael Stipe reading the liner notes from a Revellaires album, but it really takes on a special significance when it's blasting from the stereo while I zip down a rural interstate in the most Jesusy state in the Union.

Some people (for instance) likely doubt the cultural significance of Michael Stipe getting oiled up, heading down to the studio, and forgetting to conceal that he has a massively chronic Southron accent (my guess is that the cited friend thinks I could've cut off that sentence after the word "Stipe").

Not me. We had a brief discussion over there about some asshat band called Vampire Weekend, which is, it appears, responsible for an unspeakably annoying series of commercials this season for a company once best known for making engines for the planes that attacked Pearl Harbor**. Until today, all I knew is that this song was selling cars, and that it sucked. Now, thanks to BFF, my life has new focus. I am going to start a camp for overprivileged children who think that this is music.

"But wait," you cry, "Didn't your elders think that your generation's music was despicably horrid?"

Yes. They did. They were wrong. My elders suffered through Eisenhower in their formative years and thought it was normal. My elders were morons. This generation's elders were born from 1946-1962 and rule the world. Get the fuck over it.

**This is a lie. The part about aircraft engines, I mean. It's important to grasp the historical concept that the victors*** write the history.

***Yes. That's exactly what I mean. Suck on it, Gen WTFEver..

Kidney Stones in the Tract of Excellence

2010-12-28T21:12:00.000-05:00

I'm really bored. I'm in the far-away place, again, though at least I spend tomorrow coming home for one day off (during a week I invariably spend out of the office, ideally with Ilse and Bam-Bam, while Databoy hies off for his traditional school-break week of worship by his grandparents, Joseph and Mary). I'm watching the first Tuesday Night Football game ever, because it's there (Thesis: Cris Collinsworth is a transvestite. Discuss non-pejoratively¹ amongst yourselves.). And because Sasha is one good Michael Vick rip away from dealing me my second fantasy football title game loss of the season (gratz to Dr. Death for saving his one FF victory in six tries this season for a title game).

Thanks also to Purple for the awesome Webcam cock video. Okay, it was actually an awesome Hooded Negro imitation. It's the little things that make life worth living even in the face of the drone of I-75 300 yards from my hotel room window.

Also: Christmas was very very good to me. Thanks to Ilse for the exceptional shirt and the dirty video games.

¹ Tscha, right.

On Navelgazing

2010-12-19T12:41:00.000-05:00

I love my friends. Honest, I really do. I'm not as horrible a person as I'd really like to be. But some days, I would like to be. It's neither politic nor kind to post one's horrible thoughts on one's friends' own blogs. Especially when I'm one. You are one, aren't you? But thoughts are had. Even for those I love best and most. Oh yes they are.

Hackneyed, true. Possibly even copyrighted, though I'll claim fair use--after all, they're just laying around on the Toobz. All that, none of it good. But expressive nonetheless.

And seriously. I love my friends.

Personal data: home after a week there. Here until I go there. Which is the day after Sweet Baby Jesus day. Un-fucking-real. I'd really like to tell you what I'm doing there. But I can't, because a certain part of the government would hunt down every one of you and grope the fucking Sweet Baby Jesus out of you. And you wouldn't like it. Even if you're into that sort of thing. Believe me, you're not that into it. Trust me on this. Because, as we noted, I love my friends. But to their navels, I say:

Peace out.

Confessions of the Nonverbal

2010-12-09T20:19:00.001-05:00

I know you get not much but whine from me these days, when you get anything at all. Hard days at Casa Satanica, what with me on the road so much, consumed by a fucking horrible project for a fucking horrible customer in a fucking horrible place (back to the land on Sunday, and it's looming larger in my fear place than it usually does, because it's all just so fucking horribly exhausting and so fucking horribly wrong).

Ilse and the little men are troupers for putting up with this shit. You who know me personally and well know that I tire easily of the family gig, at the immediate in-your-grille action level, though the longer haul is fine--I made the associated choices freely and after long contemplation of permanence (a state I had for some time forsworn), even if I need to escape to the laptop or the PS3 to clear myself of the day's poisons.

This thing, the days and days away from home, eating crap, communicating by Webcam (a recent and very nearly successful experiment made even more merry by focusing the cam on my bald spot and my nostrils, to the great amusement and gaggification of Databoy), suffering the raw exercise of power to no good purpose while exercising same for same in an awesome demonstration of practical gravity; it wears, it burns, and every proximate moment with any of them is precious beyond measure. It will no doubt startle my intimates that I can say this levelly of, say, Databoy, who is at 12 a very nearly unmitigated pain in the ass at most moments of most days.

You may remember Bam-Bam, on whom we last looked in entertainingly some five years ago (here's a less entertaining bit of Bam-Bam background, with other autism stuff--Bam-Bam and not--under the Actual Science link in the Demonic Cloud of Tagginess somewhere to your right). He probably has it hardest of everyone. He has no idea why I disappear. It's starting to ease for him a little as the disappearances become semi-normal (and are always followed by reappearances). The Webcam thing, which we tried mostly for him, was only semi-successful because he alternated between trying to rub noses with Ilse's laptop, and running away to bounce on his trampoline because the whole notion of his Landru on the teevee was a bit much for him to handle.

Anyway, Bam-Bam and I maintain the special relationship that we've had ever since our family came together under a single roof back in 2006. I'm the parent who puts him on the bus, the one who gets him up, the one who tucks him in--it seems to be his choice. He doesn't ignore his mama, and she has her uses--mostly food provision. But we're close, me and Bam-Bam. There's stuff he expects me to do, and one of Bam-Bam's quirks is that expectations are expected to be actualized, dammit. He's still nonverbal, but he's gotten much more sophisticated at communicating his expectations. I'd even venture to say he's clever. He's sure as hell not dumb--he's demonstrated some pretty sophisticated evasion strategies, and the giggling when he's busted pretty much puts a lock on the notion that he's pulling those on purpose. On the other hand, he's also pretty accomplished at trying to tell you what he thinks you want to hear.

So it's been an awesome week, really, just getting to be at home and put the boy on the bus. The other day, the bus was really late. We started a conversation of sorts.

Me: Did you bribe Tricia and Cheryl [bus driver and aide] not to come today?
Bam-Bam: *nodnodnod*
Me: That's some pretty criminal masterminding, boy. You sure?
Bam-Bam: *nodnodnod*
Me: Mmkay. Lindbergh kidnapping, you do that one too?
Bam-Bam: *nodnodnod*
Me: I always knew they screwed that Hauptmann guy. What about the Northridge Earthquake of 1989?
Bam-Bam: *nodnodnod*
Me: Yikes. Black Sox Scandal?
Bam-Bam: *nodnodnod*
Me: Dayum. Abstract impressionism.
Bam-Bam: *nodnodnod*
Me: Oh, come on. Okay, all the missing pictures of Trotsky, ever?
Bam-Bam: *nodnodnod gigglefest*

(Bus arrives)

While I look forward longingly to a day when the boy can tell me, in his words and voice, exactly what the fuck he wants, what he's thinking, why why why why why--a day which may or may not come, and there's no sense whinging or even hoping on that--we do okay for talk, me and Bam-Bam. And today, and tomorrow, the last two days of the home stand, are the best days of my life. Until, etc.

Not Going To Kentucky

2010-12-04T22:32:00.000-05:00

Hence:

You know who you are, and you're welcome.