Fine Canadian Wine

So yesterday the US Womens National Team beat the Canadians in an Olympic semifinal game, 4-3, in extra time, to advance to the gold medal game. It was wacky in a number of ways, and the Canadians are feeling unjustifiably aggrieved about the whole thing. Let's discuss this, and let's not bother to do it kindly, because the Canadians are collectively way the fuck off their stereotypically polite nut about this whole thing.

It started with the Canadian coach, a Kiwi asshole named John Herdman, trying to work the referees in the presser the day before the game. I foolishly misread Herdman's performance (I mean other than the part about him being an asshole); I thought it portended a lot of Canadian diving. I was wrong, as Canadian forward Melissa Tancredi showed immediately by committing two brutal, bookable fouls within the first minute of the game. By our count, Tancredi was responsible for 9 of the 19 fouls called on the Canadians (USWNT was called for 20, all legit in reality and many of them questionable in light of what the Canadians were getting away with), which alone should've gotten her red-carded for persistence; she committed another dozen or so that went uncalled.

So the despicable fuckface John Herdman's strategy, then, was to try to neutralize the officials when he planned to turn the game into a rugby match. I don't have a problem with this, in and of itself. The Canadians have spent 11 years showing that they can't beat the US team at soccer. It's perfectly understandable that they'd want to try something else.

And it was working. The Canadian's persistent chippy fouls and outright brutality got their star player, Christine Sinclair, into prime attacking position three times--and she closed the deal on each, fueled by the Canadians' dislike of the US team coupled with her own personal rivalry with Abby Wambach, USWNT's (and, until yesterday, the world's) leading scorer. Good on her. In addition to three very well-played goals, I'll credit Sinclair (who I've never liked, but I have to acknowledge that she can score) with not personally participating in the brutality.

With the US down 3-2, Erin McLeod decided to deliberately delay the game by holding the ball; apparently, she'd been warned about that (she admitted as much, though it was a whiny, so-what sort of admission). The referee called her on it and awarded an indirect free kick inside the box--which bounced off of the arms of two Canadians. One arm was tucked. The other wasn't. Wambach converted the ensuing penalty to equalize, and the game was settled in the closing moments of extra time by an Alex Morgan header as USWNT fans collapsed in exhaustion and confusion.

This has unleashed a torrent of whining from Canadians who apparently didn't understand their team's strategy of fouling early, often, and hard, which had to that point been quite successful. They're wrong. The McLeod call was legitimate; no, it's not called often. Teams also don't often pursue a strategy of deliberately cheating, and get away with that even less often. To be offended at being called on it at a critical moment--with an admittedly dire result--is pretty poor. The handball wasn't deliberate, but Eve-Marie Nault's arm was well away from her body. She was making no effort to tuck it. The call is discretionary, but completely legit.

In short? Shut the fuck up, Canada. You rolled. You lost. I'll freely admit that your hypocritical whining in the aftermath makes me all the more happy to taste your bitter tears, but really? That's your doing.

Updated:

FIFA is investigating comments that Herdman and the Canadian players made in the wake of their failure.

In the same story, Abby Wambach admits that she lobbied for the McLeod call by counting out loud while McLeod was holding the ball and pretending to look for a play.

Video: NBC captures the utterly innocent and blameless Melissa Tancredi deliberately stomping on Carli Lloyd's head.

YFWP: Christine Sinclair whines.

AP (from YFWP): The delay call, discussed.

I repeat: shut the fuck up, Canada. And anything nice I said about Christine Sinclair? Fuck that. What a classless piece of shit. I hope FIFA disciplines her and her coach for explicitly accusing the referee of fixing the match.

Also updated:

Bronze medal game, 8 AM Eastern time on Thursday. Go France, not that the Canadians' utterly reprehensible behavior has altered that--the only time I'm not pulling for the French women is when they're playing the US.

More updating:

From the FIFA Laws of the Game (Law 12):

An indirect free kick is awarded to the opposing team if a goalkeeper, inside his own penalty area, commits any of the following four offences:

• controls the ball with his hands for more than six seconds before releasing it from his possession

In short: seriously, Canada. Shut the fuck up.

Excess

Ilse and I are on a vacation swing, having started on Sunday with dinner with her parents, Joseph and Jesusina, at an ostentatious meat palace in the capital of the Confederacy. We stayed at a modest (in American terms) hotel, and continued the next day, driving our gas-guzzling vehicle (at a high rate of speed, guzzling extra gas) on to North Carolina, where we spent two days visiting my mother, the She-Nurse of the SS, and her boyfriend. We ate modestly, but we ate, and we stayed in a slightly less nice hotel at my mother's expense (she and her gigolo just moved to a smaller place that doesn't have really room for overnight guests, not American ones anyway). We drove on, again at a pretty high rate of speed, to Asheville, North Carolina, a beautiful place, where last night we ate a seriously fat-ass meal and stayed in a hotel of the same chain we stayed at in Richmond.

So why am I so pissed off at what I visited today? A ginormous emblem of excess and rapacious capitalism, Biltmore House is a serious candidate for the capitol of capitalism. Rife with pillaged treasures and the produce of years of exploitation of Americans who couldn't afford it, the mansion is a vomitorious display. BFF characterized it as "amazing and appalling;" he's right, but I'm having trouble getting past the appalling part.

I'd like to think I'm not just pissed off because I just don't have the balls to be that fucking evil. And I wish I were sure that would be intellectually honest.

Some of the Ways in Which Chester, Pennsylvania Is A Giant Shithole

We set out to have a nice weekend, and I suppose that, overall, we did, thanks in part to the wonderful city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which is not, as some might suppose, a giant shithole. We had some very nice food, and some very accommodating folk in a pub near our hotel were kind enough to dedicate a television to the USMNT friendly against Scotland (friend Goth: "...I kept finding Waldo."). Actually, the parenthetical deserves emphasis. Here you go:

It almost looks better on the women. Almost.

The numbers don't contrast well enough with the background to be seen, either live or on television, in addition to the disturbingly French Navy lilt to the shirt's overall...idiom. And yes, the women wear exactly the same shirt.

Which brings us to the city of Chester, Pennsylvania. Once upon a time, some Phunions fans serenaded us as we entered the Soccerplex, which is in every sense the home field of the Landru family, singing "Baltimore United." They shut the fuck up a whole lot when I yelled, "You live in Chester." They mostly shut the fuck up because they were laughing their asses off, having no other reasonable response. Because Chester is, in every single respect, a giant festering shithole.

We went to Chester earlier this evening because the U.S. Womens were playing the Chicoms at Phunions Park. And it was a lovely game, just lovely. The Womens gave up a goal pretty early, like in the 18th minute or so, and it was a pretty dumb fucking goal to give up, and it was pretty much all Amy LePeilbet's fault, except it wasn't, because Pia Sundhage, who I have previously admitted makes a shitload of money as a U.S. national team coach, while I don't, was playing LePeilbet at right back, which makes no fucking sense whatsoever, because LePeilbet is a fucking center back who suffered through an entire World Cup last year at left back, but is now apparently our best option at right back, which I find really fucking hard to believe. But like I said, Pia makes a shitload of money to know better than me, and frankly, the woman got the team to a fucking World Cup final, so I should probably just shut the fuck up a whole lot about that, except I can't, because that makes the stupid goal Amy LePeilbet's fault for getting turned inside out, and I don't find that to be a satisfactory conclusion, so I'm not getting to epistemic closure on this shit anytime soon.

After that, it was all cake and Alex Morgan, though Abby Wambach was inexplicably named WotM for a 1-goal performance, even though Morgan (best sign in the crowd: "Alex Morgan Used To Like Me") had two goals and an assist. The Chicoms are a speedy lot, and pretty well-drilled, though not so much as the hated North Koreans, but they're just plain fucking tiny, and well-fed, longshanked American womanhood just pretty much beat the little Commies down into the hole they deserved to be in.

And that's the last nice thing I have to say about the game. Phunions Park is a fucking shitmoat. It's on the Delaware River, right underneath the Commodore Barry Bridge, in Chester, Pennsylvania. It's a badly designed firetrap, with poorly placed concessions, ridiculously arranged seating sections and concourses, a fucking totalitarian staff, and scandalously inadequate parking and traffic access. And oh yeah, it's located in Chester, Pennsylvania. One phylum of the animal kingdom finds the location out-fucking-standing, and that's insects, because the place is built in a fucking swamp on the shores of the Delaware River. Everything else living? Not so much, because it's also built in a heavily industrial section of Chester, which description doesn't really do much to distinguish its level of shittiness from the shittiness that is the non-industrial sections of Chester, one of America's least appealling cities to begin with.

Which is, as I may have mentioned, a giant shithole. It literally smells like fucking Calcutta. There is nothing charming or useful about the city. There is an abundance of nothing around the park, except for a giant Pennsylvania Power and Light facility (appropos of which the stadium is officially named PP&L Park, which is okay, sort of, because my family has a long history of involvement with PP&L, including painting its electrical towers and making some money, back in the day, off of its stock--thanks, Grandpa) and some really foul-smelling industrial stuff. And a whole lot of urban blight.

We should've clued early; as we came down off of the highway, many less-than-scrupulous persons tried to flag us into unofficial "approved" parking areas formed from abandoned lots marked by ramshackle abandoned buildings. We were a little squeamish about that, because we had luggage in the car from our trip, so we made for the official lots. They refused to let us into the one closest to the Park, even though it was clearly marked as a cash lot, and they were collecting cash. They sent us another half mile down the road to a lot surrounding the aforementioned PP&L facility.

Let me describe the geography. The Park sits on a more-or-less east-west road that runs by the river. There are two north-south streets that lead up to a single east-west road (PA 291) that feeds back into the highway that leads to New Jersey or I-95. We got sent well to the west of the park. Fine. Whatever.

Here's where we get to the part about the fucking ineptitude of the PP&L Park staff, and most especially the inexcusable incompetence of the fat, stupid, mongoloid, hydroencephalic retards who populate the Police Department of the City of Chester, Pennsylvania. When we exited the far lot, we got sent west, to the westernmost access to the north-south street that leads up a few blocks to PA 291. We had to go east on PA 291 to get back to the highway. We spent 55 minutes tracking back to the highway access.

Why, you ask? Because the fucking dumb shits who constitute the Chester PD were blocking one lane of two-lane PA 291 to let out all of the traffic from the easternmost stadium lots, leading to a 55-minute backup for anyone forced to go the way that the PP&L Park staff and the Chester PD told them to go.

I suggest doing crimes in Chester, Pennsylvania, because the fucking Chester PD is too fucking stupid to solve the mystery of how traffic works.

In conclusion, I have a number of people to insult:

Fuck you, Mayor John Linder of Chester, Pennsylvania, you fucking inept, lying hack. Mayor Linder, on the city's Web site: "Chester is a regional transportation hub with direct access to major roadways..."

Not when your retarded Yankeecracker police force blocks that access, you dumb shit. Fuck you.

Fuck you, Police Commissioner John Bail, of the Chester Pennsylvania Police Department, you fucking inept, lying hack. Commissioner Bail, on the city's Web site: "We are members of an elite and highly trained profession: law enforcement."

Yeah. You're the least elite and most untrained members of the profession, but yeah, sure, technically you're members of that profession. Let me make this clear for you, Commissioner Bail:  Your officers are fat, stupid, inattentive, and poorly trained at traffic management, a pretty basic police function in an urban environment. They couldn't stick their fingers up their fat asses and pull them away smelling of shit. I got a clue as to how fucking clueless you are when I found, on your Web page on the city's site, numerous mentions of places you've travelled in becoming an anti-terrorism expert, many of which, like Mumbai, India, have absolutely no traffic control whatsoever.

But wait, there's more, you fat hack: it's great that you're actually a fucking legacy commissioner, you're fucking Flounder. And you've chosen to build your career, in fucking Chester, Pennsylvania, on antiterrorism expertise? What a fucking maroon. Terrorists aren't going to touch Chester; it's already fucking wasted.


Fuck You, Chester, Pennsylvania, and Fuck You, PP&L Park. It'll be fucking cold day in Hell when I spend money in your city, or your stadium, ever again.

As Promised

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

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.

A Very Special Message for Whispers

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

Fucking Bawston.

CanadaBlog

This post is about a month and a half overdue, but Ilse took some great pictures, so I wanted to post something (not least because I promised Sasha). I've forgotten a lot of what I intended to write--in fact, I've forgotten a lot of what happened. So you get what you get.

We went to Canadah back in August, taking the long drive up through western Pennsylfuckingvania, through Buffalo, and into the land of our friendly northern neighbors, so polite and shining and worthy full of high lawful good purpose. They really are friendly folk--look at this picture from Niagara Falls, ON:

What a Helpful Country!

I go round and round with Sasha, who usually wants to know what's to hate about a country so peaceful and strong and free and maple-flavoured. Few things save Canadah from a response of "all of it," but Toronto, at least, has some charms, most of them related to food. It's also pretty fucking clean, except for the gum on the sidewalks (why can't people who actually use their litter and recycling bins manage to not spit out their fucking gum on the sidewalk?). In our experience, the food in Toronto, coupled with the ease of getting around on their beautifully functional subway and streetcar system, just barely eclipsed the self-righteousness, the nanny statery, and the awesomely ridiculous projection of broad-shouldered self-reliance from a country that sucks the Queen's dick (and ours, when the profit outweighs the shame).

Niagara Falls is a nightmare. It's like what helpful Canadians expect Americans want from a tourist shithole. That aside, the falls themselves are perfectly cool, as we found on the obligatory boat ride.

American Falls and Bridal Veil Falls, from the Maid of the Mist Docks in Canada

All photos by Ilse, unless we say otherwise. I think I took the beaver shot, though. Movies, too:

Awesome vids shot by Ilse as the boat driver powered up the boat and pointed into the current while we were surrounded by Horseshoe Falls. Brave, brave videography.

Then we went to Toronto. See above. Below: why I hate Canada.

This is a monument to war dead. From the Boer War.

You people think I'm just a mean little fuck who makes up shit like "they suck the Queen's dick." Wrong.

Actual proof that it's all about the Boer War.

See?

Bronzed corpses of Canadians who died in the Boer War.

Okay, that caption's a lie.

So there's a reason we chose Toronto.

A cathedral.

The Hockey HoF is a really cool thing, embedded in a 19th-century Bank of Montreal building, with a big mall/office complex built over and around it. They actually did a pretty good job.

Native Canadian architecture

On the other hand, Canadians are a little odd. But you knew that.

Statue of Canadian children awaiting the short bus in front of the HoF

It really is a cathedral of hockey. I don't mean to overblow this, but I really had to work to not wet myself. This is the dome of the trophy vault, inside the old bank building.

Actual 19th century bank architecture

Fat tourist with bloodied head at shrine of St. Mike Gartner

And above, some guy worships his underrepresented team.

Okay, that's it, because the rest is trophies and stuff. Thanks to Ilse for the photography.

Home

So I did a little business travel. I flew into Cincinnati, where the airport is across the river in Kentucky, and spent a lovely afternoon and part of an evening with Goth and Psyche. All hail both. They're awesome, Goth showed me his city, and I went out to dinner with them after a brief visit with their awesome children. They dropped me off back at my hotel, and the next morning I drove into deep Kentucky, passing the above on I-75 (though I shot the picture on the return trip).

I have a little bit to say about my business. Part of it involved a political event in deep rural Kentucky, where a company with which my company is associated just opened up a place that will provide a buttload of jobs. The governor was there, and the district's Congressman, and a whole passel of local pols. I went in expecting...well, not much, other than a waste of five hours of my life that could be better used productively wringing necks.

What I got was something a bit different. In my local locality, we have a view of the economy that, to those of you who live out in America, is probably by turns jaded, peculiar, and insulting. My local locality has the good fortune of being very nearly recession-proof, owing to the proximity of your local Federal government. We got government jobs, we got contractor jobs, we got jobs for people who target or leverage the government, we got jobs to serve all those folks who work for or with the government in one way or another. It really works, and unemployment around here is always lower than elsewhere in America. We've a tendency to take all this for granted.

The main place I go in Kentucky is a fairly sizeable town, as things go, on the interstate--two whole exits worth--a county seat, a bit of a tourist gateway near other tourist gateways. We mounted up and rode a good 75 minutes or so in a direction that does not get one closer to any other interstate highway, in any significant sense (yes, technically it got me closer to both I-5 and I-40, but that's not what we're talking about here). It's pretty damned rural, especially to urban and suburban folk. And that's where I met the locals, including their pols.

Long stories short, there was speechifying, and testimonials from young single mothers who, but for this facility that our partner opened up (and to which we've contributed a few jobs, like less than five percent of the total), wouldn't have any job prospects at all. I got a very close look at the effects of rural development, and at the faces of those who benefit. It's easy to make light of hillbillies, and I do. But I have to tell you, these folks are poor Americans scraping by (or not), and they're so happy to have ass-suck $14-an-hour jobs available that it'll make you cry. Around here, my lowest-paid employees get closer to $20 hourly, and their jobs bite. The Kentucky jobs are, at least, desk jobs, but in a closely monitored and supervised environment. I'd hate their job, and most of you would too. These folks bust their humps to excel at jobs we'd think of as crap. It's a different world out there, where people need.

So I shook hands with a Republican Congressman, and with a Democratic Governor, who held me fast by the elbow as politicians do, thanking me--me!--for my company's contribution to this economic renaissance in a county of about 20,000 people with a median income of jack shit. I told him how moved I was, and after a little chitchat around the theme of rural development, slyly winked and wished him--the only other Democrat in the room, as near as I could tell--luck in his election year next year.

Then there was a feed. It was a lot like a wedding or a funeral that way. It was a pretty good feed, actually.

I've spent a lot of time lately feeling pretty sorry for myself on account of work. I'm busy, I'm scattered, and I'm having to spend far too much time travelling to rural Kentucky. When I go and shake hands with folks who genuinely tell me how damned glad they are to make $14 an hour to be regimented and conformed, who thank me for my tiny part in just making jobs available in their neighborhood, when I view what I'm doing as exploitation? I guess it's time for me to recalibrate that shit. Maybe I'll let you know how that goes. Or not.

The Place I Got Birthed (with Extra Fuck for Swami)

So as he tells you first, we slogged to Philadelphia (where I was birthed) yesterday, the point of the trip being to see United play Phunion (that's his intellectual property, there) at the Linc. After years of relative indifference occasioned by factors best summarized as relating to several degrees and forms of original sin, Philadelphia has become my favorite other city, at least my favorite other city that I visit with regularity (I am very, very fond of London, and need no encouragement to go to Paris or San Francisco).

My favorite place in Philadelphia is Reading Terminal Market (very spiffy Web site, fellow Web pros), which is, now that I mention it, almost certainly my very favorite place on the face of this planet. I am not hyperbolizing when I tell you that a short walk through the avenues and stalls of the Reading Terminal Market brings tears of joy to my eyes, the kind of tears that only one's deepest home of the heart can bring. It is the very essence of every food experience that formed me, a perfect storm of the scents and flavors and food sights of my childhood fused with elements I have come to appreciate as an adult. The place makes Landru cry tears of the joy of life, minions. Chomp on that.

We also walked; he chronicles that, a little, below the fold in his post, and does a fine job, though I must caveat that we covered a very small slice of Center City, basically walking about 10 blocks down Market, then back up Walnut. Good choices for a slice, to be sure, but small and coverable in the time we had at a Landru-like pace, punctuated as that is by Serge-like informational interruptions and fruitless searches for things that are gone. Oh, and a very entertaining break at a Walnut Street Starbucks where I put my feet up for a bit (they're getting oldish) and we watched a local psychotic wackaloon bounce around outside the locked mens room for nearly 10 minutes before finally deciphering the sign on the door that very clearly instructed him to get the fucking key from the fucking area around the fucking cash register. It would've been more entertaining if he had exploded, since I was sort of shielded from the potential spray pattern. On the other hand, it would've been unpleasant for my loved ones, who joined me in a different spray pattern later, but one not quite so noxious.

So we drove down to the Linc and prepared for the game by hanging in the designated, secured lot with our DCU kin for a time before we marched, approximately one thousand strong (seriously, and maybe a few hundred more), into the Linc, snarling, singing defiance, chanting. The local authorities kept us carefully corralled, apparently fearing that your Nation's capital is a place where we practice South American soccer riots, before escorting us on a lengthy death march to the uppermost reaches of the stadium, where little can be seen and nothing can be heard. And there we proceeded to take periodic beer showers and watch the game.

I will be brief about the game¹. United has a host of problems, and many relate to inadequate personnel, though the most glaring deficiencies can, in fact, be pinned on the current coach, and I'll be the first to say it: Fire Curt Onalfo. Oh, wait a minute. I already was the first to say it, pointing out in that process that he should never have been fucking hired, because he's a fucking loser undeserving of a place in the history of our Nation's greatest futbol team, except to the extent that his existing place in DCU history is having his fucking teams mostly fucking run over by the fucking DCU bus.

Curt Onalfo is fucking Tommy Soehn in disguise. He presided over a mediocre period in the history of a mediocre club, and did so with an excess of mediocrity, displaying no flair and a commitment to boring futbol. He's a fucking hoser, and he has no fucking business coaching my fucking soccer team. He has no flair, he has no tactical aptitude, he has no vision, and he has no idea how to lead what is, admittedly, a fairly sad collection of personnel with some salvageable bright spots (some of which spots are infinitely arguable, and believe me, they're argued infinitely, just not here).

I have one more thing to say about Curt Onalfo and Tommy Soehn. Tommy Soehn actually managed to get more out of this guy:

than Curt Onalfo ever could or ever will. That's how much I fucking hate fucking Curt Onalfo, campers; I just pwn3d him to compliment Tommy Fucking Soehn. Are we clued now? This fucking inept, unimaginative, third-rate clown got all the polite he was going to get out of me when his name first came up and I said, "No, thank you."

He likes to rail about Kasper and Payne and, implicitly, Chang, though it's not so implicit, actually, and it's invariably based in some navelgazing Marxist idealistic worldview that comes off sounding remarkably like people at whom I yell to get off of my lawn, though it's actually nothing like them at all (1. He came by it honestly; 2. He's paid his dues; 3. Seriously, are you fucking kidding me?) and I alone of his contemporaries understand the brilliance of his satire when he starts spewing that way. The proof certain of my position lies here, however. That man is the fucking bone that Curt Onalfo asked for to reassure himself that he was actually in fucking charge. That's right. Kurt Fucking Morsink. So spew all you want about Kasper and Payne, who did after all bring you this fucking assclown on the apparently errant theory that it doesn't matter that a guy has absolutely no natural or environmental talent if he plays for someone's--anyone's--loserass national team. And this guy on the theory that all South Americans with greasy long hair are good futbol players, even if you only get 115 minutes of soccer out of them before they break down irreparably. No, I don't fucking remember anyone named Gallardo. Why, do you?

So, sure. Kasper and Payne suck ass and should be fucking drowned in the Anacostia. That doesn't necessarily reflect on Will Chang--who isn't really a soccer guy, and we should in a way be grateful that he hangs in without Snydering up his team, and it doesn't necessitate labelling Chang as cheap. And while I'm fucking right about all of this, it's not the point, which is this: Curt Fucking Onalfo is the fucking source of Kurt Fucking Morsink. Both are symbols of mediocrity in American soccer, and it's absolutely fucking unacceptable that either is associated with DC United and its tradition.

That's right, our fucking tradition. What else have we got? We got bupkes is what we got, though I'm fond of Jaime Moreno, as is any right-thinking American, and Tino has some raw talent that no one's figured out how to harness and channel, and Jakovic, who at the bottom line cost the team the game yesterday, is an awesome monster of filth and rage with a wonderful defensive instinct and coltish manner, and Rodney Wallace is a'ight. And oh yeah, Perkins is back, and Pontius is okies, though far, far out of form. That's it. KasperPayne's fault? Yeah, sure. Kurt Morsink is Onalfo's. Have I fucking hammered those fucking nails into that fucking coffin yet? Good.

So let's address a couple of other things. 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.

Two quick items. While Terry Fucking Vaughn is a dreadful fucking referee and a worse fucking human being, he was absofuckinglutely right to red-card Dejan Jakovic yesterday. There is no if or maybe here. It was a straight red, and that's what Vaughn dealt, and the ensuing DFK goal by (of course) Sebastien Fucking Le Toux was, as the man himself admitted, Troy Perkins' fault in its entirety, with no mitigators or comforts. Period. There is no argument to be brooked here, and frankly, bDr's implication of Vaughn by juxtaposition is unfair. Own up, bDr. The foul was straight red all the way.

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.

¹ This fucking turned out to be a fucking lie.

Clawing Out Mine Own Eyes With Feces-Smeared Punji Sticks Taken From The Bottom Of A Vintage 1969 Pitfall Trap In The An Hoa Valley

So there's this, wherein my futbol club was embarassed mightily, at home, by a pack of passive-aggressive punkass bitches from a passive-aggressive city represented by about a hundred wingnut-class deluded and sartorially retarded passive-aggressive baristas who think that selling half the seats in a grid football field and covering the rest with tarps is called a sellout.

The fun started when said fucktards got all torqued because their venue lost the bidding for who got to host the game. They lost because they proposed a 1 PM weekday time for the game in their retard fish-frog stadium. They claim they lost because of politics. They are stark raving bugfuck. Hilarity ensued.

The fun ended when, in the wake of the fucktards' first goal, my club's retard fish-frog goalkeeper deliberately stomped on or near the prone body of sartorially retarded punkass bitch number 17, whose development arrested at about the age of 8. I must assert that it doesn't matter that our goalkeeper missed, or that number 17 deserved far worse; it was a wrongass thing to do, period. I thought there might be some hope when, with about 5 minutes left in regulation, with a righteous 7 minutes or so of stoppage time, the idiot baristas started taunting by singing "Goodbye." Our intermittently badass ganja anchor mid immediately slammed home a goal off of a free kick, but time ran out before DCU (down 2-1) could equalize.

I want nothing to detract from the fundamental message that my club sucked. They danced on the ball, they turned over the ball, their tactics were shite in the face of speedy opposition, and they didn't show the heart that I expect and deserve from them. Contrary to what this guy would have you believe, they were actually the better team for more of the game, but they couldn't convert because they were unwilling to direct the pelota toward the gol. That's sorta fatal.

Despite all of that, the crunchy baristas deserved to win. They scored more fucking goals. End of story. Congrats to them. They won a trophy. In about 30 years, when they've won eleven more, they'll have some basis for the amount of aggrieved fucking noise they make. Except they won't. Seattle FC can shove itself up its own city's rainy, dank, suicidal ass.

That's not all that makes me want to smear my eye sockets with dysenteric feces. There's also this thing about the New York Times spreading a rumor about a splashy Chelsea Clinton wedding extravaganza, then blaming the Internets and the Clinton family because no one (read: the New York Times) wanted to believe the denials. Shakesville says it right.

Finally, there's teabagger outrage over the President's planned address to our nation's schoolchildren next week. Some of the more clever wingnuts are pretending that it's about a suggested lesson plan accompanying the planned speech (one of the study questions/assignments in the suggested lesson plan was, indeed, effing stupid, as would be any teacher who taught to a suggested lesson plan without reviewing it and making sure it was age/grade/region-appropriate, but of course the remarkably dumb No Child Left Behind law has gotten rid of all of the teachers who are that lazy and ignorant--oh, wait, no it hasn't.). Except when they're not. Reagan, Bush, and Hoover (!) all took opportunities to speak directly to schoolchildren, which doesn't seem to be a problem for wingnut astroturfers. SN! links to Politico's pretty transparent attempt to flame the fans of outrage, which quotes one of my local county's school board members' feeble attempts to defend herself and the school board against lies propagated by malicious racist fuckwits.

So yeah, the shit-smeared punji sticks are looking pretty good.

More Things You Need To Know, Part Infinity

Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is quite possibly the most fucking awesome movie ever fucking made. If you've ever liked a Tarantino movie, you must see this one. If you hate Tarantino, you're a gormless douche, but I'm willing to concede that you probably shouldn't see the movie. I'm not going to say anything else; in a few weeks, after it's out of the theatres, we might further discuss in specific detail the magnificent awesomeness that is this movie.

Okay, I promised some San Francisco stuff. I still don't have the energy to go with the original story line I had planned, so we'll just do some quickie stuff with the major punch lines.

The short version is this: it's a very fine city populated by smug fuckwits. California: Fuck you. Now, I personally know people...okay, person...who have migrated to California, who are perfectly fine...well, person, and this is not directed at her. But there aren't a lot of exceptions to this.

My favorite San Francisco self-entitlement moment was when I was standing on a crowded street corner on Market Street, waiting for the light to change so I could cross whatever other street we had come to. I was elbowed and shoved from behind by someone who said, in the most aggrieved way possible, "Excuse me." I reacted like any normal person would: I whirled around to see what was going on, instinctively yelling, "What the fuck?" A 20ish Calichick with a little ratdog was upset that I wasn't pushing people out of my path so that she could get around the corner. "You're in my way," she whined. I was almost too flabbergasted to respond, but I did manage to loudly suggest that she eat a bag of cocks. The horrified looks from the locals were priceless. Yeah, the little bitch elbowed me and shoved me because she and her little fucking dog (the official emblem of doucherton Californians) failed sharing in kindergarten and couldn't wait on a crowded fucking street, but I'm the one who's not nice. Eat a bag of cocks, California.

Other than the populace, it's a really cool city, and an utterly fantastic food town. It was a nice trip, and I wish that it had been a real vacation, but work intruded far too much for me to actually relax. I got bothered by someone every single business day of my vacation, until yesterday (and I think that stopped only because, upon my return to DC, I actually had to go to the office for a few hours on Wednesday, in the middle of my fucking vacation, to take care of some exceptionally unpleasant business).

Some pictorial evidence:

Probably our best picture day was at the zoo. Here, a ring-tailed lemur proudly shows off his genitalia.

Meerkats do not trust me.

This picture is funny to me and exactly two other people, assuming that there's enough contrast for them to read the funny part.

Lazy, self-entitled San Franciscans sleep away their day in the sand pit.

For Sasha.

Obligatory. Yes, the fat tourist in the black jacket should look familiar.

Ilse simulates an earthquake on the Golden Gate Bridge.

Ginormous gulls oversee everything in San Francisco, including Alcatraz.

It is possible that the Grateful Dead lived here. It is also possible that we had the wrong house.

We are quite absolutely certain that the Jefferson Airplane lived here.

I'd like to tell you that this is in Italy, but it's actually on Coit Hill.

Hooray for Fascism!

The news from St. Paul is pretty disheartening. Dig in:

Greenwald on Federal involvement in pre-convention police raids.

Greenwald on today's arrests--280 arrests was the last number I saw.

Democracy Now's Amy Goodman arrested for asking to speak to a police commander about two DN journalists beaten and taken into custody.

The Uptake's coverage, including video of a St. Paul police presser. The most charming quote come at about the 7-minute mark of part 3 of the video, whereat a St. Paul PIO tells us that "Obviously, each of the individuals arrested was involved in some criminal activity."

Niiiiiiiiice.

Some of these independent newsies--certainly the ones I'm linking to--are of a liberal bent. But streaming video doesn't lie. Go fuck yourselves, Twin Cities police agencies. Way to reassure all of us that police ain't pigs.

Wrapped in the Flag

So law enforcement officials in the Twin Cities are raiding homes occupied by people there to protest at the RNC. These are not raids where the police knock on the door and serve a warrant; they're dressed in black (with masks), toting automatic weapons, kicking in doors, "detaining" the people inside (that means making them lay on the floor, handcuffed, in case you're a little weak on the whole euphemism thing), and conducting searches for which they refuse to show warrants until the end of the search. In one case, they "detained" someone for asking to see a warrant.

It also develops that Minnesota law (not yet constitutionally tested, apparently, and rarely if ever used, allows for the detention of criminal suspects without charges for up to 36 hours (not including weekends and holidays). This could keep some detainees in custody until Wednesday afternoon.

Further, Minneapolis housing officials swooped down on one of the raided properties to board it up, 5 hours after the raid (the homeowner is still in custody). The violation tenaciously cited by those officials? A broken back door that the police had kicked in. Just for spice, Minneapolis charges homeowners $6,000 when it boards up their houses for code violations.

(Trusted and beloved local Minions correspondent Swamahari is invited, nay, beseeched to report in the comments.)

It'd be one thing if we could hold the Republicans responsible for this. But they're not the only ones complicit in the creation of the police state.

This is some sick shit. We're all the terrorists, as far as the government is concerned.

Tipping Update

It occurred to me that I might need to do a little preemptive splaining after this morning's post about the governing apparati of the city of Boston becoming totally unhinged by a bunch of Lite-Brites.

Knocking out the most simplistic stuff first: no, moron, I'm not in favor of terrorism, I didn't say I was, and I didn't advocate being in favor of it. I'm not advocating rolling over for it. I'm not advocating being a dumbass when you see a brown paper package wrapped in twine ticking away in the airport lounge. I'm not advocating cutting funding to local and federal law enforcement. Or not increasing it.

I'm advocating having a fucking brain in your head. The only reason the war in Iraq is about terrorism is because having a large, but too-small body of troops in a country undergoing a civil war (one we precipitated--not that I advocate having left Sadaam Hussein in power, since we went all that way to kick his ass and stuff) is, in fact, an invitation to terrorism. The original reasons for invading had nothing to do with terrorism, and leaving Iraq now would neither alter that country's strife-ridden path to a government that may or may not like us nor bring more terrorists to our shores.

It's like leaving your laptop on a park bench and boggling when someone steals it. It's like putting wooden barrels of gasoline in an old, dried-out barn filled with straw, and leaving matches strewn about, and expecting no one to burn it down.

I'm also not disrespecting the 3,000 or so mostly Americans who died on 9/11. Your view may be that the math disrespects them--they were, after all, only 3,000 of the 150,000 or so people who died of unnecessarily violent causes in 2001. But that would not be a real objective view, and it would be pretty disrespectful to the other 147,000 or so victims of violence.

And I am most assuredly not suggesting that terrorism deaths are unpreventable. I'm just suggesting that they should be viewed in the appropriate risk context. The rationale for preventing terrorism is the rationale for preventing any unnecessary deaths. AIDS kills far fewer people than cancer. Compare the amount spent on research into each. It's exactly the same thing. Exactly the same.

I saw the video of the two accused, wherein they would only entertain questions about 70s hairstyles. I think they've got it just about exactly right. They are effectively charged with giving the city of Boston an opportunity to look really, really stupid. Their attitude is what it should be.

The howls from the right are not as loud as I might have thought, although they're just as mean. And the howls that try to sound like sensible howling are real knee-slappers. I heard a Fox correspondent guest-bloviating on my local pound-news-up-your-ass radio station today; her take was that the Feds believe Boston did the right thing. When asked how that reflected on the other nine cities that managed not to panic over Lite-Brites, she took a trip to the Waffle House, but tried to edge in an assertion that the Feds thought Boston was right and nine other cities were head-up-ass.

Uhm...wrong.

The Tipping Point

We all experience the accumulation of idiocy in various forms, affecting various aspects of our lives, many of them trivial, some of them less so. I decided a while back that the genus of idiocy relating to politics and worldviews was one I no longer wanted to significantly engage in this blog. The thoroughgoing blindness and pervasive dishonesty of the other side just saps my soul. Should somebody engage them? Sure, somebody should, but I'm mostly not going to, and in so deciding, I forgo the right to an opinion on who should.

Yesterday's little dustup in Boston, though, is not possible for me to ignore; it is the tipping point of my rage on this issue. The "war" on terrorism is unadulterated bullshit. If you are not a law enforcement or intelligence official and you go around worrying about terrorism, you are either a complete fucking idiot, you are seeking an excuse to impose your brand of fascism on our country, or you are psychologically disturbed and should seek some help. Multiple choice is plausible.

Let me be abundantly clear about this: if you see a small electronic sign, one with blinking lights in a pattern that appears to be flipping you off, and your first thought is that you are looking at an explosive device? You need competent medical help. Seriously. It is not possible for a sane and rational person to look at this:

and think, "I am looking at a terrorist bomb." It's just not possible.

It would be easy to write this off to the stick up Boston's ass. We are talking about the descendants of the folks who brought you the Salem Witch Trials. Today's news bears this out; the two poor bastards hired by Turner Broadcasting to carry out its nefarious plot of using art installations as advertising are facing arraignment in Boston-area courts this morning, and city officials are acting like the company--and its temporary starving-artist hires--are actual agents of Al Qaida.

Let's set the terrorism thing straight: you, personally, are not going to die of terrorism. It ain't gonna happen. Let's take a look at the things that will kill you.

The World Health Organization estimates (and by the way, I worked on the book pictured on the linked page, there) that, in 2002 (the most recent year for which WHO has published data), there were about 291 million people in the United States (please forgive my national chauvinism if you're one of Minions' 0.135 non-U.S. readers). A little over 24 million of them died. That's about .08 percent of Americans. Eight tenths of one percent, eight out of every one thousand Americans, died that year (the actual figure is 831.7 deaths per hundred thousand population--I'm even willing to put the worst possible face on it and call it a whole nine out of a thousand).

That's a slim chance of dying to begin with, on the low side of the middle of the spectrum, around 80th in the world (191 countries are listed), a death rate most similar to that of, oddly enough, France. Our national death rate in 2002 was not very far from the global death rate of 918.5 deaths per hundred thousand population.

Various countries in Africa approach or exceed a death rate that triples ours. Stop. Think. Triples. Around 2.7 percent of the denizens of Sierra Leone (not a particularly safe country for humans, I grant) died in 2002.

So, when it comes to dying (at all--we haven't even gotten to terrorism yet), you have a middling advantage in that you are an American. You would do a bit better in any of a number of countries--including, interestingly enough, Israel and Syria--and significantly better in a handful of countries, all of them (with the exception of Brunei) oil-rich countries that border Saudi Arabia.

Why did people die in 2002? WHO classifies deaths by cause. Globally, about 26 percent of deaths in 2002 owed to infectious diseases of various sorts, 12 percent to cancers, a whopping 29 percent to cardiovascular diseases, and smatterings of 4 and 5 percent attributable to various other causes; 58 percent of deaths owed to causes classified as noncommunicable diseases, which subsumes everything not infectious or injurious.

Only 9 percent of deaths in 2002 owed to injuries, and of those, two-thirds were accidental in nature--traffic accidents, falls, drownings, and the like. Another 17 percent of injury-caused deaths were from self-inflicted injuries, meaning suicide. Only 1 percent of deaths (and it's almost exactly 1 percent) resulted from violence or war.

As a citizen of the world, you had less than a 1-percent chance of dying in 2002. If you died, there was only a 1-percent chance that you died from any violent cause--including terrorism.

As an American, your advantage here really kicks in, unless you're me. 87.5 percent of U.S. deaths in 2002 were caused by noncommunicable diseases--23 percent by cancers, 38 percent by cardiovascular diseases, with smatterings attributable to other disease-based causes. In the U.S., only 6.3 percent of deaths were attributable to injury, and of those, around 70 percent were accidental.

Roughly 157,000 Americans died of violence-related causes in 2002, less than six-tenths of one percent of all deaths. In 2002, you were seven times more likely to die from an accidental cause--itself not all that likely--than from any violent cause, including terrorism. Even if we take a liberty with the numbers and add in 5,000 terrorism-related deaths from 2001 into the totals, the incidences don't change significantly.

Now let's talk about preventable deaths. Well over half of cancer and cardiovascular deaths can be prevented. Compare the amount spent on preventing deaths from noncommunicable diseases to the amount spent on the so-called war on terror. No rational person can look at these proportions and think them appropriate.

Like I said, if you're scared of terrorism, you're either stupid, lying, or deeply troubled. If you're deeply troubled, I truly hope you can get some help for that--it's not surprising that, given the government's propaganda campaign of the last five years, people's heads are twisted by this issue. But if you're stupid or lying--and if you have a fear of terrorism for any reason other than some psychological disorder, you're one or both--just shut the fucking fuck up and consider a fact or two.

Attention San Diego

Just take a nice warm douche. On your own home field, you can't manage to prevent the rest of us from having to watch America's Dreamboat in yet another fucking AFC championship game, and you wanna piss and moan about the Pats mocking your asshole Terp linebacker?

This wouldn't have happened if your coach wasn't a cranky old failure and your quarterback wasn't a fucking pussy who couldn't, in four years at NC State, manage to beat any of the vomitorious excuses for football teams the University of Maryland threw at him, not even in a game that actually gave me a fucking heart attack.

I mean, seriously, you suck that badly against Dreamboat and you want any sympathy whatsofuckingever?

Retards. Stop breeding. And shut up. No, seriously. Shut the fuck up a whole lot.

Why God Hates Your Team

1. You are not Peyton Manning or Tom Brady. As is by now well-documented, God is BFFs with both Fuckface and Dreamboat. Neither minds being two-timed. I mean, c'mon, God is your BFF, what do you care about who else She hangs with?

2. You are the Seattle Seahawks, who God allowed into the playoffs for the sole purpose of exposing Tony Romo as the useless earflap he is.

3. You are Marty Schottenheimer. Do I really need to explain this?

4. You are the Philadelphia Eagles, and you have been struck down by Her Mighty Righteousness as a demonstration of all which is just and correct.

5. You are the Baltimore Ravens, and you are a felon dressed as a beatnik, coached by an ego carefully sculpted from feces.

6. While you are Rex Grossman and you are a douchebag, you were necessary for one more week because somebody had to do in the Seahawks.

7. You are Clemson, and the injustice of you remaining undefeated in basketball in January was so glaring that your ass had to be whipped by something as pathetic as the Maryland Terrapins to demonstrate to you the error of your ways.

8. You are the Maryland Terrapins, and that was one of your five conference victories this season, all of which will come unexpectedly, while you hork bile on your shoes against nonentities. At home.

9. You have chosen to closely align your personal being with one of the above examples of justice in the universe.

10. You have chosen to align your personal being against Fuckface or Dreamboat. Again. It's just not worthwhile to fuck with God's BFFs.

Your Alternative Universe Playoff Preview

Well, the wildcard weekend is behind us, and we're left with those teams that have some chance of making it to the big party in...wherever the hell the big party is this year. In descending order of significance, herewith is Minions' analysis of the weekend playoff picture.

Puget Sound Pukes at Sexy Rexy's Pad: This is just the kind of game we love. Yeah, I'm lying through my ass. Starbuck's QB Matt Filarski leads an amorphous mass of nobodies and Shaun Alexander into historic Sojer Feeuld (which now resembles a Ferengi spacecraft landing on Lakeshore Drive) to get sprayed with semen by Rex Grossman. Both coaches are distinctive; one ate Andy Reid, and the other has the most ridiculous name in coaching history. Seattle is glitchy and prone to extremes. Chicago has a stingy defense and a quarterback who doesn't care about the color of the jersey worn by the man catching his heaving spurts. Alexander is a jinxed SEC product who believes in faith healing; Grossman is a jinxed SEC product who believes in his own manly fluids. Seattle got to this game on the strength of Tony Romo's propensity for not washing his hands after dealing lubricious handjobs to his coach; Chicago got to this game on the strength of a schedule more light in the loafers than this guy (thanks to With Leather for the nightmare).

Decisive Advantage: Ilse is a Bears fan. If the Bears lose, I will be ground into ground things and served for dinner. In addition, the Seahawks somehow manage to be simultaneously wretched, abhorrent, and boring. Go Bears.

In Reality: Despite multiple Seattle fangasms as the result of Sexy Rexy's propensity for pointing it wherever he likes, the Bears win close in a relatively low-scoring affair (50 points overall would surprise me, unless the Bears roll over and die and let Filarski light them up like the Navy Pier).

Da Iggles at Da Aints: A quarterback of dubious preference meets a quarterback who hates his mother. A coach with no name meets a coach who ate Mike Holmgren. America's Team For Now meets America's Tertiary Burden* Minus Don McNabb. An inexplicable juggernaut meets an inexplicable juggernaut. There is no beauty to this game; the Iggles are thugs on a roll, and the Aints have the ugliest unis north, south, east, or west of Baltimore. Garcia is an uncompelling quarterback, and Reggie Bush is just plain effing annoying. The luminosity of certain Aints receivers is dulled by the sparkle of the New Orleans Pity Machine, and the Iggles have cobbled together a desperate suckjob of a team that got hot at the right time (and the wrong time--the Iggles' awakening the moment McNabb dropped does not bode well for their metaphysical identity, not that I give a fuck about them having a metaphysical identity other than dog shit).

Decisive Advantage: Puh-leez. Even during an Iggles-Cowgirls game, I root for a planeful of nuns to crash into the field. I can't support the Iggles for anything except soup commercials.

In Reality: End of the line for the Iggles. The noise and mildew of the Superdome will stifle them, while the posterboy for dysfunctional filial relationships chews up their secondary and opens up the field for the ReggieBush. Aints by a lot, in a relatively high-scoring game.

NFC Implications: Aints walk out of Sojer Feeuld next weekend covered in Rexjizz, but maintaining a grip on the NFC championship trophy.

The Fucking Patriots at The Tomlinsons: The Chargers are on a pretty incredible rip. They haven't lost in weeks and weeks and weeks. And the number of blowjobs LT is getting from the media, bloggers, and fans doesn't appear to have sapped him at all. This? Is the way to spread your seed, in a relatively quiet and dignified way, matter-of-factly stomping to death your division rival for Biggest Running Back Balls In All Creation. Three things militate against an easy pick, though. First, Phil Rivers is a fucking pussy. Have I ever mentioned to you that, in his six-decade career at the North Carolina State University, Phil never once beat the University of Maryland? Never once. 0-4, accompanied by much dirt-eating and pick-throwing. And is Phil out there in the media, taking huge dumps over draft-class rival and unspeakably biggerer pussy Eli Manning? No, he is not. Phil Rivers is a fucking pussy. Second, Marty Schottenheimer is a cranky old dessicant who couldn't win a playoff game if it was the only thing standing between him and a legacy. Oh, wait, that is the only thing standing between Marty and a legacy. Third, there is the matter of Dreamboat and his propensity for sneaking up on your ass in the playoffs and knifing you in the fucking kidleys. The Patriots are an assload of suck this season--it took them five sixths of the game to decisively put away the Jets in their own fucking stadium last weekend, and they actually choked on the Fins twice this season. In fact, it's remarkable that a team that sucked so badly in division games in the second worst division in football this season is even in the fucking playoffs. But they're resilient, the Pats, and Dreamboat is one seriously sneaky motherfucker, as Bridget Moynihan's sniz will be happy to tell you. I wouldn't bet on this game if you gave me 20 fucking points.

Decisive Advantage: Shawn Merriman, he-man Terp and known steroid-gobbler, plays for the Chargers. That's all I got. Otherwise, this is a tossup, and despite my love for any NFL Terp, I may well spend this time spanking the monkey or Ilse, whichever is more convenient and available.

In Reality: Southern California. Part of the Patriots' ability to kidney-stick you in the playoffs derives from Foxboro, where no more games will be played this here season. I'm thinking that this will drive a Chargers win. I will be surprised by nothing in this game.

Baltimore Colts at Cleveland Browns: This is for real, a classic battle between two storied, original gangsta franchises. I think. I lost track of which model of the Browns this is. Yeah, I think they're the O.G.'s. Anyway, this is not the first time these two clubs have butted heads for the big money, and this is clearly the marquee matchup of the weekend. A lot of considerably less knowledgeable sports blogs are into hatin' on Charm City. This is an antiquated and uncharitable worldview spawned by watching too much television and taking it seriously, a worldview that accepts the epitome of Baltimore cool as H.L. Slaveraping Mencken. This is unacceptable. Baltimore is a fabulous city reeking of cool that's as Old World as North American cool gets. The O.G. Browns team that plays there is another matter entirely, and is a pretty good reflection of the face the haters want you to see; it's sad that they think this gives them a point. Mind you, I find the team--most especially its coach, The Brian--repugnant, but I will not stand for hatin' on the city itself, which got raped by another O.G. when the Baltimore team that plays in Middle America skipped town. To add to the insult in protoplasm that is The Brian, the O.G. Browns' roster is rife with actual criminals and low-grade pre-Apocalypse Borg. And as I mentioned, their unis are positively hateful--the O.G. Brownies look like fat artists without berets. I cannot recommend the competition, either. For my part, I do not like 6 foot 4, 230-pound quarterbacks with laser rocket arms, not when they're crawling out of my television set and dragging me kicking and screaming to whatever vendor penned them the cutest and most lucrative commercial, although that dislike is tempered by the knowledge of their manlove for hack C&W singers that got emasculated by scrawny, ugly, fuckawful actresses. Furthermore, I do not care for Tony Dungy, who really needs to get Peyton Manning's media agent. The Colts of Middle America are a vulnerable team this year, but for all his relentless presence on my television, Peyton does not deserve the "can't pitch after Christmas" horseshit that was piled on him during the Colts-KC game last weekend. Listening to that rap, you'd think the poor bastard hops into a wheelchair after week 17. And so we are stuck. Fat Beatniks versus the one-man franchise in what is easily the most watchable and potentially fun game of the set.

Decisive Advantage: As much as I loath The Brian, I gotta go with my former Emergency Backup Team. They're local, they hustled Tony Siragusa off into sweet (but not quiet) retirement, they give me a continuing opportunity to assess the results of the forever ongoing Breaking Steve McNair Project, and they're not the fucking Waves of Grain Colts (which I have despised in their O.G. incarnation since I was a kid, having spent my football-aware life around other O.G. teams that revolved around varying degrees of Colts disdain).

In Reality: Peyton's gonna have a frustrating day, but that's not gonna give the O.G. Browns an offense. Indianapolis in a game that will be sort of close, but reasonably comfortable for them.

AFC Implications: Who the hell knows who might be standing at the end of the Tombstone shootout that will be a Colts-Chargers AFC Championship game? The winner should waltz over whatever emerges from the NFC title game, though.

*Except during actual Redskins-Eagles games, the Iggles are surpassed in loathsomeness only by the Cowgirls and the Large Blue Persons of New Jersey.

BREAKING NEWS UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE:

Dear Jolene,

I love you more than...well, a lot of things. But you are one sad little bunny, honey.

Love,
Landru

SCIENCE UPDATE (For Jolene)

After gathering scientific input and performing mathematical operations, I have ascertained that you are partially correct. Using my rigorous data collection methodology, I compiled information on the relative douchebaggery of various NFL teams. I then organized those data by division, and I was quite surprised at the results:

Division	GUDI*
AFC East	90.5
AFC North	87.25
NFC East	85.5
AFC West	85
NFC West	83.25
NFC Central	81
NFC South	80
AFC South	78.75

*Gross Utility Douchebaggery Index is calculated based on factors that include both team and individual player/coach loathsomeness, pussification, whingery, and personal hygiene.

I was rather surprised after I conducted my scientific analysis of the resulting distribution. When I made my statement about the relative merits of the AFC East, I was assuming that the NFC East was by far the biggest sack of douchebags in the league. After all, the sheer out-and-out loathsomeness of the Cowgirls, the remarkably foul personal hygiene of the Iggles, and the unparalleled pussification of the Giants had to outweigh even the mathematical avatarization of the relative purity that is the Washington Redskins (calculated on a weighted basis assuming that Joe Gibbs does not exist, because he can't, because if he did I'd have to put one in the back of my own head, so he must not).

But I was surprised. Despite the menacingly awful results accrued by the other denizens of the NFC East, the consistent repugnance of the Patriots, Fins, Bills, and Jets (in that order) carried the day for the AFC East. Not even the Steelers, a pack of pussies quarterbacked by bag of rocks and (until recently) coached by a venereally diseased pussy, could push their division over the top. I was also mistaken in my instinctive impression of the NFC Central; its very blandness smoothed over the astonishingly horrible results achieved by the abhorrent sacks of shit that play in Wisconsin and Minnesota. While I truly grieve for my friends who represent areas that yielded unpleasant data, mathematics do not lie.

And so, Jolene? Science kicks your ass. So there.