Here's a crazy statistic via B-Pro's Jay Jaffe (subscription required): Last year's attendance at Nationals (Still Doesn't Have A Sponsor) Park, the team's second year at the new building with the goofy center field camera angle, was 6.5 percent lower than the final year's attendance at RFK Stadium. This is astounding. That stadium cost taxpayers $693 million, and they actually did a better job of selling tickets at the lopsided old airplane hangar. It must have been all the amenities at RFK.

Perhaps the eventual corporate sponsor can work in some sort of tie-in deal.

It's easy to forget now, but when the Expos turned into the Nationals and headed to DC, the thought was that this was going to be a potential juggernaut in the NL East. Certainly, MLB initially treated the Nationals as well as it treated the Expos poorly. (It even saved some love for the Orioles.) The combination of a re-energized organization with a fanbase supposedly desperate for baseball — it had been 34 years since the Senators left — was considered a threat to the rest of the NL East. All was set up for them.

It hasn't worked out that way, and the Nationals, with the help of Jim Bowden, have squandered all that goodwill and advantage. The stadium itself is unimpressive, blandly "new" and in an area of town that isn't exactly known for its foot traffic. The team has been disorganized, confused and run, really, in a way that's not all that dissimilar from the way the Expos were run at the end: like an organization that keeps waiting for someone to push the reset button. It's not happening this time. It feels like an interim franchise. But it isn't: They've got to make this work on their own now.

I'm as excited by Stephen Strasburg as anyone else is, but it is telling that when the Nationals earned the right to draft him, the general assumption was that the team would figure out a way to screw this up. The Nationals were the Clippers drafting Blake Griffin: Why should such a special talent have to play there? This is a long way from the initial plan, and that initial plan wasn't put together all that long ago.

That said: The Nationals did make it work with Strasburg, and other than the bewildering signing of the corpse of Pudge Rodriguez, their offseason moves have veered toward the sane. (Chien-Ming Wang is a perfect fit.) This is beneficial to baseball as a whole. The game needs Washington to compete with the Phillies and Mets and Braves. The game doesn't need another Kansas City, which is what the Nationals have been so far. In addition to Strasburg, Drew Storen and Ian Desmond (who I hope is happy with Penny and can stave off her villainous father) are on their way to the majors, and Jordan Zimmermann will be back by the end of the season as well. There is a rough skeleton of a team here. Still: Attendance should improve once Strasburg arrives, but it has yet to be proven that the supposed clamoring for a team in Washington is something that actually exists. I hope it's there. But if it's not, maybe they'll give Montreal another chance. At least they could spell the team name right on the front of the uniform over there.

The Lady Huskies have won every single game over the last two seasons by at least ten points. Their average margin of victory is 34. During that stretch, they have trailed in the second half for a grand total three and a half minutes. This season, they beat the No. 2 team in the country by 12; a No. 3 by 24; a No. 7 by 33 (on the road) and another No. 7 team by 41. Only one conference game was closer than 20. (They beat Seton Hall by 67.) Last night was their worst game of the season: A 15-point win over Notre Dame (another top 10 team) where they only scored 59 points. They are very good.

With their sixth national championship in 11 years all but assured, UConn is approaching UCLA-like dominance of their sport. But it's not just that nobody can compete with Connecticut. Nobody competes with anybody. There are eight conference champions this year that did not lose a game in conference. Stanford, who lost to UConn by 12, went 28-1 and also won every game (except one) by double digits. Nebraska is undefeated and almost all of their wins are by 10 or more as well. Yet, neither is considered a serious threat to knock off the Huskies in the tournament. The NCAA is a one-team league.

Jeremy Schaap laments the fact that no one cares about the dominance of Geno Auriemma's team, saying, "If they were men, we'd marvel at their greatness." But if they were men, they wouldn't be undefeated right now. Their greatness is a major reason interest in the women's game lags behind the men's. It is simply not competitive enough and now UConn has made it even less so.

Perhaps dynasties likes these are a necessary growing pain of a sport in its adolescence, like the Celtics in the 1960s or the Yankees in the '40s and '50s. The total domination of one franchise eventually forces the stragglers to rise up and make the league better. But the women's game has a lot of catching up to do. Division I has way more schools than it did in the 1970s and unlike the men's game, it doesn't earn those schools a lot of money. (Even a lot of the smaller men's programs struggle to break even.) An upset could still happen to UConn this year, but their total annihilation of all challengers has not helped a league that has to deal with charges of "boring" on a regular basis.

The men's and women's games are so different that they are almost not even playing the same sport, but the truth is that lack of competitiveness is an even bigger problem than a lack of dunking. As the women's game has matured over the last 20 years or so, that imbalance between the haves and have nots appears to be growing. (Again, this program had a separate 70-game streak within the same decade.) I'm not literally suggesting that Connecticut be kicked out of the college game—although they might do just fine in the WNBA—but someone better figure out how to translate their success to the rest of the country before there's no one left for them to play against.

Jeremy Schaap On UConn's Streak [Video @ ESPN]

I have a question for all the commenters out there: Would you star in a porn film if someone asked you? A real porn film that gets posted on the Internet and everywhere else. You get paid. Like say, two hundred bucks. And you get to have sex with a top tier porn star, like Lisa Ann or someone like that. It all sounds great, but would you really go through with it?

I've asked myself this question a lot. Obviously, I'm married now, so I'd never accept such an offer. But I always posit all sexual hypotheticals to the alternate dimension version of myself that is NOT married with kids. I think, back when I was 18 and a virgin, and back before all porn was on the web, I would have said yes. Immediately. And then I would have failed to get an erection on camera and spent the rest of my life chewing out my genitals.

But I wonder if I'd accept so quickly in the Internet age. Every guy DREAMS of starring in a porno, of course. But you see the fucking lechers and creeps who actually go through with it, and it's hard to want to join them. Plus, you gotta go through blood tests. And you have to take direction. People are staring at you. And you have to worry about people stumbling upon it somewhere down the line. Spouses. Siblings. Parents. Is it worth all that to spend five quality minutes on camera with Sylvia Saint?

Yeah, probably. Onto your letters.

Joe:

Have you ever been watching TV and an alarm clock goes off on screen with the exact same tone as the one you use at home? It's honestly the worst feeling I can get when watching a show. The trained response that I have from that always makes me depressed thinking that I have to leave my warm bed for work, even though its 8 o'clock at night.

Even worse is when the phone going off on the show sounds exactly like your own, which has happened to me a few times. Nothing makes you feel stupider. I'll even answer my phone before the character answers his. "Hello? Oh, it's the show. HAR HAR." Same with police and ambulance sirens. Wait, is that a real police siren, or is it going off on this special episode of "Top Chef Masters"? Ah. It's real! REAL FIRE SOMEWHERE! NICE!

My in-laws have a dog who goes apeshit any time he hears a doorbell ring. So any time we watch TV at their house and some fucking Domino's ad comes on, the dog springs up and starts barking like an asshole. And, since I can't kick the dog, I find myself irrationally angry at Domino's for not taking the dog's response into consideration. CATER TO ME, FUCKFACES.

I used to write a lot of radio ads. One time, I wrote an ad with a bunch of horns honking and car crashing sound effects, and my boss got pissed. "You can't put this shit in a radio ad. Drivers will get confused and freak out." It's just an unwritten rule of radio advertising. And thus, you rarely hear cars crashing in radio ads I was unaware of. THE MORE YOU KNOW…

Jay:

Assuming you could only use 5 condiments the rest of your life and they were stored in a fresh and never ending supply (one per finger on one of your hands), which condiments would you choose AND which finger would they be stored in?

The question becomes difficult because this would include breakfasts (maple syrup/honey), desserts (chocolate syrup) and of course any lunch/dinner meal you could think of. Salad dressings do not count on their own unless you use them as a dipping sauce/topper (blue cheese for wings). Anything hot does not count (marinara sauce), nor do liquefied versions of solids (melted queso cheese).

You seem to be a portly fellow, which 5 would you choose, in which finger (doesn't actually matter we have decided over many years and debates) and why?

Oh, I think which finger matters. You'd want the condiment you use most in your index finger. If you put ketchup in your ring finger, you'd spend the rest of your life annoyed you didn't assign it the index finger. So ketchup is a given. Soy sauce is second. I DROWN my food in that shit. My wife always looks at me with equal parts fear and consternation when she sees me abuse the Kikkoman. But I don't give a shit about hypertension. Soy sauce rules. That goes in the thumb. After that, it's BBQ sauce (pinky), sour cream (ring finger), and nuoc mam (middle), which is the fish sauce they give you in Vietnamese restaurants. God dammit, that is good shit. I don't think I need any sweet condiments in there. Whipped cream would be fun for the novelty, but I can just use vanilla ice cream instead of whipped cream for all whipped cream situations.

Tough to leave out A1, salsa, maple syrup, hoisin sauce, and guacamole. I could put those in my left hand. If I were Tony Stark, I would spend most of time engineering things like this.

UPDATE: FRANK'S! I FUCKING FORGOT FRANK'S AND HONEY MUSTARD! JUST FUCKING KILL ME NOW.

Banks:

What is your stance on a proper PB&J sammich? My brother does what would probably work out to a 3:1 ratio of jelly to peanut butter. I mean it just oozes jelly. I, on the other hand, rep the PB and usually put about two parts peanut butter to one part jelly. My dad really goes crazy. He'll get the peanut butter and jelly, mix them together in a bowl, and then put it on the bread as one spread.

Why would you dad do that when they already have Goober, the shit's that peanut butter and jelly sold in the same jar? Brian Regan does 15 minutes in his act on Goober, and with good reason.

Goober is delicious. My mom bought it when I was a kid, and I used to just eat with a spoon out of the jar. I regret nothing.

Anyway, whenever I make a PB&J sandwich, I use shitloads of both PB&J. No ratio is obeyed. Just a huge swath of Skippy, topped with a Majerus-sized blob of strawberry jam. After one bite, jelly jizzes all over the plate. The PB at the center is roughly half an inch thick. Just an appalling creation, but I've always followed the maxim that all sandwiches must be built as high and unstable as humanly possible. Large sandwiches give me an erection.

Justin:

What's your stance on using a basket when you go shopping? There are times when I know I only need a few things, but those things will be more than I can just hold in my hands comfortably. I always feel like a pussy when I use one of those baskets, but feel equally daft for using a cart in those circumstances.

I almost never use a basket anymore, because our list is too big and always contains some sort of liquid product, like a gallon of milk, that would make carrying the basket a pain in the ass. All it takes is one six-pack or milk container to make that thing weigh a thousand pounds. And it always slides to one side of the basket, throwing it completely off balance.

Baskets are good if you're just a single dude who's stoned and looking for chips, cookie dough, ice cream, and a tube of summer sausage. Or if you're shopping at some place like Trader Joe's and are only interested in buying cookies, nuts, and a bottle of wine for the night. Otherwise, the basket is worthless.

Those two tier carts some joints have are a happy medium. They're less cumbersome than a cart, and you don't have to carry them. I don't like carrying things. My only issue with them is that I often strike the bottom basket with my shins while I walk. That hurts like a cunt.

Kurt:

Why do rich people keep their booze in those crystal decanters? How do they know what's in them? Maybe they have a more discerning eye because all brown liquor looks the same to me.

If you were rich, why wouldn't you keep booze in a decanter? It looks classy, and you can pretend you're Don Draper about to close a million dollar account when you pour a drink. Some booze is in those decanters because it's actually been decanted, like port or something. And who cares if you can't tell which Scotch is which? Like you can go wrong.

Rod Beck's Bolero:

I've never vomited while fencing, nor have I ever witnessed a vomiting incident at our fencing club. However, wouldn't this be the absolute worst situation in which to vomit? Barfing inside your fencing mask would be awful because (1) the mask would serve as a strainer, separating the solid parts of the vomit from the liquid component, and (2) when you did take the mask off, you'd have to run your face right through the solid portions of your own vomit. I think about this every time I put my mask on.

This is why you shouldn't fence, Manny from "Modern Family". I don't think it would be all that horrible to barf during a sporting event. There's a mat beneath you to make for easy cleaning. There are any number of people at the meet to help clean up quickly so competition can resume. AND you're already sweaty from all that swordsmanship and quoting "The Princess Bride" as you fight. Think of Donovan McNabb in the Super Bowl. When he had to barf, he just let it out on the field and went back to his business. It's nice to have that kind of barfing freedom. No worries about getting it ALL in the toilet. No hunching over the toilet and taking that pre-sniff to help induce further nausea. No cleanup worries. Just barf and go. Sounds excellent to me.

A much worse barfing situation would be if you were at the altar, or if you were appearing on stage in a Tony-nominated play, or if you were hooking up with your stepsister. All far worse.

Matt:

RE: Southwest boarding. I always do the 24-hour before check-in online thing. I watch the clock tick down on my computer until the second it turns 24 hours before. I click, and I am sure I'm going to be gloating because I have an A10 or something. But…No. I have an A51. WTF? How is that possible!!?

I guess it could be worse – I could have a C ticket with the mouthbreathers.

Do you get to do the pre-board because you have young kids? How sweet is that?

Okay, you got A51 because all the Business Select people paid extra to have priority over you, regardless of when they check in. Those people are fuckers.

Let's just get into all the rituals surrounding flying Southwest right now. First off, I really like how Southwest does things, but there are any number of little things in the process you notice you fly them often enough.

• WAITING FOR THE PLANE TO ARRIVE. All Southwest planes are on a tight-as-shit schedule. One plane flies to Baltimore to Midway to Logan to Raleigh to Miami to LA to Islip to Dallas to Madagascar to Billings all in the same day. So that plane always arrives, what, 10-20 minutes before you're set to board? It's an agonizing wait for that plane, especially if it's running late. I'll see any number of planes taxi by the window and be like THERE IT IS! But nooooo, it always keeps going. FUCK. Because once the plane finally does arrive, you have to wait for all the assholes still on board to get the fuck off. And THAT takes forever, because it always seems like there are a million of them. And there are always five or six random people who finally exit the plan a good five minutes after everyone else has already gotten off. What took THOSE assholes so long? Sometimes, the plane arrives EARLY, and that is the greatest feeling in the fucking world.

• JOCKEYING FOR POSITION. It wasn't until a couple years ago that Southwest had the A, B, and C groups all board en masse, without specific line numbers. Those days were fucking anarchy. People would sit in the line on the floor. Everyone would flood the lines the second the plane landed. Thank God they number the lines now.

• FESTIVAL SEATING. Since you pick your own seat on Southwest, every asshole that goes on first takes an aisle seat and leaves the window and bitch seats empty. Then, everyone else has to crawl over the aisle fuckers to get to the remaining seats. And the flight attendant will always pipe up, "We have a full flight! Please move in!" Only no one ever does, and I don't blame them. You got on first. Why would you take a bitch seat? Fuck that. The upside to this is that, if you fly Southwest alone, you can still get a decent seat even if you're in the C group or something like that, because there's always an open bitch seat at the front of the plane that people have avoided.

• ROOKIES. There's always one dude with a C ticket who doesn't understand why the fuck he can't board with the A group. FIGURE IT OUT, SHITBOX.

• OLD PEOPLE AND PARENT SEATING. The only time I'm jealous of old people is when I fly Southwest, because those oldies always get to board first. It used to be that old fogies and parents with babies could board first, but now parents with babies have to board after the A group. The old fuckers get first crack at the plane to themselves now. Assholes. I wish I had a degenerative hip.

Last thing: I always feel victorious when I land and A) There are people still on the plane who need to remain seated because they're flying onto the next stop, B) I walk past all the poor bastards waiting at the gate to get on the plane I'm just getting off of. Ha ha! EAT IT, CHUBTARDS! You still got flying to do. I'm going home to a warm meal and hot shower! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

TLM:

Do astronauts jerk off?

I assume so. Oh, you mean in space? Well, according to some random person at Yahoo Answers:

I was reading Michael Collins' book Liftoff and one chapter was about Skylab (America's first space station in the 1970s) and on page 191, it says, "Before the Skylab flights, various medical concerns were expressed, including the possibility of the celibate crew getting infected prostate glands that could lead to urinary tract problems. One doctor advised regular masturbation, advice [astronaut] Joe [Kerwin[ ignored."

Joe Kerwin is soooooo completely full of shit. NOPE, NO MASTURBATION FOR ME! I'M TOO AMERICAN FOR THAT! What a fucking liar. You know damn well he blew a load into the space vac.

Eric:

I spent 2 years in prison…

Like I'll ever pass on an email that starts with THAT phrase.

…and had to learn very quickly to 1) completely remove one leg from any constraint while shitting 2) shit with no stall walls 3) be absolutely aware of everyone in area (6 thrones, 150 men). Total fucking nightmare the first week or so. The great part was absolutely nobody dared to piss standing up anywhere but urinals. Worst part: going to shit in middle of night (hoping for quiet) and finding "certain" inmates douching out their assholes with condiment bottles and water as if were no big deal. Amazing how quickly you adjust to such complete fucking madness.

Holy shit. I mean, HOLY FUCKING GOD. Imagine having to take a shit in prison with any number of rapists and anal smugglers around you. Your asshole is a goddamn commodity in those places. I don't know what I'd do. I don't think I'd shit for a month. And I'd imagine that hearing inmates douche out their asshole would be the BEST CASE scenario for sounds you don't want to hear while shitting in jail at night. "Oh, no one's being raped? Oh, thank God. Thank God it's just Willie giving himself a Venezuelan enema."

Miles:

Couldn't Amtrak make a boatload of money on late afternoon/evening trains if someone walked through the aisles selling beer/wine? I'd gladly pay $7 for a Bud Light delivered to my seat. Why force us to schlep to the cafe car every time? And people wonder why Amtrak loses millions every year.

PETER KING AGREES AND WANTS HIS AMSTEL DELIVERED TO THE QUIET CAR!

Fun fact about taking Amtrak: When I get out of my seat to get beer, I NEVER guess the correct direction to walk to get to the café car. I'll walk a solid two cars down before realizing the café car was the other way. Oh, sure. I COULD take note of where the café car is before I take my seat. But that would require me to be vigilant and intelligent. I am neither of those things.

I drink like a fish on those trains. If I'm traveling alone, I always blindly leave all my crap in my seat when I go to get a beer. I'm far too lazy to pack all my shit up to prevent risk of theft. One day, I'll get up to grab beer, come back, and my shit will be GONE.

Sometimes, I make a point of getting to the station a little early, so that I can get beer BEFORE I hop on the train. Union Station in DC has a liquor store. You can buy a sixer of tall boys before you board, and you don't have to go to the café car (until you run out of tall boys after 90 minutes, as I do). Getting drunk on a train is a fucking blast. LOOK AT HOW FAST THOSE TREES ARE MOVING! SO BLURRY!

One time, I traveled on Amtrak to New York for business and, due to some kind of miraculous clerical error, I was placed in first class on an Acela train. HOLY FUCK. They bring you free booze. They bring you a menu of all the things you get to eat, like smoked fish and all sort of cool rich person food. I nearly creamed my seat, I was so happy. On the way back to DC, I assumed I still got to ride in first class. The conductor turned me away and directed me back to the coach car with the rest of the hobos. I was fucking crushed.

Fat:

As a fellow fat man, how desperately will you scrape at the sides of a pan or bowl to ensure that every morsel finds it way into your greedy maw? I just spent at least three minutes trying to make sure every morsel of Annie's Mac N Cheese made their way from the pan into a bowl. There might have been whimpering and bead sweat involved.

Of course. I never let stray bits of macaroni or anything else go unclaimed. All food must be maximized. I also do this when baking cookies or cakes. Every single bit of the dough or batter must be used. I see my wife make cookies and the sides of the bowl are PAINTED with dough when she tosses it in the sink. LOOK AT ALL THAT PRECIOUS DOUGH YOU WASTED, LADY! GET THE PLASTIC SPATULA! GET ANOTHER SPATULA TO SCRAPE THE ORIGINAL SPATULA! NO DOUGH MUST GO UNUSED!

Now that I'm on a fucking diet, I'm even more desperate to get every last taste of whatever I'm eating. I lick plates clean now. Literally. If I have an egg, I'm licking the plate when I'm done. What? Leave stray yolk goo sitting on the plate? FUCK THAT. MINE MINE MINE.

HALFTIME!

Ben:

Do you ever imagine being interviewed? Fairly often I will find that my internal narration has taken the form of talking to a pretend interviewer. In this alternate/future universe, I have an impressive and successful career and the guy interviewing me is really interested in hearing very detailed account of my thoughts about my early jobs and colleagues. I'm also frequently an expert speaker on various conference panels. I'm incisive and thought-provoking but also funny and self-deprecating. Sometimes things get heated and I have to stand up to a charlatan with a spontaneous but devastating career-ending critique like the guy who took out Joe McCarthy at the army communism hearings.

Oh, yes. I have a "60 Minutes" profile of myself that is constantly being reworked in my head. Sometimes Morley interviews me. Sometimes Leslie does. Sometimes I get Scott Pelley, who's crazy underrated. Anyway, there are always the same elements: pictures of me as a fat kid, footage of me starring and directing my own Oscar-winning films, etc. Sometimes, when I'm not careful, I will literally start mouthing out the conversation, then stop myself when I realize what I'm doing. So, so gay.

Other times, 60 Minutes has brought me on to be the whistle blower in some top secret corporate conspiracy, ala Jeffrey Wigand. "This goes deeper than you could possibly fathom, Leslie." I blow that shit wide open. No one is going to sneak arsenic into Tyson chicken nuggets on MY watch.

When PTI first started, I always imagined being the subject of Five Good Minutes. I, uh, don't think that's going to happen anytime soon.

And NFL Films! Look, everyone dreams of being an NFL player or coach or some shit like that. And one of the more enjoyable parts of that dream is imagining that you are now retired and Steve Sabol is asking you about your glory days. Oh, we were tough. NO ONE FUCKED WITH US, STEVE. (cut to footage of you scoring TD)

Noam:

Was wondering your thoughts on pen-smoking (and I don't use that a metaphor for fellatio, I promise). Do only non-smokers do this? I sit at my desk from time to time (and I've been doing this since high school, at least) with a pen dangling out of my mouth while I type (when I need to type and write at the same time, sometimes) and every so often I mime taking a drag, take the pen out like a cigarette (or cigar) and exhale, the hold it in my finger (with Lolcats caption over my head saying "invisible ashtray").

Don't forget to use the old timey movie gangster voice when you do it. YEAH, SEE! IT'S COITAINS FOR YOU AND YOUR GANG, SEE! YEAHHHHHH, SEE!

Also fun to pretend you're Albert Finney in Miller's Crossing during the Danny Boy scene. The man's still an artist with the Thompson.

Michael:

What is the optimal Taco Bell order? I try to maximize the food while minimizing the cost. I usually stick with two crunchy beef tacos and two bean burritos. I ordered a new combo the other day with an extra taco on top of it (4 items total not including drink) and felt like a fat ass until I saw the kid behind me get five items. How much is too much at Taco Bell?

I am not qualified to answer this question because I am no longer in college and Taco Bell has since expanded the menu and dollar menu options. I used to get nothing but plain bean burritos from them when I went to Michigan, because they were cheap. But if you eat enough Taco Bell bean burritos, you soon grow to become nauseated by the sight of them. I know I did. I started imaging that I was eating cockroach paste while I was eating them, and that kind of ruined it. I assume that fear, by the way, is wholly justified.

I now order the same shit every time I hit the border: three chicken soft tacos. Every one of them gets at least three packets of sauce, so there's a giant sauce bukkake on the wrapper as I eat them. Mmmmm… sauce bukkake.

By the way, I think five items is pushing it at Taco Bell, especially if you have a burrito or a gordita or some shit in there. That'll come back to haunt you.

Scott:

How much change should you be expected to have in your pocket? Like, if you buy something at a store and it comes to $4.03, everybody loves it if you have 3 pennies or a nickel or something so you don't have to get a pocket full of coins back from the cashier. I bought something that came to $4.12 the other day and the lady said, "Do you have the twelve cents?' like everybody should carry around that many cents at all times. FUCK THAT. I'm saying less than .10 is appropriate.

But she's asking you that for YOUR benefit as well as hers. Fuck, whenever I pay for ANYTHING in cash, I'm digging in my pockets to see if there's change I can get the fuck rid of. I don't want 83 cents back in change. That's like having a fucking tap class in my pocket. I can't stand having more than one coin in my pocket. I have change OCD. I have to get rid of it when paying for something in cash.

And I always come up just short. If it's $4.43, I'll only have 35 cents in my pocket. If it's $1.09, I'll only have a nickel. It's horrible. Ever manage to pawn off four pennies to the cashier when something costs $3.29 or something with a 9 or 4 on the end? VICTORY.

Sean:

I live off a main roadway and love nothing more than to put the car in neutral and see if I can coast all the way home. Right now my record is a 1/4 of a mile. Unfortunately this makes me very hesitant to tap the brakes and I sometimes come careening around corners nearly missing animals and children. Am I the only one who does this?

I only do it on straightaways. On really steep hills, I feel like a kid riding a bike when I do that. But around corners? Yeah, that's probably a bad idea.

Doug:

I've always been a huge fan of fast food and a couple months ago I realized why. It's because fast food is a bunch of little presents that you buy for yourself. Think about it. They come in wrapping paper and little boxes. When I come back from McDonald's, I'll plop the bag on the table and I'll feel like Santa with his sack, "Have you been a good boy this year, Douglas? You have? Well, here's a sandwich and a box of nuggets. I wrapped them myself!" Eating fast food is like Christmas morning just with more grease and less yelling.

It's the equivalent of bringing porn home back when porn was something you had to buy or steal. Oh, that moment you open your fast food or your porn, and you're all alone, and IT'S ALL FOR YOU. That's a great feeling.

I get the same feeling when I buy something off the list at the grocery store. I have to buy a lot of boring shit: vegetables, milk, baby food, etc. But every trip or so, I'll spot something awesome, like Oreos on sale, or a new ice cream flavor, and I'll say FUCK IT I'M GETTING THAT. And then I spend the entire car ride home just primed to rape that cookie package once I get it in the kitchen.

Carl:

What's your favorite video game theme music for any game on any system? I'm gonna say Street Fight II for SNES is the best - Ken's stage having the best theme song.

I was always partial to the music from Super Mario 64, especially the water music:

So soothing when stoned. It is my Enya.

/collects all 120 power stars

Brian:

I recently found out that the D-league plays its all-star game in the same city as the NBA All-Star, which I find ridiculous. Personally I think that the D-League All Star game should be played in the same state, but in a much shittier city. Instead of playing the D-League game in Dallas, wouldn't it be more fun to put it in El Paso? It gives them something to shoot for.

It shouldn't even be played in a city. It should be played in a refugee camp, and the losing team should be forced to stay in that camp. Why even have a D-League All-Star game? Who's gonna put that on their resume? "Yeah, I was an All-Star… of the pissboy league."

Pete:

Snackbot. I defy you to name something your office needs more.

A scotchbot.

Rob:

So back in college, I noticed that some of my friends cut their food differently than I do. They would hold their knife in their right hand (if they were righties) and hold their fork in their left to steady the food. After they've cut their food, they simply pick up the food while their fork remains in their left hand. I, however, do the following: as a righty, I hold my fork with my left hand to steady the food, and cut with my right. But then, when I've cut my piece, I drop the knife, transfer the fork from my left hand to my right, and pick it up with my right. The length of that sentence should indicate how seemingly complicated this is, but it's what I've known my whole life, and whenever I've tried the other way, I wind up looking like an idiot. Thankfully I've met others like me, but I feel like we're a mentally enfeebled minority.

I also transfer. I wasn't quite sure that I did when I read this email because my eating motion is second nature to me, so I went and cut a banana just now to make sure that's what I do. And I do. And the reason I do this is because my mom taught me to do so. She said it was bad manners to keep the fork in your left hand, which sounds like a whole lotta bullshit to me. And she really drilled it in. I'd be eating my food, about to take a bite…

MOM: TRANSFER your fork.

ME: Can't I just enjoy my food, dammit?

MOM: Transfer!

And so now I do just that. I'd feel retarded doing otherwise. I have no issue with people who don't transfer, but I tell you this: Ever see those people who don't even bother to turn the fork around when they eat? Like, the tines are still pointing down when they take a bite? THAT'S WHITE TRASH EATIN'. The dipshit prep school snob in me rears his ugly head!

Tyson:

I used to eat Sun Chips religiously until they switched to the completely compostable bag. I have nothing against helping the earth, but holy hell these new bags are the loudest thing I've ever heard. Even their website acknowledges that the bags are louder than their old ones. What a horrible technology. If saving the earth comes at the expense of my whole house waking up at 2:00 AM because I'm stoned and have the munchies, then fuck the earth.

Not to mention the fact that, sometimes, you need to sneak chips so no one is looking, and a bag like that makes it fucking impossible. With Pringles, you can sneak in a dozen chips with someone else in the next room being none the wiser. But open a bag like that Sun Chips bag, and it's like a siren is going off. HEY EVERYONE, LOOK AT FATTY HERE BEING A FAT PERSON!

Old Gil:

So I'm getting to the point in my college career where I have to decide on a major. What subject can I major in that will be both easy and make me look good in the future? I don't want some bullshit Museum Studies degree, but at the same time I don't want to have to do any work. I also like money if that helps narrow things down. Any suggestions? And if you had to do it over, what would you have switched to?

I was an English major, and I recommend it. When you're an English major, all you really have to do is read novels (or, in my case, skim them), then talk about them and write a few papers on them. You don't have to memorize anything. You don't have to do any fucking field research. You don't have to work with a fucking lab partner or something horrible like that. There are no quizzes (unless your professor is a dick). You can bullshit your way through things. And it's a major no one sneers at. Some teachers assign papers instead of ever giving some fucking blue book test. A lot of professors let us choose which one we wanted (we always chose doing a paper). Plus, you can claim to have read any number of great books, and know enough about them to make it sound like you're a smart asshole. I don't think I'd want to major in anything else. Sociology majors are retards.

The ten most lucrative majors, according to the New York Times, are almost all engineering majors. That shit is hard. I dunno if it's worth it.

(NOTE: The only thing that SUCKED about being an English major was the English Theory course I had to take junior year. It was horrible. The professor made us think, and do real work. YES YOU, MR. BRYANT! OR SHOULD I SAY MR. TYRANT?!)

Dave:

As an American male, is it possible to NOT drive through massive water puddles on the sides of roads, while going an excessive speed? I say no.

I concur.

David:

What's your fucking beef with Duke? Is it the fact that they've been on TV more than any team since the world-wide leader started televising games? It is because they can at any time put 5 white guys on the court and compete? Is it because you hate Coach K and his constant screaming at the refs? Is it because Dickie V verbally blows them every chance he gets? Is it because you need a 1500 (old SAT system) to get in to Duke? Is it the floor slapping? Is it Krzyzewski-ville and the Cameron Crazies? Or is it simply because you're a UNC or Maryland fan? I'm obviously a Duke fan and can understand why some people don't like them, but what drives me nuts is when people hate Duke without a valid reason ie. Carolina grad, Twerp fan. Please support your hatred with validity or you'll be emailed this question daily until you do. Be scared.

Ooooh, I'm so scared. DUKE GUY IS GONNA RAPE ME!

How about that email? Is that email enough to justify hating your fucking guts? I say yes.

Dan:

My friend and I who both have baby daughters came up with this question after Christina Hendricks' New York cover. Let's say you're given the choice: your daughter can either become super, Joan-Holloway-hot, or have somewhat below average looks. You don't have a choice about your daughter's character or intelligence, though her looks will probably factor into that on some level. YOU make the call!

Hot. Who wants an ugly daughter? If you have a good-looking daughter, you get to reject and intimidate her numerous suitors. I'd much rather do that than explain to Ugly Betty why she can't get a prom date. "Honey, maybe if you didn't let your weight be such a problem…"

MANDATORY CAVEAT: THE WRITER LOVES HIS CHILDREN REGARDLESS OF THEIR FUTURE APPEARANCE AND PROMISES TO NEVER SELL THEM TO ANY RUSSIAN ARMS DEALER UNLESS THE PRICE IS REASONABLE AND ALL PAYMENTS RE MADE UP FRONT.

John:

Sometimes after taking a massive duke, I'll go to flush and notice a couple of bubbles wiggling their way free from my fresh deposit. I'm sure it's air pockets, but you never know. Are there tiny submarines living in my guts?

No. OR ARE THERE???!!!?!?!?!

The bubbles let you know that turd is fresh. Kind of appetizing if it weren't poop.

SWH:

If a girl talks to you first in an elevator when it's only the two of you (I got "I like your bag" recently), does that mean she wants you?

Yes. Push the STOP button and pin her against the wall. But if she says, "Hey, I love the Smiths too!", beware. That bitch be hot but crazy!

Eric:

To continue your idea about eating your own flesh...in high school I had a girlfriend who played soccer. She would get pretty gnarly blisters on her heel from her cleats, and she loved to pop the blisters, cut around the dead patches of skin, remove them and press them between the pages of a large book. After a week, she would remove said pieces of dried skin from the book and chew on them like someone might chew on a piece of beef jerky. And in case you were wondering, yeah, I still enjoyed making out with her.

Oh, that is fucking repulsive. Even I find that horrifying. You girls are WEIRD.

Milledgeville is a small college town in central Georgia where about one in four people are undergraduates. Like most of this country's scholars, the kids at GCSU spend a lot of their free time getting shitfaced. "Thursday night's the night to go out and party, so Thursday night's normally pretty busy downtown," Justin says. And when Justin heard Ben Roethlisberger was partying in "Millyvegas," the strip of bars near campus, his first thought was, "No way, I got to go see him," he says.

Justin got to The Brick at "about midnight" and saw Roethlisberger and teammate Willie Colon accompanied by two large men that he described as "kind of like bouncers." Roethlisberger's "bouncers" apparently had their work cut out for them. Justin says a large crowd had gathered around the quarterback, who gamely posed for pictures and bought drinks for his fans. Seeing the star quarterback caught up in this mix of co-eds and free-flowing liquor suggested to Justin that "it probably wasn't a good idea for him to come to a college town on a Thursday night."

Witnesses have offered varying descriptions of Roethlisberger's night out in Millyvegas. On Sunday, we found a few local bartenders who said people were "all over" Roethlisberger and that he was being "molested" by female bargoers. Other accounts allege that Roethlisberger was aggressive with women in his group.

Justin disputes that. He says he saw no unusual behavior in Roethlisberger's crew. "There was a disturbance just because he was there... but he wasn't really causing a scene or being rough with anybody," he says. Though Roethlisberger was allegedly drinking "a lot" of fruity tequila cocktails, according to the bartenders, Justin says he "didn't seem drunk at all."

The Brick wasn't the last stop on Roethlisberger's Milledgeville bar crawl. His next stop was reportedly Capital City, and he was supposedly accompanied by a group of GCSU students. "I didn't see him leave with anybody other than his bouncers and Willie Colon — just the four of them," Justin says.

Before Roethlisberger and his entourage left The Brick, Justin took three blurry pictures with his cell phone to put on Facebook. One of his shots shows Colon standing behind the bar:

In another, Colon and Roethlisberger are sitting together in front of a tight crowd.

Justin captioned the third photo, "Big ben mackin on some chick." It shows Roethlisberger with a blonde woman at his side:

Justin's photo popped up in our tips box and on several online forums that suggested the woman in the picture is Roethlisberger's accuser. Justin doesn't think he photographed the quarterback with his accuser. He says the girl he saw with Roethlisberger "had a boyfriend at the bar." Other photos from the sets posted online by TMZ have been rumored to show Roethlisberger's accuser, but those claims are disputed on GCSU messageboards. TMZ ran a tease of a story saying that the site had "a photo of the two taken at Capital City bar shortly before the alleged incident," but that it "will not post the picture in this story." According to the GCSU rumor mill, Roethlisberger's accuser is a member of the Zeta Tau Alpha sorority. Justin says he doesn't think the girl in his picture is the Zeta in question, though he is "not familiar with too many Zetas."

Nor will anyone else be, if the Zetas have their preference. Other GCSU students say Zeta sisters have tucked their Facebook profiles behind privacy walls in the past few days. Several profiles of ZTA members have been taken down altogether. The main Facebook page for GCSU's Zeta Tau Alpha chapter has also disappeared. A ZTA Twitter account that was linked to the Facebook page hasn't been updated since a few hours before the alleged assault. We emailed many of the GCSU Zetas to ask about the rumors, but haven't received any responses so far.

For now, all we really know of the Roethlisberger's accuser is that, per TMZ, she dropped out of school and moved back in with her parents this weekend. A spokeswoman for GCSU tells us, "I can't confirm the status of the young lady."

We ask if Roethlisberger's accuser or her sorority could face disciplinary action for underage drinking (a prospect, one might speculate, that would dissuade someone from going public with groundless claims). "I'm not going to comment on that at all," she says.

A year ago about this time, Matt "Fuck You! [throws coffee]" Taibbi wrote another of his heavy-breathing, horse-semen-throwing drive-by sports screeds about Yankees general manager Brian Cashman. Here's an illustrative passage:

Giving a normal, red-blooded, pattern-baldness-suffering American male access to the Steinbrenner fortune and asking him to buy 25 baseball players a year in an unregulated market is no different, in any meaningful way, from handing Sarah Jessica Parker a blank check and asking her to fill a three-bedroom apartment with shoes and dresses. ... It's obscene that a job like this even exists. But for someone to have this job and fuck it up is just appalling, the kind of gross disrespect for our own good fortune that makes it hard for us Americans to look the Third World in the eye. What Brian Cashman has accomplished as GM of the Yankees over the past few years, in turning a perennial World Series champ into a third-place also-ran, is like walking into a backstage party for Led Zeppelin with a two-pound bag of coke and a 28-inch penis and failing for a whole night to get laid.

What the piece betrayed, of course, was a fundamental lack of understanding of baseball economics, but hey, who has time for such formalities when you're tossing off jokes about Led Zeppelin's ancient propensity for cocaine and rubber sexual aids the size of a baseball bat. What Taibbi was trying to say, I think, was that the Yankees have all the advantages, so if they don't win, it's a failure of creativity. He's saying that the logical extension of baseball wealth is dominance. I'm so glad he was wrong. At least something good came out of the Yankees winning the World Series.

I wonder what Taibbi thinks of the Tampa Bay Rays. It was only three years ago that a fan put up his blogger loyalty on eBay, only to have it purchased by Rays president Matthew Silverman. The joke was that you'd have to pay someone to write about the Rays — which wasn't true, obviously — and it was a joke that Silverman was in on. Eighteen months later, the Rays were in the World Series. The Rays have had this success — and as disappointing as last year was, it was still the team's second most successful in its history, by a long shot — because they have reinvented the way baseball teams are constructed in a way different and potentially more lasting than anything chronicled in Moneyball. They've done it through defense, they've done it through cold-blooded roster construction. they've done it through an endless supply of studs from the farm system. The farm system is particularly impressive considering they're constantly losing high-round draft picks because they can't sign them. Considering their payroll and (more so) their competition, the Rays have no choice but to invest massive resources and man-hours in the farm system, and even there they're hamstrung. (Taibbi can't account for this because he apparently believes baseball organizations only have 25 employees.) And still, they find a way to thrive.

They do it by being emotionless too: Carl Crawford might deserve a big contract from the team for his years of service during the down years, but with Desmond Jennings coming up, he's probably not getting one. (The Yankees will be happy to oblige him.) The Rays, because of their ballpark (a dome; not an ugly place, but still, a dome), their small fanbase and their division, can take risks without worrying about public opinion, because there is little public opinion. Silverman's fan buying was the symptom and the solution: Use the tiny resources you have to maximize every opportunity, and let the marketing folks sort it out in the end. It is freeing, being the Rays: No one's targeting you, no one's watching you and no one's noticing you. It's the perfect time to strike. Oh, and lest we forget, general manager Andrew Friedman, the architect of all this, the best general manager in the game, is only 33 years old. We've all wasted our lives.

The problem is, as always, that division. If the Rays were in any other division, they'd be perennially in the playoffs and people would be writing books about them. (Now you have to just wait for Jonah Keri's.) Instead, with the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. constantly Cold Warring, the Rays have to slip beneath the cracks. (They're like Switzerland with nuclear weapons.) It's another reason it's a shame the Rays don't have more fans: Considering how many people hate the Yankees and the Red Sox, the Rays are the logical recipient of our adoration. They're the ones who can make everybody miserable. We all win.

The Rays have the best management staff in baseball, which is good, because that staff has the most difficult job in baseball. This is a reason to cheer for them. You wonder if they look over at Brian Cashman, with his male-pattern baldness being mocked in national magazines, and imagine what it would be like to have that job. I bet they don't want it. I bet they like it right where they are. They understand how this works.

If you're scoring at home, this is Olbermann's response to Simmons's response to Olbermann's response to Simmons's ahistorical foolishness concerning Tiger Woods's comeback and Muhammad Ali's.

On Friday, Simmons tweeted: "KO, please know the feeling is mutual. You're my worst case scenario for my career in 12 yrs: a pious, unlikable blowhard who lives alone." To which Olbermann now responds:

This assumes that Mr. Simmons' career now is where mine was twelve years ago (anchoring SportsCenter, then my own MSNBC political show, anchoring NBC Weekend Nightly News, writing a best-selling sports book, etc). In fact, this assumes that this is Mr. Simmons' career, which is remarkable. Also, anybody who could write as many words without saying anything of consequence really should throw around the word "blowhard" as frequently as he would a street sewer cover.

Also, I don't think "pious" necessarily means what he thinks it does

[...]

I am surprised, however, to be able to shed some light on something that has been a prominent topic of late around the internet: the prospect that Mr. Simmons is leaving ESPN. Admittedly I am something of an authority on this process. Nonetheless, I was stunned to receive several emails from some of Mr. Simmons' bosses there, thanking me for pointing out the absurdity of, and the embarrassment to ESPN provided by, the Woods/Ali comparison.

About five years ago, I guess, somebody said Tony Kornheiser was the most uncontrollable, unmanageable talent in the history of ESPN. I was, of course, crushed (although I believe I got honorable mention). When ESPN bosses are writing me for helping them about somebody they claim has now lapped Tony and myself, I am left to conclude only that if Mr. Simmons does leave ESPN, it may not be entirely of his own choosing.

It eludes me why these ESPN suits nodding so vigorously at Olbermann's frisking of the Sports Fella are entirely powerless to prevent (or at least discourage) Simmons from cannonballing into adult swim and making an ass of himself in the first place. Not that it's surprising. This is ESPN. They run their house the way the Borgias ran theirs. Yup, Bill, these are your bosses.

Not So Big Mac After All [Baseball Nerd]

Quick note: This is the last Asshole Boss Digest. After this week, I'mma start doing more freeform posts around here. Now, onto the assholishness.

He didn't put her through a table?

Josh:

Back in the late 80's I worked in Ocean City, Maryland at a big family restaurant that served the tourists. It was a cool place to work, everyone was young and we partied a lot. But this one manager we had went crazy over the course of the summer. She told me she had been a registered nurse, and knowing what I know now if you're a registered nurse assistant managing a restaurant something must have been up. In the beginning of the summer, she was fairly normal and would talk to you, but by the end she screamed at everyone, cooks, waitresses, busboys, and customers. Since it was a beach town, she would always walk around saying, "I can't wait for you guys to leave," to the summer help.

She had a rule that if there wasn't a waitress on duty in a section she wouldn't seat people in the section. She'd make them wait in line. Which really pissed people off because they'd be standing there waiting and there was all these empty tables that the customers could see. If they did sit down she'd make them move.

One day Captain Lou Albano, his family, and one of the Wild Samoans come into the place. He's on vacation but he still has the rubber bands in his face and the Samoan is still huge and has the crazy hair. The whole restaurant is buzzing because this is a big deal, it wasn't too long after the Cyndi Lauper video, and Wrestle Mania had just taken place. She makes him stand in line. The other busboys and I can't believe it, no one whether he'll trash the place. At this point wrestling was still real. After about 5 minutes he calls "crazy manager" over she gives him shit, so Captain Lou leaves. She follows him out the door yelling "See Ya" and waving at him. It was the worst I've seen a customer treated, let alone a famous one, who was very large and acted insane for a living.

That was the highlight of the summer. That and getting glared at by Lefty Driesell.

Oh, this is golden

Anonymous:

At the time I was 18 years old, in college, and held two jobs. The first was Lowe's, the second was at a small sports store in the same strip mall. My boss (manager of the store) was a guy in his late 20's named Evan. On my second day of work at the sports store, it is just me and him working. The shoes we sold were shitty, and about 2 years behind stores like Foot Locker. On the day in question, we get a shipment that Evan is PUMPED about. Apparently he had won the contract to supply cheer uniforms for three local high schools and junior highs. This will probably triple the stores normally terrible monthly sales. We helped the UPS guy unload around 15 or 20 large boxes full of uniforms.

As we are cutting open the boxes I start noticing that Evan is sweating and muttering softly to himself. I actually watched as the sweat marks appeared on his shirt. Every single uniform was red, white, and very small. There are no teams that wear red and white in our area. Apparently the company he ordered from royally fucked up. Evan calls the company, and they inform him that they wont be able to ship the correct uniforms for 2 weeks. The schools need the uniforms in 4 days.

Evan then proceeds to lose his shit. Literally. He throws the phone across the store, and I start to get the aroma of something god-awful. He is knocking over racks of clothes in a rage and his face is a strange shade of purple/red.

I look down, and in the midst of his rage, he has shit all over himself. He is wearing khaki pants and diarrhea is running down his legs and dripping onto the floor. He paces around the store spreading droplets of shit everywhere he walks. He then walks over to the cash register area and is in full fucking meltdown mode. He assumes a catcher's stance (almost like a standing fetal postion) and I can now actually hear his bowels coming undone. Whatever he had been trying to hold back all comes out at once.

After shitting all over himself and the store for probably 2 or 3 minutes, I guess it dawns on him what has happened. He sprints to the back room and into the bathroom. I haven't moved from the place I have been standing during the entire ordeal. I stay behind the cash register for about 15 minutes waiting on him to come back, but instead he calls the store and tells me to clean up the "mess" in the store, and that he left through the back entrance and is heading home to change.

I put the closed sign on the door and start picking up all of the racks of merchandise he knocked over, being careful to avoid the shit drops. I decide that he can clean up his own shit stains and that I will just keep the closed sign up until everything is done. It is about 3 p.m. on a Friday, and we don't close until 10.

Here is the asshole part of the story. Evan never comes back. He leaves me, on my second day of work, standing in a store full of mismatched cheerleading uniforms and his shit all over the place. I have no idea what to do. I looked for numbers for someone to call, but could find nothing. I then just hang out all night in the back room watching TV and waiting for Evan to show up. At closing time I realize I don't have a key. I eventually have to call the cops, because there are no other options, other than just going home and leaving the store unlocked.

Being my second day, I haven't had a chance to get a shirt with the store logo on it. I'm afraid the cops are going to show up and assume I'm a crazy asshole who ripped open boxes of cheer uniforms and then crapped all over the place. Thankfully they just make me do a walk through of the store with them, and I explain why there is shit all over the store and my manager is missing. After that experience I decided that I really didn't need a second job after all, and didn't show up for Day 3. About 2 months later the store is closed and replaced by a Subway. I haven't eaten there yet.

"YOU GOT A NERVE TO BE ASSSSSSKING A FAVOR…"

Matt:

About three months into my time there, my boss told me to go to the very back of our stockroom, where we kept the 50 pound bags of livestock feed, and clean things up. This didn't seem like a big deal until she said, "You might want to wear some rubber gloves too. About a year ago we had a rat problem in there, so we put down rat poison on the floors and shelves. Don't worry—there shouldn't be any dead rats in there, but I need you to make sure every bit of the poison is cleaned up." I looked at her in shock. Then she said, "I'd help you out, but I had meningitis a few years ago." "What does that have to do with it?" I asked. My boss said that since she doesn't take medicine, she had to "pray her way through it," and the meningitis had weakened her immune system permanently. "I can handle unused rat poison," she said, "but if I touch it after it's been used, I'll probably die." I had no clue what she meant by the word "used," and I was so blown away by the stupidity of not taking medicine to treat meningitis that I didn't ask.

When I went back to the stockroom, I immediately understood what she meant by "used." Apparently, rats don't digest the poison once they swallow it—they vomit it up in large clumps, then scurry off to die. There were chunks of bright purple poison everywhere, especially in the places where only rats could go. Corners, baseboards, the one-inch space between a crate and a the wall: regurgitated rat poison. Looking back, I should have quit right then, but the tax free and higher than minimum wage money was too appealing. Instead, I got down on my hands and knees and scrubbed poison garnished with bubonic plague off the floor.

My GMC Yukon's gotta breathe

Pat:

This is a trivial thing yet it bothers me. Our parking spot at the office has around 60 spots. It usually doesn't fill up everyday and leaves around 10-15 spots open. But because of this snow those spots are gone. Yet my boss decides to do his usual routine of parking in 2 or 3 spots. He's the first one here every morning and decides the lines don't apply to him. Those spots are necessary now and people that come in later need to use them. He isn't even the head honcho here, he's just a department head.

Well, we clearly can't finish this series without a racist boss

Julien:

As a kid I worked a lot of construction in order to make money for college expenses (books, extra classes, meal plans, drinking money, etc.). The thing people don't realize is that construction sites are pretty much racist white guys and Mexicans. I'm a black guy working for my step-uncle's plumbing company (he's white and his brother married my mother), so I'm the exception to that rule.

I apprenticed with this grizzled old guy named Bill who was just as much of an asshole as he was grizzled and old. He constantly made fun of the Mexican guys and their accents, while he drank and smoked on the job and made constant mistakes. He would also try and take jabs at my race and try to blame his mistakes on me. Two stories come to mind of how he shit on me and I got him back.

One time while finishing off some plumbing under an under construction house, he claimed I got the hot water and cold water confused. I called him on his bullshit and knew, even before signing up for this job just from observation, that cold is on the right and hot is on the left. He doubted me and switched it. After telling me to "get your black ass upstairs to see your mistake", Lo' and behold he switched my correct work to his mistake. I came under and told him about the new mistake and he threw his toolbox and a map gas torch at me and told me to fix it. Telling me how he knows what he's talking about because he's licensed and bonded by the company and I'm a driver with a toolbelt (remember the drinking part? Two DUIs and he can't drive the company vehicle anymore)

I told him to apologize for being a jackass for no reason and he told me to shut my mouth up and crawled up whispering a few colorful words. I grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him back and asked him again to apologize. He refused and so, using my high school wrestling experience, put him in a headlock and told him to apologize nicely for saying some really harsh stuff. Fearing getting his ass kicked by someone more than half his age, he finally did, I let him go, and fixed his mistake.

Fast forward two days later and we're called out to this grandmotherly type woman's house in nowhere Virginia because her toilet's backed up. We go under the house and find the problem, a cast iron pipe that's backgraded (everything needs to move downhill, not uphill, so backgrading is a bad problem in plumbing) and I assume, clogged with everything this woman put out of her body for the past week.

Bill tells me to go under, knock out the section of pipe that sounds full, so we can replace it and correct the grading. I told him I couldn't do it, I'm not licensed and bonded, I'm just a driver with a toolbelt and he's the one who's supposed to do actual repairs because I make so many mistakes.

So Bill crawls under the house with a 3 pound hammer to break off the clogged piece. After a few minutes of heavy hammering I hear a scream from a horror movie, some scurrying around, and Bill comes out covered in everything that has come out of that woman's ass, swearing up and down, and calling me every name in the book.

The best part is that he had to finish up that job covered in filth. The ride back to the shop was hellish in the Virginia summer, and we had to bleach the passenger seat of the company vehicle, but it really was worth it to see him shit on.

The next 2 years I spent at that company working with him, we got along better, but little things would come and go. He stole things from people's houses and blamed me, he would drink on the job constantly and pass out in the vehicle with the AC on full blast for 2 hours while I fixed his mistakes. A few times we grabbed a beer after work and he would constantly hit on girls only a year or two older than his daughter, using me as bait. I learned a lot about home construction and plumbing during those years, but I really learned about people and how to deal with someone's assholish ways.

We shall never surrender!

Hank Scorpio:

Her best moment was, in a fit of rage a couple years ago, screaming that the CEO of our competition was like Hitler and that our organization was like Churchill. Sadly our Jewish CEO was not around to hear this tirade.

Framed with porn!

Mark:

I had just graduated from high school and was working as intern at the law firm of a neighbor and friend of my father, since the law was where I envisioned my employment future and I wanted to pad the ol' resume. This was a smallish firm of 4 principals partners, 10 associates, 25 or so paralegals and assorted interns and gofers like me. Naturally, I was assigned to work with my dad's friend in his "Band of Bitches" of interns and paralegals like he calls them.

Outside of the office this guy seemed like the nicest guy in the world. He coached little league, was president of our temple, let you use his snow blower write you a letter of recommendation etc. In the office he transformed into some sort of Michael Scott/Donatella Versace from SNL hybrid. He treated everybody like crap. He would comment on how much or how little skin the female interns showed and what he would do to them if they stayed late. God forbid you took too long getting his coffee he would ream you out in front front of the whole office. Pretty much he was a huge dick.

One day I was in the office before he got there while his office was being cleaned by the middle aged Eastern European woman from the building's service. She runs out of his office and asks for my help. I follow her to his desk and on the screen is some hardcore fucking. I try to stop it but it's playing a loop of clips that might make Cockeye Jones blush. I try to close the window but these scenes just keep on popping up and playing. I figure he must have downloaded a virus.

So I call my dad's friend on his cell and let him know of the situation. He tells me to see if I can delete some of the files from his computer tight and he will be there in a few minutes. I sit down in his chair and try to delete some of the files. Next minute one of the IT guys and asks me what the hell am I doing. I try to explain the situation before he calls over one of the other partners I am taken into the conference room. My dad's friend then arrived and said he will take care of the situation. He then calls my father and gives him the whole "Bernie, I don't know how to say this but I think Mark might have a problem" talk. I was fired and had to have an awkward conversation about respecting women from my parents. Of course every time I tried to explain what had happened I got the "I wouldn't believe that about Jim". Dad's friend told me he wouldn't tell anybody and thanked me for taking one for the team. What an asshole. On a positive note he did write a nice letter for my law school applications.

Watch the spectacular video of Carl Edwards tapping Brad Keselowski with three laps left in yesterday's race at Atlanta, but the backstory's just as interesting.

Last April, Keselowski were neck and neck on the final lap at Talladega, when the roles were reversed; it was Edwards that went flying, in a crash that injured seven spectators:

In 2009, Keselowski was embroiled in his own feud with Denny Hamlin, so keep in mind that he a) didn't have time to get into it with Edwards, and b) wasn't exactly the most loved guy on tour.

Fast forward to lap 50 on Sunday, when Keselowski sent Edwards into the wall (via Joey Logano). You think that tap with three to go wasn't payback?

Keselowski thinks it was:

To come back and just intentionally wreck someone, that's not cool. He could have killed someone in the grandstands. I know it's a little ironic that it's me saying that, but at least I didn't do it intentionally when it happened."

NASCAR thinks it was:

I would say there seems to be a history between those two drivers," said Robin Pemberton, NASCAR's vice president of competition. "I'm not going to go any further into it right now."

Hell, Edwards more or less admitted it:

Brad knows the deal between him and I."

So do we need any more evidence? We've got means, motive and opportunity, and, oh yeah, millions of witnesses, plus a confession. But it's entirely possible that Edwards will get off with just a fine, or maybe some points deducted.

2010 was supposed to be a new NASCAR. More aggressive, more fan-friendly. If you wreck, tough shot. As Pemberton said, "We will put it back in the hands of drivers, and we will say 'Boys, have at it and have a good time.'"

Well, they did. And without an Edwards suspension, they will have a better time at Bristol next week, where the short track and high banks make for intense paint swapping. It'd be great TV. Edwards vs. Keselowski, on the perfect track for a score to be settled.

Does NASCAR give the drivers and fans what they want, and let Edwards race? Or do they go against their self-stated credo, and punish him for putting drivers' — and fans' — safety at risk? Their answer, which should come by day's end, will go a long way in telling us what to expect the rest of this year.

NASCAR drivers Edwards, Keselowski still feuding [AP]

I just came back from a weekend at Spring Training with my father. Like most fathers, my dad is behind the times when it comes to technology, which is to say he was fortunate enough to live most of his life before The Machines took over our souls and enslaved us. (I'd say the cutoff age to say, "I remember life before I had an email address" is about 24, and dropping fast.) So even though he has recently discovered texting — something I find disturbing: It is not supposed to be that easy to communicate with your father. It's supposed to be hard — he doesn't spend the vast majority of his workdays combing the Internet for every morsel of baseball information he can find. He loves the game as much as I do, probably more, but he doesn't bother himself with the details.

Specifically: He does not bother himself with payroll and salary. My father has no idea how much money baseball players, other than that it's too much. The upcoming Albert Pujols Contract Drama is bewildering to him: "If he wants to stay here, and the Cardinals want him here, then it'll happen, right?" Well, yes? Maybe? The fundamentals of roster construction are a mystery to him. He absolutely cannot understand how Julio Lugo will make 20 times what Colby Rasmus will take home this year. It's a mystery to him. And it's a mystery to him because he does not care. The team on the field wearing the Birds on the Bat, that's the one he's watching and that's the one he's rooting for. He doesn't know any of the prospects, he doesn't know when everyone's contracts expire, he doesn't know what incentives are. My father is not stupid: He legitimately does not care. That's just not a factor in how he watches baseball.

I am envious of his obvious insanity. Knowing how much each player makes isn't just a part of baseball analysis, it's almost the whole analysis. I've now officially finished my yearly read B-Pro front-to-back like it's a novel project, and I was struck by how nearly every capsule about an established player had some discussion of his contract. (It's not for nothing that the great Cot's Baseball Contracts joined the Prospectus army this offseason.) Adam Wainwright isn't just a great pitcher; he's a great pitcher signed to a great contract, a factor in Wainwright's favor that B-Pro praises more than if he'd knocked half a run off his ERA. Carlos Lee is a perfectly acceptable baseball player, decidedly above average and very fun to watch, but his $19 million salary, clearly overpaying him, turns him from "second superstar" into "expensive albatross." Joe Posnanski is a gift, but part of me couldn't help but find his excellent, thoughtful and dead-on 11 worst contracts in baseball column last year dispiriting. Vernon Wells was No. 1 on the list, quite understandably. But Vernon Wells is not that bad. He is hilariously, massively overpaid, but he's not the worst player in baseball. (Posnanski isn't saying that, of course.) He's a serviceable outfielder whose GM stupidly will give $86 million to over the next four years. That is not Vernon Wells's fault. But every time we see his name anymore, we scoff. Vernon Wells ... man, what a disaster. As a contract, yes, obviously. As a player? Not as much. But we see behind the curtain now. The contract is a part of Wells' stats: It's arguably the most important one.

Which of course brings me (finally) to the Giants. Here are the three current highest-paid players on the San Francisco Giants, and how much they will make in 2010:

Barry Zito: $18.5 million.
Aaron Rowand: $13.6 million.
Edgar Renteria: $10 million.

By any imaginable measure, those are some wretched freaking contracts. (I personally find the Rowand one the most painful.) Renteria is signed through this year, Rowand is signed through 2012, and Zito will be in San Fran through 2013 (at least). None of those players are even close to worth what they're being paid. But they have some worth. Zito has worked his way back to becoming a serviceable pitcher, Renteria should be better this year after an injury-plagued '09, and Rowand is at least good enough to play center field and bat leadoff for a team that at least has a semblance of hope at being a playoff team. These aren't great players. But they certainly have some use. If they were each making $500,000 a year, we would all praise them. Instead, they're booed and derided.

Listen: I understand that booing players for being overpaid is half the fun. I get it. But I can't help but think we're prioritizing incorrectly. Neal Pollack wrote in Slate almost five years ago about the cult of the general manager, how many kids today — particularly the ones who don't grow up with any athletic skill, and know it immediately — grow up wanting to be front office suits rather than actual players. Any game we watch anymore, we're recasting the roster in our heads; oh, for the money they're paying Aubrey Huff and Mark DeRosa, they could have gotten Felipe Lopez and Johnny Damon. This is true, one supposes, but beside the point: What's done is done. Lopez and Damon don't play for the Giants: Huff and DeRosa do. No matter what happens, no matter how much they're being paid, Huff and DeRosa will do more for the Giants this season than Lopez or Damon (or whoever) will. They play for the Giants right now! That's them, out there on the field. They're not walking contracts. If you want to blame someone, blame general manager Brian Sabean. (Lord knows you have the right.) But better yet: Recognize that your team plays 162 games a year. You watch them play baseball, not negotiate. Those games are precious. Those games are what matter.

I'm fully aware that once the genie is out of the bottle, it's impossible to do this: Lord knows I can't. I know how the sausage is made now, and I cannot force that out of my brain. Zito's contract is more important than his ERA. That's how we do it now. It just makes me long to be like my father, blissfully unaware and uncaring about advanced statistics, average annual value and no-trade clauses. There is a game on the field, and he is watching it, and cheering for his team. I can't ever do that again. I don't know how he does it, but dammit, he does.

During the offseason, Roethlisberger lives in in Greensboro, Ga. On Thursday night into Friday morning, he and his entourage went barhopping in nearby Milledgeville, nicknamed "Millyvegas" because of the many bars catering to students from the adjacent Georgia College & State University campus.

Roethlisberger's pub crawl went on for at least three-and-a-half hours, so it's doubtful any of the parties who were engaged in postgame analysis on Facebook saw everything that occurred that night. But their collected accounts paint a fairly consistent picture of a debauched night out.

Roethlisberger's crew stopped at a few local watering holes, including Velvet Elvis, Capital City, Amici Cafe, The Brick, and the site of the alleged incident, Buffington's. His group is said to have included women from several GCSU sororities. Before news of the assault charges broke, a local bartender posted a status update saying, "ben roethlisberger was here last night hanging out at the bars in Milledgeville... he was molested by girls everywhere he went." Photos later surfaced, showing Roethlisberger out and about in Milledgeville posing with an array of young ladies at his side.

The bar staff, who are all listed as GCSU students on Facebook, were clearly excited to have a star athlete partying in their midst Almost Famous-style. A bartender who said he served Roethlisberger told us:

"He was as nice as any athlete that I have ever met. People were all over him, guys and girls. His body guards kept some people away to let him have a good time. This situation is sad and I feel for the guy. He was out having a good time just like everybody else and now this is blowing up."

According to Facebook postings from a different local bartender who joined in the discussion of Roethlisberger's night on the town, the QB was drinking "a lot" of "something with patron in it... like patron pineapple and cran." Another Milledgeville bargoer teased Roethlisberger for drinking girly drinks and possibly getting it on in the bar toilet with an update that said, "drank big ben's drink. it was a sex on the beach...what a fag, but it should of been a sex in the bathroom drink."

Friday, as news of the assault charges broke, one of the Milledgeville bartenders said the charges against Roethlisberger were "bullshit" and that "she was all over him that night.... wonder why he pursued??? she saw $$$ signs."

Their claims about his accuser can be called into question because she has only been identified by police as a 20-year-old GCSU sophomore, despite photos circulating claiming to be of her and the QB.

We can't say for sure what happened that night, but it's obvious that this is shaping up to be one of those ugly "he said she said" questions of consent that often seems to arise from the mix of alcohol, athletes, and young women. Sorority bars without a driver's license scanner and a stack of consent waivers are just bad places to be for a pro athlete. You'd think a star like Roethlisberger, with his previous assault charge and his team of handlers, would have learned to avoid this type of situation by now.

Clearly, what happens in "Millyvegas" doesn't stay in "Millyvegas."

Hunter Walker is a writer from Brooklyn, New York. He was sitting in Section 420B Row 3 Seat 10 when the Yankees won the World Series last year. You can find him online here and here.

At this stage, I'll resist the urge to make any kind of grandiose moral proclamation, but instead state a fact: Ben Roethlisberger has been branded for life.

Guilt or innocence doesn't matter. Think of the Duke lacrosse team. By now the world knows that they were completely innocent of any of the awful things they were charged with. But go back a second. When I said "think of the Duke lacrosse team," what was the first thing your mind went to?

Kobe Bryant. Who knows what happened there? Charges were dropped, and Bryant gave the woman some money to settle a civil suit. But from opposing fan's taunts to throwaway jokes made everywhere, including this site, you can't talk about Kobe without Eagle, Colorado being in the back of your head.

Now, let's consider Ben Roethlisberger, and how the world viewed him a day ago. Goofy looking guy with a knack for taking embarrassing photos. Likes to ride motorcycles without a helmet. Talented QB who led his team to a Super Bowl win as a sophomore, then again three years later.

Yes, there were the allegations in Lake Tahoe, but with every new report savaging the credibility of his accuser, the public was inclined to write her off. No one thought of Roethlisberger and thought "rapist."

Well, now we've got number two. And I suspect we'll find out a lot more about this case in the next few hours and days, though I haven't a clue which way it will go. Doesn't matter. It will be impossible to talk Big Ben without his sexual assault accusations entering the conversation.

That, my friends, is what we call a stigma.

•••••

Well, this down week went out with a bang, didn't it? Stev D will have his hands full with fallout tomorrow, and Spintern David and I will be your hosts on Sunday. Thank you for your continued support of Deadspin.

Football season was fertile ground for folks who think the NFL Shop is their own personal Night at the Improv, but it remains to be seen if our nation's baseball stadiums will prove to be quite so lucrative. Keep your eyes peeled as the summer progresses and be sure to send us more customized jersey madness. Again, we don't care if some guy got drunk and picked up a Buddy Biancalana throwback. We're looking for the truly custom and truly horrible. And also guys who like to put tape on things.

Mail submissions here with the subject "custom jerseys" and check out the earlier rounds as well.

Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V

"Twelth Man"? Isn't that the guy they found buried in a peat bog with a fossilized beer koozie in his hand? [Submitted by Tim R.]
Good thing the boss doesn't watch Monday Night Football ... oh, crap. [Submitted by Tom L.]
Fine, but only if we agree to smash imperialism. [Submitted by Rael]
You want to know what's funny about this picture? It's not that it's a German dude with a ponytail who calls himself Bronco Billy. It's that this picture was taken at the Vatican. Seriously. Check and mate. [Submitted by Rob N.]
Probably just really, really likes mid-period Dave Matthews Band. [Submitted by Nick M.]
You know, not every pimp is willing to incorporate duct tape into their wardrobe. A little over the top, if you ask me. [Submitted by Alex C.]
Notice that he's in the same section as our old friend "Deathfromabove" but that they aren't sitting together. Oh, I definitely want to party with this section. [Submitted by Steven L.]
I thought we agreed to hold it? [Submitted by Ray S.]
Truth in advertising, Part 78. [Submitted by Jim K.]
Did they not have room for Gary Fencik? [Submitted by Alex C.]
What do you know about pressure? [Submitted by Jacob D.]
You might have to ask your tailor to lengthen that a little bit. [Submitted by Flynn]
This makes more sense if you're a Ranger fan. Or if you're addicted to Adderall. [Submitted by John O.]
They know how to turn an 11 into a four, but not how to spell their hero's name. Probably should have just let Longwell kick it. [Submitted by Ryan B.]
So you're in favor of Xing out all peckers? Seems a little extreme. [Submitted by Good Newz Kennelz]
You know what? She really is as free as a bird. [Submitted by Zachary W.]
It's too bad that Jim's agent couldn't negotiate for him to get a new shirt. (P.S. No more toilet pictures. Let the man pee in peace. [Submitted by Jeff P.]

From In the Groove, by Pamela Britton

Her eyes slowly opened, her pupils so dilated they looked almost black. He saw a look of confusion in those eyes, too, and a hint of fear. No, not fear, concern and, yes, he was almost positive, the same amount of sexual interest he himself felt.

"I'd hold on to you even if I saw a picture of you wearing three breasts."

Which made her eyes widen a bit, made a laugh pop out of her and her eyes soften. "I bet you'd like a three-breasted woman."

"I bet you I would, too," he said gently, lowering his head again. And this time when they kissed it wasn't gentle, it wasn't passive, it was a kiss that instantly proved the two of them were like high-octane fuel, their flesh sparking off each other in such a way that Lance felt the purely caveman urge to pick her up and carry her to bed. Except he wasn't in his own motor coach and so all he could do was kiss her, snuggling his hips up against her, showing her what she did to him and how much he wanted more. She didn't draw away. No. She pressed herself tighter against him.

Her mouth slipped open then, the vanilla taste of her causing him to groan again and one of his hands slid up her side at the same time he removed his lips from hers, the smooth skin at the side of her neck tasting as deliciously sweet as the rest of her.

His hand dropped to her waist only to slip beneath her shirt, his fingers sliding over her ribs.

"Lance," she said softly.

[...]

"I'm sorry," she said as she slipped out, Lance staying behind for half a second before following her.

"Sarah, wait!"

But by the time he stepped out of Becca's motor coach, she was rounding the front end. He chased after her for a few steps before realizing she didn't want to be caught.

"Damn it," he said.

Be sure to tune in for the next steamy installment of Tailpipe — your smutty NASCAR romance story hour!

The general consensus seems to be that a two-game suspension isn't a fitting punishment for breaking someone's nose. But when evaluating the fairness of it, two questions must be asked. Is it a typical suspension based on the offense and is Griner being treated differently because she's a girl? The answers are yes, and not really.

The truth is that when you look at the punishments typically handed down for basketball fights, two games is about what you should expect. Oklahoma State's Andrea Riley took a swing at LSU's Erica White in an NCAA tournament game in 2008 and got a one-game suspension. (From the tournament. She still hasn't served it, because OSU hasn't been back.) The NBA's Trevor Ariza got one game back in December for swinging and missing at DeMar DeRozan. Ditto Jamaal Magloire and Detroit's Jonas Jerebko for their preseason slap fight. In college, Michigan's Zack Novak got the same punishment, not for a punch, but for a flagrant foul when he clocked Ohio State's P.J. Hill with an elbow. No matter the level or the gender, the circumstances don't seem to make a difference. Crossing the line between hard play and fighting is good for a one-game vacation. Two, if you're really a prick about it.

Even in the most notorious moment in WNBA history—an ugly on-court scuffle between Detroit and L.A—ten players and a coach were suspended, but only one player got more than two games. And those most severely punished were the players who came off the bench.

Believe it or not, the Big 12 seems to agree that leaving the bench is the more severe offense here. Their statement about Griner's suspension spends more words chastising the teams for not controlling their subs than it does criticizing the person who actually injured someone. The same holds for the men's game, where simply wandering too far from your chair is on par with an unprovoked physical attack.

So why did football's LeGarrette Blount get eight games—three quarters of a college season—for punching a player in the chin? Not only is football a much more physical and violent activity, but basketball is the sport with the richer history of extracurricular slugfests. Dr. J. vs. Bird. The Knicks and Heat. The Knicks and Bulls. The Knicks and everyone. Kermit Washington's haymaker on Rudy Tomjanovich is the most brutal on-field incident American sports have ever seen, yet basketball still considers fighting to a nuisance, not a problem that should be eliminated. The punishments are hardly more severe than they are in hockey where fighting is a hallowed part of the game.

However, even hockey knows that the outcome of an incident should have a bearing on the official response. Take all the swings that you want , but if you really hurt someone you're going to pay for it. Jordan Barncastle will probably need surgery on her broken nose and it's still not clear when, or if, she'll play basketball again this year. Griner will likely miss less time than she does. It was not a typical fight, therefore she deserves more than the typical punishment.

If basketball doesn't want to do anything serious about fighting, that's fine, but they should do something about an unnecessary and preventable injury. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like anyone is interested in teaching that lesson this time.

[ESPN Talking Head Montage by video machine David Matthews]

In the very near future, we're going to be doing a bit of a theme week here at Deadspin. That's right. IT'S GREEN WEEK! No, no. Just kidding. We'd never do that shit to you.

No, we're going to have a Spring Break week. As such, I have been charged with collecting every Spring Break horror story you good folks can muster. So send them my way. They can be hookup failures, poop stories, times you got your ass kicked, anything. All I care about is that they concern you going on Spring Break, and that you suffer some sort of pain and/or humiliation. Don't send me some shit about how you banged a fat girl. I don't care. Don't send me some email about how you went down on a girl who was on her menzies. Again, I don't care. I get a dozen of those every week. WAHHH HER VAG SMELLED BAD! Suck it up. Don't be a fucking baby.

Best stories will be posted on the site. So make them count. Now, to the hookupFAILs…

Jack:

I am at the Boot on a Friday night one spring hanging out with some friends. Anyway, the time for whatever we were waiting for was fast approaching and it was time to leave. I gathered near the door with my friends while we waited for a few stragglers to say goodbye to whoever they needed to say goodbye to. I stood there zoned out in a drunken haze waiting for the signal to leave.

Next thing I know, I am being dragged down Broadway by my entry wristband by a 5 foot tall South American chick. (I am at least a foot taller). Confused, I try to introduce myself and she cuts me off by saying, "I don't give a shit what your name is." We get to her house (also on Broadway) and she stands on her entry stairs and starts molesting me. So far, so good. We make it into her living room in a frenzy of torn clothing and sloppy make out. As our clothes come off, she jumps on me and wraps her legs around my waist. I trip over something on the floor and fall through her glass coffee table cutting my back and chest in several places. She just goes, "Oh fuck, my roommate is going to be pissed. Oh well, I hate that bitch anyway."

Then she drags me into her room and sex starts happening. About 3 minutes into it, we hear angry voices yelling, "New Orleans Police-drop your weapons!"

At this point the cuts from the table are bleeding pretty bad. I take myself out of her and throw on her pink robe. I walk out to two very angry NOPD officers responding to a domestic dispute reported by the downstairs neighbor when the coffee table shattered. After 20 minutes of her convincing the cops that: 1) I did not break in to rape her and 2) She lives here, the police leave. Then we resume the sex. About 15 minutes later, we are making sweet tender love with her bent over her dresser and me standing behind when her roommate kicks her door open. The doorknob gives me a hip stinger and a dead leg all at once. Her roommate starts berating me and her about how we broke the coffee table. Then her roommate AND her decide it is all my fault and basically start throwing things at me.

At this point, I am very confused and I retreat to the bathroom to clean my wounds. Then the girl comes in and says she is sorry, but wanted to blame me in front of her roommate so her roommate wouldn't be mad at her. She then tells me to leave, but just stay on the porch for a minute and she will let me back in. She promises to let me do whatever I want to her. I find my pants and walk out and apologize to her roommate, then I offer to replace the table because "my dad owns a furniture factory, I swear." I grab a pen and a piece of paper and write a fake phone number and write Jason, for a free table. I then leave. I never saw either of those classy ladies again. (Although I am not sure I would recognize them if I did.)

Jack's last name? Nordberg.

Dan:

I had been in DC a few months for graduate school and the school sometimes sponsored mixers at bars. At one such event in Adams Morgan, I proceeded to get totally loaded with some of my classmates. Anyway, by the time the lights came on at the bar, the only three left were me, a girl from my school and her roommate.

I suggested we continue drinking at their apartment, they happily agreed. I thought (stupidly) that I had a chance with at least one of them, if not both. So we get back to their place and after a drink or two, my classmate announces she is tired and leaves me with the roommate. Almost immediately, we start going at it. I suggest we move to the bedroom, she agrees (still looks pretty good right?). We get there and she hits me with this zinger, "let's keep it above the waist tonight." FAIL. I tried every line to convince her, to no avail. So I just gave up and waited for her to fall asleep so I could sneak out, sleep in my own bed and spare the humiliation of waking up next to her. I figured at least with this way I would avoid too much embarrassment at school.

Alas, it was not to be.

I quietly put my clothes back on and tiptoed out of her room, through the kitchen and out the door. I closed it behind me and heard it lock shut with a loud click. I then turned to leave and was quite surprised to find myself in a 3ftx3ft steel door cage, the kind that is used to prevent the scum of DC from breaking down your door and killing you in your sleep. The biggest problem with this situation was that the cage needed A KEY to open. I did not have said key. OK, I figured I'd just call my friend and get the humiliation over with. But that didn't work either because she was passed out in her room and her cell phone could be seen ringing on the kitchen table.

Next step, attempt to drunkenly kick in door. This also failed because I could barely land a solid kick with so little room to maneuver and the door was brand new and locked tight. But I gave it a good effort and beat that door to shit (without kicking it all the way it) making so much noise that the landlord came down in his skivvies with a baseball bat ready to beat down the "burglar." He took pity on me, let me out and I slunked home.

The next day I get a call from my classmate, "You want to tell me why we are stuck in our apartment?"

In the end, I did not have sex, I had to pay almost $300 to fix the door, and had to see the roommate everyday at school for the rest of the year.

"Could everyone stop getting shot?!"

Matt:

We had a Christmas party at our old apartment, and it was great, had way more booze to know what to do with and I was celebrating a one year anniversary with my girlfriend. Anyway, to celebrate, we all had shots of Jim Beam and Jack Daniels. I realize that I am drinking fast, and I feel lighter, as liquor is known to do.

The night continues, and I am having a great time, everyone is drinking, dancing, eating all my food, etc. Great night. I am drunk at this point. My girlfriend is too. At some point in the night, she comes over and says: "I want to have sex." We go to my bedroom. We're both having fun, sloppy sex with our Santa hats on, and it's actually going great. I feel I can actually finish. Tonight will succeed as a great night!

But then, after a little up and down, she says, "Oh God, I have to pee." I know I might be screwed if she leaves the room. I will lose the boner. But she understands and does the amazing thing and says, "Wait! Here! Watch some porn! I'll be right back!" She puts on a sweet little two on one on the YouPorn, it's wonderful. She leaves. This goes on for a while, and it is working.

DOOR FLIES OPEN. I am not startled because it's obviously her.

It ISN'T. It's a guy named, let's say, Chucky, and he's hammered looking for the bathroom. He says, "Whoa!" obviously, but he's real drunk and doesn't leave. He is standing in the doorway watching a naked man masturbating to porn in a Santa Hat alone at a Christmas party. I can only imagine what the man was thinking.

I tell him to fuck off politely. He closes the door. I am so fucking startled and embarrassed I immediately lose all sexual desire at all. The girlfriend comes back.

Upon seeing I am no longer ready to go, she in drunk mode, STARTS TO CRY. "Why don't you love me? Why don't you want to have sex with me?! Why are you so drunk!?"

I explain to her the story and she eventually calms down, but the sexual moment was destroyed. KEEP YOUR DOORS LOCKED BOYS.

The Santa Hat really makes the story.

Anonymous:

I grew up a Mormon in Utah and, as such, had the evils of masturbation hammered into me from an early age. Despite leaving the church while in high school, I never really got into masturbating (i.e. did not do it throughout my final two years of high school or college).

See the problem with never jacking it is that you suffer from chronic wet dreams. This problem is exacerbated when you've had any sort of intimate contact with a female, such as a thirty-minute handjob. After telling the girl, "Sorry but I just don't think it's going to happen for me tonight,"I rolled over and went to sleep in her bed. I woke up 4 hours later to what might have been three gallons of sleep sperm, spread generously all over her mattress, sheets, and comforter.

At this point, I am in panic mode. If I get up, she will wake up and discover that her bed is coated in my would-be offspring. Suddenly a genius idea strikes me: "Sleep semen is liquid, heat dries liquids, friction creates heat…I just need to hump all the sperm spots to create enough friction to evaporate that shit."

Well, I humped the hell out of several areas on the mattress, I pinned down a portion of the sheets and humped them too, all that was left was the comforter. I should probably mention that I wasn't trying to eliminate all traces of semen, just make it so the bed didn't seem like it had been dipped in clear caramel. Anyway, almost immediately after I trapped a piece of the comforter between my legs the girl woke up and asked me what I was doing. I told her that I couldn't sleep and that I should probably take a shower to see if it relaxes me. With that, I bolted for the door, headed back to my room (which was next door), and never looked back which is a euphemism for I went on to see this girl almost every day for the remainder of the school year with the shameful knowledge (she had told others) she knew what I had done.

That's what you get for being a Mormon.

Michael:

I reach for a package of free condoms I got from the Peer Health Educators on campus - only to find that those FUCKERS STAPLED THEIR CARD TO EVERY CONDOM PACKAGE! All 20 were presumably punctured, thus killing any chance I had to get laid that night.

Finally, a correction from a doctor with regards to torn frenulums.

Jason:

I submit my qualifications- board certified urologist with completion of a one year fellowship in men's sexual health. I'm the director for the center for human sexuality at a major university hospital. The vast majority of the surgeries I do involve the penis. I believe this qualifies me as somewhat of an expert.

The frenulum of the penis is something that is difficult to describe to someone who is circumcised. When a circumcision is done, the frenulum is usually divided/detached. The frenulum is simply the bridge of skin from the underside of the penis just proximal to the glans (head) that attaches to the foreskin. As I am sure you know, this area has some of the highest concentration of nerve endings in the penis and is very sensitive. In fact, many men can reach climax just by placing a vibrator on this area. The problem I have with the reader's story is that he says that he bled profusely because he had an erection. The truth is that the amount of blood in this area remains relatively constant regardless of erection. The areteries for erection are deep inside the penis. There is, however, a frenular artery that, if torn, will bleed like crazy.

As another FYI, a "frenulum" is simply an attachment of one organ/tissue to another. Another example of a frenulum in your body is from the tongue to the floor of your mouth. Coincidentally, when I was in college, I was kissing this girl (with tongue!) and she was really going at it with aggression and somehow my tongue got caught and I slightly tore this area. My mouth instantly filled with blood and, obviously, so did hers. It was like I was vomiting blood into her mouth. That was rad.

P.S. I'm happy to offer my services as a consultant for all urological/dick questions that may come up in the mailbag or otherwise.

We may take you up on that, good sir.

In 1995, on assignment for ESPN's Total Sports magazine, Powell spent a few days in Plymouth, hometown of Warren Sapp. Sapp was then an NFL prospect approaching Draft Day under a cloud of assorted drug insinuations. The Saturday that Powell was in town, Sapp was selected 12th by Tampa Bay. Powell's story never ran. Here it is in full, followed by a postscript in which the author explains the story behind the story — and the perils of smoking powerful weed with your sources.

At the north end of Plymouth, Fla., under trees on the corner of the U.S. 441 and Hermit Smith Road, Warren Sapp's cousin Thomas McCrary sells barbecue from three handmade iron cookers. One of them he had made for $35; he supplied everything (tank, wheels, pipe) except the expanded metal for the grill. The other two larger ones cost just over $100. If you order a rib sandwich, Wonza McCrary will get out a polystyrene tray and put a sheaf of wax paper on it and a piece of bread and Thomas McCrary will put a generous pile of ribs on the bread and paint the ribs with a 3-inch paint brush and his private sauce and Wonza will put another piece of bread on the painted ribs and fold over the wax-paper sheaf and wrap it all in foil and add napkins and slip the package into a paper sack and crimp the mouth shut for $5.

"You make that sauce yourself?"

"Oh yeah."

"What's in it?"

"A little of this, a little of that."

You and Thomas McCrary chuckle. "Are you open after dark?" This, unlike the sauce question, is not deliberately naive: you want to buy dinner later.

"No," Thomas McCrary says, with a wave of his arm at the tree branches overhead, "my lights are out." In the branches no lights are strung; there is no source of power on this public right-of-way corner if there were. You both laugh.

Plymouth calls itself "The Foliage Capital of the World." In twenty-four hours, Warren Sapp—one of its denizens—will make millions of dollars in the NFL draft. Many of his friends work in ornamental plant nurseries for between $150 and $200 a week. Many of them like the jobs because they can walk to them and they cannot afford a car.

"When did you know Warren Sapp was going to be a world-class football player?"

"Well, he played dirt-road football around here," Thomas McCrary says, "but I still didn't know he's gone do that."

I suggest that Warren Sapp can buy him a barbecue restaurant after tomorrow.

"Don't you say that," Wonza says. "We don't want to intimidate him."

"I don't want a restaurant," Thomas says. "They got lights. I like to pack up and go. " Indeed, his is already beginning to load up the cookers and their cooler into a flatbed trailer. "No overhead," Thomas McCrary says. "Done with it."

Jim Kraemer, the coach at Apopka High School, was the new offensive coordinator for Sapp's last year. To look at him you see a good athlete who wants to be the best coach he can be and make other good athletes. He is a man who can use words like pride and next level and excellence in creditable ways. We are in a small chalkboard room adjacent the team weight room. On the walls are schemes and play names and rudimentary plays; new audibles are being introduced—Outlaw, Motown, Boot, Cadillac— and some things that may not be audibles called Arc and Quake and Ted.

Warren Sapp was a tight end in Kraemer's offense, but on occasional defensive plays coaches saw him do things "not necessarily coachable. Headsy things. He threw his weight around and was unblockable. He is a super-smart football player." As we speak, Sapp's drug-test celebrity is mushrooming: the seven Miami positives are being released. But we are at this moment aware only of the initial report from the combine.

Coach Kraemer doesn't like that report, and he really doesn't like the sloppiness of retracting the initial combine cocaine report. Local damage has been done. "And marijuana," he says, "is not right." He gestures toward the weight room—not dissimilar from Thomas McCrary's wave at imaginary lights in the trees—where even on the uncustomary no-practice Friday afternoon a few players are clanging around, the oddly soothing clanging of olympic plates: "They see one of their heroes . . . . It's a dead fight to keep that stuff out of here."

I tell Coach Kraemer I'm headed out to Plymouth to see if it's asleep or abuzz about Warren Sapp. "Oh"—he pauses, I think to question this word I've come up with—"it's abuzz all right. We take—this whole area—great pride in our players going to the next level." From Apopka High are pros James McKnight, Derek Clark, Sammy Smith, Aaron Jones. Apopka is 36-3 in the last three years under Jim Kraemer.

"Let's see," he says. "It's Friday night. Out there under the tree there'll be some alcohol, and some other things."

"Yes, sir."

Coach Kraemer is a man who is in a personal professional dead fight with other things, and they are on his mind.

The tree is at the south end of Plymouth, about a 220-yard dash from Thomas and Wonza McCrary's barbecue cookers at the north end. The trip is like going from Ray Charles to Snoop Dogg. I get a case of beer. A white man in this situation is a geek unless he is a cop, and I elect to be a geek. I carry this case of beer as a kind of public-relations armor plate.

The first two fellows I come to I tell my business: "ESPN wants to know what y'all think about Warren Sapp tomorrow. You want to talk about that?"

"I don't mind," one of them, Spence, says.

"Good. ESPN sent a case of beer."

"Did ESPN send Olde English?"

"I'm afraid ESPN sent Busch."

We laugh. I explain that I saw people at the tree drinking Busch earlier in the day, when I got the barbecue from Sapp's cousin.

"Yeah," Spence concedes, "they some of them drink that."

"How about Warren Sapp tomorrow?"

"Well, he's slipped some around here."

"Around here?"

"Yeah."

It is 6:30, and there are about 50 people drinking beer under the tree.

"Up or down?"

"Down." This still baffles me, but I will see things that make some sense of it.

"What do you all do out here?"

"Just drinkin and chillin and conversatin," Spence says. "If you don't see someone under that tree after work, something's wrong."

"Warren has slipped because of this drug stuff?"

"Mmm hmm."

I explain to Spence that I think the NFL knows about drugs—it is not the Ladies' Aid—and they will know what to make of Sapp's problem if he has one. Spence accedes to this. "You ought to talk to Eugene, his cousin," Spence says. "If he's in his right mind. But he may have already had a couple." He accepts a Busch and I move on.

I offer a beer to Warren Sapp's cousin Eugene, who wants to be a farmer so badly that he is called Farmer Gene and sometimes just Farmer. He won't take one.

"I don't have anything to say."

"You don't have anything to say?"

"No."

"Hey, I'm not talking about anything but Warren's being at the top of the draft tomorrow."

Nothing.

"I was told you're very proud of him."

Nothing. The beer is getting heavy.

"Maybe I have bad information—"

"Maybe you do. I am not releasing any of that information until the family returns from New York."

"What information?"

Farmer Gene has walked off. I hold 23 beers in the bag. I offer them to some women sitting on a picnic table. No thanks.

"Hey! Hey!" It's a man about 30 yards away leaning on a car.

"What!"

"You trying sell that beer?"

"No! I'm trying to give it away."

"Well put it on the hood of this car."

This I do. This is more like it. This is Wilfred Neal. He is a very gracious host. We talk football, Warren. We talk white guys, being the police, they come through here prowling in a car, but maybe not they come out with a case of beer. Maybe.

I empty my wallet to show lack of badge, which we have heard means you can't be a cop, legally. Then, Wilfred points out, how could you identify yourself to other cops something went wrong? Then again how could you have i.d. on you if you under cover? We finally don't know what any of it means, but emptying my wallet has been a nice gesture, and some beers finally get taken. It is hoped that Sapp, whom they call Carlos, will do something for the community—Wilfred leaves this vague: "Something for the young people." Another fellow hopes Carlos will help with their flag-football program.

"You mean," I ask, "buy a field?"

"No. Line it out." He is hoping merely for chalk.

I offer a beer to a young man who comes up and leans on the car as if he wants one but he won't take one. He has a little of Mike Tyson's early diffidence and an incipient Herschel Walker trapezius and neck. To my offer, he smiles.

"No no," Wilfred Neal explains. "He's young."

"Young?"

"Seventeen." Looking at him, 210 or so, the neck, a little gold in his mouth, I missed it. This is a football hopeful, a prospect, and he will not have a beer on Friday night. Warren Sapp has slipped some around here. This is what Spence may have meant.

Two acres of foliage-nursery workers conversatin and chillin and drinkin and some other things on Friday night stand as chaperone to the 17-year-old prospect among them who can bench 300 pounds and who, if he acts right, can maybe get out of this mess. That is how serious they are about it: a boy among them—not a son but a prospect—will not be allowed one beer that has fallen from the sky onto a car hood on a wild Friday night. And he will not protest. He is not going to slip some around here.

There is nothing wrong with what is loftily called, by those who do not need it after a day of work, substance abuse, but there is plenty wrong with it if it cuts off your escape from that live-long day of work.

The following day, at noon, as the draft begins, Wilfred Neal is half-in, half-out of his girlfriend's car trying to fix her radio so he can go fishing. It's a new used car and he has discovered in it some kind of keypad on a cable wired into the dash which he cannot determine the purpose of. He decides to leave it alone.

Wilfred Neal goes fishing, Thomas and Wonza McCrary are unpacked and selling barbecue on the corner, Farmer Gene is not releasing any information, and as far as I know there is not a large party watching the draft on ESPN anywhere in Plymouth. As far as I know, and as far as one can tell, there isn't ESPN in Plymouth, Fla., home of Carlos Sapp.

When Warren Sapp goes No. 12 to the local and lowly Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the public expressions of disappointment are only on the faces of the Jets fans who were chanting "We want Sapp!" until the Jets too passed on him. In Plymouth people are congregating for some chillin and conversatin under the tree and do not seem aware of what has befallen Carlos.

AN ADDENDUM TO THE ABOVE

This piece was commissioned by a then-new magazine, I believe called Total Sports, under the auspices of ESPN, when it was known only that Warren Sapp had had a troubling drug result at the NFL combine. As I recall, cocaine use had been alleged, and there was some general poohpoohing of that in a kind of accession that Sapp might have used some marijuana but that the cocaine report was bogus, and the NFL was in a backpedaling mode of some sort, or Sapp and his agent wanted them to be, and so forth. In this weather it was being alleged that Sapp might fall from No. 1 in the draft to 2 or 3–-some rather insignificant slippage.

While I was actually on the ground in Plymouth being regarded suspiciously it was coming out that Sapp had tested positive for something like five drug tests at Miami over the years and that the coach there had buried the tests, and the story was becoming much larger, involving not a "mistake" by a player at the combine but big trouble at Miami and perhaps large-scale corruption in college football and in the NCAA and–-and, well, the story was suddenly much vaster than what did Carlos Sapp's homeboys think about his hitting the Big Time tomorrow, which is what I had gone to Plymouth to unearth, that and only that.

The piece was written in this stillborn moment between the two stories, one small and one not, and the editor at ESPN I was dealing with rejected the piece as no longer relevant in view of the new landscape. I could not disagree and was more or less happy that I was not asked to go get Dennis Erickson and write about so much more than I had agreed to write about. As I recall, the editor generously paid me a full fee for the piece, not just a kill fee, since these developments were not my fault. I of course have no real idea what was objected to in the piece, or by whom, but suspect the explanation, while perfectly sensible, was not all there was to it. Anyone who has done work with magazines will know what I mean: no one knows what runs, or how much runs, or why.

Now, the real center of the story takes place off page. After I got people accepting the beer ESPN sent, it was perceived that I was not partaking myself, and this re-upped the suspicion that I was some kind of NFL narc or spy or possibly a real narc, somehow. Each time I refused my own beer this pressure increased, until finally my host offered me some weed. I felt I could not refuse this and maintain my integrity. (My abstinence is from booze, not lesser drugs.) I assented and my host went home and got some doobie and came back and he had a hit and I had a hit and he one and I one–-and suddenly I was going to have trouble even walking. I took stock. I had my motel room already and thought if I set out right away I would still be able to find it; it was two blocks away. I said to Wilfred, "Man, I got to go." He said, without smirk, "I heard that."

I clopped across the drinkin and chillin yard, taking very high awkward careful steps like a stringed mannequin, past all these brothers and sisters who were not sure how honest I was or what I was, to my car, got in it, got it running, and ran it slowly to that motel, and got all my change and went to the drink machines and bought as many sodas as I could with the change at hand, and got back in the room and locked it and turned on the TV for company, and flipping through channels discovered nearly all of them at that moment showing preachers or Pat Robertson or Charlton Heston as Moses, and found that if I lay diagonal on the bed and face-down and pointed the soles of my feet at the TV I could get a relieving kind of energy from the TV, a soothing kind of balm wave that calmed me down, and started in on the sodas, and a Randall knife I had bought earlier in the day (before I had talked to Kraemer the high school coach or been to the barbecue stand to scope the Plymouth tree), for which I had paid $250 and of which I had been most proud, a thing of real beauty, with its solid tool steel and leather aura inviting you to heft it and thumb the edge and give the sheath a snifferoo and admire the work and the Randall family and just feel good about things, all things—suddenly this knife, without actually moving, levitated from the table and pointed at me and made this accusation: You have spent $250 on this, a knife, when you have two daughters to put through school, you are not presenting a very good picture of a very good responsible adult person, and the phone rang and it was a woman I had called earlier whom I had gone out with one night about five years before and did not know very well and she told me she had gotten married and that my seeing her back then five years ago had been useful in her breaking out of the funk she had been in because of her divorce and there was Pat Robertson or Moses and the knife, the hives, I had to get diagonal and couldn't get off the phone or remember from one sentence to the next what I had said to the woman, and somehow it all passed, and I survived.

The next day when Wilfred Neal is perplexed by the strange keypad device resembling a computer mouse and wired into his girlfriend's car, I am standing in the sun beside the car shaking a little in the bright light and more or less seeing in that weird keypad a symbol for all of our not knowing, his, mine, everyone's, and am reduced to the point that it would be a relief were I a cop, and Neal is, I think, ahead of me in this surrender; it is okay with him too whatever I am, whatever he is, there are forces beyond us, let's do the best we can, have a girlfriend if we can, go fishing, be cool my brother. Let's let Carlos play football or do dope we do not care, we can not care, hallelujah. I think I called into the house to the girlfriend that the pot made me lose my mind last night and she laughed inside the house. Out there in the hot yard, we heard her laugh.

Padgett Powell has published five novels and two collections of short stories, his latest the novel The Interrogative Mood. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Paris Review, Grand Street, Esquire, The New York Times Book Review and Magazine, and elsewhere. His work appears in the Best American Short Stories and Best American Sports Writing anthologies. He has won the Prix de Rome and a Whiting Writers Award. He teaches writing at the University of Florida. He has taught also at the Sewanee Writers Conference and at the Summer Literary Seminars in Russia and Kenya.

Any sports journalist out there with a Dark Side-worthy story to tell should send it along to darkside@deadspin.com. You know you've got a million of them. And while we're at it, send us your orphaned magazine features, too. We'll give them a nice home.

As a fan of a similarly hued National League Central team — a team I'm watching play at Roger Dean Stadium in Jupiter this very second — no team in the division scares me as much as the Reds do. Everything about them is personally threatening.

The resourceful and extremely motivated leader-in-exile. General manager Walt Jocketty, still angry about being unceremonious booted by the organization he resuscitated and brought a championship to. Jocketty was encouraged to leave by a change in the Cardinals' strategic emphasis, toward the farm system and advanced statistics, away from waiting for other teams to panic and do something stupid at the trading deadline. He's still bothered that Tony LaRussa didn't leave with him, too. Jocketty wants to take down the Cardinals more than he wants to do anything.

The dunderheaded but formidable manager. The oft-maligned Dusty Baker loves nothing more than setting fire to young pitchers' arms and handing 700 plate appearances to short fast men who come to the plate with the bat upside down. But Baker has a funny habit of sticking around in spite of himself — the man has reached a World Series and two NLCS with two different teams after all — and has the distinct advantage of driving LaRussa absolutely crazy. The hatred Baker and Don Tony have for each other is palpable and consistently entertaining; Reds-Cardinals series inevitably end up with batters pointing their helmets and pitchers and the managers growling at each other from opposite dugouts, two middle-aged men whose stomachs hang over their uniform belts, playing tough guy. It's grand theater.

The sleeping city desperate for a revival. Cincinnati and St. Louis are more similar cities than is often noted. A baseball tradition unrivalled by any city other than New York or Boston. An urban sensibility that's both more cosmopolitan and more backwoods that anyone on either side of the extreme is willing to admit. A downtown area that's far lovelier than people realize and vastly underutilized. The impossibility of grabbing a bit to eat past 9:30 p.m. without having to find a casino. A simmering history of racial divisiveness. The color red. The difference is that, baseball-wise, Cincinnati has been dormant as St. Louis has been ascendant; the Reds are long, long overdue. I've spent many, many evenings in Cincinnati, and that town is rabid to care about its Reds again. If they get hot and are close in September, that place will froth into a frenzy. It will carry them.

Oh, yes, the players. The Reds always seems to have one or two studs on the farm — "studs on the farm" is a trademarked phrase and is not to be used without written consent of the Baseball Writers Association Of America — who never end up becoming what dreams had held, but these days they seem likely to break that spell by sheer volume. I mean, look at these guys: Yonder Alonso, Homer Bailey, Jay Bruce, Aroldis Chapman, Johnny Cueto, Drew Stubbs, Edinson Volquez (currently injured), Joey Votto. All of those guys are Major League ready or close to it, and all are 26 years old or younger. Not of all of them will be stars. But all of them could be, and there isn't a team in baseball who wouldn't take any of them in an Irish second. The Reds get to keep each of them, as they develop and approach their peak right now. The Reds have upside and length.

The Chicago Cubs have missed their window and are about to begin a long, slow beautiful slide back to where they belonged all along. The Brewers can't ever make all their pieces work at the same time. The Pirates are slowly crawling back to sea level but have years left to go. The Astros are a joke. No, it's the Reds: The Reds seem uniquely positioned to humiliate the beloved Cardinals and stop a second mini-NL Central dynasty before it begins. It's worse, too, because no team would enjoy it more. There is righteous revenge and furious anger to those who seek to destroy my brothers. That's the team that keeps me up nights. That's the team that could turn this all wrong for us. It's the Reds, man. It's the Reds. I'm terrified of them.

You know what's the only thing that makes me feel better about all this? I say this about the Reds every year.

Ray Traylor started his wrestling career in the most unremarkable of ways: as a jobber — enhancement talent, in gentler parlance. He was one of the Average Joes sent out to get clobbered by the stars. For the majority of jobbers, this was the end of the story — they wrestled some matches, they lost some matches, they went back to their day jobs with a story to tell. It isn't exactly college football glory, but it's something. Ray Traylor wasn't destined for greatness any more than a thousand other guys. And yet, there was something about him. Dusty Rhodes (who knows a thing or two about the Common Man and the American Dream) was the head booker at the time in NWA, and he saw that something. After watching Traylor lose a few squash matches, Dusty pulled him off television and made him over as a bullying enforcer called Big Bubba Rogers. Big Bubba would soon be feuding with Dusty himself — then the promotion's top babyface — and Traylor's rise from nothing to something was confirmed. The monstrous Big Bubba Rogers, who stalked to the ring in a suit and tie, was a villain, but he was living the American Dream.

After a run in the UWF where he faced off against his future tag team partner, the One Man Gang, Traylor was hired by the WWF and repackaged as the Big Boss Man, a wrestling prison guard. Or unpackaged, rather. Because even as the idea of the wrestling law officer fed neatly into the play of good and evil at the heart of pro wrestling, it was also a reference to real life, as Traylor himself had been a corrections officer in Cobb County, Ga., prior to falling into the wrestling trade. "Stone Cold" Steve Austin was fond of saying that the best characters in pro wrestling are the wrestlers who just play themselves, but with the volume turned up. The Big Boss Man followed this model — he was little more than the WWF-trademarked version of Ray Traylor. But perhaps this was a foregone conclusion — Traylor didn't have it in him to play a monster like Abdullah the Butcher or even the Earthquake. He was too average, too unaffected. (And by all accounts, a total sweetheart backstage.) Ray Traylor was destined, it seems, to be Ray Traylor. He was a god-fearing, tax-paying citizen of the world — he was unremarkable, and that was his indelible appeal.

The Big Boss Man began his WWF career in a wholly pedestrian way, too: he beat Koko B. Ware in this first pay-per-view match at SummerSlam 1988. But the WWF writers soon saw the same spark in Traylor that Dusty had seen before, and in short order the Boss Man was feuding with the anything-but-regular Hulk Hogan. It turned out to be a sort of back-burner grudge for Hogan: he fought Boss Man at house shows and on free TV, but he spent much of his time in those days dealing with his dissolving friendship with "Macho Man" Randy Savage. The Boss Man bided his time teaming up with fellow bigman Akeem the African Dream (formerly the One Man Gang), under the "tutelage" of the huckster manager Slick, against top good-guy duos like The Rockers and Demolition. But his simmering dispute with Hogan culminated in a near-legendary cage match on Saturday Night's Main Event, wherein Hogan superplexed Boss Man — all 350 pounds of him — off the cage and into the ring.

It might not have been incredible as it seemed at the time, especially viewed today through hardened eyes of a wrestling fan who lived through ECW and Mick Foley's Flying Wallendas routine of the late '90s, but for the time it was good enough to be incredible.

Which is a pretty good epitaph for the Big Boss Man, come to think of it. Ray Traylor was an average guy who achieved his place in the pantheon for being just that, if a little better. This was crucial to Traylor's appeal. When the average wrestling fan looks at his reflection and appraises himself honestly, he probably doesn't see Hulk Hogan staring back at him. But consider the Big Boss Man: he's overweight, he's got a crewcut and goatee, he's Southern, he's blue-collar. This is the everyman, to a large portion of the WWF audience. "Justice will be served," he would say, and wrestling fans heard within it a deeper truth — that was precisely what they wanted from wrestling, and what they wanted from the universe. In his pants and (tucked-in) shirt, the Big Boss Man was Willy Loman in the funhouse mirror of pro wrestling: big and burly, sure, but a man of principle at his core — and yet an underachiever, a man not wired for greatness. He was the archetypal mid-carder, almost unremarkable, but somehow — and this can only be to Traylor's credit — entirely unforgettable.

When the Big Boss Man became a good guy, it was (of course) in the most commonplace sort of way — Bad Guy rediscovers his good streak and falls out with other baddies. But in this case it was portrayed perfectly. In a matter of mere moments, the Boss Man goes from the most diabolical of men to a fan favorite without betraying his character — and we cheered loudly, because we understood him, because he was one of us. Little wonder that in an era in which half of the wrestling superstars on WWF TV were assigned unglamorous middle-class careers "outside" the wrestling world — the garbage man, the pig farmer, the IRS agent, the repo man — the Big Boss Man was the only prole to achieve any lasting fame. He worked not because he acted like one of us, but because he was one of us.

The Boss Man would soon feud with his old partner Akeem, and then with a heelish lawman from north of the border called the Mountie (played by the underrated Jacques Rougeau). This latter feud was notable because it featured the Mountie attacking the Boss Man with a cattle prod (complete with overdubbed electric shocking noises) and culminated in a match in which the loser had to "spend the night" in the county jail.

This started the Big Boss Man down a path of increasingly bizarre and ridiculous storylines, even by pro wrestling standards. For the everyman, this was a sort of ignominy, but it made a certain sense — the Boss Man wasn't the superhero commanding an audience's awe solely by the flexing of his sculpted arms. No, he was a (sort of ) real person, only with unreal problems. Most of the feuds that would follow were based on things that happened outside the ring or off-camera. He warred with an ex-con named Nailz who, the storyline went, claimed that Boss Man beat him in his cell when he was incarcerated — the WWE's own little domestic Abu Ghraib. If this seems a little bit off-subject to the principle of wrestling, well, that was sort of the point. (Boss Man didn't help matters, though, with his anti-Nailz promos, which leaned heavily on legalese.)

When Traylor left the WWF for WCW in 1993, he abandoned law and order for vigilante justice and became known as the Guardian Angel, complete with red beret, but he soon reverted to his old Big Bubba Rogers persona, and then again to his real name. (This was mid-'90s WCW after all.) In his return to the WWF (and to the Boss Man character) the storylines only got stranger. Despite the privilege of feuding with Steve Austin, Degeneration X, and the Undertaker, that last conflict ended in a "Hell in the Cell" match that saw the Boss Man hanged by a noose in the center of the ring. (The announcer did his best to undercut any notion of implied reality by screaming, "Is it symbolic?!?" over and over, even as Traylor played dead.) A grudge against Al Snow, another Regular Joe, hinged on the Boss Man killing Snow's pet Chihuahua and serving it to an unaware Snow for dinner. The Boss Man then battled the Big Show for the WWF championship in a storyline in which the Boss Man crashed the funeral of the Big Show's father and made off with the coffin chained to the back of his car.

There wasn't anywhere to go from there. The Boss Man's WWF tenure ended not long thereafter. His last match was against wrestling's other preeminent everyman, ECW legend Tommy Dreamer.

One more story about Ray Traylor: WrestleCrap legend has it that there was a segment on America's Most Wanted in which the criminal in the filmed reenactment of a heist bore an uncanny resemblance to Ray Traylor. The story goes that wrestling fans nationwide called into the hotline with the same tip: you can find your perp at the WWF show on Monday night. That Ray Traylor could so convincingly be mistaken for someone else speaks loudly to his everyman credentials. And in the end, that the chubby guy with the goatee made it as far as he did speaks volumes about Ray Traylor's talent.

So we bid you farewell, Big Boss Man. You weren't the best ever, but neither were we.

The Masked Man works in publishing.

The Oscars are on Sunday, which means it's time for me to spend the week processing any number of scenarios in which I am involved in the ceremony. I watch the stupid Oscars every year, and they grow more insufferable on an annual basis. Yet that will never stop me from daydreaming of the day I get to A) win an Oscar and give a speech, B) host the Oscars and deliver a scathing monologue, C) present an Oscar (yep, I even dream of presenting the things, in which I add my own little flair to the announcement, and make a point of saying AND THE WINNER IS in an act of cool defiance), and D) attend any number of post-Oscar shindigs, in which other celebrities ask to touch my Oscar and indentured female servants feed me champagne and caviar while I do blow off in the VVVVVIP area.

I have an Oscar speech in my head that I adjust on a yearly basis. I will not print it here, because it is beyond retarded. I also have mental Oscar speeches prepared should I win multiple Oscars on the same night, and I always do ("Tonight, Drew Magary has become the first person ever to win an Oscar for Best Actor, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Picture, Best Editing, AND Costume Design for his work in Pussytubin' 6: Tubik's Pube."). I have also staged imaginary conversations with any number of Hollywood luminaries. It's all so very, very sad. I should be given an honorary cat.

Onto THE SPEED CHESS! your letters:

Max:

I had a girlfriend who cut my hair for a long time and now all of a sudden I have to go to a professional. This sucks mostly because I have to now pay for haircuts. But I'm also lost on barber or hairdresser.

My wife cuts my hair (and shaves my back! What a lady!). I only wear underwear when she cuts it, so the hair falls all over my body. I like to stand up when she's done and I'm all covered in my own clippings, and then I pound my chest and go MONKEY MONKEY MONKEY!!!!! The wife is not charmed.

I revel in the fact that I never have to pay for a haircut or tip a hairdresser again. Seriously, my wife will tip her hairdresser an obscene amount. WHY? It's not like the haircut was delivered.

One time, my wife got tired of cutting my hair and asked me to consider going to a salon or barbershop. I said no fucking way. Once you get free haircuts, going back is an impossibility. So I feel for you, brother. What if you just bought a pair of clippers and did it yourself? Jamie Oliver cuts his own hair, and he only looks mildly retarded. You tell me that's not worth saving yourself a trip to Jean Louis David.

Besides, there's no guarantee you'll get a good haircut if you go pro. There's not a guy out there who hasn't been completely FUCKED by a barber once or twice. I went to a barber once who had put that scratchy-as-hell collar around my neck and proceeded to make my hair look like it had just been attacked by a cougar.

I got a haircut once and went to show it to my insane ex-girlfriend, who got mad at me simply because she didn't like it. And it was just a normal haircut. Maybe a little short, but I didn't have the barber carve boobs in my hair or anything. She was in tears, she hated it so much. Women like that should be gassed.

Kendall:

My best friend swears that in over five years with his girlfriend he has not farted in her presence. Which lead me to two conclusions. 1) I can't believe they're still together, and 2) this has a make him a huge pussy, right?

Sure does. What's the point of having a girlfriend if you can't terrify her by dropping ass in the middle of some terrible movie she rented? On a deeper level, not farting around your girlfriend (or boyfriend, for that matter) suggests that you really aren't all that comfortable around her. I mean, really. Five years and you don't feel comfortable enough to let it rip with your old lady around? What, are you still trying to maintain the illusion of courtship? Ridiculous. You should WANT a girlfriend who you feel clear to nuke the couch around. That means you're yourself, instead of some dipshit guy putting on airs whenever his chick is around. I hate guys like that.

I got a lot of emails about "Hey, when is it okay to fart around your girlfriend?" And the answer to that is this: Just do it when you feel comfortable doing it around her, and you know she won't give a shit. If you never reach that point, congratulations. You need a new girlfriend.

Willie:

If you're at someone else's house (parents or in-laws don't count) and the bomb doors open, do you spray the air freshener after you purge? I'm always torn on what to do. I mean, the aerosol is there for a reason, but I don't want the whole house knowing that I just dropped the big one on Nagasaki by spreading lilac scent all around.

Well look, a smell will radiate from that bathroom regardless of what you choose. You may as well spring for the air freshener. Everyone will know what you did anyway.

At my old work, there was a huge can of Oust in the shitter, and everyone sprayed it after dropping anchor. The only problem was that the can always blasted out freshener at 560 mph, so even the lightest squeeze would produce a giant mist cloud of lavender that you could literally taste in your mouth and feel permeating your nostrils as you walked out the door. I think I would have been happier just to let sleeping poops lie.

Bryan:

Why do people back into their parking spot? I get pissed at this.

Why? Backing into a spot ensures an easy pullout when you leave. Why wouldn't you back in if it's an easy move to pull off? If I'm at the grocery store and the parking lot is relatively empty, I always pull through the initial parking spot so that I'm "backed in" to the adjacent spot. Feels like winning the lottery, because it means I got through the parking lot without having to look backwards, which hurts my back and shit.

I get pissed at parking spots that warn you FRONT IN ONLY. Hey, parking Nazis, what the fuck do you care if I back in or not? The car is the same length regardless. Kiss my tailpipe.

Robin:

I've recently started adding a fried egg to any sandwich prepared at home. I start the egg cooking in a non-stick pan, and by the time I have everything else unwrapped/sliced/ready to assemble, it's already time to flip. Then when the rest of the sandwich is ready, the egg goes on top, with the yolk still a little runny. There's something primal about eating these things, it's like I'm biting into the heart of a yellow-blooded buffalo.

Egg yolk improves everything. I watch Anthony Bourdain's show, and he'll always go to some crazy Burmese street market where they give him buffalo heart stew and they ALWAYS put a fried egg yolk in the center of it. Holy shit, I want to lick the screen when they show that yolk break. Sometimes, I think it's weird that I eat eggs, since they're chickenbortions. But one bite is pretty much all you need to alleviate your concerns.

On a deeper level, it's stunning that chicken eggs are the essential ingredient in so many different kinds of food. Breads. Pasta. Cakes. Cookies. Salad dressings. Eggs play a vital role in all of them. They're like MAGIC.

Trooper:

How long do you think it will be before we have an out and proud athlete in one of the four major American sports (MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL)? I'm not talking a superstar; the guy could be a third string goalie out of Saskatchewan for all I care. As a gay sports fan, I just think it's overdue, since we know there have been gay guys in the leagues in the past. Also, which of those sports do you think will have a gay athlete first?

It'll be forever. Whoever does it will be someone who came out at an early age and enters whichever league an already-known gay quantity. I doubt you'll ever see some guy who is already a pro suddenly pipe up, HEY! I'M GAY! There are a lot of reasons for this. First off, too many pro athletes are nutjob Evangelicals who fucking hate gays. How many white baseball players out there love to hunt and listen to country music? FUCKING ALL OF THEM. It's uncanny. 75% of Rascal Flatts' revenue comes from Major League Baseball players. Not the sort of guys who like themselves the gay. And I don't think many Latino players are all that pro-gay, either. Very macho culture, as Razor Ramon taught me.

Also, most pro athletes are extremely young guys, pumped up with testosterone and ungodly amounts of HGH. Most of them are aggressively heterosexual. BRAH! I FUCKED THIS CHICK LAST NIGHT! TWICE! BRAHHHHHHH!!! EW, DON'T TOUCH MY TOWEL! THAT WOULD MAKE ME A FAGGOT! There's that urge to be as hetero as possible. Drink the most, bang the most, blah blah blah.

I'll go ahead and freely admit now that, when I was in high school, I could easily be characterized as a homophobe. I used the word faggot all the time (even more than I do now!). I adored Dice Clay. I didn't think gays deserved rights or anything else other than ridicule. I didn't LIKE gays. At all. And not for any sort of bullshit moral reason. No, I was that way because I enjoyed it, and I suspect many other homophobes also hate gays simply because they like to hate them. I could blame youth or growing up in the '80s for how I felt, but that's a bullshit excuse. It's embarrassing and shameful and I wish I'd never felt that way.

It didn't take long for me to do a complete 180 on that old mentality and become extremely liberal in my attitudes towards gays and very supportive of gay rights. This is because I got older, settled down, and realized that inherently disliking gays (or any people outside of Duke fans) is pointless, stupid, and cruel. Some men need to grow up to reach that conclusion, and pro sports is an arena in which players are encouraged to NEVER grow up. Hence, HEY GUYS, GARY'S A FAG!!!!!

If there is ever an active gay athlete in pro sports, it'll never be in football (too many players, too many control freak coaches who don't want to deal with it), or baseball. It'll be in basketball. Because the teams are smaller, so there are less teammates to win over. And, if the gay player is crazy talented, the team will support him because there are only a finite number of superstar players. I'd expect that to happen sometime around the year 3498.

Somewhere along the way, a site like TMZ (or even this one) will out a player by posting a picture of him tonguing some other guy in a leather bar or something. But that's not exactly the same as having an out and proud athlete in the pros. I don't think it'll happen for at least another 20 years. Sad but true.

Also, Jimmy Clausen eats cock.

Matt:

Are you ever a total dick to your friends for no reason? I often find myself making comments to my friends saying stuff like they have no future, no job, no money. Even worse I also make comments about me wanting to bang my friend's mom and sister. No particular reason, but the conversations going nowhere so I decide to spice it up by being a dick.

Yes, because there is a comfort level you reach with certain friends in which you are FREE to be a dick, and so you indulge because you can. You couldn't be a dick to strangers. That would be weird. Much better to be a cock to the best man at your wedding. DAVE, YOU FORGOT TO GET PEANUTS? GOD DAMMIT, YOU ARE A FUCKING FUCKUP. This is why guy friends hit each other for no reason.

ME: Hey, Jeremy.

JEREMY: What?

ME: (punches Jeremy in gut) BOOSH!

It's just one of those guy things. Though I will tell you, when you get older, that dickishness fades, largely because your friends are never around for you to be a dick to.

Matt:

When searching for porn (particularly of the amateur variety), do you ever keep hope in the back of your mind that you'll stumble across an old girlfriend or someone from high school? That'd be the best porn surprise ever. It'd be like a sci-fi movie where you can create real images from your spank bank.

As I mentioned earlier, I had a batshit insane ex-girlfriend, and sometimes I wonder if I'll ever stumble across her not doing porn, but in a news item in which she has been either arrested or killed. I'm not saying I WANT that to happen. I'm just saying I wouldn't be shocked at such things. Just waiting for that shoe to drop. I mean, she lied to me about where she went to school and where she worked. For, like, a fucking YEAR. She could totally be a drug mule now.

Nick:

I spotted this one on a tour boat in Seattle a few years ago and I'll be damned if that is not a penis pattern staring back at me from inside the bowl.

And it's aiming AT you! What kind of game are they playing?

Presidente:

Ever try to squeeze a couple bagfuls of Caprisun into a normal glass? Fucking awful. There must be some kind of devil's magic in that tiny fucking thinner-than-Michael-Vick's-herpes-ravaged-urethra straw, because in any other vessel the juice just tastes like the nastiest watered down crap you could imagine.

Plus it only fills one-fourth of the glass. Certain foods are enhanced by either their vessel or the setting in which they are served. Like Capri Sun. Or giant pretzels at the ballpark. Some of those pretzels are real dogshit.

Bagoon:

I was a massive manwhore in college simply because the opportunities always presented themselves. The thing I miss most about the whole being single thing is the Predator scenario I went through every night at the Frats; I felt like I was in that invisible mode with the heat seeker vision going. I'd just stealth through the blackness and find the weak one and BAM hookup glory. I always imagined this is how every guy went about it, but recently I was told I was an asshole.

Well, who told you that? A woman? If a man told you that, then he probably reads The Atlantic, or something like that. All I know is that, when I was single and drunk, I searched for any live body I could get my hands on. Why wouldn't you? You're only single once, you know. Or eight times if you're Jean-Claude Van Damme.

There were times when I was drunk, and I really did feel like an animal scouring the dance floor for available womenfolk. Hooking up was the only goal. Ever. I never went out one night and was like, "So long as I get ice cream, THIS WILL BE A FUN EVENING!" No, it was always poon or bust. I never wanted to go home without making sure I first exhausted every possible avenue to finding a lady for the evening. Any lady: big, small, retard, whatever. I guess that made me a creep. I don't think I really gave a shit at the time. If you're single? Have at it.

Aaron:

Ever email something to yourself at work and then, in the 30 seconds it takes to "deliver" the email, completely forget about it and freak out when you realize you have a new message? I do this nearly every day.

ME: Clicks send on email to self, leans back in chair, relaxes, thinks about possibility of leaving early

(/five seconds pass, New Message alert pops us)

ME: Fuck, now what? It's Friday afternoon. This better not be a ...

(/slowly realizes own idiocy)

Sometimes. What usually happens with me is that I'll email myself to remind myself to do something. Then I'll open the email the instant I send it because I have email OCD and can't stand the idea of unopened mail in my inbox, then immediately forget to do what I was reminding myself to do. Happens to me pretty much on a daily basis.

I forget everything now. The same shit, over and over again. I'm supposed to brush my kid's teeth every morning. I always forget. ALWAYS. The wife comes down…

WIFE: You brush her teeth?

ME: FUCK!!!!!! (hits self in head)

I get unreasonably angry at myself when I forget to do things. My wife will call me at the store to remind to pick something up, and the SECOND I hang up the phone, I will forget about it. Annoying.

When it comes to email, the thing I hate the most is when I'm eagerly awaiting an email reply from someone about something, then the INBOX (1) will appear, then I'll fall all over myself to open my inbox, and then it's a piece of fucking spam. Never fails to make me want to spear a group of schoolchildren to death.

Robert:

Is it ok that I also blow my nose in the sink? Like once I've finished doing the dishes, sometimes I'll just keep the water running and blow my nose straight into my bare hands. The water is hot and immediately absolves me of all grossness. Amiright? My girlfriend looks at me like I'm a fucking abomination, but lets face it: I am the model of efficiency.

I do this, but I never do it with my wife around. THIS IS WHERE WE PUT OUR CHILDREN'S DISHES! Yes, but the kid's plates are loaded with their half-chewed food and drool, shit that is just as revolting as my loogies. I fail to see how I'm befouling something that houses so many dirty things to begin with. Plus, I can clean it! There's a dishbrush right there, lady!

Luke:

I've lived in a city for fourteen years now and the thing I miss the most about the country is going to a house party, getting shithammered, and wandering out into the woods behind the house to take a piss. Even (arguably especially) in knee-deep winter snow. It feels like Freedom, like it was meant to be this way for men. When I visit my hometown I hit every tree before I leave.

That is a great feeling. I remember at college, it was never really all that fun to wade through 80 people in the crowd at a party just to find a tiny piece of real estate to stand there with a friend and shout shit to one another. Always nicer to go outside into the cold and have some fucking room. You appreciate the air more when you're blitzed out of your skull. And you can actually hear other people when you're talking to them.

I loved wandering out in the cold with a Solo cup full of shitty beer in hand and just standing out there in the night, either on a porch or in the woods. Something peaceful about it. Until I booted in the snow.

Adam:

If you had to be shot where would you want to take it?

Upper left arm? Upper left arm. Provided no bones are broken by the bullet. Although, I had a football coach in college who was accidentally shot in the calf during Mardi Gras. No bones broke, he was too drunk to really remember the initial hit, and he was left with a nice little bullet wound that served as potential fodder for any number of great lies. Hard to find a more pleasant being-shot scenario than that.

HALFTIME!

Tony:

Fuck banana strings. FUCK THEM.

There's always one clinger when I peel. Terrible.

Mike:

Ever go to someone's house or a restroom (for whatever reason some faucets on the U of Minnesota campus are like this) and be surprised to find a sink that has separate faucets for hot and cold water? How in God's name am I supposed to have a decent handwashing experience? On the one hand (literally!) my palm is burnt to shit and the other is a fucking icicle. Am I supposed to move my hands back and forth really fast like I'm doing some fucking rave dance? Fuck you double faucets!

Most double faucets are that way because they're old, and whoever is in charge of the bathroom is too cheap to replace them. It's the cousin of the "push the button to start the faucet and watch the water peter out one-fourth of the way through your wash" faucet at various rest stops across our fair nation.

I avoid the hot water entirely in that scenario because you never know where someone has set their water heater. A water heater acts like a governor on hot water. It can only get as hot as you set it. Some people set the water heater in their home or building to 5 million degrees. Only you won't know that until you go to wash your hands, flip the faucet up to the right, and then get third-degree burns all over the goddamn place.

People who turn their water heaters up like this fail to understand the principles of operating a sink or shower. When I operate any sink, I first jam the faucet all the way to the left. This is because most of the time, the water starts out cold as balls. So my thinking (wrong) is that jamming the faucet all the way to the left will get the water hotter, faster. I also do this to gauge the maximum hotness of the water, and then adjust the faucet to the right accordingly. I am horrid at getting the temperature exactly right. I always overcorrect to the right, the water gets too cold, and then I have to slowly move the control back to the left.

Anyway, throwing it all the way to the left on a sink where A) the water heater is turned way fucking high, and B) the sink has an abnormally quick heating rate (only in deathly hot sinks and showers does this occur), leaves me yelping in pain from the burn. No pain causes me to violently jerk my body away like burning my hand or my finger. One touch, and I spasm like a bitch. SON OF A CUNT THAT IS HOT!!!

Nick:

There is nothing lower or more humiliating then having to call the front desk and ask for a plunger at a hotel.

No? Not even calling the front desk and asking if the adult films are discreetly billed, which is precisely how I phrased my question to the concierge, who said yes, but wasn't being truthful?

Eric:

Why do people refrigerate ketchup? Everything you put ketchup on is warm/hot. Putting cold ketchup on warm eggs or hash browns ruins it. Would you put cold gravy on mashed potatoes?

No, but there's a reason why. Ketchup is a necessary cooling agent. You get fries fresh out of the fryer, they will burn the fuck out of your hard palate if you just start going to town on them. But dip them in cool ketchup? BOOM. Hot stays hot. Cool stays cool.

And off you go. Whereas gravy makes for a critical warming agent. How long do mashed potatoes stay hot? Three minutes? But pour boiling hot gravy on them, they stay hot all the way through the meal. You see? THIS IS SCIENCE.

Also, putting ketchup on eggs is fucking gross.

Matt:

Were you tired of watching SportsCenter and hearing fucking Mike Greenberg tell everyone that we always forget that the US had to go play another game after upsetting the Soviets?

"And don't forget! I KNOW A FACT THAT YOU ALSO KNOW, BUT I'M GOING TO ASSUME YOU DON'T!"

Will:

Recently I spent a Saturday afternoon shopping with my girlfriend at the local mall. I was struck by how badly I wanted to beat up numerous 15 year-olds. And am I justified in my desire to maim these teenage deviants?

Yep. I mean Jesus, they look like fucking dipshits. I feel like an old person hating on teenagers, but really. Those fucking kids who are blocking my path to my car because they're skateboarding in the goddamn parking lot? BUY AN EMPTY SWIMMING POOL. And get a fucking haircut, you little shits.

Jim:

Don't want your buttons broken? Unbutton your goddamned clothes! As someone who has worked at a dry cleaners, I can tell you that if the shirt goes into machines with buttons buttoned, it will pull on the shirt and rip the damn thing off. So I spent some nights at work until 3AM unbuttoning buttons. The only comfort was pot.

Ah. I did not know that. Um… sorry.

Poopy Buttrag:

Everyone knows that it sucks when a coworker decides to request your Facebook friendship. The other day, the girl-next-door but conservatively-dressed Asian who I sometimes make small talk with in the hallway decided to do just that. To my surprise, amongst the most boring pictures you'd ever want to see, were two pictures of her in a bikini at the beach last summer. She doesn't know, but she unwittingly caused the spilling of gallons of baby sauce over the months ahead. So thank you, my co-worker friend, my micro-tadpoles are going to see the world rather than just the inside of my testicles because of you. This is appropriate, right?

Referee Mills Lane?

"I'll allow it."

Look, she posted the pictures, and she was the one who friended you. Classic female naivete.

HER: "Oh, look at this picture! That was a fun beach trip! I bet everyone will agree with me that this picture shows I had fun!"

YOU: (drooling, licking chops, could give two shits about someone else's vacation) Grrrrr… fresh meat… want to touch…

Tom:

Can we safely say that Home Alone is the most unrealistic movie of all time? The kid doesn't say a fucking word about what he did to anyone. You expect me to believe that kid, who successfully got to live out every man's fantasy, is just going to keep all of the awesome shit he did to himself?

Yeah, and all he wants is plain cheese pizza? No sausage? No pepperoni? I hate kids like that. SHOW SOME ADVENTUROUSNESS.

Ten-year-old kids like that would obviously brag about foiling burglars. They'll brag about anything, even shit they shouldn't be bragging about. I once bragged on my school bus about having a wet dream. THERE'S NOTHING COOL ABOUT HAVING A WET DREAM.

V-Juice:

What's the deal with the "close door" buttons on elevators? I have never seen one that works when you push it. People seem to think that hitting it repeatedly, hitting it slowly, etc will be the trick to get the door closed faster. It won't.

I've seen CLOSE DOOR buttons that work. What's more, I have totally been guilty of pushing the button repeatedly. I know it doesn't do anything extra. It just feels good to jam the fuck out of it over and over. Pushing buttons is just a fun thing to do. My kids have toys with buttons you push, like plastic cash registers and shit. I push the buttons on them all the time. Just because.

Also, when in an elevator, I dread some fucker coming at the last minute and causing the doors to reopen, costing me valuable nanoseconds on my descent or ascent. I HAVE SHIT TO DO!

Jon:

I just made an off-hand joke to my friends about how when I build a house, I'm gonna put a urinal in my bathroom, and they all laughed and shrugged me off. So I started getting adamant about it. Why not? One guy says it's not classy. What?! I walk into a dude's house and he's got a urinal in his master bath, I am fucking impressed, this guy has it all in excess. Another dude says if there's a woman in the house, it's useless. Uh, except for the total elimination of toilet seat fights for the rest of your life and/or relationship!

Tell me I'm not crazy. I'm going urinal shopping tonight.

I'd also put that goalie thing from the last mailbag in the pisser, just for that extra homey touch.

You, of course, DO have a urinal in your home. It's called the shower. Though I fully concede I only piss in the shower when inside it or about to step in. I've never peed in my own shower while clothed and not actually USING the shower. That would be weird.

I doubt any wife would allow a urinal in the bathroom. Too crass, they'd say. They'd suggest two full toilets instead. I'd accede to that, but insist on a urinal in the basement game room of my mansion. I think I could win that battle.

Kyle:

I went to Ohio State. My roommates and I lived in an older split-level home which the new owner converted into 1 house. We converted one of the living rooms into a pool room. We were down there playing and one of the wall panels suddenly fell over. We took a look inside and we find a BIG FUCKING SAFE HIDDEN IN THE WALL. There were only 2 of us in the room at the time, so we gathered all of our roommates around for the unveiling. Alas, completely empty. This was extremely depressing.

If you were to find a safe in an older home, what would you expect or want to find inside of it?

The following: A money belt containing $50,000 cash of every foreign currency. Numerous passports with various aliases and pictures of a man who, as luck would have it, bears a solid resemblance to myself. A secret list containing the names and addresses of various foreign double agents living abroad. A rifle. Two handguns. An open plane ticket to Paris. Security tapes of Tim Tebow punching a pregnant woman.

Brian:

This is a debate I've had many times: Out of any TV show past or present, what fake home or set do you wish you could live on? I'm talking living your normal life; the actual cast from the show doesn't factor in. Here are mine, in no particular order:

1. The Cosby Show: Huge house in Brooklyn, they had a backyard where you could grill/shoot hoops, along with a home office. That's only affordable on a doctor/lawyer's marriage. This is about 500% larger than any normal person's home in NYC or the boroughs.

2. Silver Spoons: Everything had a remote control. Hey! Someone's at the door — let me GRAB THE FUCKING REMOTE and see who it is. They had a train that would take you around the house. They had a plethora of REAL video games in their game room.

3. The Brady Bunch

4. The Facts of Life: I want to live in a house that has a bakery connected to it. Hungry in the middle of the night? OPEN THE BAKERY.

5. The Sopranos: Huge kitchen/living room, with a bed that always looks extremely big and comfortable.

Wayne Manor. Wayne Manor all the fucking way. Batcave. Batmobile. Batpoles. Butler. I'll take all that, thank you.

Not to go all Simmons on you, but pretty much any Real World house. They're always huge. They always have all kinds of cool shit in them. They're always in a good location. Apart from fumigating the joint and cleaning all the douche out, it's hard to argue with the joint they had in London or Miami or any of those places. I watched that show when it started, and they'd always tour the joint, show you all the awesome stuff, then show you the ungrateful fucks who got to hang out in it. Always made me want to punch them in the fucking face.

Moviewise, I always had a real affection for Winthorpe's place in Philly in Trading Places. God damn, that looked like a nice place. Always wanted to live in a bigass city townhome like that. Mozart playing at all hours.

Mike:

Are you ever disappointed when you are done eating because you have no food left? I'll go to a fast food joint and even though I spent enough money to buy a gourmet meal I am a little sad inside when I eat that last chicken nugget. After sadness comes shame for eating so much.

Happens pretty much every time I eat. I'm never emotionally prepared when the last bite arrives, especially now that I'm on a diet. Oh, that's it. No more after this. Well, that's… (has nervous breakdown)

Chas:

If you could choose a song to play when entering a toilet stall, what would it be? And you can't say "Smell what The Rock is Cookin'." That is too easy.

"Sky Is Falling," by Queens of the Stone Age.

NSR:

Like you, I am gay for Tim Gunn and crew. The reason I watch the show is to find my secret hip designer TV girlfriend to lust over for four months. This season I have it bad for Maya – those retro black bangs and lips make me want to throw her up against the Bluefly accessory wall. So, how to you strike the right balance of picking a favorite and rooting for her (or him, to each his own) without betraying the carnal reason below to your wife?

I swear to God, Maya spends every week staring at the camera looking like she's going to crawl through the set and do blow off your stomach. The fact that appears to be roughly 3 feet tall is little deterrent. She's got ScarJo's face and upper chestal area, and they ALWAYS stick her in the front row when they gather designers so she can primp for the camera. No way that girl doesn't spend every night in Manhattan out at clubs until 4 a.m. popping ecstasy pills like Tic Tics.

Anyway, just keep that shit to yourself. Root for the hilarious gay black dude, like I do. Black people NEVER win that fucking show.

Kristofferson Kriskristofferson:

My bottle of shampoo contains the following instructions: 1. Lather 2. Rinse 3. Repeat. My question to you is whether anyone actually repeats and, if so, why? Is this just a scam perpetrated by the shampoo industry to encourage needless consumption of its product?

I think you might repeat if you got poop in your hair or something. Something you REALLY wanted to make sure was completely evacuated from your hair. I think I lathered and rinsed twice once when I got boot in my hair. Tough to get all that boot out.

FT:

Me and three buddies helped a friend move into a 4th floor walkup last weekend. Anyway, towards the end of the day, we carried this guy's huge couch up four flights of steps. Given that there were four other people involved, I decided that it was ok for me to "fake lift" the couch up the steps. I put my hands under the couch just like everyone else, had a strained look on my face and make appropriate grunting noises. The other guys clearly were really lifting, and they had no idea what I was doing. Am I a bad guy for engaging in this fraud? Isn't everyone entitled to a "fake lift" every now and then?

Yes. Absolutely. I enjoy coming in late to the group heavy object lift and grabbing it in one of those magic spots where there is no weight being borne. If enough people lift one heavy object, there are always spots like that. It's one of the more pleasant surprises of a move.

When moving, I used to get off on moving very large and cumbersome (but light) objects on my won with no assistance. Makes you totally look strong. "Are you gonna move that whole plush chair yourself?" Oh, yes. BANK ON IT. Sometimes, if you're lucky, a woman will watch you move the whole object with a look of concern on her face the whole time. She thinks you're going to drop it. BUT YOU DON'T. FUCKING STRONG.

Marcus:

Occasionally I'll catch myself worrying what would happen if I suddenly forgot how to breathe. There would be that small moment in time when I almost swallow my tongue, followed by extreme panic as I can't figure out how to open my throat again. I usually just tell myself that if it hasn't happened yet, it probably won't but, like clockwork, at least once a month I am overtaken with anxiety about it (for at least 4 seconds).

I only get that same pang of anxiety whenever I take over voluntary breathing functions for something like stretching, or just breathing slowly to calm down. Once I become conscious of my breathing, I get a little worried that the involuntary function may never come back, and I'll have to spend the rest of my life remembering to inhale and shit.

Andy:

I reply to IMs while masturbating. Chances are if you know me, and have IM'd me with any sort of frequency in the past 14 years, I've taken a moment out of my jerking to kindly reply to you.

That is wrong, and I don't condone it. You're going to slime your keyboard doing that.

Chuck:

If you're ever at one of those restaurants with a self-service soft serve machine and the "ice cream" is coming out a bit slowly, I highly suggest making groaning sounds as if the machine is in the midst of a difficult dump. Any eight-year-old boy in line behind you will find it quite entertaining.

What restaurant has that? Golden Corral? I'd abuse that thing like a robot lover.

Alden:

True story: I purchased my first box of tampons last September (I'm a 25 year old dude) before going to Kabul, Afghanistan for the first time. I had heard they were good for plugging bullet holes in the event you found yourself perforated by an AK-47. I bought the heaviest flow I could find because I figured I'm a bleeder. I bought the generic CVS brand; should I have splurged for name-brand tampons?

I defer to Iraq vet Matt Ufford on this. Uff says:

I have yet to hear the theory that you should jam something inside a bullet wound — especially since first aid compresses already exist (also, those compresses are designed for combat use and easy to tear open, not wrapped in plastic like tampons).

That said, as with all other products, the higher price of name-brand products in drug stores is only for the slick packaging. I would guess that the CVS tampons stop blood flow just as well Tampax or whatever.

So there you go. You made both a wise purchase AND a stupid purchase. Give them to your mom.

Finally today, yet another GREAT MOMENT IN POOP HISTORY. And once again, we deal with the Vice Presidency.

Zach [NOTE: It's come to our attention that this story bears a striking resemblance to this one, from The Foggy Monocle]:

I headed to the bathroom before going back to work. I was finishing up my pee (definitely NOT masturbating) when two men in suits entered, each sporting dark sunglasses and a white telephone cord that reached from their left ear backwards into the collar of their jacket. Completely brushing past me and another gentleman at the sink, they proceeded to open every stall and inspect, flushing one of them as they continued to probe the lavatory. It reminded me of a cop looking for drugs at my house. As my curiosity neared its apex, I saw one of the men raise his hand to his face and speak furtively into his mic, "We're all clear."

Suddenly the bathroom door flew open as if drawn by a magnet, and then Vice President Cheney himself entered hastily with his hand clutching his gut. Ushered by another service agent, he gave my fellow witness and me the slightest head nod as he rifled for the appointed stall. While my powder room corroborator exited the bathroom immediately, I idled for a second, spurred by my hangover perhaps, and "feigned" vanity as I peered into the mirror. Soon it happens. A few noises emanated from that fated stall, sounding off like a bag of pudding rupturing violently from the inside, followed by a barely audible vocal contraction. Holy shit! So the second-in-command of our country is not immune to gastrointestinal volatility. Any pangs of disgust were immediately overruled by the goofy smile I was involuntarily forced to wear. This was obviously too much to take. Shooting for the door, I caught a stern glance from one of the Matrix dudes that conveyed the unspoken words, "You better not fucking tell anyone about this." I suppose the widespread dissemination of this story is just my cross to bear.

He greeted that toilet as a liberator.

It's always perilous when the tropes of sports reporting bleed into the abyss of real life. As anyone who has ever worked in news organization with a sports department can tell you, the sports section is always siphoned off from the rest of the paper. It's a bit of a turf war of nonsense. When I wrote the Fair And Foul blog for the Times a few years ago, it was under the umbrella of the opinion section, rather than the sports section. This was extremely important to both sides: The columns had to be separate from the sports department's coverage, clearly delineated as edited by different people than the other sports stories. This even though this was the Web, and no reader could possibly understand or care. I'm guilty of this as well. At The Sports Section at nymag.com, I avoided the Tiger Woods debacle like the plague, under the auspices that Tiger was a gossip story, not a sports story, like a Web user would tell the difference. My real reason was that the Tiger story bored and depressed me. It didn't seem like sports; it seemed like Page Six junk. The blurring of those lines is not something anyone who covers sports professionally wants to deal with, with the obvious exceptions of the people who run this site, Bill Simmons, Jason Whitlock, Jeremy Schaap and maybe Mario Lopez. It all comes back to that Nancy Grace Rule. To me, sports is a place to escape from the real world, not to be reminded of it. It took me a while to figure this out.

But the crossover is nonetheless inevitable, which is why, once again, we're about to deal with another season of What The Tigers Mean To Detroit pieces. Detroit (economic collapse) and New Orleans (natural disaster) are the usual suspects, though you can certainly make the claim that St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Cleveland and Oakland aren't exactly full of lively, thriving citizens these days either. (Let us all be relieved the Yankees are no longer representing post-September 11 resilience.) Wading into the deep end of the pool is asking sports journalists to do something they are not inherently trained to do; this is, after all, why they so often leave the yard. They don't want to do it, and we don't want them to. Yet, still, they do. Dave Dombrowski didn't trade Curtis Granderson as an insensitive rebuke to a struggling city; he did it to keep payroll down and keep the team competitive for the distant future. Asking him to constantly keep both in mind is moving the goalposts.

I am not sure why we all feel compelled to do this, to attempt to elevate sports into something they are not. It is slack-jawed obvious that the success or failure of the Detroit Tigers this season will have a negligible, at best, effect on the economic climate of the metropolitan area, but that's not gonna stop some poor bastard, at some point, being forced to ask Johnny Damon how Important he feels the Tigers are to their fans. I mean not to cast aspersions here, but Johnny Damon's ability to access depths of profound introspection is up for debate. Asking him about the unemployment rate seems cruel. There are actual experts to comment on Detroit's well-being. They're difficult to find in the press box, though, and on an 11:30 p.m. postgame deadline.

I do not deny that a city can bond together and rally around a sports team in a way that helps them temporarily forget their troubles and woe. (See here for glorious details.) But after everyone has packed up their laptops and gone home, the city will remain, in pain, desperate to keep its head afloat. Detroit has larger problems than can be solved over a weekend series when your team is in town, even if the Tigers win two out of three. If you want to root for the Tigers because Detroit is bleeding, and believe it makes a difference, feel free. But please forgive the rest of us if we just concern ourselves with how many opportunities Austin Jackson has to steal and thus help our fantasy team. It's the only sane option.

I was quite familiar with Deadspin when I took this internship. I was the commenter Cecil's Wielder for a time, was featured in a Deleted Scenes (I'll get to the bottom of this Easterbrook business), took some terrible pictures at the Bill Simmons signing, and even got a job from formerly Chief Wahoo once. Hi, Sam!

It's high time to get some basic questions out of the way, and what better inspiration than one of my favorite favorite questionnaires ever.

About David

Favorite Color: Blue
Favorite Sit-Down Restaurant: Applebee's? Barking Dog?
Favorite Modern Invention: Gore-Tex
Favorite Food: Spanish Rice
I Chose CSI Because: I actually went to Fordham. Their auxiliary campus, with the emphasis being that it's a Manhattan school.
Hobbies: Your basic 20-something hobbies, Taboo
When I Was Little, I Wanted To Be: In Point Break
Now, I Want To Be: The writer of Point Break
Favorite Cereal: Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch
Favorite CSI Instructor: Brenda Larsen
If I Could Be An Animal, I Would Be: One of the lesser sexual innuendo ones.
Favorite TV Show: Yacht Rock

This Or That
Shaven or Unshaven
English or Math
Salt or Sugar
Casual or Dress Up
Hamburger or Hot dog
Mountain (Mississippi Queen!) or Beaches
Cake or Pie
Vanilla or Chocolate
Talk or Listen
Coffee or Hot Chocolate

Now, a story:

I'm a huge fan of both Drew Magary and Dave Bry, who writes for The Awl. Bry does a feature in which he apologizes to people for various transgressions. So, I have decided to tell a poop story as well as apologize.

It was senior year at my college preparatory high school in Chicago that Michael Wilbon may or may not have attended. Astonishingly, our basketball team had made the playoffs and was to face Will Bynum's alma mater. Being young and dumb, my friends and I thought the best way to attend the big game was drunk. And so drunk we were.

Now, a drunk high school basketball game attendee is nothing new. But a drunk high school basketball game attendee repeatedly calling a bench warmer on his school's team "Poop Stick"? That is another matter.

My high school was one that had a lot of parties, and I even went to a few of them (although clearly not enough). Allegedly, at one of these parties, said bench warmer — we'll call him "Brendan" — and his girlfriend at the time, "Kendra," had decided to, as no one said at the time, "Do it." But they had decided to try a less traditional method, and an incident occurred that warranted me shouting "Poop Stick" at this kid.

My shouting began during the warm up drills. "Way to go, Poop Stick" is not something you want to hear after doing a proper left-handed layup or hitting a jay from the elbow, let alone after missing one.

Soon, the laughs died away and the game began. It was at this point that I thought it a good idea to call for Poop Stick's insertion into the game. "Yo, Kehoe, put in Poop Stick" is not something that you should yell at your history teacher, but I didn't know that then.

Needless to say, the act grew tiresome, and it was brought to my attention that "Kendra" was actually sitting perilously close to my group and had most likely heard everything. Rather than seeing this as the time to shut up, I began my taunting with renewed vigor. When I saw a teary-eyed "Kendra" leaving before the half with one of her friends, it was triumph that I felt, not shame.

After the seventh or eighth "Way to go, dick," my grin eventually subsided, and I decided to return to the game and root for the team. At least I hope that's what I did. I was pretty gone.

Well, "Brendan" and "Kendra," I have wanted to apologize to you in some way for quite awhile, but obviously not enough to make a real effort. Really, if I had run into you at Game Keepers or Lincoln Station, that would've been horrible, right? So, "Brendan" and "Kendra," if you're out there, that was a dick move on my part. My bad.

Now, for the rest of you, I like doing video stuff so if you find something good, or see something really good, email, email, email. I'm at david@deadspin.com. Of course, tips are also accepted. Lastly: Greg Paulus. What a competitor .