Okay, let’s talk about this FUCKING Bux game I’m simply not BELIEVING as it unfolds before my horrified eyes.

Oh, the Bux defense has been on their game, but honestly, it’s supposed to be. The Bux offense has simply been appalling all game. Brad Johnson… BRAD JOHNSON!!!.. threw TWO FUCKING INTERCEPTIONS in the first quarter… ONE OF THEM IN THE END ZONE!!! I mean, HOLY SHIT!!

Beyond that, the whole first half was marred by penalties. After the first few, I had to pretty much resign myself to it… if the Bux had a nice looking pick up on offense, it was coming back on a flag.

And, you know, I am now officially over Shaun King. The announcers keep giving him hand jobs about his great quarterback statistics in the pre season, and maybe he’s brought his accuracy up, but who cares? He cannot get anywhere near the end zone. He cannot move the team consistently down the field. And personally, I think he’s a little bit too eager to find opportunities to run out of the pocket; he seems to think he’s going to knock Brad Johnson out of the top spot by convincing someone he’s a garage sale Michael Vick.

Okay, we’re punting after another Shaun King drive fizzles. Hey, can we put Chris Simms in, please? I’d like a Bux touchdown sometime tonight.

It occurs to me that Shaun King fans (and such there be, bizarre though the concept is) who might read this at some point in the future may immediately start whining about how Shaun hasn’t had the A team to move around the way Brad Johnson gets. I say bullshit. Thomas Jones has rocked the earth nearly every time he gets near the ball, and King has had Karl Williams consistently in his unit as well. He’s had a lot of running and receiving talent and he hasn’t been able to do a goddam thing that matters on the field all pre-season.

On the other hand, Simms goes out on the field with the same stuff King has to work with, or third stringers, and he puts the Bux consistently into the end zone.

Well, the Bux have the ball again; let’s see if they can do anything with it this time. Maybe they’ll let Simms do something.

Okay, could we please stop doing sideline interviews while plays are actually occurring on the field? I mean, JESUS!!

Ah, Thomas Jones finally gets the Bux a touchdown. THANK YOU, TJ.

And I suppose I should apologize slightly to Shaun King, since he was quarterbacking that drive, but as far as I can see, Gruden simply minimized King’s potential for making errors by keeping the ball on the ground. I guess Shaun handed it off well, though. Go, Shaun.

I’ve noticed over this preseason that professional announcers like to say ‘in this league, you have to…” a lot. Somebody just mentioned that “in this league, quarterbacks have to be tough”. It just makes me wonder. Are there other football leagues? Well, I guess there are, there’s arena football and NFL Europe and like that… so do announcers for those leagues ever note, “Well, in this league, quarterbacks can be great big pussies and it doesn’t matter”?

And there have now been three flags thrown on a lousy Jacksonville punt, two against Jacksonville and one against the Bux. Nice to see crisp, professional level play here in the pre-season, yes it is.

Okay, fourth quarter, and hopefully, Chris Simms will come in and rack us up some points. The Bux can most likely count on its defense to preserve a four point lead, but I wouldn’t mind seeing the front line visit the endzone a few more times, and Chris seems to be the guy we go to for that here in preseason.

AGH!! It’s fourth quarter and SHAUN KING IS STILL SCREWING UP MY OFFENSE!! GET HIM OUT GET HIM OUT GET HIM OUT!!

Yeah. Three and out and now we’re punting. Nice job, Shaun. Please sit your ass down on the bench and do not get off it again this game.

And we have another penalty. Yay.

Christ. Does ANYONE sponsor NFL besides car companies?

Okay, my boy Chris Simms is in… ahhh… he’s not doing much. Oh, well.

And we have another flag on our fourth down punt.

Yeah, yeah, I’m being nicer to Chris than I was to Shaun. When Shaun throws for two touchdowns and two two point conversions, I’ll start being nice to him, too.

Mind you, I don’t expect to have to make good on that.

Okay, the Jags just sort of stumbled into the end zone, but thankfully, they had a big flag on the play and got sent back ten yards. Yay.

And the Bux recover a fumble! About damn time they had a turnover in their favor.

And Mr. Simms will be coming back out. Let’s see if he can put a drive together for me.

Well, he couldn’t. But the Bux won anyway. They won sloppy, ugly and aggravating… wow, flashback to the Dungy era!! But still, it’s a ‘w’.

We need to do better than this, though. We really, really do.

SHIFT_IDIOCY

Car commercials are the worst.

Car commercials that start out trying to look like a movie spot are especially aggravating. Like nearly everyone, I find most movie commercials to be a welcome break from the usual ad stream. While movie spots are, indeed, trying to get me to buy a product, the product they’re selling, by definition, has to entertain and titillate me during its commercials, or I’m not going to go watch the movie. So movie ads have to (at least in theory) provide me with some viewing pleasure, which is one helluva lot more than most other commercials bother trying to do… and CAR commercials are, as noted, the absolute worst.

So for a car commercial to, even for a passing instant, con me into thinking I’m about to get to watch a movie ad is simply unacceptably aggravating. And just to add insult to injury, the particular car commercial I’m thinking of has a Smash Mouth song running in the background. I don’t know how other people feel about the use of pop music hits in commercials, but I find it obnoxious as hell.

I don’t know why car commercials are, at least currently, the worst class of commercials over all. Perhaps because the target market for most car manufacturers are the more affluent classes, and thus, the companies don’t want to risk offending potential customers, so they keep anything even remotely controversial out of their ad campaigns.

However, I’ve noticed that the edgy, funny, entertaining ad campaigns of the late 1980s and 1990s seem to be dwindling away. You still see some funny, interesting stuff in the ads that are aimed primarily at a younger, predominantly male audience (read that as, beer and liquor ads). However, anything that targets a broader demographic seems to have gotten resolutely boring. Has anyone else noticed how generic and tedious the Taco Bell campaigns have become? Only last year they were still doing edgy, occasionally very funny stuff, but lately, they seem to have switched over to whoever has been writing those really flat, unfunny, utterly mainstream ads for Wendy’s for the last couple of years. Subway’s commercials have gone from occasionally funny to really painful to sit through, especially since they’ve added this nameless so called comedian as their spokesperson.

Getting back to car commercials, however… Dodge has about the most relentlessly boring ones. Their strategy seems to be to write ads that appear, simply on the surface, to be funny… they set up certain situations that seem to have humorous potential, with visually odd looking customers interacting crisply with various salespeople… yet there’s never anything remotely approaching actual humor. They’ll have a couple of similar looking, shaven headed, fat guys come in and these guys will be boisterous and enthusiastic and smack their chests together and high five each other and turn the radio in the car they’re looking at up and bob their heads to some music we can’t hear, and all of this is very kinetic and visual, and it all seems to be signalling to us that it’s very funny, but in fact, there’s really nothing funny in that. It’s like every Dodge commercial is a long, well written set up for a brilliant punch line, and then the punch line never comes.

Probably the most annoying car commercial I’ve seen, though, is the SUV ad that talks about how it’s ‘for your adventures in the urban wilderness’. You know the one… we see several urban scenes of people doing various urban things, with different jungle and animal noises superimposed on the soundtrack. There’s one shot of kids on an overhead jungle gym, with monkey noises tracking over it, that I think is especially badly conceived, because it makes it painfully obvious that this must be the only urban landscape in America with no black people in it.

Of course, if any ad executive was ever stupid enough to propose a commercial showing black people with jungle noises superimposed over them, that clueless dolt would probably end up getting jail time for it, somehow. You simply wouldn’t do a commercial like that; you’d be hearing the screams from every minority special interest group in America seconds after the ad aired for the first time. Hell, you’d probably get protests before the ad aired, these days.

And I don’t object to those objections. I simply note that a commercial that implies human beings are beasts, and you need a special car to keep you safe from the animals that are your fellow city dwellers, should be considered offensive even if the ad is very careful to only use white folks in it. If it’s offensive (and it is) to superimpose animal growls and jungle noises over pictures of black people, it’s just as obnoxious to do it over white people, I think.

As our cultural comedy has turned ugly, mean, and relentlessly vulgar over the last twenty years, our mainstream advertising seems to be getting more and more boring. Both developments are rather depressing.

RANDOM NUMBERS

Laura McElroy is anchoring ABC-28’s eleven o’clock newscast tonight. I always enjoy watching Laura, despite the fact that I should and do know better, because one time she came up and introduced herself to me when I was hanging around outside the City Council chamber, waiting for Council to adjourn to so I could go in and help out my then-boss, Gail. Laura obviously mistook me for someone important that it might be good to cultivate; she gave me a big hit of positive attention, something I’m sure she doesn’t remember but, well, good looking, competent, intelligent, obviously high powered women don’t come over and introduce themselves to me with a big shiny professional smile and a firm power shake very often, so it’s kind of burned onto my memory.

I confess, I didn’t recognize her when she introduced herself… I’ve noticed that electronic journalists, especially, look very different in person than they do on the screen, for some reason… but I realized who she was the next time I saw her on TV. Not really worth noting, I suppose. But hey, my life has so many exciting things in it, sometimes it’s hard to choose what I should throw up here.

An interesting thing… okay, not to any of you, but it’s not like any of you are PAYING me, so just keep it to yourself there, skippy… is that apparently, Paul’s dog Chewbacca has forgotten how to get out of his collar. I guess dogs can learn to do stuff from experience, but it seems that two weeks in the double collar harness that foiled all Chewie’s attempts at escape have unlearned his egregiously annoying Houdini dog behavior.

Which is nice, because now when he gets antsy, we can just put him outside on his leash without worrying that within minutes, he’s going to be off roaming the neighborhood.

Okay, yes, that’s really boring. As Joliet Jake’s not so silent brother Elwood once inquired, “What do you want for nothin’?”

And… hmmmm… lovely, gracious Elayne Riggs has suddenly turned my whole day around (with twenty minutes left on the clock) by dropping a nice comment on my current page (which, since I’m still typing this, will be Thursday’s archive by the time you all read this) complimenting me on “Believe It… And Die!” So thank you, Elayne, and I guess I’ll have to draw up a few more of them now.

Hey, blame her.

I sent the amazingly annoying Tuxedo Slack an email the other day giving him a Doc Nebula style pep talk and feedback on several of his blog pages. I think he may have committed suicide, or at least, gone into emotional shock, as a result. At least, he hasn’t had a new blog entry in a while. I’d say something like “I must use this power only for good”, but so far, it seems to be an ability I can only use to aggravate and annoy.

Oh, cuz in law Mel called me up and asked me to babysit her six year old for a couple of hours this afternoon. Actually, she wanted Paul, but Paul had to work. I was obviously her absolute last resort and she was obviously less than thrilled at the thought, which is certainly okay, since babysitting any six year old in the world has to be in my Top One Hundred Things I’d Rather Not Do, Thank You Very Much.

However, me being the only babysitter Mel could get seems to have worked wonders on her ability to find a way to not need a babysitter after all, since she called me back an hour later and said she’d found a way around it. Heh. I bet Paul would have been stuck going over there, though.

It’s like washing dishes badly whenever your mom makes you do it. Eventually, she just gives up and does them herself. (This didn’t work on my mom; she just beat me severely until I learned to wash them right.)

I have to admit, I have no idea why so many people regard me as such a lousy babysitter, but while I’m being so honest, I also have to say I guess I don’t mind, since it’s certainly not anything I really want to do.

I was a little disappointed Mel cancelled, though, because I loaned a buncha videotapes and DVDs to her and Chad a couple of weeks ago and I was going to raid their shelves and steal them back again while I was over there. I currently have WAY too many DVDs and such out on loan to people, and it always makes me antsy.

And on a completely different subject, I really don’t understand why certain things are ‘within reason’ and other things definitely aren’t even remotely feasible… are, in fact, apparently just ludicrous and appalling and utterly out of the question… but that's probably just one of those eternal mysteries. ::grin::

Don’t worry if you don’t understand that last sentence at all. Only one person out there is going to. ;)

Oh, yes. And the idiot who runs the local Zephyrhills card and comics shop, which sucks profoundly, called me up today and wanted to know when I was going to come in and pick up my comics. I told him I didn’t have an income right now and he probably shouldn’t plan on me coming in soon. This rather annoyed him, but, well, I was actually being considerate. Imagine how exasperated he’d have become if I’d told him that after ordering a bunch of books at his shop, I’d been so completely disimpressed with his shitty attitude towards customer service that I’d called up my old comics shop in Tampa and arranged for them to ship me comics once a month, instead.

Alli is still sending me email… at least, she sent me one yesterday morning… and claiming that she enjoys our correspondence, but I think we all know I’ll help her get past that soon enough.

And that’s going to about do it for this installment. As Kasey Kasem always used to say, ‘when your head’s stuck up your ass, for god’s sake, don’t wiggle your ears’.

Actually, I don’t think Kasey Kasem ever said that.

But he should have. Can you IMAGINE the looks on the faces of millions of American Top Forty fans coast to coast when they heard THAT come out of their relentlessly boring AM radio speakers some Saturday or Sunday night?

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, “Wow, I didn’t recognize you in men’s clothing”. According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I’m reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I’d take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here’s The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people’s blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin’s Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron’s blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don’t really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren’t related to me by marriage, I’d most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I’ve learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don’t care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I’d get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don’t Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.