Jacked.

So I know y'all have been waiting on pins and needles for my 5,000-word dissertation on why Georgia's narrow, hideously sloppy win over Georgia Tech last week symbolizes the beginning of the end of hope for the Georgia program in much the same way that Sonny Corleone's assassination marked the beginning of the end of Michael's soul in the first "Godfather" movie, and I was really (not really) looking forward to getting right on that, but lo and behold, when I came home from lunch on Tuesday I looked to my right and saw a big dust-outlined square where my 42" plasma TV used to be. And there was an empty cubbyhole where my DVD player used to be, and an empty box where the Wii I'd just bought and hadn't even hooked up yet used to be . . . and absolutely nothing where my laptop used to be. Long story short, I got robbed, and it sucks.

The real shit of the deal is that just about everything I've ever written was on my laptop, which, barring a miracle, I'm never getting back. (Hope the crackheads enjoy the porn I had saved on there, at least.) But the other stuff can easily be replaced -- and will be, since I had renter's insurance with the full-replacement-cost rider. Right now this is a major pain in the ass, but in the grand scheme of things it's going to prove to be a minor annoyance.

All that said, I'm computer-less for the near future, so you're not gonna find a lot on here until that situation is rectified. Holly and I are fixing to do some computer shopping on Sunday -- she's trying to draw me over to the Apple side, and she may just succeed -- so I'm hoping this hiatus won't last too long. But a hiatus it is. Hang tight for a bit, and for God's sake keep y'all shit locked down. And if you come across a Dell Inspiron 6000 with the serial number DZYXS81, kick the guy who sold it to you in the balls, if you wouldn't mind.

Thiiiiiiiiinks.

Side hustlin'.

So if the posting traffic on here hasn't been quite as brisk as it's been in the past, it's because I've been busy mucking up not just this blog but several others since football season started.

First off, you're looking at the senior Georgia football correspondent for SB Nation's Atlanta regional site -- that's not an official title per se, but go ahead and call me by it anyway, makes me feel important -- where I'll be posting on the Dawgs on a regular basis. You'll be able to find me in story streams on each week's upcoming game -- offensive previews on Wednesdays, defensive previews on Thursdays, with occasional in-game updates as warranted. I'll also be doing short recaps each Monday, along with "Opposition Research" posts each Tuesday taking a peek at what the Dawgs' upcoming opponents accomplished over the preceding weekend and judging whether that should lower or heighten Bulldog Nation's worry level.

Obviously I'm biased here, but I can't sing the praises of SBN Atlanta enough, nor the SB Nation network in general. The Atlanta site is headed by a talented and knowledgeable gentleman named Jason Kirk, who's an avowed Tech fan but arguably one of the most tolerable, least douchey Tech fans I've ever met. More importantly, unlike Bleacher Report, where any jagoff with a 56K modem can begin firehosing his ill-informed, syntactically dubious judgments at the rest of the world with minimal-to-nonexistent editing, Jason and the rest of the guys running SBN's various Keebler trees actually take pains to seek out good writers who know what they're talking about and can make it all entertaining. Even if you barely spend 10 seconds skimming anything I've written, I hope you'll read SBN blogs regularly, join their communities and support what they're doing; I think you'll get more out of their content than just about anyone else's, mainstream sites included.

And as long as I'm making an impassioned SBN sales pitch, I should probably also plug Every Day Should Be Saturday, which joined the SB Nation liberation army back around the beginning of the year. I'm assuming most of you are tuned into EDSBS already -- and if you're not, seriously, what the hell is wrong with you -- but either way, I'm sure you'll be thuh-rilled to know that I've got a regular feature going there, the "CFB Buyers' Guide," every Tuesday. I'll also be pitching in on Holly's "Best in Class" post each week and other random goofarounds here and there.

Finally, I'll also be offending and alienating people as far away as San Antonio, Texas, through the "Gridiron and Grits" blog on the San Antonio Express-News's website. The blog is run by one of my supervisors, a former San Antonian who -- steady, now -- got her degree from South Carolina. So yeah, she's the enemy, but she follows the SEC rabidly (and possesses no small amount of influence over my future wage-earning ability), so if you read and/or comment over there, be nice. She didn't ride me nearly as hard for the Dawgs' loss to the Gamecocks as she could have, so there's that.

Between all this and a travel schedule that, not surprisingly, picked right up once the season started, I've had to re-evaluate some of my time commitments, and that means I won't be contributing to the Dr. Saturday blog over at Yahoo anymore. But read my other stuff, make me feel like a special flower, and comment to your heart's content. And by all means keep coming by here -- I'm not abandoning this joint by any stretch.

Pickin' and grinnin'.

You guys enjoy picking, right? Well, here's your chance to throw out more picks than a Georgia Tech quarterback -- the Big Ass Pick'Em Group, the official picks pool of Hey Jenny Slater, is back for another year.

Each week we'll be picking all of the top 25 and SEC games -- picks are against the spread, no confidence points. If you want to join, go here and enter group ID# 14755 and password "bacarri" (all lower-case). The person who's made the most correct picks by the end of the regular season will be the subject of an exclusive interview on HJS; the player who comes up with the funniest and/or filthiest pick set name will also get a shout-out here.

As of right now, the start of college football season is exactly one week away. Good luck, nerds.

A new side hustle.

I'd file this under "shameless self-promotion" if the mere act of having a blog didn't qualify as self-promotion in the first place, but either way: If you're into the Atlanta sports scene and you're not already keeping up with SB Nation's Atlanta-specific site, you need to be. Tons of worthwhile stuff on the Braves, Falcons, Hawks, Thrashers and, of course, the Bulldogs.

I'm contributing twice a week with some armchair analysis of what's going on with Georgia football. Which, unfortunately, has mostly involved the Georgia legal system of late -- but hey, it's summer, and if your college football program is getting written up at all, it probably ain't good. Whatever: Here's some of what I've been banging out the last couple weeks:

· My take on the tragicomedy of Damon Evans's downfall -- specifically, why he had to go.

· Actual number-crunching in the service of explaining why it would be all but statistically impossible for Georgia's turnover margin -- a garish -16 last season -- to get any worse in 2010.

· And, of course, plenty of material on the recent arrests of Dontavius Jackson and Tavarres King for booze-related offenses: why their punishment might signal a major strengthening of discipline in the wake of the Evans embarrassment, and why certain folks should get over themselves before turning the sanctimony dial up to 11 in discussing such incidents.

The actual football discussion, of course, will ramp up considerably as the actual season draws closer -- by which time, of course, both our athletes and our administrators will be too busy to get arrested for shit.

Reputations I'm sullying this week (other than my own, of course).

My apologies for posting having gotten off to a slow start in this, the blog's first week of, uh, re-emergence. I moved into my new place over the weekend and have been trying to get shit straightened out, which yesterday included sitting all morning in a half-empty house waiting for someone to turn my water on, only they never came, because who cares, my time's important because I don't have, you know, A JOB or anything.

Ahem.

But anyway, I've still been on the grind, which included posting the annual college-football composite ranking over at EDSBS. This, as you may or may not recall, is where I dig up the unofficial "preseason" rankings put out by folks like Phil Steele, Athlon, ESPN.com and the like, and combine them into a single top 25 ranking that gives a reasonable preview of where teams are going to be ranked in the official preseason polls that'll be submitted by the sportswriters and coaches in a few weeks. As it stands now, this summer's composite looks-a like this:

1. Alabama
2. Ohio State
3. Boise State
4. Texas
5. Florida
6. TCU
7. Nebraska
8. Iowa
9. Oregon
10. Virginia Tech
11. Oklahoma
12. Wisconsin
13. Miami
14. USC
15. Pittsburgh
16. Arkansas
17. Florida State
18. North Carolina
19. Georgia Tech
20. Penn State
21. Oregon State
22. LSU
23. Georgia
24. Cincinnati
25. Auburn

Full analysis is over at EDSBS, but the salient nugget for Bulldog Nation is that the Dawgs do check in down there at #23, which may seem like an insult if you've been following Senator Blutarsky and his Steele-sourced glimmers of hope for why Georgia could be in for a pretty promising year -- but then again, if you saw Georgia crash and burn against Tennessee and Kentucky last year and are still having PTSD flashbacks of our threadbare secondary and -16 turnover margin, you might be happy just to be nominated.

And then over at Dr. Saturday, I'll be throwing occasional assists this week to the lovely Holly, who's flying solo while the good Doctor is on vacation. My first contribution is here, a rumination on the Mountain West's chances at earning BCS status now that they're losing Utah to the Pac-10; it's meticulously researched (like everything else I do, duh!) but probably not as fun as Holly's post on the new spiderweb Lane Kiffin has managed to flail around in. OK, look, I know the guy beat the pants off us last year, but since then he's led a very schadenfreude-friendly (schadenfriendly?) existence; I wouldn't say he has a reverse Midas touch, exactly, but he does seem to have a very particular kind of bizarro Midas touch, the kind where everything he touches turns to DERP.

Also, I've been pulled in to contribute to a new project SBNation is doing -- they've been rolling out a number of "regional" sites over the past few weeks, and the Atlanta site goes live this week; I'll be posting a couple times a week on Georgia football. So keep your eyes peeled.

Further updates as developments warrant. Now I gotta head out so I can swing by my new place and see if I can actually use the crapper there yet. Fun!

Hi, everybody!

I'm back . . . and you may all consider yourselves iced.



But more to the point, Hey Jenny Slater is back as well, rested and refreshed after a hiatus that ended up lasting exactly three months. I know you all probably hate the new format, but don't worry, I'll be tweaking it over the next few weeks. The posting, however, will be exactly as douchetastic as you remembered.

But never you mind any of that -- you've got some drinking to do. Bottoms up, schmucks.

"But we were on a break!"

I feel like I've written this post four or five times already -- "Sorry for the lack of posting over the last few weeks, here are some lame and only tangentially relevant excuses" -- but it may bear repeating once again, because I've come to a decision about the blog: I'm taking it offline for the next few weeks while I try to slam an adrenaline needle, "Pulp Fiction"-style, into my job search.

I've been examining and re-examining things that could make me a more viable candidate for the various jobs I've tried for recently, and without meaning to overdramatize this, when I'm potentially going up against several dozen candidates for a given position -- all of whom are just as desperate as I am, some of whom may be just as qualified -- even something as simple as this blog could mean the difference between making the final cut for an opening and not making it. I mean, though it may not always seem like this is the case, I don't go out of my way to offend people on here. And I don't think I've posted anything here that would automatically red-flag me as unqualified, unstable, or a threat to the security of the republic. But if a job came down to me and another guy with 15 years of writing/editing experience, and the hiring manager is sitting there thinking, "Well, there's this guy who dropped a bunch of F-bombs over a Georgia football loss last fall, and this guy who apparently has never done anything like that" -- I'd hate to think I missed out on a job over something that picayune. But it could happen.

And it's not like y'all are going to be missing out on much, at my current rate of production, at least. Between hunting for jobs and recent co-captaining gigs at EDSBS and Dr. Saturday, my output here has slowed down to the point where this blog has basically become a glorified Tumblr page, and I've been torn between being frustrated over that and really not being inspired enough to do anything about it. This isn't euthanasia, it's merely a hibernation, by the end of which this blog will hopefully emerge refreshed, re-energized, re-inspired and, God willing, written by a person with a steady income.

So Hey Jenny Slater goes behind the wall at midnight tonight (OOH DRAMA), and if you're really starved for my cranky outbursts in the meantime, you can follow me on Twitter or over at EDSBS or Dr. Saturday, where I hope to maintain a healthy contribution level during the interminable football offseason. I'm sure I'll also be popping up like a bad penny at Holly's joint. (I know what you're thinking: "Doug, if you're really so concerned about maximizing your employability, why would you allow yourself to be filmed singing along and doing a really gay dance to an Erasure song in your car?" All I can say is the heart wants what it wants, I guess, and at that moment my heart wanted to sing along and do a really gay dance to an Erasure song in my car.)

Thanks to those of you who have hung with this blog through the recent lean months, and I promise it'll be back eventually. For now it's time to regroup and light a fire under myself in a number of other areas. Your thoughts and prayers during that period will be appreciated, and when Hey Jenny Slater does come back, I will do my best to reward your patience by ensuring that it doesn't suck too terribly hard.

Peace.

Once again, it's time to get loathsome.

Back at the beginning of 2007 I did a fairly self-explanatory series titled "The 50 Most Loathsome People in College Football." (Yes, an idea blatantly ripped from the Buffalo Beast's beloved annual feature. I only ever said I was hilarious and insightful, I never said I was original.) At the time I guess I figured it was something that could be whipped out every few years or so, and looking back over that now, the start of a new decade seems like a perfect time to open up nominations and lay into the people doing their level best to suck all our enjoyment out of the greatest sport of all time.

Obviously, I'm already putting a list together of the people who belong in there, but any list like this should be a participatory exercise, so I want y'all's suggestions as well -- anyone who by word or deed has been a blot on the landscape of college football. The parameters for inclusion here are pretty broad; it can be an asshole coach, prima donna player, smug broadcaster/columnist, or incompetent administrator of some sort; it can even be a douchebag blogger or celebrity hanger-on who somehow keeps being invited to show up at games or in the broadcast booth despite adding nothing to the proceedings. Anyone who, by their mere association, has taken away just a little bit of your enjoyment of our favorite fall pursuit.

Keep in mind, though, that we're talking about the most loathsome people, so we want to try to keep our primary focus on the most macro offenses. A coach who loudly proclaimed his own brilliance and superiority while driving a program into the ground? Worthy of inclusion. The dicklick whose season tickets are directly behind yours and who grouses incessantly about every single play call, even the ones that end up scoring? Probably not quite on the level I'm talking about. Likewise, when making the case for a particularly loathsome individual, try to focus on the things that would arouse the ire of the broadest possible spectrum of CFB fans. A defensive back who forced your favorite player to fumble in the most critical game of the season? Ehh, that kid was just doing what he was supposed to do. If that defensive back later beat up his girlfriend, left early for the NFL while trashing his team on the way out, and left his old program on NCAA probation because of cash payments he was taking while he was enrolled there, OK, now we're talking.

Put your nomination(s) in the comments thread, along with any supporting information you feel might bolster their case as a particularly loathsome boil on the ass of college football; I'll be accepting nominations right up until, oh, let's say Saturday the 23rd (i.e. one week from tomorrow). And I'll try to get the full list put up by the end of the month. I can't promise you your nomination will end up making the final cut, but they'll at least get a hearing.

Now let the rage begin!

Merry Christmas.

As difficult as things have been over the past year or so, I've periodically had to remind myself that I actually have it pretty good -- roof over my head, clothes on my back, food in my belly, a loving family who's willing to give me a helping hand when I need it -- and that's especially true around this time of year. Whereas 90 percent of the world would probably be happy with a sanitary place to live or an extra piece of bread in tomorrow's meal, I've got it good enough that I can afford to ask for stuff like Legos and Wii games for Christmas. Unemployment issues and whatever else aside, I must be doing all right.

But the most important thing I'm blessed with is the people in my life, and that includes my those of you who grace me with a little time out of your day to read this blog. Thank you, and Merry Christmas -- or Hanukkah, or Kwaanza, or winter solstice, or whatever you choose to celebrate this time of year; I hope that your holiday is blessed with as much love and companionship as mine has been, and I hope that the new year brings all of us as many additional blessings as we need.

Thank you.

While we're all taking this day to ponder all the things we're thankful for, I thought I'd take a moment to do the same here. I know the ratio of maudlin posts to overall posts on this blog has been creeping upward of late, for which I apologize, but I want to thank you all for being regular readers, even through some very difficult times over the past few months in which I didn't do as good a job of keeping this thing updated as I should have.

When misfortunes happen in bunches and depression sets in, the attitude that frequently takes over is, "Why should I bother doing [X], it's not gonna make a lick of difference one way or the other" -- and for me, that's been particularly applicable to my writing, in spite of the fact that it's one of the things I do best and enjoy the most. This blog, the work I've been doing for other people's sites, the book that I've been alternately trying to write and trying to give up on for years now -- with each one of these things, I've had that "Why bother" attitude at one point or another over the past year or so, or multiple points, to be more accurate. But y'all are why bother, and now is as good a time as any to remind myself of that and thank all of you for it. Y'all have taken the time to read this blog, care about what's written here, and on occasion even be entertained by it, and that's kept me from throwing my hands up and saying "screw it" despite many temptations to do so.

So a heartfelt "thank you" to you, the readers, for both your time and attention and for the encouraging words you've commented, e-mailed, and Twittered my way; to Holly, Orson, Matt Hinton, and all the other bloggers who have permitted me to deface their sites with my invective over the past few months; and to my family, who have put up with my constant presence (and the nonstop stream of "Super Mario Bros." theme music that comes with it) and still been able to grit their teeth, smile, and assure me sincerely that better days are ahead. Not a day goes by when I don't thank the Lord for all of you, and it's about time you knew that.

Apologies are in order.

Monday morning, as I was driving back from Atlanta after a day of fun-filled awesomeness that included my very first NFL game, it occurred to me that I'd whiffed on that day's Monday Morning Cage Match and the last two Friday Random Ten+5s. I do have something approximating an excuse: I spent the second half of last week in West Virginia for my granddad's informal memorial service/ash-spreading, and the week before that I was frantically boxing all my stuff up and trying to get it moved out of my apartment by the end of the month. So it's been kind of a crazy few weeks ever since I got back from Dallas, and I've had to let a few things fall through the cracks here and there.

What I don't have an excuse for, though, is the fact that the quality of the stuff I have put up here has declined markedly over the past couple months, and I really can't disagree with anyone who suggests that my heart really hasn't been in it lately. It's been a rough summer and fall for me, and having to move back in with my parents has been one more depressing thing to stack on top of a growing pile of frustrations. It's not that I don't get along with my parents, mind you -- we have about as great a relationship as a mother, father, and son could have -- and it's certainly not that I don't appreciate their willingness to take me in and give me a home base from which to decide what I'm going to do next. It's just that . . . well, I mean, I'm 31 years old. On the list of things I was hoping to accomplish in my thirties, this wasn't one of them. I'm extraordinarily blessed with a very loving and supportive circle of friends and family members who have continued to support me and who haven't treated me as radioactive just because I'm back under my parents' roof for the time being, so I've got that going for me, but this is still a detour I was hoping to be able to avoid.

So in that sense, yeah, I've been depressed lately. That's not exactly a new development -- it goes back a good ways before I got laid off, even, and only recently have I really taken stock of how I've let it affect my life and keep me from doing things that I actually want to do. But one of the things that I enjoy most in life is writing for this and other blogs and hearing people's reactions to what I have to say, and I've done a disservice to more than just the people who are kind enough to devote some of their time and attention to reading this blog -- I've done a disservice to myself by not putting as much effort into it as I could be.

And I'm going to try to do a better job of that in the coming months. Obviously I still can't promise that this blog will be the #1 priority -- holidays are coming up, for one thing, and oh yeah, I still have to hunt down an actual job, the search for which has been lengthy and involved. (On that note, I've had interviews for jobs at Clemson, Virginia Tech, and an ad firm in Birmingham, but unfortunately haven't been offered any of them, so the hunt continues.) But even with that in mind, I think I can do a better and more energetic job of keeping this thing updated than I have been lately.

So I hope you'll accept both my apologies for having fallen down on the job a bit and my humble requests for your continued patience and understanding. This, too, shall pass, but even in the meantime, there's no reason we all can't try to laugh at stuff. And I'm going to do my level best to do a lot more of that.

Thanks.

Five for Slive podcast: What's the matter with the refs, Florida, Auburn, the BCS, and everything else?

It's my turn to host the Five for Slive podcast this week, in which Jerry Hinnen of War Blog Eagle and I discuss topics of note in the SEC. This week we get our licks in at SEC officiating, diagnose a couple of ailing offenses, and toss out a few upset opportunities.


MP3 File


Other places you can find me this week:

· At Dr. Saturday, sampling the tears of Ohio State fans and taking stock of an Oklahoma team that might be playing for its season this weekend against Kansas.

· At EDSBS, inflicting my usual strain of terrible gambling advice on an unsuspecting public. (Hey, not my problem. Y'all really should be "suspecting" by now.)

· On Twitter, where, wow, I've managed to come across as really angry the past couple days.

St. Louie linkdump.

I'm en route to Dallas for this weekend's Texas-Oklahoma game, and banging this out on an iPhone, no less, because there's no free wi-fi in the St. Louis airport, but here are some links so that I still might entertain you (sort of) while I'm out of pocket:

• This week's Profiles in Disillusion, in which Georgia does indeed play a prominent role. Though by no means the starring one: At least we didn't let Duke score 49 on us on our own field.

• Also at Doc Saturday, a preview of Notre Dame-USC, otherwise known as Charlie Weis's come-to-(Touchdown)-Jesus meeting in South Bend, and my two cents on the top CFB scandal of the past decade (shocking hint: it involves Alabama).

• In exchange for those brilliant bits of insight, the Doc tips his hat to my Richt/Tuberville manifesto in his own take on the increasingly touchy times down in Athens.

• Gambling picks at Orson's joint that might -- might! -- manage not to suck out loud for like the first time all season.

• And last but definitely not least, the inaugural Five for Slive podcast -- the brainchild of War Blog Eagle founder Jerry Hinnen -- jumps off this morning, with Yours Truly bravely pontificating through clenched teeth about the state of the SEC at the season's midpoint (and UGA's dwindling relevance to same).

Enjoy! See you folks when I'm back on the ground in Big D.

I do it for the kids.

What I've been up to this week:

· Rollin' through the Kübler-Ross stages of grief with last weekend's most disillusioned and despairing football fans, sampling the tears of each and finding Florida State's and Miami's particularly smooth, with a nice finish;

· Examining the state of Michigan State football as they try to break a three-game skid against Michigan, of all people (see, I know Big Ten stuff!);

· Wagerin' money I don't actually have on this weekend's games, and using mad MS Paint skillz to depict Lucy from "Peanuts" packin' big-ass heat; and

· Carrying off the Straight Bangin' Award in this week's BlogPoll for being most cynical about the general worth of my own team. In case you hadn't noticed, we don't do optimism here.

Week 4 BlogPoll ballot, revised.

Not a huge change here, but a commenter reminded me that Nebraska had performed pretty well on the road against what is now the #7 team on my ballot, so in they go. This also saves me from having to move Georgia into the rankings after a come-from-behind win at home over an unranked team. If they can beat LSU this weekend, they'll go into the rankings; otherwise, I'm obviously not sold on them as a top-25-caliber team.

That Indian wouldn't just be letting a single tear roll down his cheek, he'd be putting a gun in his mouth.

Among the many wonderful things I could say about my peeps at the Tent City tailgate -- generous, knowledgeable, attractive folks who always have plenty of places to sit and are generally pretty good at holding their liquor besides -- they are also a fairly tidy bunch. Their tailgate last Saturday hosted a couple dozen people, both Georgia and South Carolina fans, under a pair of large tents with three tables of food and drinks; there were at least a dozen coolers here and there, a satellite-linked TV powered by a gas generator, and, of course, a hungry and very entitled-feeling Boston terrier. Yet by midnight, all the tents, tables, and chairs had been safely packed away in various people's automobiles, and our collected detritus had been wrapped up and bagged up so efficiently that you literally might not have known anyone was ever there.

So, North Campus tailgaters, what's y'all's excuse?



I mean, this is the nicest part of campus, the section we always point to when we're comparing ourselves to such aesthetically blessed campuses as Virginia and UNC and Ole Miss, and this is how we treat it? I wouldn't even leave this kind of filth if I went and tailgated at Georgia Tech or Tennessee, and I hate those fuckers. I'm certainly not going to leave my own campus like that.

Yeah, yeah, I know: There aren't enough trash cans on campus, and because we're still setting aside (completely unused) space for "family-friendly tailgating zones," whatever trash is left on the ground gets crammed into that much smaller a space. But that really isn't an excuse, is it? If you take out the trash at your house, you can take out the trash at your tailgate. Have a bag for bottles, a bag for paper trash, tie 'em up, throw 'em in the back of your big-ass SUV, and drop 'em in the dumpster at the Raceway or whatever on your way out of town. It's not that hard.

This isn't the tree-hugging, spotted-owl-humping, lefty pinko environmentalist in me talking; it's the Georgia fan talking. Clean up your trash, or not only are we going to have a university that looks like Hunter S. Thompson's hotel room in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Mike Adams is going to use it as an excuse to charge us all five hundred bucks to tailgate on campus.

So pretty please, with sugar on top: Clean up after your fuckin' tailgate. Rant over. Carry on with your business.

Branching out.

I've, uh, vertically integrated myself. You know, diversified and shit.

In addition to the football-related bloviating that has already begun in earnest here, I'll also be spending this fall befouling the blogs of two other gents who should know better. At Dr. Saturday, I'll be contributing "On the Spot" every Tuesday, taking a look into the program, coach, player, or whoever that has the most at stake in the coming weekend; once the games actually start, I'll also be regaling you good folks each Monday with "Profiles in Fan Disillusion," a weekly survey of the most despondent, angst-ridden, and hilarious reactions from the fanbloggers whose teams sustained high-profile and embarrassing donkeypunches the previous Saturday.

The Wannabe Wagerer, on the other hand, will not be returning at Doc Saturday; instead I'll be inflicting my preposterously unqualified betting advice on the readers of EDSBS, where "Free Money Doug" will be ridin' dirty around the middle of each week. Picks will be rated on a risk scale of one (oddsmakers all but dumping bundles of crisp twenties in your lap) to five (the financial equivalent of Russian roulette, only with bullets in five chambers as opposed to just one). As these picks are for entertainment purposes only, I refuse to accept responsibility for any monetary losses on the part of readers, though paradoxically, I do accept tips in the event of wins.

This in addition to regular participation in the BlogPoll and the SEC Power Poll soon to get cranked up again over at Team Speed Kills. Man, if I were getting paid an hourly wage for all this stuff, I could quit looking for a job. Ahem.

FML, Inc.

When last I took the unusual-for-me step of introducing you to some deep details of what was going on in my personal life, I had just gotten laid off from my job and was coming out of my fourth back surgery in two years. Well, sit the fuck down a minute, because the story's only gotten more exasperating from there.

I went in for my fifth and, God willing, final back surgery a couple weeks ago. Backing up a ways, I had some stainless-steel rods installed on my spine when I was 16 years old to treat my scoliosis, and in surgery #4 the docs discovered what they figured was probably the reason I'd been growing all these cysts one after another on my back: a little bracket connecting the rods had come loose and was wiggling around just enough to carve out a spot where bacteria could collect and my back could get all inflamed. Surgery #5 was to remove that little bracket, which I will take home and shoot repeatedly with a .45 whenever the pathologists get done with it, and I had my follow-up appointment earlier today; the neurosurgeon took my sutures out and said everything looked pretty healthy.

In between the two surgeries, though, I did manage to incur nearly $3,000 in car-repair bills on my 10-year-old Volkswagen from various parts randomly failing, breaking, or snapping off and flying into another part of the engine. Fortunately, my parents were kind enough to cover those for my still-unemployed ass. But, the day I came home from surgery #5, I arrived to find a summons jammed in my door: I'm being taken to small-claims court for nearly another three grand by a company in South Carolina I'd never even heard of.

Backing up some more: Two years ago my identity information somehow got stolen by some jagoff in southern California who proceeded to open more than a dozen accounts in my name, ranging from minor charge accounts with Target and Wal-Mart all the way up to a line of credit with CarMax, from whom he bought -- and I'm not making this up -- a Range Rover and a Mercedes-Benz CLK500. I only found out about it when companies started sending me letters asking me to clarify some of my identity information because some stuff I'd put on "my" credit application didn't match up with what was on my credit report; I promptly filed a police report and was even matched up with a detective in the Financial Crimes Unit of the Pasadena Police Department who was trying to track down the perpetrator. A few months later, the detective called to tell me the guy had been caught and the cars had been impounded, and I filed what I thought were all the proper reports and claims with the credit bureaus to start getting the fraudulent shit taken off my credit report.

Only it turns out that quite a lot of stuff didn't get taken off. One of the CarMax accounts, unbelievably, was still on there when I checked up on it again a few weeks ago. And apparently Wells Fargo was still trying to collect on the debt that the California miscreant had rung up even after he'd been arrested. When those efforts failed for obvious reasons, they sold the debt to an outfit in South Carolina called LVNV Funding LLC -- the company now trying to drag me into court.

Not long after getting the summons, I did a little research into LVNV Funding, and all it took me was five minutes of Googling to conclude that LVNV is about as sleazy a bunch of ripoff artists and extortionists as are allowed to operate legally in this country. Basically, companies like Wells Fargo take old debts they've given up on trying to collect and sell them to LVNV, who incurs minimal risk by purchasing the debt for pennies on the dollar but can reap a pretty nice reward if they can get the debtor to pay the amount in full. This they accomplish by siccing any one of a number of vaguely named subsidiaries (Resurgent, Astra, Venta, etc. etc. etc.) on the debtor through phone calls, letters, and, evidently, lawsuits designed to intimidate the debtor into paying up. Their M.O. appears to be sitting back and hoping that either a) the debtor is so scared he pays up right away or b) he ignores the eventual court summons, fails to show up for court and thus has summary judgment found against him, and then LVNV gets to go in and start taking his money or his stuff. Worse, while all this is going on they somehow manage to "re-age" your debt on your credit report, which basically means resetting the "last account activity" date so that the statute of limitations can't run out. As long as that bad debt is sitting on there, it's killing your credit record, so they're basically holding your formerly good credit score hostage until you pay up. (My own credit score has plummeted more than 70 points just in the last year.)

I've already done what apparently few people bother to do and responded to the lawsuit through the proper channels here in Birmingham. I gave LVNV's law firm here in Birmingham a full description of the identity-theft case and why I'm not responsible for the debt their client says I owe, and they say they're investigating it. But at least at the moment, I'm still scheduled to go into small-claims court three weeks from now and hope I can get this thrown out. We'll just have to see.

Meanwhile, I'm seeing a therapist for depression -- a condition that I'm realizing started many months before all this other shit started going down -- and that's been promising so far, but I still don't have a job. I've applied for more than 30 positions at universities, media outlets, and corporations all over the East Coast, and so far have received about a half-dozen definite rejections but no invitations for any interviews. I've managed to budget things out to where I can make it to the end of the year without starving even if I don't find a job during that time, but the latest wrinkle is that the company that purchased my apartment building a few months ago has been ramping up renovations, and there's a very good chance that I'm going to have to vacate my old, drafty, but beloved old apartment sometime in the next few months so that they can continue that process. Should that happen, I'm probably going to have to move in with my parents; between my unemployed status and the disaster area that people like LVNV have made of my credit rating, there's no way in hell any reputable real-estate company would lease an apartment to me.

Anyway, as ludicrous as this might sound, I didn't reveal all of this in an effort to seek anyone's pity; pity's nice every once in a while, I guess, but it doesn't accomplish a whole lot in actual practice. And in spite of the fact that these past two months have without a doubt been the worst two months of my life, I know I'm still better off than probably 99.999% of the people on the planet. (Would I rather be unemployed and getting sued, or having my limbs hacked off by the Taliban just because I tried to send my daughters to school? I'll take the lawsuit, thanks.) Rather, I make only two requests of anyone who might be reading this. First is that you keep me in your prayers -- doesn't have to be anything fancy, just something like "Please let Doug get an interview for one of those jobs he applied for at UGA" or "Please let Doug run into Erin Andrews at a bar and have her be just tipsy enough to think that going home with him is a good idea, that'd probably lift his spirits right about now" (because yes, it would). I know I'm a loathsome commie pinko leftist, but I do subscribe to the Judeo-Christian religious tradition and believe very fervently in the power of prayer, so if you've got any more pull with God than I do, it would not make me feel the least bit uncomfortable for you to use some of that on my behalf.

Second thing I ask is this: If any of you have had any run-ins with collection agencies or junk-debt collectors like LVNV Funding, NCO Financial, Fred Hanna, Unifund, or any of the numerous others who purchase old debt and then hound people into paying them off, or if you know of anyone who has, please e-mail me and tell me your story. I can already name two different federal credit laws LVNV has broken in their dealings with me so far, and from what I've gathered, they don't seem to be the least bit scrupulous about following those laws with anyone else, either. And once I've gotten LVNV off my back for good, I'd like to start talking with my state legislators, my state attorney general, maybe even my representative to Congress about the hell that these companies cause people and how badly we need some kind of additional legislative safeguards to ensure that they aren't permitted to basically extort money from people who don't owe them a dime to begin with. Maybe this will be the kind of crusade through which I'll find my life's greater purpose or something, but even if it's not, something still needs to be done about these junk-debt collectors, and I'd be happy to listen to anything you want to tell me that might help.

Anyway. I'm sorry if all this has bored you half to death, but if my presence on this blog has seemed a little sparse lately, this is pretty much why. I'm going to dig my way out of this one way or another, so just bear with me here and join me in hoping and praying for the best. And when all this is over, and I have a new job and a new apartment and a patched-up credit score, you're all invited to come over and get stinking-ass drunk with me. I'll keep you posted on when that shindig is going to go down.

Audience participation time.

Two opportunities for you football fans out there to prove you're smarter than me:

First, join the Big Ass Pick'Em Group, my college pick'em league on Yahoo. We pick each week's top-25 games against the spread, and the person with the most correct picks at the end of the season wins. Sadly, they don't have official point spreads for I-AA games, so you will not get the chance to predict whether Florida can actually cover 73 on Charleston Southern. But you'll be able to pick nearly all of the non-embarrassing games. Go to this link and enter group ID# 13556 and password "gingerninja."

If the NFL is more your bag, or even an additional bag, you can also join the official Hey Jenny Slater survival pool. If you're not familiar with the concept, how it works is you simply pick one team each week that you think will win their game. However, once you pick a team to win, you can't pick that team again for the remainder of the season. Players fall by the wayside each week, and the one left standing is the winner. To join, go here and enter group ID# 10854 and password "jankyspanky."

The winner of each group gets mentioned by name on this blog at the end of the season, which is a prize literally worth its weight in gold. Sign up, e-mail the usual address if you have any questions, and good luck.

I'm takin' the wheel!(Oh, yeah, this is gonna end well.)

Just in case you missed me trumpeting the news on Twitter or Facebook, the great Orson Swindle is enjoying a highly jealousy-inducing vacation down on the Gulf Coast this week, and in a colossal error of judgment has put me in charge of Every Day Should Be Saturday while he's gone. So I'll be Alexander Haiging it up over there in his absence, bringing you all the college-football news that's fit to belittle and, where warranted, throwing in some of the miscellaneous stupidity you've come to expect from Hey Jenny Slater. As white-hot as the temptation is to do such a thing, I won't be overhauling EDSBS to a red-and-black color scheme with a header graphic of Vince Dooley being carried aloft by the boys back on New Year's Day 1981 -- I gotta at least try to be a courteous guest, after all -- but I think I can probably get away with a dick joke or a supermodel-in-underwear picture every now and then.

On that note, if you have a particular dick joke or undie shot you think merits inclusion -- or, perhaps more usefully, an actual CFB tip or link -- fire it off to the e-mail address at the top of the right-hand column on this blog. Can't promise I'll use it, but if I do, I'll at least do you the courtesy of valiantly guarding your anonymity by failing to give you credit. Wish me luck, folks.