The Friday Random Ten+5 remembers some pretty sweet victory parades.

Like I said yesterday, the past 48 hours or so -- thrilling wins by the U.S. and Slovak soccer teams, a match to end all tennis matches won by Georgia alum John Isner -- have been about the happiest that sports have ever made me outside of the four or five glorious months we call "football season." It's true that most of my awesome sports-related memories are intimately tied with some great success on the part of the Bulldogs -- or the Washington Redskins, in the pre-Snyder era when they still had successes -- but I've been privy to some pretty amazing non-football achievements that made my heart swell with pride to be an American, a Georgia fan, or perhaps just someone who happened to have a TV and a cable connection and be in the right place at the right time. This +5 is dedicated to the heroes who made me snap out of my pigskin-and-beer-induced trance and made me realize that there are other sports in the world, not an easy thing to do in and of itself: My Five Proudest Sporting-Related Memories That Had Nothing To Do With Football.



October 5, 1991: Braves claim their first division pennant in nine years
Confession: While I'm a ripe old 32, I'm not one of those Atlanta-area Gen-Xers with massive archives of miserable memories about how bad the Braves were in the '80s. We didn't move to Georgia until the summer of '91, right before I started high school, and I don't have many memories of paying attention to baseball period before that. But not long after we moved down to Columbus, my dad had some sort of job-related doctor thing up in Atlanta that included tickets to a Braves game, so off we went to Fulton County Stadium. The Braves were leading the NL West for the first time in forever, but only a game ahead of the Dodgers, with two games to go in the season; we got to watch Smoltzie pitch a complete game of pure ruthless efficiency, downing the Astros 5-2, then hung around while they showed the Dodgers-Giants game on the Jumbotron. I don't think a single person left the stadium as the LA-SF game wore on, and when the Giants corralled LA's final groundout to clinch their own 4-0 win, the place exploded even louder than it had when the Braves had won. A photographer took our picture as we walked triumphantly back to our car, and somewhere, in some newspaper's dusty archives, there's a picture of little 13-year-old me with the foam tomahawk someone had handed me on my way into the stadium, waving that thing like I'd caught the winning out myself.



October 28, 1995: Braves win the World Series
It took another four years before the Braves won the Big One, of course, but I remember exactly where I was when it happened: in the TV lounge of the lobby at Oglethorpe House my freshman year at UGA, surrounded by pretty much every single one of my neighbors, watching I think it was Marquis Grissom tear across left-center to catch the final out. When it finally happened, when all those years of disappointments and achingly close missed opportunities gave way to a Series title, the entire room poured out and I remember spending the rest of that evening engaging in copious amounts of underage drinking whilst wearing my Braves boxers on the outside of my clothes. Good times.



July 23, 1996: Kerri Strug vaults on a bum ankle and wins the gold for the American gymnastics team
We caught a couple of events when the Olympics were in Atlanta, but we watched the team gymnastics competition from home, and saw the whole drama with Kerri Strug's ankle and the one last vault she did to clinch the all-around team gold for the U.S. for the first time ever. Considering that she had to be taken straight from the Georgia Dome to a hospital afterward to be treated for tendon damage, I think Strug's hero status was well-deserved, as were her "Saturday Night Live" cameo and appearance in one of the funnier spots from the golden age of "This is SportsCenter" ads.



March 16, 2008: Georgia wins the SEC basketball tournament
I don't have the clearest memory of where I was when this went down: I think I'd driven home from Birmingham to Columbus that Friday night -- through a hellacious thunderstorm, of course -- and woke up the next morning fully expecting to open up the Ledger-Enquirer sports section and read about how the Dawgs had been unceremoniously bounced out of the tournament in the second round by Kentucky. Instead, I got to read about how the second-round game hadn't even been played because of a tornado that tore through downtown Atlanta -- ripping a hole in the roof of the Georgia Dome in the process. So I got to watch two games on Saturday -- the first a Georgia victory over Kentucky (their second straight overtime win), followed just hours later by an equally improbable win over Mississippi State. Keep in mind that, in the most delicious irony of ironies, this all happened on Georgia Tech's basketball court, where the entire tournament had been moved because of the damage to the Dome. And the following afternoon, the Dawgs -- who'd been the sixth seed in the East at 4-12 in the SEC, 13-16 overall -- knocked off Arkansas to claim one of the least probable NCAA tournament berths ever. They lost in the first round to Xavier, of course, and less than a year later Dennis Felton was out of a job, but still, this was one of those miraculous weekends that could bring a glimmer of pride to even the most beleaguered program. (Of course, now that Mark Fox is in charge and recruiting like a madman, the Hoop Dawgs are gonna win so many of these things that the fan base gets bored and starts taking them for granted like asshole Kentucky fans. Book it.)



February 24, 2010: Slovakia beats Sweden in ice hockey to advance to the medal round of the 2010 Olympics
Just like I really get into the World Cup despite not being much of a soccer fan, I like Olympic hockey even though I don't follow the sport much otherwise. And with the NHL being littered with bad-ass Slovaks, I figured the motherland had a great chance at a medal in Vancouver (after having smoked the rest of their group in the first round in 2006 but getting bounced by the Czech Republic in the first round of the knockout stage). SVK began the 2010 hockey tournament by getting whacked again by the Czechs, but then stunned the world with a shootout win over the Russians, and closed out group play by pounding Latvia 6-0. They dispensed with Norway in the first round of the playoff, but that only meant they'd earned the right to face Sweden, the defending Olympic champions, in the next round. Instead of folding, though, the Slovaks scored on a power play in the second period and never trailed from there, and my boys were headed to the medal round for the first time ever as an independent country. (About that: Yeah, there was no medal. Not this time. But it's happening four years from now, oh yes it is.)

Ahh, memories. And now the Ten:

1. Pet Shop Boys, "Always"
2. Fatboy Slim, "Right Here Right Now"
3. Moby, "Natural Blues"
4. A Tribe Called Quest, "The Pressure"
5. Deee-Lite, "Power of Love"
6. Pet Shop Boys, "Legacy"
7. The Streets, "Don't Mug Yourself"
8. The Pixies, "Crackity Jones"
9. Ween, "Piss Up a Rope"
10. Duran Duran, "Save a Prayer"

Your turn -- your Random Tens and/or favorite non-football sporting memories go in the comments, if you're so inclined.

It's great! To be! An American Georgia Bulldog of Slovak descent!

So let's recap: In the past 24 hours, I've gotten to see

· Team USA advance to the knockout round of the World Cup -- winning their group, no less -- on one of the more thrilling goals that's ever been scored;

· the longest tennis match ever played, which was won 6-4, 3-6, 6-7, 7-6, 70-68 by a Georgia Bulldog; and

· Slovakia, in its first World Cup as an independent nation, advance to the knockout round via an amazing 3-2 victory over the defending world champions -- in the process sending the loathsome, preening, flop-artist Italians home in disgrace.

I didn't know it was possible to be this happy so far away from football season.

The Friday Random Ten+5 salutes the motherland (and hopes for a semi-Miracle On Ice).

I don't spend a tremendous amount of time following ice hockey, but I've been watching a lot of it during the Olympics, as the Slovak national hockey team has progressed steadily through group play and now the single-elimination playoffs. Slovakia, of course, is the motherland of my mom's side of the family, and they've bitchmade Russia and Sweden so far on their way to facing Canada tonight in the semifinals. Win, and they would face the winner of U.S.-Finland in the gold-medal match; lose, and they still have a chance to pick up a bronze medal in the consolation match on Sunday. Either way, it would be Slovakia's first medal in Olympic hockey since splitting from the Czech Republic back in 1993.

The team's run in Vancouver has been a source of ancestral pride, but it's hardly the only thing Slovakia has to be proud of, so I decided to devote this week's +5 to the motherland: Five Things You Might Not Have Known Were Awesome About Slovakia.



The Tatras
No, not the Ta-tas, perv. The Tatras are the mountain range that stretch across Slovakia's northern border with Poland and are the highest peaks in central Europe; having been to Slovakia about 10 years ago, I can attest that they are beautiful, and they're a part of the landscape just about wherever you go in the country. Maybe one of these days Slovakia will get to host the Olympics, and then we'll see who's got the raucous home crowds for hockey matches, Canada.



The Slovak resistance in World War II
Slovakia actually had one of the more active resistance groups during the Nazi domination of Europe at the height of World War II, and mounted a two-month-long rebellion against the country's collaborationist government in 1944. Even though the "Slovak National Uprising" was eventually defeated by a large contingent of Nazi troops sent into the country, it continued guerilla operations for another six months and kept the Germans busy until the Red Army could roll in and rout the last of the Nazi occupiers from the country in March of '45. (Granted, the Soviets turned out to be not that much better from a dictatorial-occupying-power standpoint than the Germans had been, but you take your victories where you can find them.)




They have an American football team
A few weeks ago, CBS's "Sunday Morning" did a segment about a league of teams playing American football in France and profiling some of the players who'd come over from the U.S. to play in it (one of whom, incidentally, was former Georgia QB Blake Barnes). Turns out there is an American football team in Slovakia, too -- the Bratislava Monarchs, who moved from the Central European Football League to the Czech League of American Football last year and went undefeated through their first regular season of CAAF play before losing to the Prague Lions in Czech Bowl XIII. (Yes, it's called the Czech Bowl. And yes, it is a league in which the Lions can win the championship. It really is kind of surreal.)



Tom Selleck
Tom's father, Robert, came to America from Slovakia before World War II, and his son went on to star as Magnum, P.I., for eight seasons, thus providing thousands of young men of my generation with an inspiring life goal: to live rent-free on a breathtaking Hawaiian estate, drive around in a tomato-red Ferrari, squire around a choice selection of the island's hottest women, and solve murders. I'm still working on that one, of course, though I do have a friend in Honolulu whose couch I can crash on once I finally decide to kick that plan into motion.



Slovak chicks
Slovakia meets the high standards of female talent set by the rest of the former Eastern Bloc, not only with the steady stream of supermodels they turn out each year but with a host of tennis players as well, such as Dominika Cibulková and Daniela Hantuchová, who was featured in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue last year. Slovakia spends a lot of time in the Czech Republic's shadow, but in this area, at least, they play second fiddle to no one.

The puck drops between Slovakia and Canada tonight at 9:30. I will be in front of the TV, and I'll have my jersey on.

The ten:

1. Thievery Corporation, "Encounter in Bahia"
2. Kraak and Smaak, "Squeeze Me"
3. Richard Cheese, "Butterfly"
4. The Pixies, "I Bleed"
5. R.E.M., "The Wrong Child"
6. The Farm, "Rising Sun"
7. Beck, "Ramshackle"
8. Erasure, "A Little Respect"
9. Alex Heffes, "Bukom Mashie"
10. Patton Oswalt, "Married & Single"

OK, so where are y'all's "people" from? Sing your homeland's praises in the comments (even if you can only trace them as far back as, say, New Jersey), and throw your own Random Tens in there while you're at it.

The Friday Random Ten+5 crosses its fingers and hopes for the best in 2010.

After a protracted holiday-induced absence, the Friday Random Ten+5 is back to say . . . man, 2009 really sucked. I mean, I'm not going to say everything that happened last year was bad, but any year in which I lose my job, get sued, have three back surgeries, have to move back in with my parents, the Dawgs lose five games, and the Redskins go 4-12 is not one I'm likely to look back upon fondly. The year had its isolated bright spots, but on the whole, 2010 almost has to be better by default.

I'm optimistic about this new year, and I'm full of hopes for various things -- obviously including finding a job, getting a new car, the Dawgs hiring a kick-ass defensive coordinator and running roughshod over the rest of the SEC East, that sort of thing -- but I've also got some assorted aspirations and hopes that fall outside those usual sorts of things. These are things that I believe can benefit not just me but all of society, and in the first +5 of 2010, I'm sharing them with you -- Five Things I Hope Happen In The New Year.



The "Arrested Development" movie finally coming to fruition
First we were told it was happening. Then we were told nothing was actually happening yet. Then we were told that it's happening, and it has a screenwriter, he just hasn't actually written anything yet. C'mon, guys, make this movie so it can be hilarious and a runaway success and get the TV series re-started on a network that actually appreciates it. Like, what about an NBC Thursday-night lineup including "The Office," "Arrested Development," and "30 Rock"? That's a lineup so awesome it might actually turn Jay Leno at 10:00 funny. Well, OK, that might be setting the bar a bit too high, but we can always hope.



Slovakia making the final four of the World Cup
My esteemed countrymen from the glorious sovereign nation of Slovakia have made the cut of 32 for the World Cup this summer, and few things would make me happier than to see them make it into the semifinals. Or into the semifinals (against the USA, of course). If that can't happen, then I want the Slovak hockey team to win the gold medal in the Winter Olympics.



Lego coming out with a James Bond series
They already have Star Wars figures who carry guns of some type, not to mention the "Agents" series, in which many of the minifigs are armed as well. Why not go all the way and introduce a James Bond series to tie in with the next Bond film, due to start filming later this year? They could make the tricked-out Aston Martin from "Goldfinger," the bad guy's secret under-lake satellite base from "Goldeneye," the two airplanes from the shootout in "Quantum of Solace," the possibilities are endless. (Just leave "Die Another Day" out of it. That one sucked.)



Joe Lieberman being eaten by something
Wolves, bears, giant irradiated scorpions, zombie Ted Kennedy, I'm really not partial. I just want his sanctimonious ass off my TV.



A huge nationwide backlash against the Twilight franchise
Baby sis has already expounded upon why the Twilight book series is not only appallingly poorly written but also in danger of making our young girls believe some horrible, horrible things about men and relationships, and done it better than I could, so I'll stay away from the literary criticism. All I will say is that pre-teen girls are by and large the dumbest demographic in the entire human race -- it's almost like they start devolving around age 10 and don't catch back up with where they're suppposed to be until 17 or 18 -- so anything pre-teen girls like that much almost has to be idiotic by default. And while I have no doubt that the Twilight fad will burn itself out in due time (if nothing else can kill the franchise, the inevitably godawful adaptation of the final book in the series will), I'm praying that our nation comes to its meager senses before then. It just makes me sad, going into a theatre to see a good movie and having to wade through a line of teenage girls and middle-aged housewives about to live vicariously through this idiotic romance as an escape from their own shitty relationships. New rule: If you're an adult male married to a woman who would go see "Twilight" un-ironically under any circumstances, you are entitled to as many extramarital affairs as it takes to blot out that fact, however fleetingly. I really hope that if there are intelligent civilizations in other solar systems, they wait until after this fad has burned itself out to come visit us, because I don't want them thinking Stephanie Meyer was somehow the pinnacle of culture in our civilization or anything.

Those are mine . . . and Holly has one to add: "For Tim Tebow to tank at the combine, fall to 26th or wherever in the first round of the draft so that the Cowboys pick him up, he has a terrible first half of the season and announces after only eight weeks that he's retiring from football, and thus the Cowboys have lost their first-round pick and Tebow's a pussy."

Wow. That's pretty specific . . . specific and hilarious.

Anyway, here's the Ten:

1. Hard-Fi, "Hard to Beat" (Axwell mix)
2. Pet Shop Boys, "I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing" (Voxigen mix)
3. Busta Rhymes, "So Hardcore"
4. 3rd Bass, "Triple Stage Darkness"
5. The Who, "A Quick One While He's Away"
6. The Dust Brothers, "This Is Your Life"
7. Patton Oswalt, "'80s Metal"
8. A Tribe Called Quest, "Start It Up"
9. LL Cool J, "Mama Said Knock You Out"
10. Roni Size and Reprazent, "Brown Paper Bag" (Photek remix)

Feel free to place your own Random Tens and/or wishes for the new year -- be they hopeful, magnanimous, vindictive, filthy, or some combination of any of those -- in the comments.

Happy New Year!

And štastný nový rok to those of the Slovak persuasion -- including, but not exclusive to, Bratislava native and SI model Lucia Dvorská -- as our homeland celebrates 19 years of glorious independence today. (Almost old enough to drink, though in eastern Europe we all start drinking at age 4, so I guess that's neither here nor there.)



Whether 2009 was good to you or 12 months of complete crap, here's to 2010 being better in every way.

The Friday Random Ten+5 spreads itself around, so to speak.

As I've already mentioned, last weekend I was up in deepest, darkest West F'in' Virginia with a whole houseful of my dad's relatives, remembering my granddad, who passed away this past May. At my dad's suggestion, we all stood around in the main room of their big ol' house up on top of the mountain and each gave one particular memory we had of him; my dad remembered his dad teaching him how to sail, I remembered the time Granddad showed up at our house in Tennessee, well into his 60s by then, driving the new purple Toyota Celica he'd just bought. I guess I shouldn't be surprised at how varied our memories were -- if not a jack of all trades, Granddad was certainly a jack of most of them, and I know we're all grateful for the knowledge about a host of different things that he was able to pass down to us before he died.

Then we toasted him with champagne and English shortbread (his favorite) and headed out back to the rose garden to spread his ashes there. It got me to thinking where I'd like to have mine spread when I finally shuffle off this mortal coil. (After I donate all the relevant organs to needy people and/or science, of course. You probably aren't going to want anything to do with my liver or kidneys by that point, but my heart, lungs, corneas, and possibly prostate may still be worth having. Claim your preferred organ now before someone else gets it!) There are probably too many important places in my life to just dump the entire bag in one spot, though, so we're gonna take my remains on a world tour of sorts. Herewith are the Five Places I Want My Ashes Spread When I Finally Kick The Bucket:



Midfield at Sanford Stadium
This one's a no-brainer. I can think of no higher honor for my pulverized bone fragments then to have them re-pulverized by the cleats of the Bulldogs. I don't even mind if Uga XVIII or whatever we're up to by then takes a leak on me; there's a sort of high honor to that, too.



Glacier National Park
The summer after my freshman year of high school, my mom, aunt, sister, cousin and I went on a nearly month-long camping trip out West, starting at my aunt's house in Caroline County, Virginia, and ending up on the U.S.-Canada border in Glacier National Park up in Montana before turning around and heading back. Glacier might be the most beautiful spot on earth, and I wouldn't mind having a bit of me sprinkled on top of a mountain or in St. Mary Lake or something.



Nag's Head, North Carolina
My parents had their honeymoon here in August of 1972, and every year when I was a little kid we'd go back out there around that time of year and stay for a week. We'd always stay at the home of the Hansons, a retired couple who rented out the lower floor of their beach house; from what I hear, that house was irreparably damaged by Hurricane Hugo back in 1989, and I'm sure there's some condo building or pastel-colored monstrosity sitting there now. But I'd still like to have some of my ashes left behind at a beach that was always one of the places I most looked forward to going to each year when I was a kid.



Zemianske Sady, Slovakia
We went out here 10 years ago on yet another family trip, our month-long marathon tour across Europe. We started out in Vienna, spent a few days there, then headed over the border into Slovakia, which is where my mom's family comes from; we even got to see the little town where her ancestors were from, the graves of her great-grandmother and great-grandfather, and the church (above) that the townspeople were in the process of building at the time. Might be nice to have a little bit of me brought back to the Old Country, even if that kind of full-circle journey does have sort of a cheesy-novel ring to it.



Dick Cheney's coffee
This, of course, is contingent upon Dick Cheney outliving me, but I've got a hunch that's going to happen. Whether due to a deal with Satan or incredibly advanced machines whose development and creation were funded by a top-secret government slush fund he directed from the vice president's office, he's going to outlive us all, and you know it.

Now the Ten:

1. Prince, "I Would Die 4 U"
2. Astrud Gilberto, "Who Needs Forever?" (Thievery Corporation remix)
3. Pet Shop Boys, "You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You're Drunk" (The T-Total mix)
4. Pet Shop Boys, "Where the Streets Have No Name (I Can't Take My Eyes Off You0" (Extended mix)
5. Moby, "Everloving"
6. Groove Armada, "Inside My Mind (Blue Skies)"
7. The Beastie Boys, "Bodhisattva Vow"
8. Pet Shop Boys, "Confidential" (Demo for Tina Turner)
9. The London Suede, "Rent" (live)
10. RUN-D.M.C. and Aerosmith, "Walk This Way"

Please welcome the triumphant return of the Random Ten+5 by listing your own Random Tens, as well as the places you'd like to be buried, ash-spread, or otherwise disposed of, in the comments.

Happy New Year/Štastný nový rok to one and all . . .

. . . and merry Constitution Day to the great nation of Slovakia, which celebrates 16 years of swingin' independence today. The nation is thus empowered to drive a car all by itself.

Slovakia's current reigning Most Famous Person, tennis player Daniela Hantuchova, reciprocates thusly: "Děkuji a všetko najlepšie k Bulldog zadok-výprask v Capital One Bowl." Go translate it yourself, I got games to watch and a ton of food to cook.