A memo from the desk of Arnold T. Pants, Esq.:Things to do in Denver when you're unemployed.

Doing nothing, and it's everything I thought it could be.

Recently downsized but don't feel like actually looking for another job yet? Me neither, working sucks. Here's some shit to distract you instead:

· First of all, I'm gonna have to go ahead and pimp some of my own work, should any paying blogs, Web sites, or sports journals be looking for writers: Here's my less-than-rosy take on George O'Leary's job security for Dr. Saturday (prithee excuse the character formatting, we're working on it), and here's MY EXCLUSIVE ALL-ACCESS INSIDE LOOK at Lane Kiffin and the Tennessee football program for EDSBS! Why did Kiffykins give such broad access to his deepest, most top-secret planning to a Georgia interloper like myself? He probably fucked up and forgot to check that I was a Bulldog fan, but like everything else, he'll say it was all part of his master plan.

· It has come to my attention that some people found this past week's Monday Morning Cage Match unfairly biased in favor of Lexus and against Texas. One or two people hinted that had a category along the lines of "End zones" been included, the Lone Star State would've cleaned up. OK, I'm an open-minded guy, let's compare rear ends:


Lexus SC430 . . .


. . . and Texas Longhorns.

OK, yeah, you know what, y'all were right and I was wrong. Game over, Texas wins. My decision is final.

· And now that I've pimped my own work, it's time to pimp some other people's: Platinum-level Friend of Holly (and therefore friend of Hey Jenny Slater) Livia drops Pat Buchanan with a knee to the balls and keeps on kicking, while over at Practically Harmless, Sister of Hey Jenny Slater does the same to the Twilight book series here and here.

What else do we know about Bella? We know that she's clumsy. Sooo clumsy. Clummy-clum-clumsy. You can hear "Yakety Sax" faintly in the background throughout the book. She falls down in the woods. She trips over her own feet at the beach. She trips over her own feet in class. She drops her books. She thwacks her classmates in the head with a volleyball. She thwacks herself in the head with a badminton racquet. She gets paper cuts. At one point, Meyer specifically describes her eating a bowl of cereal, "chewing each bite with care," as if a Lucky Charms-Mama Cass moment is an ever-looming threat. And in case you weren't able to pick up on it yourself, Bella is kind enough to tell you herself.

I'm absolutely ordinary - well, except for bad things like all the near-death experiences and being so clumsy that I'm almost disabled.

Oh, are you clumsy? I totes hadn't noticed.

· Back to Pat Buchanan for a moment, sort of: As blatant a bigot as Pat Buchanan is, he is completely, utterly sane compared to Glenn Beck, who did everything except audibly shit his pants when a caller somehow managed to get past what I'm sure was NORAD-tight call screening to disagree with him on health care:



Now, here's my question: You're a radio host. You're crazier than a Greyhound bus full of methed-up ferrets, but be that as it may, you've somehow developed a sincerely devoted following despite yourself. Who says "GET OFF MY PHONE"?!?!? You're the host, Miss DuBois, fuckin' drop the call if it's that upsetting to you! Why throw a literal howling hissy fit and make yourself look like even more of a twit than you already have? I refuse to believe that anyone, even his most ardent fans, are actually laboring under the delusion that Glenn Beck is sane at this point; I think his fans are actually hoping he's crazy enough to jump the White House fence with an Uzi in hand or something like that. Actually, in Beck's case it'd probably be more along the lines of a Super Soaker filled with ReaLemon, because that's just the kind of thing he'd come up with, but whatever.

· In other news of wingnuttery, some folks are apparently so determined to take Obama down that they're making up stories about Obama getting booed during the first pitch at the All-Star game last week. Hey, if that's all it takes to make something true, then I would like to announce here and now on this blog that Erin Andrews didn't spurn my advances in Tempe the weekend of last season's UGA-ASU game, she in fact came back to the house our group had rented and we polished off a '98 Dom in the hot tub. Salud, motherfuckers!


Oh, yeah, I got her number. It's OK, I know you want to touch me.

· Remember the Friday Random Ten+5 a couple months back in which the Mi-24/25/35 series attack helicopter received an induction into the Badass Hall of Fame? The "Hind" originally earned its badass reputation by laying waste to the Afghan resistance in the early 1980s, to the point that only a rapid influx of American-sourced surface-to-air missiles (as highly entertainingly dramatized in "Charlie Wilson's War") succeeded in turning the tide. Well, now that the Afghan military's forces are in the process of being rebuilt by coalition forces so that they can stand on their own two feet and defend themselves from the Taliban, the Afghan National Army Air Corps is being supplied with -- what else? -- Mi-35s. The irony here is so delicious and satisfying that I'm now substituting it for one meal each day.


The hunted become the hunters, or something like that.

· I would like to go on record as saying that Al Franken will one day go down in history as one of the better U.S. senators we've ever had. Unlike "Stuart Saves His Family," this statement is not intended as a joke.

· Finally, courtesy of Twitter pal and equally rabid Bulldog partisan Ally, here's the first solid, specific recommendation anyone's given me so far as to what I should be doing with myself while I'm unemployed. Soon as my folks leave their house for any length of time, I'm building something along the lines of this:


Rooftop Waterslide

· Actually, maybe this is what I need to be doing with myself:



Of course, pimping, as Big Daddy Kane warned us, isn't easy, and I should probably save this kind of work for when I really buckle down and get serious about holding down a regular job.

The Friday Random Ten+5 would prefer that your bloodline end here.

Whatever else I try to accomplish here at Hey Jenny Slater, I try to be intensely focused on customer service. And you may not know this, but I take requests, as long as it's not an unbelievably stupid idea. An example of a non-stupid idea: Bestest friend Kristen, honorary HJS Exalted Hero of the Revolution, e-mailed me from Denver a couple weeks ago to call my attention to this article concerning the first five Coloradans who should be given the new male birth-control pill. Plus-five idea? You're damn straight, buddy.

I have to confess I'm a little mystified about how the male pill works -- does it prevent you from ejaculating? Or maybe it administers a tiny dose of THC to each of your sperm cells, meaning that all of your sperm are too tired to make it to the fallopian tubes and are too busy going "Dude, have you ever looked at a uterus? I mean, really looked at a uterus?" besides. But I'll leave that to doctors and other science people to figure out. All I can do is come up with the list of Five Guys Who Should Be Given The Male Birth-Control Pill Before Anyone Else, and here it is:



James "Jim Bob" Duggar
The Duggar name may not automatically ring a bell, but trust me, you've heard of him: He's the former Arkansas state legislator who evidently had it revealed to him in a dream that his wife's sole purpose on earth was to serve as a walking, sentient fetus factory. A quarter-century later, they've got 18 kids and have shown no inclination to cease spawning anytime soon. Somehow this has to be stopped -- if not for the sake of our overburdened planet, then for the sake of poor Michelle Duggar's uterus, which has to be held together with bulldog clips and duct tape by now.



Leonardo DiCaprio
Those of you who are heavily involved in fantasy football are probably familiar with the concept of a "Can't Cut" list, which basically sets aside the really elite players in the league, your Peyton Mannings and your LaDainian Tomlinsons and so on, and says no team can just summarily drop them from the roster because to drop a player that awesome would have to involve some kind of shenanigans. Why do I bring this up? Well, Bar Refaeli, international supermodel and confirmed HJS birthday buddy, would seem like an obvious candidate to go on the worldwide "Can't Cut" list of potential sexual partners -- and yet Leonardo DiCaprio gave her the heave-ho earlier this week. What the fuck? Leo, dude, you were awesome in "The Departed," but be that is at may, you're kind of a fucking ingrate, and if that's the best judgment you're capable of exhibiting then perhaps you're not someone who should be fathering children. Plus the more offspring wandering around out there with DiCaprio's DNA, the harder it's going to be for my sons to get tail 25 or 30 years from now.



Glenn Beck
Tough call between Beck and Sean Hannity here. Both are so dumb they'd lose a battle of wits to a Speak & Spell, and both seem to think volume and hyperbole is a reasonable substitute for actual facts or grasp of current events. But Hannity is merely an annoying asshole, like those tiny little dogs who think they're Great Danes and spend every waking hour barking and trying to nip at your ankles; Beck is full-on, raving, black-helicopter, shithouse-rats-won't-even-talk-to-him crazy. Not only that, but Hannity appears to have stopped at two kids; Beck has popped out four, and at the age of 45 he's got plenty more child-bearing years in him, provided Eli Lilly and Company manages to ride out the recession in good financial health. I've got a sinking feeling Beck is poised to fashion at least one more little Beckling whose head he can stuff with loon-ball Obama-is-Hitler propaganda, and we owe it to future generations to head that off before it happens.



Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer
"Date Movie." "Epic Movie." "Meet the Spartans." "Disaster Movie." These two asslicks should be denied the right to breed based on that résumé alone. But you just know that these guys are the kind of self-satisfied, douchey, aggravating, laugh-at-their-own-jokes dumb-jock types who were roundly despised even by their own fraternity brothers, and given fertile, unsuspecting young women to plant on their casting couch, they'll bring up their kids to be the exact same kind of people. Sorry, guys, can't allow that to happen. The rest of society can regurgitate pop-culture tidbits just fine on its own.



Tony Romo
Remember what a gigantic, inescapable f%$#ing deal it was when Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner had their first kid? Or when Gwyneth Paltrow and that dude from Coldplay whose name I'm too lazy to look up had theirs? We didn't -- couldn't -- stop hearing about it for weeks. And if Tony Romo and Jessica Simpson succeed in popping out an offspring, it's going to be every bit as bad. And that's just the start: If they have a boy, that kid's almost certain to start playing football at some point, which means that in 18 years we'll no doubt be subjected to a recruiting battle more exhaustingly annoying than Jimmy Clausen, Bryce Brown, and Nick Montana put together. (On the other hand, if they have a girl, then there's your 2028 Miss Teen South Carolina right there.)

And now the Ten:

1. Underworld, "Unruly July"
2. Dave Attell, "Gambling"
3. David Holmes, "Don't Die Just Yet"
4. The Breeders, "No Aloha"
5. Busta Rhymes, "Things We Be Doin' For Money Part 1"
6. Sir Mix-A-Lot, "Baby Got Back"
7. The Buzzcocks, "Why Can't I Touch It?"
8. Public Enemy, "Caught, Can We Get a Witness?"
9. Johnny Cash, "A Boy Named Sue"
10. The Who, "Who Are You"

Your turn: Your own Random Tens and/or nominees for the first round of male birth control go in the comments, please.

A memo from the desk of Arnold T. Pants, Esq.:Getting back in the saddle.

· First of all, I want to thank everyone who e-mailed or commented or text-messaged their kind wishes in the wake of my granddad's death last week. The family's been taking it really well, and I think we've all been extremely lucky to have big groups of people to rally around us when we've needed it.

Incidentally, while the process of "settling affairs" is still ongoing, I was granted what I guess you could call my piece of the "inheritance" while I was up in West Virginia with the family: an unfinished bottle of Glenlivet that had belonged to Granddad. We don't have many Scotch drinkers in our family, but he was a big fan. That bottle is one that will never be finished -- I'm always going to keep a little bit sitting there in the bottom, for Granddad -- but I'm proud to have it on my shelf.

· OK, enough with the seriousness; time to get back into this "blogging" thing, which I have been extremely slack about the last few weeks. I won't say anything dumb like "It's what Granddad would've wanted," because I frankly have no idea whether he gave a crap about this blog or anything on the Internet period, but -- if I let this unfortunate event stop me from blogging, then the terrorists have won, or something. Let's bring out the Legos.







· Those were so good, let's have some more. Cakes! My favorite:



· The other day I noticed an interesting confluence in my Twitter feed -- two Twitterers I follow, one ultra-liberal and one ultra-conservative, linked to the same snippet of video from Glenn Beck's appearance on "The View." And they both agreed that Beck pretty well got his ass handed to him. See for thyself:



First allow me to stipulate two things: 1) I don't like Glenn Beck. 2) I don't watch "The View" and, thus, do not find it to be an especially stimulating venue for political debate. But with all that said, allow me to ask: What kind of fucking idiot is Glenn Beck? You know you're going on "The View," so you decide to mock (and, demonstrably, lie about) its two most recognizable stars on your radio show? To call that "bush league" would be an insult to both bushes and leagues, and to call Beck a "buffoon" would be an insult to the many people throughout history who have managed to make perfectly productive careers out of buffoonery.

Right-wingers, you can take me at my word or not, it's up to you, but your already tarnished political brand is doing itself no favors by its continued association with a whining bumblefuck like Glenn Beck. Rush Limbaugh is an asshole, and avowedly so, but at least he's occasionally an asshole in the service of some greater point or idea; Glenn Beck is just a dork who fell bass-ackwards into a TV gig and who serves no current purpose other than to give sarcasm a bad name. Cut him loose and move on.

· Heard the other day that Olivia Wilde had been given the top spot on Maxim's "Hot 100" list for this year. Is it bad that I had to look up who she was?

· Conspicuously not on the list: CNN money/financial reporter Poppy Harlow. Happened to glance at her on the news the other day above the chyron "Tips for Servicing Your Hybrid" and said, out loud, "I'd service her hybrid." You know when's not a good time to say something like that out loud? When you're on the phone with your girlfriend.



Be that as it may, she's a live one, all right. But don't think for one second that I'm making her the new Hey Jenny Slater Official Future Wife or anything like that; I'm not getting my heart broken like last time.

"We have become so politically correct that no one would even daaaare think about sending in the Marines to fight pirates . . . "

Well, Glenn Beck was right about one thing: We didn't send in the Marines. We sent in Navy SEALs.

If Beck (or Newt Gingrich, or Brit Hume, or any of those other Fox News dicklicks) are ever right about anything else, then by all means let me know. I wouldn't want to miss it.

In the meantime, hijack this, bitches. (Chart lovingly, painstakingly crafted over at Tiki Bar.)