The Friday Random Ten+5 runs downstairs to see what Santa (or Rece Davis) brought.

So last night was the official beginning of the 2010 college football season, and it was everything I hoped it could be. OK, maybe not everything -- South Carolina looked frighteningly proficient, and at no point in the USC-Hawaii game did anyone leave a flaming bag of dog poo on the sideline for Lane Kiffin to frantically stomp out, but still, it was football. In high def. That I was watching on my own TV, in my own house, that I was paying for with money from a job, which was not the case this time last year. Maybe God really does want me to be happy.

I don't think it's much of an exaggeration to say that I look forward to this glorious day in much the same way that a little kid looks forward to Christmas; that's how giddy the anticipation is. It's got all the trappings of Christmas, when you think about it: excited predictions about what we're all going to get (in the wins column), wearing special outfits and cooking special foods, spreading glad tidings to our fellow believers, making elaborate travel plans. (Seriously, a couple weekends ago Holly and I sat down and planned out every weekend between now and mid-December -- who our teams are playing, where we're gonna be, whether we'll be in the same place or off doing our separate thing. I made a spreadsheet. It's color-coded. Maybe you're not impressed, but Holly's mom was, and that's what counts.)

So I hope that counts as proof that I haven't become totally jaded, or completely lost my ability to experience childlike wonder about, you know, stuff. And football's not the only thing: There are still some things I await with breathless anticipation, even as an adult. These wonderful things are the subject of this week's +5: Five Things I Anticipate As Eagerly As Christmas (Or Football Season).



The Phil Steele annual
Stipulated: When you're making multiple sweaty-palmed visits to Books-A-Million round about the first week in June to see if the Holy Grail of football statistics and handicapping advice has arrived, you have a problem. Maybe a terminal one. But the arrival of Phil Steele's college football bible is the unofficial halfway point of the offseason -- a sign that it really is OK to start getting publicly geeked up about this stuff again, not to mention a sign that the end of the seemingly interminable football-free desert is on the horizon. And when you open that thing up to find that your team has been anointed by Saint Phil to do great things, it's like a ray of sunlight has burst from the clouds and pointed itself straight at you.



New James Bond movies
Even in the waning days of the Pierce Brosnan era, as the Bond franchise threatened to crumble into a mess of over-the-top CGI and questionable casting choices, the arrival of a new James Bond movie was something to look forward to. Now that the franchise has been rebooted and an emphasis has been placed on actual, you know, cinematic merit, it's become An Event. The series has stalled as MGM Studios has gone into deep financial troubles, but Daniel Craig is still under contract for two more movies, and both Craig and director Sam Mendes are said to be eager to get started on the next film once MGM gets its finances squared away. I'm crossing my fingers and hoping there will be a 23d Bond film (and a 24th) -- it just looks like we're going to have to wait a while for them.



New updates to the iPhone operating system
OK, yes, this is Nerd City, the kind of thing that (ugh) a Georgia Tech fan might get jacked up about. But if you were an iPhone owner, you'd understand. "You mean I can cut-and-paste with a tap of my finger now? AND there's multitasking?!?!" Maybe it's sad that this is what I've been reduced to, but hey, it's a harsh world out there. You take your glimmers of hope where you can find them.



The World Cup
Here's the weird thing: For 47 out of every 48 months on average, I don't follow soccer at all. No, I don't feel guilty about this, it's not like soccer doesn't have enough fans elsewhere in the world. But there's just something about the World Cup that's awesome to me. Maybe it's the fact that nations from all over the world -- in some cases nations who might otherwise be inclined to despise one another -- are coming together in a single country just to play a game. Maybe it's the opportunity to see teams from fairly downtrodden countries rise up and get a chance to kick the ass of a superpower every now and then. Or, hell, maybe it's just stuff like this. But whatever the case, the World Cup is the one case in which I can get excited about someone winning 1-0 in overtime. It's not football (well, it's not our kind of football), but it'll do.



Getting my income-tax return
For about the past decade, I've been fortunate enough to get a refund from the gubmint on my income taxes, rather than owing them more money. It's kind of like getting a nice little present (or in some cases not-so-little) out of nowhere in the otherwise bleak expanses of February and March. And I can probably set my watch by the moment one of my libertarian or conservative friends pops up in the comments to say "I don't know what you're getting so excited about, the government's only giving you back your own money," but -- man, quit blocking my shine. It's money. I can spend it. Why bitch about it? Assuming I'm still going to continue getting refunds now that I'm at a new job, I think I'm going to blow 2011's refund on this.

Wow, I feel like a kid again! OK, not really. But here's the Random Ten, which I know y'all have been anticipating as eagerly as Christmas, or football season, or the return of the McRib sandwich:

1. The Roots, "The Spark"
2. Sugar Ray, "Spinning Away"
3. The Clash, "(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais"
4. Beck, "Modern Guilt"
5. DJ Shadow, "High Noon"
6. Beck, "Youthless"
7. The Pixies, "There Goes My Gun"
8. Dexys Midnight Runners, "Come on Eileen"
9. P.M. Dawn, "Reality Used to Be a Friend of Mine"
10. Pet Shop Boys, "Metamorphosis"

Your turn to put your own Random Tens, and/or lists of things you still bother to bounce up and down getting excited about, in the comments. And happy Footballmas, everyone.

Stay riveted to this blog tomorrow night, when I'll be live-blogging my laundry folding.

Normally I hate it when someone puts up a blog post or Twitter that's basically one long (or not-even-that-long) "I don't care about X," because seriously, get over yourself. There is no International Secret Brotherhood of Coolness, and they're not going to whisk you off to their secret lair in a cave under a mountain in the Swiss Alps and initiate you into their number because you wrote 1,000 words about how the World Cup or Pixar movies or house music are completely unworthy of your attention and that's soooo awesome.

Now then: That said, seriously, fuck Lebron James and his one-hour prime-time which-hat-am-I-gonna-pick special. And at least three-quarters-fuck ESPN for indulging him.

A whole hour? For what? Is Lebron gonna rap? Tell jokes? Is James Lipton going to interview him about what he was feeling while he was shooting all those Nike ads? I mean, Kobe Bryant is the poster child for everything that is rancidly selfish and ego-driven about the NBA -- which is most things about the NBA these days -- but even he didn't get an hour in prime-time to tell us he was gonna stay a Laker and not sign with the Clippers after all.

So yes, I'm breaking my cardinal rule and announcing to the world that I don't give one-tenth of a rat's ass which city will be slobbing King James' knob for the next four or five years or however long it turns out to be. The paintball episode of "Community" comes on at the exact same time -- you think I'm gonna miss that to watch Lebron's ego get even more inflated? And look, I didn't want to say it, but yes, this makes me more awesome than you. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go listen to some really obscure band you've never heard of.

"The ability to bend it like Beckham is insignificant next to the power of the Force."

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

My first thought was that the unfortunate player at the end of the clip would have to be Italian, since they're the masters of clutching various body parts and writhing in pain when they haven't actually been touched.

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.

And I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm going to the knockout round.

Though I have next to zero interest in soccer generally, I've always gotten really excited about the World Cup, because it's sort of like an Olympics for one sport: People from all over the world come together in one place to (mostly) put aside political differences and compete not with guns and bombs but with sheer athletic prowess, and some people win and some people lose, but the hope is that everyone does so with a real love for the whole idea of competition and a respect for sportsmanship. (Well, except for the French maybe, but you never know what you're gonna get from them.)

Sitting there in my cube, though, surreptitiously checking the action on the FIFA MatchCast and being less and less slick about it as the game wore on and got increasingly tense, I was reminded not of any specific Olympic memory but of the 2006 Georgia-Georgia Tech game. An agonizing defensive struggle, packed with numerous great plays but an even greater number of missed opportunities, and it looks like the good guys are going to be hanging their heads right up until the last minute, when a talented but maligned player goes in for an amazing score.

It even felt the same way to be watching it: Just like in 2006, I was away from the actual action, keeping track of it on a few seconds' delay -- but there was a group of people watching the game on one of the big-screens on the opposite side of our floor, and in the 91st minute of the match I heard a huge cheer go up from that side of the building. Just as I'd heard a huge cheer when the Americans knocked in their disallowed goal in the first half, and just as I'd heard a huge cheer go up from Sanford Stadium, right down the street from our tailgate spot, when Staffy hit Massaquoi for that TD pass. Wait a few seconds, and then boom, the little soccer-ball icon popped up signaling Donovan's goal, and it was party time for the rest of the day. (Yeah, it was a weird way to be watching the game, but let's be honest, it wasn't like I would've understood the game of soccer any better had I been watching the action unfold on TV right in front of me.)

So congratulations, Team USA. And everyone say a prayer for similar miracles today for Slovakia, who need a win over Italy to have any hope of following the U.S. into the knockout stage.



And actually, while you're at it, say a prayer for American tennis player and damn good Dawg John Isner, who will be resuming the longest tennis match in history at some point later on today. If I weren't pulling for Isner so hard, I'd say just let him and Nicholas Mahut both advance to the next round and take on their opponent two-on-one -- it almost seems unfair to make someone lose at this point, and besides, after playing seven hours of tennis yesterday they probably only have enough combined physical stamina left to equal that of one healthy player (if that much). But Bulldog Nation's pulling for you, John -- just keep acing those serves, and stay hydrated, for God's sake.

"He's a very good boy."

The "Onion News Network" has already put out dozens of pitch-perfect parodies of 24-hour news networks and morning shows, so it should probably come as no surprise that their piss takes on "SportsCenter" are seamless as well.


Kentucky Violated NCAA Rules While Recruiting Basketball-Playing Dog

Stay with it through the stinger at the end. I hope some of these guys are getting acting jobs elsewhere; to be able to ape the tone of ESPN's reporters and anchors that closely speaks to some level of talent. (I mean, if Paris Hilton can still show up in movies . . . )

(H/T: The Senator.)

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 makes its 28 days count.

I've had a surprising number of people tell me recently that February is the month they hate the most -- surprising, I guess, because it seems wasteful to spend that much angst on the month that occupies the fewest days out of the year. On the other hand, though, I guess I can see where they're coming from: It's always cold; the weather sucks; it's got Valentine's Day plopped right in the middle of it, which, even for people in relationships, is one of the more insufferable holidays; and hanging over our heads is the constant reminder that the Powers That Be picked the shortest month of the year for Black History Month, which is just some incredibly racist shit.

But if you keep an open mind, you can find some stuff to like about February other than the fact that it'll be over with quicker than any of the other months. You actually don't have to look too hard, either; I didn't, and I still managed to come up with this week's +5, Five Things To Look Forward To In February. You can start off by congratulating yourself that you made it through January, which really sucked. But anyway:



The Super Bowl (this Sunday)
It's always bittersweet when actual football finally comes to an end. And as a fan myself, I find it especially cruel that the Super Bowl comes so soon on the heels of National Signing Day, a reminder of the kind of stupid bullshit that we're all supposed to go bananas over if we're going to make it through the offseason. But if the season's gotta end, it might as well do so with a bang. And this year's Big One promises to be one of the better games we've had in quite a while; hopefully the ads will be, too, because they've kind of stunk the past few years. But either way, it's still a chance for nuts like myself to get together with fellow fans, raise our glasses to the greatest sport in human history, and place a prop bet on something incredibly stupid like whether the national anthem will last longer than two minutes.



The 2012 Winter Olympics (February 12-28)
I can sort of sympathize with Kyle King here: The Winter Olympics isn't football. But if you're willing to look past that, it's a lot of other things that are good in their own way -- bobsledding, hockey, people sledding downhill face-first at 80 miles an hour, American athletes flexing nuts at a whole host of different sports, and people from all over the world coming together for purposes other than blowing each other up, which is an unfortunately rare thing these days. And even if there's absolutely nothing else on the schedule that interests you -- not even a bunch of people saying "aboot" -- you can always tune in on the evening of Sunday the 21st to stare at Tanith Belbin (above), medal-winning ice dancer and absolute hottest skater ever. I'm just planting seeds here.



Carnaval (February 13-16)
As for the 2016 Olympics, if you're still fuming over Chicago getting snubbed in favor of Rio de Janeiro, consider: Here's what's going on in Chicago right now, while in Rio they're downing caipirinhas and watching women parade down the streets in costumes like the one above. Nothing against Mardi Gras, but Carnaval is maybe the biggest and best party anywhere on the globe -- it's like Mardi Gras, but on steroids, and instead of girls flashing their boobs for beads, the dancers and "samba queens" start out with barely a stitch on, as a matter of course. Eliminating the middleman, like, which is the kind of efficiency we could all learn a lesson from. One of these days I'm going to save up the money to fly down there, with my biggest worry (besides getting mugged) being that I might not come back. (In the meantime, though, perhaps one of you who isn't at work right now can click here and explain the physics of this to me.)



Presidents' Day (February 15)
Woo, federal holiday! Which means some of you get the day off! For those of you who don't, well, I don't know what to tell you. Being unemployed, pretty much every day is a day off for me.



"Cop Out" (February 26)
Yes, I know: This movie's probably going to be retarded. But it's directed by Kevin Smith, and has Tracy Morgan being, well, Tracy Morgan for a couple hours, so by the end of February I am almost certain I'll be able to turn my brain off for long enough to enjoy it. Besides, this being a notoriously slow time of year for movies, what else are you gonna watch besides this and maybe the Scorsese movie that's coming out? "Valentine's Day"? "The Wolfman"? I think Spencer Hall had the right idea about that last one.

There, see? You now have an itinerary. Don't say I never gave you anything. And now, the Ten:

1. A Tribe Called Quest, "Award Tour"
2. U2, "Gone"
3. Elbow, "Flying Dream"
4. The Chemical Brothers, "The Private Psychedelic Reel"
5. Moby, "Oil 1"
6. The Strokes, "Last Night"
7. The Supremes, "Reflections"
8. Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock, "It Takes Two"
9. U2, "Sunday Bloody Sunday" (Live from Sarajevo)
10. Pet Shop Boys, "Yesterday, When I Was Mad" (Coconut 1 12" mix)

Your own Random Tens and things you're looking forward to this month -- or, alternatively, reasons you'll be ready to jump out in front of a bus before the 28th rolls around -- are welcome in the comments.

Curling, curling, curling towards freedom.

When Spencer and Holly were invited up to Knoxville to learn the sport of curling with one of the few bona fide curling clubs in the Southeast, my presence was requested as a co-novice who could perhaps absorb some of the foolish n00bness that would otherwise have been concentrated on just the two of them. And absorb I did. (They say that blah blah percent of life is just showing up, so I showed up.) Spencer's recap is here. A taste:

The question remains: is it a sport? What's it doing in the Olympics? Isn't it more of a game than a sport, a kind of overgrown bar distraction played on ice? Absolutely. Additionally, Ski-jumping is just formalized suicide, Biathlon is a quantified military training exercise, and short-track speed skating is a shoving match that happens at twenty miles per hour. Figure skating doesn't even have points or goals, and lies in the hands of potentially corruptible judges.

Curling is mesmerizing for one reason: its simplicity. Chess on ice is the usual comparison, but it may be even simpler than the endless variations and gambits of Kasaparov's game. Leaning out on the hack and staring down the ice, curling engages the game-playing brain at its most basic and addictive of levels. Put this there; leave space here; completely screw over opponent. Like the best games, it is a true zero-sum game, but unlike chess involves the body, a kind of meditative rock-toss you do over and over again until you're in the wordless space Zen Buddhist monks are always blabbing on and on about. The ice helps: there's blank whiteness, a few lines, and everything else evaporates away.

Curling doesn't involve speed or too much agility. You don't need a mountain to play it, and you most certainly don't need rhinestones, though if you wanted to wear a Johnny Weir body suit no one's stopping you from bringing fabulous to the sport. In fact, you can pretty much wear anything as long as you have clean tennis shoes on. It's really the only hard and fast clothing rule in curling besides "wear pants," and even that might be negotiable. NFL-style celebrations are also considered acceptable, as illustrated in Doug's thanking of the Supreme Being after a final point-scoring thrown on the Hammer, or the final toss of an "end" or round.

Hey, anything that involves that much beer can't be bad.

The Friday Random Ten+5 prefers the pointy ball.

Well, the Braves lost last night, bringing an end to what was shaping up to be a very interesting MLB wild-card race. I was sorry to see that happen, but I'll be honest with you: My interest in baseball, which was once reasonably high, has been waning steadily for years now. I guess that when the Braves stopped winning pennants like clockwork every single season, it kind of opened my eyes to a hard truth -- baseball, as a sport, just isn't that exciting. I mean, I still love the Braves and will root for them no matter what, but outside of that and the College World Series I just can't get into it. Both the gameday experience and the game itself have a lot of fundamental flaws, and with my investment in the baseball season more or less concluded with the Braves' loss, now seems like as good a time as any to explain them: This week's +5 is Five Reasons Baseball Is Inferior To Football.



The field layout is all weird and runs completely counter to the concept of a competitive, binary sport
Think about it: In football, baseball, and even hockey, you've got two teams who start at one side of the playing area and who are trying to move in generally linear fashion toward the opposite side of the field to put the ball or puck or whatever in a specific place. In baseball, however, the goal is to end up right back where you started. And you don't have the ball because the offense never touches the ball to begin with. And then you've got the fact that the playing field itself isn't even of uniform size, so what counts as a home run in one park might not count as a home run in another park. This is no way to run a sport.



There are long stretches where nothing happens
Football has timeouts and pauses for official review and that kind of thing, but other than that the action is generally constant; on every play, everybody is moving, because everybody's got a job to do, whether it's running, blocking, or trying to tackle someone. You can't have an extended conversation during a football game unless it's halftime. In baseball, though, the batter may just stand there waiting for a pitch to hit, and even if he hits it there may only be a couple guys in the outfield who are actually in a position to do anything. And because there's no game clock of any kind, everyone on the field can just take their sweet-ass time to do whatever it is they're supposed to be doing. I have long been a proponent of what I guess I'd call a "pitch clock" in major-league baseball: Once a pitcher lets the ball go, he's got 20 seconds to get off the next one. If he spends so much time fidgeting or adjusting his cap or reading bedsheet signs in the stands that the 20 seconds pass without a pitch, that's a ball. Seriously, pitcher, you've got exactly one thing you're supposed to know how to do out there, so fricking get on with it already.



Baseball is too subjective
I realize that football involves judgment calls too -- did the receiver have control of the ball before he went out of bounds, was that pass interference, where do they spot that ball, et cetera -- but for the most part it's pretty cut-and-dried. Baseball, however, involves the nebulous concept of a "strike zone," which people have attempted to define many times over (as shown above) but is ultimately still up to the discretion of an overweight white guy in an ill-fitting shirt whose entire job is to stand behind the batter and say "I think you should've been able to hit that." (I have friends who do that when I try to talk to girls at bars, and it's just as frustrating and irritating then, but I digress.) And this overweight white guy makes these judgment calls hundreds of times a game. The whole game is based around it. And again, that's no way to operate. It'd be like if a football referee said, "You just completed a pass for three yards, but against that defensive alignment you should've been able to go for a lot longer. That's a loss of downs and I'm making you do it over again."



There are 162 frickin' games
I honestly find it confounding how people get worked up over regular-season baseball games at all, at least before August, and equally confounding how MLB players manage to get motivated for them. If you're playing 162 games, who gives a rat's ass whether you lose a specific one? The NFL, however, only plays 16 games per regular season, and college teams only play 12 or 13, so every game matters. Then there's the fact that baseball must not be terribly physically taxing if you can afford to play six games a week, which goes back to the standing-around-doing-nothing point. Can you imagine what would happen if an NFL team tried to play six days a week? The players would all be in a persistent vegetative state less than a month into the season. Baseball players, on the other hand, can play six out of seven days and in many cases still stay relaxed enough to turn into complete fatasses. I can't respect that.



Cheerleaders
Granted, after a century and a quarter of professional baseball, some teams have finally seen the light and started adding the all-important element of hot chicks into the game experience -- the Atlanta Braves' Squaws, for example, all of whom seem like perfectly lovely, personable young women. But the cold, hard fact is that any good cheerleading squad involves a certain element of cleavage or otherwise-scantily-clad-ness, and as far as MLB is concerned, this seems to be something that only the Marlins Mermaids have figured out. Come on, guys, you've got to give us something to look at while everyone's standing around scratching their asses between pitches.

And now the Ten:

1. Roni Size, "Brown Paper Bag" (Photek remix)
2. N.W.A., "Fuck Tha Police"
3. R.E.M., "Daysleeper"
4. Pet Shop Boys, "Domino Dancing" (alternative version)
5. Me First & The Gimme Gimmes, "Only the Good Die Young"
6. Dave Brubeck Quartet, "Pick Up Sticks"
7. Thievery Corporation, "Focus on Sight"
8. The Pretenders, "Human"
9. Underworld, "Moaner"
10. Patton Oswalt, "Your Moment of Irony"

If you agree with the statement that baseball is superior -- or if you're a baseball fan who thinks I'm a disrespectful heretic -- share any additional arguments you might have, along with your own Random Tens, in the comments.

Not dead, just lazy.

After having gotten scolded by four different people from three different time zones in the span of a few hours last night for not having updated the blog in nearly a week, I realized I owe everyone an apology. Yes, I have been a slack-ass blogger lately, and I don't have much of an excuse. Last night, of course, I was in Atlanta for the UGA-Tech baseball game at Turner Field, which Georgia won 7-5; over the weekend, I was in Columbus, tidying up the place so my parents would have a clean house (and a stocked refrigerator) to come home to after their big trip to Europe. My secondary motive for going home was to get some work done in a big empty house and a distraction-free environment, but I quickly found out that any house with a Nintendo Wii in it, no matter how empty otherwise, is not a distraction-free environment. So obviously I didn't get any blogging done (or much else, for that matter), but I did raise my skill level on Wii baseball by like 700 points. So suck on that, bitches.

Now, as for last Thursday, I do have a legit excuse: I was invited by longtime commenter Zen Bubba up to Nashville for (drum roll, please) the final round of auditions for the Tennessee Titans cheerleading squad, held at the Wild Horse Saloon downtown. ZB, if you'll recall, graduated from law school with a classmate who was on the cheer squad last season and was aiming to re-up for 2009-10, and when he asked if I wanted to come up to Nashvegas and cheer her on, I had only two questions: 1) How quickly can I say "Hells yes" without sounding like a tool, and 2) is flash photography allowed?

As it turns out, Bubba took care of most of the photography (the good pictures are his, while the shitty ones are pictures I took on my iPhone), so here we go:


The inside of the Wild Horse Saloon right as things were getting started. It's a rather large venue. The vibe at a cheerleader audition is kind of like a cross between a Vegas show, "Dancing with the Stars," and the Miss Georgia pageant, and like Miss Georgia, the audience at the cheerleader auditions was filled with girls who were dressed like they expected to be yanked up on stage at any moment.


This would be the Wild Horse, I guess, sittin' easy by the main staircase.


And here is Jocey, now packing a Juris Doctor in addition to her dancing skills.


And here is me, egged on by ZB to douche it up as much as possible; the mirror-lens shades are kind of taking on a life of their own at this point. The PBR, on the other hand, is a Nashville tradition for me; I was in Nashville the weekend before the 2004 Tennessee Democratic Primary, and after a marathon day of campaigning, we all got together at like one in the morning at Robert's Western World on Broadway, where I had a pork-chop sammich and a Pabst Blue Ribbon that constituted what at that point felt like one of the top ten meals I'd ever eaten. So ever since then, trips to Nashville have involved at least one (and usually multiple) PBRs.


You may or may not be able to read this sign hung from the second level of the Wild Horse, but it says "Erica cures my swine flu." I must admit I'm impressed by both the curative powers of the Titans cheerleading squad and their fans' awareness of current events; I doubt the auditions for, say, the Raiderettes would be this topical.


And last but obviously not least, here's me with Jocey (right), who did indeed make it back onto the squad for a second year, and squad captain Valerie (left).

And that's basically why there was no Friday Random Ten+5 last week. I regret nothing.

Better know a Georgia head basketball coaching candidate.

The dominoes set up by the firings of Dennis Felton at Georgia and Mike Gottfried at Alabama are a-fallin', and today comes news from Mark Schlabach that Missouri coach Mike Anderson, fresh off a 31-7 season, a Big 12 tournament title, and a trip to the Elite Eight, now has an offer on his desk from UGA. Supposedly we're offering to dump $2 million a year in his lap, a major jump up from the $1.3 million Missouri is offering in the five-year contract extension the Tigers plan to offer.

Is that a lot of money? You bet, particularly for Georgia, given that the total $14-million deal (over seven years) would be, according to Paul Westerdawg, equivalent to all the money we've paid our basketball coaches total over the last three decades or so. But is it worth it? As someone who's had numerous opportunities to view Anderson's teams in action over the past few years, I say yes, with an option to bump that up to a hell yes sometime in the future.

Anderson got to UAB about the same time I did in 2002, and over four seasons with the Blazers, he took us to the postseason every time -- the NIT in his first season, where we advanced to the quarterfinals, and the Big Dance his three other seasons, including a run to the Sweet 16 in 2003-04 (in which we knocked off Washington and #1-seeded Kentucky to get there). He implemented a fast-paced style that became known well beyond the Birmingham city limits as "40 minutes of hell," assembling an 89-41 record before heading to Missouri after the end of the 2005-06 season.

And most of this was accomplished before the Big East raided Conference USA for most of its top basketball programs, meaning Anderson was winning despite having to compete against Rick Pitino, Tom Crean, Bob Huggins, and, of course, John Calipari. After starting off his UAB career 0-4 against those guys, he went 7-6 the rest of the way. The Blazers didn't dominate C-USA, but they were consistently competitive.

And now he's emphatically turned around a Mizzou program that Quin Snyder had turned into a disaster area both on and off the court. So yes, Bulldog Nation, he is worth it. The challenge now is to see whether we can outhustle Memphis for him; Memphis may play in a lesser conference, but the basketball program is their athletic department's main energy source and they'll certainly be prepared to bring in their usual truckloads of corporate cash from FedEx and whoever else to try and lure him in. But the fact that Damon Evans has already put such a big offer on the table is an encouraging sign that we're taking our men's basketball program seriously for the first time in a long, long while.

I'll be following this with interest, and I hope like hell we get him -- and if you're even a casual fan of Georgia basketball, you should, too.

The Friday Random Ten+5 goes dancing, after a fashion.

For me, the NCAA basketball tournament is kind of like World Cup Soccer: I'm not really that big a fan of either sport, but man, I love the tournaments. And in the case of college basketball, it's because of the brackets. There's something very satisfying about filling one of those out -- you are the master of the universe, determining who lives and who dies in very cut-and-dried fashion, and at least until the actual games start, everyone is a genius, picking the upsets that nobody else thought to pick and thereby demonstrating your intellectual superiority over all.

That's not to say I think college football needs something like this -- no way do we need 64 teams, or 32, or even 16, involved in picking that champion -- but basketball has been able to make it work. And I dare say there are a few competitions in life that could be dramatically improved by going to a 64-team single-elimination tournament. What sorts of things, you ask? Well, that's why this week's +5 is Five Things That Would Be Way Better If They Were Decided By 64-Team Brackets:



Presidential elections
Presidential elections are always complete chaos in the early going when one party (or, in the case of this last election, both) has 10 or 12 candidates up there arguing with each other. We could expand the field to 64, yet at the same time make things a lot simpler, by letting each side field 32 candidates and have have them debate one another two at a time; after each debate, we vote, and the biggest vote-getter from each debate advances to the next round. And you'd still get some impressive upsets, because I don't think most people would've placed Barack Obama any higher than a three seed going into 2008.



The Miss America pageant
Holly made the case for this one pretty concisely: "I can't think of anything more awesome than getting 63 pageant girls up on stage one at a time and telling them there's someone hotter than them." To expand the field to 64, we'd have to start including representatives from American protectorates and minor outlying territories such as Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, etc., but it'd be worth it.



The war on terror
One thing that's always kind of sucked about the global war on terror (or whatever they're calling it these days) is that as much as we'd like to make it all about al-Qaeda, that's not the only enemy we're fighting; we've also got the Taliban, remnants of the Baath Party, Hamas, and Moqtada al-Sadr to worry about, to name only a few. I bet it wouldn't be hard to find 63 distinct, separate groups out there who hate our frickin' guts. But putting everyone into a 64-team (-faction?) bracket would make things way easier on us, because then we could take on those groups one at a time, with all the other ones we're not fighting at that particular moment taking each other out in the meantime. And then I guess we'd end up taking on al-Qaeda in the finals, but you never know, maybe there'd be an upset along the way and we'd end up facing a sleeper organization like al-Qaeda in Iraq. (I guess AQI is a branch organization like UNC-Greensboro or Texas A&M-Corpus Christi or something like that.)



Playmate of the Year
Given that Playboy is making most of its money these days off their Web site anyway, why limit Playmates to only 12 per year? If 12 hot naked chicks is good, then 64 pretty much has to be better (a whopping 433 percent better, to be exact).



The Westminster Dog Show
I just think it would be hilarious if someone like ESPN or Fox Sports covered Westminster and did so in similar fashion to the way they cover March Madness. "Big upset in the Hunting regional today, as the third-seeded Standard Poodle got upset by the 14th-seeded Dutch Partridge Dog -- also on upset alert is the fifth-seeded Bluetick Coonhound, who took a dump on the carpet during a practice run this morning and is facing a very scrappy challenger in the 12th-seeded Boston Terrier."

And now the Ten (coming from the iPhone this week in honor of the face-rocking iPhone OS 3.0, which I'm more excited about than any reasonable person has a right to be):

1. Chaka Khan, "Feel for You"
2. The Clash, "The Guns of Brixton"
3. Pet Shop Boys, "Liberation"
4. Air, "La Femme d'Argent"
5. Groove Armada, "The Final Shakedown"
6. U2, "Acrobat"
7, Pet Shop Boys, "Home and Dry"
8. Boogie Down Productions, "Jimmy"
9. R.E.M., "I Wanted to Be Wrong"
10. John Barry Orchestra, "On Her Majesty's Secret Service"

Good luck with your brackets this weekend, folks, and feel free to drop your own bracket ideas and Random Tens in the comments. And GO BUCS! History is going to be made on the court this afternoon in Dayton; you heard it here first.

Bracket that ass up.

Some of you have probably been sitting there today thinking to yourselves, "Gee, I'd really love to compete in an NCAA tournament pool this year, but I'd feel a lot better about my odds if I could enter one run by somebody who knows nothing about basketball whatsoever." Buddy, have I got a deal for you!

The Big Ass Tourney Pick 'Em Group, the official online bracket competition of Hey Jenny Slater, is once again open for business. If you want to join up for a chance at schooling the rest of us retards, go here and enter Group ID number 115110 and password "radford" (all lower-case); then all that's left for you to do is to fill out your bracket. And with Georgia not even in the same metaphorical galaxy as the field of 65 this year, your job will be even easier, as you won't be confronted with the loyalty-to-Doug-versus-actual-recognizable-logic dilemma that I'm sure was such a stumper for so many of you last year.

I will say this, though: Two squads that were once "hometown teams" for the Gillett clan earlier in my life have made the field this year as 16 seeds, and I'm telling you right now, one of them's finna make history by punking a #1 this week. So if you pick all the #1s to roll, you're going to look back on what I just told you one day and weep.

Lecture over. Go forth and be smarter than everyone else.

The Friday Random Ten+5 goes for the gold.

I know the next Olympics are still a year away, but I was in a conversation the other night about sports or other activities that should be Olympic events, so that's what you get this week: Five Events That Should Be Added To The Next Olympics.



Pole dancing
This was the suggested event that got the whole conversation started, if memory serves. Scoff if you want, but there's a lot of athletic ability involved here, as the above video should demonstrate. And like, say, figure skating, it could involve points for compulsory moves (the spin, the slide down the pole, the hanging headstand) as well as artistic merit. Presumably the costumes would be excellent. And if it takes off, you could even add pairs or synchronized pole dancing down the road.



Laser tag
In theory, the biathlon at the Winter Olympics should be awesome: Contestants go skiing off through the woods, stop, and then bust out rifles and start shooting at stuff. It sounds like the opening to a James Bond film. But in actual practice, it's pretty boring, as they're just standing still and firing at paper targets. Laser tag wouldn't involve live ammo, obviously, but it would add that element of exciting that the biathlon is sorely lacking, as all of the athletes in a given heat would be shooting at each other. Last man standing in a each preliminary heat advances to the finals, and then the last man standing in that competition gets the gold. I mean, I'd watch -- maybe not as intently as the pole-dancing competition, but I'd still watch.



Dodge ball
After watching the Vince Vaughn/Ben Stiller movie from a few years back, the question I was asking was, why don't we have this as a major team sport, in the Olympics or anywhere else? I guess you'd really have to make sure your steroid testing is top-notch, though.



Football
A no-brainer, clearly. If the rest of the world gets to have their version of football in the Olympics, then we should be able to have our dramatically more awesome version. It's the greatest sport in the history of mankind, of course, and one in which Team USA would dominate on a regular basis, but there's another reason this is a needed addition to the Olympic canon: It would give American football fans the chance to prove once and for all that they can be just as loud, drunk, and obnoxious as football fans from soccer-hooligan powerhouses like England and Germany. (Actually, "football hooliganism" wouldn't be a bad addition as an Olympic sport, either, at least as an exhibition.)



Skydiving
Lots of potential for both athleticism and artistic interpretation here, too, and you could even have a separate group competition where teams would try to do stuff like this. Points would be deducted for not sticking your landing and for your parachute not opening -- which sounds cruel, I know, but an athlete's equipment is his own responsibility.

And now the Ten:

1. Living Colour, "Glamour Boys"
2. The Pixies, "Hey"
3. A Tribe Called Quest, "4 Moms"
4. Ice Cube, "Now I Gotta Wet 'Cha"
5. Pet Shop Boys, "Minimal" (M-Factor mix)
6. Primal Scream, "Movin' On Up"
7. David Holmes, "Hey Lisa"
8. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, "You & Me & the Bottle Makes 3 Tonight (Baby)"
9. Pet Shop Boys, "A Different Point of View"
10. Basement Jaxx, "Jump 'n' Shout"

Happy Friday folks. Put your own Tens and/or suggestions for Olympic additions in the comments.