Jacked.

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

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

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

Thiiiiiiiiinks.

The Friday Random Ten+5 is back, and it can't dance.

I know the Friday Random Ten+5 has been absent for a few weeks, and it's mainly because I just couldn't come up with any good ideas for +5s -- but a conversation I had with Holly the other day gave me one. We'll talk periodically about what we might plan, wedding-wise, if we ever decide to pull the trigger on this thing, and mainly it's just us coming up with outlandish ideas such as a Super Mario Brothers-themed ceremony where she comes down the aisle dressed like Bowser. (Her idea, not mine, which just makes it that much more awesome.) But we were talking about ideas for what song to play at our first dance, and we came up with some doozies. Hence, the Friday Randomness returns with Five Unbelievably Inappropriate Songs To Play As The First Dance At Our Wedding Reception.



Wu-Tang Clan, "Shame on a Nigga"
This is the song that inspired the entire conversation, and we've talked about it enough at this point that the chances we actually do it are probably right around 50-50. Which will make our parents so very proud of us, I'm sure.



Dead Kennedys, "Too Drunk to Fuck"
This would be appropriate since it describes quite a few people at the end of a wedding reception anyway. You go there to pick up some bridesmaids, you dance, you drink, and by the end of the evening you're in no position to do anything but puke on your nice clothes and cry in a cab on the way home. Or maybe that's just me.



Wham!, "Careless Whisper"
Hits the inappropriateness trifecta: references to infidelity, references to dancing . . . and five minutes' worth of pure, uncut, Colombian '80s cheese. Including '80s saxophone, which could make even "The Star-Spangled Banner" sound goofy.



Josh Groban, "You Raise Me Up"
I'm not including a YouTube here because this song is so godawful I can't even stand to have it on my blog. Yes, it's much worse than "Careless Whisper." Most of Groban's catalogue, if this song is any indication, makes "Careless Whisper" look like "Smells Like Teen Spirit." And to my ears, at least, it's way more offensive than "Too Drunk to Fuck." If we played this as our first dance, we'd have to play "Too Drunk to Fuck" or maybe Cee-Lo's "Fuck You" immediately afterward, just to demonstrate to everyone we didn't really mean it.



Nirvana/Richard Cheese and Lounge Against the Machine, "Rape Me"
Pretty self-explanatory, no? It's either this or the Beastie Boys' "Girls."

And now the Ten, whose appropriateness cannot be verified in advance:

1. Pet Shop Boys, "K-Hole"
2. Johnny Cash, "Give My Love to Rose"
3. Red Hot Chili Peppers, "Scartissue"
4. Pet Shop Boys, "Vampires"
5. Nanci Griffith, "I Don't Want to Talk About Love"
6. Tito Puente, "Mambo Gallego" (remix)
7. Fatboy Slim, "Going Out of My Head"
8. Underworld, "Ring Road"
9. Moby, "Bodyrock"
10. U.N.K.L.E., "Logan's Run"

Please welcome back the Ten+5 by putting your own Random Tens, and your ideas for utterly horrible wedding-reception numbers, in the comments.

I've seen too much for a little while, I want to forget.

Well, what can I say about this past weekend except I shouldn't have watched "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" Friday night -- everything I needed to know about what was going to go down the following afternoon was right in there.

Except when you get right down to it, the above scene, iconic though it may be, is insufficient -- and entirely too simplistic -- to accurately portray Georgia's misery in this rivalry, particularly when there's a far more apt metaphor in the very same TV special. I mean, yeah, Charlie Brown gets the ball whipped away from him at the last second every single time, which is embarrassing enough, but you'll notice nobody is ever around to watch it; the humiliation is at least a dark secret shared only between him and Lucy. To declare that "Lucy = Florida" also doesn't work -- while Lucy and the Gators are both bitches who wear blue and aren't nearly as hot as they fancy themselves, that statement implies that Georgia's chances for success are entirely in Florida's hands, which, no matter what Bulldog Nation may be thinking in its most desperate moments, isn't true either.

No, the better metaphor is "Great Pumpkin = equal footing in the Georgia-Florida rivalry." More obscure, I know, and definitely more abstract, but sometimes to make sense of cosmic absurdity like this you gotta be willing to try and wrap your brain around something challenging. Every year, we think it's coming; every year we think that if we just believe enough, it will reveal itself to us and, out of moral obligation, reward us for our seemingly unending persecution in its name. OK, I just totally fucking freaked myself out by sussing out that the Great Pumpkin is a metaphor for the Second Coming -- seriously, Charles Schultz, way to blow a brother's mind on what is otherwise a day of perfectly festive debauchery -- but all that being said, we believe, it doesn't show, and we get publicly humiliated for our faith all over again.

I believed. Oh, boy howdy, did I believe. I believed even after Aaron Murray got picked off on the game's very first play from scrimmage, believed even when Florida's previously moribund offense started gathering steam, believed even when we went into halftime down 21-7. Because look! We roared back after halftime and went on a 17-3 run to tie things up, and then, when Florida scored a relatively rapid-fire TD that put them back on top, we went right back down the field to tie it up again and, just for good measure, held on Florida's final drive of regulation and successfully forced overtime. All the trappings of that rare amazing Georgia victory were there: More than 30 points against a very good Gator defense? Check. Great QB play? After a miserable first half, Aaron Murray settled down in the second, going 13-of-21 for 198 yards, two TDs and no turnovers, looking once again like the stunningly poised player we'd seen over the first eight games. Confident squad? By the time Georgia tied it up with four and a half minutes left in regulation, our guys were jumping all over the place. The defense couldn't wait to get out on the field and make a stop; the offense looked hungry to get out there and take a stab at getting the winning score.

But obviously we didn't. Yeah, some of it comes down to inferior play -- the turnoverpalooza in the first half, f'rinstance, without which we might have been up by two scores and simply handing the ball off to Caleb King and Washaun Ealey to see how much clock, and how much of Urban Meyer's soul, they could grind down. Some of it also comes down to inexplicable coaching -- we were lucky enough that the Mikey Henderson "One and Done" play worked the first time three years ago, so did we really think we were gonna outsmart Florida's secondary with it a second time, particularly with a QB who I'm not sure has hit a fade to the end zone all season?

Some of it, though, I'm struggling to justify with any word other than "luck." Take these four situations:

1. Trey Burton fumbles at the Florida 14 and Georgia picks it up.
2. Aaron Murray fires a pass over the middle to 6'4" TE Aron White, and it's a little high but White gets a hand on it.
3. John Brantley gets sacked by Darryl Gamble at the Georgia 35 and fumbles, and a Georgia player gets a hand on it.
4. Aaron Murray throws another one over the middle to A.J. Green, the best receiver in college football, and A.J. gets a hand on it.

Two times the ball began the play in Florida's hands, two times it started off in Georgia's; all four times Georgia gets a hand on it at some point; but all four times it belongs to Florida by the time the whistle is blown. Yeah, yeah, I know: Inferior play had a hand in some of this, too, even the blown opportunities with the fumbles -- if we just fucking fall on that first one rather than trying to pick it up and run with it, for example, we start inside the Florida red zone with three near-automatic points and a pretty good chance at seven, and we deny Florida the long TD drive that swing momentum in their favor for pretty much the rest of the first half.

Still: Four times we get a hand on the ball and we don't get any of them? Not one? If we can have a game like that less than a year removed from going -16 in turnover margin, fuck a regression to the mean. It wasn't just the turnovers, either. Late fourth quarter, game tied at 31, Florida's gotten another good KO return from Chris Rainey -- and oh, God, don't get me started on his sociopathic ass being suited up and in the game to begin with -- and they've got 2nd-and-9 just a couple yards shy of midfield. Darryl Gamble crushes Brantley eight yards behind the line, resulting in 3rd-and-17 from the 40 (on a day when we're actually covering third downs pretty well, wonder of wonders), which gives us a chance to force a punt and set ourselves up with not-horrible field position and a couple minutes and two time-outs with which to get Blair Walsh in place for the game-winning field goal. Awesome, right? Right?

Nope -- a false start by Florida, their fifth false start of the day, negates the sack. They get the first down, drive into Georgia territory, pin the Dawgs at their own 6 and it's off to overtime we go. Even when they fuck up, it turns out better for them.

I realize I'm leaving myself getting open to getting flayed here -- by fans both Florida-identified and non -- with charges of whining. Hey, you're taunting a dude who's lost the ability to feel, so you're the one who's arguably wasting more energy here. And yes, again, I realize that no small amount of what I've described above goes back to Georgia's players not having the focus or fortitude to make the optimal play in a given situation, whatever that happens to be. And not long after I got home from Atlanta this evening, as I gathered my thoughts and tried to figure out what exactly I wanted to say in this space, I'll admit I briefly entertained the thought that the loud, heavily publicized, tension-fraught atmosphere of Jacksonville might have something to do with that lack of focus, which of course led to me wondering if maybe we should move the Cocktail Party out of there after all. (I mean, we've already officially ripped the words "Cocktail" and "Party" out of it to begin with; after that, any talk of tradition, on the parts of the respective university presidents at least, is pretty ridiculous.)

But no, I'm not gonna go there. Even if you think the series would be more fun for the students as a home-and-home; even if you can make a case, in spite of Georgia's still-pretty-good road record under Mark Richt, that the Dawgs' greater travel distance is a tangible hindrance to their chances of winning in this rivalry; even if you think that the Dawgs face a "hostile environment" in a stadium that is divided directly down the middle between Dawgs and Gators, it would be wrong to move this game. Why? BECAUSE IT WOULD BE A BITCH MOVE. If we were to go to a home-and-home, then no matter how dominant a run Georgia went on immediately afterward, no matter how supposedly solid our reasoning was for moving the game, we'd be the the school that whined the Cocktail Party out of Jacksonville and one of the sport's last remaining neutral-site rivalries out of existence. I'll be damned if I'm going to have that on my conscience, or the University of Georgia's.

Unfortunately, that doesn't get us a millimeter closer to solving the critical question: What do we do? I'm sorry if you came here for answers, because I don't know. What I do know is that I won't be watching the game next year. If I'm in front of a TV, it'll be tuned to something else (maybe I'll put a "Mad Men" DVD on); if I'm in the Jacksonville area, I'll be relaxing on a sunlit beach, stuffing a lime into the neck of a Corona and thanking the good Lord that, independent of any fortune or misfortune being visited upon my football team, I'm gainfully employed, living in what remains the freest country on earth, and blessed with an inordinate number of family and friends who care about me dearly. But I can't put myself through the misery of another one of these -- not for another year or so, anyway. Believe me, I've got nothing but admiration for Linus for going out there year after year in the face of overwhelming odds and public humiliation and laying bare his trusting soul for all the world to see. But I'm not Linus; I don't have a blanket to turn to anymore; and when I dated a girl named Sally in high school, she dumped me for a dude in the band. I've had an inkling for a while now, in other words, that the Great Pumpkin ain't coming for me. So I think I've earned a year off.

Has it gone on too long? Do you mind that it hurts?

You all saw what happened just as clearly as I did, I'm sure, so I'm going to keep this (relatively) short and sweet, except to say this: I kind of feel like Chazz Palminteri at the end of "The Usual Suspects."

I'm sitting there, thinking I've got the case wrapped up -- not entirely to my satisfaction -- but I think I've at least got a handle on it, know what's going to happen next. Then I sit back in my chair, coffee in hand, and I look up at my bulletin board. The collapse of the run defense in 2008, followed by the collapse of the pass defense in 2009. The inexplicable implosions against teams who are supposedly at a marked talent disadvantage -- Tennessee 2007, Tennessee again two years later, Kentucky last November. Joe Cox, a fifth-year senior, making the kinds of mistakes a freshman wouldn't make. And the off-the-field stuff -- the DUIs (which we racked up another one of last night), A.J. Green punting his jersey, Washaun Ealey driving after being specifically instructed not to. The never-ending stream of injuries that seem to ensure we never quite have a full, healthy complement of players to put on the field. All these things which, taken just one at a time, could be shrugged off as isolated incidents, mere frustrations, but all together they make you drop your coffee cup on the floor and stare slack-jawed at the inescapable conclusion: Mark Richt is Keyser Söze. Only in this case, Keyser Söze is Ray Goff.

What I see when I look at Georgia football now is a program that is losing control. You can blame that on the players, and sure, the ultimate responsibility for their actions lies with them, but when you view the people above you as weak and indecisive, what's your natural inclination? And could our coaches possibly be doing a better job of looking weak and indecisive right now? We've just put the last dab of whipped cream on top of our first three-game SEC skid in nearly two decades, and in the midst of a bunch of meaningless word salad about "looking within" and "[making] sure that everything we do is the right thing to do," Mark Richt gives us this bit of insight into the coaching staff:

“We just, at times, called a couple running plays just blindly and just said, ‘Hey we’re going to run this no matter what,’ ” he said. “There times when we had success and some times we got hit in the mouth because of the pressures they brought. And again, until you look at the film, it’s going to be hard to say exactly. They did a nice job defensively.”

Let's say you're an 18- or 19-year-old kid who's actually witnessing this thought process play out on the field, hours before Richt makes specific mentions of it. What do you think after something like that? If you've just watched your coaches heave a 160-pound tailback up the middle right into the teeth of a hulking MSU defensive line for an entire half with exactly zero success, what conclusions do you then draw about your coaches' true determination to see you and all your teammates leave that stadium with a desperately needed win? If, at my current position at MegaConglomCo p.l.c., my editor tells me that my top "action item" for this week is to beat my head repeatedly against a wall, and I say "I don't see how that's going to help me complete my projects on deadline" and she says "No, trust me, this is how I want you to do it," how hard am I going to work for that editor, or anyone else in my department, going forward?

And yet I may not be in any kind of position to cast stones here, because if you accused me of phoning it in with this post, you wouldn't be completely incorrect. I've written it several times already -- banged out the first iteration after Vanderbilt '06, wrote another one after Tennessee in '07, composed the revised and expanded! Georgia Tech '08 edition while sitting in a boarding lounge at LAX. Each time I wrote it with some degree confidence that things would turn around, that Richt and Co. would learn their lessons from it and improve going forward, confidence for which I was chided more and more as the years wore on. So in some ways I'm just as guilty of the whole "Do the same thing over and over expecting a different result" strategy as anyone else associated with the program.

No longer, though. I still hope things will get better, but I no longer have confidence that they will. Let's be real here: The team in white that played and was coached last night in Starkville might be a 4-8 team if they get some lucky breaks. The "miracle ending" to 2010, at this point, is if we manage a Marine crawl back to 7-5, the same record that got last year universally described as "the worst season under Mark Richt's tenure" but with nothing tangible to point to as an indication that things will get any better in 2011.

Is that enough to earn Richt a pink slip? After this season? I honestly can't say. If we end up 4-8 or 5-7 this season and Greg McGarity determines that Richt has earned one more year to try and end the slide, then I'll be OK with that. I mean, really, at this point, what difference does one more year make in the cosmic scheme of things? On the other hand, though, if McGarity decides it's time to pull the plug on the Richt Era and make his mark on the program by bringing in a new guy, I'll be . . . relieved. I will be sad, and tremendously disappointed that a man as fundamentally good and upstanding as Mark Richt never got to achieve the legendary status that so many of us have wanted for him ever since he pulled off P-44-Haynes almost exactly nine years ago, but I'll be relieved that someone finally decided to throw the switch on an embarrassing slide and do something different. There was a time, as recently as a few days ago, when I couldn't even conceive of saying something like that, but there you have it. Think of it as me being willing to make a major change in my worldview; I can only hope that it's not way too late for Georgia's coaches to do the same.

Poll dancing, week 3: At least nobody died.

So I was up in Tennessee this past weekend, getting a firsthand look at the Tennessee-Florida rivalry with Holly and Spencer (and, of course, catching just enough of the Georgia-Arkansas game to know what it feels like to have one's heart ripped out of one's chest while still fully conscious). Holly had her future sister-in-law's bridal shower to attend Sunday afternoon, so she said I could either stick around in Knoxville and ride home with her or ride with Spencer and get home early. Holly's brother's fiancee is a lovely girl, but showers of any kind, be they bridal or baby or whatever, peg my personal Fun-O-Meter right down around "receive prostate exam from doctor with very cold hands" territory, so I said I'd hitch a ride with Spence.

Five miles or so north of Cartersville, Georgia, right after we'd been blown past by three Clemson coeds in a yellow Mustang convertible with the vanity plate "TOPL1SS," Spencer's car decided to die from embarrassment and give up any ambitions of traveling faster than 20 miles an hour on I-75. We pulled over onto the shoulder and called a tow truck, and because the tow truck didn't have enough room in the cab for all of us and the two dogs I'd brought up to Knoxville, they got to ride in Spencer's disabled Honda on the back of a flatbed. Here's Jenna, wearing her DUDE NO SERIOUSLY WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING expression as the car is hoisted aboard:



So we made it back to Decatur about an hour and a half late, where Spencer's better half was waiting for us with Red Bulls and a thermos of vodka. And I got home, and the Redskins lost in overtime after blowing a 27-10 second-half lead to the Texans, and that's that.

How was your weekend?

Games watched: North Carolina State-Cincinnati, first half of Southern Miss-Kansas, Florida-Tennessee, parts of Auburn-Clemson, the end of Michigan State-Notre Dame, Arizona-Iowa.

Hey Jenny Slater Ballot - Week 4

Rank	Team	Delta
1	Alabama Crimson Tide	--
2	Ohio St. Buckeyes	--
3	TCU Horned Frogs	--
4	Oregon Ducks	1
5	Nebraska Cornhuskers	3
6	Arizona Wildcats	15
7	Stanford Cardinal	12
8	Boise St. Broncos	-1
9	South Carolina Gamecocks	--
10	Arkansas Razorbacks	2
11	Oklahoma Sooners	-7
12	Florida Gators	-1
13	Texas Longhorns	4
14	Auburn Tigers	-1
15	Iowa Hawkeyes	-9
16	Miami Hurricanes	2
17	Utah Utes	3
18	Nevada Wolf Pack	--
19	Oregon St. Beavers	-5
20	California Golden Bears	-10
21	Penn St. Nittany Lions	2
22	Clemson Tigers	--
23	Pittsburgh Panthers	1
24	Michigan Wolverines	-9
25	Michigan St. Spartans	--
Dropouts: Wisconsin Badgers, Houston Cougars, Air Force Falcons

SB Nation BlogPoll College Football Top 25 Rankings »

The next five: Wisconsin, Virginia Tech, LSU, Georgia Tech, Notre Dame.

· Yup, it must be Pac-10 Week up in this ballot, as Arizona and Stanford ride perhaps the two most impressive victories of the weekend into the top 10, joining Oregon's point-a-minute squad. The Pac-10 was pegged as one of the weaker BCS conferences in the preseason, but between these three teams and Oregon State, who frequently seems to take a while to get rolling but has as much raw talent as anyone in that league, the race for the Rose Bowl could be very, very fun to watch this year.

· Iowa takes a hit for nearly putting poor Ricky Stanzi in the hospital thanks to the Hawkeye O-line's horrendous breakdowns toward the end of their upset loss to 'Zona, and yes, the Wildcats are a good team, but that kind of pass protection isn't going to get anyone very far in the Big 10 this year. Nor will Oklahoma's schizophrenic defense get them anywhere near the national championship game if they keep this up.

· I'm feeling Texas more than I was previously -- OK, yes, that defense is just plain unfair -- but I'm still not sold on the offense. I have a feeling they're going to need to put more than 24 points on the board to beat the Sooners or Cornhuskers.



· California takes a precipitous drop thanks to getting pasted by Nevada on Friday night, further cementing my suspicions that Jeff Tedford is not actually a human but a robot who missed getting a critical software update sometime back in 2007. Michigan also takes a steep fall after proving pretty conclusively to the world that they're going to have to win every game this season by a score of something like 45 to 41, and seriously, whoever's bright idea it was to start putting D-IAAs on the Wolverines' schedule just needs to cut that shit out.

· Welcome Nevada, Clemson, and Michigan State, and yes, Clemson gets in there despite losing, because they looked way better than I thought they would and lost to Auburn on a very horrible bit of bad luck, and who else am I gonna put in there, anyway.

So there's that, and here's the SEC Power Poll ballot for this week:

1. Alabama -- Laugh if you want, but that was a pretty good offense that the Tide D completely stuffed in Durham. Still can't find any real reason not to call these guys the best team in the nation.

2. South Carolina -- Sleepy performance against Furman, but they'd earned a breather.



3. Arkansas -- Still don't know if I'd call their defense SEC-championship caliber, but it looks improved enough to earn a pretty decent bowl bid, if nothing else.

4. Florida -- This weekend's game at Alabama will show just how far the Gators can get with their still-not-quite-fully-baked offense.

5. Auburn -- Weird (and incredibly hard-hitting) game Saturday night, one Auburn was very fortunate to survive with a win. It'll be interesting to see how this affects their play over the next couple weeks.

6. LSU -- Continuing to beat below-average teams just badly enough to look competent in front of the pollsters. Christ, they're gonna go 9-3 again, aren't they?

7. Kentucky -- That #2 ranking in the SEC in total offense won't last once they start playing real teams. The #10 ranking in run defense, though, just might.



8. Georgia -- It's gonna be hard for this offense to accomplish anything of note if the coaches can't find a setting for Murray other than "do absolutely nothing" and "carry the entire team on your back."

9. Tennessee -- Like last year, they're going to have to content themselves with a lot of moral victories. Unlike last year, it doesn't look like that's what they're playing for.

10. Vanderbilt -- Vandy now has a better SEC record than Georgia, Tennessee, or Ole Miss. Oh, hey, good for them.

11. Mississippi State -- Look on the bright side, State fans: With Mullen at the helm, it now takes two QBs to throw five picks in a single game.

12. Ole Miss -- It's a damn good thing for the Rebels that the NCAA doesn't have English Premier League-style relegation, or they'd be sewing "C-USA" patches onto their jerseys right now.

The Friday (Saturday?) Random Ten+5 throws out some prognostications.

My apologies for the Friday Random Ten+5 getting pushed back a good 24 hours -- unexplained molasses in my Internet connection have prevented me from getting just about anything done during that time, but the problem seems to have been (mostly) alleviated. So I thought I'd toss out some predictions involving varying degrees of ballsiness about the 2010 football season. Only one of them has to do with the Bulldogs, mind, and nearly all of them are pulled straight out of my ass, but hey, if that's not what the preseason is for, then what, I ask you, is it for? Anyway, here's the +5 for this last Friday before the glorious dawning of another season -- Five Random-Ass Predictions About College Football in 2010:



The Georgia secondary will key noticeable statistical improvement by the Georgia defense.
Look, let's not beat around the bush here -- going from a 4-3 front to a 3-4 is not an overnight project, and the Bulldog defense is going to struggle this year. But by the end of the season I think we'll feel pretty confident about the direction in which Todd Grantham has us pointed, and I think a big part of that is going to be our pass defense, of all things. The more I hear about Scott Lakatos, the more I like him -- he did an excellent job at UConn with nowhere near the kind of blue-chip talent we have access to down here -- and if nothing else, he seems to have completely replaced Willie Martinez's philosophy of "If you're a senior, you start, regardless of whether you have any idea what you're doing" with the revolutionary idea that the better players play. And we've got some good ones -- Bacarri Rambo and Brandon Boykin both looked good last season, and Vance Cuff and Sanders Commings are two guys I'm also very excited about. It's been a long time since our pass defense didn't give acid reflux to entire stadiums full of people, but I think Lakatos has us on the way back.



The game of the year will be the "Civil War" -- Oregon vs. Oregon State for a trip to the Rose Bowl.
With the USC dynasty apparently over and Oregon coming off a rather tumultuous offseason, there are no invincible teams in the Pac-10 this year, and the race for the conference title should be very interesting. I don't think it'll be decided until the very last weekend of the regular season, when Oregon and Oregon State play in Corvallis with the winner taking all. OSU seems to be mostly flying underneath the radar this year, but they've got a ton of returning talent and have, I'm told, one of the Pac-10's scarier home-field advantages. I had the Beavers at #16 in my preseason BlogPoll ballot and wouldn't be surprised to see them higher than that in the mainstream polls by the time bowl invites are handed out.



Boise State and UConn will go to BCS bowls; USC and Texas won't.
Boise State, I think, could get there even if they lose to Virginia Tech -- they're ranked high enough in the preseason, and the VT game is early enough, that they've got plenty of time to work their way back into the top 10 -- and I'm more convinced every day that UConn is going to come out of basically nowhere to win the Big East this year. As for USC, I just don't get why so many people are ranking them as the favorite to win the Pac-10 title again. Sure, pound for pound they may be the most talented team in the Pac-10 on paper, but they probably were last year, too, and all it got them was an 8-4 regular-season record and a trip to something that is now called the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl -- and that was with Pete Carroll. You really think Kiffykins is a money bet to do any better? After the off-season they've had? As for Texas, I think they'll be fine on defense, but first-year starting QB (even if he is incredibly talented) plus big questions on the O-line plus a running game that's been non-existent for two years now equals a team that may be counting its blessings just to get back to the Holiday Bowl. I think they'll be right back in the thick of the title hunt next year, but 2010 is gonna require some rebuilding.

Added: Have been reminded that USC is under a bowl ban for the next two seasons. So, uh . . . hey! I got one right already! [smiles nervously, slinks awkwardly off stage]



The postseason firings will be less notable for who gets fired (Brewster, Zook, Friedgen) than who doesn't (Rodriguez, Hawkins, Price).
As I explained in the "Hot Seat" post I did on Rich Rodriguez earlier this summer for Dr. Saturday, Michigan is one of the few remaining programs in the country that looks for reasons not to fire a head coach, and if Rodriguez can just squeeze the Wolverines back into a bowl (which I think he will) he'll get enough of a vote of confidence to last another year. Hawkins, too, stands a good chance of getting Colorado back into a bowl this season, and CU's decision to delay their entry into the Pac-10 until 2012 may have earned him some extra time (though if he goes 4-8 next season, they'll waste no time unloading him so that they can get a fresh start in their new conference). Price, meanwhile, is a guy who appears to be well-liked enough in El Paso that he might be able to survive even another 5-7 season (though I think UTEP gets back into a bowl this year, too).

Hottest seats heading into 2011: Les Miles, who I think is poised for a mediocre year in Baton Rouge that will more than likely initiate the tried-and-true assistant housecleaning in the offseason; Mike Gundy, who has the fewest returning starters in the country this season and has already been the target of grumbling from T. Boone Pickens; and Butch Davis, who could also be headed for a disappointing season and has the added pressure of a player-eligiblity scandal that seems to be building by the day.



Alabama and Oklahoma will face off for the national title.
Not a very outside-the-box pick, I know, but I think Bama will weather their defensive rebuilding a lot better than some people seem to think. Meanwhile, Oklahoma -- while I don't think they're a better team than Ohio State, at least on paper -- will have the advantage of an easier schedule; a late-season loss to Wisconsin, Penn State, or Iowa will put the Buckeyes just far enough back that they miss out on a title shot. Their disappointment, however, will be nothing compared to that of Boise State fans, who will watch their team go undefeated for the fourth time in five regular seasons but still get boxed out of the national-title game. (At which point Orrin Hatch will demand immediate Congressional action, perhaps even involving impeachment hearings.)

Now watch as none of these five things turn out to have been accurate by the end of the season. But until then, the Ten:

1. Pet Shop Boys, "New York City Boy" (The Thunderpuss 2000 club mix)
2. 3rd Bass, "M.C. Disagree"
3. U2, "She's Gonna Blow Your House Down"
4. Toto, "Africa" (shut up)
5. Phil Collins, "Sussudio" (shut up twice)
6. U2, "4th of July"
7. Asian Dub Foundation, "Return of Django"
8. 3rd Bass, "The Merchant of Grooves"
9. Crowded House, "Catherine Wheels"
10. Pet Shop Boys, "Hit Music"

Apologies again for the lateness of this week's Ten+5 -- feel free to regale us all with your own predictions for the upcoming season, and Random Tens, in the comments.

A very non-expendable Friday Random Ten+5.

Soooo last week Holly and I accompanied Josh to a screening of "The Expendables." Really, our motivation for going wasn't to watch the movie so much as watch Josh watching it -- as you can tell by his blog, he's been a wee bit excited about the movie for, oh, a year and a half now. So you can imagine our dismay -- to say nothing of Josh's -- when it turned out that the movie, to put it politely, stunk on ice. Basically, it was a direct-to-DVD movie with an $82-million budget. I'm still not convinced that the film had a script at all, and yet somehow the actors, for all their badassery, seemed overmatched by what meager dialogue they had. So we didn't get much in the way of characterization, and even less in the way of motivation. (Seriously, when Mickey Rourke is the deepest and most soulful character in your story, you've got problems, particularly when he's only on screen for a total of maybe 10 minutes.) And while all of this kvetching about dialogue and character might seem irrelevant in a movie that clearly sells itself as a pretty mindless action flick, even the action scenes descended into complete incoherence after a while. It's pretty hard to bore me with gunfights and massive explosions, but somehow "The Expendables" managed it. The one exception: Terry Crews and his automatic shotgun. Messing with either is inadvisable.

It did get us to talking afterward, though: If we were putting together an ensemble cast of total badasses for some kind of suspense film, be it a good 'n' violent war movie, a caper flick, or whatever else, who would we pick? I don't have the plot of mine quite nailed down yet -- band of grifters hired by the CIA to clean out the entire treasury of a rogue terrorist nation, maybe? I'm still working on it -- but I know who my five badasses would be. Thus this week's +5 is the Five-Man Army For My Ensemble Action Movie:



George Clooney
I know not everyone is crazy about Cloons -- he talks a lot, he can be kind of a dick, he dates women far beyond the caliber of anyone you or I will ever so much as be in the same room with. But that's kind of what makes him a badass, I think. And he was suave as hell in all three of the Ocean's 11/12/13 movies. I see him as being kind of like the American version of James Bond; it's easy to picture him shooting people whilst wearing a tux.



Robert De Niro
Just turned 67, and still has it. And though he won Oscars for "The Godfather Part II" and "Raging Bull," I think my favorite performance of his is in "Casino," a movie I thought was just OK at first but seems to have gotten better and better with age: He plays a character who's smarter than most of the people around him, smart enough to know that the house of cards they've all built for themselves is going to come crashing down eventually, yet he can't keep himself from getting caught up in the glamour and temptation along with them. (Yet I also laugh every time I think of him in "Meet the Parents," asking if it's possible for him to be milked.)



Clive Owen
If Clooney is the American James Bond, Clive Owen wouldn't make a bad British one; if Daniel Craig ever decided to hang up his Aston Martin keys and retire from the franchise, Owen would be first on my shortlist to replace him. Equally adept as a badass ("Inside Man") or as a heavy-drinking sad sack forced by circumstance into becoming one ("Children of Men," one of my top five movies of all time).



Samuel L. Jackson
Permanently ascended into the pantheon of badasses 16 years ago with this line and has since cemented his legacy through "Shaft," "Black Snake Moan," the "Iron Man" films, and being one of the only tolerable things about the "Star Wars" prequels. And now, as Josh points out, he's lending his badassery to support a worthy athletic cause.



Michael Caine
Sir Michael will turn 80 in less than three years, but whatever -- he was one of the original movie hardasses back in the '60s and has retained that title ever since. Even when the movie he's in is absolute crap -- i.e. 1987's "Jaws: The Revenge" -- he manages to maintain his awesomeness: "I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific." His most recent performance was in "Harry Brown," an average movie featuring an exceptional performance from Caine, and while there was a rumor going around for a while that it would be his last leading role, that has since been debunked, to our great relief.

My movie will be called "The Indispensables," catch it at a theatre near you the twelfth of Never! (Followed by a cash-in direct-to-DVD sequel, "The Machine-Washables," sometime after that.) And now the Ten:

1. Looking Glass, "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)"
2. John Coltrane, "Resolution"
3. Pet Shop Boys, "I Don't Know What You Want But I Can't Give It Any More" (PSB Extension mix)
4. Jakatta, "American Dream" (Afterlife mix)
5. James Brown, "Papa Don't Take No Mess (Part I)"
6. Radio 4, "New Disco"
7. The Jazz Jury, "Pictures"
8. Talking Heads, "This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)"
9. The Streets, "Has it Come to This?"
10. New Order, "Everything's Gone Green"

Your turn: Give me your five-man ensemble cast of badasses, along with your Random Tens, in the comments.

A new side hustle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

They see me dozin', they hatin'.

There are as many different types of mugshots as there are types of people, from the pathetic and embarrassing (panicky grimace, eyes wide with the fear of being violated in the holding cell during the night) to the brazen (shit-eating grin and a proudly displayed "FREE MUSTACHE RIDES" T-shirt). But I think y'all will concur that this mug occupies a whole new plane of realness.



Yup, when you can't even keep your eyes open for your mugshot, you know you've advanced to the Premier League of drunk driving. One small problem: The cat in the photograph is UGA's athletic director, Damon Evans -- being spirited back to Athens as we speak, as I understand it, where a ripping good hangover and, likely, a cheery weekend of resume-updatin' await.

Should events warrant a series of Better Know A Replacement-AD Candidate posts, kind of like we did with the defensive coordinator position a few months ago, you'll read 'em here.

Fool me once, shame on you, etc.

Saturday while I was driving around running errands there was a story on one of NPR's financial programs about how a new round of banking regulations are kicking in next month, and banks offering "overdraft protection" -- i.e. a service whereby they'll cover an ATM withdrawal or point-of-purchase debit sale that would technically overdraw your account, for a fee -- will have to allow customers to opt in or out of such an amenity. Sounds fair to me: Back when I was young and irresponsible -- you know, a couple years ago -- I would do something dumb like go to the grocery store the day before my next paycheck was supposed to clear and buy a twelve-pack with what I thought were the last twelve or fifteen bucks in my checking account, only to find that it was actually more like my last seven or eight bucks, and my account was technically overdrawn, and my bank was going to charge me an additional thirty-five bucks for covering the purchase I otherwise wouldn't have been allowed to make. Now, you can blame irresponsible bookkeeping on my part, and you wouldn't be wrong, but still, had I known that in exchange for avoiding an embarrassing rejection at the checkout counter, I was going to end up buying a $47 twelver of beer, I might've declined that little feature.

Well, now my bank has to give me the option to do so, which I fully intend to do -- and here, incidentally, is what I found on the home page of my bank when I logged on to check up on some recent transactions this morning:



Ah, yes! That overdraft coverage, which is so awesomely convenient! Whose enrollment is fast, easy, and free (except for the $35 or whatever they have to pay if they actually buy something too rich for what's in their account)!

Look, I'm not stupid -- I know the real lesson here is don't spend money you don't have. (Getting smacked with overdraft fees is one way of learning this. Burying oneself under ~$15,000 of credit-card debt within a few years of graduating from college is an even better one.) But it seems like the old version of automatic overdraft protection encourages people to spend money they don't have, and like all those supposedly wonderful credit cards we gorged ourselves on in the '90s and early 2000s, which let us spend spend spend until we realized they'd snuck a bunch of arbitrary interest-rate hikes into the fine print, it lures us into thinking we can spend without consequence -- at least until the nasty surprise of a rate hike or overdraft charge smacks us in the face once we turn the corner.

Banks bitched and moaned about this rule change before it got passed. Me, I like having the option of turning down something that looks too good to be true. Hey, I don't have a problem with someone trying to profit off of the stupidity and/or irresponsibility of the American consumer -- lord knows that's a growth industry these days, and one of the few we have left -- but they should at least be honest about it.

How to talk to (or about) an unemployed person.

I apologize for the relative dearth of new content on this blog over the past couple weeks. I blame it on a general malaise whose cause I'll get to in just a sec, though if you wanted to just translate that as "laziness" and leave it at that, I guess I couldn't argue with you. I would've liked to have had some news to offer on the ongoing job search, but there hasn't been much, certainly nothing meaningful.

In fact, I got kind of a nasty one-two punch in the last 24 hours: First, while I was filing my weekly unemployment claim with the Alabama Department of Industrial Relations on Sunday afternoon, a note popped up that this appeared to be my last week of eligibility for standard unemployment benefits and would I like to apply for the emergency extension that's been made available by the federal stimulus bill. I can't complain too much about that one, I guess -- after all, I'm lucky to have had that available to me at all, because it's certainly better to have it than not -- but still, that was a milestone I was really, really hoping I wouldn't have to cross. Then, this morning, I got the news that an opening I had applied for at Columbus Regional Healthcare -- and one that I was kind of excited about -- had been whittled down to two finalists, and I wasn't one of them. Ordinarily this wouldn't have been quite the punch to the gut that it was, since I've kind of gotten used to rejection over the very protracted course of this job search, but the thing is, my dad works for Columbus Regional, and if I can't even lean on nepotism as a way to land myself a job, then by that measure I'm actually less employable than Lane Kiffin.

Anyway. I've now been unemployed for more than seven months, during which time I've applied for probably around 100 jobs, some of them as close by as my hometown, others as far away as L.A. and Seattle. It has been an almost uniformly spirit-crushing journey, but one that has taught me a lot that I might never have learned otherwise. For one thing, I guess you could say that I've learned what it's like to technically be in a disadvantaged minority, and of all the things that suck about being in a disadvantaged minority, one of the worst is that people talk about you like you're not real.

The unemployment rate, the number of unemployed people, the number of jobs the American economy has added or lost in a given month -- these numbers get tossed around with a frequency that rivals football scores in the fall. And just like football scores, they are frequently used for the purpose of taunting and trash-talking. And until I'd entered the longest period of involuntary unemployment of my life, I had no idea just how demoralizing and infuriating that could be.

I've been rejected for around 100 jobs and on more than one occasion have barely scraped by in terms of paying my bills for a given month. So when I see a Republican Congressman or talking head crow on TV about how this Democratic bill or that Democratic bill have failed to make a dent in the unemployment rate, it really rankles me, as if they're actively rooting against my getting a job so that they'll have something to beat the Obama administration over the head with. It may be funny to you that the unemployment rate has stayed at such-and-such percentage in spite of everyone's best efforts, but as a member of that percentage, it's not much fun for me at all. And it's kind of shocking that these folks can't even take ten seconds to take a step back and observe just how joyous they look in proclaiming the news of my continued unemployment.

But the Republicans are hardly the only ones who don't get it. I get at least three e-mails a day from Media Matters or Democracy for America or some wing of the Democratic Party trying to pump me up and make me feel awesome that something the Democrats have done have created X number of jobs. That's great, and I certainly don't begrudge any of the people who've been able to snag one of those jobs, but obviously it hasn't trickled down to me yet. I don't know how to build fighter planes or bridges, and I haven't been to medical or nursing school, so I'm still out there looking. And looking. And looking. It's not like I expect someone to just drop a job into my lap -- though if any of y'all were thinking about doing that, you're welcome to do so -- but sometimes it seems a wee bit tone-deaf to get that excited about a supposed economic recovery when nearly 15 million people are still looking for jobs. Things might be getting better overall, but for me personally, I'm still in a deep recession, and the economy hasn't turned around for me until I'm pulling down a regular paycheck again. So it would be nice if fewer people in D.C. would act like all our problems are solved.

(The other thing I love is when one of those e-mails asks me for a donation because they just can't pass meaningful legislation without my support. You know, maybe I'm being cynical, but you've got control of the White House and majorities in both houses of Congress -- if you can't pass meaningful legislation with all that, then I doubt my five bucks is going to put you over the top.)

And believe me, I don't think for one hot minute that I'm stuck in the worst of it. I've got a roof over my head and two loving parents who have been generous enough to give me a soft place to land, and other than a mountain of credit-card debt that I freely admit I built all on my own, I don't have too many huge debts or obligations that are in danger of putting me under on a regular basis. But think about the people who have families, student loans to pay off, major medical bills for themselves or their loved ones, and who no longer have an income capable of keeping up with all this stuff. When you gloat over the success or the failure of an economic plan that's been passed by Washington, these are the people you're using to make your point. These are the people whose problems you're conveniently putting out of your mind so that you can score gotcha points against someone. And that is a shitty, shitty way for one American to be acting toward another.

We don't want to be your talking point. We don't want to be in your rah-rah press release. We don't want to be your billy club for you to bash the other side with. We don't even want you to turn around and offer us your pity, because that and two bucks will get us a tall coffee at Starbucks. All we want is the opportunity to go to an office or factory or store or whatever for eight hours a day and earn enough money to feed, clothe, and house ourselves. (Think about what little that is to ask: We're only asking for the ability to go do something most of us don't even like to do, and wouldn't do if we didn't have to.)

So keep that in mind the next time you're tempted to use me, or any of the 14,799,999 Americans as of last month, to score points against someone on the opposite side of the aisle from you politically. If you're going to crow about the failure of a given job-creation plan without offering any better ideas as an alternative, or crow about the success of a given plan without offering anything other than "Stay the course, our work here is done" as a follow-up, you may be helping yourselves but you're sure as hell not helping us. All you're doing is getting us really, really pissed off.

Rant over, because it's time to hit up the job sites again. And if any of them finally come up a winner, rest assured you'll hear about it here.

The Friday Random Ten+5 takes a few stars off the flag.

All right, Utah, what the frack?

A plan is circulating under the radar in the Utah State Senate to share the holiday honoring civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., shot to death in 1968, with one of the country's most famous gun makers.

The plan is to rename the holiday, which falls on the third Monday of January, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr./John M. Browning Day, adding the gun manufacturer whose birthday also falls in January.

Is this going to be the start of a trend? Will the banks get a day off in October for Columbus/Remington Day? Will Presidents Day celebrate Washington and Lincoln and Smith and Wesson? Or do only black guys have to share their birthday commemorations with gun manufacturers?

That's it, Utah -- your statehood is officially downgraded to probationary status, with full statehood only being restored once this stupid-ass piece of legislation is voted down and consigned to the Smithsonian Institution's American Museum of Bad Idea History along with the Bay of Pigs invasion, New Coke, and the BCS on Fox. And if this thing does somehow get passed, you're being knocked back to a territory again. A territory! In case you haven't guessed, this week's +5 is Five U.S. States That Should Have Their Statehood Rescinded:



Utah
Seriously, I'm having trouble figuring out what purpose this state serves other than being a Mormon barrier of puritanical morality standing between us and Vegas. Rescind Utah's statehood, annex them into Nevada (which they kind of almost were to begin with), and we'll have that problem out of the way, plus we will have reduced the amount of whining about mid-major conferences not getting automatic bids to the BCS by about two-thirds. On that note, I had a dream last night that I was on the sidelines at a Utah football game, and I was yelling about the Utah players chop-blocking everybody, and their coach came all the way over to my side of the field to read me the riot act about it. Screw you, Utah, for invading my subconscious.



Texas
I can concede that the Lone Star State has its good points -- Austin, cheap airfares on Southwest Airlines, the cheerleading squads of its professional sports franchises -- but good lord, people, get over yourselves already. You fight one war of independence from Mexico, and all of a sudden you think you're hot shit, all "biggest state in the lower 48" and "you know, our constitution gives us the right to secede and form our own nation" and blah blah blah. Yeah, you think just because you managed to wriggle your way out of the crushing grip of a global superpower like Mexico, you're all ready to become an independent nation? Call me when you win the fight to secede from China or Pakistan or something. It's long past time we night to knock Texas down a peg or two by splitting it right down the middle and turning it into the third- and fourth-biggest states in the continental U.S. (Oh, and even now, Texas would be only the seventh-biggest province in Canada. I didn't want to have to whip that out, Texas, but you kind of drove me to do it.)



South Carolina
My favorite beach, Edisto Island, is located in South Carolina about halfway between Charleston and Hilton Head, so this smarts a bit. But jeez, South Carolina, y'all have really been bringing the crazy lately. You had the Confederate-Flag-flying-over-the-state-capitol controversy, the Miss Teen USA embarrassment, the governor telling everyone he was hiking the Appalachian Trail when he was really jetting down to Argentina to nail his mistress, and, of course, everything associated with Bob Jones University -- and now you've got a state legislator proposing to ban U.S. currency and only allow the use of silver and/or gold coins. Yup, when you walk into a bar to buy your little airplane bottles of liquor, you'll only be able to use doubloons or pieces of eight, evidently. I did leave my heart in Edisto, so I can't bear to kick y'all out of the United States completely, but you haven't in any way proven the maturity level necessary to be a separate Carolina, much less an independent, self-governing U.S. state. I think we need to put y'all in time-out by absorbing you back into North Carolina -- which, to be fair, is not exactly a bulwark of sanity itself -- until such time as you can prove you're sane enough to govern yourselves.



Delaware
I remain highly skeptical that anyone actually lives in Delaware; really, it's just a big tax haven for the credit-card companies that somehow ended up with its own license plates. I think we've only been allowing them to live this charade because they were the first state to ratify the Constitution, but so what? Would you give unlimited, uncensored commenting abilities to the worthless, drooling jagbags who leave "FIRST!!!111!!11!!" comments on your blog? Yank statehood away from them, annex the state into Maryland where it belongs, and make MBNA pay its fair frickin' share already.



Alaska
Yes, the 49th state has untold natural beauty and some of the largest oil and natural-gas reserves in the Western Hemisphere. It's also got fewer than 700,000 residents -- fewer than the number who live in the Birmingham metropolitan area, yet with a far greater proportion of them who are, quite frankly, completely insane -- knocking around in more than 1.7 million square kilometers of real estate. Just for comparison's sake, that makes it more sparsely populated than any independent nation on earth and all but two of its dependent territories; even the disputed territory of Western Sahara is several times more crowded than Alaska. Plus the state is one of the biggest leeches of tax revenue in the entire country, sucking up a buck eighty-four in federal spending for every dollar they contribute in taxes. (And these are the people who complain the loudest about how much money the government wastes.) I think we can exploit Alaska's wealth of natural resources just fine without granting them the full privileges of statehood. You got a problem with it, go bitch to your next-door neighbors in the Yukon.

By my count, this plan puts us at 47 states, so I say we go ahead and give statehood to D.C., Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, just so we don't have to change the flag. Problem solved. No, no, you don't have to thank me.

And now the Ten:

1. Röyksopp, "Tristesse Globale"
2. Dimitri from Paris, "Sacre Francais"
3. The Fugees, "The Score"
4. Orbital, "Halcyon + On + On" (live)
5. Eric B. and Rakim, "Casualties of War"
6. George Michael, "Waiting For That Day"
7. Air, "All I Need"
8. Perez Prado, "Mambo #8"
9. Happy Mondays, "The Boys Are Back in Town"
10. Yello, "Oh Yeah"

Your Random Tens and recommendations for states that need to have their statehood yanked, either temporarily or permanently, are welcome in the comments.

The Friday Random Ten+5 stares into the abyss, and finds five incredibly annoying people staring back at it.

Years ago, sportswriter (and #34 on the Most Loathsome List) Mitch Albom wrote some book called The Five People You Meet in Heaven, which supposedly was about a dude dying, going to heaven, and meeting the five people who had the biggest impact on his life and the person he became, even if he didn't know it at the time. I'd like to think that if that stuff actually happens, Jim Fletcher, the teacher whose funeral I went to yesterday, would be one of my five. But that's only if the afterlife is as Albom describes it, and since nothing else I've read of Albom's describes a world that exists in any kind of reality as I know it, I have to conclude (until shown otherwise) that he's full of crap about the Five People thing, too.

No, more likely we get sent to hell and have to confront the five people who played the biggest roles in turning us into the bitter, resentful, pissy people we became as adults. Then we have to hang out with them for the rest of eternity -- in a crowded chain restaurant in some tourist-trap of a town, with a waiter who can't get our orders right, seated next to a family who won't keep their obnoxious kids from running around and making noise. It's not a pretty picture, but it's more relatable, at least. And that's the inspiration for this week's +5: When I finally get around to writing my counterpoint to Albom, these are going to be the Five People I Meet In Hell.



Tom Cruise
Ever since I was little, I've loved airplanes, and when I was young I desperately wanted to be a pilot. These aspirations came to a head in the summer of 1986, when my dad took me to see "Top Gun," the first movie I'd ever been allowed to see with a whole lot of cussing in it. Not more than a few months later, I took the Ishihara Color Plate Test and failed miserably, determining that I was red-green colorblind and thus would never fly for the military, NASA, or any reputable airline. A part of me will always associate Maverick with that disappointment; the other part of me will associate him with turning into a fucking loon around 2005. What happened to you, Tom?



Jennifer from the seventh grade
The first time I ever told a girl I liked her, also not coincidentally the first time I got rejected. And by "told her I liked her" I mean "got her best friend to tell her," and by "rejected" I mean "according to her friend, she wrinkled her nose up in disgust." I've had an intense fear of rejection ever since, and am frequently a nervous wreck around women I'm attracted to -- except for Hooters waitresses and exotic dancers, oddly enough. Totally comfortable in those environments. I don't know why that is.



Newt Gingrich
They say that most people get more conservative as they get older; if you're curious as to why I haven't, you need only look to this guy, who set out to prove everything George Orwell wrote in Animal Farm was spot-on almost from the minute he took over as Speaker of the House in 1995. I mean, my politics have always leaned to the left, but it was this dicklick who really hardened me from a liberal-leaning bleeding heart into an angry, bitter commie pinko. Seriously, nailing a Capitol Hill staffer even while you're impeaching a sitting president for getting blown by an intern? I hate to think my political motivations have devolved completely from "make the country and the world a better place" to "wipe the smug grin off [insert political opponent here]'s fat-fuck face," but if they have, Newt's historical footnote of a Speaker tenure was probably the point where it started.



Quincy Carter
If the stuff I write about Georgia football frequently comes across as morose and fatalistic -- even when good things have happened, as if I'm sitting there biting my nails, just waiting for the other shoe to drop, like a Michigan fan -- His Quincyness is the reason. One of the top recruits in the country in 1998, scored a major coup for Georgia by backing out on his commitment to Tech and coming to Athens, was touted as a sure-fire superstar -- and then proceeded to pile-drive his career into a pit of interceptions and head-slapping mental errors. Instead of starting slow and then maturing into a fearless field general, Quincy led us to nine wins as a true freshman and regressed steadily from there, to the point where he didn't even take the field in the last four games of what would turn out to be his final year. They say that was because of "injury," but I suspect it had more to do with the "Pineapple Express"-caliber weed stash he supposedly had in his possession. Either way, it doesn't matter -- from that point on, every win, no matter how amazing, and every blue-chip recruit, no matter how highly touted, has been a source of joy and anxiety in equal measure. And don't even get me started on the Redskins.



My boss when I worked in Atlanta
After a mostly ineffectual year in Lynchburg, Virginia, at my first job out of college, I was offered a job in Atlanta and jumped at it the way the Uruguayan rugby team probably jumped at their first taste of non-human meat after being rescued in 1972. Everything went fine for a year or so, and then somebody lobbed through the window a grenade marked "office politics": the investment company that had been brought in to keep the place afloat started making major changes, a brief power struggle ensued between that company and my company's founder, and my boss, who'd been dating said founder nearly the whole time, went a little nuts. That experience taught me that any job, no matter how much you might love it at first, can devolve into "I'm just doing this to be able to pay my rent" at any moment and without any prior notice. Tell 'em, Biggie.

And now the Ten:

1. Pet Shop Boys, "Vulnerable" (Public Eye dub)
2. A Tribe Called Quest, "Description of a Fool"
3. The Chemical Brothers, "Where Do I Begin"
4. Pet Shop Boys, "Being Boring"
5. Röyksopp, "Remind Me"
6. Neon Heights, "Again"
7. Deee-Lite, "Build the Bridge"
8. Toto, "Africa"
9. Michael Jackson, "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'"
10. Patton Oswalt, "Death Bed"

Your turn! Throw your Random Tens, and/or the five people you're likely to meet in hell, in the comments thread.