Now that the White House has weighed in, I can speak up, too. Just what the hell is all this furor over Don Imus' insult of the Rutgers women's basketball team? So he called them "nappy-headed hos." And now everyone is up in arms that he made a racial slur.

Excuse me, people, but perhaps, just perhaps, calling someone "nappy-headed" is not as significant as calling a bunch of women "hos." The first describes kinky hair, which is usually undesirable. The second labels a woman as a whore. What Imus suggested in his statement was that the winning basketball team was made up of prostitutes with unflattering hairstyles. And this is to some degree a true statement given the nature of NCAA exploitation of athletes in profitable venues and the fact that the Rutgers women's basketball team members have unflattering hairstyles.

Now Al Sharpton is screaming about the slight and Don Imus has a two-week vacation. What amuses me about this is wondering if he had just called the team "hos" without mentioning their hairstyles, would he be in this much trouble? (Last time I checked, Al Sharpton doesn't rush to your aid unless you are a member of a minority or a Thanksgiving turkey.)

And I'd advise the Rutgers women's basketball team to stop blaming Don Imus for raining on their moment in the sun. Ladies, no one watches women's basketball. (For example, at the University of Georgia, women's season tickets for our competitive SEC program sell for $25. The horrible, horrible men's team sells season tickets for over 10 times that. Apparently in sports, dicks cost more than tits, which is oddly very contrary to the dating scene.)

May I suggest to you, Rutgers, that while you may have provided the sun, Imus and Sharpton provided the moment.

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Yesterday, a friend and I were trying to reconstruct the basics of sexual baseball. We were both sure that "first base" was a kiss and intercourse was "home plate." However, we could come to no consensus about what hitting a double or a triple equated to in the sexual arena. We argued over whether or not third base was oral sex, mostly because my friend supports the Democrat party line and claims that "sexual relations" doesn't include oral sex. I suppose the facts that neither of us cares much for baseball and he's long married and I'm socially inept contributed to this confusion greatly.

That got me thinking about sports metaphors for sex and dating. Running the previously mentioned bases, "hitting a home run," and "striking out" are all clearly baseball inspired. I can't think of any other sports that have donated quite so many terms as metaphors for sex. Are these other sports so exciting that sex pales in comparison? Should we start calling the ménage à trois a "hat trick." Or perhaps rename premature ejaculation to "scoring a safety"?

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You know that I'm a fan of the Miami Dolphins. I have been since I first took an interest in the game of football back in the late 1980s. My favorite wide receiver of all time is a relative unknown named Orande Gadsden who played only 4 years exclusively for the Dolphins (and who, by the way, was the last man to catch a pass in the NFL by Dan Marino). I can tell you every quarterback who has started for the team since Marino retired. (Hmm, let's see; there's Huard, Fiedler, Griese, Lucas, Rosenfels, Feeley, Frerotte, Culpepper, Harrington, and now Lemon. Get ready, Packers fans, it will be worse than you think, trust me.) And we've been slightly above mediocre for most of that time. Hell, we've only had 4 losing seasons since joining the NFL! But if there's one aspect of the game that we've totally failed to grasp in the past two decades, it's coaching.

When current owner Wayne Huizenga bought the team in the early 90s, Don Shula was our coach. Shula was, in all regards, a great coach, one of the best in history. However, when Shula decided to retire 10 years ago, Huizenga chose to go with a proven wash-out at couch, replaced Shula with Jimmy Johnson, a Floridian who had great success with the Dallas Cowboys. Expectations were high. I thought we'd be great again, perhaps even Super Bowl bound. But the team went nowhere. This was likely because of a conflict between Marino, our aging superstar who naturally preferred the passing game, and Johnson, who would have preferred to restart the team from scratch with a focus on the run. In any event, after 3 years of exhausting turmoil, both Johnson and Marino were out.

In comes Dave Wannstedt, Johnson's protege who is fresh off several mediocre seasons with the Bears. Again I had high hopes. Wannstedt looked pretty good at times with the Bears, getting by with a team with less-than-stellar talent. Turns out that the talent problems were probably Wannstedt's fault. In Miami, he always looked lost, like a babysitter who doesn't know what to do when the tweens he's supervising get into the coffee ice cream and start bouncing off the walls. Wannstedt championed an ivy league quarterback with extremely limited passing skills, and he brought in Ricky Williams, who was the player voted "Most Likely To Destroy His Own Team" before the rise of Terrell Owens. We tanked. Wannstedt was fired in the middle of his fourth season, less than a year after receiving a contract extension from Huizenga as a reward for consistent under-performance.

Though I pulled for Wannstedt's temporary replacement, Jim Bates, to be the new coach, no one listened to me. Wannstedt's players had come together for Jim Bates, winning out at the end of the season. Instead of rewarding Bates, Huizenga traded competency for a "name" coach, LSU's head coach Nick Saban. Like a fool, I jumped on the bandwagon and agreed that he'd take us to the heights of the NFL again. But like Wannstedt, Saban soon proved that he couldn't control professional athletes or evaluate talent. Sure, he ditched Fiedler, but he replaced him with Culpepper. (True story: at Dan Marino's Hall of Fame induction ceremony, my brother and I noticed that Culpepper's numbers were comparable to some of the all-time greats. I remember my brother commenting that someone was going to look at those numbers and mistakenly think that he was actually good. Apparently, that someone was Nick Saban.) At least Saban fooled more than just me. He tricked professional sportswriters into thinking we'd reach the Super Bowl in 2007. Instead we had a 6-10 record, the third worst in the AFC. And then, like a kick in the crotch after a punch in the gut, Saban jumped ship earlier this week to head back to the relative safety (and economic goldmine) of college coaching.

Now it's back to the drawing board to select a new coach. I've lost my faith. I'd hope that Huizenga could find someone qualified, but I know now that he's just going to grab a big name. In fact, I heard today that he's already planning to interview other washed-out ex-NFL coaches, including Dom Capers (a confused mess who couldn't manage a winning season in 5 years with the Houston Texans), Mike Mularkey (purportedly an "offensive genius," though he couldn't settle a quarterback controversy between the clueless J.P. Losman and mediocre Kelly Holcolmb for two years with the Buffalo Bills), Chan Gailey (an Dallas Cowboys head coach who fled criticism to Georgia Tech, where he can't get his students to play a complete 4 quarters or manage a game clock), and Jim Mora, Jr. (known to Atlanta Falcons' fans as "the man who ruined Michael Vick," he's every bit as bad as his father but without the entertaining press conferences).

So now the Dolphins have 2 or 3 more rebuilding years ahead, where the sputtering offense will have an ineffective overhaul as the aging defense falls apart under it's own weight. I'm starting to understand how Raiders fans feel.

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Today's blog entry was going to be about how much I hate those stupid inflatable yard holiday decorations, but then I realized that everything in the blog has been negative this month. So instead, let me mention something that I actually like: Heroes on NBC.

Heroes is up against Monday Night Football and is marketed to that group of television viewers that is disinterested in sports (you know, geeks and women). As much as I love comic books, I'm not going to bypass weekly football for a television show about, well, anything. I wouldn't have ever discovered this gem except for NBC's brilliant decision to also air it on their sister station SciFi Network on Fridays before Doctor Who, which I also love. And starting last week, NBC.com now streams old episodes so that I can catch up on the elements that I missed. (Heroes is as much an episodic serial as any other soap opera, so, believe me, there was a lot to catch up on.)

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: America loves super heroes. (I think it's part of the American Dream.) Despite the entertainment ghetto to which comic books have been traditionally relegated, they continue to inspire more popular entertainments such as movies and television shows. If this show was a comic, it would never reach the mass audience it deserves. And it's a blast to find a well-written television show that contains as much wonder, suspense, and excitement as an issue of Grant Morrison's JLA. If Superman Returns had been written half as well as this, it could have been among the greatest movies ever.

Yet despite being a television show designed for a mass audience, the show is very loyal to its comic book roots. (In one episode, a major character is revealed to be a member of the "Merry Marvel Marching Society." Sweet!) Heroes is an enjoyable mixture of X-Men meets X-Files with a hint of Smallville. Though this makes it a little predictable for longtime comic readers, it more than makes up for that with an enthusiastic and encouraging embrace of the super hero genre. In any given episode, you'll find such echos of such characters as DC's Phosphorus Man, Thorn, and Waverider, or Marvel's Cannonball, Rogue, and Shadowcat. Excelsior!

So there you go. Something I like. This blog will now resume its regularly scheduled bitching.

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Yesterday ESPN.com ran the following headline:

Couples takes six holes in Skins Game

Now that's a sporting event that I'd like to see!

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This weekend I was thinking about how pleased I am that baseball season is over because it means that after several months of self-imposed exile, I can listen to Atlanta's 96 Rock radio station again. During the season, 96 Rock - Atlanta's oldest FM station, number 96.1 on your analog radio dial - forgoes classic rock 'n roll for Atlanta Braves coverage. It sucks to tune the radio in hoping for AC/DC or Tom Petty and hearing Skip Caray lamenting weak batting instead.

I suppose it's a trade-off for the Clear Voice >shudder< owned radio station: losing the listening audience like me that tunes out because we're not hearing music versus the increase in listeners due to the broadcast of a baseball game. But who even pays attention to baseball anymore?

Television ratings for baseball games have been gradually declining for decades. Major League Baseball frequently points out that revenue is up and allowing for inflation, ticket prices have remained relatively consistent over the past half-century. This really means that revenues aren't so much up, they're just much larger numbers thanks to that same inflation. So baseball revenue has been largely stagnant for years, indicating an overall decrease in interest among a growing American population. America's Pastime? More like America's Past Time.

I'm pretty sure that radio ratings are falling across the board as people are given more options in the home, office, and car. (I looked at the internet in an attempt to verify this, but all I could find were sites maintained by radio advertisers such as the Radio Advertising Bureau, and they are the last group of people who would willingly confirm this.) I'm not surprised that broadcasting baseball games may provide a shot in the arm for declining ratings in an industry besieged by the variety of popular entertainment. However, I would think that weakening your listening base by bisecting your listenership into summer sports fans and winter rockers would only damage your all-too-important brand loyalty.

So give it up, 96 Rock, and give me America's other dying amusement: rock and roll.

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Hell, it's my blog I can bitch if I want to. And it's Friday the 13th, so I'll kill someone with a machete while wearing a hockey mask if I want to, too.

PayPal really knows how to get my goat. One month ago tomorrow, I shipped a 24 pound package via USPS Economy Parcel Post to Argentina. (The contents were some Masters of the Universe figures I sold for a friend on eBay.) The buyer has grown impatient after a mere 3 weeks of waiting for an international Economy Parcel Post (read as "slow boat") package and has earlier this week opened a dispute with PayPal for the cost of the item. Of course, this means that PayPal has put a "temporary hold" on my account in the amount of the payment. If this were a $29.50 item, that's be no big deal. But it's not. It's a $295.00 item.

So now, my Paypal account is essentially useless to me until PayPal realizes that I did ship the item, the buyer is just being incredibly impatient, and I'm in the clear. My past experience with Paypal tells me that this will take about 90 days. Meanwhile, PayPal will be hassling me to pay them what I "owe" them (HA!) and I will be unable to take eBay payments through PayPal. As anyone who sells on eBay knows, this means that it is pointless to try to sell anything on eBay. Therefore, no income for me for 3 months.

Once again, let me say to you people out there: PayPal sucks. If you use it, learn to enjoy the sensation of someone grabbing you by the balls and squeezing while ramming a Louisville Slugger up your ass. Fuck you, PayPal.

(Granted, I am well aware that the problem in this case is not actually PayPal, but the dipshit who decided that economy international postage should arrive on his doorstep within 3 weeks of shipping. But since I'm not currently in the mood to travel to Argentina to avenge this disruption in my life, I'm attacking the messenger. PayPal doesn't care.)

On a completely unrelated note, why do MLB and the NFL have Breast Cancer Awareness Months? Exactly how many players in either of those leagues are female? In 2002, only 3,000 more women in the U.S. were killed by accidents than died from killer breasts. (That's less than 10 a day in a country with 300 million people.) When was the last time you heard of an Accident Awareness Campaign? Breast cancer isn't even the largest killer of women in America. It doesn't even make the top 5. Alzheimer's Disease is credited with killing more women than breast cancer. (However, a Alzheimer's Awareness Month wouldn't make much of an impression, as everyone who cared to promote it would forget about it by the time it arrived.) I suggest that breast cancer is so widely championed these days simply because it is the only one of the top ten killers of women that doesn't also kill large numbers of men.

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This past weekend, my brother and I were attacked by a spontaneously exploding tempered glass bathroom door that we were planning to install. (I blame witchcraft, I do!) My mother insisted that my brother go to the hospital to get stiches for his sliced hand. To cheer him up, I bought us Clue!, one of the very few "classic" board games that we didn't already own.

I had only played Clue! a few times, and I had certainly never won. Ever. So I was determined to win at least once. My mother, my brother, and my brother's girlfriend agreed to play with me. They were pretty good sports about it, too.

In the end, I made them play game after game for over 5 straight hours, until at last I won a game. I'm pretty sure that they let me win, especially since at one point my mother accused Col. Mustard of committing the murder in the Study with the Revolver when she was later revealed to have the Study in her own hand. But who cares how I won? I won! That's the important part. And everyone else was a loser! Ha! Take that, losers!

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Remember the television Incredible Hulk series? I watched an episode tonight where David Banner finagled himself a job as an orderly at an insane asylum. Now, you would think that would require background checks before a drifter who mumbles his last name (which always starts with a "B," that way David, a genius with degrees in physics and medical science, won't forget what his last name is supposed to be each week while still remaining "incognito") could get a job with no references or qualifications. Maybe you can work as a mechanic, short order cook, handyman, electrician, grocer, laboratory technician, gardener for an elementary school, boxing trainer, bartender, unlicensed driver, truck loader, nanny, store clerk, sports reporter, oil rigger, janitor, or choker setter without proving your qualifications, but I think it takes a little more to work for a hospital. At least I would hope that it would.

David, David, David. *sigh*

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