Six sports teams that should be created (or will be under a Bryan regime)

As interesting as Madden's "Create-A-Team" feature is, I always wanted to take my desire for owning a professional franchise further, preferably without being Mark Cuban's eventual cellmate in the process. The following is a list of teams that should be created or eventually will be under a Bryan regime:

1. The Knights of Anyone but Norv Turner

Level 75 anti-Norv Turner Paladin with end game armor and accompanying non-photoshopped thirteenth century man servants

The way I see it, the Knights wouldn't just be a football team. They would be part of an all-encompassing, massive organization dedicated towards the preservation of comparatively tolerable football. God wills it!

Whether this comes to fruition or not, can we just all agree that Norv Turner should be barred from any professional head coaching gigs? The guy may be a decent offensive coordinator, but he's been the equivalent of a league-sanctioned death sentence as a head coach. Avoid him like the plague and fire your General Manager for good measure. Hell, send him an e-mail or two just to be on the safe side.

2. Auburn Let's Just Throw Shit at the Wall and Hope it Sticks.

Hiring former Texas defensive coordinator and failed Iowa State coach Gene Chizik could backfire for the embattled Tigers, especially given the plethora of considerably more qualified candidates. On the bright side for Auburn fans, it could be worse. See #5.

3. The Cleveland is Just Another Word for "We Monumentally Suck."


Where should I begin with this? Their professional football team sucks; their (Correction: "the") college football team couldn't beat anyone relevant if their lives depended on it; and their baseball team may have been a game away from taking the league championship in 2007, but that was two seasons ago and nobody cares. Baseball is boring and stupid. No, I don't care whether you think Fred Merkle should be denied admission into the Hall of Fame because of a baserunning error or not. Go get laid. Christ.

4. Daly City Fighting Filipinas

Official Team Logo

This would be a major coup in the world of subconciously racist sports team names. Most Filipino women are one realization of a glaring carciature on top of another, what with their disposition of being as vocally jumpy as Jawas; having the same rapid, indiscernable pronunciation of a bunch of Ewoks; and possessing the convex facial features of former Packers defensive lineman Gilbert Brown. It's only a matter of time before some bright eyed NFL executive bilis implements this plan and compiles a list of the team's fitting expansion draftees soon thereafter:

Warren Sapp Stalwart defensive lineman whose cheeks are pretty much a win-win for the FF. Recorded 96 sacks in an illustrious career which also included a Super Bowl victory and a second place finish on Dancing with the Stars. Agility +1. (Not to be confused with Albert, Fat.)

Tony Siragusa Like Sapp, a prolific defensive lineman whose cheeks are a dead giveaway. Retired after a Super Bowl victory with the Baltimore Ravens in 2001, finishing with 22 sacks in over 120 played games. Now an analyst and sideline reporter who spends his Sundays dissecting football tactics and regaling millions with his cherished memories of touring with Billy Ray Cyrus.

And finally, Herve "The Ghost" Villechaize Underappreciated tailback whose diminutive size makes hiding behind his offensive line a small task...literally. You could probably stuff him in an arcade machine and he'd be able to operate it like those midgets inside the Jabba prop who got to hog themselves some Carrie Fisher ass by proxy (lucky bastards). That's assuming that Herve's alive, which he's not.

If he were, then he'd line up in the Wildcat formation and before everyone knew it, BAM! Six points, a championship, and a shotgun to the other team's mouth.

5. Notre Dame Prison Lifers


If you can't do the time, then don't commit the crime of hiring a glorified offensive coordinator who can't develop his players or coach to save his overstretched collar. And for the love of God, don't give him a ten year contract extension just because he managed to ascend the stairs without pausing for a bucket of fried chicken (the portly one has devoured staffers for ordering flame grilled); that's pretty much the equivalent of the death penalty for spitting on the sidewalk and landing next to a morbidly obese serial rapist on death row. Don't drop the soap!

The cards indicate that you're not doomed to shitty football, though it wouldn't feel like it if you can at least make one good decision every once in awhile. And don't regale me with your stories about Tony Rice and Michael Stonebreaker. Both are dead as far as contemporary college football is concerned and Lou Holtz is old and senile. At least that's enough to dull the pain from being verbally cockslapped by Mark May on a daily basis.

6. San Francisco Lets make our Sports Team an Outlet for our Latent Wuss Agenda

I remember the days when they could sling the rock and draft players who didn't have small, girlish hands. Football teams are supposed to be inoculated from their hostile surroundings. Clearly, San Francisco fails in this regard.


I don't have a sociopolitical axe to grind, but something's wrong when a team that won five Super Bowls — it probably would've been more if it weren't for those nancy boys in Green Bay and Dallas — within a thirteen year run hasn't gotten a new stadium while the Yorks make one bad decision after another and Mayor Gavin Newsom goes around yearning for universal health care. It's time to get your priorities straight, Mayor. For all we know, people probably die in the stands because of their sheer indifference about anything. I mean, have you seen their football team lately? 

Put me down for an apathetic "meh" and an autopsy when they invariably screw up their next first round draft choice.

Everything sucks except for when compared to Fallout 3

Honestly, I can't think of a better game I've played this year. Grand Theft Auto IV was pretty good, but something was missing; Warhammer Online got boring and repetitive after awhile (there were too many good players like Kardek and Illidar on Sylvania Server, whose eliteness is unsurprising when you consider their meticulous, stalwart dedication towards their other weekend activities); and, quite honestly, I played Fable II expecting this:

Instead, I ended up with this:

Fable II, there were some things I liked about you and others that I didn't, but let's just be friends. Ok?

By contrast, Fallout 3 lives up to its gynormous expectations and then some. The first parts of the game are a fairly cinematic cocktease until everything erupts in one gynormous, perpetual orgasm in a post-apocalyptic future, littering your midsection and shaming your conscience while you kill people, oversized cockroaches, super mutants, and everything in between. There are few things in life that can lay claim to being better than this. On second thought, there aren't. There are several times that honestly shit myself while playing this game, and for the life of me, I don't think too many games can lay claim to inducing such a gooey reaction. Think of Fallout as the burrito and the residual hours of fun as its gooey byproduct. Think of Fallout as the burrito and the residual hours of fun as its gooey byproduct.

Anyway, for anyone else who wants to lose a pair of underwear, one way or the other, I recommend getting Fallout 3 immediately. I mean, right now.

Just go.

Charlie Weis' swan song new contract extension

Yep. Advocating Weis' return would pretty much be approaching shitty football with the injudicious stoicism of a retard burning his hand on a stove. But don't tell that to the stoics who just gave the portly one another year, which may as well be tantamount to a slow-roasted, heavily-labored, and gratuitously sweaty death sentence for their otherwise stout football program.

Pride will inevitably go before the fall in either case, but not until after the former's three Super Bowl rings; the unblemished head coaching records against Pittsburgh, Purdue, Navy, Air Force, and Syracuse; and the decided schematic advantage which yielded only 41 rushing yards against Syracuse and didn't record a single first down until the end of the third quarter against Southern California's backup scrubs. Also, it's strange that I use the term "against," because I only saw a bunch of guys who ran around in circles before willingly offering themselves and readily capitulating on first contact at that. It's ok, Irish. Now where did that slightly above-average team touch you and your ill-prepared coach?

I'm sure that real Notre Dame fans would rather immolate themselves (or tune to something comparatively milder) than tolerate another year of this, but the collective base has become so accustomed to inferior football that there are very few of them left.

I hope Megan Meier will be reincarnated as somebody who knows how to use MySpace's ignore function

To tell you the truth, it's hard to reconcile the blubbering outpour of sympathy for Megan Meier, not that I have any for her morose, morbidly obese former nemesis. There's probably a greater chance that I would've given a shit if she were killed walking down the street by any means other than throwing herself into the path of an oncoming semi, but the motivation remains the same: she killed herself because she was stupid. Since when did it become socially acceptable in this country to be so personally irresponsible?


I don't expect much from any 13-year-old who takes some random person she met on the internet seriously — given that she presumably wouldn't have been on the internet if her mother actually considered her delicate medical condition and knew what the hell she was doing in the first place, an act which I believe used to be called parenting — but at least she saved everyone the trouble of finding her belly up in the bathtub after being told that her favorite band sucked. Yeah, I may have pretentiously wallowed in the cascading chorus of my abject self-pity and abundance of Doritos after someone verbally murdered my Survivor tribute video on YouTube, but I eventually dealt with it (and the five pounds to boot). At the very least, I'd advise anyone in a similar position not to slit their wrists when they're told to clean their room; I'd rather have my civil liberties. (Or, at the very least, an awesome montage in which Dave Bickler's vocals fuel my efforts to get them back.)

That being said, if Tina Meier were truly sincere, then perhaps she'd address whatever inflicted the smoldering corpse that used to be her narcissistic daughter than launch some self-righteous crusade against something as vague and mundane as internet bullying. First off, no one can be jailed for writing anything obnoxious. Depending on how thick your skin is, "internet bullying" can technically be anything — at least anything in the regard that it can be ignored without the indirect consequence of arbitrarily penalizing everyone else. Otherwise, we'd have to jail everyone simply because some selfish dumbass with a tiara lacked cognitive fortitude. It only follows that both humanity and the fashion police benefit when people like this rid themselves of the genepool.

Alas, I am so incensed over this grievous constitutional infringement that I think I'll commit suicide just to prove a point. Details forthcoming.

How to spot a depressingly shitty war film

Its box art will probably be this:


Why everyone likes this film perplexes me because A) I never understood it and B) I never came across anyone who did. I reasonably assumed that everyone was afflicted with muscular dystrophy and had to endure this insufferable scourge, but the fact that I'm not doing a catatonic Louise Glover completely invalidates my point. I mean, I don't get it. Is it supposed to be some sort of coming of age film? Because if it is, then that's for queer teenage dramas starring that queer, Zac Efron. We're talking about a war film, or something that tries to be like one by lacing itself with superficial soldier jargon and boorish one-liners, either of which would've been mildly tolerable if the fighting scenes didn't suck so much. That the characters spend more than an hour brazenly firing into thin air almost makes you forget who the hell we were fighting.

Who needs substance and transition when you can watch me save the world from those dangerous hydrofluorocarbons!?

In addition to its perversion of the war against. . . something, almost everything in this film is pointless, and through some miraculous measure, so are the action scenes — or the deplorable lack of them. Gee, it wouldn't hurt to have someone actually die in combat at least within the first four hours because that's kind of what war does. And it also wouldn't hurt if the backstory and dialogue actually made sense instead of peddling some morally ambiguous and supercilious subtext straight from some snotty asshole's half-baked, metaphysical treatise on warfare. I don't know about you, but I watch war films to gawk at people being blown apart and crucified; I don't watch to inflate some director's misguided sense of self-worth by sharing my subjective interpretations of a Rorschach test for bullshit.

In addition to actually having a tangible plot as opposed to an inkblot of an intoxicated echidna — or a cheese sandwich — filmmakers need to stick to the violent and gritty formulas that made Blackhawk Down, Saving Private Ryan, and Rambo so successful. All three films are entertaining and practical; they don't try to scrape the bottom of war's root causes because nobody gives a shit, which is fitting since I've never heard of too many soldiers who've wandered into sniper-infested cities torn over abstract concepts like relativism and the "duality of man." (They're apparently too busy, you know, fighting for their fellow man or something like that, not that certain filmmakers would know.) Finally, neither film talks down to its viewers with some condescending, pseudo-holistic approach of warfare intended to "replicate" the confusion of being a soldier; such would invariably involve some boring, three-hour barracks scene filled with inflated high school cheerleader lore and fifty billion masturbation innuendos. Way to rub me the wrong way while I try to tie up the loose ends with Jennifer, Kubrick.

We need those movies because everything else just plain sucks, like those porn sites that demand SexKeys to justify their lesser porno, which, if you're savvy, you can effectively access on a site that doesn't need a SexKey. In the same vein, you're better off tuning to Uncommon Valor or Hamburger Hill unless you want to be treated to a preview that looks and sounds good when you see the thumbnail, but ruins everything with its bad dialogue, dildo-licking (I don't think Full Metal Jacket had any, but I'm going to err on the side of caution), and extraneously lengthy setup. Whoever made it is or was a fucking tasteless hedonist. And whoever likes it is probably bad in bed.

Technically, he got 29

Also, Senator Clinton's name was misspelled and anyone who supports Ron Paul can't comprehend the consequences of their actions anyway, which means that Jesus edges the apathetic and Mike Huckabee vote (technically the same thing) by six. That, of course, is dependent on the assumption that my dogmatically-influenced mathematical calculations of the write-in vote from Duval County, Florida hold any water.


May your reign be long, your cabinet members true beyond the tempting auspices of 30 slivers of bling, and your political acumen as incisive as a lance to the backside.

Nonchalant review of a random internet site (which I may have perused beforehand)

Ah, Domer Domain. You never cease to reinforce your status as the perpetual red-headed, retarded stepchild of the Notre Dame fan community.

The first thing I thought when I visited this place was "Holy shit! This place just screams utter legitimacy." In fact, I may have spotted Max von Sydow in the middle of all that blatant intellectual property theft. (Mr. Sydow, your name doesn't deserve to be sullied by being mentioned in the proximity of such undesirability, for which I apologize.)


And will you look at that? January 1st is already marked as a definite bowl game date, which assumes that Notre Dame won't get its ass kicked by a blind, deaf-mute, cane-wielding midget along the way. (EDIT 11/22/08: I rule.)

Maybe I'm being a bit harsh. This place is a bit legitimate when it doesn't steal premium information from college football pay sites. Instead, it does the next best thing by publishing and promoting hearsay from a 15 year old kid, which is great because I creamed myself in sheer disbelief when he reported that Golden Tate's favorite food was chicken. I always thought it was beef, bacon, or something that didn't really give a shit about what a college athlete has for dinner. On second thought, chickens really don't — unless you're Foghorn Leghorn, whom the aforementioned Notre Dame receiver will shamelessly devour in a matter of minutes — and neither does everyone and everything else. Way to go, kid.


So, Domer Domain blows, which is unsurprising if you consider that Notre Dame's college football team currently does, too.

Others who could influence the outcome of the election

Almost immediately following his terse confrontation with the Wrightian-inspired Sharia Socialist, Joe the Plumber became a thunderous rallying cry for hopeless political campaigns and those unskilled, unlicensed, and gratuitously uninformed members of the middle class who just despise economic progress (God bless them). His sudden and unexpected ascendance to the political forefront begs the rise of other offsetting figures, of varying title and occupation, who may affect the outcome of this year's presidential race:

The Duke of Earl

This potent, yet inherently redundant regency had its humble roots in the clever title of Gene Chandler's eponymous hit song of 1962, from which the aforementioned rhythm and blues artist consequently adopted the eventual title and the fiefdoms that came with it. The Duke still resides in his mighty vassal state of Chicago, from where he makes annual sojourns to the lesser lands of Las Vegas and Atlantic City to promote his vocal trade. When prompted for an edict regarding this year's presidential election, the Duke dismissed any subsequent results stemming from such as "illegitimate" and "unbefitting of his style."

L Tetris Block, the Tetris Block and 2007 GameFAQs Character Contest Winner

The undeniable scourge of inexperienced Tetris players and prepubescent Final Fantasy fanboys everywhere will jar a monkey wrench — or an inopportune tetris block — in any presidential candidate's well-laid plans. Nothing else can derail any stout gameplan, except for. . .

Brady Quinn, which roughly translates to "He who throws fifty feet above wide receiver" in Sioux

As you can see, beneath those gynormous lats and big-game shortcomings is an incredibly hidden soft side.

Political analysts don't think that too many closeted gay men who aren't already Republican Congressmen will support Senator John McCain's polarizing candidacy. Then again, they never thought that the presidency would come down to a first-term junior Senator and a man who can't raise his arms above his shoulders, either.

Bruce Banner, the flaccid, reserved alter ego of the Hulk

Bruce Banner loses almost every vestige of humanity during his almost subconscious transformation into society's ever-present, impulsive, towering anti-hero — much in the same way that Joe Wurzelbacher exposed himself as an obvious Republican operative during his lackluster attempt to pass for an independent concerned over Barack Obama's fiscal policies. QFT, bitch. Now go back to jerking off to Anne Coulter's adams apple.

William Pitt, the First Earl of Chatham, also contemporarily known as "Pitt the Elder"

Among other things during his lengthy tenure, Pitt the Elder's superb conduct of the Seven Years' War effectively lessened French power through the seizure of Canada and a shrewd alliance with Frederick the Great. Given his vast, world-changing accomplishments, it stands to reason that neither Senator Obama nor Senator McCain and his legion of politically-motivated unskilled workers would have been fit to shine this British Prime Minister's boots — or brush the dead lints from his equally scrupulous colonial wig.

Byron, the Second Lieutenant

Fortunately, you can't spell woefully unprepared without "WOE!"

Joe the Plumber is neither qualified nor licensed to plumb anything. And he's also an asshole. By contrast, Byron is someone who, presumably, has been trained to do whatever he's been trained to do...or so we, in our collective naivety, have been led to believe. This is a man who, like the two who are pitted in this gutsy contest, swore to protect to constitution, to which I have no doubt all three will do to the fullest extent of their respective, arm-raising capabilities. Unfortunately, therein Byron's capability lies the problem. When prompted for his thoughts regarding this year's contest, he really didn't know.

In spite of some of his glaring weaknesses, Byron's candor is a breath of fresh air in an environment dominated by nefarious political operatives.

And finally, Haleth, the son of Hama

The altruistic heir to the doorward of Rohan was among a handful of precocious adolescents who perished during their nation's admirable yet half-hearted defense of Helm's Deep. There exists no adequate way of gauging how he would've felt about the American presidential election, but it probably wouldn't have mattered anyway; he would've been too young to vote.