Hank and the First Amendment: A Primer

To no one's great surprise, ESPN and Hank Williams have parted ways after he compared Obama and Boehner playing golf to Hitler and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu playing golf. Just as well; we've been subjected to that retarded "Are you ready for some football" song for 20 FUCKING YEARS. About damn time to shake things up.

Anyway, Hank immediately played the Victim Card:

"After reading hundreds of e-mails, I have made MY decision," he wrote in a statement on his website. "By pulling my opening Oct 3rd, You (ESPN) stepped on the Toes of The First Amendment Freedom of Speech, so therefore Me, My Song, and All My Rowdy Friends are OUT OF HERE. It's been a great run."

No.

Here's what the First Amendment actually says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

First phrase: CONGRESS shall make no law. Not ESPN shall make no law. The First Amendment is designed to keep the GOVERNMENT from telling you what you can and can't say, not ESPN or any other basic cable network. Or your employer. Or your Mom. Or any other non-governmental body. Hank Williams Jr. and ESPN had a mutually beneficial business relationship. When ESPN decided that it would no longer be beneficial, they cancelled it. I have no idea what kind of contract ESPN and Bocephus had, but I'm sure it didn't contain a provision saying that "ESPN will not terminate its relationship with Williams Jr. because of any retarded thing he says in public." But there's not First Amendment involvement here at all.

(Of course, over the years, courts have added a number of exceptions to the seemingly plain "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech." It's illegal to threaten to kill someone, for example, even though that's a law abridging the freedom of speech. But that's neither here nor there.)

Oh, one more thing: I fully support Hank's right to say whatever the fucks he wants. If he wants to say Obama faked the moon landing and is secretly a Chinese spy, go for it. I'm just saying that ESPN firing him has nothing to do with the First Amendment, despite what he says in his oddly capitalized email.

In which TK enters the craft brewing business

Despite the fact that I have no facial hair and a BMI solidly within normal range, yesterday I joined the ranks of Dudes Who Brew Beer At Home. Surprisingly enough, I enjoyed the brewing process (well, Stage 1 of it, anyway). "Surprising" because I don't really like anything.

I'm not going to break down the whole 4-hour process into what I did because that would be boring. Basically, it involves a lot of boiling things and then cooling things off and then boiling something else and then cooling that off and then pouring yeast into it. It's more difficult than making Top Ramen and less difficult than making chili. It does make your house smell strongly beer-y, for lack of a better word. Not really like beer, but like something related to beer. It's this sort of fetid, yeast-y, agricultural smell. Also, hops smell a lot like marijuana. This must be the reason that so many homebrew guys are probably also big stoners. (The guy who taught the beer-making class I went to acknowledged this reality on several occasions.) I can also say that the process felt vaguely medieval. I can easily see a monk in 1358 doing pretty much the same thing I did, except over an open fire instead of a Kenmore stovetop and also probably not while occasionally checking in on the 49ers.

I ended up with 5 gallons of a dark brown liquid. It is now in the Primary Fermenter, which sounds complicated but which is actually a 5-gallon bucket with an airlock on the top, which is actually a bendy plastic tube that lets gasses out but doesn't let anything floating around in. Every few minutes, the Primary Fermenter makes a reverse-burping sound and, I suppose, gasses come out, although you can't smell anything.

Saturday we do the First Racking, which means we pour the stuff out of the Primary Fermenter and into the Secondary Fermenter, which is a big glass jug. We should have beer ready to drink in like a month. I'll keep you posted.

If this goes well, I'm going to start distilling my own whiskey at home. Maybe I'll grow some tobacco too. And opium poppies can't be that hard to grow, right? Never mind. Disregard that. I never said that.

What are your Panhandler Rules?

If you're like me (and there is almost no chance of this, I realize that, it's just an expression), on your daily perambulations through the City, you encounter a variety of panhandlers, homeless and otherwise. As with most things in my life, I'm often perplexed about how to handle this fraught situation and so I'm croudsourcing this issue to find out what it is you do.



As I work in the Civic Center area, which is part of/maybe just immediately adjacent the Tenderloin, I see some of the same panhandlers every day.



There is the oddly well-put-together woman who I've written about before who posts up at the corner of Grove and Larkin during commute hours (she's there roughly 7:30-9 am and then 4 to about 6 pm) silently holding a sheaf of Street Sheets and who doesn't look homeless or even really troubled in any way; in fact, she would not be out of place waiting on you in a diner or something. NOT HOLDING THAT AGAINST HER; I'm just saying, it's kinda weird.



(I wrote that prior post about her in 2009. She's still out there, basically every day. I continue to be really curious about what her deal is but I really don't want to stop and talk to her because I pass her every day, usually twice a day, and I don't want to set up a thing where I have to stop and talk to her every day. It has nothing to do with her being homeless; I don't want to stop and talk to anyone twice a day. I'm not one of those people who hangs around their corner store trading neighborhood gossip or that kind of thing.)



(OH SNAP I just looked at the Google Street View for Grove & Larkin and thought I saw her but it's just some chick with a coffee. Goes to show how normal she looks.)



There's the Bearded Disheveled Guy Who's Always Reading a Paperback Book. He can be found in Civic Center Station pretty much all the time. I've actually given him money before.



There's a whole crowd that hangs out around the Main Library. One of them is a guy who wears Rollerblades all the time and skates around passing a football back and forth with one of his comrades. In all fairness, I've never seen him ask anyone for money, so maybe he just likes to wear Rollerblades and throw the rock around and hang out by the library.



UNRELATED: Check out the cool Street View Dog on the corner of Larkin and Golden Gate! AWWWWW, PUPPY!!!!



And so on. My point is, when you see your Regular Panhandlers, what do you do? Do you give them money?



Or I guess, what are your usual Giving Money to Panhandler Rules? I mean, in SF, you probably get hit up for money 5 to 12 times a day unless you're Richie Rich and live in Pacific Heights and drive your Volvo to work and your secretary brings lunch to you. So what are your giving money rules? When do you toss a buck at a panhandler?



(RELATED STORY - I remember reading somewhere years ago about an invitation to some fancy-ass party in a part of town where there were obviously panhandlers and the invitation asked guests to not give money to the "outdoorsmen." Outdoorsmen! FAVORITE HOMELESS EUPHEMISM.)



Have a nice holiday weekend at Burning Man or whatever it is you do. I guess if you're at Burning Man you're not reading this anyway.



Also, I'm still on jury duty but hopefully only for another week and then everything will be back to normal.



Also, we're trying out Boxing Room tonight and I'll totally tell you if it's good or what. Smoked Chicken & Andouille Gumbo! FUCK YEAH. Speaking of restaurant websites, THANK YOU FOR NOT AUTOPLAYING DIXIELAND JAZZ ON YOUR WEBSITE BOXING ROOM. I KNOW THAT MUST HAVE BEEN NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE TO RESIST.



OK, I'm done now.

This week's Your Free iTunes Downloads Reviews

Not a good week. Lots of subpar electropop, plus yet another song in Spanish that I don't feel qualified to judge. Let's get started.

Andy Grammer, "Miss Me"



You've heard this song a million times before. It sounds like the background music in a commercial for visiting Nevada or something. It's super-clean and shiny and totally devoid of life. This will show up in a Kate Hudson romcom during the "we broke up and I'm sad and moping around the house" montage towards the end.

Owl City, "Deer in the Headlights"



Ugh, this is terrible. It's like they didn't even put any effort into it. Just string together some synth effects and any melody that pops into your head and call it a day. Are all their songs this bad? No wonder people hate them so much. Fuck this.

Jadakiss, "Hold You Down" (f/ Emmany)





Seriously, I was really liking Jada at the beginning and then WHAM we get hit with the totally predictable R&B chorus. Why you gotta mess up a perfectly good rap song by cutting and pasting a Destiny's Child chorus in the middle of it? Oh well, guess "Emmany" needs to work too.

Ziggy Marley, "Forward to Love"



Really, Ziggy? This is what you're doing? This isn't any good, even by reggae standards. I mean, it seriously sounds like something some white college kids put together after listening to "Legend" for a whole semester.

Junior Boys, "Itchy Fingers"



WOW THIS IS SO BORING.

Here are some sentences you might hear when this is playing in the background:

"The dentist will see you now."

"Your call is very important to us. Please continue to hold and we will be with you shortly."

"Welcome to T.J. McGillicudy's! My name is Cody and I'll be your server today."

"This sure is a good song, Mark Sanchez!"

Justice, "Civilization"



The video, which seems to involve a herd of bison trying to keep from getting crushed by falling statutes, is far more interesting than the song. Poor bison. I thought Justice was supposed to be good? This isn't very good.

Sie7e, "Tengo tu love"



I'm kind of uncomfortable judging songs sung mostly in Spanish because I don't really know enough about the genres to know what I'm talking about. This is some kind of vaguely reggae-ish thing where the guy uses some English words like "love" and "black card" and whatever, I'm not the right person to ask.

THE VERDICT:Even though they're all free, nothing worth downloading this week. Unless you happen to love terrible electropop. Seriously, Owl City must be stopped, for the good of music.

Conversation with The Wife about how much football coaches make

The Wife: "So how much would a high school football coach make?"

Me: "Like the coach in Friday Night Lights? Like in a small town, working at a kinda poor school? Like 35, 40 K maybe."

"What about college?"

"Depends on the college."

"Well, like Florida."

"Florida? I don't know, maybe $3 million."[*]

(Incredulous) "THREE MILLION DOLLARS? To be a football coach?"

"Yeah, but it's one of the biggest football schools in the country. At most colleges, it would probably be more like several hundred thousand."

(Musing) "I should get into that. I'm just gonna need to learn what a down is."

[*] As it happens, I was pretty close; Will Muschamp, the new Florida coach, will average about $2.7 million a year. The last coach, Urban Meyer, made about $4 mil a year.

If nothing else, this exchange should prove that you don't need to know much about football to be a huge fan - and I mean HUGE fan - of "Friday Night Lights." Due to a scheduling quirk, you can now buy the whole final season on DVD as it's airing on NBC. She loves peeling off 2 or 3 episodes in a row, unshackled from network control. No ads is nice too.

The Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory

In 1977, Jimmy Carter used the Philadelphia Experiment to travel back in time and take two dinosaur eggs from fellow Illuminatus Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello home. He put one of the eggs on the Roswell UFO and sent it to England and stored the other one in a janitorial closet in the basement of the Washington Monument. One of the eggs hatched in 1926 and became Queen Elizabeth II.

Years later, Franklin Roosevelt and the Bilderberg Group engineered Pearl Harbor to benefit International Paper, who would make the ration books used during the war. It was around this time that Moses appeared to L. Ron Hubbard and gave him a microfilm that contained all Scientific Knowledge in the Universe. Unfortunately, Hubbard ate part of the microfilm, thinking it was blotter acid, and mistranslated the rest. This would be the basis of Scientology.

After the war, David Rockefeller and the Trilateral Commission invented Jell-O as a mind control substance. When Jell-O proved ineffective, they switched tactics and began implanting subliminal messages in episodes of “Gunsmoke” and in Petula Clark albums. John F. Kennedy accidentally learned of the backward making operation and so Dean Martin was sent to kill him. Dean Martin is an alien. Lee Harvey Oswald just happened to be there. Jack Ruby accidentally shot Lee Harvey Oswald when he was supposed to shoot the startled-looking guy next to him, who was also an alien. This has nothing to do with the rest of this stuff; it was just some unrelated alien-on-alien violence.

Whoops.

In 1961, the second dinosaur egg hatched and Obama was born. Ironically, the egg had just been with Rockefeller in Kenya when Rockefeller was there on safari, but the egg actually hatched in the main galley of a TWA flight from Kinshasa to Montreal. When it was later learned that there may have been some alien egg residue left on the plane, it was shot down when it was flying as TWA Flight 800. The Masons decided to have a Hawaiian birth certificate prepared because the original plan was to make Hawaii and independent kingdom and Obama would be the King of Waikiki. This plan was abandoned when that title was used for a 1978 Burt Reynolds comedy that flopped at the box office.

The moon landing actually happened just as NASA reported. However, Neil Armstrong lost the film on the way home and the whole thing had to be recreated. To do this, all the Apollo 11 astronauts actually went right back to the moon and filmed the whole thing over again. There were also some aliens there too.

Most of the main Illuminati and aliens were running AT&T. They wanted AT&T broken up because one of the aliens spilled a full glass of wine on Nikola Tesla at a party in Hoboken in 1981 and there was a whole big thing about it and everyone was pissed. This ruined Tesla’s plan for him and Regis Philbin to control people by using high-intensity microbursts. Later, Tesla and Philbin invented a new people control technology, but it has only a short effective range. They are currently planning to install 726 mind control boxes in San Francisco to test the new technology.

Caution: Mind Control Box. (Photo courtesy of the SF Appeal, which is controlled by the Bohemian Club and Italian Freemasons.)

Flouride is perfectly harmless and is effective at reducing tooth decay. However, the Council on Foreign Relations spread rumors that it is harmful pretty much just for kicks.

In 1982, Obama died in a Coca-Cola and Pop Rocks accident. He was replaced by an identical, but slightly less cool, copy.

Tupac Shakur faked his own death to pursue his real interest in professional football scouting. He actually died under mysterious circumstances in 2007 after advising the San Francisco 49ers to draft Alex Smith with the first overall pick of the 2005 NFL draft.

Please forgive this brief foray into football

I don't usually write about football because I don't watch as much as I used to, having converted to baseball starting about 10 years ago when I first joined a Giants season ticket group. I leave football to Daisy. But this was just too hilarious.

[NOTE: The rest of this post will only make sense if you're an NFL fan in general and a 49ers fan in particular.]

From a Q&A with new Niners Head Coach/Franchise Jesus Jim Harbaugh, in today's 'Gate:

Q: What is your prototypical quarterback?

Harbaugh: "First of all, a competitive guy that's a winner, somebody that has great athletic instincts, somebody who is very accurate throwing the football, a quick-minded guy who can think fast on his feet and can make decisions quickly, someone who has leadership ability, an understanding of timing and can make really good decisions."

Q: Is potential free agent Alex Smith someone in the mix?

Harbaugh: "Yes, Alex Smith is definitely in it."

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Wait, does Harbaugh not know who Alex Smith is? The total fucking bust who everyone agrees has no future with the 49ers? The one who failed when given chance after chance after chance? He's "definitely in it"?

Let me translate for you, in case you're not a football fan. Here, I found this Q&A with the Director of the Museum of Modern Art:

Q: What do you look for when purchasing a work of fine art?

A: It must have a bold vision and something to say. It should be edgy and dangerous and challenge your perceptions of what art is, but must also have an inherent beauty that can't be quantified or explained. It must speak to the soul, as well as the eyes.

Q: Is art by Thomas Kinkade in the mix?

A: Yes, Thomas Kinkade is definitely in it.

I certainly hope this is some bullshit that's part of Harbaugh's master plan, because if he's serious, and you're a 49ers fan, be very fucking afraid.

Better older/better younger

Last night I watched "Heathers" with The Wife because she'd never seen it (partly at least, I suppose, because she's 10 years younger than me) and you know what? It wasn't nearly as good as I remembered. I guess some movies are best watched stoned with 8 other people in a dorm room. A lot of what I took for edgy and alternative at the time now seems sadly dated and forced. She didn't like it much either. I guess "Heathers" doesn't stand up so well.

Anyway, that made me start thinking. What's better when you get older? What's worse?

Better when you get older

1. Food and wine (the things, not the magazine)

When you're really, really young, you think creamed celery is pretty much the bomb. Then you have an annoying I'll-only-eat-white-food phase. Then McDonald's seems like the Best Fucking Thing Ever. Then what, college cafeteria food? Bitch please. You have no idea how to eat until you build up a palate that comes from years of experimentation. (Some people longer than others, obvs.) Same thing with wine. You don't even like wine when you first start drinking. Then you think Turning Leaf is basically Stag's Leap on sale. It takes a long time to figure out what good is.

[DISCLAIMER: This doesn't apply if you're some Richie Rich who grew up in Atherton and went to the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton on Tuesday nights like it wasn't no thang. If so, I hate you/am jealous.]

2. Your parents

Those nagging sacks of flesh that use to exist solely to drive you batshit insane slowly morph into Intelligent Adults with Thoughts and Feelings. Sometimes they even say something rational or sensical. Not often, but once in a while.

3. Sex

Remember how hard it was to learn to drive a stick? And the first time you tried in the parking lot somewhere you kept stalling and stalling and you could never make the car go? And now you don't even think about it and you can flow through the gears like a professional driver without even thinking about it? And because you have the basics down so pat, you could basically do everything without thinking about it and be able to play with the radio or even fix your hair while you're driving.

Now, I wouldn't drive for 3 hours around town in a stick anymore, but that first hour is still fun.

4. New York City

You know what makes New York City fun? MONEY. You know what you don't have when you're young? MONEY.

[Again, if you're some trust fund kid who grew up on the Upper East Side or whatever, more power to you. I'm talking generally here.]

5. Baseball

There is something about the casual rhythm of baseball that appeals to me more the older I get. When you're young, your sugar-addled, gnat-like attention span gets frustrated if something doesn't happen every 3 seconds. Now that I'm a little older, I appreciate the break.

Better when you're younger

1. Drugs

Yayyyyyy! Let's stay up for 3 days! Stroking your hair and blissing out to Happy Mondays is SO MUCH FUN. Best of all, I can stay up until 3 am shrooming and then go to work the next day!

2. Law & Order

The repetition is somehow lulling and calming. It is a replacement for the gentle cycles of childhood. Instead of Nap Time, it's Misleading Suspect Time. Instead of Snack Time, it's Courtroom Scene Time. Only as you get older do you realize that watching a show in which every episode is essentially the same gets a little unsatisfying.

3. Picking up chicks

When you get a little older, you'll learn that it's not as much fun. Especially getting them to take the candy and get into the van. JOKING. JOKING.

4. House parties

Younger: OMG SO MUCH FUN 3 kegs drinking all night tons of people who's that who woke up in the bathtub LOL there's someone passed out on the kitchen floor

Older: Who are these people in my house? Is that guy opening my 1989 Pichon-Baron and pouring it into a plastic cup?

5. Football

Something about football doesn't appeal to me as much as when I was younger. I'm theorizing there's a thing where baseball gets better and football gets worse the older you get. I don't know why.

A short story based on today's Trending Topics for San Francisco, at around 9:00 a.m.

Jim Harbaugh was upset. He paced his office, fuming, then grabbed his iPhone 3GS and called Vince Young, whom he findly referred to as “Huckleberry Finn,” for reasons neither of them could remember.

“Vince,” Harbaugh said. “Did you see these god damned People’s Choice Awards?”

“Maybe,” said Vince Young. “What’s up?”

“Well,” Harbaugh fumed, “I was watching and the category for Favorite Constitution came up. Can you fucking believe this shit? Britain was nominated?”

“Great Britain doesn’t have a written constitution,” Vince Young said. “What are you talking about? Are you drunk?”

“No, Vince Young, I’ve never been more sober,” Harbaugh said. “So did you see who won?”

“Was it the Netherlands?,” Vince Young asked.

“Japan!,” Harbaugh yelled. “And their constitution only dates to 1947!”

Vince Young shook his head. “Just seems wrong. Anyway, who won for Favorite Pseudonymous American Author?”

“Mark Twain,” Harbaugh replied. “But he wins about every year. At least the years that Ellery Queen doesn’t win.”

Vince Young sighed. “Anyway, #Whats4Breakfast?”

“What did you say?,” Harbaugh asked. “Did you just say ‘Hashtag what’s for breakfast,’ all strung together really fast?”

“Maybe,” Vince Young said. “#ces.”

50 Reasons to Love San Francisco

50. It was 81 degrees last Thursday. NOVEMBER 4.

49. It’s usually 60 degrees on July 4. TAKE THAT, REST OF AMERICA.

48. The view from Bernal Hill.

47. The view from Tank Hill.

46. The view from the 20th & Church corner of Dolores Park.

45. Ritual Roasters, Blue Bottle, Caffe Trieste, Philz, or any of the other hyperspecialized coffee purveyors you depend on.

44. Making fun of tourists. Giving tourists directions. Rolling your eyes anytime someone says “Fisherman’s Wharf.”

43. 6-hour brunches.

42. The Neptune Society Columbarium. (Seriously, go if you’ve never been. It’s amazing).

41. Fresh focaccia from Liguria Barkery on Stockton.

40. Irish coffee.

39. Walking/biking through Golden Gate Park on Sunday when the streets are all blocked off.

38. Bay to Breakers. In whatever incarnation it currently has.

37. Red’s Java House.

36. Going to the Attic for the first time in 10 years and finding out that the cute bartender looks exactly the same.

35. Finally breaking down and going to Alcatraz and finding out it’s actually pretty cool.

34. When you’re out of town and someone asks you where you’re from and you say “San Francisco.”

33. The endless amusement in bitching about Muni, even though it almost always gets you there. Eventually.

32. The Ferry Building. $6 tomatoes.

31. The Heart of the City Farmer’s Market at U.N. Plaza. 6 tomatoes for $1.

30. Arguing about Critical Mass.

29. It’s-Its. Especially Mint It’s-Its, the obviously most superior It’s-It.

28. Frank Chu.

27. Sunny afternoons in Dolores Park. Cold beer, cold water.

26. The roast chicken at Nopa. The shaking beef at Slanted Door. The salt & pepper crab at R&G Lounge. The cioppino at Caesar’s. The sand dabs at Tadich Grill. A burrito from El Farolito.

25. Burritos in general.

24. Anchor Steam. Speakeasy. Toronado. 21st Amendment. The incredible beer culture and obsessive devotion to, and interest in, beer.

23. Earthquakes. Earthquake stories. Knowing with absolute certainty there is going to be a massive, devastating earthquake and not doing anything to get ready for it. Except putting a battery-operated radio and a pint of vodka in a shoebox and calling that your “earthquake kit.”

22. Taking the ferry to Tiburon and having brunch at Sam’s.

21. Herb Caen. (R.I.P, and kidz, if you don’t know, go read his stuff.)

20. Walking across the Golden Gate Bridge (BONUS: It’s 58 degrees, the wind is 40 mph, and it’s so foggy you can’t see the water).

19. Beach Blanket Babylon, The Marsh, and one-person shows with 6 people in the audience.

18. As bad as they are now, the San Francisco 49ers. Remember 1994? How about ’81, ’84, ’88, and ’89?

17. The Embarcadero Center lights at Christmas. Union Square at Christmas. The fucking puppies and kittens in the windows of Macy's at Christmas.

16. Happy hour at Zeitgeist, the 540 Club, the Royal Exchange, the Hi-Dive, the Ha-Ra, or wherever you happen to be at 5:00. Or 4:00. Or 3:00. Or, fuck it, 2:30.

15. Seeing live music in the basement of Li Po, at Stern Grove, Symphony Hall, the Fillmore, the Independent, or any of the other hundreds of places you can see live music any night.

14. Watching the fog roll in and slowly take over. Fog in general.

13. Santarchy. (I know they have it in other cities, but it started here, so there.)

12. Street food, from the bacon-wrapped hot dog guys on Mission to the Crème Brulee cart to the Korean BBQ truck and on and on and on.

11. Corner stores. Your corner store might have a better wine selection than most American cities. You could walk out with a Watermelon 4 Loko, a wedge of camembert, a Philips head screwdriver, and a jar of olive tapenade.

10. Amoeba Records (and Aquarius too, for that matter).

9. The Pride Parade. The Dyke March. Pride Weekend in general.

8. Your urban family.

7. Street art.

6. Dogs. Dogs everywhere. Fort Funston. Crissy Field. Duboce Park. Dogs in bars. Dogs on barstools next to you. Dogs in cabs. Knowing more dogs personally than children.

5. The neighborhoods. The Lower Haight is less than 2 miles from Cow Hollow, but you could live your whole life in one and never visit the other.

4. YOUR SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS.

3. SF MOMA, the DeYoung, the observation tower in the DeYoung, the Palace of the Legion of Honor, the Cartoon Art Museum, and Specs 12 Adler. All important cultural institutions.

2. Never having to grow up if you don’t want to. (Don’t I know it.)

1. You know what? Be as weird as you want. Work on your rock opera about the Boxer Rebellion. Be a barista/dominatrix. Talk almost exclusively about your conspiracy theory linking albinos and aliens. That’s cool. Let’s grab a drink and you can tell me all about it.



(In response to "50 Reasons to Be Pretty Damn Euphoric You Live in New York City," which appeared on the Village Voice's blog last week.)

Here's my explanation of why professional sports are satisfying and necessary

"There's some part of our reptilian brain that needs to conquer and dominate others. It's hard-wired into us. We used to satisfy this intense, unstoppable urge by actually conquering and dominating others. But now we have evolved and don't do that as much as we used to. So, even though it would be incredibly satisfying and rewarding for all of us to march on Dallas, burn it to the ground, sew the soil with salt so nothing ever grows there again, sell the citizenry into slavery, and take their gold and HDTVs, our society frowns on that kind of thing. So instead, we assemble a team of surrogates to represent our city-state and we give them a fearsome name like 'Giants' and we send them forth to do our conquering for us. And now there is only ritual humiliation and defeat, but it's all we've got and we enjoy it nonetheless. That's why we have professional sports.

"Also, two or more guys can't sit around and drink beer and talk. There has to be something on in the background. Televised sporting events enable male friendship to exist without awkwardness."

Brief notes on a family reunion

First off, I haven’t seen Mad Men yet, but I think I’m going to watch it tonight, so I’ll wrote about it tomorrow. OK?

I just went to a family reunion of sorts. My Dad lives in Tennessee, and this reunion thing was in rural Virginia, where he’s originally from, so this trip required flying to Nashville, then drive drive drive 5 hours to Virginia, spend the night in a hotel (a Hampton Inn, as a matter of fact, and kudos to Hampton Inn, very nice), then drive to the reunion thing, spend 3 hours there, then drive drive drive back to Nashville.

Here’s how it goes in the cars. In one car we have my Dad and me. In one car we have The Wife, The Sister, and The Stepmom. On the way there, Dad and I mostly talk about My Future, and Politics (which we are able to do without anyone getting angry and slamming the door, which is good because we are in a car) and The Sister and Her Future and also the rest of the family. This trip also included a stop at Cracker Barrel, a staple of any road trip in the South.

I asked Dad why there’s no booze at the family reunion. He said “Cuts down on fighting and shooting, I guess.” Makes sense.

My Dad’s 84 years old, so he’s the only surviving sibling. He joined the Army to become a pilot when he was 17 and so he left rural Virginia and went to Japan and Korea and Bangkok and Vietnam and Goose Bay, Labrador, and spent two weeks in Australia waiting for a part for his plane so it could be repaired that he still waxes rhapsodically about and about which we will probably never know the complete story. Anyway, a lot of the rest of his family still live within 20 miles of where they grew up. I don’t have a lot in common with them except that we all hate Florida State.

This is the view from where the reunion was held. There's a Dollar General and a cemetery, two features of any small Southern town.

Still, it was interesting talking to them and hearing stories about Dad as a kid, which usually involved he and a friend borrowing someone’s car, picking up a couple of girls, and disappearing for 2 or 3 days. It’s a good thing they didn’t have Amber Alerts back then or my Dad would be doing life in prison. Some of the stories involved people with names like Ziphead and Chubs. Chubs, Dad explained, “wasn’t fat or anything. We just called him Chubs.”

It was nice and everything, but it's good to be back home.

And in today's distressing polling news

About a third of the people polled by Time magazine think Obama's a Muslim. 46% of Republicans do. Wrap your head around that for a minute.

(It occurs to me that there's probably a huge amount of overlap between people that think this and people who thought Obama was under the thrall of Jeremiah Wright. You can't have it both ways, people. Either he's a Wright-Christian or a Muslim. Pick your poison.)

(You know what else about the whole Jeremiah Wright thing? Who the fuck listens in church? You and I both know Obama was sitting there going "Just 25 more minutes and I can get home and watch the fucking Bears. Oh God will this guy ever shut the fuck up.")

Muslims have to pray like 6 times a day and there's a whole thing with a rug and pointing towards Mecca and whatnot and do you think for a second that the President of the United States could get away with this without someone noticing and going "Oh, hey, I wonder why the President kneels down on his little rug with the Presidential seal 6 times a day. What's up with that?" The White House Press Corps is so far up his ass that they can report on what he had for breakfast based on personal observation from inside his duodenum. You think they're going to whiff on him worshipping Allah? Bitch please.

Personally, I don't want my President to be any religion at all. The last thing I want is for the one person who can destroy the planet to believe that the Afterlife is a good place to be. Fuck that, I want him to think that This Life is the best and should be preserved at all costs.

That being said, my best guess is that, religion-wise, Obama is probably like a lot of guys his age who went to Columbia undergrad and Harvard Law - basically agnostic, but goes to church because it's expected in his social circle. And if I'm right, FINE BY ME.

I guess we shouldn't be surprised. 48% of people believe in ghosts. LOOK OUT WHAT'S THAT BEHIND YOU!?! Just kidding, there's nothing behind you. 23% of people believe in "witches," whatever the fuck that means.

BUT WAIT! It gets even better! I love this shit:

When Americans are asked to identify the country from which America gained its independence, 76% correctly name Great Britain. A handful, 2%, think America's freedom was won from France, 3% mention some other country (including Russia, China, and Mexico, among others named), while 19% are unsure.

19% are unsure! Love it. That roughly correlates with the 18% who think the Sun revolves around the Earth. Teach the controversy, I say!

Why am I blathering on about this? I don't know. Let's go get a drink. It's Friday.

The World Cup, explained for Americans

Soccer is a game in which a bunch of guys kick a ball around aimlessly for about an hour and a half. Sometimes, but not very often, it goes into a net and then someone takes his shirt off. This is called a "goal" and is to be avoided whenever possible. Soccer games usually end in scores like 1-0 or 2-1, although a 0-0 tie is the best.

Soccer is very popular in socialist countries like France and Japan because you don't win very often and the game is all about passing the ball to someone else - i.e., transferring wealth from those who have it to those who don't. Plus, people fake injuries a lot and fall down, just like they will when Obamacare takes over and everyone gets all kinds of free health care they don't need. Plus, it's boring, and anywhere that's not America is boring.

Every few years, all the countries in the world call home their players from Chelsea and Man U and form national teams. Then they have a big tournament called the World Cup. Predictably enough, it's not straightforward like March Madness. Instead, you can play like 3 games before you get eliminated. Stupid. Oh, and little bullshit countries like Paraguay win all the time. Germany's really good, which figures, since they make BMWs and fascism there. Brazil's really good, too, which also makes sense because Brazil is socialist too and no one has to work and they can spend all day playing soccer instead of working. France cheats. Shocker, I know.

San Francisco is full of foreigners and socialists, so everybody here pretends to like soccer.



See, they'll even stand in front of City Hall and pretend to watch France and something called a "Uruguay" play soccer on a big TV that's far away. They're really thinking about drugs and how much they hate God.

So everybody plays a lot of these games and the US usually doesn't do very well and that's about it. Football season starts in like 2 1/2 months, thank God.

It's not you, it's me

I'm sorry, dog dawg. I know I've been letting you down the last couple of days. I've got problems like A Lot of Work to Do and I Can't Think of Anything Interesting to Write About and No One Wants to Hear What I Thought of the Super Bowl and I Didn't Liveblog the Free Grand Slams at Denny's Today and so there it is.

Maybe I'll just give up and recap The Bachelor. That's the blogging equivalent of going to see The Lion King on Broadway.

UPDATE - Oh, I forgot, I do have one thing to add. Since it's me, it'll be me bitching about something. Surprise. I was at Hemlock on Friday night. Pretty busy. One bartender. Many of the customers around the bar had 24 oz. PBRs and I craved one so I wouldn't have to return to the bar and wait forever and also because I like PBR unironically. So I say to the bartender "Pabst," and I get a 12 ounce bottle. WTF? So I say, "Oh, I thought I was getting a 24-ounce can," and she said, "You didn't ask for that." Now, maybe she's right and I didn't, but given the fact that ~40% of the people at the bar were drinking the tallboys, don't you think it would have been cool to ask?

Here's where I give my BS opinion on the CBS Super Bowl abortion ad thing

So the kind of people that get agitated about stuff like this are agitated because CBS is apparently going to run a pro-life ad during the Super Bowl featuring former Florida QB and future NFL mediocrity Tim Tebow.

Apparently the ad is going to feature Tebow's Mom, who's going to say that doctors told her to have an abortion and she had the baby instead and it grew up to be Football Jesus.

Apart from Tennessee fans, no one should be that upset about this. For the vast majority of women, that fetus is going to become a Ritalin-addled behavior problem who blasts Cannibal Corpse after stomping into his room and slamming the door and knocking the Thomas Kinkade prints off the wall, rather than a monk-pure starting quarterback who writes Bible verses under his eyes and spends his spare time giving bone marrow to kittens.

But the bigger issue here is the fact that some TV ad during the Super Bowl isn't going to make any difference at all. First of all, how many pregnant women watch the Super Bowl to start with? And how many of them are on the fence about whether to get an abortion? "Hmmmm, I was going to get an abortion, but now that future mid-second-round draft pick Tim Tebow says it's a bad idea I guess I won't."

Look, women who want to have abortions in this country already have to deal with an unbelievable amount of shit, and it's getting worse all the time. Not only might a woman have to deal with a bunch of protesters screaming in her face, state legislatures keep enacting ever-more byzantine and abusive hoops that a woman has to jump through to get a legal medical procedure. Do you really think that a TV ad is going to be the tipping point?

Abortion is one of those things about which people already have their minds made up and rarely change their opinion. Have you ever had an abortion argument with someone that ended up with one person saying "Hey, you know what, that makes a lot of sense. You're right and I'm wrong." I doubt this ad is going to change anyone's mind either. And as long as CBS is willing to take ads from NARAL too, getting upset about this is a waste of time.

One side note. In that New York Daily News article I linked to above (where it says "pro-life ad" in the first para), the ad below appears on the side of the screen, or at least it did when I looked at the article. If you want to get upset about an ad, this one makes a lot more sense:

Yeah, losing 38 pounds in 2 months sounds realistic. For a POW camp.

Jukebox of Terror

I was at Bloodhound on Saturday evening, hanging out and watching the Emerald Bowl (meh, kinda boring) and drinking and so forth. It was pretty dead; there were only maybe 10 people in the place, total. One of the owners was playing a great mix of old soul and funk from his iPod, which we were heartily enjoying, when one of our fellow patrons stepped up to the jukebox. What followed was an object lesson in why some people should never be allowed around a jukebox.

Now, let me preface this by saying that Bloodhound has a pretty good jukebox. It's not one of those Internet jukeboxes that lets you play any song ever recorded; no, it's preloaded with CDs, but there's some great stuff on there, like Blitzen Trapper's "Furr" and "Dear Science" by TV on the Radio and both discs of "The Essential Clash." Homegirl skipped right over all this musical goodness.

No, she seemed bound and determined to play a set that sounded just like any drive time on KFOG, one tired, played-out radio hit after another. You know what's great after Fleetwood Mac's "Say You Love Me"? Why, "Jammin'" by Bob Marley, that's what! Oh yay! And then how about "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic"? I've only heard that 10 or 12 thousand times. I almost forgot what that sounded like. What, nothing from "Steel Wheels"? I can tell you wanna rock; that's why you put on "You Better You Bet," one of the lamest Who songs. Am I in a bar, or in the back of a soccer mom's Windstar? "Hey Mom, play 'Fire and Rain' next!! PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE!!!!!"

By the time her set mercifully ended and mine started, it was about time to go. She put on like 15 songs of relentless blandness. The musical equivalent of American cheese and mayonnaise on Wonder bread. Painful.

Regretsy gets inevitable book deal, and I can't get Hulu to work on my computer.

You know Regretsy, the very funny site that makes fun of really, really bad crafts people sell on Etsy? You know what I'm talking about.

I knew it was just a matter of time before they got a book deal, because the idea is great and the person who writes the captions (under the pseudonym "Helen Killer") is is brilliant. It's LOL funny.

Come to find out today that yes, they did get their book deal, and that Helen Killer is actually April Winchell, whose name I have heard before but didn't really know who she was. As it turns out, she's Internet famous and I guess real life famous too.

Now, I have nothing but good wishes for April Winchell, but there was some tiny part of me or maybe big part of me that was hoping that Helen Killer was actually just a very funny 23-year-old administrative assistant from Minneapolis and not someone who was already semi-famous. I don't know why.

Now, let's move on to getting Ugliest Tattoos and Item Not as Described book deals. Not just because they're written by friends of mine! Because they deserve it.

(Special 40goingon28 thanks to Tami for Twittering about this.)

In a completely unrelated story, are you watching The League yet? It might be the funniest show on television. I know what you're saying: "But TK, how could a show about fantasy football be funny?" Shut up. You whine too much. Go watch it on Hulu or something. If that works. I can never get Hulu to work for me.

One minute you're on top of the world, the next minute, some secretary's running over you with a lawnmower.

Unbelievable. But that's why he's Brett Favre and you're, well, you.

Caught up with my Mad Men last night, so I finally saw the lawnmower episode from two weeks ago. GROSS. Mad Men's getting weird. Not like that's a bad thing or anything, it just is. That whole thing with the hitchhikers last night - what was that all about? And is Betty a terrible mother or just stressed out?

Then the Raiders slammed the phone down and pouted and wrote "I HATE RICH GANNON" in big letters on their notebook

This is why the Raiders are so lame:

Team officials told CBS Sports they did not want Gannon to attend Saturday's television production meetings in advance of Sunday's Raiders-Broncos game, The Chronicle has learned, citing his public criticism of the organization in recent years.

"Rich Gannon is not welcome here," Raiders executive John Herrera said Friday when asked about the ban. "We told CBS we did not want him in our building, we did not want him to be part of our production meeting, and that's where it sits."

Oh God. "Richie hurt our feewings, so we don't want him come ovah!" The Raiders have meticulously cultivated an image as the Bad Boys of the NFL, dangerous scrappers who you'd want to avoid. Now we know the truth: their feelings get hurt when someone is mean to them. Why don't you and the rest of your Girl Scout troop go up to your room and play with Princess Sparkle Pony if you don't want to see Mean Old Rich Gannon, Raiders?

But wait, there's more:

Herrera quoted Gannon as saying in several interviews they should just "blow up the building and start over" in Oakland. Team officials took that as literally as they did figuratively, and told Gannon as much before last season's home game against the Chiefs.

"We think in a post 9/11 world, that's not a very proper thing to say," Herrera said. "It's uncalled for. He seems to be a guy who can't get over the fact that he played the worst Super Bowl game in the history of the game and he wants to blame everybody but himself.

Yes, when Rich Gannon said that the Raiders should "blow up the building and start over," he meant that the Raiders should actually place a number of high explosive charges around the team facility in Alameda and detonate them, killing everyone inside and reducing the structure to a smoking pile of rubble. That's the impression I got, anyway. In a post-9/11 world.

Then Herrera caps it off with a cheap shot about Gannon's Super Bowl performance. The Raiders should be slobberingly grateful that they were ever in the same parking lot as a Super Bowl. This is why they're the laughingstock of the NFL.