Quotes Of The Week

Quotes Of The Week:

1) The First-Grader, with an example of why it might not be a good idea to hold "Red Ribbon Week" at school the same week as Halloween. She told us on Thursday, "Tomorrow at school, we're having a rock concert to celebrate Halloween and drugs!" So, rock concerts at school are the same as rock concerts everywhere else. THAT'S a relief.

2) A Production Director for a radio cluster in Savannah, reading a short commercial after a newscast. I won't mention where he works. I'm only snarky enough to do that if it were my old employer, and it wasn't! Anyway, the commercial asked me to "come to the Con-Coarse Dee-Ele-gants in Hilton Head..." this weekend. The Alabama pronunciation of Concours D'Elegance invades Savannah! Is that how they speak in the South of France?

Heath Ledger and Jack Nicholson My Eye

It's official. Kevin Cronin of REO Speedwagon is now The Joker. I caught him the other night on one of those Time-Life Music infomercials. I believe it was the "We Used To Have Roadies Carry Suitcases of Aqua Net and Groupies With Only One Disease, and Now We're Lucky To Get a Gullible, Failing, Corporate Classic Rock Station To Believe There Are Still Five People Who Give a Crap About Us; I Guess We'll Wait To See If Celebrity Fit Club Comes Calling" collection.

Those Time-Life infomercials are addictive. The guest shots by the old celebs are priceless. Mickey Gilley doing the "When Country Music Was All About Beer Drinkin', Coon Dawgs, and How Much I Love My Beer and Coon Dawgs More Than My Woman" collection, Cuba Gooding, Sr. with the "You Know My Son, Don't You? Well I Ain't Him! My Son's a Lot More Famous Than Me, Don't Remind Me! No, I'm Not Doing that Jerry McGuire Thing, That Wasn't Me, That Was My SON, DAMMIT" collection, and the great Bobby Vinton co-hosting the "I Have So Much Vibrato, My Uvula Looks Like a Boxing Speed Bag" collection.

I just saw a couple more, and it's interesting they were shown back to back. The first was the "Best Of The Midnight Special: The In Our Prime, Doing Lots of Cocaine, and Lovin' It" DVD set, which I have to admit looks pretty awesome. Right after that came the "Rock And Roll Hall of Fame Concerts: The Post Rehab/Mortem, Blondie Ain't Blondie Any More, We Have To Sing Everything An Octave Lower Except For That Fro'd Punk Leo Sayer" DVD set.

Speaking of rehab, I obviously need some, because this Time-Life addicition is either out of control or I am just a big, honkin', grotesque loser.

I'm Goin' Straight To Hell

The old Drivin' N Cryin' song from my college years is never more appropriate than this time of year, the time when ghosts, fairies, pirates, Gene Simmons, Spider Man, and Transformers arrive at your doorstep with the Adam Sandler commandment "Gimme some candy!" on the tips of their tongues. It is also the time of year when the costume industry absolutely insists that every woman in America wants to dress up as, to paraphrase the Mrs. and some of her friends, a whoooooooooore. So what do candy and ho's have to do with me and my destiny to shake hands and play poker with Mephistopholes when my number is up? Well, to believe the Halloween antimatter cottage industry that has developed over the last couple decades, everything.

When I was growing up, my then-church (First Baptist Church of Trenton, GA) threw a Halloween party every year. Don't worry, you haven't had too much S'Mores Schnapps. You read that correctly. A HALLOWEEN PARTY was given by a Southern Baptist church in the buckle (or maybe the fourth or fifth hole) of the Bible Belt every year in the 1970's and early 80's. It usually included loads of candy that made us behave like, well, (imagine this) kids, bobbing for apples, and (GASP!) a haunted house! I must say with all modesty that, having personally worked in many of those haunted houses, they were some of the best in Trenton year after year. They were also some of the most painful because instead of running away while screaming, those who go through Baptist haunted houses tend to leave you with shiners and loose teeth while screaming.

(Completely random thought: Can you scare the bejesus out of someone in a Baptist haunted house? Just wondering.)

I might have missed their conception, but I first remember hearing about alternatives to Halloween parties and to Halloween itself during my college years. One of the loudest and (at least for a while in the South) ubiquitous of these alternatives was the "Judgement House." In a nutshell, Judgement Housing was designed to scare the bejesus INTO someone by showing them, often times graphically, how'd they'd be whittling away their time with The Devil if they didn't come to know The Lord. I could make a comment about a loving God dressing up for Halloween and going "Boo", but I won't. Folks are free to believe what they want and to share those beliefs as they'd like. What gets me more than the Judgement House alternative to All Hallows Eve are the folks who sincerely believe that I will end up in the final scene of the Judgement House simply by taking my kids trick or treating.

Those folks will claim this isn't the case. "We only hold 'Fall Festivals' or 'Harvest Festivals' or 'Trunk or Treat' or 'Keep Your Kid Out of Hay-ell" events on Halloween to keep children safe." After all, for the last 70 years, there has been a long line of deranged adults who eat the corpses of children for a living. They spend 364 days a year preparing the poison to be injected into copious packages of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and other treats, which, when you think about it, may explain the flavor of Candy Corn. I am not trivializing bad neighborhoods or the rare occasion when something bad happens, but do we need 8,000 alternatives to one of the most fun nights of the year when all that needs to take place is for parents to (get ready for one of my few Einstein moments) stay with their kids and only go to decent 'hoods with lots of lighting? I know. Not all parents are decent parents, which makes the victims my kids since only a handful of homes in my neighborhood actually welcomed trick-or-treaters last year.

If the purveyors of Halloween alternatives really wanted to help, they would turn their own neighborhoods into a giant welcome mat for kids who just want to have fun and give themselves a three-day sugar coma. But they don't want to help Halloween, they want to kill it, and usually it's because of an e-mail they received from their mother-in-law; you know, the one that has obviously been forwarded to about 97,000 people. That e-mail says Halloween comes from ancient pagan rituals which included the worship of Satan, raising your pinky when drinking a cup of tea, turkey bacon, the burning of Lee Greenwood records, and worst of all, the cancelation of college football games! And of course, since everything we read on the internet is true.....and you're going to Hades, too if you don't forward this to 50 people!

So, I humbly ask for your prayers, as I obviously need them. Because even though there may be fewer places for them to collect their chocolate booty, I can't wait for this Saturday. My older kid will be dressed as a doctor, so she'll be ready to perform animal sacrifices, while my toddler, dressed as a pumpkin, will surely be screaming "Yoo hoo, Satan, I'm here to serve you! My pumpkiness is your pumpkinness, oh evil one." My guess is that, in the end, my personal religious beliefs won't be worse off.

Oh, the first time I heard the song "I'm Goin' Straight To Hell" was at a Drivin' N Cryin' concert at Jacksonville State University in Alabama, circa 1991; a show I attended with some friends.....from the school's Baptist Campus Ministries chapter, who screamed the lyric at least as loudly as I. Well, at least I will have some good company.

Better choices to rank college football teams

Another week, another collective college football voter Cialis moment for Pete Carroll. Maybe its just me, but year after year, it seems that the cerebrally-challenged folks who rank the teams for college football's top 25 polls are simply trying to win the favor of the USC coach (by the way, that's the real USC in Southern California, and you South Carolina folks just need to stop right now). Guys, you remember how you desperately wanted to hang out with the cool guy in school, the leader of the pack, the man who got all the chicks and passed out the ones he didn't have time for to his buddies? That is how the hot dog eaters (hat tip to my pally Kevin Miller for that term) of the college football media and coaching world treat Mr. Carroll year after year, and this week there is yet another downright embarassing example of guys willing to be Pete's urinal hand-man.

Don't get me wrong. Pete Carroll has restored greatness to USC football. The program that was dominant throughout much of the 60's and 70's went through a swoon in the 80's, generating win-loss records that are only acceptable at places that believe they are big time but aren't, like Ole Miss or every ACC school except for Virginia Tech and, lately, Georgia Tech. But the Trojans has been mostly glorious over the past decade, and Carroll gets most of the credit for paying good money for....., errr, for rebuilding them. But Carroll also always gets a pass for losing games that USC should win in about the first five minutes of the first quarter, such as the Washington game this year. The reason for this is, well, he's just so dang cool. Instead of the 50-something guy that he is, Pete acts as if he's 23 and doing Red Bull/Crunk Juice shots on the sidelines during the game. Members of the media act like women trying to catch the garter at a wedding reception as they beat the snot out of each other just so they can inhale three seconds of the Carroll aura. How else to explain the fact that, despite suffering the worst loss of any top-ten team this season, Carroll's Trojans are ranked ahead of not one, not two, but THREE unbeaten teams in the new BCS standings.

I know what those pollsters who are desperate seeking some Cinemax skin-flick time with Mr. Carroll would tell me. "Do you really think Cincinnati could beat USC?" Well, Cincy's thugs beat Oregon State on the road by a larger margin than USC's thugs beat the Beavers at home. "Come on, Ray. TCU and Boise State ahead of USC?" Answer: Boise beat an Oregon team that may go to the Rose Bowl this year, and you have been shopping at those Cali Pot Shops too much if you really believe the Pac-10 is better than the Mountain West. "Who wants to see that dang blue field, again, or something called a Horned Frog when you can watch (cue the Marilyn Chambers music) Matt Barkley, the sexiest...errrrrrr, the best freshman QB in the country?" Bow-chicka-bow-bow. I always thought there was something pornographic about guys who follow football recruiting so closely. Now, we see that extends to media folks and other pollsters living their vicarious "Animal House" existence through those guys after they start their college careers.

Since the powers don't have the cojones to implement a playoff, the only way to fix the fight for college football's mythical national championship is simple. It is time to ditch all the pollsters and only allow a small "blue ribbon" panel rank the teams. Who would be on this panel? Glad you asked.

1) Me. Since, as should be obvious by my earlier analysis of media lust for Pete Carroll, I know everything.

2) Adam Van Brimmer, Savannah Morning News, the only pollster worth his salt. Even though for whatever reason he isn't allowed to write about sports on a regular basis any more, and the SMN's sports section is much worse for it, he is still an Associated Press Top 25 voter, and his rankings actually make some bit of sense. Adam can also defend his rankings with the best of them, using actual on-field results as his guide, not some hypothetical "but seriously, do you think..." rationale that so many other pollsters apparently use.

3) My kids. They are smarter than me. My first-grader could probably crank out a computer program that could correctly predict the results of every football game as well as the number of bribes your elected officials will take while running the country into a ridiculous amount of debt. My toddler, by simply walking up to the computer whenever one of those annoying espn.dot.com auto-play videos starts on every single web page, already watches more football every week than at least half the current pollsters.

4) My cats. I would talk to them about each school, then see how long it takes them to poop on the floor after the talk to determine the rankings. Yes, on the floor, as they apparently believe the litter box is a one-use item.

5) My Magic 8-Ball. I used a radio station contest several years ago to successfully prove that the 8-Ball could predict the outcome of football games as well as any human. Ranking a top-25 with an 8-Ball would be easier than the CEO's version of Marco Polo; "Budget Cuts! Everyone's Fired!"

"That isn't a representative sample of the nation, Ray. You have to have lots of people from all over the country pick the teams to be fair." No, you don't, because that would just lead to what we have this year, a bunch of guys desperate to sleep with Pete Carroll and desperate to keep two teams from what overwhelmingly is the best conference in the nation, the SEC, from playing for the mythical crystal fuball. Also, the beauty of the Steele system is that no one would know who was behind the rankings! We could just pretend that there are still a gazillion pollsters, not tell anyone the truth, and get something that actually resembles the best teams in college football competing for the fake national title every year. No one would ever have to know the truth!

Sure, it's ludicrous. So are this week's BCS standings.