Cultures throughout history have believed that confessing embarrassing or sinful aspects of one's behavior brings good luck and favor from the gods. I don't see why college football fans should be any different, and I'm not the first one to notice this. Todd over at Roll Bama Roll only had to wait two years after confessing his moisturizer habit to watch the Tide win a National Championship. I think I can live with that type of longterm humiliation, especially since I have enough embarrassment fuel to last until Tim Tebow starts a game in the NFL. That's why I'm confessing a few things in hopes of currying favor with whatever saints or deities I need to please for us to beat Florida.
Possible choices: Saint Arnold of Soissons, Patron Saint of Bartenders, or Adrian of Nicomedia, Patron Saint of Arms Dealers. Both very real, and both huge in SEC country.
The Paul Finebaum Show disgusts me. I listen to it occasionally on satellite radio on the way home in the evenings, but rarely for more than 5 minutes at a time. That's how long it takes me to realize that, for just a little while every evening, three quarters of the villages in Alabama are left to find a way to subsist without their allotted idiot. As a college football fan and blogger I should be immune to other college football fans who literally cannot tell their rear ends from Gene Chizik's mother's pot roast. But I can't even listen to the show and pretend it's campy irony because, sadly, there are really people that dumb and they do actually own telephones and frequent the internet, which is not ironic, just sad.
I have horrible taste in movies. Every year my wife and I try to see the newest Best Picture Oscar winner. I checked the list a while back and I think I've seen 17 of the last 20 winners at least once. And, while criticism of the Academy may be justified in certain instances, the Best Picture winner is usually a very good movie. 2009's selection, The Hurt Locker, was an excellent film which will hit you square in the gut, and I highly recommend that you see it.
That being said, when there's no football to be watched, I'm not sitting around watching From Here To Eternity and Annie Hall. I'm far more likely to be watching Wedding Crashers for the 84th time. Or Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle (apparently I'm the only person in America who's ever seen this one sober, but still thought it was hilarious). And The Hangover. I could watch The Hangover every single day, twice on Mondays, and never get tired of it. I think it's because Justin Bartha just has so much gravitas. The man's like a smallish, simian Marlon Brando.* I imagine my lowbrow taste in film developed because I have a job in which I spend a lot of time dealing with thorny intellectual and emotional issues. In my spare time I just don't want to have to think too much. Those who read this blog regularly may respond here with a hearty "mission accomplished!"
I am a soccer fan, and believe most anyone can be a soccer player. I know, that's not much of a confession these days, but it was back when I started following the game back during the 1994 World Cup. The town I grew up in had no recreational or other organized soccer. In fact, to my knowledge, no one in my hometown at that time even played disorganized soccer. So I would often take my soccer ball and kick it around our backyard, scoring imaginary goals against the brick wall of our garage. Friends of mine in other, more cosmopolitan Georgia hamlets (like Dublin and Perry, and no I'm not kidding) played soccer and I would occasionally kick it around with them.
But I didn't play an organized game of proper football until my freshman year in college when I played for my fraternity's intramural team. Surprisingly I learned that I had two soccer skills, and no more. For one, I was a decent goalie because I learned that playing in goal is a lot like playing linebacker, you just read and react to the flow of the ball while keeping an eye out for possible misdirection. Also, after four years of having future SEC football players truck my pasty butt on a high school football field, I had no fear of taking one in the chest from some Lambda Chi. Second, I could slide tackle like nobody's business as a result of years of baseball training. I quickly realized that slide tackling was in fact just like sliding into second on a stolen base, with the caveat that the base was moving. Though in the case of the chain smoking frat bros I was playing against, not that fast. Also, very few of them could keep the ball within 2 yards of their toe on a regular basis, so that it was almost impossible to foul them when executing a tackle. These things combined to convince me that soccer, at a recreational level, is not so much a sport as an alternative to jogging. Sure, the folks playing in the Premier League are masters of an athletic art. But soccer is like the checkers of athletic endeavors. Anyone can play it, though the real masters are thinking 84 moves ahead.
I really want Derek Dooley and Tennessee to suffer a miserable season in 2010. I know he's Vince's kid and such a nice guy and so on and so forth. And it's kind of fashionable to feel sorry for the fact that Team Kiffy left a smoking crater of a depth chart that has Dooley the Younger patrolling the finest junior colleges in America for offensive linemen. But I haven't forgotten that the Laner absolutely shellacked us last season, a fact which would gall me even further but for the fact that it was likely what put the "for sale" sign on Willie Two Thumbs' Athens lawn. And I haven't forgotten all of the Tennessee fans who cruised the interwebs telling other SEC fans that our animosity for the guy was just proof that we were scared of General Peachfuzz. Tennessee, you still have not suffered enough for Mike Hamilton's stupidity and your compatriots' decision to buy into that guy. Seriously, for about 10 months there Tennessee football fans were, with some exceptions, 27% more insufferable than before. And believe me, as a Georgia fan I know what insufferable looks like from the inside. One more year of penance though, and you folks will be good with me. Until then, I have nothing but petty, juvenile disdain for you.
I can and will sing most of the lyrics to Son of a Preacher Man by Dusty Springfield:
Feel free to confess your own sins, college football related or otherwise, in the comments. Until later . . .
Go 'Dawgs!!!
*Though I do worry that the planned sequel will be a let down, twice as profane and half as funny as the original. That's usually how sequels to this kind of movie play out. Will I still see it on opening day? Do tigers hate cinnamon?