Free Form Friday
Welcome to Free Form Friday, your Dawg Sports open comment thread for the offseason weekend. It is not endorsed by Vampire Weekend, is generally less entertaining than Weekend At Bernie's, and a helluva lot less anthemic than Loverboy's "Working For The Weekend." More hijinx below the fold . . .
Maestro, cue the music for those who don't give a damn about a Grammy and for bloggers who've literally blown too much hot air to need a little gold-plated paper weight:
Watching the Grammys was worth it just to hear people try to pronounce DeadMau5. Who I actually like by the way because, ya know, when you perform dressed like DJ Mickey Mouse from a bad ecstasy high I just have to salute that. And because, I actually listen to a good bit of his music. But mostly it's the hallucenogenic rodent schtick.
Speaking of bad hallucinations, is it wrong that I was hoping during Nicki Minaj's Grammy performance that the whole thing was actually a Dan Brown novel come to life and she was going to get offed there on the stage? I actually like a good bit of popular music today. I believe that the internet, file sharing, and a variety of other technologies have made it easier for really good music to be found. Unfortunately, Nicki Minaj has never made any of that good music. She did make a truly lame ass Pepsi commercial with Elton John and Flava Flave. Seriously, if ever the Illuminati were going to emerge and do us all a solid before this thing goes any further, now would have been the time*
Of course musical matters are matters of taste, and in matters of taste there is no dispute. There is however a dispute about beer. It's a long-simmering one, but one which recently played out on the pages of The Atlantic. Who knew that anyone who wrote for The Atlantic even drank beer? It's so . . .plebeian.
Former Jimmy Carter speechwriter and Atlantic contributor Jim Fallows however has been holding forth recently on the age-old question of whether bottled beer tastes better than canned beer. It's an important question generally, and specifically for those of us whose beer consumption largely takes place during the fall in tailgating locales which often restrict glassware. Many of Fallows' readers seem to believe as I do: it's not that beer tastes crappy out of a can. It's that a lot of canned beer was crap before it was packaged. You can serve High Life in a Faberge egg. It's still Miller High Life. And I say that as someone who's consumed my share of Miller High Life, Pabst's Blue Ribbon and other assorted beers from the low end of the price scale. There's a reason Bud Lite costs almost half as much for a six pack as a good Terrapin seasonal selection. And it ain't that cans are cheaper. That being said, PBR goes great with a Chik-Fil-A biscuit at 8:00 a.m. while standing around an Athens parking lot. Or at least that's what the reprobates I tailgate with tell me while I'm sipping green tea and eating a healthy fruit salad.
On the subject of tailgating, if you're like me you've already committed the Georgia Bulldogs 2012 schedule to memory and blocked off gameday Saturdays on your calendar. Some of you may have sent a pleasant memorandum to friends, family and coworkers reminding them that if they intend to get married, give birth or require a kidney on those dates and further intend to involve you in the endeavor they are SOL. If you haven't, that's okay, there's still time and I think Hallmark now has a card for that.
But if you're an ACC football fan that's not possible, because they still haven't figured out what the ACC schedule looks like, because West Virginia is like that friend of yours who says he's going to help you move this Saturday but at the last minute this thing comes up and yeah, refrigerators are heavy and stuff, but he's got this thing. No it just came up. Yeah, a work thing. But I digress.
Can you imagine how high the stack of bodies would be if the SEC schedule were not out right now? I mean, Vanderbilt fans have to know which weekends to lock up the good china. Auburn fans need to plan their semi-monthly baths. Florida fans are supposed to let their probation officers know their whereabouts at all times.
Of course it's Florida State who's left in the lurch here, so going slowly is important. You have to be very, very selective in deciding who you'll beat by three touchdowns before inexplicably getting clubbed like a baby seal by Boston College and/or Wake Forest.
Speaking of three ring circuses, snobbery and elaborate scheduling, SB Nation is now officially a member of the big boy sports journalism club. How do you know this? Because the mothership sent Matt Ufford to cover the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, in the most Uffordian manner possible. Spoiler:
There's an etiquette to petting dogs at a show. You're generally okay petting anything with a short coat, but breeds with longer fur are off limits until after they're shown, as their grooming process is long and delicate. At one point I was surrounded by 32 Golden Retrievers but couldn't pet any of them: it was an outer circle of Hell.
Here's wishing you, your canine companions, and Nicki Minaj a great weekend, Dawg Sports readers. Feel free to talk amongst yourselves about the Grammy Awards, beer, and how the ACC football schedule exists solely to give Coach K a couple of months of freedom from press conferences. Until later . . .
Go 'Dawgs!
*Dawg Sports does not actually endorse the killing of pop musicians. Even the truly talentless auto-tuned ones whose lead resume item is "millions of teenage boys want to grope me."