jimmy

I don’t know.

After Thursday, everything was thrown up in the air. Oregon lost to Stanford deflating everyone’s hardon for the impending BCS Championship Game against Alabama. Baylor beat Oklahoma which finally gave them an ounce of credibility. Florida State now has the inside track for that matchup against Alabama.

Except, what we found out on Thursday was that anything can happen from now until the end of the regular season. Take Alabama, for example. The only team that really put the fear of god in them this season was Texas A&M with that spread option offense. Who else runs that offense? Why, Auburn of course.

In fact, that Auburn offense that was led by quarterback Cam Newton and offensive coordinator Guz Malzahn was the only win by Auburn in the Iron Bowl in the last five years. So if Auburn wins that game, they go to the SEC Championship Game instead of Alabama. In other words, Alabama would not get a chance to get back into the BCS picture.

So Florida State goes to the game, right? Well they end their regular season having to go to the Swamp to face Florida. Florida is awful, sure, but it’s a rivalry game. Florida is fighting for the bowl lives having gone to 22 consecutive bowl games, the nation’s longest active streak.

Or maybe, it will be Alabama and Florida State in the title game.

That’s what makes November so much fun. Remember 2007, the year of the upset? Things were such a clusterfuck, South Florida was ranked No. 2 at one point. In late November there was a No. 2 vs No. 3 matchup between Kansas and Missouri. It was like everything we had known in life to that point didn’t exist.

It was beautiful.

Here’s the AP poll and below are my rankings.

The whole Miami Dolphins mess brings up a question: what makes a man?

The report from the Sun Sentinel last night that the Dolphins coaching staff asked Richie Incognito to toughen up Jonathan Martin brings up that ever elusive question on masculinity.

Does being obese and wearing skin tight pants once a week make you a man?

Does leaving a voicemail that you are going to shit in someone’s mouth make you a man?

Does sticking your dick into a vagina make you a man?

Does loving to have penises put in your mouth and asshole make you a man?

Does sticking your fist into someone’s face make you a man?

I don’t know what the standards for masculinity are. I hated the standards I was taught growing up: to just keep quiet, to walk with your chest puffed out, to just blend into the background. I’m loud, vulgar, bitch a lot and sort of swish around.

I’d like to think myself as a tough son of a bitch. The only real problem I had with gay bashing came in college, and that ended with my so-called “basher” on the ground after I kneed him in the chest. When someone gives me shit, I dish it right back.

As a sports fan, I get that these athletes perform amazing feats in each game that I could not imagine to do. That’s why athletes are looked up to.

But judging how many of them hit women, rape, murder and are all-around odious examples of humanity, should athletes be the basis of how we live our lives?

I’ll just say that when I have someone’s dick in my mouth or asshole (or maybe two different dicks in the orifices at the same time!), I’m certainly not thinking about some stupid football player. Unless, that is, it is a football player who is fucking me.

I watched the documentary Helvetica last night, and they spent some time talking about “grunge typography”. Of course Ray Gun Magazine was brought up.

The work of David Carson on the art of the magazine always felt familiar to me. You can see a good representation of the work on Google Images.

I suppose the movement played itself out, but I have to agree with the sentiment: Helvetica is boring. Any Joe Blow could type a company name in Helvetica Bold on a bold color, and boom! Instant graphic designer!

Then it gets me thinking. This website’s font is mainly Helvetica and its Windows bastard offspring Arial. I’ve actually done the bare minimum of design with this site. WordPress and its themes have made the painstaking task of designing websites obsolete.

Having constructed the tables for my college football rankings from scratch, it brought me back to when I was doing all of this by hand. Basically all of this to say that I might just redo this joint.

Sorry for all of this wallowing in sentimentality.

I can’t put my finger on why I don’t like Florida State. They are supposed to be the antidote to the SEC supremacy that has generated so much antipathy towards football fans outside of the South.

Perhaps it’s because of quarterback Jameis Winston. During Florida State’s media day back in August, he was asked by a reporter about his potential of becoming like Johnny Manziel. I believe the reporter phrased it as “Manziel Disease.” Winston replied, “If I ever get Manziel disease, I want all of you to smack me in the head with your microphones.”

That did not sit well with me as someone who has proclaimed my love for Johnny Football.

Manziel was the pirate helming a Texas A&M team in its first year in the SEC. He was the swashbuckling renegade ready to expose and rebel against the machine that is the NCAA. He wasn’t going to play by the long held non-written rules of decorum.

He was Johnny Football sent on this earth to play football and have fun. He rode that all the way to a Heisman Trophy, the first freshman ever to win the award.

So I saw Winston’s remarks as reactionary, a move to go back to the tradition, the boring, the safety of the NCAA.

Not helping his case is the constant blare of the “Tomahawk Chop”, the relative weakness of the ACC and how soft their non-conference schedule is. Nevada and Bethune-Cookman, a FCS school, were dispatched by a 116-13 margin. Idaho comes up on Nov. 23 with their only non-conference challenge Florida at the end of the month finishing out their regular season schedule.

I guess the Seminoles are for real. They beat then-No.3 ranked Clemson 51-14 at Death Valley two weeks ago, and on Saturday they knocked out No. 7 Miami 41-14. So this is a really good team.

Hell, they might just be able to beat Alabama in a BCS Championship Game.

But at this point, I’d much rather see Nick Saban lift up another Coaches’ Trophy in January.

Here’s this week’s AP poll and below is my top 10.

I didn’t know Adrian Cardenas. I’ve probably seen him play. In his first game in the Majors on July 31, 2012, as a Cubbie he broke up a A.J. Burnett no-hitter at Wrigley, a two-out single in the bottom of the eighth inning. I have a habit of starting to watch games where a no-hitter or a perfect game is possible starting in the seventh inning.

So I probably saw that single to right field. In fact, here it is.

Yesterday he wrote a piece in the New Yorker why he quit baseball at the age of 24. He gives two reasons:

I quit after trying to balance my life as a professional baseball player with my life as a student during the last three years of my career. In the spring and summer, I played ball. In the fall, I studied creative writing and philosophy at New York University. But with every semester that passed, I loved school more than I loved baseball, and eventually I knew I had to choose one over the other. As I submerged myself into an academic environment, I thought often of my parents, who knew nothing about baseball but raised me with a passion for music and language so great that sports seemed irrelevant by comparison.

I quit because baseball was sacred to me until I started getting paid for it. The more that “baseball” became synonymous with “business,” the less it meant to me, and I saw less of myself in the game every time I got a check from the Philadelphia Phillies Organization, the Oakland Athletic Company, or the Chicago Cubs, L.L.C. To put it simply, other players were much better than I was at separating the game of baseball from the job of baseball. They could enjoy the thrill of a win — as it should be enjoyed — without thinking of what it meant to the owners’ bottom lines. These players, at once the objects of my envy and my admiration, are the resilient ones, still in the game. I am no longer one of them.

There is so much romanticizing bullshit that surrounds sports. Look at what’s going on with the Boston Red Sox, how they’re trying to connect the horrific Boston Marathon bombing with how the team’s World Series win pulled the city out of mourning and back into normalcy.

It’s easy to fall into these mythologizing traps and perpetuate these falsehoods. Look at most of the talking heads at ESPN. But sports isn’t an allegory of anything. It doesn’t explain humanity.

It’s a game that supports a business.

Sure, it can cause 50,000 people to cheer on command. It can bring together a fan base for a moment. But to think it can actually heal an entire city is laughable and preposterous.

It sounds like Cardenas couldn’t separate the ugly realities of the game versus the mythology. It’s better to quit than fake it.

Last night at the Kings game, Abbey from Fox Sports and I were gabbing about a bunch of nonsense. She talked about wanting to take her laptop and work at a bar but because of societal pressures felt unable to do so.

All of a sudden it hit us: a sports bar for sports writers!

• Power outlets would be readily available for all.
• The wifi would be really good, but just for shits it would go out every 2 hours to replicate that arena/ballpark experience.
• Really greasy, really fried and really shitty food would be served.
• The back of the place would be reserved for writers on deadline complete with signs reinforcing that no noises should be made even though there would be no separation between them and the rest of the bar. Besides, bloggers look better than “respectable media” so they would make up what the public initially sees upon entrance.
• Tvs will be everywhere showing all of the games.

We were talking and talking about it thinking about what a great idea it was. Then we realize how awful it would be.

It would be perhaps one of the most miserable places in the world, a place where no one concedes an argument, like a really bad version of First Take. Since everyone is broke, there will be no tipping which further adds to the misery of the place.

It’s a total money loser, but selfishly I’m thinking it would be a great place for me to do work.

Friday night I had dinner in Old Torrance with NY. It had been a little more than a month since I’ve seen her, which she reminded me very clearly multiple times. There was an implication that I’m an anti-social hermit, but I know that it has become a fact. She points it out to me all of the time.

We’re gabbing. She’s talking about work and shopping. I decide to tell a story about my tortured past. When I was in first grade living in Louisiana, we had two chihuahuas for about six months. I loved them. Sure they were troublemakers, but they weren’t too bad.

For some reason my mom decided to get rid of them, so she told me she gave them to a loving family who had a big yard for the dogs to play. Fine. I was upset, but I was okay with it.

I come to find out from my aunt that my mom just set them loose in some field. Just let them go.

So I’m building up the story to NY saying, “This is a tale of trauma from my childhood.” Or something along those lines. NY blurted, “What? Did you get molested?”

To which I responded, “No. It wasn’t THAT romantic.”

*rimshot*

I went over to Cathi’s and Tyson’s farmstead deep in the heart of the hippest neighborhood in America. We carved pumpkins. Actually, I didn’t carve a pumpkin. I just nibbled on food all day.

There was a trip to Donut Friend, a place where you can add toppings to your donut. I got the “Jets to Basil” which is a donut stuffed with goat cheese, strawberry jam and basil leaves topped with a sugar glaze and balsamic reduction sauce. We at LAist did a photo gallery of the place a couple of weeks ago.

Yesterday I powered through all episodes of the second half of Breaking Bad. It was great, although I really hated the ending. I hate that such a loathsome character like Walter White got to be the hero and the martyr. I hate that Skylar was left so vulnerable after all of the sacrifices she made. I hate that it tried to tie everything in a nice little bow.

At least, that’s what Rolling Stone is telling us today.

Lou Reed is 71, so I suppose his death shouldn’t be surprising. But you know how sometimes a person is old as shit, and you’re not ready for them to die?

I was late to the Lou Reed/Velvet Underground party. It wasn’t until after I moved back to LA from Santa Barbara that I really started to listen to them. I think it was when I read Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son that I listened to that landmark Velvet Underground and Nico album.

It hit me like a ton of bricks.

When the album first came out they said not a lot of people bought it, but all of those who did formed a band.

I don’t want to believe that Lou Reed is dead. But I suppose that is the case.

It was obstruction that ended Game 3 of the World Series. You can talk about the coulda woulda shoulda, Will Middlebrooks obstructed Allen Craig.

First of all, it was a great play by Dustin Pedroia at second base with all of the infielders drawn in with runners on second and third with one out. He was able to get Yadier Molina out at the plate.

Second of all, it was a shitty fucking throw by catcher Jarrod Saltalamacchia to try and get Craig out at third.

While this was happening, I was driving home. I was listening to the call on ESPN Radio where play-by-play man started yelling about interference. So I thought Craig was called out for interference.

Then he said that the run counted. So then I started shouting “OBSTRUCTION, NOT INTERFERENCE!”

Runners interfere, fielders obstruct. Simple. That’s one of my pet peeves in baseball, people who can’t tell the difference between obstruction and interference. So there.

The only question to ask after this game: why the fuck did it take almost four hours? No wonder no one wants to fucking watch baseball.