BIG BABY!!!!!!!!

Seventeen

Beat LA!

I'm back from the coast and figured I should put something up so people don't think this site is defunct. Just to make it clear we're not defunct, just very, very lazy. That's all.


2 wins down, 2 to go.

USC Denies Receiving Money from Athletic Programs

As the University of Southern California piled up bowl wins and NCAA tournament appearances over the past decade the money in its coffers may have also been piling up.

A source close to the USC athletic department has provided a paper trail that indicates that the Trojans may have received hundreds of millions in cash, donations and ticket sales as a result of its football and basketball programs' success. The University's president, Steven B. Sample, adamantly denies these allegations.

"I don't know anything about it. It caught me by surprise. I've got to get to L.A. to see what's going on. I'm just focusing on the [professor] draft," said Sample.

The source has indicated that University charges admission, sometimes in excess of $100, for their home football and basketball games. These sales bring in upwards of $26.75 million each year, which goes directly into the school's deep pockets, claims the source. That figure does not include money given to the program from boosters or the free publicity that the school receives from its athletic teams' success.

Football coach Pete Carroll personally received $2.5 million annually from the school, according to the source.

"I would just like to know if I did [get money], where did the money go? I am a greedy football coach like everyone else. Anyone who saw me try to coach the New England Patriots would know that I could never manage anything that valuable."

Despite the red-faced stammering of Carroll and basketball coach Tim Floyd the allegations have not disappeared. The NCAA, which prides itself on protecting the amatuerism of athletics, has vowed to look in to the matter.

"The fact that a University may have received monies as a result of their athletic programs is simply an affront to the NCAA and athletics in general. Furthering the matter is that these athletes were never compensated in any meaningful way while the athletic director, coaches and administrators grew fat on the deeds of these fine young men and women. We will not stand for this," proclaimed Myles Brand, the NCAA's completely non-hypocritcal president.

Brand closed his remarks by adding that Division I-A (Bowl Championship Series Division Place Thingy, whatever) football will add a playoff system next year because it was "about freakin' time."

It's Make Fun of a Comment Time

I guess I shouldn't rag on people who comment on this blog considering we're lucky to get anyone to read this thing let alone respond to it but with the NBA's regular season winding down I figured it was time to unearth this gem from last November 2nd in response to my post about my enthusiasm regarding the start of the Celtics' season:

How can you be excited for a team with no real depth, a terrible head coach, and a point guard that has never played a minute of meaningful basketball in his pro career? -Anonymous

Well Mr. Anonymous, the Celtics have the best record in the NBA, their bench has more than acquitted themselves over the course of the year, Doc Rivers and Tom Thibodeau have done an excellent, excellent job, and Rondo is a strong candidate for the Most Improved Player award. How do you like them apples?

Dr. S's Generic Bracket Breakdown

(Note from Doug: I love the NCAA tournament, it's great and it's fun but there is one thing I f*cking hate about it: All the generic, assembly-line articles that hack writers write this week. It's really pretty terrible so instead of spending your time clicking through dozens of articles, why don't you read this one: its an amalgamation of all the crappy articles that are written every March about the tournament by Freglomerica's resident sports columnist, Dr. S.)

Last night the brackets were revealed and you all know what that means? Yes, March Madness! Whoa! Yeah! This is the GREATEST EVENT EVER. I know i just wrote that the Super Bowl is the GREATEST EVENT EVER just six weeks ago but that was then, this is March and its time for Madness. All you crazy cats out there will probably spend more time filling out your brackets this week than working. Ha ha ha, that's awesome. Work sucks. Although no matter how long you spend on your bracket you're going to end up losing to some chick in accounting who chose teams based on retarded girl-logic. That's OK, dude-bro. Here's my handy guide to filling out your bracket:

1. Choose based on mascots- Have you ever been trying to pick a winner in a sporting event and thought to yourself, "How can I make this pick while at the same time be as cool as that tool from Not Another Teen Movie?" Then this strategy is for you. Would a Wildcat beat a Golden Eagle? How about a Wildcat against a Mountaineer? Could a Bull Dog best a Jaguar? Bull Dog beat a Duck? Bull Dog top a Hill Topper? Bull Dog or Musketeer? What the hell happens when a Bull Dog goes after a Wildcat? Choose this method if you want to let everyone know how cool, funny, and unique you are. But first answer me this: What the heck is a Torero? (You see what I did there? Its an obscure, bizarre mascot and I asked you what it is because its funny. It would have been a lot better if Vermont made the BIG DANCE because that joke works waaaay better with Catamount.)

2. The less you know the better- Sometimes too much knowledge is a bad thing. Just look at the cute secretary who wins the pool every year. So my advice to you is to don't read anything about the BIG DANCE (including this column). In fact it would be best if you didn't even know who was in the BIG DANCE. So what if you might choose Final Four teams who only won 10 games all year and are not in the tournament, you'll still be light years ahead of those suckers who did research and made their picks based on information. As we well know, knowledge is dumb, why else would the bosses' 11-year-old daughter win every year (In case you you couldn't tell I get paid based on how many references I make towards a no-nothing female winning office pools).


3. Choose based on schools Web site- Cruise around the net, bro, and check out all the schools Interweb sites. If their site is lame than their team is probably lame. If their sites are cool like me then their team is probably full of cool players. Also the more prominently the BIG DANCE is mentioned on their home page the worse the team will do. That is why I'm choosing Cornell to win it all. They don't even have an "Athletics" link on their site. Radical! (This theory may not be so great because I haven't heard it beat to death by all my fellow hack writers/broadcasters so proceed with caution otherwise you'll lose to that PR rep who knows nothing about basketball and may, in fact, be legally retarded).

Those are my pointers for filling out your brackets. Best of luck during the GREATEST EVENT EVER even though no matter what you do you're going to lose to the part-time secretary who's never seen a basketball game in her life. Smell ya later! -Dr. S.

Oh wait a sec, I didn't get my commission for joking about how great office pools are, here it is: I love office pools especially if there's a high dive. Zing!

(Note from Doug: This was our 100th post on Freglomerica. Celebration to follow shortly.)

4th and 37: Where's my helmet?

OK so I'm lazy and haven't posted anything in a long time. Boo-fucking-hoo. Eat this shit up then:

-I haven't heard much buzz about the new Rambo movie, which is really a shame. Granted I only interact with like the same 10 people for stretches of time much longer than I care to admit. Anyway I saw the movie about 2 weeks ago and it was with out a doubt one of the most enjoyable movies I have ever seen in my entire life. Let me give you a quick plot summary: Rambo works on a snake farm in French-Indo China (I don't think that phrase has been P.C. for two score years). Anyway some relief workers want to cross into Burma (you may know it as Myanmar but it will always be Burma to me) and they ask Rambo to take them. After some tremendous acting Sly takes them into Burma, which is in the midst of genocide or something like that. The trip goes relatively smooth (Rambo only had to kill 4 people) other than a whiny guy complaining about the people Rambo had to kill.

Rambo returns to his job of snake wrangling (no homo) for a couple weeks until a band of mercenaries arrive who have been hired to find the missing relief workers. They hire Sly to take them into Burma. The mercenaries are a lovable, hard-nosed bunch but their leader acts like Rambo is a tool even though he is jacked and outweighs him by 100 pounds. My favorite mercenary was the Asian (update: Tim Kang). You may know him as the smarmy jerk in the cell-phone (cingular I believe) commercials they've shown during March Madness for the past couple years; he is also in a Shell commercial right now.

So now were about 30 minutes into the flick and the mercenaries go to rescue the relief workers (who have been captured by the generic bad guy army). Rambo shows up and saves the mercenaries then they go onto the prison camp to save everyone. Just as they are fleeing with the rescued prisoners to their boat the whole freaking Burmese army shows up. This is when the movie starts.

For the next 30 minutes Rambo kills everyone. Literally everyone. I did my best to count and I have his total body count at around 70. A very, very respectable number; for a reference point Arnold killed about 85 dudes in Commando. But the body count only tells half the story. The graphic nature of this violence was unbelievable. I was seriously stunned. It was so so violent. At one point Rambo shot a guy's head off with something and the whole audience (about 25 people) gasped, myself included. I couldn't believe it. I don't even have another movie to compare it to. these weren't generic action movie deaths either. I'm talking blood-spattering, gut-spilling violence.

After that TREMENDOUS sequence the movie wraps up very quickly. I couldn't believe how short the movie was, it was seriously 75 minutes. It was a 7:30 showing, there were 15-20 minutes of previews, and then I was in my car at 9:10. No joke. Now some of you are probably saying, "Wait, Doug. Doesn't a really short movie mean you got ripped off for that $9.50 you paid for the ticket and that $6.00 Icee?" To that I have a response in two parts: First, to the latter point about refreshments: I didn't need to buy snacks because I had a pack of Fruit Stripe gum. And no I didn't need to use my time machine to travel back to 1993 to buy it either. Now onto the next/former point: I love short movies. I will watch any movie that is under 90 minutes, no questions asked, and I will undoubtedly love it. However when a bad movie stretches past 100 minutes you've lost me forever. The perfect example of this is Date Movie and Epic Movie (the Bash Brothers of 2006 satirical movies). Date Movie was great and Epic Movie was not. Not because Date Movie had superior acting/writing/directing but because it was 40 minutes shorter. Seriously, I could watch a 70 minute movie on anything short of a colonoscopy (unless it was an interesting person's colon, say Robert Redford).

Long story short: Go see Rambo if it's still in the theaters and if you can't then buy it immediately when it comes out. Simply a life altering experience.

Well that's about it for me I'll try to write about something tomo....

Fuck that. I don't want to do any more shitty tax returns. I'll keep writing.

-The Slam Dunk Contest:

I don't know about you but the Slam Dunk Contest is one of my favorite events of the year. It is awesome. And as I have written before it is very, very American. But this year's contest left me a bit disheartened. I know that there were some awesome dunks but I had some major problems.

First, Rudy Gay got hosed. I'm not saying he should have won or even advanced to the second round but a 78 on that first dunk was just plain disrespectful.

Anyway, onto the larger issue: Dwight Howard did NOT deserve to win that thing but it was pre-ordained by the NBA that he was supposed to win. (If you have any doubts just go back and listen to Kenny Smith's on-air orgasm every time Dwight Howard is on screen). Let me list the problems I had with D-Ho's contest:

1) That first dunk was Andre Iguodala's invention so he should have lost points for creativity, but he didn't. It was still a pretty sweet dunk but I couldn't understand why everyone was acting like it was the first time anyone had seen a dunk before. We saw the SAME EXACT THING two years ago.

2) The Superman Dunk: As soon as he put that cape on he was winning the whole thing, which is bullshit to begin with. And then he didn't even touch the rim on the dunk. I know a dunk is defined as throwing the ball down into the hoop (which he did) but I think that's a garbage explanation. What's to stop someone from from jumping from the top of the key and trying to throw the ball into the basket from 10 feet away. Granted it would be tricky but it could happen. So by the D-Ho Dunk definition you could conceivably dunk from anywhere on the floor as long as you are able to get the ball above the rim and throw it downward. (Again, I know this is semi-improbable but once you start blurring the line between dunk and shot everything goes to shit and the next thing you know there's money missing from the dresser and your daughter's knocked up, I've seen it a thousand times). And finally, D-Ho meant to touch the rim. If he could have touched the rim he would have, plain and simple and I think that's the best argument about it not being a dunk (although I'm not sure that it makes any sense).

3) His dunk with the mini-hoop. I don't know why this dunk was considered better than the Gerald Greene's one with the ladder and his teammate holding the ball but it was (considered better).

This was the dunk of the night:



I'm getting too upset about this. Gerald Greene should've won. I'm moving on...

Miscellaneous Ramblings:

-I'm working as an accountant (I am NOT an accountant) and since it's tax season I'm working a ton of hours (on top of writing for Newser). I don't really mind working late during the week too much (because the week sucks anyway) but it's working every Saturday for 3 months that really kills me. I only work from like 9-2 but that is more than enough time to ruin a Saturday, then consequently a weekend, then a week, then a month, then a year, then a lifetime. Working on Saturday means that I can't drown my sorrows on Friday night and then by the time I get out of work my favorite part of the week is almost over (Saturdays 11-4). So then I only get one day to sleep in. At least it has made me appreciate Sundays more (although I still think it's a fucking piece of shit day masquerading as a day off).


-I'm getting really pumped up for baseball season even more than normal which is alarming. See I'm a huge baseball fan and I didn't think I could get more excited about baseball but I was wrong. I began wondering why and, depressingly, I realized that sports in the post-college world are much more important than sports while you were in college. Yeah, I followed sports a lot in school and watched a game of some sort almost every night but now they're all the only thing to which I look forward. In school if my team lost I'd be like "Fuck it, I'm going to a party tonight, whatever." Now if my team loses I spend the whole next day reading about it while slacking off at work. And then I don't have a party to go to afterwards. This is seriously depressing to me.

Here are my quick predictions for the MLB season, individual awards only (subject to change):

AL MVP: Alex Rodriguez, NYY (Dark Horses: Manny BOS, Nick Swisher/Paul Konerko CHW)

AL Cy Young: Erik Bedard, SEA (Dark Horse: James Shields, TB)

AL Rookie of the Year: Jacoby Ellsbury, BOS (edges out Evan Longoria, TB)

NL MVP: David Wright, NYM

NY Cy Young: Brandon Webb, ARI

NL Rookie of the Year: Joey Votto, CIN (beats out Kosuke Fukudome, CHC and Jay Bruce, CIN)

(I'll have an excessively long preview sometime soon)

-I'm sick of the damned weather jerking my chain. Last Wednesday it was like 60 degrees, then on Friday a fucking foot of snow gets dropped on my ass. That's just bullshit. I didn't even get to take off from work early like most of my co-workers. Well at least it was Friday and I had the whole weekend to look for... oh wait I work on Saturday's I didn't have a full weekend. ARRGGGHHHHHH!!!

-To those of you breathlessly awaiting future installments of my world-renowned Real World: Sydney summaries (Hi Maggie!): it's been a long time since I watched an episode (I still have about 8 to go) but my notes are still kicking around so I may get to writing about it soon (and I may also cure cancer/play shortstop for the Red Sox/write that novel I've been bullshitting my self about). At least mentioning the Real World gives me an excuse to run this photo: