The Sixth Cents I

I'm unveiling a new post today, I hope I'm going to stick with this thing long enough to make it a regular column on my blog. Maybe it'll be every Tuesday, we'll just have to see. Bill Simmons has his More Cowbell column, Jayson Stark has Rumblings & Grumblings, and now I have "Six Cents." I'm not suggesting that I'm nearly the writer that Stark or Simmons are, hell, I just started writing a week ago.

What these columns will be about is six topics that aren't worthy of their own column, but together would form a good sized post. I'm calling it "Six Cents" because I'm notorious for giving more than my two cents about random topics. It kind of sounds like "Sixth Sense" as well, which was a fairly disturbing movie. I assure you that some of the topics will be equally disturbing.

I'm also going to keep track of these using Roman numerals much like the Super Bowl and Wrestlemania because honestly, shouldn't every recurring event be tracked with Roman numerals? Wouldn't it be great to read about my birthday party next summer and see an evite like this, "Cap's Birthday - XXVII"? Or for Christmas we could be like, "Celebrating Jesus' Birth - MMV Edition"? Or better yet, "New Year's MMVI - The Year Osama was tied to a street light in Manhattan"?

That being said, this is where I will give you shorter thoughts on a bunch of topics. It will be about the different things going on in my completely screwed up life, the most recent insanity that is going on in the sports world, and maybe even a little political sidebar just for Hutch. Here goes.....
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1. Which leads me to my next point kids, don't smoke crack.
Has everyone been keeping up with this craziness? Seems to me that Michael Irvin is getting a free pass here. Seriously people, this isn't bigger news? Does anyone remember when Rush Limbaugh made some inappropriate comments about Donovan McNabb and black quarterbacks? Didn't we talk about that for weeks?

Rush got immediately fired for making a statement that was basically true. Politically incorrect, definitely racist, but when you think of mobile quarterbacks in the NFL, what names come to mind? Mike Vick, Randall Cunningham, Donovan McNabb, Daunte Culpepper, Kordell Stewart. Okay, you probably try to forget about Kordell Stewart, but you get the point.

Limbaugh gets canned, understandably, but here is Irvin, arrested for possession of a freaking crack pipe and...nothing. There has been very little reported on the incident, he's so far kept his job, and he has even been given a place on several national TV shows to explain himself. Didn't he just get arrested in 2000 for possession of crack cocaine? Wasn't that just five years ago? Did he seriously use the line that we all used when we got caught with something we weren't supposed to have as a kid? "It's not mine, it belongs to a friend."

Okay, and what if he's telling the truth, you ask? Then he is a fucking moron, that's what. Why not just take it straight to a dumpster and throw the stupid thing away? Why would you hide it in your car? Unreal.
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2. Just like my sister said, trust the Green Weenies with beer, it's what they know.
They're at it again folks. Stupid Weenies. For those that haven't heard, Frank Solich, the first-year head coach of a 4-7 Ohio University football team, was convicted of drunk driving yesterday, but (also) not fired. This guy was apparently found passed out by the police with his car still in drive going in the wrong direction on a one-way street. Brilliant. Clearly everything we've heard about Athens, Ohio is true, there is nothing to do but drink there. Even 61-year old football coaches get blitzed out of their mind and do stupid shit. That bad of a season, Frankie? At least Solich can take solace in the fact that he isn't in the cornfields of Nebraska anymore (this coming from an Ohioan.) Do you see what I did there? Did you see it? How I made a play on words? Solich and solace? No? Okay, terrible joke.

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3. Mobile Pole
At least we know the Chicago Bears don't take after their Norris Division rival Minnesota Vikings and their sex cruise. We know this because Da Bears actually beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on the road. As we heard Burgess Meredith say during his role as Mickey in the Rocky movies, "Women weaken legs," so they couldn't have possibly participated in "Tailgates Gone Wild" or they'd have likely stunk up the joint. But you simply can't make stuff like this up. Apparently there were a few arrests at the Bears-Bucs game in Florida last Sunday for running a strip club out of a mobile home in the parking lot. This was the fourth game they'd been to and only got caught because they were trying to be "professional" and made flyers advertising the club. Good times.
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4. Wahoo! What a finish!
I know it's not even December yet and that baseball's winter meetings will bring more moves throughout Major League Baseball than we've had so far. Does this mean I can't vent about the Tribe? Nope.

The real reason the Indians made that valient come back in the second half last season (only to come up short) was because of their pitching. This is a fact. Here are some vital Tribe stats from 2005:

3rd in team ERA
3rd in opponents batting average
1st in opponents on base percentage
2nd in fewest walks allowed
2nd in opponents slugging average
2nd in save percentage

So what's the first order of business in the offseason for our boys? Let key members of the pitching staff play elsewhere, obviously. We let Bob Howry, the most reliable bullpen guy, go to the Cubs. It also doesn't look likely for us to resign Kevin Millwood, Bob Wickman or Scott Elarton. Remind me again why we allowed a guy to buy the team that can't even afford to keep the uniforms clean? I understand that we were competitive with the 5th lowest payroll in baseball last year ($41.5 M), but you simply have to spend more than that if you want to sell tickets and still be playing ball in October.
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5. Don't Mess with Texas
Received this from a Southern Belle friend of mine, Brooke. Pretty damn funny if you ask me. Sometimes I wish I was a Texan, but then I realize that I don't own a pick-up truck or a gun. Too bad. What fun I would have.

Warning: Conservative political comment below.

If this were a pro-life rally or an anti-gay marriage demonstration and nobody showed up, I think that the liberally biased media would have been all over this. They would have made fun of Republicans everywhere and made it seem as though exactly ZERO Americans felt the same way they did.
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6. Year of the Fan.
I suppose ESPN forgot to ask the real fans what they wanted to see on their monopoly of a network. Dick Butkis in a reality show. Fake press conferences. Stuart Scott's poetry slam. ESPN Hollywood. All Yankees and Red Sox, all the time. Ridiculous movies that over dramatize how real life sports icons lived. "Stab me in the eye with a dull object because it hurts more" personalities such as Lee Corso, Dick Vitale, John Clayton, Chris Berman, Woody Paige, and Skip Bayless. I hardly think that's how we would have responded. Time for some new blood boys. Hire me.

Don't get me wrong, I love the concept of Bristol, Connecticutt. I seriously hope to run one of their channels someday. But these guys made some very good points about why ESPN, in it's current form, sucks. I don't agree with all of these 52 reasons, but I enjoyed reading all of them because it was just unbridled anger at its best. This is how we roll.