5 Friends Vote: The Revenge

Remember that video that a bunch of famous people made a few weeks ago to celebrate Metroville's 300th post?

Now there's another one, featuring famous people who are even more famous (as well as some of the original famous people), and I'm beginning to suspect that the whole enterprise might have never had anything to do with honoring this blog.

(Stupid famous people. They think they're so cool, talking about "voting"...whatever the hell that is.)

Celtics Are Champions Once Again!

There is just one game in the NBA season, right?

No? What is it, then--a couple more?

Eighty-one more? Yeesh...

We returned bandwagon fans are still a little rusty.

The Undecided Voter's Rhyme-Based Guide to the 2008 Presidential Election

With one week remaining until The Most Important Presidential Election In History™, cable news informs me that there are still undecided voters in America (I don't personally know any, but far be it from me to disagree with what TV says). My well-documented bias towards Barack Obama in the current race notwithstanding, I am a registered Independent who officially favors neither Democrats nor Republicans, and especially not Ron Paul (to wit: I thought very highly of Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, putting aside the fact that I also thought at the time that I was best friends with Knight Rider); I brazenly attest that this puts me in a unique position to offer advice to the potential jurors of the United States who are still uncertain about whom to cast their vote for when they step into the booth on November 4th...that is, some of them.

By no means do I feel qualified to address the theoretically-existent undecided voters who are capable of applying genuine thought and reason to the many issues at stake in this election--they're on their own, as far as my purposes here are concerned. This post is specifically targeted at the undecided voters who are leaning towards John McCain for no other reason than because the word "Obama" rhymes with the word "Osama":

If you wouldn't mind putting down that can of paint you're drinking from for a moment, I'd like to examine the issue of rhyming words vis-à-vis their value in the upcoming presidential election.

It's true--Barack Obama's last name rhymes with Osama bin Laden's first name. There are a lot of people who don't like Obama who would have you believe that this grammatical similarity indicates a substantive commonality between the current Democratic candidate for U.S. President and the evil mastermind behind the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001.

But have those people considered the words that rhyme with the words that describe things they do like? It's unlikely, because thinking and words hurt their brains. I ask you to do what they cannot, and contemplate the following selection of 25 rhymes:

Beer: Queer

Bill Engvall: Bilingual (which indicates a terrorist)

Bush: Rush (the band from Canada, which is a foreign country)

Camouflage: "Entourage"

Cheney: Brainy (and thinking is for faggots)

Christ: Feist (who is from Canada)

Football: Fútbol (which means "soccer", which is foreign)

Foreigner (the band): Foreigner (a foreign person)

Fox News: Cock Shoes (which--while not an actual thing--sounds pretty gay)

God: Zod (who tried to kill Superman)

Gun: Hun (who was a person from Asia, which is a foreign place)

Hate: Plate (which liberal elitists use when they eat)

Hunting: Punting (which is quitting)

Incest: Seacrest

Jesus: Pees Us

Larry the Cable Guy: Marry-Clark-Gable Guy

Limbaugh: Simba (who is from Africa, which is where black people are from)

NASCAR: Ass Czar

Palin: Gay Men

"Pro Life": "Go Fife" (and fifes are gay)

Racism: Chase Jism

Truck: Puck (which is used in hockey, which is from Canada)

War: Poor (which, coincidentally, is what the Iraq War made America)

Weapon: Stepin (as in “Fetchit”, who--although hilarious--was a black person)

White Power: Nice Flower (and flowers are gay)

I could go on, but no amount of further examples would ever change one fact that the average Obama-hater is quick to point out: Barack Obama's middle name is "Hussein", which is the same name as the last name of Saddam Hussein (who, although he had nothing to do with 9/11--unlike Osama bin Laden--is, thankfully, dead...also unlike Osama bin Laden).

If that's the kind of ostensible "logic" (for lack of a better term) that can influence your choice for the next President of the United States, there's really no effective counterpoint that I can present to you.

Except...oh, my god--

"Hussein" rhymes with "McCain"!

Neo-Nazis Dream Big, Accomplish Squat

Say what you will about neo-Nazi skinheads Daniel Cowart and Paul Schlesselman (I'd start with "they're kind of racist"), the young men certainly set lofty--and weirdly specific--goals for themselves. Not only did they plan to assassinate Barack Obama, the act was to have been their suicidal grand finale to a murderous spree that took the lives of 88 (because--follow along here--'H' is the 8th letter in the alphabet, so two 8s mean two 'H's and two 'H's obviously mean "Heil Hitler") African-Americans, 14 of whom (everybody knows that the number 14 is associated with the 14-word phrase, "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children") were to be killed by decapitation.

Before they were arrested in Tennessee on October 22, Cowart and Schlesselman managed to carry out exactly zero of their 89 planned murders.

Oh, well. Swastika for effort.

Nukular Safety Is Fer Queers!

I don't want to make the blanket assumption that anyone who supports John McCain is a hate-filled, proudly ignorant, mouth-breathing troglodyte...but after seeing the above clip from an event at Northern Iowa University on Saturday, wherein the long-off-the-rails Republican presidential candidate's insipid mockery of Barack Obama's concern for nuclear safety (boiling it down to "blah, blah, blah") is met with a fourteen-second ovation, I will absolutely make that assumption about anyone who attends McCain/Palin rallies.

Aren't Guns Awesome?

Praise Jeebus for the Second Amendment--without it, we Amerikuns wouldn't have no way of protecting ourselves against the redcoats.

Also, we wouldn't give 8-year-olds the opportunity to kill themselves with Uzis at machine gun shows.

Whatever the future may hold for the parents of the late Christopher Bizilj, the "certified instructor" under whose supervision the child shot himself in the head with a fucking Uzi and everyone involved with the Westfield Sportsman's Club (ideally, prison)...they can at least be secure in the knowledge that they are true patriots.

Two Funny Parents Probably Equals Unfunny Baby

...Nonetheless, I'm very happy for Amy Poehler and Will Arnett about the birth of their child.

He might grow up to be good at math, or something. Math is important.

Chicken McMugget

When the story broke on Thursday about a young woman in Pittsburgh having the letter 'B' carved into her face by a mugger after he saw her McCain bumper sticker, you almost had to be a little bit happy for the McCain campaign: finally--after all the treason-proclaiming, murder-instructing and out-and-proud-racist nutjobs that have emerged in support of the GOP candidate--they had a crazy person on the Obama side (and a big black one, to boot!) to point to in their defense.

That is unless you saw the above photo of the alleged victim, McCain campaign volunteer Ashley Todd, and noted the fact that the 'B' scratched into her face was backwards--as though it had been done in a mirror--as a sign that the other shoe would soon be dropping.

Alas, it has, as Todd confessed on Friday that she made the whole thing up. Not only was she not attacked by an Obama supporter (having etched the incriminatingly-positioned letter into her face herself), she was never at the ATM at which she had purported to have been mugged.

And the McCain Crazy Train (formerly known as the "Straight Talk Express") keeps on rollin'.

Confused, Tired Old Man Tired, Confused

I couldn't disagree with him more.

I couldn't agree...with myself...I couldn't disagree...with myself...

Patriotism...God....

Zzzzzz, pudding, fail.

The Dos and Don'ts of Postponing a Presidential Campaign

DO: Mean it.

DON'T: Not mean it, get caught in your politically-motivated lie, then spend the next couple of weeks getting raked over the coals by David Letterman.

DO: It so that you can visit your sweet old grandma (who helped raise you) because she has fallen ill.

DON'T: Try to pretend that you have a grandma in a desperate attempt to keep pace with your opponent, for you might be as old as--if not older than--a large percentage of actual grandmas.

DO: Win.

DON'T: Lose. (But...black, gay, literate, female polar-bear-God-willing, Goofus...you will.)

ALCS Game 5, Following Three-Day Seventh-Inning Stretch, Concludes in ALCS Game 7

All that excitement of the Boston Red Sox's historic comeback late in Game 5 of the American League Championship and their handy defeat of the Tampa Bay Rays in the next contest to bring the series down to a decisive Game 7?

Never happened.

Steve Harvey Forces ALCS Game 7

Prior to the Boston Red Sox's brain-melting comeback in Game 5 Thursday night, it's fair to say that the American League Championship Series had been the Tampa Bay Rays' to win.

Following Boston's 4-2 victory in Game 6 on Saturday, the series is officially anyone's.

What is it that has changed the face of this year's American League showdown? Is it the Red Sox's tendency to thrive in the face of ALCS elimination--a reputation born in 2004, when they won four straight elimination games to defeat the New York Yankees--and solidified in 2007, when they rallied back from a 3-1 deficit to beat the Cleveland Indians? Is it the Rays' inexperience? Is it a combination of both?

While many potential explanations hold merit, Metroville happens to believe that the 2008 ALCS has been altered by comedian, actor and radio personality Broderick Steven Harvey--perhaps better known to you as "Steve Harvey".

When baseball fans throughout the country tuned into TBS on Saturday at 8 p.m. EST--the scheduled broadcast start time for Game 6--and found themselves watching an archival "TV Bloopers" special, I'm willing to bet that most of them didn't panic. I, for example--because it was not yet 8:07 EST, the official scheduled start time for the game, when I turned on my television--assumed that, perhaps because of how late in Game 5 had the Sox turned things around, TBS had been unable to put together a pregame show.

When 8:07 EST rolled around and the TBS broadcast switched not to the Red Sox-Rays game but to a syndicated episode of "The Steve Harvey Show", it's fair to assume that most viewers' emotions took a turn. Casual baseball fans probably thought, "Hey, what the hell?"; dedicated fans of the Red Sox or the Rays probably thought, "HEY, WHAT THE HELL?!"; fans of the comedy stylings of Steve Harvey over baseball probably thought, "All right!".

As a Red Sox fan who is also possibly an honest-to-goodness crazy person, my reaction was something else entirely: I immediately feared that Boston's improbable victory on Thursday night was a product of my imagination--that they had actually lost the game and the series; there would be no baseball on TV until the World Series started on Wednesday, and no Red Sox baseball on TV until 2009.

Later, after the technicians at the Atlanta headquarters of TBS (some of whom I hope are no longer employed) had amended their colossal gaffe, my thoughts turned toward the possibility that there existed any Tampa Bay Rays fans (among the few hundred real fans, mind you, that existed prior to the current season) neurotic enough to have experienced a delusional episode similar to mine during the twenty minutes that "The Steve Harvey Show" supplanted the ballgame. What must they have been thinking? Had the Red Sox victory in Game 5 been a product of their imaginations--as I had briefly feared was the case for me--they would not have turned on their televisions on Saturday evening to watch a baseball game: the ALCS would have been over, the Rays would have reached the World Series and wouldn't be playing again until Wednesday. The only possible explanation, in their minds, would have been that...

The Tampa Bay Rays never existed!

Somewhere around 1995 or 1996, they--living lives of total unfulfilment in the farthest corner of the American Southeast and being baseball fans with no interest in the ticky-tacky Florida Marlins--had, in an unconscious preemptive countermeasure against their suicides, withdrawn from reality and conjured the establishment of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, down the very last detail. The twelve-year history of their beloved baseball team WAS NOTHING BUT A FEVER DREAM.

How fucked up must that have been for them during those twenty horrible minutes?

It was likely fucked up enough that, even after TBS had righted its sinking ship Saturday evening, there's no way that the tried-and-true Rays fans dedicated enough to have experienced a psychotic episode of such severity could have completely gotten their heads back in the game before its end. And when a team's most dedicated fans don't have their heads the game...the team doesn't have their heads in the game. The fewer the amount of truly-obsessed fans, the more influential is each individual's karma upon a team's performance. It's superstitious-science. If you don't understand it, you're not a real fan of any professional sports team (which could easily make you a current supporter of the Tampa Bay Rays).

So here we are, heading into a decisive (and--at least as of a few days ago--inconceivable) Game 7. If you think that you can honestly predict which team will win, you're either (A) a member of one of the two opposing clubs (in which case: What up, Youkilis! Sweet beard! (and/or) Hey, Grant! Is it "Balfour" or "Ball Four"? WOOO, go Sox!) or (B) a multi-divorced degenerate gambler whose children won't speak to him (in which case: Sorry Dad keeps intercepting those letters with the checks in them, Biological Dad!). It's anyone's game. Should the Rays win, I will be very, very, very sad, as a Red Sox fan...but also (comparatively much less) happy, as a baseball fan, to see a small-market, low-budget team make it to the World Series. Should the Red Sox win--as I hope they will--I will be very, very, very happy...not just for my team, but for the few Tampa Bay Rays fans who are (relatively) old-school enough to be obsessed enough with their favorite baseball team to occasionally become mental patients. Why?

Because those Tampa Bay Rays fans will finally, through their hard-earned agony, have experienced the rite of passage that is a team curse.

In their case, it would be: "The Curse of Steve Harvey".

Gotta start somewhere.