Author: Stagger Lee

If Karl Rove is a poor man’s Lee Atwater – and make no mistake, he is – then Steve Schmidt is a homeless man’s Karl Rove. Seriously. At this point, down double digits with less than a month to go and all the internals tracking against him, John McCain should be suing Schmidt for malpractice at the very least. Personally, I would be lining up some pipe-hittin’ micks from South Bend IN for an Irish blanket party.

It didn’t have to be like this. In fact, if I were running things, I could probably have McCain up by six or eight points, without ever using the words “Ayers,” “Wright,” or “my friends.” Follow the bouncing ball, kids…

Continue reading “I Am A Bad Ass”

Although if you have to lose, losing to Coach Croom’s team is far from a disgrace. There’s actually a lot of symmetry there: a good stout defense that capitalizes on mistakes and an offense that does just enough to keep the ball away from the other team. Vandy got out-posessed 36 minutes to 24, and that should really tell you all you need to know. Well, that and the fact that they set season highs for penalties and turnovers. Much of what has gone well all year for the ‘Dores revolved around doing all the itty-bitty things right and not making mistakes.

Well, technically, all that’s shot to hell now is the national title game berth. Everything else up to and including an SEC championship is still on the cards, as the Commodores are technically still tied for 1st place in the SEC East. But then, we do have Georgia next week. My concern there is that once the Dawgs realize that they really need not to get snakebit again (and heaven knows Vandy has shocked their shit more times than they’d like to remember), we will wake up in a week on a 2-game losing streak and at risk of foundering against Duke…and losing the Duke game would seriously raise the possibility that the 5-game winning streak will be capped by a Tedford-esque 7-game losing streak.

And then there will be trouble.

(No idea why the ‘Skins shat the bed, although I put all the blame on Johnny “Cakes” Auville. If he ever bets on YOUR team, hang yourself. Or better yet, hang him.)

That’s right, I said it, and F you Mike Godwin. I’m through calling a spade a fucking shovel.

* I’ve voted already. If you still don’t know by now who you’re voting for, then don’t bother, beause quite frankly you’re not smart enough to vote. You should also stay away from sharp objects and might want to avoid anything more intellectually rigorous than Family Guy.

* There are not a lot of artists whose new material I will buy on day one without regard for cost or preview. Bruce Springsteen, U2, Voice of the Beehive (and let’s face it, there’s not gonna be much more of that)…and now, the Killers. Based on the first two tracks on SNL, they have made The Leap. Day and Age drops November 22. Run, don’t walk.

* It’s remarkable what you’ll sit and watch in HD. They were running something about caves on Discovery HD Sunday night and I sat there like a drooling slack-jawed moron. OK, a worse one.

* If you have these, you should be shot dead where you stand. No trial, no appeal, nothing. If you seriously want this, you need to die.

* God Almighty, I’m in a sour mood considering where my teams are. May just be Tuesday. I could never get the hang of Tuesdays.

* Wow…good job I was on a long-term holding pattern with AAPL, huh? (bangs head on table)

* A word of advice to Tessa and Anna: “I may never get to see this in my entire life!” is no longer an operable excuse for staying up past your bedtime. Nevertheless, congratulations, and tell your folks you could go to bed a lot earlier without missing anything if you all came West.

* Where’s my coffee? I have to start the morning by swapping around three UPS units in the server room and I’m not doing that without some caffeine in the system.

* My Buddy Vince Sez that Bernie Mac just changed a tire on his Charger. He fully expects it to light up on fire like Ghost Rider now.

Finis.

Not much to say about Bama or Cal – they both won, they both could have looked better doing it, and Cal still has a QB controversy not improved by Tedford’s refusal to grant Kevin Riley a single snap against Arizona State (apparently overthrown passes and an INT aren’t a problem if you’re wearing a 6). But the real story of this weekend was the two teams of my acquaintance who spotted their foes two touchdowns in the first quarter…and shut them down the rest of the way.

Never has the NFL’s disdain for the Redskins been so obvious as when the schedule came out. Opening with three division road games in the first five weeks (plus the Saints) made it pretty clear that Roger and his little band of reprobates wanted Washington out of the way in a hurry. Before the season started, I’d have predicted 1-4 over the first five, maybe 2-3 if luck broke incredibly well. Didn’t expect 4-1 – and as for the 1, I have seen nothing indicating that the Giants would be materially better than the Redskins when they meet up again at FedEx. It’s not like the Skins were blown out in that game…and in the next month, they get to play the Rams, the Browns and the Lions. Oh, and they still haven’t turned the ball over yet on the year.

But Vanderbilt…what can you say? The backup QB picks apart Auburn with the short passing game when the run isn’t there, the defense throttles both the spread and the power-I, the announcers are blown away, and it all ends the next morning when Vanderbilt rises to #13 in the AP poll. If they win next week, it will match their best start since 1928…and give them their first taste of bowl eligibility since 1982.

This is a special year, and if you didn’t believe it before, the completely full student section should tell you. In my day, they turned out in coats and ties and Laura Ashley dresses, showed up at the beginning of the second quarter already bombed, and left halfway through the third to go back to the frathouse and drink some more. Now they show up in all black – some of them with their entire body painted black and/or gold, even the co-eds – and they stay all the way through to the end, through a curtain call for the team, and sing the entire alma mater at the end. When they screamed out the bit about “CONQUER! AND! PREVAIL!” there were chills up my spine.

If this is really it – if this is where the corner was turned and the the miserable sad-sack Vandy of old that always fell apart down the stretch was finally buried – history will record that our world turned around at 8 PM on October 4, 2008 in Nashville, at the expense of the Auburn Tigers.

Magic.

To see College Gameday on campus for the first time ever. To see the team you were raised to hate held to FOUR (4) YARDS RUSHING in the second half. To see their QB eat grass five times. To see them held scoreless for the last forty-eight minutes. To see signs like “Everyone’s SEC Pushover No more!” and “MY BUTLER WENT TO AUBURN” and “THE GEEKS SHALL INHERIT THE TURF” and “4-0 NOT JUST OUR GPA ANYMORE.” To see Lee Corso and Kirk Herbstreit throwing up the VU sign. To beat Auburn for the first time since 1955. To be 3-0 in the SEC for the first time since 1950. To be 5-0 for the first time since 1943. To be all alone, undefeated, at the top of the SEC East, for the first time in history.

To have the phone blow off the hook in the last three minutes with phone calls, text messages, voicemail, Twitter. To see that score, 14-13, flashing across the screen, and know that from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, from San Francisco to Mobile to Virginia, people are thinking of you and your team.

You can wait an entire lifetime for a day like this. Thankfully it’s only taken me 14 years.

(13) AUBURN 13

(19) VANDERBILT 14

FINAL

NO ONE ON THE CORNER HAS SWAGGER LIKE US

DYNAMITE GO VU!!!!!!!!!

Palin’s Small-Town Snobbery: Why it’s time to bury the myth of rural virtue – Reason Magazine:

The myth of rural virtue and urban vice is an old one in this country, and it persists no matter what the changes in the landscape. And whatever questions Palin may face in her debate with Biden, her paeans to small-town virtue aren’t likely to be among them.

Most Americans, it seems, can tolerate hearing of the superiority of the small town, as long as they don’t have to live in one. You wouldn’t know it from listening to country music stations, or to the governor of Alaska, but four out of every five Americans choose not to reside in rural areas…

Nicked from Reason magazine. I don’t know how it got to the point that all my content these days is coming from libertarians and paleoconservatives. Maybe I’m just getting old and cranky (Just? -ed.) or maybe it’s some sort of residual effect from eating so much Top Dog before games. (Who knew that the world’s number-one Objectivist hot dog stand would be in Berkeley?)

But yes. I have lived in small town rural America (population ~3300), and I have lived in the capital of the universe and the cradle of the future. For myself, I have made the call, and I’m more than happy with it.

It was obvious the world had changed. Something very different was going to take its place. Geopolitically, it meant the end of the Cold War, the formulation of what some called the New World Order, and a brand new archvillain named Saddam Hussein. And into this brave new world, in August 1990, I started college. I’d been dreaming of that moment for the better part of twelve years.

It all fell apart in eight days.

Continue reading “Flashback, part 5 of n”