Perhaps ESPN CFB Analysts Sleep in Hyperbolic Chambers

Yes, "hyperbolic" as in "hyperbole."

That's one of the few explanations I can find to the utter ball-washing of Tim Tebow.

Because the other explanations all have them as blathering idiots, willfully ignorant of how football actually is played (what with the defense and special teams and all.)

Sure, I'll admit it, I cracked some jokes when Tebow broke into tears after Florida lost at home to Ole Miss. Partially it was a defense mechanism (UGA having had their asses handed to them by Bama that same weekend and all) and partially it was hoping he'd pull a Reggie Ball and Florida would go into a tailspin (I hate Florida.) Also, anyone who is the star QB at their school but proudly admits having a sex life less active than the most celibate Jonas Brother should be used to jokes being cracked their way.

He's a great quarterback though, really. I'll say it. I hate it, but I'll say it.

But here's what pisses me off: this isn't news. He was carving up defenses last year. Florida scored scores of points last year. Tebow had better numbers last year.

But now he's "better?"

No idiots...Florida's defense is better.

Is Tebow playing "with more heart" than '07? Maybe, but that's not why Florida went from a 4 loss team to a 1 loss team playing for a national title.

Florida's defense sucked last season. Looked a lot like UGA's defense this season. Auburn "keeping Tebow off the field" in a close win was the exception. In the UGA, Michigan and LSU losses, Florida just couldn't get enough stops on defense to win. Tebow and co. scored a good number of points in each, but it wasn't enough when the other team can get a score or two more.

And for the life of me, I can't figure out why this isn't being brought up on ESPN (or ESPN affiliated sportstalk radio). Does someone high up in Bristol, CT have money riding on Tebow pulling an Archie Griffin?

Sam Bradford and Colt McCoy have better numbers than Tebow this year. They really should finish 1-2 in the Heisman voting.

So why ignore the defense ESPN?

(And, in a semi-related note, wouldn't it be nice if UGA's D made the same transition from porous sieve to ball-hawking brick wall by '09?)

Gimmie Fiction

I know, I know. It's been a long while since I've made any updates. A lot's been going on...and not a lot's been going on (how's that for cryptic?)

I may have gotten hooked on the short post format over @ Shorter Excerpts (see link to your right, click on it) and longer-form stuff has been forgotten. Also, it's not football season.

But I aim to return my original blog to "Regularly updated" status. For starters, here's a snippet of a longer-form bit of fiction that may form a complete and functional short story on its own:

A Malady Particular To This Generation (IV)
(Excerpt)

“Mike?”

“Yeah. Brooklyn?”

“Yeah.”

She was shorter in person than Mike thought she’d be. This had become a chronic issue for Mike. If pulled aside by some semi-officious statistician that dealt with height and asked what he thought the average 20-something female’s height would be, Mike would probably guess “at least 5’7.”

Brooklyn looked more or less exactly like her Facebook profile pictures: Short, reddish-brown hair (likely the red highlights were added in recently), clear, untan (but not pale) complexion.

Green eyes.

She had on one of those fancy belts that Mike thought looked like a curtain pull tied about the waist, jeans, and UNC blue blouse showing a teasing-but-not-taunting amount of cleavage.

Her only accessory was an iPhone, which she was somehow typing something on using only her left thumb.

“So, should we get some drinks?”

“Sure. I’ll have an appletini.”

”Scrubs fan?”

“What?”

“The show? Scrubs? Zach Braff? That guy from Office Space?”

“Oh. No. I just like them. Plus Scrubs is on opposite Grey’s so I can’t watch it.”

“Ok. Well I’ll be right back with the drinks.”

The whole time, Brooklyn’s thumb was going nuts on her iPhone.

Mike thought it a bit presumptuous to assume he was paying for the drinks, and wasn’t a huge fan of playing waiter with them—this was mainly the result of several dates in a row where all the women paid for their own drinks, and the most recent two seemed insulted and pissed off at the notion that Mike would pay for both. Now Mike’s “Golddigger Radar Antenna” was up, and he thought getting a draft PBR would be a good preventative tactic. That many folks can’t tell a lager from an ale from a pilsner, and any beer in a beer glass will look pretty similar—that didn’t enter his mind.

When he got to the booth Brooklyn had selected—her back to the wall, but somewhat secluded in the bar—she was still at the iPhone, but trying to keep it hidden. Could a person touch-type with a thumb?

Michael Stipe IS Hip-Hop (sort of)

So, while spending a rather boring Wednesday night pantsless, aching, sore, cursing the writer in Men's Health that taught me how to do dumbbell squats, and watching "Top 100 Songs of the 90s" (which I still feel should be "90 songs of the 90s" but that's just me) something hit me.

What's the REAL connection between the Georgia football team, and a 17-year-old line-dancing rapper? Soulja Boy didn't start the dance. Nope. He (while being like 5 or so, according to the math I just did in my noggin) was just copying Michael Stipe, who as you can see in the video, was "crankin' dat" over a DECADE before Mr. Collipark's latest protege.

And if I have a few more beers to go with my muscle relaxer, I think I can find the Macarena in here too.

Plots Available To A Good Home

As I've mentioned before, the novel I'm working furiously to finish right now isn't my first attempt. Or even my second.

Now, not all of those would-be novels are consigned to either my junk-heap or content to rest in the ghost of my dead hard drive (RIP 2000-2004). Two of these incomplete would-be tomes are waiting their turns, or waiting for me to complete some intense research. A third might see the light of day as a screenplay (which given its history is fitting.)

Flashback to the summer of '98. While I was probably one of the few people in my graduating high school class to not have Comedy Central, and therefore, miss out on South Park's debut, I had found myself absorbed in a show called Buffy The Vampire Slayer (not from the beginning, but close). Faced with my first summer in years where I didn't have a summer reading list packed mostly to the gills with stuffy old books I had no interest reading, I figured "what the hell, I'll write a Buffy script and see if they run it." Obviously I had no idea how TV writing, or professional creative writing worked, but hey, wikipedia wasn't around, and people didn't even really use Google. My hook was that it was going to be a special "Spring Break" episode of Buffy, where they go down to Florida, or somewhere near a large body of water, and they encounter some Lovecraftian cultists bent on raising one of the Old Ones, and of course, Buffy and the Scoobies would thwart this nefarious plot. Then, a bit later (ah the days of dial-up, pre 56K Internet) I found on the semi-official site, The Bronze, that they did not accept outside script submissions. Not being a big fanfiction person (what's the point if you don't actually see it?) I decided to expand and adapt it to more normal teenagers. And then late in my first semester at UGA, I joined a band, and the story was forgotten.

With ScriptFrenzy (a similar, but not as strenuous, contest to National Novel Writing Month--a 20,000 script in the month of June) starting soon, I'm thinking about going back to it.

Some of the others...not so much. So here's two plots of abandoned novels I have no major use for, but you might:

1. Working title(s): Full Circle, Just a Bunch Of Stuff That Happened. A genetically modified government super-solider escapes, turns evil (don't they always?) and takes over the mafia, with the eventual goal of world domination. But the original thrust of the novel was going to be on how this mafia-CIA/FBI/etc. conflict messes with the sort-of-but-I-didn't-pull-it-off-54,000-words-in-related lives of over a dozen characters. I was trying for the bastard offspring of Stephen King's The Stand, and Altman's Short Cuts more or less, and it was my first attempt at a novel. So I can't say I lacked novelistic ambitions...

2. No working title: A postmodern collegiate bildungsroman. Over educated, smartass son of an Amherst prof is a freshman at UGA. His "failsafe" prom date shows up on the bus his first week of class...only she's had major plastic surgery and is now both smart and, to our narrator, groin-grabbingly hot. The movie script he wrote as a joke for his dad has been picked up in Hollywood and now he's rich. His agent though, is an embodiment of the Native American Trickster god, Coyote. And it was supposed to be a variation on the genie story where he gets everything he thinks he wants, but also somehow trapped inside a script he wrote...and I couldn't figure a way to reconcile the two threads easily...plus the protagonist was shallow and greedy enough that one person that read an early draft of chapter one compared him to the reprehensible narrator of Martin Amis's Money...and I didn't want to write 300 pages in that voice. But maybe you do...or can think of a better comeuppance for him.

Rock Vocal Power

Maybe there was too much anticipation for it to live up to.



(No, not the Red Sox-Yankees series, or even DiceK’s debut into The Rivalry.)



Maybe there was no way it could live up to the last go-around.



(Nope, not talking about dating…at least not yet anyway…either.)



Maybe it’s just me, but Friday’s filmed-for-a-DVD concert wasn’t quite what I was hoping for.



Disclaimer #1: In no way was it a poor show. The acoustics were great and the sound guy deserves top shelf cocktails for the rest of the tour (The Tabernacle’s a beautiful venue, but as a former church, tends to be far more boom-y and reverberating than most clubs). The set list was excellent, mixing some very old stuff ("Indie Queen," "Over Your Head,"), 1-and-a-half covers (Part of "Laid" by James, and a rocked out "Born To Run"), with the usual Butch/Marvy suspects ("The Best Thing You Never Had," "Mixtape," "Joan" and "CLLS" at the piano.)



That said, it didn’t seem to hit the same transcendant levels of performer-audience interaction that Butch had at the Legion Field show, and the energy overall seemed scaled back from even his pre-Rise And Fall Of…tour 40Watt show (where we first heard some of those new tunes.)





Was it a conscious decision to scale back the pick flip-and-catches? (I’m guessing "no" here, because there was a great flip, catch-in-mouth-spit-catch moment late in the set).





Did the band eat some tainted shellfish and feel under the weather?



I’m not sure, but I think I might blame the crowd.



Atlanta’s always been Butch’s strongest area, and I’ve never seen him outside of the state of GA (something I plan to rectify maybe even as soon as his next—or 1969’s next—tour), but the general consensus from fans is that the crowd response isn’t remotely the same in general (and who knows, there could be some trucker-hatted aging hipsters in LA that outright dislike the guy…their loss of course.)





On his last trip to ATL, he remarked about seeing so many familiar faces in Atlanta. But this go-around it looked like there were a lot of new faces too.





Young faces.


Faces that were here because it was an all-ages show, and because they heard about Butch when The OC had him on as a featured artist back in December. Faces that were seeing Butch for the first time and didn’t know that when he asks you nicely to shut the hell up for three minutes so he can play "Joan" on the piano, it’s not a joke, he means it.





Faces that didn’t know that we could’ve kept that a cappella outro to "When Canyons Ruled the City" going a lot longer, and it would’ve been cool as hell. Faces that don’t even know who the Marvelous 3 are, and probably do have parents that have "Born to Run" on tape somewhere.



And they were everywhere too.





Maybe, as much as I don’t want to admit it, I am getting too old for midsize and large-venue general admission concerts. At Legion Field I had room to move about, play the occasional air-guitar and generally make a not-too-noticeable ass out of myself. At the Tabernacle, if I moved too far one way, security would tell me to either move to the back, or I’d find myself surround by a pack of drunken morons too busy patting each other on the back on how wasted they are to pay attention to the show.





Disclaimer #2: I'd also been fighting a sore throat/fever for most of the week and had been running at least a degree of fever less than 24 hours before the show. Plus I'd forgotten the cardinal going-out-rule that no matter how hot or cold it is outside, when 1,000s of people get crammed together it's going to be: hot. And perhaps a long-sleeved, black, not-exactly-breathable dress shirt was poor attire.

And so I figure that’s the most likely reason for the semi-disappointment (I’m still going to buy the DVD—along with extra copies to inflict on friends and family for gifts).

But, in the interest of full-disclosure there is one other reason: The Girl and I got reacquainted and started dating right after the Legion Field show (she was almost right behind me, but didn’t come up to me and I didn’t turn around enough or else I need my vision checked--she has a look she can give that if I had been getting it that night, I should have seen--anyway…but the next day she emailed me and a week later was what I still consider The Best Date I’ve Ever Had, in caps even, and so on). She claimed she never missed a Butch Walker show, and while we haven’t talked (and I haven’t even tried lately) I may have spent half the show with my head on a swivel looking behind me, to the side (and even wandering to the smokers’ pit and to the top balcony before Butch’s set started and the rest of my crew showed up.) Also, I may have sang her name instead of "Baby" on a few songs…but at this point it’s an old habit, dating back to October.



(Weird Coincidence Note: after the 40 Watt show I met/flirted with two lovely ladies from either North or South Carolina who had driven all the way to Athens to see the show. I suggested afterwards that they join me at Mercury Lounge for drinks. They didn’t show, but this gets weird when I mention that The Girl and I’s TBDIEH also took place at Mercury Lounge. This just hit me today, and I’m sure it signifies/means nothing…but still…)






And maybe all he really needed was fireworks. The first time I saw Butch solo was only a few blocks from the Tabernacle, at Downtown Rocks (with LFT opening), and in addition to playing his now famous Queen Medley, there were enough fireworks (literally) to rival a David Lee Roth production.





Of course after that show I met the man himself at Smith’s Olde Bar…hmmm. Damn it. I knew I shouldn’t have gone home after the show Friday…