LSU football player Morris Claiborne made some news recently when he scored an appalling 6/50 on the NFL's verison of an IQ test, the Wonderlic. (For contrast, Super Bowl champ Eli Manning scored a 39.) Here is his rebuttal.
"That test don't tell me who I am and what guy I am and what kind of ability I have. I looked at the test, and wasn't any questions about football. I didn't see no point in the test."
Steelers fans have been reeling ever since the team announced that this year, they will twice wear their 1934 uniforms.
It didn't take long for comparisons to be made to 80s big-hair Christian metal band Stryper.
I was content with that mockery until my buddy showed me pictures of his gay softball team's uniforms.
This has not been a good week at work. The details are numbing, so I'll boil it down to its essence: I have a ton of work to do, and the staff has been chugging retard pills like they're Heroin M&Ms.
Bonnie, particularly. Today she had a morning so inept, it rippled through the entire staff—wasting time, controlling damage. It's days like that the small-business owner feels sorry for himself. And if he's prone to feeling sorry for himself, as I am, then he's a pig wallowing in pools of fetid self-pity.
I'm pretty sure I just called myself fat.
Last week, attempting to de-dogify my car, I paid $130 to have the interior detailed. When I went to pick it up, the GPS/stereo display screen was dead; it had gotten wet. Thus did they keep my car another week, waiting for replacement parts from the dealership. $3200 in replacement parts.
That company's net loss on the detailing: $3070, plus labor, plus the loaner car. Ow.
"I'm so sorry about the inconvenience," said the business's owner as he shook my hand.
"I'm so sorry about your ledger," I replied, and he nodded pitiably.
On my way home, I imagined the guilty employee, doubtless fired, going home and explaining in detail about how The Man screwed him over.
I've been listening to a lot of off-season chatter about the Steelers' needs. The conversation turned to quarterback. "They're not going to go after a QB," the analyst said, "unless Ben—"
This is a sentence that for 31 other teams ends "—gets injured."
On my team, however?
"—does something profoundly stupid."
Yep. I'm so very proud.
I'm going to hell for this, but this is the funniest headline/photo combination I've ever seen.
In the space of a minute, Allie made several observations that were already percolating in my brain.
"Get out of my head," I finally said.
"Man. There's pizza everywhere in here," she replied.
I had the flu last week. It was not a fun ride. On Wednesday, I reported to a buddy that I had just thrown up.
"It tasted like the curry I had Sunday night," I moaned pitiably. Everyone cringed and shuddered appropriately. And then, not 10 minutes later, my buddy set out for dinner.
"Now I want curry," he said without a trace of humor. Then he got curry.
I defy you to find a woman would be so inspired.
In one corner, we have our dear friends on the AM radio right, insisting as only privileged white people can that racism never has anything to do with anything.
In another corner, we have the Sharptones, insisting as only mind-reading blacks can that racism has everything to do with everything.
In yet another corner, we have the media bleating about whether George Zimmerman "profiled" Trayvon Martin. (Let me go ahead and answer this one: Cops profile. Zimmerman is a wannabe, not a cop. So no.)
And in the fourth corner, alone as ever, we have me. The facts of this case will probably never be fully known, but I don't need to know more than what everyone already agrees upon. Martin was walking through the community, and Zimmerman followed him. Increasingly nervous, Martin told his girlfriend via his cell phone that some weird guy was following him. Then Zimmerman got out of his car to confront Martin.
Did Trayvon Martin then hit Zimmerman in the head? I certainly hope so. I hope he kicked him in the nuts, too. Zimmerman couldn't have seemed more threatening without, well, brandishing a gun.
If someone follows and confronts me like this, I am assuming the absolute worst about his intentions. I will not ask "Excuse me, are you per chance an overzealous member of the local neighborhood watch?" before I hit the guy. I will, to coin a phrase, stand my ground.
In the best possible light, Zimmerman went looking for trouble, found it, and killed an unarmed guy. In the worst light, he's a murderer. Kinda seems like splitting semantic hairs, doesn't it?
Stank troll Matt sends in this guide for straight people going to gay bars. I'm alarmed by how many of these complaints I have already heard. I have seriously got to move to Pittsburgh sooner rather than later.
This part reminded me of poor, departed Stan. I miss that flake.
You can stop clutching your girlfriend like she's some sort of heterosexual life preserver to keep you from drowning in a sea of receptive anal intercourse. You don't need to hold her hand and make out with her and go out of your way to announce your orientation. We already know you're straight. Those shoes you wore on your way in told us, you don't need to keep repeating yourself. It's a bit insulting. And keep the PDA light. If we wanted to watch straight people make out, we'd go just about anywhere else in the whole damn universe.
The week's work over, gay buddy Mike and I found ourselves in a seedy San Jose bar, discussing what we were going to do with our free time. I was going to try to get an early flight home, I said. How about you?
"I'm going to head up to the Castro district, see some friends," he said. I stared at my friend, the stereotype. Words failed me.
"WHAT?" he said defensively. "I don't say anything when you tailgate at football games in Pittsburgh."
Touche!
A bunch of us were eating sushi in San Jose last week. My buddy mentioned my retirement fantasy of getting a condo within walking distance of Heinz Field.
"You want to retire to downtown Pittsburgh?" the big boss asked incredulously.
I shrugged. "Walking to Steelers and Penguins games and even Pirates games? Sounds like a pleasant way to run out the clock to me."
There was a silence. Then Andy piped up. "That is simultaneously the saddest and coolest thing I've ever heard."
Last week, I traveled to San Jose on business. I've finally reached a point in my career where I'm 1) staying in a hotel with a bar and 2) actually encouraged to rack up expenses. You can imagine my anguish when there was no mini-bar in my room.
I rebounded.
I couldn't decide on a room-service dessert. My solution: don't decide.
You'd think that'd be my trophy photo, but no.
If this was a test of my restraint, I went down in glorious, alcohol-fueled flames.
I got a second dog, remember, because Dex spent every second of my work day staring at me.
BTW, "Poindexter!" is best sung as the chorus in the Bonanza! theme song. Make up your own lyrics.
So during my recent "Whatever happened to...?" research binge, I looked up three former love interests. The one I slept with is out of the Navy, three-times divorced, unemployed, lives with her four kids in the same backwoods Ohio farming community in which she grew up, complains online about her intestinal problems, and looks more or less like a well-seasoned catcher's mitt. Mostly more.
The two I didn't sleep with? A pretty doctor and a pretty lawyer.
Concluding this story
Just last week, I was doing that "Say, I wonder what ever happened to...?" thing that was invented about five minutes after the Internet was.
I'd often wondered about the fiery train-wreck that Laura's life was barreling toward. When last I saw her, she was a 30 year-old basket case, completely unhinged, a secretary and single-mother of a decidedly unfortunate son, in front of whom she stripped. Her friendships and relationships were pure carnage, and she had just begun anew in a state where the only people she knew were the treacherous fiancee and friend.
Not exactly a prescription for Happily Ever After.
Laura has an incredibly common name, so I didn't figure my odds of finding her were good. Bogus hits abounded. And when I saw a bunch of hits for a lawyer in Portland, I felt safe ignoring them.
Except that it's her.
Wha-wha-WHAT?
She's a highly rated attorney at a prestigious firm. That's pretty far from what I'd expected to find, which was Laura blowing herpetic pimps for crack.
"How on earth do you draw a line from where we left off to where she is now?" I asked an equally incredulous Dorkass.
I had to know. There's a story here—as Dorkass put it, "a Lifetime movie kind of story." How did she manage such a career change, so quickly? Did I witness her bottoming out? Was the whole Kristi/fiancee thing the bottom? Better yet, was I?
But really, the one thing I most want to know is this: was she on drugs then, or is she now?
So I wrote her. No, I didn't ask about the drugs. I just said hi.
And this woman—a towering legend in my life, a woman who told me she loved me shortly after flipping me her thong—politely asked me to remind her where I know her from.
Continuing this story
While I stared at the soup pot held at cleavage level, Laura beamed and said she was there to take care of me. She slipped inside and commenced chopping vegetables. Had I not been stoned on DayQuil (not to mention been a huge, sick baby feeling sorry for himself), I would have stopped her. But I didn't. So she made me soup and I felt woozily flattered.
While sauteing the celery, Laura swallowed hard and admitted that she was interested in me. No, really. She extolled my many imaginary virtues and concluded that she even loved me...but she was with this other guy and found it all terribly confusing.
I'm not sure how I was supposed to respond, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't "Well, really, that all works out, 'cause I'm interested in Kristi."
Laura left my house in a fluster, and two days later, I was back at work. Kristi sat in my guest chair with such violence that it bordered on furniture assault. She was trembling, enraged. At me. She told me she was giving me one chance to explain myself. Laura had just told her about the soup event, except her version had a slanderous flourish: it seems that while she was there, I had touched her inappropriately and made her so uncomfortable she fled.
"Uh," I said.
I barely managed to convince Kristi that Laura was lying. Following longstanding policy with established psychopaths, I decided not to engage Laura any further. That's when toys started to disappear from my office. They appeared, of course, in Laura's. If I wanted them back, I would have to engage her.
"We have a bunny boiler!" Dorkass observed. Indeed, during one encounter, Laura even used the phrase "I will not be ignored."
Eep.
I began to worry about Laura's willingness to indulge her psychoses at my place of work. Wanting to get ahead of any bogus accusations, I talked to my boss about it. He was typically understanding.
"Waitasecond. That wants to bang you, and this is a crisis?"
Not coincidentally, he was my last male boss.
Covering my bases, I asked her in writing to return the items to my office and to leave me alone. She cooperated. After she returned my stuff, I never heard from her again. She moved to Florida to be with her fiancee, and I dated Kristi.
Until four months later, when Laura found Kristi an admin assistant job in Florida that actually paid for her relocation from Seattle. For an admin job! Bitch.
Kristi and I tried to date long-distance, but we were ill-suited even under the best of circumstances, so that relationship eventually disintegrated. But I did learn that she and Laura were no longer speaking. It seems that soon after Kristi's arrival in Florida, she and Laura were battling for the attentions of the fiancee.
Tomorrow: this story's surprising modern-day conclusion
