Damn You, Rack 'Em Willie!

The latest youtube video that makes me giggle in an uncontrollable fashion: Rack 'Em Willie.

The first couple times we watched this video at the golf course, not a whole lot happened besides some laughing. Slowly but surely, however, this video kept seeping into our brains, and now the entire pro shop constantly speaks in Rack 'Em Willie's language. And of course, if you know me at all, you know it didn't stop there; it soon carried into my home life.

So now, in an ironic-yet-completely-predictable twist, I spend most of my day muttering "Rack 'em, rack, rack 'em, rack, rack, rackball"......but instead of being able to file that under 'quoting a hilarious youtube video'.....I just sound like the very crackhead that the video is making fun of. It has very quickly and very seriously become a debilitating problem for me.

It's a tough life when you're so easily influenced by youtube. RACKBALL!

Pretend I'm The Pizza Delivery Guy And Watch Me Wack Off

Pocket dialing. It happens to all of us. Sometimes you're the victim, and sometimes you're the perpetrator.

Sometimes you pocket dial a good buddy who will understand the situation, maybe bust your balls a little bit about it the next day.......and sometimes you pocket dial an ex-girlfriend at 3 a.m. while at an after-party shotgunning PBR's and smoking three cigarettes at once, and she takes it as a sign that you want to get back together.

Sometimes you get pocket dialed and all you hear is static or rustling, maybe a snippet of conversation.....and sometimes you get pocket dialed and hear the unmistakable sounds of baby-making coming from the other end (this happened to me once, and all I can say is that porn must suck for blind guys. Just having the audio portion leaves a little something to be desired.)

Sometimes you pocket dial someone while you're in the car, singing at the top of your lungs. While mildly embarrassing (especially if it's the Spice Girls, or the Aladdin soundtrack, or you're belting out the robot voice in 'Mr. Roboto' or something) it's still OK. It's acceptable in our society.

But sometimes....SOMETIMES, my friends......you pocket dial someone, while singing at the top of your lungs, to this song. And it becomes slightly less than OK.

I guess I should be thankful that in this instance yesterday, the victim of my pocket dial was NOT an ex-girlfriend. That....might have sent some mixed messages.

My 'Dad', The Governor?

Former NBA basketball player Chris Dudley and I have a long and storied history. It all started back in 1999, when I was still a true New York Knicks fan, and Patrick Ewing got hurt during the Knicks' wonderful run to the Finals as an 8 seed. All of a sudden Dudley was getting major minutes, and we were loving every second of it (Dudley is one of the top 5 nerdiest players to ever play in the NBA, as well as the worst free throw shooter in NBA history, by percentage.)

Also, in one of my favorite clips of all time (go to the 1:10 mark) after getting posterized and shoved to the ground by Shaq, Dudley gets up and guns the ball at his back and attempts to look tough, while everyone else tries not to laugh. Nobody, but NOBODY, dunks on Chris Dudley and gets away with it.

My first step in the Dudley-lovefest was DVJS and I making t-shirts with just his face on it. My friends and I have had a long-running joke that since my dad is such a badass, and I'm such a pussy, that I was clearly adopted. So the next step, once we saw the Dudley and I share the same crooked nose, was to start claiming that he was my 'real' dad.

Then, during our senior year in high school, the relationship went to the next level. The Phoenix Suns (of which Dudley was now a member) came to Fargo to play the T'Wolves in an exhibition game.

(If this next section sounds like me bragging, it's because I am. At 17 years old, it was one of the coolest nights of my life up to that point.)

During pregame warmups, we were all bantering with the Suns. Cliff Robinson was shooting corner three-pointers and missing the majority, so I told him to stay out of there tonight, it wasn't his spot. He gave me a 'what the fuck, white boy?' look, and then during the game, hit about four or five corner threes, pointing and winking at me in the crowd after every one (he knew where we were sitting due to later events.) We were busting balls with everyone on the Suns (except Jason Kidd, part of the reason I still hate him today, what a prick.) Then the kicker came from Lane (who else) when Dudley, the last player on the court before tipoff, threw down a monster dunk before trotting to the bench. Lane stands up and screams in his typical video game voice "Noooooooooobody brings the thunder like Chris Dudley!!!!!!!!!!!" So now not only does the entire Fargodome know who we are and what we're about, the entire Suns bench is dying in laughter. Soon after tipoff, we busted out our signs "Dudley For President" and "Chris Dudley Is My Real Father" and the team was practically rolling in laughter. So that's how the game went.

Afterwards, we were hanging in the parking lot waiting to get more autographs, when a few of the players approached us on their way to the bus and started bs'ing with us. Corie Blount, seeing a Taco Bell across the street, gives Lane 20 bucks and sends him on a taco run (literally, as Lane tore off at a dead sprint across the parking lot.) As soon as Dudley came out, the whole team erupted and called him over to us, and a picture taking and autograph session ensued. Dudley looked embarrassed, as it was probably the first time in his career he was the most popular guy on the team, and all the black guys were practically falling down laughing.

After awhile, things die down, and the Suns bid us adieu and get on the bus. It's at this point that Lane shows back up again, and without breaking stride, sprints right onto the bus, tacos in hand. Shortly after, security guards are dragging him off as he fights them, waving the bag and yelling "I've got Corie's tacos! I've got Corie's tacos!"

I'd like to think that Dudley kept the picture of us hanging in his locker for at least the rest of the season, but at least we know that the rest of the team made fun of him for months about that night (except Jason Kidd, that dick.) A couple years later, in 2003, we were at a game in Minneapolis, and though we missed the team boarding the bus, we got Dudley to come to the front of the bus and give us a what-up. And that was the last time I saw my real dad.

But he's been doing big things. Besides being a leading advocate for diabetes awareness (he suffers from type 1) he officially won the Republican nomination in the race for Governor of Oregon earlier this week.


Chris Dudley: a beacon of truth, justice, and missed free throws.



I've been keeping an eye on his political aspirations for a couple years now, and have been eagerly anticipating this day for awhile- really, the only thing that can get me excited for politics. I'm debating a move to Oregon (I've always loved Portland) just so I can vote for my 'dad' in this fall's election. If that falls through, I'll just have to rely on ADawg or Bobbi to cast my vote for me. I don't ask them for much.

Chris Dudley in 2010! Yes We Can!

Internet!

Things are a liiiittle b-u-s-y these days. Between working 50ish hours a week, golfing, moving, and watching Jonathan Papelbon give up multiple 9th-inning home runs to the Yankees (the new sports den came real close to getting a hole kicked in the wall last night) I currently don't have the time to post any original thoughts at this juncture. In the words of the immortal Harrison Ford: "I already work around the clock!!!"

However, I do have three videos from the world wide web to help you kill some time; that's what we're here for anyway.

1. I found this while I was on my fantastic voyage of Saved by the Bell clips last week. The video isn't the best quality; we've been making homoerotic jokes about Zack and Slater since we were old enough to know what 'homoerotic' meant; and Brokeback Mountain jokes were completely beaten into the ground by mid-2007 (I think there was even a Senate Committee hearing that officially delcared Brokeback jokes old news)....and yet, I still giggled quite a bit at this clip. I'm simple like that.

2. I'm bringing this one to you on behalf of Gangel, who was kind enough to share this with me on Facebook. I was able to hold it together until the Godfather one-liners, then continually laughed harder and harder until it was finished. Hank Azaria, comedy genius. (Also, it's a superb four-way battle between Gangel, Schne, DVJS, and Kos to see who can put the funniest videos on my Facebook page. Frankly, we're all winners for them trying. What was the world like before youtube? I'm glad I don't remember.)

3. Do you like Where's Waldo? Do you like tongue-in-cheek documentaries? Do you like Hermoine from the Harry Potter movies stripteasing to songs from the old Jock Jams CDs? You'll find two of those three things in this clip.

Maturity

Someday, there will come an age in my life when, upon receiving a two-game suspension in City League basketball for technical fouls, we won't turn it into a joke, and I won't show up for our game to sit on the bench in a suit, and we won't ask our lawyer friend to draft a letter to the league President appealing the second game of the suspension. However, that age is not 27.

(Also, there will be an age in my life where I stop getting technical fouls, but that's beside the point. I thought I was done at age 24....in the last year I've had an itsy bitsy little relapse.)

Suspension or no, the Curtis J. Phillips organization finally broke through and won their first outright league title this season. Our rivalry with The Dawgs has been compared to the Suns/Spurs rivalry of the last five years (by me) in the sense that both us and the Suns have seemingly gone out of our way to invent creative ways to lose games. (Seriously, if you doctored the video to make the overall quality of basketball better, you could do a 30 for 30 documentary on our shenanigans with The Dawgs**, and it would be enjoyed by basketball fans. I promise you.) So it was only fitting that in the same year that the Suns finally knocked the Spurs out of the playoffs, we also got over the hump and defeated The Dawgs to clinch the championship.


**Shenanigans with The Dawgs, 2008-2010:

- One game we were up 9 with about 1:30 left to play. A bunch of missed free throws, a couple turnovers, and a thrown away inbounds pass at halfcourt leading to a breakaway layup with 3 seconds left later, and we lost by a point.

- One season we adopted the Suns' old '7 seconds or less' offense, and beat The Dawgs by 25 (although they had already clinched the title that year.) The next season, they had at least two players scouting every one of our games all season, then for the championship game, brought in a couple of ringers (technically legal due to a league loophole) who led them to a narrow victory. Needless to say, we had a little "chat" with them after this game. This is definitely our version of the 2007 Suns/Spurs series, when bullshit suspensions following Robert Horry's cheap shot on Steve Nash derailed the Suns.

- One game, during a particularly atrocious performance by the referees, one of the refs responded to our bench's chirping by threatening to fight two of our players in the parking lot. Needless to say, we were not the beneficiaries of an abundance of good calls down the stretch of this game.

- One game, we battled back from a late deficit, and down by three, I was fouled on a three pointer with five seconds left. I made the first two, back-rimmed the third, and we lost by a point.

- One game, we were down six with a minute left when I got T'd up and ejected. But The Dawgs missed both technical free throws, and the boys rallied around the ejection and tied it up with under ten seconds left, then won in overtime. However, we lost a different game to an inferior opponent earlier in the year, costing ourselves a share of the title.


Happy Friday.

"It Wasn't Supposed To Be This Way....Not For Us"

On my Doucheberry, I keep an ongoing memo where I list all the songs I need to download the next chance I get (the memo is appropriately titled 'Downloading.') So anytime I hear a song I like on a jukebox, or in someone's car, or anywhere in public that this scenario may play itself out, I can punch it in quick and not have to remember the title and artist myself.

ANYWAY, I got a liiiiittle bit shitfaced on Saturday night, and when I woke up Sunday morning there was an entry in the Downloading memo entitled 'laura branigan saved by the bell fuck you jeff.' Um, what?

So I did a little googling and apparently sometime during the night- my guess is when we after-barred at Jud and Wing's place, and we had the 80's music TV channel going in the background- I heard the Laura Branigan song 'How Am I Supposed To Live Without You'. This song, as I hope the hamster running on the wheel in your brain is starting to figure out, is the song that is playing at Homecoming while Kelly is breaking up with Zack (although I think it's the Michael Bolton version of the song, in an award-winning performance by Slater and Jessie.) I had no idea who Laura Branigan was....turns out she also sang 'Gloria', which as anyone who attended school in Grand Forks, North Dakota can tell you, is an absolute staple of middle school gym class line dancing (along with Rick James' 'Superfreak.')

The 'fuck you Jeff' part of my memo? Also should be fairly obvious by now:

This fuckin' guy.



So all this Saved by the Bell googling led to finding some pretty fantastic videos sprinkled around the interwebs. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the official Zack & Kelly break-up video, since NBC scours youtube for videos belonging to them like Arizona police officers looking for illegal immigrants (political humor alert!) Not that it really matters for me personally, I've got that whole scene pretty much memorized by now. ("Do you like him?"....."No....yes....I don't know!" And so on.)

I feel sorry for everyone not from my generation, who missed out on the awesomeness that is Saved by the Bell. At least you had Hannah Montana to look forward to after school?


(Side note: when I initially read the memo in my phone, my first thought was that I was talking about the girl who was in Saved by the Bell: The New Class, and is now looking frighteningly saucy in that new Miller Lite commercial, and maybe I wanted to remind myself that yes, she is indeed hot? But alas, I discovered that her name is actually Lindsey McKeon, not Laura Branigan, so it was back to the drawing board. Good to see ol' Lindsey gettin' work, though. Keep on doing what you're doing.)

Just because: my all-time top 5 Saved by the Bell episodes, from way back in February 2008. Or as I like to call it, 2 months B.C. (Before Chalmers.) Can it really be that long ago?

Gettin' My Hills On

Embarrassing confession: back in 2005, I was a fan of the show Laguna Beach. Not just a casual fan, either; more like "holy shit it's 9:00 I've got to get to a TV right now ahhhh I can't miss the opening!" It's tough to pinpoint exactly what sucked me in (underage girls?) I had already given up on 'The Real World' and 'Road Rules' and 'Real World/Road Rules Challenge' and whateverthefuckelse MTV rolls out with that franchise. But something about Laguna cut right to the core of me (let's be honest; it was the underage girls.)

A couple years later, we watched 'The Hills' pretty regularly at Culligan Manor, but I'm blaming that one on Horp and Noles (Horp was also the sole reason I even know that the show 'Sweet Sixteen' exists.) Without them, I doubt I would've tuned in once- I was never a big Lauren Conrad fan. I couldn't take much of that show, however. The I-can't-even-believe-these-are-real-humans douchebaggery of Brody and Spencer made the show untolerable for me. I turned it off and never looked back.

So the other day, I'm enjoying a peaceful hungover Sunday on the couch. I seriously couldn't even remember the last time I just set up shop on the couch and watched shitty TV all day long- it's the one major downfall to the excitement of March Madness, as well as having this weekend job at the golf course. I started out watching NBA playoff basketball and flicking around on commercials. Then I saw that an episode of 'The Hills' was on, and Kristin Cavallari was heavily involved (probably the captain of the All-Bitch Team- where knowing that she's a raging B somehow only makes her hotter.)

In Ron Burgundy voice: We are through. Through! Because of your actions, you SCORPION woman!!!


So I watched for a couple minutes.....then I started watching the new episode when it came on, and the basketball game got relegated to commercials....before I knew it, I was balls-deep in a Hills marathon, and couldn't even remember what NBA game I had previously been watching.

And I gotta tell ya, it was fantastic. Just being hungover, eating shitty food, watching horrible TV, going on ebay to buy my ticket to climb back on the MTV bandwagon....glorious. Everything I remembered it to be. The one difference: I kinda like Brody and Spencer now. Don't get me wrong, they're still gigantic toolsheds....but at least they're kinda funny. Either that, or I'm a bigger asshole than I used to be. Spencer talks to The Plastic Robot Formerly Known As Heidi Montag like she's six years old, and it kills me every time. And Brody taking back Crazy Eyes Jayde when she's completely and totally insane.....classic case of crazy in head equals crazy in bed.

Then the other shoe dropped when the new season started on Tuesday night. The entire episode was probably 17 minutes, with 13 minutes of commercials. And absolutely NOTHING happened. Not one thing. And I was quickly reminded of one of the reasons I stopped watching in the first place. In half-hour segments, these shows are terrible. Nothing effing happens from minute to minute. But in marathon form, one after another after another, suddenly these episodes become action packed.

So new game plan: I'm just DVRing the whole season, then waiting for another Sunday afternoon when I have nothing to do besides crush an entire season of shitty TV.

Today is where my book begins.....the rest is still unwritten.

Derby #136, Or: One Of These Years I'm Destined To Lose Money

Random stories from the weekend to follow, but first: some one-liners that only the select few people who attended will understand. They aren't worth telling the whole backstory since they are a little inside in nature:

- "Girls on film......girls on film"
- JV and highway bounce passes
- Andy/Christian and the case of the missing $300 (that could TOTALLY be an Encyclopedia Brown story)
- The shitfaced ramblings of Slough: "Let's derive ourselves on Schne's jacket"......"My answer is twofold"......"Do you guys remember that Schneweis guy? I heard he likes dudes now. BIG dudes"......"How much money did I lose? Let's just say that I am sans twenty dollars."

Now, stories the rest of the interwebs might possibly care about:

- While bar-hopping Thursday night, I was one of the first people out of our current bar en route to the next one, and here was the scene I walked into: Dave (one of Schne's Louisville friends I had just met a couple hours earlier) standing against the front bumper of a car that was halfway in the parking lot and attempting to pull into the street, holding his cell phone out and screaming "I'm calling the cops! Do you hear me? I am calling the FUCKING cops!" Until a black girl handed him a fistful of cash, he moved, and they drove off. Apparently these girls came up to him while he was on the phone and molested him while asking if he wanted a parking lot BJ (the very best kind, in my opinion.) He said no, then realized as they walked off that they had just picked his pocket. And things escalated from there. At least he got his money back- and on the bright side, in honor of Dave, I bet on a longshot horse named 'Pickapocket' later that weekend that, naturally, came out of nowhere and won the race. So at least I was able to profit from the situation. Which is all that matters, really.

- I'm convinced Louisville has the best cabbies in the lower 48 states. Every year, dating back to our spring break trip in 2005 (when our two cabs raced each other home at 70mph on busy roads while blasting Ludacris loud enough to permanently damage my eardrums) we always get interesting rides. On Thursday night, our cabbie announced that our 5 block ride was going to cost $20. Amy and I pulled the patented Stenjo move and just got out and started running. Schne and JV started a good cop/bad cop routine where JV calmly says "Come on man, just come on. 20 bucks? There's no way it's that much. Come on." While Schne yells from the backseat "You are a LIAR! You are a lying man! There is NO EFFING WAY we're paying this!" I think they only ended up paying like $14.

On Friday night, we got a large black man who spent the entire ride lecturing us on how to bring girls home from the bar: "You just gotta ask for it....you JUST. GOTTA. ASK. Just go up to them and say it: Hey, girl. What do you say we get outta here and go do something nasty? Girls love it when you're direct with them." He also had Entourage playing on a little portable DVD player on his dashboard that he clearly rigged up himself, and had no problems with hollering at girls with big boobs walking down the sidewalk. Although that effort required him to drop to a speed that was below 60mph, which wasn't exactly his cup of tea.

- On Saturday night at the bar, I was walking across the patio from the bathrooms to our crew, and a group of people spotted the Adam Banks j-shirt I was wearing and started a rousing "Quack! Quack! Quack!" Mighty Ducks chant. Just as it was reaching its crescendo, and I felt like the coolest guy in Louisville, some other dude walked by and shouted, in perfect video game-voice, "You fucking cake eater!" It was tremendous work by that guy. The best boom roasted by a stranger since we were posing for a picture in front of Cheers in Boston and some guy gave us a drive-by "They don't know your name!"

- During the Oaks races on Friday, we found ourselves in a box across the aisle from the one and only Joey Fatone, of NSYNC fame and fortune (it is NSYNC, right? I was calling him a Backstreet Boy for half the day before being corrected.) Remember that website that was big a few years ago, the one where you'd upload a picture of yourself, and it would spit out a list of the celebrities you resemble the most, in order of percentage? Somehow, my #1 celebrity match was Joey Fatone. Go figure that one out.

79%? This fuckin' guy?

- Due to the onslaught of rain that hit Louisville on Friday night and Saturday, our plans for Derby day shifted. In yet another sign that we have aged another year since 2009, we were all in agreement that the infield was out of the question. If I was 21 or 22, then sure, sign me up for the infield, I'll just throw on a garbage bag suit, tennis shoes that I can throw away later that night, and let's go check out the mud-wrestling pit, dude. But I'm 27 now. I would like to wear my clothes home; drink my mint julep without worrying about flying mudballs splashing into it; and be able to access the betting window without making a journey that makes Frodo's voyage to Mordor look like child's play. So we shelled out the extra money and sat in the grandstands. It's not a box next to Joey Fatone or Avery Johnson or anything, but it's much better than the infield when it's been raining for 18 straight hours. We'll re-evaluate next year if the weather is nice; I have to say there is still no better feeling than duct-taping a bottle of Early Times to your crotch and sneaking through security, unfolding your lawn chair, and plopping down to watch horse races for eight hours. I missed that feeling this year. (Especially since if you're not going to the infield, security apparently doesn't care at all. We knew from last year that they were a lot more lax at the main gates, so we all had Early Times tucked into our dress socks. However, we didn't even get a pat-down this year. Shit, I was openly drinking from a Qdoba cup full of whiskey and Coke, and still breezed right through. Next year I'm bringing a case of beer, fuck it.)

- Once again, I'm one of the luckiest bastards at the Derby. My Super Saver pick paid off nicely (although Mission Impazible ended up sucking, he was in great shape before clipping heels with another horse on Turn 2.) My system of picking names that relate to inside jokes; particular odds that I like on a race; paying attention to which jockeys and numbers have won or lost for me throughout the weekend; and just relying on my gambling hunches continues to pay off. Meanwhile, regular track-goers are poring over statistics and insider tips for the full 40 minutes between races, and I'm having more success than lots of them. I'm not trying to brag; I actually feel guilty about it for the most part. I'm just saying, I'm about two more successful years away from writing a self-help book on how to win money at the Kentucky Derby. I'll call it "I Like Those Odds: How My Buddy Getting Pickpocketed By A Couple Of Skank-Ass Ho's Won Me $95." It can go on the shelf next to "All Night Super MarioKart Time Trial Benders And Me: How To Succeed On The SAT's."

- The age-old question, one we delved into quite a bit this weekend: if you owned a race horse, what would you name it? I think I'd go with either:

1. 'Game Jeans' because of a certain referee who ejected Noles from a Devils Lake tourney basketball game like eight years ago

2. 'What Up With That?' because it would be tons of fun to yell during the race. Also, because these SNL sketches are superb (the best thing Keenan Thompson has done since Russ Tyler and the knucklepuck- though I'd listen to arguments that his kids-themed news show was pretty good.)

3. 'Broseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat' because we were playing the 'Bro Namath, Bro Pesci, Brosie and the Pussycat Dolls, etc.' game, and I came up with the Dreamcoat one and wanted to pat myself on the back a little bit. Indulge me.

Just so you know, your answer may be good, but it's never beating Lane's answer from a couple years ago: 'My Face.' Can you imagine if that horse was the Derby favorite, and you had 100,000 people yelling "Come on My Face!" as he made his move on the homestretch? Classic.