The Den

WRITTEN BY MAX

John Donne: The original hipster asshole.

So I’ve been debating on whether or not to include what I’m about to include on here.  I know people generally like the shit we write, even if they find fault in the ideas or don’t agree with the side we take, and that is, frankly, spectacular.  But I’m trying to think of a way to increase content but I don’t want said content to suffer, either.  Conversely, I have in the past written a lot of poems and short stories, and never had any of them published.  So I was thinking I might publish some of them on here.  In doing this, if you have absolutely no interest in reading stupid old poetry that’s okay.  I’ll always put it under a jump so if you just like the silly photos we do or want to skip over it entirely, you will have the option.  But for anyone who does want to read whatever messed up shit I’ve written, then by all means, have at it by clicking through.

Some of these will be poems, and some will be ideas I got for re-writing a song to a current event.  I’m poor at most things, but for whatever reason I can throw down current event lyrics over old music like nobody’s business.  I also have a few short stories and if I decide to put any of those up here, well, then you will have yet another reason to form a strong dislike for me.

Anyway, If you like it let me know, and if you hate it let me know.  I don’t really have any expectations.  I’ll set them all up the same way – a brief description and then I’ll put the title, and then a jump so if you are coming to it from the main page you won’t be able to see the poem.  If you link to it from Facebook or Twitter it will take you straight there, and then you have to decide what you want to read and not read.  Luckily, almost all of my poems are short and are either about girls or stereotypes or processed meats.  So we have the going for us, which is *maybe* nice.

I’m going to call this feature “The Den.”  May God have mercy on us all.  Everyone who gets that joke should probably make a habit of reading.

Today I’m going to post two really old poems I wrote but they both make me laugh.  One is just about grammar and the other one is about Kevin Bacon and my old college town.  I haven’t read either of these in years, but I got to thinking, this Kevin Bacon one is a pretty good reflection of a lot of the stupid shit going on in America.  I mean, that’s a little lofty, but you can see the parallels between a packing house college town from ten years ago and Jersey Shore, Teen Mom, and race relations today.

Anyway, here they are.  One last note, I will put a set of four or five dashes around each poem so you know when it starts and when it ends.  Some of the shit I have written is pretty weird and not always just line by line, so when you see a second set of dashes, you know it’s done.

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It’s A Good Old Fashioned Jam Make

WRITTEN BY MAX

We had ourselves a good ol' fashion jam make this past Saturday.

This weekend, much to our chagrin, we had a good old fashion jam make.  My girlfriend’s dad picked a ton of wild raspberries and gave them to us.  Ton is more of an approximation, it was like six or seven pounds.  But nonetheless, we made it, and this is the point where I will relate to you the joys of making jam.

First off, don’t wear your favorite baby blue and yellow sweater when you make raspberry jam.  The first step in the process is mashing the berries to squeeze out the juice as much as possible.  It should look something like this picture:

This Weekend’s Prop Bets

WRITTEN BY MAX

There are 5 prop bets I would love to put money on if we had a sports book in Iowa, and I had some money.

1. The Pats Defense Gives Up The Fewest Points In The Post Season – I mentioned this earlier this week, and it’s still my favorite bet ever.  The Patriots have this weird ability to turn their worst thing into their best thing come playoffs.  I look for the defense to have a swell game.  This is the safest of these bets.

2. The Ravens Score More Defensive And Special Teams TDs This Week Than Offensive – If the Pats shut the Raven offense down, doesn’t this make perfect sense?  Is it out of line to think the Ravens only kick two field goals but return a fumble or INT or punt for 6?  I would seriously consider this one if it was available.

3. Alex Smith Lays An Egg (-3) over Alex Smith Lays A Golden Egg – I seriously heard this statement from an ESPN radio host this week: “Well, and now Alex Smith has turned it around, so you have to watch out for him.” Really?  He has one good quarter against a middle-of-the-road defense, including a QB Eagles sneak, and suddenly this guy is viable?  I know we did this a lot last year with Aaron Rodgers, and he came out and stamped our foreheads, but please, let’s wait and see what Smith does this week before we anoint him.  I think it’s definitely three times more likely he shits the bed.  As a side note, can we agree that if he pulls another QB sneak for a big touchdown, we call him the San Francisco Feet?

4. Joe Flacco Throws For Less Than 150 Yards – This could be a dangerous bet if you are one of the people thinking the Pats D sucks, but hold on a minute.  We’ve already bet that the Pats give up the fewest points in the playoffs.  Plus, don’t the Ravens have to try to get Ray Rice going early and often?  This is a not a stretch by any means, and if the payout was higher than 5 to 1, you take it no question.

5. Someone Kicks A 60+ Yard Field Goal – This is very unlikely, as it is supposed to be raining in San Fran and the winds will be swirling in New England.  I’d say the only kicker with the leg for it is Cundiff on the Ravens.  I’d stay away from this bet, unless it’s like a $1.  I think you would be better off taking the ‘Someone Will Get A Field Goal Blocked’ bet with some of the weather conditions we are supposed to see.  I’d put a $20 on this, though.  Note, the longest kick in Playoff history was Pete Sonofabitch with a 58-yarder.  This one looks unlikely, but you should get good odds.

Well, good luck in all of your gambling ventures.  And remember, if you fritter away the kids’ college savings, they can take out their own loan!

CENSORED

 

Contact your congress and senate representatives and tell them to vote no on SOPA .

PREMIERE REVIEW: Betty White’s Off Their Rockers

WRITTEN BY MAX

What could be funnier than a rusty trombone joke? Nine of them.

Betty White has been called a national treasure.  Not the type that Nic Cage would steal, but the kind we look upon kindly and appreciate while she is alive, and will probably appreciate even more when she dies.  I am all for her inserting herself into every punchline she can between now and then, and I find her sweetheart porn brain routine agreeable with me under most circumstances.  Unfortunately, her new show, Off Their Rockers, only had one really great skit, and we will get to that in a minute.  But first, the problems.

For some reason, NBC felt the need to have crowd roar during the opening credits.  Not crowd applause and cheers.  In fact, no crowd.  Just roar.  Pointless, considering they then cut to a scene of Betty on the phone talking about how she is going to get with John Hamm.  They did this after each commercial break, cutting to White while she talks about the next big dick she wants to swallow, in so many words.  And if she wants to get after it, fantastic. I’m okay with that.  But White has so much more to offer than just spreading frosting on a young man reminiscent more of a Harlequin cover than a real boy.  And while I’m sure this persona of White would love for him to tell a lie, I urge her to do the same thing everyone tells me to do, and that’s stop with the dick jokes.

The reason I want to see more from her than this, and more from her than I expect from myself, is that I’m only thirty-one.  I have time to change my sense of humor, and make jokes about kids, and politics and other not-crotch jests.  While I wish White the best and many fruitful years, do we really want to look back in twenty years and realize that the last decade of her life was one big dick joke?  Honestly, maybe we do.  Maybe we do because she has had a chance to be funny for so many years, and if this is how she wants to spend her days, then maybe it’s the old more power to her cliche.  For the sake of this show, however, I hope writers broaden her stroke a little, or the material will become redundant, and quick.  Maybe that’s the rub.  I’ve made these same jokes a billion times and now they just aren’t funny to me any more. (see the last paragraph)

The skits themselves were fine to okay.  A few brought a chuckle.  Most nothing more than a smile.  Some not even that. I enjoyed the one where Vaguely Pat Morita karate chopped the cake in the grocery store because he didn’t need a whole cake.  The skit where a man has a strange woman watch his Hoverround and goes in to take a piss, and then a big black guy wearing the same outfit comes out and takes the scooter was okay. However, half the skits had no context other than “Hey, here is an old person and they are bat shit crazy!  Look at them, they are zany!”  The context White tried to provide before hand didn’t help either.  In fact, before one set of skits she wrapped her talkie by saying, “I think these folks got the point,” and then the next skits where completely pointless.  Most of the people getting pranked just looked confused.  Some had that Homeless Man Talking To Me Look, you know, when a Bogus G approaches and you pretend you didn’t see or hear them.

The production value of this show sucked, too.  Here’s the best way I can explain it.  In the nineties, there was a popular VHS called NFL Football Follies.  We had movie time 8th period after basketball season my sixth grade year, so I brought a video my mom had bought thinking it would be okay to watch.  It was called Football Funnies.  It was basically the illegitimate brother.  The funniest thing was when a classmate quipped, “These aren’t football funnies, it should be called Football Stupids.”  I mean, the video just had a bunch of stupid clips about birds landing on the field, and running backs making too many cuts and getting tackled for a loss.  That’s how I felt about most of this show, but then, we had the Rusty Trombone skit.

Holy hell, this was awesome.  The old broad (see above photo – she is sans-trombone) plays off that she is getting text messages from her randy boyfriend.  So she stops an unsuspecting woman and asks her if she can help.  She is very upfront about why she is asking her for help and the young gal does her best to help.  So O.B. is asking her ridiculous things that may or may not be made up, and then the young girl offers that she knows what a rusty trombone is.  Then, the younger girl pauses for a second and gets a look like, “Oh shit.  I said too much.”  So now, I’m thinking, “Holy shit, she has first hand knowledge!”  Since all of the skits were basically under a minute, at this point they go their separate ways, but the younger girl keeps apologizing that she couldn’t help, and really, she was very sweet and likable, but I can’t shake the feeling that we got a chance to peek in her bedroom, and it looked a lot like a three day bender to Las Vegas, or that time she rolled in college.

This got me thinking, I would watch a week long series each year where old people went out with a cell phone and pranked people by asking them what these strange sexual positions their boyfriend/girlfriend had sent them mean.  The intentional humor would be high, but the unintentional humor would be off the charts.  This would be the funniest show on the planet if you got the right old people to play it close to the cuff.  I want this show.  I need this show.  I have to have this show.  It would be like shark week, only a billion times better.

I may watch another episode of Off Their Rocker, but I imagine the formula will be the same – two or three solid skits per week and 15 duds.  If everything else is a rerun give it a watch, but if it stays on Monday nights, there are a lot of other shows more deserving of your eyeballs.

PREMIERE REVIEW: ALCATRAZ

WRITTEN BY MAX

The cast of Alcatraz on Fox.

Alcatraz, the latest TV offering from Producer/Director J.J. Abrams, starts off in a pretty good way, surprisingly attempting to build some character traits.  Our leading lady, Rebecca Madsen (Sarah Jones) loses her partner, which we learn as a flashback.  Rebecca is a young hotshot detective.  While director Danny Cannon does do a good job of developing her character in the first few minutes, that character is a pretty, annoying cliché. I’ve seen this trick before, where the hot shot young female lead spouts one obscure video game or nerd core fact, and suddenly it’s supposed to give her street cred.

This is immediately apparent in the first fifteen minutes when Madsen meets up with Dr. Diego Soto (Jorge Garcia, or Hurley as you may recall from Lost).  She immediately drops some knowledge on getting double scores on his vintage game, and she gets an immediate marriage proposal from Diego.

Strangely enough, Jones and Garcia have great chemistry.  (NOTE: After watching two episodes, it would actually be pretty cool if they drummed up a love interest between these two.  More on that if I continue to watch the show.)

The first two parts were pretty boring, honestly, but then they started killing people.  It picked up with a nice pace, although procedural, until the end when we the viewer are actually privy to most of the premise of the series, related by the usually excellent Sam Neill, who plays Emerson Hauser.  The premise is absurd.  Someone stole all the prisoners from Alcatraz in 1963, and now they are showing up, un-aged, and killing.  The goal of the show is to figure out who stole them, and why they are bringing them back.

Breaking Down The NFL Playoffs

WRITTEN BY MAX

If your third downs and turnovers are growing, you are going home. Enjoy your time off!

Until this weekend, every favorite won their game in the NFL playoffs this year.  The first exception was New Orleans on Saturday and then Green Bay on Sunday.  But all of the losers this year have things in common.  I’m pretty sure I’ve got the formula down now on what it takes to win football games at any level, but let’s take a look at the numbers from the playoffs thus far.

I think we can all agree that the most important stat is turnover differential.  This stat doesn’t matter for the season as a whole, but within individual games, it is the most critical.  Here were the turnover differentials for the losers during Wild Card Week:

Cincinnati: -3
Detroit: EVEN
Atlanta: EVEN
Pittsburgh: EVEN

Now let’s take a look at this weekend’s losers:

Houston: -4
Denver: +1
New Orleans: -4
Green Bay: -3

This week it was may more important.  Obviously, it’s not a for sure thing that you will lose if you turn it over.  But as a part of this theory, turnovers are the first key to success.  If you maintain possession and create turnovers, you increase your odds of winning this year by 7-1.

The next part of the equation is two parts.

Part 1: limit 3rd downs over the course of a game.  This means, either collect a first down or score on first or second down.
Park 2: if you have a lot of 3rd downs, convert them.

Let’s look at the losers 3rd down conversions from the past two weeks:

Cincinnati: 6-13 (Houston went 6-12 in this game)
Detroit: 7-10 (N. Orleans went 7-11 in this game)
Atlanta: 4-14 (N. York went 8-15 in this game)
Pittsburgh: 7-16 (Denver went 3-10)

Now let’s take a look at this weekend’s losers:

Houston: 5-15 (Baltimore went 4-16 this game)
Denver: 7-18 (N. England went 3-6 this game)
New Orleans: 5-14 (S. Fransisco went 5-15 this game)
Green Bay: 6-12 (N. York went 8-16 this game)

Limiting 3rd downs and converting more than your opponent increased your chances of winning by 50% this year.  So far, turning the ball over and not converting has easily explained away every loss except Detroit. Part three of this formula is balance in relation to your opponent.  How well does your team balance on all sides of the ball? Let’s delve:

Detroit threw the ball 43 times for 380 yards.  The rushed the ball for 32 yards on only ten attempts.  Conversely, the Saints also threw the ball 43 times for 459 yards, but they also managed to rush the ball a whopping 36 times for 167 yards.  The Saints ran 28 more plays than Detroit, and possessed the ball for almost 15 minutes longer.

Here’s your losers’ balance for these two weeks:

Cincinnati: twice as many passes, half as many rushes, yet Houston was almost 50/50 in yardage balance
Detroit: See above
Atlanta: 100 yards less than New York in each category, yet they ran the same amount of plays.
Pittsburgh: Statistically they should have won, and played a pretty even game with Denver, but they failed to convert on third down and had too many. (Rule 2)

Now let’s take a look at this weekend’s losers:

Houston: Statistically they were better than Baltimore, but see rule 1.
Denver: They were very balanced, but gained half as many yards as New England while leading in T.O.P. and also running about ten more plays.
New Orleans: over 400 yards passing, but under 40 yards rushing.  Meanwhile San Francisco was pretty balanced all game.
Green Bay: Ran a way more balanced game, but see rule 1.

That about sums it up.  Teams that have had success holding onto the ball and converting third downs are 7-1.  The one team that lead in those two stats was extremely out of balance.

If we went back through each team’s stats, we could probably come up with a pretty good summary of how teams have responded to other teams similar to their championship opponents.  But once you hit the playoffs, you have to throw that way.  The Wild Card Week is the start of a new season, and nothing else from the regular season matters any more.  The Giants are a great example of this.  Again this year, they were dead, and then somehow, they manager to Lazarus at the end of the season and then swagger into Atlanta like Charlie Bronson, travel to Green Bay and out class the defending champs, and now head to San Francisco to play the only other team in the NFC to display some sort of mastery of all three principles.

The AFC is a little different.  Baltimore is pretty balanced, but New England usually does the first two parts of this theorem so well it doesn’t matter what their opponents do.  If I had to pick a big winners out of this game, I’d say New England probably takes it.  Baltimore is really good, but they won’t run the number of plays needed to keep pace with New England.  I see them getting into trouble early, and then getting away from their game plan, which immediately leads to more third downs and less balance.

As a side note, I think my favorite prop bet would have been which team will have the best defense in the playoffs.  I would have picked New England in a heartbeat.  They have this knack for turning their worst trait into their best, and as I sit here watching my tape of the New England game for the third time, their D is everywhere making plays.  It almost looks like New England’s D has the Denver playbook.  Denver and Baltimore are really pretty similar on offense.  New England has no trouble in this one shutting down the Raven attack.  They pull ahead late and win this one 28-17.

San Francisco-New York is way tougher. Both teams are at such a high level right now.  There is no doubt that San Fran is more balanced, but defensively it’s a toss-up and this game could come down to big penalty or a special teams gaff.  I don’t think we will be as lucky as this week with how good of a game San Fran-New Orleans was.  But I expect this to still be a showcase.  I think I like New York in this one because Eli Manning is terribly underrated.  He’s so clutch, and there is not a measurement for clutch (I suppose you could count rings).  I won’t be upset or surprised if either team wins.  I will be surprised if there is a blow out.  Give me New York with the final score 14-13.

Personally, that San Fran-New Orleans game was maybe the best game I’ve ever seen in my life. I rank it up there with Brady’s first Super Bowl and Steve DeBerg coming out with a giant cast on his hand to lead the Chiefs over the Oilers.  No matter what he has done or will do the rest of his career, Alex Smith has that moment, and for the 4th quarter of that game, Smith was the best QB in the world.

 

 

 

Bowl Pick Em Wrap Up

WRITTEN BY STAFF

Sorry for the delay on this one, but I’ve been kind of sick this week and just didn’t feel like taking the time.  But, I have remedied the situation, and here is Max, Greg and Eric’s final pick breakdown.

There were three games that none of us did because of schedules.  Also, Greg and Eric were tied up the last few games.  We didn’t award an overall winner between us due to this, but you can see that we didn’t do too bad as a group.

Here’s the link to the final tally.

ISNOTAWASTELAND FINAL 2011 BOWL PICK EM

Also, congratulations to Drew Beals who won the first ever INWL Public Bowl Challenge.  As a reward, he will get a hard copy of all the Photoshops that we did for this year’s pick ‘em.  It just might take me a little bit to get that put together, Drew, so have patience, but I assure you, the check is in the mail.

Thanks again to everyone who played.  I know it isn’t OLIVIA WILDE NAKED, but it was still an okay time.  Even good times.  Here are the final stats for the five people who participated.  I got third.

1	Charge That to the Game  Self Gloss	26 of 35	491
2	shuturcockholster  Jeff Simonsen	21 of 35	410
3	Familiar W/ Your Mom *  Mr. Stupid	19 of 35	392
4	Honey Badger don’t give a $h!t  Billy	17 of 35	369
5	I try to pick games  Dan	19 of 35	318