Category Archives: Humor

The Onion’s top sports stories of 2005

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onionsports_team.article.jpgThe Onion includes several Texas-related entries in its satirical end-of-the-year list of the top sports stories of 2005:

Apr. 5óThe Baylor women’s basketball team defeats Michigan State to win the NCAA women’s championship, showing the nation and their own university what a Baylor team can do when it works hard, plays as a team, and does not conspire to murder one another.
Dec. 11óThe Houston Texans, searching desperately for a way to improve and threatened by the potential for awfulness displayed by the Green Bay Packers, voluntarily forfeit the remainder of the 2005 season in order to draft Heisman Trophy-winning running back Reggie Bush of USC.
Dec. 12óUSC Trojans running back Reggie Bush announces that he has done much soul-searching and has decided to stay in school in order to complete his college degree, lead the Trojans to another national championship, and avoid playing for the Houston Texans.

Ouch! And while on the subject of tough football seasons, this Ebay seller’s idea — if successful — could generate a flood of similar offers from Houston Texan fans. 12/28/05 Update: And here is the rest of the story.

A Big Ad

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Carlton Draught.jpgMy two teenage boys recommended the link for this Carlton Draught (an Australian beer) commercial, I think because they want an easy link to it for their friends. Maybe the friends will read a few other posts while they here, so what the heck. Besides, the commercial is pretty darn impressive. Hat tip to Adrianne Truett for the link.

“Coach, did you see that guy’s tattoo?’

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adam_sandler6.jpgDo you recall me telling you that some folks in Texas take high school football very seriously? In the “you can’t make this stuff up” category, the following is from this article in today’s Chronicle:

Bigger. Faster. Better beards.
Looking back now, it should have been obvious that something was amiss about the adult football team that Texas Christian School fielded three weeks ago in Austin.
Not to mention the tattoos.
“Some of the guys had tattoos and full beards and looked like they were like 25,” Not Your Ordinary School senior running back David Johnson said of his opponents that Oct. 28 afternoon. “At the time, we thought they were just sort of big.
“Now we see why they looked so old.”
It turns out Johnson and his team unwittingly played a six-man team made up of college-age players, coached by Texas Christian [High School]’s Herc Palmquist. The Texas Christian varsity team was told the game had been canceled and they had the night off.
Instead, Palmquist brought eight college-age players to play what he called a “pickup game,” which NYOS won 28-18.
Now, Palmquist is serving a five-game suspension leveled by the Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools, which governs Texas Christian athletics.

Read the entire article. If Coach Palmquist gets canned over this, perhaps he could scout for the Texans? On the other hand, given that Texas Christian lost the game even while using college-age players, maybe not.

An interesting English tradition

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KingsCollege.jpgAs noted earlier here and here, I enjoy the British tradition of witty obituaries, which often provide a hilarious review of the failings, idiosyncracies and peccadilloes of the deceased.
In that regard, this Wall Street Journal ($) article examines the tradition of Cambridge University’s King’s College in regard to publishing obituaries of its alumni that, as the article puts it, reflect “an anthropological study of the eccentric ways of the British intelligentsia.” For example, the Journal describes the obituary of the late novelist Simon Arthur Noel Raven, whose writing was described by some as “smut for its own sake”:

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A couple of good ones

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letterman.jpgjayleno.jpgA couple of good ones to pass along to friends as we move on toward the weekend. First, from Letterman:

“We’ve had so much rain here this week. Do you realize that we are this close to being ignored by FEMA!”

Then, from Leno on the Minnesota Vikings players’ recent Lake Minnetonka escapade:

“What are they, 1-3? That’s the only offensive thing they’ve done all season.”

Guardian profiles Jon Stewart

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jonstewart.jpgThis Guardian article profiles Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart, who reveals that his real name is Jonathan Stewart Leibowitz and why he dropped his last name for show business purposes:

“I’m not a self-hating Jew. Actually, to borrow a line from Lenny Bruce, I just thought Leibowitz was too Hollywood.”

In the meantime, while discussing celebrities, the Onion reports that Lance Armstrong recently confronted an endurance test that almost overwhelmed him.

A key tip for dealing with rattlesnakes

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rattler.jpgOne of the best parts of the Houston Chronicle for many years has been the newspaper’s Hunting and Outdoors section of its sports section. Inasmuch as my reaction to finding a rattlesnake would have been the same as the fellow’s reaction as described in the following Chronicle article, I was glad to learn something from the Chronicle piece about dealing with dead rattlesnakes:

Even a dead rattlesnake can hurt you. Just ask Trey Hanover of College Station.
On Labor Day weekend, Hanover and his father, Tommy Hanover, were working on their deer lease when they killed a big rattler. They shot the snake’s head off with a shotgun and loaded the carcass in the truck to show other hunters on their lease that they needed to be careful.

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Texan fans in full revolt

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reliant stadium 4.jpgThe Texans firing of offensive coordinator Chris Palmer this morning did little to quell the anger of Texan fans over yesterday’s debacle, one of whom emailed me as follows:

“The biggest joke of all is leaving the roof open. On Friday, I got an e-mail telling me that the roof would be open and that I should stay hydrated during the game. I couldn’t believe they were sending out a heat related medical advisory on a stadium that has air conditioning. During the first year of the new stadium, management said it was going to keep the roof open in order to have an advantage over the teams that didn’t practice in the Texas heat. So, yesterday, the Texans — whose bench is on the sunny side of the field — sat there and baked. The Steelers had air-conditioned benches (Texans not) and sat in the shade. Moreover, the Texans lost whatever home field advantage we might have had because half of the seats were emptied by people seeking refuge from the sun. What a bunch of Braniacs.”

Key hint to the Texans’ front office — the only thing worse than an angry fan is an angry fan who is also hot and sweaty after boiling in the sun for three hours.
Looks like it’s going to be a long season, folks.

Do you ever feel this way?

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frustration.jpgTheodore Dalrymple is probably best known for his weekly columns in The Spectator and his essays in the American quarterly City Journal. He is a psychiatrist working in an inner city area in Britain where he is affiliated with a large hospital and a prison. His columns report on the lifestyles and ways of thinking of Britain’s growing underclass, and in his book, Life at the Bottom, he warns that this underclass culture is spreading through society.
In his latest City Journal piece, Mr. Dalrymple expresses the frustration that he feels in responding to the various pooh-bah theories that seem to abound these days:

In Australia recently, I shared a public platform with an educationist, who had won awards for social innovation in the field of education for disadvantaged minorities. I was looking forward to what she had to say.
I was soon in a towering rage, however. She uttered some of the most foolish cliches of radical education theory, now about 40 years old—theories that I had fondly thought were now behind us, . . .
Halfway through my own reply, however, I suddenly became bored. Why do I spend so much time arguing against such obvious rubbish, which should be both self-refuting and auto-satirizing the moment someone utters it? Why not just go and read a good book?
The problem is that nonsense can and does go by default. It wins the argument by sheer persistence, by inexhaustible re-iteration, by staying at the meeting when everyone else has gone home, by monomania, by boring people into submission and indifference. And the reward of monomania? Power.

Read the entire piece. Hat tip to Craig Newmark for the link to Mr. Dalrymple’s latest.

“Who’s laughing now, Mister?”

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catfish_over.jpgDuring the U.S. Open Tennis Tournament, Lexus has been running a clever series of commercials featuring U.S. tennis star Andy Roddick. The series — called “On the Road with Andy Roddick” — features five different people talking to Mr. Roddick about various subjects while cruising with him in a convertible Lexus.
Click here to watch each of the five commercials. My favorite: “Catfish”