Those Limey Fruitcakes!

Well it's that time of four year cycle again when I desperately try to care about soccer known as the World Cup. The World Cup kicks off tomorrow with the two greatest countries on Earth duking it out: Mexico and South Africa. Woo hoo? Then we get the heated rivalry between... Uruguay and France? Yay? It's hard to pinpoint why I can't get more excited about the World Cup. It's not that I hate soccer, as I was once the Grim Reaper of Soccer (which is a blog post for another time). Part of it is undoubtedly that outside of the USA & the countries I hate (I still do not understand how North Korea got into this tournament. Won't the entire team defect at the first opportunity? Barring that, won't a red card result in execution? It seems like a high risk, low reward team, although I guess an extra ration card would be pretty tempting but I digress), I do not really get many of the rivalries. I understand the winner of the match between France and Germany gets Alsace-Lorraine but besides that, very few matches mean anything. Without the bigger picture, its just a bunch of guys running up and down the field for 2 hours, maybe scoring once or twice and flopping wildly every other kick. However, just like in 2006, I will give soccer a chance & will watch as many matches as I can.

However, it is impossible for me to ignore the biggest and best match of the first round: the United States & England. This is a rematch of not only the American Revolution, but also the War of 1812. Sure, it's one thing to be a free and sovereign nation but without having a really good soccer team, what's the point?! Besides, you know, inventing much better sports such as baseball, basketball, and football. But besides that, there is a much more sinister angle to this match.

As everyone with a pulse knows, the worst oil spill in the history of all creation has been going on for the past eternity (at least in terms of news coverage). And who happens to own the oil well that won't stop leaking? British Petroleum! Like every good American, I refuse to acknowledge that there is a difference between Britain and England (Wales can suck it!). Obviously, BP is a co-conspirator with the English National Team. But how does BP destroying the Gulf Coast help the English "football" (or "footie" as they call it across the pond, as told to me by a bonafide limey) team?

"I'm here to kick ass and drink cups of tea... and I'm all out of tea!"

First, the initial oil spill is just now reaching the scenic Gulf coast, ruining the best beaches in America. Since the spill has kept spilling for weeks and weeks, the beaches could be under siege for the duration of the World Cup. This means that the World Cup has one less major competitor in the category of "Stuff to Do in the Summer". Thus, more people will tune into the World Cup. Simultaneously, the American team will be depressed because they know that even if they win the World Cup, they still won't be able to enjoy the Gulf beaches afterward. In their weakened emotional state, the American team will be vulnerable to the relentless dry humor and sarcasm of the English team. Every time we try to pass the ball, an Englishman will say "Oh yes, that seemed well practiced" or "Maybe you'll be on SportsCenter for a few seconds today". Eventually, the American team will fall to the taunting and be humiliated by the Limey Fruitcakes (that's the name of the English National Team). Since the beaches are closed down due to Oil Suffocation, a greater number (read: any) of American households will be exposed to the humiliating taunts of the Limey Fruitcakes. This will cause nationwide depression and leave us vulnerable to invasion by the hated Redcoats!

This could be Murfreesboro!

At least, that's how the English plan things will go. Of course, the United States of America has a proud history of foiling English plans. Remember the Revolutionary War? I think history will repeat itself. That is to say, we'll play hard for the first half but be hopelessly overwhelmed. Then we'll bring in a couple French players to push us over the top!

P.S. I know I said I would talk about Iron Man 2 & Robin Hood. So here are my abridged reviews

Iron Man 2- Don Cheadle is Iron Man too! Good fun, but a bit too much in love with sci-fi. You know it's bad when you're starting to lose three college aged men who love video games with your techno-babble.

Robin Hood- It's just like Gladiator in medieval England. Except for the end, when it becomes Saving Private Ryan in medieval England. Shot for shot, it is the Normandy scene from Saving Private Ryan but with armor & arrows instead of machine guns and grenades. They even have a man get set on fire.

Maypocalypse Now

Fact: Over the past two years, I have updated the English Muffin Power Hour at random intervals. Yet none of them ever occurred in the month of May. Why?

First and foremost, May is the shortest month of the year, in terms of the number of letters. You might think that it's a petty and trivial reason, but I've never let that stop me before. It's just impossible to respect a month that refuses to use so much of the alphabet. Second, MTSU does a fantastic job of demanding I write as many papers as possible at the end of the semester so the last thing I want to do. Also, the first half of the month is basically the End of the Days. Between finals, moving out, moving in, unpacking, and fending off wolves with my bare hands (although bear hands would make it easier), I consider myself lucky to have all my limbs intact this time of year. Most importantly, since all of my friends are equally exhausted by this point in the year, it means no one has the energy to leave town for an extended period of time. In my brain trust alone, I will have friends visiting California, Alaska, Belgium, South Africa, and the very center of the Earth starting in June. So I figure it's better to hang out with them before they get carried off to the sea by crabs/tricked by hippies/be appointed Duchess of Waffles/held hostage by the Prawn Aliens/become king of the mole people. In fact, despite my every intention to update this month, this is my third attempt at this post

Unfortunately, it seems as though justifying a lack of content is not quite as entertaining as actual content. So I figure I'll talk a bit about some of the many adventures I have been the last post.

Graduation: It's hard to believe that I'm a college graduate. Maybe I had raised my expectations too high, but I was a bit disappointed by my diploma after I picked it up. It was a very nice sheet of paper and it came with a lovely case/coaster (that reminds me, I need to go frame shopping later). Personally, I expected the diploma to descend from the heavens carried by the most majestic gryphons in the land, illuminated by a single ray of light that parts the gray clouds, lettered in gold on a diploma carved from platinum and a case embroidered with mithril. What else could I have been working towards over the past 18 years of education? The ceremony itself was another story. The events leading up to the ceremony were panicky and chaotic even by my standards.

But first, a little explanation is required. For the second year in a row, the RA on my floor ingloriously abandoned ship with less than six weeks left in the semester, which meant I was responsible for checking out a floor of freshman. Then the Nashville Flood delayed my Monday night exam to Friday night, which meant I was still giving scholarly presentations with 18 hours before graduation. The net result of all this was I had no time to set out an outfit for graduation. I was one well placed packed box away from having an Angus Young look; I had remembered my dress shirt but could not find any dress pants and had to make do with shorts. Fortunately for the integrity of both Graduation and AC/DC, I found a pair of long pants in a box I had in my car and got to graduation a mere half hour after I was supposed to (Depressing Fact: I still was not near the last person to show up).

The actual ceremony itself was another story. The whole thing was delayed by thirty minutes because the earlier graduation didn't get done in a timely fashion. I feel like MTSU's graduation classes are getting big enough that we should really have three graduation ceremonies: Friday night, Saturday morning, and Saturday afternoon. Then we wouldn't have to try to get through 2,000 names in an hour and a half. But I digress. There were three types of graduates attending the ceremony: graduates who were listening to their iPods, graduates who were texting, and graduates who were bored not only out of their minds, but out of their souls. My iPod was MIA since March through circumstances that I still do not understand to this very day, and I had left my cell phone in the car (though I don't know if that was intentional or the byproduct of the Pants Frenzy). Thus, I was bored out of my soul. Dr. McPhee gave a good speech about how MTSU is awesome and is continuing to enhance its awesomeness department. However, the commencement speaker was a complete failure. His speech had no purpose beyond "be brief" and it failed in that regard. They say that you will not remember the commencement speech years later but I didn't remember it later that day.

The oddest part was the person who announced the graduates from the College of Liberal Arts. Ominously, she started the list by calling it the "College of Liberial (sic) Arts". Sure, she corrected herself, but I think it’s unacceptable for any professor to not understand how the name of their college is pronounced. Additionally, she could pronounce a name like "Kwame Deshontrius N!xau" but mispronounced Buchanan (she pronounced in Buck-han-an). Maybe she decided she would mix it up to see if anyone was paying attention.

However, despite my myriad of complaints, it was a truly overwhelming experience to see that the educational war had, at long last, come to an end for me. After nearly twenty years of notes, tests, papers, presentations, and exams, it had all come to a glorious end. And I'll be darned if I didn't feel proud of it, gryphons or not.

Next time: Iron Man 2, Robin Hood, and Misadventures in Biking

Mmmm... Roethlis-burgers

So NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has officially suspended Ben "No Means Yes" Roethlisberger for six games, which can be reduced to four if he can show that he'll keep Big Ben safely in the pocket. Now, the dangerous part about this suspension is that "Silence is Consent" Roethlisberger was never actually charged with a crime. The good news is Goodell doesn't really care about "due process" because he can suspend you for character issues. And this is a character issue. Besides the whole consent debacle (I am not opening that can of worms, although the Georgia case was more likely to be assault than the Vegas case), Roethlisberger is committing an even graver crime. He is treading on the Macking Grounds for College Playas. Big Ben is 28 years old, a multi-millionaire, and a Super Bowl winning quarterback. So why is he picking up 20 year olds at clubs? That's the job of the college-aged playa! It disrupts the natural order and is proven, with actual mathematics, to be down right creepy.

That's right, it can be mathematically derived that Big Ben's actions are creepy. I'm now going to combine two of my favorite hobbies: quantifying intangible feelings and stealing things from Wikipedia. Wikipedia teaches us that the standard, non-creepy age disparity in pimpin' is A(H)>(A(P)/2)+7, where A(H) is the Age of the Honey and A(P) is the Age of the Playa. A quick plugging shows us the Roethlisberger numbers:

(28/2) + 7 = 14 + 7 = 21

Clearly, Roethlisberger is breaking the creepiness threshold by hitting on 20 year old honeys. He's also violating the right of Milledgeville playas to mack on fine honeys. I stand in solidarity with my Georgian pimpin' brethren! No NFL Quarterbacks in College Bars (unless they have graduated in the past two years, at which point they are granted tolerance).

WARNING: I start legitimately talking about sports now. If you are a sassy and/or fine honey, please take caution.

Full disclosure, I am a Steelers fan. That said, I still agree with Goodell on this one. I probably wouldn't have included the wishy-washy conditional part of the suspension, but I guess he has to include some way of saying Big Ben has been rehabilitated. The interesting part is that this suspension comes down the day before the draft, which means for the next 24 hours (edit: now it's 5 hours), every NFL fan worth his salt is free to speculate on if the Steelers will trade Roethlisberger. If I had a top ten pick, I would not trade for Big Ben. He gets sacked more often than Rome in the 5th century AD (fact: ladies love classical history jokes) and teams that are bad enough to have a top ten pick are characterized by having a porous line. The only team I could see making a move for Big Ben is Oakland. Why?

1. They have the #8 pick, which means that they would only give up a reasonably awesome prospect.
2. JaMarcus Russell is a black hole of failure, and the entire organization is unable to escape the pull of his fail.
3. Al Davis is genuinely insane, and will want to challenge Roethlisberger to a helmet-less motorcycle race.
4. Most of Roethlisberger's uniform won't need to be changed. Just replace the gold with silver, the Steelers with Raiders, and the hope for a Hall of Fame career with soul-crushing despair.

I could go on, however, I'm technically finishing this post in Public Finance. What? I can have senioritis too!

It's April?!

Oh man, how can it already be the second week of April? I was going to update this last week, but I was attacked by a Cold from Hell. It was never bad enough that I wanted to go to the doctor, but it never went away (as I write this now, I'm still dealing with a bit of a cough). Tragically, my to-do list this week is about 20 items long and none of them include "Update Blog", "Be Awesome", or "Play lots video games" (N.B. if you are a sassy/fine honey, I meant to write "write poetry while doing 100 situps", I just said the thing about the video games so I could relate to the reader). In retrospect, it might have been a bit much to try juggling 18 hours, graduation, a job hunt, and running an honors society.

However, there is some good news. I am all clear to graduate on May 8th starting at 1 pm. I've also got a really interesting presentation in Econometrics about the determinants of Quarterback pay coming up on Thursday. The downside is that econometrics requires actual math to support my arguments, I actually have to spend time analyzing my data. I will try to update the blog again after that craziness has passed (because once that test is done then I have nothing to do in that class until May 6th except "listen" to other presentations).

However, I suppose it's become the norm for me to include some element of humor to my post. So I will end with easily the trippiest level in any Rock Band game ever. Just watch the background rather than the crazy notes.



I think this is cutting edge acid trip simulation technology. It almost makes the lyrics sensible. And with that, I bid you a fond goo goo g'joob.

P.S. Question: Am I the eggman, the walrus, or both?

My Week: In Movie Clip Style

Yes, I'm actually finding time to blog twice this week. In this scene, the role of Hunter Barry is played by Man in Cowboy Hat, Graduation is played by the Truck, Graduation Paperwork is played by the gun-toting drug dealers, and Economics Homework will be played by the dog.

Okay, now that that's explained, allow me to elaborate. I have just finished up roughly a month's worth of getting papers filled out, signed, stamped, and signed again in order to graduate in May (related note: OHMYGODHOWCANIBEGRADUATING?!). In the process of filling out one of the forms, I discover that I am missing a class needed for my Econ degree. I was surprised because I double-checked before this semester started and I knew I had all the advanced courses I need, from Econometrics to the Development of Third World Economies to Another Intimidating Sounding yet Impressive Course Title. It turns out the course I needed was "Intro to Math in Social Sciences". Interestingly enough, despite being an intro course, it's not needed as a prerequisite for any of the courses offered in Economics. Although I suspect that may be more a symptom of the department rather than the class. After all, despite Calculus being required for the degree, it was not a prerequisite for Microeconomic Theory (aka Applied Calculus). And that's how I gained an extensive knowledge of derivatives before opening a calc book. But I digress.

Now, I am a reasonable man, but it appears that the Records Department would not accept that having passed every Upper Division Economics course I needed for a degree was a sufficient "intro". Luckily, after much loophole searching, I discovered I didn't need a math course I was in this semester. So I fill out the course substitution work and sell my advisor on the idea. I take it to the Econ Office, who tells me I need the approval of the Math Department. The Math Department Chair says he can't actually sign it, but he can give his endorsement for the substitution. However, he'll only endorse it if another math professor agrees with it. So we find a math teacher who promptly agrees with me. I go back to the Econ Building and I'm told to get the information systems chair to sign it. However, he's also hesitant and demands a talk with me before signing it, and then goes over to the chair of the Econ Department to sign it. The Econ Chair asks for an explanation and by now, the fourth telling, I had perfected the story. The IS Chair sends me out of the room to talk with the Econ Chair and I ultimately find out it was the Econ chair's call all along and he approved it. The good news is that counted as my exercise for the day!

Mark Twain say what?

So I'm reading Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain these days. Don't mistake that for me actually being able to enjoy reading a book, as MTSU is determined the suck every last moment of my fleeting time here with work (apparently there are legitimate reasons why no one takes 18 hours their last semester. I thought it was just superstition!). I came across an interesting passage in which Mr. Twain discusses how having a freakishly good memory like one that, for instance, was able to recite large portions of Monty Python from memory (bonus story: one day in Medieval History, Dr. Haas challenged me to recite the Spanish Inquisition sketch from memory to prove how few things people have memorized. He immediately regretted that challenge.). But I digress. Twain's exact words were

Such a memory as that is a great misfortune. To it, all occurrences are of the same size. Its possessor cannot distinguish an interesting circumstance from an uninteresting one. As a talker, he is bound to clog his narrative with tiresome details and make himself an insufferable bore.

Oh no, he didn't! Mark Twain has called out my literary go-to technique "But I digress" from 130 years in the past. Well let me tell you something, Mark Twain, if that is your real name, WHICH IT ISN'T, all my details are interesting. Why? Because I sort memories into Awesome and Extra Awesome, based off of their relevance to most conversation. Awesome categories such as the Best Ninja Turtles, the date of the Battle of Fredericksburg, and the Greatest School Computer Game are stored in long term storage, only to be brought up in very specific circumstances (by the way, the answers to those questions are Donatello, December 13th 1862, and DinoPark Tycoon respectively. editor's note: I just realized those answers were all alliterative. My subconscious must be really well organized! Probably just grabbed a bunch of random answers from the "D" file and updated his Facebook with the time he saved.). Extra Awesome details see the light of day a lot more often, such as How Kansas Could Lose in the Second Round, Who I Don't want to Escape the Zombie Horde with, and Who is Most Likely a Hobbit in Disguise (the answer to all three of those questions is Bean. He had Kansas winning it all, which doomed him. I've seen him play Left 4 Dead so he's more likely to run away from the zombies and I can't outrun him; so the zombies would either overwhelm me or catch me first. And finally, he's incredibly reluctant to adventure, can't grow a beard, is about 4 feet tall and lives in a hole in the ground [I may have made that part up].).

But you're not getting off that easily, Mr. Greatest American Humorist of His Age! I've read your book (Life on the Mississippi) and guess what? Most of chapter 2 is just Huck Finn. I don't mean thematically similar, I mean you literally 19th century copied and pasted a chapter from Huck Finn into your book. What's the matter? Was 59 chapters not enough for your book? (bonus fact: Life on the Mississippi was actually published before Huck Finn came out. In a way, it was the world's first viral marketing campaign, which is pretty cool in retrospect. But Twain should have known that the future would become the past and one day mentioning his one book in his other book would cause countless people to have flashbacks to 11th grade English. The horror... the horror...). But I digress. My point is that I may ramble at times, at least I didn't have to steal my name from my workplace!

Did you think just because William Faulkner called you "the father of American literature" that means you can trash-talk whatever blogs you want? Because that right is actually promised by the First Amendment and you don't have to be putting up with Faulkner's crap to do that. Also, there will be retaliation from the blog itself.

P.S. Graduation craziness has died down a bit so I will chat about my adventures in PCB next!