Divisional Round

It's only a few more hours till the Manning Broncos make their debut in the playoffs, and I'm nervous as shit. Even though the Ravens are by all accounts the inferior team... playing on the road... in a short week... with Joe Flacco... I somehow can't shake the feeling that this is going to be a much tougher game than the one 4 weeks ago where we lol'd them at M&T Bank stadium. Their defense is certainly healthier, and better at being acquitted on murder charges thanks to Ray Lewis. If he does that stupid dance I hope the entire stadium erupts in a "Felony" chant.

Peyton is apparently 0-3 in cold weather games in the playoffs, which this certainly is one, but let's be honest here: That sample size is bullshit, from several years ago (dating back to 2005), playing superior teams (twice the Patriots, once the Jets when they were better) and oh yeah all of those were road games since Manning was in a dome his entire career prior to coming here. Plus now he wears the glove, which he has slaughtered teams with the last two times he's worn it (over 600 yards, 6 TD's, 1 INT in those two games). I think by game time the nerves will subside, but this is that fucked up weekend traditionally in the NFL where favorites can lose to the hot team, and it's rarely 1 versus 2 in the championship game in either conference. But that's what I want, I want New England in Mile High in a week and a day. Let's make it happen.

Donkeys

Life is magical and full of joy. As a Broncos fan, I have two significant things I can celebrate tonight. In not too delicate terms, we're solid as a fucking rock and the rest of the league is covered in question marks. Fresh off a week when we beat the shit out of the now AFC North champion Baltimore Ravens, we saw Houston lose and New England look shaky today. All the while, Manning and the Broncos answered the question "what's better than 9 wins in a row?" with today's 10th straight win. We're on some next level shit here in Mile High.

The game against Cleveland was never in question, we scored on the first drive with a perfectly placed 22 yard cruise missile to the back of the end zone caught by Demarius Thomas, then on the second drive Manning put it up high for Eric Decker who came down with the 10 yard TD pass. In the second half we stepped on their throat with two more touchdowns, while only giving up 1 total TD on defense all day. D looked impressive all day, getting to the quarterback and stopping the Browns' running game. In summary today we handled our shit, while the rest of the contenders in the AFC couldn't stop stepping in shit.

The loss for Houston puts them at 12-3, a tie with us that they hold the tiebreaker for. But let's take a look at next week's matchup for both teams: We play the Chiefs, a team short on talent and heavy on hurt after the events at Arrowhead earlier this month. After Kansas City won their game on December 2nd against the Panthers with heavy hearts, the drained team has now lost 3 in a row, scoring only 1 TD in that span.

Houston, however, plays a pride game against the division rival Indianapolis, a team that regains their head coach Chuck Pagano, who has been cleared to come back to work after undergoing treatment for Leukemia. If there's one word the Texans should fear, its #chuckstrong, and if the Broncos win and the Texans lose, we'll be the number 1 seed. Couple that with a Patriots win, the Texans would fall to the 3 seed and lose their first round bye. Something about that seems too good to be true, but it is a distinct possibility now that the road to the Super Bowl in the AFC may go through Denver. Holy shit.

Then there's also the fact that the other "complete" team in the NFL, the 49ers, got their shit pushed in by the Seahawks tonight behind the strength of the 12th man at Century Link field (one of my favorite stadium nick names, the Clink). The aforementioned Patriots were down early and barely bested the god awful Jaguars. What does it all mean Basil? Well, we're sitting pretty right now, and with one week left in the regular season, I'm ready for the Broncos to go in to the playoffs with a head full of steam.

The Fifth Professional Sport

You know what I love? Extremely shitty TV. Tonight is the season finale of MTV's "The Challenge", which Bill Simmons coined as "the fifth professional sport". On this show, extremely stupid people, many of which are on steroids, compete in hair brained "challenges" which range from KY jelly wrestling to eating competitions and spelling bees, where a misspelled word results in the contestant being catapulted 50 feet into water. Couple these challenges with unmitigated alcohol abuse and a propensity for drama, and you have a terrible show I love to make fun of and feel better about myself while watching. Currently I am three glasses of wine deep in preparation for this Super Bowl-esque event, and I am giddy with excitement. This season pitted teams comprised of four cast members of various "Real World" seasons, and there was no shortage of people who stopped being nice, and started getting real.

At the moment I write this, there are only 3 teams left: Brooklyn, a savvy team of douche-canoes consisting of four cartoon characters. JD, who's so quiet I had to look up his name. Apparently he trains dolphins. Chet, a hipster who is fond of wearing hats that say "Chet", Sarah with her gloriously horrible tattoos and Devyn, probably the most hilarious of the bunch, and an ebony beauty queen. I know my last post was about not being a hater, and this may seem like hating, but my life would be so much less fun without these people, thus it is anything but. I celebrate their narcissism (N-A-R-C-I-S-S-I-S-M, Chet's bane in the spelling bee challenge) on a weekly basis.

Next we have team San Diego, a group of rookies who have managed to make it to the final challenge. This is perhaps the most volatile team of the bunch, as well as being the only other complete team of four. Before I go on, I should take a moment to explain the structure of the show for those unfamiliar. Each week's challenge yields a best and worst team. The best team, aka the "power team" is immune to the dreaded elimination round, the arena. The power team also has the privileged of hand picking a team to go into the arena, which makes for fascinatingly retarded political maneuvering  The worst team has an automatic ticket to the arena, and this matchup between the selected team and the worst team comprises the last 15 minutes of each show. Team San Diego has won several challenges, and has no love of team Brooklyn. A quick survey of their personalities makes the reasoning pretty clear. You have Zach, an arena football player, Frank who's not only gay as the day is long, but also clinically psychotic. Then for the females you have Sam who is utterly gender confused, and extremely sensitive, and then the light of my life, Ashley, who is by far the most attractive girl on the show. Their hatred for Brooklyn is evident by the fact that they flat out sent them to the arena two or three times. Each time Brooklyn was successful, and came back with a vengeance.

The last team, which has lost two of its members to the arena, is team Las Vegas. The two that still remain are Trishelle of Playboy fame, and Dustin, a southern pretty boy who at one point participated in something called "the Frat House" which is a paid subscription voyeur service for gay men. In this, attractive dudes are set up in a house rigged with cameras, and walk around naked all day. My boss at work, a gay man, has said that this is a very popular site in the gay community. The members of team Vegas that are no longer present are Alton, a black man who sprinkles HGH on his cheerios, and Nany, who was the object of one of Frank's insane drunken barrages. They were eliminated in a highly controversial arena where Trishelle welched on an agreement to volunteer herself for the arena after a poor performance in a challenge. After the two were sent home, Dustin was livid and it has taken all of 2 minutes and thirty seconds in the following episode to make amends. These people have the memories of goldfish.

With all that said, the teams are now competing in the finale, which took them to Africa. The teams with less than superb athletic specimins (Sam on team San Diego, and Devyn on team Brooklyn) will be the most interesting to watch. Typically the last challenge is some kind of long distance battle against the elements. Last year's battle of the exes took the finalists to Iceland, with a devestating 15 mile trek on snow shoes. This year appears to be in a desert, and I'm going to finish my glass of wine whenever someone bails due to heat stroke. Don't worry, I'll just go ahead and call in sick to work now to save myself the trouble.

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One of my favorite rabbit holes on the internet is YouTube. I frequently dive into videos with interesting thumb nails, and then continue on with related or recommended videos. Most of them are about music, usually live videos or covers done by talented drummers or guitarists, even some oddballs ones like a Game of Thrones theme on the Piano, or this guy who does death metal covers on his clarinet

It's no real secret I prefer extremely complicated and heavy music. I have a soft spot for classic rock and pop, but if I'm on my own kit, its almost exclusively metal. So recently I've been looking at some new bands and I came across one called The HAARP Machine. They seem really promising, with extremely technical riffs in horrifically complicated time signatures. The first video I saw of them was of their guitarist yawning through one of the most brutally complicated guitar parts I've ever heard. Any time you can make something this difficult look this easy, sign me the fuck up.

I'll be honest and say the first thing that drew me to the video was this guy's appearance. I'm not sure I've ever seen someone wearing traditionally Middle-Eastern attire like this in a progressive death metal video. Of course a quick survey of the comments section yields the obligatory "towel head" or "jihad core" comment, which is clearly the worst part about YouTube.

The ability to perform a drive-by via internet anonymity and shit all over someone with a hateful comment is a well documented problem in society today that I'm not sure we had to deal with 50 years ago. You see it all the time in any setting that has a "shield". Whether it be someone making passive aggressive moves against you in traffic that they would never do if they weren't separated from you by their soundproof car interior, or someone calling you retarded or gay or worse on Twitter, this type of behavior is rampant. And its not just 13-year-olds on XBox Live, it's grown fucking adults who feel compelled to spew hate while hiding behind a keyboard.

I'm not one to throw stones in a glass house, in my formative years I was one of these imbeciles challenging the world to "fight me in real life bro", but that stopped around the time I got into college. You hear it a lot from celebrities, being scrutinized for every comment they make and every bit of content they produce. And God forbid they make a grammatical error due to sending a Tweet from their iPhone. It's funny to see how they all handle it in a different way too. Some really internalize it, and shut down their Twitter accounts in short order. Some take the troll bait, and engage their digital adversaries. One of my favorite methods is used by Joe Rogan, who probably has no shortage of wannabe tough guys following him due to his UFC affiliation (note: I am a UFC fan who freely admits I have no idea how to fight). He simply Re-Tweets someone who's making an obviously overblown hateful reaction, with no comment. Then its a feeding frenzy as the guy who formerly had all of 35 followers now has a timeline full of "What the fuck is your problem dude?" from Joe's thousands of followers. That may not be fair to reverse the hater's polarity, but it sure is hilarious.

One thing I did appreciate was when YouTube allowed you to use your real name as your ID. To me, that's the first step of breaking down the wall of anonymity. You don't want a potential employer Googling your name and finding 600 comments using the word "retard" or "faggot". But YouTube stopped short by making it optional. I personally opted for this, but I wasn't really part of this growing problem. Maybe some day we'll have a reliable method of shaming these people in real life, and when that day comes, only the most hardcore of the internet trolls will continue this idiotic behavior.

50 Years With and Without Guns

Today I had an interesting discussion with myself (sup, only child) about a topic a lot of people have been talking about recently. With the mass shootings in Aurora (about 20 minutes away from where I sit now), Oregon, Wisconsin and now Newtown Connecticut (about 30 minutes away from where I grew up), there is a renewed fervor for gun control. The discussion I had with myself was complicated. I am a right leaning pragmatist, and I enjoy shooting shit that doesn't know its name, however I do not hold the party line with the NRA or any of the survivalist groups that think if the Federal Government gets a little snippy with its citizens, our second amendment rights will be enough to keep it in line. Perhaps guns don't kill people, perhaps people kill people, but perhaps the gun helps. As Eddie Izzard said in his famous 1998 comedy special "Dressed to Kill" (predating Columbine by a few months) "I think [the gun] helps. I just think just standing there going, 'Bang!' That's not going to kill too many people, is it? You'd have to be really dodgy on the heart to have that…”

In order to get anywhere on this discussion, I feel it necessary to extrapolate both arguments in my own completely arbitrary way. Let's start with full on gun control, how does that look in 50 years if we ban the sale of all guns today? Well, let's look at other illegal things that people like to have. We all know about prohibition, which turned bootlegging into organized crime into Goodfellas into one of my favorite TV shows of the late 90's early 2000's, the Sopranos (Woke up this morning/Got yourself a gun). OK, that one didn't go so well. How about drugs? Besides the fact that I'm sitting in Denver right now, elsewhere in our country Marijuana is illegal, yet people still find a way to smoke up. Some places more than others. You would be hard pressed to find anyone that feels the War on Drugs has been a success. The current violence in Mexico is strongly linked to cartels battling each other and law enforcement for control over the major drug pipelines.  Anyone want to take a trip to Tijuana to see the Donkey Show? Well my pasty white skin makes me a prime target for machete swinging practice, so I think I'll pass.

So banning those things didn't go so well. "But you can't compare apples to oranges! Drugs can be easily concealed and guns are cumbersome and in much less demand! No one has ever gone on methadone for a gun addiction!" Try telling that to Ted Nugent! Or anyone within 300 miles of an SEC football stadium! The point is, banning things doesn't get rid of them. If we banned all guns today, in 50 years we would still have several orders of magnitude more guns than Japan or England or Sweden, you know why? Because you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. People have guns, the government can't go around confiscating them because the numbers are just too gaudy. People are also used to having guns, so they will subvert the law in the newly furnished black market. Perhaps in 3 or 4 generations things would get better, as the redneck factor worked its way out of the gene pool via quad related accidents. But that doesn't help the children in Newtown, or the moviegoers in Aurora, or the students of Virginia Tech.

Now let's go the other way, what happens if we hang on to status quo and do nothing about gun control. The second amendment has been around since the Bill of Rights was signed in 1789 (enacted 1791) so let's just round that to 220 years. So the short answer is probably nothing would happen. Maybe we as a nation never reach that critical mass number where enough people have been directly affected by gun violence to force a change, as we haven't to this point. Maybe some people move to countries with less guns, and maybe the rest of the world lords their superior morality over our heads, but what else is new. One thing is for sure, we will still live in relative fear.

I went and saw the Dark Knight Rises a week after the shooting, and I realized if someone opened fire in the IMAX theater I was in (with 1.21 gigawatts of surround sound) I would have very little in the ways of a reaction until it was probably too late. I just don't know if that's a problem in London, or Stockholm, or Tokyo. The common thread to all these mass shootings is someone went nuts. Schizophrenia commonly manifests in a person's early 20's, and while I'm no doctor or psychologist, I just have to imagine that some form of mental illness precedes shooting a classroom full of 6-year-olds. With that being said, is it easier or more difficult for a person suffering from psychotic behavior to obtain a high capacity fire arm in a place where gun ownership is perfectly legal, or a place where fire arms are banned?

Many people vilify the NRA for their non-budging stance on gun control. The fact is, there's plenty of precedent suggesting that any legislation against your cause snowballs into banning your cause outright in short order. This is the principle of "zero sum games", one side cannot win without the other losing. This was the principle employed during trench warfare. We needed to surge and die for the literal inch of dirt, because that's an inch of dirt the enemy no longer has. The NRA has taken a look at other battles that were fought and lost by unpopular lobbies. Take smoking, I'm old enough to remember when smoking in restaurants was perfectly ok. I also remember the subsequent transitions to smoking sections in restaurants, then only smoking in the bar, then only outside, and now smokers are forced into little shaming areas several feet from the establishment. This was a battle fought and lost by the tobacco lobby, and the NRA watched and took notes. Hence their refusal to relent on assault weapons, which many NRA members in a moment of honesty may say have no intrinsic value to the legitimate uses of fire-arms over shotguns, pistols and hunting rifles. But giving up assault weapons means to them eventually giving up the rest, just ask the smokers.

So back to my extrapolation of the current status quo, the NRA would most likely say "in 50 years we would be in the exact same place we are now, free to own guns as was constitutionally guaranteed by our founding fathers". And they might be right, but are we possibly citizens of a different world than the founding fathers were? I would argue emphatically yes. I smoked a lot of pot in college, so this information might not be as accurate as I want it to be, but a quick survey of my personal belongings does not include the following: a slave, a musket, a powdered wig, a plantation or a healthy hatred of the Royal British Army. That's because I was born in the 1980's, not the 1780's. Our world is vastly different now, and a gun is not a part of my every day life. I very much understand people who hunt, it is one of the hobbies I would very much like to get into later in life. And I also understand people who want to defend their homes and their families against intruders who are also able to wield guns. This legislation would not come without sacrifices, and those legitimate uses of guns would be the collateral damage. Is that too much to sacrifice? Maybe so, I tend to err on the side of sovereignty. One place we can start however is how we go about treating mental illness in this country. Like I said, no one shoots a room full of 6-year-olds without some severe mental illness. But that's a discussion for another time.