Hard dudes. Quick deaths. Few words.

First person plural: off. Blame this on cold medicine.

I should mention that my Dad is the oddest person I’ve ever met. He is and has always been a quantum person: blip! he’s here, joking, laughing, fully engaged and charismatic in the way men who claim membership in the “Smiling Irish Bastard Hall of Fame” can be. (I have next to no idea where my family actually hails from, it’s just the phrase and the similarity that matter most here, not the documented truth.)

Then, in a minute–blip! Gone. He still stands in front of you, or next to you, but in an instant his mind has gone somewhere completely alien and unreachable to you. Someone once wrote of Dean Martin that he must be either the deepest soul on the planet, so elusive was he, or that he was the shallowest. I’m never really sure of either, but the two do share an ethos of being phenomenally elusive people as hard to hit square on as Linnie Patrick coming through the hole. Years can pass without any real, substantive information being exchanged in conversation, and I have, on occasion, written down what I know about my dad using notebook pad. I don’t get past the second page. There is not enough information to fill the pages, thus saving the world from the 3,923,918th anguished daddy-issues bildungsroman.

(You all owe him a note of thanks. I forward them on for you happily.)

Linnie Patrick is a deliberate reference here: Linnie played for Alabama and was quicksilver in cleats when Bear Bryant coached at the University of Alabama. My father met Bryant once–possibly more, but again, information here is scarce–through the equally vaguely defined relationship my grandfather claimed with Bryant. All I know is my grandfather, a horse-trainer who shuttled around the country from track to track, knew Bryant in some degree and had enough of a connection to wangle a visit and (apocryphally) a scholarship offer for my aunt. I’d love to elaborate, but I can’t. That is all I know, leading to the endless stream of qualifiers, parentheses, and limiting modifiers. I don’t know much, and like 99.9 percent of history, it has evaporated into an oblivion of forgetting, half-memory, or denial.
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Kirk Herbstreit has his Columbus, Ohio home for sale, meaning he’s got either upgrade or transfer plans afoot for the Herbstreit clan. TSD’s not sure where he’s going, but the pics of the place make it seem like a nice buy even in the worst American real estate market in bleems. Is that a horseshoe-shaped stairway with a horseshoe shaped archway at the top? Yes, yes it is.

Herbstreit construction: homes for men, and their highlights.

Tressel’s house in in there, too, and sadly there’s no visible brothel, trebuchet big enough to fire a man with, or fountain of blood in the picture. Those must be in the back.

It’s more embarrassing than bad, or depending on your viewpoint, not bad at all, but here’s what we were talking about in the Curious Index this morning when we were talking about this being a bad day for Wake Forest: pictures that appear to be Riley Skinner posing nude for the camera.

Remember, kids: it all ends up on the internet. If there’s a video of you being ball-gagged and dominated by a prominent Canadian sex ed expert, don’t go around expecting it not to pop up somewhere. And if it does pop up somewhere…Sue Johanson, you’re a dead woman, you hear! A dead woman!

Sue, you promised!

This week’s cup runneth over with points for Missouri and some bonus foam on that rapsheetaccino for Tennessee. The Big Board is, as always, brought to you by Brian, who is hung like Reggie F’n Nelson.

Missouri earned points we neglected to include last week, mostly because we couldn’t believe anyone not named Robert Downey, Jr. could be caught with such a diverse array of recreational drugs. And yet he exists: late of the Missouri football team, backup defensive tackle John Stull was arrested on Jan. 11th and is charged with two felony counts of drug possession, one misdemeanor count of drug possession, suspicion of possessing drug paraphernalia, possession of intoxicating liquor as a minor and use of a false identification.

Felony drug possession is a step above your average weed-toting Gator-inhalator charge, especially when you’re talking about coke and pills, which is precisely the case in Stull’s case. Three points each for those, one point for the misdemeanors, and we’ve cooked up a 10 point kilo of points for Missouri that was miscounted as 3 last week. We, like the Gainesville Sun, regret the error.

The asterisk by the score is significant, though: it indicates an early watch on the Ellis T. Jones III award, meaning the award for the single largest score for an individual. If Missouri stays clean for the rest of the Fulmer Cup race, we would award Stull the ET3 award, and give the program award to someone else. The point is to account for programmatic, patterned bad behavior ind a single program, not one outlier on an otherwise well-behaved team. Thus the little octopus hovering in the northeast corner up there.

Officer, I don’t like your tone. Tennessee lineman Anthony Parker picks up a bullshitty disorderly conduct charge, but a point is a point is a point here. Why is it a a bit bullshittish? Because Parker’s biggest crime seems to be hollerin’ and cussin’, a time-honored pasttime in Tennessee from what we can remember from our tenure in the Parallelogram.

Knoxville Police Department spokesperson Darrell DeBusk said Parker, 21, was arrested in the parking lot of the Sutters Mill Apartment complex just after midnight Saturday morning.

Henard then arrested Parker and took him to the detention center . . . .

That’s why it’s bullshit, but you don’t quiet down when the cops come a-callin’, and you get-a disorderly conduct charge and one point for the Vols, who are already making an outstanding claim in the early paces of the Fulmer Cup race. Tradition never graduates! WOOOOOOOOO!!! This is ourrrrrr country…..

And remember…Ole Miss picks up points for disorderly as well. We still think they’re blameless due to the intoxicating effects of erotic chicken.

P.S. Texas A&M’s points were an error, as well–the incident occurred during the season, and is not eligible.

Gainesville Sun, you are error.

Bloggers are irresponsible. Factless. Rife with innuendo and bleeding half-truths. Unbound by any ethic or rule, those rapscallions! Why, if I had half a mind I’d….

In a Thursday recruiting story, The Sun inaccurately reported that All-America wide receiver Julio Jones was sent home early from his University of Florida visit by the coaches and that Jones, who is from Foley, Ala., was recruiting for Oklahoma while he was in Gainesville.
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Sources confirmed Thursday that Jones, in fact, stayed for his entire visit and had not done any recruiting for another school. The Sun regrets the errors.

Good fucking night–error doesn’t cover what a story accusing a player of recruiting for a rival school during the heated peak of handshake season is. Just trying to put together a comparable headline boggles the imagination:

On Wednesday, the Sun reported that Julio Jones stabbed Florida defensive coordinator Greg Mattison with a car key for misusing the “who/whom” combination in a sentence. Jones also did not kidnap four recruits and force them to sign letters of commitment to “The University of Satan” while threatening them with a grub hoe, nor did he commit unnatural acts of non-coercive simulated sodomy with a mailbox on 13th Street early Saturday morning. We regret the error.”

Thanks for coming Juilo. The Gainesville Sun hopes you enjoy your time in Tuscaloosa or Norman.