Juxtaposition is fun! Step one:

Mendenhall shared a story with reporters about how he took his wife, Holly, on a spring recruiting trip to New Orleans once and called it a “very unique experience.”

“When I came out, Holly was in the car, and kids were surrounding the car,” he said. “So we both learned our lesson. Yeah, it is a unique place. A little faster than what I am accustomed to, I would say.”

Step two!

And that’s why juxtaposition is fun! (HT: Allen)

Penn State is having their “PSU Fan Rap Contest,” meaning they want Penn State fans and students to submit their own original compositions honoring Nittany Lion football. If you’ve watched Snowman’s video embedded above, you know that the contest is a foregone conclusion. (Hot finger snappin’ death: he’s got enough to go ’round, h8ers. SNAP. DIE.)

The best two aren’t actually bad. There’s Kake, who tells you he’s a rapper by drinking grape soda on camera, and Intrepid, who has the best balance of being task-focused (raps about PSU and gets the theme) and says of Joe Paterno: “dude’s been in more bowls than a spoon,” which is a cocktail-worthy line in any work. Neither of them snap semi-rhythmically, though, and that’s what’s gonna cost them in the end.

No one has taken advantage of the obvious “Zombie” sample, yet, but we encourage those who would like to do this to go ahead and do it. If you dress up as Joe Paterno and eat people dressed up as Jim Tressel and Patrick Fitzgerald, we’ll throw the full weight of our voting bloc behind your submission. Doubt the electoral power of Mingovia at your own risk, auslander.

(HT: BSD)

Clayton Bigsby thinks this headline is fabulous.

It’s still on their front page, if you’d like to check it for yourself. (HT: Commenter “Tedd Dupay.” You won this bet, Tedd.)

Ethnographic arguments are fun: Minnesotans are boring 364 days out of the year because they’re all Scandinavians! (And one day out of the year they get drunk, burn down their houses and run into the woods crying!) New Yorkers are multi-ethnic, and therefore pains in the asses in every single way and ready to slaughter each other at the drop of a hat! Many Louisianans are descended from French settlers, and therefore have a taste for organ meats, are always late, and are huge fans of sex with multiple partners.

Don’t blame me. Blame my Viking heritage.

As this last sentence illustrates, every now and then ethnography might actually be a compelling explanation for a place’s distinct milieu. More often than not, it’s a crutch for hip-pocket analysis of the most windbaggish sort:

In that hierarchal society, the leader of men — the general in battle, the coach in football — is a more paramount figure. Nick Saban at Alabama is Stonewall Jackson, Steve Spurrier at South Carolina is Jeb Stuart. (Can’t be any Robert E. Lee, because Bear Bryant took that with him to the grave.) So, you add the Celtic warrior ethic to the great leader concept and … listen here, y’all got yourself one whale of a football team.

As much as we’d like to see Spurrier with an ostrich plume in his visor, the insistence of anyone above the Mason-Dixon that the reason Southerners–a uniform group with universal motivations, of course–do anything hearkens back to the Plantation economy and some kind of cracked, viral theory of culture is baffling and yet persistent. No real causation, no real data, just the fun kind of connect-the-dots-now-gimme-Ph.D stuff conveniently ignoring football’s rampant popularity elsewhere in the Big 12 and Big Ten.

Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have to finish up this julep and observe the progress on the back forty.

Ever heard of Jeremiah Wright? He’s the Muslim preacher who taught Obama about raising the capital gains tax to 75% in order to fund gay weddings and DESTROY THIS COUNTRY. He hates America, too.

He has many stupid things to say, and this includes interesting facts about marching bands, too! Watch his insightful take on marching bands as excerpted by the Colbert Report. White ones do it like this NAH DINK NAH DINK NAH! Black ones be like this OOM CHA CHA BOOM CHA CHA BOOM!

Never mind that FAMU’s every bit as precise as a major standard “European” style marching band, and that their practice sessions are less band rehearsals than football drills. They’re black, so they don’t worry about your whiteass precision. Because this all looks so, so sloppily done: (more…)