No one has the manual for life since, as Douglas Adams once observed, it’s attached to the umbilicus at birth, and thus continually discarded by careless medical professionals. If you did, though, it would tell you not be a shitbird at the gym and precisely how not to be a shitbird at the gym. You need to know this because in one manner or another you are a total asshole at the gym, and everyone silently hates you for it. We’re the only one who’ll tell you these things, and you’re welcome, really. It’s our pleasure.

Not only are you weak at the gym, but you are annoying as hell, too.

So, before we get to the season and the pseudoephedrine pace of real, living, breathing portion of the year, let us list our proper rules for gym use and happy co-existence with your fellow gym-mates, mostly because we’ve already written it, it’s two weeks before the season, and we’re still pissed at Professor O’Dorkley who spent 20 minutes in the squat rack on Tuesday reading the New York Times and doing sets of one rep at a time while promising “I’ve just got a few more.” We hope you choke.

One: Don’t stink. Everyone stinks at the gym, but the occasional fragrance frotteur insists on wearing the gym clothes they pulled from the trunk. (more…)

The offseason top 25 has nothing to do with football. You might read it anyway.

25. Italian starlet Edwidge Fenech. She’s particularly stunning when set to dreamy Italian quaalude music. Fact: if you should fall in doomed love with an elusive but alluring younger woman, music like this starts playing spontaneously, but only if you happen to be in Europe.

Correction: only if you are in Western Europe. In eastern Europe the song “Cherokee” by (natch) Europe will begin playing.

24. Rope swings.

If you’re not in traction, you’re just not trying. (Nepal laughs at your puny American rope swings! And safety regulations!) (more…)

Today is nine kinds of catastrophically overbooked: freelance pieces, two SN pieces, and a mounting sleep debt we’re not entirely enjoying. (Less giddy sleepy, and more zombiedrooling stupor.)

We’ll get the CI up ASAP, but in the meantime accept comic gold. Warning: the chorus of this song is:

Why you comin’ home
at five in the morning?

Something’s going wrong,
Let me smell yo dick.

You may recognize it from Lord Byron’s epic poem Manfred. You may not. Either way, it’s awesome.

Note: always wear rhumba panties and a corset to bleach your cheating man’s clothes. (HT/Blame: OPS.)

No, we’re not ready to actually make a top 25. Phil Steele (our only hope against Skynet) hasn’t spoken yet, and we’ll reserve judgment until then. It’s the only thing we’ll actually invest the few unmolested neurons we have left in before August. In the meantime, here’s the EDSBS staff’s offseason diversions list. Orson’s got odds; Holly’s got the evens.

Orson
25. Powerlifting. I blame Barwis, but I can’t go to the gym without doing something stupid with a bar and an Olympic rack. It’s way too fun doing moves that leave your whole body shaky like you just ingested a bad crack latte. It’ll be awesome until a disc flies out of my spine and knocks out grunty guy over on the fly machine over there.

Holly

24. Macrobiotic yogurt. The closest thing to cannibalism in your grocer’s refrigerator.

23. Mulberries. There’s a tree outside my door loaded with them. It’s like a squirrel-germ infested snack on the way to the car every time. I haven’t died yet, though I have found myself standing in the middle of the road feeling indecisive without explanation. (more…)

Long have we yearned for the right measure of praise for the Economist, our favorite magazine in the universe. After all, they combine airtight prose with ruthless cold sense and snarkily captured pics: everything we aspire to be and will never, ever be. They also make covers like this, for which we love them and would willingly massage all of their black-socked feet:

Someone has beaten us to it. If that’s the price to pay for being well-informed, then too fucking bad. SIR–this rules. Thank you, Orson Swindle, Atlanta, GA USA.

Whilst Patrick is sporting immense celebratory lip coverage over at Thirty-Five Seconds, we’re prepping for some margaritas with our favorite tri-cultural hero from south of the border: Die schnellste Maus von Mexiko!

Enjoy your Cinco. We’ll see you tomorrow.

The offseason survival guide would like to help you through this long, football-free offseason. In order to speed up this process, we’re all going back to 1979 to learn to be smooth. Crack open the champale and get your SMU jersey out. It’s about to get smoother than you ever imagined, albeit in a non-football way.

A Smooth House. The whole idea of smooth is to pretend you’re living on a houseboat in California, or in a ski house in Vail. (Not Aspen–that’s so 80s, man.) If you don’t have a houseboat in California, that’s fine: purchase a houseboat somewhere else. The houseboat should come equipped with a hot, lanky woman who wakes up in a bikini on it four or five days a week. She should be a marine biologist, or failing that,

If you can’t find a houseboat equipped with a hot, lanky woman in a hip-hugger two-piece, or just can’t find a houseboat, you must consider purchasing a home in the woods. The home should be made of pine cut into boards set at 45 degree angles, and it should feature wraparound decks, huge bay windows in geometric shapes, and an irregular offset roof with a window across the top. It should be decorated in mostly browns, feature lots of rugs and wicker furniture, and have a hot tub you can go into naked with some pink champagne and a brunette majoring in ecology or some shit like that.

Oh, and a fireplace with a rug in front of it, because that’s where you get your smooth lovin’ on. It’s as key as blow, backgammon, and Dallas on Friday nights.

Fondue. No class smoothness can happen without fondue. It’s important if you’re classing up to the Smooth Life to have a primo fondue set. (more…)

..no matter what them latte-drankin’ yuppies at Forbes say! You just have to like college football. We’re off to get a latte, now. A manly one, served in a skull and topped with the froth of our enemies. And we won’t be paying for that, by Crom’s beard, we won’t.

(Our fave Conan quote: “Conan, why do you pray to Crom?” “Because he always answers my prayers. He always says NO!”)

The ad doesn’t even attempt to solder together what beer and the ability to block someone have to do with each other, but we respect that kind of naked dialectical linkage in our advertising: no need to couch it, we like our consumerist propaganda neat.

So…they went and had beer afterwards? And then made passionate love? Kroeter, we must know what happened to you after you discovered the 190 pound offensive lineman could read.

We’d like to ask our readers: do you know anyone who lives in Beijing? And would be willing to have a writer/blogger type pay a fair price to crash on a couch, bed, heated kang, hammock, or square of filthy floor? And in do not tell me that “yeah, everyone I know is leaving town and getting out and you’re right bullfucked when it comes to accommodations,” because this is not helpful, and then we’ll just have to tell you to go fuck to adjust the area.

China: rocking you like a hurricane since a billion years B.C. You’re welcome for the kites and gunpowder, btw.

More fine Chinglish at the Chinglish pool. (Via Bethei.)