You know an issue has gained popular momentum if a columnist writes about it–usually meaning a pressing issue, like their golf game (”my short game’s off!), their ex-wives (”still demanding money ow my back!”), or their yard (”Darn crabgrass!”). Finding something you sympathize, much less agree with in a regular columnists’ mailbag should be a point of great concern, and a sign that your personal development has a. advanced directly to the age of 48, or b.) that you should consider taking up a hobby to become more interesting, like a fierce cocaine habit, for example.

We may have to do that after reading this in Pat Dooley’s mailbag:

I agree with you about Miami where the music was too loud and excessive. I’ll listen closer on Saturday, but what they really need to do is plug my iPod into the sound system. Then we’ll be rockin’.

Agreed on one point: we’re generally very queasy about music being played over the loudspeakers, especially because everyone’s taste in music sucks except for Barstoolio’s, and even then we’re suspicious because we like her music, and our taste sucks. It’s particularly bad because at Florida they crank up with “Thunderstruck,” a middling AC/DC song at best, and then pepper the proceedings with “Zombie Nation,” the aural infection that we uneasily “oh oh oh” along with when in the stands because….dammit, it works.

It works other places, too: if you’ve been in Tiger Stadium when they play “Callin’ Baton Rouge,” it works; so do a number of other songs, including “Jump Around” at Camp Randall and “Enter Sandman” at Virginia Tech. We’ve mentioned this before, but if they played the first 35 seconds or so of this at Florida Field…

…we’d write a check worth literally tens of dollars to the athletic department on the spot. It wouldn’t bounce or anything. We’re not willing to let Pat Dooley plug in his iPod yet–DO YOU LIKE TOM PETTY?–but the real test would be asking yourself: does subtracting the music lessen the experience?

In some cases, the answer is a resounding yes, though in Florida’s case no one would weep if “Thunderstruck” were taken off the case completely. If you can’t get feverishly excited in 90 degree heat and 60 percent humidity, you’re simply not excitable, or perhaps lying on the ground twitching from heat stroke.

The Kid from House Rock Built presents his 5 Fight Songs for Getting Your Swole On. Get cracking! There’s hang cleans to be done, son! BARWIS SEES ALL.

We don’t know about the rest of you, but we are definitely that guy at the gymnasium with the iPod zoning out, trying to forget they are surrounded by the interminably douchy after work crowd day in and day out. Please let our doughy dilligent self through to the real weights please, as we’d like to put in our time and get the fuck out. Thanks, guy doing uneccessarily heavy shoulder shrugs 2 inches from the rest of the rack.

Regardless, our workout mix is always gingerly sprinkled with 5 times the US government’s daily recommended dosage of college fight songs. We have to say that there are just some songs that pick you right the fuck up like that barely legal caffeine-guarana-panther testicle poison they sell next to the towel bin. So, we pay tribute to our 5 favorite allies on the warrior’s trail to jacked-uped-ness.

Honorable Mention: Rudy Montage

We’re not talking about the sappy Zamfir in the pines panflute nonsense, but we have to show our love for the rambling blue-collar ballad of a scrappy little lad that tries so big. We’re especially fond of the corresponding movie sequence that let’s us see Samwise Gangee get the everloving crap kicked out of him by Polish immigrants.

Dont just stand there trying to think! Let’s hit those ropes! Jump to 1:35

Aggie War Hymn (more…)

You, too, may be the next Louis Elbel: the University of Washington is seeking a new fight song and is holding an open contest for submissions. Off the top of head, the first song coming to mind when thinking of Willingham’s repeated references to his “system” is, well, this, because ever since his first year at Notre Dame the “system” has been most definitely down:

It would have to go with some nice Fenerbahce-stand-hopping, of course, but we think it would be perfect, especially with a lyric sheet reading “buh-DOO-do-DOO-do-DEH” over and over again.

Handler One: Ralphie, that’s a good girl.

Handler Two: Man, she’s flipping me out right now.

Ralphie: Trample. Kill. Ram. Trample. Gore. Crush crush trample. Fear. Two legs everywhere. Trample them all. Desperate hunger for grass. Kill.

Handler Three: We’ve got to go in two.

Handler One: Look at her eyes. It’s just one pit of black surrounded by white fear. God, that’s unnerving.

Ralphie V: Hunger. All that grass. Must crush, then eat. Sun. Buffalo in heaven. Demand blood. Ram. Stomp. Run. Kick. Destroy two legs.

Hander Two: Where’s Trey? He’s supposed to be here. We can’t do this with just three handlers.

Handler Three: We ready to go?

Trey, Handler Four: Hey, guys, when are we—AAAIIIIGGGHHHHH

Handler one, hanging on for dear life: OH GOD HER EYES HAAAAIIIIIILLLLLP!

Ralphie: OPEN SPACE RUN KILL.

Handler Four: My insides feels leaky and warm…I can’t feel…my…hands…

Handler One: I CAN’T HOLD ON JESUS CHRIST WHY THE HELL DO WE HAVE A BUFFALO THEY DON’T LIKE LEASHES!!!!

Dan Hawkins: Well done, boys! That’s a division one football mascot!

Ralphie: Sun. Grass. Trampled. Yes. Suddenly tired. Hungry. Stop.

Handler One: MY SHOULDER! OH GOD MY SHOULDER!

Hawkins: Can we get her to skydive onto the field? And then trample someone? That would be EPIC.

(HT: Rashaan Salaam)

Don’t borrow, steal: an offseason requires desperate measures, and in a pinch we’ll be happy to do the pinching. We present what will hopefully be a running series: Stuff _____ People Like, based on the painfully accurate Stuff White People Like. We begin, to be fair, with our own alma mater, Florida.

Stuff Orange and Blue People Like

Law school. Perhaps biasing the study with our own personal experiences, but everyone who graduates from Florida goes to law school, is thinking about going to law school, or has considered going to law school. They may also be in the process of applying to go to law school, or just getting over the thought of going to law school. At the least, the Gator fan you encounter has had sex with someone who went to law school. (This is a requirement for graduation. Go look. )

O, just-a like the Italian breads my a-mama made!

Panera. We have never, ever, ever seen a demographic spread their financial legs more whorishly for a business than Gator fans for Panera, the bread and coffee chain out of Atlanta that specializes in selling sugary breads for two to three times what you might actually pay for them at a real bakery. And that’s right, Florida fans, we said that: Panera’s not a real bakery. It’s a goddamn cookie shop with coffee and shitty wireless–that’s it. A sugar cookie the size of a roofing shingle is still compacted sugar, butter, and flour, even if you’re eating it in a pleasant place with healthy wheat stalks woven into all of their ersatz rustico! Italian decorating. The pleasant decor and clean floors will keep the calories off, right? No, it won’t, but walk in there on a Saturday and you’ll swear the place was giving away free crack and fistfuls of Tebowbucks in little orange and blue baggies.

Speaking of bland, tasteless, and overpackaged…. (more…)

Little light-headed, sure. But yeah, otherwise, Boulder’s awesome. I mean, the beer, the scenery, the vibe, the complete lack of humidity…it’s gorgeous. And look at this! This is insanity, man.

Wait. What the hell are they doing with that…is that a buffalo? A live goddamn buffalo? They’re not going to…

Oh, my. They are.

Mike V, who was really, really old by Tiger standards, died sometime during the night at his habitat at LSU. Mike was seventeen, and hopefully is now shredding muntjac and wild boar on the hunting fields of the afterlife.

Considering the $25 million LSU shelled out for the mascot’s habitat, they’re undoubtedly looking for a new Mike as we speak. Animal rights activists be damned–having a live tiger on campus is just badassness no matter how you cast it, and no one’s gone more out of their way than LSU, which has constructed what amounts to a mini-zoo for their pampered mascot.

There’s a Roy Horn joke somewhere in here, but we just can’t find it. RIP, Mike.

Always nice to begin a piece with a bit of self-endorsement, which is precisely what we’ll do: if you haven’t listened to the Tony Barnhart interview from EDSBS Live this past Tuesday, you should, and not just to hear us on the tail end of an epic caffeine bender.

The best line in the whole thing doesn’t come from any of the participants, but rather from the dead and great Lewis Grizzard. Barnhart mentioned the line Grizzard had on the Clemson-Georgia game:”It’s more than a football game. It’s their way of life against ours.” No one’s ever issued a statement more perfectly encapsulating why, mid-game, you may actually look at the otherwise pleasant and similar people wearing different colors than yours and suddenly feel like you gazed upon the primitive celebrations of a lesser, hairy-knuckled tribe unworthy of having clean water and healthy children–and certainly unworthy of being on the same field as your obviously superior, fully-evolved football team of gridiron samurai.

The irony in all of this is that most people accuse the opposition of being guilty of something they are, by demographic, equally or more guilty of the offense themselves. Nothing’s funnier to the outsider than watching SEC fans accuse other SEC fans of being “redneck” or trash, especially when the rest of the country walks around with this mental cheatsheet of regional prejudice in their head:

However, since we’re soooooo scientific, which individual myths about fanbases are true? (more…)

Signal to Noise points the way toward a grave, grave issue: cheerleaders and the damage they’re doing to this nation through the television.

Ask and you shall receive– SM
(more…)

Todd over at Roll Bama Roll thinks we’re cracking on the state of Alabama a bit unfairly. We concur; the state of Alabama did, as he rightly points out, produce Hank Williams, who made every awesome song ever written before the age of 29, when he died from congestive heart failure induced by being ten men crammed into the body of one. It’s just too much for one system to handle.

We would point out in the latest chapter of “Fightin’ Music” that Florida has not one single musical act to claim in the name of quality. Popularity, yes; Creed sold a zillion fucking records in the late ’90s/early ’00s, a time when we were too busy selling our plasma and giving handjobs for rent money visionquesting and temping to prevent such an atrocity from happening. They did, however, provide the soundtrack for countless teen pregnancies between fundy kids who took virginity pledges, so we have to thank them for the unending dark comedy there.

Florida is a musical Namibia. Sadly, our supplemental football fight music doesn’t change that. If anything, think of “Gator Steve” as a kind of sonic defoliant, killing the happy green thoughts in your mind like Agent Orange sprayed on a Vietnamese hillside. We sometimes forget that there are quarters of this world where men wear tanktops, listen to country music, and watch CSI because they find the murder scenes sexy without apology. You forget there are people who annoy you almost as much as NPR-listening fauxhemians who find Sarah Vowell “droll.”*

And then you hear this:

Bull Gator Steve!

MP3 File

*If you use this word and are not British, you will be punched in the teeth.