This Friday’s Latin-themed Cheesecake of the day comes via Kanu, who answered our call for an OMG Shirtless! cheesecake recruit from Brazil with speed, skill, and precision.

Bianca Rinaldi, a paulista from Sao Paulo . Foi um prazer te conhecer, bonito.

Bianca Rinaldi. Proof that living in Brazil might be worth the exaggerated risk of being shot.

Eagle-eyed Boi from Troy does what bloggers do best: notice something tiny, sit on it, and then wait until it becomes relevant to unleash it on the world. In this case, it’s another USC Facebook Flub involving one of the White Power crue, Brian Cushing.

Cushing’s crucial Facebook change, as made very late one night by…well, under Cushing’s account at least. This is precisely what we would have done to our roommates had we had Facebook at the time. (With pitiful dial-up connections, we were too busy downloading Stasi surveillance pictures of Katarina Witt nude.)

The profile (with screenshot here) reads:

Brian Cushing: USC ‘09

Interested in: men.

This is all accompanied by Cushing’s picture, which is the Leprechaun from the Leprechaun Movies.

After reading this, we’re so glad we didn’t have to be nineteen in the public eye. That whole “bisexual republican freon addict professional rollerblader” phase was rough enough without an audience.

Guilty of Facebooking Under the Influence? Or just sloppy with his passwords?

With college football now firmly in the pre-spring practice doldrums, everyone’s watching basketball, a sport played indoors by men who are either completely gay, or totally homophobic. The wonders that must occur in those lockerrooms!

Basketball: a safe place for men of all preferences. Especially Tim.

We’ll confess that we’re so basketball averse we didn’t even watch the national title game last year. The game. With Florida. The national title one. That’s how little we care about squeaky shoes, fourteen thousand timeouts, and a sport where Duke can succeed with consistency across three decades.

However, interest in quality theme music prevails, though, and we may have a team to follow besides Florida and their misunderstood Ugly Betty of a forward, Joakim Noah: South Carolina-Upstate. Their homemade theme song samples NBA Jams, the greatest basketball video game ever, whch merits mention and subsequent digression below concerning the video game prowess of Rony Seikaly.

(Rony Seikaly could bury half-courters blindfolded in that game. Under the coordinated twitching of Cuddles Swindle’s fingers, he’d spend half the game “on fire” and raining hell down on my poor Golden State Warriors Tim Mitch Richmond and Chris Mullin. Even cheat code Bill Clinton couldn’t extinguish the ouzo-fueled fire of Seikaly, who in retirement took up the hobby of fucking every model he could get his hands on in South Beach while, in our imagination at least, hearing the trademark dialogue from NBA Jam in his head while flawlessly executing the Havana Banana on a Peruvian car model: “he’s on fire!!!”)

Rony Seikaly: unstoppable three-shooter and supermodel-fucker.

We digress. The thesis of the following piece: Upstate. Upstate? Upstate. UPSTATE. (HT: Troy.)

MP3 File

Credit to those who saw this coming: Facebook was going to blow up and do some damage of an irrevocable sort eventually. Now that USC’s White Power page has made Jarvis Moss’s “Heisemens” page look like, well, what it was (um, totally and absolutely correct and innocuous,) watch for the inevitable prohibitions on Facebook content by the more tightassed universities, or just bans outright by even more controlling institutions.

The root of the joke, however, is pretty funny. It allegedly stems from the fact that the black guys on the team call the group, which includes Dallas Sartz and Brian Cushing, “white power.” And as we all know, “white power” as a repeated comic phrase is bankable funny, whether it’s out of the mouth of Clayton Bigsby, Dave Chappelle’s black, blind white supremacist, or as yelled by “White Power Bill” after he shivs someone in the yard on “Arrested Development.” It’s mostly funny because the concept itself is absurd, mockable, and espoused by people who don’t exactly “sell the sizzle” of their chosen lifestyle.

But it’s funny when he says it!

However, in order for this to be funny, you have to be operating at the least in what we’d call the high ironic mode, and preferably in an environment of zero taboo (like we imagine a football lockerroom to be), which means you have to accept the following premises.

1. Your audience has to know that you think white power is bad.

2. It has to be presented in a demonstrably absurd fashion. The more over-the-top, the better.

3. Your audience, preferably, should trust you.

4. You should trust your audience.

So really, this entire brouhaha is not a matter of racism, but bad comic design and placement. Clearly, these guys will not be on the writing staff of 30 Rock any time soon, since their design was sloppy, they didn’t realize their whole audience wouldn’t know that they were kidding, and the joke itself (”arresting black children before they commit crimes”) is offensive without providing any cutting insight. Again: not racist, but certainly reeking of dumb-ist.

(Compare this to the scene in 40 Year Old Virgin where a guy asks a black guy if his child, when born, is already on probation. This wouldn’t be funny coming from an older white guy; it comes, however, from the mouth of an older Indian man, a transgressive and savvy choice because a.) Indian guys are supposed to be polite! And good at math!, and b.) minorities are supposed to stick together, like the Minoriteam!)

Minoriteam-unite!

Nor will they be receiving Fulmer points, since technically they did nothing wrong. However, any of the players concerned will be referred to as First Name “White Power” Last Name as punishment for the next year for their atrocious comic execution. The Punchline is just down the street, white players of USC. Just don’t go there on a night when Michael Richards is playing.