There were two eras of mustache wearing all other mustache-friendly eras quake in the face of: the Southern Rock Scene of the 1970s, and graduates of any European military academies in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

We lean on the second today to bring you a hairy giant and the man it dragged around with him through life: Paul Von Rennenkampf, “a poor leader of men” and Russian general of the early 20th century.

At least he had the ’stache going for him.

Happy Mustache Wednesday, motherfuckers!

In West Fuckin’ Virginia, rest assured that fullback Owen Schmitt was NOT the one shot in this incident involving a wild and wonderful resident of the state on Sunday morning at 4:20 a.m.:

Michael Lusher of Huntington, West Virginia was asleep yesterday morning when a bullet hit him in the head. He woke up four hours later surprised to see blood dripping from his skull.

Lusher was fine, but he did bleed and go to the hospital. That’s how you know it wasn’t WVU fullback Schmitt, whose titanium skull would have deflected the bullet directly back into the weak-ass rabbit-stabber of a gun it came from, destroying the weapon and severely injuring the no-doubt ass-drunk rifleman.

Like Lusher, though, we doubt Schmitt would have woken up. That would be letting the bullet win.

Schmitt: laughs at your “bleeding.”

Read Feldman’s bit on Schmitt if you don’t already have a mancrush on the guy. (in$ider stuff.)

(HT: DCTrojan.)

T. Kyle King, resident mayor of the college football blogosphere, makes the persuasive case that Friday games in college football are anthrax for the sport, something we irrationally concur with because our wise, wise gut told us to. (Same part of the body that told us doubling down on an 11 was a sure bet versus our Dealertainer® at Imperial Palace Sunday afternoon. And was-BLACKJACK!-expensively wrong for us.)

We’re unsure if Kyle’s basic premise-that ending the exclusivity of the sport’s scheduling would become a slippery slope to game-a-day mediocrity-is true. What we do know is his comparison of baseball to football brings up one important parallel hinted at elsewhere in the blogosphere today: steroids. Per Shanoff’s Daily Quickie:

NCAA CFB: Was Oklahoma giving its players banned supplements? The story isn’t that they were, it’s that they got caught and exposed. PEDs in college football – hiding in plain sight – is, along with the NFL’s version, one of the more accepted forms of willful blindness from sports media and fans. Tracking…

OU…again?

The story he’s referring to is here, and concerns OU’s self-reported use of “supplements” overlooked by the compliance department. (more…)

Mind your blackberries-you may be booted from the nearest sports event of choice for representing the events of the day. Louisville Courier-Journal reporter Brian Bennett was ejected from the NCAA Baseball Tournament for blogging about Louisville’s eventual 20-2 victory over UConn, and his credentials might not ever be restored. The NCAA regards his blogging about the facts of the game as a de facto rebroadcast of copyrighted material, and said as much in a pregame memo.

Bennett went on anyway until the Dorkstapo found him:

I continued blogging until the bottom of the fifth inning, an NCAA representative came to my seat on press row and asked for my credential and asked me to leave. I complied.

Blogging patriot? Brian Bennett, now-rebel blogger.

Somewhere, Walter Benjamin is wandering the streets of the afterlife in a leisurely fashion and laughing to himself. Everyone in the stadium holding a Blackberry or cell phone who said as much as a peep about the game in a digital medium stands guilty of what Bennett did-relaying live information about a copyrighted event. As the Courier-Journal pointed out, the semantic triple lindy here is this: the NCAA seeks not to protect its broadcast rights, but to copyright the actual live facts of the event:

Once a player hits a home run, that’s a fact. It’s on TV, everybody sees it. They (the NCAA) can’t copyright that fact. The blog wasn’t a simulcast or a recreation of the game. It was an analysis.

Thus…our liveblogs of games could be verboten. Along with any updates we send to friends over the internet, any discussion, a picture we snap at the game that gets posted a website with fifteen readers and .38 cents of monthly revenue…all sacrosanct property of the NCAA, or possibly ESPN, or Fox, or whomever holds the broadcast rights to the event. It’s a stance only the finest minds of the 18th century could have invented.

We didn’t care at all about the College World Series now, but just to piss off the NCAA we’ll post a live update while watching the game just to chafe their harbls right good. This is the glorious age of amateurs, and not its centripetal phase, either. Until the NCAA starts taking away cell phones at the gate, Brian Bennett or any other blogger can perform the nastiest of protests: they can buy a seat and immediately start texting away.

Unless the next step is cell phone jammers at stadiums. Don’t put it past them.

We open the mailbag for our guest columnist, our resident local spammer. Enjoy AND UPDATE YOUR ACCOUNT INFOMRATION IMEDIATELY!!111

1. Dear Orson,

-Koncerned in Kalamazoo
Dear friend,

I am the the last surviving son of Amadou Foulanisake finance minister of LIBERIA country troubled by war and strife untold you must have heard of. IN my possession I have SIXTY MILLION DOLLARS AMERICAN from the LIBERIAN TREASURY and only need an outstanding dignity business partner for investment opportunity.

Amadou needs your help.

Please send banking information immediately to invest with us and help save oru family.

Also, we feel Michigan may be overdrawing on last year’s successful account but is the default pick because no one knows who to pick in a muddled Big Ten. GOD BLESS easy pickings based on returning qb, rb, and wideouts and everyone else shuffling their personnel decks.

Yours sincerely,

AMADOU FOULANISAKE
HIS MOST INDULGENTLY INDEBTED
SON OF AMADOU FOULANISAKE, DECAPITATED
FINANCE MINISTER OF LIBERIA SAVE PRAISE GOD FOR YOU SIR

2. Dear Orson,

-Fascinated with the effects of high fructose corn syrup in Fresno

d1d y0u heaR how B1g he waz? (more…)