HARVEY UPDYKE PLEADS NOT GUILTY, ROLL TIDE

The law can be very funny when it wants to be. In Tennessee is illegal to catch a fish with a lasso; in Hawaii, one may not place coins in one's ears. We know for a fact that in Stuart, Florida it is against the law to keep a donkey in a bathtub.  Ohio has one rule would completely agree with:

If you ignore an orator on Decoration day to such an extent as to publicly play croquet or pitch horseshoes within one mile of the speaker’s stand, you can be fined $25.

And one we would completely disagree with:

It is illegal to get a fish drunk.

Goddamn liberals can't even let a man get his guppy plastered* in this town anymore without saying their frilly words about what I got to do with my Thursday nights, Buckeye players talkin' bout their affairs in public, a fine man like Earle Bruce run out a town...Hades in a gutbucket, that's what this all adds up to, I tell ya.

The law again provides in the case of Harvey Updyke, who pleaded "not guilty and not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect" to his array of charges in the Auburn tree poisoning case. It's kind of Alabama to allow for someone to be both curable and mentally incompetent while also allowing for someone to have a "mental defect" that is beyond repair. (If the legal code doesn't say "plumb broke in his damn head," then we completely renounce our fake law degree we just made up and do not have.)

The plea is standard issue in all cases where a mental examination has been requested, but the phrasing is still delightful even if Dr. Updyke himself has publicly recognized that his degree of obsession with Alabama football is "not healthy." This leads us to our favorite possible defense: that Updyke is not only insane, but is a very specific kind of insane unique to being a sports fan.

In the most extreme case, the defense would plead that he suffered from "Updyke's Syndrome," a condition unique to being an Alabama fan, it would make it into the DSM-5, and we would cackle for the rest of our lives until noting that "blogger syndrome" was also included and painfully relevant to our own lives**

*Not a euphemism.

**Symptoms: weight gain, pale skin, decimated attention span, using inappropriate internet phrases to address serious events in real life.