Is It for Temperature Control?

How much do you have to love football to be the guy on Sunday squirting water into the players’ mouths?  

It would be amazing if that guy made more money than you.

He probably does, but for the good of the entire world, I certainly hope not.  

So, you've all seen this guy.  He has what has to be the worst job in the entire NFL.  He stands there on the sidelines holding a towel and two water bottles.  When players come from the field to the sidelines, he hands them the towel so they can wipe their heads, and then the players stare off into space and open their mouth while our hero squirts water into it.  That's his job.  He quirts water into people's mouths so they don't have to do it themselves.  

This is nonsense.  

These are some of the largest and most powerful athletes in the entire sporting world.  They're capable of bench pressing me.  I have to believe that their grips are strong enough to compress a water bottle enough to get a drink.  Yet, the team has a guy...presumably a paid position...who's sole job it is to squirt water at people.  It completely baffles me why the professional athletes are incapable of getting a drink of water by themselves.  I do it all the time, and I'm only am amateur. 

So, here you have a guy who I'm going to assume has his pick of what he wants to do for a living.  He chooses to work for an NFL team because he likes football.  He clearly can't be one of the players, perhaps not ready for the front office yet, got cut from the grounds-keeping crew, working his way up to being a trainer perhaps...and the only job left for him is water boy.  He sticks it out, just so he can say he works for an NFL team and gets his 2 1/2 seconds of air time on national TV when he's squirting water into a star player's mouth.  I can't imagine what it is about this job that keeps this guy coming back week after week.  The only thing that could even begin to explain it is a deep-seeded love of football and the chance to get into the games for free every weekend.  

You Came Here. This Is Your Fault

What do you get when you fill a sock with bass wind instruments made out of potatoes?

Jeremy...we've talked about this.

And based on that discussion, I decided to go with this as my Sametime Status today.  

 

But, the readers deserve better than this.

The readers, who are good and wonderful people, know what they're getting into when they come here.  This is exactly the kind of thing they come here for!

And they're going to stop if you go ahead with this, you know that, right?

Nah.  They're love me all the more for it.

You are completely delusional.  Seriously....I'm begging you not to finish this joke.

I'm going to.

Fine...don't say I didn't warn you.  So, Jeremy...what DO you get when you fill a sock with bass wind instruments made out of potatoes?

A Tube of Tuber Tubas! 

I'm leaving.

Have a good weekend, everybody!    

Vote Jeremy in 2028!!!

The 2013 campaign season is mercifully behind us.  In unrelated news, campaigning for the 2014 elections is in full swing!

I don't know if we can really fully embrace the 2014 elections just yet.  We need a good solid week or two of analysis from the 2013 elections first.

Very true, but so much of that analysis will consist of the implications the 2013 elections are going to have on the 2014 elections.  Two sides of the same coin, perhaps. 

Or the same side of two different coins, if Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are to be believed.   

So what we now have are inane gasbags who are going to sit around on TV and talk about other inane gasbags who just got elected to do nothing but sit around and argue about why they should get re-elected next time.  It's a vicious circle, really.  The really amusing part about this particular election is how everybody is claiming victory, which you wouldn't think to be the case.

So there's this Governor who got re-elected in a walk.  It was actually terrific that the polls closed at 8PM Tuesday night, and at 8:02, with 0% of the vote counted, CNN declared a winner.  He won the election, but the other side also said that they won because the guy who actually won is closer to their ideology than other people from the governor's party.  

Another race for governor in a different state had a very different outcome.  Early polls suggested that one of the candidates would win in a landslide, if lots of people turned out to vote.  Roughly 25% of the population actually voted, and the guy won a close race.  The other candidate declared victory because the race was closer than it might have been, which means the other guy's policies are all wrong.  

Either way, all of these elected "leaders" will now go around campaigning for their next election every time a TV camera is trained on them.  We'll get to hear lots and lots about how the other side is destroying the country and how the only way we can avoid a disastrous fate is to vote for one party over the other.  Basically, business as usual, which means that this election...like the last many elections, and the next one...didn't change a thing.  Please prove me wrong. 

Just One Deeply Concerned Citizen

There was an awful lot of road construction in Georgia between 1979 and 1985.  Hopefully, they've got that all sorted out by now

Can I safely assume that you looked up construction project plans from Georgia for the time period in question?  

You absolutely can not.

In that case, I somewhat hesitate to ask how you drew this conclusion.

Well, if you remember Not Too Long Ago, I had a Sametime Status that had to do with the theme song to the old TV show "The Dukes of Hazzard."  Well, as is often the case, once my mind gets its little claws wrapped around something, I end up watching a bunch of Youtube videos about it.  

I would hope there's some form of therapy or a support group for this problem of yours.

What I came to learn is that there are no roads in Hazzard County Georgia.  There's one little town which may or may not be called "Hazzard" and that has a little bit of pavement, but the roads seem to be about 50 feet long, enough for a car to be forced to drift around corners before driving off into the countryside on dirt roads.  

The odd thing about all of these dirt roads is that they're constantly under construction.  Everywhere people drive at remarkably high speeds, they're faced with construction crews with large piles of dirt placed directly in the road.  With a single flagman positioned on one side of the construction, and only about 5 feet in front of the dirt pile (which is nowhere near enough of a buffer), this provides a remarkably unsafe work zone, and leads to cars running into these unfortunately placed piles and becoming airborne.  After one incident like this, you'd think there would be an investigation into how to make these work zones safer for the workers and the general public, but it seems like there never was, as this issue kept on happening for 6 years.  The Hazzard County Department of Public Works should really be investigated for allowing this sort of, dare I quip, hazardous work environment to continue.  

There's also the issue of the crumbling infrastructure throughout the county.  The sheer number of bridges that are "out" all over the place is staggering, causing people to resort to jumping their cars over rivers, streams, gulleys, farm houses, and ponds.  Why there was ever a bridge over a pond in the first place is anyone's guess, and only serves as a further indictment of Hazzard Country's poor town planning.  Where these bridges have been destroyed, there are never any signs posted as a warning, nor are the roads blocked off in any way, endangering the public some more.  In addition to the poor bridge maintenance, the maintenance of the dirt roads themselves leaves plenty to be desired.  Many of the roads seem to have large dips in them sufficient for causing cars to leave the road surface and once again become airborne.  Other roads have large patches of shrubbery overgrowing the roadway.  It probably comes as no surprise to you at this point that these shrubberies are readily run over by cars traveling at high speeds causing two or more of the car's wheels to leave the road surface, causing the car to either tip over (occasionally only tip to one side, riding on two wheels until the driver can rectify the situation), or leave the road surface entirely.  

After 1985, I stopped paying much attention to the goings on in Hazzard County, so I'm not sure whether any or all of these problems have been resolved.  For the sake of the county's residents, I certainly hope they have.  It sounds like an awfully dangerous place to live.  

For those interested in doing your own research into these issues, please consult This Resource. 

His Nickname Is Probably "Tiny"

In an amusing bit of irony, a football player named Incognito is the subject of a lot of news headlines

Incognito:  adjective.  Having one's identity concealed, as under an assumed name, especially to avoid notice or formal attentions.  I'd say having your name and picture splattered all over CNN and ESPN is the opposite of that. 

Football suffers from sharing the bulk of its playing season with Hockey, as you can well imagine.  That said, for the most part, football is played one day out of the week, and the other six, we can pretty safely ignore it.  The NFL tries to make it more relevant by having games on Thursday (which everybody hates) and monday (which nobody stays awake long enough to watch).  But you can't argue the fact that football is relevant that one day out of the week, so we can talk about it here for a bit.  

Apparently, it's become news that football players can be mean to each other.  Nowhere is this worse than in Miami, where one of the team's players has been suspended from the team for "conduct detrimental to the team" which by and large consists of being too mean to the rookies.  

To be clear, Jeremy is by no means condoning or marginalizing the topic of bullying.  He's using hyperbole to make a joke.  This message especially goes out to all of the very large football players who may be offended by this.  

The part of this story that's actually amusing is that the guy who got suspended is named "Incognito," and he's doing a remarkably poor job avoiding notice or formal attentions.  Perhaps if he kept a lower key, none of this would be an issue. 

I'm Not Planning On Leaving My Job At The Moment

Silly CCR.  You can’t roll on a river, you have to float

Well, if the Proud Mary was one of those floating casinos, you could roll dice while on the river, thereby validating the lyrics a little bit.

So today's Sametime Status concerns the classic CCR song "Proud Mary" which repeats the phrase "Rollin'...Rollin'...Rollin' on the river."  The song, I guess, is about a boat, and I've always assumed that it had nothing to do with gambling.  Here are some fun facts about this song:

• John Fogerty had never been east of Montana by the time this song, from the album "Bayou Country."

Despite the fact that the song consists of roughly one chord (The bridge changes, but that's about it), Fogerty claims to have been inspired by Beethoven's 5th syphony.

The song has since been covered over 100 times.  Some Of Which are significantly better Than Others.

BOO! Hahaha....Nailed It

“I Am In The Office”

Well, I can't say this is the most original Sametime Status you've ever come up with.  I also can't say it's the worst.  

Well, strictly speaking, it's my Sametime Status's Halloween costume.  It's going as a standard, boring Sametime Status.

I would like to amend my previous opinion.  This is also not the worst Halloween costume you've come up with.  Remember that time you wore a green shirt and put a flashlight on your head to go as the Green Lantern?

That was funny!

Or that time you drew an H on your forehead and said you were Arnold Rimmer's hologram from Red Dwarf?

Also hilarious!  I really fail to see your point.  Happy Halloween, everybody!