Written by Lars Hancock

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I hate the holidays.

Yeah, I said it. You think it too, don’t you? Most of us don’t have the balls to say it out loud. Thanksgiving ends, you’re stuffed full of turkey and all that football-soaked tryptophan-induced bliss goes straight to horror, knowing the next day you get to climb the rickety ladder into the attic and carry heavy boxes down it risking paralysis or death so your house can look like Santa had explosive festive diarrhea all over it. If OSHA had any jurisdiction over your home, that operation would have been fined and shut down long ago.

Should you survive decorating, you then get to spend a lot of time and money, both of which are in perilously precious quantities, to bring a bunch of crap into the house that nobody really needs, to placate all the spoiled people that you love in the house. You don’t give out of love, you give out of fear – is this good enough? Is this enough money? Will they be disappointed if I don’t give them this? Will they think I’m cheap? All of this joy while being bombarded with the holiday music which has long since grown stale.

Just when you think it can’t get any worse, the big day finally gets there. The kids wake you up at 2:30 in the morning, and you watch them tear into all their crap, love it, play with it, get bored with it, and never touch it again all in the span of ten minutes. But, hey, here’s a gift for me! It’s a…. sweater? I fucking hate sweaters. there aren’t even reindeer humping on it. Some socks too? You shouldn’t have. No, really, you shouldn’t have.

Ugh. Is it too late to invite Jovan Belcher to dinner? Is it too soon to make that joke?

But fear not fellow holidayophobes, I have the solution for you: better gifts. Better gifts for me, in particular. Yeah, I know it is better to give than to receive, but if you give me crap I don’t want, you’re not getting the maximum enjoyment out of your holiday. Help me help you. If you follow this off the chain gift guide, you’re sure to give me what I want this year and make me glad I slogged through the 30 days of misery that preceded it.

1.Sex. You can get me sex every year for Christmas and I’ll be a happy man. Wait, is it sacrilegious to give sex as a gift for Christmas? Eh, I’m happily married, so as long as my wife gives it to me, I say it’s good. I think the best way is in the form of a coupon book. Get creative in this one - “This coupon is good for one naughty Catholic schoolgirl roleplay” or “This coupon is good for one night of me sending the kids to my mom’s for the night and cooking you dinner wearing nothing but a fishnet teddy”. Heck, we don’t even need the rest of the gift guide if you include that one…

2.Donation to my cause. One of the things that irks me about the holiday season is the complete wasteful consumerism with resources that can better be used in other places. I’m on the board of a charity that is trying to provide relief to Haiti, specifically the people in Cite Soliel that the rest of the world has just given up on. For the $100 you spent on that sweater, you could have fed fourteen starving children for a week, children that are literally dying because they are in such a hopeless situation. That’s meaningful to me. Everyone has a cause that is near and dear to them, find it and support it – that real donation will make them a lot happier than a pair of socks. By the way, make it a cause dear to the recipient. I may not have a heart for your cause, and I see right through your Human Fund scam.

3.Tablet. I’m human, tablets are cool, I want one. It will help me be very productive, I’m sure, plus Temple Runner all huge and stuff! By the way, I’m at 53x bonus multiplier on Temple Runner – I don’t know if that is a source of pride or shame. But back to the point, I need a tablet. NEED.

4.Booze. There’s this beer coming to market at $85 a six pack that is supposed to be the best in the world. I’m never going to buy that myself, but you are so thoughtful that you think I deserve it. You give me $85 beer for Christmas, I may cry with joy, and that will make your holiday awesome. Note scotch, wine, whisky, and other libations are welcome too.

5.Shoes. I’m a man. I buy shoes when my old ones become unusable, like the day I was having lunch with a friend and one of the soles literally fell right off as I was walking. That actually happened. I’m pretty sure I need new shoes, so get me something fashionable, because I really don’t know what is and isn’t in style.

6.Underwear. See shoes, above. Except the underwear situation is much worse. If you really want to make me happy, buy me a dozen Under Armor boxer jocks. It’s like a warm supporting happy nest of love for the ol’ fruits and vegetables.

Here are some things you are specifically not allowed to get me

1.Garmin. Seriously, who needs an expensive piece of hardware to tell you where you are going when every smartphone available today has this feature? You don’t have a smartphone? Get one for the price of a Garmin. I don’t get how these guys are still in business.

2.Gourmet sauces. Ugh, so cliché. I make my own sauces, you’re insulting me with your store-bought concoction. Besides, that hilarious label? Means it tastes like crap inside.

3.Clothes. It’s not going to fit me and I’m going to have to take it back and I don’t want it anyway. This is not a helpful gift.

4.Cookware. I like what I have, thank you. Cookware is very personal, like your wife. You have a relationship with it that should last a lifetime. Don’t arrange my marriage please.

5.Gift certificate. Put some thought into it you lazy bastard.

6.Team gear with player’s name in it. True story: I once bought a Browns jersey with Charlie Frye’s name on it. True story #2: I once threw away a Browns jersey at the game after watching Charlie Frye against Pittsburgh. Some genius Browns fan last weekend turned their Peyton Hillis jersey into something magnificent by adding a SYP to the front of the name on the back. Regardless, with loyalty these days, there’s approximately a 0% chance my name jersey won’t haunt me in the near future.

Anyway, off to the questions.

Just how far back will Haslem set the Browns back if he pulls a Holmgren and decides to keep SHUR because he won a few games against teams that actually are worse than us? I'm saying at least three years because SHUR will screw things up next year enough to get the boot, resulting in a new coach, who will want a new (noticably younger) QB. I hate myself for thinking this, but OIC. –justmebd

Let’s not panic here. We still have completely losable games against the Redskins, Donkeys, and Squealers ahead of us, any of which could be a career-destroying loss for the Shurmur regime. We will safely lose two of the three, if not all three, which will give Haslam all the ammo he needs to can the coach.

Critically, if you look at the last three wins, you see progress because we actually won, but you really don’t see anything useful being done with the Shurmur offensive system and you definitely don’t see adept coaching. The team is clearly winning on talent and talent alone, and by facing teams with inferior talent and equally inept coaching.

If we win two of the last three games, however, that doesn’t hold true. We are facing superior opposition with respectable coaching, and to win would demonstrate real progress. Would Haslam be fooled into giving Shurmur another chance? Quite possibly, yes, and clearly that decision would spell doom for 2013.

How far does that set us back? Under Shurmur’s system, Weeden will only ever be average, as will Richardson, because that system was played out in 1986. The new regime will replace them both, and unless Braxton Miller turns into the next RGIII and is available to us #1 in the 2014 draft, we’re screwed and rebuilding with a questionable QB. New coach, new QB, three years of rebuilding. At which point the regime will be fired for not doing enough, and lather, rinse, repeat – we’re back into the same cycle we’ve been in since 1999.

Winning two of the last three games can set this franchise back at least five years, and most likely keep us in the death spiral we’ve been experiencing since the earth was believed to be otherwise to round. Two ugly losses and we can put our new system in place in 2013, and contend in 2014. Let’s hope Heckert is retained to keep putting the right puzzle pieces in place to make that happen.

How do I properly slice bread? -CDT

I never got the adage “the greatest thing since sliced bread”, mainly because sliced bread isn’t that great of a thing. How lazy are we as a society that we can’t take a knife out and custom slice a piece of bread to the thickness we desire, while maintaining the freshness of the overall loaf in the process? Is the saying sarcastic, because most fresh-baked bread isn’t pre-sliced, and it is so much better than the generic Wonder crap.

The important thing about slicing bread is to ensure you respect the planarity of the other slices or the end of the loaf itself. There is nothing worse than a missliced loaf that is fat on the top and skinny on the bottom. Ever try to make a sandwich with a lopsided piece of bread? Toast is worse – the bottom turns to charcoal and the top is essentially raw dough. Awful. Take your time and slice it properly, there’s no reason to rush through this.

Demystify cheese. –CDT

My kids are lazy. They apathetically leave their cups of milk everywhere, and we are constantly finding them weeks after they have been misplaced. Is there a glorious hunk Parmesan Reggiano inside? Of course not, it is a toxic science project of rancid globs of putrid white goo. Not tasty.

Somehow, early man figured out a way to keep old milk from turning into a disgusting wad of puke, and instead found a way to make it tasty cheese. Somehow, they added bacteria and/or mold to it and made it taste better. I can’t even imagine what they were thinking when they did that – there is nothing about a cup of old milk that would ever think you could turn it into something delicious like aged Gouda. Nearest I can figure, early cheese was some sort of assassination attempt on a prehistoric king where they tried to poison him with bacteria and mold laden glop disguised as food, and somehow they stumbled upon delicious cheese.

I’m sorry, cheese is one thing I simply cannot demystify. It is simply mindboggling that it actually works, like a Frisbee or Pat Shurmur’s offense the past three games. Not that Shurmur’s offense is anything like a delicious creamy Maytag Blue, but it is a pretty decent American cheese, which I’m pretty sure has vinyl in it somewhere.

The banana, one fruit so many uses. –CDT

Indeed, like you can put it in a tailpipe to keep a car from chasing you, or you can leave the peel on the ground to cause the kart chasing you to spin out so you can win the Mushroom Cup, or you can use it like a telephone, because that gag never gets unfunny. Hello dog, this is monkey. Hahahahaha.

Gypsies will use bananas to train monkeys to do their nefarious deeds as well, like picking your pockets or robbing the Federal Reserve Bank. Monkeys will do ANYTHING for a banana.

How many Spanish Gypsy trained monkeys would it take to pull off a heist like in Die Hard 3? –CDT

In the movie, $140B of gold was stolen from the Federal Reserve building. It was taken via 14 dump trucks, which is a preposterous load on each of them considering that equates to about 5 million pounds of gold, and your top rated dump truck can maybe haul 50,000 pounds (for those not so adept in math, that means you need over 100 dump trucks to haul that much gold, and we’re talking 2012 gold prices here too). If you consider loading times, etc., that becomes even more preposterous.

Gypsy monkeys are a far better choice. Each bar weighs about 27 pounds, and it would be perfectly reasonable for a gypsy-trained monkey to break into the Fed, steal a bar, and sneak out to stash it in a pre-designated area of the city. You could even train the monkeys to stash them in separate locations, so if a single monkey is compromised, the whole stash isn’t lost.

$140B of gold would be about 200,000 bars. Assuming your monkey could make about ten trips before John McClain caught onto the ruse, that means you would need 20,000 monkeys to pull off the heist. Of course, training 20,000 monkeys would be somewhat ridiculous of a concept, especially training them to bring the bar to a specific location in New York, and training them to go to the Fed building to get the bars in the first place would be difficult at best, because they’re not exactly going to let you practice. But still, the gypsy monkey scenario is more likely than the dump truck one.

A better use for the 20,000 gypsy monkeys would to give them all typewriters to make a movie that didn’t suck as bad as Die Hard 3. They should be able to do that in a few weeks, tops.

Why do we have creamed corn in our cabinet? We never eat creamed corn, does it come with the house? Or was it ghosts? –CDT

Everyone has this, and nobody is really sure. My theory is that every pantry is installed with a teleporter in it, controlled by Del Monte. Any surplus production is automatically teleported into various cabinets around the world so it can be donated to the local canned food drive. Wouldn’t it just be easier for Del Monte to donate the surplus directly? Sure, but they would look like total dicks donating 50 tons of creamed corn every Christmas. They teleport it to your cabinet and then you get rid of it, because you’re too cheap to go out and buy a nice can of garbanzo beans or San Marzano tomatoes or something normal people want to eat for the drive. You look like the dick, not Del Monte. Nice move Del Monte PR.

Why do some movie theaters still sell those giant pickles? Do you consider a giant pickle appropriate movie theater eating? –CDT

Pregnant women still want to leave the house, but they can’t really do a lot of the things they want to do. Fancy restaurants? Their clothes don’t fit properly, so they don’t want to go. Night clubs? You ever try to tolerate one of those shitshows without booze? No, basically the only place they can go is the movies. The pickles are there to cater to pregnant women, because for some strange reason, pregnant women love pickles.

Let's say I have been involved in baseball for 49 years in some capacity......playing ( collegiately ACC at a school in the sun), coaching, scouting, blah, blah, blah,). What the f#$$%%ck am I missing ? Can it be that hard to find a 1st baseman and Left Fielder? Seriously. Seriously. No seriously. -pod's uncle

The problem in the majors is one of economics. Quality left fielders and first basemen are often the best hitters on the team, who are only on the team because they can hit. They need defensive positions where they can hide and not screw up too many things with their steroid-laden immobile bodies, so they can be in the lineup and bang out 40 or so homers a year. And when you hit 40+ homers a year, the Angels, Yankees, Red Sox, Braves, and Dodgers will sign you to an eleventy billion dollar contract for the next million years. That leaves everyone else to fight over whoever is left.

Teams have two options here: 1) develop good talent yourself or 2) trade for someone else’s developed young talent. Since the Indians are obviously incapable of doing the first since Manny Ramirez came up, they rely on the second, trading Cy Young winning pitchers for left fielders and first basemen. Unfortunately, the Indians remain unable to develop talent and therefore all the talent they acquire is wasted, like week-old heads of lettuce in the vegetable crisper in your fridge (aka the vegetable rotter).

Now there are two options to fix this: 1) spend more money on player development, or 2) spend money on major league quality free agents. Both are viable, yet neither fits the Dolan economic model, which is 1) don’t spend money, and 2) when in doubt, don’t spend money. But hey, we should be thankful to have a team, and glad he’s making money, right? Or we could turn away from the Indians and focus on the Browns, the Cavs, and our everyday lives, which would endanger the Dolan profits, until he ratchets the spending down another notch. The logical conclusion of this is that there will be five people per game watching an Indians team that has 25 $5.75 an hour high school fry cooks on its roster.

What could Neil Schon have possibly seen in Michaele Salahi? - pod2

She’s a truly awful woman, isn’t she? Schon apparently dated her when her soon-to-be-ex husband was also dating her, and she actually chose against Schon. Ten years later, he breaks up her marriage to be with the woman that dumped him. None of this makes any sense, because all Salahi did in that time period was become an obvious attention whore who aged ten years.

Schon is a rock legend, had has been for decades, so it is highly unlikely Salahi did anything in the bedroom that was at all unusual or extraordinary for his life. She clearly isn’t the world’s most interesting conversationalist, and she isn’t all that beautiful (definitely not as hot as she thinks she is). The only logical conclusion is that Salahi knows gypsy mind control tricks, and has Schon in some sort of decades long hypnotic trance. If monkeys knock off the Fed, you can be assured Salahi is behind it.

Does anyone drink instant coffee by choice? –pod

Sadly, some people are really that lazy. Making a pot of coffee is about as difficult as slicing bread. Instant coffee is assuredly the leftover dregs from every Maaco on the planet collected into one giant dehydrating vat at the end of each day. People that drink instant coffee are so lazy they prefer to drink this reconstituted hog sweat instead of a hot and delicious cup of fresh brewed coffee. They consciously torture their tastebuds, and subsequently their coworkers with their instant coffee breath. To each their own...

By the mercy of God does anyone in the entire world ever consume Pepsi-X...for any reason....under any circumstances? Horrid. –pod

Some people will do anything to seem cool. Often these people have no idea what it means to be cool, so they unfortunately try to do things that make them seem cool which actually make them seem like giant dorks. These are the people that drink Pepsi-X.

You’re a handsome single dude and Chris from the Bachelor invites you to be on the show. 25 beautiful women. What would your criteria be for weeding down the field? –Sabre

If I was handsome or single, I’d probably have a different attitude about things. But I’m neither, which is great, because I somehow found a beautiful woman to marry me and give me excellent Christmas presents. Yay me. But let’s play the hypothetical here for fun.

First and foremost, a woman has to be smart. That would likely eliminate about 24 of the contestants right off the bat. You can tell right away if you are having a real conversation with a person, or if your words are just banging around inside their empty skull. You’re picking a life partner, not an accessory. Your wife is more than something pretty to make your friends jealous – she’s your best friend, your confidant, the mother of your children, your real soul mate. If you’re stupid, sorry, you can’t be any of these things. I would listen and find the women I could talk to, and give them the first few roses.

Okay, I’ve got the smart ones, now what? Next you have to be fun. So I’ll pick dates that are a little crazy, and see how you hang. Let’s jump out of airplanes, bungee jump, race cars, whatever – let’s be nuts, because if you’re boring, you’re always going to be boring, and I want to make sure our relationship is vibrant and can remain as such forever.

I will also look for conviction at this point. Don’t be wishy washy about things, if you have a stance on politics, religion, or another controversial topic, I want to hear it and know that you’re the type of person who will stand up for what they believe in at whatever cost it may bear. Oh, and if I don’t like your convictions, I’ll dismiss you – my convictions are just as important to me.

That will probably narrow it down to my one, and if it doesn’t I’ll just pick the one with the biggest ti… um…. heart.

Please email questions to lars.hancock@yahoo.com, tweet them @ReasonsImADrunk, or DM them to me in the forae to LarsHancock.