Saturday night means it's "Moot Points" time here at The Cleveland Fan, and Hiko starts this weekend's piece with an epic take on a television commercial we've all seen that gets under his skin.  Hiko also takes some time to hit on Casey Hampton, Britney Spears, and the Browns recieving corps.  It's our dose of comic relief.  It's "Moot Points".

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Trust Is A Four Letter Word With Five Letters

There’s a commercial on the radio that I hear sometimes, and it never ceases to annoy me.

Basically, one mom answers the phone, and it’s another mom on the phone. “How are you doing, Phyllis?” asks the first mom.

“Well, not so good, Henrietta,” responds the second mom. “My daughter Jane is out with your daughter Zelda. They said they were going to a basketball game, but I’m a nosy overbearing worrisome housewife with no dreams or goals of my own, and I’ve got nothing better to do than bother my poor daughter and judge her friends. So I was thinking about it, and I’m not sure Jane even likes basketball. Not that I’d know, since I don’t think of her as a human being, just a product designed to make me look good and feel good about myself.”

“I trust my daughter implicitly, Phyllis,” Henrietta replied, “because she’s my daughter – a reflection of me – and she couldn’t possibly do anything wrong. But she is with your daughter, whom I distrust as much as you distrust mine. So if anything immoral is occurring, I can easily lay the blame at your daughter’s feet. Therefore, why don’t I call Zelda on her cell phone and check up on her and make sure she’s not being negatively influenced by anyone evil, like your spawn. Then I’ll call you back and we can gossip about our neighbors.”

“That sounds like a plan, Henrietta,” gushed Phyllis, and the conversation ended.

Henrietta called Zelda’s cell, and Zelda answered. “Hello?” Zelda yelled above the apparent din behind her.

“Hi sweetie-kins,” cooed Henrietta. “How’s your game?”

“What?” Zelda bellowed, the music behind her quite loud.

“Honey,” began Henrietta carefully, “it doesn’t sound like you’re at a game.”

As if Henrietta had any idea what a basketball game sounded like.

Then, in the background, over a loudspeaker, a voice shouted “You are watching a Wildcats High School Basketball Game!” Which PA announcers say all the time, just in case the people at the game forget why they’re there or who they came to watch.

“What did you say, Mom?” Zelda hollered over the cheers of the crowd.

“Nothing, sweetie-bear,” responded Henrietta, surely glowing in her pride.

Then on came the commercial announcer to say: Kids make the right choices when they have parents that care enough to not trust anything they say and bother the living hell out of them.

This message brought to you by the Happy Shiny Society of America.

So after I’m done listening to it, I say to myself: Who wrote this shit?

And what color is the grass in their world?

In reality, this is how this scenario would go:

The phone rings, and Henrietta picks it up. “Yello,” Henrietta yawns tiredly.

“Hey, Henrietta, it’s Phyllis, Jane’s mom.”

“Who?”

“Phyllis.”

“No, who is Jane?”

“Your daughter Zelda’s friend. Jane. Tall girl. Brown hair,” Phyllis pleads.

“Oh – her. The one that dresses like a whore,” Henrietta said.

“Yeah… well… do you know where she and Zelda are?”

“Search me,” Henrietta replied. “I just got off a double shift, I’m beat, I just made myself a 40 ounce screwdriver that’s got only a splash of OJ, and I all I wanna do is forget about this week and that mother f… I mean, my boss. Zelda left a note saying they were going to your house. I don’t know anything other than that.”

“Zelda showed up here, but her and Jane left,” Phyllis explained. “She said they were going to a basketball game.”

“So they’re probably at the basketball game.”

“Well, I’d say the same thing, but I just found out that Jane stole $500 from my room, and almost all my wee… and some other stuff.”

“Aw, for the love of Christ!” Henrietta cursed.

“Since her dad left, we haven’t been able to afford cell phones, so I thought maybe you could call Zelda and find out what the hell the girls are up to, and have her tell Jane that if she’s not home in a half hour, I’m calling the cops because I’m sick and damn tired of her shit!”

“Yeah, all right,” Henrietta agreed reluctantly. “I’ll call you back in a few.”

Sighing and shaking her head and muttering about how much she’d rather be watching re-runs of The Cosby Show, Henrietta turned on the radio, checked the score of the basketball game, and then called up her daughter.

“Hello?” Zelda yelled above the apparent din behind her.

“Zelda, where the hell are you?” Henrietta yelled back.

“I’m at the basketball game.”

“Like hell you are. What’s the score?”

“Huh?” Zelda asked.

“The score, the score! What’s the score of the game? Look up at the scoreboard and tell me the score of the game!”

“Uhhh…. 46-39?”

Henrietta froze, surprised that her daughter got it right.

“Fine, but I want you to get your ass straight home after it’s over. And tell that slut friend of yours Jane that her mom knows that she stole the $500 and that she better either get home now or be on the first train to Mexico.”

“Uhhh…. OK.”

“OK then,” and Henrietta hung up. Smiling to herself on her parenting skills, she sat on the couch, took a big chug of her super-sized screwdriver, and turned on Deal Or No Deal.

Meanwhile, in the backseat of her boyfriend’s car, Zelda hung up her cell phone. Neither she nor Derek was wearing much in the way of clothing, and the windows were steamed up. Derek was smoking a bit of the righteous weed that Jane and Zelda had stolen from Jane’s mom. No one had seen Jane since she hopped in the RV with the rodeo clowns back at the BP.

“Why the hell did you answer the phone?” Derek asked, trying not to let the smoke out of his lungs.

“’Cause if I don’t, then she grounds my ass,” Zelda replied.

The radio was on really loud, tuned to the basketball game. Derek looked at it, annoyed.

“Can’t we turn that shit off?” he asked.

“Not if you wanna get laid,” she replied with a grin, reaching for his belt buckle.

Commercial Announcer: Kids don’t make the right choices. They’re kids – they’re stupid. No matter what you do, kids are going to be themselves, and it’s almost impossible to stop them. It’s naïve to believe that your kids aren’t going to try all the “bad” stuff that you did when you were their age. So, either send them off to military school in Greenland, or try to come to an understanding with them so they can make it through this confusing time without dying, getting knocked up, or contracting a venereal disease.

This message brought to you by Trojan Brand Condoms.

***Casey Hampton of the wholly repugnant Pittsburgh Steelers was on Playbook on the NFL Network on Thursday night, and he told the interviewer “The interior has to be really solid if you’re gonna run a 3-4”.

Bingo!

***Britney Spears didn’t look that fat to me.

A bottle of Mad Dog… a short prison sentence… hells yeah.

***There is no denying that Derek Anderson and the whole Cleveland Browns offense had a fantabulous day on Sunday.

But let’s look at the receiving stat line for a moment:

Braylon Edwards – 8 rec, 146 yds, 2 TD

Kellen Winslow – 6 rec, 100 yds, 1 TD

Joe Jurevicius – 4 rec, 44 yds, 2 TD

Steve Heiden – 1 rec, 27 yds

Laurence Vickers – 1 rec, 11 yds.

What’s that tell you? That Braylon, Kellen, and Joe had excellent days? Well… yes… but what it tells me is that our receiving corps is frighteningly thin.

Derek Anderson passed for 328 yards – and 290 of it went to three players. Only two Wide Receivers caught balls. I don’t even remember any of the other ones in there.

Tim Carter… how useless has that guy been so far? Travis Wilson… has he been active? Josh Cribbs comes in the game sometimes, but you, me, and the rest of humanity is aware that he’s not there to catch the ball.

Certainly our lack of WR depth didn’t hurt us against the Bengals – but Braylon’s gonna start seeing double-teams, and there’ll be a day where we are facing a team with 2 good Corners, and we’ll need some love from our Bench Boys.