Written by Lars Hancock

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Out Of Bounds, 2-17-12

Have you ever seen a chicken slaughterhouse?

Basically, you have a bunch of chickens nervously and excitedly bobbing up and down in a pen. The worker will select one of them at a time, put its feet on a hook, and the machinery will then stun the chicken, drain its blood, and send it to processing.

This was the floral department at my local grocery store on Valentine’s Day.

It may come as a shock to you to learn that I hate Valentine’s Day. I don’t need Hallmark telling me when and how I can screw my wife (she is perfectly capable of making those decisions all by herself thank you). Since I do consciously dote and attend to my wife on a regular basis, I don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars on a specific day to tell her that I love her. She’s more than aware of it the way I treat her the other 364 days in the year.

My present to my wife this year was a nice dinner for the two of us, which is pretty much my present to her every day, mind you, as I do the cooking. I did bring it up a notch by getting a lobster and some filets, and made an exceptional lobster-truffle pasta, but my real gift to her was bringing the elements of dinner home for her while she had her friends over at my house. Because the fastest way to a woman’s heart is through the envy of her friends.

But back to the chickens in the floral coop. These poor bastards have been conditioned by society to spend $100 on flowers as mere poker stakes for Valentine’s Day. They needed their arrangement to be the best and brightest with only the reddest of roses, in hopes that their peasant offering to Venus will convince her to give them a five minute unenthusiastic fuck tonight, for their only action of the month. I was tempted to go all Norma Rae and stand up on the checkout counter, and lecture them on pride, dignity, and respect. Instead, I chuckled to myself, picked a Coke Zero out of the cooler, and went on my way.

In related news, enrollment for the Browns’ six-month season ticket payment plan deadline is March 1, so act now!

Anyway, off to the questions.

Cialis, Viagra, or Yohimbe root? –pod2dawg’s “uncle”

When 28-year old Fausto Carmona was revealed actually to be 31-year old Roberto Hernandez Heredia, Cleveland was dealt a significant blow, as one of the arms that was to be counted on to build a stable rotation in 2012 and beyond was revealed to have much more mileage than originally thought.

You see, a pitcher only has so many good pitches in his arm. Modern strength and conditioning programs have extended the life of pitchers, but fundamentally, a pitcher’s arm breaks down after delivering the heat tens of thousands of times a year. Now, if you’re a junkballer, you can get some more mileage out of your arm and pitch into your early 70s, like Gaylord Perry, but for most pitchers 35 is where the arm gives out, and once it is done, it is done.

With the miracle of erectile dysfunction drugs, however, your little Commodore Perry doesn’t have to befall this fate anymore.  But here, we must ask ourselves: is it right to make the admiral willing while the rest of the navy is so weak?

First of all, and this must be said, the thought of old people fucking is just nasty, even if you’re an old person. The sight of grandma’s wrinkly naked body will turn any Fausto Carmona into a Roberto Hernandez Heredia instantly, and there is no drug short of LSD that can help you with the visuals there. If you’re so old that the admiral needs a little extra starch in his uniform, you’re likely going to be docking the Edmund Fitzgerald into a port that is less San Diego and more Baltimore. And the thought of that will send your ship straight to the bottom of Lake Erie, regardless of how much coal you have in the ol’ furnace.

And what, pray tell, are you going to do with your fancy new Typhoon-class class Red October once you make it seaworthy again? You can’t just pull that thing into any old port, and the home port of Severomorsk isn’t about to open the gates that locked behind you so long ago. You’ve got a diplomatic nightmare here Captain Ramius.

No, it’s best to let old pitchers go to pasture, and trot them out once a year to fantasy camp where they can still go an inning here or there throwing junk that is more nostalgic than competitive.

Oh, and if you’re asking for recreational use, let me close with a story. A friend of mine got himself a sample pack of Viagra from his doctor. Excited to try his newfound powers, he took one… the same night his wife took a sleeping pill. You see, the supply and demand curves were completely unchanged with the extra wood his woodchuck was able to chuck – it was as if Adam Smith opened a mitten factory in Rio. And as the old saying goes, he who goes to bed with a sex problem in his mind wakes up with solution in hand.

I think we all can agree that the quarterback position in Cleveland has been shit since the days of Bernie.  Sure, the supporting cast hasn't really been there to help these guys succeed but overall it has been a cluster fuck.  Kosar owned this town for a long time. That being said, what the hell is Bernie talking about these days? I follow him on Twitter and every tweet feels like a Peyote trip.  Is he having a prolonged stroke?  Should I call an ambulance for him? I'm seriously worried about the guy. This is one example out of HUNDREDS.

"Finished my sons Football, What an awesome group of A FOOTBALL FAMILY AT UNIVERSITY SCHOOL. THANKS AND CONGRATS.

Seriously, check out his twitter feed sometime. It's fucking crazy. –Brady, Bowling Green, OH.

Bernie was always regarded as a player who made plays with his head instead of his athletic ability. When you listen to him analyze a game, he goes deeper than the typical Jon Gruden rah rah fellatio you get out of most color guys, and provides a real depth of insight into the game and nuances of playing QB in the NFL. Yet somehow, he comes across as an insane madman on twitter. I’ve got four theories on this.

1. Bernie is the honey badger. Simply put, Bernie doesn’t give a fuck. He knows he’s badass, and just ejaculates whatever is between his ears into a tweet. No proofreading, no editing, think it, say it, tweet it. This causes a lot to get lost in translation, as Bernie is sometimes three steps ahead of himself when he writes. But, Bernie doesn’t give a fuck, so that’s what it is.
2. Massive head trauma. Bernie took a lot of hits in throughout his football career, and sadly, we are just starting to learn the effects of cumulative head trauma. This is a very sad and very real problem, and could have indeed caused Bernie’s brain to cloud up. I mean, look at that mentally challenged crack ape Terry Bradshaw – nobody could be that stupid, crazy, incoherent, and clowntastic without some sort of head injury, right? It’s just sad.
3. Maybe “smart NFL player” is an incredibly low bar. The incoherent babblings you see there could be considered intelligent in comparison to the rest of the league, where the vast majority of the players could do a three cone drill in less time and better precision than it would take them to add two single-digit numbers together.
4. Something just done broke in his head. Life hasn’t been easy for Bernie. You think “the drive” and the “fumble” fucked YOU up? Think about what they did to the guy who did everything right to get his team to the Super Bowl, only to watch helplessly as others screwed it up. And then after he retires, he goes through a bitter divorce, loses all his money, and his daughter goes into porn. If all that shit happened to me, my tweets would be even more incoherent than Bernie’s. went to licker store they ran out of COLT 45 HOW AM I TOO WACTH COLE MCCORD PLAY WITHOUT MALT LICKER?

By the way, @NotReallyBernie does an amazing parody of Kosar for what it is worth (parody borrowed en homage for my fake tweet).

What the fuck is wrong with people who eat breakfast food for dinner? Worse, what the double-fuck is wrong with people that teach their kids to eat breakfast food for dinner? It's no wonder that kids who don't know that pancakes are for breakfast and steak is for dinner are so confused at lunchtime that they eat bags of Doritos Late Night All Nighter Cheeseburger chips. Breakfast for dinner is the chief cause of America's obesity epidemic, not to mention Iran about to get the nuke AND the dissipation of earth's ozone layer. --Eggsy Mourning, Greasy Spoon, AR

Well, it seems as if #4 is the correct answer, Mr. Kosar. Thanks for the clarification.

But ignoring the insane and deranged rambling tone of this question (I guess this may be the type of reader Out of Bounds appeals to), let’s attack all the fundamental misconceptions and try to provide an answer.

First of all, let’s think of the children. Kids don’t have the basic instincts to survive. Things like eating properly, not playing in traffic, and not throwing knives at each other just don’t compute to kids. Why the fuck will the little bastards put filthy toys touched by every dirty kid hand in the neighborhood in their mouth, yet a simple piece of grilled chicken may as well be pulled straight from Oprah’s vagina the way they react to it. Doesn’t make sense. Don’t try to think about it, because if you do, the little hellions win. Fact is, kids love breakfast for dinner, and they’ll fucking eat it, so I heartily encourage making this a weekly special. If you don’t, they’ll break your brain causing you to tweet incoherently, and they’ll wind up in porn. Breakfast for dinner is good for kids and families.

Now as for adults, breakfast for dinner affords many opportunities for creativity and proper nutrition. If you make something egg-based, it is nearly impossible to eat too many calories, so your dinner becomes protein rich and healthy. You can dress up eggs nicely for dinner fare as well – adding such things as truffle, asparagus, harissa, or salmon, for example, can take something very simple and make it complex and delicious. An egg is a blank palette, any great chef can make breakfast for dinner elegant and delicious.

Where exactly would you draw the line should you be so staunchly opposed to such a brilliant concept anyway? Many great dishes require egg – try making a carbonara without egg. And if you really want to blow someone’s mind, whip this recipe up. Bacon is a breakfast food, but finds a home in any dish from a burger to ice cream. I had to cook dinner for 22 people this weekend, and made port-braised short ribs served over a fennel cornmeal waffle. A waffle for dinner! At a dinner party! Crazy!

Look man, there are no rules. The rules say you’ve got to be one of the chickens waiting at the flower stand for the opportunity to beg for your annual conjugal relations experience with your wife as scheduled by the Hallmark corporation. Don’t be that guy, and enjoy some breakfast for dinner.

Last Friday night Jason Whitlock tweeted the following about Jeremy Lin, the Knicks Asian-American phenom:

Jason Whitlock @WhitlockJason Some lucky lady in NYC is gonna feel a couple inches of pain tonight.

How come Jason Whitlock's fat ass wasn't fired for that racially motivated tweet and where do Al Sharpton and the Reverend Jackson stand on all of this? I have not heard them speak passionately on this as of yet. – peeker643

So essentially, your question was “do you want to go tapdancing in a minefield with me?” My answer: hell yeah.

In my opinion, the fundamental problem with race relations in America today is that we make too much of a deal of them. White people are afraid to say anything for fear of being called “racist”, and minority communities band together as minorities to preserve their own interests, allied in union against white people. This creates isolationism, fear, distrust, and a palatable tension about everything that each and every American thinks and does when a person of a different race is nearby. What the fuck happened to the great Melting Pot, where we all banded together as Americans, created a common purpose and culture based on respect? We just gave up on that shit apparently.

The law, and the intelligent portion of our culture, is staunchly against racism in all forms. If we took the advice of Rodney King and just tried to get along, well, maybe we’d get along. But instead because white people were complete douchebags for the first 200 or so years of this country, we have a New Years Day-esque racial tension hangover that has created a culture of distrust that is only getting worse, a culture fostered by noted bigots like Sharpton and Jackson who are opportunistically looking to fill their own coffers by fanning the flames of hate. Which is why they could give two craps about Jeremy Lin’s cock: the Asian community isn’t going to support them, and calling out a member of their own community only weakens their political clout within it (even if it does make them less hypocritical).

Let’s be blunt. There was nothing funny about Whitlock’s tweet, there was nothing remotely professional or particularly useful about it, and no employer wants someone who thinks like that to represent them. If Whitlock was white, he’d be fired faster than Don Imus was. Why him being a minority allowed him to keep his job is hard to say, but it seems as if this is an instantiation of a social truth: white America has grandfathered the right to be racist to minorities as pseudo-social reparations for 200+ years of Caucasian dickheadedness. This is an awkward truth, but a truth nonetheless.

So Whitlock can eat a big bag of dicks for all I care. He’s a subpar journalist as it is, and has clearly demonstrated subpar social skills, thought processes, and maturity. He was lucky it didn’t cost him his career this time, but at some point, people will get tired of his shit, and we won’t be forced to deal with his feeble-minded racist pomposity.

 

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