The All-Time Biggest Sports Jerks

I bought this book from Barnes and Noble on Monday and just finished reading it on the shitter about 5 minutes ago. All of the names you'd expect (Tyson, A-Rod, TO, Vick, O.J, etc.) are represented and torn apart with absolutely no evidence or insight that you haven't repeatedly heard your entire life. When you aren't be dazzled with new and exciting information like "Manny Ramirez is a dingbat!" or "Terrell Owens is selfish!", you're regaled with Michael Freeman's observational brilliance, reasonable opinions, and wit. Here are a few things I've learned from this book:

-Ko-Me is a really clever nickname for Kobe Bryant that should be used at least five times per page.

-Stephen A. Smith is a great sports journalist

-John Daly is fat and drinks a lot. This is extremely funny, and you should make as many references to it as possible, even when it bears no relevance to the subject. Are you having trouble coming up with a wacky comparison to illustrate Terrell Owens' selfishness? Say he cares more about himself than John Daly cares about beer. Here is an actual joke taken from the book's chapter on Daly: "The reason Daly is now one of the worst golfers on the planet is because when he gets on a roll, he stops to eat it." Amazing.

-Last season Eagles receiver DeSean Jackson made an embarrassing error by catching a sure touchdown pass, streaking toward the end zone, and starting his celebration a split second too early, resulting in him dropping the ball on the one-yard line. By doing this Jackson wasn't simply making a silly rookie mistake, he was emphasizing celebrating over doing his job, in effect putting on a deplorable and disgusting minstrel show that brought shame upon all black men in America the moment it happened.

-Mike Gundy is a misogynist because the sports journalist he was yelling at during his infamous "I'm a man! I'm forty!" tirade was a woman. According to Freeman, any circumstance in which a man yells at a woman qualifies as "bullying misogyny". Apparently the proper way to address a woman trying to succeed in a man's world is to give her special treatment because of her gender.

-The Lakers were heavily favored over the Celtics in the 2008 NBA Finals.

-Posting on your blog real names and IP addresses of people who sent you angry e-mails specifically for the purpose of embarrassing them and invading their privacy is heroic, provided that those people hold different political views from you.

-If you've met Michael Freeman, corresponded with him, had him present at a significant moment in your career, or provide him with any other reason to personally inject himself into your story, you can expect to jump 30 or 40 spots higher on the list.

This is the most enlightening book I've ever read.

Episode 17: Drinking

1. I've felt shitty about a lot of these cartoons because I felt like the writing wasn't great, or the writing was good but it fell apart in execution due to poor voice acting and third grade level production values. Well, this is the first cartoon since Crash: The Board Game five episodes ago that I've actually liked.

2. The joke about how alcohol makes you a great writer is based on a little bit of truth, because I've always noticed that most of the truly great writers, musicians, and comedians that I've held up as my greatest influences are or were total alcoholics and drug addicts. Honestly that's a main reason why I drink as much as I do: because sometimes I feel like sobriety guarantees a failure to create any sort of great art.

3. Case in point: Bill Hicks, George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, Chris Farley, John Belushi, Mitch Hedberg, Richard Pryor, The Beatles and Ernest Hemingway were all drug addicts and/or alcoholics, while Dane Cook has led a completely clean and sober life.

4. Honestly, I don't have enough to say about the creative process of making these videos to fill ten facts. You may notice that most of my "ten facts" blog posts are mostly filler, or drunken whining. Here is the process that I go through to make one of these videos:

1. I think up an idea
2. I spend a couple hours writing a script
3. I come up with a list of pictures that will make up the video
4. I draw the pictures
5. I record the sound into my computer and edit it
6. I make a slideshow of the pictures and sound with Windows Movie Maker

And that's about it. Honestly, I'm fucking surprised I've managed to fill ten items this long with such thin material to work with. It would be like an NFL kicker trying to write ten interesting facts about every game he's ever played. He could probably do it, but on average less than two would be about his personal contributions.

5. Yeah, for that reason I think I'll cut this post short.

Episode 16

Oh dear god, I've actually made a two-parter!

1. Apparently I thought it would be a good idea to take a conflict and premise that wasn't funny enough to sustain one video and stretch it out into a two-parter. Based on my TV viewing experience, this is a first step towards a writing job with Saturday Night Live.

2. I've always been of the opinion that Manute Bol is a failure of a human being. Being a 7'7" athlete with as much range as Tom Cruise's right hook means your only possible recourse for marketing yourself is pointing out hilarious size differences between yourself and others. Manute Bol did a few magazine covers with Muggsy Bogues, and spent the rest of his time doing worthless things like playing basketball, honing his defensive prowess, and fighting for Sudanese freedom. Gheorghe Muresan, on the other hand, immediately realized the moneymaking potential of his hugeness and landed himself a starring role in My Giant opposite Billy Crystal, a hilariously tiny Jew. Because Manute Bol never once considered doing a movie where he pushes Gary Coleman around in a stroller, I have to declare him the unquestioned god of failed potential.

3. I promised my girlfriend I would end this video by making fun of the Buffalo Bills, but then I decided to follow my heart, because although the Bills fucking suck, the Bengals fucking suck exponentially more.

4. This video is frightening realistic. I actually crashed at home last weekend because I came up for a friend's wedding in Chicago. When I got there I saw my dad's laptop (which I allegedly broke) fully repaired and sitting on the dining room table. I was so terrified of touching it that I didn't even push it out of the way to eat breakfast.

5. I was sorta worried about being seen as ripping off Saturday Night Live with the Grape-Nuts joke, but I think I'm probably in the clear since Mike Myers probably wasn't the first person to notice that Grape-Nuts have an inaccurate name either.

6. If you have an Xbox 360, download Splosion Man. You'll thank me.

7. If you don't have an Xbox 360, fucking buy one. You'll thank me.

8. Today I made my exercise bike go 10.4 miles in 30 minutes. I have effectively gone from exercise bike master to exercise bike god.

9. Here are a few of the "Corey touches things and immediately ruins them" jokes that I thought about including but ultimately rejected: Corey touches a porn star's cock and watches in horror as it immediately shrinks to half its size, Corey pats his little sister on the shoulder and watches in horror as she complains that her hymen was just broken, and Corey hugs his grandfather, which immediately kills him.

10. I rejected the first idea because I couldn't think of any logical situation to involve it in the story, I rejected the second because it was too fucked up even for me, and I rejected the third because I don't fucking know how to draw all of that.

The Madden Curse

You see these guys? They're Pittsburgh Steelers safety Troy Polamalu and Arizona Cardinals receiver Larry Fitzgerald. They're on the cover of this year's edition of Madden. Look at their fucking faces. Look at them hard. Commit the image to your memory, because those faces are going to look like tenderized hamburger in about 6 weeks. Remember the shape of their perfectly sculpted bodies, because they're going to look like starving Rwandans after they get their fucking teeth knocked out and have to drink ribeye steak through a straw. Remember how gracefully they run, because by week 9, their knees will shatter like a champagne glass in the presence of a Castrati chorus singing Party all the Time. Open your ears because I'm about to squirt a Hershey shit of truth in there: These two are going to get fucked by the Madden Curse.

What is the Madden Curse, you ask? It's the mysterious cosmic evil force that causes every Madden cover athlete to either suffer a serious injury or suffer an otherwise extremely disappointing season after appearing on the cover. Ray Lewis failed to record a single interception the year he was on the cover. How fucking terrible does a linebacker have to be to not get even one pick? It's almost as embarrassing as all of those seasons where Deion Sanders failed to get so much as a single sack.

The only logical explanation for Madden cover athletes being more prone to injury is a magical curse. Think about this: 8 out of the first 9 cover athletes were either running backs or running QBs. These players get tackled more than anyone else on the field. That means they're the toughest. The coach wouldn't assign them to a job where they get tackled all the time if they weren't the toughest players on the team. For these players to get injured in the process of getting hit hundreds of times could only be the work of a curse.

You want more proof of the Madden Curse? For the first eleven annual Madden games, John Madden himself appeared on the cover. He's fat, for the past 30 years he's only been able to find work one day a week 5 months out of the year, and on the rare days that he actaully does find work, he finds the work so miserable that he resorts to drawing penises to amuse himself.


You poor, poor, man.

Don't even get me started on how rare it is for a player's production to drop off after having a breakout season. That never happens in football. I hope you love the living shit out of the big fat checks you cashed for appearing on the Madden cover, Troy and Larry. Troy, when you're injecting nutrients into your ass because Willis McGahee crushed your esophagus, and Larry, when you have Dr. House verbally berating his staff for not being able to figure why your testicle exploded, I hope you realize how much you really sacrificed to get that money. If you guys get hurt, it'll be because of the curse and definitely not because you play the most violent sport in America, and it's statistically proven that over half of all NFL players get injured every season, and curses and magic aren't real, and people who bring up the goddamn fucking Madden Curse every year are goddamn fucking dipshits.

Crapstick Doodle: Episode 15

1. This is the 15th cartoon I've made, and the most views I've ever gotten is 250 for the first one. This is getting just a bit discouraging.

2. Like really discouraging.

3. The thumbnail is the AOL logo grinding mud into a couch while saying "Fuck yo' couch". Back in 2004 when we were fucking inundated with kids quoting Rick James and other such Dave Chappelle brilliance this kind of reference would have been the most annoyingly lame thing I could possibly do. In 2009 it's either a fun throwback that we're okay with laughing at again, or it's pathetically dated on top of being annoyingly lame. I should probably change that thumbnail now...

4. The piles of shit on the map are arranged in a discernible pattern with the exception of one spot in the northeast where there are like 6 piles all on top of each other. That's the Boston area, and it's not a coincidence.

5. With the exception of the silly shit at the end about an evil death box, this is more or less exactly what happened last week when I visited home.

6. Coming up with a fantasy football team name that distills a perfect level of hilarity and shocking offensiveness into 4 or 5 words is about as difficult as writing an entire comedy sketch.

7. Kroger Bistro Salads fucking rule. Their awesomeness is the only thing actually making me stick to my 1,500 calorie diet / daily exercise extreme weight loss routine I've been going through for the last week.

8. Xbox Live is the most distracting fucking thing ever. It's directly responsible for this cartoon taking about twice as long to make as it should have.

9. I'm unbelievably happy that I'm back at my old job. Cracker Barrel had all of this ridiculous shit like customers, rules, and managers who expect you to work hard. It was almost like a business over there.

10. While a fist going up a turtle's ass is funny, it's probably not funny enough to sustain a four-minute comedy video. Lesson learned. Wow, this has got to be the most miserable, self-defeating, not-even-attempting-to-be-funny blog post I've ever written.

From Gentile Golem's diary...

Dear Diary,

I was driving around Florence, Kentucky and I noticed a small diner whose sign claims that they have the biggest Cookie Burgers in town. I've never seen a Cookie Burger in my life and I have no idea what they are, but here we have a store priding themselves on their Cookie Burgers as the main reason to come in. That's unusual enough, but remember that they claim to have the biggest ones in town, which means there's at least one other Cookie Burger vendor somewhere in the city, and they're probably bitter rivals. They're probably working day and night, dedicating their lives to outdoing and crushing their enemy in the name of pride as well as feeding their families. I'm not saying world peace is a completely impossible dream and we shouldn't even try to achieve it, but in a world where the size of Cookie Burgers can be a source of significant conflict, our chances are looking pretty fucking slim.

A Review of Harry Potter

The following is a review of Harry Potter. No, this isn't a review of the newest Harry Potter film, it's not a review of the seventh and final book of the series, and it's not a retrospective of the greater cultural impact that the series as a whole has had on the literary landscape. All of that stuff would be distinctly faggy and/or interesting. This is a review of Harry Potter himself, and how awesome or sucky he is as a hero.


Harry Potter is the most respected, heroic, stalwart, and capable boy in the entire wizard world. Don't believe me? Here is a list of just a few of his exploits over the 160 minutes of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince:

-Over the course of the movie he takes interest in two girls he finds attractive, only to do absolutely nothing about it and wait for them to make the first move.

-He spies on a classmate that he suspects of wrongdoing, only to completely blow his cover, get hit with a paralyzing spell after his ass gets found out, and then get his face stomped on.

-He tries to use magic to fight off an attacking horde of Gollums, and when he finds that his magical ability is hilariously worthless, he resorts to punching them.

-Appears on a movie poster that, were we not familiar with the character and series, would look like a poster for a terrible suspense flick about a young serial killer:

Evil comes in all shapes and sizes. Homicidal Patient 6: Killing in a theater near you

-Not once but twice he gallantly charges at his enemies like he's Don Quixote and he's about to kick the shit out of some fucking windmills, and not once but twice the villains immediately slap him down with their hard, throbbing black wands. As the bad guys look over his writhing and helpless body, they decide he's such a worthless sack of mouse turds that pointing a wand at him and saying two words to invoke the death spell isn't worth the effort, so they just leave.

-He hides under some floorboards and just fucking watches a bunch of bad wizards murder his mentor.

-In the only instance in the entire film of him actually being useful, he forces an old delirious man to drink something he doesn't want to drink. This act of heroism puts him on par with anyone who has ever worked as a nurse.

-He makes a little bit of light come out of his wand. I need $1.50 worth of batteries to do this, but Harry Potter can do it for free. I guess he has this slight edge over me, but I can ask girls out on dates.

-With the help of a magical potion that completely guarantees success at whatever you attempt, Harry successfully get one of his teachers drunk and procures information............... that turns out to be completely worthless, since Dumbledore fucking already knew it anyway.

-He passes Potions class with the help of the wizarding equivalent of a Nintendo book of cheat codes.

It's a proven fact that the people of the wizarding world of Harry Potter are a bunch of complete and total gaping pussies. Most of them are so afraid of Voldemort, a wizard responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, that they're terrified of even saying his name. Listen to me, you wand-toting gaggle of fucking nancies: us muggles aren't afraid to say the name of Adolf Hitler, a guy who's responsible for a thousand times more deaths. We're so badass that Mel Brooks made The Producers, a movie that features tons of Hitler-related comedy, less than 25 years after World War II.

Also, we didn't lose our edge as the years wore on. As evidenced by all of the O.J. Simpson-related jokes on late night TV in the mid-90's, we think a beloved athlete and former American hero cutting his white wife's head off is HILARIOUS. That's how fucking hardcore we are. But even by the pussisized standards of the wizard world Harry Potter is an utter failure of a hero.

By the sixth movie I think the dark wizards came to this same realization as well, because the first five movies were all about Lord Voldemort trying like hell to kill Harry Potter, while the sixth movie is all about attempts to kill Dumbledore. With the exception of one run-in with water creatures that try to kill anyone who gets close to them regardless of fame, nobody seems to give even half a shit about killing Harry. He can't get murdered by dark wizards even if he tries. He's all like "Here I am! Come get some! If I die during the fight, so be it!" and the dark wizards just leave out of boredom.

It reminds me of a couple months ago when my parents' house was robbed by a couple heroin junkies looking for shit to pawn to pay for their next fix. They stole various things, including a flat screen TV and all of my mom's jewelry, but my enormous pile of VHS movies, retro video game consoles, and my totally sweet tie collection went untouched. One the one hand I'm glad that my shit wasn't stolen, but on the other I'm bummed that not even desperate penniless heroin junkies thought my shit was worth taking. So while I feel Harry Potter's pain to a certain extent, I still think he's a fucking loser and the single most overrated hero in contemporary literary history. Also, the actor who plays him is woman-sized.

Final score: 1.4/10

Robogeisha

Sometimes you come across something that beats the ever-loving shit out of you so hard with its fearless insanity that it renders all wacky sarcastic commentary moot and redundant. This trailer for the upcoming film Robogeisha defies explanation to the point that I've given up on describing it to anyone, instead opting to plop their asses in front of the computer and forcing them to watch it because no words can do it justice. I'll shut up now so you can watch it.