Kick Around This Week's Features

I should’ve taken care of this yesterday. It’s weekly feature time.

The top five for the week is football movies and I must include the warning that I have yet to see The Blind Side:

5 – The Waterboy: Think what you will of Adam Sandler’s stupid sense of humor, it works for me more often than not (Happy Gilmore, yes, Grown Ups, no) and this was one of his best

4 – Rudy: The classic underdog movie. You can’t help but pull for Rudy by the end of this film. Even though all he does is get in for some garbage time at the end, you feel like he won a championship.

3 – Brian’s Song: The friendship between Gale Sayers and Brian Piccolo is the subject of one of the only movies ever a man can watch with a box of tissue and not be ashamed of himself.

2 – Remember the Titans: I firmly believe that sports are more than a game, particularly at the high school level. They can teach young people lessons about life and integrity if led by the right coach. This movie is a shining example of that.

1 – The Longest Yard (1974): Speaking of Adam Sandler, the remake he made of this movie kind of sucked, especially in comparison to the original where Burt Reynolds is at his best. Yes, even better than Smokey and the Bandit. Yeah, I said it.

This week’s cool-ass thing you’ll never own is this blog. While it is undoubtedly cool, I’m pretty fond of it and will not relinquish rights for less than mid six figures. Besides, if you were to purchase it, it would cease to be cool as soon as it was no longer owned by me and, thus, you would still not own a cool-ass thing.

The sign you are a nerd for this week is that you couldn’t figure out why that place with the really good chicken wings and all the big TVs was suddenly more crowded than usual on Sunday. It’s called football season.

This week’s nemesis is opening day optimism. Sure, this time of year, it’s my football team, but it could just as easily be baseball, basketball or hockey. Regardless of sport, I’m so excited by my team’s potential (usually not deservedly so) that I’m setting myself up for heartbreak.

The lesson I learned this week is that Little Caesar’s “Hot & Ready” pizzas carry with them no guarantee to be either hot or ready.

This week’s equation is:

Where S is soccer, p is the predictability of which way the ball will bounce, g is goals scored, m is manliness, and F equals football (yes, American Football).

This week’s Star Wars quote comes from the many armed General Grievous: “I expected someone with your reputation to be a little…older.”

That’s all for this week. Thanks, as always, for reading. Stay tuned for an impassioned plea to come from me soon. I hope I can count on you.