It’s constant. Especially this time of year. You’ll be watching basketball with your friends. It’s near the end of the game. It’s 66-62. The leading team’s point guard slashes into the lane and kicks out to an open shooter in the corner. He takes the three. It tickles the nylon, doesn’t even touch iron, delivers that perfect ‘swish’ sound effect that you could put in a stock sound effect library for the NBA 2K audio engineers to include in the next game. It’s a dagger shot, nearly puts the game out of reach for the team trailing. Somebody’s going on, somebody’s on the bus home. It’s a turning point in the tournament, the beginning moment that leads to worst moment of the losing players’ careers and potentially the start of the sorts of tournament runs that get in the CBS highlight packages forever.

From somewhere in the corner of the room, you hear the word. “Nice.” The score says 69, which is a sexual position in which two people engage one another orally at the same time. This was, at one point, maybe the early 1990s, genuinely funny to people. Bill and Ted used it. But later on it became played out and not funny. In the mid-2010s, it became ‘ironically’ funny to imitate the people who thought it was funny and go “Nice” whenever you see a 69. I don’t know where we stand now.

I will say that a properly deployed 69 is still funny. For example, when Saturday Night Live’s Pete Davidson ended up judging the NFL’s “Best Catch” Competition at the Pro Bowl, he masterfully acknowledged the absurdity of his presence before following it up with a well-deployed score of 69, lampshading what we expect out of Pete Davidson nowadays. But it is played out. Comedy is built upon the subversion of expectations, and 69, the number of sex, and its number-of-marijuana cousin, 420, and its number-of-the-beast cousin, 666, surprise nobody anymore.  They have slipped into obligatory comedy status alongside funny commercials and meme formats.  Continue reading →

My parents moved house last summer, leaving the home they’d lived in since shortly after my birth in 1995 for one about forty miles away, nearer to my mother’s family, my sister, and I. The process of moving out of that house involved me sifting through and clearing out a space in which I’d had a bed and a home on-and-off for my entire life. The emotional effects this experience spawned can help define many of my actions over the course of the latter half of 2022. I found old notebooks, journals, collected homework assignments from high school, pens, research materials, toys, video games, books, a surprising number of cassette tapes – every sort of artifact a person could absent-mindedly neglect to get rid of over 27 years of life and find themselves deciding to part with through tear-blurred eyes on a time crunch.  Continue reading →

I was recently introduced to Mrs. Coyote.

For those unaware, Mrs. Coyote is the recently introduced wife of The Coyote, which is his full legal name, who is the mascot for the San Antonio Spurs. After years of the Coyote’s existence as, theoretically, a bachelor, Mrs. Coyote entered the picture in 2018 to break up a romantic triangle between the Coyote and two different San Antonio area TV anchorwomen. To date, this is Mrs. Coyote’s only appearance. What really struck me about this was that I’d never thought of any professional American sports mascot as explicitly married before. Is The Coyote the only one?

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I remember not the day that I decided to start documenting vending machines that I saw. I have conflicting theories within myself on when it started, all valid, and all based in reality, but I have no memory of the specific impetus. But it was in February 2017 when I first actively began documenting them anywhere online, on my Tumblr, then called Vending Machina, now residing under a different name. The posts are all still up, though.

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On a late summer night in St. Paul, America… and indeed Mexico as well, were reacquainted with what we might call…

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As to avoid retaliation from any men currently serving as the head coach of a professional soccer team located in a medium-sized city in the Great Plains region of the United States of America, any and all references to which specific professional soccer team in which medium-sized city in the Great Plains region of the United States of America I would theoretically in this hypothetical dream world I’m creating for the purpose of this blog post be finding a new coach for have been redacted. This is again a thing I’m thinking about for no reason and with no intent of my own and nobody currently coaching a professional soccer team located in a medium-sized city in the great plains should have any reason to believe I’m talking about replacing them or to come beat me up. All of this is good fun had on my little blog.

Probably the Most Obvious Ones:

Kerry Zavagnin (Assistant, Sporting Kansas City)

Zavagnin during his playing days for a professional team

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College sports conferences don’t make any sense any damn more. Texas and Oklahoma are gonna play South Carolina and Vanderbilt every year, UCLA and USC are joining the damn Big Ten, which means they’ll play Big Ten schools Rutgers and Maryland, Kansas and Kansas State will not play Nebraska or Missouri anymore but might get Colorado back and will definitely get UCF and BYU in the near future, The best golfer is a black guy, the best rapper is a white guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America’s Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn’t want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named “Bush”, “Dick”, and “Colon.” Need I say more?

Sorry. When I get going it’s hard for me to stop. But there must be a reckoning – and this one can’t come out of Athens, Georgia. We all understand why it is this way, I’ve had midwits on Reddit tell me over and over again that it’s about money, as if any of us were under any different impression. It’s Fox, it’s Disney, it’s a desire for a consolidated television product that guarantees marquee games each week – and while that is all well and good for Lincoln Riley and whatever the name of the guy who coaches UCLA at the moment, and it’s been providing dividend after dividend for the power football programs in my native Kansas City area – We Kansas fans love our Big XII doormat status and look forward to our away games in Utah, and the Missouri fans love the slow recognition that their primary value in the SEC has shifted from “Will get the SEC network on to cable packages in St. Louis” to “Tomato Can for the actual power SEC teams.” – It is completely senseless for basically everyone else.

What of the non-revenue olympic sports? The football programs understand that they have to go play at the Bounce House in Orlando because it’s the only way we at Kansas and Kansas State can keep our collective College Football Playoff aspirations alive. But what of the talented tennis player from Great Bend who gets a scholarship to K-State with no intention of playing professionally, why should they have to go to Provo? Why should they need to take hours-long airplane voyages to Ohio and West Virginia? What of the collective collegiate spirit of the Kansas City metropolitan area? Shouldn’t those matter just as well?

I’m daring to say yes, they do matter, and I, along with my business partner Mike, with whom I had the idea driving in my car the other day, have a solution:

Introducing: The Tank 7 Collegiate Athletics Conference

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And not even one of the ones that people know about, either. I’m screaming into the void for this one, I recognize – But, boy am I screaming.

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