I meant to write this over the last week but I needed to wait until the next game ended to really come to a conclusion. I’ve seen this before, where the Jayhawks nearly upset a team much better than them, followed by a week of almost optimism, followed by a complete, total drubbing to bring us back down. Everything I write nowadays tends to tread a very thin line between incoherent cathartic rambling and coherent cathartic rambling, and I feel that this probably skews more towards the former. Regardless, here are my thoughts at this point.
I come to the MLS All-Star game each year because it is a unique event. It’s unique in the American context because it goes out of its own league for competition, and it’s unique in the global context because other soccer leagues don’t do it at all. At least, that was the way it was until this year, when another league, the neighboring league against whom MLS always measures itself, entered the fray with an All-Star team of its own, turning what was previously a mid-summer exhibition where the reserve squad of some European team came in and played disinterested soccer against a squad of good MLS players primarily trying not to get injured for the final stretch of the season.
This game was not like that. This game was exciting and interesting, and I liked watching it the whole way through. THAT WAS NOT WHAT I SIGNED UP FOR!Continue reading →
Okay, nobody panic, but there’s realignment happening again. Realignment talk is spiking, surging all over the country. Experts agree that there is somewhere within the range of a 98%-100% chance of every person in the United States being subject to a conference realignment in the near future and it’s not slowing down. NCAA conference realignment is EXPLODING and let’s face it, we are all going to get realigned, and you need to panic. But don’t panic. JoeBush.net’s resident conference realignment expert is here to tell you what measures you and your university can take during this period to stay off of shaky ground.
Let’s start where all great stories naturally start: Norman, Oklahoma.
I probably don’t remember any dreams that I have over the course of a night. I know that I have them, I know sometimes they’re scary or horny or whatever, but I almost never remember what happens in them. Maybe small, little bits of them stick around in my memory – an image, a character, a feeling. A year out, I remember The MLS is Back Tournament of 2020 in the same way. A weird name, a huge Adidas logo at midfield, FC Cincinnati players pretending to drive a school bus celebrating a goal that got called back. Characters like Chris Mueller, Joao Moutinho, Thomas Hasal. A feeling of confusion that still hasn’t quite left.
It was fifteen years ago yesterday. July 6th, 2006. I don’t remember where I was or what I was doing that day. June 6th, 2006 I can vividly remember being at Overland Park’s famous “Kentaco Hut” complex, a restaurant with a KFC, a Taco Bell, and a Pizza Hut Express all jammed together, watching a CNN report on a festival held in a town named Hell in Michigan, as that day bore the once-in-a-lifetime experience of being 6/6/06. Of 7/6/06, though, I have no recollection.
Little did we understand how close we were to knowing that day as the last one that any of us could recall. For that was the day that the aliens attacked, and one man, one bizzbatch, stood up, pulled out a gun, and spake back:
Not Today Motherfucker!
I am considering intense self-flagellation for the crime of not including this video in my inaugural YouTube Hall of Fame post from a few weeks ago. Lord knows that I deserve it. In my defense, I thought that I had mentioned it in that 2016 post. I didn’t. I mentioned it in a 2017 post during the “Bad Opinions Month” era, and I called it “The Best YouTube Video” there so please consider it to be a sort of preliminary member of the YouTube Hall of Fame, so great that it transcended the Hall of Fame initially. Like a Marion Motley-type.
The event captured in this video was never reported on by the news. In fact, I looked up the news from the day after this event was captured and they don’t even mention a damn thing about how a guy yelled “Not Today Motherfucker!” at a UFO and shot it with a gun.
Yeah, it’s all bullshit. Some pirate bullshit movie came out, Tom Watson played golf and we all love Tom Watson in Kansas City, Felipe Calderon wins a contested election in Mexico. Total media blackout on the guy who saved us all from a UFO attack. Bull’s Shit.
So if nobody back then fifteen years ago is gonna thank him – and hell, if me yesterday forgot to thank him – then I think it’s high time that we all thank him on this fifteenth anniversary (give or take a day) of when this guy, YouTube User bizzbatch, saved us all from a UFO attack.
As the impact from the single bullet fired from this gun prompted the blue explosion cloud to engulf the UFO, bizzbatch fist pumped in excitement and pride. It’s high time that we all collectively fist-pumped in excitement and pride with him. He did it. He stopped this UFO, wherever it was, and however it got there, from doing whatever it was supposed to do, by firing a single bullet at it from a gun. He is history’s most unsung hero, the man who deserved a third of the video of his heroism to be taken up by a title card, and this post is a simple statement of gratitude.
Will we forget him again? Perhaps. But are we going to forget him today?
Not Today Motherfucker!
If you want an email newsletter to keep you updated on things I make or do you can check out the new Substack where I’ll send you an email anytime something new goes up. I’m also on Tumblr but that’s really it now
It turns out that it was over five years ago that I wrote “What is the Best YouTube video of All Time?” I really thought it was sometime in like 2018 that I wrote that but apparently it was 2016. Whatever. Anyway, five years ago is a long time in terms of a website that takes on a lifetime’s worth of videos every single day, and it’s a long time in terms of videos that I’ve discovered on that aforementioned website. I do not necessarily disagree with my prior stance, that limpmixbit’s “Fred n Bulk n Skull Theme” is the greatest YouTube video of all time, however, in my long life journey since May 2016, I have discovered or uncovered or remembered many excellent YouTube videos, and they deserve recognition as well. It is this recognition that prompted my realization that I must construct what is, at the very least, my personal Hall of Fame for YouTube videos. Continue reading →
Sunday night I watched as the Phoenix Suns of the National Basketball Association finished a sweep of the Denver Nuggets of the National Basketball Association in the second round of the NBA Playoffs. I feel that this ending was only right. Not only because the Phoenix Suns are a superior team to the Denver Nuggets (or at least this version of the Nuggets, sans-Jamal Murray), which their play clearly showed them to be, but also because I cannot, for the life of me, consider the Denver Nuggets winning an NBA championship. I simply cannot put two and two together there. I cannot formulate it in my brain. I cannot imagine a shirt that reads “DENVER NUGGETS NBA FINALS CHAMPIONS.”
This is the closest thing I could find, it’s a divisional championship shirt. I’m trying to imagine it saying “NBA FINALS CHAMPIONS” but I can’t.