Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Badvertising: Tabasco



I don't know about this ad. On the one hand the song is a little catchy and I'm a sucker for barbershop quartet.

On the other, these creepy pepperoni faces make me think of zits, which is not what you want to associate with food. Plus the visual of pouring Tabasco on this slice makes me think of a big shot of hot sauce right in your eye, which I can only imagine must hurt like hell.

On another note, Tabasco seems to advertise a lot as something to put on pizza. I don't understand this. Hot sauce is for bland food or meals that need a kick. Pizza is just bread, tomato sauce and melted cheese, and none of those things really needs hot sauce. Pizza is usually great by itself, and if its not then you really shouldn't be eating it.

Monday, October 12, 2009

Butter makes it Better

I love me some Paula Deen. She has an amazing ability to shoehorn butter into just about any recipe, plus she's a sassy broad. And now we know she's a trooper too. Check out this video:



Crazy guy invading your kitchen on live TV? No problem. Just don't mess with her, because I know she would do awful things to you with her knife. Though maybe she'd feel bad and make you some butter covered butter as an apology. That might be worth it.

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Just FYI

The Broncos are super lucky, they have throwbacks so ugly that whoever approved them should be put on trial at The Hague, and to top it all off their coach has some (ahem) "unfortunate" hand gestures.

















This was gonna be a perfect weekend too. Dodgers and Angels advance to their respective LCSes, LSU loses in "Death Valley", and we got a World Cup qualification to boot. Then the lucky ass Nazi Broncos had to get lucky and Nazi up the end of it. Jerks.

Onward Sam's Army!

South Africa here we come (again)!

Last night the US Men's soccer team punched its ticket to the 2010 World Cup. It took an exciting, back and forth 3-2 win over host Honduras to finally get the job done, but with victory they secured enough points in CONCACAF qualifying to make it.

Not a bad couple days for American international relations, with one Nobel Peace Prize and one World Cup slot. Maybe today we'll hit a trifecta and North Korea will decide to disarm .

I did have one gripe about the game, namely that I couldn't watch it, and neither could a lot of our nation. Since the game was in Honduras, they technically owned the broadcast rights, and for some reason US networks couldn't or wouldn't work out a deal to broadcast in the states. To make things worse, the Hondurans apparently are crazy about their rights and were constantly shutting down any attempts to stream the game over the Internet. As a result, a lot of fans like myself were reduced to getting updates via "match tracker", which is basically someone typing what happens during the game, or even worse *ugh* Twitter. Do you have any idea how frustrating it is to try and track the last minutes of a tight match via Twitter?

Imagine the absurdity of this situation. The richest, most advanced nation in the history of the world, who's President is so dreamy he won the damn Nobel prize 24 hours earlier, is somehow unable to secure a TV feed for a match which could qualify it for the biggest sporting on the planet. There are tons of two bit countries where everything, even war, will stop for these games, and we can't even get a feed on ESPN2. I wondered if we could invoke the Monroe Doctrine or something to get the Hondurans to share the broadcast.

I also thought it was funny that Honduras is having this huge government crisis and they they still managed to host their CONCACAF games. Their government was overthrown this year, and the United States does not recognize the new regime as legitimate (which probably has something to do with the lack of broadcast rights). But even though they are an illegitimate regime denounced by the world, they damn sure are gonna put on the game as scheduled. That's just good sportsmanship.

Saturday, October 10, 2009

In the Tall Cotton?

I had a weird moment today watching the UCLA-Oregon game. The Ducks have this running back with super quick feet. It seriously looked like he was playing Dance Dance Revolution out there as a he juked and avoided two, three, even four Bruin defenders at a time. He tore up UCLA in the second half and was a big part of the victory.

After one of this guy's impressive runs, the announcers were talking about him. One of them said something like "I wouldn't say put him in the tall cotton just yet". I'd never heard this saying before or anything like it. My buddy and were perplexed, to say the least. The player in question is African American, and putting two and two we came up with "What the hell?".

I tried looking up the term later, and all I got was that "tall cotton" refers to a time a plenty (ie. when the cotton crop grows tall). I guess it sorta made sense (maybe? or not?) if he was saying that the player himself is not yet "the tall cotton" on account of his limited playing time. But that just sounds weird, and it doesn't make a lot of sense given the way the sentence was constructed.

I'm not trying to make something out of this, and I seriously doubt the announcer meant anything negative by his comment. I'm just struggling to figure out what he meant.