Sometimes I nuaaowkk qiesa

A silly thing happened to me last week at work. I know I promised not to talk about work here before, and this will not be too much about that. You do not want to hear me talk about my job because engineers are boring, right? At work, I am an engineer. Here, on the internet, I can be anything! A swashbuckling writer who just does not care what the world things -- I am going to continue observing! You are welcome, internet.

Anyway, I got a reply to an e-mail I sent to a colleague that went something like this:

Colleague,

Do not worry about the content of this message. Rest assured that it was technical and boring yet still reaffirmed how awesome I am.

Thanks,
Engubrrt

Normally, I sign with just my first name, but somehow my fingers managed not to land on the homerow exactly right and my otherwise superlative typing came out a little confused. Colleague had the good manners not to ask, "Who the hell is Engubrrt?" but if I know him, he probably showed everyone in his cubicle row while saying something along the lines of, "Get a load of this guy!"

This is not the first time I have confused my own now in communication. I remember one time I called a Tall Friend in elementary school to ask him about Command and Conquer or whatever we talked about in those days and left him a message along the lines of, "Hey Engineer, this is Tall Friend. I don't remember what this said but it was probably me calling you out as a crappy C&C player." He was both amused and bewildered by my nontraditional approach to trash talk.

The moral of this story is that even I cannot escape my powerful observations. I must continue my swashbuckling. My observations cannot esoy!

For it's root, root, root for whoever the hell they are.

I went to a Greenville Drive game tonight. They were playing against the Asheville Tourists. That is no lie. Tourists are the sort of people that those from my homeland consider like cockroaches made out of money - disgusting in every way except that they are made out of money. Yet Asheville, NC named a Single A baseball franchise after them. Great. The Drive are a farm team for the Boston Red Sox, and the stadium looked like a miniature Fenway Park. It was pretty neat, and everybody had Southern accents instead of Boston ones. Some of you may be thinking, "Well, that's sort of a lateral move, isn't it?" The answer is no, it isn't. A Southern accent is infinitely superior to a Boston one in every way. The Boston accent is like poop on a cracker.

One thing I remembered while sort of watching this baseball game is that I don't really understand the "Charge!" cheer. Or the wave, but let's do one thing at a time. The "Charge!" cheer, in my opinion, has no place in baseball or football games. It's merely a Pavlovian sound that elicits the same response wherever you go. The point of cheers is to psyche up your team so they'll perform better. If "Charge!" is universal, then it could be monkeys in the stands, rather than actual fans. Clemson has a cheer where they spell CLEMSON by sections around Death Valley. That is intimidating. If the PA system played the do-doo-do-doooo Charge! sound, sure it would be loud, but so what? Charge! can go to hell.

Worst Facial Hair in Sports

I want to do a list of the five worst facial hair styles in sports over the past year. This will draw more heavily from the NFL than any other sport because, well, MLB and NBA bore me.

5. Ricky Williams - Everyone's favorite pot head, Ricky, after returning from a year off and a suspension in a cloud of blue smoke, sported this lovely rug on his face. He looks like he spent the last year doing something really manly like wrestling lions barehanded in the Savannahs of Kenya rather than sitting around and blowing grass with Lenny Kravitz. Well, sadly, he's not really that rugged, he's just really strange. Who knows what sort of mayhem will get to see in the next season?


4. Jake Plummer - The quarterback for the Denver Broncos who can't stop turning the ball over. He was my starting fantasy quarterback this year, and everytime I played him I felt like I needed to shave. He's got some sort of weird Kenny Loggins/Charles Manson look, and for some reason, it just doesn't seem right for a quarterback. He had one of the best season of his career, though, so I'll bet we see Jake the Snake with an even bigger beard next season. I still will be a little concerned that he'll start singing "Danger Zone" while brainwashing women to kill people.


3. Apollo Anton Ohno - I know this speedskater won gold and two bronze and I should be thankful for representing our country and winning the 500m race, but really, when I look at him all I can think is "You know that guy is a total douchebag. Just look at his soul patch." Also, the fact that women think he's hot, he has the same name as a god and he's an Olympian. Any one of those four things would immediately cause me to jump to the conclusion that this may be a fellow who likes himself a lot. But mostly it's the facial hair. I was happier when I thought he was an Italian.

2. Adam Morrison - The leading scorer in the NCAA and an ugly, ugly kid. His mustache is a little hard to see, it's the bit around his mouth that looks like dirt and shadows, and that's exactly why he belongs on this list. This guy is going to play in the NBA and he's wearing the same facial hair as that kid who wanted to look grown up in 6th grade. Adam Morrison's mom could grow a better mustache than that. J.J. Redick is making fun of him for looking ridiculous. Shave your face, Adam. And stop crying on the court.


1. Kyle Orton - The starter for Chicago last season after Rex Grossman went down (again) sported what may be the ugliest neck beard in the history of facial hair. It was a tough call between Adam Morrison's dirty upper lip and this, but ultimately, I couldn't pass up the chance to write that previous sentence. He just looked like an Indiana bumpkin while cleanshaven at Purdue, but now that he's moved on up to the big time, he looks like the sort of fellow you'd see in a tattered suit coat on a streetcorner downtown with a 40 of OE in a brown paper bag. But don't worry, since Chicago now has Grossman and Griese, we'll never see him again! Interestingly enough, on a team with people named Grossman and Griese, it's the guy named Orton who looks disgusting.