Bolt From The Blue
It's usually not a good idea to open up a post with a defensive statement. I learned early on that the rules of successful blogging are really almost exactly the same as the rules for surviving an encounter with a cougar: make yourself look bigger than you actually are, make as much random noise as you can, do not back up and never, ever turn your back. Running away is out of the question, unless of course the question is "Would you like to be chased down, felled with a dental bisection of your carotid artery and then slowly devoured over a period of several weeks?"

Of course in terms of blog-readers instead of cougars, this is mostly metaphorical. But only mostly. I know long periods of time alone at the keyboard has turned at least one of you feral.

This is all prelude to what was going to be my opening line. It sounds like I'm backing up, but just know it's not that. Really, it's just an opportunity for some of you to get out right up front (OK, just three paragraphs in) when you know what's coming. It's just me being my nice ole considerate Pops self.

You are welcome. Here goes:

This post is about sports.

But only sort of. Look, I made it through a whole entire baseball season without a single mention of my mediocre-yet-torturously-marginally-competitive favorite team. So you can cut me a little slack, especially when you consider what I have to say.

If the San Diego Chargers do not make it to the AFC Championship game this year, I will kill this puppy:


Here's the worst part: this is not my puppy.

If the Chargers do not at least make it to the game before the Super Bowl, I will be forced to a) identify this puppy, b) locate this puppy and c) murder this puppy in cold blood.

I found this picture by doing an image search for "puppy" on Yahoo. I have no way of knowing how old this picture is. Is this puppy still even a puppy? If not, it will be doubly sad for the family that has housed and raised this pup into a dog and no doubt a treasured member of their family. How much more will it suck then when I show up and kick it to death right in front of their crying children?

Or maybe this puppy is already dead. Maybe this is the last picture that was taken of it before they picked it up by it's scruff, hauled it off to the lab and tortured it to death in order to see what happens when you get Autumn Plum eyeliner in your eyeball. Or maybe it lived a long happy life on a big farm with a creek and a tire swing and chickens to chase and eat raw before dying. Probably of salmonella poisoning. Either way I'm going to have to find it's puppy grave, dig this puppy up and crush its little skull with a shovel if the Chargers don't almost go to the Big Game in February. A promise is a promise.

It sounds a little harsh, but consider: I grew up a Rams fan. A team that sucked a tremendous amount of ass, or at least had the misfortune of being in the same division as the most successful team in the history of pro football, the 1980s and 1990s San Francisco 49ers. You don't know it, but I spit when I typed that.

Then in 1995, the team up and leaves for... St. Louis? Yes, St. Louis. Then within like two years, it wins the fucking Super Bowl. Fuck those fucking Midwest motherfuckers.

So I became a Chargers fan. Last team left in SoCal, you see. Oh, and mid-1990s/early 2000s Chargers? Consistently one of the worst teams in all the land. Lucky me.

But now the team is good. It's got arguably two of the best skill position players in all of football, a first-rate defense, a talented young quarterback... No more excuses. They will deliver for me. Or I will kill a puppy.

I figure this is just the jolt they need.

Ha, jolt. Get it? See, because they have lightning on their helmets. Like a jolt of... you know, on their...

OK, if you don't agree that they're awesome, at least listen to a clip of their awesome fight song. After you listen, here's a fun game: guess which era of Chargers history produced this song! Here's a hint: cocaine spoon.

You don't even have to be interested in football to care about this. You just have to care about the life of an innocent puppy dog, whom you know will be tied in a sack with a brick and dropped into a convenient body of water of my choosing should the team in any way fail to play in the AFC title game on January 21, 2007 (on CBS, check your local listings).

Root. Hope. Pray.

PETA wants the Chargers to win. You listened to them when you stopped wearing fur. Listen to them now.



This post on the Narcissus Scale: 9.9


Pops
- posted by Pops @ 10:04 PM