Vikings' Stadium Takes Cue from Home Team, Collapses

More Evidence—as if You Needed It—that the World Isn't Fair

   
1. John Lennon, a flawed and often self-contradictory but sincere advocate for peace, love, and kindness, is dead.

2. Fred Phelps is not.

A world without war and a God that despises His own creations and even revels in their destruction may both be products of their particular creators’ imaginations, but it should be pretty clear which one is an admirable dream and which is sick, cruel, and blasphemous.

Separated at Birth: V and the Burger King?

   

Clones, stunt doubles, or long-lost evil twins? And how are we to tell
which one is actually the evil one?

Geneticists and conspiracy theorists have long speculated on the possible relationship between V for Vendetta’s mysterious masked antihero and Burger King’s über-creepy masked, uh, Burger King. We may never know if these two are indeed evil twin brothers—or, if so, who we should thank for separating them so many years ago and sparing the world the horror they surely would have wreaked had their strengths been combined—but I’m not convinced that’s even the most important question to ask.

The crazy ones always get the girls.

More important is this: If you had to choose to be doggedly pursued to the ends of the Earth by one of these two, which would you pick? The verbose but violent, vengeful, potentially psychotic and mercilessly murderous anarchist V, a master of explosives, edged weapons, and poisons, with both the will and the ability to kill you in any of a dozen creative and probably ironic ways if he’s convinced you’ve wronged him . . . or the Burger King, a creepy dude with a ridiculous frilly collar, who wants only to sneak into your most private spaces, hand you a hamburger, and then leer at you with his fucked-up plastic head?

I don’t know about you, but I’d take my chances with the guy who’d probably plan to kill me. I’m pretty sure that once the Burger King is done with you, he takes your soul.

Peyton Hillis: Best Peyton (or Payton) Ever?

No, of course not. But he’s not bad.

Among Denver Broncos fans’ biggest complaints about the very recently ended Josh McDaniels era is the dismissal of running back Peyton Hillis, who in 2008 led the team’s injury-stricken running corps with 343 rushing yards. After barely touching the field in 2009, he was informed that he “didn’t fit” the Broncos’ system¹ and was traded to the Cleveland Browns for a highly-touted clipboard holder and a sack of moldy jockstraps.²

We couldn’t find a picture of Brady Quinn anywhere,
but Saturday Night Live’s Colin Quinn has seen just
as much of the field for the Broncos this season, so we
figure he’s close enough.

Since then, the Broncos’ running game has enthusiastically sprinted to the bottom of the league, while Hillis has flourished for the Browns. At the beginning of 2010 training camp he was approximately 423rd on the depth chart, but thanks to a tragic photo-shoot accident, every other Cleveland running back was electrocuted, and Hillis ended up with the starting job.³ Through twelve games of the 2010 season, Hills has generally been between solid and spectacular, amassing 1,376 total yards (962 rushing, 414 receiving) and 13 touchdowns (11 rushing, 2 receiving),⁴ and has helped transform the perennially struggling Cleveland Browns into a team that’s actually not totally crappy all the time.

More important than the Browns’ ride to near-mediocrity, though, is Peyton Hillis’s continued rise up the short and half-distinguished list of all-time greatest Peytons.⁵ For your entertainment, the thoroughly researched and comprehensive list is as follows:

Greatest Paytons/Peytons of All Time

1. Walter Payton, running back, Chicago Bears, 1975–1982
2. Peyton Manning, quarterback, Indianapolis, 1998–
3. Walter Payton. Yes, again. He was that good. Running the ball, to Walter Payton, was “like makin’ romance.”⁶
4. Eddie Payton, kick returner, Detroit/Cleveland/Kansas City/Minnesota, 1977–1982
5.  Peyton Hillis, Denver/Cleveland, 2008–
6.  Leo Payton, running back, Rochester Jeffersons, 1923–1924
7.  Jarrett Payton, running back, Tennessee, 2005
8.  Payton Williams, defensive back, Indianapolis, 2000
9.  Sean Payton, quarterback, Chicago (replacement player), 1987

 
Football enthusiasts across the nation have one question on their minds: will Peyton Hillis end his career at the top of the list?

The universal response to this question is a confident no—he remains some 19,000 total yards behind Walter Payton, and has done at least 250 fewer stupid commercials than Peyton Manning—but one thing remains clear: if the folks in the Broncos organization aren’t kicking themselves for letting Peyton Hillis go, there are plenty of folks around here who’ll be happy to do the kicking for them.

NOTES

1. From what we’ve seen so far, the Broncos’ primary objections to Hillis were his tendency to fumble and his insistence on crossing the line of scrimmage. Remaining Broncos backs do not seem to have these problems.

2. I stand by the absolute truth of this statement, except the part about the jockstraps.

3. My sources inform me that I may have confused the Cleveland Browns’ training-camp results with the introduction to the John Goodman movie King Ralph. You’d be surprised how often this happens.

4. By way of comparison, the Denver Broncos—including the statue of Kyle Orton—have combined for 1,034 yards and 8 touchdowns rushing, and are averaging almost a full yard less than Hillis’s 4.5 yards per carry. Knowshon Moreno’s impressive 161-yard effort in Game 12 put the Broncos ahead of Hillis in total yards for perhaps the first time all season.

5. Also included: Paytons.
6. “The Super Bowl Shuffle,” Lennon/McCartney, 1985.

Fun Facts about Sangria

Sangria: Amazing.

After having returned safely from a housewarming party, warmed by conversation with good friends, plenty of food and drink, and loads of general pre-holiday cheer, I am happy to report that I have learned the following things:

1. Triple sec has alcohol in it. This probably isn’t news to most people, but as a mostly-beer-drinker, I didn’t know. I had always assumed, despite somehow ending up with a couple of bottles of triple sec in my liquor cabinet for several years, that it was just an alcohol-free mixer, like 7-Up, tonic, or Miller Lite. However, Mrs. Some Guy was pretty sure that triple sec—an important ingredient in sangria, which was served at the housewarming party—was indeed alcohol, so I looked it up when we got home, and she was right.
2. Sangria is amazing. I learned this particular lesson forty-six times as I drove home. Sangria, as it turns out, has several kinds of alcohol in it.
3. Amazing, believe it or not, can be pronounced as a seven- or eight-syllable word.

Approaching a Milestone

Some Guy’s Adventures Through the Pint Glass, Part 7

Day 7: “It is something that man was not meant to disturb. Death has always surrounded it. It is not of this Earth.”

The Beer Mystery Case (artist’s conception)

The Beer Mystery Case, like the fabled Ark of the Covenant (which, incidentally, mimics the Case’s design), is steeped in history yet shrouded in secrecy. Its power is both mysterious and mercurial, oftentimes granting its users wondrous gifts, other times inflicting upon them nothing but incomprehensible face-melting terror.

This is why I don't drink Coors Light.

One would be right to wonder, then, if the world might have been better off had the Beer Mystery Case, like the Ark, stayed buried in the Egyptian desert forever. One would be right to wonder the same thing about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, too, but that’s neither here nor there.

Frankly, to rightfully question the motivations of the Beer Mystery case is far beyond the scope of mere human understanding. The mere notion of it is as laughable as, say, questioning the wisdom of Ryan Spilborgh’s beard. As some famous long-dead English guy once wrote, ours is not to question why, ours is but to drink some shitty beer and possibly barf.¹

So I, with this essential truth in mind and my fate clearly out of my hands, reached into the Beer Mystery Case and pulled out

Miller Genuine Draft, Miller Brewing Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.²

There’s a scene in the mock-rockumentary Spinal Tap where one of the fictional titular band’s albums, Shark Sandwich, is said to have been given a scathing two-word review: “shit sandwich.” Funny though that scene was, rest assured that we here at Bowling in the Dark would never stoop to such cheap, easy vulgarity to make a point.³

Miller Genuine Draft, ready to return from whence it came.

Our biggest complaint about Miller Genuine Draft was not its flavor (which was both thin and displeasingly bitter) or its color (which, as can be seen in the photo above, is unappetizingly similar to certain fluids that nobody in their right mind would contemplate drinking⁴), but that the Mystery Case saw fit to give us four of them.

Disappointing though Miller Genuine Draft is—and despite the red flag that comes up whenever something insists on being advertised as “Genuine” (much like a seedy used-car salesman inserting “honest” into his name)—there are, we have to admit, times where a cold MGD might prove to be welcome. For example, it would serve well as a chaser if you’re in the midst of a Nepalese drinking contest, and drinking an MGD would definitely be preferable to being trapped underground forever in the dark, surrounded by thousands of poisonous snakes. And we’re willing to admit that other good reasons to drink Miller Genuine Draft may indeed exist, but at the moment, none come to mind.

Some Guy’s rugged and adventurous rating for Miller Genuine Draft, then, consists of 1 (one) roasted Nazi henchman and 1 (one) smarmy exploding French archaeologist.

Naughty henchman (l), haughty Frenchman (r).

NOTES

1. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” 1854. Quoted verbatim.

2. Because the Miller and Coors breweries merged in 2008 to become MillerCoors—a name suggesting an almost total lack of imagination—Miller Genuine Draft is, technically speaking, a MillerCoors product. But its creation long predates the merger, and Coors already has plenty to answer for, so I will refrain from blaming them for MGD.

3. We will do it, however, just to be jerks.

4. That is, Coors Light.