Functionally ReTodded

I read this story this morning and actually laughed.  Out loud.  Alone.

So Jimmy Clausen, the Notre Dame QB and younger brother of former Tennessee QB and all around unlikable asshole Casey Clausen, was out for dinner with his family and some other seniors at a local establishment when someone made a comment or two to Clausen and then punched him in the face.

I don’t condone violence (in every circumstance), but I know I’ve wanted to punch a Clausen in the face for the last seven or so years.  Combine that with the fact that he plays for Notre Dame and the fact that I hate Notre Dame so much and you can see why I snickered.

But then the grown up in me thought about it, and I decided that unless Clausen slept with the guys girlfriend or mom, he probably shouldn’t have punched a student-athlete in the face because the team sucks.

If anyone should be punched in the face over Notre Dame’s underachieving record over the last five years it’s their soon to be ex-head coach Charlie "Do as I say not do as I do" Weis.

Weis was hired and paid a fuck-ton of money to be the great savior of Notre Dame football as their head coach.  Never mind that he’d never been a head coach.  Ever.  Never even coached his kid’s peewee team.

Further, he never played a down of football.  Ever.  I understand he was the "offensive genius" behind some of the New England Patriots Super Bowl winning offenses, but I have a difficult time believing that student-athletes buy completely into Weiss lecturing them about effort, working out, commitment and sacrifice given that Weis looks like this:

The five glorious years under Weiss’ guidance, (five years that included two losses to the Naval Academy, a loss to nearly IAA UConn in Double OT at home, a loss to Army, a loss to North Carolina, a terrible Syracuse team, Air Force and four drubbings at the hands of USC) saw the further decline of a program that has spent my entire life full of itself and the perceived superiority over every other college and university.

And the only good two years were the first two with Ty Willingham’s old players.

But Notre Dame was so desperate to return to their past glory that they assumed that this early success meant that Weiss was a genius.

So they gave him a 10 year, 40 MILLION dollar contract extension.

Let me be clear here.  I hate Notre Dame.  I have hated Notre Dame my entire life.  Not because anyone that had influence over me, but because I had eyes and ears.  Here are some reasons why I hate them.

-  They refused to join a conference like other former independents Penn State, Florida State and Miami did.
-  They were allowed to sign an exclusive television contract with NBC.

-  They somehow qualify as an "at large" team for the BCS frequently, and get to not share their portion of the money with a conference.
-  99.9999 percent of their fan base are the most arrogant and unlikable assholes on the planet.
-  They continue to play far and away the weakest schedule of any "power" team in the country, playing the likes of service academies, Duke, Syracuse, UConn and other seemingly horrid teams.

So now the head child molester at Notre Dame, Father John Jenkins , has the unenviable task of deciding which of the following to do:

1)  Keep the clearly inept Weis as his head coach for seven more years at FOUR MILLION DOLLARS A YEAR
2)  Fire Weis, making him the third ex coach Notre Dame has had in eight years, and at this point all of their exiting records would be identical.
3)  Ask the alums to pay off the remaining 28-32 MILLION to make Weis go away
4)  If they choose three, asking the alums for even more money, since a four million dollar a year coach is now going to cost five or six million a year to come to Notre Dame since the university now has a penchant for going thru coaches at a pretty fast clip.

None of these options are good for Notre Dame, and I’m glad.  They deserve everything they’re getting and I look forward to more struggles, failures and ineptitude in their future, starting with a beatdown at the hands of the academically AND athletically superior Stanford Cardinal this weekend.

Then you’ve obviously come to the wrong place, especially given what I’m going to talk about today.  If you’re easily offended, I suggest you click on this link and go away.

Today’s story is about a woman in particular and stereotypes in general.  Not all stereotypes, mind you.  I don’t have that kind of time.

A news story came across the wire at the FRT Eyewitness newsdesk that caught my eye.  The headline read:

"Woman passes driver’s exam on 950th try"

As I read on, I found that she was a 68 year old grandmother who failed to get the minimum 60 points of a possible 100 on 949 different occasions.

Oh, and now she has to pass the driving portion of the exam to get her license.

First off, I don’t remember the rule exactly, but when I was taking my driver’s test back in the 80’s, they had guidelines about when you could re-take the test if you failed to pass.  If you took it in the morning and failed, you could take it again immediately.

If you failed that you had to come back the next day, then if you failed again you had to wait two days, then a week, then a month, etc.  Obviously they don’t have that rule in place in South Korea or this woman would have had to start trying to pass the test right after she finished blowing Abraham Lincoln.

I think the only reason this story made it to our side of the 21st century is because it feeds nearly every stereotype we have about bad drivers, and those are that women/old people/foreigners of any kind/specifically Asians are horrible drivers.

I know we can’t judge an entire race/gender/country based on this story, but I don’t think it helps the cause of  the folks fighting to end the blanket stereotyping of old Asian women being shitty drivers.

Further, based on images I’ve seen of the driving in South Korea, do we really think it’s a good idea to give a 68 year old woman the keys to a car and throwing her into traffic?  What are the chances she’s not in an accident within the first fifteen seconds?  100-1?  1,000-1?

And then it got me to thinking about stories that would pander to similar stereotypes.  Combine that with my deep-seated need to be inappropriate, I came up with these headlines.

Native American man arrested for jaywalking after getting drunk and firing a weapon at a casino and wandering the local roads picking up litter and crying about it.

Indian man loses job at mini-mart to off-shoring and goes back to home country to do tech support for Linksys.

Drunk and belligerent Irish man chokes to death on potato and accent.

Black man with large penis and many kids born out of wedlock hides in watermelon field after stealing a basketball.

What kind of headlines can YOU come up with?

As I was laying in bed last night trying to stay awake long enough to see Bill Simmons The Sports Guy on Kimmel (I failed), I had a realization.

Four years ago at that exact time I was half sitting / half laying down in the cardiac ICU at St. Joseph’s hospital here in Atlanta after undergoing semi-emergency robotic bypass surgery.  My first two memories after waking up were:

1) I’m not dead.

2) Fuck this hurts!  I guess less invasive doesn’t mean less painful.

I’d like to heap some praise on some people now.

First I would like to thank my wife, who was 81 weeks pregnant the day I had surgery.  Although I know you were scared and that you cried when I wasn’t looking or wasn’t around, you were very brave for me because you knew that I was scared utterly shitless. I would like to thank Thing Two for waiting until nine days after my operation to be born so I could be there for her arrival.

I would like to thank my family (blood, in-laws, close friends) for your support.  Although I was drugged and asleep, you made my pre-surgical hours nice and you helped my wife more than you know.

Thank you to Sister Murphy, the nun that sat with my wife and prayed for me.

Thank you to Dr. Douglas Murphy.  He was the surgeon that performed the robotic procedure on me.  I didn’t know it at the time, but this procedure had only been done about 50 times up to that point, so I was very early on the test curve. Dr.  Murphy saved my life.  And he is a good guy.

He is also one of the primary surgeons teaching the use of this surgical system in the US. And interestingly enough, when I came back for my checkup a couple of weeks later, we brought Thing Two with us and also gave him a picture of me, GBD and Thing Two.  Years later, I came to find out that my story and that picture are in the powerpoint presentation he does about the robotic surgical option.

Oh, and if you didn’t know, Thing Two’s name is Sophia Murphy.  I figured if the name Murphy was good enough for my surgeon, the nun that helped my wife, AND my wife’s maternal Grandfather’s last name, it was a fine middle name for my beautiful little girl.

(If you’d like to go back to the early stages of my blog to read stuff where I am angry, sad, scared, introspective, and occasionally very high, click on this link and enjoy ).