Thank You Sir, May I Have Another?

Displaced Aggression League Report -- Week 7
This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Take off the turban, remove the crown. It will not be as it was: The lowly will be exalted and the exalted will be brought low. A ruin! A ruin! I will make it a ruin! -- Ezekiel 21:26

Like a slow-orbiting comet or the McRib sandwich, truly epic upsets don’t come around very often; and when they do, it’s an occasion worth noting with appropriate solemnity.  Such was the case in Week 7 when the 12th-place Wackers’ put a DavidVs.Goliath-style Kybosh on 2nd-place Gonk’s Revenge.  It was an outcome that no one expected, and was all the more dramatic because the scales weren’t tipped until the last 60 seconds of the game. A loss like that is like diarrhea on prom night, and an ominous indication that, should such trends continue, Revenge may be on their way to ending the season sleeping under a bridge and using muscatel as hand sanitizer.

This stunning development alarmed the genteel and privileged elite, comprised of a handful of top teams who, up until now, have contentedly-jockeyed for advantage from week to week without facing any real danger of dropping into Our Beloved League’s vulgar middle-tier.  Gonk’s Revenge plummeted from 2nd- to 6th-place in the blink of an eye, while the Duestakers snatched the coveted 1st-place-crown from the bruised and scarred forehead of N.O. Brass, whose Week 7 fortunes plummeted along with those of their beloved Saints.

Elsewhere, the Gridiron Goddess had a particularly cruel laugh at the expense of the Blue Devils, who lost out on an unlikely 39-point explosion by a benched receiver over the weekend, but nevertheless marched gamely into Monday night facing a 75 point deficit against the Turduckens. However, it became clear in the first quarter, after Eli Manning posted negative-four points, that the Devils would be unable to seal the deal. 

On the poor side of our League’s tracks, Mental Garbage posted the week’s high score of 158 -- fully 28 points over their projected total -- allowing them to defeat the unfortunate Lakeviewers and shamble from last- to second-to-last place.  Many of us have puzzled over how, with overall strategic competence on par with Carl from that movie Slingblade, Mental Garbage still manages to outscore most of the League on a recurrent basis.  While some suggest they may be retarded like a fox, Vegas oddsmakers are treating this as a genuine case of fantasy sports Savantism.  Whatever you choose to call it, several of our teams might benefit from a dose of that kind of high-octane Gump-mojo at this point in the season.

Respectfully Submitted,
Commissioner Tom
Ojo Del Tigre!

EMERGENCY BULLETIN

--Alert Level ORANGE--
Displaced Aggression Team Owners,
Please be advised: In response to heavy and extreme negativity caused by the results of last week’s matchups, ESPN has placed the entire Displaced Aggression league on Orange Alert status until further notice.  Your Commissioner has been safely removed to an undisclosed location – possibly for the remainder of the season – where, hunkered down like a Jihadist in Tora Bora, he will continue to issue periodic League Updates and answer vital communications.
Direct contact is not recommended, but care packages containing antacids and Irish Whiskey may be forwarded via the League Office. 
---End of transmission---

TEA PARTY MOMENT: AUSSIES LOSE WHITE PRIVILEGE

I never really thought of myself as bigoted or xenophobic, but it dawned on me recently that I'm prejudiced against Australians.  I'm not going to try to soften this by claiming that some of my best friends are Australian, because they’re not.  In fact, I can’t remember ever actually meeting an Australian, although I did briefly work for a woman with a Boston accent so thick that some Chicagoans thought she was from Australia.  Hate is too strong of a word.   It’s not really even that I dislike Australians as much as I’m scared of them. They’re not like us; something just feels off.

There could be any number of valid reasons for this revulsion; their alcoholism, their loudness, their penchant for cruelty towards marsupials, not to mention their Aborigine-murdering/penal-colony roots.   For me it comes down to this: Australians have an amazing talent for imitating us, while genetic differences prevent us from reproducing their accents as convincingly.   Think about it; American actors always sound amateurish and cheesy when they do Outback Steakhouse voice-overs, but how many Australian movie and TV actors can you name off the top of your head who can effortlessly slip into completely-authentic American accents; Nicole Kidman, Mel Gibson, Russell Crowe, Naomi Watts, that guy Jason from True Blood, the list goes on and on. 

I mean, honestly; did you even know that these people were Australian when you first saw them?  I sure didn’t, and finding out the truth left me feeling violated and mistrustful.  I'm starting to look at people in my daily life differently, wondering if, just maybe, they might be Australians too. I can’t help thinking about all the people who I always just assumed were American. People who, in some cases, I’ve known all my life; People I have allowed into my own home!  And what about our government, for God’s sake; for all I know, the President of the United States could actually have been born in Australia!

Here’s my bottom line: If Australians want to come live here, fine.  But is it too much to ask for a little transparency on their part?   I understand we can’t "violate" their civil rights by making them display some sort of identification on their outer-clothes (my idea was for it to be a large, red “A”), but can't we at least force them to speak in their own accents while on U.S. soil?

You can judge me if you want to, but first ask yourself; can you really trust an Australian the way you could trust someone of a less-suspect heritage, like a Canadian or a New Zealander?  You tell me.

THANK YOU, SANTA KITTY!

Pointless Haikus (or I Know What You Did Last Summer)

I.

I am out of shape.

My shirt barely covers me.

Need a size larger.

II.

Stoned by 10 am;

I can’t talk on the phone, but,

I cut the lawn well.

III.

My wife doesn’t fart,

But she does get the vapors.

It smells like a swamp.

IV.

I’m starting to think

My dog is smarter than me.

My wife’s not surprised.

V.

I like my job.

I like vacation better.

I sigh and return.

The Worm Has Turned

Displaced Aggression League Report – Week 5

A terrible wailing reverberated across Our Beloved League in Week 5 as the Gridiron Goddess wept and screamed for a sacrifice, sending shivers of horror through the seven teams jockeying for dominance at 3-1.   And, although each of us knew that the awful Reaping must eventually begin, no one wanted to be one of the several goats that it took to finally satisfy her.  In the end, the 3-1 cluster was torn asunder and our mightiest team was counted among the casualties.

After nervously watching a 60-point lead dwindle to just 5 in the final minutes of Monday night’s game, the Turduckens were finally able to breathe a sigh of relief and mount the head of 1^st place Gonk’s Revenge onto a pike.  In a near-repeat of this insolent dethroning, the 2^nd place Salukis were able to withstand a stunning onslaught by Mental Garbage, hanging on and making it to 1^st place, as Grandpa would put it, by an arse-hair.  

Week 5 was as much about redemption as it was about regicide; the 0-4 Lakeviewers and Dingobros, hacked their way to a Monday night victory against Dayment and pummeled the clearly-shaken Wackers, respectively.  And, while posting a competitive point total for the first time this season may have given Dingobros reason to hope that the worm has finally turned for them, this downward spiral is familiar territory for the Wackers, whose owner has reportedly degenerated into a modern-day version of General Custer; stomping around his bunker and calling play after demented play, seemingly oblivious to the fantasy season crumbling around him. 

Elsewhere, the Duestakers eked out a razor-thin win over the Pulled Hammies, a team rendered rudderless by an owner who continues to make boldly-misguided lineup choices without any apparent sense of shame or irony, the way a morbidly-obese shopper might place a can of Slimfast next to their cheesecake on the checkout counter.   

Meanwhile, Hellfire Club, another resident of the League’s 3-1 tier, was matter-of-factly taken apart by the 1-3 Blue Devils, while N.O. Brass split out of 3-1 the opposite way, defeating Token Female and moving into 2^nd place; all the while displaying an insightful strategic approach that many observers find to be, frankly, un-American.  Nuance might go over well in parts of Europe and maybe even Canada, but not in a country where one quarter of the population believes that their President is secretly Muslim, and that Old Testament notables could have ridden around on dinosaurs just as easily as on donkeys.

Finally, a cautionary note for any team that has yet to face Gonk’s Revenge (i.e. the Salukis in Week 6): don’t be fooled by Gonk’s drop to 5^th place; at 3-2 they still have scored more points than any other team in the League – nearly 50 more than the newly-crowned Salukis.  It will almost certainly take more than a mid-season loss to grant the True Death to this vampire.
Respectfully Submitted,
Commissioner Tom

Oh, The Humanity!

Displaced Aggression League Report -- Week 4

Recent estimates put the cost of dementia within the developed world at $604 billion for this year, and after last week, many observers have come to believe that the poor coaching and team management on display in Our Beloved League may account for a significant portion of that total.

While it appeared on paper that six of our seven matchups were still unresolved as of Monday night’s game, dumb luck and colossal point-deficits made it obvious that few of these were actually up for grabs: The Pulled Hammies trailed by 89 points as they faced off with N.O. Brass, while the Blue Devils carried a 97-point deficit against Gonk’s Revenge, and the Wackers trailed the Salukis by an astounding 115 points going into Monday night.  Unsurprisingly, none of them even came close to turning the tide as New England wore down the Dolphins, and the disgraced Wackers and Hammies racked up embarrassing point totals of 47 and 34, respectively.

The bells of disappointment tolled even louder for Dingobros and the Lakeviewers, whose early-season records seem to be playing out like Greek Tragedy as they slide to 0-4.  This is particularly vexing for the poor Dingobros, who came within 4 points of clawing their way out of this quicksand.  And the Lakeviewers, like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, keep waking up to the same soul-crushing outcome, over and over again.  It’s beginning to seem like the mere act of putting forward a starting lineup sets them up for inevitable disappointment; as if they were committing to a social engagement during Shark Week, or feeding Indian food to a St. Bernard.

The picture is no less murky for many of our Winners; the bizarre stratification resulting in half of the League’s teams jostling with each other at 3-1 belies the 148-point range between 1st-place Gonk’s Revenge and 7th place Mental Garbage, in total points scored-to-date.  The real struggle for supremacy appears to be shaping up between Gonk’s Revenge and the 2nd place Salukis – themselves 73 points ahead of the next-highest scoring team and 3rd place contender, N.O. Brass, a Young Turk outfit that put itself on the map through a combination of brute force and rat-like cunning.

Interestingly, no fewer than ten of us racked up totals that were 20 or more (sometimes many more) points shy of our ESPN projections going into this week’s matchups, which begs the question: Whither ESPN’s Gurus? It’s not uncommon, as a season progresses, for ESPN’s own point-projections to become the subject of controversy and complaints.  And, while having online experts lead us off a cliff from time to time is a sadly-familiar experience, this year’s projections seem to be diverging from reality as dramatically as our national political discourse. 

October finds many of us viewing these fantasy prognostications with a suspicious and squinted eye, the way Baptists look at Unitarians, or my wife looks at me when I promise to deal with the bathroom sink that’s been partially-clogged since Easter.  The value and veracity of this data is no longer presumed the way it might have been at the start of our season; aspersions have been cast, bona fides questioned, and insinuations made.  Only the weakest among us are still drinking ESPN’s Kool-Aid at this point.

This means, of course, that we’re on our own.  We’ve gone Rogue and crossed over into uncharted terrain; the edge of the map where, in olden times, learned men would scrawl ominous messages like “Here Be Dragons,” and “Doom Awaits.”   At this point the only rational course of action is to turn up Hank Williams loud enough to drown out the pleading voices of our loved ones, and hunker down in front of our computer screens while we let this sickness run its course.

Respectfully Submitted,

Commissioner Tom