Listen all! This is the truth of it. Fighting leads to killing, and killing gets to warring. And that was damn near the death of us all. Look at us now! Busted up, and everyone talking about COVID Variants! But we’ve learned, by the dust of them all… DFO learned. Now, when teams get to fighting, it happens here! And it finishes here! Two teams enter; one team leaves!
And then the other team leaves. No one’s actually gonna die unnecessarily. It’s preseason football, not Florida.
It’s been a long strange Spring and Summer since the Super Bowl. We laughed! We cried! We got jabbed in the arm so that bunkering in our homes being antisocial was optional instead of mandatory! The draft came and went, several big trades were made, the Texans became the Greatest Shitshow on Turf without even setting foot on the field and Indianapolis decided to hold training camp in the middle of a fucking minefield. It’s a brand new year, with brand new football to opiate your masses.
Welcome home, you magnificent bastards.
For starters, we actually have a preseason this year. I admit that I kind of enjoyed last year’s “Fuck it, let’s just start the regular season” approach. It added spice, and we avoided the spate of Avoidable Training Camp Injuries that routinely kill at least one team’s season before it even starts. This year, each team plays three preseason games instead of the four that were played in The Beforetimes. It’s unclear how different teams will use their players under the new system– some will want their starters to tune up, others will continue to use at least one game to evaluate “bubble” players and work out depth chart issues. I anticipate Dan Campbell will use at least one game to evaluate players’ willingness and skill at kneecap-biting.
To The Game!
Dallas @ Pittsburgh: Well fuck. Yes, we have football back, but it’s a fucking dud between two of the least likeable teams in the last 4 decades.
The Non-Gendered Cowpersons (Dallas, or “NGCPs”) got rid of Jim Tomsula and kept Mike McCarthy, which is just fucking daft. DAK! Prescott has gone from loveable yogurt-shill fighting The Man for just compensation to just another coy HIPAA-citing fuckwit who is either too stupid to guard his own multi-million dollar health or too scared of alienating the seething mass of Texas shitkickers who already barely tolerate an “urban” quarterback running their beloved team. Their defense is still shit. McCarthy is apparently thinking he can outscore his own defense’s ineptness like he did at the start of last year, which will result in Prescott getting crushed into tiny boneless cubes of ham by midseason.
I wanted to love the Steelers. Mike Tomlin seems like a mostly-respectable guy. They had a 3-4 defense when everyone else was reliant on 4-3 maulers. Shittsburgh continues to trot out the corpse of Ben Roethlisberger at quarterback. The upside is that the beatings he has taken mean he is probably too slow, shambling and sore to rape anyone in a bathroom. His backups are a racist who got savagely beaten by Myles Garrett and an idiot who got savagely beaten by his wife for giving another woman $20k in gifts. The rest of the team is completely without personality, except for Watt the Younger, whose personality is Grit.
Fuckit. Any football is good football
LET’S DO THIS!
That set piece from NBC with the tsunami and the connection to Crescent City was actually really well produced.
Unfortunately the people of Crescent City may ask for assistance when the climate change induced wildfires burn their city to a crisp.
Today I learned about Carabelli’s Tubercle!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cusp_of_Carabelli
Okay here’s another submarine story. I hope these don’t bore you.
This is the “Yacht Story.”
My submarine would come out of King’s Bay Georgia and due to the continental shelf we had a two day transit to our dive point.
One time, a civilian motor boat with a bunch of drunk Georgians tried to follow us on the surface transit. They were trying to ride right next to us. It was not a fishing trawler (a real fishing trawler would never do anything like that) it was just dumbshits with too much money in their pockets and a big boat and now they’re dealing with real combat sailors on a ship that’s carrying nuclear weapons. Not a good idea.
I was up in the bridge cockpit when this happened. I saw it all.
We were about 100 miles off the coast, and after 30 minutes of this nonsense our captain got fed up and ordered a marksman up to the bridge. In our armory the standard issue rifle was the M-14, which is chambered in .308, and that’s a big bullet.
Now this was a really expensive boat that was screwing with us, and they thought they were being very cute. The marksman took a single shot “across the bow.” Nobody got hurt and there was no property damage. That’s the standard naval warning to another vessel to cease, desist, and go somewhere else. The second shot (if necessary) is going at somebody’s fucking head.
That boat turned to port immediately and hauled ass. It was actually pretty impressive.
We then proceeded on our merry way to the dive point.
a) None of us are bored by these stories, they are excellent and you should piece them together in a memoir
2) I’m picturing two versions of this scene, the actual one, and a version where it’s occurring on the Black Sea and it’s the country of Georgia rather than the state. I would totally watch Caucasus remakes of US shows before I would watch US remakes of UK shows.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPzDI1DBOK0
Gumby liked this one!
>It was not a fishing trawler (a real fishing trawler would never do anything like that)
Yeah, pretty sure all the fishing trawlers got the message after what happened to the Ehime Maru.
Submarines are the most lethal weapons in human history. The main battery on my boat had a range of half the hemisphere of this planet. We had more equivalent firepower than all of World War II. We were in the killing business, we were not in the business of being killed.