I love A Knight’s Tale. It is a near-perfect Flick. Funny. Great soundtrack. All-Star cast (Heath Ledger, Alan Tudyk, Mark Addy, Rufus Sewell, and the criminally-underappreciated Shannyn Sossamon).

But the whole thing is stolen by Paul Bettany as Geoffrey Chaucer, starting here:

For there is something inherently noble about trudging! Like the Charge of the Light Brigade or voting for the Democratic senate candidate in Alabama- you know it’s a pointless, doomed endevor, but the effort itself is the reward.

Or put another way by Crosby, Stills, Nash and possibly Young: Rejoice! Rejoice! We have no choice but to carry on.

For we come now to the Trudging portion of the sporting year. NBA basketball is finally over, with The Hairpiece’s Nuggets putting the Heat out of our misery. I expect the same this evening from Hockey- hopefully a mercy flush by Vegas will save us from hockey stretching into July. It’s juuust too early for fire sale trades in baseball, so teams like the Cardinals will continue to both suck and disappoint instead of just sucking.

Right now, the casual sports fan is kinda SoL. The WNBA is good if you actually like basketball. The CFL…well, either you Rep Them Elks In Your Blood or it’s just funny-looking methadone football. To say nothing of the lengths you have to go through to get Aussie Rules Football on American telly.

So instead, we trudge. We drink. We watch movies. I recommend A Knight’s Tale and Xicala Anejo mezcal.

It’s smokey in a beautiful way, sort of the other side of the coin from a heavily-peated scotch. Not vanilla-caramel sweet underneath, but more like fiery flan.

NFL NEWS:

-Schadenfreude! I had forgotten the funniest aspect of the Iggles bringing byword-for-failure Matt Patricia into the coaching fold this off-season: star cornerback Darius Slay hates his fucking guts! Slay is saying the right things, but I’m not buying it. No doubt Philly is confident that alienating one of its team leaders is worth it for the contribution that Patricia will make as…”senior defensive analyst.”

-For Fuck’s Fucking Sake: There is a existential disagreement as to whether Bills star wideout Stephon Diggs is at the team’s mandatory minicamp. Coach Sean McDermott says he isn’t. Diggs’ agent says he is, and that he doesn’t “know why [McDermott] said what he said today.” It appears he may have been there in the morning but left before practice?

Diggs is in Year 2 of a contract extension paying him $96 million (roughly half guaranteed). League sockpuppet Ian Rapoport says based on conversations with said agent, it’s not a contract issue but an “in-house situation that they are on the way to resolving.” Josh Allen later added “Internally, we’re working on some things, not football-related[.]”

What in the everloving merciful fuck does that mean? It’s a fucking FOOTBALL TEAM. The only reasons to be there are “football-related”! Did someone steal his Goobers? Is this about the new WR coach? Is Diggs succumbing to Wideout Madness? WHY CAN’T WE HAVE NICE THINGS?

Screw it, I give up. I can’t do this anymore  I’m becoming a Patriots fan.

NON-NFL NEWS:

-cormac mccarthy died today and was considered by many to be the great american author but frankly most of his shit i read is violence porn and impressionistic nihilism and his stylistic choices are so twee that it distracts from whatever small substance might be trapped in the cracks below.

WHAT’S ON TONIGHT:

Miami Panthers of Sunrise vs. Las Vegas Golden Showers (7pm Central, TNT): It’s June. The temperature in Las Vegas at gametime will be 91 degrees. The playoffs have been dragging on for two. fucking. months. This is not the time or the place for hockey. Please god, let this end.

QUIZ TIME:

Why is cheese popcorn? If you don’t want regular popcorn, you just make it caramel corn. And yet every time you see a big tin of popcorn, at least a third of it is cheese. What the fuck is wrong with you people?

So today’s Quiz Question- what is your most inexplicable food?