Football Week 9: Monday Night Edition.

       Tonight is pretty much it for my Saints.  If they win, they can at least dream of making the playoffs, if they lose, well, they may as well tank the rest of the season and get themselves a decent draft pick.  This will probably be my statement/lament for the rest of the season.  I would like to see them rally after pretty much every roadblock has been put in their way this year.

       Tonight they play the Eagles, probably my second least favorite team.  Actually, I hate the Cowboys fans the most and the Eagles actual players the most, so we can quibble over where that would place them on my overall hate-o-meter.  A few years ago, there was this fan in the Superdome stands.  For me, it was love at first sight (they even put her in Maxim magazine after her fame swept through the interwebs).  Anyway, if you are out there, Heather, my offer of marriage still stands. 

        Needless to say, with all going on the last week or so here after Sandy, I have not had time to scan new pages and I do not have any more Saints cards scanned.  So I will have to pick a page and find some vague tangential connection.  Ahhhh, here we go:

Like I said, I hate any player who suits up for the Eagles.  Well, here are four players who are pretty damn despicable no matter what uniform they wear (and most of them now wear the uniform of their state's DOC).  Lawrence Phillips took a boatload of talent and threw it all away in a series of domestic disputes and then got a long stretch in the pokie after an assault with a deadly weapon.  Somehow, Pacman Jones is still in the league and not in prison, proof that if you are a viable player, the NFL will always look the other way.  Not only has Jones shot up more than one(!) strip club, he ruined a fantastic nickname like 'Pac-Man' forever.  Maurice Clarett was both impetuous and well armed - to the tune of getting kicked off a national title team in college and then going to jail for armed robbery.  In there he also flamed out in the NFL without ever playing a regular season snap; hell, he never even suited up for a preseason game.  I also read that he has been trying to clean up his act.  I'll believe it when I see it.  Last but certainly not least is the immortal Rae Carruth.  Rae showed flashes of talent for the Panthers for a couple of years, but then he ran into a problem, he got a girl pregnant.  His solution to this problem was certainly creative and unique: he decided to have her killed in what looked like a carjacking.  Classy guy.  He'll be in prison until at least 2018, and really, how he escaped the gas chamber for that one, I will never quite understand.

Not shown: Mark Chmura, OJ Simpson, Lawrence Taylor (though he soon will be), Jim Brown, Donte Stallworth, Leonard Little, and Ray Lewis.  Also not shown, tonight's starting quarterback for the Eagles, the worst of the lot, Michael Vick. Since I love dogs more than any person on this planet, I cannot reiterate my hatred for him enough and I will not even try.

The Sweet Smell of...Something.

       Around 10-11 years ago, during a moment of great weakness, I ordered some magazines from a kid selling them door to door.  Maybe his sales pitch was too ingenious, maybe his sob story cracked my black heart, or maybe I was just sick of reading Reader's Digest and Sport Illustrated on the can (in my world, magazines are only read in two places - a doctor's office waiting room or the bathroom...) but I broke down and bought three subscriptions for his charity or whatever for like $20.  Now, funny thing about magazine subscriptions is, once they have you, they want to keep you.  For those of you who have never worked in publishing, ad sales are determined by readership and while it is hard to gauge newsstand sales, what with returns etc., subscriptions are a sold pair of eyes.  Magazines like subscriptions, that is why those obnoxious little cards offer you $75 worth of magazines for $9.99 - they make money from advertising, not subscription sales.  I am rambling here...back to 11 years ago or whatever, I bought three one year subscriptions to Rolling Stone, Maxim, and The Week (which was brand new at the time, I think they might have given that one to me).  Anyway, one odd thing they will do in magazine circulation is they warn you over and over that this is the last issue you will receive and implore you to renew.  Then, if you do nothing, they will turn around and renew your subscription anyway.  Is it any wonder that magazines are dying?  The Week stopped coming after one year; it was a good quick toilet read.  Rolling Stone only stopped coming this past December after they renewed my subscription over and over again and I kinda miss it.  Maxim, on the other hand...

Maxim just keeps on coming, year after year.  I felt kind of foolish getting this magazine when I was 25 - so imagine my shame at (nearly) 37.  I mean, it is half-way decent crapper reading material, but the articles aren't good enough to be called literary and the smut is not dirty enough to be called porn.  These kinds of "Lad" magazines are pretty much trash.  And, so you don't have to tilt your head, you can see that I will be getting this magazine until July 2017.

Twenty.  Seventeen.

What are the odds this periodical will still be around in five and a half years?  Hell, what are the odds I will still be around in 2017?!?!

Is there a point to all this?  Well, when I am trapped with my thoughts reading Maxim, I expect saucy little pictures like this...

with the obligatory vapid interview with whatever ingenue they have slapped on the cover this month.  My ex used to mock Maxim as the ultimate sign of a whipped boyfriend, as he is not allowed to have porn in the house anymore.  This is the same gal who questioned my sexuality for collecting pictures of men.  She was quite the charmer sometimes.

One of the more obnoxious things they put in this kind of magazine are the cologne ads.  They usually end up just smelling like a mixture of glue and hand soap.  But this month, I was taken aback.  I got this ad in my Maxim magazine:

Oh. Dear. Lord.

That's right, there is a NY Yankees cologne.  Your dreams of smelling like Yogi Berra can now come true at the perfume counter in Macy's.  I am puzzled, amused, bemused, and down right horrified that this exists.  I imagine thousands of boyfriends and fathers receiving this in the coming months for various anniversaries and greeting-card holidays and thousands of little blue bottles forgotten and neglected in medicine cabinets all over the tri-state area.  I know sports teams exist to make money, but have the Yankees no shame whatsoever? I am still shaking my head right now at the very notion of this and I have had days to try and let it sink in.  I would call and cancel my subscription to Maxim, but I am pretty sure that is quite impossible.