Author: docboese

About this time three years ago I wrote a blog about the silliness of the names of some of the lesser bowl games. My two favorites back then were the “Bad Boy Mower Gasparilla Bowl” and the “Poulan Weed Eater Bowl”. Who won and lost in these football extravaganzas is unknown to me and frankly I could give a mouse turd in a margarita. My point was that the dignity of the college football post season was being despoiled by the proliferation of meaningless games where so-so teams risk injury to their players for the name recognition of a corporation with the teams only reward being a participation trophy.  This year is no exception, in fact it is far worse.

Here is a partial list:

Avocados From Mexico Cure Bowl. I love avocados, I don’t care where they are from but what do they cure?

Scooter’s Coffee Frisco Bowl. Guess I now know what avocados cure. Also, it is not San Fransisco, but Friso Texas!

Famous Toastery Bowl. Toastery is an all-day breakfast chain in the Carolinas. Hope they serve avocado toast.

Duke’s Mayo Bowl. Best Foods and Miracle Whip beware, there’s a new goo in town. As a new twist on the now cliche, pour the bucked of Gator Aid on the back of the winning coach, at the end of this game the coach will be douched with a bucket of Duke’s mayo. Reminds me of the climax of a gay porn movie, not that I have ever seen one myself.  
All I can say is I am really glad that a porta potty corporation is not currently sponsoring a bowl game.

TaxAct Texas Bowl. Yep, Texas, where men are men, sheep are scared, and taxes are for bussing the undocumented to sanctuary cities.

Wasabi Fenway Bowl. Wasabi in this case is not the sushi green shit but a storage company. Only in America.

Pop-Tarts Bowl. That’s what I call my toilet about four hours after that feast. Apparently, at the end of this game the winning team will eat the edible mascot. By the way this bowl was formally known as the Chez-it Bowl. I think they traded down.

Barstool Sports Arizona Bowl. This one speaks for itself.

In no way should you construe this, my latest rant, as retaliation for my beloved Beavers not being selected for one of these silly bowls. That is the result of having a dismal 5 and 7 season, including a 49 to 14 rout to the despicable slug eating ducks.  I can make no excuses for this. True, we had been abandoned by ten members of the once glorious PAC 12, our coach had left us before our last game of the previous season taking the cream of our team with him to Michigan State and dropping off all off his beaver logo clothing at Good Will in a black plastic garbage bag. There is a special place in hell that awaits him unless the ghost of Dee Andros doesn’t roll over and crush him first. Then the fucking ducks poached our field goal kicker. What kind of low life team poaches a kicker? Why he went there I will never understand. He will never fit in as he has no felony convictions. But these are not excuses, especially as our fellow PAC 12 rape survivor, the Washington State Cougars, are playing in a bowl game and were even considered for about 30 second to get into the college football championship series. Then they lost to the New Mexico Lobos and the college football world was once again moving in greased grooves.   

And finally, my personal favorite silly bowl game name.

Idaho Famous Potato Bowl. This is one of the few bowl games where the sponsor is not a corporation but an entire state. Idaho is enamored of the lowly tater. In their defense, It is one of the most adaptable and inexpensive foods on the planet and reasonably nutritious as well.   I am not sure what the state of Idaho gains from this bowl game sponsorship as they have that motto on all their license plates, with road signs saying they have “free taters for out of staters” if you visit a museum in Black Foot, ID. As an added incentive they have the world’s largest potato chip on display there. Thirty years ago, Judy and got suckered lnto stop there. As is costs to visit the museum, we didn’t go in, but we did get a single, raw, medium sized potato. And even though the signs said “taters” it was still truth in advertising as the signs also said, “out of staters”, both plural. As there were two of us, we got two taters and yippie, holy fuck, they were free.

I recently bought 50 pounds of famous Idaho potatoes for under ten bucks. That comes out to twenty cents a pound. With an average potato being about half a pound, the state of Idaho had a pretty good cost benefit for the signs. And even though I got a screaming deal on those 50 pounds of starchy goodness, that was at post pandemic inflated 2024 prices. So comparatively those 30-year-old potatoes were essentially free. Therefore, “free taters for out of staters” was the absolute and unvarnished truth.

But I digress…I have this problem with my rants.  Back to the Idaho Famous Potato Bowl. As an added wrinkle to the Gator Aid bath, the wining coach of this epic bowl game will be drenched with a buck of French fries. I’ll let that sink in for a bit.

Recently, 13 eastern Oregon counties voted to leave the state of Oregon and join Idaho. This succession movement would move 62% of Oregon’s land and 9% of her population into the state of “Greater Idaho”. There are lots of reasons why this is a bad idea, especially for the state of Idaho, whose voters have not had the opportunity to voice their opinions on this issue. The greater Idaho advocates main reason is that there are extreme cultural differences between mostly rural eastern Oregon and us west of the Cascade elites. They claim that we don’t listen to them and look down on them as ignorant buffoons.  Sadly, I have to agree. Anybody who wants to join a state where they baptize a coach with French fries instead of Gator Aid should be looked down on. And their best football team plays on a blue field. Don’t let the swinging door hit your coverall covered fat caboose on your way out.

It’s called space tourism. For a mere 250 to 500 thousand you can have a 10 min ride up on a suborbital flight into space and hopefully safely back down again. That is a minimum of 25,000 a min, or 417 a second.  The amount of time actually spent in space is four minutes tops.

The most famous of this new breed of space explorers has to be William Shatner, aka Captain James Tiberius Kerk. You may also remember him has the worse actor ever to appear in non-pornographic movies.  He said that going to space was a life changing event.  So is menopause and it last longer.

The latest in these space adventures occurred just a few days ago when Blue Origin lifted off six of these would be “astronauts” from it site in West Texas which is right near the spot where the Lord gave the earth an enema.

Profiles of these six is enlightening.  First is Emily Calandrelli who goes by the moniker “the space gal”. She claims that she studied aerospace engineering for nearly ten years which I take to mean she never graduated or worked in the field.  She says she starred on a national science TV show. Yep, that qualifies her to be an astronaut… not.  Her dream is to show girls that they can reach for the stars. Bull Shit!  She was on a self-aggrandizing ego trip. If she was really interested in helping girls reach for the stars, she could have set up a college fund aimed at getting more women into aerospace engineering. Maybe they might even be successful in the field.

Others on this flight included a married couple who were on their second Blue Origin flight, an investment CEO, a private pilot, an entrepreneur, and a man who was sponsored by a streaming shopping channel.  Pretty much all rich folks with more money than they know what to do with and a desire to feed their egos. Or as Calandrelli put it: “We got to weightlessness, I immediately turned upside down and looked at the planet and then there was so much blackness. There was so much space. I didn’t expect to see so much space, and I kept saying That’s our planet! That’s our planet! It was the same feeling I got when my kids were born, and I was like, ‘That’s my baby! That’s my baby!’ I had that same feeling where I’m seeing it for the first time, and it was beautiful.”

Really Emily? What did you expect to see for your $250,000? It is not like you were the first to see it. You could have watched a video, bought a 3D headset, or looked at a globe while stoned and had pretty much the same experience. Ok, you were weightless. But that same sensation could have been achieved by smoking some really good stuff, or so I’ve been told.

So why do this exorbitantly expensive, extremely short and potentially lethal thing? Yes lethal. As of 2023, 673 people have been to space, 19 have not survived the trip. Thats 2.8 percent.  And the rocket these guys went up in is not only experimental but also reusable. Ever heard of stress fractures. Google the British Airways Comet. This was the first commercial passenger jet. It was an engineering marvel of its day until it crashed, twice. Turns out that as the aircraft flew to high altitudes then back to the ground, the pressurizing and depressurizing placed stress on the hull resulting in micro fracturing which after repeated use led to airframe failure. In simpler terms it exploded like a bomb. Correct me if I am wrong, the Comet flew at 500 mph at 30,000 feet and was subjected to a little over 1 g acceleration and maybe 100 degrees Fahrenheit temperature fluxes. The Blue Origin goes from earth to 67 miles up where there is no air pressure, is under multiple g stress, and the most extreme temperature fluxes possible. Do you think they x-ray the whole fucking thing before they send it up again? This is a for profit company by the way.

Once again why do this expensive and really stupid thing. The only answer is it’s for inflating the ego of basically childish individuals who do not value their own worth. Why risk your life to go into space, visit the Titanic or climb Mt. Everest? They are not doing it to “show girls that they can reach for the stars”. It is done so that they can brag to their “friends” at a gala for some artsy cause while they sip their shaken but not stirred martinis. And finally, Emily, the earth is beautiful but it’s nothing like your baby. It is a planet that is rife with problems that need to be solved so that your baby and subsequent babies will have a life that has the potential to be as good as yours has obviously been. I am happy that your trip to the vastness of space changed your life. Sadly, this change in you was not for the better.