Meet Your New Life Coach

Quite obviously, the stated premise and goal of this here blog is to discuss sports. Y'know, just in case you haven't figured that out by now.  As Homer Simpson might say, "Sports sports sports sports, sports sports sports sports... Marge, Bart gets to sit up front today, because he's a good guy at sports."  Sports are fun.  Sports are year-round.  They're an American institution.  Soccer is not one of them, and neither is NASCAR, but you guys knew that already.  That being said, I am not, and don't want to be, known as a person that is one-dimensional.  I have, like, three dimensions.  Talking about football is probably the most prominent one.  My sweet hair is #2.  But anyway.. this entry isn't about sports, though I may sneak in a mention or two, but only peripherally.  This is just a slice of knowledge that I feel the need to spread.  So here we go.

1.  The color purple.  Note the lower-case letters, as I am certainly not talking about the movie of the same name.  In recent years, purple has made a name for itself as a color not to be taken lightly any longer.  Through hard work, dedication, perseverance, and the Baltimore Ravens, purple has staked its claim as no longer being a color just for chicks.  The underlying psychology of the color is unique, almost duplicitous.  It's a dark color, which says don't fuck with me because I'm hardcore, but it has a subtle brightness about it that says "I'm not emo and I'm ready to party at a moment's notice."  I thought about this earlier tonight as I was shopping for a sweatshirt for the upcoming winter.  I actually wanted the gray/neon yellow one, but they didn't have it in my size, so I looked slightly to the right and saw the purple one.  I was hooked.  Transfixed.  I had visions of the women absentmindedly removing their clothes in anticipation as I casually strolled onto the scene.  I bought the purple sweatshirt.  It will almost assuredly become a staple of my regular attire in the coming months, even though it's not exactly heavy-duty and this winter looks like it's gonna be a brutal one.  Men, you can wear purple now.  It's OK.  Your life coach would never steer you in the wrong direction.

2.  I recently read a book by my favorite author, Nelson DeMille, that I hadn't read before, that I'd actually been putting off reading for years because, well, he writes two distinct styles of books:  first-person and third-person.  The one third-person novel of his I read, titled Spencerville, was a good book.  That's it.  The dozen or so first-person novels of his I've read have all been AH-MAY-ZING.  (Actually, I just did a mental count, and the real number is ten. Ten books I've probably read ten times each, if not more.)  So I finally broke down and bought the Google e-book, which is my preferred style of book these days.  It's called The Charm School.  It's a Cold War novel.  It's about espionage and it's set in the former Soviet Union.  The basic premise is that the Russians have a secret "school" that they send "students" to to "become" Americans.  When you read that previous sentence, I'll be 99% sure you're gonna do finger quotes.  That was the point of it.  Anyway, my favorite part of this book occupied maybe a page and a half.  The two main characters, a defense attache (military intelligence) and a public information officer get into a little tiff with the KGB on the street right down the block from a KGB jail.  Things get physical; the guy punches the KGB colonel in the face after being shoved against a parked car, and when things settle down, the KGB colonel places the guy and his female companion under arrest.  As they start walking toward the jail, two unmarked cars come from opposite directions.  Five guys, including the Moscow CIA station chief, get out of the car in black jackets and ski masks, carrying silenced automatic weapons.  The KGB guy tells Mr. CIA that he is also under arrest, after which Mr. CIA threatens to kill the colonel's associates and kidnap him right on the streets of Moscow, unless they let their American captives go immediately.  KGB colonel agrees, everyone leaves, scene over.  I don't know about the rest of you, but I didn't come down from the gotdamn Smoky Mountains, fly across 5000 miles of ocean, fight my way through half of Sicily, and jump out of a fuckin' aeroplane... wait, wait wait wait, no.  Sorry, I'm mixing my plot points here.  That'll come later in this entry.  I don't know about the rest of you, but the thought of CIA thugs wearing ski masks and carrying automatic weapons prowling the streets of Moscow threatening to kill KGB agents for no reason and getting away with it gives me red, white, and blue balls.  America, yo.  I could read that page and a half a million times in a row and never get tired of it.

3.  As men, we've bought bottles of cologne at some point in our lives.  It's true.  Cologne is valuable.  When you're shopping for cologne, remember this one small detail:  blue.  Blue cologne is better than everything.  It's better than a perfectly-cooked steak.  It's better than the birth of your first child.  It's just better.  Me personally, I'm a body spray man.  It's cheaper, it smells just as great (though not as overpowering), and you get more for your money.  Blue cologne and blue body spray are at the top of the market.  No matter the brand, no matter the price, BLUE.  Everything from Cool Water to this stuff I "borrowed" from a friend of mine back in the day called Deep Blue Sea is better than everything you've ever worn.  Go blue or go home, stank-ass.

4.  So, ISIS.  Or whatever they've taken to calling themselves these days.  Those guys in Iraq and Syria that keep cutting people's heads off and getting American bombs dropped on them.  I don't think bombs are the answer, though bombs are awesome.  What I think of when I think of ISIS is the movie Inglorious Basterds.  Brad Pitt leads a small unit of Jewish soldiers into France to kill Nazis.  That's it.  They're not a strategic unit.  They don't capture and hold positions.  They just kill and scalp, kill and scalp. ("I got a little Injun in me," says Pitt's character, Lt. Aldo Raine) Personally, I think this is exactly what's needed.  A small, well-armed and highly-motivated group of assassins who do one thing:  find ISIS soldiers and kill them.  Kill them in humiliating and inhumane ways.  This is the kind of thing that will make anyone carefully consider their next move.   I don't know about the scalping, but if you shoot off their genitals and nail them to a big wooden Star of David coated in pig blood while they bleed to death and display them in the town square of Mosul, some cerebral terrorist might think, "maybe we shouldn't do this anymore.  Let's just go home and pray or something."  Just a thought.

I wrote this entry for a few reasons.  One, I wasn't fully satisfied with my Monday Sunday Roundup yesterday.  It felt half-assed.  Two, I had tonight off work and plenty of time to do it after I assaulted a local Chinese buffet.  Three, I wanted to see if people who don't read my writing because it's usually about sports would take a peek. I hope they do.  Have a wonderful night, and keep reading, and tell your friends you know a guy who's good at writing stuff.  See ya when I see ya.