Nurse the Hate: The M-200 in Athens and NFL Week 11

 

Sometimes you get a bad idea that you need to make blossom into action.  For example, I once visited my brother at Ohio University.  This in itself isn’t a bad idea.  The Cowslingers played The Union, a beloved but not especially good club that was the only real place to play in Athens OH in the late 1990s.  Its had a horrible fight of stairs to load in, a somewhat dodgy sound system, poor lighting and not especially cold beers available at the inconveniently located back bar.  I think it was one of those joints where if you had gone to school there as an 18-22 year old, it was likely you could have romanticized it as a great club, much like I have with Mother’s Junction in Kent, a similar horrific load in with even more filthy men’s room.  There is a certain freedom in playing rock music in a college town as a 20 year old that can’t be beaten.  For that moment, you are a big deal as you are commanding the only real stage in The Bubble you live in.  Your friends are probably supportive as they are excited to be in the inner circle with the rock stars of the moment.  The whole thing is built for feeling invincible, the illusionary glow of a somewhat successful gig lighting up your night.

Now when I was there on this occasion, I was probably about 26-27.  That is old enough where you have outgrown college hijinx but not old enough to forget how to do it.  Coming off a gig like that, you get into the spirit of the college town.  You can decide to act in a manner calling back your glory days of only a few years ago.  Look, I don’t know why I had that M-200 with me.  As I recall, a friend had come back from Mexico with a bunch of them.  I guess in the late 1990s you could fly on airplanes even with 1/4 sticks of dynamite in your bags.  We can easily forget that Pre-9/11, America was a place with a bunch of personal freedoms that are long gone.  You could walk into the airport and meet people at their gate, eat dinner at the airport without a real reason to be there, or fly fireworks back in your luggage.  Perhaps this is the "Great America" that Donald Trump was trying to re-make, though I have never seen evidence of Donald doing anything as fun as smuggling fireworks.  

As an amateur explosives enthusiast, I liked to have these M-200s at hand.  One never knows for sure when they will need to blow something up.  I can tell you with great certainty that the M-200 is the tool to get that job done.  I had blown up an almost life sized plastic Santa, a Barbie Beach House, numerous watermelons and one cantaloupe in the past few months while achieving magnificent results.  Its was at the after party at my brother’s rental house nestled in comfortably next to a graveyard that I discovered a huge plastic pail of peanut butter in the pantry.  I knew that it could make for a spectacular explosion by shoving the explosive into a cut hole in the side of the plastic.  As you can imagine, it didn’t take much for the enthusiasm to grow in the party about this project.  Now, it was pointed out that the peanut butter’s owner Mike would likely be very disappointed by the destruction of this as it probably represented 50-65% of his food for the remainder of the semester.  Yet, sometimes the enthusiasm for bad ideas snowballs into an unstoppable motion.  This was the case here.

We took the peanut butter outside.  It was a massive plastic container of peanut butter, a discount brand that featured a creepy clown on the label.  I cut the hole into the clowns’s head, and lit the wick.  An indelible image from what can only be referred to as a “massive explosion” was the outline of my brother running away silhouetted by the harsh white light of the pyrotechnic.  The volume of the explosion was deafening, providing a visible thump onto your chest.  It was the type of explosion that would bring a SWAT team in 2020 America.  There was no other way to say it but that the peanut butter and container were gone.  It all just ceased to exist.  We looked for a moment or two, but could find no evidence of the container.  Let’s face it, even college towns have their limits, and an explosion of that magnitude at 3am was going to bring a police presence that would not be in the mood for  some out of town wiseasses in cowboy shirts with illegal Mexican fireworks.  We scampered into the house like mice.

I will admit that I felt bad when I went to sleep about blowing up Mike’s food.  He was just some poor sap with no money walking around in thrift store clothes that just so happened to have the bad luck of having my brother as a roommate.  It was a tough break, but bad ideas can just come to fruition sometimes.  I didn’t really know how bad the idea was until daybreak when we discovered that all the peanut butter had been blown up into the leaves of the trees.  I say “daybreak” because that was when all the birds of Southern Ohio discovered and descended on a feast unlike any they had ever had or likely ever would have.  The collective noise of hundreds of birds was deafening.  These are the unintended consequences of bad ideas.

I am feeling like that same young man in a cowboy shirt lighting that wick as I prepare to bet on the New York Jets for the second time in 2020, and this time to WIN OUTRIGHT.  This cannot end well, and there will no doubt be collateral damage just like that time with the peanut butter when I talked my brother into it.  Yet, hear me out on this and let’s see if we can get you on board too…. The Jets are winless.  They are winless because they deserve to be winless.  They are terrible.  They are coming off their bye week where for the last 13 days the merciless New York media and their National Press brethren have been talking endlessly about how awful the Jets are.  The Jets must be motivated to get a win, and this week the LA Chargers provide one of the last real opportunities for the Jets to do so.      

The Chargers head coach is Anthony Lynn.  If the Jets can keep this game close, Anthony Lynn has shown us time and time again he will allow his opponent, no matter who that team is, to either get a backdoor cover or steal a game outright.  The Chargers are now 2-7 with their season essentially over.  The LA media is openly asking the coach if he’s about to be fired, assistant coaches are busy lining up their next jobs, and guys are playing for individual stats.  The Jets on the other hand are motivated.  Jacksonville won the first game of the year, have sucked since, but no one gives them any flack.  The Jets are winless.  They need that target off their back like Jacksonville.  Joe Flacco, a shell of the player he used to be, does not want the last chapter of his player bio being him taking a franchise 0-16.  Will they win?  Probably not.  Can they cover?  I figure they will play as hard as they have all year versus a team potentially sleepwalking.   I think the move is to split your bet in half.  I am on the Jets +9.5 with the other half Jets +400 on the money line to win outright.  That could be a nice little payout.

The Browns last two games have been low scoring affairs played in horrible winds.  The weather was so bad last week an enormous tree blew over in my back yard almost killing my neighbors.  You think Baker Mayfield can complete a long pass in that?  Hell, the weather last week was better than it was two weeks ago.  The Browns have been under the total two weeks straight, and now play the Eagles on a forecasted rainy Sunday.  Gamblers are going to pound the under after hearing it is going to rain all day here on Sunday and that Carson Wentz can’t play football anymore.  The good news?  The wind is going to be light to moderate.  Rain doesn’t kill scoring.  Wind does.  The better news?  Myles Garrett isn’t playing so someone else will have to make a play on the awful Browns D.  The total is 47.5, way too low for teams that average 53 points if you take out the two gale force wind games.  I am taking a firm position on Cleveland/Philly OVER 47.

I have lost a lot of m money betting against Aaron Rodgers in big games.  I am not doing that today.  For some reason, The Public believes the Colts are better than the Packers.  This is largely due to a high profile win over an overrated Titans team in prime time thanks to a couple of blocked punts.  This line opened at Green Bay -2.5 and is now Indy -1.5.  If we are saying that home field in Covid Times is worth one and half points, this means that Green Bay and the Colts are even on a neutral field?  The 7-2 Packers with Rodgers in a big game looks quite nice, especially with the Colts #1 D line player on the covid list.  Rodgers has somewhat quietly thrown 26 TDs and 3 INTs this season, while Phillip Rivers waits in the shadows to throw a back breaking pick late.  I will take Green Bay and points all day over an overvalued Colts team.  Green Bay +1.5.

Season Record:  14-14-1