Pap Pap Takes A Fall

 

I just returned from a trip to Florida, hands down my least favorite place to visit in the USA.  If given the choice between a weekend in Miami or a weekend in Buffalo, I am choosing Buffalo 99 times out of 100.  The contrived soullessness of Florida with its paper mache strip plaza landscape is a cultural desert with full blast air conditioning.  I am always happy to leave it.  After picking up the bassets at the dog boarder, they were all jacked up with separation anxiety/back to home joy.  As a result, they both drank a gallon of water shortly before bedtime.  I suspected that this would be an issue, and indeed it was.  At 4am Marvin started crying.  It was one of those "I'm not kidding.  I REALLY gotta pee!" cries that I recognized.  I got up in a fog and took the bassets outside where they both had marathon pisses.  

I am not a great sleeper.  I don't have one solid 8 hour sleep, but rather string together a series of multi hour naps.  As I stood there waiting for the dogs to come back inside I knew I'd probably have a challenge to fall back asleep.  I decided my best move would be to go to the couch and see if I could fall asleep streaming some video as white noise.  I didn't turn on any lights as that would have made it impossible for me to fall back asleep, so I walked over to the couch using the laptop as a flashlight.  The bassets, thinking that this just might be a chance at an early breakfast, excitedly circled me as I headed across the room.  This was when I made my mistake...

I would love to see video of how I did it, because even now I'm not sure of the mechanics.  All I can tell you is that as I fell after tripping over the coffee table.  I held the laptop aloft to make sure it was safe therefore guaranteeing I would take the full blow to my head.  I fell straight forward, snapped my head backwards when I hit the couch frame, and then tried to catch myself with my right arm which immediately seized up my tricep.  I hit so fucking hard I thought "you just broke your neck and died.  What a stupid way to die.  You fucking idiot.".  My head snapped back like if someone had hit your forehead with an aluminum baseball bat as hard as they could.  It was unbelievable. 

I sat up and took a quick inventory.  I moved my various body parts.  I couldn't believe that I was still functioning.  The dogs licked my face.  Holy shit did my arm and head hurt.  I was on my hands and knees like when you see a QB take a monster hit in an NFL game.  Ok.  Ok.  Ok.  I got up and sat on the couch.  That's when I could feel the swelling start.  Within minutes a huge index card sized lump started to form on my forehead and my right upper arm swelled up tight like a sausage.  It felt like my skin was going to pop open.  It's 4am and I'm trying to figure out how I am going to ice this down and maybe control it.  I wasn't dizzy.  I wasn't nauseous.  Maybe this wasn't so bad?  (Honestly, I had just gone though a near death experience but I wouldn't think about that until later.  Eight inches to the right and I would have hit the brick hearth.  Dead.  Four inches left and it would have been the couch corner.  Dead.)  Now I had to figure out how to get a couple frozen bags of peas to balance on my head and back of my arm simultaneously.  The bassets went to their bed and immediately fell back asleep.  The house was quiet.  Should I go to the ER?  Fuck.  

I didn't have any of the signs that suggested skull fracture but I'm sure I had some level of concussion.  There was no bleeding, barfing, or dizziness.  I decided just to ice it.  Two days later the lump is down and all that blood started to drain into my skull giving me a raccoon eyes like I was an early member of KISS.  The arm had turned a brilliant shade of violet.  I looked terrible but all things considered didn't feel that bad.  That's when I went to my 6 month follow up to the cardio guy.  When he walked in the room, he had what I would call a strong reaction.  I believe his first words were "JESUS CHRIST!!!!".  He was so freaked out he couldn't even look at me when he was talking.  He was insisting I get a CT scan and wanted to put me in a wheelchair to make sure I could make it down there.  I had walked the dogs for an hour that morning, and had even worked out the day before.  I thought I was on the mend, but he was really freaking out.  This is when I thought that maybe I had fucked up on my decision making.    

After a series of X-rays and scans it turned out I didn't fracture my skull.  I did get a hairline fracture by my elbow, but they can't really do anything about that so it didn't matter.  I have now entered my "old guy with weird face injury" phase, similar to guys you see at Home Depot or the grocery store with flaking open sores or loosely taped gauze.  I knew this phase was coming for me sooner or later, but I didn't expect to go from the pit at a Viagra Boys show last Monday to "Yes, as a matter of fact, I have had a recent fall" in 8 days.  It's this type of whirlwind series of events that only confirms my suspicion that I am on borrowed time.  I'll tell you this, I'm not planning a skydiving trip or mountain climbing expedition anytime soon.  Extreme sports for me have moved out of that realm to "mowing the lawn on a hot afternoon".  It's grim.

My focus is now on this lingering headache and NFL futures.  It's so difficult to find value on these because of the over analysis from every dime store dickhead like myself trying to find any edge.  I try to look at franchises with meager fanbases that are sitting in the "sorta crappy" zone.  Here's a team you never think about... the Atlanta Falcons.  The Falcons are coming off an 8-9 season where Cousins gave them most of their juice.  They fired their coach, brought in Kevin "That's on me.  We gotta clean that up." Stefanski and quickly signed my concussion buddy Tua to augment the always injured Michael Penix at QB.  This does not fill me with confidence.  Stefanski on the surface is a good head coach with his two Coach Of The Year trophies, but I never bought in.  He had the worst against the spread record of any veteran coach, meaning that he won most of the games he was supposed to but by less points and he almost always lost the games where his team was an underdog.  On top of that, with the Falcons Stefanski is taking over a team with bad QBs that can't get the ball downfield.  Sound familiar?  He should give the ball to Robinson 400 times a game, but he won't. He'll try to win with four yard dump passes.  

The Falcons went 3-6 with Penix last year.  Nobody wanted Tua because of a suspect arm and the potential that he will die on the field with another big hit.  Where are the wins going to come from?  The NFC South is sorta shitty with all the teams being more or less equal on paper.  For them to improve on last year they need to fix their defensive line (they haven't), get better QB play (Tua looks awful and Penix isn't healthy enough to play), and hope no one else in the division has gotten better.  I think the Saints are on the rise, and the Panthers/Bucs are better than the Flacons.  They start with three 2025 Playoff teams, go on the road to New Orleans, and then Balt/Chi/SF.  At best they are looking at 2-5 unless Stefanski is better than he has been historically.  At that point, is this a team that's looking to "build for the future" to get into draft position for a QB?  No one will hold the new staff responsible for going 5-12 and getting a new potential QB in the draft.  Atlanta UNDER 7.5 wins.    

           

 

 

Explosive Diarrhea Update

 

I’m not sure how the authorities figured out that the source of the explosive diarrhea was the lettuce at Taco Bell as my experience has been that ingestion of Taco Bell in and of itself will result in explosive diarrhea.  For example, if you got in contact with any random set of regular Taco Bell customers and started to poke around their bowel movements, I think that in no time at all you’d discover that explosive diarrhea wasn’t so much an ailment but a lifestyle choice.  I remember Leo telling us in the van one time that he shits 4-5 times a day like it was the most natural thing in the world.  If you are in line at the Taco Bell drive through near my house, you likely spend your day shitting across the region.  Based on my understanding of fast food consumers buying patterns, it would have been difficult for health authorities to dial in if it was the Taco Bell, McDonalds, or Subway which was the culprit of this regional gastrointestinal distress.  Hats off to whoever figured out it was the lettuce across a regional Taco Bell distribution system.  Frankly, I’m stunned to know anything in our government works as designed these days.

I think we forget about what "normal" was in the 2010s.  The sheer incompetence of the Trump Administration is mind boggling.  This just in...  It turns out that if you get rid of all the people with experience and education in a particular area, you’ll have a big drop off in performance.  I guess most people are tuned out so aren’t that concerned that an 80 year old man surrounded by sycophants has bungled his way into a lose/lose situation in the Middle East that increasingly seems to be spiraling further out of control.  It’s also hard to figure out what is really going on over there as we have all become so conditioned to the consistent stream of lies and bullshit from the government that it requires you to seek out information from more trustworthy news resources like Al Jezeera and influencer podcasts.  All I know is we allegedly “won” the war we started but have not achieved any of the stated goals and are currently taking fire from the guys we beat and can’t move any ships.  Sweet, sweet victory.  

I also can’t figure out why the journalists all maintain procedural norms with the administration and pretend he’s not shit talking on the fly when they ask any question.  They don’t seem to understand that by legitimizing him with deference they have become part of the problem.  Instead of "The reflecting pool does not appear to have any evidence of vandalism and it is unclear what evidence the president is referring to in his social media posts", why is it not "You can't believe anything this guy says, because if he demonstrably lied about a botched repair job how could he possibly be telling the truth about ANYTHING?  Today he said X/Y/Z, which are also obviously lies.  Here's what we can confirm to be true.".  I think it would be in everyone's best interest to just stop with the pretense that the office still demands respect to the individual.  The individual in question has no policies, follows no advice, taps no information and seeks to make our reality whatever is going on in his head at any given moment.    

While Trump's approval rating is at a near historic low, it’s hard to believe that 34% of the country still approves of presidential performance.  That’s really low, but still almost 1 out of any 3 people?  Even the "well, I don't like some of the things he says, but..." crowd you's think would notice how badly this guy is fucking things up.  Still, there are less true believer cult members now.  You still see some of those creepy hillbilly shrine houses where they have flags and banners seemingly unaware of the fact that they are cheering along to a bunch of rich guys stealing their taxes, but it’s either that or college football flags for that crowd, so whatever….  I guess they need their passions.  If you are interested you can always wander onto social media to find a climate change denier or someone freaked out by the inevitable “socialist/communist” boogie man the conservatives reliably revert to in times of stress.  I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone that is worried about socialism actually define what it is they think will happen if someone that wants to install healthcare or affordable housing options into the community gets some authority.  I am of the opinion that a lot of people that think they are “rich” and thus a potential target of the Communist Boogieman don't understand what the definition of "rich" is.  There are a lot of dudes that own shit like jet skis and four wheelers that think they are "rich".  I’m not saying those toys are cheap, but when the kooks in the far left want to target the rich with their pitchforks, they mostly just want Bezos and Zuckerberg to pay taxes like the rest of us.  I don’t think that is a dangerous liberal idea.  I think that’s fair and equitable but goddamn are hillbillies in $60,000 houses worried about Bezos keeping a higher percentage of his earnings or what?

Ultimately most people don’t pay attention to anything unless it directly impacts themselves like being cut off in traffic or a delay in their diarrhea Taco Bell order.  As I write this, there are two women talking to each other directly behind me.  Neither one of them is really listening to the other, their conversation just a babble of noise that intersects in the brief pauses.  “You know when you’re driving from somewhere new and then RIGHT RIGHT you don’t really know for sure where you are going because I KNOW I KNOW and like I was telling my husband I KNOW RIGHT? and then WHEN YOU DON’T KNOW CAUSE IT’S LIKE A NEW he was wanting to know if I IF YOU HAD YEAH YEAH OK OK OK”.  Those two aren’t capable of grasping anything beyond what is going on directly in front of them on the surface level.  How can you move society ahead when most people are fucking morons?  This is what keeps approval ratings at 34% as opposed to 16% and makes the rest of us consider if we want to roll the dice on having a salad to eat.  I like salads.  I don't like explosive diarrhea.  Damn, did the United States fuck itself up.  We are all stuck in this car with an 80 year old dementia patient at the wheel that didn't know how to drive when he was at his best.  Meanwhile, one out of three people in the car are like "You're doing great!" as they scroll Tik Tok dances on their phone having no idea we're speeding into a wall.  It's not great.

That's why I'm focusing on NFL win totals.  There are things we can all agree on there, like the Arizona Cardinals aren't going to be very good.  They are sitting at 500-1 to win the Super Bowl, so expectations are very, very low.  When their win total was released it was at 4.5 wins.  That was immediately bet down to 3.5 wins.  That's rarified air.  Anytime you can look at a 4-13 ticket for a winner you need to give it a glance.  The NFL has razor thin margins between being "average" and "bad".  Each one of these teams is a couple key injuries or cluster injuries at a position away from being terrible.  Add into that mix that each team every season has one of those "I can't believe the (team) won last week over the (clearly superior team) on Sunday.  However, it's hard to build up much confidence in the Cardinals to hit that over.

One of my first considerations in betting an over total is "good QB/good coach".  If a team has both of those in place, they are generally a winning team.  The only teams last year that had that combination but had a losing record were the Ravens at 8-9 (but Lamar missed 4 games, and are we positive John Harbaugh is still a "good" coach?) and the Chiefs at 6-8 (Mahomes missed 3 games).  The Cardinals are rolling into 2026 with Jacoby Brissett and Gardiner Minshew.  At some point they will toss rookie Carson Beck out there to solidify our expectations of him being a shitty QB.  Their coach is first year NFL head coach Mike Lafleur, one of those guys that was an OC under Sean McVeigh so thus has all McVeigh's success attached to him much like past examples of this concept at work like Josh McDaniels.  His brother is Matt Lafleur, again cementing that he HAS TO BE good.  This gives me concern.

The Cardinals schedule in the first half is, shall we say, challenging.  @Chargers/Seattle/@SF/@NY Giants/Lions/@Rams/Broncos/@Dallas/@Seattle/Rams/@Kansas City and that takes you to Thanksgiving.  Looking at that, you have to think they have that Giants game circled.  Maybe Kansas City has a longer rebuild than expected?  I will give them a win in there somewhere.  I just don't know where.  Best case scenario they are what?  2-10?  Now they have to find two wins in the stretch run of Washington/Philly/Jets/@Saints/Raiders/SF.  For me, I'm thinking, "Can they beat the Jets and Raiders at home in December as the Jets try to tank for a pick and the Raiders listlessly wrap up the year on the road?".  

I don't know.

I see this as an automatic play at Over 3, but the books will hesitate to go there on it despite all the negative juice already on the under 3.5.  Last year the Jets/Titans/Raiders went 3-14, so the league seems to have embraced tanking for the draft.  Browns and Titans only won 3 two years ago, but winning 3 games or less is very rare in this ultra competitive league.  The case for the Cardinals winning 4 games+ becomes the only side under consideration.  Let's try to make the argument...

*  The team needed improvement in the line, so they drafted a stud guard in the second round and signed two apparently competent free agents.  This should make their offensive line somewhere in the 16-22 range in the league.  Not great, but not a total disaster like in Cleveland, Tennessee or Houston.  You can win four games with a line like that.   The Cardinals have drafted a bunch of exciting skill position players and put nothing into the line.  You know who else does that?  The Raiders and Falcons.  Uh-oh. 

*  Jacoby Brissett isn't great, but he keeps you in games.  He's thrown 3 times the number of TDs than INTs, so he's good at keeping the team hanging around in games where a turnover can change the outcome.  The problem is Arizona doesn't have a great turnover differential.  Brissett played really well for a stretch in Arizona last year but when you looked at the end of the game, they still lost.  Dude went 1-11 as a starter last year.  Is Carson Beck going to be better?  Probably not, but they will need to find out.  If you think Beck will be an improvement over Brissett, you gotta consider the over 3.5 wins.

*  The Arizona defense was 28th against the pass and 27th against the run in 2025.  Will they be better?  Ummm... I guess they could be?  It seems like they will improve statistically as they will be consistently behind trying to stop short passes and runs up the gut designed to keep the clock running against them.  They aren't winning many games for the team though.  "Boy, did the Cardinals shut down the Rams" is not something I expect to type.  

Gun to head, I'd take the over on this at plus juice.  I think they get a couple weird wins before Thanksgiving.  A win over SF (who I think is going to be feast or famine), the annual insane NFL upset win over somebody crazy, and then find two wins from the Giants/Washington/Jets/Raiders mix.  The variables are if Beck can somehow give you improved QB play, Lafleur really IS a good coach, and the line is good enough to give Jeremiyah Love some opportunities.