This Week's Picks: Week One

 

Well, kids, I'm back again with another season of This Week's Picks, the worst college football prediction post on any social media platform in history. 

This Saturday is Lee Corso's last "Gameday" appearance. He's retiring at the age of 90 which means he outlasted me by only 25 years. "Gameday" won't be the same without him.

 

Jawja vs Herds of Thunder:  The Dawgs start the new season playing Marshall, which isn't exactly like playing Texas or Clemson.  The new Dawg quarterback drives a pickup truck, not a Lamborghini and doesn't look like a billy goat.  The Dawgs are ranked 5th right now, which seems about right.  Dawgs win. 


Bees vs Buffs:   I like Coach Neon Deion Prime Time Sanders, honest, I do. I just haven't decided if he's a good coach or not.  Georgia Tech looked a lot better last year than they have in a long time.  Don't hate me Tech fans: Bees win. 

 

Texsass vs Ahia State:  Well, Ohio State won the championship last year, and Texas didn't. This year, Texas starts as the number one ranked team, and they think a Manning will lead them to the promised land as the prophets foretold.  Maybe. I tend to agree that Texas is better than Ohio State.  Texas wins. 

Alabama vs Florida State:  Alabama had a wacky year last year. Getting beaten by Vanderbilt will do that to you.  Meanwhile, Florida State had a bad year last season, which is worse than wacky.  Bama wins. 

 

Ellesyou vs Clem:  I watched "SEC Football: On Any Given Saturday" on Netflix last week and I noticed that LSU is good, but there's something about them that's a little off.  I can't put my finger on it. For some reason, Brian Kelly just doesn't jive with the bayou and boudin (pronounced "Boo-Dan").  Meanwhile, Clemson came back from a couple of so-so seasons to play really well last year.  I generally always pick SEC over ACC especially at the beginning of the season.  Tigers win. (See what I did there?)

Our Lady vs Myamee:  Two of my least favorite teams. Oh sure, they are great and all that, but gee, sometimes they are just too much. Miami has former Georgia quarterback Carson "Billy Goat" Beck as their starting quarterback. For that reason alone, Notre Dame wins. 

  

My Beloved Owls vs Possessed Deacons:  The Owls had a rough season last year. They fired their coach and hired Jerry Mack. Hopefully, he can have the Owls flying high this year.  I would love for Kennesaw State to beat Wake Forest, but, as Lewis Grizzard once told me, for real, " Always bet with your head and not your heart".  Wake Forest wins.

 

 

The Hard And The Beautiful

 

 

I’m going to be honest with you. I’ve had many teachers during my days as a student in the Cobb County Public School System who were not good teachers.  However, I've also had many fine teachers. 

 

Probably the best teacher I had was Roger Hines.  He taught English at Wheeler High School.  I was not into my humor writing mode at the time, mainly because I could not spell and I didn’t know many rules of English Grammar. 

 

I think I knew what a “dangling participle” was (it was when your participles dangles and would cause you to flunk Freshman English in college because in those days college professors got a thrill out of ruining your life.) For some reason, the “your” and “you’re” issue which plagues this current generation, wasn’t a problem.

 

I knew I wanted to go to college and I heard you had to write a lot of papers. So, as a senior at Wheeler (School Motto:  “Does your mother know you are wearing that?”), I took Grammar taught by Mr. Hines. I’m positive I had the lowest GPA in the class, mainly because I was dumb and lazy, which is a terrible combination for any type of student. 

 

Well.  Mr. Hines did not earn his nickname, “The Grammar Hammer,” for nothing.  His class was very tough and somehow I made a “B” due to the grace of God.  

 

But, Mr. Hines made Grammar interesting.  He didn’t use sentence diagramming.  According the Lord and Master of the Universe (Google AI Overview), Sentence Diagramming “breaks down a sentence into its component parts and shows how they relate to each other using lines, positions, and shapes. This technique helps in understanding the function of each word and the overall structure of the sentence.”

 

It never did with me. 

 

Mr. Hines (everyone calls him “Mister”) has written a book, “The Hard And The Beautiful: Life In a Family Of Seventeen Children” (Westbow Press). For the record, Mr. Hines is number 16 out of 17. You can buy the memoir from Amazon or Barnes and Noble's website. 

 

One thing I share with Mr. Hines is the state of Mississippi.

 

My mom was born and raised in the state of Mississippi, or as my Uncle Fatty would say, “Miss-a-sloppy”. She moved to Marietta, Georgia to help her sister, Elizabeth (or how they pronounced it: “Lizbeth”) after Elizabeth had twins, Linda and Brenda.  In Marietta, she met and married my father and then had three stair step feral boys. I was the youngest.  Even though she lived in Georgia, she always considered Mississippi "home" and insisted we did too even though all three of us were born on the second floor of Kennestone Hospital.  Some people from Mississippi can be stubborn for no logical reason.

 

Mom was from “The Delta”.  The Delta is the “birthplace of the Blues”.  If you have been in the Mississippi Delta during the summer, you will understand why people were singing the blues. 

We didn't take vacations to the beach or Disney World.  We went to Mississippi to visit kin.  

 

My mom was from a large family, too.  Grover and Laura Moore had seven children.  Grover had a store. The store went belly-up during the depression. Mama and them had to work on a farm. They had money, and then they became poor, which is something that stuck with mom for the rest of her life. 

The Moores were poor, but compared to the Hines family of Forest, Mississippi, they were the Rockefellers.  Mr. Hines did not grow up poor. Mr. Hines grew up "po" (they couldn't afford the "o" or the "r.")

 

Outhouse, yes, of course.  No running water in the house. Heat was provided by a fireplace.  Everybody went barefoot. Clothes were passed down and passed down and passed down.

Since Mr. Hines was at the tail end of the children, his older brothers and sisters were like second parents to him.  Amazingly, there were no black sheep in this family unless you want to count the siblings who joined the Charismatic churches and spoke in tongues. 

 

Mr. Hines's mother, like all mothers, was a saintly woman.  She was changing diapers while her oldest sons were in Europe during World War II.

Mr. Hines relates that his mother would say she was "slap give out" (Translation: "I'm tired").  I've heard my mother say that a million times.  His mother also said, "I'll swanny".  So did mine, but my Mom said, "I'll swanny to Pete".*

W.E. Hines was Mr. Hines's father. He was a man economical with his words.  He was a hard-working man because there are no other kinds of tenant farmers. 

 

W.E. kept a daily diary, which is one of the funniest parts of the book. The diary was short and included the days highs and lows.  Family legend has it that when Mr. Hines was born, his dad wrote: "Roger born today. Low today 76.  High today 98".

You don't know anything about the teachers who taught you. You don't know their struggles. You don't know their pain. You don't know if they like teaching and young people, or if they got into it because it was an easy major.  

 

All you know is that for an hour of your life, daily for several weeks, they taught you, and hopefully, you remember some of it.  Mr. Hines once mentioned a C.S. Lewis line about "trousered apes," and I think about that every time I see Florida Georgia Line on TV.**

To my Wheeler pals: you would do well to buy and read "The Hard And The Beautiful."  It gives you great insight into a person we all loved and admired.

 

If you are anything like me, you have always wanted to grade a former teacher. 

 

Here's mine: A+. 

 

 

*The Bible forbids people from swearing, but it doesn't forbid swannying

**Mr. Hines loves country music, the George Jones type. "Three chords and the truth". Pedal steel guitar. Every year, on Facebook, he reviews the Country Music Awards show by basically saying he watched five minutes of it and turned it off. 

 

 

What Sells

 

 

Have you ever thought some people have lost their ever-lovin cotton-pickin' minds?  It turns out many, at least on TikTok, have.

There is an actress named Sydney Sweeney who is, as Little Richard would say, "built for speed." A nicer way of saying it is that she is a comely young blonde who is well-endowed. 

She has appeared in several movies and streaming TV shows. For some reason, her bosoms have also made cameo appearances in these movies and streaming TV shows. She is the closest thing we have to an "It" girl in popular culture today.

When I was a young man, Farrah Fawcett was "It". Every boy loved Farrah, particularly the poster of her in a bathing suit. For the record, I didn't have the poster because I have been washed in the blood. However, I did give the poster to one of my brothers for Christmas.

I was a Linda Carter man.  I mean, Farrah was good-looking, and I wouldn't kick her out of the proverbial bed for eating proverbial crackers. In fact, I wouldn't kick her out of the proverbial bed for eating proverbial sardines. 
 

I don't know why, but I'm pretty sure Farrah would not acknowledge me in the hall at my high school. I'm not saying Linda would consider me eye candy, but you never know. She might have laughed at my jokes, but I bet she would still ride off with the captain of the football team at the end of the day.

We used to have "Super Models". I think they had super powers. Christie Brinkley. Cheryl Tiegs. Kathy Ireland.  Lord. we thank ye for them.   I couldn't tell you the name of any current (under 30) Super Models.  I don't even know if they make them anymore.

American Eagle is a company that makes and sells blue jeans and blue jeans accessories.  They wanted to improve their profit margins and make money for their investors. The nerve of them.

They brought in Ms. Sweeney for a commercial.  In the commercial,  Sweeney is wearing a tight pair of blue jeans and a tight denim shirt that amplifies her cleavage.  Her line: "Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans are blue.”

One woman on social media "accused American Eagle of implicitly arguing that everyone with a different racial or ethnic background is de facto ugly."

I wouldn't say American Eagle was "implicitly arguing" that "everyone with a different racial or ethnic background is de facto ugly and therefore less human."  They were "implicitly arguing" that Sydney Sweeney is hot and if you want to be hot, you need to dress like Sydney Sweeney, which means you'll need to buy our blue jeans.

Others stated American Eagle's "great genes/jeans" pun in the advertisement is a dog whistle for your friends and mine, the Nazis. Ah, yes, the great dog whistle argument.  If you listen to a lot of people on TikTok, everything is a dog whistle.

It's like they imagined Don Draper coming into the board room of Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Price, Nixon, and Agnew with the marketing head honchos of American Eagle, three sheets to the wind, saying something like:

"We'll get Sydney Sweeney wearing a pair of your jeans in an ad and you will sell a lot of jeans and increase membership in the Hitler Youth. It is a win-win. Peggy get me some more of that magic brown liquid." 

Instead of focusing on the hyper-sexual nature of Sweeney and her movies, they go off on this loony interpretation about Nazis and how the new Trump era doesn't think anybody but blondes can be pretty. 

Back in my young adulthood, there was an actress/model named Brooke Shields, and she did an ad for Calvin Klein jeans in which she said, "You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”

I know the 80s were such an innocent time, but that was a pretty shocking ad because it implicitly stated Brooke went commando or something. Maybe it had something to do with the Nazis. I don't remember.

Brooke was 15 years old when they did that ad, so it was, at the very least, "inappropriate" for a 15-year-old to comment on her lack of drawers.

Sweeney doesn't have that problem. She is an adult. The National Nags had to go with the possible Nazi angle, and "only white beauty standards were genetically superior to others" argument, which is very silly.

I mean, really. You are expecting a genetics argument from Sydney Sweeney and a blue jean company?

There's a commercial for a protein shake where a pleasantly plump actress says this shake is her "ride or die". I guess because it tastes good. I don't think the Shake Company is saying this full-figured gal is superior to others. They are saying, "buy our shake."

Frank Conniff, who was on "Mystery Science Theatre"  posted on X: "Sydney Sweeney did a sexually suggestive commercial made for the sole purpose of selling jeans. You see, this is why Democrats always lose."

First of all, Democrats don't always lose. But Conniff was right. There are those, and they are mainly Democrats, who have to make a big deal out of every small thing, and people tune them out. 

Someone responded to Conniff's post, saying, "It's an American impulse to see a demonstrably very attractive young woman having her moment and deciding she needs to be taken down a notch.  They just had to reach for this."

That they did.