I spent the last three days in Richmond, Virginia. Richmond, The Hartford Of The South! I stayed at a hotel which was, in most respects, delightful. But it had a few tragic flaws. First of all, it had no pay-per-view porn of any kind on the options menu. Fucking Southern hypocrites. There’s an entire bottle of free body lotion in the bathroom with my penis’s name on it (That name? “The Bull.”). You’re telling me all I have to masturbate to is my imagination? That’s bullshit.

Second of all, and this is something every middle-of-the-pack hotel does: No fitted sheets on the bed. I think we’re all quite familiar with the standard hotel bed. It consists of one bottom sheet, one top sheet, one ratty blanket, and one bedspread that hasn’t been washed in over six decades. Mine likely still had traces of Charles Robb’s DNA on it. Anyway, these beds are made so tightly, it’s like sleeping under a goddamn sheet of Cling Wrap. And, since they never use fitted sheets, anytime I try pulling the sheets out from under the mattress to get some breathing room, the whole goddamn thing comes undone.

I am a restless sleeper. I toss. I turn. I breathe heavily. I scratch myself. I even practice Tae Kwon Do. I rotate sleeping positions like I’ve been skewered on a goddamn spit. Back, side, stomach, side, back, side, etc. As a result, I have never slept in a standard issue hotel bed without waking up the next day splayed out on a bare mattress with a laundry heap of sheets spilling over the side. This annoys the fuck out of me.

Are fitted sheets that expensive? Is there not enough room in a hotel budget for elastic? GET SOME FITTED SHEETS ON YOUR BEDS, HOTEL MANAGERS. Cornell University didn’t teach you JACK SHIT about proper hospitality.

Anyway, here are your cheerleaders for the week. Did you know one of the Cowboys’ cheerleaders is named Starr Spangler? I bet she’s seen a hotel bed or two.

As you may have guessed, I am not what you would call a voracious reader. Don’t get me wrong. I like reading the labels on whisky bottles. But books? Whoa, slow down there, mister. That’s a lot of words, many of them big and fancy.

Books are very thick, and therefore intimidating. I like lots of books I’ve read, but I’ve also been so traumatized by the books that I was forced to read in school that I approach them now with a good deal of trepidation. Will this book transport me to a whole new, enrapturing world that holds me in its thrall? Or will it be “Great Expectations”?

/shudder

We had a book draft earlier in the year, in which we all pretended to be crazy literate, and Ufford referred to his writing as “his prose”, which is rather high-minded nomenclature for dead stripper jokes. One reader, PBNW11, who might be some sort of robot beta model, even compiled our choices (and many commenter choices) into this Amazon list, which was damn near the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for us.

But now it’s time to explore the other side of the coin. Oh, I like me some books. But I also hate a great deal of them of them as well. Now, I don’t normally admire Nazis or crazy Midwestern preachers, but I do like me the occasional book burning. Books are plentiful, and highly flammable. I see no reason no to use the shittier ones as an alternative fuel source. The time to switch from oil to Coulter is upon us. These are books you’d pick to throw into a bigass A&M-style bonfire.

THE RULES: Pick one book at a time. All editions of the book you pick will be incinerated, and can never be republished. Once a book is selected, wait 10 choices before selecting another. Once an author is selected, all their books are off the board. Sorry, Otto Man. Only one Bill O’Reilly book for you. I get first dibs, so I’m picking the single worst piece of shit foisted upon me by the English staff at Exeter.

“Herland,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I’ll let Wikipedia describe “Herland” for you:

Herland is a utopian novel from 1915, written by feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The book describes an isolated society composed entirely of Aryan women who reproduce via parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction). The result is an ideal social order, free of war, conflict and domination.

Racist? Yep. Reverse sexist? Yep. Demonstrative of pushy, annoying, extreme liberal ideals? Oh, yes. Worst of all, there were no Cliffs Notes for it. Guhhhhhhhh.

Your turn. Will Leitch, Bill Simmons, and Buzz Bissinger await your picks with horror.

Shutdown Corner has gameplay video of Madden ’09, not due out until fucking August because fuck me, that’s why. Could do without “The Power and the Glory” shit. Normally I disdain people that get obsessARE THOSE NEW PLAYER ANIMATIONS AND CAMERA ANGLES!? Cause, really, it’s just a game and FUCK RANDY MOSS IS DOING THE SOULJA BOY DANCE! I’ve got more important things to do than I WONDER WHAT RATING RASHARD MENDENHALL GETS? HE BETTER BE ABLE TO BREAK SOME GAT DAMN TACKLES!

It was two weeks ago that Buzz Bissinger took on Deadspin’s Will Leitch during an HBO special hosted by Bob Costas, and I’m getting along like any survivor not located at ground zero of the atomic detonation: I avoided the initial blast, but the fallout lingered for a week before the winds finally changed, leaving me irradiated with media bloviation. My symptoms: exhaustion, nausea, headaches.

Everyone had a response, and a response to the response, and the newly MSM-recognized commenters responded to the responses to other responses until the fractal spun into the minutiae of oblivion. Bissinger got blasted by everyone, apologized but stuck to his guns, then performed a round of interviews in the blogosphere to show his non-maniacal asshole side. Leitch responded with typically circumspect Leitchiness, then got blind-sided by Jason Whitlock for his casual laziness toward race, causing more Leitch circumspection before Whitlock participated in a follow-up interview with FanHouse which maybe-but-maybe-not added to the mental gridlock and exhaustion that led to Whitlock’s leave of absence.

Keep in mind that (a) the above recap is only a fraction of the scores of thousands of words spent on this subject across the Internet, and (b) for something that is supposedly a sports story, none of these people are athletes.

Whitlock, before announcing his Waffle House walkabout, closed his FanHouse interview with this:

Blogs are suffering from the same problem as the MSM. We think if we ignore our shortcomings, no one will notice them. Some smart blogger will fill the void and begin the process of holding blogs accountable. There’s an audience for that. There is a good-old-boys network among bloggers that will eventually get shaken up. Lips will get removed from asses at some point. This is America. There’s always someone available to call bulls—.

This prompted some introspective hand-wringing from The Big Lead (“Hmmm, maybe we should critique blogs”), making it the unofficial response to the response to the response to the response to the response to the story not about sports but about writers talking about how to cover sports.

In order to keep this endless trolleyfuck going, I’ve prepared a statement on behalf of Kissing Suzy Kolber. Ready? Ahem…

You people are fucking gay.

We had assumed, as you yourself almost certainly had, that the whole Spygate fiasco was officially dead and buried. Not so, sayeth noted statesman and eater of fresh dog shit Arlen Specter, who is feverishly trying to resuscitate this motherfucker so bad that one would think it was casting the deciding vote in a defense-of-marriage amendment.

The Republican senator from Someplace is calling for an independent investigation, citing baseball’s Mitchell report as some sort of precedent. Specter seems to pay no regard to the facts that (a) George Mitchell was not serving in the United States Senate at any time during the production of that report, (b) Mitchell came forward at Baseball’s request, and (c) Arlen Specter is an Eagles fan, and therefore unfit for public service, or any other sort of gainful employment. We also had a (d) fact, but it included a punch line with a very obscure reference to NASA, and we weren’t sure anyone was going to get that.

Those of us here at KSK were fortunate enough to acquire a complete transcript of the Specter press conference, along with am added bonus — transcripts of private remarks Specter made after the conference was concluded. Unfortunately, these items were delivered to us by a visually-impaired, moped-riding chimpanzee named Mindy, who we rely on for most of our political news, since she has unique access to the underbelly of the political scene.

And she has her own moped.

But Mindy’s latest delivery to us was jumbled and confusing; the two transcripts were mixed together, along with four pages of a Peter Pan coloring book and pages 16-25 of the screenplay of the 1982 box office hit Tootsie, starring Dustin Hoffman.

At this point we were ready to say, “Fuck it, let’s not do a transcript post,” until the phone rang. It was one of those automated customer-service surveys, and I promptly hung up. Sure, it had nothing to do with the issue of the transcript, but the disruption to our thought process was significant enough that when pressed with the choice of resuming the diligence of our chore or, say, making one of those frozen skillet dinners out of a bag, that we headed directly to the kitchen. That was a very long sentence.

We don’t remember which frozen skillet dinner we enjoyed — I want to say Teryaki Chicken and Fried Rice, but don’t hold me to that — but after finishing and leaving the dishes out on the counter for someone else to clean up after us, our strategem evolved from “Fuck the transcript” to “Fake the transcript.”

That is, we decided to falsify a given amount of substance to justify the presence of our post that sought to oppose a Midwestern conservative dickbag that was wasting everyone’s time for his own benefit.

And, to that end, we present this artifically-conceived-yet-somehow-very-authentic-looking-document detailing the senator’s remarks in an easy-to-follow, bullet-point format that may or may not feature a gratuitous amount of hyphens.

(You can click this fucker to view it now. That was my bad before.)

Thank you and good night.

Well, well, well. Look who just just fackin’ exawnerated far cheating by Rawjah fackin’ Goodell himself? BILLY BELICHICK AND THE REST OF AMERICA’S TEAM, THE FACKIN’ NEW ENGLAND PAYTREE-UHTS! That fackin’ pussy snitch Matty Wawlsh didn’t have any hahhhhhhhhd evidence that my boys cheated in any way, shape, or farm. Case fackin’ closed. PUT THAT IN YOUR TAPE RECARDER AND JERK AWFF TO IT!

I know you fackin’ faggot hatahs out they-ah hoped far a different result. I know you held out hope, against all hope, that the fackin’ Pats jugguhnut was just some kind of illusion. But it’s nawt, you fackin’ losahs! Our collective dawminance was just as real as this Tazmanian Devil tattoo on my bicep. Look at fackin’ Taz! He’s fackin crazy, just like the fackin’ Tawmstah!

Anyway, now that The Genius and my beloved fackin’ Paytree-uts have been clee-uhed of all chaaaaaaaaahges, it’s time to collect some gawddamn restitution. That’s right! You fackin’ people owe the entiah Celtics Nation an Apawlogy.

And $3,000 trillion in punitive damages.

I don’t think you fackin’ faggots could possibly cawmprehend the terrible haaaaahtache this SpyGate case has caused, both to myself and the greater Massachusetts pawpulation. We have fackin’ suffahed a grave injustice, and now we demand to be paid far it! Now, I know you dahkies out there like to piss and moan all day long about how you deserve reparations. Maybe you fackin’ dahkies should try lookin’ far a job instead! My buddy Neil needs a busboy over at his pub/tanning salawn.

But those blackies don’t deserve any reparations. It was they-ah ancestahs that suffered. BUT WE PATS FANS AH SUFFERING NOW! This was REAL pain, inflicted by malicious hatahs! Don’t try comparin’ that to some sob stary about yah great great aunt being sold awn the open mahhhhhket! That’s unfay-uh!!

Furth-ah-mor-ah, I demand that the final scar of Super Bowl Farty Two be over-fackin’turned. That’s right! WE were not the ones who cheated! By accusing us of cheating, EVERYONE ELSE gained an unfay-uh psychomological advantage! That’s REAL cheating!

This entiah cawtroversy took an unimaginable toll on Tawmmy Brady, Tedi fackin’ Bruschi, and the rest of ow-ah heroes! You don’t think they wouldn’t have plowed the Giants like a Puerto Rican schoolgarl if they didn’t have that shit hangin’ over they-ah heads?! Such was they-ah despay-uh, that even the legendary rooting pow-ah of the great Baston faithful could not override it. And I think you know just how unlikely that is!

THIS IS AN OUTRAGE! THE PATS EASILY WON THAT GAME IN AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE BY SIXTY FACKING POINTS, YOU FACKS!

So I want that game overturned. And I want my money. I told my garlfriend I’d take hah to Cancun. BUT I WANNA DUMP HAH AND PAAAAHTY WITH SOME NARTHEASTERN U. TAIL INSTEAD!!!!

This has been a very hahhhd time for the great people of Celtics Nation. We have been terribly wronged. And now ow-ah great Celtics are being screwed out of a Cawnference Finals berth, depriving us awl of the Lakahs-Celts Finals that everyone in America wants WITHOUT A SINGLE EXCEPTION OF ANY FACKIN’ KIND.

All because of the refs and that facking LeBrawn dahkie. Everything thinks he’s so great. BUT HE DOESN’T HAVE KEVIN FACKIN’ MCHALE’S EYE-UHN WILL! McHale would have knawcked that big dumb dahkie right on his ass! Then the Gahhhhden faithful would have let him have it! You think LeBrawn would be tough enough to handle that?! I THINK NOT!

LeBrawn’s not so fackin’ tough! “Oh no, that guy fouled me too haaaahd! I got a booboo! Oh no! Someone put me in a choke hold!” Sack it up, BrawnBrawn. Your mama should be well acquainted with police choke holds by now!

You clearly lack the steely resolve and determination of Tawmmy Brady and Celtics Nation. NO ONE’S FACKING TOUGHER THAN US!

So please, pay us our punitive damages. We were-ah really hurt by all this.

Jerry Porter recently took part in a Hanes promotional event that yielded no small degree of painful-to-watch comedy. Much like Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty, this chap Dave travels across the country, bringing an optimistic everyman joie de vive to a hodgepodge of quirky locales. Except Dean Moriarty didn’t challenge quasi-celebrities to see who can put a pair of underwear over their clothes the fastest. This is Dave…

Even his visage bespeaks quality entertainment.

As if this whole “guys playing underwear games” didn’t lend enough of an air of fruitiness to the proceedings, Dave’s decision to groom an imperceptible speck of something from Jerry’s brow took it to a whole new level.

Jerry says he “probably won’t” win, but he’s “not going to lose.” I have no idea what that means. At the risk of spoiling the ending: Jerry cheats– a skill learned with the Raiders– in order to win– a skill not learned with the Raiders.

A final look at the scoreboard shows that Dave has four wins against eleven losses. We presume this means Dave is now mathematically eliminated from the Underwear Race Playoffs.

If you feel you simply must see the whole thing, here it is:

I almost didn’t post the video because I’m disinclined to give Hanes the free publicity. But in the end, it was too entertaining not to share. Perhaps Hanes will send us some new drawers for free. This cheap pair I’m wearing right now is like a three-star hotel: no ballroom.

What Lofa might have looked like in happier times.

Seahawks linebacker Lofa Tatupu was arrested in Kirkland, Washington Saturday and charged with DUI after allegedly blowing a Busey-esque .015 .15 on the ole breathalyser. Tatupu, who signed a $42 million extension in March and has established himself as a Pro Bowl fixture, issued an apology through the team.

Living down the taint of lawless behavior is difficult but can be achieved after intense character rehabilitation and extensive public relations work. However, there is no erasing the stigma of getting popped while driving a Hyundai Accent. Tragically, Lofa will wear the shame of his choice of automobiles like the Mark of Cain for as many days as he remains on this mortal coil.

Films that the Patriots could use to predict the migratory cycles of birds and use them in their adjustments!

I just obtained a film of me taping the TV report about Lofa Tatupu getting busted for a DUI. I did it on behalf of the Patriots, so they can know what to expect from drunk linebackers in hoopdies in the future. Just because Belichick doesn’t get the videos from me personally doesn’t mean they don’t make it to him through the pipeline. They’re very intricate cheaters.

I’m taping you! Right now! What if I were to tell you this is for the Patriots, so they’ll know how you’ll react when you’re being told you’re being filmed to benefit the Patriots. It’s a limited but useful application, commissioner.

Just let me stay relevant a little longer. I can film myself groveling.

I feal the wolst is yet to come foll Hines this offseason. Now must auction arr thing flom lestaulant. Lestaulant is plide and joy when no pray footbarr.

U.S. judiciar system make Hines serr lestaulant fixture and lestaulant birding. Why? What is banklupt? Bank rook fine to me. Just when menu begin come togethell. Finarry get cheesebulgel that big enough foll man in Pittsbulgh.

No! You save for customel, prease!

So mindbrowing. This arr happen super fast whirr my mind is focus on having herp sterrpid tarr leceivel Rimas Sweed. Smirre is wash flom face these day.

He herpriss, I think. Rimas been leceivel in correge befoll and he stirr need herp. Such bad second lound pick. What he need me foll? I become leceivel super fantastic in no time at all and no even pray leceivel in correge.

STAND STLIAGHT, ASSWHORE!

First I terr him take numbell 14 jersey because peoperr in shitty rove Near O’Donnerr. He berieve this! So sterrpid.

I terr him make sule get at reast one foot on white rine that go alound endzone. He say in correge this count as out of bound. STERRPID, I say. This rook rike correge?

Okay, get you out of face. This is no ovel, Rimas. I be on you rike kimchi sauce!