While I’m in a reminderin’ mood – Here’s another mention that I’m doing a reading tomorrow evening at Varsity Letters in Brooklyn. Meandering speeches, monotone delivery – my reading’s gonna have it all!

[Cutler story via Deadspin]

Today marks the release of my second greatest literary achievement after the fake Philip Rivers Twitter feed, the surpassingly awesome (don’t wanna oversell it) The Football Fan’s Manifesto. So now that you’ve already pre-ordered it off Amazon, you can go purchase a reserve copy in stores for the express purpose of throwing at others. It’s bound to be the most widely read manifesto since The Washington Post and The New York Times ran Ted Kaczynski’s in full (why can’t I get that kind of play?).

And let me tell you, it’s about goddamn time. Jeebus, do book deadlines suck. I finished editing this thing months ago and have had to spend the meantime sitting around praying specific jokes and references would hold up long enough not to be outdated by the time the book even hit stores. For example, there’s one part where I mock Cleveland for its 45-year title drought. Only so the Cavs could made me sweat it out for three whole rounds of the playoffs before failing miserably! Tension, I tells ya.

Invariably, whenever I tell people I have a book coming out, they ask if I’m going on a book tour. Which is silly. Because only Leitch gets book tour money (ON TOP OF RAISIN MONEY!). I do, however, have two non-alone-naked-in-front-of-the-mirror readings scheduled for next month:

After the jump is a section that, while funny, didn’t survive the second draft of the book because my editor said it was kinda sorta wholly out of place with the rest of the book. Like dick jokes need coherence! A shame, but now you can enjoy it on the site, print it out, shove it between pages, and have your own personal simian’s cut of the book.

A Message From Philip Rivers Regarding Your Autograph Request

Wellie, well, well, wellington, wee wascally fanboy, I can tell from the eager glint in your wall eyes that you want me to get a-scribblin’ on your tattered knock-off replica King Philip “the Laserfaced” Rivers jersey. Hmm. Where should I sign? The part with the months old chili cheese stain? The area where my name should be stitched on, but you crapped out and bought the chintzy fake decal version? Or would you prefer me put the ol’ John Handonmycock on the pieces of duct tape that are holding upright the dilapidated hovel you call home-sweet-hole-in-the-ground?

OR MAYBE I CAN JUST SIGN YOUR DEATH CERTIFICATE, YOU SAD EXCUSE FOR A COCKTHIRSTY CUTLERFUCKER! YOU KNOW WHAT? I BET YOU JUST LOOOOOOOOVE JAY CUTLER, THAT YOU WERE JUST ASKING HIM TO SIGN FOR YOU EARLIER TODAY. AND HE PROBABLY MADE THAT HANGDOG TEENAGE SULK FACE AND DID IT. WELL I’M NOT SO EASY PEEZY, SONNY JIM. THIS ISN’T EVEN A FUCKING SHARPIE YOU WANT ME TO SIGN WITH. HOW DARE YOU PLACE THIS GUTTER PEN IN THE THROWING HAND OF THE BEST QUARTERBACK ON THIS OR ANY PLANET!? GO HUG A CLAYMORE, YOU HEFTY BAG OF GIBBON SHIT!

Hey, hey, shh, shh, I get it. You’re not alone. The whole world wants a piece of me now. Philip Rivers, Marmalard, King Laserface; The name echoes throughout eternity, does it not? This was not always so. Everyone around the league wanted to write me off as another Ryan Leaf (he was misunderstood anyway). Time was, they said I was nothing but a trash talking punk, that my passes fluttered in the air like the omnipresent weightless debris that people say gives your neighborhood “character”. That I wasn’t good for anything but taunting the crowd on the road. Heck, I even had to hear about Ben Roethlisberger and Eli Manning being the best quarterbacks of my draft class. MY DRAFT CLASS! How they’ve gotten rings and I don’t. Can you believe that?

WELL I CAN PASS RINGS AROUND RETARDHURLER AND MOMMA MANNING’S FINAL CHROMOSOMAL DEFECT! THOSE TWO CLOWNS AREN’T FIT TO CARRY A TISSUE COVERED WITH MY CRUSTED EJACULATE! THEY ARE QUARTERBACKS OF LESSER GODS!

You know, if it wasn’t for my worthless running back LaToeInjury UncleTomlinson pussying out on me in that AFC Championship Game in New England, you’d have a Super Bowl champion refusing to sign for you right now. Instead, I’m a regular old unfathomably awesome swinging dick Sojourner Truth for abstinence who’s got better thing to do than to ascribe his priceless name to your meager and probably stolen possessions. I can tell it shocks you that a man as immensely powerful as I has suffered disappointment in his life, but I assure you the slings and arrows reach even my unfathomable heights. Take that as minor solace as you leave here empty-handed.

Wait, wait. No, no, no, get back here. I’m not through berating you yet. What gall you have to ask favors of me! I bet you weren’t a fan of mine when I was at NC State. I bet you weren’t in the stands when I was playing high school ball in Alabama. You haven’t shown me true loyalty, now have you? Were you there for me when I had a grossly uncharacteristic bad game because Antonio Gates tipped my painfully perfect parabolic passes to nearby defenders?

Well? Were you? Huh? Were you? FUCK YOU NO YOU WEREN’T!

You show me those ticket stubs. Prove to me that you’ve been on the Riverswagon since day one and maybe, just maybe, if you catch me in a generous mood and with my guard down and my cock up, and I’ll mark an X on your sweatshop-produced imitation of football finery.

But you can’t show that, can you? Just wasting my precious time that could’ve been better spent yelling at important people. All this hassling me and still you think you deserve my autograph?

You probably don’t even want to keep this autographed jersey as the cherished keepsake to be passed down through generations of your single branched family tree until centuries from now when post-apocalyptic road warriors unearth it from the rubble of your home and use it to clothe their unquestioned and all-powerful leader. No, it won’t be like that at all. Chances are, it’ll be up on eBay before one of my trademark floats hits the ground. WELL I HOPE THE ADDED INCOME TAKES YOU OFF THE WELFARE ROLLS LEAVING YOU NOT TO DIE IN THE STREET LIKE A COMMON LOSER BUT IN THE SEWERS WHERE THE MORLOCKS WILL RIP OFF YOUR LIMBS TO USE AS SEX TOYS!

One more thing:

Ya betta ask somebodddddddaaaaaaayyyyyyyy!

Then eat me raw, cheesedick.

There, I did it. I torched a beloved Terrible Towel for your malicious delectation. After all, I’m a man of my word. Now go run out and buy The Football Fan’s Manifesto in exchange for my WRENCHING ULTIMATE SACRIFICE. Or just buy it because you think it might be a entertaining read. Either way, I’ll be doing a live chat on Deadspin starting around the noontime hour today (UPDATE: Here’s the link), as they’re running an excerpt from the book, along with a bunch of photos of me relapsing into alcohol and drugs after years of clean living through religion. After the jump, another member of the Ape clan brings shame to the family.

Rule of thumb: when you frequently mention to your son who writes for a profane sports blog that you’ve become a regular reader of said blog, don’t be shocked when he ambushes you for a video prediction about your favorite team. Papa Ape doesn’t come up short in the homerism department, giving an overly optimistic assessment of his Niners’ chances (BECAWSE HE’S NAWT AS SMAHT AS SIMMONS’ DAD) but also bothers to ask for clarification on one of the more colorful terms that often appears on our fair blog.

The Football Fan’s Manifesto tip contest turned bad publicity stunt that will only cause me pain and likely not lead to any additional sales has come to a head. I can’t close the poll for some reason but here are the results at midnight, when I said I would end the voting. And the piece of merch that’s going to be fried will be a Terrible Towel. You people are some suckers for symbolism, I guess.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I definitely don’t want to burn a towel. The ghost of Myron Cope will never forgive me. But compared to what I could have lost, this is a huge relief. Hell, I have three of them and can get more at about $5 a pop (which goes to public schools the Allegheny Valley School, so I can be smug about my meager outlay). A few canny dickbags in the comments mentioned that the Hines jersey, though a crappy replica, holds the most sentimental value for me. And they’re 100 percent right. It’s not even close. It’s by far the most valuable item to me of all the things I offered up for sacrifice. Broggel nerr smire foll week if he have buln that jelsey! Yet still you picked a towel. YOU FOOLS! I spent all afternoon panicking that I was gonna have to lose the Hines jersey. After all, I wore it in that picture that got me shitcanned from The Post. I wore the thing under another jersey during the Super Bowl because I was freaked out because I wore it during Super Bowl XL and my superstitions were running on overdrive. It’s a priceless piece of Apeiana! You could even have made me destroy one of the other jerseys or the Fathead, which set me back far more money than one of several Terrible Towels. Still, I’m gonna have to destroy a towel and probably will never hear the end of it from fellow Steelers fans this year. You’ll get your video next week, jackals.

The following is the winning entry in the tip contest for The Football Fan’s Manifesto (here’s an interview I did about the book for The New York Times’ Fifth Down Blog). The winner has been sent a list of my Steelers gear (crusty underwear being possibly too flammable has been left off), from which he will choose something for me to destroy and I will post the video of that on the blog closer toward the time of the release of the book, you bloodthirsty jackal bastards. Anyway, here’s the winner Thalas’ entry.

“So, a million (seven or eight) years ago, I used to work for an agency (Solid Gold Entertainment in Burlington, VT) that provided entertainment for gentlemen on their bachelor parties, birthdays, etc. I would make lame jokes into the mic and engage the audience (to whatever degree it was necessary, often less was more) while young ladies would seek to pique the partygoers interests using only their feminine wiles. I was also responsible for driving the talent to party sites.

I’m at a mechanic’s garage in Poultny, Vt with four girls and the owner of the business as an extra set of hands. At this point, I was the extra set of hands. This was for a bachelor party. For whatever reason, there were a few people there who know the groom from college (Houston, it looks like) who played sports and had a modicum of time in the national consciousness. Among them was a gentleman who was a multiple-time pro-bowl offensive player back in the day. (Shh…Kimble Anders. I should state that as a life-long Bills fan, I really couldn’t give a fig about Kimble Anders one way or another before I met him the afternoon in question) This man was very drunk before we showed up, and continued to stay sloshed throughout the evening. I don’t mean to give the impression that he wasn’t watching the girls or anything, but he spent hours trying to engage me in conversation. At this point, I was still relatively new to the business and somewhat unsure of myself, so I was trying to be polite and funny to him without neglecting my duties in front of my boss. The other people at the party clearly liked him and they took turns trying to engage him and shut him up, but he kept working his way over to me (at the time, I used to wear Hawaiian shirts a lot — maybe that was it).

The offensive player in question started out by trying to appeal to my intelligence. He kept talking about this friend of his who invented the sentence, or at least that’s how it sounded. He was actually just telling me about a Noam Chomsky book he was working his way through. Then, he kept trying to tell me about some teammate of his that was gay (I think the guy I talked to played for the same team his entire career), but I couldn’t tell you who it was now even if you told me the name (some friends say I said Bracy Walker at the time, but that doesn’t seem right to me now, and it wouldn’t really matter to me unless you’ve already heard stories and can confirm this for me). Finally, He begins to tell me of this player’s ritual his team had. I’m very sorry to report that this involved a passing around a picture of a dog (an English Bulldog he kept saying) and his teammates (not him, of course, so says he) would take turns placing parts of their anatomy in holes cut out in the picture to get “screwing the pooch out of their system”. I think he said this was something that happened in training camp each year, but things were not clear to me (maybe this never happened, but I thoroughly am convinced that at the time, he believed it was true). According to him, a Hall-of-Famer and (at least one) potential future HOFer were involved in this. What of this is true, I cannot say, but it has certainly colored my perception about a whole team and potentially all players in general.”

Because you didn’t homoerotic misadventures went on in every locker room? Interesting. Anyway, a fine winning entry and please be merciful when deciding which priceless piece of merch I must destroy to please the readers.

Also, congrats to commenter Pip and reader Lance for each getting a free copy of the book for their winning (but not quite grand prize winning entries). Here are a couple ‘Shops Lance did.

HarperCollins asked me to come up with a video to help promote my football-themed compendium of lazy dick jokery, so I came up with an idea that would best entertain me. Then someone suggested one that might actually be fun to watch and the results are above. If the potential use of a book as a humiliating projectile translates to sales, I’m in for mega tycoon wash for weeks and weeks.

UPDATE: Now with correct spelling!

Thanks to Candice and Paul for helping me put this together and TheStarterWife for help with the concept. And apologies to KSK readers Jonathan and Adrian, who showed up on the first day of shooting and got books chucked at their faces, yet did not appear in the final version of the video due to general ineptitude on my part. So free books for them. And if it’s any consolation, I got a bookkake in the face as well.

Just a few more days to get in on the Photoshop/funny video/tip contest for the book. Entries go here.