And the alarm gives out a warning
And I don't think I ever make it on time
By the time I grab my books
And I give myself a look
I'm at the corner just in time to see the bus fly by
It's alright 'cause I'm saved by the bell

A miraculous thing happened to me Sunday morning, which I desperately needed (well, honestly, a miraculous thing happened to me Saturday night after the game, but a gentleman never kisses and tells.) I'll get back to that soon (Sunday morning, not Saturday night, you sick pervs.) For now, let me vent my frustrations with Clemson football (or the lack thereof.)

After all of the hype, it turns out that Tommy Bowden is still a failure as a head coach. I've been calling for his head for three years, and after we allowed the Crimson Tide to not only bind and gag us, but also put it in our ass with no lube, it hurt. We even let them slap us and make our mascara run. I would have to say that this year will not change my opinion of Tammy.

Don't get me wrong. As a person, ol' Tammy is great. I have personally waited on him in a restaurant when I was in college. He was the picture of grace, and his wife and children were very sweet and polite. Anyone want to guess what that means? Not a goddamn thing when you're making over six figures as a football coach. I'm also a nice guy, and if I had kids, I would like to think they wouldn't be terrors. Want to guess what kind of head ball coach salary I currently bring in? I'll give you a hint: zero, about what Tammy deserves.

'Bama ran us up and down the field. Our offensive line was barely even laughable, and our special teams lived up to the name "special" like no other. Corky could have blocked more tackles than they did. Sweet Jesus, it was horrendous. Our defense held as long as they could, but with Bama's offense lighting up the field every two minutes, they got tired. Hell, I got tired just watching them. I was in a foul, foul mood whan I went to bed last night.

But when I woke up today and walked into my living room, I was confronted by a wonderful vision: Saved by the Bell, the board game. I immediately called as many people as I could and started up a tournament, loser buys beer. After several fierce rounds, in which I scored dates with both Zach and Slater, I emerged victorious. That's right: I am currently undefeated on the board. Trivia questions? Shit. I got that. Detention? No detention hall can hold me, bitch. Gay-Drew, the Cap'n and I had a hell of a day today. This type of alcohol-driven silliness was just what I needed.

If the teacher pops a test
I know I'm in a mess
And my dog ate all my homework last night
Right alone in my chair
She won't know that I'm there
If I can hand it in tomorrow it will be alright
It's alright 'cause I'm saved by the bell


Maybe next week will be better...I hope your teams performed better than mine did.

JT out.

Yours truly, beardless and about 35 pounds lighter 2 years ago.


It's that time of year again, kids. Football season. I know that NFL preseason games have been going on for weeks now, but I don't really follow pro ball. While professional players may be more talented and well-versed in the game, I think a lot of them lack heart. Don't get me wrong, if I was making a ridiculous amount of money per year to play a game that eight-year-old boys play for fun, I would be a bit more careful about taking those big risks as well. Luckily, I'm a salesman, and rarely have to concern myself with being tackled. I think the day that being tackled becomes a major concern of mine is the day that I start seeking employment elsewhere.

College football started tonight, and I just got finished watching the University of South Carolina Gamecocks come from a dismal first half to really redeem themselves in the second half and shut out the NC State Wolfpack. This was a tough game for me, and I'll explain why. As a lifelong Clemson fan, USC has been my bitter rival since I was born. North Carolina State is an Atlantic Coast Conference team, and so is Clemson. Common sense dictates that I should have been pulling for the Wolfpack tonight. This is where it gets tricky.

When I was still living in the upstate of South Carolina, I was surrounded by Clemson fans for the most part. There would have been no question, I would have been pulling against USC with every fiber of my being. Now I live in Columbia, in the heart of Gamecock country. My girlfriend is a die-hard Gamecock fan. My roommate is a die-hard Gamecock fan. Through my old job at the Village Idiot, I actually became friends with several members of USC's offensive line. So I've made a compromise. Unless USC is playing against Clemson, I am trying to look upon them in a more favorable light. Make no mistake, though. Come the last Saturday in November, all bets are off.

Now that that's out of the way, I'm ready for what my heart says is truly the start of football season: 8:00 PM Saturday night, my Clemson Tigers face off against Alabama's Crimson Tide in the Georgia Dome in Atlanta. Unfortunately I can't make it to the opener this year and that sucks, but I will be firmly planted on my couch, beer easily within reach by the time kickoff rolls around. In fact, I'll probably be blaring the Tiger Rag all the way home from work.

It's not just about the football, though. It's about the entire experience. Going up to Greenville on a Friday night, staying up drinking and catching up with old friends until the wee hours of the morning, only to wake up bleary-eyed and heavy-headed at the crack of dawn, coolers packed and ready to go so we can get into Clemson and claim a premium tailgating spot. The near-military precision that my tailgating crew gets everything set up in under ten minutes and the first beer is cracked with fifteen (this is no small feat, either. We take tailgating very seriously. I even have a tailgating checklist set up in Excel to be sure nothing is forgotten.) Seeing very close friends that I haven't seen since the end of last football season. Sure, we always promise to get together in the off-season, saying this year will be different and we know we can make time. Knowing that Chip just shipped off to Iraq and won't be around in person this year, so we'll have to drink with him in spirit. Getting circled up to cannonball our Boone's Farm, knowing that it's a terrible idea, but doing it anyway because it's tradition, damnit! Eating fried chicken, pimento cheese sandwiches, and an assortment of snack food all day to keep our appetites at bay and balance out the superhuman amounts of beer that are consumed. And then...game time.

"The Most Exciting 25 Seconds in College Football"
Brent Musburger


Go Tigers!



I hope you all enjoy football season as much as I'm going to!

JT out.

Taking a fresh load of clothes out of a dryer while topless can cause your nipple to get burned by a very hot zipper. I do these kinds of things so you don't have to. Sometimes I feel like a real live crash test dummy. I'm not like the guys on Jackass though. I'm just accident prone. Sure, I occasionally do stunts on here, but it's amusing stuff like trying to chug a gallon of milk in an hour, not insane stuff like stapling my naughty bits to my leg. My naughty bits and I have an agreement: I don't intentionally staple them to my leg, and they don't accidentally get stuck in my zipper. It's win-win, really. Anyway, I'm sure none of you stopped by to read about my naughty bits (but if you did, you're welcome. Call me.)

The point I was trying to make in a rambling fashion is this: I don't get normal injuries like stubbed toes or paper cuts. I get my nipples burnt by searingly hot zippers. Actually, I would have to say that I get burned more often than anything else. I'd have to attribute this to a lot of cooking, both at home and when I've had kitchen jobs in restaurants. In fact, I would say that I've had a fairly painful burn at every job I've ever had. For instance, I once burned myself six times in one night in a kitchen job. I still have one of the scars. Oddly enough, it is just below the knuckles on my left hand. I'm still not sure how I got burned there. And not just restaurants, I got third degree burns over half of my body when I sold office supplies for Staples. It was a terrible laminating accident (no it wasn't. I made that up.) It's partly due to being in a fast paced environment, and partly about not paying attention. Those two factors combined can be lethal and funny at the same time, much like Chuck Norris's early years as a birthday clown. Not like Steven Segal's clown years. They were just tragic and predictable.

Also, if any of you ever go to the beach with me, you would be well advised to keep your distance in the ocean. I'm a jellyfish magnet. I had a streak of about six years that I got stung at least once per beach trip. One year I got stung three days consecutively. I've been stung so many times it doesn't even phase me anymore. I calmly limp out of the water, go sit down, and rub meat tenderizer into my leg. Then I get drunk. Honestly, it got so bad that, to this day, my mother keeps meat tenderizer in her beach bag, even though I haven't been on vacation with my parents in several years. (I think there were entirely too many commas in that sentence, but I'm not sure which ones to remove.)

You want random? Here you go! I once wrenched my bad really badly while bending over to pick up a box and sneezing simultaneously. I fractured my skull when I was turning somersaults in a small room and ran headfirst into the wall. I have a scar on the top of my forehead from a bed-jumping accident when I was young. We were in one of those hotel rooms with two double beds, I was jumping back and forth between them, and I missed, hitting my head on the bed frame. It required stitches.

Picture this: You're my dad. Even at the age of four (not my dad. Me.), you know that your young son is destined to be roguishly good looking and devastatingly charming. You suspect that one day he will be both a professional athlete and an astronaut. You have left your son and wife in the hotel room to go get food for supper. When you come back, both people are gone, and there is a significant amount of blood on the floor. Luckily, my mother acted quickly and got the hotel manager to drive us to the emergency room. Also, she was kind enough to leave a note so that my dad didn't think we had been kidnapped by Libyan terrorists, eager to get their hands on the pinnacle of human evolution (not my mom. Me.) This is the kind of hell I put my parents through.



This picture? Taken after I attempted to take a running leap over a flaming grill, and promptly landed on the grill, setting my pants on fire and knocking the flaming contents of the grill into the yard. I'll be honest. I had been drinking for that one. I seriously doubt any sober person would decide to take a running leap over a flaming grill. Also, notice the CDP shirt. Go say hi. I'll wait right here until you come back. While I didn't suffer any burns on this one (quite luckily, I might add) I did pull a muscle in my back and bruise my dignity a bit. Just so everyone realizes how lucky it was that I avoided any burns, here is a picture of the contents of the grill on the ground:



I landed slightly to the left of that.

In general, my message? Don't try this at home, kids. I'm a trained professional, doing these things so that you don't have to. Sound off in the comments section and share any random or amusing injuries you've gotten.

JT out.

I've been out of practice for so long that I can't seem to form a coherent post. It's not that I have no material. Quite the opposite, in fact. Hell, I've been gone for almost two months. Well, not gone, just noticeably less present?

Anyway, the new system is humming along. The main problem is that I only just realized that my external hard drive also got zapped when my motherboard in the old system did. What does this mean for me? Well, for starters, all of my music files were on the external. Not just imported CDs and less-than-legal downloads, but all of the vinyl albums that I had digitized and painstakingly removed the needle hiss and pops from. I cringe to think of how many hours I lost there.

Also, it held all of the movies I had ripped off of my DVD collection (and maybe a few that I just plain ripped off) so that I could fall asleep at night watching my favorites. This includes every single episode of The Office and Scrubs. On top of that, all of the installation files for software I downloaded.

The worst? Every damn one of my World of Warcraft patches and upgrades. It is going to take me the better part of two days worth of downloading to even think about getting any game time in.

Oh well, the important thing is: I'm back. Now, where the hell are y'all?

JT out.

All right kids, I'm back. For real this time. I have a brand new system and it's time to rock and/or roll. First, some general housekeeping issues:

1. Kyle, my roommate, has been awesome about letting me use his computer. He didn't mind me using it to post until he found out that my creative method involved watching episodes of Father Knows Best while in the nude and covered in honey.

2. There will be no further installments of The Idiot Speaks. I no longer work there, and I find nothing about it funny. Well, not in the "ha-ha" funny kind of way.

3. I don't have a third item for this list, but in my mind, a numbered list needs to have at least three items.

I don't have a lot of time to post right now, since setting up a new computer for me involves hours of uninstalling all of the bundled crap that a new system comes with, such as trial versions of every program known to man, and reconfiguring the default settings so they don't piss me off. Side note: Vista blows. Hard. I'm tempted to wipe the hard drive and install XP on this machine.

As of now, I'm installing various updates and programs and sitting through 9431 restarts. Fortunately, our good friend Burt came over tonight and Kyle, Burt and I are watching the Democratic National Convention and have made it into a drinking game. Anytime anyone says the words "change," "experience," or "future," we have to take a drink. If anyone says "scrotum," we have to chug six beers in a row. I really thought Nancy Pelosi was going to say it at one point. Also, speaking of Nancy Pelosi, her opening speech sucked almost as bad as Vista does.

Anyway, I'm back to stay, and I've missed you all terribly. More soon.

JT out.

...really, really sorry about the lack of updates. The lack of a functioning computer and assorted life/work issues has me too distracted to post right now. I promise to come back, just not sure when. Thanks to everyone who has kept the faith and keeps stopping by.

JT out.