Off the Wall

My new section is now called Outside the Hash, and it is going to deal with football. Website coming soon but follow us on Twitter or Like us on Facebook.

Do Names Matter?

It was the third week of my freshman year. My friends and I were sitting in my dorm room having some adult beverages.  My friend Ang invited her best friend from high school over, who also lived on campus.

I never met Ang’s friend before, but I like what I saw. I tried to impress her by making some jokes.

I don’t think it worked though because she left after an hour of being there.

Right after she shut the door I told my friends how great I thought Brianna was. I kept talking about Brianna. None of my friends knew whom I was talking about because her name wasn’t Brianna. 

My friend Kacee, who just met the girl not named Brianna for the first time too, said, “Jake her name is Donna. DUMBASS.”

Little did she know her name wasn’t Donna. It was Dana.

Three years later Dana finally agreed to go on a date with me.  A year and an half later she finally agreed to marry me.

So do names matter? YES THEY DO. She still hasn’t let me forget that I’m a dumbass.

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Why I Don’t Have a Girlfriend Anymore.

I hate having a girlfriend.  Why? Because I hate dating.  I just want to be done with it and be happily married.  I though I met someone who felt the same way about me.  We dated for two years, so I bought her a ring.  I wanted the proposal to be amazing and unforgettable.  Unfortunately, it is unforgettable for all the wrong reasons.  This is the story of me losing my girlfriend. 

When I was fifteen I thought of a great way to purpose.  I would have to be down in Florida or some typical place. I would take her for a walk on the beach during a sunset.  I would hide the ring in a seashell, which would be in my pocket.  As the sunset was burning through the sky, I would get down to one knee acting like I was picking up a seashell, but show her my shell with the ring in it.

Due to insignificant funds, I couldn’t afford to go down to Florida.  So I thought taking her to the bay by campus would be the next best thing.  I was wrong.

I have been living in Green Bay for four years now and I have never walked down to the bay.  Looking back, I wish I would have though.

It was about 7 o’clock and we were driving back from dinner.  It was an overcast sky, but I still wanted to propose on some sort of beach during some sort of sunset.

I asked her if she wanted to go down to the bay. She had a confused look on her face but nodded her head yes.  Five minutes later we arrived at the bay.

The bay has two parking lots. One is paved and very beautiful.  It has the greenest crab grass you could image. A couple of picnic tables, and a willow tree that branches drape over the water. The other lot has a gravelly, unpaved road and looks like it could be use to shoot a scene of a horror movie.  So naturally I wanted to do it at the part of the bay I felt like we were not going to get murdered.

So we pulled up to the nice parking lot, and it is packed. I didn’t want to propose to her with people watching because I would feel very awkward, especially if they started clapping.  So I decided to improvise and asked her if she wanted to go for a walk on the bay.

I’m not sure if you ever walked on the bay? DON’T! The beach part of the bay is nothing but small shells that pierce through your shoes.  And the smell is horrendous.  The best way to describe it is if you would smell a sumo wrestler’s used undergarments, then multiple by 50.

So we are walking on the bay towards the unpaved parking lot, trying not to vomit from the smell. I was hoping that the up close view of the bay would out weigh the smell of the bay.  I was wrong again.

There was no view of the bay because giant cattail plants blocked our view.  The only things we could see were dead fish and birds that were washed up on the beach.

We weren’t the only creatures who saw the dead animals through.  There were other animals feasting on the dead animals, which looked angry when they saw us.  They must of thought we were going to steal one of their dead pigeons to have for dessert.   

I wish I could of told my girlfriend not to look down, but I didn’t, and she stepped in the dead carcass of an unknown animal.

Finally, we finished walking through the valley of death to the other unpaved parking lot.  There was no one there beside a creepy older man sitting in his old rusted Ford Bronco looking at the bay.  He was parked five feet away from the only rock to sit on.  The only thing that separated the rock and the creepy man in the truck was a bush.

By bush, I mean a twig that had one dying leaf on it. 

I didn’t care though; I was ready to ask her.

In all those years of planning, I never thought of a way ask the question. 

I started to talk about anything and everything trying to find a way cleaver to ease my way into asking her. The best way to describe the way I was talking was violent verbal diarrhea.

Finally I was just blurted out the question.

My heart was pounding; sweat was dripping from head.

She stared at the ring, obliviously to her surrounding, which now included the creepy man laughing uncontrollably to himself in his truck for no apparent reason.

She then said something I will never forget—yes.

And that is the reason why I don’t have a girlfriend anymore—I have a fiancé.

There are a lot of things that went wrong that day.  Looking back, I wouldn’t change one thing, especially when she said yes. 

Pete The Prankster

Let's face it.  Most people think that the NFL’s preseason is a joke.   The only people who take it seriously are the coaches.  All the coaches besides Seattle Seahawks’ Head Coach Pete Carroll. 

Carroll likes to use the preseason to pull pranks on his players and then post the video on YouTube for the world’s enjoyment. 

The first prank happened last preseason, when he or someone on his staff put a rubber snake in a drink cooler and video typed people opening it. 

This year he pulled a prank on one of his players by having officers arrested him in the middle of a team meeting.

This is not the first time Carroll has used police officers in a prank on his team.  When he was the head coach at USC, he had a player fake arrested for assaulting a freshman.

Being the head coach in Hollywood has made him a great actor.  In this one he has a fake list of players who illegal downloaded music from the Internet.

The ironic thing about this video is that the USC football program still cannot go postseason bowling because of Pete Carroll and his coaching staff.

Sanctions or no sanctions, Carroll’s players know that they can lean on him to keep the locker room loose and fun.

Is Jermichael Finley Overrated?

Have you ever gone to a movie that everyone was saying was the best movie ever, but when you saw it, you thought it was only ok.  It had some good parts. Maybe one or two good one-liners, but it didn’t live up to the hype.  That ok movie is Jermichael Finley’s career so far.

Finley is entering into his fourth season. This year isn’t a make or break for him, but he has yet to play all 16 games in the regular season. If he doesn’t play in every single game, he will get the dreaded injured prone tag to his name.

There is no doubt he is highly talented, but what good is all his talent when he is injured on the sideline?

People are making him seem like the greatest tight end in the league, but I don’t even think he’s the best tight end from the 2008 draft. 

John Carlson of the Seattle Seahawks has had a far better career than Finley.  Both Carlson and Finley average 32 yards per game.  Both of them average more than ten yards per catch and around five yards after the catch.  Carlson has nearly five hundred more receiving yards in his career than Finley and almost twice as many touchdowns.

This is due to the fact that Carlson is more durable than Finley. Since they were drafted in 2008, Carlson has only missed five games compared to Finley’s sixteen games.

Finley has had flashes of greatness in between his trips to the inactive list.  Until he can go a whole season without getting hurt, I don’t see how people can get lost in his hype.  The local media and die-hard Packers fans make it sound like he is a first ballot hall-of-famer, when he hasn’t even made a pro bowl yet. 

I root for Finley, but some people need to take off their green and gold blinders and look at the facts.   In his one decent year, back in 2009, he only ranked in the top ten among tight ends in one category—receiving yards—and he was ranked tenth. That year he was twelfth among tight ends in receptions and fourteenth in touchdowns. 

ESPN's Top 10 Tight End Rankings

Before people make Finley King of the Tight Ends, shouldn’t he at least finish among the league leaders in receiving yards, receptions, and touchdowns? Or maybe just top five in one of those categories?

I know people say that he creates mismatches, but how valuable are those mismatches? The Packers went 3-2 in games that Finely played in last season. In games he didn’t play, they went 11-4, including the playoffs and a Super Bowl victory.

Is Jermichael Finley overrated? Not Yet.  Is he over hyped? Definitely.

Zack and Kelly Are Back

Before The Office’s Jim and Pam were America’s sweethearts, there were Saved by the Bell’s Zack and Kelly. Many of us grew up watching the reruns on T.B.S. early in the morning before school.  Some people were lucky enough to watch the new episodes on Saturday morning on N.B.C.  Believe it or not, Saved by the Bell only lasted four seasons, not counting the College Years.  In the four seasons of the show, it produced more than 80 shows, each episode more beloved than the previous.

After the show ended Zack (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) and Kelly (Tiffani-Amber Thiessen) seemed to vanish off the map.

It took them more than 15 years, but both of them reappeared on two of the best new shows on television.

Tiffani-Amber Thiessen resurfaced in late 2009 in the U.S.A. Network show, White Collar.  She plays the wife of F.B.I. agent Peter Burke, who is in charge of the F.B.I.’s white-collar crime division in New York.  Burke’s criminal consultant is conman Neal Caffrey, who is on a work release program after being caught twice by Burke—once for being a mastermind thief and the second after he escaped from prison to see his ex-girlfriend.  He now needs to wear an ankle monitor so that the F.B.I. can monitor his every move. 

The show focuses on the dynamic relationship of Caffrey and Agent Burke.  Burke tries to show Caffrey that a man can either be a man or a con.  He cannot be both.

The show is similar to end of the movie “Catch Me If You Can,” where Leonardo DiCaprio character helps Tom Hanks catch other criminals.

The show has stronger main characters, where Thiessen plays Elizabeth Burke.   Who proves that behind every great man is a great woman.

The show is just finishing up the third season. 

Seventeen years after Saved by the Bell ended, Mark-Paul Gosselaar landed a starring role in T.N.T.’s new show Franklin and Bash. The show just finished its first season, and it’s a story about a pair of lawyers who use unconventional ways to win their cases.

Franklin, who is played by Breckin Meyer, and Bash, who is played by Gosselaar, are best friends who live a bachelor lifestyle that would make Hugh Hefner envious.  

Both shows mix in dry humor with the drama.  It is a shame that both shows are not on a major network so they could gain the popularly they both deserve.