We finally have legal mixed martial arts in South Carolina! Well, I guess we’ve had it for a little bit now. I think it was legalized around four months ago. It’s just that now we get to the actual MMA shows, like The Fight Party at the Bi-Lo Center last Friday night.
It was a good time and a good crowd. They’ll be back in May and hopefully the crowd comes back as well. They ran off 12 fights in about two and a half hours and the vast majority of those fights finished. I think all of them may have finished. Forgive my memory for being fuzzy.
There’s more on the way and that’s fantastic. Quaker Steak & Lube in Greenville (conveniently located a quarter-mile from the station!) is hosting some live MMA on the 20th. They’re going to erect a large tent in the huge lot between Quaker Steak and Harley of Greenville. I believe the tent is going to be enough for the cage, over 1,000 people, and beer vendors. Also, Maffew and myself will be there, and right after the live fights outside, we get to see UFC 110 from Sydney, Australia.

I have to say my favorite part of legalized, sanctioned MMA is the way it can win people over. It’s easy to forget how many people don’t realize there are rules and regulations. One of the guys in sales for the Planet was sitting beside Matt and myself last Friday, and he thought it was going to be some sort of barbaric gladiator contest with no rules and two guys trying to kill each other at any cost. He came away with a heightened understanding along with a whole new understanding of the sport.

The show on Monday was exciting because our old friend Gordon Senerius came by to do Ask a Lawyer. Gordon is a cool guy. Not only a lawyer, but a laid-back individual who loves him some Jimmy Buffett. The questions were good for the most part. The P1’s and their legal problems made me realize how often we wind up in court fighting over children and on behalf of children. That’s a sad reality of our time. We have to chalk it up to that, minimize the trauma, and leave it at that. It’s best to move on.

The most interesting point Gordon made was in regards to tort reform. It’s one of those things we hear thrown around a lot in politics, but does anyone actually know what it entails? I still hardly understand it. I really wish Senerius was here with me right now to explain it to me as I type about it.
In basic terms, medical tort reform would lead to decreased payouts for victims of medical malpractice. Once again, a terrible idea from our government. For one, it would be hard to find anyone who believes decreased medical malpractice insurance premiums would lead to more affordable health care for anyone, anywhere. It seems like putting a band-aid on Paige’s broken leg. And if we did that, and the doctor did just put a band-aid on Paige’s broken leg, she would be screwed out of a good settlement because we regulated how much doctors owe patients when they do things like amputate the wrong limb or leave a piece of medical equipment behind during surgery. If someone thinks any of this is a good idea, please explain it to me in terms I can understand. Because it seems like an awful one.
It seems to me that the government might not care very much about healthcare reform because they only present horribly flawed ideas concerning it. Meanwhile, everybody arguing about it makes it more of a hot commodity and that seems bad as well. We’re screwed, is what I’m saying. If nothing else, we can all agree on that.

February is evidently Marijuana Awareness Month as well as Black History Month. I would imagine it is some other month as well. Every month is designated to recognize or be aware of something. This one just happens to be marijuana. Most people seem to be aware of it so I guess it works.
We talked a bit this morning about legal pot in America. Wondering if and when it may happen, as well as asking people why they would or would not vote to legalize or decriminalize. Unfortunately, our phones went out and we weren’t able to talk to any of those people. Stuff happens. Forrest Gump said that.
I had a polite and thoughtful email from a lady who said she didn’t want to smell pot smoke everywhere she went, or to deal with giggling potheads when she goes to a restaurant or a movie.
For starters, I’m sure it’d be just as illegal to smoke a joint in a movie theater as it is to smoke a cigarette in a movie theater. Same goes for restaurants.
Secondly, if you’re in a movie theater, you’re surrounded by stoned people. And if people are giggling during the movie, you may have gone to see a comedy.
Also, if you’re in a restaurant, someone there is stoned. Quite possibly the person cooking your food. Also the person serving your food. Definitely some other customers. You may not necessarily be in the majority in this case. I’ve been to all-night diners. I know.

Whoa there is almost too much happening in the world right now. Or at least in the part of the world I occupy. I don’t mean geographically. It’s more of a mindset thing. When I say there is a lot going on in the world, that means there is a lot of football or baseball or fighting or basketball or boxing on TV. That’s generally what excites me. Those things, zombie movies and whacked out conspiracy theories! Especially whacked out conspiracy theories about zombies who play football.

Football can go first. Clemson won impressively in a largely defensive battle with Kentucky. South Carolina lost horribly in a largely horrible game against a far more inspired, driven, competent UCONN team who wanted to win one for a fallen teammate. Good for the Huskies. They’re a better story. ‘Team rallies around fallen teammate’ is a better headline than ‘Dumb QB leads Gamecocks to victory two years after keying professor’s car; pees off balcony during celebration’ and pretty much ever lame duck sportswriter in America was dying to write just one more article where they could exploit Jasper Howard one more time. Because another story about Jasper Howard’s death is easier than trying.

Boise State is the real story, in my mind. They looked great Vs TCU. The pre-game talk was entirely about the TCU defense, which proved to be a phenomenal unit all season long. Every Clemson fan will tell you quickly that TCU’s defense is legit and among the best few in the nation. Every Boise State fan will agree. But the Broncos’ D wasn’t supposed to do what they did to the Horned Frogs. It was an impressive win over a very good team. The game showed everyone, in primetime, that Boise State and TCU deserved to be BCS teams this year. Utah did it last year. Boise State has done it in the past. It’s a beautiful thing.
Even better, that Boise State team from last night is largely the same Boise State team we’ll be seeing on that ugly blue field in the fall. There wasn’t one senior offensive starter for Boise State in last night’s Fiesta Bowl. If that isn’t enough, 10 of 11 defensive starters will be back in the fall. That’s 21 of 22 starters returning to a really, really good football team.
The Fiesta Bowl win and the number of players returning to an already dominant, undefeated team might mean…I can hardly bring myself to think about it. But it probably means a top-5 (more like top-3) pre-season ranking for Boise State football. And another undefeated season (with Virginia Tech on the schedule!) could mean a Boise State date for the BCS Championship this time next year. That’s the biggest sports story to watch. Actual sports story, that is. Sports story that takes place on the field rather than in an electrical closet or Tiger Woods’ Nike golf slacks or Gilbert Arenas’ gun safe.

UFC 108 went down over the weekend. The card was cursed, supposedly. The main event was never going to be the main event till a month ago. Rashad Evans was going to fight Rampage back at UFC 107, but Rampage had a falling out over going to play Mr. T in an A-Team movie. Antonio Rodrigo Noguiera was on the card, but he got hurt and will fight in February. Jim Miller beat Duane Ludwig. Miller was originally scheduled to face Tyson Griffin, who was replaced by Sean Sherk, who was then replaced by Duane Ludwig before the fight could finally happen.
Despite all the setbacks, UFC 108 was a really good show. Better than UFC 107 and almost as good as the most recent Strikeforce card on Showtime. Rashad Evans looked a little rusty, but he owned the first two rounds before maybe relaxing too much in trying to wait out the decision in round 3. Still, you can’t question trying to wait out a decision against a fighter as dangerous as Thiago Silva. Rashad proceeded to show why trying to wait out the final round might not be a good idea against a fighter as dangerous as Thiago Silva. There is a downside. The downside, of course, is getting knocked out. It almost happened. We almost wound up with Rampage Vs Thiago Silva. Which would be a fantastic fight, but come on. We want Rampage Vs Rashad.
Thankfully, we get our wish. Rashad had enough guts and a strong enough chin to take a few stiff shots and not go down. So we get Rampage Vs Rashad in 2010, then we probably get that winner fighting the Shogun/Machida rematch winner. It’s a good time to be a light heavyweight in UFC, providing you don’t mind getting beat up.
For the record, I can’t help thinking Gegard Mousasi would steamroll all these dudes if he wasn’t hanging out in Strikeforce with no one to fight. It’s a shame. Mousasi might be the best 205lb. fighter in the world right now and it’s only fair that we get to see him fight in the best 205lb. divison. Instead, the Strikeforce 205lb. division is a shallow, poor comparison where Mousasi can easily run wild the same way BJ Penn and Georges St. Pierre have cleaned out the UFC 155lb. and 170lb. classes. That’ll be fun to watch too.

Most of my very favorite things in all the world could be described in one word: Stupid

I love stupid. It will put a smile on my face like few other things could ever do. It happens all around us, all the time. It isn’t the same as dumb. Dumb is another of my favorite things, but it’s more innocent. Dumb is when you clumsily injure yourself somewhat. Stupid is when you drive a car through a house and kill someone. Dumb is when you talk before thinking. Stupid is when you think first and say the same thing.

I give you Exhibit A

The Ultimate Warrior

Here is a great American hero of my childhood. THE ULTIMATE WARRIOR! When he wasn’t gorilla-press slamming people in the ring (and possibly when he was gorilla-press slamming people in the ring) he was evidently suffering from weird delusions that caused him to stop with the wrestling and start transforming into the character from wrestling. So he became the star of his own comic book and changed his name from Jim to Warrior.
It doesn’t stop there, though. The name change is just the beginning when enough stupid is involved. Sometimes it creates a perfect storm of ignorance and we all get to enjoy the results.
Here’s The Ultimate Warrior talking about…something. He was invited by some Young Republicans at the University of Connecticut to speak and share his views on…something.

Fantastic. Exhibit B:

War Machine

This is War Machine. He used to be Jon Koppenhaver until he was on The Ultimate Fighter and did pretty well. Then he changed his name to War Machine. Fast forward to the present and he’s transitioned from MMA to porn. He still plans to fight, but he’s also going to be in porn. He made that announcement on Halloween, when he shot his very first adult film. A month after that, he’s partying it up for a porn actress’ birthday and he gets in a fight. By gets in a fight, I mean he hit 12 people and KO’d 3 of them. Then he ran away and detailed his run from the law on Twitter. 
He’s still on the run, I guess. There’s an arrest warrant for my favorite mixed martial artist/porn star. And in 2009, when everything is public knowledge and everybody has a camera, we all get enjoy War Machine’s ultra violent porn star life of punching people at birthday parties.
Follow War Machine on Twitter for late-breaking news. Maybe they’ll be nice and let him tweet one last time before they cuff him, just to let us know he got caught.

I started thinking about the pre season college football polls today. You have TCU at #4 and Boise St. At #6, but I have to think Boise St. could be in that spot if not for a pre-season poll that put TCU arbitrarily ahead of them. That all only really matters is FSU manages to beat Florida and Auburn manages to beat Alabama. It’d be even better if my (drawn out of a hat) Texas Longhorns drop a game and you wind up with some combination of TCU/Cincinnati/Pittsburgh/Boise St. playing in the championship game. Basically I always want what’s worst for the BCS and this year gives us a very good chance at that if some of these shaky-looking top 3 teams will only stumble before the bowls are set.
As it stands, though, its bad for the BCS when you’re looking at 5 undefeated teams and a once-beaten SEC runner-up who only lost to the unbeaten #1 ranked SEC champion.

Otherwise, I’m going to have to get Modern Warfare 2 just because people will not stop telling me how incredibly great it is. And I’m personally really excited for Left 4 Dead 2. You know me and zombies. It’s a match made in purgatory. That’s an undead, not-really-alive-but-obviously-not-dead joke. And a strong one.

I did the photo shoot for the Neato Mosquito poster this past Saturday. It was fun and it went really well. We had a green screen in a suburban garage and that was the setting for what hopefully helps sell the movie to people. There’s a ton of pressure on my goofy face and a biscuit. We’ll see. Either way, it’s exciting to see what’s going to happen with this little piece of film.

I’m one of the few people left who like boxing and Saturday night convinced me that Floyd Mayweather Vs Manny Pacquiao is not that big a fight. It will be if it happens. Two million people will buy it on pay per view for 60 bucks a pop, people will pay thousands for good ringside seats, and it’ll be a huge event on a Saturday night. But the fight isn’t something you want to see if you like Mayweather and you saw what Pac Man did to Miguel Cotto on Saturday night.
Miguel Cotto is a perfectly game fighter with good speed and good power, but he couldn’t keep up, defend, counter, or hurt Manny Pacquiao.
Manny truly has everything you’d need to be the best fighter in the world. Anyone who beats him will have to slickly defend against his tenacity and relentless power punching, but also counter effectively enough to win on points. So you have to survive 12 rounds against his power, and find enough offense to win at least 7 of those rounds on points. Against a fast, slick fighter who can hardly be countered by anything. This is not going to be easy, not for Floyd Mayweather, and not even for someone like Sugar Ray Lewis or Marvin Hagler. It’s a fight built to suit Sugary Ray Robinson, but he’s dead and can’t very well take the fight in 2009.

I have an admission to make while I’m at it. I really, really hope I wind up with some Cirque du Soleil tickets for this weekend at the Bi-Lo Center. I’ve heard this Allegria show is very good and involves lots of high acts. And by high acts, I mean acts taking place many feet above the floor of the arena. Not stoned acts, at least as far as I know.

There is news that Brock Lesnar might never fight again due to some mysterious intestinal disorder that has him hospitalized at the Mayo Clinic and facing major surgery. I’m sure details will come out, though it all seems a little mysterious at the moment. What sucks is, that Brock Lesnar/Shane Carwin fight may never happen and UFC might be stuck putting up another interim championship in the heavyweight division. That’s too bad. The best possible outcome in the short term is a four-man tournament with Shane Carwin, Cain Velasquez, Junior dos Santos, and Minotauro Nogueira. Then they’re gonna need a whole lot more heavyweights so I’d say it’s the right time to have all these monsters in the house on The Ultimate Fighter.
All in all, UFC is having a tough run of it right now. Even if Lesnar were healthy right now, Carwin would be out of the November 21st fight for sure and probably the January 2nd makeup date due to his MCL injury. Minotauro is out at the moment with yet another staph infection (don’t hang out in dirty Brazilian bath houses) and there’s still no one around to offer a legit challenge for the welterweight or middleweight titles. But they still have a slew of talented 205-pound fighters and some 155-pound fighters. But not much in between, or beyond 205.

Strikeforce, on the other hand, has managed to pick up the top heavyweight, a couple of top-tier light heavyweights like Gegard Mousasi, and even a couple of middlweights who’d be nice to see in the cage with Anderson Silva. And good for Strikeforce. I’m happy to have another game in town, as long as Dana White has better luck over the next few months and gets back to the quality shows he was putting on for the first 9 months of 2009.

We’ll start our 28-hour Big Ass Broadcast on Thursday. That’s an adventure in itself. I’m thinking we’re going to surprise a bunch of people this year and raise a huge total for Toys for Tots. And it’s all about the numbers where we’re concerned. That’s our pride as a P1 Family, but more importantly, it’s toys for kids to play with and not many things are more important to childhood than having toys to distract you from all the grown-up worries the rest of us are consumed by. I wish I could play Connect Four to get away sometimes. Or Hungry Hungry Hippos. I sort of want to roll around on the rug playing with some G.I. Joe’s right now. We could finally see who wins when G.I. Joe meets the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and exactly which side the Ghostbusters are really on.
See how much fun that is? That’s precisely why everyone who ever hears the Toys For Tots broadcast should be moved to stop by, say hello, and drop off at least one of those delightful new, unwrapped toys. Nothing you do all year will make you feel better.

Finally, a guy who never made NASCAR because he struggles with tight turns has managed to sling his weight around and get out of jail, though probably not for free.
John Ludwig, of crashing-his-Maserati-through-a-house-and-killing-the-homeowner-while-he-watched-TV-on-his-couch fame was sentenced today to a five-year suspended sentence (the most worthless thing possible) along with 3 years of probation (the second-most worthless thing possible) and 1000 hours of community service (hopefully cleaning septic tanks) while successfully avoiding any jail time beyond the 21 days he served when a reasonably sane judge rescinded bail and considered Ludwig a flight risk.
WYFF News 4 spoke to Thirteeth Circuit Public Defender John Mauldin:
“I believe that poor people have the right to be surprised, to complain and to question the handling of this case. There is an appearance that the type of justice that people get is different for rich and powerful people than it is for poor and disenfranchised people. It is critical that people have confidence in our system and that justice be equal.”

WYFF.com story on John Ludwig case and verdict.

So the Yankees won their 27th World Series last night. They took it in six because the Phillies only have one good pitcher. That will do you in every time.

And while the Yankees are the best team in MLB this year, we’ll just have to wait and see how good they are next year when Johnny Damon is replaced by…Matt Holiday. Crap. Nevermind. Next year will be #28 I reckon.

Just for a few minutes. I go through phases now that I’m in my 20s. During my teen years, I played a looooooot of video games. Fighting games, racing games, shooting games, running-around-jumping games. Whatever games I could get my hands on. The more blood, the better.

Now that I’m prematurely becoming an old man as I approach 25, my habits are different. I forget I have an X-Box for months on end. When I do play video games, I look for things I can play without becoming bored inside a half hour. If it can’t give me that, I’m better served watching old episodes of The Office on my DVR.

Sometimes, though, a game comes along that grabs my attention. Sometimes there are two. It’s usually sports games and Grand Theft Auto games at this point. And since I’m writing about this, you can assume there is another one!

First, the obvious. NBA Live ‘10 is fantastic. I have no complaints about it. I believe I enjoy it more than real basketball at this point. The features are crazy. Then again, I’m an old man and a bumpkin to the point that I’m still blown away when the real-time ESPN ticker scrolls across the screen on my video game. It gets confusing. I know I’m playing a fictional game between the Warriors and my beloved Clippers, but I’m seeing real-time news updates on Eli Manning’s foot injury and Darren McFadden’s knee injury and Matthew Stafford’s knee injury. The EA Sports people will eventually blur the line between reality and fiction. Just give them time. They already catch me wondering where the game ends and life begins.
Honestly, I’m just waiting to see Braylon Edwards show up in a Cavs game trying to fight LeBron’s friends. When that happens in my video game, it’s getting the Ouija board treatment. That’s right, I will burn it and curse it as the devil’s toy. It’ll happen.

Now, about this mysterious game that isn’t a sports game or a Grand Theft Auto game. What else could get me geeking out for a video game?
Batman, of course. I am totally wrapped up in Batman: Arkham Asylum. I’m no video game critic, though I should be because I think most video games suck terribly, but this one is amazingly great. It’s full of all the cool stuff Batman is always doing. There are literally thousands of weirdo thugs to beat up, and it features literally every Batman bad guy in the history of Batman. In some form. Except maybe Catwoman. If she shows up in the vicinity of Poison Ivy or Harley Quinn, the pants are coming off. Just a warning.
So it’s good. It’s fun. Play it. Rent it. Buy it. Whatever. And if you have Gamefly, let me know how that works out. And if there are more than 3-4 games out there that don’t suck a lot, let me know. I’d like to know.

Man it’s like I don’t even know baseball exists right now. So much football, and that’s not the only thing going on. The Ultimate Fighter starts on Wednesday with Rampage Jackson and Sugar Rashad Evans coaching the heavyweights. And there are a lot of good heavyweights to be found this time, beyond Kimbo Slice and some former NFL players.

After two weeks of college ball and one week of NFL ball, I’m pretty sure the NFL didn’t deliver one awesome game in week one. College ball, by pure volume of games, seems ore impressive. But, really, there are tons of bad football games every year and we still love them because even bad football is…football.
Clemson and South Carolina both lost to their big rivals in Georgia, therefore letting down the entire state of South Carolina. Of course, it can be said after this week that neither team has anything to be ashamed of because they both lost tough, close games. That works. I just wish it wasn’t always “Well, we lost, but we have nothing to be ashamed of because we left it all on the field.” You’d figure, just on the law of averages, that one of these teams would win a huge game now and again. No, though. No.

I guess everyone really hates Kanye West now because he interrupted the MTV Video Music Awards acceptance speech of on Taylor Swift. I’m obviously a bad person for not being angry at Kanye, but I struggle to figure out just why Taylor Swift is off-limits. Sure she seems nice, but so do plenty of other people who get crapped on in the media constantly.
Maybe I have it figured out. Go back ten years, to Britney Spears at 17-18 years old. She was singing all those songs about sex. It was like she meant to tease us all and please those of us the songs were about. Taylor Swift, on the other hand, does these sweet little cutesy songs about puppy love in high school. I think that is the whole reason Taylor Swift is considered off-limits. Because she is 19, but comes off as 13 and it’s mean to pick on a 13 year-old girl. Maybe if she were 4 inches taller we could treat her like we treat every single other person alive. That’d be nice.

Alright, it’s almost time for football. It means so many things to me right about now. Football itself, of course. The brilliantly beautiful game on the field is king amongst all the various sports.
To me, however, it means so much more than just that.

It’s a time of year that gets us out of the radio station more often and hanging out with the P1’s at least once a week. If you’ve been a P1 for a while, you know we can be found every Sunday during football season at the Wild Wing Cafe in downtown Greenville where we go and watch games and eat food and hang out with as many P1’s as they can fit upstairs at Wild Wing. Our shows seem better to me when we’re out and about more. It keeps us all in touch. I’m basically salivating over the chance to get out amongst everyone a little bit more. I know Maffew is feeling the same way. Eventually we’ll even show Jew-is Gonzalez the light.

And don’t go thinking it’s all just football. Not at all. There is tons more going on in the fall, like Birthday Bashes and Halloween and Big Ass Draft Nights all over the place. It’s the time of year we get to meet the most people and go the most places and do the most cool stuff. Then you get Thanksgiving and Christmas and it turns out to be the best six months of the year.

I hope everyone got to hear For The Love of Jimmy about 3 weeks ago. P1 Superwoman was victorious. She was lucky enough to win a date with me. I also hope everyone got to hear the update we did yesterday morning on the show.
I’ll say the women who like me are very, very troubled. Almost always very troubled. The ones who haven’t been troubled, I’ve probably run off because I was weird and trying to figure out how they were troubled. I’m using a loose definition for troubled. It can manifest in many, many ways. It has to be a loose definition with my history of regular crazy, various offshoots of crazy, criminals, drug addicts, and even death. Imagine if High Fidelity had been darker and more comedic and John Cusack got stung by a lot of bees and you’d have my personal story. Enough, though.
The only reason I bring it up is to bring up the update and the only reason I bring up the update is so I can get to the married women. Married women love me. Married women love me a lot. That was most of the update. It was married women calling in and going “Oh, I love Nine! If I wasn’t married…”
But you are married, and that sort of thing is a high compliment, but it also sucks to hear because it’s frustratingly…frustrating.
Not only that, the women who really like me are not just married. They are happily married. They’re the ones who never get divorced. The majority of marriages end in divorce, but not these. So I guess it’s good that the happiest and most stable married women find me to be awesome even though the only single ones who like me are universally insane. It’s just less fortunate that they only realize it when they’ve gone and married some awesome dude.

And that brings me to the worst part. Whenever I meet their husbands, they’re always awesome dudes who are successful and charming and nice and cool to be around and…Hell, I’d marry those guys too if I were any of these women.

If nothing else, I can garner some sort of cynical satisfaction if I meet the husband and I feel like I’m better than him, but nooooooo. They’re always cool and I would feel more like a jerk and less vindicated if I tried to hate them.

So basically my life is four hours of winning when I’m blissfully bringing you The Rise Guys Morning Show every day. The other twenty hours of my day, though, is a series of failures that range from mildly to moderately sad and moderately amusing to hilarious.
Here’s an example. As soon as I post this blog, I’m going to walk down the hall to my bathroom so I can put Ben Gay and TigerBalm on my lower back. And when I say lower back I mean the top of my ass. That’s where the Ben Gay goes. That’s where the Tiger Balm goes. Later when I have less going on, I’ll probably put an Icy Hot patch on my ass. Gonna be an eventful day.

Really, really weird. So weird I’m lost on how to sum up the first half of it without feeling my head start to spin. Bank failures, the culmination of all that money Bernard Madoff stole, a $100mil mortgage fraud indictment in NYC just today. There has been turmoil on every continent, especially concerning Iran’s election and the coup in Honduras. North Korea is firing off missiles at nothing in particular. The international scene is so crowded with issues right now, no one is bothering to feed the starving people of Africa. No one is bothering to try and stop the various civil wars and genocidal regimes anywhere.
We have global economic woes, 50+ bank failures in the United States. No one trusts anyone and the smartest investors apparently are the ones who buried their money in mason jars in the back yard. Cousin Eddie from National Lampoon’s Vacation is my nomination for Secretary of the Treasury. The rich aren’t even getting richer.
A couple of the 2012 Republican presidential hopefuls went and got themselves scandalized and Sarah Palin up and quit her gig in Alaska and that seems a little weird to a lot of people.
Michael Jackson was coming back, then he was dead. Still is, as far as I know. If he’s the beginning of a brain-munching zombie apocalypse, I can’t say it will surprise me. Not now.
There are planes falling out of the sky and planes landing in the Hudson River. There are seven huge burmese pythons let loose near a nuclear station by our own government to become giant scary Godzilla snakes – and they’re in Aiken. We can’t run away to North Carolina. They have some kind of alien sewer worm taking over beneath Raleigh and I saw Tremors too many times as a kid.
California is literally giving people IOU’s and you can donate on PayPal to help Los Angeles cover security costs for Michael Jackson’s funeral. It’s so weird in our world right now that Stuart Smalley became a senator and no one even blinked.
When I was younger I thought the dystopian future would be like something from 1984, if you remember reading in high school. Now I think the dystopian future is more like Idiocracy, the 2006 Mike Judge movie. Granted, Idiocracy seems like a lot more fun just because there’s a lot more Batin’ and Big Brother is like the lovechild of Apollo Creed and Hulk Hogan, which would be similar to a cousin of Mr. T. Sort of Dennis Rodman meets Jesse The Body Ventura.
I guess what I’m saying is, Idiocracy tells the future and I’m equal parts terrified and excited.

Somebody saw too many of those hilarious Southwest Airlines commercials. That is the easiest way out of this. Then again, you could have conflicting stories and a lack of details as to the truth of either story. We seem to be stuck with the latter.

First, this whole story is just sort of comedic with the Governor going missing and no one knowing where to find him for five days. Then again, no one bothered wondering where he’d been until that fifth day.
Then they found him. He was hiking the Appalachian Trail, according to his people. Good enough. People were a little upset that he’d been gone without putting Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer in charge. Those people should be a little concerned. In a state of emergency, like a tornado since the radar shows no approaching hurricanes, only the governor could mobilize the state’s National Guard troops to assist people in need. Had there been a tornado ripping through downtown Laurens on Saturday night, the response would’ve been delayed and that probably means another FEMA director out the door in Washington. Thankfully nothing bad happened while he was gone.

Now, though, there are these mysterious new details uncovered apparently by a local TV station (they never mention us by name so I will return the favor) who decided not to simply relay information from press conferences and official statements, but to report on the story and investigate further. Nigel Robertson probably deserves a lot of credit because I saw it there several hours before I saw it elsewhere. Anyway, the meat is that Gov. Sanford took off in a SLED car that had been tracked to the airport in Atlanta. That’s also the last place his cell phone was picked up on Thursday. AND apparently a federal agent saw Sanford boarding a plane at that airport, though no one seems to know just yet where that plane was headed.
The simple answer is he flew up the Appalachian Trail and stared flying from there. The more complicated answer is probably the one we’ll piece together over the next several days. For one, driving from Columbia to Atlanta to fly is a long long way to go to get to an airport. Columbia has one, after all. But not one where a man could just blend in amongst literally thousands of travelers at any time of the day or night. And not one where a state car could hang out in a massively huge parking deck for days on end with no one really paying any attention. The governor at the airport and a state car in the parking lot are far more likely to be noticed in Columbia. So where? Also why? I wanna know. I’m curious. And in my heart I hope the answers piece together some hilarious story that stops writing on The Hangover 2 and makes them start over again with a new inspiration in a high place.