All That and a Bag of Mail: Abraham Lincoln Edition

This week's beaver pelt trader of the week is Abraham F'in Lincoln--in honor of his 200th birthday. Also to placate reader Adam Y. who sent this email:

How can you not give Lincoln the Beaver Pelt Trader of the Week award? It’s been 200 years since, arguably, our greatest President was born. Just because you’re a little biased that he kicked Southern ass from Vicksburg to Charleston, and Atlanta in between, does not mean that you should deny a great member of the bearded fraternity, and a great American a beaver pelt award.

And to add insult to injury, you gave it to a Russian. Are you a tsarist, or an American.

BGID.

I'm a tsarist. Clearly. Even though, technically speaking, Rasputin was BGID of the week. Not our beaver pelt trader of the week. There's a tremendous difference.

Speaking of which, the Gettysburg Address of sports books--which will feature no less than three Abraham Lincoln jokes--is now listed on the United States version of Amazon. Yep, On Rocky Top: A Fan's Front-Row Seat to the End of an Era is up for pre-order. The release date is listed as August 25th here, but I'm told it will actually be August 18th. The cover price is $25.99 but after the Amazon discout goes up it should be in the neighborhood of $17.50. So start planning your women and orphan defrauding schemes now.

Ashley K. writes:

Clay,
First of all, just want to thank you for the daily laughs... secondly I am so annoyed with this ridiculous 'Blaze' character (head coach at Pahokee high school). He sounds like such a piece of shit high school football coach with a ego problem. Anyway, I was reading this article about this whole saga and noticed that the same fine place that brought us Nu'Keese is currently grooming De'Joshua Johnson to be their next big time D1 prospect. Really, De'Joshua, so much classier than Joshua don't you think.

Blaze, Nu'Keese, De'Joshua... this place is unbelievable.

Someone has to know where the name Nu'Keese came from. I don't know how the Knoxville News-Sentinel hasn't deployed a team of reporters that would rival the Watergate investigation to figure this out. Lacking that, Brent Hubbs of Volquest could text him and ask.

As for De'Joshua, I believe that's just a mistranslation of uneducated, poor, Southern dialect. What they meant to name him was The'Joshua. Which, I think you'll all agree, would have made perfect sense.

Sean M. writes:

Clay,

Last year my roommates and I started our own spring time tradition like no other. We come up with some of the most painstakingly awful events to attend, or fetes to 'accomplish' and hand them out based on how your bracket does. Let me first say that the winner gets absolutely nothing. Instead, he just doesn't have to perform any of the punishments. The first runner up gets first choice of what he wants to do, and from there it just progresses based on the final standings. Below is the list of punishments that we have come up with so far for this year.

- Go tanning 5 times in 2 weeks
- Read two romance novels and write a 5 page compare and contrast
- Attend 2 Boston Militia Games:
- Spend a night at the bar drinking nothing but malternatives (Smirnoff Ice, Mike's Hard Lemonade) from a straw
- Sit in an upright position and watch the entire Sound of Music without getting up
- Spend 5 hours here: https://www.plimoth.org

We threw out the idea of wearing a pink Jacoby Ellsbury jersey to a game at Fenway because no one would participate. Also, there are a few things to consider. We chose the Boston Militia over a WNBA game for two reasons: 1) The Connecticut Sun play at the Mohegan Sun casino, and well you could actually have fun at a casino, and 2) although the WNBA is wretched, those girls have been playing basketball since they were kids. The girls on the Militia have been playing football for 1 year. They are significantly worse at football than the WNBA players are at basketball. Also, you may think Plimouth Plantation is fairly decent, but it is much more boring than the website makes it seem (especially since you take a field trip there just about every single year you are in elementary school). And if you thought you would at least enjoy Plymouth Rock, you should know that it's encased off so you can't even get that close to it, and that a guy of average athletic ability could leap over it with a running start. The rock is that amazing. And as far as tanning goes, well let's just say that if you walk around a city as cold as Boston looking tan in April, people are going to know why.

The final stipulation, is that if people ask you why you are going through with the punishments, you can't tell people that you lost a bet. One of us lost a bet last year and had to do the Smirnoff punishment, and his responses of 'I'm drinking these because they are delicious' make it better for everyone.

So I ask you Clay, how would you rank these? And of course, we are always open to suggestions of other punishments to incorporate.

I absolutely love these ideas. I think we should do our own NCAA bracket pool and require those who participate to agree to do things like this if they lose. Then send us pictures and write about the results. This is genius. Pure genius.

Now, in looking at your list, if I had to rank them, I think comparing and contrasting the romance novels is the most crippling/funny. I would leave to read these. Second, I'd say getting a tan. Third, drinking the malternatives from a straw. (Assuming the guy is single, if you're married, big deal.) Fourth, the Boston Militia games. As for Plimoth Rock I'd probably go to on my own, even if it is lame. You're talking to the guy who insisted that his friends accompany him on the entire Freedom Trail or Patriot Walk or whatever it's called where you walk around Boston to see all the historical sites. But I'd claim this was awful so it ended up an option. Then I'd Br'er Rabbit everyone if I lost and make Plimoth my briar patch.

I also just got a postcard in the mail five minutes ago from friends, huge Oregon football fans, who visited the Civil War battlefield of Palo Alto in Texas. Yeah, I'm a dork.

I know I'm sometimes lax when it comes to following through on detail work, but we really do to come up with some great punishments that we can incorporate into a ClayNation bracket challenge. We've got a month to make this happen. Send in your nominations for punishments. We'll get ten of them or so and then require everyone who signs up for our challenge to understand the stakes and agree to them. The punishment for not following through will be a fate worse than death...being publicly branded a Big Ten fan.

Brian D. writes:

Hey Clay,

Since you co-authored "MAN: THE BOOK", I am turning to you for some expert advice.

I am a huge football fan and it pains me greatly that DANCING WITH THE STARS has started their own testicle collection of former NFL great players....and most recently have collected the cojones of Lawrence Taylor.

Next to Al Wilson and Dale Jones, Taylor is my favorite all time linebacker. It saddens me that over the next few months, he will NOT be mentioned as being a great football player, but he will be Samba-ing across the stage somewhere.

It's just not fair dammit! I want to remember him as being the great pass rusher he is. Not strutting across the stage, Cha-Chaing his butt off!

Since you are the expert, tell me if I am wrong in my thinking. Does "Dancing With The Stars" rank right up there with such "manly" tasks as squatting to pee, getting together for a quilting circle and antique shopping?

It's worse than all those things. Much worse. I don't understand why the most fearsome athlete of his era, a man who truly changed the way the game of football is played, is willing to do this. What are the odds he dances on cocaine? High, my friends, very high.

Mark P. writes:

Hey Clay:

Greetings from Toronto, Ontario, Canada home of the International Bowl and part time home of the Buffalo Bills. As a college football fan I picked up your book Dixieland Delight while I was on Christmas Vacation. This has got to be one of the funniest books not only on college football but also with pop culture references (we've all taken the hit for buddies whose wives or girlfriends have found porn that their husbands/bf have looked at).

I don't remember the last time I picked up a book and laughed to the point of tears. The wrestling references: hilarious. Although Jim Duggan was the first man to win the Royal Rumble, in Hamilton, Ontario. As a high school teacher and football coach (CFL rules), your book and web site are making the rounds with the guys I coach with - all with rave reviews. As my buddy Jeff says" each generation has a writer. For some it's Rick Reilly, for us its Clay Travis." Anyways, two things I want to bring up:

1. Bama bangs are in Canada as they are slowly replacing the hockey mullet (see Jaromir Jagr circa 1991 with the Pittsburgh Penguins)

2. As a teacher and a coach and I have been trying to get the word "bi-curious" started amongst not only my males colleagues but also one individual who is severely bi-curious. Some of our players have picked up on it when were talking to them. But here is the real snag, A NEWSPAPER WRITER IN CANADA USED THE WORD! It has made it to the press in Canada. This story was also in the Toronto Star which is a bigger publication then the Waterloo Record. clink on the link and read the paragraph on Katy Perry. Anyways, keep up the good work, love reading your columns, and hey, how about would I be able to get a copy of your book "MAN". My buddies and I are having a hard time finding it, and based on the excerpts we've read its killing us not to find a copy. If not, that's cool. Take care keep up the good work, and here's the link. Cheers,


The bi-curious era hasn't taken off as well as it should have because my editors at CBS deemed it offensive. So I couldn't spend three column years branding everything bi-curious. But the potency of the insult is even more powerful today than it was two years ago when Dixieland was released. That's because the amount of bicurious male activities these days is off the charts.

For instance did anyone watch any episodes of Bromance? We've got an elliptical machine upstairs now (yeah, I know, I suck) and the only thing on my DVR that wasn't watched were recordings of Bromance. (This is the new height of bicurious behavior for me, I was watching Bromance while using an elliptical in my own house. All I needed was to be reading Us Weekly while wearing a Kangol hat and I would have been biggest tool on earth.) After about fifteen minutes, I'd seen more homoerotic activity on the show than takes place in Nashville's Downtown Y. It was cringeworthy. The episodea I watched featured a black guy getting the same tattoo as Brody Jenner/Wayne Chism and Jenner/Chism remonstrating a guy for saying one of his favorite things about girls was their asses. Really?

Anyway, I'm not surprised that bicurious has made it to Canada. It probably arrived in Canada via a steamship that recently departed from Liverpool. You'll recall that Man the Book was a bestseller in England. Evidently I'm huge over there. I'd like to think Canada will be next.

As for Reilly, he makes $3.4 million a year from ESPN. That's about $75k per 800 word column. I'm not sure there is more overpaid writer on earth. So...yeah, I would love to my generation's Reilly.

Finally, on the porn front, married guys get thrown under the bus all the time by their single friends. For things the single friends do that the married guys don't even know about. I've got a great story for this going up next week. Stay tuned.

Jeremy D. writes:

Hey, the fog machine and the fake press conference worked. UT ended up with a top 20 recruiting class because of the fog machine. What's lame to us 20/30 somethings is exciting and cool to high-school boys whose head is swimming with fame and self-aggrandizement. These secondary violations are immaterial. Eric Berry likes Lane Kiffin and his overconfident style, so I'm with him through thick and thin. I have more of a problem with what he said about the Pahokee school than about Urban Meyer. But even then, people got waaaaaaaaaaay too offended about that comment too. I think Kiffin never intended for his 'cheater' comment to be publicized, and got too comfortable in a room full of boosters. The dude is fiery, he just needs to educate himself on the rules a little.

Don't be the guy that bashes him, there are plenty of those people out there.

I'm not the guy who bashes Kiffin, I'm the guy who calls it like I see it. So far Kiffin has shown me he has no clue how important SEC football is or how closely the media follows SEC football. I get the feeling Pete Carroll and crew get away with more even though LA is a much bigger market, and Kiffin is still using USC as his template for what he can and can't do.

Remember when Carroll had LenDale White pretend to commit suicide as a prank? It barely registered on the national scale. Can you imagine if Kiffin tried to pull that? Say he got Eric Berry to pretend to jump off one of the towers at the outdoor practice facility?

Yeah, thought so.

I'm pretty confident that the media covers UT football much more aggressively than the media covered the Oakland Raiders or USC. Why? Because there's a lot more people who care. I'm going to have a full column on this next week.

Mike R. writes:

Hey, love your column,
In a few years will we see Obama with 'Bama Bangs? By the way, my uncle gave me your book for Christmas. You signed it and you wrote, "If you go to an SEC school and can't get laid by a hot chick, you're waisting your life." I'm trying to persuade my mom to let me paint those sacred words on my bedroom wall. Will you sue me if I put those on T-Shirts and sell them?

Hopefully I spelled "wasting" correctly when I signed your book. I can assure you that the Clay Travis Copyright Police generally stay out of people's bedrooms. Especially men's. So you're safe. Just as safe with the t-shirts.

I put some pretty wacky signatures in people's books. I probably misspelled a few words. There's nothing more nerve-wracking than trying to be witty and funny while writing and carrying on a conversation with someone you don't know at a book-signing.

I've got some horror stories.

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