All That and a Bag of Mail: Crunk Tennessee Edition

Our beaver pelt trader of the week is a bit of surprise this go-around, none other than a city. Yep, I bring you Crunk, Tennessee.

Courtesy of reader L'ance M. comes this email:

C'lay,

Big fan. First time caller...

I saw this and you were the first person I thought of: were you aware that there is a town in our beloved Volunteer state called...wait for it...

Crunk, Tennessee

I've lived in Tennessee all my life and was never aware of this awesomeness. My wife doesn't know it (yet) but we're moving.

I thought you'd appreciate this. Can't wait for the new book.

I know where I want to be buried now. At least if I die while I'm still interested in getting Crunk. This is an outstanding find, the Atlantis of the ClayNation. What are the odds that Ed Orgeron buys a home here solely so he can pull out his driver's license and say, "I live in Crunk," when talking to recruits.

I think it's gotta be high, very high.

My next book is going to be entitled, "Straight out of Crunk-ville."

Rich M. writes:

My parents were in La Jolla, California last week and I guess the hotel they were staying in had a courtesy shuttle of some sort. In any event, they had a young driver who asked them where they were from, they said Florida, etc. The kid said he loved SEC football, asked if they liked any particular team. My dad told him they were UT fans and he said his favorite sports writer, some clamslammer named Clay Travis, was a big Tennessee fan too.

If true, and clamslammer was dropped to someone's parents, that's extraordinary. Otherwise, no big surprise here. I'm huge with shuttle drivers in La Jolla, California.

True story, I went to a wedding reception recently in La Jolla for the Indian wedding. Attire is business casual at the bride's parents house. But, of course, I didn't bring more than one button down shirt. Which I was going to wear for the wedding because my friend Krishna doesn't tell me the dinner is business casual. The next day I had to go to a store to buy a tie. Which I also forgot, but that was entirely on me. I also didn't take enough shirts so I had to buy a t-shirt to have something to wear back. I opted for a t-shirt with the California state flag on it.

Anyway, I'm wearing jeans, a long-sleeve Michigan shirt, and flip flops to the bride's home. Everyone else is in shirt and tie or Indian dress attire. So I'm just this goofy, loser white guy who shows up to a $5 million dollar house dressed shabbily for the occasion. What's worse than this?

I walk in and immediately two Indian people are shaking their heads at me. I assume it's for my attire and then they walk over and say, "We went to Michigan State, you guys suck." So the only thing worse than being underdressed for a La Jolla wedding reception is being undressed for a La Jolla wedding reception in apparel for your wife's college, and getting ripped for it.

Mark V. writes:

Clay-

Okay, so, if you haven't watched Friday Night Lights yet this week, consider this your spoiler alert. Feel free to mark this email as unread and come back to it after viewing the episode.

I know everything I have playing out below is all based on a fictional television character deciding to go to a very real university, but, bear with me here.

So, as you know by now, Lyla Garrity is going to Vandy. What does it say about me (and the frequency of which I read your website) that the first thing I thought of when she decided to go to Vandy is that she would certainly join Kappa Alpha Theta? Naturally, my mind wandered four years down the line to when she would pose for the (now defunct) traditional senior picture of flashing the camera wearing nothing but "Theta Loves the 'Dores" stickers over her nips. Do you think the picture of a sticker clad Lyla Garrity standing front and center outside of the Theta house could cripple the entire internets if it was leaked to the web?

I think there's a distinct possibility it would.

Remember when the rumor was out there about the Erin Andrews sex tape? It was a made-up story, sadly, but I thought at the time that the internets would die then. I started picturing Katie Couric coming on CBS News and saying, "The Internet crashed today when every American male--and every woman who has ever said, "She's not really that hot," in regards to Andrews-- simultaneously attempted to view an Erin Andrews porn tape.

No joke, as soon as we heard that Lyla Garrity was coming to Vandy, I turned to my wife and asked her whether this meant that the Friday Night Lights crew might come to Nashville and shoot some scenes. Or will Lyla, Riggins, and the crew leaving for college all be written off the show.

Finally, what happened to Landry? Is he a year younger than everyone else?

Tony S. writes:

Clay-

I have a bit of a problem with something I truly love, which is spring football. The regular season is months away and I really do hate baseball. Spring football is a great way to bridge the gap between bowl games and preseason rankings. Believe me when I say that I fully understand that these are just practices, but I can't help it. (This would be a great place for the Allen Iverson "practice" hyperlink, but I don't know how to do that.) All the big schools try to market their spring games as a giant event, and I totally get caught up in it. My problem is, I don't know what is crossing the line and what isn't when it comes to glorified scrimmages. Can I travel hundreds of miles to attend? Are elaborate tailgates too absurd? Face paint? Banners? Can I go nuts like a real game or should I play it cool and treat it like it should be.

Well, I've ridiculed spring games before, but I'm heading up to Knoxville tomorrow to snag a couple of final paragraphs for the new book. So I'll have a firsthand view of the experience.

Back in 1986 or 1988, I can't remember which, I was a kid and was part of the largest crowd to ever see a spring game to that point. Something like 86,000 people showed up.

Plus, the older I get the more I understand why spring football is so important. Time between games passes much slower when you're out of college or grad school. Remember how fast the spring and summer went when you were finishing a semester and then headed somewhere for the summer? It was magic how quick fall returned.

So I can understand why you feel the need to latch on so strongly to the spring game when it comes, you've got to make it last for six months. Basically the spring game is like sex for married men.

Plus, you know a lot more about your team thanks to the internet. You can pay attention to the position battles on a much more nuanced scale. Twenty years ago you hardly knew anything that couldn't show up in a newspaper. Now lots of fans can recite the three-deep rotations for their entire team.

Think back to ten years ago, how many fans actually knew the running back coaches name? No one, right? And if they did know the running backs coaches name, you knew that was the weird 46 year old fan who had posters of the players up in his bedroom, and somehow knew the names of the cheerleaders too. I mean, it was really weird. Now it's no big deal to have that much information. What's more, it's not that big of a deal to know the assistant coaches at other schools. That would have been truly unheard of a decade ago.

Brian K. writes:

Liked the podcast.

Thought I would ponder you a question.

This has been debated among my SEC friends, but whose semen do you think would be worth more on the black market, Tim Tebow or Archie Manning? And by the black market I mean of course offering first dibs to rivals.com message board contributors. Now obviously Ole Miss, Tennessee and Florida fans are all biased and Tebow's professional expoits have yet to be determined. And ofcourse the lineage of Tebow's children has yet TBD (if he ever decides to de-flower himself) but as it will be documented everywhere this season, he is probably the most successful college football player of all time...even if you combine all three Manning boys. But having 2 out of 3 sons won a Super Bowl and being the #1 pick the NFL draft and arguable sign (Eli will soon, Petyton already) the richest NFL contracts of our generation would be awfully hard to pass up.

Even to bring it along further, is there anyone else out there in college football history whose reproductive fluids would go for more than a Manning or Tebow. I can't think of one...Maybe Hershel or Bo, maybe.

My black-market SEC semen rankings. For purposes of this analysis, I'm considering the South as one cohesive whole and eliminating regional eccentricities (For instance, Pat Dye would rank highly on the Plains, nowhere else.)

1. Tim Tebow-- Do you think Tim Tebow's dad ever looks at his son and thinks, "How did I create this?" I would.

2. Herschel Walker--(This is operating under the controversial assumption that racist SEC fans would overlook their son's mixed-race in favor of a greater likelihood of SEC scholarship. So effectively, I'm operating under a utopian color-blind society for purposes of this analysis. Also, as readers of Dixieland Delight already know, it's secretly every Georgia fan's dream that Herschel Walker sleep with their wife.)

3. Bo Jackson--What if the state of Alabama started advertising every single black kid in an orphanage as the son of Bo Jackson? All of a sudden every Baptist in Alabama would have five adopted black sons.

4. Peyton Manning--Sunscreen for forehead sales would surge 4,000% in Tennessee.

5. Bear Bryant-- You know what they call sushi in Alabama? Bear Bryant semen. True story.

6. David Pollack--An entire generation of Southern kids would high step across the playgrounds, save themselves before marriage, and cover their eyes and say, "Golly, stop it," when Athens, where boobs are fun, girls attempted to seduce them.

7. Eli Manning--Eli would rank higher if he hadn't already spread his seed so widely in Oxford that the value has plummeted.

8. Brodie Croyle--This value is inflated because he keeps spraining his wrist while trying to create samples.

Labels: claynation all that and a bag of mail the sec black market for sperm

Posted by Clay Travis at 3:23 PM 0 comments
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