PolkPanther

I really don’t know what to feel right now.

First, I am deeply, deeply thankful for everyone’s well wishes. It means a lot to me, it really does. I don’t even know you people face-to-face and you care enough to Tweet and DM and e-mail your support, and that fucking blows my mind.

It’s complicated. I am an extremely private person by nature, except in my Internet alterego which gives me release; in “real life” I have told only a handful of those closest to me of my diagnosis. If it were up to me, it would stop there, but my soon-to-be very visible scar precludes any chance of me keeping it to myself. I’m not the type of guy who can sell being in a knife fight. The prospect of people being up in my business - or worse, feeling sorry for me - scares me far more than any other aspect.

Not really the way I wanted to start out my Tuesday.

So I got the cancer. I’m 28. They’re going to cut my thyroid out in two weeks. No, I don’t live in northeastern Japan.

The bad news? Well, yeah, I lose my thyroid, which I’m rather attached to. I’ll have a visible scar on my neck. I’ll have to take pills for the rest of my life. I have to live with the uncertainty, however slim, that it may have spread.

But there is good news. It is one of the most survivable forms of cancer, with a 99% 5-year survival rate. Chances are, I’ll continue to live my life to its inevitable conclusion (dying at age 39 in an autoerotic maple syrup-drowning accident). After treatment, life should go on for me. 

And the best news: I have to undergo radioiodine therapy, which makes me fucking radioactive for days. People can’t come near me and the literature specifically mentioned I will have RADIOACTIVE URINE. Awesome. If you don’t think I’ll be walking around the house Hulk-smashing things, you are so wrong.

There is nothing - NOTHING - better on this planet than dropping a deuce and getting away clean. When that first piece of TP comes back white, I feel like I just killed a hobo and got off on a technicality. There is a sense of massive relief, and the cocky confidence boost is immeasurable. Hooray fiber!

I don’t like the word “swaddle” and I demand that Pampers stop naming a product that.

16 And Pregnant is one of the saddest things on television. There’s exploitative reality TV, and then there’s this show. And you’d think that MTV would make it much of a stigma to have a child when you’re in high school and have a dipshit baby daddy, but they don’t. They just don’t. It’s wrapped up in fun graphics and parents who financially support them and fathers who feign interest until the cameras turn off. They don’t break dreams, they string them along.

On tonight’s episode, the pregnant girl’s mother asked her what they had saved up. $130, she said confidently.

Middle America, ladies and gentlemen.

Deadspin ran this nice snippet this morning on Tresselmania, which thankfully has died down. To summarize, Deadspin quoted my Tumblr posting about how the Photoshop I made for Deadspin spread around the Internet. And now I’m posting about the Deadspin piece quoting my Tumblr piece about the Deadspin piece.

Blogosphere! (i’m done now)

Just saw the trailer for the hilariously bad-looking Real Steel, which appears to be a movie based on Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots. I commented on Twitter that it looks like a jacked-up cross of Battlebots and The Wizard, then immediately became wistful for the latter movie.

The Wizard, if you don’t recall, was a Nintendo propaganda film from 1989 starring Fred Savage (win), Jenny Lewis (mega-win), and some autistic kid. Christian Slater was in it too, for some reason. Anyway, the gist of the movie was that it was an excuse to show off scenes from Super Mario Bros. 3, which at that time was going to be the biggest game in the history of the world.

While momentarily contemplating what a re-make of the film would be like, it occurred to me that a reboot simply wouldn’t be possible in the Internet age. The whole point anybody wanted to see it was that you got to see SMB3 at the end, and to a lesser extent, the Power Glove. MARIO IS A RACOON HOLY FUCK.

But you make something like that today? First off, there’s no single game that could elicit people wanting to go see a movie. A new Halo or Call of Duty would make fanboys wet themselves, but what could come out that would make 10 year-olds beg their parents to take them to the movies? 

Secondly, those bloggy fuckfaces would ruin it for everybody and just post the spoilers anyway. Load up Kotaku, and it’d be like “OMG SMB3 EXCLUSIVE SCENES! THERE ARE ANIMATED COINS!” And then they’d pat themselves on the back for ruining the surprise for everybody.

I feel the same way about The Sixth Sense.

You’re probably saying to yourself, ewwwwww zucchini in a chocolate cake? That’s gross, and they look like giant green weiners. Well you’re wrong, fucko. It’s moist and delicious, and if anybody asks what the green bits are, just tell them it’s pot.

SHIT YOU NEED

- 1/4 c butter (or margarine if you’re stupid)
- 1/4 c shortening
- 1/2 c oil
- 1-1/2 c sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 1/2 c sour milk (that’s milk with 1 tsp apple cider vinegar, dontcha)
- 2-1/2 c flour
- 4 tbsp cocoa powder
- 2 tsp baking soda
- 2 c finely shredded zucchini (peel it beforehand. And when I say finely, I’m talking like the size of rice, maybe a bit longer in length)
- Semisweet chocolate chips

HOW TO MAKE IT 

Cream your butter, shortening, sugar, and egg. Add in your oil, vanilla, milk, then the dry ingredients and finally the zucchini. Mix yo shit.

Bake it at 325 degrees, 40-50 minutes until it’s done. No, I won’t tell you how you’ll know. It’s a fucking cake, you figure it out.

Immediately after you pull it out of the oven, sprinkle some chocolate chips on top (I like the mini ones). 

http://ftrsports.com/2011/06/jim-tressels-new-job/

This is so much fun.

To quote:

“Look this isn’t funny to me, but my mother in Ohio sent it to me in an email and me being the good sports blogger that I am, know that OSU haters will enjoy this. I, personally, would like to punch in the face whoever made this awful picture, and then have them dragged through the Oval face down naked in the dead of winter and then watch them bleed out while the OSU Marching Band plays Hang on Sloopy and Terrelle Pryor washes my car.”

I’ve also found it on Craigslist and Topix, giving me a trifecta of white trash cross-platform meme penetration. My mother, who does not know who Jim Tressel is, would be proud.

Yesterday I found my old Game Boy in a box. I popped out one good game of Tetris (188 lines, suck it) before the batteries died. It takes AAA, of which I have none. Time to buy batteries.

Now, let me preface this by saying that I live in a rural, backwater shitburg. We do not have Target. We have Walmart, K-Mart, or drug stores. Walmart around here is basically if you took every person from those People of Walmart blogs, combined them with Amish people, and threw in a liberal dash of calf tattoos and tank tops. Times infinity.

Clearly I’m going to K-Mart.

If you haven’t been there in awhile (and judging from their sales figures, you haven’t), K-Mart is now in a neck-and-neck race with downtown Detroit and the Boston Bruins as the most depressing entity on earth. You walk in there and it’s a shambles of random sale displays, weird groceries, and shitty housewares. If somebody threw an air freshener into Big Lots, I would wager it’d be like my K-Mart.

But I digress. I needed some motherfuckin’ AAA batteries so I could play some Pokémon Red.

Walked in, spied the batteries, score. No prob. Go to get in line, and out of fucking NOWHERE six different groups of wild hicks appeared. There are two open check-out lines. I end up at the back of one line, holding a solitary four-pack of AAA batteries. There are three people working - one at each register, and another who goes over to electronics and announces she’s open, which draws out zombie-like hordes of fat people buying $5 DVDs. Not an option.

So I have picked a line, the shorter of the two. BIG MISTAKE. In my haste, I failed to notice (because I was screened out by the 300-pound guy in front of me) that I was behind a fatfuckfamily purchasing what was either a BBQ afternoon for 30 guests, or their after-dinner snack. Meanwhile, the other line zips along and I’m kicking myself, but I’m COMMITTED to this line, goldangit, and I’m going to see it out. Now, I’ve been in this line for a solid 5 minutes, and I’m irritated because this place is fucking abandoned for the other 23 1/2 hours of the day.

Finally, I get to check out. I have my money already out, and I hand the batteries to the cashier. She takes them, scans them, AND PUTS IT IN A TINY PLASTIC BAG. SHE PUT A 5”x5” PACK OF BATTERIES INTO A PLASTIC BAG FOR MY CARRYING CONVENIENCE. WHY WOMAN? WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF THIS? DO YOU HATE BABY DOLPHINS?

Meanwhile, despite the fact that I was paying cash, the credit card swipe terminal was asking me if I would “recommend this KMart to my friends and family,” which she seemed very concerned that I answer. I didn’t even know what to do about either thing. So I handed her my money and as she turned away to get my change, I grabbed the bag, took out the batteries, put the bag on top of the terminal, took my change, and left.

Like a boss.

Fuck it, I’m just going to put on a tight-fitting plaid shirt and skinny jeans and have me a bloggy blog Tumblr thing.

There will be liberal profanity.

It’s been two days since Steelers/former Michigan linebacker LaMarr Woodley (who incidentally went 1-3 against Tressel in his Wolverine career) tweeted my gloriously not-that-great “Jim Tressel as a Walmart greeter” Photoshop. It spread like wildfire, being retweeted hundreds of times and, from what I hear, e-mailed and Facebooked quite a bit among people who live in painfully boring states. Woodley’s Facebook had over 1,500 likes and 475 comments on it.

It has been fascinating to see the spread of this thing among the blogs, from Weed Against Speed’s Sportstress of Blogitude (an honor) to the deplorable MGoBlog, which consisted of a humorous number of Wolverine fans wondering if Woodley was spending his locked-out offseason creating Photoshops. They also created a rip in the space-time continuum when one of their readers commented on my creation,while having the same avatar as me. I don’t even know what to make about that.

Clearly I’m most proud of a West Virginia fan using the occasion to remind us that Jim Tressel is a huge homosexual, on account of the vest. 

And finally, somebody wrote a fucking ARTICLE out of this for TheSpoof.com. It is not worth your time to read. 

If I regret anything, it is that I brought amusement and joy to non-OSU Big Ten fans, who collectively are the most insufferable group of douchenozzles ever assembled. I hate you all.

UPDATE: People who own bass boats think it is worthy of many rolling laughing emoticons!