All-over-the-place Friday

Before too many of you scan ahead and see the word football and immediately click away from here and go back to your beloved eastern-European porn site (Seriously, why are eastern Europeans so hot? Is it because they don't have enough to eat?) (I joke, people, and tastelessly... don't go and get an eating disorder on my account.) (End parentheticals.), I promise there is more to come after this brief sports diversion.

So the final college football game of the season was played last night and purportedly left the winner, Florida, as the national champion. This is incorrect. As pointed out by King Kaufman of Salon.com, the true national champ is not Florida, or the snubbed Texas Longhorns, or even undefeated Utah. The team that truly deserves to hoist that crystal trophy is the squad from Tulane University. Kaufman explains:

The Green Wave went 2-10 this year, but they made those wins count. One of them was over Louisiana-Monroe, so I think you see my point.

No? OK: Tulane beat Louisiana-Monroe, who beat Troy, who beat Middle Tennessee, who beat Maryland, who beat Wake Forest, who beat Mississippi.

Aha! Mississippi!

What do you mean, so what? Ole Miss beat Florida. But that's not all. The Rebels also beat Texas Tech, who beat Texas, who beat Oklahoma. There's a direct line of losing from both teams in the BCS Championship Game to Tulane.

That's what makes Tulane, last seen losing 45-6 to Memphis, your 2008 national champion.

It makes as much sense as anything else.

And here's my bit for the football-averse among you:

Is anyone else like me in that, despite the firing of every neuron in your brain telling you to change the channel to something, anything less nauseatingly crass, commercial and base, you cannot, even if your life depended on it, turn away from those TV advertisements selling compilation CD sets of old, shitty music? You know, the ones that seem to go on for hours in an endless loop?

In particular, that one with Bowser from Sha Na Na (who, incidentally, eats at the Carnegie Deli, occasionally with Arthur Fonzarelli) for the "Oldies but Goodies" collection is absolutely captivating. In this one, it's not that the music is so bad (it's just old), but Bowser's incessant hamming to the camera that keeps me enthralled. He's dressed in black jeans, high tops, and a black tee with the sleeves rolled up like he's about to jump into his '48 Chevy convertible and challenge James Dean to a drag race. Except that Bowser is old and paunchy and James Dean has been dead for fifty years. It's sad and hilarious.

The other one that nearly diverted my attention from the football game entirely last night is called "Romancing the '70s", pitched by an aged, bewigged Tony Orlando. The effect of this one is sort of like eating those snot- and puke-flavored jelly beans, where your curiosity about how much worse it can get keeps you involved beyond all reason. I used to be regularly enraptured by the commercial for the soft rock compilation featuring those two guys from Air Supply, but "Romancing" collects the music that is even softer, slower and more gonad-shriveling. Truly, despite the title, I doubt anyone ever got laid while listening to Anne Murray or Neil Sedaka. Watching the clips of these feathery-haired singers of the seventies singing their cheesy Top Forty hits one after another is like watching a never-ending string of car crashes, if the car crashes were all introduced faux-enthusiastically by Tony Orlando, who clearly needs the money to keep himself in high-end hair pieces.

If I'm lucky, however, I know that one day, thirty years from now, I will be flipping through the channels only to find, at the extreme end of the dial, a fat, wrinkly and balding Lance Bass selling us "The Insufferable Millennial Dance Hits Collection." It won't be on CDs, of course (music files being primarily transferred through thought waves on the Steve Jobs-created MindWeb), and it'll cost $8,000 (inflation's a bitch.) Lance will need the money, though, since the Republicans are back in power and have finally, after decades of trying, instituted the Gay Tax.