Kermit THE Bigot

As some of you may know, Sports Quiz was at one time a radio show that was held weekly on the family friendly 99.5 FM WUSR radio station. In this time of peace and prosperity, a cultural favorite was brought on the show as a guest. A Mr. Kermit THE Frog. We, the SQR staff, were delighted to have such a lovable and celebrated icon join us on our program. We danced jigs, played lutes and even engaged in the spanking of the wench around the town square. Our ecstasy was soon halted once Mr. Frog was given the opportunity to speak to the world. He came into our studio seemingly joyful, but something seemed...well a bit off. His presence brought with it the subtle scent of Wild Turkey. He habitually kept on sniffing and scratching his nose, even bleeding slightly from his left nostril at one point. What appeared to be track marks plagued his arms. This...ladies and germs...was Kermit THE Mess. He immediately lit a fat joint upon entering the studio space, and greeted us with the words, "Hey fuckers. I'm the fuckin' frog. It's not easy bein green and all that shit. Thanks for havin' my shitty ass." In our child-like wonder we could not accept such a horrid truth this said moment, so we went with it, making excuses to ourselves as to how and why this lovable character could fall. Directing him to a seat in front of the mixing console, we kept ginger and wide-eyed in the presence of our guest. Upon introducing him after our commerical break, he immediately vomited on himself...and began to laugh about it, not even bothering to clean himself. This is where everything turned ugly. Real ugly. Kermit decided he was going to rant on and on about poison of any race that isn't white. Even presented us with some sound clips from an episode on the Muppet Show where he degraded Rowlf the dog and Ben Vereen for being African American. He even played archival audio of himself reporting from the 1992 LA Riots, in which he made yet another horrendously charged racial slur.

After a few more devastating suprises, and much throwing of fecal material on Kermits part, we ended our time with the Frog and escorted him out of the studio. With heavy hearts, we eventually accepted the sad truth about our dear friend Kermit. The pressures of show biz surely got to him. And from then on, we spoke not a whisper of his name again, although I personally spent many nights sobbing hysterically in the shower. As for how Tyler and Canada handled the rape of their childhood memory, I do not know.

Years past with no word or sign of life from Kermit THE Terrible. The painful memories of that night began to fade, and life moved on...

Until a few nights ago...

I was watching everyone's favorite show about the american household, "Family Guy." Suddenly in a cut sequence, which the show is know for, Kermit is polishing a rifle in the swamp. Along comes a black man in a small boat, asking which way town is. Kermit points the rifle at him and says, "back the way you came."

Seems Kermit is still overcome by his amphibious bigotry. Unfortunatly now, he's being paid to display it on cable television.

Pisses me off, because someone probably heard him on our show, and decided to make a buck off of it. I'm going to go cry in my shower now.

Canada Jackson's Doctoral Challenge Vol. 1

Recently I have been engaged in a pitched battle with what one might consider fate, or destiny, or the cruel and childlike whims of whatever deity might eventually send me to Hell--I have been applying to doctoral programs in the mysterious realm of "philosophy."

Little did I know, however, that for some reason philosophy programs are absurdly competitive. For instance, I saw information online showing that it is statistically more difficult to get accepted into the Harvard philosophy program than it is to get into Harvard law or Harvard medical. We could wonder for days as to why this is the case, but the answer we would eventually come to is that 84% of all philosophers are dicks who don't want to share their toys.

And so with great darkness and woe weighing heavy in my heart, I began the application process. As anyone who has been in my shoes knows, the application process is designed to be awful: time and money consuming on a grand scale, most likely to keep out the shabby mobs of poor people and negroes that are constantly banging on the gates of higher learning. The application process is the boiling oil that is doused upon the unwashed masses from the parapets, and as a person belonging to the general category that includes "poor people and negroes" I was very concerned.

It started with the GRE, which stands for Mostly Useless Test Which Measures Nothing Save Your Ability To Purchase GRE Preparatory Materials and Classes. Somehow, through reverse mishap, I managed to do well. This caused what the Greeks call "hubris."

"I am the paragon of book-learnin'," I thought. "I will have my doctorate before tomorrow noon."

But, lo, does calamity accompany me always. Not long after I began the application process did my trusty computer--bearing my only digital copy of my complete undergraduate thesis--decide to pack up its belongings, don its traveling hat, and limp off to the great central processor in the sky. Furthermore, upon discussions with a few of my old professors, all of the schools I had started applications for weren't really what I should be looking for--in other words, not only would I not get in, but I probably wouldn't find anyone there to help me with the things I'm interested in. So there I was: late in the game, with no helpful technology and starting over again.

Also, this was getting close to Christmas, and I work in retail. Add "working constantly" to that list.

I settled on five schools:
Duquesne in Pittsburgh, Marquette in Milwaukee, Boston College in...Boston, Loyola University in Chicago, and Notre Dame. Only one of which I had previously sent my GRE scores to. So here we have 80 more dollars to send the scores to these places, plus application fees, plus the original fee for taking the GRE, plus the cost of mailing the material so it gets where it has to go on time, and sorry, kids, Christmas is canceled this year.

Today, Loyola let me down easy with a polite little letter telling me I might as well have spent my money on Fabergé eggs and cocaine, and my time on training my dog to burp on command. But all is well, for Chicago is cold and full of gangsters, and I would most likely end up sleeping in a bus station carrying more knives than usual in order to fend off homeless sodomites. All wearing fedoras!

(I admit that most of my knowledge of Chicago has come from various confused stereotypes and possibly dreams I've had.)

And so, children, we regretfully cross Loyola off the list of places I may fail out of in the future. My best guess is that either 1) they read my re-typed thesis, which is the profane ravings of a madman bent on telling Plato to fuck himself in fifty pages, or 2) they somehow traced me back to this blog, and summarily submitted my name to the Hague to be investigated for crimes against humanity.

Universe...you've done it again.

Wow. So apparently the universe is slowly but surely starting to hate me. Awesome! Well, universe...go fuck yourself.

We here at the Sports Quiz Media Empire have created a freeze ray that will cease the malicious doings of said universe. The downside is that it will also kill us all.

Price you pay I guess...sorry kids.

A Christmas Message from your Uncle Jackson

Merry Christmas, you little scamps! May you and yours have a lovely time worshiping, ignoring, or denying the existence of the deity or deities of your choice. Personally, my family and I spend the holidays remembering that thousands of years ago a child was born who would grow up to be tortured to death to save us all from some kind of especially nasty metaphysical pigwidget. We do this by giving each other scarves and eating cookies, and occasionally going to a movie none of us really want to see. This is called Catholicism, and it is weird. No one really gets it the first go-round, but fortunately we have an eternity of either damnation or stagnation to think about it after the fact. I subscribe to a service called agnosticism, which means I rightly don't give a shit about the large-bearded-man-in-the-sky and would rather watch disturbing and violent pornography anyway.

As most of you are aware, our friend and colleague Tyler hiked up his grumpy pants recently and clattered out a special Christmas tirade railing against nearly everyone. I would like to take this moment here to let our readers know that Sports Quiz Radio covers all kinds of political ideas--and while Tyler more often represents the Center-With-Mild-Right-Flavorings, I want to assure you that I am here to represent the far left with positions such as mandatory man-marriages and beating unwanted babies to death with socks full of nickel rolls. And, while we're outing our habits, I voted for Barack Obama, may peace be upon him. And I also must agree with Tyler that my fellow supporters of Obama tended to be more annoying. But that's mostly because I hate hipsters in general and that Venn diagram had a hell of a lot of overlap. Just like "McCain Supporters" and "People Who Cannot Read."

But this post is not about politics. It is about Christmas--which is a completely a-political time of year. This year my scattered immediate family collected in Scranton and drove down to my grandmother's house in New Jersey. Somehow my father had procured an audio copy of the only mystery ever written by Abraham Lincoln, and we listened to it on the way there. It was disturbingly awful. It was based on a case in which Lincoln was the defense attorney, and it shows that Lincoln was actually quite bad at his job. His clients managed to get off mostly on sheer luck, and he was never able to offer an explanation of whatever happened--even for the fictionalized story. Most mysteries have some kind of ending, perhaps in which the strangeness of the whole story (the "mystery") gets unraveled and explained (the "solution"). But Lincoln ended his story with what was basically "Well that was all quite a strange occurrence, wasn't it? Too bad we never figured out what the hell happened there. Might have made a good story." Perhaps one day he took off his lawyer-ing hat and put down his mystery writer-ing pen and said to his beastly wife, "Mary, I can't write worth a shit and I'm the worst lawyer in the world, so I might as well give up now and become the President of the United States and free an entire race of people from centuries of institutionalized inhumanity." It is unsettling to see an amazing specimen of human capacity fail spectacularly at something. It was like watching Thomas Jefferson inadvertently fly a hot air balloon directly into the waiting jaws of a crocodile, all the while screaming incoherently and helplessly. Or like watching To Kill a Mockingbird with all the reverent children and black people edited out. Or it's like neither of those things, because they are silly.

Remember, kids, on this most holiest of days, that even a middle-aged Jew with good prospects can fuck it all up.

Merry Christmas, everyone!