Well, it’s a big day today. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you all, because no doubt you’ve had this date circled on your calendars for the past nine months or so, but, lest you’ve forgotten, today is the first Syracuse football game of the season, and one where Kevin and I renew our bitter rivalry, as my alma mater takes on his – the Akron Zips – on the road in the Zips’ brand new “InfoCision Stadium-Summa Field” in Ohio. We have high hopes for the season here, but then we’ve had high hopes before. Terrible as we’ve been for the past few years, it’s not like we’re looking for a National Championship. A winning season would be just fine – and a trip to some minor bowl game (the inaugural “New Era Pinstripe” bowl would be cool – literally, since it’ll be played on December 30th outdoors at Yankee Stadium) would have us all ecstatic. But things could go into the shitter rapidly with a poor performance today.

Speaking of poor performances, if you’ve been looking forward to the second debate between the candidates for Governor in Arizona, you’re SOL, because the current Guv – Jan “Prune Puss” Brewer – says she won’t do any more. This is apparently because of her piss-poor showing in the first debate, and the fact that she only participated in that so she could claim over $1.7 million in public funds. Of course, Jan “Take the Money and Run” Brewer tells a different tale (actually, she tells lots of tales, like the one about headless bodies strewn about the AZ desert by illegal Mexican terrorists, which would be a good bedtime story, but isn’t exactly grounded in what, for lack of a better term, I’ll call “truth”). There will be no further debates because Jan “Washington Irving” Brewer says

“I don’t believe that things come out in proper context in an adversarial atmosphere….”

Not to worry, though, because I’m sure plenty of Arizonans (hey, spell check says that’s a real word; cool) still love Jan “I won’t fight for you, me or Arizona” Brewer for her righteous stance against evil Mexicans and their plot to take over America by working hard for slave wages (and no benefits). After all, it should be Americans (and white ones at that) working for slave wages and no benefits. And by God Almighty, as soon as we get rid of the goddamn unions (what with it being Labor Day weekend and all), that’s just what’ll happen.

Turns out you can’t go to the National Archives and ask them to hand over George Washington’s hand-written first inaugural address so you can put your oily paws all over it – not even if you’re the almighty Glenn Beck. Go figure. I mean, I thought you could just just get a Library of Congress card and check it out for a couple of weeks. It’s only a 220+ year old priceless piece of American history.

But Beck had a good reason for lying about it. Turns out, the truth would have been too awkward to explain to his legion of devotees, whose IQs are not exactly on the level of Einstein, and whose emotional maturity levels are somewhere in the three to five year old range. I think we can all relate to that. I mean, when a four-year old asks you where babies come from, you don’t get into the whole messy truth. You just tell ’em something simple and comfortable, like daddy put love in mommy’s tummy.