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Our beaver pelt trader of the week award goes to the Kentucky football team. For winning their first game against a top 10 opponent since 1977. Congrats to the Wildcats. On to All That and a Bag of Mail:
Robert Vaughn writes:
Hey Clay, love the column, etc. I just have a quick response to the whole "Who is Carolina?" debate. I see it like this, and I think it's remarkably simple. UNC is/are the Carolina Tar Heels. USC is/are the Carolina Gamecocks. Solved. Steve Spurrier has a different idea though. When I saw him at the Atlanta Gamecock Club in April, he said that he wanted to start a new cheer at Gamecock football games based off the "We are Penn State" cheer. The result was "We are Carolina." Spurrier got the crowd to practice it and he explained that since we were now familiar with it, we could shout it on the field when we beat the UNC football team on Oct 13. Keep basketball, UNC. We're the Carolina of football, and if you want it back, beat us on Oct. 13 ... and I think that's pretty simple, too.
I got lots of South Carolina responses to the Carolina debate. I chose this e-mail because if you go to Google and type in "North Carolina football," South Carolina is the top result. Okay, not really, but doesn't seeing the phrase North Carolina football just seem odd? So the Carolina football moniker (not claimed by the NFL) will be up for grabs come Oct. 13. I think that's fair.
Aaron Kim writes:
Dear Clay, I read an online article that you wrote on the Wiffle Ball a while back and I was wondering if I could send you some samples along with a press release of a new baseball toy that I recently designed called the Blitzball. The Blitzball is unique because it is 100 flat-sided and has no holes whatsoever. You can see some great video footage on my company website. Please let me know if I can send some materials to you, thanks!
I received the Blitzball in the mail but I haven't gotten to test it yet. I did, and this is the complete truth, have my wife throw the Blitzball as hard as she could at me in an effort to approximate whether it hurts more to be pegged by it rather than a Wiffle Ball. But even this was sort of hard to determine because her fastball is not actually that fast. I offered to hit her with the Blitzball but she wasn't that excited about this.
It's times like these when I miss living with other guys. Because, no matter what, for about seven years from college through law school there were plenty of guys who wouldn't think twice about standing against a wall and getting pegged to assess relative pain.
When I went back to Washington, D.C., last spring, we ended up in my friend's basement at 3 a.m. wearing a T-shirt wrapped around our eyes taking turns pegging the blind guy with bouncy balls to see who would be the first to tap out. Women don't do this stuff. But I guarantee you every guy reading this right now wants to know what it feels like to get pegged by the Blitzball.
John writes:
Clay, is it just me or has Comcast taken away your NFL Network too?
John, it's not just you. My NFL Network is gone. Don't get me started on Comcast. Okay, well, you did. My Internet hasn't been working well for the past three months so I called Comcast customer service (as oxymorons go, the jumbo shrimp of the 21st century).
