Daytrotter is giving everyone in the Quad Cities a free annual membership

First Order Historians

Daytrotter wants to give everyone in the Quad Cities a FREE annual membership, which gives you access to more than 5,000 unique recording sessions of the best emerging artists out there, taped at Daytrotter studios in the Quad Cities and around the world. Just email daytrotterpromo@gmail.com with “QC” in the subject line, and they’ll hook you up with some great stuff to put in your ears.

Official Website:  http://www.daytrotter.com/

Daytrotter on Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/Daytrotter

View original post

The Deep Six: Terrible Sports Ideas Which Thankfully Haven’t Happened Yet

Dubsism

by J-Dub and Ryan Meehan

Ideas are the very fabric of innovation.  While that line sounds awfully deep for a silly-ass sports blog, it is nonetheless painfully true. Without ideas, as a  race we humans would have nothing to do and would spend even more time masturbating.  Take we writers of this piece for example. If it weren’t for modern progress borne of ideas, Meehan wouldn’t be selling cell phones at the mall; his days would consist of screaming at bus stops. Meanwhile, instead of working for a company that deals with trains, J-Dub would probably just spend all day banging on stuff with a big rock.

The world of sports has been the beneficiary of many of great ideas, some of which we take advantage of on an almost weekly basis. The reinstatement of the two-point conversion in the NFL allows for a wider range of one-possession games, and…

View original post 3,903 more words

These are the Kinds of Thoughts that Materialize when Football is Over‏

First Order Historians

Now that football is over for the year, I have a lot more free time on my hands on days where I’m not working on music.  (Mondays and Tuesdays are pretty rough)  The rest of the week is going to be pretty lonely without having the NFL and their massive sociopolitical negligence to kick around, so there have been a lot of things on my mind that I have been trying to defragment to make some mental space for any of the brain furniture that will show up once the preseason starts.  The empty space hurts, and idle minds can make for overworked keyboards.

View original post 2,012 more words

Conversations Not Meant To Be Public: Jimbo Fisher Keeps Trying To Figure Out Jameis Winston

Dubsism

When a situation threatens to become a train wreck, much like the Florida State drama surrounding Jameis Winston will undoubtedly be, sometimes the facade keeping us from the inside truth starts to show cracks. As we have been prone to do in this series, we find those cracks and expose them to you, the blog-reading public.

It seems that several such cracks have surfaced in Tallahassee. It seems that Criminole Seminole head football warden Jimbo Fisher is really struggling with the exploits of his star signal-caller as is evidenced by a series of conversations which were intercepted* by the investigative division of Dubsism.

*Legal Disclaimer – J-Dub and Meehan have a strange way of defining certain terms. “Intercepted” should be read as “completely fucking fabricated” by these two jamokes during yet another of their nights spent bombing Pine-Sol and Sterno shooters until 6 a.m. Despite that, we here at Dubsism would be…

View original post 1,540 more words

10 Questions with Blothar of GWAR

The Scumdogs of the Universe are sharpening their axes and stoking the fires of their great war engines in preparation for the fall 2014 GWAR Eternal Tour. Global leaders had hoped the bouts of terror accompanying GWAR’s annual rampages would finally come to an end with the passing of the group’s monstrous captain, Oderus Urungus. But tonight politicians, religious leaders, and citizens around the world are asking, “Why?! Why won’t GWAR just leave the Earth in peace?”  The band’s toothsome guitarist, BalSac the Jaws of Death had this to say:  “Something is wrong, unspeakably wrong. It feels as if the very fabric of reality has been ripped from belly to taint, and it all centers around Oderus’ disappearance. One moment, life is fantastic, as we celebrate the near sinking of Japan as a result of our recent journey across the Pacific; and the next, he is just gone. Suddenly the world is a dark, vile place with hordes of trolls biting at my hooves and daring to spit poison in my face. There is a great evil behind this, and I will not rest until I know what has become of my brother!”  There is mounting evidence of a disruption in the core of time, including the sudden appearance of the Berserker Blóthar, a Scumdog warrior who claims to be from the distant past. Apparently, he was sucked through a hole in the space/time continuum and deposited onstage in front of thousands of screaming metal heads. Fortunately for GWAR, he knows the words to all of their songs and has pledged to aid them by assuming the role of lead singer. Inexplicably, he is also a hell of a bass guitarist and he’s our guest today in 10 questions.

Thursday Night Football is Turning into a Litany of Blowouts that Proves it has many more Drawbacks than Advantages

by Ryan MeehanThursday night, I got home from working my second shift job that usually ends at about 9:15 PM every night. I fed the cat, stripped off my clothes, and closed the curtains in my living room before I realized I probably did those last two things in the wrong order. I quickly grabbed my television remote to switch to Thursday Night Football on CBS, a risky decision for anybody who is about to listen to Phil Simms get paid to speak into a microphone.When the commercial for erectile dysfunction medication left my TV, the broadcast resumed and the crawl at the bottom of the screen lifted to show that the Green Bay Packers had just scored their sixth touchdown and were now winning beating the Minnesota Vikings 42 to fucking not a goddamn point. Keep in mind here this is for the most part the same Vikings team that had ran up 41 points on the Atlanta Falcons just seventy some hours before, the same Falcons team that ended up in the NFC Championship Game just two years ago.

Let me briefly go over the advantages of having NFL football every Thursday night every week before you convince your children that a guy in a big red suit who isn’t a pedophile is going to sneak into your house and give them presents:

1) It’s good for the NFL’s revenue stream, and even if you factor in the Sunday NFL Ticket package that DirectTV puts together it still means more fans get to see more of the games.

2) It allows for the space between weeks in the NFL to be whittled down to two days, and nobody is going to lobby for Tuesday Night or Wednesday Night Football.

Those two reasons are pretty much the only advantages to this incredibly ridiculous setup. I can even counter both of those two advantages right now – First off, nobody’s taking out the world’s tiniest violin and gently bowing it over the NFL’s revenue stream. I think I speak for everybody who makes less than $200,000 a year when I say “Fuck them and their financial worries”. And to the second half of the first point – what good does making sure fans can see the game do if the product is that much more diluted? This makes the second advantage irrelevant, as there is now the same amount of space between quality football games as there was before this jackassery began in the first place.

So let’s take a look at the downsides to this whole mess. Now, I understand that the bullshit the NFL gives you as to why this needs to happen weeks one through sixteen instead of just the second half of the season like it used to. Their theory is that if there are sixteen games and two teams play each game, that multiplies out to thirty-two which is of course the number of teams in the league. Therefore, they can schedule all 32 teams to have to play on Thursday Night Football so nobody cries about other teams in their respective divisions having (virtually) the same amount of time between games. But, here’s the thing about that…If fairness is the issue here, let me ask you this:

Do all 32 teams have to go to London or Toronto as well?

Of course they fucking don’t, and if you do the math on that one with two games a year in England you’re only up to six teams. For the record, not that I give a shit about the Jacksonville Jaguars or Oakland Raiders but those franchises are getting the shaft. Additionally, they have to play a Thursday night game just like everybody else? I’m not sure if there’s a way to tackle this problem halfway, but I think at the very least if you’re playing out of the country you should be exempt from this garbage idea. Even for the Canada game – it’s not like the Bills are going to make the playoffs anytime soon anyway.

Since that’s out of the way, let’s take a closer look at the games that we have tuned out so far this year on Thursday Night Shitshow Fest…

Week One: Seahawks 36, Packers 16

This is fair game, because now it’s pretty much assumed that you’ll get to host the first game of the following year if you win the Super Bowl. (Unless you’re playing Peyton Manning, in which case forget it. You should be well aware of how that works by this stage in his career…) But why weren’t the 49ers coming to town and taking on the Seahawks for a rematch of the last thing we saw go down at that stadium? That’s the game we all wanted to see. Were we really that concerned

Week Two: Ravens 26, Steelers 6

I don’t know if you caught this one, but this was an awful football game to watch. Even if you are the world’s biggest Steelers fan and you put Heinz ketchup on your Black Cherry ice cream the second you get done sprinkling salt and pepper on it (gotta obey the Rooney rule here and make sure both sides are represented) there is no conceivable way that you could argue this was entertaining to watch. Your lead stat line for this match-up was Ben Roethlisberger throwing for 217 yards, one interception, and not a single touchdown.

Week Three: Atlanta Falcons 56, Tampa Bay Buccaneers 14

This was where things really started to fall off the rails. Tampa couldn’t make anything happen in this game, and while part of that was due to the fact that they were the Tampa Bay Buccaneers they’re still (sort of) a pro football team and they ate it because the Bucs need a little bit more time than half of a week to get their shit together. To put this in perspective, this was still a six possession game when it was over. Doesn’t anybody else think that’s kind of more than just being lopsided?

Week Four: New York Giants 45, Washington Redskins 14

I’m a die hard Giants fan that lives in Western Illinois and have loved by team since I was six years old. That being said, there was no way they were 31 points better than the Redskins even on a night where Kirk Cousins couldn’t find a red jersey if he was washing Manchester United’s uniforms. Oh, and this game was in Washington as well.

Just so we’re clear on this, I didn’t see exceptional play from the teams who won any of these five games. I saw unbelievably indescribable poor play on the other side of the ball, the play of a team who has had only three days in between games.

I could go on forever about how stupid this is, but it should be common sense. The competition committee has to know that this is a bad idea. I’m in favor of doing the Saturday games in week fifteen and sixteen, but why push it? And don’t give me any shit in the comments section about how this is a traditionalist method of thinking – I’m a huge fan of the two point conversion and I also agree with some of the other changes that the NFL has made in my lifetime. But flying teams to the same place where people with bad teeth are doing web searches on how to join ISIS so they can kill us and playing football on Thursday Night aren’t good ideas.

The Deep Six: Why The NFL’s New Domestic Violence Policy Proves Roger Goodell Only Cares About Public Perception

Dubsism

by J-Dub and Ryan Meehan

Editor’s Note: This article is a collaborative effort between J-Dub and Ryan Meehan from First Order Historians. Ryan also has his own blog, East End Philadelphia, which is featured in the Dubsism BlogRoll and it is well worth the read.

The other day, Kommissar Goodell gave what he considers to be a genuine mea culpa for what he wants you to think was a “mishandling” of the Ray Rice situation.  That  was so much twaddle because what Goodell is really doing is hoping you don’t figure out the NFL’s new policy on domestic violence is really just a chicken-shit reaction to public pressure. There are so many reasons why this should be obvious, but the NFL and the Kommissar did a pretty good of job of camouflaging what this really was.

If you doubt that, consider the following. Where was the big concern…

View original post 3,404 more words

The Deep Six: Reasons Why Roger Goodell Should Have Been Fired A Long Time Ago

Dubsism

by J-Dub and Ryan Meehan

Editor’s Note: This article is a collaborative effort between J-Dub and Ryan Meehan from First Order Historians. Ryan also has his own blog, East End Philadelphia, which is featured in the Dubsism BlogRoll and it is well worth the read.

Now that we are all indigesting a heaping helping of Uncle Ray’s Felonious Rice, we must remember that ever cloud, no matter how dark, has a silver lining.While this whole Ray rice/domestic violence cloud is pretty dark, it has done a wonderful job of removing the veneer of financial success with which Roger Goodell has been hiding his incompetency as NFL Commissioner.

All you had to do was flip on your television this morning to know the Kommissar is in deep on this one. While we aren’t going to “pile on” Goodell here for his ham-fisting of this matter; the calls for his…

View original post 4,088 more words

Point – Counterpoint: Fantasy Football Sucks

Dubsism

by J-Dub and Ryan Meehan

Editor’s Note: This article is a collaborative effort between J-Dub and Ryan Meehan from First Order Historians. Ryan also has his own blog, East End Philadelphia, which is featured in the Dubsism BlogRoll and it is well worth the read.

Like it or not, fantasy football has become a multi-million dollar business. That’s right, what was once simply just a way to get some non-traditional gambling action on the NFL or a more sporting way of announcing to the world you live in your parent’s basement has become a juggernaut of its own. That’s right, now fantasy football is for more than guys who wear “Mr. Spock” ears while they are down-loading nude photos of that chick from “Big Bang Theory,” and not the hot blond one, either…we’re talking about the one who looks like a short, white version of Scottie Pippen.

That…

View original post 3,875 more words

7 Questions with Drew Hastings

First Order Historians

by Ryan Meehan

A veteran standup comedian for two decades, Drew is known as an edgy, intelligent, performer in venues from comedy clubs to theatres.  His commanding presence onstage immediately stamps his trademark comedy that is both hilarious and self-deprecating, including observations of the human condition and the declining state of American society. His status as an unlikely farmer has been enhanced by his vast new following of farm and ag-oriented audiences. His new CD, “Farmageddon,” is his first PG release geared toward family-friendly listeners.  Drew’s one-hour Comedy special “Irked and Miffed,” is still one of the most popular among comedy fans. He is a regular favorite on the nationally syndicated Bob & Tom Radio show which has given him a huge Midwest following. Drew is also one of the elite few to receive a standing ovation on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno”, and we are happy to have…

View original post 1,152 more words