Tim Tebow's goal in college wasn't to win the Heisman Trophy or National Championships. With the Broncos, being MVP or winning a Super Bowl are secondary motivations. Tebow's primary purpose in everything he does is to witness to the world and bring the Word of Jesus to us all. And he has done that in a way few in this world ever have.

Regardless of my differences of opinion with him about religion and my never-ceasing stream of Twitter hatred for the guy whenever the Broncos play, I have to admit, Tim Tebow has made me understand Jesus in a way I don't know if I ever could without him.


From what I understand, Tebow is the Jackie Robinson of Christians in the NFL. After years of passing over strong, talented Christians in the draft, Tebow finally posed figure too large to ignore, so Denver reluctantly chose him and vowed to keep him on the bench his entire (short) career. But Tebow's talent and the overwhelming cries of the usually silent minority of Christians in this nation could not be ignored, leading him to disprove the critics by stepping in and lifting a terrible team to a win in the Super Bowl despite the protestations of the NFL, the networks, ESPN, Sports Illustrated, and the Muslims, Jews, and atheists who run this country.

Unfortunately, that was not true. In fact, Tim Tebow is not a very good quarterback and Christians are rarely quiet about anything. Neither of those things, however, is a reason for me to hate him as personally as I have.

Say what you will about his goody-goody personality and overt religious zealotry, Tim Tebow truly believes what he says. In America, Republican contenders for President, who cheat on their cancer-ridden wives and suggest repealing child labor laws, make a daily point of reminding us how much they love Jesus and his teachings. Soon, Mitt Romney will secure the Republican nomination and will be able to shift the attention to how much more he loves Jesus than President Obama does. And, in turn, President Obama will have to make the case he loves Jesus more because a huge voting block in this country justifies its decisions at the polls with statements like, "Sure, President Bush ruined the economy by sending us to war with a country that posed no legitimate threat to us resulting in the deaths of millions, but he prays every day and I don't think Gore does that."

For so many in the public eye, religion is an accessory to be worn when one wants to appear good, noble, kind-hearted. But just as it's possible to wear a Broncos shirt or baseball cap without being a true Denver fan, only a minority of any religion's followers will show any devotion beyond the surface appearance.

Tim Tebow is the rare exception whose religious beliefs come from a pure belief in the Bible. While I may not agree with what he believes, it's refreshing to be able to accept it at face value. A sect of Tebow fans likes to put forward the idea that the quarterback might actually be the son of God, and I can understand why.

Tim Tebow's wins on the football field defy all reason. While the word "miracle" gets overused, there's a statistical improbability of a guy playing as awfully as Tebow winning even one game that can't be ignored. Tim Tebow is humble. Tim Tebow shares his beliefs and feelings with the world because he wants us to be--and believes we can be--better people. Tim Tebow loves his enemies. Tim Tebow seems like a genuinely good, noble, kind-hearted person.

His followers, however...

Before he'd started rookie training camp in 2010, Tebow's jersey was the highest selling jersey in the league. Despite his own insistence he had a lot to learn before he could be an effective NFL quarterback, Jesus freaks lambasted Denver's coaches and management for not starting Tebow. Every Tebow win fueled the blind devotion of his followers and made them less bearable.

And, worst, his winning ways drew the attention of non-football fans to the NFL, which drove network and league executives to make "All-Tebow, All-the Time" the strategy for the entire season. Watch a Buccaneers-Texans game and discussion among the announcers will turn to Tebow. NFL.com recently posted a gallery of Photoshopped images illustrating what it would look like if Tebow impregnated various celebrities. Every week this year, whether he was playing or not, one of the headlines on ESPN.com, CNNSI.com, or Yahoo's NFL page featured the word "Tebow."

And, thus, Tim Tebow accomplished his ultimate goal. He made me, a devout atheist, understand Jesus and his sacrifice on the cross in a way I never had seen it before. Because while I know Tim Tebow is a good man and I have nothing against him personally, his followers are ruining football for me.

And for that, I want to see him fucking crucified!

It's hard to explain my friendship with Ryno. There's nothing particularly bizarre about it, but trying to explain it is difficult because most people never had and never will have a friend like him. I assume it's the way Harrison Schmitt must feel when talking about being an astronaut with anyone other than Buzz Aldrin or Charles Duke or the only other nine guys who have ever set foot on the moon.

To oversimplify, Ryno is generous beyond reason. I couldn't begin to guess the number of times he's bought me lunch or dinner, but it's a strong three-figured one. He's had to have dropped well over $1000 on sushi alone. And if you offer to pay your share, he usually waves your money back into your wallet dismissively. When he doesn't, you can't help but feel he's only letting you give him cash to boost your self esteem. After all, odds are he's going to use that $20 you slip him to buy your kid something she mentioned she was passingly interested in the last time she was at his house.

He bankrolled my first year of curling, something I'd been wanting to try since I was in high school, including buying our team shirts and getting me my own broom for my birthday.

And lest you think his generosity to merely a product of the well-to-do financial status that comes when a bank executive marries a doctor, he has spent literally days of his life listening to me swing manically from one extreme to another while deciding--or not deciding--how to handle breaking up/separating/working on things with my ex, and calmly listened to me whine about a sex life that's--not to brag--better than any of my other friends' by light years. The last time I got a flat tire on the freeway, he drove across town, let me use his spare tire (because mine is [still] flat), followed me to Sam's Club, and bought me a new tire since I'm not a member. He also thought to bring a bottle of water. Back in October, he set up for my kids to join his trick or treating in Ryne Sandberg and Todd McFarlane's neighborhood.

And I hate to think of where we would be if his wife, our pediatrician, hadn't provided free medical care for my family during all my unemployed and uninsured years, but I'm pretty sure at least one of my kids would be dead, the other would have polio, and I'd be hobbling around on one foot.

He takes us to Vegas at least twice a year--always for the opening two rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament in March and for our fantasy football draft in August and usually once or twice more when he gets free room offers--and when I say "we," our fantasy football league has ten owners. In each of my last five trips to Vegas with Ryno, I have eaten a steak that cost more than I'd spend on a weekly grocery trip. Last year, we're stayed in the Beatles Suite at the Sahara. The year before that, we were in a suite at the Bellagio.Already I fear this has become a bragging list, so I'll avoid further bullet points of Ryno's generosity (for three or four paragraphs). It was not my intention to brag, but rather to stress the biggest problem with having a friend like Ryno.

Buying him a present for Christmas.

As you might guess, if Ryno wants something, he buys it for himself on a whim. Afterall, if you want something, there's a good chance he's bought it for you on a whim. If there's something he wants but hasn't bought for himself, it's not something I can afford. Our friend, Hollywood, and I were discussing this two weeks before Christmas, and as the conversation went on, we got downright surly.

"How dare he shower us with vacations to Tampa and Penn & Teller shows and tickets to the Diamondbacks game in Friday's Front Row on Garden Gnome night and opportunities to be on Fox NFL broadcasts and zamboni rides at Coyotes games where we happen to meet childhood idols and tickets to every Buccaneers game in Phoenix in the past 15 years?" I grumbled.

"If he's going to make it this difficult to get him a good gift," Hollywood said, "we shouldn't even try. We should get him a terrible gift. That would teach him a lesson!"

It was a stroke of genius. "What do you get the man who has everything he wants?" I cackled. "Something he doesn't want!"

Hollywood then suggested we book a sitting at a Sears portrait studio and get an awful portrait of ourselves in one of their classic cheesy poses. You know, like one of us sitting down while the other on stands with his hands on the first one's shoulder...

But instead of going to Sears, I called my old friend Tate Hemlock. He's shot my author bio photos and thousands of shots of women in various stages of undress. He loved the idea and admitted to a strange obsession with bad family portraits from the 1970's and 80's. We set up a session for Thursday.

Hollywood drove two hours up from Tucson. We had dinner with Ryno and Teacher Dave, and then drove another hour north to Tate's home. We were introduced to Kennedy, who was hanging out and staying with him for a few days. As we discussed what we wanted to do, Tate showed us some stuff from his most recent shoots, which made Hollywood's eyes go buggy as he realized he was looking at the same girl who'd just shook our hands in the living room.

We set up a backdrop in what would normally be a dining room. The shoot was temporarily delayed, however, because the backdrop had an ice cream stain on it from a previous shoot. Tate sliced off the ice creamy portion and we went to work, starting with the aforementioned pose.As you may have noticed from some the above accounts of Ryno's generosity, the three of us are longtime Tampa Bay Buccaneers fans. So Hollywood and I decided (since we couldn't get the wardrobe or wigs to pull off a 1978 look) to give our photoshoot a Bucs theme. And from there, the cheesy, Olan Mills-esque poses poured forth.
My original plan of hiring Tate to save us some money went out the window as we doubled his asking price when we paid him because we hadn't laughed so hard in months.

Obviously, we couldn't pick just one image to be our portrait, so I got on Photoshop and created two collages, which we then printed at Costco in 16x20 and 14x18 sizes.In case you are wondering, no, when I walked up to the counter of the Costco Photo Center, I did not have to tell the guy what I was there to pick up. Somehow, he figured it out for himself.

We framed them, but, unfortunately, our plan of buying the same size frame that holds all of Ryno and his wife's wedding photos, taking that down, hiding it in the garage, replacing it with mildly erotic images of ourselves, and seeing how long it took before someone noticed was ruined by the fact said frame is massive and would have cost about $150-200.

In the end, I spent more time, money, and effort to get a terrible gift for someone who has been nothing but good to me and my family for the better part of two decades than I did on any of the "good" presents I got for anyone else this year. So let that be a warning to anyone planning to be my friend!

In light of Chris Sims's love letter to Nextwave not-so-cleverly disguised as an answer to a question about monster hunters in comics--in which he disqualifies one character from being comicdom's greatest monster hunter for not having been around long enough then hands the title to a character who's been in one 4-issue miniseries and a 12-issue team book that wasn't about monster hunting--I dug up my 2006 review of Nextwave #1.
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I'd heard varied reports around Comicblogtopia. Some people said Warren Ellis's Nextwave was great; others took the stance it was terrific. A few bloggers have indicated Warren Ellis's semen has a rich buttery flavor and is delicious on a baked potato.

I've made no attempt to hide my utter contempt for Fell and Ellis's lame, forced pseudo-weirdness within. When I picked up Nextwave, it was with the promise from Chris that "even though [he knew I] didn't like Fell, [I] would really like Nextwave because it's completely different."

All I needed was one frame to tell me Chris is a dirty, dirty liar.

This is what passes for humor when you are Warren Ellis or when you are eleven years old. Absurdist humor is much more difficult than it looks, and sadly, as it looks extremely easy, it's quite inviting to people who think they are funnier than they actually are the world over.

All you need is to list a bunch of really bizarre images and you're a comedian! Right? A weasel is only mildly funny on its own, and a giant weasel is even funnier. Dress it as a cheerleader and you're getting somewhere. Have the giant weasel dressed like a cheerleader use a human as a bucket and pants everywhere are being wet with laughter.

The fact there is no art accompanying that caption tells me one of two things, possibly both. Either Ellis felt that caption was so funny on its own, no imagery Stuart Immonen could provide could possibly live up to the idea people would form on their own, or he hadn't quite decided exactly what he was going say there by the time Immonen started drawing it.

The follow up to that frame, which actually came earlier making it the "I'm pretty sure this book is going to suck but Chris promised me it was good so I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and keep reading" frame:Oh, no, you di-in't! New Jersey is so burned right now! Making fun of New Jersey is so not cliche! I also am proud of myself for recognizing that Dirk Anger is a parody of Nick Fury. Hang on... Fury... Anger... Those are synonyms! Damn, that's sweet!

Making jokes about New Jersey is on par with jokes about airline food being bad or how "black folks and white folks be different, y'all."

The greatest example of successful absurdism is Monty Python. Unfortunately, Monty Python tends to convince more people than any other source of the seeming simplicity of absurdism.Just put together a singing trio of vikings in a diner that serves Spam with every dish and you have a classic sketch that will be quoted by teenaged boys for decades to come.

Nextwave has a very basic plot: a superhero team crosses paths with Fin Fang Foom. The absurdist moments should be garnish to that, but instead become blaring sirens and flashing neon signs announcing "Warren Ellis is SOOOOO fucking clever."

Why is Fin Fang Foom wearing purple underwear? So Ellis can refer to it repeatedly because it's SOOOOO fucking clever. Why was "The Captain" originally known as "Captain "? Because it's SOOOOO ing clever. Why are the Human Resources henchmen made of "slabs of genetically modified kelp"? Because as I learned when I was at the beach in 1986, "kelp" is a funny word.

I could go on and on, and in fact, I have. Instead, maybe I'd be better off discussing all the parts of Nextwave that didn't suck and/or were actually funny.

Dirk Anger's hightech, top secret communications device:Admittedly, that's pretty fucking clever.

There are few things more boring than listening to someone describe their dreams. Except maybe reading about someone's dreams. So last night I had this vivid dream...

I was watching a college football game though the stadium that was more like a high school field, most specifically either Blountstown or Bristol High's stadium in Florida. (I've always had a hard time differentiating those two places because they are very close together, and whenever I drove out to cover a story at one school, I'd wind up hitting the other one, too, so they are kind of the same place in my head.) The visiting team was Texas A&M and the Aggies were winning 54-0. The home team was repeatedly throwing passes into the end zone from about its own 30 yard line and having them batted down.

A woman sitting beside me was trying to tell me how good the team was and that they still had a chance at winning, at which point a receiver managed to pull down a touchdown pass and reassure her she was correct.

She went on to brag about how great the school and the other schools in its conference were. She sited as an example that one of the other schools in the conference was where they shot the classroom scenes during season 4 of "House" where he was selecting his new team.That made it the envy of all the other schools.

This particular school's pride and joy was it's Vegas-style show starring the Temptations (including two original surviving members) called "Signed, Sealed, Delivered." I know "Signed, Sealed, Delivered" is a Stevie Wonder song.

The plot of the show was about the Temptations building a huge bomb and turning to a genie for assistance. The actor who played the genie sat in a large glass enclosure near the ticket office making faces and growling at people who walked by to help promote the show. When he needed a break, a sign sat in the enclosure explaining that the genie was off finding parts for the bomb.

Beside the genie's enclosure was a display of photos of the show and a video that played on a loop, featuring a musical number by six topless USO chorus girls with their faces and torsos painted like American flags, a la Nuke's face from Daredevil. Two of the women were Sasha Grey and Carmella Bing.Their song was about being recruited for the USO, being told their pretty faces could help the nation. The chorus featured the line, "On a pretty daaaaaaaay, I heard him saaaaaaay."

For a while now, I've suspected that the story NPR's Morning Edition runs at 4:45 every morning is specifically designed to sour my mood right before I go to work each day. In the past it has covered such topics as "Dedicating 5 minutes of national air time to letting white baby boomers complain that they aren't pandered enough to in this country because grocery stores aren't all carpeted and sometimes play hip-hop music" and "Dedicating 5 minutes of national air time talking on the phone to some housewives in Ohio who are spending all day watching the royal wedding." The reason I get my news from NPR is because it is dedicated to actual journalism, but at quarter to five that always seems to go out the window, and today's story was one of the worst examples of that yet.

This morning, Tovia Smith reported on a new airport screening technique the TSA is implementing in Boston and plans to have in place nationwide eventually. TSA agents will ask a series of questions for which they don't really care about answers. What they are looking for is subtle clues that someone might be a terrorist revealed by sweating, body language, or any other number of things someone who watched half an episode of "Lie to Me" claimed would matter.

Tovia Smith interviews George Nacarra, the federal security director for the TSA at Logan airport, giving him all the intense scrutiny the mass media of River City gave Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man. Listen to the story and you will hear a government official pull a turn-of-the-century flim-flam on a reporter from our nation's last bastion of true journalism.

He offers to demonstrate, even over the phone. "Pick a two-digit number, between 50 and 100, both digits even," he says. He explains that he can't guarantee 100 percent success, since he won't be able to read all of the clues he usually gets from face and body language. On the phone, his only clues are things like voice quality, hesitation, pacing and breathing.

"Say nothing aloud," he says. "I'm just going to work off of breath. Hold your mouth next to the phone," and he begins to count as fast as he can from 50 — until he stops dead at 68.

"[It's] 68!" he announces. He says he heard a faint tongue click right when he said the number.

As soon as he qualified "both digits even," I shouted at my radio, "Fuck! He's going to 68 her?" This is a standard warm-up trick for mind-readers and psychics going back to the pre-Houdini days. In the present, it's a trick Mystery of VH1's "The Pick-Up Arist" suggests for meeting girls in bars--and given Smith's reaction as a well-educated woman, it's hard to insult Mystery as tempting as that may be.

There are certain "forces" in mentalism that are based simply on our brain's tendency to select from a small field while thinking it's selecting from a large one. The key is making you decide quickly. "Think of a vegetable," will get the response "carrot" 90 or more percent of the time as long as you don't let the subject really think about it. "Go with the first thing that pops into your head. Think of a wild animal in the jungle," will get you "lion."

"Think of an odd number between 1-50 with both digits odd and different" will almost always yield "37." Why? Because while you think you're selecting from 50 numbers, you're not. You're limited to odds, so already you're eliminating half the field. A two-digit number eliminates five more (1, 3, 5, 7, 9). Both digits odd eliminates another 10 (21, 23, 25... 49). Two different digits gets rid of 11 and 33. That leaves only eight choices (13, 15, 17, 19, 31, 35, 37, 39), so already the mentalist has a 12.5% chance of guessing correctly as opposed to the perceived 2% chance. But for some reason, the human mind jumps on 37 more often than the other seven combined and anyone who knows this appears to have impossibly guessed your number. In the case of 68, the field is limited to 60, 62, 64, 68, 80, 82, 84, and 86, and again, 68 is chosen disproportionately more than all the rest.

Another favorite is "Think of two simple geometric shapes, one inside the other. Make them different though, don't do a square inside a square or a rectangle. Now draw it." The mentalist then reads your mind and draws:Why? Because while he'll then say, "You could have picked any of hundreds of designs," you really couldn't. Simple shapes pretty much limits you to triangle, circle, and square/rectangle--a dodecahedron inside a parallelogram isn't "simple." When he suggests that a square inside a rectangle would be a bad idea, it limits you to a triangle and a circle. At that point, we fall back on the fact that we circle things (ads in the classifieds, answers to Is He Into You? tests in Cosmo, word searches) and don't triangle them. However, if the subject does draw a circle inside a triangle, the mentalist still can salvage it by saying, "Wow, pretty close, huh? I got the vibe of the two shapes, but I couldn't pick up which was on the outside," and look pretty impressive.

Banachek's Psychological Subtleties gives an intensive list of such "forces" and explains routines he uses in his shows based on them. He and Larry Becker get away with such blatant forces as "think of a flower... a beautiful, long-stemmed flower... is it a rose?" on a regular basis because while it seems obvious while reading it on a blog sitting at your desk, the illusion is much different when you're on the spot in a nightclub or--apparently--interviewing a TSA official over the phone.

Tovia Smith should be embarrassed. I only hope she will scrutinize her subject a little harder in the future before declaring Secretary Tim Geithner is going to solve the debt crisis by pulling coins out of her ears.

I recently watched the entirety of BBC's "Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares" on Netflix. In every episode scales back, limiting the chefs to smaller menus and simpler ingredients.

I bring this up because I've been putting off writing a review of Superman's Girl Friend Lois Lane #16 because I haven't had a lot of free time to write of late. Then, as Gordon Ramsey explained that a good broccoli soup can be made from broccoli, salt, and water, I concluded this story need no embellishment.

One day, Lois gets jealous of Jimmy Olsen's Superman signal watch...

But when he gives her one of her own, Superman forgets to consider that women are stupid and worthless (per 1960's comics written for adolescent boys). She calls Superman when she has a nightmare.



On the note of Superman's temper, compare how he speaks to Darkseid when the latter comes to destroy the Earth...... to the way he speaks to Lois about calling him to spring her from a stuck revolving door.As always seems to be the case when Lois, Jimmy, or Superman says anything in public, a petty criminal happens to be standing nearby, overhears, and devises a plan to use this new development to his advantage.The plan is to have Lois draw Superman away from a bank robbery. But Lois flips the script and refuses to signal Superman because not doing so allows her to lay a guilt trip on Superman.

If there is a better example of a song mailing it in than DJ Kool's "Let Me Clear My Throat," I can't think of it.

1. The song is 95% "The 900 Number" by 45 King (also known as "The Ed Lover Dance Song" to viewers of "Yo! MTV Raps" in the early 90's), which is in itself just a looped sample from Marva Whitney's "Unwind Yourself." The rest is the opening horns from "Hollywood Swingin'" by Kool and the Gang. I grant you that hip hop is rooted in sampling, but these are two well-known samples and had been well-known for years before this song came out.

2. Many of the lyrics are "samples," too. While not lifted as an actual recording, lines like "Can I kick it? (Yes, you can!)" and "I'm in love... I'm all shook up," are familiar lyrics from other songs. Hell, even "Let me clear my throat" was one of Ad Rock's most memorable lines on the Beastie Boys' "License to Ill" album.

3. This song was recorded live in a club, so I supposed it's possible Biz Markie was pulled on stage without any warning and asked to freestyle some rhymes on the spot. I hope this is the case, because that's the only excuse I can think to justify the lack of effort on his part to spin a lyrical masterpiece... or even to make any sense. By his third line, he's resorting to making noises ("Ahhhh-uuuhhh-huh-huh. Remember that?") and a moment later, he admits he's not going to worry about saying anything meaningful because the words don't really matter ("Tick tocka. Tick tocka doodle die, no matter what I say, it always comes out fly"). I also really wonder what the comparison that prompted the simile "The ladies in here are like fruit in a cup" was (other than a meaningless line to rhyme with "shook up").4. Why the hell is this considered a DJ Kool song? Clearly Doug E. Fresh was the only one who really contributed anything. What does Kool need to clear his throat for? It's not like he's saying much other than repeating the same four or five lines ("Here we go now. Here we go now. Here we go now. Here we go now. Here we go now." "Everybody jump. Jump. Jump. Jump. Jump." "Have mercy, babe. I hope ya don't mind.") and shouting out a role call of rappers who apparently had more on their agendas than Doug E. Fresh and Biz Markie that evening. Hell, the crowd has as many lines in this song as DJ Kool does.