Monday Sips

Another day, another dollar. Another week, another monday links post.

• As always, highlights!   
• Two pats on my own back this week: first off, because apparently my blog name is catchy enough that SBNation's editorial staff can refer to it in posts about NU pulling the upset and expect people to get the reference. Secondly, for apparently being close enough to Teddy Greenstein when my friends and I were shirtlessly wandering around Ryan Field that he heard us singing the Outback Steakhouse jingle, and it making enough of an impression on him that he put it in his lead. You see, journalism professors, I got published in the Trib! Except it wasn't for an article I wrote, I wasn't attributed for it and I was wearing chest paint while I got quoted, and it could have been someone else, but I think it was me because nobody else would be dumb enough to sing the Outback jingle after a football game because a) we're clearly not going to the Outback Bowl and b) even if we were, why would you sing a commercial jingle from three years ago?
• Point being, I'm stupid. But to quote a commercial jingle, life will still be there tomorrow.
• Spread Far the Fame gives the pros and cons of this whole field-rushing thing. If you're con, well, you're a buzzkill and I hate you. 
• Hail to Purple's bowl thingy has, as always, an efficient and easy to follow rundown of who/where/why we'll be playing in a bowl. And as always, I'ma go head an link to it. 
• And if you think there won't be excessive coverage of bowlage here.... well, you done gone mad. 
• As noted, I love hip-hop and basketball, so it's not altogether unsurprising that Sunday night at 3 in the morning, I found myself distracting myself from writing a paper by watching this music video, Shaq's "No Hook" featuring two rappers from the greatest hip-hop assemblage of all time, the Wu-Tang Clan. (In my defense, I was youtubing the song "No Hook" by Jay-Z, which is quite awesomely covered on Legend of Zelda themed mixtape "The Ocarina of Rhyme". The version of "Still Tipping" on there is actually better than the original version of Still Tipping, which is just a smattering of how fantastic the idea of a Zelda music inspired mixtape is.) Point being, at 3 in the morning, I spent a good 15 minutes rewinding a very specific part of the video because I thought that Method Man might be wearing a Northwestern sweatshirt. As someone who wears a Northwestern sweatshirt a lot, I had a lot of reasoning to think it might be: it looks purple-ish, it's got roughly 11 letters on it, it's arced, like all Northwestern hoodies, there's some N's, O's, and T's clearly visible on the hoodie, and I figured this video was from like '96 or '97, when NU might have had football relevance. I spent about 15 minutes trying to figure it out, thanks to the enormously crappy video quality. As far as I can tell, it's not an NU hoodie, but rather, a Georgetown hoodie, and all the scenes with Meth in them are, for some reason, flipped horizontally, so it looks like the first letter is an N. If anyone has a better hypothesis, please tell me, but it should be noted that it took me 15 minutes to come up with that. To quote the RZA, "A decimal. Let's have a festival!!!" First person to decipher that line wins ownership of my blog, unfortunately, I'm pretty sure only the RZA could possibly tell you what it means, and he probably forgot he was ever on a song with freakin' Shaquille O'Neal 28 minutes after recording it.
• The Coach Fitz Intense-o-Meter is down, obviously, to a 3.4, denoted by the ability to fashion glass vases with the heat provided from his bare hands. You're probably thinking, "well, 3.4 is awfully high considering we don't play a football game this week", but, although the intense-o-meter is capable of detecting intensity levels down to a 0.1, Fitz has never recorded an intensity reading below a 2.1, and that came while he was napping on a Sunday afternoon in April when he was in the third grade, and even then, his intensity singed the pillow he was sleeping on because he was so intense.
• Via the links section of Spread Far the Fame, I saw this site NUIntel, which I somehow have never seen before. It's like NBN, but with absurdly more frequent and detailed sports coverage. I especially enjoy the IM football power rankings and its devastating, but alarmingly accurate assessment of my fraternity's offensive playcalling scheme. (for the record, I'd like to say that I was a key figure, but I forgot to give our coach my netID before the deadline, and missed the season after game 1. However, I eagerly await any online assessment of my basketball game. My game has been described as "a cross of Slava Medvedenko and Kurt Thomas", you can laugh all you want, but I urge you to kiss the rings.)
• Demos and Kafka earned Big Ten player of the week honors. As always, I give the Big Ten conference my disdain for naming Kafka "co-Big Ten offensive player of the week", because "Big Ten offensive player of the week" wasn't specific enough. PICK A SIDE DAMNIT.