Dave on Being on the Team: Why I Am A Packer

Maybe it’s my rivals love for grammar, or maybe it’s the idea itself, but one thing is certain, if I ever use the pronoun “we” to refer to a sports team, (10 out of 10 times being the Green Bay Packers) I am harshly criticized, judged, and reminded that I am in no way part of the team. While this statement may seem true to some, I think any sports fan can agree that the fan is in many ways part of the team.

Before I justify my point I would like to make clear that I know I am in no way an owner, coach or appear anywhere on the roster for any team. I realize that even if every player were to get injured, retire, strike or sick that I will never be called to play.

Also it is important that I note that this does not apply to all things. I do not listen to my favorite band and say, “We put out a great album” or write a letter to Stephen King and say “We have good character development in chapter three.” A sports team is more closely comparable to a supporter of a political party. Even if they do not vote, many consider themselves a part of political party for just sharing the same views and opinions.

Try telling this guy he's not on the Seahawks.

With that being said, the fan plays an important position on any kind of sports team. Below are some of the responsibility that qualify you for such a position:

• Till Death Do You Part: To be part of a team, you are part of a team for life. In your position, you are never cut or traded. If you have a bad season, your coaches make horrible decisions, all of your players all of the sudden play like your grandma, well then you can either criticize them openly while still being a fellow supporter or you can cry every week till your team gets better, but you can never change your team.

• Know Thy Enemy: In many ways the fan is often a defensive position. If you find yourself constantly defending your team to friends or strangers then you are doing your job. It is important to identify your ally (fellow supporters) and your enemy (everyone else), and while you can be friends with everyone, you cannot be friends with everyone during game time.

• Game Day Responsibilities: Your responsibility on game day is to treat every game of the season like it is life or death. You can do this from anywhere, the bleachers, the bar, or in front of your television. Though your screaming, clapping, complaining, cheering, swearing, or act of violently throwing things may never be seen or heard, they are still important to the world of sporting.

You may still be saying to yourself “none of these things makes you part of the team.” If you are, then consider this Mr. or Ms. Know-It-All, when you are a fan of a sports team you’re a single thread of a social fabric made up of hundreds or thousands, or possibly even millions of others. Though your role may seem insignificant, if every fan were to stop caring then there would be no team to care for. It is for this reason more than any other that you can consider yourself part of a team. Lets face it; no team can exist without a fan base… except maybe the Jets (who are pretty damn close).





12th Man by Matt McGee is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Dave on Buffets: A Feast Fit For Kings

As an avid eater of any kind of food, I have a strong passion for the buffet. Whenever I see an all-you-can-eat establishment, I see an invitation to a unique cuisine experience that will serve dishes from around the globe and allow me to shove as much of them as I can down my gullet. Buffets are a great way to get to experience new foods and combinations for an affordable price.

The Land of Milk and Honey.

There are many reasons why you should be excited about any form of buffet. When you go to a regular restaurant you have to take a list of a thousand dishes and narrow it down to just one, but at a buffet it’s a free-for-all where you can chow down on practically anything found on the planet. When you walk into a restaurant you have to go through a whole process of being seated, waiting for a server, choosing a meal, and waiting for the meal to be plated, but at a buffet your feast fit for a king begins minutes after stepping through the door.

Buffets also give you the chance to work your inner creative slob. This is the only place where you can try eggs over eggplant, mac and cheese salad, Jell-O with string beans, or gravy over anything. Your dish is not a just a dish, but a canvas to create the perfect combination.

The key to getting the full experience of any buffet is to make sure you get at least four times what you pay for. To ensure such a task I perfected a fool proof, easy to follow technique for any fellow buffetist to use. The technique revolves around one important principle: eat as fast and as much as you can before your body can realize that you are full. If you can master that simple technique then your buffet possibilities are endless. Below are a few more simple techniques that may also help:

• Practice getting out of your chair and on your feet faster; speed is everything.
• There is little time to read what each dish is, so it is best to go by sight and smell.
• Use the whole dish to your advantage. There is more space than you think on one plate.
• Choose your beverage wisely; water is easier on the stomach than soda is.

Chicken, shrimp, pasta, pizza, steak, fish; you could have any one of these for dinner but why have one when you can have them all? That is the beauty of a buffet, instead of asking yourself which to eat, you instead ask yourself how much of each to eat. Sure, all the food may be mediocre, but for the price that you are paying, you have already subconsciously prepared for something very short of a gourmet meal.

There are a number of complaints I always hear from people who don’t enjoy a night at the buffet, but one specifically: they always feel sick after eating too much. I will admit that even I say this, but to me it is not a complaint, it is an epiphany, a moment of victory where I know I accomplished the goal that I have set myself. Yes, it is uncomfortable, but the pain is the same pain I imagine Bill Gates feels in his arm when he lifts up his wallet.

You may see a buffet as a place that is unhealthy, disgusting, and leaves you wondering what you ate (I get the same complaints about my cooking). However I see it as a golden ticket to a smorgasbord of unlimited opportunity. And sure it may be a little unhealthy, but hey, all that walking to get your food has to burn some calories…right?



Buffet fit for a king by Bev Sykes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Dave on the Coin Flip: The Coin Never Lies

    If you have ever found yourself in a situation in which you have the choice of two possible outcomes, then you know there are only two ways of handling it. One: you can analyze the situation, hypothesize the short and long term effects of each decision and make a list of pros and cons to each outcome. Or you can do the smart thing and flip a coin.


There is a reason why the coin flip has been used to settle disputes for centuries and that is because the coin never lies. The beauty of the coin is that it shows no favoritism towards either side, it can be used to settle virtually any problem at any time, and you will always be able to find one on hand. Now, before I go any further it is important to explain that the coin can only actually settle a real dispute. The coin is never used to see if you should exit your eight story hotel room through the door or the window, or whether or not to wrestle an alligator, because there is no real conflict between the two options and the answer you want is perfectly clear to you (in other words, you want to wrestle the alligator). Therefore, the coin should only be used to choose one of two realistic options.

I regrettably learned the power of the coin the hard way while in college. One morning at 3 am, my roommate, his girlfriend, Amanda and I were debating whether we should go to the diner or get some sleep before our early classes. We flipped a coin, which suggested that we sleep. Though until then I have been a strict follower of the coin, I was upset with the outcome so much that I decided to give an emotional monologue about how we “cannot live our lives by the coin” and how the coin was “the worst idea we ever had.”

I was a fool and I recant that entire speech.

The four of us ended up going against the coin and had perhaps the worst diner experience we had ever had in our lives. I will eat almost anything, and I especially will eat anything that I ordered and am paying for, but my French onion soup, usually my favorite dish at that diner, tasted like how my four-year-old moccasins smelled after walking a mile in a rainstorm. The other dishes had similar problems: the fries were cold, the omelet half cooked. In fact, everyone had a problem with the food except for my roommate. As we sort of ate, but mostly just looked at our food, we patiently waited for our server to come so that we could ask for the check. We had not seen him since we got our food forty-five minutes ago.

Eventually, when he came with the check, my roommate asked for a box for the other half of his chicken wrap. After the server disappeared for almost an additional hour, we decided to leave, wrap in hand. Ultimately, the four of us returned two hours later, tired and dissatisfied, and we only had ourselves to blame for rejecting the coin. While this may not seem like it was a total disaster, I’m just grateful we chose this situation to not listen to the coin rather than a serious one with serious consequences. I have never gone against the coin since, and have heard too many disaster stories to even consider.

What I have learned in life is that there are basically two people in this world: those who listen to the coin and those who are doomed to live a life of misfortune and regret. It is not important to use the coin for every decision you have, but it is extremely important that you never go against the coin. Below I have made a brief list of those who listened to the coin, and those who openly rejected its wisdom.

Followed coin blindly	Went against coin
John D. Rockefeller	The Owner of Hostess
Thomas Jefferson	George W. Bush
Every lottery winner	Every Jets fan

Many believe that the coin flip is fate. Maybe it is fate, or maybe a butterfly flaps its wings in China and makes your quarter lands on tails. Fate or not, the importance of the coin should not be taken lightly. The coin defies logic and reason to no explanation, and while I cannot guarantee that always listening to the coin will bring you fame, power, and success, I can guarantee that it will steer you away from disaster, misfortune, and chaos. I can think of no better way to end then to leave you with my new favorite poem:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
I flipped a coin to make my choice
And that made all the difference.
                     -Robert Frost, had he flipped a coin



Call ! by Rob is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Dave on Competitive Bearding: The Importance of Being Bearded

One thing that has caused a number of arguments between my rival and I is the amount of appreciation competitive beard growers should receive, which is why we chose this as our first topic. I can sum up my views on competitive beard growing in just a couple of syllables: awesome.

The sport of bearding is focused around a number of international circuit events that lead up to the World Beard and Mustache Championships. Here, a number of competitors are judged in a variety of beard categories such as Imperial Partial, Musketeer, Styled Mustache, and Freestyle. The main event, and hands down the most impressive (as well as my personal favorite), is the main event, the Full Beard Natural. Here competitors grow their beards to outrageous lengths and are judged extensively on length, mass, density, shape, color, and overall impression.

If right now you are saying to yourself, “this is ridiculous,” then you try growing and grooming a facial garden worthy of international competition. While I will openly admit that bearding is not an actual sport (solely because it is not on ESPN, which is my only qualification of something being a sport) I do think competitive beard growers deserve the same amount of admiration and attention as any other public figure and much more than any of the Kardashians.

Some people would criticize the time, effort, and dedication that goes into growing and grooming a beard, however, these same people probably wouldn’t criticize someone for spending that much time and care on their petunias. Competitive beards are like the petunias of the face, except that you can’t sneak popcorn into a movie theater with your petunias.

Competitive beard growing makes perfect sense since everything is a competition to men. That is just the nature of male thinking. World-class beardsman, Jack Passion, best represents the spirit of competitive beard growing. Although his comments like, “ I am a teapot, all it takes is someone to tip me over, pour me out, and their going to get f****** burned,” make him a hated competitor, I think he is nothing but entertaining. Jack Passion's obnoxious confidence and holier-than-thou attitude is all forgiven by me since he has the best beard in the world.

I should say that I might be slightly biased because I think everyone should grow out their mos, at least just a little. Why go out of your way every single morning to shave when you know it will grow back in just a few hours? Imagine how awesome it would be to have No Shave November all year round. I do not think it is a coincidence that you could easily think of a witty anti-shave name for each month: No Shave November, Don’t Shave December, Just Grow January, Face Forest February, Massive Mo March, etc. In fact, there are a number of reasons why you should grow a beard. Here are just a few:

1. Facial hair is a celebration of manhood.
2. You will have a built-in bib.
3. A beard acts as a man purse without the embarrassment of carrying a man purse.
4. Pancakes literally taste better with a beard.

Competitive beard growers take an ordinary process and make it extraordinary. If you still think competitive beard growing is a joke, check out the World Beard and Moustache Championships and maybe you will think otherwise.

Dave's Opening Statement

I am co-creating Blog You in the Schnoz as a place where I can voice my opinions on various topics, which usually cause an argument between me and my co-creator/girlfriend/rival, Amanda. Here I will take these topics and combine deductive reasoning, strong rationalization, and theological examinations to come up with a well-educated statement of opinion as well as a intellectual body of defense. In short, I will use this blog to prove that during disputes with Amanda, I am right about 90% of the time, and the other 10% I will pretend that I am to the point where Amanda will just surrender out of frustration.

Another reason I am making this blog is to prove to Amanda that the world will often agree with my opinion over hers. Also it is a place to not only organize my thoughts but to compare and more often contrast our thoughts and opinions.

It is important that I note here, in my opening statement, what I define as winning a dispute. To me, winning a dispute is not about who is right or who is wrong, its about who can make a better argument and convince as many people as they can that they are right. In many ways I think it is much more impressive to win an argument with what is probably the wrong response or unfavorable opinion, which If you know me, I usually always have.

Since I expect Amanda to attack my intellect and share a number of embarrassing stories and events, I have purposely used as many big words in this opening statement as I could. In conclusion, a warning to my rival, watch your back or you will be blogged in the schnoz. -->