By Rick Morris
Good friend and
fellow 21st Century Alliance member Jeff Briscoe of The Sports Train – the finest pure sports
talk show on both terrestrial and Internet radio – is demonstrating his
tremendous versatility by filling in, as he sometimes does, doing general talk
on the Train’s station, WCCF in
Fort Myers, FL. Being the unbelievably
gracious soul that he is, he has scheduled two FDH Lounge-oriented segments on
Christmas Eve at 6 PM EDT. One of them
involves The FDH Lounge Pantheon and
our current attempts to purge and replace some of the more unworthy
winners. The other one is Jeff’s
brainchild, an FDH Lounge list of Santa’s naughty souls for 2013.
I pride myself
on staying away from the easy targets, no matter how deserving. There are no hacks in The FDH Lounge! Here’s our list, which you can hear in more
detail on Jeff’s fine program, along with his reactions.
5 Uncle Jack. If you have to ask who that is, then you were
unfortunate enough to spend the summer and fall of 2013 NOT watching the climax
of the greatest TV drama of all time.
Now, this one is facetious, because (SPOILER ALERT!), Uncle Jack is now
in the afterlife, and not the good one, because he was a murderous Nazi
drugrunner. He rubbed out the
gravelly-voiced teddybear of a Phoenix drug kingpin known as Declan and also
(FURTHER SPOILER ALERT!) took out Hank and Gomie. But his worst offense, by far, was reacting
to his nephew Todd’s crush on weirdo crooked executive Lydia by proclaiming “The
heart wants what it wants!” Actually,
Uncle Jack was just one extension of the next part of our list.
4 AMC.
How can I harsh on the network that carried the aforementioned
masterpiece Breaking Bad, as well as the amazing Mad Men? It’s pretty easy when you think about
it. The final “season” of eight episodes
in 2012 and the other eight in 2013?
That could have been separate seasons of 13 and 13 if the pennypinchers
at the network would have given Vince Gilligan the blank check he so richly
deserved. All during the final eight
episodes, any viewers wanting to get a sneak peak of next week’s show were held
hostage to about a half hour of Low Winter Sun.
And the completely sweet Breaking Bad Barrel, which has a host of cool
features (a barrel, a two-hour documentary, a 16-page booklet from Gilligan, 55
hours of special features, a Los Pollos Hermanos apron and a commemorative coin
designed by Gilligan)? Yeah, you’ve got
to purchase the entire series on DVD and thus pay the grand price of $299 to
get that. Never mind that most of the
fanbase already owns everything except the final eight episodes – we need to
buy the entire shebang all over again just to get these priceless materials,
which cannot be sold separately. No
thanks, AMC, and I’d be using stronger language were it not the Holy Season.
3 David Ortiz. From the story of one man’s manufacture of
exotic drugs to an alleged consumer … well, never mind, I don’t want to get
sued. But suffice it to say that every
time there has been smoke in the PED era, there has been fire. That’s too harsh of a truth for most people
in 2013, however, as America’s latest new favorite fat guy attained legendary
status for his regular season and October exploits. Along with his previous runs of glory, this
was the season that cemented “Big Papi” as a true great of the game. Well, Bah Humbug. The FCC, an arbitrary agent of public taste
if ever there was one, might be cool with him randomly dropping F-bombs on the
public airwaves, but let my friend Jeff Briscoe try that and see how long he’s
around. Let’s face it (more unpopular
truth), the whole “Boston Strong” deal got pretty obnoxious once it stopped
being a rallying cry for support of the Boston Marathon survivors and victims
and started being a self-congratulatory anthem for every perpetually drunken
Chowd out there. In the immediate
aftermath of the bombing and the sorrow that every good American felt for the
victims and the community, the spirit of healing was a good one and the Boston
Bruins carried it on their run to the Stanley Cup Final. But to be beating the same drum all the way
in October when the Red Sox were looking for their own exploitable rallying
cry? That was gravy-training, pure and
simple. As patriots proved in the fall
of 2001, you could root for the Yankees to get their brains beat out in the
World Series and still stand tall for Uncle Sam and the city itself. And so too history repeated itself in 2013,
when discerning Americans everywhere realized, “If I root for the Chowds, the
terrorists win!”
2 Chris Christie. Please do not connect any dots between the
last choice and this one, as I am not out to oppress fat guys from the Northeast
in general. If anything, this one is
more reminiscent of the catchphrase of that great Canadian pro grappler Lance
Storm, “If I may be serious for a minute.”
2013 was a year that portended change and political realignment in this
country, as Kentucky Senator Rand Paul electrified a nation by staging his
filibuster about the droning of American citizens in a move that united aspects
of the left and right in support. And thus,
the threatened Powers That Be made their counterstrike. Christie sought to be the latest nexus
between the neocons and the Republican Establishment and piece together the coalition
that drove this country into the ground and singlehandedly elected Barack Obama
twice. Christie demagogued Rand Paul,
attacking his credibility on drones, civil liberties and common-sense
non-interventionism. Sadly, the moans of
militarism were joined by Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who took to peppering his
speeches with mentions of Winston Churchill.
Whenever politicians invoke that particular name, hug your children a
little bit tighter, because chances are that they’ve singled out a pointless war
where they’d like to deploy them.
1 Robin Thicke. As I said, no easy targets, so he doesn’t
make this list for dancing up on a skank on national TV. But if we’re going to talk about that
performance, frankly, he does make the list for mugging a Foot Locker employee
and stealing his gear on the way to the MTV Awards. Also, I hope that nobody else is OK with the
notion of one of the uncoolest figures of the 1980s siring a son who gets to stand
atop our pop charts. Who’s next, the son
of Screech getting a #1 hit? Does
Michael Dukakis have a spawn who’s an aspiring musician? But most of all, I object to Thicke’s people
claiming that he had the “Song of the Summer.”
Two words, dweebos: Get Lucky.
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