Applicable lyrics: “What is your mission?”

The game: Dolphins at Patriots
The beer: Maineport Sugamamaness Brown Ale
The result: Win, 38–10
The record: 14–3
The headline: “The tyrant needs attention to survive.” – Osees, “Glitter-Shot”

The commentary: I’m old and predictable. New Osees album? Probably gonna be my favorite of the year, with few recent exceptions. I knew upon learning their 2025’s effort’s title, itself a response to a decade-old Mutilator Defeated at Last (which lost to Fuzz II in one of those exceptions), that the guitar was set for heavy reintroduction. Abomination Revealed at Last, you say? “Abomination”? I wonder what was on John Dwyer’s mind?

“Well, this album just channeled out of the mist of atrocities swirling around the planet right now,” Dwyer explains. “AI empathy, genocides, social media data collection and addiction, the alignment of tech billionaires with fascist overlords and their armada of dogs, civilians being kidnapped by bootlicking thugs, the death of due process… the list goes on.”

⚪

2025

Osees – Abomination Revealed at Last

Cold-blooded public murders, intentional war crimes, aggressive bigotry, depraved victim shaming, prioritized ballrooms—let’s hope the tyrant-in-chief runs out of oxygen before, I don’t know, Stephen Miller loses his virginity. Plus: mission fulfilled, as another lyric crystallizes another beer-and-football week and/or geopolitical shitstorm. To think that last season’s “You’ve got Nazi fever!” could have been the end of it.

What a time to start Kurt Vonnegut (Jr.)’s Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons, an essay collection as old as I am and no less enlightened. “Harmless untruths,” my ass:

[Richard Nixon] believes so vibrantly in his own purity, although he has committed crimes which are hideous. […] He is a useful man in that he has shown us that our Constitution is a defective document, which makes a childlike assumption that we would never elect a president who disliked us so. So we must amend the Constitution in order that we can more easily eject such a person from office and even put him in jail.

Jesus fuck—and this is only the damn preface! For a man who often wrote about temporal crises, are we sure he wasn’t (isn’t??) a time traveler himself? Later, in an Esquire article from 1968 about the controversial Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Vonnegut outs himself as skeptical of manufactured local music scenes:

The Boston Tea Party is a rhythm-and-blues joint in a red-brick church in Boston’s South End. The patrons and musicians are mainly college kids and mainly white. The joint is the home of the so-called “Bosstown Sound,” which Newsweek says is “anti-hippie and anti-drugs.”

“Picture an assembled boy band except on a regional scale.” You’re welcome. Anyway: playoff football? In this economy?? Bills Mafia must be psyched!

No Mahomes, no problems? Bills have a new (but familiar) adversary standing in way of title

At the risk of jinxing us again—I predicted Bills 27–29 Patriots in place of the realized Bills 35–31 Patriots a few weeks ago—I can’t wait for the Bills to not win another Super Bowl.

You know the feeling. You’ve been sitting in traffic for what feels like an eternity, plodding along, always in the wrong lane. But then, miraculously, the traffic breaks up, and you have a free and clear open road ahead of you. What else is there to do but floor it?

JS101 – Basic Sports Newswriting
Always begin with a metaphor, especially one that tests reader patience.

You, in this scenario, are Josh Allen and the Buffalo Bills, and the open road is this year’s postseason. No Lamar Jackson. No Joe Burrow. And, most significantly, no Patrick Mahomes waiting to wreck yet another Bills season.

JS102 – Sports Newswriting II
Just go with it, dawg.

[…] So yes, the road would seem to be clear for Buffalo… were it not for that retooled, reworked road rocket in an all-too-familiar red-white-and-blue paint scheme streaking up on the outside.

JS201 – Intermediate Sports Newsgathering
Revert to traditional… “journalism”… for a third paragraph but don’t go nuts because some blogger will just cut that part out; then, hit ’em with that metaphor.

[…] But if the Bills are looking for hope, first off, they don’t need to look any farther than week fifteen. In their crucial road rematch–

Wait, that’s not the proper use of “road.” Remember, we’re talking about an actual road. It’s a metaphor.

[…] Last season, after yet another playoff loss to the Chiefs, Allen meditated on what went wrong once again. “You got to not just knock,” he said. “You got to kick the door down, and we didn’t do that.”

Umm…

Belichick and Brady are gone, but Vrabel and Maye will be around for a long time to come. The time is now for Buffalo to kick the door down, regardless of who’s standing on the other side.

JS301 – Sports Newswriting Theory
Never change a metaphor midstream.

Oh, Bills. I still think you’ll win Sunday, even if Vonnegut is stingy with the keys to his time machine—drag. In fact, having been inspired by my media colleagues at the Guardian (with whom I disagree on Bills–Jaguars), let’s predict Wild Card Weekend (Plus Monday) for potential bragging rights and, maybe, clicks galore. Winners in bold, straight up, no spreads—boring!

• Rams at Panthers
• Packers at Bears
• Bills at Jaguars
• 49ers at Eagles
• Texans at Steelers

Konami Code! Left, right, left, right, etc. And, in what should be “Handy” Bob Kraft’s first competitive playoff game since his politically aligned tyrant’s first term, you think I’m going to let week fifteen keep me from predicting a score? The fuck you say!

• Chargers 20–31 Patriots

Start!

Up next: I retain access to stowed, Brady-era insolence in questioning whether Los Angeles has a second football team. Cheers!