About two months ago, my son came to me expressing a desire to quit karate. My wife and I had him in martial arts since kindergarten and we’d honestly thought he’d enjoyed it this entire time. Apparently the kindest ten-year-old boy in the world doesn’t share his father’s joy at either punching people in the face during sparring or getting hit in the face during sparring. Go figure.

Anyway, he wasn’t getting off without going into some other form of physical activity. Enter my son’s friend Charlie (not his real name) who’s one of the popular neighborhood kids and something of a self-styled protector. Putting his arm around my boy, Charlie told him “Relax, you should join my church’s soccer league! You can probably even be on my team! My dad’s best friends with the director!” Continue reading →

Prefatory note: I’m currently gutted as I write this after the senseless assassination of Charlie Kirk. Apologies for moving back to the well of college football two weeks in a row but I need to take my mind off this shit. Hopefully this helps you too.—CLS

It’s time to see what the Vols can really do this season.

Beating Syracuse in week one at Atlanta was a great start. Week two’s record scoring win over East Tennessee State at Neyland Stadium was a nice preview of what the Volunteers can do when all cylinders are mostly clicking.

Now comes the big test as Georgia makes a season-early trip to Knoxville. Continue reading →

I don’t think it’s much of a secret that college football fans can be petty as all get out.

Of all the fanbases in the sport, probably the pettiest fans are those of the Tennessee Volunteers. Hey, I should know—I’m a proud resident of Rocky Top. Our fans started a Twitter shitstorm that cost a coach his job before the ink was dry on the page once, and we consider any betrayal of the Power T an egregious moral offense.

So last Saturday, you can imagine I was nervous when noon rolled around and Joey Aguilar, our new star quarterback, took the field for the first time since Josh Heupel essentially traded with UCLA, sending our former golden boy Nico Iamaleava back to California. I knew our guys could handle Syracuse but those 24 interceptions at Appalachian State didn’t look good. Continue reading →

It has come to my attention that a local high school football coach was recently fired for the egregious sin of taking his players to a football game.

Apparently the team’s bus broke down and no replacements were forthcoming. In a moment of pure country ingenuity, the coach put the team in the back of his pickup truck and drove them approximately an hour away to the site of the game. For this, he was dismissed.

This outcome is unacceptable bullshit. What was he supposed to do, cancel the game? What kind of lesson does that teach young men? If anything, Coach should’ve been given a raise for teaching all those young men that you make your towns, show up to your commitments, and give them your best effort no matter what. Continue reading →

The world’s a little quieter today, and not in a good way.

Ozzy Osbourne, the Prince of Darkness, and Hulk Hogan, the bleach-blonde titan of the squared circle, are gone. Both kicked the bucket this week: Ozzy at 76, surrounded by family, and Hogan at 71, felled by a cardiac arrest. The news hit like a chair to the back of the head, and while Malcolm-Jamaal Warner joins these two this week in a grim trifecta, I want to pause to consider what Ozzy and Hulk meant, not just to their fans but to a culture that’s increasingly allergic to raw, unfiltered humanity. Continue reading →

Happy Independence Day, friends! For those of you who don’t celebrate, fuck you. This is a joyous day for celebrating everything American!

But I must confess, I’m concerned about a lot of my American friends today. It seems there’s a lot of people who don’t think America is great. They’re not proud of this country and they don’t think there’s anything good or redeeming about it.

Fuck that. This is the greatest goddamn country in the world. There’s no place better and I’m going to give you a list of reasons why. Continue reading →

To begin, my uncle served in Vietnam and my father-in-law is a retired Army Colonel. So this whole bit’s going to be very pro military. If that bothers you, go somewhere else today.

It is extremely impressive to me that our military took seven B2 stealth bombers in Missouri, had them fly over 30 hours to Iran, they dropped bombs on targets basically the size of exhaust ports on the Death Star and then flew back home with zero American casualties.

The fact that we dropped said bombs through exhaust ports at Fordo will never stop being funny to me because it means the Iranian “geniuses” who designed that place never saw Star Wars. GEORGE LUCAS DESIGNED THE DEATH STAR THAT WAY SO NO ONE WOULD DO THAT. Wake up, Iran. Continue reading →

Hello again, friends! Welcome back to the Friday Funny, where we dive into the absurd, the awkward, and the downright questionable with a smirk and a raised eyebrow. As kids, we were told there’s no such thing as a stupid question. Those people were liars. Stupid questions flood the universe every second—some whispered in boardrooms, others shouted in comment sections. But there’s another breed of question: the ones we avoid asking, not because they’re dumb, but because they’re… delicate. They tiptoe on the edge of decorum, threatening to topple into a social minefield.

Well, today, we’re throwing caution to the wind. This is a safe place, folks! Let’s unpack some of those questions I’ve been dodging, with a bit of wit and a lot of curiosity. Continue reading →

Hello, friends! It’s your humble humorist with a quick check in before I flee blessed Knoxville for the harsh environs of Vermont for my father-in-law’s birthday. I have an exciting announcement to make: I’m a published musician now!

Don’t congratulate me too much. There’s a bit of a dumb story here.

I got into a mood last week when I injured my shoulder and decided I wanted to learn how to DJ. How I was to do this, I had zero idea, but that’s what the internet is for, right? Learning random shit at a moment’s notice?

After arguing with my nine-year-old son that yes, I totally could create an album in a day and being determined to prove I’m right, I decided to take an efficiency shortcut. I used an AI app to create my DJ name. Continue reading →

Friends, have you ever sat down to watch a television show expecting a few cheap laughs at the expense of others and then find yourself wondering if you should apologize for wasting several hours of your television’s life? That would be your humble humorist after several seasons of an Investigation Discovery show my better half subjected me to called “The Curious Case of Natalia Grace.” I went in thinking this would be a new “Tiger King” at which to gawk, and now have left the series finale with a bad taste in my mouth and less faith in humanity.

If you’ve yet to experience this mess allow me to attempt to break this wreck down like the massive “Final Destination”-sized car crash it is. An Indiana couple named Michael and Kristine Barnett adopt a little girl from Ukraine named Natalia Grace. Continue reading →