New and improved John Reidy.com

I've updated my site to Wordpress and will now be posting everything over there.

Give a visit can ya?

johnreidy.com

Thanksgiving Power Rankings

New column @ AV Club Denver/Boulder here.

My sports Podcast

The South Stands Fancast is a new thing I've been working on. It's a Hi-larious sports centric show with plenty of bad words and discussions about prison rape.

You can find it here: South Stands Denver.com or subscribe to us on Itunes by going here: Itunes Link

Let us know what you think.

JR

Our Podcast is LIVE

check out our new Denver sports talk show:

South Stands Denver!

look for us on Itunes as well.

The Argument for Michael Vick in Denver

I wrote this as one of my regular columns before Vick signed with the Eagles but didn't use it. There's some good lines in it so I didn't want it to go to waste.

O.k. before everyone starts freaking out, I do not endorse what Michael Vick did to land himself in the slammer for the last two years. It was deplorable and brutish and speaks volumes to his arrested state of development as a human being. If I was hiring him to baby sit my kids (or dogs), he’d be way, way down on the list. But Michael Vick is being courted by various NFL franchises (depending on who you ask), not for his kid watching ability but for his skill at grabbing a football and running very, very fast with it into the end zone. That right there is reason enough to put him to work on your favorite team. The cumbersome baggage that comes with him? Not so much.

As of now, Vick is “conditionally reinstated” into the NFL which means he can sign on with a team and play somewhere around the sixth game of the season. Any team signing him will not only take on paying the felon, but it will take on the scrutiny and firestorm that will come with him. That team, ladies and gentlemen should be the Denver Broncos.

I can see beefy NFL fans everywhere pausing to take the chicken wing out of their mouth long enough to exclaim “not on my team!” when the name Michael Vick is brought up. If the horrific animal abuse Vick served time for wasn’t so ghastly, it would be hilarious to point out how the very meat centric world of NFL football can’t stand this guy. Look, here’s a tip: if you’re being asked by a local news crew about how much you hate Michael Vick, try to step away from the succulent rack of ribs you are basting in the Mile High parking lot so they don’t end up in the shot.

If you remember how Michael Vick single handedly burned the Broncos at home back in 2004 (threw for two TD’s and rushed for 115 yards) then you’ll know why any team with a shaky QB situation should be lining up for this guy. Any team with a pretty good QB situation should be at least giving it some thought. Here’s why: The Broncos QB’s will be under enormous pressure to perform, not only through the season but from the very first game. I think Kyle Orton will flourish under Josh McDaniel’s tutelage, but can you imagine throwing someone as fast as Vick back there to compliment Orton?

The Wildcat is a gimmicky football formation that came into vogue last season and went out of vogue as soon as superior defenses had enough with such shenanigans. In a nutshell, the Wildcat utilizes direct snapping of the ball to a running back who then takes off for glory. It worked for awhile because defenses wouldn’t know who was getting the ball: a speedy running back or the guy who throws it. With Michael Vick thrown into the Broncos mix, you not only have one of the faster people in the league getting the ball, but one who can throw it as well. Put him and a legitimate starting QB like Kyle Orton out there and you might just create so much confusion, the Broncos will forget they are supposed to suck.

Teams are supposed to say the right thing to their fans, and the public mood right now dictates they say Michael Vick is not wanted on their particular squad. But we all know winning trumps most bad behaviors. The Broncos can and will win more games with a weapon like Michael Vick lurking back there whether he’s the QB or not. Does winning trump his bad behavior? Probably so. But take the hot dog out of your mouth before you answer.

The Bullshit that is Twilight

I don’t care what you’re into. There’s plenty of shit I like that I’m sure you’d find lame. But Stephanie Meyer, author of the Twilight series, is a serious suck-ass.

Here’s why I will never see/read the bullshit that is Twilight: It’s never seemed like a work from someone who loves writing and wants to enrich the world. It seems like a cash-grab by a housewife who wanted to push a lame allegory about pre-marital sex. I’m sure when Stephanie Meyer originally came up with her brilliant concept someone told her, “No, Steph you can’t use wizards. It’s already been done. How about vampires? Teenagers are suckers for vampires.”

To which she replied, “I don’t know. My Mormon overlords may not approve. But I guess I am hitting them over the head with a thinly disguised morality play. And the female character is very weak and can’t decide which clichéd movie monster should deflower her. So yeah, I think that will work!”

What’s next for the Twilight series? A Frankenstein with kick ass abs and a heart of gold whose intentions are misunderstood? A powerless female who loves him despite his looks? Oops. Stephanie Meyer just got a great new idea.

In the recent Entertainment Weekly, Meyer said she couldn’t show Twilight to her husband because “I was embarrassed. It was about vampires.” That should tell you right there where her heart and wallet was at. The piece also said she doesn’t read other author’s vampire lit and has never even read Bram Stoker’s classic bloodsucker. And she doesn’t watch R-rated movies so she’s never seen a vampire movie. Really? So how the fuck does someone wake up one day motivated to write about something they know absolutely nothing about? Money, plain and simple. It’s like a Klan member trying his hand at hip-hop because he knows that’s where the dollars are at. And just like hokey religions that rake in the cash, Meyer has launched her own with her cheesy vampires and flighty chicks who can’t decide which man will tell her what to do.

Look, if you dig this crap, fine. Knock yourself out. But realize this lame ass has you all snowed. It would bum me out to find out my favorite musician hated the music he played and did it solely for the check. Would I still listen? Maybe, but it would drastically change how I perceived the music. Stephanie Meyer wants nothing to do with you and your vampires, yet when the first check arrived in the mail, she went against everything she believed in to crank out more books. That to me is not only insulting, it’s pretty corrupt. But like the wussy vampires she writes about, the money to her is like the blood they suck: she got a taste and couldn’t say no. The books may provide her with the blood she needs but the readers are the suckers.

The Problem with Comic-Con

Comic-con is the yearly convention where Geeks get to flex their influential muscle and take their rightful place as taste makers of all that is cool in movies and television. Really it’s a grand moment if you ever were persecuted for your love of Star Trek and Star Wars: the geek truly has inherited the earth.

Hollywood now falls all over itself catering to geekdom because they know those nerds have the power to make something a hit or drive it straight into the ground. New projects are debuted at Comic-Con and Hollywood trots out the celebrities to make a good impression on the gathered crowds.

Comic-Con however, is simultaneously a celebration of the underdog and a funeral for the creative process. It’s great that nerds are finally considered important enough that high-paid Hollywood types would practically blow them to get a thumbs up on their new crappy show, but pandering this much to the fan is not a good thing.

Geeks will ultimately rue the day they seized this much power because the movies and TV they watch will ultimately become an insulting brownnose. The ugly beauty of watching a movie or television show is that sometimes you get gold but most times you get a bag of shit. With Hollywood constantly checking the temperature of what the Geeks like and don’t like, you will now get a bag of shit with just the right amount of inside references and nods to things only Geeks know. The new Star Trek was a prime example of this kind of pandering with all kinds of knowing winks to classic Trek lines and plot points. It got old quick, yet the geeky public ate it up. It’s only a matter of time before this kind of lame cajoling is viewed as the flimsy scheme that it is. But by then it will be too late.

This doesn’t happen in sports. A sports team’s fan base can be screaming for management to do one thing and will get something quite different. The reason is, if a team’s general manager did everything the idiot fans wanted, his team would be a mess and he’d be out of a job. Sports fans are just as zealous as sci-fi geeks but a whole lot dumber. That’s good because if they were smarter, they’d figure out a way to make the team do what they wanted and it would all go to shit. It’s all going to shit for the Geeks too; they just don’t know it yet.

I blame Harry Knowles for the start of this because with his movie review site he browbeat and bullied movie studios into making movies the way he wanted to see them. Most people would love that kind of influence, but do you really want that in the hands of people who only consume the product? When bands cater to their fans in this manner, the music becomes predictable and stale pretty fast. If you let the fat-asses who love McDonalds make the menu, the burgers would be bigger and there’d be even more bacon. Harry Knowles loves bacon and his Nazi-like control over movie content is not good for entertainment.

Be careful what you wish for Geeks. Comic-Con seems like your coronation as the intellectual superiors to a country full of knuckleheads but the studio execs that piss themselves to suck up to you would green-light a She-Hulk sitcom if that’s what they thought you wanted. Comic-Con is probably an already over-bloated, corporate event as it is. And when anything gets this large and the participants become this power hungry, it never ends well. But the Geeks don’t really see it yet. They’re enjoying their time at the top and I do tip my hat to them. But when the cast of Nobody Loves She-Hulk hits the stage next year, don’t come crying to me.

New Column: Worship at the feet of Gamblor!!!

@ Decider

Matt Duchene Column @ Decider

http://tiny.cc/EAarV

Hot Golf Talk @ Decider

HERE!

Review: Star Trek

After thinking it over, Star Trek, the J.J. Abrams re-master, is kind of lame.

I did like it after I left the theater the other night: it’s a well made movie, looks great and there’s tons of action. But goddamn is it ever cheesy.

I was told that Abrams was re-inventing Star Trek and wasn’t necessarily going to cater directly to the hardcore fans. Simply put, he was going to make a kick ass movie and not get too hung up on lore and canon.

Now granted he can’t make Spock a Klingon or have Kirk be a woman. That would not only be confusing but the sputtering outrage from the empire of geeks who treat Star Trek like it’s Genesis (the bible entry not the band…although I’ll bet they like Genesis the band too) would be deafening as they marched on Hollywood demanding Abrams head.

So Abrams, in fear of being decapitated by a replica Klingon Bat’leth (yep, I looked it up), totally sucked up to the geeks and did nothing but cater to their every Star Trek wet dream. The movie slowly but surely (emphasis on slowly) drags out every original character. Who in turn ham it up with some cornball line or a sly wink to those in the know. If this was a way of breaking free from the source material, they didn’t do a very good job.

Oh and then there’s the story. Any time a character from the future shows up and has to explain the movie to you, it’s probably bad. This happens at some point because the script does a fairly weak job of explaining why a Romulan ship has come from the future and has starting blowing shit up. Then it’s explained how that same Romulan ship has waited 25 years to attack again? Wait. What? Really? It kind of made sense, but at this point I lost interest. Also I had to pee but didn’t so as not to miss a cameo by an infant Jean Luc Picard. It never happened. What I really wanted was yet another character from the future to show up and explain what the first future character meant.

As I said before, the action is great and Abrams put together a very good looking movie. The sets are cool and the battles look great. Overall it’s a good Hollywood summer movie. But for the Star Trek faithful who are drooling all over it, I think they should be insulted. Abrams has spoon fed them a pretty bland bowl of what they think they wanted. Most sci-fi enthusiasts (read: nerds) are pretty smart so it’s puzzling how they would accept something this weak. Uber-nerd-douchebag Harry Knowles has sufficiently brow-beat directors like Abrams into not going out onto any limbs when it comes to their favorites. And to me this is sad.

It’s sad because no new ideas will come about when Nazi-Geeks get together and sink something before it even gets a head of steam. When rumors swirled about how Abrams considered changing a plotline to the Superman story, Knowles, like a fat Stalin, took to the internets to make sure that it didn’t go down. With someone like that policing what you ultimately can see and hear, it’s a wonder you see anything good at all.

So if you like Star Trek and all its accompanying spin-offs, you will probably dig this new one. When you’re done masturbating to the thought of young Spock and young Kirk arguing for the first time, think about how pandering and lame the script really was.

If you had trouble understanding what I meant in this column, please wait for future me to show up with the edited version I will be working on later this week.

The Performance Enhancing Dregs

new column here:

Out takes from the Decider Column

Some stuff doesn't make it in the column I write for Decider. Most of the time it's due to space/length concerns or I'm not making any sense. Probably the latter.

So if something doesn't make the cut that I felt was particularly witty, I'm going to post it as a bonus. Bonus may be too strong a word. Yard clippings may work better.

This paragraph hit the editing room floor and I felt it was appropriate if you plan on following Mark Sanchez in the NFL next season. It would have been the second to last paragraph:

See? There you go. I did it now too. How does Sanchez deal with his name being associated with such a spirited act? The good looking, athletic QB looks like the last person who would perpetrate such a cowardly denouement on a sex partner, yet he will be saddled with the label by internet cretins every time he fucks up. He might as well just adopt a finger wipe across the upper lip as his signature move every time he throws a touch down because if he can’t control it, he might as well make it his own. Yes, kids all across America will be doing a new touchdown celebration this fall that will make T.O.’s antics seem quaint and tame.

SOLID GOLD! I know someone is going to break this out next year and I wanted to get my name down as the genius who came up with it first.

JR

Decider: Sanchez too dirty for Broncos

new column:

http://denver.decider.com/articles/sanchez-too-dirty-for-the-broncos,27178/

Rocky

Rocky just pantomimed to a pregnant woman that he wasn't the father of her child.

Jock Itch: The Rockies ad it up

just in case you're still coming here:

http://denver.decider.com/articles/the-rockies-ad-it-up,26876/

Reidy @ Decider Denver

If you can't get enough of me and want to read some fresh new stuff, I've started to write a weekly sports column at Decider Denver.

Decider Denver is the local content offshoot of the Onion here in Denver.

I'd like to take all the credit for being brilliant but Jason Heller does a bang up job of making me seem competent. Enjoy, and let me know what you think.

Jock Itch @ Decider