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We heard tell of a unique form of torture recently that was being inflicted upon a member of the Goliard staff over a couple month stretch which sounded so excruciating and agonizing as it was being described that we felt like we simply had to provide the space to discuss it further. Our staffer volunteered for the treatment, in a way, and continued showing up for it even after he became aware he was being brutalized so nothing untoward or illegal has occurred. The tale is worth telling however, if for no other reason, than to remind us how often in life one man's choice defines another man's misery. The idea of Turd torture by herd sounds pretty bleak from the get go and, in this case, manifested itself when our man in question was forced to endure a carpool scenario to and from work each day. He was driven to this fate, so to speak, for reasons not relevant to the story and although carpooling doesn't sound so bad on the surface (especially with the price of gas these days) and probably isn't all that uncommon, the pain of this particular situation will come out in the details.

Our staffer, who is an engineer by day and currently toiling away in the mining business, began his sacrifice for the familial good by agreeing to climb into the back of a van every morning, and accept a ride up the hill to the mine site. Being the last pick up and the new guy (not to mention the lone white collar among blues) it became clear immediately that, by making the decision to eschew his own comfortable sports car and the daily dose of Starbucks and NPR that had accompanied his rides up the same hill in the past, he would instead now be expected to wedge himself into the middle of the bench in the far back of a van between two donut eating, snuff chewing, sweaty and spitting, flatulent individuals, one a pipe fitter and the other a valve flusher by trade. Instead of his own confident hand on the wheel and sound German engineering below him, a chunk of his morning would now be spent sandwiched between his gamey co-workers enduring a winding one hour commute with a driver at the wheel who felt like it was his responsibility to careen the corners in the shoddy, suspension impaired Ford Econoline and either pass every other car on the road or tailgate them into submission.

As bad as that sounds, it would have been bearable our man said, if the driver hadn't also insisted on tuning the van's scratchy a.m. radio to the local ESPN affiliate, which during the morning commute, evidently features this bloviating idiot named Colin Cowherd. We were incredulous at first at our staffer's insistence that, even though he is a huge sport's fan, the worst thing about his whole new transportation arrangement was Cowherd's involvement in it. This sounded impossible actually so we decided to give the show a listen in the staff offices for a spell to make our own judgment. And further investigation has indeed confirmed that this Cowherd guy is an asswipe of the greatest magnitude. A piece of crap in so many ways that we'll probably have trouble listing them all. Having to listen to his drivel, in any conditions, let alone those described above, seems as inhumane a torture strategy as could possibly be employed and we have a new sympathy for prisoners that have been force fed a steady diet of acid rock or pop forty while lying shivering and malnourished in their cells. It's a time tested mechanism to break a person's will by first compromising them physically by making them endure adverse conditions and then pumping doggerel at them aurally until they can't think straight or function.

As an aside, what amazes us also is that a company with a national reputation in sports such as ESPN would allow their name to be sullied by association with such a complete sewage spewing jackass. This guy doesn't even belong on local radio in Podunkville, but apparently he was on somewhere and when Tony Kornheiser quit a couple years ago, some genius at ESPN who most likely was subsequently fired, decided to give the smug little boob shown above a shot at a national audience. He won't last long we don't imagine so if you want to experience the carnage of verbiage for yourself you might want to tune in soon. This guy is a grade one Bill O'Reilly sized windbag.

The torture began subtly, our man reports, which he explained was due to the fact that he was only barely aware of the radio being on at all since he was so uncomfortable otherwise. As he began to lean back and shut his eyes training his muscles to keep from lolling against his seat mates, he became aware of nonsensical statements which were being piped into his brain almost like they were part of dreams. The first time he became cognizant that something was amiss was when he heard about how all the other Yankees are jealous of A-Rod because he's so talented and good looking. What? our man thought. Derek Jeter and Johnny Damon and for that matter any of the other Yankees didn't really strike him as being jealous of A-Rod at all. He started listening more closely and found that most of Cowherd's statements were similar in that they sound like legitimate opinions at first but are absurd once you break them down. Our investigating confirmed that the Turd effect doesn't initially strike a person when they first hear Cowherd's voice and in fact, depending on what he happens to be talking about, he might almost sound like he is making sense. Like most shysters and snake oil salesmen, he's fairly adroit semantically and, since you can't see his ferret like face on the radio, it sometimes is not immediately evident just how smarmy of a guy he is. He also has the backing of ESPN that allows him to bring on reputable guests and take calls from dignitaries of the sport world that, although they probably have no idea who the Hell he is and wouldn't give him the time of day otherwise, they come off sounding like they're friends of his who are proud to be on the air with him. In the end however, when the bells and whistles are turned off and it's just him and his banal generalizations and insipid worldview, his obvious trash upbringing betrays him and it becomes clear that he's nothing more than a chauvinistic blowhole. Listeners are worse off for any time wasted in his auditory company.

Cataloging the incredible rash of idiocy that spills out of Cowherd's mouth isn't a job that we're going to accept here at the Goliard but just in the few weeks we listened in we heard such things, as "Tony Larussa is completely overrated and doesn't make a bit of difference in the outcome of games." "Baseball managers in general have no effect on wins and losses." "The Yankees are just better than everybody because they have better athletes." "If you're not a USC, Notre Dame, or Texas type school you're never going to be able to win in college football (forgetting apparently that all those schools had decades of down time)." "The Tigers are like a triple A team that nobody wants to watch and who won't be around for the World Series." "All successful people have a plan which is why they are rich." "Fantasy sports don't matter in society." "I advise you to date a stripper, marry a librarian." "Teams outside of New York aren't relevant." "We talk about the Yankees all the time because that's all anyone is interested in." "All guys just want to be patted on the head once in awhile by their wives who cause 95 percent of marital problems" "Girls with upturned noses are this, all women are that, every guy thinks this Blah blah blah…. Listening to Cowherd presume to speak for other men is like accepting George Bush's viewpoint as being representative of all Americans. Just because the lowest common denominator, general apathy and extenuating circumstances sometimes combine to give these men a platform, doesn't mean what gets spewn from their mouths isn't complete pabulum.

We haven't done much investigating into Cowherd's past but he strikes us as the classic psuedo intellectual, embarrassed about his personal origins who couldn't make it through a junior college academically, and was completely unathletic himself so, as a result, has spent the time since compensating for these failures by force feeding the rest of us his mental masturbation which is disguised as enlightened opinion and supposed journalism and making fun of the institutions that wouldn't accept him as a younger man. Just the other day he seemed to bear this out when he made fun of "dot.edu guy" which assumedly refers to one of the hundreds of thousands of young people currently pursuing higher educations on campuses housing the sports teams Cowherd makes a living discussing. Apparently bitter now about how he couldn't quite manage what many of the rest of us took for granted which was spending part of our youths as normal college students at decent schools with athletic programs that are rewarding to support, Cowherd assumes he is playing down to "snuff dipping, van riding guy" like those mentioned above. Our staffer reports however that his fellow riders on the back bench of the Econoline actually think Cowherd is "punk ass" and "a preppy faggot". The valve flusher reportedly remarked one morning to our man that Cowherd "sounded like a guy with a little dick" who he'd like to meet sometime so he could "punch him in his lying mealy mug." There was more to the story, our man found, when the flusher revealed that, after having Cowherd's show piped into his head when he was half asleep for the weeks heading into football season, he decided to open an online account and start betting sports. He kicked the season off by heeding one of Cowherd's many completely erroneous predictions and placed a half a paycheck on the first Ohio State game of the season after hearing Cowherd go on and on about how the Buckeyes would be distracted by having to play Texas the next week and couldn't possibly cover the spread. Of course Cowherd didn't account for the first game of the season factor and when Ohio State was up by 28 points as the second quarter was starting, our flusher reportedly smashed his TV with an axe handle and stormed out of the house for a two day hunting trip where he shot nothing but "little varmints like that turd". Cowherd didn't mention the game again of course since he has no accountability and seems to conveniently forget all the incredibly wrong statements he makes as soon as they leave his head. We started picking games for fun this year in the staff offices and have been keeping track this season. The numbers show that one of the secretaries who picks games solely based on cuteness of mascots and school colors is right about twenty percent more often than Cowherd who is supposedly a paid expert.

The real problem with Cowherd however is not the fact that he is dead wrong so often or that he condescends to folks far more accomplished than he is but the way he presumes to speak for everyone else when he is clearly completely out of touch with most people and their lives. His braying ass voice comes out of the radio on topics ranging from matters financial, romantic, culinary and relationshipal and although he's not particularly insightful about any of them and completely clueless on most, he seems to have gotten the idea that people want to hear his sardonic observations. Like the scrawny guy around the office water cooler constantly criticizing the local squad for not being tough enough and then making sexually and socially inappropriate remarks until other workers finally just sit thirstily in their offices to avoid him, Cowherd seems to have no gauge for what a fool he is. And much like the famed author Henry David Thoreau, whose lectures on economics and personal relationships were poorly attended since he’d never earned a penny in his life or gone on even one date with a woman, Cowherd's ejaculations fall into the farcical category. Unlike Hank Dave however, the Turd loves to state as fact the type of selfish, me first, doggerel that is currently jamming up the evolution of our country and sending us into the Bush years tailspin that will be hard to pull out of. Any benefit that Kornheiser added to the common good by being an intelligent and enlightened voice in the dumbed down world of sports talk Cowturd has undone in the time since by perpetuating stereotypes, disrespecting women, maligning higher education and generally lowering the collective IQ with his ignorant, insenstitive remarks. It's a sad state of affairs that just because a person has drive time and happens to like sports, he or she is forced to listen either to this Turd or Jim Rome. And we never thought we'd say this, but Jim Rome is seeming smarter and more relevant every day. Nothing like a bar lowering stooge like Cowherd to come along make the rest of us seem more cogent and prescient.

Post Script

Readers have been bombarding us with more of Cowherd's stupid remarks. I suppose it falls on us to keep a running list:

11/1/2006
"If you want to marry a corporate lawyer go ahead. I'm for the traditional family. Moms should be moms.

"Never order a margarita from a guy bartender."

"Brits are asexual."

2/23/2007

"The future is for losers"

"Nobody cares about college basketball"