We’ve got one thing to ask for, for our upcoming birthday (that is, beside tickets to the Alabama-South Carolina game this fall and a case of Ketel One). Famed sports painter Daniel Moore did it. It’s out and available, like a debutant. It’s “Maximum Block,” the artist’s depiction of Terrence Cody putting his massive paw in the air and blocking another of Tennessee kicker Daniel Lincoln’s attempts, this time to win the game.

BIRMINGHAM — “Maximum Block,” the Daniel Moore painting that commemorates the game-saving play in the closest game of Alabama’s undefeated 2009 national championship season, was unveiled tonight during a reception at the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame.

[...]

A steady stream of people stood in line to get free prints of the painting autographed by Moore, a Birmingham artist whose paintings have captured big moments in Alabama football history.

Ah, beating Tennessee at the last second. That never gets old. Or coronary-inducing.

I can has?

A girl we dated once — it was in the recent past — said that we acted like an old man sometimes. We chalked it up to the fact that just bitching about things sometimes is cathartic, and that we listened to the “60 Minutes” podcast every week. Really — we’ve had a few minutes with Andy Rooney since we could watch television, so it was bound to take eventually.

Rooney has something going here that’s important. As in, to avoid losing it and violently destroying what irritates you, just complain for a few minutes and get it out of your system. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t (that train knows what it did, and deserved what it got — YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE). In that vein, the old man that resides in the dark recesses of our noggin has something to say.

===

Old Man Wolfe takes the keyboard.
To that student with the loud goddamn motorcycle — you can just fuck off to the ninth circle of Hell. Maybe you just moved in, a few blocks away, for the spring semester. Maybe a thoroughly sadistic person gave you that machine for Christmas. Frankly, I don’t give a shit. You roll up and down the road outside my place half a dozen times a day, and your fucking engine rattles the walls. I’m easily 50 yards away, and it damn near shatters the eardrums.

It’s obnoxious and a total dick move to ride that thing around town. You must have a serious adequacy problem (like another self-promoter I know) to behave in such a fashion. You ride that fucking thing, decibel levels higher than a 747 at takeoff, with your backpack, no helmet and no jacket. So, not only are you an asshole, you’re an idiot, too.

By the way — keep it up, and you may have a quite sugary gas tank. Take your crap to North Florida — this ain’t the place.
Fin.

===

Wow. That was rough. Here we were, expecting something on shoes or how the waitress doesn’t keep the water glass full when you want it, but bothers you when you don’t, and, well, damn. Hate to see what happens when he opines about the kids down the street, acting like fools with their pants on the ground.

Well, isn’t this interesting. It appears that Rep. Nikki Haley is still hanging on to an unfounded, unproven and to the best of our knowledge, untrue rumor regarding her Web site. Remember when all that happened? It was in those fine times of the mid-Summer, when Columbia feels like the ninth circle of Hell. Our own apartment averaged 80 degrees at night. It was fun.

Yeah, so it was rumored that we were receiving inside information about Haley from Under The Power Lines, which had run Haley’s site before she announced for governor. Actually, no — it wasn’t so much rumored. The Haley campaign just went to their lackey, Will Folks, to put a hit on us and UTPL for something that had absolutely no evidence, except for the fact that the Haley campaign was then, as is now, dead in the water and leaking like a rotten wooden-hulled ship. That was piggy-backed on an earlier post of dubious repute, which led to what happened today.

Haley sent a Facebook message to Nancy Mace, the woman who took over Folks site and had a chance to operate Haley’s site.

Around here, we have a phrase for such nuttery: total fucking bullshit. Really, if there was any, and we mean absolutely any, truth to this allegation, it would have hit the papers and local TV stations months ago. But, it’s not true, ergo there is no evidence, except for a blog post written by Haley’s Internet boy.

Just another example that Haley’s a decidedly second-tier gubernatorial candidate that would have been better served by staying in the House and serving her friends at S.C. Club for Growth, South Carolinians for Responsible Government, the S.C. Policy Council and the last few remainders of the Sanford crowd.

Few times are worse for everything going pear-shaped on our machine than in the middle of a legislative session week just after Carolina beat its first-ever No. 1 team in men’s basketball. So, needless to say, it pretty well sucked when about a full third of the keyboard went to hell following an unfortunate encounter with a cup of water. But, instead of going dark for weeks while some local nabobs take their sweet time to fix the thing, we were lucky enough to procure a relatively new Mac keyboard and plugged that bastard into the USB port.

Now it’s on to going through three and a half hours of action from this week’s session and getting back in the swing of things. Good times.

You may have noticed. Our site got completely haxx0red by someone who put up some Arabic crap and yadda, yadda, yadda. We’re pretty sure it wasn’t terrorists, but you can never bee too sure these days (jokes — we has them). Here’s the brilliant part of their operation: they locked us out of the site admin panel. Now, that was a real bastard to discover.

Fortunately, a number of others with Wordpress-based blogs have had the same problem, and there’s quite a lot of good information out there. One, in particular, was by a guy who went through exactly the same thing. After discovering the offending file was index.php in the site’s theme, the move was obvious. Reset the username and password through phpMyAdmin and switch out the themes temporarily until someone with more Web knowledge can get their hands on the theme in question and fix it and get everything back to normal. Having this occur just before New Year’s and a weekend means we’ll be stuck in a certain version of Internet hell through early next week, unless something unusual happens.

But, rest assured, the old (or an even snazzier, new) look will be back shortly.

UPDATE: Fixed. Fortunately, the blog theme, which is something like $60, was archived by a guy during the short time it was free. So, using that and fixing the problematic files in the original theme, it was possible to get the old format back up and running within an hour. We’re convinced more than ever that blog HTML modifications are like cooking — as long as you have a good recipe and pay attention, it’s hard to screw up.

The Free Times is rolling out its 2009 “Best of Columbia” voting, and we want you to vote for us for “Best Local Blog.” Or “Biggest Local ‘Hero.’” Or “Biggest Local ‘Zero.’” Whatever tickles your fancy.

We didn’t pimp ourselves for The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza’s “The Best State Political Blogs,” but thanks to some very nice people, managed to make the list.

If those people, plus the few thousand others we picked up along the way, decide to cast a ballot, we’d be very appreciative.

You can vote by going to http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=DIxYnZhbVIIllipxIF_2baBA_3d_3d. Or, picking up a copy of FT, filling it out and mailing it in to: Free Times, PO Box 8295, Columbia, SC 29202. You have to vote by Oct. 16. Mind you, you have to fill out at least 15 categories for your ballot to count. You can’t write in the same thing in more than three categories. And, if it’s a paper ballot, you have to include your full name, phone number, age and address, and can only have one entry per envelope. Also, you can only vote once — this ain’t “American Idol.”

It’s late August, and that means setting up your fantasy football teams. Thankfully, we have college fantasy teams in addition to pro teams, so that combines to extra pwnag3 during the season. We didn’t get everyone we wanted, but we’re pretty happy with these.

Wolfe Reports NFL
QB | Philip Rivers (San Diego)
RB | Maurice Jones-Drew (Jacksonville)
RB | Clinton Portis (Washington)
RB/WR | Marion Barber (Dallas)
WR | Wes Welker (New England)
WR | Vincent Jackson (San Diego)
TE | Owen Daniels (Houston)
D/ST | Ravens (Baltimore)
K | Steven Gostkowski (New England)
Bench players:
Carson Palmer (QB, Cincinnati), Darren Sproles (RB, San Diego), Muhsin Muhammad (WR, Carolina), Tony Scheffler (TE, Denver), Dolphins (D/ST, Miami), Neil Rackers (K, Arizona)

Wolfe Reports college
QB | Colt McCoy (Texas)
RB | Mark Ingram (Alabama)
RB | Michael Smith (Arkansas)
RB/WR | Julio Jones (Alabama)
WR | Brandon LaFell (LSU)
WR | Detron Lewis (Texas Tech)
TE | Aaron Hernandez (Florida)
D/ST | Buckeyes (Ohio State)
K | Morgan Flint (Oregon)
Bench players:
Jevan Snead (QB, Ole Miss), Caleb King (RB, Georgia), Damian Williams (WR, Southern Cal), Jeffery Anderson (TE, UAB), Bulldogs (D/ST, Georgia)

We’re also competing with @snead303 in a college pick ‘em challenge, and since he’s exiled to Colorado (where football is the fourth priority behind brewing beer, skiing and weed manufacturing), we’re ready for that one, too.

Under imminent threat of litigation, we’ve pulled the post we put up about recent developments with Columbia lobbyist and political consultant Larry Marchant. It was a mistake to run with it, and we officially apologize, and officially retract what we said in the post.

Here’s a bombshell — if you call yourself a Republican, then you are. If you call yourself a Democrat, then you are. If you call yourself a woman, you should probably have the anatomical goods.

In America, who is a member of what party is determined state-to-state. Even then, it’s a little up in the air, but in South Carolina, there is no requirement to register by party. Until the past couple decades, parties were a lot less ideologically homogenized. It’s just absurd, not to mention heinously incorrect, to call someone a “Republican-in-name-only” or a “Democrat-in-name-only.” It’s not like this is Soviet Russia, where there was a definitive line between party members and non-party members.

With ideologies, though, you can be a conservative-in-name-only, or a liberal-in-name-only. As for us, we’ve never subscribed to either ideology. We’re not in to cubbyholes. We’ve also never called ourselves a Republican or a Democrat or a Libertarian or a member of the Natural Law Party or even Bubba Cromer’s Sasquatch Party. We just roll with it.

So, there’s that.

Looks like we hit a nerve the other day when we reported that Rep. Tommy Stringer, on Twitter and Facebook, wrote, “Never buy a cat – Especially one that bites. Humane society charged me to take the dang thing back. Should have drowned it in my moat.” Naturally, having an elected official joking around about drowning cats and being clearly unable to take care of one struck us as something that says a lot about that person.

And now, it seems like he couldn’t handle the blowback from saying foolish things on the Internet, as he blocked WR from following him on Twitter and unceremoniously unfriended us on Facebook. Frankly, we’re surprised it didn’t happen earlier, what with him being one of the wholly-owned subsidiaries of Howard Rich & Co., taking $10,000 from that cabal during the 2008 primaries. And, his campaign manager was neo-Confederate consultant of Sen. Lee Bright, Chris Sullivan of Richard Quinn & Associates and his own ridiculously named Skyagunsta firm (yes, we know where the name comes from — it’s still ridiculous).

This reaction ranks right up there with former S.C. Republican Party executive director Jay W. Ragley blocking our cat on Twitter. That’s harsh, man.