Today’s contestant: Unnamed AP Writer

Entry: “Manning shook off conditions that would make a Siberian husky shiver. He repeatedly put the Giants in position to win in the third-coldest championship game ever - and certainly the most frigid of his young career.”

Analysis: There’s so much wrong with this…

Fine. It was cold. State the temperature or some shit and move on. Don’t get cute. If I ever find myself saying “third-coldest” in any context other than making fun of someone who just said “third-coldest,” I will be so ashamed that I will spontaneously freeze into the third-coldest corpse ever. And there have been some PRETTY COLD CORPSES. Am I right? Huh?

Next, I own a Siberian husky. His name is Chauncey. He’s illiterate, and he only understands maybe six words of English, but when I read that excerpt aloud to him, he scoffed. It’s not just because it’s factually inaccurate (He said that if he had been at the game, he would’ve run around in circles and stuffed his head in snow banks, because the temperature would’ve been just right for him), but also because he has a strong distaste for bad metaphors.

Chauncey’s suggestion: “If there were similar conditions at the Playboy Mansion, even James Bond’s dick would still be limp.”

From ESPN.com’s Chris Sheridan, we bring you the early leader for Worst Metaphor of the Millennium, 2001-3000:

The gesture didn’t work and Curry missed the free throw, but it mattered not one iota on a night when the anxiety and tension surrounding the Knicks evaporated when it quickly became apparent the Pistons were playing as lifelessly as attendees at a corpse convention.

Really? Corpse convention? And “lifelessly” is a clunky word. Please don’t use it. Personally, I would’ve gone with “The Pistons were as limp as James Bond’s dick at a NAAFA convention.” But that’s only one more reason why I could never be a sportswriter.

I dusted off this old thing today and gave it a fresh coat of paint. That’s all.

You’re gonna have to read this sooner or later. To wit, Sasha Frere-Jones gets bored at an Arcade Fire show and attacks indie rock as chronically too white. Sasha is the guy standing next to RZA by the way. He also defends his own white funk band as implicated better than most of my favorite bands because they play black music.

So here’s what I think.

Dear Mr. Frere-Jones,

So I like a lot of indie rock loving nerds, I want to tell you to shut up. But i’ll give you that lots of the music I love and listen to everyday is very “white” and lacks deep soulful rhythm. When I feel like listening to soulful music, I go for the real stuff; actual black artists or honkies devoted and talent enough to pull it off. Why settle for white funk when you have the real stuff?

Where I think your article was really misleading to the oldsters dumb enough to read the New Yorker to learn about pop music, not only because it didn’t bother to mention the huge success of TV on the Radio, the Black Keys and the White Stripes, both with indie fans and in relative mainstream, but because it implied that rolling was inherently more important than rocking.

Your identity politics are bush league. You don’t say anything about the utter mess of rap-rockers that ruined rock for 5 years. You’re picking on Arcade Fire, Wilco, and Pavement for even dumber reasons than you did poor little Stephin Merritt.

J-Ho and I have talked about this many times. We never really came to any conclusions. I guess The Chronic is amazingly great, but Slanted and Enchanted ultimately speaks to me more. Two great California albums from ‘92, but come on more indie fans and musicians grew up closer to somewhere like Stockton than South Central. Why should we pretend otherwise? Why should we have to keep trying to be Snoop, or even Little Richard? Malkmus pointed out Dave Brubeck, Rush, and REM are closer to our experience, why can’t we ironically celebrate that?

Pavement, with all of it’s toss-off musicianship and shambled lyricism, on some goofy level validates me to me. Before that record, I knew great art could from the ghetto and sharecroppers, because of Motown and the blues, and the classic rock that celebrated them. What Pavement said was meaningful music that was true to itself could come from my suburban existence. Lo-fi noise rock by over-read undergrads with more vinyl than talent meant there was hope for me as me. Not as somebody playing dress-up.

I rock the suburbs. Irony is my sincerity. I love hip-hop, but a white riot is the best I’m gonna do and I’m fine with that.

PS - BACK IN THE DAY, HALL AND OATS WAS NOT AS GOOD AS MICHAEL JACKSON. YOU ARE FUCKING NUTS.

UPDATE -More kindling for our indie nerd bonfire:

Exhibit A: Lester Bangs tackling real racism in the punk era.

Exhibit B: Pavement on Leno refusing to play nice.

Exhibit C: Animal Collective playing “For Reverend Green,” which somehow might be the missing link to this whole thing.

Good news, Barber Collegiates: My personal threat level has been lowered to turquoise and I’ve emerged from hiding! It’s been a hectic few weeks, and I understand four or five people are dead, but que sera sera. Many thanks to everyone who sent cookies and vodka to The Barber College Secured Location.

Being an incredibly famous writer can be dangerous. You never know who might use your words to justify violence.

I’m not sure we should let this person continue to give language warriors a bad name without a bit of a fight.

Oh, Grammar Vandal. This is difficult for me to say. I know you think you are doing God’s work, but I think you’d be a happier person if you left the sanctimonious, prescriptivist fervor to the religious right and got a job as an editor, which job would allow you to use your powers for good.

In other words: Settle down, grasshopper. You have much to learn. Relax, have an iced tea, and consider these important facts:

1) Botched “sentences” are entertaining. RUN EASY BOSTON? That’s hilarious! Why are you trying to deprive me of that sign?

2) Some rules of grammar are stupid. Tell me, do you honestly give half a shit whether I split an infinitive with an adverb? If you answered, “Yes,” you revealed your allegiance to a pointless, archaic rule artificially imposed on English by Latin-worshipping dead guys who thought it would make them sound smarter. They’re dead now. Do you see where I’m going with this?

3) By harping on strict adherence to the rules, you hurt the cause. It’s nice when people use apostrophes well and funny when they don’t, but honey, we’ve got bigger fish to fry.

4) Nobody likes a smartass.

I guess this is a well meaning response to J-Ho’s most recent myspace hottie feature. She deserved everything that was said about her I’ll bet, but whether myspace is a public forum that warrants the Queen’s English, is up for debate. Still I’m not trying to start an inner blog feud.

My English teacher wife won’t like what I’m gonna say either, and I am counting on A. and Joel to come back at me about this. But the fact is I’m the only white, English major I know who really thinks Ebonics should have been taught and that privileged professor-types complaining about how anyone, let alone poor people, write/speak/think in the name of protecting the integrity of language, should be shot.

As a semi-professional writer, I’m supposed to believe in clarity above all. But clarity is subjective and you have to be ruthless to articulate and capture transient ideas as they make sense from your perspective, not the perspective of grammar nazis.

I catch flack for refusing to be a grammar catholic, but to me the rules of English as practice represent both practical and arbitrary decisions made slowly over the course of thousand of years and only codified roughly 200 years ago by white people you’ve never met. Some of these people were geniuses, some were tools. So it’s not surprising that, at best, our language is a strangely wired system – stunning and terrible in its complexities and peculiarities, not unlike a schizophrenic.

Now it’s an often repeated HST fact, “that to life outside the law, you must be honest,” so I say this with a clean conscious: traditional usage doesn’t make for better thoughts and clinging to strunk&white, which i love and keep on my desk like a good nerd, won’t save you. As dialects are slowly being whitewashed out of America, we need “bad” grammar more than ever.

I have been reading “Moby Dick” lately and the phrasing twists don’t seem archaic to me at all, they seem new and exciting. So many not very smart people hiding behind formal grammar and big words. If you go down the Chomsky innate-grammar-mechanism road, then I suspect the mental tools needs to memorize and master grammatical systems are often antithetical to tools needed to create, question, and reinvent language, which is what every writer worth anything aspires to.

English doesn’t respect you. Don’t respect it. Butcher, pummel and break it. Own the fucker and ride it like a giant, wild mutant sea snake. Be excited about crazy slang and new ways of saying things. It’s what Shakespeare, Twain, and Old Dirty would want.