For my TAMU friends: some healthy discussion in advance of our game..

This weekend, we meet up for what could be the Game of the Century*. I respect y'all and everything, but the day you joined the conference, you became our mortal enemies once a decade or so, depending on whether we become bad enough that the SEC offices in Birmingham will allow Bama to play us as both of their cross-divisional opponents each year (After reading this board for years, I've come to assume that “in Birmingham” is actually part of their official name.) Since, given our record lately, this might be the last time we ever meet, I'd like to clear up a few things about your state. Two of them are gastronomy (and taxonomy)-related. The third isn't

1) Texas barbecue is not barbecue. It's cooked meat. It's taking what our caveman forebears did millennia ago and slapping your doohicky of a state name on it. Don't mistake me – it's delicious and I could happily eat it three times a week and sleep like a baby afterwards, but when I can achieve the same basic effect by leaving a rump roast on my dashboard while parked in the Texas Panhandle in the middle of August, you don't get to call it barbecue. Just say 'brisket'. Or 'meat log'. Or 'oven slab'. Or even some name you wouldn't give your genitalia. It's just not barbecue. And don't try to slip it past us by saying 'BBQ' or 'Cue' or so other variant. Vandy fans are too smart for that, and other SEC fans can ask us for help understanding.

2) Chili requires beans. If you can't fart “Yellow Rose of Texas" in descant with your chosen life partner after eating a bowl of chili, you have not consumed chili. You have consumed Dinty Moore Beef Stew. Either add beans to your chili or start have Meat Soup Festivals. Your illegal Mexican immigrant ancestors died for the right to put beans in chili. Honor them.

3) Nothing rhymes with Texas. “Lexus” is a proper noun and has limited applicability. I have no idea how you can work “nexus” into a poem, song, or saying without sounding like a twit. You can make the argument that “sex us” rhymes, but that plural pronoun is just perverted and wrong and involves way too many chances to take an errant elbow in the crotch. But my main point here is that 'mess with' abso-fricking-lutely Does Not Rhyme With Texas. Stop trying to rhyme it. Bad poetry isn't going to scare people away from "messing" with you.

Okay, now that I've gotten that off my chest, the rest of the SEC and I can sleep easier tonight knowing that somebody finally had the courage to tell y'all you're doing everything wrong. Here's to a good game.

(Be sure to stop by some real barbecue joints in the area. It will change your life. And possibly your sexual orientation because good barbecue could turn a gay man straight and a hot straight woman bi. Honest to God. Try it!

Yeah, I had to work in a bad gay joke there or you would complain.)




*Based on a survey of adult male heads-of-household at my current address. Margin for error +/-100%