The Cougar Lounge - Food Fight!

"Bill is at a point in his life where he is ready to go do something else and that matched up with the direction the university wanted to go."

- Oregon booster Pat Kilkenny - a big proponent of the Oregon basketball arena project - who helped grease the pig, er, fund the $1.8 million buyout to oust Moos and match him up with the direction the university wanted him to go – toward the Palouse.

"It's always flattering if you're considered for a job like that. Right now, my goal is to win this game."

- USC assistant head coach Steve Sarkisian who was lobbied to be put into the ASU head coaching candidate pool by his boss Pete Carroll – shortly before the Trojans' loss to UCLA in which they scored nine points. Uh, maybe, not such a good idea put that game on your resume, Steverino.

"If vodka can be made out of grapes, then we might as well call an apple an orange and rename brandy as beer."

- European vodka company chairman Rolands Gulbis, objecting to a recent trend of "vodka" being made of substances other than the traditional grain or potatoes. Hmmm…drink enough vodka and think up your own names for stuff? Great idea, Gulbis! You're hired! You start tomorrow in the Lounge.

It was music to the Lounge clientele's ears when football season came to a close two weeks ago and basketball season began because then nobody would get worried about any of the crazy circus tents that pop up in the last few weeks of the season and instead we can focus on the important stuff like why they won't let an ad for a vibrating condom appear on British TV until after 11 at night but they will let Footballer's Wives shenanigans go on well before then. But in order to focus on that, we would have to convince ourselves that we are in real time and with the proliferation of delayed television coverage recently, who's to say that the networks aren't just messing with Texas and everybody and nothing is really "live" anymore? The networks could install a seven, 15- or 42-second delays – whatever they damn well feel like to protect us baboons from gathering too many bones - in their "live" coverage of an event and you may never see anything live again. You already know what that feels like with any Olympics coverage. That UCLA win over USC? It coulda happened…then again…the networks coulda just made you think it happened and really USC made a miracle comeback and….aw, never mind, it happened.

Something else that happened that was delayed – slightly - by live television coverage, was poor Calvin Broadus'…oh, sorry…Snoop Dogg's arrest on drug possession charges shortly after an appearance on a television talk show. Poor Cal, who has always received the shaft from The Man, was wearing USC receiver Dwayne Jarrett's #8 jersey when he departed the Burbank hoosegow – causing some people to think that USC recruiting has really gone too far this time. But it was, of course, all an innocent misunderstanding and someday the Trojans will have a good laugh about it the next time they actually feel like laughing – which scientists say should occur sometime in 2009.

In fact, for a so-called holiday season, there has been an awful lot of not-laughing going on - Lewis Carroll might call it "unlaughing" when he got done hallucinating about looking glasses. Barney the laughable dinosaur that everybody thought was creepy is not laughing – or rather the lawyers that are in charge of Barney's assets [they might be laughing from all those merchandising deals they made back in the go-go 90s] are not laughing because some guy beat everybody else to it and put up a website a long time ago that depicted Barney as living a double life as an evil creature [sorta like that St. Nick sidekick in Austria who goes by the name of Krampus and doles out the lumps of coal and threatens the naughty kiddies with beatings if they don't behave and ask their parents to buy them lots of presents]. Shocking! Absolutely shocking that anybody would have the audacity to even think such a thing! Barney is not evil. Clearly, Barney – much like Father Lotto during football season, is clinically insane. Now, you want to talk about evil, then you can talk about Bobby Knight all you want or, when you get tired of that, you can talk about the torture they handed down to poor Argentinian striker Snoop Dogg…oh, sorry…no, it's Carlos Tevez. Evidently Tevez is being made to wear a Brazil shirt during two weeks' of training for his English soccer league team – West Ham United – as penance for storming out of a match after he was subbed out. Soccer players can be so evil.

But none of the Lounge clientele is worried about any of that stuff. They are just glad it's not football season any longer because then they would have to acknowledge that San Jose State will, unlike the Cougars, be going to a bowl game – the same San Jose State that asked to be pulled out of Wazzu's 2007 schedule. They said it was because the Cougars were too tough for their schedule but they were just being nice and it was probably because they didn't want to hurt their SOS for next year. But there is good news for the Cougars in coming years – South Dakota just announced that they would be going to Division I – sounds like a possible "Seattle game" opponent for 2010.

"We're not undefeated anymore, baby!" yells Rancid Polecat #2, who is mocking newcomer West Side Patty from last week.

That's not very nice but that's about what we would expect to be hacked up by a rancid polecat after the Cougars' men's hoop team finally lost their first game of the season, on the road, at Utah. Now, instead of being undefeated, the Cougars will only go into their regional showdown with Gonzaga at 7-1 and that is not good enough for RP [who is no McMurphy – not even close] but is good enough for the Lounge consensus.

"I'm expecting to see too many Gonzaga fans in Beasley – just like I saw too many Huskies at the Apple Cup," says a troubled Dereck "The Avant-Garde Left Wing Namby Pamby" Eau de Toilette, who remains haunted by football season.

Well, Dereck, the Cougars certainly have their work cut out for them. Not only must they sway the region but they must also convince their own languid fan base of their merit. How does the Lounge know this? Well, for the last four home games [and just for statistical anomaly purposes – and we will include Spokane in there even though the thought of Spokane as a "home" game is about as laughable as the thought of the Seattle football game as a "home game"] – the attendance for the undefeated Cougars' men's hoop games has averaged a whopping 2,730, By contrast, Utah – who began their season 0-3, their worst start in 36 years – were playing powerhouse Weber State the same night Wazzu was playing Portland [Attendance: 2208] and pulled in 8,929. USC, which has never been mistaken for anything more than a speed bump next to UCLA in men's hoops, will not be requiring a student lottery for students to purchase tickets for their hoop games until Pac-10 season starts. The reason – low turnout. The attendance for last week's game against Long Beach State? 7,112. The Cougars are a mere nine wins away from their first winning season in a decade but the Beasley seats this week will be filled with nearly half Gonzaga fans that have jury-rigged their bandwagoneering to last almost five years now. Even if the Cougars win this week, they still have a long way to go.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are over – now you're on your own, sailor! Fortunately, the Lounge has a new vat of nog and is still looking out for you this holiday season. All out of ideas for X-mas shopping? Do not fret, go to Red Ferret. You may not be able to find nor afford many of their items but the least they can do is give you ideas…bad ones or good ones, well, we are not in charge of that. But how can you not be inspired by flying alarm clocks, solar-powered milk frothers and gravity-defying shoes?

Finally, the Lounge Scientists were forced to subsume some their bright ideas under other headings because it seems as though their nog-induced lab findings were being met with nothing short of frivolity – which is good for the festive holiday season but not so good for serious scientific findings. So they decided to sleep on it and that was a good decision because they discovered that a gentle – remember, that's gentle, non-lobotomy levels – electric currents to the brain during sleep produced additional memory. About 8% more memory, in fact, and that's good to have in the holiday season when you are trying to forget all about fruitcake. The research was designed to help people with brain injuries but the scientists know that college students on the verge of finals are already drooling over the prospect of zapping themselves to remember that extra 8% for the tests. Normally, the scientists think it's a good idea to zap a college students' brain – especially after a late Saturday night – but in a rare display of social consciousness [noticeably apart from their usual state of unconsciousness], the scientists are warning against any hasty conclusions.

"I think every single medical student in the country might want to plug into this type of device at home or in the dorm but, in the end, we don't know if there are adverse side effects that we just don't recognize at the moment," says Lounge Scientist #83, Daniel Herrera of Cornell University, who clearly needs a zap since he has forgotten that even if there were adverse effects, it would take a long time to differentiate them from normal student behavior.

But after the 2006 football season and based on early attendance figures for basketball season, Wazzu students could use it to zap themselves into remembering where they are supposed to be on Tuesday evening.

+++++++sponsored by Clark's Restaurant+++++++++

Attention COUGAR Fans! Autumn is here! Time to feed that appetite. How can you afford to go one day further without some tasty morsels from Clark's Restaurant in Grays Harbor – home of the Best Hamburger in Twin Harbors for seven consecutive years? Come in for the burger, fresh homemade fries and milkshakes concocted from homemade ice cream. Go ahead, we dare you to try and pass up more than 12 varieties of hamburgers to choose from, full dinners, lunch and full breakfast served daily. Clark's Restaurant 360.538.1487. Seven miles south of Aberdeen, Washington on Highway 101. Proud supporter of CougZone. Mention this ad for a free small hot chocolate.