To help Commodores across the nation deal with the pain of fresh losses and the lingering memories of historic ones, we've instituted Schadenfreude Fridays. The aim here is to comfort Vanderbilt's faithful by presenting train wrecks even worse than the past 35 years of Commodore football. Schadenfreude is pleasure taken from the suffering of others - and even though this football season may be a triumph of Coach James Franklin's spirit, the odds that we still finish 3-9 are pretty good. Ergo, the joy of watching others fail may be one of the few highlights of 2011. These don't necessarily have to be football related or even sports related - just something so spectacularly terrible that it makes Vandy fans a little bit happier to be cheering for their lovable group of three-star recruits with high GPAs and even higher 40 yard dash times.

The Alaska-class cruiser is not one of them.

The Alaska-class cruiser was a beast of a machine. A 34,000 ton battleship that was custom made to destroy the best and biggest ships that Japan and Germany had to offer. These boats were one of the largest projects the U.S. Navy had ever undertaken at the time. They were agile behemoths that could induce pant-wetting fear in even the most grizzled enemy officer. They were the Allied Forces' trump card to any suit the Axis could pull on the open water. They were the end result of two decades of naval innovation.

Of course, by the time they were ready for combat, they were mostly useless.

The Alaska-class was strictly designed to take out one of the biggest sea threats of World War II - enemy cruisers. These ships, also referred to as "pocket battleships" on the German side, combined heavy artillery and the speed of a smaller boat to cause problems on the sea. Their combination of speed and power made them the Maurice Jones-Drew of World War II era armored ships. They could punch holes in opposing formations and rip through fleets with the destructive force of a wolverine taped to a badger. And by the time the Alaska showed up, they were all gone.

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To help Commodores across the nation deal with the pain of fresh losses and the lingering memories of historic ones, we've got a special feature; Schadenfreude Fridays. The aim here is to comfort Vanderbilt's faithful by presenting train wrecks even worse than the past 35 years of Commodore football or the basketball team's March performances since 2007.

Schadenfreude is pleasure taken from the suffering of others - and since basketball season ended with the blunt pleasure of a kick in the balls, the joy of watching others fail may be one of the few highlights of 2011. These don't necessarily have to be football related or even sports related - just something so spectacularly terrible that it makes Vandy fans a little bit happier to be cheering for their lovable group of three-star recruits with high GPAs and even higher 40 yard dash times.

Today's entry goes beyond failure to revel in the mind of Vanderbilt's next great quarterback. Shame has no place in Jordan Rodgers's world, and the only reason this is getting the Schadenfreude treatment is just because we don't have a weekly feature called "Stream of Awesomeness Mondays." In his Twitter feed, Rodgers shares the details of his everyday life and gives us a glimpse into the regular mechanisms of a Vandy signal caller.

We've expected big things of Jordan since his arrival in Nashville, and while a shoulder injury has kept him from impressing us at Dudley Field, his Twitter has been strong enough to make him the personal favorite for the 2011 starting spot amongst the AoG contingent. Mixed alongside updates on practices and training are some absolute gems that belie Rodgers's love of spandex, scooters, and the best pop culture the 90s has to offer. Since popping up on Twitter in time for last year's summer practices, the redshirt junior has painted a picture of who the man beneath the pads is. As a result, we've come up with our own analysis for Jordan Rodgers; prolific arm and prolific tweets. 

Join us, won't you, for a feature we'd like to call "Jordan is..."

Jordan is... STYLISH:

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The 1980s were the high water mark of professional wrestling. The niche market of "sports entertainment" exploded onto the mainstream behind the force of Hulk Hogan and the united front of the World Wrestling Federation. Weekly television programs, Saturday morning cartoons, comics, and even ice cream was co-opted from what had been simple regional attention to the national stage.

The Hulkster was drawn on using toxic ink and the ice cream was 35% soap, but it was absolutely worth it. via www.awesomehq.com

This era gave America some of its greatest heros and most brilliant xenophobic caricatures. Rowdy Roddy Piper taught us that all Scots are surly, churlish dicks who want nothing more in life than to make you look like an asshole. The Iron Sheik prepared us for decades of ongoing strife with Iran. Nikolai Volkoff taught us not to trust the Soviets, and later, once the WWF resolved America's Cold War tensions, that Russians were our friends. Hacksaw Jim Duggan paved the way for Toby Keith by proving that patriotism needed no baseline level of intelligence as long as you carried a big stick and yelled a lot. And the Ultimate Warrior taught us never to trust anyone from Parts Unknown.

Unlike the wrestlers I just mentioned, the Warrior's gimmick wasn't wrapped in stereotypes but in sheer lunacy. His body and frenetic movements were a shrine to 80s excess of steroids and cocaine. His promos were assaults on literacy and comprehension. His moves in the ring suggested that he was an alien spacecraft being controlled by a tiny drunk creature hunkered down somewhere in his head. His mannerisms on and off camera seemed to confirm this.

By these powers combined, the Ultimate Warrior was awesome.

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To help Commodores across the nation deal with the pain of fresh losses and the lingering memories of historic ones, we've got a special feature; Schadenfreude Fridays. The aim here is to comfort Vanderbilt's faithful by presenting train wrecks even worse than the past 35 years of Commodore football or the basketball team's March performances since 2007.

Schadenfreude is pleasure taken from the suffering of others - and since basketball season ended with the blunt pleasure of a kick in the balls, the joy of watching others fail may be one of the few highlights of 2011. These don't necessarily have to be football related or even sports related - just something so spectacularly terrible that it makes Vandy fans a little bit happier to be cheering for their lovable group of three-star recruits with high GPAs and even higher 40 yard dash times.

The American soft drink market is a complicated beast. Behind the two major brands (Coke and Pepsi) lies a jungle of varying tastes and terrible decisions. Since the inception of the country's major sodas, beverage companies have scrapped to create the next Mountain Dew, testing various combinations of ungodly chemical flavors in order to find the right taste and win the hearts of future diabetics everywhere.

Sometimes this results in sublime prosperity. Anyone who has had Baja Blast at their local Taco Bell will tell you that Pepsi Co. has created a drink that allows you to reach out and touch the hand of god. Other variants, like Vanilla Coke, Cranberry Sierra Mist (at Thanksgiving), and Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper are moderately successful. However, they're the exception to the rule. Similar to Vanderbilt football, failure is the norm when it comes to major overhauls or new products in the soft drink market.

Like Woody Widenhofer's tenure, sometimes these failures are epic. Coke's sugary-sweet revamp in 1985 led to more pipe bombs being sent to their headquarters in Atlanta than a Kansas abortion clinic. Crystal Pepsi has been credited for bringing a nation together in solidarity after Operation Desert Storm just to talk about how shitty it was. Josta contained 19 different types of fatal poison, including cobra venom. 

Despite some high-profile mistakes, soda companies haven't been deterred from finding new and aggressive ways to lose money and alienate the public. Today, we'll take a look at a few notables in the world of terrible soft drinks.

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To help Commodores across the nation deal with the pain of fresh losses and the lingering memories of historic ones, we've got a special feature; Schadenfreude Fridays. The aim here is to comfort Vanderbilt's faithful by presenting train wrecks even worse than the past 35 years of Commodore football or the basketball team's March performances since 2007.

Schadenfreude is pleasure taken from the suffering of others - and since basketball season ended with the blunt pleasure of a kick in the balls, the joy of watching others fail may be one of the few highlights of 2011. These don't necessarily have to be football related or even sports related - just something so spectacularly terrible that it makes Vandy fans a little bit happier to be cheering for their lovable group of three-star recruits with high GPAs and even higher 40 yard dash times.

Today, we're putting the burden of shame on ourselves at Anchor of Gold. In honor of Vanderbilt's upcoming Spring Game and the tailgating that goes with it, contributor gumbercules and I took it on ourselves to run through some of your pre-game beer options for this Sunday's showdown between Black and Gold. And to commemorate Coach James Franklin's first major event at Vanderbilt Stadium, we decided to go big with it.

24 ounces big.

This week's feature will run through four of the biggest, cheapest, most impressive-looking king cans we could find at our local Woodman's up here in Wisconsin. For less than $7, we were able to pick up 96 ounces of malt liquor, high gravity lager, and something called a "stack" that all came in at 10% alcohol or higher. For one evening, we were kings amongst hobos, with enough alcohol content in four cans to make up the bulk of 20 regular beers. Of course, with great liquor comes great responsibility, so we recorded our thoughts so that we could pass them on to the Vanderbilt faithful. 

These reviews go in chronological order according to how the day progressed, so don't be shocked if they make less sense as the article wears on.

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Today's entry dives into the world of mixed martial arts, where failure is a common thread outside of the UFC. Entities like Extreme Fighting, PRIDE, and the International Fight League folded after varying degrees of success thanks in part to the competitive pressure of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Even the UFC's most viable competitor, Strikeforce, couldn't hold out as an independent promotion and were recently bought out by the brand that has become the NFL of MMA. And while these promotions left with some form of dignity and some memorable fights (especially in PRIDE's case), two organizations boldly said "Fuck you" to self-respect and collapsed in upon themselves like dying supernovas. These stalwarts of athletic failure were Elite XC and Affliction.

Both organizations have gained a presence in the public mindset over the past 4 years. Affliction is a familiar name for those of us who hang around douchebags regularly, a t-shirt company that jumped from sponsorship to matchmaking for reasons unknown to most. A shameless "couture" style company, they pride themselves on producing clothes with more hearts, skulls, wings, and script writing per square inch than Ed Hardy. Elite XC, on the other hand, made waves by being the first MMA organization to ink a major, non-cable television deal when they signed on with CBS to broadcast six events a year. Three cards later, it was all over. Today, we'll focus on their complete inability to understand the sport they sought to promote.

Elite XC was short for "Elite Xtreme Combat," and with a name like that, many understood that its shelf life was limited. Its parent company was run by boxing promoter Gary Shaw, who put his son Jared in place as the public face of the Elite XC management. This was a mistake, as the younger Shaw was a douchebag (Rapper name: $kala. Tentative reality show title: Blood, Sweat, and Bling. Neither statement is fiction). Right off the bat, things weren't exactly built for longevity with the promotion.

Despite the potentially insane decisions going on at the highest levels of management, the company was able to build a moderately talented roster of young talent and UFC castoffs. Guys like Jake Shields (fighting for a UFC title this month), Nick Diaz (Strikeforce champion), Antonio Silva (possible mutant), Gina Carano (lovely), and Paul Daley (asshole) dotted the promotion's lineup alongside veterans like Phil Baroni (likable asshole), Charles Bennett (lunatic, felon), Paul Buentello (fatty), and Roy Nelson (ditto). Of course, the company was able to pull in this talent by buying out regional showcase shows like King of the Cage and Cage Rage, which gave the company a virtual monopoly on shitty company names for cage fighting but also drained Elite XC of almost all their cash assets. In less than two years the brand had grown into one of the biggest in the industry, but wasn't making anywhere near the amount of money needed to be viable.

With a stable of solid but relatively unknown fighters on board and few usable assets, the company had to make a bold statement to earn credibility. A move that would bolster the company's talent and force competitors to take them seriously in the emerging field of MMA. Something that would legitimize the sport as it moved towards its first ever national primetime broadcast. A spectacle that would make Elite XC the brand that people went to when they thought of combat sports.

But that would have been too much work, so the Shaws said "fuck it" and brought this guy in instead:

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Are you guys getting the subtlety here? It's hard to spot.

To help Commodores across the nation deal with the pain of fresh losses and the lingering memories of historic ones, we've got a special feature; Schadenfreude Fridays. The aim here is to comfort Vanderbilt's faithful by presenting train wrecks even worse than the past 35 years of Commodore football or the basketball team's March performances since 2007.

Schadenfreude is pleasure taken from the suffering of others - and since basketball season ended with the blunt pleasure of a kick in the balls, the joy of watching others fail may be one of the few highlights of 2011. These don't necessarily have to be football related or even sports related - just something so spectacularly terrible that it makes Vandy fans a little bit happier to be cheering for their lovable group of three-star recruits with high GPAs and even higher 40 yard dash times.

Rebecca Black has been getting a lot of heat lately, and much of it is deserved; "Friday" is either a terrible song or an Andy Kaufman-esque work of genius. However, there's one song out there that deserves your scorn much, much more. A song that has flooded radio stations and reached out to the hearts of depressed teenagers reeling from breakups across America. A song that mixes metaphors interchangeably and addresses them with such literal force that you'd swear the writers have absolutely no understanding of hyperbole, structure, or possibly even the concept of fiction.  A song named Jar of Hearts.

There's no way you haven't heard this song if you live in America. My terrible gym plays it at least once an hour, presumably in an attempt to ignite rage in their spin classes. It's also on the radio nearly non-stop, which proves that teenaged girls have more control over the media than can be good for anyone.

It may be popular, but make no mistake; this song is toxic. If you play it near a Robin's nest, the mother bird will abandon her eggs. I played the YouTube video while watching Mad Men clips and it made Jon Hamm shit his pants. It makes the Cupid Shuffle look like Greensleeves by comparison. And the Cupid Shuffle is a song so bad that it tries to teach white people how to dance.

People in Indiana *love* this song. It's a phenomenon that defies explanation.

Yet, despite this toxicity, this song just keeps getting more popular. Its Wikipedia page has a whole section noting critical praise, and somehow none of it seems ironic. "Jar of Hearts" is already a Billboard Top 20 song and just won't go away. 

So is it just me? Am I the only one that thinks this song is terrible? Has my hate stemming from the end of basketball season blinded me to poor Ms. Perri's plight? Am I just a heartless bastard with no taste in music?

To figure this out, I decided to pour over the song lyric by lyric to see if I'm wrong.

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*This post is sponsored by Crank 2: High Voltage. "Truly Crank 2 is a movie intended for the Gods that somehow graced our Earthly presence.  I've never seen so many strippers get shot before!  - Roger Ebert.

To help Commodores across the nation deal with the pain of fresh losses and the lingering memories of historic ones, we're instituting a new feature; Schadenfreude Fridays. The aim here is to comfort Vanderbilt's faithful by presenting train wrecks even worse than the past 35 years of Commodore football. Schadenfreude is pleasure taken from the suffering of others - and since this year's football season holds all the promise of a thousand awkward prom nights, the joy of watching others fail may be one of the few highlights of 2010. These don't necessarily have to be football related or even sports related - just something so spectacularly terrible that it makes Vandy fans a little bit happier to be cheering for their lovable group of three-star recruits with high GPAs and even higher 40 yard dash times.

This week's installment of Schadenfraude Fridays comes to AoG a bit late, as I was having trouble trying to find things I hated spectacularly enough to include here. After some deliberation, Affliction's foray into the MMA world was put on the back burner in favor of some 8-bit nostalgia that we all can relate to - terrible NES games. 

To many, Nintendo's Famicom was the parent we never had, the parent we never saw, or the parent that didn't use their belt to punish us. Its 8-bit glory brought a low-resolution plumber into our homes and into our hearts as a generation of children realized that exercise and fresh air were totally gay. No one element has had a bigger role in our downturn as a society as the original NES, and when America crumbles into a debt-ridden, uneducated, obese third world country, our only solace will be that we finally found the castle that the princess was being kept in. And even that won't feel as good as surviving a three round war against Mike Tyson as a 105 pound midget boxer.

But for all the memorable and amazing titles the NES gave us, there are several turds floating around this punchbowl. As the popularity of the console swelled, game designers pumped out loads of crap solely in the hopes of getting paid, flooding the market with a wealth of awful. Some of these awful things were original concepts that never should have left the mind of the 14 year old autistic child that dreamt them up, while others were quick rip-offs of popular trends, movie tie-ins, or arcade ports that didn't quite understand the 8-bit concept. Regardless of the source, these were the games that crushed our dreams as eight year olds. 

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