Further required reading / counter-admission

I've not going to relay the news to you: it's easy enough to find at this stage. But in the extremely unlikely event you haven't been paying attention to the blAUgosphere over the past week, you're missing some incredible stuff:

--I linked up Grotus's Iron Bowl piece de resistance in the last post and immediately felt bad I didn't find a good spot to quote Jeremy's equally kick-ass call-to-arms at TWER. A sampling:

For over the course of the past six years, I have realized that the dynamic forged in the ’60s and ’70s - the wilderness of our fathers, a wilderness which our young hearts have never known, but that bore in them the hate on which we were nursed - provides them no alternative to the disgusting arrogance they’re known for.

That is who they are.

When the streak stretches to 10 … to 10 x 10 … they will bark and they will howl and they will return to their vomit. But they will never be able to tap the spirit of the underdog. It is a sixth sense kept from them by the facts of the world and by their sin.

Meanwhile, it is Auburn’s birthright. And that is why we will win the last Iron Bowl ever played, just like we won the first.

Dude, with all due respect to the several fine Alabama bloggers out there, if this game was going to be decided by "quality and intensity of prose," Auburn would win in a walk.

--Wire Road and Shug has been rocking the Iron Bowl YouTubery all week long. My personal favorite:



I know the biggest play of that game was the fourth-down TD pass from a cold Nix to Sanders (which you can also watch here), but the game wasn't won then. The game was won when Bostic took off, and that's when myself and my brothers (Mom and Dad were at the game) who were huddled around the radio, Great Depression-style, went nuts.

--War Eagle Atlanta's done some yeoman's work in arguing that the Iron Bowl is the country's greatest rivalry, which he sums up here along with some perspective on Auburn's relative success in it:

(P)robably our greatest claim to fame is that despite constantly being measured against one of the all-time great programs, we've never let that Goliath put us away in the head-to-head competition. We have an opportunity Saturday to pull within 4 games of tying Alabama in the all-time series. No other intrastate rivalry is as close. Most of them are blowouts in the all-time records. As I write this tonight, Texas is beating Texas A&M in their 115th game together. Texas will improve their record to 74-36-5 against the Aggies. That's a 38 game lead over their fiercest in-state rival--they have more than twice the number of wins. That, my friends, ain't even close. Yet, Auburn is only 5 games behind one of CFB's greatest teams. Bama has a winning record against every other team in the SEC, but no one in the conference plays them closer than us.

Preach it, brother.

--All right, the following picture is 89 different ways of wrong and I think it's an unnecessarily pessimistic portrayal of what ought to be a tightly-contested ball game, but A) what do you expect from a blog named A Lifetime of Defeats? B) I'll be damned if I didn't LOL:



--On the other side of the aisle, pregame takes are varying from "All week long I’ve tried to generate hate for this game. To find even an ounce of smug satisfaction in what seems nigh upon inevitable on Saturday. But I can’t" to "I've tried to brew up a gumbo pot of not very nice feelings for Auburn, but I can't do it. The best I can come up with is a weak broth of those guys don't interest me very much ... All and all Auburn, at least this season, is just another brink [sic, because it's Hate Week] in that wall." Contrast that with the Auburn preparations above: who do you think wants this game more? If the players are adopting the mood of the respective fanbases at all, Auburn will come in with a huge advantage.

RollBamaRoll at least seems to take the game seriously, with OTS providing a full preview and Todd breaking out an Embarrassing Admission he's claiming he'd planned on saving for the SEC championship game.

But in an effort to give Auburn whatever advantage I can, I'm going to make my own counter-admission. And while it's not exactly fair in that Todd's divulged two full seasons of admissions while this is my first, I think it's fair to say the football gods' favor is going to be pretty substantially curried in our favor after this. To wit ...

(OK, deep breath, I can do this ... it's just the Internet ... forever ...)

Behold! the first album (on cassette tape) I ever bought with my own money:



I had just started fifth grade at the time. So I'm not sure this one really counts as a "first album I ever bought"; I hadn't even started listening to popular music and that would be my only music purchase for more than two years. Eventually I did start listening to the radio and watching music videos, though, and when I did I saved up my allowance and went out and proudly bought this:



Sigh. Seriously, you guys, if Auburn doesn't pull this out I'm going to regret the hell out of this, aren't I?