O'Dellicious Celebrity Tournament Round One: Lil Wayne v. Gucci Mane

O'Dellicious Celebrity Tournament Round One

Lil Wayne vs. Gucci Mayne

Lil Wayne
        Growing up in New Orleans, Lil Wayne's career began blossoming at the tender young age of 15, really taking off when he deluged the internet with "mix tapes" before releasing Tha Carter III in 2008. At this point Weezy F. Baby was sitting on top of the world, a certified pothead midget toad-voiced genius, guesting on every song on the radio, running his own label, and raking in millions. Which means, based on the universal law of gravity, it was time to start heading back down. He released a horrible "rock" album, got busted carrying a gun (he's pretty gangster and was once shot in the chest...by himself by accident when he was 12 years old) and went to jail for a year. He got out not long ago but has since remained pretty quiet, releasing a few raps that he wrote while in the clink that come nowhere near to measuring up to his former greatness. He's due for a comeback, but while he was gone rap morphed into a new genre - Gay Rap. Chris Brown, Jason DeRulo, Taio Cruz, Drake, and a few others have pushed the high-voiced poppy emo rap to the forefront of the, "black music" genre, inheriting more from Justin Timberlake than they did from Lil Wayne. Lil Wayne is due for a comeback, but so far it's all been talk.

Gucci Mane
         An Atlanta based rapper who talks as if he's full up of every single drug that has ever been used since the time of the Neandrathal and has a mouth full of marbles, Gucci Mane is probably more famous for his ridiculous name than he is for his ridiculous music, and for driving his Lamborghini at insanely high speeds in circles around Atlanta on I-285 and being surprised when he gets pulled over and arrested for having a carload of drugs. After he got out of jail he released an album titled, "The State vs. Radric Davis" which I own, and which has only one good song on it (the one on which he is featured the least). He has an upcoming album titled, "The Appeal: Georgia's Most Wanted." Thankfully the drugs have finally wormed their way far enough into his brain and body to propel him to a level where he doesn't just do the normal things drug addicts do - you know, slur their words, not sleep for days and then sleep for several days straight, break things, be annoying, etc. but a level where he can legitimately be declared insane. On January 4th of this year a judge ordered him to check into a psychiatric hospital, and upon release he immediately went to a tattoo parlor and posted a picture to his Twitter feed of his new tattoo: an ice cream cone on his face. An ice cream cone on. his. face. No further questions, your honor.

Results:
    Lil Wayne's O'Delliciousness comes mostly from his incredible swagger. He declares himself to be, "the greatest rapper in the world" and then backs up that claim. While I wouldn't say that the O'Dellicious swagger even begins to approach that level, we do retain the ability to make a claim to greatness in a particular area and then, through the mystical powers of our ancestors, follow through on that claim. However the inability to sustain greatness subtracts a lot of points from this column.
    Gucci Mane, at first glance, has many more cons (so punny!) than pros, but he does beat Lil Wayne in one area - instead of becoming obscure (and I'm not saying Lil Wayne won't come back bigger than before, that's a possibility, but we're in the present, not the future) he went batshit crazy. He wasn't good enough to begin with to ever become bad, so to devolve he just turned loony. Normally, Lil Wayne would win this one hands down, but it's hard to not respect someone who tattoos a permanent ice cream cone on the side of his face that will remain there until the day he dies.

WINNER:

Yes, there are lightning bolts shooting from behind the cone, and yes, it says, "Brrr" on it. 

GUCCI MANE!

   Another round one match up will also be posted today, if Clayton ever gets off of his lazy ass. 

Fatherhood: The Blog - Week 6.

                 I am 26 years old. I have been married for two and a half years. My wife is turning 24 this Wednesday, March 24th. On Saturday, March 5th, in the year of our Lord Two Thousand and Eleven, we found out we were unexpectedly having a child. I intend to document each week of this pregnancy via this blog in our new column, un-cleverly titled (for the moment) Fatherhood: The Blog. This is the first entry.

            My wife and I both come from large families and fully intended on reproducing at some point, we just didn't expect this point to come so soon. "Don't you know where babies come from?" you might ask, as I have often asked the 20+ unwed mothers that I know (and that number is accurate, because Clayton, Margaret, and I lay suntanning in my backyard a few weekends ago counting the unwed mothers we know, not knowing that Mag was pregnant at the time). Yes, I know where babies come from, and somehow I've been able to avoid impregnating anyone/thing in my 18 year sexual history until now, using the exact same non-descript methods, a child has forced it's way into our life. I'm a disgustingly forthright person and do solemnly swear to be honest in all of my recountings for posterity's sake. In the event that I leave out portions of testimony, fudge the truth, or outright lie, it will be out of respect for my darling wife, and not to save myself from embarrassment in any fashion.

            When she told me I had just gotten off of work and we were preparing for a night out with friends at a minor league hockey game. I had been home for all of one minute and she was following me around the house with a peculiar little smile on her face until I asked her (politely), "Why are you being so creepy?" She told me bluntly, "I think that I'm pregnant." I didn't really feel anything in the moment, as my self-defense mechanisms work far faster than my thought processes and push me into a practical form of numbness long before emotion can come flooding in during a shocking moment. She had taken a pregnancy test on a whim, so I sent her to buy several more and try them as well (while I made myself Spaghetti-Os with meatballs and garlic toast with shredded cheese). When they all tested positive I came to the realization that a 99.7% accurate test, multiplied by three tests, meant that there was a 299.1% chance that I was having a baby.

           I was excited, personally. I like kids, for the most part (once they're old enough to talk and, therefore, entertain me), and more importantly, kids love me. It's pretty bizarre, but kids are drawn to me in strange ways. They talk to me, wave to me, stare at me, spit at me, just when I'm walking past them in stores. I assume it's because I have a big dopey cartoon-ish face and they assume I'm a character on a bad Nick Jr. show. I know that this child is going to change my life in a ton of ways that I've thought about, and a ton more that I haven't even the ability to predict; I know that things are going to be more stressful financially, that I'll have less time to myself, and that I'll get less sleep; I know that I wanted to be a little bit older and more settled in life before I had my first child, but I'm inexplicably giddy over this kid already. Mag was pissed the day we found out. That's a slight exaggeration, but she wasn't too happy about it - due to worry I'm certain. We had a few conversations about it during the day and then she woke up the next morning totally on board with the whole motherhood thing and talking to me about how to rearrange our guest bedroom to make it into a nursery.

        We went to the doctor a few days later and confirmed that she (my wife, not the doctor) was indeed with child, and that the estimated due date was 11/11/11. I doubt very much that the baby will be born on that day, as I think it's a law of nature that children aren't allowed to be born on their due dates, but it's still a pretty awesome date to be able to tell people. We've since been back to the doctor and heard the little shrimp's heartbeat, but I'll write more on that in the next entry in this column. As for now, I'll talk a little bit about what's going on with the baby in the belly.

         Pregnancy is much more confusing than I ever previously thought. One would think that four weeks past the date of conception one would be four weeks pregnant, but no, not really. It's calculated by some algorithm that I don't quite understand, but, regardless of whenever this thing (that is, my child) was created, it is now 8 weeks along it's merry journey to an oxygen rich environment. Being 8 weeks along means that the child itself is only 6 weeks old which means that it is the size of a thumb print. Regardless of the fact that it is small enough to flip like a coin, it still has tiny little finger and toe nubs, eyelids (but no eyes), some little ear things, and some other features I don't remember. This is the stage where it begins to look more like an alien and less like a dinosaur. Margaret looks exactly the same, and acts pretty much the same, but says that she can just tell she's pregnant because she feels different in indescribable ways. She's also a lot more tired than normal, which is weird to get used to since she's the one with all the energy in this relationship.

"Just chillin'." 

            What is a father? What kind of father will I be? What kind of father do I want to be? What if it's a boy? What if it's a girl? How will I raise this kid? How will having a child change the relationship between myself and my wife? How will pregnancy change my wife? How will being a father change the way I live my life? How the hell do I decide a name for this child that he or she will have to live with for the rest of his or her life? How do we prepare for parenthood? How do we prepare for the actual birth? 

           These questions, and more, will be answered over the next 7 and a half months of pregnancy in this blog. As Hunter S. Thompson once (or actually, many times) said, "Buy the ticket, take the ride." Oh daddy, I have.