Dear Readers,

I’m here to warn you that the Roshamblog is on the verge of mutiny. Some people here at Roshambo have been grumbling about my totalitarian tight grip of the blog content. They feel like I should cough up the password and “give others a voice.” These people cite my lack of posts over the past month as proof that I need to relinquish some control. Take for instance the fact that our road warriors, Adam Savin and Dan Ricciato, took the Roshambus to the Superbowl. Interesting blog opp, right? You’d probably want to hear from them about their adventures on the road. Or take the fact that The Wine Enthusiast’s March Buying Guide just rated three of our red wines at 90 points or higher. (FJV Syrah - 93 points; Reverend Zinfandel - 92 points; Rock - 90 points). I probably should have posted about that and maybe even mused about the rating system and our philosophy on wine scores. But alas, once again I failed you, dear reader.

In my defense - and it’s a paltry one at that - I have been sick. And busy. And sick again. And now, well, now I’m on tour with the rock band OURS, opening up for Marilyn Manson.  (Special thanks to our favorite Space Cowboy DJ, H8Ball, for the following photoshop job.  In the real world they don’t normally put the didgeridoo player’s name in lights).

Yes, I play the didgeridoo, or as Naomi calls it, the didgeriDON’T. In fact, I’m writing this post from the tour bus enroute to San Francisco for Wednesday’s show at the Warfield. In other words, I haven’t been able to give the blog its proper attention and perhaps I should consider letting others post. I’ll let you know how this all pans out. In the meantime, I will start to introduce some of the colorful characters who may help populate the blog. Starting with Adam Savin. Just give me a day or two.  Thanks for your patience.

Your faithful, though sometimes forgetful, Roshamblogger,

Scott Keneally

There’s this writer I like a lot named Chuck Klosterman. Considering the fact that he’s a monthly columnist for Esquire and the wildly successful author of the “low culture manifesto,” Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, he’s certainly a few light years ahead of me in terms of success. But still, I don’t envy or wish harm on such a man. (Okay, I might envy him, but ever since my conselors confiscated most of my Vodoo dolls, including Chucky’s, I haven’t tried hurting him). Anyways, his ESPN.com blog about tonight’s NCAA basketball championship was, at times, very smart and funny and I wanted to share it with you.

Por ejemplo, he writes…

“I prefer to watch sporting events without a predetermined rooting interest; I always enjoy games more when I can arbitrarily decide who I want to pull for while the action is happening in real time… Yet I realize most Americans aren’t like this. I’ve received a lot of feedback from people who keep asking me different versions of the same abstract question: “I don’t care about either squad in tonight’s game. As such, whom should I cheer for?”

It would seem like the obvious answer would be geography — you could simply root for whatever school is physically closer to your home, even though that principle has never made any sense and never will. The unique problem is that Florida’s location makes this inherently unfair; most of America is closer to Columbus than it is to Gainesville. Moreover, being in relative proximity to a certain school might make you like it less. You might suffer from media fatigue…

There is also the (always weird) principle of “rooting for the conference.” If you are the kind of person who loves Auburn, there are those who would suggest that conference loyalty requires your allegiance to fall with any club representing the Southeastern Conference. There are some who even apply this to pro sports, which seems absolutely insane (I know a Vikings fan who rooted for Chicago in the last Super Bowl, somehow arguing that a Bears win would “reflect well on the NFC North”)… I was recently talking about this with a Penn State graduate who… would argue that the responsibility of someone from Michigan or Indiana is to hate Ohio State all the time, particularly when it’s playing a championship game on national television.

I suppose the crux of this issue for any unconnected basketball fans comes down to philosophy: Are you the kind of person who always feels the better team deserves to win, or are you the kind of person who always prefers to see an underdog overcome adversity? How you answer that question should make it pretty clear whom you should be supporting this evening, as well as define every other aspect of your entire personality in about 400 different ways.”

Sharp thinking, yes? Now, you might be thinking, Geeze, Scott, that’s, um, nice and all but rather non sequitur. What the hell does this have to do with wine? And my answer would be: Nothing. It has nothing at all to do with wine. BUT it was something I found interesting tonight and I wanted to spread the gospel of Chuck Klosterman to our Roshambo Nation (a nation consisting of that whopping 89 of you who visit this blog on a daily basis). Furthermore, I wanted to push our Ace retail sales manager off the plank.

You see, Steve is an alumni and die-hard fan of OSU anything. He even wears the ever-hip, red OSU golf shirts to work four days a week. And since Ohio State University lost the NCAA basketball championship tonight to the University of Florida (just three months after losing to the same team in the football championship, effectively becoming the first-ever-same-year-double-losers in the history of the two college sports), I wanted to find some way to make Steve feel the full sting of the loss(es). So it’s not that non sequitur, actually. It’s more my way of inflicting pain on people like Steve now that I’m without access to my confiscated Vodoo dolls.

So here’s to you Steve. May you wince at the sight of these two chooches.

It’s hard to imagine that you haven’t heard of Michelle Wie by now. Even if you aren’t too keen on televised golf or anything having to do with penalties and handicaps and sand traps and the kind of infuriating frustration that makes you wing your $375 Big Bertha driver into the pond, you probably know her face. At the very least, thanks to a cool $10 million in endorsements last year, the teeny Wie-ny golf sensation is wedged somewhere in the double helix of our collective buy-now! gene. Even though I love golf and yelling “Fore!” and the donuts that the cart make on steep wet fairways, I don’t follow the PGA let alone the LPGA. So I haven’t thought much about Michelle Wie one way or another over the past several years that she’s spent competing in men’s tournaments. Until yesterday, that is, when I was trolling ESPN.com to avoid the boredom of my blank screen. I caught an interesting verbal volley about Wie and other related columns that got me turning about the similarities between her narrative arc and ours.

Our Wine and Golf Heroes seem to have some things in common. Not just because “they are both brazen Asians!” (in the words of one tactless friend of mine with a rhyming disorder), but because they are young female mavericks who are fist-fighting convention. Both fearlessly dove into worlds in which they stuck out like, well, like teenage girls on the professional men’s circuit. But most importantly, both Michelle and Naomi are poised to make and embrace a major gearshift in dreams. Wie will likely enroll in Stanford in the fall and Naomi is creating the curriculum for Roshambo 2.0. Ultimately, their stories are worth following because as Gonzo noted, “Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of ‘the rate race’ is not yet final.”