Get Your Own: West Virginia Lava Lamp

The Señior knows you can't say no to collegiate paraphernalia. Hell, if you could they wouldn't make this stuff. That's why he'll be showing you a weekly item you just gotta get your hands on. This week ...

What: West Virginia lava lamp
Price: $35.99
Where: CJCollectibles.com

When you walk around the outerlying areas of a concert -- just for clarity's sake, say it's Lollapalooza 1995 with The Mighty Mighty Bosstones blaring in the background -- and you happen to see a "pipe" decorated with Grateful Dead skulls. Now, the maker of said pipe isn't promoting the act of smoking weed, but they're sure as hell not dissuading you, either.

It's the exact same things with lava lamps. Do you need to be "on" something to fully enjoy the way the bubbly liquid inside moves? No, but where do 99.999 percent of lava lamps reside? In the dorm rooms of guys who own some sort of canister in which they "put their weed in there."

That being said, should the NCAA really be licensing the use of their teams' logos on products you might as well call drug paraphernalia? It's not like you're going to see an Oklahoma Sooners logo on a water bong or an incense burner with a Florida Gators branding. But here's an item that's as much a part of drug culture as anything and it has a school's logo.

Puff, puff pass, NCAA. Puff, puff, pass.

MWC falls in line, just like everybody else

The Mountain West has (reluctantly) agreed to sign ESPN's BCS deal, meaning all the posturing of Orrin Hatch and the, "we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore," antics of commish Craig Thompson, bascially amount to ... nothing.

Seriously, why should we be surprised. The MWC had no choice but to sign because not doing so meant something far worse than an undefeated Utah not getting a shot at the national title -- it would have meant no team from its conference even getting a chance at a slice of the BCS pie. That's the stranglehold the BCS holds on college football and its why we'll NEVER see a change, despite our annual diatribes on how great a playoff would be.

The MWC, just like every other conference, is too scared to take that plunge and stand up to the BCS and truly say enough is enough. It doesn't matter how many times the BCS is paraded before congress because all we can hope for is John Swofford and Co. getting berated by elected officials. That's our only reward because as the MWC signing the , reluctantly or not, shows: college football is the BCS' world and your school is just living in it .. or at least through 2013, which is when the new deal expires and some slighted conference will fake us all out in its disgust only to fall back with the crowd.

RIP, Air McNair

When he went into the NFL out of itty bitty Alcorn State, Steve McNair was being compared to all the black quarterbacks of the past. The only problem was, he was unlike any black quarterback we'd ever seen. He didn't run like Randall Cunningham. He wasn't a pure drop-back passer like Warren Moon or Doug Williams.

What McNair was, was simply a quarterback. He was the kind of player that simply got the job done and made those around him better. When you can do that, it doesn't matter if you're black or white, to quote another recent fallen star.

His death, a shooting that has all but been verified to be at the hands of a 20-year-old waitress he was having an affair with, may put a kink in the community and family man image that McNair had cultivated, but none of that changes what he did on the football field for Alcorn State, the Tennessee Titans or the Baltimore Ravens.

We will all speculate on what went on in that Nashville condo and what it means to McNair's legacy, because that's what we as a society are programmed to do. The way McNair died won't allow anyone to simply focus on what he did on the gridiron, which cuts to the core of the differences between the way we follow athletes and how we follow other celebrities. Michael Jackson went through countless surgeries to alter his appearance and went to court for allegedly molesting a child, yet we're remembering him for what his music meant to us, not the quirks of a man with a Peter Pan complex that owned the bones of the Elephant Man. We rarely hear about the personal lives of athletes until something illegal happens, yet you can find out exactly where Shia Lebouf ate dinner last Tuesday, if you're so inclined. The personal lives of athletes are largely just that, personal.

The simple truth is that few players played through pain like McNair. He was a warrior on the field and what every happened in that condo won't change that, shocked as we may be to the circumstances that surrounded his death. Celebrity often comes with a cost and to McNair, it may ultimately be the light he's forever seen in, regardless of whether it should even reflect on the way he built that celebrity in the first place.

... And We're Back

Lo Siento, mis amigos y amigas, The Senior has been off on fiesta, ... well, if you count spending a week as Mark Mangino's personal grocery shopper as a "fiesta." So what's on the Mangina's shopping list? Bacon, bacon ... and bacon.

So what's happened since we last spent the precious moments together? Well, Sergio Kindle showed us his inability to do two things at once stretches beyond running and tackling, Timmy Chang robbed something other than the NCAA record books and the Senate has decided to further waste tax payers' dollars on a BCS hearing that could give everyone the change they've been feening for -- and could set Orrin Hatch up as the People's Choice for Republican candidate for the 2012 Presidential race. Hey, don't laugh, having a pro-playoff stance helped endure Barack Obama to a legion of voters.

But most importantly, The Senior is back after his mid-summer fiesta, and unlike South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, I was not actually South America with my mistress. She lives much, much closer than that.