Your "Why, Jose, Why?" Quizo Update

I was at the bar on Wednesday night for my show - a little bit on that in a little bit - when my phone rang. It was Bill, a friend of mine who is a supporter of Manchester United.

"You been reading the papers?" he asked.

"No," I said, "I'm at the pub for my show. What's up?"

"Your boy Mourinho just quit Chelsea. It's all over the fucking news," Bill said.

"Yeah, very funny." I am certain this is a windup.

"I'm serious! The board had some kinda bust-up with Mourinho, he walked the fuck out."

"Come on, man, this isn't funny," I say, though I am starting to get worried. I'm fairly certain Bill wouldn't mess with me in this way, but I'm not 100% sure. Then my phone beeps. I have a new text message. I keep talking. "Where'd you read that?"

"It was in the Sun!" Bill says, indignant. The Sun is vaguely the British equivalent of the New York Post - they are not above completely making things up if it suits their bizarre pseudo-journalistic aims. "After your pissant little draw last night - "

"Come on, Bill," I interrupt him. "You oughta know better than to trust what you read in the fucking Sun..." My phone beeps for a text message again.

Then it beeps again.

And again.

Then it beeps for an incoming phone call.

It is at about this point I realize this is not a windup.

Jose Mourinho has quit his job as manager of Chelsea.

As shocking as the news was at the time what would come over the next four days would devolve very quickly from bad to worse to ridiculous, the most egregious element being that Jose was actually FIRED. Five trophies in three years? Not good enough. I won't go over the entire story in detail here - if you're really interested there are a number of very interesting articles on the subject in The Guardian - but suffice it to say Chelsea has, in the course of the last five days, gone from nouveau-riche international football powerhouse to broken, dejected laughingstock.

I was at the pub again yesterday to watch the Chelsea-United match and Brian of Alias Pseudonym Undercover made the comment that "firing Mourinho is like firing Bill Belicheck." I responded that no, not exactly, firing Mourinho now is like firing Bill Walsh three days before the 1988 NFC Championship. It is lunacy. It TRANSCENDS lunacy. It is a decision that exists in some dimension of capricious, brain-damaged insanity beyond the bounds of known time and space. Did you see that movie "Event Horizon?" It's like the evil dimension in that. I know, the movie sucks, yes, but it has Sam Neill and Larry "I Refuse To Call Him Laurence" Fishburne and it works for the analogy I am trying to create here.

On the plus side, after Chelsea's loss to United yesterday morning, the Eagles went and scored eight touchdowns, even if those throwback uniforms are truly hideous. I hope you weren't playing fantasy football against anyone who had an Eagle on their team. Ouch. Of course, I played against a guy who had Tom Brady. And Marion Barber. And my first five draft picks COMBINED for a total of seven points yesterday. God, I hate the world.

On the show tip, I'll toss up the URL for the thing one more time - www.phillybinge.com - but basically if you don't tell me in the next, like, twenty-four hours when you're coming, guess what? You're probably not going to get tickets. Dealer's Choice is the best show and the hottest ticket in Philly. Everybody and their goddamn brother is coming to see this thing this week. When I said last time that if you roll up at 7:45 on some show night you were probably going to get seats, but they wouldn't be very good? Yeah, I lied. If you roll up at 7:45 some show night without reservations you're not going to get a seat. Bummer for you. Good for me, as this thing ended up costing dump trucks full of money, but bummer for you. It's really quite good. Remarkably good, in fact. It's a shame so many of our fine Quizo folk probably won't get to see it. Like I said - you've got maybe 24 hours before the run sells out. Get on it.

The only downside of producing the hottest show in Philly is that I constantly get asked the question "so what are you doing next?" It felt weird saying "nothing" or evading the question, so now I've settled on the answer, "it's this great new show called 'Going Back To College For My Education Degree.' It's really long and tickets are REALLY expensive."

JLK