Powderkeg, Meister Form ZACHFOCS

Santa Monica, CA -

In a last ditch effort to ensure some sort of fairness to TNT before the start of the fall season, Back Door Santa's Nick "Powderkeg" Lyons and The Bowling Wallendas' First Captain Kevin Meister announced the formation of an investigative supergroup, named ZACHFOCS.

"Now I'm not a big city lawyer," said Meister. "But it seeeeemmmsss to meeee ... that when a guy has a deadly injury but shows up for bowling to watch a thief bowl a 317 game with handicap as his substitute, corruption has gone too far."

ZACHFOCS, or Zealously Adored Champions Heralded For Opposing Corruption & Suspiciousness, aims to bring to light the blatant corruption and mismanagement that has plagued the TNT Summer practice season in order to prevent its ugly recurrence during the lovely fall season, dubbed "Season of True Champions" by ESPN.

ZACHFOCS was formed after Powderkeg and Meister received information from an anonymous tipster associated with the current "first place" team, Evil Soup. The informant, dubbed "Deeper Throat" by those in the know, indicated that her team is a bunch of cheating liars, just as sure as her name is L*sa M*rgan.

The case against Evil Soup is damning, according to reports. Accusations include but are not limited to:

- The team was formed the first week of the summer practice season, without filling out the various W2 forms and rigorous background checks required of all TNT applicants
- Their best bowler, Bob The Snake, has a long history of tanking various matches to keep his handicap low, so he can get 15 pins a game even though he's never bowled under 240
- Their fourth bowler, TGI Davedays, only shows up 40% of the time so that the team can call up a ringer to sub for him.
- They once used a sub named Harold "The Thief" McStealerson, a known felon who's wanted in 50 states for being a dirtbag.
- Never in the history of TNT bowling, dating back to April 2011, have the two teams who met in the previous season's championship game failed to make it to the following championship game without some level of El Presidente-esque interference.
- Vegas guaranteed victories for BDS and the Wallendas at the end of July; matches for both teams were "postponed" due to suspicious closing of lanes at Bayshore, an establishment with a long history of timely upkeep and reliability.

"Look, the bottom line is this," said Meister. "The Santas and Wallendas are champions. We love to bowl and we play with heart. We recognize that there are two teams out there. We can't sit here and let Evil Soup make a mockery of this institution. ZACHFOCS is not going to sit here and get a bunch of 9's and just assume everything's on the up and up."

In other league news, it's position week I think this week, where the teams in TNT battle for their positions to begin the fall season in September. All eyes and cameras will be on lane number six-ish, where Back Door Santa looks to put the finishing touches on its new lineup. Heralded as the most scientific bowling lineup in the history of science, it was first calculated by Dr. Hurricane: Class 5 using his c:ALIBRATE method, and tested for the first time last week.

"We won three out of four games," said team captain my captain Clint "Shot Boy" Tabon. "We could have swept but we realized that we wanted to work out a few kinks and purposely lose a game in order to test the science. We've got one more chance to work on it during position week, wherein each team bowls to determine its team number for the fall season. There's been a lot of media coverage for our game this Thursday, and rightfully so."

In other BDS news, in preparation for the upcoming Hacktoberfest, team ringer John "Hacksaw" Serris completed his latest purchase, Germany.

"I made the decision that I wanted to kick it old-school with this year's Hacktoberfest, so why not kick it the oldest school and host it in Europe. I talked to my agent Hackosaur, who is not only #1 on the west side, he's also the world's foremost expert on European land investment. He told me that Germany was currently available, so I went for it," explained Hacksaw. "To my surprise, we were the highest bidder."

Hacksaw immediately won over the native Krauts by renaming Germany to Hacksaw's Bavarian Funhouse. Hacksaw, an avid fisherman, filed a petition with the European Union to drop the euro as HBF's form of currency, and the nation will immediately begin using its new currency, the khahnvoy, to buy and sell goods. Because HBF currently boasts an AAA rating from Standard and Poors, the value of one khahnvoy is equivalent to 14 euros and $19 American.

According to the Associated Press, the natives of Hacksaw's Bavarian Funhouse have taken a shine to their newfound respect on the global marketplace, and have planned a national holiday this Friday, August 19th in order to parade in the streets and spend their hard-earned khahnvoys in celebration. The day, dubbed "National Hacksaw Appreciation Month", will be featured on a commemorative silver khahnvoy; a handsome profile of Hacksaw on the front, and a picture of Hackosaur piloting Johnnie Skymaster on the back.

And finally this week, team weak link Dynamite Chris Parish returned from his sabbatical in Minnesota with his favorite accomplice Dynagirl. According to published reports, tensions on the flight home mounted when a bunch of uggos tried to look at Dynagirl and it's like, quick looking at my daughter fatties.

Dr. Hurricane: Class 5 Calibrates BDS

Santa Monica, CA -

The handsome champions of Back Door Santa announced today that they were altering their lineup order - something that hasn't been attempted in bowling circles for 664 years.

Hackosaur, the world's foremost expert on medieval bowling history, noted that the last time a bowling lineup had been changed was during the reign of Edward III of England, in 1347. Edward III was looking for a way to shake up the Royal Bowling Team of the High Court, known then as the Heroic Archers of Ye Oval Efforts (HAYOE). Unfortunately for Edward, the Black Death began a year later in 1348, wiping out 60% of Europe's population, and many scholars at the time attributed the plague to Edward's cavalier attitude towards bowling lineup regimen.

Preferring to make history rather than learn from it, BDS convened at team weak link Dynamite Chris Parish's modest 40,000 square foot estate in Hermosa Beach on Sunday to vote on the lineup measure. After a unanimous and handsome decision, they turned to the scientific community to determine the optimal bowling lineup that would not only prove successful, but be most impenetrable to the nefarious and unannounced rule changes that have dominated TNT's summer season.

BDS put a call into Dr. Mocha Hurricane: Class 5, skipper of the Los Angeles Beer Frames and an analyst at the prestigious Hackosaur University, a bowling research institute funded by the good people at Hacksaw Tax Shelter Emporium. Dr. Hurricane is known throughout the scientific community as the world's second foremost expert on bowling lineup efficiency, behind only Hackosaur.

"It was a big challenge because they needed an answer quickly," said Dr. Hurricane. "The lads wanted to test out the new lineup during the end of the TNT Summer Optional Practice League - This One Doesn't Count So Show Up If You Feel Like It Or Cancel Random Weeks, in preparation for when official league play starts up in September, when the matches begin to count again for the first time since April. Luckily, I'd been putting the finishing touches on my new algorithm and was anxious to test it out."

The new Back Door Santa lineup was finalized using Mocha Hurricane's patented formula, the coefficient: Apex Lane Integration for Bowling Readiness And Transcendent Efficiency - or c:ALIBRATE. The handsome formula scientifically emphasizes skill at the head of the order, weak linkitude right at the end, and balanced championshipness throughout.

"What I noticed during my research was that over time, the ability of a bowling lineup to succeed against totalitarian and arbitrary rule changes degrades. What worked a year ago, or even three months ago, in the face of El Presidente's corruptionality might not work anymore. One option is to add someone to your team who's handsomely-pantsed, but since BDS wants to keep its core championshipness together, we can use c:ALIBRATE to build a lineup that can minimize the degredation trajectification," added Dr. Hurricane.

c:ALIBRATE measures over 7 billion characteristics of a bowler, including but not limited to handsomeness, nuance readability, championshipality, intangibles, and guile. Each bowler is then given an overall score between 0 and 6,000,000,001, and those scores determine his place in the bowling lineup.

According to the Associated Press, Dr. Hurricane spent several minutes on Monday measuring each of the 7 billion of BDS' characteristics by hand, revealing the following c:ALIBRATE scores:

Clint "Shot Boy" Tabon: 6,000,000,000.00000000059
John "Hacksaw" Serris: 6,000,000,000.00000000059
Nick "Powderkeg" Lyons: 6,000,000,000.00000000059
Dynamite Chris Parish: 17

Dr. Hurricane went on to explain the simplistic tie-breaking procedures of c:ALIBRATE, which also shows why this formula will be universally adopted due to its ease of use.

"In the event of a tie, in order to prevent a recurrence of Black Death, team members are ordered by the number of unique letters in their last name. As you can see, we still have a tie.

The second tie-breaker in c:ALIBRATE stipulates that you then rank the players based on the number of letters in their first name, wherein any number of letters less than 5 is counted as a 5. As you can see, we still have a tie.

The third tie-breaker in c:ALIBRATE stipulates that you then rank the players by number of championships on a binary scale. Zero championships is given a value of 0, and any number > 0 is given a value of 1. As you can see, we still have a tie.

The fourth tie-breaker in c:ALIBRATE stipulates that you rank players based on the telephone country code of the nation in which their most recent championship took place; since each member won their most recent championship in the United States and thus all have a value here of 001, as you can see we still have a tie.

"The fifth tie-breaker in c:ALIBRATE stipulates that you arrange the players in reverse alphabetical order by the third letter of their first name," said Dr. Hurricane. "Thusly, you can see that we now have a new bowling order as thusly:

1. Shot Boy
2. Hacksaw
3. Powderkeg
4. Dynamite

Dr. Hurricane then used c:ALIBRATE to rank most desired subs for BDS, in the unlikely event that on a given week they forget that they love to bowl:

1. Mocha Hurricane: Class 5
2. Mocha Hurricane: Class 5
3. Brandon "Hally" Irons
4. Mocha Hurricane: Class 5
5. Fast Jerry Kaufmann
87. Scotty Shortpants
7quadrillion: Harold "The Thief" McStealerson