Private Eye | You Got Seats! Take my Ute tickets, please. 

I haven’t been back to Rice-Eccles stadium in two years because I became rather pissed when the Ute ticket office sold my season tickets out from under me. To be fair, after I wrote about it for the second time earlier this year, I was contacted by university officials hoping we could be appeased somehow. Nah, anger is my friend. As it turns out, I haven’t missed not attending those games—other than not hanging around with the Joe & Harold tailgating bunch, that is. I figure in those two years, I’ve saved hundreds of dollars in popcorn alone. That should be enough to pay for at least one airline ticket, and maybe two, depending on which bowl the Utes go to.

When I first got the bum’s rush from the Ute ticket office, I picked up the phone and bought season tickets to BYU football instead. And did so again this year, too. For two years, I’ve just given those seats away to whoever asked for them. Since I’m a traditionalist and I like traditions—such as Christmas—I’ll do it again next year and the next and the next. Psst—anyone want to put in early dibs for next season’s Utah/BYU game down at LaVell Edwards Stadium?

Meanwhile, I always will have a soft spot for the University of Utah. So, when I got an e-mail yesterday announcing that City Weekly had some extra Runnin’ Ute basketball season tickets, I quickly claimed a couple of them. Apparently, U of U basketball is a difficult sell these days, so the same ticket office that told us to go fly a kite before the football season has extended a gracious olive branch in our direction for the upcoming hoop season. I’m not sure, but I’d guess they traded ad space for those seats. No matter, that can only mean one thing—You Got Seats!

I won’t be going. The Utes will play 13 home games at the Huntsman Center between now and March 7, 2009. I’ll give my tickets to each of those games to anyone who e-mails me asking for them, starting with the University of Oregon game tonight (Wednesday, Dec. 3). Yeah, I know, the paper says it comes out on Thursday. It really doesn’t. It’s just available most everywhere by Thursday, but it’s primarily distributed on Wednesdays. If you’re reading this on Wednesday before 5 or so, drop me an e-mail. The tickets will be at our office for you to pick up until 5:30 p.m. First person to e-mail me will get the seats.

For the remaining games, I’ll put each entry in a sock or something and draw out the winners. No choosing specific games, as that gets messy. I’d like to say we’ll do this annually, but I won’t know until next year—if the Ute basketball team is successful and begins to pull more fans, the ticket office might tell us to bugger off as they did when the Ute football team started to consistently fill Rice-Eccles. I wonder, though—would those crowds have been there if Utah lost to Oregon? Or had they suffered any other loss for that matter? Maybe, but I doubt it. It’s happened before—Utah fans would rather put their fingers in a food processor than watch a losing football team.

Same for basketball. It wasn’t that long ago a ticket into the Huntsman Center was hard to come by. Now it’s not a problem at all—I mean, geez, even City Weekly has tickets. What happened? I couldn’t pretend to know, but it can’t be good. At least it’s the holiday season and it feels good to be giving these tickets away. Uhh … did I say, “holiday season?” I meant “Christmas season.” Honest. My apologies to Jesus. Please don’t tell Chris Buttars, lest he try to give me a citation.

Buttars—Utah’s resident gay-baiting racist and gnarly face of all things holy—is at it again. Even though the legislative session hasn’t started the Republican state senator from West Jordan wants to give us all a preview of what’s to come with his newest resolution that encourages local retailers to say “Merry Christmas” in their ads instead of “Happy Holidays.” Buttars is more angry than bright, so it doesn’t even dawn on him that using Christ’s name to sell a product is antithetical to Christianity in the first place. I don’t mind Christmas carols. I don’t mind Christmas cards. I don’t mind people saying Merry Christmas; that’s what Dec. 25 is—Christmas Day. But, to legislatively encourage merchants to embrace it with fixed language? No way.

Well, OK, then, but only if Buttars requires all adult stores in town to go along, too. There’s a certain wascally-wabbit sex toy that might just fly off the shelves for all the wrong reasons if it were re-named after Chris Buttars. Wouldn’t it bring Buttars special joy to not only lend his name his very own pleasure tool, but to buy it in the name of Christ as well? That should make him feel better—in more ways than one. Batteries and brains not included.

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