Myron Rolle

A lot of people say football has clearly surpassed baseball as the definitive "American Pastime." Given attendance numbers, TV ratings and the like, it's hard to disagree.

Still, as a baseball man myself, it gives me some serious joy to read about Myron Rolle and the myriad ways in which the NFL is revealing itself to be the cesspool of American professional sports.

To those who don't know, Myron Rolle was a standout safety at Florida State two years ago. After he completed his junior year he had the choice of going straight to the NFL, finishing his senior year there to improve his draft stock, or going to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He chose, in true Hallmark-heartwarming fashion, the Rhodes Scholar option. This decision has apparently cost him dearly, as he was recently drafted 207th overall in last week's NFL draft.

This wouldn't be such a big deal if it hadn't become clear in the past few months that many, if not all teams in the NFL were looking suspiciously upon Rolle for embarking on this eminently praiseworthy path of his because it showed a certain lack of "dedication" to football. I realize that NFL franchises are in the business of winning football games, not employing smart men who also happen to be good football players, but for the LOVE OF GOD, the next time some moronic sports pundit goes all "HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN?" about the next Roethlisberger or Michael Vick or whatever scumbag ends up violating the rights of dogs or women they should punch themselves in the face hard enough and with enough repetition to knock themselves out and do us all a favor.

Football is a meat market sport, plain and simple. If they cared about anything other than performance these incidents would not be happening with such alarming regularity. I realize that the NFL does not have a monopoly on idiot athletes but it is certainly becoming clear, whether because of the intrinsic violence of football itself or any number of other possibilities, that it is easily filled with the highest concentration of scumbags, player and executive alike.

How do I know this? Well there was another lovely incident during this past year's draft besides what happened to Myron Rolle.

Dez Bryant, a star wide receiver from Oklahoma State who had something of a history of rules infractions, but has never been arrested or even accused of using drugs, was talking to the Miami Dolphins during an interview when one of the Dolphins executives asked him whether or not his mother was ever a prostitute. Personally, I wish Bryant had punched the guy in the face, but apparently he's a much bigger man than this asshole, because he didn't. Still, one has to wonder about the arrogance of a person to ask such a question, since Bryant's mother's occupation would presumably have no bearing on his ability to contribute to the Dolphins as a wide receiver. But alas, John Ireland, who is the Dolphins General Manager no less, has obviously become calloused enough in the ways of NFL player evaluations that he felt no awkwardness at voicing such a disgusting query which would in any other line of work result in him getting fired or at least reprimanded harshly.

Then again, if Bryant was white and put Biblical verses on the eye black he wore under his eyes like a certain overrated evangelical I'm sure his mother could have been Lindsay Lohan and no one would have batted an eye.

I'll take rampant steroid use any old day of the week.

Somewhere in Silicon Valley Steve Jobs is torturing a man...

...for losing a prototype of the new iPhone.

Conservatives torture Muslims, liberal Apple snobs torture over lost cellphones that yuppies would literally sell their children for.

Soccer is a sport of the suburbs, thus this comment poses no threat to America

From a profile of Michael Bradley, son of U.S. soccer coach Bob Bradley and key member of the U.S. national team for the upcoming World Cup:

Soccer is Michael's business, but it is also his life. He has two overarching goals: win matches for the national team and land a job with a club like AC Milan or Manchester United. "It's been my dream for as long as I can remember to play for the biggest clubs in the world," he says. Anything that gets in the way of either is a waste of his time. Like, for instance, homesickness. Or college. Although he has mostly lived on his own since he was 13, when he joined the U.S. residency program in Bradenton, Fla., he says he's never thought about what he might have missed. When he had the chance to jump to the pros, the son of the Ivy League and Charlottesville didn't look back. "I was never going to college," he admits. And when he got the opportunity at Heerenveen, a club with a history of developing, then selling budding stars such as Klaas-Jan Huntelaar and Ruud van Nistelrooy, he wasn't about to stay in MLS. "If you want to get to the level I want to," he says, "you have to play in Europe." Even now, as he has begun to make a name for himself in the Bundesliga, he lives a Spartan existence in an uncluttered, bare-walled apartment in tidy working-class Mönchengladbach.

Somehow I feel that if a young black male from a poor, crime ridden area had made this statement or led this kind of life paternalistic sportswriters would be wringing their hands in agony bemoaning the decline of STUDENT ATHLETE IN AMERICA.

And yet, because this kid's white and he plays a sport where the business model doesn't allow for any of this college-athlete-as-unpaid-apprentice crap it's all just fiiiiiiiine.

Awesome

From David Remnick's new book, "The Bridge," a scene that makes my heart shed a tear of joy...

In 2004, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky of Illinois attended a White House event wearing the campaign pin of her state’s candidate for the United States Senate. When she saw President Bush do a double take at the one word on her pin, she assured him that it spelled “Obama,” not “Osama.” Bush shrugged: “I don’t know him.” She answered, “You will.”

I suspect if Bush had found out his middle name was "Hussein" he would had Barack sent to Guantanamo.

The Real World gets owned by the Jersey Shore

Apparently the last season of the "Real World D.C." had the worst ratings ever for any Real World season. Maybe this will teach the people at MTV to stop with the kind-of-tan-but-not-that-tan d-bags and go straight to the all-time d-bags like "The Situation."

Or, if you really want to make for the most awesome TV watching of all time, you do the obvious and you combine the Real World/Road Rules Challenge gang with the "Shore" people and you have them go at it. Can you imagine C.T. head-butting Ronnie and J-Wow stabbing him in the neck with a stiletto?

I can, and it's awesome.

This is the vision of America the Tea Party hates

Thank you to my bro Bren for pointing this out to me, this is staggeringly funny. A trio of ethnic children sitting in the backseat, Beyonce comes on, the adorable little Asian boy starts to sing along but can't cause he's not a "lady," which then forces him to promptly start balling. If that doesn't tug on your heart strings I don't know what will.

This kind of stuff really just goes to show the beauty of YouTube, if that were my kid and I was trying to tell that story to anybody it wouldn't be nearly as funny as actually watching it. Now it's an instant classic. GO AMERICA.