He actually compared the situation of a footballer, called Ronaldo, with Manchester United with being a slave. This moron player gets payed $100k a week. Yet another example of what a bunch of clueless fools professional sportsmen and their enablers are.

I am sure modern slaves in Sudan feel for Ronaldo’s plight.

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Boston managed to win the World Series with the Red Sox and the NBA final with the Celtics. Shame about the Patriots choke however. 2/3 of three in the major sports for a city isn’t that bad one has to say. Congrats to anyone who cares about basketball from Boston/New England.

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I had no idea the Preakness Stakes had gotten so, um, rambunctious.

the blog québécois

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As you are about to find out in the next 1/100th of a second. I haven’t seen so much panic since the Titanic went down.

Full size here.

the blog québécois

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The huge cost of “defending” the Olympic Torch from protests against the Chinese treatment of Tibet. Any of the idiots who have run with the thing should be treated as pariahs and shills for China. Its absolutely irrelevant that the people running are jocks. Just because the do sport does not mean they can expect a bye when doing something this wrong. Watching the whingeing athletes and celebrities complaining about the protests is most pathetic. What the hell did they expect to happen?

Why did anyone think this whole “run” was a good idea?

Now its Olympic protests Europe Part Deux…French style. The French have given up, put the thing out and taken it on a bus.

Kate Hoey MP makes sense of the whole thing. She is one of the most sensible and reasonable politicians in the UK. Comparable to Joe Lieberman in the US methinks.

More info on the Chinese thugs accompanying the Torch.

Charles Moore has a good piece on the Olympic furore linking it to the London version in 4 years.

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Debbie reports that the US Olympic louts are leeching off the city of Colorado Springs. As per normal for jocks its for large amounts of taxpayers money; using blackmail to get as much out of the town or city as possible. Now sports teams have done this in the US and the UK for years; relying on the egos of politicians to make everyone pay for their profession.

What irks me is that jocks are so spineless when its comes to things like China’s treatment of Tibet. They claim to be “just athletes and not politicians.” Suffering of millions of people is nothing compared to their “right” to compete in the Olympics. However whenever they can find a way to leech taxpayer funds out of governments they suddenly get political.

I wonder how many of the legion of Olympic types so keen on London getting 2012 actually live in London. I am wiling to bet almost all of them live in the provinces and as such are not paying one farthing towards the cost of their giant jock-fest on 2012. The entire Olympic process is so corrupt it would make Mugabe seems honest.

Like the arts; sports should not be supported by the state for one penny. If jocks and their teams can support themselves via the private sector like every other endeavor then they should not be doing it.

I would say I am boycotting the upcoming Olympics but its kind of pointless. I have far better things to do than waste my time watching a bunch of drug-enhanced ponces running around acting as if what they do matters.

Update: There are some hearty people protesting the Torch relay through London today. Well done to them, shame on all the cretins who are running the symbol of corruption, waste and empowering of totalitarian regimes around London.

Needless to say all the nitwits are saying they doing it “for sport” not “for China.”

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Wrote this in response to this thread on AMG about a recent brawl at Lewiston, ME basketball game.

[i]give kids something to do other than study study study.[/i]

But surely the whole point of school is study and learning? Wouldn’t it be a better idea to have a good computer lab than have a whole myriad of sports teams? Which one of those two things would actually benefit the most people.

Why should taxpayers pay for it? Sports are limited by their very nature. They create people who think they are superior to all others because of their physical skills. School sports create bullies and thugs. Its a myth that they build character. You want to build character in young jocks send them to the military where they can do something useful for their community. If a child wants to play sports so bad why not do it after school on their own time? Why do jocks get preferential treatment over those that want to do ballet, or music or whatever?

Mock the debate team as much as you want ,but it teaches far more useful skills (rhetoric, creative thinking, analysis, research etc) than learning a bunch of plays and how to tackle someone for the football team.

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There are no more real sports except the Pats and maybe the Baja 1000.

“Everyone’s doing it” is never a good excuse, but if they are going to asterisk the Patriots, they need to asterisk every winning football team since small cameras were invented. Heck, the Pats beat the refs AND the Colts Sunday.

As I’ve said in other places, Pro Football is turning into figure skating. No one will watch if there is a dynastic team, except local fans, so it’s time to “rotate the winners” as they do in some Olympic sports, in NASCAR and the NHRA. Chrysler would have been running hemis and winning everything from the stock local classes right up to the top pro races at the strip and the roundy round if there had not been rules in place to dumb down competition.

Now that we’ve allowed the Bedwetting Lowest Common Denominator crowd to run sports as well as the enterntainment industry and increasingly our country, we run fake races just like we have fake “reality shows” and fake “global environmental crises” to keep our hamster wheels turning.

That’s my take on professional sports and why I do not follow them, except when it is an opportunity to spend time with my family.

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Its getting cold outside here in Maine, and some of us turn our thoughts to Halloween, snow junkies turn their minds to the upcoming ski season. Whether its k2 skis & rossignol skis that you are looking for; there are lots of good deals online. Now I am not a skier, but I am sure that I wouldn’t want to pay the sky high shop prices you get in offline ski shops. If you are a snow lover its time to get yourself.

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Well the biggest name in Scottish racing has gone and joined a NASCAR team following Juan Pablo Montoya to the sport. Dario Franchitti, winner of the 2007 Indy 500, seems to think there might be a steep learning curve. I wish him well and continued to be impressed at the talent that NASCAR is attracting from abroad.

I suspect that subscriptions to NASN cable channel in Scotland will go up from now on. Well Scots do already like the passtimes of most NASCAR fans.

Oh and he is driving a Dodge.

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Da brother who thought he was untouchable by the man is in prison. This time the genius has been busted for armed robbery in Las Vegas. He claims to have been trying to steal his own stuff back from a sports paraphenelia dealer. Seven felonies are probably going to get him quite a bit of time in the pokey. The tape of what on in the room is wee bit damning methinks.

I am guessing that he never watched My Name is Earl.

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Like no one saw that one coming. The guy is deep in the manure, his club is suing him, the Feds are on his butt and his endorsements are drying up faster than spit in the Mohave Desert. Normally a perp waits until he gets to prison before declaring that he has found Jeeesus and give his life over to God in order that gullible Christians will forgive him and start a letter writing campaign. I wonder if the Nation of Islam got a look in, after all they attract their fair share of fallen scumbags as well. No doubt Vick’s advisor told him that NOI might not be the best choice in the current climate.

Of course, now that he has found Gawd there is a whole line of people who are coming out in support of him, saying he will come back to the NFL. He can be forgiven after helping the community and doing good works. Like whenever high profile black ma isn in trouble there has been a cadre of people showing up to support him and decry this as a racist conspiracy. A few of the classic cop-outs: 1. he was expressing his cultural rage (like DMX in trouble for the same thing) 2. Rednecks do dog-fighting too and the absolute best 3. well white folks hunt and that is hurtful to the deer.

The first one is an excuse that has been wheeled out to defend misogynistic, violent and evil lyrics perpetrated by gangsta rappers since the 80s (ie its ok for a black man to sing about beating a ho’ up, but white guys who sing about getting laid are sexist). The second one is offered out without any proof whatsoever and relies on racial stereo types of poor white trash. And then we have the last one, the best one I have heard so far, which can be countered by pointing out that when hunters kill a deer they eat it. Its for food, not for entertainment of degenerates like Vick and DMX. Besides the deer have a sporting chance to get away unlike the poor dogs in a fighting pit.

Maybe someone should propose that Vick and DMX share a cell so they can trade tales of their dogfighting and torturing tales (btw DMX’s latest CD is about dogfighting).

Vick is a scumbag and a evil piece of work. I loath him for one other reason…I have to be on the same bloody side as PETA and Al Sharpton!

I still think the best punishment for both Vick and DMX is one perpetrated on traitors by Caligula. It would probably mellow both of them and it would be suitable revenge for dogs.

Don’t forgive Vick treat him with contempt and loathing he truly deserves. Punish now and forgive later…much later.

RWN has posted their thoughts on him inspired by a post on HuffPo.

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I have believed this since I was a teenager. The sense of being special and all the people telling them they are godly goes to their heads. There is evidence that the overwhelming number of rapes on campuses are perpetrated by jocks. Everyone who isn’t a jock has suffered abuse by some jumped up moron who thinks he can act they way he likes because he is an athelete. Well the guys at Freakonomics seems to agree and even have a handy video for jocks too dim to read.

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I have skated for probably 20 years but it still amazes me how technology has moved on these days from the simple piece of wood with roller skate wheels on the bottom that I had in my youth. My board resembled a shrunken old style surfboard. I wasn’t bad on it, but never able to shred. Whether your are intrested in element skateboards or zero skateboards, Modernskate is place to check out online. These guys have been around since 1979, before most people knew what a skateboard was or have even seen one. They sell inline skates too for those of you that can’t be arsed to use a board.

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Considering how many different groups there are on Facebook both anti and even pro Michael “Dog fighting” Vick it is no surprise that someone has made a site campaigning for sacking. Its has a round-up of petitions and other information in the campaign to get this guy kicked out of pro-football. What is involved with, which he claims to know nothing about, is a federal crime and considering how many dogs they found on his estate he should go away for a long time.

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Susan Delacourt tut-tutting in The Star:

Soldiers, hockey gear and race cars are not just the stuff of young boys’ wish lists any more—they’re also symbols that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government is deliberately choosing to embrace.

What’s puzzling some observers, however, is how all this heavily male symbolism, mixed with an aggressive, disciplinary governing style, is going to help the Conservatives get more votes in the next election, especially from women.

“It’s definitely not a growth strategy. It’s the opposite of a growth strategy,” says pollster Nik Nanos, who says all this macho posturing may be part of the reason the federal Conservatives are stalled in the public-opinion surveys conducted in the past few months.

“It’s reinforcing stereotypes that they’re trying to get rid of—which is that the Conservatives appeal to a very narrow group of voters that tend to be very male and right-wing. ... They’re creating their own glass ceiling.”

Nanos was interviewed in the wake of a weekend photo opportunity by Conservatives in which a NASCAR race vehicle—owned and driven by Pierre Bourque, a popular Internet news blogger—was emblazoned with the Tory logo. Human Resources Minister Diane Finley, whose husband, Doug, is in charge of the next election campaign for the Tories, bluntly stated the strategy behind the NASCAR appeal.

Finley told a newspaper interviewer that NASCAR fans are “our kind of people. They’re hard-working families, they’re taxpayers who play by the rules. And those are the people that we’re targeting.”

I’m sure this will come as a shock to the Star newsroom, but NASCAR’s administrators aren’t just a bunch of cornball good ol’ boys, even if they often play that role on TV. They’ve built NASCAR into one of the most professional, successful organizations in sports:

After moving far beyond its Southern roots years ago, NASCAR continues to soar in nationwide popularity and is on the verge of spreading to an even broader, international audience.

NASCAR, once derided as a passion mostly for “rednecks,” is now a sophisticated, multibillion-dollar enterprise that claims about 75 million fans—including many of pop culture’s glitterati—and ranks among the nation’s most popular sports in attendance and television viewership.

If they’ve determined that there’s a market in Canada for their product, then I’d be inclined to believe them. And one demographic that they’ve exhaustively researched and targeted is women:

These five [women] are not an anomaly in the fast, high-octane world of NASCAR, where 42% of the fans are women, according to an ESPN Sports Poll compiled during the last 12 months from phone interviews with Americans 12 and older. That’s up from 36% in 1995.

Nielsen Media Research figures from 2003 show NASCAR led the NFL and major league baseball in percentage of female viewers on broadcast networks. Women were 35% of the total audience for NASCAR, two percentage points more female viewers than for the NFL and MLB.

Tim Buckman, spokesman for Fox Sports, says the fastest growing segment of the television audience for the 2004 Nextel Cup Series on Fox is women 18-34. Their numbers are up 19% from this time last year. The next fastest growing segment: women 18-24, up 17%.

Roger VanDerSnick, NASCAR’s managing director of brands and consumer marketing, credits the sport’s whomenolesome atmosphere for attracting women to stock car racing. “It is a family-run sport. Families participate in the sport,” VanDerSnick says.

“Our drivers are terrific role models that families and moms and children enjoy rooting for.”

Another factor that seems to have escaped the notice of the doctrinaire feminists in the press and politics is that motor sports is one of the few—maybe the only— sports that allow men and women to compete against each other on the basis of merit.

Not that the ingrates remember the battlin’ battleaxes who made this all possible. IndyCar driver Danica Patrick:

NEWSWEEK: Are you the Gloria Steinem of racing?

PATRICK: The what? I don’t even know who that is. Is that bad?

Heh. She probably doesn’t know who Susan Delacourt is, either.

the blog québécois

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This is a great piece and one which I completely agree with on all levels.

When you celebrate morons, which is what you are doing when you celebrate athletes for the most part, you are asking for trouble. When young males see you can get all you want and still aren’t able to barely construct a conherent sentence in their own language why would they bother with schooling?

Celebration of the athlete is the scourge of modern society. Celebrating freak athetlic skills over intellect and achievement is wrong.

Now maybe Boris could get his party to drop their support for the white elephant that is the olympics.

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After that exciting Daytona 500, which resembled the LA Freeway in a large crash rather, rather than a race there is a renewed interest in the sport. NASCAR is even picking up interest abroad. If you are a NASCAR fan anyway I would recommend that you go sign up to OvalFan.com for NASCAR Race Fans! You can follow all the news, views and scuttlebutt about one of the most popular motor sports in the world. And lets face it there is a lots of stuff going on with NASCAR that one needs to keep track of if you are a fan.

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That’s what it’s called—the football card pictures of a ballcarrier with one leg in the air, straight-arming an imaginary would-be tackler. At least that’s what it’s called on this site. I can’t find any other reference to it on Google or in Wikipedia.

If it’s not called the “ol’ huck ‘n’ buck”—it damned well should be. I suspect that after Google indexes this page, the pressure to call it the “ol’ huck ‘n’ buck” will be unstoppable. The pose, that is. I think Google’s name is still safe.

There are three pages of quality huckness ‘n’ buckitude. Or photos of the rejects from a Bolshoi Ballet audition. The link to the next is at the centre-bottom of each page (it’s hard to see, but lights up when you hover your cursor over it).

the blog québécois

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Sir Charities, community groups and social enterprises want the 2012 Olympics to be a success, but they must not be unfairly penalised due to the increased cost of the games (News, February 7).

We are therefore joining with voluntary and community organisations across the country to petition the Prime Minister to ensure that further National Lottery funds are not diverted from other good causes to pay for the rising cost of the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

A further diversion of more than 900 million would be disastrous for good causes, including charities, community groups and social enterprises. It will create insecurity, uncertainty and will threaten our work with some of the most disadvantaged and excluded individuals and communities in our society.

The voluntary and community sector is a vital partner in the games an event that should unite us all. The Government must therefore safeguard Lottery funding and find an alternative means of funding the overspend.

Stuart Etherington, National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO)
Kevin Curley, National Association for Voluntary and Community Action (NAVCA)
Martin Sime, Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations (SCVO)
Graham Benfield, Wales Council for Voluntary Action (WCVA)
Christopher Spence, Volunteering England
David Tyler, Community Matters
Jonathan Bland, Social Enterprise Coalition, London N1

So its not only taxpayers who are getting screwed by the whole Olympics fiasco but charities as well.

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300m has been spent on something useful that will help scientists with seeing all kinds of things that are important to man. Yet it looks as if that it will cost up to 9 bil on making things nice for a bunch of dump jocks in 2012. Which one of these two things is better investment for humanity, the British people or even the taxpayers? If this isn’t a stark reminder to people what a load of codswhallop the Olympics are then nothing will be.

I bet 300m will not even cover the bribes handed out to IOC types. If you want a classic example of how stupid British politicians have become all you have to do is think of their being pleased at having the Olympics.

Then again its not the most depressing thing going on in East London.

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No longer have to be accused of being the worst in Europe. Italian hooligans have just take a giant step ahead behaving so badly that all football has been cancelled in Italy. A policeman was killed and another severely injured during rioting at a domestic match. It is quite impressive that they Italians have taken such decisive action in response to the awful barbarity being shown by Italian fans.

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So desperate are the organisers of the London Olympics they are wheeling out Aussie tosser and crap singer Jason Donovan to defend it on the Daily Politics. He goes on about all the benefits to London and the UK but manages not to mention one of them. Overruns? “Oh well any good things cost” was his lame arse answer. This bloody Aussie has some bloody nerve to go on television and slag off British taxpayers for not wanting to pay for a bunch of spoiled athletes to ponce around East London. I bet he ain’t a London taxpayer either.

Oh yes he ends with “sports are a good thing”. Why exactly is that Jason?

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Said to be the missing link between neanderthal (ex: John Prescott MP) and modern man, this guy has a lot to answer for. The skull just reminds of some of the drones I have seen chanting football slogans. Course if its accurate its yet another nail in the coffin of the belief that the earth is only 6000 years old one would think. Bible literalists will no doubt call it a hoax.

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The Hammers have been having a few problems of late and Iain Dale is a bit of a fan. He was shocked to see there was no blog dedicated to Iain’s and ‘arry from Iron Maiden’s favourite side. So Iain, arch blogger, has gone and started a Hammer’s blog. Head over and have a gander. While the team might not be getting many goals at least let the blog get some hits. And after all, West Ham at least have a better record than England’s Cricket team of late.

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Not as badly as the Olympic zealots that reside here in London mind you. In fact the new stadium for the Twins will only cost $522 million according to an article in Hit & Run. However that does not mean the collosal waste of money is any more an affront to decent taxpayers.

Or as someone put it a bit more bluntly.

Having these stadiums built with taxpayer money is like being fucked with your own dick.

First you pay for it in your taxes, then if you want to go, you still pay $30 for a nose bleed seat and $7 for a beer.

That is for sure mate.

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In a very daft move Arsenal are planning to ban all national fans from their stadium. Rather rich considering the sponsor is Emirates and the team is full of people from various parts of the world. The over the top ban is backfiring nicely and bloggers are out in force damning them for this move. Surely a team that isn’t terribly well should be more careful and annoying people?

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He claims the spiralling cost of the Olympics games is a “small price to pay” for the “feelgood factor”. I wonder if he lives in London where everyone is getting hammered by the taxes to pay for it. Why don’t they put a levy on all the Olympic athletes who have made millions from their athletics. It does get a bit grating to hear all these athletes telling taxpayers they should stop whingeing and cough up.

The one thing you can assume when anyone is talking about the Olympics and their cost they are lying through their teeth. The Olympics is a scam and only screws over the taxpayers.

No athlete deserves any public funding…ever.

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Yesterday’s Evening Standard reported the real reason the Astoria & Mean Fiddler, those beloved and historic venues, are closing is to make way for a development linked to the bloody Olympics. And silly me I was just against the Olympics because it was a colossal waste of money and is another way Ken is screwing over London’s taxpayers. It now seems that not only are Londoners going to paying for it for the rest of their lives (now an estimated 2bil will come from the long-suffering rate payers) but they will be losing at least two of their beloved venues as well.

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If you are a NASCARfan then you need to head to this NASCAR Forum for the latest news and rumours about the racing series. Its got all that you need to know about everything about NASCAR and lets face it there is a lot going on for race fans to keep track of. Non-American readers of this blog might be interested in figuring out what Americans see in car racing series and what it is such a big deal in the US. With coverage on Channel 5 and MotorsTV in the UK there is an increasing interest here. There is, of course, a British series of stock cars for fans to follow as well. So go have a lot into the NASCAR Forum and enjoy all it has to offer.

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