Written by: Mike While I cannot verify this, it seemed like cameras caught a glimpse of the one and only Mercury Morris in Jerry Jones’ owners box during the first half of Saturday Nights victory over the previously undefeated Saints. I hope someone with a better image capture can get a clearer picture, but this is all we have at the moment.
Written by: Mike Whenever the calendar rolls over to a fresh set of double digits the mainstream media loses its collective shit. You can’t buy groceries without seeing 50 tabloids looking to capitalize on the phenomenon. Going on Yahoo yields links to the greatest failures of the decade (Balloon boy made the list!)
No one would do this unless schmucks like you and I became very intrigued by their opinions and thoughts on the past 10 years. But what fun is just rehashing the past 10 years when I can look back in history and come up with some funnier and ultimately less disappointing lists than the starting lineup of Tim Kurkjian’s all decade team in baseball.
The 60′s
Best Thing: USA! USA! We put a man on a celestial body not named “Earth” for the first time in the history of mankind; and we did it before those dirty Soviets. I was born about 15 years later, after the fall of the Berlin wall. This is important to know, because whenever I encounter a Russian, a white hot rage runs though my body. I want to defeat them at everything: sports, economics, political policy, poker, drinking, and most importantly space exploration. If they put a man on mars before us I’ll consume rat poison on the spot. All this, and I didn’t even grow up during the Cold War.
Worst Thing: People were so stoned and high during most of the decade that it wasn’t until 1969 that people bothered to look at the world around them. Coincidentally this was when a small pocket of nerds and scientists who never used illicit drugs launched a rocket to the moon. Almost 75% of Americans thought they were still high when watching the footage.
The 70′s
Best Thing: Umm… Uhhhh… (consulting Wikipedia)…. Civil Rights!? The beginning of the Environmentalist movement? Good things for sure, but this was possibly the most boring decade. Looking back, I’m glad I wasn’t born until the 80′s.
Worst Thing: The Oil Crisis. Had we only taken a more progressive approach to finding a long term solution for energy, maybe we wouldn’t need to have diplomatic relationships with terrorists. Instead, we just bullied our way into more oil. This is like sitting down on your couch and having the button on your jeans come undone. It’s a sign you need to workout and lose weight. Instead you change into sweatpants.
The 80′s:
Best Thing: The Jamaican Bobsled Team! Here’s how bizarre this was. If you go to the summer Olympics in Rio in 5 years, ask someone if the Ukrainian Beach Volleyball team qualified. I’m guessing there are going to be a lot of blank “you can’t be serious, really?!” stares. There were certainly more memorable events during the course of the decade, but these 4 guys from a tropical climate captured the worlds attention for 2 weeks during the winter of 88. They also inspired a movie, Cool Runnings which to this day remains one of John Candy’s finest performances.
Worst Thing: AIDS. Of all the decades worst this has to be the top of the list right? We went from doing lines of coke off a girls ass then fucking her, to having to carry around condoms and a written contract with a pre-penetration safety and well-being checklist. All because 2 dudes got confused.
The 90′s
Best Thing: The Internet goes live. Nothing more needs to be said, but I will anyways. It forever changed the way we communicate and watch porn. No other invention in the last 50 years even comes close to the cultural impact of the internet.
Worst Thing: Political correctness. White people were (and still are) afraid of being seen as sexists, racists, and necrophiliacs. They start acting like a woman has never seen or heard of sex acts while at work, hire minorities so they are seen as progressive and most certainly not racist, and generally do nothing about the whole necro thing. Can’t win em all.
The 2000′s
Best Thing: YouTube. Human beings do stupid things. Thanks to this wonderful service, we are now all able to revel in the misfortunes of others. I firmly believe that we as a people have devolved due to this. People will now risk their own well beings to get 100,000 views on YouTube. You don’t see whales purposely beaching themselves for a laugh. Even with that said, YouTube ranks as changing entertainment forever.
Worst Thing: September 11th. Whenever an entire religion (albiet the extremists) attack your countries basic principles of freedom, that is never a good thing. Everything I said about the Soviets in the 60′s can be doubled for Islamic extremists today. The attacks changed the world as we know it, and most certainly not for the better.
Written by: Patrick Galvin 
Chris Henry, the 26-year-old wide receiver for the Cincinnati Bengals, died today. His death came one day after a domestic dispute where he fell off the back of a car.
Story from AP (Courtesy of Yahoo! News):
CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Cincinnati Bengals receiver Chris Henry died Thursday, a day after falling out of the back of a pickup truck during what police said was a domestic dispute with his fiancee.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg police said Henry died at 6:36 a.m. Henry was 26.
“We knew him in a different way than his public persona,” Bengals owner Mike Brown said of the player who was suspended five times during his career. “He had worked through the troubles in his life and had finally seemingly reached the point where everything was going to blossom. And he was going to have the future we all wanted for him. It’s painful to us. We feel it in our hearts, and we will miss him.”
There’s nothing funny about somebody dying. There is something very scary about two domestic disputes involving cars in recent weeks. One of them ends in an unconscious man having been potentially hit with a golf club, lying on the street after smashing into a fire hydrant. The other ends in a man FALLING OFF A GOD DAMNED CAR and dying.
I’m never getting married, nor am I ever getting engaged. And God forbid I do, I’m sure not pissing her off in the process.
Written by: Patrick Galvin 
In what is quickly turning into a dismal cluster-fuck for Democrats everywhere, the Healthcare plan that was so close to being finalized has been blocked by Democrat Ben Nelson, who wants stricter abortion laws in the bill before supporting it.
Story from AP (Courtesy of Yahoo! News):
“Without modifications, the language concerning abortion is not sufficient,” Nelson declared in a written statement that summarized the results of days of private negotiations. The second-term Nebraskan opposes the procedure and wants tighter restrictions written into the overhaul.
With Nelson’s support, the White House and Senate Democrats would command 60 votes for the health care measure, enough to overcome a Republican filibuster and pass the bill within a matter of days.
“The absolute refusal of Republicans in the Senate to support health care reform and the hijacking of the bill by defenders of the insurance industry have brought us a Senate bill that is inadequate,” Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO, said in a statement.
His criticism of GOP lawmakers aside, Trumka’s blast seemed aimed at Nelson, Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and possibly other members of the Senate Democratic caucus who have successfully stripped the legislation of any form of government-run insurance option.
Bullshit. Democrats should have and probably did expect unanimous opposition from Republicans regarding this bill. They had 60 Democrats as it stood, so numbers were in their favor. They had the unprecedented popularity of their Democratic president. And they had a plan that made common-sense to over 50% of the American public during numerous polls. Their inability to push through a government-run option, or any option currently, is a failure they can purely call their own. They were inconsistent with their message, while Republicans were more staunch in their communal stance. When Obama said that a government-run option doesn’t translate to a single-payer system in the longterm, we as a public believed it. Until Barney Frank said the exact opposite. Bernie Sanders later joined in. Then people started scratching their heads. Similar inconsistencies occurred regarding the cost of the plan, with Blue Dog Democrats saying it was too expensive while others said it would pay for itself in the long run. As a result, the message from Democrats was never clear or consistent enough to resonate with the public to a degree they would demand change on their behalf. And thus, despite greater than 50% approval ratings, Republicans could pull the right strings (most notably Joe Lieberman) and get enough support to stanch the bill to date.
The worst part is the way the plan had originally been set up, the muscle that would enforce the private reforms came largely from the public, government-run option. Take generic drugs for example. Obama-Biden wanted generics to be used more often, and the government – run plans could have introduced them at a cheaper cost, thus forcing private firms to do the same. But now, how do they enforce the use of generics short of hardcore regulation that would draw the ire of moderates everywhere?
Democrats can blame Republicans on this if they want to, but ultimately they had an idea their party, their voters and even the swing-voters were getting behind. They just fucked up selling it. If you’re a salesman and you lose a bid, you don’t blame the competitor. You fucked up, period.
Written by: Mike The Christmas morning I opened a brand new SNES with Super Mario World was one of the top 3 Christmases of my life. I played the game religiously for the next year… I’d just keep going back and replaying it trying to find new things I missed the first time.
So now, as an adult watching these videos of Mario as a drug addicted, unemployed plumber bring me back to those wonderful childhood moments playing the game. Enjoy this!
Written by: Mike 
A Vodka filled AK47, Missiles filled with Vodka. I NEED THESE THINGS!
[President] Medvedev in June told Health Minister Tatyana Golikova that Russia’s alcohol consumption is “colossal” and asked the government by today to find ways to fight excessive drinking and bootlegged vodka production.
Whenever your country’s leader describes a problem as colossal you know it might be something you’d want to fix. But lets be honest for a second, the rest of the world (and by this I mean a random sampling of a few people I’m friends with) LOVE the fact Russians drink copious amounts of vodka. Just how much Vodka does the average Russian drink? Glad you asked
Alcohol consumption in Russia should fall to as low as 5 liters per person a year by 2020 from about 18 liters now, according to a plan published on the Alcohol Market Regulation Federal Service’s Web site today. The World Health Organization estimates 8 liters as an “accepted volume of consumption,” according to the service.
EIGHTEEN LITERS!? Even in college I don’t think I approached that number. Doing some quick math, that’s 24 750mL bottles of Popov Vodka in a year, or 1 entire bottle per person about once every two weeks. That’s mind boggling when you think about that figure as being an average for it’s citizens. There are probably people who will drink a 750 bottle once a week.
I sincerely hope this doesn’t happen. For one, we probably won the Cold War based on an ill-advised decision made after a marathon drinking session at the Kremlin. We’d also need to find a new villain for movies; the cagey yet alcoholic Russian just wouldn’t resonate with us in a world where Russian’s drank vodka at an “accepted volume”.
Written by: Mike While everyone in the country is concentrated on the growing number of alleged mistresses coming forward claiming they had a romp with the worlds #1 golfer, a new plot is developing, one in which Woods may be in the thick of. The transgressions Tiger admits to, while disturbing from a family and personal perspective, are nothing new to society. All women in think men cheat on them and every few months when there is no news, the gossip magazines just make up a story about Angelina Jolie breaking up with Brad Pitt.
But today a Canadian doctor, who is linked to supposedly working with Tiger, is under investigation by the FBI and Canadian Mounties for a stop at the border where Human growth hormone and Actovegin, a drug extracted from calf’s blood, were found in Galea’s bag in the car (according to the NY Times)
As you dive deeper into the story, and how it’s related to El Tigre, Dr. Galea, visited Woods four times in February and March to provide platelet-rich plasma therapy as he recovered from knee surgery. This therapy involves taking a blood sample, removing red blood cells that leave the platelet rich plasma, and re-injecting into the patient to expedite the healing process.
Of course, Tiger was not the first athlete to undergo the therapy. Early in 2009 Hines Ward, a Super Bowl MVP sprained his MCL in the AFC Championship game. By all estimates of traditional medicines, it was unlikely that Ward would play 2 weeks later in the Super Bowl. He did the therapy (after reviewing it’s history), and rigorous rehab. He played at least 2 weeks before playing if he had done a traditional recovery, yet the story went largely unreported. Perhaps it will take a mega-star like Tiger to bring this into our collective conscious.
With that said, the debate of the 2010’s may be just exactly what is a steroid or performance enhancing drug? In the 2000’s the media and congress went after baseball. Society was painted a picture of artificially created pharmaceuticals that players were hiding in their lockers and going to seedy ‘clinics’ to get the drug administered. The reality is we may now see legitimate procedures being done on athletes by credited doctors who are pushing the boundaries of scientific medicine.
The line between what is and isn’t a performance enhancement is blurred more than ever. On one hand, what they are putting in your body with this particular treatment was created by your body, nothing artificial about it. On the other, your body never produced the platelet rich blood; it had to be modified in a lab to get the desired result.
As we learn more about this, and other therapies, opinions will form and lines will be drawn. Professional leagues will have a new, but all to familiar issue to deal with; defining what is acceptable for its athletes to do in terms of personal fitness. The talking heads on TV will likely be varied in their opinions, and everyone with a twitter account will chime in with their 140 character take. But at the end of the day, it will ultimately be the athletes themselves who push and influence the policy. It just remains to be seen to what medical extremes they are willing to go in order to achieve athletic success.
