88 thoughts on “February 16, 2012: Is It Thursday?”

  3. Welp, I'm off to Las Vegas for the weekend. I'm pretty pumped for this trip, it's an all-expenses paid type deal and I will be living as large as possible. I also plan on making a lot of half-baked sports bets. Wolves to the finals? Why not!

            1. Mine was a snide remark about the BBWAA giving Edison Volquez several RoY votes despite him already having pitched 80 innings over the previous three seasons.

  5. Tweet of the year:

    @Moses_Alipate12: If Lin dunked on LeBron while wearing Yankee hat then Tebowed in front of Favre, would ESPN explode?

  6. theres so many ways this could go (twitter)

    Minnesota Twins @Twins

    Plouffe talked about working out with a "new evil JoeMauer" this morning, what other stuff does #EvilJoeMauer do?

    1. I hope this means Joe Mauer is going to play with facial hair this season. I'd like him to shed his "good guy" image by breaking other teams' spirit with his awesome hitting this year. And maybe he can power bomb Barreiro & Souhan through a table.

    2. I'm pretty sure the only difference between regular Joe Mauer and Evil Joe Mauer is that the later drinks Land O'Lakes milk.

    5. Evil Joe Mauer plays third base, hits a ton of homeruns and strikes out at a record pace. He also has more tattoos than Mark Reynolds Ryan Roberts.

    6. From my awesome wife, Philosofette:

      Evil Joe Mauer makes people wait a week before he responds to their fan mail.

      1. That is a good one. He also doesn't use calligraphy when he writes them back after that long wait.

    1. I don't think any other NHL fans have high ground to stand on. Fights are cheered in every rink, and fights are nothing more than an attempt to injure an opponent.

      1. apropos: apparently a guy i used to work with is going to the game tonight. here's his FB status from about an hour ago:

        I hope there's a huge fight tonight. Go Wild!

        5 people like it so far.

      2. I agree re:fights, but cheering for an accidental injury is something else.

        For the record, I don't really feel like Montreal fans are in the wrong here. I just thought that this is an interesting glimpse into how amped up a crowd can get over a sporting event.

        1. Is cheering for an accidental injury better or worse than cheering for a premeditated injury? I mean, sure, I'm against cheering for injuries, but I don't think it's really that fundamentally different than cheering for your guy to beat the crap out of another guy.

          1. I haven't watched the video, so I don't know if I'm accurately describing the Chara situation, but in cheering a fight, the fan is at least cheering for something their player did well (hockey fights usually involve both players knowing what they are getting into).

            Cheering Chara getting hit by the puck isn't cheering anything except the fact that he is in pain. That's what feels the grossest here, I think.

            1. I suppose you could draw the distinction that way, but it seems a bit like ranking involuntary manslaughter as worse than first-degree murder. "Hey, at least the killer successfully accomplished what he set out to do."

                1. Because no one has ever died from taking a blow to the head? Why is it so unfair? People cheer when two guys are out there beating the crap out of each other, with the intent to harm. Personally, it's hard for me to see this as being completely acceptable, while cheering a random injury as somehow out of line.

                  1. People cheer when two guys are out there beating the crap out of each other, with the intent to harm.

                    If that's what a hockey fight is, how do you not outlaw boxing? That entire sport essentially is a relentless, one-way ticket to brain damage.

                    1. I'm not interested in making absolute moral judgements here. I'm just saying that once you step across the line where actively cheering violence towards another player is acceptable, it's hard for me to accept cheering a different kind of injury as suddenly way over the line or completely classless.

                    2. Fights are part of the game that pits a member of one team against a member of the other. They are violent, yes, but they are also a distillation of the general conflict of the game.

                      An accidental injury is just pain for the player injured without any connection to the game.

                      Cheering a fight isn't that far from cheering for your team. Cheering an injury is being a jerk (not the worst thing ever, but I think it's still kinda gross).

              2. hockey fights usually involve both players knowing what they are getting into

                I think that's the biggest difference in my interpretation and yours.

                First-degree murder would be more like if an opposing player got jumped, beaten up, and injured. I don't think anyone would defend fans who cheered for that.

                I don't particularly like fans who go to games hoping to see a fight. But it is a part of the game, and the vast majority of players who fight have been in plenty of hockey fights before (if not in the NHL, then minors, juniors, etc.), so they know their abilities and the risks involved.

                  1. Like the immediate risk to their next paycheck if they don't participate in the fight?

                    The point of my analogy, really, is that I'm not buying that in cheering a fight a fan is cheering someone doing something well. They are cheering someone intentionally harming someone else. That's supposed to make me feel better about it?

                    Like I said, I suppose you could draw the distinction that way.

                    1. i suppose i was trying to say what DG said in that it's about two players agreeing to hurt each other, rather than a one way street. i definitely agree with you that violence is violence and that cheering for one form isn't really all that different than cheering for another. mine was more of a question of semantics.

                    2. Like the immediate risk to their next paycheck if they don't participate in the fight?

                      As a percentage of players in the league, how many hockey players are so bad at any other aspect of the game that the only way they stay rostered is because of their fighting ability?

                    3. So you suppose that it would be really easy for a player to go back to his bench after backing down from a fight?

                    4. Also, I would say that the more likely you are to be in a fight, the more likely you are to depend on that as part of your career. There have been 376 fights so far this season and the top 10 fighters (by total bouts) have 130 combined fights. So I think a lot of the guys routinely involved in fights feel a very real pressure to fight or lose their job.

                    5. Jeez, DG, this ubelmann guy's been agitating you all game day. It's not looking good for your side. Maybe you should get out there and mix it up with him, you know, to rally your team.

            1. I would have trouble taking an MMA fan seriously if he asserted that the Montreal fans in question were out of line for cheering on Chara's injury. I'm not here to say what's morally defensible or not, just that once fans are out there cheering for two guys to intentionally harm one another, what is so shocking about fans cheering for unintentional harm?

              2. I'm a pretty big MMA fan, but I wouldn't cheer for an injury. The people who fight are paid to fight. They know why they're there and they know the risks. I don't mind seeing blood, but I don't want to see anybody get seriously injured either. Let's be honest, the people who fight in hockey are paid to fight. Yes, they're paid to play hockey, but fighting is part of their job too. As long as the NHL decides it should be part of the game, I have no trouble cheering for a fight. The bigger question is whether or not fighting should be allowed at all. So while I wouldn't mind seeing a fight, I would also argue that fighting in hockey should probably be banned.

                1. Nice straddle, GH.

                  While I was a bit more bloodthirsty in my youth, I've always appreciated the artistry of the "European" style of play, which begs for Big Ice.

    2. Oh, man. I didn't think you were being so literal until I went to the front page and saw "Dwight Howard Week". That is rich.

      1. I love the little byline under the picture of Dwight & LeBron hugging. Much like LeBron, Dwight Howard doesn't get his due. What? LeBron definitely "gets his due." And you're devoting an entire week to the guy. Get real. I hate the sports media's obsession with creating a narrative.

  9. It turns out that alcohol is good for fruit flies, too. In moderation, of course.

    The flies in the study reached only about 0.02 percent blood alcohol levels; they would have to drink four times that to reach the blood alcohol level considered illegal for driving.

    1. I love the conclusion, too:

      It's as if the flies ask themselves, "Do I want to suffer from toxic levels of alcohol or do I want to die from this wasp?"

    1. The bad news is that you'd have to drink about 118 gallons (450 liters) of beer a day to see a health benefit from the antioxidants in hops. Eventually, researchers hope to distill that hoppy, anti-cancer goodness down to a pill to help prevent cancer.

      I'm going to need a whole lot of those half quart cans.

    1. Except that the Twins are referred to as "reviled", that might just be the best footnote ever in a legal brief.

    1. "It depends what you like," a clerk says when asked for advice on which type of phone to buy.

      "Do you like the Androids' faster download times, bigger screens, longer battery life and better cameras? Or do you like Apple?"

      A-hahahahahaha!

      2. A guy I worked with in Apple Valley moved on to Apple as a workplace. Half his Facebook updates are fellatings of the company's every move, and he tattooed the logo on his arm. He has a script ready for every instance in which someone says Apple is less than perfect. It's really, really embarrassing.

        1. exactly. I think this guy probably would meet the "deserted island" test. Because I can't imagine a female actually wanting to mate with him.

    1. And while we are sending out links, here are three fun trades I made on the NBA trade machine while drinking tonight involving the Wolves:

      One.

      Two.

      Three.

      Yeah, I should probably just go to bed now.

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