Czech please!

Plfff.

Um, you don't need to have your finger on the pulse of teen America to know who the Jonas Brothers are. Their media saturation is such that you don't have to do much more than exist in order to recognize them. I don't know any of their songs, but I can go "oh, ugly kids in suits with bad hair, hey, it's the Jonas Brothers."

College-style matching possessions, but with kickoffs, not starting at an arbitrary point. The game ends when one team leads after having an equal number of possessions. If you believe the system is fine because "well then the defense shoulda stopped em then! footbaw!", your brain is most likely composed of oatmeal, especially on the heels of that Saints-Bears game where the end of the game was crotch-deep in highly dubious pass interference calls. It's an offensive league.

Sure wish I could hold that note on "The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side," but why?

No, because I think people rightly or wrongly consider the 1980s as the standard, with the modern trap era being an unfortunate aberration wherein nobody could get over the blue line to shoot on what was closer to a child's pillow-fort than an actual goalie, a modern analogue to the dead ball era in baseball. It's possible that the post-lockout era will be regarded as being over-inflated relative to the norm and informally adjusted as well.

After reading this year's Baseball Prospectus, I'm starting to feel like I underrated Cincinnati rather heavily. I don't know why. Sloppy outing from them this year, by the way. There's no rhyme or reason to whether a moved player is listed with his new team or his old, and there's no index in the back of the book to help you out, even though they allude to one in the preface. Typos out the ass, too. I know it was a weird offseason, but for $22 I expect better.

At the moment, Gary Floyd has a great Crucifixio Jones quote in his signature. Man, was that guy a piece of work or what.

Brodeur coasted on the winds of the neutral zone trap at its absolute zenith/nadir. When you face 12 shots on goal a night, anything's possible! Oh and the Pahlsson trade is going to be Dale Tallon's undoing. He'll be back in the broadcast booth by next year with Scotty Bowman taking over, most likely. The Hawks have been the worst team in the league since the deadline, since they traded a solid defenseman for, in effect, an unripe AHLer. Now I'll just be happy if they make the playoffs and win a game.

Nah, there has to be some point to winning a division championship other than selling t-shirts to drooling idiots who would actually wear a "2009 NFC North Champions" shirt with pride. This Jay Cutler thing keeps getting weirder. Apparently McDaniels did a terrible job of communicating with Cutler during all the transitional-period stuff, or something, and further alienated him. Is everyone from the Belichick Crime Family a grumbling social retard? Can any of them take a job without phlegmatically irritating all their employees, co-workers, and media? I can already feel "biggest blunder" status being placed on the Shanahan firing.

Obviously they were waiting for Maddux to retire so it could be retired for both.

Did he pull a Byron the Bulb? What's that? Several of us have independently noticed, and then confirmed with one another, that you have a penchant for drafting posts as evidenced by your name at the bottom of the page going into Posting... mode, but then they never appear. Short attention span? Rather post nothing at all than something subpar? Don't sell yourself short: even a poor outing by your lofty standards is still better than most of the crap people post here. You've left a lot of us with e-blue e-balls, waiting for a witty albeit vowel-eschewing smackdown, and then after a long period of time, nothing. It could just be a board glitch, though, which wouldn't surprise me. You guys wouldn't believe what a mess the coding has become on this thing. If you try to change a folder subtitle, it redirects you to Austrian dungeon porn, and this was before The Problem happened!

He's going to help enact pro-Guinness legislation. If you want to order a beer, you need to give heavy consideration to ordering the black one.

Why am I watching a Bulls home game where the Bulls are in green and the Celtics are in white? This is going to annoy the shit out of me. Why am I watching a Bulls game?

A monument to not giving a fuck what happens as long as one gets paid.

I will agree with you that the NBA playoffs are unnecessarily protracted. With the exception of the Warriors-Mavericks series of 2007, I can't think of any other first round series that needed to be a 4 out of 7 rather than a 3 out of 5. (Remember Hornets-Heat, 2004? Oh lord!) This isn't like baseball, where 162 games coming down to 5 (or even 7) is such a crapshoot that all you can do is throw up your hands and hope for the best, or hockey, where there's generally more parity from 1 down to 8 than there is in basketball, and a goaltender can fuel a crazy run to the finals by a lower seed with relative facility. With the NBA, it's pretty cut-and-dried: there are about four to six legitimate contenders in a given season; between the lottery teams and the contenders lie utter cannon fodder. This year, I'd say the Lakers and Spurs are the only two real threats from the West and it's a blob from 3rd to 9th; Cavaliers and Celtics from the East, the Magic have a sliver of a chance, as does Dwyane Wade. These first round series serve no competitive purpose. They're just tune-ups, and yet they take weeks to complete. These shit teams like the Bulls and Bucks need to be summarily dispatched in no more than five days: game, rest, game, travel, game. So yes, you, cabbageboy, are correct. I understand where you're coming from to an extent with the town mouse/country mouse thing, but if your argument has any strength, it's due to the failure of the NBA to maintain a strong national television footprint. Baseball relies on its markets more than any other sport, but people outside of them still follow teams without claiming allegiance to an inferior product, right? Da fire and da passion! Dey got a pep band an everyting! Why is the "emotion and intensity" of college basketball a good thing? It just means that a lot of the parties involved, players and broadcasters alike, are histrionic goofs. Adam Morrison's contrived weeping and the over-the-top screaming from any number of broadcasters are not arguments for the quality of the product vis-a-vis the NBA. "HE'S A GOOD KID, BABY! THEY'RE ALL GOOD KIDS!" "TAKE IT HOOOOOME JEROOOOOME! ONIOOONNSSS!!!" Shut up! I mean, I like the Gus soundbites as much as anyone, and he's not always as bad as others are, but when you scream like a lunatic on every big play, where do you go from there? How do you top your enthusiasm when it needs to be topped? You hit a threshold, and suddenly you're telling everyone that everything is the best anything ever, and then townies start to believe it.

I'm not Irish.

That's what I don't get, he may never get a another shot again. Who knows, but I'd rather try and make mid six figures then try to win the WBC for my country. Maybe it's something they put in the water here, but I wouldn't really feel any national pride if USA won. Of course you wouldn't. Nobody would. We have nothing to prove, and this doesn't prove anything. Soccer is different, because all the respective leagues are at a close enough competitive level that there's no undisputed world champion: the best team in England might not be as good as the best one in Germany or the best in Brazil or whatever. The Fake Italians versus the Dominicans Who Couldn't Get Out Of It versus Americans That Aren't Injured Yet is silly. The world championship is determined by the National League vs. the American League, period-sentence-'graph.

I'm a baseball fan too, and I don't want to see the meaningful competition jeopardized by meaningless competition. I don't want Ted Lilly being asked to play in left because Ryan Braun got hurt (though as a Cubs fan I have to say that the possibility of injuries to Braun and Lindstrom certainly don't hurt us). American Idol has good ratings too. So?

Man, for a guy who carries himself as a baseball genius, you sure are choosing to die here on Retard Hill. Nobody has suggested that we eliminate spring training (though shortening it from this interminable seven-week odyssey would be great), because spring training is not the same environment. I think Ryan Braun himself acknowledged as much. It's controlled in order to prepare players for the highly compensated jobs they hold for six months. Players will get hurt in games, they'll get hurt in training, they'll get hurt ironing the shirts they're wearing as they iron them. That's reality. But playing at full intensity ahead of schedule seems to be more dangerous than spring training, and so risk should be minimized by holding players out of this. There is absolutely no reason to do this. We don't need to grow the game, we don't need to determine anything. We need to get players ready for the season. That's all that matters. The Commissioner's office isn't hiring, Al. You don't need to carry the water for Selig's Folly as more and more people start to realize that this has absolutely no point whatsoever. I like baseball too, and I love pointless endeavors, but I have no patience for pointless baseball endeavors.

You're not a good idea.

Hey, that's another thread.

It's too sugary! I like my bagels savory. If you do it right you get a nice balance of nutty, creamy, and salty. If you want cinnamon and jelly, eat a donut. I had Pop-Tarts for breakfast this morning, and I realized that Pop-Tarts are, in a way, useless. They don't compose a substantial and satisfying breakfast in and of themselves. I mean, they taste good, but you don't lean back and say "mm, that's a breakfast." Also, they're too big to just be a little snack, because they're packaged in pairs so you can't just eat one, and you have to toast them (with most flavors) so the preparation is a minor undertaking, as far as snacks go, and that's some high caloric intake for a snack. So what do you do with Pop-Tarts?

Is this true that Brian McCann was forced to play left field (where he has never played in organized baseball) because of an injury-shortened bench? That's a something. So Chipper Jones aggravated the strained oblique muscle that has put him on the disabled list before, Matt Lindstrom is shut down for at least 10 days, Ryan Braun and Dustin Pedroia are hurt as well, and Davey Johnson floated the idea of forfeiting the game. Lovely.

Aw that sucks. It should be like in school when the teachers made a mistake correcting your test, and if you got it right but it was marked wrong you got the point back, but if they marked it right and you were wrong you kept the point. Your sitch could also be the basis of a college-themed movie, if it hasn't yet already, possibly starring a rapper. He gets in on a clerical error and raises hell. It would be called Clerical Error.

Oh look, Cutler and Favre have the same agent, Bus Cook. He must specialize in butthurt redneck quarterbacks. I don't think Cutler would be that expensive. The Broncos have no leverage.