Day: November 18, 2008

Eat My Sports: Free agency snags and grabs

We’re taking a break fro the NFL this week to focus back on the mecca of all sports: baseball. See for us, the season isn’t over, we’re just on a four-month break until Spring Training. But until then there are some moves to be made, and you just might be surprised where your favorite player ends up, or who your team ends up with.

Manny Ramirez
I just can’t quit you Manny … oh wait, yeah I can, because you always quit on your team about year seven or eight. Manny is the top prize in this year’s free agency pool, mostly because of his monster final two months of the season with the Dodgers. BUYER BEWARE. Ramirez was in a contract year as soon as he left Boston. I’m pretty sure I could hit .400 and smack 17 HR if I had $27.5 million on the line. The fact is that Ramirez is a 36-year-old slugger who maybe has two good years left.

Ramirez Scott Boras wants a six-year deal somewhere in the $150 million range. So look for the Dodgers to be generous, but not too generous. I really think the final years of the contract will be a snag. The Yankees will make an offer just to piss off Boston and the Angels will make a move, but I really think you are looking at the Toronto Blue Jays. Crazy, right? No. Toronto is the only team dumb enough out there to give an aging late-40s hitter a six-year deal. And let’s face it, no one in Canada cares about baseball, so Ramirez won’t have to worry about that whole “media” thing.

Most likely destination: Toronto Blue Jays Continue reading Eat My Sports: Free agency snags and grabs

When is a gun not a gun?

How would you describe a gun to, oh, let’s say … Oliver Cromwell? Oliver Cromwell it is.

You’d probably say something like, “It’s a weapon from which a shot is discharged by a controlled powder explosion, usually small and hand-held, and carrying one makes you look awesome.”

But did you mention to him that a gun must also have been manufactured after 1896?

Not only is this news to Cromwell’s musket troops in English Civil War, but also to two U.S. prosecutors who could not prove that a defendant’s gun was, in fact, a gun. The weapon in question was possibly manufactured in 1880, which makes it possibly 16 years too old to be considered a firearm according to federal code.

So, Fun Fact for RAM Members:
It’s just assault if you use an arquebus, not assault with a deadly weapon. At least not here in the U.S. Who knows what kind of weaponry they still cling to in older, backwoodsier places like Denmark?

(Postscript: The guy with the mystery gun was still convicted of felony possession of ammunition … You know, for the “gun.”)

Warriors of the Week: Cane toads

It’s always fun to watch the opposing side succumb to infighting. When it comes to the War on Animals, there is still plenty of this, not only because of a food chain and all that nonsense, but because they can’t help but kill each other sometimes.

In Australia, cane toads are all over the place, or so Discovery (Channel) would have us believe. This is a bad thing for humans in most cases (like say, if you live in Australia and want to eat things produced on a farm), but aside from making a delightful squishing sound when you run over them, cane toads are helping us in another way: they are killing off crocs.

The poisonous toads, which are native to South America, are being eaten by Australia crocodiles, and the poisons then in turn kill the killers. Really, this solves two problems for us. We have fewer cane toads and fewer crocodiles. This is a win-win situation.

But will the sex part of censuses have to be changed?

It never stops being wild over in Australia. Come Thursday, Australia will have its very own political Sex Party! And when we say “sex party,” mind you, we mean a political party dedicated to fighting a stuffy, sex-negative political environment (and, specifically, that nasty little porn filter, natch), not, you know, a nationwide orgy. Though if the Australian Sex Party gets its way, who knows? After all, just like Jell-O, Australia’s got room for more than one sex party, after all.

Too many balls on the field

Americans just don’t care about soccer. Maybe it’s the fact that we didn’t invent it, maybe it’s the fact that they don’t serve alcohol at the games in Europe, maybe it’s the lack of anything ever happening in an average game. Whatever the reason may be, the “rest of the world” (oh yeah? Then where’s Canada?) loves the sport, but that is because the rest of the world is clinically insane.

An Italian soccer team lined up for a free kick (they give them away for free because they’re not worth much) and dropped their shorts, trying to block the goalie’s view of the ball. This is the first time in professional sports where someone has intentionally dropped their pants since the 1926 U.S. Open, when Archibald “Crazy Pants” Fitzgerald dropped trou in an attempt to distract Bobby Jones while he was making a putt on the 15th green.