Day: May 28, 2013

Sometime between 2008 and now we forgot a little something about Kobe Bean Bryant. His career accomplishments after 2010 left him one ring shy of Michael Jordan’s six, and we immediately began debating who the better player was. At that moment we forgot that he was a mere role player on is first three championship teams, and that Shazam O’Neal carried those Laker teams to the title. We forgot that his ego drove the Lakers to trade O’Neal to the Miami Heat, and that the Lakers were barely a playoff team until Pau Gasol entered the picture. We forgave all this, named him the player of his generation and elevated him up to a Jordanesque place. We forgot about Tim Duncan.

The Big Fundamental is about as fun to watch as it is going to a kid’s recital. However, while its not pretty, it is effective. Effective to the tune of five NBA Finals appearances in 14 seasons, ring number five within reach and never a lull for San Antonio not being a top three team in the West. If Duncan gets ring number five, it will match Bryant’s total, but more importantly, all five of those rings were won because of Duncan, not in spite of him. Continue reading Eat My Sports: The forgotten debate

There’s regular adultery. There’s emotional and mental adultery. And thanks to the power of streaming media, there’s now Netflix adultery: committing the monstrous act of watching episodes of a show before watching it with a spouse as promised.

Of those who cheated, 66 percent did so “at home by themselves on the main TV.” A shocking 21 percent confessed to watching in bed while their significant other slept. (This is my modus operandi, and it is shameful.) Forty-one percent of cheaters refrained from revealing spoilers; 12 percent would rewatch and “fake it” in their reactions; 14 percent felt so guilty they confessed to cheating.

Watching it in bed while the partner sleeps? Faking it? Slatterns, harlots and strumpets, all of them.

Another cruise ship caught fire on Monday. This time it was Royal Caribbean’s Grandeur of the Seas.

We don’t know who names cruise ships, but we appreciate their sense of irony for future news stories when inevitable disaster strikes. And we mean inevitable because our previous generations worked their waterlogged asses off to invent flying after so many (at least three million) transoceanic ships were lost in history.

Passengers spent four hours waiting to possibly board lifeboats while the crew put the fire out. They prepared for the worst in the whitest fashion possible: by using the ship’s WiFi to complain about the safety procedures at CruiseCritic.com.

Even if nothing went wrong with the ship itself, be it fire, norovirus, iceberg or getting flipped turned upside down, the passengers would still have to contend with the worst part of any cruise: the other passengers.

There’s trouble brewing in Germany.

The country’s brewers are warning the German government that allowing hydraulic fracturing, a process used to recover oil and natural gas trapped inside rock formations, could hurt the beer industry. The brewers say the drilling technique, which involves injecting a mixture of water and chemicals, could threaten groundwater, which is a key ingredient in beer.

This is shaping up to be a battle between Big Oil and Big Beer.