Yessir.
- There's pretty much nothing of note going on right now. I was considering spacing this sentence out one word per line so my post would be longer, but then I realized it would just look very thin. Hey, Texas A&M, seriously, join the Big Ten, just so I have something to write about. Please. (What, the Big Ten presidents don't want to expand any more? Screw you, Big Ten presidents.) On the plus side, theyll have divisions decided by late August. I was gonna post a video of somebody shooting themselves in the brains out of boredom but deemed it to be too graphic for this.
- Talking about brain damage (SEGUE. SEG. WAY.), it's difficult not to be sucked up into Rick Telander's ongoing series about the effect of football on the heads of people who play football. Anything by Rick Telander is pretty awesome - Heaven is a Playground, not just a true statement, also a fantastic book, I'm always shocked that this man writes for the same paper that until so recently employed Jay Mariotti and Jim O'Donnell - but this is especially fantastic, swinging from Telander, a former Northwestern cornerback to former NU running back Mike Adamle to former team doctor and 1930's Wildcat Doc Reid. He spits fire, and I'd urge you to read it even if it wasn't closely linked to Northwestern. I doubt he goes ahead and asks anybody currently employed/playing at NU to see how things have changed since he played, but knowing Telander, he's good, and maybe he did.
- Congratulations abound to the homies at Spread Far the Fame for moving up to the blog leagues at Chicago Now, joining the other blog homie Chicago College Basketball on that network. They're also better than Jay Mariotti. Then again, so am I. So are you. Name something, and you're better at it than Jay Mariotti is at being a person. You're a better breakdancer than Jay Mariotti is a writer, and I don't even know you, let alone know how good at breakdancing you are. (I, of course, was a backup dancer in the film Step Up 2: The Streets, so comparing my breakdancing skills to Mariotti's writing would be unfair. (Sorry to SFTF for sidetracking this originally congratulatory bulletpoint with hatred.)
- I know a lot of you might be Bulls fans, but if LeBron James comes to Chicago, I'm going to eat my own arm.
- While we're at it, my hometown Knicks drafted Landry Fields, who you may remember from his performance at NU earlier in the season. I specifically remembered him posterizing two NU players, and frantically began searching for the video, which I eventually found: peep the :28 and :57 marks to see Landry sonning John Shurna and Drew Crawford.
- A lot of y'all probably fairweathered your way through the World Cup, but I'm a pretty active soccer fan, so I'm still paying attention post-US. So's some NU engineering professor who came up with an attempt to quantify successful soccer players, although I must say, a) his system doesn't sound very complex and b), people, like, lots of people, already use similar stats. But keep trying! (IknowhehasanengineeringdegreeandIdontbutIwatchalotofsoccer)
- Last, but not least, I was alerted to this from ESPN.com/The Big Lead: apparently, ESPN's Outside the Lines did an investigative report into my most beloved of homemade hallucinogenic drugs, the purple drank, and it's purported entry into the athlete community, which I assume took place in 2006 when people still listened to music from Houston, but four years before Mark Fainaru-Wada became hip enough to report on it.
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- If you don't remember, my first blog was affectionately known as The Purple Drank, so I'm always glad/terrified to see athletes sippin' on purple. Sip, friends, but sip wisely. Sometimes, it's great: you feel great, everything slows down, life seems to be moving at the perfect pace for you to feel exactly the way you want. Other times, it's late June and you're trying to write crap about Northwestern sports. But like I always say, when life gives you a cough, get your doctor to prescribe you heavy duty cough syrup and mix it up with Sprite and Jolly Ranchers. Here's to hoping NU's athletes stay off the sizzurp. (My favorite part of that video is the fact that ESPN.com now has a tag for "Lean", so you can keep abreast of all the latest lean related news on one easy page.) (Also, the fact that they put "purple drank" in quotation marks and refer to it as "relatively unknown", even though I'd be mad if I made a purple drank joke in common conversation and the person I made it to didn't get it.