Vladimir Putin, Russia’s former president and now prime minister, has released a judo instructional video (watch it after the jump, via FanHaus).  Putin, who rose to prominence through his service in the KGB, almost kind of maybe seems to want Russians to perceive him a certain way.  From the New York Times:

Just weeks after Russia’s state-run media reported that Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin had saved a news crew from a wild tiger, he is flexing his muscles again, this time in an instructional martial arts video…

The video is part of a growing media library highlighting Mr. Putin’s masculinity that includes episodes of Mr. Putin, a former K.G.B. agent, bare-chested on a fishing expedition and in flight in a fighter jet. No cameras were rolling when Mr. Putin was said to have tranquilized the tiger as it stalked the journalists who had accompanied the prime minister and some scientists on a scientific expedition to Russia’s Far East in late August.

Some people may think Putin’s trying too hard to come off as a virile alpha male, but I think he’s been pretty subdued about his exploits.  Why, just last Tuesday, he ran an Iron Man triathlon.  It wasn’t an official race or anything, he just wanted a good workout that day.  And he would have finished sooner if he hadn’t stopped to foil that bank robbery, which became a real time-suck when those two lingerie models insisted on showing him their gratitude.  And he was all, “I will do it, but only for the good of Russia and your happiness as citizens.”  And the women experienced earthly pleasures they had never known.

You don’t hear the media reporting that, do you?  Because Putin’s too modest.

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The Lions, predictably enough, have started the season 0-2 with a pair of embarrassing losses. President and GM and Matt Millen, who has long been the NFL poster boy for incompetence (the Lions are 31-83 with him at the helm), is now ratcheting up the blatantly obvious buffoonery by ripping off the Bush Administration’s anti-logic:

“Stay the course,” Millen said. “It’s a little bump. … It’s not like you have to panic. You don’t have to make wholesale changes. You don’t have to do all that stuff. It’s all right there.” [...]

“I think the people who came out (to training camp), they like what they see because they see discipline. They see the approach is right. They’re practicing right. All the little things.”

What about the fan who says, ‘That’s practice, but these are games’?

“Well, if a fan says that, then they don’t understand the game of football, because it can’t happen on the field if it doesn’t happen here,” Millen said.

Yes!  Yes, that’s it!  It’s not that the Lions are bad, it’s that the fans don’t understand progress.  Those idiots think that “results” in “games” are what matters.  What a bunch of jackasses.  Matt Millen’s talking about practice.  Not a game.  Practice.

[FanHaus]

Apparently Russia's hockey league is just like its attempt at a free market: a great deal more violent and unregulated than its American counterpart.

This video needs some serious editing, by the way.  Before the explosive beat-down two minutes in, there's just a lot of standing around — someone has a bloody face, and people are technically participating, but you can tell they're not really into it.  Kind of like sex with your girlfriend. 

[James Mirtle] 

Russian biathlete and four-time Olympic gold medalist Alexander Tikhonov was convicted of an attempted assassination, then was immediately freed.  In related news, Russia is fucking badass.

Tikhonov, who won gold medals in the 4×7.5-kilometer relay at four Olympics from 1968 to 1980, was charged in a plot to poison Aman Tuleyev, governor of the Kemerovo region, in 2000… However, he was immediately freed under a general amnesty passed by the lower house of the Russian parliament in 2000.

And that's all the article mentions about how he's not in jail right now.  General amnesty?  For what?  For everyone?  For Olympians?  For unsuccessful murder attempts?  Fucking A, MSNBC, tell me the relevant statutes so I can figure out where I can go to poison people.  I mean BESIDES going in and applying for a job at Taco Bell.  I'll have you know I already have a job.  At Jack in the Box.

(Pictured: Failed poison attempt target Rasputin, also known as the "Mad Monk."  Or, as I call him, "Pretty Much the Coolest Dude Ever.")