I’m going to keep watching this until they get out.

- Follow us on Twitter @withleather
- Follow me personally @MrBrandonStroud and Burnsy @MayorBurnsy
- Like us on Facebook.

Links

Every Face Punch In ‘Road House’ Is Everything You Could Ever Ask For In A Supercut - I prefer that Bloodsport style of 80s-movie punch where you get hit and you turn and throw up blood, but maybe that’s just me. And Chong Li. [UPROXX]

Hanksy Broadens His Pop Culture Horizons With Cosby, Danson, And Gosling-Inspired Works - Somebody needs to add a Cosby sweater to every piece of graffiti ever. I want the HI HOW ARE YOU frog thing in Austin to have a Cosby sweater. [UPROXX]

Lindsay Lohan Will Host Saturday Night Live For Some Reason - She’s gotta promote those washed-out Terry Richardson cigarette ads somehow! [Warming Glow]

Scientists Create Substance That Could Let People Climb Like Spider-Man - My dreams are coming true. What a wonderful world wherein I might one day be able to dispatch a lightning guy by tossing a manhole cover at him! [Gamma Squad]

Oscar Voters Are 94% White, The Rest Are Erik Estrada And Lorenzo Lamas - The good news: now at least Midnight In Paris has a chance of winning stuff. [Film Drunk]

Peter King Says As An Underdog, We Underrate The Underdog Faction - “If your NFL market is experiencing signs of depression, consult your medical professional and have them sign journeyman returner Eddie Abilify.” [Kissing Suzy Kolber]

B.o.B.: So Good - Only if I get to look at Hayley Williams for every 45 seconds of him rapping. I could really use a wish right now. [Smoking Section]

Cage Potato’s Comprehensive 2012 MMA App Buyer’s Guide - Somebody should make an app about UK women’s mixed martial arts and call it “Angry Birds”. [Cage Potato]

Are ‘Downton Abbey’ Trading Cards Gonna Be the Next Craze? - Only if I have to tap Manor to use them. [The FW]

The 30 Reasons Why We’ll Miss ‘Downton Abbey’- They should let Whitney Cummings remake this show for CBS about a wacky girl trying to make it on her own in the big city and call it ‘Downtown Abby’. [Pajiba]

Sports Cards For Insane People: Have A Happy, Creepy Valentine’s Day! - The back of Greg “The Hammer” Valentine’s card is the best, I just wish the front said I BROKE WAHOO’S LEG, VALENTINE with hearts around it. [SB Nation]

Pierre Abernathy: The Dirty Dirty Sheets Interview - Check out this interview with the funniest pro wrestler you probably haven’t heard of. His moonsault is the stuff of legend. [DirtyDirtySheets]

Ron Swanson Is On IMDB - “Give me all the production credits you have.” [Buzzfeed]

This isn’t really a sentence that ever should’ve been typed, but somebody in the St. Louis Cardinals front office forgot to file copyright the intellectual whatever of the squirrels that ran onto the field during games 3 and 4 of their series against Philadelphia, and now that the “serendipitous rodent” has become a “mascot of sorts” for the club, every bootleg t-shirt jockey and sports-minded taxidermist is free the plaster the thing on its wares.

STL Today has the important legal analysis:

“No one can come and say, ‘This is ours,’” Haim Mano, marketing professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said of the Rally Squirrel. “It’s wide open.”

Major League Baseball, he added, could claim copyright of the footage of Games 3 and 4 against the Philadelphia Phillies two weeks ago, when a squirrel temporarily interrupted the game and darted across the field. And vendors could also run into dangerous territory if the squirrel-themed merchandise includes something that looks like a team logo or other trademarked material.

As funny as the discussion gets (and remember, it’s a discussion about how you can make chocolate squirrels and call them Rally Squirrels to sell them to dumb Cardinals fans, but if you put the Cardinals logo on them you’re infringing), it doesn’t get any better than this:

To help market the nuts at the St. Louis shop, a family member dropped off a squirrel statue that has been passed around the family as an inside joke for years. They placed a red background behind it.

“I don’t think anybody can copyright squirrel nuts,” he added.

They need to take advantage of the trend now, because win or lose, the “rally squirrel” won’t be around forever. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could think of another animal to cite when rooting for the Cardinals?

Yesterday marked the start of the 2011 Running of the Bulls, the most popular part of the seven-day festival of Sanfermines in honor of San Fermín in Pamplona, Spain. This is one of those things I can’t really report about without editorializing, so I’ll let good old Wikipedia fill in your blanks.

Spanish lore says the true origin began in North-eastern Spain during the early 14th century. While transporting cattle in order to sell at the market, men would attempt to speed the process by hurrying their cattle using tactics of fear and excitement. After years of this practice, the transportation and hurrying began to turn into a competition, as young adults would attempt to race in front of the bulls and make it safely to their pens without being overtaken. When the popularity of this practice increased and was noticed more and more by the expanding population of Spanish cities, a tradition was created and stands to this day.

The modern purpose of the run is to transport a bunch of bulls from the off-site corrals where they had spent the night, to the bullring where they would be killed in the evening, and to charge Bohemian tourists with no sense of compassion 250 bucks to stand on somebody’s balcony. Ah, sorry. I don’t want to push my beliefs on anybody, but I do want to present to you a huge gallery of pictures from the event. They’re beautiful shots, and I guess it’s hard to take a picture of anybody doing anything during the Running of the Bulls without it looking like a critique on humanity. It’s apparently important to a nation’s culture, like our professional football games, and we can’t hold it against Spain and the Spanish that most of the people paying to attend are devolved goons, like at our professional football games.

Enjoy. And be sure to be in Pamplona for the running next July and every Summer after, should you decide this looks like a great way to spend an afternoon.

[header photo credit AP / Daniel Ochoa de Olza]

Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this month we reported that Egyptian strongman al-Sayed al-Essawy was in training to boost Egyptian tourism by killing a full-grown African lion with his bare hands at the foot of the Pyramids at Giza. Sounds like a plan, right? Well, the fight went down, and it wasn’t exactly Hercules of Yore, unless the whole “Hercules” thing is exaggerated and he just fed a donkey to the Lernean Hydra and sat around waiting for it to fall asleep.

Here’s the video recap, followed by a quick rundown of carny lies:

1. al-Essawy claimed he was going to fight a lion with his bare hands, but went into the ring dressed like a Three Wishes dot com Halloween gladiator, carrying a pronged spear, a machete, a shield and a dagger.

2. When you say “I’m going to fight a lion” people assume you mean “a wild lion that will be trying to fight me back”, not a lion you paid for yourself and fed an “entire donkey” (credit to one of the onlookers).

3. When you say “I want to fight a lion in front of the pyramids” people assume you mean “I’m going to battle a lion in the desert in front of the pyramids”, not “I’m going to fight a lion in the same general country as pyramids”.

Read the rest of this entry »

On Sunday, as the Junior Barranquilla soccer team was defeating Pereira 2-1 in the fourth game of the Liga Postobon, an owl landed on the field after being struck by a ball, and Pereira’s Luis Moreno kicked the bird. Even worse, the owl is Junior Barranquilla’s official mascot and good luck charm, so I’m sure the team went apesh*t and taught him a lesson, right? Nope. They gave him a stern, “What the heck, man?” Probably because Moreno is a pretty big dude.

As fans shouted in protest and chanted “Murderer” at Moreno, the bird was simply cleared from the field and taken to a zoo for treatment. Luckily, the bird is fine and I don’t have to worry about getting my barbed wire baseball bat through Customs for a little trip down to Bogota for avian justice. So what then of Moreno’s despicable act? How does the man with no corazon feel?

“I apologize to the fans, it wasn’t my intention, I did it to see if the owl could fly,” said Moreno after the game, which he left amid a heavy police guard. The Pereira player explained he did it to rid the field of the bird as quickly as possible. (Via Columbia Reports)

The problem with that excuse is that people have eyes, and they use those eyes to watch video footage of people kicking injured owls. If Moreno felt any concern, he sure has a strange way of showing it. Needless to say, animal groups are furious over Moreno’s treatment of the mascot, and they’re calling on the Colombian government to take serious action. And action will be swiftly dealt, friends. Mainly because the country has no animal abuse laws, so Moreno won’t be punished. Viva justicia!

Video after the jump…

Read the rest of this entry »

This is nothing more than your garden-variety “High school students somewhere in America sell raunchy shirts of horses fingercuffing cheerleader from rival school while exchanging an equine high-five of sorts.” But everyone else is posting it, so I feel compelled to weigh in on it, even though its actual relevance to sports is significantly small.

Actual “show your school spirit” shirt sold by students to “support team.”

Via an anonymous and concerned parent. via, via.

Those “vias” were a feminist law professor blog, and Jezebel, which is basically Cosmo in first-draft form. Anyway, it’s almost inconceivable that this is being sold by anyone other than a handful of students in some sort of underground market. Furthermore, said kids probably can’t even wear them to school. And “supporting the team” has been misinterpreted in the comments of both sites: the school isn’t seeing any money from the sale of these tees. And it’s a good thing, because the objectification of young girls wearing skimpy outfits and jumping along the sidelines uttering cheers any 8-year-old could concoct while the men are doing all the work in the field is just horrendous…except when it’s being done by cartoon Equidae of the animal kingdom. Eat your heart out, Eeyore. Among other things. Thanks, John. Also. Read the rest of this entry »