It’s strange, as I was settling in to watch college football this weekend, I found myself wondering: “Hey, you know who are two people that we haven’t heard from in a while? Brian McFayden and Verne Troyer.” The former, of course, rose to mild prominence as a VJ on MTV’s Total Request Live in the early 2000s, before the music network completely phased out music, and then as the host of the CW’s Beauty and the Geek. The latter is obviously best known as Mini Me from the Austin Powers franchise and eventually the housemate that got hammered and peed everywhere on VH1’s The Surreal Life before releasing the world’s second most unwanted sex tape, with all due respect to Dustin Diamond.

So what the hell are these two former Y-list celebrities up to these days? Well, wouldn’t you know it, they’re talking Michigan Wolverines football over on the online digital show Campus Insiders, which I believe is that show that always aired in my campus cafeteria. As it turns out, Troyer is a Michigan Wolverines fan, and it was almost impossible to write that without using an adjective like big or huge because of the groaning that would quickly follow.

Of course, that didn’t stop McFayden.

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♫ "You don't knooooow, OH OH!" ♫

Girls on the Internet have had a tough August.

Earlier this month, UK tabloid The Sun reportedly showed Sports Illustrated covergirl Kate Upton a photo of teen boy-band sensation One Direction and asked her to pick out which member she thought was the cutest. If you’re unfamiliar with the group (or their hits “One Thing” and “What Makes You Beautiful”), they’re five teenagers with attitude formed a la the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers on the seventh season of the British version of ‘The X Factor’. Imagine the Spice Girls if they were boys, and all five of them were Baby Spice. Kate apparently pointed out band member Harry Styles, which instantly caused rumors that she had a crush on him and planned to hook up with him at the MTV Video Music Awards. I don’t know.

Anyway, the rumors were squashed, but with the VMAs only a week away (they air on September 6), radio hosts like Ryan Seacrest are bringing them up again. If you felt a rumbling yesterday afternoon, don’t be alarmed — it was only One Direction’s six-million-plus Twitter followers FREAKING THE F**K OUT because their confrontational sexual armageddon is nigh. One Direction Kate Upton rumors are their horsemen.

It’s a nice mixture of girls pretending they’ve never heard of Kate Upton, girls feeling shamed and insignificant because America’s closest living equivalent to Jessica Rabbit is competing for the same guy as them, a metric ton of name-calling and good old fashioned death threats. I’ve compiled a few of my favorites, and I hope you enjoy them. Well, “enjoy” is probably the wrong word.

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Tonight’s Raw preview:

As SummerSlam draws closer, the plots surrounding the two World Championships have begun to thicken considerably. For the past several weeks, it seemed like the champions were well on the road to retaining their titles, handling their opposition with relative ease and a solid game plan, re-establishing their dominance at each turn. Now, though, WWE Champion CM Punk and World Heavyweight Champion Sheamus find themselves mired in circumstances potentially beyond their control as the summer classic approaches. How will the champs respond? (via WWE.com)

In other Raw news, ‘Jersey Shore’s’ DJ Pauly D will guest star, which should be f**king delightful.

A couple of reminders … I’m going to be in California this week for SummerSlam, and Burny’s going to be holding down the fort while I’m gone. I don’t do this enough in these wrestling columns and threads, but consider reading the rest of the site, would you? I usually work crummy wrestling jokes into places they don’t belong anyway. Even if you don’t like sports a lot, you’ll find something to enjoy. Anyway, me being live for SummerSlam means I’m going to try (key word: try) to have a Best And Worst Of WWE SummerSlam 2012 Live column ready to go before I board a plane on Monday morning, so look out for that, as well as our normal SummerSlam discussion thread opening this Friday.

Also, if you aren’t following me on Twitter already, make sure to do so and follow along with my WWE ’13 hands-on experience/live roster reveal thing on Saturday. Sure, you can probably find info about it on a forum somewhere already, but play along, jerks.

As always, the 10 best comments from tonight’s open discussion thread will be featured in tomorrow’s Best And Worst of WWE Raw report. To nominate a comment for top 10 status, please reply to it with a +1. If it’s a racist comment and it has like fifteen +1s after it, I’m going to use it as a top comment just to shame you and look like a hypocrite.

Over the weekend, my Uproxxian colleague Danger Guerrero sent me a link to an old MTV Rock N Jock Softball clip, and it basically turned my afternoon into a complete waste. I didn’t get pushed into the YouTube wormhole as much as I willingly belly-flopped into the extensive search results for all things Rock N Jock, and I spent a good 4 or 5 hours reliving one of the most important pop cultural influences of my teenage years. After all, which child of the 90s didn’t desperately want to take a 10-point shot or a swing at the gold ball?

According to MTV’s website, the Rock N Jock franchise is alive and well, but that’s a bit misleading. Currently airing on MTV 2 on Saturday mornings, the latest version of Rock N Jock is a series hosted by Todd Richards and “Dirty” as they travel to various extreme sports events to talk to athletes like Shaun White and Ryan Sheckler, which basically sounds like every show that airs on Fuel TV. Clearly, it’s a far cry from the days of the Bricklayers and Violators battling for terrible fashion supremacy.

I’m certainly not the first blogger to get a wild hair and demand that MTV bring back the iconic softball, basketball, football and even bowling contests between actors, musicians and athletes, but as someone who once begged his mom to buy him a Homeboys baseball jersey for Christmas (thank you so much for not listening, mom) I think we’re due for some rematches. If Beavis and Butthead can make a comeback, then Rock N Jock certainly can, too.

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Links

Photoshop Challenge: Come At Bane, Bro - That pose still makes me think people should be photoshopping him into Moonwalker. I really don’t want Zoidberg-face Bane to be the Venom of the Batman movie franchise. [UPROXX]

Louis C.K.’s Advice To Young People - The world would be a lot better if we listened to him more, and listened less to Jim Gaffigan. [UPROXX]

7 New and Returning January Shows You Should Seek Out and 7 You Should Avoid - Avoid: basically everything debuting in January. Seek out: Venture Bros. DVDs. [Warming Glow]

5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Buy a PS Vita - #6. Portable gaming is for babies and yeah, Patapon is pretty awesome when you’re in line at Walgreens but so is talking to strangers. [Gamma Squad]

Meet The New GamePad Controller For iOS Devices - Like I said. If you’re gonna use a controller bigger than the screen, you should probably just be playing at home. Or at an arcade, if one still exists near you. This doesn’t make Angry Birds any more fun to play on the toilet. [Smoking Section]

Man Misses Mouse And Shoots Roommate, Revealing Child Rapist - I love that Vince got the best story of the year out of the way early. I feel like “making a girl hide in a closet for any reason other than hide-and-seek or hilarious stakeouts” should be Instant Death Penalty. [Film Drunk]

Who Gets To Continue To Be Awful At Their Job And Who Does Not? - Anything with a Flintstones header gets love from me. If I had it my way, With Leather would be a Flintstones fan site and I’d be doing slideshows about The Twitch. [Kissing Suzy Kolber]

20 People Who Don’t Know What A New Year’s Resolution Is - My new year’s revolution: 360 degrees. [Buzzfeed]

12 New Year’s Resolutions for 2012 Moviegoers - Mine are “see more movies at Alamo Drafthouse, where people get kicked in the ass for texting” and “make somebody release a Criterion Collection edition of City Lights“. [Moviefone]

5 Actors Who Got Their Start on ‘Punk’d’ - I like knowing that Whitney used to look like even more of a plastic surgery monster. They should make an “actors who got their end on Punk’d” and put Brandy on it. [The FW]

Five Shows That Started Off Slow (and Have Since Hit Their Stride) - I am going to strangle the next person who tells me ‘Happy Endings’ is good. Kim Bauer making Scrubs face about Scrubs-level jokes is not my idea of a good show. [Unreality]

Hero: Jessica Alba had a baby in August and looks like this in a bikini now - Welp. [FARK]

The 10 Best Movies You Didn’t See in 2011 - I never got around to seeing Thor, does that count? [Pajiba]

If the heads of the World Boxing Council, Federation and Association were looking for something that could recapture the public’s fascination and fanfare of their corrupt sport, I’m not sure this latest bit of boxing news is going to do the trick. As if it wasn’t bad enough that Floyd Mayweather was sent to jail for beating his girlfriend, thus delaying his fight with Manny Pacquiao that will never happen, the boxing world now has a promoter that rivals Don King for terrible hair… Snooki.

Team Snooki Boxing is made up of the three Irish Hyland brothers – Patrick ‘Pajo’, Eddie and Paul. Each has a long list of accomplishments and Irish championships under their belt. “We are incredibly excited to introduce The Hyland Brothers and Team Snooki Boxing,” the VP of Final Round Promotions, Mike Pascale, said. “We’ve seen what these boys can do, and expect nothing less than continued success and ‘living up to the hype’ for each of them here in the States.”

(Via the Examiner)

The brothers will fight for the first time ever on the same card in the U.S. when they take part in the “Irish Invasion” event on January 28 at the Resorts Casino Hotel in Atlantic City. “That’s awesome,” responded the elderly people who still go to Atlantic City.

Even though this seems like it’s the straight-to-DVD sequel of The Great White Hype – one of the most underrated sports movies of all-time – I’m willing to give this new promotion the benefit of the doubt. After all, for being one of the most exploited gimmick characters in TV history, Snooki has somehow created quite the empire for herself, with a best-selling book and even her own fragrance.

Above all else, Snooki being involved with boxing gives us yet another reason to post the greatest GIF in the history of the Internet.

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