To the untrained eye, soccer is a sport where people with no fight training or impulse control hang out and kick a ball around until one of them overreact and everybody starts brawling. I’m a soccer layman, so if I get any of this wrong, please don’t knock me to the ground or try to stomp my head.

In a U-13 (The Widowmaker!) match between Bahia and Vitoria, Bahia’s goalkeeper kinda-sorta punches a Vitoria strike in the back, so the striker sells it like he’s caught a knee to the chest from Anderson Silva. In retaliation, Bahia takes a Vitoria player to the ground and everyone tries to kick him in the face. Seems totally reasonable! From there, the fight escalates into a team versus team affair with everyone running in from off-screen to jump and kick indiscriminately. One guy gets a full-on Power Rangers jump kick to the back and ignores it in favor of running forward and kicking a different guy.

If none of this is soccer and I’ve misidentified a capoeira video, I apologize. That said, it’d be pretty awesome if other sports would handle flopping like this. Next time Blake Griffin goes down holding his eye, everyone on the court should get to boot him in the dome.

As an added bonus (so you don’t think Americans don’t play soccer exactly like this), here’s a clip of a Utah high school student pulling off a Million Dollar Man knee-lift during a soccer game.

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As Eric Freeman of the excellent Ball Don’t Lie points out, there are positive and negative aspects to being 7-foot-6. On the negative side, even mundane, day-to-day activities like buying clothes, walking through doorways, sitting in cars and fitting into pre-19th century buildings become impossibilities. There are a few positives, though, like being able to make millions of dollars for a couple of years as a basketball player, and that when a Monstar steals your talent all he’s really stolen is your ability to be tall (and you’re still that, you didn’t shrink) so you’re more-or-less unharmed.

Being that tall also, as we’re learning today, makes stories about people stealing your special tall-people things super, super sad.

Last Friday, someone burglarized the barn on [former basketball star Shawn] Bradley’s property. The only item that was taken was a bicycle made specially for him in 2006.

“Whether you’re 7 feet 6 inches or normal height, stealing someone’s bike is low,” an upset Bradley said Wednesday. [...]

After Bradley retired from the NBA in 2006, the 7-foot-6 center said he needed to find a way to keep the weight off. Trek made a bicycle just for him.

A bicycle made just for him.

Ignoring the fact that Shawn Bradley has a barn to house his special bicycle like he’s Pee-wee Herman and ignoring the fact that somebody broke onto an NBA millionaire’s property and all he took was his special 8-feet-tall megacycle, how f**king sad is this. It gets even worse when you read his follow-up, which sounds exactly like a five-year old explaining why this particular stolen big wheel is the biggest deal ever — he namedrops his brother. His BROTHER.

“My brother is 6 feet 10 inches and he can’t ride it,” Bradley said.

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"Don't do it, broseph."

Providing further evidence that hiking serves no purpose, 64-year old Amos Wayne Richards picked up a copy of 127 Hours recently, and James Franco’s gritty performance totally inspired him. The film, of course, tells the story of hiker Aron Ralston, who decided to go hiking in Utah’s Little Blue John Canyon by himself and eventually had to amputate his own arm with a broken credit card after being trapped under a boulder for, well, 127 hours.

So Richards decided to take a trip to Little Blue John Canyon and go hiking by himself. Wanna take a guess at what happened next?

Canyonlands National Park rangers found Richards four days later. Along with the leg injury, he had dislocated his shoulder but was able to work it back into place.

“It took me about three or four minutes to work my shoulder and get it back in place, and once I got it back in place, I stood up and realized my ankle hurt a little bit,” Richards told WBTV in Charlotte, N.C.

Without cellphone service and only two protein bars to eat, Richards began crawling back to his car across the rocky terrain. He filled his water bottles with rain as he painstakingly retraced his steps, eventually dragging himself almost five miles.

(Via the Los Angeles Times)

Broken leg. Four days crawling across the desert in the middle of Bumblefart, Utah. All because he was inspired by a movie about a guy who already got trapped in the desert. I may not be the most fitness-crazy guy, nor do I really give a squat about nature (hooray technology!), but I’ve been told they have machines at gyms that can simulate this kind of exercise and adventure. Hell, if you want the experience of losing a limb, I’ll run you over in the parking lot. Beats the crap out of traveling 2,500 miles.

Three high school football players in Utah have been charged with sexually abusing three teammates.  The boys, all 15-year-old sophomores, are charged with attempted forcible sodomy and forcible sexual abuse (Side note: Good News! Forcible sodomy is not sexual abuse).

On one occasion, the boys held another boy down in the shower, and one of them placed his buttocks on his face, according to court documents.

In another incident, the teens held a boy down and tried to place genitals in his mouth, authorities allege.

I don't understand what the big deal is.  Getting held down and having a teammate's cock stuffed in your mouth is a rite of passage that builds unity and team chemistry.  How else can you explain the New England Patriots' success this year?

As Signal to Noise points out, the NCAA tournament season is upon us, and with that comes gratuitous human interest stories. And the New York Times has gotten a head start on the field by profiling UNLV forward Joe Darger, a Mormon whose familial cheering section "includes his father, his mother, his 18 siblings and his father’s other wife."

John Darger is married to Carollee Darger, Joe’s mother. He is also married to Elizabeth Darger, the mother of eight of his children… His children range in age from 2 to 40… [John] grew up with 46 siblings. His father had several wives. Polygamy was passed down like a family heirloom.

The article has all sorts of fun facts, like how Joe moved out of his dorm freshman year when he learned it was coed.

Ummm… what? Dude grew up with dad and granddad humping multiple wives non-stop, chose to go to college in Las freaking Vegas, and he can't live in the same dorm as chicks?

Wow. Kids, can you excuse us? Joe and I need to have a sit-down. This may take a while. But if I can teach strippers how to love, I can teach this retarded man-child how to score college threesomes.