Kenny G on the Vuvuzela. I wonder how Pat Matheny feels about this video.

“Lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked up playing.”

Via Jon and Holy Kaw.

Here's an explanation of the 2010 World Cup team nicknames. My favorites:

Denmark - Danish Dynamite, Olsen-Banden (The Olsen Gang), Olsen's Elleve (Olsen's Eleven)
Why: The brilliant Denmark team of the 1980s was called Danish Dynamite, while the current are nicknamed after coach Morten Olsen. Sounds like a short term strategy for a nickname, but Olsen has been in charge since the year 2000. Plus Olsen's Eleven is a world class pun.

England - The Three Lions
Why: There are three lions on the Football Association crest, in reference to the total number of lions ever spotted in England. Or because of the English coat of arms.

Thanks, Andy.

Last week, it was reported that 7'7" Sudanese basketball player Manute Bol passed away at the age of 47. Among several interesting tidbits about his life, Bol is also credited with popularizing the phrase 'my bad'.

-St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jan. 10, 1989: When he [Manute Bol] throws a bad pass, he'll say, "My bad" instead of "My fault," and now all the other players say the same thing.
-USA Today, Jan. 27, 1989: After making a bad pass, instead of saying "my fault," Manute Bol says, "my bad." Now all the other Warriors say it too.

Here's a feature about Manute from the SI Vault, which I continue to suggest is one of the better resources on the web.

Thanks Andy and Jonah.

I'm not sure this is what Biz and Ev had in mind. Last week Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff live-blogged the execution of Ronnie Lee Gardner's with 3 Tweets. Seems like Shurtleff is responding to criticism by digging in further. His latest Tweet? "Astonishing that no retweet whiner express outrage that Gardner shot 2 men in the face, & a cop; nor one word of empathy for their families."

The Boston Globe has a story about anonymous online posters posters, and it's pretty much what you'd expect. Except for the below section where the writer describes an internet experience completely different than any I've ever known.

I’ve always loved finding the hidden gems in online comments – the surprising slice of data that makes me question one of my political assumptions, the pithy one-liner that makes me laugh out loud. But those gems seem increasingly rare amid all the yelling and hollow rage and predictable talking points.

Comments on news sites are about 1.5 steps above comments on Youtube. To prove my point, commenter BarackSnoozesOilOozes (whose avatar is a picture of Barack Obama with Joker makeup in the style of Shepard Fairey's Hope poster) chimes in with:

Another one sided article by the Glob.

They Glob fails to mention that the mods often favor posts by anti-American Democrats who support Obama because that's how the paper leans.

It took 5 freaking comments, 2 of which are, "First" and "Second" for the comments thread to devolve into name-calling and paranoia. This is my favorite article of the week.

I love this drawing of Boston's quirky squares. You and your new cities can go shove.



Thanks, Kerry.

Didn't see a whole lot of crazy from Rasheed Wallace this year. He actually didn't do much of anything until the playoffs. After they were over, he wanted to talk to referee Joey Crawford. Anyone know more?

Olly Moss posting a Mad Men design? If you didn't know I'd post this, you don't know me very well. At all. That Don Draper quote at the bottom of the poster that's hard to read? "You know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It's freedom from fear. It's a billboard on the side of the road that screams reassurance that whatever you are doing is OK. You are OK."

You guys, the new season starts July 25th.

For an article, Matthew Orona had his four year old son play Grand Theft Auto. The civic minded son spends most of the time not stealing cars, not killing people, and using the ambulance to take people to the hospital. He did run over a woman and he was ashamed.

Lost creator Damon Lindelof put together a treatment for a movie about the BP oils spill and how to stop it.

But if... dammit, IF... someone were to go up there and detonate a calibrated warhead on that damn thing, its trajectory could be altered. Altered so specifically that it could be made to hit a very specific target...A target on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. It can plug that leak...Bay's in. He loves the "James Cameron fucking environmental message bullshit" of it...Willis wants to do it, even though he seems to have forgotten he died in the first one. If we want him, easy enough to say he's a twin brother or do some time travel thingamajob once they get into space.