Cosmo Thinks They Know NHL Hotties…AGAIN

Hey Cosmo, Over here! Did you forget about me and my Minnesota Wild teammates?

Dearest Cosmo:

STOP NOW. JUST STOP. First of all, we started these hot guys in sports lists way before you did. Also, we’re actual female sports fans, so we, you know, watch games, monitor players and, for the most part, know who to watch for in a game.

I’m not saying that this new list of “NHL Playoff Hotties” is completely bogus, but you clearly don’t know what you’re doing. Granted, you did manage to include some obvious hotties, i.e. Henrik Lundqvist and Kris Letang, who you somehow forgot to include in your original list that we also called you out on.

Hump Day Hotties: You Make the Call

Christien Sage of Oklahoma State. One pick Cosmo got right. He kinda reminds me of Austin Nichols in this picture.

As a lazy lady lately (whoa, alliteration!), I’ve been a total slacker about scouting new hotties to show you dedicated readers. I’ve been very anti-sports watching lately (aside from my favorite teams), so I’m completely unaware of fresh meat. With the NCAA Tournament upon us, there is plenty of fresh meat awaiting our ogling eyes. There is always that hot college boy that makes you feel like a pervy old lady.

With that said, Cosmo has been busy covering the sports world again, compiling a list of NCAA hotties to watch. I’ll let you be the judge, but here’s my 2 cents.

MLB Doesn’t Get The Streaming Thing. Again. Some More.

I have not really been keeping up with the Word Baseball Classic particularly well. The early games of course were over in Asia at odd times (although I have been aware of the hard luck Chinese Taipei team, since a friend who was raised in Taipei has been obsessing on Facebook). But here it is Friday night, there are finally games on in a manageable time zone, and two of those games feature Puerto Rico (featuring Cardinals Yady Molina and Carlos Beltran) and the United States (I am kind of a homer).

And then I tried to hit that little TV icon to “watch live.”

Some background: I am an MLB.TV premium subscriber, I pay to access regular season baseball on my Roku, laptop, and smarphone. But I don’t have cable.

To add insult to injury, once I made it past the cable screen (I have a sympathetic cable-subscribing boyfriend), I got this:

Yeah, see all that stuff about the Apple devices you are authorizing?  See anything there about Android devices? Guess what type of smartphone I have? (Also, as near as I can figure, this screen pops up every time you pull up a game. They are not only forcing you to set up an MLB.com account, they’re refusing to remember your log in.)

So, yeah.  Once again, MLB, you have failed basic internet streaming.

Cliff Lee is the devil

(Nick Laham/Getty Images)

Just to summarize:

8 innings pitched

122 pitches

2 hits

0 runs

1 walk

13 K

Bee’s line

1.3 glasses of merlot (contemplated drinking straight from the bottle at 7-0)

1/3 bag of Lays’ reduced salt chips

28 swears

8 middle fingers (mostly for Josh Hamilton)

 

Damn you, Cliff Lee. Damn you to hell.

(I hate that you’re so awesome.)

Five Words.

Dick. Move. Hall. Of. Fame.

Okay, look. I’ve devoted a lot of time and energy into hating the ever-loving hell out of Brett Favre for the monumental screw-job he handed Green Bay fans by first doing the ‘I MAY RETIRE OR I MAY NOT WOULDN’T YOU LIKE TO KNOW’ dance and then the ‘LOLOLOLOL I AM SIGNING WITH YOUR RIVAL’ swan song. I really, really thought there couldn’t possibly be a bigger dick in organized sports than Brett Favre. I mean, the man singlehandedly held up football in Green Bay for a solid three years, and I’m pretty sure Aaron Rodgers still has Favre voodoo dolls in every room of his house.

That said? I’ve never seen an athlete so tone-deaf as to think that a nationally televised hour-long special to announce his free-agency decision smacked of anything beyond rampant egotism. That was horrifying in and of itself.

But a nationally televised hour-long special to break up with his hometown team in the most public manner possible? That’s an unprecedented level of douchebag.

Congratulations, LeBron James. You’re 2010’s entry into the Dick Move Hall of Fame. Good thing I don’t care about basketball.

Are you a “Lady” or not?

I had a Twitter conversation with a few people last night over the use of “Lady” before a team mascot name to denote women’s sports versus men’s sports at the high school and college levels.

One person made the argument that by having the “Lady” qualifier, women’s sports are being separated and there’s an implication that they aren’t on the same level as men’s.

The other person felt that getting upset over the use of “Lady” was taking political correctness too far. They said they’d never even thought about the topic until someone else brought it up and felt that there was no underlying problem with differentiating between the two.

A quick internet search didn’t pull up any history in terms of the first use of “Lady,” but I hypothesized last night that the origin may have come from newspapers needing a way to distinguish between the teams when covering the sports.

It also likely had its origin in the early part of the 20th century, when being called a “Lady” would have been flattering and possibly used as a way to feminize sports and the athletes who played them.

One of the things I most hate about the use of the “Lady” qualifier is when it creates incongruous names. Here in Milwaukee there’s a Catholic high school who’s nickname is the Popes, meaning the girls teams are known as the Lady Popes.

There are a few cases where the “Lady” moniker has gone beyond use in recaps and has become an accepted part of the team’s name. The Tennessee women’s basketball team is known as the Lady Vols.

As someone who’s had to write recaps of four games at one school in one night, I appreciate the ability to have the “Lady” qualifier at my disposal to be able to help differentiate the articles and make sure the reader knew which sport was being discussed

I also admit to being annoyed when I go to my favorite college’s website and read a headline and am not sure which team is being discussed, so in that way I would appreciate the use of “Lady.”

But those are both opinions tempered by my background in journalism. I can see the need to have a way to distinguish between the men’s and women’s sides for clarity and that tends to outweigh my feminist instinct on the matter.

I find myself not particularly bothered by the use of “Lady,” but I feel like I should be more annoyed. Normally any sort of distinction that separates women from men would get my hackles up, so I’m not sure why I’m so unmoved by this issue.

What do you all think? Acceptable usage or inappropriate separation tactic? Does the very mention of a “Lady” team make your blood boil and you start yelling “Oh hell no!” or are you as ambivalent as I am?

Oh, look! Another lesson in how to train your girlfriend-bot!

So on my commute home, I decided to play around on Twitter, where I stumbled across this gem. How to Get Your Girlfriend Into Sports.

Now, leaving aside that the obvious answer to this time-honored problem of being a sports nut partnered with someone who doesn’t enjoy the old athletic display is to just date someone who likes sports. God, men (and women) of the world, if sports are important enough that you have to condition your partner into liking them, FIND SOMEONE WHO ALREADY LIKES SPORTS. Your partner is not a puppy. Don’t train them like one. God.

Let’s address this nonsense point by point, shall we?

Send in the clowns.

So if you’re following me on Twitter, you’ve discovered that I have a bit of an unhealthy obsession with figure skating. (Okay, okay, that’s like saying John Mayer has an obsession with saying spectacularly stupid things in public.)

Given that I hate most girly aspects of sports (pink anything and everything, Ladies Nights, and the existence of Alyssa Milano’s Touch line, to start) like burning, some of the other Ladies…were mildly confused when I started shrieking about toe loops and salchows. I mean, it’s figure skating, right? I should like manly things, like the biathlon and moguls. I should frown on feathers and sequins and Dick Button.

But here’s the thing. I love figure skating. I loooooooove figure skating.

15 Yards for Fugliness: A Photographic Survey of Nike’s New Football Uniforms

Over the last few weekends, Nike has been previewing their latest attempt to “improve” athletic apparel on several premiere NCAA Division I (yeah, that’s what I still call it) football programs.  Now, perhaps these uniforms, designed to be ultra light and form fitting, are functionally a worthy advance, but from a sartorial viewpoint, well, my inner Tim Gunn was making this face. A lot.

A brief survey of some of Nike’s designs after the jump.

Yes, Again: The (Last-Minute) Case For Tim Lincecum

There is a statistically-inclined rant after the jump that I think you all need to hear.

Oh good, another person for me to have no respect for.

What the hell, Bud Adams?

Fail.

Whatever Rhoden is smoking, he’s welcome to share.

Still, what Major League Baseball needs is a great World Series, a Series for the ages. And with all due respect to those two other potential matchups, it’s a Yankees-Dodgers World Series that could take the game back to its roots at a time when baseball desperately needs to recover a portion of the trust, if not the innocence, that it has lost in the steroid era.

Really.

Huh.

Interesting.

Very.

Look, we’re not naive. We know someone on every team, if not most uber-successful players, at least dabbled in PEDs. Ramirez was dumb enough to get caught, and Rodriguez was dumb enough to think that because MLB promised to destroy the 2004 test results they actually meant it. Ramirez served his time, and Rodriguez got to eat crow in front of the whole nation. It’s over.

But baseball needs to be saved from itself and the whole steroids mess with…a World Series featuring players who featured in two of the biggest steroid-related stories of the last twelve months? That makes the kind of sense that’s not.

You know what would save baseball from itself and the whole steroids debacle? A steroids testing and punishment program with teeth. A great series between teams who have figured out how to play small ball and long ball. Hell, just give me some good baseball.

But this? Laughable example of head-up-your-ass New York homerism at best, whitewashing the serious offenses of the steroid era at best.

And while we’re talking about Philly…

Ugh.

I’d like to thank the Philadelphia Eagles for taking that one last step necessary to make this town a baseball town. Because no, we’re not okay with this, and we don’t understand.

Seriously, Mike Vick? Mike VICK? Mike ‘I am the scum of the earth and should rot’ Vick? And we’re supposed to be pleased about this? I just watched the local broadcast team try to justify this by saying that he’s going to bring a lot of athleticism to the offense and they can run the wildcat formation now, and no. Just no. In fact, I hate Hugh Douglas a little right now for trying to make me okay with this.

And the thing is, it doesn’t even make sense from a FOOTBALL perspective. Donovan falls apart the moment he even SNIFFS competition. Not that Vick’s much competition, because he’s been away from the game for what seems like forever. WHY? WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS?

My husband’s been a die-hard Eagles fan his entire sporting life. The man bleeds green and white. For the last decade, my entire social life on Sundays has revolved around making sure he’s in front of a TV with beef jerky and a bottle of Yuengling by the time the Eagles kick off. We have no social life during football season, because ‘But the game’s on’ is a valid excuse to get out of just about everything. He just turned to me, ashen-faced, and said ‘I don’t think I can root for the Eagles any more.’

Yeah, it’s like that. Me? I’m just pissed that Mike Vick gets to play in the same town as Chase Utley, who actually SAVES puppies.