1 Happy St

Sometimes when I'm with my friends in a group setting, this blog will get mentioned in conversation. Somebody will say something like "oh, you've never been to his blog?" Then the other person will say "no". Then the first person will say "yeah it's pretty gay, but I check it out sometimes."

And that will be the end of it.

Other times, somebody will come up to me and say something like "Dude, I hadn't been to your blog in like 2 weeks, but I just spent the last 30 minutes catching up on all of it. I loved your joke about Elian Gonzalez." Then I'll say "yeah, thanks. Wait, what joke about Elian Gonzalez?" And he'll be all "hmm, maybe that wasn't your blog. I caught up on a lot of reading this morning."

And that will be the end of it.

But on Saturday, I had a first. I was at lunch with a handful of friends and we were well on our way to that first conversation up there. But watch how it turned out:

Guy 1: "You've never been to his blog? It's pretty gay, but I check it out sometimes."
Guy 2: "What's it called?"
Guy 1: "Number 1 Happy Street"
Guy 2: "Ha....What the frig is the address here?"
Me: "Wait a second. You get it?"
Guy 2: "Yeah, My Blue Heaven. Awesome movie."

I think I'm in love with Guy 2.

So did anything interesting happen last night? I went home sick from work, took some meds, and passed out until this morning. My newspaper feels really thick, so something must have happened, but I haven't had a chance to read it yet. I see a black guy on the front page waving to me, but the headlines aren't clear on who he is or why he's waving.

Okay, well I'll check in later.

Please skip this if you don't care about sports blogs. In fact, you should probably skip this regardless.

Last night on Costas Now, they had a segment about sports bloggers and how bloggers fit in as a form of news media. On the speaking panel was Will Leitch of Deadspin (pro-blog), Buzz Bissinger (author of Friday Night Lights and extremely anti-blog), and Braylon Edwards (pro-football…or something). From the response of the studio audience, and for that matter the smugness of Bob Costas towards Will, I think an outsider to this discussion topic would have thought that Buzz Bissinger won the argument and that everyone associated with sports blogs are a bunch of childish morons. To be fair, this wasn't Will's fault. I realize that Deadspin is the most-read sports blog out there, but there has to be some perspective there. Confusing Deadspin as a legitimate source of sports news is just wrong. And I would assume that the comments that follow each posting aren’t meant to be taken all that seriously. And yet Bissinger grouped all sports bloggers together as a bunch of morons who can’t get their point across without using profanity*, if they had a point at all to begin with. First of all, Bissinger can go fuck himself (smiley). Second of all, that’s an awfully large brush he's painting with.

* A point not lost on this particular blogger is that Buzz used quite a bit of profanity himself to drive his point home during this show. Hypocrite much? And yes, I just used "hypocrite" as a verb.

I think we all would have been better served if a different blogger was on that panel. Maybe someone from USS Mariner. Or Athletics Nation. Or Shysterball. Or Baseball Prospectus. Having Leitch was cherry-picking IMO. I like Deadspin, but it’s more of a tabloid than anything. Nobody reads the NY Post for stock tips, right? Just like we don't read Deadspin for sports news.

Okay that is all.

You may have heard about this already, but in case you haven't, I'll summarize: A blogger named Bill Baer got into a pretty heated email conversation with Bill Conlin, a reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News. Unbeknownst to Conlin (I think we can assume), Bill the Blogger posted the email conversation on his blog, which contained some verbiage by Conlin that some people considered racist. Now Conlin is facing discipline from the Philadelphia Daily News. It also created quite a bit of popularity for Baer and his blog, and eventually led to this interview.

Pretty fascinating stuff.

For obvious reasons, I have to side with Bill the Blogger. But the whole situation raises some pretty interesting ethical questions about blogs themselves. Luckily for Greg and I, we would never post someone else's work on our blog and then make fun of it.

Oh crap.

And oh crap.

And oh crap.

And oh crap.

And oh crap.

And oh crap.

Sorry Joe Morgan.