- Sure, there would seem to be much bigger, more salient issues for Congress to tackle than the clusterf*ck that is college football’s current postseason setup, but I’m actually pretty happy with the House subcommittee that approved legislation Wednesday aimed at forcing college football to switch to a playoff system to determine its national champion. The dark lords who preside over the giant pot of crap that is the Bowl Championship Series clearly aren’t going to give up their ginormous pay days for anything short of an act of God, so if the House wants to take aim at them, they have my full support. Also, I would like to take this chance to rip the idiotic lawmakers who opposed the bill on the grounds that Congress has bigger issues to tackle. Admittedly, this bill faces a tough fight, but if it is somehow passed and signed into law, it would prevent those ass hats at the BCS from promoting a postseason NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision game as a national championship unless it results from a playoff. The measure passed by voice vote in a House Energy and Commerce Committee subcommittee, with the only tool to vote "no" being Rep. John Barrow, D-Ga. "With all due respect, I really think we have more important things to spend our time on," Barrow said before the vote. With all due respect (none), shut your cake hole, b’otch. The BCS is broken and I’m guessing that writing this bill didn’t exactly take a long time or an extreme amount of effort. Some legisltative aide could had tapped it out between fetching morning coffee and updating his or her Facebook status. The national health care or economic stimulus bill it ain’t, to say the least. But it’s a needed bill, because as the five undefeated teams currently existing in this college football season show, the BCS does not work. With five unbeatens and only two given a chance to play for the title, the system is broken. "What can we say -- it's December and the BCS is in chaos again," said the bill's sponsor, Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, the top Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Barton rightly pointed out the inherent unfairness in the BCS and astutely observed that those who operate the BCS won't change unless prompted by Congress. This bill aims to do that by prohibiting the BCS from promoting promote a national championship game "or make a similar representation," unless it results from a playoff. Doing so would be illegal and I hope, punishable by a long prison term. As of now, there is no Senate version, although Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, has pressed for a Justice Department antitrust investigation into the BCS and could easily take the ball and run with it should the bill pass the House. I also have confidence that President Obama would sign such a bill into law, as he said last year during his campaign that there should be a playoff system. As you’d expect, the aforementioned BCS ass hats tried to shoot down the bill and cast as many aspersions on it and its proponents as possible. In a statement before the vote, BCS executive director Bill Hancock said, "With all the serious matters facing our country, surely Congress has more important issues than spending taxpayer money to dictate how college football is played." In other words, “You can have our tens of millions of dollars when you pry them from our cold, dead, white, wrinkled hands.” I do want to give credit to the subcommittee chairman, Rep. Bobby Rush, (D-Ill.), who co-sponsored the bill and took time to fire back at Hancock. "We can walk and chew gum at the same time," Rush sniped. Big ups to all of the representatives who supported this bill and to those who will undoubtedly rally behind it in the days ahead. You are heroes to college football fans everywhere……….
- The semester is coming to an end for a lot of college students across the country and there are a few choices for how to unwind and mark the occasion. The obvious choice is explained in one word: alcohol. Getting liquored up on whatever you can't get your hands on is always an appealing option and I’m guessing that your local student body took significant advantage of this option while showing little or no regard for the legal drinking age. However, thousands of students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison elected, at least for an hour and a half this afternoon, to eschew pounding cheap beer and tequila in favor of a good ol’ fashioned snowball fight. The snowball fight grew out of – as all good social activities do these days – a Facebook group that started on Tuesday and managed to accumulate more than 6,000 members by the time the festivities began. Thousands of students gathered on Bascom Hill to participate in the snowball fight, with some participants bringing shields to protect themselves (I’m guessing the Dungeons and Dragons dorks accounted for most of these people) and others armed themselves with water balloon launchers capable of propelling projectiles some 300 yards on a good day. The battle pitted dorms from two areas of campus against one another, with Lakeshore dorms defeating the Southeast dorms after about an hour and a half of battle. No word on how the winner was determined, but I suppose that in a situation like this, there are no real losers. Everyone gets a chance to relax, have some fun and be a part of something that will stand out as a great memory for some time to come. That being said, I’d still much rather be a student at a school where there is no snow on the ground at any point during the year………
- If I didn’t know any better, I’d think the powers that be in Rio de Janeiro are a tad ashamed of its many shantytowns and the impoverished Brazilians who live there. The government is set to build massive cement-block walls around the slums, claiming it's to save rainforests. That is most definitely not the answer you would get if you ask the people who live in the city’s slums. Those poor people argue that it's an attempt to shut them out because the city is ashamed of them and possibly looking to wall them off from the world with the 2016 Summer Olympics approaching. Thousands of people are impacted by what is being called the "eco-wall," by officials. It encompasses places like the Santa Marta shantytown where some 7,000 others live. The state of Rio de Janeiro began building the wall around Santa Marta in March and plans to spend $17 million on similar walls around the shantytowns, of which there are nearly 1,000. These places are known as and they are filled with poorly built homes that sit atop shaky foundations, often built one on top of the other. Some are near the heart of the city, while others are carved into the rainforests that cling to the hillsides. All told, approximately 20 percent of Rio's 6 million people live in the shantytowns, so this is a major issue. So how is the city trying to argue that walling in these 1.2 million impoverished people is environmentally motivated? Well, Icaro Moreno, director of Rio state's public works, says the walls are necessary because the favelas have continued to expand by 7 percent over the last decade and have contributed heavily to deforestation. "The limits used to be virtual and now they're physical," he stated. "The government is saying, 'If you cross them or break them, you will be violating public property.'" As I mentioned at the top, many of those who are seeing their places of residence walled in believe that this is merely an attempt to hide them from the world as the 2016 Olympics approach. Others argue that the city’s elite are behind the effort to wall off what they view as an affront and an eyesore in their town. The shantytowns aren’t even displayed on most maps of the city and now they are cut off from the rest of the world by ugly, gray block walls that are visible from a long way off. What validity is there to the environmental concerns the city is spouting? Well, experts say that the rainforest was once home to more plant and animal species than the Amazon and at present, only 7 percent of the original forest is left. To me, that’s not the issue, because we all know that the rainforest is in trouble to some extent. What we should be looking at is whether building 9 miles of walls around 13 favelas is the answer. No, the walls aren’t designed to keep people in or out, as anyone can still pass freely from one side to the other at any time. But to me, it looks like the city of Rio is ashamed of its poorest residents and looking for any excuse it can find to wall them off from the rest of the city……….
- Two conflicting message are currently being sent out by companies for whom Tiger Woods is a pitchman. On the one hand, these companies - Gillette, Nike, Gatorade, Electronic Arts and others – are publicly voicing their support for Woods and saying that they will not sever ties with him even though he’s been revealed as a lying, cheating, philandering, skank-chasing playboy with no integrity or decency. Sponsors have issued statements to the effect that they are standing behind Tiger and will stick with him through this crisis. At the same time, ads for those same companies that typically air with regularity are now all but impossible to find on television. According to media tracker Nielsen, the last time a Tiger-led commercial appeared on television was Nov. 29. Ever since that 30-second Gillette ad aired during NBC's "Football Night in America," Woods’ commercials have vanished faster than the Pittsburgh Steelers from this season’s NFL playoff race. That Gillette ad aired eight times during November, but zero times in December. Even during last weekend’s Chevron World Challenge, the golf tournament hosted by Woods since 2001 (which he skipped this year), no ads featuring Woods could be found. Most analysts expected this to happen, with the logic being that sponsors would stick with Woods in the long run but look to lay low for a while until the public moves on to the next big scandal and stops being so angry with Woods. "Brands that planned to use Tiger in any meaningful way in the next few weeks would be looking to perhaps do something else, both out of respect for Tiger and because now isn't the best time to have him out there peddling their product," said Paul Swangard, managing director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon. There are a few of Tiger’s corporate partners, including AT&T and Accenture, have not issued comments about their sponsorship of Tiger. He may lose a couple of them, but the unfortunate thing is that in the long run, if he can make these companies money, they will stick with him no matter what a ginormous douche bag he is…………
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