ohhh_yeah

http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2014-06-25.html AMERICA'S FAVORITE NATIONAL PASTIME: HATING SOCCER I've held off on writing about soccer for a decade -- or about the length of the average soccer game -- so as not to offend anyone. But enough is enough. Any growing interest in soccer can only be a sign of the nation's moral decay. (1) Individual achievement is not a big factor in soccer. In a real sport, players fumble passes, throw bricks and drop fly balls -- all in front of a crowd. When baseball players strike out, they're standing alone at the plate. But there's also individual glory in home runs, touchdowns and slam-dunks. In soccer, the blame is dispersed and almost no one scores anyway. There are no heroes, no losers, no accountability, and no child's fragile self-esteem is bruised. There's a reason perpetually alarmed women are called "soccer moms," not "football moms." Do they even have MVPs in soccer? Everyone just runs up and down the field and, every once in a while, a ball accidentally goes in. That's when we're supposed to go wild. I'm already asleep. (2) Liberal moms like soccer because it's a sport in which athletic talent finds so little expression that girls can play with boys. No serious sport is co-ed, even at the kindergarten level. (3) No other "sport" ends in as many scoreless ties as soccer. This was an actual marquee sign by the freeway in Long Beach, California, about a World Cup game last week: "2nd period, 11 minutes left, score: 0:0." Two hours later, another World Cup game was on the same screen: "1st period, 8 minutes left, score: 0:0." If Michael Jackson had treated his chronic insomnia with a tape of Argentina vs. Brazil instead of Propofol, he'd still be alive, although bored. Even in football, by which I mean football, there are very few scoreless ties -- and it's a lot harder to score when a half-dozen 300-pound bruisers are trying to crush you. (4) The prospect of either personal humiliation or major injury is required to count as a sport. Most sports are sublimated warfare. As Lady Thatcher reportedly said after Germany had beaten England in some major soccer game: Don't worry. After all, twice in this century we beat them at their national game. Baseball and basketball present a constant threat of personal disgrace. In hockey, there are three or four fights a game -- and it's not a stroll on beach to be on ice with a puck flying around at 100 miles per hour. After a football game, ambulances carry off the wounded. After a soccer game, every player gets a ribbon and a juice box. (5) You can't use your hands in soccer. (Thus eliminating the danger of having to catch a fly ball.) What sets man apart from the lesser beasts, besides a soul, is that we have opposable thumbs. Our hands can hold things. Here's a great idea: Let's create a game where you're not allowed to use them! (6) I resent the force-fed aspect of soccer. The same people trying to push soccer on Americans are the ones demanding that we love HBO's "Girls," light-rail, Beyonce and Hillary Clinton. The number of New York Times articles claiming soccer is "catching on" is exceeded only by the ones pretending women's basketball is fascinating. I note that we don't have to be endlessly told how exciting football is. (7) It's foreign. In fact, that's the precise reason the Times is constantly hectoring Americans to love soccer. One group of sports fans with whom soccer is not "catching on" at all, is African-Americans. They remain distinctly unimpressed by the fact that the French like it. (8) Soccer is like the metric system, which liberals also adore because it's European. Naturally, the metric system emerged from the French Revolution, during the brief intervals when they weren't committing mass murder by guillotine. Despite being subjected to Chinese-style brainwashing in the public schools to use centimeters and Celsius, ask any American for the temperature, and he'll say something like "70 degrees." Ask how far Boston is from New York City, he'll say it's about 200 miles. Liberals get angry and tell us that the metric system is more "rational" than the measurements everyone understands. This is ridiculous. An inch is the width of a man's thumb, a foot the length of his foot, a yard the length of his belt. That's easy to visualize. How do you visualize 147.2 centimeters? (9) Soccer is not "catching on." Headlines this week proclaimed "Record U.S. ratings for World Cup," and we had to hear -- again -- about the "growing popularity of soccer in the United States." The USA-Portugal game was the blockbuster match, garnering 18.2 million viewers on ESPN. This beat the second-most watched soccer game ever: The 1999 Women's World Cup final (USA vs. China) on ABC. (In soccer, the women's games are as thrilling as the men's.) Run-of-the-mill, regular-season Sunday Night Football games average more than 20 million viewers; NFL playoff games get 30 to 40 million viewers; and this year's Super Bowl had 111.5 million viewers. Remember when the media tried to foist British soccer star David Beckham and his permanently camera-ready wife on us a few years ago? Their arrival in America was heralded with 24-7 news coverage. That lasted about two days. Ratings tanked. No one cared. If more "Americans" are watching soccer today, it's only because of the demographic switch effected by Teddy Kennedy's 1965 immigration law. I promise you: No American whose great-grandfather was born here is watching soccer. One can only hope that, in addition to learning English, these new Americans will drop their soccer fetish with time.

Needs a few spoke cards. Did you already give that idea any thought?

"I’m only 32, so hopefully I have four or five more years in me." “When I say ‘Newcastle till I die’ and ‘I can’t see myself ever wanting to leave the club’, that hasn’t changed, because I will be a Newcastle supporter and will continue to be." “That I’m leaving the club doesn’t diminish that." “Hopefully, it’s a place I will go back to in some capacity, to help give back to the club what they’ve given to me.”

Just got back from a walking the dog with my daughter in the neighborhood. A few blocks away is place called the Eagles Lodge. It is basically a second home for bored, elderly folk. They have swap meets and a wrestling event twice a month. Tonight was the night of the wrasslin. As we are nearing the building we could see a fire truck, ambulance, and two vehicles for johnny law. Seeing how we are both professional rubber-neckers we walked over to see what all of the commotion was about. Turns out two fans got into a confrontation inside the event. One told the other, "why don't you step outside with me." Fast forward a bit. They tussle outside in the parking lot. One guy picked the other guy up and gorilla press slammed him into the pavement. Busted the lads face wide open and there was a large pool of blood. What I did not understand though was why the authorities demanded the event stopped for the night. Did they think that the crowd was all going to brawl? One or two less rednecks could be seen as a positive, amirite?

Figured this was a good spot for this. Mark McGhee and his fond memories of time on Tyneside They say in football that you should never “go back”. And without doubt – like going back to an old flame – it’s never the same the second time around. Not in Mark McGhee’s case though. The hard-working Glaswegian striker arrived on Tyneside in 1977 as a youngster, but the move didn’t work out the way he might have hoped. After just 28 league appearances and five goals he returned to Scotland and was part of an outstanding Aberdeen side, winning title medals and European gongs under Alex Ferguson. Stints at Hamburg and Celtic followed before a return to Newcastle in 1989 after the club had been relegated back to Division Two followed. Mick Quinn and McGhee instantly struck up a wonderful partnership and the club came agonisingly close to promotion to the top flight, losing narrowly against Sunderland – with the Scot hitting the post in the play-offs . McGhee might not have achieved the dream for Jim Smith’s United, but he was a hit on the terraces. He dramatically weaved his way round the Bradford City defence in the last minute of a game to score a goal that Lionel Messi or Diego Maradona would have been chuffed with. McGhee said: “Out of all the clubs I played for in my career, I regard Newcastle as the dearest to me and hold them close to my heart. “Mick Quinn and I had something we were proud to be part of.” Quinn said: “I got to know Mark very well. “It’s always about bonding with players. “You have to gel. I moved to Newcastle about three or four weeks beforehand. “Mark was staying at the hotel like me, and he’d been here before of course, at the same hotel funnily enough. He knew the area and knew Newcastle. “For me that was a big help in the early days of my career. We got on well on and off the pitch.” But Quinn admits that he and McGhee were different players on the field. Quinn was a poacher who once admitted he’d “knock his granny over to score”. Speaking on McGhee he said: “Mark was unorthodox. “You couldn’t say we were like Toshack and Keegan. “We didn’t blend – Mark had a free role. “He’d get the ball and drift left or right and drop deep. “He’d turn defenders and drag them out of position. “He would hold the ball up well for me to get into the box and score goals. He gave me the licence to get into the box. “Mark did a lot of hard work, but to be fair he got his own fair share of goals to boot. “We actually got 57 between the two of us.” But for all the success that year for McGhee and Quinn, the partnership didn’t manage deliever the ultimate prize. Quinn won the golden boot with 38 goals. But the pair looked back in agony, he said: “We still never got promoted! “We were gutted. We worked so hard and could have gone up. “Just to kick us where it hurts even more Sunderland ended up getting promoted despite losing the play-off final to Swindon. “Swindon had financial issues and went down so Sunderland got their place. “For me and Mark we’d had a hell of a season together and got on together on and off the field. We ended up living in the same street. “The next season Jim Smith tried to get it going again with promotion but it didn’t come off and he lost his job. Ossie Ardiles came in and began playing younger players but I stayed on and Mark left.” For Newcastle fans it was the end of a great relationship in attack for the Gallowgate faithful.

"How do I feed my butter the grass. Should I take a lap around my patch with a lawnmower and then spoon feed it the clippings. Does it prefer if I kick my feet up and let it grow quite long before taking scissors to it? How about chili flakes? I enjoy them. Should I give the grass a dash?"

Better than the combo of Senderos and Djourou.

How are you making the gravy, Brock?

Look forward to photos of cooked pigeon. Also, I wish I knew how to cook it. Thinking a few garlic granules and a few minutes of zapping in the microwave?

Think this is what CSD is on about. http://www.shieldsgazette.com/sport/football/newcastle-united/exclusive-pardew-admits-striker-hunt-has-stalled-1-6682086

Images of the street art found in Brasil. https://www.google.com/maps/views/streetview/brazils-painted-streets?gl=br&hl=en-gb

RYAN Taylor was in denial. After all, it couldn’t happen twice, could it? But it can, and it did. This was April last year. Taylor was lying, prone, in agony clutching his right knee. He had just come through seven months of painstaking and meticulous rehabilitation from a ruptured cruciate ligament. Then the same thing happened at Newcastle United’s Benton training ground. There wasn’t even anywhere near him on the practice pitch. There wasn’t even a tackle, just an unfortunate twist of the knee. It just happened. Luckless Taylor initially convinced himself that it wasn’t the same injury that he had suffered in a Europa League qualifier against Atromitos at St James’s Park in August 2012. The 29-year-old had scored a trademark free-kick in the first leg, which kicked off with the temperature approaching 40 degrees in Athens. But there was a chill in the air a week later on Tyneside. And a scan a few days after the game confirmed his and the club’s worst fears. Taylor isn’t ashamed to admit there were tears in the doctor’s room when he was told he would miss another season of football. “I tried to convince myself it wasn’t,” Taylor told the Gazette in an exclusive interview. “I knew I’d done something, but I tried to convince myself it wasn’t the same injury. “I was trying to remain positive until I had the scan. “There was nobody near me in training. There was just one twist. “I had the scan and it didn’t sink in until I came back in. “There were tears in the doc’s room. I didn’t know what to do at the time. “I’d just worked for seven months solid to make sure I was back. I was looking towards the next season, not the last three or four games (of the 2012-13 season). I wasn’t interested, to be honest. “It would have been nice, but it wasn’t the main concern. “The lowest point was being told it’s a re-rupture. It didn’t sink in – I tried to still think it wasn’t. “When I came back in and talked to the doc, that’s when it all hit me. That was definitely the lowest point. “It took a couple of weeks to get over it. “They gave me some time off to just have some family time.” Once he had come to terms with what had happened, Taylor focused on what he had to do. “We just came back and spoke to a couple of people,” said the likeable Liverpudlian, signed from Wigan Athletic in 2009. “We realised the best one to go to was The Steadman Clinic over in Colorado. “I just didn’t know why it happened again until we went and saw the guys over in Colorado. “They figured everything out as to what the problem was and they have corrected it now. “We went out there and I’ve been as positive as I could have been. There was an issue with the first one, and they fixed it. Now it should be fine.” Alan Shearer and Michael Owen are among those to have undergone procedures at the world-renowned Steadman Clinic. And Taylor sought their advice before deciding to make the journey across the Atlantic to Colorado with the club’s long-serving and experienced physio Derek Wright, who has been with him every step of the way. And the surgeons there were to discover why Taylor had suffered a second, agonising rupture. “I spoke to Michael, Jimmy Bullard, Al (Shearer) and Jamie Redknapp,” said Taylor, who is working towards a return to training next month when his team-mates report back to the club. “Because I knew it was such big surgery for me career-wise, I had to make sure it was right. “I spoke to people who had been over there and come back from the same injury. “They gave me the green light – everyone was so positive about the place. I was like ‘come on, let’s get over there’. “But things didn’t work out. I had to have one operation and go back six months later to get the cruciate put in. That was the problem of why the first one went.” Taylor has needed support from the club’s staff and his team-mates. And he has got it, forging an especially strong bond with Wright. “Every day, most players have asked how I’m getting on,” he said. “On the staff side, every single one of the staff have been amazing – from the manager to the kit men. “The physios and doctor are fantastic.” Taylor embarked on the players’ “lap of appreciation” after the final game of the season last month. Hopefully, he’ll be back on the field in a black and white shirt soon.

@@ewerk The fixture list you posted is missing a few dates. September 24th and January 3rd. Mark them down for heavy defeats.

Turkish footballer Emre Belozoglu was handed a two-month 15 days suspended jail sentence on Tuesday for a racist slur he used against Ivory Coast midfielder Didier Zokora during a match in 2012. The court sentenced the Fenerbahce and Turkey national team midfielder on the grounds that the act constituted an insult crime of "religious, racist, ethnic, sexist or sectarian discrimination." The incident, in which Zokora accused Belozoglu of calling him the "N" word, occurred in April 2012 at a playoff match between Fenerbahce and Trabzonspor. Belozoglu was accused of racism three times during his three-year career at Newcastle United, but the English FA's investigations failed to prove the accusations. Belozoglu became the first Turkish footballer ever to have been handed a prison sentence for racism.

London "fashion".

Sonnen retires after a positive doping test. Talked smack to his previous opponent since he also had a positive. Self-awareness.

France.

"I spoke to Newcastle about Bony last summer. Newcastle should have bought Bony a year ago but they didn’t believe in him. "They could have signed him for £10million, but they said they weren't sure if he was good enough, that he was only playing in Holland (with Vitesse). "Now he is worth £20million. "The next step for Bony is a top-six team in England or a top team in Germany, Spain or France, or he will stay with Swansea. "We have a certain strategy. Bony is in a totally different place to Newcastle and wants to move to a club with ambition. "We have had no contact with Newcastle."