Two-pronged programming alert

June 26th, 2008 | Posted by PostmanE

Item No. 1: The Deadspin army is currently roasting Will. It’s hilarious. I was asked to contribute something, which was really nice, but more important than that is that you hurry over and read Bill Simmons’ thing. It’s … awesome.

Item No. 2: Ball Don’t Lie is live-blogging the draft tonight. MJD and I will be there. So will you. Don’t ask questions; just be there.

That’s all.

More The Big Lead-related nonsense

June 23rd, 2008 | Posted by PostmanE

Most of the few hundred people reading this right now don’t give a fuck, but whatever, it still irks me, and it’s (50 percent) my site, so I’m going forward. TBL, in his response to Leitch’s scathingly accurate criticism of his comments in the L.A. Times this weekend, linked back to this post a couple of months ago. Back then, I wrote:

A larger point here, at the risk of looking like a dumbass in six months, is that as blogs further professionalize and gain legitimacy, bloggers should expect parallel increases in criticism and credibility. If you’re going to take the game to Yahoo!, AOL, ESPN, and everywhere else — if you want to be at the Super Bowl — you have to play by the rules. To do anything less risks losing everything before really gaining anything. (Which is not to say that blogs have to break news, just that if you fancy yourself a newsman and not just a commentator, you’ve got to get it right, and you’ve got to be transparent.)

Despite McIntyre’s either/or posturing after his link, I stand by that. What I meant to get across at the time was that if TBL was going to present himself as more than an outlet for opinion, if he was going to make himself seem like this tip-collecting omnipotent news-breaker, he had to get things right. All of us do, should we choose that route. That’s the only obligation. I think most reasonable bloggers would have agreed with that far before Buzz Bissinger acted like a jackass on subscription television.

Will’s point is that your blog can be whatever you and your readers want it to be, and that you shouldn’t change for Buzz Bissinger’s sake. My point is that if you want yourself to be a newsbreaker, you have to be right. These are not mutually exclusive distinctions. The rest of us didn’t need BuzzBiss to tell us to “clean up our acts.” We were doing just fine well before that.

Blog meta moment of the moment: Will leaves Deadspin

June 5th, 2008 | Posted by PostmanE

This is where I tell you how much influence Deadspin has had in sports blogging, and how good a writer Will Leitch is, and how nice of a guy he’s always been, and how if I wouldn’t have stumbled on DeadSpin (some idiots still punctuate it like that!) back in the day how I wouldn’t have started commenting and then blogging and then wouldn’t be writing for FanHouse or Yahoo! etc etc but everyone already knows all that so fuck it. If you’re reading this, you get it: Will’s a big deal. You didn’t need me to tell you that.

So, now that he’s a mainstream writer again, I just want to know if Will is moving out of his basement or not. Surely, Wikipedia will have the answers:

Damnit!

World Cup 2006

May 30th, 2006 | Posted by PostmanE

(Here is a World Cup preview, just a little tickler for the month of madness we will be covering and covering well. Check it out. Oh, and if you’re one of those “soccer sucks, go back to England, we play football and baseball and basketball here, freedom isn’t free” idiots, then just skip over it. Thanks.)

It’s May 30. Three out of four years, that is an inconsequential date. This year, though, is the World Cup, an international showcase for the most popular game on Planet Earth. That means May 30 is Day One of the final Ten-Day Countdown before the insanity ensues.

Every four years, the WC brings hope to many and fury to more, as 32 countries reconcile their expecations of their national teams with the blatant reality that they probably don’t have a chance in hell to take home one of the ugliest trophies in all of sports. But I’m betting you knew all that, even if you don’t like soccer.

Perhaps of more importance to you, then, is where you can find some of the best information on the Cup. No problem:

• Start here. The WC has its own site, as it well should, but the site is less a PR gimmick and more a fantastic place to begin your reveling in soccer glory, from recent photo galleries to classic WC video, all on the homepage.
• For news updates, check out the obvious choice, ESPN SoccerNet. That’s the main page, but here is ESPN’s World Cup page and its Team USA page.
• For ridiculous British soccer mania, and a lot of fun, check out Football365.com. The use of the vernacular English and the rumor-based nature of the news is a great antidote, and it provides an extensive window into British football and the country’s national obsession with it. More on that here, as well.

These are just the tip of the Soccer, or Football, as we prefer to call it (and yes, we like American Football a lot too) iceberg. Delve further with Deadspin, who is doing a tremendous day-by-day group prediction preview and Mike Cardillo, who seems to know quite a bit about the beautiful game.

Oh, and if you have the itch to play a little (virtual) soccer, as we always do, play the new game for XBOX 360. It’s insane.