Majorly English

OJ Simpson, a real slashing type of runner, has had it up to here with celebrity news coverage:

Celebrity reporting has replaced what is real news,” says O.J. Simpson. “There was always a place for it, but it was Rona Barrett. Now it is the equivalent of Edward R. Murrow reporting it today.” Simpson tells Joe Strupp:
“It is about time that the news media point out that they are not doing
their job. Things have changed a lot from my trial until today. It is
all about ratings, unfortunately.”

As always, the Juice comes through to remind us of our priorities. But really, who can blame the guy for being bitter? Dude murdered two people, and Paris Hilton gets as much, if not more coverage just for violating her parole! We used to have standards in this country!

Poynter Online – Romenesko

ESPN is continuing its valiant effort to quantify everything in our lives, so that we will forever know without a doubt who/what/when/how/why was/is/will be the best of all time.

It’s all very helpful, in that it allows us to end all debate about sports, because we know that billions of people obsess over sports, but HATE arguing about it. We’d all much rather quietly watch the events unfold on the screen, then be told by Trey Wingo what we think about it.

ESPN’s proud tradition of relentless ranking includes its proud series on the 2005 USC Trojans: Best Team Ever?/! If you missed it, and I hate you if you did, but basically ESPN seers decided whether or not the 2005 Trojans would beat the top 11 times from the past 50 years, which constitutes all of time. By online vote, USC beat every team on the list except the 2001 Miami Hurricanes, presumably because Larry Coker discovered how to fiddle with cookies. Unfortunately, the sports savants forgot to include the 2005 Texas Longhorns on the list.

The legacy continues . . .

From USA Today:

July is usually a slow month for sports news. So ESPN’s SportsCenter, in an off-beat plan that will be announced today, figures it can just invent its own news.

The idea, ESPN senior coordinating producer Glenn Jacobs says, is to add a new Who’s Now segment on every SportsCenter in July. The concept, he suggests, might seem familiar: “We’re stealing our model directly from ABC’s Dancing with the Stars.”

Except nobody will dance. The point, Jacobs says, is to select 32 famous active athletes, seed them and put them in tournament-like brackets. Each day, one will be eliminated — based on verdicts from ESPN judges and viewer voting online and via text messages — in head-to-head matchups. The last one left will be deemed the “Ultimate Sports Star.”

Once Sportscenter has determined for us which athlete is the greatest athlete to ever athlete, presumably they will kill the studio feed and show 1997 ESPN reruns of paintball tournaments. Either that, or they will tackle new forays into lists, such as ESPN’s Top 25 Letters and Texas Instruments Presents Sportscenter’s Top 150 Numbers, Not Worn By Athletes, Merely the Abstract Concept of the Numbers Themselves.

Awful Announcing: Who’s Now?: Yet Another Quirky SportsCenter Feature To Debut Tonight

I’m getting married in less than a week. Naturally, being that I’ve decided that I want to commit myself to a lifetime of companionship, which will become official and finalized in front of dozens of people who have been important in my life, it’s a significant event. We have a DJ and everything.

My lovely fiancee and I have been planning this event for months and months and months and weeks and months, down to the very last details. We’ve been so entrenched in this arduous process of celebrating our love, we don’t know how NOT to plan anymore.

Twelve months ago, we were stressing about choosing a reception site, reserving a DJ, and finding a dress. Nine months ago, we needed to find someone to make a cake, and we needed to choose a menu. Six months ago, I needed to figure out my tuxedo, and we needed to decide if you really can make a cat be a ring bearer (note: you can’t. [extra note: I'm kidding {clarification note: About considering the ring bearing cat, not the physical possibility of it. You're more than welcome to find out.}]) . Three months ago, we were stressing about china patterns and whether we should get the black plastic or brushed steel pasta fork.

Now that we’re within a week, we’ve run out of a lot of details to plan, which means we’re now forced to stress ourselves over the color of M&M’s made available at the rehearsal dinner, and reconsidering the whole cat thing, except as flower girls (still kidding).

Despite over a year of planning, there’s one major details that remains so tantalizingly out of our grasp: the weather. We weren’t stupid enough to plan an entire outdoor festivity, crossing our fingers and hoping for the best, but we still would like the day to go down without a torrential downpour. However, it still remains to be seen.

I’ve been obsessively checking weather.com every four hours or so, and every single time I look at it, I get a different verdict for Sunday. Sometimes it’s perfect, other times it’s going to thunderstorm, and I could have sworn I saw once HIGH-82, LOW-71, 60% CHANCE OF LOCUSTS, THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE HAS ISSUED A CROP-EATING PLAGUE WATCH FOR THE FOLLOWING COUNTIES. . .

Naturally, since I’m losing sleep over this issue, there’s no reason to drag you down into the depths with me, is there?

Here’s the current forecast:

It looks perfect. All weekend long. We’re so screwed.