Explore Posterous

Steroids, Slander, and the Internets

Maybe I'm extra special partial to this because I've fallen in love faster with Raul Ibanez than any other baseball player, and it's a little unsettling to see him react so angrily to what I consider to be an understandably suspicious, imperfectly presented, but ultimately harmless blog post, but maybe my rapture runs deeper. Maybe the debate really does provide a totally fascinating angle from which to look at press and rumor and the evolution of information flow...



Good for ESPN for hosting the discussion. Good for Jerod the blogger for participating with cool and humility. And good for Raul for offering stool samples if requested. Radical transparency, baby.

Mushrooms and Marketing

Read this on a bottle of supplement pills today...

At least 1,500 years ago, Tibetan herders observed that yaks would eat Cordyceps and then frolic with great energy and "passion." This encouraged the herders to experience the power of Cordyceps, which has led to its use by hundreds of millions of people over the ages. In 1993, the Chinese National Track and Field Team attributed their success in breaking the World Records in part to their use of Cordyceps.

First of all, hundreds of millions of people is a bold statement. 

Second, what happened to the Chinese National Track and Field Team after 1993?  Less Cordyceps in their diet?  More in the diets of non-Chinese track and field athletes? 

And, finally, I really hope I get to see a yak frolic with great energy and "passion" someday.  Those quotation marks are positively tantalizing.

Performance Enhancing Chemicals

I don't know anything about this new Michael Phelps scandal except...
 
(A) I saw a headline that read:
 
If Barack Obama Can Admit to Smoking Pot, Why Can't Michael Phelps?
 
And (B) I was invited to join a Facebook group called:

Michael Phelps smokes POT which makes him cool. Fuck the British Tabloids.

So I clearly have no real reason to comment, but, since blogging is blogging, I will:

If Michael Phelps has, at any time during his high stakes swimming career, won a big race while stoned, then I have a whole new level of respect for his swimming skillz.

Note: One sentence post? One sentence post. Not the most traditional (grammatically legal) capitalization or spacing scheme, but I think it works. Party.