Because ESPN needs help redefining the word “sports” to mean “anything”

Turn on ESPN these days (or I mean, don’t actually do that, because ESPN is awful, but I meant “if you were to turn on ESPN these days because you accidentally hit the wrong sequence of buttons on your remote or you hate yourself”) and you might be surprised to find out that the all-sports, all-the-time sports network(s) is/are airing a card game, or a bunch of people yelling at each other, or a documentary about people yelling at a physically disabled high school card player. The point being, there are something like 19 different ESPNs at this point (sorry, Sarah Palin – still no job openings for you), and you gotta fill up that airtime somehow, and unfortunately because the universe isn’t altogether terrible, there is only one of this guy.

But apparently the expansion of non-sports doesn’t begin and end with ESPN. 

Yup. Fishing. 

FISHING.

 

Look, we can have decent, respectful conversations about whether riding bicycles is a sport (it isn’t) or playing cards is a sport (it’s a game) or bowling is a sport (it’s barely a game, but at least part of your body has to be in some sort of shape, sort of), but we cannot have the same conversation about fishing. Fishing involves sitting in a boat and fishing. It is so non-complex and so non-sports-like that there is almost literally no other way of describing WHAT IT IS AND HOW IT IS DONE than just “fishing”. Math is more of a sport than fishing is.

Then again, this is happening in Missouri, where, in the city of Mole, it is illegal to frighten babies, so…*

 

 

*NO DANCING IN PURDY!!!

“You are all going to die” – All previous commencement addresses (including yours) are now ridiculously inadequate…

…because Joss Whedon gave this one.

So if you either a) keep telling stories about how *awesome* your commencement speaker was (full disclosure: mine was James Earl Jones and he said “may the Force be with you” during it and, at the time, it was pretty cool) or b) think your commencement speaker sucked (which usually means it was someone like a diplomat or a foreign corespondent or something who was too busy accomplishing real things to bother spending time getting famous enough for you to know who he or she was), then, if a) you can stop telling those stories because you are now wrong or b) feel better, because now, by comparison, everyone else’s commencement sucked, too.

(Also, no Ascension):

A Change in Focus

Hi, world. Joey here.

John and I have recorded nearly 30 episodes of our smash hit podcast, Sports 4 Starters. But when we publish an episode, our meager Facebook fan base doesn’t seem to know what to do with it. We get a few listens and interactions on our posts, but there should be so much more.

Producer extraordinaire Christian Larson said, “The people love text.” So that’s what we’re giving them. Don’t worry — we’ll continue to do the podcast. That’s our vocal bread-and-butter. And we have some exciting things planned in the near future.

Plus, all three of us are “writers” in the barest sense of the word, in that we know how to write and enjoy the process, which means that actually doing the thing makes sense and is something that should happen.

So this will be a place for us to give our short- or long-form musings on the types of things we’d normally talk about on the podcast. Things like sports, of course, for starters, but also other, non-sports things, like video games and movies and television and technology and so on and so forth ad infinitum.

So journey with us, please, and read what we have to say. And share it with your friends. Encourage us to write, because we all should be writing far more than we already are.