Kobe Bryant Puppet Finds LeBron James Puppet Dead In Apartment Bathtub

The Onion is always hilarious.

Always.

A few interesting stories before the NBA Finals

The NBA Finals kick off tonight and the Los Angeles Lakers are facing the Orlando Magic. The anticipated puppet vs puppet match up between Lebron James and Kobe Bryant (if you don't know what I'm talking about, see this) didn't come to fruition.

And we won't be seeing any Bryant vs. Dwight Howard commercials because Howard is sponsored by Adidas (the puppet commercials were made by Nike).

So what will we be seeing?

Well, a key player for the Lakers is Lamar Odom. Odom who, apparently, can blame his erratic play on his sweet tooth. Or something like that.

We will also see former streetball star Rafer Alston (nickname: Skip to my Lou) as the starting point guard in the NBA Finals. The Washington Post profiled Alston.

And if you have 35 minutes to kill, Bill Simmons had NBA legend Jerry West on his podcast (mp3 here). West is a very smart man, he was a great player, an equally great general manager and, if I can judge by this podcast, a humble man. His prediction: the Lakers will win.

West played for the Lakers and was the general manager for the Lakers for years.

Future of news gathering: Non-profits

I work for a non-profit that reports the news (the New Mexico Independent).

So I'm pretty interested in the question of the future of news reporting. Not the future of newspapers, necessarily, but what will be next in the evolution of news reporting?

And this blog post at Open Left is interesting.

Chris Bowers writes:

It isn't just that people are willing to produce quality content either for free or for prices that don't approach profitability. It is also that the Internet has led to a growing perception that just about all information should be free. Consumers are demanding free information, and lots of people are willing to give it to them.

Good luck finding a for-profit business model to compete against that. Eventually, if you want to make a living producing news, you will have to do it with an organization that is not interested in, and does not rely upon, making a profit.

Headline of the day from ESPN.com

From ESPN.com:



That would be Chien-Ming Wang, the Chinese pitcher who is coming back from an injury and a stint in the bullpen for the New York Yankees.

Wang pitched into the fifth inning and allowed five runs. As of this point, the Yankees are losing to the Texas Rangers 5-1. Edit: Now it's 5-5. I think I jinxed the Rangers. Final update: The Yankees won 8-6. Damn them.

Hat tip to @arjunjaikumar, who is a Boston Red Sox fan.

A new angle on Tianamen Square's "Tank Man"

Yesterday, I wrote about four iconic photos of "Tank Man" in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China.

We've all seen them, they are among the most famous photographs in history.

But now they New York Times' "Lens" blog (the New York Times blogs all have one-word semi-zen names -- the baseball blog is "Bats" for example) shows us a never before seen photo from a different angle.

Mr. Jones’ angle on the historic encounter is vastly different from four other versions shot that day, taken at eye level moments before the tanks stopped at the feet of the lone protester. Wildly chaotic, a man ducks in the foreground, reacting from gunfire coming from the tanks. Another flashes a near-smile. Another pedals his bike, seemingly passive as the tanks rumble towards confrontation.

The photograph encourages the viewer to reevaluate the famous encounter. Unlike the other four versions, we are given a sense of what it was like on the ground as the tanks heaved forward, the man’s act of defiance escalated by the flight of others.

Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of Tank Man's heroic stand. Still, to this day, no one knows who he is or what happened to him.

Zach Galifianakis is the new comedy god

OK, the title is a little bit facetious. But Zach Galifianakis is a really funny guy. Or he's extremely unfunny. It all depends on the person who is watching his act.

I watched Galifianakis' Comedy Central special (video) with my old roommates and a girl when they were over at the house. This is a Comedy Central special where Galiafianakis jumps around in a leotard, has a chorus of his ex-girlfriends sing a song and... well, it's pretty weird.

My roommates didn't get it (for the record, they thought that Dane Cook was hilarious). The girl? She said that Katt Williams is funny and asked if we had any of that.

Yeah.

Anyway, the New York Times magazine ran a feature on Galifianakis (my second favorite Greek comedian behind Demetri Martin).

Here's a portion:

The beard lends him a subtly beatnik air, a link to the first generation of stand-up iconoclasts, like Lord Buckley and Lenny Bruce; at the same time,it gives him a professorial quality — dare I call it a gravitas? — that makes his more meatheaded material jarringly effective. Galifianakis himself put it more succinctly: “I look like a homeless guy now. People seem to appreciate that.”

One of the people who appreciated it was Kanye West, who saw Galifianakis perform at a Hollywood club called Largo in 2007. “I was doing a bit about how much I hate celebrity egos, and that seemed to resonate with him, for some reason,” said Galifianakis, with a barely perceptible grin. “He asked me to do a video for him, and I said yes, with one condition: I just go off by myself and shoot it, and he doesn’t get to look at it until it’s done.” To everyone’s surprise, West agreed. The resulting video, in which Galifianakis and the indie-folk icon Will Oldham drive a tractor around a cornfield while lip-synching West’s hit single “Can’t Tell Me Nothing,” has been viewed nearly half a million times. “I wasn’t sure what Kanye would think of it, to be honest,” Galifianakis said. “But his response was perfect, considering how we’d first met. He said it was the best video he’d ever made.”

Sports and birds just don't mix

On ESPN.com right now, one of the Editor's Choice videos (featured on the front page of the website) is this video of a cricket player throwing the ball and hitting a bird:



Of course, as an American, this reminded me of the Randy Johnson fastball that hit and annihilated a bird back in 2001.



And apparently in England, the bird hitting extends even to soccer, er, football. Michael Ballack, of Chelsea, destroys a bird in similar fashion as Randy Johnson, which you can see here.

If you thought that basketball, being an indoor sport, would be safe from birds interfering with the game. Well, you'd be wrong.

100 great movie lines in 200 seconds

Via NewMexiKen:

You can argue with a few of the lines ("This is Sparta!" doesn't belong on the list for sure), but it's still a cool video. I'd say that I recognize about 95 of the lines, even though there are many movies that I haven't seen.

Penn Jillette juggling broken bottles

There is something strangely disconcerting about this video of magician Penn Jillette juggling broken glass bottles (hat tip to @brianarn for the link).

I'm not sure what it is about the video that creeps me out... maybe it's the a minute and three seconds of total silence. Maybe it's seeing Jillette's mouth moving in super slow motion, obviously saying something. Maybe it's just Jillette.

But, yeah, the video creeps me out.

Oh, and before the video, I saw a commercial featuring Bear Grylls, the star of Man vs. Wild. I always refer to Grylls as the fake survival expert since he's faked numerous scenes. I prefer Les Stroud of Survivorman.

Orlando Magic player to change shoes for NBA Finals

Mickael Pietrus of the NBA Finals has worn the same type of shoes all year long. He has worn this type of shoes while his team reached the playoffs. He wore this type of shoes as the Orlando Magic knocked off the defending champion Boston Celtics and dethroned "King James" (Lebron James) and the Cleveland Cavaliers.

But now, he has to change up.

Because those shoes that Pietrus wore? They are Kobe Bryant brand shoes. And he is playing against Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers in the NBA Finals.

"I have [Kobe shoes] at my house, but I'm going to play with Michael Jordan shoes," Pietrus told the Orlando Sentinel (via ESPN).

Well Jordan has six titles and Bryant only has three. So it seems like a no-brainer to me.