Thoughts on Bloggery, Position Changes and Buying Shots for Strange Women

I haven't addressed the whole Buzz v. Blogs controversy, and won't really start now. After all, the rest of the 'sphere has done a mighty fine job with it already, No. 7 in particular.

I will say, though, that a large part of this whole stinky cocktail of anger, jealousy and fear springs from the inescapable fact that all of these brick-and-mortar sportwriters, with their cherished ruts and ridiculously out-of-proportion salaries, are being forced into the world of new media by editors who realize that the days of T. Ringolsby lecturing to a captive audience about the importance of having a dirty uniform are over.

They may not like it, they may have trouble figuring out how to work the Google on the internet machine, they may cringe at having their public make comments on their game story, but they know the score. There's nothing they can do about it, and since most of them are professionally unfit to do anything else (reading unedited sports copy is like eating a cheeseburger with a chunk of broken windshield stuck in it) they take their lumps in the meetings, dutifully pump out a few sentences every few days to run as an in-house "blog" and then yell at those goddamn kids to get off their lawn.

* In Broncos news: evidently the team is considering turning its brand new linebacking prospect, Spencer Larsen of the University of Arizona, into a fullback. That makes perfect sense, because they drafted a fullback--Arkansas' own Peyton Hillis--a round later, and what two positions are more similar? Thanks to the (unbelievably painful to read unedited) Bill Williamson, now of ESPN, for verifying something that Shanahan mentioned days earlier but yet still somehow escaped notice because it was just so freaking bizarre.

* I was having a beer last night, waiting to meet a friend from out of town, and two women sat next to me at the bar. No surprise there--there aren't many stools, so they didn't really have a choice. They ordered two shots of whiskey, made small-but-shamefully-flirty talk with the 'tender and then said "and I hear this guy over here is gonna buy our shots."

I laughed. Nice try, I said. One of them mimicked me, and in her best 7th grade bitch voice gave me "what a gentleman."

Look. I'm a pretty decent sort. I try not to start fights with strangers, be nice to animals and show my mom the respect she deserves. But some cunt--who, it must be said, bore a surprising similarity to the girl who rubs a peanut in her cleavage in that Planter's commercial--that demands her drinks be paid for by a guy, simply because he's there? That nonsense doesn't fly in my world, friends. Doesn't. Fly.

So what did I do, you ask? What rhetorical sabre did I choose from my vast arsenal? Did I say "sorry, I only buy drinks for pretty girls"? Or "sure, but only if you show me you can fit the whole bottle up your snatch?"

Uh...no. Nothing like that. I sat there and ignored her ugly ass. The moral? Don't read past the football stuff in these posts, unless you're out of Ambien.