Because none of them would buy this magnificent (NSFW) profile of Jose Canseco by Pat Jordan.

...I'd make a facetious bet with Adam Bonin over the Amherst-Brandeis Final Eight Division III basketball game, but I'm pretty appalled at Brandeis these days.

Old-style Astros caps are a Crips gang sign.

I can't find the blog comment where I criticized the trade, but I thought the Suns got severely taken by the Heat in giving up one of the best players in the league for the desiccated bones of Shaquille O'Neal, who simply isn't the Shaq of five or even two years ago. Even three years ago, O'Neal demonstrated in the Detroit-LA series that he no longer had the stamina to play every other day, and the Suns have gone from a team with a 15% or so chance of winning the title needing only some breaks in the playoffs to a team that may well not make the playoffs: they're 3-6 with Shaq in the lineup (only 1 of those wins against a playoff-contending team) and in the hypercompetitive West, that's dropped them from on top of the league to sixth seed, only 2.5 games ahead of ninth-place Denver with 20 to play. Phoenix can probably eke in to the playoffs at 51-31, requiring an 11-9 finish, though they're helped by a relatively easy schedule: two games against Memphis, two against Portland, one against Minnesota, Sacramento, Seattle, and New Jersey. Critically, they have a home-and-home against Denver Mar. 31 and Apr. 1.

I'll take the controversial position that Camden Yards is overrated (via ALOTT5MA). Yes, it's important and historic; yes, it was a top-ten park when it opened, perhaps even top-three or better. But now that Camden set the standard for new parks, and the vast majority of cookie-cutters have been replaced with Camden-style parks, Camden is inferior in many ways to the majority of late-1990s/21st century parks that refined the Camden model: ceteris paribus, I'd see a game at Minute Maid over Camden any day. Bank One is also superior, and I hear good things about the Seattle park.

The worst park is perhaps RFK, though I haven't been to Tampa.

"The exclusion of non-human players like Bunny is another shameful example of the long history of injustices done by baseball’s racist policies. That black and rabbit players could only play against white players in non-sanctioned exhibition matches deprived the game of some of the best talent to ever play, and from what we’ve seen, robbed scientists of a chance to better study phenonema with wide applicability to questions of physics that could have greatly benefited all residents of the earth, be they human or Leporidae." [USS Mariner via Throwing Things]

Sports never loses its capacity to surprise. I can't stand hockey, but the final thirty seconds of this game are pretty remarkable (via C. Newmark).

Weird tale of Chris Brown, the erratic 1980s journeyman third baseman, who appears to have killed himself in an arson in Sugar Land.

My father told me about a local Houston furniture store that offered free furniture to anyone who bought over a certain amount over the weekend if the hapless Houston Texans football team beat the then-undefeated Indianapolis Colts in Indianapolis. It must have moved some furniture, and certainly got the store free publicity, so a Southern California furniture store tried the same tactic when the mediocre UCLA Bruins played the #2-ranked USC Trojans, who had won seven straight matchups in the cross-town rivalry, and were a 11-to-13 point favorite. Oops.

I had presumed the Houston store hedged its 50-50 bet with customers by putting a few thousand dollars on the underdog moneyline in Las Vegas, but there's no mention of that in the LA Times story.

If my TiVo was hooked up to broadband and I still played fantasy sports, this would be a nice feature.

1. Sequence: Tony Kornheiser debuts on Monday Night Football, gets mixed reviews, including a pan from his own newspaper. As I predicted, TK throws a fit, as he tends to do when the WaPo criticizes him, creating a newsstory of its own (also NYT). Gene Weingarten satirizes this; lots of idiots don't get the joke. The irony is that Kornheiser's reaction was relatively muted compared to incidents in the last few years where he had critical reporters fired.

2. Weingarten also gets the story about jdate-r Darren, who turns out to be even more of a jerk than the Costanza-like scenario much blogged about.

3. Netflix warehouses.

4. I'm more environmental than Al Gore.

5. This page about Thai food in Chicago makes me hungry.

A datapoint on the concept of Indian mascots and offensive team names like the "Washington Redskins": the Dutch football team Ajax are called the "Jews" and I learned today (via Bonin) that the English Premier League team Tottenham Hotspur call themselves the "Yids," thus putting the shoe on the other foot. And I don't know whether to be proud or appalled. What say you? (Obligatory related YouTube of fans chanting "Yid Army".)