In late June, the N.F.L. convened its rookies in the hope of teaching them to make choices that aren’t so poor. For the better part of four days, the league commandeered La Costa Resort and Spa, north of San Diego, for a ”rookie symposium.” Every drafted rookie was required to attend (or pay a $10,000 fine), from the No. 1 pick, David Carr, to the lowly seventh-rounders…Since then, the N.F.L. has freighted the symposium with speakers who try to scare the rookies into lawfulness.

Take Irving Fryar’s motivational speech for example:

Irving Fryar, a recently retired wide receiver, is such a speaker. ”We’re going to have some idiots come out of this room,” he begins. ”Those of you feeling good about yourselves, stop it. You ain’t did nothing yet.” Fryar recites his career stats: 17 N.F.L. seasons, a drug habit since he was 13 and four trips to jail. ”The first time, I was stopped in New Jersey,” he says. ”I was on my way to shoot somebody. Driving my BMW. I had guns in the trunk, and I got taken to jail. The second time, also guns. Third time was domestic abuse. Fourth time, it was guns again. No. Yeah, yeah, it was guns again. Things got so bad for me, I put a .44 magnum up to my head and pulled the trigger.” Now Fryar is a minister. ”When I was a rookie,” he says, ”we didn’t have anything like this. I had to learn it the hard way. Don’t use me as an example of what you can get away with, brothers. Use me as an example of what you shouldn’t do.”

And rookies, please don’t do what Marcus Spears up and did…

There are more scary stories. Marcus Spears, a veteran offensive lineman with the Kansas City Chiefs, tells the rookies about sitting out his first season with an injury. ”I turned to drinking a lot,” he says. ”And on occasion, I’d smoke some sticky. We’d go to these strip clubs, and I would get so drunk, I’d drive home and not even know I drove home. Four, five, six times a week.

Heck, the NFL is so keen on getting to you they come knocking on the door when you’re not attending the Symposium:

One night during the symposium, between the end of lectures and the 12:30 a.m. bed check, I sat up talking with Jeff Hatch, the New York Giants’ third-round pick. (He was bleary-eyed. La Costa Resort is overrun with rabbits, and one of them got in Hatch’s room two nights earlier; its rustling kept him awake.) Hatch is a 6-foot-7, 310-pound offensive lineman, a Penn graduate and this year’s only Ivy draftee. ”It was unbelievable,” he said of the predraft testing. ”You’re just being grilled by these people. I must have talked to 15 or 16 teams. The Giants, you may or may not know, are notorious; they give you this 438-question test. It takes an hour and a half if you’re moving decently. Questions like, Did you ever put a dog in the microwave? Or like, If there’s no cops around, do you speed?”

Dogbert's View on the Market

A 44-pound feline was found waddling around Saturday without a collar in Voorhees, and officials at the Camden County Animal Shelter hope she gets a nice — hopefully, diet-friendly — home.

“She’s built like a quarterback,” said Deborah Wright, a shelter volunteer and current foster owner of the kitty. “I mean, how do you lose a 44-pound cat?!”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25937546/

For those of you that have seen the film, chime in, but those who have not, be warned!  Mr. Engber summarizes Wall-E’s message as a simple tenet: “if we don’t change the way we live, we’ll all get really fat and destroy the world.”

Not only does he go on and on about the film and it’s link between obesity and ecology, he makes quite a number of bold claims:

• “there’s little evidence that overeating causes obesity on an individual level and no real reason to think that anyone can lose a lot of weight by dieting.”
• Two months ago, the Washington Post compared childhood obesity to global warming.
• Last year, an AP story called “Fighting Fat and Climate Change” claimed that we could cut annual CO₂-emissions by 64 million tons if every American just got out of his car to walk for half an hour a day.

Gosh.  As if you needed any more reason to cry… “All this may be enough to leave some overweight viewers of Wall-E in tears.”

Some others:

Fresno, CA – FAT (not wholly inappropriate)
Perm, Russia – PEE
and the topper: Fukuoka, Japan – LA Times wouldn’t print it, but we found it – FUK!!

This name may sound familiar – remember this post?

More funny sports names!!

Fort Myers, FL, best known for…well, nothing, saw 200 people go crazy over stolen cigarettes at a gas station because, really, there’s nothing else in this town. While we’re not sure if gas stations conjure up images of jail for these folks but we did hear reports of numerous salad tossings that night as well.

It turns out “Trakr” (apparently, the dog is not a hero of spelling) sniffed out survivors after the 9/11 attacks. BioArts, a California-based firm trying to portray its madness as Da Vinci-esque, will extract Trakr’s DNA and send it to its South Korean counterpart Sooam Biotech Research Foundation. South Korea? I expect Trakr burgers to be a big hit really soon.

Researchers have determined that chimps have a far superior photographic memory than do humans! Little baby chimps outperformed human adults in tests, often slapping the adults in the face after they once again lost. And these weren’t even American adults, whose poor education is reflected by Miss South Carolina’s hilarious and oh so sad answer to a question about geographic knowledge.

Now when someone calls you a “monkey ass”, you can take it as a compliment!