Iowa Liberal

That’s upper peninsula for the uninitiated; land of guns guns guns! We fished for trophy walleye on Little Bay de Noc until the wee hours of the morning with terrific success. Here’s a twenty eight incher I caught earlier in the evening:

I almost got seasick this time. I say almost because I was definitely green but not enough to pollute the icy cold waters of Green Bay and consequently ruin everybody’s appetite. It must be because I’m getting older because earlier this year I was motion sick after just one ride at a local amusement park which hasn’t happened to me in thirty years. I’ve also never experienced motion sickness on a boat before this weekend and since I’m not accustomed to the feeling I always forget to take dramamine previous to my excursions. Luckily I was able to stave off nausea long enough to land this ten and a half pound, thirty inch monster:

Congratulations were exchanged, pictures were taken and cans of half warm Budweiser were raised.

I didn’t get into any politics with the locals but for an excruciating twenty minutes I endured the Glen Beck program. A female audience member was lamenting how you’re unable to engage in a civilized discussion about Barack Obama’s policies without him calling you a racist. Judging by the thundering applause I guessed that the audience agreed with her assessment. What color is the sky in their world?

-mg

NYT reports on an excellent development: the foundation of a MMA club at a high school. The only condition is that the students don’t actually punch or kick each other. They train for everything, but when they spar it’s just grappling jiu-jitsu style.

I was frequently derided as a faggot in high school because I didn’t play sports. If I could have done it over again I would have taken wrestling and stomached some early defeats, but while other guys were playing football I was in my garage hitting and kicking a punching bag, dutifully practicing moves from movies like “Bloodsport” and “Big Trouble in Little China.” By the time I tried Tae-Kwon-Do in college I already had a pretty good right foot, but even then I was learning the best stuff from a buddy in my dorm (shout out to John Trunnell, one of the earth’s finest and funniest guys), who knew more about what wins a real fight than any of those pompous authoritarian fools in that Tae-Kwon-Do class. Now that I’m in my thirties and living in the big city, now that the UFC has become a national phenomenon instead of a niche rental at Blockbuster (referred to by John McCain as “human cockfighting”), there are classes in MMA all around. I hope to enroll in one when I have better money and health insurance to cover injuries, but at 35 I’ve still not yet had the opportunity to get the kind of training I’ve always wanted. So what an opportunity it would have been to get real martial arts training in high school instead of prancing about in costumes applying importance to ball-handling.

-jb

The Onion nails it once again.

-mg

Hank Aaron is still the biggest hero.

And it’s not just the steroids that give Bonds the advantage, either.

-mg

…David Beckham and his attractive-only-by-English-standards wife are boring.

Beckham’s main quality in the U.S. market is, of course, his brand-name celebrity aura. If in doubt, witness the image of Becks as a fetching prince on a white horse, saving his Sleeping Beauty as part of Disney World’s “Year of a Million Dreams” advertising campaign. Thus Beckham has joined Donald Duck and Goofy in the U.S. soccer pantheon. Unlike the elitist circles of global soccer, where professional players are actually required to win games between their celebrity stunts, American sports-as-entertainment culture seems ready to worship unconditionally Beckham’s right foot and boyish attractiveness. It also appears to be hungry for Mrs. Beckham’s impressive vacuity–she once frankly owned up to never having read a book in her life–which should reach its height on U.S. television: Victoria has signed up with NBC for her own fashion reality special, in which David might be subjected to kinder, gentler hair-drying treatments.

Ouch.

-mg