Juice for Everyone

To celebrate the official Barry Bonds Day, a thought experiment: What if drugs were perfectly legal for all athletes? What would our favorite sports look like? Assuming everyone's favorite sport is baseball. And that it mattered.

An economist's take on perfomance enhancing drugs.

Apparenlty professional cycling started the practice of athletic doping in the first place.

[T]he history of modern doping began with the cycling craze of the 1890s and the six-day races that lasted from Monday morning to Saturday night. Extra caffeine, peppermint, cocaine and strychnine were added to the riders’ black coffee. Brandy was added to tea. Cyclists were given nitroglycerin to ease breathing after sprints. This was a dangerous business, since these substances were doled out without medical supervision.

Staying up for 6 days while on the road taking cocaine mixed with brandy, rat poison, and nitroglycerin. What could possibly go wrong?

Today in Unnecessary Nakedness

In the right time and place, naked can be a beautiful thing. The gym I frequent is not such a place.

Socrates might ask of his fellow philosophers, “Is it--or is it not-- appropriate to be sitting completely naked in front of Paul’s gym locker casually reading a book on executive management?”

And the philosophers would answer in unison, “Master, it is certainly not!”

But there’s an executive manager out there who disagrees with the wisdom of the ancients and he’s not visually pleasing.

Perhaps more understandable, but still unsettling: last week’s long naked discussion in front of my locker regarding riding lawnmowers with another gym patron. Also naked. Not just a naked hello, but a full naked conversation with many naked, naked follow-up questions regarding blade-height and horsepower.

And it’s not even lawn-care season!

And then there’s today, where yet another casually unclothed gym patron initiates a conversation, this time with me:

“So are you like watching the Super Game this weekend? I wonder if during the Break Time Show there will be another Clothing Mis-fire.”

The correct terms he should’ve used are: Super Bowl; Half-Time Show; and Wardrobe Malfunction.

I’m pretty clueless about sports, but even I know that people don’t talk like that. The only reasonable assumption is that he’s actually an alien majoring in Anthropology at Mothership University.

And he must be failing because ANTH 101 teaches that traditional human costumes for conversation between non-intimates consist of cloth draped over our bodies. In football terms, he would be flagged with a 10-yard penalty for unnecessary nakedness.

The Super Broker Shuffle

Apparently the Chicago Bears are going back to the Super Bowl. Last time they went in 1985, they weren’t just a team, but a cultural phenomenon. Having lived through 1985, I can attest that even an oblivious kid could not escape Bears on TV, Bears on the radio, Bears in car advertisements. I think they did something for McDonalds.

The pinnacle of their cultural relevance was undoubtedly “The Super Bowl Shuffle”. Before the big game, most of the entire team participated in a group “rap” with much shuffling awkwardness. It was on the radio, it was on MTV. It was everywhere.

The track even reached #41 on the Billboard charts. It was a confusing time for all of us.

As awkward as it was seeing ham-fisted athletes act like musicians/dancers, it was soon eclipsed by the SUPER BOWL of AWKWARD later that year. I refer of course, to the lesser-known “Super Broker Shuffle”. Unfortunately this never made the Billboard charts:





There are really no words to describe this further.