Thursday

Extremely sore from CrossFit yesterday. My mood is much improved.

Diet 8:30 a.m. Cereal, two eggs, two sausage links. 9:30 a.m. Switch. Noon Salmon and wild rice LeanCuisine. 5 p.m. Banana and soda. 7 p.m. Spaghetti and meat sauce with broccoli florets, garlic bread. I had a voracious appetite, maybe because I ate so little for lunch.

No skills or conditioning, just rest.

I usually avoid the genre of fake news that involves people yelling at each other about things they pretend to care about, but I saw this on Sam Caplan's blog and wanted to comment on it.



I know Jay Mariotti gets paid to wear clown pants on ESPN, and I know having 4.37 seconds to discuss issues doesn't lend itself to informed debate, but I cringed when he started talking the way I do when middle aged white people talk about rap. It's likely that he doesn't understand the history of the sport, the martial arts involved, the rules and how they developed, you know, the things you should know if you want to speak intelligently on the subject of MMA. He could have even said, "I don't really know what I am talking about, I'm just not comfortable with the sport." But then he would have owed an explanation for his enjoyment of football or how MMA is substantively different than boxing.

Jackie Macmullan says that young people love MMA because it involves violence and "that bums me out." It's such thoughtless thing to say, and I mean that literally. People would simply not say things like that if they put any thought at all into the subject. Violence has been a part of human culture since we started walking on two feet. Violence for cultural/political/religious dominance closely followed by violence for entertainment.

Hearing braindead megaphones like this spout off about the harm MMA does to our culture when they probably write hundreds of inches a year about football, a sport that cripples the minds and bodies of men across America every fall and winter, is akin to arguing about the war on drugs with a liquor industry lobbyist.