as I'm a 20-something white (& white-collar) male. I've logged something close to daily time on Deadspin since '06, but my ardor has been gradually cooling, mostly because Leitch can't keep his mouth shut. He's a nice guy, reasonably reasonable and all that, but as an employee of Gawker he is absolutely unqualified to lead the blog charge.

Deadspin makes its bones not on astute analysis (indeed, most of Deadspin's playoff previews and team-by-team breakdown duties are farmed out to other bloggers or sympathetic sportswriters) but coy character games. A photo of Matt Leinart with two co-eds and a beer bong is funny, sure, but Leitch insults everyone's intelligence by claiming the photos go up because it makes Matt "human". Read the comments; no one's gobsmacked by Matty's humanity. Everyone's there to, well, gawk. The Brady Quinn=gay meme, the Tom Brady=gay meme, the pandering shots of Allison Stokke and Erin Andrews... this is not the brave new world of sports fandom, this is the same old base-level amusement, enshrined on a server. I understand that you don't judge a blog solely on its comments; but when 10% of your posts are about balls, expect that to trickle down. Leitch is a fine writer: not in the sense that he can craft a pleasing phrase or provide penetrating insight, but in the sense that he writes with a minimum of grammatical mistakes and maintains a consistent gee-whiz-I'm-just-a-nice-fan-with-a-dream tone. Every so often, when an athlete dies or Deadspin is attacked in the mainstream media, he mounts a pleasant response that blows his commenters - largely smart guys and girls with a good BS meter, made lazy- away.

Fire Joe Morgan, the site cited in HBO's taped segment, could have offered a cogent argument for the blogosphere-as-Fifth Estate. For their day jobs, these guys are writers in the MSM, for God's sake, and Costas chooses to grill the head of a Gawker Media blog that gets a crap-ton of hits. Clearly, Costas wanted to take the internet to task, and as the editor of a site that once broadcast an ESPN anchor's voice messages to a girl in a bar, Leitch (bless his heart) is a fine recipient.

With one mouth Leitch, AJ Daulerio, and the KSK crew protest their validity as sportswriters; with the other, they provide or enable a stream of content revolving around horse cocks, bangability, and creepy MSM gossip. I'm not going to lie here; I'll leer at Deadspin's post of Naked Santonio Holmes, or thrill to the Chris Berman YouTube clips, or chortle at Sean Salisbury gossip. It's a fleeting fix, though; it's non-caloric and barely tangentially related to sports. And it's a Deadspin standby. I get that Stuart Scott, Berman, and the like need to be taken down a couple pegs in our collective estimation, but that's not sportswriting. That's not the vanguard of the 'revolution'. That's cheap meat for bored eaters. And Costas could've had a much better meal to chew on if he'd chosen another blogger.

I'm not trying to suck up here, but King's a good example of internet sports writing that's worth a damn. He's got a sense of history, is judicious with the coarser talk, and provides analysis, rather than analysis generously leavened with photos of drunk athletes. For schadenfreude and good ol' unrestrained snark, Deadspin's my destination. For writing... not so much. Ever.

in the business, we call that an EPIC BURN.

And I want ten bucks for my ticket, now that you've given away the end of the film.

That you're a troll whose only two posts on this site are links to asinine, non-starter YouTube clips and a rant from Sean "If everyone taps their heels three times Clinton would be the primary-vote leader?" Wilentz? The term "troll" is grossly overused on this site and elsewhere, but I'm fairly certain it applies here.

Her supporters, as quoted by the Daily News, are shamelessly utilizing the "this is art, man, it's not my fault small minds can't comprehend the weighty questions involved." As usual, academia (or the academically-aspirant, in the artist's case) wants to convince us that an abstract, literally visceral project is more relevant, and will provoke better discussion, than 40+ years of the abortion discussion. As if countless, heartbreaking stories of teenage girls discarding fetuses in bathroom stalls and dumpsters is less compelling than one Eli with a turkey baster and a dream.

You know what? I don't care. I'm remaining unprovoked by anything other than the arrogances that would concoct this project, then po'-facedly protest that "it's just, like, artistic and thoughtful, not controversial." At least Beuys and Burden were honest about their aims. Unless she's a one-hit wonder, Shvarts is doomed to a half-life of succesful self-promotion in cloistered, endlessly-amused high-art circles. Surely this was her aim from the word go.

No one's saying the Heat tanked.

...when they've got a show on basic cable?

When Dowd and her fellow inkspillers remonstrate Democratic candidates about their egghead ways, isn't that just a veiled way of saying "the people," the salt-of-the-earth Joad types, are idiots? Their little minds can't deal with someone from another American culture? They don't want a president with a grasp of law, history, policy? It's one thing to say that Sen. Obama's "bitter" comments are insulting (that can be debated on its merits, certainly); it's another thing entirely to say his entire persona - his way of life and those fundamental historical bits of him that can't be focus-grouped into obedience - is an affront to regular ol' America. That, to me, is the real condescension, and I'd say the primary results thus far show how little Democrats subscribe to Dowd's unimpeachable, empirical evidence.