For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Here’s the sort of thing I’m talking about:

Well, in tonight’s unlikely Broncos win over the Pittsburgh Steelers, Mr. Tebow completed ten passes — for a total of 316 yards. Better yet: that’s an average of 31.6 yards per completion.

I don’t know if any of them qualified as a “Hail Mary”, but that’s pretty nifty work nevertheless.

Olympic swimming records set to tumble at London 2012 as Speedo unveil Fastskin3 swimwear system

I realize I’m just an old fossil, but this is a depressing trend. Next it’ll be quantum-tunneling suits, or something.

I think the ancient Greeks had the right idea: make ‘em compete in the nude. It’d boost ratings, too.

Next time, just throw it back.

Accountants say the man who caught the home run ball that Derek Jeter smashed for his 3,000th hit Saturday will have to pay as much as $14,000 in taxes, New York media report.

Christian Lopez, 23, caught the ball and promptly handed it over to the Yankees without demanding any kind of payment, the Daily News reported. The Yankees rewarded him with suite seats for the rest of the season, plus a heap of autographed team memorabilia.

That’s what could cost Lopez. According to The New York Times, the total value of the seats and loot could exceed $120,000. The IRS would consider that to be taxable income, several accountants told both newspapers.

We’ll see how this one plays out; there may be a loophole. Story here.

Yes, yes, mere frivolity, perhaps — but a nice diversion from the doom and gloom all around us. That’s what sports are for.

I wonder who’s got that ball!

HT: Lawrence Auster.

Inequality.

Just as nature abhors a vacuum, the State abhors inequality. So a few years back, into the breach it leapt — with all the sagacity, foresight, and subtlety of method we’ve come to expect. This has now produced the usual cornucopia of unintended, if not entirely unpredictable, consequences. Story here.

In case you missed the game, I have stumbled across what is, I am sure, the most detailed and informative account you are likely to find anywhere on the Internet. It comes from something called the Temple Daily Telegram.

Some excerpts:

For the third time in six seasons, terrible Towels will whisk during the Super Bowl, where the Steelers will confront Green Bay after silencing Rex Ryan’s mad wreath in a 24-19 attainment for the AFC championship Sunday.

Look out big D, here comes another big D – in black and gold, and with an unmatched story of carrying off the Lombardi Trophy.

The Steelers (14-4) in addition will defence the Packers, who have been 2?-point favorites, with a versatile dispute led by their quarterback and regulating at a behind of Rashard Mendenhall.

The defense, led by James Harrison, had a destroy relapse for a touchdown and a goal-line mountain that tighten down the Jets’ remark in the fourth quarter. it will definitely examination Aaron Rodgers in the due diversion in Arlington on Feb. 6.

Got that, Rodgers? You’d better hit the books.

The Steelers just did what they had to do:

“It’s not continually graceful with us,” Roethlisberger said, “but we do the job.”

The Steelers accomplished the Jets’ mellow with a drawn out primary half for a 24-3 lead. Mendenhall had 95 of his 121 yards and a touchdown.

…“God is good and this one was for Steelers fans,” Roethlisberger said. “I’m unquestionably haughty of the way we came out and inspected us tonight.”

The Steelers have been regulars, together with Super Bowl titles for the 2005 and 2008 teams, both led by Roethlisberger and a impassioned salvation sparked by playmaking haven Troy Polamalu.

Polamalu, his enlarged hair arising from under his helmet, didn’t have to do a sum lot this time. Not with the way his teammates topsy-turvy the Jets during the line of onslaught before to a enterprising new York bloat in the second half.

“We overcame a lot some-more obstacles this year than we have in the past,” Polamalu said. “But we still got one some-more to go. ”

And too often, new York’s salvation was like a suspended dike that Roethlisberger and Mendenhall ran by with ease.

As for the hapless Jets:

The Jets struggled to retard and catch, with the usually sure-handed Cotchery origination a pass third-down drop. Or tackle. Mendenhall found seams to the left, right or up the middle. His 35-yard scuttle in the second perform led to Shaun Suisham’s 20-yard domain thought and a 10-0 lead that was unassailable the way the Jets were whiffing.

Read the whole thing (with glamorous photo of Roethlisberger) here.

Thousands of Sports Fans Drunk After Football, Baseball Games

I understand this is the cover story for the forthcoming issue of DUH! magazine, but you heard it here first.

I couldn’t believe it. Tough men playing in brutal conditions is (or, I suppose I should say, was), an unshakable pillar of the football mystique. No matter how bad it gets, the game goes on. Look at the mighty Green Bay Packers, for example, playing all those games up there on the Frozen Tundra at Lambeau Field, wearing their short-sleeved jerseys with the temperature below zero. Think of all the games we’ve seen in swirling blizzards, where the groundskeepers could hardly keep the yard-lines and hash-marks visible. Think of all the games we’ve seen in monsoon-like downpours that turned the field into an acre of cleat-sucking mud. I even remember a Bears game I couldn’t see at all, because the field was completely shrouded in fog.

It was clear to me that this pigeonhearted decision, which should live in infamy, was yet another depressing, and in this case deeply symbolic, example of an America gone soft. Arrayed against us, all around the world, are implacable foes: lean and obdurate men, their eyes burning with unquenchable fire, stubborn and unyielding in their cause even in the face of certain death. Meanwhile, such pampered milksops have we become, such cringing, sniveling quake-buttocks, that we can’t even play football — and yes, we are talking about football here — in the snow.

Well, it seems I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. Here’s what Dennis Prager has to say about it.

“George and I had our differences, but who didn’t?”

From his New York Times obituary:

From the last days of DiMaggio through the primes of Mantle, Berra, Jackson and Jeter, Sheppard’s precise, resonant, even Olympian elocution — he was sometimes called the Voice of God — greeted Yankee fans with the words, “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Yankee Stadium.”

“The Yankees and Bob Sheppard were a marriage made in heaven,” said his son Paul Sheppard, a 71-year-old financial adviser. “I know St. Peter will now recruit him. If you’re lucky enough to go to heaven, you’ll be greeted by a voice, saying, ‘Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to heaven!’ ”

In an era of blaring stadium music, of public-address announcers styling themselves as entertainers and cheerleaders, Sheppard, a man with a passion for poetry and Shakespeare, shunned hyperbole.

“A public-address announcer should be clear, concise, correct,” he said. “He should not be colorful, cute or comic.”

Well, worry no more.

The trumpet itself is called a vuvuzela, which I understand means, in some local tongue, “cheap piece of crap that makes a really loud vu-vu noise”.

The thing is LOUD: at its maw it has been measured, according to this Wikipedia article, at 131 dB, which is comparable to a Formula One race car in full flight. Multiply that by the seating capacity of a sports arena, and the result is an extremely large amount of totally pointless noise.

I’m not suggesting that spectators at the World Cup should sit in silence and applaud politely when goals are scored. The voice of the crowd is an important part of events like this. But stadium noise is usually a densely composite sound that varies continuously as events on the field unfold. It is a confluence of tens of thousands of emotional human utterances. Its individual components span the full range of the human vocal apparatus, and the attentive listener can pick out of the sound of the crowd individual people saying things. Sitting in the stands, you hear the voices all around you clearly and separately, while those farther away begin to blend into the general roar. Even that general roar rises and falls, and clearly expresses shared sentiments in the form of boos and cheers. It is a rich, complex, and deeply human sound.

But the vuvuzela offers none of that. It doesn’t even vary in pitch; it just brays away on a constant, deafening B-flat. It expresses no individuality, no thought, no emotion — nothing at all, except an urge to make noise. And that noise is disturbingly non-human: it is the sound, not of a stadiumful of people getting together to cheer their champions to victory, but of a world-devouring swarm of insects. It is utterly mindless, and as such I find it terribly depressing.

A friend of mine is heading to South Africa later this week to attend some of the games. I don’t envy him at all.