Anyone else catch last night’s UFC event? Mixed Martial Arts can be an acquired taste, but it’s oddly compelling once you get into it. Plus, I doubt there’s another sport — aside from maybe the NBA — that offers tattooed athletes such visibility, so there’s that. The above piece is, I believe, on a young man named Emil Hennix, who, if Google has taught me anything, is an amateur fighter himself.
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| Photo source: The Sporting Blog |
[The Sporting Blog] Spencer Hall over at the TSB checked in this morning with a tale of intrigue and deceit (and poor decision-making) that could only have occurred within the confines of collegiate sports. Kirby Freeman signed with the Miami Hurricanes a little while back and, in an attempt to assert his devotion to the team, got the team’s “U” logo tattooed on his back. Well, as Hall writes, sometimes these things aren’t meant to be. Things were going well …
Until now! (DUH-DUH-DAAAAAAHHH.) Freeman transferred to Baylor after losing his starting QB job, and has had the tattoo changed to either a zero or an “O” for “Ohmigod, that is one lopsized zero. Did you play for Oregon?”
[…]
This reminder that a scholarship is four years, but a tattoo is for life comes from The Sporting Blog.
Sound advice!
[Intelligencer] Ha ha, so apparently all the children in Belleville, Ontario, have taken up the time-honored tradition of good old-fashioned cigarette smoking, and some of the elders are displeased. A youth activism group, Unfiltered, has taken up the task of weaning these kids off smoking by handing out temporary tattoos, apparently? At this point, this article takes a delightful turn wherein the townspeople become very concerned that this trickery could actually lead to the young’ns wanting real tattoos, which would be at least as bad as them smoking a pack a day, probably.
“People have been smoking forever, but we just found out that it’s not healthy,” Dolan said. “People have had tattoos forever, maybe it’s going to take us a longer term to find out it’s not healthy.”
Dolan told the board he has been told permanent tattoos put a strain on the body because some of the ink enters the individual’s bloodstream and is then filtered through the body. This, he said, puts an extra strain on some organs.
Dr. Richard Schabas, medical officer of health, said he was not aware of any medical problems linked to tattoos. The only concerns, he said, would be with the needles used to inject the ink. If those needles are not properly sanitized there can be infection problems.
Schabas said the health unit does carry out routine inspections of tattoo parlours in the area. However, he told Dolan there may be some validity to his concern.
“As a matter of policy, I’m not sure we should be encouraging tattoos,” he said.
Schabas said using temporary tattoos to appeal to children is an understandable tactic but may need to be re-examined.
“You walk a fine line here, Bob. You want to relate to kids but, on the other hand, we want to ask ourselves if we want to normalize a behaviour that, maybe, we don’t want to,” he said.
First of all, yes, we “just found out” cigarettes aren’t healthy, what, yesterday? Sixty years ago? Whatever. Anyway, this whole thing makes my brain collapse in on itself. How old are these kids that are smoking? If they’re over the age of 10, I don’t think the temporary tattoo offensive is going to have much success, sadly. But at least the Belleville town council is doing its part to combat the “normalizing” of Pagan dick-choppery like tattoos and such. Can you imagine what it would be like to live in a world where people thought it was OK to get tattoos? Terrifying.
[NY Post] Continuing this election season’s trend of all candidates (and their families) engaging in ritualistic anti-American ink-jamming, as they call it, Caroline Kennedy, one of the front-runners to fill Hillary Clinton’s vacant Senate seat, apparently has a miniscule tattoo on her forearm that nobody had ever noticed until the New York Post realized they were short a column the other day. It is apparently a butterfly but it may as well be a birthmark or a bruise — it is seriously barely there. Naturally, though, because she is a Kennedy, and there is always some sort of sordid tale behind everything those freaks do, this is not just some innocuous splotch of ink:
Kennedy got the tattoo while vacationing with her family in Asia during the late 1980s.
During a night out in Hong Kong, Caroline, her brother, John F. Kennedy Jr., and her cousins Edward “Teddy” Kennedy Jr., 47, and Kara Anne Kennedy, 48, challenged one another with a mischievous dare, a source said, noting that the group had consumed a few drinks.
The boys challenged the girls to get a late-night “tat” at a nearby parlor.
Caroline and Kara went first and emerged “bruised and bloodied,” emblazoned with butterflies on their arms.
But when it came time for Teddy and John Jr. to reciprocate, the men “chickened out,” refusing to go through with the dare, the source said.
When reached for comment, Kennedy corrected the horrible newspaper, and said she actually got the tattoo on a dare from Governor David Paterson, thereby securing Clinton’s Senate seat. Ha ha, timely references.
[Twitter] Hey, did you know BME has its own Twitter feed? True story! If you like BME, but don’t feel like it’s quite pithy enough for you, add us! And while you’re at it, head on over to BME Shop! The holidays are fast approaching, and there’s no better present for grandma than one o’ them split cock T-shirts. And keep on sending in your photos of you decked out in BME gear and jewelry!
[YouTube] This one’s a little on the esoteric side, but do you know BME mainstay and perpetual image-leaderboard contender Perk900? (Of course you do.) Well, some time ago, he apparently worked at Blockbuster Video and was the subject of a short film, which you can see below. Did someone say Cable Ace Award?
[Adam Riff] The captains of industry over at Adam Riff have been running weekly clips from a Jackass-style video made by Respect Authority, many of which are positively cringe-worthy. This week’s installment features the young gentleman on the receiving end of the most unsanitary and most improperly placed nipple piercing in the history of both nipples and piercing. If you’re the sort of person who’s offended by piercings being performed without gloves, some manner of sanitizer, or any adherence to anatomy whatsoever, you should probably shoot yourself in the eyeballs before watching this.
I think I just puked my pants.
[Big League Stew] ‘Duk over at Yahoo! Sports’s Big League Stew passes along a video from Mouthpiece Sports featuring the world’s last remaining Barry Bonds fan. Bonds, of course, was found guilty by an international tribunal of mass-producing all the world’s steroids in a sweatshop inside his skull and running around cold stickin’ baseball players with syringes full of dinosaur semen and such. After his conviction, he was sentenced to fight Jose Canseco to the death inside the Thunderdome, but was granted clemency, and now lives on a remote steroid farm in the Canadian north with Mark McGwire and their seven children. Anyway, this is one of the kids, showing off his Barry Bonds jersey tattoo:
[Right Celebrity] Sweet holy dogshit this is the most awkward thing I’ve seen all day. World-famous playboy and the only man who can pull off the three-day mustache, Brad Pitt, was on Oprah the other day fielding questions from every maniac with a microphone, apparently. At one point, some fan-girl from the Oprah head office hijacked a video feed and began pestering Pitt about his tattoos, which, he, as someone resembling a normal person, didn’t want to discuss on account of them being private. The conversation went something like this:
Insane Woman: HEY BRAD BIG FAN HUGE FAN HEY POP OFF THAT SHIRT AND LET’S SEE SOME TATSSSS
Brad Pitt: Ha ha, good one, but I’d rather not. It’s a fun connection to have with your partner, but it’s private.
Insane Woman: NO REALLY I HEARD YOU GOT A SICK ICEMAN TAT ON YOUR ARM! HAHAHA WHAT DOES ICEMAN MEAN, DOES IT MEAN YOU WANNA DO SOME CRAZY SEXING WITH ME, HAHA GODDAMN BOOYAH
Brad Pitt: Please stop asking me about my tattoos, they’re personal.
Insane Woman: C’MONNN RIP OPEN THAT SWEATER AND LET’S FREAK RIGHT ON THE TOM CRUISE COUCH, I SEEN PIXXX OF SOME INK ON YOUR TUM-TUM, YOU GONNA SWEAT IT OFFFFFF OH SHIT
Brad Pitt: I am leaving the planet of earth.
NOTE: No delicious, delicious fish were harmed in the making of this tattoo by Todo at ABT Tattoo in Hampton, Georgia.
And just like that, another in the books. Take it easy, ModBlog, and we’ll see you in the morning.
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| Richard Roeper (Photo credit: Jim Newberry / NBC Chicago) |
[NBC Chicago] So even though we know by now that if you get a tattoo — any tattoo, even a small and loving portrait of a family member or a saint or something — you will never get a job doing anything except maybe digging graves for Satanists or lobbying for the tobacco industry, some people have been able to make it work. Like Richard Roeper, he of the now defunct Siskel and Ebert and Roeper!
I thought, If I ever do it, it’s not going to be a woman’s name or a White Sox logo or a stupid friggin’ leprechaun. It’ll be a Celtic cross. It’ll be something that has meaning the next day, and 20 years after the fact. But I waited a few more years before finally getting one. It just seemed so ridiculously trendy for a while there.
My standard line is that I got a religious symbol on my arm because I spend so much time in the company of the devil. I need to counter that by keeping God literally close at hand. It’s a joke. Kind of.
[…] I walked into Howard Stern’s studio, and the first thing he told me was he loved the tattoo. George Clooney nudged me just before we were doing a TV thing. My sleeves were rolled up; he could see the beginning of the tattoo and wanted to see the rest of it. “Very cool,” he said. Nearly everybody is complimentary. Then again, I’m sure there are some folks who have said, “Midlife crisis idiot.” Just not to my face.
After I got the tattoo, I called my mother before coming down for Thanksgiving dinner and warned her that I’d added something permanent. When I told her it was a tattoo, she replied, “Oh, that’s fine. I thought you were going to tell me you’d gone out and adopted a little Maddox.”
If George Clooney complimented one of my tattoos, I would probably hire someone to walk beside me and point to it at all times. Two thumbs way up, Roeper! Ha ha, references.
[Mercury News] According to this sordid tale of intrigue, this Angel Ayala character was getting tattooed by Jose Gutierrez and, rather than paying the $40 he was charged for the tattoo, traded the artist a handgun for the work. That … seems … fair? Except, whoops, that gun was used in a murder two years ago! Ayala was later arrested, though, so, happy ending? Eh?
[STLtoday] If there’s one thing sports fans and athletes alike love, it’s deferring blame that would usually get chalked up to “poor performance” or “stopped taking steroids” to ridiculous superstitions. If a team goes years and years without winning a championship, it’s not due to errors in management — it’s a goddamn curse. Well, when the long-suffering Chicago Cubs mightily defecated their sleeping apparatus a few weeks ago, in a year when it seemed like they were primed for a World Series appearance, it had to have been someone’s fault, right?
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| Burroughs’s cursed tattoo. (Photo source: STLtoday / Jimmy Burroughs) |
Absolutely right, and that person is Jimmy Burroughs, a 26-year-old Indiana resident who, while on vacation in Tennessee, visited a tattoo parlor to get a Cubs tattoo (gotta support the team). But the tattoo artist, some joker named Deke Rivers at American Rebel in Gatlinburg, scribbled “Go Cards,” a reference to the Cubs’ divisional rival St. Louis Cardinals. Except when he covered it up, the ink over top faded, and the “Go Cards” became totally visible. And then this tattoo singlehandedly beat the Cubs in their series against the L.A. Dodgers.
“I lightly scratched it in there,” said Rivers, who has been tattooing for six years. “I wouldn’t have messed with him. I take my job seriously.”
Rivers refunded Burroughs’ $190, but Burroughs decided not to fix his flesh-and-blood endorsement of the Cards.
“This was the weird thing — after I got the tattoo, the Cardinals actually started losing and the Cubs took off,” Burroughs said.
Like the rest of Cubbie nation, Burroughs and his family believe secret forces in the universe control the club’s fate. Could the goat of 1945, the black cat of 1969 and Steve Bartman of 2003 be shape-shifters sent here to test fan loyalty?
“We are very superstitious,” said Burroughs’ sister, Amanda Burroughs, a Cubs fan living in O’Fallon, Ill. “We’re the kind of family where you have to sit in the exact same spot you did last time the Cubs won. So when I heard about the tattoo, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh.’ But then the Cardinals weren’t doing so well, so my family was fine with it. Well, we all know how that turned out.”
Yes we do: hilariously.
… but you know what? It’s worth it. Boosh! Enjoy game one of the World Series, ModBloggers, and we’ll see you in the morning.
(Tattoo by Nick Hansen at Ink Machine in Lincoln, Nebraska.)
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