What's good for the goose

A certain wife who will remain nameless didn't appricate the article on Rafael Van der Vaart as much as my co-workers did. As an olive branch DevilDinosaur is proud to present AC Milan's latest dreamboat Yoann Gourcuff.

Currently Mr Gourcuff is playing for Bordeaux on loan from AC Milan. He has 2 goals in 13 appearances and is finally starting to get some playing time on the french national squad. I've watched a couple Bordeaux games this year and Gourcuff is the real deal. He's quick with the ball, makes good decisions and has that kind of a young decco vibe going on for him. With AC Milan's squad full of guys older than I am, it won't be long before he's starting for the rossonerri. Also I hear he writes poetry, loves walks on the beach, raises puppies in his spare time and is newly single.

Who works out in jeans and no shirt? Also where are his shoes? I hate this guy...

My Eyes! The goggles do nothing!

I'm sure I'll get ran out of town for saying this, but sweet sassy mollasy the new Seattle Sounders uniforms are ugly! They kind of remind me of something I saw bell biv devoe wear on the arsenio hall show 16 years ago.
Since the shirt sponser is X-Box I vote for a 3rd jersey that's the same color as the red ring of death.

Who ya gonna call?

Ray. If someone asks if you are a god, you say, "yes!"

Who wears the pants here?

This story is everywhere today, and a certain nameless operations manager has complained I don't blog about hot ladies enough.

Apparently Dutch soccer "superstar" Rafael Van der Vaart picked up an intentional booking last season so he would be suspended for a game and go to his wife's birthday party.

"Before the match had begun, Huub Stevens (Van der Vaart's former manager) said to his assistant: “Van der Vaart will deliberately pick up a fifth yellow card. His wife is celebrating her 30th birthday and he wants to be there.”
Stevens was right. Van der Vaart kicked the ball away after the referee had blown the whistle and duly earnt a yellow card.
Three days later the team played Hertha BSC in Berlin – without superstar Rafael – where they drew 0-0. And there was one happy WAG, Sylvie van der Vaart, who got to celebrate her birthday with her husband." - build.com

It's hard enough convincing most non-soccer fans that soccer players are serious athletes, you know 'cause most of them're european. This kinda nonsense isn't going to help. Can you imagine a guy like Ray Lewis or Walter Jones skipping a game to play tea party with his wife? Even A-rod doesn't skip batting practice to hang out with madonna, and he's about as wussy an athlete as we've got in the states.

...ok fine she's attractive. Still you're a professional athlete, lucky enough to get paid big time bucks to play a game most of us regular fans are willing to pay money to play. Show some respect to the fans, especially to the season ticket hol.. and to the spor..

...um, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, priorities! Soccer is just a game, but family is what's really important in life. Good for Rafael, I hope things work out for him and Real Madrid.

Comics are for kids!

Finally a collectible statue that will tell my fellow co-workers how much I love comics and whores! Thanks Marvel, how soon can I get you my 200 dollars?

I'm not sure what this one tells them...

Saaaaved by Zeeeero

Popular Mechanics has an absolutely brilliant article up on the 10 cars that damaged GMs reputation. I've posted a few of the highlights

"Legend has it that when Chevrolet Division Manager John DeLorean went to the GM Proving Grounds to get his first look at a prototype of the new 1971 Chevrolet Vega, the front of the car literally fell off onto the ground....the only innovative thing on the Vega was the all-aluminum block around which its 2.3-liter four-cylinder engine was constructed. Unfortunately, the art of building aluminum engine blocks was in its infancy back in 1971 and the unlined cylinder walls of Vega engines were scoring almost instantly. That led to lots of oil burned and early death for this engine. Throw in haphazard build quality and sheetmetal that you could practically hear rusting away, and the Vega truly rates as one of GM's great debacles. But the Vega was actually a sales success. Chevy sold nearly 268,000 during the 1971 model year, over 390,000 during 1972, almost 396,000 during 1973, and over 450,000 during 1974 (sales finally collapsed during the 1975 model year)... But ultimately that meant there were just that many more people disappointed by the Vega. By the mid-1980s, Vegas were being junked so aggressively that some salvage yards in Southern California had signs up saying they wouldn't accept any more."

I'm sure there was some VP at GM that thought all the mechanical problems the Vega was having would be great for sales. I mean the sooner your customers have to buy a new car the sooner you get to sell them a new one, right? What else are they going to do, throw their vote away? it's a two party system!
Sorry I channeled Kodos there for a second.

"From the late 1970s and into the early '80s, Oldsmobile sold the most popular car in America: the Cutlass. Olds was on a sales roll; it seemed nothing would be able to stop the division. Then came the Oldsmobile diesels, and stopping is exactly what they did best.... Soon after the 5.7-liter diesel V8 debuted in Oldsmobile full-size 88 and 98 models (during 1978), the engines started tearing themselves apart. That extreme fragility was despite the fact that the 5.7-liter diesel option cost between $800 and $1000 extra per car and only made a puny 120 hp and a stingy 220 lb-ft of peak torque at 1600 rpm. In short, these engines were awful. But the 4.3-liter version of the diesel V8 was even worse—rated at only 90 hp, it was somehow even more fragile.... And when the engines inevitably blew up, the cars they were in would either head to an early death in a junkyard or have a more reasonable powerplant swapped in."

A 5.7L diesel that gets 120hp and puts out 220lb-ft of torque! My nissan sentra has a 1.8L 126hp aluminum hamster on a wheel and it gets 30 miles to a gallon. Sure it's not as torquey as the super manly V8, but come on. This isn't just a car that helped kill GM, but diesel engine production in the US. Mention a diesel engine to anyone over 35 and this is the kind of car they think of. A smoke belching piece of crap that costs a ton to maintain and has no performance bonuses over it's regular gas powered brothers. To bad no one thinks of the 63mpg Ford Fiesta that's only available in europe.

"Even today, the two-seat GM EV1 remains one of the best-engineered, best-working pure electric vehicles ever released to the public. With clever engineering throughout its aluminum structure, an incredibly aerodynamic body and a whole bunch of lead-acid batteries, the first-generation EV1 was able to go maybe 75 miles if driven with extreme care. The second-generation EV1 with nickel-metal-hydride batteries upped that range to about 150 miles... GM built the EV1 to satisfy a mandate from the state of California that 2 percent of a manufacturer's fleet sold there be zero-emissions vehicles. However, the EV1 and electric vehicles built by other manufacturers finally convinced the California Air Resources Board that the zero-emissions mandates weren't achievable by then-current technology. This led to the cancellation of the mandate. So GM canceled the EV1, and when the leases on the 1117 it had produced ran out,GM took them back and crushed them...suddenly the world was full of conspiracy theories about why GM "killed" the electric car. If the Hummer H2 makes GM seem callous toward the environment, the way GM handled the EV1 makes the company seem downright hostile. It's been a public relations nightmare."

Here it is the granddaddy of all GM screw ups. At a time when people were starting to worry about global warming and the price of gas was about to go through the roof, GM decided to crush its entire fleet of electric cars. Now they could focus on more cost effective projects like rebadging its Suburban into belgian military grade knock off humvees. You really think GM has been helped out by the small army of crooked hat retards driving these things around the country? I'm pretty sure this is the reason the terrorist hate us.

what's up with this guy?

This is like a photographic interpretation of the old lewis black joke, "if it wasn't for my horse...". When did the 76ers hire a christmas rat to be their mascot. Really philadelphia, this is the best you could do for christmas?

That's not legal

Maybe I'll start a collection of creative soccer cheating videos. Here we have Hull favorite Dean Windass trying to interupt "internet icon" (or how about "you tube phenom"?) Rory Delap's throw in during last weekends matchup. Apparently he got away with this one, but was carded for a second attempt at distracting Delap.

I think I would wear a yellow card from the sideline as some kind of badge of honor. I mean most subs just sit in their big cushy chair doing nothing all game. Dean Windass is out there patroling the sidelines acting as some sort of rougue defender, above the law. He's like the steven segal of epl bench warmers.