No surprise, there’s a considerably large array of Wheaties boxes available for purchase on eBay. No surprise, most of them feature the athletes some of us remember from our youth or kids’ youth – to be featured on a Wheaties box has been quite the accolade in popular sports for some time. Each listing has a colorful, hopefully price-point-justifiable, story to tell. For example, an unopened encased box signed by Celtics Red Auerbach, Larry Bird, John Havlicek, Bob Cousy, Jojo White and KC Jones. Over 30 NBA titles combined, asking price $999. Question is: is there cereal in there?

For the more skeptical collectors amongst us, here’s something more guaranteed whole-grain free. And at the price of just four dollars a box…



For $10 K, you’ll receive a set of Wheaties boxes that includes 325 1993 Dallas Cowboys Super Bowl XXVIII championship editions, 125 Michael Jordan’s Comeback boxes, and 105 of those Auerbach, Bird, Hondo, etc. boxes, just to name 555 of the 2,750.

According to the listing, all the boxes are from the General Mills plant in Buffalo, NY, where the seller, ernest_orlando, went to college. Ernest says he bought them off plant employees, who were each given three boxes each time a new box was issued. So unlike what could potentially be molding inside other commemorative Wheaties memorabilia, these factory-flat boxes he guarantees have never come in contact with any sort of dietary fiber.

Tweet This Post

Shaq’s weekend in Boston: He crashed a wedding. He sat on a bench. He almost took some kid to the arm bar. He picked on Big Baby. He wore the same American flag fist tee the whole time. He went Big Aristotle all over the Harvard University bookstore.



I was too frightened by how small that paper soft drink cup looked in his hand to understand that last part. I’m sure it was enlightening.

(via SLAM)

Tweet This Post

Roughly 10 days ago, vitaminwater launched a marketing campaign that cast Gary Busey (rarely a bad decision) in a video as Norman Tugwater, Fantasy Sports Lawyer. Shaq and Adrian Peterson were along for the ride, and the results were just kind of funny if you ask me. Nevertheless, like most people who’ve seen Point Break at least 25 times, I decided to stick with the Norman Tugwater experiment – by that I mean follow him on Facebook and Twitter. The results: Tugwater, pretty hilarious. Here’s some of his finest work to date:

To the writer(s) behind Busey’s latest maniacal exploits, I commend you. In fact, I’d enjoy knowing who was behind this, and picking their brain; Who are you? Do you credit Not Gary Busey on Twitter as a source of inspiration? Have you seen Point Break 25 times? Do you feel that Busey’s character, FBI agent Angelo Pappas, carries the first act of Point Break, like I do?

Tweet This Post

Is your mom on Twitter? If not, I’d say at this point there’s a 25% chance at this point she never will be. However, if she is, there’s at least a 25% percent chance she’s following Chad Ochocinco. I just took a quick gander at Chad’s recently added Twitter followers, and it’s a litany of could be middle aged moms. Thanks, Viacom.

I was interested in hearing about some new athletes out there worth following who, despite showing promise on Twitter, remain obscure, non-mainstream, questionably professional or – best yet – all of the above. I asked a group of my sports blogging constituents to contribute to a quick poll: Who’s the most fringe athlete that you follow? The list is good to the point that it inspired me to go the extra mile and create Fringe Athletes on Twitter Lists*.

First, mine: Gerald McCoy, the Tampa Bay Bucs’ first round draft pick.



I first became engrossed with Gerald on Twitter when he was pointing out his fellow draftees’ “wrist game” on Draft Night. Since then, here’s what Gerald’s been up (according to @GK_McCoy):

1.) He got a Droid
2.) He threw out the first pitch at a USA woman’s softball game vs. Japan
3.) He’s been enjoying the Twilight saga

Thurman Thomas (Isaac, Guyism)

He has over 21,000 Tweets right now, and I’m confident every single one of them occurred after his career ended in 2000. Thurman may be a Hall of Famer, but when it comes to Twitter, he remains largely misunderstood – the man has a Top-5 Stupid List (http://huggingharoldreynolds.blogspot.com/2010/05/thurman-thomas-dares-me-blocks-me-moves.html) and only 7,300 Followers.

The Iron Sheik (Eric, Camel Clutch Blog)

Is your mom on Twitter? There’s an 11% chance she follows the Iron Sheik.

These first two probably weren’t fringe enough for purists, it’s about to get super fringe on this list.

Leonard Weaver (Matt Lo Cascio, Jay Cutler Superstar)

If you didn’t know who Leonard Weaver is professionally (an NFL fullback), you wouldn’t learn from his Twitter bio. He’s currently using that forum to promote the Leonard Weaver Family Foundation (respectable) and ask people to help him name his new dog (sort of ridiculous). He’s currently calling that dog New Baby.

Mix Haxholm (Jared, The Atlantic Wire)

She’s a professional archer. A former Miss Thailand. And was recently named Cosmo’s Fun Fearless Woman. Less than a month into her Twitter tenure, but possessing a tremendous upside as she works towards the 2012 Olympics.

Todd Stottlemyre (Scott Lewis, TheScore.com)




When he submitted this, Lewis called ex-MLB pitcher Stottlemyre “the worst follow going” on account of the fact that he just tweets about stocks all day. I just scanned the feed, most recent conversations were around a recent life-changing Financial webinar that Stottlemyre was involved in.

Don’t worry, I didn’t add him to the Fringe Athletes Twitter list.

Speaking of great submission copy for athletes who probably don’t belong on this here…

Jose Canseco (Sooze, Babes Love Baseball)

“@JoseCanseco isn’t obscure at all, but he’s by far the biggest douchebag/delusional moron I follow on Twitter.” – Sooze





Andre Caldwell (Chris Richardson, Intentional Foul)



How annoyed is Viacom that this tweet only came from the Cincinnati Bengals third string Twitter wide-out?



Marcus Jordan (Ethan Jaynes, NESW Sports)




Michael Jordan’s son who averages 8.0 pp. for the University of Central Florida men’s basketball team – an all-around fringe human being, if you ask me. Worth following,  although he probably peaked during Game 7 of the Finals this season.

Robbie McEwen (Phil, Gunaxin)

This guy is an Australian cyclist, and even if you care very little about him you’ll want to hear what he has to say. Decorum is not his strong suit.



Here’s one linked to a video where he does a lot of effin’. Here’s another one linked to a photo Robbie referred to as “the best picture of the day” from Tour de France, Stage 10.

Dee Gordon (Paul Raymond, My Sports Rumors)

He’s the son of Tom “Flash” Gordon, and according to Raymond, one of the best hitting prospects in the Dodgers organization. Must be something. He’s got one of those fabled verified account with just 603 followers.

Last, but not the least fringe, not by a long shot: Jason Richards (Bob, Detroit For Lyfe)



It’s with a heavy heart that Bob, Davidson alum, submits Jason Richards, but I believe he decided to do it because he knew that Richards was almost too perfect for this list. here’s what he had to say:

“He’s a friend and also the point guard of the Stephen Curry-led Davidson squad that lost in the 2008 Elite Eight to Kansas. He’s the one Curry inexplicably passed to for the final shot that missed just left and crushed our itty bitty school’s hopes of reaching the Final Four.

Jason went on to play for the Miami Heat summer team and fall team after being undrafted. He tore his ACL in a fall practice,but got paid a handsome minimum contract because he was injured on their clock. After rehabbing and living luxuriously off that min. contract, he bounced around between Europe and D-League teams before re-tearing his ACL. All that in the past 2 1/2 years. He is now an assistant coach/film guy for Pitt’s basketball team.”

*Note: As soon as Twitter is not over capacity I’ll finish up that Twitter list.

Tweet This Post

Pleased to post that with the help of people far more capable than myself, Steady Burn was able to thwart a malicious attack by some Malware scoundrel.

Wanted to take this opportunity to post that the whole site is back up to snuff, and also thank a few folks for helping out of this bind:

Thanks Isaac from Guyism, Ethan from NESW Sports and the whole crew of sports bloggers who worked their contacts to get me some help.

Thanks to Brooklyn Vegan for the tips on Google Webmaster Tools, which should help me keep the Page Rank intact.

Thanks to Bryan, Steady Burn’s designer and my go-to web guru, for making some very necessary updates to my WordPress template that made it more secure.

Lastly, special commendation to Michael VanDeMar who fixed what had become a site-wide infection in one half hour flat. I’d definitely recommend him to any blogger facing a similar issue.

In the interest of taking the bad with the good, wanted to add that Steady Burn’s Tumblr now has 18 followers as a result of most of the intermittent posting taking place over there for the last few weeks.

If anyone has a blog that needs a similar treatment, feel free to email me. The word going around is that there’s Malware attacks going on that target WordPress blogs hosted on GoDaddy – which is like 150% of the blogs on the internet.

I should be back to regular posts almost immediately. MH

Tweet This Post

Somewhere along the way, I’d forgotten that The Ref had a verified Twitter account, that is until he called Stephen Slater a ‘bag nazi’ and a ‘super slider earlier today. I apologize for not paying attention, Denis, because you’re first rate on Twitter; in the past week he hit the nail on the head re Whoopi Goldberg, Eat Pray Love and Snooki.

Yesterday, Leary put it to Alex Rodriguez nicely, using his own brand of scientific analysis to compare A-Rod to the past stars in a series of tweets dubbed ‘If the Old Stars Had Steroids’:

If you’re interested in that old school ‘No Cure For Cancer’ brand of Leary, follow him on Twitter. Also, Rescue Me is starting to pick up this season too if you ask me.

Tweet This Post

Tweet This Post

Roughly a week ago myself and my officemate @moneyries heard what I believed was the song Half Light II (No Celebration) off the Arcade Fire’s new album The Suburbs. And we loved it. I was bounces around the office going “move to the city, come back home, move to another city” and no one knew what I was so jovial about, and I didn’t really care. To hear it, go to VC guy’s Fred Wilson’s radio station FredWilson.fm and check out track 11.

Earlier this week, NPR launched a stream of AF’s new album The Suburbs, much to my chagrin that tune was not part of the album’s stream, but a different version was. To sample that version, allow me to present the Arcade Fire performing it live two nights ago at Madison Square Garden.

It’s highly evident that this is the real Half Light II (No Celebration). The remarkable thing to me is that each version could be the best song on The Suburbs.

Well, we’ve tried everything we could think of to figure out what exactly that other song is. We shazam’d. We Googled “Move to the city, come back home, move to another city.” We tweeted, clearly. To no avail.

Any suggestions? Anyone in the know? This is new territory to me – liking a song and not knowing what’s it called. Hell, it might not even be Arcade Fire after all, though it sounds like them. It’s kind of driving me nuts.

(Photo: Spin)

Tweet This Post

Found via MoneyRies on Tumblr…

Highly serviceable NFL tight end Brent Celek recently hosted a contest for people to design his Twitter background, and someone with highly serviceable MS paint skills won.

I put in an inquiry to @BrentCelek to see who the winner is. Let’s see if I get a response.

Celek is also giving away spots in his Fantasy Football league this year. According to NFLTouchdown.com, 11 of his Facebook fans will get to play Fantasy with Celek this year.

On Saturday, Celek started a contest on his Facebook page where he will pick 11 fans to participate in a fantasy football league with him–but there’s a catch. Instead of picking fans at random, the former Cincinnati Bearcat decided to make it more interesting by having his fans perform tasks to earn a spot in the league.

So far, two contestants–Charles Alexander and Derek Diep–are the first two winners to join Celek in his fantasy league. While Alexander earned a spot by being the first fan to respond to one of Brent’s wall posts, Diep clinched the second spot by being the first to send in a picture of himself wearing Celek’s jersey in front of a stop sign.

Wonder how the NFL’s resident tight end social media expert Chris Cooley feels about Celek trying to take a shot at the title?

Tweet This Post

Pictured above: the sports book at the Monte Carlo Casino in Las Vegas. At some point in the 30-odd hours I’ll be sauntering in there to lay some money down on either Juan “Baby Bull” Diaz (35-3, 17KO) or Juan “Dinamita” Marquez (50-5-1, 37KO). Which Juan should I pick? (Went for it…)

I recently enjoyed the privilege of informing the group of guys who I’m traveling to Vegas with this weekend for a bachelor party (my first time in Vegas in fact) that we’ll be out there for the fight of the year. Depending on how everyone does at craps table, perhaps some of my comrades will join me in laying down some winnings on the fight. I’m definitely betting on this fight, and I’m leaning towards Diaz at the moment – just because I want to root for him.

Boxing trainer and fight writer, Gordon Marino, breaks down Diaz-Marquez II over a Huffington Post. Check out a clip below of the their first meeting back in Feb ’09, ruled in Marquez’s favor in the ninth round.

NOTE: I previously posted that I was looking for a good boxing book, and was advised by the good men at No Mas to read The Harder They Fall by Budd Schulberg. Just finished it. I Highly recommend it.

Tweet This Post