Gary Busey is the man...

For anyone who hasn't seen it already, check out this video of Gary Busey putting in a Joe Namath-esque performance in creeping the shit out of Jennifer Garner and Ryan Seacrest before the Oscars last night. I don't even want to get started on how ridiculous red carpet shows are: many other people have smugly critiqued or angrily attacked the celebrity-obsessed culture we live in with far more eloquent and funny words that I can ever hope to write here. But I will say I loved it when the overproduced crapfest that is the Oscar preshow got interrupted by some good old spontaneous weirdness.

As for the Oscars themselves, I thought they were pretty underwhelming overall: would it have killed them to throw Eddie Vedder up there with a guitar to perform a couple songs from the awesome soundtrack he wrote for Into the Wild? We really needed three terrible songs from Enchanted? I won't say it was an awful show, John Stewart had a few good lines (I thought the Yom Kippur/Atonement joke was funny at least), but overall I think underwhelming is the best way to describe the night, Gary Buscey aside.

And yeah, I know this is supposed to be a sports blog, and I've kind of been slacking on that lately, but I think that's largely because we're caught in the February doldrums right now. February really is the worst month on the sprots calendar: the NBA and NHL are months away from the playoffs, football is done, we're still a month from anyone really starting to pay attention to baseball, and the Big Dance is still a few weeks away. Its looking more and more like the presidential nomination will be wrapped up int he next couple weeks, so look for more sports stuff going forward, but for now I might keep throwing up Gary Busey videos until we start seeing something interesting in the sports world.

Important/Current event/serious link of the day: great piece about the war in Afghanistan in this week's NY Times Sunday Magazine. My buddy Rob forwarded me this article, it really is one of the better (and more depressing) pieces I've read about what it's like to be an American soldier fighting in the Middle East. We need to be reading more concrete examples like this and less rhetorical bullshit spewed out by pundits and politicians (on both sides of the aisle) thousands of miles away from the front lines. Wherever your views might fall on the political spectrum, I think its hard to argue with the fact that, in recent history, America's foreign policy has been shaped and influenced far too strongly by ideological dogma than by the actual situation on the ground.

Light-hearted link of the day: Manatees have to be the stupidest animals in the world. Kudos to my little bro for this one.