The Great "River Monsters" Wolf Fish Switcheroo

One of the few shows I watch nowadays on TV is River Monsters (that's not an I'm-too-cool-for-TV statement; I just spend too much time listlessly surfing the Internet to watch a lot of TV), but the season 3 finale focusing on the Wolf Fish sort of tested the limits of credulity. Observe:

At the end of the episode, Jeremy hooks the fish and pulls it into the boat. The following screen cap is at 41:41:

Note the size of the fish - small enough for him to lift into to boat with one hand. Then, the scene transitions into a shot of him hoisting the fish up to his chest, culminating in the following screen cap at 41:49:

Look, I'm not a fish expert or anything, but I do have three semesters of coursework in "which thing is bigger than the other," and it looks like the fish in the second shot is like fucking five times bigger than the first one.

I know it's tough to film these kinds of shows, but seriously. Come on guys.

Unmarried and Pregnant, the Christian Way

Look! The virgin will conceive a child! She will give birth to a son and will call him ... uh, probably Aiden or Mason or something.

ABC News brings us a report of Texas teacher Cathy Samford, who has been fired from Heritage Christian Academy for getting pregnant out of wedlock and purportedly violating the moral conduct clause of her employment contract. Then, instead of just shutting her mouth and filing a lawsuit, she hit the airwaves to claim that she had planned to be married, she's not a whore, etc. etc. Setting aside the question of whether the clause trumps the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, if she had just kept quiet I daresay she would have been fine. To wit:

1) It's 2012 and you can get pregnant without having sex, and thus presumably with no moral taint. While the Catholics object to in-vitro fertilization, I don't believe Protestants have an official policy. The Bible, as it frequently does for everything we actually care about, remains silent on the issue. So have you necessarily sinned by having a bun in your oven? Ostensibly not.

2) Their entire fucking religion revolves around a woman who got pregnant out of wedlock! If anything, you're MORE of a Christian role model by being unmarried and pregnant. Provided, of course, that you keep your damn mouth shut and subtly suggest that it was the Holy Spirit's doing, possibly giving new meaning to "the coming of the Lord."  

Fuck Gamestop

And fuck Nintendo for giving XB exclusively to Gamestop.

Huzzah Jamie Moyer!

More than a year ago, I wrote this post lamenting the retirements of all the athletes who were active the moment I began following sports. Of the last remaining baseball players I had identified, only two remain; Omar Vizquel, who is expected to play a utility role for the Jays, and Jamie Moyer, of all people, whom ESPN reports has won a rotation spot with the Rockies at the age of 49. Let's pause for a second to reflect on how unusual this is; of all the players who were active in 1992, who would have guessed that one of the two remaining in 2012 would be a then-30-year-old?

So now Moyer joins a team that's younger than he is, though that's not hard to do at this point. He is actually older than nine franchises other than the Rockies: the Brewers, Rays, Jays, Royals, Mariners, Marlins, Nationals, Diamondbacks, and Padres. In one year he can add the Mets and Astros to that list; if he manages to hang around for two more years, he'll add the Angels and Rangers on top of them.

Generally spotty playing time complicates prognostication, but given a few more seasons, Moyer has a chance at 300 wins. That's more a function of longevity rather than sustained excellence, though - it will be interesting to see what the HoF voters do if he does finish at 300. Not to be outdone, Vizquel himself stands reasonably close (159 short) to the other traditional HoF threshold of 3,000 hits, so we may not even need to wait until Johnny Damon retires to test the "statistical threshold" theory of HoF voting.