Blogroll!

I've added a couple new links to my "Stuff I Like to Read" and I figured I'd go ahead and give my two faithful readers a rundown of what all of this nonsense is. Here we go!

AOL Fanhouse - This is pretty much where reading sports blogs began for me. Actually, I take that back. I started reading a blog by Dan Shanoff, who used to have a daily column called "The Daily Quickie" over at ESPN.com's Page 2. "The Daily Quickie" was a fun read because he just gave a quick line or two about every major sports story of the day. His blog gives him more freedom to expand on his thoughts, and I eventually became too irritated about some of his asinine opinions.

The good that came out of this is that he would link to a bunch of other blogs, including the AOL Fanhouse. The Fanhouse is a giant conglomerate of bloggers that cover just about every major sport. I don't even go to ESPN for sports news anymore, because these guys are on top of every major sport story and more.

Common Sense Has A Voice - This a leftist political blog written by my friend Josh "Swany" Swanson. He's a small town North Dakota guy like myself. He did work for the Ed Schultz talk radio show and is now in law school at Creighton. As you can imagine from a law student, he does pretty good research on the stuff he writes about and provides good insight. That doesn't stop him from posting the occassional fiery tirade every now and then.

Every Day Should Be Saturday - This blog is probably the most popular college football blog out there. This guy does more than just regurgitate the news. He adds a lot of different things to make his blog more about entertaining the readers. Notable, recurring posts include USC head coach Pete Carroll's Facebook page updates and Mustache Wednesdays.

EDSBS is also notorious for keeping track of what they call "The Fulmer Cup". This is a scored, offseason "competition" to see which football program can rack up the most points for players getting in trouble with the law. Currently, Missouri holds the lead.

Gopher Gold - This blog is run by the three reporters at the Star Tribune who cover Gopher sports. Unfortunately, Chip Scoggins and Myron Medcalf, the two guys who cover football and men's basketball, rarely post updates. When they do, it's usually just a preview of the article that is running in tomorrow's paper.

Roman Augustoviz, however, does an excellent job of covering men's hockey and often posts about wrestling, women's hockey, women's basketball, and other non-major sports at the U. If you want good, in-depth reporting on any of these sports, Roman is your guy. He updates constantly, too, with a new post almost every day.

Gopher Illustrated - This is the Rivals.com affiliate for Gopher sports. It mostly covers mostly recruiting and a lot of their articles and info require a subscription to access. I am one of those nerds who has a subscription. The guys running the site provide daily updates from recruits all across the country, and this isn't even their day job. It's a pretty interesting process to follow.

Idealism Never Goes Out of Fashion - One of the new links, this is a personal blog written by my friend Becca, who is currently studying in New Zealand. Her rants and muses vary in topic, ranging from party planning to the complexities of online shopping outside of the United States. Regardless of the topic, her posts are often quite detailed and written exactly how she speaks, which is sometimes hard to do well.

I'm o.k., I'm all write - This is another personal blog written by another personal friend, Elliot. Elliot and I were roommates one fateful semester at the U. We had some pretty good times, which included watching downloaded Simpsons episodes, drinking cheap vodka, and playing Star Wars: Dark Forces simultaneously on both the computer and Playstation. All good things must come to an end, and the gooder these things are, the quicker they end. That semester lead to me being put on probation due to poor grades and Elliot being suspended due to poor grades. These were dark times, my friends.

The sun came up the next day, though, and we're both doing fine. He's now happily married and back in school with on new focus on his passion of writing. His updates have been slower lately, but when he does post, he also has a good portion of devout readers for a personal blog. They usually have entertaining comments to keep checking during down times.

MinnPost - Another new link, this is an independent newspaper here in Minneapolis. The columnists seem to be pretty entertaining and insightful, but the thing I like most about this site is an article called "The Daily Glean". Similar to "The Daily Quickie" I mentioned earlier, this is a quick rundown of all the major local news stories of the day. It's almost like reading the transcript from a local news TV broadcast, except it contains links to the original stories so you can get more detail.

Paging Jim Shikenjanski - An oddly titled Gopher sports blog that mainly focuses on basketball (Jim Shikenjanski was a former Gopher basketball player; as to my knowledge, I don't believe Jim Shikenjanski is the author of this blog). This guy gives pretty solid analysis on basketball, but his posts on football are of the average talk radio blowhard variety. He's going to be ending his blog and starting up his own Gopher sports news site soon, so this should be pretty exciting.

Randball - Very entertaining sports blog and quite surprising for being affiliated with the Star-Tribune. Michael Rand just seems to spit out all of his thoughts straight through his fingers and onto the keyboard of his computer. This just seems the way that blogs should be written. Just un-edited thoughts spewed everywhere with no need to make anything look pretty.

Stuff White People Like - I never really understood "redneck humor" a la Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy. Sure, I grew up in a small rural town with people who may fit some of these jokes, but ultimately these comedians were simply making fun of white people who were poor and uneducated. It just came off as mean more than anything.

Along comes this humor blog to finally stick it to the upper-middle class white people. It's pretty damn amusing, and I find myself reading posts thinking either a) It's funny because it perfectly describes me, b) It's funny because it perfectly describes people I know, or c) It's funny because I was briefly offended and said, "Well, not all white people like that particular item," before realizing that that's what a stereotype is.

Sunday Morning Quarterback - While a lot of sports blogs just regurgitate news and try to add a funny quip or picture to compliment the story, this guy actually does some pretty hardcore statistical analysis. And it's pretty good, too. I've tried to run some of these stats to try and prove something else and then e-mail it to him, but he covers just about every base.

The Wizard of Odds - If you want every little tidbit of college football news from around the country, this is the place to go. This guy doesn't write a lot of original content, but he scours just about every major newspaper website for any article or column that's related to college football. I like to start my day off with this one.

TNABACG - The title of this blog used to be "The National Anthem Before a Cubs Game", but is now simply TNABACG with the appropriate tagline "Minnesota sports, poorly acronymed". The writer, Jon, used to be a columnist for the Minnesota Daily. His blog covers just about any Minnesota sports related news and is updated about three times a day.

I was once given a shout out on that blog because I shared an interesting article with him in the comments section. Unfortunately, I was to lazy to sign in with my blogger account and just gave the simple, mostly annonymous moniker, "Chris".

Curses! This could have drawn hundreds of new readers to my blog. Oh, well. I don't want to get too big too soon.

Twins Ballpark 2010 - The writer started this blog shortly after legislation was passed to fund the new Twins ballpark. He has posted on numerous subjects and relentlessly followed the process of getting this stadium designed and built. He showed up to public meetings and sent lots of feedback to Twins officials from himself and his readers. He came up with the idea of transplanting a flagpole from a local VFW in Richfield to the new stadium. What's the significance? That flagpole was originally the flagpole at the old Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington before that venue was demolished to make way for the Mall of America. He communicated his idea to the right people and they liked it.

There haven't been too many updates recently, because not a whole lot is happening except for the actual construction. But if you find this sort of stuff interesting, I recommend going back and reading his first post and continue on to learn about the entire process. It's good reading.

*****

If you have ever wondered what kind of nonsense my brain is absorbing on a daily basis, that was it. I hope you find it enlightening.