Introducing Brittany from Hartford! Yup 3 straight from the Queen City. And not only that but I think she is Miss Hartford! Wow! I'm not going to lie to you. I wanted to get the Hartford hat trick so we could officially call this Hartford week at the Stool. Cue the music....

As hard as it may be don't let the Brass Bonanza distract you. We still need smokeshow nominations. Send them to randomthoughts@barstoolsports.com

 Click for more of Miss Hartford County

I would pay money to hear Al Troutwig's call of this landing. I'm sure it would have sounded something like this...

"A disaster of unparalleled consequences that will shake the very foundation of gynmastics"

SportingNews.com - The Bengals organization has officially welcomed Chris Henry back to the team after giving him the boot back in April. Clearly, they came to the realization that having a decent passing attack is more important than setting good examples. That’s fine, seeing as they are in the business of winning football games. And apparently, the fans in the Cincy area couldn’t be happier, as evidenced by this billboard purchased by someone on Interstate-75, a highway just outside of the city.

Hilarious! Let me just say that you need to be all sorts of pissed off to spend your own money on a street sign. I mean I've only thought of doing this once and that was obviously when the Sox traded Nomar.

PS - I hate when people say Nomar did roids. Can't a guy work around here without everybody accusing him of being on the juice? Seriously look into those eyes and tell me he cheated. Impossible!

(photo from SI.com)

Cue the duckboats!    It doesn’t get much better than this for Red Sox fans.    Not only did Julio Lugo re-injure himself running in the outfield last night/Jed Hoyer hit him in the kneecap with a crowbar, but our long national nightmare with Clay Buchholtz is over.     Thank fucking god!   Did you see his stats in today’s Globe?  The Red Sox are 70-42 without Buchholz and with them they are 3-12.   That’s impossible!  I haven’t seen anything that bad since my high school team went like 60-4 in 3 years and ESPN’s Todd McShay was 0-3 on the mound.     At some point you just got to cut the cord.    So despite last night’s loss I'm as optimistic as I’ve been in a long time about our chances.   You know the Devil Rays and their 1 game losing streak are shaking in their boots.    

PS – You know it’s bad when a major leaguer says he agrees with the decision to get demoted….

"But the last couple starts, it's hard to think they can give me any more opportunities than they have in this stretch, especially with only a month and a half left in the season and the pennant race as close as it is now. "You've got to send guys out there that . . . you believe they're going to go out there and give you a win or give you six, seven innings, and I haven't been doing that. So I hate to say it was the right decision, but I believe it was."

I thought Manzo was the only one with a finger painted Yankee hat and headphones necklace.

(Japan rubbing it it right in our grill mix)

BEIJING (AP) -- Losing for the first time since 2000, the U.S. softball team was denied its fourth straight gold medal, falling 3-1 to Japan on Thursday as the sport bowed out of the Olympics for at least eight years -- and maybe for good.

There are choke jobs and then there are choke jobs. When you lose your first game in 8 years in the Gold Medal game of the Olympics, that qualifies as one of the greatest choke jobs in the history of sports. I'm sure this will go down as Japan's version of the Miracle on Ice. Nice job ladies! Now get back in the kitchen where you belong instead of embarrassing our country! (I kid) Anyway, if I've said it once, I've said it a million times. You don't really know what it feels like to lose until the other team is throwing their coach up in the air like this. That's when you know you've hit rock bottom. Seriously do anything to me but this. I can take the pig piles, champagne, hugging etc. Just don't throw the coach up in the air right in my face.

Click here for the answer...

It's like I've always said, nothing makes a person speechless like a hot sideline reporter. Or Bob Neumeier. It's a goddamned shame Neumie's presence didn't shut Dale Arnold up like this.

TOKYO - A 61-year-old Japanese woman gave birth to her own grandchild, using an egg donated by her daughter, a clinic said Thursday... The clinic said it performed the procedure because the woman's daughter has no uterus, but didn't give details on why she had that condition. The surrogate mother used a fertilized egg donated by her daughter.

What the hell's gotten into grandmas? First they're holding perps at gunpoint, now they're cranking out their own grandkids? What ever happened to watching "Murder She Wrote," smelling like mothballs and calling you by your cousin's name? Anyway, if for the sake of argument the baby is a boy, here's a look at this particular family tree:

• The kid is both the son and grandson to Granny, here.
• The daughter is the boys mother and half sister.
• If the mother has a daughter (a neat trick without a uterus, but bear with me), the girl would be the boy's sister and his aunt (I think).
• The father is the mom's husband and the grandmother's babydaddy.
• Grandpa is the boys grandfather and step-father.
• There's a 90% chance that Travis Henry is involved somehow.

All of which sounds weird to you and me, and the people of Japan. But this family would be right at home in Maine.

In case you're wondering how anybody could be this talented at bumping and grinding the answer is below. Years and years and years of practice.

Thanks to Mike for the video....

Eonline - It’s a sad day for Wheaties. Kellogg’s beat out the “Breakfast of Champions” for the honor of featuring Michael Phelps on Corn Flakes and Frosted Flakes cereal boxes. Of course, nutritionists aren’t too happy about the switch either, since Tony the Tiger’s cereal has three times the amount of sugar as Wheaties and only a third of the fiber, neither of which help the fight against childhood obesity.

Sad day indeed. I wonder what the difference in bids were between Corn Flakes and Wheaties? I mean if I were Michael Phelps and I was rumored to be worth 100 million dollars, I would have sucked it up and gone with the Wheaties Box. Because I don't care how many Gold Medals you win, you're not a legendary Olympic champion until your face is on the Breakfast of Champions. And what's up with Corn Flakes getting in the mix in the first place? How many marketing wizards and hours of board meetings do you think it took them to come up with the idea? "Hey, let's just to steal Wheaties trademark!" Seriously can't Corn Flakes come up with their own shit. This is just lazy.

Aol.com - POINT MARION, Pa. (Aug. 19) -- An 85-year-old woman boldly went for her gun and busted a would-be burglar inside her home, then forced him to call police while she kept him in her sights, police said. "I just walked right on past him to the bedroom and got my gun," Leda Smith said.  Smith heard someone break into her home Sunday afternoon and grabbed the .22-caliber revolver she had been keeping by her bed since a neighbor's home was burglarized a few weeks ago. Leda Smith, 85, says it was "exciting" to stop a burglar inside her home, adding that she hopes she stopped a crime spree in her Pennsylvania neighborhood. "I said 'What are you doing in my house?' He just kept saying he didn't do it," Smith said. After the 17-year-old boy called 911, Smith kept holding the gun on him until state police arrived at her home in Springhill Township, about 45 miles south of Pittsburgh. "It was exciting," Smith said. "I just hope I broke up the (burglary) ring because they have been hitting a lot of places around here."

 I know everybody wants to talk about how great this grandmother is for standing up for herself, blah, blah, blah.  But honestly what was this robber thinking?  Why did he let her just waltz right past him and into the bedroom to get her .22 caliber in the first place?  Did he think she was going to bake him some cookies or something?    Listen, there is a reason why rule #1 of robbing a house is to subdue and tie up everybody inside.   You don’t want to give people (yes old people still count as people) the chance to get their weapons and assault you.   So as much as I’d love to give Grandma all the credit here, I think this is more a case of the robber losing this game than granny winning it.  Still making him call the police on himself was a nice touch.

From NFL.com: NFLPA executive director and Pro Football Hall of Famer Gene Upshaw has died. Upshaw, who was 63, had been fighting pancreatic cancer.

Holy crap. I try not to spend much time following the whole boardroom/ union vs. management/ collective bargaining side of sports, but Gene Upshaw was a figure hard to miss, and this comes as a shock. A week didn't go by without Upshaw in the news and I never saw a word about him being sick. He was a pretty remarkable guy, going from a guard with the Raiders to sitting the across the negotiating table eyeball-to-eyeball with the most business-savvy executives in all of sports. And he took mountains of crap for that very thing. The NFLPA got ridiculed mercilessly for picking an ex-player to run the show while the baseball players chose Marvin Miller, the guy who took on US Steel. So every time a veteran gets cut, fingers would be pointed at Upshaw for cutting lousy deals with the league, but in reality he swung a deal that got the players 64.5% of revenue, contracts with guaranteed money up front, and most important of all, kept the peace, avoided a repeat of the ridiculous 1987 strike fiasco, and kept the games going. Which is all any of us really give a damn about.

Who knows what this means going forward. The pundits all say labor storm clouds are on the horizon. There are unresolved issues like revenue sharing between the owners, stadium financing debt and a rookie salary cap, whick Upshaw once supported and recently opposed. So we're left to wonder who his replacement will be, and whether he'll be more of the same or if he'll be the Sonny to Upshaw's Vito and big changes are in order. The way things have been under Upshaw, you hope not.

More Sarah here...

Who do you want to Wake Up with? Ub@barstoolsports.com

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