Jonathan Lee Riches strikes again

Avid readers, or people who are awake, might remember Jonathan Lee Riches from such lawsuits as "Michael Vick stole my animals and sold them on eBay for terrorism funds".

Well, he has a new target: none other than the new home run king (Sadaharu Oh?) and our good friend, Barold Lamarcus Bonds.



Riches now claims that among other things, Bonds sent hitmen to his residence after he threatened to reveal his steroid usage in 2004, gave mustard gas to Saddam Hussein, and selling steroids to nuns. He seeks 42,000,000.00 million dollars in Swiss Francs (I'm pretty sure that is a defunct currency and who requests a dollar amount in Swiss francs?) for these damages.

I'm guessing that Riches was annoyed at the time it took for Fox News to break his Vick case, so he went for another one. In any case, I know what story I'm going to be submitting to Digg in three weeks...

[Hat-tip to Nerds on Sports for this one. Being a nerd writing on sports myself, I feel like that site has a nice little pull on me. And they were the first blogroll that Pure Point ever made *tear*]

[edit] DC Scrap ran this story on Epic Carnival with the same title as mine and the same closing joke. I realize that both were obvious choices and it's most likely purely coincidental since I doubt DC Scrap reads my blog, so I'm not saying he plagiarized me. I just don't want people thinking that I plagiarized him, so note that my post came 3 hours before his.

Digging for sports

I noted yesterday that one of the most dugg stories on Digg was a Fox News Report covering the Jonathan Lee Riches lawsuit of Michael Vick.

I'm not going to go into the low level of journalism exhibited in the article. 100% Injury Rate does that well enough.

This is going to be about the general ineptitude of the Digg community when it comes to sports.

I recognize that the Digg community and perusers of sports blogs are probably very disparate groups. I also might be biased because I usually take issue with a lot of things said on Digg. However, this story was barely news three weeks ago when every sports blogger alive (including me) posted about it.

The title of the Digg story is "Michael Vick outed as Al Qaeda operative, sued for 63 zillion dollars," which means that he (I can only assume) missed the inherent humor in someone being sued for 63,000,000,000.00 billion dollars. Nevertheless, the diggers ate the story up, propelling it to its current mark of 2354 diggs.

I would have dugg this story had it been submitted on the July 27 even with that gaff, but is it even news now?

This wouldn't be too bad if it didn't happen so often though.

Three weeks ago, there was a story listing the "Top 50 Basketball Players of All-Time", which garnered almost 500 diggs despite listing Lebron and D-Wade at 29 and 30 respectively and Dirk at 26 while greats like Robert Parish, Kevin McHale, James Worthy, and Bill Walton went unranked.

When Bonds broke the record, TIME had a slideshow of Barry through the years, which was dugg 844 times. Almost 12 hours and 40 comments passed by before anyone pointed out (I was the first to) the bogus stat that TIME calls "Runs per at bat." His rookie year, Barold apparently scored 25.8 runs per at-bat, a record for sure as I don't know anyone else who has scored more than 1. I clarified that they probably meant "At bats per home run," which isn't an honest mistake by any means and I can't believe that slipped by the editors, and I was dugg down at first.

I realize that a good number of legitimate sports bloggers frequent Digg. I assume that Hank Worrell of WTB does by the "Digg This!" button on some of his posts. I assume that WCK at 100% Injury Rate is as well, since sometimes (not often) his posts mirror stories that are in the most dugg section for the day. Let me say that I have nothing but the utmost respect for these two as they represent what I am striving to become. However, it pains me that the majority of the Digg public is that clueless about things.

Alright, I'm done ranting for the night. I feel like this is the type of post that doesn't lend itself to comments, but maybe if you feel like you'd like to share similar experiences, by all means do so.

As a little sidenote, Google Analytics tells me that someone actually came to my site after googling "barold lamarcus bonds." I don't know why or how this happened. Maybe it actually is his real name. Or maybe they particularly enjoyed those two posts of mine. I'm hoping for the latter.