fl Page 27 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Yes, Referees Are Biased Towards Brazil
Today, Brazil will face off against Germany in the World Cup semi-finals, and they'll do it without their superstar Neymar, who was taken down in Brazil's game against Colombia. FIFA has decided that they won't punish Juan Camilo Zúñiga, whose knee-to-the-back tackle fractured Neymar's vertebrae. Bu...
How The Rivalry That Was Supposed To Usher In Cycling's New Era Didn't
On Tuesday, May 29, 2012, Andy Schleck won the 2010 Tour De France. He finished 39 agonizing seconds behind Alberto Contador on the road, but the Spaniard's suspension for taking clenbuterol meant that Schleck inherited the yellow jersey. Winning a proxy war against Contador was a cruel way to bag...
Paramore's "Ain't It Fun" Is The Summer Jam Twitter Desperately Needs
It's a pleasantly sweaty June night at the bucolic, Live Nation-owned Xfinity Center in Mansfield, Mass., and Hayley Williams looks like she's ready for a fight. The lead singer of Paramore is sporting the kind of high-waisted shorts, knee braces, and white high-tops you might associate with a sparr...
God Save Dairy Queen: Scenes From The Fast-Food Franchise Wars
Manhattan's first Dairy Queen opened last month, its arrival heralded by months of agonizingly sincere public debate. Critics bemoaned the suburbanization of their precious city and exhorted responsible New Yorkers to patronize their nearest Mister Softee truck instead, rather than feed the soul...
How The UFC's Biggest Show Of The Year Turned Into A Fiasco
If you follow mixed martial arts long enough, even at a casual level, and if you are capable of feeling shame or outrage, the sport will eventually embarrass you. For those of us who follow the sport intently, especially those of us who deeply love it, this is a regular, sometimes daily, occurrenc...
Big Mac Vs. Whopper: The Ultimate Burger Smackdown
It's been a rocky week for the USA. We were let down by our Supreme Court and our soccer team, and we head into a potentially hurricanous Independence Day licking our wounds and pondering our mistakes and just kidding, we fucking RULE, and that's partly due to geographic good fortune and relatively ...
One Fight In Bangkok: The Holy-Shit Elation Of <em>Ong-Bak</em>
There are stuntmen in Thailand willing to do ridiculous things without wires, motion-capture suits, or green screens helping them out. In Born to Fight, that meant fighting atop moving trucks. In Ong-Bak 2, that meant running on the backs of moving elephants. And in 2003's original Ong-Bak, that m...
Nasty Dread: Beware The Ersatz Island Schmaltz Of Magic!
It's the rare band that makes Smash Mouth seem edgy by comparison. It's the rare band that makes Sublime seem arty, that makes 311 seem novel, that makes Jack Johnson seem… tolerable. But here we are, and here we go: Magic. Oops, make that Magic!—the exclamation point being one of many red flags ind...
I Raked Grout For Ten Hours. You Won't Believe What Happened Next!
Jolie Kerr is a cleaning expert and advice columnist. She'll be here every other week helping to answer your filthiest questions. Are you dirty? Check the Squalor Archive for assistance. Are you still dirty? Email her....
Send Us Your Best Road-Trip Stories
Hey, young people: What are your plans for the summer? Flying down to the beach with your buddies? Planning on taking your girlfriend to Napa for a week? Gonna stay around the house, throw a few bitchin' parties, maybe get arrested here and there? Working hard and saving toward your future? ...
Melissa McCarthy's Self-Made Waterloo: <em>Tammy</em>, Reviewed
1. So what happened here, exactly? Tammy is a passion project for Melissa McCarthy—she co-wrote the film with her husband, Ben Falcone, who also directed and has a small role as a fast-food manager—and she spent nearly a decade trying to make it. So why is it so, so terrible? This is the movie McCa...
The Freewheelin' Riff Raff: Embracing The Cagey, Loopy Joys Of <em>Neon Icon</em>
My favorite Bob Dylan interview is the infamously painful sit-down with Time magazine in D.A. Pennebaker's 1967 documentary Dont Look Back, wherein Dylan gets miffed at a prying line of questioning and slams the writer, the publication, and the publication's readership alike for subscribing to a wor...
The Grierson & Leitch Top 12 Movies Of The First Half Of 2014
As of today, we are halfway through 2014. Most of your "prestige" movies aren't out yet—only a third of our top 10s last year were from the first half of 2013 —but that doesn't mean this year's first six months didn't have its delights. Surprisingly, many of the standouts were bigger-budgeted studio...
Saying Goodbye To Roger Ebert: <em>Life Itself</em>, Reviewed
When Roger Ebert died on April 4, 2013, it felt like a death in the family, not only because I'm a film critic, but because he and Gene Siskel are a huge part of the reason why. The different incarnations of their Siskel & Ebert show were instrumental in my upbringing, driving home the idea that ...
<em>Under The Dome</em> Has A Villain Problem
Stephen King's mammoth 2009 novel Under the Dome features two killer antagonists. One is, well, the dome itself; the other is "Big Jim" Rennie, a bully of a local politician who seizes the dome's sudden appearance as a chance to affirm his fiefdom. Too bad only the inanimate bad guy made the transit...
American IPAs, Ranked
The British invented India pale ale in the 18th century, but despite having been born in one foreign country and named for another, IPA has evolved into a distinctly American art form. Excellent IPAs are now made all over the world, but America's unrivaled dedication to hops and bombast have effecti...
Runway Food Run Amok: Crowning Aspen's "King Of Porc"
After about 90 minutes at Grand Cochon in Aspen, Colorado, it all starts going to your head. Whether it's a function of being crowded into a century-old ballroom with hundreds of others at an altitude of 8,000 feet, the cumulative effect of spending three days treating wine as one of the four main f...
HBO's Majestically Bleak <em>The Leftovers</em> Finds God Everywhere, and Nowhere
Organized religion doesn't show up much in prestige television. Which is surprising, given the genre's tendency toward Big Existential Questions, and given how thoroughly Christianity is baked into how America thinks about itself, and given the ways the Christian Right and Mormonism and Scientology ...
<em>Nurse Jackie</em> Is Peaking With A Downward Spiral
"We need to talk about Jackie," All Saints Hospital nurse Zoey (played by Emmy winner and excellent speech-giver Merritt Wever) warns her boss as the penultimate episode of Nurse Jackie's sixth season winds down. That's an understatement. The show's titular caregiver and reckless drug addict (Oxycon...
Walter Matthau, '70s Action Hero: The Lurid Charms Of <em>Charley Varrick</em>
For much of his adult life, Walter Matthau looked like a weathered chew-toy version of Ronald Reagan, not like anyone's idea of an action hero. But for a three-movie run of early-'70s crime thrillers, he made a case for himself as one of the all-time great movie tough guys, a calm and sardonic every...