Hero:

Many of my smart, reasonable friends thoroughly enjoy soccer as I’m certain many of you do, and I’m not looking to start an argument I’ve had about a billion times before. I just don’t care for the sport, for several of the reasons Colbert details in the video above.

Straight up, I find it boring. It doesn’t maintain my interest. And I’ve seen plenty of it at this point, though I was probably biased going in.

The arguments Starr cites are typical of soccer’s defenders. The thing is, I have no doubt that soccer players are world-class athletes and I very much respect the fact that they can run 7 miles per game. Bully for them; I couldn’t do that.

But I couldn’t run a marathon either and that doesn’t mean I’m going to watch one. Plus, the second part of his argument — that soccer players are not “freaks of nature” as I assume he thinks basketball and football players are — not only vaguely contradicts his first (since he expected us to be impressed by the midfielders’ amazing athleticism) but doesn’t make a damn difference to me.

I would actually much prefer to see freaks of nature battling it out in competition. Adds to the spectacle, which is a big part of why I watch. In fact, soccer might be a lot more interesting if both teams had to carry an NFL linebacker on the field somewhere. Oh, and he’s allowed to dispense bonecrushing hits.

On the plus side, I enjoy crazed celebrations and hooliganship in general.

Bull riding has long been mythologized for its danger. A rider climbs onto a lurching 2,000-pound bull, grasps the end of a rope that is wrapped around the animal’s midsection and must stay aboard for eight seconds to score points.

“It’s like a violent game of chess,” said Ty Murray, a nine-time world champion rodeo cowboy.

– Dan Frosch, New York Times.

Hmm… a dude clinging to stay atop a bucking, 2,000-pound beast for eight seconds? Yeah, that does sort of sound like a chess match.

Oh wait a minute, no. That’s nothing like chess. In fact, rodeo might be as unlike chess as any sport there is. Who is the opponent, in this analogy? The angry bull? Death? Sorry, cowboy, I’m just not sure there’s anyone working to calmly outthink you as you’re tossed around by that tortured monster.

The Times story is otherwise tragic and very well-penned, and I don’t aim to make light of Bryan Guthrie’s awful fate, but it makes for a reasonable excuse to weigh in on bull riding. I went to the Professional Bull Riders tour when it came to the Madison Square Garden last summer, mostly so I could say, “this ain’t my first rodeo” the next time I end up at a rodeo.

But now that I’ve seen one, I’m not sure I’ll ever make it out to a second rodeo. I appreciate that it’s certainly terrifying to ride a bull but since they actually stop the clock once you reach eight seconds and judge you on style, it’s not really very exciting at all. Just a succession of dudes riding bulls. Sometimes they hang on for eight seconds and sometimes they don’t. You end up tempted to root for horrifying mishaps, as I imagine you would at a NASCAR event.

And at no point during the event did I ever consider that it was anything like a chess match, or even a violent chess match. A violent chess match would probably be a lot more entertaining.

Actually, I think a good idea for a sport would be to pit two chess masters against each other in the middle of a rodeo ring. Then, at some undisclosed point in their match, release an angry bull and see what happens. Now you’ve got to think on your feet, bro.

Yeah, you could take his queen with your rook right now and put yourself in pretty good position to lock up checkmate in a few moves, but there’s a pretty solid chance you’ll be gored by then, and the whole chessboard bucked into the mud. So how do you play that? You tell me, buddy; you’re the so-called “master.”

You might know Brian Boitano as a figure skater, and as the dude so revered by the South Park crew in their song, “What Would Brian Boitano Do?”

But what you might not know is that Brian Boitano is, in truth, every bit as heroic as that song made him out to be.

Check it out. Boitano’s got a newish cooking show out called — no joke — What Would Brian Boitano Make?, and in a recent episode, he treated a women’s roller derby team to a meal entirely composed of bacon-driven dishes.

Obviously Brian Boitano and I are of like mind.

In the video linked above, Boitano visits the creator of the Bacone, a concoction so amazing I can’t even think of how to cleverly describe it. It’s a cone made of bacon filled with eggs and a biscuit. The bacon is the utensil you use to eat the treat, but it’s also, of course, delicious bacon.

Perhaps even more amazingly, the Bacone was not the only dish Boitano made in that episode that featured bacon as a food delivery method.

How this man managed — or manages — to stay in decent shape eating foods like this is beyond me, but I think now I’m beginning to recognize the greatest purpose for the Winter Olympics: The Winter Olympics have brought Brian Boitano into the public eye so he could expose to the world the many awesome ways to make better use of bacon.

Lyrics NSFW:

I’ve voiced my distaste for the Olympic Games on numerous occasions, but due to my old job editing the now-defunct WCSN.com, I know more than I’d care to about the Games and have plenty of opinions about them that I’ll probably end up sharing here.

Before I continue, a little background: WCSN.com’s big calling card was its abundance of live streaming video. The site broadcast sporting events from around the globe, which required a whole lot of mechanics to pull off, and so always necessitated someone to just sit there monitoring the video stream to make sure nothing went wrong.

Many times, that guy was me. I got paid to watch silly sporting events from all sorts of strange places at all sorts of bizarre hours. Sometimes I’d have to write recaps, at least a few of which are still archived at UniversalSports.com. Often, they ooze with sarcasm.

One of my favorite sports to monitor in those days was ski jumping, but I won’t lie: The event’s appeal — especially during the overnight shift — is identical to what I understand is a big draw of NASCAR. You watch to see if they crash.

Sorry if that sounds inhuman. It probably is. But no one ever got irreparably injured in the events I was watching and, you know, they signed up to be ski jumpers, so it clearly comes with the territory.

What I didn’t realize in all the time I spent watching ski jumping was that apparently the entire sport has something of an eating-disorder problem. Who knew? The Times has a great, lengthy feature today detailing the dilemma, including proposed solutions to the issue.

I’m fully in support of much fatter ski jumpers, because, like I said, the most entertaining part of ski jumping is when they fall. (Again, I’m sorry I’m such a jerk.) And as I stated yesterday, fat people falling is hilarious.

But the most important rule change that needs to be made to ski jumping — and if I haven’t offended the ski-jumping community already, this probably will — is this: Ski jumpers should not be judged on style. As it is, five judges rate each ski jumper on a scale of 1-20, and the outcome weighs heavily in the event’s final standing.

I cannot express how dumb it is that ski jumpers are judged on style. It’s inexplicably dumb. The object of ski jumping should be to ski jump as far as you damn can. Who cares how cleanly you land, or how you hold your skis while you’re in the air, or your balance?

It should be about distance, baby. Length. I don’t care if you look like a total clown getting there and crash at the finish, I want to see how far a human being can propel himself on skis. That’s ski jumping. It’s not called “ski aerial balancing.”

Put up a big, cushy pad at the finish, enforce a 200-pound weight minimum, then sit back and watch these fat bastards fly. I guarantee it’d be the most-watched sport in the history of the Winter Olympics.

Excuse me if you’ve heard some of this shtick before: I am no fan of the Olympic Games.

I’m sorry, but they’re boring. Call me when you’re baseball, Olympics.

Anyway, I wrote a humor piece for the Perpetual Post about the subject, refuted ably by Akie Bermiss. Check it out.

I saw an item in the Daily News’ Gatecrasher this morning about Gossip Girl star Sebastian Stan participating in Bode Miller’s “Tennis Fusion” event on the Upper East Side on Tuesday.

The what now?

A Google search for “tennis fusion” almost entirely returns references to this very same event — specifically Sebastian Stan’s involvement —  and nowhere can I find any details that elucidate what, exactly, “tennis fusion” might be?

What did you fuse tennis with, Bode Miller? Competitive downhill skiing? Drinking? Watch promotion?

I, for one, hope it was something violent. There are many things I like about tennis — most notably that it features no clock so it, like baseball, “ain’t over ’til it’s over” — but one thing it’s always lacked is full nelsons. Maybe tennis fusion means that doubles partners are on opposite sides of the net, and the person on the same side of the net as you is actually your opponent, and he’s encouraged to resort to bodily harm to hamper your chances of returning a serve.

The other big news here? One of the stars of Gossip Girl is named “Sebastian Stan.”

That can’t be his real name, can it? Did someone really cast a show starring — listen to these names — Leighton Meester, Blake Lively, Penn Badgely, Chace Crawford, Taylor Momsen, and, of course, Sebastian Stan?

Apparently, at least according to the show’s IMDB page. I’ve never seen the show, though Matt Cerrone raves about it. Regardless, if the characters in the show had that set of names, I’d dismiss it as unrealistic.