The beauty of Sitemeter is that I can see which search terms have been used to find this site. It's no surprise that they have generally included Jiri Tlusty's name and some spin on naked pictures. Unfortunately for those seeking a little flash of skin, I won't be posting these and the original low-rent Perez Hilton wannabe's site received a nice letter from MLSE's stable of lawyers advising him that the Hand of God would swoop down and crush him for having the audacity to not only publish the photos but to also make editorial comments on Jiri's orientation. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
It's always cute when the mainstream media thinks that they've uncovered some bombshell. Mirtle has a nice recap of the feeding frenzy that erupted in Toronto over the past couple of days. Greg Wyshynski ties all the varying reactions to the situation back to the Leafs' decision to ban cellphone cameras and other recording devices out of the fear of just such an incident. And people say that the Leafs' brass has no foresight! All that ink was spilled over a story that Deadspin broke a scant seven days ago. I, along with anyone else that loves sports and humour, read Deadspin daily so this entire story came as no surprise. My reaction was akin Kim and Godd's:
If you'll permit us to cover our ass for a moment, we were well aware of the Jiri NSFW story last week; we decided it wasn't really sports journalism so we left it. Furthermore, we feel bad enough about generating links and buzz for the usual mitten-stringers, let alone some low-rent Canadian version of Perez Hilton. This is yet another reason why Kim and I will never make it journalism, cause J Jonah Toronnasun looked at the same story and saw FRONT PAGE BABY!
Bitter Leaf and former Battle of Ontario contributor Chris Selley both write excellent send ups of the chief of the Chicken Littles, Damien Cox, as they lampoon his ridiculous, shrill, and inane column. Both are well worth the read and I can only wait in anticipation for Cox Bloc to deliver on their promise:
Times like these make it tempting to go off half-Coxed, and spew whatever nauseous bile first comes to mind, but the situation demands consideration. Rational thought. Reasoned analysis. Time to construct great dick jokes - because merely good dick jokes would be a disservice to you, the reader.
Update: They lied! No dick jokes only some serious recriminations about the sad state of the Toronto media which is just as good.
That's why the moralizing, the salve needed by the journos to justify using humiliation and hate to move units, stinks so foully. Reading Cox (which Mr Jorn will fully eviscerate tonight - it's just that bad), one call smell the hypocrisy. Leafs journalists who have jumped on Jiri, ask yourself - is this what you wanted to do with your life? Is this what being a sportswriter was supposed to be like? For the final irony here is that it isn't Jiri who has really been exposed - it's you. And you should be ashamed of yourselves.
The truth of the matter is that a bunch of old guys are so completely out of touch with reality that they don't know that what Tlusty did is commonplace among the younger generation. Go to College Humor and you can find tonnes of pictures of topless girls that have allowed boys to write on their chests any number of hilarious sayings. Go through their links and you'll find pictures of girls making out at parties to get attention or of the things that can happen to those poor saps that pass out at a party when a friend, a sharpie, and cell phone camera are present. Hell, go to the real Perez Hilton site and you can see snapshots of the latest celebrity nipple slip or wardrobe malfunction/ommission. As Bitter Leaf points out, it's not even like Tlusty is the first athlete to get caught on camera doing something stupid. There is a whole website dedicated to chronicling drunk athletes and their antics. It's hard to get away with anything now with technology so prevalent. Wade Belak, though, has seen the light:
Guess I won't be taking the garbage out naked anymore.
Obviously, Tlusty feels bad about the situation but the truth is that the real villains in this story are the girl with the loose grip on morals that released the private pictures and his Sault Ste. Marie Greyhound teammates. How they failed to introduce him to the Junior Hockey Bible is beyond me. It would have quickly summarised the world of junior hockey for the lad from Slaný, Czech Republic. Becoming familiar with the lingua franca of the hockey dressing room he would have be less likely to become the meathead on the squad. He didn't have to throw on the jets to pick up this Facebook chick. It was a rookie move to try to placate a puck bunny. You were headed to the show Jiri! In North America they send you naked pictures. At the very least it would have saved him from getting burned by this swamp donkey. He'll get carved by the boys in the room for a while but that's just part of becoming a team. After all, what else would you expect from a compatriot of these two wild and crazy guys: