Creepy and Odd

First with the creepy. Check out this nasty story from ESPN about a high school football player whose head was being eaten from the inside out by a nasty beetle.

[High school fullback Jake Asp] woke up because he felt something strange and painful in his right ear. When the pain became unbearable, family members took him to a nearby clinic. They speculated that something had happened to him in the game the night before.

"Someone said I could have popped my ear drum," Asp said. "...But when I got to the [clinic], they took a look in there and saw it, and I was like, 'What the heck? How did I get a bug in my ear?'"

Asp could hear it, and it nearly drove him nuts. "It was digging and biting into my eardrum," he said. "That went on for, like, 15 minutes. I could hear it -- a whole bunch of loud popping noises. It hurt pretty bad."

Um, yeah. So, nightmares away. Thanks to my fave sports blog, Deadspin, for that one.

And this is just really bizarre to me. Big Ben was bleeped in local Pittsburgh newspapers for saying "brainfarts" - they replaced farts with "(cramps)" because the word "farts" is apparently just too offensive for the general public. What the hell? Okay, I thought it was pretty wacky when my young sister-in-laws (they're now 13 and 14 years old) weren't allowed to say "fart" and were only allowed to say "toot" in reference to the act of passing gas, but that was just a family quirk, but for a newspaper to censor it? Jeez, don't they have better things to censor? As if I didn't have enough issues with the media right now, now they've taken it too far. Let the man say FART! Thanks to Dave's Football blog and Deadspin for covering this odd censoring.