the urge to zurza

For NASCAR's most yawn-inducing stat of the season's first half, look no further than Victory Lane. Just seven winners in eighteen races made the top seem like an exclusive country club, the boring type filled with rich snobs that stopped adding new members around the turn of the century. As title favorites Jimmie Johnson and Denny Hamlin led the way, scoring five victories apiece, the list included no first-time winners, filled instead with "been there, done that" owners like Joe Gibbs, Rick Hendrick, and Roger Penske shutting out the unsuspecting peasants below.

It started after game one, firstly as a joke: Germany had beaten Australia 4-0 in a superb performance, while the Netherlands played just well enough to grind out a 2-0 win over Denmark. Germany is playing like the Netherlands and the Netherlands like Germany, people said. Ha, ha. Then, as the tournament went on, it was no longer a joke. It was true. Germany hit four past England and Argentina, while Holland scrambled past Japan and Slovakia and beat Brazil with two goals from set-pieces.

While the world anxiously awaits Ilya Kovalchuk's fateful "decision", let's dip into the mailbag and address some of your questions and concerns.

   It was only a matter of time until Lindsay Lohan took to her Twitter and started spewing shit so crazy only Britney Spears can read it without suffering an aneurysm. Here she is making up a bullshit excuse for her “Fuck U” fingernail before going on to cite U.N. policies on torture to decry her Read More ...

Blogging, depending on your approach, is a lot like investing in prime assets. Some niches appreciate faster than others and all require a dedicated overseer who is constantly tweaking and improving the portfolio and instruments to guarantee the best results. The blogosphere is your marketplace and the strategies that you implement and maintain will greatly affect the long term success of your blog.

However, before investing your precious time and effort into growing a blog you need to have a solid plan to execute and define clear goals for yourself. Here are some excellent tips to help you get started on the right track to achieve your blogging dreams.

Building & Executing The Right Strategy

Developing the right plan for your blog is much like creating a business plan for a company. You need to take into consideration profit and loss, sales and marketing ideas and projections; and short and long-term goals. You don’t need to have a business degree to get your plan together, all you need to do is clearly document what you want to achieve and the resources and other prerequisites so that you are ready to take on your blogging journey in a focused and prepared way.

Practice The Right Techniques

The right techniques are much simpler than most expect. These days, there is no such thing as overnight success in blogging. If in one day you experience a spike in traffic of up to even 200% of your regular volume, you will need to be able to maintain it; and maintaining such an increase will require stable blogging fundamentals that have a solid foundation built overtime. Solid practices such as:

• Consistent posting
• Connecting with others through commenting and social networks
• Building trust & authority by providing great value
• Maintain a professional or respectable online reputation
• Respect others in your niche
• Aim to set trends rather than copy others

These represent the true “magic formula” if there is any. Stop looking for the get rich quick/get traffic quick schemes, these have no foundation and the audience gained through these methods are unpredictable and you have no authority in their minds. Aim for value, then trust and authority; then you can expect sales, advertising deals and other unthinkable opportunities.

Aim High, Very High!

Like the old cliche, “shoot for the moon but even if you miss you will be among the stars;” your level of success in blogging is greatly determined by how far you are willing to go with your ideas. Don’t be afraid to ask the most successful blogger you can think of for help. You never know, that blogger might take you under his or her’s wings and help you to grow quickly by providing unique opportunities for you. Always remember that the blogger who chooses to go a step further, blogs with passion and without doubt, achieves the greatest success and reward.

Breakdown Your Plan Into Smaller Steps

Its very common, especially for new bloggers, to experience information overload. This can be a crippling and discouraging dilemma and the overload is oftentimes experienced when the realization hits that successful blogging is not a walk in the park. It takes lots of writing and innovation, and for the uninspired, quitting seems to be the only option. To overcome this, breakdown your tasks and goals into simpler ones that can be achieved daily or weekly. With this method you’re feeding your soul with consistent success which will be fuel to help keep you going on your journey and give you a clearer and more focused mind.

Never Give Up!

Giving up is about the easiest and at the same time deadliest thing you could ever do with any task or goal. Giving up destroys your confidence, drains your soul and shows the world that you’re just not good enough. Spare yourself the trauma and keep fighting. When you hit that dead end reassess or change your strategies and keep on going. Most importantly, be practical about your blogging goals and never measure your success against another person’’s. It is guaranteed that your success will be more or less and different from the successful bloggers you admire. At the end of the day, your success depends on whether you gave up or not.

Conclusion

You definitely have what it takes to become a successful blogger, you simply need to find the niche that suits you, believe that you can achieve and execute a well thought out plan. The internet lifestyle awaits!

 Alright, folks, after way more entries than I anticipated, it’s time to close the door on submissions for The Superficial Banner Girl contest. In the meantime, enjoy Gianna from New York (above) while I sift through an assload of shots and hash out how the hell this voting process is going to work. I’m thinking Read More ...

The Dutch have won every World Cup game so far, but their progress to the semifinal has been accompanied by very somber tones in the international media. Many pieces have read like full-blown obituaries: "Total Football," the famous free-flowing, attacking philosophy of the Oranjes, is dead, they say, replaced by an ugly, win-at-all-costs mentality epitomized by serial agitator and all-around bad guy Mark van Bommel. The class of 2010 compares unfavorably with that of 2008, many say, too, because coach Bert van Marwijk has curbed the offensive instincts of the Marco van Basten-led side that destroyed France and Italy with the best football of the competition in the European championship.

FIFA's slightly odd decision not to impose the usual yellow-card amnesty after the group stage or second round was always going to create difficulties for somebody, and it is fortunate for the spectacle of the semifinal and the prospects of a competitive game that both Netherlands and Uruguay have been hit by suspensions, losing two key players each, and the tactical makeup of the game will depend largely on who is brought in to replace the absentees. Both also have defensive injury worries.

Until the quarterfinal, everything Uruguay has done has been about control. It held off France to draw 0-0; it calmed the passions of South Africa and the crowd in Pretoria to take control of Group A with a 3-0 win on National Youth Day; it stifled Mexico to win the third group game 1-0. In the second round, there was a spell when South Korea seemed to take charge, but as soon as it had equalized, Uruguay swept back to find a winner. Against Ghana, though, in the final minutes of extra time, there was no control; there was merely nerve-rending hanging-on, and if Asamoah Gyan had taken the penalty he went on to take in the shootout five minutes earlier, Uruguay would have been out and Ghana would have been Africa's first ever semifinalist. Instead after the game ended at 1-1 in extra time, Uruguay triumphed 4-2 on penalties.

  Here’s a topless pic of Katy Perry that just found it’s way into my inbox and I have no idea where it came from, how old it is, if it’s real, whatever. What I do know is those nipples are huge and this looks close enough to me. Of course we can’t be certain until Read More ...