I couldn’t find a way to crowbar any of these into their own posts, so here’s some stuff that, alone, is relatively useless, but, when cobbled together, makes for a solid post on the unofficial last work Monday of the summer.

Finally, someone has the balls to come forward and talk about the lunacy surrounding concussions and sports:

Wall Street Journal sports editor Sam Walker privately accused The New York Times of backing what he described as an “absurd” effort to introduce greater safety regulations into football.

In an email to another Journal editor, in which he offered notes for a forthcoming column called “In Defense of Football,” Walker described the Times as the “quarterback” for a team of “grant-grubbing academics and worry warts” pushing a “nanny state narrative.”

“Another thing [the writer] might mention is this absurd concussion lobby, which consists of these researchers in Boston and other assorted grant-grubbing academics and worry warts who are all trying hard to push this nanny state narrative,” Walker wrote in the email, obtained by POLITICO. “The quarterback of that team is, of course, the NYT — but we wouldn’t want to mention them in the piece.”

“[T]here isn’t is any evidence that shows that kids who play up through HS then stop, as 95% of all players do, are any more likely to have lasting health/brain issues. No evidence.”

There’s no doubt that certain leagues – the NFL – are doing their best to faux-fix the problem, and that it needs to be addressed, but hipster nutjobs and bloggers essentially want to turn hockey and football into sports barely resembling their former selves, when the majority of concussion issues only occur at the highest levels of competition– the professional level, where players are paid millions to take that risk.

Meanwhile, Richard Deisch of SI.com summarizes the controversy surrounding ESPN’s decision to pull out of a PBS documentary on concussions:

“It was a table for four: Roger Goodell, commissioner of the N.F.L.; Steve Bornstein, president of the NFL Network; John Skipper, ESPN’s president; and John Wildhack, ESPN’s executive vice president for production. The meeting was combative…with league officials conveying their irritation with the direction of the documentary, which is expected to describe a narrative that has been captured in various news reports over the past decade: the league turning a blind eye to evidence that players were sustaining brain trauma on the field that could lead to profound, long-term cognitive disability.”

The Times story was immediately denied by the NFL. In an email sent to reporters including SI.com, the NFL said, “It is not true that we pressured ESPN to pull out of the film. The lunch was requested several weeks ago by ESPN. We meet with our business partners on a regular basis and this was not unusual.”

ESPN also issued another statement, denying the NFL had exerted influence. “The decision to remove our branding was not a result of concerns about our separate business relationship with the NFL,” ESPN said. “As we have in the past, we will continue to cover the concussion story aggressively through our own reporting.”

35 historically classy names for the penis and the vagina, such as placket-laceprivy-counsel and Cyprian fountain for the vagina, and silent fluteDon Cypriano and, oddly, what I call mine, Master John Goodfellow, for the penis.

22 things Miley Cyrus looked like at the VMAs.

Off-screen gameplay videos of FIFA 14 for Xbox One. Is it just me… or does it look like exactly the same game with a bit more going around the pitch?