Each year prior to the Super Bowl, the mayors of the two cities whose teams are involved in the game make an always-lame bet on the game. This year’s bet between New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard is particularly lame (More on this later.) Thankfully, the owner of the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Indianapolis Museum of Art have stepped up to the plate to make things really interesting.

After much trash-talking over Twitter which led to their upping the stakes over and over, IMA’s Maxwell Anderson and NOMA’s E. John Bullard finally settled on a bet in which both are laying down one of their collection’s prized treasures: IMA is betting a J.M.W. Turner painting, “The Fifth Plague of Egypt,” while NOMA is betting Claude Lorrain’s “Ideal View of Tivoli.” Both are considered masterpieces.

After the wager was agreed upon, Bullard got in one last bit of Saints smack:

Thanks for accepting the wager of a Claude from New Orleans for a Turner from Indianapolis. But this is definitely the Saints year. They are the Dream Team and in New Orleans we know that dreams come true. Geaux Saints!!!”

As for the mayor’s bet, the mayor of Indianapolis is wagering the “famous” shrimp cocktail from a local restaurant, which he says is good because the cocktail sauce is “spicy.” Really dude? You’re offering to send shrimp, which were probably caught in the Gulf of Mexico off of Louisiana’s coast, along with your “spicy” sauce, to the mayor of New Orleans if the Colts lose? YOU’VE GOT TO BE FUCKING KIDDING ME! Don’t you people in Indiana have a green bean casserole or a tater tot salad or something, ANYTHING, that is a true representation of the local cuisine?

As you may know, Lil Wayne hails from the projects of New Orleans. As you may also know, the New Orleans Saints are playing the Minnesota Vikings this weekend with the winner advancing to the Super Bowl. With that said, Weezy has announced that he’ll be pulling for the Vikings on Sunday because he’s a Brett Favre fan. You know what, fuck Lil Wayne! |MTV|

Just when you thought things couldn’t possibly get any worse, just as the “Jungers effect” seemed to be taking hold, the New York Times reported last night that the Canadian doctor who treated Tiger Woods’ knee injury last year is under investigation by the FBI and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for the sale and smuggling of illegal drugs, including human growth hormone and other known performance enhancers.

The doctor, a sports medicine specialist named Anthony Galea, began treating Woods after his agents began to shit their pants when “traditional” treatments for his knee injury failed to produce results.

Dr. Galea said Mr. Woods was referred to him by the golfer’s agents at Cleveland-based International Management Group, who were alarmed at the slow pace of Mr. Woods’s rehabilitation after knee surgery in June 2008. The doctor said he flew to Orlando, Fla., at least four times to give Mr. Woods the platelet therapy at his home in Windemere, Fla., in February and March of this year. When asked for comment about Mr. Woods’s involvement with Dr. Galea, Mark Steinberg, of I.M.G., responded in an e-mail message: “I would really ask that you guys don’t write this? If Tiger is NOT implicated, and won’t be, let’s please give the kid a break.”

Despite the fact that the Times didn’t “give the kid a break,” Tiger isn’t the only elite athlete who uses the doctor’s services:

(Dr. Galea’s) practice has become a regular destination for injured professional athletes, including N.F.L. players who take red-eye flights on Monday nights for treatment on Tuesdays, their day off, because of the platelet-rich plasma methodology that he began using eight years ago. News of his arrest shocked many in the sports world, especially those who refer to him as “Miracle Man.”

“We’re all surprised by this — we believe it’s going to go away and it’s a misunderstanding,” said David Cynamon, co-owner of the Argonauts. “He might be one of the elite sports medicine doctors anywhere, and that’s why the likes of Tiger locate him.”

The use of platelet therapy, which has become more prevalent in sports medicine in recent years, is believed by some doctors to dramatically speed up recovery times. Platelet-rich plasma is created by putting a small amount of the patient’s blood in a centrifuge, which separates the red blood cells from the platelets that release proteins and other particles involved in the body’s healing process. No more than a teaspoon of the substance is injected into the damaged area. In some cases, the high concentration of platelets — from 3 to 10 times that of normal blood — catalyzes the growth of new soft-tissue or bone cells.

Okay, in defense of Tiger and any other athlete who uses drugs or complicated treatments to recover from injuries, what’s the difference between that and a surgeon who has LASIK surgery on his eyes so he can continue to do his job, or a high-powered executive who has to take adderall or prozac to make it through the day before popping a viagra so he can fuck his wife? Just saying. So can we give the guy a break on something like this if he’s merely trying to repair an injury so that he can continue to do pursue his career?

Further, the New York Post is reporting this morning that Tiger is “on the edge,” basically coming apart at the seams as his life unravels in front of the world, and really, who could blame him.

Unless you went to bed early last night, you probably know that the New York Yankees won their 27th, freaking 27th, world championship last night. In the midst all of the hoopla, it’s easy to forget that Kate Hudson, the greatest slump-buster of all-time, deserves a lot of credit for the team’s success by sexing renowned choke-artist Alex Rodriguez into an icy calm post-season assassin. So when the team’s victory-parading through the Canyon of Heroes tomorrow, let’s not forget about the heroic canyon between K-Hud’s legs, okay? Perhaps Bloomberg can re-name the West Side Highway after her ladybits or something.

Back in the 1990s, former Chicago Cubs first baseman Mark Grace coined the term “slump-buster” to describe a ritual in which he and other ball players mired in hitting slumps would go out and sleep with the most dowdy baseball groupies they could find, thinking that by giving something back to the universe in the form of throwing these women a bone, the universe would in turn help them come out of their hitting slumps. Now, considering that the Yankees were sucking so dreadfully bad early in the season, only to turn it around right around the time that Alex Rodriguez starting dating Kate Hudson, and considering that A-Rod has in the past been one of the biggest post-season choke artists in baseball history, only to turn that legendary streak of failure around this post-season with K-Hud in the stands cheering him on, is it safe to go ahead and label Kate Hudson as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, slump-busters of all-time?

Now, obviously, it’s still a wee bit premature to judge seeing that the ALCS and the World Series have yet to be played, but based solely on the body of work she’s put together so far, she’s definitely a front runner. Any casual observer of the sport can easily see that A-Rod seems to be a new man out there on the field this year. His anus seems considerably looser than it’s been in the past. He seems more footloose and fancy free, like a kid out there just having a good time, which is exactly what a good slump-busting by an artfully skilled slump-buster is supposed to do.

Now, I know that some would make the argument that Kate Hudson isn’t exactly the first person who comes to mind when one thinks of the word “dowdy.” Some would point to the fact that she’s a big glamorous movie star person, a movie star person with a penchant for starring in cinematic abortions, but a movie star person nonetheless. To all of this I say BALDERDASH! Kate Hudson is a marginally cute dunderhead, which makes her most definitely a slump-buster, OKAY!!!

Further, when you really stop and think about it, the story of K-Hud and A-Rod has all the makings of a crappy Kate Hudson rom-com, doesn’t it? A rom-com titled, naturally, The Slumpbuster…the story of a slumping athlete whose life, soul and career are resurrected by an equally slumping actress. This shit is just writing itself.

Then again, maybe Cynthia Rodriguez, A-Rod’s ex-wife, is just the biggest succubus in all the land and him shedding her is the reason for his recent turn of fortune? Personally, I prefer the “Kate Hudson is the world’s greatest slumpbuster” storyline, but maybe that’s just me.

And oh yeah…GEAUX YANKEES!

Well, that’s all fine and dandy, but he’s now been essentially told to go fuck himself. Rush Limbaugh’s dream of owning strapping black men is dead. |ESPN|

If you follow pro football, you know that the New Orleans Saints defeated the New York Jets yesterday in the Superdome, 24-10. As a Saints fan (I’ve got a freakin’ Fleur-De-Lis tattooed on my arm for Christ’s sake!), I derived great satisfaction from the win. You know who else did? Former Saints quarterback/radio host/world class coonass Bobby Hebert, that’s who. Just check out this video of his reaction in the press box when the Saints recovered a Mark Sanchez fumble in the end zone to go up 17-3 in the second quarter. It’s friggin’ amazing!

Buffalo-area vandals defiled the front lawn of Buffalo Bills cornerback Leodis McKelvin by painting a giant white dong and “25-24,” the final score score of a Bills loss to the Patriots on Monday night, a loss many Bills fan blame on a late fumble by McKelvin. No word on whether or not the dong in question was an erect or flaccid one. |Buffalo News|