The Newsroom

WARNING: I may be the last person on Earth to see this video. But, wow, is it ever good.

Starbucks To Begin Sinister 'Phase Two' Of Operation SEATTLE-Starbucks officials announced Monday that they are through with the coffee-distribution portion of their long-range plan.

The keen-eyed among you will have noticed that I now have a "shared items" applet along the right-hand side of the page. I have several dozen blog feeds in my Google Reader (an amazing application), and from time to time, I'll be marking items there that I think my readership (all 4 of you) might be interested in reading as well. Or not. The items can be clicked one at a time, or you can click the "read more" link to read all the items in my list. Currently, there's some MMA news, a good article on the death of Christian rock pioneer Larry Norman, and and older link to the day I got cut from the Edmonton Sun .

There's talk today that EliteXC, probably the closest thing the UFC has to a rival in North America as far as MMA promotions go, is going to get a TV deal with CBS . If this happens, this is huge for the sport of mixed martial arts. It's obviously great for EliteXC, which would go from being the distant second-place promotion in the U.S., to being a legitimate threat to the UFC overight. It will be good for fighters, too, as a rising EliteXC is going to be trying to lure talent from UFC, and bidding wars are going to erupt for top talent. It could even be good news for Dana White, the combative UFC president who has been acting more and more like Vince McMahon recently than ever before (and that's not a compliment). Dana has tried to get on HBO ... and failed. He tried to get on CBS ... and apparently failed. Sure, Spike TV probably saved UFC from bankruptcy, but UFC needs to take the next step in growth, and Dana's reported insistence on maintaining total control over ...

For something completely different ... I'm going to try to live-blog Monday Night Raw tonight. All the fun begins in 15 minutes, when the Score starts the show... 7:05 - The Score is showing highlights of the WWE press conference today with Floyd Mayweather, and one of the first things they show is a dude wearing a UFC hat. Well done. Big Show looks very dapper in a suit. 7:18 - William Regal wants a photo-op with Cena, Orton and Triple-Haich (sic) for "prosperity." 7:23 - Cena stands nose-to-nose with Hunter ... which means, of course, that Cena is in the ring and Hunter is half-way up the ramp. 7:25 - Opening segment ends with Orton laying out Cena and Hunter. I suspect next week will see Cena lay out Orton and HHH, and then the week after, HHH will triumph over Orton and Cena. Oh, wait, he did that last week. 7:28 - The Score's sports cutaway just compared the Leafs vs. Senators game to Hulk Hogan vs. Iron Mike Sharpe. 7:32 - Santino and Carlito vs. WWE tag champi...

wbcwee Originally uploaded by mjenkinson Sports Illustrated gets its acronyms mixed up. But, seriously, you'd never see SI.com get "NFL" wrong in a headline.

As I mentioned below , I downloaded and installed the Firefox 3 Beta 3 last week, and found it to be quite spiffy, even if had broken most of my extensions. I had been using it for a few days and not thinking to much about it when I realized that all my extensions were back. And some of the Beta 3 changes were gone. Apparently, Firefox had downloaded the latest patch for Firefox 2.0 and in the process, it "updated" itself from version 3B3 to version 2.0012. So, now, when I start FF, I get the updated 2.0012 ... except for the odd time it actually starts up version 3B3. In short, I seem to be using some kind of mutant version 2.0012-Beta3 combo browser. I would download the beta version again, but I much prefer having my extensions back to using the faster Version 3, so at this point, I'm going to wait for the release version of 3 and stick with my mutant hybrid browser.