RIP Elite XC

Report: Pro Elite and Elite XC ’shutting its doors effective immediately' which has to be part of the fallout from promoting Kimbo Slice as the second coming of Ninja Christ.

They would have fared better if they'd focused on Gina Carano and the other excellent female fighters they had in their stable. But instead they opted to promote and hype and talk up a YouTube star without the skills to back it up.

Not to say that they don't have other good male fighters but they seemed to have a special niche with female fighters. Shame Gina has such a hard time making weight though as that will hold her back.

Anyway, an MMA start up is going to bleed money for years before it starts to even see a profit margin on the horizon and right now isn't the right time for a long tail possibility given the economic climate.

I hope the UFC signs some of these now unaffiliated fighters because there are some solid martial artists in there.

The lesson here is don't hitch your company to a false martial arts superstar. Kimbo isn't anywhere near a top flight fighter, he's a freakshow from Teh Intarnets who fought unskilled rubes in backyard ass whoopings. If he had even moderate mma skills then UFC-cast-off Petruzelli wouldn't have been able to kick his ass so easily.

And don't even get my started on Goldenboy getting involved in mma, Goldenboy is a boxing promotion by Oscar de la Hoya and has about as much to do with mma as dodgeball has with football.

Today's WTF? Fail

I'm trying to give a trial run to Parallels for the Mac to see if it can resolve some problems at one of my schools (well, actually the problem occurs at all of them).

I registered my info and got ready to download the demo program when I was faced with this rather stupid roadblock error message. The astute observer will notice that there is no field to enter in a phone number therefore this error page is a complete FAIL.

Improving Themselves into Oblivion

I noticed that the annoying Yahoo Beta My Yahoo home page upgrade bar at the top of my old My Yahoo homepage has become more sinister. It is now a countdown clock to when my current and well liked page will be forced to upgrade to the new look and site.

Here's the thing, I've seen the My Yahoo future and, frankly, it sucks ass and I won't use it. I've already migrated my widgets and feeds to my iGoogle home page which isn't being forced to do anything except work for me.

Yahoo is also being courted again by the idiot bastards from Redmond that suck the life and fun out of pretty much everything they touch. Its time to put Yahoo on a liferaft with a token bottle of water and a handful of saltines and push 'er off.

Forcing me to upgrade to the new Yahoo home page is the last straw, this relationship has been strained for months now.

What don't I like about the "improved" home page? The layouts force me to have a big honking and annoying ad in a prime real estate spot well above the fold on the left column. The text is a lot harder to read, they changed fonts, sizes and other stuff to make the text more difficult to look at, read and understand. I'm sure I could eventually figure out how to get the font to look like the old homepage but that's a pain in the ass being arbitrarily just handed to me.

There's no reason to change over to a new page and, in doing so, Yahoo will lose a few more customers that it can ill afford to lose. I'm one of them. There will be two reasons for me to visit any Yahoo pages from here on out, I have an email address I tend to use for throwaway sites that require my email before allowing me entry. Two, I do play Yahoo fantasy sports. Sorry, there is a third reason, Yahoo's coverage of MMA (that's mixed martial arts) is better than any other site I know of. Good columnists, a good mix across the mma spectrum (or did you think the UFC was the only game in town? that'd be the excellent marketing job done by Dana White's boys).

Three things, Yahoo. That's all you've got left for me. And once I integrate Yahoo Mail into my Google homepage, that'll be one less thing.