Good morning! How'd you sleep? Fitfully, worried that the most powerful man in the world has doomed us all through his thoughtless petulance? Us too, Sport. Us too.
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers kicked off their five-week tenure as the subject of HBO's football docu-series Hard Knocks with a premiere party at the Tampa Theatre. I care nothing for football, and am only including this event in today's edition of Sh*t Happened out of professional obligation, and also as a tip of the hat to Times staff writer Greg Auman, who managed to work the pun "Home Bucs Office" into his story. I like that so much I'm thinking of starting a Greg Auman fan club. Maybe I'll call it The Auman Brothers…
Speaking of braindamageball, the University of South Florida has identified two locations on its campus where it might could build a $200 miillion, 50,000-seat braindamageball stadium. Since the university doesn't have the money to build it and recently signed a six-year contract to play its Bulls games at Raymond James, I imagine we can expect this inevitably controversial, insanely expensive and at the end of the day wholly unnecessary project to proceed, like, tomorrow, because campus envy.
Speaking of problematic sports arenas, Tropicana Field was ranked the worst baseball park in the MLB for food safety and handling violations by Sports Illustrated, based on state records obtained by the magazine. Hey, maybe that post-game hangover that had you calling in sick from work on Monday really was "food poisoning"!
And finally, a Tampa dash-cam video that appears to pretty clearly show a person dumping a dog out of their car and driving away went viral yesterday, ensuring that everyone in Tampa who's on Facebook, owns a gold Chevy Cavalier and DIDN'T abandon a dog will be hiding their car in the garage and taking the bus for a few days. You can't stop all the assholes from being assholes, but you can always help make the world a better place for animal victims like this one by donating, fostering, volunteering, adopting or just having a few beers and buying a few raffle tickets at one of the many fundraising events for local and regional animal nonprofits that are always happening around here.
This article appears in Aug 3-10, 2017.