There’s a screen grab from today’s STLToday.com/sports homepage on the right.

Do they think that’s how Pujols reacted to the rumored offer with only 7 years as opposed to his required 10? They think he reacted to it like that time Skip Schumaker ripped that nasty fart in the dugout and then tried to look all casual in the other direction to throw Pujols off the trail?

Maybe he did.

We’ll never know.

Saturday afternoon at Busch Stadium, a large group consisting of many gay and lesbian couples plans to attend the Cardinals game. Not sure why, the Cards are way out of it, but whatever, that’s their choice. Another choice of their’s is to put in a request to be featured on the “Kiss Cam”. Ok, cool. We don’t see the problem, or even why this is front page news on STLToday…we also have a full set of chromosomes, which might be why we aren’t “outraged” by this and taking to the always delightfully retarded comment section to scream about it.

A staple of sporting events for years, the “Kiss Cam” is pretty simple: Find couples in the crowd. Keep the camera on them until they give each other a little peck. It’s pointless, but gives people a chance to think about something else when the Pirates have crowded around the Cardinals and keep kicking them in the junk. How the hell could this mindless little thing be a problem for anyone? Well all the trouble started because of…wait for it…the Rams.

The request to feature same-sex couples on the Kiss Cam at Busch Stadium grew out of an incident that occurred Sunday at the Edward Jones Dome, where the Rams hosted the Arizona Cardinals. During the Kiss Cam feature, two men dressed in Arizona jerseys were among the couples shown. The crowd laughed and booed when the two men tried to shoo away the cameras. But there were gay men in the crowd who said it was offensive that the Rams organization would choose to embarrass Arizona fans by portraying them as a gay couple.

Eh. I don’t think this was something that was done to “mock the gay community” any more than when Dustin Hoffman kissed Jason Bateman at a ballgame earlier this year, but people are touchy these days. We like that the Rams went for it there and tried their hands at a joke, but frankly it was a bit tired, and line we wouldn’t cross if we really needed everyone we to buy tickets to our games, since alienating people isn’t good business. Either way, it offended some people and, shockingly these days, they acted rationally: They formed a group to go to a sporting event, and asked politely if they could be on the Kiss Cam for once. Well done! So where did the wheels come off? STLToday happened.

Making the issue 20 times bigger than it should have been and knowing full well that their comment section would ignite in an inferno of hatred, STLToday decided to run the story with the headline:

“Gays to Cards: Put us on Kiss Cam, too“

Are you fucking kidding us with that shit?  Could you have found a more shit-stirring headline that that? What about “Queers Order Cardinals to Play Gay Porn on Busch Stadium Jumbotron”?  ”Gays”? So every gay person wants to be on the kiss cam? We’re talking about 200 people here. If this was any other group, would you lump them all together like that? You can talk all you want STLToday about how you are working hard to keep your comments section clean but you’re full of shit, so just admit you want the hoosier hate because it makes your page views go up.

Fun’s just starting though.

First we have Chris Tunno, a Cardinals spokesman, who says this is why it’s scary territory to put homosexual couples on the big screen:

Do you pick a guy and a girl? And what if you pick someone who is not together? And two guys and two girls? Same thing. You’d be in a total mess.

Ever been to a Cardinals game? Every single time we’ve seen the Kiss Cam in action they always end up with at least one shot of a “couple” that aren’t together. Every. Time. When it happens, you can tell right away they aren’t a couple by the body language, people chuckle, the camera moves on and people forget about it. Happens every time without fail and who does that hurt? If the Cardinals were really worried about this, there is a simple solution to drop the chances of a mismatch down to zero: Do a little couple research during the game. Get some binoculars out and scan the crowd. If two people (guy and girl, guy and guy or girl and girl) are a couple, they don’t have to be making out to tell. No one’s going to confuse two hoosier’s with their cut-off t-shirts high-fiving each other as a couple. Of course those two dudes could actually be gay as a tangerine, but you won’t confuse them with a couple.

Ok, we’ve solved the problem for the Cardinals, exposed STLToday as douche-bags and showed you a few other taboo Kiss Cam situations with our inline images…lets get to those STLToday comments shall we? You know you wanna see them!

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Excuse me, but what the f*ck is this shit?

“Poopstock?!” Oh man that’s clever! In fact it’s super freaking clever because we said, or “coined” it if you will, a full 4 days before this little drawing came out. (Here, here, here, here and here…oh and here) Mention? Credit? Nope.

Guess Kings of Leon aren’t the only ones that get shit on around here.

Screw this! We’re leaving! Some of this photo got in my mouth and now we’re done.

via …screw this. No more via’s for them!

One last thing, we made a drawing in response to this lovely little “Matson cartoon”. Click though the jump to see it.

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St. Louis’ #1 website, STLToday.com, finally launched a much needed redesign the other day. Our sources say its been in the works for some time and has been in a beta test for a few weeks before finally getting released to the general public the other day. We may have gotten a peak somehow and might have been using it for a little while now…or not…maybe…just sayin’.

So what do we think?

Quick version: It’s better.

Long version: First off, its faster, and that’s a welcome feature in of itself. We don’t want to know how much time of our life was wasted waiting for that big annoying photo rotator to load on the sports page. The other big improvement is the look of the single story page. Much cleaner look and, once again, loads much faster than before. We love the tabs interface where you have the story on the page, and you can click the tabs to see any photo galleries, videos or comments for this story…in fact we like it so much, we designed and created it on ToastedRav.com two years ago, but that’s cool, just glad to see STLToday suck a little less.

Not everything is cherries and hand-jobs out there in STLToday.com land though. We totally appreciate the effort to clean up the main sections, its not quite there. First off, this header is horrible. The ads are way too big still and the way its designed people will just ignore everything above the header and the ads will do no good to the struggling paper.

Going farther down the page, some sections look like ghost towns with nothing going on below the fold while others have way too much going on. We don’t need 18 stories on the front page about the Blues during their off-season…especially since four of those articles share the exact same title!

The last big problem we see is the fact that they are still pumping up Deb Peterson! What the hell? She hasn’t written a single interesting thing for years, and is constantly beat to the punch by bloggers and the Riverfront Times with nary a mention from Peterson. We don’t always agree with Burwell, but having her sitting there next to three 100% legitimate columnists is a joke.

Score: B -/C+ It’s a lot better, but this is where it should have been 3 years ago and still clinging to some “old media” ways. Catching up to the web is hard work. Good luck.

You know how sometimes news people will put a question mark at the end of their headlines or, even more commonly, the TV news anchors will do the higher voice thing at the end of stuff before going to the break: “Are there too many fat people in St. Louis?!”, “People find Randy Naughton informative?!”

This headline is just like those. The answer to the “question” we posed to ourselves is: Yes. Kurt Greenbaum is moving on from his post at STLToday.com

Greenbaum, you may remember, was the guy that looked up a commenter’s IP address, used that personal information to track down and call his employer, thus getting the guy fired and then promptly bragging about it on his blog. Totally made his feel awesome, right up until the time the internet reached down its collective hand, grabbed Greenbaum, chewed him up, spit him out and then took a fat dump on him.

You forgot?! Read!

The Post Dispatch’s “Social Media Guy” Tattles on Naughty Commenter, Craps on Privacy Policy

The Internet Hate Machine Turns On Kurt Greenbaum

We Talk With the Man Behind KurtGreenbaumIsAPussy.com

Kurt Greenbaum 29th Most Search Google Term

Checking in on the Kurt Greenbaum Saga

Greenbaum Returns! STLToday’s Comments Under Hilarious Attack

Greenbaum to Giving Tips About How to Handle New Media?!

Kurt Greenbaum Thinks He Did Nothing Wrong (with video)

…we liked that subject.

After going in to hiding for a while and returning, although quietly, at the start of this year, Greenbaum is leaving the STLToday.com site he “ran” and the parent newspaper St. Louis Post Dispatch to be an editor on Patch.com (which one could also infer that Patch is coming to St. Louis).

The obvious joke here is to never comment anything even remotely edgy on Patch.com now that Greenbaum rolling in, but come on, we’re a little more original than that here.

…

Actually, in all seriousness, we would avoid commenting on Patch.com just to be safe.Image from KurtGreenbaumIsAPussy.com