I was watching the postgame show on the NFL Network last night when all of the sudden things turned a little bit strange.

Like them, I was laughing hysterically.

I’ve been waiting for this to be posted somewhere on the internet so a big thanks to YouTube user DCFanatic8 for posting the video.

Desi Cullen: Desmond Conner is reporting that UConn Huskies punter Desi Cullen underwent an emergency appendectomy last week but is expected to play in the International Bowl on January 3, 2009 [Hartford Courant]

As you may or may not know, my blog, SOX & Dawgs, is the 7th seed in the South Region for the Busted Coverage 2008 Sports Blogger of the Year.  Time is running out for the 1st round voting as it will end at 11 PM tonight. So please take a moment and go over and vote for SOX & Dawgs to advance to the 2nd round. Thank you very much!!!!

Jon Lester: The no-hitter thrown by Boston Red Sox pitcher Jon Lester on May 19th against the Kansas City Royals was named the winner of the TYIB Single Game Performance of the Year in voting by the fans.  Congratulations Jon, an honor well deserved. [redsox.com]

The NFL has announced that Ellis Hobbs of the New England Patriots has been named the AFC Special Teams Player of the  Week for week 15.

Hobbs helped the Patriots to a 48-29 win over the Oakland Raiders with a 95 yard kickoff return for a touchdown. The 4th year pro out of Iowa State is currently third in the NFL with 1,266 kickoff return yards.

Also take a moment to vote for Sammy Morris as the FedEX Ground Player of the Week and Matt Cassel as the FedEX Air Player of the Week.

Bank Robbery: Just 24 hours after the “Hanging Sox” logo is unveiled, a man in Chicopee, MA commits a bank robbery with the logo on his hat. [Red Sox Monster]

Pro Bowl: The New England Patriots will be represented by two players at the NFL Pro Bowl this year as Wes Welker and Stephen Gostowski were named to the AFC Team. [Reiss’s Pieces]

Mark Teixeira: According to Karl Ravech of ESPN, Mark Teixeira is anticipating a contract that will pay him anywhere from $22-28 million a year.

Karl Ravech of ESPN reported that he had checked in with someone close to the Teixeira negotiations. According to Ravech’s source, the first baseman, who is the prize of the free-agent market, is in negotiations with five teams: the Angels, Nationals, Orioles, Red Sox and Yankees. Using the standards set by Torii Hunter’s five-year, $90 million deal and Alex Rodriguez’ 10-year, $275 million deal–both of which were signed last offseason–Ravech reported that Teixeira is in line for an eight-year deal of $22 million to $28 million per season.

[WEEI.com]

As some of you may or may not know, Steve has decided to take some personal time away from the blog. I’m not sure when he’ll be back or if he’ll be back at all. During that time, I’ve taken over the Patriots and Celtics coverage here and will continue to do my best at keeping you up-to-date. If anyone is interested in helping out with the blog, especially the Pats and Celtics (the C’s especially if you have Comcast SportsNet NE), send me an email through the contact page.

You may have noticed a few changes here as well. I’d been wanting to do this for about 6 months now or so but a while back I had looked at plugin called asides. The plugin is used for short blurbs or blog posts. I tested it out today a few times so if you’re scrolling down the site and see something like this:

or

They will be located between the blog posts and can also be found in the recent posts section on the right sidebar. Because of the plugin, I increased the number of posts on the front page to 20, it had been at 15. So far I haven’t noticed a difference in load times but if I do, I’ll decrease it back to 15.

For those who want to look back at what’s been written in the past, you can use the calendar for the archives of a particular day. Just click on the day and it will bring you to the day’s blog posts. Same thing goes in the archives as well. The archives are done by month for the current year. For example, if you clicked on the July archive page and wanted to see what was written on July 14th, you can then click on the 14th on the calendar and it will give you all of the days posts.

I don’t have a category drop-down menu anymore because honestly it would take  a long time to scroll through the 365 categories I have. But if you’re interested in seeing what else has been written about a particular category listed on a post, just click on it and it will give you all the posts. To test it out, you could click on the General tag at the bottom of this post and it will bring you to all of the general posts since the site’s inception in November 2005.

I know that some people come to the site for just the UConn news or the Patriots or the Red Sox news. I’ve always had the separate category feeds for each of them but had just made a casual mention of them in a blog post. So if you subscribe to the site through a feed reader and are interested in just one of those feeds instead of everything from the site, I’ve taken the liberty of adding each those three feeds to the meta section as well.

And of course, if you want to email the post you are reading or post it on one of the social network sites, you can use the share this button.

Lastly, I am awaiting the upgrade release of the Cutline Split Theme to take advantage of the new WordPress 2.7 commenting features. Once it’s released, I’ll make the necessary tweaks to the style sheet so it’ll look like nothing has changed visibly.

Thank you for making SOX & Dawgs a part of your day.

PS – Don’t forget to enter the 3rd annual SOX & Dawgs College Football Pick’em Contest.

Steve Silva of Boston. com reports that Boston Red Sox reliever Hideki Okajima completed the Honolulu Marathon this morning with a time of 6:10:26 in rainy conditions.

Under rainy and wet conditions, Red Sox reliever Hideki Okajima completed today’s Honolulu Marathon in 6:10:26 (gun time).

Okajima, who turns 33 on Christmas Day, was among 23,000 runners who were expected to start the 26.2 mile race with about 60 percent of the field from his native Japan.

Post edited to reflect corrections from Boston.com. Their original post had Okajima finishing the marathon with a time of 3:57:57.