On the subject of Michael Phelps — because apparently we’re still talking about Michael Phelps — Charles Barkley, master of the endearingly outlandish quote, recently had this to say on ESPN Radio in Dallas:

“It’s the jackass generation. You got every little nitwit walking around with a cell phone trying to catch you in a compromising position. I mean, my man Michael Phelps can’t even smoke no dope with his friends. If you can’t smoke with your friends, who the hell can you smoke with? I’m not here trying to be this or this, I’m just telling you: My man’s smoking dope with his friends and one of his friends sells him out. That’s the generation we live in now. It is what it is.”

I would like to quickly refute Charles Barkley, if I may.

I’m pretty sure, though I’m not positive, that most of Michael Phelps’s friends wouldn’t have ratted him out for smoking weed. As a matter of fact, Phelps wasn’t partying with his friends when he was caught smoking a bong. He was at the University of South Carolina visiting a girl. They were at someone’s house partying. Anyone who has ever visited a different college, or gone to college, or even someone who has ever been to a party larger than 30 people, knows that someone you don’t know is going to show up. At some point in the night, you’re going to take the keg tap from a random dude you’ve never met before. That’s the nature of a party.

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The news that Barack Obama appointed Dan Rooney as the American Irish Ambassador is all over the Googlez today, as it should be.

After all, it is St. Patrick’s Day. And Rooney is the owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers. And Barack Obama is hip and cool and happening! Anyway, the traditional route here would be to say, “Wow! What a great and cool choice blahblahblah.” But that’s been done like a hundred times today.

Instead, how about another list of sports-related people and what countries I’d like to seem them appointed to. If you’re really lucky, Jon Bois will do this tomorrow, only funnier!

• Michael Phelps … Jamaica — Too obvious? Too corny? Or just “How High”? (/Redman’d)
• John Daly … Scotland — Because it’ll get him out of our hair, they won’t give a crap how much he drinks and there has to be a golf tour he can avoid getting kicked off of. Downside: no Hooters.
• Mark Cuban … Cuba — An “it’s in the name” joke could be appropriate here, but, really, who better to turn around a sputtering country stuck in its ways than the guy who made the Mavericks relevant again?

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Unfortunately for the people who got to spend a night smoking weed with Phelps — and all of us, really — the Michael Phelps story refuses to die. An overzealous South Carolina sheriff is building a case against everyone who was at the infamous party, including people who weren’t in the photo and people who weren’t even at the party. One such person is the owner of the ROOR bong Phelps was photographed ripping. That is harsh, Mr. Sheriff. As Jeff Spicoli would say, “Hey, bud, what’s your problem?”

Of course, it doesn’t help one’s innocence — or the sympathy one would receive from stoners the world over — when one tries to sell his Michael Phelps bong on eBay.

We’ve also learned that the department has located and confiscated that bong. Sources say the owner of the bong was trying to sell it on eBay for as much as $100,000. The owner, who wasn’t even at the party, is one of the eight now charged.

All sorts of lessons to be learned here. One: Don’t sell a bong on eBay. Two: Don’t sell a bong on eBay if it could remotely link you to a pothead so famous the backwoods sheriff in your county wants to make a name by prosecuting him. Three: Don’t take camera phone pics of Michael Phelps doing bad things. You’re only bound to get arrested. And four: Don’t smoke marijuana, kids. It’ll rot your brain like that other egg that was all scrambled in those commercials. And no one wants that.

Michael Phelps got dropped by Kellogg’s as a sponsor recently. That seems fairly dumb because, well, what he did wasn’t that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. And, given recent national events, (A-Rod namely) it’s going to blow over pretty quickly. Which may be why Seth Meyers, a notorious defender of people that smoke the cheeb, came to his defense in an SNL “Really” skit on Saturday night.

Of course, as Ufford noted, this would be tremendously better if the always foxy Amy Poehler was involved, but props to Meyers for pointing out that Kellogg’s is basically run by potheads*.

*I don’t actually believe that. but it would be awesome.

Do you smoke weed? If you don’t smoke it regularly, you’ve probably at least tried it, and if you haven’t at least tried it, you surely have a friend who has. Is marijuana even taboo anymore? Our current president is an admitted former weed smoker (”I inhaled. That was the point.”), while movies specifically about pot are big bucks at the box office. This is 2009, people. Bud happens.

Unless, of course, you’re an American Olympic hero. Unless you’re Michael Phelps. In a story literally everyone has heard about already, News of the World published a photo of Some Dude That Looks A Lot Like Michael Phelps ripping a bong over the weekend. Turns out, Phelps it is:

“I engaged in behavior which was regrettable and demonstrated bad judgment,” Phelps said in the statement released by one of his agents on Sunday. “I’m 23 years old and despite the successes I’ve had in the pool, I acted in a youthful and inappropriate way, not in a manner people have come to expect from me. For this, I am sorry. I promise my fans and the public it will not happen again.”

Of course Phelps has to make the standard apology, and maybe this will hurt his endorsements slightly, but in the meantime, I’d like to give you my stereotypical hippie-ish weed speech. Ready? Cool.

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There’s a pretty good chance that my parents would have paid a lot of money to find out I wasn’t going to be a good soccer player. Or, in a more applicable sense, I bet Tim Couch’s mom and dad would have pushed him towards professional baseball, where the money is actually guaranteed instead of, well, you know.

And, for future NFL busts (looking to you, Eric Crouch, Jr.!), science might have achieved a way to avoid certain, utter and total humiliation in life. That’s right, SCIENCE AND MATH … and hey, please stop shouting about grit, Jim Armstrong.

In health-conscious, sports-oriented Boulder, Atlas Sports Genetics is playing into the obsessions of parents by offering a $149 test that aims to predict a child’s natural athletic strengths. The process is simple. Swab inside the child’s cheek and along the gums to collect DNA and return it to a lab for analysis of ACTN3, one gene among more than 20,000 in the human genome.

The test’s goal is to determine whether a person would be best at speed and power sports like sprinting or football, or endurance sports like distance running, or a combination of the two. A 2003 study discovered the link between ACTN3 and those athletic abilities.

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Oh, so hey: that Guitar Hero commercial from last week was pretty cool. Cool because they managed to get four sports monoliths into one commercial for a fun game and it didn’t completely suck. (Alex Rodriguez AND Kobe Bryant?!?!? WOW.)

So if you’re looking for a little more information on how it all went down, here’s an interview Tony Hawk conducted with Michael Phelps:

Michael Phelps doesn’t even know what day it is. That’s true shred or die fashion, bro!

And this has been your Halloween Friday throwaway post.