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– Sherdog.com bloodyelbow.com

(See? This is why you can’t take Bader anywhere. Photo courtesy of Combat Lifestyle.)

- Lesnar weighs in on Frank Mir, predicts July return to UFC. (The Rumble)

- Dana White’s Jose Canseco media nightmare continues on ESPN. (Cagewriter)

- Bellator’s welterweight tourney matchups are set. (Heavy)

- Strikeforce’s Luke Rockhold says fighting in the ocean isn’t fun. (Fight Magazine)

- Is HGH testing in MMA feasible? (MMA Payout)

- Tito Ortiz was so young once, and actually sort of made sense. (The Garv)

- Cole Miller out of March 31 Fight Night bout with an injury. (MMA Weekly)

- Vitor Belfort loves his wife’s feet. (Fightlinker)

- Three freak show fights that ought to happen. (Bleacher Report)

- Canadian women’s hockey team knows how to celebrate. (Total Pro Sports)

- Top 10 bad movie babes. (Ask Men)

- Police searching for avid ESPN fan who robs banks. (Asylum)

- Emergency airlift of condoms headed to Olympic Village. (Scores Report)

- Your possibly NSFW Spicy Gallery for the week. (Break)

- What your car really says about you. (Holy Taco)

- Dolph Lundgren does Elvis, karate. (Screen Junkies)

- The best stadiums in America. (Made Man)

- NASCAR crew member narrowly misses getting run over. (All Left Turns)

- The exact wrong way to use a hand grenade. (Nothing Toxic)

(Proof that nobody looks cool when they’re about to sneeze. Photo courtesy of EdMulholland.com)

After his bloody win over Anthony Perosh at UFC 110, Mirko "Cro Cop" Filipovic will still be getting a Duke Roufus-trained striker to stand and bang with at UFC 115, only new reports suggest that it won’t be Ben Rothwell, as previously expected.  MMA Scraps is reporting that Cro Cop and Pat Barry have been offered a chance to try and kick one another’s faces in when the UFC visits Vancouver.  Do we have to tell you that signing this fight is about as close as you can get to guaranteeing a highlight reel caliber knockout finish without actually paying one fighter to go in there and leave his chin wide open?  We didn’t think so.

But if Barry is getting Cro Cop, what of Rothwell?  The rumor is that he may now be getting Barry’s original opponent for UFC 115, Gilbert Yvel.  So basically, the stand-and-bang quotient just doubled.  Join us after the jump as we go ahead and get ourselves hyped for the awesomeness that awaits us.

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(Props: YouTube.com/UFC)

You know what sucks? We have to wait three whole weeks until Jon Jones and Brandon Vera headline the UFC’s first event on Versus (March 21st; Broomfield, Colorado). What the hell are we going to do in the meantime?(And don’t say "Volunteer at a soup kitchen"; this is no time for jokes.) In the above hype-videos, Bones promises fireworks against Vera, and says he’ll give the Truth a striking war if that’s what he wants. He also makes a dig at Vera’s well-known hubris, saying he’s not the kind of guy to call out Chuck Liddell after winning his first UFC fight; Bones has a black belt in humility, apparently. Brandon Vera is aware that Jones has been blowing through his opponents, but feels that he’s never fought anybody on Brandon’s level, and his chin hasn’t been tested yet. ("It’s really easy to be the hammer, but it’s hard to be the nail.") Anybody see Vera winning this one? Anybody?

After the jump: Georges St. Pierre sweats alongside Michael Phelps in a new ad for Under Armour. Let’s be thankful this wasn’t an ad for Reebok.

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(A black eye and the faintest hint of a smile. That’s our kind of woman. Photo by Esther Lin.)

Wednesday we tried to educate your ignorant asses on Takayo Hashi, the Japanese fighter who is one half of the 135-pound title fight on tonight’s Strikeforce: Challengers show (you made your FightPicker selections yet, by the way?). It’s only fair that we also shine the spotlight on her opponent in tonight’s main event, the undefeated Sarah Kaufman.

In addition to having a perfect 10-0 record that includes wins over the likes of Miesha Tate (one of MMA’s hottest women, let’s not forget) and Shayna Baszler, Kaufman also has the distinction of winning all but two of her fights via TKO stoppage. She may not win pretty, but she’s a gritty fighter who likes to stand and bang and will not give you a second to breathe once the bell rings. If you need another barometer aside from her record to tell you how dominant she’s been, just look at the odds on her fight against Hashi. She’s fighting the #2-ranked fighter in her weight class, and bookmakers still expect it to be a blowout.

Biographical notes: Kaufman was a dancer from age two, but transitioned to fighting because it is far more awesome. She’s from Victoria, British Columbia, and yet bravely missing tonight’s Canada-Slovakia hockey game in order to fight for a title. She’s more or less estranged from her family, who she says “weren’t bad parents,” but were not active or health conscious or terribly supportive of her fighting career. See her in action after the jump.

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Our friends at Fight Magazine have struck gold again with their Fight! Life video series (you haven’t forgotten all that stuff with Bas Rutten already, have you?), this time by talking to Eddie Bravo about one of his favorite subjects: weed.  Like many great romances, things were rocky between them at first, so much so that it even prevented Eddie from getting laid.  But just when you think this is going to be a sad, sad story, he starts a sentence with, "There was this girl at the strip club…" 

As is usually the case, that’s the point where the story starts to get interesting and doubtful all at the same time.  If that’s not enough to liven up your Friday, check out the latest effort from professional video editing lol-machine lookoutawhale after the jump.

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("These barbarian Americans," Fedor thought to himself. "Worshipping laminated rectangles with names on them.")

Strikeforce has been laying suspiciously low lately, leading some to wonder if they’re having behind-the-scenes problems with Fedor Emelianenko or their broadcast partners; Gegard Mousasi’s departure from M-1 two weeks ago added another wrinkle to the mystery. Strikeforce CEO Scott Coker tried to shed what light he could yesterday, telling reporters that the organization would hold an event in Nashville, Tennessee, on April 17th, and that more announcements would come next week. No, it’s not much to work on. But recent reports have also clued us in on the following…

— The middleweight title fight between Jake Shields and Dan Henderson is a done deal for April. Said Shields: "I have a date (and) venue, but they told me to hold that back. Hopefully CBS. I think it’s CBS. There’s a slight possibility of Showtime because they’re still (working it out). I don’t know the rest of the card or any of that yet. But me and Dan’s on, and I’m hoping it’s on CBS."

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Last night, many of us were shocked and saddened by a video floating around the ‘net that featured Chuck Liddell, completely naked, working out with his girlfriend, also completely naked. The video was notable for a number of reasons:

1) The girlfriend has been I.D.’d as Jose Canseco’s ex, Heidi Northcott. I will now pat myself on the back for my powers of observation.

2) Chuck didn’t wipe down the machine when he was done with it.

3) As CageWriter put it, "is the camera man a crazy, obsessed fan? How is this person still alive?"

4) After the video was originally taken off YouTube, it popped up on DailyMotion under the title "Antonio mckee highlights," which is brilliant because nobody would ever think to search for that.

Even Jimmy Kimmel was mystified by the clip. But the truth has been uncovered — it was a viral ad for Reebok ZigTechs, a new shoe line that Chuck endorses. (Which is strange in itself considering that MMA fighters don’t compete with shoes on, but whatever.) So here’s a question: Now that you’ve seen Chuck Liddell’s blurred-out ass and package, are you more or less likely to buy Reebok ZigTechs?

Related: Jose Canseco owes $320,000 in back-taxes and won’t be fighting for Strikeforce. So this video is pretty much the last thing he needs right now.

(Photo courtesy of Fight Magazine)

If you thought Frank Mir’s apology on UFC.com for his remarks about Brock Lesnar didn’t sound like it came entirely from a place of sorrow deep within his heart, congratulations, you’re a tough one to fool.  I spoke with Mir yesterday for this SI.com column and he confirmed that, even after he was called in to the UFC offices and chided for the comment, he still didn’t really understand what the big deal was:

"When I got called in and they told me, ‘Listen man, this is an issue,’ I kind of had a smirk on my face the whole time," says Mir, who was quoted in a public apology for the remark on the UFC’s Web site earlier this week. "I was like, you’re kidding, right? This is a joke, right? I’ve heard people say that this is to the death. I’ve heard people say about an opponent, ‘I’m going to kill him.’ I heard Brock say he was going to put his hand up my rear end to pull out a horseshoe. I didn’t hear anyone get too upset about that."

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