Odds and Ends, August 4, 2015

• Heading to Vegas on the weekend and into next week.  Should be able to grab some NFL futures info and the like.
• Speaking of which, Brian Tuohy (in the late stages of getting a third book ready for a Labor Day 2015 release!) notes CBS Sports is going into gambling and Daily Fantasy Sports (which is creating it's own controversies!) HARD now with it's new Sportsline website.  (And a good amount of the content is paywalled behind a $10/month, $100/year subscription service.)
• MMA trouble from this weekend, and it didn't involve Ronda Rousey or the bigmouthed Brazilian she KTFO'ed in 34 seconds.  Nope.  Probably the dirtiest fighter in the sport has been thrown out of his SECOND MMA promotion.  Two years after Rousimar Palhares was thrown out of the Ultimate Fighting Championship for dangerous conduct (and, given the amount of drugs and other bullshit in Dana White's camp, one has to wonder how far Palhares had to go to banned in 2013!), Palhares has been thrown out of the World Series of Fighting and stripped of his welterweight title for similar dangerous conduct, including eye-gouging and attempting to unduly break the arm of the other fighter after the other fighter had tapped out to a kimura armlock.
• The vice-president of the WSOF, I think, said it perfectly...

“I don’t think [Palhares] is a bad guy, but I just think he has mental problems and shouldn’t be allowed to fight until he fixes them,” World Series of Fighting vice president Ali Abdel-Aziz told Yahoo Sports.

• That might not even be the top story of the WSOF night!  This, however, might be...

Nick Diaz and Khabib Nurmagamedov fought outside the ring near the cage.  WSOF is banning both Nick and Nate Diaz from future events.  Both Nick Diaz and Nurmagamedov are signed to the UFC.

• Jadaevon Clowney is back in the news -- this time, for his father, who was arrested for a gunfight at a strip club and is now charged with attempted murder.  Why do I not see this as a surprise for the father of a one-trick pony (who is now on the PUP list!) who made an NFL career out of an illegal helmet hit in a bowl game his junior year and basically sat out his senior year???? 
• And the suspensions for the Toronto Blue Jays came out for Sundays to-do with Kansas City.  After the umpires refused to throw out any Kansas City players for throwing at Josh Donaldson three times in Sunday's game, Aaron Sanchez gets a three-game suspension for having the audacity to throw at one of the Royals!  And the manager gets a game too!  Why do I not see this as a surprise that Blinded By The Light is openly looking, at this date, for an I-80 World Series between two teams of utter thugs???