UFC color man/comedian extraordinaire Joe Rogan recently posted a video he shot of the magical ‘Surprise!’ moment from Dana White’s recent 40th birthday bash.  Though Rogan tries to rev it up with some of his trademark high-energy announcing (“Oh. My. Goodness!”) Dana doesn’t look all that blown away, at least until he realizes that the Tapout guys and Chuck Liddell also showed up.  But the weird part is, Rogan informed the Twitter community that the evening’s entertainment was mid-nineties grunge rock band Stone Temple Pilots.  From the sound of it, Rogan just about lost his shit when they took the stage:

I just saw stone temple pilots perform at Dana White’s birthday party. It was easilly the greatest live performance in any art form… That I’ve ever seen. It was fucking insanely good. Those motherfuckers were insanely good! I’m seriously inspired. Incredible.

Seriously?  You’re telling me Stone Temple Pilots turned in the greatest performance "in any art form"?  Maybe if the year is 1994 and the only other art form you’ve ever seen performed is Christian Interpretive Dance. 

Instead of releasing a timely, orderly stream of video blogs for UFC 98, Dana White and co. opted to do a couple before the event and then a multi-part epic afterwards.  As with most multi-part epics, the majority is forgettable stuff that should have been edited out.  But around the eight-minute mark in this video things get interesting when Dana White does an interview with Edge Magazine and claims that everyone from fighters to fans would be totally cool with an openly gay athlete in the UFC.  

This is obviously not true, and Dana White knows it’s not true.  What’s amazing is not that he says it anyway, but that he thinks pretending to be ignorant of homophobia in the world of men’s pro sports is the best way to smooth things over with the gay community.   It isn’t.  It’s blatant pandering, and the effect is actually worse than admitting that the world of MMA would have a tough time adjusting to an openly gay fighter.