UFC 112 “Invincible” takes place on Saturday, April 17, in Abu Dhabi. The latest UFC 112 fight card can be found in our fight cards section.

Brandon Vera takes on Jon Jones in a light heavyweight battle at UFC on Versus 1.

Here’s the premiere episode of UFC Primetime “St. Pierre vs. Hardy” that aired earlier this week on Spike TV.

HT: BE

What’s up everyone? Still in New York City, but found a little time tonight to catch up on what’s been going on in the world of mixed martial arts the past two days. The short answer is not much, but I’ll dump a bunch of links below in case you missed any of the news.

Strikeforce/CBS Standing Their Ground on April 17 | Sherdog

Heavyweight division crippled by co-promotional demands | SI.com’s Ben Fowlkes

Dana White and Bob Arum are BFF’s now! | WKR

Liddell’s fiercest opponent may be himself | Kevin Iole

Hong Man Choi is Frankenstein | Bloody Elbow

Mayweather Jr.: White knew nothing about combat sports before he met my uncle | Cagewriter

James Toney Calls Out UFC Champ Brock Lesnar as Freddie Roach Says the UFC is “Using” Toney | Bloody Elbow

Chuck Liddell talks about his naked workout video on Jimmy Kimmel Live | YouTube

Alistair Overeem Has No Problem Kicking a Little Girl | CagePotato

Josh Barnett will probably fight Mighty Mo at DREAM.13 | Josh Gross

Frank Mir’s WEC status uncertain, hopes to take part in future broadcasts | MMA Junkie

UFC invades New York City for UFC 111 special viewing party at Radio City Music Hall (saw that today) | MMA Junkie

“UFC Primetime: St-Pierre vs. Hardy” highest rated “Countdown” show ever | MMA Junkie

By the way, New York City is pretty badass. We explored Manhattan today and saw most of the major landmarks and locations like Times Square, Ground Zero and Central Park. It’s been a culture shock for me coming from an average-size town in Florida, but well worth the trip. You should make it here at least once in your lifetime if you’ve never been. If nothing else, come for the pizza. The pizza I ate tonight was freakin’ awesome…the bum diarrhea in the subway, not so much.

Update: A couple more stories that popped up this morning…

Chuck Liddell vs. Rich Franklin reportedly headlining UFC Fight Night 22 on April 17 in Nashville (Strikeforce counter), Tito out of UFC 115 fight against Chuck for unknown reasons | Fighters Only Mag I’ll try to do a post on this later tonight…

War Machine is selling his kidney on Ebay, Only $50,000! | MiddleEasy

I mentioned a couple weeks back I would be taking a trip to New York City. We were supposed to go two weeks ago today, but we ended up rescheduling it for this weekend because of that big blizzard that hit the northeast. Our flight leaves this evening, and I still have to pack and drive two hours to the airport, so I won’t be posting anymore today. I’m taking my laptop, but being this as close to as a vacation as I’m going to get I probably won’t be posting much, if any, until Monday when I return. I’ll keep my eye on things and if any major stories break, I’ll try to do something quick on it. Otherwise, I’ll probably just post links to stuff on Twitter when I get a chance. The news ticker will continue to run without interruption as well.

Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Georges St. Pierre talks about his upcoming title defense against Dan Hardy at UFC 111.

HT: Sportsnet.ca

If you thought WEC 47’s ratings were disappointing, wait till you see the estimates for UFC 110’s pay-per-view buy rate. From Dave Meltzer via Fight Opinion:

I don’t have a number of buys, but based on trending data which has historically been pretty accurate, it could be in the 215,000 to 240,000 range, basically along the lines of the tape-delayed foreign shows. This was foreign, but wasn’t tape delayed. One cable industry source gave an estimate of 215,000.

Ouch, not a good day at Zuffa headquarters.

I’m actually quite surprised by the low number. It didn’t have any established UFC superstars on the card unless you want to throw Michael Bisping in that category, but it did have Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, Cain Velasquez and hardcore fan favorite Wanderlei Silva in the headlining slots. Not a recipe for big numbers, but I figured it would have hit somewhere in the 350,000-400,000 range, not question the floor for a UFC pay-per-view which previously stood somewhere around 300,000 buys. Apparently these guys aren’t as popular as we like to think amongst the casuals, or maybe the fact that UFC 110 took place only two short weeks after UFC 109 dissuaded people from buying it. I don’t know, but the UFC has to be looking forward to their big UFC 111 card with GSP and Frank Mir to help regain some of the momentum they lost over the past few months.

Image via Sherdog

…For UFC 111 at least.

The hottest ticket in New Jersey just got hotter, as it has been announced that Playboy cover model and UFC All-Access host Rachelle Leah will be returning to her old gig as Octagon Girl for one night only on Saturday, March 27th at UFC 111 in Newark, New Jersey’s Prudential Center.

I don’t think there will be any complaints about that.

The trend continues. Without Urijah Faber headlining, the WEC just doesn’t pull in the ratings like they do when he’s on the card. Even Jens Pulver, Miguel Torres and Brian Bowles couldn’t push WEC 47 above the 400,000 viewers mark.

This past weekend’s WEC 47 event on Versus scored a 0.46 household rating and 373,000 viewers, MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com) today confirmed.

The ratings were down sharply – 42 percent in all – compared to World Extreme Cagefighting’s prior show, WEC 46 (640,000 viewers), which took place in January and benefited from proven draw Urijah Faber and a main-event title-unification bout between Benson Henderson and Jamie Varner.

To put those numbers in perspective, it’s the second-lowest rating the WEC has drawn in the past two years only besting WEC 45’s dismal 330,000 viewers. It will be interesting to see how these numbers compare to the UFC’s Versus card in a week and a half. Zach Arnold doesn’t think it will perform as many think it will mainly because of Versus’ lack of branding power. He might be right, but the card is stacked for a free show so you never know.

My biggest question though is what happens if WEC 48 is a success on pay-per-view? Would that mean the days of watching Faber fight on free television are over? I don’t know, but someone who I’m sure doesn’t like the idea of that is Versus given they’re struggling to draw a good rating without him.

Image via Sherdog