- Is there anything more predictable and tired than shots on local TV news broadcasts of shoppers waiting outside the doors of stores at 5 a.m.? Every year, same story; lunatics line up at ungodly hours, run each other over and do battle over insanely low prices on Chicken Dance Elmo and cheap electronics. Not only do I not want to be anywhere near the whack jobs that are ready to throw down with their fellow shoppers in order to secure a “must have” item, I don’t need to see some trite news story about it. If you’re nuts enough to wake up at 4 a.m. to get to the store, wait outside in the cold and fight for cheap stuff, I don’t need to hear about you, see you, see video of you, hear an interview with you as you stand in line, you name it. Tell you what, I’ll pay an extra $20 for an item if it means I can sleep in to a normal hour and not have my eyes gouged when I reach for the last laser level on sale for $10 at the same time as another shopper.
- Tawny Kitaen is not a woman you want to mess with…..or date…or marry, or generally be around. You may remember her as the woman who physically abused and beat her former husband, ex-Major Leaguer Chuck Finley. She would go ballistic over small things and end up whacking Chuck with her shoes over and over. Well now Ms. Kitaen has been hit up on felon drug possession charges after authorities found cocaine in her apartment. If there’s anything worse than a violent, abusive, psycho chick, it’s a violent, abusive, psycho cokehead chick. And if you’re a crack addict at age 45, I have to say your future is not bright. There is not a lot of hope for you at that point, even if you used to be a quasi-celebrity.
- What’s truly awesome about Major League Baseball contracts is that they’re guaranteed. In other words, when a team like the Houston Astros makes the insane decision to hand a 6-year, $100 million deal to a player like Carlos Lee, they are bound to pay him all $100 million, period. So when you pay an overweight, power-hitting outfielder with limited defensive capabilities about twice as much as what you should, you’re just stuck. It’s why situations like the Albert Belle-Baltimore Orioles saga are commonplace. Belle signed an 8-year, $88 million contract with B-More in the late 1990s, then had a degenerative hip condition prematurely end his career. Now insurance helped pay some of the deal, but the fact remains that Belle was on the Orioles’ payroll years after he stopped playing. So I look forward to Houston, in about three years, trying desperately to unload a 290-pound, broken down Lee on some other team dumb enough to take on his contract. Happy trails, Astros.
- Zero props to the CW network, which continues to make decisions showing that its executives have a collective IQ of 14. I’ve lambasted these morons in the past for decisions like canceling Everwood, bringing back the tired, lame 7th Heaven and greenlighting terrible shows like Runaway. Now, the network decides to only have a 20-episode season of what has been its absolute best show thus far, Veronica Mars. It may not get the best ratings, but the ratings are good enough that Mars deserves a full 23 or 26 episode season. The limited pickup of 20 episodes doesn’t signal good things in the future, either, i.e. the network doesn’t look like it is too enthused about having the show back for a fourth season. The idea behind combining the WB and UPN was to take two networks struggling to make inroads on the Big Four (NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX), combine them and have a stronger network better able to compete. But with decisions like the ones the CW is making, they’re going to run themselves out of business long before they push their way into the fight with the big boys.
- Today’s reason why “illegally” downloading and burning copies of music is a good thing: U2 is looking for new ways to squeeze money out of fans with the release of U2: 18 Singles, which essentially is a repackaging of 16 previous hits with two new recordings mixed in so they can pretend they’re not totally re-treading stuff they’ve already put out. “Best of” and “Greatest Hits” albums do this all of the time; this time especially sucks because U2 already has a two-disc greatest hits album, covering the 1980s and 1990s. But now they expect fans to buy an album whose songs they already have on not one, but two CDs, on a third friggin’ album. Thus, I am again saluting everyone who rips the songs and puts them on Lime Wire or Kazaa or downloads them from similar places. Artists can b*tch about losing money from this practice, but I say it should just about balance out with the money they extort with bogus compilation albums like 18 Singles.
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