- Forget Girls Gone Wild, our theme for the present is Athletes Gone Wild. Need proof? How’s about the dozen-player plus brawl at Madison Square Garden over the weekend, where multiple Knicks and Nuggets players went at it following a hard, dirty foul by Knick Mardy Collins. Collins ironically went to college at Temple, where his coach, the now-retired John Chaney, sent in a player he labeled as a “goon” to administer a dirty, flagrant foul to an opposing player. Collins whacked Nuggets’ guard J.R. Smith, setting off a bench-clearing brawl. All ten players on the court at the time of the foul were ejected, and the suspensions for the brawl range from one game to the most peripheral participants to 15 games for Carmelo Anthony, who sucker-punched Knick Jared Jeffries. Also over the weekend, Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Terrell Owens spit in the face of Atlanta Falcons cornerback DeAngelo Hall during a game and has since been fined $35,000 for the offense. Top it off with Chicago Bears defensive tackle Tank Johnson, who was arrested when police raided his home and found, among other things, six guns for which Johnson had no licenses or permits. All told, a banner weekend for the world of pro athletes, arrests, brawls, spitting on opponents. I love this game!
- Bizarre choice by Time magazine for its 2006 “Person of the Year” award, given to…….“you.” That’s you, as in whomever is reading those words, assuming you are a person who makes use of the internet in any way. The magazine really copped out on this one, and I have a few theories on how they arrived at this absurd choice: 1) its editors were split evenly among multiple choices and despite locking the door and brawling it out until one person won, they could not reach a consensus, 2) at the annual Time holiday party, everyone got so sauced that they couldn’t make it into work the next day and so they picked you because it was quick and required little thought, 3) they got drunk at the party and some conniving, opportunistic intern hacked into the editor’s computer and changed the actual person of the year story to the dumbest possible thing he or she could think of, which ended up being “you”, 4) they decided to test the theory of seeing what would actually happen if you locked a bunch of monkeys in a room with typewriters, be it recreating the works of Shakespeare or crafting a story declaring that the Person of the Year is “you”…………….So in case you missed it up to this point, I think Time made a poor choice on assigning the award.
- South Dakota gots a whole lotta guns…….in fact, South Dakotans are the most strapped state in the union, with an average of 7.4 out of every 100 adults packing heat. This number is based on people with gun permits, though, so that has to be factored in. I’d guess that if you surveyed illegal gun owners (assuming they didn’t shoot you first), New York or Nevada might be places with more guns per capita. But apparently the guns are mainly for recreational and hobby purposes in South Dakota, according to state officials and representatives. I’ll go along with that, because let’s face it, there ain’t a whole lot to do in South Dakota on the whole, so going out and shooting aimlessly or hunting the scores of wildlife on your expansive country property may be a reasonably fun alternative.
- Weekend box office update………either people suddenly remembered that Mel Gibson went on an anti-Semitic rant last summer, or the opening weekend luster of his new movie, Apocalypto, has worn off. It slipped to sixth in this weekend’s box office earners, behind the holding-strong Happy Feet at fourth, The Holiday at fifth and a trio of newcomers in the top three, The Pursuit of Happyness, Eragon and Charlotte’s Web. Amazing that an animated penguin movie is still so high on the list so many weeks after being released, but it is about winter break time from school for the kiddies, so maybe Happy Feet can hold on a little longer. And as I always say, any weekend where there is no Borat movie in the top six is a wonderful weekend for cinema………
- As if you don’t get screwed enough when you fly, Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport has found a new way to turn you upside down and shake every last cent out of your pockets. On top of paying $5.00 for a whopper and $4.75 for a small cup of soda, you can now pay $9.99 to place your “contraband” (i.e. anything other than your actual body and two articles of clothing) in a bubble wrap envelope that will be sent to the Hilton Hotel. What the hell good that will do is beyond me, but if you want to ship your belongings elsewhere, that will cost you extra on top of the $9.99. You do get to avoid losing the items totally, but if it’s something like liquids, razors or, heaven forbid, a family-sized tube of toothpaste, isn't it cheaper to just buy new ones? The regulations about what you can now bring on planes are idiotic, but this isn't the way to deal with it. Find something new, O’Hare Airport, cause you aren’t getting you hands on any more of my money than you already bilk me out of.
- Recruiting young men and women for the armed forces is really tough right now, I know. Recruitment numbers are down, and the military is even lowering standards for new recruits in order to meet quotas. However, I don’t think that the tactics used by some recruiters in the Tucson area are the right choice……unless you happen to be a big-time drug lord. A dozen Army and Marine recruiters in and around Tucson were snagged as part of a major FBI cocaine investigation, although in all fairness, none has yet been charged with providing drugs to students they were attempting to recruit. But odds are it happened at least a few times, and wouldn’t that just be the all-time best recruiting pitch…….“Excuse me, son, would you be interested in serving your country by joining the U.S. Army? No? You sure? I can score you an eight ball of coke and promise you a gram a week for the duration of your four-year service commitment. Think about it, ok?”
No comments:
Post a Comment