Friday, January 05, 2007

Five Friday thoughts

- Two NFL teams finished with three or fewer wins this season. Yet the one that had only two victories, the Oakland Raiders, seem to have more hope for success in the near future as opposed to the team with three wins, the Detroit Lions. Why, you ask? It’s not because the Raiders have the top pick and the Lions the second pick in this April’s draft. No, it’s because when a guy is blatantly incompetent in a management position, the Raiders actually have the sense to fire that individual, while the Lions keep giving the guy more chances. Art Shell was an abominable failure in his second stint as Raiders coach, going 2-14 this year. he looked comatose and mannequin-like most of the time, the same blank expression and motionless visage regardless of the game situation. It was almost as if he were one of those freaky giant puppets at Chuck-E-Cheese and someone forgot to plug him in. But at least the Raiders fired Shell on Thursday, while the Lions are giving their joke of a general manager Matt Millen a seventh season at the helm despite awful draft, bad free agent signings and general incompetence. The Lions will almost certainly botch their #2 pick in the draft, and while the Raiders don’t have a stellar track record, they still have a better shot than the Lions to get it right. Brace yourselves for more years of mediocrity to come, Lions fans…..although by now, you should all be very used to it.

- Vegas has been “the place” to go for gambling, bachelor parties and spring break trips in the past, but recently so many people go to Vegas as there’s been so much emphasis on making it family friendly and cleaning things up that LV has become almost passé to many people, they’ve moved on to the next popular destination. But Vegas is going to have one big thing going for it very soon; Celine Dion is no longer going to be performing there. So unless you’re gay or a middle aged woman, that is great news. Women can no longer drag their husbands, fiancés and boyfriends to the show, featuring some of the most boring, uninteresting music on the face of the earth. I mean, has Dion even done any new material lately? Because ever since her terrible song in the abomination that was Titanic, no one in the music world mentions her or gives a crap what she does. She’s had a five year run in LV, and although that’s kept her from foisting her music on the rest of us, it’s been one more thing in the “con” column for deciding whether Vegas is the right place for a trip. No word on what Caesar’s Palace is going to do with the special theater they built just for Celine’s show, but it couldn’t possibly be a show I’d want to see less than I’d ever wanna see Celine Dion.

- People hate America, and we keep giving them more reasons to do so. We’re intent on competing in the most idiotic, pointless “contests”, dueling one another in feats of sloth, dishonesty and sheer gluttony. We’ve got a dam competitive eating federation, for crying out loud. Now, we have Jason Pisarik a lazy schlub who outlasted other lazy schlubs for the title of Ultimate Couch Potato at an event held at the ESPN Zone in Chicago. Pisarik, who apparently has no friends, no girlfriend, no hobbies and no life, spent 39 hours and 55 minutes watching sports on a couch at the ESPN Zone and won a prize package for his efforts, as well as another decade with no dating prospects. To top it off, dude is an accountant, and if that doesn’t scream athletic, well-rounded stud, then I don’t know what does. Everyone enjoys relaxing and many enjoy watching sports and lying on their couch to do so, but I think 12-13 hours of football, with meal and restroom breaks, on New Year’s Day with all of the college football bowl games is as far as you need to take it. Best of luck with your life, Jason Pisarik, because by the looks of it, you need all the help you can get.

- What’s a fair price to pay for losing a person? I mean, literally losing a human being, as in having them disappear the same way your luggage might on a cross-country flight or a package could get lost in the mail? Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines has answered that question, reaching a $1 million settlement with the wife and family of George Allen Smith IV, a 26-year-old man that vanished from a Royal Caribbean cruise ship in the Mediterranean on his frakkin’ honeymoon. That’s one of the all time worst times to vanish, not that there’s a good one. But you’ve just gotten married, you’re looking forward to a new life with your new bride, and poof, you disappear. Personally, based on the amount of the settlement, there had to be some mitigating circumstances, because if you knew for sure that a person’s disappearance was directly attributable to a travel entity’s error, I’d be thinking eight-figure settlement, easy. You really can't replace a person, although Royal Caribbean apparently feels like $1 million is a close approximation.

- Join me in feeling terrible for former MLB slugger and roid user Mark McGwire, who amazingly (or not) appears a lock to miss induction into the Hall of Fame on this year’s ballot. Thankfully, a majority of voters look to be steering clear of being culpable in one of the biggest atrocities in baseball history, voting a guy who took performance enhancing drugs to fuel a dwindling career and thus broke numerous home run records. A player has to be listed on at least 75 percent of ballots cast to get inducted, and an early straw poll showed that only 29 percent of those surveyed would vote for Big Roid, er, Red. Save the “Oh, he never tested positive, you can't prove anything,” line of reasoning. The guy hemmed, hawed and danced around answering all steroid questions in a Congressional hearing, once had a bottle of a steroid precursor in his locker in plain view and added copious amounts of muscle mass late in his career. We all have enough evidence to decide, because this isn't a court of law. We don’t need the smoking gun/syringe, a positive test or anything else. Reading the clues we already have, if you don’t think McGwire took steroids, you’re either on his personal payroll or you’re a member of his immediate family. Heck, even those people probably believe he ‘roided up, they just wouldn’t admit it publicly. Let’s all continue pulling for McGwire’s sustained rejection, year after year, for HOF induction. He’s a borderline candidate based on stats alone, so all the other crap circling around his oversized head makes him a definite no, now and forever.

No comments: