Thursday, January 04, 2007

Some fresh Thursday anger and indignation

- The right guy won this year’s NFL MVP award, period. LaDanian Tomlinson was the best player, the most valuable to his team, whatever criteria you want to use. Some were campaigning for Drew Brees because he had such a good season for a Saints team playing in the still hurricane-ravaged city of New Orleans, and that is flat-out erroneous thinking. Yes, Brees was amazing in recovering from shoulder surgery, he did lead the Saints to the playoffs and he was an important influence in helping New Orleans continue its recovery, but sympathy for the Gulf Coast over being victims of a deadly hurricane should not vault a player from that area up the MVP ballot. Tomlinson set several NFL records this season and was the league’s most valuable player beyond any doubt. I can think of a dozen quarterbacks with whom the Saints would have done just as well, but I can't think of a single running back in the NFL who could have completely approximated what LT brought to the San Diego Chargers this year.

- In a classic case of barking up the wrong tree, University of Florida students have been vociferously lobbying the school’s administration to cancel all classes on Monday and Tuesday in conjunction with Monday night’s college football national title game, where the Gators will play Ohio State. Predictably, the school balked at the request and was only willing to move the add/drop date back four days so that if students didn’t go to class and got too far behind, they had more time to drop. Having gone to college, rather successfully, I might add, let me throw some hints out to UF students: 1) since classes tend to run on a MWF or T-TH setup, if you don’t go on both days, you’re only going to miss one class from each course you are taking, not two, 2) it’s the friggin’ first day of the semester, are you really going to miss that much? At least a few profs just hand out the syllabus, give an overview of the course, tell you to buy the textbook and let you go, and 3) you would be better off going to the profs themselves and telling them that none of you are going to show up, so don’t bother having class. Besides, are you all going to be hammered out of your minds both before and after the game? Kickoff is at 8:30 p.m. Monday, so theoretically you could go to your Monday classes, most of which end by early afternoon, and still have the keg tapped and ready to go before the game. Stop being such a bunch of crybabies, suck it up and do what you need to do. Go to class those two days or don’t go, but stop b*tching about it.

- Want musical equipment, costumes and instruments from a cocaine-using, thug-marrying, bill paying delinquent pop diva? If you’re like me, the answer is no. But if you aren't like me, then perhaps you would be interested in an upcoming auction to be held by a New Jersey storage facility where Whitney Houston stored many of her above-mentioned items. Seems that paying for drugs for herself and ex-husband Bobby Brown, plus bailing him out of jail over and over again, put a drain on Whit’s finances, to the point that she stopped paying Speed of Sound Storage in 2005 and now owes them more than $200.000 in back payments. The amazing thing, though, is that any profits from the auction that go above the amount owed to Speed of Sound go to Houston’s company, which rented the storage space. In other words, once more than $200,000 is brought in, those purchasing items will effectively be funding Houston’s drug habit, which she claims is now history, which of course few actually believe.

- Short and sweet: FOX has canceled The O.C., and I’m pissed. The show has actually gotten better this season, yet the network is pulling the plug and the final episode will air on Feb. 22. Rumors have been bandied about whereby the CW network might pick up the show for next season, but at this point, there’s no substantiation for those rumors. It’s just funny to see so many crappy shows on FOX get to stay, yet this good show goes; a show, I might add, that has been jerked around from one night to another, one time slot to another, and yet still has a loyal following. Ratings have dipped this year, and of course the actual quality of a show has nothing to do with it staying on the air (see Ed, Everwood, etc.), because the networks only care about ratings, which equal advertising dollars. So if the best possible scenario comes to fruition, we’ll be seeing The O.C. on the CW this fall, but if not, we can all say farewell to the show far too soon.

- Oops, sorry we killed so many people. That’s what NATO is saying about its role in the ongoing fight against insurgent groups in Afghanistan, specifically during the 2006 calendar year. NATO admitted Wednesday that it killed too many Afghan civilians in fighting last year against Taliban rebels, but rest assured, world, the organization promises to change that unfortunate reality in 2007. Well, I’m sure the “my bad” defense will help ease the pain of everyone who had a friend or family member killed in the fighting. Would this also work for the U.S. in terms of apologizing that so many Japanese were killed and badly wounded by the bomb we dropped on Hiroshima? Can all overzealous mass killings just be apologized away? Call me crazy, but I just don’t think the world works that way; it never has and it’s not likely to….ever.

- At least one part of Major League Baseball was juiced in 1998, and science has proven that it was….the baseballs. While we can't prove that the players (Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa pictures to be inserted here) were on ‘roids because there was no formal testing (other than looking at the hundred or so pounds of muscle they each added and the increasing size of their heads), scientific research firm Universal Medical Systems, Inc. has done CT scans on the baseball McGwire hit for his 70th home run and found it to definitively have a synthetic layer added around the core. In other words, it’s a sort of super ball, rubberized ball that had an extra layer of oomph under the cover. Of course, in 1998, baseball was still fighting back from the devastating 1994 strike, so juicing the balls and looking the other way as players juiced up (allegedly) would theoretically boost home runs, scoring and excitement, things that fans tend to love. Question is now, was there anything about baseball in 1998 that wasn’t fake or enhanced? At least tell me that you didn’t spike the ballpark sodas or deliver corked bats to all the players, MLB. Yikes……..

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