- How many text messages do you send on your cell each month? 200? 500? University of Arkansas football coach Houston Nutt has you beat, and it’s landing him in a lot of trouble. Some of Nutt’s detractors, seeking ammo to get the coach fired, used the Freedom of Information Act to access his cell phone records and discovered that over the course of one month this past winter, Nutt send more than 1,000 text messages to a local female TV anchor, despite the fact that Nutt is married and the anchor is decidedly not his wife. The anchor in question, Donna Bragg, is the director of a charitable foundation in Fayetteville and Nutt claims those texts were charity-related, but that’s a dubious claim. Doing a little math, we can break this down and find that on average, there were 32-33 texts per day being sent from Nutt to Bragg, more than one per hour. I’m not a text messaging expert, but I can say with confidence that if you text someone more than once an hour every day for a month, there’s something more going on than charity work. Nutt went so far as to send one text 19 minutes before his team played in the Capital One Bowl on New Year’s Day. Those critics who dug up Nutt’s phone records are using them against him in their latest ploy to get him fired, but the coach has responded with an open letter claiming the text messages were in relation to Bragg’s charity work and nothing else. I’m going to split my vote on this, because I don’t believe Nutt’s explanation but I also don’t believe that excessive text messaging alone is a fireable offense. Unless someone has proof of much more inappropriate conduct and conduct that goes beyond merely bad judgment and marital unfaithfulness, you cannot fire Nutt over sending too many text messages to a special lady friend.
- One of the dangers of playing the “Do you know who I am?” card is that people actually will know who you are and will punish you because of it. Normally I say that if you have to play that card, then you’re not important enough for people to know or care who you are. For American Karaoke judge/lush Paula Abdul, going with “Do you know who I am?” is an even worse decision. You may or may not realize this in your drugged up, alkie state P., but you’re an incredibly annoying, irritating part of the most offensive, awful TV show in the world, and when people see you in a public place and realize who you are, they just might seek to stick it to you to gain some revenge for the part you play in facilitating the atrocious karaoke-ing on your show each week. Thus, when Abdul tried to cut in line and force her way on to a Southwest Airlines flight from San Jose to Burbank and once onboard, attempted to save a seat so she could have some extra room, her fellow passengers weren’t down. One heckled her with a Sanjaya blast (seeing those frightening pictures of him/her is enough, I don’t need to know anything about who this Sanjaya person actually is), saying that Paula was no Sanjaya and that she needed to be treated just like any other passenger. See, travelers are funny that way, they don’t give a crap if some drugged up former Laker Girl with a Botox-ed up grill and a gig “judging” glorified karaoke singers on a crappy reality show wants to take their spot on a plane or save an extra seat on that plane. They want to get where they’re going as quickly as possible and they’re not giving anything up so you and your E-list celebrity status can have some extra perks. Stay in your shoes, Paula, realize who you are and take your sorry butt to the back of the line. Be thankful the airline doesn’t force you to ride in the cargo hold, where you deserve to be.
- Prepare to riot, soccer fans: rumors have the L.A. Galaxy, the Major League Soccer (again, the ultimate oxymoron as soccer is never major league) franchise of southern California, pursuing aging, head-butting Frenchman Zinedine Zidane. Zidane is the ass clown who used his head as a battering ram when an Italian player got under his skin with some good “your momma and sister” smack in the last World Cup. Now, the Galaxy want to bring him to America to team up with another over-the-hill has been, David Beckham, in an attempt to convince the rest of us that soccer really does matter. Personally I’m going to keep on not caring, and I have a feeling the rest of America (well, those over the age of 12 who don’t play youth soccer and slurp down Capri Sun pouches religiously) will do the same. Still, I do feel the need to pose a question in response to a comment by Alexi Lalas, the team president for the Galaxy, who stated that buying out Zidane’s European league contract would not be a problem. On the heels of paying Beckham ridiculous amounts of money, how can an MLS franchise have any more to spend? Their league is about the ninth most popular in the country, attendance is miniscule and I don’t see too many people sporting MLS merchandise, so where is the Galaxy coming up with this kind of jack? We may need to audit their tax returns and make sure they’re not trying to write off the $15 million they spend annually on Capri Sun and orange wedges as a business expense and therefore a tax deduction. Bring all the aging Euros you want to your team, L.A. Galaxy, you’re still soccer and you still don’t matter.
- I’ve criticized the Chinese government for actions I label as crappy in recent weeks (trying to ban all sexually explicit online content and destroying pirated copies of music, movies and software), but now there really is something crappy about China. A fertilizer plant in the Guizhou province accidentally discharged a massive amount of sulfur dioxide, and the resulting stench literally sickened 140 teachers and schoolchildren in the area. Major points deducted for the Chinese government on this one; if you’re going to rip your citizens’ porn, bootleg music and movies and their illegal software copies, the least you can do is properly regulate your fertilizer plants so they don’t release illness-inducing levels of airborne toxins into the atmosphere.
- Sorry for the beatdown and abuse, we just overreacted a bit. Those are the heartfelt, genuine words of contrition coming from the Russian government after police administered violent beatings to protestors in two recent demonstrations against the administration of President Vladimir Putin. The marches took place over the weekend in Moscow and St. Petersburg and included prominent Russians such as former world chess champion Gary Kasparov. The police predictably went overboard in wailing on demonstrators with their clubs and batons and in arresting people as fast as they could slap the cuffs on. But hey, a canned, stiff, sterile apology from a governmental spokesman should soothe any lingering tensions, right? Everyone will just forget that your administration is violently suppressing democracy and individual rights and moving back toward the Communist end of the political spectrum as long as you dig surface-deep and issue a scripted apology, Mr. Putin. All is well, don’t worry about it, everyone will just shake hands, smile and forget all about it…………….
- Is there any traffic law that New Jersey governor John S. Corzine’s vehicle wasn’t breaking when it crashed and left him hospitalized last week? A state police investigation revealed that Corzine’s vehicle was traveling at 91 mph at the time of the crash on a stretch of highway where the speed limit is 65 mph. Add to that the already known fact that Corzine was not wearing a seat belt and was being driven by a state trooper whose job it is to enforce seat belt and speed limit laws, and you have the recipe for quite the political crap storm. I’m the last person to criticize anyone for breaking the speed limit, but the governor has to know that someone in a position of authority over a whole state cannot be involved in this kind of crash where he’s breaking multiple traffic laws with a law enforcement official there overlooking said violations. Corzine comes off as a major hypocrite in all of this, and I look forward to his teary eyed, scripted fake apology in a few days as he attempts to spin the whole mess into a big misunderstanding.
- Organized crime may not be as public or prominent in the United States as it was during the 1920s with Al Capone (although it does still exist in a very real way), but the mob is alive and well in Japan. An organized crime chief gunned down the mayor of Nagasaki on Tuesday because he was pissed about the city’s refusal to pay for repairs to his car when it was damaged at a public works construction site. Mayor Iccho Ito was shot twice in the back as he walked outside of a train station, with one bullet piercing his heart and causing cardiac arrest. The heart attack was fatal, and Ito died after emergency surgery at Nagasaki University Hospital. Tetsuya Shiroo, a senior member of the Yamaguchi-gumi crime syndicate, was tackled by officers at the scene of the crime and arrested after firing the fatal shots. All I can say is that if this is how Japanese mobsters react to their car getting scratched, I would hate to see how they react to something really major. Mental note to self: if ever in Japan, steer clear of any members of the Yamaguchi-gumi crime syndicate……
- Besides being an effective torture device for wives and girlfriends to use on their husbands and boyfriends, Dancing With the (D-list) Stars isn't anything but a glorified ballroom dancing class with terrible music that fills an hour of airtime less interestingly than a test pattern. However, is it too much to ask that your show not feature covers of crappy ‘80s music that sounds like it’s sung by Cookie Monster with a bad case of laryngitis? All you need to do is walk through a room where someone is watching that joke of a show and hear five seconds of that ear-assaulting crap-ola in order to realize how blessed you are not to have a wife or girlfriend who forces you to watch DTWDLS. Oh, and having former man-bander Joey Fatone on the show doesn’t do much for your credibility either.
No comments:
Post a Comment