Adios, Rosie O'Fat, adios, creepy snakes-on-a-plane guy and adios to illegal immigrants if you heed my advice

- For future reference, attempting to re-enact Snakes on a Plane in real life is a bad idea. Yahia Rahim Tulba, a would-be passenger attempting to board a flight out of the main airport in Cairo, Egypt was detained by customs officials after it was discovered that his baggage included 700 live snakes, some of them poisonous. Tulba was asked to open his bag after he informed officials of the snakes’ presence but asked everyone to stay at a safe distance. He intended to sell the snakes in Saudi Arabia, although the total value of his scaly supply of crawling creatures was not immediately known. No word on whether Samuel L. Jackson was also on board the plane, but this is yet more proof that no matter how many pictures they put on the security signs at the airport to show things you can't bring on a plane, some moron will try to sneak something else onto a plane that shouldn’t be there. You’ve seen the signs, pictures of guns, knives, water bottles, explosives, etc. with a red circle around them and a red slash mark diagonally across them. Looks like airport security will now need to add a snake graphic to that list so that would-be snake smugglers don’t try to board the plane with hundreds of dangerous animals. I’m still at a loss as to how you could think this was OK under any circumstances, but then again the world is not a smart place……….

- Good to see another state legislature engaging in the pointless, idiotic and wasteful notion of apologizing for an act that happened nearly a hundred and fifty years ago. The state legislature in Alabama has become the latest to issue a formal apology for slavery, even though all those who were enslaved are dead, the people who owned slaves are dead and anyone who was directly affected by the horrible practice of slavery in Civil War times is also dead. The Alabama Legislature officially passed a resolution Thursday that expresses “profound regret” for the state’s role in slavery and also apologizes for slavery’s wrongs and their effect on this country. Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina have already passed similar legislation, which I am sure are of great comfort to the people buried in cemeteries around the country who actually suffered those effects and wrongs, even though those people have no knowledge of these resolutions and never will. I move for a new resolution that no one should be apologizing for anything they didn’t do when those who were wronged are no longer alive. More or less, these measures are a feeble attempt to garner favor with African Americans of this day and age and a way to put a happy face on a terrible time for America - except they don’t accomplish any of that because you can't apologize for something you didn’t do to someone who no longer exists.

- So the verdict is in on the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and the verdict is…..ehhhhh, it’s OK. That’s the best I can muster for this movie, which unfortunately continues the recent trend of third installments in major movie series that are definitely weaker than the first two editions (see Spiderman, Shrek and even the last version of the Matrix trilogy a couple years back). While the plot is decidedly less complicated and difficult to follow than the preceding Pirates movie, Curse of the Black Pearl, At World’s End is unwieldingly long, two hours and 45 minutes, and while there’s plenty of action to fill that time, the picture has numerous holes that make it a bit of a sinking ship long before the final credits roll down the screen. The most obvious beef I have with this movie is its ending, specifically the ending for Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley). Without giving it away, I’ll just say that it’s neither really positive nor really negative, but more of a halfhearted cop-out that won't make much of anyone happy. Also, the dialogue in large chunks of the movie is terribly indiscernible, with the main culprit being Capt Barbosa, played by Geoffrey Rush. During climactic action sequences on the high seas, Barbosa’s loud proclamations sound like garbled gibberish that you need subtitles to understand. Also, the movie devotes a large chunk of time and effort toward the relationship between Davey Jones and the goddess of the sea, Calypso, but ultimately this storyline proves to be of little relevance to the main focus of the movie. Ultimately, I think At World’s End falls victim to the massive expectations for it based on the preceding two pictures in the series. Everything in a movie of this magnitude has to be big, over the top and excessive, and the movie as a whole suffers for it. Still, the great special effects and visuals, plus a cast of interesting characters and plenty of great action do save the film to some degree, and as such it’s not a total waste.

- Elizabeth Hasselbeck, you are my hero. Besides being considerably hot, Hasselbeck has done all TV watchers a huge favor and delivered a swift kick to the sizeable arse of Rosie O’Donnell that has propelled the chubby former comedienne out the door of ABC’s The View even sooner than planned. Hasselbeck and O’Fat tangled about the war in Iraq, which O’Fat is a vocal critic of. There was some haggling about O’Fat tagging American troops in Iraq as terrorists and whether she actually said that, and several times Hasselbeck stood up to O’Fat’s bullying tactics and pounded the table while insisting she be allowed to speak. I’m going to go ahead and forget that I actually agree that the war is a terrible thing, because even though I don’t agree with Hasselbeck’s stance on the issue, I more importantly agree with her standing up to the tyranny of idiocy that is Rosie and sending her fat, ugly face packing. If an argument is enough of an irritant to cause O’Fat to ask for an early release from her contract and leave the show immediately, I have to side with whomever is on the other side of that debate. Well done, Liz, you’re a hero to all of us…………..

- We could save ourselves a lot of trouble on debating and hashing out this new immigration bill currently making its way through Congress with two things: a ginormous wall and a whole lotta guns. The Senate has overwhelmingly endorsed a wide-reaching bill that would tighten border security and create a strict verification program designed mainly to deny jobs to illegal immigrants. Rejected by the Senate were two measures also relating to immigration, one of which would have ended the temporary worker program for immigrants after five years, and another bill that would have allowed government authorities to question a person about his or her immigration status if authorities had reason to believe that person was in the United States illegally. Both of those measures were rejected by a narrow one-vote margin, showing the contentious and hard-fought nature of the immigration issue. There would be no need to question illegals or to find a way to deny them jobs, though, if my solution was adopted: a 35-foot wall along the whole border, topped off by five rows of razor wire, with guard towers stationed every quarter mile, manned by guards with high-caliber automatic rifles. Think about it Congress, it could just be the answer to all of your immigration problems……….