Morons at the MPAA, the wrong way to go about pimpin' and a doping trial full o' fun

- Absolutely, unequivocally, smoking sucks. If you smoke - be it cigarettes, cigars, cloved cigarettes, a pipe - you suck and that’s a statement I’m not backing off of, because I can guarantee that you have not smoked every single cigarette of your life in total and complete seclusion in an airtight box where none of the fumes were breathed in by another person. Thus, someone else has been forced to breathe in your hazardous, cancer-causing smoke and increase their chances of lung cancer because you lack the willpower and common decency to stop killing them and yourself with the toxin-laced smoke from your tobacco product of choice. As bad as smoking is, however, it’s still absolutely laughable that the Motion Picture Association of America is now factoring the presence of smoking in movies when it assigns ratings to films. Along with sexual content, language, nudity, violence and dialogue, smoking will be a part of the equation in determining whether a movie is rated PG, PG-13, R, etc. I can think of a lot of reasons I wouldn't want children seeing a movie, but smoking isn't one of them. God help us if kids are indeed gullible and stupid enough to pick up smoking because they saw a character do it in a movie and there wasn't a single authority figure in their life to stop them from picking up the most disgusting habit known to man.

- Most of America, even the most rabid sports fans among us, stopped giving a crap about the sport of cycling the instant Lance Armstrong retired. Without Lance’s commanding presence, cycling wasn’t something the majority of fans cared about enough to follow. Still, when Armstrong’s friend and former teammate Floyd Landis made a heroic comeback from hip surgery to win the Tour de France last year, many Americans cheered him and rallied behind his victory. That support turned sharply to disappointment and outrage when a mandatory drug test revealed traces of synthetic testosterone in a sample taken from Landis. Over the past year plus, Landis and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) have waged a pitched battle over the validity of those positive test results. There have been twists and turns as some samples have tested negative and some positive, as Landis and his team of lawyers and lackeys have attacked the testing process, the labs doing the testing and anyone else they think might be against them. The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency is also involved, but its own rules prevent the agency from publicly discussing the case. Now, Landis and the anti-doping agencies in France and the United States will go toe-to-toe in a formal hearing at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif. to try to reach a conclusion on the situation. Landis has already spent more than $1 million on his defense against the doping allegations, and at this point I think he’s just wasting his time. Just as everyone forgot about cycling after Armstrong retired, everyone has forgotten about cycling and your (alleged) cheating has faded into obscurity. Let it go, move on to your next endeavor in life and quit dredging up the issue and wasting money. At this point, you’re not going to change the perceptions that most people have about you and what you may or may not have done. Let it go, Floyd, you’re doing as much harm as good at this point.

- Hard to see how this idea backfired: A group of teachers from a Murfreesboro, Tenn. elementary school decided to stage a fake gun attack on school trip as a sort of crisis training exercise for their sixth-grade students. For some reason, when parents of those children learned about what had gone on, they weren’t down. The teachers began the simulated gun attack during the last night of the trip, telling students that a gunman was on the loose and that they needed to lie on the floor or hide under tables. They even had one teacher in a hooded sweatshirt act as if he was trying to break down the door, only to reveal to the students as they began crying and panicking that it was only a drill. What these idiots intended as a “teaching experience” didn’t sit well with parents, who took umbrage at their children being subjected to psychological trauma, emotional distress and outright terror. Memo to teachers and administrators at Scales Park Elementary School: You are dealing with young children, not a commando unit in the Army. Simulated terror exercises are too extreme for kids that age, so next time try sitting them down and just telling them what they should do in case of a dangerous situation such as a gunman on the loose. And oh yeah, tell their parents in advance so they know what you’re doing and aren't taken by surprise when they hear news about your simulated gunman exercises with their children.

- The average NFL career lasts between three and four years, which leaves the majority of players with a difficult decision when their short pro football life is over. What do they do with their life after that? For many of them, football is all they have ever known and they didn’t put that much time or effort into learning and building their knowledge base in college. They’re at a loss as to what they should do next once their playing days are done. Not former Pittsburgh Steelers player Richard Seigler, though, because he had a plan and he most definitely put it into motion once he was done playing. Oh, did I mention that Seigler’s plan was both highly immoral and illegal and could land him in prison as well as on the list of worst guys in America? Such is the life of a pimp, which is what Seigler has allegedly decided to become. He is charged with felony counts of pandering and living off the earnings of a prostitute after flying a young woman from Spokane, Wash. to Las Vegas, forcing her to engage in prostitution and then taking most or all of her earnings for himself. He could be sentenced to 10 years in prison if convicted on all charges. Now I’ll be the first to admit I haven't kept up on the going pimp/ho earnings-split rates, but I have a feeling that most ladies of the night get to keep some of what they bring in. As far as post-playing career moves go, this is one of the more creative and less intelligent ones I’ve seen. Seigler needed to do a bit more research, because while prostitution is legal in certain Nevada counties, it isn't within the city limits of Vegas. Additionally, even if he hadn’t been arrested at this point, I don’t see how Seigler’s pimping business could have been too successful, because how many hookers are going to go to work for a pimp who doesn’t allow them to keep any money they bring in? Use your upcoming time in prison to hammer the kinks out of your business model, Rich, so this kind of problem doesn’t arise again.

- A word of advice to Timbaland, Nelly Furtado and Justin Timberlake: If the three ingredients in your musical recipe are equivalent to combining horse manure, cow manure and monkey crap, it doesn’t matter what order you put them in or if you choose to combine any two of the three, the end result is still going to be crap. These three artists just keep churning out one steaming, stinking pile of rancid musical garbage after another, teaming Timberlake with Timbaland, mixing in Timbaland with Furtado or bringing all three of these acts together for songs, albums and videos. Let’s see, you have the weasel-on-helium voice of Timberlake, the suddenly skanky, urban-leaning Furtado and her questionable vocal ability and a mediocre rapper in Timbaland who should have stuck with producing instead of stepping behind the mic…….and you’re expecting good music from this combination? Just because it’s club friendly and some of the music-stupid public likes the sound doesn’t mean anything, because you can slam most any song to a dance beat, synthesize and distort the vocals and the Ecstasy-loving clubbers at most nightclubs will dance to it. Plus, the oh-so-terrible musical taste of your average 13-year-old girl will always embrace Timberlake because they think he’s dreamy. With lyrical and topical depth rivaling that of a drop of spit, the Furtado-Timberlake-Timbaland trio is one of the worst things in music this side of American Karaoke, and I sincerely hope that they all go their separate ways soon.