- If you’ve ever complained about or criticized any coach you’ve ever had at any level of sports, just be glad that you didn’t have the protagonist in this story as your coach. Brenton Wuchae, a 40-year-old track coach in North Carolina has completed the perverted old dude trifecta by dating, sexing up and now marrying a 16-year-old girl that he met while he was her freaking high school track coach. Windy Hager, the girl in question, married Wuchae after her parents signed consent forms allowing the union to take place. Let’s stop there for a second, because a good rule of thumb is that if your bride-to-be needs a parental consent form, that’s a great sign that you shouldn’t be getting married. That’s doubly true if you’re old enough to have been alive during Woodstock and your prospective bride is barely old enough to get her driver’s license. After the wedding, Wuchae immediately resigned from his post at the school, which I really don’t get. You mean to tell me it would be awkward to be a track coach at a school where your 16-year-old wife is a student? You’re telling me that kind of setup might be inappropriate? Might you be put in a tough spot when your wife wants to get home to watch TRL or go to the mall with her friends and you demand that she stay and work on her hurdling technique? Spin this any way you want, but it’s still one of the most bizarre and creepy stories of the year. Even if you argue that more and more women are marrying men a couple decades their senior and vice versa (Ashton Kutcher-Demi Moore, Anna Nicole Smith, etc.) realize that those people, while marrying much older significant others, were OF LEGAL AGE AND DIDN’T NEED A PARENTAL CONSENT FORM! It’s one thing for a 31-year-old guy to marry a woman in her fifties, quite another for a 16-year-old girl to marry a 40-year-old man. On the plus side, when Windy runs up a massive cell phone bill or forgets to take out the trash, B. Wuchae can always ground her and send her to her room, so that’s a positive, I guess………
- By now, you’ve probably heard the rumblings that Tom Cruise wants to buy the L.A. Galaxy, SoCal’s professional soccer team. See, I told you he was insane. Investing tens of millions in soccer is certifiable by anyone’s definition, especially if that soccer team is a Major League Soccer franchise, with Major League Soccer remaining the ultimate oxymoron. America, or at least 97 percent of it, isn't down with soccer, never has been and never will be. That’s why the MLS continues to play to small crowds and land abysmal TV ratings, not to mention exactly zero national sports media outlets make a point of discussing soccer on a regular basis. Yet T. Cruise is looking to buy the Galaxy and own the team that his good friend David Beckham is about to come and play for. How ironic that Beckham once admitted that he wasn’t so good at “the maths” but it’s Cruise who apparently can't do any sort of investment math in this situation? Let me help you out, O Insane One: investing more than $2.74 into any MLS franchise is a bad investment. Low TV revenues, poor attendance and measly merchandise sales do not a profitable investment make. The orange slice/Capri Sun market is maxed out and there are only so many soccer moms in minivans filled with rambunctious nine-year-olds that will attend your glorified game of human foosball. I know Cruise has jumped on a couch with Oprah, he’s unleashed unprovoked, violent verbal tirades on innocent bystanders like Brooke Shields and done a dozen other insane things the past couple years, but a potential purchase of a MLS franchise might be the most psycho of them all.
- I was shocked and appalled to learn that the new film Evan Almighty is neither funny nor good. I mean, who would guess that a lowbrow, animal-centric comedy featuring a “humorous” take on the whole Noah’s Ark story wouldn’t be laugh-out-loud funny? Look, I know that Steve Carrell is a hot comedic commodity, what with his success on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and his run on The Office, but whoever green-lighted this movie was obviously doing so after dropping massive amounts of peyote. You can throw all of the wacky animal hijinks in that you want, but if your movie has even once scene where the primary comedic ingredient is a guy getting crapped on by birds, your movie is not what we film fanatics would term a cinematic masterpiece, to say the least. Also, let this movie be another lesson that throwing together an all-star cast of big-name actors doesn’t guarantee you a successful movie. It didn’t work for The Departed, which managed to be only a better-than-mediocre film despite a cast with Mark Wahlberg, Matt Damon, Leonardo Dicaprio, Jack Nicholson, Martin Sheen and Martin Scorscese as director. The all-big-name strategy doesn’t work in pro sports (see the 20XX L.A. Lakers with Shaq, Kobe, Karl Malone and Gary Payton) and it doesn’t work in movies. Save your money if you were considering seeing Evan Almighty, just go to the nearest park and you can probably see some guy get crapped on by birds for free.
- Not a good day to be an Aborigine, that’s for sure. Australian Prime Minister John Howard has dropped a porn and alcohol ban on all Aborigines living in the country’s northern territories and instituted tougher rules on their welfare benefits in an attempt to fight sexual abuse among the native people. Some Aboriginal leaders rejected the plan as too paternal and discriminatory, by which I’m going to assume they mean they’re angry about not being able to get access to their favorite porn and booze. Now I’m not sure what qualifies as good Aboriginal porn, nor am I sure what kind of hooch the Aborigines like to drink, but if the country’s prime minister is concerned enough about the prevalence of sexual abuse among your people to drop that kind of ban on you, then you might want to take a closer look at your behavior before you go throwing around allegations of discrimination and paternalism. Besides, if poorly educated Americans living in the back woods of our country were able to find ways around Prohibition in the 1920s and manufacture their own alcohol, I’m sure the Aborigines can find a solution for this problem. As for the ban on porn….maybe go ahead and let that one slide, because no offense to y’all, but a dependence on porn qualifies you as many things, none of which are positive. Clean it up, Aborigines, I don’t need this kind of news dragging me down.
- Good to see Congress make the effort to revive the work of the Iraq Study Group, but I honestly don’t going to think it’s going to make a difference. This group is a bipartisan panel of prominent former U.S. officials who last year had the - gasp! - audacity to suggest that W. should change course on the war in Iraq. In other words, they publicly voiced what 98.6 percent of Americans over the age of eight were thinking. On Thursday, the House adopted legislation to restart the work of the group, which would then be called upon to produce a new assessment of the Mess O’Potamia that contradicts, er, offers a different viewpoint from the W. administration progress report due in September. Maybe since the vote in the House, a 355-69 slam dunk that showed agreement from both sides of the aisle, will lend more weight to the findings of the panel, but you have to doubt it, based on the administration’s strategy of plugging its collective ears and screaming “LALALALALALALALALALA!!!!” at the top of its lungs every time an opposing viewpoint to its oafish strategy in Iraq is voiced. So come September, look for the Iraq Study Group to vociferously object to keeping American troops in Iraq while W. and his crew of sycophants try to continue lying to all of us and to convince us that progress is being made and that we can win if we just send over 100,000 more troops and remain in Iraq until 2046. Good to know there are some things you can count on, even if what you’re counting on is continued incompetence.
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