- Six months ago, Ian Johnson was part of the best college football game I’ve seen in years and one of the best underdog stories in sports, period, when he scored the winning two-point conversion in Boise State’s Fiesta Bowl win over national power Oklahoma. After scoring the winning conversion, Johnson immediately made his way through the end zone, over to the sideline where he dropped down on one knee and proposed to girlfriend Chrissy Popadics, a Boise State cheerleader. It was a cool capper for an amazing night of football and a genuine feel-good story all around. It’s continued to be a feel-good story…..right up to the point where Johnson and Popadics were forced to hire security guards for their wedding this weekend because they have received death threats based on the fact that Johnson, a black guy, is marrying a white girl. That’s right, some backwoods, backwater, backwards, socially retarded thinkers out there have been so incredibly classless, socially stunted and small-minded as to send death threats to two college kids because they’re getting married and are of different racial backgrounds. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of those threats came from people who regularly wear hoods and giant white sheets, if you catch my drift, but there’s never, ever any excuse for anything like this. Even if you want to hold an outdated, bigoted and just plain wrong belief such as the belief that interracial marriages are wrong, you have no right at all to threaten, harass or even belittle those who enter into such a relationship. The biggest issue you should have with a wedding is what music to play at the reception, what color to make the bridesmaid dresses, etc. - not how many security guards to hire. As much of a long shot as it is, I hope that the police are able to find out who is making these death threats and prosecutes them to the fullest extent, because that type of backwards-thinking, racist person is hurting society a lot more than they are contributing to it.
- So maybe the new iPhone from Apple isn't the be all, end all of technological marvels that it was supposed to be. Numbers released yesterday by AT&T show that in the first two days after the iPhone’s release last month, a significantly lower number of the new phones were sold and activated than had been predicted. Analysts had theorized that as many as 500,000 iPhones would be sold the first few days, but the actual total ended up being 146,000. In related news, shares of Apple stock closed down $8.81 a share Tuesday, a 6.1 percent drop that put the value of an individual share at $134.89. Of all the possible results for the release of the iPhone, selling less than a third of the number of new phones than was predicted wasn’t one of the more expected outcomes. Glitches and bugs in the phone, maybe. Problems with service and reception on the phone, also plausible. But that hundreds of thousands of people would look at the iPhone, see what it has to offer and say, “Nah, I’ll pass,” wasn’t what most people expected.
- As a regular user of Facebook, I was surprised to hear that a rival site is suing Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg for allegedly stealing their idea. The three founders of ConnectU, a social networking site similar
to Facebook, have sued Zuckerberg on the basis that they originally came up with the concept he used for the site and asked Zuckerberg to finish the computer code for their project while all of them were students at Harvard. Instead, the plaintiffs contend that he repeatedly stalled and put them off, only to pirate their idea and pass it off as his own. The lawsuit they filed will be heard at the U.S. District Court in Boston and the suit asks the court to shutter Facebook and give control of the company and its assets to the three founders of ConnectU. Part of me wants to ask if these three just finished watching The Italian Job on DVD and were inspired by Seth Green’s character’s continual claims that he was the real Napster and that Shawn Fanning stole the idea while both were students at…..Harvard. Either way, these three had better hope they have documented proof that they had the idea first, because unless they can provide more than a case of their word versus Zuckerberg’s, their lawsuit is going to be bounced quickly and with prejudice.
- The tenure of Alberto Gonzales as U.S. Attorney General was summed up nicely by a group of senators questioning him at hearings on Capitol Hill, with that summation coming in the form of two words: unqualified and deceitful. Gonzales’ part in the firing of eight federal prosecutors and his role in W.’s federal eavesdropping program have been under intense scrutiny mostly because he’s clearly done illegal things and lied about them repeatedly. For four hours on Tuesday, senators grilled Gonzales about a number of things, including allegations that he pressured a hospitalized attorney general into approving a counterterror program that the Justice Department considered illegal. As is his custom, Gonzales evaded, double-talked or outright refused to answer many questions. “It’s hard to see anything but a pattern of intentionally misleading Congress again and again,” criticized Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis. Nobody knows lying and deceit better than Congress, so if Sen. Feingold says something like that, I’m going to go ahead and believe it to be true. Well, to be fair, I’ve seen enough of the testimony ol’ Alberto has given to see his pattern of hemming, hawing and double-talking to know that he’s a lying sack of s**t. Hopefully this hearing will restart the pressure on Gonzales and his crew for all they’ve done, especially the illegal and politically motivated firings of those eight attorneys general. Ah, the W. administration……….it’s FAN-tastic!
- It’s not a good day for social networking sites, because not only is Facebook facing a federal lawsuit, MySpace is in the spotlight because it now appears that the site, best described as an adolescent version of Facebook, is an even bigger haven for pedophiles than originally thought. An internal investigation by MySpace found more then 29,000 registered sex offenders with profiles on the site, more than four times the number the company had initially estimated. North Carolina State Attorney General Roy Cooper and his colleagues had recently demanded that the News Corp.-owned site provide detailed information about how many sex offenders were registered on MySpace and where they live, but I doubt that either Cooper or MySpace execs were expecting such a disturbingly high number of sexual deviants and freaks. Anyone who has ever had an account on MySpace, well that’s a different story. I think anyone who has used the site even a bit would think that 29,000 might be seriously underselling things.
- What’s the big fuss? Who doesn’t have $207 million in spare change laying around their house? For some reason, when police discovered that amount of money at the Mexico City home of Maryland businessman Zhenli Ye Gon, they got suspicious and that suspicion culminated in Gon’s arrest on Monday on charges of operating one of the biggest drug trafficking rings ever discovered in the Western Hemisphere. Gon allegedly was in charge of an operation that supplied the main chemical ingredient in making meth. He was arrested in a restaurant in Silver Springs, Md. and something tells me he’s going to have a hard time making a case for his innocence. There aren't a lot of ways to legally accumulate $207 million and those who do earn that kind of cash legally don’t tend to keep it in physical form at their home. Those people - the Paul Allens, Warren Buffetts and Bill Gates of the world - they usually keep their hundreds of millions of dollars in banks and investments. And of course, this is definitely going to drive up the price of meth, so all my druggie readers will want to make sure they’re stocked up before prices start soaring…...kidding. I don’t have that many druggie readers, I don’t think…………
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