- If this is what taking performance-enhancing drugs do for you, athletes may want to reconsider the practice. Detroit Tigers infielder Neifi Perez, he of the robust .172 batting average, one home run and six RBI, was hit today with a 25-game suspension by Major League Baseball after testing positive for a banned stimulant. Perez is past his days of being a starter and a star player, so maybe he was taking the stimulant in an attempt to boost his productivity and usefulness to the team, i.e. a means to earn more playing time. Whatever his reason, the drug he chose obviously didn’t work if you use his performance as a measuring stick. Perez’s suspension continues to trend of less-than-star players being the principal fall guys of MLB’s drug testing policy. So far, not a single A-list, star-quality player has gotten dinged. So either those guys know how to beat the testing, MLB chooses to look the other way if they test positive (unlikely given the new scrutiny on the sport by Congress and the public) or most of baseball’s best players are able to perform at the highest level without any supplementary help from ‘roids. As for our friend Neifi………well, at least he has a month off during the middle of the summer that he can use to take a vacation to Europe or the Caribbean, also to cycle off of whatever drugs he had been using. I realize that may drop his home run production from X to zero, but it’s a sacrifice Neifi’s going to have to make if he wants to continue to play professional baseball.
- Count me as one of the people who don’t give a rat’s arse about the upcoming Tony Parker-Eva Longoria wedding. I barely care what Parker does on the court, what with the NBA being my fifth or sixth favorite sport, so why again should I care about any detail of the man’s wedding? So he’s famous and his wife is even more famous, great. Their wedding will have lots of expensive stuff and be held at a fancy place, also super. A lot of rich people tend to do that stuff. Also, like every other wedding ever held anywhere at any time, the bride and groom will exchange vows and rings, then kiss one another and walk down the aisle together. Unless the wedding is also going to include a special moment where Ton and Eva announce a cure for cancer, declare that they are going to send me a check for $1 million or that they are single-handedly going to end the war in Iraq, then I really don’t see a single reason for me to care about their nuptials. I wish them well and hope their marriage is more successful than the majority of celebrity marriages, of which the average lifespan seems to be 18 months. Other than that, I’ll be making a point of ignoring any and all news about the wedding and hopefully you’ll be smart enough to do the same.
- This never would have happened to the “real” James Bond. An al-Qaida-inspired computer expert who billed himself as the “jihadist James Bond” was sentenced to 10 years in prison Wednesday by a British court for running a network of extremist websites and stockpiling videos of the murders of Americans Nick Berg and Daniel Pearl. Younis Tsouli, 23, also uploaded guides on how to build suicide-bombing vests onto the Internet. Taken in totality, his antics would definitely be Bond-esque, but James Bond most definitely wouldn’t get caught and put in prison for ten years. Also, before I’m willing to bestow that type of nickname on Tsouli, I need to know how often he hooks up with smoking hot, drop-dead gorgeous women who just happen to be nuclear scientists, doctors and jewel thieves and whether or not his car is capable of shooting missiles from the headlight sockets and/or turning into an underwater craft at the push of a button. Lastly, mixing in an escape from prison would also help Tsouli truly earn the “jihadist James Bond” label. He is in fact imprisoned in England and James Bond is, after all, British, so it’s only fitting.
- No bigger fan of a good protest and/or riot exists than me, but I also must take the time to mock and ridicule those who stage bad protests and give all of us dissidents world wide a bad name. Thus, a major, major wag of the finger to the weak, feeble protest attempt made by more than a million people in Colombia on Thursday. These yutzes were bold enough to………honk their car horns in unison to demand the immediate liberation of all the company’s kidnap victims! That is absolutely, positively one of the worst protest ideas ever. In order to make a powerful political/social statement, you join together with a bunch of other bozos in making one of the five or six most annoying sounds known to mankind (ranking behind any music from Britney Spears, the Spice Girls or American Karaoke, the sound of Fran Drescher’s voice and the noise from a smoke alarm). Five seconds later, your protest is over and I’m sure that the people responsible for all of those kidnappings were scared to death. Either that or they were laughing their butts off at your pathetic attempt to make a statement. For future reference, Colombians, please note that any good protest/demonstration must contain at least two of the following: marching, signage, chanting, rioting, burning, looting, pillaging, kidnapping, hostages, fiery rhetoric and gunfire. Of those eleven possible ingredients, your “protest” contained none, making your effort an utter and abysmal failure.
- Not to compound the grief of a family that has just lost a child, but is it too much to ask that people stop acting like complete morons and trying to incorporate things like cannons into their Fourth of July celebrations? An 8-year-old boy in Olympia, Wash. was tragically killed Wednesday when a small cannon being fired as part of his family’s holiday celebration exploded. For the family of this boy and other families across America, I have a special educational message: Your local municipality probably has fireworks of some sort, usually on a much grander scale. Also, chances are that there are people at those fireworks shows who have at least some clue about what they’re doing and that tends to avert this very kind of catastrophe. Go to these shows for your major firework enjoyment needs and restrict your home celebrations to sprinklers, bottle rockets and the occasional Roman candle if you happen to be knowledgeable about fireworks. From now on, leave cannons and all other major artillery out of the holiday equation unless your holiday plans include sacking and plundering a Medieval castle or laying siege to the fort in your nearest port city in an attempt to gain a military stronghold.
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