- Troy Hudson probably isn’t feeling very wanted or popular right now. Hudson, an NBA player and aspiring rapper, has experienced two less-than-stellar events of late, one relating to his basketball career and one relating to his budding rap career that could mean an expedient end to that rap career. First, Hudson decided that he would join the legions of athletes who want to be musicians and release his own rap album. You hear athletes and musicians say it all the time: All ballers wanna be rock stars and all musicians wanna be ballers. Unfortunately, most athletes who try their hand at music fail miserably and Hudson looks to be no different. In the first week following the release of his album, Undrafted, on July 17 Hudson sold……are you ready……a whopping 78 copies. Yes, that’s correct, dude was not even able to break triple digits in album sales. There are bad first weeks, there are terrible first weeks and then there are first weeks when your album sells 78 copies. Even a Milli Vanilli reunion album would sell more than 78 copies, as would your average college band selling self-made CD’s out of the back of their van any given weekend. Then you have Hudson’s team, the Minnesota Timberwolves, buying out his contract and showing him the door. There is a silver lining to this side of the equation, as Hudson will receive $6 million this season and $6.2 million next season, which is approximately 80 percent of what he was owed under the terms of his contract. He’s now free to sign with any team, plus he gets to leave the frozen tundra that is Minneapolis, so that’s a positive in some sense – well, unless Hudson has developed some sort of bizarre preoccupation with riding the indoor Ferris wheel at the Mall of America. But in the span of two weeks, having your new rap album bomb out and having your team cut you isn’t exactly the morale booster most of us would hope for. On the flip side, it will give T. Hudson plenty of material with which to write his “What I Did This Summer” essay when school starts back in the fall……..
- Late night TV host David Letterman has never been shy about letting people know that he is a graduate of Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. He often plus the university by mentioning it on his show, but now visitors to BSU will have a large, conspicuous reminder of who the school’s most famous alumnus is. The building housing the school’s communication and media department will now bear D. Letterman’s name, a move he had resisted for years but has now accepted. You really cant quibble with the choice, because Dave has accomplished a lot in his career, but what I want to know is whether or not there will be a Top Ten list posted in every office and classroom and in the building’s lobby. Y’know, something along the lines of “Top 10 Reasons to Attend Your Early Class After Last Night’s Kegger” or “Top 10 Excuses to Give Your Parents When You Need Money to Buy Ramen and Pizza After Spending All Your Money on Beer.” I also look forward to BSU naming another building after one of its distinguished alumni, a match that would be even more appropriate than Letterman and the communication/media building: writer Jason “Jabba the” Whitlock, the portly and opinionated man who once played football and the school having his name put on the dining hall.
- One of the great concert tragedies in music history will be revisited soon, with, David Biechele, the former tour manager for the band Great White, set for a parole hearing after serving one-third of a four-year sentence for igniting the pyrotechnics that killed 100 people in a nightclub fire in Providence, R.I. If you’re not familiar with the tale, the book Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story by writer Chuck Klosterman devotes a few pages to the tragedy and also examines a bit of the aftermath. Biechele will have his hearing on Sept.19, and I honestly don’t know where to come out on this. On one hand, he was largely responsible for the deaths of 100 people but on the other hand, it was an accident. The question is whether such reckless negligence and carelessness in the name of entertainment merit more than 16 months in jail. I’ll go ahead and say yes, if only because in reading Klosterman’s book and the excerpts where he talks to the friends and family members of a few people who died in the fire, it’s heartbreaking to see how these people died just because they wanted to hear a performance by one of their favorite bands in a club they went to regularly. Biechele and anyone else who had any part in permitting those pyrotechnics needs to serve a lot more than one-third of a four-year jail sentence, because even though it might not be murder or even manslaughter, it was still a crime and when people die, 16 months in jail just isn’t long enough for the person responsible.
- So you flee an oppressive, dangerous country and try to flee to the United States, only to be intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard and detained at Guantanamo Bay. You were trying to enter a country illegally, without proper documentation and without going through the proper channels, so it would be reasonable to accept a certain amount of inconvenience, right? Not if you ask a group of 22 would-be migrants from Cuba who have embarked on a hunger strike to protest their continued detainment at the prison. Look Cubans, there is no bigger fan of protests and social dissidence than me, but what the hell did you expect? You try to enter America illegally and then get pissed when we don’t give you a green light to come in and leech off of our wealth and prosperity? If we didn’t detain and process illegal immigrants, exactly what kind of mess would we have on our hands? If you really want to come to America, you’d better get used to how things work. You commit a crime (i.e. attempted illegal immigration), you usually end up locked up and in trouble with the law. The kicker is that that these immigrants aren’t even going to be sent back to Cuba because it has been determined that they face a credible threat of persecution if repatriated, so eventually they’ll get to America. I just find it incredibly disingenuous and hysterical that they try to crash our border and when they are detained for it, they get pissed and decide to go on a hunger strike. I’ve got nothing against immigrants if they go through the right process, but if I were immigration authorities I would be in no rush to resolve this situation. Let these tools sit in Guantanamo Bay and not eat, get to ‘em when you have time.
- Call it childish, call it immature, but I call it laugh-out-loud funny. University of Indiana football player Blake Powers is in a bit of hot water after drilling an off-duty police officer with a water balloon. The incident occurred in Bloomington where Powers, in a car with three friends, tossed a water balloon from the car he was in, sending the balloon through the open driver’s window of the car next to him at a traffic light. The projectile hit the other driver, off-duty Bloomington cop Paul Wampler, in the head. Wamper followed Powers and friends back to a local residence. He called in the incident and has apparently decided to press charges, but he still looks like a ginormous tool here. The cop wasn’t injured and in fairness to Powers, there was no way he could have known that the guy he was about to drench was in fact a law enforcement officer. I’ve heard this labeled as a college guy acting like an immature 12-year-old, but unless you’re totally devoid of a sense of humor, this is just a funny prank gone wrong. If you can’t get over being hit with a water balloon on or near a college campus, it might be time to reassess your choice of places to live. After all, college kids aren’t exactly known for their omnipresent seriousness and maturity. They burn couches, they throw crazy parties and they do keg stands – and yes, sometimes they throw water balloons (or shoot them hundreds of yards with the help of a water balloon launcher). The cop in this case is pressing charges, so clearly he’s one of the humorless, serious, stodgy people who can’t take a joke. But answer me this: If a guy isn’t cheating in school, driving drunk, assaulting anyone, failing out of school, doing or selling drugs or stealing money, is he really that big of a problem? This police officer and anyone at IU who imposes discipline for this “incident” need to check themselves and take a minute or two to remove that stick from up their……
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