- Quite a weekend for the Tennessee Titans. First, the team rushed to court to secure an injunction preventing suspended cornerback Adam “Pacman” Jones from taking part in a Total Nonstop Action (TNA) Wrestling pay-per-view held Sunday night. After getting their injunction, the Titans then worked out an agreement with Pacman that allowed him to participate in the event but prevented him from physical contact with other participants, using any object (or being hit with a similar object) that could cause injury and basically anything else that could injure him in any way. Then came Saturday’s preseason opener for the Titans, where star quarterback Vince Young was suspended from the game by head coach Jeff Fisher for violating team rules. The infraction turned out to be Young spending the night before the game at his home instead of at the team hotel, a luxury afforded only to Titans with at least four years of NFL experience. Young is in his second season in the league, so Fisher sat him for the game, which isn’t actually as big of a deal as it might seem because starters usually only play one or two series in the first preseason game. The capper for the weekend was Sunday night’s TNA PPV Hard Justice, where Pacman Jones verbally sparred with another wrassler, then was “discovered” laid out backstage, supposedly the victim of a brutal attack by his adversary. The sequence was obviously fake, but TNA went all-out, having Jones loaded onto a stretcher and whisked away by ambulance. All in all, one of the more interesting weekends for a pro sports franchise lately.
- I was hit with a new emotion over the weekend as I flipped through the channels and stumbled across a new show on VH1. The show is called Mission: Man Band, while the emotion I felt upon discovering it was horr-laugh-sad-musement. The show’s premise is resurrecting one of the darkest ages in the history of music (running neck and neck with disco), the era of man bands, wherein grown men frosted their hair, bleached their teeth, wore matching outfits and danced in unison with other grown men to the delight of pre-teen girls everywhere. This new show has recruited for former man-banders from groups like Backstreet Men of O-Town Sync Degrees and slammed them all into one house to form an über-man band. The leader of of group appears to be the short dude with a bad goatee who used to be in a man band with the weasel-voiced Justin Timberlake. I think that’s who it is, but if it is him then he clearly spent all the money he made on Bon-Bons, pork rinds, beer and ice cream (or consumed several small children and has yet to digest them), because dude is massively fat. Honestly, I’m horrified at the prospect of more man band music, but I’m also amused at the notion of seeing four middle-aged dudes, three of them in abysmal physical condition, all with zero musical credibility and at least three of them with unjustifiably bloated egos try to carve out some semblance of a musical career. Sure their music will suck, but watching these four tools bumble and stumble their way through the process of making that awful music is going to produce no shortage of hilarious moments of unintentional comedy. Tune in and catch the hilarity!
- Things are going well in Iraq, really they are. Just look at…..the $40 million black-market arms deal between Iraqi government officials and Italian mafia groups involving more than 100,000 Russian-made automatic weapons intended for use in Iraq. U.S. officials in Iraq are denying that they gave approval for the transaction, which they obviously have to say whether it’s true or not. The cache of illegal arms was discovered by anti-Mafia investigators in baggage at Rome’s busy Fiumicino Airport. A month-long investigation followed a trail of emails and telephone calls and led police to search the baggage stored in a remote corner of the airport. The U.S. officials in Baghdad claim to have no knowledge of the transaction, but even so it doesn’t reflect positively on the “progress” being made in Iraq. You’ve got the government of the country buying tens of millions of dollars in black-market weapons, but we’re all supposed to believe that W.’s rebuilding plan for the country is going just fine and that the Iraqi democracy will be flourishing in the near future? It doesn’t matter what kind of shiny wrapping paper and pretty bow you put on this political turd, it’s still a load of crap and it’s not getting any better until we pull our forces out of Iraq, period.
- Rush Hour 3 is going to need to do a lot better than it did during its opening weekend if the studio hopes to turn a profit. The movie brought in $50.2 million at the box office over the weekend, but that figure looks a lot less impressive when you consider how much of that money is already spoken for. Chris Tucker’s contract calls for him to receive a wholly unjustifiable $25 million or 20 percent of the movie’s gross, whichever is greater. Jackie Chan gets either $15 million of 15 percent of the gross, again whichever is greater. He also controls the film’s distribution rights in China and Hong Kong. Director Brett Ratner is due $5 million for leading an utterly mediocre movie as well, so between those three they’re guaranteed at least $45 million. That doesn’t take into account the production and distribution costs either. Oh, and the opening weekend tallies are more than $20 million less than The Bourne Ultimatum earned on it’s opening weekend, good times……………
- So it looks like LAX is the new Ellis Island, at least for one weekend. More than 20,000 arriving international passengers were stuck in four of the airport’s terminals on Saturday when a computer glitch prevented customs officials from processing their entries into the U.S. The marooned passengers spent the majority of the day in travel limbo, unable to formally enter the United States. What better thing is there to have happen after hours and hours of international travel filled with stops, layovers, bad airplane food and boring in-flight movies? I’m guessing there were nothing but smiling faces throughout all four of those terminals on Saturday, am I right or am I right?
No comments:
Post a Comment