- O.J. Simpson is a beauty. I don’t know anyone else who could pull the act that the Juice is pulling and still be laughing and smiling as he did it. After being arrested and charged with seven felonies in conjunction with a break-in and burglary in a Las Vegas hotel room, some amazing details are emerging about just how the Juice planned and pulled off his own personal sting operation. First, there’s the fact that the Juice allegedly put together his posse for the raid at a wedding cocktail reception. Yes, dude found four or five guys at a wedding reception and talked them into forming the Juice’s own personal S.W.A.T. team. Most single guys go to wedding receptions to pick up chicks, but O.J. goes there to recruit members for the J.S.W.A.T. Then there’s the fact that TMZ.com is floating an audio tape allegedly from the hotel room when the Juice and his crew burst in to steal back memorabilia he claimed was his. On the tape, a voice believed to be Simpson’s can be heard telling the rest of his posse to not “let anyone out of this room.” Simpson has admitted to being in the room and taking the memorabilia under contentious circumstances, but he also tried to tell police that he was unarmed. Well, apparently at least some of his guys were, which escalates things substantially. Also on the tape, an enraged Juice yells, “You think you can steal my sh*t and sell it? You think you can steal my sh*t?” over and over. The guys he’s screaming at are noticeably panicked (and rightfully so), with one of them trying to throw his buddy under the bus and placate the Juice by saying, “Mike took it.” Good one, because as much as I appreciate loyalty to one’s friends, I appreciate staying alive more and doing anything other than what this guy did could have caused him to receive the Ron and Nicole treatment. The hilarity of this situation doesn’t end with the end of the robbery, though. Apparently O.J. called one of the men he and his posse robbed the next day because in seizing some of his belongings, Simpson also picked up some things that didn’t belong to him. So after robbing these guys in plain sight with no disguise in the most heavily surveilled city in America, he calls one of the victims and leaves a voice mail for the guy, asking how O.J. can give his stuff back to him. The kicker is that when asked about the whole incident, the Juice went with the clichéd Vegas catch phrase, saying, “I thought what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” Ahhhhh……good one, Juice, you’re hilarious. Or you would be if you weren’t the worst dude in the history of the world. Most of the time you can leave what happened in Vegas in Vegas, but not if you commit burglary and armed robbery, that you can’t leave in Vegas. Still, you have to love the sheer testicular fortitude of a guy who got away with a brutal double murder (allegedly), continues to act like everyone doesn’t know he really is a murderer, goes to Vegas to stage his own commando raid on a hotel room full of memorabilia and has the balls to crack a joke like that. Having said all of this, I have to ask, now that the raid has been completed and your plan executed, Juice, the one question we all want to know is: Has this brought you closer to finding the real killers? Just curious…….
- And the winner is……no one? For the first time in forever, not a single one of the five major TV networks has a schedule that is clearly the best as the fall TV season begins. Mostly that’s because on the whole, every one of the five schedules sucks. Not one of these networks has a single night, let alone a whole week, of shows that are great. For every Prison Break, there’s an Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?, as is the case on Fox. Some networks, such as ABC, don’t even have their best show returning until January, as is Lost. Then you have Fox calling its new crime drama K-Ville a “landmark series,” even though it’s going to last about four weeks before being cancelled and is about as revolutionary as a peanut butter sandwich. Perhaps the most downtrodden of all networks is the CW, for whom I have no sympathy because the suits there have done this to themselves. They’ve systematically eliminated their best shows the past two years and are now left with a smorgasbord of rat feces on nearly every night of the week. The ONLY good show that the network has to offer during its premiere week is Smallville. Teen drama One Tree Hill is being retooled and will return in January with the show’s characters advanced ahead four years in time, past the college years the typically kill such shows. It remains to be seen if the revised version will work, but it definitely can’t be any worse than stinkers like Reaper and Beauty and the Geek. I honestly can't remember a year in which no new shows have excited me enough to watch. Even last season there were Heroes, Traveler and The Black Donnellys. This year there’s…..The Big Bang Theory, a lame half-hour comedy about a bunch of science nerds trying to pull chicks? Thanks, but I’ll pass.
- One college football note I neglected in yesterday’s posting was the ending of the longest losing streak in the nation, with the Duke Blue Devils snapping their 22-game skid. They hadn’t won a game since October 2005, but on Saturday night, the Dukies defeated Northwestern by a 20-14 score. Smart kid on smart kid violence isn't something I usually endorse, but in this case I’ll make an exception. Duke has long been known for two things – well, three if you count their irrepressible arrogance – and those two things are being smart and having a good basketball team that everyone outside of Durham hates with a passion. But for one glorious Saturday in September, the Dukies stopped sucking long enough to win a football game. Personally I’m happy to see it, because I’ve been on teams that go winless for prolonged periods of time and it absolutely sucks. The jubilation from the Duke players and coaches was awesome, and even if that’s the only win of their season, at least they’ve shed the dubious distinction of being the biggest losers in college football. The game came down to the very end, with Northwestern missing its final chance to win with just a few seconds remaining when quarterback C.J. Bachier’s pass fell incomplete in the end zone, sending the Duke sideline into a frenzy. Now if this were the Duke basketball team I would be rooting for their losing streak for reach 15,022, but I am glad to see this football team finally win. Their coach is not a loathsome, rat-like whiny bastard like Duke’s basketball coach, Mike Kryzewski. So well done, Dukie football, you all earned it.
- You know how it’s said that banks operate on the principle that money comes in from deposits, goes out on loans and if every with money in the bank came at once to withdraw their money, there wouldn’t actually be enough on hand to meet the demand. In other words, the bank would crash if everyone tried to take out their money at the same time. Well, many British bank customers seem eager to challenge that logic, because on Saturday, hundreds of customers lined up outside branches of the Northern Rock Bank, desperate to withdraw their money after news came out that the bank had applied for an emergency loan to remain financially solvent. At some locations police were called in to maintain order, but neither the police presence nor assurances from the government that their money was safe dissuaded the anxious Brits. If only they would all follow my lead and place their money in a far safer place…..at their local betting parlor on a wager that O.J. Simpson will officially be named the worst guy ever by the end of the decade……
- I haven’t seen the official numbers yet, but I’ll go out on a limb and say that the current World Cup of women’s soccer is producing some of the lowest ratings numbers of the year for ESPN. And before you pass that off as my bias against soccer or women’s sports (OK, so soccer is boring and women’s sports at any level are substantially less interesting than the same men’s sports at the same level), hear me out. With America being the soccer-loathing nation we are, exactly how many people do you think are tuning in at 4:55 a.m. for some exciting World Cup action between Korea and Nigeria? Yeah, that’s what I thought. I know ESPN is hard up for programming to the point that they regularly broadcast auto racing, poker, dog shows and spelling bees, but while soccer is actually an improvement over those choices, it’s a marginal improvement. People barely give a crap about the men’s World Cup and men’s soccer is a much more established sport. At least we can all take solace in the fact that the airtime being used up for this event is at a time when no one would be watching anyhow. That’s what happens when your games are being played in China, I suppose.
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