- Two days ago, I wrote about how big a bunch of losers Star Trek dorks were, dressing up in their costumes, going to conventions and so rarely venturing outside of the darkness of their mothers’ basements. But you know who’s just as big a bunch of losers, if not bigger? It’s you, University of Florida football fans, those of you who made threatening phone calls to the owner of the impound lot who says that he received more than 200 menacing calls from you UF psychos who were irate that someone dared cal the cops on one of your beloved felons, er, players, when he broke the law. Worse yet is the fact that more than a dozen of the calls were death threats and others were bomb threats, Stan Forron told Florida Today. Several callers even offered to pay the $76 towing bill if Forron would drop the charge. Forron was surprised by the response, clearly forgetting that many fans are ignorant a-holes who excuse everything their team does and always thinks that someone else is in the wrong. “I've been in the [towing business] since '77 and I've never seen anything like it,” Forron told Florida Today. "The fans are very passionate. I think that's a big part of it. ... I'm disappointed that people could be like that. I realize how passionate people can be. But it's disappointing that they would threaten lives and property over something like this." Yes, disappointing is one word for it, while other applicable words would be moronic, indefensible, idiotic, brainless, ass-hatted, etc. How does your mind go from, “Hey, Joiner just got arrested for breaking into an impound lot,” to, “I need to call and threaten to blow up that guy’s home and business if he doesn’t drop the charges against my boy T. Joiner,”? Whose mind works in that contorted, malfunctioning a way? Clearly Florida Gator fan’s mind does. Oh, and what are these a-holes defending Joiner for? Well, according to Gainesville Police, Joiner pushed open an electric gate, got into his girlfriend’s car, inside the lot, and started to drive off. When Joiner stopped to close the gate, he was confronted by a witness who called police. Shortly after Joiner's arrest, Forron said the player had arranged to pay the bill and pick up the car. But Forron said no one was around to take Joiner's money, so he must have thought it was OK to take the car and settle up later. "He was a perfect gentleman," Forron said. "That had a big influence on why I wanted [the charge dropped]. If he had been yelling and screaming, they wouldn't have been dropped." Hey Forron, you already caved in and gave everyone what they wanted, you don’t have to continue the brown-nosing. I don’t know any perfect gentlemen who burglarize other people’s property. And I’m sure that’s what Joiner was thinking, that since no one was around to take his money for the car, it was acceptable for him to break in and take it. This isn't one of those roadside stands in some rural town where you pick up a quart of strawberries and drop your money in the pickle jar if no one is there to take it. This is a guy deciding he didn’t like someone impounding his girlfriend’s car and thieving it back before getting the charges thrown out because hundreds of ginormous tools who also double as Florida Gator fans scared the lot owner into dropping the charges. But what does Florida coach Urban Meyer care, he played Joiner quite a bit in Saturday’s loss to LSU. But maybe karma evened things out, because that loss ends Florida’s national title hopes, so Joiner, Meyer and Co. got a little bit of payback after all from the universe.
- High school reunions already suck, why does anyone need to do anything to make them worse? You go and pay $80 bucks for a mediocre meal that you eat in a room filled with a hundred or more people that you didn’t like when you went to school with them and probably like even less now. You listen to awful music, marvel at how badly many of your former classmates have aged and wonder if any of them have ever heard of a treadmill or elliptical machine, all while hearing them talk about their lives, which you could not possibly care less about. All the while, you’re reminded of how old you’ve gotten and how you can't do a lot of the things you used to be able to do. All of this would be bad enough to cause most people to avoid their reunion like Rosie O’Donnell avoids the salad bar, but then you have people like Timothy Joseph Vaughn, 39, of Lakeland, Fla. Vaughn is a deeply disturbed soul who decided that a good way to spice up his 20th high school reunion would be to threaten a massacre that would make the tragic Virginia Tech shootings look “like a birthday party.” He mentioned the Va. Tech shootings in an email to the reunion coordinator for the Lakeland High School class of ’87 reunion, then police found hundreds of homemade explosive at his home and arrested this tool. Look, I know every class in every school has their lunatic loner, the guy who you figure might go Unabomber, but hundreds of homemade explosives? And this guy was cracking jokes about a tragedy like the Virginia Tech shootings? On second thought, maybe seeing fat, annoying, dull former classmates and having to look at pictures of their kids isn't so bad……
- How’s about a story featuring a college athlete not acting like a complete knucklehead? That would be Washington State basketball player Taylor Rochestie, who displayed a complete lack of selfishness and ego by voluntarily giving up his scholarship for his senior year so the team could sign a highly touted recruit from Florida. Rochestie is a starter and will be one of the team’s senior leaders this year, but he will also be a non-scholarship guy paying his own way because he and his family can afford the $25,000 cost of attending WSU for a year and he felt the scholarship would better benefit the team if it were used on this new recruit. You could point out that yeah, he’s only doing this because he and his family are well off and he doesn’t need the financial help, but not all wealthy people are that way. Not everyone is a Bill Gates-esque philanthropist who gives away his or her money to help others. Many people who have a lot keep it and don’t use any of it to help others, so props to Rochestie for not just keeping what he could have said was rightfully his, but instead doing something to make his team better. Not only is he not getting arrested, testing positive for weed, driving drunk or assaulting girls, but he’s actually sacrificing to help his team win. Now go sleep in and skip your early class tomorrow or build a beer-can pyramid in your living room so we know you’re still a real college dude, T.
- Mac is dating Drew Barrymore, but who is PC dating? Mac would be Justin Long, the actor who played the part of an Apple computer in the popular TV spots, and PC would be John Hodgman, who played the role of Windows-based computers. Long, who was in the most underrated TV series of all time (Ed, which NBC still needs to put out on DVD, get on it!) is dating Barrymore after the two acted together in the upcoming film He’s Just Not That Into You. The seem likely to continue the ever-present trend of on-screen hookup, on-set love, breakup within a few months, but you never know. After all, he does have a great operating system, isn’t susceptible to viruses like PC and….never mind. They’ve been seen out and about in Vegas, making out, and are said to be “very serious,” which is code for “they’ll break up in about a month.” Justin, I know you’re not an A-lister, my man, but Drew Barrymore in 2007, you can do better. If this were 1997, I’d say you were doing as well as you could, but you should at least be able to bag one of the girls on the new CW FALL shows like Life is Wild or Gossip Girl, right?
- It’s “It depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is,” all over again. While our former president, one Bubba Clinton, used that evasive wording and phrasing to talk his way around what women he’d had sex with, our current Moron-in-Chief W. is using the same verbal two-step to dance around the issue of whether or not the United States is in the practice of torturing terrorism suspects when they are being interrogated. In comments clearly written for him by someone else because they actually made sense – kind of – W. insisted that “this government does not torture people.” However, his administration sycophants still refuse to discuss certain torture, er, interrogation techniques that have reportedly been used, including head-slapping and water-boarding. Head slapping? What is this, terrorist investigation or the WWE? Head slaps are what HHH does to Mick Foley in their big WrestleMania match, it’s not a method an interrogator should be using to coax information from a suspect. What’s next, shots to the head with a steel chair and slapping on a submission hold until the alleged terrorist gives you what you need to know? Both Congress and the Justice Department have publicly denounced torture as an interrogation technique, but reports this week suggested that the department has secretly authorized torture techniques at some of the CIA’s secret overseas prisons. But if you parse words, get knee deep in semantics and double talk your way through questions about torture, I guess you could make it seem like you don’t allow torture and in no way is it going on. However, when your administration has lied, deceived, manipulated and misled the public and Congress on so many issues over the past seven years, don’t expect the rest of us to buy the load of sh*t you’re selling, W. You’ve shown over and over that you have no respect for the Constitution, the laws of this country, Congress or the wishes and beliefs of the American people. So is there torture going on? Yes, almost certainly. Are you lying when you say that torture is not going on? Yes again. Are we all über-thankful that in about a year your sorry ass will be gone from the White House for good? You better believe it.
- The Kaiser Chiefs said it best: I predict a riot. The same is true any time you mix angry French teenagers and the police, the authority figures those teens despise. Dozens of hooded teens in Saint Dizier, France, put on an impressive display of looting and rioting Friday, using metal bars to demolish two police cars, set fire to more than a dozen other cars and then set fire to a community center in the latest clash against authority in a region of northeast France that has seen more than its share of raging against the machine. The cause for this particular clash wasn’t anything more than the usual strife between angst-ridden teenagers and authority figures, but the ability of these hooded hoodlums to take their looting and rioting to the next level shows that they have the potential to be truly great social dissidents. If your only cause to riot is tensions with the police that aren’t even over a major issue like police brutality, racial profiling or a similar issue and you can get yourself worked up enough to do that much damage, just think what you could do if you were fighting for a major cause. So take pride, young French rioters, because you’ve staged this week’s Riot of the Week! Here’s to many future successful social demonstrations featuring violence, property destruction and general mayhem for all of you.
- Somebody’s lying here, and call it a hunch, but I’m going to say that the liar is Gen. Than Shwe, the military junta ruling over Myanmar. Conflicting reports about the detainment of Buddhist monks in the country and the number of protestors killed in the large-scale demonstrations in the capital city of Yangon on Sept. 26-27 are emerging, with the government insisting that the number of detainees is around 2,100 and the death toll at approximately 10, with the opposition movement placing those figures closer to 6,000 detainees and 200 deaths. Also, the government is claiming that only 109 of the hundreds of detained monks remain in custody, while they continue their search for four monks they have labeled as ringleaders of the rebellion. Both sides have reason to lie, with the government wanting to downplay the brutality and excessive force it use to stop the rebellion and the opposition wanting to make the government out to by as brutal and villainous as possible. Of course, that’s not a difficult task when your military is beating down and firing on civilians and arresting anything that moves on a city street and the whole world can see images of what is going on. Even going by the limited footage and images I’ve seen, it seems impossible that only 10 people were killed in those protest marches, so I have a very difficult time buying the government’s story. Either way, this conflict looks to be bogging down at the moment, with both sides entrenched in their positions and many citizens in Myanmar resigned to the fact that without outside intervention, they don’t have much hope of dislodging their oppressive government from its spot atop their country’s hierarchy. Hopefully the more bold and outspoken among them won't allow hope to be lost completely, because this is a fight worth fighting. Plus, it’s nice to see a country actually fight its own battle for democracy and not have the United States (well, pretty much W.) impose democracy on it whether the people want it or not (sound familiar, Iraq?).
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