ftover college football thoughts from the weekend, since I didn’t do my usual rundown of the entire day of action. One, how pissed does Pete Carroll have to be right now? After new Stanford head coach Jim Harbaugh spent all offseason tweaking Carroll by making comments about how USC might be the best team in the history of college football, Stanford goes into the L.A. Coliseum and stuns the #2 Trojans 24-23 with a last-minute touchdown. Gone are USC’s national title dreams, down the drain at the hands of a coach that Carroll has to want to kill right now. Meanwhile, LSU salvaged its own title dreams for now by rallying from a 10-point fourth-quarter deficit to defeat Florida 28-24, handing the Gators their second consecutive loss in the process. LSU’s vaunted defense had a mediocre game at best, but in crunch time they stopped the Gators and for the time being, LSU is on course for a berth in the national title game. There were some real barnburners all day long, many of them involving non-ranked teams as usual. In the Big Ten, Northwestern actually won a conference game, 48-41 in overtime against Michigan State in a game where there literally seemed to be a score every time a team got the ball. Northwestern’s C.J. Bacher threw for more than 500 yards and five touchdowns and thanks to a porous defense, his team needed every yard and every point it could get. Really off the map was a Mid-American Conference game in which the University of Akron Zips scored 15 points in the final four minutes, including a safety with less than a minute left and a lateraled free-kick return for a touchdown with no time left on the clock, to win at Western Michigan, 39-38. Out in Hawaii, the Rainbow Warriors won the game against Utah State, 52-37, but may have suffered a bigger loss when star quarterback and Heisman hopeful Colt Brennan left the game with a leg injury in the third quarter. However, UH is still undefeated at 6-0 and sits at #XX in the polls, one spot behind the University of Cincinnati, which ruined the season of Big East rival Rutgers for the second consecutive year with a 28-23 victory in Piscataway, N.J. Also joining USC as a Top 5, undefeated team losing to an unranked conference opponent was Wisconsin, which fell 31-26 to the surging University of Illinois Fighting Illini. Believe it or not, the Illini have shaken their status as perennial doormats in the Big Ten and currently sit alone in first place atop the conference standings with a 3-0 league mark. Perhaps the best way to sum up the weekend is to say that when the dust had settled, the fourth and fifth-ranked teams in college football, respectively, are Boston College and South Florida. Yeah, it sounds insane, but it’s true – and we’re still only at the halfway point of the season.
- You brought this on yourself, America, with your inexplicable support of idiotic, gawd-awful TV shows like American Karaoke on FOX and Making the Band and its 45 different incarnations on MTV. Now, FOX and MTV have decided to lower the bar even further, if that’s possible, with new shows America’s Next Great Band (FOX) and Making Menudo (MTV). That’s right, MTV is resuscitating the rotting, decomposing corpse that is Latin America’s original man band, Menudo. Why they’re doing this, I don’t know. After all, this is the group that spawned the musical mistake that is Ricky Martin, so why reward it by casting a new bunch of matching-outfit-wearing, unison-dancing, hair-frosting man-banders to create more of the absolutely un-listenable music that Menudo is known for? Allow me to use this analogy: If a guy goes out and brutally murders a family of four, chops them up and burns their remains and then offers to make you a delicious strawberry cheesecake if you’ll overlook his transgressions, do you accept the offer? Heck no. Likewise, if a musical group spawns something as hideous and horrendous as Ricky Martin and his crap-ola music, then that group wants to reform with new members and produce more music and theoretically more guys like Martin, there’s no way you allow that to happen. Yet here’s MTV, not only supporting that effort but acting as a facilitator. Joining them in their stupidity is FOX, which clearly isn't satisfied with having crappy glorified karaoke contests to launch the careers of effeminate warblers like Clay Aiken and now wants to go out and find all the hack musicians it can, regardless of genre, and put them on TV as well in America’s Next Great Band. That poseur rockers INXS already tried this concept as failed miserably doesn’t seem to have deterred FOX, which will now parade an endless line of losers on stage with their subpar playing of instruments to supplement the mind-numbingly bad vocals that American Karaoke provides the network with a never-ending supply of. But I don’t feel the least bit sorry for you, America, because you brought this on yourself. If you’d had the good sense to not watch shows like American Karaoke on FOX and Making the Band in the first place, you wouldn’t be dealing with this new round of terrible TV.
- As strange as this might sound from someone who loathes the music of the Black Eyed Peas with every fiber of his being, I sincerely wish the members of the group would stick together and focus on only making music as a group. Why, you ask? Well, although every single album from the Peas has been utterly crap-tastic in the worst possible way, at least when they’re together, you only have to worry about avoiding music from a single source. Instead, we’ve been subjected to some of the most horrifically bad, sickeningly pathetic pop music ever made from the joke of an artist that is Fergie, and now will.i.am., who should apologize to e.e. cummings for ripping off the concept of putting your entire name in lower-case letters and using it for such a crappy musical career, is putting out his own album, Songs About Girls. Wow, how original, Will I Ain’t. Who would have guessed that as the “mastermind” behind the farce that is the Black Eyed Peas, whose music contains less depth and lyrical skill than the drunken ramblings of your average frat dude on a Saturday night and is far more painful to listen to, your solo album would be songs about girls. Not so coincidentally, your Peas pal Fergie also likes singing about girls – no, make that girl, as in singing about herself, how hot she thinks she is and how much guys wanna get with her. For this album, Will I Ain’t goes with a concept album, with the songs about a guy who meets and falls in love with a girl but ultimately loses her. It mixes funk, soul, dance and club music into one appalling ball of musical garbage. I didn’t know it would be possible to take so many different types of music, incorporate them and fail to pull out any of their good qualities into the finished product, but Will I Ain’t has done just that. It’s akin to taking every piece of leftover food – pizza, Chinese, hot dogs, watermelon, French Fries, a half-eaten quesadilla – and throwing them all into the same blender to mix. The result is going to be ugly, it’s going to smell bad, it’s going to be messy and you’re not going to want to be within a thousand feet of it, let alone eat it. The same can be said for Songs About Girls, except it might be even more unappealing than the mixture coming out of that blender.
- The Buddhist monks in Myanmar might be in a state of detainment or repression from the military in their nation, but clearly their example has inspired monks (and non-monks) worldwide to speak out against the brutally oppressive military regime currently governing Myanmar. Activists in cities across Europe and Asia held vigils Saturday in support of the pro-democracy forces in Myanmar, where the ruling military junta has been busy harassing beating, killing or jailing those who dare speak out against him and his regime. Some activists within the country also held their own secret vigils in support of those who have been injured, jailed or killed in the resistance efforts. While the worldwide demonstrations aren’t expected to have much of an effect inside Myanmar, they should help to keep the issue on our collective global conscience and thus increase the chances that someone will step in to help the people of Myanmar if they ask for international support in their fight against the elitist regime that has now ruled their nation with an iron fist for 45 years. Some of the protests on Saturday took place in locations such as Taipei, Melbourne, London and Paris, where police actually blocked demonstrators from marching on the Chinese embassy. That’s notable and amusing because I didn’t know that French military or law enforcement were good for anything but surrendering…..but I digress. Even in nations where protest marches are done in support of a conflict thousands of miles away, this situation is creating tension and strife. Keep the pressure on, world, because eventually this junta and his regime will go down.
- Thhhhhheeeeeee Yankees LOSE! Thhhhheeeeeeee Yankees lose! Suck it, John Sterling. Sterling is the Yankees radio announcer famous for belting out an elongated “Yankees win! The Yankees win!” every time the Bronx Bombers are victorious, so I thought it only fitting that I pay tribute to him on this glorious day when the Yankees are eliminated from the postseason yet again, this loss costing manager Joe Torre his job. That gem comes courtesy of the biggest ass in all of baseball, on the executive side anyhow, George Steinbrenner. Big Stein dropped the bomb before Game Three that unless the Yanks won the series, Torre was gone. That led to the predictable compulsion of TBS to show a close up of Torre every time something bad happened to the Yankees in the third and fourth games of the series. Now, that fatal loss has happened. Torre will be canned, while legendary Yankees public address announcer Bob Shephard, who is missing this series with some sort of throat malady and prompting the Yankee ass-kissing TBS broadcasting crew to continually fall prostrate at his proverbial feet and lament Shephard missing this series, can have until next year to rest his pipes and get ready to announce more baseball at Yankee Stadium. Speaking of that TBS crew, could Skip Caray, Tony Gwynn and Bob Brenly have been more biased in favor of the Yankees. If you watched the game tonight, you know that the answer is no. Every time the Yankees got so much as a 2-0 count on a batter, even if there were no runners on base and they were down by four runs, Caray ramped up his enthusiasm and jacked his voice up a notch, telling us that the Yankees are ready to make a comeback. Even as they trailed by two runs in the ninth, this ass hat was trying to tell us what the broadcast schedule would be for Game Five, as if it was a given that they would rally and win despite the two-run deficit and no runners on base. This isn't about an anti-Cleveland bias, either. I don’t believe it would have been any different if it had been the Angels, the Tigers, the Twins, the Mariners or the White Sox playing the Yankees. Clearly, the networks are sluts for the Yankees, desperate for the ratings boost that they provide. Should this affect the way the game is announced? No, but it does, and you could clearly hear it tonight. However, for the third straight year, the Bronx B’otches have failed to make it past the first round of the playoffs, setting up an American League Championship Series that won't make the rest of the country sick to watch. The Boston Red Sox aren’t the darlings they once were, but they aren’t nearly as hated as the Yankees. So I look forward to a great ALCS, but mostly I look forward to knowing that the Yankees will be watching that series from their couches. You suck, Yankees and Yankee fans.
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