- It just seems that for the exorbitant $60 admission you pay to get into Disney World, they should be able to offer you some kind of guarantee that you won't have a fatal heart attack and die on one of the park’s rides. That’s what happened to Jeffery Reed, 44, when he rode the Animal Kingdom’s Expedition Everest ride, which simulates a high-speed train ride through the Himalayas. Reed was unresponsive when pulled from the ride and given CPR, then pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. He had no visible signs of injury from the ride, so maybe the heart attack was from a pre-existing condition he knew about and chose to ride the ride in spite of. Or maybe he didn’t know he had a heart problem and this was unexpected; either way, Disney World was definitely not a happy and magical place for he or his family. But back to Disney World and their murderous rides….I mean, for $60, with the millions that come to Disney World annually and the inflated food and souvenir prices, can’t Disney offer a free heart screening to all visitors? You all jack up the prices of everything associated with your freaking park, from parking to admission, souvenirs to refreshments, and you can’t mix in a complementary heart screening pre-ride? Just pull one of the Seven Dwarfs off of their normal duties and have them help out……
- What is the cost for a university trying to cover up the rape and killing of one of its students in her dorm room? For Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, Mich., the answer could be as much as $357,000, which isn’t nearly enough. The school could be fined that amount by the U.S. Department of Education for its handling of the situation, mostly because it attempted to cover up what had happened, lest its sterling reputation as a bastion of educational respectability be tarnished. After all, we are talking about the Eastern Michigan University here, the Harvard of the eastern half of the state of Michigan. Let me give some advice to the EMU administration: Having a rape and murder take place in campus housing may look bad for your school. It does reflect poorly on campus safety and security and it might scare current and prospective students, thus hurting enrollment a bit and most importantly for you all, your bottom line. However, the correct response would be facing up to what happened, investigating how it happened and taking every possible step to improve campus security so that something like this doesn’t happen again. Covering it up makes you look even worse than you already did and now it’s going to cost you a blemish on your rep as well as $357,000. Hope that was worth it…..
- The best running subplot to the current college football bowl season has been watching to see which team would lose several of its players to academic, legal or team-rules issues next. This isn’t a new trend; every December, in the gap between the end of the regular season and the start of bowl season near the end of the month, players become ineligible because the semester ends for most colleges and universities in the first two weeks of December. Grades come in and invariably, some of the less scholarly athletes out there flunk classes, thus making them ineligible to play in their team’s bowl game. This year, the trend of players being ineligible or suspended by their team has apparently been following the Barry Bonds/Roger Clemens/BALCO workout regimen. School after school has seen a player or in most cases, players, taken out by bad grades, team rules violations or legal problems. Most visible has been the Florida State Crimi-noles, er, Seminoles, who are going to be without a whopping 36 players in the Music City Bowl, nearly all of them suspended for cheating in an online music history course. Next on the list is the University of Tennessee football team, with coach Phillip Fulmer announcing that six scholarship players would be academically ineligible for the Outback Bowl. The Vols’ leading receiver, Lucas Taylor, is ineligible to play against Wisconsin on Jan. 1 as well as reserve receiver Kenny O'Neal, reserve defensive back Ricardo Kemp and freshman linebacker Chris Donald. Additionally, defensive starters Demonte Bolden and Rico McCoy failed to meet the necessary academic requirements to play in the Outback Bow. "We have every resource available through our academic center for academic success by our athletes in all of our sports," Fulmer said in a statement. "In most of these cases, it was simply the student-athlete not being accountable and doing their work. In Lucas' case, however, he passed enough hours, but a new NCAA policy that went into effect this fall made him ineligible. One bright spot is the fact that all of these athletes will be in school spring semester." The new policy that Fulmer referenced in his statement requires all student-athletes to pass six hours within the specified grade requirements of each individual major. Gee coach, that seems awfully tough. Six whole credit hours? What do you think these guys are, Mensa members? What are oyu going to ask them to do next, tie their shoes and count to ten? Moving on, we have Ohio State, which has suspended two players for the national championship game, defensive backs Donald Washington and Eugene Clifford, for the mysterious “unspecified violation of team rules.” Washington has appealed, so he’s not technically suspended yet, but that doesn’t mean he’s not still a knucklehead. Other teams losing players to suspension/ineligibility are Clemson with two players lost and New Mexico, which lost star running back Rodney Ferguson for the New Mexico Bowl because he wasn’t smart enough to stay academically eligible. All in all, a banner month for college football dunces and felons, and there’s still time for more of this crap before the bowl games end in a couple weeks. I’m looking forward to the next suspension or ineligibility, because you know it’s coming…..
- When distributing illegal steroids to prominent athletes, how to keep track of who gets what and when? It’s the age old question, right up there with the chicken/egg debate and whether to wear white after Labor Day.
Thanks to records were made public as part of the government's case against former track superstar Marion Jones, we can now see how BALCO, the lab that supplied ‘roids to many elite athletes, did business. As if logging profits and losses on a ledger, the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative kept a multipage document that listed the names of athletes, the doses of performance-enhancing drugs they were taking and the results of urine tests conducted to detect steroids and masking agents, according to court records released Friday. Jones has already pleaded guilty to two counts of making false statements to federal agents. She is scheduled to be sentenced Jan. 11. She’s also had her records and results dating back to 2000 vacated and wiped from the books for track’s international governing bodies and also has had all of her Olympic medals won during the time ripped from here. But back to BALCO….this is our first chance to see how organized and structured the operations were at BALCO and perhaps to understand how they were able to outsmart various testing and governing bodies for as long as they did. After all, if their records and files are as thorough as they appear, you can be sure BALCO was just as cautious and well-organized in the rest of their operations. In Marion Jones’ case, the ledger, as well as accompanying calendars, document her use of the steroids norbolethone and tetrahydrogestrinone (THG), as well as the oxygen-boosting drug EPO, human growth hormone and insulin. The documents indicate her use of the substances in 2000 and 2001, and an accompanying sentencing memorandum says of Jones, “The defendant's use of performance-enhancing drugs encompassed numerous drugs (THG, EPO, Human Growth Hormone) and delivery systems (sublingual drops, subcutaneous injections) over a substantial course of time.”
- I gotta say, this is a bad decision. Thomas Nelson Inc., a Christian book publisher, has postponed the release of a parenting book by Lynne Spears, mother of train wreck Britney and knocked-up 16-year-old Jamie Lynn, after news of her youngest daughter’s underage pregnancy surfaced. The book, Pop Culture Mom: A Real Story of Fame and Family in a Tabloid World, was initially scheduled to drop on May 11, Mother’s Day. But for some reason, T. Nelson Inc. decided that wasn’t a good idea. Again, I have to disagree. I think we could all learn something about parenting from reading this book. Who among us doesn’t want to know how to have your oldest daughter marry a gravy-training trailer-park-trash dirtbag with whom she has two kids that she doesn’t know how to care for, makes fetch her cigarettes for her, doesn’t wear underwear in public, drinks, drugs up and fails to show up for custody hearing depositions and a younger daughter who gets knocked up before she even makes it to her junior year or high school? What parent or prospective parent out there couldn’t learn from Lynne Spears’ stellar example? This goes right up there with O.J. Simpson’s murder-by-the-numbers, “hypothetical” If I Did It, Here’s How It Happened book as the two most awesome book ideas of the past century. By awesome, of course, I mean the worst idea ever. You have to love the irony, though, of a woman who might be the worst parent in recent memory and who clearly passed no lessons of how to not f’up your life on to either of her kids writing a parenting book. Me thinks you should be reading those books and not writing them, Lynne.
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