- The spirit of rioting and protesting has really died off here in America in the past few decades. Ever since the ‘70s, we’ve become far too apathetic about taking it to the streets to riot and demonstrate against things we disagree with. Most of your upper echelon rioting is done overseas nowadays, so it gives me great pride to bring you news of a good ol’ fashioned riot right here in the U.S. of A. The New Orleans City Council voted Thursday on demolishing 4,500 public housing units and many activists and preservationists surprisingly weren’t down with the idea. The council met and voted unanimously to demolish the housing units even as protestors rioted and clashed with police in the streets outside. The vote clears the way for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to tear down four housing developments as part of the city’s rebuilding efforts following Hurricane Katrina. Dozens of protestors tried to force their way into the packed City Council chamber, with cops using chemical spray and stun guns to stop them. Right, because you always want to go to the stun gun blast as a first resort. Several mounted officers were also on hand to beat down protestors, but my hat is off to all those rioters who took things up a notch here. Their government was doing something they felt was wrong and they spoke out loudly against that action, with the predictable over-reactive response from the police. I would have liked to see some property destruction mixed in as well, but other than that, well done New Orleans rioters, well done.
- Mission Impossible-esque it was not, but a surprisingly simple art theft in Sao Paulo, Brazil still netted millions of dollars worth of paintings, including Pablo Picasso’s Portrait of Suzanne Bloch. The thieves needed only a crowbar, a car jack and three minutes to make off with several valuable works of art from the Sao Paulo Museum of Art just before dawn on Thursday. I might be a bit harsh on this, but if your museum has that many valuable works of art, including one of Picasso’s more famous works, shouldn’t your security system be a little better than it clearly is at the Sao Paulo Museum of Art? It’s like putting a “Do Not Steal” sticker on your Hummer H2 and leaving it unlocked in the middle of downtown Manhattan; you’re basically asking someone to steal it. If thieves need just one crowbar, one car jack and three minutes to clean you out of your most pricy pieces, your security sucks. Better luck next time, S.P.M.A., although that’s coming from a person who doesn’t believe in luck, so maybe better security next time is more apropos….
- Finally, Sacha Baron Cohen has made a positive contribution to the entertainment industry, and unfortunately that contribution is not giving me back the two hours of my life I wasted watching his crap-tacular Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan movie. However, Cohen has announced that he is retiring Borat, the clueless Kazakh journalist who was the central character in literally one of the 2-3 worst movies I’ve ever seen, along with Cohen’s other alter-ego, Ali G. “When I was Borat or Ali G, I was in character sometimes 14 hours a day and I came to love them, so admitting I am never going to play them again is quite a sad thing,” the actor said recently. Not as sad as I was after watching Borat and realizing how awful of an experience I’d just had, S. Nearly two hours full of bodily function/bathroom/crude sex humor and as lowbrow of comedy as you can get centered around an asinine plot a mentally handicapped park squirrel would be bored with made for a gawd-awful movie experience, so no one is more thrilled than I am that there will be no sequel. Seriously, your movie made me long for the acting talents of Pauly Shore, so you can see how low on the watchability scale we’re talking here. Adios Borat, the only better thing at this point would be if you’d never existed at all…..
- Well done, unidentified Jefferson County (Ky.) Circuit Court judge, well done. I too agree that any chance was as Americans can take to up each of our chances of contracting lung cancer on a daily basis, that’s a chance we need to take. Jefferson County is home to the fabled Churchill Downs, horse racing’s most famous venue, and the track’s exemption from a citywide smoking ban for Louisville has inspired one local judge to make a tremendously bad decision. The judge used the track’s exemption from the smoking ban as a reason to strike down the smoking ban for the whole city. His ruling declared the exemption for Churchill Downs as unconstitutional and therefore, the whole law was unconstitutional. Quite a leap in reasoning you took there, your honor, not to mention a terrible decision. I could be wrong, but I’m fairly sure no one in your city or any other is upset because they don’t get the chance to have secondhand smoke blown in their faces or to breathe in the toxic fumes puffed out by smokers choking down their death sticks. Personally, I’m staying as far away from you leather-faced, green-complexioned losers as I can, and I hope that voters in Louisville rally to overcome this judge’s stupidity by passing a new law banning smoking in their city.
- I have seen the Billboard end-of-the-year charts and I have to say, I’m worried for you, America. Scanning the charts and seeing the top-ranked songs and albums for 2007 does not inspire much confidence in your musical tastes or hope that those tastes will improve heading into 2008. Artists with the “top” songs for 2007, at least according to Billboard, include Beyonce, Rihanna, Gwen Stefani, Carrie Underwood and that fan-tossing, underage-sex-simulating freak Akon. Artists on the top album chart aren’t any better; Fergie, Justin “Weasel on Helium” Timberlake and that former American KaraokeJustin Timberlake at the top of your charts. They follow in the footsteps of previous success stories like Vanilla Ice, Milli Vanilli, Boys 2 Men and Britney Shears, er, Spears. Yes, it’s days like this when I’m thankful that the majority of Americans aren’t responsible for choosing the music I listen to, because if they were, I’d probably shove my head into a running blender.
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