Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Bad news for stoners, hockey is still irrelevant and Amy Winehouse lives her music

- The NHL All-Star Game was played over the weekend. No, seriously, it was. You may not have known it and until stumbling across the box score from the game in my local paper yesterday, I may not have known it either, but apparently it did happen. I doubt it was televised on any channel of relevance and I’m assuming it received the crappy time slot it so richly deserves, so avoiding it, either intentionally or unintentionally was easy to do. From what I can gather, the game was held in Atlanta, always a hotbed of hockey activity. I mean, when you think hockey, who among us doesn’t think the ATL? The Eastern Conference defeated the Western Conference by an 8-7 score, meaning some mullet-wearing Euros and Canadians in one color of uniforms beat some mullet-wearing Euros and Canadians in different colored unis. I could track down the names of the participants, but I wouldn’t know who they are and neither would you, so why bother? I’m honestly not kidding when I say that I didn’t know the game was even being played this past weekend until after the fact when I happened to see the score. That’s how irrelevant the NHL has become in the United States, even big sports fans like myself don’t know or care about its showcase event. Thanks for nothing, hockey, now go back to irrelevance and indifference where you belong.

- Way to show some spine, Frenchies. Normally the French are only offensive when it comes to their B.O., but thousands of French workers went on a very different kind of offensive recently to demand higher salaries and to protest job cuts. Tens of thousands of civil servants all across the country took to the streets to make their voice heard, including teachers, hospital workers, firefighters and postal workers. Sanitation workers, no….mostly because as far as anyone knows, no one in France actually pays attention to sanitation. But anyhow, back to the protests…..the government dismissed it as a “labor ritual,” but they need to think again. This isn’t just one small, isolated protest here. This is tens of thousands of people marching en masse to let you know how they feel. Ordinarily I would rip the Frenchies for not mixing in looting, rioting, property destruction and arson, but since it is the French we’re talking about, it’s just nice to see them protest at all. Coming on the heels of the riots and anti-police violence from French teenagers last month following the deaths of two of their peers in a fiery motorcycle-police car crash, I’d say it looks like France is finally becoming a place where people know how to be social dissidents….

- God bless you, South Carolina. Although I’m still pissed at the Republicans in South Carolina for not getting the joke and banning fake news host/satirist Stephen Colbert’s tongue-in-cheek plan to run on the presidential ballot in his home state (grow a sense of humor, ass hats), I’m definitely down with the state’s Democrats, who dealt a crushing defeat to Sen. Hank Clinton in Monday’s Democratic primary. Barack Obama won the state, doubling up on Hank by a 55 percent to 27 percent margin. John Edwards, who should be dropping out of the race any day now, tallied a paltry 18 percent to come in third. But one more state goes the right direction and I am pumped! It’s going to take each and every one of us to prevent the absolute travesty that having a militant, femin-Nazi like Hank in the White House would be. I’m also getting increasingly tired of Hank’s husband Bubba Clinton out there trying to shill for her. Look, a-hole, we tolerated you in office for too long, but now that you’re not our leader, you’re nothing more than a punch line and a funny caricature of your former self, so beat it. Congrats on the victory, Barack, let’s keep this train a-rollin’…..

- The California Supreme Court is no friend of stoners. Why that is, I don’t have a clue. I just know that the justices on the court have dealt a major blow to the state’s status as a place where sick people can get fraudulent prescriptions allowing them to get high, er smoke weed to help alleviate their pain. In a ruling this past week, the court declared that employers can fire workers who use medical marijuana, even if their hippie lettuce was prescribed by a doctor. This particular case saw the court uphold the firing of a man whose employer found out that he used marijuana for alleged medicinal purposes. Gary Ross sustained a back injury while in the Air Force and his doctor wrote him a scrip for the tree, but apparently that’s not good enough. Right, because we want to make it harder for the people who actually do have a legitimate use for the drug, Cali Supreme Court. I know some people abuse that right, but that doesn’t mean those who use it the way the law intends should be punished too. Your state is a haven for stoners from north to south, east to west, so you’re fighting a losing battle anyhow. Just give it up, roll a fattie and pass the Cheetos, please…..

- Let’s hope all of Amy Winehouse’s songs don’t prove as autobiographical as her most popular single, Rehab. She b*tched about it for the better part of four minutes in one of the most indecipherable, incomprehensible, rambling and incoherent songs of this or any other decade, and now the British pop tart has headed off to experience rehab first hand. Worse yet, she’s checked in voluntarily. Way to go soft, Winehouse. I thought you were this tough, hardcore alkie wench, but no, you’ve sold out. Of course, you were about to ruin yoru life and career the way you were going, so maybe it wasn’t all bad. “Amy decided to enter the facility today after talks with her record label, management, family and doctors,” read a statement from Universal Music Group. “She has come to understand that she requires specialist treatment to continue her ongoing recovery from drug addiction.” Let me sum that up for you more concisely: She’s a lush who was about to ruin her career if she didn’t get sober. The only problem here is that now I don’t know what she’s going to write about or if she’ll even be able to write songs sober and straight. On the other hand, that would be a good thing for the rest of us, so please do sober up, Amy….

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