More baby trafficking, no Alfonso Soriano heckling and NBC lowers the quality of its summer lineup

- If I ever find myself in a situation where I’m in the midst of a public scandal and my reputation is being attacked from every conceivable direction, I’m going to make sure I have someone like Leslie Sloane at my side. Who is Leslie Sloane, you ask? She’s the publicist for Lindsay Lohan, who is currently being talked about as a possible lesbian who is engaged to Samantha Ronson, an openly gay deejay in the L.A. area. The pair has been all but inseparable for a year, but the recent court decision legalizing same-sex unions in the state of California has apparently started open season on all alleged homosexuals in the state, especially the famous ones. With her client’s reputation under attack, Sloane came out swinging….well, kind of…actually, not really. In an email response to allegations that Lohan is a lesbian and engaged to Ronson, Sloane scripted an oh, so professional email that read, “This is gross. She is not a bad girl. Leave here alone.” Leave her alone? Just a thought, but you should not be ripping lines from Chris Crocker, the shrieking teenager from Nowheresville, U.S.A. who posted a YouTube video assailing everyone who was ripping Britney Spears for being a freak show. Bonus points for working the word “gross” into your email as well. Where did Lohan find this woman anyhow, the third grade of the nearest elementary school? Did LiLo offer her a pudding cup and fruit roll-up in exchange for her services as a publicist. When the strongest, most mature sentence of your email is a six-word lie about how your client is not a bad girl, that’s a bad sign. She’s been to rehab multiple times, she’s had drug addictions and worse, but she’s not a bad girl? Seems like a textbook example of what a bad girl is. But thank God she has a great support system behind her with people like Leslie Sloane…..

- Whew. The NBA and basketball fans outside of Detroit and San Antonio dodged a major scud this week. By some miracle, we were to avoid having to see either Detroit or San Antonio in the upcoming NBA Finals. When the Boston Celtics marched into Detroit on Friday night and did for the second time what many critics said they wouldn’t do even once in the series - win on the road - they won the series over the last gasp of a dying, consistently underachieving Eastern Conference dynasty by a 4-2 margin. The 89-81 victory put Boston back into the Finals, a place the franchise has been more than any other - except for their Finals opponent, the Los Angeles Lakers. The Celtics rode strong play in Games 5 and 6 from stars Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen, both of whom had otherwise underwhelmed in the playoffs up to that point. The C’s move on to face their longtime nemesis, a team they’ve played in the Finals 10 times. But I can't muster any animosity for either team in this one, especially the Lakers. They dispatched the least-interesting team in the NBA to watch, the Spurs. Seriously, what’s not good about the end of a series in which the whiniest, most annoying, least charismatic, least interesting, most tired/played team in professional sports is eliminated? Yes, the drama of a seven-game series is great - as long as you have two great teams with interesting star players going back and forth in one great game after another. This series had as many clunkers as it did good games, so having it go seven games wouldn’t have been ideal for anyone. The Spurs and their cast of robotic, lifeless, “professional” and boring players are gone, much to the joy of the NBA and basketball fans who tune out in record numbers any time San Antonio reaches the NBA Finals. The Lakers, one of the Association’s elite franchises, are back into the Finals, bringing a lot more personality, style, substance and an equally good team when compared to the Spurs. I literally spent the last two minutes of the clinching Game 5 smiling at the TV as pictures of the despondent, resigned-to-their-fate Spurs flashed across the screen. I waved goodbye to guys like Bruce Bowen and Robert Horry, rejoicing that they were about to be eliminated from the playoffs. Normally you feel at least a little bit bad for teams when they’re eliminated just because anyone who has ever played sports at any level knows the agony of defeat, but I had to marvel at the fact that I didn’t feel one damn bit bad for the Spurs, not at all. With them gone and the Lakers representing the Western Conference in the Finals, you’re not losing anything in the quality of the basketball on the court and you’re gaining so much everywhere else with the Lakers instead of the Spurs. So adios, San Antonio, you won't be missed. A quick point before I go….i know that I’ve pegged the NBA league office as a stupefying collection of morons to the nth degree, but the schedule for the NBA Finals shows that they’re still trying to prove their idiocy. The series begins Thursday night in Boston, then takes two days off bf Game 2 on Sunday, also in Boston. That in and of itself is completely lame but it’s something you’ve come to expect from these ass clowns, two days between games with no travel involves. No, what makes this a new level of moronic action is that the gap between Games 2 and 3 is one day, with Game 3 on Tuesday…..in freaking Los Angeles! That’s right, the gap between two games in the same damn city is two days but when you’re traveling literally all the way across the country, the gap is one day? Seriously, you don’t want to flip-flop that? Way to go, NBA, you’re managing to f’up what should be the first great NBA Finals you’ve had in years…..idiots.

- The return of Nashville Star on NBC, just the thing you need….if you’re looking to take your summer lineup right down the crapper. Come June 9, NBC will be cementing the status of its summer schedule as the worst among the major networks by bringing back a reality show that takes everything awful from the abomination that is American Karaoke on Fox and injects it with a hearty dose of the plague that is country music. As bad as AK is, adding country music to it might be the only possible way to make it worse. With America’s most famous mullet, Billy Ray Montana, er, Cyrus at the helm, this is going to be a truly terrible show once again. Country music is bad enough when its veteran twang-ers yodel on about booze, pickup trucks, chewin’ tobaccy, booze, lost women, the local saloon, booze, losing their dog and booze, but when a bunch of aspiring amateurs take up the task…..yikes. I realize that summer TV is kinda like a playground basketball court once all of the older kids have left and no one is around but a few scrawny dorks who finally get their chance to play because no one else wants to at that time, but if Nashville Star is the best you can do, maybe shutting your station down for the summer is the best option for you. NBC should be down on its knees thanking the good Lord that it has Heroes, because without that great show this network would be worthless from top to bottom.

- Don’t you dare heckle Alfonso Soriano, fans in the left-field bleachers at Wrigley Field. According to at least one of the team’s season ticket holders, the team told security personnel in the left field bleachers to crack down on fans who might boo or harass struggling outfielder Alfonso Soriano. That claim is being disputed by Cubs chairman Crane Kenney, who said Wednesday that the team had done no such thing. The matter came up after Soriano dropped a fly ball in the ninth inning Sunday in Pittsburgh, helping the Pirates rally to a victory. One season ticket holder told the Chicago Tribune that crowd control personnel told fans Monday they were instructed by supervisors to use a no-tolerance policy for anyone cursing at Soriano, or harassing him. The ban was alleged to have included special focus on those fans using profanities but according o this season ticket holder, its scope was even broader. Now the team is firing back with a predictable denial, claiming that no such rule was put in place. “We did not admonish our security guards to be more watchful of it, nor did we have any ejections nor did we really have any issues,” he said. “We did not advise our security guards to change their behavior at all after the Pittsburgh series nor are we aware of any incidents of ejections or anyone even being disciplined.” I’m honestly not sure who to believe here, because I seriously doubt that one fan made this entire thing up and started an issue out of nothing. Now was it the stren, iron-fisted warning that this fan is claiming it to be? Maybe, maybe not. However, you can't expect the team to own it even if the allegation is true. No way a professional sports franchise cops to coddling its star player because he’s so emotionally fragile that he can’t handle fans taunting him from the bleachers. But it’s also entirely possible that this fan was pissed about something else ballpark security told him to do or not do and seized on something small in order to create a stink over this issue. Either way, Soriano went a long way toward silencing those boos by lining a game-winning hit to lift the Cubs to a comeback win over the L.A. Dodgers Wednesday night, so maybe we won't have to hear any more about this anyhow….not until Soriano’s next dropped fly ball, that is…..

- Would someone please tell me how exactly I can sell babies and not get arrested for it? People seem to be trying all sorts of methods and approaches to pawn off infants for profit and every single time, law enforcement in their country comes down really hard on these people. Last week it was the German couple who put their 7-month-old son up on eBay for $1.60 and claimed they did so as a joke after the boy became too noisy. Those two idiots had their child seized by the authorities and are facing possible criminal charges, but at least they were only trying to sell off (allegedly) one baby. A couple in northern Mexico appears to be much more immersed in the baby smuggling/selling business, with police in the area having arrested Amado Torres, 64, and wife Maria Isabel Hernandez, 25, for buying Mexican babies to sell to couples in the U.S. for a profit. These two are suspected of buying a dozen or more children age 2 or younger to flip to American couples, but their operation appears to be out of business at this point. As a quick aside….a 64 year-old married to a 25 year-old? My man, Woody Allen thinks that’s weird. What say we stick within a couple of decades when it comes to the age difference between people we marry? But if putting your kid up on eBay is a no-no and buying them to smuggle across the border and sell for a profit in another country is also unacceptable, then what’s a baby seller left to do? This must be what people mean when they say that times are tough for small business owners…..

An amazing Lost finale, a bizarre golf club could help astronauts and Bobby Petrino, you still suck

- I think that by now you all know me well enough to know that I’m a problem solver. When a difficult dilemma presents itself and no one seems to know how to cope with it, I’m here to help provide that solution. With the lone toilet on the international space station broken and the astronauts currently there left with almost nowhere to go, NASA is looking to issue an in-orbit plumbing service call when the space shuttle Discovery visits next week. Until then, the three-man crew at the station has to make do with an improvised system and hope that things don’t get really smelly and really unsanitary in the meantime. The cause of the problem is a broken motor fan on the Russian-made toilet, yet another reason to be pissed at those Communist bastards at this point. But being the solutions-oriented guy that I am, I’d like to take this opportunity to solve this problem by offering up a new invention that is designed for golfers here on Earth but which would provide a nice fix for those toilet-less astronauts at the international space station as well. Allow me to introduce to you the Uroclub, a golf club with a hollow shaft that you can fill with urine if you’re out on the golf course and need to go to the bathroom but there isn't one nearby. The Uroclub looks like a normal 7 iron, but it has half a liter capacity for urine inside its hollow shaft. On top of that, it also has a privacy shield so that your fellow golfers can't sneak a peek when you whip it out on the side of the course to do your business. The geniuses who invented this novelty club are going with the slogan “The only club in your bag guaranteed to keep you out of the woods”. Great, fellas. I’m sure this will make golfers around the world thrilled, knowing that at any point during a round one of their playing partners might rip their 7-iron out of their bag, unscrew the top of the club and begin filling it with urine. Still, it could be helpful to the astronauts at the space station for the next week. If you don’t have a working toilet, why not go with the next best thing? Besides, astronauts love hitting golf balls out into space, so why not kill two birds with one stone? Glad I could be here to help out with this one, solving an international space station crisis is always a nice way to wrap up a week.

- The season finale of Lost (and no, ABC, the episode you aired two weeks ago that was allegedly Part One of a two-part finale doesn’t count) aired last night and it was a two-hour thrill ride that answered some questions but raised many more, as any good season finale does. The mind-blowing moment of the episode didn’t come until hour two, but the entire show was flat-out awesome. First there was the issue of Martin Keamy and his mercenary crew to deal with, which proved easier than you might think. As part one of the finale ended two weeks ago, Ben Linus surrendered to Keamy and his men in order to allow Locke to sneak inside the Orchid station and Kate and Sayid met up with Richard Alpert and the rest of the Others, who have been AWOL the entire season. As Keamy, his men and Ben arrived back at the helicopter, they were met by Kate, who was setting up an Others ambush. She claimed that Ben’s people were chasing her and when Keamy’s men ventured out into the jungle to find them, the assault started. All of Keamy’s men were killed and he himself was assaulted by Sayid in a kick-ass fight and then shot in the back by Alpert. As part of the deal for setting up the ambush, Sayid and Kate were granted safe passage off the island. Back at the Orchid, Jack and Sawyer arrived and found Locke and Hurley there. Locke was struggling to follow Ben’s instructions on how to move the island and he and Jack had a heated conversation in which Locke urged Jack not to leave the island. When Jack insisted on leaving, Locke told him that once he and the others returned to their old lives, they would have to lie to everyone about every single thing that had happened to them from the moment they arrived on the island. At that moment, Ben arrived back at the Orchid from the helicopter and together with Locke, made his way underground to the Orchid station. There, Locke and Ben found “the vault,” a mysterious chamber that, according to yet another DHARMA Initiative instructional video, was located next to some exotic negative matter that makes time travel possible. While Locke watched the video, Ben crammed the vault with every metal object he could find, a direct violation of the no non-organic material policy for the vault spelled out by Dr. Halliwax in the video. Ben then threw the switch, activating the chamber and blowing a huge hole in its back wall. Everyone above ground also had their own chaos going on. Those aboard the freighter were sitting on top of a huge bomb even though most of them didn’t know about the massive stockpile of C4 explosive located below deck. While Desmond, Jin and Michael tried to disarm the bomb, everyone else on the boat went about their business. Unfortunately the bomb was rigged up to a radio receiver that also served as a detonator which would set off an explosion of Martin Keamy’s heart stopped beating, i.e. if he were killed. Even as all of this went on, Daniel Faraday continued running the Zodiac boat back and forth between the island and the freighter, taking Oceanic 815 survivors off the island. He urged his fellow freighter crew members Miles and Charlotte to leave with him on one trip but both elected to stay on the island. When they chose to do so, Miles insinuated that Charlotte had some hidden motive for staying, a theory she confirmed later when telling Daniel of her decision to stay. She hinted that she was still looking for the place she was born and what went unsaid is that the island might be that place. It makes you wonder if she’s the same girl that was Ben’s friend when he was a boy first arriving on the island and the one who made him the wooden doll he carried with him all of those years. Also leaving the island were Jack, Kate, Sayid, Desmond, Sawyer, Hurley and pilot Frank Lapidus in the helicopter. They lifted off and were on their way to the freighter when they discovered a hole in the chopper’s fuel tank that was causing them to lose fuel at an alarming rate. When they couldn’t find the freighter and were nearly out of fuel, Lapidus instructed them to dump everything not bolted down. That wasn’t enough and after a suggestion that losing another couple hundreds pounds would help, Sawyer sprung into action. He kissed Kate and said one last thing to her, then jumped out of the ‘copter into the sea below where he began swimming back to the island. He made it there and was met by Juliet, who sat drinking a bottle of DHARMA rum and staring out to sea. She was staring at the burning remains of the freighter, which blew up when Keamy, still alive thanks to body armor that allowed him to survive Alert shooting him, took the elevator down to the Orchid and was ambushed and killed by Ben. That triggered the bomb on the boat, which Michael had been trying to keep from going off by spraying its battery with liquid nitrogen. The bomb was triggered just as the helicopter came back, leading to a frantic scene in which Jack and Desmond tried to refuel it with enough gas to get back to the island people tried to get onto the helicopter before the freighter exploded. Nearly everyone made it, but Sun’s husband Jin did not and she was forced to watch him go down with the boat when it blew up. So back to the island it was, a plan that was going fine until Ben pulled Locke aside in the Orchid, told him to go back to the surface and take over leading the Others. In doing so, Ben put on a winter coat and told Locke that he was going somewhere cold in order to move the island and also that the rules of the island dictated that whoever moved it could never return to it. With that, Ben stepped through the hole in the wall of the vault, went down a rocky tunnel and kicked in a layer of ice covering a hole into some bizarre cold, Arctic-like cave. Once inside, he found a large metal wheel with spokes implanted in the cave wall, with half of the wheel exposed. After chipping away ice from around the wheel and with the help of a crowbar, Ben was able to move the wheel and a bright light came from a crack that opened in the wall. As he did that, it led to a sky-altering, bright-light, weird-sound event just like the one that took place in the Season Two finale. At that moment, the island literally disappeared right into the ocean, giving that one mind-blowing moment that was jaw-dropping to the nth degree. Sawyer and Juliet were sitting on the beach when it happened and apparently went wherever the island went. Locke was taking his place with the Others at that time, so he must have gone with the island as well. Left to deal with the vanished island problem were those aboard the helicopter, which now had nowhere to land. Out of fuel and places to touch down, the craft crashed into the ocean and everyone scrambled to put on life vests and get into the raft that Sayid had deployed before impact. All of them - Jack, Kate, Sayid, Hurley, Aaron, Sun, Lapidus and Desmond - made it into the raft and drifted well into the night, at which point a rescue boat found them. The boat belonged to Penelope Widmore, Desmond’s girlfriend who tracked him based on the brief call he made to her from the freighter earlier in the season. Aboard Penny’s ship, Jack set the plan in motion to spin a lie about how the Oceanic 6 had lived since the crash and how they came to be rescued. As part of the lie, the six of them were placed onto a lifeboat one week after coming about Penny’s boat and floated out to sea near the island of Membata, the island where their fictional rescue began. Lapidus and Desmond stayed on Penny’s boat while the Oceanic 6 landed on Membata, were met by the locals and began their journey back to civilization. That was the last of the in-the-present scenes for the season, but the flash-forwards were also a huge part of this episode. Things kicked off right where the Season Three finale left off, with Jack and Kate on a remote access road near the airport. Kate stopped her car and backed up to where Jack was standing, then jumped out and chewed Jack out. She berated him for leaving her and her adopted son Aaron and revealed that this particular flash forward was three years after the argument we saw a few episodes ago when the two of them fought over her still doing something that Sawyer asked her to do when they were back on the island. She also yelled at Jack for suggesting that they should go back to the island. We even hearkened back to last season’s finale, which I was ironically watching earlier in the day. There was Jack, going to the funeral of the mystery man at the downtown funeral parlor and wonder why Kate didn’t go. Also shown was Sayid, appearing outside of the mental hospital where Hurley was living and shooting a man who he said had been lurking outside the facility for a week. Once inside, Sayid told Hurley that they were being watched, but that Jeremy Bentham had been died two days ago, apparently by suicide. He stopped Hurley when Hurley wanted to say Bentham’s real name, but Sayid insisted that they were under surveillance and that Hurley needed to leave with him to go “somewhere safe.” Hurley agreed, but we didn’t find out where they were headed. Kate was dealing with her own issues, having a nightmare in which Claire appeared in Aaron’s bedroom and demanded that Kate NOT, under any circumstances, take Aaron back to the island. As we would find out later, that’s exactly what Jeremy Bentham was urging her and the rest of the Oceanic 6 to do. Sun had her own flash-forward, showing up in London and confronting Charles Widmore. She offered to help him out in his search for the island but wouldn’t say why, although the fact that she partially blamed Jack for her husband’s death and Jack wants to return and help the island might have something to do with it. As the episode came to an end, Jack was back at the funeral parlor in the middle of the night, breaking in and opening the coffin of none other than Jeremy Bentham. He was startled when Ben Linus appeared in at the door and began talking. Ben asked about Jack’s off-the-wall actions of late, including flying on commercial flights every weekend and wishing for them to crash (which Ben called “dark…very dark”) and when he got to Jack’s expressed desire to go back to the island, Ben dropped a bombshells. The only way to go back was for all of the Oceanic 6 to return. Ben said he had ideas on how to make that happen even though Jack and Kate weren’t on speaking terms, Hurley was insane and Sayid’s whereabouts weren’t known, at least not to Jack. As Jack and Ben prepared to leave, Ben pointed out to Jack that Jeremy Bentham would also have to return to the island with the Oceanic 6 in order for their return to be allowed by the island. It was then we learned who Jeremy Bentham really was and to no surprise, it was John Locke. Jack revealed that Locke/Bentham had told him prior to his death that a lot of bad things had happened on the island since his departure and that it was Jack’s fault for leaving, thus he needed to return and was telling Kate that very thing on the road at the end of the airport runway. So that’s where the season ended, with the idea that the Oceanic 6 needed to return to the island. No word on why earlier this season in flash forwards Sayid was going around killing people under Ben’s orders or where the island might have gone to, so those mysteries linger until Season Five. But a stellar, stellar finale, easily the best season finale this TV season and one of the best I can ever remember, just awesome.

- Jason Mraz is never going to become a truly legendary rocker/musician this way. When a musician grows acres and acres of a crop on his or her property, that musician’s options for choices of crop are limited. You can grow pot, you can grow pot or you can grow pot. I was temped to say cocaine is also a viable option, but that takes a little too much effort for your average musician. You can even put together a small greenhouse inside your home and grow marijuana fairly easily if you don’t want to run the risk of being arrested, so that’s the route you need to go. Minimal chance of getting caught and arrested and even if you do, it’s only pot. But not Mraz, who has devoted five acres of his land to avocado trees. Apparently he has a strong hankering for guacamole, because the singer-songwriter recently told CNN that, “Believe me, our kitchen is just like decked out with them. We’re constantly washing them, we’re eating them and we’re giving them to all our friends.” Mraz also explains that his trees are 25-30 years old and two or three times a year, workers come through and pick the avocados. See, if you were a true rocker, Jason, you could go down to your basement, to your hydroponic greenhouse and you could harvest your own pot, no workers necessary. If you have any questions about how to get started, I believe Willie Nelson can give you detailed, specific instructions on how to get it going. Plus, your friends will be a lot more psyched to receive a few nicely rolled joints than they are to receive a gift of avocados or guacamole.

- Several months have passed, but one thing that remains infinitely clear in the wake of the Atlanta Falcons’ disastrous 2007 season is that former coach Bobby Petrino still lame and still a certified piece of crap. Petrino signed with the Falcons prior to the 2007 season to be their coach, inking a fat multi-year contract to leave the University of Louisville and make the jump to the NFL. He said in an emotional, totally fraudulent press conference that leaving UL was the toughest thing he’d ever had to do. Good thing he went through it though, because it prepared him for the moment when he weaseled out of that same Falcons job less than a year later. Petrino showed his true weasel-y colors that time, leaving letters for his players in their lockers after an embarrassing Monday Night Football loss and abandoning ship with three games still remaining in the season. He couldn’t even stick it out to the end of the year and he didn’t have the balls to face up to his players and owner to let them know that he didn’t want to be their coach anymore. He bolted for the University of Arkansas and has spent the time since then blatantly dodging questions about his cowardly exodus from Atlanta. That dodging act came to an end this week at the Southeastern Conference’s spring media day. When hit with a question about whether he could have handled his departure from the ATL differently, Petrino replied, “Not that I know of. Because of the timing of it, because both sides of the fence, that’s how it worked out. It was a situation where there was no other choice.” No other choice? You mean other than manning up and fulfilling the contract you signed? Or if you couldn’t do that, at least working to the end of the season and not bailing on the players you spent six months leading and telling them to buy into your system? Other than those choices, you mean? Nice to see that even after a substantial amount of time has passed you still don’t have an ounce of class, honor or integrity, Bob-O. He further showed his total lack of class when he asked by some clueless, off-the-wall idiot at media day if his time with the Falcons reminded him of a weird dream from the 1970s TV show Dallas. Petrino cracked, “That’s not the show I thought of. Have you ever seen the movie Misery?” Whew, stop it coach, you are killing me.

- Weezer has always marched to the beat of its own drum. Lead singer Rivers Cuomo is a guy known to live as a recluse much of the time, someone who doesn’t exactly embrace the hard-living lifestyle of a rock star. So the new video for the band’s song Pork and Beans isn't surprising coming from everyone’s favorite dork rockers, not even the video’s inclusion of a wide range of cultural punch lines such as Kevin Federline, that bizarro loser who made a video of himself shrieking at everyone to stop making fun of Britney Spears, Miss Teen South Carolina Caitlin Upton and others. The video was the most-watched clip on all of YouTube over the Memorial Day weekend, having been viewed 3.1 million times. “It’s an anthem about not conforming to what people want you to be,” video director Matthew Cullen said in an interview. Cullen also said that he doesn’t consider the video a finished product and that it could be redone, mashed up and reformatted. “We want it to be a living thing on the Internet,” he explained. If you get a chance to check it out, I’d recommend doing so because you’ll get some good laughs out of it. I can’t say that I subscribe to the band and Cullen’s idea that it celebrates people who have done things their own way and achieved fame and success, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy watching a montage of a motley crew of losers set to a good song.

How the WNBA makes me laugh, reality TV dating show idiots and more New England Cheat-riots cheating

- If I’m Hulk Hogan, I’m strongly considering spending a little less time on reality TV and my daughter’s career as a poor man’s Britney Spears rip-off and using that time to teach my kids how to drive. Hogan, a.k.a. Terry Bollea, has dragged as much life out of his Hulk-ster persona as possible, but perhaps appearing on shows like American Gladiators and WWE Monday Night RAW shouldn’t be his primary concern at this point. On May 9, his son Nick was sentenced to eight months in Florida’s Pinellas County jail after losing control of a car and causing a one-car accident that injured a passenger. Now the Hulk-ster’s wannabe pop tart daughter Brooke is the one having trouble behind the wheel. Her car collided with the vehicle driven by 19-year-old Ronald Gallmon this past weekend in Clearwater, Fla. The two parties are disputing who was at fault, with Gallmon reportedly attempting to change lanes several times on the Bayside (Go Bayside, beat Valley - sorry, but that’s for all you Saved by the Bell fans out there) Bridge, lost control of his car and hit the car Brooke Hogan was driving. Gallmon claims that while his tire did blow out, it was Hogan who hit his vehicle and not the other way around. Both cars were towed, but thankfully no one was injured in the crash. So whatcha gonna do, drivers in the state of Florida, whathca gonna do….when the Hulk-ster’s spoiled kids and their erratic driving….run wild…on….you? My suggestion is double-checking your insurance coverage and finding alternate routes, but that’s just me….

- Who would have thought that in a situation involving new allegations of cheating against the one of the National Football League’s premier franchises, the surprise wouldn’t be that this franchise has been caught cheating for the second time in a year but rather that the league’s gutless commissioner isn't going to do anything about it? The New England Cheat-riots have already been busted for filming the defensive and offensive signals of opposing teams during games, a clear violation of NFL rules, and they were dinged a first-round draft pick and a significant fine for the offense. But now, the same man who played such a visible role in the Spygate scandal, former Cheat-riots video assistant Matt Walsh, has alleged that the team engaged in another illegal practice during his time as an employee. Walsh says that the Cheat-riots used players in practice that they had placed on the injured reserve list, another big violation of league rules. Players on the IR list are supposed to be done for the season, too injured to take part in football activities. They can’t practice in any way, shape or form, mostly because being on that list is supposed to mean that they are physically incapable of doing so. The rule keeps teams from placing players on the list simply to avoid having to release them and give other teams a chance to sign them. If a guy can’t practice and is of no direct, immediate value to the team, the idea is that teams will only place players there who are legitimately injured. Using them in practice is a clear advantage for a team because it gives that particular player more time on the field to develop, it gives a break to aging veterans in practice because they have to take less reps and it also upgrades the quality of practice players that starters compete against. In other words, this practice would most definitely give a team engaging in it an edge over opponents who weren’t doing it. Walsh made the allegation to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and now former NFL lineman Ross Tucker, who played two seasons with the Cheat-riots, is backing up those claims. Tucker says he didn’t see the practice on either of the two other teams he played on but when he saw it in New England and asked Cheat-riots’ receiver Troy Brown about it, Brown told him that every team did it. Apparently not, at least not according to Tucker. The amazing part of this story isn't that the Cheat-riots have been caught breaking the rules again, but rather that Goodell, the gutless wonder that he is, is saying that even if the allegations are confirmed, he won't punish New England for their misdeeds. Hey Rog, you can't exactly employ a blanket policy for punishing teams. One penalty doesn’t cover everything they do for a given year or decade. You need to penalize them for every single time they break league rules, even if it’s a team like the Cheat-riots who break the rules more often that Paula Abdul acts like a crazed lunatic on national television. If proven, these allegations most definitely constitute cheating and they need to be punished accordingly. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve had to whack the Cheat-riots’ knuckles with a ruler before, you have to do it again and again until they stop cheating. Allowing this offense to go unpunished will only further prove that you are the spineless, pushover of a commissioner that your many critics are alleging you to be.

- Not that you needed any further proof of this, but Tila Tequila is a moron. It’s not like everyone didn’t already know that anyone associated with a reality dating show is an absolute attention whore and a total idiot, but this chick is looking to cement that knowledge in cement, encase it in a block of granite and slam it inside of a titanium safe. Tequila, whose real last name is Nguyen (What, her name isn't really Tila Tequila? No way!) blames the shameless self-promotion and desire to start an acting career of Bobby Banhart, her “soul mate” from the first season of A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, as the reasons the couple didn’t last. Where to start, where to start…..how about here: You freaking dumbass, you didn’t think that some overly tanned loser with spiky hair who voluntarily appeared on a reality dating show wherein he competed for the affections of a pint-sized MySpace skank/aspiring singer was after something other than true love? You didn’t figure that an ass clown like that might be into himself a little too much and looking to start an acting career rather than find the love of his life on reality TV? “I felt like he was starting to get caught up more in the Hollywood world,” Nguyen whined in a recent interview. She says Banhart never met her parents and that the two of them just drifted apart. Additionally, she wonders why Banhart didn’t mention his desire to act to her while the show was filming. Seriously, you’re that dumb? Hey idiot, he didn’t mention it because he figured he’d get booted from the show and wanted more camera time. Besides, everyone who isn't totally brain dead already knows that no one goes on a reality dating show to find love because every f’ing couple that meets on one of those shows breaks up within a few weeks. But you go ahead and keep filing A Shot at Love II with Tila Tequila and however many subsequent seasons of that abortion that MTV will pay you for. Once again, we’re reminded that nothing good ever comes from reality dating shows or from MySpace, so thanks for that, T.

- Since when did brushing up against some portly American tourist on the street and lifting his wallet or jumping him in an alley and taking it by force become passé? Both of those techniques could have gotten an unidentified 54-year-old Italian thief what he wanted and also averted the tragic death that befell Frank Phel, 74, of California as he visited the town of Tiburtina. Phel and his wife were enjoying a pleasant afternoon at a local café when this thief approached them and began chatting them up, pretending to be friendly. He even fetched them cappuccinos under the auspices of being kind to a couple of foreigners, then laced their drinks with a mix of drugs and sleeping pills so he could rob them once they were drugged up. That part of the plan apparently worked because the thief was able to successfully execute the robbery, but from there things went wrong in a hurry. After being drugged and robbed, Phel was wandering in a daze on the train tracks at the suburban Tiburtina station when he was struck and killed by a train. So now this thief not only gets hit with the charges for drugging and robbing Phel, he also is going to be charged in the man’s death. All of that for a freaking wallet? Again, couldn’t you find a way to lift the wallet without drugging the guy? That way you get your undeserved earnings and he doesn’t have to die because of you being a ginormous sleazeball. That seems fair, no?

- Watching ESPN or TNT during NBA playoff games recently, I’ve gotten a nice comedic surprise that I just wasn’t expecting. Because the NBA insists on continuing to subsidize the 12-years-and-running charity case that is the WNBA, NBA broadcasts are regularly peppered with WNBA commercials. It’s as if the NBA thinks that just slamming some slow-mo WNBA “highlights” on the screen with some whiny pop music over top of them is going to convince everyone who has seen what women’s pro basketball and hated it that their reactions and responses to the WNBA are all wrong. One specific commercial features the WNBA’s newest “star”, Candace Parker. Parker is in black and white, a close-up shot showing her sitting in a locker room spouting common complaints and criticisms that people make about the WNBA. The primary one that cracks me up is Parker saying, “Nothing exciting ever happens” in the WNBA as a slow-mo shot of WNBA player Lisa Leslie lumbering down the court, soaring all of a few inches off the floor and nudging her hand and the ball above the rim and dropping the ball through the hoop while barely tapping the rim for a “dunk.” Allow me to help you with this, WNBA. When you’re making a commercial that is supposed to be ironic and sarcastic, pointing out that things people rip your game for are wrong, you should not be showing lowlights of plays that do little more than confirm those criticisms on your commercials. Leslie rambling down the floor and putting down a dunk so weak that 5-year-old kids on Little Tykes hoops would be embarrassed doesn’t show me that I’m wrong for ripping your league. It proves that I and the tens of millions of basketball fans who want nothing to do with your game are 100 percent right.

Where did all the Memorial Day baseball go, where America spent its weekend movie dollars and to get if your special lady aspires to be a skank

- Enough is enough, Hank Clinton. At first, you plucky persistence and refusal to drop out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination even though you have no chance in hell of winning it was mildly comical and amusing. The rest of us could sit back, point and laugh as you put on a bold face and proclaimed that you could still win and that you weren’t giving up in that femi-Nazi, bitter, hostile tone of yours. We’ve now reached and zoomed right past the point where that stopped being amusing and started really pissing people off. Seeing your act over the weekend, giving a speech at the Pabellon de la Victoria evangelical church in Hormigueros, Puerto Rico in which you pretended to be a person of faith and said that your faith has kept you in this race and still gives you a chance to win was ridiculous at best, infuriating at worst. “If I had been listening to those who have been talking over the last several months, we would not be having this campaign in Puerto Rico today,” Hank declared. And your point is? What exactly would we be missing if you had dropped out? A bunch of long-winded, pointless, misguided speeches from you about how you can still win this election even though your opponent and everyone else with an IQ above 15 have already begun focusing on the McCain-Obama battle in the upcoming general election? In case you missed it while you were busy spewing pointless political rhetoric at Puerto Ricans over the weekend, Hank, Barack Obama secured three more superdelegates in Hawaii on Sunday, giving him a total of 1,977, just 49 short of the 2,026 needed to secure the nomination. Obama is so concerned about competing against you that he left Puerto Rico to return to the mainland where he filled in as the commencement speaker at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. as a replacement for the ailing Sen. Ted Kennedy. I’m someone who never believes that it’s okay to quit, but in this case Hank, I’ll make an exception. You need to quit and to stop embarrassing yourself and wasting everyone’s time by pretending that you’re still in this race. We know that you’re not and I think, deep inside that black, man-hating heart of yours, I think you know it too. Let it go, back away from the podium and as Mike Tyson would say, “fade into Bolivian”…..

- How a professional athlete spends his or her offseason says a lot about them. Those with the drive and determination to be the best spend their down time working out, training and strengthening the weaker aspects of their game. They might take a week or two off after the end of a season, but after that they’re right back at it, preparing for next year. Then there are players like Joakim Noah of the Chicago Bulls, a guy with exactly one year of NBA experience and not a good year at that. Noah spent much of his rookie year in the doghouse, running afoul of both coaches and teammates. At one point, he was suspended by his coach for a game because of he was regularly late for practice and got into a confrontation with an assistant coach, both of which the coach deemed detrimental to the team for some reason. When Noah was about to come back to the team, the squad’s veteran players voted to keep him suspended, an unprecedented move that showed just how much they disliked him and his act. At season’s end, Noah had posted averages of 6.6 points and 5.6 rebounds per game, not exactly Rookie of the Year-type numbers. So you would think that heading into the offseason, he would have no shortage of things to work on, right? Let’s just say that improving as a basketball player does not appear to be the top thing on his “How to spend my summer” list. Noah was picked up by police in Gainesville, Fla. on Sunday for possession of marijuana and having an open container of alcohol. Gainesville police spokesman Sgt. Rick Roberts says Noah was arrested around 1:50 a.m. Sunday after an officer spotted him on a sidewalk holding a plastic cup containing an amber-colored drink, a violation of city law. During a search at the station, officers found marijuana in his pocket. Oops! Noah was released after signing a notice to appear before a judge -- standard procedure for such offenses, but he could face up to 6 months in jail and a $500 fine for the marijuana charge. The jail time is extremely unlikely given the fact that Noah doesn’t have an extensive criminal record. Still, he’s in good company when it comes to returning to the place where he went to college in the offseason to catch up and hang out, but most guys manage to avoid burning blunts and driving while intoxicated when revisiting their college town. My man, you clearly did not recognize during the season that you were no longer in college and should stop acting like it, nor have you realized it during your offseason. The same stunts you pulled in college and were beloved for aren’t going to play in the NBA, nor can you can away with getting high and cruising around with an open container in the car. Maybe working out isn't the best idea for you this offseason, Joakim. Perhaps you should spend your offseason trying to figure out how to adjust to life post-college and stay out of jail, off your team’s suspended list and away from the sh*t list of your teammates. With your team looking for a new coach, you have a chance for a fresh start, so try not to screw it up.

- Looking to get that special girl in your life a gift that will show her how much you love and appreciate her? Not sure of the right way to let her know just how much she means to you? Allow me to suggest the all-new “Carmen Electra Professional Pole Kit,” a portable stripper pole that your special lady can use to grind on and pretend that she’s a practitioner of one of the lowest, most disgusting professions in the whole world. The portable stripper pole is available at Spencer’s Online, but it will set you back $129.99. Then again, no price is too great for the gift that says, “Hey honey, I wish you were a totally nasty skank who grinds on a pole and takes her clothes off for strangers who show $1 bills into her thong.” The funny thing is that Electra and her crew are touting this line of portable stripper poles as a great way to get a workout. Yeah, I realize that cardio stripe-tease classes are popular right now, especially in SoCal, but that doesn’t make the women who take those classes or own a portable stripper pole any less of a total skank. Can’t say I’ve ever gotten the fascination with strip clubs, because if you don’t have the game to pull chicks in real life who will take their clothes off for you because they want to and you have to go to a place where girls are paid to disrobe, that would seem kinda depressing to me. If you’re going to splurge for a stripper pole, why not just go the extra mile and see if you can’t find a place that sells dignity and self-respect, it’d be a much better use of your money….

- Not exactly a shock that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull topped the box office earnings list for the weekend. With a mega-blockbuster like this, being the top-earning movie on opening weekend is a given just from the sheer name value of the movie. Whether it’s Spiderman, Ocean’s 11/12/13, the Bourne franchise, etc., people will go see these movies because of the power of the previous films and because everyone else is going to see it as well. The new Indy film took in $101 million, giving it the best three-day opening for a film this year. However, that total is $2 million less than Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End took in last Memorial Day weekend, which is ironic because both films were greatly hyped and proved to be the worst of their respective franchises. The all-time Memorial Day weekend box office champ is Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith, which raked in $173 million in 2005 and stands as a testament to the power of pasty, pale, basement-dwelling dorks everywhere to vault their favorite movies to the top of the heap. Coming in second for the weekend was another big-time movie, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, with $23 million. Third through fifth places were occupied by Iron Man ($20.1 million), the awful What Happens in Vegas ($9 million) and the mediocre, way-too-long Speed Racer ($4 million). The quality of movies definitely declines as you go further down that list, but then again the best movies rarely correspond to the highest-earning movies anyhow….

- Where did all the Memorial Day baseball games go? That’s been a noticeable and sad trend the past few years, especially on ESPN, a network that used to have wall-to-wall baseball on Memorial Day and the Fourth of July but now airs no games on those days. Not that long ago, there would be Memorial Day baseball from 1 p.m. EST to late into the night on the Worldwide Leader, but this year ESPN didn’t air a single game on the holiday. I realize that not many teams played day games this Memorial Day, but not even broadcasting a single one? Why not? One of the best parts of Memorial Days in the past was sitting down and watching a little baseball while the burgers and hot dogs cooked on the grill or letting your big meal digest while you took in a few innings of a game. So how did we go from multiple games on throughout the course of the day to none at all? I’ve never heard an official explanation from ESPN, but what I did find was….lacrosse? Really, that’s the best you can do on Memorial Day, college lacrosse? This isn't to demean lacrosse or lacrosse players, but these guys are great athletes and pretty darn tough, but lacrosse isn't exactly a mainstream sport and one that 99 percent of sports fans have an interest in seeing on Memorial Day. Besides, why not let these college kids head home for Memorial Day? But hey, when you’re dealing with ESPN maybe it’s best to appreciate what you have and be thankful that they didn’t show a spelling bee, dog show or poker tournament on Memorial Day. Bring back Memorial Day baseball, I say, if anyone at ESPN is smart enough to listen.

Greek's Monday episode, wacky Belgian fish protests and why Bob Mugabe still sucks

- Gotta hand it to those wacky Belgian fishermen, because no way would I have come up with what they came up with as a means of protest and social dissidence. These forward-thinking fishermen handed out a ton of free fish during a protest against a rise in fuel prices at Belgium’s main fishing port. “This could continue,” said Emiel Brouckaert, a spokesman for the fishermen, “The costs of running a boat are no longer covered by our earnings. A lot of fishermen are in the red.” So you’re giving fish away and that’s going to make things better how? But far be it from me to shoot down any act of protest, no matter how economically flawed it may be. However, the disruptive punch of this particular action was magnified when French fishermen simultaneously disrupted maritime traffic and blocked an oil refinery, involved 300 to 400 people and the whole protest occurred peacefully over about two hours, a police spokeswoman said. Again with the French as a part of social activism and protest, I like this trend. The Belgian fishermen, who gathered together after a call from several unions, aren’t done either. They cautioned that more action may come if their demands were not taken into account. The movement’s genesis came in France began on May 10 in Atlantic ports near La Rochelle and quickly spread to northern France and the Mediterranean after diesel prices soared to 75 cents a liter, compared with 40 cents in November. The actions of the fishermen in Belgium look to be inspiring others as well, which is always a hugely positive consequence of any protest. Portuguese fishermen plan to follow their French counterparts by staging a national strike in protest at the high price of fuel, union and industry officials said. The strike would begin on Friday, May 30. So while the price of seafood in Europe might be taking a hit because of this, I’m not a big fan of seafood nor am I currently residing in Europe, so it’s cool with me. Besides, it’s social dissidence, it’s striking out against perceived inactivity and unresponsiveness of government, so dam straight I’m down with it. Make The Man pay for what he’s doing (or not doing, as the case may be), that’s one of the rules I live my life by…..

- God bless the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers. With the NBA on the verge of a nightmare Finals matchup between two teams that everyone outside of their respective cities are tired of and who have matched up in forgettable finals before in the Detroit Pistons and San Antonio Spurs, the Celtics and Lakers have both grabbed big wins early on in series against the Pistons and Spurs, respectively, and appear to be well on the way to preventing that atrocious Pistons-Spurs series. After the Celtics and Pistons split the first two games of their series in Boston, they traveled to Detroit where all the idiotic “experts” in the media were sure that Boston couldn’t win because they were 0-6 on the road in the playoffs. By their reasoning, the Pistons were the team to beat and there was nothing Boston could do about it. Well, nothing other than a 14-point bitch-slapping of the Pistons in Detroit in Game 3. In spite of the Pistons coming back to win Game 4 and tie the series at 2-2, you have to like Boston’s chances with two of the series’ final three games, including Game 7 if necessary, are in Boston. The Lakers-Spurs series has gotten off to a great start as well for those of us wanting neither the Pistons nor the Spurs in the Finals. In Game 1 in L.A., San Antonio jumped out to a 20-point third-quarter lead before the Lakers surged back and ripped the game by an 89-85 margin. That was followed by a 101-71 beatdown in Game 2 that left the Spurs in a 2-0 hole. Now we get to hear all of those tired, inaccurate clichés about how you have to knock out the defending champ (which the Spurs are) in order to be the champ. Allow me a moment to debunk that moronic myth, if you will. In sports, being the defending chap doesn’t mean sh*t the next season. Winning last year’s title doesn’t give you a 20-point head start in games the next year, nor does it give you an automatic one-game lead in a playoff series the next season. You win the title in 2007, the relevance of that title ends once the 2008 season begins. So it means absolutely nothing tangible that the Spurs won last year’s NBA title. That’s doubly true in pro sports, where rosters see such extensive turnover from season to season. The team that won last year’s championship isn't the same team that’s playing this year. Even if most of the same players are there, all of them are a year older and have changed to some extent. Other teams aren’t the same either, so the landscape around a defending champion has changed as well. But back to my previous point, the point being that until the Spurs are eliminated, analysts and pundits will ply those same lame clichés about needing to defeat them to prove that you are the real champ. Thankfully the Lakers hold a 2-1 lead in the series and have the best player in the NBA in Kobe Bryant, so it’s only a matter of time before they win the series anyhow. So thanks to the Lakers and Celtics for helping us avoid the total abortion of a Finals that Spurs-Pistons would have been.

- Greek continued a great sophomore season last night, providing another fun episode that has me thinking that of all the shows I’ve watched this season, I think I just might have the most fun and laughs with this one. Not saying it’s the best show on TV, but it’s consistently fun and delivers a lot of laughs. This week, the laughs came as the Omega Chi’s and Kappa Tau’s raced to throw the first big party on campus since the administration lifted the burdensome restrictions on the campus Greek system. The Omega Chi’s had a distinct advantage because they actually planned their party out and had money to spend on booze, two luxuries the KT’s didn’t have. While the Omega Chi’s invited the six best frats and sororities on campus to their parties, the KT’s were left to scrounge up a few dollars for three kegs and alcohol-free Jell-O shots, which led to a predictable lame party. Cappie won't settle for his party to flop, so he leads his small band of KT brothers and partygoers to the Omega Chi house where they proceed to steal a crap load of alcohol and haul it back to the KT house to jumpstart their own party. The Omega Chi-Kappa Tau party showdown also divides the sisters at the Zeta Beta house, where president Casey accepts the Omega Chi’s invitation while her little sis Rebecca and a few of the pledges want to attend the KT party thrown by Rebecca’s boyfriend Cappie. To solve the dispute, Casey assigns Rebecca and her pal Mandy to be the sober sisters for the night, theoretically restricting them to a night at the ZBZ house alone. Rebecca, being the spoiled, disagreeable rich girl she is, won't stand for that and leads a pledge revolt by going to the KT party with Mandy and several other pledges. Casey realizes what they’ve done when Betsy, one of the ZBZ sisters, gets hammered at the Omega Chi party and no one answers her calls to the ZBZ house for a sober sister to come get her. This continues a series of interruptions for Casey’s fun at the party even on a night when she and BFF Ashleigh agree to talk to as many cute guys as possible. Ashleigh succeeds on her mission but Casey finds her new strategy of sending out positive energy and having guys come to her to be a bad idea. She is constantly interrupted by Calvin, who Evan Chambers has tasked to keep her from talking to other guys so he can try to get back together with her. When the one guy at the party Casey really wants to talk to, Ryan, does approach her, she’s busy talking to him when Betsy stumbles up to them and Casey has to deal with her drunk sister. She takes Betsy to the KT party and tries to leave her with Rebecca, who refuses and starts a big argument with Casey. Meanwhile, Betsy pukes all over the floor at the KT house and Casey ends up walking her home anyhow. During the walk, she’s met by Ryan, the guy she spent most of the Omega Chi party talking to. She’s thrilled when he kisses her but repulsed when he then tries to basically eat her face and shove his tongue halfway down he throat on the second kiss. Casey’s little brother Rusty was busy with a problem of his own throughout the episode, that problem being his “fun” buddy Tina. Once Rusty realizes Tina wants him for little more than sex, he gets cold feet and decides that he can’t be a part of that kind of arrangement. Instead of the usual setup where a guy wants just sex and the girl wants more, the tables were flipped and after a deluge of phone calls throughout the episode and advice from Cappie, Beaver and two random strangers at each of the parties, Rusty gets help from two frat brothers who send Tina a text message from Rusty’s phone to break things off with Tina. In return, she informs him that she has crabs, meaning he’s getting a not-so-nice parting gift from their little fling. Rusty’s pal Calvin is having romantic trouble of his own, trying to have a date with his new pal Michael at the Omega Chi party while also running interference for Evan, trying to keep guys from talking to Casey. At night’s end, despite Michael not being the least bit comfortable at the party, he and Calvin share a kiss and appear to be finally getting their relationship going. Blessedly absent from this episode is the wet-blanket, one-note, one-dimensional downer that is Dale. That meant a nice lack of religious clichés, anti-fun sentiment and the outright prudishness that is all the character depth the show’s writers and producers seem to want to give to the character. Next week’s episode will be the last one before the season finale and it will feature Rusty getting into a fine mess thanks to a fake ID he uses at a local bar that ends up with a case of mistaken identity and him at a wedding singing. Should be a blast, so until then….

- Never before have I attempted a three-pronged Albums to Avoid feature, so give me a little room as I try it here. This week, three albums you’ll want to steer clear of for three very different reasons are out. One is in a genre that is easily in the running for worst genre in the history of music, country, right up along with disco, polka, mainstream pop and techno. The second one you’ll want to avoid because it’s basically your typical train wreck, vanity project album by a bored actor/actress who has always harbored a desire to record an album and now feels validated to do so because they are rich and famous. Lastly, there’s an album that manages to suck despite being in a good genre because it is the lowest level of the particular genre. Let’s start with the easy one here, the country album. It’s the one I told you about just a few days ago, the effort by Dancing With the (D-List) Stars professional dancer Julianne Hough. Her country-pop effort is every bit as bad as I feared it would be, probably worse. It contains songs about bad country music clichés like alcoholism and mostly sounds like its theme is a rip-off of a bad, chick-flick made-for-TV movie on the Lifetime network. Hough’s vocals are mediocre at best and even though she hired a songwriter who penned many songs for former American Karaoke-er Carrie Underwood (yeah, that’s a great formula for a winning album) and brought in a lot of guest vocalists, this album blows with a capital “B”. The vanity project that’s an Album to Avoid comes from Scarlett Johannson, who proves that having a nice rack and being a decent actress don’t help you when making an album. Johannson attempts to cover for her lack of musical ability by enlisting help from David Bowie, TV on the Radio’s David Sitek and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Nick Zinner, but those assists only underscore how bad Johannson is musically. The songs are all over the map stylistically and there is no discernable style or coherence. Whether it’s a terrible tune like No One Knows I’m Gone (and no one would care if your album was gone or never existed in the first place, Scarlett) or the whiny, wistful I Wish I Was in New Orleans (why don’t you go there and take your album with you, maybe sink it to the bottom of the nearest bayou), this is one of the worst albums ever in a genre where no shortage of crap-tacular records have been made. The third Album to Avoid is a rock album, so you maybe be surprised that I, of all people, am ripping it. But then again, it is a classic example of arena rock at its worst from Three Doors Down, a band that typifies all that is wrong with arena rock as a genre. Their polished, slick rock sound, radio-friendly lyrics and lack of actual texture and individuality to their lyrics put them in a category where, even though they’re a step above crappy mainstream pop music, they’re still all but unlistenable. They’re the band that mainstream pop fans listen to when they’re trying to pretend that they have an edge and are cool. When you hear songs like Train and It’s the Only One You’ve Got typify this problem, sounding like they were written more to be played on radio and in commercials than to actually be good music. Already It’s Not My Time is a mainstream radio favorite, its poppy riff and sappy chorus perfect fits for faux rock fans everywhere. So there you have it folks, three Albums to Avoid in one single paragraph, you’re very welcome.

- Ah, the sweet scent of the political process at its best, a country sitting on the verge of a runoff election to determine who will be its leader and shape the direction of the nation for the next few years….and of course the opposition candidate delaying his return to the country because of an alleged military execution plot against him while his supporters beaten and killed by the party currently in power as they look to continue their reign of terror. Such is life in Zimbabwe, where opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai finally made it back to his home country late last week, a week after he was originally scheduled to come back because his party believed him to be the target of an assassination plot by the country’s military, under the leader of the country’s dictatorial current president, the loathsome Robert Mugabe. The 84-year-old Mugabe has led Zimbabwe since the country gained its independence from Britain in 1980, but he and Tsvangirai are set now set for a June 27 runoff election to determine the future of Zimbabwe. Furthermore, good ol’ Bob Mugabe doesn’t appear willing to leave the decision in the hands of actual voters - unless those hands are chopped from their dead, lifeless bodies and dragged to the polls where they are used to write his name on the ballot. Tsvangirai is breaking out the heavy artillery in a linguistic sense, saying that, “Mugabe once led our people to freedom. He can even now set his people free from poverty, hunger and fear” by stepping down. Could? Absolutely. Will and have the integrity and testicular fortitude to? No. Mugabe is not interested in what’s really best for Zimbabwe, he’s interested first and foremost in retaining his power and then maybe getting around to doing what he and only he believes is in the best interest of Zimbabwe. He already lost this election once and proceeded to wreck the election results to the point that this second election was necessary. Fortunately for Zimbabweans, this time the rest of the world will be watching…..

Baby auctioning, bad entertainment industry combos and more good French rioting

- I have to admit, the French are really impressing me this year in terms of putting on quality riots and protests. Maybe the idea of all of them as a bunch of pastry-eating sissies who surrender any time anyone breaches their borders brandishing anything more than a water gun is off-base….but probably not. That doesn’t mean they can’t stage some great riots, as demonstrations this week against governmental reforms proposed by President Nikolas Sarkozy. In conjunction with economic struggles that have put a hit to the pocketbooks of many Frenchmen, that was enough to inspire literally hundreds of thousands of these normally submissive people to take to the streets in some spectacular riots. They clogged roads, blocked ports and created enough mayhem in Paris and 100 other cities and towns around the country that the police had their hands full trying to quell the dissidence. All told, more than 300,000 individuals made their voice heard and they were supplemented by a one-day walkout by state workers protesting plans to extend the country’s retirement age. Trains, traffic and other public services were badly hampered for the entire day and the government has yet another black eye in a period of rule that has been punctuated by regular clashes between angry mobs and police. Now with this many Frenchmen angry, I would have assumed that the government was threatening to take their crepes away, make them shave their nasty moustaches and take a shower, but I can neither confirm nor deny that those are among the proposed reforms that Sarkozy is proposing. Regardless of the particulars of what you’re rioting about, Frenchies, you know I’m down with your act. I love and support rioters of every size, shape, color, creed and nationality, just as long as they’re set on sticking it to The Man…..

- I do my best not to write about any of the crappy reality dating shows on TV, but I can’t help it when it comes to The Bachelorette. This Deanna chick and the promos ABC has been bludgeoning viewers with over an over again are just too ridiculous and pathetic to be left alone. This chick is whiny and pissed because she was on a previous season of The Bachelor and got her heart broken? She’s back now because she wants “her fantast love story”? Are you freaking kidding me? Chica, if you had one go-around with reality dating shows and you’re dumb enough to want to do it again, there’s no way I can call you anything other than a moron. Appearing on one of these shows is about as low as you can go in the TV world. Trying to find love on a show that is so fake, phony and contrived is laughable at best. You cram together 25 dudes or chicks based mostly on their physical appearance and then slam a person of the opposite sex amongst them all, telling them to choose the love of their life from some group of 25 losers they’ve rounded up? Just as people say a trial by jury is bad because a jury is comprised of 12 people not smart enough to get out of jury duty, choosing a lover from 25 reality TV losers is a terrible idea because these are ass clowns dumb enough to appear on a reality dating show in the first place. Has it totally escaped you that every freaking one of the couples who met and “fell in love” on one of these shows is broken up within a few months? Even the ones who pledged their undying love for one another on the show are splitting up within a few weeks, shocker. But you think you’re going to get a fairy tale romance from this after you saw this charade up close and personal once before? Deanna, you just may be the single dumbest reality TV participant I’ve ever seen….

- You really crack me up, hockey honks. With the Stanley Cup Finals, the crowning moment of the NHL, now underway, you’d think that the NHL actually matters in the American sports landscape the way that hockey fans and commentators are talking. These yahoos are trying to build up the matchup between the Pittsburgh Penguins and Detroit Red Wings like it’s going to elevate hockey from its position as the fifth or sixth most popular sport in the United States. A quick aside…how the hell is Detroit the Western Conference representative in this series? Last I check, the D is squarely on the eastern half of the country and not even close to being halfway across the country. Nice geography, hockey. But because Detroit is the most rabid hockey city in the U.S. (again, it’s akin to being the tallest midget, the bravest Frenchman or having the best teeth in England) and Pittsburgh has some of the most talented young players in the NHL in Sidney Crosby and Yvgeny Malkin, hockey advocates would have you believe that this series is somehow going to save their sport from the abyss of irrelevance in which it currently resides. Of course, if that were the case, the sport’s biggest championship series wouldn’t be airing on a second-tier cable network formerly known as the Outdoor Life Network (now known simply as Versus). If your sport’s championship series is broadcast on a network that a majority of Americans don’t even receive, I’m sorry to inform you that you and your sport just don’t matter. So Crosby and his sad, scraggly, pube beard that’s spottier and more feeble than a meandering Andy Rooney rant on 60 Minutes can take their act and toil in obscurity as the overwhelming majority of American sports fans pay attention to the NBA playoffs, Major League Baseball, the PGA Tour, the NFL offseason, their local Little League team, etc.

- There are many questions raised when parents post an ad on eBay offering to sell their 7-month-old child for one euro, or about $1.60. You know the questions I’m referring to, obvious ones such as “Is there a ‘Buy It Now’ price?” or “Can I get free shipping?” and “What’s the minimum bid?” Unfortunately I don’t know the answers to any of those questions because the hardliners at eBay shut down the auction just two hours and 30 minutes after the ad was posted. The Internet auction site deleted the posting later and no bids were made for the child. Furthermore, authorities in southern Germany have taken custody of the 7-month-old boy despite claims from the boy’s mother that ad was joke. Ha ha ha……whew, too funny, great joke. Seriously, stop it, you guys are killing me. No really, stop it. Stop lying and trying to explain this away, you idiots. This is one of those matters where even if you thought this was some kind of joke or prank, it’s not all right. Among the things you can’t do in life, right up there with wearing spandex in public if you’re a dude, owning a pair of jean shorts and owning a Backstreet Boys album, is putting your kid up for sale on an Internet auction site. Police spokesman Peter Hieber says the baby was placed in the care of youth services in the southwestern Allgaeu region, but he also admitted that on Saturday that the mother told police the Internet ad was only a joke. However, the police don’t appear to be sold on that explanation because they have begun an investigation into possible child trafficking against the parents. Yeah, great joke, German parents. Too bad you can't be prosecuted for being morons, because that conviction would be a slam dunk. Besides, exactly who was this joke supposed to amuse? Did one of you think, “Know what? I’m going to pull a fast one on my wife/husband and throw little Hans up on eBay for a single euro, that’ll be hilarious!” or were you pissed at youer in-laws for continually trying to tell you how to raise you kind and figured you’d get back at them by auctioning off their grandson online? But hey, I’m sure this won't be something that haunts your kid for the rest of his life or anything, being the baby whose parents trying to auction him off top the highest bidder.

- When thinking of the worst possible marriage of show business entities, one of the first nauseating couplings to come to mind would be American Karaoke and….well, pretty much anything else. You take your Reubens, Clays, Clarksons, etc. and you add them to almost anything else in the entertainment industry and you have a crap-tacular mess (see From Justin to Kelly, the abysmal 2004 movie musical if you need any convincing). But here’s a combo that is nearly as stomach-churning its own way: Dancing With the (D-List) Stars and country music. That unpalatable mix will happen courtesy of DWTDLS champion dancer Julianne Hough, who has decided that being a part of one entertainment train wreck isn't enough and that she needs to help further propagate the sheer horr-a that is country music upon the world. Her self-titled album will be dropping soon, so I’ve got a new entry for my Albums to Avoid feature in my crosshairs. The album is being described as country-pop in the vein of Hough’s “heroes,” Shania Twain and Faith Hill. Actually, mixing in pop music makes in a ménage-e-twa of entertainment industry awfulness, so props to her on that. If anyone out there is wealthy enough to buy every copy of this album in advance along with the master recordings and then burn them all, I would encourage you to do so and I think all sane, musically-educated Americans would salute you for your efforts.

A race where no horses die, a man band enabler goes to jail and American Airlines wants to screw you over

- Let’s just imagine for a moment that you’re an owner of a local insurance agency in a suburb for Charlotte, North Carolina (it’s exciting, I know, but try to remain calm). Now let’s imagine that the North Carolina Department of Insurance is sending out an investigator to audit your business. Maybe you have some things you’ve been doing, shady business practices, that you want to hide and don’t want the dreaded NCDI to find out what you’ve been up to. What do you do? How do you avert this impending crisis? If you answered “murder the investigator sent to audit your agency,” congratulations, you’re thinking just like the man that Charlotte police killed NCDI investigator Sallie Rohrbach when sent arrived to investigate his insurance agency. Rohrbach’s body was found in a wooded area south of Charlotte about one week after she went missing and police didn’t have to look far to find their prime suspect. Call me crazy, but I don’t think this guy is going to pass this audit. How the heck do you go from zero to murder that quickly anyhow? I get that no one likes to be audited and if you’re engaging in any illegal business practices you don’t want to be found out, but getting to the point where you murder someone to cover up your misdeeds is insane. Whatever it was you were looking to cover up wasn’t as bad as murder….at least I hope not. As always, hope possibly spending the rest of your life in jail or receiving the death penalty was worth it, idiot….

- I’ve come to hate the delays in the game during NFL contests in which instant replay is used, but longer, more boring games aside, Major League Baseball needs to implement replay in its game immediately. The practice could be kept to a limited number of plays, maybe even to one specific type of play: home run calls. Allowing umpires a chance to look at video to determine if a ball was fair or foul on a home run or if it struck something above and beyond the outfield fence before bouncing back onto the field would help reverse some of the more egregious errors MLB umpires have made just this week. Twice in games at Yankee Stadium, umpires have blown home run calls on plays where video would have clearly shown them they were wrong. In a Sunday night game between the Yankees and their cross-town rivals, the New York Mets, Mets first baseman Carlos Delgado slapped and opposite field shot that was hooking toward the left field foul line as it neared the fence. Just as the ball reached the foul pole, it caromed to the foul side of the line and into the stands. The umpires initially ruled it a home run but then conferred as reversed the call. Replays showed the ball deflecting off the bottom of the foul pole on a portion of the pole that was black instead of the yellow color covering nearly the entire pole. The fan who caught the ball showed it to a TV camera with a scuff mark on it and the camera also showed a white mark on the foul pole where the ball hit. But with no replay, the erroneous call stood. Then on Wednesday night, the Yankees were playing the Baltimore Orioles and Yankee slugger Alex Rodriguez hit a long fly ball to right-center field that obviously hit off of some stairs above and beyond the fence. The ball came back onto the field of play and the umps ruled it to be in play instead of a home run, leaving A-Rod at second base with a double. Wrong call, but one that could have been corrected with a quick replay session. It’s time for MLB to stop resisting replay and allow it to be used on at least a minimal basis. Those who argue that human error on the part of umpires is just part of the game or that replay would slow games down…just shut your mouths. Guys having home runs ripped from them by inaccurate umpires is one tradition baseball can afford to lose.

- Everyone has their fetishes and freakery, that much we know. Just last week, a Canadian couple who like to carve one another with knives during sex were reunited following the lifting of a court order keeping them apart after the man in the relationship nearly died because of a stab wound to the chest inflicted by his girlfriend during sex. Little did any of us know that just over a week later, a story would come along that would make those two freaks look normal by comparison. According to a story published this week Edward Smith, 57, of Washington claims that has sex with cars. No, he doesn’t have sex in cars, according to Smith he has sex with cars. Smith says he has never been attracted to women, only to cars. Whoa there, buddy. That’s not just freaky and perverted, it’s as repulsive and deviant as any behavior I have ever, ever heard of. Smith claims to have had more than 1,000 lovers in his life, all of them cars and that he is what is clinically known as a mechaphile. “Maybe I’m a little bit off the wall, but when I see movies like Herbie and Night Rider, when cars become loveable, huggable characters, it’s wonderful. I prefer cars. I talk to them like they’re girlfriends. Cars are my preference.” No you didn’t….you did not just say you get turned on by movies like Herbie and Night Rider, you sick freak. No one should allegedly have first had sex with one of their cars at the age of 15. Does the car get charged for statutory rape in that case? And how old was the car? But back to Smith’s perverse obsession with cars in movies….nothing like turning to your friend at a movie to mention something about the action on the screen and noticing that the guy two seats down is….umm….getting a little too much enjoyment out of a scene with Kit or Herbie. According to Smith, he’s gotten after it with cars that belong to other people, not just his own, and has done so both at auto shows and on the street. “There are moments way out in the middle of nowhere, when I see a little car parked and I swear it needs some loving. There are times when I’ve waited until the middle of the night and just hugged and kissed them.” The story is so absurd and out there that you have to think (and hope) that Smith is making all of this up. Why a guy would make something this perverse up, I don’t know. By saying this stuff, you’re basically ensuring that anyone who hears it will want nothing to do with you and will keep themselves and their cars a safe distance from you at all times. But Ed Smith isn't concerned with people knowing he’s a mechpheliac; his main concern is that no one thinks he’s a homosexual. “I’m not gay,” Smith wants everyone to know. Good, because that would just be so repulsive when juxtaposed against your alleged sexing up of cars. After you admit to something like that, there’s pretty much nothing you can cop to that will make things worse. You could be found to be a cannibal, bank-robbing, drunk-driving arsonist and it’s still not going to make people think any less of you. Oh, and his freakery doesn’t end with cars. He claims that his most intense sexual experience was “making love to the helicopter from 1980s TV show Airwolf.” Furthermore, he’s currently “dating” Volkswagen Beetle called 'Vanilla' - appropriately painted in full Love Bug livery and he writes poems, sings songs and talks to his cars, whilst fervently denying any wrongdoing. And no, I don’t want to know the specifics of how Smith makes sweet lovin’ to cars, some things are better left unexplored…..

- Props to American Airlines for being the first airline to have the balls to rape travelers of even more money for things that should come for free with the exorbitant price of air travel. In a move that every other airline will wish they had possessed the testicular fortitude to institute first, AA will now charge travelers $15 for every bag they check. No, not for bags that are excessively heavy or beyond the allowed limit of pieces of luggage per customer - for every damn bag you check. What, it’s not enough that we fork over extra money for gawd-awful airplane food and booze, you want $15 for just checking a single bag? Who can travel without luggage? The answer would be no one, which basically means you’re squeezing an extra $15 out of every person who flies your airline. Heck, I’m going to resort to shrink-wrapping all of my clothes so I can jam them into a carryon bag and avoid paying this surcharge. And I can guarantee you that this horrible policy is going to lead to a lot of people trying to haul their impossibly large bags onto the plane and attempting to cram those bags into an overhead bin that’s several feet too small to accommodate them. I get that with rising fuel costs it’s tougher for you to turn the same massive profits you used to make, but why not try this reality on for size. Americans across the board are taking a hit from higher gas prices. Many businesses are making less money because of the higher gas costs, so you might just have to accept that you’re not going to have quite the same profit margins you did a couple of years ago. Perhaps your CEO will have to be happy with a $4 million annual salary bonus instead of an $8 million salary bonus this fiscal year. Just stop screwing over travelers with bogus fees for things you should be giving them for free. Either that or change your company name to BOHICA Airlines….you know, “Bend over, here it comes again”…..

- If it were up to me, Lou Pearlman would have been in jail more than a decade ago and he’d be serving a life sentence in the most brutal maximum-security prison in the country. That dude has done so much to absolutely wreck and pollute the music world with all of the man bands like O-Men Sync Boys of 98 Town that he put together and thrust upon the music-listening public that a life sentence in San Quentin wouldn’t be nearly harsh enough for him. Sadly, that kind of crime isn't punishable under our current legal system, so instead it will be guilty pleas on charges of conspiracy, money laundering and making false claims in bankruptcy court that do in the cherubic band manager. Pearlman was sentenced Wednesday to 25 years in federal prison for engineering a scheme that bilked thousands of investors out of their life savings over the course of two decades. That was the maximum sentence allowable for Pearlman after he pleaded guilty to ripping in excess of $300 million from investors in his company and also from banks since the 1980s. U.S. District Judge G. Kendall Sharp (ah, the first initial in front of your name, what pompous, blue-blooded legal professional doesn’t need that?) clearly has a sense of humor, as he promised to knock one month off of Pearlman’s sentence for every $1 million he repays of the money he stole. If he can pay back all $300 million, that would mean Pearlman could eliminate his jail time, but I’m guessing he has only a fraction that amount left. The question is, do you pay $10 million to lessen your jail time by 10 months or hang on to the money and spend the extra time in the can. With the way our judicial system works and the overcrowding problem in prisons, I’d hang onto the jack and bet on having the sentence shortened anyhow for good behavior. That doesn’t mean that I think Pearlman ever deserves to get out of prison, because clearly he doesn’t. At least with him behind bars, that’s one less idiot out there trying to put together the next “great” man band…..

- Something is getting lost in all of the Triple Crown talk following Big Brown’s win at the Preakness Stakes last Saturday. Yes, there is a horse with a legitimate shot to win horse racing’s three most prestigious races in a season for the first time since 1978. But in light of what happened to filly Eight Belles at the Kentucky Derby earlier this month, the bigger story is that we had a major horse race and all of the animals forced to run it in survived - for now. Nothing quite like having a Triple Crown race punctuated by the second-place finisher euthanized on the track, horse racing! Thankfully all of the competing ponies in the Belmont made it out relatively unscathed, so the track veterinarian didn’t have to run out and give any of them the needed before they could even get off the track. Congrats on that, horse racing, it’s quite an accomplishment to not have one of your competitors die on the field of play. While other (real) sports manage to have never had a single competitor put to sleep on the field, you manage to have it happen with alarming frequency. Yet another reason why you’re not a sport and why watching your little pony race is a huge, huge waste of time.

A high school yearbook funny, a new home for wrasslin' on TV and Jose Canseco plumbs the depths of life

- Officials at McKinney High School in McKinney, Texas need to grow a sense of humor and learn to stop taking themselves so seriously. Yes, in school yearbooks delivered this week, there were altered photos containing heads on the wrong bodies, students with their necks stretched totally out of proportion, one photo of a girl with an arm missing and another in which a girl’s head was placed on what appeared to be a nude body, but so what? What you call obscene and in poor taste I call a welcome infusion of interest and excitement into the world of stale, lame high school yearbooks. Who really wants a bunch of lame head shots of people they didn’t like, staged pictures of various clubs and teams and basically a lot of run-of-the-mill crap that is about as interesting as a blank piece of paper? So instead of berating Lifetouch National School Studios Inc. for the alterations to your yearbook pictures, maybe look at them in a more positive light. Yes, Lifetouch has apologized for what it called “an unfortunate lapse in judgment,” but the fact is there was no apology necessary. Apparently the school was so absolutely anal that it demanded that all heads be the exact same size in photographs and all eyes be on the exact same level, because God forbid anyone not look as totally uniform as possible. Personally I think the school officials deserve what they got for being such overbearing, demanding asses. Maybe next time you all can relax a little bit and not demand every photo be identical and uniform to the nth degree and you won't end up with this kind of problem. I can’t say that I understand how Lifetouch went from that request to pics of kids with heads on the wrong bodies, girls with missing arms and others with their heads on nude bodies, but that doesn’t make the McKinney HS officials look any less idiotic and anal for the request in the first place.

- It may be a decided step down, but World Wrestling Entertainment has found a new home for its Friday Night Smackdown program. The show will be jettisoned by the CW when the current contract with WWE expires in September, which means that the show needs a new home. It’s found one on MyNetworkTV, a second-rate network created for stations that were left out in the cold when the UPN and WB merged a couple of years ago. Basically MyNetworkTV shows a lot of crappy reruns and second-rate shows, meaning that Smackdown will instantly become its most noteworthy program when it debuts on Oct. 3. Actually, WWE programming will start on MyNetworkTV on Oct. 2 with highlights from WWE’s WrestleMania, but Smackdown won't air until the next night. For all you wrasslin’ fans out there, especially fans of WWE’s second best weekly show, now you’ll know where to find your Smackdown action when the CW gives it the boot at the end of September….

- Now this is the kind of sensitivity and class you like to see from the men and women representing your country abroad. While an overwhelming majority of American soldiers have done an outstanding job of showing character, toughness and integrity while fighting the most unjustified war imaginable in Iraq, there is the occasional knucklehead who does something dumb and embarrasses his country. When I say dumb, I’m referring to something like the idiot sniper who decided that it would be a good idea to use a copy of the Quran for target practice. That sniper has since been removed from Iraq and a U.S. commander in the region held a formal ceremony to apologize to local Sunni leaders. To this unidentified soldier, I have to ask one question: How exactly did you think what you did was going to be okay? I get that many of the people you are battling and trying to avoid being killed by are of the Muslim faith, but that doesn’t give you the right to use the holy book for their religion as target practice. Maybe you and your boys were sitting around, talking about what you could do to break up the monotony and someone jokingly threw out the idea of shooting up the Quran. But you, my friend, were the only a-hole dumb enough to actually follow through on the idea. Way to show the world what America stands for, a lack of integrity and respect for the beliefs and views of others. Nothing like perpetuating the ugly American stereotype in a country where you’re supposed to be….well, whatever the hell it is that our troops are still doing in Iraq. Assign this jerk to a base somewhere in Alaska and maybe he’ll learn his lesson then.

- It was only a matter of time before Jose Canseco made it here, but it’s still a little startling how quickly Jose arrived at this point. After his baseball career ended, Jose was left to scramble for income because he’d managed to waste a lot of the money he’d earned in MLB and needed something to do with his life. He first turned to The Surreal Life on VH1, living with a bunch of has-been, no-name loser, D-list celebrities in a SoCal house while cameras rolled. Once that was over, Jose tried his hand as an author and actually had some success with his first book Juiced, which helped bring the steroids problem in baseball into the spotlight. But from there, the downward spiral quickened and Jose began wrecking whatever credibility he built from the book. Word leaked out that he was attempting to extort money from major leaguers in order to keep their names from being linked to ‘roids in his book and in his follow-up to that first book, the recently released Vindicated. Sandwiched in between all of this was a failed attempt to start his own sports management agency and a phony comeback attempt to MLB that was nothing more than a book promotion stunt. But now Jose has hit rock bottom, literally. He’s scraping the bottom of the barrel by offering anyone and everyone $5,000 to step into the ring and fight him. Canseco and promoter Damon Feldman are seeking a challenger for fight set for July 12 in Atlantic City. The chosen opponent will be paid $5,000. Those looking to brawl against a soul-less, money-grubbing, reprehensible slime ball should e-mail fightcanseco@aol.com. Welcome to the bottom of the barrel, Jose, something that’s pretty tough to accomplish for a guy who just had his house repossessed and has appeared on The Surreal Life.

- I’m just wondering how anyone tries to argue the virtues of relaxing laws on child pornography before the Supreme Court and does so with a straight face. This week, the court heard a case that began to make its way through the court system in 2004 when former Miami police officer Michael Williams was convicted on kiddie porn charges. The appeals have dragged on since then, with Williams’ attorneys trying to make the case that criminalizing the “promotion” of child pornography is a First Amendment violation. Seriously, are you f’ing kidding me? You think our founding fathers intended for the Constitution to give you the right to possess and distribute images of young children in sexual activities? How the hell can you even make that case without your head exploding from the sheer hypocrisy of it all? This isn't one of those cases where everyone claims to be okay with free speech until there’s some sort of speech they don’t like. Fact is, kids engaging in this kind of activity is against the law, as is videotaping or photographing them while doing it. You want find a single person outside of the pedophile community who thinks that it’s all right, yet you want to make it legal for people to get their hands on this sort of material? Thankfully the Supreme Court voted 7-2 against relaxing the kiddie porn laws, but I don’t think a simple defeat in court is enough for the tools who argued this case. They deserve prison time right alongside Williams just for arguing his position in the case. Everyone is entitled to their day in court….unless their day in court is spent arguing the merits of legalizing child pornography.

The wrong way to acquire protection, anti-Hank Clinton sentiment and things I wish I didn't know about the NY Yankees

In recent years, the Catholic church has rightly taken a lot of heat because many of its priests committed heinous, despicable acts of sexual abuse against young boys. But the acts of sexual freakery among the men of the cloth clearly are not limited to any one faith, because men like certified piece of crap Joe Barron, a Baptist minister at a Dallas-area megachurch, are out there doing sick, pervy things as well. Barron, 52, of Plano, Texas was caught up in an Internet sex sting in which undercover officers posing as a 13-year-old girl chatted with Barron for about two weeks in what police termed sexual conversations. Barron then suggested a meeting in the town of Bryan, making the 200-mile drive from Plano and being met with a rude surprise upon his arrival. Nice work, you piece of garbage. You’re preaching messages of morality and how to live on Sundays and then engaging in deviant, perverse, criminal acts with what you believe to be 13-year-old girls during the week? You have to wonder if some of those online chats took place from Barron’s office at the church, which would be absolutely stomach-churning. I know that anyone who commits this kind of act or intends to is equally despicable, but you have to have a special level of contempt for such blatant hypocrites as Barron. It’s men like him who turn their faith into a punch line for the world, not to mention bring shame to their families and their congregations. Hope you enjoy jail, Mr. Barron, maybe you can play the part of that 13-year-old girl with your new cellmate….

- Can someone give me an update on prices for air travel to Pakistan for the month of June? Looks like I might be making my very first trip to the southwest Asian nation if the threats being issued by Pakistani lawyers to stage massive street protests in June prove to be true. The lawyers are demanding that the country’s new government follow through on its pledge to reinstate judges purged by President Pervez Musharraf. These same lawyers staged some rockin’ protests lasts year to help loosen Musharraf’s grip on power in Pakistan, so they do wield some significant influence. The entire country is in the midst of a power struggle and quite frankly, there’s no better time to riot, march, protest and demonstrate than when control of your country’s government and judicial system are up for grabs. I apologize for not being able to make the trip to participate in your last round of protests, Pakistani lawyers, but if I can wrangle a good price on airfare from Orbitz in and you all make good on your threats to take it to the streets once again, I just might see you next month. But don’t feel the need to wait that long to start your social dissidence, because when in comes to sticking it to The Man, there’s no day like today….

- By now you’ve probably heard the story making the rounds about New York Yankees slugger Jason Giambi rocking a golden thong with flames on the waistband as a “slump buster” to help him out when he’s scuffling at the plate. It’s a funny story but not a surprising one given the tendencies toward superstition that baseball players are famous for. These guys jump over base lines going on and off the field, they eat the same pre-game meal every time they’re on a hot streak, have been known to brush their teeth in the dugout during games and just about any other crazy superstition you can dream up. So while I personally will never, ever be sporting a thong for any reason, at any time, in any place, I don’t have a big issue with Giambi doing so as long as I don’t have to see him in it. Do I wish I hadn’t heard about it? Sure, but if he wants to slap that thing on and believe it will help him get out of slumps, so be it. Where I have a problem is when, as the story alleges, Giambi starts passing that thing around to his teammates and allowing them to wear it when they’re looking to break out of batting slumps. That I do have a problem with. Dudes should not, under any circumstances, be sharing underwear. You wear your underwear, that’s the end of the list of people allowed to wear them. Well, maybe your girlfriend or wife wants to snag a pair of your boxers to wear around the house, that’s about the only possible exception. But no way, no how should you be sharing your underwear with other dudes. That’s true for any kind of underwear, but especially true with a thong. If you want to be one of those freaks who thinks it’s cool to wear a thong, that’s your problem. But sharing that thong with other dudes makes you an affront to every other guy walking the face of the Earth. It’s sick, disgusting and any other like adjective you can come up with. No matter how many times you wash that thing and how strong of a laundry detergent you use on it, there is simply no way that another dude putting on that thong is going to be anything other than really, really creepy and nasty. Bad enough if you and your boys want to buy matching gold thongs and rock them, but even that would be far better than you all sharing the same gold thong. Even women, who are a lot more likely to share clothes than guys, generally speaking, aren’t swapping gold thongs and loaning them out to friends. So either stop doing it or stop talking about it, but either way just make this the first and last time I hear about it.

- So apparently a lot of Hank Clinton supporters are angry and alleging sexism because their candidate isn't going to win the Democratic presidential nomination. Memo to you, angry Hank supporters: the reason people weren’t down with Hank isn't because we’re sexist and won’t accept a female president. More so, we won't accept that dude as our president. I have no problem with a woman in our nation’s highest office, just as long as it’s not some militant, angry femi-Nazi with the stereotypical angry lesbian hairdo and the man-hating, bristling personality that Hank has. She’s tried so hard to fit in in the male-dominated political world that she’s taken on way too many male characteristics, right down to the way she looks and acts. I don’t think you want Hank as the first female president, it just wouldn’t say good things about your gender. She’s one of the least feminine, womanly women I’ve ever seen, so maybe you want to talk amongst yourselves and come up with a better, more electable candidate for 2012. Get over the fact that some airport gifts shops were selling Hank Clinton nutcrackers (very funny and extremely appropriate) or that supporters of Barack Obama have been sporting “Bros before Hos” t-shirts. Feminists of all ages are decrying Hank’s defeat as evidence that Americans are biased against female candidates, but anyone making that claim is missing the point. Those feminists have been the reason Hank has boasted a 52-45 percent advantage over Obama during the primaries thus far. Amongst women over the age of 65, the margin was even wider, with Clinton holding an edge of 61 percent to Obama’s 34 percent. To those women, I simply say that this is what you get when only one woman runs for president. All of you were so geeked to see a woman run that you unconditionally threw your support behind her while simultaneously forgetting (or choosing to ignore) that no one in their right mind who wasn’t a raging feminist would vote for. Find a female candidate without such a hard, dude-hating edge to her and I guarantee the response to her candidacy will be much more accepting and welcoming across the board. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to bust open a case of party poppers, streamers and silly string to continue celebrating the demise of Hank’s campaign…..

- Hard to rip a guy for looking to be responsible and taking the necessary steps to make sure that he’s being safe when he has sex. Making sure that you are stocked up on protection is the smart and responsible thing to do, and it seems to be beyond the capabilities of too many dudes, especially athletes. Guys like Travis Henry, Shawn Kemp, Calvin Murphy, Rod Smart (a.k.a. He Hate Me of XFL notoriety) who have a half dozen or more kids by as many women because they can’t or just won't wrap up could learn a lot from a guy like Tory Williams. Unfortunately, Torri, a senior safety for the University of Purdue football team, was arrested on May 6 in West Lafayette for shoplifting condoms, showing that while he might be responsible when it comes to sex, he’s also not very bright when it comes to procuring said condoms. Instead of simply walking over to the student health services building and picking up as many free rubbers as he wanted from that big glass jar sitting out on the front counter, Williams decided it would be a good idea to steal his rubbers from a local convenience store. Williams was arrested for taking condoms from the Pay Less Supermarket on Greenbush Street, which wouldn’t be a huge offense for most people, but in his case the Tippecanoe County Prosecutor has filed a petition to revoke Williams's probation on a previous conviction for a bar brawl he was involved with last year while intoxicated. Tory, my man, you really need to plan better. All you have to do is exercise a little foresight and stock up in advance, because if you just plan ahead and grab a fistful of rubbers when you’re in the vicinity of the health services building, you won't find yourself in the predicament you’re now in. Instead of being suspended from the football team after being hit with shoplifting charges, you can enjoy your time with the girl you got the rubbers for AND still be eligible to play ball. Props for trying to be responsible and practicing safe sex, but zero points for execution of those intentions.