Saturday, May 24, 2008

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.

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