- Watching the primary results roll in from Indiana and North Carolina last night, the emotions ran from sheer terror early in the evening to a sense of relief and confidence by the night’s end. Initially, the only results on the CNN election coverage screens showed Hank Clinton with a sizeable lead in Indiana, with results from North Carolina not posted yet. But just as the absolute horror of a landslide win for Hank in Indiana began to wash over me like a tidal wave of rusty razor blades soaked in lighter fluid, the tide began to turn. The results from Indiana became closer and closer as more precincts reported, especially as the urban areas (which voted heavily in favor of my main man Barack Obama) began to be counted. By 10 p.m., all of the major news networks were calling the race in Indiana a toss-up, too close to call. Not exactly the resounding victory for Obama I’d been hoping for and thus enough to drive a wooden stake through the heart of that femi-Nazi vampire Hank, but still an acceptable outcome. That’s largely because at the same time as the Indiana results were becoming very muddled, it was clear that Obama had won North Carolina by a wide margin. In a state ripe with minority voters (God bless you, minority voters!), Obama was predicted to do well and he did just that, scoring a win in the vicinity of the 57 percent to 43 percent in favor of B.O Suck it, Hank! Your hopes to win West Virginia and Kentucky in the next couple of weeks and keep your campaign alive are feeble at best. After tonight, the deficit in delegates will have grown wider and your hopes of being our femi-Nazi in chief will be that much closer to going up in smoke. So well done, voters in North Carolina and Indiana, I knew I could count on you to do the right thing!
- So Microsoft can't actually buy anything it wants, nice to know. Despite the widespread assumption that Bill Gates could pretty much buy the entire solar system with his massive fortune, the company he founded has finally met its match when it comes to hostile corporate takeovers. In its bid to buy rival Internet company Yahoo Inc., Microsoft has made every attempt to ram its will down the collective throats of the suits at Yahoo. They hit Yahoo executives with their best offer and when that didn’t work, they threatened to take their case directly to Yahoo shareholders, who could vote in a new executive board that would be favorable to the Microsoft offer. That clearly did not work either because the final word on the matter came when Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang received a letter from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer offering $47.5 billion, or $33 per share, for Yahoo’s stock, which is currently valued at $29.40 per share, and Yang didn’t take the bait. This led Microsoft to officially end its quest to buy Yahoo and thus take a major step toward dethroning its chief competitor in the world of online search engines and advertising, Google Inc. Sorry for your troubles Microsoft….actually, no I’m not. It’s pretty freaking awesome to see a major international corporation told to f’off and that it can't have what it wants because of its considerable wealth. Great to see the world doesn’t always work that way….
- Pulling a Giambi. That’s something you don’t want to be known for as a professional athlete, as the term has come to be associated with holding a press conference or interview and offering up a generic, vague apology without saying exactly what it is you’re apologizing for. Giambi did it a couple of years ago when he was all but handcuffed to baseball’s ongoing steroids scandal and a confirmer ‘roider. He held that press conference and apologized for making mistakes but didn’t say what those mistakes were. Everyone knew what he meant, but out of fear that the Yankees might terminate his contract if he admitted to ‘roiding up and other possible ramiprecussions, the burly slugger stayed in the gray in-between and offered no specifics. Now joining him in that world of gray is his former teammate, Roid-ger “Pocket Rocket” Clemens. Clemens is also dogged by steroid accusations, but his apology comes in response to a recent run on allegations that he’s sexed up nearly every attractive woman he’s ever come into contact with. All right, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but with one woman (or girl, as Mindy McCready was at the time of her alleged affair with Clemens) after another coming forward, it’s easy to get the impression that there’s a never-ending string of them. So Clemens held his own press conference to apologize for…..something. He didn’t say what he was apologizing for, other than hints that stories about his past “mistakes” and indiscretions were being blown out of proportion and that people he cares about are getting hurt in the process. He apologized to his family and fans, which I’m sure means a lot to them…or it would if they knew what they apology was for. At this point, even having this press conference was a huge mistake. Clemens gambled that he could fight against these allegations and accusations the same way he attacked opposing hitters during his career. But this time, there was no zipping a fastball at a batter’s head, no fractured piece of Mike Piazza’s bat to chuck at anyone to silence those who dared oppose him. Roid-ger should have handled this matter with class, honesty and dignity, but those are three things he’s never had much of and hasn’t acquired any of post-baseball. Now he’s dug a huge hole, his reputation is shot and he’s the butt of everyone’s jokes. Every maneuver he tries to extricate himself from this mess just digs a deeper hole, as did his non-apology apology. Admittedly I’ve never liked Clemens, so seeing him go down in flames is pretty funny to me. That being said, he really does need to just drop his protestations, his defamation lawsuit against former trainer Brian McNamee and just fade away…..
- A massive opening weekend for Iron Man proved that the summer blockbuster season really is upon us. Robert Downey Jr.’s action epic raked in more than $104 million for the weekend, easily outdistancing the crap-tacular runner-up, Made of Honor. Sorry ladies, but even for a chick flick that is one terrible movie. I know it features McDreamy…or McSteamy, or whichever doctor from the über-chick flick of TV shows Grey’s Anatomy that Patrick Dempsey plays, but even if my all-time favorite actress or actor were in a film and it was as abysmally bad as Made of Honor is, I still wouldn’t try to defend the film. Moviegoers seemed to agree with that sentiment, as the hordes of women dragging their boyfriends, fiancés and husbands to see the movie only bought enough tickets for the flick to gross a meager $15.5 million for the weekend. The werid thing is that Made of Honor was followed in the box office standings for the weekend by a film that was actually far worse - Baby Mama. (On a side note, in last week’s Real World, the cast members learned that their “job” would be training as an improv comedy troupe with the same woman who has trained, among others, Baby Mama stars Tina Fey AND Amy Pohler - how proud she must be to have trained the two leading ladies for the worst comedy I’ve seen in at least five years.) That train wreck made $10.3 million and was followed by Forgetting Sarah Marshall ($6.1 million) and Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay ($6 million). Quite a weekend when Harold and Kumar is actually the third-best movie in the top five earners……
- False rape accusations can have serious ramiprecussions, but rarely are they so deadly, so quickly at they were for Devin LaSalle of Arlington, Tex. Seems LaSalle was having an affair with Tracy Denise Robertson, 37, (if we know your middle name AND your age, chances are you’ve done something stupid) and the pair chose the idiotic location of a pickup truck in the driveway of the home shared by Tracy and her husband Darrell. Amazingly, Darrell discovered his wife and her lover getting after it while parked in his own driveway and predictably wasn’t happy about it. This being Texas, Darrell had his shotgun close at hand and put it into action. He did so after his quick-thinking but not exceptionally bright wife tried to cover her affair by crying rape. An incensed Darrell then fired four shots into LaSalle’s truck as LaSalle tried to flee the scene, killing his wife’s lover and earning himself an arrest by the local sheriff that ended with an odd twist. Instead of indicting Darrell for shooting and killing Mr. LaSalle, the grand jury indicted Tracy Robertson because of her false rape allegations that led to the shooting. She’s now facing a charge of involuntary manslaughter and a sentence of two to 20 years in prison. Maybe next time you’re having an affair and your husband finds you sexing it up in his own driveway, tell him the truth, k? Once you’re released from prison, that is….
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