Wednesday, May 28, 2008

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.

No comments: