- Maybe I didn’t make myself clear enough last time we discussed this, so allow me to try it again. HANK CLINTON, YOU HAVE LOST THE RACE FOR THE DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATION. NO POSSIBLE CHANGES ARE OUT THERE TO REVERSE THAT OUTCOME, YOU HAVE LOST. I hate feeling like I’m beating my head up against a concrete wall, but that’s the feeling I’m getting here with Hank. Even as Hank’s advisors are privately conceding that my man Barack Obama will probably reach the necessary 2,118 delegates to secure the nomination by the time tomorrow’s primaries end, the Clinton camp is still bitching about things like the disputed primaries in Florida and Michigan as if they will make one damn bit of difference. Back when people outside of Hank’s delusional inner circle still believed that she had any shot at winning the nomination, having Florida and Michigan stripped of their delegates at the Democratic National Convention in August was considered a major blow to Hank’s campaign. Now that Obama has won the nomination, the relevance of delegates from those two states being counted or excluded is all but gone. That being said, the Democratic Party Rules Committee decided over the weekend to strike a compromise that will count delegates from Florida and Michigan as half-votes in a striking similarity to those dark times in our nation’s history when laws like the Three-Fifths Compromise relegated the votes of African Americans to a value of 3/5 of the value assigned to the votes of white people. Of course, the crime here wasn’t being so audacious as to have a different skin color than the ruling majority but rather moving up the primary elections in the offending states to January, breaking party rules in a lame attempt by Democratic leaders in Florida and Michigan to elevate the importance of their states’ primaries. The decision by the committee still leaves Clinton without four delegates that Hank’s camp was expecting from Michigan, prompting adviser Harold Ickes to lament, “Hijacking four delegates is not a good way to start down the path of party unity.” Read between the lines and you can see that even Ickes is basically conceding the race to Obama, yet he’s whining about four irrelevant delegates? You and your candidate seem to be the problem when it comes to party unity, Harry. What’s funny here is that back in January, both Hank and Obama agreed that results from Florida’s and Michigan’s primaries should not be counted because they were held too early, but now Hank has reversed field. Methinks that maybe it has something to do with the fact that in January, she was still the frontrunner for the nomination and figured she could win without those two states. Now that she’s desperate and grasping for straws, suddenly her views on the situation have changed. Tough luck, Hank, but it’s O-V-E-R.
- You might be asking yourself, “Is soccer still totally ridiculous and are its fans still rabid, psycho lunatics?” Maybe it’s been a while since you last asked yourself that question and you’re wondering if the answer has changed. Sadly, the answer to that question is no. Fans in places outside of the United States, places where soccer actually matters, are still killing and injuring one another for no real reason. Take the World Cup qualifying match in Monrovia, Liberia between host Morocco and Liberia where eight fans suffocated to death when the unruly crowd at Samuel K. Doe stadium in Monrovia pushed up against a metal bar designed to restrain exactly the type of hooligan-ish behavior they were engaging in. The bar snapped and the forward motion of the soccer hooligans sent dozens of people crashing onto the floor below. Those falling fans crashed onto others below. crushing them and causing the aforementioned fatalities. “Spectators tried all sorts of means to save (them), but could not help,” said Liberian Red Cross rescue worker Emmanuel Johnson. The sad thing is that you could see this whole mess coming. Hours before the start of the match, United Nations peacekeepers had closed the stadium when it became clear that the stadium was going to be filled well beyond its 33,000-seat capacity. Thousands of those inside got into the game using fake tickets, leaving legitimate ticket holders stuck outside. How very soccer of you, soccer. First your officials aren’t smart enough to differentiate between fake tickets and real tickets, then you allow your stadium to overcrowd to the point that people are pushing up against metal barriers, breaking them and killing other fans by falling onto them. Because that’s the way you want to go, dead because some idiot soccer fan can’t stop from jostling and pushing against a barrier and breaking it in a vain attempt to get closer to the field. Yet another reason why soccer is ridiculous and why it will never, ever catch on in the United States.
- It was all about lies, plots, deceit and misdirection on last night’s episode of Greek. Of course, when a group of fraternity pledges get their hands on their very first fake IDs, that sort of thing is bound to happen. With spring break looming just one week away, the pledges at Kappa Tau were given their own fake IDs to break in as they prepared for their spring break trip to….Myrtle Beach? Not exactly the spring break hot spot you might expect, but whatever (according to Dale, Rusty’s roommate, Satan himself lives in Myrtle Beach, who knew?). Rusty, pledge brothers Ben Bennett and some dude named Pickle all set out to give their new IDs a try. Their trial run came at a mock club entrance Cappie and the KT brothers set up in the house, with Rusty failing miserably to pass himself off as Chad Stewart. That failure inspired him to throw himself into a major research project on Chad Stewart, a member of KT three years ago who had since traveled around southeast Asia and become a singer-songwriter with a strong underground following. On his next try, Rusty succeeded where Ben and Pickle failed, getting served alcohol at a local hotel bar. The only problem came when the bartender believed he really was Chad Stewart and ‘fessed up to being a huge fan of his music. She asked him to go to a party with her that weekend, which Rusty decided to go to despite Cappie’s warnings that he couldn’t pull of being Chad Stewart for a whole night. When Rusty/Chad showed up with über-square roommate Dale in tow, the girl revealed that she had lied to him about the party. It was actually her sister’s wedding and she wanted Rusty/Chad to sing her favorite song off his underground album, the song Hunter’s Heart. When Rusty bombed out and couldn’t play the guitar or even sing more than one line from the song, he was forced to admit his real identity, much to Dale’s amusement. Hopefully Rusty can get back into Chad Stewart mode for next week’s season finale. Also practicing his own type of deceit was Evan Chambers, who was still trying to lie his way back into a relationship with his ex, Casey Cartwright. For weeks, Evan has been busy trying to weasel his way back into Casey’s good graces. This week those efforts took the form of helping her study for her LSATs by getting her to take the same LSAT prep course Evan took last semester. Since her avowed goal is law school, just like Evan, it seemed like a natural fit. Once in the class, Casey realized how far behind she had gotten, with everyone else in the class having applied to law schools and been taking LSAT practice tests for months. With help from Evan, Casey studies and sees her scores on the practice test improve, prompting a “friendly” dinner with Evan to celebrate. At the dinner, he offers her a chance to have a meeting with the dean of admissions for Harvard Law School, who happens to be on campus at Cyprus Rhodes. Casey is initially suspicious because Harvard is also where Evan plans to go, but when he assures her that he’s not plotting to get her back, she agrees to the meeting. Those plans hit a wall when her BFF Ashleigh is at Dobler’s for a beer with former Zeta Beta president and allegedly reformed b*tch Frannie and Frannie spots Shane, the Lambda Sig who stood up Casey after the Zeta Beat Mr. “Purr”fect contest because Evan paid him $1,000 to leave her alone. Frannie knows the real story and spurs Ashleigh to confront Shane so she’ll find out the truth to and tell Casey, thus putting a stop to the seemingly inevitable Casey-Evan reunion that both Frannie and Ashleigh see coming. That’s just what happens, with word getting back to Casey about Evan’s evil plot and her blowing up at him. Frannie’s motives remain unclear, whether it’s because she thinks Casey can do better than Evan or because she wants him for herself. Whatever her reasons, Casey still goes to the meeting with the Harvard dean of admissions and while she’s there, realizes that she doesn’t actually want to be a lawyer. She never really thought about what she does want to be and settled on law because when she began dating Evan during their freshman year, that was what he wanted and so she picked it up as her dream too. Now, she’s not sure what her major should be and looks to be on her way to a new one. Maybe she should ask Cappie for a recommendation since he’s pretty much tried every possible major at CRU during his time there, although sadly there were no new “I once was a ___________ major” moments for Cappie this week. Those have been lacking this season, but maybe in the finale……anyhow, back to this week’s episode, where Ashleigh found herself wrapped up in a scheme to pay for her spring break trip despite having blown through the entire allowance her parents had given her for the month. To pay for her trip and all of the clothes she wanted for it, she fell into the extremely clichéd trap of college students getting baited into signing up for credit cards pushed by credit card companies who set up shop in the quad and offer quick credit to any sucker dumb enough to sign up. Because she wants a credit card of her own with a bill that doesn’t go to her parents, who can then monitor her spending, Ashleigh signs up and immediately goes on a spending binge that quickly sends her over her credit limit to the point that she can’t even buy some gum at a local convenience store. Her problems appear to be solved when she calls the credit card company to get on a payment plan but instead has her credit limit increased. Call me insane, but I think she’s headed for disaster in next week’s finale when it comes to her free-spending ways. Going AWOL this week was Cappie’s girlfriend Rebecca and the rest of the Zeta Beat pledges. Nearly absent were all of the KT’s outside of Cappie, Rusty, Ben and Pickle, with brothers Wade and Beaver appearing only in the first few scenes in the ceremony to bestow the new fake IDs on the pledges. You’d figure that it will be all hands on deck next week for the finale, so be sure to tune in then as most of the Cyprus Rhodes campus will apparently be heading to sunny Myrtle Beach, S.C……..
- What is this, London or the campus at Big State University? With authorities in London set to impose an alcohol ban on the city’s mass transit system, lushes, alcoholics and revelers of all shapes, sizes and degrees of mental stability came out for one final night of alcohol-fueled fun on the subway system before the new rules went into place. The subway was engulfed by thousands of revelers Saturday night, with eyewitnesses recounting tales of totally smashed, fall-down-drunk partygoers dressed in a wide range of costumes that included fancy. prom-style dresses and causing a hell of a lot of damage. These drunks fought with each other, damaged subway trains and vomited all over the place - in other words, a typical night for an out-of-control frat party on the campus of your state’s major university. It’s almost like the dean is hitting the students with a no-alcohol policy and every frat and sorority on campus is wheeling keg after keg into their house for one final, mass blowout party. The mayhem in London forced authorities to close six stations on the network, including major hubs at Liverpool Street, Baker Street and Euston. At least 17 arrests have been reported thus far, with much of the insanity occurring on the Circle Line, which rings the center of the city. The event initially began good-naturedly, but as always happens when you mix mass quantities of booze with mass quantities of people, bad things happened quickly. Partygoer David Mudkips, 25, of east London, described the event as “like rush hour but fun. There were people’s sweaty armpits in my face but I didn’t care because I was drinking.” Sounds like my idea of a good Saturday night, crammed into a small, moving subway car that’s packed with drunk people who are likely to be vomiting regularly due to the combination of motion and beer. This does sound like it would have been a fun night if you were there, one of those great stories to tell people about down the road. I don’t believe for a second that the alcohol ban will totally stamp out people sneaking beer, vodka, gin, rum, tequila, etc. onto trains, but this should be the last frat party on wheels that London will see in the foreseeable future anyhow….
- Who loves a good conspiracy theory more than me? No one, that’s who. Nothing puts a smile on my face quite like someone who is disappointed with the outcome of a situation, competition or event alleging that things didn’t go their way because of some vast, secretive conspiracy to do them in. That being said, I’m not sure that I’m buying the allegations by Shaniqua Tompkins, ex-girlfriend of rapper 50 Cent, that the fire which destroyed the multimillion-dollar home she and her 10-year-old son occupied in Dix Hills, N.Y. was caused by arson and that 50 was involved. Tompkins and son Marquise were taken to a hospital after suffering smoke inhalation but were later released. The allegations of arson came even as 50 Cent, a.k.a. Curtis Jackson, was hundreds of miles away, filming a movie in Louisiana. The home essentially burned to the ground, leading investigators from the Suffolk County arson squad to launch an investigation. The fire was first reported at 4:59 a.m. and put out a mere 45 minutes later, showing once again that if you live in a rich neighborhood, emergency response services tend to be better. In addition to alleging arson by 50 Cent and his associates, Tompkins also claims that the rapper had previously promised to give her the house but had not made good on the promise. Apparently she’s now under the impression that 50 would rather burn the house to the ground and take the insurance money rather than give it to her. A nice theory, to be sure, and factoring in the crime-for-insurance-money idea always makes for a fun debate, but I’m going to go the other way on this one and say that 50 Cent is not bruning down houses he owns to dislodge former girlfriends and collect insurance money…..
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