- For a guy who is already alienating a city and his fan base by demanding a trade and ripping his organization, this next bit of news isn't going to help Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Chad Johnson out. Apparently Ocho Cinco not only wants out of Cincinnati, he hasn’t been paying his property taxes while living there the past four years. A review of property records shows O.C. owes thousands of dollars in back taxes on his Cincinnati home. According to the Hamilton County Auditor's Office, he hasn't paid any property taxes on his condo since he bought it four years ago. According to property records, Johnson owes more than $13,000 in taxes for his condo and of that amount, he's delinquent $12,780. Making matters worse is the fact that $8,000 of the money he owes would have gone to Cincinnati schools. A local television station attempted to reach Ocho Cinco for comment but there was no answer to a knock on the front door at his condo and his neighbor said he's out of town. No surprise there, given the fact that 1) it’s the offseason and who wants to spend their offseason in Cincinnati when they’re a millionaire star athlete and 2) he’s currently demanding a trade to get out of the city anyhow. That being said, you need to take care of your taxes, O.C. As Wesley Snipes and Jimmy Hoffa have proven, you can be rich and famous and get away with a lot of crimes in the United States, but try to stiff the government on your taxes and you’re going to take a fall. Besides, you make more in one game check than you owe on your property taxes, so just settle up. If Charles Barkley can even the score on a $400,000 gambling debt, you can pony up $13,000 for taxes. No one likes paying them, especially property taxes because why should you be taxed on property you bought and rightfully own, but you need to pay. Not only that, but after welching on your property taxes for four years and gipping the local schools out of $8,000 during that time, you need to scratch off a nice $25,000 donation to them to make up for it. Pay your taxes, O.C., no matter where you’re playing next season.
- If you didn’t get a chance to see the MTV Movie Awards Sunday night…..you can probably tune in to MTV right now and catch the show re-airing for the 1,405th time this week. But if you aren’t able to do that, don’t worry because you won't be missing much. The show had a few good moments but mostly it was a big snooze. Any show that has the Pussycat Skanks as one of its musical acts is a loser by definition, so that’s one big strike against the show. Seriously, why would anyone be down with a group that consists of five tramps dressed like hookers, dancing in unison and lip-syncing to garbage pop music that wouldn’t be good if it were sung live by people with actual musical talent? The eye candy factor doesn’t play because last I checked, by listening to the Pussycat Skanks, you don’t actually get to make physical contact with them. The other big musical act for the night was Coldplay, a group that I can stand but one that had the entire crowd sitting on their asses, watching passively as lead singer Chris Martin pranced around the stage in all his pomposity and tried to rev them up. The awards themselves were….well, they were no better. Never, under any circumstances, should I hear anyone say, “And the winner is…..Transformers!” It was a bad movie that flopped big time, an action flick that never got on track and was plagued by mediocre acting. Seeing host Mike Myers team with Dana Carvey to bring back their famed Wayne and Garth characters from Saturday Night Live was actually pretty funny, with the pair taking names of movies from the past year and turning them into names for porn films. Other than that, the best comedy of the night was when Anne Hathaway, Steve Carrell and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson presented an award and used a funny heckler in the crowd for a good laugh or two. The “controversial” moment of the night came when Seth Rogan and James Franco of the upcoming movie Pineapple Express brought out a bag of fake weed and a fake joint and pretended to smoke the fake hippie lettuce while the show went to wide-angle camera shots to avoid showing the faux weed-smoking session up close. It was a stunt that was allegedly supposed to be axed by MTV at the last moment but word didn’t get passed along in time to stop it from happening. All in all, one of the worst MTV awards shows in recent memory, a forgettable evening that was thankfully kept to two hours….
- Even though Tatum O’Neal isn't really relevant as an actress anymore and hasn’t been for two or three decades, you have to admit that it’s funny to imagine her on the street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side Sunday night, jonesing for a crack fix and getting busted by the cops while making her buy. O’Neal, 44, was nabbed by police on the Upper East Side at approximately 7:30 p.m. Sunday when they spotted her trying to procure some coke from the local crack dealer. She was taken into custody and charged with criminal possession of a controlled substance, a misdemeanor that becomes a lot more interesting when it happens to someone who is at least moderately famous. That’s especially true for O’Neal, a woman who penned a book in 2004 about her road to sobriety after battling drug and alcohol addictions during her time in show business. It also doesn’t bode well for a mother of three to be trolling the street corners near dawn on a Sunday night in Manhattan, trying to score some Colombian nose candy. I don’t care if your kids are grown, teenagers or toddlers, having mom arrested, thrown into the back of a squad car and hit with drug possession charges is going to be a major negative influence. Besides, since when do famous people go out onto the street to buy their own drugs? Isn't that what they have personal assistants and posses for? Isn't there one grungy loser in the crew of every celeb who has connections to the drug world and is responsible for scoring the weed, coke, X and heroin for the rest of the group? C’mon, T., you have to know better than this….
- Thank God you don’t have a vote in this fall’s general election, Puerto Rico, because you showed this weekend that you most definitely are not capable of making good use of your right to suffrage. Your ill-reasoned decision to hand Hank Clinton a landslide victory in your Democratic presidential primary shows that you are not very smart, not well-informed and quite possibly mentally handicapped. Hank should not be winning any states period, let alone by a 68-32 percent margin. Never mind that the victory was totally symbolic and that Barack Obama now stands at 2,071 delegates, 47 short of the 2,118 needed to officially secure the nomination. Not that it’s going to matter, but Sunday’s victory in Puerto Rico inspired yet another round of false bravado from Hank, who tried to pretend that the victory somehow proved that she was still the right choice for the Democrats and that the 200 uncommitted superdelegates should disregard the wishes of voters and tab her as the party’s candidate. “In the final assessment I ask you to consider these questions. Which candidate best represents the will of the people who voted in this historic election?” Hank asked. “Which candidate is best able to lead us to victory in November and is best able to lead our nation as our president in the face of unprecedented challenges at home and abroad?” You really want me to answer those questions, Hank? Okay, but just know that you aren’t the answer to any of the three. You are not the choice of the people, you have no chance to win in November and there is no way in hell I want you ever leading any country I’m a citizen of in this or any other time in its history. Obama leads in the popular vote, in delegates and superdelegates, so he’s the choice and we all know it. Deep down, so do you, Hank, even if you won't admit it. Thank God that after last night’s primary Obama has enough delegates to win the nomination so that Hank has one less false pillar to base her continued candidacy on. Quit and stop making a pest of yourself, Hank, for your own best interest and that of America as well.
- What a big weekend at the movie theater for middle-aged, desperate, lonely women. The opening weekend for the new Sex and the City movie cemented the franchise’s status as the chick flick queen, resulting in a take of $55.7 million that was the biggest opening weekend ever for an R-rated comedy. Never mind that it’s absolutely lame unless you’re a chick or gay and that unlike some chick flicks that have at least a moderate appeal to some guys, this movie had a high level of success in spite of itself. I would never have imagined that collecting four barely, marginally, debatably attractive women who are all well past their prime go around Manhattan whining about their pathetic love lives and buying expensive clothes would be a good idea for a successful TV show or movie, but this just goes to show that quality of a movie and its success at the box office have no correlation whatsoever. The funny part of the weekend was seeing the reaction after the movie took in $26.9 million on Friday, a development that prompted industry analysts to start issuing insane projections for what the film would earn for the weekend. Of course, it made nowhere near that much, but by chick-flick standards, it was still a good start.
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