- You know it, you love it.….it’s Albums to Avoid, the absolute worst in new music brought to you as a public service so that you can keep a safe distance from atrocious new albums that take awful music to new depths. This week our Album to Avoid comes courtesy of dancing, crooning, music-mangling poseur Usher, a man who has tried to blend a smooth, lady-pleasing style with the illusion that he has some hip-hop cred and failed in both arenas. The U-man has a new album out and it’s titled Here I Stand. When he says he stands “here,” my hope is that his “here” is always far, far away from where I am, because this album (and his entire act) blows in royal fashion. It’s exactly what you would expect from a poppy, dancing loser who really should have been a member of a man band like O-Men Back Sync Street Boys at some point in his career. This album finds him trying in vain to successfully straddle the gap between the slick player image he’s crafted up to this point and his new role as a father and family man. That theme might work for someone who didn’t make crappy music, but for Usher it’s a recipe for disaster. Songs like This Ain’t Sex hail back to forgettable, poppy, slick club music of Usher’s past, back when he churned out garbage songs like Yeah! with astonishing regularity. This is one album where even the contributions of Jay-Z as vocal backing can’t help save an album from the trash heap. It’s also nice when an artist rips off a song name from a crappy, chick-centric home-remodeling show, so the song Trading Places is a great addition to a terrible album. In this sh***y tune, Usher offers to serve his woman bed in breakfast, mow the lawn, etc. Riveting stuff, U., really. But if you think that you’re only getting terrible, dancy pop music on this album, don’t worry. There are equally terrible ballads, songs such as His Mistakes, which showcase Usher’s true limited vocal abilities. Put all of this crap into a big musical blender, stir it up and press the button and out comes Here I Stand, an album that sucks from many different angles and on a variety of levels, making it a true Album to Avoid…..
- Stoners always come up with the best stories to explain away their possession of large quantities of weed. By the best, of course, I mean the most ill-conceived and pathetic stories, ones that would make you laugh out loud if they weren’t so utterly fraudulent and transparent. Take for example an unidentified 30-year-old pothead arrested near Iowa City, Iowa over the weekend, a man who tried to talk his way out of trouble by explaining to police that he planned to turn the several one-gallon trash bags full of marijuana he possessed into compost. For some reason, the cops didn’t buy what he was selling and the man was sent to jail and remained there when he was unable to post the $14,000 bail on charges of possessing marijuana with intent to distribute. Of course he couldn’t post bail; all of his wealth was in those bags of the chronic that were seized from him. The Johnson County Sheriff’s Office reported that the man was arrested early Saturday morning and at that time, deputies found the bags of pot in his possession. I don’t have this verified, but based on the circumstances of his arrest I’m guessing that this idiot used some of his own product before attempting to transport the rest of it. How else do you explain hauling that much tree in a place where police could see it and not having a better story for them? At least try to lie and tell the officers that you found the plants on your neighbor’s property and were driving them to the police station to turn over before some of the neighborhood kids found them. That story probably would have landed you in jail as well, but it’s a hell of a lot more plausible than the compost idea. Next time, stay home with your bong, Cheetos, hackey sack and Planet Earth DVDs and leave the transporting to people who know what they’re doing, unidentified Iowa stoner.
- Zach Smith is my kind of sports fan. The 19-year-old Cleveland resident is a big Detroit Red Wings fan and managed to score tickets to Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals, played a couple hours east of Cleveland in Pittsburgh. Being a Red Wings fan, Zach Smith has also embraced the Detroit hockey tradition of throwing an octopus onto the ice when his team scores a goal. It’s a practice the Red Wings have discouraged in recent years because it holds up the game and presents other issues for anal, humorless pro franchises such as theirs. But the tradition lives on with fans like Smith, who snuck a live octopus into Mellon Arena for Game 4 and hurled it onto the ice. Here’s where the story gets good; Smith was immediately ejected from the game by security and at that point, he looked like a complete idiot, wasting a ticket he paid hundreds of dollars for just so he could chuck an octopus onto the ice. “You're outta here,” Smith said they told him. “Come back in and you get arrested.” However, my man Zach was two steps ahead of security, having bought a second $300 ticket to the game in advance, knowing he would be ejected after his octopus toss. He also brought a change of clothes with him (he was wearing a regular T-shirt, instead of Red Wings gear, when he threw the octopus and changed into a Red Wings sweater post-ejection) so he wouldn’t be recognized and with his second ticket in hand, he walked back into the arena and enjoyed the rest of the contest. Before you pragmatists out there go nuts, yes he did spend a lot of money on this stunt, but if he can afford it, I think the whole thing is hilarious. The plan began actually Friday as Smith was visiting his girlfriend in Detroit. They bought an octopus at Superior Fish Co. in Royal Oak, stored it in a cooler and drove to Cedar Point, a.k.a. America’s Roller Coast and hands down the best amusement park in the country. On Saturday, drove to Pittsburgh with the cold, smelly and uncooked octopus in tow. Smith wrapped it in a plastic bag and taped it to his belly, under his shirt. “Before the national anthem, we made our way down there and stood there,” he said. “I got it out and just tossed it.” Awesome, just awesome. Here’s arena security being made to look like a bunch of ginormous ass hats, which in reality arena security tends to be. These tools take themselves way too seriously and have no sense of humor or humanity. They’re like fleshy robots, pre-programmed to stamp out fun any enjoyment wherever it may occur. Summing up that sourpuss attitude was Jay Roberts, general manager of Mellon Arena. “You're not allowed to throw things on the ice in the building, and we kick people out for throwing all sorts of things,” he said. “That could have hit somebody.” Just shut the hell up, you overbearing, humorless bastard. Yeah, it could have hit someone if Smith threw like a drunk, stoned elderly guy with a torn rotator cuff it could have. Your position looks even more tenuous when you’re asked about fans throwing hats onto the ice to celebrate hat tricks (scoring three goals in one game) by players and your response is, “That's part of the game, and they are allowed to throw the hats.” So here’s a 19-year-old knucklehead outsmarting Roberts and his ass-hatted security crew, violating one of their rules and finding a way around the punishment. I love it and I honestly wish there were more fans out there like him. Props to you, Zach, enjoy celebrating the championship your team won this week following your wacky hijinks.
- It may be the offseason for nearly every TV show that matters, but just because it’s summer break for television doesn’t mean there isn't news to report. For those of you who have forgotten about 24 since it hasn’t been on the air in more than a year and won't return until November with a two-hour movie to fill in the happenings to Jack Bauer and Co. during hiatus and bridge the gap until the series comes back to Fox in January. The show’s producers have been busy building in some new characters, including actress Sprague Grayden a regular on CBS’ Jericho who also had a short run on Weeds on HBO. She has now landed a recurring role on the new season of 24, playing daughter to Cherry Jones' POTUS. In other casting news, for those of you who enjoyed Charisma Carpenter in her first stint on ABC Family’s Greek, she will reprise her role as the national sorority representative she played in the series' Season 1 finale. Back then, her Tegan character launched an investigation into the scandal surrounding expose of the partying, misbehaving culture in the Zeta Beta Zeta chapter at Cyprus Rhodes University. In her encore, slated for this fall's season premiere (yup, Greek will be back for a third season, good times), she helps ZBZ president Casey deal with a pledge who is causing trouble for the sorority. Don’t forget to tune in Monday at 8 p.m. for the show’s Season 2 finale, it should be a good one.
- Up to now, I’ve been ambivalent toward the whole Steve Bartman-Moises Alou hysteria over Bartman interfering with a fly ball during Game 6 of the National Leaue Championship Series in 2003. As a Cubs fan, I’ve always realized that the blame for the loss lay with the players who were unable to field several other balls they should have gotten to, get outs from their pitchers and come up with the hits necessary to win the game and the series. Those idiots who terrorized Bartman and bought the ball he snagged over a leaping Alou so they could blow it up and supposedly reverse the mythical curse on the franchise are just a joke in my book. So when Alou came out earlier this year and was quoted as saying he would not have caught the foul ball that Bartman reached for in the eighth inning of the 2003 NLCS, it still seemed like a non-story. After all, who cares about it five years later when everyone has moved on? It didn’t help Bartman either; his life was already ruined. I’ve overlooked everything about this story…..right up to the point where I read that Alou is now reversing field and recently said that he would have indeed caught the ball had it not been for fan interference, according to the Palm Beach Post. Back in March, Alou was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that he would not have caught the foul ball, but Alou said last week that he did not recall telling the AP that. “I don't remember that,” he said. “If I said that, I was probably joking to make [Bartman] feel better. But I don't remember saying that.'” You seem to have a problem here, Moises, and it isn't Steve Bartman. Your problem seems to be that it takes you a hell of a long time to get around to explaining things and those massive gaps tend to create a whole lot of misunderstandings, inaccuracies and make you look like an ass in the process. First it takes you four and a half years to comment on whether you really would have caught the ball or not and once its’ reported that you said you couldn’t have caught it and everyone talks about it like it’s big news, you let that story sit out there for months before saying you never made those statements? Now I am pissed and I am into this story, but it’s for the simple reason that I think Alou is a freaking joke and that his statements on this topic have rendered him useless and a piece of crap.
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