- You really have to be trying to rack up 248 felony charges. Even your most prolific, sinister criminals have a hard time breaking the 100-felony barrier. Plus, you need to be a really, truly despicable human being to accumulate that many felony convictions, no doubt about it. Thirty-eight-year-old James McCafferty of Philadelphia, Pa. fills that bill, what with running a body part-harvesting business at the funeral home where he worked. McCafferty pleaded guilty Wednesday to those 248 felonies related to the case in which he was charged with allowing “cutters” to come in and take body parts from corpses for $1,000, all without the knowledge of the families of the deceased. I literally don’t even know how a person has the gall to do something like this. People entrust you with the remains of their deceased loved one, expecting that you will prepare them for burial and give them the honorable, respectful sendoff they deserve. Instead, you figure that because no one is going to look at the bodies that closely once you’re done with them, you can dissect them and sell off the valuable parts for a profit. It might be the most reprehensible crime I can imagine outside of hurting children. However long McCafferty goes away for, it won't be long enough……
- Musicians can go one of two ways when they’ve had early success in their career. Either they stick with the same shtick that made them successful, not tinker with it and look to ride that style as far as it will go, or they can look to grow, evolve an push their barriers. Either way, they’ll receive criticism. Stay in the same mold and people will criticize you for now growing musically. Try something new and you’ll likely be ripped for straying from your sound and changing what was working for you. Lil Jon is taking the latter route, hoping that his synth-heavy hip-hip will have a broader appeal because of the variety of new sound and genres he’s incorporating into his upcoming album. As someone who’s not a fan of his music and gets a little tired of him asking “What?!?” 8,501 times every song, I don’t care if he fails or soars, but if you are a Lil Jon fan, be prepared to hear dance acts, soca musicians, rockers and more on the rapper’s next album. “It’s not just music for the United States: It’s music for the world,” Lil Jon has been quoted as saying. He’s hoping to broaden his appeal and undoubtedly make a lot more money, but it should be interesting to see if the attempt to fuse rap and all of these other genres turns out to be as big of a train wreck as I think it could be…..
- Everyone knows or has a crazy, eccentric grandparent who accumulates ginormous quantities of coins. You know, that grandma who has overflowing jars of pennies and is trucking bags full of penny rolls to the bank to deposit, that’s who I mean. These are the same people who always “have exact change” at the register and hold everyone up in line behind them fishing through a purse full of loose change for the exact combination of pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters. Multiply those people by 10,000, mutate them into their most annoying form and double it and you have 70-year-old James Jones of Springdale, Ohio. Jones recently went into his local Chevrolet dealership looking to buy a new Silverado truck. Unfortunately for the dealership, this a-hole doesn’t trust paper money and so he and his wife hauled in 16 f’ing coffee cans full of change. It took several employees an hour and a half to count all of the change, which amounted to $16,000. That was half the price of the truck, with the Joneses writing a check for the other half. Why they couldn’t put that change in the bank and write a check for the whole amount, I don’t know. What I do know is that if I’d been there, I’d have punched Jones in the face. I don’t care if his is a senior citizen, if you’re enough of a knob to bring $16,000 in change to pay for a new vehicle, you deserve to be punched in the face, regardless of your age. Yes, old people can be funny about money, but even if you distrust online banking, don’t like using credit cards and like to be old-fashioned, paper money has been around for a couple hundred years, I think it’s safe to use. Enjoy your new truck, Mr. Jones, and be glad I wasn’t around when you can ambling in with your coffee cans of change…..
- This is undoubtedly one of the more bizarre and unexpected doping stories of this or any other Olympics. For the second time during these Games, a North Korean pistol shooter has been booted from the Olympics after failing a doping test at the Asian championships held in December in Kuwait. Pistol shooter Kim Hyon-Ung was qualified for the Olympics but failed to make it to North Korea's final list of shooters for the Beijing Games. “Kim Hyon-Ung was barred from participating in the Games after it became known belatedly that he failed a doping test carried out during the Asian championships,” one official said. The report comes just one day after North Korea's Kim Jong-Su, who won silver and bronze medals in Olympic shooting, failed a doping test. I’m not even sure where to begin here, because shooting is one of the last places you’d expect doping. After all, the more common steroids and performance-enhancing drugs wouldn’t factor in in the sport because you don’t need muscle tone, strength or speed. However, the one thing you need more of than any other physical ability when it comes to shooting is a steady hand. That appears to have been the motivation Kim Jong-Su, who won silver in the men's 50m pistol and bronze in the 10m pistol, because his positive test was for banned beta-blocker drugs which prevent trembling. Maybe I’m just being overly positive here, but I take a lot from the fact that while North Korean shooters might be doping up, at least they’re not packing nukes when they come to the Olympics…..
- Wanna know the best thing about the MTV Video Music Awards? You don’t have to have actual musical talent or have produced a single good, listenable song in your career to win or be a performer. Witness the train wreck known as Britney Spears, whose flabby, disjointed, lip-synced performance at last year’s show won't be enough to keep her from being featured prominently in this year’s show. Worse yet, the ass hats who took part in the nomination process have tabbed her as one of the finalists for video of the year, best pop video and best female video. The video of the year category is a total joke, what with musical luminaries such as the Jonas Brothers, Chris Brown and the Pussycat Skanks being among the finalists. Also, MTV hasn’t ruled out allowing Spears to perform one of her crappy pop songs, songs being used in the most liberal sense of the word. Here’s the thing: unless she’s managed to find actual vocal talent in the past year, Spears still can’t sing worth a crap. The only reason she was ever popular was because at one point, she actually looked hot. Now that her appearance has gone in a downward arc for a variety of reasons (nonstop clubbing, smoking, boozing and having two kids will do that), she’s nothing but a novelty act, a circus sideshow that shouldn’t be nominated for a single award anywhere, at any time. Yet more proof that in the music world, MTV is a force working against good music and for the gradual homogenization and dilution of good songs and albums……
No comments:
Post a Comment