- There are times when three years, nine months in prison just doesn’t seem like a stiff enough sentence, not when dealing with sick puds like Phillip Thompson of Stockton-on-Tees, England. For a man that law enforcement in this town in northeastern England are calling the “librarian” of a child porn ring that possessed more than 250,000 indecent images of children, that sentence could be tripled and it still wouldn’t be stiff enough. Worse still, Thompson distributed his freakery to subscribers in more than 30 countries around the world, making him and international pervert of the highest degree. I’m just thinking out loud here, but I’m putting the odds on Thompson having a MySpace page at 87 percent, give or take a few. You’re not that big a pedophile without frequenting the world’s biggest haven for pedophiles, that’s for sure. Either way, this story can do nothing but make my stomach churn at the mere thought of Thompson and his merry band of freaks sharing and looking at these indecent images, so let’s just keep moving…..
- With the success of Batman, Spiderman, X-Men and other comic book-base films in recent years, studios can’t move fast enough to snap up the rights to what they believe will be the next big movie based on a graphic novel. The hot candidate for that next big hit has been Watchmen, the big-screen adaptation of the comic book by Alan Moore and David Gibbons. The movie is slated for release in March 2009 and it’s already been featured in a cover story on Entertainment Weekly. However, the project hit a speed bump this week when 20th Century Fox (it’s not just the name of a great Doors song, people) claimed that it, not rival Warner Bros., owns the rights to the film and that Warner Bros. failed to acquire those rights. That would keep Warner from putting out the movie, at least until Fox extracted a hefty fee for it - assuming Fox’s argument holds up. So far, Fox is winning the legal battle, with a federal judge refusing to dismiss Fox’s legal action this week. That ruling means the two sides will engage in discovery and proceed with the case, but the judge making the ruling did not offer any opinion on the merits of the case. If I’m betting on this one, it ends with Warner Bros. paying out a major settlement to Fox and everyone coming out of this with even more money in their pockets….well, everyone except movie fans who pay $10 a ticket to see it……
- Leave it to two teenage girls to bring New York City’s food industry to its knees. Okay, so they didn’t exactly go that far, but Kate Stoeckle and Louisa Strauss did reveal significant false advertising and dishonesty in both seafood restaurants and in stores selling items from the sea. Citing a love for both seafood and DNA testing, Stoeckle and Strauss decided to find out whether the sushi they were being served at their favorite Manhattan eateries was the real deal. The pair visited four NYC restaurants and 10 stores, spending around $300 to buy what was billed as high-class sushi. They then shipped their slimy purchases off to a graduate assistant at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. After that, the two graduates of Manhattan’s Trinity School received word that the sushi wasn’t what it was billed to be. Well, it was still raw, slimy and disgusting, so in that sense it was as advertised. However, a DNA coding test that Stoeckle’s scientist-father Mark is a major advocate of proved that the high-class sushi was really lower-grade fish being passed off as the real thing. Kate Stoeckle explained the experiment and her motivation for it thusly, in a way that I’m sure all of us can relate to: “Growing up, DNA bar coding was dinner conversation, so it comes naturally.” Mmm hmm, sure. I know that DNA coding was always a big point of conversation at my house growing up. In fact, it’s all anyone wanted to talk about. Eventually we had to drop a moratorium on the DNA coding talk because it was the only way to get anyone to discuss anything else. Score one for rich, privileged white chicks from Manhattan, taking the seafood industry down a peg……
- This might sound a little extreme, but I believe it’s time to consider banning the Guinness Book of World Records. Sure, it seems harmless to have a publication that records the largest birdhouse made of popsicle sticks, the most people playing the opening riff of “Smoke on the Water” or the most people riding a unicycle at the same time in one place, but the book also inspires knobs like Jim Purol to do what they do. Who is Jim Purol, you ask? Purol is the a-hole who spent two entire days at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California last month, looking to set the record for….wait for it….wait for it….Most Seats Sat in in 48 Hours! Yes, this knob went all around the stadium, sitting down in seat after seat, looking to set a world record. He did so, managing to successfully plop his sorry ass into 39,250 seats in 48 hours. Well done, idiot. You can successfully stand up and sit down, your family must be very proud of you. Of course, Purol didn’t stop there. No, he went on to sit in every one of the stadium’s 92,542 chairs. Awesome, right? Who isn't impressed by a person who can sit down in a chair? And who do we have to thank for this pointless display of sitting? Well, aside from Purol himself and his parents, we can thank the Guinness Book of World Records for “inspiring” Purol to attempt this ginormous waste of time in the first place. If we simply banned the publication, it would force all the losers who try to set world records in similarly moronic feats to shift their focus elsewhere. Something to consider….
- Last time I checked, biting was not an Olympic event, nor was it an acceptable tactic in any Olympic event. Someone should have forwarded that memo to Dzhakhon Kurbanov, a light heavyweight boxer from Tajikistan who was disqualified for biting his opponent on the shoulder during their Olympic quarterfinal bout Tuesday night. Kurbanov’s bout with Kazakhstan's Yerkebulan Shynaliyev was stopped with 17 seconds left in the third round when Kurbanov bit Shynaliyev during a clinch. For some reason, Shynaliyev didn’t appreciate being bitten by his oppnenet and angrily showed the blood on his shoulder to the referee. You can see where Kurbanov might go to the biting tactic, what with being down 12-6 at the time and having virtually no chance to win on points. Of course, he could still have won via knockout, but why bother trying to outbox your opponent when you can just take a bite out of his shoulder? It was the last in a series of rule-bending tactics for Kurbanov, who had already been warned multiple times for shoving and holding during the bout. The DQ was a disappointing ending for Kurbanov, a 22-year-old fighter who started his Olympic journey off with a bang last week by beating world champion Abbos Atoev in his first bout. Not the best way to cap off your first Olympics, trying to turn your opponent’s shoulder into an after-dinner snack. Ironically,
former world heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield was in attendance for the evening card at Workers' Gymnasium, the same Holyfield who was infamously bitten on the ear by Mike Tyson on June 28, 1997. I didn’t know Mike Tyson was now a boxing coach in Tajikistan, but Mike needs something to occupy his time and I suppose this is as good a pursuit as any….
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