Sunday, September 07, 2008

Tired of Ocho Cinco, Lost news and adios, Mayor Kilpatrick

- Let the freak show continue. Because make no mistake about it, that’s exactly what the once-awesome Chad Johnson has become. For years, he was the fun-loving goofball with hilarious touchdown celebrations like the Riverdance, using the end zone pylon as a putter and leaping into the Dawg Pound in Cleveland. Now….he’s just a loudmouth who antagonizes his team and fans with trade demands he fails to stand by and who has now engaged in the ultimate publicity stunt: changing his name for the sake of getting more attention. Johnson officially changed his name to Chad Javon Ocho Cinco in Broward County, Fla., last week and his team, the Cincinnati Bengals, announced Thursday that they have begun “the process of listing the former Chad Johnson as Chad Ocho Cinco for all club business, per the legal change of his surname effected in Florida.” Among the changes will be Chad wearing his new surname on the back of his jersey for Sunday's season opener at Baltimore, something he did as another publicity stunt before a game two seasons ago, ultimately wearing the name only for warm-ups and having a teammate remove it before the game started. Now, Ocho Cinco will be on his jersey permanently - or until he changes it to something else when he stops getting the attention he wants and needs another fix. “It's something I don't think anyone has ever done before,” Johnson/Cinco told the Bengals' website last week. “Have I ever had a reason for why I do what I do? I'm having fun.” In the past, I would have been with you, but not anymore. You’re a narcissistic, self-absorbed a-hole whose act has run thin. You are no longer the best receiver on your own team, you can’t stay healthy and after you unsuccessfully spent the entire offseason lobbying for a trade, you stopped being amusing. You may still amuse yourself and I guess that’s what truly matters, but just know that most of us have moved on from you being a person of interest…..

- How does an elephant beat a heroin addiction? No, that’s not a trick question, it’s a legitimate, real-life question that veterinarians in Beijing have been forced to answer after finding Xiguang, a 4-year-old male Asian elephant, in May 2005. According to reports from China, Xiguang became addicted to heroin at the hands of illegal traders after he was captured along the Chinese-Myanmar border in March 2005. According to reports from Chinese news agencies, the traders fed the elephant bananas laced with heroin as bait and to pacify the animal. Nothing like turning a beast weighing more than a thousand pounds into a heroin addict, well done Chinese traders. Thankfully, Xiguang was only in the custody of these a-holes for two months. He was later found along with six other captured elephants in China's southwest region, where he was suffering from withdrawal and had to be sent to a protection center in China's tropical Hainan island. As part of his treatment, the elephant received daily methadone injections in doses five times larger than those given to a human and as of this week, he has fully recovered. Now all he has to do is survive living in a country with toxic air, polluted water and all sorts of other environmental problems…..

- What is it with people giving out the wrong phone numbers for legitimate activities and inadvertently directing people to phone sex services? First it was the University of Central Florida’s football program, giving out the wrong number to dial into a conference call with head coach George O’Leary and having the cancel the teleconference when reporters found that they had called a phone sex line instead. Now, the National Wildlife Refuge System is getting in on the act. This week, people calling a federal phone number to order duck stamps are instead greeted by a phone-sex line, due to a printing error the government says would be too expensive to correct. The correct number to order the duck stamp is 1-800-782-6724, but the error transposes two numbers and the card instead lists 1-800-872-6724. As a result, instead of spelling out 1-800-STAMP24, the number spells out 1-800-TRAMP24. Whoops! Quite a surprise when you’re expecting to call the National Wildlife Refuge System to order a duck stamp and are instead welcomed by a husky female voice to “talk only to the girls that turn you on,” for $1.99 a minute at “Intimate Connections.”
Then again, it would be cheaper for five minutes with one of the husky-voiced ladies of Intimate Connections than it would be to buy a duck stamp, which costs $15. Of course, duck stamps are required to hunt migratory waterfowl, something you can’t do with a conversation with one of the phone skanks at Intimate Connection. With a snafu like this, you might think the NWRS would be eager to correct it. Wrong again. The error will not be corrected until next year's duck stamps, so The Fish and Wildlife Service, which administers the program, will stick with the 3.5 million duck stamps attached to cards with the wrong number. Just for future reference for everyone else out there giving out phone numbers, though, can we try to cut down on the accidental phone sex numbers passed out? That’d be super……

- You’ll be back, sure you will, Kwame Kilpatrick. I’m sure that given a decade or five, people will forget that you were the mayor who disgraced his office by lying under oath about an affair with a staffer, assaulted police officers who tried to serve a warrant on a friend, violated his bail by going to Windsor, Ontario after getting out of jail and ultimately resigned because of the scandals he’d caused. And in no way was it comical to see a defiant Kilpatrick address Detroit on Thursday night, trying to use misdirection by reminding everyone what city had accomplished under his leadership that supposedly balances out the disgrace of having a lying, cheating, scumbag of a mayor who made the city a national punch line. “The city is much better shape than the city I received seven years ago,” said Kilpatrick. “We in Detroit have done amazing things together.” Well, to be fair, most of your recent accomplishments have been shared only by yourself and your former chief of staff, but I digress. Kilpatrick went on to say the he stepped down so the city could move forward, how very noble of him. After all, it’s somewhat difficult to govern your city from behind bars, which is where he’s headed. Under a plea deal, Kilpatrick will serve four months in the Wayne County Jail and then spend rest of his five-year sentence on probation. Additionally, Kilpatrick, 38, agreed not to run for public office during his probation, to pay $1 million in restitution and to forfeit any future pension. Not a bad deal for someone who was accused of blocking a criminal investigation into his office, firing a police deputy to cover up an extramarital affair and other possible illicit activities and shoving a police officer trying to serve a subpoena on a friend of Kilpatrick's who was a potential witness in his perjury case. So no, Kwame, you won't be back and yes, your city will be much better off without you……

- Welcome another member to the island crew, Lost fans. Although based on last season’s jaw-dropping, stunning finale, there may not be an island to occupy and it’s hard telling where this next season will begin, on an island or with the survivors back in the real world. Either way, ABC has confirmed that Zuleikha Robinson (Rome, X-Files spin-off The Lone Gunmen and Fox’s canceled drama New Amsterdam) will be a part of Season 5 of Lost. She’ll appear during as Ilana, a wicked smart and, as you might expect, a very dangerous Euro femme fatale. Initially, she won’t be a cast member but the show’s producers have said that they have written her part in such a way that the door is open for her to become a series regular if things work out. The thing is that, at this point, this show is so good that they could add most anyone to the cast and I wouldn’t care. Heck, they could add Pauly Shore and…..okay, let’s not go that far. The bottom line though, is that I’m as jacked for Season 5 of Lost as I can remember being for the new season of any show…..

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