- Well maybe I don’t want your freaking autograph anyhow, Ringo Starr. The oft-temperamental, cranky former Beatle delivered a shot across the bow of his loyal fans this week in a video posted on his Web site, wherein Starr says he will no longer sign fan mail or memorabilia. “I want to tell you please... do not send fan mail to any address that you have. Nothing will be signed after the 20th of October. If that is the date on the envelope, it's gonna be tossed. I'm warning you with peace and love I have too much to do. So no more fan mail, thank you, thank you, and no objects to be signed. Nothing,” the 68-year-old ranted. And while adding “please” might make the message seem a little gentler, Starr undid that by saying explicitly that it was "a serious message to everybody watching.” Quite a turnaround for a guy who once starred in an episode of 'The Simpsons' which showed him answering every piece of fan mail and saying on that show, “They took the time to write to me, and I don't care if it takes 20 years, I'm going to answer every one of them.” Hey Ringo, if you don’t want fans to contact you, then why do you keep putting out albums? By its very nature, music is supposed to make a connection from the artist to the listener, yet here you are putting out new music, expecting people to buy it and then asking them to not contact you. Seems a bit contradictory, no? Perhaps you should have released that new album called Liverpool 8 earlier this year. , divides his time between homes in Los Angeles, the South of France and Surrey. Also, you may not want to ever come back to L.A. if you really hate attention, because L.A. just isn’t the type of place you go to escaper prying eyes. in summation, I suppose my message is that you are an ungrateful, hypocritical bastard who used to be part of one of the truly legendary acts in music but is now just a crotchety old crank……
- Stiff is the fine if you lie to the Golden State Warriors about the true cause of your injury. Teams are never kind to players who injure themselves while participating in activities prohibited or discouraged by their contracts, things like riding motorcycles, skydiving, etc., but the Warriors apparently take things more seriously than most. The team is punishing Monta Ellis by suspending the injured guard for 30 games without pay Saturday for violating his lucrative new contract by getting into a moped accident. All of this comes after Ellis agreed to a six-year deal worth $66 million in July, making him one of the franchise’s highest-paid players ever. He then rewarded the team’s faith in him by severely spraining his ankle in a low-speed moped crash in late August. As a result of the suspension, Ellis will lose nearly $3 million in salary. On the judicious side, the Warriors did count four preseason games in the suspension's length, so they’re not being total hard asses and Ellis can now return after the Warriors’ 26th regular-season game on Dec. 17.
Further mitigating the severity of the punishment is the fact that Ellis recently underwent surgery to repair a torn ligament and was unlikely to return before Dec. 17 anyhow. So he does lose $3 million, but what is $3 million to a guy who is due $63 million more in guaranteed money - assuming he doesn’t go knucklehead again and violate his contract by bungee jumping or popping a wheelie on his moped. But Monta, for future reference, go ahead and familiarize yourself with the following, the portion of your contract the team cited in handing down this punishment: Paragraph 12 of the NBA's uniform player contract, which prohibits a player from engaging "in any activity that a reasonable person would recognize as involving or exposing the participant to a substantial risk of bodily injury," including “driving or riding a motorcycle or moped.” Any other legal or contractual questions, you know where to find me…….
- Quite the mind-bending episode of Heroes last night, throwing everything you thought you knew for a loop. For starts, the confrontation between Peter Petrelli and Sylar that took place on Level 5 of Company headquarters last week started things off, with Peter’s mother Angela stepping in to stop the fight. But when she does, Peter turns on her and demands that she tell him what secrets she’s been hiding. She resists his atrempts to read her mind, leading Peter to start slicing her head open with his telepathic magic finger. Peter is stopped when Sylar recovers, heals using one of his powers and gets up off the ground, turning the telepathy on Peter and flinging him into the wall. Once Peter was subdued, Angela placed him in a medically induced coma to prevent another attack, but that was far from the end of her troubles. Her other son Nathan was with his new girlfriend and confidant Tracy Strauss, and she passed along some information that set off a Petrelli family implosion. While sharing with Nathan that she had accidentally killed a man with her power to freeze things, she told him about a doctor in Recida, California who had made her the way she is, with powers. When Nathan learns about Dr. Zimmerman and that he worked for the Company, he and Tracy head straight for New York and a meeting with Angela. At the meeting, Angela reveals that not only is Tracy a genetically engineered being with superpowers, so is Nathan and so are many others. The formula used to make them that way is the very formula that Hiro Nakamura allowed both halves of to be stolen by speedster Daphne Millbrook for the mystery employer she keeps referring to. An irate Nathan storms out of the office after refusing to help his mother track down the stolen formula and allegedly prevent the world from a cataclysmic destruction. And still the nightmares continue for Angela…..literally. She’s gripped by a vivid nightmare while sitting at her desk, imagining that Nathan, Tracy and Peter have all been murdered and she is then confronted by a mysterious man who says she can’t stop him because she won’t even be able to move. We find out who that man is later, but before that we find Hiro Nakamura and sidekick Ando having to work with the man they took down and imprisoned in a coffin last season, Adam Monroe. Once Adam is freed and realizes that Hiro will keep teleporting him back into the coffin unless he cooperates, says he has an idea to help figure out who is stealing the formula and why. Adam takes Hiro and Ando to a bar he claims is the place to go for “specials” (people with abilities) looking for work. That claim turns out to be a ruse when Adam picks a fight with the bartender, ducks a punch and ends up getting Hiro knocked out so he can escape. When Hiro comes to, he and Ando can’t find Adam, but Adam doesn’t get away because he is instead captured by Knox, one of the Level 5 escapees now working for the same mystery employer Daphne is working for. Someone who isn’t working for anything or anyone other than his own selfish, maniacal interests is Dr. Mohinder Suresh, who is becoming more and more bizarre after injecting himself with a serum in the season premiere that was designed to give him his own super powers. Instead, the formula has turned him into some sort of molting, disgusting, nasty insect-man who encases people in cocoons of spider-like silk on his walls. Those so imprisoned include his nosy, spouse-abusing neighbor, a drug dealer from Central Park and when she confronts Mohinder about his recent behavior, even his girlfriend/lover Maya. Personally, this is one storyline I could do without, mostly because I don’t enjoy the creepy, crawly, molting bug-man angle. Thankfully there were bigger fish to fry, including the one that Claire Bennet was looking for as she went through her father, H.R.G.’s, old Company files and found so-called villains with super powers who had hurt people. Claire found one, Steven Canfield, who lived near her in Costa Verde and went after him only to find that Canfield wasn’t a bad person, he’d just made one mistake and used his power to send a neighbor into a vortex, never to return, during an argument. After initially looking to capture Canfield, Claire turns around and tries to help him get back together with his family, only to be stopped when her father and his new partner Sylar show up. Claire is hurt and alarmed, but she, Sylar and H.R.G. are soon in trouble together when Canfield creates a vortex threatening to suck them all up and then escapes. Claire survives thanks to help from Sylar, the very man who assaulted her and copied her power to heal earlier this season. When he tries to make amends, Claire and her father want none of it. Instead, they follow Canfield to the Griffith Park carousel, where H.R.G. offers to let Canfield go instead of returning him to Level 5 - if he sends Sylar into one of his vortexes and thus banishes him for all of eternity. Canfield refuses, saying he won’t be a monster and electing to send himself into a vortex rather than hurt anyone else. After the ride back to the Bennet home, H.R.G. tells Claire he’s doing what is necessary to protect her and the family, the same line he’s always sold. Helping people isn’t what Claire’s birth mother, the flame-maker Meredith has in mind. She leaves the Bennet home, where she’s been staying to protect Claire and family during H.R.G.’s absence, to ostensibly find Claire. Instead, she goes to see a man with powers known as the Puppet Man, for what looks to be sinister business. The Puppet Man, a.k.a. Eric Doyle, and Meredith share a nice meal in a creepy room full of marionettes, after which he forces her to kiss him. The Puppet Man will be a bigger part of next week’s episode, so more of him to come. The big news of the episode was who is responsible for the bizarre appearances of the dead Linderman and who is the mystery man paying Daphne to steal the formula, among other things. We find out who he is after Linderman offers Daphne a new job recruiting people to join a mysterious organization, one designed to supposedly help save the world. Daphne and Knox are part of it, and Linderman asks Daphne to recruit Hiro, Matt Parkman, Mohinder Suresh and others. Hiro obliges and shocks us all by agreeing to kill Ando to get in, although with his ability to move through space and time, you have to assume he’ll go back and reverse that. But Daphne does her job, only to realize that Linderman isn’t real; he’s a vision, an apparition. Yet she continues working under his orders, orders that we then learn are actually coming through Maury, Matt Parkman’s dad and the man with the ability to control people’s mind and put thoughts into their heads or make them see their worst nightmares. It has been Maury making Nathan Petrelli see Linderman all season and Daphne see him too. Maury is working for a man who is bed-ridden and mute, but with whom he can still conversate telepathically, a man at the head of a company called Pinehearst, a company Steven Canfield initially thought Claire was from. We see this man lying in bed and don’t know who he is at first, only that he is the one organizing the team for Pinehearst, the team of people with abilities to wage a battle yet to come. In the final minute of the episode, it’s finally revealed that this man is….Mr. Petrelli, Angela’s husband and Nathan and Peter’s father, the man who allegedly died before his sons could take him down in a legal battle for his many crimes and deceptions in Season 1. How did he survive? What is his power, how is he using it and what for? Lots of big questions raised, answers to come in the weeks ahead….
- I never thought we would make it here. No, literally, I thought somehow, some way, the United States of America would cease to exist in some manner under the inept, inadequate, incompetent rule of W. Dude made the Enron boys look like pros by comparison, yet here we are, still alive and ticking as a nation as W. begins his final 100 days in office as of Sunday. Yes, in just over three months, our worst president (and nightmare) ever will be gone, and although the effects of his abortion of a rule will be felt for years to come, at least he won’t be able to do any more damage - at least I don’t think so. After presiding over the bleakest economic downturn in decades, there’s just no way to be sure. W. claims that during his last three months of incompetence that he will reassure the nation that an abysmal economic period will give way to better days. He intends to keep speaking about the economy, even if no one is listening to him. His final act on this front will be overseeing the $700 billion buyout of devalued assets from banks in attempt to stem the tide of financial despair gripping the country. “It looks like I'm going to have a lot of work to do between today and when the new president takes office,” Bush said this past week. I’d say so, what with you leaving behind a national debt that has soared from less than $6 trillion when you took office to more than $10 trillion now, W. But I guess we wont be seeing that Mideast peace deal built around the outlines of Palestinian state you said you’d accomplish, nor will be see North Korea of get rid its nuclear arms like you vowed to help bring about. In other words, more of the same crap we’ve been seeing since you took office in 2000, and no one expects any different. In fact, I’d be kinda disappointed if it went down any other way……
- I knew it! Yahooooo! I won the office pool for betting on how long Pacman Jones would last before he did something stupid and was suspended by the NFL again. It was 41 days, just what I put my money down for! It’s life’s most bankable certainty, that sooner or later, Pacman is going to go Pacman and run afoul of the law and the NFL. Sure enough, after being reinstated prior to the start of this season and pledging to turn over a new leaf, Pac did what he always does, this time getting into an alcohol-fueled brawl with one of his team-furnished security guards at a Dallas hotel last week. While no charges will be filed legally speaking because the security guard is under orders from the Cowboys to keep his mouth shut, er, the incident was nothing substantial, the NFL doesn’t see things that way. Because Pacman has been involved in no less than a dozen - A DOZEN - incidents with the law since being drafted by Tennesse in 2005 (Strip club incident
Where: Atlanta
When: April 2005, Hotel incident
Where: Nashville
When: June 2005, Nightclub arrest
Where: Nashville
When: July 2005 Vehicle confiscation Where: Nashville
When: April 2006, Shots fired
Where: Nashville
When: April 2006, Nightclub arrest
Where: Murfreesboro, Tenn. When: Aug. 2006, Spitting incident
Where: Nashville
When: October 2006,
Triple shooting
Where: Las Vegas
When: February 2007,
Hotel scuffle
Where: Dallas
When: October 2008) after a college career marreed by similar legal issues, the NFL has suspended him for at least four games for his most recent violation of the league's personal conduct policy. The league based its decision on the fact that Jones was involved in an alcohol-related incident at a Dallas hotel on Oct. 8 for which police were called. The suspension will be unpaid, and commissioner Roger Goodell will determine the ultimate length of Jones' suspension following Dallas’ game against Washington on Nov. 16. “He does need to address the kinds of things that seem to be with him at various times and one of those that he's dealt with for a really long time, he needs to address in a way that most of us might understand -- alcohol issues," Cowboys owner Jerry Jones stated in response to the situation. Well, alcohol issues and being a freaking moron with the IQ of a chia pet, Jer. Unfortunately, while it may be possible for Pacman to lick his liquor addiction, I don’t think he’s going to be able to shake the fact that he’s a moron……
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