- That’s the team spirit I love to see, Stephon Marbury. Showing that his “Starbury” persona is alive and well even though he’s been inactive for every game his team, the New York Knicks, have played this season, Marbury declined when Knicks coach Mike D'Antoni gave guard Marbury the chance to play for the first time this season. Because the Knicks were faced with a short bench after the team completed two trades earlier in the day, D’Antoni went to Starbury and offered him the chance to play. So why did Marbury decline to step on the court and help his team in what became a 104-87 to the Milwaukee Bucks? “The only thing I'm at liberty to say is that I was told that they were moving forward, and I'm not the person who chooses who plays or doesn't,” Marbury said. Detailed…..but unresponsive. You not being the one who decides who plays and who doesn’t do not explain why you wouldn’t play when asked. Because you wouldn’t swallow your massive, bloated ego, your team had to use a seven-player rotation as you once again took your customary spot on the bench in street clothes. However, D'Antoni said afterward that even though he wanted Marbury to play, he would not label the refusal as insubordination. “But that's enough of the talk, because it is a distraction, and we need to go forward,” D'Antoni said. "We've got a new team coming in.” Yes coach, you do have forward Al Harrington coming in from Golden State and guard Cuttino Mobley and forward Tim Thomas from the Los Angeles Clippers, but here’s the problem: you still have Starbury. This malcontent wouldn’t play even when his team’s two scorers, Zach Randolph and Jamal Crawford, heading out the door, so why would you believe that things are ever going to change. This is a bad situation all around, especially for the team and its fans, not as much for Starbury, who is making that $21 million salary to do nothing. For the sake of Knicks fans, who have endured a crapload of problems the past few years, here’s hoping this mess is resolved soon…..
- Stop me if this sounds familiar: a powerful Hollywood union is preparing for a strike. Where have I haeard that one before? Oh, that’s right, the writer’s strike that crippled last season in the world of television. Well, can I interest you in another strike? This one could come courtesy of the Screen Actors Guild after marathon talks between the union and producers broke off early Saturday and the SAG now saying it will ask its members to authorize a strike. The SAG's contract with Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers expired June 30 and at that point, the two sides couldn’t agree on how actors would be paid when movies and TV shows are distributed through so-called "new media," such as mobile phones and the Internet. “As previously authorized by the national board of directors, we will now launch a full-scale education campaign in support of a strike authorization referendum,” SAG said in a written statement. A date for the possible strike hasn’t been officially announced, but after prolonged, bitter negotiations like these, it could be at any time. The most recent round of talks, the first since July, ended at 1 a.m. Saturday after 27 hours of talks. So far, the producers alliance has demanded SAG accept terms similar to those in contracts concluded over the past year with six other unions representing writers, directors, etc. “Taken together, these six new labor agreements will keep our industry at work, allow producers to experiment with new media, and give everyone in our industry a stake in the success of new and emerging markets,” AMPTP said on Wednesday. At this point, the SAG isn’t suggesting that the strike vote won't result in an immediate walkout, but will serve first and foremost to fortify their negotiating position. All of this comes after last month’s request by the SAG's board of directors voted last month for a federal mediator to help with the negotiations. The decision to strike is now in the hands of the SAG's 120,000-plus members, a number that includes many who no longer pursue acting jobs and vote according to a policy stating that a member who joined after having just one line in one show has a vote equal to the highest-paid stars, as long as his or her annual dues are paid. In other words, ready for another strike to derail your favorite shows this year? Me neither…..
- Few things piss me off more than The Man abusing his authority, especially in excessive, violent displays of physical force. That would appear to be the case in Houston, Texas, where three police officers have been temporarily transferred from patrol duty to desk jobs after claims of assault against the father of Green Bay Packers wide receiver Donald Driver. The (alleged) excessive force users in question are officers Bacilio Guzman, Gilberto Cruz and Matthew Marin, and their fate will be decided based on the findings of the department's internal affairs division. Allegedly, Marvin Driver Jr. was beaten early Monday as police were arresting him for outstanding traffic warrants. Leading the charge in sounding out the allegations of police brutality are his relatives, who had asked that the officers accused in the incident be suspended or placed on administrative leave. According to police, they are still awaiting medical reports on Driver “to determine what injuries he sustained.” His injuries may not be known, but one positive is that Driver was in good condition Friday at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center. For some reason, the Houston police seem more concerned with defending the reputation of the third officer to arrive on the scene than they are with making sure justice is served. They maintain that more blame for the incident should go to the first two officers who arrived at the scene and that the third man “was extremely concerned about the well-being of Mr. Driver.” Thankfully, Driver has been able to describe his experience in detail to investigators and his family. As you might expect, at least one member of Driver’s family has already played the race card. One of his sons, Michael, has said he thinks his father was beaten because he is black. The family’s take on the incident is that the officers stopped Driver in front of his mother's home, where an argument took place between relatives and police. The officers then explained to the family that Driver was being taken to jail for the outstanding warrants and from there, everything went to hell. I don’t know exactly what happened and from the sounds of this, this isn’t a Rodney King repeat, but it sure does sound like excessive force was used and once again, law enforcement has crossed the line from protecting and serving to beating and hospitalizing…..otherwise those they arrest would not be “injured, semiconscious and unresponsive” when paramedics arrived on the scene……
- Jack is back. On Fox last night, it was time for 24: Redemption and the location was Sangala, Africa. After Season 6 left Jack staring off a cliff in Malibu into the vast, unending Pacific Ocean, this season kicked off with the world’s toughest secret agent living in a small village, helping his old friend Carl Benton run a small school for boys in a war-torn region. Early on, courtesy of U.S. Embassy representative Frank Trammell, we also found out that for the past year Jack has been running from a subpoena from the U.S. Senate to testify about torture allegations from his time at CTU. Jack tells Trammell to f’off and decides that rather than allow the embassy to cut off funding and supplies to the school and bring trouble there, he will just leave and start running again. That becomes difficult when an African warlord named General Juma begins ravaging the area and abducting young boys to serve as soldiers in his army. Word comes that Juma’s men are coming to the village where Jack is, a rumor that is confirmed when two of the boys from the village are attacked and shot at a nearby soccer field by Juma’s men as they come to take them away. One boy, Desmond, survives and relays what has happened to Benton, who has come looking for him. Back at the school, Jack has to secure the area before Juma’s men arrive. The boys in the village all hide in a secret room under the floor of the village’s school building, with Jack left to defend the village against a couple dozen rebels using only a few sticks of dynamite and a couple of handguns - in other words, the usual Jack Bauer odds. He is able to hold them off for a while and kill a few, but is ultimately captured and tortured, just like old times. Deep into another round of torture, Benton makes it back to the village and signals Jack from the brush using a mirror off the jeep he has been driving. Jack feeds to rebels a lie about the boys from the school hiding in the very spot where Benton is and when the rebels go there, Benton takes them out, using the skills he learned back in his time in special forces service with Jack. Jack, Benton and the boys escape on an old bus owned by the school and head for the nearby capital city, which is a few hours away on treacherous roads. They head there because the U.S. government (more on this shortly) has ordered an evacuation of all non-military American personnel in the country and Benton has immigration forms that would allow all of the boys to leave the country. Using a radio he took from one of the rebels, Jack is able to monitor surveillance on the roads. This saves everyone on the bus when they are able to veer off the road just a minute before a rebel patrol on the road would have spotted them. The remainder of the trip into the city, just a few miles, must be made on foot. Unfortunately, one of the boys in the group, Willy, nearly steps on a mine when he wanders off the path and in saving him, Benton steps on the mine himself. Jack wants to try to disarm the mine, but Benton realizes that doing so would take an hour, time they don’t have. Jack agrees to take the boys to the embassy and Benton stays behind, knowing he is going to die but also hoping to take a few rebels with him. He accomplishes that feat when the rebels catch up to him and surround him, shooting him repeatedly and finding themselves blown up with him when the mine goes off. Jack and the boys make it into the city, but at the embassy, Trammell informs him that without the sponsorship of a U.S. citizen, they can’t get on the helicopter. Since Jack is their only hope and Trammell traps him into a deal of giving up himself to face the Senate subpoena in exchange for the boys getting to leave the country, Jack surrenders. He and the boys leave on the last helicopter out of the country, heading to the U.S. for vastly different receptions. The United States look vastly different than the one Jack fled at the end of Season 6. Cowardly, weasely President Noah Daniels is on his way out, making way for the new leader of the country, President Elect Allison Taylor, the first female president in U.S. history. It’s Inauguration Day, but the new president has big challenges on her plate before she even takes the oath of office. She becomes aware of the crisis on Sangala and opposes Daniels’ plan to basically do nothing, to pull all U.S. citizens out of the country and refuse to bring U.S. troops in the region in to intervene. Also, there is the mystery of finding out how General Juma has managed to raise and arm an army despite being stripped of his powers and resources by the U.N. three years ago. The explanation for that is funding from a mysterious, shady character named Jonas Hodges, played by Jon Voight. Hodges is funding Juma, and doing so has necessitated some shady accounting practices by his accounting firm. When the account manager, Kevin, who helped create and run the account feels something might be amiss and starts asking questions, he finds himself in deep trouble. Then, when his boss orders him to destroy all records related to the account, he becomes even more suspicious. Instead of destroying the records, Kevin forwards them to his home computer and goes to a unique source for help: Roger Taylor, who also works at the firm and who happens to be the son of the new president. Roger hears out his friend and promises to look at the records after the inauguration, but Kevin doesn’t make it that long. Two mysterious hit men sneak into his house, destroy his computer records, interrogate him and then kill him before burying him in concrete in his back yard. Roger doesn’t receive the email with the records, so he’s left to wonder what went wrong with his friend, something I’m sure will come up once the season starts. So a lot of questions raised to start the new season, a few questions answered as to what Jack Bauer has been up to since we last saw him and from the looks of the previews, a heck of a season coming up. Oh, and props to Fox for slamming us with commercials about purchasing the DVD or iTunes version of Redemption multiple times during the episode. Know what, I think I’ll wait for Season 7 to come out on DVD and get this prequel movie when it’s inevitably included there, thanks…..
- All seems to be in place for the Florida Gators to be one of the nation’s elite college football programs for some time to come. They have a great head coach in Urban Meyer, they have a steady influx of top recruits, a definite homefield advantage in the Swamp…..and they have the one thing every program needs to be truly elite, their share of knuckleheads and criminals on the roster. Meet Florida backup quarterback Cameron Newton, who was charged with stealing another student's laptop computer after being arrested Friday. Newton has been suspended from the team, which seems largely irrelevant, as it’s tough to take part in team activities when being held in the Alachua County jail. He is staring down felony counts of burglary, larceny and obstructing justice. This was clearly a well thought-out criminal enterprise, as Newton allegedly stole the laptop worth $1,700 and then threw it out his dormitory window Friday when officers arrived to investigate the theft. Good call, Cam. No one is going to notice a flying computer. It’s so common to see a lapper woth $1,700 flying out of a dorm window that no one even notices; just like those damn car alarms that no one pays attention to anymore because they go off at drop of a hat. Then again, it’s not surprising that Newton didn’t react more intelligently when the police showed up, because he’s shown a lack of intelligence and criminal savvy throughout the whole theft process. After a student reported the computer stolen Oct. 16, investigators were able to link the laptop to Newton five days later when he allegedly used the machine to access the school's network. And what gave him away? Well, the user name he logged on under was "cnewton." But it doesn’t end there; no, there’s plenty more here to show what an utter moron Newton is. When university police went to Newton's dorm Friday, were invited inside and noticed the laptop on Newton's desk. Yes, dude invited officers inside with the stolen property sitting out in plain view. It took the cops (and these were university police, so if they can turn you inside out that quickly, you know you’re not very bright) all of five seconds to find what they were looking for and after that, they left the room to confirm that the computer matched the serial code of the laptop reported stolen. How they were able to see past the clever cloaking job Newton pulled with the computer, I’ll never know. Allegedly, this knob had painted the laptop black on the top and had "Cam Newton" written on the top in white paint. Seriously? You thought that was going to fool anyone? Right, because that’s not very conspicuous, a computer with black paint on top of it and your name painted in white on it. My man, how many computers have you seen with the owner’s name painted in white or any other color? People don’t paint their names on their computers, that tends to be 1) ghetto and 2) possibly damaging to the machine. Still, there is more idiocy to come, as when the officers returned to Newton’s dorm, the computer was gone. They didn’t have to go far to find it, tracking it down behind a trash bin outside the dorm and learning that, “Mr. Newton threw the computer out of his bedroom window,” according to the police report. Well done, Cam, well done. Just a suck-tacular performance from start to finish. Hard to figure out why you didn’t get away with this. But hey, you can now have a chance join ex-teammate Jacques Rickerson, a backup cornerback at UF who was kicked off the team two weeks after he was arrested and accused of slapping his girlfriend, choking her and then covering her face with a pillow. Yes, the football program is definitely looking elite at the University of Florida once again……
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