- Kanye West may be arrogant, he may be the most egotistical, full-of-himself a-hole in the world of music and he’s not nearly as talented as he likes to think he is, but I’m 100 percent with him any time he decides to slam that weasel-voiced, Michael Jackson rip-off, former man-bander Justin Timberlake. In truly humble West fashion, the rapper recently dubbed himself "the voice of this generation" while also taking shots at Timberlake. “I realize that my place and position in history is that I will go down as the voice of this generation, of this decade, I will be the loudest voice,” West proclaimed. “It's me settling into that position of just really accepting that it's one thing to say you want to do it and it's another thing to really end up being like Michael Jordan.” Sorry Kanye, but you are not my voice and you never will be. Your music is OK, but nothing spectacular. You’re not even the best rapper of this generation; that would be Jay-Z. And it’s tough to be the voice of a generation when your genre of music is not the dominant genre on the scene. That being said, props on slamming Timberlake by saying that there were other artists, including Timberlake, who were in the running to go down as music's top dog of the generation, but couldn't pull it off. “There were people who had the potential to do it but they went on vacation, so when Justin went on vacation I made albums,” said West. One final note on this: what did the self-proclaimed voice of a generation do shortly after making these erroneous comments? He got himself arrested early Friday morning for allegedly assaulting a paparazzo outside the Tup Tup Palace bar in Newcastle, northern England. Way to represent, Kanye! I’ll go ahead and proclaim that the balloting for voice of this generation is still open and also that Kanye West isn’t anywhere near the lead in this race…..
- Boy, Bobby Bowden sure does have firm control on his football program at Florida State, doesn’t he? After a massive academic cheating scandal resulted in the suspension of more than 30 Seminoles players for the team’s bowl game last season, Florida State suspended five players for Saturday's homecoming game against Boston College after their involvement in an on-campus brawl earlier this week. “The police report has not been concluded, but from the information that I have gathered, I am suspending five players who were apparently involved in the fray,” Bowden said in a university-issued statement. “Taiwan Easterling, Bert Reed, Corey Surrency, Cameron Wade and Richard Goodman will all be suspended for the Boston College game.” Just what did these five idiots do? According to Maj. James Russell of the Florida State University Police Department, the fight broke out at the university's student union between Seminoles football players and members of the Phi Beta Sigma fraternity. The confrontation stemmed from bad blood between some of the athletes and fraternity members, but a high-noon showdown at the student union certainly kicks things up a notch. Campus police were called to the large fight near the student union at 12:37 p.m. on Wednesday, a fight in which a female bystander who wasn't involved in the fight, was struck in the face by a thrown chair. She was treated and released from a local hospital, but at this point it isn’t known who threw the chair.
Props for having each other’s backs, I guess…..but how the heck do you allow yourself to get drawn into this kind of mess? No matter how much you hate this fraternity and even if its members are total douche bags, you are student-athletes and as such, you are held to higher standards of behavior. If you engage in an on-campus brawl and chairs are thrown, a lot of things will result from it and none of them are good. You embarrass yourselves, your team, your university and oh yeah, you get suspended and let down the team you are supposed to be helping. And make no mistake about it, Easterling, Reed and Surrency are all receivers who have played key roles in Florida State's offense this season. The three have combined for 51 catches, 722 yards and eight touchdowns as the Seminoles and their team is tied with Wake Forest for first place in the ACC’s Atlantic Division. Back to the long-running discipline issues within the program for a moment….this is the third time this season Bowden has had to suspend a receiver, as both Reed and Surrency have missed games. In other words, they’ve done stupid stuff like this already this season, yet they haven’t clued in to the fact that they need to clean their act up. Surrency was suspended for the Georgia Tech game for an undisclosed violation of team rules, and Reed was suspended for the game against Virginia Tech for violating the school's academic attendance policy. Not going to class, brawling in the student center, injuring fellow students with chairs thrown in said brawl, letting down your team…..well done, guys. You really are proving that people who call your team the “Criminoles” are telling the truth……
- Batman has lots of adversaries - the Joker, the Penguin Mr. Freeze, etc. - but now the caped crusader is facing off with the mayor of an oil-producing Turkish town. Huseyin Kalkan, leader of the city of Batman in southeastern Turkey, is looking to sue Christopher Nolan, director of the latest Batman movie "The Dark Knight," for taking its name without consultation.” Are you serious? Do you expect anyone to believe that? No one named anything after your backwater, crap hole town, you idiot. The movie is named after a hero who has a fear of bats, then conquers that fear and incorporates bats into his costume and schtik. More than likely, no one involved with any of the Batman movies has ever heard of your town. “The royalty of the name 'Batman' belongs to us... There is only one Batman in the world,” Kalkan declared. “The American producers used the name of our city without informing us.” What’s next, ass clown? You going to sue every deli and sandwich shop in the world that dares use the word turkey in its name? Maybe a lawsuit against Louisville Slugger for using the word bat in its products’ names? Your ploy looks even shadier when you consider that it is a shameless cash grab, a feeble effort to score money you don’t in any way deserve after someone suggested that your cash-strapped community needed more funds. Just because you need the money doesn’t mean you can spin around in a circle, randomly point your finger at the first person or group that you think you might be able to make a link to and say, “Give me your money.” It would be nice for the poorer among us if it worked that way, but no. In case you are wondering just what the town of Batman looks like, it has a population of just under 250,000, is the provincial capital of the oil-rich Batman Province and lies close to the Batman River. And it actually has a link to a recent work of fiction that was award-winning, just not the one its mayor is trying to extort. No, the town was featured in the novel "Snow" by Nobel prize-winner Orhan Pamuk. Oh, and in what court are you going to file this suit? The movie has either made no or very little money in your country, so you don’t really have jurisdiction to sue Warner Bros., the studio that released the film, anywhere. Mayor Kalkan, you will be seeing none of the $1 billion that “The Dark Knight” has made worldwide, and you should consider yourself fortunate if, assuming you sure Warner Bros., they don’t sue your sorry ass and look to take over your town in the process to rename it “Warner Bros.-ville”…….
- Nice, but not quite enough. That’s how I would assess the $2.5 million in damages a jury awarded on Friday to a Kentucky teenager who was severely beaten by members of a Ku Klux Klan group because they mistakenly thought he was an illegal Latino immigrant. In rendering that judgment, the jury found that the Imperial Klans of America and its founder wrongfully targeted 16-year-old Jordan Gruver, an American citizen of Panamanian and Native-American descent. The $2.5 million total includes $1.5 million in compensatory damages and $1 million in punitive damages against "Imperial Wizard" Ron Edwards. A big salute to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which represented Gruver in the case. He and the SPLC went into this thing with the most admirable of goals; a verdict that could break the Klan group, allowing the teen and the law center to seize the group's assets, including its headquarters, a 15-acre compound in Dawson Springs, Kentucky. By the sounds of the post-case comments, they haven’t deviated from that plan. “We look forward to collecting every dime that we can for our client and to putting the Imperial Klans of America out of business,” said SPLC founder and chief trial attorney Morris Dees, who tried the case. Keep at it, Mo, because anyone with even a fourth of a brain supports your cause and reject the idiotic, backwater ideology espoused by the Klan and all like-minded groups. The jury that reached this verdict was all-white, so that makes it even sweeter. Maybe if more people had the courage that Gruver showed here, incidents like the one he was involved in, wherein three members of the Klan group taunted him with ethnic slurs, spat on him, doused him with alcohol, knocked him to the ground and repeatedly struck and kicked him, would not happen. Not that any amount of money can wipe away the memory of this kind of experience for someone like Jordan Gruver, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t something to be celebrated……
- Been here before, heard this song sung before and seen the scenery too many times to count. So you’ll have to excuse me, Iraqi Cabinet, for not being enthused to hear that you have approved a security pact that would set the terms for U.S. troops in Iraq. Various parties in the ongoing debacle that is American involvement in Iraq have thrown out the idea of a date for our troops to leave a place they never should have been in the first place, but there are always so many provisos and qualifications attached and people who need to give approval that an actual withdrawal of troops seems more difficult than finding Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa riding a unicorn being led by a leprechaun through the lost city of Atlantis inside the Bermuda Triangle. However, maybe this time it will be different (stop laughing, if you can). Perhaps by June 30, 2009, all American troops really will be out of Iraqi cities and towns, as per the terms of this new agreement. By that date, the deal mandates that U.S. troops withdraw from all Iraqi cities and towns. After that, the date for all troops to leave Iraq will be December 31, 2011, he said. A spokesman for the Iraqi government claims that these dates are "set and fixed" and are "not subject to the circumstances on the ground," claims I don’t believe for a second. Now that it has been passed by the Cabinet, the approved draft will be sent to the Council of Representatives, Iraq's 275-seat parliament, later Sunday, where it will be put to another vote. Maybe if we all put it on our respective Christmas (or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa) lists as our #1 gift choice and wish really, really hard, this deal will stick and the national nightmare that is the Mess O’Potamia will end. Impossible, you say? Well, one national nightmare is already guaranteed to end in mid-January when the worst president in the history of our country leaves office for good, so there is always hope…..
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