- Of course the stodgy, conservative, old white dudes who comprise the ownership contingent of Major League Baseball wouldn’t want a fresh, non-traditional voice like Mark Cuban as a member of their exclusive club. Cuban has been very public about his desire to buy his favorite baseball team from current
owner Sam Zell, who put the Cubbies up for sale after the Tribune Company, which owns the team, was sold and the new owners didn’t want to keep them as part of their holdings. According to one report, Cuban won't even make the final cut if commissioner Bud Selig and Major League Baseball owners have their way. Despite being a billionaire who has proven he knows how to run a first-class professional sports franchise, Cuban will likely be shut out because he doesn’t fit the traditional mold for an MLB owner. “There's no way Bud and the owners are going to let that happen,” a source declared earlier this week. “Zero chance.”
So far, Zell has yet to shorten the field of five potential buyers who submitted bids of about $1 billion to the Tribune Co. for the Cubs and Wrigley Field. Honestly, something should have been decided by now, as the Cubs were on the market at the start of the 2007 baseball season. However, Zell is either extremely indecisive or just lazy, because another source claims that a deal before Opening Day 2009 is unlikely.
So why can’t Zell just sell the team to whomever he wants? Because the WASP-laden group of owners in MLB have a say in who joins their club, that’s why. Major League Baseball must approve the sale of any team, so even if Cuban indeed was the highest bidder for the Cubs at $1.3 billion, as was reported over the summer, and even if he is totally qualified to own the team, that doesn’t mean he’ll get the team. Also among the five bidders are the Ricketts family, which founded the brokerage that is now TD Ameritrade Holding Corp. and a group led by Sports Acquisition Holding Corp. that includes former baseball home run king Henry Aaron and former Republican congressman Jack Kemp. While the possibility of Hammerin’ Hank owning my favorite team is cool, I’m still pulling for a miracle that will allow Cuban to buy the team. But whoever buys the Cubs, they will pay a heck of a lot more than the Tribune Co. paid in 1981 when they bought the Cubs for $20.5 million…..
- Great news, fellow Lost fans. ABC has confirmed the premiere date for the fifth season of Lost, and it's Jan. 21. So only two months left to go before we pick up the tale that left off last season with the island disappearing into thin air in the middle of the ocean and the Oceanic Six living tortured, haunted lives back in civilization. The show will be back on Wednesday nights, changing from last season’s crappy Thursdays at 10 pm/ET time slot to a regular time slot of Wednesdays at 9 pm. Best of all, the season will kick off with a three-hour event, one hour of a clip show from last season followed by the first two episodes. It will be nice to get back to a normal season after last year, when a plan to run the entire season uninterrupted was crashed by the stupid freaking WGA strike. At the moment, it’s not known if the too-short 17-episode Season 5 will attempt the same feat, but regardless of how the season is structured, if this season is any match for the previous one, especially the mind-blowing finale, we’re in for an amazing ride and one that will have more twists, turns and surprises than any show on television….
- So we have another example of idiots run wild on Facebook. This one has the potential to ruin a life, whereas the last one (a New England Patriots cheerleader who posted pics with a friend who had schwastikas drawn on his face as he was passed out) just ended the career of a girl who danced up in sequined, tight leather outfits and danced for thousands of ogling male fans for three hours on a few Sunday afternoons a year. This new incident involves now-former University of Texas lineman Buck Burnette, who has been thrown off the team after he posted a racist message regarding president-elect Barack Obama on his Facebook page. As Facebook users know, you can update your status, which is supposed to tell where you are, what you are doing or what you are thinking, to let everyone know what’s going on with you at the moment. Brunette updated his Facebook profile status with the following comment: “all the hunters gather up, we have a #$%&er in the whitehouse”. Wow. That’s, umm…..bigoted…..small-minded……idiotic….racist…let’s go with all of the above. Not too hard to figure out the motivation for Longhorns head coach Mack Brown when he immediately kicked Burnette off the team for “unspecified violations of team rules.” What, blatant, hateful racism directed at the next leader of this country is a violation of your team rules? Okay, I guess if that’s how you want it. Nice try by Burnette in trying to apologize this one away, saying, “Clearly I have made a mistake and apologized for it and will pay for it. I received it as a text message from an acquaintance and immaturely put it up on Facebook in the light of the election. I’m not racist and apologize for offending you. I grew up on a ranch in a small town where that was a real thing and I need to grow up. I sincerely am sorry for being ignorant in thinking that it would be ok to write that publicly and apologize to you in particular. I have to be more mature than to put the reputation of my team at stake and to spread that kind of hate which I don’t even believe in. Once again, I sincerely apologize.” Great, but until you live about, oh, the rest of your life in a way that backs up those sentiments, I’m going to go ahead and keep suspecting that you are a racist. Not what I would have expected from someone whose Facebook profile lists his religious views as “I Love Jesus”. Buck, nothing I know about Jesus indicates he would approve of those sentiments, so maybe go read your Bible again, seeing as you now have a surplus of free time on your hands……
- Should you be sporting a pacemaker to keep your heart ticking at the right rhythm, you may want to consult your doctor before mixing in a workout that incorporates an iPod or MP3 player. Why? Because a new study suggests headphones commonly used with digital music devices contain magnets that could potentially cause interference if placed directly on the chest above the heart device. That report, presented this week at the American Heart Association meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, suggests that pacemakers, which are designed to boost slow heart rhythms may deliver signals that tell the heart to beat faster, whether it needs to or not, when exposed to magnets like the ones in headphones. “For defibrillator patients, it is a much bigger concern because the magnet can temporarily deactivate it,” says the study's senior author, Dr. William H. Maisel, director of the Medical Device Safety Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts. Every year, approximately 250,000 people in the United States each year are given pacemakers. An additional 125,000 receive implantable cardioverter defibrillators, or ICDs, which can shock the heart back into a normal rhythm. In conducting their study, researchers attached eight types of headphones to iPods and tested them on 60 patients with ICDs. The headphones were placed on the chests of patients, directly over the ICDs. All told, some electromagnetic interference occurred in 23 percent of patients. However, many of the experts at the conference where the study was presented disputed the validity of the results and whether there was actually a need for caution amongst pacemaker patients. So if that includes you, take the study however you want, just make sure they you don’t meet your end listening to some crappy song by the Pussycat Skanks on your iPod while working out, that would be a truly terrible way to go…..
- Behold the power of the family-friendly film. The animated sequel flick “Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa” led the weekend with a $63.5 million debut, an impressive outing and one that easily beat out all of the challengers. Actually, that total was enough to surpass the $47.2 million debut for the original “Madagascar” over Memorial Day weekend in 2005. But the movie didn’t just get fat on the dollars of younger children and their parents; teens and adults made up half the audience on Friday and one-third on Saturday. Coming in a distant second was a pretty mediocre comedy, “Role Models,” starring Seann William Scott and Paul Rudd as immature adults sentenced to community service as mentors for two misfit youths. It brought in a decent $19.3 million in its debut, but those numbers look much better when compared with the weekend's other new wide release, the music comedy “Soul Men,” which opened poorly with $5.6 million. Even the chance to see the last movie for the late Bernie Mac and Isaac Hayes, who both died earlier this year. Jackson and Mac play an estranged singing team on a reunion road trip to a memorial concert. Actually, Bernie Mac had a hand in “Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa” also, providing vocals as Zuba, the father of Ben Stiller's Alex the lion. Slipping to third on the weekend was the top film from the previous two weekends, Disney’s "High School Musical 3: Senior Year,” which made $9.3 million to raise its total to $75.7 million. Here’s how the top 10 shook down overall: 1) "Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa," $63.5 million, 2) "Role Models," $19.3 million, 3) "High School Musical 3," $9.3 million, 4) "Changeling," $7.3 million, 5) "Zack and Miri Make a Porno," $6.3 million, 6) "Soul Men," $5.6 million, 7) "Saw V," $4.2 million, 8) "The Haunting of Molly Harvey," $3.5 million, 9) "The Secret Life of Bees," $3.1 million, 10) "Eagle Eye," $2.6 million. A diverse and eclectic group of movies, and shock of all shocks, there are actually a couple of good ones in there, so get out and see them……
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