- Good news, everyone. Our long national nightmare is over, the issue is resolved and you can all rest easier. No, I’m not talking about the absolute abortion of a presidency set to end in less than two weeks, although this could apply to that situation as well. No, I’m referring to the fact that the long-suffering people of Lawrence, Kansas have finally seen their struggle come to an end and now, at long last, they can…..have a pet hedgehog? Yup, it’s true. Previously, it had been illegal to have pet hedgehogs in Lawrence, but the fighting spirit of an 11-year-old boy and three years of vigilant lobbying against the ban were enough to overturn it. Judson King’s fight began when he was only eight, and now that he’s a sixth-grader at Corpus Christi Catholic School, his efforts are paying off. Back in 2005, King wanted a pet hedgehog but found out the city's animal code prohibits them within city limits. For some odd reason, his parents didn’t do what any other balls-having, non-wussified person would do in their situation, namely buy the hedgehog elsewhere, sneak it into town and give a big middle finger to the idiotic ordinance in the process. That’s probably because King’s mother, Rebecca Weeks, said she was hoping the law would be a good excuse to shoot down her son’s request, but Judson kept researching how to change the law. For a junior high student, he sure must like research, because he spent two years digging into all sorts of information and presented his case to commissioners last January. "I pretty much did research every single night for the past three years, and I daydreamed about having them. I had about 5,000 pictures of them," King said. Slightly disturbing, but whatever. The bottom line is that the commissioners found that there was no substantial reason to keep the law in place and earlier this week, it was repealed and King was able to have his belated Christmas gift -- a two-and-a-half-month-old hedgehog named Little Luke. So residents of Lawrence, Kan., the next time you want to go buy your own pet hedgehog and are able to do so legally, you’ll know who to thank……
- What the hell is wrong with you, parents of America? First, a New Orleans man kidnaps and murder his toddler son in order to get out of paying child support, and now an Auburn, Wash. woman caught in a bitter custody dispute has been caught on tape trying to hire someone to kill her ex-husband and his family. Clearly Elizabeth Beimer hasn’t hired very many hit men to kill her family, because if she had, maybe she would have been able to figure out that the dude she was talking to about offing her ex and his family was really an undercover detective. Maybe her judgment was clouded by the bitter custody battle she was engaged in with her ex-husband, but that’s no excuse. In session 12, lesson four of my seminar for aspiring-but-stupid criminals, we go over the right way to hire a hit man to whack your ex and do so without being caught, and it sure isn’t the way that Beimer went about it. No, she was dumb enough to ask a friend for helping in finding
a hit man, but instead, but no sooner than that conversation ended, that friend went to the police. A sting was set up and a hidden camera video shows Beimer entering a motel room to talk to an undercover detective. As you can see from the following exchange between the two, Beimer has very discriminating tastes when it comes to how her ex-husband and his parents are killed.
Undercover detective: Bludgeon them with a crow bar, baseball bat…
Beimer: I don't care.
Undercover detective: …and then disappear. I'm out.
Beimer: That's fine.
Undercover detective: There's nothing you want out of the house.
Beimer: Nothing I do want. Ain't got anything worth anything to me.
Truly a touching moment, and not at all incriminating when caught on tape. At this point, I ask the same question I asked at the start: What the hell is wrong with you, parents of America? You’re willing to kill three people just to keep custody of your child? How does your twisted mind even get to that point? Never mind, I don’t want to know…..
- My longtime readers may remember that until this TV season, I watched and wrote regularly about One Tree Hill. I haven’t done so this season, with good reason. The tools that run the CW have slotted the show in the same time frame as both Heroes and Prison Break, so I watch one of those two live and the other as soon as it’s posted online. Sooner or later I catch episodes of OTH online as well, but it usually takes a few days and by that time, I’ve moved on to other stuff to write about. However, I have kept up with OTH and Monday night, it was a new episode while PB and Heroes were still on holiday hiatus. Thus, a few thoughts about the One Tree Hill season so far and last night’s episode. First, the show is getting absolutely ridiculous in one respect: Monday night saw the arrival of the third crazy, abducting, psycho-stalker type to the show, some lowlife thug who is the big brother of a kid who Brooke’s (Sophia Bush) foster daughter Sam is friends with. This follows the crazy, kidnapping nanny Carrie who developed a psychopathic fixation on Nathan and Haley’s son Jamie and also Peyton’s crazy stalker a couple of seasons ago who pretended to be her brother. Really, at this point it’s just ridiculous, because no way do that many psychopathic criminals enter the lives of one small group of friends. Second, the leap ahead in time by four years prior to Season 5 really did save and improve the show. It’s much more watchable in this time frame, in spite of the aforementioned crazy infestation. Sophia Bush still isn’t a great actress, but the storyline of her raising a foster daughter who is a teenager has been at least a little compelling. Also, the tragic murder of Quentin Fields, the star basketball player at Tree Hill HS, earlier this season has created some good drama, even if it goes the same route of the overload of psychopaths by creating a second tragic shooting in the history of the series. Honestly, it’s almost as if the writers are either lazy, stupid or both and just keep recycling different versions of the same storyline. It has been interesting watching Lucas try to develop his book into a movie and the tension with his producer, who just happened to be a guy Peyton dated while living in L.A. I will admit that it’s harder to get a good feel for a season of any show watching it exclusively online, so that definitely colors my view here. That being said, it’s been one of the better seasons of OTH so far and I’m interested to see where it goes from here……
- Here’s another of my favorite phrases in all of the English language: Marxist militant groups. Here’s why: try and name me a more fun, exciting and entertaining group than your local Marxist militant group. Can’t do it, can you? These guys are a laugh a second, full of zany hijinks, fantastic comedy and oh yeah, they also do things like fire automatic weapons at Greek riot police in Athens, which one of Greece’s leading Marxist militant groups did on Monday. Greece has been a simmering pot of rioting goodness for weeks now, following police in Athens murdering a teenager in a blatant show of excessive force. Maybe the involvement of an angry group of Marxists will help teach the Athenian police a lesson next time they go looking to bust a cap into some poor kid. Police are fingering Revolutionary Struggle, a Marxist group that claimed responsibility for an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Greece in 2007, in this attack. The group hasn’t claimed responsibility for the incident, but the cops believe the attack has the M.O. the group has become known for. Police also know that one gun that was fired Monday was used in an April 2007 attack on a police station, an attack for which Revolutionary Struggle claimed responsibility. However, at present they have none of the guns used in the attack in their custody, so their case isn’t exactly ironclad. What is known is that a minimum of two masked gunmen sprayed more than 20 shots at the riot unit Monday, hitting an officer in the chest and groin while he was guarding the Culture Ministry in central Athens. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to see anyone shot or critically injured, cop or not, but you can’t argue that the incident that sparked all of this came because those very same police murdered someone. That doesn’t justify some of the things done to retaliate, but police can't deny being the spark that started this fire….
- The issue of hiring minority coaches has been an issue in both college and professional football for some time now, but the difference between the two is that the NFL has actually bothered to take steps to fix its drastically out-of-proportion ratio of minority head coaches. College football is a different animal when it comes to hiring minorities - one that needs to be taken out behind the barn and shot. In the NFL, the Rooney Rule (named after former Pittsburgh Steelers owner Dan Rooney) mandates that any team hiring a new head coach interview at least one minority candidate. That doesn’t guarantee that a minority will be hired, but it does give minority candidates more exposure and experience in regards to the process of interviewing for head coaching positions. The same can’t be said for college football, where the hiring process is a murky, shady exercise fraught with greasy boosters, powerful players hiding in the shadows and school administrations whose decision-making process is neither clearly defined nor subject to public scrutiny. In other words, a potential head coach doesn’t just meet with a school’s athletic director and university president. Those two individuals are far from the only ones with a say in who is hired, which is a big part of the problem. Don’t believe me? Just ask Florida Gators defensive coordinator Charlie Strong, who said this week that he definitely believes race is a reason he hasn't been offered a head-coaching job during his 25 years in college football. Strong, a 48-year-old black man, answered affirmatively when asked him if his race and also his interracial marriage were factors in getting passed over for jobs, including one at a Southern school a few years ago. Strong admitted that he has been told more than a few times that he has been passed over for jobs because his wife is white. Why is that an issue? Well, because in specific areas of the country (i.e. the South, where Strong resides), bigoted, backwards-thinking tools who can’t un-stick themselves from 1940 believe that people of different races shouldn’t be allowed to marry one another. It’s a claim Strong says he has heard that too many times for it to be rumor. "Everybody always said I didn't get that job because my wife is white," Strong said while helping to prepare his team to face Oklahoma in the FedEx BCS National Championship Game. "If you think about it, a coach is standing up there representing the university. If you're not strong enough to look through that [interracial marriage], then you have an issue." Agreed and agreed. The fact that there are only seven black coaches at the nation's 119 Division I schools, also known as the Bowl Subdivision, is a big problem. One thing I feel compelled to mention as a counterpoint, though, is this: trying to overcompensate and fix the ratio all at once would be equally bad. In other words, trying to force through a bunch of minority candidates to even out the ratio in one fell swoop would be a mistake. Yes, the ratio needs fixed, but it should happen naturally over time. A better measure would be from here on out, to look at the ratio of minority coaches among those hired. As time progresses, if minority coaches are treated fairly and given a legitimate chance, then the overall ratio will get to where it should be. The biggest stumbling block is those bigoted, rich, behind-the-scenes boosters who are exerting influence at these schools and being racist against men like Charlie Strong. Those boosters should listen to the message that Strong has for them in regards to his wife’s skin color: "She makes no calls and she plays no defense," Strong said. True dat……..
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