- Thanks for announcing that you’re not retiring, want to play baseball again, have undergone a hip procedure and could be by Opening Day, Bar-roid Bonds, just one problem: no f’ing one wants to sign you. In case you forgot, you sat out all last season because no one had any desire to sign you and bring in the 18-wheeler-load of baggage you carry. So why you’re announcing all of this now, I don’t know. It’s like me announcing that I’m taking some voice lessons and will be available for lead vocals on the next Audioslave album or am taking acting lessons and will be available for a leading role in this season of Lost: so what? No one at all wants me to fill either of those positions, regardless of what I allegedly do to prepare myself for them. Bar-roid, last I checked you were still staring down a March trial on charges of lying to a federal grand jury and obstructing justice in the BALCO case, plus you are still a guy with an ego the size of the Golden Gate Bridge and a sense of entitlement like none we’ve ever seen in professional sports. If you want to have surgery with the intent of resuming your career, that’s fine because it’s your money to waste. The fact that you hired Dr. Arthur Ting to perform the surgery and will ostensibly go through rehab doesn’t change the fact that no team wants to bring you in. You’re a liability on defense and couldn’t only be a designated hitter, but you are far too much of a circus side show and magnet for controversy that bringing you in solely in to DH is more than teams are willing to take on. That’s your own doing, because it was your actions that led to the feds charging you with 14 counts -- since reduced to 10 -- of making false declarations to a federal grand jury and one count of obstruction of justice. Besides, why don’t you wait until you find out your fate in court before wasting time and money on an attempted comeback that isn’t going anywhere, anyhow? Just trying to be helpful, my man……
- Keep it up Mexico, you’re killing a valuable part of the world’s economy and to be honest, you actually seem happy about it. At this rate, you’re going to cripple the very businesses that fuel your nation’s economic system: drug cartels. On top of that, if you keep doing things like arresting the leader of a drug cartel that set off two grenades during a public celebration in September, killing eight people and wounding more than 100, you’re going to drive the price of drugs up so high that the average stoner or crack addict will be priced out of the market. However, if you hadn’t arrested Alberto Espinoza Barron, we likely never would have found out that there was a Mexican cartel leader known as "the Strawberry." Yes, the organization known as the "Michoacan Family," which operates in the Mexican states of Michoacan and Mexico, was being led by a dude named after a fruit. Now I’m left wondering if his lieutenants were the Banana, the Kiwi and the Pear. But named after fruit or not, these aren’t hombres you want to mess with, not after they allegedly set off two grenades September 15 in the public plaza in Morelia, the capital of Michoacan. But the drug war isn’t just about arresting cartel leaders; there is also the issue of corruption within the military and government, with cartels bribing people for information and assistance. A few days before arresting the Strawberry, Mexican officials arrested an army major assigned to a guard unit protecting Mexican President Felipe Calderon. The army major, Arturo Gonzalez Rodriguez, received as much as $100,000 a month for passing information to a drug cartel, so it’s not difficult to see how the cartels manage to stay a step ahead of the law most of the time. Throughout Mexico, cartels are known to recruit low-level soldiers, either to bribe them for information or to hire them away from the army and into the employ of drug cartels. The reason they do all of this? I choose to believe that it’s to provide high-quality narcotics to the average consumer at an affordable price, although I’m pretty sure Mexican government officials would disagree with me on that one…..
- Perhaps Oprah should just stop endorsing supposed non-fiction works for her book club. Having already been burned once when endorsing the alleged memoirs of a person with a spectacular life story of change and heartache, Oprah clearly did not lean her lesson and now she’s been burned again. This time, Herman Rosenblat is the culprit who pulled the wool over Winfrey’s eyes with his supposedly true tale of love born on opposite sides of a barbed-wire fence at a Nazi concentration camp. No sooner had Oprah slammed her seal of approval on the tome than Berkley Books canceled Rosenblat's memoir, "Angel at the Fence," after he acknowledged that he and his wife did not meet, as they had said for years, at a sub-camp of Buchenwald, where she allegedly sneaked him apples and bread. Dead is the book’s planned February release date and alive is the egg splattered all over Winfrey’s, Rosenblat’s and Berkley Books’ faces. So what justification can a man give for so shamelessly exploiting the worst mass tragedy in world history for personal gain? Well, according to a statement issued Saturday through his agent, Rosenblat described himself as an advocate of love and tolerance who falsified his past to better spread his message. Sorry pal, rejected. Some teary-eyed, altruistic ideals about values for a better world does not a valid reason to lie about being a Holocaust survivor make. Fact is, you have been married to the former Roma Radzicky for 50 years since meeting her on a blind date in New York. Your story isn’t any better, more special or even different than millions of others who met their spouse the same way. You may have initially fooled Oprah, film producers, journalists, family members, school children and strangers online but in the end the warnings from scholars and skeptics that your story didn't make sense proved true. You’re not the first ass clown to lie about being a Holocaust survivor in order to sell a book, but maybe if enough people mock, ridicule and belittle you, you’ll be the last, you tool……
- It was a close, tough race, but Caracas is the champ. Venezuela’s capital city has won the title as the murder capital of the world, racking up an impressive 510 murders in December alone. The designation was bestowed upon the city by Foreign Policy magazine, which said that Caracas tops the list of five murder capitals of the world, with an official tally of 130 homicides per 100,000 residents. In a city with 4 million inhabitants, that’s a bad ratio. You might be asking just who the top competition was for Caracas; going down the rest of the top five, it goes: 2) Cape Town, South Africa, 3) New Orleans, 4) Moscow, Russia, 5) Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea - or as I like to call them, the five places at the bottom of my possible vacation destination list. For some odd reason, officials in Venezuela aren’t celebrating this great victory for their nation. In fact, Minister for Interior Relations and Justice Tareck El Aissami said Monday he will form 50 community police units in Caracas and take other measures so that "we can have in a short time a culture of peace, tranquility and calm for all the Venezuelan public." Still, it’s going to be a ginormous battle, as critics argue that the sizeable lead Caracas has in the murder race would be even larger if the country accurately recorded prison murders, which the state never gets around to properly 'categorizing.' Also, in a bit of news that hits close to home for a lover of social dissidence, riots, protests, etc., the statistics from Caracas also don't count those who died while 'resisting arrest,' which is big in a city where cops are infamous for their brutality against student protesters. Drug and gang warfare also help keep the total high, so as you can see, it’s a team effort. So while there may be fewer of you - 510 in the past month - to celebrate, enjoy your reign, Caracas…..
- Reinforcing that there simply are no down sides to banning smoking, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has released a new study which finds that implementing smoke-free policies can lead to fewer hospitalizations resulting from heart attacks. The study focused on the impact of smoke-free ordinances implemented in Pueblo, Colorado, in July 2003. Researchers then compared the number of hospitalizations for heart attacks 18 months before the policy went into effect and three years after implementation. The Pueblo Heart Study found that although 399 people were hospitalized for heart attacks before any smoke-free laws went into effect, but once the law was put in place and remained in effect for three years, that number dropped to 237. For you non-mathletes out there, that’s a 41-percent drop. To read more about the study, pick up my idea of feel-good, light reading: the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Researchers theorize in the story that the drop in heart attacks and hospitalizations from them could be linked to factors including an immediate decrease in secondhand smoke exposure, the possibility that being forced to comply with smoke-free rules in public may have led people to adopt a smoke-free environment at home or the fact that restrictions to where smoking is allowed may have led more people to quit smoking completely. This new study supports findings from eight other studies that also saw a drop in heart attack related hospitalizations after smoke-free laws are enforced. This would seem to incidate that the Surgeon General wasn’t making a funny and pulling our collective leg back in 2006 when he released a report concluding that "exposure of adults to secondhand smoke has immediate adverse effects on the cardiovascular system and causes coronary heart disease and lung cancer." Wow, inhaling any smoke coming from those cancer sticks you loser smokers are so fond of lighting up harms a person’s health? Who saw that coming, other than everyone? Oh, and according to the National Cancer Institute and American Cancer Society, there is no safe level of secondhand smoke, so there’s always that. In other words, the more places we can ban smoking, the better of ALL of us will be…...
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