- Is there no limit to the depths that ’80 losers, er, enthusiasts will sink? I know you tools really locked onto your favorite decade and cultural landmarks from those 10 years, but this whole mess about paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to the phone number made famous by Tommy Tutone's "867-5309/Jenny" hit is just ridonkulous. In the 1982 song, Jenny's number was scribbled on a fictional bathroom wall, but for the knobs who are bidding on this “item,” it apparently was seared into their minds with a musical blowtorch. The opportunistic individual auctioning off the number is Spencer Potter, who got the number for free five years ago. Honestly, I give big ups to this guy because it’s not his fault that there are so many lifeless losers out there willing to throw their money away for a stupid phone number. He’s merely taking advantage of these fools in exactly the manner the rest of us would and should if we found ourselves in a similar spot. Selling the number is also smart because Potter said he has gets about 40 calls a day to the number, mostly from a-holes hung up on the ‘80s and unable to join the rest of us in Reality Land. Those clowns have bid the auction up to more than $365,000, all for the right to hold the area code 201 version of a number in a song by a one-hit wonder that should have been a no-hit wonder. They’re about to make a small-time DJ from Weehawken, New Jersey, very rich for no good reason. But then again, it’s not just the idiots bidding on this number who are delusional and warped. Jeffrey Steinberg, a Philadelphia-area resident who holds the toll-free versions -- both 800 and 888 -- of the number said he values his numbers in the millions. Dude had the kahones to allegedly reject a $1 million from a national weight-loss company several years ago. I stand corrected….the dumbest people in this equation aren’t those bidding ridiculous amounts on a phone number; Steinberg is a bigger tool than any of them. What a great country this is, where any fool can luck into a phone number that happened to be in a crappy ‘80s song and see the rights to that number for nearly half a million dollars. If only eBay would follow its own example, set back in 2004 when the site halted an auction by the purported holder of the 212 area code version of the number. God bless freaking America…….
- If you heard some loud, prolonged weeping during the tearful final scene of last night’s emotional episode of Smallville, it may have been Clark and Lana as they said a heart-breaking goodbye, but it was probably a combination of that and me weeping openly as Kristin Kreuk was appearing in what is reported to be her final episode of the show. By now you know how I feel about Ms. Kreuk, who in my opinion is the hottest woman on the planet. Knowing that that may have been her final scene of a show for which she was an original cast member some eight years ago sucked, period. But I’ll try to keep myself in check and actually recap the episode. Clark and Lana are happily together, fighting evil with their respective superpowers, but a familiar madman decides to ruin things: Lex Luthor. Working through a former Queen Industries inventor named Winslow Schott, Lex (in some sort of damaged state and sustained by lots of machines and an an undisclosed location) terrorizes Metropolis with bombs made and deployed by Schott, who hides them inside of toys as per her bizarre toy fetish and predilection for all things toy. The first big boom of the episode comes in a board meeting at LuthorCorp, where a vote of no confidence in current LuthorCorp CEO Tess Mercer is taking place. Oliver Queen stops the meeting when he walks in and announces that he has bought a controlling share in the company and will run it with Tess. Within seconds, a bomb rocks the room and blows up everyone in it, except for Oliver, who is injured but survives. From his hospital bed, he tries to figure out who was responsible and quickly fingers Schott, whom he fired for being a crackpot who brought toys to work and began hiding bombs inside of them, far outside the parameters of his job. Oliver asks Chloe to help him find Schott without telling Clark because he hopes Schott will lead him to Lex, who Oliver intends to kill. Clark obviously isn’t big on that sort of thing, so Oliver elects to keep him out of the loop. Clark and Lana do visit Oliver in the hospital and begin investigating the bomb on their own, finding a chip made by Queen Industries attached to a shard of the bomb lodged inside a wall at the blast site. They believe Oliver might be up to something sinister, but Clark’s thinking changes when he encounters Chloe on Oliver’s private jet, trying to uses her computer skills to track down Schott. Clark knows she’s lying about what she’s doing and gets her to fess up to her search for Schott. Clark and Lana then go in search of Schott, finally tracking down his current address from the patent office, as he is an inventor. At his workshop, a bizarre, dark room full of dolls, clowns and models (the toy kind, not the fashion kind), they find one doll with a remote camera inside its head and surmise that Lex has been watching through that camera. They also find a miniature model of Metropolis that Schott used as a simulator for the bombs he’s been setting off in the city. An exploded Daily Planet building clues them in to the next target, but at the Planet, Lana can’t find the bomb. Clark uses his super hearing to locate it on the roof, but that’s where a cruel twist from Lex comes in. The bomb is wired with ginormous doses of Kryptonite, which Lana can absorb with the Prometheus suit she stole from Lex’s labs and had attached to her body last episode. The Catch-22 is that once she absorbs that much Kryptonite, it will remain in the suit and thus Clark will never be able to go near her again. It’s the ultimate cruel twist, delivered by Lex himself via a remote video system attach to the bomb. Clark and Lana make the tough call, deciding that she must disarm the bomb and save the lives of hundreds of people in the area rather than allowing it to go off just so they can be together. Following a tense scene in which Lana is literally lifted up into the air by the energy she absorbs from the bomb, Clark speeds off in a rage, determined to find Lex. He does so with the help of a “Lex tracker” Chloe made him using the signal from the camera implanted in the doll at Schott’s workshop and Queen Industries’ satellites. Joining Clark in pursuing Lex is Oliver, who survives a second attempt on his life by Schott in the form of a visit to Oliver’s hotel room with a bomb planted inside a motorized monkey toy. Oliver subdues Schott and escapes, then uses the monkey bomb to blow up the mobile headquarters Lex is traveling in and broadcasting his signals from. Clark arrives on the scene after Oliver and is about to attack Lex himself when Lana shows up to talk him out of it. The truck blows up before they can finish their talk, with Oliver only admitting his responsibility for the blast to Chloe and swearing her to silence. Clark and Lana are left to say yet another painful goodbye in the loft of the barn on the Kent Farm, with Clark battling back sickness brought on by the presence of Kryptonite all over Lana’s body to kiss her and hold her one last time before she tearfully exits the barn and his life. Like I said, just a depressing end to an episode, realizing that we’ve almost certainly seen the last of Kreuk on the show. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go drown my sorrows in something………
- Bad things just seem to keep finding Roid-ger Clemens and I can’t figure out why. It’s not as if he was ever a bad guy, a liar or a cheater who soiled the game of baseball with his dirty deeds, right? Oh wait, he’s all of those things. Maybe that’s why bad things keep happening to him, things like tests have linking his DNA to blood in syringes that his former personal trainer, Brian McNamee, says he used to inject the pitcher with performance-enhancing drugs. Of course, verification tests will be done on these preliminary results, but don’t expect the end result to change. Roid-ger willingly gave a DNA sample to federal authorities, so the match is all but definite. Yes, it still remains to be determined whether the syringes ever contained steroids or human growth hormone, but at this point does anyone seriously believe otherwise? I’m actively rooting for the results to hold up and the link to ‘roids to be made so we’ll have definitive proof that Clemens lied under oath to Congress last year when he denied using steroids or HGH. Nothing like a federal grand jury in Washington indicting a seven-time Cy Young Award winner, no? Amazing how a scumbag like Brian McNamee, a guy who supplied and administered steroids and kept dirty syringes in containers in his garage for years, is the credible one in this battle and that he appears to be telling the truth when saying that he injected Clemens more than a dozen times with steroids and HGH from 1998-2001. But someone may want to let Clemens' lawyer, Rusty Hardin, in on just how much of a hole his client has dug. Hardin is clearly delusional, openly declaring that told the DNA testing "won't matter at all. "It will still be evidence fabricated by McNamee. I would be dumbfounded if any responsible person ever found this to be reliable or credible evidence in any way." Sorry Russ, but McNamee being an irresponsible sleazeball doesn’t change the fact that your client ‘roided up and lied about it. Attacking McNamee might be your only play here because your client is so obviously guilty, just don’t expect it to work……
- Sometimes the universe just needs to get out of the way and allow people to off themselves when they do the rest of us a favor by attempting to remove themselves from the gene pool. You know, people like the unidentified man in Burlington, Vt. who was found by authorities stuck inside a chimney of a building located at 184 Main St. Reports came in of a man heard crying for help in the downtown area early Sunday morning and when police arrived in the area, they heard the man's cries for help and followed the sound until they found footprints in the snow on the roof. Following the footprints (solid detective work, guys, well done) led them to the chimney, where they found the man stuck but conscious. The man told the authorities that he had been there for a few hours, but that he didn’t live in the building. So you may wonder how a person ends up stuck in the chimney of a building where they don’t live. The answer, of course, is alcohol. The man said he'd been drinking with his brother and didn't know how he got on to the roof, a story that authorities didn’t totally believe (the drinking part yes, the not knowing, not so much). Regardless of how he got into the chimney, rescuers still felt compelled to dislodge him from the chimney and initially tried to get him out with a rope, which didn't work. The option they settled on was taking the chimney apart brick by brick, resulting in serious damage to the roof. On top of that, it took three teams of firefighters to respond to the scene (not a lot of actual firefighting to do in Burlington, I take it). As of yet, the man has not been charged with a crime, mostly because being a brain-dead tool isn’t officially a crime…..yet. But how’s about in the future, when someone of this ilk and low IQ tries to take themselves out of the gene pool, we don’t stop them from doing so………..
- Let me get this straight….there are people out there who don’t want money given to the banking industry as part of its massive bailout from the U.S. government to be used for a company to slap its name on a new baseball stadium? Jeez….I don’t get that at all. Isn't that just the sort of worthwhile project the bailout was created to facilitate? If Citigroup Inc isn’t allowed to swing some of its bailout money to help pay off its nearly $400 million, 20-year marketing deal with the New York Mets that includes naming rights to the Mets' new baseball stadium, the company may have to back out of the deal altogether. Word is that Citigroup is already exploring the possibility of backing out of the deal because of growing concerns about how lenders are using government bailout money. No final decision has been made, but the jerks who are leading this charge have attacked the deal between Citigroup and the Mets as an example of misplaced spending by financial institutions that needed bailout funds. Citigroup has been reassuring everyone that "no TARP [Troubled Asset Relief Program] capital will be used for Citi Field or for marketing purposes,” but that has done little to quell the dissent. Two representatives, including (sadly) one from my home state, have been pushing Citigroup to dissolve the Mets deal: U.S. Reps. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) and Ted Poe (R-Texas). "Citigroup is now dependent on the support of the federal government for its survival as an institution," the letter harshly declares. "As such, we do not believe Citigroup ought to spend $400 million to name a stadium at the same time that they accept over $350 billion in taxpayer support and guarantees." To drive home their threat, a House committee is summoning top executives from various strapped banks, including Citigroup, to appear before the committee and explain how they’ve been spending TARP funds they have received. Something tells me they aren’t going to be too happy to hear, “We used that cash to slap our name on a nice, new stadium in Queens.” Of course, the Mets aren’t going to be happy either if the deal falls apart. It wouldn’t happen immediately and could involve the bank paying a breakup penalty to the Mets, but financial compensation would only soften the blow a bit and would still leave the Mets with a stadium with no name. But the Mets can still cling to the legally binding agreement Citigroup signed with them in 2006," a deal the Mets insist that “Citi (has) reinforced that they will honor.” The Mets could be just the first of several entities impacted by Citigroup’s financial woes, as the company has its name on a number of other sports-related events and structures, including the Rose Bowl last month, and the 2010 BCS national championship game. So the question remains, America, just what should your tax dollars-turned-bailout money be used for…….
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