- Flat-out stunned. No term better describes how I felt upon learning that the biggest rip-off sham in the history of infomercial products, the Snuggie, has sold more than 4 million units. Since launching nationally on direct-response TV in October with a bizarre, disturbing two-minute commercial showing freaks of all ages with maniacal, phony and weird smiles plastered on their faces as they engaged in everything from watching TV to sitting at a soccer game, the Snuggie has somehow managed to become an actual legitimate product - at least based on its sales numbers. Don’t get the wrong idea; it’s still a freaking backwards blanket with arms that is a total rip-off at any price, but enough idiots are buying one that this thing is a freaking cultural fad. Heck, more than 200 parody videos have popped up on YouTube, mocking the ridiculous original commercial. There’s so much to mock about an item that makes you look like a cross between a Jedi knight, a Buddhist monk and an aspiring member of the Heaven’s Gate cult that there probably should be more than 200 parodies at this point. Seeing a woman rocking a Snuggie as she attended Barack Obama's inauguration on Jan. 20 only perpetuated the problem, as did that freak Ellen DeGeneres donning one on her daytime talk show (by the way, how the frak does Elliot Degenerate still have a talk show? She’s not funny, she’s not interesting and her 15 minutes of fame were up years ago). Among the faux ads mocking the Snuggie on YouTube, one proclaims a "Cult of the Snuggie" and features opening text which declares: "In a godless and cold world, there is but one place to seek warmth and salvation" as a segue into the next two minutes. With that many people mocking this piece of crap, you have to wonder how the Allstar Marketing Group of Hawthorne, N.Y. has managed to sell more than 4 million of the blankets, totaling just under $40 million in retail sales. Perhaps more Americans would be hesitant about buying them if they knew that a Snuggie purchase is actually SUPPORTING COMMUNISM, as they are made by Chinese suppliers. So many are being ordered that delivery is often taking longer than the promised four-to-six-week delivery time. They’re also being sold by two retailers, Bed, Bath & Beyond and Walgreens. Further maximizing profits is the fact that because of the struggling economy, conventional advertisers are scaling back on advertising, leaving more time for direct-response ads at cheaper prices. Still no word on what people are doing with those damn free book lights that come along with every Snuggie purchase, but maybe someone in the Facebook fan club for the product, which has more than 4,000 members, could explain it……..
- Riot Watch! Riot Watch! Today, we have a very special brand of riot for you, one of the more violent types of riots and thus one of the more fun ones to talk about: prison riots. This particular riot is noteworthy because it is the second time in the last two months that inmates at the Reeves County Detention Center in Texas have rioted, making them co-leaders for my “Top Rioters of 2009” award, alongside the violent, resourceful and extremely angry anarchists who have been terrorizing Greece in recent weeks to protest the killing of a teenager by police. I’m guessing that the thousands of inmates who rioted at the Reeves County Detention Center didn’t have such lofty aspirations for social justice. This riot broke out between more than 2,080 inmates from two of the center's three buildings, with inmates brawling in the prison yard about 4:30 p.m. CT. It took responders from several law enforcement agencies to quell the violence, but in spite of those efforts, officials had not brought the unrest under control as of 1 a.m. Sunday. At this point, prison officials either don’t know or aren’t saying what prompted the riots. Whatever the cause - gang-related, someone cutting in line to use the free weights, not calling a foul on the basketball court or swiping someone else’s chow in the cafeteria - the end result was three inmates hospitalized, including one with a severed finger. This riot comes just over six weeks after inmates took two workers hostage and set fire to the recreation area at the center in Pecos, located about 430 miles west of Dallas. That incident didn’t last quite as long, even though the inmates involved did make several demands. In spite of that, they surrendered later that night. What’s impressive about this riot is that if 2,080 inmates were involved, that would represent nearly 87 percent of the inmates at the 2,400-bed, low-security facility. Ironic, no, that this place is a low-security facility? May want to rethink that status or who you send there, because it certainly seems like some pretty violent dudes are being held there. The prison is actually a felon melting pot of sorts, housing federal prisoners as well as inmates from other states. Whatever the mix, one thing we know…..these guys looooove to riot…………
- The seventh show/hour of this season of 24 (gotta love that you always know exactly where you stand in a season and how far there is to go, 24 episodes every season) offered the first major twist/victory that isn’t really a victory in the bigger scope of things. After placing a tracking device inside the mouth of Sangalan Prime Minister Ule Motobu following his kidnapping last week, Jack, Tony, Chloe, Bill and the newest member of their team, FBI Agent Renee Walker, followed Motobu and his wife to the building in downtown D.C. where Col. Ike Dubaku, a member of the renegade military regime of Gen. Benjamin Juma that has seized control of Sangala, was running his operations using the CIP module he had procured in order to hack into the government firewall protecting transportation and utility systems for the entire United States. After tracking the Motobus to the building, Jack, Tony and Bill entered through a utility door on the roof after Agent Walker flashed her FBI badge to enter through the lobby, went up four floors and let them in. After that, Billy and Tony went down to the third floor, where Dubaku had his lair, and Jack and Walker came from above, working their way through a heating vent from the fourth floor. Things got dicey when a roof surveillance cam alerted Dubaku and his men to their entry, leading Dubaku to pull up stakes and prepare to flee. The timing was fortuitous because he was right in the midst of using the CIP module to set off a major chemical disaster at the Boyd Chemical Plant in Kidron, Ohio. The plan was to cause an explosion of a tank containing a toxic insecticide that would result in lung damage, chemical burns and even death for anyone coming into contact with it once it became airborne. The CIP module allowed Dubaku to seize control of the plant and prevent personnel there from shutting it down even after the FBI office in D.C. identified the problem and tried to step in. With Janis Gold and Sean Hillinger, the snarky, a-hole tech ace on the job at the FBI office, the plant’s manager John Brunner tried to manage the crisis and ended up going into the reactor room himself and trying to release some of the pressure from the tank to delay the explosion for a few minutes and give the workers at the plant and the people in Kidron time to evacuate. Doing so cost him his life because he ended up inhaling some of the toxic gas in spite of wearing a protective gas mask, but once Dubaku decided to pull the CIP module out of use and move his operations to avoid Jack, Tony and their team, the explosion never came. Instead, nearly everyone in Dubaku’s crew died in a firefight and he managed to escape after using Michael Latham, the computer engineer his men kidnapped in the season premiere and forced to create the CIP module, as a human shield. Latham was forced to wear a vest of explosives and die in the resulting kaboom in order to keep Jack, Tony and Bill at bay as Dubaku escaped. The Colonel fled and was next seen riding a train through D.C., talking on the phone with Secret Service Agent Vasser, who was one of the two agents in on the setup to frame Henry Taylor, husband of President Allison Taylor, for the murder-suicide in the apartment of Samantha Roth, former girlfriend of the Taylors’ late son Roger. Agent Brian Gedge was supposed to carry out the plan to dose Henry Taylor with a neuromuscular paralytic, then murder Roth once Vasser dropped her off at her apartment under the auspices of giving her a chance to pack a bag before going into protective custody. As it turns out, Gedge and Vasser are both working with the conspiracy led by Dubaku and killing Henry Taylor and Roth before they could get any further investigating Roger’s death, which came because he too was looking into parts of their conspiracy. However, Henry recovered from the paralytic in time to turn the tables and kill Gedge, but he was unconscious after their struggle and fall from the second floor of Roth’s apartment to the foyer below, so he couldn’t answer the phone when Ethan Kanin, one of his wife’s advisors, tried to call both he and Agent Gedge. Kanin wanted Henry’s help to convince President Taylor to pull U.S. troops from Sangala to meet Dubaku’s demands, but when he couldn’t reach Henry or Gedge, Kanan had the Secret Service put out an APB. Before anyone else could arrive at the apartment, Vasser stormed the place and secured Henry Taylor, binding and gagging him and shoving him in the trunk of Vasser’s agency vehicle. A call from Dubaku on the train instructed Vasser to bring Henry to Dubaku, which turns out to be a run-of-the-mill apartment building in the city. Actually, Dubaku has a lady on the side, a diner waitress named Marika who has no idea who he is and knows him as Samuel. Weird seeing Dubaku come home to a normal, one-bedroom apartment in the city, drop his keys in the kitchen and act like a normal dude. That went out the window when he got back on the phone with Vasser and told him to drop Taylor “at the Korean place across the street.” Apparently Dubaku will deal with Henry from there, and you have to imagine that holding him for ransom will be the approach there. But the end result from this episode was that a) the CIP module was destroyed in the shootout, b) Motobu and his wife are safe and on the way to the White House to speak with the president. Jack and Bill plan to drop him off there after Jack convinces Bill and the rest of the crew that in order to take down the conspiracy, they will need help from some government agencies. They want Motobu to speak directly with President Taylor to tell her about the conspiracy within her administration because going up the chain of command would mean going through people who might actually be part of the conspiracy. So that’s where we stand heading into next week, we’re getting closer to meeting the season’s ultimate big, bad guy: Jon Voight, so stay tuned for that…….
- Why do these sorts of things never happen where I live? Dammit, if someone is going to have something interesting like a 10-second porn clip flash across their screen during a Super Bowl broadcast, why not my corner of the world? Why should fans in Tucson, Arizona be the ones who get that sort of jolt to their viewing of the big game? The broadcasting faux paus occurred late in the game, just as Cardinals' receiver Larry Fitzgerald was sprinting into the end zone on a long touchdown catch and watching himself sprint on the stadium's Jumbotron as he ran. Viewers watching the game on Comcast Cable got a very different visual in the form of 10 seconds of pornographic imagery flashing across their screens. Comcast Cable, responsible for beaming the material into the homes of thousands of people, had an apology locked and loaded almost before the game ended. "We are mortified by last evening's Super Bowl interruption, and deeply apologize to our customers for the inappropriate programming," Comcast Cable said in a written statement. "Our initial investigation suggests this was an isolated malicious act.” In other words, someone with an axe to grind decided that to extract revenge on KVOA for some perceived wrong felt that piping some porn into the Super Bowl broadcast, undoubtedly with a lot of kids under the age of 10 watching, was the best course of action. One station that carried the pirated signal was KVOA-TV, which stated that "when the NBC feed of the Super Bowl was transmitted from KVOA to local cable providers and through over-the-air antennas, there was no pornographic material." Spin it however you want, all I know is that this sort of thing never happens in my corner of the world and I hafta admit, I’m a little envious of you viewers in the Tucson area……
- Could our new president already be failing to live up to campaign promises he made regarding allowing the use of medical marijuana in states where state law makes it legal? Say it ain’t smoke, er, so, B. Obama. After claiming to support the legalization of pot…..for medicinal purposes before being elected, the continued persecution of people like Ken Estes, the operator of several Bay Area marijuana dispensaries, after Obama’s inauguration seems to indicate otherwise. Estes claims that just like under W., he continues to be targeted by federal drug agents even though he says he's followed their instructions and California law. Likewise, the operators of a marijuana dispensary in South Lake Tahoe were subjected to a federal raid just two days after Obama took office. When you see the wringer that the D.E.A. has put Estes through, shutting down a Richmond dispensary last month, you have to wonder just how serious Obama really is about allowing those who benefit from the use of medicinal marijuana to continue reaping those benefits. Just look at Estes, who is a quadriplegic and is seeing the business he built dismantled piece by piece by the very government that should be helping him. “They're trying to destroy me because I'm outspoken about the truth,” said Estes. It sure sounds like it, as in the past eight months The Man has 1) it raided his marijuana growing facility in Oakland, 2) shut down the dispensary in Richmond and 3) closed his dispensary in South Lake Tahoe. Like any hopeful pot grower and supplier, he was hopeful that the persecution would end with the exit of the worst president in the history of presidents, W., from office. Not so, as the Obama administration has kept the good ship Persecution of Pot on the same freaking course. That stance has led tens of thousands of medical marijuana supporters in the state of California to vociferously call on the Obama administration to clarify federal policy on medical marijuana, which clashes with California law. Personally, I’m down with people like Dale Gieringer, a medical marijuana activist who rightly labeled the federal laws on marijuana use as “bankrupt.” If medicinal marijuana can help ease the pain of people with extremely serious illnesses, let them smoke it. Stop persecuting them, relax the laws and let’s toke it up……
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