- I see your boldness and I love it, Somali pirates, even if those freaking tools in the German navy don’t. In case you missed it, a band of hearty pirates fired on a naval tanker off the coast of Somalia and were pursued by German warships. The pirates were apprehended after firing at the tanker in the Gulf of Aden, which was in the general vicinity of ships operated by the EU and NATO. Perhaps firing on a vessel with so many friendly (and well-armed) ships nearby was a bad idea, but isn’t that part of the allure of pirates anyhow? Odds be damned, they’re hearty, bold and won't back down from a challenge. So these pirates opened fire, were pursued by the tanker and the warships and were ultimately captured. The seven suspected pirates are in German custody, but if I know pirates like I think I do, it won't be for long. It doesn’t matter that a large number of countries have deployed navy ships to the region, including the United States, China and Japan. Pirates have been around a long time, longer than the various international coalitions of nations looking to shut them down. They know how to survive under duress and with a growing number of fishermen realizing that piracy is much more lucrative and switching over to the dark side, there are more and more pirates on the high seas. Perhaps that means you wind up with some pirates who shouldn’t be out there because they just aren’t smart or talented enough, but you need to keep repopulating the talent pool to give the next generation of buccaneers their chance to shine. I’m with you, Somali pirates, right to the bitter end. Keep fighting The Man as he tries to hold you down and refuse to lose……
- I have to hand it to Los Angeles Lakers center Andrew Bynum; dude will do anything (and I do mean anything) it takes to get back to health and return to the court. Some guys just aren’t willing to make the necessary sacrifices to return to the court quickly following a significant injury, but not my man A. Bynum. Even if rehabbing the right way means going to the Playboy Mansion to hang with Hef and the Playmates and having hot Playmates sit on his shoulders and put added weight and pressure on his repaired right knee, Bynum will do what he has to do. He’s been out since February with a torn medial collateral ligament in his right knee, so you know it has to be killing him not to be out on the court as his teammates push for the best record in the NBA and homecourt advantage throughout the playoffs. You can see that on Bynum’s face in the pictures of him at the mansion, balancing Playmate Nicole Narain on his shoulders, wearing a green smoking jacket and slippers and suffering through a pajama party populated by Playmates. He’s clearly torn up about not being with his teammates on the day that there were in Atlanta preparing for what would be an 86-76 loss to the Hawks. Honestly, it tears me up inside just having to look at the pained expression on dude’s face. No man should ever have to suffer like that, but there Bynum is, soldiering on and plowing through his rehab like a trooper. Heck, he even made time for the ever-difficult rehab exercise of getting down with some Playmates on the checkered dance floor set up in the backyard. So to all of the haters out there ripping on Bynum for his Mansion run, shut your pie holes. Andrew, you keep up the great work and I will see you back on the court in no time……
- Twitter has quickly gone from fresh, new tool for communicating with people to a really annoying, passé nuisance that we’d probably be better off without. Whether it’s United States senators Tweeting worthless, inane thoughts during a presidential address on national television, a NBA star Tweeting from the locker room at halftime of a game or one of your friends Tweeting that he or she is in line at Starbucks and can’t believe the ugly sweater that the dude in line behind them is wearing, Twitter is basically a blatant duplicate of people’s Facebook status, which is always very, very fresh and never dumb. People throw up the dumbest, most mundane things on their Facebook status and Twitter basically mimics that in 140 characters or less. Now, not only are idiots posting the most mundane details of their life for all to follow on Twitter, idiots are tring to sell their homes via Twitter. Meet DJ Waldow, a North Carolina resident who will be moving to Salt Lake City, Utah with his wife, who is in her residency as a doctor. Obviously, dude needs to sell his house and so he decided that rather than making an actual effort to sell his home by putting up signs, hiring a real estate agent or doing something legitimate, he would post a message on his Twitter page. “Is it possible to leverage power of Twitter to sell our house," he typed. His hope was that the 1,150 people who follow him on the social networking site will help him and his wife sell their home near central Durham. “When I first started talking about it on Sunday, I had 108 different clicks on the site," Waldow said. "When I Tweet something out -- it could potentially be seen by a thousand people following me. But when somebody else re-Tweets it -- it can be seen by a thousand people following them. So it spreads pretty quickly.” Sadly, there appear to be enough no-life-having losers following this tool’s Twittering that by week's end, more than 400 people had clicked on the link he's "Tweeting" through the real estate site Trulia. Some of the even bigger tools involved have actually reposted his messages for their friends. “You can see all the other people re-Tweeting it," Waldow wrote. "This is somebody who lives in Chapel Hill. This is a guy in Durham."
Of course, there’s probably nothing altruistic about the people making these efforts for Waldow, not when he's offering $250 for the person who actually finds a buyer for the house. You’ll have to excuse me if I’m not amused by all of this, because in my opinion Twitter has managed to jump the shark quicker than just about any cultural phenomenon in years. Next……….
- What does it say about you if you’re dead inside your home for more than a year and no one realizes it? Nothing good, that’s for sure. I don’t mean to cast aspersions on 74-year-old Mary Sue Merchant of Calhoun County, but the fact that she was dead inside her house for more than a year and no one stopped by or noticed she was missing and went to check on her can’t be good. The Calhoun County Coroner's Office has begun to piece together the story of how Merchant came to die and decompose with no one noticing, and you can bet that it’s going to be an interesting tale. “So far, we've found a few parts of this puzzle, but not many,” explained Coroner Donnie Porth, “It was a lot of sadness of course, because you wouldn't think the world that we live in today that somebody could live their whole life and then passed away for a year and a half. And nobody would have had the opportunity to check on her.” Agreed, and the kicker is that the only reason anyone found the body was that the home was sold in a delinquent tax sale, and the purchaser became concerned when he saw the car out front in the same place for months. Police went to the home and found a body that they believe was Merchant. According to investigators, she passed away in October of 2007. Says Porth, "The world we live in now, of course, everyone is so busy, and your neighbor doesn't have time for you."
Contributing to the problem was the fact that Merchant’s late husband David was a corrections officer and because he feared inmates once they were released, the Merchants led a private life. Merchant's sister-in-law. who lives in Newbury County, discovered the woman's phone had been disconnected but assumed that she might have had it cut off and got a cell phone instead. In the end, a life of isolation and living in what has to be an extremely rural and secluded area seems to have led to a very odd and unnoticed death for Mary Sue Merchant……..
- How freaking magnanimous of you, Hal Steinbrenner, you arrogant, loud-mouthed a-hole. How very big of you to admit while sitting in your new $1.5 billion ballpark that some tickets in the new Yankee Stadium might be overpriced given the recession. Really, you think that the prices you slapped on premium Legends Suites seats 13 months ago - $500 to $2,500 - as part of season tickets is a tad high? What tipped you off? The fact that in the brand new stadium of one of the most popular franchises in all of sports, quite a few of those seats remain available for individual games? But hey, I’m sure people will jump all over them once the season begins and the prices go up to $2,625. “I think if anybody in any business had known where this economy was going to go, they would have done things differently,” Steinbrenner said Thursday. "Look, there's no doubt small amounts of our tickets might be overpriced.” Small amounts? How about every freaking one of them. Go ahead and continue “to look into that," a-hole. Your economic view is clearly distorted, otherwise you would not be hailing the availability of “thousands of very affordable seating.” Everyone isn’t a multimillionaire like you, idiot. The Team Marketing Report, which annually assesses the cost of various parts of attending games for every team in the league, released its annual survey Thursday and said the average price of a Yankees home ticket was a major league-high $72.97, a 76.3 percent increase from last year's $41.40. You read that right, a 76.3 percent hike. Well done, Yankees. You may not have taken back the position as Major League baseball’s best team, but at least you reclaimed your title as its greediest from your archrival, the Boston Red Sox. The Sox had been first for 13 consecutive years, but they dropped to second behind the Yankees. I do have to salute the Arizona Diamondbacks, who had a major league-low average for the third consecutive year, at $14.31. Overall, the major league average of $26.64 was up 5 percent from $25.37, less than half last year's 10.1 percent hike. The Yankees also led the majors in pricing for premium seats at $510.08. But hey, you can always snag those obstructed view bleacher tickets at Yankee Stadium for $5, what a bargain! Oh wait, I’m sorry. Those are “partial view” seats. You know, kinda like “pre-owned” cars. Call your crappy obstructed¬-view seats what they are, Yankees. A pathetic, transparent and fraudulent attempt to claim that you have good seats available for cheap prices. Thanks for reminding me why I hate you and your arrogant, underachieving franchise, Hal. I needed the reminder….okay, not really…….
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