- DENIED! I can’t guarantee that will be the NCAA’s reply to a pathetic, feeble request from Florida State officials to please, please, please not strip victories from head football coach Bobby Bowden and other programs on campus because of an academic cheating scandal that involved dozens of athletes. As part of the NCAA sanctions announced last month, the school will suffer the loss of scholarships in 10 sports and a four-year probation the NCAA announced March 6, along with being forced to vacate all team and individual records for contests where the ineligible athletes competed. Florida State’s weak contention is that the penalty of forfeits in football and nine other sports was too harsh. “Even if this committee upholds the vacation penalty, it should not require the reconfiguration of the records of innocent head coaches," attorney William Williams wrote in the school's submission. BZZZZZZZZZZZ! Sorry counselor, but that was the sound of my “your defense is a ridiculous piece of sh*t” buzzer you just heard. Innocent head coaches? Nice try. Believe it or not, these coaches recruit players to come to their school and play for their program. When they do so, these coaches basically tether themselves to the players in a lot of senses. They base the success of their program on how these players perform on the field, but the players are still a part of the program when they are off the field. In order to compete and do so legally, players must stay academically eligible. If they aren’t, then any competition in which they participate must be forfeited - in every sense of the word. There is no splicing up a win and allowing the coach to keep his or her portion of it because he or she wasn’t the one who cheated on a test. Fact is, the coaching staff should and often does do a heavy amount of monitoring when it comes to the academic endeavors of players. They’re involved in all aspects of a player’s life and no formal 28-page written appeal by a private attorney representing the school will change that. Something tells me that if Bowden didn’t have 382 career wins -- one fewer than Penn State's Joe Paterno, the all-time major college leader, you wouldn’t be making this argument. Also, don’t pretend to give a damn about any of the other sports you are allegedly coming to the defense of with this futile appeal. This is about Bowden and giving him a shot at the record, plain and simple. Normally I don’t defend the tools at the NCAA, but in this case, their decision to force Florida State to surrender victories in games where ineligible student-athletes participated in the fall of 2006 and 2007 and spring of 2007 is the right one. None of FSU’s legal mumbo-jumbo changes the fact that dozens of student-athletes cheated through online testing for a single music history course in the fall of 2006 and the spring and summer semesters of 2007. Staffers helped students on the test and in one case asking one athlete to take it for another, after which these athletes competed for their respective teams. Game, set, match. Sorry FSU and attorney William Williams (who names their kid Williams with the last name Williams? Idiot.), but your appeal is DENIED…….
- I realize that Prison Break is winding down and that the series will soon be killed off, but is it too much to ask that the network pretend it actually gives a crap about what has been one of its best series for the past four years? There was so little promotional energy for this week’s episode that I nearly forgot it was on. Fortunately, I tuned in just in time for a fantastic episode that made me pissed all over again that the show is ending. As for the show…..all roads led to Miami. Michael and Sarah finally arrived in Miami and joined the motley crew led by Michael’s big brother Linc in looking for Scylla. Michael and Sarah had a place to stay courtesy of an old medical school friend of hers who keeps a condo in the city. From there, they went about trying to decipher the note recovered from the man who attacked them while they were trying to make their way through Arizona. Michael is able to pick out phrases that refer to him and the road in Arizona where the attempted abduction took place, but the second line of the note is confusing and refers to something called Rockwell. Some online searching turns up a Rockwell Boulevard in Miami and the sequence of numbers beside it on the note lead Michael and Sarah to a parking garage and to a specific parking space several floors up. There, they find a black Lincoln sedan and Michael picks the lock to get inside. The car appears ordinary, but a briefcase under one of the seats contains driving directions to the Everglades Municipal Airport and a gun. Coupled with the initials “V.S.” on the note, Michael and Sarah made the assumption that V.S. was flying into the airport and whoever was supposed to take the car was also supposed to pick up V.S. Off they head to the airport, but along the way a cell phone in the briefcase rings and when Michael answers it, he ends up talking to his mother for the first time since finding out that she’s alive. The conversation is very short and both parties hang up stunned to have talked to one another at all. Christina Scofield has been having a long day overall, having been working hard to find a buyer for Scylla now that she has the device in her possession. She makes a trip to the Indian Embassy. where she meets with the ambassador and pitches him a plan in which the revolutionary data and research contained on Scylla will help India create all sorts of amazing vaccines for its people and help them grow crops in previously unusable soil. To seal the deal, Christina wants the ambassador to give a speech detailing this new technology at a major scientific conference to take place in Miami the next day. The ambassador agrees after some harsh negotiating, but the scene has gotten more complicated in the few moments he’s spent considering the proposal. While Christina awaits his reply, word comes from her security that Linc, Mahone and Don Self have somehow broken into the embassy. Their path to the embassy began where last week’s episode ended: with the sniper who was trying to kill Linc in Miami when he tried to talk to his mother again to find out her plans for Scylla. The sniper has a clear shot, but Linc walks under a row of trees and out of sight, at which point things turn horribly wrong for the sniper. Mahone, Self and T-Bag are also in the area, looking out for Linc. Mahone has binoculars and spots the sniper from the street below, at which point he alerts the rest of the crew. T-Bag is the wheel man and speeds to the building where the sniper is while Mahone, Linc and Self go on foot. Mahone arrives first, ascends the stairs and shoots it out with the sniper, who manages to get past him and down the stairs. Mahone gives chase but the sniper is several flights ahead. He reaches the ground floor and looks to break out into the open when a nice shoulder tackle from Linc drops him. The sniper then turns knifer, stabbing Linc and making a run for it. T-Bag tries to knock him down with the SUV, but it turns out to be another car that hits the sniper. He falls to the ground and is dead almost instantly, much to the horror of the many onlookers. As sirens wail in the distance and the police approach, Linc and his crew snag the sniper’s cell phone and speed away. Back at their condo, the group takes the SIM card from the phone and tries to hack it to find out who the sniper was and who he was working for. General Krantz calls while they work and not-so-patiently informs Linc that he expects results in the form of retrieving Scylla by the end of the day. Using the SIM card, Mahone pulls off the most recent number the sniper called and after checking with the phone company, he’s able to use the information gathered to track that number. Following he signal leads the group to the streets of Miami and ultimately to the embassy, where they witness Christina and her security team getting out of their vehicles. Self then devises a plan to get inside, namely by having T-Bag make a colossal ass of himself to distract the security guards and allow the other three team members to sneak over the walls. T-Bag does his part, handcuffing himself to the gate and going on a rambling diatribe about how India abuses elephants. He ends up arrested, booted from the property and beaten up for his troubles, but the plan works. Self, Mahone and Linc get inside the embassy and try to find Christina. To that end, they change into fancy suits and attempt to blend in with the rest of the security guards. That part of the plan fails when one of Christina’s guards recognizes them, calls the sighting in over the radio and apprehends all three men. They are herded into a side room and forced down on their knees, with instructions to not move a muscle lest they be shot dead. A few minutes later, Mahone realizes that just as he, Linc and Self couldn’t afford to fire their guns inside the embassy lest the set off a major incident, Christina’s security is in the same spot. No one is going to kill them if they try to flee, so that’s what they do. By the time they escape, Christina is long gone but embassy security buys the lie that they are with her and one of the guards hands Linc a scrap of paper that Christina dropped. It has one notation: that a man named Sandinsky is arriving at 4:30 that afternoon. A phone call to the Company yields information on Sandinsky’s arrival at the Everglades Airport, sending Linc and his crew rushing there with only 15 minutes before Sandinsky lands. Michael and Sarah are already there and have managed to use a little misdirection ploy to distract the clerk working the reception desk so they can get a peek at the log of incoming flights. Sandinsky is set to arrive soon on a small private plane, but Michael and Sarah have no idea how many people will be waiting on him when he lands. In addition to Linc and his team, two of Christina’s men pull up outside the terminal while Michael scans the flight log, necessitating a change in plans. As he does so well, Michael improvises by going to the air traffic controller for the airport, pulling a gun on the man and forcing him to call the tower to direct Sandinsky’s flight to land on a different part of the runway than previously scheduled. Also, Michael forces the ATC to send an emergency vehicle out to meet the plane and to allow Sarah to ride in it. The vehicle zips across the runway as Sandinsky’s plane touches down and Michael follows it in the Lincoln. Christina’s men immediately recognize that something isn’t right and they rush across the runway in their own SUVs, arriving just as Michael and Sarah meet a deplaning Sandinsky and force him into their car. A nice high-speed chase ensues, but when a second vehicle joins the pursuit, Sarah runs out of places to go. Michael has been in the back seat questioning Sandinsky, but with the car surrounded by men with guns, the chase is up. Christina’s men take Sandinsky and are about to leave with gun shots ring out from across the tarmac. It’s Mahone, Linc and Self, who have just arrived on the scene. They shoot down all of the bad guys, then take Sandinsky for themselves. Linc, who earlier in the day refused a request to meet with his brother, finally comes face to face with Michael. “I told you to stay out of this,” he warns his little brother. Michael and Sarah must watch Sandinsky driven away and seemingly their chances of finding Scylla with him. Back at Linc and Co.’s condo, they question Sandinsky and find out that he’s a professor from Dartmouth who is in town to make a presentation at a conference the next day. He denies any knowledge of the Company or Christina Scofield, but he’s lying. Linc doesn’t know that, but Michael does. He managed to pick Sandinsky’s pocket in the midst of the car chase and take the professor’s Blackberry. On the phone are no less than 20 emails and calls between Sandinsky and Christina, so they are clearly working together. Michael calls the last number dialed from Sandinsky’s phone and once again finds himself talking to his mother. “How bad do you want him, Mom?” Michael asks. Before a stunned Christina can answer, Michael tells her that he’ll be in touch and hangs up. Meanwhile, Sarah sneaks off to the bathroom and finds out an answer to the question that’s hung over her all day, ever since she found a pregnancy test in the medicine cabinet upon arriving at the condo: is the pregnant. The test says yes, so it appears that Michael will soon be a father. All in all, a great episode and once again, more than good enough to royally piss me off that the show is ending……
- Just what are the limits of unlimited text messaging plans? Seems like a paradoxical question, but two men in Susquehanna Valley, Pa. decided to test the limits of their plan and the results seem to be murky at best. Nick Andes and Doug Klinger apparently had very little going in their lives and decided that the best use of their time would be to spend an entire month texting each other non-stop - at the office, in the car, even walking down the street. They both have unlimited plans, so what could go wrong? “Basically because of us being bored at work and just texting back and forth a bunch of times and we would try to bother each other,” said Andes. Ah, the “I’m bored at work so I’ll text my buddy thousands of times” line of reasoning, a true classic. Their normal practice of texting instead of working led the two men to go online and find out what the record was for sent and received texts. They found that the record belonged to a loser named Deepak Sharma, a man from India who logged 182,689 text messages in May 2005. “I think initially neither of us thought that the record was beatable; 182,000 texts is a lot of texts,” said Andes. But as with all great-yet-ridiculous efforts by guys to do things that are equally amazing and worthless, Andes and Klinger decided to make a run for the record and spent all of March texting. “With my phone I can set up 45 messages to go out at one time,” said Klinger. “I'd put my phone on silent and it would beep at me once the inbox was full and I'd clear the inbox and they would just keep coming,” said Andes. Oddly enough, sending that many text message got old quickly. By the time March came to a close, both men conceded that they were excited for it to end. When the smoke cleared and all of their inane texts were counted, the scoreboard read Idiots With Too Much Time 217,000, Common Sense 0. Andes and Klinger were pretty pleased with themselves - until Andes’ bill arrived, that is. He came home one day to find a box on his doorstep and inside were thousands of pages of all the text messages. The amount at the bottom of the bill: a staggering total of more than $26,000. “And I panicked, I called T-Mobile and I got their attention in a hurry. The lady asked how she can help me and I said, ‘If you pull up my account, you're going to know,’” said Andes. Fortunately for this loser, he has been assured by T-Mobile that t he will not have to pay the $26,000 bill. His phone is already showing his normal balance, but he said the representative told him it still must be cleared with corporate. The company says it has credited Andes’ account and returned it to its normal balance, but it is still investigating the matter. The explanation given to Andes was that the mix-up happened because when T-Mobile set up its system it had to set some limit, even though the plan is technically unlimited. The company chose 100,000 and no T-Mobile customer had ever exceeded it before. Clearly, they didn’t anticipate two morons with no lives, no hobbies and no real friends in Pennsylvania looking to see just how far they could push the bounds of unlimited text messaging……..
- Someone get the Discovery Health channel or The Biggest Loser on the phone, because one of those two needs to seize this ginormous (and I do mean ginormous) opportunity that is right in front of them. In Tarrant County, Texas resides Karen Ferguson, a woman so FAT that she is unable to leave her trailer home. Being that FAT, you’d expect that a person wouldn’t want much outside attention - and normally you’d be right. But Ferguson is so FAT that she feels she has no other choice but to make a public plea for help. “I would never bring myself down to go on the news looking like this,” Ferguson said. “I would wish it'd be for a cure or that I'm doing good or something. But not like this. It's hard on the family.” So how much does this woman weigh? Ferguson estimates she weighs 700 pounds and in a glimpse into why she may have gotten so FAT in the first place, she offered an excuse by blaming it on her diabetes. Nice try Karen, but making excuses and blaming your FAT-ness on something you can’t control is the sort of cop-out that has likely led to you weighing in at more than a third of a ton. I do feel bad that you haven’t been out of your trailer for a year and very seldom leaves the large chair built to bear your weight, but until you accept responsibility for your condition, nothing will improve. You know it’s bad if you have a broken ankle, which Ferguson does, but you can't wear the medical boot to support it. “I've had three surgeries to save my toes, and they've saved them,” she said. With no other options, Ferguson has now made her first smart play in a long time by going public. Fact is, people love uber-FAT people who can’t get out of their bed or chair. Invariably, some sentimental, emotional sucker out there will be sucked in by this story and offer Ferguson the help she needs. It worked for the world’s former FAT-test man, Manuel Uribe, who turned his obesity in a series of specials on the Discovery Network. So lots of success in losing weight, Karen, but you need to look in the mirror before you do anything else….a really big mirror……
- Attention all women 18-49, homosexual dudes and other fashion lovers: after a prolonged showdown with NBC Universal, Lifetime has won the right to air Project Runway's sixth season and announced that the fashion competition show will return on Aug. 20 at 10 pm/ET. The season premiere will be quite the event, as following the premiere, , a 30-minute companion series Models of the Runway will premiere. The new show will go behind the scenes with the show's mannequins, for whom it is also a competition in case you forgot. Lifetime, the network famous for its female-intensive programming that has an eerily similar thread of abused, mistreated women and/or outdated shows that haven’t been in production for a couple of decades, will be having quite the summer prior to the return of Project Runway. One of the network’s most highly-rated shows, Army Wives, returns on June 7. Lifetime will also be introducing several news shows, including Drop Dead Diva, a new comedy about shallow model-in-training who dies suddenly and comes back as a brilliant, plus-size attorney, which will premiere on July 12. The network is also developing two movies based on the crime novels of Patricia Cornwell and new comedy pilots that feature the quintessential Lifetime actresses - past-their-prime, aging cougar-like women like Sherri Shepherd, Valerie Bertinelli and Cybill Shepherd. If nothing else, at least lifetime is staying true to itself and its demographic…….
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