Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Reveling in last week's Mexican prison break, an NFL player channels his inner Randy Moss off the field and a crazy cat lady I want to hurt

- Let’s just say that I am 100 percent a-ok with this next story. If the resignation of a senior Mexican prison official is the price to pay for a great prison break story in which 53 inmates literally walk out of said prison without a shot being fired, I’m good with that. So when I heard that nearly a week after dozens of inmates walked out of a prison in Zacateca and that the central Mexican state's top security official has resigned because of the incident, I had no bad feelings at all. If Alejandro Rojas Chalico feels that he can no longer serve as the Zacatecas secretary of public security, so be it. Gov. Amalia Garcia Medina can accept Chalico's resignation or not; I simply don’t care. As long as exciting things like this prison break take place, I don’t care who goes down as a result. I am openly rooting for the continued success of the 53 escapees who left Cieneguillas prison in the city of Zacatecas on Saturday with the help of 20 men in evading capture. As I said before, these men broke out their amigos without firing a shot, so props to them for a great plan. The prison break took fewer than five minutes, which is extremely impressive. Yes, the escapees are believed to be connected to the Gulf Cartel, a powerful drug cartel operating in northern Mexico, but you can’t be choosy when it comes to enjoying prison breaks. They just don’t happen often enough to only root for incidents involving non-drug cartel members. Besides, it gives Mexican law enforcement a chance to hone its skills by tracking down men who are targets of the international criminal police organization Interpol and some of the most dangerous men in all of Mexico. These dudes are bad enough hombres to merit the issuance of an "orange notice," and even though I know nothing about Interpol’s color codes, I have to think that orange is a pretty solid color ranking. So to summarize, I don’t feel the least bit bad about Chalico’s resignation or the fact that 53 hardened criminals are now free and roaming around Mexico. I choose to find the silver lining, use these lemosn to make some lemonade and enjoy the excitement of a prison break……

- Randy Starks, this is no good. Channeling your inner Randy Moss (and can’t that mean so many things?) and going all slow-speed battering ram on a traffic cop is not only a bad idea, it’s not even a very badass move if you’re going to indulge your criminal tendencies. Starks, a defensive end for the Miami Dolphins, was arrested early Sunday after police said he struck an officer with a slow-moving Freightliner truck, according to a police report. He faces a charge of aggravated battery, hardly a reputable charge for any self-respecting thug looking to build some street cred. As do so many indiscretions by pro athletes, this incident took place on South Beach. Shortly after midnight, officers saw the Freightliner truck in bumper-to-bumper traffic on South Beach's Ocean Drive. What drew their attention to Starks’ whip? How about having some 13 people inside, a vehicle designed for four, including a woman sitting on the lap of Starks, who was driving? That was enough to draw the heat for Starks and his crew, so officers began pursuing the truck on foot for about a half-block and pounding on the rear driver's-side window. Not surprisingly, the vehicle kept on moving, probably because the music was cranked up so loud on Starks’ pimped-out sound system and he couldn’t hear anything other than his bangin’ beats. Eventually the officer caught up to the truck again, and it stopped after the officer pounded on the window a second time. “I slowly approached the side door and just as I reached it the vehicle accelerated and started moving forward and slightly to the left," the unidentified officer writes in the report. "The vehicle's path caused the driver's side of the vehicle to strike me in the chest pushing me back and pinning me against a vehicle stopped in traffic in the northbound lane.” In other words, Starks swerved to the left and pinned the cop against another vehicle. Was it intentional? I suppose that’s for the courts to decide, but Starks had better hope his actions weren’t purposefully trying to hurt a cop. Courts tend to look down on that sort of thing. Not only that, a second officer was pounding on the passenger's-side window, so the odds that Starks had no clue about what was happening are slim. He did eventually stop his truck and was arrested, but that was far from the end of his troubles. A police check showed that the truck's license plate was not assigned to that vehicle, so Starks faces a charge for that as well. Not exactly the night out on South Beach that Starks and his crew had in mind, I’m sure. The questions now are a) whether this will land him in jail and b) how long the NFL will suspend him for. Well done on all counts, R., you must be very proud of yourself…….

- This should absolutely eliminate that stereotype of the crazy cat lady. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been cursed/blessed to have a crazy cat lady in any neighborhood I’ve lived in, but the residents of one neighborhood in Lodi, Calif. know firsthand what the experience is like. In this neighborhood lives crazy Tina Teixeira, who clearly a) loves her cats and b) is certifiably insane and has no discernable relationship with reality. See, Crazy Tina Teixeira has a lot of cats on her property and she took great offense when she noticed people regularly speeding down her street - a 35 mph zone - at 20-30 miles over the speed limit. Was she concerned for her own safety or the safety of other human being in the area, especially kids? As you’ll soon see, not only was she not concerned with the safety of the neighborhood kids, she was actually a threat to their safety. In an insane effort to curb speeding on her street, Teixeira posed a sign with the words, "Hit a cat, I'll hit your kid." Yes, this nut bag is threatening to hit people’s children if they hit one of her cats. I literally don’t even know where to begin. First off, you psychopathic bitch, how do you get to the point of likening human life to cat life? And make no mistake, that’s just what this loon is doing. "You don't want me to hit your kid so don't hit mine. You hurt mine, that is just like if I went over and ran over your kid. Basically, that is what I was intending," said Teixeira. Dammit skank, they are CATS, not PEOPLE. Just because you are so desperate and pathetic that you can’t find an actual loving relationship with a human being doesn’t mean you can elevate your cats to the same status as actual humans. Second, if you can’t keep your cats out of the street, it doesn’t matter how fast people drive because if they are hit by a car going 35 mph, 45 mph or 65 mph, they are going to be dead, dead, dead. Second, is everyone who drives down your street a neighbor or someone you know? If not, how are you going to find out who they are and where they live? Thirdly, what about people like me, who don’t have any kids? What do you do then, you certifiable nut? You put this sign up in a neighborhood located precariously close to a school, which is very classy. Just be glad that I don’t live near you, because if you put that sign up and came out yelling at me about my driving speed, as Teixeira admits she often does, I’d probably speed up and aim for either you or your cats, b’otch…….

- So many potential suspects, where to begin? Police in New York may think they have an idea of who was responsible for detonating an explosive device that blew out the windows of a Starbucks coffee shop in an Upper East Side neighborhood over the weekend, but I wouldn’t be so sure. The blast rocked the Starbucks on 92nd and 3rd avenue. Early indications are that the time of day the blast- between 3:30 a.m. and 4:30 a.m. - took place echoed that of a pattern of unsolved early morning blasts that have occurred outside the British Consulate, the Mexican Consulate and the Armed Forces recruiting booth in Times Square over the past two years. “The similarity is the time. The Mexican consulate, the British consulate, the Times Square bombing event at the recruiting station, we have this event. They all happened between 3:30 a.m. and 4:30 a.m. that's the immediate similarity we are looking at,” said Commissioner Ray Kelly. That great Ray, but do you have any idea how many people out there who could be pissed at Starbucks? Customers who have been paying 200-300 percent too much for a freaking cup of coffee, fired baristas, loser musicians who can’t get their songs included on those lame music compilations Starbucks sells, owners of smaller coffee shops who have been squashed by the corporate coffee conglomerate that is Starbucks…..and the list just keeps going. The point is that when you’re charging $7.00 for a cup of mediocre coffee, pushing crappy music on your customers and employing freaks with an average nine piercings in various parts of their bodies, you piss off a lot of people. So go ahead and talk to potential witnesses, review security camera tapes and do what you feel you need to do. The fact is that no one was injured in the blast and Starbucks was closed at the time, so clearly whoever was responsible for the explosion didn’t want to hurt anyone. "We don't know the motive. Obviously it is a cause for concern, but we are going to do an in depth investigation," Kelly said. "Starbucks has been victimized in the past in other cities. So we are looking into that issue as well.” Seems like a good idea, the little guy striking back against the massive, greedy corporate giant. Good thinking, commish……

- So maybe Reaper isn’t completely dead…..yet. Sure, things look admittedly bad for what is the CW's lowest-rated hour-long show. One of its lead actors has landed a leading role on a new show on a different network, its own network hasn’t given it a spot on the fall schedule and there really aren’t any positive signs for the show. In spite of that, there is one small chance that Reaper survives and makes a comeback this fall. If ABC Studios, which produces it, is able to hammer out a deal to air it as a syndicated series, Reaper could be back come the start of the new television season in the fall. The reason the show still has a chance as a syndicated program is that the CW recently revealed its plan to turn its Sunday night programming over to affiliate stations. Thus, ongoing talks between ABC Studios and CW affiliates could land Reaper on Sunday nights on your local CW affiliate (any who isn’t proud to be a CW affiliate?). One issue even if the show does return is the status of Tyler Labine (who plays Sock opposite Brett Harrison's Sam). Labine has the lead in Sons of Tucson, a new Fox comedy recently picked up for the fall. Theoretically, Reaper would be his first commitment, but if the show is merely a syndicated show floating out in space and not attached to any specific network, his contractual obligation to Reaper could be rendered null and void. Oh, and then there’s the issue of show creators Michele Fazekas and Tara Butters, who have signed a two-year deal with 20th Century Fox TV that calls for them to leave Reaper. So I suppose fans should be rooting for the show to come back in any form, but the question seems to be if it would be worth it to make a return if it’s a neutered, watered-down version of Reaper…….

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