- Here’s the thing about getting caught with more than 200 pounds of pot in your vehicle: there’s not much doubt as to what you’re up to. Compound that with the fact that police seized another 200 or so pounds of the hippie lettuce from your boyfriend’s home and the fact that you’re a drug dealer is more or less confirmed. That the stoner/pot dealer in question is a former mountain biking world champion is not at all surprising. What, because someone who competed in an X-Games-type sport being a confirmed pot head is so stunning? Meet Melissa "Missy" Giove, who was arrested Tuesday on federal drug charges after authorities seized marijuana from a truck she was driving in upstate New York. Giove, of Chesapeake, Va., and 30-year-old Eric Canori of Wilton, N.Y. were charged with conspiring to possess and distribute more than 100 kilograms of marijuana. All told, police seized nearly 400 pounds of pot from the truck and from Canori's home outside Saratoga Springs, 25 miles north of Albany. What, you’re saying that they weren’t going to smoke all of that themselves? Was there no stash of 5,000 bags of Cheetos and every episode of Planet Earth on DVD also at the home? Maybe they were going to hunker down with their favorite bongs, get stoned and stay that way - for the next 50 years. U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officials and the U.S. Marshals teamed up for the bust after they learned of Giove and Canori's plans last weekend when Illinois State Police pulled over a woman driving a truck and trailer loaded with about 220 pounds of marijuana. As always, when a stoner gets pinched by the cops, they’re looking to roll on anyone and everyone the can in order to receive leniency from the prosecutor. To ensnare Giove and Canori, authorities completed the delivery to the Albany area, where Mulvey said Giove picked up the vehicle and trailer. Clearly these two aren’t the brightest criminals, because
if they had bothered to scope out the pickup point, I’m guessing some crummy self-storage facility, they might have seen a lot of unmarked vans and suspicious-looking people lurking nearby. But they didn’t pick up on any of that and after Giove picked up the truckload of pot, drove north and followed Canori to his home, the police were right behind them. They watched from a distance as some of the trailer's contents were unloaded, then arrested Giove was later on at nearby Saratoga Lake. A search of Canori's home turned up more than 150 pounds of pot and more than $1 million in cash stashed in a closet and the basement, further cementing the case against these two lovers of the chronic. So for those of you who have been constantly asking what Melissa "The Missile"Giove has been up to since she was the downhill world champion in 1994 and won World Cup season titles in '97 and '98, then retired from downhill racing in 2003, you have your answer. She’s been getting baked, distributing pot and now will be heading off for a few years in the clink……
- Get ready for the latest incarnation of the most overrated smartphone in the history of smartphones, Apple’s iPhone. Tomorrow, Apple will begin selling what it bills as the fastest, most powerful iPhone yet and you can be sure that the requisite lines of losers will queue up outside Apple stores around the United States and seven other countries for a shot at throwing away a whole lot of money on the new iPhone 3GS. I get why Apple is so giddy to foist this new phone on the public, given the fact that the U.S. smartphone market grew by 68 percent last year and is projected to grow by 20 percent in 2009 and almost 25 percent next year. I just don’t understand why anyone would wait in line for hours for the right to throw away big money on the device and based on past iPhone releases, have difficulty using it, activating it or with one of the other bugaboos certain to best the phone from the start. What, you can't wait a day or two for one, when you can walk right into the store and throw away your money, er, buy it? Are the other smartphone options - namely the new Palm Pre, the BlackBerry Storm or phones powered by Google's Android or Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating systems - that bad, to the point you need to act like it’s the day after Thanksgiving and you’re joining the other idiots jostling in line for a shot at an iPhone? But based on research done by technology firms, the iPhone is the top dog when it comes to mobile Web surfing, generating 65 percent of mobile HTML browsing. However, in the first quarter of 2009, Apple had only about a 20 percent share of the U.S. smartphone market, well behind the 55 percent of the market that BlackBerry has cornered. What Apple does have is the lead in mobile applications - a.k.a. apps - which are software programs that let users play games, use things like Facebook from their iPhone and most anything else you can think of. If you cruise Apple's App Store, you’ll find 50,000 applications for sale and no other competitor is close to matching that total. The main tactic in looking to grab a share of the apps market from Apple is simply to offer developers a larger share of the profits generated by their apps. Apple offers a 70/30 split, but Research in Motion, maker of BlackBerry, is offering a more favorable 80/20 split. Among the challengers to the iPhone’s push for a bigger share of the market, many experts point to the Palm Pre because it's the first smartphone since the iPhone to use multi-touch. Users can manipulate the screen with their fingers, allowing them to zoom in and out, maneuver a particular part of the screen by “pinching” it, etc. The new iPhone will definitely stay true to Apple’s commitment to charging ridiculous, exorbitant prices for its smartphones.
The iPhone 3GS starts at $199, with a required two-year contract that will cost at least $70 a month with AT&T. Nice to know that there are still some things in this world you can count on…….
- Saddlebrooke, Arizona: Irony lives here. There’s no other way to describe a firehouse catching fire and nearly burning to the ground with six firefighters inside. Golder Ranch Fire District Chief John Fink said that when a fire broke out at Station 373, he was awakened by what sounded like someone pounding on his wall. It turned out that the pounding sound on the fire captain's bedroom wall was actually the fire crackling loudly. The fire ripped through the building just before 1 a.m. Wednesday, with Fink and all six of his men sound asleep. Thankfully, everyone made it out alive and the building was the only thing that took a major hit. Early estimates have the building as a total loss, gutted and in need of a complete rebuild. Part of the problem in terms of the damage being so extensive is that the station, located northwest of Tucson, was an older building and thus not well-equipped to withstand a large fire. "The point of origin was at the end of the hallway in the communications room which is also the captain's office. Then we have where the captain's bedroom was, and that's where he was asleep," says Shaun Greener, who's in charge of Golder Ranch fire facilities. Fink and his men reacted in time to get out ahead of the fire even though it burned so hot, radiant heat went through a closed window and the fire spread into the bay where a fire engine and an ambulance were parked. Once they were awake and alert, it took about 30 minutes to get the fire under control. "All the bunk rooms where the firefighters slept, with the exception of the captain, is in the rear of the station, where it's a little bit safer, but had the fire gone a little bit further, they would have been in danger too," Greener says. In the aftermath of the blaze, Chief Fink says the community has really stepped up. Saddlebrooke's developer is providing three villas as a temporary fire station, free of charge and that the local homeowners association will be providing free meals. In a further twist of irony, Golder Ranch just received a federal grant to pay for a sprinkler system in the fire station, but the grant came a little too late to prevent about $500,000 worth of damage. The cause of the fire hasn’t been officially determined, although officials believe it started among the electronic equipment in the communications room. The Golder Ranch Fire District does have fire insurance, so the station will eventually be back and hopefully better than ever. Still, gotta love the irony……..
- Should you faith in the fact that America is going in the wrong direction and doing so quickly be waning, allow me to bolster that confidence. The fact that literally thousands of attention-whore, musical-sellout losers showed up at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta on an otherwise fine June morning to audition for American Karaoke should be all the evidence you need. Cameras were all over the parking lot and these tools ate it up, mugging for the lens, practicing so they can sound like not only a sucky, no-talent hack but a sucky, no-talent hack who practiced for a few minutes in a stadium parking lot and generally acting like morons. They were as young as 16, from places like Randleman, North Carolina, McDonough, Georgia and all sorts of other far-flung places across the southern United States. All told AK’s supervising producer Patrick Lynn expected more than 8,000 people were at the Atlanta auditions. This traveling freak show/karaoke contest brings two dozen representatives of the show to a given city to screen the performers and choose the best karaoke-ers to a later round where they would sing for a group of executive producers. Only after that do the show’s four über-attention-whore judges/knobs looking to promote their own careers while pretending to judge a glorified karaoke contest view the performances. I’d say that I’m stunned and mortified to see just how many musical abortionists show up to audition for this joke, but by this point I’ve ceased to be amazed and am now resigned to the fact that there are just so many people in this country with no musical tastes and sensibilities and I cannot rescue them all. Sure, I could load up my car and drive to Atlanta, Boston, Massachusetts; Chicago, Illinois; Dallas, Texas; Los Angeles, California; Denver, Colorado; and Orlando, Florida to stage a mass intervention, but I fear that this idiots are beyond saving. Special shame goes on the parents who drove in some cases hundreds of miles to allow their child to audition. An adult doing it is one thing, but parents enabling this type of musical atrocity is borderline child abuse. I’d rather see them be a stage parent in the world of beauty pageants than allowing their child to have the scarring experience of selling out all their musical credibility by auditioning for American Karaoke. Heck, one freak showed up to audition in a wedding dress, which I’m sure will be used in one of AK’s “montage of losers” commercials they like to use in promoting this nightmare. Again, thanks for restoring my faith in the fact that America is in a downward spiral……
- It’s the ages-old dilemma of every drug runner: where to hide your product when you’re looking to move it. You can try to hide it inside luggage, people, vehicles or most anything else you can find a way to open up and slide the drugs inside. However, finding a truly great hiding place for your blow, weed or meth takes ingenuity. A group of drug runners in Mexico tried something new this week and as fate would have it, their choice proved to be a bad one - a very bad one. These druggies hid nearly a ton of cocaine inside a shipment of frozen sharks. Navy inspectors followed a trail of clues to the shipment of sharks at the southeastern port of Progreso, in Yucatan state, on Tuesday. An anomaly in two shipping containers during a routine X-ray piqued their curiosity and when they broke open the container and sliced open one of the sharks, what did they find inside but black bags containing rectangular packets filled with cocaine. That first shark was only the tip of the cocaine iceberg and by the time they were done, authorities recovered 870 packages of cocaine, weighing about 1,967 pounds. The cargo was aboard the freight ship Dover Strait and had been loaded in Costa Rica, which I’m guessing might just be the source of the drugs. So props to whoever slid those bags of coke into those sharks in terms of being creative and trying something new, but clearly they need to find a new tactic or risk losing more of their product to The Man. Step your game up, South American drug cartels, step it up……..
No comments:
Post a Comment