- When New York real estate billionaire Stephen Ross bought the Miami Dolphins from longtime owner Wayne Huizenga in January, no one was quite sure what to make of it. Here was a New York real estate magnate purchasing a team in South Florida, which theoretically makes sense because so many former New Yorkers move to the Sunshine State when they retire. Plus, NFL ownership is an exclusive club and when an opportunity to buy a team comes up, you take it regardless of geographic location. But clearly Ross had an idea of how he wanted to run things and that idea includes an obvious focus on incorporating as many celebrities as possible into his franchise. It all began when Ross and music legend/mellow dude Jimmy Buffett partnered up to slam the name of Buffett’s brand of beer, Land Shark, on the Dolphins’ stadium. Additionally, Buffett penned a Dolphins anthem that will be played at the newly christened Land Shark Stadium. After Buffett was on board, Ross proceeded to add (and I use this term liberally) singers Marc Anthony and Jennifer Lopez, who are married, as minority owners in the team. For some people, that would be enough crappy pop singers as part of their team, but Stephen Ross wasn’t finished - far from it. He then managed to turn musicians Gloria and Emilio Estefan around and line them up as minority owners as well, increasing his franchise’s cash flow but also drastically upping the risk of a takeover via elevator music within the organization. Bearing those developments in mind, I guess the prevailing emotion I feel when hearing about the Dolphins’ newest minority owners is relief. These two individuals are very successful in their field, they understand the demands of being an elite athlete and most importantly, they don’t sing garbage pop music. They are none other than Serena and Venus Williams, two of the best players in women’s tennis. The Williams sisters have become the latest celebrities to own a stake in the Dolphins. Both sisters live in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., about an hour's drive from the Dolphins' stadium, so the deal makes sense from that standpoint. Wishful thinkers out there will undoubtedly view this as a hopeful sign because at present, the NFL has no African-American majority team owner. Between them, the Williams sisters have combined to win 18 Grand Slam titles and much to my chagrin, they have successfully shoved the über-hot Maria Sharapova out of the women’s tennis spotlight of late. Now if you believe Ross, these celebrity ownership additions aren’t necessarily out of financial need, but more to reflect the diversity of South Florida and show that the franchise is connected with the community. There is also an minority ownership offer out there for Buffett, but he’s apparently been too busy with his Parrotheads to take Ross up on it. No word yet on whether Enrique Iglesias or Shakira will soon be buying into the Dolphins as well, but here’s hoping……..
- It’s the age-old question: Where do I hide my meth when I a) don’t want to lose it and b) don’t want to get busted for possession. Cars are out because the chances of a cop discovering your stash during a routine traffic stop are simply too great. You could try hiding it in a simple household item like a coffee can, but you could very easily forget about that and throw out the coffee can and your meth along with it. As you can see, it’s quite a conundrum, but leave it to great minds like Lorri Campo of Montcalm, Mich. to find a solution to this vexing problem. Seems that my girl L. Campo decided that the best place to hide her meth was in the diaper of her infant grandson. Yes, she and her boyfriend are among five adults charged in connection with a meth bust last Wednesday and during the bust, officers found the infant. In addition to the tot with meth in his underpants, members of the Central Michigan Enforcement Team also found large quantities of non-diaper meth, a meth lab inside the house and additional equipment and in a van parked in the driveway. In what should be a truly fortuitous break, Compo's grandson, Steven Rish Jr., who is almost age 1, was removed from the home and placed in custody of Child Protective Services. This kid clearly has a better chance in the care of non-meth addicts and away from his degenerate grandma. She now sits in the Montcalm County Jail facing use of cocaine, methamphetamine, ecstacy charges and maintaining a drug house. It was actually Rish’s non-methhead grandmother who discovered the drugs in his diaper after picking him up from protective custody. She was changing Steven and discovered a plastic bag of meth in his diaper, which she then turned over to police. At this point, no one knows for sure why the drugs were placed inside the diaper, although I have a pretty good idea. The boy’s mother Katrina, who left her son at the house earlier in the day before the raid took place, doesn’t seem too enthused about her mother’s actions. “It's so hard. The fact that my parents would do something like that, that's so selfish - that could have killed my son. Something that could have put us out on the street with nowhere to go, that's just wrong,” she fumed. Wrong? Showing ingenuity and creativity in finding new places for druggies to hide their stash when the cops raid their home is wrong? If it is, I’m not sure I want to be right……….
- Monday was a huge day for Washington Nationals fans - both of them. Not that I blame people in and around the D.C. area for not being in a rush to support a team that has annually ranked as the worst in baseball since arriving in town just under a decade ago. Even with a new stadium, the Nats still suck and they’re still going to finish in the basement of the NL East year after year. Still, the team signing No. 1 draft pick Stephen Strasburg to a contract literally less than one minute before the deadline for picks to sign is a huge boost for the struggling franchise. The Nationals failed to sign their top pick last year and with Strasburg being hailed as quite possibly the best pitching prospect ever - literally ever - and a possible savior for the franchise, inking him to a deal was paramount. Had the Nats and Strasburg’s maniacal, greed bag of an agent, the legendarily loathsome Scott Boras, not agreed to a contract before midnight, the 102-mph-throwing righty would have gone back into the draft next season and would have had the choice to sit out the coming year, pitch in an independent league or pitch abroad in a place such as Japan. The problem was Boras, who was looking to not just exceed the record for richest contract ever given to a draft pick, he was looking to “change the way the system works.” In other words, he didn’t want to better the $10 million in guaranteed money that Mark Prior signed for out of USC in 2001; he was throwing out numbers like $50 million. Yes, I said $50 million. Now that may have been nothing more than posturing and looking to drive the actual asking price up, but even the $25 to $30 million Boras was reportedly asking the Nats for was absurd. Sure, Strasburg has amazing stuff and was dominating on the mound for San Diego State, but Boras claiming that he’s an other-worldly pitching marvel worth more guaranteed money that most established, top-end free agent pitchers sign for was a joke at best. And so the two sides dug in their heels and the deadline approached with fans helplessly watching to see if their franchise would swing and miss yet again. In the end, the deal was reached and Strasburg will receive $15.1 million over the next four years to help resuscitate the lifeless Nats. Strasburg gets a $7.5 million signing bonus payable over three years and his actual salary breaks down to: the prorated portion of the $400,000 minimum for 2009 which comes to$102,732, $2 million in 2010, $2.5 million in 2011 and $3 million in 2012. However, the Nationals are already saying that despite speculation that Strasburg might be major league-ready now, he likely won't pitch in the big leagues this season. Instead, they imply that he will pitch for the team’s Single-A rookie league affiliate to start and has next to no chance to make it to the majors until 2010. I’m sure Nats fans would love to see this guy on the mound this year - heck, probably tomorrow - and while it would be cool to see him become one of a select few players to jump straight from college to the majors, there’s not much to gain from bringing him up right away. The Nationals will still suck no matter when he comes up…………
- Enviro-nuts, we may have finally found the individuals responsible for starting the trend of global warming and you can have your chance to berate these people…..if you can find a way to go back in time several thousand years. One of you must have your own eco-friendly, green time travel machine, so it shouldn’t be that difficult. According to a new study by researchers at the University of Virginia and the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, the blame game starts with ancient man, who may have started global warming through massive deforestation and burning that could have permanently altered the Earth's climate. If you’re like me, you picked up your copy of the scientific journal Quaternary Science Reviews as soon as it came out and read all about these interesting allegations. As the theory goes, early farmers spent thousands of years burning down mass quantities of forests to the point that that huge amounts of carbon dioxide were pumped into the atmosphere. In so doing, they may have caused the Earth to warm up and forever altered the climate. The chief accuser of these ancient farmers is lead study author William Ruddiman, a professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and a climate scientist. “It seems like a common-sense idea that there weren't enough people around 5, 6, 7,000 years ago to have any significant impact on climate. But if you allow for the fact that those people, person by person, had something like 10 times as much of an effect or cleared 10 times as much land as people do today on average, that bumps up the effect of those earlier farmers considerably, and it does make them a factor in contributing to the rise of greenhouse gasses,” Ruddiman said. The so-called “slash and burn” tactics these farmers employed involved burning down a forest, digging holes between the smoldering stumps and planting seeds in those holes. Crops were planted until the nutrients were tapped out of the soil and the farmers would then move on to the next plot of land. For some odd reason, none of these guys stopped to consider all of the greenhouse gases they may have been releasing into the earth’s atmosphere (not even Al Gore’s ancestors). Thankfully there are brave souls out there willing to defend ancient Joe Caveman/Farmer from Ruddiman’s heinous accusations. Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology in Stanford, California, is among those who disagree with Ruddiman, saying Ruddiman is "exaggerating the importance of early man.” It’s a bit of a backhanded compliment, so to speak, but ancient man needs all the help he can get here. The dispute between the two camps seems to be at what point the phenomenon of global warming really got rolling, with most scholars arguing that it’s a much more recent trend. The belief is that global warming has only began building over the past 150 years, while Ruddiman's research argues that the Earth was on its way to another ice age 10,000 years ago and that ice sheets were already forming in northern latitudes when ancient man started his slashing and burning method of farming. Personally I say we give a break to ancient man and focus all of our blame where it belongs…..on the now-defunct W. administration……..
- This would be one of those situations where a person got exactly what they deserved and yet I still despise the person who administered the justice. Those of you who read this space regularly know exactly how I feel about the menace to our society that is country music - hate, loathing, despisal, desire to eradicate from the face of the Earth. As such, a person making the fatal error in judgment of attending a Kenny Chesney concert is deserving of many things - ridicule, flogging, a lobotomy, a brain transplant so they can have a shot at actual good taste in music. Oh, and that person would also deserve to have his or her camera ripped from them and the camera’s memory card removed if they attempted to film, er, take pictures of the concert. Susan Mazar is the music misfit in question, having attended a recent Kenny Chesney concert at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts. She was in the front row, brandishing her Sony camera and allegedly taking pictures of the concert when Chesney walked down the stage to where Mazar was standing, grabbed her camera and tossed it on the stage. "(Chesney) was like a person in front of me and he reached down, grabs the camera, shuts it, goes down the walkway and throws it on the stage," Mazar said. She later got her camera back, but without the memory card. Mazar was extremely upset about the missing memory card, which she says was full of pictures of her family vacation. Normally I’d have major issues with some a-hole musician yanking someone’s camera from them under any circumstances, but my loathing of country music supercedes that tendency. Also, video cameras are on the list of banned items at Gillette Stadium. That’s right, Mazar’s camera was a digital video camera, not a still camera. Yes, video cameras can take still pictures, but how many people do you know who use digital video cameras for that purpose? Furthermore, I’ve seen a picture of the camera Mazar has and I have the same model of camera. It takes sh**ty still pictures, mostly because IT’S A VIDEO CAMERA! In other words, Mazar is lying through her teeth and so she basically deserved to lose her memory card. Next time, know the rules and if you’re going to illegally film a concert, er, take still pictures of a concert, be smart and a) don’t do it in the front row and b) hide your camera under a jacket, oversized shirt, etc. Either that or don’t abuse your ears and brain by taking them to a country music concert…….
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