Delusional pet owners, a crack-dealing point guard and who won your CW "show cancellation" office pool

- When the NCAA passed new rules allowing student-athletes to have jobs to earn extra spending money during the school year, I don’t think this is what they had in mind. Binghamton University basketball player Emanuel "Tiki" Mayben took the NCAA up on its offer and found himself a gig - as a crack dealer. Mayben was arrested Wednesday night in his hometown of Troy, N.Y. and charged with selling cocaine twice on June 29 when police found 3.4 grams of cocaine on him. The arrest came as part of a three-month undercover probe of cocaine sales in Troy. At his arraignment Thursday, Mayben pleaded not guilty to possessing and selling cocaine. More than likely, he and his attorney, Greg Cholakis, are looking to work some sort of plea deal with the prosecutor, perhaps to have Mayben roll on others higher up in his operation and name names, but arrests that result from three-month undercover sting operations tend to be more likely to result in the actual guilty parties being arrested, in my untrained legal experience. Not sure this is quite that head coach Kevin Broadus had in mind after his team made its first appearance in the NCAA basketball tournament last year, that his starting point guard would be arrested and revealed as a coke kingpin. "I did all I could," Broadus said. "I tried to help the kid." Hmm, that doesn’t sound like a guy who is all that surprised, no? Of course, one look at Mayben’s illustrious college career raises some major red flags about the type of guy he is. He was recruited by Syracuse University out of high school, but wasn’t smart enough or academically disciplined enough to qualify to play for the Orange. Instead, he began his college career at the University of Massachusetts, where he sat out one season before playing 31 games in the 2006-07 season. He lasted there for all one of year before transferring to Hudson Valley Community College, where he played during the 2007-08 season. In other words, Binghamton was his fourth intended school and the third for which he actually played. I hate to go all cynical on you, but smart, high-character guys don’t jump from one school to another four times in just over three years. On the floor, Mayben was good enough to set a school single-season record for assists at Binghamton, but off the court he clearly is a shady dude. Cholakis’ assertion that he’s never been in trouble before does little to quell my concerns about his character. Don’t confuse never having been convicted of a crime before with being a good guy and an upstanding citizen, counselor. This is merely the latest black eye for the Binghamton program under Broadus. In May of last year, Miladin Kovacevic, who wasn't recruited by Broadus, left a classmate in a coma for several weeks after a barroom brawl in May 2008. Kovacevic jumped bail and fled the country. Then in November, Malik Alvin, a transfer student brought in by Broadus, was charged with stealing condoms from Wal-Mart (I wrote about that one, laughs all around). Call me nuts, but Broadus doesn’t seem to be a good job of bringing in quality guys or policing the less-than-quality guys already on hand………….

- There’s a winner in your office pool for which crappy, low-quality, poorly written and inane CW show about rich, spoiled, famous people living in New York or Southern California will be canceled first and it is…..the person who put his or her money on the Ashton Kutcher-produced series The Beautiful Life! Yes, picking any one of these crap-tacular garbage fests over another is tough, but because the CW can’t get the message that putting hot people on screen with mindless dialogue and absurd plots isn't enough to pull in viewers, it’s a debate we’ll continue having. Beautiful Life, a scripted drama about the world of modeling, is not only the first moronic CW show to be canceled this fall, it’s also the first casualty of the new fall TV season. As a nice tie-in to the previous story, it starred everyone’s favorite coke addict (allegedly), Mischa Barton. But the plug has been pulled and production ahs ceased after the debut episode lost about 60 percent of the audience of its lead-in, America's Next Top Runway Bimbo, and the second episode only attracted 1 million viewers. The real question now is what crappy, low-quality, poorly written and inane show about rich, spoiled, famous people living in New York or Southern California the CW will fill this time slot with and the answer appears to be the revamped Melrose Place, a show also receiving dismal ratings. Reruns of the newest episode of this nightmare of a show will take the place of Beautiful Life, which is akin having a bleeding ulcer replaced by kidney stones. Sure, the CW is far from the only network with new shows bombing out big time, but its shows are just so much worse than nearly everyone else that it’s impossible not to mock them. As for the other networks with shows that will soon be canceled, leaders in that race would seem to be NBC’s Parks and Recreation and ABC’s Accidentally on Purpose. Oh, and I would be remiss if I wrote about crappy TV shows and didn’t rip one of Fox’s lame-tastic reality shows, so here goes: So You Think You Can Dance is registering such lackluster ratings that will probably be relegated back to the summer. So if you are the proud winner of your office pool by virtue of picking The Beautiful Life, I salute you. If you picked another CW show, I recognize you for a valiant effort. If you picked another show on a non-CW network…….you are a moron……………

- Few groups are more deserving of loathing and incessant mockery in our society that overzealous, out-of-touch-with-reality dog owners. I love dogs, I had a dog growing up that was amazing and a great friend to the family, but he was not, as you dog kooks out there would like to believe, a child or an actual family member on par with the humans in our family. If you believe that, then you don’t have any friends and you are a pathetic loser. Get out, meet people and interect with your fellow humans, you loser. It is against that backdrop that this next story is set. Pet food company All American Pet Brands is holding its Cutest Dog Competition, asking dog owners to submit photos of their adorable dogs to the contest's Web site. So far, over 60,000 people have uploaded pictures and visitors to the site can vote for their favorite pooch. "It's a fraternity or sorority with people who don't just have pets, these are their family members, their best friends," said All American Pet Brands CEO Barry Schwartz. Allow me to translate from bullshit-ese for my man Barry: We found a way to squeeze some pub and business out of these pathetic losers and we’re milking every last drop from this. But the contest itself isn't the real debacle here; no, that comes courtesy of one particularly loathsome entrants to this contest, New Orleans piano teacher Cara McCool. Allow me to sat that McCool’s plan to win the contest and use the $1 million prize for New Orleans recovery efforts is admirable. New Orleans is still struggling to recover from Hurricane Katrina and people don’t fully realize that fact. However, McCool acting like some great injustice has been perpetrated against her simply because her dog, Mozart, has been bumped from the first-place spot in the contest by Stephen Colbert el dos, a Pomeranian Chihuahua mixed-breed puppy from Atlanta, Georgia. As you might have guessed, Stephen Colbert el dos is named after Stephen Colbert, the best fake newsman on television. "It's just coming out of nowhere," McCool said. "It's just unfortunate. MoMo is named after a famous person too, but he's dead." Oh shut up, you wench. I already hate you for that comment, but there’s more. "He's my furry child," McCool explained. "Sometimes I pull up chairs for him to sit next to me when I play or teach. He has been known to jump on the bench and actually has put his paws on the keys.” Wow….you are a ginormous, pathetic loser. THE DOG IS NOT YOUR CHILD. THE DOG IS NOT HUMAN. YOU HAVE NO FRIENDS AND NO ONE WHO CARES ABOUT YOU IF YOU ARE TALKING LIKE THAT. I hate to go with the all caps, but McCool left me no choice. It also needs to be pointed out that Stephen Colbert el dos is not owned by the actual Stephen Colbert, although fan sites have speculated that Colbert el dos will appear on "The Colbert Report" if he makes the top 12, but the show will not confirm those reports. Either way, Colbert el dos should benefit from the famous “Colbert bump,” which Colbert claims is given to candidates, products and other entities he endorses. He himself has won a contest to have NASA name a room in the International Space Station for him, although NASA doubled back and instead of naming the room in his honor, the agency sent a treadmill to space with his name on it instead. As for the pathetic loser/owners contest, er, Cutest Dog Contest, the winner will be announced on Thanksgiving Day, so you have until then to vote…………

- Animation ruled at the box office for the second straight weekend as Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs earned $24.6 million worth of tickets and falling off a minuscule 19 percent from the previous weekend to win the top spot yet again. That take brings the film’s total gross to $60 million, not a bad tally at all. Coming in a distant second was a Bruce Willis movie that has gotten surprisingly little buzz, positive or negative, Surrogates, which opened with $15 million. The movie stars Willis as an FBI agent in a futuristic world where people can enter and live through the bodies of others. Willis is curiously absent from much of the movie’s marketing, including an odd poster campaign that featured human-robot hybrids in seductive poses. In third was a recycled version of Fame, which did better than it probably should have in making $10 million despite a solid veteran cast featuring names like Megan Mullally and Kelsey Grammer. Following those three up on the earnings list was The Informant!, which had an underwhelming debut last weekend but dropped off just 34 percent this time around and earned $6.9 million for a fourth-place finish. Sadly, also lingering in the top five was Tyler Perry’s I Can Do Bad All By Myself, a movie I could not think less of and will be glad to see just go away. There were also some new releases that enjoyed mixed results, as the outer space thriller Pandorum earned just $4.4 million from 2,506 theaters for a lame-tastic per-screen average of $1,758. By contrast, Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story generated a whopping $240,000 from just four theaters for $60,000 per-screen average—the year’s best so far. A movie that you’ve undoubtedly never heard of, the Audrey Tautou period biopic Coco Before Chanel, grossed $177,000 at 5 location for a $35,400 average. Lastly, all fans of The Office out there should be happy that one of the show’s stars, John Krasinski, pulled in $20,600 at a single screen with his directorial debut, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. The last movie of note to talk about is a movie that hit the promotional hammer hard over the weekend, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, which earned a decent $369,000 from 120 theaters. So while having an animated family movie as the top earner for a second straight weekend might seem like a negative development for the cinematic world, just know that it could be worse and temper your complaints accordingly……………

- I’m still deciding whether or not to be pissed at the World Wildlife Fund for ripping the WWF acronym from World Wrestling Entertainment (formerly World Wrestling Federation) about a decade ago, but I’ll set aside my possible hostilities and enjoy the news that the organization has announced that some 163 new species discovered last year in the Greater Mekong region of southeast Asia, including a frog that eats birds and a gecko with leopard stripes. Plants dominate the list, tallying 100 of the 163 spots, with the rest breaking down thusly: 28 fish, 18 reptiles, 14 amphibians, two mammals and one bird species. These 163 new species further highlight the wealth of biodiversity in the region, said Barney Long, head of the WWF's Asian Species Conservation program. "It's a melting pot of diverse habitats. It has some of the wettest forests on the planet, high mountains, and a diverse array of terrestrial and marine habitats, including the Mekong River," he said. "We continue to find new species of fish, primates and mammals, and nowhere else compares to the amount of large mammals that have been discovered in the region. It shows how little we know about species in the region. From a biodiversity perspective, there are still huge amounts to discover about region." For the geographically ignorant among you, the Greater Mekong consists of the countries through which the Mekong River flows: Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and Yunnan Province of China. I know, I know, it’s extremely ironic that any region including the world’s worst polluter, China, would also be celebrated for its biodiversity. But a big reason for that diversity is the fact that the Greater Mekong has more protected spaces than anywhere else on mainland Asia. That’s why it’s home to new species like the colorful Cat Ba leopard gecko of northern Vietnam, with its large, orange-brown "catlike eyes" and a body of leopard stripes. This curious creature was discovered on Cat Ba Island, the largest of 366 islands in Cat Ba Archipelago and home to many rare species that can only be found on the island, including Limnonectes megastomias -- a fanged frog with an appetite for other frogs, insects and birds. Who knows, not that some of the war and unrest in the region - albeit a very limited portion - have simmered down a bit, scientific exploration could turn up even more new species in the months ahead. With all of the negative environmental news coming at you every day, hearing about new species and biodiversity should be a nice pick-me-up experience, glad I could help………….