- You knew it would happen eventually, it was merely a question of when. Elin Nordegren, the wife of Tiger Woods, was going to seek a divorce sooner or later. Whether Tiger took time away from golf to work on his personal and family life or not, that relationship had come off the tracks and wasn’t going back on. The fact the Elin strung him out for a couple of weeks and was supposedly renegotiating their prenuptial agreement to guarantee herself more money in exchange to stay married to Tiger, then jammed him anyhow, makes it even better. I don’t know for sure if she did in fact receive a rumored payment from Woods to remain married in addition to renegotiating the prenup, but that would be equally awesome if the reports are true. Either way, a source close to Nordegren claims that that a "divorce is 100 percent on." Of course, speculation began to run rampant when Nordegren was recently photographed pumping gas without her wedding ring. I have no rooting interest one way or the other, but expecting Nordegren to stick with Woods for any amount of money would be offensive and demeaning. By staying, she would basically look like a spineless, money-grubbing woman who stayed with her husband after he cheated on her with everything that had a pulse, was female and walked upright on two legs. Even if she truly did love him and want to try and save their marriage, that would have been the perception of many. By leaving, she becomes something of a heroic figure in the eyes of many, deciding that the high-class lifestyle, private jet and mansions weren’t a satisfactory tradeoff for remaining with one of the most legendary adulterers of our time. I’m just guessing here, but it seems safe to say that Elin will get primary custody of the couple’s a 2-year-old daughter and a 10-month-old son. How will this affect Tiger’s plans to take an indefinite leave from public life and golf so he could focus on his personal and family life? No idea. But I could easily argue that you don’t need time to work on your family life if you don’t really have a family anymore. On the plus side for Tiger, he did get the uplifting news that he had been voted the Associated Press’ athlete of decade on the same days that news of his impending divorce broke, so I’m sure that balanced out the hurt of having his wife kick him to the curb. But of course, Tiger has handled all of this the exact same way, day after day, for three weeks and counting: by hunkering down in his mansion and refusing to leave. Seriously, dude has out Howard Hughes-ed Howard Hughes by this point and there is no indication he’s surfacing any time soon…..unless his crew threw him inside a large duffel bag, slipped him into the back of an SUV and snuck him off the property weeks ago and he’s now at some secret locale in parts unknown………
- CBS may not have any good original, scripted programming (most-watched network or not, its schedule sucks), but the network knows which shows drive the ratings and it’s seeking to capitalize on those shows’ popularity while it can. Survivor, The Amazing Race and Criminal Minds are all among the network’s most-popular shows and now CBS will turn them, along with several of its other crap-tacular series, into video games. CBS Consumer Products announced the upcoming release of video games based on those shows as well as Ghost Whisperer, Diagnosis Murder and Hollywood Squares. With Survivor and Amazing Race being action- and challenge-driven shows, their game incarnations will require players will participate in various challenges in order to win, just like contestants on the shows. Likewise, Criminal Minds and Diagnosis Murder will require players to examine crime scenes for clues to help solve murder mysteries. Now if the Ghost Whisperer video game were truly representative of the show it portrays, it would put players to sleep within the first two minutes. But from what I’m told, it will actually have players help the recently (and fictionally) deceased and their loved ones find closure. And lastly, the Hollywood Squares game will play just like the game show (minor, irrelevant celebrities sold separately) and will also include bonus footage from the TV show. One unique feature of the Hollywood Squares game is that it will not only be available on computers and gaming consoles, also be on the iPhone. The Amazing Race will be released first, hitting stores at the start of the show's next season in the spring. All the other games are scheduled to come out in 2010, but no specific release dates have been announced. When it comes to buying or not buying them, all I can say is that Amazing Race and Survivor aside, they cannot possibly be any more boring than the shows they are based on………
- Know what’s been missing from the international scene of late? Some good ol’-fashioned intra-Middle East tension between longtime rivals Iran and Iraq. Sure, they fought a bitter and brutal war in the 1980s that left both sides worse for the wear, but their overall level of animosity toward one another has been lacking of late. Thankfully, steps are behind taken to ratchet things back up and we owe our thanks for that to what the Iraqi government is calling an Iranian "armed group" that it says seized an oil well in southern Iraq on Thursday night. The sun had barely risen Friday over the giant piles of sand that constitute Iraq (just kidding, Iraqis) when the Iraqi government issued a strong statement deploring the act and demanding the immediate withdrawal of those responsible. And playing its prescribed part in the conflict, Iran is denying any takeover took place. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki headed an emergency meeting of Iraq's National Security Council to discuss the situation and I’m guessing the talk wasn’t about who was going to win this season of Survivor in Sunday’s finale. "The council stressed that such incidents would be considered a violation of the border and violated Iraq's sovereignty and its territories and calls upon Iran to pull out the group from well No. 4 and take down the Iranian flag from the tower of the well immediately," Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said in a statement. One problem I’m sensing here on the Iraqi side of the equation is inconsistency in labeling the mysterious, enigmatic force currently controlling this particular oil well. Senior Iraqi government sources initially referred to the Iranians as "security forces," but the official Iraqi government statement later called them an "armed group." That needs to be cleared up, but how’s about getting to know this oil well a little better? Swell. It was drilled in 1979 and is in Iraq's Maysan province, east of Amara, near the Iranian border. It resides within the province's Fakka oil field and likes hot summer days and spewing giant amounts of precious materials from the ground in its free time. To help address the situation, the Iraqi government summoned the Iranian ambassador in Baghdad, Hassan Kazemi Qomi, to speak about the incident. Qoumi was also asked him to provide a note to Iran's Foreign Affairs Ministry "to address such a violation." For the time being, the Iraqi government is at least attempting to keep up an illusion of civility and diplomacy by calling upon Iran "to resolve all border problems through diplomatic dialogue and avoid the use of military force in order to preserve our common security and bilateral relations between the two countries." Uh-huh, sure. Say what you want, but we all know you two are itching for a chance to obliterate one another from the map. You hate each other, you share a border and you fought a bloody eight-year war that ended in 1988 in a cease-fire with no clear victor and parts of the border under dispute. Yes, relations between the two nations have improved since the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime in 2003, but no one ever really believed things would stay that way. Something was needed to kick-start the hate machine and as nice as rumors are that Iran has been providing Iraqi insurgents with material for roadside bombs during the Iraq war, something bigger was clearly needed. This alleged raid by Iranian forces could be just the thing and I could not be happier……….
- Few things terrorize the music world and strike fear into my heart quite like that smug, egotistical a-hole Simon Cowell. This comes from a person who has never watched his shi**y, crap-tacular abortion of a reality show/world’s largest karaoke contest, American Karaoke. I don’t need to bastardize my musical integrity or waste an hour of my life watching that garbage to know what an arrogant piece of crap Cowell is; I can see that simply in the way dude conducts himself away from the show and how he does business. He has confused taking advantage of the horrible music tastes and lack of intelligence among most music fans and force-feeding them a string of slickly produced, abysmally bad pop singers whose music they buy up like mindless lemmings with actually producing quality music artists. With all of this in mind, it is with great trepidation that I reveal to you that Cowell is preparing to launch a U.S. version of another lame-tastic music contest, "The X Factor." He’s been in talks with the Fox network since the summer and is preparing to announce an arrangement that would begin terrorizing U.S. audiences with "X Factor" in 2011. "There are discussions going on with 'American Idol' and also about the possibility of bringing 'X Factor' to the United States, but no decisions have been made, and nothing has been finalized," Cowell's spokesman Max Clifford said. Thank God, there is still time to avert this disaster. There is no freaking way we should be rewarding a man who has bedeviled us with AK for eight years run and reportedly makes between $30 million and $40 million per season. Sure, his Karaoke contract expires in May and perhaps he’s using the threat of this new show to hijack Fox for a sweet new deal to do both shows, but the bottom line here is that we could all have twice as big a headache if this X Factor deal goes through. It’s basically the same freaking show as American Karaoke, except that Cowell and two other judges mentor the X Factor contestants, adding competition as the judges -- as well as the musicians -- are competing against one another and also allows groups to compete in addition to solo singers. In the end, it still boils down to cataclysmically bad music sung by glorified karaoke singers who are judged by a panel of egotistcal, camera whore judges and a music public that clearly has a musical IQ of 14 at best…………
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