Bad omens for the Knicks, wasting research dollars and NASA has a coke problem

- I have a sneaking suspicion that the 2009-10 season is not going to end well for the New York Knicks. On what do I base that suspicion? Could it be because they have a roster full of bloated contracts given to FAT, overrated players with no hope of ever living up to those deals? Nope. Is it because they are currently 16-22 and in ninth place in a weak Eastern Conference? No. Maybe it’s because their coach relies on a gimmicky, fast-paced style of play that has won him exactly zero NBA championships? Ummm…..no. This assessment is based solely on the behavior of a few select Knicks players during a recent road trip to Oklahoma City. To put it succinctly, several players were convinced that their downtown hotel was haunted. The team stayed at the Skirvin Hilton in downtown OKC, which to be fair, has long been the source of stories from guests about ghost sightings and strange noises. One urban legend has , a woman jumped to her death while holding her baby in her hands sometime in the 1930s. But these guys are professional athletes, right? They thrive on overcoming pressure, blocking out possible mental hurdles and focusing on the task at hand. Don’t count Knicks center Eddy Curry in that category. Despite standing over seven feet tall and weighing in at over 300 pounds, Curry was apparently terrified by the urban legend from the 1930s and barely slept at all the night before the game. They said it happened on the 10th floor and I'm the only one staying on the 10th floor," Curry said. "That's why I spent most of my time in (Nate Robinson's) room. I definitely believe there are ghosts in that hotel." Just for a minute, imagine the sheer absurdity of that moment: a 7’0, 300-pound NBA player refusing to go to his own hotel room and electing to hide out in the room of his 5’8 teammate for safety from ghosts. But Curry wasn’t alone in his insanity; forward Jared Jeffries was riding the crazy train right alongside him. "I definitely believe it," Jeffries said. "The place is haunted. It's scary." Because of the ghost threat, Curry claims he slept for only two hours. One of the lone sane people with the team, assistant coach Herb Williams, teased Jeffries and Curry for believing that the Skirvin is haunted, but Curry wasn't laughing. "There are too many stories," Curry said. "Something is going on there." Oooookay, Eddy. Whatever you say, my man. Just know that you can now look forward to fans in arenas around the country to don white bed sheets and make spooky noises to intimidate you every time you come to their city to play………

- By now, you all know my abiding love for moronic research studies that amazingly confirm things that we all know and have known since virtually the dawn of man. Nothing pumps me up quite like “researchers” wasting thousands, and in some cases, millions of dollars “discovering” things that you or I could figure out without even having to visit Wikipedia or step outside of our home. There have been dozens of such studies in the past few years alone, but perhaps none inexplicably and wastefully probed such a known conclusion than a study conducted recently by the Australian Science Media Centre. These Mensas set out to test the hypothesis that - wait for it…..wait a little longer….. - that sitting on your ass for hours on end watching television is not good for your health! Stunning, I know. Researchers followed 8,800 adults over a six-year period and found that people who watched four hours or more television per day had an 80 percent higher risk of death from cardiovascular disease. Waaaaaait a second…..you’re telling me that people who sat on their butt for more than four hours a day, meaning they likely got little or no exercise and likely did not have great eating habits (how many health-conscious couch potatoes do you know?) were more likely to suffer from cardiovascular disease than those who watch less than two hours of TV per day? Worse still were the ever-more-obvious insights these tools offered to help combat the effects of being a lazy piece of crap who watches more than four hours of television a day. Their suggestions were to a) get regular exercise and b) to stand up and "get moving" during any prolonged sedentary period. Woah there, groundbreakers. Let’s not just throw out kooky, irrational and unproven ideas on a whim. Suggesting that people pry themselves away from their television, computer or smartphone long enough to do a few situps, pushups or jumping jacks is a bit too revolutionary if you ask me. As always, though, thanks for wasting a lot of time and money on digging up a hidden truth that all of us already knew. You’ve contributed nothing new to the world despite six years of painstaking research and you’d be better off lighting all of your materials on fire and dancing around the flames…………

- Now this is a NASA that I can get behind in a big, big way. Shuttle launches and exploring the moon is all well and good, but what I want from my space agency is summed up in three simple words: Colombian nose candy. Yup, that’s right: NASA has a drug problem. On Tuesday, an employee at NASA’s facility in Cape Canaveral, Fla. spotted a small bag of cocaine inside a shuttle processing hangar at Kennedy Space Center and this fool inexplicably notified security immediately. Why? Can’t find a good use for a little blow, NASA employee? If nothing else, find a friend or a friend of a friend who is a coke head and sell the Bolivian marching powder to them. Go to any local club, look for the resident drug addicts and make the sale, idiot. But no, this fool notified security and guards came and confiscated the bag with cocaine from the floor of the facility, near the bathroom. Now, NASA is teaming up with local police in an attempt to figure out who their resident coke head is. Only 200 people have access to the area where the cocaine was found, so that narrows the field significantly right away. The employees allowed in the facility are being tested, so that could also solve the problem quickly. For some odd reason, NASA agency has a zero-tolerance drug policy and expects to prosecute and terminate whoever brought the cocaine to the facility. May I ask why? What could possibly go wrong when you are launching space shuttles costing hundreds of millions of dollars into outer space and someone potentially involved in that process is coked out of their mind? "It's a zero tolerance for drugs because you have margins for errors your talking about human space flight," said Allard Beutel, a spokesman for the Kennedy Space Center. But perhaps the real culprit isn't one of those 200 NASA employees known to have access to this particular building. Maybe there is someone out there who is missing the dime bag they had on their person and they don’t know where it went. If you think that could be you, allow me to fill in some of the details to help. The bag of blow was found in Orbiter Processing Facility No. 3, where Discovery is being prepared for a March launch to the International Space Station. "This is not a place where you have common traffic. People have to be bagged to be in there and it's secure access to these locations," Beutel said. So if you are a person with access to a secured location and have done work in Orbiter Processing Facility No. 3, it could be your bag of coke that was found. The next shuttle scheduled to be launched from KSC is Endeavour on Feb. 7, so there is time to clear all of this up before then. Having said that, a space agency with a coke problem is one that I have much more interest in, so here’s hoping this isn't the last such incident we hear about at NASA in the near future…………

- Maybe Google's Nexus One phone really is just like the iPhone and on par with Apple’s popular smartphone. After all, every time losers line up outside stores for hours and even days on end for a shot at the newest iPhone model, they are inevitably disappointed when service is subpar, bugs abound and they have trouble activating their phones. Prices are absurdly high and there is no way the phone can possibly deliver all it would need to deliver to justify that price, so the launch is always something of a failure. That’s precisely what has happened with the Nexus One. Ever since the smartphone's launch last Tuesday, it has been plagued by consumer complaints including spotty 3G connectivity, a high early termination fee, poor customer support from Google and problems with the touchscreen. The blame for these problems can go to no one but Google, as Nexus One is the first device to be sold by the search company itself, rather than a manufacturing or carrier partner. The phone runs Android 2.1, was designed by HTC and works with T-Mobile's network in the United States. Its cost is high; it retails for $180 with a 2-year contract with T-Mobile, with an unlocked version also available for $530 -- freaking $530! -- and that version will work on other GSM phone networks worldwide as well as AT&T in the United States. You can get ripped off, er, buy the Nexus One exclusively through Google's online store and cannot go to a T-Mobile store for assistance in solving your Nexus One problems. In other words, you are extremely, extremely limited on the help you can get for your overpriced, overrated smartphone that you may have spent an entire week’s paycheck on. Every forum Google has for customer service has been bombarded with complaints from frustrated customers who want some freaking answers to their freaking problems. Google doesn’t exactly seem too bothered by all of this and thus far, the company has offered little more than standard boilerplate apologies and promises of change. "Solving customer support issues is extremely important to us, because we want people to have a positive Nexus One experience," said a Google spokesperson. "We are trying to be as open and transparent as possible through our online customer help forums." Open and transparaent is fine, but what customers really want it to actually be able to connect to T-Mobile's 3G network, which they are paying damn good money to have. Instead, the Nexus One does not pick up the 3G network or keeps switching to the slower EDGE network. What say you about this problem, Google? "We are aware of the issues that have affected a small number of users and are working quickly to fix any problems," the spokesperson lied. A small number of users? If you “small number of users” you mean a lot of them, then I agree. All of this is problematic, but what’s worse (and yes, that’s possible) is what it would cost disgruntled Nexus One users to get out of their contract and return their defective phone. Nexus One customers who bought the subsidized, $180 version and then decide to cancel their contracts will have to pay $200 to T-Mobile along with $350 "equipment recovery fee" assessed by Google if you give up on the contract within 120 days. Quite a smartphone you’ve got there, Google. Maybe you should stick to search engines and online maps…………

- I shouldn’t have to ask, but I will: What 5-year-old kid out there doesn’t enjoy brandishing a gun and playing in a house stocked with medieval weaponry? It just seems like a natural match……or at least it does to people like Robert Gormandy of Farmington, N.H. Police in the small town said they found drugs along with the aforementioned gun-toting 5-year-old and medieval weaponry while serving a search warrant at Gormandy’s home. They were called to the apartment because a family member had reported an altercation between Gormandy and a 17-year-old family member. After a preliminary investigation, officers returned a few hours later with a search warrant. Were Gormandy not a moron, he might have viewed that time window as a good opportunity to hide any incriminating evidence, but he obviously didn’t, because when the police returned, they reportedly found Gormandy's 5-year-old child holding a .22-caliber gun. "A five-year-old carrying a gun can definitely be a very dangerous situation," Farmington police Sgt. Scott Ferguson said. Hmm, are you sure it was Sergeant Ferguson and not Captain Obvious? Saying a 5-year-old boy with a gun is dangerous sounds like quite a leap in judgment, Sgt. Ferguson. But the answer to why Gormandy was fighting with his unidentified family member in the first place (and why he may not have been smart enough to get rid of incriminating evidence before officers arrived with the search warrant) could be found in what the cops discovered once they returned: marijuana plants, hallucinogenic mushrooms, growing materials. other drug paraphernalia, handguns, shotguns, rifles, samurai swords, medieval weapons and a homemade 18-inch cannon. Yes, I said a homemade 18-inch cannon. "It was a homemade device with a barrel on it. It was spring-loaded (and) appeared to be possibly to be shot off from the ground or even possibly from your shoulder," Ferguson said. Who builds their own homemade cannon? Well, Farmington police believe Gormandy is a local drug dealer. And to be fair to him, officers said they believe Gormandy did attempt to dispose of drug evidence in a child's toy box inside a dumpster near the home when he learned officers were investigating him. So efforts were made the evade arrest, just not good efforts. In the end, this fool was charged with two counts of felony criminal threatening, one count of endangering the welfare of a child, two counts of manufacture of a controlled narcotic drug, two counts of possession of a controlled drug and one count of possession of a controlled drug with intent to distribute. Quite a laundry list of charges, I have to admit. Considering that those charges are coupled with a 2003 domestic violence conviction that prohibited Gormandy from possessing weapons, I’m guessing dude will be heading to jail for a nice stretch. In the meantime, both the 17-year-old and Gormandy's child were removed from the home and are staying with family members. Hopefully those family members allow that 5-year-old to do what he clearly loves the most: toting loaded guns around………..