TBS wins the Conan sweepstakes, a computer game leads to murder in Russia and Texas Stadium goes boom

- That’s the best Conan O’Brien could come up with? After the big fit he threw about being ousted from NBC because of uninspired ratings and performance as host of The Tonight Show, rumors were fast and furious as to where O’Brien would land. The leading contender seemed to be Fox, the lone one of the major four networks to not have a horse in the late-night talk show race. Yet after all the buzz and all of the talk, Conan O’Brien is landing with…….TBS? Yes, a basic cable network that makes its mark running Everybody Loves Raymond and Seinfeld reruns is the prime choice for a guy who fancies himself as one of the industry’s funniest guys. "In three months I've gone from network television to Twitter to performing live in theaters, and now I'm headed to basic cable," O'Brien said in a statement. "My plan is working perfectly." Yeah, that would be a lot funnier if it weren’t so sadly true. O’Brien also tried to inject some humor into the situation with a Tweet, writing: "The good news: I will be doing a show on TBS starting in November! The bad news: I'll be playing Rudy on the all new Cosby Show." Again, why don’t you save some of that humor for your late-night show on a second-rate basic cable network, bro? I realize that O’Brien’s pals Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have achieved a lot of success on Comedy Central, another basic cable network, but the key difference there is that those guys are actually funny. O’Brien is simply awkward, occasionally funny in a mild sense and typically just forced and annoying in his comedic attempts. As for his new show, it will be one hour and debut in November at 11/10c after the World Series, airing Monday through Thursday. Way to work a whopping four-day week, CoCo. Oh, and props on serving as the warm-up act for George Lopez's Lopez Tonight. Nothing says you’ve hit the big time quite like opening up for George Lopez. No one really saw this end to Conan’s saga coming, but TBS appears to be very happy with itself and to have a bloated, distorted perception of O’Brien’s comedic talent to match his own self-perception." Conan has been the comedic voice for a generation," said Steve Koonin, president of Turner Entertainment Networks. "TBS already has a huge audience of young comedy lovers, and Conan's show will give these fans even more reasons to watch our network. For decades, late-night TV has been dominated by broadcast television. Now, with a young audience and a growing late-night lineup, TBS is set to be the choice of comedy fans for years to come." Voice of a generation? Huh? Conan isn’t the voice for anything I’m a part of, so I have to dispute that claim. I do find it interesting that O’Brien decided to go with TBS after Lopez called and asked him to join TBS' late-night lineup. Perhaps Rupert Murdoch didn’t see enough potential profits in bringing O’Brien aboard to sign him to a deal with Fox, but this has to be a huge letdown for O’Brien if he were truly honest. In the meantime, he will be embarking on his live comedy tour, Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour, which kicked off Monday in Eugene, Ore. Sadly, a live comedy tour is probably going to be a step up from his gig once the tour ends…………

- Dallas Cowboys fans love their team, but who knew they loved their team’s vacant former stadium nearly as much? In case you missed it, Texas Stadium was imploded Sunday. The former home of America’s Team was demolished as literally thousands of fans looked on. A stadium being blown up remains one of the coolest sights around, bar none. Seeing explosives rip apart a structure and seeing it crumble to the ground in a giant heap of dust and rubble is fun any day of the week, I just didn’t realize how much fun it could be until I saw that thousands of Cowboys fans not only showed up to watch the demolition, but that they actually tailgated it. Yes, there were kooks in the area who set up grills, cooked out and basically acted like it was a normal game day just to see an old, empty stadium get torn down. With more than a ton of explosives in place, the actual demolition took only a few minutes. Casey Rogers, an 11-year-old from nearby Terrell, Tex. was the one to push the remote detonation after winning a national essay contest sponsored by Kraft. "It was really cool. I just want to do it again,” Rogers said. Also on hand was Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who had to be a little sentimental about seeing the demise of a venue where he had seen so much history. "We got to be part of three world championships in that stadium. We have the memories and you can't take that away," Jones explained. To get an idea of just how big this event ended up being, just know that a freaking fireworks display lit up the sky over the stadium in its final moments as those thousands of tailgating kooks took bites out of their brats and threw down a Miller Lite. The demolition cost $6 million, which seems like a steep price to pay for something that lasts less than two minutes. After the initial cloud of dust cleared, three steel structures were left standing. Demolition officials say the implosion was a success and expect the beams to fall when the debris is removed. The scene afterward was quite a mess: 6 million pounds of debris that will be mostly recycled and used for road projects. Officials say it will be several before the site is completely cleaned up, so there is still a chance for intrepid fans to sneak onto the site and steal away a piece of debris to remember the old stadium by…………

- The issue of cyber-bullying and online scams have become an unwelcome staple of social networking sites like Facebook and to address users’ concerns with those issues, Facebook has redesigned and re-launched its Safety Center aimed at parents, educators, law enforcement officials and teens. The safety center address issues like cyber-bullying, how the site works with law enforcement to investigate criminal activity, what you can do if someone has posted a photo of you on Facebook that you don’t like and more. The revised security center launched today and is available to all 400 million of Facebook’s users. It’s overall purpose it to make sure that people are joining ridiculous fan pages, sharing pictures of themselves holding the camera two feet from their face and LOL-ing safely and securely. Facebook Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan addressed the changes in a blog post and gave users and idea of how the page could benefit them. “Safety is Facebook's top priority,” Sullivan wrote. “We've created cleaner, more navigable interfaces to help you find answers to safety questions fast.” To that end, the security center spells out clearer answers to commonly asked questions and makes information on security questions easier to find. Privacy settings are also explained in detail on the new page and new users can learn how to block other users, remove unwanted content from a profile page and anonymously report abusive behavior. The page is the result of Facebook’s collaboration with its Safety Advisory Board and will hopefully help to make Facebook a safer place for its increasingly younger (or older in some cases) user base…………

- Ponying up big money for a digital camera or camcorder is an expense that most of us have to seriously consider and plan for. When you find a good deal on a camera that fits your needs, it’s hard not to get excited about the prospect of scoring a sweet buy. That’s the feeling Jason Hand of Albuquerque, N.M. got when he picked up a digital camera-camcorder last month from Sam's Club on Eubank Boulevard in Albuquerque. He purchased the floor-model camera and even received $100 off the list price. His excitement last right up to the moment he uploaded his family’s Easter pictures from the camera to his computer and got an unexpected bonus: an image of a woman's genitals. Hand said he found three pictures that apparently came with the camera and had not found them before that point. "That's when I noticed, 'Oh my God, there's a picture of an older lady, a young girl--she looked about 10--and a picture of one of their private areas,'" Hand said. He immediately called Sam's Club upon finding the images. "My first thought was this is a returned item, that someone returned to the store and the store just put back on the shelf," he theorized. According to a manager at the store, returned items are sometimes used as floor models, but employees typically check for images left on the camera before putting it out for display. Someone must have missed these images or just thought that some poor, unsuspecting soul would get a kick out of seeing a picture of a total stranger’s private parts at random. Whatever the case, Hand implied that Sam’s Club wasn’t exactly concerned with his problem and all but pointed the finger at him. "They blamed me for doing this," Hand said. "I thought that was unacceptable. There was no customer service at all, no apology." The offensive images on the camera carried date stamps from July and August 2009 and January 2010, months before Hand purchased the camera. None of his five children saw the images, so at least he dodged that bullet. All told, just one more reason not to buy used digital cameras and video cameras from warehouse stores that sell in bulk……….

- When über-conservative, paranoid people argue that video games are terrible for kids and turn them into serial killers while rotting their brains, I never took those arguments too seriously…..until now. When we reach the point that 14-year-old boys in southern Russia is charged with killing his father with a sledgehammer after his parents tried to stop him from playing computer games, it might be time to revisit the topic. The boy, whose identity was not released, is from the coastal town of Tuapse, located by the Black Sea in Russia's southern Krasnodar region. He was clearly spending a lot of his time playing online computer games and when his parents intervened and took away his keyboard, let’s just say the kid didn’t react well. "The parents had taken away the keyboard as a disciplinary measure after he spent a week playing computer games," said Inna Biryukova, a spokeswoman for Krasnodar investigators. After that, things went sideways and became extremely bizarre in a hurry. I’ll allow the region's investigative committee to explain what happened next courtesy of a statement they released about the crime. "At around 1:00 a.m. (local time) on April 12, the suspect dealt his sleeping father at least two blows on the head with a sledgehammer. The man died on the spot from a head injury," the committee said in a statement. So rather than argue with his old man or even try to take back the keyboard by force, the kid elects to go to the shed, pull out a sledgehammer and cave in his father’s skull? Oh, and after the murder, his mother apparently didn’t try to confront him or call the police right away, but instead gave him the keyboard back and the boy played computer games for several more hours until he fell asleep. I repeat, after murdering his father with a sledgehammer, the kid got his keyboard back from moms and calmly sat down to play his beloved computer games for a few more hours. That is creepy, unnerving and any other adjective for making your stomach turn that you want to apply here. Once the boy fell asleep, the mother, who was not injured, contacted relatives who in turn called police. Under Russian law, the boy is old enough to be charged with murder under Russian law and even with no criminal record, he is now being held in pre-trial detention, Biryukova said. Just an all-around bizarre and terrifying story and one that’s enough to make me rethink my entire position on the issue of video and computer games…………