- It must be nice to be sent to solitary confinement only to receive a pick-me-up when someone brings you word that your new album hit No. 2 on the Billboard 200 chart for the week. Most inmates - and I base this largely on viewings of The Shawshank Redemption - spend their solitary confinement stint in a dark, cramped cell, eating meals fed through a slot in the door and with occasional visits from the warden warning them that they’re going to keep running his massive money laundering and racketeering scam lest they be put on the same floor of the prison as the most violent and predatory convicts. But not Lil Wayne, who was sent to confinement during the last days of his weapons-charges prison sentence for stashing a non-prison-issue iPod charger and headphones in his cell. He apparently tried to hide the contraband in an empty potato chip bag in a trash bin, but to no avail. Had Lil Wayne watched The Shawshank Redemption a few dozen times like I have, he would have known that the warden would find the prohibited item there but not in the hole in the wall he had carved with a geological rock hammer smuggled into the prison by Morgan Freeman. So it was off to "punitive segregation" for the rapper, who will now remain in solitary confinement 23 hours a day and won't allowed to socialize with other inmates, watch TV, or listen to music--until his November 4 release. Having never been in “punitive segregation” (isn’t all segregation punitive in some sense?), I can't say for sure, but I’d imagine that even a top-selling album wouldn’t make your days much easier if you were set to spend the better part of a month locked inside a small, isolated cell for 23 hours of every day. But once he endures the next few weeks, Weezy can revel in having I Am Not A Human Being sell 110,000 copies in its first week of digital-only release, scoring that success even though the album has yet to have a physical release. Eleven of his songs also held down spots on the Hot Digital Songs chart, ranking him second behind only the "Glee" cast's 12 entries on the list. The album’s success was undoubtedly buoyed by his new video with Eminem for the song “No Love,” which Lil Wayne shot just prior to reporting to prison……….
- Allow the annual BCS debate over giving one-loss teams the chance to play in the misnamed BCS national championship game to begin. Every year, a one-loss SEC team that is highly esteemed and believed to be among college football’s best teams emerges and the “experts” debate whether that one-loss team from the supposed best conference in college football should play for the national championship ahead of undefeated teams from “lesser” conferences. This year’s debate will likely center around Alabama, which was the No. 1 team in the nation until South Carolina manhandled it 35-21 Saturday for the Gamecocks’ first-ever win over a top-ranked team. Aside from vaulting South Carolina coach Steve Spurrier, a.k.a. The Ol’ Ballcoach, back to national prominence (which is always good for college football), the outcome sticks Alabama with its first loss since the 2008 season and dropped the Crimson Tide to No. 8 in the new ESPN/USA Today coaches’ poll, which is a key component in the BCS rankings that (wrongly) determine who will get the opportunity to play for the national championship. Oddly enough, the Gamecocks are two spots lower than the very team they just defeated, which makes sense nowhere in the world except perhaps college football and even there, it’s sensical quality is dubious. The SEC has the seventh through tenth spots in the poll, but only Auburn and LSU remain undefeated in the conference at this point. With Alabama’s fall from the ranks of the unbeaten, Ohio State assumes the mantle of the nation’s top team, with red-hot and seemingly unstoppable Oregon on its heels and Boise State regaining the No. 3 spot it lost to Oregon last week after the Ducks battered Stanford at home. But with seven unbeaten teams ahead of it, Alabama is inexplicably still considered to be in the national championship race by many so-called experts and will likely remain there unless a second loss is forthcoming this season………
- I think I have Nextel’s next advertising campaign locked and loaded. “Buy our phone and you just might save your life the next time someone is attempting to shoot and kill you.” Okay, so the wording needs to be tweaked, but the basic idea is there and it’s there because of Juan Camarena of New York, N.Y. Seems that my man j. Camarena was confronted by a bitter, gunptoting ex-building superintendent at the apartment building where Camarena had just started his new job as a handyman. The building, located at 29 West 119th Street in Harlem, was the scene as Camarena went about his business and the ousted super, bitter about being fired and losing his apartment, came looking for some payback. Rather than attempting to shoot the man who took his place, he allegedly tried to kill the handyman his successor hired. Fortunately for Camarena, his Nextel phone in a pocket was in between he and the speeding bullet. When the shooter opened fire, Camarena only ended up with a scratch on his stomach because his Nextel stood between him and a bullet. The alleged shooter is clearly a loose cannon who flipped out after being ousted, going so far as to warn both the new building super and Camarena that, "You'll save yourself a lot of trouble by not working here." Both men brushed off the threat, but this kook was serious about his threat and showed up in the building Thursday morning. While Camarena went about his work in the stairwell between the second and third floors, he was confronted by the gun-wielding kook. "He said to me, 'You have to get the f*** out here right now,' with his hand in his pocket," Camarena said. "When we go to put away the broom, the guy takes [the gun] out of his pocket and bang, shoots." Witnesses reported hearing shots, but what they didn’t know was that a simply, mid-level Nextel cell phone had absorbed the impact of the bullet and saving the life of the intended murder victim. "I'm still alive, thank God," Camarena said. "That Nextel saved me." Police have surveillance footage of the shooter leaving the scene to go with Camarena’s eyewitness account, so here’s hoping this jilted super doesn’t stay at large long………..
- Well that just ruined my plans for a morning swim in northern California. Suffice it to say that seeing an 80-foot pregnant blue whale wash ashore would dampen anyone’s day, especially when the whale in question is DOA. The mammoth creature washed ashore last weekend after apparently colliding with a ship, winding up on a rocky beach in Bean Hollow State Park near Pescadero. Researchers spent this past week inspecting and analyzing the whale, which is believed to be the first such animal to wash up on U.S. shores. The blue whale, which is the world’s largest known creature, is massive enough that even this particular whale's fetus is 17 feet long. Researchers collected tissue and bone samples from the whale's 75-ton carcass concluded Wednesday and speculated that the best likely it died of blunt-force trauma, likely in a collision with a large boat. "Because the whale was on its back, we couldn't tell anything as far as possible cause of death," said Guy Oliver of the Long Marine Lab. "I'd say it probably died four to five days (before reaching the shore). The fetus was about 50 feet from the carcass, and most likely came out, after it died, from a discharge of gas pressure." According to Oliver, the last known beaching of a blue whale was in 1979, when the 87-foot skeleton of a whale washed up in Fiddler's Cove near Pescadero. That skeleton is now on display at the Long Marine Lab, but the bones of this new beached whale aren’t likely to end up as part of a matching set. The whale was discovered last weekend by tourists walking along the sea in Bean Hollow State Park got a surprise last weekend. "I literally had to step back a few feet and say 'Oh my gosh! This isn't real!'" recalled park visitor Marcia Yaw. And as happens in all such situations where a living thing of any genus, species, phylum or kingdom dies, losers with no life have shown up to leave flowers and other trinkets next to the whale's body. But the real question to be asked here is what the boat that hit this poor whale must look like right about now………
- Another weekend, another win for Social Network. For the second time in as many weeks of release, the Facebook-centric flick based on bestselling author Ben Mezrich’s book about the meteoric rise of the popular social networking site and its creator, has scored the top spot at the box office. With a $15.5 million haul, the movie dropped only 31 percent its second weekend for a total gross of $46 million after just 10 days in release. Three new releases expected to provide competition for the film fell flat, as Life As We Know It actually earned a lot more than an unimaginative, horrible comedy like it should ever make, yet finished in second place with $14.6 million. Aside from the name value of Katherine Heigl and Josh Duhamel, Life had little to offer beyond stale humor, jokes that fell flat and an over-the-top promotional machine. Third place went to another newbie, the Diane Lane horse flick Secretariat. The Disney offering made $12.6 million and rated especially well with female moviegoers. Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole was fourth on the list as the holdover made $7 million its third weekend in release for a disappointing cumulative tally of $39 million. In fifth place was the master of the unimaginative, predictable and poorly acted horror movie, Wes Craven, with his new film My Soul to Take, which earned $6.9 million in over 2,500 theaters. A whopping 86 percent of that total came from 3-D screens, a total that should drop off steeply one 3-D theaters move on to bigger, more attractive prospects. The remainder of the top 10 was comprised of: Ben Affleck’s The Town (No. 6 with $6.3 million its fourth weekend in theaters and nearly $74 million total), the indescribably bad Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (No. 7 with $4.6 million for a $44 million cumulative total that clearly indicates that the film will fall far short of making the impact that “Bong Hit” Oliver Stone’s original incarnation of Gordon Gecko and friends made in the ‘80s), Easy A (No. 8 with $4.2 million to continue boosting its profit margin, having made $50 million after being produced on an $8 million budget), disappointing horror movie Case 39 (No. 9 with $2.6 million in its second week of release) and Disney’s You Again, which continues to sink like a stone and made a paltry $2.5 million in its third weekend of release to claim the No. 10 spot on the list. Stay tuned next weekend to see if two drastically different films - Jackass 3-D and the geezer action flick Red - open………
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