- Cue Ron Burgundy because that certainly escalated quickly. And it really - and I do mean REALLY - got out of hand. One minute, the Tennessee Titans are playing great football and seemingly headed for a win that would, ultimately, tie them for first place in the AFC South. They have the best running back in football, a promising young quarterback who has overcome plenty of personal demons to reclaim his starting job…..and then not. In the span of three hours Sunday afternoon, the Titans lost a football game and perhaps the man they believed was their franchise quarterback. That man is fifth-year quarterback Vince Young, who apparently will not be around to help the Titans as they attempt to take advantage of what should be a fairly easy schedule down the stretch. The game began well enough, with Young completing 12 of 16 passes for 165 yards, no touchdowns and no interceptions, but an overall solid effort. He did enough to keep his team in the game even if the fans booed he and the offense lustily throughout the game. Still, Young tore a flexor tendon in his right thumb when he hit his hand on a helmet on a 37-yard completion to Nate Washington late in the third quarter and after staying in to hand the ball off on the next play, he left the game and went to get his hand taped. A tape job tends not to be enough to fix a torn tendon, so Young as unable to return to the game and Tennessee head coach Jeff Fisher turned to rookie backup Rusty Smith, in that spot because veteran backup Kerry Collins is out indefinitely with a calf injury. "Vince tore a flexor tendon in his thumb and I was not satisfied with his ability to control the ball, so I stayed with Rusty," Fisher said. "He never said to me he was OK and wanted to go back in, and I was told he was a little upset after, and I was also told he threw half his uniform in the stands." That’s right, dude lobbed his shoulder pads into his stands because he was angry about being injured and unable to return to the game, always a mature play. After that, Young reportedly stormed out of LP Field and on his way out, he apparently dropped his job as the team’s starting quarterback. Fisher said following Sunday's game that Young has lost his job as starter and explained that there was "no excuse" for Young's behavior. That may not seem like a big deal for a player who could well be headed for season-ending surgery, but Fisher’s tone made it sound like Young’s tenure with the franchise could well be over. All that in a span of three hours……..
- Is anyone surprised? Nerds ruled at the box office this weekend, with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows drawing out all manner of pale, dorky, socially awkward magic lovers to see their favorite fake wizard do his thing on the big screen and propel the latest adaptation of one of literary one-trick pony J.K. Rowling’s books to the top of the earnings charts. The film made $125.1 million for its opening weekend to easily rout the rest of the field. Seriously, no other movie was within $100 million of Harry Potter. The closest pursuer was the previous two weekends’ box office champ, Megamind, which made $16.2 million to finally inch over the $100 million mark at $109.5 million - the very same $100 million mark Harry Potter eclipsed in a span of four days. Third place went to Unstoppable, which dropped off by 42 percent in its second weekend but still made $13.1 million to raise its cumulative total to $41.9 million and counting. Coming in fourth was Due Date, which held fairly steady (only declining 41 percent) and made an additional $9.2 million to elevate its overall tally to $72.7 million. Last among the top five ways The Next Three Days, which was a ginormous flop in its first weekend despite the name value of noted chain-smoker Russell Crowe. The thriller proved to be not all that thrilling, making a paltry $6.8 million despite opening in 2,564 theaters. Rounding out the rest of the top 10 were: Morning Glory (No. 6 with $5.2 million after a 43-percent drop-off and a cumulative take of $19.9 million), Skyline (plummeting further and faster than any other movie on the weekend - 71 percent! - and making just $3.5 million to ease its total up to $17.6 million for two weekends), geezer spy comedy Red (No. 8 with $2.5 million in its sixth weekend of release, giving it an impressive cumulative total of $83.6 million), Lionsgate’s For Colored Girls (No. 9 with an unimpressive $2.4 million after a 63-percent drop and an equally unimpressive running total of $34.5 million) and Fair Game (No. 10 with $1.5 million, meaning it has made a whopping $3.7 million in three weekends of limited released). Dropping from the top 10 from last weekend was the extremely profitable Paranormal Activity 2, which descended to 12th this weekend…………
- Interested in a Droid phone for one cent? If so, Amazon.com has a deal for you, my friend. The web retailer is offering all Droid phones for a penny……assuming that you’re willing to sign up for a new Verizon Wireless contract. On the one hand, you can get any of Verizon's U.S. Droid phones, including the Droid X and new Droid Pro, essentially for free, through November 22. If you sign up for a new account, you’ll also receive a $35 credit to cover the full cost of activating the phone. On the other hand, you’re limiting yourself to Verizon as a service provider, so there is a tradeoff. Still, this seems to be a sign that the intensifying smartphone competition across all carriers is sparking a race to the bottom in pricing. Up to now, the $199 price point has remained the low end of the spectrum, but Amazon bucked that trend back in August when it reduced the price of the Samsung Vibrant to one cent. Jeff Bezos’ crew followed that up by selling two Windows 7 phones -- the HTC Surround and LG Quantum -- for one cent with a two-year contract from AT&T. They even threw in some BlackBerry, Android and Palm models. Honestly, the only people with a huge beef when it comes to these one-cent deals are new customers, whose best option is upgrading their phones and extending their current contract in exchange for a discounted phone -- for the Droid X, it's currently $49.99. Of course, if you’re someone like me who has held out on the cell phone revolution and remains one of the five people in the world without one, none of this matters anyhow……..
- Simply put, if your election doesn’t have some form of fraud, then it ain’t true democracy. An election is not legit until someone tries to rig voting machines, buy votes, destroy or discard votes they don’t like or intimidate voters not on their side into not voting at all. So while some might recoil in horror at an audio recording featuring two men are heard speaking in Dari, with the distinct accent of the western city of Herat, Afghanistan, as they negotiate terms for rigging more than a dozen races in Afghan’s parliamentary elections, I find myself strangely pumped up. Trying to rig an election, in a perverse way, is showing respect to the process. If the election were worthless and its results irrelevant, then no one would bother trying to rig it. According to the country’s Independent Election Commission, one of the men is Abdul Rashid Irshad, a low-level staffer in the commission’s Kabul headquarters. On the tape, Irshad doesn’t exactly sound like a voice of authority, but his conversation partner, known warlord and current member of President Hamid Karzai’s cabinet Ismail Khan, sounds like he’s the scumbag running this show. Irshad claims to have control over what Khan wants, namely the ability to turn a half-dozen winning parliamentary candidates into losers, and losers who were favorites of Mr. Khan into winners. “When you talk you seem worried,” Mr. Khan says. “I am afraid you will ruin things.” Striking the perfect tone of weasel-ness and timidity, Irshad meekly replies, “To be honest, your excellency, we have to be worried because we are under pressure here.” The tape throws more uncertainty into an election so fraught with fraud that 1.3 million votes — about a quarter of the total — have already been thrown out. While this case of fraud is relatively minor, it puts a real face on a serious issue. While corruption is believed to have affected only a small portion of Afghanistan’s political races and the Independent Election Commission and the Election Complaints Commission has spoken confidently about the validity of the voting results, Khan and Irshad are exactly the sort of slimy election-fixers the commission is attempting to weed out. On Sunday, the complaints commission gave its final ruling on more than 2,000 charges, ultimately disqualifying 21 more candidates on the grounds of election fraud to bring the total of disqualified candidates to 25 overall. Official certification of the voting results is expected later this week. Ironically (or perhaps not so ironically), 13 of the final 21 disqualified candidates are supporters of President Karzai. The results are expected to leaver Karzai with a Parliament that has an even smaller minority of members loyal to him than he had expected. Fittingly, the eradication of fraud this time around could undo some of the damage done when that very same type of fraud helped Karzai steal, er, um, win his presidential election last year. Sucks when the shoes is on the other foot, eh Karzai……..
- There are precious few things in this world more amusing than watching pathetic losers who spend hours or even days camping out in line for free or heavily discounted electronic goods. The sight of adults scrapping with one another over who cut in front of who in line, going to the bathroom on themselves (which actually has happened) and looking like disheveled hobos with wrinkled clothes and unshaven faces all in the name of a cheap laptop that they may be too far back in line to get their hands on is hilarious. But every now and then, these losers strike it rich and get the cheap or free crap they wait in line for. Count über-losers Lorie Davenport and Tina Thain of St. Petersburg, Fla. in that category. These two were actually rewarded for their loser-dom by their local Best Buy, which gave the women iPads for being the store's first customers in line for Black Friday nationwide, calling them the 'First Family of Black Friday.' Davenport and her family have no life to the point that they have literally set up a tent in the Best Buy parking lot. "We have a group of 10 this year," said Davenport. "So we're rotating shifts according to work schedules and family time and when they need to shower and eat." ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME? Hey losers, how pathetic and materialistic must your life be if you have nothing better to do than camp out in the parking lot of an electronics chain store for a freaking week? What, are you tools going to set up a portable kitchen there and cook your Thanksgiving dinner on the engine block of your car? Go home, celebrate the holiday and if you must, get up at an ungodly hour Friday to go jam into the line with all of the other freaks. "We make our Christmas list," Davenport stated. "We find out all the deals at other stores. We get our game plans together. Some of our family really thinks we're crazy.” Some? The ones who don’t are just as big of losers as you freaks are. And what are you doing encouraging these ass hats, Best Buy? Don’t give them free iPads, don’t leave lights on in the parking lot and certainly don’t have police on hand to beef up patrols for security. Leave these clowns to their own devices, let some of St. Petersburg’s finest hoodlums and miscreants take care of them and I guarantee they won't ever camp out for Black Friday again. Problem solved and you’re welcome……….
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