- Could it be? Is America finally wising up and realizing what a complete and total waste of time and blight on society the ass hats of Jersey Shore are? Let’s not go that far, at least not yet, but if ratings for the GTLers drunken, scream-filled fourth season in Italy are any indication then MTV might be squeezing the last remnants of life out of its most mindless reality series. Jersey Shore delivered 6.6 million viewers for its season finale, down 13 percent from last season’s final episode. Thirteen percent may not seem like a huge number, but considering the whopping 8.8 million viewers who tuned in for the season premiere this time around, the finale’s number represents a disappointing drop-ff for the network. For each of the show’s past two seasons, the ratings for the season finale was an increase over the previous one - 4.8 million for Season 1, 6.1 million for Season 2 and 7.6 million for Season 3 - until this year. Considering the budget hike MTV made by shipping the Shore meatheads and skanks to Italy for this season, the low finale number is even more disturbing. That brings us back to the question of why viewers aren’t tuning in as much to see Ronnie, Snooki, Paulie D and Co. head-butt walls, fight with each other and be the worst ambassadors possible for America. The early part of the season was predictably chaotic and moronic, but the rest of the cast seemed to tire of the idiocy of The Situation as the year wore on and the mayhem simply wasn’t there toward the end of the season. In other words, unless these IQ-deprived tools are acting like drunken, immature clowns then people don’t care to see them on television. If they’re anything other than boozing, fighting, sexing drama queens with inflated egos, then you can't laugh at them and if you can’t laugh at them, there is nothing interesting left for the Shore. Even so, a fifth season is still going to happen and MTV will continue to extricate every last ounce of life from this disaster before casting it aside and looking for its next mindless reality “hit”…………
- Criminals will do just about anything to evade capture and remain free. Stealing cars, robbing people and breaking a plethora of laws are virtual musts for wanted men (and women) looking to stay out of police custody. Often, changing one’s appearance is also a necessity in order to throw the law off your tracks…..just not to this extent. A Chinese fugitive on the run from police after allegedly stealing 7,000 yuan from a barber's shop where he worked in the eastern city of Changzhou took the concept of disguising himself to a whole new level. Rather than grow his hair long, color it, rock some bushy facial hair or wear glasses, this freak went big with a sex change in an attempt to disguise himself as a woman. The suspect, identified only as Ming in the police report, went on the run in April. Police finally tracked him down this week and were reportedly amazed by his curvy, womanly body. He/she/it confessed to having a cosmetic surgeon perform a breast enhancement operation, but this kook took it to an entirely different level by taking female hormones in the hope that switching genders would throw investigators off his/her/its trail. Authorities are now conducting tests to determine Ming's identity and biological sex, so the case hasn’t been officially solved just yet. Something tells me this isn't going to end up as a movie some day with Harrison Ford playing the role of the fugitive as he/she chases down the real, one-armed barber shop robber………
- The words won't make any different on the duration or hostility of the ongoing NBA lockout, but that doesn’t mean HBO Sports talking head Bryant Gumbel’s asinine remarks about the relationship between NBA commissioner David Stern and the league’s players are any less imbecilic. In his closing commentary on Tuesday's "Real Sports," Gumbel said Stern had "always seemed eager to be viewed as some kind of modern plantation overseer treating NBA men as if they were his boys." Ah, a nice slavery blast. Right, because the man who presides over a league wherein players are paid seven or eight figures a year to play a game and sometimes make millions more in endorsements is completely the same as some loathsome plantation owner forcing slaves shipped from another country to work his land under brutal conditions, surrender all personal freedom and be subject to brutal beatings for no good reason. There are many things wrong with the NBA and its economic model at the moment, but similarity to slavery is not one of them. Don’t confuse Stern and the owners wanting to overhaul the sport’s economic model because both they and the players broke it through sheer stupidity and greed with Stern wanting to dominate and subjugate the players. Gumbel’s ignorant remarks also glossed over the fact that some of the league’s owners are black and they - not Stern - are the ones paying player salaries and making money from the sport. Slave master Stern was sick at the tail end of the work week and it fell to NBA Deputy Commissioner Adam Silver to deliver the initial reply to Gumbel’s comments while filling in for the plantation owner, er, commissioner at an NBA news conference Thursday. "I can't speak for David, and the only personal comment is, I thought it was outrageous," Silver remarked when asked to comment on Gumbel’s remarks. And for once in the three-plus month lockout, someone associated with the lockout actually said something intelligent…………
- Science is at it again, rewriting history and changing what it wad certain of just a few days ago. What part of man’s time on Earth are scientists now revising? Well, it has long been believed by most in the scientific community that the Clovis people were the first humans to populate North America, about 13,000 years ago. However, a new study has poked a hole in that theory and backed up evidence that the first immigrants arrived even earlier. Specifically, a mastodon rib with a bone point lodged in it is the reason that we’re all supposed to believe that people may have come to North America closer to 14,000 years ago. A study led by Michael R. Waters, an archaeologist at Texas A&M University, pegged the age of the mastodon rib at 13,800 years, which is somehow supposed to mean that people lived on the continent before previously believed. “It’s the first hunting weapon found pre-Clovis,” said Waters. “These people were hunting mastodons.” The fossils were actually discovered in the late 1970s at a dig known as the Manis site, near Sequim, Wash., by Carl Gustafson, an archaeologist at Washington State University. However, when Gustafson proposed that the skeleton was about 14,000 years old and that hunters had killed the mastodon with a bone point, other scientists doubted his conclusion. Without current technologies to assess the fossil, the debate remained unresolved. With much better technology at their disposal, Waters and his colleagues — including Dr. Gustafson — were able to use mass spectrometry to date the rib, the bone point and tusks that were found at the site. The team also used CT scanning to more exhaustively study the embedded bone point to confirm that it was a hunting tool. Those tests showed that t the point was more than 10 inches long and that it had been sharpened. “It couldn’t have been anything else,” Waters concluded. He and his team believe the tool may be linked to a people know as the Manis, who like the Clovis people probably migrated to North America from northeastern and Central Asia, making their way over the Bering land bridge through present-day Alaska. “What’s nice about all the pre-Clovis sites is that some had stone tools, and now here we see bone tools, all the rudimentary technologies that we later see in Clovis,” Waters said. Whatever you say, doc. Keep me posted on when you’ll be changing your mind again and revising your theory on when people actually arrived in North America…………
- What is the quickest way to clear out a courthouse? If you want the full effect without all the hazard of possibly going to jail for phoning in a bomb threat, take note of what happened at the Coral Gables Courthouse Friday, when the building after several people got sick and were rushed to a hospital after the building was fumigated. Coral Gables Fire Rescue closed the building after the illnesses were reported late Thursday and it remained closed Friday to due reports of what is being described as a "strange odor." Courthouse personnel attempted to conduct business as much as possible without full building access on Friday. “This is a precautionary measure to protect the public and all personnel who work in the building, and to make the building available to the County for any follow-up testing they may need to do on Friday,” said Chief Judge Joel H. Brown. Some attorneys and clients showed up for their scheduled hearings and trials, only to be turned away. Instead of facing an angry judge, they came face to face with caution tape and a locked door. Local attorney Robert Orovitz turned the sidewalk into a courtroom, meeting with clients and striking deals on the street. "That's the nice part about working something out, even though the court is closed. Because we worked it out, they don't have to come back," said Orovitz. HAZMAT crews scoured the building but did not find any traces of fumigant as the health department launched an investigation of its own. The delay left some accused criminals with an unexpected surplus of free time on their hands as hearings scheduled for Friday were canceled and rescheduled for future dates. The courthouse could reopen as soon as Monday, but an update won't come until later in the weekend. A cynic might argue that some intrepid defendant or defense attorney cooked up the stink scam to delay a trial, possibly buy some time to locate (and “take care of”) a troublesome witness or carry out some other legal shenanigan…………
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