Tuesday, June 27, 2017

Aliens riding shotgun, "Better Call Saul" gets extended and Taco finds his Bueno


- Future NFL draft picks, take notice: Taco Charlton is your new role model. His given name is Vidauntae Charlton and if he was content rolling through life with that clunky moniker, he would not now be the owner of a nice, new endorsement deal with the purveyors of quasi-Mexican food known as Taco Bueno. Taco Charlton was drafted by the Dallas Cowboys earlier this year and given the area of the country to which he was headed, it was a virtual surety that a Mexican restaurant was going to make a deal with the former University of Michigan defensive end. "We had meetings with a bunch of restaurants that sell tacos and we were looking for a long-term relationship," said Joel Segal, Charlton's agent and president of Lagardere team sports. After weeks of intense negotiations (presumably over free chips and salsa), Taco Bueno won out. The 3,000-employee company has more than 180 stores in seven states, nearly half of them within the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area. "I actually fell asleep towards the back end of the first round of the draft," Taco Bueno CEO Mike Roper said. "But when I woke up in the morning, my phone lit up with the news that the Cowboys had drafted a Taco. We had to do something." And do something they did, signing a man who admitted that he does love him a good taco and who, as part of this deal, will have the chance to come up with some new offers for customers. Future draftees, find a popular product whose name you can rock, make sure it catches on before you turn pro and you too can watch the dollar, dollar bills roll in……


- No proof is not proof of innocence, Brazilian president Michel Temer. Temer is facing a new round of corruption charges against him and he’s choosing to respond with a very, very clichéd and predictable response, one in which he denounces the charges against him as fiction on the grounds that there is no proof that he took bribes. Nothing screams innocence quite like insisting that your opponents can’t prove your guilt and sadly, that was the foundation of Temer’s first comments since the attorney general formally accused him of corruption earlier this week. In an address clearly meant to rally his supporters, Temer spoke to reporters and allies in the capital Brasilia, proclaiming that his career and life had been "productive" and "clean." Given that he’s following a president who was dogged by our own similar allegations, Temer knows that the heat on him is intense. He’s also a career attorney, which means he’s no stranger to such allegations being thrown around, but he believes that his legal background merely qualifies him to know when accusations have a legitimate basis and when they don't. His wasn’t exactly the most rabid defense of oneself, as he ended up coming off more butt hurt than anything else when he labeled the accusations against him as  "an attack on my personal dignity." But certainly not an attack on your competent governance of Brazil, because the South American nation hasn’t seen any of that yet……


- It hasn’t been nearly explosive as the show from which it was spun off, but “Better Call Saul” is proving it has some staying power of its own, apart from “Breaking Bad.” AMC has renewed the spin-off show for a fourth season, keeping alive the “Breaking Bad” legacy after the hit show built around a teacher who becomes a meth magnate after being diagnosed with terminal cancer went off the air in 2013. “Saul” debuted two years later, following the story of lawyer James “Jimmy” McGill, a.k.a. Saul Goodman, who came to run the legal side of Walter White’s burgeoning criminal enterprise in “Breaking Bad.” Bob Odenkirk stars in “Saul,” which is set six years before the start of the original show. The renewal is for a 10-episode fourth season that will air in 2018, but the question fans want to know is whether the fourth season will also be the show’s last. Co-creator Peter Gould didn’t exactly assuage those fears when he spoke about the show’s future. “I will say I think this show has a definitely limit to it. It’s a story with a beginning and a middle and a definite end. I have to say, I would rather have it end too soon than go on too long,” Gould said. The third season began in April and aired its final episode earlier this month, with Season 3 bringing the long-awaited debut of “Breaking Bad” character Gus Fring. Season 4 will have immense hype of its own, especially since the end may be nearer than anyone knows for Saul and friends………


- Kooks are everywhere. Sometimes, they’re riding shotgun with a person who’s speeding through a small town in Georgia, oblivious to the fact that the long arm of the law is about to reach down and bring their day to an abrupt halt. Police in Alpharetta, Georgia had themselves what had to be one of their funnier traffic stops in recent memory when one of their officers pulled a man over on a suburban highway, approached the car and found a certified bag of weird sitting in the passenger seat. The driver was pulled over for driving 84 mph, which is over the limit just about anywhere in the United States, but it was the life-sized doll of a big-eyed, large-skulled alien in the passenger seat that drew the officer’s attention. Police spokesman George Gordon tried to explain the odd scene, but seemed to be at a loss for words. "He did not mention as to why he had an out of this world passenger,” the wise-cracking spokesman said. Maybe the reason he was rolling dirty with an extraterrestrial was explained by the fact that, despite being well over the speed limit, he got off with a verbal warning. Memo to all Georgia drivers and visitors: Stick some sort of artificial alien life form in your car if you plan on breaking traffic laws and you too could get off with just a warning. The officer managed to laugh off the stop and even took a few photographs of the safety-belted alien police the department later posted on social media. Of course, any traffic stop that doesn’t involve a drunk, belligerent, high or raging maniac inside the car is probably a nice break for police, so an oversized alien doll is probably not too difficult to deal with……..

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