Archive for July, 2007

Man leads police on a car chase.  News helicopters are covering it from the air.  News helicopters collide, crash, and kill the cameraman and pilot in each chopper.  Police catch man several hours later, and may charge him with the deaths from the helicopter crash.  wtf?    doesn’t quite seem right to me.

Is it just me, or is Weird Al‘s polka-fied version of Float On, from Polkarama! on Straight Outta Lynwood, better than the Modest Mouse original?

I’m thinking Prof. Farnsworth should create a box that contains a universe where Weird Al is the real artist and everyone else is parodying his songs.

I’ve recently added Entourage to my list of must-see tv, and it got me thinking that I should do a small writeup of the two shows that have grabbed my attention in the last few months.

Entourage – This HBO series is currently in its fourth season, and was nominated for seven Emmy awards this year. Being an HBO series, there are no commercial breaks, but that also means you are less likely to be able to watch it, due to it being an HBO series.

It centers on a young movie star and his entourage (go figure). The star of the show is Vincent “Vinny” Chase, with the other major characters being his best friend/manager Eric “E” Murphy, his older brother Johnny “Drama” Chase, his friend/driver Turtle, and his agent Ari Gold (who is played by the awesome Jeremy Piven).

It was originally based on the experiences of executive producer Mark Wahlberg as an up and coming star in Hollywood, but the later seasons are pure fiction.  Entourage airs Sunday night at 10PM EST, with numerous repeats throughout the week.

TapouT - This is another show I came across channel surfing in the hotel. It airs on the Versus channel, which used to be the Outdoor Sports Network or something like that. It is about a mixed martial arts (MMA) apparel company (named TapouT), as they look for young fighters to sponsor as they try to make it big in the MMA world.

Each episode focuses on one fighter, as the TapouT crew picks them up at their gym, and drives them to their first fight under their sponsorship. It’s not going to win any awards, but its fun to watch if nothing else is on.

And I couldn’t write about TV shows without saying that all of the following are fantastic: Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe, Firefly, Lost, and Prison Break.

On Monday, the newspaper reported former neighbors of Donaghy in Pennsylvania said they were approached more than a year ago by a private investigator they believed was hired by the NBA to check into Donaghy’s gambling habits.

from ESPN

So the league may have known since last year that he was gambling. The FBI didn’t tell the NBA they were investigating until after the finals, but Stern may have been running his own investigation (without the FBI, mind you) last year. Did he stop the guy from reffing (let alone betting on the games he reffed)? Of course not. But he did take action before the season started:

“They are going to be very conscious of player complaining,” Riley said last week. “That’s one of the big things with them. Every call, there’s always 10 guys complaining to the officials. They’re just telling them to cut it out.”

from ESPN

Yes, he took his foreknowledge of gambling and game fixing and enacted a zero-tolerance policy to forestall player complaints about the refs. The refs are allowed to cheat, but the players cannot protest this. This guy gives slimey mold a bad name.

Stern, I’ve said it to you before and I WILL say it again: “fuck you.”

Here’s the sitch at my office: the USPS will not deliver our mail.  The other company in this building gets their mail delivered.  They have an acceptable mail box and the mailperson delivers our mail to their box sometimes.  Reason: they don’t want to get out of the car.  Seriously.

Did the policy change?  Not recently – apparently the new person running the route is following rules never followed before or they are not following their rules at all.

Sometimes we get our mail from the other company. They got a package delivered today – by hand, inside the building – but didn’t want to accept responsibility for our package.  So the mailjerk takes the package for our company, leaves the building, gets in their little mailmobile and leaves.  No package for us.  They were already in the building, up the stairs on the second floor – closer to the intended recipient of the 7th Harry Potter contained within the package than to the exit – but left anyway.

These are the actions of an individual, not the fault of the entire USPS and yet this is a condemnation of the entire USPS. The people on the phone will not do anything.  They haven’t yet managed to tell us where we can place a mailbox to receive our mail.  They haven’t taken action with the delivery driver.  “How do we get our mail?” we ask, in different words, every day for the last several weeks.  There are no answers.  They won’t give us phone numbers for anyone higher up in the organization, they have only 1 piece of advice for our complaints:
“Send a letter.”

I shit you not.  These lobotomized lazy-bots are so horribly stupid and/or unconcerned with customer service that they – real live human beings, no less – actually tell us to complain about our mail not getting picked up or delivered by sending a letter.

Bring on the nuclear war; the human race is a failed experiment.

What’s your favorite thing to step in right after waking up from a refreshing nap? My fave is gently digested salmon paste. It looks just like undigested salmon paste, only a little smoother. Cat gullets have a smoothing effect on fish-based food compounds.

What’s your favorite way to relax after a delicious meal? Me, I like my nose to bleed so I can spend 5 minutes in the loo getting it to stop. I also enjoy a rousing 15 more minutes of restarts and stops following the initial stoppage of play.

According to my mail today I am eligble to win $5,000/week for life, thanks to PCH, so I got that going for me…

Update: As if le monde couldn’t get any more retarderized: 24: The (24 hour long) Movie