Some things I just don’t understand …
• A woman in Sierra Vista was convicted of stealing $3,500 from
a Buena High School student account. She was sentenced to three years
in prison.
NFL player Donté Stallworth (with the lame-ass apostrophe)
consumed four giant tequila drinks at a Miami nightclub, became way
past legally drunk, got in his SUV, and ran down and killed a
57-year-old man. Stallworth served 24 days in jail.
Please explain that to me.
• Accepting an award at the Black Entertainment Television
(BET) Awards a couple of days after Michael Jackson’s death, rapper
Lil’ Wayne said, “Wouldn’t none of us not be here wit’out him.”
Dude, drink some more cough syrup.
• This isn’t funny, but it made me laugh. Last month, all of
the residents of a Flowing Wells-area mobile-home park had to be
evacuated after a fire in an electrical box. The name of the place? The
Aristocrat Trailer Park.
• Careers in the National Football League generally only last a
few years, so players try to cash in as much as possible. Wide
receivers generally have two options: They can be really good and catch
a lot of passes, or they can be flamboyant and outrageous, and hope the
white boys in the media suck up to them in an effort to be down with
the bruthuhs.
Chad Johnson of the Cincinnati Bengals could have taken the first
route (no pun intended), but he settled for the second one instead. On
those rare occasions when he actually scored a touchdown, he always had
a celebration planned that was guaranteed to do two things: Get himself
on TV, and make the fans forget about the six other passes he didn’t
catch. He wears the number 85, and one day during an interview, he told
the reporters that they had to refer to him as “Ocho Cinco,” even
though “85” is “ochenta y cinco.” (If he’s a moron in English, you
can’t expect him to be any smarter in Spanish.)
He then went so far as to have his name legally changed to “Chad
OchoCinco.” He still sucks.
Anyway, on that fateful day a few weeks ago, he Twittered (or
tweeted, or whatever the brain-dead call it), “Okay, first Mrs. (sic)
Fawcett now Mr. Jackson. please tell me that this is a mistaken rumor.
if not this is just as sad as 9/11.”
• Proving that timing is everything, when (still) South
Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford spilled his guts about the “love story”
between him and the woman in Argentina with whom he had been cheating
on his wife, he did so on the day before Michael Jackson and Farrah
Fawcett both died. If he had held out just one more day, that story
would have been buried by a media that mistakenly equates celebrity
with importance.
However, even then, he didn’t have enough sense to just shut up. He
gave more interviews, told of other liaisons, and then uttered the
worst sentence a husband has ever let slip. He said that he was
currently “trying to fall back in love with his wife.”
Lucky her.
• Arizona state Rep. John Kavanagh (R-Fountain Hills) wins the
PC (Paternalistic Condescension) Award for his stated opinion of the
intelligence of the average Arizona voter. Speaking about Gov. Jan
Brewer’s call for a vote in November for a temporary 1-cent-per-dollar
sales-tax increase, Kavanagh looked down his nose and told the
Arizona Daily Star, “There are times when (a public vote) is
appropriate like the protect-marriage amendment which is pretty much a
public moral ethical cultural issue. And then there’s (sic) complicated
economic issues, which should perhaps be best left to the elected
representatives who’ve had a considerable amount of time to study the
complicated issues.”
Wow, first of all, leaving no inapplicable adjective un-invoked, he
says that the proposition banning gay marriage was a “public moral
ethical cultural issue.”
What’s more amazing is that I, an Arizona voter, was able to type
all that stuff on the super-complicated keyboard, which has, like 26
letters on it—in the wrong order!—along with numbers and
punctuation marks and everything! No way I could understand a 1-cent
sales tax and/or the meaning of the word “temporary.”
• It’s really weird how things work out. When the UA men’s
basketball season ended in March, and athletic director Jim Livengood
went looking for a coach to replace living legend Lute Olson, all kinds
of big names were bandied about. My heart sank when it was (prematurely
and incorrectly, as it turns out) announced that then-USC coach Tim
Floyd would be taking over at McKale. He had a cloud of suspicion the
size of the spaceship in Independence Day hanging over his
head.
What a difference a few months make. Floyd turned the UA down, then
resigned at USC in the face of a gathering storm of big-time recruiting
violations. The UA then hired safe, boring Sean Miller, who quickly
went out and assembled a recruiting class ranked in the Top 10 in the
country, including a couple of guys who jumped ship at USC after Floyd
skedaddled.
Now the UA has a great chance to add to its streak of 25 straight
NCAA Tournament appearances—and make some noise in the
tournament.
Some say it’s better to be lucky than good. Just ask Jim
Livenlucky.
This article appears in Jul 30 – Aug 5, 2009.
