I’m not saying Burress deserves any sympathy, because the moment he decided to attend a nightclub with an unlicensed, loaded firearm tucked in his waistband, he was jeopardizing his life and the lives of others. But did Burress’ actions warrant Bloomberg’s irrational grandstanding? You’d think the mayor of the nation’s largest city would have bigger concerns than the stupidity of a professional athlete. But since when do politicians pass on an opportunity to make themselves the center of attention?

“If we don’t prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law, I don’t know who on earth would,” Bloomberg said Monday. “It makes a sham, a mockery of the law. And it’s pretty hard to argue the guy didn’t have a gun and that it wasn’t loaded. You’ve got bullet holes in and out to show that it was there.”

First of all, the whole argument of, “I would think this guy would have bigger problems” is a commonly used argument that logistically is a sham.  We are complex beings and we can do multiple things at once.  I am surprised Jemele Hill has time to write articles when she isn’t keeping herself alive by eating and breathing while living under shelter.  You see how stupid that is?  The mayor of New York can express concern about someone blatantly violating NYC gun laws while still paying attention to any number of other things.  They aren’t mutually exclusive.  Please can we stop using this argument?

Jemele further digs into a hole with some race baiting.

Why wasn’t the mayor as willing to stand on his soapbox when New York City police officers shot and killed Sean Bell? Bloomberg called for a “thorough” investigation at that time, but he didn’t damn those police officers the way he did Burress. (All three officers were acquitted earlier this year.)

(Head ready to explode.)  POLICE OFFICERS DESERVE THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT.  PLAXICO BURRESS IS NOT A POLICE OFFICER.  On top of this, if you read about the Sean Bell case it isn’t as clear cut as an athlete who is CLEARLY guilty of having a gun in a place where he wasn’t allowed to have a gun, without a license and also handling it in about as hazardous a manner as you can handle a firearm, short of giving it to a child in a crib.

Finally Jemele cements herself as a desperate columnist who will stop at nothing to make a point even if it is based in non-sequiters and base level emotional manipulation.  IE the economy is hurting people right now.  I will link Bloomberg to the bailout and Wall Street in order to criticize his opinion on unlicensed guns floating around the city he is responsible for.

I also wonder why Bloomberg didn’t act this outraged after the American people were forced to bail out some of his Wall Street buddies because of their bad decisions?

Do you wonder why?  I don’t.  He might be outraged, but it isn’t necessarily in his best interest or under his jurisdiction to make a comment about his Wall Street buddies.  Someone carrying a gun in the city is a Bloomberg issue.  Wall Street’s federal bailout is NOT necessarily a Bloomberg issue.  See, there is no need to wonder.  It is easy to see.

Then again, what could I possibly expect from a “columnist” who is so consistently off the mark and hypocritical.

With that being said, is this match set for October 4th on CBS the right stepping stone for Kevin “Kimbo Slice” Ferguson?  Is this the equivalent of when the UFC put Brock Lesnar against Frank Mir?  Or is it an even lower rent version of that?

Frank Mir had disappeared from the competitive landscape before his fight with Lesnar, mostly due to a motorcycle accident in 2004, but even as of this writing the dude is only 29 years old.  Ken Shamrock had a considerably more impressive career than Frank Mir, but the dude is 44 years old now and he hasn’t looked formidable in years.

Shamrock certainly doesn’t look as impressive as he did the day I sold him a set of electric ear and nose hair trimmers in Brookstone in the Copley mall in Boston.  (True story.  Wrestlemania was in town and Ken was in the WWF now WWE for a shot at the Intercontinental belt.  See how I pushed that story in here for no apparent reason?)

Anyway, it should make for an entertaining fight at EliteXC on October 4th on CBS, and it definitely is another step up in opponents for Kimbo Slice.  At the same time, it also proves Dana White’s point when he scoffs at Kimbo Slice as a formidable MMA fighter.  White is on record as saying that Kimbo Slice is an interesting personality, but that he would get smashed by pretty much any fighter that the UFC has under contract.

There is certainly no way of knowing for sure based on who Kimbo Slice has fought thus far, and Ken Shamrock probably won’t be able to provide any kind of proof one way or the other.

I know that our website is lacking any real good functionality, but it is there.  You can find our phone numbers.  You can send us email.  It is a means to something.  I am just saying.  I am considerably less likely to employ your agency to market my business if you haven’t embraced the web as a tool to market your own business yet.

So, maybe you shouldn’t call me anymore.

Polar Bear Doesnt Need to Flush – Watch more free videos

The reason?  This product.

This, looks like an ordinary wireless router, but it isn’t. This is a mobile wifi router from a company called WAAV. It has been announced already that mobile wifi technology will be available in some of next year’s Chrysler cars. This device grabs the mobile data signals from cellular carriers like AT&T or Sprint and broadcasts it inside your car (and about a 50-100 foot radius outside your car) so you can access the internet on the go. This means laptops, video games, and soon enough wifi radios.

This is an important point because if the internet starts being an accessible network on the road in every car, it will certainly marginalize the need for a lot of satellite technology. All that money that Sirius and XM have spent over the years will seem completely wasted as more and more people stop bothering with satellite antennae.

Then, the new merged Sirius/XM company is no longer anything more than a content company. Instead of selling a technology, they are just selling Oprah, Martha Stewart, Opie and Anthony, Howard Stern, NFL Football and Major League Baseball.

Except those last two will probably stop renewing their contracts with Sirius/XM because they won’t need a middleman to broadcast the radio descriptions of their games straight to consumers. So there is one lost selling point for Sirius/XM.

Also, the Sirius/XM music channels will have stiff competition from Slacker and Pandora that use user data to customize radio stations just for you, not to mention iPods which will easily be connected in any car on the road in the next couple of years. As it stands now, I would guess that at least 50% of cars being produced today have MP3 player functionality, at least by way of headphone jack.

It is through this filter that I find all the debate over Sirius/XM so hilarious. These two companies have done an amazing job developing a technology that will be completely unnecessary in a matter of years. As that happens, the content producers will be able to go directly to the consumers more and more, thus marginalizing the need for a company to consolidate talent into a service platform once and for all.

Does this sound like a monopoly to you? It doesn’t sound like a monopoly to me either.

Hat tip to MisterCrunchy, who actually commented on this site well over a year ago that satellite technology was going to be marginalized and obsolete.

Well, folks, the Janet Jackson / Justin Timberlake nipple-gate-pasty-wardrobe-malfunctioning affair is finally over.  The date Justin Timberlake attempted to but really didn’t make Janet Jackson “naked before the end of this song” was February 1st 2004. Yesterday, a Federal Court of Appeals struck down the fine against CBS stations nationwide that totaled $550,000, levied by the seemingly toothless FCC. It makes me happy that the legal process played out this way, but the effects have already been so sweeping that the $550,000 is really the least of the country’s problems. This Janet Jackson nipple has caused sweeping puritanical change in the last 4+ years since it all went down because the FCC was able to get the maximum penalty raised from $27,500 per incident to $500,000 per incident.

Let’s count the ways:

1. Television had to institute delays in most live broadcasts
2. Television producers stopped pushing the envelope on nudity and language in their programming, even after 10 PM
3. Radio tightened up their rules about language.  It is to the point now where lawyers for CBS have instructed the Opie and Anthony Show that they can’t say “douche bag,” or “scum bag,” but they are allowed to use the word “douche,” and “scum,” individually.  The (over)thinking is that the addition of the word “bag” constitutes a “description of a bodily fluid” and thus potential for FCC fines.
4. Howard Stern moved to Sirius Satellite Radio at least partially as a result of the climate created by the event.  Within a month of “nipplegate” Clear Channel, a syndicator or Stern’s show, removed Stern from its stations, citing raunchy material.

And who knows how many more examples there are of “standards and practices” departments at networks getting out of control with censorship.  And this all went down as the result of an event that was EVENTUALLY OVERRULED IN A FEDERAL APPEALS COURT!

That’s just awesome.

How many comedians, entertainers, writers, and other artists have been stifled in the last 4 years, unnecessarily.  The people that live on forever generally push the limits of what we are used to seeing.  How much farther have we been set back?

Luckily, I don’t think we have been set back.  While these companies were overreacting to the FCC and all the mock outrage over this incident, it has caused other avenues to thrive.  Today, some of the most popular shows in the country have existed on HBO, Showtime, FX and other cable outlets that don’t censor themselves.  While the networks have spent time nitpicking show creators on their networks, we have had the pleasure of watching the final seasons of The Sopranos, The Wire, Weeds, Dexter, Lucky Louie, Big Love, Rescue Me and what is reportedly the only show that Comedy Central doesn’t censor, South Park.

While the satellite radio companies seem set to merge because of negative economic realities facing the two companies, it isn’t a referendum on the content that the companies tend to put out.  It is more a statement about the delivery method that the companies bought into with satellites.  Still, as the first “cable” networks for radio, XM and Sirius have thrived content-wise with Opie and Anthony, Howard Stern, Ron and Fez, and others who all do uncensored talk.  In addition XM and Sirius have channels that play songs and comedy unaltered for language like terrestrial radio has to play them.

I would like to think that the tightening of rules has actually pushed people to these alternative outlets over the years.  So while I think that the reaction to this event was stupid, maybe we will look back at it one day as the catalyst that the U.S. needed to push the boundaries in different directions to places outside of the ridiculous realm of “indecency” that is created and monitored by a governmental group that has almost no checks and balances.

It may have taken more than 4 years, but there is some sense of justice in seeing these fines overturned.

And think about that for a second. How much dog fighting can possibly be taking place around the country? Granted it is an awful thing, but with basically less than a handful of people nationwide participating in this activity, the amount of time that we have spent talking about it as a nation is completely disproportionate.

Anyway, I was watching the segment on Bryant Gumbel’s HBO show and the story hit a breaking point for me where I just couldn’t watch it anymore. It is one thing to have all these animals bred to fight for money. How these “Dog Men” get their pit bulls trained to fight like that is where these people truly hit their lowest points. As I am watching they start talking about how these trainers will kidnap people’s pets right out of the backyard, take them to their fighting pits, duct tape their mouths shut and allow their killer pit bulls to just ravage someone’s pet.

This didn’t totally surprise me, but then Real Sports showed a clip of one of these helpless animals basically using the black lab defense pose where they roll on their back, while a pit bull systematically circled it and dismantled someone’s pet.

After about three seconds of this clip, I looked at my remote, hit the stop button and erased the show from my DVR. But, the damage has already been done. Now, I have to think about this horrendous thing all the time, even though the occurrence of dog fighting, nationwide, is a really statistically insignificant type of occurrence.

Being informed sucks.

Digg users enjoyed the article. Except for the ones who are pissed at the use of the term CPU to describe a computer controlled opponent with artificial intelligence.

So then mayhem ensues. Geek computer guys vs. Geek gamers who have always referred to the artificial intelligence in games as “the CPU player.”

I don’t know which side of the fence that I am supposed to be on, but the comments on the story are hilarious. Keep in mind that when a comment isn’t popular it gets “Digged down” and you might have to click “show comment.”