|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
What a marathon weekend. Let's wrap up a big binnallofamerica.com weekend with the long awaited July 4th edition of News Watch.
Today ... after 6 months of grueling competition ... the Noory Story Showdown Champion is revealed. We do things a little different in honor of this historic News Watch, by kicking it off with the NSS Champion being crowned. Following that, your Hot 5 Stories of the Week, Future News Now, That's Entertainment !, My Fandom : Year 2, and an editorial on the Fourth of July.
The Noory Story Showdown
This Week's Point Getters : The final week of the Noory Story Showdown saw some serious scrambling to grab points and get to that coveted top spot, claim victory, and become the first ever NSS Champion, winning the $40 shopping spree to the binnallofamerica.com store and a lifetime of bragging rights. Well, a lot of that effort was thwarted by four replay episodes and a guest host who didn't even bother to read headlines (Ian Punnett). Therefore the scoring is low.
Streamlinkers : No points scored.
theUSofE.com : Baemark picked up one point with "Voice of Tigger dies", ready by Chris McGill on Monday. Oscar scores one point with "White House embraces massive intelligence changes" read by Hilly Rose on Wednesday.
Notes : I will allow one week for anyone who wishes to contest the final point tally with any stories that were missed.
Noory Story Showdown I final standings on 7.4.5 : Baemark (25), Oscar (23), mirage (16), Degataga (15), Templar (9), Dennis (6), Jerikai (4), FAZER (3), dark matter (3), Valkryie (2), SomeAverageJoe (2), SimpleComplexities (2), TxStarGazer (2), Raven (2), shanesq1 (1), jerseyred (1), Dustminer (1), afeent1 (1), crimsonadam (1), sideshow (1), outuvbody (1), al138 (1), sinimat (1)
Winner : baemark
Runners Up : Oscar and Mirage.
Notes : baemark wins a $40 dollar shopping spree to the official binnallofamerica.com store. Oscar and Mirage win binnallofamerica.com T-Shirts and a surprise mystery prize. Please send me your mailing addresses for delivery of the prizes.
Don't forget :
Hot 5 Stories of the Week
I don't know what's creepier, that they have a "wife carrying" competition or that Estonia has won it eight years straight. Okay, probably the first part. We all know Estonia is quite skilled at human trafficking.
Despite what many feminists may say, it appears the wives in these competitions are in favor of the challenge of being carried. I saw a segment on these events on one of those newfangled news magazine shows and those wives sure liked the competition, until their husbands fell in the pool or collapsed in the obstacle course.
Forty couples from 10 countries gathered in the remote Finnish village of Sonkajarvi to complete a 253.5-meter-long obstacle course. A man must carry a woman, not necessarily his spouse, through a pool and across hurdles. It took a blue ribbon panel to produce what I've been harping about here in News Watch for six months : NASA smells and they are about to be trounced by the rest of the world in space travel. Thankfully, the nerds who produced this study came up with some reasons why NASA is awful. One is that all the smart folks seem to be leaving the US and the schools in India and China are producing the proverbial "rocket scientists", leaving poor ol' US with your average American genius.
Who'd work with NASA anyway ?
"Around the world, the United States was long considered to be the unchallenged leader in all aspects of space exploration and technology. That is no longer the case," the two wrote in a report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 3>Experts Don't Expect More Cases of Mad Cow (AP via myway.com)
File this one under : US asleep at the wheel ... again. So they found a cow with mad cow disease, took over a year to be certain about it, and then said that it is unlikely we'll see anymore Mad Cow. Unlikely ?! binnall News Watch prediction : At least one more cow will be found with Mad Cow in the US before the end of 2006. Bank on it.
Anyone with any doubt, I recall to you a story I heard on C2C, I believe, in which a ranch somewhere out west was testing their own cows for the disease. Each and every cow was tested and then the price for the meat was jacked up because they were guaranteed not to have mad cow. What happened ? The FDA shut down the ranch, for shadowy reasons I still can't understand.
Officials announced last week that a 12-year-old beef cow from Texas tested positive for mad cow disease but they don't expect to find another case.
It's that time of year again when kids are out of school and parents act like dolts. And, as usual, the media is there, ready and willing to declare it an "epidemic" once the number of incidents reaches three. People wonder why kids bring guns to school. With parenting like this, is there any questions ? I weep for the future.
At a little league field in Aurora, there was yet another example of an out of control parent, police said. Witnesses told investigators that a father -- angry his son did not make the All-Star team -- confronted the boy's coach and slapped him.
Ah, prison loaf. Just like mom used to make. Remember that whole thing about "cruel and unusual punishment" ? Forget about it. Not that I am against punishing inmates who throw food, but mashing all the food into a repugnant little "loaf" certainly qualifies for "unusual". Try getting away with that at Gitmo. Al Franken would be all up in your area.
Note the fantastic quote from the Warden in this excerpt. He describes the prison loaf as tasting like carrot loaf with fish. And he says it wasn't that bad ! Carrot loaf with fish ?!
Curry County Adult Detention Center Administrator Don Burdine said he tasted the prison loaf before agreeing to serve it to prisoners.
"It really wasn't that bad," he said. "It kind of tasted like a carrot loaf with fish in it." George Bush is all about Alberto Gonzales. He's been all about him for quite some time. Thankfully, Alex Jones is all about reminding us that Alberto Gonzales advocated torture and a bunch of other outlandish things. Expect Alberto to get the nod to ascend to the Supreme Court. Maybe not in place of Sandra Day O'Connor but there will quite a few seats opening up in the near future.
As usual, AJ breaks down what we can expect to happen. Whether it goes down like this, we'll find out.
Bush will play the race card in lauding the first Hispanic on the Supreme Court and Gonzales' detractors will be labelled as racists. That's Entertainment !
I remember a few years ago when swing dancing all of a sudden was really popular. Thankfully, it quickly faded and now only creeps are still doing it. Enter ballroom dancing, the sudden new craze that threatens to dislodge poker as the pastime forced upon America by the entertainment industry.
You've got the stunning #1 hit show this summer "Dancing with the Stars" and some other show on FOX coming that claims to be from the makers of American Idol. Sadly, I have a feeling we will not be seeing Ruben Studdard doing the Lindey Hop. I will refrain from getting into this dancing craze because everyone will forget about it after a few months and I don't want to be stuck with that kind of arcane knowledge.
Meanwhile, somewhere else in the world Ben Affleck married Jennifer Garner, setting off another firestorm of "news" from the mainstream media who somehow thinks this warrants a graphic. For shame. After the J-Lo debacle, you'd think they'd leave poor Affleck alone, but they can't stop covering his love life. Repugnant. One needn't wonder why celebrity relationships never last as they are covered ad nauseum until the quickly fizzle out. Expect the much ballyhooed Cruise-Holmes tryst to last until the end of the year at best and the end of 2010 at worst.
Everyone's talking about War of the Worlds, with a big discussion going on over at theusofe.com. It ruled at the box office, though I'm still waiting for the numbers to show up on the news sites. While WotW may have done big business, over 100 million in the first 5 days of release, I'd be remiss in not talking about the story of how bad this summer movie season has been. I will not commence to explaining why.
I pointed out a lot of reasons why in my Summer Movie Preview a few weeks back. First of all, the movie industry apparently thinks they can start Summer at the beginning of May now. That is where the problem starts. Then they front load that first two months with the big guns of films until they're left with precious little after July 4th weekend. Yes, kids, take a look at what is coming out now and you'll see scant "big budget super summer" movies and more run of the mill flicks that could be put out any time of year.
This scheduling makes the first few weeks of Summer make or break and if the movies stink or just don't live up to the hype, then the rest of the summer cascades off. How any movie can live up to the hype nowadays is beyond me anyway. I think the excessive promotion of some of these movies is another death knell for the Summer Movie Season '05.
To say this year's crop of flicks was impotent is an understatement. The biggest flick was Star Wars and that is a niche audience that is fervent in their fandom. The Batman movie was probably the 2nd big "vehicle" flick of the Summer and it has merely performed "as expected". Mr. and Mrs. Smith was your generic action flick, Madagascar was your animated hit, and "The Longest Yard" your big comedy film so far. There has been no big "break out" film that becomes the most talked about movie of the summer, ala "Sixth Sense" a few years back, or "Something About Mary" even further back.
Given history, this crop of chum that is the final 6 weeks of Summer films up until Labor Day will probably have the more quality films of the Summer, devoid of excessive hype. If we are going to have a break-out film it will have to come in the next few weeks or else the big story of the Summer will be how bad the season was for the movie industry.
Here's where I'd add in the box office numbers, but apparently no news site can be bothered to post them and I am tired of waiting. Suffice it to say, WotW was easily #1. I've no clue 'bout the rest.
Since last week's update, the Red Sox went a dreadful 2 and 4 at home here in Boston. The lost two separate series, first to Cleveland and to Toronto. Thankfully, the hated Yankees and Baltimore are still kinda spinning their wheels and the Sox remain in first place.
The big news here this week was relief pitcher Keith Foulke's quote after giving up a grand slam and costing the Sox the game in the 9th inning. After being booed mercilessly by the Fenway fans and questioned about it by the press, he called them "Johnny from Burger King." Of course, that was all the media in Boston needed to go bat crap and discuss this sound bite ad nauseum.
Of course, there was the usual, "they pay for a ticket, they can boo" sentiment from most in the media. There was another side of the coin where many said that the Boston fans were ungrateful for Foulke's work in the playoffs and he had a right to answer back to all the boos. Essentially, it boils down to a player saying something stupid and then the talk radio making a much bigger deal out of it.
Other strange things I noticed included pitcher David Wells being tossed by the 2nd base umpire, which is rather odd. Even more odd is that I'd just seen a segment on "Baseball Tonight" on umpire tossing guys, so it was particularly relevant. The general consensus is that young umpires are trigger happy to toss people and are not as "diplomatic" as the old timers. I can see that.
Fourth of July ... Jingoism at it's Finest
Don't get me wrong. I love the good ol' US of A. I am a proud card carrying Patriot. What irks me is the vermin who seem to don the colors of our country and profess their love of freedom for one day of the year. You know who I am talking about. The yokels who bought the flags for their cars after 911 and then let them get turned to rags as they left them on for 2 months. Bandwagon America fans.
The Average American has never left the country to see what it is like elsewhere. But they'll swear it is the greatest country in the world. The Average American doesn't even vote ! They barely read ! They think about the issues that the mainstream media tells them to think about and not any others.
The Average American is painfully unaware of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution but is sure to be boozing it up all day and lighting off fireworks well into the night. They don't care that the Constitution has been virtually shredded and that as Janis Joplin so eloquently put it "freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose." Are you kidding ? They got the day off from work, this is the greatest country in the world.
Meanwhile, every store with something to sell has more American flags plastered on it than your average B2 bomber. Something about fourth of July just screams for stores to try and make a buck of off everyone with a wallet that can be pried open by their "specials" and "sales". Both they, and the consumer, know that on July 5th, those sales will be over and the flags and streamers will be back in the store room while Clovis on the third shift busily hangs "Back to School" decorations for the morning rush of sheeple.
Perhaps I will sound like an ass, but what is it about the Fourth of July that brings out the morons ? They seem to creep out of the woodwork at midnight on July 3rd, shirtless, no doubt drunk, with awful hair and an ill placed fading tatoo. They seem to congregate around local parades or backyard barbecues. They have, sadly, become the poster children for the Fourth of July.
Much like what has been said about Christmas, the meaning just ain't there anymore. Look at what happened to poor Labor Day and you can see where our holidays are going. No one even cares about it other than to drink and party one last time because Summer is over.
So to you, my dear readers, I ask you to take some time today on our nation's birthday and think about two things. One, the things that are good about America, our freedoms and the folks who died to protect them. Where else could a little creep like myself spend hours on end pontificating on the nature of Richard Hoagland's bolo tie ?
Secondly, think of how much better our country could be if the populace was actually motivated to care about things instead of numb to everything but the crap that passes as news these days. Hope for the future and perhaps we can make things better for a change. I have a feeling we are standing on the precipice of two distinct different futures. While we have the time, let's stop and consider the options.
End Notes
While there is still some daylight left, I'm off to grab a burger and, hopefully, see a yokel hurt himself with fireworks. At the very least, I'll be able to watch it on the news. Hope your 4th was splendid.
Plugs : Big weekend is wrapping up over @ binnallofamerica.com. BoA Audio : Interview with Monsignor Corrado Balducci, Feature Article : C2C goes "Host to Host", and 2 new Coastie Contenders all at BoA right ... now.
Coming this week, Lesley looks at the hosting changes @ C2C in "Grey Matters" on Tuesday. Khyron is in the groove with "Ghost Files" on Wednesday. A look at George Noory's vacation in "Hot Newz" on Thursday. And, a look at Noory's first full week back in the hosting chair in "the binnall report" on Friday night. Of course, some madness along the way as well.
Be safe in your scant few hours remaining on the 4th. Until July 11th, be safe, be prepared, and be real.
