Friday, June 29, 2007
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Who picks these player photos for ESPN?
Whoever it is, I would like to shake that person's hand for the comedy, intentional or not. The strange thing is once these guys get a photo for their player profiles, no matter how ridiculous, they never seem to change. Here's a sample of a few guys who were probably cheated out of millions of dollars because their photos made them look "challenged" in one way or another ahead of the NBA Draft.
Glamour shot of Jared "I'm not retarDud" Dudley
Marco Belinelli: "Ayyyyy, Ima Skeletora Juniora." - in exaggerated Italian accent
Tiago Splitter "The Slow Spaniard"
UPDATE: "The Slow Brazilian who happens to play in Spain"
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Those crazy teat-loving Poles
The German politician's description of the photo as "tasteless" is a real insult to Chancellor Merkel's chestly endowments.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Monday, June 25, 2007
My new favorite basketball player
Please oh please oh please sign Pooh for next year Jim Kelly. How can you resist that name...and those pearly whites! I know Urine Johnson was a flop in the NBA but Pooh is can't-miss!
Jun 25 - One player Toronto might invite back for a closer look, based on his performance over the weekend, was point guard Pooh Jeter, who played last season in the D-League for Colorado, the Raptors' affiliate there.
"In college, he was a scorer and he's really developed from just a scorer into a point guard and his development has been incredible there," Jim Kelly said. "He's been one of the better performers here." -- Toronto Globe and Mail
Jun 25 - One player Toronto might invite back for a closer look, based on his performance over the weekend, was point guard Pooh Jeter, who played last season in the D-League for Colorado, the Raptors' affiliate there.
"In college, he was a scorer and he's really developed from just a scorer into a point guard and his development has been incredible there," Jim Kelly said. "He's been one of the better performers here." -- Toronto Globe and Mail
Thursday, June 21, 2007
From career advice to flashing in Teen Wolf
Please check out this clip from the end of Teen Wolf. This is nearly as earth shattering as the priest's boner in Little Mermaid.
Employee Evolution
Great career/life direction website for 20-somethings profiled in the Journal today.
24-hour endurance run
Damn, this guy is ridiculous. 50 marathons in 50 days?! 24-hour run happening today in Times Square.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Bloomberg = stud
Damn this guy is a breath of fresh air in the midst of all the robo-talk on the campaign trail.
Monday, June 18, 2007
Friday, June 15, 2007
Arguably the 1st, 2nd and 3rd greatest mug shots ever
A treasure trove over at The Smoking Gun that you have probably seen before but who can get enough?
Larry Effing King
The Richest Man on the Planet
One too many Lost dvd marathons for blondie.
The Skita Smirk
I really enjoyed this picture of Skita, NBA draft bust extraordinairre. He is smirking as he's getting stripped! Doesn't that look scream out: "Wow, I can't believe the jokers in the Nuggets front office wasted a lottery pick on me! I suck!"
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Bryce Maximus James
The name of Lebron's newborn son. Maximus comes from Russell Crowe's character in The Gladiator, which just so happens to be Lebron's favorite movie. Just because The Big Lebowski might be my favorite movie doesn't mean I'm gonna name my kid The Dude, but King James can do whatever he wants. I can't believe you are even wondering what Lebron named his first son. Lebron James Jr. of course.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Match Made In Heaven
IHOP is in talks to buy Applebee's!!! Mmmmm, maple syrup quesadillas, perhaps with a side of Ribs in a Blanket? I like this. This is good. Consolidating locations of fat accumulation is really gonna make things easier for all of us in our quest for the holy grail of American fattitude.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
(Some of) The Truth comes out
'Sopranos' creator's last word: End speaks for itself
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
The Star-Ledger
What do you do when your TV world ends? You go to dinner, then keep quiet.
"Sopranos" creator David Chase took his wife out for dinner Sunday night in France, where he fled to avoid "all the Monday morning quarterbacking" about the show's finale. After this exclusive interview (agreed to before the season began), he intends to let the work -- especially the controversial final scene -- speak for itself.
"I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there," he says of the final scene.
"No one was trying to be audacious, honest to God," he adds. "We did what we thought we had to do. No one was trying to blow people's minds or thinking, 'Wow, this'll (tick) them off.'
"People get the impression that you're trying to (mess) with them, and it's not true. You're trying to entertain them."
In that final scene, mob boss Tony Soprano waited at a Bloomfield ice cream parlor for his family to arrive, one by one. What was a seemingly benign family outing was shot and cut as the preamble to a tragedy, with Tony suspiciously eyeing one patron after another, the camera dwelling a little too long on Meadow's parallel parking and a walk by a man in a Members Only jacket to the men's room. Just as the tension ratcheted up to unbearable levels, the series cut to black in mid-scene (and mid-song), with no resolution.
"Anybody who wants to watch it, it's all there," says Chase, 61, who based the series in general (and Tony's relationship with mother Livia specifically) on his North Caldwell childhood.
Some fans have assumed the ambiguous ending was Chase setting up the oft-rumored "Sopranos" movie.
"I don't think about (a movie) much," he says. "I never say never. An idea could pop into my head where I would go, 'Wow, that would make a great movie,' but I doubt it.
"I'm not being coy," he adds. "If something appeared that really made a good 'Sopranos' movie and you could invest in it and everybody else wanted to do it, I would do it. But I think we've kind of said it and done it."
Another problem: Over the last season, Chase killed so many key characters. He's toyed with the idea of "going back to a day in 2006 that you didn't see, but then (Tony's children) would be older than they were then and you would know that Tony doesn't get killed. It's got problems."
(Earlier in the interview, Chase noted that often his favorite part of the show was the characters telling stories about the good ol' days of Tony's parents. Just a guess, but if Chase ever does a movie spinoff, it'll be set in Newark in the'60s.)
Since Chase is declining to offer his interpretation of the final scene, let me present two more of my own, which came to me with a good night's sleep and a lot of helpful reader e-mails:
· Theory No. 1 (and the one I prefer): Chase is using the final scene to place the viewer into Tony's mind-set. This is how he sees the world: Every open door, every person walking past him could be coming to kill him or arrest him or otherwise harm him or his family. This is his life, even though the paranoia's rarely justified. We end without knowing what Tony's looking at because he never knows what's coming next.
· Theory No. 2: In the scene on the boat in "Soprano Home Movies," repeated again last week, Bobby Bacala suggested that when you get killed, you don't see it coming. Certainly, our man in the Members Only jacket could have gone to the men's room to prepare for killing Tony (shades of the first "Godfather"), and the picture and sound cut out because Tony's life just did. (Or because we, as viewers, got whacked from our life with the show.)
Meanwhile, remember that 21-month hiatus between Seasons Five and Six? That was Chase thinking up the ending. HBO's then-chairman Chris Albrecht came to him after Season Five and suggested thinking up a conclusion to the series; Chase agreed, on the condition he get "a long break" to decide on an ending.
Originally, that ending was supposed to occur last year, but midway through production, the number of episodes was increased, and Chase stretched out certain plot elements while saving the major climaxes for this final batch of nine.
"If this had been one season, the Vito storyline would not have been so important," he says.
Much of this final season featured Tony bullying, killing or otherwise alienating the members of his inner circle. After all those years of viewing him as "the sympathetic mob boss," were we, like his therapist Dr. Melfi, supposed to finally wake up and smell the sociopath?
"From my perspective, there's nothing different about Tony in this season than there ever was," Chase says. "To me, that's Tony."
Chase has had an ambivalent relationship with his fans, particularly the bloodthirsty whacking crowd who seemed to tune in only for the chance to see someone's head get blown off (or run over by an SUV). So was he reluctant to fill last week's penultimate episode, "The Blue Comet," with so many vivid death scenes?
"I'm the number one fan of gangster movies," he says. "Martin Scorsese has no greater devotee than me. Like everyone else, I get off partly on the betrayals, the retributions, the swift justice. But what you come to realize when you do a series is, you could be killing straw men all day long. Those murders only have any meaning when you've invested story in them. Otherwise, you might as well watch 'Cleaver.'"
One detail about the final scene he'll discuss, however tentatively: the selection of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" as the song on the jukebox.
"It didn't take much time at all to pick it, but there was a lot of conversation after the fact. I did something I'd never done before: In the location van, with the crew, I was saying, 'What do you think?' When I said, 'Don't Stop Believin',' people went, 'What? Oh my God!'
"I said, 'I know, I know, just give a listen,' and little by little, people started coming around."
Whether viewers will have a similar time-delayed reaction to the finale as a whole, Chase doesn't know. ("I hear some people were very angry and others were not, which is what I expected.") He's relaxing in France, then he'll try to make movies.
"It's been the greatest career experience of my life," he says. "There's nothing more in TV that I could say or would want to say."
Here's Chase on some other points about the finale and the season:
· After all the speculation Agent Harris might turn Tony, instead we saw Harris had turned, passing along info on Phil's whereabouts and cheering, "We're going to win this thing!" when learning of Phil's demise.
"This is based on an actual case of an FBI agent who got a little bit too partisan and excited during the Colombo wars of the'70s," Chase says of the story of Lindley DeVecchio, who supplied Harris' line.
Speaking of Harris, Chase had no problem with never revealing what -- if anything -- terror suspects Muhammed and Ahmed were up to.
"This, to me, feels very real," he says. "For the majority of these suspects, it's very hard for anybody to know what these people are doing. I don't even think Harris might know where they are. That was sort of the point of it: Who knows if they are terrorists or if they're innocent pistachio salesmen? That's the fear that we are living with now."
Also, the story -- repeated by me, unfortunately -- that Fox, when "The Sopranos" was in development there, wanted Chase to have Tony help the FBI catch terrorists isn't true.
"What I said was, if I had done it at Fox, Tony would have been a gangster by day and helping the FBI by night, but we weren't there long enough for anyone to make that suggestion."
I spent the last couple of weeks wrapping my brain around a theory supplied by reader Sam Lorber (and his daughter, Emily) that the nine episodes of this season were each supposed to represent one of the nine circles of Hell from Dante's "The Divine Comedy."
Told of the theory, Chase laughed and said, "No."
Since Butchie was introduced as a guy who was pushing Phil to take out Tony, why did he turn on Phil and negotiate peace with Tony?
"I think Butch was an intelligent guy; he began to see that there was no need for it, that Phil's feelings were all caught up in what was esentially a convoluted personal grudge."
Not from Chase, but I feel the need to debunk the e-mail that's making the rounds about all the Holsten's patrons being characters from earlier in the series. The actor playing Members Only guy had never been on the show; Tony killed at least one, if not both, of his carjackers; and there are about 17 other things wrong with this popular but incorrect theory.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
The Star-Ledger
What do you do when your TV world ends? You go to dinner, then keep quiet.
"Sopranos" creator David Chase took his wife out for dinner Sunday night in France, where he fled to avoid "all the Monday morning quarterbacking" about the show's finale. After this exclusive interview (agreed to before the season began), he intends to let the work -- especially the controversial final scene -- speak for itself.
"I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there," he says of the final scene.
"No one was trying to be audacious, honest to God," he adds. "We did what we thought we had to do. No one was trying to blow people's minds or thinking, 'Wow, this'll (tick) them off.'
"People get the impression that you're trying to (mess) with them, and it's not true. You're trying to entertain them."
In that final scene, mob boss Tony Soprano waited at a Bloomfield ice cream parlor for his family to arrive, one by one. What was a seemingly benign family outing was shot and cut as the preamble to a tragedy, with Tony suspiciously eyeing one patron after another, the camera dwelling a little too long on Meadow's parallel parking and a walk by a man in a Members Only jacket to the men's room. Just as the tension ratcheted up to unbearable levels, the series cut to black in mid-scene (and mid-song), with no resolution.
"Anybody who wants to watch it, it's all there," says Chase, 61, who based the series in general (and Tony's relationship with mother Livia specifically) on his North Caldwell childhood.
Some fans have assumed the ambiguous ending was Chase setting up the oft-rumored "Sopranos" movie.
"I don't think about (a movie) much," he says. "I never say never. An idea could pop into my head where I would go, 'Wow, that would make a great movie,' but I doubt it.
"I'm not being coy," he adds. "If something appeared that really made a good 'Sopranos' movie and you could invest in it and everybody else wanted to do it, I would do it. But I think we've kind of said it and done it."
Another problem: Over the last season, Chase killed so many key characters. He's toyed with the idea of "going back to a day in 2006 that you didn't see, but then (Tony's children) would be older than they were then and you would know that Tony doesn't get killed. It's got problems."
(Earlier in the interview, Chase noted that often his favorite part of the show was the characters telling stories about the good ol' days of Tony's parents. Just a guess, but if Chase ever does a movie spinoff, it'll be set in Newark in the'60s.)
Since Chase is declining to offer his interpretation of the final scene, let me present two more of my own, which came to me with a good night's sleep and a lot of helpful reader e-mails:
· Theory No. 1 (and the one I prefer): Chase is using the final scene to place the viewer into Tony's mind-set. This is how he sees the world: Every open door, every person walking past him could be coming to kill him or arrest him or otherwise harm him or his family. This is his life, even though the paranoia's rarely justified. We end without knowing what Tony's looking at because he never knows what's coming next.
· Theory No. 2: In the scene on the boat in "Soprano Home Movies," repeated again last week, Bobby Bacala suggested that when you get killed, you don't see it coming. Certainly, our man in the Members Only jacket could have gone to the men's room to prepare for killing Tony (shades of the first "Godfather"), and the picture and sound cut out because Tony's life just did. (Or because we, as viewers, got whacked from our life with the show.)
Meanwhile, remember that 21-month hiatus between Seasons Five and Six? That was Chase thinking up the ending. HBO's then-chairman Chris Albrecht came to him after Season Five and suggested thinking up a conclusion to the series; Chase agreed, on the condition he get "a long break" to decide on an ending.
Originally, that ending was supposed to occur last year, but midway through production, the number of episodes was increased, and Chase stretched out certain plot elements while saving the major climaxes for this final batch of nine.
"If this had been one season, the Vito storyline would not have been so important," he says.
Much of this final season featured Tony bullying, killing or otherwise alienating the members of his inner circle. After all those years of viewing him as "the sympathetic mob boss," were we, like his therapist Dr. Melfi, supposed to finally wake up and smell the sociopath?
"From my perspective, there's nothing different about Tony in this season than there ever was," Chase says. "To me, that's Tony."
Chase has had an ambivalent relationship with his fans, particularly the bloodthirsty whacking crowd who seemed to tune in only for the chance to see someone's head get blown off (or run over by an SUV). So was he reluctant to fill last week's penultimate episode, "The Blue Comet," with so many vivid death scenes?
"I'm the number one fan of gangster movies," he says. "Martin Scorsese has no greater devotee than me. Like everyone else, I get off partly on the betrayals, the retributions, the swift justice. But what you come to realize when you do a series is, you could be killing straw men all day long. Those murders only have any meaning when you've invested story in them. Otherwise, you might as well watch 'Cleaver.'"
One detail about the final scene he'll discuss, however tentatively: the selection of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" as the song on the jukebox.
"It didn't take much time at all to pick it, but there was a lot of conversation after the fact. I did something I'd never done before: In the location van, with the crew, I was saying, 'What do you think?' When I said, 'Don't Stop Believin',' people went, 'What? Oh my God!'
"I said, 'I know, I know, just give a listen,' and little by little, people started coming around."
Whether viewers will have a similar time-delayed reaction to the finale as a whole, Chase doesn't know. ("I hear some people were very angry and others were not, which is what I expected.") He's relaxing in France, then he'll try to make movies.
"It's been the greatest career experience of my life," he says. "There's nothing more in TV that I could say or would want to say."
Here's Chase on some other points about the finale and the season:
· After all the speculation Agent Harris might turn Tony, instead we saw Harris had turned, passing along info on Phil's whereabouts and cheering, "We're going to win this thing!" when learning of Phil's demise.
"This is based on an actual case of an FBI agent who got a little bit too partisan and excited during the Colombo wars of the'70s," Chase says of the story of Lindley DeVecchio, who supplied Harris' line.
Speaking of Harris, Chase had no problem with never revealing what -- if anything -- terror suspects Muhammed and Ahmed were up to.
"This, to me, feels very real," he says. "For the majority of these suspects, it's very hard for anybody to know what these people are doing. I don't even think Harris might know where they are. That was sort of the point of it: Who knows if they are terrorists or if they're innocent pistachio salesmen? That's the fear that we are living with now."
Also, the story -- repeated by me, unfortunately -- that Fox, when "The Sopranos" was in development there, wanted Chase to have Tony help the FBI catch terrorists isn't true.
"What I said was, if I had done it at Fox, Tony would have been a gangster by day and helping the FBI by night, but we weren't there long enough for anyone to make that suggestion."
I spent the last couple of weeks wrapping my brain around a theory supplied by reader Sam Lorber (and his daughter, Emily) that the nine episodes of this season were each supposed to represent one of the nine circles of Hell from Dante's "The Divine Comedy."
Told of the theory, Chase laughed and said, "No."
Since Butchie was introduced as a guy who was pushing Phil to take out Tony, why did he turn on Phil and negotiate peace with Tony?
"I think Butch was an intelligent guy; he began to see that there was no need for it, that Phil's feelings were all caught up in what was esentially a convoluted personal grudge."
Not from Chase, but I feel the need to debunk the e-mail that's making the rounds about all the Holsten's patrons being characters from earlier in the series. The actor playing Members Only guy had never been on the show; Tony killed at least one, if not both, of his carjackers; and there are about 17 other things wrong with this popular but incorrect theory.
Monday, June 11, 2007
My dvr is not broken thank you very much
Explanation for the series ending Sopranos blackout:
People in the diner in The Sopranos last night:
- Guy at counter was Nicky Leotardo, Phil's nephew
- 2 black guys were the ones that tried to shoot Tony in an earlier season
but missed and clipped his ear.
- The truck driver was the brother of someone robbed and killed by
Christopher in season 2.
- Cub scouts were witnesses in the train store when Bobby got shot.
- Do you remember the convo that Bobby and Tony had two episodes in the boat, about getting whacked? He said if you were to get whacked, you would never see it coming and it would just be like everything would go black all of a sudden...
People in the diner in The Sopranos last night:
- Guy at counter was Nicky Leotardo, Phil's nephew
- 2 black guys were the ones that tried to shoot Tony in an earlier season
but missed and clipped his ear.
- The truck driver was the brother of someone robbed and killed by
Christopher in season 2.
- Cub scouts were witnesses in the train store when Bobby got shot.
- Do you remember the convo that Bobby and Tony had two episodes in the boat, about getting whacked? He said if you were to get whacked, you would never see it coming and it would just be like everything would go black all of a sudden...
Thursday, June 7, 2007
Wine at a premium
Ok, I was kidding about the crack dealer hedge fund. But this is for real and apparently successful: The Fine Wine Fund.
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
Redemption
It was pretty universally accepted that Rick Barnes aggressively screwed up his team's chances in the NCAA tournament even though he had the best college basketball player in history. And indeed, "Watching Barnes manage the second half of the Kansas game was like watching Principal Ed Rooney handle the Ferris Bueller situation." However, the man made quite a comeback today in my book with this gem on his ex-ass-saver Kevin Durant and the whispers that Durant's stock was dropping because he showed up to pre-draft workouts weak and out of shape:
"If people question his strength, they're stupid," Barnes said Tuesday. "If they are looking for weight lifters to come out of Texas, that's not what we're producing. There are a lot of guys who can bench press 300 pounds in the NBA who couldn't play dead in a cowboy movie. Kevin's the best player in the draft – period, at any position."That is an aggressively true statement. Nice job Rick.
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
Size Matters!
I mean economies of scale silly. Anyways, diehard Zone readers have alerted me to AdultVest, "The world's first and only investment community designed specifically for the adult industry!" And they are about to launch a hedge fund to originate loans for ever-expanding adult-entertainment club networks. I swear, some aspiring entrepeneur is going to launch a hedge fund soon backing underfollowed crack dealers.
Monday, June 4, 2007
Gaaaaary
Gary Sheffield is a crazy human being. In a Dark Alley Poll, he ranks near the top of instant killers to avoid. That wild look he gets in his eyes makes one want to pee his and/or her pants. Anyways, his militancy continues. But in the midst of his neverending us against them shtick, a larger point sticks out: holy crap, only 8.5% of MLB players are African-American. By my count there are only two African-American starting pitchers in the whole league (Dontrelle and CC Sabathia). The league runs baseball academies off back roads in the Dominican (think Pedro under a mango tree) but they've got nothing similar in Chicago or New York. Why don't we ever hear about this?
The yuppies are coming!
Or in the case of my roommates and I, the yuppies have already arrived. This building is going up a couple blocks from me in Williamsburg. Please check out the delicious comments section, specifically #9. 
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