News Item: Gary Matthews, Jr. implicated in Orlando steroid probe
So, Angels, have fun paying a much smaller Matthews $55 million over the next five years. Also mentioned in the case are (surprise) Jose Canseco, and Evander Holyfield. What, they didn’t have drug testing on “Dancing With the Stars”?
News Item: New evidence suggests Thomas Jefferson was Jewish
To paraphrase “Dogma,” does this mean Sally Hemmings was part-Jewish?
Here’s something to get excited about: HBO is preparing a seven-hour mini-series adaptation of the Iraq war book “Generation Kill”– and it will be written and executive-produced by “Wire” co-creators David Simon and Edward Burns. Should be excellent, though no word on whether it’ll be produced before or after “Wire” season 5.
I don’t know what’s funnier- this headline, or that one of the two mens’ names is just one letter away from “Joe Lieberman.” (Via Andrew.)
UPDATE: After becoming a Blogosphere-wide laughingstock, the Green Bay paper has decided to change the headline above. For the story about two longtime friends who had started a tool company, they went with the headline “Long-time fishing Buddies Get Down to Business With S&M Tool.”
Armond White on David Fincher’s “Zodiac”:
“Problem is: Finchers technique distracts from a resolved mystery or narrative closure; it encourages apathy that suggests resolution and absolution are impossible. Zodiacs ending is a shocking let-down, not because its gruesome but because it nullifies itself. This time, Fincher puts everybodys head in a box. Toschi and Graysmiths decades-long pursuit becomes a dead goose chase.”
Critical reaction to “Zodiac” so far has been almost uniformly positive (89% on the Tomatometer), but I didn’t care for it. It felt less like the great “Seven” than a really, really long episode of “CSI” or “Criminal Minds”- one in which they don’t even solve the mystery at the end. Also, it’s too long by about 45 minutes.
News Item: Vikings release Brad Johnson
It’s not a surprise and it had to be done. Johnson is like many, many quarterbacks in the NFL: He’s shown flashes of brilliance in his career, and also flashes of mediocrity, with a season seldom going by in which he doesn’t show both. In other words, there’s a reason he’s been with five different teams.
As a middling QB, Johnson is no different at all from Brian Griese, Jake Plummer, Rex Grossman, Trent Dilfer and (yes) both A.J. Feeley and Jeff Garcia. The Vikings, in choosing a QB for ’07, would be wise to avoid all of the above.
Sorry folks- the site was down for most of the day today due to a domain name registration error. We’re all good now though; watch for more posts soon.
There’s a new website celebrating addiction to BlackBerrys, called Crackberry.com. I look at it here.
From an E! news story on a madam who claims to have serviced many in Hollywood:
“According to a former Hollywood madam, Ben Affleck and Bruce Willis have more in common than mediocre acting skills and starring roles in Armageddon.
Hey, Willis wasn’t so bad on “Moonlighting,” or in “Sixth Sense” and “Unbreakable.” I’m curious who else was on the client list. Now that Al Gore is a huge movie star…
An ethnic paper in California called AsianWeek is in trouble for running a column in a recent issue titled “Why I Hate Blacks.” The author of the piece, Kenneth Eng, is a self-described “Asian supremecist” who writes under the title “God of the Universe,” and had previously written pieces titled “Proof That Whites Inherently Hate Us” and “Why I Hate Asians.”
Gee, who would’ve thought people in San Francisco would complain about that?
Stephen Silver, Writer 