Paranoid? This one could put you over the top.
Philip K. Dick‘s classic sci-fi short story, ‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale,’ which you probably know better as Paul Verhoeven‘s TOTAL RECALL, now reboots and upgrades with new technological gizmos and settings. Continue reading
Less than a year ago actor Charlie Sheen was written off by most of America…
He was a druggie, slut crazy and on and on. And you know what? He was. I wrote a couple of stories in his defense. Why? Because I think a man who has achieved what Sheen has deserves a second, third and fourth look. When you have been a major film and TV star for most of your life m- in Sheen’s case 30 years or more – you can get bored.
Hey, I wish I could speak from that kind of success and experience. Continue reading
Someone needs to head down to the Safeway, because we’re running out of Turd Polish.
It’s getting bad out there—like, regular Royals bad. Gone are the days of “fun team to watch!” and, “lookit the little roses bloom!” Everything has been replaced by a typical, smelly old Royals team rife with mental errors, lackluster performances and an obscenely visible talent differential-gap.
At the beginning of the season, back when hope still sprung eternal, I tried to figure out the best way to cover the Royals.
We’re not the Star, and my regular engagements (the actual job where I make real paper money) prohibited me from covering them on a daily basis. Plus, daily coverage would have likely constituted me recapping what Bob Dutton had already said. Kind of boring. I toyed with the notion of a weekly recap, but decided that this too was probably a bit much. So I settled on a monthly recap—a “broad strokes” time capsule that was meant to capture “the month that was,” or something like that. Continue reading
You’re welcome, fellas.
General Manager Dayton Moore just finished making hypothetical trade-deadline love to me, Joe Royalsfan, and apparently I’ve got all the elasticity of “Octomom” Nadya Suleman, because I didn’t feel a thing.
Wait… was that it?
Did you…
Are you FINISHED?
Greinke’s with the Angels.
The Yankees got Ichiro.
Ryan Dempster went to Texas.
Shane Victorino is now a Dodger.
The Royals, you ask? Well, they dealt closer Jonathan Broxton to the Cincinnati Reds for minor league pitchers J.C. Sulbaran and Donnie Joseph. And that’s it. Continue reading
Well baby, get ready! Get excited! This IS OUR YEAR!
Chiefs and Chopper! Oh, sorry – that one’s over. “Anything Can Happen From the Fifty!” In just over one week, GAME ONE, Preseason NFL Football. Yeah, baby. Thank God. And with our Kansas City Chiefs among the favorites.
Well,in some circles.
When you have a very good team, you don’t need those silly slogans do you? Continue reading
Will the recent midnight movie massacre at Cinemark‘s suburban Aurora theater bring to an end the popular practice of kicking off big movies at 12:01 a.m.?
I don’t think so.
In checking this Thursday’s—actually Friday morning showtimes—it looks like many of the major circuits Kansas City complexes have scheduled midnight performances of the sci-fi action-thriller reboot TOTAL RECALL. And that includes Cinemark’s two local theaters.
I’ve had discussions with a number of theater executives and personnel during the past week. And while none would go on the record, I have the distinct feeling that security has been beefed up for for the time being. I also suspect that unless the boxoffice numbers for late shows stay solid and/or the film distributors are willing to share in those midnight show security expenses, they could soon become a thing of the past. Continue reading
Maybe we should worry less about where our Olympic uniforms are made and worry more about winning?
*******
A handful of local priests are backing Missouri’s right to prey at public schools. Continue reading
Remember that childhood axiom about nice guys finishing last?
That’s how most sports media jock sniffers have been treating Joe Posnanski where his upcoming book about disgraced Penn State football coach Joe Paterno is concerned.
Guilty until proven innocent.
No way could silver-tongued, nice guy sportswriter Posnanski deliver an honest-to-gosh lowdown on what a lowlife Paterno turned out to be for allowing his assistant Jerry Sandusky to abuse young boys for 14 years after first learning of it. Not to mention playing a lead role in covering up for Sandusky and lying about it. Continue reading
Craigslist is great. Craigslist is terrifying. Like it says in Corinthians, Craigslist is all things to all men.
It is a shot-to-shit 1983 Nissan Sentra with blown shocks, blood stains on the cloth interior and a cool 298K on the odometer, all highway! all yours and all for $300.
It is a Puerto Rican transexual hooker with a hidden switchblade and a dusting of venereal disease, her oddly effeminate pimp hiding in the closet.
It is also a fairly decent digital marketplace for people to unload the useless shit that clogs their existence; the 50 water-bloated issues of Spiderman from mom’s basement, or the autographed POWER Team! poster that you reluctantly accepted at a church carnival because you didn’t want to look like a hedonistic dick.
But often, it’s nearly impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff.
That’s where I come in. Continue reading
With all the bad news abound— heat, drought, midnight movie massacre – and some would even suggest, the London Olympics—it’s time to bring back one of my favorites: The Name Game...
Consider it my tip of the hat (or flash of the raincoat) to those clever porn promoters, titillating title terrorists and movie marketers who so cleverly turn well known motion picture properties into cheap knocks-offs.
How do they get away with it? They’re parodies protected by the First Amendment. Continue reading
I love this country. We invented Cool Ranch Doritos, the jackhammer, the skyscraper, the corn dog, the iron lung, the electric guitar, the internet, the ATM (1939!) chicken nuggets, baseball and the first commercially practical incandescent light (though not the light-bulb itself, as many believe).
Only in America can people find fame and fortune because of a homemade sex-tape (Kim Kardashian) or having all of the inherent intelligence, wit and humor of a velociraptor (Larry the Cable Guy, Katt Williams, Carlos Mencia).
In addition, I love sports. All kinds, even. Cricket? Sure. Indian Leg Wrestling? Why not? If there’s a semblance of athletic competition involved, with something on the line, I’m pretty much in.
Therefore, it would stand to reason that the Olympics are just about the greatest thing ever. All kinds of battles on the field and on the court and in the pool, AND I get to root for THE GREATEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD? Sign me up.
BUT NOT SO FAST. Continue reading
Before I get too far in, let me just say this – no, the sky is not falling…
Sporting Kansas City are currently tied for 2nd in the Eastern Conference, just one point behind the first place New York Red Bulls. KC boasts one of the best defenses in the league, with the lowest goals against average in all of MLS.
OK, that’s that.
Now let’s talk about a disturbing trend, one that’s confounded Sporting players and staff alike. A trend that’s brought back the one word that KC boss Peter Vermes hates more than anything else — soft. Continue reading
With all the big comedy stars in Montreal this past weekend, there was one glaring no show!
T.J. Miller, the hottest comedy star on the rise anywhere, was missing in action. T.J. has done way too many films lately to name, but here are a few: CLOVERFIELD, HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON (ONE and TWO), GET HIM TO THE GREEK, YOGI BEAR, UNSTOPPABLE, GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, SHE’S OUT OF YOUR LEAGUE – and in theaters now: ROCK OF AGES and FINDING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD. All that plus TWO new TV series – the one for Comedy Central starts in September and the other, a network show, starts in the fall.
Brother, he is a busy, busy boy. Continue reading
A little more than 10 years ago, when I still bought into the notion of the honorable American newspaper, and there wasn’t yet a lot of talk about its eminent death, I traveled to Omaha for a journalism conference where I heard a reporter from the Kansas City Star named Mike McGraw say, “I love documents,” and my career instantly came into focus.
“I love studying them, skimming them, sifting through them,” he said, leaning comfortably against a podium in a hotel ballroom, in a voice of sincerity and wonder and ease.
And I understood, finally. Continue reading
Shirts or skins?
In a fit of increasingly common hubris, Islamic countries participating in the Olympics have pressured the International Olympic Committee into adjusting the criteria for women’s volleyball to allow shorts to the knee and sleeves.
The catalyst for this remarkably bad idea (Gabrielle Reece would look like Darth Vader in a Burka, but she could still spike that baby!!) is less important than the execution. Continue reading
Many in the media are hesitant to let anybody know they’re out of town…
As if lowlifes or the under class will rise up and burgle them. That’s why the Star always included that cryptic line by my pic when I was on vacation about my column returning when it returned.
Uh, obviously. Continue reading
Where do I even start?
The war in Syria is in full swing and I find myself once again thinking “pseudo-treasonous” thoughts by backing the Assad Regime. Almost every Arab country that’s gone down this path: Egypt, Iraq, Libya is now being governed by the Muslim Brotherhood or a derivative thereof.
Is that an improvement over the secular dictatorships the people were living under? Continue reading
$3.25 in Canada!
When I was little, professional wrestling was tits. All I needed to make my life was a bag of Keebler’s Pizzaria’s Pizza Chips, my mish-mash collection of Ninja Turtles action figures, and a few fat hours of AWA Saturday morning wrestling… or NWA, or WWF. I wasn’t picky. I had my favorites in every federation.
The Hulkster was the greatest, but Sting wasn’t far behind. The Road Warriors could have probably stomped both of them to death, or at the very least, spiked them unapologetically with their Mad Max shoulder-pads.
My uncle Randy—who spent his days peddling wares to indigent folk at Avenue Rentals—used to tape all of the programs fit for viewing, and I’d come over on Saturday evenings and watch Nick Bockwinkel put Verne Gagne in a cross-face chicken-wing while I pored through stacks of Pro Wrestling Illustrated, gaping in terror at gore-rific photos of Abdullah the Butcher with a fork stuck in his head, or Bruiser Brody howling at an invisible nemesis in the sky, his forehead a travelogue of scar tissue and feigned insanity.
One night—years after my notions about the Ultimate Warrior’s true strength had been dispelled and crushed like so many skulls underneath a steel folding chair—I got drunk and ordered some vintage issues of Pro Wrestling Illustrated from eBay. Continue reading
With all the major game systems having been out for years now and Christmas months away, consumers are seeing video game prices drop to unprecedented lows…
That’s a win for gamers who wish to round out their collections, consumers looking to score some “cool dad” points, or anybody tired of watching the Royals lose on TV.
The newest generation of systems are optimized to work on HDTVs and feature high definition graphics and rich sound. Long gone are the days of static backgrounds and 8-bit sound effects. But a good video game is not about just being visually pleasing, it has to be fun to play and replay.
The Sony PS3 is probably the best system out there in terms of game selection and performance. The console also doubles as a Blu-Ray player, and costs only about $100 more than a standard, decent blu-ray player.
Here are three games under $25 to get you started. Continue reading
Hey, Montreal is truly like, “You ain’t in Kansas anymore!”
Oh, Canada – I was actually surprised that everyone speaks French here in Montreal. And that there are very few Americans up here, except for the ones that are attending the Montreal Comedy Festival.
It even looks like Europe here.
Lots of older buildings, clean. Last time I was in Canada I got stuck in Calgary in 1995 and was shooting a low budget movie, co starring Sonny Landham (48hrs / Pedator), Brian James (Blade Runner/ The Player) and Frank Stallone.
I played a lawyer. Continue reading
