This just in . . . Miley Cyrus = not fat

I know it seems like a silly post to end the year on, but work's just been crushing me, and I don't have the energy to be all topical and stuff.

A week or two ago, Miley Cyrus appeared on the red carpet for some event in a cleavage baring dress, and the celeb bloggers went nuts. From speculation about supposed breast enhancement to gigabytes of snark about how she was all bloated and doughy from drug use, overeating, reckless lifestyle, yada, yada, blah, blah . . .

Here's a couple of pics of Miley in Hawaii from this week:

Yeah . . . maybe it's just me, but that doesn't look fat or bloated or doughy or anything. She looks like a typical leggy teenager to me. But then I'm not some blogger dude pretending to be a woman or a gay man and dishing snark by the truckload to generate hits and revenue.

Happy New Year folks!

Bolts end the year on a high note

The Lightning won their final game of the year, 5-2, over the Carolina Hurricane tonight.

A game that lumbered along with lots of shots and little scoring, broke open in the third, as Steve Stamkos ended the 2-2 tie with a goal early in the period. The Bolts exploded after that, and at one point were leading 6-2, until a fairly ridiculous call negated the final goal.

Stamkos got his 5th career hat trick (in a 3 year career, no less!) and the guys looked as though they may be turning this season around, notching their third straight win.

Martin St. Louis got his 500th assist as well and looked to be returning to form in the game.

Way too much talent on this team for them to be languishing at a .500 record. Here's hoping they are starting their run to the playoffs.

And from the "this is just wrong" department

It should come as no surprise to anyone who's read more than a couple of my postings, that I cruise the political blogs (to make my blood boil) and also the celeb blogs (to get a good chuckle).

Lots of these celeb bloggers sell ad space to various other blogs and such to help offset the cost of maintaining their blog or, I suppose, simply to make money. One of these, BUZZNET has stuff on quite a few celeb blogs. One in particular caught my eye.

A heading of "New Babe on the Block" pointed to a gallery of . . . Chloe Moretz.

It should be pointed out here, that Chloe is only 14 years old. Now I know she's done some outrageous stuff in films, and all these young models are doing magazine covers and other things that are a bit beyond their years. But come on, man!

Catagorizing a 14 year old girl as a "babe in the making" or some such just sets off my creep-o-meter.

Maybe I'm just getting old or something, but like I said in the title of this post -- this is just wrong.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to my three regular readers and anyone else who stumbles across this blog today.

Have a safe and happy holiday season

Merry Christmas eve

I was going to go on about a bunch of stuff that's bugging me and doing the Scrooge on my holidays, but the heck with it.

Here's sisters Brittany and Sherri in their best Santa's helpers outfits instead:

Late night hotness . . .

Just something about that 80's two-tone hair . . .

Dogs and cats, living together . . . mass hysteria!

PolitiFact, the biased, slanted, disingenuous, liberal propaganda machine from the St. Pete Times today called the Democrats claim that Republicans had voted to end Medicare "The political lie of the year."

What's next? Is the sun going to rise in the west tomorrow? Are the Cubs gonna win the series next season? Am I gonna get a date?

Maria Conchita Alonso is okay in my book

The actress who actually was born and lived in Venezuela ran into useful idiot Sean Penn at a Miami airport the other day and called the dictator sympathising fool a communist ass-hole!

Of course, Penn, the gentleman that he is, retorted that Alonzo's brother was an assassin and called Alonso a pig.

Alonso called Penn out on his hypocrisy of living rich and entitled whilst supporting murdering dictators who keep their people in poverty in the name of socialist dogma.

The only way this could have been any cooler, would have been if Maria had knocked Penn's punk ass out, then walked away.

A bit of economic history

Below is a nifty little economic primer on the Great Depression and Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt and what their economic plans did to exacerbate the situation:

Ms. Fields does a decent job giving you the thumbnail story on what happened, which is bags more than students get in school these days. If they get anything at all. And of course, way better than any of the outright lies and distortions the main stream media spew each day on the subject.

Apparently this video got the attention of a writer, Peter Ogburn, at something called Fishbowl DC who immediately filled his diaper.

Taking his thumb out of his mouth, Ogburn spews out some sexist vitriol about the blatant cheesiness of the video (in his opinion) and the relentless focus on Ms. Fields cleavage.

?!?

Now this young lady is attractive. But knowing what this clown wrote, I watched closely . . . real closely, and if she was showing a lot of cleavage, I missed it. Or I need to update my glasses prescriptions.

But this is simply another example of the left taking the low road to denounce anyone who doesn't buy into their socialist view/plan for the country.

Rule 5 Sunday -- Taryn Manning

Today's Rule 5 posting is young actress, and I guess sometime singer, Taryn Manning.

Don't know much about Taryn, and it's the day after our office Christmas party, so I'm in no shape to do a bunch of "googling" to find out about her. I know I've seen her in a couple of horror films, most recently The Breed, but that's it.

The pics below appear to be from a Playboy shoot, but I've no idea when they were done. Like I said, way too hungover . . .

A couple nsfw-ers in there, so use caution when viewing.

*click on the thumbnails for full-sized images*

Rule 5 Sunday suggested by this.

Hat tips:
Jake Finnegan
The Daley Gator
The Classic Liberal
Say Anything Blog
Proof Positive

What in the emo hell - part 2

So Lindsay Lohan's in Hawaii taking a break from . . . whatever it is she does, oh yeah, getting $900k+ for posing in Playboy. And she's got the usual entourage of folks with her, 'cause she can really afford to bring them along now.

One of the celeb blogs has some pics of her chillin' and partying and has this picture of Lindsay's younger sister Ali with some dude:

Okay, first off, could someone get Ali a cheeseburger and a milkshake please? Jeez, is that chick skinny!

Secondly, what the f*ck! Is that guy wearing Ali's jeans or what?! What kind of guy wears jeans like that?!

honestly

Oof, Bucs lose again

The Bucs lost today to the Jacksonville Jaguars 41-14.

Staking themselves to a 14-0 lead by the second quarter, the Bucs watched impotently as the 3-9 Jags reeled off 41 unanswered points. At one point, Jax scored four times in the span of seven minutes.

Looking at the stats of the game, the teams played nearly identical. Using only that metric, someone who had not watched the game would assume the final score was more like 17-14 rather than the embarrassing blowout it was. But the telling difference was turnovers. The Bucs committed seven of them -- interceptions, and fumbles that gave the Jags either a short field or a walk-in score. Even against the league's worst teams, you simply cannot do that and expect to win.

Head coach Raheem Morris' post game interview had him talking about returning to basics and running things more like training camp -- focusing on ball control and other things that professional football players, who get paid millions of dollars, should not have to be reminded to do.

On the FOX halftime show, Howie and the guys were talking about how the veterans on the team need to stand up/speak up and so on. What veterans?! This is a team of rookies and guys with only one or two years in the league. Morris jettisoned all the leaders off the team as soon as he took over from Jon Gruden.

Rhonde Barber? Not exactly a huge voice in the locker room. Albert Haynesworth? Yeah another game with no tackles. Who's going to listen to a guy who's been kicked off three other teams for being fat, lazy and a distraction?

Contrast this with two other events in the NFL today -- in Green Bay, the undefeated Packers are laying a b*tch slapping on the Raiders (46-7 last time I looked), playing angry and focused because they were disappointed in their performance in last week's last minute win against the Giants. And Patriots qb Tom Brady sitting on the bench getting his ass chewed out by the qb coach for throwing an interception in the end zone during a close back and forth game with the Redskins.

What's the difference? In a word . . . coaching.

Raheem Morris might be a nice guy, but he's out of his depth as a head coach. Three years in and under Morris' direction the team is regressing not progressing. That's bad coaching, plain and simple. Scaling back the playbook, talk of returning to basics, longer practices at the end of a long season as punishment . . . that's the noise made by coaches who don't know what else to do.

Bucs ownership had their Obama moment when they hired Morris -- a guy with no experience and no reasonable expectation he would succeed. And they/we got exactly what the country got/is getting from the President -- a long ugly tumble into disaster and mediocrity.

It's time for a change, both in the White House and at One Buc Place.

Rule 5 Sunday -- Jessica James Clement

Sunday sort of snuck up on me this week, so a quicky Rule 5 is in order -- Jessica James Clement.

Don't know much about this chick. She's 26, comes from England, apparently didn't skip the bread and butter at meals (if you take my meaning).

She's pretty, has a regrettable penchant for large tattoos, and cheats at foosball by distracting her opponents with scandalous gaming attire.

*click on the thumbnails for full-sized images*

Rule 5 Sunday suggested by this.

Hat tips:
Jake Finnegan
The Daley Gator
The Classic Liberal
Say Anything Blog
Proof Positive

And of course, no one saw this coming

Lindsay Lohan's Playboy pics leaked online today. You gotta feel sorry for the folks at Playboy. I don't know how much stuff like this hurts their sales, but you just can't keep things like this offline anymore.

That said, I rate the pics meh.

I mean, we've seen Linds naked enough times already, either because she's falling out of her clothes or she's done some artsy photo shoot. So we're not breaking any new ground here. I guess it's simply the fact that it's an official Playboy shoot that gives the pics any cache at all.

The pictures continue what has become a disturbing, from the perspective of this amateur photog, trend -- over exposed, over filtered photography. Linds is channelling Marilyn Monroe with the bad wig, garish lipstick and extreme eye make-up. It makes me wonder what the images that Hef nixed look like. At least they didn't photoshop her freckles off.

And I have to admit, for someone who uses their body like an amusement park via drugs and alcohol, Lindsay is still bangin'.

Here's a sfw sample to judge for yourself:

Update:
And for those of you who are really interested, here are the rest of the ridiculously photoshopped images from the Playboy spread. All nsfw, so beware:

Darien Grubb moves to JGR

Former crew chief for 2011 Sprint Champion Tony Stewart, Darien Grubb has been picked up by Joe Gibbs racing to replace the dismissed Mike Ford as crew chief for Denny Hamlin.

The best kept secret of last season was that Stewart informed Grubb halfway into the Chase that he would not be kept on after the season ended. Casual fans and outside observers were scandalized after the news got out that the affable Grubb had been let go. But knowledgable fans know that Tony lost at least three races during the season due to miscues on top of the pit box.

On more than one occasion, Stewart could be heard either on the radio or in post race interviews grumbling and wondering how he lost a race he had been running away with. No great surprise that the highly competitive Stewart was shopping for a new crew chief.

Grubb started out as an engineer at Hendrick Motorsports, coming to the public notice as the marionette for a suspended Chad Knaus during one of Jimmie Johnson's championship seasons. When Stewart created Stewart-Haas racing, they brokered to use Hendrick engines and chassis, and Rick Hendrick offered Grubb to Stewart in the package.

Now with Joe Gibbs, Grubb will be using Toyota equipment, which is an entirely different package. It will be interesting to see if he can have any level of success there. I hope he does as the guy seems eminently likeable.

Tony picked up the talented Steve Addington from Penske and the nutbag Kurt Busch's team. I'm sure Addington ran, did not walk, to Stewart's to get away from the bi-polar Busch, who has since been dumped by the perfectionist Penske.

With all the drivers and crew chiefs flying around, NASCAR looks like it's being run by some fantasy league players. It's going to be an interesting 2012 season.

Late night hotness . . .

Say, are those wh . . . *backs away slowly*

Valentine notches first win as Sox skipper . . .

. . . as David Ortiz agrees to salary arbitration to return to Boston for the 2012 season.

Make no mistake, Papi was headed out of beantown. At the end of last season, Ortiz publicly declared his desire to leave the Sox as he stated he was tired of the drama surrounding the team.

After becoming the Red Sox's new manager, one of the first things Bobby Valentine did was make a trip to the Dominican Republic to chat with the award winning DH. Claiming he was invited by Ortiz' reps to attend Big Papi's charity golf tournament there, the real reason was to reassure the big slugger that he was wanted and needed in Boston and that things would be different next season.

Valentine has been a whirling dervish, meeting or contacting as many players as possible since signing on with the team. And that's some good pr for the new manager and a needed boost for player morale to see that the new skipper is going out of his way to reach out to them.

Bobby V's putting a smile back on the face of this Sox fan.

You learn something new every day

Part of the fun of being a mailman is interacting with the customers. In fact, with as crappy as things are at the P.O., it's pretty much the best part of the job.

So I'm delivering this fairly heavy package to one of my customers today. And I joke as I give it to him that it must be a fruitcake. Because of the weight, you see. Come on folks, work with me here.

But he corrects me by telling me it's a special Italian grain for the upcoming feast of St. Lucy on December 13th. He goes on about how St. Lucy is the patron saint of blindness (or the eyes) and what they make and how no one really celebrates the day down here in Florida and all.

How cool is that?

So of course, I google it and read some info on it and, voila . . . a bit more out of the ordinary knowledge creeps into my soggy brain.

So it was worth getting out of bed today after all.

Okay, so I was wrong

The Bucs can't beat the bad teams either.

Sunday, the Bucs suffered a 38-19 thumping at the hands of the 3-8 Carolina Panthers. I had said in a previous post that at least Tampa was able to beat the sub-500 teams, but even that is beyond their abilities at this point.

With the defense slumping to 30th in the league in total yards allowed and points allowed, head coach Raheem Morris still doggedly works every week to dismantle defensive guru Monte Kiffin's legendary Tampa 2 defense in favor of something only a former defensive backs coach (as Morris was) could love - a blitzing, man-to-man coverage defense similar to what was played in Miami years ago.

Of course, when the Dolphins were having great success with that scheme, they had DE luminary Jason Taylor and hall of fame corners. The Bucs have neither of those. Just a defense so full of rookies and inexperienced young players, that Morris is scaling back the defensive scheme yet again to try and help the floundering players.

Under Morris, the defense is on pace to become the worst in francise history. Last year's 10-6 record is now obviously an outlier and a 4-12 record for this year is not out of the question.

What should be questioned is whether this team needs new management. There's no bright light on the horizon that gives fans hope here. Josh Freeman may be a great quarterback someday. Then again, he could be another Vinnie Testaverde - a guy who looks great in the pocket but never quite reaches the potential you think/hope might be there. Or even another Michael Vick - a guy writers and pundits claim is the next big thing yet never seems able to deliver any team to the promised land. The defense has no rising young stud, despite Morris' penchant for referring to any and all of his guys as "studs."

So how many years do we give this coach and gm to get the job done? Plenty of head coaches with bonifide credentials have been hired by other teams, while we keep our "trendy" choice and slump ever lower in the standings. How many more losing seasons do we endure before we think about a change here?

Just askin.

Seriously . . . for a comic book?!

Nicholas Cage just auctioned off his prized comic book that features the first appearance of Superman for over $2 million.

$2 million!!!

Now granted, he'll lose 99.99% of that to the IRS for all the back taxes he owes, but come on man! $2 million?! That's just wrong.

On a completely unrelated note, the ceiling fan in my living room conked out and my right front tire is leaking air, so I'm looking at $1000+ in tires and such right before Christmas this year.

But I'm totally okay with Nick's little windfall there . . . *grumble*

Maybe this'll take my mind of that inequity . . .

Nope, didn't work *grumble*

So, what have I missed -- sports

Hey, what do you know, the Red Sox signed Bobby Valentine to be their new skipper! Wow! Who could have seen that coming? Oh yeah, me! Way back after Francona stepped down, I was one of the first voices to suggest Bobby V for the job.

Of the crop of available hires, Valentine's the best for the job. I think he'll be a good change from Tito's laid back style, so I'm a bit more optimistic about the upcoming season.

Maybe this Cherrington guy isn't such a doofus after all.

The bloom is off the rose with the Bucs. Lumbering to a 4-7 record, everyone could see what I and others thought, that last season was an outlier. The Bucs cannot beat anyone with a winning record. But they can beat teams with a losing record. So I guess that's something.

I got my facepalm moment last week, when St. Pete Times sport reporter John Romano lamented that the Bucs coaches seemed to think they were above reproach from the media. Romano couldn't figure out where such hubris came from. Really, John?! The local sports media has shown about as much critical diligence in their reporting on the Bucs as Times political reporters have shown towards the Obama administration.

Which is to say, they've been wearing rose-colored glasses with lenses as thick as coke bottle bottoms!

Don't know what's up with my Bolts, but they've got me shaking my head. Mired with an 11-11 record, this team has way too much talent to be so freekin' skitzo in their play. I don't know if this is specific to Tampa or what, but with each coaching change, this team takes off for a year then melts down. I don't get why they won't stay bought in to any specific coaching philosophy, but there's a small window for St. Louis, Lecavalier, and these guys to get to the Cup again before age begins to wear them down. I'm dying for some more Stanley Cup games here, so these dudes need to get their game on now.

My alma mater's team, USF Bulls, have stumbled to a very disappointing finish to their season. Starting off a nifty 4-0, the wheels came off quickly and they lost last night's season ender to West Virginia 30-27. Their season record of 5-7 is bad, but their conference record of 1-6 is frightening. With the state of Florida football in flux, the Bulls could have been in a position to make a big push in recruiting to get some of the top tier talent that usually ends up at the Big 3 - UF, FSU, and Miami. But this season's debacle isn't going to help them out much.

*sigh*

So, what have I missed -- politics

If you're one of the three people that regularly drop by to bask in my daily meditations on . . . well, anything, you've probably noticed I haven't been writing much these last weeks. Well, with what we call the season in full swing at the Post Office, I've been working like a low rent whore recently, and just been collapsing when I get home at night. Hence -- no ramblings. But I'm gonna give it a go and get caught up here.

First off, politics . . .

Hey, what do you know, flavor of the month Herman Cain is melting under media scrutiny and looks to drop out of the race. Gee, didn't Sarah Palin accurately note his bright, shiny new thing status a while back and get slammed for it?

I said from the get go, that Cain doesn't belong anywhere near the Presidency due to his stunning lack of legislative and international affairs experience. And finally that's come out. Along with some really dirty laundry. Why people think stuff like this won't come out under media scrutiny is beyond me. As was Cain's lament about the scandal not coming out when he was a 1%er in the polls.

Just shows more naivete on his part.

And the Great Seducer is now surging in the polls. Newt-mentom is running rampant! Again, I said early on that Newt was the best debater and can shred anyone in political talk. And now that he's showcasing his encyclopeadic knowledge on these idiotic weekly debates, his poll numbers are rising.

As are the shrieks from conservatives who remember his positions on the global warming hoax, tea party, etc.

I said he's the ultimate beltway insider, and he still is. And he'll sell out any position to gain a political victory. Of course, anyone's better than the currrent president, but Newt's just not my idea of the right guy.

Mittens is bitching about not getting softball questions from FOX, Rick Perry's trying to point out that we're not electing the Debater in Chief (a good point, imho), and Michelle Bachmann's jumping up and down trying to get someone to notice her.

If only Sarah had decided to run . . .

Rule 5 Sunday -- Web hottie hopefuls

Today's Rule 5 posting is a selection of web beauties chasing the American Dream -- fame, fortune, etc.

With the proliferation of the internet, digital cameras, and photoshop, every hometown hottie with a tripod handy is trying to be the next big thing with her own modeling website.

Does it work? Who knows? I figure the only person making money off these gals are the webmasters. Some of them hang in there for quite a while, so perhaps lightning strikes, you know?

*click on the thumbnails for full-sized images

Rule 5 Sunday suggested by this.

Hat tips:
Jake Finnegan
The Daley Gator
The Classic Liberal
Say Anything Blog
Proof Positive