There’s absolutely no doubt about it: We’re doomed!
McClatchy mea culpa: Bites doesn’t particularly need a reason to cap on the Sacramento Bee, but that’s never stopped employees of the only newspaper on Q Street from stepping up. The latest Bee scribe to throw a bone Bites’ way is Bobby Caina Calvan, currently serving as a foreign correspondent for McClatchy Co. in Baghdad.
It seems Baghdad Bobby has an issue with authority, or at least one of the MPs guarding the entrance to the Green Zone. When Bobby flashed his ID at the gate, said gendarme failed to recognize the name of his news organization, Knight Ridder. (As Bites has reported many times, McClatchy bought out Knight Ridder last year, but apparently McClatchy reporters prefer to use Knight Ridder’s name in Iraq, perhaps to attract attention away from McClatchy’s dwindling stock price.)
But Bites digresses. The guard denied the hapless reporter access until his identity could be confirmed, and Bobby pitched a fit. Even worse, he wrote about it on his blog. Here’s Bobby, in his own words, showing the guard who’s boss.
“What’s the use of these media badges if people like you aren’t going to honor them?” Bobby scolded. “Is this for nothing? Why don’t you call? That’s your job, isn’t it?”
Then Bobby told the guard he was jotting down the guard’s name.
That’ll show ’im!
Unfortunately for Bobby, such shenanigans aren’t taken lightly in the blogosphere, and he was deluged with negative comments, which were later removed, but not before an enterprising blogger captured them for posterity. “I wish I’d been that soldier,” reads one of the nicer posts. “You would have had a difficult time typing this blog entry with your broken fingers up your dumb ass.”
Bobby has apologized in a subsequent post, bless his heart. He did not respond to Bites’ inquiry before press time, but tune in next week. You never know.
For Pete’s sake: God save Sacramento King fans. The coming season promises to be the worst ever. Turns out unheralded first-round draft pick Spencer Hawes has glass knees. Who’d thunk it, besides anyone who’d bothered to read the guy’s medical report? Then there’s reserve center Justin Williams, apparently afflicted with an overactive libido. And trouble magnet Ron Artest, who seemingly can’t take a punch, not even from his own wife, and will miss the start of the season because of it. Don’t forget $11 million point guard Mike Bibby, who’ll miss 10 weeks thanks to a boo-boo on his thumb.
Could it possibly get any worse?
In a word, hell yes.
It seems Cal Expo is paying former Gov. Pete Wilson $400 an hour to cajole the Kings into building a new stadium at the state fairgrounds, an effort that Bites predicts can only be doomed to failure. True, few negotiators possess Wilson’s rat-like charm, but even he is no match for the Brothers Maloof, whose megalomaniacal demands will no doubt include all of Cal Expo’s parking fees, the harness racing gambling concession and water rights to the proposed peripheral canal. Wilson might as well chain a cinder block to his ankle and throw it in Lake Natomas.
Frankly, Bites has about had it with this sorry excuse for a professional sports franchise, which has been practicing much of the pre-season in Sin City, where the Maloofs are actually considered respectable business people. Too bad what practices in Vegas can’t stay there.
Leaves of grass: Fresh off his frighteningly successful exploitation of the anti-global-warming movement, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has apparently set his sights on the NORML demographic. No doubt members of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws lit up after reading the Schwarzenegger’s recent quote in the British edition of GQ magazine. Commenting on the massive toke he takes in his first film, Pumping Iron, Schwarzenegger insisted marijuana “is not a drug. It’s a leaf.” Try that one next time Sacramento’s finest pulls you over.