Daily Archives: February 1, 2009

Feb 1 2009

How do you like him now?

So, an image services over the weekend of Michael Phelps with a bong.  MSN has a nice long and repititive story covering the whole drama. Here’s are some of the highlights…phelps1

Olympic great Michael Phelps acknowledged “regrettable” behavior and “bad judgment” after a photo in a British newspaper Sunday showed him inhaling from a marijuana pipe.

“I engaged in behavior which was regrettable and demonstrated bad judgment,” Phelps said in the statement released by one of his agents. “I’m 23 years old and despite the successes I’ve had in the pool, I acted in a youthful and inappropriate way, not in a manner people have come to expect from me. For this, I am sorry. I promise my fans and the public it will not happen again.”

“He looked just as natural with a bong in his hands as he does swimming in the pool. He was the gold medal winner of bong hits.”

He has never tested positive for banned substances. The case is unlikely to fall under any doping rules.

Phelps’ main sanctions most likely will be financial — perhaps doled out by embarrassed sponsors who might be reconsidering their dealings with the swimmer.

“Michael is a role model, and he is well aware of the responsibilities and accountability that come with setting a positive example for others, particularly young people,” the USOC said in a statement. “In this instance, regrettably, he failed to fulfill those responsibilities.”

This isn’t the first embarrassing episode for Phelps after an Olympic triumph. In 2004, a few months after winning six gold and two bronze medals in Athens, the swimmer was arrested on a drunken driving charge at age 19. He pleaded guilty and apologized for the mistake.

“We are confident that, going forward, Michael will consistently set the type of example we all expect from a great Olympic champion,” the group said.

Like Michael said, he’s 23.  Granted, that’s no excuse for his actions but America loves to put people like him up on a pedestal and look what happens? These people are human, just like the rest of us, and they make mistakes. Or just once they slip up and act like everyone else and someone is right there taking a photo.  We’ve seen it happen with a ton of celebrities and politicians.  Why should an Olympic athlete be any different?  He did it the first time with his DUI when he was 19 and yet we forgave him and he got to go back and compete (America would have been a fool not to let him compete and we knew that).

Oooh…he won 8 Gold medals (two thanks to his team mates but no one cares about them) and now look at him.  Who cares?  If it wasn’t a bong, it’d be some cheap and taudry night out with some whore in a hotel room making a porn vid, or he’d be convulsing in an alley outside the Viper Room, or die of a drug overdose in his hotel, or have an affair with Jennifer Anisten and move to Africa and adopt foreign babies, or be gay in a hot tub with Chad Allen!  Who cares?!

Wake up, America!  Your heroes aren’t as perfect as you make them out to be!

Feb 1 2009

Angels and Demons: My Official Amazon Review

There’s not too much I can say about a book that already has 2000+ reviews written about it varying from “I loved it” to “I hate it.” I have to admit I didn’t love it as much as I did The Da Vinci Code, but I didn’t hate Angels and Demons either. At 560 plus pages, however, there was a lot I could have done without. angels

Brown makes a slow climb to introducing the power of CERN and the antimatter that has been created. I was already 100 pages into the book before I had really warmed up to it. I almost gave up on it.

Robert Langdon is a fascinating character, but Brown bats him around the head in a James Bond-like setting only giving Langdon a gun or a steel pipe for defense. I know he’s supposed to be more of a scholar, but Langdon almost gets lost in the action once the puzzles have been solved.

The book is riddled with cliche writing (pun intended) that even Brown should be ashamed of. Strip away the religious banter, the ambigrams, the CERN science, and the historical blah blah, and you’d probably have a 5th grade creative writing essay.

Just as he did in the code, Brown distances himself from the bad guys, who’ve sent a pawn to do their dirty work anyhow. We know he’s the bad guy because he’s in the “shadows” and laughs an evil laugh and kills people but the reader never really gets to know who he is or where he came from.

SPOILERS:
By the time Vatican City was safe, I couldn’t take much more but Brown tried to shove several more “A-has!” in just the last 40 pages from the Pope having a child to Fatima’s third prophecy still being a secret. I think these would have worked better had he not already put the reader through 500 pages, come to an over-the-top explosive conclusion, and only killed 6 people. The adrenaline rush was over by then and I just wanted the book to end.

END OF SPOILERS.

I only read this book because there’s a movie coming up and I do like Tom Hanks and look forward to seeing him in the lead role. And you know Hollywood will clean up the manuscript and fit it into a two hour show. Dan Brown should do the same thing with his next book. Lay off the Catholics for a while and its religious mysteries. Stop clouding your story with religious and historical “facts” which you twist around just to get people talking and Googling. Oh, and maybe take a writing class or pick up a thesaurus and put down the Bible and the history books.

For readers out there who get all in a tizzy because Brown didn’t get his facts right, grow up. After all, this book is shelved in fiction. We read fiction half expecting to be taken to another time and place anyway. Brown found some far out stuff no one had ever written about, he put the good parts in, changed the parts he didn’t like, and made a million dollars doing it. Hmm…sounds just like those people who wrote our grade school history textbooks. Oh…and the Bible too!

Notice I did give this book a 4 star review. I have to give Brown kudos for the severely complex and over-the-top plot. Once it got going, it did keep me interested enough to finish reading it despite the flaws I have pointed out here. Now I’m going to go read something much lighter and fluffier…

(Pictured is the original cover.  It was redone, and has since been redone again to advertise the upcoming movie, but look closely.  The title of the book is the same right side up and upside down.  This is called an ambigram, which plays a big part in the book.)