SAN DIEGO, CA – The San Diego Convention Center just wrapped up Comic Con 2012, over 150,000 nerds and studio types converged to keep this sun-drenched city’s economy afloat for another year. Unfortunately, the MTM press credentials didn’t come through for me this year and everything sold out within minutes back in March. But I do have contacts who made it down there, shouting “Connnnnnnn!” at me in texts, or sending pictures posing with a sharp, white tuxedo-ed Bruce Campbell. Mostly, fans lucky enough to get into the venerable Hall H got to see hints of things coming up – The Hobbit, Man of Steel, Pacific Rim, Django Unchained, and even a surprise teaser for a new Godzilla – while I stayed home and looked around for my own clues as to what’s coming soon. Drew Brees, Jeremy Lin, Ben Sheets and Joe Pa all came to the forefront…
https://youtu.be/CEn-GFGUG0o
It must be coming up on Football Season, Part 1: Drew Brees is now getting paid like the best quarterback in the game, especially after winning so many people’s fantasy season week 17 championships last year (that being the week he decided to run up the score in a meaningless game just to set the passing yards record at home).
It must be coming up on the end of conventional television providers: The fight between Viacom and DirecTV (which feels like any big time sports league strike…both sides suck, and I get screwed) means I don’t get Comedy Central or Cartoon Network now, and may be spurring me to drop the whole package and patch things together on Hulu and Netflix streaming. At least I don’t have Dish, which is having a similar spat with AMC, so I could finally fill my Breaking Bad fix last night.
It must be coming up on…2002? Ben Sheets looked like the heralded prospect coming up to beat the Mets yesterday, and the Yankees still can’t quite beat the Angels consistently.
It must be coming up on football season, Part 2: Denver sack specialist Elvis Dumervil (pronounced Dumber-vil) is arrested in Miami for aggravated assault involving a handgun. Was he practicing for his first game going against Tebow?
It must be coming up on basketball season: Jason Kidd was supposed to mentor Jeremy Lin, but now Knicks fans are left hoping he can hit open jumpers as well as he can telephone poles. Lin, meanwhile, is taking both his flash and his pan to Houston…the Harvard guy knows how to strike while the iron’s hot.
It must be coming up on college football season: Penn State’s Board of Trustees has to decide quick about what to do with the Joe Paterno statue. I think that if they don’t make the right decision soon, that statue is gonna come down like Saddam Hussein’s. I can’t add any thing to this that our astute contributor The Public Professor hasn’t already said (and said well), but I think “JoePa” could become a verb, as in, “that guy was so close to running out the clock with a clean slate before it all fell spectacularly apart in the last minute.” Other victims of getting JoePa’d:
Our 29th president, Warren Harding, was a popular compromise conservative (there was such a thing?) but his political career, and then his life, ended amid scandal two years into his term.
Ken Lay was one of the smartest guys in the room at Enron, riding high until it turned out he’d been screwing his employees, his investors, and the country before dying facing 30 years in prison.
Alan Freed was the guy who coined the phrase “Rock and Roll” and was on top of the world as its most prominent DJ. Unfortunately for him, “payola” is the phrase we more closely associate with his name now, and he died amid scandal at 43.
I’m sure there are many more examples, but Googling “died amid scandal” only brings up page after page of JoePa stories.
It must be coming up on Tuesday, because Grote2DMax is tomorrow.
