Week ‘n Review – June 17

On Fridays, The GBOAT will feature a quick recap of the most popular or awesome news stories of the week. Love this post? Hate it? Got any suggestions? Leave some feedback!

1. Miami Heat lose, everyone celebrates….including some of the Heat.

I am required to like Erick Dampier. He is a Mississippi State graduate, so there is a level of loyalty to him that I’m supposed to uphold. However, as Damp has spent a great deal of his career scowling, it’s sometimes a little bit hard to REALLY love the guy. Not exactly a huge personality.

Erick spent the last six years of his career playing for the Dallas Mavericks. This past year, they got rid of him and picked up some other tall guys. Erick spent some time without a team, then signed with the Miami Heat. The Mavericks and Heat, turns out, played for the NBA Championship, and the Mavericks won.

AWKWARD.

The Mavericks naturally went out to celebrate their victory Sunday night before flying back to Dallas….and apparently Erick Dampier went with them. To celebrate….losing? This is a little bit like John McCain losing the presidential race to Barack Obama, then hitting the club scene with him that night.

2. Vancouver loses the Stanley Cup, has lamest riot ever

The Boston Bruins beat the Vancouver Canucks (a profession sports team whose nickname is just a racial slur) to win the NHL Championship, and Vancouver fans promptly pulled an anti-Dampier: they piled into the streets to….stand around and look at each other.

I watched this live online, just to fulfill a lifelong dream of watching a riot happen from the comfort of my bedroom, and I was a little disappointed. There was no sign of the Royal Canadian Mounted Riot Police, and furthurmore, there was no sign of a riot. Just a crowd of people standing around in the street, taking pictures of the three guys destroying things.

Now, just to be clear, I understand that the riot was MUCH worse than I could see from my streaming video. Apparently this particular news source was doing a story on the boring side of riots. But regardless, it was still a sports-induced riot, which is just a little bit dumb.

In movies, riots are always just constant chaos, with people just running everywhere punching, kicking, and biting. Turns out that’s a lie. Riots are just 6 angry people throwing things and hundreds of people standing around watching. The allure is now gone.

Unless that was just a Canadian-style riot.

(Once again, to avoid anyone getting angry, I’m well aware that the riots were bad. They were also a bad idea.)

3. Anthony Weiner resigns, all jokes officially used up

It was probably only a matter of time before Representative Anthony Weiner resigned, after it was announced that he had been sending out pictures of himself to people.

What IS shocking about this story, however, is how quickly the Internet Box was done with jokes about this. It’s not every day that somebody with such an unfortunate last name actually does something this stupid. But for whatever reason, everyone got so excited about all of it, they emptied all of their jokes out at once last week. Not sure what the record for “quickest exhaustion of a joke” is, but it was most likely set thanks to Anthony Weiner. There’s something to be said for pacing yourself.

It says a lot about the American public that we were done so quickly with this story. News broke and you could almost hear an audible “….meh” across the nation. Not even Twitter could care. Afterall, Thursday would’ve been the 40th birthday of Tupac.

4. Al Qaeda appoints another bearded old guy as leader.

And now the section of the post that has probably put me on some sort of CIA watch list!

Terrorist group al Qaeda finally got around to saying “Okay, okay, you got us. Bin Laden’s dead. Well done.” and in the process announced that his second in command is taking over.

Now , you’ve got to give al Qaeda props for being consistent, I suppose. While America has been busy going out and electing young, charismatic leaders to mix things up here, al Qaeda went with this guy:

Reports say that Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was a longtime assistant (like 100+ years) to Osama Bin Laden, accepted the position just days before his 60th birthday.

Don’t know about you, but I’d like to see the birth certificate on that one.