Welcome back to The SMonday Swindle Sheet.
After a meeting last week with Inside Pulse’s top brass (and Fingers, too), it was decided that I would be moving this column from Saturdays to Mondays, presumably to try and benefit from all of the traffic that the site pulls in on Monday from Raw. The staff at The Saturday Swindle Sheet agreed that it could be good thing for the column, so we’ve decided to repackage it for your Monday reading pleasure.
Also, in an effort to establish a Friday gimmick, we decided to take the “Most Ridiculous Item of the Week” segment out of this column and post it as a stand-alone feature. We hope that you enjoy the new look, and if not, Matthew Michaels will gladly call your ass out and say that if it’s a fight you want, then you’ve got it, and you won’t win. ph33r!
OPENING SHOT…
BLURBS OF THE WEEK
Officials for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame announced last Monday that Van Halen, R.E.M., Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Patti “The Godmother of Punk” Smith and The Ronettes would be this year’s inductees. The annual ceremony on March 12 in New York will honor the artists. Chances are that former Van Halen singer David Lee Roth will be in attendance, so expect him to make an idiot of himself, while Sammy Hagar will technically not be able to claim his slice of the award until 2010. Gary Cherone, on the other hand, will never be able to claim his slice of the award, because when he is technically eligible for it in 2022, the music industry will have passed an edict required everyone to pretend that Van Halen III never really happened; all evidence it ever existed will have been buried in Alamogordo, N.M., and speaking of it will be a crime. Of course, Gary Cherone will still not have stopped crying about it, his only comfort coming from Nuno Bettencourt‘s coddling.
As of this week, the late singer James Brown‘s body still has yet to be buried, as his family and legal team try to finalize his will, the location where he will be buried, and other unresolved legal issues. Brown’s casket is currently being held at his home in Beech Island, S.C., in a temperature-controlled room that is guarded by security guards. According to Brown’s attorney, Buddy Dallas, who recently spoke with reporters for The SMonday Swindle Sheet, in an EXCLUSIVE interview, one of the security guards had called for help earlier in the week, after reporting that Brown’s corpse had climbed out of the casket and was chasing him around the room. However, it ended up being a false alarm, as the alleged “corpse” was just Michael Jackson, who had somehow gotten into the house, and had mistaken the security guard for an 8-year-old boy.
Christina Aguilera announced this past week that she’s teamed up with Procter & Gamble to release a line of fragrances. “I love trying new things in my music and in fashion,” the singer told reporters. “To have a perfume of my own is the beginning of an exciting adventure.” For those of you not familiar with the Procter & Gamble Company, they also produce Cascade dish detergent, Crest toothpaste and Folgers coffee. While perhaps fragrance producers Chanel or Estée Lauder may have made more sense, neither was willing to create XXXtina’s proposed Tartar Control Lemony Fresh Wintergreen Mocha scent.
Toni Braxton has filed a $10-million lawsuit against former manager Barry Hankerson, claiming that as a result of his “underhanded double-talk”, she was convinced to leave her longtime label Arista to sign with his Blackground Records. According to the suit, Hankerson told Braxton that Arista was not interested in working with her anymore, while he told the record label that Braxton was not interested in recording with them anymore. Neither case was true, and Braxton seeks damages for wages that she believes were lost from her leaving Arista. She also seeking an additional $20,000,000 (US) after Hankerson convinced her that it would be a good idea to cooperate with the relatives of a murdered Nigerian warlord in order to transfer funds from a Nigerian Bank to her checking account.
Vermont-based roots jam band Dispatch sold out New York’s Madison Square Garden this week for a show next summer, becoming the first independent band to do so. Tickets for the “Dispatch: Zimbabwe” event, which will raise money to help benefit the struggling African nation, sold out in a matter of minutes. While tickets were available through the MSG box office, they could also be purchased through Ticketmaster for $29,999 apiece, including $29,949 in convenience charges, shipping charges, handling charges, processing charges, Ticketmaster CEO-needs-a-new-gold-plated-Rolls-Royce charges, more convenience charges, printing charges, scanning charges, and even more convenience charges.
Glam rock musician Gary Glitter may end up getting his sentence reduced after having served the past 10 months in a Vietnamese prison for molesting two children. While Glitter (né Paul Francis Gadd) was originally sentenced to three years, he one of several selected inmates whose sentences could be reduced due to celebrations for next month’s Lunar New Year. Yeah… I don’t get it, either.
My Chemical Romance guitarist Frank Iero had to leave his band in Tokyo and fly back to the United States after being becoming sick, possibly after finally coming to the realization that he plays in one of the shittiest bands in history. As the band will continue to play a few Australasian dates, they have enlisted the services of Drive By guitarist Todd Price to fill in for Iero.
Board members for Riverbank Unified High School in Riverbank, Calif., have decided to ban the image of the late hyphy rapper Mac Dre from the school because a large majority of his images found on students’ t-shirts show him using drugs. “It’s glaringly obvious,” Principal Ken Gesick told reporters for The SMonday Swindle Sheet, in an EXCLUSIVE interview. “That these kids really need to stop doing drugs and listening to this hyphy crap… but I guess it beats doing drugs and listening to Southern rap.”
Singer/choreographer/American Idol judge Paula Abdul has signed on to participate in a live action movie based on the popular Bratz toy line, which has been integral in showing tween girls everywhere that it’s okay to look like a f*cking skank. Abdul will appear as a character in the movie, and will also be choreographing all dance routines in the movie. Even bigger than this story, however, was a guest appearance that Abdul made on Seattle’s Fox-13 morning show, where she spoke to the anchors from New York via a satellite feed. Apparently, she’d been out drinking all night, because she was so destroyed that she could barely hold her head up. Seriously. I was just waiting for her to fall out of the chair or stool that she was sitting in, but alas, it did not happen. Well, I guess it’s better than being a cokehead.
Cheers
-JF2k7!
