Random Blogging: Birkhead, Pacman and "nappy-headed hos"

That may seem like an odd assortment of tags, but consider these stories making news right now:

New NFL commish Roger Goodell has reacted swiftly and mercilessly to the trouble- making riff-raff infecting his league; talk radio kingpin/mumbling fossil Don Imus is embroiled in another controversy thanks to his severe, incurable case of diarrhea of the mouth; and Anna Nicole's babydaddy has finally been revealed, and boy is it going to take a long time to wipe the smile of that guy's face!

Let's recap a wild and weird few days in the on the pop culture grid.

-Goodell rains punishment down on NFL troublemakers
There's a new sheriff in the League, and his name is not Reggie Hammond, it's Roger Goodell. In a few short months the man who replaced Paul Tagliabue has come down hard on a couple of oft-troubled players, quickly making the previous regime look like the Wonder Years.

The new head honcho of the NFL hasn't enacted a complete new disciplinary program yet, but he still found it within his power to suspend the Titans trouble making DB/return specialist Adam "Pacman" Jones and his oft-arrested former West Virginia teammate Chris Henry of the Bengals for a total of 24 games next season under terms of the existing conduct policy.

Jones received one of the harshest, and most expensive suspensions in league history as he was banned for the entire 2007 season following his embarrassing strip club shooting incident in Vegas this February. That fiasco, in which he allegedly "rained" $81 Gs down on a bunch of strippers, resulting in a melee where 3 people were shot and a bouncer was paralyzed, was the final straw, and he now stands to lose $1.3 million in salary.

It was Jones' 10th run-in with law enforcement in the last few years, and he fast becoming just as well-known for hanging around with "the wrong crowd", League-speak for gang bangers and dope slangers, as he is for his spectacular interception & kickoff returns.

Another trouble-magnet from the world wide leader in that department is wide receiver Chris Henry. The second-year player out of WVU has been arrested more times in the past two years than Robert Downey Jr was during the '80s, and for that he will serve an 8-game suspension next season. His hi jinks, which range from DUI to possession of a firearm, will cost him roughly $200,000; lucky he isn't a big star or it would have cost him Pacman money.

But Sheriff Goodell isn't playing games with the image of the league anymore. With so many transgressions running the gamut from possession of a small armory (Tank Johnson) to the Viking's Booze Cruise he realized he had to act swiftly to curtail this kind of counter-productive (to profits) behavior. With the Players Association's blessing and at the urging of fans & media, Goodell has hit the players where he knows it hurts the most

In the wallet.

-Don Imus latest member of the Hollywood's Bigoted & Intolerant Club
When the talk radio veteran (and his sidekick/producer) yukked it up at the expense of the players from the Rutgers women's basketball team last Wednesday, he couldn't have realized the severity of the repercussions that would follow.

Trouble was he didn't seem to care, either.

Now Imus is facing a shitstorm of epic proportions; advertisers have pulled out of his radio show & its TV simulcast on MSNBC; he has been suspended from the show for two weeks beginning next Monday; and a slew of public figures, from Al Sharpton to Barack Obama, are calling for his outright ouster from the airwaves.

The reason for all the hoopla ocurred last Wednesday when Imus was on the air talking about the young ladies from the Rutgers team which had just lost in the Women's National Championship game, but you would have thought he was referring to some crack whores living in a van down by the river. He made comments about their tattoos, producer Bernard McGuirk classified the game vs. Tennessee as the "jigaboos versus the wannabes" and then Imus infamously uttered the most unoriginal description of a black women to come around in decades, "that's some nappy headed hos."

For some reason what was merely the latest in a long line of bigoted, insensitive and just downright unfunny quotes might be the one that gets this leatherfaced windbag off the air for good. He is currently in full-fledged Mel/Kramer mode, going on a nationwide apology tour and uttering the stock phrase rolled out by all celebs with good publicists in these situations: "I'm not that kind of person."

Look, dickhead, you've made a career of making stupid comments and putting your foot in your huge mouth, but this time you didn't mean it? Then how about when you called journalist Gwen Ifill a "cleaning lady", a Washington Post reporter a "beanie wearing Jewboy" or respected African American writer Bill Rhoden a "quota hire"? Did you mean those comments or not? I'm confused.

You see there's a difference between making jokes about people who do foolish things while in the public eye and just slamming innocent people because they are of a different color, religion or ethnicity.

But you're beginning to see that difference now, aren't you Don?
(sorry Mom, but I never liked this guy)

- Birkhead, not Howard K. Stern, father of Anna Nicole's daughter
After months of nauseating media coverage, innumerable potential candidates and one fucked up judge, the paternity of Anna Nicole Smith's daughter Dannielynn has finally been revealed:

Larry Birkhead, come on down, you're the proud possessor of a potential billion dollar lottery ticket!

When news broke that Birkhead was indeed the true father of Dannielynn, not Smith's lawyer/ lover/lackey Stern, I'm sure the first thing on his mind was the health and well-being of his little girl.

And his second though immediately after was "I'm rich, bitch!"