(If either of my readers is wondering why the usual One Big Dump has come in multiple big dumps today, it’s because we’re trying something new to fool Google. And because, well, we were worried about beating the Manny Acta firing to print.)
The great Thom Loverro rips Rob Dibble a new one and then some in the Washington Times.
I love listening to Dibble’s work on the Nats’ TV broadcasts, but I just plain love Loverro, who is about the nicest guy still typing.
If Loverro is going after you — and boy o boyo, does he go after Dibble — then something’s up.
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LeBron James is coming to town tonight, in the flesh.
Fresh off starring in an immediately obsolete series of puppet commercials with an inanimate Kobe Bryant, James’s scheduled to show up at the AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Spring tonight for the premiere of “More Than a Game,” a documentary about James and some buddies from Akron, Ohio who played youth basketball together.
I love LeBron as much as the next guy, but “More Than a Game” is a more than lame name for a movie about King James.
Sources indicate the rival Kobe puppet won’t be able to attend the movie opening. He’s hungover from celebrating another championship.
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I’d barely watched Dwight Howard until these last couple weeks of playoffs. I can’t see that guy’s inflated physique filling my TV screen without thinking about the couple that just got indicted by the feds after saying they sold steroids up here to our the Nats and Caps. They live in Winter Park, Fla.. That’s just outside Orlando. Did these folks really have to leave town to find customers? (Seriously, anybody who thinks David Stern isn’t a genius, answer me this: Why didn’t the NBA take any heat in the Dead Balls Era™?)
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So Six Flags finally hit bottom, long after everybody on Wall Street — or, well, most people on Wall Street and some gnat on Champlain Street — had written the Dan Snyder-led company off. Snyder was clearly waiting for Lavar Arrington to beat him to the bankruptcy court.
(Lavar’s bankrupt restaurant, the Sideline Bar and Grill, is in Largo; the nearest outpost of Snyder’s bankrupt theme park chain, Six Flags America, is in Largo. I’ve never read Freakenomics, but something tells me everything ain’t right in Largo.)
And anti-kudos to anybody who lets Snyder off the hook for telling Six Flags investors in 2005 they’d be “better off hiding their money under a mattress” unless they don’t put him in charge of the company. So they put him in charge of their money and…HE LOSES EVERY PENNY!
And how ’bout how Snyder trying to hide with that Saturday morning bankruptcy filing? His cowardly and naive tactic that didn’t keep big boys from telling the world about his failings.
And then he puts out a press release with his partner in debacle, CEO Mark Shapiro, pumping up Six Flags “record year” (in reality the company lost more than $100 million in 2008) and saying that the Snyder management team’s “three-year turnaround” is complete. That’s true, if by “turnaround” Snyder & Shapiro mean taking stock that was selling for $11.93 cents a share three years ago when they took over and making it WORTH ZERO CENTS A SHARE!
That’s rich.
(Here’s the reaction Todd Sullivan, a blogger who has monitored Six Flags since the Snyder regime took over, reacted to Shapiro’s statements on bankruptcy filing day: “Mark Shapiro is the kind of guy who could urinate on you and tell you with smile he is ‘rinsing some dust off you.'”)
Shouldn’t Snyder, instead of hiding behind the weekend news cycle and Shapiro, have been making a public apology to all the folks who fell for his bogus mattress rap, a crowd that includes Six Flags investors Vinny Cerrato and Karl Swanson?
We’d love to hear from anybody who trusted Snyder’s claims for Six Flags and… LOST EVERY PENNY!
We know you’re out there!
Karl? Vinny?
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