Keep on Hats Like Adebisi

Do You Like Fried Cheese?

This man likes it as much as anyone I know...except myself. Note: Do not eat 8 fried cheese sandwiches in a 40 hour period, it makes you feel less than stellar.

Now that we have the serious stuff out of the way, on to the really serious stuff.

Q: Am I racist for not ever wanting to be in the same movie theater as black people?

A: No, I actually want to enjoy the movie I paid to see.

I found myself in the newish Pearle theater on Temple's campus this past Saturday night, everything was going well until the last quarter of the movie. At approximately 11:45 PM EDT a family of 16, who coincidentally were sitting directly in front of us, decided that "Superbad" was indeed Superlong and all got up to make their slow move toward the isle. Leaving Early? Fine. Leaving early and screaming about how:

"This movie is too fuckin long! "

"Yeah, what the fuck"

"This shit super shitty"

This equals ignorance at its best. If ignorance is bliss, these douches must reside in Shangrala. Without giving anything away, there are some scenes at the end in which the costars express their happiness with their friendship, to which the dudes sitting behind me had this gem to say:

"Yo son, this shit just got mad gay"

"Yeah MAD GAY son!"

Thanks you fuckin ty voles I finally know what constitutes "mad gay". Needless to say none of the above even comes close to the time that the guy sitting next to me left the theater only to return 8 minutes later with 4 Styrofoam containers of wings and bleu cheese. I enjoy wings, but smelling another man eat them in the movies is awful.

Whew...now that i got that off my chesticles, on to the-

Gems of the Week

-Can you say Best Movie Ever? (watch the trailer)

-I love Philly!

I Also Love the Eagles.

Memories from the Land of the Empty Orchestra

Many weeks have passed since I departed on a Dalembert Report-funded scouting jaunt to Japan, in search of talent, vistas, and blog fodder. Safely home I now realize that internets allow us to blog from anywhere in the world; "The DR-Live from Japan" sadly will have to wait a year(at least). Instead of wasting time filing scrupulous reports and meeting insane editor expectations and deadlines I chose to relax and investigate the beach.

Between sunny days in the sand and humid nights on the town I had plenty of time to contemplate and absorb my surroundings. I played basketball with a local squad of 20-somethings who taught me the simple pleasures of warm-up drills and a scorekeeper. I waited out a typhoon by closing all the shutters and watching season 1 of 24. I blended in to my surroundings like Waldo in a peppermint factory, Britney at a Penn party, or Pacman at Delilahs. Besides my exclusive use of English, the subtle wardrobe entirely built around Sixers, Phillies, and Eagles shirts, and my 8-inch height advantage over nearly everyone, I barely stood out. I'd like to pass along some of what I observed.

People think of Japan and dozens of predictable images pop into the minds eye: sushi, karaoke, samurai, karate, atomic explosions, sumo, Mt. Fuji, geishas, rice, crazy television, keen fashion, and many other things, some flagrantly racist and others simply sexually disturbing. I'll try to tackle the list one by one:

Sushi: yes they have sushi here. Yes it is good. Yes it is probably much much better than the sushi you eat at the nearest Teriyaki Boy in the mall. Personally I didn't eat much sushi in Japan. There's a lot of other great food that I'd never seen or tried before and I also ate way too often at the nearby Hokka Hokka, a chain in Japan that serves up meat and rice on the fast and cheap. The food here is delicious. If you go to Japan I seriously recommend eating yourself into a disgusting fat stupor.

Karaoke: Karaoke is damn fun. I'll qualify that by adding I sang in tiny bars with almost nobody I knew while respectfully sauced. Would I be equally inclined to offer my version of Bohemian Rhapsody in a crowded American bar with dozens of familiars in attendance? I'll cross that bridge when I reach it. Until then, Karaoke is great. Try it and see.

Samurai and Karate: Stunningly I didn't see any swordsman or karate kids in my time there. I guess they vacation like everybody else in the summer.

Atomic bombs: We bombed the motherlovin' crap outta Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Check that new HBO documentary and feel the weight.

Sumo: I didn't get to see any sumo in person but I am sure it is cooler than anything ever. One aspect of small-town Japanese life I appreciated was that according to my contacts, basically all the fatboys you see are training to be sumos. Isn't that a wonderful system? Replace the stigma of fat and lazy with the honor of fat and sumo and no young boys will worry about body insecurity again. I'm not sure they have a system to displace the negative body-image problems of the fat girls with positive ones but I'm sure they don't.

Mt Fuji: Big famous mountain tourist trap. Never got close top it. Also a big famous female wrestler from G.L.O.W. who filled the Asian role.

Geishas: As with sumo and Mt. Fuji, sadly I was not lucky enough to spend my time with any geishas. I did find Japanese woman to be both attractive and effusely deferential. Oh yeah, no fluoride in the water there(at least where I was) so lots of bad teeth.

Rice: Fuck Uncle Ben's dry shitty rice and get yourself some Japanese sticky rice. Seriously, invest in a rice cooker and live to be 100.

Television: Ridiculous. Most shows tend to revolve around at least 5 people sitting around tables eating food, discussing bullshit, and quipping dramatically about nothing. Big emphasis on drama and intrigue. For my own sanity I watched close to no tv but from what I did see I would say the Japanese took the View and added men, more tables and food, and put it on every channel for 18 of the 24 hours a day.

Fashion: forget about modern styles and sharp cuts, the best fashion tool in all of Japan is the sweat rag. Where I was(Shimizu) was so hot the sweat rag was THE accessory of the summer, coming in all shapes and sizes and even morphing into a do-rag piece that ties in the back and soaks up sweat while knocking down trend-setter jaws.

Before I end I want to thank my tour guides, my cat Gay-Gay, and Bunno sensei.

Gems of the Web

Allow myself to introduce myself...I am the newest contributing member of the DR, Tha Bul Bubak. I am a professional at this thing they call the internets and also enjoy long walks on the beach, rough sex, and demoralizing/defiling others. Now, on to the Gems of the Week.

-By now all of our three readers have seen the Chocolate Rain video on youtube, but have you seen this?

- Has there ever been a better time to be a pinko commie ruskie bastard?

-No explanation needed

-Email conversation of the week: (names have been altered to be much better)

Tavarious Pounds: coincidentally, yesterday, i found the end of the internet.

Nate Newton: if it involved poop and asians, then I think I found it too....

Canadian Bacon

The dog days of summer means that the Dalembert Report takes a break from bringing you the workd of Sammy D in order to engage in exciting summer vacation endeavors. These include recieving handjobs from Ukrainian strippers (eldiablogrande), puttering about in a rural Japanese garden of Daikon radishes (tutkwon), and giving out obligatory courtesy wipes (flintskins).

But unlike us lazy pieces of shit, Sammy D has been busy this August.

Samuel Dalembert of the NBA’s Philadelphia 76’ers became the latest member of Canada’s Senior Men’s National Basketball Team today after becoming a Canadian citizen earlier in the day at a swearing-in ceremony in Hamilton, Ontario. Dalembert, was born in Port-Au-Prince Haiti, but moved to Montréal where he won a Quebec High School Championship and played on Quebec’s provincial basketball team before completing his schooling in the United States and attending Seaton Hall on a NCAA scholarship. Dalembert has kept his strong ties to Canada, with his family continuing to live in the Montréal area.

That's right...Sammy will be following in the illustrious footsteps of Bill Wennington, Jamal Magloire and Mike Myers and repping team Canada in the Olympics.

I'm feeling a little conflicted about this news, kind of like when I found out about Pat Burrell fisting Giuliano. On the one hand, I'm excited for Sammy to get some more practice, and thrilled to hear that he lives in the Munt (just like i was titillated when Giuls was able to confirm my longstanding suspicions as to Pat the Glove's sexual deviancy). On the other hand, instead of being the NBA's only Haitian player, Sammy is now just one of three Canadian ballers, and there's a long history of players sucking after spending their offseason with the national team (ie: learning that a close friend let Philly's most hated baseball player massage his prostate in the mens room of Bar Noir).

Department of Non-Frivolous Lawsuits

You don't know Jonathan Lee Riches. Michael Vick says he doesn't know Jonathan Lee Riches. The Dalembert Report, with the possible exception of flintskins, (who spends his free time engaged in pursuits about which we have no idea) doesn't know Jonathan Lee Riches either. But judging from his latest legal filing, the guy is definately someone we would love to share a 40 of Coqui 900 with.

Riches is suing Michael Vick for the amount of "63,000,000,000 billion dollars" which as far as I can tell is somewhere in the neighborhood of googolplex dollars, which according to Wikipedia is more dollars than molecules exist in the entire universe.

He's suing Vick because he says Vick stole two of his dogs, then used the proceeds from the dog fight where said dogs were involved to buy missiles from Iran and give them to Al Qaeda. Which is obviously true and makes me wonder why they're even bothering to send Vick to trial and not just shipping his black ass straight to Gitmo.

So when Fox News is broadcasting a breaking story tomorrow about Mike Vick being extraordinarily renditioned to Syria, you'll know why.

Me and Sammy McDee

The man pictured here is Brian Roberts, the CEO of Comcast Corporation. Comcast owns controlling interest in a company called Comcast Spectacor. Comcast Spectacor owns the Sixers.

Thus, Samuel Dalembert technically works for Comcast. I also work for Comcast. Brian Roberts is mine and Sammy D's boss.

I work for a division of the company called Comcast Interactive Media, which is a fancy way of saying 'the internet.' Sammy works for a division called "The 76ers" which means he plays basketball.

When Sammy is at work, he reports to 76ers head coach Maurice Cheeks. Coach Cheeks reports to Team President Billy King. Billy King reports to Comcast Spectacor Chairman Ed Snider, who reports to Comcast Chief Operating Officer Steve Burke, who reports to the aforementioned Brian Roberts.

When I'm at work I report to the Executive Producer of Comcast.net, who's name is Neil McManus. Neil reports to a guy named Charlie Herrin, the Senior Vice President for Internet Development. Charlie reports to Amy Banse, the President of Comcast Interactive Media. Amy reports to the aforementioned Steve Burke, who reports to the aforementioned Brian Roberts.

So in the eyes of Comcast, Sammy and myself are essentially the same person. Which makes me almost as happy as if I'd discovered that Sammy and I were earning the same salary.

Ron Mexico is Dead

Some amazing and baffling new revelations are coming to light in the wake of the federales indicting Michael Vick on dog fighting charges. For one, we now know that that menace to society, that one man crime wave, that scourge of the NFL and the Atlanta metro area goes by the terror-inspiring nickname “Ookie”.

That’s right. The NFL’s most dangerous QB is named after a game where teenage boys compete to see who can be the first to ejaculate onto a pastry.

Equally as perplexing is the name of Vick’s alleged operation: Bad Newz Kennels. I’m assuming that the ‘bad newz’ part is a double entendre, referring not only to the intimidating nature of the pit bulls housed therein but also to Vick’s hometown of Newport “Bad” News.

But why drop the second z after kennel? Why, if your going to replace one s with a z would you not continue with the theme throughout the whole title of your operation? Did Vick feel as though a second z would have been overkill? Is he so bad at spelling that he truly thinks the word “news” ends with a different letter than the word “kennels”? Maybe “badnewzkennelz@gmail” was already taken.

We may never know.

Still in Effect!

Sorry for the short hiatus - you can thank both the corporate (.net) and the much more mundane (my internet installer) sections of Comcast Corp for the suspension in posts. That and spending way too much time watching LW3 bung down thunderous dunks on hapless and oafy Harvard-attending white centers by the name of Cusworth.

More on the Sixers summer league team soon to come. In the meantime, here's how I feel about the Phillies chances of making the playoffs:



On the bright side, at least we have our 10,000th loss to look forward to.

The Draftermath

Some critics of draft analysis bitch and moan that true critique of the draft should be held in check until two or three years from now, when the players chosen have properly aligned themselves into categories of boom and bust, wow what a great pick and what the hell were you thinking?? I disagree. I believe I'm properly credentialed to render verdicts now and with absolute certainty. Besides, who has time to wait three years when global warming could cover the East Coast with ocean before I can fairly decide if Thaddeous Young was the right pick instead of Al Thornton? There's an old saying in Texas, maybe they have it here in Philly too: I'd rather be rash and stupid than patient and smart. No wait, it's I'd rather be a stupid dummy than a patient genius. No, no, it's better to be wrong right away than right all along. It's something like that, but one thing is for sure when the draft is involved, fool me once, shame on you, fool me year after year after year, you're not gonna fool me twice. Onwards with the draft of 2007.

Big Stories:

1) Greg Oden and Kevin Durant went to Portland and Seattle and seem destined for greatness. This was the big story of draft night, making it one of the most boring big stories on draft night ever. One of the super nice developments of draft night for me was seeing how funny Greg Oden is in interviews; we need more sarcasm, wit, and charisma from our superstars these days, and if he give us 15 years of solid soundbites who cares about his success on the court?

2) Trade Frenzy Gone Poof- It was thought that picks 3-14 could get shifted around through any combination of trades and player swaps. This didn't really happen. Atlanta held the 3rd pick and took Al Horford. Memphis stayed at #4 and took Mike Conley Jr. Boston, who we'll get back to in a minute, DID trade the #5 pick to Seattle, but after that everybody got scairt and clammed up like some bitch-ass clams.

3) Joakim Noah looks exactly like Shuggie Otis.

4) Zach Randolph got traded to the Knicks, ensuring two things: 1)Isaiah will get to keep his job even longer(a great thing for non-Knick fans) since Knick fans love this trade and 2) Strip clubs, never short on paying customers in the Big Apple, are about to enter a period of sustained patronage and prosperity not seen since Babe Ruth patrolled the town in furs and velvet hand gloves. If Randolph can continue to average 20-10-10(points, rebounds, and misdemeanor arrests) this trade works out for everyone, including the residents of Portland, who can go back to leaving their doors unlocked at night now that the final link of the Jailblazers is safely relocated.

Winners:


1) Portland, Seattle and Atlanta. Duh.
2) The Clippers got Al Thorton at #14. Good pick.
3) The Sixers!! Ah Yes, the Sixers.

Initially I was disappointed when I heard the name Thaddeous Young called at pick #12. Who is this guy? After careful consideration I've decided he's a great pick and will eventually be seen as a better player than Julian Wright and Al Thornton, the two guys most Sixer fans wanted to see with that pick. I like that he's a lefty. Lefties have cool looking shots, and nice, crafty games. Jalen Rose, Michael Redd, Mo Peterson, all lefties. He's got a great name. I'm in no way looking forward to the day but at some point he'll have a bad day at the office and the Daily News headline will read "Hideous" and I'll chuckle. He's 19 so look for him to grow more, fill out, and become much stronger. And the dude is funny. In his first week as a Sixer he lit up the press corps with gems like "Everybody loves me" and "I'm like Dirk Nowitzki except I play defense". Bravo young Thaddeous. That gave me a great idea to call him young Thaddeous instead of Thaddeous Young. Who's with me?

Besides Young Thaddeous the Sixers drafted Jason Smith and Derrick Byars, and a dude named Herbert Hill who hopefully is related to Henry Hill. Smith is a 7ft whitey with shotting skills and athleticism. I love the pick. Byars has 1st round talent and pedigree and I fully expect him to make the team. The big complaint from Philly fans is that Billy King didn't trade up, didn't make a splash, didn't do diddly-poo. Well folks, apparently he offered Milwaukee all three first round picks plus Steven Hunter and Rodney Carney to move up to #6 and they balked. I'm not sure he could have done more without getting totally ripped off. Anyway, we got some pieces, some athletes, and a dude related to Henry Hill. Good work.


Losers

1)The Celtics. Traded the #5 pick, Delonte West, and Wally Sexyback for Ray Allen. Granted, the C's will probably be better for the next year or so with Ray Allen on the team, but they got a lot older with this trade and that's back-to-back years they traded a lottery pick away. Last year they could have had Brandon Roy or Randy Foye and this year they could have had Yi Jianlian or Corey Brewer or even Young Thaddeous. Instead, they got Sebastian Telfair and Ray Allen. Nice work Danny Ainge. In three years when Allen is washed up and Pierce is slowed down, these moves will be seen as titanically moronic.

2)The Milwaukee Bucks. Passed on numerous trade opportunities and drafted the one dude who didn't want to play for them, Yi Jianlian. He's Chinese. Milwaukee has as many Chinese people as the movie Schindler's List. This can't work. Hopefully they'll trade him to Philly for far less tha we offered on draft night.

3)Yi Jianlian. I feel bad for the guy, biggest night of his life and he goes to the one city he and the nation of China expressly stated he would not play for, then is forced to talk to Stuart Scott for five minutes. Nobody should have to go through that.

4)Us, the viewers for having to watch a split screen of Stephen A. Smith and Dick Vitale. That's called a shit screen.

5) Lastly, the Lakers, T'Wolves, and Suns, for wasting everybody's time with all that trade talk involving their star players only to do nothing and leave themselves with mopey superstars and blue-balled fan bases. Never a good combination.