Better Fake Protest Sign

Sometimes the internets like to have fun with things.
For instance, some clever person photoshopped a sign into the famous Martha Burk-led protests against the Masters. Amidst all the women with signs arguing for gender equity, nestled inconspicuously in the back is a sign that says "Iron My Shirt Bitch."

I e-mail Mrs. Poop that picture every time I need my shirts ironed.

We also have this sign, in a monitor behind Fox anchor Shepard Smith. The banner on the screen reads "Biggest Protest in Canadian History in Progress" and the protester in the monitor is holding up a sign that says "I Am a Little Upset."

Animal Cruelty at CitiField

I went to the Mets game yesterday and came across an unconscionable act of animal cruelty. A dog sitting on a rug, dressedin a Mets shirt and hat, wearing sunglasses and somehow holding a pipe in its mouth.
Most of you know I hate animals in clothes, so just walking by this poor pooch made me uneasy. But I went back and took a picture because I thought I should expose this.

But turns out when I googled this, many people had previously written about this dog, Coffee, not just for the clothes, glass, pipe and the fact that he's forced to perform to raise money for a lazy human who is too stupid to get a real job, but some observers think he was wearing a shock collar which his irresponsible human owner could use to shock him if he got up, or moved.

I really wish PETA would get involved and protest this cruelty, or put enough pressure on the Mets to ban him from the premises. Surely panhandling on private property is grounds for ejection.

Song of the Week

"Fancy" - Iggy Azalea
I'm actually not a big fan of hers, I think she's a white Nikki Minaj.
Which makes me uncomfortable when a white girl comes into a genre dominated by black men and becomes an instant overnight success.
Also, I don't think she's hot. And her boyfriend, Nick Young aka Swaggy P is the biggest douchebag in the NBA.

Time's Up Macklemore

Ironic that a guy who preaches tolerance and acceptance of everyone would be an anti-Semite.
But that's what happened when Macklemore came out for a performance in a disguise, big nose, bushy beard very similar to offensive caricatures of Jews used by the Nazis and others.

And just by pure coincidence he wore this get-up while singing Thrift Shop, a song about going to such great lengths to get a bargain that you will sleep on sheets that smell like piss.

Once he realized his mistake, he quickly apologized. Oh no, wait he didn't, he blamed the beholder.

"Some people there thought I looked like Ringo, some Abe Lincoln. If anything I thought I looked like Humpty Hump with a bowl cut....I wasn’t attempting to mimic any culture, nor resemble one. A 'Jewish stereotype' never crossed my mind."
He said it was "surprising and disappointing" that the disguise was slammed as anti-Semitic.
"I acknowledge how the costume could, within a context of stereotyping, be ascribed to a Jewish caricature," Macklemore wrote. "I am here to say that it was absolutely not my intention."
And when he got called out by courageous famous Jews like Seth Rogen he responded with ""A fake witches nose, wig, and beard = random costume. Not my idea of a stereotype of anybody."

I actually think he was trying to dress as Howard Wolowitz from The Big Bang Theory.

Good Gracious Ass is Bodacious

Greg Hardy reportedly beat up his girlfriend Nicole Holder.
The couple has been dating on and off since the end of last year and even moved in with each other.
Until the other night when according to the police report "the victim stated she was lying in bed with the defendant and he just snapped. The victim advised the defendant physically threw her into the floor, and then tossed her into the tile bathtub. The victim stated the defendant then slammed her into a futon that had several guns and machine guns lying on it causing her to cut her arm on the end of one of guns."

Why was Hardy so mad?
Holder told the police that when her and Hardy broke up in March she had a "short lived relationship with the entertainer Nelly."
In layterms, she fucked Nelly, one time, maybe twice.

Now, that's certainly not an excuse to beat her ass but I can see how that would be an impediment to their reconciliation.

From this, the only picture of her online, she doesn't look that hot. I guess she just hangs out in the right places (she's supposedly a waitress at some nightclub) and makes herself available. And if the choice is between her and nothing, I guess I would take her.

Headline suggested by Michael.

3000 Words

Ryan Gosling wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Macaulay Culkin on the cover of Life Magazine.

Macaulay Culkin wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Ryan Gosling wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Macaulay Culkin on the cover of Life Magazine.

Ryan Gosling wearing a t-shirt of Macaulay Culkin wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Ryan Gosling wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Macaulay Culkin on the cover of Life Magazine.

Song of the Week

"Waves" - Mr. Probz (Robin Schulz remix)

Jasmine Jordan Graduates

Michael Jordan attended his daughter Jasmine's graduation from Syracuse University over the weekend.
Jasmine was a sports management major in the David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics.
David B. Falk happens to be Michael Jordan's agent, seated to his right in this picture.

I couldn't find a picture or any information about MJ also attending the Sunday ceremony in the Carrier Dome, only the smaller "college" one on Saturday.

But congratulations to Jasmine. Let's hope she hooked up with CJ Fair and will someday send their prodigious offspring to SU.

If a Picture is Worth 1,000 Words How Many Are in a Youtube Video?

Gawkers catch the collapse of a massive sinkhole in Baltimore:



This is why we don't bring Diesel to Chase's baseball games:



And this is why Billy preaches safety first:

Song of the Week

"The Man" - Aloe Blacc
This song is so weird. It starts out as an Elton John cover, then it transitions into some serious soul music and ends as a choral gospel number.
He was the singer on Avicii's ubiquitous "Wake Me Up."
I'm pretty sure he's a member of the Crips because it's well known that members of that gang use CC in lieu of CK because CK could stand for "Crip Killer."

No Wonder Eric and Jack Fought Over Her

If you remember the final season of "Boy Meets World" you will recall that Jack and Eric welcomed a hottie-hot-hot, tall, red-headed roommate named Rachel Maguire played by Maitland Ward.
We haven't seen very much of Ward since then. Until now. When we saw almost all of her.
Ward wore an incredibly hot sheer dress to a movie premiere.
Question: do you think she had to wax her pussy to wear this?
If so, what did the old Korean lady think of the 4-leaf clover tattoo that seems to be positioned just to the right of her happy place?

Staten Island's Heroin Epidemic

The New York Times had a great article over the weekend about the growing use of heroin on Staten Island. I paste the entire thing here because some people may not have access to the Times.
The obituaries have a certain sameness to them: full of praise and regret for lives cut short, marked by telltale details and omissions. The deaths occurred at home, or at a friend’s house elsewhere on Staten Island. The mourned were often young and white, and although how they died was never mentioned, nearly everyone knew or suspected the cause.

A 23-year-old man, a cello student in high school and the son of an elevator company vice president died in March. A former high school hockey player who delivered newspapers died in 2013 at 22. Another 23-year-old man who was working construction died at home in July 2012. Family members and autopsy reports revealed that they died from heroin or combinations of drugs including heroin.

Thirty-six people died from heroin overdoses in 2012, the highest number in at least a decade, according to the most recent available city health department records; the death rate was higher than the city’s other four boroughs had seen in 10 years. The amount of heroin seized by the Police Department on Staten Island has jumped more than 300 percent from 2011 to 2013, and this year shows no sign of abating: Through April 13, officers seized roughly 1,700 glassine bags of heroin, up from about 1,200 bags over the same period in 2013. That number does not include the 347 bags seized on Wednesday in raids at an auto-repair shop and its owner’s home.

Drug treatment facilities and addiction programs teem with patients; informal support groups for addicts’ relatives have had to find larger meeting spaces. And last month, the city authorized nearly all Staten Island police and emergency medical workers to carry naloxone, a drug to counteract heroin overdoses.

“You’ve got kids falling apart. You’ve got families falling apart,” said William A. Fusco, the director of Dynamic Youth Community, a drug-treatment center in Brooklyn whose clients include many young Staten Islanders. “You’ve got people who have got no idea what to do, and they’re all saying the same thing: This was a good kid. This was a good kid.”

For decades, heroin was mostly found in the urban sections of the island’s north, where the ferry docks from Manhattan and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge touches down from Brooklyn. It afflicted the borough’s poorest areas, with sales concentrated in open-air markets at a few notorious housing developments like Stapleton and Park Hill.

But as in towns and cities from Vermont to Washington State, heroin’s new surge on Staten Island has ravaged primarily its working- and middle-class communities, especially in the borough’s south.

Numerous heroin addicts and dealers said in interviews that the drug was usually purchased in bulk elsewhere in New York City or in New Jersey, then resold on Staten Island. Law enforcement officials back that account, noting that they have not found any heroin mills in the borough, requiring the police to fight an army of small-time dealers.

“They hide in plain sight,” Detective Ray Wittick said on a recent Wednesday as he steered an unmarked police minivan through a Waldbaum’s grocery store parking lot in Princes Bay, where drug deals are not uncommon.

Some parents have taken to sending their children for treatment in Brooklyn, in part to avoid the glare of those who would recognize them at facilities on Staten Island.

Candace Crupi said she did not want to leave any mystery about her son’s death. The obituary in The Staten Island Advance in March said Johnathan Crupi, 21, had been overwhelmed by addiction. He died at home of a heroin overdose.

“I wanted people to know that I wasn’t ashamed of him,” she said. “People are so ashamed of addiction. There’s such a stigma, and it’s just not right.”

On the family’s kitchen table, among funeral bouquets of red and yellow roses, sat a photograph of Johnathan. It had been a formal occasion, the young man in a tuxedo, his hair closely cropped in a Caesar-style cut.

In a back bedroom, where his body was found on March 28, the smell of cigarettes still lingered 10 days later.

Since the obituary appeared in late March, Ms. Crupi, 60, said she had been approached by people she knew well, and those she only barely recalled, offering condolences and praising her bravery. At Johnathan’s funeral, hundreds showed up, including many strangers who described their families’ own struggles with heroin.

“People that I never knew were going through the same thing,” her husband, Barry Crupi, said. “It was so many people. So many people.”

An Island Unto Itself
Spread across an island more than twice the size of Manhattan, Staten Island’s 470,000 residents live in a collection of small communities often arranged around short main streets, the neighborhoods bearing the names of early residents — Tottenville for John Totten and his family — or for the industries once prevalent, like Graniteville for the quarries once active there.

Until 1964, when the Verrazano Bridge opened, Staten Island had no physical connection to the rest of New York City; older bridges led only to New Jersey. That long separation gave Staten Island its own sense of identity and culture, from the centrality of the Staten Island Mall to the wooded brush vulnerable to fires set by bored teenagers.

There is also a sense of continuity: Staten Island’s demographics have not greatly changed since the 1970 census. In contrast to the rest of the city, the borough’s white non-Hispanic residents outnumber minorities, accounting for about 64 percent of its residents, according to the 2010 census. Most homes are owner-occupied, and unemployment is below the city average.

“When I was growing up, you’d see people riding horses on Hylan Boulevard,” Detective Wittick, 45, said. “You felt like it was something out of a movie, you know. These little towns with the perfect life. You knew all your neighbors.”

That familiarity still exists, but now it carries a burden when drugs are involved.

For a time, a culture of recreational prescription pill abuse seemed like just the latest way for many on Staten Island to deal with weekend boredom. Pills could be found at the cafeteria in Tottenville High School, or at local bars where older men sold their medications, like Roxicodone, Vicodin or Percocet, for a healthy profit. A young barber on Amboy Road said some customers asked to pay for their haircuts in pills.

“You could make money off it,” said Andrea, a 21-year-old recovering addict from Great Kills. “It didn’t seem like there were any consequences.”

Or, in the words of a local rap song from 2012: “Pain killer paradise, Staten Island.”

Pills began showing up in drug seizures around the island, often traced to doctors whose offices were flooded by users seeking illegal prescriptions. One such physician, Dr. Felix Lanting, was 85 when he pleaded guilty to distributing oxycodone in 2012.

His arrest caused a momentary jump in prices, recovering addicts said, but he was just one source among many, including a Lickety Split ice cream truck where 30-milligram oxycodone pills were sold on the side.

An Inexpensive High
Gradually, dealers and users switched to heroin. Some opioid addicts found that their habits required 20 or 30 pills a day, an unsustainable proposition at as much as $30 each. Heroin, already available around New York City for about $5 to $10 for a single glassine, became a cheap alternative.

Brandon, 22, of the south shore town of Eltingville, remembered when the police arrested a group of young men in 2012 for selling pills around Tottenville. His supply dried up.

Then a fellow addict took him over the Goethals Bridge to an open-air heroin market in Newark. “It was so much easier, it’s $6 and it’s always there,” said Brandon, who is now in a 12-step recovery program. “I’ve done one pill since I got introduced to heroin.”

Another recovering addict, Nikki, 29, said she began each day with 15 or 20 Vicodin pills. “I would take them in one shot,” she said.

The daily hunt for money to buy more, usually raised by finding and selling scrap metal with her boyfriend at the time, finally became too much. One day in 2009, the boyfriend came home with something new — 50 little bags of heroin. “I told him, ‘Once we go this way, there’s no going back,’ ” she recalled in an interview. “This is the beginning of the end.”

She said she got hooked.

Four years later, Nikki said, she was clean but admitted that there were lapses. During a recent period of recovery, a friend of a friend asked her to deliver some heroin to a buyer. She agreed but was subsequently arrested. She is now out on bail, raised through pawnshop proceeds from her jewelry. She is also pregnant: The baby is due in July and, once born, will immediately require detoxification from the methadone that Nikki takes every day. She and her new boyfriend will remain on methadone for the foreseeable future, but Nikki said heroin and pills are behind her.

“I’m going to become a mother,” she said.

Most of the addicts interviewed for this article passed through the Dynamic treatment center in Brooklyn, a Y.M.C.A. on southern Staten Island or a Pills Anonymous group that has expanded to include heroin addicts; all requested that they be referred to by only their first names as they rebuild their lives.

Nearly all began by sniffing heroin, much as they had sniffed crushed pills. Soon many sought out the greater high that a needle provided. For Brandon, his first time shooting up was in January 2013, with a fellow addict in the bathroom stall of the Wendy’s on Richmond Hill Road. “I’m thinking, I could be dead in 30 seconds,” Brandon said of his mind-set at the time. He did it anyway.

Mike, 23, of Tottenville said he could find bundles of glassine bags in Newark for as little as $3 or $4 apiece. What he did not use, he sold on Staten Island for $10. Other recovering addicts described similar trips to East New York, Brooklyn, or Elizabeth, N.J. Any profits would go straight back into buying more heroin.

Although deaths from heroin are apparent here, evidence of the drug on the streets is less so. Sales take place by arrangement over the phone, a quick stop in a shopping center parking lot or in the house next door.

For instance, Angelo Gallo and his father, Ugo Gallo, pleaded guilty to selling heroin last year out of their two-story detached house on David Street in Eltingville. A city sanitation worker now rents the home, a few doors down from a police officer.

In the similarly sleepy bedroom community of Oakwood, police officers caught Frank Monte, 47, in the act of selling 300 glassine envelopes in a white plastic bag for $1,320 in cash.

Mr. Monte, who pleaded guilty to felony drug possession, denied any involvement in the sale, saying his previous time in prison for selling drugs had biased the officers. “When you go to jail on Staten Island, you’re labeled for life with these cops,” he said in a phone interview in March.

A few days after that conversation, he was arrested in a car near Clove Road and the Staten Island Expressway with 531 bags of heroin, according to the arrest report. He pleaded guilty, this time to a higher degree of felony possession.

Sabrina, a recovering addict, remembered telling her parents she was going out for ice cream only to go see a dealer by the public pool near her family’s Woodrow home. The dealer took her $100 and drove off.

Desperate for a hit and out of cash, she returned home and told her mother she had been robbed. Her mother questioned why she needed so much money for ice cream. Incensed, Sabrina began tearing apart the home. In the struggle, she shoved her mother, breaking her ankle. Soon after, Sabrina, 25, checked into rehab.

Difficult to Police
Unlike more established drug markets that predominate in other areas of the city, those running heroin here are mostly independent and deal in small quantities. Narcotics officers on Staten Island who have worked in other parts of New York say that dealers and buyers here tend to be even more suspicious of outsiders than elsewhere in the city.

That complicates catching dealers here, as the Police Department has had more difficulty conducting the sort of buy-and-bust operations that are the baseline of narcotics work in other boroughs. “There are those inherent challenges because of the closeness of Staten Island,” said Capt. Dominick D’Orazio, the commanding officer of the borough’s narcotics squad.

Most heroin gets to Staten Island by car and is delivered that way by the dealers who crisscross its neighborhoods, officials said.

“They’re not coming down with a kilo,” said Daniel M. Donovan Jr., the Staten Island district attorney. “They’re going uptown and getting an ounce and then breaking it out.”

Prosecutors and the police said they have noticed that violent drug gangs who have long operated on the north shore of the island — selling mostly crack and marijuana — are switching to selling heroin, where the profit is.

New York City authorities are moving to track the incoming, often prepackaged heroin. Investigators have had some success in turning small-time players to catch those coming onto the island with greater quantities. The goal is to follow the trail back to the major suppliers in the city, who are believed to be primarily in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx, where the police have discovered the city’s largest heroin mills.

That many middle-class Staten Island families send their kids to Brooklyn for treatment speaks to the pervasiveness of the problem and the shame it carries in an insular borough. “Families generally feel better when their child is out of the community,” said Karen J. Carlini, the associate director at Dynamic.

Last year, parents began gathering informally in the backyard of Alicia Reddy’s home in the Huguenot neighborhood. A registered nurse with experience in detox, Ms. Reddy, 44, had been fielding so many calls from parents about addiction, she said, that she decided to hold a monthly meeting to provide information.

“A big factor was that parents were ashamed,” she said.

As the problem worsened, the gatherings quickly outgrew her yard. They are now held at a nearby school, attached to Our Lady Star of the Sea, a Roman Catholic church on Amboy Road, two miles down from a tight cluster of businesses — a decorator, a barber shop, a bagel store — tied in recent years to illegal pill sales, guns or heroin.

Nearby, in the basement of the church rectory, a Pills Anonymous group meets. On a recent Tuesday night, 36 people gathered, describing feelings of helplessness, as well as the strength they found in one another. The program’s 12 steps, written out by hand, hung on a table at the front.

Brandon told his story of repeated episodes of treatment and relapse. In an interview after the meeting, he said that he has been clean for nearly a year, since June 16, 2013.

He counted at least 10 people who he knew had died from pill or heroin overdoses, including an acquaintance from high school he saw again while in treatment for heroin. The classmate died last month.

“There’s no reason that I’m different from Adam,” he said. “I should be dead too.”

Song of the Week

"Turn Down For What" - DJ Snake & Lil Jon

Dumb Yankees Fans

The brilliant Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon pulled a good prank on stupid Yankees fans (click here for a funny joke -- needs speakers!). They asked them to boo a giant cardboard box with Robinson Cano's face on it. And then the real Robinson Cano popped out.



I love how quickly they change their dispositions.

I'm A Douche

My company is celebrating an anniversary this week so they gave everyone small bottles of champagne to celebrate. Someone came to talk to me and asked why mine was still on my desk. I said I don't really drink champagne, so she said she would take it if I didn't want it.
I said "no, [Mrs. Poop] wants to do this stupid thing. When we buy our house she wants to go there and sit on the floor and drink champagne in a totally empty house. I know it's stupid, but that's what she wants to do."
My colleague replied "that's what my husband and I did when we bought our house."

Oops.

But I'm not as big a douche as this student at Davenport University who tried to do a backflip on stage after getting his diploma.

Song of the Week

"Special Lady" - Ray, Goodman & Brown

Seinfeld Night for the Cyclones

The Mets minor league team will host Seinfeld Night on July 5th, the 25th anniversary of the night the Seinfeld pilot aired.
The first 2,500 fans will get a Keith Hernandez Magic Loogie bobblehead which says "I'm Keith Hernandez" on the front and "Nice Game, Pretty Boy" on the back.

MCU Park will be named Vandelay Industries Park for the evening. Anyone presenting a legitimate business card showing he is a latex salesman will get in for free.
Mailmen in uniform will throw out the first pitch.
A dance contest will reward the best "Elaine."
And the best part of the whole thing: the Cyclones will wear puffy shirts during batting practice.

Julian Scares Me Sometimes

99% of sports fans, even serious ones, do not know who this man is.

Julian is the 1%.

Sports Illustrated's Pablo S. Torre filled in as the host of Olbermann when KO had shingles. Julian ran to the TV and screamed "that guy's name is Pablo."

At first Mrs. Poop thought no way. Then she looked over at me, saw I was dumbfounded and slackjawed and anxiously asked me "is that really his name?"

When I regained the power of speech I told her that yes, his name is Pablo and we asked Julian how he knew that.

We reconstructed the story with the help of Chase. Apparently they had been at Moe's and Around the Horn was on (Chase told me Pablo had 10 points), and it said his name. Chase read it to Julian and they both thought it was cool since to them Pablo is a blue penguin from the Backyardigans.

Sometimes we worry about Julian's memory because of all the blows to the head he's taken from all the times he's fallen while behaving recklessly. And because sometimes he can't remember a single thing about his day such that when we got to him for "Best Part of the Day" he says his best part of the day was hearing Chase's best part of the day.

But then he goes and does something like this and scares the shit out of me.

Trash or Treasure?

Our second installment of Trash or Treasure revolves around this naked lady cup I bought in Acapulco:

Now you may be saying "But Poop, it's not a naked lady cup if she's not naked." To which I say "fill it up with cold water and wait."

Mrs. Poop's New Favorite Yankee

Now that Derek Jeter is moving on to make banging Swimsuit models his full time job, this leaves a void in Mrs. Poop's heart.
Who will be her favorite Yankee next season?
Answer: Masahiro Tanaka.

What did Tanaka do to endear himself to Mrs. Poop?
This is what he said when asked about the biggest cultural difference between Japan and the U.S.:

"The washlet is a system in Japan where you press a button and water comes out and washes your ass. Not having that is a big difference."