Danehy

When it comes to these items in the news, Tom gets confused

Some things I just don't understand ...

• A woman in Sierra Vista was convicted of stealing $3,500 from a Buena High School student account. She was sentenced to three years in prison.

NFL player Donté Stallworth (with the lame-ass apostrophe) consumed four giant tequila drinks at a Miami nightclub, became way past legally drunk, got in his SUV, and ran down and killed a 57-year-old man. Stallworth served 24 days in jail.

Please explain that to me.

• Accepting an award at the Black Entertainment Television (BET) Awards a couple of days after Michael Jackson's death, rapper Lil' Wayne said, "Wouldn't none of us not be here wit'out him."

Dude, drink some more cough syrup.

• This isn't funny, but it made me laugh. Last month, all of the residents of a Flowing Wells-area mobile-home park had to be evacuated after a fire in an electrical box. The name of the place? The Aristocrat Trailer Park.

• Careers in the National Football League generally only last a few years, so players try to cash in as much as possible. Wide receivers generally have two options: They can be really good and catch a lot of passes, or they can be flamboyant and outrageous, and hope the white boys in the media suck up to them in an effort to be down with the bruthuhs.

Chad Johnson of the Cincinnati Bengals could have taken the first route (no pun intended), but he settled for the second one instead. On those rare occasions when he actually scored a touchdown, he always had a celebration planned that was guaranteed to do two things: Get himself on TV, and make the fans forget about the six other passes he didn't catch. He wears the number 85, and one day during an interview, he told the reporters that they had to refer to him as "Ocho Cinco," even though "85" is "ochenta y cinco." (If he's a moron in English, you can't expect him to be any smarter in Spanish.)

He then went so far as to have his name legally changed to "Chad OchoCinco." He still sucks.

Anyway, on that fateful day a few weeks ago, he Twittered (or tweeted, or whatever the brain-dead call it), "Okay, first Mrs. (sic) Fawcett now Mr. Jackson. please tell me that this is a mistaken rumor. if not this is just as sad as 9/11."

• Proving that timing is everything, when (still) South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford spilled his guts about the "love story" between him and the woman in Argentina with whom he had been cheating on his wife, he did so on the day before Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett both died. If he had held out just one more day, that story would have been buried by a media that mistakenly equates celebrity with importance.

However, even then, he didn't have enough sense to just shut up. He gave more interviews, told of other liaisons, and then uttered the worst sentence a husband has ever let slip. He said that he was currently "trying to fall back in love with his wife."

Lucky her.

• Arizona state Rep. John Kavanagh (R-Fountain Hills) wins the PC (Paternalistic Condescension) Award for his stated opinion of the intelligence of the average Arizona voter. Speaking about Gov. Jan Brewer's call for a vote in November for a temporary 1-cent-per-dollar sales-tax increase, Kavanagh looked down his nose and told the Arizona Daily Star, "There are times when (a public vote) is appropriate like the protect-marriage amendment which is pretty much a public moral ethical cultural issue. And then there's (sic) complicated economic issues, which should perhaps be best left to the elected representatives who've had a considerable amount of time to study the complicated issues."

Wow, first of all, leaving no inapplicable adjective un-invoked, he says that the proposition banning gay marriage was a "public moral ethical cultural issue."

What's more amazing is that I, an Arizona voter, was able to type all that stuff on the super-complicated keyboard, which has, like 26 letters on it—in the wrong order!—along with numbers and punctuation marks and everything! No way I could understand a 1-cent sales tax and/or the meaning of the word "temporary."

• It's really weird how things work out. When the UA men's basketball season ended in March, and athletic director Jim Livengood went looking for a coach to replace living legend Lute Olson, all kinds of big names were bandied about. My heart sank when it was (prematurely and incorrectly, as it turns out) announced that then-USC coach Tim Floyd would be taking over at McKale. He had a cloud of suspicion the size of the spaceship in Independence Day hanging over his head.

What a difference a few months make. Floyd turned the UA down, then resigned at USC in the face of a gathering storm of big-time recruiting violations. The UA then hired safe, boring Sean Miller, who quickly went out and assembled a recruiting class ranked in the Top 10 in the country, including a couple of guys who jumped ship at USC after Floyd skedaddled.

Now the UA has a great chance to add to its streak of 25 straight NCAA Tournament appearances—and make some noise in the tournament.

Some say it's better to be lucky than good. Just ask Jim Livenlucky.