Friday, January 05, 2007

Coffee-Soaked Awards - Week of January 1, 2007

As befits the beginning to a new year, this past week has been one for the ages, with new predictions, new falls from grace, new candies purchased from the store. Well, okay, maybe not that last one, but that's only because we have a very strict diet for our candies, and we do insist on sticking to it. But still, this past week has been a pretty interesting one, and let's just take our weekly trip down Awards Lane, and see where they bring us.

Happy F'in New Year To You Award
So many different problems surrounded celebrities around their New Year's festivities this particular year. You've got Vanessa Minillo swearing on MTV, Britney Spears "nodding off", and Tara Reid proving that math, specifically counting, is still just out of her reach. Even Dick Clark had problems, but his have a medical basis. Either way, we're obviously only a few years away from Carson Daly's New Year's Eve with actual sex taking place, and starlets who believe that W is between 7 and 9.

Too Late for a Drive-Thru Award
Customers on subways in NYC are used to having delays. What they may not be used to are delays caused by people fainting, due to having skipped meals. Specifically, these meal skippers are the people who are trying to squeeze into that ever smaller size to achieve a ridiculously unhealthy "ideal" body type. Just another thing to make New Yorkers grumpy on their way to work, adding to a list that already includes not enough coffee, having slept poorly the night before, the cost, and being a New Yorker.

Or Forever Hold Their Peace Award
We have to give this to an official in Vienna, Austria, who decided to end a wedding ceremony after the bride jokingly said that she did not want to marry her groom. The official even forced the couple to wait almost three months before allowing them to try again. One question still looms; where was this guy for the Spears/Federline wedding?

Art in the Human Form Award
You've got to hand it to people of Norway, who had an appeals court uphold a decision that stripping is considered art, and therefore not subject to a value-added tax. Finance Minister Kristen Halvorsen, who is still thinking of rewriting the laws to garner federal revenue, has been described as "a total buzzkill". She could probably change that perception by stripping.

My Candidate Can Beat Your Candidate Award
Nigerian politics certainly has taken a strange turn when Umaru Yar'Adua has been forced to challenge potential opponents to a game of squash, due to concerns about his health and ability to govern. Yar'Adua, who has a kidney condition, is feared to merely be a puppet for current President Olusegun Obasanjo. Meanwhile, VPCheney has recently challenged those who question him to a hunting trip.

Guilty of Higher Ratings Award
We give this award to Nancy Grace, of Headline News, for helping to boost the network to higher and higher ratings, largely due to the confrontational style of her program. After all, this is the woman who was sued because an interview she conducted may have directly led to a suicide... of the interviewee. Grace has been known in the past to drive a point that she believes, regardless of evidence pointing any other way, until her guests have succumbed to her hellfire tactics. With the news of her ratings surge, expect Grace to push the envelope even further, hoping to outshine even Bill O'Reilly when it comes to using false information for personal gain.

There is Hope Award
Even though the hanging of Saddam Hussein was captured on a cell-phone camera, and then spread throughout the world (first on YouTube, then on your local news), there is still some hope that not all video-taped death scenes will be showcased. News out of Australia is that the authorities in charge of the Steve Irwin death investigation have released the original recording back to Irwin's wife, and then destroyed all other copies. Somewhere out there, a Crocodile Hunter approves, and the public has been spared.

Well, that wraps up another week here at the Coffee-Soaked Mind. We'll be back next week with more news, more stories, more awards, and, we assume, more internal organs than Lindsey Lohan. We'll see you on the flip side of the weekend, and, until then, stay safe out there.

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