Add one more notch on my horrible karma belt (if you can find room, of course).

I spent a good hour of my work day today hoping that a man would die.

Working in the news business, I have access to some pretty cool things. For instance, if I missed the late SportsCenter, I can call up highlights of any game played (professional and most high-end college games, at least), watch them, pause them, rewind them, abuse them until the final score turns out more favorable for my team (coming in 2007). I can read any number of stories on news wires before they’re printed anywhere. Even with the speed of the internet news organizations, I get them all dropped to me without having to Google anything.

Then there’s the police chases.

While you hear stories about people in LA becoming immune to the daily police chase, they’re still chock full o’ excitement. Since to actually be IN a police chase, you have to be a bad guy, I don’t feel bad if the chase ends in a horrible twist of wretched metal, and the huge, well-timed explosion of fire that follows. As long as no innocent people are harmed. Lately, we’ve had a run of weak endings. Guys running out of gas, cars hitting trash cans and getting stuck in neutral, car pinned in at a traffic light and the guy gives up without a fight…stuff like that.

Bo-ring!

This past Friday, we got a good one. A guy drives for an extra 15 or 20 minutes on the halves of three tires, and finally ends up yanking the pick-up into a ravine, rolling it 7 times, tossing his buddy out of the passenger side window, and giving up after trying to hide in a tree.

But tonight, we have a new champion. Not only does this guy miss a turn and take out a guardrail, causing about a half dozen cop cars to roll up and come out with guns cocked, but he spins free and takes off for another 10 minutes. Finally, tires all but gone, he starts to pull into a fast food restaurant parking lot (El Pollo Loco for those of you that were wondering.). He stops just as he enters the lot, gets out with a gun, and its on. The cops fire at him a few times, shattering a car window and getting him in the leg. He tumbles to the ground, tossing the gun aside, and they get him in the hip. At this point, he’s probably as good as arrested, but he rolls over and pulls something from his pocket (“Does he have a gun? I don’t know! RED TEAM GO! RED TEAM GO!”). Time to say goodnight, bad guy. All you see next is about 6-10 bullets skipping off the pavement around him, and his clothes puffing out occasionally as another bullet hits. He must have taken at least three of them in the ass (insert “Blazing Saddles” and Mike Piazza jokes here). My always classy response was to drop my jaw and half shout “Holy shit! They killed him!” No one else was watching, so they had no clue until I filled them in. The guy didn’t move a muscle the whole time he was on the ground, but the way the cops descended on him (and later the reports that he was taken to a hospital) meant that he somehow survived, or didn’t have a soul.

This is where my cheering came in. What fun would it be to tell such a great story, but have it end with “they picked the bullets out of his can, and sent him to jail”? No fun at all, I tell ya. Finally, he died, and I felt like the story was worth telling. (That and my original exclamation had some truth to it.)

NBC 4 in Los Angeles doesn’t have the video up anymore, but they have a pretty good slide show of the chase.

*****
In a not totally unrelated note, it’s time for another University of Cincinnati men’s basketball update!!!

Two more players off the team, one for not getting the grades (which at UC I believe is carring a pulse through remedial subtraction), and the other for a firearms violation.

Forward Roy Bright is charged with carrying a concealed weapon, a felony, but the best part is the story of how it went down.

According to the report, Bright “pulled a .32-caliber Iver Johnson revolver from his right pocket and the revolver was fired. The arrested, Roy Bright, is not sure if he fired the weapon or if the weapon was dropped and discharged. After the revolver was fired, Mr. Bright placed the weapon back into his pocket.”

It’s been awhile since I’ve fired a weapon (but don’t you think that tin can in a field has forgotten it!), but if I think hard enough, I remember KNOWING that it had gone off in my hand. But like I said, I’m not a professional like Mr. Bright apparently is. Also, the part about witnesses seeing you flee the scene? Yeah, that’s not good.

The good news is, UC head coach Bob Huggins suspended him from the team. The bad news is, Huggins only suspended him because a press conference to explain why he’s on the team would have cut into happy hour.

Like sands through the hourglass, these are the days of Bearcat basketball.