- It’s about freaking time and I could not be happier to see quirky, eclectic and awesome rockers My Morning Jacket back out on the road. Jim James and crew took nearly a year off from touring, but they will make their return starting in April for a nine-date outing through several Southeastern states. The tour commences April 20 in Birmingham, Ala., winds up in Columbus, Ohio on May 2. It includes a stop at the annual New Orleans Jazzfest and the opening act for all nine shows will be the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, a New Orleans favorite that lost many of its members for various reasons tied to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. The namesake venue that hosted so many of the band’s performances made it through the storm in near-unscathed shape, but the impact on the band’s musicians was more than enough damage. Many of the musicians have been displaced and cannot find work or paying gigs and Preservation Hall's Music Outreach Program, which provides private lessons for students who would otherwise be unable to afford them, was also severely disrupted. MMJ and the band from Preservation Hall first team up in the spring of 2009, when MMJ frontman Jim James performed with the band in its legendary French Quarter venue. Two songs recorded that night, "St. James Infirmary" and "Louisiana Fairytale," will be part of an upcoming benefit album for Preservation Hall. The album will also feature tracks by such artists as Tom Waits, Ani DiFranco, Jim James and Andrew Bird.
As for the tour dates for MMJ and PHJB, they are:
Apr. 20: Birmingham, AL (Alabama Theater)
Apr. 21: Nashville, TN (Municipal Auditorium)
Apr. 23: Atlanta, GA (Chastain Park)
Apr. 24: New Orleans, LA (Jazzfest)
Apr. 27: St. Augustine, FL (St. Augustine Amphitheater)
Apr. 28: Charleston, SC (Family Circle)
Apr. 30: Raleigh, NC (Koka Booth)
May 1: Columbia, MD (Merriweather Post Pavilion)
May 2: Columbus, OH (LC Outdoor Pavilion)
These should all be amazing shows, as any MMJ performance tends to be. It’s also a chance to generate some attention for a very worthy cause, so if there is a show on the tour in your area, you would do well to get out and see it………….
- As someone who loves Central Park and makes a point of spending time there on any visit to Manhattan, I bring you this next story so that you too can enjoy a pleasant visit to what I argue is the best place to go in NYC, bar none. Authorities and medical experts are concerned that a rabies outbreak in Central Park could spread from raccoons to humans. So far, health investigators have confirmed reports of 28 rabid raccoons in or near Central Park over the past two months. As of Friday, the situation had become serious enough that they felt the need to issue a public warning. The city’s health department has been monitoring the rabid raccoon situation since December and is working with the parks department and others to increase surveillance and vaccinate wild raccoons in Central Park, Morningside Park and Riverside Park. Officials believe that that ideal conditions in Central Park for animals, especially a low number of predators, could exacerbate an outbreak. "Urban ecosystems sometimes have the ideal measures," said Dr. Charles Rupprecht, chief of the rabies program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "When you get an infectious agent like rabies, it tends to have these untoward effects, meaning an outbreak.” To minimize risks for park visitors, authorities are increasing surveillance and vaccinations and recommending that visitors to city parks keep pets on a leash and steer clear of raccoons they see during the day. For the nature-ignorant among you, raccoons are nocturnal animals who rarely venture out in the daylight. If they are out during the day, that "means they are probably carrying rabies," said Marlene Elizondo, a nurse with the International SOS, which offers medical care and consulting services to companies, nonprofits and other organizations. "In such a condensed area like New York, it's more likely that a human would come into contact with" a rabid raccoon, Elizondo said. Park visitors are also asked to notify authorities if they see any animal behaving strangely. To illustrate the rate at which the problem is growing, consider that health officials received 10 reports of rabid raccoons in Manhattan last year, but eight of them were in December. That was on the heels of only one such case from 2003 through 2008. The primary hot zone for rabid raccoons seemed to be the northern part of Central Park, between 79th and 110th streets. Keep that in mind if you are fortunate enough to visit Manhattan any time in the next few months and please steer clear of any demented-looking raccoons out during daylight hours……….
- Pittsburgh Pirates owner Bob Nutting is a piece of crap. A guy who trades basically his entire starting lineup, including two All-Stars, over the course of two seasons and then takes umbrage when two separate groups approach him with offers to buy his team is a douche bag, plain and simple. Gutting your team the way Nutting has shows definitively that a person cannot afford to field a competitive team and shouldn’t own one to begin with. Asking fans to continue to pay the same ticket prices to come see the crap the Pirates have put out on the field after their team-gutting trades the past two seasons is insulting and ridiculous and Nutting is either insane, delusional or dumb, possibly all three. Yet when he received two separate proposals to buy the team last year, he declined to listen to either. One was a surprise bid from Pittsburgh Penguins co-owner Mario Lemieux, who paired with Penguins co-owner Ron Burkle to make an unsolicited proposal for the Pirates four months ago. Nutting also turned down several sale overtures made by Pittsburgh lawyer Chuck Greenberg, who instead partnered with Nolan Ryan to purchase the Texas Rangers in a deal completed last week. A few years ago, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban also was rebuffed in efforts to buy the team and he too was shot down. Nutting maintains that the Pirates aren't for sale even though the team would clearly be better off with someone other than him owning the team. This time, the Nutting and his crack staff felt the need to publicly shoot down the sale rumors said in a statement read Saturday at the team's annual fan festival. "No formal, substantive offer had been made," team president Frank Coonelly "We had a meeting four months ago with Bob, Mario and Ron Burkle. But what I can confirm for you at that time, today, tomorrow, next week, the Pirates are not for sale. Bob is committed to bringing a championship back to Pittsburgh." Oh no, he didn’t. That tool did not just say that the man who traded All-Stars Jason Bay and Freddie Sanchez and the rest of the lineup that took the field on Opening Day 2008 and has yet to bring a single marquee free agent to the Steel City is committed to bringing a championship to Pittsburgh. Exactly what part of getting rid of your best players mid-season every single year in a massive salary dump and ending up in last place spells “committed to a championship?” Or better yet, how is ensuring that you’re putting a team on the field that will continue your franchise’s string of 17 straight losing seasons showing commitment to a championship? The Pirates lost 99 games last to set a Major League Baseball record with that 17th straight losing season, yet their owner won't sell? Just look at the team’s payroll; the Pirates' projected $35 million payroll for the upcoming season is only about half of the totals for NL Central rivals Cincinnati and Milwaukee, despite being in a similar-sized market, and is expected to be the lowest in the majors by at least $5 million. There is no freaking way that Nutting gives a damn about winning a championship and he’s insulting his fans by trying to sell them on that lie. Worse still is Coonelly appearing at the team’s fan fest and perpetuating that lie. "Mario and Ron are very smart business people. They've been very successful with the Penguins and have done a great job with them," Coonelly said. "What they see in the Pirates, I would think, is that they're interested in purchasing a team much like the Penguins earlier this decade: A team on the rise. A team that has a plan. A team that has financial stability." A team on the rise? What kind of cheap stuff have you been smoking, Coon-Dog? Yes, owning two of the Pittsburgh's three major pro sports teams might have allowed Lemieux and Burkle to launch their own TV sports channel and that would have made them a lot of money. Having said that, any profit they may turn would pale in comparison to the fact that they would undoubtedly, by virtue of them not being Bob Nutting, would make in putting a team on the field that was at least mildly competitive and a threat for a winning season every now and then…………
- And so it continues. Avatar rolled on at the box office this weekend, raking in $30 million to push its domestic total to $594 million, perilously close to the record of another of James Cameron’s crap-tacular, overrated films, Titanic. That four-hour crap-fest made $600 million, but it is best known for wasting four hours of my life that I can never get back. What’s amazing about Avatar’s weekend is that it dropped off just 14 percent, which is a smaller drop-off than last weekend. Coming in second place was the R-rated drama Edge of Darkness with $17.1 million, a bit below expectations but still solid. That number could have been higher but for the angry Jewish contingent out there whose leaders called for a boycott of the film due to producer Mel Gibson’s comments a few years ago. Third place went to the Kristen Bell and Josh Duhamel-led romantic comedy When in Rome, which opened with a $12 million take. Next on the list was The Tooth Fairy, which rebounded from a disappointing opening weekend to give Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Co. a $10 million haul, good enough for fourth place and a cumulative total $25 million for 10 ten days in release. Rounding out the top five was the actual best movie among the group, Denzel Washington’s Book of Eli. The post-apocalyptic drama dropped 44 percent its third weekend in theaters, raking in $8.7 million to raise its cumulative tally to $74 million. The steepest drop on the weekend went to Legion, the Paul Bettany-Dennis Quaid drama that plummeted 61 percent and earned only $6.8 million in its second weekend for a total take of $28.6 million. In seventh place was The Lovely Bones with $4.7 million, followed by Sherlock Holmes (8th place with $4.5 million), Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakuel (9th place with $4 million)
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