- A quick question for you: Has anyone seen my cooler full of icy, delicious beverages and ice cream treats? I had it with me Friday when I was hanging out in Manhattan. It’s missing now and if anyone has seen it, let me know, I’ve had the cooler for a long time and it means a lot to me. Good, now that we’ve taken care of that, on with the news. So there was a massive evacuation of Times Square on Friday after someone spotted and reported a suspicious package near 45th Street and Broadway, outside the Marriott Marquis hotel. With the city already on edge, the package - a cooler - caused raised alert levels and a swift evacuation of the area. It took investigators an hour to determine that the green plastic cooler contained only water bottles. Upping tension was the fact that the cooler was found very close to the spot where a U.S. citizen of Pakistani descent left a car bomb that failed to detonate six days before. The evacuation took place around 1 p.m., but people remained in the hotel and nearby buildings, said Kathy Duffy, a hotel spokeswoman. "Our buildings were not evacuated," she said. "Our hotel has not been evacuated." The incident didn’t faze the glut of tourists and smattering of locals in the area, as Times Square quickly filled back up and cars began rolling through as soon as the police tape came down. Around the same time, authorities were also investigating a suspicious truck a few blocks west at 45th Street and 10th Avenue in Midtown's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood. That too proved to be a false alarm, which isn’t surprising because the New York Police Department reports that officials get 90 to 100 calls per day about suspicious packages or vehicles. However, we can all thank Faisal Shahzad, an American citizen who is originally from Pakistan, for leaving a defective car bomb in Times Square last week and making everyone that much edgier and paranoid. Oh, and big ups to the NYPD for neutralizing that cooler in timely fashion, lest one of those water bottles detonate and send shards of sharp, lethal water hurling in all directions…………
- The Associated Press Defensive Rookie of the Year is lacking a lot of his prior luster right about now and Houston Texans linebacker Brian Cushing has no one to blame for it but himself. On Friday, Cushing was suspended for the first four games in 2010 due to a test he took last September. The announcement of the suspension was delayed because Cushing appealed the test in February. He lost the appeal and it is not known when he learned of the failed test, but the situation is also set against a backdrop that drastically colors its constitution. Cushing was dogged by rumors of performance-enhancing drug use before he became a pro, but with no positive tests or definitive evidence with which to indict him, the league had no basis for action and the Texans did their due diligence and selected him in the first round with the 15th pick. Initially that selection appeared to be pure draft gold, as Cushing went to the Pro Bowl in 2009 and was named the league’s top defensive rookie after accumulating 133 tackles. He was a key part of an improved defense that led the Texans to a 9-7 finish and the brink of their first-ever playoff berth as a franchise. Now, he will miss Houston’s first four games of the 2010 season (against Indianapolis, Washington, Dallas and Oakland) and even if he comes back and kicks ass in the final 12 games of the season, he won't be making a return trip to the Pro Bowl due to an earlier agreement with the NFL and the NFLPA, any player who tests positive for performance-enhancing substances is not allowed to play in the Pro Bowl. Cushing has already gone on the record as saying that the drug he tested positive for was not a steroid, but at this point it hardly matters. A guy who came into the league as a prime suspect for using PEDs has to be even more on guard about what he puts into his body and pleading ignorance as to what is in the supplement you took is no longer a viable defense in the NFL or any other major professional sports league. Cushing has let himself and his team down and for a franchise that has clearly reached a point where it needs to make the playoffs this season or begin dismantling and rebuilding with a new blueprint, losing its signal caller on the defensive side of the ball isn’t going to help at all, even if one of its first four games is against the inept Oakland Raiders………..
- For all the dudes out there who continue to insist that they only read Playboy for the articles, here is your chance to prove it. Because most employers frown on you surfing for porn at the office (something about creating a hostile work environment, sexual harassment, blah, blah, blah), Playboy knows that the average guy can’t log onto its site at work. In response to this problem, Playboy has announced plans to roll out a work-friendly website. "Playboy’s TheSmokingJacket.com is the safe-for-work website that brings you everything you love about men's entertainment and the internet, minus the stuff that'll get you into hot water at the office," Playboy spokeswoman Theresa Hennessey said in a written statement. The site is already up but has not yet been made active, with Playboy saying only that it will be launched "in the coming months." The decision is a curious one for the publisher, which is seeking to redefine and rebrand itself online in a world where guys clearly have other (free) options for pictures of chicks without their clothes on. Even though Playboy Enterprises reported a net loss of $1 million in the first quarter of this year and that was significantly less than the reported loss of $13.7 million during the same quarter last year, it doesn’t take a master economist to realize that a company cannot operate for long with those numbers in its ledger book. The new site, named after founder Hugh Hefner's preferred brand of leisure wear, may be the first step in Playboy’s attempt to redefine itself. "We believe that 2010 will be a transitional year and that the true benefits of our strategy will be more fully evident next year," Playboy CEO Scott Flanders said in a statement. So what will be on the site for those who just want to “read the articles” and nothing more? Well, it’s expected that The Smoking Jacket will have the magazine’s familiar collection of celebrity interviews, short fiction by big-name authors, rankings of the nation's top party schools and other miscellaneous content. Will guys flock to the site in the same numbers they flock to Internet sites where women are naked? Probably not, which means I’m betting on The Smoking Jacket not being all that hot in the long run…………
- To support your country’s Maoist rebels or not, that is the major question currently facing Indians. On the one hand, supporting those groups is a bad idea because the government has issued a stern warning to all citizens against the practice, saying that such groups are the greatest internal security threat to the nation. The warning came down Thursday from India's home ministry, which declare that nonprofit groups and intellectuals found helping the banned insurgents “spread their ideology” would be prosecuted under the country's laws. On the other hand, who can't get with a group seeking to take down and overthrow an oppressive, rights-repressing government that is trying to tell people who they can and cannot support? International human rights groups are slamming the decision mercilessly, saying it is a blatant attempt to subvert and silence political speech. "The Indian government should think twice before trying to silence political discussion and demanding endorsement of its views on Maoist groups," said Brad Adams, Asia director for Human Rights Watch. "The recent views expressed by the Indian government against so-called sympathizers could be understood as carte blanche by local authorities to harass and arrest critics of Indian government policy." I have to agree with my main man Brad, what with likening free speech - peaceful speech at that - to a criminal, terroristic act. Just because someone is caught in the middle of a struggle between rebel groups and the government those groups oppose and may feel inclined to speak out in support of the rebels doesn’t make them a criminal. The Indian government has been heading this direction ever since it outlawed Maoist rebels and branded them as terrorists. You all can probably guess where I stand in the battle of Maoists v. government: whichever side is going to result in more brawling, riots, violence and civil unrest. So if the Maoists are in fact looking to overthrow the government, then I’m guessing they are my best bet in this matter. However, the government seems to believe the rebels "have no place in India's parliamentary democracy," an assertion I strongly disagree with. An anti-establishment point of view is crucial to the basic functioning of any true democracy, which India is proving it does not have on the basis of these decidedly un-democratic actions. Tossing out ridiculous claims that the Maoists are hampering development in areas under their control, killing innocent civilians and destroying infrastructure seems far-fetched at best. This is, after all, a group that enjoys support from both the country’s poor as well as India's elite. I don’t necessarily support all of the Maoists’ actions, but their daring assaults on security forces last month were pretty freaking brazen, especially ambushing 200 armed federal police conducting a road inspection in Dantewada district. So keep up the fight, Maoist forces of India, because your nation is counting on you to stand up to a government this is vastly overstepping its bounds. Speak out for those who aren’t able and continue stickin’ it to The Man whenever and wherever possible………..
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