- Concussions have been the most prominent issue in and around the world of football for many months now. At every level of the game, preventing concussions has become a focus and redesigned helmets, more stringent testing for those suffering concussions and studies about their lingering effects have become commonplace. The latest step in the process came today, as NFL commissioner Roger Goodell sent a letter to 44 governors urging them to pass a law similar to one in Washington state that protects young athletes from concussions. Goodell’s letter will be a key portion of Dr. Richard Ellenbogen's testimony at Rep. John Conyers' forum on concussions in New York on Monday. Ellenbogen has a relevant perspective on the issue because he treated Zackery Lystedt, the Washington teen who suffered a brain injury in 2006 after returning to a middle school football game following a concussion. The incident prompted Washington to pass Lystedt's Law, which prevents young athletes from returning to play soon after a concussion, no matter how mild. Washington is one of six states with such a law currently on the books, joined by Oregon, Connecticut, Virginia, New Mexico and Oklahoma. Goodell and the NFL want the remaining 44 states to follow suit and they have strong support from Ellenbogen and Dr. Hunt Batjer, who head the NFL's new Head, Neck and Spine Committee. "The Center for Disease Control estimates that there may be as many as 3.8 million sports and recreation-related concussions in the United States each year," Goodell wrote. "These injuries are sustained by both boys and girls in numerous contact sports. "Given our experience at the professional level, we believe a similar approach is appropriate when dealing with concussions in all youth sports. That is why the NFL and its clubs urge you to support legislation that would better protect your state's young athletes by mandating a more formal and aggressive approach to treatment of concussions." The Lystedt law is based on three fundamental tenets: 1) Athletes, parents and coaches must be educated about the dangers of concussions each year, 2) If a young athlete is suspected of having a concussion, he/she must be removed from a game or practice and not be permitted to return to play until 3) A licensed health care professional clears the athlete to return to play. "We would urge that similar legislation be adopted in your state," Goodell added. "We believe that sports and political leaders can help raise awareness of these dangerous injuries and better ensure that they are treated in the proper and most effective way. Young athletes, as well as parents, coaches and school officials in your state, will thank you for taking a stand on this important issue." It’s a very cogent point and one that every town, city, state and governing body for sports would do well to take note of and adhere to. Step it up, protect young athletes from returning too soon after a concussion and make sure that they have all the time they need to recover……….
- Tales like this next one always, always creep me out to the nth degree. Men like Marcin Michal Strachanowski make my skin crawl while also inspiring an urge in me to find them and punch them in the junk repeatedly. In case you don’t know, Strachanowski is the priest accused of sexually abusing minors in his parochial residence in the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He surrendered to authorities Friday night in the village of Realengo after state Civil Police issued a "preventative arrest" warrant against him on Thursday. This scumbag is accused of handcuffing a minor in 2006 and forcing him to perform sexual acts at his home in the Divino Espirito Santo church in Rio de Janeiro's west zone. Judge Alexandre Abrahao Dias Teixeira, who issued the warrant, also detailed police investigations that painted the profile of a man with a "compulsive attraction to sex with adolescents" and who allegedly turned his parish residence into an "erotic dungeon" where he forced boys to have sex with him. Now, if you’ll excuse me for a moment to go throw up in my mouth, we can continue……okay, I’m back. As I was saying, the victim who was allegedly handcuffed and forced to perform sex acts on the priest against his will told investigators that after being frequently raped by the priest, he was forced to remain silent and was threatened regularly. The Rio de Janeiro archdiocese released a statement saying it has suspended Strachanowski from his duties (ya think?) and that it has called on a ecclesiastic tribunal to oversee a canonical trial. "The archdiocese of Rio de Janeiro laments the incident, especially for the people involved, especially for the possible victims, and clarifies that the mentioned clergyman already finds himself suspended of his parochial functions," the statement said. Again, just an all-around revolting and disturbing story that cannot possibly have a single silver lining to it. It merely reinforces the fact that there are a lot of sick freaks out there in the world and that there is no limits to the depths to which these sickos will sink……….
- Just as expected, Shrek Forever After easily won the weekend box office race, outpacing the competition with $71.2 million. What wasn’t expected as the film’s failure to even approach the $121 million that its predecessor, Shrek the Third, opened to back in 2007. That failure becomes even more pronounced when you realize that Shrek Forever After had a litany of expensive 3-D screens at its disposal. IMAX screens did account for 7 percent of the film’s total, but the overall gross was markedly less than what most industry observers expected. The PG-rated flick from Dreamworks Animation also ranks behind the second installment of the Shrek series and the only film among that quartet that it outperformed was the original in 2001, which opened to $42 million. Iron Man grabbed the second slot for its third weekend in theaters, losing its grip on the top spot but making an additional $26.6 million to put its cumulative total at $251.2 million. In third place was Russell Crowe’s Robin Hood, which fell 48 percent its second weekend in theaters and grossed $18.7 million for a total two-week gross of $66.1 million. Fourth place was occupied by Letters to Juliet, starring Amanda Seyfried and dropping just 33 percent its second weekend for a $9 million haul. Next on the list was the ridiculously bad Queen Latifah-starring romantic comedy Just Wright, which made $4.2 million with flimsy writing, a laughable premise, bad acting and an overall production value ranking just above your average YouTube video. Sixth place went to the biggest bomb of the weekend, the Relativity Media financed R-rated comedy MacGruber. Based on a Saturday Night Live skit and proving once again that a concept that works in a four-minute comedy sketch doesn’t hold up for a feature film, the project from producer Lorne Michaels and starring SNL castmates Will Forte and Kristen Wiig made a meager $4.1 million and looks like it will have a tough mountain to climb in merely earning back the $10 million it cost to make the film. By the way, if you invest $10 million any anything and MacGruber is all you get in return, that’s what we like to call low return on investment. The rest of the top ten was filled out by: Date Night (holding surprisingly strong, earning $2.8 million for a seven-week gross of $90 million),
- Uh-oh, Facebook. Angry users are deleting their accounts on your site at a growing pace over privacy concerns and now comes a report that Facebook, along with MySpace, Digg and a handful of other social-networking sites, have been sharing users' personal data with advertisers without users' knowledge or consent. The report, which was first published in the Wall Street Journal, suggests that the sites shared data including names, user IDs, and other information sufficient to enable ad companies such as the Google-owned DoubleClick to identify distinct user profiles. Perhaps in an implicit admission of guilt, both MySpace and Facebook stopped sharing the data after being confronted about the practice. Facebook users can thank researchers from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and AT&T Labs because those researchers are the ones who first noticed the cover data sharing in August 2009. However, even in this data-sharing treachery, Facebook stands out as making more egregious mistakes and missteps than other social networking sites. When the site’s users clicked on ads appearing on a profile page, the site would sometimes pass along the username behind the click, as well as the user whose profile page from which the click came. In essence, by clicking on an ad, you were sharing all sorts of information about yourself with an advertiser and doing so without your knowledge or consent. Advertisers contacted for the story tried to feign ignorance about the data sharing and said they did not use it, which is almost certainly a lie. Either way, this isn’t going to help allay concerns about Facebook’s privacy problems and no matter how many times the site revises its privacy policy, there concerns are going to linger - perhaps now, stronger than ever. Anyone who was on the fence when it came to keeping or deleting their Facebook account may now have the added push they need to hit the hard-to-find “delete account” link on the site……………
No comments:
Post a Comment