Fernandez v. Portland turns ugly, HP has tablet troubles and smoking in movies still an issue

- To say that Rudy Fernandez and the Portland Trailblazers aren’t getting along right now would be putting it mildly. The enigmatic guard is not returning calls from Blazers coach Nate McMillan and the NBA has hit him with a $25,000 fine for violating league rules by threatening a holdout and publicly demanding a trade. Tensions are especially high with Team USA set to play Fernandez and the Spanish national team Sunday night. "I've tried to contact Rudy, and he hasn't returned calls [since the season ended]," McMillan stated. "So we'll just have to see what happens. We're looking to improve our team at all times, but I don't know what's going to happen." Through his agent, Andy Miller, Fernandez informed several news outlets that Fernandez will not report to training camp and is willing to sit out the next two seasons if the Blazers refuse to trade him. After investigating the comments, the league office decided to issue the fine because of rules that prohibit players from publicly requesting a trade. A similar fine was assessed to Stephen Jackson and Nate Robinson last season for violating that rule, although both were eventually traded. The same may not happen for Fernandez, as new Portland general manager Rich Cho has rejected every trade offer that has been presented. Portland received several trade offers from teams with mid-first-round picks who wanted to trade for Fernandez, but then-general manager Kevin Pritchard also declined. Reported offers for the pick have the Celtics and Bulls offering their No. 1 picks in 2011, but the Blazers aren’t biting and with more than a month remaining until the start of NBA training camps, Cho is willing to wait it out. Fernandez is demanding a trade because of a reduced role last year - his second NBA season - and told several Spanish news organizations earlier this summer that he wants to be traded or released from his contract so he can return to Spain to play professionally. "That has been pretty much their position all summer, and Rich Cho is working on that. We know that situation and we've got to fix it," McMillan said. "The thing is, we're going to look at what's going to be best for the organization. Rudy is a very good player, a talented player that we like, and you just don't let a player like that go in a situation like this. He's keeping his ears open to what teams are saying, but that's not something we feel we're going to be forced into doing." Perhaps Miller and his client should be cognizant of the fact that Fernandez underwent back surgery in December and plays behind all-everything guard Brandon Roy, so the team isn’t burying him behind some slob. Get into camp, honor the deal you signed, know your role and shut your mouth, Rudy……..

- This certainly isn’t getting better. I thought we had all agreed that smoking was a horrible, harmful and nasty habit and that we wanted as little of it in our lives as possible. That doesn’t jibe with the fact that nearly half of the top-grossing films from 2009 contained scenes with tobacco use. According to a report Thursday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that increase took place after a steady decline in recent years. Why is this such a big deal? Well it’s the age-old problem of seeing smoking onscreen making kids two to three times more likely to start smoking than kids with lighter exposure. Researchers examined the instances of tobacco use in the highest-grossing films from 1991 to 2009. They found that this trend peaked in 2005, but has since progressively declined. As that number declined initially, it mirrored a significant decrease in the number high school students who had ever tried a cigarette. In spite of that, the decline is not enough given the “strong scientific base that smoking onscreen causes kids to smoke," said lead author of the study, Dr. Stanton Glantz of the University of California, San Francisco. This study, which was funded in part by the American Legacy Foundation and the California Tobacco Control Program, are accompanied by several recommendations from the CDC, including assigning an R-rating to films that depict tobacco imagery, anti-tobacco adds preceding films that contain onscreen tobacco use, and prohibiting tobacco brand placements in films. All of these seem perfectly reasonable given that tobacco use remains the cause of one out of five deaths in the U.S., and approximately 1,000 kids take up the habit daily. One of last year’s biggest films, James Cameron’s "Avatar," featured lead actress Sigourney Weaver as a cigarette-smoking environmentalist. Again, this doesn’t sound like us stamping up tobacco use and tobacco’s involvement in American society, so let’s see what we can do to rectify that……..

- In need of some new kicks, Orlando residents? If you’ve worn out your good pair of Nikes and need to replace them but are short on cash, perhaps there is an alternative for you: take that spare glock or 9mm in your closet or under your bed and trade it in for a new pair of shoes at the nearest location of the city’s 12th annual Kicks for Guns campaign. The campaign launched Friday at numerous Central Florida locations, sponsored by eight law enforcement agencies at nine locations. A local radio station headed up the event, which allows gun owners (or finders) to exchange an unloaded firearm for a pair of new tennis shoes or a gift card. The day was a major success in the mind of law enforcement officials, who received more than 1,050 guns by day’s end. Oh, and some weirdo also turned in a Vietnam War-era land mine and five samurai swords. Making the day even more successful (and making donors even more thankful that names were not taken), four of the returned guns were identified as stolen. "The idea is to remove unwanted guns from the community that can potentially become the target of thieves," said Palm Bay police Officer Ron Lugo. Well, when you make it as easy as placing your unloaded firearms in a paper bag and dropping them off just down the road from your home in exchange for some new shoes, it’s tough to say no……..

- Riot Watch! Riot Watch! After putting on a happy face for the World Cup this summer as the eyes of the world were on it, South Africa isn’t quite as harmonious these days and that, my friends, is a good thing. Public sector workers launched a countrywide strike in South Africa on Wednesday, with hospital workers, education employees and civil servants walking out on the job to demand better compensation and benefits from their government. "We are trying to bring them to their knees," strike leader Nomusa Cembi said of the South African government. "We took a decision yesterday that we would go on strike indefinitely until our employer gives us a better offer." The goal of the strike is to raise wages 8.6 percent and gain a 1,000 rand ($137) per month housing allowance. Not only that, the striking workers are demanding that those improvements to be backdated to April 1 of this year and that their medical benefits also be bettered. Being just two days old, it’s not clear how long the strike will go on, but one positive note is that the protests are expected to intensify. Trying its best to appear calm and poised under pressure, South Africa's ministry of public service and administration recognized the rejection of its the latest wage and the indefinite strike as having been "noted with great concern" and went on in a futile attempt to denigrate the strike and those behind it. "We question how a responsible leadership can advocate for an indefinite strike action knowing why the demand cannot be met in this financial year, knowing the impact such action would have on the delivery of services to all the citizens of the republic, knowing the adverse effects it would have to the very members whose interests they represent," the ministry said in a statement. Keep telling yourselves that, guys, keep telling yourselves that………

- Launching a new tablet computer is great, but without apps for that tablet to run, users are going to get bored somewhat quickly. That’s the dilemma facing Hewlett-Packard, which has announced plans to release a WebOS tablet early next year, but is having difficulty persuading software developers to write apps for the computer. With the iPad going strong and other tablets running Google's Android OS set to hit the market, it’s a challenge that is only going to grow from HP. It would appear that HP didn’t do a good enough job of looking into the future and foreseeing this challenge when it bought Palm in April for $1.2 billion, largely for the smartphone maker's webOS operating system. The operating system was praised for its polished look and eye-catching features when it debuted in January 2009. Being tied to the ill-fated Palm Pre did the OS no favors and it sank into the morass of the smartphone world thanks in large part to a lack of mobile apps. Competing against the iPhone and its tens of thousands of more apps, the Pre got curb-stomped. How HP plans to overcome this deficiency in the tablet world, no one knows. Apple's iOS App Store more than 225,000 applications, the Android Market has more than 70,000 and HP’s tablet…..not so many. Go ahead and chalk it up as yet another loss for a company trying to compete with Apple and it’s world’s-best operating system………