- It’s happened before in Major League Baseball (and the results haven’t been good) and now it’s about to happen in the NBA. The New Orleans Hornets will soon be the first franchise in league history owned by the NBA, following in the footsteps of the Montreal Expos, who were owned by MLB before that franchise was sold and moved to the nation's capital as the Washington Nationals. Multiple sources have confirmed that the NBA plans to seize control of the Hornets and that those plans are moving ahead "100 percent" and will be publicly confirmed within the next few days. Without a doubt, this is a truly bizarre twists in the Hornets’ hectic history, as current owner George Shinn founded the team in Charlotte in 1988 and controversially moved them to New Orleans for the 2002-03 season. The team was later forced to make Oklahoma City its temporary home for two seasons in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and there was speculation that it may not even return to New Orleans. Ultimately, the Hornets returned and Oklahoma City instead hijacked Seattle’s NBA franchise, but things have been anything but stable for the Hornets in New Orleans. Shinn, who is battling serious health issues, was on the verge of selling his majority share in the team to minority partner Gary Chouest, but that deal collapsed for good in recent days. Rather than allow chaos to ensue, the league plans to step in and run the team while trying to find an owner who can be persuaded to keep the team in New Orleans. Fact is, Shinn is debt-ridden and can no longer afford running the team, but also can't find a buyer. The league stepping in could also impact the desire of All-Star point guard Chris Paul to remain in New Orleans long-term. Whether Paul signs a new long-term deal or not, NBA commissioner David Stern is determined to keep a team in New Orleans and tried to inject life into the franchise by awarding the 2009 All-Star Game to New Orleans. Convincing a new owner to keep the team in one of the league’s smallest markets will be difficult, especially with this week’s disclosure that this season's attendance has dropped to the point that the Hornets are on pace to have the right to opt out of their lease with the state of Louisiana as early as March 1. The Hornets averaged just 13,826 fans through their first nine home games even with an 11-1 start on the court and with Chouest withdrawing his offer to buy the team because he no longer thinks he can devote the time needed to run an NBA team as well as his private company isn’t likely to fire up Hornets fans about their team. Knowing that they might lose their team if they average less than 14,213 fans during a 13-game stretch of home dates between Dec. 1 and Jan. 17 may inspire them to come out and watch a team that is playing much better than expected. If not, the NBA is going to have an absolute brawl on its hands to keep the Hornets in New Orleans………..
- Have a hankering for a prime piece of Montana wilderness that once belonged to one of the most infamous figures in the past century of American history? Now is the time to act, as you can score the tract of land that once belonged to the nefarious Ted Kaczynski, who spent 17 years in a cabin on this very property, building his instruments of death and mailing them to unsuspecting people around the country. Of course, Kaczynski - better known as the Unabomber - is serving a life sentence at a federal supermax prison in Colorado, so he no longer needs the land. The cabin is long gone, housed in the Newseum in Washington, D.C. But the property it sat on in western Montana is up for sale AND the asking price was recently reduced from $154,500 to $69,500. "It's very secluded. Hardly any one goes up there," says John Pistelak, who runs a realty company in town and is handling the sale. "I've had all kinds of calls." Lots of calls from people curious about a potential move to lovely Lincoln, Mont. Oh, and don’t think that moving to this piece of land means that you too must eschew modern comforts, like electricity or water, and dwell in a small, crude building like the one Kaczynski lived in for nearly two decades. Besides, how can anyone not be fascinated by the site where some mail-bomb-murdering kook sat down and penned his an angry 35,000-word anti-technology manifesto? Maybe I’m the only one with a thing for manifestos, but the idea of some misanthrope sitting down at a creaky wooden table and scrawling 35,000 words of anti-societal bile is interesting. The person who buys the property will become the proud owner of 1.4 acres south of Lincoln and the newest member of a town of 1,500. A real estate brochure reading, "Own a Piece of U.S. History: Home of the Unabomber," touts the property and hails its proximity to wilderness areas and "great fishing and hunting." Pistelak even admits the land normally would go for no more than $50,000 if not for Kaczynski’s ties to it. Nothing like cashing in on the fame of a guy who killed people from thousands of miles away by mail bombs. "With the history, it's got to be worth something," Pistelak said. Lincoln resident Wendy Gehring, who knew Kaczynski and was a neighbor, doesn’t seem too fired up about the sale. "I have nothing good to say about him," she fumed. "The town doesn't really give a rat's ass about Ted Kaczynski." And who would pass up the chance to live next to this charming lady? Oh, and a prospective buyer could run power on the property from a few lots down, which would really be the ultimate eff-you to Kaczynski. Or, and I’m just throwing ideas out there, you could call your own brother out and have him pitch in to help you build a ramshackle wooden building like Kaczynski and his own brother built after he quit a tenure-track position at the University of California-Berkeley in 1969 and built the original shack. There are just so many possibilities and I haven’t even mentioned the possibility of penning your very own manifesto………
- Russia has had a bit of an up-and-down week. On the one hand, the communist nation (and yes, I believe y’all are still commies, Russia) was awarded the 2018 World Cup, beating out joint bids from Portugal and Spain and Belgium and the Netherlands for the right to host the biggest event in the “beautiful game.” On the other hand, it has to suck to have not one, not two, but three navigational satellites fail to launch. Russia's space agency is investigating the failed launch of three navigational satellites, which were meant to complete the Russian GLONASS satellite navigation system. None of the three made it to outer space and all of them went into a "non-targeted orbit" following their launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Sunday afternoon. The Federal Space Agency confirmed the failed launches and issued a statement that shared nothing at all of value. "A special Board has been established to find out the cause of the contingency and to define next steps," the statement read. According to unidentified Russian officials, the satellites crashed into the Pacific Ocean off Hawaii, but U.S. military and Coast Guard were unable to confirm those reports. The satellites were launched aboard a Proton-M rocket from Baikonur about 3:25 p.m. Sunday and were scheduled to be fully operational in about six weeks. I guess that won’t be happening now. GLONASS, by the way, is the Russian equivalent of the U.S. Global Positioning System network. Losing these three satellites means that the network remains three satellites short of being at full strength. But hey, you can always draw hope from the fact that in eight years, you’ll be hosting a gathering of guys with long, greasy mullets who like to fake injuries and engage in lame post-goal celebrations………
- Well lookee here, dorky wizards don’t necessarily rule all at the box office. After easily besting the competition in its opening weekend, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows ceded the top spot to the very movie it beat out last weekend, Tangled, which managed to edge past the pale, socially awkward Harry Potter and his wizard pals even though both films lost more than half of their revenue from last weekend. Tangled did decline some 56 percent, but still made $21.5 million to up its cumulative total to $96.5 million for its first two weeks. As for Harry Potter, the dorks who camped out to see it last weekend were definitely not back for a second viewing as the film fell off 66 percent and made a scant $16.7 million for a two-week total of $244.2 million. Outside of the top two films, no other movie hit the eight-figure mark for the weekend. Third-place finisher Burlesque made $6.2 million in its second weekend and seems destined to end up as a major disappointment with its current running total of $27 million being less than half of its $55 million budget. Fourth place went to Denzel Washington’s Unstoppable, which hasn’t won at the box office in any of its four weekends but has churned out one respectable effort after another and remained in the top five in each of its four weeks. This time around, a $6.1 million haul raised its cumulative earnings to $68.9 million. The final spot in the top five went to Love and Other Drugs, which brought in 41.5 percent less than last weekend but still made $5.7 million to push its current earnings to $22.6 million. The remaining occupants of the top 10 for the weekend were: Disney/Pixar Films’ Megamind (No. 6 with $5 million after suffering its biggest week-to-week drop-off thus far at 60 percent), Due Date (No. 7 with $4.2 million for a running tally of $91 million in five weeks), Faster (No. 8 and still a massive, massive disappointment after two weeks with $3.9 million this weekend and a paltry $18.1 million overall), newcomer The Warrior’s Way (No. 9 with $3.1 million in its opening weekend) and Russell Crowe’s drastically underperforming The Next Three Days (No. 10 with just $2.6 million and an astonishingly low $18.4 million through three weeks). Dropping out of the top 10 from last week was another film failing to meet expectations, Morning Glory, which tumbled to No. 11 this weekend…….
- Smoking is for losers. That’s been established in this very space time and time again, so any potential suffering and misery from quitting and going through withdrawal is outweighed by all the ways choking down cancer sticks can ruin your life. Still, I appreciate the good folks at Rhode Island’s Brown University who completed a study that found people who were in the process of quitting smoking were never happier. These commendable researchers have just completed their work and published their efforts in the journal Nicotine & Tobacco Research. At the core of the study was the premise that everyone knows that giving up smoking is known to be good for our physical health, but nobody really seemed to know whether the process makes us happy or depressed. Smokers would argue that a) they can quit any time they want to and b) part of not wanting to quit is the absolute agony they will go through in attempting to wean themselves off their death sticks. Those fears are exactly what researcher and author Christopher Kahler took dead aim at when he said the following: "The assumption has often been that people might smoke because it has antidepressant properties and that if they quit it might unmask a depressive episode. What's surprising is that at the time when you measure smokers' mood, even if they've only succeeded for a little while, they are already reporting less symptoms of depression." He went on to explain that smokers thinking of quitting should be encouraged by the double benefit - both physical and mental. Quitting isn’t the nightmare so many smokers fear it to be and the Brown researchers can point to data they examined on 236 male and female smokers who wanted to quit, data that revealed much less psychological suffering from attempts to quit than were expected. Participants were given smoking cessation counseling and nicotine patches and then established a date to officially stop smoking. They all underwent a standardized test for symptoms of depression seven days before they stopped smoking and further evaluations for depression took place 2, 8, 16 and 28 weeks after their quit date. Of the 236 participants, 99 of them never actually quit smoking, while 44 were only found to be smoking free during their first evaluation after the quit date, 33 were smoking-free up to their 8-week check-up and 33 stopped smoking for the duration of the study. Among the quitters, researchers found generally high morale. Only if they relapsed into smoking did their moods decline. As long as they abstained from smoking, their moods were extremely positive. The ones who managed to abstain throughout the study period had the highest levels of happiness. From that data, Kahler and his team extrapolated that link between happiness and smoking cessation is strong, strong enough for the myth of quitting being an agonizing, soul-sucking ordeal to be debunked………
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