- Los Angeles Clippers home games may not have much meaning or intrigue at this point in the season - or any season for that matter - but that doesn’t mean the Staples Center was not a riveting place to be Saturday before the Clippers took on the NBA’s worst team, the Cleveland Cavaliers. Actually, the most interesting action on the court at Staples took place before the game, when a steak knife-wielding man held police and security guards at bay for nearly half an hour. Given that the man’s identity was not released, it would be nearly impossible to narrow down the field of possible suspects because anyone who has been a Clippers season ticket holder for more than one season has easily seen enough bad basketball to drive them to the point of insanity. Staples Center’s general manager, Lee Zeidman, explained that the knife-wielding kook walked into the venue through an employee entrance, at which point security officers tried to block his entry. They backed away when the man waved his steak knife menacingly in their direction and began issuing threats. "He tried to enter the doors and we tried to secure him and stop him ... he pulled out a knife at that point and told our officers in no uncertain terms to get away from him," Zeidman stated. The man then sprinted down a tunnel to the arena floor, where he was met by 25 security staffers who surrounded him until police arrived. Once police came onto the scene, the man wandered to the visiting bench, where he spoke to three police officers with their guns drawn from approximately 20 feet away. He made no specific demands, nor did he offer any clues as to a motive for his actions. "He was talking a lot of gibberish, making a lot of veiled threats, and nobody could really understand him," Zeidman said. "There were no specific demands. He told us: 'Just back away or else you're going to get hurt. Leave me alone. I'm prepared to do whatever it takes to get whatever I want.'" Maybe what he wanted was for a racist, sexist, sleazeball owner like Donald Sterling to sell the Clippers to someone who knows how to run an NBA team…….or it could be that this man was just mentally ill and in need of psychological help. Either way, police shot him with a beanbag gun and detained him after he made a move toward a tunnel leading off the court. He was hauled from the arena in handcuffs as players from both teams watched the drama unfold on a TV outside the Cavaliers' dressing room before they were instructed to return to their locker rooms. All in a days’ worth of exciting action in Clipper-land…………
- There are plenty of professions - professional athlete, government office worker, toll booth operator - where a lazy person looking to knock off work a few hours early or mail in the last few hours of a shift or event and not have it put anyone in danger. Needless to say, police officer in a major U.S. city is not one of those occupations. That message would have been helpful to the four police officers and two lieutenants currently suspended from the Buffalo Police Department after being accused of skipping out of work several hours early. An anonymous tip led city officials to investigate the six individuals and Buffalo mayor Byron Brown doesn’t sound happy about the matter. "If the allegations are true, certainly taxpayers should be outraged," Brown fumed. "I can confirm that six officers were suspended and the allegations are that supervisors allowed officers to go home early, and not complete their work shift." Worse yet, the accused officers work out of the department's B District in the downtown area. Whether it’s Buffalo, New York City, Chicago or Compton, the downtown area is one place where police officers need to show up on time, do their job well and finish their shift. Brown is not the only city official who wants answers and Buffalo Common Council majority leader Richard Fontana sounds even angrier than the mayo, saying, "I want to know what officers were involved. Who they were. Who the lieutenants were, and why this is allowed to happen. We're hearing at least a couple hours. Maybe even in some instances, we're hearing possibly to go to another job. And that's even more disheartening because they're getting paid twice then," His anger matters because Fontana chairs the police oversight committee. As for the officers…….leaving early for a second job? What, like working as a mall security guard to earn some extra cash? It’s a nice scam if you can pull it off, but wouldn’t there be at least a tinge of guilt when you’re supposed to be out protecting and serving the people of Buffalo and instead, you’re shirking your duties, getting paid anyhow and earning more money working another job at the same time? Quite a fine police department you all have, Buffalo……….
- There are limits even for films called Limitless, but even those limits were not enough to prevent Bradley Cooper’s new flick from winning at the box office in its debut weekend. Limitless made $19 million in its first weekend, beating out the top film from each of the previous two weekends. Rango jumped up a spot to second place for this frame, recovering from a one-week fall to best the film that displace it at the top of the cinematic heap, Battle: Los Angeles, for the No. 2 spot. The animated film from Paramount made $15.3 million and has scored a solid $92.6 million through its first three weeks of release. As for Battle: Los Angeles, it finished third in its second weekend of work with $14.6 million to elevate its cumulative tally to $60.6 million. Lionsgate Films’ The Lincoln Lawyer was about as interesting to moviegoers as a set of Lincoln Logs, opening with a dud of a debut weekend at $13.4 million. Perhaps the director cut one too many shots of a dreamy, shirtless Matthew McConaughey, but Lincoln Lawyer will have to find its stride soon if it aspires to be anything other than one of the quickest films this year to go from the big screen to Blu-Ray and DVD. The last of the top five was the combo live action/animated alien film Paul, which had a letdown of an opening weekend as well with $13.1 million. The latter half of the top 10 consisted of: Red Riding Hood (No. 6 with $7.3 million after a 48 percent drop in its second weekend for a two-week total of $25.9 million), The Adjustment Bureau (No. 7 after its won 48 percent drop, resulting in a $5.9 million weekend that pushed its three-week take to $48.7 million), Mars Needs Moms (No. 8 after chasing a disappointing debut weekend with an equally disappointing second weekend of $5.3 and an über-disappointing two-week total of $15.4 million), Beastly (No. 9 thanks to a $3.3 million effort in its third weekend for a cumulative total of $22.2 million) and the spectacularly unwatchable Hall Pass (No. 10 with $2.6 million and $39.5 million after four weeks of release). The bottom three films from last week’s top 10 - Gnomeo and Juliet, Just Go With It and The King’s Speech, all dropped from the list this weekend. For King’s Speech, it was something the film hadn’t experienced since very early in its 17-week run. Considering that the film has now made $132.4 million, one would imagine that Weinstein Bros. isn't disappointed in the film at this point………..
- Apparently the Dalai Lama was serious when he announced two weeks ago that he would soon be stepping down as Tibet’s head of government. Despite pleas from the Tibetan community in exile (and yours truly) that he not abandon his post to focus solely on the religious side of his job while inching ever closer to retirement, the Dalai Lama has not backed off his pledge and Tibetans across the world began voting Sunday for a new leader to lead the resistance against Chinese rule over their Himalayan homeland. The Tibetan parliament-in-exile has also begun discussions on how to handle the Dalai Lama's resignation from politics, although if they are smart their strategy is first to beg him to reconsider before moving on to their secondary options. The scene was colorful and upbeat in India's northern city of Dharmsala, where the exiled government is based, as monks in crimson robes joined students, housewives and business people to cast their votes for their nation’s next leader. The new prime minister will lead the Tibetan government while the Dalai Lama retains his position as the nation’s spiritual leader. Finding someone who can inspire the sort of staunch resistance to the heavy-handed rule of China's Communist authorities in Tibet is an extremely difficult task and while allowing the 76-year-old Nobel Peace laureate to focus entirely on the spiritual side of the equation may not be as easy as it sounds. Breaking the Chinese death grip on Tibet will be a near-impossible task and in scanning the list of candidates for prime minister, it is hard to identify someone capable of taking on the challenge and leading a revolution. But it is not too late for you to change your mind, D. Lama, and no one would mind at all…………
- The planet has not been especially kind to mankind over the past several years, what with tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes and Sarah Palin terrorizing the world and making life unbearable for so many. Not that we can demand some reparations from Earth, but the scene in the sky over much of the world the past several nights has been a nice change of pace. Twitter, Facebook and anywhere else stargazers can gather have lit up with glowing thoughts on the so-called "supermoon" doing its thing in the night sky. The biggest full moon in nearly two decades led to #supermoon trending on Twitter as the moon made its closest approach to Earth in its elliptical orbit, closer than it has been in 18 years. Shots of the supermoon flooded photo-sharing site Flickr and many of the shots truly were breathtaking. Full moons differ in sizes due to the oblong, elliptical shape of the moon's orbit. One side of the ellipse is about 31,000 miles closer to Earth than the other, meaning when the moon is closest to Earth (at its perigee), it is 14 percent larger and 30 percent brighter than when it's farthest from the planet (at its apogee). Talk about the supermoon started several weeks ago, with astrologers and amateur astronomers postulating that the extra-large full moon could lead to unusual weather. The conspiracy theorists among us even wondered if the supermoon contributed to the earthquake and resulting tsunami that devastated Japan last weekend. These kooks often point to supermoons that occurred in 1955, 1974, 1992 and 2005 and attempt to tie the extreme weather and other natural disasters from those years to the fact that the moon appeared bigger than normal in the night sky. Whatever you say, astrono-kooks……….
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