- Could Marshfield, Mass. finally be getting with the times and joining the rest of us in the 21st century…..or at least 1995? If next week’s town meeting turns out the right way, then yes, Marshfield could just get an added touch of modernity it has been sorely lacking. See, video games in public places have been banned in Marshfield since 1982, and for people who want to play video games in restaurants in the town, there was no relief. Local restaurant owners are among those fighting to lift the ban, arguing that it would benefit business along with allowing in harmless, fun and benign slices of entertainment fun. “People wanna come in, it’s another form of entertainment,” said Stephen Drosopoulos, who owns Venus II Restaurant. “(They) wanna come in, have a couple drinks, play some video games in the bar.” When the games were initially banned, the case was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. One might imagine that in the three decades since, the ass-backwards thinkers who are still living in a Footloose-era world in which any modern technology or anything not safe in Leave It To Beaver times is bad, fodder for eternal damnation and the devil’s play thing would have backed off their stance, learned to accept the modern world and ceased opposition of video games. Umm…..wrong. There are still supporters of the ban and those idiots say the question before their community is about much more than the games themselves; to them it’s about the future and character of the seacoast community. “It would definitely change the type of entertainment we offer,” said Faith Jean, who supports the video game ban. “We’re a coastal town. Now are we an amusement coastal town or are we fishing and swimming and sailing?” Oh no! Not an amusement town! Hey tool…….video games aren’t going to ruin your town. People aren’t going to come to Marshfield, play video games all day long and never set food on the beach to swim, fish or sail. More than likely, they’ll send their kids to play the games so the kids will stop bothering them as they finish their meal. Oh, and Marshfield allows Keno in bars, restaurants and some stores despite the ban, so not allowing video games does sound extremely hypocritical………..
- Oh, so close. The world seemed to be on the verge of getting rid of one more mediocre, forgettable, mildly good-looking actor and then the truth had to jump up and bite us all in the behind. Reports surfaced over the weekend that actor Ryan Phillippe wanted to retire. Cinema buffs will recall his memorable roles in…..umm….uh……never mind. Honestly, Phillippe never had any great or memorable roles and is best known for being married to Reese Witherspoon for a few years. Beyond that, he’s as forgettable and easily replaceable an actor as Hollywood has seen in years. The less of these quasi-talented hacks hanging around the industry, the better. “I’m going to spend a third of my year in New York… I think I’m going to end my acting career,” he is quoted as saying. “I’m so introverted. I’m ready to be behind the scenes. I’m 36, but I’ve been doing this for 20 years.” But no sooner than those rumors and comments circulated than Phillippe and his people stepped forward to correct them. They are going with the battle-tested “taken out of context’ strategy, suggesting that rumors of Phillippe’s acting demise were greatly exaggerated and that he is merely looking to expand his producing and directing work while also continuing to be seen on the big screen. An optimist might argue that more time producing and directing should theoretically leave less time for his (bad) acting on-screen and I might buy into that argument if not for that fact that Phillippe currently has four projects in the works: By Virtue Fall, Chronicle, Tlatelolco: Mexico 68 and Setup. That sounds to me very much like a man who plans on acting in the present, the future and the distant future. We’re stuck with Ryan Phillippe and the many other semi-talented thespians getting by on their looks…………
- I smell a new primetime drama for Fox! Prison Break may have ended several years ago in one of the most disappointing television series finales ever, but recent events at the Sarposa jail outside Kandahar, Afghanistan may have opened the door for a sequel, so to speak. For the second time in just three years, inmates have managed to escape the prison, one of the country’s largest. Nearly 500 prisoners, including Taliban commanders and fighters, escaped overnight through a tunnel beneath a prison cell. A Taliban spokesman claimed that the tunnel was more than 1,180 ft. long and took five months to complete. The spokesman told the BBC that the tunnel led from a house rented by allies of the Taliban northeast of the prison, to the political wing, where prisoners were held. The tunnel bypassed security checkpoints and the main Kandahar-Kabul road and was created using heavy digging equipment. There was reportedly so much earth removed that the group hauled it away and sold it. Engineers were involved in the digging as well, making one wonder how all of this went on and no one at the prison was aware. Or maybe, prison employees were aware and chose a nice under-the-table handout to stay silent. Prison officials showed media members the hole in the cement floor of the prison cell, revealing an opening 3 ft. in diameter leading to a tunnel that tunnel straight down for about 5 ft. and appeared to go in the direction of a mud-walled compound with a brown gate and shops on either side. According to the Taliban spokesman, three militants inside the prison had known about the plan and herded prisoners to the tunnel. Mohammad Abdullah, one of the inmates at Sarposa who Taliban spokesmen said had helped organize the escape, alleged that “friends” obtained copies of cell keys prior to the escape, with friends believed to be code for prison guards. When the escape went down, organizers opened cell doors for other prisoners and led them to the room with the tunnel in small groups. Abdullah said in an interview that there were no guards inside the cell where the tunnel emerged. “At the other end, in the house where the tunnel started, we positioned suicide bombers so that if something happened, if fighting broke out, they could respond," he stated. Abdullah put the number of escaped prisoners at 541, with the operation beginning at 11 p.m. local time on Sunday and ending four and a half hours later. Prison officials refused to comment on the escaped inmates, but another Taliban spokesman said about 106 of the inmates were commanders - four of them former provincial chiefs. Once inside the safe house, escapees were loaded into vehicles and taken to "safe places" while the Taliban alerted the media about what had just happened. Prison officials reportedly did not discover the remnants of the escape until 4 a.m. and it took the governor of Kandahar province, Tooryalai Wesa, about two minutes to declare that the breakout was "absolutely the fault of the ignorance of the security forces.” Police have organized a massive search operation for the inmates and had already rearrested 26 by the end of the day Sunday along with two men shot as they attempted to escape. For the rest of the escapees, a Fox contract could be waiting for you……….
- Hmm, so injecting poison into your face could lead to problems? What the freak? No one could have seen that coming, yet here we are, digesting news that having Botox injections to smooth facial wrinkles dulls people's ability to read emotions in others, at least according to a study led by David Neal, a professor of psychology at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and co-author Tanya Chartrand. These two brilliant scientific minds published their findings in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science in a move deliberately designed to strike fear and panic into the heart of every plastic, superficial southern California cougar who hears about the study. The study examined the supposition that one way humans read the feelings of others is by mimicking their facial expressions, after which muscular feedback from our faces to our brains helps us decide which emotions the expressions correspond to. By jamming poison into your grill and firming it up artificially, you lessen your ability to mimic others’ facial expressions, in turn reducing your ability to fully interpret the emotions you are trying to read. Based on this theory, Neal and Chartrand conducted two experiments, one to dampen facial feedback signals and one to amplify them. In the dampening experiment, researchers compared a group that had an injection that reduces muscular feedback (the Botox group) and another group that did not (the control group, which received a dermal filler). The emotion perception of the Botox group was “significantly impaired," amazingly. In the amplifying experiment, researchers tested the idea that feedback signals are stronger when facial muscles try to contract but meet resistance. They had subjects apply a special gel to their face and found that "emotion perception improved, and did so only for emotion judgments that theoretically could benefit from facial feedback.” Neal characterized the ability to mimic the facial expressions of others as a way of getting "a window into their inner world.” He then fired a shot across the bow of every SoCal plastic surgeon by declaring, “with Botox, that window is a little darker.” Wow, that’s harsh. If people want to dull their emotional perception by paralyzing their facial muscles for shallow, superficial reasons, then who are any of us to condemn them? Of course, people shallow and self-absorbed enough to Botox their faces in the first place probably wouldn’t be so great at perceiving others’ emotions anyhow because that would require them to realize that people other than themselves exist………..
- Relations between Derek Jeter and the New York Yankees turned bitter last fall and winter when the two sides engaged in contentious contract talks and according to a new took, "The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter," that relationship may have been irreparably damaged by what transpired. The book details a Nov. 30 meeting between Jeter, his agent Casey Close, Creative Artists Agency attorney Terry Prince and Yankees general manager Brian Cashman in which Jeter stayed for only the first 45 minutes, telling Cashman and other Yankees personnel how angry he was that they had made details of the negotiations public. After informing Cashman, team president Randy Levine and co-owner Hal Steinbrenner of his feelings, Jeter reportedly got up to leave and Cashman asked him to sit back down and hear him out. "You said all you wanted was what was fair," the GM told the Jeter. "How much higher do we have to be than the highest offer for it to be fair?" That remark apparently struck a nerve with the future hall of famer, who received no other offers during free agency and ultimately signed a three-year, $51 million guaranteed deal plus an option year and incentive bonuses. The team decided to take the negotiations public after Close said during in interview that the Yankees' negotiating stance was "baffling." Steinbrenner allowed Cashman to launch a public attack on Jeter, leading to a divisive quote from Cashman that he should test the market to "see if there's something he would prefer other than this." In the end, Jeter met with Levine in the shortstop’s Trump World Tower home the day before finalizing the contract and was able to sway Levine enough that he added an extra $4-5 million to the team’s offer. Another aspect of Jeter’s strained relationship with the team to be detailed in the book centers on his relationship with Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez, which hit a low point in a loss to Baltimore in 2006 in which the two players came together for a dropped pop-up. The ball dropped between them and in full view of everyone in the ballpark, Jeter gave Rodriguez a death stare that led then-manager Joe Torre to scold both players. Cashman reportedly asked Torre to talk to Jeter about improving his relationship with Rodriguez and Cashman decided to step in when Torre refused. "Listen, this has to stop," he told Jeter. "Everybody in the press box, every team official, everyone watching, they saw you look at the ball on the ground and look at him with disgust like you were saying, 'That's your mess, you clean it up.'" Jeter countered, "Show me the video. Show me the video." Cashman declined, but apparently both he and Jeter never let go of the animosity and unease created by that incident and several others since…………
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