- Riot Watch! Riot Watch! London may be gearing up to host next summer’s Olympic Games, but the primary focus of many Londoners over the past few months seems to be finding reasons to burn their city to the ground in their quest to strike back at The Man. Saturday proved to be a great day for such activity, as disturbances broke out in another district of the city late in the day after a peaceful protest against the killing of Mark Duggan in a police shooting led to a massive riot featuring the torching of a double-decker bus, the destruction of police cars and the trashing and looting of a mall in the Wood Green district. The mayhem was centered in north London's Tottenham area and disturbances also broke out in Enfield, about 5 miles north of Tottenham. In the Tottenham riots, several buildings were set ablaze and some truly epic television footage showed a double-decker bus in a massive fireball as police charged through the streets, futilely trying to restore order. Police reported that 26 officers received injuries, most if not all apparently minor, and made 55 arrests. Most of the arrests were for burglary; others were for crimes including violent disorder, robbery, theft and handling of stolen goods. Another inspiring number from the riot was the 49 “primary” fires in Tottenham that London's fire department said it dealt with. Rumors of other riots supposedly being planned in other areas of London circulated on Twitter and Facebook, but none materialized and for now, the violence seems to have died down. Sunday was highlighted by riot and mounted police patrolling the streets with K-9 units. "We do have extra resources out tonight on duty across the capital," police commander Christine Jones said. "We are carefully monitoring any intelligence and ensuring we have our resources in the right places. No one wants to see a repeat of the scenes that we witnessed last night in Tottenham." Wrong-O, Christine. You may not want to see a repeat of those scenes, but riot lovers around the world certainly do. As for fears that the rioting and unrest over the past few months cast a negative light on London with the Olympics looming, don’t worry about that because people are going to watch and attend the Games no matter what. "I hope people will have a fantastic Olympics no matter what happened last night," London Mayor Boris Johnson said. Don’t sweat it, Mr. Mayor. The sight of between 300 and 500 people gathering around Tottenham's police station and lobbing bottles full of gasoline - or petrol for you Brits - at lines of officers formed to protect the station isn't going to turn anyone off to the Olympics. How anyone can not be fired up be rioters taking baseball bats and metal bars and attempting to storm the police station makes no sense. Tottenham was still smoldering - literally - Sunday as streets were littered with bricks and lined with overturned scorched trash cans while burned-out buildings scarred the cityscape. Allow me to be the first to say to everyone who had a hand in Saturday’s dissidence pyrotechnics…..well done…………
- In the battle of the monkey movies (and can you ever have too many of those), Rise of the Planet of the Apes has won an uninspiring and moronic battle thanks to a better-than-expected opening weekend that made it the box office champion for the just-ending three-day frame. For its first foray into theaters, the latest incarnation of an ape film franchise that should have been left dormant made $54 million domestically to clinch first place, beating out The Smurfs for the honor. That left second place for The Smurfs, with a 41-percent decline from its own opening weekend leaving it at $21 million for the frame and with a $76.2 million total through two weeks. Third place was held down by last weekend’s (undeserving) top movie, Cowboys & Aliens. After a whopping 57-percent drop-off from its first week, the bizarrely anachronistic film made a scant $15.7 million to elevate its two-week domestic tally to $67.4 million and counting. The award for worst top 10 film/movie we’d all be better off with if it had never been made for the weekend goes to The Change-Up, which recycled the über-tired premise of the body swap comedy - offering only the “Hey, but ours is R-rated!” twist as a means of enticing moviegoers - and made just $13.5 in domestic earnings against its $52 million budget (a budget clearly not consumed by high costs for talented writers). Last among the top five was Captain America: The First Avenger, which garnered an additional $13 million in its third weekend to up its overall earnings to $143.1 million. The rest of the top 10 consisted of: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 (No. 6 with $12.2 million and $342.8 million through its first month in the U.S.), Crazy, Stupid, Love. (No. 7 with $12.1 and a respectable $42.2 million in two weeks in theaters), Friends with Benefits (No. 8 with a measly $4.7 million and $48.5 million cumulative total), Horrible Bosses (No. 9 and a surprising success story as it jumped well over the $100 million barrier with $4.6 million in its fifth weekend of release) and Transformers: Dark of the Moon (No. 10 with $3.1 million and $344.1 million to continue as one of summer’s biggest success stories). Dropping out of the top 10 were the mind-numbingly bad Zookeeper (No. 11 and clearly the worst of two awful monkey movies currently in theaters) and Cars 2 (No. 12)…………….
- Athletes looking for an edge will try literally anything they can to make themselves stronger, faster and better, or simply able to recover more quickly from injuries. Still…….spritzing a deer-antler spray under your tongue to gain muscle-building and fat-cutting effects? Whether fans realized it or not, Major League Baseball players have been freely using the spray at nearly no risk and would have continued to do so had MLB not issued a warning requesting players not use the spray because it contained "potentially contaminated nutritional supplements" and had been added to the league's cautionary list of products. In its warning, MLB cited reports from the drug-testing industry but stated the warning was not issued because the spray includes the banned chemical. What the spray does contain is IGF-1, or insulin-like growth factor, which cannot be detected in the urine tests used by baseball. Because the players' association has not come to an agreement with MLB on blood testing, substances such as human growth hormone still go largely unchecked. According to news reports, scientists discovered IGF-1 in the velvet of immature deer antlers and in the spray players have been using as an alternative to steroids. IGF-1 is considered a performance-enhancer and its use is prohibited by baseball and the World Anti-Doping Agency, among other governing bodies. It is believed to mediate the level of human growth hormone in the body and MLB said in its warning that the spray can cause players to test positive for the banned steroid methyltestosterone. The spray’s manufacturers tout it as producing "anabolic or growth stimulation," "athletic performance" and "muscular strength and endurance." As always, good to know that athletes will inject, ingest or apparently spray anything into or onto their bodies if it will give them any edge at all…………
- Kooks seeing Jesus or the Virgin Mary in random places in nature or on manufactured products is a never-ending source of amusement for the rest of us who aren’t imagining that sort of nonsense. Jesus and Mary have been seen in everything from tree bark to toast, from grass clippings to potato chips. Now, one of them has supposedly been spotted in the tried and true regalia of hippies everywhere, the de facto uniform for those who refuse to let the ‘70s die…….tie-dye t-shirts. The spotting comes courtesy of Indianapolis resident Carylin Landers, who has been making shirts for about three years as a side business. Her hobby took an allegedly interesting turn last week when she tied a knot in a shirt, bundled it up and dropped it into a vat of dye. When the shirt came out, Landers says it was adorned with the likeness of the Son of God. "I'm not even a religious person," Landers said. "I was shocked at what I saw." She took a picture of the shirt and sent it to her sister, who told her not to dye the shirt again, which she usually does to add more than one color. "I had decided I was only going to do the top of the shirt in the second color, since the image was on the bottom," Landers stated. "I would just hold it out of the dye." Unfortunately, Landers is also an idiot in addition to being delusional and she accidentally dropped the shirt in a dark navy color and thought she'd ruined the image. "I rinsed it when it was done, only to see that the second color didn't touch the face. It only outlined it more," she recalled. Predictably, Landers has received a flood of feedback from fellow kooks who have learned of her “miraculous” find and want to know more about it. Enjoy the moment, kooks, then get over it because you know there is someone else out there who will soon spill a bucket of paint in their garage and have it coagulate in the shape of the Virgin Mary’s visage……….
- In the ongoing quest to ensure that there is literally an app for everything, the makers of GLMPS are hoping the picture-loving world of digital camera, Android, iPhone and BlackBerry users who are perpetually snapping shots to upload to Facebook or Twitter of themselves and their friends doing every mundane activity under the sun will embrace their creation. As anyone who takes picture with any frequency knows well, some of the most photographic moments actually come in the seconds before a picture is snapped. Preening, posing, hair-fixing and posture-shifting make for some hilarious moments pre-photo, but those moments are never recorded and instead, you are left with some posed, stiff picture of you and your crew in a dimly lit bar or in the bleachers of a Major League Baseball game. With the help of GLMPS, that can change. The app enhances the picture-taking process by recording video for the five seconds before a picture is snapped. When a user sorts through their images, they need only to tap the thumbnail of a particular picture to view the five seconds of video that preceded the picture. GLMPS then allows users to share the video on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare or just send it via e-mail. The best news of all? GLMPS is free and as the motto of so many Internet users (and residents of planet Earth in general) remains, “If it’s free, it’s for me,” a free app that does anything remotely useful is always welcome. So if you’ve been searching for that ideal means of embarrassing your prima donna friend who has to look perfect in every picture and insists on retakes if their hair is slightly mussed or their smile isn’t spot-on, GLMPS could be just what you’ve been searching for…………
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