- The NFL season hasn’t even started yet and it may already have its best story written. Saturday was cutdown day for teams, meaning they needed to trim nearly three dozen players in order to get down to the NFL-mandated 53-man regular season roster. With literally hundreds of players being cut league-wide, there were bound to be plenty of hard-working, high-character guys out of work and looking for a new team to catch on with. Fortunately, Mark Herzlich was not among those cut. Herzlich, an undrafted free agent out of Boston College, made the New York Giants’ 53-man roster. His story of being diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer in his left leg in 2009, being told by doctors he may never walk or play football again and making it all the way back to lead his team through his final season has inspired many and now Herzlich will have a chance to inspire even more people. The Giants cut 27 players from their active roster by the 6 p.m. ET deadline on Saturday and Herzlich was not among the cuts. He tweeted: "Well it is 6:03pm an I am still a Giant God Is Good." This is in no way a case of the Giants keeping him as some sort of charity case or feel-good story because every roster spot is valuable in the NFL and no team is wasting a spot on a player they are not confident can contribute in some way. Herzlich earned his spot and Giants coach Tom Coughlin said as much. “Herzlich didn't bat an eye the whole camp," Coughlin stated. "Physically, he did everything you asked and more. I saw him improve literally week by week. He can play multiple positions. He's very smart. He does an outstanding job on special teams. He's told one time and he goes and does it. He deserves it." In fact, he was one of four rookie linebackers the Giants kept, but undoubtedly the best story among the four………
- Being an elected official is not for everyone. Some individuals simply don’t like the public eye and the added visibility that come with being expected to make key decisions about how a town, city, state or country is run. However, those people tend to avoid, ya know, actually running for office. Once you take the plunge and place yourself on the ballot, it is generally assumed you want the job. The good people of Wareham, Mass. certainly thought that of town selectman Mike Schneider, who was elected to his new post earlier this year. They probably thought it ever since April, when they voted Schneider as one of Wareham’s five unpaid town selectmen. In fact, the likely continued thinking it right up until this week, when it became clear that Schneider and his family had left town without telling anyone and weren’t coming back. Schneider was last seen at a town event when he attended a July 26 selectmen’s meeting, but that was the last anyone heard from him. He has missed three meetings since and yet the town clerk has not received a letter of resignation, a note or call. Residents say there are many theories and rumors flying around about what became of Schneider, who was serving his first stint as an elected official in any capacity. Many are extremely concerned about his well-being, as those who know him say simply disappearing is out of character. When a local TV station knocked on the door of his home, no one answered and from the outside, all of the home’s interior furniture seemed to be gone. Schneider’s employer, a charter school called the Cape Cod Collaborative, has not heard from him either. There are neighbors who claim they saw Schneider and his family pack up and leave, possibly en route to Florida for a new job. No one knows for sure, but the mystery of it all is almost certainly more exciting than the actual truth…………
- Keep in coming, Yemeni government, keep it coming. You a-holes can launch as many attacks as you want on protestors demanding the overthrow of the current regime, but they aren't backing down. Protestors have boldly taken it to the streets on a near-daily basis since February against President Ali Abdullah Saleh, demanding his resignation. The protests have raged on even though Saleh has been in Saudi Arabia for two months for treatment of serious wounds suffered in an attack on his compound. He has refused to quit despite his injuries and the fact that his people no longer want him in charge, thus the continual cycle of protests throughout the country. Sunday’s uprising took place in the capital Sanaa, with security forces responding with a predictable show of excessive force. A protest march passed the Foreign Ministry and the sight of people daring to march down the road was enough to spark security forces to open fire on them, wounding five. Activists said security forces sealed the city to try to prevent a large turnout, but when those efforts failed they reached for their guns, flipped off the safety and let it rip. Clearly, the government has no respect for the dogmatic, devoted mindset of the many dissidents who have routinely taken part in the protests that have fueled the uprising and made Yemenis believe that for the first time in a long time, change is possible. That Saleh is AWOL and still trying to cling to power is equally pathetic and doesn’t have to same cache as it might if he were standing tall and facing the protestors on Yemeni soil. Sure, Al-Qaida-linked militants have taken advantage of the turmoil to take control of parts of Yemen's south, but any revolution has its side effects and consequences. If some terrorists whack-a-doos gaining a foothold in one corner of the country is a byproduct of a nation-changing uprising, then so be it…………
- On Labor Day weekend, perhaps it was appropriate that a movie all about hard-working folks held down the top spot at the box office. For the second straight weekend, The Help remained at the top of the cinematic heap despite a relatively modest take. Its $14.2 million effort was enough to beat a trio of newcomers and elevate the film’s cumulative earnings to $118.6 million through four weeks. Second place went to The Debt, which debuted with $9.7 million despite being in a mere 1,826 theaters. Sci-fi flick Apollo 18 made its own debut in third place and cashed in with $8.7 million. That was a hair better than supposed scary movie/crappy horror film Shark Night, which managed a scant $8.6 million that netted it a fourth place finish that was several (dozen) spots higher than the film’s quality merits. Last among the top five was Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which continued to hang in the top five after five weeks of release by making $7.8 million to boost its running total to $160 million in domestic earnings. One notch down and landing in the latter half of the top 10 were: Colombiana (No. 6 and continuing to disappoint despite Zoe Saldana’s undisputable hotness with $7.4 million for a two-week domestic total of $21.9 million), Our Idiot Brother (No. 7 with $5.1 million - a mere 26-percent drop from its debut last weekend - and $15.4 million thus far), Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (No. 8 and yet another disappointing film that debuted last weekend, making $4.9 million to raise its overall earnings to $16.3 million), Spy Kids: All the Time in the World (No. 9 with $4.6 million and $29 million total after three weeks) and The Smurfs (No. 10 with $4 million and $131.9 million domestically in six weeks of work). Dropping out of the top 10 from last weekend were Crazy, Stupid, Love. (No. 11) and the über-über-über-disappointing Conan the Barbarian (all the way down to No. 17 and with just $19.6 million in three weeks against a $90 million budget)…………
- As if the world didn’t have enough of its own junk, apparently outer space wants to exacerbate the problem. According to an independent report released Friday, there is so much junk in space that collisions could start to increase exponentially, leading to a continuously growing pile of space crap in orbit. The study was sponsored by NASA and conducted by the National Research Council, a nonprofit science policy organization. The NRC surveyed NASA's work to meet the threat of space debris and didn’t exactly offer a sunny prognosis. Space debris is a catch-all term encompassing a wide array of sh*t drifting aimlessly through space - broken satellites, spent rocket stages and other junk in orbit — and is considered extremely dangerous because it could hit and damage working satellites, as well as spacecraft like the International Space Station. Collisions of two or more pieces of space junk can also create many smaller pieces of space junk, significantly increasing the amount of debris in space. One recent example of this phenomenon is the 2009 crash of a U.S. Iridium communications satellite and a broken Russian spacecraft. Scientists believe the problem will likely become more visible, and urgent, over time. "Space is becoming essential to our current civilization," said Donald Kessler, chairman of the report committee and retired head of NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office. "If for any reason we weren’t able to use satellites as easily as we do today, there would be a reduction in the standard of living." Kessler is an important voice on the subject, as he even has his own space-junk term: Kessler Syndrome. The term refers to a situation in which the amount of debris has reached a critical threshold. The current situation in space meets the criteria for Kessler Syndrome, with enough orbital debris that collisions will cause a continual cascade, with each adding to the total amount of debris and increasing the chances of further collisions, according to several studies. "Even if we add nothing else to orbit, the amount of debris could continue to increase as a result of random collisions between fairly large objects," Kessler said. "You'd generate debris faster than the natural decay process could return it." Additionally, the massive budgetary slash NASA is undergoing courtesy of the Obama administration is likely compound the problems with space junk. Even before the budget cuts, most of NASA's space debris programs consisted of a single staff member. "If anyone retires or moves you have a pretty large gap," Kessler said. "There's usually just one civil servant that's been charged with a whole bunch of things." So does this report actually provide any solutions or just pose lots of problems? Thankfully, there are a few recommendations offered up. One is for NASA to come up with a strategic plan to prioritize the areas within its micrometeoroid and orbital debris program that deserve the most funding and attention. Another is NASA spearheading the gathering of urgently needed data in several areas to improve scientific models and predictions of the effect of debris collisions and establishing a better database of information about spacecraft anomalies. These all sound super, but unless Kessler is planning on befriending Bill Gates or Warren Buffett and convincing them to fund the proposed projects, the odds of them happening are infinitesimal…………
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