- For the love of God, will someone please step up and do the right thing? After the University of Maryland football team wore the most hideous uniforms ever worn by anyone, anywhere, for their season opener on Labor Day against Miami, the chance has come to retaliate against this crime against fashion/humanity. Anyone who hasn’t seen the jerseys won't understand this fully and yet should probably not track down pictures in order to protect their eyes and minds. The jerseys essentially looked as if two designers had each made uniforms based on different halves of the Maryland state flag and a third party cut each of those unis in half an stitched them together. One side of the jersey and helmet were black and yellow and in the pattern of half the state flag, while the other side of the jersey and helmet were white and red in the style of the other half of the state flag. They were so hideous they nearly broke Twitter with all of the tweets trying to find new ways to describe how hideous the uniforms were. Now, there is an opportunity to wipe at least a few of these sartorially regrettable outfits off the face of the earth. Knowing full well how controversial (i.e. awful) the uniforms were, the university has decided to put 10 of the jerseys and helmets up for auction on its athletics website, umterps.com. The auction kicked off Friday and bidding began at $500 for the helmets and $200 for the jerseys. Philanthropist looking to benefit the world at large by buying all of these fashion mistakes and burning them in an incinerator have until Sept. 19 to place a bid, with all proceeds going to benefit the non-charitable, definitely a business organization that is the Maryland athletic department. But in all honesty, where the money goes is wholly irrelevant when you consider the benefit of buying the gear and taking a blowtorch to it……………
- World, the warning has been issued and now it’s time to answer the question of whether or not Iran is lying out its ass again. A day world powers have long been dreading has arrived, as Iran announced Sunday that its Bushehr nuclear power plant is now online, making it the first Middle Eastern country to produce commercial electricity from atomic reactors. Of course, if the United States, the United Kingdom, France and other global super nations believed Iran’s agenda was solely to produce energy with their nuclear plants, this wouldn’t even be a story worth discussing. Instead, the Bushehr plant joining the grid Saturday night with a capacity of 60 megawatts - according to the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran - is reason for the rest of the world to wonder if Iran is one step closer to building its own arsenal of nuclear weapons. The AEOI said Bushehr "joined the national grid" Saturday night at 11:29 p.m. (2:59 p.m. ET) and the plant is expected to produce 1,000 megawatts of electricity when fully operational. That would represent about 2.5 percent of Iran's current electricity consumption, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. A formal ceremony to inaugurate the plant will be held September 12, at which Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will undoubtedly wield a ginormous pair of scissors, cut an oversized ribbon…..and give a double middle-finger salute to the U.S. and every other nation that has accused Iran of developing its nuclear system for weapons-making purposes. Saturday was a long time in the making for those involved with the Bushehr plant, which has been under construction since 1975, before the revolution that created the current Islamic republic. With the IAEA, the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, listing no other nuclear plants under construction in the region, the plant may stand alone for some time. The big announcement came just two days after an IAEA report stated that Iran continues to defy U.N. resolutions aimed at curbing its nuclear program and expressed concerns Ahmadinejad’s regime may be developing nuclear weapons. And the drama continues……….
- Smartphones are used for just about everything now, so why not turn them into your means for accessing the next film up in your Netflix queue? Now, users can do exactly that as long as they have the proper operating system for their Android phone. Smartphone users whose Droid runs either the Froyo or Gingerbread versions of the Android operating system will be able to use the updated Netflix app, which arrived in the Android Market Friday. Neither Netflix nor the Android Market hyped the new app much, as the only notation in the store is under the app’s “What’s New” tab where a message now reads, “Netflix now supports all Android 2.2 and 2.3 devices.” The news may not be helpful to some tablet users, as official Android tablet support is still only available for specific devices. Drawbacks or not, all of this represents a significant improvement from several months ago, when Netflix had was entirely unavailable on Android. That changed in May when the company announced support, although at first it only worked on a handful of devices. That number grew to about 20 over the summer, with the latest version of the Netflix app the biggest leap forward in the process to date. Many Netflix users have waited impatiently for the video service to cater to them in the same way it has catered to users of Apple iOS. Netflix users also watched as Windows Phone 7 got Netflix last November. Netflix knew it was short-changing millions of customers and Greg Peters, vice president of partner product development for Netflix, even apologized to Android users for leaving them behind. Peters wrote on the company’s blog that security and content protection concerns with the Android platform necessitated that the company work with handset manufacturers individually, slowing the process. “Unfortunately, this is a much slower approach and leads to a fragmented experience on Android, in which some handsets will have access to Netflix and others won’t. This clearly is not the preferred solution, and we regret the confusion it might create for consumers,” he wrote. Whatever problems existed have apparently been solved, as the more than 80 percent of them are running Android 2.2 or 2.3 can officially join the party. As for all of the other Droid users…………
- With America spending much of its weekend coming together and reflecting on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, it seems not everyone was caught up in a spirit of unity and camaraderie. Specifically, Sun Valley (Calif.) residents Caitan Arrequin and Rafael Flores Vaca appear to have been more focused on their neighborly confrontation and figuring out who could shoot who first when their dueling parties could not co-exist. Seems the two men were each holding parties Friday night and into the early morning hours Saturday, along with a third party that somehow managed to stay out of the drama. One thing led to another and the next thing you know, Arrequin was allegedly pulling out his gun and fatally shooting Vaca in what Los Angeles police believe may have been a gang-related shooting. According to the police report, men from the two parties got into an argument just after midnight and Arrequin then allegedly went to his home, got a gun and shot Vaca with it. Paramedics rushed Vaca to a nearby hospital where he was pronounced dead, escalating the possible charges against Arrequin to murder. Although police have not identified a definite motive for the dispute, they suspect it may be gang-related. LAPD homicide detectives served search warrants about 4 a.m. and entered the apartments belonging to Arrequin and Vaca, where they allegedly found "information and evidence" leading them to believe Arrequin shot and killed Vaca, according to an LAPD news release. Officers arrested Vaca about 5 p.m. Saturday and booked him into a county jail facility. He remains there with bail set at $100,000. So maybe that idea of 9/11 pulling America together and promoting a spirit of unity didn’t quite reach everyone in the exact same way……….
- For the first time in three weeks, a film has toppled The Help and won the box office earnings race. A wave of sickness swept over moviegoers on the 9/11 weekend, with Matt Damon’s Contagion taking the top spot in its first weekend with a solid debut of $23.1 million. That nearly tripled the output of Help, which dropped to second place with $8.7 million to make its five-week domestic haul $137 million and counting. Newcomer and MMA-centric flick Warrior punched its way to $5.6 million and third place in its first weekend, not so bad against the backdrop of a $25 million budget. In fourth place with a total that would land it about four spots lower on most weekends was The Debt, which coincidentally enough is no longer in debt thanks to $4.9 million to up its two-week domestic total to $21.9 million and officially surpass the film’s $20 million budget. Finishing the top half of the top 10 was the still-disappointing Colombiana, which is still failing to fully capitalize on Zoe Saldana’s hotness thanks to a subpar script and bad acting and made a scant $4 million in its third weekend for a cumulative total of $29.7 million. In the bottom half of the top 10 were: Rise of the Planet of the Apes (keeping the summer of the crappy monkey movie alive at No. 6 with $3.8 for a six-week domestic tally of $167.8 million), the ridiculously bad horror flick Shark Night 3D (No. 7 in its second week with a mere $3.5 million and an embarrassing $14.7 million domestically after two weeks), sci-fi scary movie Apollo 18 (No. 8 with $2.9 million and $15 million in two weeks in theaters), Paul Rudd-led comedy Our Idiot Brother (No. 9 with $2.7 million and $21.4 million overall) and the depressingly terrible Spy Kids: All the Time in the World (No. 10 with $2.5 million in its fourth week). Dropping out of the top 10 from last week was The Smurfs (No. 14) after seven weeks………..
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