Friday, October 07, 2011

Four-band rainbows, Libertarian kooks and hating Courtney Love

- You may think him a delusional kook, but Florida-based radio talk show host and chairman of the Libertarian Party of Florida Adrian Wyllie doesn’t care. The state of Florida and the federal government can pass all of the new laws they want requiring proof of citizenship to get or renew your driver's license, Wyllie isn't backing down. As a member of the Libertarian Party, Wyllie believes it violates his constitutional right against unreasonable search and seizure to be required to provide that sort of documentation. Sure, it makes no sense and no, providing some basic paperwork isn't a huge ordeal. Wyllie won't be able to renew his driver’s license when it expires and that doesn’t bother him either. He refuses to stop driving as believes he is on the right side of this debate. "I believe I am in the position of right and the state needs to be corrected," he explained. The law he so objects to is the federal Real ID Act, which requires anyone getting or renewing a driver's license to provide proof of citizenship, address and social security number. In select cases, divorce papers and marriage licenses must be shown. Ever the activist and the diva, Wyllie had friends videotape his encounter at the driver's license office where he refused to provide the necessary documents and then surrendered his license. He continued his fight by driving regularly for the next two months in the hopes of getting a ticket that he could fight. When that didn’t work, this tool went on his radio show on WTAN in Clearwater and taunted Sheriff Jim Coats into enforcing his own laws. Begging for a citation did the trick as a Pinellas County sheriff's deputy pulled Wyllie over later that day and gave him a ticket. Another citation could lead to as much as one year in jail and yet Wyllie doesn’t care - or so he says. "I'm willing to take this as far as it needs to go," he proclaimed. As for the law, it was put in place after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to prevent terrorists from getting legal IDs. Oh, and about that vow to “take this as far as it needs to go” and its consequences…….not so much. Wyllie went before a Pinellas County judge on Wednesday afternoon and begged to stay out of jail. "Being incarcerated would result in my losing my livelihood, my ability to support my family. It would destroy me. So there are consequences," Wyllie pleaded. Way to man up, weakling………


- No one needed another reason to hate Courtney Love, but she hands them out like fun-sized Snickers bars and Tootsie rolls on Halloween, so why not? As record labels, music fans and others around the industry continue honoring the 20th anniversary of her late husband Kurt Cobain’s most famous work, Nirvana’s 1991 album Nevermind, Love is once again seizing the chance to gravy train on Cobain’s life and legacy to keep her own sorry self in the spotlight. She sat down for an interview for the November issue of Vanity Fair and was asked if she's angry with Cobain for committing suicide in 1994. This, by the way, is the point where scores of angry Nirvana fans begin ranting to no one in particular about how Cobain didn’t commit suicide and was murdered in some sort of bizarre plot. But either way, Cobain is no long among the living and for that, his widow is bitter. "Mad? Ya think?! If he came back right now I'd have to kill him, for what he did to us. I'd f**king kill him. I'd f**k him, and then I'd kill him. He tried to kill himself three times!" Love fumed. She further spewed compliments about the man she loved by talking about his heavy drug use, saying, "He OD'd at least five times. I was the f**king E.M.S. I was always sticking pins in his balls. I carried around Narcan!” Narcan, for the non-heroin addict, is a drug used to revive heroin users. Later in the interview, Love copped to her own parenting failures and her fractured relationship with she and Cobain’s daughter Francis Bean Cobain, who legally emancipated from Love nearly two years ago, at age 17). Her last complaint had to do with what else, money, as in a large chunk of money missing from Nirvana’s bank account after Cobain’s death. Love calls the situation “the fraud” and believes it pre-dates her husband's death. "We could never find our money!" she whined. "We had $135,000 in our bank account. They said that if he would go do Lollapalooza he would make $11 million… Do you think Kurt would have killed himself if he had known he had $54 million?" Umm…….yes. Assuming Cobain really did kill himself, then yes, he would have done it no matter how much money he had. Just as Terrell Owens’ publicist Kim Ethridge tried to deny an alleged suicide attempt by the mercurial wide receiver by saying “Terrell has 25 million reasons to be alive” in an allusion to the $25 million he was owed on his contract at the time, Love looks shallow, superficial and idiotic by suggesting that money would have inspired a miserable and mentally troubled man to not commit suicide…………


- No matter what happens in the fifth and deciding game of the National League Division Series between the Philadelphia Phillies and St. Louis Cardinals, no one can say St. Louis didn’t pull out all the stops in trying to win the series. The Cardinals have scrapped all series long after a miraculous late-season comeback to even make the playoffs and facing a 2-1 series deficit and possible elimination at home in Game 4 on Wednesday night, the home team even received some help from nature when an impromptu episode of Jim Fowler’s Animal Kingdom broke out in the fifth inning. With the Cardinals at bat and Phillies ace Roy Oswalt on the mound, an adventurous squirrel darted onto the field and across home plate shortly after Oswalt delivered a pitch. Undeterred by the invasion of the bushy-tailed rodent, plate umpire Angel Hernandez called it a ball. An incredulous Oswalt and manager Charlie Manuel protested the call, but Hernandez refused to change the call. Batter Skip Schumaker flied out to center on the next pitch, but Oswalt gave up two runs the following inning and could well have been unnerved by the distraction and unable to shake being thrown out of his rhythm. He was still bitter about the non-call after the game and complained about it to the media. "I didn't want to stop in the middle of my motion, so I threw it," Oswalt said. "I was wondering what size of animal it needed to be for it not to be a pitch." Manuel approached it with more of a sense of humor even though his team dropped a tough 5-3 decision to even the series at 2-2. "Of course, being from the South and being a squirrel hunter, if I had a gun there, might have did something," Manuel said. "I'm a pretty good shot." Squirrels have been an issue in St. Louis during the series and the grounds crew at Busch Stadium might want to call in animal control in the event the Cardinals win Game 5 and advance to next weeks’ NL Championship Series. A squirrel was spotted beyond the center field wall earlier in the day on Wednesday and on Tuesday night, a squirrel was seen going for jog in foul territory along the third-base line. And as with so many non-human, occasionally inanimate objects (hurricanes, injured body parts of athletes), the squirrel has its own Twitter account as of Tuesday night. Good times…………


- To quote infamous Seinfeld slacker George Costanza after being confronted by his boss for having sex with the cleaning lady on his office desk, “Was that wrong?” Several police officers in northern Mexico could well have asked that same question Thursday after being accused of allowing violent drug gang to hold kidnap victims in the local jail while ransom payments were being negotiated. Four officers from Juarez, a suburb of the city of Monterrey, were arrested and are being held pending further investigation, said Jorge Domene, the security spokesman for Nuevo Leon state. State and federal police learned of the alleged improprieties this week when they freed two kidnapping victims from jail cells in Juarez. Investigators suspect the victims were abducted by the extremely violent Zetas cartel, with the four officers believed to work for the cartel. Law enforcement officials being bribed or intimidated into working for drug gangs by providing them with information is a common phenomenon, as are protecting their activities or detaining and turning over members of rival gangs. Last weekend alone, the Nuevo Leon attorney general's office detained 73 local policemen from a half dozen communities in the state who confessed to having performed various services for gangs. Their crimes included spying, acting as lookouts and even carrying out killings and kidnappings. For some odd reason, those arrests led authorities to conduct background checks on 99 other officers, 21 of whom were fired after refusing to cooperate. Figuring out why officers cooperate with cartels isn't difficult; they don’t want to see their families die and most of them earn $350 a month or less. Putting a big pile of cash in front of these law enforcement professionals is like placing a nice, juicy steak and a dessert platter in front of Rosie O’Donnell after she hasn’t eaten in 48 hours………..


- Is the myth about rainbows real? No, not the idea of a midget (i.e. leprechaun) waiting at the end of it with a pot of gold, but the existence of the rare visual phenomenon known as a tertiary, or triple, rainbow. Thanks to Internet video “star” Paul Vasquez, who vaulted to online fame when he posted a video of his overly emotional response to seeing a double rainbow in Yosemite National Park, multiple rainbows have become a much-debated phenomenon. An amateur storm chaser in Germany headed out recently after a storm and saw not just a triple rainbow, but an even more exceptional event – a quadruple (quaternary) rainbow. Using a technique was developed a year ago by Raymond Lee, a professor of meteorology at the U.S. Naval Academy, this adventuresome resident of Deutschland used the new meteorological model to successfully predict where tertiary rainbows would appear in the sky. Scientists were skeptical about the model and with only 5 reported instances of quaternary rainbows in the past 250 years, the likelihood of seeing one was beyond miniscule. Lee’s new method may change all of that and by using the model he developed, two amateur photographers have been able to produce photographs of multi-rainbows in the past few months. Both images show a tertiary band and one reveals the first-ever captured quaternary band. “I’m getting lots of reports from individuals who say to look at this photograph and there are the two main rainbows in the picture,” Lee said. “They’re looking at the wrong side of the sky, where you normally see the bright primary secondary rainbows. To see the tertiary and quaternary rainbows, you need to look back towards the sun. About 40 degrees towards it.” With that secret revealed, many more images of three- or four-band rainbows could be seen. The cause of the extra bands is the same as in a normal, one-band rainbow: sunlight bending as it moves through water, a process known as refraction. The curvature of raindrops during storms bands sunlight at slightly different angles, dispersing them and separating them into the familiar ROY G. BIV bands. To properly photograph rainbows, Lee advises photographers to hold their hand out at arm’s length, with their thumb over the sun, splay their fingers so that the distance between their pinky and thumb is at about a 17 degree angle and look where their pinky stops to see where the third and fourth bands should be. These rainbows are so elusive because each time the process of light passing through raindrops occurs, the rainbow becomes fainter. Michael Theusner, an atmospheric scientist and amateur storm chaser in Schiffdorf, Germany, followed Lee’s model and found the mythical four-band rainbow, earning himself immense cred in the rainbow-chasing community…………

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