- With NBA labor talks staggering and stumbling along and no agreement in sight to end the four-plus month lockout, what is the missing element needed to bring the two sides together and reach a consensus? If you said blatant racism and playing of the race card via a hateful and inappropriate analogy, you would be wrong - but that doesn’t mean NBA union attorney Jeffrey Kessler was going to pass up the chance to do the above. “To present that in the context of ‘take it or leave it,’ in our view, that is not good faith,” Kessler said of the league’s most recent offer. “Instead of treating the players like partners, they’re treating them like plantation workers.” Ah, a nice plantation blast. That should make the relationship between players and owners so much better, even if the comment didn’t come from a player. The fact that Kessler is an educated man, a licensed attorney who should know better, only makes his use of this horrific analogy that much worse. Kessler and every other public figure needs to keep the following analogies and comparisons out of their mouth no matter what: Hitler, World War I/II, Nazis, slavery, rape, Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Using any of the above for any reason other than to talk about the actual historical events themselves is going to end badly. And so it happened for Kessler, who had to do a quick about-face and issue a perfunctory apology. "The comments that I made in The Washington Post took place in an interview late at night Monday after a very long day," Kessler said in a statement. "Looking back, the words that I used were inappropriate; I did not intend to offend. I was merely passionately advocating for the players." Oh, so you want to use the, “It was a long, hard day and I was tired and frustrated” excuse, okay. That works……to make you look even worse. Commissioner David Stern use the incident to pile on and blame Kessler for the stalled labor talks. "Kessler's agenda is always to inflame and not to make a deal," Stern complained, "even if it means injecting race and thereby insulting his own clients. ... He has been the single most divisive force in our negotiations and it doesn't surprise me he would rant and not talk about specifics. Kessler's conduct is routinely despicable." Wow, a nice “routinely despicable” shot from the commish, very cool. In defense of the NBPA, sources close to the union have said that that its leadership does not condone what Kessler said and that Kessler will be reprimanded for injecting racial rhetoric into the negotiations………….
- The standards are high for riots and protests in England right now, given the sheer, unbridled rage shown over the summer in demonstrations that spread wildfire-style through the country. As such, Wednesday’s march by students through central London on Wednesday to protest cuts to public spending and a big increase in university tuition fees will be measured more critically and a cheap ripoff of the Occupy Wall Street won't cut it. Unfortunately, that was a big part of what Wednesday’s protests offered as a group of protesters erected more than 20 tents at the foot of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square. Sure, thousands of students marched through downtown London and that’s all well and good, but an estimated crowd of 10,000 is only part of the recipe needed for a successful uprising. The tents in Trafalgar Square were quickly removed by police and other officers in riot gear prevented protestors from joining up with an existing protest camp against corporate greed outside St. Paul's Cathedral. Backing down from lines of police in riot gear is weak and police almost seemed amused by the sight of more than thousands of people marching near the cathedral with chants of "No ifs, no buts, no education cuts." With nearly 4,000 police officers deployed along the route, which wound from the University of London to the city's financial district, there was nearly an officer for every two protestors in the hopes of preventing the sort of violence that has marked previous student protests in the city. One such incident occurred in December, when students staged a spontaneous attack on a car carrying Prince Charles and his wife Camilla. Despite the relatively benign atmosphere of Wednesday s protests, police cited merely "a number of arrests for public order offenses." Protestors rallied around the common refrain that tripling tuition fees for the next school year will price many students out of a chance at higher education, in effect making college only for the wealthy. In the aftermath of the day’s events, protestors issued predictable allegations of police of trying to intimidate marchers in light of reports that officers would be authorized to use rubber bullets if violence broke out. Next time, do something that merits the use of rubber bullets and then there will be something to talk about………….
- Very rarely does science do something truly important like figure out whether or not horses had spotted fur thousands of years ago. Thankfully, researchers like Arne Ludwig of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin and his colleagues are out there asking these important questions. Their query comes after images of dappled horses adorning the cave walls in Pech-Merle, France surfaced and inquiring minds began asking why ancient man would paint spotted horses when we all know that horses are not spotted like leopards or striped like zebras and tigers. After careful analysis of DNA from the remains of 31 horses found in Europe and Siberia, Ludwig and his team have determined that those prehistoric painters probably weren’t taking artistic license when they painted those polka-dotted horses on the walls of that French cave. Previous studies have shown that horses were either bay or black before domestication and that more elaborate patterns emerged as a result of breeding selection imposed by humans, but the DNA analysis suggested that some prehistoric horses really did sport spots instead of one-color patterns. Researchers sampled DNA from 31 horses, of which 18 were bay, seven were black and six carried genetic variants that produce a leopard spotting pattern. Rather than depicting images of religious or cultural significance with the spotted horses, ancient man may have simply been drawing exactly what he saw. More about this research sure to change your life in many and varied ways can be found in the online edition of the Nov. 7 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences……………
- The odds of a gas pump successfully printing out a receipt seems only marginally better than a person’s odds of winning the lottery most days. For one Grover, N.C. resident, the general incompetence of gas pump printing devices became a life-altering moment in a positive way over the weekend. The man had ventured over the border into South Carolina and stopped to purchase gas at the VJ Express station in Blacksburg, S.C. Not surprisingly, his receipt did not print and rather than just mutter an obscenity at the pump and make a mental note of how much his gas cost so he could write it down later, he decided to do the very thing a person using a credit card to buy gas at the pump is trying to avoid: going inside and waiting in line for a receipt from the disinterested cashier on the other side of the bulletproof glass. When the man went inside, he was sucked in by lottery tickets out amongst the cigarette lighters, energy drinks and unhealthy snack foods for sale at the counter and bought a $10 Big Dollar Doubler instant ticket. He returned to his home in Grover, scratched off his ticket that night and learned he had won a $200,000 lottery prize, according to the South Carolina Education Lottery. Ironically, the man had been in South Carolina partially because he thought gas might be cheaper o on the other side of the border. "I was getting gas in South Carolina where it's cheaper and I could save a buck," he said. He made an even happier trip back to South Carolina the next day to collect his winnings and claim one of three remaining $200,000 prizes in the $10 Big Dollar Doubler game. The odds of winning one of the prizes are one in 288,000. The best part of winning the prize has to be the knowledge that you can afford to fill your tank up every time you stop for gas and have fewer interactions with gas pump printers with fewer visits to said pumps……………
- Yawn. Two talent-deprived hacks with no musical ability between them are feuding again. Why anyone cares about anything either Pitbull and Lindsay Lohan has to say is unclear, but here the two of them are, feuding again. The drama began after Lohan objected to and sued the “rapper” for a line in his song "Give Me Everything." Lohan took issue with the lyric in question — "I got it locked up like Lindsay Lohan" — and filed suit for defamation. Pitbull, whose bastardized blend of a few elements of rap with pop and electronic music is an affront to anyone who likes good music, responded with a statement on his Planet Pit website apologizing to Lohan for any unintended harm from the "Everything" lyric and said that he "supports" the actress' career. Lohan initially filed suit against Pitbull in August, seeking an injunction to stop all broadcast of "Give Me Everything," claiming that the "by virtue of its wide appeal, condemnation, excoriation, disparaging or defamatory statements by the defendants about the plaintiff are destined to do irreparable harm." Prior to MTV’s lame-tastic Video Music Awards show, Pitbull continued to backpedal and attempt to spin his words. "In no way, shape or form would I want to bring that on anybody," he said. "I didn't look to defame, degrade or hurt someone's career. For me, mentioning it on a #1 record around the world, I thought it would be helping someone's career, and keeping them relevant. We mention people's names all the time; when it comes to rapping, it's always about double meanings and metaphors and how you flip certain things," he said at the time. Those sentiments clearly have come and gone in the past three months as evidenced by the fact that Pitbull has filed a countersuit against Lohan. In the countersuit, Pitbull alleges that his lyric is justified in light of the actress's ongoing legal problems. The suit also poses questions as to whether Lohan is even eligible to file suit in New York since she has been spending the majority of her time serving probation in California. "In light of Ms. Lohan's continuing obligations to the State of California, as well as the foregoing facts, Ms. Lohan is a citizen of California, not New York," Pitbull's countersuit states. Neither party is commenting on the matter at this point, but both look ridiculous for even having the debate…………
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