- LeBron James should stop talking. Legitimately, permanently, stop talking. Wanting to be a global icon and the first black billionaire are endeavors seemingly not well-served by keeping one’s mouth shut, but LeBron should consider the idea nonetheless. Yes, he is one of the most-famous athletes in the world and by nature of his job he is going to get a lot of questions and feel compelled to answer them. However, the self-proclaimed King just is not well-equipped to answer said questions without saying something stupid, offensive, whiny or just plain ignorant. This reality smacked James and the world in the face again after Orlando Magic center Dwight Howard did a 180 on demands to be traded and signed an agreement to forego his opportunity to opt out of his contract at the end of this season. Signing the wavier means he will be under contract with the Magic through next season and as with every star player who has come up for free agency since James’ ill-fated and imbecilic television special “The Decision” in 2010 in which he knifed the entire city of Cleveland in the back on national TV, media members grasping for an angle tried to draw links between Howard’s situation and the one James faced in Cleveland. Rather than politely answer the questions or offer any real insight, James came up with a response that made him sound whiny, spoiled and extremely arrogant. "Everyone keeps comparing all these guys' situations to mine," James said. "I fulfilled my contract in Cleveland. I was an unrestricted free agent and I could have done whatever I wanted to do. I was free, that's what the collective bargaining is all about. That's why the rules is put in like that. But none of their situations -- not Chris Paul, not Carmelo Anthony, not Dwight Howard -- none of their situations is like mine." Of course. No one can be like LeBron or on his level. Teammate Dwyane Wade didn’t help James’ cause by attacking the media further. "No matter what happens, we know it comes back to LeBron," Wade said. "I was watching the Peyton Manning press conference. I love Peyton Manning. I said, 'I guarantee you in five seconds it is going to come back to LeBron.' It came right back to him.” Dwyane, refer back to the advice at the top of this page and you might want to follow it as well……………
- Visitors to the Gettysburg battlefields in rural Pennsylvania had a great opportunity this past week. While spending quality time seeing the fields where thousands of men from the North and South put their lives on the line and killed each other in bloody battles, history lovers had the chance to pick up a disproportional tribute to another bloody time in American history. For the low, low price of $20, visitors could buy the large-head/small-body likeness of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Owning the top-heavy doppelganger of one of history’s most despised and controversial figures may not appeal to everyone, but the offer was a limited-time opportunity. Officials at the Gettysburg National Park Museum left the bobbleheads on sale for a week before losing their nerve and caving to pressure from a bunch of spineless cowards who felt that the dolls were an offensive tribute to a killer. “The item was inappropriate, and we should pull the item from the shelves,” says Gettysburg Foundation spokeswoman Dru Anne Neil. Wrong-O, Dru. If it sells and brings people to some God-forsaken battlefield in rural Pennsylvania to buy a novelty item, then give the people what they want. A troublesome local reporter sparked the controversy by casting light on the story and from there, a great chance unraveled. The gift shop purchased the bobbleheads through Kansas City manufacturer BobbleHead LLC, which sold out an initial run of 250 of the dolls online and is working on another batch. “When we make a bobblehead, we want to make sure that when we’re making it we’re the only ones that are making it,” said BobbleHead LLC sales manager Matt Powers. When compared to some of those offerings - late North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il and Osama bin Laden – a Booth bobblehead doesn’t seem quite so bad………….
- Remember last month when a plot to attack Israeli targets in Bangkok was blamed on Iranians and Israel used the incidents as an impetus to inch closer to kicking off World War III? Those planned attacks in Bangkok may not have been the whole story. Police in New Delhi say a bomb attack that wounded an Israeli diplomat's wife last month is connected to the Bangkok plot. The announcement also provides more evidence for the Israelis to pair with a failed bombing in the former Soviet republic of Georgia that also targeted an Israeli diplomat. Indian authorities had been slow to implicate Iran in the Feb. 13 attack in New Delhi that wounded the diplomat's wife and three others with a bomb attached to her car by a magnet, but officials admitted their investigation continued to lead them in that direction. Police issued arrest warrants earlier this week for three Iranian men who had left the country on the heels of arresting an Indian freelance journalist who reportedly worked for Iranian news organizations. Delhi Police Commissioner B.K. Gupta confirmed that one of the three wanted men had been in contact with Masoud Sedaghatzadeh, who was arrested in Malaysia and accused of involvement in the Bangkok blast. Delhi police are seeking to have Sedaghatzadeh extradited from Malaysia and are asking for assistance in location and extraditing he and his two co-conspirators. "We have informed the Iranian ambassador of these developments so as to seek the cooperation of the Iranian authorities in bringing those involved in this dastardly attack to justice," Foreign Ministry spokesman Syed Akbaruddin said in a statement. Sedaghatzadeh is believed to be the operational head of the group that was planning the Bangkok attacks and his arrest in Malaysia led investigators to the other suspects in the case. The group allegedly executed a reconnaissance mission at the Israeli Embassy last May before returning to Delhi in January and February to plan the attack. Other members of the plot traveled to Iran to provide assistance to the attackers and helped with travel. It’s a complicated web for investigators to untangle, but a web that seems to lead unerringly in one direction………….
- Thank you, science, for giving FAT people another excuse for their obesity. Normally the Mayo Clinic deserves immense amounts of praise for helping seriously ill people with all manner of maladies, but in this case its brilliant medical minds are enablers instead of problem solvers. Researchers recruited volunteers for a study into the effects of lost sleep on a person’s eating habits. They discovered that individuals who get an hour's less sleep a day develop hunger pangs which make them eat the equivalent of an extra meal, to the tune of 549 more calories a day. When deprived of 80 minutes of sleep, participants consumed the same amount of extra calories normally found in a hamburger and serving of chips. The study arose from concerns that widespread sleep deprivation could be leading to epidemic levels of obesity. Previous population studies have suggested a link, but there was no direct evidence and too many other factors to establish a definitive connection. Adding a certain reality TV vibe to the effort, researchers had volunteers live in “Big Brother” house conditions, i.e. putting them all inside a house to live together and chronicling their activities – minus all of the roommate sex, ridiculous contests and hysterically over-dramatized voting out of cast members. Participants’ eating, sleeping and exercise habits were chronicled and analyzed. For the first three nights they were allowed to sleep as much as they liked and averaged 6.5 hours. After that, they were split into two groups. Nine people were allowed to continue their normal sleeping patterns for eight nights while the others had their sleep reduced to an average of five hours and 10 minutes. Food availability was consistent throughout the study. The group whose sleep patterns remained the same also maintained the same eating habits, but the sleep-deprived ate considerably more. Those results surprised the study’s authors. "The increase was much more than we had expected," said professor Virend Somers, a heart disease consultant and the study’s lead author. Sleep deprivation is believed to cause increased caloric consumption by reducing production of an appetite-suppressing hormone called leptin while increasing production of an appetite stimulant called ghrelin. The unfortunate outgrowth of these findings is that no one in a tech-charged, fast-paced world filled with smartphones, tablets, social networking and a plethora of entertainment options is going to get more sleep. As such, the results will simply provide more ammunition for the FAT to defend their portly condition……….
- Green Day used to be a badass punk rock band. The key words in that sentence are “used to be.” In the early 1990s, Billy Joe Armstrong and the fellas were a raw, edgy punk trio that made good music and was anything but mainstream. As punk became inevitably homogenized and mainstreamed, Green Day followed suit and went from fringe punk band to mainstream power punk band with no edge at all unless that edge was railing against the evils of former President and still clubhouse leader for worst Commander in Chief ever W. For a band that’s lost its edge and is churning out one identical album after another, the question is how to go about promoting that next identical album. For Green Day, this new album will be the follow-up to “21st Century Breakdown” and they have chosen to promote it with a series of 14 YouTube videos. The series began last month and the third installment was posted this week. Shot in black and white, the video is designed to be extremely cryptic and mysterious, but the fact that it’s a well-produced effort from an extremely famous band takes away from its edginess. It opens with the band standing in the studio with the sound of a scuzzy bass guitar playing in the background as a narrator asks, "We gonna do a new thing?" Near the end of the 32-second video, drummer Tré Cool says, "I'm really digging our sound right now." Other muffled voices fade in and out atop a bed of feedback and drum rolls, muddying the waters further. The band have previously said that their new ninth studio album will move away from the concepts of their last two records, which could be good if it means getting back to their old, edgy selves. It could also be disastrous if they decide to homogenize their sound further. Either way, the sheep-like musical masses will buy it in bulk………
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