Tuesday, June 12, 2012

KKK road clean, Hollywood honors male strippers and bad late-night eating habits

- For not long enough, male strippers have not been getting their due. Every bit as skeevy and skanky as their more-celebrated female counterparts, these hunks of overly tanned, oiled-up man meat working filhty brass poles in seedy clubs have been largely ignored. Hollywood has discovered this wrong and is now working overtime to rectify it. Of course, the most prominent example is the Matthew McConaughey-fronted flick “Magic Mike” with fellow Hollywood heartthrobs Matthew Bomer and Channing Tatium, which will shine a light on the truly inspirational world of male strip clubs. Whether they honor the bad female stripper clichés of daddy issues, coke habits and general life failure or not, it will be uplifting for the world to see these heroes of the G-string do their thing. But there obviously were not enough spots in the film for every well-toned actor who would go in front of the camera dressed as a sexy cowboy or police officer, so what are the others supposed to do? Follow the example of “Melissa & Joey” actor Joey Lawrence, who will cope with his exclusion from “Magic Mike” by joining the legendary Chippendales in Las Vegas. Lawrence, who shows up shirtless quite often on his show, will do a one-time gig with the famous mancers until June 24. Spending a few days with the bowtie-wearing beefcakes who once had the honor of being lampooned in an iconic “Saturday Night Live” skit featuring the late Chris Farley should help the man whose best-known career accomplishment is his catchphrase on the early ‘90s sitcom “Blossom,” when he frequently uttered the one-word proclamation, “Woaaah!” Keep up the good work, Joe……….


- Who doesn’t think of white trash when they think of the Ku Klux Klan? So in a way, it might be fitting that a North Georgia chapter of the white supremacist group has applied to "adopt" a stretch of highway in Union County, Georgia. If approved by the Georgia Department of Transportation, the application would allow these hatemongers to receive state recognition for cleaning up a one-mile portion of a highway. The International Keystone Knights of the KKK filed the paperwork on May 21 and the North Georgia KKK could soon be responsible for cleaning litter on a part of Georgia State Route 515 near the North Carolina border. "All we want to do is adopt a highway," said April Chambers, the chapter's secretary. "We're not doing it for publicity. We're doing it to keep the mountains beautiful. People throwing trash out on the side of the road ... that ain't right." That’s right, an official spokesperson for a group who ends her official statement with, “That ain’t right.” Stay grammatically incorrect, you ignorant fool. A Georgia DOT spokeswoman refused comment on the application. Oddly enough, not everyone is in favor of the idea, but Chambers is either clueless or has drank the Kool-Aid for so long that she doesn’t know better because she actually believes the KKK is not a racist group. "We're not racists," Chambers said. "We just want to be with white people. If that's a crime, then I don't know. I don't understand it." No, clearly you don’t. Hey Mensa, believing you should only be with white people and that black people are inferior in any way makes you racist. On the DOT website, a statement about highway adoption reads: "Any civic-minded organization, business, individual, family, city, county, state, or federal agency is welcome to volunteer in the Georgia Adopt-A-Highway program.” Seeing the bigots of the KKK out picking up trash, which is right about at their level of cultural sophistication, might be fitting. "I don't see why we can't (adopt the stretch of highway)," Chambers whined. "Just because I'm white, I can't stick with my own group?” Why? Because the world isn’t one color, you tool. Learn to embrace diversity………..


- Managing the Boston Red Sox has been a real challenge for Bobby Valentine. After his team suffered a weekend sweep at home to the Washington Nationals to drop to 29-31 and six games out of first place, Valentine ranted against biased umpiring and suggested that all of the calls in the series went against his team. He alluded to inherent umpiring bias and followed up his complaints on Monday by suggesting that it may be time for Major League Baseball to come up with a new system for calling balls and strikes by expanding the role of technology and replay in the sport. He argued that such steps would take the human element out of the process and make it more uniform. When asked prior to Monday's game with the Miami Marlins if he had received a call from the commissioner's office regarding his critical words about the umpires, Valentine said he hadn't, but added, "I probably will, right? Isn't that great when that happens? Then they fine you, take your money, reprimand you, as though I did something wrong. It's great. It's a great system. I love it." That led to a diatribe in which he argued that if hitters constantly swing and miss at balls they believe to be strikes, umpires can't be expected to get all the calls right. “W hen someone says the most ridiculous words that I ever heard: 'But we like the human factor.' It's criminal that we allow our game to scar a young person like that, and then it continues on. I think in 2012 it should not be part of the process,” Valentine explained while referring back to his days doing broadcast work at the Little League World Series. “I don't care what anyone says. I could get fined for it every day of my life. It's my belief. Our game is not somebody else's strike zone. Our game is what the book says. That's how it should be played from Little League to Cooperstown, to make it fair, to make it right." His main point, beneath all the bravado, was that the system is flawed and that all of the blame shouldn’t go on the umpires. Valentine ended his rant by pointing out that he has no idea how the Internet or fax machines work, but that their existence should mean baseball can design a functioning system to accurately call balls and strikes………..


- Drafting a constitution in politically tumultuous Egypt should be fun. Finding a governing document to appease warring factions with drastically different, extremely rigid views on the world shouldn’t be difficult at all….assuming everyone is actually willing to have an open mind, be cooperative and strike a few compromises. In other words, not happening. That much as evident Tuesday as Egypt's parliament met to select a 100-member panel that will draft a new constitution only to have liberal lawmakers boycott the session. In a joint meeting of the body's lower and upper chambers, which are both dominated by Islamists, liberal lawmakers were AWOL even though the session was called by military ruler Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi after negotiations between political factions trying to select the panel reached a dead end. A court ruling disbanded a previous panel that was dominated by Islamists and liberal lawmakers contend Islamists are attempting to do the same thing again. Whenever the panel is finally convened, it will have to determine the balance of powers for Egypt's key state institutions and other key issues that have smoldered since Hosni Mubarak stepped down in February 2011 in the face of a popular uprising. "It's Egypt's constitution we are talking about here," said Ahmed Said, leader of the secularist Free Egyptians party. "The math of majority and minority should not apply." If the selection of the panel is this much of a fight, imagine how ugly the scene will get when the constitution is finally written. The liberal lawmakers who withdrew from the debate did not sound regretful about their decision. "I see that what has been done carries a hint of unconstitutionality," said independent lawmaker Youssef el-Badry. "We have pulled out rather than take part in an illegal process." On the opposing side, Muslim Brotherhood lawmakers say they are abiding by an agreement reached with non-Islamist groups that they equally share the 100 seats. Liberals, leftists, women and minority Christians disagree and fear that the new constitution will have an Islamist slant. The longer the showdown drags on, the longer the ugly transitional period between Mubarak and the next president continues……


- Hang on, science. Suggesting that certain foods are good for overall health one day and will kill a person the next day is fine, but don’t go dropping shocking revelations on the world like your new claim that unhealthy foods, such as sweets and chips, are more appealing to people who haven't had enough sleep. In other words, people who can’t get to sleep in the middle of the night may stumble to the refrigerator and pick out a carton of ice cream or grab a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos from the pantry? Wow. According to Marie-Pierre St-Onge, a research associate at St. Luke's Roosevelt Hospital Center and an assistant professor at Columbia University's Institute of Human Nutrition in New York City, those are the facts. St-Onge and her research team studied the areas of the brain that were most active when people were looking at healthy or unhealthy foods and learned that the reward centers of the brain were activated when sleep-deprived subjects saw pictures of unhealthy foods. "We found regions associated with reward and motivation -- those that are involved with addiction and pleasure-seeking behaviors -- were more strongly activated in the short-sleep phase," St-Onge said. She studied 25 normal-weight men and women who underwent fMRI after five nights of restricted sleep (four hours a night) and then again after five nights of being allowed to sleep for nine hours. When shown pictures of healthy foods, unhealthy foods and nonfood items, unhealthy foods activated areas of the brain considered reward centers only in people whose sleep was restricted. There was no such activation in subjects with a full night of sleep. A separate study at the University of California, Berkeley added to the discussion, which will continue this weekend at the Associated Professional Sleep Societies annual meeting in Boston. In that study, researchers found significantly impaired activity in an area in the frontal lobe of the brain in sleep-deprived people. The frontal lobe helps control behavior and make complex choices, so making smart food choices when extremely tired would be more difficult. In the second study 16 healthy young adults underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) once after a full night of sleep and then again after 24 hours of sleep deprivation. They then rated their desire for 80 different foods during each test. The takeaway, as always, is to install a lock on the fridge before bed and your problems will be solved………..

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