Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Predicting crime, vegan NFL stars and "Breaking Bad" gets uglier


- Fantasy football dorks, now is the time to take notice of everything that every one of your potential draft picks you’ll select next month when you and your league of fantasy dorks hunkers down in someone’s man cave to pick players does, right? Well, running backs are the first-round fantasy draft targets around the fantasy football world and one of the top picks in every draft will be Houston Texans star Arian Foster. Foster, Foster has run for 2,840 yards on 605 carries (4.7 yards per carry) and caught 119 passes for 1,221 yards in two seasons since taking hold of the Texans' starting job in 2010 and he should have a great season ahead….just running on a different sort of fuel. Less than a month before training camps begin, the former undrafted free agent out of Tennessee says he's gone vegan. Foster, a thoughtful dude who approaches life philosophically and has plenty of intelligent thoughts on a wide range of subjects, made the announcement on Twitter last week. "Officially a vegan now. We'll see how this goes. But week one down. So far, so good. Feels wonderful," he tweeted. Not surprisingly, with the high volume of morons with Twitter muscles lurking on the microblogging site had pointed opinions on the announcement and even a seasoned Twitter vet like Foster was rankled. "People feel so strong about meat and milk. I wish they felt this strong about peace," the two-time Pro Bowler wrote in a follow-up tweet. As long as he shows up and delivers another season of 2,000 total yards and 17-20 touchdowns, no one should care what Foster eats, be it vegetarian, vegan, carnivore or a diet consisting entirely of yams. Enjoy your soy burger and wheat grass juice, Arian………


- The world is creeping closer to the dystopian future sci-fi books and movies have long “warned” us about.  A few police departments around the United States are now using a program called PredPol, which predicts where future crimes will occur. The program marks a map of a city with small red squares, each indicating a 500-by-500-foot zone where crimes are likely to take place next. Much like a thermal-imaging map, it shows even more precisely where cars may be stolen, houses robbed, people mugged, etc. It it calculates its forecasts based on times and locations of previous crimes, combined with sociological information about criminal behavior and patterns. The Santa Cruz (Calif.) police department has tested the program for the last year and a Los Angeles Police Department precinct has been using it for the past six months, with promising results. Predictive-analytics software is the term for this creepy, Big Brother-ish technology that sounds like a real-life rip-off of the CBS hit drama “Person of Interest.” Those who have used it cite cost efficacy in the face of shrinking budgets as a big reason the program is beneficial. "We had to try something because we were not being offered more cops," said Zach Friend, a crime analyst with the Santa Cruz Police Department. Oddly enough, the technology used in the program was originally used for predicting earthquake aftershocks and Friend contacted its creators after after reading an article in the LA Times. Santa Cruz was in a bind, with a 30-percent increase in crime and a 20-percent decrease in staff undeniably linked. The SCPD used the software to estimate where home, car and vehicle burglaries might take place and officers received printouts at the start of their shift. The result has been a 19-percent reduction in burglaries over the past year. Still, Friend realizes not every police department will jump on board with the program right away. "Law enforcement agencies historically are conservative in their approach to change. That includes to adopting all kinds of technology, from computers in the cars to even radios," he observed. Maybe if they had more respect for fictional crime fighters like Jim Caviezel and Michael Emerson, that would change………


- Waaaait a minute. A basic cable TV drama about an underachieving chemistry genius turned high school teacher who is informed he has terminal cancer uses his expertise to secretly provide for his family by producing the world's highest quality crystal meth isn't going to end its second-to-last season on a happy, upbeat note? That shocking news has dropped as the cast and producers of the gritty AMC drama “Breaking Bad” as the series’ fifth and penultimate season premieres on July 15. “It’s not going to end pretty. It’s a bloodbath now, I’ll tell you that,” said cast member Aaron Paul. After November's gruesome finale in which viewers saw the shocking face-melting death of central character Walter White’s (Bryan Cranston) drug-lord nemesis Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) and was floored by the revelation that Walt possibly poisoned a young boy to save his own butt, anyone who didn’t know the ending would be bloody and ugly just isn't intelligent….at all. “You can look forward to even more crazy sh*t,” proclaimed series creator Vince Gilligan. “We’re definitely going to see Walt winning more, and the question of season five is what does it take to stay at the top? I think at the end of season 4, we see that Walt has won. He explicitly says so.” Gilligan went on to say that viewers can expect to see Walt struggle to stay on top in the drug game and Cranston added that fans will “sh*t, uncontrollably, watching this new season.” Oh, and there will be hookers involved and characters from previous seasons will also resurface in some very dark storylines. White’s wife, Skyler, played by Anna Gunn, has admitted her character will be breaking down emotionally this season as she tries to make sure her family stays alive. Put it all together and it should be one hell of a ride………


- Again, Japan and China? Really? You two are like 9-year old boy and his bratty 7-year-old brother who can't just play nice in the family swimming pool…..except in this case, the pool is the East China Sea and no one is fighting over who gets the cooler water wings. No, Japan is pissed at China after three Chinese patrol boats were spotted in waters off disputed islands in the East China Sea, over which both countries claim sovereignty. The coast guard ship in the area gave a warning and the Chinese boats left, but Japan still lodged a formal protest with China Wednesday, summoning its ambassador in Tokyo. Better still, the drama unfolded as the two nations’ foreign ministers met in Phnom Penh, on the sidelines of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) meeting. Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, who held talks with his Japanese counterpart Koichiro Gemba, “reaffirmed China’s principled position” and “stressed that the Diaoyu Islands and their affiliated islets have always been China’s territory since ancient times, over which China has indisputable sovereignty,” according to an official statement. The battle over the sea and its referred to by Japan as the Senkaku islands, has raged for months and heightened after Tokyo spoke of plans to “buy” the islands from a private developer, a move labeled by China as a provocation. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Liu Weimin proclaimed that reporters China “does not accept the representation lodged by Japan” and insisted the three patrol ships “entered into the waters under Chinese jurisdiction to conduct official duties in accordance with Chinese law.” That official duty is allegedly to protect Chinese fishing vessels in the area, although that probably isn’t the reason the People’s Liberation Army Navy is planning to hold a drill in the East China Sea, in waters off eastern Zhejiang province that are not part of the dispute, this week, according to the Chinese Defense Minstry. Coupled with debates over the South China Sea at the ASEAN meeting, China has suddenly become very unpopular with its regional neighbors……….

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