- The drama is all a figment of your imagination. Athletes
love talking down to media members and chastising themm for manufacturing drama
and tension between rivals or even teammates. As the story goes, the media
creates artificial controversy to drive page views, sell papers and get
ratings. FC Barcelona
star Lionel Messi, widely
recognized as the best soccer player in the world today, insists there is no personal rift
with Real Madrid rival Cristiano
Ronaldo even though the two play for bitter rivals and represent different
countries (Argentina and Portugal, respectively). Barcelona hosts
Real Sociedad and Real Madrid tackles Valencia as La Liga play begins this
weekend and FC Barcelona is looking to regain the league title Real Madrid
ripped from them last season. Toss in the two stars battling to be certified as
the best player on the planet and it would be safe to assume that there is a
rivalry there, but Messi shot down such theories. "I respect him, but I
have no relationship with him, as I don't with a lot of other
footballers," he said. "I have relationships with my Barcelona
clubmates, and with the international squad, Argentinian players who I've got
to know well over the years. There's never been any kind of anger toward
Cristiano. It's all made up by the press who want to believe there's a constant
duel between the two of us, but I don't compete with Cristiano, nor does he
with me." Whatever you say, L. Either way, Spanish soccer fans will riot,
lob blood and urine bombs in the stands, burn things outside the stadium
whether their team wins or loses and act like the soccer hooligans they are.
Have a feud with Ronaldo or don’t, just know that the facts aren't going to get
in the way here……….
- Being a super-smaht Harvard researcher means one is always
looking for ways to make the world a better, more intelligent place. Cures for
cancer are being sought, weight-loss aids are being developed and fertilizers
to help grow crops in the most arid of regions are in progress….right? Maybe,
but there is also time to create a robot that can change its color and successfully
camouflage itself. The chameleon robot was inspired by nature and built by a research team led by Harvard
professor George Whitesides. Whitesides, whose name seems a bit racist, worked
with Stephen Morin, a post-doctoral fellow and first author of the paper on the
project. “One of the fascinating characteristics of these animals is their
ability to control their appearance, and that inspired us to take this idea
further and explore dynamic coloration,” Morin said. Whitesides explained that
there really was a purpose behind creating a color-changing robot, namely to understand
why different organisms have the shape and color they do and why some can
change these characteristics while others can’t. “Evolution might lead to a
particular form, but why? One function of our work on robotics is to give us,
and others interested in this kind of question, systems that we can use to test
ideas,” he said. He and his team plan to use the robots to model color changing
patterns of living organisms to try to understand how some animals change their
color in different environments. How did they create their shade-shifting
robot? By creating color layers
that began with a mold made by 3-D printers, which was then made into a
micro-channel when silicon was added. After the channels solidified, the
researchers could pour colored liquids into them, allowing the robot to mimic
animal behavior and camouflage itself. Morin believes the robots could even be
used in search and rescue missions because their color-changing abilities could
signal to fellow robots and even people…………
- No one knows how to grandstand quite like a politician. A
person couldn’t be a politician if they didn’t know how to shamelessly
self-promote. Juan
Manuel Sanchez Gordillo, regional lawmaker and mayor of the town of Marinaleda,
Spain, knows this well. His knowledge showed in the way he seized upon the
chance to become a cult hero for staging supermarket robberies and giving
stolen groceries to the poor. Gordillo, whose town has a population of just
2,645, kept his surge of self-aggrandizing up Thursday when he began a
three-week march with the purpose of embarrassing the government and energizing
anti-austerity campaigners. Marinaleda is located in the southern region
of Andalusia and became the scene of big drama last week when food stolen by
would-be Robin Hoods was seized and given to families hit hardest by Spain's
economic crisis. Gordillo, ever the opportunist, seized on the momentum
from the incident to launch the march, with 1,000 people setting out from the
town of Jodar - the town with Andalusia's highest unemployment rate -
intending to walk across the region in the sweltering summer heat and lobby
other local leaders to refuse to comply with government reforms, deputy mayor
Esperanze Saavedra explained. "We want the government to
be sensitive to us and think more about those who are suffering than
about the banks," Saavedra said. He and his mass of marchers will deliver
a message for mayors to skip debt payments, stop layoffs, cease home evictions
and ignore central government demands for budget cuts. What with that flying in
the face of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's government’s efforts to convince
investors in Spanish bonds that he can fix the battered economy, there could be
tension ahead. Gordillo has become something of a national celebrity in the
past few weeks, a hero to the downtrodden masses (which describes much of Spain
right now). "There are people who don't have enough to eat. In the 21st
century, this is an absolute disgrace," he proclaimed this week in an
interview in the Atocha train station in Madrid, rocking a badass, Fidel
Castro-style beard. He actually stood outside the supermarket while the theft
of the groceries took place, serving as a sort of ringleader. Suffice it to say
that not everyone is down with is act, especially because Gordillo has
political immunity as an elected member of Andalusia's regional parliament. You
can't be Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham," said Alfonso Alonso,
spokesman for the ruling People's Party (PP) in the national Parliament.
"This man is just searching for publicity at the cost of everyone
else." That does seem likely, but Gordillo has been mayor for 30
years, so the people clearly like him and continue to vote for him and would
regardless of this particular publicity stunt. Either way, it is definitely
amusing to watch………
- Lil Wayne is all over the map. Weezy is talking about
releasing an album of love songs one day, then he’s announcing plans to leave
the rap game and take up skateboarding full-time and now…..now, he’s delaying the release of his
DJ Drama-helmed project “Dedication 4,” a Gangsta Grillz mixtape, so he
doesn’t steal any of the buzz from running mate 2 Chainz's newly released debut
album “Based On A T.R.U. Story.” Wayne and his Young Money crew have long made a point of saying that they
are a family and that their New Orleans-based empire is a family-first
operation and this backs up that philosophy. "I know I was supposed to
drop that Dedication 4 tonight — but listen, my homeboy 2 Chainz just
dropped his album yesterday [August 14]," Wayne said following his
performance in New York City alongside Nicki Minaj. "That's my real, real,
real good homeboy right there and I refuse to put any attention on me when the
spotlight, everybody's eyes, everybody's attention and everybody's focus should
be on my n---a 2 Chainz's album Based On A T.R.U. Story. So therefore I
ain't giving you b*tches Dedication 4 yet. I'm gonna give it to ya'll in
another week or so. But I ain't gonna lie, I ain't finished that motherf--er. I've
been skating and sh*t. Stop trippin' pimp.” You heard the man, stop trippin’
pimp. Just so fans who attended the show didn’t feel totally cheated, Wayne dropped
the first offering from his mixtape over 2 Chainz and Drake's club anthem,
"No Lie." Lil Wayne and 2 Chainz have been close since the Atlanta
rapper was originally known as the MC Tity Boi from the group Playaz Circle and
the pair recently collaborated on one of Playaz Circle's biggest records to
date, "Duffle Bag Boy.” Wayne also appears on the intro for T.R.U.
Story on the track "Yuck" and just gave another boost to the
project……….
- Finding valuable junk in your basement that you didn’t
know you had is always fun. When “you” are a museum and not some
junk-collecting slacker in the suburbs, the excitement isn't quite as high, but
it’s still there. The good folks at the Evansville (Ind.) Art Museum recently
discovered a work by none other than Pablo Picasso sitting in its storage room.
The piece had been sitting idle for nearly 50 years before it was discovered.
Unfortunately, the museum is too small to afford taking care of and insuring
such a valuable work of art and its board of trustees on Monday decided to sell
it through a New York auction house. Guernsey's, a New York auction company
that was trying to find the piece, will sell it at auction and undoubtedly make
an absurd amount of money from an insanely rich person with nothing else to
waste their money on. “Seated Woman with Red Hat” (“Femme assise au chapeau
rouge”) is the name of the piece and the reason it was sitting in storage was
because it had not been identified as a Picasso in documentation provided to
the museum when the piece was gifted in the 1960s. "The
value is well into the millions," said Guernsey's President Arlan Ettinger.
The piece was created using a layered glass technique called gemmail, which uses
individual pieces of colored glass overlapped and joined together with clear
liquid enamel and then fired. The work is then illuminated from behind and produces
a result that modulates color and captures light through many layers and
textures of glass. Picasso produced 50 or more gemmaux masterpieces during his
two years of study at the Malherbe Studio in France and gave half of his
collection to the Malherbe family in return for their expertise, training and
collaboration, keeping the other half for himself. Industrial designer Raymond
Loewy purchased “Seated Woman with Red Hat” in the late 1950s and gifted the
piece to the Evansville Museum in 1963. At the time, confused museum
officials were befuddled by documentation mistakenly identifying the work’s
artist as “Gemmaux.” The origins of the piece, which is signed by Picasso, have
now been cleared up and the 36-inch-tall artwork in a wood support will now go
on the auction block…….
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