- A game that doesn’t matter and whose score is forgotten as
soon as it ends is getting a minor facelift. The NBA, which stages an annual
exhibition game each February in which it gathers 24 of its best players and
calls it the NBA All-Star Game, is tweaking the mechanism by which players are
selected for a meaningless contest where defense is frowned upon and the And-1
Tour is embarrassed by players’ lack of effort to stay in front of their man. Previously,
players were picked according to normal positional designations: guard, forward
and center. Operating within those lines made the selection process muddy because
some players don’t play one specific position and there might not be a worthy
choice at center, given that there are half as many of them as there are guards
and forwards. To fix this minor problem, the league is doing away with position designations for forwards and centers and
instead asking fans to vote for three "frontcourt" players. The
announcement came down Wednesday and according to an official statement by vice
president of basketball operations Stu Jackson, the change is based on the more
amorphous definition of player positions in NBA lineups. The San Antonio Spurs
and future Hall of Famer Tim Duncan are a case study for why the change is
being made, as Duncan is listed as a power forward but has mostly played like a
center. "It makes sense," Jackson said. "It made sense to our
competition committee. Having a center is the only specific position that was
singled out on the ballot. It just seemed a little outdated and didn't
represent the way our game has evolved. The 2013 All-Star ballot will be
released on Nov. 13 and the All-Star Game is slated for Feb. 17 at Houston's
Toyota Center. Now if only the league could find a way to actually make players
give a damn about playing defense in the contest………
- Something about the idea of making moonshine legally in a
government-approved distillery just feels wrong. For decades, residents of the
southeastern United States have made, transported and sold their own homemade
brand of the drinky-drinky, all while trying to avoid the long arm of the law.
Outrunning the police and souping up car engines was the impetus for the
official “sport” of rednecks, after all - NASCAR. Making a special brand of ‘shine
in a still out behind an abandoned barn on the side of a small mountain
somewhere in the Deep South just feels right (if not legal), in contrast to a change in
Tennessee law that allows for small craftsman distillers to make moonshine
legally. Businesses like the Piney Flats distillery are taking advantage of the
law and in the process, turning an old corporate garage into Sullivan County's
first and only distillery. That renovated garage is the point of origin for Roberson's
Tennessee Mellomoon, a100-proof Tennessee moonshine. The concept itself sounds
fine: a group of friends sitting around the kitchen table, dreaming big. "We've
got a lot of rich history in east Tennessee and moonshine is a big part of it.
It really just kind of fell into place," said Byron Reece, one of the
founders of the company. He and his pals talked about the idea for more than a
year and then, in the prime example of a dream gone horribly wrong, the group
formed an LLC and made their moonshine business official. They worked to meet all
of the requirements on the federal, state and local levels and filled out
mountains of paperwork. After that, they scoured recipes online – another
cheating tactic – and combined a number of recipes using corn, sugar and rye.
With all of those steps completed, they launched their business and in the
process, took a leak on years of moonshine-ing tradition. Let the world know
when you all grow a pair, find a rusted old barrel or five and start brewing in
the middle of the woods in the middle of the night on the side of a hill,
fellas……….
- Amazingly, the mainstream pop-rock stylings of Adam
Duritz, his epic dreadlocks and Counting Crows have been around for more than
two decades. With the band’s seven-times platinum debut "August and Everything After" set
to turn 20 next year, fans might think Duritz and Co. would be doing something
typically cash-grabby like working on a re-mastered version of the album to
make some more money without having to actually write or record new music. Not
so, Duritz says. Instead, he would much rather celebrate Counting Crows'
sophomore release, 1996's double-platinum "Recovering the
Satellites." "Everyone says we should do something for 'August'...but, honestly,
a group of years seems like a particularly lame reason to revisit a
record," Duritz said. "I can see why, the commerce of it. But it
would be like just taking money from the fans.” He pointed to a live album and
DVD featuring “August” in 2011 as enough of a tribute to the project. So should
the Crows revisit all the mainstream poppiness of “Satellites” and find some
way to honor it? Hell no. It’s still not that good of an album even if Duritz
insists it’s a really good listen. "That's a truly great album a lot of
people missed," he added. "I don't think it necessarily got the
credit it deserves 'cause there was a bit of backlash after 'August.' It was a
huge step forward for the band.” Ah, the ol’ “never got enough credit” lament that
athletes and recording artists have long kept as a tried-and-true statement. What
actually is interesting about “Satellites” is that the original recordings for
the album are AWOL. "Geffen lost all the (master) tapes," Duritz
explained. "What exists is the digital tapes that they transferred to do
the mix; those still exist, but it's only the songs mixed for that record.
Anything not mixed for the record is gone.” In other words, no B-sides, no lost
tracks that didn’t make the original cut….maybe it’s time to forget this album
just like music fans have forgotten most everything else Counting Crows have
released and will forget this year's covers album "Underwater Sunshine (Or
What We Did On Our Summer Vacation)” in about two second………
- Waaaaait a minute……sugar-laden energy drinks loaded with
unhealthy amounts of caffeine can wreck a person’s health? Because that fact
has not been hammered into society’s collective consciousness often or
emphatically enough, there is a wrongful death lawsuit pending against Monster
Beverage Corp. and the Food and Drug Administration is piling on by releasing incident
reports indicating that Monster Energy drinks might have been responsible for
five deaths since 2009. The issue of death by caffeine is back in the spotlight
and although toxicologists typically peg the amount of the stimulant necessary
to kill a person at 5-10 grams, the 14-year-old Maryland girl at the heart of
the lawsuit consumed 480 mg of caffeine over two days, or less than a gram. Anais
Fournier’s parents are suing on the ground that caffeine caused her death even
though most experts asked about the case have said that dose would not be
expected to be fatal in a normal person of that age. Factors such as
weight, medications and underlying health conditions also play a role and according
to a 2003 Journal of Toxicology article, a 41-year-old woman lived after
consuming 50 grams of caffeine, 10 times more than what's considered a lethal
dose. Caffeine sensitivity varies from person to person, so knowing whether
Fournier downing two 24-ounce cans of Monster Energy during two consecutive day
trips to the mall last December caused her to go into cardiac arrest at her
home on Dec. 17 or not. She never regained consciousness and now her family has
reached across the country to see justice from California-based Monster
Beverage Corp. in a criminal complaint filed in California Superior Court last
week. They seem to have shaky a case on the grounds that medical examiners
determined that Fournier died of "cardiac arrhythmia due to caffeine
toxicity complicating mitral valve regurgitation in the setting of
Ehlers-Danlos syndrome," meaning the caffeine caused her irregular
heartbeat, but Fournier had a heart valve that was already leaking because of
an underlying genetic disorder. Simply put in lingo any insurer has loved
hiding behind for years, pre-existing condition you should have known about. Also,
doctors never analyzed the caffeine in Fournier's blood, according to the
autopsy in her case. Besides, the company issued an official statement
expressing sympathy for the tragedy while simultaneously rejecting any
responsibility for the death. What more could a family want………..
- Maybe it isn't traditional political thinking, but maybe Japan's justice
minister should not be resigning while using the lie of health concerns to
obscure the real story that he has past ties to an organized crime syndicate. Keishu
Tanaka is 74 years old and “health concerns” is a plausible excuse for any
74-year-old man, but when the truth is that you were once liked to the Japanese
mob, the narrative changes. Not only should Tanaka not have resigned, but he
should have used the accusations to boost his street cred and give his image a
certain badass slant. His resignation is another blow to unpopular Prime
Minister Yoshihiko Noda and the second resignation by a minister since Noda
took office in September 2011. Let’s all agree to collectively reject Chief
Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura’s claim to the media at a news conference that
Tanaka stepped down for health reasons, bypass Tanaka checking himself into a
Tokyo hospital with chest pains, irregular heartbeat and high blood pressure
and celebrate the fact that someone who was recently linked to the Yakuza
organized crime syndicate by a magazine article actually made it to a
high-ranking government post. Even if Tanaka continues to claim that he merely acted
as a matchmaker at a mobster's wedding and attended a party thrown by the head
of a crime group about 30 years ago and was not aware of the groom's mob
connections or the nature of the event at the time, who cares? Odds are he’s
lying anyhow because he’s a politician, so why not fabricate, er, discover wild
stories of him ordering mob hits and running racketeering scams? When you
factor in Tanaka’s admission shortly after his appointment that his party
branch accepted more than $5,000 in donations from a company run by a foreigner
while knowing that accepting funds from foreign nationals is illegal, this guy
has all the makings of a shady, integrity-free badass not to be trifled with.
Otherwise, he’s just an old dude whose body is breaking down and who is
stepping out of the public eye. Support for Noda's cabinet has fallen to 18
percent, making a regime change very likely in the near future. But what if the
mobster justice minister were still around to crack skulls and strike terror
into the hearts of the administration’s enemies? That might shift the paradigm………
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