Saturday, October 27, 2012

When to stop smoking, line drives off pitchers' skulls and the world hates Fatsel Rose


- Is everyone lining up to take a shot at Fatsel, er, Axl Rose? The line definitely is growing and after Rose’s abysmal performance earlier this week at a benefit show in San Francisco organized by Neil Young in which an out-of-shape, gasping-for-breath, cherubic Rose huffed, puffed and mumbled his way through the single worst rendition of “Welcome to the Jungle” ever performed – including karaoke versions – the Axl jokes and memes were flying around the Internet like enchiladas flying into Rose’s pie hole at a Mexican restaurant. Perhaps no one hates Rose more or has blasted him more over the years than former Guns N' Roses bandmate Slash, who sounds like he wants to fight Axl every time he talks about him. The Axl hate seems to run through the Slash family, at least based on an interview this week by Perla Hudson, Slash’s wife. Following Rose’s emabarrasing on-stage effort and subsequent appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” Hudson lined Rose up in her crosshairs and hit him below the belt. Granted, Rose helped her and every other joke maker out by bringing an entire burger truck to Kimmel’s studio to feed the host and his audience, but Hudson still went further than most. 
“I was waiting for something enlightening and all I got was promotion for a show and his evident affinity for a chili burger,” Hudson joked. "Where is the love Axl? And I stayed up for this? Sex, drugs and chilli dogs. Long live Axl Rose." For the record, Rose answered questions about the early days of Guns N' Roses in Hollywood and Kimmel asked him what it felt like to be just a few minutes from the iconic band’s old rehearsal space. Rose admitted he hadn't been by the building in some time, but when he was asked if he remembered it at all, he replied bluntly, "Unfortunately." Hudson had the last word, commenting on the lineup of the bastardized version of GNR Rose now plays with. "He's had a Slash, a Buckethead and a Bumblefoot and evidently way too many Tommy's chili burgers!" Hey oh, Perla………


- Riot Watch! Riot Watch! Let this be a warning to anyone who would dare to attempt to move Peru’s biggest wholesale market to another part of the capital, Lima. A second attempt in three days to relocate the market did not go well for the Peruvian government, which didn’t move any markets but did move plenty of local police to the market’s current location to deal with hundreds of angry food merchants who have no intention of giving up their current location. Anyone doubting how serious the merchants are about staying put need look only at the two deaths and 27 injuries from Saturday’s uprising after a similar battle on Thursday resulted in the deaths of two civilians and injuries for 68 police officers. For those who are a bit slow on the math, that’s four people dead and at least 95 injured from two attempts to close the ginormous La Parada food market, which sprawls over 7.4 acres in Lima's downtown. Government officials ordered vendors to move to a new market in the eastern part of the capital by mid-September, but their demands were refused and the government either had to step its efforts up or live down the shame of being b*tch-slapped by a group of food sellers. It chose the former and installed huge concrete blocks to impede entry by cargo trucks into La Parada on Thursday. That action led to Thursday’s violent clashes between vendors and police and the food-based raged continued Saturday. With any luck, it will stretch into next week and hopefully beyond………


- Player safety is a major point of focus in the NFL right now, but another major American professional sports league is extremely concerned about the well-being of its players and the threat of head injuries: Major League Baseball. Baseball’s issue has nothing to do with players leveling each other while running at Olympic sprinter-like speeds and instead centers on the players who are the initiator of every single play in every game. Pitchers are the focal point of ongoing discussions within MLB’s hierarchy because of the rising number of them being struck in the head by line drives off bats being swung 60 feet away. A prime example of this phenomenon came Thursday night in Game 2 of the World Series, when San Francisco’s Gregor Blanco blasted a fastball back through the middle and off the side of Tigers pitcher Doug Fister’s skull. Fister remained in the game and worked into the seventh of a 2-0 loss, but the moment was still terrifying and it has commissioner Bud Selig and his cronies thinking. The league is now looking at ways to protect pitchers from being injured by batted balls and MLB senior vice president Dan Halem said Friday night that hat liners are a possibility in the minors next year. The issue is now on the "fast track," Halem said. “Hopefully, we can come up with something," he said. "We're making progress." One possible option, according to Halem, is the idea of protective headgear for pitchers MLB medical director Dr. Gary Green has been talking to companies about. That could include borrowing an idea from the NFL, where players are now wearing both helmets and protective flak jackets made with high-impact, military-grade Kevlar. A Kevlar-lined cap could be on the horizon and MLB has been exploring all possible solutions for months, even before Oakland pitcher Brandon McCarthy was hit in the head by a line drive last month, causing a skull fracture and brain contusion. "After that, it kind of pushed up our timetable," Halem said. "We decided to fast track it." The ball that struck Fister ricocheted about 150 feet, reaching Tigers center fielder Austin Jackson on one hop and underscoring how fast it was traveling. At least one participant in the World Series sounded receptive to the idea. "I definitely think it's something worth exploring," Game 1 winner Barry Zito said. "We've had high-profile examples of those injuries lately, what happened with Brandon and then here in the World Series." McCarthy sounded a similar tone after his incident, saying he would be willing to listen to ideas about protective headgear, provided it didn't impact his pitching. How does a pitcher wearing a souped-up batting helmet on the mound sound……….


- New Mexico has a problem. Okay, so New Mexico has a lot of problems, but it is focusing on one in particular right now and that problem is the $30 million it spends annually to collect more than $130 million in child support from deadbeat parents. No matter how much money the state spends, though, one group of deadbeats never pays up: the incarcerated ones. Prison inmates and the 10 cents an hour they make cleaning trays in the prison kitchen do a poor job of financially supporting their children outside the prison walls and some state lawmakers don’t like that one bit. “I am a little surprised,” said Rep. Al Park, D-Albuquerque, who is co-chair of the state legislature’s Corrections Committee. “I pay for my kids, you pay for your kids. Everyone should pay for their kids.” He’s referring to inmates like convicted murderer Michael Guzman, who is in prison for kidnapping and raping two women in 1981 in Tijeras Canyon and murdering one of the women after he raped her. He was convicted and sentenced to death, but a life in prison hasn’t prevented him from being married twice and fathering four children while incarcerated. He received an assist in procreating from then-Gov. Toney Anaya, who commuted Guzman’s death sentence in 1986, which allowed the inmate out of the maximum security facility and into a facility where he could earn conjugal visits through good behavior. Those visits consist of as many as 12 hours alone with a legal spouse in a specially constructed portable building. Only 254 inmates out of about 6,500 across the state have earned the privilege and New Mexico is one of six states that allow the practice. Park wonders if ripping inmates like Guzman’s rights to conjugal visits might not be the most direct route to preventing more unsupported children like the four unfortunate sons who belong to Guzman……….


- Still choking down cancer sticks, turning your skin an ugly shade of green, your skin a nice leathery consistency and your voice into the equivalent of someone talking while chugging a jar of razor blades, ladies? Now is the time to quit and if you can stop downing death darts, you just might dodge some major health issues commonly associated with the filthy habit of smoking. Researchers in the United Kingdom have found that women who give up smoking by the age of 30 will almost completely avoid the risks of dying early from tobacco-related diseases and even those who stopped by the age of 40 lose an average of one year from their lifespan. The researchers studied more than a million women in the UK and overall, they discovered that lifelong smokers died a decade earlier than those who never started. Stopping by age 30 meant women lost just one month off their life. What lead researcher Richard Peto of Oxford University and his team want women to take from their findings is that this was not a license for young women to smoke. Peto’s comprehensive study followed the first generation of women to start smoking during the 1950s and 60s and found that oddly enough, women suffer from the effects of smoking just as much as men when they smoke as much as men do. "What we've shown is that if women smoke like men, they die like men," Peto said. “More than half of women who smoke and keep on smoking will get killed by tobacco. Stopping works, amazingly well actually. Smoking kills, stopping works and the earlier you stop the better.” What was interesting among the study’s results was the fact that the amount of time smoking mattered more than the sheer number of cancer sticks consumed. Either way, more proof that death darts are vile and disgusting is always a positive development for the world………

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