- The box office was a wreck this weekend as newcomer “Wreck-It
Ralph” trounced the competition to the tune of $49.1 million. That strong debut
for the animated, video-game-themed release nearly doubled up the efforts of
Denzel Washington’s new movie, “Flight.” In its first weekend, “Flight” soared
to $25.1 million and that was more than enough to knock “Argo,” last weekend’s
top film, down to third place with $10.2 million for a four-week domestic total
of $75.9 million. “The Man with the Iron Fists” was the third new movie in the
top four with an inauspicious $8.3 million opening, which bumped Liam Neeson
and “Taken 2” down to fifth place with a $6 million weekend for a cumulative
total of $125.7 million through five weeks. Tom Hanks continued to muddle along
with his new film “Cloud Atlas,” dropping four spots to sixth place in the
project’s second weekend. With $5.2 million, “Atlas” has made a modest $18.3
million in domestic earnings so far. “Hotel Transylvania” scared its way the
seventh place with $4.6 million and bumped its cumulative haul to $137.6
million after six weeks in theaters. The eighth-place finisher was “Paranormal
Activity 4” with $4.4 million. So far, the low-budget scare flick has
brought in $49.6 million. Kevin James’ MMA-centric movie “Here Comes the Boom”
was solidly in ninth with its take of $3.6 million, but its four-week bank roll
of $35.5 million isn't lowering the boom on anyone. “Silent Hill: Revelation (3D)”
rounded out a scare-happy top 10 with $3.3 million and has garnered $13.9
million in two weeks. “Fun Size” (No. 12) fell out of the top 10 in just its
second week of release……….
- Whoa there, science. Let’s not be reckless and suggest
that living
near a bar encourages people to drink too much. Also, let’s not suggest that heavy
drinkers move to neighborhoods with easy access to alcohol because that seems
like a rush as well. These presumptuous suggestions come courtesy of a study
from Finland, where researchers d found that of nearly 55,000 Finnish adults
followed for seven years, those who moved closer to bars were somewhat more
likely to increase their drinking. A person who moved 0.6 miles closer to a bar
saw a 17-percent increase in his or her odds of becoming a heavy drinker,
classified as consuming more than 10 ounces a week of distilled alcohol for men
and about seven ounces a week for women. However, even the study’s authors
admit their findings are a near-total waste of time and that their results do
not prove that mere distance from a bar turns people into lushes. "Factors
other than proximity are also likely to explain the observed association,"
conceded lead researcher Jaana L. Halonen, of the Finnish Institute of
Occupational Health in Kuopio. Great point, Jaana, but then why waste time and
money on the study? Halonen suggested that one possibility is that drinkers
choose to live near bars. To investigate that possibility, she and her
colleagues studied a group of people who had a bar open close to them in a
place they already lived. Those findings were similar to the numbers for the
group that moved closer to a bar, suggesting that the reason for a bar’s
proximity to a drinker was not a deciding factor. Even when factors like income
level were accounted for, the results did not change. One interesting note in
the study was the fact that all participants were public employees, a group
that definitely has reasons to drink. At the end of the seven-year study, Halonen’s
team learned that people who lived 400 feet or less from the nearest bar drank
heavily at a rate of 9 percent, while the figure dropped to 7.5 percent for
those who resided 1.5 miles from the local watering hole. In other words,
science has once again successfully confirmed what the world already knew……….
- Iowa does not have a lot going for it. There is a lot of
corn, a large population of cows…..and….umm….. Kurt Warner’s journey to NFL
stardom passed through the state’s Arena Football League organization. Other
than that, Iowa is the prototypical fly-over state, best viewed from a
first-class seat on a plane 25,000 feet overhead. Maybe that will change after
video game maker Atari proclaimed none other than Ottumwa, Iowa to be the “Video Game
Capital of the World.” Ottumwa’s ties to the gaming world date back to 1981,
when Walter Day opened the Twin Galaxies Arcade on Main Street. The business
opened at a time when video game arcades were popping up across the country,
but remained open for just three years. It closed in 1984, when home gaming
systems became much more prevalent. However, Day kept the Twin Galaxies name
alive by carving out a niche in the gaming world. The Internet as the world now
knows it did not exist and with his natural curiosity about who had the highest
scores in the world for popular arcade games like Donkey Kong or Centipede, Day
began keeping track of gaming history. “It just happened because there was a
need, and I said, “Hey, let’s start a scoreboard,” and everyone went for it,
and the next thing I know, Twin Galaxies is the most famous arcade in the world
and Ottumwa’s proclaimed the ‘Video Game Capital of the World,’” Day said. While
the arcade was open, Day became and ‘80s gaming celebrity and the then-relevant
Life magazine traveled to Ottumwa in November, 1982, to photograph the best
video gamers in the world outside the arcade. “It’s become, possibly, the most
famous photo of the video game industry,” Day added. Twin Galaxies continues
today as an online scoreboard website and the kooks at the Guinness Book of
World Records relies on Twin Galaxies scores. The Ottumwa Chamber of Commerce
openly dreams of bringing a video game hall of fame to the town and giving
folks outside the Hawkeye State a reason to visit………
- Rise up, Colombia, rise up. Even if the activists
staging a protest Thursday tagged their big event with a bland, weak name like "Day of Dignity," the spirit was
solid as Colombian counterparts of Spain's "indignados" took to the
streets of the South American nation’s major cities to protest inequality. The
mild revolt began Thursday in Bogotá as students participating in an
apprenticeship program and judicial employees walked off the jobo demand the
government comply with a 20-year-old mandate to standardize their pay and
continued on Friday with nationwide protests. City dwellers were not the only
ones rising up, as rural residents also staged their own demonstrations in
provinces such as Putumayo, bordering Ecuador, and Norte de Santander, which
sits on the border with Venezuela. A leftist civic movement called Marcha
Patriotica worked with nearly 100 other organizations to sponsor the faux-test
and more than 300,000 people participated nationwide, according David Florez, a
spokesman for the movement. He listed marches and rallies in 25 of Colombia's
32 provinces and suggested these demonstrations show just unhappy Colombians
are "with the model we have
of an unequal country based on extraction" of natural resources. Other
grassroots are seeking to further the modest momentum of the event to secure "direct participation" in the
peace process set to begin next week in Oslo between the Colombian government
and FARC guerrillas. Why are all of these ordinary Colombians so angry about
the socioeconomic state of their nation? It could be because Colombia is the
world's 10th most-unequal country in terms of income distribution as measured
by the Gini index, a metric used by the World Bank, United Nations and other
international institutions. A small group of the über-rich and the bulk of a
country living in relative poverty has been a cause to riot for centuries and
remains so in modern times…………
- Not everyone around the sports world is a big fan of
protecting athletes from head injuries. New Orleans Hornets head coach Monty
Williams realizes that concussions are a bigger focus these days, but he
doesn’t like one of his best players not being allowed to play just because he
suffered a “mild” concussion on the court. Forget for one second that there is
no such thing as a mild concussion and focus on the fact that Hornets rookie
big man Anthony Davis remains day to day after being on the wrong end of an
accidental elbow from teammate Austin Rivers in a game Friday night. Davis, the
top overall pick in June’s NBA draft, didn't make the trip with the Hornets for
Saturday's game against the Chicago Bulls. The Hornets won the game, but
Williams was unhappy about not having his prized rookie available because of a
silly policy put in place to protect players with head injuries. “When you're
dealing with the brain, I guess what's happening in football has impacted
everybody," Williams said before the game. "He got touched up a
little bit last night. That happens a lot in basketball. It's just that now
they treat everybody like they have white gloves and pink drawers and it's
getting old. It's just the way the league is now.” Williams then ratcheted up
the knuckle-dragging, Cro-Magnon/Neanderthal rhetoric by suggesting that the
league has gone soft and that it is time to re-embrace the bass-ackwards ways
of the past. "It's a man's game," Williams said. "They're
treating these guys like they're 5 years old. He desperately wanted to come,
but he couldn't make it." In Williams’ intellectually stunted book,
players who suffer the concussions should have more of a say in whether they
play or not. “The NBA is doing what's necessary to protect the players, but
this is not the NFL. You don't get hit in the head that much. I understand it.
But as a coach, I'm a baby about it. I want my guys ready to play. That's
basically the bottom line; I'm just a baby.” No, not a baby, just an
out-of-touch fool who doesn’t understand that concussions are concussions no
matter what sport they happen in……….
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