- Christmas night did not go the way Jordan Hamilton and his
Denver Nuggets teammates hoped it would. With a national television stage to battle
the streaking Los Angeles Clippers, who entered the game with the best record
in the NBA, the Nuggets had a chance to make a statement. Playing in the fifth
and final game of the league’s big holiday showcase, Denver had a shot to go on
the road and beat a team that had not lost since Nov. 26. Instead, the visitors
from the Mile High city suffered a 112-100 defeat in which they were never that
competitive and Hamilton emerged from the holiday having created an ugly
Christmas memory by cursing out fans seated near the court in the closing
minutes of a
game that had been decided long before he lost his mind. With 3:50 left in the
fourth quarter, Hamilton was running the wing on a fast break when he caught a
bounce pass and sprinted to the basket, where he was fouled. As happens
occasionally during NBA games, Hamilton’s momentum took him into the crowd and
sent him tumbling a couple rows into the crowd. After righting himself and
turning back toward the court, Hamilton looked back over his right shoulder and
uttered an extremely obvious profanity to a Clippers fan seated near the spot
where he ended up. Amazingly enough, in a nationally televised game his words
were caught on camera and on account of the NBA not taking kindly to its most
prominent employees cursing out the paying customers, the league slapped Hamilton
with a $25,000 fine for the incident. A great charity will get the money and
Hamilton will get a valuable lesson that no matter how idiotic or ignorant a
fan’s remarks may be, unless they are racist or some other form of hate speech,
players have to shake them off……..
- Soldiers create a lot of trash while in the field. The
U.S. Army wants to find a way to be both more efficient and more
environmentally responsible, so it must find a way to reuse or recycle its
waste and to that end, the Tactical
Garbage to Energy Refinery II prototype (TGER) is in development. The TGER
is mounted on a trailer and can turn about a ton of garbage into electricity. A
typical 550-person unit generates about 2,500 pounds of trash a day in the form
of paper, plastic, packaging and food waste, but one of these standard
60-kilowatt diesel generator-powered gadgets can turn that trash into synthetic
gas. TGER produces enough fuel to run a generator on approximately 75 percent
within two hours. Given 12 hours, the device can produce alcohol that, when
blended with the synthetic gas, can run a generator on full power. Making units
self-sustaining eliminates the need to find or carry power sources and it also
eliminates the need to deliver such power sources in combat settings. Fuel
convoys travelling to and from base camps in Afghanistan and Iraq are popular
targets for militant groups. Additionally, recycling waste on-location will
decrease security risks by eliminating the need for contractors who could be
co-opted by insurgents. How green is TGER? According to Army Edgewood Chemical
Biological Center, which developed the prototype in conjunction with SAIC, TGER
Technologies, Defense Life Sciences and Purdue University, extremely green. “If
you start off with 30 cubic yards of trash, you end up with one cubic yard of
ash, and that ash has been tested by the Environmental Protection Agency. They
call it a benign soil additive. You could actually throw it on your
roses," said EBRC senior technologist James Valdes. The first TGER
prototypes were tested at Camp Victory in Baghdad over a period of 90 days. "We
picked a forward operating base in Iraq because we wanted to really stress the
system,” Valdes added. “All other energy systems had been tested in
laboratories or under ideal conditions and temperature climates. What we really
wanted to do was stress it with heat, sand and real-world trash." After
the first round of tests, Valdes' team eliminated a system that made pellets
from trash and instead created a horizontal gasifier with an auger device to
rotate trash. To change the inert gas being produced into usable fuel, they
modified the technology to inject steam into the gasifier, ensuring a larger
conversion of usable gas. With those upgrades, the new TGER 2.0 prototype
produces 550 BTUs of gas, a threefold increase from the 155 generated by the
original model. Factor in an automated touch-screen interface that allows
soldiers to monitor every part of the machine, including gasifier-to-ethanol
production and power output, and the TGER becomes an easy-to-use machine
requiring only one soldier to feed garbage and another to monitor the
conversion. TGER could also have valuable scivilian uses, perhaps in disaster
relief efforts…….
- Economic peace is an issue confronting not only the U.S.
government and the National Hockey League, but also threatening to cripple the
shipping industry along the East and
Gulf coasts. With the clock ticking toward a Sunday deadline, a strike by the
International Longshoremen's Association is just days away and the outlook
isn't rosy. The ILA and the U.S. Maritime Alliance are at odds over a new deal
and the two sides are battling over container royalties. The ILA wants to keep
the fund as it is, while the USMA wants to establish a cap on much money is put
into the fund for workers with the goal of eventually eliminating it. A 12:01
a.m. deadline on Sunday looms and if no deal is reached, ports along the East
Coast will be plunged into a state of chaos. "Commerce as we know it
today, all those that rely on our ports, would be significantly effected if not
shut down," said Curtis Foltz, executive director of the Georgia Ports
Authority. From Texas all the way up to Maine, ports will be impacted by the
potential strike. "If there is a coastwide strike, it effectively shuts
down the ports from Maine through Galveston, Texas,” Foltz added. ILA members
have not gone on strike since 1977, but the painful memories of that
three-month work stoppage linger for many in the shipping industry. The 1977
strike crippled many businesses, although some union members later said the
strike was a valuable learning experience because it illustrated the need to
work better with shippers and manufacturers. What makes a potential strike so
dangerous is that unlike a work stoppage in, for example, a single city among
members of a transportation union is the wide range of products that pass
through ports. All manner of goods, from food to clothing to consumer
electronics, come in to ports on cargo ships and manufacturers that are unable
to ship anywhere on the East Coast will have no choice but to find more
expensive alternatives – or not ship their goods at all. Simply put, consumers
will have to pay more while also facing the perils of the federal government sending them over the fiscal cliff…….
- If 50 Cent’s new album sucks, he’s going to have a lot of
‘splaining to do. Expectations for the project, titled “Street King Immortal,”
were already high and not just because a) of its name and b) the fact that more
than a few of 50’s fans are probably high as well. In addition to being shot
nine times and surviving, the man legally known as Curtis Jackson has
established himself as one of the biggest names in hip-hop, meaning his albums
are awaited with a high level of anticipation by the rap masses. To upgrade
those expectations, Jackson took to Twitter the day after Christmas and
informed his followers that his new joint will "not fall short of a classic.” He also vowed to start
the New Year with a "new approach" and said hip hop gave him
everything he could of dreamed for and then some. "New year,New approach, I'm not afraid of change.this Sh!t is going
perfect STREET KING IMMORTAL will not fall short of a classic," he
tweeted. The video for the first single from the album, “My Life,” debuted
online last month and with production by Symbolyc One (Jay Z, Kanye
West) and guest appearances from Eminem and Maroon 5 man-bander hack Adam
Levine, the song has raced up the rap charts. Two other tracks, “New Day” and
“My Life,” which was produced by Dr Dre, features a guest spot by Alicia Keys
and was mixed by Eminem, have also leaked online and both will feature on
“Street King,” 50 Cent’s fifth studio album and the follow-up to 2009's “Before
I Self Destruct.” The release date for the new album is Feb. 26……….
- Rise up, Iraq, and stick it to The Man. Just because former dictator
Saddam Hussein has shuffled off this mortal coil doesn’t mean Iraqis don’t have
reason to be enraged at their government and that was borne out Friday as tens
of thousands of Iraqi Sunnis angry over perceived second-class treatment by the
Shiite-led government gathered along a major western highway and elsewhere around
the country for the largest protests yet in a week of uprisings. Well-organized
and well-attended, the rallies took place after traditional Friday prayers and
showed the world the force wielded by a dogmatic protest movement that appears
to be gathering support among Sunnis, who have been increasingly antagonistic in
light of an uptick in arrests and prosecutions that they feel underscore Shiite
political dominance. Friday’s biggest demonstration occurred along a main highway
to Jordan and Syria that passes through the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi in
the Sunni-dominated desert province of Anbar, due west of Baghdad. In an
inspiring scene, several thousand protestors took it to the streets in Fallujah,
carrying placards declaring the day a "Friday of honor." While every
Friday should be a Friday of honor, seeing many demonstrators toting d old
Iraqi flags used during the Hussein era of terror was a bizarre sight, to say
the least. To provide a bit of contrast, other protestors raised the current
flag, which was approved in 2008. Yet more rebels flew the banner of the predominantly
Sunni rebels across the border who are fighting to oust Syrian President Bashar
Assad. Similarly large and irate crowds also blocked the highway in Ramadi,
further to the west, to demand "fair treatment" from the government
and the release of prisoners. Dhari Arkan, the deputy governor of Anbar
province, led that effort………
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