- And we have a new record-holder. NBC has seized a lead
that may be impossible for other networks to overcome, setting a mark for
television ineptitude with its new (and now dead) drama “Do No Harm.” The
network has officially canceled the freshman series after its debut episode
ranked as the second-lowest midseason premiere in television history and its
second episode brought in just 2.2 million viewers. Its Jan. 31 premiere was a
giant flop and viewers were clearly not coming around to Steven Pasquale as Dr.
Jason Cole, a respected neurosurgeon who has a successful career, a way with
the ladies and a good heart for those in need, but who also knows he has an
extremely dark side to his personality. The good (and apparently unwatchable)
doctor wakes up disoriented in a wrecked hotel room amidst several near-naked
women he's never seen before and soon realizes that at the same time every
night, he undergoes a total personality transformation that leaves him as a
devious, philandering, near-sociopathic maniac. His other self even has a name:
Ian Price. He’s kept Price in check for years with a powerful experimental
sedative, but the body they share has developed a resistance to the sedative
and now, Price is loosed and determined to ruin the life of his tormentor. This
struggle puts everyone Cole cares about in danger….or it would have if the show
had aired more than two episodes. Instead, a story that next to no one seemed
to care about will be truncated and NBC can go back to running repeats of other
shows in its time slot and Pasquale, co-starts Michael Esper, Lin-Manuel
Miranda and Phylicia Rashad and executive producer/writer is David Schulner can
all move on to their respective next projects, which have to be better than
this dud……..
- Ladies, now is the time to act. Dr. Curtis Cooper will never be a hotter
commodity than he is right now. Cooper is the winner of a grant of $3,000 from the
Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a project that has used volunteer
computers to calculate and search for primes for 17 years. His feat?
Discovering the new largest prime number in the world, 257,885,161-1. His find is
also the 48th Mersenne prime and Cooper discovered it on his computer at the
University of Central Missouri, where he is a professor and bonafide chick
magnet in his spare time. A Mersenne prime is a prime number that can be
written in the form Mp = 2n-1 and finding one is extremely rare. Starting at 0 and counting up to 25,964,951, there are 1,622,441 numbers
that are prime, but only 42 are Mersenne primes. Cooper unearthed the 48th Mersenne as part
of 39 39 days of continuous calculation by his computer in order to verify the
prime status of the number, which has over 17 million digits and was discovered
Jan. 25. To complete the process, Cooper used GIMPS’ algorithm, which was
developed in the early 1990s by Richard Crandall, an Apple Distinguished
Scientist. According to Mersenne.org, Cooper’s discovery was verified
independently by several different sources: : a 32-core server running MLucas
software, a Nvidia GTX 560 Ti running CUDALucas software and an Intel Core i7
CPU using GIMPS software. Writing out all 17 million of the number’s digits
would fill approximately 28 novel-length books – the same number of phone books
one would need to record all the digits of the ladies undoubtedly already lined
up at Cooper’s office door waiting to throw themselves at him because of his
huge scientific muscles………
- Rickshaws are not utilized nearly
enough in the quest to bring peace to a war-torn world. Pakistani youth leader Syed Ali Abbas
Zaidi is out to change that reality and in a region marred by relentless violence
carried out by radical Islamic groups in his country, he is using three-wheeled
motorized rickshaws as a weapon.
Zaidi is actually stealing a page from the playbook of those radical
Islamists, who have long used rickshaws as mobile billboards to carry slogans
in support of religious warfare in neighboring India and Afghanistan and to
foster hatred against the United States. In response, Zaidi has created a fleet
of rickshaws emblazoned with peace slogans and decorated with colorful designs
to get his message out. "We need to take back this romanticized art form
and use it for peace sloganeering and conflict resolution," he explained.
The message has been received well so far in a nation where domestic Taliban
militants and their allies have waged a bloody insurgency across the country in
recent years, killing thousands of people. Zaidi’s "peace rickshaw" project is based in Pakistan's
largest city, Karachi, a hot mess of 18 million people wracked by ethnic,
political and sectarian violence. More than 2,000 people were were murdered
last year in the city and after seeing those numbers, Zaidi’s Pakistan Youth
Alliance held workshops with over 200 students in some of Karachi's most
conflict-prone areas to come up with designs and slogans for the rickshaws.
They came up with clever slants on common Urdu street expressions, creating
messages such as, "Hey dude, don't fight." Other rickshaw-side quotes
include snippets of Sufi poems, phrases from the Quran or messages of harmony
and unity. The alliance enlisted the help of a truck artist in the city located
on Pakistan's southern coast. A an anonymous donor gave $25,000 to the effort
and Zaidi hopes to spread the project to other major cities as it gets more
funding………
- The Matrix don’t mess with suckas. That would be the
nickname for veteran Dallas Mavericks forward Shawn Marion, who is playing on a
team that has been riddled by injuries, is seven games below .500 and 5.5 games
out of the last playoff spot in the NBA’s Western Conference. In other words,
the Mavs likely aren't headed to the postseason and owner Mark Cuban has
already declared his willingness to consider a wide range of trade options to
overhaul his underachieving team. Marion, who is 34 and due
$9.3 million next season, knows he could be a prime target for Dallas to unload
if its front office tries to shed salary. He’s fine with being traded – just as
long as the team he’s shipped to doesn’t suck. Not only does Marion not want to
go to another team with no chance of winning a championship, he says he won't
even show up if he doesn’t like his new home. "If I'm going to get traded,
they're going to tell me what's going on and where I'm going," he said
matter-of-factly. “"Because if I'm going to a (expletive) situation, I'm
not going. It's just that simple. At this time, I'm too old to be trying to go
through and be a, you know what I'm saying, not have a chance to do anything.
I'm at a point where I want to be playing for something right now." The
calm demeanor with which Marion delivered his threat was slightly unnerving,
but he is adamant that he will not report to a team that doesn't have a chance
to contend for a title. "That's the only way I'm going, yeah," Marion
said. "Yeah, that's it. That's the only possibility that could come out of
that. Other than that, it ain't happening." When asked if he would retire
rather than report to a lottery-bound team, he conceded that “anything is
possible.” Of course, the 15-percent trade kicker in his contract that would
bump his salary into eight figures could be just the poison pill to keep
another team from trading for him………
- Lawyers are already widely despised and the butt of many
jokes, so adding shameless self-promotion and unabashed hijacking of an
over-commercialized holiday shouldn’t do too much damage. With Valentine’s Day
less than a week away, Southfield (Mich.) attorney Walter H. Bentley III is looking to drum up
some business and gain some publicity by staging a Valentine's Day contest that
will award the winner a free divorce. Bentley says the winner will be chosen
based on most compelling and convincing story as to why they should get to
dispatch of their spouse in legal (and non-lethal) fashion for no charge. "I
am truly excited to be able to offer this opportunity for a free divorce.
People come to my office regularly who simply cannot afford to get divorced in
the current economic environment," Bentley said in a statement. Only a
lawyer would say he or she was “excited” to offer a divorce under any
circumstances, but as with any contest for so much as a pack of ramen noodles,
there are rules and lines of fine print to sift through before claiming the
prize. The divorce is limited to an uncontested divorce with no or minimum
child custody issues and it is limited to Michigan residents. In other words,
Northwest Ohio residents who might want to sneak across the border, steal a
free marriage termination from their Michigan friends and slink back to the
Buckeye State, no dice. Entry forms for the contest can be found on Bentley’s
website and the deadline to apply for arguably the most dubious prize offered
by any contest in recent memory is Feb. 12……….
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