- The name of Radiohead guitarist Thom Yorke is either
pointless or some sort of elaborate joke because Atoms For Peace just does not
seem to be the right handle for a band fronted by a man who promises to "f*cking
knock their teeth out" if anyone dares to refer to the band as a
supergroup. Such supergroups are increasingly common as musicians look to
channel their inner NBA star and team up together to make a bigger impact.
Atoms For Peace consists of York, producer Nigel Godrich, Flea from Red Hot
Chili Peppers on bass, percussionist Mauro Refosco and drummer Joey Waronker.
Yorke was in a cagey mood when discussing the band’s debut album and was asked
about the fact that the project, titled “Amok,” debuted at No. 2 on the album
charts in Britain, behind pop/R&B singer Bruno Mars. "Who the f**k is
Bruno Mars?” Yorke responded. "Sorry. I'll get slandered now." Just
to be clear, Thom Yorke does not like the supergroup label and he definitely is
not a fan of Bruno Mars. What he IS a fan of seems to be rest, as he took time
off from Radiohead to work with Atoms For Peace and sounds like he could use a
vacation at this point. "What am I doing? I don't know, really. More
electronic crap," he said. "I think I need a break at some point. I
went straight from Radiohead into this. The break's, like, three days. That's
kind of all I need." Later on in his mini-rant, Yorke lit up DJs for
making too much money for showing up and jerking around with someone else’s
music, so the entire process felt a bit like the temperamental rock star being
bitter at the world and complaining about everything. Of course, you know
what’s great therapy for that, right? F*cking knocking someone’s teeth out……..
- What’s wrong with Spain? It’s an amazing country filled
with life, history, culture and natural beauty, which makes it decidedly
peculiar that its official population fell last year for the first time since records
began. Could the decline be tied to Spain’s financial turmoil or maybe to the
fact that its royal family is embroiled in a legal scandal? Put your money on
the former, because the numbers seem to be due to a decrease in the number of
immigrants due to a five-year, on-and-off recession that has sent unemployment skyrocketing.
According to the National Statistics Institute, Spain’s population fell by
206,000 to 47.1 million, with that decline accounted for by the fall in the
number of registered foreign residents. It’s the first official population drop
s since records began in 1857, although figures were compiled roughly every
decade until 1998. Spain’s economic woes, along with those plaguing the rest of
Southern Europe, seem to have no end in sight. Up until 2008, Spain was in the
midst of an economic boom that drew Spanish-speaking immigrants from Ecuador,
Colombia and Bolivia to Europe in search of work in construction. During the
first eight years of the decade from 2001-10, the country’s immigrant
population swelled from 924,000 to 5.7 million. No sooner did that number hit
its apex than the recession hit, complete with a bursting of the housing bubble
and a government chafing under the restrictions of austerity measures imposed
by the European Union. Spain’s unemployment rate has hit 26 percent and this
seems to have inspired those same immigrants who flocked from half the world
away to return home. According to the NSI, the biggest chunk of the population
decline came from Ecuadoreans and Colombians. Even the country’s two largest
groups of immigrants, Romanians and Moroccans, both shrank substantially last
year. The one group whose numbers did increase was native Spaniards, whose
numbers grew last year by 10,000……and still a smaller increase than in recent
years………
- Aaaaand that’s why you’re the Charlotte Bobcats. One
year ago, the organization being run (into the ground) by the greatest player
ever to lace up a pair of basketball shoes hired a relatively unknown coach
with no NBA experience to take over their league-worst team. Mike Dunlap was
asked to come in and turn around a team that set a league record for highest
losing percentage in a shortened, 66-game season. After winning just seven
games last year, there was nowhere to go but up….right? Yes and no. The Bobcats
did win more games – a virtual certainty with a full, 82-game schedule – and
lowered their losing percentage with a 21-61 mark. Dunlap seemed overwhelmed in
exactly the way a coach who is in way over his head typically would, struggling
with game management and handling NBA players. He showed incredibly thin skin
by benching veteran players for
weeks at a time after they'd irritated him and feuded with veterans such as Ben
Gordon, with the vets chafing under his micromanaging approach. For those
reasons and more, the Bobcats fired Dunlap as coach Tuesday after a single
season. Finishing with the second-worst record in the NBA ahead of only the
Orlando Magic can have that effect, even when a team concludes the season with a
three-game winning streak that bumps them from having the best odds in the
upcoming draft lottery. Bobcats president of basketball operations Rod Higgins
said he and general manager Rich Cho spoke with Dunlap and players before
tracking owner Michael Jordan down on the back nine of whatever country club he
was visiting for the day and asking him to make a coaching change. "The
change was allowed," Higgins said. Higgins conceded that player input was
"a part of the process, but not the only indicator." "I just
don't think he was a great fit," Cho said. "Probably best that we go
in a different direction." In other words, we f*cked up by hiring a coach
whose most extensive experience was as an assistant coach at St. John's, making
Dunlap the first person to make a direct move from an assistant coach at the
college level to a head coaching position in the NBA. Maybe the Bobcats can
make a better hire this time around, just as long as they find Jordan before
he’s four beers deep into his second round of the day at the club…….
- Doesn’t this just feel like a time when the United States
and all of its citizens should be aware of where their incendiary and explosive
devices are? With last week’s tragic events at the Boston Marathon and no
shortage of kooks eager to procure a copy of the Anarchist’s Cookbook or go
online and learn how to make a bomb, knowing where all manner of things that go
boom are located just seems wise. In that spirit, would someone care to explain
why the hell a military explosive device was found Sunday afternoon on
Cardiff State Beach in San Diego? The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department
confirmed the discovery of the explosive device at about 1:10 p.m. by a
beachgoer, who picked it up and took it to nearest lifeguard station. Picking
up explosive devices without knowing whether they are about to detonate or not
is generally a bad move, but this dumb do-gooder managed to escape the situation
without blowing themselves up or losing any digits or limbs. The lifeguard were
a bit smarter in handling the problem once it arrived at their door and they immediately
called sheriff’s deputies, who ordered a full evacuation and called for the arson-bomb
squad. The squad arrived on the scene, contained the device and took it away
for disposal. Within two hours, the evacuation order was lifted and all of the
surfers, tourists and bros hanging out and catching some rays at the beach were
able to get back to their afternoon of leisure. In a development that doesn’t
exactly inspire an immense amount of confidence, bomb technicians were unable
to determine exactly what kind of explosive device it was, saying only
that it appeared to be military ordinance………
- Nature’s pests have been put on notice in Oregon. In this
case, the pest is sea birds and the mighty hammer of God striking down that
pest is the
Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. Technically, the agency is merely killing
sea birds to see if they are eating protected young salmon, but the issue
is much bigger than that. If these rule-flouting fowls can’t respect basic
guidelines about which fish are acceptable eats and which ones are off limits,
then they need to be made aware. That’s why the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
has allowed Oregon to expand a study started last year into how many salmon
cormorants are eating from the Tillamook estuary into the Umpqua and Rogue
estuaries. Under the new rules, the department can now shoot 50 cormorants a
year on each of the estuaries, through March 2015. All of this stems from
pressure that started last year from sport fishing groups that led the
department to ask for permission to reduce the number of cormorants eating
young salmon on the Oregon Coast by 10 percent. The bureaucratic impediments at
the USFWS denied that request until the department gets hard data showing it
would help the recovery of threatened coho salmon, not just salmon
in general. Department spokesman Rick Swart confirmed that the first
cormorant was shot on the Umpqua estuary last week and with 4,000 cormorants
nesting on the Oregon Coast at the Tillamook, Umpqua and Rogue estuaries,
there is plenty more shooting to do. Of course, bird-huggers will point out
that cormorants are protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act the department
has killed sea lions, protected by the Marine Mammal Act, for years now because
they threaten and endanger salmon at Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River. When
studies showed that d cormorants at the mouth of the Columbia River eat 15
percent of the millions of young salmon and steelhead migrating to
the ocean, the time to act had arrived. Swart explained that department
personnel do the shooting and check the birds' stomachs and if the contents are
not clearly salmon, they are sent to a lab at Oregon State University for
identification, and sometimes DNA analysis. Now, let’s get to shooting
some annoying birds…….
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