- The Chicago Bulls continue to be the most surprising
story of the NBA playoffs. A team whose superstar hasn’t played since tearing
his ACL one year ago and may never return to the court at the rate he’s going
(and the way he’s dragging his feet) and with another of its stars out the past
few games due to an illness and botched spinal tap somehow keeps on beating
more talented teams. After dispatching fourth-seeded Brooklyn in a first-round
matchup with Derrick Rose still on the bench and Luol Deng out as he recovers
from that bad spinal tap, the Bulls marched into Miami on Monday and beat the
66-win Heat in Game 1 of their Eastern Conference semifinal series. They did so
without Rose, Deng, injured guard Kirk Hinrich and with starting center Joakim
Noah limping up and down the court with a bad case of plantar fasciitis. Their
93-86 win sent shockwaves through the league and it also seems to have fired up
the outspoken Noah, who delivered an
impassioned message for the haters who continue to crack on Rose for not
returning to action even though he was medically cleared to play two months
ago. Noah went out of his way to make the statement by veering off course in
responding to a question about how much pride he and his team feel being able
to win without Rose while so many people count them out. and he went off on an
emotional defense of his close friend. "Derrick's a brother," Noah
said. "And to see him go through this is tough, but at the end of the day
it's really funny how quick people are to judge. But people don't know what
it's like to lead a team, especially after you tore your ACL. "Everybody
who hasn't been in that situation before should really shut up because I feel
like it's just so unfair to him and to this team.” Rose hasn’t done himself any
favors, practicing and reportedly looking good in doing so, and warming up
before game in plan view to further fuel the debate. He perpetuated the drama
Monday when he said that his status for this series was "still up in the
air. I might have a chance.” A chance of creating false hope for something that
won’t happen……..
- Take two giant steps back, NASA. All of a sudden, the
space agency is emplying scare tactics by warning that if it is to land
humans on Mars by the 2030s, as President Barack Obama has directed, time is
running out to finalize a plan and develop the technologies required. "Interest
in sending humans to Mars I think has never been higher," NASA chief
Charles Bolden said at the Humans 2 Mars Summit here at George Washington
University. "We now stand on the precipice of a second opportunity to
press forward to what I think is man's destiny — to step onto another planet.”
What Captain Fearmonger didn’t say in his speech was that sending astronauts to
the Red Planet will likely require at least three missions: one to launch the
crew and the vehicle that will take them to Mars, one to launch the habitat
humans will live on at the planet's surface, and one to launch the vehicle that
will lift off from Mars to take the crew home. Some 400 metric tons of
equipment would have to be launched from Earth's surface for the project and
approximately 40 metric tons of
that mass will have to be delivered to the surface of Mars at one time. To this
point NASA has been able to land only 1 metric ton at a time – when the agency landed
the Curiosity rover last summer. As difficult as that exercise was, it is not
as tough as the return, when the astronauts will have to lift off from the
surface of Mars and travel home. "To me this is one of the biggest
challenges," said Mike Raftery, director of space station utilization and
exploration at Boeing, the primary contractor for NASA's heavy-lift rocket
being developed to go to Mars. "We have to essentially land a launch pad
on the surface that's then ready to launch the crew back to Earth." Factor
in the life-support systems, medicine, food, communications systems and
navigation equipment Mars crews will have to bring with them and this begins to
sound like both a time suck and a resource drain that is simply unnecessary given
America’s debt-ridden financial state. According to Sam Scimemi, NASA's
International Space Station director, the deadline for choosing an architecture
for the mission, including what type of propulsion to use to get to Mars, and
how many launches are required, is 2020 if the agency is to meet Obama’s
deadline. Nice try, NASA scare tacticians, but no dice………
- The world is a scary place these days. Maniacs are
setting off bombs at marathons, terrorists are trying to hijack planes and
federal agents are raiding caches of weapons in mobile homes located in rural
corners of Minnesota. In fact, the world has grown so scary that even cardboard
can strike terror into the hearts of folks just looking to go about their daily
routine. Look no further than Mission College in Santa Clara (Calif.) for proof
of the panic-causing power of some well-placed cardboard. The small school went
on lockdown Tuesday afternoon for about 45 minutes after a cardboard cutout of a gun was
mistaken for the real thing. A school spokesman explained the situation and
added that the situation was a big misunderstanding that took place when a
sociology of criminology class project involving students dressing up as
criminals took an unfortunate turn. As part of the exercise, one student wore a
ski mask and carried a cardboard cutout of a gun, school spokesman Peter Anning
said. Before class started, this would-be method actor was outside the
classroom taking pictures and an overreactive fellow student panicked and
called Santa Clara police at 2:47 p.m. to report a person with a gun. Because
every threat needs to be taken seriously at least until place know that the
person reporting it is a total kook, Mission College went into lockdown at 2:53
p.m. Police rushed to the scene and began searching for the student in
question. Officers were able to locate and speak with the student and the
lockdown was lifted about 45 minutes later, Anning said. Maybe next time the
professor teaching that class should alert school officials what he or she is
up to, just in case………
- Riot Watch! Riot Watch! Bangladesh has given the world
plenty of anger-fueled uprisings in recent months, but few have been better
than the display that started this week. The streets of the city’s capital, Dhaka,
were filled with the lovely sounds of gunfire, explosions and tear-gas
canisters as Islamist protesters demanding laws against blasphemy scraped with
police. Four deaths were reported as tens of thousands of supporters of the
Hefazat-e-Islam movement blocked nearly all the roads leading into the capital.
Their uprising was built on a list of demands that included an anti-blasphemy
statute. The day’s festivities may have remained mundane had a group of Hefazat
activists not tried to break a police cordon. Once that happened, the sh*t was
on and street battles raged on for hours. Police used rubber bullets and
rioters responded with homemade explosives and chunks of brick. Local police
reported a litany of injuries, including police officers and journalists. Syed
Ashraful Islam, secretary-general of the ruling Awami League and a government
minister, accused rioters of setting fire to the Communist Party of Bangladesh
office and ransacking several other business establishments in Purana Paltan in
central Dhaka. At the end of the day, Hefazat leaders proclaimed that they
would not leave the capital until their demands were met. As part of the
demonstrations, rioters called for tough laws against bloggers and writers who
they believe insult the Prophet Mohammed. Hezafat wants an anti-blasphemy law
to silence a group of bloggers, online activists and authors they have called
"atheists" and accused of denigrating Islam and Mohammed. In
February, those targeted by the campaign launched a sit-in campaign at Dhaka's
Shahbagh Square, demanding a ban on Bangladesh's largest Islamic party,
Jamaat-e-Islami. Let’s just say neither side is changing their position on this
one……….
- If the rumors are true, Guns N' Roses are already light years
ahead of where they were the last time they were preparing to release an album.
The band that these days consists of a 300-lb. Axl Rose, his 600-lb. ego and a
rotating cast of characters Rose plugs in to keep the band alive and that
incarnation of what used to be one of the biggest rock bands in the world is
reportedly on track to release a new album next year. According to GNR
guitarist Richard Fortus, the band’s sixth studio album is mostly finished, but
probably won't be released until 2014. Of course, by virtue of not taking a
decade to make and devolving into an album that probably should have been
released by “Axl Rose and Whoever He Can Convince to Work With His Pompous Ass
For More Than Five Seconds,” this new album will have a huge head start on its
predecessor, the long-awaited and much-maligned “Chinese Democracy.” By the
time “Democracy” dropped in 2008, its recording and production costs had
ballooned to a record $13 million. That qualified it as the most expensive
album ever made and given how much it sucked and how many critics and fans
slammed it as a worthless exercise in egotism, the return on that investment
wasn’t exactly high. In other words, it wasn’t the kind of album that fans were
after when a 15-year gap exists between its release and the album before it,
the 1993 release '"The Spaghetti Incident?" in this case. For the
new, as-of-yet-untitled new album, that buildup should be smaller and everyone
can enter the process of releasing it with the realization that Rose is now a
total has-been whose voice is a shell of what it used to be and that the album
itself will most likely suck donkey balls……..
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