- There is no good way to spin this story. For the past
few weeks,
Caleb Lawrence McGillvary has been a cult hero who stormed YouTube and wowed
the world with his tale of hitchhiking, attacking a madman who was attacking an
innocent woman and using his hatchet to stop this lunatic. He mused on the
worth of a human life, dignity and beauty and did it all as Kai the Hitchhiker
Hatchet Guy. He is a drifter straight out of Dogtown, the typical SoCal flake
numping through life aimlessly and without a care in the world. That changed
Thursday when police in New Jersey revealed that they were seeking McGillvary
as the chief suspected in the bludgeoning death of 73-year-old lawyer. Kai the
Hatchet-Wielding Hitchhiker stands is accused of killing attorney Joseph Galfy
Jr. at the lawyer's Clark, N.J. home. Police went to Galfy’s home after he
failed to show up at work on Monday and found him severely beaten, dressed only
in socks and underwear. McGillvary emerged as the primary suspect and police
claimed he had altered his appearnce to elude capture. Those attempt didn’t
work for long, as Philadelphia police arrested McGillvary on Thursday evening,
hours after authorities identified him as a suspect and were then "flooded
with calls from around the country," Union County Prosecutor Theodore J.
Romankow said. One of the tips that helped in locating him came around 5:45
p.m. Thursday from a man whose neighbor said she'd dropped McGillvary off at a
New Jersey train station earlier in the day. A worker at a Starbucks in Philadelphia
later reported just spotted a man who looked like McGillvary. Police found him at
a nearby Greyhound bus terminal minutes later and arrested him without
incident, Romankow said. "The investigation came together very
quickly," the prosecutor said. According to investigators, Galfy and
McGillvary had exchanged text messages in recent days and they also know McGillvary
spent Sunday night at Galfy's home, Romankow said. No motive has been
identified, but McGillvary’s fans have taken to his Facebook page the past
couple days to express their shock and offer to raise money for a legal defense
fund. McGillvary is being held in Philadelphia pending extradition to New
Jersey…….
- Ready for another reason to envy/despise/admire Scarlett Johansson? Here you go. The actress, singer and accidental
self-nude photo leaker is branching out to the directorial world and is set to make her
directorial debut with a big screen adaptation of Truman Capote's first novel “Summer
Crossing.” Johansson said the novel has long been a favorite and that
having it be the story for her first film as a director is something of a dream
come true. "Several years ago I began working alongside the Capote estate
and writer Tristine Skylar to adapt Summer Crossing, an inspired early
work of Truman's which has long captured my heart," Johansson said in an
appearance at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday. "Being able to bring
this story to the screen as my full-length directorial debut is a life dream
and deep privilege." Capote penned the novel in the early 1940s but like
many temperamental artists, he was unhappy with the finished product and
elected to throw the papers away. They were discovered more than 50 years later
and the manuscript was auctioned off, leading to “Summer Crossing” finally
being published in 2005. Its story centers on a 17-year-old upper class
debutante called Grady who enters into a relationship with a lowly parking
valet when her parents travel to Paris in the summer of 1945. Directing a film
set in Paris definitely doesn’t suck and while casting has yet to be announced,
Johansson is due to begin shooting next year. In the interim, she has already
added a second directorial gig to her schedule. She’ll reunite with “Iron
Man 2” co-star Robert Downey Jr.
on “Chef,” an indie comedy to be filmed in Los Angeles…….
- Speaking of the Cannes Film Festival…..how about some
international thievery intrigue at this year’s incarnation of the prestigious
event. It comes courtesy of a bold thief who heisted a hotel-room safe and made off Friday with
$1 million worth of gems by Chopard, a Swiss jeweler that supplies gaudy
baubles for the rich and arrogant to wear on the red carpet at the most
celebrated gathering in cinema. The story on the stolen jewels varies depending
on who’s telling it; police claim the jewels were meant to be loaned to stars,
but a spokeswoman for the jeweler later said they were not. Police said the
safe was literally ripped from wall of the hotel room of an American employee
of Chopard in the middle of the night. Jewelers who attend the festival
commonly stay out all night to keep an eye on their pieces or to get them back from
stars after parties, so the night theft makes sense. “It seems pretty unlikely
to us that it was just one person,” said Cmdr. Bernard Mascarelli, a police
spokesman in the nearby city of Nice. “There must have been either inside
complicity, or people who were in contact with this person and knew that the
person had jewels.” Chopard also makes the Palme d’Or, the award for best
picture at Cannes and widely recognized as the biggest prize in the movie
industry. Festival organizers refused to disclose its whereabouts on Friday,
but insisted it was safe. If not for the theft, Chopard would be having a solid
run at the festival. Julianne Moore wore a platinum necklace packed with 56
total carats of diamonds supplied by the jeweler on Thursday and singer-songwriter
Lana del Rey wore Chopard for the second straight year. The theft took place at
the four-star Novotel and with the festival set to run through May 26, the
actors, directors, film dorks, jewelers still in Cannes are likely to be a bit
more on edge for its duration……..
- Winning golf tournaments can net a player all sorts of
prizes beyond the requisite amount of cash. Cars, fancy trophies and more are
all waiting for the best player on a given weekend and if you’re English golfer
Luke
Donald. Last November, Donald won the Dunlop Phoenix tournament in Japan and
earned one usual trophy and the winner's check – and a cow. The tournament is
held in Miyazaki, which has a breed of cattle with the same qualities as the
ones found in Kobe. Its meat is prize just like Kobe beef and cows bred for the
beef get names, are rumored to drink beer and get massaged with sake. The end
result is a cow with a high amount of fat that is prized by those who can
afford to eventually eat it. It has been seven months since Donald won the
tournament and he apparently has better things to do than find a way to get a
cow from Japan to the United States. That dilema has now been solved and ,
Donald collected his meat prize on Tuesday. What arrived at his house in
Chicago was a giant load of beef that came from the cow he originally won.
Donald has a reputation of a foodie, but after winning the cow he was informed
that it would be impossible to get the physical cow back to the United States.
He contacted Nick Kokonas, a partner with celebrity chef Grant Achatz at upscale
restaurant Alinea, and Kokonas urged him to get the beef any way he could.
Kokonas knew what to do because his restaurant imported Miyazaki, famous for
its meaty flavor and bacon-type fat, into its restaurant before the USDA banned
the importing of Japanese beef most recently in 2011. Miyazaki goes for $160 a pound, so getting a hold of an
entire heifer is quite a coup. "Yes, we want the whole cow," Kokonas
said when he was asked through an importer if he wanted the whole cow.
"Luke won the whole cow, didn't he?" At the time, the cow was still
alive and the meat was thus unavailable. Kokonas contacted a food importing
company called Northwest Earth & Ocean and the story took a few twists.
Donald was informed that his prize wasn’t one cow and that he needed to specify
the cuts that he wanted and how many pounds of each he were requesting. The
final agreement was for 200 pounds of Miyazaki beef and it was shipped in
segments. On Tuesday, Donald received a package that contained about $80,000
worth of beef and grilled it up for a satisfying conclusion to the tale………
- If NASA wants to keep everyone interested in what’s going
on in space, it may want to share its exciting other-worldly news more quickly
in the future. Instead of announcing Friday that a boulder-sized meteor slammed into the moon
in March, igniting an explosion so bright that anyone looking up at the right
moment might have spotted it, try announcing the same damn thing two months
earlier. The space agency’s Meteoroid Environment Office first reported the
discovery of the brightest impact seen on the moon in the eight-year history of
the monitoring program, an event surpassing the other 300 lunar impact events that
have been logged over the years. The impact occurred on March 17 and is
considered many orders of magnitude brighter than anything else observed. “We
have seen a couple of others in the ‘wow’ category but not this bright,” said
Robert Suggs, manager of NASA’s Lunar Impact Monitoring Program at Marshall
Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Ala. If amateur astronomers didn’t spot the
blast, it’s likely because it lasted only about a single second. It did shine
like a 4th magnitude star, making it bright enough to see with just the unaided
eye, but NASA used the monitoring program’s 14-inch telescope to snag an image
of the lunar explosion and not everyone has access to one of those. From the images,
researchers estimated that the object probably weighed 88 pounds and was 17
inches wide. It crashed into the moon at speeds of 56,000 miles per hour and
its impact released as much energy as five tons of TNT. NASA scientists hope to
corroborate the impact with close-up photography from a NASA
spacecraft orbiting the moon. “They are planning to image that location in
hopes of finding the crater which would be very significant scientifically,”
Suggs added. The impact took place on the same night as two fireball detection
networks independently captured an unusually large number of bright meteors streaking
through Earth’s skies. Turns out Jack’s Mannequin founder and pop singer Andrew
McMahon wasn’t crazy when he sang, “Some days all I do is watch the sky” in 2003……
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