- Making the Major League Baseball All-Star Game is a nice
honor for players and not only because it triggers a bonus clause in their
contract that adds $100,000 or so to their bank account. Being selected as one
of the best in baseball and playing in a star-studded even as the rest of the
season comes to a halt for three days is a nice ego boost as well. However,
that honor is a bit less meaningful if one’s team has to team up with a website
for carved-up, overly tanned cougars seeking younger men to hook up with in
order to get the votes to make the ASG. Such is the plight that nearly befell
New York Mets third baseman David
Wright. The Mets host the All-Star Game on July 16 at Citi Field and Wright will
represent the Mets, even if he's not the starter at third base. He will captain
the National League squad in the Home Run Derby and is featured in
advertisements leading up to the game. Unfortunately, he trails San Francisco
Giants third baseman Pablo Sandoval in NL All-Star voting at third base. Seeing
the most recent voting numbers, a Mets marketing official decided to reach out
to dating website Cougarlife.com to explore a potential voting push partnership
to support Wright. The site pairs older women with younger men and Wright was recently
had been named "MLB's Hottest Cub" via a vote of more than 11,000
respondents on the site. Seeing that development, a marketing employee decided
to reach out to the site and see what they could accomplish together. Oddly,
that employee’s superior learned of the plan and nixed it. "Cougar Life
voted David Wright as the hottest cub," the Mets said in a statement
Thursday. "In our effort to expand All-Star balloting to wider audiences,
so as to increase votes, we did reach out to Cougar Life. Last year there was a
big swing of votes at the end that cost David the starting job. We decided to
do everything to make sure that doesn't happened again this year. We ultimately
elected to pass.” Wright admitted after Thursday’s game that he had asked the
team to tone down its in-game appeals to fans to vote for him for the All-Star
Game. Wonder why………
- He doesn’t have many options left at this point, so it’s
nice to see Arnold Schwarzenegger confirm he'll begin filming “Terminator 5” in January. “Acting” in
terribly written action movies with predictable plots is his lot in life and as
a disgraced and divorced former governor, he seems to have accepted it.
Announcing that he will return to the sci-fi franchise to play the role of the
Terminator makes sense because he is neither a gifted actor nor an A-lister and
this role doesn’t require either. "I think this year the script will be
finished and we will be able to go into pre-production,” Schwarzenegger said of
the project. As the name suggests, it it’s the fifth installment in the franchise,
but it is only the fourth time the Gover-nator will reprise his titular role. He
played the cyborg assassin in three films released between 1984 and 2003, but
skipped 2009's “Terminator Salvation,”
which starred Christian Bale and
Sam Worthington. He spoke about the film at the 21st Century Financial
Education Summit seminar in Australia and befitting a man who knows his best
acting days are behind him and that he won't exactly be offered any
Oscar-winning roles alongside Sean Connery or Daniel Day Lewis, he expressed
excitement about the opportunity to return to a familiar role and for that
matter, that anyone is still willing to fire him. "I'm very happy that the
studios want me to be in ‘Terminator 5’ and to star as the Terminator, which we
start shooting in January,” he added. Of course, once he’s done with “T-5,”
there will undoubtedly be another edition of “The Expendables” in which he can
team up with a bunch of other should-be retirees to pretend that dudes old
enough to collect Social Security can still kick fictional ass on the big
screen…….
- Surprise, surprise. A nation ruled by an oppressive despot
in training just so happens to have a prison population that has swelled in
recent years with those caught fleeing the country under a crackdown on
defections. Such are th byproducts of the rule of Kim Jong Un, who must live up
to the dictatorial legacy of his late father, Kim Jong Il. Defectors living in
South Korea and researchers who study Pyongyang's notorious network of labor
camps and detention centers have tried to put a number on the increase and
their results are staggering. "They are tightening the noose," said
Insung Kim, a researcher from the Database Center for North Korean Human
Rights. K.J. Un is believed to have tightened security on the country's borders
and pressured Pyongyang's neighbor and main ally, China, to repatriate anyone
caught on its side of the frontier. "Forced repatriation from China is a
pathway to pain, suffering, and violence," according to "Hidden
Gulags," an exhaustive 2012 study on the prison camps by veteran human
rights researcher and author David Hawk. "Arbitrary detention, torture and
forced labor are inflicted upon many repatriated North Koreans." Survivors
of the camps tell tales of being fed as little as five über-tiny slivers of raw
potato a day and beaten relentlessly by the guards. In North Korea, leaving the
country to escape having your basic rights trampled on a daily basis is
considered treason and typically means up to five years of manual labor. If the
nature of the defection is "serious,” i.e. with the help of South Korean
or American Christian missionary groups as opposed to trying to reach China for
work purposes, the defector is subject to an additional charge of anti-state
activities that could mean life in prison or even death. Being deemed hostile
to the government can also lead to a life sentence in a labor camp. No one is
sure of how large the North Korean prison population is, but estimates put the
numbers between 100,000-200,000. The number of defectors who successfully snuck
across the border into South Korea dipped from 2,929 in 2009 to 1,509 in 2012,
the lowest number since 2005………
- Foursquare is still around, in case everyone forgot –
which they did. To help remind the world it still exits, the social media and
human tracking service is upgrading the visual appeal and usefulness of its few
remaining users’ check-in history. The service debuted the new means of viewing
a person’s check-in history on Friday. The Foursquare Time Machine site begins
with a person’s first check-in and continues to animate their check-ins on a
map using connecting lines and pretty glowing circles. When a user completes
his or her travels for the day and settles in as the day winds down, the final
result is a visual representation of their meanderings and a way to see how
often they have visited various parts of their town. For example, a high number
of visits to the local adult video store or habitual runs to Starbucks for a
mid-morning double-milk latte with foam can now be shown in all the color and
majesty of a social networking site that no one uses. Time Machine will present
folks with stats on the types of businesses they frequent and they will be able
to download and share an infographic showing their Foursquare history, which
may or may not be a good idea depending on how seedy and skeevy their daily
travel habits are. To fully enjoy this tracking of check-ins, merely click the
right and left navigation arrows for a more detailed walk down Foursquare memory
lane. Because next to no one uses Foursquare directly, other social apps such
Vine, Path, and Instagram are linked to it to power its location tagging
system. For those who are already paranoid that the NSA is tracking their every
move and believe the government planted a bug in their moo cow coffee creamer
container on the breakfast table, this might not be the best development……
- No one – NO ONE – tells ArrangementFinders.com when and where they can or cannot place
billboards. When the Jefferson County Commission asked the site to take down a
controversial billboard in Birmingham on Thursday, the site that pairs up
would-be relationship partners with shady aspirations not only said no, it
decided to kick things up a notch by considering the expansion of its efforts
in Alabama. The billboard in question is posted near the Birmingham
Shuttlesworth International Airport and targets young female students, asking
if they want to make money by dating a "Sugar Daddy." ArrangementFinders.com
confirmed that after the billboard was posted, it saw more than 1,000 new users
sign up for its site. ArrangementFinders.com marketing representative A.J.
Perkins said the average age of the women who have signed up is about 22 years
old. The old-fashioned souls of the Jefferson County commission passed a
resolution on Thursday asking the company and the owner of the billboard to
take the display down. "The billboard is inconsistent with the values of
most people in Jefferson County hold. I think the one thing the people of this
state are concerned with are our children," Jefferson County Commission
President David Carrington said. Despite an alleged 1,000 emails to the
commission from people objecting to the billboard. Perkins insisted the company
has no plans to take the billboard down and indicated the company may look at
expansion in the state. "Pretty large number for us, especially for that
area of the country. We need to be deeper into Alabama, into Birmingham than we
originally were," Perkins said. In other news, the Bible thumpers in Birmingham
have stupidly been suckered into giving a trash dating site exactly the
publicity it was seeking with a sleazy billboard…….
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