- Texas A&M
Aggies sophomore quarterback Johnny Manziel is going to be in the public eye
for a long time. As such, he’s going to need to get much better at handling all
of the attention. So far, Manziel has proven most adept and pissing people off,
flaunting his celebrity status and acting like a spoiled brat. The 2012 Heisman
Trophy winner is fresh off leading his team to an 11-2 season and their highest
end-of-season ranking (No. 5) since 1956. He’s also fresh off an ill-advised
tweet suggesting that he can’t wait to blow the popsicle stand that is College
Station. In a tweet he has since deleted, Manzel posted early Sunday morning, "Bulls---
like tonight is a reason why I can't wait to leave college station...whenever
it may be." He did not elaborate on why he was so angry and he tried to
pretend it didn’t happen by deleting it despite the fact that anything a public
figure tweets is more or less permanent because followers will retweet it and
record it in screen captures that will live on for all of digital eternity.
However, he did chase his deleted message with what appeared to be a related
tweet that read, "Don't ever forget that I love A&M with all of my
heart, but please please walk a day in my shoes." Yes, a guy who has won a
Heisman Trophy and spent his offseason winning money at casinos, sitting
courtside at NBA games and golfing at Pebble Beach is telling everyone they
would appreciate how difficult his life is if they only walked a mile in his
shoes. Ironically, the drama comes just days after Texas A&M coach Kevin
Sumlin was asked about the constant attention Manziel has received during the
offseason. "I've seen it, just like everybody else," Sumlin said
Thursday. "I think being around other guys in the past has helped me, but
there's never been anything like this before. Being around Adrian Peterson or
Jason White or Sam Bradford or Case Keenum or Drew Brees, people like that,
that's part of the deal.” Maybe Manziel had the right idea in March when he
quit Twitter because social media "can get to be distracting at
points." He probably would have been better off not returning to the site
on April 12………
- Headless cat robot? Well done, science. Creating a
cat-like robot without a head, fur, whiskers or the normal meow-ing sound might seem like a
ginormous waste of time, but researchers at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de
Lausanne in Switzerland have done it anyhow. Their “cheetah-cub robot” is an
ongoing project by the EPFL’s Biorobotics Laboratory that endeavors to build a
robot that is small, light and fast. The overall direction of the research is
instilling robots with speed, agility and stability in the hopes of building similar
machines for search and rescue missions. “The sum of morphology and control
enables us to run this robot very fast, up to 1.4 meters per second, which is
about seven body lengths per second,” Biorob’s Alexander Sproewitz said. That
figure looks solid – until one compares it with the 29-mph Cheetah built by
Massachusetts-based robot specialist Boston Dynamics. The Biorob team needs to
step its game up because engineers working on the Cheetah believe it has the
potential to reach speeds of 40 mph. However, EPFL says its creation is “based
on the meticulous observation and faithful reproduction of the feline leg.” The
cheetah-cub robot’s legs are comprised of three segments powered by springs and
actuators instead of muscles. “This morphology gives the robot the mechanical
properties from which cats benefit, that’s to say a marked running ability and
elasticity in the right spots, to ensure stability,” Sproewitz explained. “The
robot is thus naturally more autonomous.” Biorob director Auke Ijspeert said
the long-term goal of the cheetah-cub robot is “to develop fast, agile,
ground-hugging machines for use in exploration, for example for search and
rescue in natural disaster situations.” Sounds riveting……..
- Did someone order a cleanup on aisle Northern Ireland
border village of Belcoo? It turns out that the organizers of the Group of
Eight summit of world leaders in Northern Ireland did exactly that in advance
of their little gathering of world leaders on Monday and Tuesday. They spent
weeks and quite a bit of money sprucing up the facades of businesses all around
the County Fermanagh venue, including hanging window-sized posters on two derelict
Belcoo shops to conceal their broken-down interiors and make them look like
thriving businesses with fully stocked shelves. Seeing such time, money and
effort put into freshening up a village of 500 residents and two pubs is mildly
humorous and some locals have complained the makeover has covered up the
reality of economic hard times. They aren’t amused by seeing a faux front that
makes the
former Flanagan's butcher's shop look like a thriving business packed to the
rafters with fresh cuts of meat. Mix in a poster of an open door over the
actual locked door and the scene is so realistic that some shoppers have nearly
walked right into the wall. Across the way is a former pharmacy draped with a
similar banner that depicts its shelves full of office supplies, books and
computer software. Belcoo lies directly on the Republic of Ireland border and
about 10 miles a luxury golf resort (of course) hosting the G-8 summit and is
in many ways emblematic of he massive collapse of Ireland's Celtic Tiger
economy. Even the area’s most famous resident, fallen billionaire Sean Quinn,
watched helplessly as his cross-border business empire of insurance, building
supplies and luxury hotels has been seized by an Irish state-owned bank. Phil
Flanagan, whose family shut down Belcoo's butcher shop last year, called the
banners and their price tag of $500,000 a deceptive practice amounting to “a
huge lie and a false economy.” Interestingly, the practice is older than most
realize. It reaches back to the Potemkin villages of 18th-century Russia, which
deployed large-scale paintings and facades of villages along the banks of the
River Dneiper to fool Russia's ruler, Catherine the Great, into believing that
her war-battered region of Crimea was thriving……….
- Jay-Z is already a hip-hop legend. He might just be a
better businessman than he is a rapper. How many other artists have struck a
sweet deal with a cell phone company to sell enough copies of their new album
for it to be certified platinum weeks before its releases? The answer is one
and H.O.V.A. is that one. His new album, “Magna Carta Holy Grail,” was pimped
to the world Sunday night during an extended TV commercial featuring Jay-Z with Rick Rubin,
Pharrell Williams and Timbaland and talking about making music in the modern
world. "We don't have any rules, everybody is trying to figure it
out," he says in the clip, which you can watch below. "That's why the
Internet is like the Wild West. The wild, Wild West. We need to write the new
rules." Those rules include making a deal in which 1 million copies of the
album will be given away for free to Samsung Galaxy smartphone users 72 hours
ahead of the record's official release on July 4. That number is enough to
qualify the project for platinum status and Samsung didn’t even have to pay
full price. No, tech giants do not pay the $9.99 prevailing rate that the
average music fans pay on iTunes. They secured their copies of “Magna
Carta Holy Grail” for a mere $5 each. Users who score a free copy will receive the
music through the Magna Carta app, which they will get later this month. All of
this was revealed in Sunday night’s TV spot to hype Jay-Z’s 12th studio album.
"The album is about this duality of how do you navigate your way through
this whole thing, through success and through failures, and remain yourself,"
Jay-Z added at the end of the spot. His label, Roc Nation, added to the
promotional buzz earlier this month when label executive Lenny S posted an image
on his Instagram page with the following caption: "JAY x JT x NAS x TIMBO
Rat Pack shit. For some this is "Work"... For us it's just Fun.
#RocNation." That was a reference to an image of Jay-Z with Justin
Timberlake, Nas and Timbaland in the studio……..
- Again? Seriously, FBI? An agency supposedly all about
preventing and investigating terrible crimes threatening an entire nation is
once again hard at work search for the decaying remains of a man who has been
dead for decades. Yes, the Bureau has once again received information from
an aging reputed mobster that has agents digging through some abandoned lot in
the greater Detroit area for the remains of former Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa.
Sources confirmed that the FBI began digging in the waist-high grass of a
Detroit-area field Monday in yet another search for the remains and insisted
the information
that sparked the latest hunt in the nearly four-decades-long search for Hoffa
is "highly credible.” Agents in charge of the search were executing a
search warrant for a field in Oakland Township, north of Detroit, based in part
on information provided by alleged mobster Tony Zerilli. The sealed documents
pertaining to the search is reportedly several pages long. The early hours of
the search revealed no signs of any remains, but it is taking place on private
property and both media and the public could not get close enough to see much. FBI
Special Agent Bob Foley, head of the agency's Detroit office had little to say
about the circumstances surrounding the search, confirming only that the facts
leading to the search warrant reached the threshold of probable cause. Zerilli,
now in his 80s, told a New York TV station earlier this year that Hoffa was
buried in a Michigan field about 20 miles north of where he was last seen in
1975. He also claimed that he was told Hoffa's disappearance was not connected
to Genovese family New Jersey crime boss Anthony "Tony" Provensano,
contrary to popular belief. Instead, Zerilli told the FBI, Detroit mobsters
wanted Hoffa dead. At the time of his disappearance on July 30, 1975, was
thought to be setting the stage to get back into a power position with the
labor movement after he was released from prison. As Zerilli tells it, he
learned of Hoffa’s whereabouts when he was released from prison and asked a mob
enforcer what happened to Hoffa………
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