- The Peacock will have its big week near the end of
September and hold some of its biggest shows for the early part of October. NBC
has announced that it will launch most of its fall lineup during the traditional premiere week
beginning Sept. 23 and during that time, it will roll out many of its new
shows, such as “The Blacklist,” a new drama starring James Spader as a criminal
who helps the FBI catch other criminals. It will premiere in the Monday time
slot after the two-hour, fifth-season premiere of “The Voice (Karaoke),” which
will see the return of coaches Christina Aguilera and CeeLo Green. The second
season of successful new drama “Chicago Fire” will launch the following night
at 10 p.m. after the Tuesday installment (good God, there are two of them?) of
“The Voice (Karaoke).” The network’s most successful new drama for last season
will, in an incredibly logical move, change nights. “Revolution” will jump from
Mondays at 10 p.m. to Wednesday nights at 8 p.m. for its second season followed
by the 15th-season premiere of “Law & Order: SVU” at 9 p.m.. Thursday
nights will be a mix of the old and new as veteran sitcom “Parks and
Recreation” will hold onto its Thursday night primetime leadoff spot and debut with
an hour-long episode that has the show traveling to London. That will serve as
a lead-in for the new “The Michael J. Fox Show,” with Fox returning to network television starring as a New
York news reporter returning to work after getting his Parkinson's under
control. Several of NBC’s new shows will be held back and be introduced to the
world the first week of October, including “Ironside,” which stars Blair
Underwood in a remake of the classic Raymond Burr drama. It will premiere on
Oct. 2, one night before new comedies “Welcome to the Family” and “Sean Saves
the World,” the latter of which stars former “Will & Grace” cast member
Sean Hayes as a single father with a teen daughter and opinionated mother. Oh,
and FAT people in need of losing 300 pounds will get their chance for help when
“The Biggest Loser” returns with an hour-long episode on Oct. 8……..
- Action sports are slowly, but surely growing on the world.
X-Games is adding more global events and expanding into new locals like Brazil,
Germany, France and Spain and here in the good ol’ U.S. of A, the man who drove
the skateboarding revolution has found a place in pop culture and the
mainstream. Skateboarding icon Tony Hawk has donated personal equipment to the
Smithsonian's National Museum of American History and along with fellow legend '70s
pro Cindy Whitehead, he’ll have a collection of skateboard-related items on
display at the museum's Division of Culture and the Arts. The display will be
part if Innoskate, an event exploring innovation and invention in skateboarding
and its influence on endemic and mainstream culture. There will be a special ceremony
honoring Hawk's and Whitehead's permanent donations to kick off the two-day
public festival, presented by the Lemelson Center for the Study of Innovation
& Invention. There will also be a screening of "Bones Brigade: An
Autobiography," a 90-minute documentary that covers Hawk's history with
the seminal Powell Peralta skate team throughout the '80s. At the center of the
display will be Hawk's first skateboard, a fiberglass Bahne model from 1975,
complete with Chicago roller skate trucks and Stoker loose-ball-bearing
urethane wheels, a hand-me-down from his older brother. "I remember trying
it for the first time in our driveway [in 1977]," Hawk said. "My
brother [Steve] had gotten a newer skateboard, so his old one was near the
garage. I picked it up and started riding, having no idea how to turn. I went
to the end of the alley, ran into the fence, and then picked it up and turned
it around. My brother was laughing that I couldn't figure out how to turn. ...
Somehow I managed to hold on to it through all the years, though.” Alongside
Hawk’s items, Whitehead will display her Molly padded shorts, Puma sneakers,
Sims team jersey, a bib from the 1980 Gold Cup series and a handful of
skatepark membership cards. She admitted that it will be “bittersweet” to give
up the items and know she will never get them back, but is glad they will be
displayed for all the world to enjoy………
- Can anyone put a price tag on making sure undesirables
don’t slink across the U.S.-Mexico border and steal our American dream? Of
course they can. It’s why original legislation crafted by Congress’ bipartisan Gang of Eight set
aside $1.5 billion for 700 more miles of fencing along the southwest U.S.
border. Unfortunately, that funding has become tangled up as part of an
immigration bill winding its way through the Senate. In fact, it was part of a
immigration-bill deal forged in the Senate this week. In order to get
Republicans on board with the deal, Democrats threw them a bone with a deal to
add more to the massive border security and fencing proposal. Past fencing
projects would suggest that this revival of the concept won't be cheap. Customs
and Border Protection spent $2.4 billion between 2006 and 2009 to complete 670
miles of border fence and that was the chintzy, single-layer line of fencing
designed to keep either pedestrians or vehicles from crossing into the United
States. This time around, the plan is for a double-layer fence — two parallel
barriers on either side of a corridor manned by Border Patrol — that would
require more land acquisition, more supplies and more labor to build. Best of
all, there are absolutely no firm cost for the fence. A 2009 report by the
Government Accountability Office pegged the cost of pedestrian fencing between
$400,000 and $15 million per mile with an average of $3.9 million a mile. Even less
expensive vehicle was projected to cost anywhere from $200,000 to $1.8 million
a mile, for an average of $1 million a mile. Environmental groups are among
those against additional fencing, with their predictable complaints about
negative effects on wildlife in the areas where new fences would be built. Oh,
and there would also be the need to seize some land via imminent domain, so
that should be fun as well. That doesn’t even take into account difficult
terrain in remote areas that would further escalate the cost of putting up a
new boundary. Sprinkle in the requisite amount of government waste and this one
seems bound to come off the rails…….
- Germany and Canada….the dynamic duo, back together again. Two
nations with a long (and virtually non-existent) history of teaming up to
accomplish great things have yielded more great results with researchers from
their respective countries producing a new map of the human brain. This is not the
bland, boring type of map that shows every brain cell and its every connection
or the kind that shows broad patterns of activity in brain regions. No, it’s a
work of classic anatomy, done with high technology. In all of its wonderful
simplicity, this map shows a three-dimensional reconstruction of a human brain
in unprecedented detail. Dubbed BigBrain, it s 50 times as detailed as previous
efforts and will be available to researchers everywhere. Lead author Katrin
Amunts of the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine in Jülich, Germany,
spilled the details of this exciting development, which depicts a specific
human brain, that of a 65-year-old woman. The brain was preserved in paraffin
after the woman’s death, sliced into 7,400 sections and photographed at a
microscopic level just above that of viewing individual cells. The resulting
picture will serve as a sort of anatomical framework that other researchers can
use as a reference to investigate both large patterns of brain function and its
finer details. Don’t confuse this useful anatomical map with the project neuroscientists
are pursuing in the new brain initiative from the Obama administration. Other
researchers have already expressed excitement over the chance to work with what
Amunts and her crew have created…….
- Riot Watch! Riot Watch! Things got real really fast in
Lebanon this week as a small-yet-rabid mob of 100 people clashed with
police as they protested against a decision to postpone parliamentary elections
in Lebanon until the end of next year. The violence sparked up when the
protestors boldly attempted to break through a security cordon outside
parliament and were beaten back by baton-wielding police. This balls-out crew
responded to the use of excessive force with some rather crude weaponry, namely
throwing sticks and bottles of water. There wasn’t a high rate of violence, as
only two demonstrators were lightly injured in the scuffles. The festivities
wound down by early evening, although demonstrators threatened to hold a
sit-in. Their quasi-uprising came nearly three weeks after the government voted
to postpone parliamentary elections, which had been due this spring, until
November of next year. Their motion to extend the normal four-year term between
elections was allegedly necessary because of "the security situation in
several Lebanese regions that gives rise to political escalation and division
which often take on confessional forms.” "Security and political tensions
prevent the holding of an election campaign," the legislation stated. When
it was passed, the bill was billed as the solution to a months-long deadlock
over a new electoral law and with Prime Minister Tamman Salam, who was named on
April 6. Salam remains unable to form a new government because of divisions
over Syria and he also happens to praise over a nation that fought its own bitter
civil war from 1975-1990. Lebanon’s Sunni Muslim opposition widely supports the
Sunni-led uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, while the Shiite movement
Hezbollah, a long-time Assad ally, is actively aiding his forces inside Syria.
Conflict or not, the brave protestors who rose up to demand justice are having
none of the plot to push back elections to address the tension……..
No comments:
Post a Comment