Friday, June 21, 2013

Soccer bores the masses, Microsoft's new bad ida and bananas + cocaine


- Denmark’s youngest city just received an unexpected infusion of party-starting powder. Aarhus the third largest city in the country and located in its western half, was the scene of an interesting scene in which employees at the supermarket chain Coop were opening boxes of what they thought were bananas from Colombia. Even though quite a few boxes emigrating from that particular South American country tend to be coke-related, these employees were actually expecting to find bananas when they opened the boxes. Instead, they found about 220 pounds of what police believe is cocaine. The first hint employees had that something might be amiss was neither Charlie Sheen hovering over their shoulder as they opened the boxes nor a collection of coked-out strippers anxiously awaiting the contents of the containers. Rather, they noticed that some of the boxes were heavier than others. Coop spokesman Jens Juul confirmed that the bags of white powder were found inside the boxes and this was far from a one-time occurrence. More bags with white powder were found Wednesday in a separate shipment from Colombia at a central dispatch facility in suburban Copenhagen. Somewhere back in Colombia, a drug trafficker is extremely pissed off and looking for someone to pound to a bloody pulp for sending their product to the wrong place and in the meantime, Juul confirmed that the company has contacted their Colombian supplier. Police are still investigating and attempting to figure out who is responsible for the Colombian nose candy ending up in Denmark. There is always the option of simply breaking out a credit card and mirror and having some fun the way the shipper intended, but even the fun-loving, beer-swilling Danes don’t seem inclined to just turn the other cheek, lower their nose and get to it. So far, no arrests have been made…….


- Some folks really should not be allowed to own a GPS, a car or pretty much anything more dangerous than a pair of socks. An unidentified Massachusetts woman falls into that category, as evidenced by the fact that she followed her GPS right into the path of an oncoming train in Belmont. Transit police confirmed the details of the incident after officers were called to the Brighton Street railroad crossing Tuesday night when a minivan got stuck on the tracks and a commuter rail train slammed into it. Fortunately, the driver and her children escaped before the collision and no one was hurt. Her van was destroyed, but such is the price tag for sheer idiocy. Police have done her a disservice by not releasing her identity because if the world knew who she is and the true identity of one of the biggest tools walking the planet, perhaps this woman could shamed/motivated to find some way to up her IQ. Instead, transit police described what happened after she allegedly followed her navigational device’s instruction to make a right turn in a statement: “Unfortunately the right hand turn positioned her vehicle onto the railroad tracks, after attempts to drive off the tracks were unsuccessful the driver of the vehicle along with two minor children exited and moved away from the track area to a safe location. Shortly thereafter a MBTA Fitchburg bound commuter rail train struck the vehicle.” Nothing quite like looking ahead and seeing where one is about to go rather than blindly accept the word of a machine, especially in light of the issues users have experienced while following navigational helpers such as Apple Maps. Amazingly, the driver was not cited and the 70 passengers on the train emerged unharmed and were picked up by local buses to finish their journey……..
 

- The question was not if, but merely how much. Robert Downey Jr.'s four Marvel movies have grossed $3.9 billion, making the real question how much money he would get for the next few films he stars in for the studio and how many of them he would agree to make. The exact dollar amount wasn’t announced, but a new contract was on Thursday as Marvel broke the news that it had re-signed the man who plays Tony Stark for two more “Avengers” films. While the company did not address the progress on an “Iron Man 4,” it did confirm that Downey is on board for 
“Avengers 2,” which is set to begin shooting next spring with Joss Whedon back behind the camera. The tentative release date for the project is May 2015 and Downey recently noted that he is extremely comfortable in the role of Stark, the billionaire playboy who created the famed Iron Man suit. “We fit each other pretty snug, and I feel like when I’m him I know what to do,” he said. Fans of the first “Avengers” movie will undoubtedly be thrilled to hear the news and being a part of another round of the superhero team-up epic slides right into Downey’s already-packed filming schedule. He is currently shooting the legal-themed thriller “The Judge” for David Dobkin and once he’s done there, he will reunite with frequent collaborator Jon Favreau for mystery restaurant flick “Chef.” Neither will give him the chance to put on a fancy, high-tech suit or blow sh*t up while making out with Gwyneth Paltrow or partnering with Scarlett Johansson, Samuel L. Jackson and Chris Hemsworth, so returning to the role of Stark/Iron Man will be a nice break from dramatic roles in which he isn’t armed with planet-saving technology……..


- Even when soccer isn't a boring, no-goal affair filled with floppers, divers and ridiculous hooliganism from fans in the stands, it’s still boring. Witness Spain’s curb-stomping of the Pacific islanders from Tahiti 10-0 on Thursday at the Confederations Cup. The defending World Cup champion rolled up the Tahitian underdogs in a truly ridiculous mismatch that actually ended up being a bit less lopsided than some expected. Even Tahiti coach Eddy Etaeta said he feared Spain might score as many as 20 goals. Watching the Spaniards roll in a contest that amounted to a glorified scrimmage didn’t exactly give fans their money’s worth, but they did get to witness history in the form of the largest margin of victory ever in a Confederations Cup match. The previous record margin for the World Cup tune-up was six, when Brazil beat Saudi Arabia 8-2 in 1999 and beat Australia 6-0 in 1997. Spanish star Fernando Torres had himself quite a day, tallying four goals and nearly making it five when he had a penalty kick late in the match that he somehow missed. David Villa added three goals for the winners to fuel the beatdown of the crowd favorite Tahitians, who had Brazilian fans at Maracana Stadium cheering wildly for them and jeering the Spanish. Jeers or not, La Roja breezed through the game and when midfielder Mata tried to score with a bicycle kick with the score at 4-0, the crowd booed him relentlessly. When Torres missed his penalty kick late – and yes, Spain kept its starters in for much of the game despite its massive lead – the crowd erupted in cheers. Tahiti keeper Mikael Roche raised his hands in celebration as if he had made the stop himself. The Tahitians didn’t exactly show up expecting to win and Etaeta kindly put a flower lei around the neck of Spanish coach Vicente del Bosque before the game and called playing Spain a "Christmas present." His players displayed a similar sentiment, draping trinkets around the neck of the Spanish players just before the start in a gesture of friendship and respect. To Tahiti’s credit, its players did battle and trailed just 1-0 down after 15 minutes, but it was all pain and suffering from there. The one positive for Tahiti is that it didn’t come close to suffering the biggest rout in soccer history, which happened in 2002 when Stade Olympique de l'Emyrne scored 149 own-goals in a match against AS Adema in Madagascar in protest of what it claimed was biased refereeing……


- Microsoft is learning. It is now becoming more self-aware and realizing how terrible its new product ideas are before wasting loads of time and money launching them. The latest bad idea was an effort known internally as "Project Brazil,” which would have seen the house that Bill Gates built establishing its own online marketplace to compete with the likes of Amazon and eBay. That plan has since been abandoned and Microsoft is not moving forward with efforts to create an e-commerce hub that would have played host to a variety of retailers and tech companies. "Project Brazil was an incubation to enable a more direct commerce model between customers and brands and merchants," a Microsoft spokeswoman confirmed. The company does already have Bing Shopping, which allows users to compare prices on products and connect with participating merchants, but Brazil reportedly would have seen the tech titan taking a much more active role in transactions. Had the idea advanced, it would have been included in o a future version of Windows for PCs and tablets and eventually into other products, too, such as Microsoft's Xbox gaming consoles. Other plans reportedly included offering customers large discounts by subsidizing the prices of merchandise based on the amount of ads merchants bought on Bing or Redmond's other online properties. Microsoft refused to say when it officially killed the project or why, but the reason is largely irrelevant for a company that always gets its ass handed to it when it tries to mimic or compete with Google. For example, Microsoft earned just 3.8 percent of all search ad revenue last year, much less than Google and not nearly enough to effectively use ad sales to subsidize product pricing. Move on to the next terrible idea, Microsoft………

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