- Engagement photos remain some of the most ridiculous
examples of photographic and financial waste around, but they can still save
lives – yes, save lives. All folks need to do is hear the tale of Becki Salmon and
Matt Werner of Andorra, Pa. and they can learn a life-saving lesson. Salmon and
Werner were recently engaged and did what so many newly betrothed couples do:
hire a photographer to schlep out to some local park or small waterfall and take
“romantic” posed shots of them gazing adoringly and faked-ly into one another’s
eyes. There they were, on the banks of the Wissahickon Creek in Fairmount Park,
using up three hours of their lives trying to get the perfect engagement
photos. "It was hot, it was humid, and it was awful in the sun,"
Salmon recalled. As they were going through their photo shoot, their
photographer inadvertently caught a young boy playing on the rocks behind them
and falling into the water. The boy quickly sank beneath the surface and fought
to get back to land. "He was obviously struggling to get back to the
surface," Salmon said. "His head went back. He was bobbing up and
down. I knew he was going under." Rather than wait for someone else to
act, Salmon jumped into the creek fully clothed. She said afterward that she
would have reacted the same way regardless of how she was dressed. "If I
would have had my wedding dress on that, that's what I would have been in the
water in," she said. Photographer Ken Beerger’s assignment went from
captured posed, cheesy shots of people in love to shooting a dramatic rescue
scene. As he snapped away, Salmon grabbed the boy and pulled him to safety,
eventually helping force the water from his lungs. Heavy rains had left the
river higher than normal and muddy with sentiment that had washed into the
water. Had the boy sank fully below the surface, he may have never been found
alive. The lesson to be learned, as always, is that if you’re a negligent
parent who doesn’t monitor their 5-year-old son when close to water, just make
sure there is a trained lifeguard and paramedic nearby who is in the midst of
an engagement photo shoot………
- If the world were a fair place, every lawsuit involving
a member of the Hack Eyed Peas would immediately be decided in favor of the
opposing party. It’s the only right thing to do when the most abysmally awful
and untalented bunch of hacks to get together and make music in the past two
decades tries to win a judgment against anyone else for any reason. In that
fair world, über-producer Pharrell Williams would already have won the
lawsuit he just filed against HEP member and “The Voice (Karaoke)” will.i.am after Williams
was accused of violating trademarks owned walking musical joke that is
willi.i.am. According to the lawsuit, will.i.am has demanded that Pharrell stop
using the phrase "I AM", a reference to his I Am Other company, on
his websites. The snarky lawsuit labeled will.i.am's trademark as
"relatively weak" before going onto the semantic argument that Pharrell's
trademarks do not feature periods between the I and the am, while will.i.am's
do. Pharrell's spokesman Brad Rose has petitioned the court rule that "I
Am Other" doesn't "infringe, dilute or unfairly compete" with
will.i.am. For his part, will.i.am has previously denied reports that he was
suing Pharrell for the use of "I Am" while two-facedly saying he has
only “done what any trademark owner must do to protect and maintain a
trademark,” according to his lawyer, Ken Hertz. "We think their proposed
trademark is too close to our registered and common law trademarks. They
disagree. We hope to work out a sensible compromise that will allow both
parties to move forward without unnecessary acrimony," Hertz said. Williams
should win the lawsuit based on the fact that his music sucks a lot less than
the plaintiff’s, but even if he loses, he still has appearance on the top two
best-selling singles of 2013 to his credit and plenty of producing gigs in the
works……..
- Google aims big and Yahoo must follow suit. While Google’s
quest for world domination in the tech field and beyond is well-known, Yahoo is
just now showing the desire to do battle for technological superiority. Its
push continued Wednesday when Yahoo acquired email and address book management app
Xobni, the company’s third acquisition in as many days as part of a push to overhaul
its online products and boost its Web traffic. According to a company
statement, Yahoo will integrate Xobni's technology into its communications products,
including the mobile and PC versions of its email and instant messaging
services. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the
reported value of the agreement is $30-40 million. As part of the deal, 31 Xobni employees
will be joining Yahoo, including Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bonforte, who
previously worked at Yahoo. In the year since Marissa Mayer became chief
executive at Yahoo and began issuing promises to boost traffic to Yahoo's
online services and revive its stagnant revenue growth, such acquisitions have
become increasingly common. So far, Yahoo has acquired more than a dozen small,
Web startups to add to its roughly 11,000 employees, with a heavy focus on adding
technology and services designed for smartphones and tablets. The deal to buy
Xobni came one day after the company acquired Qwiki, a mobile app that creates
mini-movies using a consumer's collection of photos and videos, and two days
after it acquired Bignoggins Productions, a mobile app to help players of
fantasy sports games. Maybe the efforts are working because shares of Yahoo finished
Wednesday's regular trading session up 2.4 percent at $25.59……….
- Evo Morales is NOT happy. That will happen when a nation’s
president is treated like some unruly drunk on a commercial flight and has his
private plane grounded because of a false rumor that a certain NSA leaker was on
board. The Bolivian presidente’s jet took off from Vienna, Austria, on
Wednesday morning almost 14 hours after it was allegedly forced to land there
while it was taking Morales home from Russia, where he had met with Russian
President Vladimir Putin at a summit for gas exporters. The Bolivian government
promised to complain to the United Nations over the "abduction" of
its president, claiming international law had been violated. Its threats
to file a formal complaint to the U.N. Human Rights Commission may seem
extreme, but that’s what happens when France, Portugal, Italy and Spain all deny
a plan access to their airspace. No unauthorized people were found on board the
plane and Vice President Alvaro García Linera called the incident a straight-up
kidnapping. “We want to tell Bolivians, we want to tell the world, that
President Evo Morales, our president, the president of all Bolivians, was
kidnapped in Europe today," Linera proclaimed in front of the official
presidential residence in the capital, La Paz. "We want to say to the
nations of the world that President Evo Morales has been abducted by
imperialism and is being held in Europe.” Yes, abducted by imperialism. It’s a
great phrase and while hideously over the top, Morales was just as bombastic
when he issued a statement from aboard his presidential plane Wednesday. “I
feel this was an excuse to frighten, intimidate and punish me. More than
anything, an excuse to try and silence us on the struggle against the politics
of plunder, invasion and domination,” Morales said. His statement also alleged
that his life was put in grave danger when Portugal and France stopped
his plane at the last minute. “I don’t understand why France, Italia, Portugal and Spain would say
... that they were stopping me because I was taking a certain Edward Snowden,”
he said. His amigos in Cuba backed up his words, denouncing the international
decision to divert Morales' flight as "inadmissible, unfounded and
arbitrary." Yes, but that decision did yield some entertaining angry
rhetoric and ramped up tensions between several nations, always a positive
thing……..
- Derrick Rose still doesn’t seem to get it. The Chicago Bulls star who missed all of last
season while recovering from ACL surgery and he still believes he handled his “attempted”
comeback last season the right way. Rose, who began practicing with his team
during the season and reportedly looked great doing so, also warmed up on the
court before games in plain sight of fans and media and along with his brother
and agent Reggie Rose, filmed a series of videos hyping his comeback from his
ACL tear. He took heat from former players like Charles Barkley and Steve Kerr,
who questioned why he wouldn't play in a game if he looked that good in
practice and had been practicing for that long. Rose now says that he had to be
selfish in his recovery process, regardless of what anyone said. "It was
hard," Rose said. "One of the hardest things I've had to go through
in my life. After surgery, when you start running ... when you have an injury
like this, there is stages you have to go through, I'm still going through my
stages. I'm not a selfish guy at all, but having this injury and going through
what I had to go through and being smart, it's something that I had to be
selfish with. I couldn't worry about anyone else but myself and my
health." Oddly enough, he would have received much less heat had he made
it clear all along that he would not be coming back this past season under any
circumstances, no matter how good he looked on the court in practice. Instead
of giving vague answers about coming back when it was God’s will and refusing
to close the door on playing, he could have merely filmed no promotional
videos, kept his workouts in the dark and not led anyone on. Even though the Bulls
had expected a return after the All-Star break and Rose was in early March, it’s
likely that very few would have excoriated him verbally if he simply said, “I don’t
believe it’s safe for me to play this season, so I’ll see you next year.”
Instead, he was wishy-washy and simultaneously fed the hype for a return while
never committing to anything. Being selfish is fine; sending conflicting
message is not. His halfway-there act played that much worse after his
shorthanded team scrapped to first-round playoff win against Brooklyn before
falling to Miami in the second round………..
No comments:
Post a Comment