- Who isn’t bankrupt either morally or fiscally in Michigan
these days? Detroit is bankrupt and can't pay its former employees’ pensions
and Flint is such a hell hole that one of its city council members just quit
because he’s concerned about the safety
and economic well-being of its residents. Quitting is an unusual and some might
say cowardly way to address major problems facing a city one was elected to
help run, but 8th Ward councilman Michael Sarginson has chosen that path to
express his displeasure with the current direction of its city. "When you
watch the negativity that goes on in Flint day after day... it eats at you as a
council person," Sarginson said. The tipping point for the now-former
councilman came earlier this week after police failed to respond to an incident
he reported. "I called them, because one of my neighbors was a victim of a
crime and they never showed up," Sarginson added. Sarginson did not
provide specifics for the alleged crime, but Flint Mayor Dayne Walling said he
was told by the department that an officer was sent out to speak to the victim.
Sarginson insisted he was not aware of any such contact and ended up sounding a
bit pervy in explaining the problem. "A councilman has special needs...
and if a councilman has a situation where he needs help... they should at least
get back with him," Sarginson said. Hmm….sounds like someone is expecting
special treatment because of his position on the council and is pissed he
didn’t get it. The city will somehow forge ahead without Sarginson and it
shouldn’t take long to move on. The city's charter calls for the position to be
filled in the next 30 days and maybe the next Ward 8 councilman won't quit when
he isn’t treated like a local deity……….
- No credit for undoing what you never should have done in
the first place, NCAA. Also, no credit for pulling the plug on a ginormous
mistake you decided to put an end to only after a media uproar and after you
had made millions of dollars on the “mistake.” That mistake would be the
governing body for college sports selling
individual jerseys and other team-related memorabilia on its website. Facing
public outrage and a lawsuit by former players seeking a cut of the money the
organization made selling merchandise bearing their likeness, NCAA president
Mark Emmert on Thursday said college sports' governing body would stop its cash
grab, calling the practice a "mistake" and admitting others might
view it as hypocritical. The tipping point came after a report showing that
typing the names of Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel, Clemson
quarterback Tajh Boyd, South Carolina defensive end Jadeveon Clowney and other
high-profile players into the NCAA site's search function produced results with
jerseys emblazoned with those players’ numbers. Amazingly, the NCAA disabled
the search function after the news broke and issued a ridiculous, lame and
completely disingenuous quasi-apology. "In the national office, we can
certainly recognize why that could be seen as hypocritical, and indeed I think
the business of having the NCAA selling those kinds of goods is a mistake, and
we're going to exit that business immediately," Emmert said. "It's
not something that's core to what the NCAA is about, and it probably never
should have been in the business." You “probably” shouldn’t have
done it? My, what a courageous admission. Either way, the NCAA will stop selling team and player
merchandise and will offer NCAA championship merchandise only. Emmert then
claimed he didn't know when the NCAA started offering individual school's
merchandise on its website and tried to sell the idea that the governing body
didn't make money off the sales because it was an aggregator site. Whatever
works for you, Mark………
- Two Turkish Airlines pilots had a rough landing in Beirut in the early
hours of Friday. Lebanon can be a dangerous proposition for foreigners on any
given day, but this day was particularly hazardous for the pilots, who were
abducted in Lebanon by armed men who forced them from a bus driving from Beirut
airport. The entire situation remained clouded in mystery throughout the day
Friday as the Turkish foreign ministry and the airline said they were working
closely with the Lebanese authorities but had no immediate information on who
was behind the abductions or on the condition of the two men. There is always
the chance that the kidnappers had been on a particularly bad flight with a
plane full of crying babies, broken toilets, soggy sandwiches and a bumpy
landing before disembarking and finding their bags had been lost, so they decided
to exact some revenge. "We immediately contacted the Lebanese authorities
at every level ... and they are conducting a very comprehensive
investigation," Turkish foreign ministry spokesman Levent Gumrukcu said.
"As yet, we do not know who did it or for what purpose." There is a
possible link between Turkey, which has recently sought to secure its role as a
power in the Middle East, and its support of rebels battling to overthrow
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and resulting ties to fighters who captured
Lebanese Shi'ites close to the Turkish border in northern Syria last year. It
is an undoubtedly convoluted theory, but for now it is all the Turks have as
they try to answer the question, “Dude, where are my pilots?” The rest of the
crew were taken to in a Beirut hotel and returned safely to Turkey later in the
day. One silver lining is that an act of terrorism at an airport didn’t involve
a bomb or hijacking a plane and merely involved two pilots being kidnapped for
unknown reasons, although that probably won't make Turkey or the pilots’
families feel much better……..
- How do ancient proteins reveal clues about the
habitat and origins of life on Earth? Glad you asked. One particular protein is (allegedly)
existed almost 4 billion years ago in single-celled organisms linked to the
earliest ancestor of all life. It now survives in the extreme environments of
high acidity and temperature expected on early Earth and also Mars. A team of
Spanish and American studies examined the resurrected protein and wondered if
they had brought back something extraterrestrial. “Maybe we have resurrected Martian proteins. Maybe the last universal
common ancestor formed on Mars and transferred to Earth,” said Professor Jose
Sanchez-Ruiz of Granada University. The team looked at gene sequences in a protein
called thioredoxin, taken from a wide variety of modern organisms and placed
them on a molecular-scale tree of life to chart their progression from their
primordial forms. They used computer analysis to determine how modern genetic
sequences developed from original codes and try to track ancient DNA sequences
in the protein from as far back as four billion years ago. From there, the
researchers used modern bacteria to convert the ancient gene sequences into a
chemically active protein that could be measured to determine its molecular
structure and the properties of the ancient protein. The protein they studied is
an enzyme that can break sulphur bonds in other molecules and has a number of
metabolic functions in cells. Most life on Earth shares the protein and professor
Eric Gaucher of Georgia Tech pointed out how easily it can be altered. A gene
can become deactivated by as few as one or two mutations. If our ancestral
sequences were incorrectly inferred by having a single mistake, that could have
led to a dead gene,” Gaucher said. By the end of the study, the international
team linked the connections in the protein’s development to geological changes
in Earth's environment and reached the not-so-shocking conclusion that ancient
life lived in a hot environment…….
- Buy up those titanium umbrellas and seek shelter
immediately, world, because another Shaknado is on the way. After
so-awful-you-can’t-help-but-watch weirdness that seized the social media world
into a collective frenzy and the resulting buzz over the original SyFy
horror/horrible thriller “Sharknado,” the only real question about a sequel was
not if it would happen, but how quickly SyFy could crank it out. Amazingly, the
sequel will take more than the five minutes it seemingly took to conceive,
write, film, edit and produce the original film and it will premiere in July.
The movie also has a name: “Sharknado 2: The Second One.” The name is absurdly idiotic
and simple, likely by design, and the network announced the name Thursday while
revealing that fans played a large role in deciding what to call the project. "Since
Twitter played such a huge role in the success of the original movie, we wanted
to use that platform to ask our fans to name Sharknado 2," said Thomas
Vitale, executive vice president of programming and original movies at Syfy.
"This response is another reminder of how Sharknado has become a pop
culture phenomenon. We want to thank all our viewers for their wonderful
contributions to keeping up the shark-mentum." Because the cast of the
original film was comprised of E-listers who had boozed, coked or bad-acted
their way out of Hollywood, one would expect all of them to be extremely
available for the filming of the sequel. That means you, Tara Reid and Ian
Ziering. Don’t try to act like you have any better offers in front of you for
the next year or the rest of your acting career, for that matter……..
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