- Anyone who has paid even remote attention to the boxing
career of heavyweight titleholder
Vitali Klitschko knew that what the well-spoken Ukrainian did Thursday was
inevitable. Klitschko, a three-time world titleholder and older brother of
fellow heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko, has always been extremely
thoughtful and eloquent, and he has also been heavily involved in politics for
a while now. He has served on the Kiev city council and won a seat in the
450-person parliament in the elections last fall. With his star power and
charisma, it was only a matter of time before he aimed higher politically. "I
have decided to run for president of Ukraine [in] 2015," Klitschko said
during a speech in front of the Ukrainian parliament. He is the leader of the
UDAR political party in Ukraine and running for the nation’s highest office
could well mean the end of his boxing career. Klitschko has hinted at retirement
in favor of politics for the past few years and he has not fought since making
a ninth successful defense of his world title in September 2012, when he
stopped Manuel Charr in the fourth round on a cut in their fight held in
Moscow. A scheduled mandatory title defense against Bermane Stiverne this fall
was called off after Klitschko said he suffered a right hand injury in August. Stiverne
demanded that Klitschko be stripped of the title, but the WBC elected to hold
off on a decision until 2014. Politics became a much bigger part of Klitschko’s
life when he and his family left Los Angeles, where they had been living, and
returned to Ukraine. A failed run for mayor inspired him to found the Ukrainian
Democratic Alliance for Reforms (UDAR), a political party he said was
determined to clean up government corruption and give ordinary people fair
treatment. "We want to build democracy in Ukraine," Klitschko said
last year. "In Ukraine, you can buy everyone. You can buy every position,
every judge, you buy every court decision. The biggest enemy to democracy is
that there are no clear rules and so much corruption.” Oddly enough, both
boxing’s heavyweight division and his native country are troubled and in need
of his services, but Klitschko seems to have made his decision……
- Tens of thousands of people use online dating services
and if their omnipresent, overly sappy and power-pop-scored TV ads are to be
believe, such services are an amazing gift to modern daters. That logic doesn’t
seem to fit with the picture being painted by Vernon, Ct. resident Alison Champagne, a woman who is trying to
find love while also attending graduate school and working. She sought help
with her love life from a matchmaking service for working professionals called
It's Just Lunch and that help turned into a continuation of her string of
rejections and letdowns. Now, Champagne is seeking sweet revenge in the form of
a refund and some freaking answers. "Everyone said it was worth a
shot," Champagne said. Her shot came on the promise of It’s Just Lunch
taking care of everything from finding a potential suitor to arranging a lunch
date to making the reservation. She signed up for a plan that cost $2,600 for
one year of matchmaking, 10 dates, whichever came first. Champagne’s first date
was set for Labor Day, but her scheduled date stood her up. The dating service
told her that the man called the previous weekend to cancel, but because it was
a holiday weekend, no one was working and therefore, no one processed it. It’s
Just Lunch also claimed Champagne’s date called the restaurant, but the hostess
must not have told her. "Right after that I started looking up scams, and
things like that," Champagne said. "And I saw a lot of shady
things... a lot of people who had been stood up on their first date."
Fearing she might be getting scammed, Champagne began doing research on the
company but also decided to try another date with the same guy. However,
the company claimed it was unaware of her desire for a second date and offered
to set her up with a different date when the original one wasn’t available. Amazingly,
the second date canceled just a couple hours before the date. At that point,
Champagne reached out to a local TV station’s investigative team and they were
told that the company had offered her another date, but not a refund. By this
point, maybe she should just see if her story can engender any sympathy trying
to get a date on her own……….
- They’ve played every other continent, so Metallica has
decided to complete its around-the-world musical cycle by playing a gig in
Antarctica. The veteran rockers have confirmed a show to take place inside a
dome at the Argentine Antarctic Base Carlini on Dec. 8, with the audio transmitted
to the crowd through headphones. That audience will be comprised of the winners
of a competition in Latin America and those lucky winners will travel on an
Antarctic cruise from Dec. 3-10, stopping at Carlini for the gig. Playing
Antarctica will be a tough task, especially given the only other artist to play
the frozen tundra to the south of….everything. That other and would be a group
of musical scientists, called Nunatak, who performed in 2007 at British
Antarctic Survey's Rothera Research Station as part of the Live Earth climate
change awareness concerts. "We'll be playing inside a dome on the base and
in another twist, the show will be transmitted to the audience via headphones
with no amplification... a real first for us,” Metallica wrote in a post on its
website. “The show will also be streamed live for our friends in those Latin
American countries who cannot join us at the base and filmed to share with
everyone at a later date." The concert, as would be expected, has a
corporate sponsor: Coca Cola Zero, which will run the contest for folks living in
Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica or Mexico. Once they finish their frozen
set from the bottom of the world, Metallica may turn its attention to a
long-awaited set at Glastonbury, which remains the biggest festival they have
yet to play. Drummer Lars Ulrich recently said the band would love to play
Glastonbury, but worried the chances of it happening were slim. "Every
year there's probably less chance of us doing it than the previous year, but it
just looks like it would be a fun night out," Ulrich said……
- In a galaxy far, far away…..who knows what’s there? An international team of astronomers is aiming to find out after
discovering the most distant galaxy yet. This riveting new find is about 30
billion light-years away and could shed light on the period that immediately
followed the alleged Big Bang. The researchers found the galaxy using the
Hubble Space Telescope and its distance was subsequently confirmed by the
ground-based Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Due to the unfortunate length of time
required to travel from the outer edge of the universe to Earth, the galaxy
appears as it was 13.1 billion years ago (its distance from Earth of 30 billion
light-years is because the universe is expanding). "This is the most
distant galaxy we've confirmed. We are seeing this galaxy as it was 700 million
years after the Big Bang,” lead researcher Steven Finkelstein said.
Finkelstein, who sounds like a character from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” is a
researcher at the University of Texas. He and his team of astronomers were able
to measure how the galaxy – named z8_GND_5296 – is from Earth by analyzing its
color. Due to the aforementioned expansion of the universe, light waves are
stretched, making objects appear redder than they actually are (Note: This may
or not may explain John Boehner’s absurd skin coloration). The phenomenon is
know as redshift and this new galaxy has a redshift of 7.51, beating the previous
record-holder, which had a redshift of 7.21. While the new galaxy is small –
about 1-2 percent as massive as the Milky Way – it is rich in heavier elements
and is unique in its ability to turn gas and dust into new stars at a
remarkable rate, churning them out hundreds of times faster than our own galaxy
can. Way to be, science, you’ve actually done something interesting………
- If you’re going to restore an historic fresco, you had
damn well better do it right. Those words would have been helpful to the
unfortunate person tasked with restoring the historic frescoes in Chaoyang’s Yunjie Temple.
When sent to bring faded, dilapidated art back to life, this sucker instead
turned them into vivid, colorful new works of art that don’t look a thing like
the originals. Instead of a restoration, the artist painted new images directly
onto the nearly 300-year-old original ones using bright colors and bold lines. Once
a graduate student visiting the temple saw the botched restoration and posted
photos online, public outrage ensued and the officials responsible for
green-lighting the job were fired. Destroying cultural relics is not uncommon
in China, but for some reason to practice still pisses a few people off. The
man who photographed the paintings and posted them originally visited the
temple in 2011 and liked the ancient frescoes so much that he took some friends
back to see them during the National holidays at the beginning of October.
Commenters on his post mused that their children could do better work and that
the new frescoes are no longer real Chinese relics. The mangled frescoes were
housed in the Yunjie Temple, which was built in 1734 and is considered a
heritage site for Liaoning province. Inside the temple is a pagoda that has
also been designated a national heritage site. When restoration work on the
frescoes began in May, the manager of the temple insisted the effort was based
on original frescos and had been conducted by a professional fresco
artist. He added that he was happy with the result, possibly thinking that
no one would ever see the finished product and realize what had happened – because
he is a ginormous idiot. Instead, the mess came to light and the official in
charge of temple affairs and the head of the city’s cultural heritage
monitoring team have been fired. Li Haifeng, the Chaoyang government deputy
secretary-general, has since said the restoration was not approved by the
government and was carried out by a local company that was not qualified. In a
world full of understatements, that may be the biggest……..
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