- His location is new, but Brooklyn Nets power forward
Kevin Garnett’s unbridled rage against anyone who dares to step to him remains
the same. Garnett, who was traded from Boston to Brooklyn this offseason,
clearly took his hatred of the Miami Heat and their star with him to New York.
After LeBron James said that Garnett and Nets small forward Paul Pierce should apologize for hypocritically criticizing Heat sharpshooter
Ray Allen for leaving the Boston Celtics because they had done the same thing,
Garnett was having none of it and before the two teams met in an exhibition
game Wednesday night, KG had a little something for LBJ. "Tell LeBron to
worry about Miami. It has nothing to do with Celtic business," Garnett
said. James was equally direct in his remarks and that goes a long way to
explaining why Garnett was so angry – along with the simple fact that he’s
Kevin Garnett. "I think the first thing I thought was, 'Wow, Ray got
killed for leaving Boston, and now these guys are leaving Boston,'" James said. "I think it's
OK; I didn't mind it. But there were a couple guys who basically [expletive]
on Ray for leaving, and now they're
leaving. "That's the nature
of our business, man. I don't know what Boston was going through at the end of
the day.” Pierce was less confrontational when asked about the debate and
danced around it by passive-aggressively pointing out that while he is no longer
in Boston, he was traded and didn’t simply sign with another team. "I left
Boston?" Pierce said when asked of James' comments. Garnett’s instructions
to James to shut up and keep he and Pierce’s names out of his mouth remain the
proper way to handle such disagreements……..
- Who doesn’t want free peanut butter for life? It’s a
rhetorical question, even for people with peanut allergies, but they too would
love to have a bottomless supply of that rich, creamy goodness for the rest of
their life – if they’re smart and have a death wish. Vermont Peanut Butter is a
small company looking to grow and they understand this concept well. It’s why
they’re combining a unique offer with a pitch to invest in their fledgling enterprise
in its early stages. To grow beyond a company that simply cranks out jar after
jar of the brownish spread, VPB has plans to begin producing single-serve
packets of peanut butter for people on the go. Adding a new product and
producing the packaging for it can be an expensive proposition, so the company
is reaching out to the local community for help. In order to raise the
necessary $50,000 to launch the new line, VPB is seeking 50 investors to give
them $1,000 each and in exchange, those investors will receive free peanut
butter each week for the rest of their life. "When we have this equipment in place, we'll be able to manufacture
over 10,000 packets a day," said company executive Chris Kaiser. Those who
invest $1,000 will receive two limited-edition Mason jars that can be filled
with any VPB variety weekly for the rest of their lives. The promotion has been
dubbed “Forever Nuts” and those who live close to the company’s Morrisville
location can either pick up their peanut butter at the plant or designate two
people to fill up jars for them. Those who live out of state can pay to have it
shipped. The promotion has been running for two weeks and so far, the company has
17 out of its 50 investors. Its plan to create single-serve packets dates back
for years, when Tropical Storm Irene washed away its Waterbury location.
"We had the pouches they were designed and in-house, we had a few
components of the machine in-house, and all that was destroyed," Kaiser
said. Vermont Peanut Butter rebounded and revived its dream in Morrisville and
now, they’re sharing that dream with others……….
- Winter is lurking and after last winter’s “Airpocalypse,” government
officials in Beijing are already working to ensure they aren’t a global laughing
(and coughing) stock again. Communist overlords have introduced new guidelines
for dealing with so-called “bad-air” days and the focal point is the city’s
roadways. Under the new rules, an alternative driving day schedule for cars is
the proposed solution. Those with even-numbered license plates and those with
odd-numbered plates will alternate being allowed to drive on days when Beijing
issues a “red alert” under a four-tiered pollution warning system. The red
alert will be issued when the air quality index (AQI) is expected to be over
300 over a three-day period, which is pretty much every three days in the
smog-choked capital. In addition to banning some drivers from the road for the
day, the capital will increase public transportation frequency and hours of
service for residents. China’s Environmental Protection Bureau estimates that
the new rules would force an estimated 2 million more people onto the city’s
already packed buses and subway system. City officials would be subject to the
law as well, keeping 30 percent of
the city’s fleet of vehicles to stay off the roads during bad-air days. Similar
restrictions were put in place throughout the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing
as China sought to not embarrass itself during the world’s biggest sporting
event by having every single athlete drop dead due to its toxic air. A
scaled-down version of the traffic restrictions have remained in place since
then, but the primary focus has been on reducing traffic congestion as opposed
to improving air quality. There actually has been marginal improvement in terms
of air quality since 2008, but if there had been substantive improvement then
the new regulations would not require industrial plants and constructions sites
to suspend or limit work to control particulate in the air. Oh, and outdoor
barbeques would not be suspended in the event of an orange alert, which they
will be going forward. No barbeques, Beijing? What the hell is this, Communism?
Never mind……….
- Dammit, Oxford University genetics professor Bryan Sykes,
did you really need to ruin it for humanity? Sykes couldn’t allow mankind to
enjoy the possibility that the
legendary Himalayan yeti was wandering around the mountains in all of its furry
awesomeness, threatening to snap any man in half if that man dared to cross its
path. Instead, this science nerd had to do actual research and conclude that
the Himalayan yeti may in fact be a sub-species of brown bear. Sykes conducted
DNA tests on hair samples and found that they matched those from an
ancient polar bear. That led him to theorize that the myth likely stems from
the fact that the animal is a hybrid of polar bears and brown bears. "I
think this bear, which nobody has seen alive... may still be there and may have
quite a lot of polar bear in it," he said. "It may be some sort of
hybrid and if its behavior is different from normal bears, which is what
eyewitnesses report, then I think that may well be the source of the mystery
and the source of the legend." Blah, blah, blah. So you conducted DNA
tests on hairs from two unidentified animals, one from Ladakh - in northern
India on the west of the Himalayas - and the other from Bhutan, and found their
genetic makeup to be very similar to that of polar bears and brown bears.
Comparing your results with the genomes of other animals that are stored on a
database of all published DNA sequences and finding a 100-percent match with a
sample from an ancient polar bear jawbone found in Svalbard, Norway is not
nearly as exciting or cool as proving that the yeti really exists. The sample
from Ladakh came from around 40 years ago, while the second sample was in the
form of a single hair, found in a bamboo forest by an expedition of filmmakers
around 10 years ago. Sykes admitted that his results were "completely
unexpected" and that more work needed to be done interpreting them. Damn
right they do, professor, because the yeti is not happy with you right now…….
- Hint: if the season finale of your show requires a
29-minute audiobook to explain what one of its central characters did in between
the closing minutes of the episode and the start of the next season, then maybe
the episode didn’t do quite enough ‘splaining. “Homeland” producers should take
note of this idea because they just released a 29-minute audiobook
explaining what Damian Lewis's character
Brody has been doing between the end of season two and the start of season
three. “Homeland: Phantom Pain,”
the audiobook is narrated by Lewis and available to download from Audible. A
synopsis – yes, there is a synopsis – for the audiobook fills in some of the
gaps and sounds as complicated as the season finale itself. "Picking up at
the end of Season two after he has parted from Carrie at the border, Brody
relates, in the form of a letter to Carrie, his desperate escape by sea and
land as the world's most-hunted fugitive. Guided off the grid by a former CIA
analyst and a battle-scarred French mercenary, he stays in the shadows... both
physically and emotionally. But wherever he goes and whoever he meets, he cannot
stop thinking about Carrie,” the synopsis reads. All of this should be helpful
to fans who have been asking unanswered questions since the third season of
HBO’s popular drama premiered on Sept. 29. The premiere wasn’t as exciting as
it should have been for many fans, as the episode leaked nearly a month early and
within hours, had been downloaded illegally over 100,000 times. Wonder how many
of those fans are enthusiastically downloading the audiobook to find out what
they’ve been missing……
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