- Eccentric billionaires get to say and do a lot of stupid
sh*t that would get the rest of us fired and/or committed to a mental ward at
the nearest psychiatric hospital. New York Knicks team owner and Madison Square Garden executive chairman James Dolan is
one such individual. Aside from hiring the blatantly inept Isaiah Thomas,
allowing Thomas to ruin his historic franchise and then trying to hire Thomas
back after firing him in the wake of many losses and a sexual harassment
lawsuit, Dolan may have finally reached his zenith of crazy at the outset of
the 2013-14 season. Out of a recent meeting with the coaching staff and some
team executives comes the story of Dolan telling the assembled crowd that he
believes the Knicks have enough talent to win a title and that he expects them
to do so this season. In Dolan’s defense, the Knicks did win 54 games last season, finish in second
place in the Eastern Conference and win a playoff series for the first time in
13 years. Working against him is the fact that a team that could not even reach
the conference finals and made only minor additions while many of its Eastern
Conference rivals upgraded substantially. The nearby Brooklyn Nets overhauled
their roster with veteran talent, the Chicago Bulls get former MVP Derrick Rose
back after missing all of last season with an injury and the Miami Heat won the
title last year and added big man Greg Oden to their rotation. Most experts
predict the Knicks will finish no higher than fifth in the East and many within
the organization seem to agree, because sources said many in the room when
Dolan made his proclamation were stunned and rattled. Sure, a temperamental
billionaire who is footing the bill for the second-highest payroll in the
league expects results, but so does Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov, who has
publicly stated his expectations for his team to win the title this season. Knicks
coach Mike Woodson has said several times that he thinks the Knicks have enough
talent to compete for a title, but saying that is much different than the owner
letting everyone know that he expects it to happen………
- The world needs to brace itself because there is a new
(extinct) king of the dinosaur would. Researchers at the University
of Manchester have created a digital Argentinosaurus robot that
digitally demonstrates how the diplodocus was the biggest dinosaur to walk the
Earth. Their 80-ton behemoth would have left the mighty T-Rex at its knees,
leaving science to figure out how such a hulking creature would have moved its
vast bulk. The immense size of sauropods – of which the Argentinosaurus was a member – has always presented a
quandary for biologists because they push animal bones and muscles to their
limit. The long-necked, tree-trunk-legged titans of the Jurassic period seemed
to be too big to move effectively. The questions were numerous: How did their
muscles and bones support and move their big bodies? How could their digestive
system fuel that movement? "The biggest elephants weigh around six or
seven toes," said Dr. Bill Sellers, of the University of Manchester, who
led the digital robot study. "So Argentinosaurus was at least 10
times bigger than the biggest elephant. s you get bigger your weight goes up by
the cube of your height, but the force your muscles can generate only goes up
by the square, so your strength-to-weight ratio gets much worse." The
reconstruction was based on a rather limited fossilized combination of bones,
as only the Argentinosauruss legs and part of its spine have been
unearthed. Sellers and his colleagues scanned a reconstructed skeleton housed
at the municipal museum in Carmen Funes municipal museum in Argentina and
formed their digital dinosaur from there. Sellers admitted that with such
projects, there is always a temptation to make a reconstruction a bit bigger
than the dinosaur was simply to say yours was the biggest. To make the digital
dinosaur walk, the researchers used a beefy computer with a souped-up processor
and the results showed that to move effectively, the Argentinosaurus’s movements at its joints had to be
very restricted. That would have made getting very high off the ground
impossible, but when you can squash the other dinosaurs underfoot, that matters
a little less………
- Way to be, New York City Council. When you’re not doing
ass-hatted things like telling the world-famous Madison Square Garden that it
has one decade to move so you can expand Penn Station, you can actually
accomplish something worthwhile. For example, the council is the verge of
raising the minimum legal age to buy cigarettes in New York City from 18 to 21
after a vote Wednesday evening. City lawmakers approved raising the age in a
35-10 vote at City Hall and while the measure still must be signed by Mayor
Michael Bloomberg, the mayor has pushed for the bill as part of his efforts to
target the cigarette industry. In a statement released after the vote, Bloomberg
expressed strong support for the bill. “Between 2001 and 2011, New York City
cut the proportion of public high school students who smoke by more than half.
However, the decline in youth smoking in our city has stalled. We know that
tobacco dependence can begin very soon after a young person first tries smoking
so it’s critical that we stop young people from smoking before they ever
start,” Bloomberg said in the statement. “By increasing the smoking age to 21
we will help prevent another generation from the ill health and shorter life
expectancy that comes with smoking.” The bill itself is laudable, even if the
belief on the part of supporters that it would discourage young people from
starting early is total crap. Those who want to smoke are always going to find
a parent or older sibling to steal a cancer stick from or a friend to bum one
off of, but anything that prevents even one child from smoking is still solid. If
only ass-hatted Councilman Eric Ulrich (R-32nd) realized this. “I think the
city council made a big mistake today, what we are doing is essentially
empowering a black market,” Ulrich said. “We are hurting small businesses that
rely on cigarettes to bring people in to the stores.” Yes, way to pick death by
lung cancer or emphysema over taking some money out of the pockets of
convenience store owners. Under the proposed law, sellers who violate the law would
be fined up to $1,000 for each violation found in a single day and up to $2,000
for a second violation. Repeat offenders could eventually lose their license to
sell tobacco products……….
- David Bowie continue to be quite possibly the most pompous a-hole in
all of rock and roll. The man who was too big to show up live for the London
Olympics closing ceremonies despite being invited and the event being in his
home city and who rarely shows up in public anywhere these days could likewise
not be bothered to attend last night’s Mercury Prize ceremony. The British
music prize was handed out and Bowie was considered the fourth favorite to win
the prize with odds of 7/1, according to oddsmakers. Most musicians would be
honored to be one of the nominees and therefore would show up for the ceremony,
but Bowie is not most musicians. Instead of a live appearance, he debuted the
(literally) dirt-cheap music video he made for “Love Is Lost,” featuring a James
Murphy remix of a track from Bowie’s album “The Next Day.” The video was played
in full during the event, where Bowie was a nominee alongside Disclosure,
Arctic Monkeys, Foals and Jake Bugg. It was shot in simplicity on a home camera
with the help of assistant Jimmy King and best friend Coco Schwab and the
Spartan effort features a pair of puppets from Bowie's archives. The project
has been described as a "strangely moving gothic inflected story line
perfect for Halloween” and the entire effort was shot and edited in the singer’s
office in Manhattan. The total cost was $12.99 (plus tax), which was the amount
needed to buy a USB flash drive to download the finished video onto………
- What the hell is going on down under, Australia? Since
when can a government
employee who was injured while having sex in a motel room during a business
trip NOT receive ? If that’s the kind of world we now live in, maybe it’s time
to find a new world. The Australian High Court ruled 4-1 that the woman's
employer did not induce or encourage her to participate in the sex, so the
federal government's insurer, Comcare, was not liable to compensate her. Sadly,
the court’s ruling is final and could have ramifications for other federal
employees who claim compensation for unconventional work-related mishaps. The
woman could rightly have argued that sending her on a business trip and footing
the bill for her hotel room plus (theoretically) plenty of alcohol she would
pass off as a work-related expense, her employer did encourage her to take it
off and get some. Sadly, this working-class hero cannot be identified for legal
reasons, but her case has dragged on for six years. She was a federal civil
servant in her 30s when she was hospitalized for the injury in 2007 after she
was injured during a romp with an unidentified man in her hotel room. The woman
was injured while she and her new special friend were having sex and a glass
light fixture above the bed fell onto her face, injuring her nose and mouth.
After her coitus-related mishap, she suffered depression and was unable to
continue working for the government. Comcare initially approved her claim for
workers' compensation, but after what had to be some very uncomfortable
investigation, the company rejected the claim. The High Court had a chance to
play hero, but found the sex was "not an ordinary incident of an overnight
stay," such as showering, sleeping or eating. Clearly, none of the judges
have ever been on an extended business trip. Comcare is reportedly considering
its options for recouping the compensation it previously paid to the (not a)
victim……..
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