- OMG, the world as we know it is coming to an end! Pack
your tin foil helmets, stock up on batteries, non-perishable food items and
bottles water and head to your apocalypse bunker because the sh*t is about to
hit every fan in the world. Yes, the day we all feared is now imminent and
there appears to be nothing anyone can do about it. At the center of the drama
is French President
Francois Hollande, who is (supposedly) o the verge of destroying his country’s
professional soccer world because he refuses to exempt players from his
proposed 75-percent tax on the income of the über-wealthy. For some reason,
those within the French soccer community were under the impression that they
were special and could convince Hollande to give them a pass on paying the tax.
When he declined, teams began threatening to boycott matches in protest and the
Professional Union of Football Clubs warned that the tax could very well
"kill" French soccer. Industry representatives met with members of
Hollande’s regime late last week, but found no relief from the Socialist
leader's assault on top earners, which is a key component of his efforts to
shrink France's massive budget deficit and support its sagging economy.
"The need to raise the public accounts justifies fully this effort we are
asking companies to make, (companies) that choose to give out annual high
salaries," the government said in an official statement following the
meeting. Under the new tax, employers must pay the levy on salaries exceeding €1 million a year and do so for two
years. In response, the Professional Union of Football Clubs plans to strike in
protest later this month -- the first boycott of its kind in more than 40
years. They cite declining ticket sales and reduced incomes from television
rights as the reasons they cannot afford the tax, which sounds semi-plausible
until one looks at the eight-figure transfer fees many clubs pay when procuring
a star player from another team. Nice try, French soccer………
- Embarrassing stories of why folks ended up in an emergency
room with a spatula stuck up their backside or a pen up their nose are in
abundant supply in any hospital in America, but this is a first. New York
University student Asher Vongtau didn’t end up in an emergency room – at least not
initially – because he didn’t have a foreign implement stuck in him, but rather
it was he who was stuck in between two foreign objects. Vongatu is recovering
from injuries he sustained when he became trapped between two buildings in
Lower Manhattan and needed to be rescued. The sophomore was wedged in a coffin-sized
space next to 80 Lafayette Street for two days. It remains unclear (i.e. he
refuses to admit) how he came to be stuck between the two buildings, but rescue
workers had to breach a concrete wall to gain access to his location between an
18-story NYU dorm and a parking garage. He remains in serious but stable
condition at Bellevue Hospital after being pried from an area about 18 inches
wide just after 5 p.m. Sunday. His distraught mother traveled overnight to New
York City to be by her son's side as he was rescued, but said her son doesn't
remember the events that led up to him falling. She did say that Vongtau has
broken bones, bruises and possibly a fractured pelvis, but cannot remember how
any of it happened. Friends first reported him missing following a fire alarm
in the dorm Saturday morning and emergency personnel suggested they check the
roof first. An NYU public safety officer found Vongtau's cell phone on the roof
and hear him groaning in the space below. However it happened, authorities now
believe that Vongtau may have fallen out of a fifth floor window to get wedged
between the buildings. No word on how many cheap beers and/or bong rips may
have been involved……..
- There may be more habitable places in Earth’s immediate
vicinity than previously thought. new data from the Kepler space telescope shows at least
a fifth of stars surveyed have Earth-like planets in a "Goldilocks"
orbit. That orbit is a habitable sweet spot that's not too hot or too cold for
liquid water and making that figure all the more impressive, it is derived from
just the stars that are visible. So far, the NASA probe has photographed more
than 150,000 stars in the Milky Way galaxy and more than 3,000 planets have
been identified. After their initial findings, scientists turned their focus to
stars similar to our Sun and tried to find planets between one and two times
the size of Earth in those stars' Goldilocks orbital zones. They learned that
22 percent of the stars had planets about the size of Earth that could harbor
liquid water. For the biology-dumb, water is a basic building block for life as
we know it. Finding these locations is difficult, so the actual number could be
much higher with additional research. Kepler is also limited because it relies
on seeing planets pass directly in front of the target star on the same orbital
plane as its telescope. "What this means is, when you look up at the
thousands of stars in the night sky, the nearest Sun-like star with an
Earth-size planet in its habitable zone is probably only 12 light years away
and can be seen with the naked eye. That is amazing," said UC Berkeley
graduate student Erik Petigura, who led the team that analyzed the Kepler data.
Petigura’s crew examined 42,000 stars and found 603 planets orbiting them at
various distances. Of that number, 10 were Earth-sized and distant enough from
their stars to harbor liquids suitable for creating life. Geoffrey Marcy, a
professor of astronomy at Berkeley, extrapolated the findings across space and
speculated that our galaxy could contain billions of billions of Earth-like
planets. However, just because these planets can support life doesn’t mean
anyone lives there – not unlike Montana. Still, the possibilities are endless…….
- New characters on established television shows can have a
tough road early in their run with their new small-screen home. Replacing an
über-popular fan favorite can be even more difficult, which makes new “NCIS”
cast member Emily
Wickersham’s early success all the more remarkable. Wickersham hasn’t made a
single appearance on screen an already she seems to have struck a positive
chord. Her new character, Eleanor "Ellie" Bishop, an NSA analyst who
specializes in international threat assessment and global preparation, was
supposed to be a multi-episode recurring role, but producers announced Monday
that she has been upgraded to series regular. "Emily Wickersham's Ellie
Bishop is proving to perfectly complement the NCIS team," show runner Gary
Glasberg said in a statement. "Her energy and enthusiasm is
contagious. Great things are planned for Bishop and we couldn't be more
thrilled to have her on board." Wickersham is widely viewed as the replacement
for Cote De Pablo's departed Ziva David character, with De Pablo
deciding to leave the show to pursue other projects. Wickersham will make her
debut in the Nov. 19 episode, when Bishop is brought in to assist
with the investigation after Gibbs (Mark Harmon) and his team learn that the
Secretary of the Navy was bugged during a confidential briefing. If fans end up
liking the newcomer’s performance half as much as the suits at CBS and on the
show’s production team seem to, one of television’s highest-rated shows should
survive De Pablo’s departure without too much of a ratings dip……..
- The old truism holds once more: Look amongst enough piles
of rotting groceries in a run-down Munich apartment and eventually, you’ll find
hundreds of extremely valuable works of art by some of the greatest painters of the 20th
century. German authorities proved it true over the weekend by unearthing hundreds
of works of art by Picasso, Matisse and other masters that had been seized by
the Nazis, lost for decades and are now worth more than $1 billion. These
artistic gems were reportedly found among piles of rotting groceries in a
German apartment and were located as part of a worldwide effort that has been underway
since the end of World War II to recover masterpieces plundered by the Nazis
from Jews inside Germany and from elsewhere in Europe. It remains the largest
art heist in history and bit by bit, the pilfered treasure is turning up. The
pieces found in Munich include paintings, drawings and prints, all of which
will be appraised by experts, but their value is already estimated at more than
or $1.3 billion. In keeping with the idea of secrecy, German authorities have
not released photos of the cache, which also includes works by Marc Chagall and
Paul Klee. Investigators found the stash after a man taking the train from
Zurich to Munich was found carrying a large but legal amount of cash and he was
found to be the son of Hildebrand Gurlitt, a modern art specialist in the early
20th century. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels recruited
Gurlitt to raise cash for the Third Reich by selling art that had been
deemed degenerate by Adolf Hitler, but much of the art in Gurlitt’s custody
went to his son when the he passed away. The willfully ignorant or simply
clueless son claimed to have no idea of the art’s origin and didn’t bother to
find out. Cornelius Gurlitt, 80, kept the works hidden in darkened rooms in his
filthy, food-littered apartment in Munich and sold pieces when he needed money.
Gurlitt’s art treasure was actually discovered two years ago, but authorities
kept it quiet for reasons they have no revealed. Considering the fact that international
warrants are out for at least 200 of the prized works, there are a lot of
people who are interested to know what’s in this newfound collection…….
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