- There are loveable losers in life that you can't help but
like, no matter how often they lose or how much they fall flat on their faces. Lexington,
Ky. resident Henry Earl is one of those people and he has earned himself an
unusual title on the way to his dubious celebrity status. Earl has garnered
celebrity status among students and police in the city of 300,000 by racking up
what is believed to be the world record for arrests. No one knows for sure how
many times he has been arrested, but the current estimate is somewhere north of
1,500 times. Earl, a homeless man who goes by the name James Brown, has
reportedly logged almost 6,000 collective days in jail. His troubles stem –
shocker – from alcohol-related issues, as he can often by found shaking his groove
thing for change to buy his next drink. His most recent appearance came in Fayette
County court Thursday for a probation revocation hearing after being arrested
for alcohol intoxication last week. Because of the arrest, he spent
Thanksgiving in jail for the third time in five years. He also celebrated his
64th birthday there in October. Earl’s tale started innocuously enough, with a
modest 264 arrests in the 1970s and 1980s. When it was first discovered that he
had reached 1,000 arrests, various media outlets jumped on the story – and
promptly found out that they didn’t even know about those early arrests. In
other words, arrest No. 1,000 had come years ago and no one realized it. Even Lexington
police and Fayette County jail officials can't confirm an exact number because
their records go back to only 1992. Earl has been on the wrong side of the law
since 1970 and Lexington police spokeswoman Sherelle Roberts confirmed that
Earl has "definitely" been in handcuffs more than 1,000 times.
"It's
a weekly, if not every-two-or-three-days thing," she said. "He's
never doing bad or illegal things purposely. ... He's just so highly
intoxicated that he's posing a danger to himself.” Virtually all of Earl’s arrests
have been for alcohol intoxication, with the occasional criminal trespass mixed
in. For some inexplicable reason, judges have been showing a decreasing amount
of mercy to him of late and a few of his recent sentences have lasted three
months. This year, he has only been arrested five times……….
- Dear God, please no. Not again. Don’t make us suffer
through another interminably long and insipid season of Derrick Rose “Will he
or won't he?” debates. All basketball fans will recall the torture of last
season as Rose pretended he might come back from a torn ACL and help his
Chicago Bulls topple the mighty Miami Heat in the Eastern Conference playoffs.
Rose practiced at full speed, worked out in practice gear before games and
released videos hyping his return, only to sit out the entire season. He then pronounce
himself fully healthy and ready to play at the start of this season….and
summarily tore the meniscus in his other knee just 10 games into the season.
The prognosis for the injury was bad enough that Rose was to miss the rest of
the season and essentially have two years in the prime of his career wiped out.
But wait…..Rose says it may not be so. "If
I'm healthy and the situation is right, I'm going to be back playing," he
said during a news conference in his first public comments since tearing the
meniscus in his right knee Nov. 22. "If I'm healthy and my meniscus is
fully healed, of course I'll be out there playing. But if it's something
totally different and the outcome is not how I would want it to be, there's no
need." That’s right, Rose is once again dangling that carrot in front of
fans and media members even though Bulls general manager Gar Forman said last
week that Rose is "really out" for the season regardless of the
Bulls' potential for a postseason berth. The smart money would be on Foreman
telling the truth and Rose being full of sh*t when it comes to playing again
this year, but of course that won't stop fans and media members from constantly
speculating about Rose’s health, overanalyzing his performance in half-speed
drills and breathlessly pontificating about when he’ll be back in action. Even
if Rose doesn’t return to the Bulls this season, the speculation can live on
into the offseason because he is (shockingly) unsure if he will play for Team
USA next summer. Good times………
- Thieves are not always the smartest lot. They pull stupid
stunts like stealing ginormous trucks whose contents they don’t know. They are
people like the two unfortunate fools who thieved a truck carrying "extremely
dangerous" radioactive material in Mexico earlier this week, only to
abandon the truck when they realized how much trouble they were in. The stolen
truck was found close to the place where it was stolen, while the cargo was
found about half a mile from the container. Authorities believe the thieves
probably opened the container not knowing what it was carrying and burned
themselves. The something inside was the radioactive isotope cobalt-60, which
was being transported from a hospital to a waste storage center, the
International Atomic Energy Agency said. The radioactive material was shielded,
but removing the shielding would expose a person to lethal levels of radiation.
IAEA officials believe the thieves are likely either dead or dying following
the incident. Crews quickly worked to close off the area once the truck - a
2.5-ton Volkswagen truck with an integrated crane - was found. It was stolen
Monday from a gas station in Tepojaco, near Mexico City. Mexico's federal,
state, and local authorities searched for the vehicle across several states and
are still trying to determine who stole the truck and why, although there is no
indication it was taken for any criminal or terrorist purpose. The good
news is that the truck contained only a thumb-sized amount of cobalt-60, used
in medical treatments. The bad news is that this amount of radioactive material
could be ground up and used to make a dirty bomb. Cobalt-60 is among the
materials that would be hardest to disperse over a wide area if such a
dangerous device would be made and according to safety guidelines on the IAEA
website, a "malevolent use of radioactive sources…could also cause
significant social, psychological and economic impacts." In this case, the
only ill effects appear to be limited to two kooks who were both stupid and
misfortunate………
- The cast is gradually rounding into form for the upcoming
“Batman vs. Superman” film and quite believably, none of the casting choices
are generating as much hate from fanboys and critics as Ben Affleck as the
caped crusader. For example, “Fast & Furious 6” star Gal Gadot has snagged the coveted
role of Wonder Woman in the superhero epic and so far, there have been zero
online petitions demanding director Zack Snyder change his mind and find
someone who won't totally suck in the role. "Wonder Woman is arguably one
of the most powerful female characters of all time and a fan favorite in the DC
Universe," Snyder said in a statement. "Not only is Gal an amazing
actress, but she also has that magical quality that makes her perfect for the
role. We look forward to audiences discovering Gal in the first feature film
incarnation of this beloved character." Gadot has a diverse background,
having won the Miss Israel title in 2004 and going on to represent Israel at
the 2004 Miss Universe beauty pageant. Prior to that, she served in the Israeli
Army for two years. More recently, she has filled the role of Giselse the
car-loving hottie in the two most recent movies in the “Fast and Furious”
franchise. She joins Snyder, Affleck (Batman) and Henry Cavil (Superman) in the
star-studded cast of “Batman vs. Superman,” which is expected to begin filming
some time next year. The project is a sequel to this year’s “Man of Steel” and
while production will start in a matter of months, the film’s scheduled release
date isn’t until July 17, 2015. In between now and then, perhaps if Snyder
tries really, really hard, he can find an actor that fans will hate and
attempted to get fired more than they hate and are still trying to get Affleck
fired……..
- We’ve all been wondering….and now we might know. Or not.
Fact is, science isn’t sure and the world isn't sure it had any idea what
science is talking about when it tells us that wormholes — shortcuts that
in theory can connect distant points in the universe — might be linked with the
spooky phenomenon of quantum entanglement. For those not in the know, this
phenomenon involves the behavior of particles being connected regardless of
distance. If accurate, these findings could help scientists explain the
universe from its very smallest to its biggest scales. They could also fuel a comprehensive
theory describing how the cosmos works. Currently, two disparate theories
exist: quantum mechanics and general relativity. One specific prediction of the
theory of general relativity devised by Einstein involves wormholes, formally
known as Einstein-Rosen bridges. Under this theory, wormholes - can behave like
shortcuts connecting any black holes in the universe. Oddly, quantum mechanics
also has a phenomenon that can link objects such as electrons regardless of how
far apart they are — quantum entanglement. Einstein mockingly called this
seemingly impossible connection "spooky action at a distance,” but numerous
experiments have proven quantum entanglement is real. Proving a connection between
entanglement and wormholes could help reconcile quantum mechanics with general
relativity on both large and small scales. Kristan Jensen, a theoretical
physicist at Stony Brook University in New York, carried out the research based
on the theory that wormholes are linked with entanglement. HIS premise was that
wormholes are each pairs of black holes that are entangled with one another.
They could be created simultaneously and automatically entangled, or radiation
given off by a black hole could be captured and then collapsed into a black
hole, and the resulting black hole would be entangled with the black hole that
supplied its contents. Jensen worked with theoretical physicist Andreas Karch
at the University of Washington in Seattle and investigated how entangled pairs
of particles behave in a supersymmetric theory, which suggests that all known
subatomic particles have "superpartner" particles not yet observed. Jensen
and Karch discovered that if one imagined entangled pairs in a universe with
four dimensions, they behaved in the same way as wormholes in a universe with an
extra fifth dimension. What does this mean? Merely that entanglement and
wormholes may be one in the same………
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