- Welcome back to the one part of your musical career that
doesn’t suck, Cee Lo Green. The part-time reality karaoke coach and part-time
crappy solo artist has revealed that he will reunite with
bandmate/über-producer Brian Burton (a.k.a. Danger Mouse) in 2014 and bring
back to life the musical outfit known as Gnarls Barkley. Green was asked
whether he and Burton would ever work together again. The pair have not teamed
up since 2008’s “The Odd Couple,” but Green suggested they would ride together
again very soon, “Yeah man, like next year,” he said when asked about a
reunion. Both of Gnarls Barkley’s releases – including their 2006 effort “St.
Elsewhere” – were well-received, which is more than can be said for the garbage
Green turns out these days as a solo artist. Two years after Gnarls Barkley
went on indefinite hiatus, Green released his suck-tacular solo debut, “The
Lady Killer,” and an even worse Christmas album, “Cee Lo’s Magic Moment,” which
was not magical and more than a moment long. Since then, Green has been making
a living as one of the coaches/karaoke judges on “The Voice,” judging and
coaching alongside the hack-tastic man-bander Adam Levine, some country music
signer and the artist formerly cared about as Christina Aguilera. Burton, on
the other hand, has been producing for the likes of Frank Ocean, U2 and The Black Keys.
He is also one-half of another alternative duo, Broken Bells, with The Shins
frontman James Mercer and that duo will release their second album next
month………
- Even small-town history can be torn down. In Ashland City,
Tenn., this reality was hammered home early Monday morning. An old cantilever bridge had helped travelers cross
the Harpeth River for more than 80 years, but like many once-useful relics
(Mitch McConnell, please stand up) it has been replaced by something newer and
better. Last year, the Tennessee Department of Transportation began
constructing a new bridge. With the new span mostly completed, the old bridge
was merely in the way and because “The Bridges of Madison County” has already
been filmed and no one is coming to Middle-of-Nowhere, Tennessee to crank out a
sequel, there was simply no use for what had become a landmark along the
Harpeth River. With power tools roaring and heavy equipment operating, the
bridge was torn down, ending its 83-year lifespan. Dozens of locals showed up to
watch the demolition as crews shut down traffic on the new bridge so folks
could park and brave sub-freezing temperatures for more than an hour waiting to
see workers demolish the old bridge. As the parts of the old bridge tumbled to
the water, a loud splash rang out along the river and 83 years of history were
reduced to a heap of soggy scrap metal in a matter of seconds. The modern
bridge that will replaced the old version is projected to be complete by June, with
a very affordable price tag of just $8 million and change………
- The Detroit Lions have been a beautiful disaster over
the second half of the NFL season. It’s only fitting that their campaign should
end in a spectacular ball of flame with its captain losing his mind and
screaming obscenities at those around him. After a 6-3 start and a nice hold on
first place in the NFC North, the Lions have lost five of their last six games
and were eliminated from the playoff race with Sunday’s loss to the New York
Giants. The man captaining that disaster, head coach Jim Schwartz, is not
exactly going down with class and dignity. Near the end of regulation, as his
team took a knee to run out the clock and head to overtime rather than try for
a game-winning drive using their two remaining timeouts, fans booed lustily.
That prompted an irate Schwartz to turn and shout loudly and unspecifically in
the direction of the fans, seeming to respond to their discontent with some of
his own. A coach getting hooked by the fans is never a good look and doing so
in a game that ended with his team completing a six-week tank job is even
worse. Yet when Schwartz was asked about it the next day, he insisted he wasn’t
yelling at the fans and was instead trying to fire up his team for overtime (by
yelling at the fans). "Really
it wasn't directed ... I didn't grab the microphone and make a crowd announcement,"
Schwartz said. "But it was a situation that, from a coaching standpoint,
we looked at that situation, and we've had similar times in the past where
we've run a very similar play to that and broken free and got yards and taken a
timeout and had a shot at the field goal or a shot at the end zone."
Trying to defend a failed trap play chased by two knees and an overtime loss
looked almost as bad as the initial screaming, although Schwartz said his
reaction to the boos wasn't meant as a "slight" to fans. He ducked a
question about whether his bosses -- general manager Martin Mayhew or the
team's owners -- have said anything to him about the outburst and admitted he'd
thought about saying something to fans at the end of the first half but kept
quiet. But perhaps his most absurd observation of all was the claim that his
team’s season was not a failure. "We didn't make the playoffs and it's
obviously anybody's goal when they go in, so we didn't achieve that goal,"
Schwartz said. "But I don't know if I'd be as strong as to call it a
failure. That was the word you used. I don't know if I'd be as strong to call
it that.” If only you were as strong now as when you were screaming down your
own fans, Jimbo……..
- This is different. Planes occasionally end up in parts of
the airport where they should not be, but most of the time those situations
occur when an aircraft lands in difficult circumstances and chaos ensues. Über-rare
is the occasion when a plane crashes into a terminal before it even gets off
the ground. That is precisely what happened late in the night as the wing of a
jetliner carrying some 180 passengers sliced through a building at the airport
in Johannesburg, South Africa, just as the plane was about to take off. No
passenger or crew on board the British Airways flight were injured , according
to Harriet Tolputt, a spokeswoman for the international aid agency Oxfam, who
was on the flight. Four ground employees who were in the building sustained
"minor injuries," Airports Company South Africa, which runs the
airport, said in a statement. The flight was bound for London, but getting
there took much longer and one more plane change than passengers were hoping
for. Tolputt recalled the plane taxiing along the runway when a loud crash
stunned all aboard the aircraft. Passengers told stories of seeing the wing hit
the building on the edge of the runway at O.R. Tambo International Airport.
British Airways confirmed that the Boeing 747 was damaged, but said the
189 people on board disembarked safely and that a “full investigation” was
underway. Passengers were put up in nearby hotels overnight, with some shaken
and in tears. Their flight was troubled from the outset, as they waited an hour
for crews to put foam on a fuel leak. One would surmise that they were happy to
get on a different plane with different pilots the next day……….
- The world may be short on water, but Greenland has
plenty – and not just because it’s a frozen tundra that merely needs to be
thawed. It’s also because there is a massive reservoir of melt water rapped underneath
the frozen landscape of the Greenland ice sheet, where temperatures often hover
below zero degrees Fahrenheit, according to new analysis. Some intrepid
researchers from the University of Utah discovered the huge aquifer while drilling for
core samples in 2011 and began studying the area further. This took some time,
as the gigantic reservoir was found to be roughly 27,000 square miles, an area
about the size of Ireland. Using ice-penetrating radar featuring two drills,
the research team probed as deeply as they could and when they pulled their
equipment back to the surface, it was pouring liquid water, despite air
temperatures in the area were around minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit. Water was
found at a depth of 33 feet in the first drill and 82 feet in the second,
according to the team’s findings. "This discovery was a
surprise," said Rick Forster, lead author and professor of geography at
the University of Utah, in a statement. "Instead of the water being
stored in the air space between subsurface rock particles, the water is stored
in the air space between the ice particles, like the juice in a snow
cone." Ooh, ooh… a snow cone? Everyone loves snow cones! But back to the
point…the researchers mostly found layers of dry snow in a drilling expedition
and because it was early spring, there was no possibility for surface melt to
seep in through the cracks That means the water is likely trapped underneath
the surface year-round. "Of the current sea level rise, the Greenland Ice
Sheet is the largest contributor - and it is melting at record levels,"
Forster said. "So understanding the aquifer's capacity to store water from
year to year is important because it fills a major gap in the overall equation
of meltwater runoff and sea levels." These results suggest that a
significant amount of the ice melting from Greenland’s glaciers is still being
stored within the Greenland ice sheet, trapped and prevented from causing the
global sea level to rise……..
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