- If there is one thing Major League Baseball players are
better at than playing baseball, it’s getting injured in freaky bizarre ways.
MLBers have a well-documented capacity to sustain injuries doing mundane tasks
that millions of non-athletes successfully complete injury-free every day:
taking out the trash, carrying groceries up stairs, putting hats on their heads
and opening jars of processed food, to name a few. Add the name of Texas Rangers pitcher Derek Holland to
that dubious list after he sustained what he described as a "freak
accident" at his home and damaged the cartilage in his left knee. "I'm
devastated by this injury," Holland said in a statement released by the team.
"It was a freak accident at home that resulted in a hard fall on my knee.
As upsetting as this is, my goal is to begin rehab and get back on the mound as
quickly as possible." Holland has already undergone arthroscopic surgery
on the knee to repair the torn cartilage and the club expects him to be out
until midseason. According to Rangers general manager Jon Daniels, Holland fell
on the stairs in his home, causing the injury. While he did not damage his ACL
or MCL, the Rangers’ projected No. 2 starting pitcher is expected to be out of
action until mid-July. Ironically, Holland made 33 starts last season and was the
only pitcher on the Rangers not to miss a start. The fact that Holland pitched
213 innings and emerged healthy, yet was done in by that tricky stair that
snipered him and sent him tumbling to the floor in a heap is the perfect
illustration of how random injuries take down one MLBer after another. With
Holland out, Daniels said the team
will look to add more depth to its rotation. "I expect we will add some
[starting pitching], but I expect it will be more in the depth category than
really replacing somebody at the front end of the rotation," Daniels said.
Japanese free agent Masahiro Tanaka is one possibility for the Rangers, but he
will be über-costly to sign……..
- Samsung plans to release the next generation of its
flagship smartphone by April and the Galaxy S5 might be getting invasive with
it. An executive for the Korean tech giant confirmed the phone’s imminent
release, but Lee Young Hee, executive vice president for Samsung's mobile business,
also said it has not been confirmed that the phone will include innovative eye-scanning
technology. The Galaxy is the primary rival for the iPhone and according to
Lee, it will be much improved when it hits the market. "We've been
announcing our first flagship model in the first half of each year, around
March and April, and we are still targeting for release around that time,"
Lee said. "When we release our S5 device, you can also expect a Gear successor
with more advanced functions, and the bulky design will also be improved."
Lee addressed the gathered geeks at the International Consumer Electronics Show
in Las Vegas and when asked about the eye scanner that could give Samsung its
counter to Apple's iPhone 5S with its fingerprint security feature, she
sidestepped the query. "Many people are fanatical about iris recognition
technology," Lee said. "We are studying the possibility but can't
really say whether we will have it or not on the S5." She did tell the
crowd that the S5 will look and feel significantly different than its predecessor,
perhaps in response to complaints that the S4 was too similar to its
predecessor. "When we moved to S4 from S3, it's partly true that consumers
couldn't really feel much difference between the two products from the physical
perspective, so the market reaction wasn't as big," Lee added. "For
the S5, we will go back to the basics. Mostly, it's about the display and the
feel of the cover." Degenerate smartphone junkies around the world will
anxiously await the finished product, no doubt………
- Give it up for stoners. Normally rapped as a lazy,
energy-less group that cannot extricate themselves from their sagging, smelly
couches long enough to do anything more than pull another Pop Tart from the box
or pop the next “Planet Earth” DVD in the DVD player, potheads are taking steps
to eradicate their sluggish stereotype. In particular, ganja enthusiasts in a
rural part of eastern Colorado have stepped their game up and proven that they
have both energy and a prank-loving side to their game. For several years now,
the Colorado Department of Transportation has been fighting a nonstop battle with
a determined group of area stoners with sticky fingers. These adventurous tree
smokers decided at some point that they needed proof of their pot love in
government-approved signage form and began stealing a mile marker sign that
read – you guessed it – Mile 420. As anyone with even the most remote
understanding of stoner culture knows, 420 is a magical number for those who
like the bake because 4:20 p.m. is supposedly the best time of day to get high.
April 20 has become the stoner high holiday for the same reason and that line
of thinking caused multiple thefts of the Mile 420 road sign, according to CDOT spokeswoman
Amy Ford. At some point, CDOT officials realized that replacing stolen 420
signs with identical 420 signs wasn’t working and they hatched an alternative
plan. Instead of putting up another 420 sign, they erected one that reads
419.99. Ford confirmed that the new sign was put in place late last year, but
said she wasn’t sure how many previous mile markers had been stolen. The 419.99
sign hasn’t been heisted yet, but maybe a pothead with a sense of humor will
thieve it and spray paint an addition to its message, something like, “419.99….almost
there but not high enough.” Your move, chron lovers………
- Bombay Bicycle Club sound very much like a bunch of territorial indie
rock hipsters right about now. The English band has scanned the indie rock
scene upon which they exist and found it wanting. But in a twist of good news,
BBC has identified the source of the problem that plagues their genre: the
continued success of fellow Brits Arctic Monkeys. With their album “AM,” Arctic
Monkeys scored one of the most-acclaimed releases of 2013, but they have been a
fixture on the indie scene since their debut in 2006 and the members of Bombay
Bicycle Club believe that has caused a glut of crappy bands to flood the indie
market and turn it in a clusterf*ck of musical awfulness. Bass player Ed Nash
denounced what he deemed a large number of band indie bands as the byproduct of
Arctic Monkeys’ commercial success in the past seven-plus years. "When
Arctic Monkeys blew up there were so many indie bands that music was just
saturated. The amount of bad indie bands was unbelievable. There was a kind of
backlash to that, and I think that's why you don't have so many bands on the
radio or headlining festivals,” Nash said. “Indie was the biggest form of music
at that time and a lot of sh*t got through. There was a reaction to that
because there were a lot of terrible landfill indie bands." Wow….calling
bands bad is one thing, but assigning them “landfill band” status is another
level entirely. Bombay Bicycle Club clearly do not see themselves as a landfill
band and would probably be geeked if you and all of your friends bought their
new album, “So Long, See You Tomorrow,” when it drops next month………
- Tibet and China took a big, fiery hit Saturday when a
massive fire
razed an ancient Tibetan town in southwest China that’s popular with tourists. A
massive blaze raged for nearly 10 hours, torching hundreds of buildings to the
ground as fire engines tried in vain to navigate the narrow streets to reach
the burning structures. The cause of the fire has not been officially
identified, but local reports claimed the blaze started in a guesthouse and was
accidental. It reportedly began at about 1:30 a.m. in the ancient Tibetan
quarter of Dukezong, which dates back more than 1,000 years and renowned for
its historic buildings, old-timey cobbled streets and strong Tibetan culture. Dukezong
is part of scenic Shangri-La county in Deqen prefecture, with the Shangri-La
name adopted in 2001 in the hopes of drawing tourists by alluding to the
mythical Himalayan land described in James Hilton’s 1933 novel of the same
name. The county also spent much time and money renovating its old
neighborhood, Dukezong, remaking it as a tourist attraction filled with shops
and guesthouses. All of that was consumed in a giant ball of flame Saturday,
with the blaze turning the night sky red as 242 homes and shops in Dukezong
were destroyed. More than 2,600 people were dislodged by the fire and many
historic artifacts were also lost in the blaze, according to state media. Residents
told tales of waking in the middle of the night to the sounds of explosions and
noted strong winds and dry air that fueled the fire. When it became clear that
the fire engines could not fit down the town’s narrow streets, residents lined
up to pass buckets of water to combat the fire. Sadly, because most of Dukezong’s
buildings are made of wood and the fire spread easily because of dry weather,
the more than 2,000 firefighters, soldiers, police, local officials and
volunteers who fought the fire were unable to get it under control until 11
a.m., by which time much damage had been done……..
No comments:
Post a Comment