- Kevin Love has
many reasons to be unhappy about his life. Sure, he makes eight figures
annually to play professional basketball and millions more in endorsements, but
he also plays basketbll for the perenially putrid Minnesota Timberwolves. The
Timberwolves rarely make the playoffs, never contend and are always waiting for
next year. On top of that, playing for them necessitates living in, ya know,
Minnesota for most of the year, in the state’s eight-month winter from
September to late May. The losing and the frigid climate finally got to Love after
Tuesday night's 104-103 loss to the Phoenix Suns. The All-Star forward lit up
some of his teammates after the defeat and wasn’t exactly covert about who he
was lambasting. "We can't have two guys sitting at the end of the bench
that play good minutes just sitting there and not getting up during
timeouts," Love said, referring to the poor body language exhibited by
veterans J.J. Barea and Dante Cunningham in the fourth quarter. "We all
need to be in this together. That kind of pisses me off. We're supposed to be a
team." At 17-18, the team is many things, but together is not one of them.
Hopes of a playoff berth are on life support and Love knows it. That’s why he
spoke out in an attempt to motivate two teammates he needs to play well and
give a damn if the Timberwolves are going anywhere this season. Having two
veterans b*tching about their lack of playing time hinders the progress needed
to make the playoffs and Love tore Barea and Cunningham a new one for it. "It's
two guys that we expect more from them," Love said. "I think they
expect more from themselves.” The best part of the rant is that Love didn't
call out either player by name, but he didn’t need to because everyone know who
he was addressing. Maybe Love was angry at himself as well after going 4-for-20
from the field and 0-for-3 in the fourth quarter as his team lost a nine-point
lead, but that doesn’t change the fact that he was right and then some……..
- Hooray for American industry. It’s a day to celebrate the
United States in all of its technological awesomeness after Orbital Sciences
Corp. launched its unmanned Antares cargo rocket to the International Space
Station. The launch came after a delay due to a massive explosion on the sun
led to fears of radiation, but American adventurism will not be denied by any
disaster, natural or manmade. The Orbital Sciences rocker lifted off under a
brilliant blue sky from Wallops Island, Va., at 1:07 p.m. Thursday, carrying a
capsule full of supplies for the International Space Station, as well as some
ants for an educational project. Yes, America shoots ants into space but no
longer launches human beings into the great beyond. The launch was visible
along the East Coast from South Carolina to Massachusetts. It took place one
month after space station repairs forced its indefinite postponement. That damn
polar vortex that sucker punched most of the United States earlier this week forced
another delay, after which a strong solar storm interfered and the first major
solar flare of 2014 erupted from a massive sunspot seven times the size of
Earth after a series of mid-level sun storms. "We are concerned about
mission failure," Orbital's chief technical officer Antonio Elias said
prior to the launch. After analyzing solar radiation and finding it within
acceptable range late Wednesday, the company green-lit the mission, for which
NASA is paying it handsomely……..
- Duuuude, this is awesome. Not only is Washington the
second state to legalize pot for every adult, but the Evergreen State also has
(possibly illegal) home ganja delivery. The delivery in question is by Winterlife
Co-op, a company that promises to deliver high-quality recreational pot to your
door in 45 minutes or less (now word on whether it’s free if it fails to arrive
in the specific time). Customers talk to a dispatcher, who takes their
information and sends out a driver once the age (over 21) of the buyer has been
verified. The driver inspects the customer’s ID, makes them sign a document
stating their belief that marijuana has medicinal properties and hands over the
chron. The company’s founder/chief executive stoner goes by the code name Otter
(seriously) and explained that establishing Winterlife Co-op was simply a
matter of survival in hard – and high – times. “When we got into it originally,
we just really needed a way to feed ourselves and our families and it was
really not intended to get as big as it did,” Otter said. “Our main goal is to
provide safe, legitimate and reliable service to the smoking community of
Seattle.” Otter added that the company welcomes police oversight, which is
ironic given that a key part of his business is still illegal. Allow American
Civil Liberties Union spokesperson Allison Holcomb to explain. “The problem is
the driver — or the deliverer who is handing you the marijuana — is actually
committing a felony, technically,” Holcomb said. “The person who is
purchasing the marijuana is completely fine. It’s never been a crime under
Washington state law to buy marijuana.” Holcomb did author the bill paving the
way for legalized hippie lettuce, Initiative 502, and seeing as she is the
criminal justice director for the ACLU Washington, she probably knows what
she’s talking about when she said that I-502 requires all sales to occur on the
premises of a state licensed outlet. The chances of police busting a Winterlife
Co-op driver remain low. “If there are no complaints, and no one is being hurt,
we would hate to take resources away from those investigations where people are
being robbed and attacked and deploy them in another area where there basically
have been no complaints,” Seattle Police Department spokesman Sean Whitcomb
said. Sounds like The Man is finally loosening up……..
- Russia’s preparations for next month’s Winter Olympics
seem to be going well. Dictator Vladimir Putin is pardoning imprisoned
dissidents by the thousands to curry favor with the international community and
oh yeah, the government has put security forces on combat alert in the southern Stavropol region
after the discovery of five bodies with gunshot wounds and an explosive device.
Security across the country is already high ahead of the Olympics in Sochi and suicide
bombers killing at least 34 people in separate attacks in the southern city of
Volgograd last month kicked things up a notch as well. Still, there’s nothing
like the mysterious discovery of five corpses in four cars in two separate
districts outside the regional capital Stavropol to put everyone on edge. The
current threat at the top of the terrorist menu is the one posed by an insurgency
by Islamist militants who have threatened to try to prevent the Olympics from going
ahead. So far, the government has not said whether the bodies and explosive
device found near them are linked to that insurgency. The unidentified
explosive device was also found near one of the vehicles, according to a
spokesman for Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) in Stavropol. Following
the Volgograd attacks, Putin vowed to annihilate all "terrorists" in
Russia. If only this were one of his über-staged photo ops where he does heroic
and manly things with a cadre of photographers conveniently nearby, that might
be how the story unfolds. As it stands, the Winter Olympics open in Sochi on
Feb. 7 and the Black Sea resort town lies on the western edge of the Caucasus
mountains where the insurgents want to carve out an Islamic state. That sounds
like a perfectly lovely place to hold one of the world’s biggest sporting
events…….
- It could be the plot of a new VH1 reality show (assuming
VH1 is still on the air), but it’s not. Chance The Rapper is moving in with Mercury
Prize-winning singer James Blake later this year because the two….are going to
work on music together. The pair have previously collaborated on Blake’s song “Life
Round Here,” but they are prepared to take their strictly musical partnership
to the next level. Living with another dude in a strange house will be a new
experience for Chance the Rapper. "I've never lived anywhere other than
this house, the one I grew up in in Chicago. It will probably be like being on
vacation for the first couple of months. Then I'll start figuring out what kind
of music I'll be making,” he said. “We're probably going to make a bunch of sh*t
every day. I don't know what we're going to do with it. We might give some shit
to other artists. We're getting a compound so we figure we might invite people
round to the crib and make some music in the house, then kick them out and
bring in some new people." The whole endeavor sounds pretty cool,
actually, and might actually be a decent reality show. Who wouldn’t watch a
couple of interesting musicians from different genres living, writing and
working together and inviting fellow musicians over to jam? Mix in a cranky
landlady who bangs on their door and yells at them to keep the racket down and
this could be a ratings bonanza…….
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