- The moment overgrown children everywhere have been waiting
for over the past 17 years is finally here. Yes, the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers are
returning to the big screen in a new live action film. The last time the
cartoonish heroes in their color-coordinated jumpsuits made an appearance on
the big screen was 1997 in "Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie.” That cinematic
classic was the sequel to "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie"
in 1995 and as anyone with a VHS tape of one of those film fiascos can attest,
they are the sort of movie fare that is difficult to forget. Lionsgate and
Saban Brands announced this week that the Power Rangers franchise is on the
comeback trail, continuing the franchise that began with a children’s
television series that launched more than 20 years ago and has been running in
some form continuously since that time. "The new film franchise will
re-envision the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, a group of high school kids who
are infused with unique and cool super powers but must harness and use those
powers as a team if they have any hope of saving the world,” the studio said in
a written release. The release didn’t offer up many details or lay out any sort
of timeline for the new movie. It likewise did not explain how the plot for the
project – and yes, there are plots for these masterpieces – would fit into the
overarching Power Rangers mythology. However, fans can revel in the knowledge
that the studio is aware of the franchise’s “deep and detailed mythology,”
which could just as easily mean they have no intention of honoring it.
Regardless, loyal fans/dorks will surely rally behind this idea and waste
plenty of disposable cash seeing it and buying the corresponding merchandise………
- Look at the U.S. Navy, leading the way for the tech world….by
setting it back a decade. Knowing its sailors need ways to entertain themselves
on the high seas but also realizing that any Internet-connected device is a
chance to be hacked and expose sensitive data to prying eyes, the Navy has unveiled an e-reader sailors could use while deployed at
sea without the fear of being hacked by enemies. Electronic devices like the Kindle and iPad are not
allowed on submarines because of their vulnerability to hackers and the Navy
even discourage the use of e-readers at sea because no Wi-Fi means no way to
access new content. Trying wireless Internet on submarines and ships typically
doesn’t work well out in the middle of the ocean, so the Navy asked digital
technology producer Findaway World two years
ago to create the Navy eReader Device, or "NeRD" for short. The NeRD
is now ready to go and while it wouldn’t appeal much to land dwellers because
it has no ports, card readers, cellular connectivity or Wi-Fi connectivity, it
will work for the Navy’s purposes of keeping sailors entertained without
creating an opening for hackers. Better still, the NeRD comes with 300
preloaded e-books out of the Navy's digital
library of 108,000. That is less than 3 percent of the library, but Ralph
Lazaro, Findaway World's vice president of digital products, noted that it will
help lessen the load created by the high number of hard copies of books that
currently reside aboard naval vessels. "I know the paperbacks (on Navy
ships) get passed back and forth until they fall apart. We're hoping the NeRD
holds up a little better,” Navy General Library program assistant Nilya Carrato
said. The NeRD is preloaded with a mix of books from different genres,
including fiction, nonfiction, historical books and classics. Among them are George
R.R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire"
novel series, "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," "Ender's Game,"
"The Lord of the Rings," "The
Stand" and "The Immortal Life of
Henrietta Lacks." The Navy will initially
distribute five NeRDs to each of the submarines in its active fleet. Happy
reading, sailors………
- Every family has one. You know them. We all know them and
we all wish they would shut up, sit down and stay out of the way because they
are the person who embarrasses the entire family by saying the wrong thing or simply
being such a colossal idiot that everyone else in the clan wants to pretend
they’re adopted or legally disown them. For most families, this isn't a huge
problem because they don’t have their family idiot embarrass them on national television
while some former sitcom star clowns them with a stick microphone from a few
feet away. Meet Anna Sass, whose family appeared this week on the daytime game
show Family Feud, hosted by actor and comedian Steve Harvey. The Sass family
bested some other SoCal vacationers to win the preliminary round and went on to
the Fast Money round, in which two family members independently answer five
random questions asked to 100 strangers and must combine for 200 points (1
point per respondent who gives each answer the constants come up with) to win
$20,000. After her partner scored 182 points, Anna needed only 18 to secure the
big payday. “How many points do you need?” Harvey asked. “I need 18,” Anna
correctly replied. Given the answers that followed, the real miracle is that
she actually did that math correctly. When asked, “What chance do you have of dating a girl who's a 10?”, she chose the nice, round number of 4
percent. To the question of where people keep checking their watch, she chose a
restaurant. The third question was to name a noisy insect and the razor-sharp
Anna chose to pass. For the fourth question of something a person’s belly does,
she answered, “Throw up.” For the fifth and final query, “A married couple
might be deeply in [what]?”, her answer was, “Marriage.” Those answers netted
her a grand total of zero points, a new record low for the show and pathetic
enough that Harvey should have given her a $20 bill from his pocket out of
sheer pity. Nice effort, Mensa………
- Fulham FC's 14-year stay in the Premier League came to an
end last week as the English club officially lost any chance of finishing high
enough to avoid relegation. It has been a disappointing season for the club,
which has a 9-24-4 record in Premier play and has fallen short of virtually
every reasonable expectation for their performance. With the team he used to
own now staring down the barrel of relegation and an angry mob/fan base
demanding answers, former Fulham owner Mohamed Al Fayed believes he knows why
the club is in a free fall. The reason is simple: the removal of his Michael
Jackson statue. That’s right, the much-lambasted statue was commissioned by Al
Fayed and installed at the back of the Hammersmith Stand in 2011. Al Fayed had
the horrific art made because he was a friend of Jackson and the singer even
paid a visit to Craven Cottage when he attended a match between Fulham and
Wigan in 1999. However, when he sold the team to Pakistan-born tycoon Shad Khan,
Al Fayed was told the statue didn’t measure up to whatever standards the new
owner had and would be removed. When the topic came up of Fulham falling out of
the Premier League, Al Fayed had his statue theory locked and loaded. "This
statue was a charm and we removed the luck from the club and now we have to pay
the price,” he said. “When [Khan] asked me to move it I said, 'You must be
crazy.’ This is such a fantastic statue which the fans are crying out for.
"But now he has paid the price because the club has been relegated. He
called me because he told me he wanted Michael to return. I told him, no way.”
Oh no, he didn’t. Al Fayed did NOT just claim that Khan begged to have the
statue back only to be stoned in a delicious blast of karma….but he did. Sadly,
Al Fayed actually seems to believe in his own kook-tastic theory and that’s the
most depressing part of all of this………
- Well played, Procter & Gamble. Part of doing
business in foreign countries is understanding the culture and history of those
countries well enough that you don’t inadvertently piss off millions of people
with a packaging or advertising malapropos that you totally should have seen
coming. It’s also a part of business that clearly escaped the detergent
manufacturer when it designed the promotional packages for Ariel washing
powder. Whichever advertising agency wizard the company contracted to design
the packaging came up with a layout featuring a large number "88" on
a white soccer jersey. That’s a problem because neo-Nazis often try to
circumvent a national ban on the use of Nazi slogans in public by using codes.
The über-clever extremist bigots use "88" to represent the phrase
"Heil Hitler," because "H'' is the eighth letter of the
alphabet. Similarly, "18" is used to stand for "A.H." or
Adolf Hitler. By dropping a seemingly innocuous soccer jersey with a random
number on it on the side of a box and allowing images of that box to show up
online, Procter & Gamble has enraged thousands of outraged consumers who
took to social media sites to excoriate the company for its ignorance. Doing the
only thing an embarrassed corporate titan can do in such situations, Procter
& Gamble acknowledged Friday that the number was "unintentionally
ambiguous." Spokeswoman Melanie Schnitzler said the company has stopped
shipping the offending boxes along with a liquid detergent that was being
promoted as "Ariel 18." A cynic might argue that it’s an awfully big
coincidence that the company chose two numbers to tie to the product that both
have direct links to neo-Nazi groups, but no one is that devious and evil. Just
kidding………
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