- Bitter much, Rhys Webb of The Horrors? Despite being the bass
player for one of the best British indie rock bands on the scene at the moment,
Webb has a spot of sour milk in his tea right now and it’s all because of the
latest album from wildly overrated pop hack Lily Allen. Allen, who recently
released a lame album whose name – “Sheezus” – she shamelessly ripped off from
Kanye West and music she undoubtedly ripped off from any litany of fellow pop
hacks with a nearly identical sound, is selling her new album for 99 pence (the
British approximation of 99 cents) through one online retailer and Webb, for
one, is not a fan. "Her record company have done that to give Lily a
surefire Number One," Webb fumed. “Albums should be something that are
there for a lifetime.” Not sure what once in a lifetime has to do with it, but
the retailer offering Allen’s album for 99 pence is Google play, which is
giving its users a chance to purchase Allen’s third release for the bargain
price following its release this Monday. Maybe Webb is right and this is all a
shameless promotional ploy. Then again, maybe the label merely recognized than
one Pound Sterling is all this hunk of garbage is worth and priced it accordingly.
Either way, the plan has worked so far. Official sales data shows that “Sheezus”
is No. 1 at the midweek stage of this week's Album Chart, 12,000 copies ahead
of nearest rival Paolo Nutini. And by the way, The Horrors just so happened to
release their own new album, “Luminous,” this week and suggesting that a rival
album was priced low just to boost its own commercial potential at the cost of its
overall worth is a mighty convenient argument. For the record, “Luminous”
ranked sixth on that same chart and although the album is light years better
than Allen’s, it’s unlikely to leapfrog “Sheezus” any time soon…………
- Shape Magazine 1, newly slimmed-down Illinois woman 0. The national
fitness magazine purports to be all about sharing the stories of folks who have
gotten themselves in shape or found ways to stay in shape throughout their
lives, so it would seem to be the ideal place for someone like Andalusia, Ill.
resident Brooke Birmingham to show and tell her tale of weight loss and a life
regained. After all, Birmingham lost 170 pounds and gained national attention
by documenting her journey on her blog. When shape magazine learned of the
story, it contacted her and said it wanted to feature her in their “success
story” column. Birmingham agreed and submitted a photo of herself in a
two-piece bathing suit, showing off her new physique. However, the magazine
contacted her and asked for a different photo. When the reporter working on the
story spoke to Birmingham about the photo request, she explained that her
editors told her it’s company policy to show success stories of woman wearing a
shirt. Unfortunately for the magazine, Birmingham actually reads the magazine.
She correctly noted that there are several success stories in the magazine featuring
women in bathing suits and no shirt over them. What was the real problem with the
photo Birmingham submitted? No one is saying for sure, but it would seem that a
picture depicting a woman with rolls of excess skin around her waist – a
phenomenon common in individuals with rapid weight loss – is not what Shape had
in mind. Since news of the photo controversy broke, Birmingham has seen an
outpouring of support through her Facebook page. She said she hopes to use her
story to motive other regardless of how her showdown with Shape turns out……….
- If any NFL team was bound to arrive at this point first,
it was clearly the New England
Patriots. For the past few years, the Pats have become a sort of
turnstile for troubled players and future felons who are in uniform one day and
out of the NFL – and perhaps into an orange jumpsuit – the next. So it makes
good sense that the Pats will become
the first NFL franchise to offer rebates to anyone who buys a jersey of a
player who is no longer under contract to the team within a year of the
purchase. It’s not like they haven't walked this road before; last year, the
team took the unprecedented move of allowing anyone who had bought a jersey of
Aaron Hernandez, who is charged with murder, to exchange it for the jersey of
another player. So far, Hernandez is the only current or former Patriot to be
charged with murder, but other former members of the team have passed through
Foxboro so quickly that fans foolish enough to spend three figures on their
jersey end up feeling even more foolish than they should have for buying a
replica jersey despite the fact that they are an adult and not a starstruck
12-year-old child. Tim Tebow jerseys sold well last year, but the
com(bust)ible quarterback was cut before the season started. LeGarrette Blount
became the Patriots' go-to rusher in the second half of last season and after
fans latched onto his bruising running style, he left in March to sign a
two-year deal with the Steelers. Realizing it could make this offer and not
feel even the most remote sting of swapping out a few replica gamers here and
there, the team sent an email Thursday morning to its entire mailing life
announcing what it calls the jersey guarantee. But wait….there’s a catch. Of
course fans won't get the entire purchase price back or even a credit to that
amount. Those who purchase jerseys from the team website or stadium store and
have the player whose jersey they bough leave the team within a year of
purchase will receive a 25 percent discount toward the price of the next
Patriots jersey they buy. Considering that the cheapest adult-sized replica game
jersey costs $100 and the elite-level jersey will retail for $295 this season,
this isn't exactly a world-class steal of a deal……..
- The line is long and odds are, a few shady deals will be
worked out behind the scenes before this is over. The instant Uruguay announced
plans to not only legalize marijuana within its borders but to make the
government the official overlord of the hippie lettuce business, there was no
doubt that there would be fistfights galore for the right to be the official
purveyors of pot to The Man. And as expected, Uruguay's drug czar
says more than 100 businesses have expressed interest in bidding for no more
than six licenses to grow the government's marijuana. Drug secretary Julio
Calzada laid out the ground rules for those wishing to grow ganja for the
government, saying that successful bidders will have to identify everyone
involved in the business and the source of their investment. These measures,
while tough to enforce and easy to work around for cartels used to doing exactly
that, are in place because they supposedly can help prevent organized crime
figures from receiving licenses. Calzada added that many involved in the
process of turning Mary Jane into an official government enterprise are concerned that illegal Paraguayan
pot growers will get government protection in Uruguay. The same general
sentiments were expressed by President Jose Mujica, who said recently that he
is worried that drug traffickers will try to influence the campaigns to choose
his successor in October. The idea of drug cartels throwing their considerable
resources behind candidates who will then use their newly secured power to set
chron-friendly policies to benefit their benefactors is both hilarious and spot-on.
Just think, if this entire experiment goes well, it could serve as a road map
for other nations to make the same decision and slowly convert the world to one
big, ratty couch in some rental house basement with black light posters on the
wall and the undeniable smell of skunk weed locked into every last fiber………
- World, this is crap – literally. Maybe if people around
the planet knew what a health hazard they were creating by continuing a practice
that should have gone the way of polio, dysentery and corsets, they would stop
crapping where they drink. According to data released this week by the United
Nations, a whopping 1 billion people worldwide – more than 13 percent of the
world’s population – still practice “open defecation.” Simply put, these
ignorant people take a dump in the same water in which they bathe and the same
water they drink and use for cooking. Clearly, they’re not aware that the
practice leads to the spread of fatal diseases. “‘Excreta’, ‘faeces’, ‘poo’, I
could even say ‘sh*t’ maybe, this is the root cause of so many diseases,” said
Bruce Gordon, acting coordinator for sanitation and health for the WHO.
Diseases such as cholera, diarrhea, dysentery, hepatitis A and typhoid are all
common in societies that practice open defecation and such societies tend to
have large income disparities and the world’s highest numbers of deaths of
children under 5 years old. Past efforts to educate and improve sanitation have
largely fallen short and the real problem is the attitudes and cultural norms
in such places. In some Third World nations, latrines built to improve
sanitation are ignored or use as storage sheds. Some countries, such as Vietnam
and Bangladesh, have made great strides from having more than one in three
people relieved themselves in the open in 1990 to all but eradicating the
problem in 2014. Overall, the number of public crappers has declined 23 percent
from 1.3 billion in 1990, but the remaining 1 billion offenders remain a
problem. About 90 percent of them live in rural areas and “continue to defecate
in gutters, behind bushes or in open water bodies, with no dignity or privacy,”
according to the U.N. study. The largest fecal trouble zone is sub-Saharan
Africa, where the practice remains on the rise in 26 nations. Nigeria leads the
way with 39 million open defecators in 2012 compared to 23 million in 1990.
India has the largest raw numbers of raw sewage producers at 600 million and
its lasseiz-faire policies on open defecation have long pissed off neighboring
Bangladesh, which has put a big focus on fighting water-borne diseases since
the 1970s. All in all, this story really stinks…….
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