- Pharrell Williams is no stranger to putting ridiculous things on top
of his head. Usually, the absurdity takes the form of comically large hats that
look like a 10-gallon bucket from a cheesy Western mixed with Smokey the Bear’s
lid on steroids. However, the über-producer decided to kick things up a notch
recently by wearing a Native American headdress on the cover of a British
magazine. Williams, who helms many projects and occasionally “sings” on his own
crappy albums, appears on the cover of this month's Elle magazine, eschewing his
famous brown hat for the feathered headdress. The identity of the person
responsible for that unfortunate and inexplicable choice in hear wear is
unclear, but Elle did its best to fall on the resulting grenade of religious outrage
with a statement suggesting that the wardrobe decision was made by its own staff.
"[W]e persuaded ELLE Style Award winner Pharrell to trade his Vivienne
Westwood mountie hat for a native American feather headdress in his best ever
shoot," the publication said in a statement. Williams also tried to head
off the backlash with his own apology, replete with a claim of racial love and
tolerance for all. "I respect and honor every kind of race, background and
culture. I am genuinely sorry," William said in a statement. Both
statements are swell, but how no one involved in the creative sh*t storm that
led to the photo being taken at all realized that it is offensive to wear
Native American headdress if you are not a Native American is beyond
explanation. Some of the offended parties riffed on Williams hit single “Happy”
to register their displeasure, tweeting messages with the hashtag #nothappy……….
- Nepal, Nepal, Nepal… you can do so much better. You have
the world’s most famous mountain and people from around the world pay tens of
thousands of dollars per person for the chance to come to your country and
attempt to scale it. Your mysterious, pecuilar culture is the stuff of
admiration from travelers of all ages and nationalities and yet, you’re making
news because a bunch of kooks with nothing better to do than seek a pointless
and worthless Guinness World Record decided that they wanted to waste a few
minutes of their than 2,000 people to in a park in Nepal's capital time
attempting to set
the record for the largest tree hug. This ass-hatted effort drew more —
including Parliament members, students, office workers and even Buddhist monks
— in a ridiculous effort to accomplish something meaningful when all that was
required to participate was being a living, breathing human being with arms. The
participants gathered Thursday at a park on the northeastern outskirts of
Katmandu with the espoused goal of setting a new record in order to celebrate
World Environment Day by spreading awareness about the importance of trees. The
previous Guinness World Record for most people hugging trees simultaneously
took place, quite predictably, in the hippie utopia that is Portland, Ore., in
July 2013. The organizers of Thursday's event made sure they snapped plenty of
photos, recorded some video that no one will actually want to watch and sent
along a signed statement from the Parliament members who were there and the
names of the participants to the knobs at the Guinness Book of World Records
and the Guinness folks will decide whether to recognize the feat as a new
record…………
- Stay in your lane, United States men’s national team soccer coach
Jurgen Klinsmann. Do what you do best, namely letting the U.S. know that its
team has no chance of winning the upcoming World Cup. What you should not be
doing is misplacing your anger over criticism for leaving star midfielder
Landon Donovan off the U.S. World Cup squad by trying to comment on a sport you
know nothing about. As he tried to mount a valid defense, Klinsmann threw a
verbal haymaker at the NBA as an example of how American professional sports
teams pay a player for his past accomplishments rather than for his future. The
German native expressed disbelief over the Los Angeles Lakers giving 35-year-old
Kobe Bryant a two-year contract
extension for $48.5 million when the future hall of famer’s best days are
clearly in the past. "This always happens in America,"
Klinsmann said. "Kobe Bryant, for example -- why does he get a two-year
contract extension for $50 million? Because of what he is going to do in the
next two years for the Lakers? Of course not. Of course not. He gets it because
of what he has done before. It makes no sense. Why do you pay for what has
already happened?” Klinsmann seems ignorant of the fact that teams pay stars
like Bryant partially out of loyalty, but also because those stars are big
draws who sell tickets and move merchandise. Bryant’s circumstances have little
to do with Donovan spending the first three months of 2013 on a self-imposed
sabbatical away from his sport and returning only to be cut from his own
national team. Klinsmann said he was put off by what he saw as Donovan's
inconsistent motivation and did not believe one of the best players in the
history of American soccer has enough left in the tank. The funniest part of
Klinsmann’s diatribe was his suggestion that he is building toward the 2018
World Cup and his thinking that he’ll still be around once the U.S. is swept
out of the 2014 edition………
- It is a question everyone who lives past the age of 70
must contemplate and it is a query many people answer differently. Pennsylvania
resident Ivan
Stoltzfus believes he has found his answer for what to do in retirement and it
has nothing to do with golf clubs, fishing poles, classic cars or giving bags
of Werther’s Original candies to his grandchildren. No, Stoltzfus is ready to
embark upon one of the longest journeys of his life, one that will take him
from New Jersey to California with the goal of raising $1 million for the
Wounded Warrior Project. He will ride a 1948 Model A John Deere tractor from
coast to coast, in the process rolling past his hometown of Honey Brook, Pa. “My
heart has just been going out for those guys who are coming back and trying to
fit in civilization,” Stoltzfus said. “A lot of them are feeling hopeless
and I just want to bring awareness and let them know we care.” Maybe Stoltzfus
has watched as the bumbling idiots of the Veterans Administration have failed
returning veterans on a grand scale and decided to do something. His journey
began about one month ago and while the going has been predictably slow so far,
he isn’t ready to give up because of his love for the troops. “I never served
in the military, but I always wanted to somehow pay back the people who made
the ultimate sacrifice,” Stoltzfus said. Before he left, word of his planned
excursion leaked out and well-wishers donated a trailer with a queen size bed,
kitchen and a bathroom. The tractor itself is accessorized with a cab from an old
Peterbilt for additional comfort. So far, Stoltzfus has raised $60,000 and he
hopes to complete his trek this fall……….
- Amazon isn't exactly dominating the online sales world as
it once did. A glut of competitors all vying for online shopping dollars have
diluted the influence of the House that Jeff Bezos built, so Bezos and his crew
are trying everything they can to return the focus to their digital shopping
mall. The latest attempt in this vein is a mysterious video for a mystery product set
to be launched on June 18 by Bezos. A 50-second video includes footage of a
series of people gasping over a hand-held device just out of shot, praising it
as "super awesome," "amazing" and "very real life.”
Details are scarce, but the product is believed to be a holographic 3D phone
that monitors the position of and projects to each of the user's eyes through
four front-facing cameras, creating a stereoscopic, three-dimensional image
without the need for 3D glasses. In the video, the actors hired to make the
mystery product seem cool tilt it from side to side and move their heads to see
what it is displaying. Rumors about the phone have it sporting standard rear
and front-facing cameras along with an
additional four front-facing infrared cameras that work with other
sensors to facilitate the software’s 3D effects. These additional cameras are
reportedly situated in each of the four corners on the face of the phone and
their function is to track the position of the user’s face and eyes in relation
to the phone’s display. With this setup, Amazon’s software can then make constant
adjustments to the positioning of on-screen elements, altering the perspective
of visuals on the screen. Amazon has been rumored to be ready a smartphone following
several hardware launches over the past year, including the Fire TV streaming
box and new Kindle Fire tablets. With a reported Qualcomm Snapdragon processor,
2GB of RAM and a modified version of Google’s Android operating system, this
unnamed phone sounds as interesting as any mystery device possibly could………
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