Sunday, August 03, 2014

Lorde seeks originality, Slovenian prison freedom and strip-clubbing NFL All-Pro drunks


- Arizona Cardinals linebacker John Abraham needed to apologize….just for more than he actually owned up to on Friday, one month after being arrested on a DUI charge. Abraham issued a statement through the team and in it, he made his first comments since the arrest. "First, I want to apologize to my family and friends, the Cardinals organization, my teammates and the fans for letting them down," he said in the statement. "I understand the significance of my actions and right now I am taking the necessary steps to handle my personal business. I am very thankful for the support from my family, friends and especially the Cardinals organization during this time in my life.” Those words are fine, but the real omission from the mea culpa is for being that guy – as in the guy who was driving drunk because he was day drinking at a strip club. While many guys swear by the all-you-can-eat buffet of quasi-food at their local gentleman’s club, an NFLer should never been liquoring up at the Pink Pony strip club in the middle of the day. Professional athletes should be able to pull most any woman they want and not need to go pay for the privilege of seeing a woman get naked. Abraham was arrested after an officer found him passed out behind the wheel of his black Dodge Challenger around 4 p.m. ET on June 29 at an intersection of an Atlanta suburb after he had left the club. When he was roused, he insisted he had just two drinks and told officers at the scene that he had been waiting on someone to pick him up, but the person never arrived. After admitting that he didn’t feel he was OK to drive and failing several field sobriety tests, the All-Pro linebacker made a pathetically early trip to the drunk tank and later had his license suspended……….


- If only all prison stints were so flexible and all prison officials so accommodating. Slovenian ex-Prime Minister Janez Jansa has been serving a two-year sentence for bribery since June. That sort of criminal enterprising should be a reason for a man to remain locked up for the duration of his sentence, but Jansa is no ordinary prisoner. Somehow, despite being locked up, he actually won a seat in parliament. Voters in Slovenia simply don’t seem to give a damn about whether a candidate is currently incarcerated or not and they voted for the leader of the opposition Slovene Democratic Party in disturbingly high numbers. The victory was nice, but it left Jansa with a problem. He had a seat in parliament, but guys in prison jumpsuits and only one hour of rec time a day can't exactly go about legislative business at the capital the way other non-felonious lawmakers can. That’s where his understanding prison administrator friends come in. They magnanimously granted Jansa a brief prison furlough to attend the country's first parliamentary session and he arrived unescorted to Friday's parliamentary session as several hundred supporters gathered outside the building. Yes, there were sycophants so adamant in their support of a criminal that they actually gathered en masse outside the legislature to show their belief in him. All of this is facilitated by the fact that Slovenia's laws don't formally ban a prisoner from running for the 90-member parliament, which is something Jansa’s colleagues may want to tackle. A few wise souls have demanded that he be stripped of his seat, but so far that movement hasn’t gained much traction………


- Give Lorde credit. She cranked out a very well-received album in 2013 and “Pure Heroine” was both a clever double entendre and a polished project that launched the hit single “Royals,” so putting together the follow-up should be a logical walk down the same musical path. Instead, the New Zealand singer says she is struggling to write new songs because everything she is coming up with sounds too much like her debut album. For many pop stars, that wouldn’t be a concern. Cranking out the same generic sound over and over would be perfectly acceptable as long as fans were buying it and showing up at concerts. Lorde feels otherwise and added that she is trying to move her songwriting to a new place rather than staying exactly where she is. “I’m definitely writing new stuff. I don’t know how everything will end up. The first period of writing after you have recorded an album, it all sounds like the album before it,” she said. “I’m trying to get that out of my system and move it to a new place. But I’ve been writing with some good people and just doing weird, cool stuff, which is always good for being creative.” In addition to working on her own album, Lorde is overseeing the soundtrack of the new Hunger Games film “Mockingjay: Part 1,” which is due out in November and will feature her first new music since “Pure Heroine.” She said she is reaching out to every artist on the soundtrack personally, although one would suspect she won't be contacting Weird Al Yankovic, who parodied “Royals” on his own new album. Still, Lorde said she was “psyched” to be parodied by Yankovic and actually initiated the parody by reaching out to him……….


- Butter me. A topping party broke out over the weekend in the eastbound lanes of I-465 just west of I-65 in Indiana when a semi carrying 45,000 pounds of butter and whipped cream crashed along the expressway due to a narcoleptic driver who couldn’t stay awake. According to Indiana State Police officials, driver Charles Pryor III fell asleep and hit a sign. The force of the collision tore the trailer in half, sending containers of butter and whipped cream products sprawling across the highway. The scene got messy in a hurry with Reddi-Whip, Blue Bonnet butter and Parkay butter spray strewn across multiple lanes. Pryor escaped injury, but his fate with the company should be decided by all of Utah-based CR England’s trucks are equipped with an electronic on-board recorder that monitors a driver’s activity…..except for the fact that he was using a rental truck at the time of the crash while awaiting repairs on his CR England vehicle. Because of that, he was logging his driving and rest times on paper instead of electronically. That will make it tougher to determine whether he violated federal rules prohibiting drivers from driving more than 11 of the 14 consecutive hours they work. The various dairy-based products made quite a mess of the highway and delayed traffic for a few hours, but local and state police were eventually able to find enough rolls, butter knives and angel food cake upon which to used the spilled spreads and clean up the road so traffic flow could return to normal………

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