- Riot Watch! Riot Watch! The rage was real and it was
intense Tuesday in Sao Paulo, Brazil as housing activists raged against the
machine and clashed with police after authorities evicted
about 200 families who had illegally occupied an empty hotel. On the surface,
kicking squatters out of an abandoned building is a logical step, but not if
you ask the activists who engaged in violent clashes in which they hurled rocks
and pieces of wood at some of the 250 police troops who showed up give an
estimated 200 families the boot. The squatters t had occupied the building's 20
floors for six months, but their stay was terminated with prejudice and that’s
when it all went south. The confrontation spilled from the hotel to nearby
streets and in front of Sao Paulo's Municipal Theater, where some protesters
torched a bus. Setting large vehicles on fire is always a great way to escalate
a riot and that’s exactly what happened in this case as riot police fired
rubber bullets, tear gas and stun grenades in an effort to disperse the crowd.
After the initial burst of outrage, everyone took a brief rest break and calm
prevailed for several hours before more violence erupted in central Sao Paulo,
with rioters blocking some roads in the region. Television images from the day
told a story of young men wearing gas masks and vandalizing nearby businesses
and rioters toting homemade wooden shields to fend off rubber bullets. Lt. Col.
Mauro Lopes of the Sao Paulo police department said seven people suspected of
breaking into a store and of setting the bus on fire had been arrested, with 60
more taken into custody for questioning. The root of this entire mess is a so-called
"roofless" movement that organizes poor families to move into
abandoned buildings, often in central Sao Paulo……….
- Just because you’re a PED-using cheater who won't be
available to his team for the first round of the playoffs doesn’t mean you
can't do some good in the world, right
suspended Baltimore Orioles slugger Chris Davis? Davis is serving a 25-game
suspension for a positive amphetamine test and has apologized for making
"a mistake by taking Adderall,” but maybe that Adderall came in handy
earlier this week when he came across what witnesses described as a heavy
pickup truck overturned on I-295 in Baltimore. Witnesses reported Davis
happening on the scene of the accident and leading an effort to unpin a man who
was trapped underneath. Fellow motorist Mike Soukup was one of the people who
helped Davis after the MLBer waved him and several other drivers over in an
effort to help the man trapped under the truck. Soukup noticed that the person
leading the rescue effort looked a hell of a lot like a guy hitting a
major-league-worst .196 this season and who has struck out 173 times in 127
games. After the makeshift rescue crew successful lifted the truck and freed
the person trapped underneath, Soukup addressed Davis by what he thought was
his first name and found out that he had guessed correctly. Maybe for the
duration of his banishment, Davis should be forced to traverse the roads of the
greater Baltimore area, searching for distressed motorist and using his
greenie-fueled burst of energy to help them with whatever problem happens to be
ailing them at the moment. Perhaps MLB could even knock a game or two off his
suspension for it………
- Artists are supposed to be eccentric. They are supposed to
be lovelorn folks whose tortured existence often leaves them with the sort of
heartbreak that provides them with the necessary fodder to write great songs,
pen amazing books or craft beautiful works of art. However, that eccentricity
can be taken a bit too far and reach the point of pathetic desperation. That’s
where New York City artist Dan Perino is currently residing and his artist’s
heart now finds him posting thousands fliers across the city begging for a
girlfriend. Many dudes are desperately in search of love, but few try a
scattershot approach of public desperation. Maybe that gives Perino an edge as
he trudges out into the city every day with a thick stack of fliers bearing his
face and a roll of masking tape. He posts his fliers wherever he can and so
far, he has put up some 15,000 of them in search of love. Even with the
discount a man gets when he wants 15,000 copies of anything, the price tag of 3
cents per flier equals $450 – a small price to pay if one finds true love. “One
day, I just woke up and thought, ‘I’m going to post fliers looking for a
girlfriend,’” Perino said. “She doesn’t have to be a raging beauty.” On some
level, Perino does have standards. He wants a woman who wants children even
though he already has one child from a previous marriage. The fliers have
netted him 65 dates so far, but none have materialized into anything more
serious. His biggest foe in all of this could eventually be the New York City Department
of Sanitation, which fines people $75 for posting fliers on public property. Do
the math and if all 15,000 of those fliers went up, that could amount to a $1.1
million fine. In a fortunate twist for Perino, many of his fliers have been
torn down by cantankerous New Yorkers who just don’t give a sh*t. And so the
search for love goes on………
- Sun Kil Moon frontman Mark Kozelek is raging and the world needs to
get the hell out of his way or else, be prepared to turn its rings around, take
off its chains and fight. One week after nearly inciting a brawl at a gig in
North Carolina because he referred to the locals as “f*cking hillbillies” and
later tried to claim it was all a joke, Kozelek is at it again except this
time, he’s starting fights with other musicians instead of the paying
customers. Kozelek was performing at the Ottawa Folk Fest at the same time as
The War On Drugs were performing on a different state in the same area and
given the brand of mellow, singer-songwriter indie rock he spins, the rockin’
sounds of The War On Drugs simply overpowered what Kozelek had to offer on that
stage. In this type of situation, what is an emo-sounding crooner to do? Play
on and hope that the audience appreciates his thoughtful brand of music? Hell no.
Kozelek instead asked, “Who the f*ck” is that and when someone told him that
the band he was so miffed by was The War on Drugs, Kozelek replied: "I
hate that beer-commercial lead-guitar shit. This next song is called 'The War
On Drugs Can Suck My F*cking Dick.’" He technically did not play a song by
that name or with those lyrics and yet, the drama was far from over. The War On
Drugs have acknowledged the comments on Twitter and suggested that the original
comments may have been made in jest. “Can anyone confirm
that mark kozelek was talking shit on us during his set in Ottawa last night?
Cuz we obviously booked the schedule....wtf,” the band tweeted. Stay classy,
Kozelek………
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