Thursday, October 09, 2014

Fundamentalist kooks v. Austrian yoga, Florida quarterback criminals and Airbnb vs. San Francisco


- Look at Drake, muscling up one a group of hip-hop icons who have accomplished more in their storied career than his hip-pop ass ever will. Wu Tang Clan have been a combustible lot since their inception and that propensity for implosion has made them both entertaining and infuriating to fans and critics over the years, but there is not question that RZA, Ghostface Killah and Co. still skate lyrical and sonic circles around Drake any time they step to the mic. Someone should inform Drake about this because he just disrespected Wu Tang by shelving a remix of one of his tracks because he wasn't happy with the tone of the guest verses. Drake originally paid tribute to the Staten Island hip-hop heroes with his track “Nothing Was the Same,” a direct nod to “Wu-Tang Forever.” In response, Wu Tang delivered a show of respect with their own remix of the track. Yet when the Wu was finished, Drake looked disainfully on their efforts and wanted no part of its release. RZA postulated that he and his bandmates "came too hard for [Drake]" and weren't "woman-y" enough for him. "He wanted us to talk about broads," RZA said. "At the time, I wasn’t feeling woman-y – I was feeling hard as nails. So, I wrote him a hard-as-nail rhyme, and he was talking about something totally different, so the subject matter didn’t really mesh." In other words, the Wu was merely being the Wu and Drake wanted a whiny, poppy R&B effort that they refused to deliver. In spite of the blatant dis, one member of the Clan wasn’t down on Drake. "I like Drake, though," Wu Tang member Ghostface Killah said. "I like him because he pays homage. But at the end of the day, he knows how to rhyme. He's not weak." Maybe not weak, but certainly not smart……….


- Political correctness didn’t die, it merely hopped a flight across the Atlantic Ocean. It now resides in Austria, where the cowardly fools who run an elementary school have elected to kowtow to one loudmouthed mother rather than stand up for itself. The school has dropped yoga classes for children after a mother argued that yoga goes against Christian teachings. The drama began shortly after yoga classes started after a whiny mother came to the school and complained that even the word "yoga ... had negative effects." Yes, this fundamentalist nut job is averse to even the letters y, o, g and a being used together in a word, let alone the inherent evils of the Downward-Facing Dog. This maternal kook seems to have looked only at the fact that yoga has its origins in Hinduism and Buddhism while ignoring the reality that some forms of yoga still have ties to those religions, most yoga is nothing more than glorified stretching that functions as mental and physical therapy for the over-stressed masses. All of this unfolded in the southeastern village of Dechantskirchen, where school inspector Helga Thomann meekly said schools should not offer anything linked to "esoteric" practices. Yoga teacher Ingrid Karner and the children are the ones who suffer here. Karner said she was told to stop classes at the school after a complaint "that it's not allowed, according to the Bible,” despite the fact that the Good Book has no verse dealing with donning stretchy clothing and bending one’s body into contorted poses for the sake of relaxation. School principal Maria Hofer noted that no parents complained when courses started this year, so the question becomes why school officials couldn’t muster the kahones to fight off one wayward parent………


- Memo to all members of the quarterback depth chart for the University of Florida football team: Keep your head down, don’t commit any type of criminal assault on another human being and soon enough, you just might be under center in a starting role for the Gators. It seems like a simple thing to do to earn a first-team gig, but it’s already proven to be too much to ask (allegedly) for two of Florida’s current signal callers. The first would be freshman quarterback Treon Harris, who has been suspended indefinitely while authorities investigate sexual assault allegations made against him. Florida coach Will Muschamp called the allegation against Harris a "very serious charge" and said Harris’ status has not changed since the suspension. According to police, a female student accused Harris of sexually assaulting her around 3 a.m. Sunday -- hours after he helped Florida (3-1, 1-1 Southeastern Conference) rally to beat Tennessee 10-9 in Knoxville. It’s not a good way to celebrate a win and when your coach is speaking about a need to "move forward and manage your football team, it doesn’t sound like you’re going to be suiting up again any time soon. Ironically, Harris might have been named the starter Monday had he, ya know, not been under investigation for trying to rape a woman. With Harris out, struggling fourth-year junior Jeff Driskel will keep his job and he may or may not be backed up by Skyler Mornhinweg. Why is Mornhinweg’s status uncertain? Probably because he tried to cave a teammate’s face in over accusations of stolen cleats. According to campus police, Mornhinweg and teammate Gerald Willis got into a fight over a pair of missing cleats. Willis apparently couldn’t find his kicks and grabbed a pair labeled No. 17 that he thought belonged to close friend and fellow defensive lineman Jordan Sherit. The shoes actually belonged to Mornhinweg, who changed his number from 17 to 8 this season. Mornhinweg confronted Willis about the shoes, things escalated quickly and punches were thrown. Muschamp tried to laugh the matter off and said too much had been made of it, but any time teammates are going bar room brawl on each other, that’s not a good thing………..


- Airbnb is officially legit and legal in San Francisco after resolving the company’s legal issues and adding in a few new responsibilities for people who use the site. For the lame and uninformed, Airbnb is a peer-to-peer accommodation service (i.e. couch surfing) and it had been stepping on the line when it came to the city’s ban on residential rentals of less than 30 days, a law intended to keep landlords from turning apartments into hotels. San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors elected to eliminate the ban for residents renting out their permanent homes, defined as the space they inhabited at least 275 days the previous year. By enacting this change, the city is essentially limiting the number of legal rentals to one per host, since a person cannot theoretically occupy more than one structure for 275 days a year. That’s interesting because one-third of the listings on Airbnb come from people who offer more than one property. The law also bans serial renting and limits the number of days someone can rent their entire apartment 90 per year. Folks can still rent out a spare bedroom without restriction and Airbnb had said it is agreeable to all of the above limitations. The new law “will give regular people the right to share the home in which they live and make it fair to share in San Francisco,” the company said in a statement. There was more good news for the company, as it will not be asked to police its own network. In the past, such claims from technology companies such as Napster and Google have made the same request, but all have been denied. At this point, all Airbnb needs to do is notify hosts about the new law and collect taxes, something it had already started doing at the beginning of this month. Hosts, on the other hand, will be squeezed by The Man for a $50 permit and must keep two years of records showing they haven’t been using the site too frequently. With this fight resolved, Airbnb can channel its legal dollars toward a similar fight in New York City………..

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