- Riot Watch! Riot Watch! There’s always a reason to rise up
and revolt in Haiti, mostly because it’s the only way the nation’s impoverished
populace can make sure they are heard. The latest inspiring uprising came this
week as thousands
of people marched through Haiti's capital demanding that long-delayed elections
be held and calling for the president and prime minister to resign. This one
was a hella-inspiring effort that saw rioters in Port-au-Prince burn tires and
hurl rocks at police in a rudimentary effort to get their point across. In
proving why you don’t bring rocks to a tear gas fight, police retaliated with
tear gas and backed down the demonstrators in typical overreactive fashion.
Unfortunately, no major injuries were reported, so clearly no one involved in
this melee put forth the proper amount of effort. In a signal that maybe it’s
time to do something about the damn problem at hand, this was Haiti's third
anti-government protest in about a month and the first one in recent years to
push through the security perimeter at the National Palace. To repeat, they
bum-rushed the security perimeter at the National Palace and got close enough
to let The Man see that they were toting pictures of Russian President Vladimir
Putin asking him for help. Why the hell they think Putin gives a damn about
them or will make any effort to help them is a mystery, but it’s probably
because these maniacs accuse the United States of supporting Haiti's current
leaders and since Putin despises the U.S., maybe he secretly loves them.
Meanwhile, Haitian President Michel Martelly and Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe
have said they want to hold elections but accuse legislators of blocking the
vote by preventing a quorum. A likely story by The Establishment…….
- World, let’s feel bad for Weezy. Yes, Lil Wayne is trapped
and now everyone knows his plight. Millionaire musician and media star he may
be, Wayne is stuck in a bad place after his manager announced that the rapper is not leaving
his record label, despite Wayne’s claims that he is a "prisoner" at
the label in a heated dispute over the release of his new album. As Lil Wayne
tells it via his Twitter account, Cash Money is refusing to put out his LP,
which was due this fall. Fall is two weeks from being over and there is no sign
of the album, so Weezy went on a late-night Twitter rant that he chased with an
Instagram post in which he again calls himself a prisoner and says he
understands if fans are "fed up" waiting for the release of “Tha
Carter V.” Knowing how bad it would look for those words to be out there
without any sort of rebuttal, manager Cortez Bryan insisted relations between
the rapper and his longtime label are "good." "We're here, we're
staying," Bryan said. That wasn’t a ringing endorsement of enthusiasm, but
more of a, “He doesn’t have a choice, he’s stuck and so he’s going to do what
he’s told, dammit.” Whenever it finally drops, “Tha Carter V” will be Wayne’s
10th solo album and as its name might suggest, it’s the successor to “Tha
Carter IV,” which dropped in 2011 and was very well-received by fans and many
critics. Maybe this album drama is some sort of effort to squeeze Wayne
following his announcement earlier this year that his 10th album will also be
his last one, with only a helluva big payday able to lure him out of his
self-imposed retirement. Maybe Wayne wants to chase other business interests,
maybe he doesn’t want to become an aging rapper like Jay Z and Eminem, or maybe
he’s like a boxer, retiring and un-retiring a dozen times before he finally
quits…………
- Not enough people are willing to push aside the good
cheer of the holiday season and deliver a big, hearty, “Eff you” to
unsuspecting fools. The Metropolitan
District Commission of Wethersfield, Connecticut is more than happy to play the
role of Grinch this Christmas and in the process, to drop the hammer on poor
Dawn Pelligrino. Pelligrino, a mother of two and a longtime Wethersfield
resident, recently received a major shock in her mailbox. She was hit with a
$4,000 water bill from the city because it turns out that her statements were
wildly inaccurate for the past nine years. She has lived in her current home
since 2005, unaware that she had an old meter-reading sysem and therefore had
been receiving estimated bills for nearly a decade. According to Pelligrino,
she uses quite a bit of water for normal mom duties including washing clothes,
dishes and watering her lawn in the four months a year when it’s no winter or
almost winter in her area. She had no idea just how much water she was truly using.
"Never in the nine years did I get a letter in the mail saying you have an
old meter we need to change it,” Pelligrino said. “Never did anyone come to my
door, nothing. No one had ever made an attempt to change that meter." Her
troubles began when she made the mistake of physically going to the MDC offices
to pay her bill in person. Letting them see your face is always a bad idea and
the desk jockey who took her payment noticed that Pelligrino had an old meter
system and arranged to update it. Pelligrino didn’t even know where her meter
was - #clueless - but a crew located and replaced it in her basement. One month
later, the $4,000 bill arrived at her home. "It's horrific,” Pelligrino
said. “It is. I don't even know how people can afford this." According to
the MDC, once a new meter is installed, it can determine how much water has
been used since the last official reading and that’s how it found out what a
water hoarder Pelligrino is. The company claims it puts plenty of information
on estimated bills on its website and on the bill itself and is working on
upgrading its billing suspect to stop situations like this from happening
again. In response, Pelligrino argued that the company knew about the issue in
2005 and did nothing about it. She’s set up a three-year payment plan to pay
what she owes at no interest and also plans to file complaints with the
attorney general's office and Department of Consumer Protection. Merry freaking
Christmas, Dawn………
- The Portland Pilots are not a great basketball team. The least they
could do is attempt to be a reasonably classy one. They’ve won six of their first seven games this
season against laughable competition and their first defeat came at the hands
of their local rivals, the Portland State Vikings. It was a defeat punctuated
with literally the most meaningless dunk possible and that dunk came via to
lamest piece of trickery on a college basketball court this season. With the
Vikings holding a 14-point lead over the Pilots and the clock ticking down to
zero, Portland guard Bryce White had one last trick up his sleeve. White
approached Portland's Alec Wintering - who was dribbling out the clock - as
if he was going to give him a handshake as time ran out. When Wintering reached
out to shake hands and left the ball exposed, White deked him by swiping away
the orange and streaking to the other end of the court for an easy dunk that
boosted his scoring for the game to 12 - gotta mind the stat sheet - and cut
the final deficit to a much-less-embarrassing 83-71. Losing by 14 would be
shameful, but losing by 12 is pretty damn commendable, so it was a great move,
right? Of course, none of the Portland State players made any effort to stop
White and instead shook their heads at his foolishness. They aren’t slated to
face the Pilots again this season, but White is only a sophomore and odds are,
he’ll meet Portland State again. When that happens, one would expect that the
Vikings won't show a whole lot of mercy to the man who tried to clown them in
totally unnecessary fashion. Stay classy, Bryce…….
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