- It’s a freaking war in Venezuela and at the center is a
valuable commodity worth doing battle over: sugar. In what’s becoming a disturbingly
frequent trend, national guardsmen and state price adjusters are fanning out
across the communist nation to put place a military-style
"occupation" designed at sweetening up the kitchens of millions of Venezuelans.
In a different kind of hostile takeover, the Venezuelan government is
temporarily taking over the Dia a Dia supermarket chain as part of a crackdown
on private businesses it believes to be responsible for sugar shortages and
long lines of people waiting to buy a different sort of powdered substance than
is usually popular in South America. Two executives of Dia a Dia were detained
over the weekend as part of an investigation by price-control authorities and
the nation’s largest drugstore chain is suddenly at the center of a very
combustible situation. Congress President Diosdado Cabello announced the arrest
of Dia a Dia's owner and said military and government forces would occupy the
chain’s 35 stores with the explicit purpose of distributing basic goods. Sure
enough, within 24 hours there were armed soldiers running lines for bags of
sugar at a Dia a Dia store near the presidential palace. At least now any potential
fights in the aisles over who gets that last loaf of bread or that final
discounted bag of rice should be avoided and maybe there won't be scumbags
trucking 15 items in the express lane and trying to pawn it off like it’s no
big deal. Enjoy that next supermarket trip and shop safely, Venezuela……….
- Caddies of the world, rise up and united. Specifically,
PGA Tour caddies who believe that the tour from which they make a living is
taking advantage of them by forcing them to bib up during tournaments are
banding together to demand their piece of the pie. A group of 80 such bag
carriers have filed a class-action
lawsuit demanding that the tour compensate them for wearing bibs because those bibs
have the logo of the tournament sponsor. A federal lawsuit filed this week in
Northern California claims that the PGA Tour is making $50 million per year off
the sponsors while the caddies get nothing from the arrangement, other than the
chance to be walking billboards who make a decent share of whatever prize money
their golfer wins. This dispute has been percolating for more than a year and
is part of a larger beef stemming from what caddies claim is the tour’s
continued denial of their access to health care and pension plans. The two
caddies leading the charge for the suit as class representatives are Mike
Hicks, the caddie for Payne Stewart when he won his last U.S. Open, and Kenny
Harms, who caddies for Kevin Na. It’s worth noting that the caddies aren't
going after the golfers themselves, but rather the tour they believe to be
exploiting them as they stroll down sun-soaked fairways toting thousands of
dollars worth of clubs for millionaires who also look to them for expertise on
the course, distances and weather conditions. This problem could definitely be
solved by doing away with bibs, but that definitely ain’t happening………
- Everyone has standards and we all have a breaking point
when we’ve simply been pushed too far. When The Man enacts one too many
restrictive rules or the boss dictates something moronic for the umpteenth
time, you have to either push back or surrender your dignity and self-respect
in the process. For Sublette County (Wyoming) Sheriff’s Deputy Gene Bryson, that
moment came after Sheriff Stephen Haskell imposed the new dress code in the
western Wyoming county that includes Pinedale, which True West magazine
recently named a true Western town. Previously, deputies were allowed to wear
Western attire, including cowboy hats and cowboy boots. Going forward, the
sheriff is requiring deputies to wear black trousers, a tan shirt, black boots
and a black ball cap, saying the change is for safety and uniformity. "I'm
very much for the Western way of life and the look. And that's the way I
dress," Haskell said. "However, for a professional outfit ... I like
everybody to look the same. We are one team unified in one purpose. That is to
do our job." Rather than force everyone to cowboy up, Haskell elected to
eschew cowboy boots, which he says are slippery on ice, and cowboy hats, which
can blow away in Wyoming's ferocious wind. Bryson is clearly set in his Old
West way of life and rather than adapt and change, he’s retiring after 28 years
with the department and about 40 years total in law enforcement. With him he’ll
take his brown cowboy hat, brown cowboy boots and a leather vest in the summer
or a wool vest in the winter. He admitted that he’s retiring specifically
because of the new dress code. "I am not going to change. I've been here
for 40-odd years in the sheriff's office, and I'm not going to go out and buy
combat boots and throw my vest and hat away and say, `This is the new me,’”
Bryson said. Well played, cowboy………
- Neil Young has it backwards. He’s an old-school, grizzled
rocker who’s supposed to stubbornly cling to the past and refuse to accept that
new-fangled technological hooey that those damn kids are using. He’s not
supposed to be the one bashing antiquated technology and insisting that the
world keep moving forward. Yet here is the 69-year-old rocker, denouncing the
recent resurgence of hipster discs, a.k.a. vinyl records, calling it
"nothing but a fashion statement." Coincidentally, Young launched his
own Pono digital music player earlier this month and stands to benefit greatly
from people forgetting that physical forms of music exist and buying all their
songs in intangible form. "A lot of people that buy vinyl today don’t
realize that they’re listening to CD masters on vinyl and that’s because the
record companies have figured out that people want vinyl," Young said.
"And they're only making CD masters in digital, so all the new products
that come out on vinyl are actually CDs on vinyl, which is really nothing but a
fashion statement." The thing is, ol’ Neil does have a point. But then
again, everyone knows that vinyl is a total hipster d-bag move and that’s why
vinyl copies of any album exist. Vinyl saw a 49-percent sales increase in the
United States last year and vinyl sales in the United Kingdom passed the 1
million mark last year for the first time since 1997, meaning a lot of people
out there are trying desperately to impress their friends and dates. Young
admitted that the vinyl revival is “a great niche and it's a wonderful thing
and I hope people continue to enjoy vinyl and it continues to grow because it's
a good thing," but insisted that "it's maintained that "this is
a convenience-oriented society and vinyl is not a convenient thing." Young
would undoubtedly want people to pay up big for Pono, which offers high-quality
audio and is capable of storing up to 2,000 high-resolution songs, so they can
enjoy the two new albums he released last year. In the end, owning a vinyl copy
of anything has very little to do with listening to music at all and Young has
to know that too……..
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