- When is an NBA coach officially done with his team? Is it
a) when they are 19 games below .500 and hemorrhaging losses at a massive rate,
b) when his players are breaking huddles with chants about how many weeks they
must suffer through to reach the end of the season or c) when their players
convince him to cancel morning shootarounds because it doesn’t jive with their
busy nightlife? The answer is all of the above, at least for Brian Shaw, who
was axed by the Denver Nuggets in a move everyone saw coming. "I want to sincerely thank Brian for
his time with our organization," general manager Tim Connelly said in a
team release. "You won't find a better guy than Brian and he is one of the
brightest basketball minds I've ever been around. Unfortunately things didn't
go as we hoped.” Not unless you hoped to be 12 games out of a playoff spot and
with a team that clearly did not want to play for a coach who didn’t want to
have many of them on his team. See, Shaw complained on numerous occasions to
Nuggets management about the maturity and professionalism of some of the
players, but management told him to stick it out. Now his headache will be
stuck with interim coach Melvin Hunt for the remaining 23 games of the season.
Hunt gets to try to break a six-game losing streak with a team that broke a
huddle coming out of a timeout in Friday's home loss to the Utah Jazz with a
chant of "1-2-3 ... Six weeks!" Shaw tried to convince everyone –
maybe himself too - that the team was referring to the end of the season, which
is about six weeks away, and said it actually referred to the last time Denver
won a home game. That span of time is now irrelevant for Shaw, unless you want
to count the six weeks of paychecks he’s going to get for not coaching the
Nuggets…………
- Everyone wants a memorable engagement story to tell their
family and friends for the duration of their marriage. Not everyone is willing
to go to the lengths Arthur Edelhoff and Lindsay Duncan of Corrales,
New Mexico went to in order to certify their commitment to one another. These
two love birds to got engaged on top of Sandia Peak, surrounding themselves
with beautiful vistas to mark a moment that both of them had dreamed about for
years. They didn’t go the badass route and walk to the top, but they did take the
tram up the mountaintop early in the evening. The plan was in place: Get
engaged, break out the smartphones and start notifying the world of the big
news through texts and social media, then make the trip back down to
civilization and celebrate with a fancy meal together. There was only one
problem – the wind. After taking happy engagement photos, Edelhoff and Duncan
were informed that they would have to wait for the 40-mph gusts swirling around
them to die down before they could make their return trip. According to Jay
Blackwood, the assistant manager of the Sandia Peak Tram, some 140 people were
stranded for about four hours. Edelhoff and Duncan didn’t get off the mountain
until nearly 10:30 p.m., marking the first of what will likely be many times in
their marriage when they would like to get away from each other but have to
stick it out for hours on end. Don’t look for these two to go with an outdoor
wedding a setting that could offer some more of nature’s wonderful surprises on
the big day…………
- Verrrry clever, Muse frontman Matt Bellamy. Bellamy knows
how to troll fans in order to promote a new project and he did his job with
aplomb when he was asked by a fan about rumors that Muse's forthcoming single will be
aired soon on radio are true. Rather than offer a simple answer to a yes or no
question, Bellamy got all cryptic with it. "Too offensive for radio,” he
answered coyly. Someone else asked him about speculation that the first single
was titled, “Drones,” Bellamy claimed it was “#psycho handler, brainwashing us
to become human #drones.” It had all the makings of a perfectly done Twitter
publicity stunt and tagging a song by a mainstream rock band to be "too offensive for radio" is
equal parts ridiculous and amusing, with a dash of preposterous sprinkled in. Muse
has dropped tiny hints here and there about its next release, hoping the trail
of bread crumbs will keep fans interested until the album is actually ready.
There was an Instagram photo with a Photoshopped image of a drone that carried
the band's logo, the latest in a line of data shared by the band to detail their
work in the studio. They have done similar publicity stunts for previous albums
and deserve credit for being engaged and active with fans during the process
rather than trusting their label to pimp the album and line up the same
interviews and TV appearances with the usual music scene players to build hype
for the release. That doesn’t mean anyone actually believes Bellamy’s claims
that any single on the album is even remotely offensive or controversial, but
it’s nice that he thinks his music has that kind of gravitas to it………..
- How did you celebrate World Wildlife Day?
Never mind, because if you’re like 99 percent of the world’s population, you
have no idea which day this week was WWD and there’s no sense telling you now.
But even if you had known, odds are you wouldn’t have celebrated quite like
Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta did. Kenyatta decided that it was the perfect
day to go pyromaniac on 15 tons of elephant tusks to discourage poaching and
trade in ivory. It’s been 25 years since ivory trade was banned, but the
renewed demand from emerging markets threatens Africa's elephants and rhinos,
according to Kenyatta. He and fellow African leaders are concerned about both the
scale and rate of the new threat to endangered wildlife species. "Many of
these tusks belonged to elephants which were wantonly slaughtered by criminals.
We want future generations of Kenyans, Africans and the entire world to
experience the majesty and beauty of these magnificent beasts. Poachers and
their enablers will not have the last word," Kenyatta said. With that, he
turned and put a torch to a pile of elephant tusks towering 10 feet high and
drenched in fuel. Soaring prices for ivory in places like China and other Asian
nations is driving elephant killings by poachers across Africa and a
conservation group called Save The Elephants said last year that 100,000
elephants were killed in Africa between 2010 and 2012. For its part, China
imposed a one-year ban on ivory imports, which is a huge gesture on the level
of the United States offering to ban the import of Swedish pickled herring for
a year. Elephant populations in Tanzania, Gabon, Cameroun, Central African
Republic, Mozambique, Republic of Congo and Congo remain in the danger zone
even though Kenyan poaching declined last year with 164 elephants and 35 rhinos
killed, down from 302 elephants and 59 rhinos killed in 2013. Sadly, not
everyone can celebrate with a massive ivory bonfire…….
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