- Ever
heard of Terminix, Recep Tayyip Erdogan? Turkey's
president is under fire for the controversial construction of a grandiose new
presidential palace that critics claim he wasted state resources when he was
prime minister by building the 1,150-room palace. Yes, 1,150 rooms. Oh, and a
few people have pointed out that the palace may have been illegally built on protected land. So how does
Erdogan respond? By claiming that his
old office was infested with cockroaches, that’s how. He moved into the vast structure
after he was elected president in August and in the run-up to Sunday's
parliamentary elections, opposition parties have criticized the expenditure as
proof that their country’s leader is a self-serving, greedy, deceptive and
manipulative scumbag who would rather build a multi-mullion-dollar palace than
call an exterminator and clean up his existing office. According to Erdogan,
cockroaches roamed the lavatories in the now-vacated prime ministry and while
those buggers are notoriously hard to kill, it might have been worth the effort
for a country that isn't exactly swimming in disposable cash. "Does such
an office suit the prime minister of the Republic of Turkey? There can be no
question of waste where representation is concerned,” Erdogan said, presumably
from behind his mahogany desk with his granite-topped office bar to his left,
his ivory statue of himself to his right and his gold-plated toilet lurking in
his personal bathroom next door. Yes, because it’s all about reputation and not
the least bit about responsibly using resources to ensure that your country
runs well and serves the needs of its citizens………
- It’s amazing what a free album can do for an
artist….when they don’t force-feed it into the iTunes libraries of every iTunes
user in the world. U2 took a lot of heat for album-assaulting listeners with
their new album “Songs of Innocence” because the project landed in users’ music
libraries whether they wanted it or not. It was free, but that didn’t placate
the ire of those who argued that automatic musical downloads were wrong. Chance
The Rapper took a different approach for “Surf,” the album he released this
week alongside Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment. Like “Songs of
Innocence,” it’s free, but unlike U2’s opus, music fans must seek it out and
actually choose to download it before it appears in their music collection. The
album leans heavily on the skills of Donnie Trumpet & The Social
Experiment, but it also features guests including Busta Rhymes, Janelle Monáe
and Erykah Badu, along with Chance and his band. The band is comprised of s
Donnie Trumpet, Peter Cottontale and Lido and the album is only available
through iTunes, though according to Chance the Rapper, that hasn’t hurt its
popularity. According to the rapper, the album has been downloaded 618,000
times in full album downloads with a further 10,198,708 single track downloads.
Best of all, this isn't some limited-time offer. "The best thing about
#surf is that this is only the first week of it being free, forever,"
Chance tweeted. Free music is never a bad thing, even if some might dispute the
validity and fairness of the means by which it’s delivered………
- Catawba
College graduates for the spring semester of 2015, you’re the real winners. No,
not because you worked so hard for four or five years - maybe more - and came
out on the other end with a valuable degree that represents the top-notch
liberal arts education you received and will allow you to pursue your life’s
dreams. That’s all great, but what makes you winners that unlike thousands of
other college graduates across the United States in the past month, you had
zero obligation to sit through an über-boring ceremony in which your provost or
school president yammered on and on about the value of education and changing
the world around you. Catawba grads escaped this hell on a sunny spring day because a massive invasion of honeybees forced Catawba to cancel
graduation and several other activities slated for the campus’ main auditorium.
OK, so technically the bee infestation merely forced the college to hold its
graduation elsewhere, but you could always pretend you didn’t get the email
notifying you of the new location or say that you didn’t realize it had been
changed until it was too late. Spokeswoman Tonia Black-Gold said the college
has hired a company to remove the bees in a non-lethal way after maintenance
workers discovered a massive honeycomb inside a wall of one of the building. Wildlife
biologist Bryan Bosley estimated that nearly 100,000 bees have been removed so
far, but as many as 300,000 remain. Maybe school officials should have kept
graduation right where it was scheduled because the threat of a bee attack
might be the only thing that could liven up the otherwise-boring ceremony……….
- If
you found the first two rounds of the NBA Western Conference playoffs largely
unwatchable, the league’s commissioner has a message for you: Too damn bad. Commissioner
Adam Silver said at his annual NBA Finals press conference that there is very
little chance the league will rectify the garbage exhibition that was any
series involving the Los Angeles Clippers and Houston Rockets courtesy of the Hack-a-Shaq
tactic, in which a team deliberately sends an opponent's poor foul shooter to
the free throw line. That approach to the game was used heavily by the San
Antonio Spurs in their first-round loss to the Clippers and by both the Rockets
and Clippers in their second-round matchup with one another and it was
excruciatingly ugly. That led for calls to ban the tactic and it seemed only
logical that it would happen…until Silver claimed that executives at the league's general managers
meeting May 13 voiced opposition to modifying the rule. "The data shows
that we're largely talking about two teams, throughout the playoffs,"
Silver said. "In fact, 90 percent of the occurrences of Hack-a-Shaq
involve the Rockets and the Clippers, and for the most part, it's two players.
Seventy-five percent involve two players, DeAndre Jordan and Dwight Howard. So
then the question becomes, should we be making that rule change largely for two
teams and two players?" Should you? Hell yes. Even one more game that sees
40-percent free-throw shooter DeAndre Jordan heaving up 30 cinder blocks at the
backboard is too many and Silver is missing the point if he takes the position
that "as a steward of the game," he has concerns that eliminating
Hack-a-Shaq might provide a disincentive for young basketball players to
practice foul shooting. That’s so far beyond being remotely true that it might
be time to start the Hack-a-Commish to beat Silver into submission……..
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