Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Starbucks v. San Francisco, whiny women's soccer stars and awkward Romanian politics


- Does Smash Mouth leader singer Steve Harwell know that he’s Smash Mouth leader singer Steve Harwell? It would appear not because if he were aware, he would be down on his knees thanking anyone who actually comes to see a show by his one-hit wonder band rather than cursing out members of the audience and threatening to beat them down because they dared to treat him like a common park pigeon and pelt him with bread during a live show this weekend.  Harwell and his band were performing at the Taste of Fort Collins street festival in Colorado and for no good reason, festival attendees are given a loaf of bread upon their entry to the venue. At some point, one bold soul decided it would be a good idea to chuck slices of Wonder Bread at Harwell and others followed. Bread is notoriously difficult to throw, but some slices did make it to the stage and Harwell elected not to realize what a never-was he always has been and remains, but rather to get extremely offended and launched into a profanity-filled tirade during which he threatened to go into the audience and had to be restrained by security team members. Usually it’s security holding back riled-up fans, but Harwell flipped the script and he angrily stormed off he stage before the band finished their allotted time at the festival. "Come on, someone throw one more thing at me," Harwell can be heard in a video of the incident, which occurred when the band attempted to play the only song of theirs that anyone knows, “All-Star.” “If you're man enough to throw something at me I'm going to walk out there and beat the f*cking sh*t out of you. You're a bunch of p*ssy bitches." That’s the way to show that you’re actually relevant, Steve-O…….


- Awkward! Things are definitely a bit weird right now in Romania, where the country’s president says he didn't know the country’s prime minister would attend the European Games, which most European Union leaders have avoided because of concerns about host Azerbaijan's human rights record. One might think a president and prime minister would be on the same page, but it doesn’t look like it after Premier Victor Ponta traveled to Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, for the opening of the games Friday hours after he survived a no-confidence vote in Parliament. Perhaps emboldened by the victory or simply figuring that he should probably take advantage of his free travel privileges before another no-confidence vote came up and he was ousted, Ponta joined such embattled eastern European leaders as Russian President Vladimir Putin, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko at the opening even as protests against Azerbaijan's human rights record took place in cities around the world  as the game opened up. While he probably wanted to use significantly more profane language, President Klaus Iohannis dialed his rage down - at least publicly - and called Ponta's attendance at the games "a foreign policy gaffe.” Iohannis claimed he did not know about the visit by Ponta, who leads the ruling Social Democratic Party and was recently named in a corruption probe. The two men have been at odds and their relationship worsened further after Iohannis asked Ponta to resign due to the probe and he refused. Just because Ponta is accused of money laundering, forgery, tax evasion and conflict of interest from 2007 to 2008 when he was a lawmaker who (allegedly) received money for a SUV and payment for apartments without doing any work is no reason to stop down or stop traveling on the corporate mind………..


- Bad play, United States women’s national team forward Abby Wambach. There is nothing weaker thana professional athlete falling short of expectations and rather than owning it and saying they need to do better and be better, the athlete tries to pawn blame for their shortcomings off on someone or something else. If you want credit when you succeed, then own the blame when you don’t. It’s even worse to foist blame off on an inanimate object such as the ball you’re using or the playing surface. Someone should have tipped Wambach off to that fact before she claimed the U.S. team would have more goals in the Women's World Cup if not for the playing surface. So far, the American hve plaed both of their games on synthetic grass, i.e. Field Turf, and in their 3-1 victory against Australia, Wambach missed a pair of headers that she normally converts. In both cases, the ball deflected wide off her dome and in the next game, a 0-0 draw with Sweden, another Wambach header was driven down into the turf, bounced up, and was then tipped over the bar by Sweden goalkeeper Hedvig Lindahl. Cue Wambach b*tching about the turf. "I think I score if we're on grass," she said. Unfortunately for her, the entire Women's World Cup is being played on artificial turf fields and before the tournament even began, the surface was clearly in her head because she was part of a group of 60 players that filed a lawsuit against FIFA and the Canadian Soccer Association, claiming gender discrimination because the men's World Cup has been played exclusively on grass. Way to set the gender back a few decades, Abs. "If it hits grass, it's harder for a goalkeeper to react, so if the ball bounces higher the goalkeeper has more time to react off the turf,” Wambach added. Again, don’t complain about the surface, go out and rise above it because that’s what athletes do, then no one can talk junk because you got it done……..


- Starbucks and its tatted-up, nose-ring-sporting baristas are officially in a fight. That fight is anchored in San Francisco, where the city's board of supervisors is in the process of approving a law that will require health warning on advertisements for sodas and other sugary drinks – including Starbucks' famed Frappuccinos. This war against sugary beverages took a big step forward last week when the board tentatively approved the warning labels and it will hit its tipping point with a final vote Tuesday night. A yes vote would put sugary drinks on the same level as cigarettes, which come with ads that warn customers about risks associated with the product. Now, Mountain Dews, smoothies and even Frappuccinos will be forced to include warnings that drinking beverages with added sugar contributes to obesity, diabetes and tooth decay. Before lovers of overpriced coffee drinks put down their customized tumblers and push away from the table at their local Starbucks where they’ve set up shop for the past eight hours with a full office consuming 1/4th of the entire store in order to fight, just know that loaded-up Frappuccinos can easily contain hundreds of calories, as many as four to five times as much as a 12-ounce can of soda. "This legislation is the first time any government has required health warnings for sugary drinks," supervisor Scott Wiener, the bill's sponsor, wrote on Facebook. "We have an obligation to try to reduce consumption to make our community healthier. This legislation moves us in that direction." Critics of the law contend that the beverage industry is being unfairly singled out because companies and restaurants selling sugary desserts are allowed to run unmarked advertising, but if the bill passes it would require - among other businesses -  San Francisco Starbucks locations to adjust signs and advertising featuring Frappuccinos to include the warnings. That’s certainly going to cut into the time spent pimping the über-annoying mix of hipster pop music that Starbucks loves to sell at its stores, but sometimes sacrifices must be made………

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