Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Terrelle Pryor burns bridges, losers and their Nintendo crocheting and Burger King's red Samurai burger


- Like ketchup and tomatoes on your hamburger but feel like there’s not enough vibrant red coloring on your favorite sammitch? Burger King, home of so many examples of wretched dietary excess, is aiming to fix that and add even more hollow calories to your daily diet by grilling up an all-red burger that will make its debut soon in Japan. For now, the Samurai burger will be available only in the Land of the Rising Sun and it will feature crimson-colored buns and red-tinted cheese, along with the so-called "angry sauce." There will also be some non-red elements to the sandwich, as customers can choose either a beef Whopper patty or a royal hot chicken patty. The red Samurai burger will be offered for a limited time of July 3 through August 20, although one would expect that if it’s a real menu hit, it will hang around for a while longer. That might be tough with a whopper of a price tag that will put its cost at about $5.60. It will pair nicely with Burger King's black Samurai burger, which is already available in Japan. This all keeps up with the idea of disturbingly ugly and unhealthy foods being served up both in the United States and abroad by fast food joints, alongside the monstrosity that is Pizza Hut's pepperoni pizza with a crust made from pigs-in-blankets and the Double Down from KFC, a sandwich that uses fried chicken as buns instead of bread. By comparison, a red sandwich is only mildly offensive and not quite as unhealthy as the other fatty foods keeping America’s waistline bloated……….


- For a day, funk rocker Nile Rodgers went back to his humble roots. Rodgers, like so many successful artists, once ground out a living on street corners and in grimy clubs. He has since sold hundreds of thousands of albums over years and years, but after playing the British Summer Time festival in Hyde Park on Sunday, he began his week by doing a short stint as a street performer  on London's South Bank. Rodgers did very well for himself when he spent 20 minutes performing near the Thames Rivers, earning about $20 and later posting. "This really was a blast today. I truly used to like busking. I made a decent living and some lifelong friends," he wrote in a tweet. “Today I went busking on the ‪#London Southbank. Didn't draw much of a crowd until I stared playing dance music. Hmm?” Rodgers noted that he started out his musical career when he was young and homeless by busking and while the odds of him getting costumed up and showing up in Trafalgar Square or outside an Underground station with a guitar case and asking for donations isn't something that’s going to happen on a regular basis, it calls back to U2’s recent stints doing the same in the past, the most recent coming on a New York City subway platform last month. That Rodgers had to start busting out some dance music before people really started paying attention to him is sad, but given that societal music tastes are so terrible and gravitate toward unlistenable pop crap when it comes to radio stations and streaming services, it’s not the least bit surprising. Still, taking to the streets 12 hours after playing a show alongside Grace Jones is a neat way to begin a new week………


- Is Norwegian Nintendo super fan Kjetil Nordin a loser? Yes, he is. Sorry to those who take offense to calling someone a loser when you’ve never met them, but there is nothing wrong with labeling someone as loser-tastic when they spent much of the past six years of their life tirelessly crocheting a real-life "World 1" map of Super Mario Bros. 3, made entirely out of yarn. Kjetil carved out a whopping 800 hours  to make this happen and while you can argue that devoting the equivalent of nearly five full weeks of time to making a monument to your girlfriend-less, friend-less, social life-less status merely shows how much you love your favorite video game and gaming system, it’s proof of much more. It’s proof that you are a socially stunted misfit who has neither friends nor self-respect, because having either would have alerted you to the fact that this project is like a giant flashing light of patheticness that you can never turn off even if you send that map up in a ginormous ball of flame. "I've spent 800 hours crocheting and many hours researching and searching for the correct yarn,” Nordin said. “When the water was half way finished I saw that I had chosen the wrong shade of blue. It was almost purple, and very ugly, so I had to undo all of it. That took an extra week." Want to guess who wasn’t with him when he was out searching for the perfect shade of blue yarn to create the water on his oversized art project? His girlfriend or best friend, both of which it’s clear he doesn’t have and won't have any time soon. Don’t even bother telling Kjetil to be proud of his accomplishment because pride shouldn’t be anywhere near this embarrassment……….
 

- Terrelle Pryor has been a disappointment for virtually his entire NFL career…so why change now? Pryor, who was a 2011 supplemental draft pick by the Oakland Raiders, never lived up to any promise he once held during a short stint starting in Oakland and since then, he has bounced around the league and failed to latch on anywhere. His most recent stop before this week was Cincinnati, where he not only failed to earn playing time or win the starting job, but managed to detonate several bridges on his way out the door. The Bengals are livid that Pryor posted images from their recent minicamp to one of his social media accounts Monday afternoon after being waived on Thursday. The videos he posted were of himself throwing passes during full-team drills at the Bengals' minicamp and even though media members are allowed into those sessions, cameras are permitted to roll only during warm-up and start-of-practice installation periods and are forbidden from documenting, via video, accounts of those full-team drills. Pryor spent just a month with the Bengals after being brought in by offensive coordinator Hue Jackson, who was the Raiders' head coach at the time Pryor was drafted. He managed to look remotely competent during a tryout during rookie minicamp in May, but came up well short of his goal of competing for the Bengals' backup quarterback job.  He actually dropped one spot on the depth chart to fourth and when it became clear he wouldn’t win the backup job, the Bengals cut him loose. They did so to give him time to catch on with another team and he was claimed by the Bengals’ in-state rivals, the Cleveland Browns, at the start of the week as a receiver. Thus, the tagline on one of the videos Pryor posted and later deleted: "Going to miss QB but I will make a great WR! Already working!!" Just not working on understanding the rules - unwritten and otherwise - of your sport………..

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