Monday, August 31, 2015

Bulldozing Spanish history, the demise of "X Factor" karaoke and Buffalo basketball criminals


- Being a big fish in a small, hell hole of a pond apparently wasn’t enough for University at Buffalo star forward Justin Moss. Moss was the Mid-American Conference Player of the Year last season after averaging 17.5 points and 9.2 rebounds and helped lead the Bulls to the NCAA tournament for the first time in school history, but he won't be around to help new coach Nate Oats in defense of Buffalo’s MAC title. That would be because Moss and two of his teammates took what should have been a great opportunity to make some extra cash doing handy work at the university and turned it into a criminal affair. Moss and two teammates were caught back in early June stealing $650 from the dorm room of two football players, a theft they carried out after being hired by the school to change out smoke detectors and do other work in the dorms. Nothing says intelligence quite like being on the verge of playing your way into a promising career playing professional basketball in a year or two and flushing that chance down the drain so you and your boys can pilfer beer money from other athletes’ dorm rooms. Maybe Moss intentionally got himself dismissed from school because he couldn’t bear being left behind by his drama queen diva/chronic bitcher of a former coach, Bobby Hurley, who bolted Buffalo after last season for a much better gig at Arizona State. Moss and the two other players involved -- Raheem Johnson and Mory Diane -- returned the money, but the case was turned over to the school's judicial board. Johnson and Diane have been suspended, as was Moss, but Moss lost his appeal and is now gone. Great judgment, Moss, great judgment………..

- Another fight, another loss for you, socially stunted ignoramuses desperately trying to cling to an era when it was legal to discriminate against people on the basis of race and treat black folks like they were less than human. Not only did South Carolina finally rip down the Confederate flag at its statehouse, but Texas has gone and removed its own symbol of the Confederacy from its prominent place on the campus of the state’s largest university. Despite the best efforts of the stuck-in-the-1860s tools of  the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a statue of Confederate president Jefferson Davis has been removed from its place on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. The Confederate heritage group, which is another way of saying we have a disturbing level of reverence for an era when plantations were the Fortune 500 companies of the day and enslaving people was still a thing, made an appeal to prevent the university from removing the statue from its place near the university's iconic clock tower. University President Greg Fenves recently announced that the relic of a bygone and ugly time would be moved to a museum, a move in response to the fact that the statue has become a target of vandalism as well as criticism that it is a symbol of racism and discrimination. A judge last week ruled against the lawsuit to keep the statue in place and with a growing wave of support sweeping the United States to eliminate all Confederate symbols from mainstream culture, this likely won't be the last such situation Americans deal with. It should be great to see you all keep fighting a losing battle to keep one of the ugliest times in our nation’s history alive, Confederate sycophant kooks………


- Is the world finally getting it? It only took a decade and a half, but it appears that reality karaoke TV shows are finally receiving the lack of attention they should have been getting all along. With “American Karaoke (Idol)” on its long-overdue final season in the United States, “X Facator Karaoke” is having major issues of its own across the Atlantic. Ratings for the sorry show Simon Cowell built have fallen by almost 2 million from 2014, with the Season 12 premiere of the show’s British incarnation debuting Saturday with Cowell and Cheryl Fernandez-Versini joined on the judging panel by new additions Rita Ora and Nick Grimshaw. In spite of the hype and promotional buzz, the premiere attracted 7.11 million viewers compared to almost 9.5 million who watched the first episode of the 11th season. ITV director Peter Fincham is clearly looking for a scapegoat and has singled out the BBC with accusations that the network is playing a "game" wherein it deliberately schedules “Strictly Come Dancing” against “X Factor Karaoke.” Yes, a reality dancing show versus a reality karaoke show is what the world has come to. In recent years, “Strictly Come Dancing” has blown right by “X Factor” in the ratings and when the two shows overlap on Saturday night, “X Factor” tends to tumble in the numbers. "I don't know why [the BBC] did that, but it feels a bit like, 'Let's try to see if we can clip The X Factor's wings'," Fincham whined during a panel at the Edinburgh International Television Festival. "This really matters to us, because we are a commercial business. I know from my own time at the BBC that this is a bit of a game. All the evidence we have from our audiences is that they don't want the two to overlap. It's perfectly possible for them not to overlap." Bro, quit bitching and accept the fact that your terrible show has finally worn out its welcome. Go away quietly and find an empty corner of the room into which your wannabe karaoke-ers can sing………


- Umm, about that heritage-protected Stone Age monument in the village of Ardesende, located in northwestern Spain….can we not talk about that? Mayor Jose Luis Valladares Fernandez would prefer that everyone just forget about that monument because it kinda, sorta doesn’t exist anymore and a picnic table may or may not have been put in its place. Technically, the mayor denies his town council destroyed the historically important, 6,000-year-old Neolithic burial site so it could create a place for folks to pour a glass of sangria and snack on some tapas, but a dispute has blown up after an environmental protection group reported to the region's Environment and Planning office the destruction of the historic site. The group claims the monument, whose granite structure formed an ancient burial chamber, is listed by the regional government's heritage directorate, but Fernandez and his regime are firmly denying that there is no record "those stones" were catalogued. You know, because if you pretend to have no record of the site existing, you have to be telling the truth. Locals in the town claim the stones came from the demolition years ago of a building that residents called "the Big House,” so at least the townsfolk are rallying behind their leader in his attempt to sweep a pretty offensive, low-end infrastructure development under the rug. Just to be safe, it might be wise to stake out any remaining historical sites in Ardesende to make sure that a bulldozer isn't currently rolling toward them……….

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