- Well,
at least this is an embarrassing story about the Catholic Church that doesn’t
involve a grown man sexually abusing a child and ruining that child’s life for
the next eight decades. Unfortunately, that’s where the non-negative news ends
here. This is the story of Cardinal William Joseph
Levada of Menlo Park, California, a former San Francisco archbishop and one of
the highest-ranking American officials of the Roman Catholic Church, who
apparently left his morals and his ability to hand his keys to a designated
drive back on the mainland when he visited Hawaii recently. The cardinal was
stopped while driving on the Big Island when a patrol officer saw him swerving
all over Queen Kaahumanu Highway like his car was on roller skates. Levada was
arrested on suspicion of drunken driving and released from jail after posting
$500 bail and let’s just say that he’s not trying to pretend that he was
wrongly accused of one of the most irresponsible and reprehensible
non-murderous crimes a person can commit. To his very limited credit, Levada
said in a statement issued through the Archdiocese of San Francisco that he
regrets his error in judgment and intends to cooperate with authorities. My
man, you may have begun serving as archbishop of San Francisco in 1995 and been
a cardinal since 2006, but you just committed one of the cardinal sins of the
road. Nothing screams moderation and faithfully adhering to God’s teachings
quite like pounding one too many vodka tonics and getting behind the wheel when
your already-subpar 79-year-old driving skills are further impeded by your
BAC……….
- Can
someone convince Bruce Dickinson to sit down and have a heart-to-hear chat with
Harrison Ford before he goes ahead with his big plans for Iron Maiden’s forthcoming world tour? Ford is one of the
most noteworthy amateur pilots in Hollywood and has crashed more than one
non-Millennium Falcon aircraft in his time, so he’s the perfect person to talk
to Dickinson about his plans of getting a license to fly the four-engine Boeing
747-400 jumbo jet that Black Sabbath plans to use for its upcoming world tour.
The jet is almost twice the size and over three times the weight of the Boeing
757 the band used on previous tours and having a non-professional pilot
steering that behemoth through the air is asking for trouble. The tour will be
in support of “The Book of Souls,” Iron Maiden’s first new studio album in five
years. The album will drop on Sept. 4 and the tour is expected next year, with
their bulky beast of aerial burden carrying the entire line-up, crew and over
12 tons of equipment more than 50,000 miles as that motley crew crisscrosses
the globe. While no official list of tour dates and stops has been announced,
the tour is set to commence in the United States in late February with the plane,
dubbed “Ed Force One,” scheduled to be ready to go with Dickinson at the
controls. Whether Iron Maiden will survive the tour is another matter entirely,
but traversing 35 countries across six continents will make for quite the
adventure for the over-the-hill rockers………
- Riot
Watch! Riot Watch! Who’s to blame in Argentina after protests
over alleged vote fraud in a northern province were broken up with tear gas and
rubber bullets? Trick question! It doesn’t matter who’s to blame; all that
matters is that the country got to enjoy some wonderfully violent clashes that
further escalated tension ahead of
October elections. But because this is politics and pointing fingers and
shifting blame is the default response, top presidential candidates in
Argentina and other government officials exchanged accusations about who was to
blame for what they wrongly labeled a debacle. Cabinet chief Anibal Fernandez
suggested that foreign elements from "up north" had organized the
uprisings, which came to a screeching, disappointing halt when police fired on
people and forcefully removed them from the main square of San Miguel de
Tucuman, about 807 miles north of Buenos Aires. Mauricio Macri, the leading
opposition candidate for October's presidential election, chose to throw out
his conspiracy theory that it's impossible to say the gubernatorial election in
Tucuman was clean when at least 40 ballot boxes had been burned. "We can't
say that this was a normal election," said Macri. "Burning a polling
place in the 21st century is unacceptable." There was no shortage of
differing viewpoints after this mess, with ruling party presidential candidate
Daniel Scioli claiming that protesters and politicians simply didn't want to
accept that ruling party candidate Juan Manzur won the election. According to
the official results, Manzur won with 54 percent of the vote compared to 40
percent for Jose Cano, the closest contender. Various involved parties claimed to
be either asleep during the riots or simply ignorant of what happened, but the
truth is that none of that matters. Riots happened, dissent was voice and The
Man was put on notice that this election process is far from over………..
- In
case you missed it, the Los Angeles Lakers sucked last season. They went 21-61
and had the fourth-worst record in the NBA with a roster of never-were’s so
deprived of talent than they nearly forced the league to adopt European
soccer’s system of relegation for the teams that suck more than humanly
possible. They figure to be almost as bad this season with an aged-out,
on-his-last-leg Kobe Bryant coming back as their best player and 2014
first-round pick Julius Randle trying to round back into form after tearing up
his knee as a rookie before playing in a single regular-season game. L.A.’s
2015 first-round pick, guard DeAngelo Russell, may help a bit but it’s clear
that a loaded Western Conference will leave the Lakers in the dust as they
grasp in vain for the eighth and final playoff spot next spring. Faced with
another lost season, what is one of the most storied franchises in NBA history
to do? How about bringing back a broken-down, has-been relic of its past and
hope that a guy nearly two decades into his NBA career can suddenly find the
fountain of youth? Come on down, free agent forward Metta World Peace. World
peace, who played four seasons with the Lakers from 2009-13, is reportedly
close to signing a one-year contract with the Lakers. Bryant is reportedly
supportive of the idea and World Peace has been in the Lakers' practice
facility this offseason playing against the team's players, so he seems to be
head in the direction of finding his first NBA job since the New York Knicks
waived him during the 2013-14 season. But hell, any time you can throw down a
couple million dollars for a guy who balled off the edge of the map in China
and Italy last season, that’s an investment you have to make………
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