Saturday, August 15, 2015

Squirrels = glorified rats, John Daly is awesome and another, another Hollywood remake


- Earlier this week when we suggested that Hollywood was hell bent on reviving every old TV show or movie in some form or giving it a wholly unnecessary sequel rather than coming up with original new concepts, some may have thought it was a joke. It was not. Two pieces of news about two such projects (“Twin Peaks” and “Deadwood”) in two days started the ball rolling and now comes the revelation that a TV series based on the 2001 film “Training Day” will soon be hitting screens. The original film starred Denzel Washington as a wholly corrupt Los Angeles police officer training rookie cop Ethan Hawke, with Washington winning an Oscar for his performance. Like the movie, the show will center on the relationship between the two officers. It will be executive produced by “Southpaw” producer Antoine Fuqua, who will work  from a script penned by Will Beall (Gangster Squad). Fuqua Films and Jerry Bruckheimer TV will oversee the series, which is being developed for CBS after the network - surprise - won a bidding war with its rivals over the chance to latch onto something that is already a known commodity and won't require anyone to summon true creativity to come up with an entirely new idea based on characters and situations that haven’t already been created in the entertainment world. Hawke and Washington, fittingly enough, will next work with Fuqua on another retreated project, a remake of the classic Western “The Magnificent Seven.” New ideas? We don’t need no stinking new ideas…………..


- Verrry magnanimous of you, Thailand's legislature, verrry magnanimous. You passing over the chance to f*ck over 248 members of the previous Parliament for trying to amend the constitution and make it more fair for the people is such a kind and warmhearted gesture that it brings a tear to the eye - or it would if you weren’t a bunch of pompous dicks who made a meaningless gesture in the name of winning some public relations points. The legislature voted against impeaching those 248 members of the previous parliament and in the process, sparing them a ban from politics. The National Legislative Assembly, appointed after a military coup last year, shockingly did the right thing when it rejected a recommendation by the National Anti-Corruption Commission. The government sycophants on the commission said the former lawmakers' effort in 2013 to make the Senate an all-elected body constituted abuse of power. Yes, because giving voters the right to select all of the legislators making key decisions about how to run their country is an outright outrage and need to be stopped at all costs and punished to the fullest extent of whatever new laws you can make up to take down those responsible. The impeachment attempt was viewed by some critics as an effort to cripple the Pheu Thai party, the political base of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted by a 2006 coup and whose sister led Thailand's last elected government. The entire Thai political scene is a giant mess right now with no true good guys, so why should this clusterf*ck by any different? Keep up the terrible work, everyone involved with this disaster of a country……….


- John Daly will likely never win another PGA Tour event. That doesn’t prevent Long John from being one of the absolute best watches of any golfer in the world and it’s about more than just the retina-scarringly bright pants he wears on the course each weekend before the first two rounds before he’s eliminated for missing the cut of every tournament in which he plays. What makes JD such a great show is the steady stream of events like what happened as he was lurking just inside the cut line at the PGA Championship on Friday. As he teed it up on the par-3 seventh hole, Daly jerked his tee shot right, baptizing his ball in nearby Lake Michigan. After taking a drop and hitting another tee shot, he replicated his first hit and with two shots and two penalty strokes on his ledger, he deliberately yanked his third shot to the left side of the green and with that ugly result, he helicopter-tossed his iron into the lake. It was a Daly-esque finish to a terrible sequence that killed any chance of him making the cut, one he chased by finishing with a septuple-bogey 10 on the hole, dropping him well down the leaderboard past the point of no return. It was the 17th time that Daly has posted a double-digit total on a single hole in a PGA Tour-sanctioned event and amazingly, didn’t even match the 12 that occurred during last year's Valspar Championship. Those 17 double-digit scores rank first on the list of current players, but at least Daly won't be getting any angry letters from the Environmental Protection Agency berating him for polluting the lake and demanding that he rectify his misdeed. A young man in a boat recovered the club moments after it hit the water, saving Daly from another blight on a bad day……..


- Anyone still doubting that squirrels are filthy rodents, even glorified rats with bushy tails who pilfer bird food and carry all manner of disease in their mangy little bodies? Look no further than Yosemite National Park, where officials have temporarily shut a popular campsite after two squirrels died of plague in the area. Park officials confirmed that Tuolumne Meadows Campground will close from noon Monday through noon Friday so authorities can treat the area with a flea-killing insecticide, although busting out a hunting rifle and sending as many local squirrels as possibly shuffling off to the great acorn stash in the sky would also help. Plague is carried by rodents and is spread by fleas and even though transmission of plague between people is rare and the threat to humanity is low on this one, there is already one case of it happening here. An unidentified child fell ill with the plague after camping with his family at Yosemite's Crane Flat Campground in mid-July and it wasn’t until this week that the park reopened Crane Flat after treating that campground for four days with an insecticide. The infected child is recovering in a hospital and both that child and their family can be thankful to not be included among the nine people who have died in California since 1970 after contracting plague. Just remember that the next time you see a furry little squirrel with an acorn lodged in its nasty mouth, pausing on the trail in front of you and staring at you with its beady eyes, taunting you with the reality that if it wanted, it could send you to the hospital with one rabid bite on your ankle. We’re onto you, squirrels, and we’re the ones with all of the guns and ammunition……….

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