Saturday, August 08, 2015

Venezuelan beer outages, Prince seeks bscurity and a sexually harassing college AD


- If you’re willing to commit felony assault for her, you had best be prepared to commit to her for as long as you both shall live. Hear that, East Texas resident Josten Bundy? Bundy, along with sounding like the clichéd serial killer in some lame slasher movie, has pleaded guilty to assaulting his girlfriend's ex-boyfriend after claiming that the man "had been saying disrespectful things" about his lady, Elizabeth Jaynes. In response, Bundy challenged the man to a fight and punched him twice in the jaw. Points for actually challenging the guy to throw hands rather than jumping him outside a bar with four of your buddies, but it didn’t do much for Smith County Court-at-Law Judge Randall Rogers, who was responsible for handing down Bundy’s sentence after this low-class Romeo pleaded guilty to assault with bodily injury for the February throwdown, sentenced Bundy to probation on the condition that he marry Jaynes within 30 days. That left Bundy with the choice to say “I do” to the woman he appears to care a lot about or spend 15 days in jail. Faced with that choice, a couple that most would determine to be nowhere near ready to make the sort of commitment that marriage requires swallowed hard, took a deep breath and applied for their marriage license. They also scheduled a date with a justice of the peace and based on the recent trajectory of their relationship, they might also want to think ahead and get in touch with a good divorce attorney and schedule some time with another judge who will officially declare their rocky union to be over……….


- We all have that one co-worker…the one who inevitably has a beer or six too many at the office holiday party and ends up delivering the sort of drunken antics that both mortify us and leave us with hilarious stories to tell long after HR has fired their ass for their lecherous behavior. It’s just that this co-worker usually isn't the boss, a high-profile public figure and a guy making well into six figures annually. In other words, you don’t expect Minnesota athletic director Norwood Teague to be turning in his two weeks’ notice amid allegations of sexual harassment involving two university employees. The revelation came complete with heavily redacted transcripts of the sexual harassment complaints against Teague, which included texts to one woman in which he asked her to skinny dip and for him to perform oral sex on her. This poor woman  told school administrators that what started out as her texting with Teague about setting him up with one of her friends took a sharp left turn into creepy scenes of him pinching her butt repeatedly and asking whether she was open to cheating on her husband. "Then his texting started to cross the line as he suggested skinny dipping, another drink with no touching, his attraction to me, etc.," the woman wrote to school administrators. "At this point I responded, 'No' and 'Stop.' He continued to text." The second woman told tales of being stalked at a university event and feeling cornered by Teague at times, complete with repeated queries about when she was going to marry her boyfriend. Mix in unwelcome physical advances such as rubbing her back and poking her side and you have two women fleeing with friends because they feared the leader of their athletic department would follow them. Oh, and this is a shocker, but Teague claims booze was involved in his really bad night. He admitted to drinking too much that night and said he would seek help for an alcohol problem. Now that he doesn’t have a gig, he has plenty of time to dry out at a rehab center……….


- There isn't a country in the world that wants to run out of beer. Germany tops the list and the United States isn't far behind, but Venezuela appears to be just as attached to its liquid courage as anyone. That much is evident as Venezuelans try to ride out a massive heat wave without their favorite beer, the latest nightmare in a nation that has undergone shortages of everything from basic food staples to light bulbs. Cerveceria Polar, which distributes 80 percent of the beer in the socialist South American country, is running short on barley, hops and other raw materials and had to start shutting down breweries this week. The brewer has also halted deliveries to Caracas liquor stores and while some stores have also been out of milk and bottled water for months, the absence of beer has hit home especially hard. The beer outage is hitting the rich and poor alike and ha even affected places like El Tigre, a prime showcase of the country's beer culture where people down  undersized bottles of beer that help ensure they always have a cold one in their hands. The heat wave has seen temperatures in the upper 80s during a month that averages 73 degrees and in order to keep its customers happy, El Tiger bars have bought up massive quantities of what remains at supermarkets and is selling the bottles for 200 bolivars rather than the normal 150, in violation of government price controls. Beer would be helpful with a wave of violence that broke out recently in food lines around the country and with an election that the ruling party is expected to lose badly in a matter of weeks, getting drunk would be a nice escape. Supermarket lootings and the arrest of Venezuela's Liquor Store Association for unexplained reasons after denouncing the shortages of beer making materials, it’s clear this situation is headed to an ugly place. Beer production cannot resume until the government approves foreign currency to import raw materials and dictator Nicolas Maduro has been eerily silent on the issue so far. It could be only a matter of time before this turns nasty......... 


- How does an aloof, wildly overrated and oft-inaccessible artist who is well past his prime and no longer remotely relevant to the music scene ensure that his new album is completely unnoticed? Just ask Prince, who has confirmed his upcoming 33rd studio album, “HITNRUN,” will be exclusive to music streaming service Tidal. Tidal is the wholly underperforming streaming service brainchild of Jay-Z and it will host an album described by Prince’s band as "funky, “experimental" and catering to the tastes of hardcore Prince fans. It wasn’t exactly a long and labor-intensive album to produce and took just 90 days to conceive, record and prepare for release. The first single, 'HARDROCKLOVER,' was released early last month. Putting the project only on Tidal and removing all of his other music from Spotify and all other streaming services seems like a way to cloak the project in total obscurity and even if the reason given was low royalty payments, Prince isn't exactly choosing the route that will expose to most people to his music. He worked with Tidal on his Baltimore 'Rally 4 Peace' concert, streaming the first hour of the show live and matching donations made to local youth charities through the site. That show was in memory of Freddie Gray, whose death in Baltimore police custody prompted riots and protests throughout the city. Anyone who does manage to find “HITNRUN” and views the album’s artwork will not that its 'Phase One' subtitle intimates that there may be successors to this album. Of course, if you don’t know an album exists, how can you be aware that it has a sequel? Questions to ponder………..

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