- The
American government should probably huddle with the FAA and figure out exactly
what its policy on drones at massive rock concerts is because Matt Bellamy and
friends are coming. The Muse frontman and the crew around the band’s 2016 Drones World Tour clearly have some lofty ambitions
and when a frontman comes out and says his band is looking to build upon Pink
Floyd’s famous The Wall Tour, bank on a high production value. "It’s our
version of The Wall, basically," Bellamy said of the tour. Production
designer Oli Metcalfe and tour director Glen Rowe backed up Bellamy’s claims
that there would be drones, promising "a whole swarm of drones" and a
stage "like a double headed arrow.” Such massive productions are the place
where bands like U2 and Muse tread and to hear the production team tell it,
Muse is aiming to take it to another tier. "We’ve been able to work with a
company in the Netherlands that have written a piece of software that can
control a whole swarm of drones," Metcalfe said. "So we’re
programming them in a different way. They’re not manned, they’re not manned
vehicles as in somebody with a controller. They’re controlled by a computer
system and tracking system." The double-headed arrow stage would
purportedly be a way to get the band closer to the fans and would span the length
of the area with a narrow design that would swoop low and allow for an optimal
view of the show. Rowe said the design was inspired
by boxing rings. “The whole circle moves one revolution per hour. The idea is
Matt starts there and an hour later he comes back, so in the show everyone sees
him [up close] twice,” Rowe said. Listen closely and you can almost hear the
cash register chiming as the price of tickets for this spectacle soar higher
and higher……..
- Doesn’t
it just sound exciting to live in a country where a military coup is not only
possible, but one of the more likely outcomes of your unstable government
simply doing business? Sure, post-coup it might not be much fun to have an
iron-fisted military regime in place, choking your freedom to death and
crushing dissent with malice, but the mere possibility that you could wake up
one morning, turn on the television and see a military broadcast announcing the
power shift is pretty damn cool. Just as Burkina Faso, where the country’s military seized the airwaves and installed a general
loyal to the ex-president, executing a respectable coup weeks before national
elections. It was yet another dramatic twist in a year where the West African
country has seen President Blaise Compaore ousted in a popular uprising last
October after he tried to prolong his 27-year rule. The transitional government
installed in his place was never taken seriously, as evidenced by the fact that
soldiers arrested the interim president and prime minister late Wednesday and
announced hours later that they had been removed from office. Nothing screams
legit government like your top officials being scooped up off the street and
thrown in jail by the military, sparking violence in the streets and return
gunfire by the presidential guard to disperse crowds protesting the coup.
Reports from the scene indicated at least six casualties in the melee and
afterward, members of the presidential guard wandered about the city in pickups
and on motorcycles seeking to disperse any gatherings. That was bad news for
the zeroes and zeroes of people looking to start their vacation in Burkina
Faso, which closed its land and air borders and imposed a 7 p.m.-to-6 a.m.
curfew. This is a damn-impressive sixth coup since the country won independence
from France in 1960. A coup every nine years sounds just about right……..
- A
professional athlete being charged with a crime for inflicting violence upon
someone else is nothing new. That athlete facing criminal charges for busting a
burning slug into a giant, furry killing machine is a different twist on the
story. Anaheim Ducks defenseman Clayton Stoner has both a funny last name and a
court date in Vancouver on Oct. 9, the day before the Ducks open the season, on
charges that he illegally shot a grizzly bear in British Columbia. Three days
before his team plays the Vancouver Canucks in Anaheim, Stoner will stare down
opposition from a different Vancouver team and begin the process of defending
himself against two counts of knowingly making a false statement to obtain a
hunting license. According to court documents, the statements in question were
made in his hometown of Port McNeill in May 2013, when he played for the
Minnesota Wild. Authorities have charged the NHL veteran with hunting out of
season, hunting without a license and unlawfully possessing dead wildlife
related to the shooting of a bear near Bella Bella. The case against Stoner
hinges largely on the efforts of Coastal First Nations, an alliance of native
groups in British Columbia. The alliance identified the slain bear, which it
says was 5 years old, in a 2013 statement. "The bear, nicknamed 'Cheeky'
by local field technicians, was skinned and left to rot in a field. His head
and paws were carried out past a sign declaring trophy hunting closed in the
Great Bear Rainforest,” the statement reads. These enviro-Nazis even channeled
their inner Ken Burns, producing an entire 20-minute documentary titled
"Bear Witness" about Cheeky's death. Stoner can’t really claim it
wasn’t him, given that online picture
showed him holding the severed head of a grizzly. He claimed to have “applied
for and received a grizzly bear hunting license through a British Columbia
limited entry lottery,” a claim that is now being called into question………
- The
family that packs deadly drugs inside cereal boxes together to conceal said
drugs stays together….maybe all the way to a long stint at the nearest state
penitentiary. The heartwarming, pocket-filling story of a family-run heroin ring in New York City may have hit a snag when Brooklyn
District Attorney Kenneth Thompson announced that two dozen people are charged
in a 368-count indictment, but the sheer magnitude of this operation is
impressive in a sick, dealing-a-drug-that-is-the-devil way. According to
Thompson, the operation netted about $1.5 million last year by supplying heroin
to more than a dozen distributors, including a Manhattan court supervisor and a
drug counselor. Never mind how great it is that someone tasked with overseeing
part of the court system and another person who was supposed to help people
kick their addictions to drugs like the very one he or she was peddling….how
about the innovative mind that decided to include heroin inside cereal boxes as
if it was some sort of 50-cent plastic toy a kid tears a box of Trix open to
find? Thompson says the group sold about 25,000 packs of heroin each month,
although he didn’t disclose whether any actual cereal was included inside the
boxes, which would have been a nice added touch. But with a low-level operation
such as this one - mobsters and elite criminal organization generally aren't packing
heroin into Cap’N Crunch boxes in Brooklyn - it’s only a matter of time before
someone makes a mistake and the whole operation comes tumbling down……….
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