- Unions:
The scourge of civilized societies around the world. They protect lazy,
incompetent and selfish workers from getting fired or even being required to
actually do their job properly and in Italy, they’re the reason thousands of
sweaty, pasta-stuffed tourists couldn’t visit one of the most important
architectural treasures in the world. It was a frustrating day for the
gelato-gulping set of visitors who were held at bay outside Colosseum by a
union meeting, prompting Italy’s culture minister to insist that the country
would develop new policies to ensure that such incidents never happen again. Dario
Franceschini said he was outraged that for an entire morning, "tourists
were left to wait in line in front of the whole world, this time at the
Colosseum, the most important archaeological site in Rome." Premier Matteo
Renzi is on board with Franceschini’s vows, agreeing to pursue measures to
protect Italy's cultural treasures from strikes, with new norms defining
Italian monuments and museums as essential services. Maybe unions can meet in
other places, ones that don’t require visitors to pay 10 euros to get inside,
perhaps at a warehouse or office complex. Then again, this is nothing new for
Italy. A strike at Pompeii earlier this summer left lines of tourists sweating
it out in the sun outside the World Heritage archaeological site, suggesting
that maybe, just maybe unions are choosing their meeting and strike sites to
create maximum disruption in order to ensure that they have as much leverage as
possible on The Man………
- Welcome
to the party, Adam Silver. The NBA commissioner may only now be admitting
publicly what the rest of the world has known for the nearly two decades the
WNBA has been in existence, but it’s good to have Silver aboard. His league began
backing and promoting the WNBA in 1996 and the league played its first game a
year later, beginning a truly irrelevant era of yawn-inducing basketball that
continues to their very moment when, allegedly, the WNBA playoffs are going on.
It’s important to say allegedly because no one is actually paying attention to
them and it’s impossible to be 100 percent sure they’re going on, but that’s
the rumor. For years, fans who are not pre-teen girls or the parents of
pre-teen girls have complained that the NBA has crammed it’s women’s league
down their throats and subsidized a glorified charity project that would most
definitely fail if not for the Association propping it up financially. The idea
of a professional women’s basketball league in the United States seems cool on
the surface because women do deserve a chance to chase their dreams just like
men, but if the market won't sustain that league because it features
substandard basketball and can't draw in fans used to seeing the likes of Blake
Griffin, LeBron James and Anthony Davis play much faster and above the rim,
then that league needs to die. Silver isn’t there yet, but he’s trending in the
right direction. “We thought we would
have broken through by now,” Silver said during the Sports Business Journal’s
Game Changers conference in Manhattan. “We thought ratings and attendance would
be higher.” Aside from that clearly being a lie because no one actually expects
more people to like the WNBA, the fact is that in 2014, the WNBA-wide average
attendance per game was 7,578 fans. Silver did hit it on the head when he said
his support was for the WNBA as part of a cause, rather than simply a sport.
Trying to support it as a sport as an exercise in futility and always will
be………….
- It’s
great to see the next generation blindly, stupidly and ignorantly embracing the
hate and bigotry of their elders, showing that as much racial progress as the
United States has made, it’s still so far from where it needs to be. Props to
the 20-plus western Virginia high school students who
are so enraged by their school’s new policy banning vehicles with Confederate
flag symbols from the school parking lot that they were willing to get
themselves suspended for holding a rally to protest a new and refusing to take
off clothing displaying the symbol. The lead bigot is Christiansburg High
School senior Houston Miller, who organized the rally, and he believes that the
administration should not be able to tell students what they can wear or put on
their vehicle. Never mind that it’s one of the general purpose of a school’s
administration, because that would miss the point here. The real point is why a
bunch of teenagers want to glorify one of the ugliest and most regrettable eras
in the history of their country. Kids often do such things merely for the sake
of rebellion, but when their choice of cause promotes the heinous legacy of
slavery and subhuman treatment of one race, maybe it’s time for someone to step
in. "I feel like I should have the right to wear whatever I want, and I'm
standing up for this," Miller said. The school’s dress code isn't that
draconian and merely prohibits students from wearing articles that reflect
adversely on people because of race, gender, or other factors. The rule against
having Confederate symbols on vehicles in the parking lot is new this fall in
light of the June 17 massacre of nine black worshippers at a church in
Charleston, South Carolina. Maybe these young ignoramuses are supporters of Dylann
Roof, the white man charged in the slayings, who was photographed holding the
Confederate battle flag. The 21 students who rocked Confederate flag clothing were
initially given in-school suspensions, but 15 of them decided to go full-on
troublemaker and were sent home for the day after being loud and disruptive. As
always at least it was for a good cause………
- There
are far too many TV shows ripped off from movies or which are merely recycled
from old shows and most of them are terrible. Their mere existence displays the
unoriginal, lazy and slack-luster manner in which the industry now approaches
the development process. The plan for a series that will serve as a prequel to
the “Taken” film franchise is not one of them. “Taken” burst onto the scene in
2008 when Liam Neeson starred as badass Bryan Mills, a man whose teenage
daughter unbelievably flew to Paris with a friend to follow iconic rockers U2
around Europe - never mind that no 18-year-old girl is that big of a U2 fan, because
the implausible plot gave Mills a chance to tell the men who kidnapped his
daughter that, “I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you
are looking for ransom I can tell you I don't have money, but what I do have
are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long
career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my
daughter go now that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not
pursue you, but if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you and I will
kill you." NBC likes the idea of putting that very particular set of
skills on the small screen and has put a project in motion that will take place
long before Mills is married or has a daughter. The series will be set in
modern day and will show how Mills acquired his set of skills. Based on the
plot and timeline, Neeson will not be playing Mills and that’s perfectly fine….as
long as the network can find someone to approximate what he brings to the role.
The potential is here for something great and now it’s up to NBC not to f*ck it
up……….
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