- It’s
such a terrible cliché that it almost makes you sad. How many movies and
television shows have featured a man of the cloth in some foreign land,
masquerading as a holy guy only to be corrupt to the core and serving as a
front for a gang, cartel or other corrupt organization? In fact, it’s such a cliché
that it almost can’t be true in real life…except it is. This trite tale is true
in El Salvador, where the national prosecutor's
office has arrested an evangelical pastor for allegedly having ties to a
criminal gang, charging him with belonging to a terrorist organization. Despite
its name making it sound like it’s part of some whacko religious cult itself, the
Life Unit of the prosecutor's office says it ordered the arrest Tuesday of the
Rev. Pedro Antonio Jimenez de Leon and 28 alleged members of Mara Salvatrucha,
one of El Salvador's two major gangs that operate in the historic central
district of the capital. This padre allegedly worked the street corners of the
city along with his minions, carrying Bibles and collecting extortion money as
church offerings. Best of all, it still isn't clear if Jimenez is actually an
ordained pastor. What is clear is that El Salvador recently designated Mara
Salvatrucha and the 18th Street Gang as terrorist organizations in the hopes of
stemming a massive tide of violence as warfare between gangs and with the
government has pushed homicide rates to civil war levels. Not that El Salvador
has ever been a top tourist destination, but gang wars tend to turn away the
would-be vacationers……….
- Are
you a casual baseball fan without a rooting interest in this year’s World
Series? Now you have someone, or more specifically, something for which to root
during the fall classic. Throughout the New York Mets’ unlikely run to the
National League pennant, one un-missable element of their appeal has been the
waves upon waves of glorious, flowing hair streaming out from underneath the
hats of starting pitchers Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard. The young,
talented duo clearly form the best 1-2 punch of quality lettuce by starting
pitchers in all of baseball to the point that the Mets often use the hashtag
"HAIRWEGO" on Twitter to promote deGrom's starts. Players often grow
weird facial hair or let their mane go wild during playoff runs due to
superstitition, but deGrom’s awesome hair has been a thing for quite a while
now and yet, as the World Series kicked off, he dropped a piece of disturbing news
on the world. When he was asked who had better hair between him and fellow Game
2 starter Johnny Cueto of the Kansas City Royals, deGrom hit humanity with a
jaw-dropper. "I think mine is gone at the end of the year, so I'll give
that award to him. It's driving me nuts. I've got to get rid of it,” deGrom
said. Yeah, but this dude is 3-0 with a 1.80 ERA this postseason, so why mess
with what works? Sure, DeGrom had closely cropped hair at Stetson University
and during his early years in the minors, but was he winning playoff games and
making himself a lot of money on his next contract with that short ‘do? No and
no. So root for some of the best hair in MLB, root for deGrom to change his
mind and root for all who let it flow……….
- At
some point, career criminals just become depressing. Being a renegade who spits
on the law and risks going to prison in order to make a dishonest living has a
certain appeal for a time, but when that criminal reaches retirement age and
keeps on going the outlaw way, he or she goes from badass to sad sack. They
become 85-year-old Doris Payne, who swore 10 years ago that she was done with a lifetime of thieving jewels across
two continents. She said the same thing several arrests later, in 2013, but amazingly
for a woman who has committed countless thefts over six decades in the U.S. and
Europe and has discussed her exploits publicly, she appears to have been lying
every time. That much was clear earlier this month when she was arrested and
charged with pocketing a $690 pair of earrings from a Saks Fifth Avenue
department store at a mall in Atlanta's upscale Buckhead neighborhood. She’s
clearly slipping in her old age, as a lowly store security guard watching
surveillance video took her down when he saw Payne enter a Christian Dior
boutique inside the department store and take the earrings from a standing
shelf before quickly leaving. She was arrested before she could even leave the
mall and now faces a charge of theft by shoplifting. Weirdly enough, she is
also wanted on a warrant for a similar offense by the sheriff's office in
Mecklenberg County, North Carolina, and will face extradition, so it appears
Payne will be spending her golden years eating off cheap metal trays in the
prison cafeteria. Maybe this was how it was always supposed to end for the daughter
of an illiterate coal miner from tiny Slab Fork, West Virginia. Maybe a woman
who walked out of a Pittsburgh jewelry store with a diamond valued at $22,000
at the age of 23 can’t end up any other way, but it doesn’t make this tale any
less of a bummer…………
- Het
Backstreet Men, stop grasping for relevance like a hormone-fueled 14-year-old
girl shrieking and clawing the skin off a bunch of her peers in an effort to
get even a touch of your bedazzled clothing. You may remember the BSM as a
bunch of pop-and-locking grown men masquerading as a teen pop group, singing
sugary sweet pop crap written for them by someone else while being carefully
managed and promote so as to squeeze every dollar out of their appeal before their
lack of actual musical talent was discovered. That was nearly two decades ago
and yet these fools persist, with their latest stunt a cheeky tweet in which
they draw supposed similarities between their song
'The Call' and Drake's 'Hotline Bling.’ 'Hotline
Bling' was originally released in July, but its music video dropped last week
and Drake’s goofy dance moves in it have spanwed wave after wave of meme. It
also sparked the BSM to tweet - still unclear why a defunct man band needs a
Twitter account - that their 2000 phone-themed track was the original and Drake
is just an imitator. “The Call,” which no one cares about and has ever
actually listened to, has a man telling his lady friend not to wait up for him
to call because his phone’s battery is about to die. Drake’s song sports a
chorus in which he sings, “You
used to call me on my cell phone late night when you need my love/And I know
when that hotline bling that can only mean one thing.” What say you, man banders? "Not to cause any beef
@Drake... but before there was Hotline Bling... there was The Call,” BSM
tweeted. Nice try, tools. Now put down the phone you used to post that missive
and go the hell away….again………
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