- Soccer
fans/hooligans are not the sort of people you want to piss off. They’re willing
to burn down their own stadium, destroy their own city and take the world to
the brink of nuclear war - and that’s just when the home team wins by four
goals instead of five against its hated rival. So the fact that all thousands
of Liverpool fans did near the end of a 2-2 draw
against Sunderland over the weekend is walk out in the 77th minute in a protest
against increased ticket prices is actually a relief. About 10,000 enraged fans
carried out the pre-planned walk-out -- the first in Anfield's 132-year history
-- after Liverpool this week announced a
$112 match ticket, up from $86, and a $1,500 season ticket. The club claims the
new price structure -- which includes 45 percent of match tickets decreasing in
price, 64 percent of season tickets reduced or staying the same in cost, better
availability for local fans and around $1,500 $14 tickets for the riff-raff - offers
greater accessibility and affordability. The enraged protestors were having
none of it, so with their team leading 2-0 in the 77th minute, thousands headed
for the exits. Coincidentally, Sunderland then rallied with two late goals to
earn a draw and fan groups Spirit of Shankly and Spion Kop 1906 can now argue
that their team fell apart without them. The club is something of an easy
target because it’s owned by Americans, Fenway Sports Group, so anything they
do can easily earn them derisive calls of damn Yankees………
- Oh,
this is going to go over really well in New York City. Everyone loves it when
elected officials of local government bodies decide to give themselves more
money even though their town is full of people struggling just to pay the bills
and feed their families. That’s doubly true in NYC, where the New York City Council raised its pay by a whopping 32
percent to end last week on the grounds that their massive spike in income was
tied to new rules that limit their outside income. The 51-member council voted
40-7 to approve the pay-raise legislation, giving itself the first raise since
- gasp! - all the way back in 2006. With this vote, members’ salaries are
rising from $112,500 to $148,500, retroactive to Jan. 1. The big winner is speaker Melissa
Mark-Viverito, whose salary is increasing from $112,500 to $164,500. “Every
dollar is a worthy investment in a government that works full time,” said councilman Ben
Kallos, a Manhattan Democrat, as he voted in favor of the bill. Wow….the
brass pair and gag reflex you need to say that sentence and not either break
out in hysterical laughter or have your past spontaneously burst into flames.
Kallos boldly argued that the raise was reasonable because members worked hard
and because the legislation restricted outside incomes and eliminated stipends
earned for committee work or for fulfilling other council leadership positions.
Wonder how this will go over with the Independent Quadrennial Advisory
Commission, appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio last year to assess the pay
of elected officials. After all, every member who serves as a committee or
subcommittee chairman is eligible for just a paltry stipend of at least $8,000
and Mark-Viverito earned a meager $25,000 stipend as speaker. That’s hardly
enough to pay for an extra leather living room set for your luxury Manhattan
apartment with a nice park view………..
- One
of the most indestructible forces in punk rock may be ready to go quietly into
that dark night. Iggy Pop, who is more than four decades into being a
pint-sized badass known for rolling around on stage in broken glass from
shattered beer bottles, delivering straightforward, shredding punk tunes and
stage diving with reckless abandon well past retirement age, has revealed that 'Post Pop Depression,' his new album
with Queens Of The Stone Age's Josh Homme and Dean Fertita and Arctic Monkeys'
Matt Helders, may be his last. "I feel like I’m closing up after this.
That’s what I feel. It’s my gut instinct,” Pop said. He added that he wouldn’t
stop making music all together, but would step away from recording albums and
being an active artist. “To really make a real album you really have to put
everything into it and the energy’s more limited now,” the rocker added. “The
kind of artist I am, I’ve got something I can bring but it’s really about other
people I can put together. I’m kind of a fan, too, I like to hang out, I like
to be in bands, I like to hang around musicians." Before hanging it up,
Pop will headline London's Royal Albert Hall with his new bandmates in May and
his new album will drop soon. Perhaps wanting to enjoy every last minute
without too much scrutiny, the project was recorded in secret last year, which
may have been the first thing in his entire career that Iggy Pop has done
either secretly or quietly……..
- Somewhere
- from second place, possibly - Donald Trump is smiling, nodding and being more
orange than any human has the right to be. Tunisia is doing the Donald proud
with an anti-jihadi fence that's being built on the
country's border with Libya to stop Islamist militants from entering Tunisian
territory and it seems that Defense Minister Farhat Horchani is mighty proud of
the new barrier as well. Horchani inspected the first completed part of the
122-mile fence over the weekend, getting a firsthand perspective on a project
that aims to counter the threat from jihadi militants and render the entire
border impassable by vehicles. According to Horchani, the project came about
with financial assistance from Germany and the U.S., which can only make it
more popular with any Muslims who aren't fans of the fence. The minister toured
the in-progress defense structure with military personnel and dozens of
journalists, taking in a sprawling structure composed of sand alongside
water-filled trenches and monitoring centers. Tunisia has actually moved
relatively quickly on the fence initiative, which was just announced last
summer after two terrorist attacks in three months killed 59 foreign tourists
and garnered world attention. Building a big-ass fence typically does not solve
all of one’s problems, but it does give a government the ability to placate its
people for a while and claim that it is doing everything within its power to
keep out unwanted, evil people and make its tiny slice of the world that much
safer. Of course, it also helps when you have a couple of world powers willing
to foot much of the bill and ensure that your relatively poor nation doesn’t
have to contribute much more than sand and hard labor to the construction of
the newest, most foreboding portion of its largely unimpressive national
defense system………..
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