- There
are a lot of subpar musicians who will be a part of the Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame induction ceremony this year. The ceremony will take place at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn on April 8 and
while its purpose is honoring people who have made massive contributions to
rock and roll, past inductees from the worlds of disco and mainstream pop have
diluted the integrity of the hall to the point that watered down is an
understatement. This year, the problem goes beyond inducting hacks who may
belong in some hall of fame somehere, just not the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Yes, elevator pop musicians Chicago will be inducted and they’re as rock and
roll as My Little Pony snorting a pile of glitter, but the real hacks will be
the ones giving speeches and inducting those chosen for membership in the hall.
Exhibit A is Matchbox Twenty/20 lead hack, er, singer Rob Thomas, whose band
once changed its name from Matchbox 20 to Matchbox Twenty because it was
“edgier.” Thomas is clearly the biggest tool taking the stage, but former Limp
Bizkit reject and track pants/wife beater-wearer Kid Rock is a close second.
Yet on the horizon, there are reasons for optimism and they come in the form of
Metallica's Lars Ulrich, The Black Keys and now, Kendrick Lamar. Lamar
will induct hip-hop icons N.W.A. and having a Grammy-award winning rapper
inducting one of the genre’s pioneers is spot on. Other inductees include Cheap
Trick, Deep Purple and Steve Miller, who can only hope to balance out the
hack-dom that will fill the room that night……..
- Greece
is rarely a dull place. Riots over austerity measures being forced on the
country in order to receive European Union financial bailouts and keep the
economy afloat are regular reasons to riot and various immigrant-related issues
never fail to create drama, but a little action hero theater can always make
life more interesting. Say, does anyone know of a domestic militant anarchist
group that could, say, attempt to hijack a helicopter for undetermined
nefarious purposes? Yes? Great, let’s get started. Send in a woman armed with a gun, a woman whom police
believe is linked to said anarchist group. According to a police statement, the
woman chartered the six-seater for a flight to central Greece, but in the air
drew a gun and demanded to be flown toward Athens. The pilot proved that he has
a little badass in him, wrestling the woman and getting her under control after
she fired three shots, ultimately landing the craft in a rural area before the
woman escaped on foot. The gun was tracked back to convicted Revolutionary Struggle
terrorist Nikos Maziotis, who is held in Athens' maximum-security Korydallos
prison, and hijacked helicopters have twice been used to break a jailed bank
robber out of Korydallos, so let’s do a little anarchist math - why is there an
Anarchist’s Cookbook and no Anrarchist’s Math Book, by the way? - and see if we
can't deduce what this woman was up to. Greece's anti-terrorism squad is
investigating the attempted hijacking and it’s not hard to imagine them
arriving at the inevitable conclusion that someone was scheduled to make an
unauthorized airborne exit from the prison……….
- If
the ink on the police blotter is still wet and an SEC football star is no
longer a member of his team, it must mean winter is over and spring is here. The
early days of spring are when college football season is over, spring practice
hasn’t yet started and therefore, players have too much free time on their
hands when they’re not busy skipping class and perfecting their beer bong and
pong skills. Today, it’s senior defensive end Jason Hatcher becoming a man without
a team after the Kentucky Wildcats dismissed him from the team following his
arrest early Monday on marijuana possession and speeding charges in Franklin
County. Yes, this is a B-list dismissal from a second-tier SEC program, but a
spring arrest for ganja possession is still a college football lstory at a time
when they’re in scarce supply. According to the police report, a sheriff's
deputy clocked Hatcher's Chevrolet going 81 mph in a 70 mph zone on eastbound
Interstate 64 and pulled him over at 12:55 a.m. During that traffic stop just
west of Frankfort, the deputy noticed a strong odor of marijuana and Hatcher
went with the low-rent move of trying to conceal some of the drug in his pants.
Everyone knows the committed stoner must try to swallow the chron and not just
shove it into his boxers. Amazingly, the deputy wasn’t fooled and a subsequent search
found a "large quantity" of marijuana in Hatcher's car. He and his 39
total tackles and 2.0 sacks now face charges of trafficking in less than five
pounds of marijuana, tampering with evidence and speeding………
- NASA can't
send human beings into space on its own any more, so why not send a
fourth-grade art project instead? Big ups to the guys and gals who used to plan
missions for the likes of Neil Armstrong and John Glenn for coming up with an
idea to get creative, even if that creativity is in the form of glitter, glue,
colored pencils and crayons. Yes, NASA is inviting the public to send art to an
asteroid on its new spacecraft: the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource
Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer. Known to its friends as OSIRIS-REx
for short, this probe will be the first
to collect a sample of asteroid and bring it back to Earth. It’s scheduled to
launch in September and travel to the asteroid Bennu to collect about 2 ounces
of materials from the space rock and bring them back to Earth in 2023. Yes, a
seven-year round trip for 2 ounces of space junk from Bennu, formerly known as
Asteroid 2012 DA14. The asteroid passed within 22,000 miles of Earth on
February 15, 2013 and when an asteroid passes within less than a tenth of the
distance to the moon to the Earth, it’s time to investigate. Bennu has a 538-yard diameter and does a close
fly-by on Earth every six years, leading scientists to predict that there is a
high probability that it could hit Earth in 2182. That’s possibly relevant,
albeit not for anyone currently living on Earth, but it still begs the question
of why anyone would feel compelled to send art to an asteroid that could one day
crash into our planet? "The development of the spacecraft and instruments
has been a hugely creative process, where ultimately the canvas is the machined
metal and composites preparing for launch in September,” said Jason Dworkin,
OSIRIS-REx project scientist at NASA. Oh, so this is a symbolic launching of
art into the cosmos and not merely a cheesy government publicity stunt for a
space agency whose budget is dwindling more by the day? Good deal, NASA powers
that may be………
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