Saturday, March 19, 2016

Aquaman gets his movie due, a quack doctor's Jesus Shot and Aussies v. koala dollars


- It happens every spring and summer: An NFL team becomes enamored with a freaky athlete who never played college football, but holds or attends a pro day and shows off insane athletic ability that makes said NFL team fantasize about turning this raw, unpolished gem into the next big thing. The Kansas City Chiefs have been that team before and now, they’re that team again. The Chiefs signed Mississippi State track and field standout Tautvydas Kieras this week, inking the  6-foot-3, 271-pound Lithuanian even though he never played a single down of football for the Bulldogs. What he did in Starkville was set the school record in the discus and post impressive throws in the shot put before attending Mississippi State's pro day and bench-pressing 225 pounds 24 times, jumping 35 inches in the vertical and posting a sub-4.7-second 40-yard dash. That size of a dude with that much quickness and leaping ability gets NFL scouts drooling and whatever training Kieras did in Las Vegas is about to pay off, making him the successor to tight end Demetrius Harris, who played basketball for Wisconsin-Milwaukee before catching on with the Chiefs. Hall of Fame tight end Tony Gonzalez also played basketball before spending much of his legendary career catching passes for the franchise, so looking for talent beyond the gridiron has been the Chiefs’ thing for longer than just about anyone. The good news with these signings is that they don’t cost much and if they don’t pan out, no draft picks were wasted………


- Koalas: Cute, cuddly tourist magnets of leeches sucking money out of the pockets of average Australians? The answer may be both, but that is doing little to placate the rage of angry Aussies who are enraged about news that their country spends some $400,000 a year to care for and assist koalas in their mission of beign adorable, according to statistics released by the country’s Labor party. This report is far from objective and unbiased - it’s part of the party’s “Waste-pedia” booklet and Waste Watch website - but it claims the koala related expenses include $133,000 to fly four koalas to the Singapore zoo, a $62,500-a-day tour of Kangaroo Island with foreign diplomats and $150,000 for a diplomatic trip to Western Australia where politicians hugged wombats instead.  “Tony Abbott is no stranger to this – he spent $24,000 so Vladimir Putin could hug a koala at the G20,” Labor member Pat Conroy said, alluding to the former Australian prime minister. “Government spending is not in itself bad, but it must be remembered at all times its taxpayers’ money, not politicians’ money being spent.” Hearing that so much money is being spent not on protecting endangered natural habitats where the animals live or eradicating diseases that are threatening the koala population, but on what amount to fluff activities more about publicity than protecting any animals is enough to enrage many a taxpayer, but is anyone asking how much money these not-really-a-bears bring in for the country in terms of tourism dollars? Let’s try that math……….


- Aquaman has waited too long to get his slice of public superhero glory and now that he’s finally achieving it, he may as well have a hot chick on his chiseled arm. Jason Momoa has been confirmed for the lead role for the upcoming Aquaman film, the latest to populate the DC universe. The film is due out in 2016, but the Aquaman character will appear in next year's “Justice League Part One” to officially get his story rolling. When Momoa swims onto the scene, he will have some quality arm candy in the form of Amber Heard, who confirmed that she will play Mera, Aquaman's love interest, in both movies. "It's interesting," Heard said. "I'm wearing a half suit of armor, half scales, I dunno — it's strange, it's strange." Aquaman has lagged behind other DC and Marvel heroes in terms of movies, maybe because studios are H20-racist and don’t treat water-based heroes the same as those who operate on land, but he and his assortment of water-based powers made their DC Comics debut in 1941 and nearly eight decades later, they will finally get their due on the silver screen. The latest project featuring more conventional heroes, “Snyder's “Batman vs. Superman: Dawn Of Justice,” drops next week and alongside Ben Affleck as Batman and Henry Cavill as Superman, the film will star Momoa as Aquaman, Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman, Amy Adams as Lois Lane, Jeremy Irons as Batman's butler Alfred and Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor. Maybe Momoa can steal a few scenes, get fans excited and then build on that momentum next year before taking center stage - or center sea - in his own movie a couple years down the road……….


- Every supposed medical or medicinal breakthrough needs a famous face to champion its cause in order to break through from experimental to widely accepted. Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller is not a celebrity or anything close to it, but he’ll have to do when it comes to bringing a controversial medical procedure called the “Jesus Shot” into the national spotlight. The Texas lawmaker is taking heart for allegedly traveling to neighboring to Oklahoma on the taxpayers’ dime to get the experimental treatment he claims has miraculously cured his chronic pain. This shot is so out there that it has been administered for the past few years by only one doctor, John Michael Lonergan. It contains two drugs and one vitamin approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Those components are Dexamethasone, Kenalog and vitamin B12, used in concert to treat inflammation linked with chronic pain. The one part of this that most will agree on is that it’s reasonable that Miller suffered from chronic pain, which the National Institutes of Health defines as any pain lasting longer than 12 weeks. In a whiny, hypochondriacal United States, it’s the number one adult “disability” in the nation, which is saying something in the world’s fattest country with all of the ailments that being full of blubber and cholesterol entails. Lonegan currently works at Priceless Beauty Spa in Kingfisher, Oklahoma and claims that the Jesus Shot cures chronic pain for life. You may not believe this, but he only charges $300 for this life-changing cure and at that price, why not use government dollars for your personal expenses because your government health plan won't cover an experimental treatment by some quack with a syringe and a healthy level of greed? Give Miller credit for finding a crack in the wall of the system and exploiting it for all it’s worth……….

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