Sunday, April 10, 2016

Jet Pack Man crashes and burns, Russian hockey doping shenanigans and a Wu Tang movie


- Stay weird and overpriced, Japan. The land of the Rising Sun, a.k.a. the Place With a Bizarre Hello Kitty Fascination, a.k.a. the Place Where All Sorts of Animals Are Treated Like Deities, is at it again. Already home to cafés where cats, rabbits, owls, hawks and snakes can chill alongside human guests, a new establishment in the Far East is adding an exotic new spin on the idea of having a dirty, supposed-to-be-wild animal sit next to you as you sip your tea and eat your biscotti. A new café called Harry, patrons can fork over $9 to $12 to spend an hour with hedgehogs, the spiky-yet-cuddly creatures of Sonic the Hedgehog video game fame. This new café is located in the Roppongi entertainment district and it offers 20 to 30 hedgehogs of different breeds that simply nap it out in glass tanks. According to café staff, the point of their business is to show people the charm of hedgehogs by proving that they’re not too prickly to handle. The thinking is that if you can win over these tiny creatures and get them to open up and allow you to see their face, then it will be a truly wonderful bonding experience for one an all. Oh, and the hedgehog café is located in the same building as a rabbit café, so it’s a real wildlife kingdom down in the Roppongi entertainment district right now. One can only hope that something legit like lemurs or aardvarks is next……….


- If the recent NWA biopic “Straight Outta Compton” wasn’t edgy enough for you, then maybe a Wu Tang Clan movie will do the trick. According to RZA, one of the founding members of Wu Tang, a biopic of his group is in the works and he believes it will be a big hit between the tale of the Wu is "really an against-the-odds story." While these seem to be more hopeful and long-term-dream words, at least we know that the idea is being kicked around even if it’s going to take a while to pull this disjointed mess together. After all, anything that tries to reunite or revive Wu Tang at this point takes seemingly years to happen, so agreeing to a movie and then walking it through the entire production process could take a decade. "Yes [there will be a Wu Tang Clan movie], but it's not easy. I've been having conversations with some people, so we'll see if that's something we can tie together,” RZA said. "I think it would be a blessing for American culture. It is really an against the odds story. You're talking about guys with felonies on their records, you know what I mean? Not that that's something to brag about, but that's something to understand.” As RZA sees it, during his time a young black man was all but destined to be dead or incarcerated by the time he turned 25, yet he and his fellow Wu Tang members overcame those odds and in the process, changed the rap game. Now, they want to cash in with, er, share their story with the world on the big screen………


- World prepare to be stunned. In a shocking turn of events, serious injuries have befallen a man who makes his living strapping experimental human flight apparatuses to his back and shooting himself into the sky. Denver’s own Jet Pack Man was rushed to a local hospital this week with a head injury and minor burns after he crashed during a test flight. Witnesses reported that Nick Macomber, who was featured on a national morning show last summer for his prowess in taking more than 600 flights with a jetpack, crashed around 9:30 a.m. on the 2600 block of West 8th Avenue, falling from an unknown height after the jet pack malfunctioned. According to Troy Widgery, CEO of Jet Pack International, Macomber wasn’t wearing a helmet during the test flight, which came to a crashing halt during the landing process. “He should’ve been wearing a helmet, but he’s so good, and again this was just a test flight,” Widgery said. “If he would have been doing a performance flight he obviously would have been wearing a helmet but he was just going 10 feet off the ground.” Ten feet seems like a very conservative estimate given the damage Macomber sustained, but at least Jet Pack Man wasn’t critically injured in the incident. For a man who has flown over the Four Seasons Hotel in Denver and flown for crowds inside professional sports stadiums, it would have been a bit of a letdown to take his last flight on some random downtown Denver street and crash and burn in front of some trendy coffee shop or thrift store………


- Nothing shady or suspicious here, all. Just keep moving and ignore the fact that Russia hurriedly changed almost its entire under-18 ice hockey team a day before the team departed for the world championships in North Dakota. To the skeptic, having both the coach and all Russia-based players removed and replaced with a hastily assembled group of under-17s with no explanation would be a reason to suspect that perhaps Russia’s pesky doping problems could be involved, but Russian Hockey Federation president Vladislav Tretiak insisted it was "a tactical decision by the coaching staff” and nothing more. Yes, because all good hockey tacticians change their entire roster the day before a major tournament and replace their coach in the process. "I ask you not to give in to rumor and to speculate about what has happened,” Tretiak said. Hey Vlad, you may live in a repressive country that stifles dissent as a go-to tactic, but you have to realize you live in the 21st century with social media and 24/7 sports coverage, so speculation is simply automatic at this point. The fact that the previous players' profiles were deleted from the team website within hours exacerbates the cause for speculation. Tretiak did say that the federation had not conducted any informal doping tests of its players, which would be a breach of anti-doping rules, but several recent Russian athletic doping scandals have the spotlight on Vlad Putin and his crew ahead of this summer’s Olympic Games in Brazil. But with such a über-trustworthy country with a long track record of transparency and honesty, this is all probably much ado about nothing………

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