- Fat
is not in this spring for the Boston Red Sox. Manager John Farrell proved as
much this week when he decided to bench the wildly overweight Pablo Sandoval
and his five-year, $95 million contract because unheralded former ninth-round
draft pick Travis Shaw is a better option at third base. Sandoval showed up in
Florida at least 50 pounds overweight and endured a slew of unflattering photos
showing off his massive girth along with all of the accompanying jokes and
memes. But all of that would have been tolerable had Sandoval done what he’s
long claimed is his jam, namely play well at an elevated weight and prove he
can earn that bloated contract. Instead, a guy named Travis Shaw just beat him
out. "For right now to start the season, I feel this is the best for our
team to go with this alignment," Farrell said after previously promising to
determine playing time based on performance, not contract status. Sandoval
tried to brush off the demotion by saying he would let his play and the season
he has speak for themselves, but that doesn’t do much to inspire confidence
after last season, when he had the worst year of his career and then chased
that with four errors in his first 11 games in spring training this season.
Farrell hasn’t really tried to defend his gargantuan third baseman, suggesting
instead that Sandoval's longstanding issue with controlling his weight has
limited his range and agility. As a result, a three-time World Series champion
will back up a dude making $515,000 this year. Maybe the demotion is a
psychological poly to inspire Sandoval to thin out, but right now he’s simply
weighing his team down……….
- Romania
- or at least 100,000 of its households - is in the dark. That’s according to Energy Minister Victor Grigorescu, who addressed a news
conference in Bucharest with the revelation that there are more than 100,000
households in the country without electricity or gas or access to public
transportation. That’s a problem for a non-Third World nation and while those
figures are from the government and therefore could be skewed or manipulated, Grigorescu
said his country needs “to build infrastructure from zero in areas where there
is none. We need to modify the existing infrastructure." That’s a bold
claim, as is the suggestion that Romania should think about the future and move
away from relying on widespread natural gas heating and choose electric central
heating. Trying to sell all of that and the large bill that will inevitably
come with putting all of those dreamy plans into action to a nation of people
so poor they can't afford to live in a place with electricity or a bus stop
nearby will be a massive undertaking. However, this looks a lot like stark
reality smacking a country that has been living in denial since communism ended
in 1989 and ignoring the need to invest in infrastructure such as good roads, a
modern railway network and the Bucharest subway. Eventually those issues must
be addressed and after passing the buck from generation to generation, someone
finally gets stuck with a ticking time bomb they can't get rid of before it
goes off in their hands. In other words, enjoy your expensive future, Romania………
- Don’t
let their cheery, goofy demeanor on “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” fool you;
The Roots will cut your uncooperative ass if you step to them. The house band
for Fallon’s NBC late-night show and Philadelphia’s favorite hip hop/neo soul sons were supposed to play a pair of
David Bowie tribute concerts this week at Carnegie Hall and Radio City Music
Hall, respectively, this weekend. That won't be happening after The Roots' bandleader Questlove laid
out a rather cryptic rant on Instagram. "I've never been so insecure or
petty as to deny a fellow musician use of any of my equipment (or my band's
equipment or resources or contacts or knowledge or anything) it angers me when
that same courtesy is not reciprocated,” the afro-sporting drummer wrote. “Keeping
a level head and not being self destructive is a weak point I'm working on. But
I'm also keeping it true... We have patience. But we do not have patience for
the #Bitchassness. Enjoy your precious equipment." It sounds like someone
got snippy when their drums, amps or guitars were touched without permission
and as a result, none of the trip of The Roots, Kimbra or Bilal will play the
shows. Musicians are notoriously touchy, temperamental souls and their
equipment is both very expensive and highly specialized much of the time, but
refusing to let a capable outfit like The Roots near your gear and reacting in
such a way that they feel compelled to drop a social media nuke on you is still
a bad look………
- Maple
syrup is having itself quite a week. First, a family in Vermont with its
roadside stand based on the honor system robbed of 63 gallons of the sticky
liquid and now, syrup is saving the day in small-town Minnesota fires. Waterville,
very ironically named, has no notable water in or around town and in southern Minnesota - the Land of 10,000 Lakes - that
poses a problem with a father-son duo notices that their neighbor’s boiler is on fire. These
rural heroes, who own a maple syrup company, drove over their sap tanker to
help put out the fire. Knowing that the only liquid of which they had a
sufficient quantity to have any hope of putting out a fire, they used about 400
to 500 gallons of syrup to douse the blaze. “It wasn’t a big deal, it was the
neighbor’s place and we know them so it was worth putting out. It could’ve went
anywhere, it was a windy enough day, anything could’ve happened. To a lot of
people it’s a lot of gallons, but to us we collect 50,000 gallons a day,” Tyler
Hering one of the syrup-wielding firefighters and the vice president of the
syrup company that used up a lot of its product but got plenty of free
advertising and publicity out of the occasion. The good news is that the fire
was put out, no one was harmed and aside from a lot of pancakes and waffles
that don’t have anything to pour on top of them, everyone emerged from this
potentially sticky situation (relatively) unharmed……….
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