- Lots of former professional athletes struggle with the
transition to life after sports. Former Pro Bowler Patrick Willis doesn’t seem
to be one of them, even if he’s making a fraction of what he used to earn when
he was cracking skulls and sacking quarterbacks playing middle linebacker in
the NFL. Willis elected to walk away from football at the age of 30 and now,
he’s gone from balling for the San Francisco 49ers to grinding away Monday
through Friday with a Silicon Valley tech startup company. The 11th overall
player drafted in 2007 and a veteran of eight NFL seasons, Willis is now in a
life of staff meetings, cubicles and break room doughnuts, working at a company
called Open Source Storage. "For me, this is an opportunity to be able to
tell young kids that you can be more than just a physical specimen to be
great," Willis said. "I'm a person that can't speak about something
until I've done it myself." His new career stemmed from a chance meeting
with tech entrepreneur Eren Niazi, who launched Open Source Storage in 2001,
when Niazi spotted his neighbor trying to haul some trash bags to the curb,
hampered as he recovered from yet another injury-related surgery. Two years
later, Willis joined the company as a board member and executive vice president
for partnerships. "A lot of guys come in with a big ego, but Patrick’s not
like that," Niazi said. "He's just a total pleasure to work
with." Fans may have been stunned when a great NFL player in his prime
chose to walk away from the game and tens of millions of dollars, but Willis
had been planning the move for some time, not wanting to end up as a
beaten-down former player barely able to physically function on a day-to-day
basis………
- Most people have no idea where Tajikistan is or how to
spell Tajikistan, but that ignorance isn't going to help the poor, oppressed
souls who call this Asian nation home. Not much is going to help the
Tajikistani people, not in the wake of the dubious passage of a referendum on
changing the Constitution to allow their authoritarian president to run for the
office indefinitely, effectively allowing him to rule for life. No one expected
anything different under 63-year-old President Emomali Rakhmon, who has
iron-fistedly ruled the former Soviet republic in Central Asia since 1992. During
24 years in power, this despot has crushed or bullied all opposition to his
rule. For that reason, the referendum was expected to pass easily and while
official vote totals in matters such as this are more of a punch line set by
those in power than an actual, legitimate count of how people voted, as the day
wound down on Sunday, the official turnout for the referendum was about 80
percent. The proposed changes were clearly made with one eye on keeping the
current, tyrannical regime in power and the other on the future by lowering the
minimum age for presidents from 35 to 30 years. Thus, Rakhmon's son, now 29,
can run in the (sure-to-be-rigged) presidential election in 2020 and succeed
him as leader of the country. It’s great to be an obscure, Third World nation
to which the world pays little attention and in which the rules of fair
elections are wholly irrelevant……..
- It’s awesome to see that Marvel isn't totally woman-hating
when it comes to dishing out prime roles in its films. In the wake of “Iron Man 3 screenwriter” Shane Black
claiming that Marvel barred him and co-writer Drew Pearce from making the
film's villain female because that character wouldn’t sell enough action
figures, the studio is doing its best to save face by adding Oscar winner as the
lead villain for the next Thor film, titled “Thor: Ragnarok.” Blanchett, who
has won Oscars for “The Aviator” and “Blue Jasmine,” will play a “powerful new
villain” called Hela, portrayed in Marvel comics as the Asgardian goddess of
death. The cast is shaping up as a talented, eclectic one, with “Jurassic Park”
and “Independence Day” star Jeff Goldblum also a part of the cast as the
eccentric Grandmaster, an ancient and supernatural character with mysterious
powers. Mix in Tessa Thompson (“Selma”), who will play Valkyrie, and Karl Urban
(“Lord of the Rings”), who plays Skurge, and you have a promising recent
quartet of additions alongside a big-name cast that includes Chris Hemsworth as
Thor, Tom Hiddleston as Loki, Mark Ruffalo as Hulk and Anthony Hopkins as Odin.
The film will build on the stories of 2011's “Thor” and 2013's “Thor: The Dark
World,” both of which also starred Hemsworth and Hiddleston, with the third
chapter scheduled to hit theaters next November……..
- Maybe some Arizona residents are ironing out their own
ideas for ways to help future President Donald “Orange Julius” Trump supplement
that beefed-up immigration policy he’s promising to enact. Sure, Trump wants
that 50-foot wall, but if he has a posse of paintball-gun-toting idiots roaming
one of the states most affected by the steady stream of illegals flowing across
the border, then maybe Mexicans and others fleeing Central and South America
for the United States will think twice about border crashing. Then again,
there’s a decent chance that the group of friends who randomly got paintballed
walking along East Broadway Boulevard in Tucson late last week were merely
victims of a low-IQ d-bag with access to a paintball gun and an abundance of
free time. The group was near the corner of Park Avenue when something shot
past the four friends and hit the fence next to them, according to one member
of the crew, Devon Salter. As Salter remembers it, he and his friends were
headed downtown when they heard a shot and the fence next to them shook. "I
had no idea, like, what it was," Salter said. "If that were to have
been a gun, like, that would've been it for us." The attack left a pink
splotch of paint on the fence and Salter saw someone pulling what looked like a
barrel of a paintball gun into a silver sedan that fled the scene. A similar
attack was reported soon afterward on a Tucson News Now vehicle near Tucson
High School on North 2nd Avenue and East 6th Street. These attacks came days
after an unidentified woman was hit by a paintball on her left ankle,
sustaining a bruise and a healthy dose of fear in the process. According to
Tucson police, they are aware of the paintball incidents, but needs more
information from witnesses and victims in order to boost its ongoing investigation………
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