Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Bovine inspiration in Hungary, karma at a North Dakota zoo and Toronto's baseball rage


- Mooooooove, b*tch, get out the way….of angry Hungarian dairy farmers demanding that their government lower taxes on all dairy products while claiming that support from Hungary and the European Union is insufficient and ineffective. That’s a mouthful of demands and one the enraged farmers punctuated by marching with some 50 cows near parliament and hand delivering a petition to an official from Prime Minister Viktor Orban's office, demanding more talks with the government and complaining that authorities had broken earlier agreements. The government has sought to placate these unhappy dons of dairy products with a plan to cut the sales tax (VAT) on fresh milk from 18 percent to 5 percent from 2017, but farmers want the lower tax rate to apply to other dairy products, too. It’s a moo-ving plea and farmers in any society are generally a sympathetic lot because they rise incredibly early, toil insanely long hours, earn little money for their comprehensive efforts doing physical, dirty labor and are seen as the humble folks who quietly provide the food we need, but this is still an uphill battle. According to one of the protesting farmers, Imre Hegedus, he and his peers are getting 60 to 65 forints ($0.21-$0.23) per liter of raw milk from processors, covering just over half of their production costs. Spanish farmers have a tradition of parading with their sheep to bring awareness to their own causes, but cows in Hungary are a nice twist on the trend and a sign that these farmers have bovine inspiration………


- Canada is supposed to be a calm, chill and overly apologetic place, drowning in politeness. Either that stereotype is off by a million kilometers or there is something polluting the protein powder in the Toronto Blue Jays clubhouse because right now, there is no an angrier team in all of Major League Baseball. Directing this circus of seriously angry dudes is Blue Jays manager John Gibbons, who was ejected from the Blue Jays' 3-1 victory over Minnesota to cap the weekend, adding another chapter to this exceptionally irate tale. The ejection came one day after Toronto's Josh Donaldson was ejected by umpire Toby Basner in the first inning, as Gibbons was tossed by crew chief Joe West in the fifth. The most recent melee began when Donaldson homered in the first inning Sunday and stared at the Twins' dugout as he crossed home plate. Minnesota starter Phil Hughes childishly responded in the fifth inning, throwing  two pitches to the AL MVP in the fifth, one inside and one behind him. When Donaldson expressed his displeasure to plate umpire Mark Ripperger, Gibbons defended his player by rushing out of the dugout and arguing with Ripperger and West. "The guy's a strike-throwing machine. And then there's a tight pitch, and then he throws behind him," Gibbons said. "I thought they were going to chuck him. But you never know what's going to happen nowadays, if you want to know the truth. Whether it's warnings, the guy gets thrown out or nothing. You never know." Toronto then petulantly retaliated when starter Marcus Stroman hit Kurt Suzuki with a pitch in the bottom of the inning. "Major League Baseball has to do something about this," Donaldson fumed regarding the beanball war. "My manager comes out to ask what's going on, and he gets ejected for it. That's what happens. I just don't get the point.” The point, at this point, seems to be Toronto starting fights on the regular and pissing people off wherever they go………


- #Karma. Life doesn’t always get it right when it comes to paying back those whose d-baggery/idiocy/outright stupidity warrant a swift and painful kick in the ass, but in the case of the two morons who snuck into a North Dakota zoo about six hours after it closed over the weekend, the invisible force of repaying good for good and evil for evil in the universe appears to have hit it head on. These two fools climbed the fence surrounding Roosevelt Park Zoo in Minot shortly before midnight and while you might be able to defend them in the sense that there is damn near nothing to do in North Dakota around midnight, getting liquored up (probably) and breaking into the zoo, where your first move is to intentionally antagonize one of the bears by sticking your right arm through the enclosure's bars is a thousand steps beyond stupid and indefensible. Thankfully, for this ass hat’s future good, his act of stupidity did not go unpunished and one of the bears came over and bit his hand. At that point, the man and his friend went to the Trinity Hospital emergency room, where emergency personnel both treated him and notified police they were treating someone for injuries sustained in a bear attack. After getting the medical help he needed, the man and his friends were arrested on suspicion of felony trespassing. It was a disturbing reminder that there are more idiots out there in the world than any of us care to realize and every day they’re on the precipice of doing something imbecilic that puts themselves and sometimes others in danger……….


- And another brick in the man-band wall cracks, crumbles and falls to the ground of shattered fangirl dreams. Zayn Malik is gone and now, man-bander Harry Styles is planning to ditch Simon Cowell’s record company and strike out on his own. One Direction man-bandedly decided to go on hiatus in January and since then, Styles hasn’t said much publicly about what he plans to do next in his career built on songs others write for him, dancing in unison with four other dudes and wearing sequined outfits with overpriced designer jeans. But now, the word is that Styles wants to cut ties with Cowell’s record label Syco, which has represented One Direction since the band were first put together on Cowell’s show ‘The X Factor’ in 2010, and in the process spark a potential  bidding war between two major record labels. Styles left One Direction’s management firm Modest in February, bolting a company that also represents Little Mix and 5 Seconds Of Summer. His teeny-bopper-pop ass is now represented by American manager Jeff Azoff, whose firm Full Stop Management oversees the careers of Meghan Trainor and Lukas Graham. In other words, he’s not really rolling with someone who represents legit, substantial artists whose songs aren't over-crafted pop offerings from a cadre of professional songwriters. The top bidders for Styles’ overly coiffed services are rumored to be Sony and Universal, the latter through Capitol Records, which is home to Katy Perry, Beck and The Beach Boys. Wherever he goes, look for him to bring his hordes of shrieking teenage girl fans with him to his next, sure-to-be-wildly-overrated musical venture of awfulness……..

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