- Did you know you were anxiously awaiting a sequel to a
movie that came out 52 years ago? If you didn’t, now you know and you can be
satisfactorily excited about the “Mary Poppins” sequel, which has an official
release date of Christmas Day 2018. The remake of the classic musical starring
Julie Andrews as a magical nanny will feature British actress Emily Blunt and
“Hamilton” star Lin-Manuel Miranda and will be directed by Rob Marshall, who
specializes in film adaptions of Broadway musicals. The original came out in
1964 and Hollywood rarely waits that long to make a sequel to anything at all,
but this one has somehow slipped by - until now. It will also have the help of
Emmy, Tony and Golden Globe-winning composer Marc Shaiman, who is writing the
score and collaborating with Scott Wittman on new songs for the film. “I am
truly humbled and honored to be asked by Disney to bring PL Travers’ further
adventures to the screen. The iconic original film means so much to me
personally, and I look forward to creating an original movie musical that can
bring Mary Poppins, and her message that childlike wonder can be found in even
the most challenging of times, to a whole new generation,” Marshall said in a
statement. The Mary Poppins character first appeared in 1934 in a book by PL
Travers, who wrote seven more stories about her adventures and published them
between 1935 and 1988. The new film will reportedly be set in 1930s London and
will feature Jane and Michael Banks, the children from the first film who are
now grown up and they and Michael's
three children will be visited by Poppins following a family tragedy……..
- Oh, those wacky Buddhist monks of Thailand, always such cut-ups.
Their wacky stunts never cease to amaze and amuse and they done done it again
to kick off the week when they released dozens of tigers at a controversial
Buddhist temple in Thailand to delay the process of removing the wild animals
from the property even though they are quasi-tourist attractions. It was quite
a scene at the "Tiger Temple," in Kanchanaburi Province west of
Bangkok, a popular tourist destination where visitors could walk among the
tigers and pose for photos. However, Thailand's Wildlife Conservation Office
(WCO) claimed the temple's 137 tigers posed a danger to visitors and that they
were being mistreated. That led to the government deciding to remove the tigers
and that led to some pissed-off monks setting some 137 tigers free in the
temple to wreak havoc. “Yesterday was mayhem," said Wildlife Conservation
Office (WCO) director Teunjai Noochdumrong. "When our vet team arrived,
there were tigers roaming around everywhere. Looks like the temple
intentionally let these tigers out, trying to obstruct our work." When WCO
staff arrived to remove the tigers, temple officials refused to let them in.
That led to an hilarious standoff in which the two sides spent a day in a
bizarro hostage crisis situation before wildlife officers finally entered and
were able to sedate eight tigers. "We hope to gain more speed capturing
them," Noochdumrong said. The temple claims it is a sanctuary for wild animals, but that
probably isn't much solace to the more than 2,000 personnel, including
veterinarians, WCO civil servants, provisional police and local military,
taking part in the mission to relocate the tigers to a compound in Ratchburi
Province. Fight on, all of you tiger-loving Buddhist monks, fight on…….
- Angry Nick Saban is the best Nick Saban. Thankfully, the
Nick-tator is often angry an irascible is his default setting, so the world
often gets to enjoy his curmudgeon-ly ways and this week provided some real
Saban fireworks. At first, the Nick-tator said he didn’t want to talk about
satellite camps at the SEC meetings, but that was merely a false front that
gave way to a storm of pure, unadulterated rage. The target? Teams being able
to host football camps for propsects in far-flung areas of the country. Saban has
made it clear that he’s not a fan of such camps, purportedly because he’s worried
about third-party involvement. “Anybody can have a camp now and if they have a
prospect, they can have a camp," Saban said. "Then you're expected to
go to that camp and they can use you to promote their camp because Ohio State's
coming, Alabama's coming, whoever else is coming. Somebody sponsors the camp.
They pay them the money. What do they do with the money? And who makes sure the
kid paid to go to the camp? I mean, this is the wild, wild West at its best
because there's no specific guidelines relative to how we're managing or
controlling this stuff.” In this case, the micromanaging, dictatorial college
football coach has a point. Satellite camps had been previously banned by the
SEC and the NCAA Division I Council, but mere weeks later, the Division I Board of Directors
rescinded that ruling and instructed the council to make recommendations on the
college football landscape as a whole – satellite camps included. Ol’ Nicky
believes the camps contradict the NCAA’s previous stances on third-party
involvement in the recruiting process and he made that point at full volume
with wild gesticulations. “Why would we be promoting somebody else's camp
anywhere? Because it's the same thing I said before. This is the only sport
where the high school coach still mattered. What they did at the high school
mattered,” Saban ranted. What went unsaid is that Saban is bitter that these
camps will allow other schools to steal potential recruits from him……..
- Someone needs to track down James Weeks and ask him if
he’s considered running for president. Haters will look at this guy as the kook
who was running to be the Libertarian Party chairman and tried to win over the
party’s membership by taking to the stage in Orlando and performing a
striptease. "We could use a little bit of fun," Weeks told the crowd
as well as viewers tuned into C-SPAN, which broadcast the convention. He then
busted out his phone to provide music for his soundtrack - where’s the
audio-visual help, Libertarian Party? - and began removing his badges and
trying to get the crowd into the opportunity to see a flabby, pear-shaped man
with a hairy torso taking off his clothes. Instead, he got a few scattered
cheers and more than few boos as he removed his suspenders and tie. By the time
he tore his shirt, the crowd erupted into loud boos. Sadly, he took that as a
sign that people didn’t like what he was selling and he tried to offer an
apology that no one on the crowd wanted because there was no way they were ever
un-seeing what they had just seen. "Sorry, that was a dare," Weeks
said. "I'm gonna go ahead and drop out." Drop out? Why? No one gives
a damn that the party made headlines at the convention for selecting former New
Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson to head the party's presidential ticket with
ex-Massachusetts Gov. William Weld as his running mate, but that ticket isn't
winning a damn thing this November. However, you put a thrill-seeking,
crowd-pleasing showman like Weeks in the headlining slot and don’t act like
people won't take one look at Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump and decide that
Weeks couldn’t be any worse than those two………
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