- It only sounds like a ridiculous incident that would
happen on a tongue-in-cheek sitcom like “Parks and Recreation.” A youth
baseball game involving children under the age of 10 goes from fun summer
activity punctuated by a team trip for ice cream to a full-on embarrassment courtesy
not of some immature, spoiled brat of a child, but by a grown-ass adult who was
supposed to be there to keep order and not disrupt it. Worse still, the adult
causing waves is the mayor of the town and he’s now accused of breaking the jaw
of an umpire who had the audacity to make a call with which the mayor did not
agree. The umpire was confronted by Monee (Ill.) Mayor Jay Farquhar, who
charged at him over a foul ball in the second inning of a game in which
Farquhar was managing a youth team on which his son plays, involving children
as young as 7. Sources who witness the incident say it took place on school
property and directly across the street from the village hall where Farquhar
presumably governs the town in calm, well-reasoned fashion. The mayor’s story
is that he was just acting in self-defense, while the umpire has a jaw broken
in two places and some nasty bruises. The doesn’t really fit with a
self-defense defense, nor does the fact that the league has suspended Farquhar from
managing for a year and banned him from even attending games. Monee police have
referred the matter to the Will County Sheriff’s Department for further
investigation, while Farquhar is not helping his case with a Facebook post in
which he presumably was trying to defend himself. "[T]here is no excuse
for striking an official...in retrospect, it was a reaction which lacked
comprehensively best judgment for the coach (me) to defend myself against the
physical escalation of the umpire,” the mayor wrote in his post. A huge swing
and a miss, mayor, swing and a miss………
- The world has been lacking quality pop-punk, teeny bopper
bands lately….oh wait, no it hasn’t. So welcome back, sort of, Canadian
pop-punkers Sum 41, who have announced their first album for five years. In the
interim since 2011’s ‘Screaming Bloody Murder, Deryck Whibley was diagnosed
with liver failure following alcohol abuse in 2014 and has since gotten sober,
though his issues with drinking can probably be traced back to the end of his
marriage with fellow Canadian pop-punker Avril Lavigne, whose taste in men may
be the only thing worse than her taste in music given that she followed her
marriage to Whibley with wedded bliss with Nickelhack frontman Chad Kroeger.
The new album, “13 Voices,” will also mark the return of guitarist Dave Baksh,
who rejoined in 2015 after nine years away from Sum 41 to front his own band
Brown Brigade. "I am really excited to be releasing an album after
everything I've been through recently. This new music represents the journey
I've been on throughout the process of making this record,” Whibley said of the
new project. “I had to fall in order to rise, and nothing feels better than to
have something you love that you had to really fight for. I can honestly say
that ’13 Voices’ saved my life and I cannot wait to share it with all of you.”
All jokes aside, if this album did help this guy overcome substance abuse issues
and saved his life then it’s a good thing, but it still doesn’t mean that it
contains any good music………
- In the name of oppression, governments can sometimes still
stumble onto a positive decision. For example, Ethiopia's parliament wants to
muzzle dissident voices who might use the freedom afforded by the Internet to
make their points of view heard and therefore has approved a law to imprison
people who commit various online offenses. That’s the negative part -
prosecuting those who spread views it wants to keep quiet. It’s that part of
the law that bloggers and activists have decried, arguing that sharing
defamatory speech shouldn’t net a person three years in prison. However, in the
midst of trying to silence those who oppose it, parliament has actually managed
to include provisions that could make Ethiopia a better place. Specifically,
decreeing that those who distribute pornography and spam online can be jailed
is a good thing, especially the part about spammers. No one likes spam emails
about discounted drugs, horny foreign women who want to sleep with them or
amazing investment scams, er, opportunities that will make you a millionaire.
If every country could jail those who send out spam, then maybe the inboxes of
the world would be better places. The law's most severe penalty is 10 years'
imprisonment for sharing pornography online, while spam can net the same
three-year sentence as anti-government speech. According to Ethiopia's
cybersecurity officials, the country is subject to more than 1,000 cyberattacks
per day and this new law will enable it to prosecute such crimes more
efficiently. That argument has been rejected by rights groups who accuse the
East African nation of restricting freedom of expression and using spyware
against dissidents living overseas. Even before this law was passed, last month
an Ethiopian court charged an opposition activist over his Facebook posts. The
times, they are a-changin’ in Ethiopia, and not for the better………
- Screw geography. To hell with sensible travel schedules
for college student-athletes. Big dollars are at stake for colleges and
universities across these United States and that means college presidents are
pleading their case to conferences for inclusion in the big-dollar party that
is the College Football Playoff. The latest is University of Central Florida
president John Hitt, who is trying to get his team the hell out of the middling
Conference USA and into the Big 12 even though the misnamed, 12-team conference
is comprised of teams in the center of the country, not the southeast. But Hitt
doesn’t care how far his athletes must travel for games as long as it makes the
most money possible for the school and so he laid out his case for UCF to join
the Big 12 in a letter to Oklahoma State president Burns Hargis. Hargis is
helping lead the Big 12’s talks about expansion and in the letter, Hitt touted
both his school’s supposed great fit in the league and the community around
UCF. He touted the growth of the Orlando, Florida, market and UCF's popularity
with high school students and wrote that UCF could expand its 45,000-set Bright
House Networks Stadium to 65,000 if it were invited to the Big 12. "UCF's
athletic profile fits well with the Big 12," Hitt wrote. Not only did he
praise his own cause, but he included a report the school commissioned to throw
shade at the candidacy of UCF to fellow Big 12 expansion candidates UConn and
Cincinnati. In the report, the authors claim that Orlando's population growth
is expected to be six times greater than Cincinnati's and 500 times greater
than the region of Hartford, Connecticut, over the next 10 years. Elsewhere,
the report claims that Orlando trumps Cincinnati and Hartford in employment and
income, concluding that, "Orlando has proven that it is capable of
attracting and sustaining economic growth, making it an ideal candidate for
joining the Big 12 Conference." Except that it’s in f*cking Florida and
the rest of the conference is in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa and Missouri,
but never mind all of that logic nonsense……….
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