Thursday, June 30, 2016

Samuel L. Jackson's Star Wars envy, restaurant receipt racism and Swiss nudist waterpark drone drama


- If you’re going to show up at a public waterpark, take off your clothes and let it all hang out when you hurtle down the big water slide, there are certain risks you run. Chlorinated water in places chlorinated water shouldn’t be, chafing from hard plastic slides in unwelcome regions of your body….and apparently, some perv with a drone and too much free time flying their unmanned aerial craft above the park and possibly capturing footage of you floating down the lazy river in all your glory. Panicked nudists at the Bernaqua waterpark in Bern, Switzerland are worried that they may have been exposed after they spotted a drone hovering above a sauna area more than once over the past few days. “A customer told a lifeguard, who warned the security guards,” said Andrea Bauer, a spokeswoman for the company that owns the waterpark. “The people who visit that area are naked or wearing few clothes. Protecting their privacy is therefore all the more important.” The park has women’s-only and mixed sauna zones, both of which are nudist, and clearly no one in either area would want anyone filming them at the park, especially without their knowledge. At this point, it’s unclear whether the drone has a camera attached, but what is clear is that flying a drone over a crowd is illegal in Switzerland. Figuring out who the drone belongs to is a difficult proposition, but hopefully there was no camera involved and whoever the drone belongs to realizes the sh*t storm they’ve created and finds a better use of their time………


- Say hello to Idaho State and Eastern Michigan, third-tier NCAA bowl games, and goodbye to powerhouse programs in down years like Michigan, Florida and Tennessee. In a crushing blow for bowl games that shouldn’t exist but do because #cashgrab, the NCAA's Division I Council implemented a new rule this week mandating that all bowl-eligible teams with 6-6 records must be chosen for a bowl game before any teams with a 5-7 record can be considered. The council made its move following a season in which only 77 teams were eligible for the 80 bowl slots, leaving three 5-7 teams to be granted waivers to play in bowl games because of their APR scores. The fact that all of them -- Nebraska, Minnesota and San Jose State -- won is irrelevant because even with the win, THEY STILL FINISHED BELOW .500. Going forward, only after all bowl-eligible teams are selected can teams with 5-7 records be considered, and their eligibility will again be determined by the highest, most-recent multiyear APR scores. "It's impossible to project how many eligible bowl teams we will have," Big 12 conference commissioner and chair of the football oversight committee Bob Bowlsby said in a statement. "We think we have a selection process in the postseason that makes sense and is fair to the schools and the bowls." Bowlsby admitted that raising the bowl-eligibility standard to 7-5 was not seriously considered in part because it would have "put a lot of bowls out of business,” and at the end of the day, the NCAA and its bowl partners are all about business above all else. Having too many bowl games isn't a travesty and is more of a #firstworldproblem, but getting rid of a few (and their regional trucking company or local wing joint sponsors) would have been perfectly fine………


- It’s no longer a convenient joke or an amusing story for news anchors to reference in the closing minute of their half-hour broadcast as they prepare to sign off for the night. On literally a weekly basis, a customer of a restaurant of some kind is recoiling in horror and demanding justice because an employee uses a derogatory term to label them on a bill or order form of some kind. Last week, it was a Rhode Island bar patron who was dubbed “Fatty” by his server, who was summarily fired by the bar’s owner - and his father - once the receipt went viral on social media. Now, the trend is making an appearance in Kentucky, where a Louisville Papa John's employee is out of a job after allegedly writing a racist name on a customer's pizza order. The issue was actually brought to light by Laura Cheifetz, who took to social media after her coworker’s friend, who is Asian-American, ordered a pizza that was delivered to her with the words “Ching Ching” on the label. Cheifetz tweeted the picture to Papa John's and after what had to be plenty of cursing and quick damage-control planning at corporate headquarters, the company used its official Twitter feed to respond to Cheifetz and assure everyone that it had taken appropriate action against the minimum wage earner who used the offensive word on the receipt. “This action is inexcusable and doesn't reflect our company values. This employee is no longer a member of the PJ's team,” the company wrote in a tweet. The ideal result would be employees of eateries across the United States seeing all of this and acting with a modicum of professionalism, but that clearly is not going to happen……….


- After seeing J.J. Abrams’ (mostly) well-received take on the Star Wars franchise and knowing that there are plenty more movies in the series - and spin-offs - in the works, it appears that a face of Star Wars’ past is looking on and thinking he wants a piece of that lucrative action. Samuel L. Jackson believes his Star Wars character Mace Windu could make a comeback even though it definitely appeared that Windu was killed off in the über-forgettable “Revenge Of The Sith.” In that movie, Jedi leader Windu had his arm severed by Anakin Skywalker before being killed by Darth Sidious as he’s pushed over a ledge and suffers a long, apparently fatal fall. Despite that strongly implied death, Jackson sounds like a man who wants everyone to forget that he appeared in the three films of the prequel trilogy - i.e. the three worst of the seven existing films in the franchise - and accept that he could come back into the Star Wars universe just like several other characters who returned in “The Force Awakens.” Jackson is adamant that his character lives on somewhere in the galaxy far, far away. “Of course he’s still alive. Jedi can fall from amazing distances, and there’s a long history of one-handed Jedi. So why not?” Jackson said. “I told him (George Lucas) my thoughts and George was ‘I’m OK with that. You can be alive.’” Of course, Lucas has no involvement with Star Wars after selling the saga’s rights to Disney, so neither his nor Jackson’s beliefs on Windu’s fate are of much consequence at this point to those making the decisions on where the profitable franchise goes from here………

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