- Very few people pay attention to Olympic canoeing events
when they Olympics are going on. No one knows who the athletes competing in
something like the two-man canoe slalom
event are and even those who stumble across a race while scanning the channels
late at night when the Games are being broadcast at an unusual time due to being
halfway around the world pay little attention to the identity of those row,
row, rowing their boat gently down the stream. For those reasons, maybe it’s
not the worst thing in the world that Joe Jacobi is now trying to recover his
stolen 1992 gold medal after it was thieved from his car in Atlanta. The former
American Olympian is searching for his medal, won for the U.S. in the two-man
canoe slalom event in Barcelona, Spain, after the medal was seized by thieves
who ripped it from a backpack that was taken from his car while he and his family
were inside a restaurant. Surveillance footage of the parking lot shows two men
involved in the break-in and according to Jacobi's wife, Lisa Riblet Jacobi,
police found the thieves' getaway car and recovered some of the stolen items
Tuesday but are still looking for the medal. The kinds of dudes who are
breaking into cars in a diner parking lot during daylight hours on a weekday
generally aren’t the high-end sort of criminal, so the odds of these two
sticky-fingered fools having the connections and intelligence to actually fence
that medal and get anything close to its actual value aren’t high. As for why a
guy is toting around a 24-year-old Olympic medal, Jacobi’s wife said he takes
the medal with him to share it with schoolchildren at public speaking events.
Maybe it’s time to hire a big, burly, bald dude in sunglasses and with 24-inch
biceps to roll with him to, at and from those events……..
- Folks Snapchatting, texting and Facebooking in the
restroom is about to get a lot more common at James Street Gastropub and
Speakeasy in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The business is well-known as a solid
jazz club and restaurant in the Steel City and as of this week, it’s also a
place that’s going full-on old-school curmudgeon by trying to get those damn
kids to put down their damn smartphones and actually talk to someone face to
face. The restaurant is offering those willing to put their phones away for
their dining experience a 20-percent discount on their bill and like Derek
Jeter demanding that everyone who visits his Florida estate put their phone in
a basket for safe keeping when they walk in the door, employees will offer
diners a chance to go digitally dark while they dine. “You will be greeted by
the host or hostess and they will give you the option of putting the phone in a
safe location that will be kept at the table in case of emergencies,” general
manager Kevin Saftner said. Yes, because having everyone stack their phones in
the middle of the table and forcing the first person to reach for theirs during
the meal to foot the entire bill is no longer doable. The idea behind the new
policy is that people being engrossed in their phones can distract musicians
performing at the club, slow the process of serving for waiters and ruin the
connection you can have with your fellow diners. The hands-free zone will run
from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. each day, so those who prefer to stay connected to their
world and not feel like they’re missing out on some financial savings because
of it can simply hit the restaurant up outside those hours………..
- The hopes that Steven Tyler’s long-planned country music
solo album would simply go away and never happen appear to have hit an iceberg
and are slowly sinking to the bottom of the musical ocean. The Aerosmith
frontman has been enamored with the idea of going country for some time and
sadly, he’s following through with the project. 'We’re All Somebody From
Somewhere' will be released on July 15 and will contain 13 tracks. "I headed down to Nashville last spring
to start working on this project, wrote some kick ass songs with some of Music
City’s finest songwriters and now we get to share them with the world,” Tyler
said. "Country music is the new rock ‘n’ roll. It’s not just about
porches, dogs and kicking your boots up. It’s a whole lot more. It’s about
being real.” You shut your mouth, you microphone-tonguing, scarf-hugging geezer
rocker. Country music is not the new rock and roll because country music
remains twangy, yodel-y and in its truest form, not good. This album comes as
the band fends off rumors that they may replace Tyler, something guitarist Brad
Whitford hinted at when he said the band had “considered” touring with a
different singer. Those comments followed Tyler saying the band could come to
an end sometime next year, so it seems like its members are clearly moving in
opposite directions right now. As for the country album, Tyler recorded it with
T Bone Burnett, Dan Huff, Marti Fredriksen and Jaren Johnston and while those
are some big names with country music clout, Tyler should be nowhere near this
genre of music unless he’s prepared to drive his rock and roll legacy directly
off the nearest cliff……..
- Changes to long-standing traditions keep on coming in
Spain and the areas of rest and leisure continue to be the primary targets.
Daily siestas are still in danger and perhaps the only subject generating more
heat on the Iberian Peninsula these days is bullfighting. In the latest
showdown over the controversial sport, Spanish lawmakers have voted to ban the
spearing to death of bulls at one of the country's goriest spectacles. This one
comes from lawmakers in the Castile and Leon region, who confirmed an earlier
government decree to prohibit bull killing at September's annual Toro de la
Vega festival in the town of Tordesillas 120 miles northwest of Madrid. In past
festivals, dating back centuries, dudes on horseback traditionally have chased
a bull and speared it in front of onlookers. It’s a totally pointless slaughter
that doesn’t give the bull any chance to survive and for that and many other
reasons, the event has attracted increasing protests in recent years by animal
rights activists. Defenders of the controversial practice argue that the ban
would violate the cultural heritage of Tordesillas and Spain, presuming that
just because something has been done traditionally for decades, it must be good
and right and should continue to happen even as our knowledge and social
consciousness grow. Bullfight and bull spectacle supporters who demonstrated
outside the regional parliament as the bill was being debated and in the end,
it was the bleeding hearts that won the day, saving a few bulls from having
their blood spilled for no apparent reason other than it being done for a long,
long time…….
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