- It may be time for a collective intervention for the
Dallas Cowboys defense. The season is still months off and already, America’s
Team knows it will be without not one, not two, but three key players due to
violations of the NFL’s substance abuse policy. First, second-year defensive
end Randy Gregory was banned for the first four games of the season for
violating the league's substance abuse policy, but he was just the tip of a
very high, glassy-eyed iceberg. Up next, linebacker Rolando McClain was
suspended for the season's first 10 games for violating the same policy just
three months after the Cowboys re-signed him to a one-year deal worth up to $5
million. For a dude who is set to receive a $1.25 million base salary and could
earn $125,000 for each game he is on the 46-man roster, getting banned for four
games is an outright stupid choice. Now, McClain won’t be maxing out at $2
million for games he’s on the roster and he’s going to have a tougher time
hitting $1 million in playing-time incentives. It’s another chaotic twist for
the eighth pick of the 2010 draft by the Oakland Raiders, a man who was
released after the 2012 season in which he was deactivated for the final five
games, retired twice and is now back in the league playing reasonably well. But
wait, there’s more. Cowboys defensive end DeMarcus Lawrence will also be AWOL
for the first four games of the season for violating the NFL's substance abuse
policy, robbing the team of a guy who led it with eight sacks last season but
must sit for four games for using amphetamines. Worse still, it’s the second
consecutive year the Cowboys will start the season without at least two key
defensive players. Time for a 12-step program instead of a defensive team film
session, Dallas……….
- Do prison inmates really need running water? It’s a
question the mayor of Chester, Illinois is poised to raise on account of years'
worth of unpaid utilities from its state run facilities. “The state has not
paid us for their utilities for the Menard Correctional Center or the Chester
Mental Health Facility, coming to a total of $1.3 million,” Mayor Tom Page
said. “It’s been incredibly difficult, we’ve had to transfer from one fund to
another, and we’ve basically had to put the brakes on all new initiatives.”
Putting the brakes on new initiatives is one thing, but not putting a new roof
on the local water plant is one thing and turnonf off the water at a prison
housing hundreds of inmates is another. Yet the mayor is a cold, hard man who
says he will show no mercy despite the circumstances. “I always tell people, if
my 84-year-old mother lived in Chester, Illinois and she was 60 days late on
her payment, we would turn her water off, Page said. "It wouldn’t even be
newsworthy, but now we have two major facilities that have gone pretty much a
year without paying their bills and we’re leaving them on." Page is a
former prison warden and says he understands the dire situation facing his town
and its prison. If this goes on, Page said the facility would have to transfer
inmates, costing locals their jobs. He hopes the state legislature will
introduce a bill to pay the cities and vnedors who are owed months of bills and
although there is no set date as to when he would shut the state facilities
water off, it’s going to be considered. A spokesperson for the Illinois
Department of Corrections issued a statement saying the agency has been in
constant communication with all of its vendors who have not been paid in nearly
a year due to the failure of the majority party to pass a balanced budget and
enact structural reforms.” And yet, no money is flowing……..
- It took 27 years - seven longer than it was supposed to -
but at long last, filming has finally begun on the remake of Stephen King’s
horror classic “It.” Director Andres Muschietti posted an Instagram photo of
his director’s chair emblazoned with a blood-red It logo with the caption “Day
one,” alerting the world to the fact that the project was finally on track. It
will star Bill Skarsgard as Pennywise the Clown, as played by Tim Curry in the
original from 1990. It’s not a big-name cast, as other members include Javier
Botet, Owen Teague and Jaeden Lieberher. All have solid resumes, but not in the
sort of films that the majority of the American moviegoing public has see.
Warner Bros. announced plans to remake “It” back in 2009, but the project has
been snakebitten ever since. The first director, “Beasts Of No Nations”
director Cary Fukunaga, left in 2015. When “It” was dropped on the world back
in 1990, it was a two-part TV movie and to honor that spirit, Warner Bros.
wanted to release the remake in two parts to honor the spirit of King’s
whopping 1,138-page novel. The book was published in 1986 and centers on a
shapeshifter that can transform itself into its victims’ worst nightmares. The
being’s most common form was as Pennywise and to fight back, a group of young
outcasts team up to try to defeat him. Word on the street is that Muschietti’s
new film updates the setting to the present day, rather than keeping the original’s
1980s landscape. It would be a nice tweak, but this could still end up as a
truly awful, forgettable film that’s most punch line than blockbuster………
- Well isn't that convenient? A Hong Kong bookseller who was
set to lead the southern Chinese city's annual pro-democracy protest march
conveniently decided that he had something better to do that day … either that,
or Lam Wing-kee decided not to take part because he felt "gravely
threatened." Organizers of the protest had invited Lam, expecting him to
be a big part of an event expected to attract tens of thousands of people, but
they had to do what concert promoters around the world are loathe to do because
they hate disappointing the masses, announcing at the late minute that their
star attraction "suddenly" backed out of the event. Lam is one of
five booksellers who went missing for months only to turn up later in police
custody in mainland China, so he clearly has reason to be afraid and ending up
in police custody in China once and surviving to tell the tale is one more
escape from the abyss than most people get. Why run the risk again? Lam has
already played with fire by returning to Hong Kong last month and defying
Chinese authorities to speak out about his ordeal of being detained secretly on
the mainland. One visit or outright menacing message from the Chinese
government sent the message that if he showed up for the march, it would be the
last bold, socially aware event in which he ever took part………
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