- Naps can be a good thing. Many successful athletes, head
coaches and even titans of industry swear by their midday power napping time
and claim that napping it out for half an hour or an hour recharges them and
enables them to tackle the rest of their day with renewed zeal. But any good
thing has the potential to be dangerous and for Jacksonville Jaguars running
back Denard Robinson, taking a nap landed him in deep - albeit not hot - water
earlier this week. Robinson was found asleep at the wheel by authorities as his
car was sinking into a retention pond in Jacksonville, Florida, early in the
morning with his lady friend in the passenger seat. The two were dozing in
Robinson's Chevy Impala when police officers approached the car at
approximately 4:22 a.m. and both had to be assisted out of the vehicle. A
well-paid professional athlete asleep in his car after driving it into a pond
sounds like a recipe for a DUI charge, but amazing, an officer determined that
Robinson wasn't impaired, so no DUI charges were filed. Police didn’t find any
skid marks to indicate Robinson tried to hit his brakes before the car went
into the water and the running back addressed the incident in a tweet, writing
that he "should not have been driving that late or when I was that tired."
The Jaguars acknowledged the incident in a statement, but a guy who is expected
to be used as a change-of-pace option in the backfield this season and not the
feature back doesn’t exactly merit a whole lot of fuss……..
- What’s that all aboot, Canada? Aren't you supposed to be
annoyingly polite, mild-mannered and big fans of Bryan Adams? That last fact
still appears unfailingly true, but the first two are in doubt now that a
Canadian judge has ruled that an indigenous woman in Calgary, Canada who yelled,
“I hate white people,” before punching a white woman in the face and knocking
her tooth out did not commit a racially motivated hate crime. Judge Harry Van
Harten issued a written decision in which he ruled that the motivation of the
perpetrator, Tamara Crowchief, in the attack on the victim, Lydia White, was
not related to racial bias. This provincial court judge seems to be ignoring a
direct act of racism and flew in the face of the prosecutor’s argument that the
unprovoked assault, which occurred in November 2015, rose to the level of a
hate crime. Van Harten said there wasn’t enough evidence to establish the claim
that Crowchief attacked White because of her skin color despite loudly
proclaiming her hatred of a specific race of people. “There is no evidence
either way about what the offender meant or whether … she holds or promotes an
ideology which would explain why this assault was aimed at this victim,” the
judge wrote in his decision. Yes, because a person says that sort of thing
before violently attacking people she has never met before because she in no
way, shape or form possesses any sort of bias whatsoever………
- The list of famous people terrified to fly and therefore
resigned to traveling the world for their various professions by other, ground-bound
means isn't long, but it is growing. Former football announcer and video game
franchise inspiration John Madden famously traveled America by a tricked-out
bus because he hated planes and now, revived, new-look pop-punk rockers
Blink-182 are planning to tour Europe by boat because drummer Travis Barker is
no fan of the friendly skies. Barker suffers from flight anxiety and has been
unable to travel with the band after a plane crash in 2008 resulted in him
developing a fear of flying. Getting around Europe by non-air means is actually
pretty feasible, with boats, trains and buses all options. “We are looking into
it. Hopefully we can make it work,” Blink member Mark Hoppus said. “Travis is
looking into the possibility of taking a boat from L.A., which is a very long
trip.” Yeah, maybe you want to drive to New York and then take that boat the
rest of the way. Barker has previously said he is willing to make the boat trip
and then once he reaches Euroep, to travel by bus even though that will mean
much more travel time. Getting rich and famous and being able to charter
flights where you want to go is one of the status symbols most bands seek, but
for Barker, the experience of being involved in a plane crash has convinced him
that there are more important factors to consider……..
- Ah, the karmic symmetry of trash cleaning up trash. Georgia-based
Donald Trump fans, a.k.a. members of the Ku Klux Klan, are winning their legal battle
to pick up highway trash after Georgia's highest court unanimously ruled in the
group's favor. The Georgia Supreme Court dismissed an appeal by the Georgia
Department of Transportation after a lower court had ruled the agency violated
the Klan group's free speech rights when it denied its application to
participate in an "Adopt-A-Highway" program. Rather than deal with
the drama, the state suspended the highway cleanup program in 2012, shortly
after the controversy broke out. The case centers on questions about the
state's right to claim immunity and the constitutional guarantee of free
speech, Justice Keith Blackwell wrote in his decision. He determined that the
decision rested on jurisdiction and therefore decided that the transportation
department filed its appeal incorrectly, leaving the court without the
authority to consider its claims. You have to love the in-your-face bigotry of
the International Keystone Knights of the Ku Klux Klan when its members applied
to participate in the program in May 2012, seeking to adopt a 1-mile stretch of
State Route 515 in Union County. Yes, because that was in no way a move to
throw the group’s message of hate squarely into the public spotlight. Having the
group's name posted on signs along the stretch of road it has adopted wouldn’t have
caused a single problem, right? The transportation department denied the
application on two grounds, claiming it’s unsafe to adopt the road because it's
a controlled-access highway with a speed limit of 65 mph and also because “the
impact of erecting a sign naming an organization which has a long-rooted
history of civil disturbance would cause a significant public concern.” Who
would take up for a group built on hate? That would be the ACLU, which sued on behalf of the Klan group. The state filed a
motion to dismiss the case and now, it lurches forward with this ruling, which sends
the case back to the lower court where it could go to trial if the KKK group decides
to press the issue………
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