- Bitter much, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Abbott is his state’s
highest-ranking elected official and theoretically should be focused on issues
like education, health care, relations between police and citizens and infrastructure,
but his eyes are apparently on a different prize right now. In the wake of the
wrongly named, 10-team Big 12 conference announcing that it would not expand
after it spent three months vetting and interviewing potential new member
school, including the University of Houston, the governor took to Twitter to
rip the conference a new one. Having previously tweeted his support for Houston
being added to the Big 12, Abbott wasn’t holding back on social media.
"The Big 12 owes a lot of people an apology. It punted on expansion &
shanked its future. @UHouston deserved better," Abbott tweeted. Why is he
so angry? Is the governor a UH alum who wanted to see his old school join one
of the Power 5 conferences and have a guaranteed shot at a national
championship every year by virtue of that affiliation? Nope, Abbott is a
University of Texas graduate and UT was one of the 10 current Big 12 members
who voted against taking on teams like Houston, BYU and other viable
candidates. Houston was among the 11 schools the Big 12 met with in September,
but now the Cougars will have to stick and stay in Conference USA and there’s not
a damn thing they can do about it. At least they have the governor’s support,
though…….
- Shelby Palmer, you are a certified badass - along with
being a certified skydiving instructor. Palmer is an instructor at Skydive
Temple in Salado, Texas and in four years instructing people on how to properly
jump out of working planes, he’s completed 1,900 safe dives. None of them were
quite like a recent jump during which he
managed to lose his shoe and then catch it while he was still in the air. The
crazy mid-air antics came after his friend Christopher Elder asked him to
perform a skydiving stunt with him called "Mr. Bill.” It was something out
of the ordinary, so Palmer jumped at the chance. "One of my favorite
things to do is take new students out to do stuff," Palmer said. "Mr.
Bill's, though historically I'm very successful at them, but this one didn't go
so well.” The fact that he lived and wasn’t injured would suggest otherwise,
but Elder and Palmer tried to rehearse the stunt as best they could before hopping
out of the plane, knowing that it’s extremely difficult to communicate once
you’re in the air. As they began performing the stunt, Elder relaxed his arms a
little too soon and was jolted off of Palmer. The two men moved away from each
other and in the process, Elder accidentally knocked Palmer's left shoe off.
"I realized as he came off of me that I was missing a shoe and I started
looking for it immediately. I could just see it coming underneath his right
side,” Palmer recalled. Having borrowed his shoes from someone else, he decided
to go after the shoe. He calculated his speed and angle of descent, drifted
over and snagged the shoe, then executed a successful landing on the ground………
- Frontmen for metal bands are typically thought of as
hard-rocking, edgy badasses. Rarely do any of them prove it quite like Ryan
McKenney, the lead singer for grizzled metal men Trap Them. McKenney, who is
known for being sheer chaos in motion on stage, was performing with his band at
Bloodshedfest in the Netherlands when one of his on-stage stunts went horribly
wrong. In a time-tested concert action sequence, McKenney jumped from the top
of a speaker stack and unfortunately for him, he did not stick the landing.
Instead, an awkward return to the ground resulted in two broken feet and while
it is possible to keep singing with two broken feet, it’s much harder if you’re
not Stevie Wonder, John Tesh, John Legend or some other piano-playing performer
who has the luxury of sitting on a nice, cushioned bench while plying your
trade. Yet McKenney would not be silence and continued to performing, using
monitors to prop himself up and visibly in pain. His feet weren't the only casualties
in the fall, as a Trap Them performing in London days later showed the true
extent of McKenney’s injuries, as he played with a bruised face, black eyes and
both of his feet in casts. Sure, one could argue that a member of any legit
band playing in or near Amsterdam should be peaking on chron and any other
number of drugs that could help numb the pain of such a fall, it certainly
looks like McKenney was feeling the full brunt of his pain during the remainder
of the set. But such is the price of creating the sort of iconic concert
moments that fans will never forget……..
- Stay intolerant, Russia. It’s not the least bit embarrassing
that a theater in one of your largest cities has cancelled a planned
performance of the musical "Jesus Christ Superstar" following
protests by an organization of conservative Orthodox Christians. The irony is
that this wasn’t some band of irreverent outsiders coming in from the West and
bringing their evil, capitalist values to Russia in an attempt to ruin the
communist utopia of Vlad Putin’s evil empire. No, this show was to be staged
Nov. 1 by a troupe from St. Petersburg, entertaining the masses in Omsk,
Russia's seventh-most-populous city. That show will not go on after a local
group called "Family, Love, and Fatherland" filed a complaint
alleging that the musical mocked religious faith. It is true that “Superstar” doesn’t
present the sunniest take on religion, but unless this is North Korea and a
hellacious despot with a fat, toad-like head and no fashion sense stifles every
semblance of freedom of expression, then the show shouldn’t really be a problem.
It’s been performed thousands of times in dozens of countries around the world
over the years, in a wide range of languages no less, and hasn’t really
encountered this sort of problem. Still, it’s not a huge surprise given growing
conservative sentiment and resistance to Western popular culture in Russia. Amnesty
International issued a statement denouncing the cancellation as "an
affront to freedom of expression and the latest example of interference in
Russian cultural life by nationalist 'activists.'" Hope you’re happy with
yourselves and your blind hatred and general intolerance of culture and
progress, Russia…….
No comments:
Post a Comment