- It was a brawl at the border as one year came to a close
and another began. The border fence around Spain's North African enclave of
Ceuta has been the scene of plenty of mayhem in recent years as migrants
desperately seek a way out of Africa, only to be turned away over and over
again. That didn’t stop a teeming mass of 1,100 would-be border crashers from
trying to storm the border crossing and sparking an all-out battle in which
Spanish authorities say more than 50 Moroccan and Spanish border guards were
injured repelling the African migrants coming their way. According to a
regional government spokesman, 50 Moroccan and five Spanish border guards were
injured in an early morning skirmish in which the large group of migrants tried
to enter Spain. The success rate for migrants on this date wasn’t high, as the
spokesman says just two migrants managed to reach Spanish soil. Both of them
paid a high price, as they were injured in scaling the 20-foot-high border
fence and were taken to a hospital by Spanish police. Getting to the hospital
seemed to be the best way to avoid being turned away, as another 100 migrants
climbed the fence, but Spanish agents sent them directly back to Morocco. It
was a decidedly less successful day than the one last month when more than 400
migrants succeeded in breaching Ceuta's fence. Having your success rate plummet
that much in just a month is perhaps proof that it’s time for all of these
migrant dreamers to step their border-crashing game up………
- If there’s anyone you don’t want advice from right now if
you’re a UFC fighter, Jon Jones is it. Jones went from next big thing, light
heavyweight champion from 2011 to 2015, to a guy who has a mess of legal issues
that led to him stripped of the belt and suspended after he was arrested on a
hit-and-run charge and returned just long enough to win the interim title in
April, only to be stripped of the belt a second time because of a failed drug
test in June. Yet Jones, serving a one-year ban for his failed drug test,
decided that he should take to Twitter to dish out some advice to Ronda Rousey
after she suffered an ugly 48-second TKO loss to Amanda Nunes at UFC 207. Rousey,
who disappeared from public view for most of the year after losing her title in
stunning fashion to Holly Holm, has now lost back-to-back fights via knockout
after winning the first 12 fights of her career and despite banking a disclosed
purse of $3 million for her appearance at UFC 207, tied for the richest
disclosed purse in mixed martial arts history, she is undecided if she will
fight again. All she’s said is that she plans to take time off to ponder her
next move, but Jones took some of the free time he has while serving that
one-year suspension for a failed drug test to offer some free advice. "My
advice to Ronda would be to pick yourself up and try again," Jones wrote
on Twitter. "I think it's important for Ronda to show her fans how great
she truly is by displaying her courage and giving it another try. What she does
next will truly determine her legacy. I really hope she chooses to be a (sic)
unbroken.” Yes, following up an ugly moment by falling on your face again is
something you can totally avoid, right J……….
- Was it an unimaginative stoner with way too much free time
on his hands or a bold, reverent ode to the past by a dude with a dozen bong
rips in a very short period of time? Police in Los Angeles will have to sort
that one out, but what we do know is that the iconic “Hollywood” sign got a New
Year’s Day makeover from an unknown vandal who used a black tarp and other
cobbled-together construction materials to temporarily transform the letters
into a message celebrating ganja. Social media soon sparked up with images
showing the new “Hollyweed” sign on Mount Lee overlooking Los Angeles and
closer analysis revealed that the vandal used his tarps not only to alter the
letters, but send additional messages as one
of the black tarps appeared to have an image of a peace symbol and the
other a heart. Police say they have surveillance video of the suspect, who
seems to be fired up by the fact that in November, California passed a measure
legalizing marijuana for recreational use. However, this individual could also
have been paying homage to a predecessor in stoner-dom who also changed the
sign to read “Hollyweed” on New Year’s Day 1976. More than four decades later,
it would appear that fans of cannabis haven't really enhanced their creativity
all that much, at least not in areas that don’t relate directly to turning
literally any household, maintenance of food item in their domicile into a
makeshift bong……..
- Those who weren't impressed by “Rogue One: A Star Wars
Story” may either be fired up or pissed off to hear one of the film’s actors,
Ben Mendelsohn, claim that an “enormously different” version of the film exists.
According to Mendelsohn, who plays Orson Krennic in the film, the finished
product took on a new look after Disney asked for a lot of the its scenes to be
reshot. The film has garnered mostly positive, albeit not rave, reviews and
stars Felicity Jones as lead character Jyn Erso, but Mendelsohn dropped a
tantalizing bit of information in front of fans by explaining that the reshoots
changed the story somewhat. “We did have multiple, multiple ways of going at
any given scenario, we had multiple readings of it,” Mendelsohn said. “So
should they ever decide to, there would be a wealth of ways of approaching
these different things. And I know from having seen sort of the crucial kind of
scenes throughout it, I know there’s vastly different readings of at least four
of those scenes.” Most films have at least a few reshoots once the studio gets
a look at the finished product, but in this case, Mendelsohn said that the
amount of scenes with “enormous differences” stood at around “20 or 30.” Fans
have already seen a small glimpse of how different the movie could have been,
as its first trailer includes scenes that never appeared in the final film,
such as Jyn running across the beach with the plans for the Death Star. She
eventually was enveloped by what was essentially a nuclear cloud of light, heat
and destruction on that same beach, but it’s not clear if Disney will ever use
any of the discarded takes, perhaps putting them on the Blu Ray/DVD release of
the movie is a few short months…….
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