Death row drama, "Fresh Prince" reunion rage and NBA stars v. their slacking teams

- It’s been a season of NBA stars calling out their teams and teammates for lackluster performances, from LeBron James and his Cleveland Cavaliers all the way to the West Coast with Damian Lillard and his Portland Trailblazers. With the regular season winding down and the playoff race heating up, there’s bound to be another star player unhappy with his team and willing to lay his teammates out publicly, so let’s wait and see who….wait, is that Indiana Paces star forward Paul George at the mic? Let’s listen in. "There's no urgency, no sense of urgency, no winning pride," George said following the team's 115-114 home loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves. “This locker room is just not pissed off enough." Those angry words were directed at a team that’s currently the seventh seed in the Eastern Conference, but lost following a controversial foul call that sent Wolves point guard Ricky Rubio to the free throw line, where he made all three attempts to win the game. "We should have a professional approach, man, and defend our home court, especially to a team that's not even in the playoffs," George said after netting a team-high 37 points. "That's what it comes down to. As a team, we've got to have a grit, and we've got to own up, man up." The Pacers are in an interesting spot, one game behind the fifth-place Atlanta Hawks but just two games ahead of the ninth-place Chicago Bulls. They could vault as high as fifth in the Eastern Conference or fall out of the playoffs entirely, so it’s understandable that their biggest star wants to make sure that each and every last one of his teammates is on point for every game……… 

- What does Vladimir Putin do in the few spare moments each day when he’s not mentally dominating his quasi-pal Donald Trump in every conceivable way? Sometimes he does shirtless horseback riding photo shoots, sometimes he does staged “discoveries” of ancient pottery while scuba diving and every now and then, he makes a well-publicized, well-documented visit to an Arctic archipelago as part of Russia's efforts to reaffirm its foothold in the region. His latest visit to the Franz Josef Land archipelago, a cluster of 192 islands where the Russian military has recently built a new runway and worked to open a permanent base, featured a much-photographed Putin inspection of a cavity in a glacier that scientists use to study permafrost, followed by a not-at-all-staged chat with environmental experts who have worked to clean the area of Soviet-era debris. Putin’s posse included Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and other senior officials/ass-kissers, all of them there in a clear show of authority designed to remind the world of the Russian presence in the Arctic as a top priority amid an intensifying rivalry over the region that is believed to hold up to one-quarter of the planet's undiscovered oil and gas. Nothing brings a nation’s leaders out in a show of support quite like the battle for control of valuable natural resources, even if that means going to a freezing, hell hole of a land where the only reasons to hang around are the beautiful wildlife and the beautiful cash with which you plan to line your wallet by exploiting what the land has to offer……..

- And 3, 2, 1….Mount Viv has exploded once more. The bad blood between Janet Hubert, who originally starred as Aunt Viv in “The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air,” and the rest of the show’s cast has boiled hotter and hotter for more than two decades. Hubert’s disdain for Will Smith is near legendary status and when several members of the cast, including Smith and co-star Alfonso Ribeiro, showed up recently on Instagram with a happy, smiling beachside photo, Hubert was bound to respond. The photo showed Smith, Riberio (Carlton Banks on the show), Tatyana Ali (Ashley), Karyn Parsons (Hilary), Daphne Maxwell Reid (the second Vivian) and Joseph Marcell (Geoffrey the butler), with Ribeiro captioning the photo by mentioning that the only sad part of the moment was the absence of James Avery, who played Uncle Phil and passed away in December 2013. Hubert must not like Instagram as her social media of choice, so she fired back on Facebook, denouncing Ribeiro as  a “media hoe” and the picture as a “so called reunion photo.” “There will never be a true reunion of the Fresh Prince,” Hubert said. “I have no interest in seeing any of these people on that kind of level.” Hubert played Vivian Banks in Fresh Prince from its first season in 1990 until the end of its third season in 1993, while Maxwell Reid took over the role from 1993 until 1996. The near-even split of the role hasn’t dissuaded Hubert from her belief that she is the one and only true Aunt Viv, largely because she was reportedly fired after becoming pregnant and Smith later said publicly that the pair found it difficult to work together prior to that. As part of her anti-Fresh crusade, Hubert has also promised to publish a memoir called “Perfection Is Not A Sitcom Mom,” which she claims will tell the true story behind the show…….

- It seems like quibbling over a trivial matter when a massive guillotine hangs overhead, but that isn't stopping (for now) a lawsuit by three inmates on Louisiana's death row who claim in their suit that they face inhumane isolation for 23 hours a day in cells "the size of an average of home bathroom." Three bitter dead-men-in-waiting qualifies as a big enough group for a class action lawsuit and the one this trio has filed claims prison officials are violating the constitutional rights of death row prisoners at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. It’s a federal lawsuit alleging that the conditions are inhumane and jeopardize inmates’ physical and mental health and while that might seem like a trivial matter for men who - barring some last-minute legal acrobatics - are going to be sent shuffling off this mortal coil very soon, the suit is marching on. It asks the court to order prison officials to alleviate the conditions of solitary confinement for all prisoners on death row at Angola and given that the other side in this dispute is a bureaucracy that often turns a nice profit from the whole incarceration process, it only makes sense that a spokesman for the state Department of Corrections said the agency can't comment on pending litigation. This legal push did pick up some steam last week when a federal appeals court revived a similar lawsuit challenging conditions on Virginia's death row, so challenging the conditions of the condemned appears to be the big legal trend of the year………

Angry Mexican fishermen, The Process is pursued and Chance the Rapper goes corporate

- Everything’s bigger in Texas…except, it seems, residents’ ambitions for their criminal enterprises. It’s simply not impressive that a Texas businessman is guilty of a paltry scam in which he used inside information from a lottery official to win a $783,000 Wisconsin jackpot in 2007. It’s not exactly a Power Ball, nine-figure lottery scam, yet it still landed a low-aspiring fool named Robert Rhodes in the category of convicted criminals after he pleaded guilty to being party to a computer crime, a felony. In what can only be called a missed opportunity, he brought with him a $250,000 check to begin paying back the Wisconsin Lottery, but sadly, it wasn’t the prototypical oversized lottery check that winners so often receive. How good would have been to see Rhodes toting an oversized, cardboard check into court as he accepted a plea agreement calling for him to serve six months of home confinement in Texas and pay $409,000 in restitution. According to investigators, Rhodes' was friends with former Multi-State Lottery Association information technology official Eddie Tipton, who wrote software used to randomly pick numbers for lottery games. Tipton, who is awaiting trial in Iowa, allegedly supplied Rhodes with the winning combination in the 2007 Megabucks game and this dynamic duo allegedly split the $783,000 payout. Again, how did you two not wait for a much bigger payday before attempting your ill-fated scheme? At least then you could have spent the past decade enjoying the millions of dollars you illegally won……..

- Being a rapper ain’t what it used to be. Gone, it seems, are the days when the East Coast-West Coast war was claiming lives, inspiring shootouts and generally keeping everyone wondering if their favorite rapper would be alive by the time his next album dropped. Now, Jay Z is a mogul, Ice Cube is more successful as an actor than he even was as a rapper and one of the biggest current names in the game is apparently going legit - legit as in hiring an intern, because what rapper doesn’t need an unpaid college student to fetch them coffee and do all of the grunt work? Enter Chance The Rapper, who has begun what’s either an elaborate promotional stunt, a shameless attempt to secure some free labor - or possibly a combination of the two. The Chicago hip-hop star and three-time Grammy Award winner posted a message on Twitter in which he noted that he is “looking for an intern” and seeking “someone with experience in putting together decks and writing proposals.” However, the post was a bit lacking in that it didn’t provide any additional details, such as when the internship begins, what other duties may be included and for that matter, how interested applicants can contact him or whoever among his crew will be handling the interviewing and screening process. But given that he’s now a commercial pitchman for candy bars and a willing partner of Apple Music, maybe he really does need some extra assistance on the business side of the ledger………

- Beware the ire of Mexican fishermen. It’s quite the showdown in Mexico's Gulf of California between local fishermen and the whale-huggers of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Sea Shepherd has been removing illegal and abandoned nets that endanger the vaquita, the world's smallest porpoise and in response, dozens of fishermen have….burned a boat? Yes, it’s a rudimentary retort as part of a threat to force out a ship operated by the conservation group. Sea Shephard has made progress, but not enough and illegal fishing for the totoaba, another species, has reduced the number of vaquitas to fewer than 30. The best the angry fishermen could do in the town of San Felipe was paint the name of the Sea Shepherd on an empty, open fishing boat they burned and then chased with threats to remove the conservationists' ship themselves if the government doesn't. "Just as they are judging us fishermen, we will judge all the environmentalists," said Sunshine Rodriguez, a leader of the local fishing cooperative in San Felipe, Baja California. "We aren't going to just sit around." The boat burning drew hundreds of onlookers and supporters at San Felipe's main waterfront boulevard and those folks heard an angry spokesman for the fishermen proclaim that they would give the government “five days to get this boat out of our territorial waters, or we will do it ourselves.” Meanwhile, Sea Shepherd continues to call for a boycott of Mexican shrimp, and possible plans to permanently ban all gillnet fishing in the area. The object of their affections is the vaquita, which gets caught in nets set for the totoaba, a fish prized in China for its swim bladder. It’s all the poor man’s version of battles to save endangered, most glamorous species in places like Africa, but it’s still a heated battle for the open seas………

- How long does it take to wash off the stink of The Process? About the length of time it takes for a fired general manager’s non-compete clause to expire, as it turns out. Life is looking up for former Philadelphia 76ers general manager Sam Hinkie, who is reportedly the target to be Sacramento Kings owner Vivek Ranadive’s next failed hire of transaction. Yes, the man who once theorized that because he coached his daughter’s youth basketball team to amateur glory by using a strategy in which one player cherry-picked while four teammates played defense and then threw the ball down the floor for easy layups, the same strategy would work in the NBA in after the man who led the 76ers’ great tanking experiment before being fired by Philadelphia in April 2016. Hinkie is gone, the Sixers are showing signs of progress with the blueprint he laid and now, Ranadive has reportedly expressed exploratory interest in hiring the disgraced architect of The Process, in which a team consistently and intentionally (allegedly) loses lots of games to secure top draft picks, thereby building for future success. Not surprisingly for a known lover of terrible basketball ideas, Ranadive has repordely been intrigued with Hinkie for some time and that could spell doom for current Kings GM Vlade Divac, who has failed to get the team moving in anything resembling an upward direction during his short tenure. So Ranadive had good reason to seek and receive permission directly from Sixers counterpart Josh Harris to speak with Hinkie and when the latter’s non-compete clause with the Sixers expires at the end of this season, Hinkie is free to unleash the process on a new fan base………

Why book burnings don't work, Father John Misty tries hard to be cool and Matt Barnes' rage

- Call it athletic hyperbole, but Golden State Warriors forward Matt Barnes is still one angry dude. Barnes, who has bounced around the NBA and played for nine different teams over the course of 13 seasons, has been consistent in at least one respect. He’s a world-class agitator with a blatant mean streak, willing to start a fight for almost no reason at all. So when he sends a shot across the bow of the most recent team to cut him, the Sacramento Kings, it’s all part of another day at the office. "I'm trying to kill them," Barnes said ahead of his first game against the Kings since he was released last month during the blockbuster trade that sent DeMarcus Cousins to the New Orleans Pelicans. "Plain and simple. Things didn't go well there. It was frustrating because being back home and really taking pride in trying to put that team back on the map, and then just in a day's time you're no longer a part of the organization.” It was his second stint with the Kings, but he’s been released and traded so many times that by this point, he should be used to the feeling. He wasn’t exactly low-key during his latest run in Sacramento, having been arrested in December following an alleged assault of a woman at a New York night club. Yet he landed on his feet with the Association’s best team and even got his assault trial postponed until June after his lawyer successfully argued that Barnes could be playing in the NBA Finals for the Warriors that month. Yet here he is, angry as ever and looking to crack some skulls……..

- Mexico is a place that thrives on the business of people putting weird, dangerous substances into their bodies. But not all of those tales involve drug mules and cartels; some center on a bunch of weirdos living  in a squatters' settlement where people were apparently "milking" crocodiles for their blood. Mexican authorities were able to rescue 14 crocodiles and found 20 others dead and according to the country’s office for environmental protection, some local residents in Chiapas wanted the blood because they believed it could cure cancer, diabetes, AIDS and other diseases. As is so often the case with these off-the-grid medicinal ideas, scientists say there is no evidence that crocodile blood cures these diseases, but that didn’t prevent the locals from trying. Authorities found most of the dead crocs with their heads or tail hacked away, while the 14 living crocs were released back into the wild. The entire scene is a tenuous and creepy one in which the squatters have set up a settlement in Chiapas' coastal nature reserve known as la Encrucijada, and have been hunting crocodiles. It’s hard to argue that life could really get worse for people living in such squalor, but getting rounded up by the police and accused of such cruel treatment of animals is definitely one way to accomplish it……..

- Stay true to your cooler-than-thou hipster self, Father John Misty. The indie musician, whose real name is Joshua Tillman, is best known as the drummer for Fleet Foxes and now, as a solo act fond of saying outlandish things such as calling Nickelback the authors of great music, but as he prepares to release his third album next month, he wants to make it clear that he’s not out to a famous rock star at any cost. Needing to say interesting things to promote that new album, “Pure Comedy,” Tillman dropped a revelation designed to make him seem so above even one of the most popular shows around. “There are many other things I’ve said no to,” Tillman said in explaining why he hasn’t jumped to a major record label. “I was asked to audition for the second season of ‘Stranger Things.’ I didn’t want that level of exposure. I don’t want to be TV famous.” Ah, so you don’t want to do the one thing that artists who make a sudden rise in fame do to raise the ire of fans - sell out. But wait, this is the same guy who has made two appearances on “Saturday Night Live,” right? Oh, and about SNL…..he claims that when he made his most recent appearance on the show, he was under the influence of LSD. To be fair, Tillman did say that he’s taken his LSD diluted and insisted that he’s

“not on a psychedelic journey all the time.” Only when he makes his observations about Nickelback, it would seem……..

- Never, ever channel your inner Nazi….when living in a dry area with lots of brush. That’s the lesson imparted to us by a Florida man burning books in his yard who ended up torching much more than a few unwanted tomes. According to Florida Forest Service officials, the man’s pyromaniacal ways caused a 700-acre brush fire which destroyed two buildings, damaged six homes and nearly 20 sheds and barns. At least 150 residents were forced to leave their homes to escape the blaze, but thankfully firefighters were able to do a much better job containing the blaze than the responsible party was in burning his books without any collateral damage. “Things are looking really good as far as weather, so this is giving our firefighters a big opportunity to make some excellent progress today,” FFS spokeswoman Annaleasa Winter said. “The fire has not spread.” In fact, fire crews were able to allow residents to return to their homes after a few hours thanks to an assist from the weather. According to authorities, the blaze started around 2 p.m. and gusty winds helped it spread after they believed it had been contained to about five acres. At that point, the evacuations began and the beauty of it all is that the man didn’t bother to get the proper permit to hold his little book burning, meaning he will be billed for the firefighting effort, officials said. But hey, the great news is that according to the FFS, the man did not intentionally cause the inferno and acted extremely remorseful. Those swimming at the shallow end of the gene pool often do once they realize all that trouble their actions have caused for others, but to no avail……..

Trump troubles spread like a plague, Uganda in crisis and the wrong guy to call a genius

- Put the bleach down and stop the whitewashing, Netflix. So say the fans and critics who are accusing you of whitewashing again after sharing the trailer for your “Death Note” remake was released. While you may not know a lot about the project, the most relevant fact here is that this upcoming movie is based on a popular Japanese manga comic book series that has already been made into four Japanese films - zero in on the word Japanese appearing twice in that sentence. See, the repetition of that word indicates that the characters, most of them anyhow, should be Japanese, yet Netflix’s adaptation relocates the entire story to Seattle and replaces the original’s Japanese lead character, Light Yagami, with a white, American character named Light Turner. No one is trying to knock the man playing Turner, “The Fault In Our Stars” actor Nat Wolff, but his casting and the additional fact that the franchise’s female lead, Misa Amane, has also been replaced by a white, American character called Mia Sutton, has a lot of people extremely angry. Whether Turner and “The Leftovers” actress Margaret Qualley can pull off their roles in the tale of a high school student who discovers a supernatural notebook which gives him the ability to kill anyone whose name and face he knows isn't the question…why Netflix got rid of the story’s roots and made it a typical, white-dominated American production is. On the heels of the studio casing white British actor Finn Jones as the lead in “Iron Fist,” Netflix’s latest Marvel series, this most definitely was not the wisest move in terms of casting choices………

- Even people Donald Trump has never met and probably didn’t even know existed are having their lives ruin by the Mutated-Tangerine-in-Chief. The latest casualty is a state legislator in Hawaii who claims she was pressured to give up her leadership post at the statehouse after criticizing one of the many, easily criticizeable aspects of Trump’s presidency. Rep. Beth Fukumoto said members of the GOP willingly turned a deaf ear to racism and sexism by Trump, including his suggestion to create a Muslim registry during his campaign. "As a Japanese-American whose grandparents had to destroy all of their Japanese artifacts and items and bury them in the backyard to avoid getting taken and interned, how could I not have said anything?" Fukumoto said. “And how could my party have not said anything?" Her words and general opposition to the hatred and xenophobia that have come to define Trump’s political existence led to her being voted out of her post as House Minority Leader in February, not long after she called Trump a bully in a speech at the Women's March in Honolulu, saying many of his remarks were racist and sexist and had no place in the Republican Party. Her words were on point, but since then she went in search of feedback from her constituents about leaving the GOP and said three-quarters of the more than 470 letters she received supported the move. Fukumoto agrees with many Democratic positions on affordable housing and equitable taxes and intends to make a party swap, but even there she may not be welcome. Hawaii Democratic Party leader Tim Vandeveer said his party will consider Fukumoto, but added that some are concerned about her past voting record on civil rights and women's issues. As another participant in last year’s race for the White House, one Bernie Sanders, can attest, one can always go the independent route………

- You’re not helping, Manchester United midfielder Ander Herrera, you’re hurting the situation and you need to think before you speak. Herrera is a teammate of arguably the biggest ego in sports right now, Swedish forward Zlatan Ibrahimovic, whose arrogance is so legendary that he once proclaimed that he hadn't gotten his wife a gift for her birthday because “she already has Zlatan.” When a man is that full of himself already, one of his teammates publicly proclaiming him to be a genius is only going to inflate that ego further. "He is a genius. He can say that he will score 30 goals and that he is the best because he can get away with it,” Herrera said. “He is so good that he can do that Ibrahimovic can very annoying because he wants to win it all, even at football-tennis." Yes, Ibrahimovic created two of the three goals that saw United past FC Rostov and booked their place in the Europa League quarterfinals and he’s clearly a great player, but let’s keep that between us and not throw the G-word around so casually. Keep doing that and ol’ Zlatan may just demand that Manchester United chance the name on the back of his No. 10 game jersey to “GENIUS” and that he be allowed to do whatever the hell he wants on the field without the interference of his non-genius coaches and teammates. Ibrahimovic has scored 26 goals and set up eight more in 41 appearances since joining United as a free agent last summer, so you can't deny his production, but you can avoid feeding his enormous self-image……..

- On a continent where it seems many nations balance on the precipice of disaster on a daily basis, it’s a bad sign when the United Nations refugee chief says a particular country is at a "breaking point." In a joint statement by U.N. official Filippo Grandi and Uganda's government, that’s precisely how Grandi describes Uganda as nearly 3,000 South Sudanese refugees pour into the country every day. They’re fleeing the ongoing turmoil in the world’s newest nation and as a result, the U.N. has called this the world's fastest-growing refugee crisis. According to the statement, more than 570,000 refugees have arrived from South Sudan since July, a number projected to surpass 1 million by the middle of this year. Uganda isn't exactly a rock-solid nation in terms of its fiscal and governmental standing, but it’s nonetheless hosting a total of 800,000 South Sudanese refugees who have arrived since the country's civil war began in late 2013. Ugandan Prime Minister Ruhakana Rugunda sounds like a man presiding over a country taxed to its limits and noted that the unprecedented surge in refugee arrivals has placed "enormous strain" on public services and infrastructure within his nation. In light of all they’re being asked to do in helping those in need, Uganda and the U.N. said in their joint statement that the country needs significant international help and they believe more than $250 million is needed this year. Here’s hoping the world doesn’t turn a blind eye to this situation as it tends to do with so many horrible humanitarian crises……..

Sh*t storms follow Lane Kiffin, vanity plates = loser and more Ghostbusters movies loom

- Because #Russia. In the communist tundra on the north side of Asia, mysteriously evil things are always happening to those who dare to go against the grain or get in the way of the powers that be. Really, it was only a question of when and how a Russian lawyer linked to a case exposing corruption in Moscow would die. Anyone who had “plummeting to his death from his fourth-story apartment on a chilly March day,” you’ve won the Nikolai Gorokhov Death Pool. His top clients immediately called the death suspicious, which definitely fits a lawyer falling from his fourth-floor apartment as a crane was lifting a large bathtub into his home. A neighbor who called an ambulance for the fallen Gorokhov said he tumbled down just as workers were lifting a Jacuzzi through the window and noted that the equipment being used by the workers was shaky and haphazard at best. As could be expected, media outlets with a healthy fear of Vlad Putin’s regime described it as an accident and reported that a rope on the crane snapped, but Gorokhov’s former employer, British businessman Bill Browder, called the incident “extremely suspicious.” He went so far as to tie the incident to Gorokhov's work challenging Putin's government, pointing out that Gorokhov has spent the last seven years exposing their complicity in the death of Sergei Magnitsky. Magnitsky was a Russian whistleblower who died in jail in 2009 and he’d hired Gorokhov, who just happened to be due to represent Magnitsky’s mother in a Moscow court and was acting as a witness in a U.S. money laundering case. It’s quite a string of coincidences in a land where there’s no such thing as a coincidence when it comes to dubious deaths for enemies of the state………

- The last one lost a lot of money, but what the hell, let’s make some more. The latest reboot of the Ghostbusters franchise, last year’s all-female version starring Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones, Kristin Wiig and Kate McKinnon and directed by Paul Feig, garnered plenty of hate and criticism before it dropped and was a commercial failure, bringing in $128 million on a budget of $144 million after spending just one weekend in the top spot at the box office. Yet despite failing at the one thing that matters most to a studio, the project prompted Rory Bruer, president of Worldwide Distribution at Sony, to say “there’s no doubt in my mind [a sequel] will happen.” Despite his ill-advised words, there has been no further news of a sequel since then….until the director of the original Ghostbusters movie, Ivan Reitman, suggested that the reboot was a good idea and that he is “developing live-action films.” “We certainly would’ve loved to have a larger hit. But considering the last film was almost 30 years ago, it really did extremely well,” Reitman said. “I think the film cost too much, frankly, and that’s the real issue. I personally had other points of view in terms of where the film should go and it was kind of a continuous conversation with Paul about that.” He explained that he wanted to give Feig room to make the movie the way he wanted and while he may have succeeded in that pursuit, it’s hard to find anything else about the project that could be called a success - or would justify additional films in the franchise……….

- A winner, yet still a loser. An Indiana man who was initially denied a vanity license plate reading "ATHE1ST" triumphed in his battle to force the state to give him the personalized plate, but that doesn’t make him a winner. Anyone who spends money on a vanity plate still has to be classified as a loser by simple virtue of the fact that vanity plates are a lame waste of time, but that’s not why the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles denied Chris Bontrager's first request in February. In fact, we don’t really know that the reason was because the bureau didn’t cite a specific reason. Its denial letter to Bontrager noted the agency could refuse a personalized plate if it had a connotation offensive to good taste or decency, was misleading or deemed improper, yet didn’t specify which of those criteria it had used in his case. Bontrager suspected that the decision was religiously motivated and his first step was to file an appeal with the state. He received plenty of help from his new friends at the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana and with their assistance, he was able to move quickly through the appeals process without actually having to testify before an appeals panel. "My intention was never to litigate this matter," Bontrager said. "I just felt that the process should be more transparent." He received his new plate this week but even in the wake of its legal loss, the snippy BMV issued a short statement on Bontrager's case, affirming the state's ability to deny any plate at will. Yet in the past, both the Indiana Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court have sided with the state's ability to decide whether a message on a personalized plate would be approved or denied on the grounds that

the messages amount to "government speech." And paying for a vanity plate speaks as well, namely in support of a person not being all that wise with their cash………

- Wherever Lane Kiffin goes, pissed off people, ugly accusations and even uglier firings tend to follow. So it makes perfect sense that former University of Alabama receiver Antonio Carter has filed a lawsuit alleging fraud against Lane Kiffin, Florida Atlantic University and the state of Florida. This lawsuit may or may not have merit, but either way it’s not a surprise that Kiffin, FAU’s new head football coach, is being sued by Carter, who played for Alabama for three seasons and was a graduate assistant, but had most recently accepted a position at FAU as assistant wide receivers coach and assistant strength and conditioning coach. The hiccup occurred when two prior misdemeanor charges showed up on a background check, a background check after which Carter claimed Kiffin assured him that he deal was done and he could begin work. Instead, the job offer was pulled even though Carter claims he was already recruiting a junior college prospect from his hometown to come play for FAU. "It is believed that this relationship between plaintiff Antonio Carter and the coveted prospect was known to the coaches and defendants at the time he was hired," the lawsuit states. It further alleges that Carter sent Florida Atlantic documentation showing resolution of the misdemeanor charges on his record and received no response from either Kiffin or athletic director Patrick Chun, so he’s now seeking charges of reckless fraud, fraud through mistaken false statements, breach of contract, unjust enrichment and promissory fraud and conspiracy. Coincidentally, this isn’t the first time any of those words have been directly associated with Kiffin………

Police file deletion folly, Space Jam goes vinyl and drunken pilot hijinks

- Score another one for decades-overdue progress in the golf world. First, Muirfield in Scotland avoided being removed from the rotation of host sites for the British Open be finally agreeing to admit female members and now, the course that will host the 2020 Olympic golf tournament has avoided being stripped of the event by deciding to change its membership policy to do the same. The Kasumigaseki Country Club finally decided to stop being stuck in 1920 when its executive board decided on the change following discussions among its members. All of the furor over the membership policy ensued after Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike urged the club to admit women as full members. Critics quickly chimed in, arguing that the club's policy was contrary to the very spirit of the Olympics. The club finally decided to get off its ass and do something because in three days earlier, IOC President Thomas Bach warned the club of consequences for upholding a ban on female members. "Should gender equality not be respected, then we would look for another venue which would ensure non-discrimination," Bach said. Yoshiro Mori, president of the Tokyo Olympic organizing committee, applauded the change. "I'd like to extend my gratitude to the members of the club for their understanding and cooperation," Mori said. Until this forced change, the club's policy had excluded women from full-fledged membership but not from playing or other types of membership. It’s nice that one of Japan's oldest and most prestigious golf clubs is making this change because some Japanese clubs still bar women from playing, so maybe this will spur others to remove heads from asses soon……..

- Getting aboard a metal tube that goes rocketing through the air some 30,000 feet above the ground is enough to spur more than a few people to drink heavily. Most of the time, that’s not a problem as long as the liquored-up individual keeps themselves under control, doesn’t cause trouble during the flight and is able to drunkenly stumble down the aisle to disembark once the trip ends. However, having a beer or eight too many is an issue when you’re one of the pilots tasked with safely transporting everyone on board to their next destination. Enter Miroslav Gronych, a pilot who passed out in a cockpit before a scheduled flight in Canada and who has pleaded guilty to being impaired while in control of an aircraft. Gronych was employed by Sunwing Airlines on a work visa from Slovakia and he was slated to be a) sober and b) in the cockpit for a flight to leave Calgary, Alberta, on Dec. 31 with stops in Regina, Saskatchewan, and Winnipeg, Manitoba, before continuing to Cancun, Mexico. Maybe he began his New Year’s celebration a bit early or maybe he’s just a raging alcoholic, because prior to takeoff, he was found slumped over in his seat and escorted off the plane. A statement of facts agreed to by the prosecution and defense was read aloud in court and laid out a sad scene in which police saw his pilot's wings attached upside down on his uniform and a maid discovered an empty bottle of vodka in his hotel room. Oh, and he was also an hour late checking in for the flight, so let’s just call this the end of his flying career and keep moving……..

- Whether or not a sequel ultimately comes together with LeBron James in the starring role or not, “Space Jam” lives on and remains pop culturally relevant. For example, its iconic soundtrack is about to get a special edition reissue, just in time for Record Store Day on April 22. In an effort to introduce an album featuring R. Kelly‘s ‘I Believe I Can Fly’ as well as D’Angelo, Quad City DJ’s, Seal, Salt-N-Pepa, Monica, Barry White (with Chris Rock), Busta Rhymes, LL Cool J, Method Man, Coolio, and B Real to a new generation or just possibly cash in on hipsters’ overwhelming, never-ending fondness for all things vinyl, Atlantic Records will re-release the soundtrack on vinyl. It was the sonic backdrop for a movie starring Michael Jordan as the man chosen to lead a collection of Looney Tunes characters including Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck to victory in a basketball game for Earth’s survival against a team of aliens who had stolen the talents of some of Jordan’s NBA peers. Bill Murray and Wayne Knight also appeared in the movie and the soundtrack was originally released on vinyl in 1996, but few enough copies remain that the ones still out there often sell for hundreds of dollars on various websites. Now, that market is about to get diluted as fans can snag their own copy for a slightly more reasonable price. As for the allegedly sure-to-happen remake with James at the center, that’s harder to pin down………

- Boy, this sort of thing never happens with the always-competent, never-off-the-mark operations of your average municipal police department. It’s simply shocking to hear Columbus, Ohio police reveal that they're investigating an employee's accidental deletion of about 100,000 dashboard camera video files, the sort of files that could come in handy should someone arrested and/or prosecuted in the city ever come back and claim that they were assaulted by, mistreated by or otherwise had their rights violated by John Q. Law at the time of their apprehension. According to the department, its Columbus Police Technical Services Bureau learned last week of the mass deletion of the files. Police Chief Kim Jacobs said most of the files were from 2015 and added that the department has now called upon its resident technological experts to determine whether any of the files can be retrieved. What Jacobs is even less clear about is what impact the loss of the files will have on pending cases and right now, city officials are attempting to figure out which videos may have contained evidence and whether they had already been transferred to detectives' or prosecutors' files. According to the chief, about one in four of the files involve recordings that wouldn't be relevant to criminal matter and within a department that just deleted 100,000 potentially important pieces of footage, you can definitely take her word on all of that……..

France's Olympic ultimatum, Turkey Trump-ifies its border and RuPaul + JJ Abrams

- Not all shoplifters are equal. Sometimes, a person shoplifts because they have no integrity or moral compass and figure they can take things because they want them and get away with it. Others are not even old enough to drive or vote and go to the store and pick food off the shelves because they don’t have any of it at home. A 14-year-old shoplifting candy from a business in Rome, Georgia fell into the latter category and that’s why this part of the teen’s story ends with a happy note rather than him being sent to a juvenile detention facility. According to police, the teen gave the candy back after he was caught and when two officers took him home, they found out that he didn’t have any food at home. At that point, the officers decided not to simply shrug their shoulders, back out of the driveway and head back to the station. Instead, they took the boy shopping and bought him some groceries.  "Lt. Walters spent well over $50 getting him enough groceries to last a week," Rome police wrote in a post on their Facebook page, including two photos of the officers buying the groceries. It may not be a long-term solution for a boy (and his family) who aren't able to keep food on the table, but it’s still nice to see a couple of officers who are trying to help their community and willing to go beyond their normal duties to do so………

- JJ Abrams is visiting a new universe for his next project, one marked by lots of glitter, rouge, sequins and panache. Abrams is developing a new TV series based on the rise of drag icon RuPaul and the idea makes a hell of a lot of sense. Say what you will about RuPaul, but few have carved out the long, profitable career this drag queen has by being someone else. RuPaul already hosts the cult show “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and will serve as executive producer on the project, which won't be a reality show, but rather present a fictionalized look at the star’s youth and early career. Abrams is taking a respite from the world Star Wars for the yet-untitled project, which is being billed as a half-hour dramedy series that doesn’t yet have a network home. As for RuPaul’s current project, “RuPaul’s Drag Race” is in its ninth season, having recently moved to VH1” and being just one year removed from winning an Emmy for Outstanding Host for a Reality or Reality-Competition Program. Its new season kicks off this week with a cameo from Lady Gaga, whose appearance sees the singer disguising herself as a drag queen on the show in front of a group of contestants posing as her. It’s clearly a good time to be RuPaul, whose career may be in its twilight, but who is clearly going to make the most of every opportunity to be front and center until the next big drag queen rises up and takes the top spot……..

- The rage is real in Bulgaria, where Sunday's parliamentary elections have raised some major issues and led the natives to try to Trump-ify their border with Turkey by using their bodies and willpower to prevent what they called "electoral tourism" by Bulgarian citizens living permanently in Turkey. Several hundred Bulgarian nationalists decided that the best way to prevent people from voting whom they believed should not be eligible to cast a ballot in an important election would be to block the three main checkpoints at the Bulgarian-Turkish border to prevent undesirables from getting in. The rousing event was organized by the good folks of the nationalist United Patriots coalition, who claimed they had information that some 1,000 buses with at least 50,000 voters from Turkey were expected to cross the border ahead of the vote. Not only that, they claimed that Turkish officials were forcing expatriate voters to support a pro-Ankara party, which the nationalists consider a threat to Bulgarian national interests, leading to some inspiring TV footage from the scene in which protesters carrying Bulgarian flags and posters with the slogan, "We are defending Bulgaria and Europe," piled car tires as high as they could across the road to bring traffic to a halt. One does have to wonder how they’re going to both find time to vote and keep their beloved border safe from interference at the same time, but odds are they’ll figure something out……

- Let the French have the damn Olympics. There are only two cities left in the bidding to host the 2024 Olympic because the other potential hosts have wised up and dropped out because hosting the Olympics is a dumpster fire of an idea that sets a city up for fiscal ruin. The remaining contenders are Paris and Los Angeles and in a bold move, the Paris bid team has thrown down an ultimatum to the IOC: Give us the 2024 Summer Olympics of f*ck off. IOC President Thomas Bach tried to couch the potential disappointment of one city losing when the host city is chosen by raising the prospect of one city being awarded 2024 and the other taking 2028 to avoid there being a loser. Six months remain before the bid is awarded and the International Olympic Committee is still unsure of how to proceed. Bach’s bold idea to solve a potentially awkward situation - not only Paris or L.A. losing, but the possibility of no city being dumb enough to bid for the 2028 Summer Olympics - is meeting resistance in a big way. "We can't accept `28," Paris bid co-chairman Tony Estanguet said. "It's not possible." Estanguet, a three-time Olympic champion canoeist who became a member of the International Olympic Committee, represents a city that has lost three straight bids to host the Games. "We're OK if the IOC wants to give two games at the same session in Lima," Estanguet said of the IOC Session in Peru. "But on our side, our project is only possible for `24. We also believe this is the time to come back to Paris, or to Europe, in `24.” How does this sound, Paris: Not only can you host in 2024, but you can host the Olympics every time they take place, that way America doesn’t have the looming headache of one of its cities being saddled with hosting duties………

America's next Steve Bannon, soccer hooligans with death threats and Mulan goes song-less

- Call it the Mulan non-musical. Apparently there was enough singing in the original film, which dropped in 1998 and won a lot of praise for its animated retelling of the Chinese legend of Hua Mulan, because Disney’s upcoming remake of “Mulan” will not feature any songs. The first film included several musical numbers written by Matthew Wilder and David Zippel, but in transitioning the project to a live-action movie (i.e. making a movie without having to actually come up with a new story), the studio has decided to get rid of those musical numbers under the guidance of director Niki Caro, who said here are “no songs right now, much to horror of my children.” Since the tale itself is lady-centered, that seems to be where Caro and her crew are directing their focus. “Mulan is clearly an empowered-female story but we can also do something new in this reimagining, make it a little more muscular, stronger, with touch of Ridley Scott,” Sean Bailey, Disney’s President of Motion Picture Production, said of the movie. This is a growing trend for Disney, which also elected to drop the musical numbers from last year’s Jungle Book remake, utilizing only the song ‘The Bare Necessities’ within the movie itself and relegating the rest of the film’s iconic songs to the end credits. Some films have escaped that fate, including the top-earning movie from this past weekend, “Beauty and the Beast,” which features many of its original songs. The recycled Mulan project is due out some time next year, devoid of songs as it may be………

- Switzerland is known for its permissive banking laws, but those laws don’t exactly apply if Swiss banks are doing things that are illegal beyond its borders. That could totally kill the country’s rep as the cool nation where all the rich people stash their money if they want to diversify from their holdings in the Cayman Islands, but France doesn’t seem to give a damn and a French court has ordered Swiss bank UBS AG to stand trial in France for allegedly helping wealthy French clients evade the country's tax authorities after it rejected as too pricey an out-of-court settlement offer from prosecutors. According to a French judicial official, investigating judges found the charges against the Zurich-based bank serious and strong enough to send the case to trial at a later date and it didn’t take long for the bank to fire back from its ivory, gilded tower. UBS AG said in a statement it disagrees with "the allegations, assumptions and legal interpretations being made" and that it will continue to "strongly defend ourselves,” the latter part of which is clearly true because their billions of dollars in resources should allow them to put on a good battle in a French criminal court against charges of illegal bank soliciting and aggravated money laundering. But the reassuring part is that nowhere in the world, at any time, do the wealthy use their immense resources to circumvent or outright buy justice in any way………

- Much to the surprise of no one, European soccer hooligans remain insane, inappropriate and dangerously stupid. It’s a reality reaffirmed on a near-daily basis and today’s reminder comes from Leicester City star Jamie Vardy, says he received death threats "walking down the street" and also alleged that his wife was the victim of a road-rage incident after he was rumored to be involved in a dressing-room revolt against coach Claudio Ranieri. Vardy, currently playing for the English national team in this week's internationals against Germany and Lithuania, was speculated to be one of a group of Leicester City players involved in a meeting with the club's owners hours before Ranieri was fired in the immediate aftermath of the Champions League round of 16 first-leg defeat against Sevilla. Vardy denied those rumors and put on a good show when it came to protesting his innocence.  "The stories were quite hurtful to be honest with you," Vardy said. "A lot of false accusations were being thrown out there and there's nothing us, as players, could do about it. "As soon as they were in the papers they were out there. We just had to put it to the back of our minds and concentrate on the football." The ugliest part of the story involved Vardy’s wife, Rebekah, who he claimed was driving in her car with the couple’s children in the back when some overly zealous soccer hooligans attacked the car, scaring everyone inside and proving once more than being a soccer fan and having a reasonable perspective on life are mutually exclusive endeavors…….

- How crazy has the past year-plus been as Mutated Orange in Chief Donald Trump ran for, was elected as and has served as America’s leader? Crazy enough that you can't totally discount the claims of an apparent wack-a-doo who drove to a security checkpoint near the White House in a stolen car and was arrested after stating "there's a bomb in the trunk,” that’s how insane. Later, a man identified in court documents as Sean Patrick Keoughan of Roanoke, Virginia, revised his tale and told authorities that the object in the trunk was an asteroid and that he communicates telepathically with the president. Keoughan approached the checkpoint at 10 p.m. Saturday and said he had a meeting with Trump and given the current lineup of crackpots around Trump, it’s entirely reasonable that he could not only provide great insights, but that he’d be the most sane and reasonable person in the room. Maybe when he approached again at 11 p.m. and made the statement about the bomb, security should have made sure there was no bomb and after that, tried to pry out whatever wisdom Keoughan wanted to impart to Trump. For now, Keoughan faces charges of threatening and conveying false information concerning the use of an explosive, which are punishable by a maximum of 10 years in prison. Prosecutors ordered a mental health screening and Keoughan is being represented by federal public defender Dani Jahn, but one has to wonder if America isn’t perhaps wasting the time, talents and wisdom of America’s next Steve Bannon or Kellyanne Conway………

USA hockey v. the ladies, Ethiopia deals with garbage tragedy and Mission: Impossible adds Superman

- College is all about learning, but sometimes the methodology of learning becomes the story above all else. Such as a professor at a Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) school allegedly holding a mock slave auction in class. Welcome to the tale of a white professor at Howard University who was apparently teaching a lesson on Frederick Douglass' slave narrative when he made the regrettable choice to single out one of the two black men in the class. At that point, ignoring the warning bells that had to be going off in his head, he  then apparently discussed how slaves were examined before they were sold and  asked the black student to stand up because he looked "healthy" and "like the type of slave buyers would look for." That would have been offensive enough had he stopped there and there still would have been a sh*t storm of controversy, but this old white dude decided to up the ante by asking the student to “turn around so we can see your buttocks” so the class could get a better sense of how much he was worth. When that happened, it definitely became a learning moment for that student, because his class voiced its disgust at what the professor was doing and proved that at least some people in that room understood that a line had been crossed. The student later said he initially participated in the exchange because he never expected the professor to take things where he ultimately did and for its part, the university would only say that it was “ aware of the incident and is investigating the matter." Sounds like someone is headed for a sabbatical for the rest of the semester while someone with at least a shred of racial sensitivity takes over his class……..

- Yes, they’re still making Mission: Impossible movies and no, Tom Cruise hasn’t decided that he’s banked enough dough to fund Scientology and ceded the franchise’s leading role to someone else. What he will do is welcome a major new face to the series, namely current Superman place-holder Henry Cavill, who will join Cruise in “Mission: Impossible 6,” due for release next July. Cavill will reprise his role as Superman in DC’s Justice League film later this year, was welcomed to the fold  by director Christopher McQuarrie via Instagram. “Say, @henrycavill. Had a thought. Curious if you’re interested in a role in the 6th installment of Mission: Impossible. No pressure,” he wrote. Cavill returned serve via the ‘Gram, writing, “How can I say no to a man with such perfect hair.” The two went back and forth and the director explained that the role would involve “extreme heights, high speeds … practical stunts, firearms and sporadic explosions.” Having said all of that, details about Cavill’s role are still scarce, but word on the street is that will be a right-hand man to Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and not a bad guy, though there’s always an opening for more bad guys in any Mission: Impossible movie, so Cavill and his amazing hair could end up on either side of the ledger here. What isn’t a mystery is that there will be massive effects, insanely over the top and implausible stunts and a plot with loads of holes in it, but people will go to see it in droves because so many of us love seeing sh*t blow up………

- It’s a dicey, age-old question governments have grappled with and been perplexed by: What do you do with a landfill where 113 people were killed in a garbage collapse? Sure, you could keep piling garbage there and attempt to cover the memories of the deceased with mountains of filth, but that would be insensitive and could also leave the door open for similar tragedies in the future. So Ethiopia is taking a different tact, turning the property into a park and green space. Government spokesman Negeri Lencho said survivors of the disaster will no longer live there even though hundreds of people had been thought to be living or working at the Koshe landfill where the collapse occurred March 11 on the outskirts of the capital, Addis Ababa. The incident was especially devastating because most of the victims were women and children and any time those two groups die in large numbers, folks feel that some of society’s weakest were harmed and not adequately protected. According to city officials, people who had been living at the landfill have been relocated into temporary housing and Negeri said that because the government's focus has been on search and rescue work, it is not yet known what caused the deadly collapse. In Third World nations such as Ethiopia, such tragedies happen all too often and at this point, it’s hard to have confidence in the government’s ability to prevent more of them………

- The clock is ticking and the ladies aren't budging. USA Hockey and the women's national team are squaring off in a dispute that defines all that sports have become in our world today - i.e. it’s all about the money. The players want more money, the federation doesn’t want to give them what they think they’re worth and both sides are trying to wage a public relations battle alongside negotiating with each other. Thus, mere hours after the federation issued a detailed statement disputing the lower compensation figures the team had presented, players and their attorney blasted those new characterizations "patently false." Among the many maneuvers in this back and forth were the team threatening to boycott the March 31-April 7 IIHF World Championship. USA Hockey executive director Dave Ogrean was adamant that his organization remains committed to having the national team it selected play in the tournament and since the United States is the defending champion and has won six of the past eight world championships, the American team boycotting the tournament would be a big deal. John B. Langel, the players' lead attorney, made it clear that his side has made an offer and it’s now on USA Hockey to respond. Players are scheduled to report to Plymouth, Michigan, on March 21 for pre-tournament training, but that’s very much in doubt after USA Hockey claimed that the 23-member national team's demands would exceed $8 million total in an Olympic year and $5.7 million in a non-Olympic year, at a rate of $237,000 per player for winning gold at the Olympics and $149,000 in non-Olympic years, and the players quickly shot down those claims as outright false. It’s reassuring to know that regardless of sport or gender, at the end of the day, modern sports are, at their heart, always about the dollar sign……..

Chance the Rapper sells out (or not), duck supplants pizza rat and the latest Kyrgios incident

- How does one buy favor with the potential future leader of a decidedly stylish nation? How about buying him two suits worth 13,000 euros ($14,000) so said presidential candidate can look damn good on the campaign trail? French candidate Francois Fillon received his fancy new threads last month and now, we know from whose coffers the cash for those two suits came. According to a French official, the benefactor who bought the suits is an unofficial adviser for African and French presidents. He’s lawyer Robert Bourgi, who maintained close ties to former French presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, as well as the former leaders of Senegal and Gabon, and now he’s apparently made a new friend in Fillon. That could be an issue, as the judges who already were investigating Fillon have extended their probe to include the suits he says he received as a gift. For some odd reason, the judges feel like an outside party giving a candidate two pricey new suits could represent a possible conflict of interest for a guy who is staring down some very serious charges for allegedly using public funds to pay his wife and children for work they never performed. To the cynical onlooker, this might appear to be a corrupt, dishonest person (i.e. a politician) breaking rule after rule before he’s even elected, but in spite of the haters, Fillon has vowed to keep campaigning for the April-May election. Considering some of the other options on the ballot, the sad truth is that this guy may not be the worst choice for voters………

- It’s a true tennis rarity: a Nick Kyrgios story that involves him leaving a tournament in a manner that doesn’t involve intentionally antagonizing fans, disrespecting his opponent or making tour officials consider a long-term ban for him. Sure, the enigmatic Aussie is gone before a highly anticipated quarterfinal against Roger Federer at Indian Wells, California, but his abrupt exit is due to (allegedly) food poisoning. Kyrgios defeated second-ranked Novak Djokovic in straight sets to advance to the quarters, but was forced to hit the eject button before battling Federer because he wasn’t feeling well and in a tweet, he theorized that the culprit may be food poisoning. Neither Kyrgios nor Federer had seen their serve broken in the tournament and even Federer admitted that he “was really looking forward to playing the match.” With the literal last-minute withdrawal, officials rushed to find something to entertain fans and decided to have tournament director-player Tommy Haas and Vasek Pospisil play an exhibition match. Pospisil upset top-ranked Andy Murray in the second round but lost his next match, so he apparently decided to hang around Indian Wells for a while. Kyrgios has now withdrawn from a match before it was played four times in his career, having done so twice in 2016, dropping out in the third round of the US Open with a hip injury and exiting before a Dubai semifinal because of back problems. Ironically, bailing out of Indian Wells was an unceremonious end for a guy who was coming off his second win of the year against Djokovic and spoke after the match about how he’s matured and improved his mental game in recent months. His polite social media message keeps in that same spirit, but it remains to be seen how long it lasts on the court………

-  New York City wildlife could really use its own reality show - hell, lots of people with far less to say or contribute to the world and who call Manhattan home already have their own shows, so why not the pizza rat and his new peer, the train-stopping duck. The pizza rat skyrocketed to Internet fate when it was filmed - likely without its permission - dragging a slice of pizza down the stairs at a Manhattan subway station. So what bright future awaits a duck who was able to halt a train in Brooklyn when it landed wherever the hell it felt like landing - on the tracks in this case - and stubbornly refused to move. When it became clear the duck would cede no ground, police had to step in and keep the duck from further obstructing travel while also ensuring that the train didn’t create some duck liver pate by barreling ahead with the animal still on the tracks. Witnesses reported that police didn’t have much of a battle on their hands when they stepped onto the tracks to deal with the bird and were able to remove it without further incident. According to a police spokeswoman, officers later "released it back into the wild” and “it flew away." One commuter filmed the duck prior to its time on the tracks as the animal hurried around the subway station, amusing travelers who probably never imagined that the beast would be the one that made them late for their morning meeting or kept them from making it to their coffee date at one of Manhattan’s 873 Starbucks locations. The real question now is which species will be the next to step up and seize the spotlight in the concrete jungle that is New York City’s animal planet………

- How much does it take to sell out? Depending on who you ask, either a) $500,000 or b) there was no selling out happening here. The central character in this tale is Chance The Rapper, who revealed that Apple paid him $500,000 to make his latest mixtape, the triple Grammy Award-winning “Coloring Book,” an Apple Music exclusive. It smacks of unfairness to create a monopoly built around an award-winning album, but in a series of tweets, the Chicago rapper revealed how much he’d received and defended himself against allegations that the agreement with Apple threatened his independence as an artist. “I never felt the need to correct folks on my relationship with Apple, but now that more people have tried to discredit my independence, I wanna clear things up,” he wrote. “Apple gave me half a mil and a commercial to post Coloring Book exclusively on Apple Music for two weeks.” Some fans took the rapper’s side in the dispute, arguing that Chance owed fans no explanation and had done nothing wrong. Others contended that it was unfair to limit their buying options to one music marketplace, but the rapper fired back by writing that after the two-week exclusivity period, the mixtape was available for free and that an opportunity to work with “good people” shouldn’t be passed up. All in all, it brings even more attention to one of last year’s best projects and one that, regardless of how it was sold, delivered the goods from start to finish……….

Hurling under-seasoned fries, Mexican WBC rage and Kal Penn's script-hating Twitter rant

- There are Twitter rants and then there are TWITTER RANTS. Indian-American actor Kal Penn went the latter route, posting a long series of tweets he used to shine a light on scripts he’s received in auditions that perpetuate racial stereotype in the film and TV industries. Penn, who is politically active and well-spoken, is an American born to Indian parents and is known for both his role as Kumar Patel in the Harold & Kumar films and as then-President Barack Obama’s Associate Director in the White House Office of Public Engagement from 2009 to 2011. He’s landed quite a few good roles, including Lawrence Kutner in “House”  Seth Wright in the ABC political drama “Designated Survivor,” but what has Penn chafed is the way actors of certain nationalities are written as characters in various scripts he’s read and auditioned with over the years. “Found a bunch of old scripts from some of my first years trying to be an actor,” Penn tweeted, signaling the start of a string of posts with scripts from shows like “Sabrina The Teenage Witch” and “Smart Guy,” with one script looking for a “Gandhi lookalike” and “snake charmer,” while another was casting a character described as a “Pakistani computer geek.” The “Smart Guy” script called for a character simply labeled “Foreign Student” and seeing such vague, stereotyped roles for people of his ethnicity didn’t sit well with Penn. “There are too many in this stack to tweet, I’ll be here all day,” Penn later tweeted. “That said, there were also some wonderful 1st audition & work experiences!” He saluted “Steve Harvey, Buffy, Angel, 24, really smart, creative people who didn’t have to use external things to mask subpar writing,” so props to all of those wonderful shows and people…….

- To the objective observer, it might seem nonsensical to have a new girls council to deal with issues pertaining to females in your country and not actually allow any ladies to attend that council’s first meeting, but thankfully, the powers that be in Saudi Arabia are neither objective nor in the habit of fairly observing and assessing their own actions. Saudi Arabia unveiled its inaugural girls’ council in the province of al-Qassim and launched this aspirational group with a meeting that failed to include a single female on a stage that had 13 men. The bad news is that the ladies weren’t represented on that stage; the slightly less bad news is that there are female members of the Qassim Girls Council, but due to a Saudi state policy that requires that women and men who are not related remain separated, their only means of “participating” was being shown on video screens from their position in a separate room. Yes, nothing says caring about the rights and feelings of women like shoving them into the back room with a camera like hostages and broadcasting their likeness on a screen in the main room, where the men folk gathered and took center stage. What’s sad is that the Saudi government clearly expected it to be a praiseworthy moment of inclusiveness and progress, only to have it blow up in their face and become an instant rallying cry for social media users around the world to denounce its actions and policies as unfair unjust and stuck in a bygone era……..

- Does anyone actually know the World Baseball Classic is going on? Los Angeles Dodgers first baseman Adrian Gonzalez clearly does, but it’s mostly because he’s playing for the Mexican team in the WBC, which is being contested at various sites around the world ahead of its championship round in Los Angeles. But Gonzalez, normally a pleasant individual, threw an unprovoked haymaker at the event after his team beat Venezuela 11-9 in Guadalajara, Mexico, leaving both teams tied with Italy for second in Group D. Gonzalez was irate that something called the WBC technical committee determined the tiebreaker -- runs allowed per defensive inning -- meant Italy (1.05) and Venezuela (1.11) advanced and not Mexico (1.12), meaning he would return to spring training with the Dodgers rather than play on in an event sports fans are blissfully unaware of as they lock in on the NCAA tournament. "They're trying to become the World Cup, but they're not even close to being the Little League World Series,” Gonzalez said of the WBC. He was especially angry because the Mexican Baseball Federation objected that the ninth inning of last Thursday's game between Mexico and Italy should count as a partial inning, even though Italy scored five runs without Mexico getting any outs. Italy won the game 10-9 and now, it’s moving on an Mexico isn't. Following the decision, Gonzalez, a veteran of four WBCs, said he won't play in any more. According to Gonzo, Mexico's general manager called the two WBC representatives in Mexico seven times and sent several text messages and emails prior to the team’s final game and the squad believed it only needed to win by two runs to advance. After the game, they found out that a different determinant was being used and all they could do was pack their bags and go home……..

- Know your room. If you go to a low-end, fast food restaurant, you can't expect the same quality of food or service that you’re going to get at a pricy, $$$-rated eatery in the Zagat guide. As such, when workers at a Zaxby's restaurant in suburban Atlanta hand you french fries with what you perceive to be insufficient seasoning salt, your options for reacting fall within fairly limited parameters. You can take those fries back and demand a new batch, you can ask to have more seasoning sprinkled on those fries or you can demand a refund….but you can’t hurl your carton of soggy, greasy potato slivers back at the minimum-wage-earning workers who served them up, which is precisely what one unhappy customer did. The woman had two takeout containers filled with food an when she went back to the counter to confront the employees unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity of the register, she decided that the best way to drive home her point about the importance of properly season fries was to hurl the bags across the counter. Security footage shows the customer exiting the store with her order, only to return moments later to speak to a manager. That escalated quickly to this rage-a-holic punching the screen attached to the register and according to Clayton County Police Det. Stefan Schindler, spewing some very colorful profanities at workers. She was accompanied by a man who stood silently during the entire episode, which means that she could face charges for assault (with a non-lethal food product) and property damage, while her male counterpart is guilty only of having poor taste in who he hangs out with. Next time, just accept the replacement fries or go to the Ruth’s Criss steakhouse down the street for the quality of meal you seem to feel you deserve……….

Reviving The Matrix, runaway Staten Island snow horses and the NBA's two best jobs

- Organized crime will always seek out the best way to make a pile of money without actually having to do honest, hard work on its own. Sometimes, that’s simply extorting money from those who earn it legitimately, other times it means veering into the casino, petroleum or real estate industries, but in New Zealand, it’s a sweeter endeavor - at least for thieves trying to capitalize on the honey industry’s skyrocketing prices.  Organized crime syndicates in the island nation are trying to boost their profit margin by stealing and trading valuable beehives and according to law enforcement, hive thefts have increased of late, with at least 400 bee or honey thefts in the final 6 months of 2016. “There is nothing to suggest at this stage that beehive-honey theft is directly linked with a particular gang, but we do believe this offending is organized and likely being carried out by groups,” Sgt. Alasdair MacMillan, Coordinator of Community Policing for New Zealand Police said. Combine that reality with the New Zealand Ministry of Primary Industry’s report that honey exports have jumped 35 percent to $218 million since last June and you have a combustible situation. When prices for native Manuka honey have tripled in value since 2012, unsavory characters are bound to start circling. Honey producers are now having to spend increasing amounts of money on security for fear that some mob goon squad is going to descend on their property looking to cut out the middleman and funnel the profits directly into their boss’ coffers. Manuka honey is prized for its antibacterial properties as well as taste and can go for up to $50 a pound, with the hive  worth as much as $1,380. In this case, it may as well be literal liquid gold………

- The two best jobs in America belong to a pair of exceptionally tall and now, extremely stationary human beings residing in the shadows of the iconic Hollywood sign. Meet Los Angeles Lakers veterans Luol Deng and Timofey Mozgov, who signed contracts worth a combined $136 million over four seasons to come to Los Angeles less than a year ago and will now be glorified spectators for the final 15 games of the season. Of course, they’ve been that for a while now and Mozgov has effectively been shut during the past month, having played just one game since the All-Star break. Deng actually started 49 of the 56 games in which he played, but averaged only 7.6 points and 5.3 rebounds a game for a team in last place in the Western Conference and wouldn’t you know it, able to keep its first-round pick in this year’s draft if that pick falls in the top three in the upcoming draft lottery. Sitting two competent veterans who could help the team stumble into a few wins down the stretch is a brilliant strategy for a team endeavoring to keep a prime draft pick and better still, new team president Magic Johnson and general manager Rob Pelinka can claim that they’re sitting the vets to give more playing time to young players such as DeAngelo Russell and Brandon Ingram. Those guys need experience and them gaining experience will conveniently lead to the team struggling and losing more games, so if ownership has to shell out $24 million a season to Mozgov and Deng to not play and contribute as much as the Hollywood A-listers sitting in über-expensive seats in the front row at Staples Center, then Jeannie Buss, Johnson, Pelinka and head coach Luke Walton will happily trot out a losing lineup to protect that draft pick………

- What to do when your island home is snowbound and all but shut down due to a massive winter storm blasting the East Coast? For one do-gooder on Staten Island and a few of New York’s finest, the answer was to track down a pair of wayward horses who tried to use the last big winter storm of the season as cover to make their escape from captivity. In the snowy afternoon haze on Staten Island earlier this week, the two horses escaped captivity and were making a run for it when neighbor Robert Stasio looked out the window and saw the brown-and-white animals, which appeared to be Shetland ponies, galloping past his home on Retford Avenue. The Eltingville neighborhood doesn’t often sees horses running down the street, so Stasio initially wondered if he might be seeing things, perhaps hallucinating on account of being buried under a mounting pile of snow and wishing he lived somewhere warmer and sunnier. But once he realized that he wasn’t hallucinating, he got into his truck and followed the horses in an effort to corral them before they caused an accident or were forcibly stopped and frisked by the NYPD. It was a meaningful mission for a guy who grew up handling horses with his uncle at Nellie Bly Amusement Park in Brooklyn and Stasio was able to catch up with the horses two blocks away on Richmond Avenue and tailed the animals in his truck as they moved toward Hylan Boulevard, where police joined the pursuit and were able to help Stasio finish the mission and get the horses to safety…….

- It’s almost as if Warner Bros. was doing some spring cleaning, taking long-forgotten possessions off the shelf to dust and stumbled across a movie franchise it had forgotten to squeeze every last ounce of life out of in its quest to never, ever again make a truly original film. The still-blood-left-in-that-turnip franchise the suits at Warner Bros. have rediscovered is The Matrix, which cranked out three films in a five-year span between last century and this one, banking a reported $3 billion worldwide despite the movies getting progressively and markedly worse after a fantastic first film, “The Matrix,” in 1999. Now, the studio is reportedly working hard to move a new movie in the franchise, although details are sketchy at this point. Keanu Reeves famously starred in the trilogy as Neo, a.k.a. Thomas Anderson, a slacker computer hacker who’s suddenly pulled into an alternate world where artificial intelligence and mankind have gone to war, with the machines winning and turning humans into pod-grown entities used only for the energy their bodies produce while their minds are kept occupied by a fictional, computer generated world designed to simulate their pre-machine existence. Reeves ended up saving humanity, but lost his lfie in the process, so having him return would require a bit of creativity. The new movie could be a sequel, prequel or reboot and one of the early leaders in the race for the leading role is Michael B. Jordan, with no word on possible returns for Laurence Fishburne, Carrie Ann Moss or Hugo Weaving. Joel Silver produced the first three Matrix films, but he sold his interest in all his movies to the studio in 2012 for around $30 million. He reportedly approached the studio about reviving the franchise, but has a bad relationship with the Wachowski brothers, who created the Matrix world yet won’t be involved with the new project. It’s a messy situation, but if Warner Bros. can coax hundreds of millions more from this franchise, it doesn’t care who’s a part of it……..