- 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………
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