Thursday, April 27, 2017

Riot Watch! Macedonia, La La Land goes to TV and absurd pro sports facial hair rules


- Personal grooming rules in professional sports are lame. There are few things lamer than telling highly paid (sometimes millionaire) professional athletes who play a game for a living that they can't have a) facial hair, b) long hair, c) tattoos or d) dyed hair on account of maintaining a “professional” appearance as if fans follow a team based in any way on whether or not their center fielder looks enough like their insurance agent. The New York Yankees remain the gold standard for overly stuffy, self-important organizations who ban insane things such as beards and goatees, but these idiotic policies hit home for other organizations too. For example, Atlanta Braves reliever Jason Motte, whom the team just recalled Triple-A Gwinnett, where he was forced to shave his beard to comply with organization rules that forbid facial hair for minor league players. When Motte was a successful closer with the St. Louis Cardinals, the beard was a mainstay. A few days in some forgotten small town in Georgia and suddenly, it’s gonzo. "My daughter's 4½, so she ended up shaving it for me," Motte told. "She was pretty excited to help me shave it. She did say, 'You look weird. Put it back on.' But it's all part of it. It'll be back." In order to grow it back, Motte needs to pitch well for the Braves, who  have no rules about facial hair at the major league level. According to Braves manager Brian Snitker,  he plans to use Motte as a middle reliever during the sixth or seventh innings, where theoretically his powers of pitching will grow stronger as his facial hair grows longer…….


- If you find a good crime you seem to enjoy - or at least aren't remotely troubled by - then you may as well do it again, right? Let’s meet Keiyenne Mynx Hijin, who also goes by the name Geoffrey Roberson (probably best not to ask why) and is now staring down serious jail time for leaving his 1-year-old child alone in his truck for more than an hour - and doing it twice. Hijin was first charged last month after his initial arrest for abandoning his child in a hot vehicle in North Carolina. The parental stupidity began when this kook left his child in the car while he went to go work out at Planet Fitness on Feb. 3. Yes, toting your child around while you grind your way through leg day at the gym is a pain, but not nearly as painful as facing fines and jail time for living her in the car. But even the legal entanglement that befell Hijin after his first arrest clearly did not deter him because he has now been accused of committing the same crime, this time at a different location. According to investigator, this ass hat was arrested this week for the same offense when he left his daughter alone in a car next to a filthy mess and someone recognized him at Cloninger Ford on Jake Alexander Boulevard. The witness called police and detectives arrived to find Hijin’s daughter in the car, which was running with the windows down, sitting next to a toddler toilet that had waste in it. Fractional points for actually having a toddler toilet and not just expecting the kid to go in an old paint tray you set up under her car seat, but amazingly, a judge let Hijin go before the second warrant could be served and now, it appears the local legal system is nearly as incompetent as Hijin is as a parent…….


- Damien Chazelle may never be hotter than he is right now. He’s still riding the wave of awards and acclaim from “La La Land” and sifting through the myriad opportunities that have come his way since his singing, dancing walk through the daisies waltzed its way to Oscar success. So it’s not hard to see why the director would make plans to craft a television drama based on the Paris music scene from the movie. When you win a Best Director Oscar for a movie, it’s logical to squeeze every last ounce of creative juice you can out of the concept and so it is that we have “The Eddy,” a musical drama set in modern-day Paris. While the concept is still taking shape, the musical is expected to focus on a club and its owner, along with the house band (of what will surely be a collection of wild and wacky characters) and the ever-unpredictable city in which they all reside. This one could go any number of different directions given that ‘Harry Potter and The Cursed Child’ writer Jack Thorne will pen the project, though adding magic or quidditch to the equation would probably skew a tad to the ridiculous side. Either way, Chazelle is clearly not ready to let go of his most successful project to date and if he can coax a few more big paydays out of “La La Land,” then he’ll simply be doing what everyone else in Hollywood does, namely try to get as much money and mileage out of an existing franchise without having to break new entertainment ground…….


- Now THAT is how a legislature should work. Look no further than the southern reaches of Europe, where a few forward-thinking citizens busted through a police cordon and entered Macedonia's parliament, where they proceeded to make sure government worked for them by violently attacking lawmakers to protest the election of a new speaker despite a months-long deadlock in talks to form a new government. Maybe the United States Congress would work better - and faster - if the senators and representatives currently clogging up the legislative process with a slew of personal agendas, bribes, ulterior motives and dishonesty had to worry about angry constituents wearing masks and storming parliament in order to make their voices heard. The Macedonian uprising came after the country's opposition Social Democrats and parties representing Macedonia's ethnic Albanian minority voted for a new speaker, which spurred rioters to shout, throw chairs and in some cases, remove their shirts while attacking lawmakers, including opposition leader Zoran Zaev, who television footage showed bleeding from the forehead. What should become YouTube’s favorite video for a long time, i.e. television footage of the carnage, showed Zaev and other Social Democrat lawmakers surrounded by protesters waving national flags, shouting "traitors" and refusing to allow them to leave. It was a hellaciously inspiring scene that included police firing flash grenades and grappling with protestors in front of the building, none of which was remotely surprising in a country that has been without a government since December. That’s when Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski's conservative party won elections, but without enough votes to form a government, and coalition talks broke down over ethnic Albanian demands that Albanian be recognized as an official second language. The Assembly of the Republic of Macedonia, as the Macedonian parliament is known, has now been deadlocked for three weeks over electing a new speaker, but clearly the populace has no problem doing a little speaking of its own with its fists and unmitigated fury…….

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