- He went from NBA All-Star to dude eating Vaseline on
U-Stream on a dare to icon halfway around the world and purveyor of
surprisingly stylish and affordable basketball shoes….but the end may be near
for Starbury. In a surprising, yet not at all surprising development, the
Chinese Basketball Association's Beijing Ducks announced Stephon Marbury's
departure. The move to terminate his two-year contract due to the dispute over
Marbury's role and salary in the next season ends a remarkably productive
tenure with the team for a guy who fell from the basketball heights of being
one of the best players in the NBA for a short period of time to out of the
sport before heading to China and reinventing himself, becoming a star in a new
land and leading his team to remarkable heights. However, his contract with the
Ducks included a team option for Marbury as a player or an assistant coach for
the 2017-18 season, which led to several rounds of negotiations and concluded
with Marbury turning down the assistant coach offer, insisting to play for
another season. The team rejected that idea and decided it was time to part
ways with the man known in some circles as Starbury. The veteran guard penned a
letter to fans on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, and didn’t exactly
smooth things over. "First, the team did not decide who would be the head
coach, apparently the team is in a rebuilding progress,” he wrote. “Coach Min
who led this team to [three championships] might not be the head coach anymore
which makes it hard for me to accept the offer of becoming an assistant coach.”
There may not be many options left for Marbury in basketball now, not if he
wants to keep making a lot of money and balling at his advanced hoops age……..
- As if he’s feeling overlooked in world where Kim Jong-Un,
Vlad Putin and Nicolas Maduro are grabbing all the despotic headlines by
leading their respective nations into potential world-wrecking calamity on a
daily basis, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is ramping up the rhetoric
and amping up his shenanigans, with his latest outlandish remarks featuring him
claiming he could be "50 times" more brutal than Muslim militants who
stage beheadings and insisting he could even "eat" the extremists if
they're captured alive by troops. Crazy Rod D has repeatedly threatened drug
suspects with death, but during a speech during the opening of a national
sports tournament, he used the occasion to make sure all eyes were on him.
Speaking about what he could do to terrorists who have staged beheadings and
other gruesome attacks and having ordered troops to kill fleeing Muslim
militants behind a foiled attack in the central resort province of Bohol and
not bring them to him alive, labeled the extremists "animals” and then
proceeded to tell the world that he could be a wild beast too. "If you
want me to be an animal, I'm also used to that. We're just the same,"
Duterte said. "I can dish out, go down what you can 50 times over." Duterte
is known for his R-rated remarks, but this is a new dimension even for him, telling
a crowd that was laughing at a possible joke that if a terrorist was presented
to him when he's in a bas mood, "Give me salt and vinegar and I'll eat his
liver." His pledge to battle illegal drugs, corruption and terrorism
sounded swell when he won the presidency in May, but now that thousands have
died under his anti-drug crackdown, the world is seeing that he might deserve a
spot on the list of the world’s most unstable despots……..
- Yes, “Suicide Squad” was a wildly disappointing movie that
failed to come close to living up to its immense pre-release hype, but that doesn’t
mean the franchise and its characters are going away. One of the most-hyped
performances in the film belonged to 30 Second To Mars frontman Jared Leto,
which is trying to build hype for his next stint as The Jokers via his
Instagram account. Leto dropped a heavy hint that he may reprise the role in a
new film that pits the white-faced villain against Batman, posting an image of
himself dressed as The Joker holding a knife to Batman’s throat, with the
cryptic caption “@thejoker_clan ?” Having played the iconic DC Comics character
in “Suicide Squad,” Leto got a lot of attention for the ways in which he took his
performance to the extreme on set, but there was speculation that his role was
actually trimmed down significantly David Ayer and Leto himself said after the
movie’s release that his part was “more of a supporting part than it could have
been.” That might seem to make another turn as The Joker unlikely, but there is
growing belief that he’s like to reprise the role in the forthcoming film “The
Batman,” which will star Ben Affleck in
the title role even though Affleck himself as been the target of rampant
speculation that he’s looking to get out of playing the Caped Crusader and take
himself in a new cinematic direction, i.e. a role he can fill without being
terrible and making utterly, totally forgettable films……..
- Oh, treasure hunters. You kooks scour the beaches of the
world before the lifeguards arrive for the first shift of the morning, you
believe in legends and tall tales of bygone ages and you believe that if you
search long enough and hard enough, you can become filthy rich without having
to ever get a real job. Or n the case of ex-treasure hunter Tommy Thompson, an
Ohio man who has been warned by a federal judge that he could face another
contempt-of-court charge if he doesn't reveal the location of 500 missing gold
coins, a threat that doesn’t seem to have moved Thompson to spill his secrets
thus far. Algenon Marbley ordered Thompson to cooperate by granting power of
attorney to allow the government to figure out if a trust in Belize knows the
coins' whereabouts while also rejecting Thompson's request to appoint a civil
attorney to help him review records. This showdown has been going on for nearly
a year and a half, during which time Marbley has held Thompson in contempt of
court since December 2015 for violating terms of a plea deal by refusing to
respond to questions about the coins' locations. Thompson’s treasure in question
is a collection of coins valued up to $4 million and which were minted from
gold taken from the S.S. Central America, which sank in an 1857 hurricane. It’s
quite a story, the sort for which treasure hunters live and breathe, or in this
case live in perpetual danger of jail time……..
No comments:
Post a Comment