Category Archives: Celebrity
The Obama Workout Video
President Obama has released a new workout video. Actually, it’s an unauthorized cheap cell phone recording of the POTUS pumping iron. He was caught in a Warsaw hotel gym prepping for his Euro D-day tour.
Workout
At a D-day event luncheon Obama had a chance encounter with Russian President Putin. The two chatted for about 15 minutes. I recorded the conversation.
Jimmy Kimmel must have liked the cartoon!
War on Birds
The Atlantic reported in late April that a huge solar power plant in the California desert is scorching birds with 800 degree heat.
The Ivanpah plant uses 300,000 mirrors to focus the sun on a water filled boiler. When birds fly through that beam the effect is the same as when you focused the sun through a magnifying glass to scorch an ant. Oh, you didn’t do that when you were a kid? Well, here’s what happens:
At times birds flew into the solar flux and ignited.
Not only that:
“It appears Ivanpah may act as a ‘mega-trap,’ attracting insects which in turn attract insect-eating birds, which are incapacitated by solar-flux injury, thus attracting predators and creating an entire food chain vulnerable to injury and death,” concluded scientists with the National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory in a report that investigated 233 bird deathsrepresenting 71 species at three Southern California solar power plants.
War on Birds
Bird immolation’s not your style? Well, did you know windmills are licensed to behead bald eagles?:
A leading bird conservation organization—American Bird Conservancy (ABC)—has announced its intention to sue the Department of the Interior (DOI), charging DOI with multiple violations of federal law in connection with its December 9, 2013, final regulation that allows wind energy companies and others to obtain 30-year permits to kill eagles without prosecution by the federal government. The previous rule provided for a maximum duration of five years for each permit.
Hardly seems fair if you have malaria due to the ban on DDT in order to save bald eagles.
Mothers Day Kiss
Woke up Mothers Day morning to the sight of Michael Sam kissing his boyfriend’s cake covered face on SportsCenter… over and over and over. Sam, the first openly gay player in the league, was picked by St. Louis in the final round of the NFL draft. Football experts from Barack Obama to Peter King say this is a good thing. So it is.
No Kiss
It won’t be easy, though. I was reminded by a friend that Jonathan Martin got no kiss when his Dolphin teammates bullied him out of Miami to San Francisco last year. And Martin wasn’t even gay, just nice.
Sterling / Silver
How can somebody so rich be such a fool? LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling’s bigoted habits were well known around the NBA, yet they never seemed to be a problem for him. He has more NAACP life-time achievement awards than Barack Obama has Nobel Peace prizes.
Well, it’s a problem now.
Sterling / Silver
Word got out that Sterling told his girlfriend not to bring black people to his basketball games. This embarrassed the NBA. New commissioner Adam Silver came down hard. Sterling was fined $2.5 million, banned for life from his own team, and told to find a buyer.
Sterling deserved what he got if you look at it as a life-time boorish behavior award. But he’s being punished for something he said in private, not for anything he actually did.
As the Chicago Tribune’s John Kass says, “if you’re an American, you know the back story. It’s race in America. And it’s showtime.”
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar anticipated all this in a piece he wrote condemning Sterling before his penalty came down:
Racists deserve to be paraded around the modern town square of the television screen so that the rest of us who believe in the American ideals of equality can be reminded that racism is still a disease that we haven’t yet licked.
What bothers me about this whole Donald Sterling affair isn’t just his racism. I’m bothered that everyone acts as if it’s a huge surprise. Now there’s all this dramatic and very public rending of clothing about whether they should keep their expensive Clippers season tickets. Really?…
Shouldn’t we be equally angered by the fact that his private, intimate conversation was taped and then leaked to the media? Didn’t we just call to task the NSA for intruding into American citizen’s privacy in such an un-American way?
Waiving the Individual Mandate for Sainthood
Four popes, two living and two not so much, gathered at the Vatican on Sunday for a papal Hall of Fame induction. The wildly popular and beloved Pope Francis canonized the wildly popular and beloved Pope John Paul II and Pope John XXIII. It was a two for one not seen since the middle ages. The brains of the operation, emeritus Pope Benedict XVI, assisted. Daily Beast called it a Pope-a-polooza.
John Paul II ended communism. John XXIII ended meatless Fridays. They’ve been called bookends of the Second Vatican Council
Individual Mandate for Sainthood Waivers
John Paul II took the High Speed Escalator to Heaven when Benedict XVI waived the 5 year saintly waiting period. Francis greased the skids for John XXIII by granting a waiver of the two miracle mandate for sainthood.
Here’s Peggy Noonan capturing the sweeping grandeur of the event. And here is Maureen Dowd capturing the sweeping under the rug of the priest sex abuse scandals.
