Daniel Snyder, billionaire owner of Washington’s losing NFL team, is a staunch champion of free speech, when he’s the one talking. Sure, he’s suing an alternative paper for a scathing article about him and tried to ban football fans from bringing signs to games. but ten years ago he defended his right to verbally skewer a pair of groundskeepers.
The mighty Guitar Hero electronic game franchise started in 2005, back in the Middle Ages of video games. It earned hundreds of millions of dollars, but as of today it is no more. Sic transit gloria mundi.
NASA engineers at Goddard Space Flight Center and the the NASA Engineering and Safety Center examined the Toyota automobile models implicated in episoides of sudden unintended acceleration. So did engineers from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Verdict: no design flaws in the Toyota electronic throttle control. There were no electronic causes of the acceleration episodes.
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You’ve heard that meat is dangerous. Here’s proof.
A Louisiana woman threw a frozen beefsteak at her boyfriend and hit him in the face. Police say the 51-year-old man was bleeding when they arrived. The woman was arrested for aggravated assault.
Other frozen foodstuffs and alcohol may have been contributing factors. The alleged perpetrator was said to be upset at the lack of freezer space for cooling her “Tequila Rose” pre-mixed strawberry cream liqueur and tequila blend. Confirmed carnivores will probably blame the strawberries.
Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
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Washington’s Meat-Free Week is in full bloom from February 7 to 13, 2011. Following close on the hooves of DC Meat Week, the event features a fine crop of plant-based cooking and fermented grain and grape beverages, with different dining events each night. See the full schedule here.
Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
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This week’s big story in sports is the sumo wrestling scandal. It’s heavy: sumo wrestlers weigh in at over 300 pounds. The scandal: athletes have been fixing matches for Yakuza gangsters in return for cash payoffs. The repercussions: the grand tournament of Japan’s national sport has been cancelled for the first time since World War II.
Some sumo wrestlers have fixed matches by texting on their cell phones. The fingers of these huge pro athletes are so fat that some use iPads as cell phones.
In other sports news, three Pakistani cricket players have been banned from world play for cheating, and there is some kind of indoor football match in Texas.
Bonus: The Sumo Success Diet.
“Secrets of the sumo wrestler’s diet,” Monami Yui, CNN City Pulse
It’s really not much of a secret. Eat lots of this with big hunks of meat.
Want to know how you’d look as a sumo wrestler? There’s an app for that.
Image (“Say It Ain’t So, Sumo, after Utagawa Kuniyoshi”) by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
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The Big Game is tomorrow, Sunday, February 6, 2011. Not the one in Dallas, the other one. The Puppy Bowl kicks off at 3 PM on Animal Planet. Jenna Goudreau calls the event “Super Bowl 2011’s Hairy Underbelly.” The Animal Planet network has already released the starting lineup but you can see all the awww-some photos of the players at once on the New York Post website. Puppy players were drafted from shelters across the country.
There’s already a Pre-Game Show on Animal Planet’s website, which will carry the show tomorrow and game highlights for months to come.
Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
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Maryland authorities discovered 10 tons of rockfish caught in illegal sunken nets in Chesapeake Bay. The legal commercial catch limit for rockfish is 300 pounds a day. Posses are searching for the rockfish rustlers, and the Maryland State Government is offering a $7,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the piscatorial poachers. The search for more illegal gill nets also continues.
Convicted rockfish rustlers can get up to five years in the calaboose and fines of up to $250,000 or twice the value of the catch. Corporate co-conspiritors may be fined up to $500,000 or twice the value of the catch.
The Rockfish (Striped Bass, Morone saxatilis), the State Fish of Maryland, recently recovered from overfishing in the Chesapeake, and its harvest is regulated. The whopping illegal haul will tighten this season’s quota for law-abiding fishermen.
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If Ronald Reagan were alive this February 6th, he would have been a very senile 100 years old. ”No surprise, perhaps, that the American president who came to fame in Hollywood would have a centennial celebration with splash,” writes Susan Page. “He’s become a folklore president,” says historian Douglas Brinkley, “”He’s as much Buffalo Bill or Kit Carson as he is Harry Truman or Lyndon Johnson.”
The comparison with Buffalo Bill is apt. William Cody became “Buffalo Bill” through massive doses of showmanship and press agentry, the same way Mr. Reagan became president. Leslie Janka, Reagan’s deputy White House press secretary, said the Reagan administration “was a PR outfit that became president and took over the country. And to the degree that the Constitution forced them to do things like make a budget, run foreign policy and all that, they sort of did it. But their first, last and overarching activity was public relations.”
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show went bankrupt, and President Reagan destroyed the Federal tax base while borrowing against the future. His chief legacy is not Ronald Reagan National Airport, Ronald Reagan Parkway, the Reagan statue in the Capitol, the USS Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, Ronald Reagan High School(s), the Ronald Reagan Building, the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Test Site, or the Ronald Reagan Action Figure. It was tax cuts for the rich and budget policies that tripled the Federal deficit as well as financial deregulation that paved the hellish road to our current economic situation.
Let’s say you are the billionnaire owner of a professional sports team in the Nations Capital and its name is a racial slur. Let’s say your ownership has been marked by losing seasons, bad personnel decisions, and ill-treatment of fans. So what do you do? Sue publications that point these things out. Channel 9 sportscaster Brett Haber reacts:
