Could become a pick & choose experience today. Contents are highly variable in terms of both form and content, intellectual or otherwise.
In the “it takes all kinds” category, we begin with this tragic tale from the Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC). Presumably this poor guy had more to worry about than his friend’s shopping expedition.
A man jumped to his death after a furious row with his girlfriend who insisted they go into another clothes shop.
CCTV shows Tao Hsiao, 38, escorting his girlfriend around a shopping mall in Xuzhou, Jiangsu province, east China. After five hours Tao finally had enough and demanded to go home.
An eyewitness said: ‘He told her she already had enough shoes, more shoes that she could wear in a lifetime and it was pointless buying any more. She started shouting at him accusing him of being a skinflint and of spoiling Christmas, it was a really heated argument.’
The shouting match ended when the man chucked the bags on the floor and jumped over the balcony, smashing into Christmas decorations on his way down before hitting the floor seven stories below causing shocked shoppers to flee in panic.
Emergency services arrived at the scene but Tao was killed immediately from the impact of the fall. A shopping spokesman said: ‘His body was removed fairly quickly.
‘He actually landed on one of the stalls below and then fell to the floor so although the store was damaged it meant he didn’t hit anybody.
This is a tragic incident, but this time of year is very stressful.’ No fucking kidding. Really.
BTW, last time I looked Communist China had a population of around 1.7 billion with India rapidly catching up; the government of the PRC, being a totalitarian state, has the power to enforce a one-child policy in China which India, the world’s largest democracy, has not done. Over to you, Justin bay-bee.
And now for a little change of pace:
And now for something a little different …
A widowed Jewish lady, still in good shape, was sunbathing on a totally deserted beach in Ft. Myers, Florida. She looked up and noticed that a man her age, also in good shape, had walked up, placed his blanket on the sand near hers and began reading a book.
Smiling, she attempted to strike up a conversation with him. “How are you today?”
“Fine, thank you,” he responded, and turned back to his book. “I love the beach. Do you come here often?” she asked.
“First time since my wife passed away two years ago,” he replied and turned back to his book. “I’m sorry to hear that. My husband passed away three years ago and it is very lonely,” she countered. “Do you live around here?” She asked.
Yes, I live over in Cape Coral “, he answered, and again he resumed reading. Trying to find a topic of common interest, she persisted, “Do you like pussy cat?”
With that, the man dropped his book, came over to her blanket, tore off her swimsuit and gave her the most passionate lovemaking of her life. When the cloud of sand began to settle, she gasped and asked the man, “How did you know that was what I wanted?”
The man replied, “How did you know my name was Katz?”
BASEBALL: Could Montreal make a play for Rays?
— by Michael Sasso
TAMPA — In the future will we have to call our hometown baseball team les Rays? Former Montreal Expos icon Warren Cromartie — so popular in Montreal he once had his own candy bar, the CroBar — is mounting a campaign to lure a team back to the francophone city on the St. Lawrence River. Cromartie told The Tampa Tribune on Tuesday that he isn’t targeting any team specifically, including the Rays.
However, he acknowledges certain teams are struggling with attendance or their finances and he’s more than willing to let baseball writers and sports agents make the Rays-to-Montreal suggestion.
Cromartie doesn’t have the money to buy a team or pay for a new ballpark, so he knows he faces long odds. For now, he’s hoping to find a would-be owner to buy and relocate a team, while he “makes noise” to keep Montreal in the discussion. He has support from Montreal’s chamber of commerce, the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal.
“I’m on this journey, and right now it’s going well,” Cromartie said Tuesday. “I know it’s a long shot. I like the long shot that we’re in.”
Cities in North America have a long and ugly history of trying to outbid each other when a sports team goes searching for a new stadium. In fact, St. Petersburg tried for years to lA ure a team before landing the then-Devil Rays as an expansion team in 1995. The threat that a team might bolt for St. Petersburg gave big-league owners leverage to demand a new stadium from their cities.
Montreal appears to be the potential baseball market du jour.
Baseball super-agent Scott Boras floated the idea of the Rays moving north of the border during the baseball winter meetings in Lake Buena Vista this month. That set off a flurry of speculative articles by the national press, which generally lampooned Tropicana Field and the Bay area as a baseball market.
Coincidentally, Cromartie and Montreal’s board of trade issued a feasibility study around the same time suggesting Major League Baseball is viable in Montreal. It wouldn’t be cheap — purchasing a team would run about $525 million and building a stadium would run at least $500 million.
Still, it’s doable. A Montreal team would draw 27,700 to 31,600 fans per night, the study said; for the record the Rays’ average home turnout was an major league worst 18,646 last season.
A Rays spokesman declined comment Tuesday about Montreal’s efforts. Over the summer, Rays owner Stuart Sternberg told FoxSports.com that he wants to keep looking around the Bay area for a ballpark and has no plans to look at Montreal. However, he did tell the website he believes baseball can work in Montreal. For Cromartie, bringing baseball back here is a full-time job.
Cromartie, sixty, grew up in Miami and came up with the Montreal Expos in the mid-1970s. He had a measure of success in the late 1970s and early 1980s and hit .304 in the 1981 season, playing alongside such Expos stars as Gary Carter, Andre Dawson and Tim Raines. At the peak of his career in 1983, however, he departed to play several seasons of pro ball in Tokyo.
Today, Cromartie lives in Miami, but said he maintains close ties to the Canadian city and to Quebec overall. He met his ex-wife, with whom he has three kids, while playing minor-league ball in Quebec City. Montreal just seemed exciting, “electric,” as he looked out at the city’s lights during bus drives between Quebec City and Montreal in his minor-league days.
“Montreal’s pretty much made me who I am,” he said Tuesday. “That’s the jersey I wore.”
He insists Montreal is ready for baseball again, even if things didn’t go so well the last time. During the Expos’ heyday in the early 1980s, the team drew a healthy 25,000 to 29,000 fans per game, according to the baseball site Baseball-Reference.com. But that fell to embarrassing levels by the early 2000s, when it couldn’t even crack 10,000 fans on average.
Major League Baseball eventually stepped in and moved the team to Washington, D.C., in 2005, becoming the Nationals. Cromartie said he believes the Expos’ weak attendance had more to do with fans’ “venom” over its previous owner, Jeffrey Loria, than a lack of interest in baseball.
Major League Baseball is in no mood to expand beyond 30 teams, so Cromartie believes relocation is his best chance at landing a big-league club. He’s counting on Major League Baseball to step in at the right time, and if there’s a team ripe for relocation, to steer it Montreal’s way. In the meantime, he’ll try to keep Montreal’s name out there. He’s getting some moral support from an unnamed Albany, N.Y., fan who created the Facebook site Move the Tampa Bay Rays to Montreal.
Montreal has its advantages, including a metropolitan population of over 3.8 million, but it has its skeptics. Vince Gennaro, author of a book on baseball economics called “Diamond Dollars: The Economics of Winning in Baseball,” said you’d have to consider Montreal, Portland and Las Vegas when considering new markets. But, there are no sure-bet “silver-bullet” markets left in North America for baseball.
Meantime, incoming St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman didn’t sound especially worried about Montreal last week.
“There’s a lot of rumors about a lot of other cities that want the Rays,” Kriseman said. “I understand why they do. (The Rays) are a great team, they’re a great community partner. But we want them to stay here in St. Pete.”
I enjoyed putting this JL together and find it particularly juicy … not from concentrate. Joo-say! (Jew say, Ez sez, whatever). Thanks to the aforementioned Mr. Altman who provided me with every bit of raw material in this JL, I didn’t have much original work to do, as far as actual writing is concerned. The sort of challenge for this JuicyLesson was in the details of the technical aspects. ex. selection of material (Mark provided me with at least as much material again as this JuicyLesson contains), selecting, saving and copying of images and other documents, stuff like that.
And now Mr. Altman, since you have already previously viewed the guts of this JL, here’s something new especially for you.
I look forward to doing another one like this one sooner rather than later but for Sunday’s JL, after taking Shabbat off, I feel some kind of rant coming on – most likely political.
Nice weekend.
Peace out.