Current Events Activity 2.1 - One of My Friends Said He Wrote This At Drake

1.
Apparently the Parks and Rec board get fee VIP passes and so on for one weekend of ACL, which cost a lavish and exorbitant sum of one thousand big ones. This reeks of the most mild and petty attempt at corruption as well as lousy muckraking. Rick Coffer, a lily-livered worrywart, is concerned with the slippery slope to becoming some horrible Atlantic City mob-style cartoon villain caricature and won't take the "bribe" of a free show, which may as well be a thank you present for ACL and C3 for paying about one hundred thousand dollars, still an inconsequential sum of money, to rent the park for a couple weekends. Don Zimmerman, city official and man of honor, said - and I'm sure very pretentiously so - that he wouldn't accept any gifts that could sway his fickle little opinion. Sabine Romero said it's okay, and it's her job to say what is and isn't okay, and she's okay at her job. Ann Kitchen gave some of her passes to her staff and Ora Houston gave her passes to the 311 people who work in her office. I personally would accept my pass almost without hesitation or guilt, in all honestly, if I was a city official, I would want to be a corrupt one if only to get my ACL passes.

2.
The Okies have placed a temporary hold on all state executions in their state until I can only presume their top chemists graduate kindergarden and learn how to tell the difference between the words "potassium acetate" and "potassium chloride". Other states are having weird problems trying to kill people as well, because they keep trying to use midazozam and hydromorphone, both of which sound like the names of DC comic book villains but are actually chemicals that are mostly very good at making state sanctioned killing seem humane but are sometimes very bad at it. Their constitutionality has been disputed and while it is being sorted though, other states are using other cool and funky ways to kill people. Utah has gone back to using the firing squad to execute people which must make for great conversation if that is your profession. Tennessee is using the electric chair maybe because they have grown tired of people use the word electrocute out of context, and Louisiana is considering using nitrogen gas as it's backup.

3.
Israeli Prime Minister and human peanut Benjamin Netanyahu has banned members of his parliament from visiting the Al-Aqsa Mosque/site of the Temple of Jerusalem because Israelis and Palestinians aren't getting along so well at the moment. Per usual, someone took something a little too far; Muhanad Halabi stabbed some orthodox Jews, the police shot him dead, and now everything is all coming up lemons. It is usually a troubling thing that both Muslims and Jews contest who has dibs on the Dome of the Rock/Temple Compound area, but when one of the people antagonizing to build a third temple on the spot of the Al-Aqsa mosque is your agriculture minister, Muslim people have a right to be offended.

4.
Svetlana Alexevich, a Belorussian Journalist and reporter won the Nobel Prize in Literature for fighting the power in a really hardline communist country. She is the 14th woman to win the prize but the first person ever from Belarus to win the award, not that Belarus really is a cosmopolitan or interesting or colorful place. Svetlana's writing is a sort of blend of journalism and nonfiction, and wrote plenty of stories about the regular people instead of focusing on the big shots in her country.

5.
Daniel S. Hamermesh quits his job as Microeconomics teacher at UT because you can now have guns on school campuses. The statesman found out because the UT Paper, the Daily Texan, attained a copy of Hamermesh's resignation letter. Hamermesh is one of many teachers that said they would leave if SB1 became law, however the Microeconomics teacher was the first to properly leave his job.

FREE RESPONSE.

I went to the Baseball Extra section and they had a story called "Astros on a Roll" and they had a huge picture of George Springer hitting a hone run in the game last night and they had some baseballey statistics,  quality reporting with some solid facts is exactly what I expect from a sports section of a newspaper and as an extra I got a really big color picture. The really neato thing about it was probably the fact that with the online statesman I get more info and more pretty pictures than I do in the real paper version. In almost every way the online Statesman is a more viable product other than the fact that it is not real. The one reason left to buy the paper Statesman is, in my opinion, the fact that it is a real paper news source item thing. If I wanted to read my news online, I would not try and find the online version of a paper, rather, I would seek out the publication's website and sift through the articles there. If I wanted to read a newspaper, I would get the paper edition because it feels right to read a newspaper in newspaper format if it is a real paper, however it makes no sense to leave a newspaper in the same format if it is published online.