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PittsburghTiger

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Posts posted by PittsburghTiger

  1. 6 hours ago, bamachine said:

    From all I have heard, it was about 50/50. The non vocal 50% were horrified by what happened and the other half of the student body reactions.  They also feared the reactions from the Pennsylvania rednecks who seemed to be about 95% behind JoePed, so they did not speak up publically.

     

    I am friends with a married couple who are both PSU grads. They are in their early 40's and were previously worshippers at the altar of Paterno.They wanted every trace of Paterno wiped from the school records.

    Your friends are the extreme exception to the rule.

  2. 1 hour ago, SpiralOut said:

    I just love how after 9/11 we let the government basically do w/e the fuck it wanted.  So we got the Patriot Act, trillions spent on unending wars, and we invented a new Department out of thin air that seems redundant as all fuck. 

    Department of Homeland Security?  Isn't that what the military does already?  Protect the homeland.  Or ya know, the FBI who are supposed to investigate shit inside America and catch the bad guys.  Nah, we need a whole other Department which just sucks down taxpayer dollars like a black hole and which does, what exactly?

    Oh, I guess it's the beta version of what will eventually become the Ministry of Love.  Nice. 

    Can't argue with that.

  3. They have not released anything about the driver. This came on the anniversary of a similar attack last year in Sweden. In this link there is a line that says there were possibly two people who fled the vehicle, no confirmation on that.

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5589217/Lorry-crashes-crowd-Germany-leaving-three-dead.html

    A man has shot himself dead after ploughing a minibus into a crowd of people in the German city of Münster, killing three people and leaving 26 injured. 

    Six people are in critical condition and dozens more are injured after the vehicle was driven at high speed towards families outside a traditional German restaurant in the university town, 300 miles west of Berlin. 

    Terrified diners watched as the driver shot and killed himself inside the vehicle. Police say they are not looking for any other suspects and 'expect the danger is over'. 

    It is not yet known if the incident is terror related, but it comes after a wave of deadly vehicle attacks across western Europe. German media have said police are 'assuming' it is an attack, though the motive remains unclear.

    Police are investigating reports that two other people were seen fleeing the van after the crash. 

     

    I've been to Muenster. It's a beautiful city.

     

  4. 15 minutes ago, Judge Roybeanbag said:

    And this has any relevance now how?   

    Because the thread is about the movie made about the event. You may have missed that fact. But that's what the thread is about. I think you don't have to click on the thread, if you don't want to read people's opinions about the movie made about the time Ted Kennedy left a girl to die in his wrecked car. 

    It's pretty simple.

  5. 6 hours ago, Napoleon said:

    Perhaps you should watch the goal again. 

    Unlike most bicycle kick goals, Ronaldo was NOT standing still, waiting for the ball to get to him. The ball was actually crossed much farther out that Ronaldo was positioned and unlike nearly every famous bicycle kick (except for Zlatan's), Ronaldo had to quickly rush away from the goal just to catch up to the cross in order the sky in the air and then send it back toward the goal.

    Ronaldo was most certainly NOT in a position where the cross was "perfectly there for him", he had made sure that he was onside, yes, but he had to quickly move his ass to get to the ball.

    Yeah, I watched it plenty. I know he wasn't standing still. I know he had to get into an onside position. I know he got to the open space where the ball was crossed.

    He took four, or five strides/steps from where he put himself onside. He didn't have to sprint from the end line to get to the ball. On a field that size I would say that four or five strides is pretty much in position. By no means was I denigrating Ronaldo's effort, or execution. I'm not sure how you got that from what I wrote. I stated that, in my eyes, what makes him so amazing is that he makes the difficult look so easy. That's a different way of saying that the goal was not easy.

  6. 1 hour ago, Judge Roybeanbag said:

     

    Maybe he should have grabbed her by the pussy.  That would relieve your outrage.  

    That's awesome. A But Trump in the thread about Ted Kennedy basically killing a gal by leaving her to suffocate in a car as he went back to take a nap and plot his next political move.

    Solid effort!

  7. 12 hours ago, JimmyJames said:

    It’s also a good reminder of the danger of hero worshiping a piece of shit rapist like our current president named trump. Given your post I assume you completely agree. 

    I guess you didn't notice that I posted two opinion pieces. One was against the movie and said it was awful. The other said it was time that a movie like that was made to put to rest the 60-years Kennedy worship. I'm not sure how you gleaned anything other than that, but, knock yourself out.

  8. 20 minutes ago, Whitman said:

    We are supposed to get a couple of inches tonight and tomorrow's high is about 35 (game time is 32 I think).  Getting over the mountains is tough in that kind of weather and comments were made about getting players hurt for nothing.  We also only usually draw about 10K to our spring game.

    Nothing worse than a spring game in winter weather. I remember a few years back Pitt had its game, glorious weather, about 60 degrees and sunny. The next weekend the Nitters had their game and it was called in the second half due to wind, rain, snow and lightning.

  9. And from the other side.

     

    https://nypost.com/2018/04/05/chappaquiddick-is-a-long-overdue-dismantling-of-the-kennedy-myth/

     

    Nearly 50 years after Senator Ted Kennedy left a young woman to die in a shallow pond — and America went on to reward him with a lifelong career in the US Senate — we are finally beginning to reckon with the Kennedy myth.

    But only just.

    The new film “Chappaquiddick” is, to date, the most brutal and honest account of what happened that night. But it’s also something else: an indictment of our collective hero worship at the altar of Brand Kennedy, which bred so much corrosive entitlement that surviving brother Ted, the family beta male, went home to sleep it off after leaving a loyal young staffer to die alone.

    “Chappaquiddick” is a much-needed counterweight to two current hagiographies: CNN’s docuseries “The Kennedys,” airing to high ratings on Sunday nights, and Netflix’s forthcoming documentary “Bobby Kennedy for President.”

    JFK and RFK remain, of course, the family lodestars. But in 1969 Ted was next in line, and he had a lot of public sympathy.

    His brother Robert had been assassinated while campaigning for president the year before. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. Ted himself barely survived a plane crash in 1964, dragged to safety by Senator Birch Bayh (the irony) and hospitalized for five months. It was assumed, within the family and without, that Ted would run for president in 1972. He had three small children and, the July weekend he went partying in Chappaquiddick, a pregnant wife at home confined to bed rest.

    As portrayed by Jason Clarke, the young senator is a venal, self-pitying coward, thoughtless and remorseless, ambition his only care. He treats loyalists and groupies with equal contempt, and as the weekend begins, he toasts them all for “wanting to prove yourselves worthy of . . . the Kennedy name.”

    It’s clear the filmmakers are in on this joke.

    We next see Kennedy leaving the party with the young Mary Jo Kopechne, who had worked for Bobby Kennedy and was still mourning his death. The film depicts Ted as drinking and driving before his black Oldsmobile 88 flies off a small wooden bridge and into a pond, crash-landing upside down.

    According to contemporaneous accounts, the tide was dead low, the water only 5 or 6 feet deep. Both of the passenger-side windows were blown out. Kennedy later testified that Mary Jo might have been hitting or kicking him in her frantic struggle to escape. He claimed to have gone back under for her six or seven times but there is no proof. He was seen at 2:25 a.m. in dry clothes by a hotel desk clerk.

    When Mary Jo’s body was recovered the next morning, it appeared that she died not of drowning but suffocation. She likely lived for hours. There she had been, her head and neck jammed at a sharp angle up against the foot board, gasping through a small air pocket. Was she wondering where Kennedy was? Was she convinced he was on the verge of coming back for her? That he had gone to get help?

    After all, who would leave someone in this situation alone? Least of all someone who had suffered so much loss so young?

    Ted Kennedy passed by nearby lighted homes and the local fire department as he walked back to his inn, away from the pond he’d later claim was deep and at high tide. He slept that night as Mary Jo took her last breaths.

    The next morning, Ted refused to appear at the scene when summoned, demanding that the chief of police come down to the station. There, the chief finds Kennedy behind the cop’s own desk, reading a carefully worded statement. He doesn’t mention Mary Jo by her full name because he doesn’t know how to spell “Kopechne.”

    Ten hours had passed since the car went in the water.

    But Ted’s only concern is that he’ll never be president. Criminal charges don’t concern him, nor does he ever consider he might go to prison. He is, after all, a Kennedy.

    Ted flees the island, helps block an autopsy, and attends Mary Jo’s funeral wearing a fake neck brace. For a time, he considers blaming the dead girl and telling the police that she was driving. Instead he blames the bridge, he claims exhaustion, he tells The New York Times he has a concussion and is on sedatives until The Times reporter informs him no doctor would ever give sedatives to someone who’s concussed.

    And Ted feels sorry for himself all over again. Ted the eternal screw-up.

    The film’s one flaw is, ironically, the glancing depiction of the women here. Mary Jo, played by Kate Mara, is never really fleshed out: She is The Girl, a young blonde who is very serious and very starstruck, but not much more. And Ted’s wife Joan — who was bullied by the family into calling Mary Jo’s parents and invoking Kennedy family tragedy to keep them under their control, and who suffered a miscarriage weeks later — appears onscreen for mere seconds, but speaking for us all when she says, “Go f–k yourself, Teddy.”

    In the end, Ted Kennedy pled to nothing more than leaving the scene of an accident and received a suspended sentence of two months’ jail time. He would never be president, but he spent the rest of his life held in high esteem by the Democratic party. When he died in 2009, Chappaquiddick and Mary Jo Kopechne were barely mentioned. Instead he was canonized by the Senate as its Liberal Lion, a fighter for the poor, the dispossessed and, yes, women.

    This film, in this #MeToo era, should begin to change all that. It should begin a new conversation about the Kennedy family in American life.

     

     

  10. Senator Edward Kennedy, one of the most famous members of America’s most famous family, understood that he belonged as much to popular culture as to political culture. Now, nine years after his death, comes a movie about the event that, almost as much as the circumstances of his birth, established him in the tabloid pantheon: Chappaquiddick.

    The film, by the same name, opens Friday and retells the story of an accident in July 1969, on the titular Massachusetts island near Martha’s Vineyard, in which Mr. Kennedy drove off a bridge, killing his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, a campaign worker for his late brother Robert. It has been heavily promoted by conservative media outlets, and reviewers across the political spectrum have praised what they deem its damning but factual approach. Damning it is; factual it is not.

    Let’s set aside the fact that, despite the film’s advertisements claiming to tell the “untold true story” of a “cover up,” the story has been told plenty, and no one but the most lunatic conspiracy theorists see this as anything but a tragic accident in which nothing much was covered up. Let’s also put aside the skein of conjecture and outright fabrication that the film unspools — in one scene Joe Kennedy, the family patriarch, murmurs “alibi” to his son, like a Mafia don, when in fact he was so debilitated by a stroke that he could only babble incoherently. Setting all this aside, the movie nevertheless raises a serious issue.

    What is the relationship of fact to fiction, of the historical to the histrionic in art and entertainment? Ted Kennedy was a real man living out a real life. His political opponents could and did distort that life for their advantage. But just how many liberties can an artist or entertainer take when he or she deploys a biographical subject?

    Many scenes cross from dramatic interpretation to outright character assassination. In this version, the Kennedy character leaves Kopechne to die as she gasps for air, and then, with the aid of his brothers’ old advisers, cooks up a scheme to salvage his presidential ambitions. A more callow, cunning, cowardly and self-interested yet moronic figure you couldn’t find. His first words after the accident are: “I’m not going to be president.”

    Obviously, an artist isn’t saddled with the same obligations to fact that a biographer or historian is. We accept artists appropriating lives and altering them. But we also expect some an artistically valid justification for bending the truth, and sensationalism isn’t one of them. Biographical novels like “I, Claudius” or “Wolf Hall” put historical figures in the service of larger themes about the human condition. The novelist Joyce Carol Oates attempted to do that with Chappaquiddick in her novel “Black Water,” a roman à clef and a meditation on male power and female vulnerability.

    Most artists understand how thin the line between art and gossip can be when one deals with real-life figures in semi-fictional contexts, which is why most artists wait until those figures pass into what seems like “public domain” — ceasing to exist as particularized people we know from the news and assuming larger cultural proportions that turn them into characters we don’t fully know.

    Ted Kennedy has not passed into the public domain in this sense, so one tampers with his life at the peril of turning it into tawdry melodrama. This is especially true of the Kennedy family, who remain politically active, and divisive.

    Contrary to the film’s implications, Mr. Kennedy immediately and forever after felt deep remorse and responsibility for the accident; it haunted him. By the end of his life, however, the then white-maned senator had managed to transcend celebrity and emotional paralysis and become what he had long aspired to be: an indispensable legislator whose achievements included the 18-year-old vote, the Americans With Disabilities Act and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

    His was a large-life, tragic and multidimensional figure, and it could have made, and perhaps someday will make, for an expansive novel or film about sin and redemption. “Chappaquiddick” is not that movie. Instead of excavating Kennedy for larger artistic aims, it eviscerates him for narrow voyeuristic ones.

    But this is about more than Ted Kennedy’s legacy. It is a case study in how society collectively shapes its own history. It is not merely, or even mainly, the realm of historians.

    Because historical figures pass out of history and into popular culture, and because that process is accelerating, these figures are increasingly defined by popular culture. Artists and especially entertainers may not feel obligations to their subjects, but they do have responsibilities to us, one of which is honesty.

    Fake history is no better than fake news; it’s maybe worse. It is very possible that over time, through the osmosis of social media, the despicable Kennedy of this movie will eradicate the honorable if flawed real one.

    At one point in the film, Ted Sorensen, one of John Kennedy’s closest advisers, tells Mr. Kennedy, “History usually has the final word in these things.” It’s meant to be a comforting thought, to say that the truth will come out in the end. Watching “Chappaquiddick,” it’s not clear that’s true.

  11. Couches survive spring cleaning, have to wait until fall to get off the porch.

     

    They are expecting 1 to 3 inches of snow in Morganhole tonight. I suspect it would be quite miserable, even more than usual, in West By God Virginny tomorrow.

    • Like 1
  12. That picture of Alvin Harper was the last known sighting of him after he left the Cowboys, right?

    Pitt is rumored to be heading back to the old uniforms. The only thing I would do is tone down the yellow a bit and the blue stripe on the pants needs to be a bit wider. When you see the recruiting Tweets that Narduzzi puts out the kids are always in the throwback colors.

    As much as we all hate the Patriots that old uniform was infinitely better than what they wear now. The Dolphins too should go back to the classic look. The Broncos uniform was better too before the switch. I really like the Falcons red helmet much more than the black.

     

    Oh, and to go from the wonderful Oilers uniforms to that shit is amazing. People get paid to design that shit.

     

    http://nationalchamps.net/Helmet_Project/

    • Like 1
  13. 19 hours ago, RiceOwl said:

    I was just in Germany in February. 

    Spent three days in Munich and three days in Berlin (and a few in Prague too). 

    I enjoyed Berlin far more than Munich. Berlin had lots of great museums and history, felt more like a bustling city, and was far more diverse. That said, I was traveling by myself. Munich seemed like it would've been much more fun had I been with a bunch of guys getting rowdy. In Munich, I went to the BMW Museum, Olympic Park, and did a day trip to the Neuschwetein (sp?) Castle. The Castle was awesome, especially covered in snow during the winter. The one thing I missed in Munich due to a hangover was the Deutsches Museum. 

     

    Berlin is much underrated. I was there the first time just after the Wall came down and brought home a big ass chunk of that thing.

  14. On 4/3/2018 at 10:17 PM, TexArcher said:

    I generally hate Cristiano Ronaldo.  But that was fucking beautiful.

    I'm with you, but damn if he isn't fun to watch. It's just amazing that we have the opportunity to watch both he and Messi. What kills me about Ronaldo is that he makes the difficult look so damned easy. Messi is just unreal, and he does look like he is working hard for a lot of his goal, but Ronaldo just puts himself in such amazing positions to score difficult goals, but because of how he prepares himself, it looks easy. He just drifted into position so that cross was perfectly there for him, great cross too.

    If that makes any sense.

    • Like 1
  15. 4 hours ago, Goo Punch said:

    City are arguably the best team in Europe. Nobody saw that coming.

    Not being a smartass but you are the first person I have heard say that this year. Truthfully I don't follow the EPL that much. I stick with the Bundesliga first, then I enjoy watching a couple of the French teams and a couple of the Spanish teams.

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