America News: June 2014

MORTAL KOMBAT X: WHICH PLAYABLE CHARACTERS SHOULD RETURN?

In case you haven't heard, Mortal Kombat X was recently announced. While its trailer is CG only, it got us excited for the upcoming entry in the franchise.

With a ton of different characters to choose from in the series, we asked you on Twitter which ones should return in playable form. Here's what you had to say:

Baraka

Kabal

Katana

Noob

All of Them

Seriously... ALL OF THEM

This Guy is Pretty Selective

I Don't Think This Guy Understood the Question

Like we said before, there are a ton of Mortal Kombat characters to choose from. Do you want to play as Goro again? Does Baraka's name and blades make you smile? Let us know in the comments below!

Paparazzi share blame with Jonah Hill

Editor's note: Peggy Drexler is the author of "Our Fathers, Ourselves: Daughters, Fathers and the Changing American Family" and "Raising Boys Without Men." She is an assistant professor of psychology at Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University and a former gender scholar at Stanford University. Join her onFacebook and follow her on Twitter @drpeggydrexler. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) -- After a day spent being trailed by a photographer who taunted him, mocked his clothes and hurled insults about his family,actor Jonah Hill had had enough. "Suck my d***, you f****t," he said to the guy, very likely giving the paparazzo exactly what he wanted: a reaction and a profanity-and-slur laced one at that. The entire episode was caught on tape and eventually aired by gossip siteTMZ.

Hill soon after made the rounds with an apology for using the anti-gay term, telling radio host Howard Stern on Tuesday that he is heartbroken he used such a "disgusting and hurtful" term.

On "The Tonight Show," he told host Jimmy Fallon that "the word I chose was grotesque."

But while Hill is left apologizing -- and surely, there is reason for him to do so -- the responsibility was not his alone.

After all, the entire episode was a set up, encouraged by a culture obsessed with celebrities and even more obsessed with celebrities behaving badly and a gossip media that rewards those who capture it. The paparazzi have been trained to push buttons, and they've gotten quite good at it.

Unlike some stars who, it might be suspected, exhibit bad behavior to court certain attention -- Alec Baldwin could be one -- Hill's response seemed genuinely reactionary, born out of pure emotion and frustration. As such, it is not likely to reflect what he really believes.

Hill has been outspoken supporter of gay rights. Last year, he told E! News that "I have tons of gay friends, gay family members." Before the Winter Olympics in Russia, he spoke out against Moscow's anti-gay laws.

So why, then, was his breaking point reaction a slur?

It probably had far less to do with genuine homophobic beliefs than with power and a feeling of loss of it so profound that it inspired a response rooted in the same crude immaturity as that exhibited by his provoker.

The photographer, as seen in the video, was antagonistic, his behavior akin to the taunts of a playground bully, and in a way few adults exhibit, or experience, after childhood. And so, in finally responding after refusing to engage, Hill used language the man would understand and words that he, and indeed many, might never say as an adult, especially an adult in 2014.

He had a temper tantrum-like reaction, calling on words he might have used at a time he was most inclined to have such outbursts and tantrums, when such words were not OK but you were less aware of what they meant.

It's key to remember that celebrities are forced to endure harassment all the time now and bear the burden of the consequences, too.

In 2009, Jude Law allegedly hit a female celebrity photographerafter her camera flash went off in his face, although he claims it was untrue.

Hugh Grant once threw a tub of baked beans at a cameraman.

Nicole Richie had restraining orders issued against two photographers who sat outside her house all day, but not until after she doused them with water for trailing her.

While celebrities certainly are not perfect, the ones caught on camera, and the ones largely condemned, are inevitably not the ones holding it.

To make Hill's comments reflective of how he feels about gays and lesbians unfairly turns the responsibility entirely on him when the real blame is in the culture that rewards those who provoke this behavior and choose to interpret it in the worst way possible.

By suggesting these comments indicate that Hill is homophobic, aren't we, in effect, saying that we believe that's what he meant because what else would he mean?

In the end, Hill has behaved after his outburst in the most appropriate way possible, expressing believable remorse, explaining the motivations for the attack but also noting there was no excuse for what he said.

"If someone says something that hurt you or angers you, use me as an example of what not to do," he told Fallon. "Don't respond with hatred or anger, because you are just adding more ugliness to the world."

Perhaps the celebrity media would be wise to do the same.

Don Zimmer, Who Spent 60 Eventful Years in Baseball, Dies at 83

Don Zimmer, the stubby, Popeye-muscled baseball lifer with the unforgettable jowls whose passion for the game endured through more than 60 years as a player, manager, coach and adviser, died on Wednesday in Dunedin, Fla. He was 83.

His death was announced by the Tampa Bay Rays, a team he served recently as a senior adviser. Zimmer had surgery April 16 to repair a leaky heart valve, according to The Tampa Tribune.

Zimmer had been having kidney dialysis since May 2012 after falling into a diabetic coma at his home. But he continued to visit the Rays’ Tropicana Field when he could.

Zimmer was married on a baseball diamond in 1951, and it seemed he never left the field.

He played the infield for the Brooklyn Dodgers’ only World Series championship team, he was an original member of the Mets and he was Yankee Manager Joe Torre’s confidant as his bench coach on four World Series championship teams. He filled in as the Yankees’ manager for 36 games in 1999 when Torre was being treated for prostate cancer.

Zimmer managed the 1978 Boston Red Sox, who were overtaken by the Yankees for a division title on Bucky Dent’s playoff home run. He was the National League’s manager of the year in 1989 when he led the Chicago Cubs to a surprising division championship.

He played in the majors for 12 seasons, mostly as an infielder, and he managed for 13 seasons. He was an All-Star only once, and he never managed a pennant winner, but his intensity remained undimmed. While a Yankees coach in October 2003, at 72, he charged Boston’s star pitcher Pedro Martinez during a playoff melee. Zimmer swung and missed, and then was thrown to the Fenway Park turf by Martinez. He soon apologized for sullying the game he loved.

Eight years later, Zimmer’s baseball juices were still flowing.

When Tampa Bay was trailing the Yankees, 7-0, in the sixth inning of their final game of the 2011 regular season, needing a victory for a wild-card playoff spot, Zimmer left the Rays’ bench to head home. Halfway there, he realized that he had not said goodbye to the players, turned his car around and got back to Tropicana Field in time to see the Rays rally for an 8-7 victory to overtake the Red Sox for a playoff berth. Zimmer was still in the clubhouse at 2 a.m., when the celebration finally wound down.

“I’m 80 years old, and I thought I was playing,” he told The Charlotte Sun of Port Charlotte, Fla. “This matches everything. It’s crazy, it’s beautiful, it’s baseball.”

Zimmer’s bulging arm muscles on his 5-foot-9-inch frame (he was about 170 pounds in his playing years) brought him the enduring nickname Popeye when he played for the Dodger teams known as the Boys of Summer. His puffy face seemed like something out of a baseball trading card from the days when dugouts were awash in the juice from chewing tobacco.

The Red Sox pitcher Bill Lee likened Zimmer to a gerbil for his bulging cheeks. Zimmer did not care much for that description, but he never took himself too seriously. The night after he was struck in the face by a ball fouled into the Yankees’ dugout by Chuck Knoblauch during a 1999 playoff game, he wore an Army helmet. He allowed Derek Jeter to rub his head and his stomach for good luck before he came to the plate.

In an interview with Esquire in 2001, Zimmer talked about his bench-coach job: “I sit next to Torre on the bench. When he plays hit-and-run that works, I say, ‘Nice goin’, Skipper,’ and if it doesn’t work, I go down to the other end of the bench, get a drink and get out of his way.”

But as Torre put it in his 1997 memoir “Chasing the Dream,” written with Tom Verducci: “Zim turned out to be the perfect bench coach. I ran everything past Zim. We had a great rapport and a lot of fun.”

Donald William Zimmer was born and raised in Cincinnati, where his father owned a wholesale fruit and vegetable company. He was signed out of high school as a shortstop by the Dodgers’ organization in 1949.

On Aug. 16, 1951, while playing for the Dodgers’ farm team at Elmira, N.Y., he married his high school sweetheart, the former Carol Jean Bauerle (known since childhood as Soot), at home plate under a canopy of crossed bats held by his teammates.

Continue reading the main story

Thursday, 5 June 2014

MORTAL KOMBAT X: WHICH PLAYABLE CHARACTERS SHOULD RETURN?

Paparazzi share blame with Jonah Hill

Don Zimmer, Who Spent 60 Eventful Years in Baseball, Dies at 83