♫Twinkle, twinkle, little star.....♫
"Boston Internet service Starry, aiming to take on its bigger rivals, raises $100 million" by Hiawatha Bray Globe Staff July 05, 2018
Starry Inc., the Boston-based wireless Internet service, is bulking up with a $100 million funding round, which the upstart company will use to expand nationally in the high-stakes race to deploy super-fast broadband services across the United States.
Starry uses a type of extremely high-frequency radio technology to deliver broadband Internet service at speeds rivaling those from landline broadband companies such as Comcast Corp. and Verizon Communications. It recently was launched in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and has begun building networks in 14 other cities, including New York, Chicago, Seattle, Cleveland, and Indianapolis.
The technology requires only a small exterior antenna that is wired into a building’s communications equipment. In Boston, Starry has targeted apartment buildings and says its service can reach 300,000 households here. It charges $50 per month for a connection with speeds of up to 200 megabits per second.
The surge of new cash will support the company’s network buildout. With the additional capital, Starry has raised a total of $163 million from venture firms, including KKR, Firstmark Capital , and Tiger Global.
Starry is also facing off against the nation’s leading cellular companies — Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile — all of which have committed to deploying ultra-fast 5G wireless networks that will deliver data at much faster rates than today’s services. The 5G systems will offer broadband connections to fixed locations, as well as to cellphones and other mobile devices. As a result, they could spur fresh competition in the home broadband market and drive down prices for consumers; however, it will take time for 5G services to catch on, because current wireless devices do not work on those new networks. Consumers and businesses will have to buy new smartphones or new wireless receivers with 5G technology.
It's called creating a market, and no concerns about health effects?
China has made rapid deployment of 5G networks a key priority, while the Trump administration has declared that American leadership in 5G networks is a matter of national security.
Yeah, they don't want China listening to your calls; only the NSA can do that
(and they forward the stuff to you know who)!
In March, the administration blocked the Singapore-based chip company Broadcom from acquiring Qualcomm, a major maker of 5G chips that’s based in San Diego. And in January, the administration flirted with the idea of having the government build a single national 5G network, but that plan was abandoned almost immediately in the face of intense criticism from lawmakers and the Federal Communications Commission.....
They are coming home.
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Related: Drew Faust to join Goldman Sachs board
Also see:
Stormy Daniels makes an appearance in Portland club
She also came to Providence where she really packed 'em in before being arrested.
Jimmy Garoppolo hits the town with adult film star Kiara Mia
It's not ending in a honeymoon.
"New Jersey man tells Disney greeters he’ll blow the place up" AP September 07, 2018
LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — Investigators in Florida said they’ve arrested a New Jersey tourist who told greeters at a Disney World resort that Al Qaeda sent him to ‘‘blow the place up.’’
Oh, yeah? CIA-Duh sent him, did they?
Orange County Sheriff’s deputies arrested 56-year-old Gregory Lazarchick on Tuesday on a charge of making a false bomb threat.
Look, I'm sorry about his wife but once again we have a Jewish instigated event of this kind, and I think the reason are pretty darn clear. Apparently, he is some sort of Lazarus.
An arrest report says Lazarchick made the threat on July 21 at Saratoga Springs Resort as employees were asking guests about their day. He further told them that he wasn’t joking.
Why am I only reading about it now then, right before 9/11?
Because that's when they made the arrest(??)?
You gotta do better than that, guys.
News outlets report that Lazarchick later admitted to saying something about Al Qaeda when deputies spoke to him, but he said he didn’t remember exactly what he said. He was remorseful and apologetic. No bomb-making materials were found in his room.
Lazarchick’s sister told investigators he suffered a head injury and sometimes says inappropriate things.
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Related: Comcast drops Fox bid, paving way for sale to Disney
Strange bedfellows all around, 'eh?
♫When you wi$h upon a $tar, makes no difference who you are......♫
"A homeless, armless artist known for using his feet to paint pictures on Miami Beach is accused of stabbing a tourist from Chicago. 46-year-old Jonathan Crenshaw’s arrest record dates to 2008 and lists arrests for disorderly intoxication, vandalism, and battery on police officers, firefighters, and city code inspectors. Crenshaw remains in jail. An attorney isn’t listed in jail records. His court date is scheduled for July 18....."
Maybe you could help him out?
"Police raid home of couple who raised $400K for homeless man" Associated Press September 07, 2018
FLORENCE, N.J.— Police raided a New Jersey couple’s home and hauled away a new BMW Thursday after a homeless man accused them of helping themselves to some of the $400,000 in online donations they supposedly raised to help him start a new life.
Citing ‘‘enormous public interest’’ in the case, county prosecutor Scott Coffina confirmed in a Facebook post that Mark D’Amico and Katelyn McClure are under investigation, though no charges have been filed.
Then why was their stuff taken?
For all I know, they may have stolen the money but that only has not yet been proved, they haven't even been charged yet.
It was the latest twist in at onetime feel-good story about Johnny Bobbitt, who spent his last $20 to buy gas for McClure when she became stranded on a highway in Philadelphia last year. The couple subsequently found 14,000 people online who were so touched by his kindness that they donated to a fund to help him start a new life.
Police armed with a search warrant left the couple’s home in Florence, N.J., about 30 miles northeast of Philadelphia, with bags and boxes of material and the BMW, according to news outlets. Bobbitt has questioned where they got the money for the car. They have said they used their own money.
The couple are also being sued by Bobbitt, the homeless man who was to receive the donations, which were made through a GoFundMe page. In the suit, he says they used the account as a ‘‘personal piggy bank’’ to ‘‘fund a lifestyle they could not otherwise afford.’’
Interesting phrase, in the sense that it shows how early the $y$temic indoctrination begins. From out earliest memories we are taught to save money (meaning its valuable) in a bank (a benevolent thing that keeps your valuable safe).
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They should have went to work on Wall Street rather than starting a GoFundMe page.
So how is that lawsuit coming?
"Burt Reynolds, star of film, TV, and tabloids, dies at 82" by Ralph Blumenthal New York Times September 07, 2018
NEW YORK — Burt Reynolds, the wryly appealing Hollywood heartthrob who carried on a long love affair with moviegoers even though his performances were often more memorable than the films that contained them, died Thursday in Jupiter, Fla. He was 82.
A spokeswoman for the Martin County Sheriff’s Office said Mr. Reynolds died at the Jupiter Medical Center after being taken there in an ambulance from his home in Hobe Sound. A caretaker at the home had called the authorities, apparently after Mr. Reynolds experienced chest pains, the spokeswoman said. No cause of death was given.
A self-mocking charmer with laugh-crinkled dark eyes, a rakish mustache, and a hairy chest that he often bared onscreen, Mr. Reynolds did not always win the respect of critics, but for many years he was ranked among the top 10 movie draws worldwide, and from 1978 through 1982 he ruled the box office as few had done before.
From road comedies such as “Smokey and the Bandit” to romances like “Starting Over” to the hit television series “Evening Shade,” Mr. Reynolds delighted audiences for four decades, most often playing a good-hearted good ol’ boy seemingly not that different from his offscreen self.
Yet his career, which span-ned some 100 films and countless television appearances, was often marked by turbulence and he had close brushes with death, some resulting from his insistence on doing many of his dangerous stunts. He braved the raging rapids of the Chattooga River between Georgia and South Carolina for a favorite role, as one of four suburbanite buddies who undertake a journey into America’s heart of darkness, in “Deliverance” (1972).
A decade later he battled an addiction to prescription medication after his jaw was shattered in a fight scene, an accident that left him wizened and led to false whispers that he was dying of AIDS.
Fellow actors praised Mr. Reynolds as an exacting artist who worked hard at his craft and fought to overcome many demons, including a volatile temperament, but he himself projected an air of insouciance and professed not to take his career too seriously. He told The New York Times in 1978, “I think I’m the only movie star who’s a movie star in spite of his pictures, not because of them; I’ve had some real turkeys.”
To many in Hollywood, Mr. Reynolds was an enigma. Tormented by self-doubt — he particularly disliked hearing how much he resembled the young Marlon Brando — he was also strong-willed, clashing often with directors and producers. For much of his career he accepted roles, he admitted, “that would be the most fun, not the most challenging,” while turning down more substantive parts, including the one in “Terms of Endearment” that led to an Academy Award for Jack Nicholson.
Mr. Reynolds never won an Oscar, although he was nominated for best supporting actor (and won a Golden Globe) for his performance as a paternalistic director of pornographic movies in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1997 “Boogie Nights.” Robin Williams won that year, for “Good Will Hunting.”
“I once said I’d rather have a Heisman Trophy than an Oscar,” Mr. Reynolds, who played football in college, later wrote. “I lied.”
Burton Leon Reynolds Jr., originally called Buddy to distinguish him from his father, was born in Lansing, Mich., on Feb. 11, 1936, and grew up in Riviera Beach, Fla., where his father was police chief. Many biographical sources say Mr. Reynolds was born in Waycross, Ga., but in his 2015 memoir, “But Enough About Me” (written with Jon Winokur), he said he had told that to interviewers to distance himself from his northern roots. “I grew up a Southern boy who didn’t want to be a Yankee,” he wrote.
Although young Burt acted in high school plays, his passion was football. He played for Florida State University, but his sports career ended in 1955, when he was seriously injured in a car crash. He studied acting at Palm Beach Junior College before moving to New York City, where he shared an apartment with a fellow actor, Rip Torn, and found an agent with the help of Joanne Woodward.
Mr. Reynolds signed a seven-year contract with Universal Studios in 1958 and was cast in a new NBC series, “Riverboat,” starring Darren McGavin. He rubbed shoulders with Hollywood royalty on the Universal lot and, he recalled, received some valuable advice from Spencer Tracy on how to be a successful actor: Don’t let anybody catch you at it.
Mr. Reynolds left “Riverboat’’ before the show ended its brief run. (He later said he left after tossing an assistant director in the studio lake.)
He returned to New York in 1961 for what turned out to be a brief run on Broadway in the play “Look, We’ve Come Through” and then went back to Hollywood to play a half-Indian blacksmith on the long-running CBS western “Gunsmoke.”
In 1963, after what he called “a kooky whirlwind romance,” Mr. Reynolds wed a young British actress, Judy Carne, who would later gain fame as the “sock-it-to-me girl” on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.” By summer 1965 the marriage was over. Carne, who died in 2015, later said Mr. Reynolds had physically abused her, an accusation he denied.
He remained primarily a TV actor for the rest of the 1960s, with roles in episodes of “The Twilight Zone” (in a comedic episode in which his character was a parody of Brando), “Route 66,” “Perry Mason,” and many other shows. Mr. Reynolds, who was part Cherokee, was cast so often as a smoldering Indian.
His career did not take off until he became a regular on the talk-show circuit in the early 1970s, drawing laughs as the guest of Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, and others by self-effacingly presenting himself as, in his words, “the most well-known unknown.”
One TV host who was particularly captivated by Mr. Reynolds’s charm was singer Dinah Shore. The difference in their ages raised some eyebrows — she was 20 years older than he was — but shortly after he was a guest on her popular afternoon show, the two became inseparable, and they remained a couple for several years.
His appearance in “Deliverance” in 1972 — his first substantial role in a major movie — was a turning point in his career.
His performance was critically praised and prompted talk of a possible Oscar nomination. That he did not get one was attributed by some, including Mr. Reynolds, to his decision to pose artfully nude as a centerfold in an issue of Cosmopolitan magazine that was published at roughly the same time the movie was released. The photo was a sensation, but the image it projected made it harder for Hollywood to take him seriously as an actor.
Knowing now what we know of Hollywood, and it stretches back to the founding does the casting couch, Burt should be honored for not getting one.
“It was really stupid. I don’t know what I was thinking,” Mr. Reynolds said in 2016. “I really wish I hadn’t done that.”
He nonetheless worked steadily for the next decade; he made more than 20 movies between 1973 and 1982, most of them hits. They included two in which he got to revive his college gridiron dreams: “The Longest Yard” (1974), which cast him as an imprisoned football star who coaches his fellow convicts to victory over the warden’s team, and “Semi-Tough” (1977), based on Dan Jenkins’s comic novel about pro football.
Mr. Reynolds took on one of his defining roles in 1977, when he played a daredevil driver who leads the law — Jackie Gleason as a hyperventilating sheriff — on a madcap chase from Texas to Georgia in “Smokey and the Bandit,” a box-office smash that spawned two sequels (although Mr. Reynolds made only a cameo appearance in the third “Smokey” film) and ignited a long-running romance between Mr. Reynolds and his co-star, Sally Field.
“One of the things people say about ‘Smokey’ is that you watch two people fall in love on the screen,” Mr. Reynolds wrote in “But Enough About Me,” “and it’s true.”
Although he once called Field “the love of my life,” their relationship ended after a few years.
Critics were not impressed by “Smokey and the Bandit,” but audiences were thrilled: Only “Star Wars” did better business that year. For five weeks’ work on another car-chase picture, “The Cannonball Run” (1981) — directed, as were the first two “Smokey” movies, by Mr. Reynolds’s friend Hal Needham, a former stuntman — he was paid $5 million (the equivalent of about $14 million in 2018 dollars), a record at the time.
Success gave Mr. Reynolds the freedom to try new things. He directed himself in “Gator” (1976), “The End” (1978), “Sharky’s Machine” (1981) and “Stick” (1985). He tried his hand at musical comedy — feebly, critics said — in “At Long Last Love” (1975), with Cybill Shepherd, and again in “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” (1982), with Dolly Parton.
By the time he returned to the cars-as-stars genre as a stock-car racer in “Stroker Ace” (1983), his career had peaked. Vincent Canby of The Times called it “the must-miss movie of the summer,” and this time audiences agreed.
Mr. Reynolds and his “Stroker Ace” co-star, Loni Anderson, began living together in 1984 and wed in 1988. The marriage ended in 1993, in acrimony unusual even by Hollywood standards. Two decades later, the acrimony remained. “The truth is,” he wrote in 2015, “I never did like her.”
But did he beat her?
Survivors include their son, Quinton.
Mr. Reynolds was making “City Heat” (1984) with Clint Eastwood — a pairing of Hollywood heavyweights that turned out to be another box-office flop — when a stuntman clobbered him with a heavy chair that was supposed to be a breakaway balsa wood prop.
Along with a shattered jaw, he was found to have temporomandibular joint disorder. He became addicted to the sedative Halcion. He overcame that addiction, but later entered rehab after injuring his back and becoming addicted to painkillers. Adding to those problems, his investments soured, leaving him deeply in debt.
He rebounded and in 1990 began a long run on a new CBS comedy, “Evening Shade,” playing, in yet another football iteration, a former pro player who returns to his small Arkansas hometown to coach the losing local high school team. He won an Emmy for his performance in 1991.
His days as a box-office champion were long over by then, but he remained busy almost to the end. In addition to his Oscar-nominated triumph in “Boogie Nights,” there were small roles in big movies, bigger roles in smaller movies, voice-over work in cartoons, and numerous television appearances, often as an exaggerated version of himself.....
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Never mentioned his role in the Dukes of Hazzard.
"Adrian Cronauer, the disc jockey whose story provided the rough outlines for the character played by Robin Williams in the 1987 movie "Good Morning, Vietnam," in 1979, with the Korean War sitcom "M.A.S.H." and the radio-themed "WKRP in Cincinnati" both on the air, he tried selling a treatment of his experiences as a television series but found no takers. A few years after that he pitched a made-for-TV movie. "This time, a friend's agent in Hollywood got it into Robin's hands," Mr. Cronauer related in a 1995 interview, "and he said: 'Oh, disc jockey; chance to do all my comic shtick. Let's do it as a real movie,'" but not one that used Mr. Cronauer's version of events: what ended up in "Good morning, Vietnam," which was directed by Barry Levinson, was a largely fictionalized story from a screenplay by Mitch Markowitz. Still....."
That is standard for Hollywood (and the pre$$, when you think about it), and there has been a lot less laughter in the world since his passing.
"Amway founder and Magic owner Richard DeVos dies at age 92" by Keith Schneider New York Times September 06, 2018
NEW YORK — Richard M. DeVos, the Amway Corp. cofounder, who built and used one of the 20th century’s great personal fortunes to bolster the Republican Party, restore civic vitality to his hometown, Grand Rapids, Mich., and buy the Orlando Magic of the National Basketball Association, died Thursday. He was 92.
His death, at his home in Ada, Mich., was caused by complications of an infection, according to a statement on the Magic’s website.
An evangelical Christian who espoused the virtues of self-reliance, capitalism, and the free market, Mr. DeVos was above all a superb salesman. He joined Jay Van Andel, his friend and business partner for 55 years, in marketing the concept of direct sales and turned the privately owned Amway Corp. into a global enterprise with more than $8.6 billion in sales in 2017, more than 17,000 employees, and hundreds of thousands of independent salespeople.
At his death, Mr. DeVos and his family had an estimated net worth of $5.5 billion. His daughter-in-law Betsy DeVos is education secretary in the Trump administration.
As his wealth increased, so did Mr. DeVos’s prominence as a political strategist and donor to the Republican Party and conservative organizations. He supported the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and Focus on the Family, and he was a member of the executive committee of the Council for National Policy, which starting in the early 1980s pushed to propel Christian values to the center of Republican activities nationally.
In the 1990s, the Amway Corp. spent $2.5 million a year on Republican candidates and party activities, making it the largest corporate political donor in the country. Mr. DeVos, who cultivated political allies with the deftness of a senior statesman, had also served as finance chairman of the Republican National Committee.
Just when we needed him most.
In 1996 he was honored at a $3 million Republican fund-raising event in Washington at which then-Senator Bob Dole extolled his influence in the antiabortion movement and in compelling the party to embrace evangelical doctrine to build a political majority.
President Gerald R. Ford, a native of Grand Rapids, was one of Mr. DeVos’s friends. Mr. DeVos also advised Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. Mr. DeVos was a member of Reagan’s AIDS commission and helped develop the weekly presidential radio address when he agreed to carry Reagan’s Saturday noon broadcasts on the Mutual Broadcasting System, which was then owned by Amway.
Mr. DeVos’s ideas about “compassionate capitalism,” which were explored in his 1994 book by the same title, were an important source for George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” campaign slogan in 2000.
Mr. DeVos was an engaged philanthropist, particularly for educational, religious, and civic projects in Grand Rapids, where he was born and raised. Calvin College in Grand Rapids, which he attended, was a beneficiary of Mr. DeVos’s gift giving, as was the Christian Reformed Church.
In recent years Grand Rapids, Michigan’s second-largest city, has experienced a civic and business revival in large part because of the investments that Mr. DeVos and Van Andel made to restore historic structures.
In addition, a new downtown campus for Grand Valley State University, a new civic center, and the DeVos Children’s Hospital, regarded as one of the leading pediatric hospitals in the nation, all bear Mr. DeVos's name.
As long as there is no sexual harassment or racism the name can be left on the structure.
Mr. DeVos bought the Orlando Magic for $80 million in 1991, in part because he saw that owning an NBA team would provide a more visible platform for what Pat Williams, his biographer and now a senior vice president of the team, said was “his message of success through faith, optimism, perseverance, and hard work.”
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Full Moonves rising:
"Les Moonves said to be negotiating possible exit from CBS" by Edmund Lee New York Times September 06, 2018
NEW YORK — Leslie Moonves, faced with an investigation into allegations of sexual harassment against him as well as a bitter boardroom battle over the control of CBS, has for the last few weeks been negotiating his potential exit from the network he has run for two decades.
Moonves has been talking to the board about his possible departure as chief executive, including terms of a payout that would be far less than $180 million, the amount specified in his employment agreement should he leave the CBS Corp., according to three people familiar with the discussions who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a private bargaining agreement.
Why should he get anything?
The multiple allegations of sexual harassment against Moonves have partly motivated the talks, which could still break down.
During his tenure, Moonves, 68, has helped transform CBS from a last-place network into the most watched channel for the last decade, with hits like “The Big Bang Theory” and “Survivor.” That success has made Moonves one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood and his possible departure has put the future fortunes of the company into doubt.
For over a month, Moonves has been grappling with the two separate but equally fateful issues.
Poor Les!
In July, The New Yorker published an article, written by investigative journalist Ronan Farrow, in which six women made allegations of harassment against Moonves. The earliest allegations in the article date to the mid-1980s, and the most recent to 2006.
Did the New York Times and NBC turn him down on this one, too, like they did with Weinstein?
In a statement at the time, Moonves said: “I recognize that there were times decades ago when I may have made some women uncomfortable by making advances. Those were mistakes, and I regret them immensely. But I always understood and respected — and abided by the principle — that ‘no’ means ‘no,’ and I have never misused my position to harm or hinder anyone’s career.”
Shortly after the article was published, the CBS board enlisted two law firms to lead an inquiry into the claims against Moonves and the wider workplace culture at the network. The board soon after folded a separate examination of CBS News — underway since March — into the larger investigation.
What is taking so long?
The board hired Nancy Kestenbaum of Covington & Burling and Mary Jo White of Debevoise & Plimpton to conduct the inquiry.
White led the Securities and Exchange Commission during the Obama administration and was previously the US attorney for the Southern District of New York.
Kestenbaum was also a federal prosecutor with the same district. The investigation into CBS News is being led by the law firm of Proskauer Rose.
Moonves draws an annual pay package worth $69.3 million. His employment agreement included a provision that would give him more than $184 million in pay and benefits as part of his exit if the board fires him without fault, or if he leaves because of the legal dispute.....
That's when it set.
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Thank you, readers, and good night.
MORNING UPDATE:
"It’s a familiar — and anxiety-producing — cycle to those who feel addicted to their phones, and big tech is taking notice. Google recently released the results of a study in which it found “social media, e-mail and news apps were creating a constant sense of obligation, generating unintended personal stress” on smartphones. It’s part of the company’s attempt to address criticism that the tech industry has not been sensitive to the harm its products can cause....."
Must be why I'm here every morning.
