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–State Senator Daphne Campbell lied about her mother being ill in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma. Her mother had been dead for at least a year by that time.
–RISE NEWS was the first to expose text messages Campbell sent to a FPL lobbyist one day after Hurricane Irma impacted South Florida.
–The messages revealed that Campbell tried to use her status as a State Senator to get FPL to turn on electricity at her home.
–Her reasoning for the abuse of power? She had a sick mother at home who needed electricity to run an oxygen machine.
–Campbell texted: “Can someone helps [sic] me with the power. I do have a sick person in my house and she’s using oxygen. The address is… [address redacted]. Same than my children’s house…[address redacted]. Thanks Senator Campbell.”
–The problem (one of many with that rationale) is that Campbell’s mother was dead at the time, according to Campbell’s own words.
–Campbell was caught by the Miami New Times in the latest lie after reporter Jerry Iannelli came across a Youtube video from 2016, where Campbell talked about her dead mother.
–“My father and my mother died,” she says around the 2:20 mark of a video posted to Youtube in 2016.
-A Campbell staffer tried to defend his boss to the New Times by saying that she wasn’t actually talking about her biological mother. “Instead, Campbell was referring to a long-standing family friend whom she allegedly refers to as ‘mom.'” The staffer did confirm that Campbell’s biological mother was dead.
–Campbell called the original RISE NEWS report “fake news”. About that…
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——Here’s Something Completely Different: ——
There’s A Secret Buddhist Temple In This El Portal House
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Celebrating An American Addiction Fifty Years In The Making
Nick Hickman
The decorations are up and the festivities are well in the works, for this Sunday, our Nation’s baby turns fifty.
Her roots can be traced back to the beautiful union between the AFL and the NFL in 1966. What soon came to be known as the Super Bowl was born out of a desire to crown a single champion between two unaffiliated leagues both competing for the spotlight.
Now, she owns an unofficial annual holiday at the beginning of every February. She is unmatched and untouchable. She is achievement personified, but is just as prosperous as she is cultural. In only fifty years time, she has infiltrated America’s bloodstream, pulsing and ripping through our veins as often as the air we breath.
Admit it, we’re hooked. We’re all addicted. Last year, a record 114.4 million people tuned in to watch Brady and the Patriots capture Super Bowl XLIX. There are approximately 111.1 million people living in Spain and the U.K. combined.
Aside from Super Bowl Sunday, only Thanksgiving can boast a higher statistical consumption of food.
The Super Bowl of two seasons ago between the Denver Broncos—who will compete again this year—and the Seattle Seahawks drew a record $119 million bet in Las Vegas casinos. It’s a sport played and adored by only one country in the world, but as American’s, we’re obsessed.
And part of the absurdity is that we’re all obsessed for different reasons. Sure, it’s likely that the large majority of viewers will watch for the sheer competition of the game, but many will be enticed by the halftime show and even Grandma and great-aunt Alice will tune in just to watch the commercials.
Usually we pay for clever tools to help us avoid commercials, but on Super Bowl Sunday, advertising brands will be competing nearly as hard as the athletes to capture your attention.
Though who can fault them? The rationale is simple. Say, for example, that just 5% of all viewers are motivated by an advertisement, spurring them to vote with their dollar. The resulting translation is an additional 5,720,000 customers to the responsible company.
Consequently, advertising companies will be willing to pay substantially for the privileged platform that is the Super Bowl. Thirty seconds during last year’s game sold for a record $4.5 million. According to Business Insider, that number has since grown 11% to a new average of $5 million per for this years game.
Money surrounds the Super Bowl in every corner and every aspect. Last year’s contest commanded more than $330 million in advertising revenue. This year, tens of thousands of passionate fans will pack Levi Stadium in Santa Clara, a venue that cost $1.3 billion to build.
Coldplay will headline this year’s Halftime Show after being selected as one of three finalists for last year’s game. Wall Street Journal reported that—along with Katy Perry and Rihanna—the three candidates were initially asked to pay the NFL for their performance in Super Bowl XLIX.
The Super Bowl is our baby and our addiction, and this year, both will turn fifty. It’s a small milestone in the scope of historical significance, though it’s a progression that shows no signs of slowing down.
Super Bowl Fifty will have its seats packed and its commercials rolling. It’ll have a remarkable halftime performance with brilliant effects and aesthetics, all this can be expected.
And too, you should expect the same next year, and the year after that. The NFL doesn’t need a headline like a fiftieth-anniversary to command our attention on Super Bowl Sunday.
In fact, it’s likely that they don’t even need to make any additional improvements or changes to the event at all. Barring nuclear annihilation, the NFL will be gifted next year with another energetic audience of hundreds of millions of fans.
As long as the money keeps coming, the fans will continue to be provided with a product that stimulates the deepest competitive trigger in all of us. And as long as the NFL’s product is in place, our cherished addiction will never cease.
Cover Photo Credit: Kathy Drasky/Flickr (CC BY 2.0).
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Miami Vignette: The Coconut Capitalist
Miami Vignettes are very short stories about interesting aspects of life in South Florida that RISE NEWS finds in the community while reporting on other things. Sometimes little stories can have a big impact. Share yours with us: [email protected] Also be sure to sign up for our newsletter so you never miss our most important Miami stories.
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COCONUT CAPITALISM – Isidro Carrazana is an 80 year old man who works 7 days a week cutting down coconuts from people’s properties with a 30 foot pole around the Miami area.
For the record, yes he does ask for permission first from the homeowner.
He is from Cuba and moved to South Florida 27 years ago.
He lives near North Shore Hospital and sells his coconuts to various vendors around town.
He told us that he makes $50 to $75 a day.
The work certainly hasn’t made him rich, but it has allowed him to pursue the American dream.
——Here’s Something Completely Different: ——
The TV Weatherman Who Is Trying To Save Miami From Drowning
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Here’s How The Warriors Turned Steph Curry Into A Well Rested Bionic Superhuman
Before blossoming into the greatest shooter the sport has ever known, Steph Curry was defined by his fragile ankles.
Over the course of his first 3 NBA seasons, Curry missed 66 games, most of that coming after his initial operation, as he sprained his ankle five times while playing in 26 games the following year.
If his 2012 surgery failed, he was faced with the bleak prospect of inserting tendons from a cadaver into his ankle in the hopes that they would function better than the ones nature provided for him.
Luckily for Curry, the NBA, and anyone who ever wished that Steve Nash and Pete Maravich would have an And1 basketball baby, his last surgery is looking like it could be his last ankle surgery.
Steph’s problems were actually a pretty easy fix, as they were due to a mess of scar tissue, bone spurs, chips, and cartilage filling his joints “like crab meat.”
Dr. Richard Ferkel essentially vacuumed it all out, and the next face of the NBA was reborn.
“I feel like I’ve been doing nothing but rehabbing for two years. I feel like I’m never going to be able to play again. This ankle thing is not gonna be my life.”
Photo Credit: Golden State Warriors/ Facebook
Curry took advantage of as many resources as he could to fuel his 2nd chance in the NBA. Before every game now, Curry straps on his Zamst ankle braces (designed for post-sprain activity) and a pair of Under Armour sneakers created specifically for his feet.
Every team is looking for an edge somewhere in keeping players healthy and consistent. It is an accepted fact that this is the new market inefficiency in sports. But few organizations pursue this avenue with the vigor and resources of the Warriors.
They hired Australian sports science guru Lachland Penfold this offseason, and according to owner Joe Lacob, the goal is to “have like, a video game fatigue meter. A guy like Lachland will be able to go up to Bob and Steve [Kerr] and say, ‘Guys, he’s at a 77, and our threshold is 75 for Safe to Play.'”
The NBA’s new SportVU cameras that track and measure almost any movement on the court have combined with the GPS trackers the team wears in practice to give the Warriors unprecedented insight into their players’ health and its relation to their game.
The Warriors place a premium on their players’ mental acuity as well. Steve Kerr has made it a team goal to reduce personal stress, and the Warriors run complex drills to test their nervous system, as Curry described in an interview with Tech Insider:
“We overload our sensory system, nervous system, in our training with different lights. There are little beams that we have on the wall, and I’ll be doing dribble moves and reading the lights that are associated with different moves. Different colors mean to do a different move, and you have to make that decision in a split second and still have control of the ball.”
What do Steve Kerr, Chip Kelly, the Vancouver Canucks, and Jason Bourne all agree on? As the line from Robert Ludlum’s famous 1990 book goes: “Rest is a weapon.”
Photo Credit: Golden State Warriors/ Facebook
Before Kelly even arrived in Philadelphia three years ago, the Vancouver Canucks signed a deal in 2009 with Fatigue Science.
No professional squad has a more brutal travel schedule than the northwesternmost team in North America; the Canucks traveled one third of the distance to the moon en route to their 2011 Stanley Cup Finals loss, so it’s only natural that they would be interested in the effects of sleep, or the lack thereof, on the body.
A 2012 Harvard Study placed Fatigue Science’s armbands on orthopedic surgical residents and found that they averaged 5.3 hours of sleep per week, and because of this, the risk of medical error increased by 22%. Significant fatigue basically has the same effect on the body as being drunk.
Kelly has said that he believes that “an elite athlete needs between 10-12 hours [of sleep] a night.”
He was a college football pioneer in so many ways at Oregon, and he was practically the only college coach who was seriously investing in sport science.
As Chris Brown wrote for Grantland in 2014 about the basis of Kelly’s research (which was conducted on Australian-rules football):
“Many of those studies used heart rate, GPS, accelerometers, and gyroscope monitors worn by players in practice to determine how to train for peak game-day performance and how to prevent injuries. These studies also tracked the movements that players made in games so teams could mold practices and training to what players did on an individualized and position-by-position basis.”
The Eagles were 18th in Football Outsiders’ adjusted games lost to injury metric the year before Kelly arrived.
They invested a ton of money in his programs, placed trackers on their players’ wrists in practice, and finished 1st and 2nd in his subsequent seasons. Kelly has since been fired from the Eagles and is now the head coach of the San Francisco 49ers.
Top 10 teams at managing injuries over the past 5 seasons, with @ManGamesLostNFL data pic.twitter.com/Vj97MFmrWx
— Rich Hill (@PP_Rich_Hill) January 27, 2016
Atlanta Falcons quarterback Matt Ryan used to show up for work before sunrise. But things have changed for him.
“I thought that showed dedication and work ethic. I don’t do that anymore, because I realized it is more important to be rested and ready than it is to beat everybody to work.”
Pete Carroll has long embraced the importance of sleep, and the Seahawks now schedule their travel and training schedules to maximize their players’ sleep efficiency.
Richard Sherman has become one of Carroll’s acolytes on this issue, emphasizing how the head coach’s focus on good sleep was central to their Championship season of 2014 in an open letter for Sports Illustrated.
The pace of innovation in sports is accelerating. The Moneyball Era opened the floodgates for a reevaluation of everything.
Once available only to elite athletes, this technology that monitors players’ health and performance and helps explain their inextricably linked relationship is becoming more widespread and affordable.
If these advances could help alter the course of Steph Curry’s career, and thus, the history of the NBA, imagine the possibilities they could create in neighborhoods across the country.
RISE NEWS is a grassroots journalism news organization that is working to change the way young people become informed and engaged in public affairs. Anyone can write for us as long as you are fiercely interested in making the world a better place.
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