- Steve Martin’s weeklong San Francisco gig in 1975 ‘convinced him not to quit comedy’ San Francisco Chronicle
- The irony of Steve Martin’s life isn’t lost on him The Associated Press
- STEVE! (martin) a documentary in 2 pieces review – intimate portrait of a comedy legend The Guardian
- ‘STEVE! (martin) A Documentary In 2 Pieces’ Review: Morgan Neville’s Revealing Double Feature On A Comic Superstar Who Kept His Life Very Private – Until Now Deadline
- Steve Martin tells his story in double feature of great, very different documentaries Chicago Sun-Times
Tag Archives: weeklong
NFL replaces Pro Bowl with ‘The Pro Bowl Games’ featuring weeklong skills competitions, flag football game
The NFL is replacing the Pro Bowl with weeklong skills competitions and a flag football game, The Associated Press has learned.
The new event will replace the full-contact showcase started in 1951. It will be renamed “The Pro Bowl Games” and will feature AFC and NFC players showcasing their football and non-football skills in challenges over several days. The 2023 Games will be held in Las Vegas, and the flag football game at Allegiant Stadium is Feb. 5.
Peyton Manning and his Omaha Productions company will help shape programming and promote the event’s content throughout the week. Manning, a 14-time Pro Bowl pick during his Hall of Fame career, will provide his perspective and will also be a part of the coaching staff for flag game.
“The Pro Bowl is something that we’ve been looking at for a while, really continuing to evolve,” NFL executive Peter O’Reilly told The Associated Press. “Coming out of last year’s game, we really made the decision based on a lot of internal conversations, getting feedback from GMs and coaches, getting a lot of feedback from players. We think there’s a real opportunity to do something wholly different here and move away from the traditional tackle football game. We decided the goal is to celebrate 88 of the biggest stars in the NFL in a really positive, fun, yet competitive way.
“The feedback very directly from guys who had been in the Pro Bowl recently was to keep the construct of the week, make sure you’re having that multiday element. It was overwhelmingly positive both from players as well as from clubs.”
The Pro Bowl debuted in January 1951 in Los Angeles and stayed there for 21 seasons before the game moved to different cities from 1972 to 1980. Hawaii hosted from 1980 to 2009, and the game has had several homes in the years since, including Miami, Phoenix, Orlando and Las Vegas.
Quality of play in the Pro Bowl has often been criticized. Players, understandably concerned about getting hurt, treat it as an exhibition more than competition. A flag football game could increase competition while avoiding potential injuries resulting from tackling, blocking and hitting.
The NFL has a major interest in flag football. The league partnered with the International Federation of American Football to bring flag football to The World Games in July with an eye on the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.
“You tap into all the stuff that feels great about Pro Bowl week, the skills, the helmets off, the engagement and then culminate that, keeping the AFC-NFC construct, in something that’s really important, which is flag football and that opportunity to have the best athletes in the NFL out there playing this game that is so much about the future of our sport,” said O’Reilly, the league’s executive vice president, club business and league events. “It’s been an evolution, but coming out of Las Vegas last year, we really focused on how do we reinvent and celebrate our all-stars even better.”
The league plans to announce the new format Monday.
“The Pro Bowl has always been a time to step back and celebrate the game of football with teammates, fans and family,” Manning told the AP. “I’m thankful I can continue to be part of the week as all of us at Omaha Productions work with the NFL to reimagine The Pro Bowl Games. Making Sunday’s game a flag football game is great to see. Youth football has been extremely important to me, and knowing NFL FLAG will help grow this sport, I hope boys and girls can see themselves playing the same game as the best players in the world.”
Fan voting will still help determine the AFC and NFC team rosters. Tom Brady has the most invitations to the Pro Bowl with 15. Four players got 14 invites, including Manning. The East-West Shrine Bowl will be held at Allegiant Stadium on Feb. 2.
In 1999, Patriots rookie running back Robert Edwards suffered knee ligament damage and sliced an artery in his left leg playing an NFL-sanctioned beach flag football game during the week of the Pro Bowl. He missed the entire 1999 and 2000 seasons while rehabilitating the knee.
All-private SpaceX astronaut mission to return home from the ISS after nearly week-long delay
The mission, called AX-1, was brokered by the Houston, Texas-based startup Axiom Space, which books rocket rides, provides all the necessary training, and coordinates flights to the ISS for anyone who can afford it.
The four crew members — Michael López-Alegría, a former NASA astronaut-turned-Axiom employee who is commanding the mission; Israeli businessman Eytan Stibbe; Canadian investor Mark Pathy; and Ohio-based real estate magnate Larry Connor — are slated to leave the space station aboard their SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule on Saturday at 8:35 pm ET. They’ll spend a day free flying through orbit before plummeting back into the atmosphere and parachuting to a splashdown landing off the coast of Florida at about 1:46 pm ET Sunday.
AX-1, which launched on April 8, was originally billed as a 10-day mission, but delays extended the mission by nearly a week.
During their first 12 days on the space station, the group stuck to a regimented schedule, which included about 14 hours per day of activities, including scientific research that was designed by various research hospitals, universities, tech companies and more. They also spent time doing outreach events by video conferencing with children and students.
The weather delays then afforded to them “a bit more time to absorb the remarkable views of the blue planet and review the vast amount of work that was successfully completed during the mission,” according to Axiom.
It’s not clear how much this mission cost. Axiom previously disclosed a price of $55 million per seat for a 10-day trip to the ISS, but the company declined to comment on the financial terms for this specific mission beyond saying in a press conference last year that the price is in the “tens of millions.”
The mission has been made possible by very close coordination among Axiom, SpaceX and NASA, since the ISS is government-funded and operated. And the space agency has revealed some details about how much it charges for use of its 20-year-old orbiting laboratory.
For each mission, bringing on the necessary support from NASA astronauts will cost commercial customers $5.2 million, and all the mission support and planning that NASA lends is another $4.8 million. While in space, food alone costs an estimated $2,000 per day, per person. Getting provisions to and from the space station for a commercial crew is another $88,000 to $164,000 per person, per day.
But the extra days the AX-1 crew spent in space due to weather won’t add to their own personal overall price tag, according to a statement from NASA.
“Knowing that International Space Station mission objectives like the recently conducted Russian spacewalk or weather challenges could result in a delayed undock, NASA negotiated the contract with a strategy that does not require reimbursement for additional undock delays,” the statement reads.
It’s not the first time paying customers or otherwise non-astronauts have visited the ISS, as Russia has sold seats on its Soyuz spacecraft to various wealthy thrill seekers in years past.
But AX-1 is the first mission with a crew entirely comprised of private citizens with no active members of a government astronaut corps accompanying them in the capsule during the trip to and from the ISS. It’s also the first time private citizens have traveled to the ISS on a US-made spacecraft.
The mission has set off yet another round of debate about whether people who pay their way to space should be referred to as “astronauts,” though it should be noted a trip to the ISS requires a far larger investment of both time and money than taking a brief suborbital ride on a rocket built by companies like Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic.
López-Alegría, a veteran of four trips to space between 1995 and 2007 during his time with NASA, had this to say about it: “This mission is very different from what you may have heard of in some of the recent — especially suborbital — missions. We are not space tourists. I think there’s an important role for space tourism, but it is not what Axiom is about.”
Though the paying customers will not receive astronaut wings from the US government, they were presented with the “Universal Astronaut Insignia” — a gold pin recently designed by the Association of Space Explorers, an international group comprised of astronauts from 38 countries. López-Alegría presented Stibbe, Pathy and Connor with their pins during a welcome ceremony after the group arrived at the space station.
Auckland emerges from strict weeklong Covid lockdown | New Zealand
Auckland has come out of a weeklong lockdown imposed after a community cluster of the more contagious UK coronavirus variant.
There were no new local Covid-19 cases recorded on Sunday, health officials said, allowing for the restrictions to ease. If no community cases are confirmed during the rest of Sunday it would make a full seven days since the last community case.
There are still limits on public gatherings in the city of nearly two million, however, and masks are obligatory on public transport.
Footage on TVNZ showed people lining up at coffee shops on Sunday morning with many saying they were feeling relieved.
The government said it might ease restrictions in Auckland further on Friday to bring them to the same level as in the rest of New Zealand.
The prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, said on Friday that she stood by New Zealand’s decision to pursue an elimination strategy, but acknowledged it came with costs, from job losses to school camp cancellations.
She said the government was right to impose the seven-day lockdown, only weeks after lifting three days of snap restrictions, due to the more transmissible and unpredictable nature of the UK variant.
“Level three provided us with an extra layer of security while we addressed the unknowns and reduced the risk,” she said.
Rule breaking under level three, contributing to spread in the Auckland cluster in late February, had been a flashpoint for criticism this week – and sparked calls for the government to do more in terms of community outreach.
Ardern said that she did not believe anyone who broke level-three restrictions set out deliberately to do wrong, but that she had not seen any benefit in continuing a “back-and-forth” over individual cases over this past week.
Swift public health measures combined with aggressive contact tracing, border closures and compulsory quarantine for travellers have been credited with making both New Zealand and Australia highly successful in keeping the pandemic from spreading.
Both countries saw their economies recovering speedily in the second part of 2020. New Zealand has reported just over 2,000 cases of the coronavirus and 26 deaths since the start of the pandemic.
Though daily positive rate climbs back over 20%, weeklong numbers reflect some good trends
Health officials report 1,516 new cases and 13 more deaths, though four of those occurred in 2020.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) XpresCheck, a Covid-19 testing site, is now testing passengers at the Salt Lake City International Airport on Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2021.
Editor’s note: The Salt Lake Tribune is providing free access to critical stories about the coronavirus. Sign up for our Top Stories newsletter, sent to your inbox every weekday morning. To support journalism like this, please donate or become a subscriber.
While the percentage of positive COVID-19 tests in Utah went up Sunday from the day before, a look at the figures from the past week suggest some reason for cautious optimism.
For instance, the rolling seven-day average of new cases reported Sunday by the Utah Department of Health was 1,794. A week ago, it was 2,548.
The number of people hospitalized Sunday due to COVID-19 was at 461. The week prior, it was 557. The number of coronavirus patients occupying ICU beds was down by more than 40, and the percentage of ICU beds occupied declined from 97.4% to 88.7%.
Meanwhile, the rolling seven-day percentage of positive tests is also down from the previous week. On Sunday, it stood at 19.4%. The week before, it was at 22.6%.
It’s not all good news, however — there were still 102 coronavirus-related deaths in Utah over the past seven days.
Meanwhile, Johns Hopkins University’s Coronavirus Resource Center reports that we are approaching 100 million global cases of COVID-19. More than 25 million of those have been in the United States alone. There are now more than 2,125,000 deaths worldwide — led by more than 418,000 in the United States.
Here’s a closer look at the Sunday numbers released by the UDOH:
Vaccinations reported in past day/total vaccinations • 6,073 / 228,348.
Cases reported in past day • 1,516, which is 255 fewer than Saturday.
Deaths reported in past day • 13, though UDOH noted that four of them occurred prior to Dec. 31, 2020.
Five of them were Utah County residents: A male between 25-44 years old, three males between 65-84, and a female 85 or older.
Four came from Salt Lake County: A male between 45-64, one male and one female 65-84, and one male older than 85.
Washington County’s two were both female, one of them between 65-84, the other 85 or older. Weber County also had a female between 65-84, while Uintah County had a male between 65-84.
Hospitalizations reported in past day • 461. That’s down 20 from Saturday’s numbers. Of those currently hospitalized, 182 are in intensive care units — 14 fewer than announced Saturday.
Tests reported in past day • 7,331.
Percentage of positive tests • 20.7%. This is higher than the seven-day average of 19.4%.
Totals to date • 336,405 cases; 1,595 deaths; 13,016 hospitalizations; 1,965,485 tests.