Hasta La Gadget!

NEW YORK (AP) — Watch out, “Rocky” — the producing team behind some recent sport-related Broadway shows have just gotten the rights to tell the story of boxing great Joe Louis.

Fran Kirmser and her producing partner Tony Ponturo said Wednesday that they’ve acquired the exclusive global, theatrical and movie rights to Louis’ life story. If they turn it into a stage story, Ponturo and Kirmser will have their fourth sports-related play since 2010. Louis’ life certainly has plenty of fodder for a dramatic retelling, especially his rise to becoming arguably the world’s finest heavyweight champion and his decades of conflict with the Internal Revenue Service over millions in back taxes and interest. It would be the latest boxing-related show in New York following the musical “Rocky,” based on Sylvester Stallone’s film.

Louis’ history is highlighted by his two fights with Max Schmeling, the German champion whose victory in their first bout was hailed by Adolf Hitler. Louis demolished Schmeling in their rematch on June 22, 1938.

After Louis claimed the heavyweight title in 1937, he held it for more than 11 years, making 25 defenses to set a record unlikely to be broken. Louis’ influence in both boxing and race relations has been immense. He died in 1981.

Ponturo and Kirmser have a long history with mining the theatricality in sports stories. Their “Lombardi,” about the Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi, turned into a modest hit, but 2012’s “Magic/Bird,” about the friendship between basketball legends Earvin “Magic” Johnson and Larry Bird, didn’t do as well, closing after only 37 shows. The third — a look at the New York Yankees called “Bronx Bombers” — lasted less than a month this year.

Kirmser and Ponturo will serve as executive producers of Legendary Pictures’ feature film version of their “Lombardi.”

___

Mark Kennedy can be reached at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits

Craig Bowen and Jake Miller made history when they became Indiana’s first gay couple to tie the knot after the state’s same-sex marriage ban was struck down June 25.

Bowen and Miller, who have been together for eight years, told the Indy Star that they planned to celebrate the union with a champagne toast after the ceremony.

“Our parents don’t know yet, so they might be a little mad at us,” Miller said, according to the publication. “I sent Craig a text and said, ‘Hey, do you want to get married today?'”

WISH-TV reporter Jim Shella also tweeted a photo of the happy couple:

First gay marriage in Indiana pic.twitter.com/ASHrOOiv0z

— Jim Shella (@shellawish) June 25, 2014

H/T Towleroad

Rep. Charlie Rangel defeated state Sen. Adriano Espaillat in the New York Democratic primary for U.S. Congress.

Rangel, who also faced off against Harlem minister Rev. Michael Walrond Jr. in the primary, previously said he was confident he’d defeat Espaillat, who he defeated in the 2012 Democratic primary by fewer than 1,000 votes.

Rangel, a member of Congress since 1971, failed to nab the New York Times’ endorsement, but was backed by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and former President Bill Clinton. The times also chose not to endorse Rangel in 2010 and 2012.

Had he won both the primary and the general election in November, Espaillat could have been the first Dominican-born member of Congress. As HuffPost’s Amanda Terkel and Samantha Lachman reported earlier, Espaillat had been hitting Rangel over his pro-corporate votes, calling him “a friend of Wall Street and not a friend of 116th Street or 181st Street.”

Rory Uphold is the creative groove behind HelLA, a smart, witty web series about living on planet LA. A friend zapped me one of her videos, “Pretentious Hollywood.” Two friends run into each other on the street and the small talk revolves around — what else — but a grocery list chock-full of busy. Volunteering at a downtown women’s shelter, working with inner-city youth, organizing a 5K and taking in a disabled dog from a rescue shelter — the actress’ earnest delivery is dead-on, which is part of what makes the simple premise so funny and so sad. We all have people like this in our lives, and some of us ARE those people: knee-deep in the addiction to busy.

Busy has replaced the luxury car, the sprawling home or the designer handbag as the status symbol of the moment. Really, if you’re not running car pool, cooking a dinner for your best gal pals, chairing the library renovation committee, keeping up with Pilates and building a school in Africa, then you’re doing it wrong. At least that’s what we tell ourselves and anyone else within earshot. The telling of the busyness, the exhausting mouth relay we sustain to reassure our self-importance is almost more important than the doing of the things that keep us so damn busy.

After tumbling out of grad school, I landed a job at a small, private college teaching as well as acting as the assistant director for their new women’s leadership center. Busy snuck up on me and latched itself onto my ankle, python-style. Fewer than a hundred emails in my inbox felt weird. One day, my brother asked, “Who do you have lunch with?” And I stared at him. “What do you mean?” I said. “No one. I’m too busy working and catching up on things to grab lunch with other people.” Ick. Gross.

Women are among the most ardent devotees to the culture of busy. The fourth or sixth wave feminism perks have finally kicked in with a resounding YES to having/doing/being it all ricocheting around America. Why not get credit for it? Science and socio-economics have gifted many middle-class, educated women with time and opportunity, but neither of these things are theirs to waste. Instead, the race is on to prove that you’re worthy of this legacy, that you’re not about to “lean out” any time soon, you couldn’t possibly even if you wanted because, hey, way too busy.

There’s no honor in busy, there’s no reward; there’s only kinesis eroding the now, pushing us further away from the shore of here. It’s turned us into walking news tickers. Busy is the worst kind of drug, filling us with an inflated sense of ourselves, stealing moments from us because who has the time to sit on the back patio on a summer’s evening doing nothing in particular but letting night creep in around you? What’s wrong with you? Weak. Lame.

I’m as guilty as anyone else in feeling the pinch of pressure to, literally, keep up with the Joneses. I admit to rising to the bait of competition in tallying up my activities against someone else’s life and work. I accepted this as the new normal. One day I was on the phone with a friend listening to her recite the litany of errands, responsibilities, tasks and obligations she had been fulfilling that day. I felt like I was drowning in the eddy of her busy wake. What no one tells you is that some of life’s biggest revolutions unfold in quiet, dark pockets of ordinary moments. The desire to chime in with my own laundry list of stuff disappeared, vanishing into the ozone like a cartoon genie. Nope o’clock, I thought.

And so it was that I simply decided I was over busy. Yes, just like that, like waking up one day committed to vegetarianism, like finally getting algebra, like the moment you know you love your person. “No thank you, please,” I said, cribbing the firm politeness of my 4-year-old nephew.

I refuse to feel guilty about the time I spend or how I spend it. I want to cradle time, not chase it away. I want to survey my day and think about what I did, not what got done. I won’t apologize for doing nothing on any given evening. I won’t be made to feel less than because of the way I invest or choose not to invest my energies. So, sorry busy, I’m out, and we are never getting back together.

This blog post was co-authored by Jonathan Camuzeaux and published on EDF Voices.

Put Republican Hank Paulson, Independent Mike Bloomberg, and Democrat Tom Steyer together, and out comes one of the more unusual — and unusually impactful — climate reports.

This year alone has seen a couple of IPCC tomes, an entry by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the most recent U.S. National Climate Assessment.

The latest, Risky Business, stands apart for a number of reasons, and it’s timely with the nation debating proposed, first-ever limits on greenhouse gas emissions from nearly 500 power plants.

Tri-partisan coalition tackles climate change

The report is significant, first, because we have a tri-partisan group spanning George W. Bush’s treasury secretary Paulson, former mayor of New York Bloomberg, and environmentalist investor Steyer — all joining forces to get a message through.

That list of names alone should make one sit up and listen.

Last time a similar coalition came together was in the dog days of 2009, when Senators Lindsay Graham, Joe Lieberman, and John Kerry were drafting the to-date last viable (and ultimately unsuccessful) Senate climate bill.

Global warming is hitting home

Next, Risky Business is important because it shows how climate change is hitting home. No real surprise there for anyone paying attention to globally rising temperatures, but the full report goes into much more granular details than most, focusing on impacts at county, state and regional levels.

Risky Business employs the latest econometric techniques to come up with numbers that should surprise even the most hardened climate hawks and wake up those still untouched by reality. Crop yield losses, for example, could go as high as 50 to 70 percent (!) in some Midwestern and Southern states, absent agricultural adaptation.

The report is also replete with references to heat strokes, sky-rocketing electricity demand for air conditioning, and major losses from damages to properties up and down our ever-receding coast lines.

Not precisely uplifting material, yet this report does a better job than most in laying it all out.

Financial markets can teach us a climate lesson

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, Risky Business gets the framing exactly right: Climate change is replete with deep-seated risks and uncertainties.

In spite of all that we know about the science, there’s lots more that we don’t. And none of that means that climate change isn’t bad. As the report makes clear, what we don’t know could potentially be much worse.

Climate change, in the end, is all about risk management.

Few are better equipped to face up to that reality than the trio spearheading the effort; Paulson, Bloomberg and Steyer have made their careers (and fortunes) in the financial sector. In fact, as United States Treasury secretary between 2006 and 2009, Paulson was perhaps closest of anyone to the latest, global example of what happens when risks get ignored.

We cannot — must not — ignore risk when it comes to something as global as global warming. After all, for climate, much like for financial markets, it’s not over ’til the fat tail zings.