- I would normally be opposed to any TV show making repeated use of the Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen theme, but I’m going to give last night’s episode of Greek a pass. Casey (Spencer Grammer) and best friend Ashleigh (Amber Stevens) were in a fight even though they both describe their relationship as being like that of the identical, waifish and drug-loving (allegedly) Olsen twins. The episode as a whole was good although slightly scattershot, with the main storylines being the quest of Casey and the Zeta Beta Zeta sorority to put on an educational play for a local group of underprivileged students to fulfill their charitable work quota and the plight of Rusty (Jacob Zachar) as he feels pressured to take charge in his relationship with girlfriend Jen K. (seriously, it’s getting old quickly referring to her as Jen K. all the time, I don’t know many people who refer to friends or girlfriends using their last initial) and blurts out the “I love you” bomb in the spur of the moment. Somehow that led to Rusty, Cappie and Calvin (Paul James) heading to a local strip club for the mythical “lunch buffet,” apparently a place Cappie often goes to drown his sorrows. The boys end up in a pinch when their credit cards are rejected and they owe a $275 tab, but it’s Casey to the rescue. The running gag of how many majors Cappie has had and changed to continues to be one of the funnier parts of the show, as every time Rusty needs advice on a different subject, his helpful fraternity president chimes in with surprisingly good input and Rusty realizes, “You used to be a ______________ major.” Last night it was physics, but the gag continues to be funny mostly because all of us know or knew someone who had at least a half-dozen majors in college and seemed to switch them more often than most of us change our socks. A good capper for the show was Dale (Clark Duke), the uber-religious and dorky roommate of Rusty, and his band Darwin Lied rocking out at the end of the Zeta Beta show, much to the amusement of everyone. I enjoyed that part more because it meant I didn’t have to hear Dale spouting his nonstop religious clichés and propaganda, fulfilling every negative stereotype people tend to have about Christians. Oh, one last thing: exactly how plausible is it that when a frat guy, in this case Cappie, is depressed about a girl, he takes out his frustrations by cleaning the frat house? Again, I don’t know any guy who has ever been in a frat who has worked out his pent-up aggression by cleaning. Drinking? Yes. Fighting? Yes. Sleeping? Yes. Playing video games? Yes. But cleaning, not so much. Still, it was an enjoyable episode and it was interesting to see that a TV series could realistically portray the disgustingness of strip club food, yet Pacman Jones continues to sell the story that when he went to an NYC strip club the night before his meeting with Roger Goodell, he only went there to get something to eat, as if food is the reason anyone goes to a strip club, ever. Only a few episodes remain in this season for Greek, so set the TiVo for Mondays at 9 p.m. on ABC Family and get in on a great show.
- You might be selling contrition, Mike Vick, but I’m not buying it. In fact, I’m calling out your alleged remorse and regret as you faced the cameras yesterday as 100% fake. The clip was played about 587 times by ESPN throughout the day, so there was ample opportunity to hear what Vick had to say. He apologized to everyone he could possibly apologize to, except for the dogs he so brutally murdered and those he didn’t get around the murdering. He called his actions immature and said he needs to grow up, but there were key points missing from his monologue. First, Vick never said the words “criminal” or “felon”, both of which are words that describe what he now is. He said he “allowed” things to happen that should have not taken place, clearly intending to paint himself as a bystander in much of the wrongdoing who is kinda sorta guilty because he didn’t stop the activities but also wasn’t an active participant. Vick also maintains that he didn’t really gamble on the dog fights because although he supplied money for the purses, funded the whole operation and lost money when his dogs lost, he didn’t get any money when his dogs won. Oh, ok, this is one of those charitable gambling operations? Y’know, the kind where you put money in and if you lose the bet, you lose your money, but if you win, you don’t take any of the money from winning. I see these all the time, charitable gamblers looking to bestow financial gain on others rather than selfishly grabbing their own winnings. This is a ginormous spin job by Vick and his legal team, trying to avoid being pinned with the scarlet “G” that will land him in major hot water with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. Problem is, Goodell isn’t buying it, because he has a brain just like most of us and he’s smart enough to realize that the facts clearly indicate that Vick gambled, period. For everyone that’s buying Mike Vick’s apology and saying this is the first step in his road to redemption, my advice is to wait. Wait until he serves his time in prison and wait until he’s been out of prison and stayed away from dogfighting and other criminal activity for at least as long as the five or six years he was reportedly involved with dogfighting. Come talk to me then and you might have an argument that Vick really is a changed man and that he’s sorry for what he did, not just sorry that he got caught.
- I don’t know for sure what Chicago Bears linebacker Lance Briggs was doing when he held out of training camp in a contract dispute, but I can tell you for certain one thing he wasn’t doing, namely applying for membership to Mensa. Briggs went full-on knucklehead early Monday morning after crashing his car into a lamppost, light standard or other roadside object, electing to flee the scene, call a tow truck and initially report his car as being stolen. According to Briggs, he called the police back ten minutes later and admitted that his $350,000 Lamborghini was not actually stolen but rather that he had wrecked it himself. The road he crashed on is the primary road that one would take from the downtown entertainment district in Chicago to the upscale suburban neighborhoods where Briggs lives. Reading between the lines, a cynical person might think that Briggs was out late, clubbing and drinking, then crashed his car on the way home while he was intoxicated and fled the scene to avoid having to deal with the police. Again, that’s just speculation, but what’s not speculative is that police have charged Briggs with leaving the scene of an accident, failure to properly report an accident and improper lane usage. Of course, those charges are a lot better than getting hit with a D.U.I., so if a person did what Briggs did because he or she was intoxicated, you could say that they made smart business decision, so to speak. Some misdemeanor traffic charges are a lot easier to deal with than a D.U.I., that’s for sure. Whether that’s what Briggs did, we may never know for sure, but what other reason could a person have for fleeing the scene of a one-car accident like that? It looks awfully suspicious, but here’s hoping that Briggs is telling the truth and he simply panicked when the accident happened.
- We’re all dealt our cards in life. Some of us are intelligent, well-educated individuals who make our way through life on our wits. Others among us are given great musical or artistic skills and make use of those to build our lives. A third category is the people with tremendous athletic ability who create a name for themselves by using those skills to succeed in sports. Then there are those of us like Miss Teen South Carolina, who are extremely deficient in the intelligence category but have the gift of being incredibly hot and not much else. Caitlin Upton, Miss Teen South Carolina, a girl who went almost totally brain dead when asked why one-fifth of Americans can’t locate their own country on a map. “I personally believe U.S. Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation that don’t have maps. I believe our education, such as, in South Africa and Iraq, everywhere, such as, I believe they should have our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. or South Africa and Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future.” When asked on NBC’s Today show what happened to her, Upton replied that she was “just overwhelmed” by the question and barely heard it. She just “drew a blank” and “misunderstood.” Yeah, because that’s such a difficult question, with all of its one parts and incredibly simple premise. Then again, who really cares? She’s a beauty pageant contestant, after all, she’s not looking to run for president (although yes, she is still smarter than our current one). Besides, have you seen this girl? She’s freaking hot, and let’s be honest, that’s more than enough to get by in life. Pamela Anderson has done just fine by being hot and not much else, as have Carmen Electra, the late Anna Nicole Smith in her career and many, many others. She may not be able to understand simple questions, formulate coherent responses to those questions or speak the English language at anything higher than a first-grade level, but I honestly don’t give a crap. Just throw up a few pictures of this chick on your screen and you’ll understand why it doesn’t matter that she knows nothing about Iraq and has the same IQ as a bag of pork rinds.
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