- We’re rapidly approaching the time when the men carrying giant butterfly nets and wearing white jumpsuits need to come and take Joe Paterno away, because clearly Joe Pa is becoming more senile by the day. You can debate whether he’s actually already dead and the Penn State athletic department has been pulling a Weekend at Bernie’s with him for years, but you can’t deny that the old man is not right in the head. Presiding over a team that is increasingly delinquent and out of control, Paterno decided to set another bad example for his players to follow by going road rage-er on the streets of the Penn State campus last week. After being involved in a near-fender bender with another car, Joe Pa got out of his car, wagged his finger at the woman driving the other car and told her that she’d better watch it, because he had her license plate number and that he would call the cops on her. When the woman’s husband, sitting in the passenger’s seat, got out and said to Joe Pa, “Hey, that’s my wife you’re talking to!”, Paterno shot back, “That’s your problem.” When the woman threatened to call the cops on Paterno, he egged her on to do just that and she obliged. Way to go, Joe Pa, turning a simple traffic snafu into a full-blown road-rage incident involving the police. Great example for your players, coach. That’ll show them how to keep their anger in check and act responsibly, by acting like a ginormous ass hat who can’t keep his own temper under control. I’m actually amazed that with those four-inch-thick, tri-focal Coke-bottle glasses you wear that you’re even allowed to have a driver’s license, but if you’re going to have one and operate anything larger than a motorized scooter, you need to learn how to keep yourself under control. People are funny like that; they don’t care if you are college football’s all-time winningest coach or not when you start road raging on them. Act like a grown-up, Joe Pa, maybe worry about coach a football team whose season started out so well but is now nose-diving into another disappointing campaign.
- So South Africa is apparently the bizarro United States of America. No, they don’t have an über-competent president who doesn’t needlessly start major wars foreign countries, who has a firm grasp of the English language and who has more than four working brain cells – well, maybe they do, but that’s not where I’m going with this. Actually, it’s the bizarro U.S. because in South Africa, the government is actually giving valuable land back to native tribes instead of ripping that land from the tribes and cramming them onto crowded reservations. The Nama tribe, which had its land taken by a diamond-mining company more than 80 years ago, won the nation’s longest-running court case this week and has been given back possession of its land. The tribe lodged their claim to the section of coastal land back in 1997, when South Africa’s decades of whites-only rule ended. The court ruling reversed the 1927 decision to award control of the land in and around the town of Alexander Bay to Alexkor Ltd., a state-owned mining operation which used the land for a work program for poor white citizens. Now, the land is returning to its rightful owners, which is actually a lot quicker than any reparations to the many Indian tribes that we here in the U.S. robbed of their land a century and a half ago. No word on whether the Nama tribe will be putting up a casino on their regained land, but all the Indian tribes here in the United States should in no way view this as a hopeful sign that they too will be given back their original land. This is America, and we’re in no hurry to make things right with the native tribes we’ve screwed over.
- Could this be the year that the American Music Awards stop being a joke and gain some legitimacy, separating themselves from the pack of self-congratulatory awards shows and contributing something worthwhile to the entertainment industry? Don’t be ridiculous, that’s not happening this year or any year in the near future. Yes, the show is still more than a month away, but a quick perusal of the list of nominees clearly shows that there is no credibility to be found for the AMA’s. When your nominees include not one but two former American Karaoke contestants (Carrie Underwood and Daughtry), a hack pop warbler like Fergie, a faux hip hopper/dancing pop diva like Beyonce, the most fraudulent bunch of pansy poseurs in music in the form of Maroon 5, a cross between Britney Spears, Kylie Minogue and Tiffany in Avril Lavigne, the weasel-on-helium-voiced, unoriginal Michael Jackson rip-off (Justin Timberlake) and the Latina Britney (Jennifer Lopez), your show is not only illegitimate, it’s the biggest collection of terrible music this side of a New Kids on the Block reunion tour. Nice of the AMA’s to pigeonhole the White Stripes into the Best Alternative Artists category as their only nomination, because heaven knows that Linkin Park, Maroon 5 and Nickelback deserve to be nominated in the Best Rock Group category above the Stripes – no, wait, they don’t. The hilarious part of all of this is that you, the general public, can go online to http://www.abc.com/primetime/ama/index and vote on the three finalists in each category, now that the actual good artists have mostly been weeded out and the run-of-the-mill, same-old same-old nominees that are so mainstream and blasé that they make you want to puke are all that’s left. This is worse than a presidential ballot with W. and Hank Clinton as the only two choices. How about you let me have a write-in choice for each award, or maybe allow me to vote for the dissolution of the American Music Awards because they’re the biggest freaking joke in the entire music industry, either one would be acceptable.
- Smallville goes old school and I like it. For the first time in what seems forever, nearly the entire episode of the series took place inside the city limits of Smallville. There were even old show staples like small town festivals, meteor freaks, Clark and Lana together and a prototypical Smallville heist gone wrong. Most of the action was due to three visitors whose meteor powers allowed them to control, alter and create weather, skills that came in handy as they came to town looking to steal a treasure map buried in a time capsule and recover some legendary buried gold bars. Posing as contestants in the Miss Sweet Corn pageant, the trio of beauties trimmed their number to two by freezing one of their group to death when she wanted to bail on their plan. Clark’s cousin Kara, wanting to fit in on Earth, also decided to enter the pageant. That this led to several minutes of Ms. Ira Vandervoort on screen in a skimpy bikini was a nice fringe benefit, to say the least. Not that she’s going to supplant my all-time favorite TV hottie, Kristin Kreuk, atop the Smallville beauties list, but Vandervoort is at least making a race of it. It was also funny to see Clark in the role of teaching his cousin how to use her abilities and remember back to early episodes in the series when Clark and his father went through the same things. Speaking of going through the same things, Lana’s return to Smallville felt like old times, not only because she’s left and returned before (Paris, Metropolis), but because she and Clark in intense scenes in the Kent barn is a staple of most every season of the show. Conveniently, through the magic of TV, her return is made easier when Lex Luthor convinces the district attorney to drop all charges against Lana for faking her own death, meaning that no one will ever be held accountable for anything that happened with that fake death, not Lana, Lex or the LuthorCorp employee who falsely confessed to the crime because Lionel Luthor paid him to. Speaking of Lionel, he’s still AWOL, but he’ll be back, bet on it. With Lana staying at the farm with Clark and Kara, life is definitely interesting, although Kara threw a curveball at Clark by reminding him that no matter how much he wants to be, he’ll never be human and that living on the farm with Lana and growing old together just isn't realistic. That Lana confesses at show’s end that this is exactly what she wants certainly puts Clark in an interesting spot. Also in an interesting spot is the returning Jimmy Olsen, who for some reason is jones-ing after Kara even though he has a girlfriend, Chloe Sullivan. But there were definitely sparks between Ms. Kara Kent and Jimmy, so stay tuned on that. Jimmy also unknowingly stuck foot in mouth by vowing that he and Chloe would hunt down all the meteor freaks in Smallville, which apparently sets up next week’s episode in which Chloe seeks out a radical, rogue doctor, played by Dean Cain of 1990s Superman fame, to “cure” her of her meteor powers. A showdown between Kara and Lex appears to be imminent as well, because Lex knows it was Kara who saved him from drowning after the dam burst and he wants to know how. In the end of this episode, the meteor freak beauties were stopped by the Clark-Kara tandem, but they both have a long way to go when it comes to co-existing and understanding one another. They also have to try to understand the buried treasure they found where the gold was supposed to be buried, because that treasure is a crystal/key of Kryptonian origin and it doesn’t belong to either of them. Kara believes the owner of the mysterious piece of alien metal is still on Earth, so who is this stranger? That and more to be revealed as the season goes on, but for one night at least it was good to take a trip back in time, at least metaphorically, to earlier times in this series.
- Normally I wait until after Sundays to crack all things NFL in a given week because once the games are played, there’s more clarity to situations, but oh my freaking gawd, would ESPN and the NFL Network stop treating the f’ing Cowboys-Patriots game like it’s the f’ing Super Bowl, World Series and NBA Finals all rolled into one? Good grief, guys, leading off every SportsCenter or NFL Total Access with four or five stories about the game is insane. I don’t need daily reports from both teams’ practice facilities like this is World War III or breakdowns of each individual unit or position on each team. Believe it or not, the team that wins this game is not the champion of the NFL for 2007. In fact, although both teams are near slam dunks to make the playoffs, winning this game will not clinch a playoff berth for either one of them, nor will it clinch a conference or division title. Roger Goodell will not be handing out the Lombardi Trophy to the winner at game’s end. Stop reporting breathlessly every minute development in regards to this game and shoving a microphone in the face of every player from either team that you can corner in the locker room. Bill Belichick is irritating enough normally, I don’t need your blowout coverage to magnify his presence on screen ten times to ratchet up the level of irritation. Amazingly enough, there’s even another undefeated team in the NFL, the Indianapolis Colts, and with a bye this week, they are the only team assured of being undefeated when this week ends, not the Cowboys or Patriots. This was going to be a great game for me to watch, but thanks to these two networks going so far overboard, I’m literally sick of the game and it hasn’t even been played yet. I don’t care to watch more than a few minutes of it now and plan on doing so with the sound muted when I do watch so as to avoid the absurd hyperbole that the in-game coverage will surely be. This is a prime, prime example of ESPN and NFL Network not knowing when to pull back, to rein themselves in and tone done their intense focus a bit so as to not burn everyone out on a big game before it actually happens. Heck, there are several other great matchups this week, including Redskins (3-1) vs. Packers (5-0), Jaguars (3-1) vs. Texans (3-2), the first place (yes, first place) Oakland Raiders (2-2) vs. the possibly resurgent San Diego Chargers (2-3) and the first place (yes, again, first place) Arizona Cardinals (3-2) vs. the first-place Carolina Panthers (3-2). Yet if you were counting on ESPN or the NFL Network for your news, you would hardly know that these other games were taking place because they’re so focused on Cowboys-Patriots. Bad news for these two networks, but at least one of these two teams won't even be in the Super Bowl, I guarantee it. Heck, I don’t think either of them will make it, but I’d get shot at ESPN if I uttered such blasphemy. But you heard it here first, the Super Bowl teams will come from places like Indianapolis, Green Bay, Seattle, Pittsburgh or Washington…..
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