- I was really torn between watching a Monday Night Football game that was a total mismatch, the Rockies-Padres wild-card tiebreaker game to make it to the playoffs and episodes of Heroes and Prison Break….no I wasn’t. I watched the latter two and then when they were done, I locked into the baseball game for a thrill ride of a contest that ended in dramatic, controversial fashion. In a game that decided what the first 162 games of the regular season could not decide, the Rockies and Padres went back and forth for 13 innings, with the Rockies winning an epic 9-8 contest that saw two blown calls and a blown save by baseball’s all-time saves leader that has many fans in San Diego tearing down Trevor Hoffman, a man they’ve cheered for more than a decade. The two major controversies came in the sixth inning and the last inning, respectively. In the sixth, a ball hit by Colorado’s Garrett Atkins that looked to go over the fence, hit the seats and bounce back onto the field was ruled in play instead of being a home run, which would have been the correct call. Those who are saying replays on the play are inconclusive are missing a key point: no ball that hits off the top of a padded wall is going to bounce as far, as fast as that ball did. It struck something solid and firm, namely the seats. However, it was ruled in play and kept the Rockies from scoring…..until the 13th inning, when the Padres pushed across two runs in the top half of the inning and the Rockies countered with three to win it in the bottom of the inning. The last run scored on a disputed play in which Colorado’s Matt Holiday slid into home and appeared to miss touching the plate while Padres catcher Michael Barrett blocked home. Replays were again inconclusive, but home plate umpire Tim McClelland ruled Holliday safe, so that’s that. Again, everyone is missing something key in discussing this play: Barrett never tagged Holliday anyhow. He lost the ball before he could make the tag and after he recovered it, McClelland’s safe call caused Barrett to stop trying to make the tag and walk off the field. So to this point, 24 hours later, Holliday still has not touched home plate and Barrett has still not tagged him. Those three runs to win the game came off Hoffman, who blew a crucial save for the second time in three days and cost his team a shot at the playoffs. San Diego fans want his head on a pike, but a contrite Hoffman stood up and took the blame for the loss and it should be left at that. He didn’t get the job done, period. It was a great game, and for someone who didn’t have a rooting interest, it was a great way to start the opening week of the MLB playoffs.
- That’s the Heroes we all know and love. Last night’s episode, coming on the heels of an entertaining-but-erratic season premiere, was flat-out awesome, still whirling us around the globe and the space/time continuum but with a lot more coherence and flow. A large part of the reason that this episode was better is that our pal Peter Petrelli was on screen a lot more often. Milo Ventimiglia is great in this role and seeing Peter start to get a grip on his powers and piece together who he is was cool. He’s in trouble with some common Irish thugs who think he stole the shipment of iPods that they were going to steal, but ironically Peter doesn’t realize that with all of his powers (some of which he still doesn’t remember that he has yet) he could easily steal the box containing all of his belongings and possessions and get back more of his memories. There was also plenty of Hiro Nakamura comedy, with the diminutive, bespectacled time traveler helping his friend, Japanese legend Taketo Kensei, by putting on Kensei’s armor and using his ability to stop and bend time to perform feats of heroism in Kensei’s name. Another twist is added when the real Kensei is shot with arrows and appears to die, only to recover and heal himself, a la Claire Bennet. Speaking of Claire, she continues to try to blend in as a normal high school student but new friend West, with his own secret ability, makes it tough and he even sees her cut off one of her own toes and grow it back so she can know how far her regenerative powers really go. I didn’t exactly get the point of Claire having her new car stolen at school, but I have a feeling that there’s more to it than a simple car jacking, so stay tuned on that. I’m also not completely sure who it is that Mohinder Suresh and Mr. Bennet are trying to bring down with their scheme, but they used to resources of “the Company” that Mohinder has infiltrated to bring the mysterious Haitian from Season One back into the picture. The previews for next week showed our first glimpses of Nikki/Jessica (Ali Larter) and Micah (Noah Gray-Cabey), so htat’s something to look forward to. There’s also the saga of Maya and Alejandro, the Latino twins who are trying to reach America for a cure to their mysterious powers, which we also learned more about last night. As it turns out, Maya’s tears cause other people to have some sort of seizure/reaction where they die and blood comes from their own eyes like tears, Alejandro seems to be a yin to Maya’s yang, because by holding her hands and reciting some weird chant, he can reverse the effects of her powers and his own eyes do some weird color-changing and mutation. Also on the schedule last night was Prison Break episodes, which wasn’t quite as good as Heroes on this night but was still awesome. The dynamic between James Whistler and Michael Scofield continues to evolve, and anyone who thought that Whistler was some shrinking violet, wallflower type who would just be grateful to Scofield for his help was mistaken. Whistler, an Australian with a bad attitude and a mean streak of his own, is clearly not going to follow blindly wherever Scofield leads. He revealed that his involvement with “the Company” (there seem to be a lot of “Companies” going on, eh?) came when he took a mystery man out on a charter fishing trip and two months later, some “government types” came around, asking questions about where he’d taken the man and what they’d seen. This took place near Seattle, but Whistler fled to Panama, got into a bar fight and as previously stated, killed the son of Panama City’s mayor, thus his presence in SONA. On the outside, both Lincoln and Whistler’s girlfriend continued their fight to get their respective loved ones out of SONA, but Linc’s episode also included an ill-fated attempt to rescue Sara and L.J. when he and Michael figured out that they were being held captive in the town of Santa Rosa. Obviously the rescue attempt wasn’t going to be successful this early in the season, especially not when Sarah Wayne Callies is no longer on the show. The most likely outcome seems to be that she’ll be killed off somehow during the season while in captivity or trying to escape, because there’s no way you can try to recast the part and pass off a new actress in the role. Back in SONA, in typical PB style, we saw Michael in various moments of careful analysis of his surroundings, flashbacks of goings on at the prison and details that you know are going to be a part of his escape plan. So far the hints seem to involved the fact that the only known way out of SONA is if you’re dead, which would lead you to believe that the escape plan will involved he and Whistler being thought dead, although as always with this show, the obvious and likely are usually the opposite of what happens. So it was a great night of TV, which means a lot this season because the rest of the week contains only one really good show (Smallville), and it’s not on until Thursday, yikes……
- Maybe I’m biased on this next one because I’m a marathoner myself, but a truly amazing sports feat took place over the weekend and odds are that most sports fans didn’t hear anything about it. Haile Gebrselassie, one of the top distance runners in the world, set a new world marathon record, running an amazing time of 2 hours, 4 minutes and 26 seconds in the Berlin Marathon. To break that down for you a bit, that’s a pace of 4:xx per mile. It wasn’t more than a few decades ago that breaking the four-minute mile barrier was a huge deal, and based on personal experience I can say that even running a marathon at a eight-minute per-mile pace is tough. Yet here’s Gebrselassie, running an absurd pace of 4:45. I tip my hat to him, and not just because he was busy running that 2:04:26 while I was running a 3:44:59 in a different marathon on a different continent. Not nearly enough people recognize and respect marathon runners, especially the elite ones, and this is a great sporting accomplishment. Well done, H., you deserve a whole lot of respect for this one.
- I’m not really pro or con when it comes to The Dr. Phil Show because who cares if some egotistical, arrogant shrink wants to gravy train off of his fame from being a friend of Oprah Winfrey to score his own talk show where he brings on screwed up losers and tries to help them out? If he does help these people, then good for him and for them. If not, who gives a crap, because it’s a freaking TV talk show, so how much can you really expect? However, I do have one particular bone to pick with the good doctor, and that’s this: how the hell can Dr. Phil’s show have seasons, aren’t those for shows with plots and characters, not some souped up therapy session masquerading as a talk show? Yet there was a commercial promoting the new season of The Dr. Phil Show, just like NBC promoted a new season of Heroes. Let me help you out, Phil. You don’t have a plot, you don’t have storylines and you don’t have an actual legitimate TV program. You go on every day and conduct a glorified therapy session for clueless losers who look to you as some sort of life savant. Unless and until you mix in characters, story arcs, soundtracks, sound stages, special effects, action scenes and something other than one show after another dealing with different psychological issues, you don’t have seasons. How the hell do you even determine where one of your “seasons” ends and the next one begins? Do your “season finales” have cliffhangers where you try to help someone and something goes terribly wrong, but we have to wait all summer to find out what really happened? Again, I’m not saying you can’t do your thing and have your show, just don’t pretend that you’re something you’re not, namely a legitimate TV series.
- If I ever run for elected office, one of the issues in my platform is going to be ridding the world of The Guinness Book of World Records. Nothing encourages more morons around the world to attempt idiotic, pointless and waste-of-time feats in the hopes of achieving “greatness” like this absolute plague of a book. In the hopes of getting their name published in a massive waste of paper that only other losers with aspirations for similarly ridiculous feats ever read, people do things like compile 40-foot-thick balls of yarn, line up with a couple thousand other a-holes to play the famous opening riff from Smoke on the Water or they see how many people they can shove into a 1979 VW Beetle. Then there are ass hats like Russell “Rock Bottom” Byars of Franklin, Pa., who has so pathetic a life and such a dearth of friends that he went out to a stretch of river near his home, about 70 miles north of Pittsburgh, set up his video camera and recorded his “feat” of skipping a stone across the water 51 times, with the stone traveling an estimated 250 feet. Why videotape it, you ask? Because Byars submitted the tape to the equally pathetic people who publish The Guinness Book of World Records and they actually did a detailed analysis of the video to make sure that Byars’ effort was legitimate. No word on whether he will also be brought in for a drug test to ensure that he was not on any performance-enhancing drugs at the time, but I wouldn’t put it past these people. Someone needs to inform Byars, though, that he may have a world record in one of the most pointless, peripheral activities known to man, but holding that record does not make him famous, cool, great or a person of significance. No one knows who you are and no one cares, R., so go back to your one-bedroom trailer and make sure I never hear from you again unless you actually do something worthwhile.
- I’ll skip right past all the bad chess-related puns and talk about former world chess champion Gary Kasparov’s decision to enter the Russian presidential race sans lame jokes. That Kasparov was selected as the candidate for the Other Russian coalition isn't a huge surprise; he’s been active in politics for a long time now and in a country where opposing the president is almost a given (sound familiar, America?), you have to like his chances as long as he sticks to the “I’m nothing like Vlad Putin” card. After a president who seems determined to drag the country back to communism, nearly any candidate has to seem like an upgrade for Russians (again, sound familiar, America?). Kasparov received 379 of 498 first-place votes in a national congress held by the opposition coalition, but his candidacy still needs to be registered and because the opposition coalition is not officially in registered and can’t take part in elections for the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, which will play a big part in the selection process for the candidates for president. The move to put Kasparov on the ballot is likely to be blocked, so his chances of defeating the candidate endorsed by Putin and the country’s ruling party are not good. But if he fails here, G. Kasparov can always go back to playing the supercomputer Big Blue in chess matches for man v. machine supremacy.
- The weekend has come and gone at the box office, and the Rock has once again succeeded in his quest to layeth the smacketh down on the candy asses of all the other movies currently in our nation’s theaters. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, now light years removed from his career in WWE, has scored with his second-consecutive No. 1 film, The Game Plan, a football-themed comedy on the heels of last year’s Gridiron Gang, a football story with a dramatic, real-life-story slant. The Game Plan grossed $22.7 million on its opening weekend, edging out runner-up The Kingdom, which came in at $17.7 million despite rocky reviews. In spite of an opening weekend that exceeded expectations and that top spot in the earnings race, I don’t think I’ll be seeing Game Plan any time soon. The Rock is great and I loved him as a wrestler and even in Gridiron Gang and Walking Tall, but a Disney comedy about football is where I’m drawing the line. So I hope the film does well, just as long as none of my dollars contribute to its success.
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