- With the baseball playoffs preempting Prison Break last night, it was a night for Heroes to shine, which the show did with a really strong episode, a good, gripping, dramatic show that introduced some new heroes but unfortunately it also completely excluded two of the show’s best characters, Peter Petrelli and Hiro Nakamura, along with Hiro’s sidekick Ando and his new friend, Japanese legend Takezo Kensei. That the previews for next week’s episode promise a big dose of my man P. Petrelli only makes up for last night’s exclusion partially. But the characters who were on screen delivered great performances, including a new hero. Down in New Orleans, Micah, he of the ability to manipulate machines with a simple touch, is having a bit of a tough time adjusting to life with his cousins and grandma. His cousin Monica is more like Micah than either of them know, though, because she has the power to “download” and replicate things she sees done on TV, things like making a tomato rose or duplicating the “619” wrestling maneuver of WWE superstar Rey Mysterio. She does these things almost as a reflex, but this is the first time she’s really recognized her ability. She uses it to foil a robbery, knocking the would-be robber through a glass pane and sending him running. Micah, despite being warned by mom Niki not to use his powers before she left for New York to be “cured” of her own powers, uses his way with machines to hack into his cousin’s TV and allow them both to watch a wrestling pay-per-view that they don’t have the money to buy. Out in sunny Southern California, the Bennet family is back to its old habits of lying to one another, keeping secrets and hatching schemes. Claire doesn’t want to stop seeing Wes, the boy with the power to fly, whom she has become fast friends with, so she lies to her dad about what she’s spending her time on. She doesn’t want Wes coming face-to-face with the man who once abducted him and took him in for the Company for testing, and her father is that man. So she uses an offer to join the cheerleading squad as a diversion and talks her father into allowing her to be a cheerleader once again, something he’d expressly forbidden, except she’s not really going to cheerleading practice – she’s out with Wes. Noah Bennet, a.k.a. H.R.G., has secrets of his own. His plot to take down the company takes an international turn when the Haitian comes to his door and announces a new lead on the location of one of the eight mythical paintings by the late Isaac Mendez (or, as Hiro called him, Mr. Is-sock) that foretell the future. The Haitian and H.R.G. will be heading to Odessa – but not Odessa, Texas, where the Bennet family just left, but Odessa, Ukraine. Also on the international front, felons on the run Maya and Alejandro continued their run for the border, with their new friend Derek driving them. When the trio stops to check on an injured man lying in the road, it turns out to be a fatally wrong decision, although none of them realize it yet. Somehow, Sylar is that man laying in the middle of a rural dirt road in the wilderness of Mexico. They give him a ride, but at their next stop to get gas, Derek sees wanted posters for Maya and Alejandro and wants to turn them in. He tells Sylar what he wants to do and goes to call the police, but that’s the last mistake he’ll ever make. When Sylar reveals Derek’s betrayal to Maya, she begins crying, unleashing her powers to kill and make blood flow from the eyes of anyone in her vicinity. Alejandro calms her down, but Sylar realizes they have powers of their own and clearly he has plans to take those powers. Derek is killed in the incident and left behind as Maya, Alejandro and Sylar flee, headed for New York to find Dr. Suresh. Maya and Alejandro don’t know that Dr. Suresh is dead, but his son Mohinder is alive and well, continuing his work with Molly, the little girl with the ability to locate others with powers, and for the Company as part of H.R.G.’s plan. Molly’s other guardian, Matt Parkman, needs her help when he realizes that his own father was one of the 12 original heroes, a group that includes Mrs. Petrelli, Hiro’s father, Linderman and Bob, the strange man who hired Mohinder to work for the Company, among others. These people are being picked off one by one, and when Nathan Petrelli, shorn of his shaggy beard and having vowed to get clean and sober, finds a picture of the group of twelve and shows it to Parkman, Matt recognizes his father and asks Molly to help him find his dad. Despite Mohinder’s protestations and Molly’s initial reluctance to find the “nightmare man,” she agrees to help Matt and tracks his father in her mind to an apartment building in Philadelphia, right down to the third floor of the building and room No. 9, but then she gasps, “He knows I’m here!” and lapses into some sort of coma, apparently held there by the powers of Matt’s father. That’s where the episode ends, in about as dramatic a fashion as you can get. Given the fact that so many of the usual characters weren’t in this episode (Peter, Hiro, Ando, Niki), it was still s fantastic show. Next week’s episode is being billed as “a place where nothing is as it seems,” and with one or more characters having the ability to mentally project alternate realities into the minds of others and make them believe that they are real, almost anything is possible. Stay tuned…..
- Signing Madonna to a record contract at any point in time is something I’d rather shove my head into a running blender full of razor blades than do. However, looking Madonna’s new 10-year, $120 million recording contract she signed with Live Nation, I have to say that it’s an epically horrible waste of money on an aging performer in the twilight of his or her career, on par with the New York Yankees paying Roger Clemens a $28 million prorated salary this season for a few months of work and getting a 6-6 record, a 4.18 E.R.A. and less than six innings a start, plus one miserable playoff start in which he lasted 2 1/3 innings and gave up three runs and a home run. Madge’s former record company, Warner Bros., agrees with my assessment, and the company has released a “study” entitled For $120 Million, She’s All Yours. The study concludes, among other things, that Madonna’s declining popularity and marketability, combined with the fact that she’ll be 60 when the deal ends, make Live Nation’s investment a bad one. I’d add that Madonna is a no-talent hack with bad teeth who makes crappy music, gains attention by doing and saying controversial things for the specific purpose of gaining attention and changes her look and gimmick every year or so to try and stay relevant, which she’s never quite succeeded at. Currently she’s going with the Kabbalah shtick and the adopt/kidnap-a-small-African-child gimmick, and although I don’t know if she’s released a new album lately (I have an aversion to terrible music that will make me nauseous within the first five seconds of the first song on the album), I can say with absolute certainty that if she has put out (well, she always seems to put out, but I digress) a new album lately, it sucked. How can I say that? Simple. Every album and every song the woman has ever put out has sucked. She’s jumped from style to style within the über-crappy genre that is sugary-sweet pop music and has sounded ear-assaultingly awful at each stop. She’s shown no inclination to improve or capability to do so, so why would she suddenly figure out at age 50 how to make good music? Hope you don’t mind wasting $120 million, Live Nation, because you’ve just committed to do so in spectacular fashion.
- Brace yourself, sports fans; I have some devastating news that affects us all. The National Lacrosse League, clearly the foremost, preeminent professional sports league in this country, if not the world, has canceled its 2008 season after the league and the Professional Lacrosse Players Association failed to reach terms on a new collective bargaining agreement despite prolonged negotiations. I’m sure that all of you, like me, have been hanging onto every detail you could get about the status of negotiations. How ESPN hasn’t sent every reporter it has out to cover this story I don’t know……wait, I do know. It’s because it’s f’ing lacrosse and it might have the distinction as one of the only sports in this country that people care less about than Major League Soccer or professional bowling. Hey Major League Lacrosse players and league officials, you all do know that you are Major League Lacrosse, right? Who among you benefits when your extremely peripheral, eighth-tier sport, already totally bereft of any public interest or following, goes away for a year? All of the ones and ones of people who watch more than two minutes of the occasional game ESPN broadcasts when it runs out of old poker tournaments and spelling bees will forget all about you when you fail to play your 2008 season and if you ever return to the field, they won't be coming back to watch. Not that you were ever going to become a legitimate, major pro sport in America, but your 0.0005 percent chance to do so just went to -150 percent with your decision to have a strike/lockout. The best thing that all of you can do is remember who you are and realize that your best move is swallowing your pride, reaching an agreement that neither of you like and getting back out there on the field next season before you lose both of your fans.
- So does this mean that if I’m visiting Yangon, I can access YouTube or not? Gen. Than Shwe, the ruling military junta of Myanmar, restored public Internet access Sunday shortly after a U.N. envoy arrived in nearby Thailand to attempt to rally neighboring governments to action in the political showdown between the ruling military and the increasingly vocal pro-democracy forces in Myanmar. The junta’s ruling restored access to most sites, but foreign news sites are still off limits for the citizens of Myanmar, because heaven knows we don’t want any outside information or viewpoints reaching them. As long as they can only hear the news and views that the junta wants and as he sees things, then the citizens will just fall right in line with what he wants….sure they will. Restricting access to information and trying to limit the viewpoints and opinions people hear has never been an effective strategy for any other ruler trying to restrain dissident forces in his or her country, but feel free to give it another shot, Gen. Shwe. Just know that no one views your “concessions” as carrying much weight or as real signs that you are willing to change how you do things in your country. So far you haven’t conceded much of anything, just a few very minor issues that don’t do diddly to change what really matters – the brutally oppressive, restrictive, human rights-violating government that your people want to end.
- Congrats to ABC on doing what no player in this year’s Major League Baseball playoffs has been able to do: bat 1.000. For a baseball player, that would mean getting a hit in every at bat, but for ABC it means something else entirely. The network has managed to swing and miss on every freaking one of its new “comedies,” and I use the quotation marks because these shows are supposed to be funny but have produced about as many laughs as a root canal. The most obvious example is the über-retarded Cavemen, and my problems (and everyone else’s, really) with this show have been well-documented. It’s a lame piece of crap based on a series of tired, played car insurance commercials with an awful premise: cavemen living in 2007. Nearly as bad is that show’s Tuesday night partner, Carpoolers. Jerry O’Connell is the star of the show, which should tell you all you need to know about it. The man might be a decent complimentary actor in a project filled with A-listers, but a leading man who can carry a show he ain’t. However, ABC wasn’t content to keep the catastrophically bad comedies to a single night. No, the network mixed in its newest stink bomb, Samantha Who? last night. The show stars Christina Applegate as a woman who lost her memory in an accident (a la Jim Carey in The Majestic, only not nearly as entertaining) and is struggling to get it back. As she does, she discovers that her pre-accident self was too nice. She tries to correct her past mistakes as she gradually regains her memory, which is supposed to provide plenty of funny moments….and ultimately produces none. It pains me to see Gilmore Girls alum Melissa McCarthy as part of such a terrible show, but there’s nothing I can do about it. The premature cancellation of GG by the CW and its chief idiot, Dawn Ostroff, forced the show’s cast into new endeavors and this is where McCarthy ended up. The only interesting thing about these three abominations of a TV show will be seeing which one of them is canceled first. Well done, ABC, you’ve taken sucking to a whole new level.
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