- Sorry to hear that you’ve dropped out of the 2008 presidential race, Republican Sen. Sam Brownback…..at least I might be if I knew you were in the race in the first place. With about 475 candidates vying for the nominations of both parties, it was nigh impossible to keep track of all the yahoos in the race, especially when those yahoos didn’t have any money or any real support. If an irrelevant presidential candidate drops out of the race and no one is there to hear it, does it matter? “My yellow brick road just came short of the White House this time,” a disappointed Brownback announced. This time and any other time you try to run for president, Sammy. When your name is consistently omitted from any serious talk about the race you’re your party’s nomination no one wants you in their debates or forums, your hopes to win are less than zero. When those factors are compounded by a near-total lack of financial support, you might as well go ahead and get back to your work in the Senate. You know, things like bickering with W., passing lots of bills he promises to veto, churning out lots of pork-barrel legislation, wasting taxpayer dollars, that sort of thing. Get back to that, promise never to run for president again and we can all agree to forget that this debacle ever happened.
- We’re going to the perimeter fence, then we’re going to the tarmac, and we’re going to the main terminal, and on to baggage claim and THEN WE’RE GONNA TAKE BACK THE AIRPORT…..HEEEEYAAAAAHHHH!!!! Sorry, I had a bit of a Howard Dean moment there. Nonetheless, the residents of the Santa Cruz province in Bolivia have done just that, seizing control of the Viru Viru Airport, located in their province, from troops sent in the previous day by President Evo Morales. This follows a protest Thursday in which demonstrators blocked an American Airlines plane on the runway, forcing police to break out the tear gas to disperse the crowd. On Friday, those demonstrators were back en masse, armed with clubs and waving provincial flags, to take back control of the airport. The funny thing is that this is the country’s wealthiest province, yet these rich people aren’t about a little social dissidence and clashes with The Man. The seizure of the airport was seen as a major victory for the leaders of the Santa Cruz province in their fight for greater autonomy from Bolivia’s socialist central government. If I were planning on flying into the Viru Viru Airport ever I might have a small issue with this situation, but seeing as my Bolivian travel plans are a solid few years away, carry on, rioters and airport seizers, keep sticking it to The Man.
- You raise gas prices high enough, this is what you get. A tanker truck containing 7,100 gallons of diesel fuel was stolen at gunpoint from a city fuel depot in Baltimore early Friday. The tanker was found later the same day in nearby Washington, D.C., but with prices creeping up to $3.00 per gallon or more in nearly every state, you can't be too surprised when people start hijacking fuel trucks, whether it’s to get gas for themselves or in the hope of pawning that fuel off on others to get a piece of the fuel-gouging pie for themselves. Still, this truck-jacking wasn’t that much worse of an idea than that moronic Internet-led “protest” that encouraged everyone to cripple the major gas companies a few months ago by boycotting gas stations on a specific day.
- She makes bad Spanish-language albums, she produces terrible movies, but is that enough for Jennifer Lopez? No, she feels the need to come back with an atrocious album in English, the aptly-titled Brave. I say it’s aptly titled because to put out an album this abysmal and do it with a straight face requires a ton of intestinal fortitude. The album contains the same predictable, over-produced, synthesized, vocally and lyrically-weak garbage you can find on any album Lopez has ever produced. Lyrical gems such as, “Heartbreaks are overrated; Stay together, that’s the new trend,” show…..um, nothing. Thanks for the insight into what the newest trend is, J. As long as you continue to combine two of the absolute worst genres of music known to man, pop and dance, and do so with vocal abilities somewhere in between those of a duck being strangled and Carl Lewis singing the National Anthem, my trend will be to stay as far away from any project you’re involved in as possible. Maybe it’s self-defense, maybe it’s just this wacky preference for music and movies that don’t blow, but if J-Lo’s name is on it, I’m keeping my distance.
- Transitioning to a musician who actually has musical talent, guitarist/singer/songwriter Eric Clapton, he of the many solo albums and formerly of bands like Creem and Derek and the Dominoes, has released his autobiography and if you’re a music fan or specifically a Clapton fan, it’s an interesting read. One of the book’s major subjects is Clapton’s controversial romance with Pattie Boyd, a woman Clapton pursued even though she was the wife of his good friend George Harrison. Clapton’s version of their relationship in Clapton: The Autobiography stands in direct contradiction to many details of the relationship that Boyd spelled out in her book Wonderful Tonight. The book also spends time on Clapton’s many musical endeavors, including the aforementioned bands, as well as the Yardbirds and his solo work. It’s the life and times of a man who is considered by most to be one of the top five guitarists in the world, and although much of his music is a bit too mellow and laid back for my tastes, there’s no denying Eric Clapton’s immense talent with a guitar in his hands. Give this book a read if you enjoy reading about the lives of great musicians and are concerned with more than just what’s on the radio when it comes to those musicians.
- Great comeback by Allan Houston. The former-NBA-star-turned-TV-analyst decided that at age 36, he wanted to make a comeback in the Association and so he began seriously working out towards the end of last season with the goal of making a roster this coming season. He settled on one of his former teams, the New York Knicks, as the place for him and headed to training camp earlier this month. Now, before the exhibition season even hits the halfway point, Houston has called it quits again. Why he thought that the chronic knee pain that caused him to retire initially would have magically disappeared just because he hadn’t played competitively for a few years, I don’t know. How he thought he was going to be better able to compete with younger, stronger, faster players that he couldn’t compete with when he retired several years back, I have no idea. His on again/off again comeback doesn’t really hurt anyone because it’s not as if the Knicks were counting on him to play a vital role for them or even to be a serious contributor off the bench. They’re not out any money and because Houston stepped away of his own accord, coach Isaiah “The Sexual Harasser” Thomas and the team’s front office don’t face any backlash they would have gotten if they had cut a player who was among their franchise’s most popular during his time in New York. Guess A. Houston will have to get his kicks from playing rec league ball from now on…..
- The pressure is ratcheting up on Prison Break, while the second season of Heroes is struggling and wandering a bit to this point. On PB, a mysterious new prison arrived Monday night, a Brit who seems to know James Whistler but whom Whistler pretends not to know when the man confronts him with Michael Scofield and Mahone nearby. This new prisoner arrives right as Michael and Whistler are preparing to execute their escape plan, with the Company’s deadline for getting out of SONA now less than a day away. Michael decides that the escape, ironically, has to be done during the day because of the presence of military jeeps randomly patrolling around the perimeter of the prison during the night. However, during reconnaissance work for the escape, a guard spots Michael watching him through the lens of half of a pair of binoculars that Michael broke in two so he and Whistler could each have something to scout the guards with as they kept watch atop the guard towers on the fence around the prison. This causes the guards to storm into SONA, search for the offending item and put a lock on the door of Michael’s cell, throwing a major wrench into the escape plan. That escape plan also includes sending out an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) to jam the TV of one of the guards, distracting him so he won't see Scofield, Whistler and possibly Mahone escape. The other guard, Michael believes, will be distracted by the glare of the sun that hits him at the same time, 3:13, each afternoon and causes him to turn his head in the other direction for six minutes. Caught up in the mini-raid when the guards enter the prison is T-Bag, who Lechero charges with hiding the mistress/hooker who visits the prison regularly to provide her, um, services to Lechero. In hiding the woman in a closet as the guards search the prison, there are clearly sparks between T-Bag and the woman, but the question is whether T-Bag is dumb and daring enough to ever try anything with Lechero’s woman. On the outside of the prison walls, Lincoln and Whistler’s girlfriend, Sofia, are busy with their end of the plan, with the Company breathing down their necks. They purchase some items from a dive shop on the coast and try to drive close to SONA on a jungle road to do some recon of their own, but military guards stop them and angrily tell them to turn around. This leads them to the beach, where Linc buries a cooler he bought from the surf shop and something inside of it, what he calls their getaway vehicle. My guess is that it’s a raft, but with this show you never know. Orbiting around the goings on for now is Sucre, who has managed to get himself caught up with a skeezy criminal who approaches him after learning that he’s the new gravedigger at SONA and asks him to continue the arrangement the man had with Sucre’s predecessor of smuggling items into the prison. Sucre gives in and agrees ot take $5,000 for the first smuggle, then realizes that this isn’t a one-time deal. He keeps doing it, which causes some trouble with his superiors and you can be sure it will cause a lot more trouble in the shows ahead, maybe even getting him fired and preventing him from doing his part in the escape plan or holding it up some other way. The impending deadline from the Company has definitely ramped up the intensity in recent episodes, and the result has been one great show after another. The same can’t be said for Heroes, which is struggling a bit in its second season. Keep in mind that the show is still so much better than most anything else on TV that even when it’s struggling, it’s still way better than other shows, save a select few. But last night’s episode was a prime example of the show’s problems this season. Kristen Bell was supposed to make her big debut as a prickly, spoiled brat of a hero searching for Peter Petrelli, but her debut was a dud and it really wasn’t her fault. Her screen time was so limited that she had no chance to make an impact. She can shoot electrical charges from her hands and uses the power to kill Kaitlin’s brother when he won't tell her where Peter is, but a call from Bell’s character’s father, someone with the Company, beckons her home when her murderous activity is revealed. Peter was also supposed to be a prominent part of this week’s show, but his screen time was also far too limited. Aside from a scene or two making out with Kaitlin, it took until the end of the episode for P. Petrelli to get into the show. He finally opened the box containing his personal items and found nothing that really helped, just a passport telling him his real name, a plane ticket to Montreal and a picture with his brother Nathan, who he doesn’t recognize. It’s at this point that the trance-like painting ability he inherited from Isaac Mendez surfaces and he paints a weird picture of a building and street corner in Montreal while hiding from Bell’s character in Kaitlin’s flat. Across the pond, as the Brits say, in New York, Molly Walker remains in a coma and Mohinder, out of options, takes her to the Company for help despite the protestations of H.R.G., on a trip with the Haitian. Matt Parkman is AWOL from New York as Molly is taken in, because he and Nathan Petrelli have gone to Philadelphia to confront Parkman’s father, a.k.a. The Nightmare Man, whom Molly located last week. The elder Parkman, clearly cagey and in possession of the same power as his son, reading minds, only his power has graduated to a whole other level, tricks his son and Nathan, promising to tell them what he knows about the photo featuring the original 12 heroes and who is hunting them, then trapping both Matt and Nathan inside their own worst nightmare and escaping the apartment. Both Matt and Parkman are able to escape their nightmares, but find only an empty apartment and are about to leave when they discover another piece of the photograph in question with the same bizarre symbol painted on it that was on the pictures sent to Takito Nakamura and Angela Petrelli. This picture is of Bob, the man who hired Mohinder into the Company and is now running its main lab. Parkman’s father is apparently headed to kill Bob, but it can't be that clear cut, can it? Speaking of Mohinder, he’s on his way to New Orleans to a place that further highlights a big problem with this season of Heroes. He’s there to visit Monica, cousin of Micah, who is starting to realize her powers as a “muscle mimic” thanks to Micah. This is a problem because this episode devoted substantial time to Monica, still a peripheral and not-that-interesting character, and barely showed Hiro Nakamura (still in 1671, helping Takezo Kensei and Yaeko, preparing to fight the legendary White Beard and his army and sending messages to the future to his friend Ando). With Hiro and Peter getting minimal screen time and Sylar, Claire and other prominent parts of the show not even in this episode, we spend major time seeing Monica learn to play double Dutch, learning martial arts moves from an old movie on TV and learning how to play the piano from Micah. It was absolutely the weakest episode so far this season and the show clearly needs to find a balance where more characters, especially the prominent ones, are on screen more often. The episode ends with Peter saying he can't hide anymore, so what that means for next week, who knows. I’d like to think it means he’ll be a main part of the episode, but as we’ve just learned this week, that’s no sure thing. Tune in next Monday and see for yourself…..
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