- Nice of Ringo Starr to give back to the city that helped to launch he and the Beatles as a worldwide phenomenon. The Fab Four all hailed from Liverpool, England, and this past week Ringo was back as one of the headliners at a huge outdoor festival kicking off Liverpool's year as a European Capital of Culture. Starr and Eurythmics lead singer Dave Stewart headed up a great slate of artists that included about 600 performers, musical and otherwise. The festival begins a year in which more than 350 activities are planned in Liverpool, part of the port city's attempt to shed its longtime image as a dirty, destitute and crime-ridden blight on the northwest side of England. Along with performing at the festival, Starr will also star (pun intended) in Liverpool, The Musical, a showcase of the city's strong musical heritage that will also feature the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, indie rock favorites Echo and the Bunnymen, The Farm and up-and-coming rockers The Wombats. If only we could get that kind of musical gathering here in the U.S. instead of crap like Lilith Fair with a bunch of whiny chick music and OzzFest, a collection of mohawk-sporting metal-heads who are into Harleys, death metal and slam dancing. Enjoy your year in the spotlight, Liverpool, you deserve it for giving the world the Beatles, if nothing else.
- If people dare to stand up against the government, throw 'em in jail. Sounds like some oppressive, third-world country, no? Well, the truth is that it happened this past week right here in the good ol' U.S. of A. Eighty good, conscientious Americans decided to take their protest against the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to the highest court in the land and for that, they were thrown in jail. The protesters were arrested at the Supreme Court, where an idiotic ordinance prohibits protesting of any kind on court grounds. Why there is no ordinance prohibiting secret torture techniques in foreign prisons by American intelligence personnel, I don't know. You can waterboard a suspect, use other widely condemned torture techniques and get away with it all as W. and his cadre of ass-hatted cronies willingly turn a blind eye to it all, but don't dare protest that same kind of treatment on Supreme Court grounds or it's off to jail you go. Now I'm sure that these eighty demonstrators aren't going to be locked up long and they're not going to be jailed for years or even months, but the principle behind the whole thing sucks. They stood up to an administration that has stepped all over the Constitution and other rules and regulations and done so constantly and consistently throughout its eight years in office, and they get taken to jail for it. Gotta love America....
- I'm on to you, Hugo Chavez. After seeing your act for a while now, I get it. You're an agitator, someone who thrives on pissing people off. You'll do the dumbest things and pretend you're really convicted about what you're doing, but at the core you're just an a-hole who thrives on creating conflict and angering others. The clincher came a couple of days ago when my boy Hugo decided to take the side of the leftist rebel army in an ongoing conflict in the neighboring country of Colombia. Why the Venezuelan president is so involved in a Colombian conflict makes no sense until you realize Hugo is hell bent on pissing off everyone in sight at any cost. On this particular occasion, Hugo is is calling the rebels "true armies" and saying that they should not be categorized as terrorists. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. are battling the U.S.-aligned Colombian government, which is probably the real reason Chavez "supports" the rebels. Anything to piss off the Americanos, eh Hugo? Well I'm not biting. I don't believe for a second that you actually support the rebels. You're baiuting us, and although our leader is every bit dumb enough to take the bait, I won't. Support whomever you want, advocate whatever wacky cause you wish, call foreign leaders names and provoke them, I don't care. You're a dictator and you're ruining your own country and oppressing your people, but you're not my leader and so I don't give a damn, loser.
- Finally! FOr once, the jerks lost, the most detestable a-holes were booted off before the end of one of the few reality shows worth watching. All season long the uber-detestable couple of Nate and Jen have made us all feel incredibly awkward as we had a front-row seat for their constant b*tching, fighting and verbal flogging of each other. At least a dozen times each episode, they told one another how much they hated the other one, then at the end of the leg they hugged and said they were so happy to still be in the race. They fought over travel arrangements, challenges, directions, the proper technique for padding a rowboat and much, much more. This week, they took off from Osaka, Japan as the second place team of the four remaining teams in The Amazing Race. In the penultimate episode of this season, Ahead of them were Ron and Cristina (father and daughter), and behind them were Nic and Don (grandson and grandfather) and TK and Rachel (dating couple). The teams first had to find a unique building in Osaka with a hole in the middle of it, then locate a hanging garden many stories off the ground. The first three teams started three hours or so ahead of TK and Rachel, who finished far behind everyone else in the last leg. Unfortunately for those three teams, the hanging gardens didn't open until 10 a.m., allowing TK and Rachel to make up major time. At the airport, the four teams scattered across three different flights to Taipei, with Ron and Cristina surging ahead on an early flight, followed by Nate and Jen as well as Nic and Don fifteen minutes later. TK and Rachel were alone on the third flight, landing about twenty minutes behind. As Ron and Cristina sailed along smoothly thanks to Cristina's knowledge of the Chinese language, the other three teams got caught up going through customs. Along the way, Jen never did figure out how to pronounce Taipei (Tie-Pay), continually calling it Tie-Pie, which only made her b*tchy a** more annoying. I probably would have left her by the side of the road halfway through the first episode, so props to Nate for putting up with her for so long. Once they arrived in Taipei, teams made their way to the town of Jiji, where they rode along with professional stuntmen in a jeep that balanced on a rolling platform twenty or so feet in the air, then rode in a second jeep that drove underwater for 17 seconds. After that, they received their next clue. Ron and Cristina breezed through and headed back to Taipei to find the GK Tea Garden to drink cups of tea, at the bottom of which were their next clue. TK and Rachel, having fought all the way back from last place into second place, finished the challenge but then had to do a Speed Bump, a penalty task that only they had to perform because of their last-place finish in the previous leg. Their extra challenge was to take part in a local festival where they donned protective suits and masks, then sprinted through a maze of fireworks being shot off all around (and at) them, then get doused with water. After that, they returned to the Jeep challenge to get their clue. During that time, both Nate and Jen and Don and Nic passed them by, but all three teams bunched up again at the train station as they waited for a bullet train back to downtown Taipei. Jen took the opportunity to make herself look like even more of a b*tch, whining about how unfair it was that TK and Rachel had caught up to them again because she felt that she and Nate were trying harder than TK and Rachel. As TK astutely pointed out when Nick and Don relayed her complaints, she felt that way because unlike Nate and Jen, TK and Rachel have remained calm during the race, haven't spent 80 percent of every episode treating their partner like crap and acting like spoiled brats with the mouth of a sailor. Back in Taipei, teams got their message from the tea cup and went to find a clown on a unicycle at a nearby all-night market. The clue gave them a choice between two tasks: sending up 20 paper lanterns to the sky propelled by fire inside the lantern or walking 220 feet along a path made of sharp stones at the Youth Park, a local park popular with kids, then turning around and going back down the path to where they started. All four teams elected for the stone walk, with Ron and Cristina going through the challenge smoothly one more time and reaching the pit stop, the Memorial Hall Plaza, in first place. TK and Rachel raced past Nic and Don along the path and reached the pit stop in second place, securing them a spot in the final three for next week's season finale. That left Nic and Don against Nate and Jen for the final spot. CBS tried to used tricky editing, showing the teams struggling to find a taxi who knew where the pit stop was, showing them finding taxis at about the same time, then battling traffic and setting up the ever-dramatic shot of the finish mat at the pit stop as the third-place team approached. Who would it be? Nic and Don, of course, securing that third spot in the finale and sealing Nate and Jen's fate. If you heard a loud cheer and whooping when Nate and Jen finally finished and were officially eliminated from the race, that would have been me. They said the usual things people say when they're eliminated, that they did their best and wanted to win more than anything. Then there was an emotional scene in which they seemed to be saying that they had ruined their relationship by the way they had treated each other during the race, but no definitive conclusion was shown and I think we're supposed ot wonder and care if they ended up breaking up or staying together, but I honestly don't give a rat's a**. Stay together and continue to make one another miserable, fine by me, as long as I no longer have to see it. Break up and go make someone else miserable, also acceptable. Either way, the race ends next week with three great teams racing to the finish for the $1 million prize. Honestly, I'll be happy with any of the three remaining teams winning. Ron and Cristina are likable despite Ron's often thick-heaed ways, mostly because it really does appear like their relationship is changing and improving thanks to the race. You also know that I love America's toughest, crustiest, saltiest 69-year-old Don and Nic seems like a slightly dorky but cool guy, so them winning would also be great. And of course, everyone's favorite mellow, stoner-ish couple, the Bohemian TK and Rachel, have been fun to watch and they bring a nice calm to the race, so them winning would be sweet. Tune in next Sunday night at 8 p.m. to find out who the winner is.....
- One more TV note, since this is a biggie and I don't want anyone missing out. One of television's absolute best shows, Prison Break, returns to the air tomorrow night at 8 p.m. It's been away for a couple of months now and is coming back in the time sl;ot that 24 was supposed to occupy until production delays and Keifer Sutherland's alkie ways put the kibosh on that. So Michael Scofield and his crew are back Monday night, at least for the next five weeks. Thanks to the writers' strike, there are only five new episodes of the show left to air before the producers run out of script and new material. So do your best to put it out of your mind that after these five weeks we're going to be hitting a major wall where there shouldn't be one and probably left with some cliffhangers that were only supposed to last a week but will now last months thanks to the strike and just enjoy these five episodes. Tune in to FOX and see what happens at SONA all the way down in Panama. It'll be intense, it'll be dramatic and it won't disappoint, which is more than you can say for the rest of the TV season at this point.
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