- See what happens when you make the regrettable decision to appear on Dancing With the (D-List) Stars? Even while he is still appearing on the über-crappy chick-flick reality show, Miami Dolphins defensive end Jason Taylor has been placed on the trading block by his team. The Dolphins, who own the top pick in tomorrow’s NFL Draft, are trying to land another first-round pick in order to choose a player they're believe won't be on the board when they start the second round with the No. 32 pick overall. Of course, the ‘Fins are spinning this as a football move, which is fine. In truth, you know they are ashamed to have a ballroom dancer wannabe on their team. Unfortunately for Miami, being on some loser reality show not only makes Taylor undesirable to his own team, it also makes him less appealing to other teams. This trade is far from a done deal, though; team president Bill Parcells continues to deny that the team has any interest in dealing the 11-year veteran and team captain. “The only way Jason Taylor doesn't play for the Dolphins in 2008 is if he retires,” Parcells said March 3. “The team is not going to trade him.” That was before Parcells had to suffer the indignity of watching his best defensive player make a fool out of himself ballroom dancing on national television. We’ll all understand if you’ve changed your mind since then, Bill. Unload Taylor before it’s too late……
- High-class espionage was the them of last night’s episode of Smallville, with Jimmy Olsen and Chloe Sullivan doing most of the James Bond-esque work. The episode began in the present, then we zoomed back in time 14 hours to catch up, after which we returned to the present and kept on going. At the episode’s outset, a mystery man in a black burglar’s outfit was shimmying through the ventilation of a downtown office building. The mystery man dropped from the ceiling, Tasered an unsuspecting man in a suit and copied some information from a high-end cell phone in the man’s briefcase. That mystery thief then hopped in an elevator, ripped off his disguise and revealed a tuxedo underneath as he stashed a bag with his stolen information on the roof of the elevator. The mystery man’s identity: none other than Jimmy Olsen himself. Following that backwards time travel, we headed back to Chloe’s apartment where Jimmy was making her breakfast earlier that same morning. After Chloe passes on a homemade breakfast because she’s late for a meeting, we see a spying stranger on the roof across from Chloe’s Talon-top apartment, taking pics of Jimmy with a telescopic lens. Downstairs in the Talon, the same woman interrupts Jimmy as he’s getting a cup of coffee, sits him down and explains that the feds have tracked access to confidential government files to his computer. When Jimmy protests his innocence, his visitor informs him that the feds know that it’s Chloe, not him that has been hacking into government files. The agent convinces Jimmy to spy on Chloe, installing spyware on the computers at the Isis Foundation offices, which Chloe has taken over with Lana Lang in a coma at a mental hospital. While Clark searches for ways to reverse her condition, Chloe suggests he look to the journals of deceased scientist, known Veritas member and the man who helped Clark connect ho his home planet of Krypton, Dr. Virgil Swann. As Clark searches the journal, he asks Chloe to help him find BRAINIAC, the being who put Lana in her coma and who disappeared with Clark’s cousin Kara from a Metropolis rooftop two episodes ago. Chloe’s search leads her to a satellite that can only be accessed through the secure server at a building in Metropolis that happens to be the same building where the Ace of Clubs nightclub is located. While Chloe sneaks off to access the satellite server, Jimmy sneaks off on his mission to help the feds, who have convinced him that Chloe is a terrorist, working with a secret terrorist cell. Jimmy jumps the man in the hallway, downloads the information and hands it over to the feds…who tell him he’s been duped by Chloe, who ran a misdirection and led him to worthless information. Jimmy is hauled off by an agent while Chloe is apprehended by the female agent Jimmy has been working with. Chloe is beaten, interrogated….and saved by Jimmy, who uses the same high-tech gadgets the feds gave him to free himself and save Chloe, knocking out the last two agents holding her and escaping into the night. Back at her apartment, the two of them have a special moment together and Jimmy promises that he’s taken care of the feds, who are no longer following them. His solution, unfortunately, was to call Lex Luthor, who obliged and pulled the strings to get the arrest warrant for Chloe rescinded. Lex doesn’t do anything for free, though, and reminds Jimmy that some day he’ll ask for a favor in return. There are other, bigger fish for Lex to fry right now, though. He finally made the trip to Zurich, used the two keys to open the safety deposit box and found a weird gadget inside. It was a rectangle-shaped device with four or five compass-like wheels on it. By lining up each of them in the right way, a small cutout on each wheel lined up in the center and formed a rectangle. What’s in the rectangle appears to be the focus of the device, but what that something is remains a mystery. For the time being, Lex returned to Smallville and will try to figure things out there. Meanwhile, Clark managed to figure out where BRAINIAC and Kara went thanks to three things - a visit to the Fortress of Solitude, a page in Swann’s journal and the satellite images Chloe tracked down. While at the fortress, a radio transmission from Kara told Clark the she was on Krypton and that BRAINIAC was trying to kill him. The page in the journal, which also turned out to be from Kara, urged him to save Lana right away. Chloe then found a satellite image showing two blurs exiting Earth’s atmosphere, then disappearing into a vortex in the middle of out space that then disappeared. Piecing together the clues, Clark and Chloe figured out that BRAINIAC and Kara managed to travel back in time to 1989, where Krypton still exists prior to its destruction. BRAINIAC’s plan appears to be to kill Clark as an infant so he never exists on Earth. Now it’s up to Clark to find a way to Krypton circa 1989 so he can save his own life. That sets the stage for next week, so until that time…..
- Welcome back, Lost…..and goodbye Lost…..and welcome ba- wait, goodbye again, Lost…no, no welco- dammit, can we get this fixed? After several weeks off, Lost returned with a new episode last night, only to have a completely maddening hour. The show was broke up into 5-6 minute segments with way too many commercial breaks. There was no flow, no smoothness to the show, just a bunch of short segments that ended abruptly just as they were getting going. When there actually was action in between the 500 commercial breaks, we found out that the cliffhanger from the last episode where Ben’s daughter Alex was in the middle of a shootout in the jungle was actually her being kidnapped by men with guns who had come onto the island from Charles Widmore’s freighter. In the present, Ben, Locke, Sawyer and Hurley are in a house in the barracks area when Alex is forced to disable the security fence around the area, which sends a distress code through a phone call. When the message is relayed to Ben, he immediately directs everyone to prepare for an invasion by barricading windows and doors and readying their guns. When the attack team from the freighter arrives at the barracks, they start shooting everyone in sight. Sawyer is stuck outside because he had gone to rescue Claire, whose house is his with a rocket and blown up before Sawyer can get there. He does manage to unearth Claire in the rubble and take her to the house where Locke, Ben and Hurley are barricaded. Moments later, Miles, the ghost whisperer who was also a member of the freighter crew and who has been on the island for a few days now, knocks on the door of the house and when he’s let in, he presents Ben with a radio that the attack team wants to use to communicate. When Ben is told his daughter has been captured, he’s clearly rattled. When the leader of the attack team demands he come out and surrender in order for Alex to be set free, Ben refuses and counters that the freighter crew should just leave the island and never return. He gambles that they won't really kill Alex as they threaten to do, but he’s proven wrong when she’s shot in the head and is killed. At that point, Ben mumbles that, “They’ve changed the rules.” That cryptic comment then leads him to go through a secret door in the house to a secret room where he somehow summons the black smoke monster that roams the jungle of the island, terrorizing people. The smoke monster pours into the barracks area, kills the members of the attack team and allows Locke, Ben, Hurley, Claire, her son Aaron and Miles to escape. During the escape. Sawyer decides he’s had enough of the drama and announces that he, Claire, Aaron and Hurley will return to the beach camp. Locke and Ben are set on going to visit Jacob, the supernatural, mythical guru of he island, but they need Hurley to help them find Jacob’s cabin because he’s the last one to have seen it. At gunpoint, Hurley relents and decides to go with Locke. At the beach camp, tensions are also high as the satellite phone is finally fixed and Daniel Fairaday of the freighter crew manages to tape out a Morse code message to the freighter, asking about the ship’s doctor, who has oddly washed ashore on the island with his throat slit. When the message comes back, Daniel claims that the content is that everything is fine on the ship and that the helicopter will be returning to the island the next day. But Bernard, the science teacher and survivor of Oceanic 815 who has been one of the island’s most annoying residents since Season One, knows Morse code and knows Daniel is lying. He calls him on it and announces to the group that despite what Daniel said, the message does address to the question about the doctor and claims he’s fine. Bernard also says the message did not mention the helicopter, so Daniel is obviously lying. When Jack confronts him by choking Daniel, Daniel admits that he and the freighter crew were never really going to help any of the Oceanic 815 survivors to get off the island. Jack seems prepared to press the issue further, but a stomach ailment that plagued him throughout the episode and will apparently take a turn for the worse next episode stopped him in his tracks. The episode also contained a flash-forward that filled in some blanks from previous flash-forwards earlier in the season. We knew that after getting off the island as one of the Oceanic Six, Sayid became a sort of traveling assassin, killing people for Ben Linus. Now we know why…because after getting off the island, Sayid finally married his beloved Nadia, only to have her killed by a mercenary employed by Charles Widmore. Sayid returned from California to his hometown of Tikrit, Iraq to bury his wife there. Ben heard about her death on a news broadcast after he somehow was traveling in the Sahara Desert, moved into a city in Tunisia and was checking into a hotel there under the name Dean Moriarti. He turned around, chartered a flight and made his way to Tikrit. There, he identified the man who killed Sayid’s wife and when Sayid identified Ben and confronted him, Ben showed Sayid a photo of the mercenary from a traffic camera in Los Angeles five days prior, a camera at an intersection just three blocks from where Nadia was killed. When Ben manages to find the mercenary in Tikrit and follows him through the city streets and an open-air market, Sayid is close behind. He shoots the man at least five times, killing him and in Ben’s mind, bringing the matter to a close….or so it seems. He tells Sayid as much but Sayid replies that because of all he’s gone through and because of losing Nadia, the battle against Charles Widmore is his to fight as well. So that’s how he got into being Ben’s traveling assassin, question answered. At the end of the episode, also in a flash-forward, Ben is in London to visit Charles Widmore himself. Ben sneaks into Widmore’s apartment in the dead of night in typical creepy Ben fashion and accuses Widmore of killing his daughter. Widmore replies that Alex’s death wasn’t his doing and that it’s really Ben’s fault because he took the island from Widmore and brought it on himself. Widmore insists the island belongs to him and that he will get it back. Ben’s answer is that he’s now going to hunt down Widmore’s own daughter, Desmond from the island’s beloved Penny, and kill her so Widmore will know what it feels like to have a daughter killed. Widmore’s reply is that Ben will never find her, but Ben says with a smirk that Widmore will never find the island he wants. In the end, both vow that the race is now on for each of them, then Ben vanishes into the night. Overall, a good episode, one of the better ones this season because it didn’t exclude too many characters, just those on the freighter. Tune back in next week for more great Lost action….
- Tibetans have become a reliable source of violent, angry social dissidence in recent months and with good reason. They’ve been oppressed for too long by the Chinese, so the outpouring of angry rioting and protests was long overdue. Those efforts continued this Tuesday as 50 Tibetan exiles marched on the Chinese Embassy in Katmandu, Nepal, which has become a popular target for protests of late. Among the protestors were, of course, Buddhist monks, with their red robes mixing with the blood spilled as police brawled with the protestors, bloodying at least a half dozen of them. The protestors were upset about the ongoing Chinese crackdown in their homeland, so they made a beeline for the Chinese Embassy and were met by baton-wielding police. The fight ensued, with the valiant protestors fighting the good fight and inflicting a little damage of their own. You have to be proud of these people, standing up for what they believe in with the full knowledge that they’re going to come face to face with a bunch of overzealous, abusive cops and have to thrown down. Keep it up, Tibetan protestors, you guys rock.
- A few months ago, I caught a special on the History Channel about the so-called “Highway of Death” in Bolivia, a stretch of mountainous road so treacherous that you literally have to sign a waiver to do so. Anyone looking to bike, drive or traverse it in any way receives strict warnings from the Bolivian governmental agencies responsible for the roadway. Those warnings are not just for show, as evidenced by the recent death of American tourist Kenneth Mitchell while biking down the highway last Saturday. Mitchell, 56, lost control of his mountain bike and plunged some 230 feet to his death. Hundreds of people die on the road each year, a total that is extremely plausible if you’ve ever seen video of what it looks like. There is even a group of volunteers who stand at especially dangerous turns and corners in the road and have homemade stop/go signs to let motorists coming from the opposite direction know when there is oncoming traffic. In many stretches, the road is so narrow that only one vehicle can pass through at a time along steep cliffs, extreme drop-offs and perched above deep ravines. Thoughts and prayers to Mitchell’s family, along with a warning to anyone considering attempting a “Highway of Death” trek of their own.
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