- I think that by now you all know me well enough to know that I’m a problem solver. When a difficult dilemma presents itself and no one seems to know how to cope with it, I’m here to help provide that solution. With the lone toilet on the international space station broken and the astronauts currently there left with almost nowhere to go, NASA is looking to issue an in-orbit plumbing service call when the space shuttle Discovery visits next week. Until then, the three-man crew at the station has to make do with an improvised system and hope that things don’t get really smelly and really unsanitary in the meantime. The cause of the problem is a broken motor fan on the Russian-made toilet, yet another reason to be pissed at those Communist bastards at this point. But being the solutions-oriented guy that I am, I’d like to take this opportunity to solve this problem by offering up a new invention that is designed for golfers here on Earth but which would provide a nice fix for those toilet-less astronauts at the international space station as well. Allow me to introduce to you the Uroclub, a golf club with a hollow shaft that you can fill with urine if you’re out on the golf course and need to go to the bathroom but there isn't one nearby. The Uroclub looks like a normal 7 iron, but it has half a liter capacity for urine inside its hollow shaft. On top of that, it also has a privacy shield so that your fellow golfers can't sneak a peek when you whip it out on the side of the course to do your business. The geniuses who invented this novelty club are going with the slogan “The only club in your bag guaranteed to keep you out of the woods”. Great, fellas. I’m sure this will make golfers around the world thrilled, knowing that at any point during a round one of their playing partners might rip their 7-iron out of their bag, unscrew the top of the club and begin filling it with urine. Still, it could be helpful to the astronauts at the space station for the next week. If you don’t have a working toilet, why not go with the next best thing? Besides, astronauts love hitting golf balls out into space, so why not kill two birds with one stone? Glad I could be here to help out with this one, solving an international space station crisis is always a nice way to wrap up a week.
- The season finale of Lost (and no, ABC, the episode you aired two weeks ago that was allegedly Part One of a two-part finale doesn’t count) aired last night and it was a two-hour thrill ride that answered some questions but raised many more, as any good season finale does. The mind-blowing moment of the episode didn’t come until hour two, but the entire show was flat-out awesome. First there was the issue of Martin Keamy and his mercenary crew to deal with, which proved easier than you might think. As part one of the finale ended two weeks ago, Ben Linus surrendered to Keamy and his men in order to allow Locke to sneak inside the Orchid station and Kate and Sayid met up with Richard Alpert and the rest of the Others, who have been AWOL the entire season. As Keamy, his men and Ben arrived back at the helicopter, they were met by Kate, who was setting up an Others ambush. She claimed that Ben’s people were chasing her and when Keamy’s men ventured out into the jungle to find them, the assault started. All of Keamy’s men were killed and he himself was assaulted by Sayid in a kick-ass fight and then shot in the back by Alpert. As part of the deal for setting up the ambush, Sayid and Kate were granted safe passage off the island. Back at the Orchid, Jack and Sawyer arrived and found Locke and Hurley there. Locke was struggling to follow Ben’s instructions on how to move the island and he and Jack had a heated conversation in which Locke urged Jack not to leave the island. When Jack insisted on leaving, Locke told him that once he and the others returned to their old lives, they would have to lie to everyone about every single thing that had happened to them from the moment they arrived on the island. At that moment, Ben arrived back at the Orchid from the helicopter and together with Locke, made his way underground to the Orchid station. There, Locke and Ben found “the vault,” a mysterious chamber that, according to yet another DHARMA Initiative instructional video, was located next to some exotic negative matter that makes time travel possible. While Locke watched the video, Ben crammed the vault with every metal object he could find, a direct violation of the no non-organic material policy for the vault spelled out by Dr. Halliwax in the video. Ben then threw the switch, activating the chamber and blowing a huge hole in its back wall. Everyone above ground also had their own chaos going on. Those aboard the freighter were sitting on top of a huge bomb even though most of them didn’t know about the massive stockpile of C4 explosive located below deck. While Desmond, Jin and Michael tried to disarm the bomb, everyone else on the boat went about their business. Unfortunately the bomb was rigged up to a radio receiver that also served as a detonator which would set off an explosion of Martin Keamy’s heart stopped beating, i.e. if he were killed. Even as all of this went on, Daniel Faraday continued running the Zodiac boat back and forth between the island and the freighter, taking Oceanic 815 survivors off the island. He urged his fellow freighter crew members Miles and Charlotte to leave with him on one trip but both elected to stay on the island. When they chose to do so, Miles insinuated that Charlotte had some hidden motive for staying, a theory she confirmed later when telling Daniel of her decision to stay. She hinted that she was still looking for the place she was born and what went unsaid is that the island might be that place. It makes you wonder if she’s the same girl that was Ben’s friend when he was a boy first arriving on the island and the one who made him the wooden doll he carried with him all of those years. Also leaving the island were Jack, Kate, Sayid, Desmond, Sawyer, Hurley and pilot Frank Lapidus in the helicopter. They lifted off and were on their way to the freighter when they discovered a hole in the chopper’s fuel tank that was causing them to lose fuel at an alarming rate. When they couldn’t find the freighter and were nearly out of fuel, Lapidus instructed them to dump everything not bolted down. That wasn’t enough and after a suggestion that losing another couple hundreds pounds would help, Sawyer sprung into action. He kissed Kate and said one last thing to her, then jumped out of the ‘copter into the sea below where he began swimming back to the island. He made it there and was met by Juliet, who sat drinking a bottle of DHARMA rum and staring out to sea. She was staring at the burning remains of the freighter, which blew up when Keamy, still alive thanks to body armor that allowed him to survive Alert shooting him, took the elevator down to the Orchid and was ambushed and killed by Ben. That triggered the bomb on the boat, which Michael had been trying to keep from going off by spraying its battery with liquid nitrogen. The bomb was triggered just as the helicopter came back, leading to a frantic scene in which Jack and Desmond tried to refuel it with enough gas to get back to the island people tried to get onto the helicopter before the freighter exploded. Nearly everyone made it, but Sun’s husband Jin did not and she was forced to watch him go down with the boat when it blew up. So back to the island it was, a plan that was going fine until Ben pulled Locke aside in the Orchid, told him to go back to the surface and take over leading the Others. In doing so, Ben put on a winter coat and told Locke that he was going somewhere cold in order to move the island and also that the rules of the island dictated that whoever moved it could never return to it. With that, Ben stepped through the hole in the wall of the vault, went down a rocky tunnel and kicked in a layer of ice covering a hole into some bizarre cold, Arctic-like cave. Once inside, he found a large metal wheel with spokes implanted in the cave wall, with half of the wheel exposed. After chipping away ice from around the wheel and with the help of a crowbar, Ben was able to move the wheel and a bright light came from a crack that opened in the wall. As he did that, it led to a sky-altering, bright-light, weird-sound event just like the one that took place in the Season Two finale. At that moment, the island literally disappeared right into the ocean, giving that one mind-blowing moment that was jaw-dropping to the nth degree. Sawyer and Juliet were sitting on the beach when it happened and apparently went wherever the island went. Locke was taking his place with the Others at that time, so he must have gone with the island as well. Left to deal with the vanished island problem were those aboard the helicopter, which now had nowhere to land. Out of fuel and places to touch down, the craft crashed into the ocean and everyone scrambled to put on life vests and get into the raft that Sayid had deployed before impact. All of them - Jack, Kate, Sayid, Hurley, Aaron, Sun, Lapidus and Desmond - made it into the raft and drifted well into the night, at which point a rescue boat found them. The boat belonged to Penelope Widmore, Desmond’s girlfriend who tracked him based on the brief call he made to her from the freighter earlier in the season. Aboard Penny’s ship, Jack set the plan in motion to spin a lie about how the Oceanic 6 had lived since the crash and how they came to be rescued. As part of the lie, the six of them were placed onto a lifeboat one week after coming about Penny’s boat and floated out to sea near the island of Membata, the island where their fictional rescue began. Lapidus and Desmond stayed on Penny’s boat while the Oceanic 6 landed on Membata, were met by the locals and began their journey back to civilization. That was the last of the in-the-present scenes for the season, but the flash-forwards were also a huge part of this episode. Things kicked off right where the Season Three finale left off, with Jack and Kate on a remote access road near the airport. Kate stopped her car and backed up to where Jack was standing, then jumped out and chewed Jack out. She berated him for leaving her and her adopted son Aaron and revealed that this particular flash forward was three years after the argument we saw a few episodes ago when the two of them fought over her still doing something that Sawyer asked her to do when they were back on the island. She also yelled at Jack for suggesting that they should go back to the island. We even hearkened back to last season’s finale, which I was ironically watching earlier in the day. There was Jack, going to the funeral of the mystery man at the downtown funeral parlor and wonder why Kate didn’t go. Also shown was Sayid, appearing outside of the mental hospital where Hurley was living and shooting a man who he said had been lurking outside the facility for a week. Once inside, Sayid told Hurley that they were being watched, but that Jeremy Bentham had been died two days ago, apparently by suicide. He stopped Hurley when Hurley wanted to say Bentham’s real name, but Sayid insisted that they were under surveillance and that Hurley needed to leave with him to go “somewhere safe.” Hurley agreed, but we didn’t find out where they were headed. Kate was dealing with her own issues, having a nightmare in which Claire appeared in Aaron’s bedroom and demanded that Kate NOT, under any circumstances, take Aaron back to the island. As we would find out later, that’s exactly what Jeremy Bentham was urging her and the rest of the Oceanic 6 to do. Sun had her own flash-forward, showing up in London and confronting Charles Widmore. She offered to help him out in his search for the island but wouldn’t say why, although the fact that she partially blamed Jack for her husband’s death and Jack wants to return and help the island might have something to do with it. As the episode came to an end, Jack was back at the funeral parlor in the middle of the night, breaking in and opening the coffin of none other than Jeremy Bentham. He was startled when Ben Linus appeared in at the door and began talking. Ben asked about Jack’s off-the-wall actions of late, including flying on commercial flights every weekend and wishing for them to crash (which Ben called “dark…very dark”) and when he got to Jack’s expressed desire to go back to the island, Ben dropped a bombshells. The only way to go back was for all of the Oceanic 6 to return. Ben said he had ideas on how to make that happen even though Jack and Kate weren’t on speaking terms, Hurley was insane and Sayid’s whereabouts weren’t known, at least not to Jack. As Jack and Ben prepared to leave, Ben pointed out to Jack that Jeremy Bentham would also have to return to the island with the Oceanic 6 in order for their return to be allowed by the island. It was then we learned who Jeremy Bentham really was and to no surprise, it was John Locke. Jack revealed that Locke/Bentham had told him prior to his death that a lot of bad things had happened on the island since his departure and that it was Jack’s fault for leaving, thus he needed to return and was telling Kate that very thing on the road at the end of the airport runway. So that’s where the season ended, with the idea that the Oceanic 6 needed to return to the island. No word on why earlier this season in flash forwards Sayid was going around killing people under Ben’s orders or where the island might have gone to, so those mysteries linger until Season Five. But a stellar, stellar finale, easily the best season finale this TV season and one of the best I can ever remember, just awesome.
- Jason Mraz is never going to become a truly legendary rocker/musician this way. When a musician grows acres and acres of a crop on his or her property, that musician’s options for choices of crop are limited. You can grow pot, you can grow pot or you can grow pot. I was temped to say cocaine is also a viable option, but that takes a little too much effort for your average musician. You can even put together a small greenhouse inside your home and grow marijuana fairly easily if you don’t want to run the risk of being arrested, so that’s the route you need to go. Minimal chance of getting caught and arrested and even if you do, it’s only pot. But not Mraz, who has devoted five acres of his land to avocado trees. Apparently he has a strong hankering for guacamole, because the singer-songwriter recently told CNN that, “Believe me, our kitchen is just like decked out with them. We’re constantly washing them, we’re eating them and we’re giving them to all our friends.” Mraz also explains that his trees are 25-30 years old and two or three times a year, workers come through and pick the avocados. See, if you were a true rocker, Jason, you could go down to your basement, to your hydroponic greenhouse and you could harvest your own pot, no workers necessary. If you have any questions about how to get started, I believe Willie Nelson can give you detailed, specific instructions on how to get it going. Plus, your friends will be a lot more psyched to receive a few nicely rolled joints than they are to receive a gift of avocados or guacamole.
- Several months have passed, but one thing that remains infinitely clear in the wake of the Atlanta Falcons’ disastrous 2007 season is that former coach Bobby Petrino still lame and still a certified piece of crap. Petrino signed with the Falcons prior to the 2007 season to be their coach, inking a fat multi-year contract to leave the University of Louisville and make the jump to the NFL. He said in an emotional, totally fraudulent press conference that leaving UL was the toughest thing he’d ever had to do. Good thing he went through it though, because it prepared him for the moment when he weaseled out of that same Falcons job less than a year later. Petrino showed his true weasel-y colors that time, leaving letters for his players in their lockers after an embarrassing Monday Night Football loss and abandoning ship with three games still remaining in the season. He couldn’t even stick it out to the end of the year and he didn’t have the balls to face up to his players and owner to let them know that he didn’t want to be their coach anymore. He bolted for the University of Arkansas and has spent the time since then blatantly dodging questions about his cowardly exodus from Atlanta. That dodging act came to an end this week at the Southeastern Conference’s spring media day. When hit with a question about whether he could have handled his departure from the ATL differently, Petrino replied, “Not that I know of. Because of the timing of it, because both sides of the fence, that’s how it worked out. It was a situation where there was no other choice.” No other choice? You mean other than manning up and fulfilling the contract you signed? Or if you couldn’t do that, at least working to the end of the season and not bailing on the players you spent six months leading and telling them to buy into your system? Other than those choices, you mean? Nice to see that even after a substantial amount of time has passed you still don’t have an ounce of class, honor or integrity, Bob-O. He further showed his total lack of class when he asked by some clueless, off-the-wall idiot at media day if his time with the Falcons reminded him of a weird dream from the 1970s TV show Dallas. Petrino cracked, “That’s not the show I thought of. Have you ever seen the movie Misery?” Whew, stop it coach, you are killing me.
- Weezer has always marched to the beat of its own drum. Lead singer Rivers Cuomo is a guy known to live as a recluse much of the time, someone who doesn’t exactly embrace the hard-living lifestyle of a rock star. So the new video for the band’s song Pork and Beans isn't surprising coming from everyone’s favorite dork rockers, not even the video’s inclusion of a wide range of cultural punch lines such as Kevin Federline, that bizarro loser who made a video of himself shrieking at everyone to stop making fun of Britney Spears, Miss Teen South Carolina Caitlin Upton and others. The video was the most-watched clip on all of YouTube over the Memorial Day weekend, having been viewed 3.1 million times. “It’s an anthem about not conforming to what people want you to be,” video director Matthew Cullen said in an interview. Cullen also said that he doesn’t consider the video a finished product and that it could be redone, mashed up and reformatted. “We want it to be a living thing on the Internet,” he explained. If you get a chance to check it out, I’d recommend doing so because you’ll get some good laughs out of it. I can’t say that I subscribe to the band and Cullen’s idea that it celebrates people who have done things their own way and achieved fame and success, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy watching a montage of a motley crew of losers set to a good song.
No comments:
Post a Comment