- “Toxic” was the title of tonight’s episode of Smallville, with Oliver Queen on the wrong end of a poisoning attempt. As Oliver showed up for a big fundraising party that Clark and Chloe were also at, he appeared disoriented and possibly drunk. But when he passed out and Clark and Chloe came to his aid, he insisted that he had been poisoned and had only 12 hours to live. That revelation spurred two separate courses of action: 1) Clark went scurrying for a cure with Chloe helping him dig, and 2) Lois found out about Oliver’s condition and rushed to the side of her old beau. As she waited, we learned through flashbacks that Oliver had experienced a similar poisoning before when he was stranded on a remote island for two years. There, he learned to survive and honed his archery skills to become the master marksman that his alter ego, Green Arrow, is. He escaped the island only when a group of mercenary smugglers stops there to repair their boat and discovers Oliver, who has passed out and is on the verge of death because of being pricked by a thorn from a deadly flower. He recovers thanks to the intervention of one of two prisoners being carried by the smugglers, a woman who turns out to be Tess Mercer, now a fellow titan of industry in Metropolis, just like Oliver, in the present. Mercer’s background as a marine biologist gave her the know-how to use leeches to help Oliver recover because they secrete a healing enzyme and suck out the poisoned blood. The cure worked on the island and when Oliver finds himself facing the same crisis in Metropolis, he knows he’s in trouble. After Chloe uses her new superpower of a brain more powerful than any super computer to sort through the LuthorCorp database and find the identity of the poisonous flower, Clark visits Tess and asks her to provide the antidote he and Chloe know LuthorCorp has. When Tess learns who the antidote is for, she tells Clark that the facility where it is located has been relocated to Brazil and that there is no way to retrieve it in time to save Oliver. Of course, with Clark’s super speed, there is time and he finds the antidote and brings it back in time to save Oliver. Chloe’s new pal Davis, a.k.a. Doomsday, is also on hand to assist Oliver, but his presence at the Isis Foundation offices, where Oliver was taken because he refused to go to the hospital, also leads to an uncomfortable situation between he and Chloe when Davis sees her bank of computers and monitors left over from Lana Lang’s days of surveilling Lex Luthor and pries into what Chloe is using them for. Back on the Oliver front, the instant he recovers and regains consciousness, he tells Clark that the person who poisoned him will also be going after Tess. Clark speeds off and arrives just in time to help Tess, who is being attacked by one of the smugglers from the island who she and Oliver injected with the poison from the mystery flower and left to die on that island. Clark uses his heat vision to saw off a street light and it comes crashing down on Tess’ attacker. However, she’s not content with her enemy going to jail; she pays the man’s bail, then as he gets into a cab to bail out of town, she leans in through the car’s window and scratches him with a thorn from the poisonous flower, injecting him again and possibly sending him to his death. So for the most part, an episode centered in one place and with plenty of drama. Still missing Lana (Kristin Kreuk), Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum) and the rest of the Justice League, but that’s all for this week……
- Maybe unicorns really do exist, leprechauns do hold pots of gold at the end of rainbows and the Loch Ness Monster is real. How else do you explain a miraculous occurrence like Iraq and the U.S. pushing close to a deal setting a course for American combat troops to pull out of major Iraqi cities by next June, unless literally ANYTHING is possible? The plan also contains steps for a broader withdrawal from the long and costly war by 2011. It is still subject to final approval by top Iraqi leadership, but assuming they don’t screw this up, the exit date for U.S. troops would be December 2011. As you might expect, the ass hats currently in charge of our side of the war (still looking at you, W.) insist on linking that target to additional security and political progress. Still, this is an amazing step simply because that tool W. has long resisted a timetable for pulling out, even under heavy pressure from a nation pissed off with hundreds of billions of dollars wasted, thousands of lives lost and all for a war founded on falsifications and lies. It is a day that I never thought I would live to see, the single most moronic, inept president in the history of this country actually being propelled in the right direction on the issue of the Iraq war. Maybe adidas has it right with their current marketing slogan…..anything IS possible…..
- You could see this one coming for a long time. Sooner or later, you knew Lawrence Phillips would be heading to prison for a long time, and so it has come to pass. In a Los Angeles courtroom, Phillips was sentenced to 10 years in prison, two years after he was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon.
The delay in sentencing occurred because Phillips fought to withdraw a guilty plea in a domestic abuse case that could have led to a stiffer sentence. The 10 years behind bars may seem harsh, but then again, LP was convicted in 2006 of seven counts of assault with a deadly weapon. The former Nebraska running back has been jailed since an August 2005 incident in which he drove onto a field near Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and his car struck three boys, ages 14 and 15, and a 19-year-old man. All three suffered cuts and bruises, and the car narrowly missed three other people. Why the rage? If you recall, Phillips was allegedly upset after losing a pickup football game to the kids and subsequently accused them of stealing some of his belongings. In other words, a former NFLer was pissed at losing a pickup game to a bunch of kids and reacted by first accusing them of stealing his gear, then trying to pull an Albert Belle and run them down in his whip. Bizarre, but not surprising when you consider that Phillips has a history of violence dating back to his days at Nebraska, when he allegedly hit his girlfriend and abused her on several occasions. Plus, sentencing on this conviction was delayed while Phillips tried to withdraw a 2000 guilty plea to hitting a woman he had been dating during a confrontation at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The reason for that was that the plea stands as a strike against Phillips under California’s “three-strikes” law, which mandates tougher sentences for repeat offenders. He was also released by the St. Louis Rams in 1997 for insubordination. He also allegedly pawned off a Big 8 (predecessor of the Big 12 conference) championship ring to get a ride out of town during one of the more down periods in his life, so this is a downward trajectory a long, long time in the making……
- Who doesn’t love a good “Hey, a natural disaster is striking a down-and-out region, let’s gouge on prices and make tons of money” story? Me too! So it is with great confusion that I hear about the Texas attorney general suing a hotel and a motel, accusing them of price gouging during September's exodus of more than 1 million Gulf Coast residents ahead of Hurricane Ike. What is your problem, Attorney General Greg Abbott? Why are you filing suit against the Hotel Nacogdoches in Nacogdoches and the Super 8 Brookshire Motel near Katy and accusing them of illegally raising room rates after Gov. Rick Perry had issued a declaration of disaster on September 8? I’m sure it is pure coincidence that Hotel Nacogdoches, located north of Houston along a major evacuation route, charged evacuees more than double its usual rate, $99.99, for a room that had cost $49.99 two days before Ike. And it has to be pure happenstance that the Super 8 Brookshire Motel, west of Katy, charged up to $125 for a room that ordinarily cost $99 and did so during a massive evacuation of the area. Yet Abbott persists. “Although Texas law clearly prohibits profiteering during declared disasters, these defendants are charged with increasing room rates for evacuees during Hurricane Ike,” Abbott said in a statement. “The law imposes strict penalties on vendors that attempt to increase their profits after the governor issues a disaster declaration.” Not only that, dude is piling on these fine entrepreneurs by suggesting that they also charged state and local hotel and motel taxes, even though the governor had issued a declaration waiving them. As such, the office of the attorney general is seeking civil penalties of up to $20,000 per violation and up to $250,000 per violation for victims over the age of 65. Texas law prevents Abbott from bringing criminal charges, so all he can do is sue, thank God. Some equally overzealous local district attorney would have to file the criminal charges. Again, I find it no more than an amazing coincidence that faced with people fleeing a natural disaster, these motels just happened to pick that same time to raise their rates by 25 to 50 percent. It’s not too late to back away from the legal action, G. Abbott…..
- Being smart doesn’t mean your above a little bigotry and racial profiling from the cops. While the smart kids with ginormous SAT scores at Harvard might think that they are a cut above everyone else, the campus police at the school appear to be operating under a very different assumption. The fake cops also known as
campus police at Harvard are under scrutiny as the Ivy League school recently launched a review of the department amid allegations of possible racial profiling of students and professors. University president Drew Gilpin Faust wrote a letter addressed to the public and his university announcing plans to review the department's diversity training in light of an incident last month as well as “concerns expressed internally. The review will include consideration of HUPD's diversity training, community outreach and recruitment efforts, as well as the ways in which Harvard's past experience as well as best practices elsewhere can help inform our future practice.” The incident he referred to in the letter was one in which police confronted a person using tools to remove a lock from a locked bicycle. Faust writes that it was later determined that the person, who was black, was working on the Harvard campus for the summer, owned the bicycle and was trying to cut the lock because the key had broken off in that lock. But hey, I’m sure the cops didn’t jump the gun at all and rush to judgment because they saw a black person cutting a lock off of a bike. Nice to know that even in the hallowed halls of the Ivy League, small-minded and biased people still reside…..
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