- Who doesn’t love a good wedding reception brawl? A nice rumble at the reception breaks up lame music, the chicken dance, the electric slide and your drunk uncle hitting on all of the bridesmaids while the flower girl and ring bear chase each other around the room. So while I can get with Houston Astros pitcher Brandon Backe being one of 10 people arrested this month during a brawl at a wedding reception, I’m not sure I buy the story his attorney is selling to defend his client. Attorney Bob Moen, who represents Backe and six others arrested in the incident, alleged in a complaint to the FBI that Galveston police violated his clients' civil rights. Great Bob, but I have a question: do your clients get some sort of volume discount? Did one of them refer a couple of others to you and get a referral discount on his or her own rates? But I digress….according to Moen, he met with FBI agents on Wednesday to ensure there is a fair investigation into the incident. “I have initiated a formal complaint against the officers involved for their actions against the clients I represent for violating their civil rights,” Moen declared. Nice move, meeting with the FBI. You know it’s a good wedding reception if the FBI is somehow involved. To be fair to the local police (a fairness Bob Moen may not feel they deserve), an internal affairs investigation has been launched into the incident. The facts of the case are that Backe was among 10 people arrested Oct. 5 at a wedding reception at a hotel bar when a brawl broke out and police officers became involved. Witnesses have alleged that police used excessive force, which may be true since the father and brother of the bride were stunned with a Taser, and one of them was pepper-sprayed. Things escalated when police tried to arrest the bride's brother for allegedly entering a pool bar area with an open liquor container. During the struggle, the brother hit one officer in the chest and another in the face, after which others at the bar piled on when police tried to handcuff him. Backe was a member of the wedding party and he reportedly ignored police orders to back away from the fight and struggled with officers who were attempting to handcuff him. He has been charged with interfering with a police officer and resisting arrest, both misdemeanors. How proud a day this must have been for the happy couple, seeing it end with the bride’s father, brother and most of the wedding party hauled off in squad cars. Look, I’m all for resisting authority and sticking it to The Man, but you all need to check yourselves. This is supposed to be the happiest day of these two people’s lives and here you are ruining it because you got too liquored up and threw down with the police. Then again, if you have people whose idea of a proper wedding reception is having it at a hotel bar, you can’t expect anything different…….
- Thursday was creepy stalker night on Smallville, with a well-intentioned psychopathic jeweler deciding that kidnapping engaged couples and forcing them to undergo an electrically charged lie-detector test was the best way to make sure that their love was true. Jimmy and Chloe had their engagement party, punctuated by a snarky toast from Chloe’s cousin Lois in which she implied that Chloe was getting married too soon and that maybe she and Jimmy weren’t really soul mates. After the reception, the creepy jeweler ambushed Chloe and Jimmy in the street, downed them with a Taser and hauled them off to his basement lab where he hooked them up to the polygraph and told them he was doing them a favor by strengthening their bond and forcing them to be totally honest with one another. That the honesty came when massive jolts of electricity accompanied a false answer to one of his twisted questions didn’t seem to matter. Thankfully, Chloe and Jimmy passed this psycho test because they were honest, so the jeweler zapped them again with the Taser, then placed them at home in their apartment. However, their disappearance led Lois and Clark Kent to go looking for Chloe and Jimmy. After taking a drunken Lois back to the Kent farm to sleep off her hangover on the couch, Clark offers Lois a ride back to the Talon to meet Chloe for a dress fitting. When Chloe is AWOL and the apartment looks untouched from the night before, Lois and Clark are suspicious. A message from the police informing Jimmy and Chloe that their cars have been towed for blocking a street sweeper raises even more suspicions. The debate on how to find their missing friends/cousin leaves Clark and Lois scrambling and arguing, but they manage to find links to three other engaged couples who have similarly disappeared recently. The link between the couples comes from visiting the same wedding-related stores, among them a cake shop, a stationery store and a jeweler. Lois decides that she and Clark posing as an engaged couple will bring the best results in luring out the abductor, which in turn makes for some good comedy as they pretend to be engaged and don’t exactly come off in the most convincing fashion. Things nearly come off the tracks when Oliver Queen, Lois’ ex, walks in on them at the jeweler’s and Lois and Clark have to stick with the engaged couple ruse so as to not tip off the jeweler, leaving a stunned Oliver in their wake. Later that day, the plan works as Lois is abducted on the street by the psycho jeweler. When Clark receives a truncated phone message from Lois during her abduction, he knows where he needs to go. Bursting in on the jeweler’s basement lab, he is about to rescue Lois when the jeweler’s Kryptonite bracelet weakens him and he is knocked out by a blow to the head. When Clark comes to, he and Lois are subjected to the same type of probing questions as Jimmy and Chloe. That leads to Lois being forced to admit that deep down, she does love Clark despite seeming to go out of her way to say otherwise on a non-stop basis. Before Clark has to answeer the same question, he manages to head-butt the jeweler, rip off the Kryptonite bracelet and use his heat vision to explode a pipe, filling the room with steam. He then takes out the jeweler and escapes with Lois, later resulting in an uncomfortable elevator exchange at the Daily Planet wherein Lois says she slipped the polygraph sensor off her finger during the test and was lying when she said she loved Clark, who enjoys seeing her twist and squirm. Oliver does some squirming of his own, trying to weasel his way back into the good graces of new LuthorCorp CEO Tess Mercer, who is also a former girlfriend. The plan seems to work when she accepts a dinner invitation, but instead of dinner, they end up sleeping together. The next morning, however, Tess kicks Oliver out of the mansion, telling him she’s moved on and grown up sicne their relationship ended because he cheated on her. At episode’s end, Chloe and Jimmy are the only happy couple, with Clark and Lois still trying to deny feelings for each other and Oliver and Tess still on icy terms. That’s all for this time, so until next week…..
- Awesome. That’s the only word I can think of for the Chinese workers on the Atlantic island
of Providenciales, Turks and Caicos who were building a resort on the island when a financial meltdown busted the project. The workers were oddly peeved at not being paid and on Thursday they went on strike, demanding wages and reportedly holding Israeli contractors at the site. Nice work, everyone. When you are the oppressed, taken-advantage-of minority, don’t let The Man hold you down. Go on strike, take hostages, do what you need to do. According to Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yossi Levy, the construction workers have put West Caicos island “under siege” and trapped an undetermined number of Israeli contractors on the 9-square-mile island. Now that I love, shutting things down, causing an international incident and taking hostages in the process, booyah! So I’m going to ignore the words of Ygal Yancovitz, a manager for project contractors, who said the Chinese workers were angry but were not holding anyone hostage. It works better with hostages, Y., so let it go. “The workers have closed the port and aren't letting anyone out,” Moti said. “They're not being violent at this time ... but the situation can get worse. They're surrounding our living quarters and not letting us leave.” Give them time, Y., give them time. Good riots and violence can't be forced or rushed; they have to happen organically, of their own accord. These people have been working hard on the Ritz Carlton Molasses Reef project, which was to feature a 125-room hotel, marina and condominiums on secluded West Caicos island, which is a popular stop for divers. And in a major financial crisis, guess who’s involved: yup, everyone’s favorite bankrupt investment bankers, Lehman Brothers Holding Inc. Lehman financed the resort project, but after the company went bankrupt last month, the project, which was 75 percent complete, was halted. Heck, I’d be pissed to if I were those workers, getting swept up in the financial meltodwn of American banks and investment groups and not getting paid for days and days of back-breaking labor. So do what you need to do, Chinese workers, I and other riot/social dissidence lovers worldwide are with you on this one….
- Anyone excited about Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s plans to appear on "Saturday Night Live" tonight? Me neither. SNL has featured three opening skits in which former cast member and Palin lookalike Tina Fey portrays the Alaska governor, a welcome departure from her wildly overrated comedy 30 Rock. Fey first appeared as Palin for the show's season premiere last month in a sketch with SNL cast member Amy Poehler, who played Sen. Hillary Clinton. Right, because who doesn’t enjoy an on-screen reunion of two of the “stars” from one of the year’s worst movies, Baby Mama? Two weeks after that sketch, Fey reprised her role as Palin, again alongside Poehler, who parodied CBS's Katie Couric’s interview with Palin earlier that same week. So Lorne Michaels and Co. figured why not bring on the real thing, because let’s face it, just by virtue of not being Amy Poehler or Tina Fey, she’s like to be funnier than the two of them on screen together. But hey, at this point, you don’t expect much better from SNL; the show has absolutely sucked for several years now…..
- As you age, could Google be the secret to keeping your brain functioning at its highest level? If you believe the results of a study at the University of California, Los Angeles, the answer is yes. The study measured brain activity of older adults as they searched the Web, seeing how certain sites affected their cognitive functions. “There's so much interest in exercising our minds as we age,” said the researcher, Dr. Gary Small, a professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. “One result of this study is that these technologies are not all bad. They may be good in keeping our brains active.” Small recruited two groups of people for his study: one with minimal computer experience and another that was knowledgeable about the Web. Members of the latter group had more than twice the neural activation than their less experienced counterparts while searching online. That activity occurred in the region of the brain that controls decision-making and complex reasoning, according to Small's study. Unfortunately, Small said he can't pinpoint why there was more brain activity in the experienced users. “The way I theorized is that when we are confronted with new mental challenges, we don't know how to deal with it,” he offered. “We don't engage neural circuits. Once we figure out a strategy, we engage those circuits.” In the study, 24 people were divided into the two groups, who were similar in age ranging from 55 to 78 years old, sex and educational achievement. Their only difference was their technological experience. As part of the study, subjects underwent an MRI that monitored their brain activity while the subjects strapped on goggles, through which they saw a book page or an Internet search page. They were then asked to complete online search tasks such as finding out how to choose a car or looking up the benefits of eating chocolate or drinking coffee. In the end, those who spent more time online normally proved to have more proficient brain functions, a fact that bodes well for those of you who spend hours Googling pictures or videos of idiots performing wacky stunts and then posting them, or if you waste hours a week on your fantasy football squad or Facebook…..
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