- At this point, it might be easier to list who’s NOT leaving Grey's Anatomy rather than keeping track of who is making an exit. Yet another female medical professional is leaving Seattle Grace. This time, the exit-ee is an intern who appeared in only two episodes. Janina Gavankar joined Grey’s following her time as a cast member on the L Word, coming on board September as one of several new Seattle Grace interns. However, her role turned out to be smaller than Gavankar had hoped (if you blinked, you probably missed her) and she simply chose to move on. Producers refused to guarantee that that her part would grow and her screen time with it, so Gavankar decided that her talents would be better put to use elsewhere. Where might that be? Well, already rumors have her being considered for a much more substantial role in White Collar, the USA Network pilot starring Matthew Bomer, Tim DeKay and Tiffani Thiessen (Kelly Kapowski for all you Saved by the Bell homers). So to be fair, this isn’t exactly a major departure for Grey’s, but seeing as it is the second one in the past few weeks, it’s worth mentioning……
- How exactly do you prove something didn’t happen when it took place several decades ago? That’s the challenge facing the mother of a British lawyer who wrote a popular book recounting a childhood of alleged emotional and physical abuse and is now being sued for libel by beloved mom, who says the claims are fantasy. The author, Constance Briscoe, defends the accuracy of her book, "Ugly,” named after the nickname she says her mother gave her as a child. The case against C. Briscoe has reached London's High Court, where
yesterday her lawyer told that the book contained some errors but was “quite properly put in the biography section of the bookshop, not the fiction section.” Therein lies the issue, because if this book had not been billed as biographical but rather fictional, end of story. In fiction, write what you will, reality be damned. But since the book purports to be a harrowing and ostensibly true story, which has sold more than half a million copies in Britain since it was published in 2006 and even spawned a sequel, "Beyond Ugly,” the issue is more complex. The book is based on Briscoe’s life as the child of Jamaican immigrants, growing up in a poor part of London but going on to become a lawyer and one of the first black women in Britain to be appointed a recorder, or part-time judge. Among the allegations in the book are claims that her mother regularly beat and starved her before abandoning her when she was 13, that her stepfather once stubbed a cigarette out on her hand, and that as a teenager Briscoe needed surgery on her breasts because of trauma caused by her mother's assaults. For some odd reason, her mother, Carmen Briscoe-Mitchell, 74, says these and many other incidents in the book are pure fiction. Plus, shock of all shocks, she is seeking damages from Briscoe and her publisher, Hodder and Stoughton. A cash grab lawsuit against a successful author? No way. Why am I not surprised? Here’s the issue, Carmen: how are you going to prove that all of these alleged incidents are false? You don’t have physical evidence for something that doesn’t exist. Nor do you have video of every second of your daughter’s life, which is what you would need to prove that none of the incidents ever took place. Since she and her alleged abusers were the only people around for said incidents, it’s hard to prove or disprove them. But I don’t think that that’s what this is about, anyhow. I’m pretty sure you’re pissed that your daughter has made a lot of money and maybe hasn’t fed any of it your way, so you’re looking to get even. Your teary performance on the witness stand notwithstanding, I don’t imagine you’re going to have a lot of success collecting damages or a positive verdict here, which is probably as it should be……
- This should make everything better for the University of Michigan football program. Having just locked up the first eight-loss season in the 100-plus year history of the program, UM head coach Rich-er Fraud-riguez is taking aim at his team’s most passionate fans. “It's amazing some of the things that people would say [on a message board] or yell at you of a personal nature,” Rodriguez said Monday. “You almost want to tell them, 'Get a life.’ There's a whole lot bigger problems. Look at the economy.” Salient points, yes, but here’s the problem, Rich-er: you knew what you were signing up for. When you sign a contract to be a coach at a storied, major program like Michigan, you know you are in for millions of rabid fans who are a little too into their team and who often go overboard in reacting to both wins and losses. Is it right? No. But do you have any right to complain about it? No. You don’t like it, go coach at ssome Division III school in Vermont, I guarantee people will leave you alone there. Don’t expect things to get any better in the days ahead, either, especially if you receive the expected ass-kicking from your archrival Ohio State on Saturday. Additionally, zero points for playing the bad economy card. I think people know that the economy is bad; many of them are probably hoping you and your team will provide a nice three-hour diversion from it on Saturdays, not make them feel that the withering American economy is actually the more positive of the two things. Also, I don’t think you would be telling people to get perspective on football if you were 11-0 and headed for a BCS bowl game, so stop being such a freaking hypocrite. -- where the Wolverines are expected to extend their dubious record with a ninth loss -- he tried to deliver a message to fans who have lost touch. But hey, Rich-er, whaddya say we pull out some tired coaching clichés to polish this thing off and really come across as a total tool? Ready? Here we go: “I know that sounds like coach-speak. But if we can play consistently like we have at times this year and get a few breaks in there, anything can happen,” Fraud-riguez declared. Thanks, loser…..
- Sorry it’s taken me until today to review Monday night’s episode of Prison Break, I’m delayed on writing about it because the douche bags who run the local Fox network carried Monday’s Monday Night Football game, mainly broadcast by ESPN, on their network to give the folks who don’t have cable a chance to watch a crummy football game between two mediocre teams. But when I did track down the episode on Fox’s website, I was blown…BLOWN (insert faux George Steinbrenner accent from Seinfeld here, complete with hand motions) away. The day begins for Michael Scofield and his convict crew with the looming reality that Michael needs surgery to remove a growth on his brain and that he needs the surgery immediately. Sarah informs him that the doctor he saw on his visit to the hospital for the CAT scan can perform the surgery at 3 p.m. that day and that the doctor also promises not to call the cops on him. Michael reluctantly agrees to have the surgery, but first he wants to finish up the plan to break into the vault where Scylla, the Company’s supercomputer/database, is held. Part of those plans involves the vault itself, part centers on copying the sixth and final card needed to access Scylla. Getting the card falls on Gretchen/Susan, former Company operative, and T-Bag, her new partner in crime. With T-Bag’s secretary, who is really a Homeland Security agent partnered with Don Self (the man running Michael’s team), gets too nosy about T-Bag and Gretchen’s efforts, the two of them partner with the man they intend to sell Scylla to once it’s stolen, Xang, to resolve the problem. They set up Self and his partner by feeding them a false address for a meeting when they know Self’s partner is listening in on the call. When the two agents storm the house where the alleged meeting is at, Xang and his men capture them and hold them captive while Gretchen and T-Bag wait in the office he occupies as Cole Pfeiffer at GATE Industries, the office that is the launching point to the tunnel Michael and his team use to get to Scylla. The plan to get there takes a lot of doing, especially with Michael in his weakened state and with only five members of the team alive (Michael, Linc, Sarah, Sucre and Mahone). In the end, the plan calls for the following: drilling a hole in the concrete wall separating the crew from Scylla and inserting a camera to get surveillance footage of the inside. That allows Michael to see heat sensors to detect temperature change in the room, microphonic sensors to detect and sound and pressure sensors in the floor to detect any added weight above two pounds. That means the team needs to get through the concrete wall and also the Plexiglas wall around Scylla without making a sound and without touch the floor outside the vault. To do so, they first drill more holes in the wall and then use an electromagnetic wave generated by two car batteries and channeled through a long metal pipe wrapped in wire to break down the steel fibers inside the concrete wall and cause the wall to weaken and crumble to the point that it can be scraped away. Plenty of repeats of that process finally clear out a hole in the wall big enough to operate through. Also, the group inserts two umbrellas through holes in the wall and uses them to catch any falling debris so it doenst hit the floor. Once the hole is opened up, it’s time to go inside the vault. Sucre is the first man in, piecing together a horizontal metal ladder spanning the distance from the wall to the vault. With the first few sections of the ladder built and cables run through holes in the wall and anchored to walls outside the vault to keep the ladder suspended in mid-air, Sucre goes into the vault and has to use a canister of liquid nitrogen to spray into the air and return the temperature to a range that won't set off the heat sensors. After that, the other crew members hand him wooden frames to place on the ladder that can be used both to scoot on and also to hold the nitrogen canister. At one point, both Sucre and the canister nearly fall to the floor, but he catches himself and with Linc’s help, gets back on the ladder. Building the ladder remains Sucre’s job until it reaches all the way to the vault, at which point Michael takes over. He’s there because he bailed on the surgery at the last minute, believing that if the rest of the team failed and was killed on the mission and he lived because he “called in sick,” he couldn’t live with himself. So instead he has Sarah give him a shot designed to prevent him from having any seizures for about three hours, hoping that will be enough to get him through the mission and still allow him to make it to the hospital for the surgery later on. Still battling his condition, Micahel crawls out to the end of the ladder and with his own canister of liquid nitrogen and a scoring knife, goes to work. He first scores the glass in the vault wall, then hits it with a spray of nitrogen and also attches to handles with suction cups on them to the wall. The scored section of the glass lifts out of place and Michael gently lowers it to the ground inside the vault, mission nearly accomplished. However, there is someone coming for Scylla from the other direction as well. The Company has finalized transport plans for Scylla and is about to move it to Pennsylvania. General Jonathan Krantz, the organization’s head man, is overseeing the process with help from the other five Scylla card holders. His own card is the final one Michael and Co. need to unlock Scylla, but the plan to secure the card falls through when the General sees through a ploy by Gretchen to lure him to a hotel room for a little afternoon delight and steal his card in the process. However, he allows Gretchen to live, partly because as it turns out, he is the father of the daughter we learned she has earlier in the season. Back at the office, Krantz tries to gather up all six card holders to accompany Scylla on its flight to rural Pennsylvania, but at the very time those plans are coming together, a security sensor attached to Scylla that Michael managed to overlook detects his presence in the vault and alerts the General, who sets off an alert and demands that security accompany him to the vault immediately. That’s where the episode ends, with Michael standing in front of Scylla, unaware that a lot of bad guys are headed his direction in a hurry. Or does he know? Because oddly enough, he also received a piece of information from Gretchen prior to leaving on the mission, evidence we don’t know the nature of, and based on that evidence Michael sent Sara with a gun to sit on a seemingly random park bench that also happened to be along the route that Lisa Tabak, one of the other Scylla cardholders, walked on her way to a police luncheon as the mission was going on. So what is Michael up to and what does he have in store? Tune in next week and find out……
- Here is a judge I’d want on the bench if I were on trial for a crime of which I was unquestionably guilty. Sadly, Elizabeth Halverson is a judge no more and can’t be again, at least in the state of Nevada. Why, you ask? Did she accept bribes from defendants or use her position to illegally help her friends get off for crimes? No, nothing that sinister….Judge Halverson has been stripped of her office because she was found guilty, so to speak, of sleeping on the bench, lying under oath, and abusing her bailiff. I’m sorry, and the problem here is? You’re demanding what, that judges actually stay awake for cases taking place in their courtroom and live up to the standards of the very law they are supposed to enforce by, in part, telling the truth under oath? Personally, I just don’t get the ire of 8th District Chief Judge Kathy Hardcastle, who testified in Halverson's disciplinary hearing in August and issued the following scathing diatribe. “Personally I found her to be incompetent as a law clerk and not be able to do her job,” Hardcastle fumed. Her testimony and other witnesses I will just assume are lying led the commission to come up with a vitriolic, 28-page decision that concludes Halverson will be removed from the bench and will not be allowed to run for judicial office in Nevada again. But maybe there’s a good reason for her behavior, a solid explanation that will make it all OK….here it is. The Judicial Commission believes that Halverson's problems arose in part from a paranoid feud she had with Hardcastle, her supervisor. Maybe that’s true, maybe not, but can’t we cut her a little slack? After all, Halverson's husband was just arrested for a vicious attack on her with a frying pan, so she’s under a lot of stress. “Are you going to help me? Because I'm bleeding. A lot,” Halverson said in a call to 9-1-1 on September 5th. So she’s being bludgeoned with frying pans, kicked off the bench just because she took a nap or ten during cases and was “abusive” toward her bailiff? Who among us hasn’t done all of those things? Oh, none of you have? Never mind, carry on, Nevada Judicial Commission…..
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