- Riot Watch! Riot Watch! Like shooting really big fish in a really tiny barrel with an AK-47, I’m sticking with the riots in Greece and making the most of them until they die out. More than a week has passed since police in Athens shot and killed a 15-year-old boy and sparked a revolt by angry young anarchists across the country, but that hasn’t slowed the fervor of those anarchists and their riots. As this week began, Greece was bracing for even more riots as students angry over the police shooting threatened to take demonstrations that have thrown the country into a state of disarray. These rioters are the best, incorporating old and new school rioting techniques, large-scale destruction and small-scale tactics to get under the skin of the police. They have destroyed property, thrown rocks, burned things, vandalized businesses and clashed diretly with police. Now, they are going full-on poultry, hurling eggs at police outside the main court building in Athens. At the same time, other dissidents were busy planning a sit-in is scheduled to take place in front of the national police headquarters. They are taking virtually no days off, threatening daily protests this week, calling for roads to be blocked today, and getting ready to stage a demonstration tomorrow outside the courthouse where the police involved in the shooting will be testifying, and a nationwide protest on Thursday. Their efforts are getting results, too; the government’s control over the country is weakening, with some opposition groups calling for fresh elections. Thus far, at least 280 people have been detained by police, with 176 of those individuals arrested. Athens is the epicenter of the unrest, and on Sunday, there were multiple attacks on a police station in the Athens district of Exarchaia and on the environment ministry building by angry protesters with stones and Molotov cocktails. Nothing screams angry, incensed rioter like a good Molotov cocktail, so I love seeing those worked into any act of social dissidence. However, not everyone is taking the violent approach, as a peaceful candlelit vigil in front of Parliament on Syntagma Square was held on Saturday. Several thousand people took part in the demonstration, and a similar sit-in was also held in the northern city of Thessaloniki. Overall, this is just a gripping drama of social dissidence and unrest that has it all – violence, peaceful demonstrations, arson, looting, clashes with police, Molotov cocktails, throwing rocks and eggs – and I’m enjoying the heck out of it, good times…….
- Last night’s Prison Break certainly threw us for a loop. On one hand, Michael Scofield was finally set to go under the knife for the much-needed surgery to remove a tumor from his brain. The Company, which captured him last week when he passed out in an alley while on the run with Scylla, would be doing to surgery with their own doctors. Michael went into the operation, an experimental surgery not available to the general public, not knowing that the price for his surgery was his brother Linc finding a way to recover Scylla. Heck, Michael didn’t even know before the surgery that he was in a Company facility. During the surgery, he was to have local anasthetic in his head but remain awake so that his surgeons could monitor his brain functions and his ability to speak, think, etc. and make sure those abilities weren’t being harmed by what they were doing. But as the surgery went on, Michael slipped into some sort of weird coma/trance in his mind, wherein he was back inside the cell he occupied at Fox River Penitentiary in Season 1. In the cell was his old pal Charles Westmoreland, a.k.a. D.B. Cooper. Westmoreland died during the escape at the end of that first season, but he’s alive in Michael’s little mental vacation. The two talk about all that Michael has gone through since the escape, along with the fact that he feels he has failed and that instead of slving the problems in front of him, he has made them worse. He admits feeling guilty for all of the people who have died as a result of the plan he started to break his brother out of Fox River and save him from being wrongfully executed. Then, a massive collage appears on the cell wall, just like the one Michael had made prior to coming to Fox River to help lay out his plan. Just as Michael begins tearing down the collage on the cell wall, Westmoreland directs his attention to it from a distance and says, “Everything is not as it seems.” Looking back at the wall, Michael sees that the word “Scylla” is cut out in the midst of the collage. Upon further examination, he finds some more interesting details. One of them is a mental video that rolls inside one of the pictures in the collage, a video in which he hears General Jonathan Krantz of the Company say the word “bargain” over and over. Breaking down the word bargain, Michael separates it into four elements from the periodic table (barium and indium among them), which turns out to be helpful once he wakes up after surgery. But in the present, Michael crashes and it appears he isn't going to survive the procedure. Sarah Tancredi, watching from the next room, rushes in and tries to talk to him, but even that doesn’t seem to help. He receives an injection and other revival efforts, and miraculously is able to hear Sarah’s voice inside his little daydream as he talks with Westmoreland. Michael recovers and wakes up, but not before Westmoreleand disappears out the door of the cell and tries to get Michael to come with him, ostensibly into the great beyond. Michael refuses and wakes up, after which he goes right into problem-solving mode, talking to Sarah about his dream. Breaking down the word bargain, he explains that a theory exists in engineering, being able to harness the four elements he derived from the word bargain and combine them with solar energy panels would result in a source of power with limitless possibilities. It would allow the possessor to have great influence, wealth and power in the world, which Michael and Sarah realize is the Company’s endgame. Scylla, they come to understand, isn't merely the Company’s little black book with names and dates of past operations. It’s their blueprint for world domination and influence, their future plans to take over economic control. At the moment, Scylla is out in the open. Linc readies himself to hunt it down, first by talking with T-Bag, who was captured by the Company last week while holding the sister and daughter of his former partner Gretchen hostage. T-Bag has been brought to Company headquarters and after Linc rips out two of his teeth using pliers, T-Bag gives up the location of Gretchen and Don Self’s meeting with the buyer they have for Scylla. Linc and Sucre go to the location, a pier by the ocean, and just miss finding Self and Gretchen. Those to have fled after a call from Gretchen’s sister tips them off the to fact that T-Bag has been captured and thus, the Company knows about their location and the exchange. Linc and Sucre come onto the scene and find a trail of blood from the man who was facilitating the sale of Scylla that Self shot last week, along with the discarded remains of Gretchen and Self’s cell phones, gutted of their SIM cards. The only option for Linc is to call the Company, which Krantz has promised will supply anything he needs to retrieve Scylla, and have them use satellite images to track Gretchen and Self. That leads Linc and Sucre to a convenience store where Linc spots an empty spot on a display of pre-paid, disposable cell phones and figures out Gretchen probably bought one to replace the phones destroyed at the pier. Some physical coercion of the cashier yields a receipt for Gretchen’s purchase. That receipt allows the Company to track the phone to an abandoned warehouse (again? Can any dram escape the cliché of abandoned warehouses for dramatic scenes?) where Self and Gretchen meet with the buyer. The mystery man demands to verify the data on Scylla, but before the transaction is completed, Linc and Sucre arrive and when Sucre stumbles and makes too much noise in sneaking in, Self and Gretchen draw their weapons and go to see what’s making the noise. The buyer seizes the chance to grab Scylla and flee without paying, although judging from his interactions with Gretchen, she knows him and exactly who he is. So Linc and Sucre have to leave without retrieving Scylla, although they do get the pleasure of seeing Self shot and bleeding on the floor. Back at Company HQ, Sucre informs Linc that he wont be a part of the plan going forward to get back Scylla, as making sure that Michael is OK (which he now is) was all he wanted to have happen. Now that it has, Sucre claims to be headed back to Chicago to be with his beloved Maricruz and their newborn son. I have a feeling we haven’t seen the last of him, but for now he’s gone. Linc respected Sucre’s choice and went inside to check on his brother. It was then Linc told Michael the truth about his surgery and what made it possible. Additionally, Linc says that the folder he was given by Krantz, “Tombstone II”, contained information about how their mother also worked for the Company before her death, just like their father. Michael tries to tell Linc how dangerous and valuable Scylla is and that it can’t be placed back in the wrong hands, but Linc won’t hear it. He declares that he’s going to continue working for the Company to recover Scylla and hold up his end of the deal, which makes you wonder if he really is going over to the dark side. The final piece of the episode was Alex Mahone, taken into custody last week when he tried to use old FBI contacts to help bring down the Company and failed when Scylla slipped through the grasp of Michael’s crew. Agent Wheeler and his former partner, agent Felicia Lang, are taking Mahone in when he demands to stop for a restroom break as mandated by federal law during prisoner transports of more than three hours. It’s the world most tense restroom break, with Wheeler sure Mahone wants to try to escape. But Mahone is in and out of the bathroom in 15 seconds, just as ordered, and back into the car without incident – or so it seems. Inside the restroom, he snagged a piece of pipe from under the sink. Using the pipe once the car was back on the road, Mahone broke the window, opened the door using the outside handle (rear doors in police cars don’t open from the inside, for obvious reasons) and jumps out of the moving vehicle. A chase ensues in which Wheeler and Lang try to hunt down Mahone. Agent Lang actually does catch him and credits the training Mahone gave her with helping her find him. However, Mahone says he can’t go to prison and that he’s as good as dead if he does, so he’s going to run and if Lang needs to stop him, she can shoot him. She can’t pull the trigger, though, and when Wheeler catches up to her, she points him in the wrong direction, says she just missed Mahone and allows her former partner to escape. Thus, the fall portion of the show ends with Mahone on the run, Linc working on behalf of the Company and Michael caught in-no man’s land. Should be fun when the show picks back up in February, although the next six weeks of TV are going to suck without Heroes and Prison Break, might be time to find another way to spend your Monday nights until February…..
- Count this as one of those miracles of science that I’m thrilled to hear about but more than happy to never see the gory details of. The first-ever successful completion of a near-total face transplant surgery in the United States is awesome, as it restored the normal appearance of someone whose face had been severely disfigured by a horrible, tragic incident. The operation took place at the Cleveland Clinic, a place typically known more for its work in heart surgery. But this time, the hospital was the scene for a near-total face transplant, conducted two weeks ago by a team of eight surgeons. They were able to transplant nearly 80 percent of the trauma patient's face, with the forehead and chin left intact. Never before had this type of procedure been attempted on U.S. soil, although back in 2005, French doctors performed the world's first partial face transplant on a 38-year-old woman who was disfigured when she was attacked by a dog. Isabelle Dinoire, the French woman who underwent the surgery in 2005, received a nose, lips and chin. She expressed hope that others will have the same chance she had so that they too can have a shot at living a normal life once again. I agree wholeheartedly, but again, I never, ever, ever want to see so much as a second of footage from one of these surgeries or a picture from them, because I don think I would ever be able to stop vomiting and passing out after that type of visual……
- If you were in need of further evidence that Vice President and shotgun-blast-to-the-face-of-a-friend expert Dick Cheney is senile, delusional and an all-out idiot, here you go. In addition to his never-competent performance the past eight years, Cheney is still crazy enough to continue defending the choice to start the biggest abortion of a war in American history. In his first TV interview since the presidential election, Cheney defended the W. administration's decision to go to war in Iraq. Dude also had the balls to pretend that he was “frustrated” over faulty intelligence regarding mythical weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Hmm, you all didn’t seem so concerned with the veracity of that intelligence when you were rushing headlong into a trillion-dollar war that has cost thousands of American soldiers and Iraqi citizens their lives, Dick. You and your boy W. seemed content to run with bogus intel and lie about it when it served the purpose of justifying your idiotic, ill-fated war. Your assertion that "the world is better off with Saddam [Hussein] gone" is irrelevant, because that isn’t enough to justify a war in a nation we had no right to invade. "I think we made the right decision in spite of the fact that the original [intelligence estimate] was off in some of its major judgments," Cheney said. Are you freaking kidding me? Even though nearly all of your intelligence was false, you made the right call? Cheney, you are a freaking beauty. And by beauty, I mean douche bag whom I could not be happier to see leaving office next month. Not only that, you’ve been a key part of trampling the Constitution when it comes to torturing terrorism suspects and lying to Congress about it, so props there as well. Keep lying right up to the end, Dick: "Those who allege that we've been involved in torture, or that somehow we, simply don't know what they're talking about," Cheney said. That you went on to defend the practice of waterboarding says all that needs to be said there, because you just proved that your quote is a load of sh*t by explaining how you did something that explicitly violated the Constitution or laws with the Terrorist Surveillance Program. "Did it produce the desired results? I think it did," Cheney argued. The ends don’t always justify the means, you tool. The framers of the Constitution didn’t doodle down some general guidelines for you to take a piss on any time you felt like it. All right, this is just angering me too much, let’s just move on before I go looking for some shoes to throw at this mo-fo……
- I may not be a fan of any half-hour TV show, especially in prime time and especially if it’s a comedy, but I still have to be impressed at the dynamic duo of guest stars that NBC’s The Office has scored for its post-Super Bowl episode? Already, we knew that funny man Jack Black would be appearing in the episode and giving it a great boost of humor. But the show’s producers clearly weren’t satisfied with just one star and were intent on making the most of one of the most primo time slots in all of TV, following up the one sporting event that nearly everyone in America who watches sports at all will tune in for. In addition to Black, the show has also scored uber-hottie Jessica Alba, which is better than laughing at Jack Black any day, no matter how funny he is. Alba will actually team with Black in the episode as members of the cast of the bootlegged movie the Dunder Mifflin staff try to watch during the workday. Can’t say as this news is enough to lock me in for watching the entire episode, but if I can carve out a few minutes while cleaning up from my Super Bowl viewing party to watch more TV, I might flip past NBC to see if Alba is on screen and if she is, watch a few scenes…….
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