- Now here’s someone you want looking after your kids - well, assuming she isn’t behind bars for the next 25 to life. Melissa Calusinski was doing a stellar job as a suburban day care worker, taking care of young children and making sure they didn’t shove anything dangerous into their mouths or bite one another. Well, right up until she allegedly threw a 16-month-old boy in her care to the ground, causing his subsequent death and leading police to file murder charges against her. See, Calusinski was working at the Minee Subee Day Care Center, looking after eight children in a room along with two adults, including one other day care staff member, when she began “having issues with children in the room. The children were making noise and things like that.” So how did she react? Yup, by grabbing 16-month-old Benjamin Kingan and slamming him to the ground. "She told investigators she was She just lost her temper and threw the child down," said Adam Hyde of the Lincolnshire Police Department. Amazingly enough, that slam wasn’t enough to kill Kingan immediately and he actually got up, crawled across the room, picked up a blanket and toy along the way, then climbing into a bouncy chair. However, once in the bouncy chair things took a tragic turn, losing consciousness and dying due to swelling and damage to the brain. All of this is based on Calusinski’s account of things and the autopsy, because the oblivious tool who was working in the room with her told police she did not see the incident. Just wondering, how the frak are you working in a room with eight small children whose well-being you are responsible for and you don’t see or hear anything when a fellow staff member picks up a kid and slams him violently to the ground in a fit of rage? This toddler suffers a fractured skull and bleeding near the brain and you don’t see or hear anything? Simply an all-around terrible incident, period. Oh, and I’m guessing that attendance at the Minee Subee Day Care Center drops markedly in the next few weeks. Lord knows I wouldn’t be leaving any child I remotely cared about there…….
- Surprisingly, summing up the two-hour season premiere of Lost isn’t all that tough. What’s going on doesn’t make sense within the context of reality as we know it, but it’s fairly simple. Those who left the island last season in the finale and returned to the U.S. are living their lives and being hounded by John Locke, who somehow managed to get off the island after they left and is attempting to convince those who left, the Oceanic Six, that they must return to the island to save the lives of those who stayed behind. Meanwhile, everyone who remained on the island is being whipped around on the space-time continuum, jumping from the past to the future, back and forth. They have to deal with those who existed on the island in reality during those times they’ve transported to, which makes for some difficult situations, but that more or less sums up the entire episode. Sawyer, Juliet and the rest of the Oceanic survivors must cope with having their beach camp and all of its amenities gone because in the time they (and the island itself) move to, their flight hasn’t yet crashed and thus nothing they used for the camp exists on the island. Daniel Faraday, the physicist from Charles Widmore’s freighter crew, understands the time travel phenomenon because he’s studied it extensively and actually, in a flashback to the Dharma Initiative’s time on the island, he is on the scene during the construction of the Orchid station, which Ben Linus used in last season’s finale for its bizarre cave space full of negatively charged energy that makes time travel possible. Sawyer, Juliet, Daniel, Miles and Charlotte, the latter two also freighter crew members, run back and forth through the jungle, trying to determine where in time they are and whether it’s them moving through time or the island itself. Locke is all by himself, first seeing the plane crash of the drug smuggling flight of Mr. Ecko’s brother that happened before the Oceanic survivors arrived on the island and which was a focal point of much drama in the show’s first two seasons. Locke is then shot by Ethan, one of the Others (also the one who abducted Claire when she was about to have her baby), while attempting to scour the remains of the crash. Ethan doesn’t know Locke because they are in a time before the Oceanic crash, before any of the survivors knew any of the Others. Locke’s life is saved from the end of a shotgun when another of the bizarre light flashes light up the sky hits, accompanied by some sort of weird groaning sound and signaling another leap forward or backward in time. In his next stop in time, Locke is treated for his wound by Richard Alpert, another of the Others, but yet another time change occurs and Locke is gone. As for the Oceanic Six, Sayid breaks Hurley out of the Santa Rosa mental hospital, tries to take him to a safe house and is attacked there. Sayid kills two more men, bringing his total for the night to three (also the weird dude lurking outside Santa Rosa in last season’s finale), but because onlookers see Hurley holding a gun on the balcony, it’s believed that he’s the one who did the killing. Sayid can’t say otherwise, as he’s shot with two poison darts in the attack and out cold. Hurley flees with Sayid in tow, getting pulled over in a traffic stop that only exists in his head by Ana Lucia, the now-deceased L.A. cop from the island. Eventually Hurley makes it to his parents’ home, where the police show up to question his dad. Once the police leave, Hurley convinces his dad to take Sayid to Jack, who is able to treat and revive him. Jack also calls his new partner Ben, who goes to Hurley’s house and tries to talk the big fella into joining the group going back to the island. Remembering a warning from Sayid, Hurley declines (but not before hurling a Hot Pocket at Ben in the best comedic moment I’ve seen on TV in a long, long time, great laughs) and instead runs out into the street and surrenders to the police staking out the house looking to arrest him for murder. He does that rather than go with Ben, which seems like a smart move at this point. Meanwhile, Kate is facing her own legal issues as two mystery lawyers show up at her door, representing an anonymous client who is demanding blood tests to prove if Aaron is really her son, which of course he isn’t. Kate flees and begins driving around L.A. with cash, a gun and Aaron. Along the way, she gets a call from Sun, the final member of the Oceanic Six who is also visiting L.A. They meet up in Sun’s penthouse hotel room in downtown L.A. and Sun offers cryptic advice to Kate regarding the lawyers who came to her house, Sun advocates “taking care of them” and doing whatever it takes to keep Aaron. Maybe her attitude has something to do with the conversation she had with Charles Widmore in an airport security room before flying to L.A., a talk in which he basically told her that she had better respect him and she told him that their “common interest” was killing Ben Linus. Have to see why exactly Sun wants Ben dead, given that her husband died on Widmore’s freighter, not Ben’s, at the hands of Widmore’s mercenaries, not Ben’s. Regardless, the one final piece of the episode was Desmond and Charles Widmore’s daughter, Des’s girl Penny. While on a yacht in the middle of the open sea, Desmond is gripped by a vivid memory from the past while sleeping. The memory comes from the island, where Daniel Faraday actually is able to talk to Desmond while he was still working in the Dharma station, pushing the “Execute” button every 108 minutes to allegedly save the world. Because the island or the people on it are time traveling, Daniel can talk to past Desmond, tell him to go to Oxford and let Daniel’s mother know what has become of him and have present-day Desmond have that memory, wake up and tell Penny they’re going to Oxford. So a bizarre premiere, one that sets the show up to go in any number of directions this season and I can’t wait to see which one it is…….
- Way to class it up, Arizona Cardinals fans. On Sunday, you won the NFC Championship Game against Philadelphia to advance to the first Super Bowl your team has been to since moving to Arizona more than two decades ago, and clearly you know how to celebrate a big win with dignity and class. Well, assuming the definition of dignity and class is burning "Go Cards," "Go Kurt" and "I heart AZ" in the yard of Philadelphia quarterback Donovan McNabb's Chandler, Ariz. home with diesel fuel. After hanging a Cardinals flag in a tree on the property, Chandler residents Rex Perkins and Ryan Hanlon took decided to kick things up a notch by coming back and torching the yard. McNabb laughed off the flag prank and actually left it up in the spirit of good fun, just as he did when the two men left a cardboard box in the driveway with "Go Cards" written on one side and "Beat Philly" on the other. However, that box proved to be the two arsonists’ downfall after they made a final trip to the home with diesel fuel in tow and burn Cardinals cheers into the lawn, causing about $2,000 in damage. See, Perkins and Hanlon left that cardboard box and it had an address on it that led right to Perkins. Oops, that’s not good. Police tracked him down, he implicated his buddy and both confessed to the crimes. They were fingerprinted, photographed and cited for misdemeanor criminal damage. Great plan, guys. Look, I can see where it might be funny if you know where the star player for the opposing team lives and you can punk him by hanging your team’s flag in his yard, putting a pro-Cardinals box in his driveway, etc. But if you’re going to be a destructive, classless tool who takes it to the next level and incorporates arson into your act, you may want to think things through and not leave behind evidence with your address on it, that’d be a good place to start……
- The people of Portland, Oregon clearly don’t have a problem with electing a homosexual mayor, but the question is whether they’ll have a problem with a homosexual mayor who is a liar and tries to cover up possibly inappropriate relationships. Mayor Sam Adams (wonder if the beer drinker vote helped propel him to office) issued an apology on his website for lying about a sexual relationship he had with an 18-year-old male and for asking him to lie about it. "I want to publicly acknowledge a mistake I have made and I want to apologize for it," Adams said his site. "In the past, I have characterized my relationship with Beau Breedlove as purely non-sexual. That is not true. Beau Breedlove and I had a sexual relationship for a few months in the summer of 2005 after he turned 18 years of age." Pardon the cynic in me, Mr. Mayor, but it’s awfully convenient for you to claim that you only had sex with this guy after he turned 18, especially when Breedlove was 17 years old and a minor when he first met Adams. So what, you two just crossed days off the calendar and waited to get after it until he turned 18? You expect anyone to believe that? The trend of elected officials getting freaky with interns, pages, etc. is nothing new, so that aspect of it isn’t stunning. That Adams, who was then a city commissioner, and Breedlove, a legislative intern, would hook up is far from astonishing, but if it happened before Breedlove turned 18, that would make Adams a statutory rapist by the standard of the law. Also, how can you expect people to believe what you’re saying now when you denied that this relationship was sexual at all for a long time? The explanation being offered by the mayor is that he lied because of fears that people would believe false rumors passed along "by an undeclared mayoral opponent, that I had broken a law involving sexual relations with a minor." So in order to help your case that you didn’t have sex with a minor, you tried to cover things up and admit later on that you lied about the overall nature of the relationship? I’m no James Carville or Karl Rove, but that doesn’t sound like solid political strategy, Mr. Mayor. Apologizing and admitting to lying now doesn’t make you noble, credible or even believable - it makes you look worse, if that’s possible……
- If it’s free, I’ll take three. Few times has that mantra been displayed more vividly than in Orlando, Fla. yesterday as women of all ages, shapes, sizes and nationalities came from near and far, all of them lured by two words: "Free Makeup." The makeup giveaway stems from a ginormous class action lawsuit, a lawsuit that led Central Florida's largest department stores to hand out free makeup Tuesday. Just as you’d expect when anything - and I do mean anything - is given away for free, there was a line. Literally hundreds of women (what, no cross dressers or drag queens?) lined up at Fashion Square Mall Tuesday for the free makeup. These women braved cold (well, cold by Florida’s standards) weather outside of 15 chain stores handing out free cosmetics. All of this is the result of a nationwide class action settlement which claimed department stores fixed prices on makeup and limited their supply to keep demand high several years ago. What, large companies fixing prices and hoarding product to drive up demand at that high price? Who would do such a thing? Other than every major corporation and chain of stores that has ever existed, I mean….but I digress. In order to settle the suit, $175 million worth of free makeup will be distributed on a first come, first served basis at stores like Bloomingdales, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Dillards, Macys and Saks Fifth Avenue and the brands will include Chanel, Christian Dior and Estee Lauder. The giveaways will run through January 26 or until supplies last, and to get your free makeup, all you have to do is sign your name at the door to verify you purchased one of the products between 1994 and 2003. Hmm, wonder if anyone will lie and take advantage of free stuff they don’t deserve? Even if they do, serves these stores right for their despicable actions…..
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