- For the second time this week, I’m wishing a melancholy happy trails to a famous face. Normally doing so would bum me out too much, but for actor James Whitmore, I’m making an exception. He played a key role, elderly convict Brooks Hatlen, in quite possibly my all-time favorite movie, The Shawshank Redemption. Whitmore passed away Friday of lung cancer at the age of 87. His son Steve confirmed the actors death, a sad bit of news even though he had lived such a long and productive life. Whitmore was an award-winning actor in film, television and on the stage, a man of immense talents and a diverse collection of roles in which he was always genuine, believable and memorable. His credits included multiple one-man stage shows, films as Black Like Me and The Shawshank Redemption, and TV's The Practice (for which he won a guest-star Emmy). He also earned an Academy Award nod for his turn as President Truman in a 1975 adaptation of his long-running stage play Give 'Em Hell, Harry!, marking the only time in Oscar history that an actor has been nominated for a film in which there was the only cast member. He also won a Golden Globe as a supporting actor in the 1949 war pic Battleground and starred in legendary big-screen projects like Oklahoma!, The Asphalt Jungle and Planet of the Apes. I’ll always remember him from his Shawshank role because I’m not old enough to remember much of his earlier work, but that’s more than enough to send out this final bit of goodwill for Whitmore and his family, he’ll definitely be missed…….
- How’s this sound: say you’re a prisoner of the state of California, not a violent criminal but also probably not a good person as evidenced by your being in prison, and you have a few more years on your sentence when you’re released because a panel of federal judges rule that the state must reduce the number of inmates in its overcrowded prison system by up to 40 percent to stop a constitutional violation of prisoners' rights. "Overcrowding is the primary cause of the unconstitutional conditions that have been found to exist in the California prisons," the court concluded. State officials, including the Governator, Ah-nold Schwarzenegger, immediately declared their intentions to appeal, but play this thing out and imagine what will happen if the court’s decision holds up all the way through the U.S. Supreme Court. Early estimates put the number of inmates to possibly be released at 58,000, meaning you’ll have that many convicted criminals spilling out onto the streets throughout the state. They haven’t earned their release, they probably aren’t rehabilitated for the most part, but ready or not, here they come. Who wouldn’t be pumped about the possibility of 58,000 cons being force-fed back into society, all bitter, angry and looking for some payback after being locked up? I understand that the state's prison system is operating at about 200 percent of capacity, but is releasing that many prisoners a smart choice? Would you rather have these guys (and gals) in less-than-stellar conditions inside of prison or release them on an unprepared society and create less-than-stellar, dangerous conditions for the entire society? If you believe the argument being made by people like Don Specter, director of the Prison Law Office, a group that provides free legal services to prisoners in California, the released inmates would be “low risk.” Specter claims that those prisoners would be those in jail for three or four months because of parole violations, those getting early release dates, and those who might qualify for early release for taking part in rehabilitation programs. Great, except for the fact that THEY’RE STILL CONVICTED CRIMINALS IN JAIL. I’m inclined to side with the Governator and Matthew Cate, California's corrections and rehabilitation secretary, who characterized the ruling as a threat to public safety. One thing that the Governator can’t dispute is that overcrowding is and has been a huge issue in California's prisons. Back in 2006, he declared a state of emergency because of "severe overcrowding" in, saying it had caused "substantial risk to the health and safety of the men and women who work inside these prisons and the inmates housed in them." Oh, and nice that this ruling is the result of one of my favorite things on Earth, two whiny prisoners who claim that medical and mental health care in the state's prisons are so inadequate that they violate the federal constitution's Eighth Amendment ban against cruel and unusual punishment. Nothing tugs on the heart stringers quite like convicted felons whining that they aren’t being treated well. Hey ass hats, the entire country is struggling, even those of us who haven’t committed serious crimes. Suck it up, stop whining and try and work on that whole rehabilitation so you can re-enter society thing…….
- Jack Bauer returned to the White House in last night’s 24, leading off a dramatic episode that saw a man shot, another man stabbed to death, a car jacking and one hellacious car crash. As the episode kicked off, President Allison Taylor was busy assuring the American people that despite the terrorist acts of the day (plane crash and hijacking of a chemical plant), the worst was behind them and the country was no longer in imminent danger. After walking away from the podium, Taylor went to the Oval Office to speak with Sangalan Prime Minister Ule Motobo, whom she reassured that the U.S. would indeed be sending its forces to liberate the people of Sangala. Motobo also urged her to hear out Jack, Bill and Renee Walker and what they had to say. They detailed what they knew of the conspiracy within her administration and of the people working to undermine her foreign policy in Sangala, people working with the renegade regime of Gen. Benjamin Juma. Their conversation is interrupted by a call from Col. Ike Dubaku, Juma’s right hand man who has been in the U.S., overseeing the terrorist efforts against the U.S. that have been used to blackmail the president into backing out of Sangala. Dubaku now has President Taylor’s husband Henry in his makeshift headquarters in the basement of a Korean grocery store across the street from his D.C. apartment. Dubaku threatens to kill Henry unless the president turns over Motobo and pulls American forces out of Sangala for good, all within the hour. President Taylor’s only solution is allowing Jack and Renee to attempt to find Henry before the hour is up. They go to work on that while Bill and presidential advisor Ethan Kanin set up a plan to send a Motobo look-a-like to the exchange point in an attempt to buy more time. Jack and Renee dig into the files of Secret Service agents Gedge and Vossler, the two agents who set up the plan to frame Henry Taylor for the murder of Samantha Roth, his late son’s girlfriend. That plan backfired and led to Henry Taylor killing Gedge but being taken hostage by Vossler, but evidence left behind implicated both agents, leaving Jack and Renee to pry into their lives for answers. They find help from FBI field office leader Larry Moss, Renee’s boss. Getting the help means letting Larry know that Renee is still alive, a revelation that shocks him. To confirm that she’s both alive and not under duress, Larry demands a meeting at the Capitol reflecting pool, where he sees Renee face to face and turns over Agent Gedge’s phone records as per Jack and Renee’s request. Those records point them to Vossler, with Jack immediately turning to the idea of using Vossler’s family to pressure him into giving up Henry Taylor’s location. Larry is dead set against the plan, especially since Vossler’s family consists of his wife and infant son. Jack angrily points out that unless they’re willing to break some rules and threaten Vossler’s family, Henry Taylor will die. Renee reluctantly agrees with Jack and goes to Vossler’s home, where she pulls a gun, handcuffs his wife to a table and leaves the baby in his crib, crying incessantly in one of the most annoying scenes of any show I’ve ever watched. Meanwhile, Jack uses Larry’s vehicle to find Vossler while Larry himself goes back to his office to track Vossler by using the GPS tracker in his vehicle. After a harrowing race through the downtown streets that includes some insane driving the wrong way on a one-way street, Jack T-bones Vossler’s car and wastes no time jumping out of the vehicle, gun drawn, and pulling Vossler from his car. After dragging Vossler into a dark, dingy vestibule of some sort of apartment building, Jack calls Renee and makes Vossler listen as his wife tells him how Renee is about to harm her and their son. Hearing his family in peril, Vossler caves and gives Jack the address where Taylor is being held. Just as Jack is about to leave, someone else enters the vestibule to check their mailbox, distracting Jack long enough for Vossler to spring a counterattack. A fight ensues in which some nice body slams and punches are doled out, but Vossler ends up dead after pulling a knife and having Jack turn the tables and jam it into his own stomach after trying to stab Jack. Hearing this news badly rattles Renee, who hears it while looking right at Vossler’s family. Jack offers her a chance to get out, to leave their operation if it’s too much for her, but Renee decides to solider on. She meets Jack outside of the Korean grocer and they storm the basement, taking out the four men guarding Taylor. Jack shoots and kills the fourth and final bad guy, but right as this dude is going after Taylor. Taylor ends up getting shot once in the chest before Jack kills the bad guy, so he ends the episode in critical condition. Also, the decoy Motobo that is sent to buy time with Dubaku’s men backfires when Dubaku realizes it’s a trick and orders the car blown up with a handheld rocket launcher. That isn’t Dubaku’s only problem; his girlfriend Marika also presents trouble because her sister Rosa doesn’t trust Dubaku and digs into his story of emigrating from Sangala two years ago. She finds out that no one with his assumed name (she knows him as Samuel) has ever emigrated from Sangala, so she knows he’s a fraud. She says she won't tell Marika about his lie if he breaks up with her immediately, but rather than do that, Dubaku leaves his basement lair with a gun and appears to be intent on silencing Rosa for good. The other small bit of news from this episode is the continued a-holishness of Sean Hillinger, the FBI data analyst who pressurs his boss, Larry Moss, about why the White House is keeping them out of the loop on the recovery of the CIP device and the Motobo’s. Hillinger is also being pressued by Janis Gold, his fellow tech dork in the office, to cut off his affair with a staffer that she has figured out is going on. That about covers this episode, it continues to be a great start to the season……
- Good for you, Microsoft! Don’t allow a vastly inferior operating system that is your chief consumer product break your spirit. Even though churning our crappy incarnations of Windows is what you’re primarily known for, don’t let that ineptness define you. Go ahead and launch your online marketplace that’s supposed to be a worth competitor for Apple's App Store. On top of that, get your allegedly more sophisticated version of your subpar mobile operating system ready and shove Windows Mobile 6.5 out into the world to fall on its faces. Because who isn’t looking to arm their smartphone with a garbage operating system and take their phone that’s designed to offer them access to the Web and e-mail, provide phone calling and all sorts of other messaging options and equip it with a second-rate OS? Look, I get that the smartphone is projected to be the single biggest growth engine for mobile devices over the next few years and that means a lot of dollars are at stake. It just saddens me to see Microsoft, always a step behind and a notch down on the food chain of product quality, getting its hopes up again. Right now, they holds third place in terms of worldwide market share for this field, well behind leader Symbian, which powers Nokia's smartphones, and Research In Motion with its BlackBerry devices. Third place sounds about right for Microsoft and if the company that Bill Gates founded and Steve Ballmer continues to run into the ground thinks its going any higher on the list, it needs to stop dropping peyote and get real. Worry about fending off Apple, which not only has a superior OS for its computers, but is also gaining market share in the smartphone world and now stands fifth. The iPhone 3G has divided techies into two groups: lovers and haters, with very little in between, but it’s been good enough to vault Apple upward in the market, tripling its
market share from 3 percent in 2007 to 9 percent in 2008. Microsoft also must try to shift its focus from an effort that has been business-centric to one that reaches out to the average consumer as well, no easy task. That effort will get its first big push next week when Microsoft expects to unveil its new offerings next week at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, Spain. Ballmer will be a keynote speeker there on February 16, although I doubt he’ll be able to fully explain what I really want to know: don’t you have to actually try to suck really, really bad in order to actually create the most awful operating system on the market today? Answer that one for me, Steve-O………
- This should serve as ample evidence that being really, really fat can ruin a career. Andruw Jones used to be the best center fielder in baseball, a player with so much range that no ball seemed out of his reach and a powerful stroke at the plate that would make him a hall of famer in the years ahead. All of that changed when he left the Atlanta Braves and signed a free agent deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers, then showed up a good 40-50 pounds overweight and spent most of his one season in L.A. injured or returning from injury. Jones came to Los Angeles as a five-time All-Star who had won 10 straight Gold Gloves, then hit a robust .158 with three home runs and 14 RBIs in 75 games for the Dodgers. The fans booed him lustily, the team lost patience with him and as soon as the season ended, they began looking to unload him rather than pay the remainder of his two-year, $36.2 million contract. However, in Major League Baseball, teams can’t just cut a player to get out of paying him a contract he absolutely doesn’t deserve, not like NFL teams can do. When they couldn’t find a team to trade for a portly, underachieving center fielder with a range of about four feet (shocker!), the Dodgers had to swallow the notion of a buyout, a settlement they managed to negotiate with Jones and his agent and which has them paying his salary over the course of the next few years, with much of the money deferred. Because he has that money coming, albeit in delayed form, Jones could then go out and look for a deal with a new team that wasn’t a big-money contract. He weighed (the first time dude has weighed anything in a long time, apparently) offers from the New York Yankees and Texas Rangers and wisely decided to accept the offer from Texas. He inked a minor league deal that will pay him $500,000 if he makes the major league team, with the chance to make $1 million in incentives. He could have competed for an outfield spot with the Yankees, but when you’re in such a tough spot and in need of redemption after being a bust in a major market, why thrust yourself into an even bigger spot in New York? Now if only Jones can be as wise with his decisions about working out and what he eats, he might actually be able to salvage his career. No, he’ll never be what he once was or could have been at this point if he’d stayed in shape all along the way, but he can at least stop being such a joke and source of ridicule for fans. Stop being FAT, start working out and put down the chimichungas and breakfast burritos, Andruw. Have some pride and at least pretend you give a crap about your career……..
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