- Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about, Lost! It is possible to have an episode where you give screen time to both those still on the island and those who left it. Beginning with those who left, the Oceanic Six and their friends….wow. For starters, Jack managed to incur the wrath of his bosses at the hospital for bringing in Sayid and treating him while Jack himself was on suspension from the hospital for substance abuse. However, the fact that an assassin dressed as a nurse attacked Sayid with yet another round of poison darts seemed to supercede that small issue. The attack happened just as Ben Linus arrived at the hospital, with Ben and Jack finding Sayid and his attacker, whom Sayid managed to subdue and procure information from. That info was on a piece of paper in the man’s wallet and contained one key bit of intel: Kate’s address in L.A., 42 Pomona Circle. That prompts Jack to call Kate and make sure she’s okay, a call she receives while staking out the office of Nelson, the attorney who showed up at her door two episodes ago demanding blood samples for a test to determine if Aaron is really her son. To counter that, Kate first goes to Nelson’s office and makes a counteroffer: she’ll take the test if she can learn the identity of the person asking for it and talk to them. When Nelson leaves the office, ostensibly to meet with that client, Kate follows. By this time, Jack has caught up with her and rides along to a run-of-the-mill motel. There, they see Nelson meeting with Mrs. Littleton, Claire’s mother and Aaron’s maternal grandmother. Once the attorney leaves, Jack goes to her door to talk to her and try to convince her not to take Aaron away. To Jack’s surprise, Mrs. Littleton knows nothing about Aaron and is actually in town to pick up a settlement check she’s receiving after suing Oceanic Airlines. From there, Jack and Kate move on to an after-dark meeting at the Santa Monica Pier with Ben and Sayid also in attendance. The latter two are there after meeting with Nelson in a parking garage and finding out that the charges against Hurley for the three murders he allegedly committed will be dropped the next day. That follows a humorous conversation between Jack and Hurley earlier in the day with Hurley in L.A. County Jail lockup in a bright orange jumpsuit in which Hurley is actually in a great mood because he’s avoided Ben Linus by getting thrown into jail. Soon he’ll be out, but the question is what will he be walking into? At the pier, Kate is taken aback by Ben’s presence even though Jack vouches for him. She soon realizes that he’s Nelson’s mysterious client demanding a blood test for her and Aaron, a fact Ben admits. It’s part of his ploy to get all of the Oceanic 6 to return to the island. Of course, Ben still msut deal with Sun, who is still working with Charles Widmore to kill him. Widmore sends her a gun hidden in a box of chocolates, which Sun opens in her penthouse hotel room while watching Aaron during Kate’s meeting with Nelson. Sun shows up at the pier with both the gun and Aaron, clearly looking to put a bullet in Ben’s head. If she knew what was going on back on the island, she might feel differently. See, the inhabitants of the island are still shifting back and forth through time and suffering the consequences. The group - which includes Locke, Juliette, Sawyer, Daniel, Miles and Charlotte - time traveled back to some time near the present at the end of last week, but time travel is causing Charlotte to have nose bleeds and pass out. Her symptoms concern everyone, but especially Daniel - and not just because he has the hots for her. No, her symptoms mirror the ones he saw in Theresa, the woman in Oxford he conducted time travel experiments on and whom we met last week, a woman in and out of a coma and with a brain that barely functions when she’s awake. To help Charlotte, who does recover from her fainting spell, Locke suggests returning to the beach, taking the Zodiac boat around the island and going back to the Orchid station. He reasons that all the time travel wackiness began there when Ben moved the island, so maybe going back there could stop it. On the way there, they hear noises in the jungle and when Sawyer goes to check it out, he happens upon a scene from the past in which Kate and Claire were alone in the jungle and Kate delivered Aaron. Seeing the scene rattles Sawyer, but he initially refuses to even tell Locke what he saw and another time travel flash takes them to a new time “zone” anyhow. As they continue to the beach, Locke steers them around a mysterious light in the jungle, a light we learn is from the time in Season 2 when Boone died and Locke pounded on the hatch in the middle of the night and a light shot up from the hatch to the sky. Lock explains he steered clear of the scene because he didn’t want to rewrite the past: “What’s done is done,” he declares. Back at the beach, the Zodiac is gone and the camp of the Oceanic survivors is back, The group theorizes that the people on the beach may have fled in the Zodiac because of the people who had arrived in the long canoes that now sat on the beach. Rather than wait for those people to come back, the group takes off in a canoe to make the trip they had planned to take in the Zodiac. Out on the seas, the owners of the canoes come after the group in the second canoe from the beach and open fire, fire that Juliette returns with a rifle she’s carrying with her. Just as the second canoe is about to overtake them, yet another flash lights up the sky and more time travel hijinks ensue. This is actually the funniest scene of the week, as an unusually jubilant Sawyer looks skyward and thanks God for helping them escape by shifting them to a new point in time, then sarcastically changes his mind when that time shift puts the group right in the middle of a torrential storm. They battle through the storm and make it to shore, where they find the remains of a makeshift camp of some sort with all of the supplies labeled in French. The explanation of that comes when we see a raft also caught in a storm, a raft occupied by French people. The Frenchies spot a body floating face down on the water, sitting on top of a chunk of debris, and when they pull the body in we find that it’s……….freaking Jin, Sun’s husband. He was presumed dead after being on the freighter as it blew up in last season’s finale. Yet there’s Jin, on the beach with the Frenchmen once they make it ashore. Communication looks to be a problem until Jin and the Frenchies realize that both speak English. The lone woman in the group is nicest to him, a pregnant woman who introduces herself to Jin as….Danielle Rousseau. Putting those factors together, you know Jin is on the island circa 1978, when Rousseau first arrived and was about to have her baby, Alex, who of course became Ben’s adopted daughter and was killed last season by Martin Keame, leader of the mercenary team Charles Widmore sent to the island. So people we thought were dead clearly aren’t, anything is possible this season with time travel now in play and insanity rules. It’s brutally unpredictable and this episode was an awesome example of that, with Desmond, Penny their son Charlie the only ones not referenced or on screen this week among the characters that are central to the series. It’s almost too much to process, a thousand times better than last week’s episode and in a word….stellar……..
- Not only is messing with police horses stupid, it’s just plain mean. Sure, many of the men in blue are a-holes, pricks and blowhards with bloated egos and an exceptional level of arrogance, but I don’t think you can say the same for their horses. Horses tend to be not nearly as a-holish as the cops who ride them on mounted patrols. I don’t have hard evidence to back that up, but I feel strongly about that fact. So a big wag of the finger to the four men who were arrested over weekend in Tampa, Fla. and charged with touching or harassing police horses as they patrolled the busy Ybor streets. I’m guessing that Michael Bolanis, a Lincoln Financial salesman from D.C., Thomas Schuster, a mortgage broker from Michigan, Trey Palmer, a guitar salesman from Tampa and Detrick Epps of Virginia had each had a beer or eight before taking to the streets, but that doesn’t excuse the act these clowns put on. One of the men actually decided to get a running head start and attempt a flying leap onto a horse's back. Good move there, ace. Well, it’s better than trying to leap over a parking meter and smashing your junk, but not much better. Nor is it much better than the other members of this idiotic clown posse allegedly slapping the horse, pulling its tail or trying to spook the animal. According to authorities, there are about four misdemeanor arrests each year for this sort of crap, and I’m guessing that they often happen between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. near bars, just as this incident did. For his trouble, Epps earned a nice Taser blast as well as charges of obstructing and officer with violence and battery on a law enforcement officer. That’ll happen when you allegedly bite one officer on the hand and elbow another in the jaw while they’re attempting to restrain you. So to get this straight, one of these tools tries a running leap onto a horse and another goes Mike Tyson on a cop’s hand. Well done guys, you certainly have nothing to embarrassed about, aside from everything…….
- The dance continues between the Los Angeles Dodgers and enigmatic free agent outfielder Manny Ramirez. Earlier in the offseason, the Dodgers offered ManRam a 2-year, $45 million contract that he rejected because he was looking for more years on a deal. After that, both parties sat and waited, ManRam trying to find other teams to pony up the cash he wanted and the Dodgers for ManRam to realize that a sagging economy and other factors were going to make that all but impossible. So ManRam sat and waited and once it became clear that no other suitors were going to line up to bid, the Dodgers came back with a one-year deal for $25 million, an offer that ManRam and agent Scott Boras quickly rejected. Of course, the only other team that has shown even mild interest in ManRam - the San Francisco Giants - is also interested in only a one-year deal. Yet Boras and his client took all of five minutes out of the 48-hour deadline they were given by the Dodgers to accept or decline the offer. Boras, the most loathed and despised agent in all of baseball, the greediest SOB in the game, is still deluded enough to believe that he’s going to be able to land something in the vicinity of the four to six years he’s been seeking for his client. Never mind that the $25 million for this season would make ManRam the second-highest paid player in baseball for the year, behind only Alex Rodriguez. Still, it’s not surprising that ManRam rejected the offer, not when he opted out of the final two years of his previous contract, which would have paid him $20 million per year for two years and not when Boras has consistently been seeking $25-30 million a year for four to six years. The bottom line is that a combination of factors -including ManRam’s enigmatic, “Manny being Manny” nature and the belief that he basically quit on the Red Sox last year in order to force them to trade him - make it absolutely certain that he won't land anywhere in the same zip code as the demands that Boras is making. Will he land a deal better than one year? Probably, but at this point he’s begging if he thinks that offer is going much higher…..
- Nothing quite like a church trying to fulfill its Biblical calling of helping the poor and needy of its community and possibly being forced to close down because of it. That’s the plight of the Living Hope Tabernacle in Columbus, Ind., a church already in danger of closing because of woes caused by the bleak economic landscape in the country, but whose closing might be expedited because its leaders decided to change the church's mission to include housing the homeless, allowing some of the poorest of the poor find sanctuary inside the church's tiny storefront. In so doing, the church apparently didn’t follow every local zoning ordinance to the “T” and the landlord didn't approve the change. However, you’d think that given the nature of the project and the fact that it’s a freaking church, those involved might take a step back and reconsider coming down too hard on Living Hope Tabernacle, right? No dice. The church's pastor, Christopher Rutan, has been given until Feb. 19 to shut everything down. Even after one kind soul stepped up to pay the back rent the church owes, the property’s owner maintained that the church must go because of its decision to let homeless people start sleeping in the pews. Rather than trying to convince Columbus city officials to alter zoning regulations to allow the church/homeless shelter to stay where it is, this coward is taking the easy way out. Heck, it’s not as if Rutan had any intention of starting a homeless shelter. He simply saw a need when temperatures dipped well below zero a few weeks back. "The reason we did it is because we had one man freeze to death here in Bartholomew County on Christmas," Rutan said. Because of that audacity to actually be kind and compassionate, Rutan is now looking for other places to set up his church and is turning to the public for help in finding a new home for his church and a building big enough to house 100 homeless. If you live anywhere near Columbus, Indiana and can help him find a good location or just help in any manner, you should absolutely do so…….
- See what one brave man and two shoes can do? Start a freaking shoe-throwing revolution, that’s what. Just over a month after a brilliant protest by an Iraqi man who muscled up and threw his shoes at our ass hat of a former president, W., human rights protester in England did a little shoe throwing of his own. The man tossed a shoe at a man who just might as close as any mere mortal could ever get to being as bad of a leader as W.: Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao. It’s pretty much a blanket policy, anyone who has any sort of authority in the world’s most repressive Communist regime qualifies as a terrible leader and huge douche bag, so Wen Jiabao definitely qualifies. He was making a speech at Cambridge University when the shoe came flying his way and landed several meters from the premier. Just like the incident in Baghdad during W.’s visit there in December, the shoe thrower was quickly taken into custody and whisked off to jail. Some reward for an heroic act of bravery, no? The man will be charged with committing a public order offence, but at least he got a nice verbal salvo in first. A witness at the even saw the man stand up and shout, "Why are you prostituting yourself? How can you listen to the lies he is telling?" In a video of the incident, you can hear a whistle, followed by shouting and the projectile shoe rocketing toward the stage. It’s the second time during Wen’s visit that he’s had something thrown at him, with the first being a protester throwing an egg at him following his arrival in London over the weekend. Personally, I’m all about variety in protesting, but in this case, we’ve got a good thread going with the shoe throwing, so why not stick with that and ride it out for the foreseeable future……..
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