- Quite a way of greeting incoming government officials, current administration in Zimbabwe. My boy Bob Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party. While some people might view pulling an opposition party member from an aircraft just before he was to become the troubled country's deputy agriculture minister and arresting him might be viewed as…what’s the word I’m looking for here….dictatorial or oppressive, I have to admit, it’s unique and creative. And while those same naysayers might see such a move as yet another example of your repression and persecution of that opposition party, let’s call them the Movement for Democratic Change just for the heck of it, I see it as an offbeat, unusual way of governing that just might start a trend. Yes, Roy Bennett, who is also the MDC’s treasurer, might just be the first in a long line of political appointees to be ripped from a plane and arrested before they can take office. Just think if President Barack Obama’s appointees for various posts were treated this way, wouldn’t that be fun (couldn’t be much worse than the way things are now, with nominees withdrawing and dropping like flies)? Heck, I don’t even care of the ZANU-PF party’s claim that Bennett was attempting to leave the country illegally is true or not. The MDC is trying to confirm what Bennett is being charged with and the details of his arrest. Good luck on that, given Mugabe and Co.’s past record when it comes to working with/murdering/oppressing opposition groups. "However, they keep backtracking and are incoherently inconsistent on what they intend to do and charge him with," the MDC said in a statement. Yeah, that’s not going to help. Publicly antagonizing the ZANU-PF party is a good way to trigger more arrests, more murders and an even more brutal reign of terror. Then again, the MDC is fighting for democracy and the end of a cruel, murderous regime in thie nation, so go ahead and antagonize those in power. Maybe this can lead to some quality riots and nationwide upheaval and chaos. Come to think of it, this whole arrest of an appointee for a prominent government post might be a really good thing. I think we all know that the ZANU-PF party has no intention of honoring the power-sharing deal signed in September, guaranteeing it17 cabinet posts and 13 for the MDC. That much was clear when my boy Bob Mugabe brought a "bloated" list of 22 Cabinet ministers to the swearing-in ceremony, five more than permitted under the agreement. The MDC refused to take part in the swearing-in ceremony until the Mugabe trimmed his contingent down to the mandated 17, and I’m guessing that display had more than a little to do with Bennett’s arrest. Zimbabwean politics, gotta love ‘em………
- For the briefest of moments, tonight’s Heroes had a distinctive throwback feel. There was the Bennet family, all sitting around the table in their kitchen, enjoying breakfast as a family as a cloud of lies, deception and unspoken anger hovered over the apparently tranquil family moment. Of course, that lasted all of two minutes, as Claire received a new text from her anonymous cell phone buddy Rebel, who told her she needed to go to Sam’s Comics on Buford and warn a guy named Alex because the same group that is targeting her and others with powers is after him. But before she can go, Claire has a nasty argument with her dad, H.R.G., who is now selling the lie to the rest of the family that he’s a consultant for businesses and nothing more. H.R.G. also tells Claire that she is now enrolled at Costa Verde Community College and will be starting on Monday, living a “normal life” to keep her under the radar of the people who are attacking PWP (people with powers. Those people will allow Claire to remain free because her biological father is Nathan Petrelli, United States senator and leader of the anti-PWP campaign, but only as long as Claire keeps her nose out of their business. Instead of being an obedient daughter and listening to her dad, Claire sneaks out of the house and goes to warn Alex. At first, he’s skeptical…..until Claire proves that she is who she claims to be by cutting her hand with a box cutter and healing on the spot to show her power. Seconds later, H.R.G. comes into the shop and Claire realizes he’s the one who is there to take Alex. Working together, Claire and Alex get away and jump into his old VW Rabbit convertible, driving to parking lot near the beach where they ditch the car just in time to avoid a swarm of agents who converge on it. While they are in the parking lot, Alex reveals his power: he can breathe underwater like a fish. When he isn’t found by the agents, H.R.G. gets a call from The Hunter, the leader of the group of agents out hunting PWP’s. The call is to let him know that Claire’s car is less than half a mile from the comic store and also implies that The Hunter believes she’s helping Alex. When H.R.G. finds Claire and confronts her, she snaps back at him and tells him he can’t control her. To strike back, Claire tells her mother Sandra what H.R.G. is really up to, a revelation that leads to Sandra asking H.R.G. to move out of their house. Coincidentally, a new guest has moved in, at least temporarily. Claire hides Alex in her closet while they try to formulate a plan to get him to safety. Safety isn’t what Nathan Petrelli has in mind at the dark, eerily-like-every-other-secret-lair-in-TV-dramas headquarters of his secret group for hunting PWP’s. A board has been set up with the pictures of every wanted PWP on the loose, feeds from traffic and security cameras nationwide have been obtained and the hunt is on. Another challenge arises when Abby Collins (a.k.a. Moira Kelly of One Tree Hill) shows up and declares that she’s his new boss, his liaison to the president because many in the administration are concerned with his operation and what it’s up to. Also, Nathan’s request to double the funding for the project has garnered extra attention as well. Abby is horrified when she learns of the details of the program, especially when she sees the lone prisoner captured so far, Tracy Strauss, chained to a chair and under a series of brutally hot heat lamps to prevent her from using her power to freeze things. The sight of someone she knows in such horrific conditions propels Abby toward ordering the immediate disbanding of the program, but she changes her tune when The Hunter conspires to allow Tracy to break loose by putting a broken chain on her chair and making it possible for her to snap it, all so she can get out and use her power in an escape attempt to show Abby how dangerous PWPs really are. The ploy works when Tracy freezes and kills an analyst named Mark Leggett in the hall, leading Abby to tell Nathan the program will go on and that he’ll have all the funding he needs. Meanwhile, over in India Ando and Hiro are looking to follow one of Matt Parkman’s prophetic paintings and in the process, try to get Hiro’s power of time travel back. To fulfill the story in the painting, they must go to New Delhi and stop a wedding, but Ando jumps the gun by finding the bride, Annapoora, the morning of the wedding and talking her out of getting married by showing his powers and becoming the “sign” she was looking for. The problem was that Hiro was the one who stopped the wedding in Parkman’s picture, so Hiro worried that Ando had ruined destiny. Destiny said otherwise when Annapoora’s husband-to-be, Deepak, showed up at the restaurant she and her sister run, assaulted Ando for interfering in their business and kidnapped him. Deepak promised to return Ando if Annapoora went through with the wedding, but Hiro saw his chance to stop the ceremony and fulfill the prophecy in the painting and took that chance. The scene unfolded just as it was painted, Ando was saved and all was well - except that Hiro’s powers didn’t return. He was all right with that, saying he learned that he doesn’t need powers to be a hero. After the ceremony, Annapoora presents Hiro and Ando with a fax sent to her restaurant by Claire’s new pal Rebel, telling them they need to “Save Matt Parkman.” The fax is mysterious and cryptic, but off Hiro and Ando go. Back in middle America, Sylar and his new traveling buddy, teenage PWP Luke, are traversing the open road to go find Sylar’s dad. Luke claims to know where he is, but lies numerous times when Sylar presses him for the location. At Luke’s urging, they stop at a greasy spoon diner for a meal and while they are there, agents burst in to seize them after a traffic camera along the highway picked up Sylar’s face and triggered an alert back at the organization’s headquarters in D.C. The ambush comes right after Luke willingly gives Sylar the address where he can find his dad. The agents aren’t able to capture Sylar, even though one manages to put a gun to the back of his head in the one spot he’s vulnerable. Luke creates a distraction that allows he and Sylar to escape. Sylar appears to show the cold-hearted bastard in him by peeling out and driving off without Luke, who is then captured by the agents. But later on, Sylar returns to the parking lot of the Olympic Diner, manages to find his way into an agent’s outfit and gets inside the truck where Luke is being kept. He steals a computer that was being used to help track them and also rescues Luke in the process. After that, it’s back on the road to find Sylar’s pops, a man Luke has informed him sold him when he was young because “he needed the money.” The final scenes of the episode show H.R.G in a hotel bar, drowning his sorrows and asking the bartender if she knows of anyone who is renting an apartment he might be able to move into. An apartment proves to be the least of his worries, because after his final drink, H.R.G.’s vision blurs and he collapses on the floor, clearly the victim of a poisoning. The responsible parties step out of the shadows to snatch him up off the floor and carry him away. It’s Peter Petrelli, Matt Parkman and Mohinder Suresh, who pretend to be H.R.G.’s friends taking him home after one too many drinks. Of course, their intent is to interrogate him, which we’ll see next week in an H.R.G.-centric episode. Of course, the fax to India about rescuing Parkman is bizarre given the fact that he’s free, alive, well and abducting people, but maybe next week that fax will make a little more sense……
- This next story is more than a little disgusting and not for readers under the age of 14. Assuming that anyone under that age has moved on to the next story, let’s proceed. So I guess it’s true that preacher’s kids are often the worst, most troublesome people you’ll have the misfortune to meet. Most of the country probably knows who T.D. Jakes is. He’s the head pastor at The Potter's House, a church in the Dallas area. Seems Pastor Jakes has a son (not clear if it’s his son or step-son, because Jakes has referred to this guy as both) who likes, um, pleasuring himself in public and specifically in front of police officers. Meet a very disturbed individual, Jermaine Jakes, who has been arrested and charged with indecent exposure after allegedly exposing himself to two undercover vice detectives at Keist Park on Jan. 3. According to an affidavit, Jakes walked up to one of the detectives at the park with his pants unzipped. and began to masturbate while making eye contact with the detective. Honestly, that’s really disturbing and it doesn’t matter that they were undercover cops and that Jermaine Jakes didn’t know that they were law enforcement. Doing that sort of thing to anyone at all shows some serious psychological issues, no doubt. It’s the most revolting thing you can do to a person without actually making physical contact with them. No one ever, ever needs to see anyone else do that sort of thing and it’s a minor miracle that the detectives were able to maintain their cool and arrest Jakes on a charge of indecent exposure. Ultimately, Jermaine Jakes may or may not be T.D. Jakes biological son, but can’t imagine this is going to make life any easier for the family. Indecent exposure is just a nasty, nasty crime and anyone who sees it or hears about it is a victim…….moving on……..
- Can I ask why it is that I never knew any “cool parents” growing up? Yes, I realize that these “cool parents” are breaking the law by providing alcohol to minors and that their actions can prove fatal, but why couldn’t a mom or dad in my old neighborhood been in the habit of supplying booze to us kids? Sure, they could have ended up like 43-year-old Kecia Evangela Whitfield of Powder Springs, Georgia, who bought beer for her son and his friends and ended up being charged with furnishing alcohol to a minor and reckless conduct, but both of those are misdemeanors. Whitfield’s problem turned out to be serving alcohol to kids other than her son, because in the state of Georgia and nine other states, including Virginia, Minnesota and New Mexico, parents are allowed to serve alcohol to a minor in their care as long as the minor is in the guardian's home or a private setting. Sure, binge drinking among teens and young adults is at an all time high, but for the chance to be a “cool parent,” who wouldn’t go ahead and risk breaking the law by hooking up their neighborhood kids with a few 12-packs for the big party after the football game on Friday night? Other than kids getting drunk, having car accidents and dying because you gave them beer, what’s the worst that could happen? Face it, your child will be the most popular kid in school and you can be the coolest mom or dad on the block, how great is that? But as with all good, borderline-unethical things in this world, the cool parents always seem to reside in a different neighborhood than the one I live in…….
- Quite a weekend for the Phoenix Suns. Hosting the NBA All-Star Game is a huge opportunity for any franchise, but if it’s possible to have the worst weekend of your season with the league’s biggest star-studded showcase in town, the Suns are doing it. While Kobe, LeBron, Dwight Howard and the rest of the NBA’s elite roll into town for the dunk contest, 3-point contest and All-Star Game itself, the Suns are literally imploding. Trade rumors involving star forward Amare Stoudemire have been making the rounds for some time now, but the spotlight of this weekend is serving to intensify speculation and talk. Stoudemire himself is fielding questions about the subject and talking openly about places he might fit in with a new team and the odds he’ll remain with the Suns. Then there’s the small matter of the team’s growing dissatisfaction with first-year head coach Terry Porter, hired just this past offseason and already on the wrong side of nearly the entire roster. Porter has taken the running, gunning (and winning) Suns and turned them into a slower, more deliberate team which now sits ninth in an eight-team playoff race in the West, sporting a 28-23 record after a 6-10 slide leading into the break. Word came down just prior to last night’s All-Star Game tip-off that as of today, Porter would be out as coach and assistant coach Alvin Gentry would take over on an interim basis. Yes, T. Porter lasted all of 51 games and managed to take a loaded, albeit aged, team that was expected to be one of the top five squads in the West and lead it right to the fringes of the playoff race. Oh, and good lying from you, Phoenix owner Bob Sarver, saying in an email Friday that, “We have not made that decision," in reference to firing Porter. As if all of that drama wasn’t enough, the Suns have also reportedly had serious discussions about moving the Big Aristotle, Shaquille O'Neal, before Thursday's deadline Perhaps Stoudemire summed it all up best during Friday's All-Star media session: "I don't know what's going on. We all are kind of not sure what's going on. I don't know how it's going to play out, man.” Of course, he then went on to underscore the very drama he was lamenting by musing about possible trade destinations for him. Stoudemire said he still believes that it's "60-40" that he'll remain a Sun. "There's a lot of rumors about Chicago, a lot of rumors about Cleveland, Miami," he said. "I think any situation, any team that I go to, I bring a lot to the table.” Ladies and gentlemen, your 2008-09 Phoenix Suns……….
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