- Quite the heat my boys the Somali pirates are taking, no? The wrath of the United States government is upon these pirates after that little stunt of capturing the Maersk Alabama, holding captain Richard Phillips hostage and ending up getting snipered by Navy SEALS. But if you think the world is a better place without pirates, you have to ask yourself this: Would Spike TV be creating a new a docu-series detailing the Navy's anti-pirate operations. Pirate Hunters: USN if these pirates didn’t exist? Spike announced the creation of the series just one day after Phillips’ rescue, which I don’t think was much of a coincidence. Pirate Hunters: USN will be set in the Gulf of Aden, the same region where Phillips and his crew were attacked and where the bulk of piracy in the world seems to be taking place right now. Negotiations for the show had reportedly been going on for months, but I don’t buy the claim by Rasha Drachkovitch, president of 44 Blue Prods., the company behind Pirate Hunters, that the timing of the announcement was just a big, happy coincidence.
As part of the deal, the Navy has permitted cameras aboard the USS San Antonio and the USS Boxer, which was on the scene during the weekend rescue. Two crews of three people will also be aboard each ship to document all the high-seas action. In other words, you’ll get a chance to see these hearty scallywags of the high seas, the scourge of the ocean, up close and personal. Hopefully there will be plenty of plank-walking, lots of timbers shivered and plenty of rum, wenches and parrots……..
- Don’t think I don’t see what you’re doing, Turkish government. This is yet another example of The Man trying to hold people down and I won't stand for it. Having Turkish police raid the homes and offices of at least a half dozen prominent academics across the country Monday is a heinous abuse of power if I’ve ever seen one. This is a blatant attack on braves souls who the nation’s leaders believe are associated with
a plot to overthrow the government. That government predictably overreacted by arresting at least four current and retired university rectors, along with one of the directors of a non-governmental organization that provides scholarships to tens of thousands of young Turkish women. Also predictably, the nation’s official Anatolian Agency spouted the party line about how the raids were part of an ongoing and sprawling investigation into an alleged ultranationalist plot to overthrow the government, known as "Ergenekon." Right, because that’s the obvious name for a secret ultranationalist plot to overthrow the government, no doubt about it. Someone sounds a bit paranoid, and all fingers point to the Turkish government. I have an impossible time believing that the operator of an opposition television station, who is also the rector of a university, should have been arrested in Istanbul. And oh yeah, if these people are trying to overthrow the government….good for them! The Turkish government is a repressive totalitarian regime that needs to be overthrown, so if people like Mehmet Haberal, owner of Kanal B and Baskent University, are trying to overthrow it, I support them. The sight of state police raiding homes and tearing them apart reeks of oppression and abuse of power, Turkish government. If the more then 130 suspects, including retired army generals, police officers, businessmen, journalists and academics, have indeed doen what they are alleged to have done, then they deserve respect and admiration, not persecution. Personally, I wish I were a member of the alleged "Ergenekon" gang. But even if this gang exists, don’t believe for one second that its members carried out the out assassinations and bombings the government accuses them of. The paranoid freaks in the government believe these assassinations and bombings really were carried out by the "Ergenekon" gang in an effort to destabilize society and undermine Turkey's elected government. Two ginormous indictments have been handed down during the two-year investigation, which was launched in 2007. Any legitimate origins it may have had went out the window long ago and now, the operation is basically a political witch-hunt of secularist opponents of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, has been fighting against state institutions dominated by Turkey's traditional secular elite ever since storming to power in 2003. The two parties have clashed over a variety of issues, including last year
when Erdogan's government passed a constitutional amendment to lift the ban on headscarves worn by female students in universities. A group of rectors of Turkish universities rejected the amendment, which the AKP obviously didn’t like. Other skirmishes preceded this two-year witch hunt, a witch hunt that has made the current regime in Turkey look like even more of a farce than it already was. Fight the power, Turkish citizens, fight the power……
- Is this some type of revolutionary new manicure technique I don’t know about? Setting a client’s hands on fire would seem like a bad idea and one that would greatly diminish the chances for repeat business, but maybe there’s something I’m missing. Then again, maybe the unidentified customer whose hands caught fire while she was having her nails done at the Nail Studio Salon was just the victim of an extremely inept nail technician. The customer came in to have her acrylic nails removed and nail techs were soaking the woman's hands in a heated bowl of acetone when the liquid spilled and caught fire. Nearly 40 percent of the woman's body was burned, which I have to guess isn’t what she was hoping for when she walked through the door. She suffered burns on her face, neck, torso, chest, arms, hands and legs. “The investigation is ongoing. Our understanding is that there was some type of machine being used in concert with the soaking of acetone, it spilled and ignited and caused burns to this victim,” said Kevin Cartwright with the Baltimore City Fire Department. According to witnesses at the salon, the entire scene was chaotic and absurd, with an ambulance and police officers all over the place. So far, there is no word as to whether charges will be filed against the nail salon or the technicians who apparently fell asleep at the wheel and allowed this to take place. I’d save some time and write this customer a check for $1 million and an offer to pay all of her medical bills if I owned the salon, but that’s just me……
- What a very proud time this must be for you, Florida International University students, staff, administration and alumni. You have managed to procure the services of the man who single-handedly destroyed the Continental Basketball Assocaition, ruined the New York Knicks and managed to incur a multi-million dollar sexual harassment lawsuit during his tenure with the team before being fired as coach and GM and paid the remainder of his contract to stay away from the organization. Yes, Isaiah Thomas is coming to Miami and it’s safe to say that FIU had better enjoy it’s basketball program now because if Thomas’ track record is any indication, the program will either cease to exist or become a shell of its former self in the next couple of years. FIU athletic director Pete Garcia may feel like he landed a big fish as the leader of his growing program, but firing former coach Sergio Rouco on Monday looks like an incredibly poor choice if you’re going to chase him with Zeke. Other schools in the Sun Belt Conference may have hired retreads and seen the have success with their second chances at head jobs, but Mike Jarvis and John Brady are no Isaiah Thomas. In other words, they actually have coaching and management skills AND have never been hit with a sexual harassment suit. While FIU may have been all geeked up to introduce Zeke as its new head coach today, anyone who really knows basketball and knows Zeke’s history had to feel bad for the poor saps at the university. No, I don’t care that Zeke announced plans to donate his first year’s salary back to the university because odds are that he won't earn the money anyhow. The only winners here are the Los Angeles Clippers, with owner Donald Sterling talking to Thomas about a job two weeks ago. Having your team not hire Isaiah is great news and in the case of the Clippers, it’s the only good news their fans have had all season. Oh, I almost forgot…..FIU is also hiring the man who allegedly was passed out in his Westchester County, N.Y. home in October and tried to throw his daughter under the bus as the one who overdosed on medication and needed an ambulance, so I’m sure Florida International will be verrrry happy with its choice as time goes by. You just don’t get a chance to hire quality human beings like Zeke every day……..
- Allow me to say it quickly before I recap tonight’s Lost: once again, an episode that conspicuously omits several key characters, including Ben Linus, John Locke, Sun, Jin, Sayid, Desmond and Penny. Now, on to those who did appear on screen. The episode centered around Miles, which marked the first time we’d learned much about him. Up ‘til now, we knew that he came to the island on Charles Widmore’s freighter and was a ghost whisperer prior to that. Through flashbacks, we learned that Miles never knew his father as a boy and that fact was a source of pain for him. His first experience talking to dead people came when he stumbled into the apartment of a dead man while his mother was leasing an apartment in the building. Young Miles found the apartment and was able to hear the thoughts of the dead man, screaming, “I can hear him!” Some time in the years that passed, Miles and his mother became estranged and he became a mohawk-wearing, multiple-piercing-having punk who only came back to visit his mother when she was gravely ill (apparently with cancer) and near the end of her life. At that time, Miles confronted his mother about who his father was and where he was. She informed him that his father abandoned them when he was a baby, that he was dead and that his body was somewhere Miles could never go. The next flashback is of Miles as an adult, taking on a client named Mr. Gray who wants to communicate with his dead son to see if the boy knew his father loved him. Miles took the man’s money, claimed he had communicated with the boy and that the kid knew that his dad loved him. Back at his car, Miles was met by Naomi, who we know as the leader of Charles Widmore’s expedition to the island. Naomi was killed in the Season 3 finale by John Locke on the island, but with this being a flashback, she’s back in play. She informs Miles that her employer will pay him $1.6 million for his services and takes him to the empty kitchen of a seedy restaurant nearby to test his powers to communicate with the dead. Miles is able to successfully communicate with a corpse on a prep table and determine that the dead man was making a delivery to a man named Widmore. The delivery was of photographs of empty graves and the purchase order for a large aircraft, both of which we’ve learned in previous episodes were used by Charles Widmore to fake the recovery of the remains of Oceanic 815. He used to bodies recovered from those graves and placed them inside the plane on the ocean floor to serve as the remains of the flight so that no one would look for the real survivors and stumble across the island. Having proven his skills, Miles is formally given the offer to join Widmore’s team and he accepts. He’s all ready to go when he’s out one night about a week prior to the freighter’s departure and an unmarked panel van pulls up beside him on a dark street. Miles is abducted by masked men and once inside the van, the man in the passenger seat, Bram, informs him that he’s making a mistake by working for Charles Widmore. Bram promises that if Miles changes his mind and goes with him, he will learn why he has the power to speak with dead people and who his father is. Miles replies that money is all that matters to him and when Bram won’t double Widmore’s offer, he declines. That earns him the boot from the van, along with a promise that he’s “on the wrong team.” That was the flashback portion of the show, now on to the present, or 1977 in this case. After taking Ben Linus to the Others for their help in healing him after being shot by Sayid, Sawyer and Kate make their way back to the barracks. There, they must figure out how to explain Ben’s disappearance. That becomes more difficult when Ben’s father Roger realizes he’s gone and goes nuts. He accuses Kate and Juliet of culpability in the boy’s disappearance and starts asking a lot of questions. To cover things up, Sawyer directs Miles to erase the surveillance tapes from Zone 4, which covers the sonic fence along the border between the Others and the Dharma Initiative. But before Miles can erase the tapes, he’s handed a new assignment by Horace. Miles is told to take a body bag out to a construction site where Radzinsky and his men and part of the team are working. He complies and upon arriving, Miles hands over the body bag and sees Radzinsky and two other men fill it with a corpse. He’s then told to take the body back to the barracks, which he does. Horace then instructs Miles to take the body to Dr. Chang, i.e. Edgar Halliwax and a dozen other names (the guy from the Dharma instructional videos) at another work site. That task becomes more complicated when Hurley tries to sign out Miles’ van with the corpse inside. Hurley wants to take lunch to the same work site where Miles is headed so he suggests they go together. Sworn to secrecy about his mission, Miles allows Hurley to come along rather than spill the beans. Along the way. Hurley smells the decomposing corpse and demands that Miles pull over. When he finds the body, Miles is forced to ‘fess up and explains that he knows who the man is and what happened to him. At the work site, Dr. Chang is none too happy about Hurley’s presence and chews Miles out. He threatens Hurley that if he says a word to anyone about the body, he’ll be shipped to the Hydra island and have a job shoveling polar bear poop. Chang and his men take the body and disappear, at which point Hurley calls him a douche and Miles replies, “That douche is my father.” Stunning news to be sure, but there is no time to digest. Miles explains that he knew Chang was his father after being in line at the Dharma cafeteria with his mother three days ago, but before he can say much more Chang is back and tells Miles to drive him back to Radzinsky. Miles complies and arrives at a site where a work crew is building what will become the hatch on the island, the one that Desmond Hume worked in pushing a button every 108 minutes to “save the world.” Before leaving for the barracks, Hurley and Miles spot workmen etching numbers into the hatch door, the fateful 4-8-15-16-24-42 sequence that has become infamous in the show’s history. Hurley explains to Miles that the hatch will be what leads to the crash of Oceanic 815 and that an accident at the construction site will be what causes the installation of the every-108-minute button to diffuse the electromagnetic pocket that exists on the island. On the way back to the barracks, Hurley pesters Miles about getting to know his father and Miles says in no uncertain terms that he has no plans to. To shut Hurley up, Miles snatches away a notebook the big guy has been writing in and reads its contents. Turns out that because it’s 1977 and the first Star Wars movie has just come out, Hurley is writing Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, which will come out in 1980. He intends to send the script to George Lucas to “make things easier on him,” and also to add a couple of great changes to the script. When the drive back to New Otherton finally ends, Hurley shares with Miles that he too was abandoned by his father. However, Hurley gave his dad a second chance and they became best friends and he feels Miles should do the same. That’s not the only drama in the barracks, as Roger Linus’ crusade to find his son rages on. He talks to Jack about Kate’s possible involvement in the incident, but Jack talks him out of mentioning those suspicions to Horace. Covering up what really happened is becoming more complicated by the minute, but the lid blows off when Phil, one of the members of the Dharma security team, comes to Sawyer after dark and says that he knows it was Sawyer/LaFleur who kidnapped Ben because he’s seen the security tapes that Miles never got around to erasing. Sawyer invites him inside, then cold-cocks him and tells Juliet to get some rope to tie Phil up. Meanwhile, Miles is on his way back to his house when he spots Dr. Chang in his own home, playing with a 3-month-old baby who is actually Miles circa 1977. Tears fill Miles’ eyes as he surveys the scene, but the domestic tranquility is interrupted by a phone call that sends Chang out. He spots Miles and tells him to get the van and drive to the dock to pick up some new arrivals on the island. At the dock, Miles helps unload the submarine and as he does so, he’s confronted with a very familiar face that we haven’t seen for weeks: Daniel Faraday. Daniel recognizes Miles and greets him warmly, so this version of Daniel is clearly from 2007 and has gone back in time just like Miles, Sawyer, Juliet and the rest of the Oceanic 6. Where has Daniel been and what does his return mean? Answers to those questions will have to wait two weeks, as next week is some sort of stupid clip show and the next new episode isn’t until two weeks from now. So until then…….
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