- Since I haven’t done much of my “Albums to Avoid” features lately, I thought I might be positive for a change and point out some of the great albums released so far in 2009. It’s admittedly tough to find them and you really need to know where to look and be diligent, but if you can sift through the steaming, stinking piles of monkey crap that most artists churn out, there are a few gems. In the first three-plus months of 2009, those would include: 1) Hold Time by M. Ward, which continues Ward’s trend of thoughtful, introspective and storytelling folk-rock that is all at once easy to listen to and very entertaining, 2) No Line on the Horizon by
U2, which is very good and has a near-flawless set of tracks that rock out well beyond those released as radio singles. I’d stop short of calling it a great album, but it’s very good, 3) Tonight by Franz Ferdinand, which gets a little too glitzy and hipster-ish at times, but delivers some solid-up tempo alternative songs and has the clever, sarcastic lyrics the band has become known for, 4) Union by Boxer Rebellion, which is probably the most off-radar inclusion on this list but strikes a great mix of earnest, rockin’ alt/punk sounds and stellar vocals to lift the band above most of their indie brethren, 5) Lonely Road by the Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, an album that definitely has a message to it and one that makes no bones about challenging the listener to fight the tough battles in life and does so in rocking, hard-charging fashion with a few mellow tunes mixed in. But the best album of the year to this point may well be The Hazards of Love by the Decemberists, with Colin Meloy’s haunting voice and the band’s familiar, quirky delivery and layered, loaded lyrics infused in every square inch of this project. I’d highly recommend acquiring all six of these albums for your collection, but if you can only get one, Hazards of Love is the one to have…….
- Talk about compounding your problems….. Karen Lawson Garrett (as always, a bad sign if I know your middle name, almost inevitably means you’ve done something stupid) gets a few points for attempting to bail a friend out of the Davidson County (N.C.) Jail. She gets those points but loses many, many more of them because she was dumb enough to attempt the bailout with counterfeit $100 bills. Uh-oh. I haven’t seen any pictures of the counterfeit bills, but if the bail bondsman was able to spot them so easily, they couldn’t have been that good. After Garrett tried to pay for bonding service with fake bills, a local bail bond company reported her to Davidson County police and Garrett was arrested at her home on NASCAR Fan Alley. As a quick aside, why am I not surprised that someone trying to pass poor counterfeit bills live on NASCAR Fan Alley? But I digress….Garrett was arrested and charged with one count of obtaining property by false pretense and one count of misdemeanor passing an unauthorized substitute for cash. Ironically, she’s now being held in the Davidson County Jail on a $1,000 bond. This should go without saying, but in this case it may not: whoever goes to post bail for this woman, be sure to use genuine dollar bills. No funny money, no Monopoly money and nothing you just pulled off the copier at the local Kinko’s. End the cycle of stupidity right here and maybe you can get out of this mess without major prison time. For future reference, let’s also go ahead and establish a rule that anything involving law enforcement or criminal processing business is something you should not be using counterfeit cash for. Ideally you’d avoid using it at all, but if you must pass fake money, do so to convenience store clerks, restaurants and other places where the bad bills are likely to slip past detection……
- One certainty in the world of 24 is that things will get progressively worse for Jack Bauer right up until the last hour of the season. Last night certainly had to qualify as one of Jack’s worst, with the effects of the airborne Preon toxin he inhaled from Starkwood Industries’ lethal bioweapon the previous episode beginning to manifest. As Jack and FBI Agent Renee Walker tried to lead the team providing tactical support for the joint FBI/Navy SEALS unit at the Starkwood compound, Jack began experiencing tremors and convulsions in his hands and ultimately a full-on seizure. The situation wasn’t much better at Starkwood, where Jonas Hodges and his mercenary army of 1,500 had their federal government visitors surrounded outside of a warehouse. Hodges himself arrived on the scene and in no uncertain terms, reminded Larry Moss that he and his team only had a warrant for the warehouse and seeing as they had searched it and found the interior empty, it was time for them to leave. They were given a five-minute window to exit the premises, leaving Jack and Renee only a couple of minutes to formulate a plan. Leaving the compound would mean losing any link to the bioweapon and Jack realized that would be disastrous. The only solution was to create a distraction that would allow Tony Almeida to sneak away and hide, thus remaining on the compound while Larry and the rest of the team evacuated. The plan worked when Larry sucker-punched Greg Seaton, the Starkwood executive who lied about the location of the bioweapon last episode and led the FBI on a wild-goose chase. That allowed Tony to slip away while everyone else left in the helicopters that brought them to the compound. Next, Jack dug deeper into the files he recovered from Sen. Blaine Meyer’s investigation into Starkwood and found that Doug Knowles, chairman of the board for the company, had been cooperating with the senator’s investigation. Jack believed that Knowles might still be willing to help them and called his office. Knowles answered, admitted he was hoping someone from the government would call and ask for his help and agreed to find Tony and lead him to the location where the weapon was likely located. Knowles was able to find Tony and after initially catching him off guard, was able to convince him of what was going on and Knowles’ intentions. Together, and with the help of Janis Gould working the satellites back at the FBI office, Knowles and Tony navigated their way to the east side of the Starkwood compound. Using another satellite image, Jack pinpointed the likely building where the weapon was at and directed Tony to it. Unfortunately, cracking the encrypted lock on the building’s door meant some expert hacking by Janis and that took too much time. A security team passed by the warehouse, spotted Knowles and in a spur-of-the-moment decision, he went out to talk to them and try to diffuse the situation. However, they didn’t buy his explanation for being on that particular part of the compound and called Hodges, who told them to take Knowles to his office and keep him under guard. Tony was able to stay concealed and enter the building once the security team left, but as he encountered the next door lock and cracked it, a team of eight more security guards were sent to the building to ensure that Knowles had indeed been alone, which is the story he told the first set of guards. Back in his office, Knowles wasn’t allowed to even make a phone call as he awaited Hodges’ arrival. Once Hodges showed up, the conversation was one-sided. He informed Knowles of his great disappointment in his actions, declared Starkwood’s readiness to defend itself against even its own government and then proceeded to beat the crap out of Knowles and throw him over a balcony railing to his death. Back at the warehouse where the bioweapon had been taken, Tony broke the lock and took the stairs down to the basement, where he was able to locate the weapon and send a picture via his cell phone to Jack for confirmation. With the weapon located, President Allison Taylor had a decision to make. She had been in contact with Jack and ordered him to get visual confirmation on the weapon, so with that done she called in an air strike on Starkwood. She also asked about Jack’s health and as per his M.O., he fudged the truth and said he was fine. Of course, that wasn’t the story he was telling the doctor from the CDC who was treating him for his illness. She gave him drugs to help mask the symptoms and inject every two hours to keep them from coming back, but when the doc brought up a possible experimental procedure from a university in the area that might be able to cure his disease, Jack would have none of it. He shot down the idea because it involved a stem cell transplant from a family member and with his only realy family being his estranged daughter Kim, Jack refused to even contact her. Renee tried to talk him into it, but Jack tersely reminded her that it was his decision to make. By that point, the air strike was on and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had been convened to address the threat. While that went on, the president’s daughter and interim chief advisor Olivia had a mini-crisis of her own to cope with Ken Dellao, the pesky White House correspondent with whom she has a history. Dellao was the one Olivia leaked ifnromation to earlier in the season about Jack’s release to question Ryan Burnett and also about Ethan Kanin’s resignation. Dellao called Olivia because his sources had tipped him off to the incident at the Port of Alexandria where the bioweapon had been taken and he wanted confirmation about the presence of a bioweapon on U.S. soil. When Olivia tried to stonewall, Dellao threatened to blackmail her by revealing her culpability in Kanin’s resignation to the president. Olivia reluctantly agreed to meet Dellao in his hotel room, taking Secret Service agent Aaron Pierce along as her personal protector. He was ordered to wait outside the room as Olivia went in to talk to Dellao. Almost immediately, Dellao came right at Olivia with his allegations and she grudgingly gave up the details after he insinuated that if it truly was a matter of national security, he might understand and hold off on reporting the story. However, after hearing that his facts were right, Dellao told Olivia that he would only kill the story if she slept with him. She protested initially but gave in, doing the deed and taking one for the team. But in true scumbag fashion, Dellao admitted post-sex that he was still going to run with the story. That’s when Olivia pulled her trump card: she had recorded their tryst on her cell phone’s camera and would publicize it unless Dellao dropped the bioweapon story. It would ruin his marriage and result in a nasty divorce, along with ruining his reputation, she explained. Dellao had that audacity to call her a bitch after the crap he’d just pulled, which was actually pretty funny. But the story was killed and with the air strike on the way, the situation looked close to resolution. Unfortunately, the air strike didn’t arrive soon enough and Starkwood was able to arm three surface-to-air missiles with the Preon toxin. Hodges then phoned President Taylor and informed her that unless she called off the strike, he would fire the rockets at three main cities on the eastern seaboard. Confronted with visual confirmation of this threat, the president had no choice but to rush back into the room where the Joint Chiefs were assembled and abort the strike. As per Hodges’ instructions, she could not explain her reason for aborting, but instead stormed from the room in a fit of rage. Also, Hodges informed her over the phone that he intended to meet with her in the Oval Office within the hour to discuss exactly what he and Starkwood wanted from their threat. That means next epsiode we should see what will be a very interesting meeting with Hodges and the president, can’t wait for that. Until then……
- Common traffic accident or devious ploy to cause the crash of an armored truck carrying a valuable load of coins? That’s the question Maryland State Police were asking themselves Monday afternoon as they investigated a crash near the town of Elkridge in which a pickup truck towing a utility trailer pulled into the lane in front of a Loomis Co. armored truck, causing the armored truck to hit the pickup and overturn. The armored truck overturned on Interstate 95, spilling money over three lanes of traffic. The crash happened at about 9 a.m. on northbound I-95 near Interstate 895 in Howard County. According to police spokesman Sgt. Arthur Betts, the crash occurred when the armored truck driver took evasive action, lost control and slammed into the pickup truck, spilling an undisclosed amount of coins onto the highway. The armored truck driver -- Charles A. Cavanaugh -- was taken to Shock Trauma with serious injuries. Passenger Woldeab B. Gebeyehu, a passenger in the armored truck, was taken to St. Agnes Hospital for treatment. Now police must determine if Carl F. Schilling, Jr., of East Greenbush, N.Y. - the driver of the pickup - is just a reckless idiot or if he was part of some zany plot to crash the armored truck and make off with its contents. Schilling wasn’t injured in the crash, but if he was part of any plan to rob the truck, injuries would be the least of his concerns. A few motorists did scrape up coins from the highway, but almost all of the spilled money was still there when Loomis brought in another armored car to carry away the loose change (pun intended). The company didn’t how much money was spilled but cleaning up the mess didn’t take long and all lanes of northbound I-95 reopened shortly after 1 p.m., less than four hours after the crash. As much as I’d love to say this is some great conspiracy and that Schilling was part of a “swoop and squat” operation that insurance scammers and thieves are so fond of when it comes to open-road hijinks, let’s go ahead and assume that Carl Schilling is just a tool who can’t control his vehicle and keep moving……..
- ‘Tis the season for long voyages on the open seas in man-powered boats, I guess. Less than a week after Paul Ridley rowed across the Atlantic Ocean to raise money for cancer research, the crew of the Polynesian voyaging canoe Hokulea arrived home Sunday after a challenging, 1,400-mile trip to Palmyra Atoll. The young crew battled windy, turbulent weather but made it through the journey safely. Hokulea rounded Diamond Head in Honolulu just after 11 a.m. Sunday in gusty winds and heavy seas, led by Russell Amimoto, who has been training for years and earned the title "deep sea captain” with this voyage. He’s now qualified to take the vessel across the Pacific Ocean, becoming one of the youngest individuals with that designation. "Oh, it felt good to be home," Amimoto said. "Just trying to finish up the voyage well and get the hull cleaned up and ready to come home. It's a lot of work." Also on the trip was 17-year-old Kailin Kim, who made her first trip of this magnitude and came through it a much different person. "It was the first voyage that I've been on," she said. "It was really tough. A challenge for me. I just learned so much about myself and family and the canoe.” Next up for Hokulea is a worldwide voyage, setting off from the crew’s home base of Sand Island. While this trip may not have been for a charitable cause like Paul Ridley’s voyage, but that doesn’t make the courage and toughness of the crew members any less admirable. Seeing this kind of epic adventure, it really makes you ask yourself why you’re not taking on bigger challenges like these brave mariners….
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