- Oh, you wacky Maoist insurgents of India, how I love your election day hijinks and zaniness. Who else is going to attempt to ruin a monumental day in which tens of thousands of voters turned out across the country to begin picking a new federal government in a mammoth month-long general election? With elections covering more than 3 million square kilometers and polling in remote locations, some of which are only accessible by boat, angry Maoists armed with weapons could wreak havoc on the process. Elections are slated to run until next month, after which elections officials will count the vote electronically in a single day -- on May 16, three days after the last round of polling. Unlike the U.S., where elections seem to happen every other month for some obscure office or another, the voting process is something India only undertakes every five years for its 1 billion-plus population. This year the country is voting in 543 boroughs of the Lok Sabha, or the lower house of the Indian parliament. Seeing their big chance to start a fight, Maoists launched at least four attacks on the very first day of voting. These rebels have been battling the government in several states in an insurgency that has resulted in thousands of casualties since the late 1960s, a battle they claim is for the poor and the dispossessed of India. This is a tough spot for me, because I’m a big supporter of both voting rights and angry rebels everywhere. I guess the question is whether you can have both - voting and attacks by angry rebels - and I say yes. While Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh may call the rebels India's biggest security threat, I call them a welcome addition to the voting process. Whether it’s in eastern Jharkand state, where suspected rebels triggered an explosion that forced a bus carrying border security troops to stop in the Latehar distric then engaged in a three-hour gun battle, in the state of Orissa, where Maoists set fire to vehicles carrying poll workers, burned two electronic voting machines and ran off with four others or in eastern Bihar state, where suspected Maoists killed two officers in the city of Gaya, you can’t deny the Maoists are making this election much more interesting. Think about it, would you have a single shred of interest in elections in India without them? Plus, how can you fail to appreciate their enthusiasm for their cause? They didn’t even wait for the voting to begin before unleashing the first round of violence. Before the elections got under way, suspected Maoists launched a series of attacks in eastern India, raiding a border security base in Bihar on Wednesday. Fact is, there is no major national issue at the heart of the elections this year. Without these angry Maoists, things could be booooooring. So while voters choose from the more than 1,700 candidates who were contending in Thursday's first phase of voting, I’m going to continue rooting for the Maoists to do their thing and liven up the electoral process…….
- They’re set to kick off the 2009 NBA Playoffs just after noon on Saturday, but Thursday was bad enough for the Boston Celtics that it just may have been enough to blur their focus for a moment. The organization received two major pieces of bad news yesterday, one relating to the team’s biggest star and the other relating to the man responsible for bringing that star to Boston. The more pertinent issue on a human scale is the minor heart attack suffered by general manager Danny Ainge. Thankfully, Ainge was rushed to the hospital and is reported to be in stable condition. Undoubtedly, the stress of running the NBA’s most legendary franchise places a lot of stress on a person, so you’d have to imagine that the stress was a factor in the heart attack to some extent. Perhaps the last bit of bad news to push that heart attack button was the public revelation that forward Kevin Garnett, the team’s emotional and defensive leader and one of the main reasons the Celtics won an NBA title last season, will almost certainly miss the entire playoffs this year. KG hasn’t played in more than a month and the team had been constantly revising its predictions as to when he would be back, going from the end of the season to the final two games, the final two games to the final game, the final game to the start of the playoffs and now out for the rest of the year. Head coach Doc Rivers made the grim pronouncement, but you have to imagine that the team’s brain trust and training staff had known for some time that KG was unlikely to be able to play again this year. In the clandestine world of professional sports, they did an excellent job of not allowing the severity of the knee problems Garnett has been having to leak, but that couldn’t change the outcome. For a team that was projected as the only serious contender to the Cleveland Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference playoffs, losing KG is the death knell to Boston’s title hopes and I’d say its hopes of advancing much past the second round. A dark day in Beantown for sure, but the Red Sox are playing now, so at least there’s a distraction……
- When I think of Carnegie Hall, a lot of things come to mind - sophistication, orchestral music and dudes in tuxedos to name a few. One thing that doesn’t usually pop up in my brain is YouTube, but a unique event brought the two seemingly divergent entities together Wednesday night. A nearly sold-out audience showed up to see almost 100 musicians from around the world who comprised the world's first symphony orchestra comprised of members who auditioned solely online. The orchestra played their debut gig as the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, possibly ushering in a brand new era of classical music. “We hope this is game changing in the sense it redefines audition space, it brings people closer together and lets them collaborate, transcending geographical and linguistic boundaries," said YouTube marketing manager Ed Sanders. More than 3,000 musicians from 70 countries submitted auditions for the orchestra via YouTube. Applicants spanned six continents (what’s up with no applications from Antarctica, hmm?) and the orchestra’s YouTube channel has received more than 15 million page views thus far with members hailing from more than 30 countries. The symphony orchestra's members participated in the three-day Classical Music Summit at Julliard their Carnegie Hall performance served as the finale, with Michael Tilson Thomas directing the performance and serving as conductor to the orchestra. "For us it's somewhere between a classical music summit conference and a scout jamboree with an element of speed dating thrown in," Thomas said. Among the nations represented in the orchestra are South Korea, Malaysia and Lithuania. The organizers of the orchestra even managed to get world-renowned composer Tan Dun to create a piece especially for the orchestra titled "Internet Symphony No. 1, Eroica.” For a musical group with no real history, the orchestra managed to do exceptionally well by drawing a Carnegie Hall audience that was almost 90 percent of capacity. Not that I’m a huge classical music fan, but this is a pretty interesting concept and it sure beats the debacle that is American Karaoke on Fox. Speaking of Fox…….
- Prison Break is back, but I have to admit I didn’t enjoy last night’s return episode as much as I thought I would. Maybe it was the fact that it’s been several months since the last episode aired and all of the momentum the series had built for the season has evaporated, or maybe it’s the fact that…..OH YEAH, THE STUPID F’ING NETWORK IS CANCELING ONE OF THE BEST SHOWS ON TV AND KEEPING MINDLESS CRAP LIKE “THE SIMPSONS” AND “AMERICAN DAD” ON THE AIR! Either way, tonight’s episode just felt a little off. Things began with Michael and Sarah fleeing company custody and trying to make their way across the country to Miami after Michael escaped from the secluded cabin in the woods where the Company was trying to coerce him into joining them. As they stopped for a pizza in Arizona and got back in their car, a gunman took out the window of their jeep and sent Michael and Sarah running. They managed to escape and hitchhike in a minivan heading east, which took them to a truck stop in the middle of nowhere, just off the highway. Sarah suggested that it was time to call Linc and ask for help, but with the strained relationship between the brothers since Michael learned of Linc’s deal with company head honcho Jonathan Krantz to retrieve Scylla in exchange for Michael staying alive, that was a call Michael was hesitant to make. When Michael finally does call, the conversation doesn’t go well and Michael informs Linc that he will do everything in his power to stop Linc’s operation and prevent Krantz from getting Scylla back. He also tells Linc that their mother is still alive, which is the first Linc has heard of it. With that, Michael and Sarah are back to finding a way to keep their trip going. They find a truck driver who will allow them to ride in the trailer of his rig for $100 bucks and are headed toward Dallas when the truck is pulled over. The man pulling it over has cop light and a siren on his car, but doesn’t look like a cop at all. He harasses the driver and informs him that he needs to turn around and go back to Phoenix. When the driver resists, he’s shot and the faux cop takes control of the truck. He turns it around and heads back toward Phoenix after making a call on his phone and telling someone, “I’ve got them.” With one brother trapped in the back of a westbound truck, the other brother remains in Miami, trying to find Scylla. However, Linc and the other members of his crew - Don Self, T-Bag and Alex Mahone - are greeted by an unwanted gift at their doorstep as the day begins. In a blatant “The Usual Suspects” rip-off, Krantz has delivered envelopes addressed to each men, containing photographs of loved ones and the implied threat that unless they find Scylla soon, those loved ones will suffer. Linc calls Krantz and explains that right now the only lead are the keys and other items they recovered off of the man that Gretchen (not on camera at all) set up a meeting with last episode to help them find Scylla. The keys are valuable only because they are specially coded and embedded with a computer chip. That means they are a) easy to trace and b) obviously designed to protect something valuable. Checking the database of the company that made the keys, Mahone finds that one is for a nearby waterfront home and the other is for an address in Little Havana. Mahone and Linc head to the waterfront house while T-Bag and Self take the Little Havana address. In Little Havana, they find a small storefront church that T-Bag tries to talk his way into the sanctuary and back room of by posing as a professor of theology from South Florida University studying worship practices from Caribbean faiths. The man who meets him in the lobby refuses to allow him inside, saying he has a “black soul” stained with the blood of the innocent. Two burly security men convince him that leaving is the best choice and T-Bag complies. Mahone and Linc enjoy much more success even though they find an empty house when they use their key and get inside. Mahone checks out the house and finds that no one is there, but Linc finds a photograph left on the table that is a blast from the past - or so it seems. It’s a picture of he and his mother from when he was four years old. However, when Mahone presses him for information about the photograph - which shows Linc and his pregnant mother in front of an old car with Florida license plates - Linc can't remember anything. The situation becomes even more curious when Mahone dusts the picture for fingerprints and finds none, meaning that whoever left it did so deliberately and wiped away any prints. Upon further examination, many details from the photograph don’t fit. For one, Linc can’t recall ever visiting Florida as a kid of having anyone from the state visit his family. Second, the car is a 1978 model and Michael was born in 1976, meaning that his pregnant mother couldn’t be standing in front of a 1978 car if the picture were real. The license plate turns out to be the key to the picture: MLK-441. Mahone pulls up an online map and finds that the Martin Luthor King Highway and Route 441 intersect about five miles from their current location, so Linc goes to the intersection to see what’s there. Before he leaves, Mahone asks him if it’s really so far-fetched that his mother is Company and is the one trying to acquire Scylla. As it turns out, Linc is about to find out firsthand what his mother is up to. At the MLK-441 intersection, there is a trendy bar whose maitre’d flags him down and takes Linc inside to a reserved table. There, he comes face to face with his mother for the first time in 23 years. She’s been a busy woman, having tried to kill General Krantz within the past hour. The plan was to have Orrin, one of the Company’s top executives, get out of a limo he was riding in with Krantz, locking the General inside on the side of the road in a remote area. Once Orrin and his driver switched cars and pulled away, the General’s limo was blown up by a bomb. Unfortunately, Krantz manages to free himself at the last moment and leap from the limo. He then calls for a helicopter, which takes off from L.A., picks him up and takes him back to Company headquarters. Michael and Linc’s mother, Christina, learns all of this and calls Orrin, who suggests that he disappear because the General will now be looking for him. Christina proves what a cold, hard b*tch she is by agreeing, telling Orrin to put her on speaker phone and instructing his driver to shoot him. So Orrin is dead, the General is wounded and angry and Christina is meeting with Linc. She has even had a phone call with the General in which he demands to know where she is - she lies and says Johannesburg - and she snaps that he should round up his brain trust and find Scylla. Once she sits down with Linc at the bar, Christina tells him that she is trying to change the Company and make it less bloodthirsty, which he is skeptical about. Her offer is to lay low for two days while she puts her plan into play, after which Linc and Michael can have their lives back. Linc reluctantly agrees, but when he gets back to the hotel in Miami and relates this info to Self, Mahone and T-Bag, they aren’t buying in. That’s because they’ve gone back to the church in Little Havana, got into a shootout with the men who operate it and found crates of automatic weapons and phony security badges in a back room. The leader of the church admits that Company people have been in of late and are responsible for the guns and badges. The dates on the badges are for two days from now, which is not-so-coincidentally the amount of time Christina asks Linc to lay low for. Laying low isn’t an option for Michael and Sarah, with their hijacked truck going back to Phoenix. After several tries to pry open the trailer’s side door, Michael succeeds and he and Sarah leap from the moving truck. The driver stops and pursues them on foot, chasing them all the way to some abandoned shacks a few hundred yards away. Michael manages to set up an ambush and a shovel to the back knocks the bad guy down. He hits his head on a cinder block and is mortally wounded, but before he loses consciousness, he reveals that the General didn’t send him. He passes out before he can say who did, but Michael and Sarah are now free to continue their journey to Florida. By the time they get there (next week), it’s questionable whether Linc will still be around. After his talk with Mahone, T-Bag and Self, Linc goes back to the same bar he met with his mother at just hours ago even though she explicitly told him not to attempt to contact her. The bar is closed and Linc turns around to leave, at which point we cut to a shot of Christina talking to one of her henchmen and being told that Linc is back at the bar. She admits that he’s become more of a threat than she’d anticipated and wishes aloud that her sons could understand what it is she’s trying to do. When her henchman tells her that a sniper on a rooftop near the bar has a clean shot on Linc, Christina authorizes the sniper to take it. The episode ends with Linc in the sniper’s crosshairs, but will he will take one to the back of the head? Tune in next week to find out…….
- Wow. I’m just not sure what else to say when a person says they “totally get O.J.” and are referring to double-murderer/kidnapper/memorabilia thief Orenthal J. Simpson. It doesn’t even matter what part of O.J.’s life or twisted psyche them claim to understand; it’s just a frightening thing and a sure sign that your life is headed to a dark place that you really don’t want to go. Former professional wrassler Hulk Hogan, whose real name is Terry Bollea, is in just such a place. To be fair to Hogan, he’s in a bad place in life. He’s in the midst of a messy divorce from his wife Linda and as often happens to the wealthy spouse in a high-profile divorce, he’s getting squeezed. Hogan and his soon-to-be ex-wife are both living in Clearwater, Fla. and, well….I’ll let the Hulkster explain the rest. In the new issue of Rolling Stone, he laments that his ex is now dating a "shaggy-haired pool boy 30 years her junior.” As with any guy, Hulk is having a tough time digesting those thoughts - a really tough time. “I could have turned everything into a crime scene, like O.J., cutting everybody's throat," Hogan said. “You live half a mile from the 20,000-square-foot home you can't go to anymore, you're driving through downtown Clearwater [Florida] and see a 19-year-old boy driving your Escalade, and you know that a 19-year-old boy is sleeping in your bed, with your wife.... I totally understand O.J. I get it.” Wow…..just wow. I can absolutely see where having some 19-year-old dude living in the multimillion-dollar mansion you built, driving your boat and your SUV and (probably) sleeping with your ex-wife in your bed would be very painful. You might even want to do something about it, but….going O.J. on them? That’s a disturbing leap for anyone to make. Saying you sympathize with and grasp the mental state of a man who (allegedly) turned his ex-wife and her friend in human Pez dispensers is freaking terrifying. And no, I don’t care that the Juice
was tried and acquitted for the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown, and her friend Ron Goldman in 1995. The civil jury that found Simpson liable in the deaths two years later, myself, anyone with an IQ above 42 and clearly Hulk Hogan remain confident that O.J. is guilty. Making those comments is a horrible and scary thing to do, because no matter how many apologies and clarifications that Hogan’s PR honk tries to put out, it’s going to stick - and scare the hell out of people. “Hulk in no way condones the O.J. situation,” a statement read. "As part of a larger conversation, he referred to it to exemplify his frustration with his own situation.” Whatever, PR honk. If you believe Linda Bollea, the Hulkster is getting exactly what he deserves. “Hulk's serial cheating destroyed our marriage, our family and our future," she said in a statement. “Sadly, his recent comments remind us that his definition of fair is much different than what the law dictates.” Honestly, it’s not hard to imagine a guy in Hogan’s position and working in the industry he worked in fooling around. He’s currently seeking a judge’s order to prohibit Linda Bollea from allowing her boyfriend, Charlie Hill, to drive his cars and boat. Hogan cited Hill's history of traffic violations, and suggested that Hill could expose the Hogan family to liability. I’m just guessing here, but those O.J. comments may not be the best thing to help Hulk in these proceedings or life in general, but maybe that’s just me…….
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