- Riot Watch! Riot Watch! For the second day in a row, it’s an international installment of everyone’s favorite breakdown of social dissidence ‘round the globe. Today’s edition takes us to the southeastern part of France, where hundreds of angry French workers at a Caterpillar factory decided to take out their frustrations over proposed layoffs by taking holding executives of the company hostage. I have to say, taking hostages is an underutilized riot/protest tool and I sincerely wish more people looking to cause some unrest would use the tactic. Hundreds of workers are involved in this protest, blockading managers inside their offices for the third time in less than a month over the threat of cutbacks. While I’d enjoy it much more if they were actually physically putting their hands on the executives, roughing them up, maybe slapping a blindfold and gag on them and giving them a little beating, this works nearly as well. This incident took place at a Caterpillar plant in the southeastern city of Grenoble, where Caterpillar had proposed cutting more than 700 jobs and refused to negotiate. These workers may not be the best hostage takers around, as they have already released one executive and have made it clear they don’t intend to harm any of the hostages. Fellas, I know you all are new to this sort of thing, but taking hostages only works if people believe that you’re serious about harming them if you don’t get what you want. Otherwise, the authorities will just wait you out and be confident that you’ll cave in the end. You do get a few bonus points for the 500 employees who were also outside the building protesting, but your overall riot grade is no higher than a C+. Do you honestly think that the higher ups at Caterpillar are going to take your demands for negotiations any more seriously now? They know you’ll cave and don’t have the kahones to hang tough to get what you want. Believe what I’m telling you, because I’m one of the foremost authorities in rioting and social dissidence, having studied the art of rioting from the best and researching every riot, anywhere in the world, every single day. I’m here to help, so don’t bring my Riot Watch! down with your bush league efforts ever again…….
- Quite a compelling episode of Smallville tonight, plenty of action and a nice throwback feel from start to finish. The episode began by taking a trip back to the first episode of the series, showing the meteor shower hitting Smallville and bringing young Clark Kent to town. The story was told through a journal Tess Mercer had come into possession of in taking over Lex Luthor’s affairs after his disappearance and it bore a Veritas symbol on the cover. Veritas, of course, was the secret society headed up by Lionel Luthor that was dedicated to finding and protecting the alien visitor to Earth known as the Traveler. When the meteor shower hit Smallville and Clark came down with the meteors, the Kents found him and took him in, but what they didn’t know was that a second boy also fell from the sky that day. That boy was Davis Blume/Doomsday and he hid in the debris inside the same crater where Clark was found. When two LuthorCorp security guards showed up at Lionel’s order to search for the Traveler, they found Davis and Lionel wrongly presumed that he was the Traveler. After five days of running tests and observing Davis, Lionel realized he had the wrong boy. A call from Martha Kent asking for help in setting up adoption for the boy she and Jonathan had found seemed to confirm those suspicions and Lionel booted Davis out onto the street with no family and nowhere to go. Davis actually met and befriended Lex at the mansion, but after that day their paths didn’t cross. With the flashback segment done, we zipped back to the present and found Clark pitching a story to Tess in her office at the Planet about a rash of missing persons in Metropolis. Without facts to back up his theory of a serial killer being responsible for all of the disappearances, Clark si shot down. When Clark goes to Chloe at her apartment over the Talon for help in proving his theory, he finds Chloe and Davis making dinner together and looking awfully cozy. Considering that she’s still technically married to Jimmy (although Chloe informs Davis that Jimmy has directed her not to contact him ro attempt to see him), Clark isn’t happy with what he sees. Davis leaves and Clark and Chloe have a talk. Chloe agrees to help Clark with his research and finds out some disturbing facts, including more than a dozen missing persons in Metropolis in the past month. The research session is interrupted when Chloe sees a news flash that a vehicle belonging to Davis has been found burned out on a road not far from the Kent Farm. The vehicle is a smoldering heap of metal after Tess somehow manages to track down Davis and rig his jeep with a bomb while he’s off in the nearby field, burying yet another of his murder victims. He’s killed literally dozens of people, all of them the dregs of society, and buried htem in the field. Clark and Chloe show up to find Davis’ jeep being towed away. CK immediately recognizes the field as the same one where his ship crashed when he came to Earth and a scan of the ground in the field reveals that it’s also holding a lot of dead bodies. The find confirms the allegations Jimmy had made against Davis and forces Chloe to admit what a monster he is. In the aftermath of the bomb, Tess takes Davis to the Luthor Mansion and spells out the story of who he really is while a heavily bandaged Davis lies in bed recovering. He’s hesitant to believe everything he’s hearing, but as he heals (as per his Doomsday ways, he’s immortal and invincible, after all) and walks around the mansion, the memories come flooding back of his first days on Earth. Davis is soon back to health and asks Tess what she intends to do with him. She surprisingly admits that she wants him to fulfill his destiny on Earth, which is to attempt to destroy Clark. She believes that just as Judas helped Jesus face his greatest challenge and fulfill his destiny in the process (a misguided slant on things, but I digress), Davis is supposed to pose Clark’s great challenge and fulfill his role as Earth’s savior in the process. Davis is free to go, but not before violently assaulting Tess and sending her to the hospital. After that, he goes straight to Chloe at the Isis Foundation office in Metropolis. Chloe is horrified to see him and wants nothing to do with him - until Davis makes an unusual request of her. He wants her to help him die and seeing as one of his childhood memories was of Kryptonite at the mansion making him very ill, he figures that will do the trick. Chloe looks up information on LuthorCorp’s now-defunct Prometheus project (the one that gave the lovely, lovely Lana Lang her super powers earlier this season) and finds that in the project’s abandoned lab there is a chamber that can be used to disperse liquidated meteor rock. She and Davis head to the lab and he enters the chamber, urging Chloe to pull the lever and let the Kryptonite liquid flow. She can’t pull the switch and kill him, no matter what danger he may pose. Meanwhile, Clark visits Tess at the hospital and she confronts him with her theory the he and Davis are the two boys in the Veritas journal who fell to Earth in the meteor shower. Clark lies and denies the tale with a laugh, but Tess is unmoved by his denial. When Clark leaves and tries to find Chloe at the Isis office for her help in dealing with the ongoing crisis, she is gone to the Prometheus lab and only by finding the lab’s schematics on her computer screen can Clark track her down. He arrives just as Chloe is torn about pulling the lever to kill Davis. Unsurprisingly, Clark is against the idea. After all, he has had numerous chances to kill his arch nemesis Lex Luthor and refuses to do so. It isn’t until a heated conversation about destinies and how their lives are intertwined and could have been different if Clark had been the one found by Lionel Luthor’s men in that Smallville field that the beast inside Davis begins to come out. His eyes turn red and he begins to morph into Doomsday, spurring Chloe to finally pull the lever. The flow of liquid Kryptonite seems to have the desired effect, rendering Davis immobile and apparently dead. Clark and Chloe leave and return to her apartment, where she is understandably distraught. Clark explains that Oliver Queen has stepped in to help dispose of Davis’ remains and clean up the whole mess surround his death, which barely registers with Chloe. She warns Clark that she won't hesitate to violate his ironclad code of ethics if she needs to harm or kill someone to protect his secret (which she’s shown before). Clark returns to the farm and catches up on some farm chores, only to be interrupted by a visit from Tess. She again tries to confront him about his true identity and destiny, but he again tells her she’s wrong. She becomes angry after another denial and snaps that if this is how Clark treated Lex, then she understands why Lex turned on him. But Tess regains control of herself and cryptically tells Clark that she’ll “wait for him” to come to her when he’s ready to fulfill his destiny. He assures her it will be a long wait, but she says in a quiet voice that, “It’ll be sooner than you think.” Her belief is put into action when she goes back to the mansion and pulls out the mysterious Kryptonian orb that Lex acquired and tore apart the entire mansion search for the final piece to, the one that sent him to the Fortress of Solitude at the end of last season. As for Davis, he turns out to be very much alive and Chloe finds this out when noises in the basement of the Talon draw her down and she finds Davis lurking. He informs her that he is now completely immortal, to which she replies that Clark is now in grave danger. Davis makes an unusual request at that point - for Chloe to stay with him. His belief is that her presence calms him and that as long as she’s around, the killer inside him won't come out. Chloe seems set to reject the plea, walking up the stairs and out of the basement. Instead, she stops at the top of the stairs and with a scary look in her eyes, locks the door. Is she going to permanently reside in the basement with Davis? How long will she stay there? We won't know any of that until three weeks from now, with Smallville returns from a mini-hiatus. See you on April 23…….
- Chicago, Jay Cutler is your problem now. The temperamental quarterback was traded from Denver to the Windy City Wednesday, trading his Broncos orange and blue for the black and orange of the Bears. It didn’t take long for a trade to happen once the Broncos made it official that they would entertain trade offers for Cutler - less than two days, in fact. Owner Pat Bowlen announced Tuesday that he and coach Josh McDaniels had been unable to contact Cutler for the past 10 days - a claim Cutler disputes - and had thus concluded that he had no desire to remain a part of their team. They opened bidding Tuesday afternoon and by the end of the business day today, they had agreed to trade him to the Bears for quarterback Kyle Orton, first round picks in the 2009 and 2010 drafts and a third-round pick in this year’s draft. The Bears will also receive a fifth-round pick in this year’s draft, but Cutler is the obvious linchpin of the deal for them. We can all be thankful that this trade happened so quickly, preventing weeks of endless speculation and rumors on every media outlet in the country about where Cutler would go. Also, Cutler should be thankful for the expediency of the deal because he was looking worse and worse with each passing day in regards to his handling of the situation. I’d been on his side for the most part of because of the absolute botch-job McDaniels pulled in trying to trade Cutler last month, failing to complete the deal and then lying to Cutler about it. However, the interview Cutler gave yesterday in which he pretended to be taken aback by this new trade talk, claimed that he didn’t want to leave Denver and regretted that “things had gone this far” was patently absurd. He was clearly fibbing and trying to make himself look like a victim instead of owning up to his resentment towards McDaniels and the Broncos. Ultimately the Broncos still look worse in the saga and they should be giving serious thought to changing the manner in which they treat players and personnel decisions based on the Cutler saga, but because of the comments he made and the way he conducted himself, especially the past day, Cutler is going to end up sharing much of the blame for how things turned out. The only real winners in all of this are the fans, who don’t have to put up with this third-grade “he said/she said” B.S. between grown men any longer……..
- The twinned Reading and Leeds Festivals have always been far superior to any concert series or festival here in the United States, but this summer the United Kingdom is getting an especially good lineup for both festivals. Radiohead, Arctic Monkeys and Kings of Leon have been confirmed as the headline acts at the both events, which will held at Little Johns Farm, Reading and Bramham Park, Leeds, over England's August Bank Holiday weekend (Aug. 28-Aug. 30). The rest of the lineup is amazing as well, with Kaiser Chiefs, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Vampire Weekend, Placebo, Maximo Park and Glasvegas all scheduled to appear.
Festival passes are always vastly overpriced, but this might be as close as any festival has come to actually justifying the bloated price of admission. I love the Kaiser Chiefs and Kings of Leon, but any of the above-mentioned artists would be a great get for a festival. The biggest news in terms of name value is Radiohead, which will be making its debut headline performance at Reading and Leeds Festival, as well as the band’s only U.K. festival appearance of 2009. The Oxford-based band last played Reading Festival in 1994, so it’s been a long while for them. They’ll perform at Leeds on Aug. 29 then close the Reading leg of the festival the following night. As with Radiohead, King of Leon's headline appearances on Friday Aug. 28 at Reading and Sunday Aug. 30 in Leeds also mark the band's only English festival dates and will also be their final U.K. shows of 2009. Continuing that trend, Arctic Monkeys headline slot will be the band's first U.K. live dates since December 2007. Knowing what a great lineup they have on tap, festival organizers Festival Republic are looking to combat scalping by signing a deal with secondary ticketing company Viagogo to become the official secondary ticketing and ticket exchange partner of the Reading, Leeds and Latitude Festivals. Viagogo will allow fans to buy and sell tickets in a secure online environment, along with establishing a physical pick-up point at the Leeds and Latitude festival sites and Reading town center to allow fans to personally collect their tickets. Should be an amazing few days of music, hopefully a few of you will be able to attend…..
- Beware, Ohio drunk drivers. Cops in your state are on the lookout for intoxicated people using any mode of transportation, be it a car, motorcycle, moped, bicycle or even a motorized bar stool. Kile Wygle of Newark, Ohio learned that lesson on March 4 when he crashed his motorized bar stool and was arrested on a charge of driving under the influence. His homemade vehicle was made from a barstool welded to a small metal frame attached to a five-horsepower lawnmower engine, four wheels and a lawnmower steering wheel. He crashed while attempting a U-turn during a speedy drive down the street in front of his home. Even if he’d been sober, it would have been a near-impossible maneuver. Drunk….let’s just say the results weren’t good. I’m just guessing, but the 15 beers that Wygle told the arresting officers that he had consumed that night may have played a factor in his deciding to attempt the stunt in the first place. "It was just an accident. I mean a little minor accident," Wygle explained. At the time of the accident, Wygle was going approximately 20 miles per hour in his unique vehicle that is capable of reaching a speed of 38 miles per hour. The sight of a 6-foot-1, 230-pound man crashing a motorized bar stool is something I’m sorry to have missed, but clearly the police were not amused. After Wygle was treated at a hospital for minor injuries, he was hauled off to jail. Now, he’s is seeking a jury trial so he can battle the charge against him. He has already entered a plea of not guilty and given the fact that police didn’t arrive on the scene until well after the crash, you’d have to guess that Wygle might be able to find 12 people dumb enough to acquit him if he gets his jury trial. It would help if he were famous and living in Southern California, but there are stupid people unable to evade jury duty in every state, so you never know……
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