A fitting outcome for the Oakland Raiders, I review "Taking Woodstock" and everbody's fleeing Myanmar....again

- In the course of the NFL preseason, the third exhibition game is considered the most important contest for teams. It’s when starters play the most they will play during any preseason game (typically into the third quarter), it’s what most teams refer to as a dress rehearsal game for the regular season and because many teams hold their star players out of the fourth and final preseason game, it’s the last time those top players will see the field in a game before the start of the regular season. Through that prism, let’s go ahead and examine Saturday’s preseason game between the New Orleans Saints and Oakland Raiders. For most teams, losing 45-7 at home in the third game of the preseason would be a catastrophically bad occurrence, a point of great concern with the start of the regular season a mere two weeks away. Sure, the loss doesn’t count in the standings and it should be easy to shake off, but that kind of beatdown still stings, exhibition game or not. But for the Raiders, I submit that it could not be a more fitting and appropriate result for the most important game of the preseason. After all, if that third exhibition game truly is a dress rehearsal for the regular season, what could be more apropos for the Raiders and their fans than getting accustomed to the sort of beatdown that they will suffer regularly throughout the season? What represents this franchise better than having six punts and three fumbles on their first six drives of the game? I’ll answer that for you: nothing. The Raiders are owned by a possibly dead, jumpsuit-wearing kook with old lady glasses, Al Davis, a guy who is either not alive or completely senile, but either way he’s running the franchise right into the ground. He drafted receiver Darius Heyward-Bey with the fifth pick in the 2009 draft, a full 20 picks higher than anyone with a functioning brain would have drafted him, all because Heyward-Bey excelled in the one skill test Davis seems to care about these days, the 40-yard dash. They are a team of draft busts, overrated veterans with bloated contracts and head coaches who sucker punch assistant coaches in the face during meetings and then lie about what happened. So while most people would look at that 45-7 score at the end of Saturday night’s game and see a whole lot of negatives, I look up and see a scoreboard that screams, “Raiders!” as loudly as possible…….

- Would the last person out of Myanmar please turn the lights off? With literally thousands of refugees from Myanmar pouring across the border into China in recent weeks, you’d think that sooner or later Myanmar is going to run out of citizens to oppress. Also, if you’re fleeing from anywhere and China looks like a better option to you, that’s not good. The mass exodus from Taiwan would seem to indicate that a 20-year cease-fire between ethnic minorities and Myanmar's military rulers might be falling apart. According to estimates by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (a position I’d love to have simply because people would have to call me “High Commissioner”), as 30,000 people had fled Myanmar. The Chinese don’t appear to be overly thrilled with the influx of Burmese refugees (not much thrills the Chinese these days other than oppressing the basic human rights of their citizens and the possibility of world domination). Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu in a statement Friday urged the Myanmar government to "safeguard the regional stability of its bordering area with China." In other words, keep your filthy, unwashed masses out our country, fool. Still, the Chinese are grudgingly making accommodations for the glut of refugees now residing on their soil. In the border town of Nansan, the government has arranged emergency housing for refugees in an attempt to restore stability. China is also in a difficult spot because at this point, it is basically the only remaining ally of Myanmar’s brutal, repressive and totalitarian regime. Those flooding across its border are mostly are ethnic Chinese who had been living more or less autonomously in what is called the Kokang region. Now that Myanmar’s authoritarian regime is looking to break up that autonomy by dissolving its ethnic militia and incorporate their fighters into a national border police. "We are just like our own small kingdom on the Burmese border. . . . That is what we are trying to defend," said Aung Kyaw Zaw, a former rebel who lives in exile in Ruili on the Chinese side of the border. The resulting conflict has been raging since early last month, but the fears that it could spread into something larger appear to have substantial validity. Even though the peace in the area dates back to cease-fire agreements with various ethnic militias in 1989, those 20-plus years of tranquility don’t mean a damn thing to those who are now brawling. Nor does it matter to the poor refugees who are fleeing the fighting and holing up in places like the Hongping Hotel in Nansan, where the Chinese Ministry of Public Security is putting up about 40 refugees. Their lives are being turned upside down and there are no signs that the unrest will be quelled any time soon…….

- Let’s see if this government program to buy back useless crap from Americans can last longer than a couple of weeks. The state of Oklahoma can’t unleash its own “cash for clunkers” program like our esteemed federal government, but what the Okies can do is implement a federal program that will offer incentives for people to replace old household appliances with new, energy-efficient ones. Like everything newsworthy these days - federal programs, celebrity couples, etc. - this thing needs a cutesy nickname and so it will have one: "Dollars for Dishwashers.” With the help of $300 million federal dollars, states will be able to encourage their citizens to buy new refrigerators, washing machines and dishwashers and Oklahoma will put its $3.5 million for the program to good use. The program won't start just yet, as the money won't be distributed until Nov. 30 (of course, the government still hasn’t paid up many car dealerships for the “cash for clunkers” program, so take that promise with a healthy dose of skepticism). The whiny, complaining b*tches of the appliance industry are somehow managing to view this possible sales boon as a negative, saying that customers may put off buying appliances right now and wait until “Dollars for Dishwashers” begins. We worry about the lag time now that it's all over the Internet and when the states actually implement the program to manufacturers and us," said Guy Minnix of Metro Builders Supply in Oklahoma. You know what, guy? Shut it. Soon enough, the state Department of Commerce will unveil the guidelines for the rebate program and the appliance onslaught can begin. The final plans should be released by mid-October and consumers will learn exactly how much money they might get back. As someone who owns neither a dishwasher nor an out-of-date refrigerator, I can't say that I’m all that jacked up about this program, but I am excited about the potential for another government-run program that turns into an unmitigated disaster, so game on, “Dollars for Dishwashers,” game on……….

- The primary criticism of Ang Lee’s new movie, “Taking Woodstock,” has been that it’s a movie about the most transcendent, pertinent cultural event of the 20th century, a music festival showcasing tons of legendary artists, and there isn't that much of what happened on stage in the movie. People who went into the movie theater relatively blind voiced this criticism even more loudly, although I knew what to expect from watching Lee when he was a guest on “The Colbert Report” with Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central. And honestly, I had no issue with Lee focusing more on how the festival came together and the non-musical figures who made Woodstock possible than on the performances themselves. After all, even if you did devote substantial time to the music, how hard is it going to be to get believable, musically viable actors to play the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and The Who? Not likely, as you could guess. So instead, Lee wove a modest, amiable movie that basically comes off as a coming-of-age, coming-out comedy. Despite the fact that Lee was still a teenager living in Taiwan when Woodstock took place, he felt compelled to create a cinematic homage to it and I think he did a solid job. “Taking Woodstock” stars Demetri Martin as Elliot Teichberg, a young man who quits Greenwich Village to help his parents keep open their failing Bethel (N.Y.) motel. He somehow manages to become Bethel's youngest director of the chamber of commerce, but the motel is a colossal failure. It appears doomed until a neighboring community tells Michael Lang, the founder and promoter of Woodstock (played by Jonathan Groff) that his festival isn't welcome in their town. Elliot invites Lang to check out his facilities and because he’s already in possession of permit for his own annual summer festival involving an experimental theatre troupe in the barn and playing records out in the meadow, so why not tweak things a little? From there, Woodstock unfolds and the characters who made it happen offstage take center stage. In the process, Elliot manages to shake many of his conservative ways and embrace two quintessential ‘60s/’70s staples: drugs and sexual liberation. The movie is great because it takes its time telling the story, never rushing things. We get to see the festival take shape and the crowd that eventually reached nearly half a million filter into Bethel. And while some have panned Martin’s performance as so-so or even uninspired, I give him a thumbs up for a solid-but-not-great effort. All in all, I’ll slap my seal of approval on “Taking Woodstock," which is rated R and runs 120 minutes. Give it a shot if you’ve ever had even the most remote interest in this landmark cultural event and I promise it’ll be worth your while………

- Finally……the space shuttle Discovery has come back……to outer space. After being pushed back and pushed back from its scheduled Tuesday launch, the shuttle finally launched just before midnight Friday on a mission to the international space station. The crew of seven astronauts features one crew member from Mexico and another of the seven, Nicole Stott, will remain on the station as a flight engineer. In her place, astronaut Timothy Kopra will return home aboard the shuttle. In addition to the crew, another key component of the flight will be the Leonardo logistics module, science experiments and the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill (COLBERT), named for my main man Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report." After having a species of spider named after him by a researcher at East Carolina University earlier this year, I’m sure Colbert is pumped about having a piece of exercise equipment set to be shot into space named after him. So how does one receive the honor of having NASA name the newest space station compartment after them? Well, Colbert won an online poll conducted by NASA, but Colbert and the space agency compromised to give the moniker to the treadmill. Instead of being named after the best fake newsman in the business, the new compartment was given the name Tranquility (boooooooring). But hey, the treadmill is cool too. NASA astronaut Cady Coleman cites as an essential addition to the space station. “We have the treadmill now to keep them healthy, which is really part of being able to come home in one piece. So it is an essential part,” Coleman said. So after three postponements - first for bad weather, and twice more while mission managers checked out indications of a faulty valve - the Colbert treadmill, the space shuttle Discovery and its crew are finally on their way to outer space, wahoo……..