- Rather than make a quantum leap forward in time from the end of last season, tonight’s season premiere of Greek was set the day after the Kappa Tau’s “End of the World” party capped Season 3 of the show. For Rusty Cartwright, that meant dealing with the consequences of his decision to blow off the remainder of his organic chemistry extra credit project designed to help him boost his grade after earning a D on his midterm. With 24 hours to go before he needs to show the results of his extra credit project to his advisor, Dr. Hastings, Rusty needs to find a way to get back into the chemistry building to finish the project. Doing so means he must say no to spending a day with girlfriend Jordan, who wants to drive up to Canyon Lake and hang out. Rusty’s plan to finish his project is thrown for a loop when the chemistry building is locked, leaving him scrambling, desperate and resigned to a) being able to get no better than a C in o-chem, b) seeing his GPA drop below 3.5 and thus c) being kicked out of the honors program. He wallows in his self-pity, especially after learning that his RA and friend Max, who he counted on to help him get back into the chemistry building, has left the university and the country after breaking up with Rusty’s sister Casey. Rusty visits the Zeta Beta Zeta house to chastise Casey for breaking up with Max and possibly getting back together with Cappie. After that, it’s back to his apartment for more wallowing…..until Jordan decides to help him out by going to Casey and asking for her assistance. Casey reluctantly decides to intervene, giving up her plans to attend a party being thrown that night by the Omega Chi’s to kick off their “Gotcha!” assassin game, wherein fraternity and sorority members are assigned “targets” from other frats and sororities to “kill” using rubber dart guns until only one person is left “alive.” With Casey’s help, Rusty is able to steal keys to the chemistry building from an unsuspecting security guard. From there, it’s a matter of finding the right key to the building, then finding the right key to the lab (which takes forever) and getting inside. In the meantime, Cappie has heard of Rusty’s situation from Rusty’s trusty roomie Dale and springs into action. Dressing in the ninja costume he’d planned to wear to the assassin party, Cappie sneaks into the chemistry lab through an open window and opens the door for Rusty and Casey from the inside. While Rusty completes his experiment, the awkwardness between Casey and Cappie is palpable. Finally, the truth comes out: Cappie didn’t break up Max and Casey by hitting on her, she came on to him. The group sharing session is cut short when a sensor in the room picks up on gas that has leaked during Rusty’s experiment and the three of them flee the room only to find that all the doors out of the building are locked. With campus security closing in, Cappie falls on a grenade for the team and gives himself up, pretending to be a lone protestor making a stand against animal usage in experiments even though there are no animals in the building. His distraction allows Casey and Rusty to get away, plus Rusty turns in his extra credit work the next day and raises his midterm grade from a D to a C. Grades are the least of the concerns for Rusty’s pals Calvin and Dale, both of whom had interesting encounters with their respective love interests at the “End of the World” party. Calvin and his crush Grant apparently got drunk and both woke up back at Rusty and Dale’s apartment (where Calvin is a frequent couch guest) the next morning. Calvin’s memories of the previous night are foggy, but after worrying that he’d had drunken sex and didn’t remember it, Grant admits that nothing happened. The same can't be said for Dale, who was last seen getting after it at the party with cougar landlady Sheila. After hedging and dragging his feet, Dale finally admits that he had sex with Sheila, going against his religious beliefs and “purity pledge” to wait for sex until marriage. This was a rare serious, emotional scene for the show, as Dale seemed on the verge of tears as he admitted to Calvin what had happened and that “sex changes everything.” When Dale decides that having sex with Sheila means he needs to marry her, she blows him off and it’s clear that for her, he’s nothing more than someone to fool around with. We’ll have to see how Dale rebounds from this and if he can overcome his crisis of conscience. The last bit of drama involves Rebecca Logan, who made out with a mystery guy at the party and won't give up the info on who the guy is. The next day, she has a chance encounter with a down-and-out Evan Chambers, who is trying to withdraw money from an ATM near campus and finds his account empty. He admits to Rebecca that he stood up to his parents, gave up his trust fund and is now basically broke. She offers to help him pay for supplies for the “Gotcha!” party - as long as he helps her out with something. That something turns out to be posing as the mystery guy she made out with at the party. So Evan sends her flowers at the ZBZ house and poses as her date at the “Gotcha!” party so that Ashleigh will believe her story. At the party, she stages a scene in which she slaps Evan and storms off, “ending” things between them. The truth about the “End of the World” party was then revealed in a flashback to the day before, when we see a) Rebecca making out with Ashleigh’s boyfriend Fisher and b) Cappie, sitting on the roof where he ended the Season 3 finale, mulling over the revelation from Ashleigh that Max and Casey had broken up. An epiphany strikes Cappie and he sprints downstairs, through the house on his way to find Casey and tell her that he does want to be with her. Along the way, he’s stopped by a slightly drunken Evan, who challenges him as to whether getting back together with Casey is the right thing. After all, he lost her once, does he want to go through the pain of losing her again? Evan challenges Cappie to think it over, sleep on it and if he still feels the same way in the morning, he can go after Casey. Based on the next day’s events, it would appear that Cappie ultimately decided that he didn’t want the potential heartbreak of losing his dream girl again, so he’s holding off…..for now. All in all, this episode was about tying up some loose ends, re-establishing storylines between seasons and setting up the new season. Not as many laughs as usual for Greek and a little more drama, but it’s good to have the show back………
- If I’m understanding this correctly, hurricane experts are saying that a man who is responsible for the creation of the perennial second-rate computer operating system that is the source of constant consternation by users worldwide cannot possibly create technology to control the weather. These experts are casting serious aspersions on an idea backed by billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates aimed at controlling the weather. Gates and a dozen other scientists have submitted patent applications for a technology to reduce the danger of approaching hurricanes by cooling ocean temperatures, an idea that is as interesting as it is unrealistic. With the southeastern corner of the United States buffeted by hurricanes on a regular basis and the nightmare of Hurricane Katrina still fresh in American minds, a device like the one Gates and his posse are fronting would be an amazing asset. However, the project would be so much larger and on such a ginormous scale compared to anything that we’ve ever seen that scientists are having a tough time believing that this project is possible. “The enormity of it, in order to do something effective, we'd have to do something at a scale that humans have never really done before," said Gabriel Vecchi, a research scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The basic idea for the proposed technology is that because hurricanes are fueled by warm water, cooling the waters surrounding a storm would slow its momentum. According to the patents, several large barges would be placed directly in the path of an oncoming storm, with barge equipped with two conduits, each 500 feet long. One conduit would push the warm water from the ocean's surface down while the other would bring up cold water where it lies deep undersea. The primary issue with the idea’s functionality is that there simply would not be enough warning of a coming hurricane to put the barges in place and bring up enough cold water to make a difference. Even if the barges were put in place at the beginning of a hurricane season, experts doubt the degree to which the barges could weaken a massive storm. So far Gates and his spokesperson aren’t responding to requests for comment about the project, but we do know that the patents were filed in January by Searete LLC, a subsidiary of Intellectual Ventures, an invention firm run by Microsoft's former chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold. In the end, this seems like it will end up as nothing more than an interesting idea and theory from a brilliant business mind that never becomes anything tangible or practical, so it’s back to selling subpar operating systems to the world for Gates……….
- The hits just keep on coming in Afghanistan, as long as by “hits” you mean claims of election fraud. On Sunday alone, the number of voter fraud complaints in the Afghan presidential vote more than doubled. Election officials now say that they have now deemed 567 of them serious enough to affect the outcome of last week's vote. All told, Afghan officials have received 2,493 complaints, 753 of them coming after Thursday. Of those 2,493 complaints, 567 are considered Priority A -- or ones that can alter the results. The grievances include allegations of polling irregularities, voter intimidation and ballot stuffing. For the Electoral Complaints Commission to certify the results of the August 20 vote, it must resolve the complaints it has received. Even taking these fraud complaints into account, there remains a wide margin between
- There’s a great line in the first “Matrix” movie where Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) asks Neo (Keanu Reeves) the following: “Hear that, Mr. Anderson? That’s the sound of inevitability.” That sums up my feelings about a meth lab explosion in the small town of Mt. Orab, Ohio, an explosion that resulted in two meth heads, er, men being flown a local hospital with serious burns to nearly half of their bodies. Also, at least one of the victims was treated for "possible inhalation injuries," medics said. This all went down Sunday morning, when an explosion rocked the a neighborhood located on the 1900 block of Harker Waits Road. Around 7:15 a.m., rescue and fire crews responded to a call concerning a burn victim who had wandered to his relatives' home. When emergency crews arrived on the scene, they located the man and found that he had burns to over 40 percent of his body. Around the same time, other emergency workers responded to a call of a structure fire at a trailer home near the intersection of Greenbush West Road and Harker Waits Road. Using top-notch police work, the authorities were able to determine that their burn victim had wandered from the fire scene, a.k.a. the meth lab. Emergency workers then spent hours gathering evidence at the home, which was shocking to neighbors who had no clue of what the home was actually used for. “Having something right down the road -- with kids -- it's just scary," neighbor Donna Gullett said. Perhaps, but what’s equally scary is the possibility that none of the locals had a clue what was going on inside that home. Let’s put some puzzle pieces together and see if we can’t discover why I’m so disturbed. First, it’s a rural area. What is meth if not the low-class, low-rent drug of the rural population? You don’t see meth as the major drug causing problems in cities and wealthy areas - that’s what cocaine is for. Second, I haven’t seen pictures of the two men who were burned in this meth lab explosion and those pics wouldn’t do much good unless they were pre-inferno, but I’m guessing they fit one or more of the following characteristics: 1) scruffy facial hair, 2) some form of mullet, 3) no better than a high school education, 4) previous criminal history and 5) and IQ well below normal. That’s the profile of your average meth lab operator/cook, make no bones about it. Given the fact that these yahoos were living in an area where meth has become an increasingly large menace, how could no one put two and two together and figure out their deal? After all, it’s the second meth lab discovery for Brown County authorities in less than a week. Deputies discovered another lab in Hamersville on Wednesday night when they went to serve a search warrant in an unrelated case. Brown County, making a strong bid to be the meth capital of southwestern Ohio……….
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