- Heroes kicked off its fourth season in style last night, with a two-hour premiere that introduced plenty of new characters and caught us up to speed on some familiar ones as well. Things began in a generic field in the middle of nowhere (Japan, as it turned out), where a mystery man named Samuel (Prison Break’s Robert Knepper) was gathered around a freshly dug grave with a band of misfits. He was speaking about redemption and new beginnings and of Joseph, the man in the coffin who he had lost and who was a member of his family. Samuel vowed that “they will return home,” by which he seems to mean the heroes we’ve come to know and love, and will rejoin his “family.” Samuel, it seems, also has the power to control dirt, as he moved the dirt around the coffin and covered it simply by moving his hands - interesting. As the funeral ends, Samuel and his band of followers trudge back to their carnival, set up outside of Tokyo. There, they go about their business and it isn't until later in the evening we find that Samuel’s band of freaks posseses powers of its own. Lydia, a.k.a. the tattooed woman, enters Samuel’s tent wearing a loose-fitting robe and immediately drops said robe before sitting down on a chair. Samuel uses some sort of wand to inject a magical ink into her back and the ink transforms under her skin to show the face of someone Samuel is looking for - Emile Danko. Samuel then calls in another member of his gang, Edgar, and directs him to track down Danko and retrieve “it.” Edgar resists the order, so Samuel injects the same magic ink into him and it morphs into the image of a hand under Edgar’s skin, choking him by the neck until he agrees to follow Samuel’s order. Edgar heads off on is mission, heading to New York to find Danko. Six weeks have now passed since last season’s finale, so everyone has basically returned to their old life. For Danko, that means hunting PWP’s (people with powers). With Tracy Strauss alive, well and killing ex-Building 26 agents who worked for him even though he shot her last season, Danko is on a mission. He vows to kill Tracy and wants H.R.G.’s help. Around the same time, H.R.G./Noah Bennet realizes that he’s the next target on Tracy’s list. After conferring with Angela Petrelli, Noah tries to keep himself from being her next victim. That nearly happens when Tracy, still with her power to freeze things and turn into water, floods the inside of his car as Noah tries to start it up. Danko comes to the rescue, breaking open a car window in time to save Noah. It’s still not enough for H.R.G. to help Danko and instead he makes contact with Tracy, trying to convince her that she should trust him and work with him. She’s skeptical until H.R.G calls on his old friend the Haitian to wipe Danko’s memory clean and get him off of Tracy’s trail. That’s enough to earn her trust, but when Tracy goes to Danko’s apartment to see if he really has forgotten who she is, Edgar is waiting to attack. He slices open Danko with his power - wielding knives and moving at the speed of light - and leaves him dead on the floor. Edgar also attacks Tracy, but her ability to turn into water saves her life, as you can’t exactly cut water. In the end, Edgar flees without getting what he came for. Tracy calls Noah, who shows up and deduces that Edgar came looking for something, that something being in Danko’s possession. He puts a plastic bag on his hand, fishes around inside Danko’s exposed innards and comes out with a key. That key leads him to a safe deposit box at a downtown bank, but Noah is hesitant to go open the box because Edgar may be waiting for him there. Noah calls in backup in the form of Peter Petrelli, who is back to his old job as a paramedic. Peter is using his powers to help save people’s lives in an attempt to assuage his guilt for all the wrong he, his family and the Company have done in the past. Noah asks Peter to be his bodyguard at the bank, which Peter agrees to do despite also pulling double and triple shifts as a paramedic in order to save as many people as possible. At the bank, Noah opens the safety deposit box and inside is a broken old compass. It appears to be totally busted, but that doesn’t stop Edgar from attacking. Peter fends him off by using his ability to absorb powers from others and fighting off Edgar, leaving he and Noah in possession of the compass. When Peter picks up the busted piece of junk, something odd happens: it not only works, it spins round and round at top speed. Noah wants Peter to keep the compass, but Peter explains that his life finally makes sense and is normal, so he wants to stay as far away from the new Company as possible. That decision has dire consequences when Edgar attacks Noah for a second time that night, taking the compass and nearly killing Noah in the process. While Edgar returns to the Sullivan Bros. Carnival to give the compass to Samuel, Noah is saved when Peter responds to an emergency call, finds him on the sidewalk and rsuhes him to the hospital. There, H.R.G. receives a visit from Tracy, who he has called because now that he’s divorced from Sandra, his ex-wife, he has no one else. Tracy comes and the two begin to form a bond, working with the idea that they might be able to help PWP rather than hunt them. Helping people is just what Hiro and Ando have in mind back in Tokyo. They’ve created “Dial A Hero,” a business where they use their powers (theoretically) to save people. With no clients, DAH looks like a flop. Hiro’s sister Kimito is all over their case about the money they’ve spent and when their first client turns out to be a girl whose cat is stuck on a ledge. Hiro volunteers Ando to climb up and rescue the cat because neither of their powers is useful in this particular situation, so Ando shimmies up, grabs the cat but loses his balance, falling several stories to the ground - until Hiro uses his power to stop time, saving his friend mere feet from the ground, rotating his body so he lands on his feet and thus ensuring a successful rescue. Once it’s over, another problem arises: time has re-started, but Hiro has not. He is now frozen and Ando must carry him back to the office, sneak him past Kimito and figure out what’s wrong. Once Hiro snaps out of his frozen state, he informs Ando that he’s already seen a doctor about his condition - headaches, nosebleeds, etc. - and that the bad news is that he is dying, and soon. A picture of Hiro, Ando and Kimito at a carnival 14 years ago is sitting on the desk and triggers a conversation about the past, how Kimito has always hated Ando and how his spilling his slushie on her at that carnival started the hate. Hiro then explains that at the carnival is where he knew he was destined to become a hero, as a fortune teller there told him of his great destiny and set him on the path to discovering him time-stopping/traveling power, which has put him in the deteriorating medical condition he’s now in. Ando suggests that he travel back in time, stop himself from visiting that fortune teller and going down the path he’s on. Hiro refuses, but the next thing he knows, he’s disappeared and traveled back in time 14 years to the carnival. There, he sees his old self with Ando and Kimito, having fun. As past Hiro goes to visit the fortune teller, Hiro meets Samuel, who has also traveled back in time to be there when Hiro arrives. After doing his ink trick with Lydia again and learning about Hiro, Samuel asks another member of his group, a decrepit old man named Arnold, to send him back in time to meet Hiro. Once there, Samuel tries to convince Hiro to change his destiny by stopping his past self from talking to the fortune teller. Hiro refuses, saying he must not change the past, but Samuel keeps at it and convinces him to change something else - the infamous slushie spill. This time, present Hiro steps in front of Kimito, takes the Slushie hit and changes the course of history by keeping his sister from coming to hate his best friend. That done, Hiro snaps back from the past to the present and finds that in the present, Kimito and Ando are in love and that his actions did in fact change the future. The future is also on the mind of Claire, who is now enrolled in an unnamed college in Arlington, Virginia. Her roommate his overachiever Annie, an uptight snob who is bent on becoming the next leader of the free world - or at least the youngest governor of Massachusetts ever. Claire isn't a big fan of Annie and struggles to adjust to college life, a struggle made worse when she bumps into a girl named Gretchen, who recognizes her name from the Union Wells massacre at Claire’s old high school in Texas. Gretchen is obsessed with murder and the bizarre, a fascination that becomes magnified when, after a first-night-of-the-semester party at which Annie is a guitar hero hog and irritates everyone, Annie is found dead on the sidewalk outside the dorm, having fallen from the third-floor window of she and Claire’s room. The police arrive and find a suicide note on Annie’s bed, but Claire insists the note wasn’t there when she came back to the room. She suspects foul play and Gretchen takes up the trail, buying forensic books and diving in head-first. Gretchen suggests the “jump, push, fall” test police use to determine whether someone who died from a fall jumped, was pushed or fell using a test dummy. Claire brushes the idea off, but later that night, she uses her own can-heal-from-anything, can’t-get-hurt self as the dummy, flinging herself from the window, landing in the tape outline where Annie’s body had landed and realizing that Annie had, in fact, killed herself, or so it seemed. The problem came when Gretchen saw Claire on the ground, putting herself back together after the fall, pushing ribs back through her skin, etc. Now Claire must figure out how to deal with this problem, and quickly. Out in L.A., Matt Parkman has huge problems of his own. First, Angela calls to demand that he “fix” whatever is wrong with her son Nathan, who Matt morphed “created” by erasing Sylar’s memory and forcing his body to morph into Nathan’s in last season’s finale using Matt’s mind control powers. Nathan is now showing eerily Sylar-like tendencies and habits and Angela doenst like it. Matt turns her down flat, but he’s dealing with his own demons. First, he doesn’t like the close relationship his wife Janis has with Roy, the handyman she’s used for the past few years, even when they were separated. Roy is a ripped, good-looking young guy and Matt is clearly jealous. Second, the ghost or spirit of Sylar is haunting Matt’s mind, popping up in his dreams and in visions while Matt is awake. Sylar haunts him at home, at work and everywhere else, demanding that Matt get him back the body he turned into Nathan. At work, Matt snaps into a conversation with imaginary Sylar while interrogating a drug ring suspect and throws a chair at the vision, making it appear that he’s very much crazy. At the same time, Matt has quit using his mind control powers cold turkey, saying he had gotten too addicted to them. Ghost Sylar tries to convince him to use them again and Matt refuses - until he catches a glimpse of Roy getting a little too friendly with his family one more time. Matt caves in, uses his powers and makes Roy decide to go away and never see Matt’s family again, much to the delight of Sylar. Meanwhile, the man occupying Sylar’s body, Nathan, is seeing one sign after another that something is amiss. He can move objects using telepathy, blue sparks are shooting from his hands and he feels totally out of sorts. He confides as much to Angela, but she brushes it off because she doesn’t want to admit the truth. Nathan tries to get Peter on the phone to talk about it, but Peter won't even take his calls. The episode ends back at the carnival, where Edgar returns the compass to Samuel, who then coaxes his next three targets from Lydia: Peter, Claire and Sylar. Edgar mentions Samuel’s encounter with Hiro and muses that they have someone to replace Arnold, the sick old time traveler. “You don’t replace family,” Samuel rebukes him. That’s where things end, quite a premiere if you ask me. There is a lot to chew on and this episode sets up quite a season, so it’ll be very interesting to see where things go from here…………
- I can always get on board with a good cause (usually a riot or protest), so I can definitely get with a nonprofit group called Pilots N Paws. For one, they’re an animal group that has yet to use a tear-jerking, über-sad Sarah McLachlan song for its commercials over top of images of sad, shaggy dogs sitting in animal shelters waiting for adoption. Second, Pets N Paws is a very interesting operation in that it’s not just looking to find good homes for orphaned animals, it’s recruiting volunteer pilots to pick up dogs from shelters where they are in danger of being euthanized and transporting them to no-kill shelters in other states. The group’s goal is to save 5,000 animals from being put down, but hopefully they can go above and beyond that number. Dogs are literally being transported all over the country, including a Labrador mix, a German Sheppard and a set of beagles from Kentucky that were flown to Lancaster (Pa.) Airport Saturday. As you might expect, Pilots N Paws needs more pilots willing to donate their time and talents, so if anyone reading this can help, I’d definitely encourage them to do so. Actually, perhaps Michael Vick could use this as an opportunity to show he really is committed to the cause of protecting animals and buy some planes and/or pay for some pilots who can help out this worthwhile group. If you want more information on Pilots N Paws, visit pilotsnpaws.org and see what they’re all about. Not every shelter can afford to keep dogs around for a prolonged period of time, but getting pooches to ones that can keep them is an admirable goal and one well worth supporting……….
- Riot Watch! Riot Watch! With the current political climate in Honduras, it was only a matter of time before a riot or 15 broke out in the Latin American nation and sure enough, it happened today when hundreds of supporters of ousted President Manuel Zelaya gathered outside the Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa and went toe-to-toe with The Man. Things got out of hand quickly and they really escalated, which is obviously what you hope for in any riot. Police broke out tear gas, water canons and in one case, fists of fury in an attempt to subdue the unruly crowd. One picture from the melee showed a policewoman punching a handcuffed woman in the face. Nice touch there, unidentified Honduran police officer! Nothing says classy public servant like taking a cheap shot at a woman who is handcuffed and unable to fight back. But the rioters didn’t just bend over and take it; they fought back and fought back hard. Demonstrators flipped over and burned a police vehicle, which makes me so proud that I may have to pause for a moment to compose myself. Another picture from the riot showed a photo of an overturned truck and eyewitness accounts have rioters lobbing rocks and anything else they could find at police. Yeah, the cops fought back with tear gas as they looked to disperse the rioters, but everyone who knows anything about rioting knows that tear gas is an absolute desperation measure. As for the site of the riots, the Brazilian embassy is where Zelaya has sought refuge since secretly returning to the country, so it is now ground zero for the resistance. With that in mind, the Honduran government also has placed sharpshooters near the embassy and is blasting the compound with loud noise to drive people inside "crazy." Several people have already been arrested and hopefully more are on the way because that will mean the riot is not subsiding. That might be tough now that military and police are preventing people from approaching the embassy, by setting up roadblocks 1,300 feet away from the embassy, but it’s doable. On a side not, zero props to the cowards at the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, which has closed because of the "fluid" situation there. Thank the State Department for that idiotic decision. In spite of this cowardice, let’s not overlook the bravery of the rioters. Because of them, Honduran officials also have extended an overnight curfew and have closed the airport in the nation's capital. "They have declared a state of siege," Zelaya said. Zelaya himself is under the threat of arrest if he leaves the Brazilian Embassy, so he’s suffering as well. For now he’s safe because under international law, a nation's embassy is sovereign territory in the host country and cannot be entered without permission. Even though Micheletti has asked Brazil to turn Zelaya over to Honduran authorities, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has refused. At this point, the issue isn't even Zelaya’s plans to hold an election that day on a measure to allow a president to run for a second consecutive term. No, the issue at hand is the will of the people to fight back against The Man, to make their voice heard and to strike back at the leaders of a military coup who have wrongfully seized power without being legitimately elected. Take it to the streets, y’all, and riot on………..
- At this point, I almost feel bad for Twitter. Twitter didn’t do anything to any of us; it was just sitting there, a site created with good intentions and the aim of helping people communicate and connect with others. It’s not Twitter’s fault that so many of the people using it are brain-dead, diarrhea-mouthed morons who don’t think before they typed and would probably still type incredibly stupid things even if they did bother to think. The worst offenders in typing moronic things via Twitter are probably athletes, which pains me to say. I like athletes and being one myself, I hate cracking athletes. But as bad as some random loser ruminating about how much he hates people with more than 12 items in the supermarket checkout line or how much he hates it when people drive slowly in the left lane, the tweets coming from athletes are just horrifically bad. Take Washington Redskins rookie Robert Henson as a perfect example of what I’m talking about. If you’ve never heard of Robert Henson, don’t feel bad. He’s a sixth-round draft pick who has yet to play this season. Why a sixth-round draft pick needs to tweet at all, I don’t know. Seriously, what is this guy tweeting about? “Just stood on the sidelines for three hours while my teammates went out and beat the Rams, boy am I hungry!” or “Coach still doesn’t know my name and keeps calling me ‘Hey you,’ hope that changes soon!” But Henson insists on having a Twitter account and because of that, he’s dug himself a bit of a hole. Seems that after Redskins fans booed the team during its lackluster 9-7 win over the lowly St. Louis Rams Sunday at FedEx Field, Henson fired off a tweet calling those fans "dim wits" and asked how people who "work 9 to 5 at Mcdonalds" could know what's best for the team. Great perspective, R. Those fans couldn’t possibly know football because they aren’t professional football players or coaches. You’d be better off tweeting about how annoying it is that the lid on the jar of pickles at home is screwed on too tight or musing about why there’s a cotton ball stuffed into the top of every bottle of aspirin than saying what you just said. It took all of one day for Henson to see the backlash against his comments and issue an apology, which he did Monday. The experience scarred Henson so badly that he has since yanked his Twitter page down and anyone clicking on Henson's Twitter account today saw a message saying "Sorry, that page doesn't exist!" Honestly…..it’s probably better that way. Lord knows what this tool would say if you gave him enough time and enough rope to metaphorically hang himself. I’m a big advocate of Twitter forcing would-be users to pass an IQ test before receiving an account, as it would help us avoid ugly incidents like this one……….
- For once, I find myself nodding confidently and agreeing wholeheartedly with Tyra Banks. Banks and I don’t see eye to eye on many things and I couldn’t care less about the many fashion-related and vapid projects she is constantly working on and/or promoting. However, Banks appeared recently on an episode of Larry King Live and that old geezer predictably brought up Banks’ weight gain and the portly figure she’s been sporting for the past couple of years. You may even recall the time when Banks devoted a portion of her talk show (which I keep trying not to watch and always succeed) to chastising those who mocked her cottage cheese thighs, flabby midsection and overall lack of physical conditioning. “Kiss my fat ass!” were here exact words, if I remember correctly. Well, the topic came up with King and for some odd reason, Tyra took the conversation in a potentially disastrous direction. She said the following, wandering off on a bit of a tangent: “I always feel great when I don't have clothes on. So at home, by myself, walking past ...” and her voice then trailed off as King moved on to the follow-up question. The funny thing is that I completely agree with and support that statement. I am all for Tyra Banks feeling good naked and loving walking around with no clothes on…..so long as I never, ever, ever have to see it - ever. As long as she stays in the privacy of her own, pulls the curtains shut, draws the blinds and stays in a room with no outside windows, then she can be naked as much and as often as she wants. I’m not some jaded, bitter person who doesn’t like to see others happy, so if Banks is happy without clothes on, then good for her. Let her be naked 24/7, but let that nudity be in the confines of her own home and without any cameras of any sort in a one-mile range. As jarring as the mental image of her walking around in the buff is, having that mental picture replaced by an actual picture would be tragic and awful. I know Banks has shed a few pounds since her infamous outburst, but in good shape she ain’t. So continue doing what makes you happy, T., just do it somewhere that I won't ever have to see it………….
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