- Oh, this should solve everything for the Chicago Cubs. They’ve suspended mentally unstable rage-a-holic Milton Bradley for the rest of the season for what amounted to conduct detrimental to the team, one day after he criticized the franchise in a newspaper interview, but Bradley’s momma is taking up for him. Charlena Rector said Tuesday that her son would consider returning to the team if it will have him back. "All the people on TV keep saying, 'Oh, Milton has played his last game for the Cubs,'" Rector said. However, Rector believes that her baby boy will be back with the team as long as Cubs management will have him. “Milton eats, sleeps and drinks baseball. He loves it. That's all he wants to do," Rector told the newspaper. Judging by the way the club has reacted to Bradley’s act this season, don’t count on that. Cubs general manager Jim Hendry said he decided to send Bradley home after learning of the remarks the mercurial outfielder made in a recent interview. “You understand why they haven't won in 100 years here," Bradley mused. He’s also been critical of Chicago fans, who he basically accused of being racist and hating him based on the way they’ve treated him in this, his first season with the Cubs. Hmm….wonder if it could have anything to do with the fact that he’s batting .257 with 12 homers and 40 RBIs this season for a team that is staggering along at 78-73, out of the playoff race despite being a consensus World Series contender at the start of the season. Sorry Milton and momma, but when a guy inks a three-year, $30 million contract and puts up such paltry numbers for an underachieving team, the fans just aren’t going to get with him. That would be true even if it were a personable, likeable guy - something Bradley is most definitely not. He’s temperamental, tempestuous and always on the verge of blowing up. Hendry and the team’s management have suspended him for the remainder of the season and on Sunday, the GM said he did not know if the relationship can be salvaged. "Recently, it's become intolerable to hear Milton talk about our great fans the way he has," Hendry said. "We pride ourselves on having the greatest fans in baseball, so at this time we felt it was best to send him home for the rest of the season." One thing that won't help Bradley’s case is his momma doing interviews in which she blames his lackluster season and poor attitude on racism that his 3-year-old son has faced at school. "When racism hit his 3-year-old baby in school, he couldn't take that," Rector said. "Parents, teachers and their kids called him the n-word. He didn't even know it was a bad word until his mom told him." Seriously? For one, I don’t believe those claims. Second, even if they are true, you cannot tell me that having his kid called racist names is what made this guy so unhappy this season. He’s been unhappy everywhere he’s gone - Cleveland, Texas, Oakland, Montreal, San Diego, L.A. and now Chicago. His son is three years old and ol’ Milton has been pissed off and crazy for much longer than that. Stop making excuses for him, even if he is your son. You’re not helping him, you’re hurting him and you shouldn’t be giving interviews trying to excuse his bad behavior, man……………
- This doesn’t make sense, fit or flow well and it’s not that much fun to watch. If I’m saying that about the season premiere of Smallville, which theoretically should be a great episode in order to get people hooked on the new season, that’s not a good thing. But over and over, that’s what I thought as a watched the show tonight at its new night and time. For one, Clark Kent is apparently a) still lurking around Metropolis, although it’s not clear if he lives at the Kent Farm or has a pad in the city, b) wearing all black with the emblem of his Kryptonian family painted on his shirt, c) has cut off everyone he cares about and d) begun another round of training at the resurrected Fortress of Solitude. Lois Lane, having been beamed to the future by Clark’s Legion ring in last season’s finale, somehow is thrown back in time to the present, landing on a moving elevated train in Metropolis. With her comes a Kryptonian assassin chick who tries to kill Lois. There battle and the bursts of energy that transport them in time cause the train to derail, but Clark catches the falling train and saves everyone. As he speeds off, he leaves his new calling card: the same symbol on his chest, burned into the nearest building. Lois goes to the hospital and refuses to stay long. After being checked out, she is ready to leave. Chloe shows up and is glad to see her cousin, who has apparently been missing (i.e. stuck in the future) for three weeks. After sending Chloe on a bogus errand, Lois rushes from the hospital and goes back to visit the site of the wreck. Apparently the police and emergency personnel don’t bother taping things off or guarding accident scenes, because she waltzes into the fallen train and is soon confronted by a man she believes is a cop. This tall, dark stranger doesn’t say one way or the other, but when a uniformed officer catches them, he kisses Lois to seemingly cover their real motives for snooping around the train. Later, Lois goes to her customary pay phone on the street, expecting another call from the Red/Blue Blur, for whom she’s become a confidant. That call doesn’t come because Clark has made a trip to the Fortress to ask his biological father, Jor-El, why he still can’t fly. Jor-El says the power to do so is within him, but he’s holding himself back because he still hasn’t severed all ties to the human side of his existence. Clark realizes he must say goodbye to “her,” and speeds back to Metropolis, where he calls Lois at her Daily Planet desk with the purpose of saying goodbye. But when he hears her voice, he can’t bring himself to do so. While on the roof of a downtown building to make the call, Clark is also confronted by Chloe, who has also been busy. From the spacious old apartment she and now-deceased husband Jimmy were supposed to share, she’s been trying to track down Oliver Queen, Black Canary and their legion of superhero friends. They’ve all dropped off the map, distraught by the disaster of what happened with Jimmy and Doomsday. Chloe gets some unexpected help from Dr. Hamilton, a colleague of Oliver’s who reluctantly agrees to help her in her quest as Watchtower. But it is actually Lois who finds Ollie, on the outskirts of Metropolis in some sort of bad Fight Club ripoff. She poses as a card girl between rounds of the fight and tries to tell Oliver about her trip to the future and the Kryptonian assassin who mad the trip back with her, but the assassin shows up and makes that point herself. Before this badass chick can do any more damage that destroying a wall, Clark zooms onto the scene and the assassin tells him, without even turning around to face him, that he’s the one she’s after. Clark grabs her and they brawl from the warehouse all the way to the Kent barn, where the assassin reveals that she’s carrying blue Kryptonite, which robs both she and Clark of their powers. She then cryptically informs him that she’s come from the future and she’s after him because “you betrayed us” and would do something that would lead to the destruction of the world in the future. She then attacks Clark and they brawl around the barn, ultimately ending in a KO for Clark when his attacked is impaled on a knife of some sort. Before he can get any more information from the assassin, she dies. But we learn more about her because, in the most nonsensical twist of the episode, we see that she is a member of some bizarre Kryptonian military faction that has taken up residence with Tess Mercer at the Luthor Mansion. The being known as General Zod arrived in last season’s finale, but he’s gone from appearing on the lawn outside the mansion to having a battalion of his soldiers with him, two of whom have begun to turn on him, believing that he is holding out information from them. That information would include why they are on Earth, how they came to be there and why they don’t have their Kryptonian powers. Tess appears to have been taken prisoner and beaten for answers, but to no avail. When the rest of Zod’s (who is being called Major Zod, not General Zod) battalion calls he and Tess before some type of military tribunal, he turns the tables on them, chastising them for not respecting him even after he’s “scoured this land” for they and their families and done all he could to help them in the strange new place. So it would seem that lots of Kryptonians were beamed to Earth and landed all over the place, which is completely out of context and is one big reason this episode made no sense. The soldiers accept Zod’s reasoning and kneel in respect, including the same assassin who we saw Clark kill in the barn. The morning after the tribunal, Tess awakes and the Kryptonians are all gone, along with any evidence they were there at all. She meets with her chief of security, asking for the footage recorded while the Kryptonians were on the premises. In other words, she wanted them there and was looking to do what? No idea. But the footage has vanished, wiped out by the Kryptonians on their way out the door. The last two bits of news from the episode: 1) the man who kissed Lois in the train is John Corbin, a new reporter at the Planet and 2) Chloe, having found the Legion ring in Lois’ room at the hospital and takes it to the barn, where she asks Clark to use it to travel back in time to save Jimmy. He refuses, citing the tragedy that happened when he went back in time before to same the lovely Lana Lang (the über-hot Kristin Kreuk, who I so badly miss on this show) - the end result being his father died. When Clark won't go back to save Jimmy, Chloe caustically remarks that it’s good he’s embracing his Kryptonian roots because “there’s nothing human left in you.” And so it ended, an episode that I cannot describe as anything other than bad, off-kilter, disjointed and making no sense at all. Here’s hoping the season gets better from here and helps all of this make sense, because right now none of it does………..
- As we’ve discussed time and again, the drug business is a tough one. There are never-ending challenges from every direction - the law, competitors, nature - and the mortality rate tends to be high. Yet the intrepid, never-say-quit souls who plant, grow, harvest, process, transport and sell illegal drugs of all kinds love their business far too much to give up and so they forge ahead. With border patrols and policing stepping up across the U.S.-Mexico border, Mexican smugglers need to find new routes into the United States and those routes are taking them away from dry land and out onto the open seas. Smugglers are turning increasingly to the Pacific Ocean for a short sail to the California coast, where they drop off illegal immigrants and marijuana, a nice double dip for sure. "We've seen a huge spike in smuggling by water," said Lauren Mack, a spokeswoman for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in San Diego, California. "It's become very, very risky and difficult to cross by land. Smugglers try to jump where they think we're not looking.” Thanks to those effort, Coast Guard officials estimate that interdictions of human cargo on the Pacific have doubled since last year and drug trafficking increased even more. So while it’s a bummer that authorities have confiscated 60,000 pounds of marijuana this year, I take solace in knowing that if 60,000 pounds have been seized, tens of thousands more have made it into the U.S. - great news for all of my stoner friends. At this point, the water route is popular because in spite of the 60,000 pounds of the hippie lettuce seized there, the land border between the U.S. and Mexico is so heavily policed that the percentage of supply lost taking that route would undoubtedly be much higher. For example, take the trouble one bold smuggler ran into last week. Two Border Patrol agents opened fire on this cat simply because they believed was trying to run one of them over with a vehicle, and the suspect was wounded in the process. Such is life at San Ysidro, the nation’s busiest border crossing. The checkpoint has speed bumps, concrete barricades, a gate and tire shredders, so of course people are going to take to the high seas as they attempt to bring their much-ballyhood product into the U.S. Do these cartels really want to rely much on the high school students they’re paying $200 to $300 for each trip of taping drugs to their bodies and walking across the border? I think not. Instead, it’s time to take to the high seas. Besides, I’m sure that the drivers of the thousands of cars stopped on the road for hours when U.S. authorities closed all 24 northbound lanes into the country following the San Ysidro incident would have appreciated it if the smugglers had simply gotten a boat and tried that approach. So to all the would-be drug smugglers out there who are striving each day to find a way to get the chronic into the hands of the stoners who need it most, I say keep scheming, keep plotting and keep trying………..
- Two days ago I lamented the Communist, er, Russian takeover of the NBA’s New Jersey Nets by Russian tycoon Mikhail Prokhorov. But as unhappy as I am with the idea of a Commie taking over an American pro sports franchise, I may have found some people who are even angrier about this deal than I am. Several Russian legislators and analysts are absolutely ripping Prokhorov for his purchase because they believe it’s a major blow to their nation's sports. "I can't consider this action as anything other than unpatriotic," said Aslambek Aslakhanov, a member of the upper parliament chamber's sports committee. "We also have talented children here, but sports isn't being developed. They're not trying in order for us to return to our former sports ranking of best in the world." Unpatriotic? Wow. I’m not a guy who is huge on that sort of thing, but calling a person unpatriotic is basically saying he hates his country and all but accusing him of being a traitor. But Prokhorov’s purchase of 80 percent of the Nets' shares and agreement to finance nearly half the cost of building a new arena are looking like they may launch the next round of the Cold War if these critics have their way. Perhaps they’re still bitter over the collapse of the Soviet-era "Big Red Machine" as a dominating force on the international sports scene, I don’t know. What I do know is that the idea that a country’s richest man must first and foremost invest in his own country’s sports system before he even considers buying a team in another country is backwards and stunted at best. Prokhorov does own a share in the prominent Russian team CSKA and he’s stated that he wants the deal partly as a way to get access to the NBA's training methods and educate coaches on how to improve Russian basketball. In other words, he wants to steal American secrets and siphon them off for use back in Mother Russia. That should thrill the Russians, not offend them. Just don’t tell that to men like Viktor Ozerov, another upper-chamber legislator, who believes that Prokhorov is sending his money in the wrong direction. "I don't deny that Mikhail Prokhorov has put money into developing sports in Russia, but I would have liked all the means he considered possible to have gone to specifically supporting sports in the fatherland," Ozerov declared. Just about the only party yet to weigh in on this from a Russian perspective is the Kremlin, so hopefully unofficial leader/Prime Minister Vlad Putin will grace us with his observations sooner rather than later……
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