- Tonight’s Smallville was infused with an unexpected dose of Good Morning Metropolis. Because she apparently needs a second career, Lois decides that she’ll audition to be one of the morning show’s new co-hosts. Clark tags along to help Lois audition to make up for standing her up on their recent date to the monster truck rally, but when the lights go on and the audition cameras roll, CK chokes and can’t keep up with Lois. Still, their banter when the cameras stop rolling catches the eye of the executive producer and she offers them both jobs hosting the show. The first assignment is a story on Internet dating, with each of the two set up with a date online and having the date filmed on camera. Clark fills out his dating profile in 10 minutes, while Lois pores over hers and puts tremendous effort into each answer in order to attract the “right” kind of guy. When Clark’s date rolls around, Lois is convinced his profile will attract either a country bumpkin or a cougar. Instead, the date turns out to be Catherine, a smokin’ hot blonde just back from traveling aboard and currently pursuing a double major in sociology and social justice. The date goes well for both Clark and Catherine, leaving Lois more than a little jealous. To make her own date better, Lois seeks out help from her ex, Oliver Queen. She stops by his penthouse apartment to ask him what her “red flags” are so she can avoid a bad date. Instead, she happens into an awkward scene that doesn’t look good for Oliver. Despite giving up his self-destructive, alcoholic ways, Ollie is still attending underground fight clubs for some reason and at one fight, he is impressed by a hot girl named Mia who absolutely demolishes a guy twice her size. However, her night comes to an abrupt end when a scary-looking dude dressed in all black accosts her and drags her off, accompanied by two similarly scary friends. The scene catches Oliver’s attention and he somehow manages to track Mia down the next day as she’s standing on a sidewalk, offering her services as a hooker. Turns out that the scary dude from the night before was her pimp Rick, but Oliver has a mind to help her out of her current lifestyle. First, he allows her to drive his expensive sports car and along the ride, he offers to train her as a fighter and help her get out of life as a hooker. That takes them back to his apartment, where Lois drops in, finds Mia clad in only a towel following a sparring session and stint in Oliver’s steam room and gets the wrong idea. But Oliver continues trying to help Mia, going so far as to buy her a new wardrobe and making her a sort of personal assistant. He also decides to help Lois for her filmed-for-TV blind date and stops by the locale for the date, the Ace of Clubs, to pay off her date and step in as his replacement. The date is problematic from the start, as Lois is obviously rattled by Oliver’s presence. He admits that he’s here to set the record straight about Mia and what he was about to say to Lois before Mia walked into the room at his apartment. When he confesses that the thing he loves most about Lois is that she’s still in his life, she pulls the plug on the date and yanks him off camera for a chat. Clark, as Lois did during his date, must listen to the whole scene unfold as he sits in the on-site production truck. But when Lois and Oliver go out onto the club’s balcony, Lois removes her mic. She tells Oliver that she still loves him, but only as a friend. There’s someone else and that someone is Clark, who actually was about to ask her out on a second date over the comm link in her earpiece before Oliver showed up. Oliver takes the rejection surprsisngly well and even says he’s happy for Lois. As he departs and exits the club into the alley where Mia is waiting with his car, Lois follows. She tells Oliver that as his friend, she won't let him go down any more dark alleys alone. He insists that all is well and even offers to formally introduce her to Mia. Unbeknownst to Ollie, Mia has paid Rick a visit during the past hour and tried to settle her debt with him by giving him Ollie’s car. Rick, unwilling to allow his top earner to just walk away, demands that Mia help him rob Oliver. Rick is lurking in the alley when Oliver approaches the car and pistol-whips him from behind. Oliver is knocked out, but Lois and Mia fight back. Mia gets control of the gun and points it at Rick, but she can’t pull the trigger. He rips the gun from her hands and is about to shoot Lois when Ollie gets up off the ground and joins the fight. Together with Lois, he manages to escape but with Rick in pursuit, toting an automatic weapon. The chase leads to the club’s roof, where Rick corners his prey and fires off multiple shots. Clark, having heard the ruckus over the comm link from Lois’ earpiece that fell out in the alley, super-speeds to the scene and stops the bullets while also using his heat vision to blow up Rick’s gun. Lois sees none of it because Oliver is shielding her, ostensibly from the bullets. Clark stops the last bullet just inches from Oliver’s face, then vanishes from the scene as fast as he appeared. Still, the sight of Lois and Oliver together doesn’t sit well with him. As he chats with Chloe shortly after the incident, she challenges him to stop being so selfless and to go after what he wants. CK takes the advice and at the Daily Planet the next day, he walks right up to Lois and drops a kiss on her, which she clearly enjoys. Neither of them seems too concerned that Good Morning Metropolis has replaced them with Catherine, Clark's blind date, as the show's new host - at least not after the kiss. As for Chloe, she finds herself locked in a war with Stuart Campbell, Tess Mercer’s tech genius. Chloe is trying to hack LuthorCorp’s records to help Clark trace the appearance of Kandorian symbols all across the globe, but Stuart throws up one firewall after another to stop her. In the end, she breaks through the 100th firewall and finds Stuart on a live video feed, mocking her. She turns his mockery back on him by doing a screen capture on a picture of his hand, then running his fingerprints to find out who he is. Armed with all of the information and all of his records, she sets up a back-alley meeting and basically blackmails Stuart into coming over to her side in the fight with Tess. Miss Mercer has her own battle to fight in the meantime with Zod, who confronts her at the Luthor Mansion while she’s hosting a company gala to introduce her new project, the world’s first-ever self-sustaining solar tower. Zod reveals that he is chairman of RAO, the company with which LuthorCorp is partnering for the project. After the event ends, Zod informs Tess that he knows it was her who had the blood of the individual known as the Blur destroyed when the Kandorians tried to have it tested following its use to produce a vaccine for the virus the infected Metropolis with. Zod demands that Tess give up the identity of the blur and instructs one of her bodyguards, who is actually one of his men in disguise, to torture her until she either gives up the info or dies. Evidently Tess is more badass than a Kandorian warrior, because the next day Zod is sitting at a café in downtown Metropolis when an envelope appears on his table. Instead if the dog tag with the Kandorian jewel of the warrior he sent to torture Tess. It is covered in blood and as Zod examines it, Tess waves to him from the other side of the street. Message sent, but she vanishes from view as a truck passes in front of her and she’s gone. All told, a very good episode and a good job of balancing all of the show’s main characters into interesting storylines. The kiss between Lois and Clark ended the episode, so it will be interesting to see where that leads next week. Until then……….
- Great, this is going to help us all tremendously. Well, either that or it’s going to embolden idiot drivers who shouldn’t be out on the road by implying that their terrible performance behind the wheel isn't their fault. Researcher Steven Cramer, a neurology professor at the University of California Irvine, has just completed a study into driving habits and discovered that people with a certain gene variant performed more than 30 percent worse on a driving test than people without it. The study, published recently in the journal Cerebral Cortex, found that 30 percent of Americans have the variant. Under normal brain function, when a person performs a task, a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is secreted to the area of the brain that is associated with that activity. The protein facilitates communication among brain cells and helps retain memory, but people with the gene variation Cramer studied have limited BDNF secretion. "These people make more errors from the get-go, and they forget more of what they learned after time away," Cramer said. Armed with that knowledge, Cramer and his research team applied their findings to driving by recruiting 29 people to drive 15 laps on a simulated course with difficult curves and turns. Of the 29 participants, 22 did not have the gene variant; seven did. On the first day of the study, they were asked to do their 15 laps and four days later, they repeated the test. The basic idea was to see how effectively the participants learned to navigate the twists and turns in each subsequent lap. Those with the variant did worse both times and also retained less the second go-round. "I'd be curious to know the genetics of people who get into car crashes," Cramer said. "I wonder if the accident rate is higher for drivers with the variant." So you may be asking what the heck we can do with this information and if we can use it to weed out the IQ-deprived tools out there who drive five miles per hour below the speed limit in the left lane and cant remember to signal before turning or changing lanes. The answer is no, because a test to determine whether someone has the gene variant is not commercially available. However, those of you who are terrible drivers can now claim that you have this gene variant and that’s why you drive like you are handicapped mentally, emotionally, physically and psychologically……….
- Let’s just say that Malaysia is not an especially tolerant place these days. When a country’s government is seizing more than 15,000 Bibles in recent months because they referred to "God" as "Allah," that doesn’t speak well of your open-mindedness. That particular translation of the Bible has been banned in the Muslim-majority country, which is decidedly unfriendly and repressive to people from other faiths. The Bibles were imported from neighboring Indonesia, but they never made it to their intended target. The seizure should be powerful fuel for religious minorities in Malaysia who have frequently lamented the restriction of their right to practice their faiths freely. That stands in stark contradiction to the country’s reputation as a harmonious multiethnic nation that practices a moderate brand of Islam. The Rev. Hermen Shastri, general secretary of the Council of Churches of Malaysia, explained that authorities seized 5,100 Bibles, imported from Indonesia, back in March and then seized a consignment of 10,000 copies sent from Jakarta to Kuching in Sarawak state on Sept. 11. The reason for the seizures was because the Indonesian-language Bibles contained the word "Allah." Because Indonesian language is similar to Malaysian language and both languages use "Allah" as translation for God in both Islamic and Christian traditions, it makes sense that Allah would be used. That still doesn’t fly with the Malaysian government, which has banned non-Muslims from using the word "Allah" in their texts, saying the word is Islamic and may upset Muslims. Honestly, this sounds like exactly the approach that African-Americans take to the “n” word, but the two terms could not be more different. While the “n” word is an incredibly offensive and racist term, especially when used by non-blacks, Allah is an actual religious term in Islam and not in any way a profanity or racist term. In a country where 25 percent of the people are ethnic Chinese and 8 percent are Indians and many of the Chinese and Indians are Christians, this sort of persecution of their faith in the name of Islam is indefensible at best. The Roman Catholic Church leading the fight in challenging the "Allah" ban in court, saying it is unconstitutional and discriminates against those worshipping in Malay language. However, the government is clearly in no hurry to adjudicate the case, which has been stuck in preliminary hearings for almost two years. If and when the case is heard, the church will argue that Allah is not exclusive to Islam but is an Arabic word that predates Islam. Win or lose the case, don’t expect the Malaysian government to back off its stance and become more tolerant any time soon………
- I know what the ass clowns who are proposing the idea of a reality series pairing reality parasites Jon Gosselin and the freak show that is Nadia Suleman are after. They think that by combining two of the biggest blights on society today, individuals that are universally loathed and devalued by society, they are going to come up with a winning show that millions of people will tune in for. By the grace of God, I hope they are wrong and that any network asinine enough to air this potential show is swallowed whole by the Earth the second the first episode begins to air. But you can already see that these a-hole producers are overestimating their wares because they are calling Gosselin and Suleman the "two biggest media sensations of our generation." Yes, bigger than Jay-Z, Kanye West, LeBron James, the Pope, Survivor and Twitter combined, I’m sure. A leaked copy "Jon - Kate = Jon + Octomom" reads: "Mohammed and the Mountain started a religion. Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris started a Yankee dynasty. Lennon and McCartney started a music revolution. Now Jon and Octomom start a whole new reality in the world of Reality TV." Are you f’ing kidding me? This idea isn't good, it’s not creative or innovative; it’s merely a shameless stab at generating controversy using two people that we’re all tired of and wish would go away and never come back. The word on the street is that Suleman has had a thing for Gosselin for some time now, which is actually very appropriate. This brain-dead, IQ-less piece of crap would clearly be reaching far above her level in life if she went after any guy other than a scumbag like Gosselin, so in that sense she’s right on the mark. Unfortunately for the producers, their belief that the show is so revolutionary it will rival "American Idol" in the ratings and that "there will be no rival in the shocking nature of this pairing" is so far off base that it makes predictions of a Grammy for William Hung look brilliant by comparison……….
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