- Do you really want your old life back? That was the theme of tonight’s episode of Heroes and the answers varied. Tracy Strauss, having wiped herself off of the Company’s and the now-deceased Emile Danko’s radars with the help of Noah Bennet and the Haitian, Tracy is now free to live life without always looking over her shoulder. Her first step was to seek out the Governor Malden, politician she used to work with, the man who is now governor of New York. She asks if he can hook her up with her old role as an advisor and he’s all too willing to help. Malden asks her to meet him for dinner than evening to celebrate and she agrees, but during the course of the day, Tracy crosses path wit Noah and he makes a comment to her about remembering who she has been in order to figure out who she wants to be. That gets Tracy thinking and when she meets the governor for dinner, she tells him that she doesn’t just want her old role back in which she sweet talks people and does unethical things to strike deals. She wants to really help people and make a difference. Governor Malden doesn’t seem to take her seriously and invites her up to his hotel room for a little fun. She excuses herself to the restroom and tries to compose herself only to find her power kicking in and her hands beginning to turn to water. When someone else walks into the restroom, she has to compose herself. When she heads back out to the governor’s table, she turns down his offer and tells him that everything is not okay with her. Malden says he doesn’t understand, she admits she didn’t expect him to and then she leaves. As for the rest of Noah’s day, he has a couple of unexpected visitors. First, Peter Petrelli stops by to ask for his help in figuring out the mystery of the moving compass tattoo that appeared on Peter’s wrist last episode. But the tat is gone now and Noah says that even if it wasn’t, he’s still not interested in taking up a mission of hunting down the person responsible because he’s no longer in the business of hunting PWP (people with powers). As Peter leaves, Noah’s daughter Claire pops in at his apartment to check in on her newly-divorced dad. She admits to being concerned about him and tries to talk him into looking for a new job now that he’s left the Company. She encourages him and tries to prepare him for it, but in the end, Noah admits he has no interest in her suggestion to apply for a job selling lumber. So what will H.R.G. (more fun to call him that than Noah) do? The answer may come from the show’s newest enigma, Samuel Sullivan. Back at the Sullivan Bros. Carnival, Samuel finds the Tattooed Woman, Lydia, talking with the super-speed knife-wielder, Edgar. They are lamenting Samuel’s new quest to recruit new PWP to their family, but Samuel ends their chat because he needs Lydia to use her powers. He injects more of his special ink into her back and she turns her power on the form the ink into the shape of Samuel’s next recruit. To his dismay, the new tat is of H.R.G., to which an exasperated Samuel asks, “Bennet? What would I want with him?” Lydia explains that although H.R.G. is out of the game when it comes to dealing with PWP, he may have had a change of heart. That leads to a cut to H.R.G. in his apartment, sifting through piles of research he’s dug up relating to compasses with mythical powers and meanings. Peter’s visit appears to have sparked his interest after all…..and as for Peter, he leaves H.R.G.’s apartment, begins his shift as a paramedic and is tracked down at the hospital by his brother Nathan. Nathan has been having more weird experiences on account of him actually being Nathan Petrelli forcibly imposed into Sylar’s body by his mother and Matt Parkman. Angela has noticed aspects of Sylar beginning to pop up in Nathan, so she drops by his office with a box of Nathan’s old things to help “jog” his memory. What she’s actually hoping for is that Sylar’s power (one of them, anyhow) to know the entire history of an object will allow Nathan to remember experiences with those objects as a child and assimilate the memories as his own. The attempt partially succeeds, but when he visits Peter at the hospital, Nathan confides that the memories he’s having feel like they aren’t really his. He also fesses up to another memory he had when touching an old baseball cap of his. The memory was of him as a teenager, hanging out at night with a pretty girl, Kelly, at the swimming pool behind her family’s massive mansion. In the memory, he sees the girl face down in the pool, dead and with blood in the water. Peter encourages him to find out the truth of what really happened. Nathan takes his advice, visiting Kelly’s mother Millie at the mansion. She is happy to see Nathan but is still convinced that her daughter disappeared, left the country and is out there living her life, as she’s always been told. Millie admits to having hired a private investigator to check out the story and tells Nathan he’s in the clear because Kelly did indeed buy a plane ticket out of the country and was on board the flight. That’s not good enough for Nathan and he walks back to the pool and begins touching objects, trying to conjure up memories of the night when Kelly died. It works and the memories tell him the story of he and Kelly drinking, fooling around and her dying after hitting her head on the stone diving board. When Nathan meets Angela at a bar and tells her what he has been remembering, she admits to knowing the truth and covering the entire incident up by disposing of Kelly’s body, buying the plane ticket and hiding all of the evidence. An irate Nathan goes back to Millie’s house and tells her the truth, but she doesn’t want to hear it or believe it - or so it seems. After ordering Nathan to leave, Millie meets Angela for dinner and Millie plays right along as Angela tells her how Nathan has been having problems of late and just isn't himself. At the same time, Nathan is being abducted in a parking garage by a mystery assassin in black, thrown in the back of a black sedan and driven to the middle of nowhere. Once there, he’s dumped in a shallow grave, shot multiple times and buried. Millie gets a call during her dinner, telling her that the deed is done. So apparently she did believe Nathan’s story and now he’s dead……or is he? As the sedan drives away, we see the dirt above the grave and of course, a hand pops up through the ground. That’s not surprising, but what IS stunning is who the hand is attached to - Sylar. He’s back, baby. How or to what end……more on that next week. The last storyline for the week is with Hiro and Ando in Japan, where Hiro is compiling his bucket lists of previous wrongs from his life to right before he dies. Now that he knows he’s dying, the quest is more vital than ever. The effect? Groundhog Day. After Hiro’s sister Kimito asks him to give her away at her upcoming wedding to Ando, Hiro gets a call on his new “Dial-A-Hero” line. The caller, Tadashi, is on the roof of the very building that Hiro’s company is located in. Hiro rushes to the roof and finds Tidiro ready to leap to his death. Tadashi confesses that he lost his job a month ago for making a copy of his butt on the office copier and has so shamed himself and his family that he wants to kill himself. Hiro tries to talk him out of it, but Tadashi jumps anyhow. Before he lands, Hiro teleports back in time to the New Year’s Eve party where the butt-copying happened, breaks the copier before Tadashi can do the deed and thinks he’s successfully altered history. Yet when he time travels back to the present, Tadashi is back on the roof and ready to leap to his death. Seems this guy is an ass-copying addict and when he didn’t Xerox his backside at the party, he simply did it another time, with the same result. In all, Hiro travels back in time 47 times and fails every time. The final time, he admits to Tidiro on the roof that he’s learned a few things from the experience, namely that life is short and that it’s not good to keep secrets. He vows that Tadashi will always have a friend in him and that is amazingly enough to stop the suicide leap. When he returns to his office, Hiro takes his epiphany and uses it to inspire himself to come clean with his sister about the fact that he is dying. The revelation is devastating to Kimito, but as she consoles Hiro and Ando comes in to do the same, Hiro hears a weird, exploding sound and seems to lose consciousness for a moment. When he snaps back to it, Kimito demands that Ando call an ambulance, but before he can, Hiro disappears, off time traveling once again. No idea where to or when in time, but that’s another mystery for next week. For this week, it was a pretty solid episode even if there was no Matt Parkman, next to no Sylar and only one short scene of Samuel and his crew. Oh, and still no Mohinder Suresh, sadly. But still one of the better episodes of the season so far. Until next time, kiddos……………
- The state of affairs within the University of Kansas men’s basketball program right now is not good. That’s a drastic understatement given the fact that the team will be missing two key players at the start of the season for two different, yet equally reprehensible incidents. After sophomore guard Tyshawn Taylor broke his hand in an on-campus brawl between the school’s football and basketball teams last month, junior guard Brady Morningstar didn’t exactly help the team’s reputation when he got all liquored up and hopped onto the Kansas Turnpike near the East Lawrence interchange Saturday morning while hammered. Morningstar was thankfully pulled over before he could do any real damage and arrested on suspicion of driving while intoxicated. He was booked into the Douglas County Jail and released on $250 bond later Saturday morning. KU coach Bill Self didn’t have much to say about the incident, stating that the team is still assessing the incident, but aditting that Morningstar, a returning starter, used "extremely poor judgment." That judgment looks even worse when you consider that since the aforementioned brawl, rules for player conduct have been tightened severely. Based on his arrest, Morningstar was suspended from first-semester games. He is still a part of the team, but will not be allowed to play in games or travel until January. I have to say, this arrest in surprising in the sense that you’d think the other players on the team would at least try to fly right in the wake of the throwdown with the football team, but that’s the only way it’s surprising. After all, these guys are celebrities on campus and they play for a team that is expected to be ranked as high as No. 1 in the preseason poll, so of course they’re going to be at the best parties and of course there’s going to be plenty of beer and Jaeger bombs there. In other words, players on high-profile teams are going to spend their weekends, especially before the season begins, boozing it up more often than not. Heck, we’ve gone over the fact multiple times that to truly be an elite college football or even men’s basketball program, you need your requisite component of knuckleheads, thugs, criminals and goons. Taylor and Morningstar are just filling that role for the Jayhawks, looking to prove that their program really is big-time. Just don’t tell that to their coach, who now must open the year without two of his top contributors. "Regardless of the details that concern the reason for him being stopped, he broke team rules that have been much more stringent since last week. Brady was in serious violation of curfew," Self said. "We will support him through this, but needless to say I am very disappointed in the sequence of events that took place last night." Well said, coach, but if your team opens the season 12-0 or 13-0, I’d expect your fans to forget about these incidents verrrrry quickly………
- Russia’s government has concerns about illegal and illicit activities within its borders? Who knew? Apparently Russia has a massive problem with gambling in the form of "surrogate" gambling technologies such as lottery machines and online gambling three months after an almost total ban on gambling in Russia. "We are seriously concerned about the rise of surrogate technologies," Moscow deputy mayor Sergei Baidakov said. "They are the byproduct of imperfect legislation." So in other words, your citizens are a bunch of degenerate gamblers so hooked on their habit that they are hitting up "lottery parlors" offered by a third of Moscow's 525 casinos and slot machine halls? Also, people are gambling online and throwing away their money electronically? This is nothing new in Commie-land, where the government has been looking to crack down on gambling began in 2006, when then-President/dictator Vladimir Putin pledged to quash gambling on the grounds that it was tantamount to "alcoholization" of the country. But the reality is that with a seedy, amorphous entity like gambling, any time you squeeze it out of one area, it’s simply going to reform in another place. Yes, Russian officials have restricted gambling to four far-flung special zones since July 1, but the number of Internet cafes providing access to online gambling resources has risen threefold since then. Those same officials claim that their budget has suffered little from the disappearance of gambling, with tax revenues down 0.5 percent. The gambling issue has been a growing one in Russia ever since the 1991collapse of the U.S.S.R. and within a couple of years, you couldn’t throw your empty vodka bottle without hitting a slot machine. By 2008, gambling had become a $3.6 billion industry and the issue became urgent enough that the government felt the need to step in and address it. The Commie secret police are currently out and about, looking to find and close illicit casinos and slot machine halls, so if you are the proprietor of such an establishment, react accordingly and take the necessary precautions. Be advised that police seized 33 slot machines late Sunday, and have shut down 35 underground casinos since the legislation passed, so there is clearly danger lurking. If you want to keep your gambling operation up and running and you don’t reside in the Western exclave of Kaliningrad, the Primorsky region on the Pacific coast, the Altai region in Siberia and near the southern cities of Krasnodar and Rostov, you need to be careful. Authorities picked those places for the obvious reasons: they’re hell-hole, backwoods outposts without the infrastructure and resources to support a gambling operation of any real size. You rogue casino and gambling parlor operators are your country’s gambling degenerates’ only hope, so stay strong…………
- Lessons learned in the following story: 1) avoid garage sales like the Plague and 2) smoking your own meat is a dangerous proposition (I know, I know, that’s what she said). But on Sunday, an unidentified West Park, Fla. man identified by friends only as “Jesse” was kicking it at home, getting ready to watch the Dolphins-Bills game on television and smoking some meat in the Smoky Mountain Series smoker he had purchased from a garage sale on Saturday for $25. "He was so excited about it," said neighbor Luz Cruz. Excited…..right up to the point where the propane fueled meat smoker exploded and seriously injured Jesse. Instead of watching his team win its first game of the season, 38-10 over the Bills, Jesse was at Memorial Regional Hospital in Hollywood receiving treatment for his injuries. His condition wasn’t immediately known, but here are a few things we do know from this incident. First, garage sales are depressing, pathetic and often dangerous places. You have some schmuck trying to make a few bucks and get rid of a bunch of crap they don’t want and they clean out their attic, basement or storage space and pull out all of the useless things they don’t want and probably shouldn’t have bought in the first place. They round up a few rickety tables, drop their junk onto said tables with homemade price tags and then throw open their garage door to allow a bunch of no-life-having losers, mostly old people with nothing better to do. These losers drive around from garage sale to garage sale, trying to haggle over the Betty Boop lamp or half-functional kids’ bike and get the price down from $3.75 to $3.50. Of course, compared with the case of Jesse, those are the good garage sale transactions. Should you decide to buy a potentially deadly product, take it home and use it with nothing more than the seller’s assurance that, “It works fine,” you could end up on a fast ride to the local emergency room. Also, why don’t you leave the meat-smoking to professionals and stick to slamming hot dogs, burgers and brats on the grill? Home meat smoking and garage sales, two plagues on society that we would all do well to avoid…………
- Back in the spring of 2007, Georgia rockers Cartel learned a valuable lesson: Don’t bastardize your musical credibility and sell out your musical soul by partnering up with MTV for anything. After taking the offer to star in an MTV show, "Band in the Bubble," Cartel thought it was on to bigger and better things. They should have known better, but they didn’t and when the show didn't succeed and the self-titled album recorded in the bubble sold fewer than 100,000 copies, it was time to disappear and regroup. When your debut album, "Chroma," sells 250,000 units and a much-more-publicized follow-up sells less than 40 percent of that, I’d call it a failure. Epic Records also felt the album was a failure, as evidence by the fact that it subsequently released Cartel from its contract. They were adrift on the musical sea until Wind-up Records president Ed Vetri saw a possible reclamation project in the making and signed them. Now, after two-and-a-half years off the radar, the band will release its new album, "Cycles," October 20, as part of a deal that gives Wind-up the rights to collect revenue from album sales, merchandise and touring. Vetri took a decidedly laid-back approach to the process, allowing the band all the time it needed to write and record because its previous albums were both recorded in less than a month. "I think (lead singer) Will (Pugh) needed time to find himself again and support to write great songs, which he ultimately did," Vetri says. "It was a long process; they were in the studio for about a year." Like those two previous albums, "Cycles” is largely mainstream alt rock, but it is a bit more mature and has a few nods to the group’s Southern roots. "Go and get my bones/Bring them to the Deep South/Somewhere they can thaw out," Pugh growls on the track "Deep South." There are a couple of ballad-esque tunes in "Only You" and "It Still Remains," but this isn't a low-key album in the least. As any group worth a damn does these days when recording a new album, the band kept in touch with fans via Twitter, MySpace and Facebook, along with a quick tour with All Time Low and We the Kings. A more extensive tour to promote "Cycles" is planned for this fall, with This Providence, the Summer Set, Bigger Lights and the Dares as supporting acts. Oh, and this time there will be no tie-in with a crappy MTV reality show, so perhaps Cartel actually has a chance for success this time around…………
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