- Gambling was the name of the game on tonight’s Smallville, but when it’s your life on the line, gambling isn’t as much fun. Oliver Queen found that out the hard way when he was out on the town for a night of drinking and gambling. When a beautiful Asian-American girl in a red dress and sporting a huge dragon tattoo on her left shoulder blade approached him, Ollie figured his night was about to take a turn for the better. The lady in red had a proposition for him, but not the one Oliver was expecting. She had a modified version of the shell game, rotating three metal cups in circles around one another and asking Ollie to choose one. He picks the middle cup and underneath it is a red pill. Having been pegged by his new friend as someone who is looking for a new type of challenge and figuring he’s so low in life that he has nothing to lose, Oliver downs the pill. Almost immediately he begins to stagger around, his vision blurs and he collapses face-down in an alley outside the club. As he loses consciousness, he sees the girl in red standing over him, not saying a word. The next thing Oliver knows, he’s waking up Kill Bill-style inside a coffin, buried alive with only a flashlight. He shines the flashlight on the lid of the coffin and sees the words “GAME OVER” scrawled in red. Knowing that his oxygen will run out soon, Oliver chooses not to channel his inner Beatrix Kiddo and instead takes a wire from inside the flashlight, then uses it to break the hinges on the inside of the coffin and open the lid. He hops out of the coffin and finds himself – where else – in an abandoned warehouse. Located a few yards away is another coffin and the sounds of a man screaming and pleading for help ring out through the empty building. Oliver rushes over to the coffin and finds a name plate on the outside for none other than Lex Luthor, who he supposedly murdered. Breaking the lock on the second coffin, Oliver rips it open but inside he finds only a set of speakers – the source of the screaming. A voice from above informs him that he’s playing some sort of game and that it can end if he says the safe word. Having not bothered to ask what the safe word is, Ollie is at a loss. The mysterious voice informs him that since he doesn’t know the rules, the game will go on. Asked if he’s had his rabies shot, Oliver then must deal with a rabid dog that comes bursting through the nearest window. The only place to run is out that same broken window and Oliver seizes the chance. Outside the warehouse, he finds an abandoned car with its rear passenger-side door open. He dives inside just in time, but the angry dog soon proves to be the least of his concerns. The doors of the car all lock, leaving him inside as a speeding truck comes hurtling toward the car, smashing into it with Oliver still inside. That turns his lights out for the time being and Oliver isn't up and going until the next morning. In the meantime, Oliver’s absence on his own birthday has rattled Lois Lane, who has taken up refuge at the Kent Farm for solace. Clark arrives home and finds Lois waiting for him with a stack of movies and a declaration that they are having a movie night. She also came to do laundry, but Clark smells a rat and asks Lois why she’s really there – in between super-speed sprints from the room to save people in danger around Metropolis. Lois confesses that she and Oliver have always hung out and played beer pong on his birthday, but he’s AWOL and she’s worried about him. Clark tells her that everything is fine, but Lois isn't convinced. She drags Clark to Oliver’s apartment when Ollie doesn’t answer his phone and the apartment is completely empty. Never one to take no for an answer, Lois hacks into Oliver’s computer and dredges up any information she can find. The most recent item on his desktop is the video from last episode’s incident at the Ace of Clubs in which the Toy Man attempted to blow up Oliver with a bomb and expose him as a lying, murderous fraud. When Lois sees Oliver step off the pressure plate supposedly linked to the bomb and realizes that when he did so, he didn’t know that the bomb had been diffused (actually, it wasn’t real at all, but Lois doesn’t know that), she’s stunned. Realizing that Oliver was basically trying to kill himself, Lois is horrified. When the video shows Clark stepping into the picture, she’s furious that he knew about what Oliver did and not only did he not tell her, he lied and said everything was fine. From that point, Clark and Lois head in two different directions. Lois continues searching for Oliver on her own while Clark pursues a lead he found in the apartment. That lead is a napkin from a place called Roulette, so he starts hi search there. Meanwhile, Oliver is waking up from the crash-bang-boom ending to the night, finding himself on the pavement beside the car he was formerly locked inside. He scrapes himself from the pavement and scurries over to a pay phone, which he tries to use to call Chloe for help. The voice on the other end pretends to be an operator at first, but then speaks directly to Oliver, taunting him, “You didn’t think it would be that easy, did you?” It’s then that Oliver encounters the girl in red from the previous night and she tells him they need to run. Off they go, sprinting down the street. Oliver stops at an intersection and demands some answers. First, he asks the girl her name and she says it’s Victoria. He then asks her what the game they’re playing is. Victoria explains there her employers tell her who to bring into their game and she doesn’t ask questions if she wants to stay alive. Staying alive becomes the challenge of the present when a shot rings out and shatters the glass of a nearby phone booth. Oliver and Victoria take off running again, but the shooting continues and she’s hit. As she lays dying in the middle of the street, Oliver tries to help her but instead ends up covered in blood next to a dying woman as a police car speeds onto the scene. The cops want none of his excuses and instead Taster Oliver before taking him into custody. When he wakes up for the second time on the day, Oliver is being questioned by one of the officers who arrested him. In mid-accusation, the officer is interrupted by a man in a suit who says he’s from the FBI. The case is now a federal matter and the FBI man tells Oliver that he believes his story. The game he’s caught up in is run by a fraud ring that pulls in rich individuals and drains their bank accounts while they are caught up in the game. The FBI agent places a laptop on the table and suggests that Oliver check his accounts immediately. Stupidly, Oliver buys the story and logs on to access his accounts, finding that everything is intact. The FBI agent congratulates him on his good fortune and says he needs only to sign a few forms before he can leave. But once the agent leaves the room, the door locks behind him and the numbers on the screen showing Oliver’s bank balance begin to decline in rapid fashion. The balance drops to zero as a frantic Oliver can only watch. His screams don’t change what’s on the screen, but they do catch the super-hearing ear of Clark, who is in the area looking for him. Clark blows through the walls of the warehouse, rescues Oliver and takes him to Watchtower, Chloe’s apartment/lair. CK asks her to help investigate the scam that ripped Oliver off and Oliver asks Chloe for his arsenal of weapons and gadgets back after leaving them behind when he went AWOL following Jimmy Olsen’s death. Chloe is quickly able to put the names Victoria and Roulette together and determine that Victoria and Roulette are one in the same; a scam artist who preys on the wealthy. Lois is also busy with Roulette, although her encounter comes inadvertently. While searching for Oliver’s car with the help of GPS, she tracks down the yellow Lamborghini on a city street but is immediately confronted by Victoria, who insists that the car was a gift from Oliver. A kick-ass chick fight breaks out and Lois holds her own – until Victoria pulls a gun and takes her hostage. Lois ends up going back to the same club where Oliver was the previous night and is nearly shot by none other than Oliver when he shows up looking for Victoria. She has smartly dressed Lois in her outfit from the previous night and faced her away from the door so that Ollie will have a case of mistaken identity when he shows up looking for revenge. That nearly happens, but Oliver doesn’t pull the trigger and a furious Victoria threatens to finish the job. Another fight breaks out and it ends with Lois held hostage again by Victoria, who then threatens to torch the entire building with her lighter, having already doused it with gasoline. She then escapes as Oliver tends to the fallen Lois, but an explosion rips through the next room and Oliver runs over to find Victoria pinned beneath a tall shelf as flames engulf the room. He tries to free her even though she’s done nothing but torment him and she asks why. When Oliver explains that he isn't willing to let her die, she extricates herself from under the shelf and stands up as all of the flames mysteriously cease. It turns out that none of the danger Oliver has found himself in has been real and Victoria explains that she’s merely been trying to reconnect him with his heroic nature. As he looks into a wall of mirrors that pop up in front of him, Oliver looks at himself and realizes she’s telling the truth. After his ordeal ends, it doesn’t take Oliver long to realize who was behind his impromptu adventure. He tracks Chloe down at a café in downtown Metropolis and she admits that she was responsible for the “game” that he’d just gone through. She did it to show him that he needed to stop running from himself and drinking his life away and surprisingly, Oliver agreed. By episode’s end, he was back on a rooftop downtown in his Green Arrow gear, side-by-side with Clark overlooking the city and vowing to defend it together. Oliver also mended fences with Lois, playing their traditional birthday beer pong after she reminded him that she will always be there for him. For all his part in Oliver’s ordeal, Clark remains in the dark that it was Chloe who was behind it all. But the end of the episode, Clark and Chloe also discover something alarming in the video from the Ace of Clubs. Clark recognizes a woman in the crowd as the Kryptonian assassin who returned with Lois from her trip to the future and tried to kill both Lois and Clark before he killed her at the Kent Barn. How the woman is still alive in the future is unexplainable. For help, Clark goes to the Fortress of Solitude to ask Jor-El and he recognizes her as Aaliyah, a Kandorian. That’s news to Clark and Chloe, who both assumed Kandor was destroyed along with Krypton. But if Aaliyah is on Earth, other Kandorians could be too and they would have left their symbols on the ground wherever they landed. Using an algorithm to cross-reference Kryptonian symbols with satellite images from the past few months, Chloe unearths literally dozens of such symbols around the world. These would of course be Zod and his army, but Clark and Chloe don’t know that yet. That’s all for this week, so until next time………….
- Beware the zonkey. The zonkey is the mythical beast created by cross-breeding a zebra and a donkey, but for James Oleson of Brooksville, Fla., the zonkey is the angry animal that ruined his day on Monday. Oleson was attacked by the half-zebra, half-donkey at Boyett Groves, a small attraction with exotic animals for tourists to see up close. He was minding his own business, painting a perimeter fence near the zonkey’s enclosure when the animal put its head underneath the fence and began to bite his feet. After being knocked to the ground by the commando attack, Oleson was able to get away from the angry zonkey with the help of his mother and without suffering anything worse than multiple numerous bite marks on his lower legs. No word on whether Hernando County Sheriff's deputies plan to charge the zonkey with anything, but hopefully Oleson and the animal can make peace. As a quick word of advice to any other zonkeys out there, allow me to say this: You’re a fairly new creature and as such, people don’t really have a strong opinion of you one way or the other. Attacking humans is going to get you branded as a malcontent and troublemaker of the animal kingdom in short order. So rein in that impulse to bite and/or attack fence painters and maintenance workers of all sorts an just cultivate the cute, unique hybrid animal image that you have going for you. That’s my advice, for what it’s worth…………
- Never mind the fact that the citizens of Southern California don’t seem to give a rat’s ass about getting an NFL team in Los Angeles; the state’s political leaders are hell-bent on putting a team back in the nation’s second-largest media market and that’s that. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Thursday he had signed a bill allowing the construction of a 75,000-seat stadium that developers hope will lure an NFL team back to the Los Angeles area. Take a minute and realize how jacked up that line of reasoning is. This isn't spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a new stadium for a team that already resides in your city in order to keep them from leaving town. This is BUILDING A STADIUM FOR A TEAM YOU DO NOT HAVE and are merely hoping to lure by building that stadium. In a state dealing with one of the worst budget crises in the nation, how the hell can you justify that expenditure? Worse still, the Gover-nator actually signed the environmental exemption bill last week but saved the announcement for a press conference in Industry, where the stadium would be built about 15 miles east of Los Angeles. How awesome is it that the political leader of the state sat on news that he was going to financially dick over his constituents for an entire week? The only bold souls who have stepped up to oppose this absurd idea so far have been by residents in nearby Walnut, who filed a lawsuit over the project's environmental impact. The Gover-nator called the lawsuit frivolous as he addressed a crowd of union members wearing hardhats. As he spoke, a dozen protesters across the street demonstrated with signs saying "No Stadium." Yet there was Ah-nold, trying to sell everyone a load of sh*t about how great the stadium would be. "This is the best kind of action state government can create -- action that cuts red tape, generates jobs, is environmentally friendly and brings a continued economic boost to California," Schwarzenegger said. Whatever you say, Gover-nator. But what happens if you can’t lure the Buffalo Bills, Jacksonville Jaguars, Minnesota Vikings, St. Louis Rams, San Diego Chargers, Oakland Raiders or San Francisco 49ers to your new stadium? Those teams are the most likely candidates to move, but what if they don’t? It’s not as if the denizens of Los Angeles have been crying out for their own NFL team once again. They are perfectly content to kick back and watch the best games on TV every Sunday afternoon. Besides, SoCal is a bunch of transplants and people with no ties to the area, so having a team of their own isn't really something they want or need. If they’re football fans, then they have a team of their own back where they came from. Majestic Realty Co. is heading the stadium project and identified the seven teams I just mentioned on the basis that they are currently in stadiums that are either too small or can't be updated with luxury box seats or other revenue sources an NFL club needs to thrive. Of course, Schwarzenegger based his push for the stadium on the grounds that it would generate more than 18,000 jobs. How realistic that figure is, I don’t know. What I do know is that 18,000 jobs doesn’t mean 18,000 full-time, self-sustaining jobs for people in need. The bottom line is that for a state in financial turmoil, there are simply too many better ways to spend money than on a stadium that is neither wanted nor needed……….
- Everyone, it’s time to applaud Iran for being so frickin’ manganimous! Yes, those nuclear-happy tools from the Middle East have made the very generous decision to accept a draft agreement that calls for some uranium produced in Iran to be sent abroad for further enrichment. "In principle we have in fact accepted this offer for this Tehran ... reactor in spite of the fact that we are capable of producing the fuel," said Ali Asghar Soltanieh, an Iranian diplomat. "But we decided to welcome this offer in order not only to show our transparency and cooperation but prove that all activities are for exclusively peaceful purposes." Soltanieh is Iran's ambassador to the United Nations' nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency. The concession from Iran comes after three days of discussions at the IAEA's headquarters with representatives from the U.N., Russia, and the United States. Soltanieh explained that the agreement basically summarizes what the group discussed during their meeting and it must now be approved by all of the governments involved in the process. IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei threw down an ultimatum of Friday for the countries to say whether they will sign the agreement. No one is giving up the specific details of the agreement, but Soltanieh was quick to paint it as a majorly munificent gesture on his nation’s behalf. But in spite of the deal, he was also adamant that Iran plans to continue its uranium enrichment program at its Bushehr nuclear power plant. The origins of this agreement can actually be traced to early October, when the involved parties talked and agreed that low-enriched uranium produced in Iran would be sent abroad for further enrichment and then returned for use in medical research and treatment. I suppose their hopes in allowing someone else – can you say Russia? – to refine their nuclear material is so they can trumpet the process to the world as evidence that they’re not actually looking to develop a freaking ginormous nuclear bomb to blow the living sh*t out of Israel. Color me cynical, but to paraphrase Ron Burgundy, “I still don’t believe you.” Sorry Iran, but I’m going to go ahead and side with those who continue to believe that you are pursuing nuclear weapons capabilities…………..
- There are always so many stories of government employees faking injuries in order to get disability payments while they go on living healthy, un-injured lives that I often bypass the chance to comment on them. It needs to be a particularly ass-hatted individual ripping off his city, town, village or state in order for me to be motivated to say something about it. So Boston firefighter Albert Arroyo, consider yourself special. Arroyo is one of two Boston firefighters charged with fraud by federal prosecutors for lying about his injuries in order to receive disability payments, but Arroyo’s story is much better than former firefighter James Famolare. Arroyo claimed he fell while walking in a fire station in Jamaica Plain and that that this fall left him totally and permanently disabled from the performance of his duties. He and Famolare both sought accidental disability retirement pensions. The problem with Mr. Arroyo is that while out on disability leave, he was caught bodybuilding. Yes, I said bodybuilding. "Arroyo failed to disclose his repeated visits to gyms where he trained for a May 2008 body building competition," federal prosecutors said in a statement. In other words, dude was cashing his disability checks and using them to pay for his gym membership, protein mix, weightlifting belt and tanning sessions so he could look like all of the other oiled-up, orange-skinned, freakishly muscled ‘roiders, er, weightlifters at whatever event he was preparing for. Just out of curiosity, but what was Arroyo thinking would happen if he won the competition? Did he not realize that someone might take his picture and possibly publish his name and story somewhere? Good forward thinking, A. Famolare falsely claiming he suffered a career-ending injury while moving a box of files looks brilliant by comparison. Also charged in Arroyo’s scam was Erika Boylan, a clerk in the Boston Fire Department. She was charged with perjuring herself and obstructing the grand jury investigation. Here’s hoping your conviction on the fraud charge is swift and your punishment is severe, Al, because Lord knows you are not smart enough or clever enough to deserve anything other than the maximum penalty allowable under the law……..
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