- Coming into the final weekend of the Major League Baseball season, two races had materialized to at least whip up a faint aroma of interest for fans who had been decrying the decided lack of drama in the final month of the season. Sure, seven of the eight playoff spots were locked up before the first pitch on Friday, but the AL Central and NL West races were still worthwhile. Even though the NL West battle between the Colorado Rockies and L.A. Dodgers had less of an edge because the loser of the division race was still guaranteed the wild card, but when the two teams squared off in Chavez Ravine for their three-game series beginning Friday, there was intensity in the air. After the Rockies won the opener to close to within one game of L.A., Saturday’s game loomed large and in the end, L.A. ended the anxiety by winning to clinch the division title and top seed in the National League playoffs. However, the real nail-biting took place in the race between the Detriot Chokers, er, Tigers and the hard-charging Minnesota Twins in the AL Central race. After the Twins could only manage a 2-2 split in a four game series at Detroit earlier this week, hope for another miracle Twins rally seemed all but gone. Heading into the weekend with a two-game deficit, the Twins needed to be at least two games better than Detroit (3-0 to the Tigers’ 1-2 or 2-1 to Detroit’s 0-3). Because the Twins would be facing likely AL Cy Young winner Zak Greinke of Kansa City on Saturday, such a development was deemed even more unlikely…..by people who clearly don’t know the Minnesota Twins, or for that matter, the Detroit Tigers. Sure enough, the Twins swept the lowly Royals, including a win in the game Greinke started, and the Tigers were…..well, the Tigers. They lost the first two games of their home series against the Chicago White Sox before rallying today for a win to save their fading season - for now. The Twins and Tigers are now tied with identical 86-76 records, necessitating a one-game playoff to decide the division champion. Unlike the NL West, the loser of this one won't be the wild card. No, the loser will go home and the winner will head to New York to play the Yankees. The odds seem to be stacked in the Twins’ favor because the one-game playoff will be in Minnesota, but they earned that benefit by winning the season series against Detroit. Ironically, it was the Twins who forced a rule change by MLB after being in the same spot last season, a tie with the White Sox for the division crown, and having the location of the playoff decided by a freaking coin flip. The new rule makes much more sense, even if it means the one-game playoff must wait until Tuesday because that self-important blowhard Brett Favre and the Minnesota Vikings have a home game Monday night against Green Bay. Come Tuesday at 5:00 p.m. EST, you’ll find me rooting for the Twins and hoping that their Metronome magic can extend for at least a few more games………..
- Death was huge at the box office this weekend, with Zombieland scoring $25 million for the top spot, making it the best debut of star Woody Harrelson’s career. While that says good things about neither Harrelson’s career nor the quality of movies in theaters this weekend, it was enough for a zombie “comedy” to beat back the competition and reign for one weekend at least. The next best effort was turned in by Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. which dropped just 33 percent in its third weekend with $16.7 million to raise its cumulative total to $82.4 million. Coming in third was the unique offering of a limited-run Toy Story/Toy Story 2 double feature in 3-D, which hustled up $12.5 million in just 1,745 theaters even though many theaters could only manage three screenings a day. Expect much bigger numbers when Toy Story 3 you’re your local multiplex next summer. It was not a superb weekend for a movie I am all too happy to have missed, the lame-tastic The Invention of Lying with Ricky Gervais as both star and director. The non-funny comedy earned a mere $7.4 million in 1,707 theaters for fourth place, much less than estimates heading into the weekend had it bringing in. The Bruce Willis movie that didn’t bother to feature Willis in its promotional materials, Surrogates, landed in fifth place with $7.3 million, a 51 percent drop for a $26.4 million two week total. One new movie I was interested in seeing the success of was Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut, the roller-derby film Whip It!, which had a blasé opening weekend, finishing in sixth place with just over $4.9 million in 1,720 theaters. I was interested in its performance partly to see how Barrymore would fare as a director and also whether Ellen Page still had any goodwill with fans from her Juno experience. Judging by the underwhelming returns for Whip It!, I’m saying that there’s no much of that goodwill left. Right on the heels of Whip It! was Michael Moore’s latest docu/comedy blend, Capitalism: A Love Story which also banked $4.9 million as it expanded to almost 1,000 theaters. Farenheit 9/11 remains Moore’s most profitable film opening by a long shot, but I have a sneaking suspicion that Capitalism might have a little bit of staying power and a solid run in the end. Of the new movies for the weekend, the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man did well with a $41,900 per theater average in the six theaters where in played. Overall, box office was down 1 percent from last year, when the crap-tastic Beverly Hills Chihuahua was inexplicably the top movie in what remains one of the darkest cinematic periods in this nation’s history……………
- Riot Watch! Riot Watch! Let’s go tropical, baby, and head to the edge of Ecuador's Amazon Basin, to the southeastern city of Macas. Macas is a town located on the edge of the Upano River and thrives on agriculture; bananas, papayas and coffee are some of the foods farmed by the largely indigenous population. Now if I told you that an indigenous people were living happily off the land, content in their modest daily lives and there was about to be a maor problem between those indigenous people and their country’s government, what would you expect to be the root of the problem? Yup, you guessed it: the government, as always, discovers riches and natural resources in the area, looks to exploit them, er, boost its economy by mining and collecting them and dicking over the indigenous people in the process. The Ecuadorian government is all too happy to play the role of the villain here, looking to rip precious metals, water and oil, from the land and ravage the land in the process. Thankfully, the indigenous people of the region (who seem to be in need of a nickname……EcuaZonians, perhaps?) aren’t taking this lying down and this week, the hostility between the two sides has broken out into straight-up violence. The most noteworthy incident took place Wednesday near Macas, where police clashed with indigenous protesters who were blocking a highway. The government is admitting that one person was killed in the melee, so go ahead and put that figure at seven or eight. Also, 40 police officers were injured on the day. Tito Puanchir, president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon, or CONFENIAE, put the number at three indigenous residents dead and 10 injured. The spark for the showdown was a proposed water law and a mining law, which locals say will impact area resources without their consent. They allege that the privatization of water sources, priority of water access for industry, and lax pollution regulations will cause myriad problems for their people. In response, a protest was organized and the comments coming from the protest organizers have me pretty fired up. The organizers called the clash a sign of "civil war" that violated international human rights law. Good, good, throw around inflammatory terms, bring international rights into the equation and now we’re cooking with gas. But don’t think the scope of these protests is merely over one water-regulation law; protestors also called for an end to mining and oil extraction in the region. Unfortunately, one coalition of indigenous groups tucked tail and ran after the government ordered them to halt their demonstrations, but I am proud to say that Puanchir's CONFENIAE defied the calls and continued to block roads. "The response from the government was gunfire from the ground and the air," Puanchir stated. Hmm, that’s not the story the government is selling. They claim that police didn’t have weapons, but were clad only in riot gear to protect them from protestors wielding shotguns. Furthermore, these clowns would have you believe that the one man they say died in the protest was killed by the protesters' own weapons. Critics are calling for the resignation of Interior Minister Gustavo Jalk and the country's police commander in response to the incident, calls I wholeheartedly agree with. Fact is, this is a typical incident you find in Latin American countries (or countries anywhere, for that matter) with long-standing delineations between the rich and the poor and the dwellers of urban and rural areas. I salute these indigenous people for standing up to fight unfair actions by their government that would basically make easier for companies to rape their land through oil drilling, mining and logging. Fight back and keep fighting even if your government is spouting nothing but lies about everything that happens in this battle and attempting to paint you as the bad guys…………..
- I know I should be thrilled at the prospect of a person who had her face all but blown off after an accidental shotgun blast 10 years ago getting fitted with a prosthesis that will give her glass eyes, eyelashes, cheeks and a nose and allow her some semblance of normalcy - but I can’t get past the feeling of being totally weirded out. I do send nothing but well wishes to Chrissy Steltz of Portland, Oregon as she makes her way through three difficult surgeries to install the face prosthesis, which will attach to titanium dental implants. This is a courageous woman who has soldiered on despite being robbed of her sight and sense of smell and taste, and for that she deserves nothing but respect and admiration. "It took those things from me but, however, in the end, I'm not left with nothing. I still do great every day. In the end, I think, I got it better. This surgery honestly feels like just the end to a long process," Steltz said. She has continued living life and chasing her dreams the past 10 years and now has a 2-month-old baby boy to care for and raise. So far, Steltz has undergone one of the three needed surgeries and has two more to go, both to be done by doctors at Legacy Emanuel Hospital in Portland. All of this is great news, but I still find myself weirded out by the concept of attaching an artificial face to a person’s head. It’s like something out of a sci-fi movie, where a character suffers a horrific accident that robs them of their face and then wears a mask to cover their scars. Except in this case, it’s a sophisticated facial prosthetic and hopefully it will improve the life of a woman who very much deserves it…………
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