- Oh, how Lane Kiffin must be smiling right now. When Kiffin was fired last year as coach of the perpetually dysfunctional Oakland Raiders, possibly alive Raiders owner Al Davis conducted a bizarr-o press conference in which he assailed Kiffin’s character using, among other things, an overhead projector from 1974. During that presser, one of Davis’ main points was that Kiffin did not like quarterback JaMarcus Russell as a player and did not want to draft him. “JaMarcus is a great player. Get over it,” Davis chided Kiffin, who wasn’t in attendance. Now that Kiffin is the head coach at the University of Tennessee and has shown substantial progress in turning around the faltering UT program, he has not be loving the fact that on Wednesday, the Raiders benched Russell, the former No. 1 overall pick, and handed the starting job to journeyman Bruce Gradkowski for the foreseeable future. Coach Tom Cable, who took over after Kiffin was fired, had already jerked Russell from two of the last three games and his sparkling stat line of two touchdowns against nine interceptions (with five fumbles lost) doesn’t exactly argue Russell’s case to start very well. Asked if the QB switch was a short-term move, the assistant-coach-assaulting Cable said plainly that it was not. "I don't want to be like that," he said. "This is where we're headed and what we're going to do. He'll take this team and go with it." Following the decision, Russell was absent from the locker room during the media access period and was not available for comment. Honestly, I don’t care to hear from Russell anyhow. What of substance is he going to say? That he’s disappointed to lose his job but that he will do everything possible to help the team no matter what his role? The guy I want to hear from is the Crypt Keeper himself, Al Davis. Don your best leather jumpsuit, break out your overhead projector and defend your boy now, Al. But you can't do that, can you? Because you finally see what we have all seen for a long time now, namely that JaMarcus is not a great player and that it is you, not Lane Kiffin, who needs to “get over it.” Great players are not 40 pounds overweight, lazy in the weight room, disinterested in the film room and regressing as NFL players in their third season. So far, all that we’ve heard about Davis in regards to this decision is that Cable stated that Davis gave him the autonomy to make the decision on his own and supported the move. "As we all know, it's important to include him in everything so he knows what's going on with this football team," Cable said. Oh, he knows. He knows that he’s paid more than $31 million to an overweight, lazy and unmotivated slug who held out for weeks prior to his rookie season, has completed just 46.8 percent of his passes this season and is the primary reason why the Raiders’ offense is among the NFL’s worst. Still, Cable insists that he’s not giving up on Russell as an NFL quarterback. "This is in no way giving up on the guy," Cable said. "This is just trying to jump-start this team and really break it down and make a decision based on what gives us the best chance to win." Of course, all of this is not to say that Russell is Oakland’s only major problem. No, the team also blew their top pick in the 2009 draft, selecting receiver Darrius Heyward-Bey with the seventh pick overall despite the fact that he was considered the fourth or fifth-best receiver in the draft and a second-round pick at best. Heyward-Bey has caught six passes this season – total – for 96 yards. He drops nearly every pass thrown his way and is the perfect compliment to a QB bust like Russell. Perhaps when the Raiders cut Russell after this season, they can toss Heyward-Bey on the garbage heap along with him. Before we conclude, how about one final stat to illustrate Russell’s incompetence: He has completed just 2 of 34 passes that have gone more than 20 yards downfield for 85 yards, one touchdown and five interceptions. Hard to see how you give up on a guy like that…………
- The future was dark on tonight’s Smallville – well, actually it was red. At the end of last week’s episode, Lois slipped into a coma after kissing Clark and seeing one of her recurring visions of the future. This episode began with Clark having rushed her to the hospital and Oliver Queen flying in the three best neurologists in the country to help. Those efforts went for naught when Lois suddenly went missing from the hospital. Clark immediately suspected Chloe because she a) is Lois’ cousin and b) had been prying into Lois’ medical records along with her friend, Dr. Emil. Clark goes directly to the source and wastes no time accusing Chloe, who is offended but is actually able to point Clark in the right direction, namely, the direction of Tess Mercer. Tess has kidnapped Lois and taken to (where else) the abandoned Bell Reeve sanitarium, where she has set up a bizarre machine perfected by scientists that allows the user to pry into the mind of a subject and see their thoughts and memories. With the help of her tech guru, Stuart Campbell, Tess hooks Lois up to the machine in an attempt to learn what Lois saw during the three weeks she disappeared and traveled to the future following last season’s finale. The memories start up almost instantly, with Lois remembering the fight with Tess that led to her grabbing the Legion ring that Clark had been given and was keeping in his desk at the Daily Planet. She leapt forward in time a year, ending up in a bizarro future with a red sun and post-apocalyptic Metropolis in which the streets are empty, littered with abandoned vehicles and the bright red sun hovers in the sky. Almost immediately, Lois is confronted by a super-speeding Kandorian who demands to know who she is and why she’s in the restricted zone. Lois won't explain herself and is obviously afraid, but the Kandorian quickly realizes that she’s human and no real threat. Lois warns him that the Blur will stop him from whatever he’s up to, but the Kandorian retorts that under the red sun, the Blur has no powers. He points to the black shirt and coat worn by the Blur, seen hanging from a nearby pole as a monument to his demise. Lois also sees the skyline dominated by two massive solar towers, the very towers Tess Mercer unveiled plans to build two episodes ago. From there, Lois is taken to some sort of internment camp for humans that has been set up at the Kent farm, of all places. Humans are treated miserably and not given enough to eat, but Lois manages to find a friendly face: Clark. They embrace, but their reunion is short-lived. After Clark dsiscovers that Lois has the Legion ring, Aaliyah, the Kandorian assassin who we know ultimately followed Lois back from the future and tried to kill her earlier this season, and a fellow guard at the camp whisk Lois away to speak to General Zod. He’s set up shop at the Luthor Mansion, now adorned with the latest in Kandorian and Zod paraphernalia, including a slew of nice red-and-black banners. Zod offers to set Lois free if she’s willing to rat out the person who snuck her into the restricted zone near the solar towers. She refuses and after being apprised that she was also spotted chatting with Clark at the prison camp, Zod decides that both of them will be executed immediately to send a message to anyone who would defy Zod. Prior to the execution, Zod also takes a moment to officially welcome Tess as an official member of his army and presents her with her own Kandorian dog tags. Lois rails against her for selling out the human race, but Tess explains that she was merely working with Zod in an attempt to save the Earth from human destruction. The executions are about to go down with a band of bow-and-arrow-wielding, black-clad assassins come bursting through the roof and put a halt to the proceedings with kryptonite-laced arrows and knives. They manage to drive off Zod and his men, but in the process Tess is shot with an arrow and killed. The assassins turn out to be led by Oliver and Chloe, whom Clark hasn’t seen in months. The foursome of Clark, Lois, Oliver and Chloe manages to escape and travel to the secret, back-alley hideout where Oliver, Chloe and the other members of their resistance group have been operating. While at the hideout, Clark also takes a moment to clean up from his beating at the hands of Zod and while he washes his face, Lois walks in and they have a heart-to-heart that ends with them having sex, fulfilling part of Lois’ flash-forward memories we’ve seen this season. Later on, Clark, Chloe and Oliver debate what their next move should be. While they argue, Lois overhears the news that for the past few months, Clark has been AWOL and ended up trying to fight Zod on his own. He and Chloe aren’t even friends anymore and don’t trust each other. In spite of that, they must work together. Oliver and Chloe explain that the Kandorians derive their power from the solar towers, which convert the sun’s rays into a different composition, then beam them up to LuthorCorp satellites, which send them back to the sun and turn it red, which in turn gives them their power while robbing Clark of his. They must disable the solar towers to stop the Kandorians, which is why the area around them is a restricted zone. Chloe’s idea is to sneak back to Watchtower, which she powered down and put into hibernation so the Kandorians wouldn’t find it, and user her super-hacker skills to infect the towers and satellites with a virus that will turn the sun back to its normal yellow color, thus flipping the power balance back to Clark. When Lois inquires as to why turning the sun back to normal would make Clark the ideal person to take down Zod and his posse, all Clark will tell her is that he and Zod “have a history.” The second part of the plan is to steal the Legion ring back from Zod, who took it from Lois, and to send her back to the past with knowledge of what is happening in the future so it can be stopped. First, all four of them must sneak into Watchtower, which proves to be fairly easy. Once there, Chloe boots up her system, breaks down the towers’ firewall and infects them with the virus. Having completed part one, it’s now up to Clark to find Zod and take back the ring. While he works on that, Lois and Chloe attempt to make a getaway from Watchtower but are spotted and stopped by Aaliyah. She wastes no time in putting a sword right through Chloe’s stomach, killing her on the spot and fulfilling another part of Lois’ visions. Oliver shows up to ward off Aaliyah with some kryptonite-tipped arrows and he tells Lois that the best way for her to help Chloe is by getting the Legion ring back, going back to the past and preventing this very future in which her cousin dies. Lois agrees and goes back to work, finding Clark as Zod drags him through the streets of Metropolis with the intent of finishing the execution he began earlier. Lois tries to intervene by slipping Clark a kryptonite-covered knife, but Zod stops him from using is and proceeds to toss Clark around some more before grabbing Lois and preparing to take her out as well. At that exact moment, the virus Chloe infected the towers with accomplishes its purpose and the sun returns to its normal state. Clark powers back up, Zod loses his powers and the tables turn. Clark accosts Zod, takes back the ring and tells him that his reign is over. But before Clark can turn the ring over to Lois to return to the past, Zod stuns him by stabbing CK with the kryptonite-laden knife, which now works against Clark because he has his Kryptonian powers back. A wounded Clark still manages to toss Zod aside, stumble away and find Lois to give her the ring. She doesn’t want to leave him, but agrees to once he promises that they’ll see each other again. Lois puts on the ring, Aaliyah rushes grabs her as she does so and the two of them go back in time to what is actually now the past, landing on a high-speed train in Metropolis. In the present, Clark manages to find where Tess has taken Lois and goes there to save her. Before Clark can get there, Tess has Stuart hook her up to Lois on the machine so she can see the memories that Lois sees. After seeing the memories, Tess realizes that Lois did indeed travel to the future and demands that Stuart erase all of Lois’ memories from that trip. He refuses because doing so could leave Lois a human vegetable if even one mistake is made. Tess will have none of his dissent and puts a burning slug in Stuart’s back before fleeing the scene. Clark arrives, stops Tess and tries to unhook Lois from the machine, but the Kryptonite weakens him and he ends up with one of the leads from the machine stuck to him. He is then hooked up to Lois brain waves just as Tess was and he too sees Lois’ visions of the future. While he’s locked in, Dr. Emil and Chloe arrive on the scene and Emil wants to disconnect Clark, but Chloe persudes him to hold off so that Clark can see what the future is like and learn how to stop Zod. Emil relents and Clark sees the rest of the future, then snaps out of his temporary coma and returns to the land of the living. Lois is okay as well, back to work at the Planet the next day and believing that she was hospitalized for nothing more than hypoglycemia. While she was hooked up to the memory machine, Emil was able to wipe out her memories from the future and so Lois is no longer plagued by mental images of the apocalypse. She is back to normal and so Clark seizes the chance to talk about their new dating relationship. Lois worries about repeating past dating mistakes and wants to take it slow and Clark concurs. Of course, she follows that up by telling him all of the things they will do while “taking it slow,” including dancing, walks in the park and of course, a monster truck rally. From there, Clark is off to Watchtower to talk to Chloe and Oliver. They want to act on the inside info he gained from Lois’ visions of the future to take Zod out now, before he can build his solar towers and become a threat. Clark counters that when he treated Zod as an enemy the first time around, the end result was the cataclysmic future he just saw. Instead, he wants to befriend Zod and show him how great living on Earth can be. Chloe and Oliver both object, because CK wants to follow through on Jor-El’s advice to “Save Zod,” ostensibly from himself. To that end, he supped speeds to the current meeting of Zod and his troops to begin building the relationship. Zod welcomes him and demands that his troops bow before Clark. That’s where things end……and where they will stay until freaking January 22. Yes, a f***ing two-month hiatus. Way to build momentum for the season, CW. So until January, that’s your last Smallville recap……….
- Riot Watch! Riot Watch! This one has been brewing for a while and it finally reached its boiling point. With the California Board of Regents voting Thursday on a measure to raise undergraduate tuition 32 percent over the next two years, students around the state have spent the past few weeks making their opposition to the tuition hike loud and clear. To cap off their weeks of protests, a group of angry students staged a sit-in Thursday in an attempt to block university officials from leaving the UCLA campus after the vote. Some 100 students locked arms as they blocked the parking decks where regents' vehicles were parked and chanted, "Hell, no, we won't go." It was flat-out awesome, especially coming on the heels of hundreds of students marching and chanting against the increase during the meeting, which took place in an administration building on the UCLA campus. Of course, the board approved the increase and this only served to piss off the agitated students even more. The students say the cuts will hurt working and middle-class students who benefit from state-funded education and of course, they are right. Officials counter that
- This is the sort of gang that you don’t want to get on the wrong side of: a gang selling FAT from dead people. And where else would you expect this sort of crew to roll but Peru? The details of the situation are still trickling in, but Peruvian authorities say they have arrested four members of a gang that specialized in selling fat obtained from dead humans. Police are investigating the disappearance of at least 60 people who may have been killed by gang members in two mountainous states in central Peru. What’s astonishing is that authorities currently have only four suspects in the case, meaning they are accusing these four individuals of offing some 60 people. It’s not clear if they killed these poor souls simply to harvest the FAT from their portly physiques, but apparently the FAT is sold in Peru and abroad and used for commercial purposes (human-fat cooking oil for those fries, anyone?). The FAT ring conspiracy was unearthed on November 3, when police arrested two of the suspects as they left a transport business with a plastic container with human fat in it. By the way, how the hell is that considered suspicious activity? Who among us doesn’t roll with a Tupperware container of human FAT at any given time? Just because these dudes were packing someone’s else’s FAT in a re-sealable container doesn’t mean you can just charge them and two of their fellow gang members with murder, Peruvian authorities. Besides, if you don’t want gang members harvesting FAT from your body or the body of a loved one after death, there’s a simple solution: don’t be FAT. I’m always here to provide practical, sensible solutions to life’s problems, so feel free to hit me up any time should you need further guidance, y’all………
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