Polygamy alive and well in Isreael, a 24 recap and more reasons auto racing isn't a sport

- Normally, you would not expect attendees at a memorial service to bring Frisbees, but in the case of Walter Fredrick "Fred" Morrison, there is a good reason. Many mourners brought the flying plastic discs to Saturday's memorial service for Morrison, who invented the flying disc. He died this week at his home in Utah at the age of 90. His passing was confirmed by Wham-O, the company that has sold the Frisbee since signing a contract with Morrison in 1957. "Fred's the one who thought of commercializing something that people had been doing forever -- picking up a round, flat object and watching it sail," said Phil Kennedy, Morrison's biographer. "It's so simple that anyone could pick it up and fly it acceptably well in a few minutes. It's inexpensive and adaptable to existing games and to new games." To date, Wham-O has sold more than 200 million Frisbees to date, which is pretty freaking remarkable over the course of five-plus decades. Even more remarkable is that Morrison didn’t sign his contract with Wham-O until 20 years after he first began experimenting with flying disc designs in 1937. Inspiration struck after his girlfriend's uncle invited him outside to toss the lid from a popcorn tin. After that, Morrison borrowed a cake pan from his mother's kitchen to throw with his girlfriend, who later became his wife. So the Frisbee not only made him a lot of money, but it was a key part of his relationship with the woman he loved, which is very cool. As his idea progressed, Morrison began selling "Flyin' Cake Pans" for 25 cents on beaches and parks around Los Angeles, California. His love of flying things can be traced to his stint as a fighter pilot during World War II, when Morrison was shot down and held as a prisoner of war for 48 days. Not long after the war, he worked as a carpenter and puttered around with designs for aerodynamic discs in his free time. His first stab at the concept, the plastic Flyin-Saucer, was a commercial failure. Morrison achieved much more success with the Pluto Platter, which sold well enough to attract the attention of Wham-O. "The Pluto Platter was more aerodynamic, with more weight in the rim," Kennedy said. "It was sleeker -- without ribs sticking up -- and a little bigger, so it flew better." Wham-O combined the redesigned disc with the name Frisbee, which it derived from New England college students who'd been throwing empty tins from the local Frisbie Pie Co. So a melancholy happy trials to my man Walter Morrison, who brought a lot of fun and memories to a lot of people, including yours truly, with his simple, yet great invention……………

- Polygamy is alive and well in Israel and it can thank Goel Ratzon of Tel Aviv for that. Ratzon stands accused of having 23 wives and fathering 59 children (stop for a minute and really drink those statistics in because this guy makes legendary procreators like former NBA star Shawn Kemp and former NFLer Travis Henry look like amateurs) and was charged Sunday in a Tel Aviv court with multiple counts of sexual assault, rape, sodomy and enslavement after being arrested last month. To briefly sum up the case against Ratzon, the 60-year-old (alleged) polygamist is charged with living in a compound with the 23 wives, all of whom he had somehow convinced that he was omnipotent. This was a truly freaky and disturbed place, with all 23 women sporting tattoos of Ratzon's name and picture on their arms. Oh, and their children's names are all derivatives of his name. This charade began when Ratzon married his first wife in 1972. He stuck with monogamy for an impressive eight or nine years before adding a second wife in the early 1980s. He settled into life as a bigamist for the next decade, but early in the 1990s, something spurred him to begin collecting wives like Madonna collects orphans from poor African nations. Between 1991 and now, Ratzon brought 21 more wives into the fold and managed to Jedi mind-trick them into believing that he had the power to heal and curse, through which he gained "complete control of their lives, desires, thoughts, emotions and actions," the court papers say. As he appeared in court for first time last week, Ratzon made no attempt to deny any of his alleged actions. He rationalized them, saying he was innocent, because everything was done with consent. He added that any women who wished to leave could do so, a claim that seems a) dubious at best and b) tough to prove or disprove. The details of the indictment truly are stunning and mind-numbing, as Ratzon allegedly "captured the women in a 'pseudo-family' structure that revolved around the worship of his image, making the birth of his children a supreme goal that the women must aspire to, and all this was to glorify him while serving and fulfilling all his needs.” He also allegedly demanded that his wives and children completely obey all of his orders and set up a penalty system if they disobeyed him. As with any good cult leader, he also "abused his wives by trampling their self-worth and cut them off from any outside social contact including their families, and by this enslaved them to him and his desires," the court papers state. Yeah, that’s Cult Leader 101: Isolate your followers from the outside world and only allow them to experience the reality you create for them. There is so much more in the indictment - allegations of rape and sodomy of two of his daughters, sexual assault of another daughter, and rape, assault and sodomy of four other girls and complete control over the finances of everyone in his cult – but I think I’ve had enough of this sick freak’s twisted take on the world for now. What’s sad is that authorities have known about Ratzon's cult for about 10 years, but it was only about six months ago they finally convinced one of the women to file a complaint. Now that they’ve cracked that wall of silence, hopefully the entire perverted empire will come crumbling down…………

- Way to show off your little driving competition’s supposed ultimate event, NECKCAR, er, NASCAR. People who ordinarily would never watch your fake sport tuned in Sunday to catch some of the Daytona 500 and instead of seeing whatever it is you deluded fools think people should see in a bunch of dudes driving souped-up cars around in circles for three or four hours, those viewers saw those souped-up cars sitting idly by because of none other than potholes, the bane of every driver’s existence. Yes, nothing screams “premier sporting event” quite like a pothole that I could just as easily see by walking out to the street in front of my house. See, a ginormous pothole pocked the surface of the track at the Daytona Motor Speedway and delayed the Daytona 500 – twice. The race was stopped for the second time with 39 laps remaining after drivers had completed 36 laps on the repaired superspeedway following a 1 hour, 40-minute delay for the initial fix. "This is a bad predicament to be in -- for NASCAR, the fans, for everybody," driver Kyle Busch (no idea who the guy is, but I’m told he’s a driver and I don’t have any interest in spending any time digging into it, so whatever) said. The pothole developed on an area between turns one and two (again, what I’m told and too lazy to research for the sake of auto racing) and actually, it fits perfectly into my anti-auto racing views. See, my argument is that getting behind the wheel of a car, driving really fast, cutting off other drivers, changing lanes without signaling and getting into wrecks is not a sport because tens of millions of Americans already do those things every single day. Old people do them, young people do them, men do them and women do them. If NASCAR drivers are athletes, then my grandma is an athlete too because she drives and does many of the things I just mentioned while behind the wheel. Having a pothole – a problem that plagues every single street in the United States and affects your average driver every day – show up in NASCAR’s supposed premier event only underscores my point. When race officials initially stopped the race with 78 laps remaining in the 200-lap competition and cars parked on pit road for about 30 minutes, my beliefs about NASCAR and auto racing in general were galvanized, reinforced and cemented. Track workers may have been out there patching the hole, which was about 18 inches long and 8 inches wide, with blowtorches and other tools, but they may as well have been putting the final touches on the foundation of my ironclad theory about their (not-a) “sport.” So while drivers may have been lamenting the pothole, I thoroughly enjoyed the whole saga. "That hole's pretty bad," driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. said. "Hit it. That's what killed all the momentum we had." It may have killed your momentum, D., but it exponentially increased the momentum of my own theories on your cute little driving competition and made me look like even more of a freaking genius. Thanks for the support of me trying to tear you down and clue everyone in to the fact that yours is not a real sport in any sense of the word, auto racing……………

- Now that Heroes has mercifully ended yet another disappointing season, it’s time to begin recapping episodes of 24 once again on Monday nights. I know, we’ve missed a few episodes, but that can be rectified quickly. Jack Bauer is again having a bad day, he tried to get out of the spy game but was pulled back in because he’s the only one who can do the job, Renee Walker is back too, she’s had a break with reality, there are unsecured nuclear materials controlled by Russians on the open market and a rogue faction in a fictional country called the Islamic Kingdom looking to acquire the nuclear material. So there you go. As for tonight’s episode, Jack has allowed himself to be captured by the Russians he believes to have the nuclear materials with the belief that the resurrected CTU (Counter-Terrorism Unit) is tracking him so they can find the nuclear materials, which are rods of weapons-grade enriched uranium. The problem is that the Russians who capture him lead Jack out of the warehouse/auto repair shop where he was “captured” through an underground tunnel, emerging several blocks away and hopping into a waiting SUV. Back at CTU, no one has any idea where Jack is or how to track him. Cole Ortiz (Freddie Prinze Jr.), the lead agent for the CTU tactical team, shows up at the auto shop to pick up Renee Walker and assess the scene after she murdered her contact in the Russian crime syndicate, Vladimir Lehtanen. Renee is clearly shaken up and can’t offer much help as to where Jack went, so CTU director Brian Hastings orders her back to CTU for a debrief and psych evaluation. Jack is taken the restaurant that doubles as a headquarters for Sergei Petrovich Bazhaev, the man currently in possession of the nuclear fuel rods. He stays in character as Ernst Mir, a supposed international arms dealer looking to buy the fuel rods for a consortium he represents. Bazhaev isn’t buying Jack’s story, especially when Jack won't reveal who he works for. Bazhaev, who shot and killed his youngest son Oleg after the son was exposed to the nuclear rods, developed radiation poisoning and was taken for treatment by his older brother Joseph, orders Jack tortured until he comes clean about who he works for. Back at CTU, the search to find Jack is in high gear. Chloe is hard at work, as is Arlo (a dorky, pervy data analyst. This also brings us to unquestionably the lamest, most pointless, moronic, stupid and time-wasting storyline this season: Dana Walsh (Katee Sackhoff), a CTU data analyst with a shady past that she is trying very hard to hide. Basically, she was somehow an accomplice to a murder while living as a Podunk redneck back in Arkansas, was paroled and came to New York to start a new life. In Arkansas, she was Jenny, but in New York she is Dana Walsh. Life has become complicated because one of her accomplices in the murder, a hick named Kevin Wade, has tracked her down and threatened to blow her cover and ruin her engagement to Cole Ortiz unless she helps him and a redneck pal of his pull off some sort of heist that will net them in excess of $100,000. She settles on hitting an NYPD evidence locker to steal confiscated drug money, gets Kevin and his friend access cards and codes and uses her resources at CTU to facilitate the break-in. Things turned sour last week when Kevin and his cohort stayed too long at the storage facility, were found out by a cop and beat him down to escape. This week, they are at a strip club in New York, celebrating their $120,000 windfall. The agreement had been that once Dana helped them pull off the job, Kevin and his loser friend who leave her alone and go away permanently. But now, seeing how much money they made in such “easy” fashion, Kevin refuses to hold up his end of the deal. Instead, he reminds Dana that she’s now a part of their burgeoning criminal operation and that he’ll rat her out unless she continues to be a part of it. This storyline is a total hunk of crap because it’s not essential to the main storyline, it doesn’t involve any characters we give a crap about and it’s going nowhere. Still, Dana’s co-workers are becoming suspicious of her erratic behavior, including stepping out to take personal calls, meeting with Kevin in the CTU parking lot and ducking out of work to go meet with him. Arlo threatens to spill her secret to Chase unless Dana comes clean and when Cole returns to CTU after picking up Renee, she asks to speak to him privately. However, when she tries to tell him about the skeletons in her closet, he’s too stressed by the search for Jack to get into the subject deeper and simply says that he trusts her and doesn’t need to know every embarrassing thing from her past. Dana decides that she knows what to do and that she will go take care of her problem. That apparently means staking out the strip club where Kevin and his friend are hanging out, packing a gun and looking for a chance to shoot them once they leave, good times. But back to the storylines that actually matter in the bigger picture of the show………Jack’s torturer, Dmitri, uses electrical shocks, opens up the stab wound that Jack received last episode from Renee and tries everything in his power to break Jack. But being Jack Bauer, he holds out. Meanwhile, upstairs Bazhaev speaks to Fahrad Hassan, the original buyer for the nuclear rods. To explain briefly, he’s the brother of President Omar Hassan, leader of the fictional United Islamic Kingdom. President Hassan is in New York to sign an important peace treaty with American President Allison Taylor. Fahrad Hassan is aligned with opposition groups who oppose the peace treaty because it will mean reducing their country’s nuclear arsenal and earlier this season, they made an attempt to assassinate President Hassan in New York. Now, he’s cracking down back home, arresting those who oppose him, and Fahrad has gone into hiding in New York, still working to acquire the nuclear rods and overthrow his brother’s government. Bazhaev is so alarmed by Jack showing up and knowing about the rods that he halts their delivery to Fahrad and his men. At the same time, Jack manages to gain the upper hand in his tormentor by pretending to have passed out due to pain, only to attack once Dmitri turns around. Jack turns the tables, electrocutes Dmitri and manages to free himself from the water pipes to which he has been bound. He then nabs Dmitri’s cell phone, calls CTU and orders Chloe to trace the call while he goes off to find Bazhaev. That leads to a pretty freaking awesome shootout in the restaurant, with Bazhaev blasting away with some sort of high-powered shotgun and Jack dodging bullets and ducking under tables. He manages to ambush Bazhaev and knock him out with the help of a table. The CTU tac team rolls in and secures the scene, but Jack demands they give him a chance to speak to Bazhaev. When the Russian demands immunity in exchange for revealing the location of the nuclear rods, Jack dials up President Taylor and Hastings. The president authorizes the immunity deal for Bazhaev and his oldest son, Joseph, and in exchange, he gives up the location of the rods. They are at a truck stop just outside the city and Hastings dispatches Cole and his tac team to recover them. They swoop in, sirens blaring and helicopter blades whirring, only to find the truck containing the rods has been attacked. The two guards have been shot in the head, the rods are gone and a gold cross necklace has been left behind as some sort of message. When the information is relayed back to Jack, he angrily confronts Bazhaev, who instantly realizes that his son Joseph must have stolen the rods. And indeed that is the case, as Joseph is trucking the nuclear material himself and on his way to meet Fahrad. Now it’s up to CTU to find them. The last key storyline was the fate of Tarin, one of President Hassan’s security guards. He and other important members of Hassan’s delegation in New York have been arrested at Hassan’s orders because he is completely paranoid in the wake of the assassination attempt. The problem with Tarin is that he is romantically involved with Hassan’s daughter Katya, who is also in New York. She pleads with her father for his release, but he refuses and is further infuriated to learn of their relationship behind his back. Desperate to help her boyfriend, Katya goes to the win of the U.N. building where Tarin is being held to try to see him. Nabil, another of Hassan’s security team, tells her that he can’t let her in, but suggests that when Tarin is moved to a more secure location in an hour, she might be able to speak to him then. Satisfied, Katya leaves and heads back to her room. So that’s where things stand and yes, recapping 24 episodes is a lot more fun than recapping Heroes episodes on Monday nights because, at this point anyhow, Heroes is going down the crapper fast……………

- Hopefully none of you are visiting sunny southern California over the next couple of days with the hopes of snapping a picture of yourself with the famed Hollywood Sign in the background. The sign is (and will be until Wednesday) obscured by an overlapping sign spelling out "SAVE THE PEAK". The message refers to the effort by a group called Trust for Public Land to protect the Hollywood Sign from having an obstructed view by the development of new homes. The group has an agreement to purchase a parcel of land adjacent to the icon sign, but needs $12.5 million to complete the deal. Fox River Financial Resources Inc. bought the property eight years ago for $1.7 million, but now the trust wants to own it in order to protect the landmark. It has until April 14th to raise the necessary funds, having already raised half of the needed payment. After the potential purchase, the land would go to Griffith Park and be protected from the sort of housing development that could throw up a few more McMansions near the sign, obscuring it from view for many people. Not that anyone should need to be told not to do something stupid and selfish like that, but you just know that the spoiled rich people of SoCal would brawl with one another for the right to throw up their own 5,000-square-foot palace in a location blocking the sign if given the chance…………