- On last night’s Greek, a new neighbor threatened to ruin the fun at the Kappa Tau house, the encroaching future threatened to ruin the balance in Casey and Cappie’s relationship and Casey’s focus on law school began to take its toll on best friend Ashleigh. Things kicked off with the KT pledges cleaning up after the fraternity’s Valentine’s Day party, tossing trash over the back fence into the back yard of the vacant house located behind the KT house. To their surprise, the trash came right back at them, courtesy of the couple that had just moved into the house, the Hilgendorfs. Professor Tom Hilgendorf is a new member of the music department faculty and the KT’s immediately figure that having an old, married couple living next door is going to put the kibosh on their fun. Fun definitely isn’t what Casey has on her plate as she tries to write her personal statement/essay to go with her law school application. She has help from Joel, the campaign manager of the senatorial campaign she collected voter registrations in support of last episode, as he has agreed to read and advise on her application. Working on her application also leads Casey to suggest the Cappie seek some help as he finally begins to consider picking a major, but he’s in no hurry to find an academic advisor. Casey is also working with Ashleigh on putting together a freshman dorm reunion for those they lived with their first year at Cyprus Rhodes, but law school takes precedence for Casey and Ashleigh clearly begins to feel neglected. At the KT house, the guys meet to discuss how to deal with the Hilgendorfs and ways to run them off. Rusty offers to go over and smooth things over, to which Cappie’s response is to start a pool to bet on how long it will be before he can tell Rusty, “I told you so.” And sure enough, even after sending pledges over to clean the Hilgendorf’s back yard and porch and install their wireless network, Tom Hilgendorf drops by the KT house to hit the guys with a list of rules he wants them to adhere to – no significant noise after 10 p.m., that sort of thing. He also makes a point of warning the guys to stay away from his daughter, who is 16. Cappie gets to tell Rusty, “I told you so,” but they must then figure out how to deal with the Hilgendorf rules. Rusty’s next idea is to try to make Tom “feel like part of their collective,” i.e. make him feel like he’s a part of KT. The tactic actually works, just a little too well. Tom hangs out at the KT house and actually shows he has some skills in drinking games, including a combination of pool and beer pong “Monkey Hump,” in which he challenges and demolishes Cappie. Meanwhile, Rusty’s V-Day date Katherine is still crushing on him and seeks out Casey for advice. Katherine confesses to having sent Rusty an email to say how much fun she had on their date, complete with a link to a story about a new robotic hand that researchers have developed. She wants to hang with Casey, partially to help her with her law school application, but also to get advice for things with Rusty. Life is decidedly more tense at the Omega Chi house, where in the aftermath of the frat’s Valentine Day party, $500 is missing from the house’s cash box. OC president Evan Chambers calls a meeting to get to the bottom of the missing cash, but it quickly deteriorates into one big accusation-fest. Rather than allow that to continue on and poison the house atmosphere, Calvin and Grant decide to solve the problem by passing out envelopes to all of the brothers and giving them a chance to return the stolen money anonymously to the house’s common room. The tactic works, sort of, when all of the envelopes are returned and the missing $500 is in one of them. However, Calvin knows who stole it because he marked Evan’s envelope in the hope that it would come back empty and he would be able to tell all of the brothers that Evan was innocent despite being one of the most likely suspects. Evan admits to taking the money, but only because he felt like he needed to buy a great V-Day gift for Rebecca Logan. Also, he claimed that he was going to repay the money as soon as possible and thought he could do so before anyone noticed. He then tries to liken his having to adjust to life without his trust fund and the lifestyle to which he had grown accustomed to Calvin trying to adjust to having people know that he’s gay, which offends Calvin. Things are significant lighter at the KT house, where Tom Hilgendorf has turned into a honorary pledge called T-Bag, courtesy of Cappie. His presence is not welcomed by the other pledges and brothers, who want Rusty to find a way to get rid of him. Already, T-Bag has gotten drunk and spent the night sleeping in the back yard and had his wife come to the house looking for him and hanging out with an “old guy” isn’t what the brothers are after. When Rusty begins trying to haze T-Bag into leaving, the tactic backfires as he proves perfectly capable of hanging with the other pledges. He even gets down on the dirty, disgusting KT floor and cleans under the pool table – right up to the point he spots his daughter Hannah making out with one of the KT’s. Both father and daughter are somewhere they shouldn’t be, but before they can hash things out, campus security officer Huck shows up to chide the KT’s for exceeding the allowed noise level. The KT’s know that if Huck finds an underage girl in their house with alcohol around they are screwed, so they sneak Tom and Hannah out the back door while the pledges distract Huck. When the door in the fence jams, they hoist Tom over the top and then must form a human barrier in front of Hannah when Huck pops into the back yard. The blockade works and they are able to sneak both Tom and Hannah home, but they encounter more trouble when Mrs. Hilgendorf arrives home just ahead of them. To distract her long enough to sneak Tom and Hannah back into the house, Beaver and Rebecca meet her at the front door and chat her up long enough for Cappie and Rusty to get Tom inside and in bed, saving the day. Why Beaver and Rebecca, you ask? Well, after they had sex last week, news of their hookup spreads. Beaver tells Cappie, who doubts the claim but gets confirmation from Rebecca. She admits she did it because getting too close to Evan freaked her out. Now, she can’t find the silver necklace Evan gave her and looks everywhere for it, including the OC house and the KT house, which put her there when Huck showed up. The episode continues with Casey finishing her law school app with help from Joel and Katherine, who help her find a story from her life that helps explain why she wants to become a lawyer. The inspiration comes at the freshman year dorm reunion, where meeting a former dorm mate named Sonny leads Ashleigh and Casey to have a major blow up about drifting apart. Later, they meet up in the dorm laundry room and recall the fun memories of meeting there freshman year and starting their sorority journey together after meeting then-ZBZ president Frannie there. Casey observes that their lives may be busier now, but if they work hard, they can stay close. Things conclude with Cappie and Rusty hanging out post-T-Bag at the KT house, with Cappie admitting that although Tom wasn’t much good as an academic advisor, he did learn from the professor. He learned that he doesn’t want to rush out into the real world with its minivans, kids and full-time jobs. Stay at CRU as long as possible and enjoy goofing off, Cappie realizes. He shares this revelation with Rebecca when he returns he necklace, found stuck to T-Bag’s chest after he spends time cleaning under the pool table at the KT house. They recline on a bench and muse about why some people must take life and relationships so intensely and seriously. Cappie postulates that if Casey gets into law school at CRU, his perpetual student routine with no direction won't be an issue – for now. If she gets into a different law school……who knows? For now, he wants to sit on a bench and enjoy a sunny day. An episode with less laughs and more serious matter for the most part, but still a pretty solid episode overall……………
- Ordinarily, a one rich, old white guy ripping on a bunch of other rich, old white guys wouldn’t interest me. However, I’m going to make an exception because like Warren Buffett, I have a special stockpile of hate for the ass clowns who run our nation’s banks. Buffett has an solution for the problem of “too-big-to-fail” banks: Put the bankers' bank accounts on the line. Buffett recently took time in his role as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway to tear the leaders of the banking industry a new one in his annual letter to Berkshire shareholders, released Saturday. Criticizing the financial sector and those who run it is nothing new for Buffett, but his words are being given more weight as the federal government takes a closer look at the fraught-with-ineptitude banking industry and how to rein it in. While I would simply suggest not giving out any executive bonuses to execs already making eight figures, that is apparently too simple and obvious a solution to be considered. The Obama administration last month proposed separating banks' proprietary trading activities from their federally subsidized deposit-gathering and lending ones, which is admittedly more complicated and less likely to succeed than my approach. On top of this ingenious idea, the government is also considering increasing the amount of capital banks hold against losses and how much cash they carry to deal with a sudden onslaught of withdrawals. Like myself, Buffett is seeking a simpler approach and I like his idea almost as much as I like my own. He wants to force these pampered CEOs to take responsibility for assessing the risks at their firms and put their own net worth on the line in the process. "It is the behavior of these CEOs and directors that needs to be changed," he wrote. "They have long benefitted from oversized financial carrots; some meaningful sticks now need to be employed as well." What I like most about Buffett is that even though he makes a ton of money each year, his annual salary at Berkshire is $100,000, much less than almost anyone else in his position with a major company. I suppose that even the world’s second-richest man can be outraged when the government hands out massive bailouts to AIG, Citigroup and Bank of America that cost investors more than $500 billion. Seriously, who can’t muster outrage when shareholders absorb the overwhelming majority of the risk and yet receive such a small chunk of the profits when things go well? Many of the executives who presided over those banks leading up to their collapse are still there and that’s a problem for all of us. Boards that don't mandate the CEO take responsibility for risk management are "derelict" in their duty, Buffett wrote. For once, I’m going to agree with a rich, privileged old dude and get behind his idea of how the financial industry needs to change…………
- Why would anyone not want a stretch of a major highway in their state named after one of the most notorious steroid users in professional sports history? This question is directed to the Missouri Senate, which wants to rename a stretch of Interstate 70 in St. Louis that was designated the Mark McGwire Highway in 1999, one year after McGwire’s 70 ‘roid-fueled home runs set a new Major League Baseball record for single-season homers. For some odd reason, the state Senate voted unanimously Monday to rename the section of interstate the Mark Twain Highway. Now the bill goes to the House, which is expected to pass it as well. To be fair to the legislature, the bill addresses more than just Mark McGwire's highway and would also name sections of a few other highways for noted Missourians. For the life of me, I can't comprehend why any state or city wouldn’t be proud to have one of its major thoroughfares named after a guy who jammed all sorts of harmful performance-enhancing drugs into his body, made tons of money off of the improved health and production he gained from those drugs, lied about taking them, refused to answer questions in front of a congressional committee and went into hiding for years rather than face the truth only to come clean when he decided that he wanted to get back into baseball as a coach. You act like having a parent drive down I-70 in St. Louis and explain to their child how a noted cheater and liar deserves to have a highway named after them is a bad thing. I’m not sure what kind of legislative operation you all are running over there in Jefferson City, Mo., but if this is the kind of result we can expect from your efforts, then perhaps the good people of Missouri need to find themselves a new governing body…………
- Defecting from North Korea is one of the ballsiest plays a person can make in life. It’s one thing to be a Cuban athlete who defects while your team in playing at an international tournament in say, the United States. You sneak away from the team, hit up the nearest embassy and bam, you’ve got yourself a new home country. However, manning up and walking South across the heavily militarized border between the two Koreas is a balls-out play to the nth degree. That’s exactly what one brave North Korean soldier did Tuesday, walking across the border separating the two countries. The soldier crossed into the eastern province of Gangwon on Tuesday evening and immediately expressed a desire to defect. No further details were available as the defection remains under investigation, so we don’t know who this brave soldier is and what possible reasons (aside from not wanting to reside in a Communist dictatorship) he has for defecting. North Korean soldiers have occasionally defected to the South in recent years, but not with any regularity. Some civilians have also defected, but they tend to take a less-direct route that winds them through China en route to South Korea. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that there have been zero defections going the other direction, as people tend not to defect to a Communist dictatorship as a general rule. I do want to give out massive props to the unidentified North Korean soldier who precipitated this story and wish him well as he begins his new life in a new country. Without knowing any details about him, I can say with relative certainty that life will be much more enjoyable and much more pleasant in his new home country…………
- Whoopee. So the cast for the next round of Dancing With the (D-List) Stars has been announced and shocker of all shockers, it’s a bunch of lames and also-rans looking to either regain faded glory or take a stab at notoriety that has thus far managed to elude their grasp. And yes, as much as I have enjoyed Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Chad Ochocinco’s end-zone antics in the past, I put him very much in this category. A guy who changes his name from Johnson to Ochocinco simply for the notoriety and has seen his production steadily decline the past couple of seasons to the point where he’s no longer an elite receiver is definitely in that category. He’ll be joined by figure skater Evan Lysacek, sportscaster Erin Andrews, singer Nicole Scherzinger, actors Shannen Doherty, Aiden Turner, skank-tress Pamela Anderson, astronaut Buzz Aldrin and Niecy Nash and reality TV hacks Kate Gosselin and Jake Pavelka. Yes, it’s quite a distinguished group, assuming that by distinguished you mean irrelevant, unknown and unimportant. Seriously, I don’t know who two thirds of these people are. Andrews is best-known for having some perv jam a camera up to the keyhole of her hotel room, film her undressing and post the video online. Unless you’re a sports fan, that would be the only way you’d know her. Lysacek is a guy who won a gold medal in a “sport” that Americans only pay attention to once every four years and his fifteen minutes will be up very shortly. Notice that Super Bowl MVP Drew Brees isn’t doing DTWDLS, nor is Shawn White. People who matter and have a career that can stand on its own aren’t doing this crap. With no apologies to DTWDLS host Tom Bergeron, who revealed the cast Monday with help from former finalist Melissa Rycroft, this show is unmitigated crap. It makes Bergeron’s former gigs hosting Hollywood Squares and America’s Funniest Home Videos seem impressive by comparison. Just look at the former or current athletes who have been a part of DWTDLS in the past and you’ll see what I mean: former NFL running back Emmitt Smith (retired and looking to stay in the spotlight), Olympic speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno (competes in a sport no one gives a damn about), IndyCar driver Helio Castroneves (not actually an athlete at all), figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi (retired and irrelevant) former NFL defensive lineman Warren Sapp (retired and an attention whore). I guess what I’m saying is don’t expect me to be tuning in when the show premieres on March 22. "It's definitely one of our strongest cast lineups ever," said executive producer Conrad Green. "Pound for pound, it should be really fascinating watching." No it won't, C. Ballroom dancing isn’t interesting when done by people who are good at it, so a bunch of quasi-celebrities with nothing better to do learning to ballroom dance is not only not fascinating viewing, it’s cause for me to want to hunt you down and bludgeon you with a frozen sea bass. Stop wasting my time with this crap and please just go away…………
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