Recapping "Greek," saluting China for outlawing a disgusting practice and an ugly curse plagues Portland

- On last night’s Greek, a fun season continued with plenty of drama and interesting storylines. But what better way to begin an episode than with someone being greeted with beer for breakfast in bed? Cappie gets that rare treat courtesy of Kappa Tau pledge Dump Truck. As he and Casey wake up, Cappie happily accepts his beer but Casey turns hers down because this is the day she’s taking the LSAT. When she asks Cappie about his own major life decision/event, picking a major, he lies and says that he has actually three choices but doesn’t want to focus on them right now because it’s her big day. For the other Cartwright, Rusty, life is also getting interesting. He’s attempting to, for the first time, have an actual friend who is a girl. That would be his lab assistant Dana, the girl who had a crush on him since freshman orientation, got pissed when Rusty blew her off and ended up as his lab assistant after he won the Gary Wyatt engineering grant. As her first act of friendship, Rusty introduces her to Katherine, the Gamma Psi he has started dating after being set up for Valentine’s Day by Casey. The meeting is slightly awkward, but Dana reluctantly admits that at least Katherine isn’t the vapid, ditzy sorority girl she expected. At the KT house, Rusty drops in as the pledges and brothers are busily preparing for the Mardi Gras party. Everyone hates idea of Rusty bringing Katherine because the party is all about debauchery and getting girls to flash them for beads and Katherine just isn’t that sort of girl conservative. Still, Rusty is determined to bring her to the party, much to Cappie’s dismay. His own lady friend Casey is busy wigging out about the LSAT and tries to go one last burst of studying in at the Zeta Beta Zeta house. The house quickly proves too noisy and when ZBZ hasher and Rusty’s roommate Dale tries to offer a “brain booster” plate of fish and blueberries, Casey decides enough is enough and goes off in search of a new study spot. She ends up at a local coffee house, sitting outside in the sun. When she spills her coffee all over her books, she finds help from an unexpected source: Joel, the campaign manager for the Senate candidate that Casey did volunteer work for a couple episodes ago. He’s the one who suggested that she reconsider law school and he happens to be having coffee as well. He helps her clean up her mess and offers some helpful advice about the LSAT: a) it’s okay to stress out and b) find a lucky item to help you focus and calm down for the test. At the Omega Chi house, Evan and Rebecca say goodbye after spending the night together and she promises to see him tonight. After she leaves, he admits to OC brother Calvin that he actually pawned his laptop to pay back money he stole from the house to buy the diamond necklace he got for Rebecca and is still hurting for cash. Rusty’s day becomes much more interesting when Katherine visits him at the lab while he’s working on his project and asks Dana and Dale to leave the room so she can talk to him about the party. To Rusty’s surprise, Katherine bluntly admits that a) she’s a virgin, b) she wants him to be her first and c) that she wants to have sex with him tonight and has even brought a selection of a dozen different condom brands for him to choose from. Rusty is still frazzled from the experience as he, Cappie and two KT pledges go to pick up kegs for the party. Cappie counsels him that it’s a good thing because Katherine has no previous sexual experiences to compare him to, so he can relax. That is definitely not the advice Rusty gets from his big sister. Casey is looking for her lucky purple hair tie as her lucky item for the LSAT and after advising BFF Ashleigh on how to handle things her boyfriend Pete, who is out of town for Mardi Gras weekend, she goes to KT to find the hair tie. While there advises Rusty not to sleep with Katherine because she’s had all her life to build up her expectations for her first time and him sleeping with her on their second date will probably end up working out poorly. She then continues the search for her hair tie and finds it in Cappie’s room, but also gets an unwelcome surprise when she sees Cappie’s blank major declaration form and realizes he has blatantly lied to her. Cappie sees her find the form but manages to sneak away before she turns around. Over at the OC house, Grant invites Calvin to the Gentleman’s Choice gay club for Mardi Gras and admits that he turned down chance to make $500 bartending at the club for the night so he could hang with his boyfriend. In turn, Calvin shares news of the bartending gig with Evan, who takes the job because he desperately needs the money. To take the job, he breaks plans for the evening with Rebecca by telling a half-truth and saying he has to work catering a medical convention. Instead, Ashleigh and Rebecca hit the KT party but stay only a few minutes because the KT brothers and pledges pester them to flash their racks and there is no sign of Casey, who they came to congratulate on taking the LSAT. While all the fun rages on, Casey takes the LSAT and initially has a hard time concentrating because Cappie lying to her is still on her mind. She is eventually able to buckle down and do well and afterward, Joel surprises her outside with scotch and cookies because as he puts it, “This what I wanted after I finished the LSAT.” Instead of going to the KT Mardi Gras party, Casey blows it off to go to the park and sit, drink and talk with Joel. At the party, Dana and Dale are hanging out because she’s convinced him to take her to the party after seeing Katherine show up at the lab to talk to Rusty. The two nerds trade Mardi Gras facts while sitting off to the side and watching everyone else have fun. Rusty and Katherine are enjoying the “free party” portion of their evening (she has made a schedule for their evening of magic and sex) and after his chat with Casey, Rusty asks Katherine who she imagined her first time being with. She admits she dreamt of it being with none other than Al Gore. When Dana runs into Rusty and angrily rips him for having sex with Katherine on their second date, saying it makes him a dog, Rusty defends himself but is clearly having second thoughts. Around the same time, his sister is busy sitting on a park bench talking and drinking with a guy who is definitely not her boyfriend. She and Joel chat about what made them each want to go to law school (his reasoning: streaking at an Ohio State-Michigan game and being inspired to fight for the legal rights of all streakers). Things take an awkward turn when she pulls her lucky item – her hair tie – out of her hair to show it to him and her hair falls in front of her face. Joel gently brushes it back in a gesture with some definite meaning behind it and at that point, Casey stops things and admits that she has a boyfriend. Joel is disappointed but takes it will enough, although he does wonder why Casey spent all evening with him and didn’t say she had a boyfriend until the end of the evening. Back at the KT party, Dana finally admits that she still likes Rusty and says she has been giving him tons of signs before she turns and storms out of the party. Life is no less dramatic at Gentleman’s Choice, where Rebecca and Ashleigh go after bailing on the KT party. Before Calvin can warn Evan, Rebecca steps up to the bar, where she is met by a straight guy who hits on her as Evan looks on. Figuring she’ll embrace the spirit of Mardi Gras, Rebecca kisses him and Evan – who put on a mask to hide his identity from her – rips it off and confronts her about the kiss. They go out into the alley behind the club and argue it out in alley. She admits to cheating on him (with KT brother Beaver, although she doesn’t give a name) and in turns he calls her heartless and scared before storming off. The KT party has its own fireworks as Dale is forced to take over as honorary ZBZ sober sister because the original designee, Laura, has shirked her duties to get hammered. Dale spends his night ferrying drunk girls back to ZBZ, the last of which is Laura herself. Rusty and Katherine depart the party and go back to her dorm room, where her nerd-ish planning continues and they prepare to have sex. However, right as things heat up, she mentions “getting this over” and Rusty decides it feels too much like a transaction and that he doesn’t want to be a part of her having sex for the first time “just to get it over with.” He apologizes and leaves a stunned Katherine in his wake. The episode ends at the KT house, where Casey shows up post-party to find Cappie sitting in the back yard. He asks about her test and she says it went well before confronting him about lying to her. He admits that he’s just not ready to graduate and that’s why he hasn’t really picked a major. She wonders when – or if – he’ll ever change before leaving to spend the night at the ZBZ house instead of with him, end of episode…………

- Let this be a lesson to one and all: Don’t dress up in a freaking chicken suit and go out in public, period. Don’t believe me? Just ask Burger Barn owner Robert Hatter of Wichita, Kansas, who sported a chicken suit to advertise for a local burger joint and wound up the target of a drive-by shooting – with a pellet gun. Police in Wichita are investigating the shooting, which took place Friday afternoon. The man in the chicken suit was shot in the thigh with a pellet gun by a passenger in a car driving down the street. "I thought it'd be kind of neat to be in a cow outfit, but I'm too fat. I couldn't get in a cow outfit so chicken was just appropriate and I have a sign outside that says eat more beef," Robert Hatter said. Hatter slammed on his chicken suit and was out looking to drum up business for the lunch rush hour when a car pulled up beside him and someone inside shot at him twice. "The first shot like I said had gone this way someplace but the second one got me," he said. "I was standing about right here as he faced me. He pulled his shirt up, pop pop, kept going. They didn't even slow down. Apparently they didn't like chicken," Hatter quipped. Bah-dum-chee! Whoa there, funny guy, stop it. You’re cracking me up! To Hatter’s credit, he manned up and after being treated for minor injuries at a local hospital, he was back at the Burger Barn in less than three hours. Police have no leads on the responsible party, as people inside chicken suits have a notoriously difficult time seeing through those tiny, obstructed eyeholes in that oversized head and making out faces and license plates when people bust a cap into them. Having said that, none of this happens if Hatter doesn’t put that chicken suit on and parade along the side of the street. Step away from the chicken suit, everyone, and you won't have to worry about anyone shooting you for it…………

- The one job I wouldn’t want most in all of professional sports right now, no matter how good the pay, is as a center for the NBA’s Portland Trailblazers. The Blazers began the season with two promising young centers and one at a time, they watched those promising young centers fall to season-ending injuries. First, potential franchise center Greg Oden suffered a season-ending knee injury, marking the second straight year (out of two in the NBA) that he has missed a major chunk of the season due to injury. His backup and replacement in the starting lineup, Joel Przybilla, is a fairly solid player in his own right and he didn’t even last a month in the cursed role of Blazers center before tearing the patellar tendon in his right knee during a game at Dallas on Dec. 22. With their top two centers lost for the season, Portland made due with a smaller lineup for nearly two months before pulling former All-Star center Marcus Camby from the Los Angeles Clippers in a trade deadline deal. Camby is a rebounding machine who is still a viable starter despite being near the end of his career, but even he couldn’t overcome the black hole that is the center position in Portland. Camby has missed several games with a sore left ankle that he injured just a few games into his Blazers career and missed Sunday’s game because of the injury. While that was going on, Przybilla was back at his home in Milwaukee, where he was attempting to recover from knee surgery and start work toward getting back on the court next season. Unfortunately, the curse of Trailblazers centers knows no bounds or geographical limits and so even being a couple thousands miles from the Rose City wasn’t enough to keep him safe. In the shower of his own home of all places, Przybilla slipped and fell, re-injuring the knee to the point that he will require surgery again this week. He flew to Portland on Saturday and underwent a magnetic resonance imaging test, which revealed a new tear of the tendon. All told, the Trail Blazers had missed a combined 269 games because of injuries entering Sunday's game against the Denver Nuggets and even guys who are already out because of injuries can’t stay healthy. "It's been that type of season where we've had this happen and just have to keep going and moving along," said Portland coach Nate McMillan, who missed four games himself with a ruptured Achilles tendon. Making matters worse for the Blazers, Przybilla has a player option at $6 million for 2010-11, meaning he is definitely going to exercise that option and there’s not a thing they can do about it even though his injury puts his availability at the start of the next season into question. I don’t know what a team does to remove this powerful a curse from one of its positions in the lineup, but whatever the prescribed remedy is, Portland needs to employ an industrial-sized helping of it and hope that’s enough to get the job done. Otherwise, no center in the league is going to want to play for them ever again……………

- Welcome to the I-Killed-a-Dog 2010, all. Officially, the race is known as the 2010 Iditarod, but the fact is that this ridiculous event is a dog-killing menace that drags animals and mushers across 1,049 miles of frozen Alaska wilderness over the span of a week and a half. This year, 71 mushers and dog teams are on the wide-open trail toward Nome and the race is officially underway. These fools will guide their dogs through some of the most unlivable conditions on Earth, including North America's largest mountain chain, the Alaska range. "Ten days and nothing else but eat, sleep and feed dogs," Canadian musher Sebastian Schnuelle said. Schnuelle and his fellow competitors will be working to take down three-time defending champion Lance Mackey of Fairbanks, Alaska. Mackey will be trying to accomplish what no musher in history has been able to do: win four consecutive Iditarods. This is not meant as a personal attack on any of the mushers, especially not Mackey, who is a throat cancer survivor. He’s following in the footsteps of his father, Dick Mackey, and brother Rick, who have also won the Iditarod. What I’m saying is that no matter how much these kooks insist that the sled dogs love the competition and love pulling them and their sleds across the frozen tundra, the fact is that given a choice, the dogs would not be harnessing themselves to those sleds and pushing themselves to the brink of death. As someone who is an avid participant in endurance sports, I get the thrill and I’m slow to bash anyone for their choice of endurance sport. However, when you involved animals that don’t have a choice as to whether they are a part of the insanity, that’s something different entirely. I can go out and run a marathon without subjecting any animals to sub-freezing temperatures and piss-poor living conditions for a week and a half. So to the collection of freaks and psychos who comprise the 2010 Iditarod musher's roster, which includes men and women ages 18 to 69 who hail from five countries, I say this: Find a new sport and stop torturing animals, losers……….

- Way to step your game up and join the rest of 21st century civilization, China. For a long time, one of the easiest things to rip China for (and really there are a lot: terrible air quality, abusing human rights, producing toxic products) has been the country’s practice of eating dogs and cats. In places like Guangzhou, a city in southern China, eating cats and dogs is common practice and so are the meat markets where the animals are sold. In restaurants, diners can choose from a long list of menu items, including dog soup, dog steak, dog with tofu and more. A new edict from the Chinese government could change all of that, as the Commies who run the country are considering legislation that would make eating cats and dogs illegal. Leading the charge is professor Chang Jiwen of the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences, who clearly feels it’s time to stop making Fido a part of the dinner menu. "Cats and dogs are loyal friends to humans," he said. "A ban on eating them would show China has reached a new level of civilization." Agreed and agreed. Just because something is a long-standing tradition doesn’t mean you blindly continue it when times have changed and you are lagging way, way behind. the Pacific rim nations in Asia – including China and Vietnam – are all known for eating dogs and cats, but having company in stupidity doesn’t validate that stupidity. The Chinese government has indicated a willingness to take the meat off the market and even did so on a temporary basis in order to avoid upsetting international visitors during the Beijing Olympics. Similarly, officials in Guangzhou have warned vendors to stop selling it ahead of the Asian Games, which will be held in the city later this year. The new laws are part of an overall move to toughen laws on animal welfare, which is another step in the right directions. Under the new law, individual violators could face up to 15 days in prison and a fine. Penalties would be much higher for business, which would face fines up to 500,000 yuan ($73,500) if they are found selling dog meat. The ban would definitely alter the economic landscape in China, where there are actually farms where dogs and cats destined to be slaughtered for food are raised. With the ban looming dog and cat meat has become more difficult to find in China. Just don’t expect things to change quickly, because the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences speculates that the law prohibiting cat and dog meat could take as long as a decade to pass. Good, because you don’t want to rush into anything, China………