Friday, January 13, 2017

Detroit has changed, NBA bad team brawls and Prison Break's character revival

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- How do you bring the fictional protagonist/prison escape mastermind of a revived television drama back to life after killing him off in the series finale a few years ago? With a shiny new teaser trailer for the series, of course. Fox knows what’s up and the network used the latest promotional video for the revived “Prison Break” to bring Wentworth Miller’s character Michael Scofield, who fans saw dying at the end of the original series, back from the dead. The two-minute teaser features the return of a character we didn’t see die on screen, but did see his friends and family visit a seaside grave for in the finale of the show’s original four-season run. Fox doesn’t have to keep Scofield alive for long, as the new 10-episode “Prison Break” limited series is due to debut on April 4 and will see Miller joined by original cast members Dominic Purcell, Sarah Wayne Callies, Robert Knepper, Paul Adelstein and Rockmond Dunbar. “Prison Break” creator Paul Scheuring is back as the limited-run series’ writer/showrunner and while plot details are murky at this point, we do know that it will be geographically diverse as filming took place in Vancouver as well as the Moroccan cities of Rabat, Casablanca and Ouarzazate. “I would describe it as a bit of a sequel. It picks up the characters several years after we left them in the last season of the show,” Fox co-chairman Dana Walden said before shifting focus to how to bring Scofield back to life. “What [Paul] pitched to us was a very logical and believable – in the world of Prison Break – explanation for why our characters are alive and still moving around the world.” For those not as familiar with the series, it starred Miller and Purcell as estranged brothers, with Purcell’s character imprisoned and sentenced to death for a murder he didn’t commit and Miller as his brilliant engineer brother who intentionally got himself imprisoned to break his brother out and save his life……….

- Your chances of dying during a visit to El Salvador just went from “it’s looking good” to “you’ve got a break-even chance of getting out alive.” Yes, good news abounds in Central America, where one of the world's deadliest countries has recorded a rare day without a single homicide. That’s generally not a noteworthy accomplishment for a country, but in a country that hadn’t gone a full day without any killings since Jan. 22, 2015, celebrating every small victory is just something you have to do. Maybe the day when no murders are reported in a gang-plagued little Central American nation is the day you throw a parade, but the problem is that if you throw the parade the following day, the gang bangers and lead-pumping locals in any number of cities are probably going to be out in force, looking to make up for the people they failed to kill the day before. Prior to last January, El Salvador last had a run of murder-free days in was 2012, when there were two such 24-hour spans before seeing that number dwindle to one in 2013 and none in 2014. That was a precursor to killings peaking at 104 per 100,000 residents in 2015, the highest rate for any nation not in open war that year. Yes, there’s a designation between war-torn and non-war-torn nations in these ratings and those numbers showed that El Salvadorian homicides fell by about 20 percent last year - at which point it was still one of the most violent countries with 81.2 murders per 100,000 residents. It’s going to be hard to match that sort of murder production in the new year when there is a killing-free day within the first two weeks of the calendar turning over…….

- Imagine if both the Washington Wizards and Boston Celtics were actually good basketball teams. Sure, it was still hella-entertaining to see a postgame brawl between the two teams that was serious enough that five Boston police officers stood guard between the locker rooms of the two teams following the final buzzer of a game at TD Garden. The hostilities kicked off when Washington's John Wall and Boston's Jae Crowder got into an on-court dustup after the Celtics' 117-108 triumph, with Crowder apparently trying to pick Wall’s nose, extending his index finger perilously close to Wall’s nostrils after the two exchanged words, with Washington’s All-Star guard responding with a nice, swift open-hand slap before teammates and staffers intervened to prevent the fight from going full-scale UFC. Even in the resulting scrum, Wall took another swing at Crowder and when he did that, Boston's Marcus Smart and Terry Rozier went second and third man into the fight by trying to confront him. The lure of the fight’s spotlight drew in Celtics guard Isaiah Thomas, who scored 20 of his game-high 38 points in the fourth quarter and left an on-court interview to be a part of the personal pyrotechnics. Members of the two teams continued to shout at one another even as they entered their respective locker rooms, which are in close proximity, and Wall tried to pretend that it ain’t no thang. "Just some altercation. We knew there was going to be some trash-talking," Wall said. "We knew it was going to be a physical game. That's all it was: Just a little trash-talking and a physical game." Crowder pretended to not know what everyone was talking about when asked about the fight, but here’s hoping the Wizards rise a bit in the Eastern Conference playoff standings so these two can square off for multiple games in the postseason……..

- So much for actually owning a car and having the money to keep it running being considered an admirable thing in Detroit. Not so long ago, Nick Taylor would have been considered a fiscal icon in the Motor City, but now this resident of the suburban town of Roseville has been bureaucratically b*tch-slapped by the local police department merely for doing what tens of thousands of people living in cold-weather cities across America do on a daily basis. The Detroit-area man has been ticketed for leaving a vehicle running unattended in his driveway as he warmed it up, which is a tried-and-true tactic for those forced to park outside during the winter months as a means of both warming on their car’s frigid engine and getting the vehicle warmed up enough to defrost its iced-over windows. According to Taylor, he started up his car and headed back inside for abut five minutes and much to his dismay, when he got back to his vehicle he found a ticket with a $125 fine for a local ordinance violation of leaving a motor vehicle unattended. Unfortunately for him, hard-liner Roseville Police Chief James Berlin is standing by the officer who issued the ticket with the wholly bullsh*t excuse/lie that this is a public safety issue because a thief could have easily taken the car. How the hell does the chief even utter those words with a straight face? Taylor shared a photo of the ticket on Facebook and it has generated thousands of comments, none of which is actually going to help him pay this comically absurd fine…….

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