Gotcha!

Everyone has played tag, haven't they? I sure hope so, it's a great game for kids and adults. I remember when I was a kid, I even saw a movie where college students had taken tag to a whole new level. In the movie Gotcha! the college students played tag around campus with paintball guns. If you haven't seen it, go rent it for a look at a young Anthony Edwards and some serious 80s cheese.

Anyway, apparently, we're taking the game of tag virtual with blogs now, and I've been tagged by my good friend Graham. It feels a little like a chain letter, but it might also be a good way to find some other interesting blogs, so here are the rules:

1. Link to the person that tagged you, and post the rules on your blog.
   
2. Share 7 random and/or weird facts about yourself.
   
3. Tag 7 random people at the end of your post, and include links to their blogs.
   
4. Let each person know that they've been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
   

And now, my list of random and/or weird facts about myself, if you really want to know:

1. My high school had no football team or baseball team, and I liked it. We were a true nerd school.
   
2. Speaking of being a nerd, I once won a computer programming competition. Yes, they really do have those.
   
3. My wife has to match my clothes for me.
   
4. But I buy all of my wife's clothes for her, so it's fair. Did I just cheat and turn one thing into two?
   
5. I work puzzles for fun, and I'm not just talking about jigsaw puzzles. I mean word puzzles, number puzzles, and anything else that makes me have to think.
   
6. My greatest dreams are to fly an airplane and go to space. If I could afford it, I would've already been up on the shuttle.
   
7. I am a very picky eater. I figure that if you are what you eat and animals eat vegetables, then eating meat is like killing two birds with one stone.
   

Finally, I get to tag seven people. I've just got to think of seven that might actually respond:

1. Caci
   
2. Ben
   
3. Windy
   
4. Melissa
   
5. Peyton
   
6. Cole
   
7. Patti
   

Back to regular programming the next time I get inspired.

Coonskin Cap

Every young man needs to know how to make a coonskin cap, and I really feel a bit left out in that it wasn't included in any of the coursework that I had as a child. I mean, how can you expect a person to grow up to be a responsible, self-respecting citizen without intimate knowledge of how to skin a coon and make a head covering? Honestly, it's a serious shortcoming in our educational system.

Rather, it's a shortcoming of the system that I was brought up through. Some parts of the country like Huntsville, Ark. still include special instruction on skinning animals it seems, but their program is not without its flaws. I must admit that when I first heard about this, I imagined that the idea would have a few inherent issues like parents and the general public crying out about the images of torture that would fill the children's minds, the ACLU trying to defend the rights of animals to keep their clothes on in a public school, and of course, the charges of violence breeding from such gruesome practices. I did not, however, anticipate the only real issue that seems to have been present: live animals.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21791520/

If you've read the article, then you know that an instructor at a Huntsville high school had been promised a raccoon for an animal skinning demonstration. Setting aside the wonder that you might still have at the idea of actually doing a skinning demonstration in school (it's really not that much different than a dissection is it?), ask yourself how you would react if you were the parent donating the raccoon. Would you expect the teacher to want (a) a live, possibly rabies infected, angry raccoon, (b) fresh roadkill from the road yonder that I drove on up on the way over, and by the way save me a drumstick and a gizzard, or (c) a humanely dispatched specimen for scientific study?

I'll grant you that that's a tough question to answer if you've never been in a class that was doing a skinning demonstration, but I think we can safely assume that a live raccoon was not the preferred option. Either they didn't have this class when that parent was in high school, or there were other issues with this parent and high school (I'm not saying they didn't finish; I'm just saying there might have been issues) because they brought a live raccoon to a skinning demonstration. What was the teacher going to do with a live raccoon?

Obviously, the lesson has to go on, so the raccoon needs to be dispatched. "What do we have lying around that we could use to accomplish that?" I imagine the teacher thought to himself. I'm sure he went down the list of possibilities quickly:

• Crack his furry little head on the corner of my desk. Nah, too bloody, and I don't want to slip on this tile floor.
  
• Just start cutting with the knife. Death'll catch up soon enough, and this class isn't for wimps.
  
• Run over it with my car. It'll be just like real life, but someone has to hold the bugger in place while I drive, and if I have to hear another lecture about torturing my students I'll scream.
  
• Shoot it with a nail gun. Doesn't everyone have one of these handy just in case they're given a live raccoon for a skinning demonstration?
  

While the rest of us are still thinking of the possibilities that never occurred to this teacher, he was busy loading the nail gun and putting the raccoon to rest (or prepping the material by causing the least possible damage; however you choose to look at it). Of course the school superintendent was quick to point out that, "It wasn't like he held a nail gun against the head of a cute little animal in front of the class." Well, that's a relief. For a minute there I thought this was an unusual teaching method.

The good news is that the teacher has been told not to kill animals on school grounds anymore, at least one lucky kid got to go home with a coonskin cap (with a slight hole just to the left of center), and the volunteer parent had first choice of the meat.

Okay, okay. That's not all in the story, but do you really think it didn't happen?

Four Months Ago…

We played last night, but NBC.com has saved me once again. I really love being able to watch TV on the internet. After a few mediocre episodes, these last two seem to be pulling us out of the slump. Highlight below for more:

This episode jumped around between storylines and timeframes, so I'm going to try and consolidate all of the storylines separately.

We start off right where the last episode ended. Peter and Adam are in the building in Montreal, Peter has just attacked him, and Adam has just reintroduced himself. Adam says that the Haitian must have taken away Peter's memories, but that since Peter can heal himself, he should be able to get them back by healing his mind. He encourages Peter to focus on remembering and images start to flood back.

We start Peter's story back at Kirby Plaza with Nathan and Peter flying away to keep New York from blowing up. Nathan is severely burned from being so close to Peter, but he's not planning to let go. Peter has to make him let go and after Peter explodes, Nathan is falling unconscious. It's then Peter's turn, and he flies Nathan to the closest hospital and leaves him there for treatment. So, now we have an idea of why Nathan sees himself as burned. That's the first image he saw of himself after he woke up in the hospital, and it's his way of remembering that he lived and Peter died (in his mind anyway).

To avoid any unnecessary questions, Peter went invisible and tried to sneak out of the hospital, but he was stopped by Elle and Bob. How did they know Peter was at the hospital? And how did they track him when he was invisible? Regardless of all that, they took him to a company facility and offered him drugs that would suppress his powers with the promise that one day soon they would be able to remove his powers completely. Peter bought into the whole deal.

Locked in a room, Peter began to develop a relationship with the man in the next room through the air vent. That man was Adam (aka Kensei). Isn't it interesting that he chose the name Adam? Is he really the first one with powers? And did he, over the past 600 years, spread the powers across the globe through his offspring? Anyway, while Peter wasn't talking with Adam about the company, powers, and why they were in prison, he was being played with by Elle. And let me just say that she is one psycho chick. According to her, she burned down a house when she was six, shut down the power in a city when she was eight, and was labeled a sociopath when she told her counselors she would kill them. I'm probably missing something there, but the point is that she really seems to enjoy inflicting pain. The good news for us is that we finally found out how Peter got his electricity powers that he's been using so far this season.

Adam helped Peter see that they needed to escape from the prison because they weren't really being treated, they were being held captive. Peter stopped taking his meds and the two escaped together. The first thing that they did was go to Nathan's hospital room and put some of Adam's blood in the IV. It immediately started to heal him, and that was pretty cool. Do you think that the same thing would happen if you gave Claire's blood to another person? And how long does it last?

Elle and the Haitian caught up with Peter and Adam at the hospital. The Haitian chased Peter while Elle chased Adam. While I'm not yet sure if Adam is good or bad (although we know that he hates Hiro), it is convenient that Elle chased him and he got away. Peter was caught by the Haitian, but in response to the fact that Angela had helped him before, he spared Peter's life and only took his memories leaving him alone with a bad case of amnesia in a shipping container bound for Ireland. What happened between Elle and Adam? How did the Haitian explain that Peter got way? Is this the reason that the Haitian was suffering from the Shanti virus earlier this season? And who is Elle's father?

In a slightly different storyline, Angela went to visit Heidi (Nathan's wife) and implied that Nathan was going insane. She insinuated that it was a problem that ran in the family and that Nathan had inherited it from his father. She even went so far as to encourage Heidi to leave Nathan. The most interesting thing here to me was the physical touch between Angela and Heidi. Angela was touching Heidi's arm, shoulder, and hair nearly the entire time that they spoke. Does that have something to do with her power? And why did she want Heidi to leave? Was she trying to get them out of the way? Or was she trying to protect them from the people that might come after Nathan? Who knows, but at least know we have some idea of why there is a restraining order against Nathan (if you recall, the teacher said that he wasn't allowed to be that close to his kids).

We also got some back story on Maya and Alejandro. It was no more valuable than any other plot line we've seen with them. First of all, we saw Alejandro marrying the town hooker. I mean what else can you call a girl that tries to get jiggy with a guest at her own wedding reception. But who cares? Maya found them because she could tell that something was off about the way the new wife and the guest were behaving, but she can't see that Sylar wants to do more than just take them to New York in the present? Come on! And then she got upset because the wedding guest was getting a little rough when Maya interrupted their interlude, and she ended up killing everyone that was at the reception. That's pretty powerful, but exactly what is her power? And what triggers it? And why do we care?

Of course, we got another brief glimpse of them as the police come to arrest her and Maya accidentally kills him, too. Seems like that was the first moment that Alejandro realized that he could take the black goop away, but that also raised the question of what happened to it after she killed everyone at the wedding reception? Her whole power and storyline just don't make good sense to me.

Finally, Niki and Micah took D.L. to the hospital after the events at Kirby Plaza and D.L. survived. That made sense, but what about when Bob showed up to pay the bills? Was he after Niki? Micah? D.L.? All of them. He seemed to only be interested in Niki just like he seemed only interested in Peter and not Nathan. Why is he specifically targeting certain "specials?"

Most weeks this season Niki has been a welcome sight because the story doesn't revolve around her and she is totally hot. This week, the tights and silver cowboy boots nearly knocked off of my hot list in a single moment. What was she thinking? Anyway, the story centered around them was pretty lame.

Micah had the fun idea of tapping into police band traffic and stopping criminals, Niki had the fun idea to take unknown drugs, and D.L. had the only really good idea which was to become a firefighter and actually use his power to help someone. He saved a child from a fire by phasing through the flames and had a short moment in the lime light. It was about then that Niki's new alter ego came out in the form of Gina.

While Jessica was a super strong witch (with a capital B), Gina seems to be more of a super horny party chick. Don't know how that will ever come in handy; at least Jessica could kill with her bare hands if things got rough. Anyway, D.L. tracked her down in a club in L.A. and had a little scuffle with the guy trying to dance up on his wife. It was pretty cool that the guy's hand went right through D.L.'s head when they fought, but it just made the guy more angry and he shot D.L. at point blank range. Contrary to my theory last week, maybe the guy really is dead.

So, now Peter says that he remembers everything and he and Adam are going to save the world. So, is Adam good or bad? Does he still hold a grudge against Hiro? If he's bad, then what's his angle? For that matter, what's Bob's angle? Why is he collecting certain "specials?"