FADE FROM BLACK TO PICTURE OF DIGITAL CLOCK SET TO “10:00“.

CUT TO INTERIOR SHOT OF CTU LOS ANGELES.  

DIRECTOR BUCHANAN walks into command post.  CHLOE, MORRIS, and AL-FAWAZ sit at computer consoles.

BUCHANAN:  OK, everyone.  Status Report.

CHLOE:  I still can’t find Jack.

BUCHANAN:  You need to find him.

CHLOE (Fuming and scowling, with cute flip of hair):  It’s not that easy!

BUCHANAN:  You need to find him now.

CHLOE:  (Rolls eyes) Well, since you put it that way…

AL-FAWAZ:  Director Buchanan, I have a hit on Bauer.  He’s coming in the front door with two unidentified gunmen!

BUCHANAN:  Set up a perimeter!

MORRIS (Sotto voce): Like that ever bloody works…

(DOOR OPENS:  BAUER, IN HANDCUFFS, IS ESCORTED IN BY TWO UNIFORMED CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY PATROLMEN.  HE IS WEARING RUMPLED CLOTHES, IS UNSHAVEN, AND WALKS UNSTEADILY)

CHiP #1:  I’m looking for a Bill Buchanan?

BUCHANAN: I am Bill Buchanan.

CHiP #1:  Hi, I’m officer Poncharelli, and I’ve been instructed to bring your Mr. Bauer here.  He was arrested for DUI about twelve hours ago, and a Mister Trump just posted his bail. 

BUCHANAN:  Take him back to medical!

(TWO REDSHIRTS UNIFORMED CTU SECURITY OFFICERS STEP TOWARD BAUER, THEN FALL OVER DEAD)

BUCHANAN:  Er…what happened to them?

CHLOE: Budget cuts due to the writers’ strike.  They were gonna kack anyway…

BAUER:  Listen.  We don’t have time.

MORRIS (sotto voce to CHLOE):  We never bloody have time!

CHLOE (sotto voce to MORRIS): Shut up!

BUCHANAN:  What do you mean, Jack?

BAUER:  Dammit!  There’s a terrorist plot aimed at Los Angeles, and…

BUCHANAN:  Right.  Our usual premise.

BAUER: Listen to me!  We only have ten hours to solve it this time!

(AL-FAWAZ surreptitiously takes out cell phone, makes call).

BUCHANAN:  That’s madness!  Division told us…

BAUER: Forget what division told you! We have to get going, and we have to do it now!

CHLOE:  Mr. Buchanan, I just cross-referenced the writers’ guild demands with satellite scheduling uploads from Fox! Jack is right!

MORRIS:  Jack? Mr. Buchanan?  Terrorist websites all over the Middle East just posted reports that CTU only has ten hours to solve the next attack!

BAUER:  Dammit! 

CHLOE:  Jack, there’s gotta be a mole in CTU.

BUCHANAN:  We need to find the mole.

CHLOE: I’m on it.

BUCHANAN:  We need to find the mole now!

(AL-FAWAZ surreptitiously slips cell phone into BAUER’s pocket)

CHLOE (rolling eyes):  Yes, Bill.  (Types furiously).  I’ll reset the vectors of the GIS satellites in triplicate to sync with the frumious bandersnatch…

BAUER:  Bill, this is serious.  The terrorists have gained control of the TV schedule!   They can control the timing of our investigation!  We have to get back in control!

CHLOE (with an air of foreboding):  Jack? 

BAUER:  What?

CHLOE:  The satellite traces the leak to…you!

BAUER:  That’s impossible!

(AL-FAWAZ tiptoes to door of CTU as BAUER frantically searches pockets, finds cell phone)

BAUER:  Dammit!

BUCHANAN:  I’m going to have to notify Division, Jack.

BAUER:  Bill! Listen!

BUCHANAN:  Stand down, Jack.

(TONY ALMEIDA walks into shot from right, wearing swim trunks and a “Cabo Wabo” T-shirt, carrying a Big Gulp from 7/11).

ALMEIDA:  Hi, guys.

(ALL STOP).

BAUER:  Tony?

ALMEIDA (slurps the drink):  Hey, Jack.

BAUER:  But you died on Day Five.

ALMEIDA:  Whatever.

(AL-FAWAZ opens door)

BUCHANAN:  OK.  Jack, Tony, Chloe – you need to drop everything and work on finding those extra ten hours…

BAUER:  Dammit, Bill, there’s no time!

(TEN OR FIFTEEN TURBANNED MEN WEARING OBVIOUS SUICIDE VESTS TIPTOE PAST IN THE BACKGROUND)

CHLOE:  Duh, that’s the problem.

(MARCHING BAND WALKS IN DOOR THAT AL-FAWAZ HAS OPENED, PLAYING ARABIC-SOUNDING MUSIC.  AL-QUAEDA BANNERS WAVE, CHEERLEADERS IN BURQUAS SKIP DEMURELY AROUND A FLOAT DECORATED TO LOOK LIKE A SUICIDE VEST)

BAUER:  We have to find the mole!

(LARGE TANK FESTOONED WITH ARABIC BANNERS DRIVES IN BACKGROUND BEHIND BAUER, ALMEIDA, BUCHANAN, MORRIS AND CHLOE, COVERED IN TURBANNED MEN FIRING AK47s INTO THE AIR)

BUCHANAN:  Oh, and Jack?  We need to send you to Washington.  Right now.

BAUER:  Dammit.

(STING:  CLOCK READS “9:47” OVER OUTRO THEME)

Every once in a while, I like to ponder the big mysteries.  Where did we come from?  Can the City Pages write so much stuff about Diablo Cody that even G-d can’t read it all?

And, speaking of which, what about God?

But Emily Condon apparently has all the answers.  In the City Pages’ Artistes of the Year edition, she reviews Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great, and, by way of lauding the pseudo-atheist thesis, notes (emphasis added):

Far from the vitriolic diatribe of a God-hating misanthrope like Richard Dawkins, Hitchens’s work is both appropriately respectful and right.

Hm.

The City Pages is the source of all knowledge, apparently.

Who knew?

(more…)

Hollywood Liberals: all the history that’s convenient to observe!

In his book, “Ronald Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime,” Lou Cannon notes how Reagan “expressed revulsion of the brutal destruction of Afghan villages and such Soviet policies as the scattering of mines disguised as toys that killed and maimed Afghan children.” He did not need much convincing to aid the Afghan resistance.

Cannon credits Undersecretary of Defense Fred Ikle and CIA Director William Casey with allaying any concern that providing Stinger missiles to the mujahadeen might lead to the missiles’ capture and copying by the Soviets. Also involved, says Cannon, was a bipartisan coalition “led by Texas Democrat Charlie Wilson in the House and New Hampshire Republican Gordon Humphrey in the Senate.”

So you have at least five players, including Reagan, involved — four of them Republican conservatives. Ikle notes: “Senior people in the Reagan administration, the president, Bill Casey, (Defense Secretary Caspar) Weinberger and their aides deserve credit for the successful Afghan covert action program, not just Charlie Wilson.” So guess which one Hollywood makes a movie about?

I think it’s a rhetorical question.

To be fair, the movie doesn’t mention Jimmy Carter either. It was his naivete about Communist expansion that led the Soviets to invade Afghanistan in the first place. Had Reagan not beaten Carter in 1980 there would have been no Stingers and no victory in the Cold War.

But don’t expect a movie about Reagan’s victory over communism or Carter’s surrender to it.

Mark my words: In ten years, Hollywood will credit Harry Reid with winning Iraq.

…that it would not have even occurred to me to try to make.

But I suppose it’s good news.

Tom Cruise.

How do people think of him in the US? Good actor, but kind of a nutjob, what with all the bouncing around and the silent childbirth and the Scientology?

I’m probably not far off, right?

I’m not sure how much weight to give a single newspaper column (albeit a column in a relatively conservative paper by regional standards), but it’d seem Cruise’s decision to do a movie about Claus Von Stauffenberg – the Prussian Junker officer who tried and barely failed to assassinate Hitler – is resonating among Germans:

Es bedurfte eines Querdenkers, um dieses Vorurteil zu durchbrechen. Es bedurfte eines Weltstars, um sich damit im Ausland Gehör zu verschaffen. Durch seine Entscheidung, Graf Stauffenberg sein Gesicht zu leihen, wird Tom Cruise das Bild, das die Welt sich von uns Deutschen macht, verändern. Das Ansehen des Landes zu retten, gerade auch im Ausland, war einer der wichtigsten Beweggründe Stauffenbergs bei seiner Tat. Durch Tom Cruises mutige Entscheidung, diese Rolle zu spielen, wird Stauffenbergs Anliegen auf mittelbare Weise doch noch verwirklicht. Eine breite Öffentlichkeit wird anhand seiner Geschichte verstehen, dass man sich dem Unmenschlichen widersetzen kann, und dass Heldenmut und eine menschliche Haltung noch wichtiger sind als der Erfolg einer Tat.

What? You took Spanish like the rest of the “path of least resistance” crowd? OK, auf Englisch:

It took an unconventional thinker to break through this prejudice. It required a world-class superstar to get that message to audiences abroad. With his decision to lend Graf von Stauffenberg a face, Tom Cruise will change the image that the world has of us Germans. To rescue the image of his country – especially abroad – was one of the key motives Stauffenberg had for his deeds [attempting to assassinate Hitler]. Because of Cruise’s courageous decision to play this role, he has indirectly fulfilled Stauffenberg’s intentions. Based on his story, a huge audience will come to understand that one can oppose inhumanity, and that a hero’s courage and nobility are even more important than the success of his deeds.

So I’ve wondered for years – how badly do the Germans want the world to ignore, or at least temper their view of, the Holocaust and World War II?

It’s true – there were Germans who resisted the Nazis.  Unlike Stauffenberg – who planted a bomb that came within an unlucky fluke of killing Hitler in mid-war, and who died for his efforts – most died, unlamented, in concentration camps or Gestapo prisons.  Some fled Germany (and some of them turned around and fought with the Allies).  They were a thin film among the German people, many of whom were enthusiastic Nazis, very many of whom (if you believe Goldhagen) were culturally and theologically anti-semitic, most of whom acquiesced with Naziism for whatever reason.

But I’ve known a zillion Germans.  I speak, or at least spoke, the language well enough to get past just the words.  Germany’s done a lot to purge itself of the mindset that led to its many, many sins (as even Goldhagen noted in the afterword to Hitler’s Willing Executioners).  So I can’t say that I blame them for wanting to show some part of the other side of their culture.

I can’t wait to see it, honestly.
(Via ModVoice)

I used to joke about it; someday, even the hard left won’t be able to deny that Ronald Reagan changed history by setting in motion the events that brought down the USSR.

And when Hollywood and The Media realized this, they’d set in motion the machinery to claim credit for it themselves.

And thus we have Charlie Wilson’s War:

This is progress. With “Charlie Wilson’s War,” a trio of liberal Hollywood A-listers — director Mike Nichols, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and actor-producer Tom Hanks — have made a movie that acknowledges the evil of Soviet communism, celebrates Cold War hawkishness and more or less decries the post-Vietnam evisceration of U.S. intelligence services.

Hey, by 2027, we may even get a film about American war heroes in Iraq.

I do want to see the movie; left-symp filtering aside, it’s one of the great – and heretofore uncovered – subjects of my lifetime; the collapse of the USSR, decried as impossible by the left even as late as 1991, a fait accompli by the time Bill Clinton took office.

It’s possible, too, that the filmmakers have fashioned a new genre of Washington-based drama, one that combines detail-laden high seriousness about geopolitics with the screwball sensibility and smart dialogue of Preston Sturges.

Perhaps.  There’s no denying that Aaron Sorkin is as talented a writer as he is a smug Hollywood liberal.  It’s a maddening conflict for a conservative who loves good art and a good story. 

I’ll have to try to see it over the weekend, and give my review after the holidays…

I’m going to guess that this little flap resolves itself – one way or another…:

Former Brady Bunch star Christopher Knight threatened to leave his model wife Adrianne Curry when she posed for sexy lesbian photos – as a birthday gift.

…just in time for May sweeps.

I’ll take “trial separation, resulting in ecstatic but reserved reunion during November sweeps” for $20.

 (Via KAR)

Bill over at the Salad reviews Until the Devil Knows You’re Dead:

Anyway, the movie finally starts and it’s about a family and some stuff happens and what-not and blah, blah, blah AND MARISA TOMEI IS NAKED A LOT!!!!!!! Haaaaaaa-le-lu-jah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Ha-Ha-Lay-Hey-Loooooo-Ya!!!!!

What an outstanding body! I mean movie. Marisa is 42 years old and she couldn’t possibly look any better. Yowza. Perhaps the best movie nudity since Phoebe Cates blessed my life for 15 seconds in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”.

(CLOSED CIRCUIT TO MY MALE READERS ONLY: High praise indeed.  END CLOSED CIRCUIT).

(CLOSED CIRCUIT TO MY KIDS:  I have no idea what movie he’s talking about.  END CLOSE CIRCUIT)

The movie – sez Bill – is otherwise good, not that it matters.

The rest of the post…well, it doesn’t live up to the pullquote.  Yagh.

…but this was something I hadn’t seen…

Not only does the new local deep-lefty-pocket-financed “Daily Mole” provide a shoddy knock-off of “citizen journalism”…

…it provides and even shoddier knockoff of our own regular (some might say chronic) commenter Angryclown.

Pathetic.  Even my commenters are better than the Mole’s “regular” contribs.

It truly is better here.

Rendition, the star-clogged exercise in anti-Administration paranoia, is getting waterboarded at the box office.

Perhaps the production team should be secretly loaded on a plane for Oman:

It’s not easy to make a dull film when your central components include terrorism, torture, secret CIA operations and contempo Middle East intrigue, but Gavin Hood has done it with “Rendition.” By underplaying the melodrama in the presumed hope of seeming subtle when Kelley Sane’s script is so baldly melodramatic, the “Tsotsi” helmer drains the life out of an obviously explosive subject…The CIA’s sliver of evidence against [Reese Witherspoon’s Egytian-born hubby] is records of a few cell phone calls to him from someone who may only coincidentally have the same name as a known terrorist. But that’s enough for the CIA’s terrorism guru (Meryl Streep, brandishing a slight Southern accent and too-obvious negative commentary about her nasty character) to have Anwar “put on a plane” and officially become a missing person.

Who do these people think they are, Michael Moore?

(Via Kouba @ TvM)

I attended the Twin Cities’ debut of Indoctrinate U Friday night at the Oak Street Cinema on the U of M Campus (details here).

Things I liked:

• It was the kind of movie I’d love to see more of, in this Youtube/ITunes/Blogger driven era of grassroots media; you could tell it was shot on video on the cheap.
• Which didn’t distract from the message; there is a systematic anti-right, anti-conservative, anti-Christian bias in american post-secondary education, at schools big (Scott Johnson’s daughter Eliana, known to bloggers of a certain age as “Yale Diva”, testified about life as an underground Republican at Yale) and small (Ahmed al-Quloushi, a former guest on the Northern Alliance, who testified about being pushed into a psychological gulag at his small California college for writing a pro-American essay.

Plenty of other notables were there: Jamie Delton was there (and I’ll hope he writes a review soon). Scott Johnson wrote about it on PowLine this morning:

The theater was also packed with a responsive crowd last night, a large part of which stuck around after the screening to hear from Evan and film producer Thor Halvorssen. I haven’t seen such a big crowd in that theater since “Putney Swope” opened there in 1969. Several University of Minnesota students were in the audience and testified to the accuracy of the film’s depiction of university life. In a recent New York Times column Stanley Fish (wrongly, in my view) pooh-poohed the film’s portrayal of the university, but he also smartly captured Evan’s genius

I’m tempted to say Robin “Rew” Marty of the MinMon went to and wrote about the wrong movie – but no, I actually saw her there. So that doesn’t explain her review.

A better one might be that the standard knee-jerk response on the left is to ascribe all conservative complaints as “whining”.

In response to Maloney’s tales – of conservative newspapers being stolen from their drop sites, of conservative students being spat upon, of conservative students being forced to attend psychological counseling for…being conservatives, Rew wrote an anecdote about one of her professors:

…and concludes:

Are there left-leaning professors who push their students? I’m sure there are, and I am sure that just like the other professors I have encountered, they have what they believe is a good reason for doing so. College is a time for new ideas, new challenges, and new outlooks. I responded by becoming more firm in many of my beliefs, just as Mitch Berg and other responded by finding a new path more suited to their convictions. But that’s education, not indoctrination.

Well, yes. That, indeed, was the point of my piece yesterday – where my advisor, Dr. Blake, helped me question the bases of my own “beliefs” as a late-teen/early twentysomething. Robin tells a similar story, and tells it modestly well (although she fails to indicate why any survey of English literature would be intellectually honest in eschewing Robert Browning’s work for his wife Elizabeth’s – indeed, there is none).

But it has absolutely nothing to do with Maloney’s point in Indoctrinate U. The film isn’t about people feeling uncomfortable about having their beliefs challenged, or about professors “pushing” their students. It’s about:

• A student Several students being accused of harassment and being coerced into getting psychological treatment for (in one example) pasting up fliers to a conservative speaker’s appearance.
• A psychology department head being harassed to within an inch of her job after being “outed” as a conservative – and the attendant lopsidedness of political beliefs on college campuses, especially in the humanities and liberal arts.
• Conservative newspapers being systematically stolen from their drop boxes.
• Conservative activists being attacked, spat upon, and harassed – for exercising their First Amendment rights (which we’ve seen in spades in the Twin Cities over the years)
• Professors using their bully pulpits to vent about politics in courses that have nothing whatever to do with politics.
• Liberal groups using mob tactics to bully non-PC groups – recruiters, especially – off campus.
• Administrations systematically enacting double standards – allowing left-leaning students to behave in ways that are sanctioned when the students lean right…

…and on, and on. The movie is 90 minutes; it’s funny and aggravating and has nothing, really, to do with anything Robin talked about.  Rew giggles, comes up with an off-topic but personal anecdote (which is intended, one supposes to counterbalance all 90 minutes of Maloney’s material) and says conservatives are whining, that it really cuts both ways (absent any actual counter-evidence).
Which, to be fair, is still no worse than the rest of the left does in addressing this issue.

You don’t have to take my word for it, of course. Get your butt on down to the Oak Street Cinema at 7:15 PM any night this week.

Kudos to the Minnesota Association of Scholars for participating in the showing.

Two recent, heavy-handed anti-war films turned into IEDs at the box office:

Both “In the Valley of Elah” and, more recently, “Rendition” drew minuscule crowds upon their release, which doesn’t bode well for the ongoing stream of films critical of the Iraq war and the Bush administration’s wider war on terror.

“Rendition,” which features three Oscar winners in key roles, grossed $4.1 million over the weekend in 2,250 screens for a ninth-place finish. A re-release of “The Nightmare Before Christmas” beat it, and it’s 14 years old.

Both of these movies received intense media coverage and slaving critical praise – as, predictably, will pretty much any movie that attacks the idea of the war.

Is America looking for a feel-good hit, or is the movie-going public just not buying it?

Annie Lennox abandons stage in the face of a guy in a gas mask:

BOULDER, Colorado (October 18, 2007) – Popular singer Annie Lennox fled the stage when a man wearing a gas mask and cape appeared in the crowd towards the end of her set at Macky Auditorium on Tuesday.

Lennox spotted the man approaching the stage, tossed her microphone to the ground, and ducked backstage without saying a word to the audience. She describes the incident as “really freakish and disturbing” on her Blog.

To be fair to the guy, I thought the same thing about the video she did for “Sexcrime”

HBO is going to make a movie about the Duke lacrosse case:

Variety, an entertainment industry magazine, reported that HBO plans a movie from the book “Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case,” which was written by KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor Jr.

The movie would explore the dynamics of racism and class that made the case a national story, Variety reported.

Yes, I just bet that the movie will star racism and classism.

This one, I have to see.

Predicting Casey and Hung in the Top Three has been pretty much a given for the past few weeks, especially since Howie and Sara bit the dust.  Dale beating Brian into the final round was only a slight surprise, when you remember the formula for all of these Bravo “reality” shows; the final three must contain:

1. A hypertalented jerk; AKA “the Santino/Marcel role”
2. A hot babe (afficionados call this “The Chloe position”)
3. A loveable, often gay, guy (AKA “The Vosovic”)

Dale and Brian could both cover the three slot, and Dale is funnier.  So picking the final three was no great shakes.

But who’s gonna win?

I’m not so much concerned about the actual food they do on the grand finale tonight, as I am trying to parse the various clues the producers (who are, in the end, the only “judges” that matter on the show) have dropped. 

Am I nuts, or have the producers been showing Hung to be much more…fallible than he used to seem, lately?  About the same time Casey moved from perpetually-on-the-bubble to constant contender, about five weeks back?

Prediction:  tossup between Casey and a late dark-horse surge by Dale, either of whom would make a much more telegenic personality for the show’s next few seasons than the almost-Teutonically-perfect cooking machine Hung.

As bad as things may be in the world these days, I do take heart in being able to note…

 …that it’s been years since I’ve read, seen or heard anything about Andy Milonakis.

…about the quality of popular entertainment, I flip this bit here on. 

Kills me every time.

I never liked Happy Days much; I very, very rarely watched it.  But to the extent that I ever did watch it, I tuned out even faster when it got to the point when every major character would walk on camera, the in-studio audience would erupt in pro forma applause; when Fonzie would go “‘eeeey”, the house would practically come down, as if Henry Winkler repeating “‘eeeeey” for the ten thousandth time was…well, worth applauding.

Drove me nuts.

I used to love MASH.  The first bunch of seasons were good stuff – even though after the first six seasons Alan Alda started taking over as the show’s driving creative force (with the commensurate increase in political preachiness), it pretty much kept its “snap” about it…

…until about the the eighth of its eleven seasons.  It was about the time Gary Burghoff left the show that the wheels seemed to come off.  I don’t think it was Burghoff’s departure itself, but some shuffling among the writing staff that scuppered the show. 

Whatever; for the first three or four seasons, the show was brilliant; seasons five through seven, uniformly excellent. 

Eight through eleven?

It was like the cast stopped playing a couple of sarcastic pacifist doctors, a conservative brahmin blueblood, a crusty old regular army guy, a neurotic nurse, a mild-mannered priest and a grumpy but ingenious draftee; they all became one-liner machines that lived like doppelgangers within the bodies the “the” stock surgeons, colonel, nurse and ex-transvestite characters, serving only the message and the writers; you could almost predict every line:

UNSYMPATHETIC OFFICER CHARACTER: “If we stop trying to take back North Korea, what’ll we have?”

HONEYCUTT: “Peace?”

UNSYMPATHETIC OFFICER CHARACTER: “What are you?  Some kind of comsymp?”

HAWKEYE: “Well, compsymple pleasures are the best…”

COL. POTTER: “Captain Pierce, I suggest you stop trying to kill the major with comedy before you kill your patients!

KLINGER:  “Habibi!”

I write this, mostly, to set up some background for the most depressing thing that’s hit me all week.

I saw an episode from the newest seasons of Scrubs – by far my favorite new TV discovery – the other day.  Now, Scrubs has been for five seasons one of the most crisply written and inventive shows ever, and a show that did “side-splittingly hilarious” (pick  your episode) and “mind-warpingly poignant” (the “Waiting For My Real Life To Begin” dream musical sequence with the heart-transplant patient stands out, and totally kills me) with equal, sometimes dazzling facility.  And everyting you really  need to know about parenting, you can learn from Perry Cox.

Unfortunately, the episode I saw the other evening reminded me of one of those episodes of MASH I hated so much back in ’81; where instead of the fanciful-yet-believeable ensemble that made the show such a standout, we got “a metrosexual, a black doctor and his bossy Latina wife, the neurotic rich girl and the arrogant jerk with a heart of gold” mouthing lines that might have been written for “Happy Days”. 

I’m hoping they pull out of it soon…

Katie from Yucky Salad:

I know I shouldn’t nit pick the fine points of a pretty famous story; I certainly know and appreciate that musicals require a high level of suspension of disbelief, and I’m usually better than OK with that. Anyone who knows me knows I wish I lived in a world where people burst out singing for no other reason than breakfast was ready. The problem with Brigadoon, just like with Superbad, was that it was just, well, superbad.

I’ve never met anyone with the guts to actually say that, before…

…to get new art moved in and placed…

…just…

…right.

Roosh points us to a bit that, the one time I saw it way back when, had me laughing so hard I nearly stroked out.

 Apropos not much.

That is all.

24 will apparently be shot in an exotic location next season; Washington DC.

And spoilers?

Bauer’s day gets off to a shocking start when former colleague Tony Almeida (played by Carlos Bernard), last seen in Day 5, returns after being left for dead by a terrorist conspirator in CTU’s infirmary.”

Say wha?! “Tony’s uncertain fate… left the door open for his return,” explains exec producer Howard Gordon. “And since there was no silent clock at the conclusion of his last appearance — the 24 tribute to a major character’s demise — we always kept this as a possibility.” Indeed, it was widely rumored (and, I believe, perhaps even filmed) that Tony was to resurface in the final seconds of last season.

Carlos Bernard should thank his agent they didn’t waste Almeida’s return on Day Six. 

Wait until you-know-who finds out that wife Michelle herself is alive, and working as a chaplain at ER‘s County General!

I think we’ll find out that Audrey was really catatonic during Days 2-5, too…

(Via Flash)

…I missed the Emmy Awards telecast.

Bit by bit, my predictions for this season of Top Chef seem to be coming true. 

Although Brian gave us a bit of a scare last night, CJ was duly ejected (hahaha) from the airplane elimination challenge, as I suspected.

Remember – as I noted last week, these Bravo reality competition shows have a formula; by the final round (in TC’s case, a Final Four), they will always have:

• One highly-talented, frequently gay, guy.  (In Project Runway Season 2, which is my template for this theory, it was Daniel Vosovic, the blazingly-talented guy).
• One jerk.  In PR2, it was Santino, the imperious egomaniac with the Kim Thayil hairdo.
• One babe – Chloe Dao, in the case of PR2.  Dao was the eventual winner.

So I reiterate my prediction:

1. Brian will be the Talented Guy (with a possible, but I think unlikely, Dale upset).
2. Casey will fill the Babe role; indeed, I figured she was a lock once Camille and the long-shot (too girl-next-door-y, although I’d totally get her phone number) Lia got booted.  If I want to wax conspiratorial, I’d say that’d be why she won last night (remember – the producers play a major role in determining the results of each week’s competition, judges notwithstanding), even though Hung’s dish got arguably better reviews; the buzz among TC fans has been that Casey’s been eye candy, and she’d need a win or two to have some cred behind her trip to the finals). 
3. The Jerk?  Hung.  Doy. 
4. The fourth role in the Final Four?  Gotta be Sara, although I can see Dale squeaking into this more easily than the Talented Guy.

So that’s the big question for next week; does Dale upset either Brian or Sara and get to the finals?