HOUSE IS BACK!!

You’d need caps too if you spent your last few weeks of summer slogging tortuously through last season’s Heroes. I’ve never seen a show with less consistency of characters, less explanation for events, or less emotional impact for more effort put in. First Peter learns to control his abilities, then he suddenly can’t control the nuclear thing. First Nathan hops on board with his elders’ preposterous plan to allow a foreseen nuclear event in New York with some vague and unlikely scenario of the “world being healed” to follow. I think I know what kind of nuts the writers were smoking in that pipe, if you know what I mean, and yup, it turns out it’s just as crazy as it sounds with Truthers say it. Then Nathan suddenly has an unexplained change of heart and swoops in to save the day. People dead left and right, and we don’t even care. Except Sylar. I would be very grateful if I never had to look at him again. Alas.

Am I the only one who noticed that “save the cheerleader” didn’t have any direct connection whatsoever to “save the world?” It might have if Claire had been the one to pull the trigger on Peter. As it was, what did it matter if she was there or not?

Bad writing. Bad show. Perfectly decent acting that really makes me hate the characters, but if there are too many characters to hate, why do you watch at all?

Don’t even get me started on Niki/Jessica/D.L./Micah. It’s a big word, but say it with me anyway: Ex-tra-ne-ous. I’ve never seen a more uselessly irritating set of characters.

I made it all the way through the season, so I’ll watch long enough to see what they do with La Bell. After that I’m gone.

Because in case you missed it before, House is back and every bit as good as ever.

And yeah, I know Dancing with the Stars is back too. They are pushing the outer limits of my tolerance with this multiple-nights-per-week schtick. Two was enough and more than. I’ll get around to it, but sorry, ABC, not tonight … House was on.

Allah characterized Bollinger’s description of Ahmadinejad as a “petty and cruel dictator” as the “money line.” It’s not. I am frankly stunned at the words President Bollinger used: deplore, no implication of “weakness of resolve to resist those ideas” or “naivete about the very real dangers inherent in such ideas,” dishonorable, no “rights of the speaker” but only “our rights to listen and speak,” “know thine enemies,” “mind of evil,” brutal, targets of persecution, intolerable, dangerous propaganda, ridiculous, “brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated,” absurd, “defy historical truth,” state sponsor of terror, fanatical mindset. A very clear, forceful summation of Iran’s offenses that I couldn’t believe he would have given, to Ahmadinejad’s face, until I watched it myself, but Xrlq’s right: It was both barrels.

I disagree with Allah’s characterization of Bollinger’s speech as a Colbert maneuver. Colbert could count on nothing but support from his audience at the press dinner. It was a peacock move that succeeded about as well as anybody would who attempted to go so far outside his own milieu. I think it’s far from clear that Bollinger thought he could count on the same support, and as the cheers as Ahmadinejad begins to speak make clear, he certainly did not have undivided support even in the room. Pity the poor little teenagers, so full of their own education and confident in their years numbering more or less twenty, resenting being told how to judge Ahmadinejad more than the crimes of the Iranian government on people just like them in Iran.

As for Ahmadinejad, could he possibly have had any idea of this at the time he accepted the invitation to speak?