Dr. Jack: 35 Key Bullet Points To Prepare Anyone for Breaking Bad's Season 4 Premiere

“Breaking Bad” will premiere its fourth season this Sunday on AMC. I know what most of you who do not watch the show are thinking. “I’m not going to start watching a show in its fourth season. I don’t care how good it is, I’ve missed too much.” Now, yes you would be right, you’ve missed A LOT. More than I could ever fully recap here. But what you can still learn is the minimum of what you need to know to begin watching the escapades of Walter White come this Sunday.

It’s a fantastic show. One Chuck Klosterman just called the best show of the past 10 years on Grantland. So if you have the time, and let’s be honest, it’s Friday so you probably have the time, take a look at a few key bullet points from the past three seasons of “Breaking Bad”. When you’re finished you should be all prepared to enter Walter White’s world.

Season 1

• Walter White is a chemistry teacher who finds out he has terminal lung cancer.
• Walt has a wife named Skylar, a teenage son named Walter Jr. who has Cerebral Palsy, and a daughter on the way.
• Walt has no savings to speak of, and therefore becomes increasingly nervous he will have nothing to leave his family when he passes away.
• Walt’s brother-in-law is a DEA agent (Hank) who takes him on a crystal meth sting, where Walt sees one of his former students (Jesse) escaping the scene.
• Walt and Jesse then team up to produce and sell the perfect blend of meth, with Walt knowing the chemistry and Jesse “knowing” the drug trade.
• As Walt begins to make money, he is able to pay for his hugely expensive medical treatments.
• Walt begins going by the pseudonym “Heisenberg”.
• Walt and Jesse become hooked up with a kingpin named Tuco, who, after making a deal with Walt and Jesse, proceeds to beat one of his thugs to death.
• Walt Season 1 Murder Count = 1, a rival dealer he chokes to death, who Jesse then “dissolves” in a bathtub, which falls through the ceiling, leaving Jesse and Walt to mop up the dealer’s remains.

Season 2

• Tuco, tweaked out on meth and severely paranoid, kidnaps Jesse and Walt, Walt and Jesse eventually get away after wounding Tuco. Hank traces Jesse’s (who he thinks is Walt’s pot dealer) car to Tuco’s hideout and kills Tuco in a shootout as Walt and Jesse run away unseen.
• Jesse is kicked out of his house and eventually moves into a split home next to the renter and recovering addict, Jane, who Jesse starts seeing.
• Walt and Jesse try to just be distributors and one of their dealers gets pinched. They hire local ambulance chaser Saul Goodman to get him out.
• Walt gets favorable medical news and is told a very expensive surgery would further improve his chances.
• Needing more money than ever, Saul hooks Walt up with a wholesaler, local fast food chicken restaurant owner Gus.
• Walt delivers their latest batch for $1.2 million while Skylar goes into labor, Jane, who is now back on drugs, convinces Jesse to blackmail Walt for more money.
• Walt tells Skylar about his second cell phone under sedation and that coupled with all his other secrets from the last few months leads Skylar to order Walt to leave the house.
• Jane overdoses and her father is so traumatized he ignores his responsibilities as an air-traffic controller and causes a major plane crash with the wreckage landing on Walt’s lawn and car.
• Walt Season 2 Murder Count = 1, he arrives at Jesse’s house just as Jane begins to OD and instead of helping her, he lets her die in front of him, ridding him of her threats of blackmail.

Season 3

• Jesse is in rehab and Walt tells Skylar he’s a drug dealer and she promptly wants a divorce.
• Two twin drug dealers who are Tuco’s cousins come to hunt Walt because they believe he killed Tuco.
• As Walt attempts to reconcile with Skylar by ignoring her divorce demands, she sleeps with her boss to get back at him.
• Gus tries to get Walt cooking again and offers him $3 million and has built an underground lab for production, and he also persuades the twins to leave Walt alone until their business is finished.
• Walt begins cooking for Gus with a new partner named Gale as Jesse has gone off on his own.
• Hank, who’s been chasing “Heisenberg”, tracks Jesse’s trailer down with Walt inside. Having no other option of getting him to leave, they have Saul’s assistant call Hank saying his wife Marie has been in an accident and Hank then flees.
• When Hank realizes Jesse has tricked him, he goes to his house and beats him to a pulp.
• Walt convinces Jesse to not press charges against Hank by allowing him back into their partnership.
• Gus tells the twins Hank is the one who killed Tuco and the three have a bloody showdown in a parking lot, which leaves one twin dead, one missing his legs (who later dies) and Hank paralyzed.
• Skylar offers to pay for Hank’s medical bills with Walt’s drug money, but tells Marie it’s from gambling.
• Jesse, trying to skim off the top, tries selling extra meth on the side. He hooks up with an addict named Andrea whose young brother was forced by dealers to kill one of Jesse’s friends last season.
• Jesse wants vengeance, but the dealers are Gus’, who forbids it. Later, Andrea’s young brother is found murdered.
• Jesse goes to kill the dealers but as he does Walt drives up killing one of the dealers, and then gets out and shoots the other in the head, then tells Jesse to run.
• Gus brings back Gale as Walt’s assistant and Walt soon realizes Gus has instructed Gale to memorize the meth recipe so he can get rid of Walt.
• Walt, knowing Gus’ plan, sends Jesse to kill Gale so no one besides Walt and Jesse know the recipe, making them indispensable.
• Gus’ men pick up Walt and take them to the lab to kill him, but Walt calls Jesse and tells him to kill Gale now, who then pulls the trigger.
• Walt Season 3 Murder Count = 3, the two dealers and he basically forces Jesse to kill Gale.

That’s really all you need to know, and if this sounds like the type of stuff that might interest you then you’re all set for Sunday. Enjoy the premiere!

-Dr. Jack

Man Trolls Cops During TV Interview...Probably Expecting Serious Payback.

What's the official over/under on how many times this guy's been pulled over for traffic violations since this interview? 4, 5 times per week? Seems fair, right.

Because not matter what your thoughts on your local police force, I'd say its always a bad move to troll them sarcastically. Write a thought out op-ed piece for a newspaper, sure. Give a serious, stern intervew on tv, acceptable...make smarmy, hysterical jokes about your local officers, now you're asking for it, that'll get you the Rodney King treatment 9/10.  The last thing a cop wants is a guy who gets a crowd to laugh at them...most of them became cops to keep the good times from high school rolling, just substituting homeless people for nerds, and minorities, for well actually just minorities.  They didn't take the job to be made fun of, mocked, and humiliated by crowds.

Company Softball is Ruining My Blogging Career

Straight up ruining it, the later nights, the mid week beers, waking up and just wanting to smash my alarm clock into little pieces and go back to bed…none of it is conducive to blogging apparently.

My night time routine right now is a joke, get out of work, pound beers and softballs, make a few web gems in the field (I easily lead the league in UZR) finish the beers, order pizza or sub at 10:00 pm, go to bed like 20 minutes after inhaling said food…Just living the life of a degenerate.

Of course none of this would be a problem if I’d found a co-blogger by now (all due respect to Dr. Jack) to help carry the daily load. Seriously, if anyone out there has any interest in writing on a daily-semi daily basis let me know, if you’re a tool and mildly funny, you’re in…That’s it, those are our qualifications, we’re pretty desperate. If I have to wake up one more morning and have to force myself to chug high-octane coffee just to quiet the pounding in my head and get a post up by 9 am, I’m going to lose my mind.

Australian Farmer Opens Brothel To Support his Paralyzed Wife

Fox News - The day after Rachel Rohrlach and her soon-to-be-husband, farmer Chris Rohrlach, announced they were expecting their first child, Rachel suffered a debilitating stroke that left her a quadriplegic. Rachel was just 21. Her son was born while she was in a coma. Fast forward several years later and the rigors of an Australian drought, raising their teenage son and the addition of a new baby proved to be a great financial burden, so Chris and two friends came up with the controversial solution to build and manage a brothel. “At some point we all have to ask ourselves – what will I do for love? What am I prepared to do for the love of a friend, a husband, a wife, a lover, a parent, a child, a beloved pet?”  Another question the film then ponders is whether one can be a successful pimp, while at the same time maintaining the status-quo of a happy, healthy husband and father. “Chris entered the brothel business all gung ho. He thought the hard part was building the brothel and after that it would just run itself. But Chris had no experience in the sex industry and as a result, once the brothel opened he was completely out of his depth,” Uberoi explained. “Even in Australia, where sex work is legal, the sex industry is still very problematic. Chris was a nice man who thought he could just run a 'nice' brothel. But it just wasn't that simple!”

Question answered, Pimpin' aint easy...even legal pimpin' in laid back Australia. 

Husband of the year right here folks, life throws you a paralyzed wife, you don't up and leave her, you stand by her side and open a brothel in her name and honor in order to support her and your new born infant son. When push comes to shove your family is your family. Safe to say this guy is more of a man than just about anyone on earth, taking care of his responsibilities the only way he knows how, through the sex business. 

Smart man too, picked pretty much the only recession proof industry in the world. The other farmers in his community may be publicly outraged, but I can gaurantee you when they're bored at night and the sheep and goats and shit have all fallen asleep, you can bet your ass they're thankful there's a brothel right down the drive for some late night entertainment.

Happy 20th Anniversary Rodney King: Arrested for DUI...Again

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – Rodney King has been arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence in Southern California. The Moreno Valley Police Department said officers pulled King over Tuesday after seeing him commit several alleged traffic violations. He was booked into jail for investigation of DUI, and bail was set at $2,500. King was the black motorist whose beating by four white police officers in 1991 exposed racial wounds and led to a devastating riot in Los Angeles. He has struggled with sobriety publicly and appeared on television's "Celebrity Rehab."

Good to see someone is memorializing the 20th anniversary of the Rodney King beating and the ensuing LA Riots...Also good to see that Rodney is still a fine upstanding citizen...I mean it's been like 3 years since he was last in the news for drug or alcohol related driving offenses. That's a new personal record, congrats Rodney!

Note: This is in no way condoning the beating of Rodney King, just mere commentary that this man has proven again and again that he's the scum of the earth, driving on PCP, driving drunk, running over girlfriends (no proof of dui there), driving drunk into a house, claiming to have been sprayed with a shotgun (I have no idea what this means), and now driving drunk again....Just saying it's not quite a coincidence he was the guy getting his ass beat.

The Biggest Office Scam of All Time: The Salaried Worker

Can someone explain to me how corporations get away with this scam? Can't believe I ever fell for it, granted I was younger and dumber, but still...THEM: "hey kid, we're willing to pay you the same amount no matter what, so if you work 35 hours instead of 40, no problem you're still getting paid." ME: "Golly that seems like a swell deal, where do I sign!?" So naive.

Sure maybe it works in the favor of employees during a great economy, with enough co-workers to spread the work around and everyone getting out right at 5 PM sharp. But in this economy? Completely dog shit. I can't even remember the last time I didn't get to work early, didn't work at my desk through lunch and didn't stay late.  All for the grand total of $0 extra dollars...safe to say Salaried employee is just corporate speak for: Sucker We're Ass Raping Via Paycheck.

I've honestly calculated it out the past few weeks, on a per hour basis I'm making slightly more than the average new person just in out of college still getting paid OT.  Right around when you hit 45-46 hours per week they hit a break even point with me.  It's infuriating, this is what I worked for? This is what all that sucking up and bullshitting my way to the middle was for? A decent raise that now barely offsets the affects of increased overtime?  Dogshit, dogshit, dogshit, and I am not happy.

UPDATE: Those Gold US Dollar Coins No One Wants? Here's a Brilliant New Use, Frequent Flier Miles!

Get me this paper weight now!

NPR - We recently reported on the the government's failed effort to persuade Americans to use dollar coins. But the coins have found at least one group of fans: Travel enthusiasts who buy thousands of dollar coins with credit cards that award frequent-flier miles for purchases. Once in possession of the coins — shipped to them by the government for free — they can deposit them into their bank accounts and pay off the credit card bills. The result: a free ticket to anywhere. "We've used them to go on trips around the world," says Jane Liaw, a 35-year-old public health researcher and science writer in San Francisco. Liaw says she and her husband, who use a variety of tricks for earning miles, are planning trips to Greece and Turkey, "all on miles and points." Liaw says she spends some of the coins at the local farmer's market and stores. The problem is that even if so-called "travel hackers" like Liaw put some of the coins in circulation, their purchases from the Mint contribute to a huge and growing buildup of one-dollar coins in Federal Reserve vaults....The mountain of coins is the unintended result of a 2005 act of Congress. The law requires that more and more coins be minted, despite a lack of demand by the public. (For more, see our story "$1 Billion That Nobody Wants.") The Mint's direct-ship program is aimed at getting the coins into everyday circulation. Officials there first noticed something amiss in summer 2008, when they saw that a small number of customers were repeatedly ordering large numbers of one dollar coins. The top 20 customers bought between $219,000 and $696,000 worth, says Mint spokesman Tom Jurkowsky. Another clue the hackers left was that dollar coins were arriving in banks still clad in their U.S. Mint packaging. "Do we feel a little bit violated? Yes, and that's why we aggressively sought measures to eliminate what we called an abuse," says Jurkowsky. Jurkowsky said the Mint sent letters to the top abusers and imposed a limit of 1,000 coins every ten days. "It's not illegal," he said, "But it's an abuse of the system. That's not what the system was set up to do. The system was set up to promote the use of dollar coins and we are simply trying to do the right thing here."

Is CW trying this tonight? YUP!  Just last week The Alt-Tab commented on the mockery of the US Government, spending millions on producing billions of dollars worth of unused gold coins...some how a light never clicked on for us that we could put that surplus to work for us...Well if passively making fun of people for their incompetence is fun, actively joining in on the scam has to be a blast.  

How do miles work anyway? To be completely honest I've never changed in my rewards miles, wouldn't even know what to do, I've always been boggled by them. How is it that I need like 500,000 rewards miles to travel 1,000 by air? Something doesn't add up, its funny money.  Shouldn't we just move to a system where 1 mile = 1 mile? Or is that too obvious.  I only ask because I'm wondering if that $1,000 per week figure is going to throw a cramp in my style, like am I going to be getting enough miles for a grand per week to fly wherever I want in a few months? Or is this just another pyramid scheme like the time I sent out $11 dollars to some guy who claimed I'd become rich in months and that he'd been on Oprah?

How Will Raising the Debt Ceiling Affect You?

Admit it, you fell asleep just watching that video huh? Yeah, me too. You wanna know how  the debt ceiling being raised would affect me? I'd get to go one fucking day without hearing about the goddamn debt ceiling.

Don't get me wrong, I understand this is a very important issue, its just hard to take it seriously when you're just drowning in talking heads and outrageous headlines left and right. Hey guys, update me when something actually changes, until then please, I'm begging you, cover something else. You're like the boys who cried wolf at this point, keep talking about this impending date of doom for the US economy and the deadline keeps moving back. It comes across as complete bullshit.

The coverage of this thing has gotten so outlandish, I'm frankly shocked that I haven't seen one of those hysterically stereotypical news cartoons from South Korea or Taiwan, or wherever those are from. 

Man Charged With Shoplifting for Taking, Drinking Beer....Yup, At Walmart

RAPID CITY, S.D. (AP) -- A Walmart is no bar. Police in South Dakota charge Perry Arpan popped open a beer in a Walmart and downed it. Rapid City police say Arpan tried to put the empty beer can back in the case. Store security stopped Arpan as he was leaving the Walmart. He's now charged with shoplifting. A police spokeswoman tells the Rapid City Journal that Arpan takes "beer theft to a whole new level."

Oh sure, you can eat as many grapes as you want, but you shotgun one little beer and you're accused of shoplifting...dude was just making sure it wasn't skunked, a valid concern given that Walmart isn't exactly known as a purveyor of fine beers. I'm sure if everyone just relaxed a second they would have seen he had every intention of buying the other 11 once he knew that first one was fine.  We need to formally iron out what you can and can't eat while food shopping once and for all so that blatant miscarriages of justice like this are no longer present in our society.