And of course that BS source is McNulty.

In our house we're hoping the fabulist will wind up getting his comeuppance on an article he's actually producing in good faith - because the source is BSing him.

For what it's worth, I play basketball in the E. Village with Ramon, the actor who plays Omar's boyfriend; noted playwright Adam Rapp also plays there. OK, I'm bragging. Anyway, I love that someone else noticed Cheese and Randy both have the name Wagstaff. Something's gotta come of that, even if it isn't the happy scenario of a Prop Joe inheritance.

****But if anyone was watching the Clemens/McNemee hearings, one of the congressmen on the panel said that people should feel more responsible for coming forth about drugs so there aren't more incidents like the one in Baltimore where the family's home was firebombed for being snitches?****

Anyway, I'm concerned they'll do a replay of the Stringer thing where Greggs and the Bunk put together a case against Marlo that gets short-circuited by him gettin' got in the street. I'm further concerned that with all of Omar's talk about heart, the writers will be too tempted to have Marlo found with a gaping hole in his chest where his evil ticker used to be.

I have two questions. First, what are we to make of Omar's jump? Either he jumped to the ground and crawled away or swung into a balcony. Both options are equally outrageous. So is Simon having fun and winking at us with this "serious Spiderman shit" or will more details of the escape be revealed?

Second, the cell phone scam confuses me. At the newspaper meeting, McNulty lied and said he received a call from the same pay phone as the reporter. So the pay phone should be bugged. But the number he gave to the DA was for a cell phone, right? So wouldn't this ruse run a huge risk of discovery? Or did he give the pay phone number to the DA as a cover, but had Freamon listen on the cell phone?

He's Puerto Rican. That scene where Omar finds out about Butchie's death was shot in Old San Juan's La Perla, a poor neighborhood complete with ocean views and a West Baltimore-like street drug market.

to the show’s heavy hitters, McNulty and Omar: they jump off the deep end. Maybe the real attention-getters of the show’s final season will be the ones who’ve been waiting in the wings: Slim Charles, Sydnor, Cutty, Avon. Marlo doesn’t have any get-out-of-jail-free card the way that Omar did; he just might end up in Jessup with Avon. The stage has been set already in Wood Harris’ riveting performance (“I’m what you might consider an authority figure”) earlier in the season.

Chris. Whose face I see every time I walk past an Armada. He’s got allegiance to Marlo for unknown reasons and a common thread to Michael by a history of sexual abuse that no one else even guesses at. Maybe he'll have to choose between the two. It remains to be seen why he bows down to a man like Marlo, who hates women so much that he shoots them in their breasts. Chris is throwing knives into the floor and saying goodbye to his loved ones; he knows things will end horrifically and violently.

Meanwhile, even Bubbles can’t suspend his own disbelief at the results of his blood test. He seemed to have Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions on his face in season 1 and looked downright furtive when his old shooting partner Johnny told him he had HIV. Cutty has a bit of a Cinderella story with the gym and all; Bubbles’ future may prove similar considering the friendships Ed Burns and David Simon made while writing The Corner. Bubbles is in a prime position to realize the lies of McNulty and Templeton, and has the balls to do something about it (a la Herc and the preacher in season 4).

The newsroom: kind of boring. And trite. And note that it is a thin twentysomething who’s lecturing Haynes about Templeton. Huh? And Alma seems sweet enough, but must the one substantial Latino/a character be so one-dimensional? And where is Omar’s boyfriend supposed to be from? Where are the Salvadorans and Ethiopians? Hell, where are the Asians?

It was pretty telling that Gus referred to Templeton's homeless Marine story as "the real deal." I think that Gus knows that Templeton is fabricating.

It doesn't surprise me that Gus praises Templeton's homeless marine story for its plain, declarative, non-flowery nature. The contrast between this story and the previous, made-up ones is something that should raise Gus' suspicions even more. The more flowery the story, the more likely that the story is being conjured in the author's mind instead of an account of real facts.

Re: your "Ongoing Massacre" post. Is this your way of telling us you have a black friend? Other than that, I'm not quite sure anymore what you're going on about. Aren't you an upper class white woman who enjoys watching this program?

JK Rowling, you're slightly insane, but will you marry me?

The middle-class and upper-class viewers of The Wire are definitely engaging in acts of voyeurism. Check out this review of Episode Two from Salon's reviewer Manjoo:

"Two other scenes I had to watch twice. One, Marlo meets Avon. Marlo once had a security guard killed for giving him lip, but here Avon, from the wrong side of the bars, gets the better of him. "Let me help you find your tongue," he says, putting Marlo in his place. And two, Snoop's drive-by sniping. Best line of the show: "In B-more, we aim and hit a nigger, you hear."

Why is Manjoo so thrilled by Snoop murdering someone? Why is entertaining to watch poor blacks terrorizing each other?

I agree with the above poster about Bunk & Kemah. Nobody mentioned her going home to see Elijah to brush up on her child psychology skills so she can interrogate the child victim of the triple homicide who will be able to ID Snoop and Chris as the killers...

And Bunk's evidence on Michael's stepfather (and perhaps if he helps Randy get out of the home so he'll talk to him) will also lead to the same perps.