Gobsmacked

"You, Me, and Dupree"--Early Take

2006-07-14T11:09:00.000-04:00

There used to be a couple of deejays in the D.C./No.VA area who would review movies solely on the basis of trailers and ads, never having seen the movies. I'm going to start doing that, and first up is "You, Me and Dupree." I'm a late night talk show junkee, so I've seen Michael Douglas, Owen Wilson, Kate Hudson and Matt Dillon making the rounds and showing clips. Between their appearances and all the ads on TV, I feel like I've seen every gimmick and joke in the entire movie. And that causes me concern. When a movie is really good, a few teasers are released. When it needs some help, a lot more ads are used and in them much more of the movie is shown, and all the stars "press the flesh" via TV appearances. "Dupree" has all the attributes of showing you the best it's got in the ads, with time compression in between the setups and the punch lines (a technique that always keeps things from dragging and helps make things funnier), but I can't imagine there's a whole lot more to see.

Owen and Luke Wilson (Luke is not in "Dupree" but has his own movie coming out next week) are Hollywood hot with audiences, so I have no doubts that "You, Me and Dupree" will be a commercial success. But I'd be willing to bet that critics give it bad reviews.

Thumbs down from Gobsmacked. And if I'm wrong, I'm come back here and say so after I see the movie.

Watch This Company

2006-07-14T09:29:00.000-04:00

Alcoa Aluminum (stock symbol AA) reported its earnings this week and they fell short of Wall Street analysts' expectations. The stock was punished accordingly, falling from a high of $36.96 to close yesterday at $30.99. In after hours trading last night, the stock went down a little further. Bummer! The largest aluminum company in the world, by far, just can't cut the mustard.

Hold on! What exactly did Alcoa report? In a nutshell, they reported the highest quarterly income and revenue in company history. That's saying an awful lot for AA, and it begs the question as to how much "expectations" really matter. Sometimes they matter a lot. In my view, this is not one of those times. Aluminum is a commodity that is needed for an awful lot of "stuff." Big ticket items include airplanes, cars, trucks, ships, engines, and of course, aluminum foil (joke). Further, we are in the midst of a commodities boom that is expexted to last another 5-7 years. The Chinese are building, the Chinese are building, goes the familiar refrain. And that's an awful lot of people. Add the increasing Chinese demand to the everyday world demand (which includes a lot of third world countries that are building infrastructures and need aluminum), and you've got a commodity that is red hot. As boring as aluminum may be to you, consider the fact that if you'd have invested a few bucks in nickel a year ago, you'd be rich right now. Nickel, for goodness sakes! Ditto for copper. You get the idea.

Here's another factor to consider: Many institutional value investors considered AA a buy at $35. These are the obscenely paid guys who look for bargain stocks--not the rah-rah growth stocks like Google--the stocks they consider to be significantly undervalued. If they thought AA was a buy at $35, what does that make the stock at $31?

Right now, the market is turbulent with trouble in the Middle East. So the overall market may go down again today, which will have a dragging effect on every stock. But as soon as the crisis starts to lift, watch for AA to go up. If you keep you investment finger on the market pulse by checking quotes at msn.com or by using your brokerage real-time quotes, you've got a chance to get a high quality stock at a great price.

Why Can't This Foreign Car Co. Sell Cars in U.S.?

2006-06-27T16:31:00.000-04:00

Quick, what car company sells the most cars in China? (No peeking at google). Toyota would be an obvious choice given the fact that they have the most respected business model in auto sales, and they clearly wouldn't want to miss out on the Chinese market. Honda would be another logical choice. Even GM would be a logical candidate: Chinese execs love Buicks. But, no, it's Volkswagen. That's right. VW exports more cars to China than any other car manufacturer. In fact, VW is the biggest car manufacturer in Europe, and kicks butt worldwide. Except in North America, which means the U.S. when you consider how many cars Americans buy each year. VW has consistently made money around the world, yet has also consistently lost money in the U.S. What's up with that? If you can figure out what the Belgians, the Norwegians and the Chinese want, why is it so hard to come up with vehicles that appeal to U.S. car buyers?

My guess is the price. Exhibit A: the now discontinued VW Phaeton, which listed for $66,700-$74,350 for the V8 model and $96,600-$101,300 for the W12 (12 cylinder) model. Did someone spike the schnapps with LSD? Over $100,000 for a VW? I honestly wonder what VW could possibly have been thinking. At $100,000, you're competing with big luxury names and models, like the Maserati Quattroporte, the most beautiful sedan on the market. And of course you've got the higher end BMW's, the Mercedes Benz's, the Lexus's--many luxury vehicles in the pecking order by the time you get to spending $100,000. Let's assume you want to spend $100,000 for a vehicle. Are you going to go straight to your local VW dealer? Or imagine yourself driving a $100,000 vehicle into your driveway while all the neighbors watch. Is that vehicle going to be a Phaeton? Apparently not since the Phaeton was a dismal failure and VW made the decision to drop the model for 2007. But the Phaeton begs the questions as to whether any marketing surveys were done, and how VW could possibly think that such a vehicle would sell in the U.S.

VW's other vehicles that are bigger and much more expensive than the Golf, the ones with the highest profit margin, sell at prices that are too high for what is on offer. A 2006 VW Touareg (why give this vehicle such a hard name to spell?) starts at an MSRP of $37,410 for the V6 model and $44,750 for the V8 model. Now I'd be the first to agree that the Touareg is a really nice SUV, but when it comes to shelling out over $40,000, there are a lot of options on the market. Toyota makes a host of SUV's, all of which have been rated as having rock solid reliability. At $40,000, you are at or approaching a number of options that include luxury vehicles. And for those who don't care about a European feel, there are many domestic SUV's that have loads of room and cost a lot less than the Touareg. Which explains why the VW SUV has garnered some great ratings, but flopped on the market. For $40-45K, people are going to look at the BMW or Lexus SUV's, or will begin to wonder if they can afford a Land Cruiser. Then there's the VW Passat, a wonderful car. But it starts at $30,000 and goes up from there. And it competes with Toyotas and Hondas that get better ratings, have much better reliability and go for less in price. The new Camry has a sporty look, a good road feel, and has a stereo (with iPod conectivity) that is top rated. For well under the cost of a Passat.

If VW really wants to compete, it first has to solve its identity crisis. Revisiting the Phaeton for a moment, it begs the question as to whether a buyer who's in the market for a $100,000 vehicle is going to go to a showroom that features a number of cars at the economy end of the scale, like the Golf. No! When I look at the dealers here that sell $100,000 vehicles, such dealerships scream luxury; they don't offer cars down in the $15,000-$20,000 range. (And they also have great coffee). So VW needs to make up its mind as to whether it wants to compete with the mainstream, or ratchet things up and get into the luxury car biz.

Second, assuming VW wants to compete with the mainstream car lines, the company needs to be ready to take on the Japanese when it comes to quality and reliability, and it has to be able to at least come close with prices. VW's reliability has been average at best over the years, sometimes woeful, and that's just not going to cut it against Toyota and Honda. People then begin to wonder why they are paying more for a Passat that 1) isn't as fast as a Camry, 2) doesn't get as good a gas mileage, 3) isn't nearly as reliable, and 4) doesn't have as many features.

So VW execs need to make up their minds as to whether they want to offer value for money, as VW does with some of its lower cost models, or offer something extra that will appeal to American buyers enough to have them buying. If VW wants to offer vehicles in luxury price ranges, perhaps, a' la Toyota, Nissan and Honda, VW should open a luxury car division here and market its higher end vehicles through a Lexus-type division. Americans aren't yet convinced that they want to pay a hefty premium for a vehicle that says "VW" on it. And that would leave the Golfs, Jettas and Beetles for the VW dealerships to sell.

The VW commercial that ends with "lowest ego emissions" displayed on a Passat is a clever commercial, but is not going to answer the fundamental issues that North American VW needs to address.

80's Icons: Get Back on Stage?

2006-06-26T18:00:00.000-04:00

I read an AOL survey, by no means scientific, that questioned whether selected 80's rock/pop stars should have quit after the 80's or should keep on rockin'. Most of the results were exactly as I expected. Michael Jackson, reeling from the fallout of civil suits and criminal charges concerning his relationship with child guests at Neverland, received a 92% should-have-quit vote. (Personally, I think if he could put on a song-and-dance show that was anything close to the Thriller Tour, I'd go see him). Sister Janet split down the middle, and I'm not talking about costume malfunctions, with a 50-50 vote. But Michael Jackson didn't even receive the worst count. That was reserved for Bobby Brown, who got a resounding 96% negative vote. Presumably, much of that is related to repeated charges against him for disturbing the peace, assault and drugs. And in case you're wondering, his significant other (I don't know whether they are married) Whitney Houston, got a 64% vote to keep staying off the stage. Again, it's obvious that her well-known drug abuse hurt her as much as her lack of a career. Had she stayed healthy and drug-free, I think that melodic voice of the 80's could still be paying her great dividends today.

Let's look at a few others in negative territory. Flavor Flav, someone I never heard of, got a 91% NO vote. (This also begs the question as to how someone can be an "icon" if you've never heard of them. I was in England for part of the 80's, but the really big acts in the U.S. were also huge over there). Paula Abdul, despite American Idol (or perhaps because of it) got a 76% give-it-up vote. Prince (what happened to all that talent I kept hearing about?) is better not heard according to 61%. Thankfully, 70% voted that Michael Bolton should have given it up after the 80's. (I'd go further and say he never should have started "crooning" in the first place. Bolton is one of the most annoying performers I can think of, and what makes him even more annoying is that he keeps hooking up with beautiful babes, most recently Nicollette Sheridan (okay, she's not Halle Berry or Jessica Alba, but who is?). Some other famous names in negative territory: Ozzy (68%) and Guns 'N' Roses (73%), an indication there is still some sanity left in America).

The Keep-On-Rockin' Vote: The biggest surprise for me was the vote on Bruce Sprinsteen; the Boss got only a 52% keep-on-rockin' vote, this despite the raves over his present folk tour and the fact that any time he tours he sells out everywhere. I guess you either love him or hate him. (On an off-topic note, it always cracks me up that the reviewers for the Wall Street Journal virtually worship Springsteen despite the fact that he is squarely 180 degrees from their ultra-conservative politics). Compare Bruce's anemic rating to a whopping 70% vote of confidence in Sting (yes, Sting) and you get an idea of how weak the vote for Springsteen was. LLCoolJ got 64%. U2 led all artists with 77%, likely due to their shows, their hits, and Bono's insatiable desire for publicity. Aerosmith walked this way at 74%, a figure which seems at least 20 points high to me. Are they still in a class with U2? Did I mention the Springsteen vote?

Finally, what about the smartest singer on the planet in the 80's? Miss Like Virgin/ Like A Prayer/Like A Slut who always kept the sex machine going, using not only her concerts but such non-musical venues as the documentary Truth or Dare and coffee book (Ha!) Sex. Madonna played all the publicity for everything it was worth. She did some good songs, but in my view she was always overrated musically. Madonna garnered a postive vote of 53%, barely beating The Boss out. It's hard for a maturing material girl to stay in vogue.

"Match Point"

2006-06-23T11:15:00.000-04:00

I finally got around to seeing the movie that was often referred to as being one of the best that the year 2005 had to offer. After viewing the film, I'm going to have to stick to my assessment of 2005: It was a lousy year for movies. Match Point struck me as a minor variation on the literary classic, An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser. Working class young man improves his circumstances. Gets a working class girl pregnant at a most inconvenient time. Has to decide how badly he wants to remain out of the working class. If you've read An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (and I realize that's a big "If" since very few people have read the 880-page novel--Signet paperback edition), this movie will surely seem familiar despite the English setting. This is somewhat surprising since two movies have already been done of Dreiser's novel: An American Tragedy (1931) and A Place In the Sun (1951), and Woody Allen would assuredly be aware of these films. Allen tries to put a different spin on the theme by changing the setting to England and by introducing the notion of luck. In Match Point, the protagonist is a former professional tennis player who leaves the tour to become a pro at a London tennis club. Allen uses the visual of a tennis ball hitting the net tape and bouncing straight up in the air to illustrate that sometimes one is better off being lucky than good--you never know which side of the court the ball is going to drop in for an easy winning point. This foreshadows the throwing of a highly significant ring towards the Thames River; the ring ends up hitting a railing and bouncing up in the air and at least for awhile the viewer is left wondering whether it made it to the river .

Perhaps I'm too much the tennis player commenting here, but I found the tennis tape metaphor unconvincing. If you're playing singles and both players are hitting from the baseline, the ball is going to hit the tape a number of times. Sometimes it will favor one player and sometimes another. But what if the ball hits the tape on a big point, even matchpoint, and rolls over giving a player the match? I would submit that you have to ask how the match got to matchpoint in the first place. Didn't the better player get himself to the point where he will win the match if he wins the next point? Further, if you're playing doubles, any good doubles partner at the net will reach the ball and be able to flick all but the rarest of balls back over the net at an acute angle. Okay, that's the tennis player out of me.

The other question that came to mind was where tennis pro Chris Wilton's accent went to. Working class boy from Ireland ends up on the tennis tour. Somehow he ends up with an English accent that is between posh and what is known as the BBC accent. How does an Irish kid end up with such flawless English upper-class elocution? We'll never know.

What worked for me? The beautiful settings in London (the condo on the Thames, the Tate Gallery, the family home, the posh areas of London) and in the countryside; the English family, particularly one of my favorite actors, Brian Cox, who adores Chris Wilton (played extremely well by Jonathan Rhys Meyers); and the dramatic moments when Wilton is lying in wait and as a viewer you don't know whether he's going to be able to commit murder, much less successfully commit murder. Allen conveys the agony the amateur would-be murderer must feel about as well as it can be portrayed.

My unsolicited advice: Buy a copy of An American Tragedy and read it. You'll get hours of pleasure reading it, and you'll find it much more satisfying than Match Point.

Billy Preston Dead at 59

2006-06-21T15:02:00.000-04:00

I read in the most recent issue of Rolling Stone that keyboardist Billy Preston died of kidney failure at the age of 59.

What impressed me the most about the article was the note that Preston was the only non-Beatle to ever get a recording credit with the group, for his contribution to "Get Back," which, I read somewhere, the Beatles thought was what made the song a hit.

One other thing that made me laugh in the article: Preston released two instrumental gospel albums with the titles The Most Exciting Organ Ever and The Wildest Organ in Town!.

The Arctic Monkeys Lose Bass Player

2006-06-21T14:01:00.000-04:00

You didn't know there were monkeys in the Arctic? You didn't know they had a band? Just skip the next few sentences, then, and you'll be fine.

The Arctic Monkeys, AKA "better than the Beatles" are a group of 20-year old Brits who play indie rock. (I notice that more recently they are being referred to as "the next Oasis." I'm not sure if this is because the yutes of today do not know who the Beatles were, or because--and this is frankly what I fervently hope--the Arctic Monekys are coming down a peg or two). Their bass guitar player Andy Nicholson, quit, citing tour fatigue. As a geezer I have to ask: Do healthy 20-year old bass guitar players get fatigued? I'm not saying that playing a bass guitar is easy, although there are certainly much harder things in life. But it's not like a bass guitarist has to jump all over the stage like many lead singers, lead guitarists and even rhythm guitarists have historically been expected to do. Look at Mick Jagger, older than even me, and the schedule and prancing he keeps up on a tour. Check out tapes of The Who's Pete Townshend. In his heyday, he mades these incredible leaps and moves during Who concerts. (And on and on with many other lead guitarists). Read about the Hamburg days or tour schedules of the Beatles and the hours they put in seven days a week. Now that's fatigue!

No, I think it's fair to say that even though tours are a grind, Mr. Nicholson and the rest of the group didn't play well together (sorry). I notice that when he previously dropped out, the Arctic Monkeys found a replacement immediately and did not miss a beat (again, sorry) on their North American tour. So much for the importance of Nicholson, I guess. Despite using the word "mate" at least a thousand times when talking or blogging about Mr. Nicholson's departure, the other three members of the Arctic Monkeys don't seem all that broken up about it.

At the rate the Arctic Monkeys are going, they will retire at age 22 and each write memoirs of the just how tough it was to be multi-millionaires by age 20 and feted accordingly.

The NBA

2006-06-21T13:24:00.000-04:00

Mark Cuban (billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team) and Bill Simmons (sportswriter whose Page 2 column on the Espn Website is highly popular) love NBA basketball. They have followed it for years and are very, very passionate about it. Sure Cuban acts like a crybaby if he doesn't like a ref's call. But he also has some excellent ideas about how the NBA could better present and represent the game. "Transparency" is his word for it. He says he is big on transparency in business, and that includes the NBA. His view is that the NBA should talk about what went on in big games, including the officiating. (The NBA is wary of that idea because they don't want to be put in the position of constantly second-guessing the refs).

I have to laugh at the Mark Cuban blog that is about him and the Mavs. His latest entry points to a Bill Simmons column that is surely one of the longest columns in history. As I said, Simmons loves NBA ball. He has a passion for it that, frankly, I have never had and never will. I enjoy a good game, but I find the amount of hard contact allowed to ruin much of the beauty of the game. More accurately, what I really hate is to see a trip down court where there's a no-call when someone is on the floor bleeding, and the next trip up the court someone gets called for a touch foul. If you're going to allow so much contact, I don't know how you ever call touch fouls. It would be like a baseball umpire having a strike zone that dramatically moved with each changing batter. First, we're going to call a strike on a ball thrown around the batter's ankles. Next, we're going to move the strike zone above the batter's head. Which is pretty much what goes on in the NBA. Cuban complains about the refs' calls in the Miami series, but if it hadn't been for some highly questionanable calls in the Mavs-Spurs series, the Mavs would never have made it to the NBA finals in the first place. The other thing I don't like about NBA ball is how short their clocks are. 8 seconds to cross the center line. 24 seconds total to shoot. How about starting the 24-second clock after the ball passes mid-court? Even Almighty MJ agrees with that one. Give them some time to work against a tough defense, please. It's like a Dan Jenkins novel written years ago in which a character says: "They've ruined NBA ball. Know what NBA basketball is? Every 24 seconds 10 niggers jump up in the air." Okay, it's horribly racist, but it makes the point about the clock.

You might check out the Bill Simmons column, though. He does know the NBA game and he has no peer when it comes to writing about it. He covers every aspect of the NBA while discussing the Mavs-Heat series. (Column was written prior to last night's game). I did laugh at his point that because he loves NBA basketball so much, he writes about it a lot. And he says people complain about how much time he spends on the NBA. His punch-line is that since his column is free, it's funny that people write to complain about what he chooses to write about.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/060620

Parole: Defending the Mentally Challenged, Pt. 2

2006-06-20T11:28:00.000-04:00

For part one go here.

...Parole Officer (PO) "Gonzalez" and I enter the conference room, and I silently groan to myself. The hearing officer, "Mr. Ford," is already present and he is not a friend. At the last parole hearing at which he presided, he and I argued over my cross-examination of a witness. The witness was the ex-wife of my client, and her damning testimony included a lot of details that had nothing to do with the charges. Further, none of her testimony could be corroborated. This screamed cross-examination. Unfortunately, Mr. Ford kept cutting me off and preventing me from asking the questions I wanted to ask. My choices were to continue to argue with Mr. Ford, a clearly counter-productive course of action, or to ask more open-ended questions and open the door for further damning testimony. I chose a third option, stating that since I was not being allowed to properly cross-examine the witness, I was going to cease questioning. (Amazingly, when it came time for a recommendation, the PO, a tall, ramrod stiff poster of a parole officer, recommended that my client be released with no sanctions. Alas, Mr. Ford ignored the recommendation).

George is brought in, and because he is not considered a threat, his handcuffs are removed. George is happy to see me and wants to hug me, but is discouraged from doing so by the prison deputy. I tell George to listen carefully and to be ready to speak to the facts surrounding the charges against him. I also tell him that if there's anything he doesn't understand, to speak up and ask me, not to hesitate in any way. There are no witnesses, so it is just the PO, the hearing officer, the parolee and the attorney present. Mr. Ford brings the hearing to order and asks if I want to waive the reading of the rights. I do not, so Mr. Ford proceeds to read them. Next, he asks how George pleads to the charges. George says they are true. Mr. Ford then asks for testimony from PO Gonzalez. His comments are short--no need for embellishment in a case like this. I ask a few questions, but George has already admitted guilt and there is no getting around the positive tests, the failures to report and the change of residence. End of phase one.

We quickly move to the second phase and Mr. Ford asks me if there is anything my client would like to say. I huddle with George and tell him that if there is anything he wants to say about the charges, he can say it now. George simply testifies, "I messed up." Getting ready to summarzie on behalf of my client, I ask George if there is anything else he would like to say. George begins to cry as he says: "I lost everything. I lost my wife. I lost my home. I lost my job. My boss was a good man." George is now sobbing. These are real sobs of sorrow and George cannot continue. Mr. Ford asks me if there is anything I would like to add. I point out that George was on parole for almost three years without incident, that he hit a bad patch starting with problems at the shelter. I repeatedly intersperse my summary with George's words, "I messed up," adding that George owned up to everything he did, that he was not trying to avoid responsibility. Mr. Ford cuts me off, saying, "Thank you." I continue and Mr. Ford cuts me off again, saying "Counselor, we get it. He messed up. The hearing is now ended." He then turns off the tape recorder.

It is now up to PO Gonzalez and Mr. Ford to determine what recommendation to make. Both vote in favor of letting George go. No additional jail time. No sanctions. George has won his own case. My role was pure window dressing. George is a free man, and as we part I tell him to call me any time. George tells me that he won't let me down.

Parole: Defending the Mentally Challenged, Pt. 1

2006-06-20T00:01:00.000-04:00

I walk into the Bexar County Jail, a combination jail and prison that is huge. A Bexar County Parole Officer greets me and we head back into the bowels of the prison in order to participate in a parole hearing. There is no feeling like walking into a prison. It permeates every pore. A prison is more than the sum of the sights and sounds that send the message, "This is where humans are caged." It transcends the left-brain world of logic and words and leaves you spooked and wondering what it would be like to be a resident instead of a visitor.

Inmates in orange suits are in their cells, except for the few who are mopping the floor or are outside on a cleaning detail of some kind. Those who are allowed out of their cells for such details are called trustees by the prison system; trustee is invariably pronounced "trusty" by the inmates. Trustees are the happiest ("happiest" being a most relative term in this environment) because their days go by faster while they work outside their cells. They also get a break on their prison time; trustee time is 3-1, meaning they get 3 days credit for every actual day served. Those who are not granted trustee status sit in cells and wait for the next break. Their time goes by slowly. I think about their time and wonder if an Einstein relativity equation could possibly capture the slowness of time in a prison.

Eventually I get to a "conference room" in the jail where I will defend a parolee at a revocation hearing--my client is accused of violating a condition of his parole. Those who are released from prison on parole sign contracts that bind them to very strict terms. Scheduled and random drug testing. Regular reporting to their parole officer. Staying at an agreed-upon residence. Going to counseling. Taking their prescriptions. Staying away from places that serve alcoholic beverages. Working at a state-arranged job. And many more. Breaking one or more of these conditions can result in the parolee having his or her parole revoked and being sent back to prison, or sanctions can be imposed. These sanctions range from staying in an interim facility to reporting or being tested more often.

My clients all have the same thing in common: they are mentally challenged. Either they have low IQ's or they are mentally ill. I accept state appointments to represent them. As you can imagine, it is not an easy task to take on. The communications process can be extremely challenging. Surprises abound.

Today I defend "George," a large African-American whose IQ is 67. (I'm not sure which IQ test is administered). I have read his file and spoken to him. He was sent to jail originally for multiple counts of cocaine possession and stealing. He spent several years at Huntsville, the largest prison in Texas, prior to being released on parole. The allegations against are that he tested positive for opiates, for cocaine (a separate test is given for cocaine), that he is no longer residing where he agreed to stay, and that he did not report to his parole officer the last few months, nor did he respond to attempts by the parole officer to reach him. These are typical allegations, and make a slam-dunk case for the state, particularly given that the standard at the hearing is preponderance of the evidence (51% or more probability) rather than the criminal trial court standard of beyond a reasonable doubt. A parolee does not have the procedural protections that a defendant in trial court has. Parole hearings are far more down-to-earth, with an almost exclusive emphasis on facts rather than criminal law or procedure. The hearing will be in two parts, the first to determine guilt or innocence, and the second to determine what, if anything, should be done as a result of the initial finding. Attendees at the hearing are the parole officer, the hearing officer, the parolee, the parolee's attorney (if an attorney has been hired or appointed) and any witnesses. Given the allegations against George, as well as the ease of proving them, it does not look good for George...

"Heathers" Proves True

2006-06-15T13:16:00.000-04:00

In a previous post I questioned the elation over the death of al-Zarqawi, noting that in the dark comedy "Heathers," the protagonist discovers that there's always someone waiting in the wings when it comes to power. Today, the headline on my ISP news is "Terrorism In Iraq Has A New Face," with the subtitle, "He's Taken al-Zarqawi's Place." The article discusses the apparent rise of Egyptian Abu Ayyub al-Masri to head of al-Qaida, providing his resume of terrorism, training, and important connections.

And if al-Masri isn't chosen as the new leader...
American Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said that al-Masri's ability to exert leadership over al-Qaida cells remained unclear and there were other "al-Qaida senior leadership members and Sunni terrorists" who might try to take over the operations.

Let's agree that al-Zarqawi was a murderer, but that celebrating his death as if a major blow has been dealt to al-Qaida is as farcical as a dark comedy.

Dixie Chicks Update

2006-06-14T12:53:00.000-04:00

In a previous post, I discussed the rejection of the Dixie Chicks by much of the country muisic crowd, and mentioned their new CD, Taking the Long Way, which is more rock than country. With songs like Not Ready To Make Nice, they make their intentions clear. The CD has been a huge success, selling over half a million copies. Yet the Dixie Chicks are looking at canceling up to half of their concert dates because of poor ticket sales. One might think this was still due to the fallout of their criticisms of Bush and his policies. But the Wall Street Journal offers another explanation: The Dixie Chicks are finding that, just like employees who try to change careers, moving to a different area is not easy. Are the Dixie Chicks now a rock group, a country group or a mix? The success of Taking the Long Way Home might well be due to curiosity as much as anything. And those curious to hear the new sound and the unrepentant message are probably not the kind of fans who are going to line up to buy tickets to a concert. I'd bet that most of the ticket buyers are die-hard fans who want to hear the early hits of the Dixie Chicks. With Bush's popularity ratings so low, I can't imagine that the fallout of the Maines comments a few years ago is having any effect today.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and "Heathers"

2006-06-12T11:27:00.001-04:00

Now that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has been killed, articles and television news commentary are raising the spector of optimism. We took out the #2 terrorist (maybe even #1 depending on bin Laden's health), so it only makes sense that we have less to worry about when it comes to terrorism.

(Getting off-topic for a moment, don't you find it interesting that it is being reported that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi lived for 52 minutes after the bombs hit? Not 51. Not 53. Exactly 52. In criminal cases here in the U.S., we rarely get that kind of exactitude. God knows that after all the emphasis on DNA testing, not to mention the techniques shown on the three CSI television series, that we're all aware of the science applied to time of death. But this guy gets bombed, his body has to be transported, and only then can tests be run, and they find out how long he lived after the bombing to the minute)?

Moving back to the subject of optimism over al-Zarqawi's death, I refer you to the movie "Heathers." It is dark. It is hilarious. It is full of memorable quotes. It is that rare Hollywood film that offers brutal insights into the human condition in a most entertaining way. This late-80's film is about a high school couple, Veronica and J.D., played by Winona Ryder and Christian Slater, who decide to murder the cruel leader of the cruelest of In-Clique girls who run the school. Then the couple decides that it's time for two bullying jocks to go. (Actually, Veronica thinks she's playing a prank in both cases, but she underestimates J.D.). What Veronica discovers is that when it comes to ruthlessly wielding power, there is always someone ready and willing to fill the void left by the death of a despot. This is a simple psychological truth. The optimistic news commentators could do worse than rent or buy "Heathers" and watch it. It would be one way for them to learn that there is another "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi" out there somewhere just waiting to take the place (if he hasn't already) of the dead al-Zarqawi.

"A Prairie Home Companion"

2006-06-11T21:13:00.000-04:00

"Radio like you've never seen it before." "It is a feel-good movie, a must-see for fans of the weekly radio program." Wrong! Wrong! I say "Wrong!" yet again.

I like Garrison Keillor's actual radio show, but this movie sucks. The movie manages to be annoying, not funny, and amazingly enough, not musically interesting (even for those who like the folk genre that characterizes Keillor's regular show). You can actually see the "genuises" thinking up this movie: "Let's shoot 'A Prairie Home Companion,' but instead of shooting one of the regular shows, we'll invent the thinnest of plots, throw in a name director and a bunch of Holloywood stars, and use them to conduct 'comedic' dialogue." Aaargh!

I would like to have heard one complete song done by Keillor's regulars. No. Instead, each time a "nobody" (or nobody duet) starts singing a song or playing an instrument (and the songs these nobodies performed were by far the best the movie had to offer), the movie cuts to lame exchanges between the Hollywood names, or even more annoyingly, cuts to Virginina Madsen randomly walking around the theater. (Madsen is dressed in a white trenchcoat and plays "Dangerous Woman;" she says she's an angel as she walks around the theater looking for someone to take to heaven. Hey, I told you it was lame). Okay, we've got Woody Harrelson, Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Kline, Lindsay Lohan, Virginia Madsen, John C. Reilly, Maya Rudolph (the former SNL star), Meryl Streep, and Lily Tomlin. Can we squeeze a few more stars in? The sad part is that the Holloywood stars and not the actual radio stars dominate the movie. We get to see Hollywood singing (or lip-synching) ill-chosen songs as the plot grinds through the lamest of comedic points.

Keillor and his radio show would have been far better served if a film documentary had been done. An aging Robert Altman and Hollywood-comes-to-Minnesota made a farce (and not in a good way) of it.

Dad and D-Day

2006-06-07T10:42:00.002-04:00

On June 6, 1944, my father landed at Utah Beach as part of the Allied invasion of Normandy, France (commonly referred to as D-Day). Despite the fact that Dad's regiment made at least five landings during WWII, he never said much about his war experiences until a few years prior to the end of his life. "The boys who landed at Omaha got it a lot worse than we did" was almost all I ever heard about his landing at Normandy under enemy fire. But he added, "When I jumped out of the landing craft the first thing my foot stepped on was a body." I once asked Dad what the hardest part of WWII was for him, and he answered, "Coming home and knowing Clement wouldn't be there." (Clement was his twin brother, who was killed in Saipan. Two of my uncles were killed in WWII).

Late in his life he was invited to speak at high schools about WWII and his experiences, and by then he believed that WWII and the reasons for its being fought were important for young people to know. He spoke on numerous occasions, and was impressed with the interest the students demonstrated and by the questions they asked.

I would have written this short piece yesterday, but got preoccupied with visitors. Sorry, Dad, but I know you'll understand. We haven't forgotten.

X-Men Powers

2006-05-26T18:25:00.000-04:00

I've never read an X-Men comic and I've only seen part of one X-Men movie, so the question I am about to pose is probably obvious to all X-Men fans. What is the deal with the huge disparity in powers? (This obvious question came to me as I watched a promo on AOL). As I understand it, the X-Men are mutants with special powers who are just trying to get along. These special powers, however, seem to vary tremendously. Some of the X-Men have God-like powers. Storm controls--surprise--the weather. Professor Xavier controls minds. Magneto, not exactly a good guy but not all bad either as I understand it, controls magnetism. Dark Phoenix has telekinetic powers that put her in Level 5 (the highest level, I assume) of mutant powers. Cyclops directs some sort of powerful energy from, where else, his eyes. Then you get to the X-Men that seem to have gotten gypped. Wolverine has these claws. Is that really a power? Okay, they are something like 9-12 inches long when he unleashes them, but how can that compare to weather control or mind control? Isn't the claw thing rather wimpy? That's it? Claws? Thunder, lightening, deep freezing ice, mind control, and claws? He also has the ability to heal himself, and he's got some sort of metal that is fused to or has replaced his skeleton, thus giving him tremendous defensive power. (What if another mutant sucked out his heart--would he be able to "heal" a new heart instantly)? But his offense seems to suck. Ditto for Callisto. Again, I must be missing something, but as I understand it, Callisto has the ability to detect other mutants and get to them really fast. Callisto seems at first glance to be some kind of glorified messenger girl. There are a few other examples of mutants who are power-challenged, but you get the idea. Doesn't the disparity in mutant powers create serious credibility issues for some of the mutants? Or is that the point--they act as a team, so the less-powerful bring what they have to the party and no one worries about it?

Desmond Dekker Dead at 64

2006-05-26T10:14:00.000-04:00

He's long been a favorite of mine. From "Honour Your Mother and Your Father" to "007," and my own personal favorite, "It Is Not Easy."

Story at MTV.com

Best American Novels

2006-05-24T11:59:00.000-04:00

Normally, I'm not a huge fan of lists, mainly because I like my OWN lists so much (but also because VH1 has pretty much ruined the whole idea of lists for me with their endless parade of "The 100 Best ____ " shows). BUT, lists can serve to remind one what he has forgotten about somewhere along the way or even missed out on completely.

Making the internet rounds recently has been this New York Times article: What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?

Looks like Toni Morrison's Beloved topped the list, followed by these Honorable Mentions: Don DeLillo's Underworld, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, American Pastoral by Philip Roth and all four Rabbit books by John Updike (which, even though I've never read the series, impresses the hell out of me). The complete list is at the above link.

Overall, the list makes me feel like I have some catching up to do. While I have read the list's #1 pick (thank you, 11th grade English), I spent most of college reading philosophy texts and most of the past few years reading classics and young readers books (for my part-time gig as a Teachers Guide writer). I guess I should really pick me up some Updike and Roth.

Dixie Chicks Turn To Rock

2006-05-23T11:32:00.000-04:00

Those country music fans aren't of the "forgive and forget" persuasion, are they? Once Natalie Maines had the temerity to criticize Bush, or at least say she was ashamed he came from Texas, the Dixie Chicks were banished from country music by country "fans." Maines tried to back off from her original statment, but it was like trying to put the toothepaste back in the tube. Frankly, I thought at the time that the brouhaha would blow over, somewhat similar to the smashing of the Beatles' records back when John Lennon said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. But the grudge carried from 2003-2006 and took the Dixie Chicks down. According to Wikipedia, prior to 2003 (when Maines made her statement) the Dixie Chicks had two albums that sold over 10 million copies, and a number of singles that hit #1 or #2. Interestingly, one of their biggest hits criticized contemporary country music for getting away from its roots and ignoring greats like Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash and Hank Williams. This success did not help them once the country music crowd decided the group had stepped over the line. Radio stations led the country faithful in boycotting all things Dixie Chick, and the group found themselves with sparse audiences at concerts and a much smaller market for their CD's.

Now the Chicks are everywhere. On the cover of Time. On Larry King (next week). Because they have released a no-holds-barred album, Taking the Long Way that, among other things includes lyrics that say they refused to kiss ass and they still can't stand Bush. Interestingly, the album was produced by the guy who produced albums for the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Johnny Cash. More interestingly, for me anyway, the album is more rock than country.

Rock has a history of being associated with giving the finger to the establishment. In the early days of rock, it was all about the beat and a few chords, a beat that drove everyone except teenagers crazy. (When each of the Beatles first heard American rock, they considered it a life-changing experience because it was nothing like the standards being played at the time). The anarchy of rock has a history of scaring the establishment. The hips of Elvis. The haircuts of the Beatles. The lips of Mick Jagger. (So innocent now, but at the time, words like "obscene" were used to describe attributes like those just mentioned). The attitude that every true rocker has is "Let's turn it up and shake it up." Rock fans expect their favorite artists to hold their middle fingers high. And as rock moved from the 50's to the next century, each great act seemed to build on what had gone before, adding nuances and complexity. But the same message was sent each time: Freedom!

So rock on, Dixie Chicks! And to all you country music fans who can appreciate neither Hank Williams (Sr.) nor dissent: Go fuck yourselves!

Bush, NSA and Constitutional Rights

2006-05-22T11:53:00.000-04:00

I hate to be right. It's not like anyone is going to listen to me or that I'm going to get a bonus. But I have to point out that some months ago I sounded the alarm here at Gobsmacked, stating that the Bush rationale of constitutionality for what he was having the National Security Agency (NSA) do was bogus. In short, we had a system in place that gave NSA free reign to listen to conversations for 72 hours while they pursued getting a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Special courts are set up to expedite the requests for eavesdropping, and they virtually always approve the requests. So why would Bush need to bypass a system that was already heavily tilted towards allowing electronic eavedropping? Something was fishy, and it turns out--surprise--it was Bush.

At the time Bush made it sound innocent enough didn't he? Didn't you get the impression from Bush that NSA was funneling gazillions of calls in order to listen to a few phone calls between between American citizens and suspicious characters connected to al-Qaeda? That the number of actual phone calls listened to wasn't that big and that the reason for listening to them was sound, or at least "sound" while we conduct our "war" on terrorism? Bush said he had constitutional authority to order NSA to do this and many people believed him, or didn't care if it was constitutional.

It turns out there's a whole lot more to what NSA has been tasked to do, and NSA has been faithfully executing its tasks with the help of the phone companies (Qwest being the notable exception--though its reasons may be more due to its CEO being accused of insider trading than to any consitutionality concerns). Entire networks of calls between Americans are being constructed in what can only be described as a wholesale eavesdropping operation. This is huge, and the Bush administration knows it. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has actually said that the reason congressional approval wasn't sought for the now-revealed scope of eavesdropping was that the Administration didn't think Congress would approve. That's tantamount to saying, "We know what we're doing is illegal, so we're not going to be so bold as to seek approval for doing it."

Finally, a rant (what else?). If you've watched the news, you've surely seen at least one interview in which an American interviewed by CNN says, "I don't care if they listen to my phone calls." How is a personal preference related to the constitutionality of a government action??!! I might not care if I'm strip-searched by the police, rubber gloves and all, every time I go to enter the grocery store. Are my preferences concerning strip searches by the police in any way related to whether such searches are constitutional? Of course not. So why analyze the Bush/NSA actions that way? Let's analyze the Bush/NSA actions according to relevant federal law. And when we do, we'll find egregious transgressions and a president who has trampled constitutional rights and authorized illegal activities on a massive scale.

Hip-Hop "Oldies"

2006-05-22T00:54:00.000-04:00

Hip-hop is now second to rock in popularity. (Country is third). Some day, radio (or satellite or internet) stations will define themselves by the era of hip-hop that they play. Until then, older hip-hop seems best forgotten, at least judging by today's young listeners, and older hip-hop artists feel they have little in common with today's rappers. Interesting, then, that the Wall Street Journal "Pursuits" section should have a long article devoted to older rappers and a bit of history of the hip-hop genre. Right off the bat, the article quotes Daryl McDaniels, more famous under the name D.M.C., as saying he can better relate to John Fogerty (yes, John Fogerty, the guy the "Bloom County" comic strip used to love to make fun of) than to today's rappers. Rap moves very, very fast, and artists approaching 35 start finding themselves as relevant as J.J. (Jimmie Walker) from the old TV show "Good Times." This is in stark contrast to rock 'n' roll faves like the Rolling Stones (contemporarties of the Beatles, playing rock a quarter of a century before rap was ever heard of), U2, Madonna and Bruce Springsteen, who can put together a tour and make millions of bucks any time the mood strikes them.

The following list (my comments, if any, accompany each choice) from the article is described as "10 essential albums that helped define a genre:"

Beastie Boys, "Licensed To Ill" (1986). Eminem became the white rapper, but these guys were so fresh, so creative that they trounce Eminem as far as I'm concerned.

Run-D.M.C., "Raising Hell" (1986). "Walk this Way" with Aerosmith pulled them into the mainstream.

Eric B. and Rakim, "Paid In Full" (1987). I've never heard of them, but Rakim apparently has a way with words.

Public Enemy, "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back" (1988). The title says it all--politics and race. It's almost as good as "Killing in the Name Of" by Rage Against the Machine.

De La Soul, "3 Feet High and Rising" (1989).

Dr. Dre, "The Chronic" (1992). Synthesizers, funk influence and the intro of "Snoop Doggy Dogg" who now turns up everywhere under his abbreviated name.

The Notorious B.I.G., "Ready to Die" (1994). Many have commented on the title in light of the shooting death of Biggie Smalls in 1997. We're talking some serious violence. Many blamed Smalls for the shooting of fellow rapper Tupac Shakur in 1994 (five bullets). Tupac speculated that other rappers were involved, though Tupac himself perpetrated quite bit of violence before being shot and killed in 1996. Tupac is widely idolized and I believe his records still lead the rap genre in sales. I don't know why this list doesn't include either "2Pacalypse Now" or "Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z." ).

Missy Elliott, "Supa Dupa Fly" (1997). Nothing against Ms. Elliott, but hip-hop strikes me as a genre best suited to male artists.

OutKast, "Speakerboxxx/The Love Below" (2003). Hey Ya!

Kanye West, "Late Registration" (2005).

American Idol--What Else?

2006-05-17T12:48:00.000-04:00

As I wrote in a prior post, I am American Idol impaired. In general, I know only what I learn from late night talk shows and references from other media. Until last night, for instance, I knew only that there was a guy who had been kicked off the show who had been previously considered a lock to win the contest. (Theories as to why abounded. One person told me that so many people thought the guy was a shoo-in that they didn't bother phoning in and voting for him). Once I started seeing pictures of Katherine McPhee, I wondered if people were voting on looks instead of talent.

So I actually tuned in last night to check it out. Oh my God! I still don't get it! (Or maybe I do and I just don't realize it). I watched as Ms. McPhee performed, expecting to be mesmerized. Frankly, she's nice to look at and her voice is strong, but there's something about her presence that annoys that hell out of me. I can't quite put my finger on it, no pun intended, but as soon as she started singing I could hardly stand it. And, again, it was nothing to do with her voice. It had something to do with her. Maybe it was a vibe I thought I was picking up that communicated that as long as she didn't fall flat on her face, she was now definitely going to win. So let's not take any chances. I dunno. Clearly, and I'm quite used to this, I'm in the extreme minority because even this guy Simon, who's supposed to be the ultimate hard-ass, said her performance was the best vocal showcase he's heard all year. (I did read somewhere that he makes $36M a year, so, Reality Check, he knows a whole lot more than me).

The popularity of American Idol extends to 30-second clips. The contenders on AOL today for best clip were: Nick Lachey on Ellen, Ellen on Leno, McPhee on AI, Felicity Huffman on Celebrity Debut, and a segment on Letterman that I love called Great Presidential Speeches in which the last one is always part of a Bush speech in which he looks like an idiot. The tally for most popular clip:

Katharine McPhee's 'Rainbow'	59%
George W. Bush's false start	18%
Ellen's mom joins a crafty gang	13%
Nick Lachey's celeb soured love life	8%
Felicity Huffman's early work	1%

I give up. I'm going to have to tune in to AI for the finale and I'm certainly going to have to vote.

Duke Handles Rape?

2006-05-16T11:32:00.000-04:00

Much has been written about the Duke lacrosse team players' rape of a black stripper being a study in contrasts, most notably, white/black and rich/poor. Both of these contrasts are obvious, particularly to those who have ever visited Duke University and the surrounding area. You don't have to go very far--literally a stone's throw--from Duke's beautiful buildings and campus to find some awfully depressing areas. And most of these lower income areas are inhabited by blacks. If anyone doubts that we have a class system in America, they should visit Duke University and the areas in and around Durham. I'd also add another contrast to those noted above: the jock versus the non-jock. Having seen the pictures of the lacrosse player defendants, read their released statements and listened to their defense attorney, I'm convinced that these players have the typical entitlement attitude that our society encourages athletes to have. (One of the defendants has a criminal case pending in Washington). Lacrosse is huge in the mid-Atlantic region and getting bigger all the time. Lacrosse players are considered all-round jocks who are genuine tough guys, and on campuses where lacrosse is big, they are given the star treatment. It's not too big a leap for some of those guys, thankfully very few, to get to "We're entitled to take advantage of this stripper."

There's something else about this case I'd like to comment on, an AP report of something Duke's Provost said. The AP report read: "At Duke's graduation ceremony over the weekend, Provost Peter Lange blamed the 'sad events and relentless media coverage' of the case for tarnishing the school's image." I hope the AP report took Lange's comment out of context because otherwise it serves as a brutal condemnation of Duke University. (In a similar situation, I cannot imagine, say, UMBC's president, Dr. Freeman Hrabowski, doing anything other than going balls to the wall to make sure that UMBC better connected with the community and send the messsage that UMBC would keep a tight rein on its student-athletes). Duke is a marquee university with a history of world-class academics and leading-edge programs. As such, Duke should be ashamed that its provost employed a defense the Republicans frequently use--blame it on the media--rather than simply stepping up to the plate and accepting responsibility. A better speech might have acknowledged the realities of the privileged Duke students and the underprivileged who live in the surrounding area, and might also have said that Duke was working towards better integrating itself into the community. Many Duke students began community work after the rape was first reported. Let's hope the provost can learn something from them.

Thugball and Hot Women

2006-05-10T17:27:00.000-04:00

Suzanne got free tickets to last night's playoff game between the Spurs and the Mavs and off we went. Before we got to our seats, I was reminded of one aspect of NBA games: Really, really sizzling women attend them. And it's not simply that they are attractive. They dress the part and carry themselves with loads of attitude. The combination is potent. Also, since lots of Dallas fans had tickets to the game, it was interesting to see the contrast between the long-legged blondes from the Big D and the dark-haired beauties from San Antonio. Any mortal would be hard-pressed to choose between the two, but surely would not be disappointed with any of these women who would deign entertain his (or her) entreaties. I don't know what it is about the NBA, but it's the professional sport that has consistently attracted the most women of the above description and this phenomenon has been written about in years past. But last night was an up-front, first-hand reminder.

Last night also reminded me that television cannot do justice to how good professional players are. In tennis for example, it looks so easy on television for a player to take a ball on the rise moving at well over 100 mph, hit it in the middle of his or her racquet, and change direction of the ball for a winner. In person, you gasp in awe. (And if you ever hit with someone at the professional level, you cannot keep even basic groundstrokes hit straight to you in play). It's similar for NBA ball. The size of the guys up front and personal is daunting enough, but the speed, power and physical play is lightyears faster, stronger and rougher than you ever imagined. Even a no-frills pass can be executed so fast that you wonder how the player catching the ball manages to hold on to it, muchless immediately move to shoot. Every time Tim Duncan got the ball, he had at least one big guy like Erick Dampier mauling him (quite literally), and one quick small guy slapping at the ball. The physical nature of the game, particularly at classic low-post position play can hardly be overstated. Trip after trip down the court, the big guys are leaning and pushing in ways that would have any mortal on his ass in two seconds. A smaller guy (meaning less brawn) who enters that territory better make sure he's quick enough to get through harm's way and to the basket, or he's gonna end up like Manu Ginobili did a few times last night--on the floor and bleeding.

As for shooting, it's also difficult to see just how quickly some of the players release the ball, how deadly some of them are, and how far out some of them are shooting from. You can easily see the 3-point line on TV, but you can't appreciate how far that is from the basket--and many players take shots from a yard or more past the 3-point line. I watched Dirk Nowitzki warming up and he missed exactly two shots. Keep in mind that a lot of shots are taken during warm-up, and a lot of these shots are either from way outside or are game-simulation shots where a player moves, quickly pulls up and shoots. Nowitzki didn't miss until he finally tried a few shots that bordered on the outrageous.

I'd still change a few aspects of NBA ball. Call players for traveling (Nowitzki dragged his post foot a lot). Call offensive players for charging instead of defensive players for blocking. Cut back on some of the physical play so that we could see a little more finesse.

Baltimore Makes The Big-Time

2006-05-10T13:45:00.000-04:00

I'm late to the party in commenting on this, but I notice that once again the Miss USA pageant was held in Charm City. And, frankly, I thought the scantily clad contestants were great ambassadors for Baltimore. The program took the time for the hosts to do a show-and-tell of the city, and they actually did a surprisingly good job. Yes, they mentioned all the standard things about Baltimore, the Inner Harbor being Exhibit A in that regard, but they also paid homage (as does the Miss USA web site) to Baltimore's neighborhoods. I'm partial to that because so many cities don't have real neighborhoods; many cities are more like Dorothy Parker's famous description of L.A. ("seventy-two suburbs in search of a city"). The hosts also mentioned something I'd never heard of in Baltimore, some kind of pop culture museum. (Since OTL's employer has something to do with the museum, I'm surprised he didn't tip me off about it). Note: The only articles I could find on the museum were from 2005, so perhaps the idea has been scrapped. But why would the Miss USA folks mention it only a month ago if that were the case? I have no idea how good or how bad this museum will be, but the mere fact that the hosts mentioned an attraction that I'd never heard of intrigued me.

By contrast, I recently read an American Airlines magazine article on things to see and do in Baltimore, and it read like any article I've seen in the last five years. The Inner Harbor. Camden Yards. Fells Point and the de rigueur mention of the Admiral Fell Inn. Little Italy. End of story. Since many people who read airline magazines are well-traveled, you'd think AA would have found at least one thing that was a little off the beaten track. If OTL were to write such an article, I guarantee he'd come up with more intriguing sites in a few sentences than were in the airline's entire article.

Investment Diversification

2006-05-08T15:03:00.000-04:00

Investment diversification means spreading your resources across several asset classes and sub-classes. Asset classes are things like equities (stocks), bonds, and real estate. Diversification is most often used in conjunction with stocks and bonds. The idea with bonds is to buy different qualities of bonds and to "ladder" them, which means to choose different periods of maturity. With stocks, investors are encouraged to diversify by having various percentages of their money in small-, medium- and large-cap stocks, as well as international stocks. One can further diversify according to investment style--say, value or growth--and choose sectors (health care, energy, natural resources, consumer staples, basic materials and so forth). Diversification, in a nutshell, is placing your eggs in several baskets instead of one basket. It reduces your risk significantly.

Here's what is rarely mentioned about diversification: It waters down the return on your investment. The greatest investor of the 20th century, Warren Buffet, has said he prefers to put all his eggs in one basket and watch that basket very closely. (Now that Berkshire Hathaway, Mr. Buffet's company, has become so bloated, I'm not sure he's following his own advice any more). As you spread your investment dollars among classes, you can be sure that not all the classes are going to go down during any significant investment period. But you can be sure they are not going to go up, either. For instance, small cap stocks have been so hot over the last few years that they are now selling at a 33% premium. By contrast, large caps have languished. Exceptions (energy companies in large caps, for instance) exist in both categories of course, but that's been the general trend. The bottom line is that if you had your money exclusively in small caps over the past few years, you would have made a lot more money than if you were diversified. And if you had it exclusively in natural resources, energy or gold stocks, you'd really be sitting pretty. (After the summer months end, watch for large caps to roar). Sectors rotate as well. Both gold and oil have gone through the roof in the past year. Health care, particularly most of the big pharmaceutical companies has not done anything. If you watch the sectors that have had big run-ups in price, as well as those that have gone nowhere, you can buy low and sell high if you investigate those sectors that are not the current hot spots.

So should you diversify or not? That depends on how much time you want to invest in investing. If you prefer to "set it and forget it," diversify. (Columnist Scott Burns has a Couch Potato Portfolio that consists of 50% stocks and 50% bonds--all invested in index funds--and it has outperformed most actively managed mutual funds. I believe Mr. Burns has also updated the portfolio towards 60-40 and 70-30 stocks to bonds. Regardless of what you think of his portfolio, his web site has a variety of interesting and excellent ideas). If you wish to be more active and follow the market, consider having a diversified base and using the rest of your investment dollars to move into sectors and funds that you have done your homework on.

As always, don't make any investment decision unless you know why you are doing it.

Typical Consumer Rep Response

2006-05-08T11:14:00.000-04:00

But at least I'm getting a few coupons out of it.

Hi Andy,

Thank you for contacting us recently regarding the number of servings
in Kashi® Organic Promise™ Strawberry Fields. We sincerely appreciate
your feedback and realize how crucial it is to the success of any
product.

The serving size for the cereal is based upon weight not volume. One
serving is 32 grams, which is approximately equal to 1 cup of cereal.
Each box contains about nine, 32 gram servings, or a total of 295 grams
of cereal. In addition, the nutritional facts listed on the label
correspond to 53 grams.

If you have a small kitchen scale, along with the time and patience,
you can also measure out your servings exactly to 32 grams.

Thanks again or your interest in the Kashi Company. I will mail you
some coupons to use the next time you shop.

Best of health,

Anjanette M Alpher
Consumer Relations

Letter to the Makers of Kashi Cereal

2006-05-04T15:43:00.000-04:00

Hi --

I recently purchased a box of your Organic Promise Strawberry Fields cereal, and I just wanted to voice a small complaint.

I've been eating the Heart to Heart and the GOLEAN, but decided to give Strawberry Fields a shot. What disappointed me was the fact that I only seemed to get three bowls of cereal out of the box! Granted, bowl size is a relative measure, but when you consider that with Heart to Heart and GOLEAN I can typically get six nicely sized bowls out of a box... well, you understand what I'm getting at. It was a not-so-nice surprise is all.

Thanks for listening,

Andy

Second Colbert Post O' The Day

2006-05-01T11:12:00.000-04:00

On Saturday, Stephen Colbert gave a speech at a dinner for members of the White House Correspondents' Association. All the Washington bigwigs were there (including the President, the First Lady, John McCain, Justice Scalia, etc., etc.), and I think Colbert took a bite out of every single one of them. Seriously, his speech was so brutal it's almost uncomfortable to watch.

Crooks and Liars has it HERE.

"I believe that the government that governs best is a government that governs least, and by these standards we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq."

Thank You, 60 Minutes

2006-05-01T09:23:00.000-04:00

For those of you familiar with the documentaries of Ken Burns (especially The Civil War), this bit from The Colbert Report is hilarious.

CHECK IT OUT.

(seems to work best in Internet Explorer)

Wall St. Journal to Gobsmacked: "Sure, we'll get our ideas from you."

2006-04-28T15:06:00.000-04:00

As dedicated readers know, earlier this month we posted a story about the Nintendo re-creation of the 1986 World Series. I guess the Wall Street Journal recognized the awesomeness and decided to do a story of its own.

You're welcome!

Awesome

2006-04-28T10:34:00.000-04:00

Is there anything worse than hearing that yet another oil company is posting profits in the billions?

Wonder Woman "Contest"

2006-04-28T01:01:00.000-04:00

I'm always the last to hear anything, so this may be old news, but I understand they are looking for a Wonder Woman to play in the movie. I've previously written of my admiration for Lynda Carter when she was back in the campy days of the TV series, and I see no need to deviate from the characteristics that made her my favorite (as opposed to Lindsay Wagner as the Bionic Woman). Wonder Woman should have a combination of amazonian and sexy physique, should genuinely look like she could and would kick ass, should have a beautiful face and hypnotic eyes so she can stare someone down (and mesmerize me), and have dark hair. Some of these characteristics are arbitrary but the whole exercise is a bit capricious since Hollywood is involved. I've read that the following women are being considered for the part, and have posted my comments next to them:

Nadia Bjorlin: My #1 pick. She's got it all!

Catherine Zeta-Jones: She's played physical roles and action/adventure roles, but her vibe seems more the sexy James Bond seductress than a genuine ass-kicker.

Lucy Lawless: I hate to say this given my own age, but she's getting too long in tooth to be WW.

Beyonce: My #2 pick. She can do attitude better than I thought, and she's certainly got the kind of curves that say "danger."

Charlize Theron: Too blonde and too many awards for making herself look ugly.

Evangeline Lilly: My #3 pick. She's got the looks and is rated R--as Vince Vaughn explained in "Swingers," you've got to get past PG and be a little menacing to keep everyone guessing.

Ashley Judd: More mentally tough than physically. Also, too old.

Rebecca Romijn: Big and blonde and we've seen her in "costume" as one of the X-Men. Dye her hair and she's a front-runner.

Jennifer Love Hewitt: You must be kidding. She fails every criteria.

Lindsay Lohan: Looks too much like a punk kid. She's more annoying than entertaining.

Natalie Portman: Ha! Yeah, a 90-pound Wonder Woman. "Mini-Me" Wonder Woman, maybe.

Kate Bosworth: Strains of the Beach Boys' "Surfer Girl" play.

Little Stevie Wonder

2006-04-27T14:52:00.000-04:00

Ever since a friend loaned me Songs in the Key of Life last year, I've been really into Stevie Wonder. With songs like "Pastime Paradise," "Sir Duke," and "I Wish," that record is truly something else. Nearly every song is money!

Recently, I picked up Definitive Collection, which is basically a beginner's course in Stevie Wonder (exactly what I needed) and let me tell you, there are some STUNNERS on there. My favorite Stevie song all-time is probably "Superstition," a song I've heard credited for opening the door to funk for the majority of the white population. I'm also a big fan of "I Was Made to Love Her," which is a fantastic song and right up there with "Superstition."

The real treat on Definitive Collection, though, is "Fingertips (Part 2)," a live recording by 13-year-old Stevie, then known as Little Stevie Wonder. This recording was made at a live Motown Revue performance and kicks like only a song from the early '60s Motown era can. I highly recommend seeking this one out on iTunes or somewhere because it offers an early glimpse at a performer who is obviously going places. (Of note: the recording features a young Marvin Gaye on the drums!)

News for Conservatives Makes Big Bucks

2006-04-26T16:38:00.000-04:00

Geoff and I have discussed how the political middle of American politics has moved significantly to the right. If additional proof of our premise was needed, it came in the form of a Wall Street Journal article on April 25th. The article focused on the 10th anniversary of Fox News, but made a telling point. Fox News "blew by its rival (CNN) almost 4 1/2 years ago" and has stayed ahead of CNN in the ratings game ever since. In the words of Johnny Carson, "I did not know that." I thought Fox was a joke, watched only by the far right fringe, and now I read that it's not only taken seriously, but it's blowing CNN away.** In fact, Fox News is doing so well that it intends to demand a lot more money from the cable companies that carry it. Whoa! That means that of the people who are interested in national and international news--and let's face it, most Americans aren't all that interested--a hefty percentage of them tune into Fox News to get informed. (I can't tell you how tempted I was put quotes around "informed" in relation to Fox News). Can it get any more depressing? Let me put this in one declarative sentence: Of the limited number of people interested in the big picture news, most tune into Fox News. The mind reels at what their perception of the U.S. and the world must be 1) by the mere fact of their choice of Fox News as their source for getting the latest scoop and 2) the far right spin that Fox News puts on much of the news it presents.

** There is a ray of hope. I did some additional research into ratings and found that the way programs are polled, Fox does indeed have many more viewers than CNN, but in actual numbers of viewers per day, CNN still leads Fox. The reason for this is that Nielson "pings" the networks several times a day to arrive at its ratings. So those networks whose viewers watch for longer periods of time get credit for more viewers. But CNN viewers tend to tune in, get the news and change the channel or turn off the telly. Fox viewers are fewer in number, but watch longer, probably because they are tuning in to the opinion programs.

Wes Anderson's AMEX Ad

2006-04-25T16:44:00.000-04:00

This is basically everything I love about Wes Anderson in the span of about two minutes.

Julio Franco and Kaz Matsui

2006-04-21T13:33:00.000-04:00

Last night, the New York Mets' Julio Franco hit a home run. It was an ordinary home run in every way, except that it was hit by a 47-year-old, making Franco the oldest player in the history of Major League Baseball to hit a home run. Pretty cool.

What I liked about this story was the photo that ESPN ran on its home page (right; click to enlarge). If that's not the look of a man who's just hit a home run I don't know what is. It's all in the eyes.

Also of note in that game (Mets vs. Padres) was that Kazuo Matsui, in his first at-bat of the year, hit an inside-the-park home run. That makes three years in a row that Matsui has hit home runs in his first at-bats of the season!

Check out some great video footage of both of these events here.

Eva, I Hardly Knew You

2006-04-20T16:27:00.000-04:00

I took Eva Longoria to task some months ago for insulting a San Antonio bicycle cop who requested that Tony Parker and her move on. (They were stopped in the middle of the street in Tony's huge, black Escalade). Based on her beauty titles (Miss Corpus Christi and so forth) I assumed that she was yet another spoiled Beautiful Person in America, used to getting her own way simply because The Gorgeous rule in America.

Lately I've learned, however, that Ms. Longoria worked at Wendy's for four years while attending high school. She started in her freshman year and by the time she was a senior had been promoted to assistant manager. She can still recite the order in which the ingredients, including all condiments, are to be put on a hamburger bun. Anyone who works at a fast food place for that long has my eternal admiration. It might be fun for a burnout like Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey's character in American Beauty), but in real life the ultra-high turnover speaks for itself. Interestingly enough, the manager she worked for still works at the same Wendy's (probably more a reflection of the South Texas economy than his career aspirations). Perhaps she should take a drive through her old Wendy's drive-thru for old times sake. It can't be too far from where she and her parents live in San Antonio.

I'm not sure that I would have been able to answer had I gone into Ms. Longoria's Wendy's and been asked by Eva if I wanted to "Biggie-Size it."

A Sad State of Affairs

2006-04-20T12:56:00.000-04:00

This is pretty interesting, if depressing for O's fans like me.

The Baltimore Orioles' average attendance is down 18.8% so far from last year. That's pretty surprising given that they have a winning record, are second in the always competitive A.L. East, and that the weather has been downright beautiful!

Check out the chart below (borrowed from Rick Maese's blog) for attendance numbers for the Majors.

Team Diff. Games Avg.

Balt -18.8% 12 26,238

Bos +3.5 9 36,235

NYY -8.5 3 50,176

TB +25 7 17,214

Tor +6.5 8 27,632

Team Diff. Games Avg.

ChW +32% 9 30,878

Cle +17.5 6 24,639

Det +0.5 7 23,100

KC -5.5 5 21,730

Min +6.5 8 27,237

Team Diff. Games Avg.

LAA +7% 6 42,202

Oak -2 8 22,898

Sea -15 9 26,762

Tex +2.5 7 31,767

Team Diff. Games Avg.

Atl +12% 6 34,749

Fla -50 6 14,562

NYM +4 11 39,479

Phi -8 7 28.163

Was -17 3 31,993

Team Diff. Games Avg.

ChC +2% 6 39,289

Cin -15 9 22,026

Hou -7.5 10 31,370

Mil +13 6 26,508

Pit 0 10 20,430

StL +4 6 40,755

Team Diff. Games Avg.

Ari -14% 9 23,717

Col -6.5 9 23,777

LAD -11.5 9 43,086

SD -13.5 5 31,987

SF -19 6 32,237

Rumsfeld Rerun--"The Daily Show"

2006-04-20T12:00:00.000-04:00

I don't know if you caught The Daily Show last night, but Jon Stewart showed a clip of Rumsfeld talking about us going to war against Iran and how that was the furthest thing from the truth. Rumsfeld used the words "henny penny" and in that pedantic voice of his explained how one newspaper reports something and before you know it all the rags have picked up on it. Then Stwart showed a clip from 2003 in which Rumsfeld used the exact same words in discussing Iraq. It was amazing how close the clips were.

Stewart added in that news anchor style of his that if a country has a four-letter name beginning with "Ira" and Rumsfeld has anything to say about it, get yourself on full alert.

It's not very funny as reported here, but at the time Stewart presented clips of Rumsfeld and made his comment, it was hilarious. And a little scary too.

Deciderman

2006-04-20T11:38:00.000-04:00

There were two great Leno segments last night. The first was during the monologue, when Leno brought out a comic book with a superhero on the front of it called "Deciderman." He then went on to spoof the George W. comments that he (Dubya) was the decider and he was going to decide what was best as regards Donald Rumsfeld. (I noticed that the manner in which George W. phrased his comments, it sounded as if he was going to do what was best for Rumsfeld, not what was best for the country). The second funny segment was when Leno showed a clip of an intern visiting a convention that was a gathering of people who had created new superheroes and were dressed in the costumes of the superheroes they had created. Most of them, frankly, were not very good at explaining the purpose and powers of their character, even as they wore the very costume of the character they created. Perhaps it's more about the costume. One guy in full was costume was a therapist in Santa Barbara. (When checking the credentials of your therapist, you need to look beyond education and experience and check into his or her fantasy life and corrsponding ability to distinguish between the two).

The Leno segments gave me an idea. I'm going to compete with George W. for the Deciderman role. I can decide! Hell, a coin toss or roulette machine can decide. No knowledge or need to be right necessary! Yes. No. She stays. He goes. Get more oil. Declare war. Go into debt. Really deep debt. I can go on Deal or No Deal, the hottest game show going, and choose a number between 1 and 26 again and again. I won't even hesitate or start crying or moan to my on-stage family or the audience. Hell, the boxes with numbers are random, so I'm going to whiz through my picks--at least as much as Howie Mandel allows me to.

Jumping right into negative campaigning, I'm going to show the infamous lost 7 minutes of George W. when he was told we were under attack on 9/11. Michael Moore has already done the work for me. I'll just show that segment again and again where Bush has that stupid deer-in-the-headlights look on his face. I'll be a shoo-in.

Excuse me. I've got to go work on a costume.

Help Needed

2006-04-19T13:29:00.000-04:00

I am American Idol impaired. I don't understand why so many people care so fervently about who wins and who gets kicked off and why the judges make the comments they do. I've never seen the actual show, only ads for it, snippets of reports about it, and Big Headlines on my ISP about it. This means I have very little to no idea as to what 90% of America is talking about, which further means that I am in effect a social outcast.

If anyone can explain this phenomenon and why a talent contest means so much to so many people, I will be in your debt. Help!

Wet Spots on the Kitchen Ceiling!

2006-04-19T12:45:00.000-04:00

We've had uncharacteristically hot weather for this time of year, even for San Antonio, with highs over 100 degrees the last several days. With today's high projected to be only 95, we'll probably have to get our winter coats back out.

The daytime heat we're having is a dry heat, which of course means that 102 degrees in San Antonio is the equivalent of 67 degrees in Baltimore. When the sun sets, however, the humidity rises and the evenings tend to be hot and sticky until about 1:00 a.m. Fortunately our A/C is working. Or is it?

Last night, I noticed a couple of spots on the ceiling of our kitchen. (We have a two-story house with the bedrooms and two bathrooms upstairs). Neither of the spots was under a bathroom, so I assumed a pipe was leaking and then running along some wood before dripping down to form the spots on the kitchen ceiling. I pointed this out to my wife, who of course made helpful comments like, "Oh my God! A water pipe or drain pipe is leaking and it's going to soak the kitchen ceiling drywall until it falls down in wet pieces and makes a mess everywhere and then we're all going to die!" Or something close to that. I checked the upstairs bathrooms and found no evidence of a leak. I called up a plumber (to be fair, my wife recommended this plumber) and the helpful woman who answered the phone asked me if the indoor A/C unit was above the spots in the kitchen, because if it was, a pan was probably overflowing and I should turn the A/C off. She also added that it was terribly important that I figure out whether it was a plumbing or an A/C problem because she had different technicians for each job. I checked. Eureka! How could I have missed an entire A/C unit? (The main unit is outside--this is the inside unit that works with it). "Can you send someone out" I asked in that "I'll pay anything, do anything" voice. She could, but the earliest he could get to the house was 11:30 p.m. Okay! Send him.

The A/C man arrived at midnight. For once, I was happier to see a man at our door than Toby (our Beagle mix dog). A most pleasant, easy-going guy, Bob got right to work. In short, he looked at our entire system, cleaned the main drainage pipe by shooting nitrogen through it at 400 psi, cleaned the backup drainage pipe, went outside and checked his work, cleaned again to make sure, and before you knew it all the water was gone from the pans that collect it. As we sat down to take care of the bill, I told him he must be awfully busy. Ha! I didn't know the half of it. He works Friday to Friday, on call 24 hours a day, and had been working from 8 a.m. to 1:30 a.m. (the earliest he got home) and even 3:30 a.m. (the latest he got home). And if he got home and got another call, he would have to go out again. Believe me, I would not be as "pleasant and easy-going" as Bob if I were putting in those kinds of hours, many in very, very hot conditions. As Bob left our house at 1:45 a.m., I have to say I admired the guy.

The All's Well That Ends Well Category: The bill was $156, half the price of an iPod. This plumbing company does not charge extra for making after-hours calls.

"Post Turtle"

2006-04-19T12:42:00.000-04:00

As a Terrapin, I resent any fun being poked at a turtle, but nevertheless the following has been whizzing around the internet and is pretty much on target:

While suturing a cut on the hand of a 75-year-old Texas rancher, whose hand was caught in a gate while working cattle, the doctor struck up a conversation with the old man. Eventually, the topic got around to former Texas Governor George W. Bush and his elevation to the White House.

The old Texan said, "Well, ya know, Bush is a 'post turtle.'"

Not being familiar with the term, the doctor asked him what a "post turtle" was.

The old rancher said, "When you're driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that's a 'post turtle.'"

The old man saw a puzzled look on the doctor's face, so he continued to explain.

"You know...he didn't get there by himself, he doesn't belong there, he doesn't know what to do while he's up there, and you just want to help the dumb shit get down."

"Thank You For Smoking"

2006-04-16T11:09:00.000-04:00

If you haven't seen this movie, go see it. Don't read any reviews. Just see the movie. The reviews I've read miss the point. Some want to explore how a character can represent the cigarette industry and look himself in the mirror. Others want to discuss how effective the movie is at attacking the cigaratte, guns and boooze industries. All of them (or at least all of the reviews I read) miss the larger and most important point: You can sell Americans anything if you choose the right tactics. The tactics aren't necessarily subtle, but they work.

The protagonist in Thank You For Not Smoking is a lobbyist, and an extremely effective one, for the cigarette industry. Nick Naylor, played so compellingly and convincingly by Aaron Eckhart, really does have you believing that he can sell anything. As he says, "You know the guy who can pick up any girl? I'm him on crack." Throughout the movie, Nick is placed in what are seemingly situations from hell for a cigarette supporter, yet he manages to turn the tables and have you laughing out loud. (I write this as someone who haters smoking and smokers--yes, I'm sorry, I actually hate the smokers too--and who suffers from asthma).

When Nick's son, Joey, asks for help with his homework assignment, a 2-page paper that answers the question "Why is the American government the best government," Nick glibly answers, "Because of our endless appeals system." But then he goes on to explain that the question itself is ludicrous, and cites some of the key statistics that determine quality of life in developed countries and that demonstrate that America is sorely lacking in many of these key areas. He further explains how to play the game in terms of answering the question even though the question itself is stupid. In a later scene, Nick talks more about the art of arguing with Joey, and uses ice cream flavors as a demonstration. Joey chooses to support chocolate and Nick chooses Vanilla. At the end of the argument, Joey says, "But you didn't convince me that vanilla was the best flavor." Nick answers, "I didn't have to. All I had to do was undermine your argument that chocolate was the best flavor."

In 90 minues, Nick gives us the short course in how, if you are morally bankrupt, intent on winning at all costs, and able to employ a variety of techniques to manipulate words and arguments, you are going to win. Let's look at the selling of the Iraq War as an example. As with Nick's comments and advice on Joey's paper, Bush & Company didn't answer the questions posed to them. They rephrased the questions to ones they wanted to answer, and argued accordingly. As the old maxim goes, How you frame the issue (or question) determines the outcome. And that's exactly what the Republicans did. What else did they do? Consider Nick's observation about the ice cream argument. The Republicans used that same techinique when they equated questioning the war with treason. They didn't convince the Democrats that the war was right so much as they destroyed any chance the Democrats had to prove that going to war was wrong. (They later continued to use techniques to achieve the objective of cutting off any chance of substantive dialogue). And now we come to the classic: Remove most of the doubt by calling on a seemingly knowledgeable source for evidence that supports your argument. In the movie, Nick uses a "lab" that's part of an institute set up by the tobacco industry to cast doubt on evidence that definitively demonstrates that tobacco causes all the health problems that it does. Bush & Co. used the intelligence community in the same way to convince Americans that Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction. Of course, when this last argument was shown to be patently false, several other arguments were brought to the fore by the war supporters, most notably how bad a guy Hussein was--despite the fact that the U.S. plays ball with nasty authoritarian regime characters from many countries every day.

If you watch Nick in action, and stop laughing for a moment, you see how Americans end up buying the unthinkable. We think we have the greatest nation on earth, the fairest, the most pure of heart, the smartest people, the one in which anyone can succeed--despite overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary.

--The key stats that Nick cites, the real stats, place the U.S. in the middle-to-bottom of the pack when it comes to comparing quality of life in developed countries.

--If you're poor, you actually have a chance to move up the ladder to midde- or upper-class in most European nations than in the U.S. This is an historic first, and part of a decades long pattern of the entrenchment of our poor. This was reported in the Wall Street Journal, that booster club of capitalism.

--The overwhelming trend of the past three decades has been the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer in this country, despite our perception that we have a fair country. The trend has gotten more pronounced under the Bush Regime.

--We invaded a country with a secular leader despite the facts that the country had nothing to do with the infamous events of 9/11/2001, it had no weapons of mass destruction, and the fact that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by religious fanatics largely from Saudi Arabia.

--We sent about 11,000 troops to find bin Laden, the guy who actually did set in motion the events that culminated in 9/11, in Afghanistan. Bin Laden's resources and Afghanistan's size and terrain render such a paltry effort ludicours, despite Bush's repeated comments that we were going to root out bin Laden and bring him to justice.

--We have now managed to create a situation in which it would actually be preferable to bring back a monster like Hussein and put him in power, than to continue to ineffectively try to contain an Iraqi civil war and the growth of religious extremist insurgents.

--We are now over a trillion in debt as a result of our invasion and occupation of Iraq, with no successful end in sight. If other countries didn't buy our debt, we'd be screwed.

--Our government debt is compunded by the fact that our trade deficit off the charts and is a bigger threat to our national security than terrorism.

--Republicans say we care about the environment, but the monies and resources we commit to it show that we don't.

And so much more. See this movie. Laugh. Then consider how we've made such a mess of things.

Maaaaaaad Money

2006-04-13T12:28:00.000-04:00

I was watching The Today Show yesterday morning and the guest was none other than CNBC's Jim Kramer, whose show Mad Money is quite a hit with the financial set. I've seen his show before and like his shtick. I think he's like the Dick Vitale of the stock market: you either love him or you hate his guts.

Anyway, he was talking about the rising price of gas in this country and how it's going to affect this, that or the other thing. What I liked, though, was that he also discussed how you can actually take advantage of the rise in gas prices by investing in oil refineries. Neat idea. Maybe it's not a new idea on the whole, but it was certainly new to me, as someone who pays little to no attention to the stock market.

The conversation also made its way over to other companies that are profiting in a big way right now, including Halliburton, about which Kramer commented, "...and you can always count on the New York Times to drive the price down every six weeks or so." Ha!

Ed vs. Spencer

2006-04-13T08:54:00.000-04:00

Thanks to an advertisement I saw in Rolling Stone, I recently found the funniest show I've seen on television in at least five years, if not 10. It’s called Ed vs. Spencer and comes on BBC America, Thursdays at 11 p.m. Seriously, it's brilliant.

It's an ongoing documentary about two best friends who compete against each other in different bizarre challenges each week. The first episode I saw was, "Who Can Make Himself the Sickest?" and I have to say I can't remember the last time I've laughed that hard. Ed, who is arguably the smarter of the pair, begins researching different ailments and how to contract them in a short period of time. This includes wearing tight rubber underpants in order to develop crotch rot, wrapping his feet in plastic bags to get a fungal infection, and going to a snake handler to see if he can get bitten by a poisonous snake. Meanwhile, Spencer, the slob, begins by going on a drinking and smoking binge AND NOT STOPPING for the entire seven days. He also throws himself down the stairs a few times.

It sounds kind of stupid now that I'm writing it down, but really it's unbelievably funny. The other episodes I've seen were "Who's the Most Attractive to Women?" and "Who Can Stay Handcuffed the Longest?" which involved Ed and Spencer being handcuffed to each other for a period of days and resulted in several fistfights; the funniest bits, though, were when Spencer was trying to eat and Ed kept pulling his hand away from his mouth (classic!).

I'm trying not to ruin all the good stuff but I can't help it. If you're lucky enough to have BBC On Demand or some similar service, go check it out. You won’t regret it.

"Out, damned spot! Out, I say"

2006-04-12T12:18:00.000-04:00

I’m lying on my right side on an examination table in the most pristine doctor’s examination room I’ve ever seen. Dr. Babcock gives me a couple of shots in my left arm and tells me if I feel any pain to let him know. I don’t feel anything except the blood running down my back. It tickles and is annoying at the same time. The blood continues to run, and just as I wonder how long it’s going to flow, Dr. Babcock tells his nurse to get a blanket (he uses a medical term for it). He cleans the blood off my back and places a disposable “blanket” between my arm and my back. This is my second trip to his office, and he’s cutting a bigger chunk out of the back of my left arm, the same place he previously cut. I ask him what the machine does that I hear running, and he responds that it is a cauterizing machine to minimize the flow of blood. Dr. Babcock is not unfriendly, and he has an economy of words that I most appreciate. I don’t want a Chatty Cathy cutting on me. (I’m also one of those people who, while flying, doesn’t want to hear the pilot yakking away and telling me that we’re passing over the snow-capped Rockies). He does say that though he is removing a good chunk of tissue, he isn’t cutting any muscle out. I don’t feel him sewing up my arm (I did the previous trip), and he does take the time to explain that he will be sewing on the inside and the outside of my arm this time. Then he moves on to other places on my body to cut and sew. It is quiet and my thoughts drift as he works. What exactly is the difference between sutures and stitches? Does one just sound more medical than the other? That baby aspirin I take really does thin my blood. Damn that blood can run. Normal procedure would have me off the aspirin or any other blood thinner for two weeks prior to surgery, but all this has happened pretty quickly.

Read more...
It is, I am told, the classic scenario. My wife noticed an unusual spot on the back of my left arm, kind of like someone had taken a black magic marker and made an asymmetrical mark right behind my biceps, and she asked me about it. (Spouses are often the first to notice because moles or strange marks are often on the back of the body where one doesn’t easily notice). Coincidentally, I was having an annual physical in a few days, and during the physical, Dr. Horton commented on the mark. He took a good look, asked me how long I’d had it (I didn’t know), and said, “I don’t want to alarm you, but I want you to see a dermatologist as soon as possible.” He then maintained eye contact that said, “Is that clear,” to which my eyes, right out of A Few Good Men responded, “Crystal.” His verbal statement is one of those circuitous comments that would have me chasing my tail if I were a dog. Why say that he doesn’t want to alarm me if he doesn’t want to alarm me? But in retrospect I’m most thankful for his comment because I took action when I might not have if he had just casually mentioned it.

Dr. Babcock only examines, cuts and evaluates lab results. Nothing else. No psoriasis or eczema or rashes or athlete’s foot for him. Which is kind of funny because I found Dr. Babcock by happenstance. I went to my online HMO web site and looked up dermatologists, and his name was at the top. Babcock on Babcock. A mnemonic even I can remember. (Babcock is also the name of one of the major streets that runs through San Antonio’s medical center area). I checked his credentials and he graduated from an excellent northern med school and had been practicing for quite awhile, so I decided to go with him. I called his office and they could see me in two days. Was he desperate for patients? Usually it takes much longer to get in to see a specialist. And he only works from 8-noon. Hmmm.

I walked into his office the first time and was greeted by efficiency you just don’t see these days. In the span of 20 minutes I had filled out papers, and Dr. Babcock had examined and cut out the mark and sewn up my arm and one of his nurses applied the dressing. The stitching-up took the longest of the things that were done. He made quite a cut for such a small thing to remove; it hadn’t even been raised above the skin. I wouldn’t have known Dr. Babcock’s plan had he not handed me a paper and asked me to sign, “so I can do what you need me to do.” I told him I didn’t know what I needed him to do. He explained that the mark or mole needed to be removed and sent off to a lab. He also added that there were only two other doctors in town, in addition to himself, he would trust to evaluate the lab work and that he might be consulting with them depending on what the lab sent back. Usually, I would take such a comment as hubris, but his age, his manner and his matter of fact way of speaking convinced me he was on the level.

I walked out and paid his receptionist, Sara. Even as I pondered the sequence of events—I’m a ponderer and things seemed to have happened awfully fast—I could appreciate the beauty of this young lady. I commented on her calendar, which I thought was a calendar of her friends that she had gotten done through some service, but it turns out it is a “Laguna Beach” calendar. That of course meant nothing to me. Sara explained that it is an MTV series about seniors in high school. I replied that my high school days were best forgotten, and she responded that the series reminds you of exactly why your high school days are best forgotten. It turns out Sara has a B.S. in Nursing--I’ve never met a doctor’s receptionist who had a B.S. in Nursing--but chooses to work 8 to noon rather than the long hours she previously worked in a hospital.

Dr. Babcock did indeed consult with the two other doctors about my lab results. Medical skeptic that I am, I assumed this was to throw some money their way—how difficult is it to figure out a mole? During my follow-up communication with Sara to find out my test results, I learn that I need to go back in and have the same thing done all over again, only more tissue removed from the same area. More? It seemed excessive the first time. Sara explained and used the C word and the term "treatment plan," but I reminded myself that there were at least three skin cancers, though I couldn’t name the other two. Just prior to Dr. Babcock’s second surgery, I got a brief moment to read the lab report that Dr. Babcock handed to me. Three words jumped out at me: “ASAP” and “early melanoma.” It turns out that the initial surgery apparently removed all the cancerous tissue, but some of this tissue had been within one mm of the edges of the chunk he removed. After consultation with the other doctors, the decision was made that the prudent thing to do was remove more tissue from the same place just to make sure. Or as sure as you can be.

During the second visit, the word “melanoma” ringing through my head, I asked Dr. Babcock what the report meant in terms of a prognosis. He said I had a 90% chance of escaping full-blown melanoma. But he also added several other things that put me on notice. “You must have had significant exposure to the sun at some point.” (Tennis tournaments and league play). “Wear long-sleeve shirts when playing tennis.” (In San Antonio)? “Stay out of the sun.” (This reminded me of the old joke, almost always told in the context of employer-employee relations, about being treated like a mushroom—“Kept in the dark and fed bullshit).” Dr. Babcock also added an ominous, “If I were in your position, I would switch from an HMO to a PPO.” (My HMO does not require a referral, so it’s not as bad as some). His other instructions were to check under my armpits regularly (more ominousness), be sure to use the stuff his nurse gave me to dress the arm twice a day, and to see him again for more cutting in two weeks. (The average human has 24, 10-15 or 20-40 moles on his or her body, depending on what article you read, and Dr. Babcock seems intent on removing the few I have left). He also adds, "Go home and thank your wife."

If you want to read an overview of skin cancer, including the A-B-C-D of detection (see below), this 1997 article from Better Homes and Gardens is an easy read and surprisingly good.

According to this guide, the following features characterize melanoma (though they are not exclusive symptoms):

* Asymmetrical lesions
* Border irregularity
* Color variation
* Diameter greater than the size of a pencil eraser

The Beatles and the Arctic Monkeys

2006-04-11T14:35:00.000-04:00

I'm a Fab Four fan forever. So when I keep reading or hearing "the Arctic Monkeys have smashed the record for the fastest selling debut album of all time," I want to puke. Further, according to Wikipedia, "The band won 'Best New Act' at the 2006 Brit Awards, and went down in history at the 2006 NME Awards in becoming the first band to win 'Best New Band' and 'Best British Band' in the same year." To add even more insult to injury, the NME voted Whatever People Say I am, That's What I'm Not the fifth best album of all-time. The only thing I can figure out is that the Brits must desperately need a Second Coming, Armageddon band every few years. Whatever happened to Oasis? Or any number of bands over the past 15 years that have been hailed as the best ever? According to one music critic reporting on NPR, the Arctic Monkeys aren't even the best Brit band today; he gave the honor to Clearlake. (Based on the records he played, I agree with him). And Whatever People Say is the fifth best Brit album of all time? If you add up the best albums of the Beatles, The Who, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, you come to at least the best 20 albums ever, Brit or otherwise.
Read more...
But let's revisit this "fastest selling debut album" in context. When the Beatles began their pilgrimage towards recording a rock album, just about everything was against them. I'll just describe a few of the major obstacles. First, the British system itself despised rock and roll. It was perceived as an American phenomenon that was best left in America. The BBC didn't even play rock 'n' roll. If you were British and wanted to hear R 'n' R, you had to either go to a club (if you were lucky enough to have one near you that allowed rock 'n' roll bands to play), buy a record or tune in to Radio Luxembourg. R 'n' R wasn't even recognized as a genre in mainstream Britain; that's quite a bias to overcome, particularly when that prejudice is ingrained in the radio and television media and the recording industry. Second, if you were an artist who wanted to record, you imitated Cliff Richard and sang modernized versions of old standards, or sang what would today be called lite or elevator music. Bands and rock 'n' roll were anathema to the British recording industry. That's why the Beatles have such a strange mix of tunes on their earliest albums. What is a song from the musical Music Man ("Till There Was You") doing on Meet the Beatles? Neither EMI nor George Martin were comfortable with releasing an album consisting solely of tunes written by Lennon and McCartney. In fact, Martin admits that had Lennon and McCartney not pushed so hard for their songs to be on the early albums, there would have been a lot more covers of fluff songs on them. Finally, one has to consider the period that the Beatles started in. Simple fact: Brits were mostly poor. Teenagers occasionally bought a single, but rarely bought albums. They couldn't afford them. The Beatles were thus fighting three colossal obstacles with their release of their first album, Please Please Me. So let's place debut albums in their proper perspective.

Oh, and what did Please Please Me do? The title track shot straight to #1, and the energy or melodies of the other songs, like "Twist and Shout" and "P.S. I Love You" catapulted the album to the #2 spot, just behind, who else, Cliff Richard. The album went on to become #1, turned the British media and recording industry on their respective heads, and got British teenagers saving up to buy albums in addition to singles as they clamored for more. At that particular time, the Beatles were touring with major British artists, yet were embarrassed to find that at show after show, the British artists who were considered institutions, like headliner Helen Shapiro, had to listen to shouts of "Bring back the Beatles" (they were the warm-up group) throughout their entire sets. The world was never the same.

Nintendo, the '86 World Series and High Fives

2006-04-11T13:29:00.000-04:00

The fine folks at National High Five Day (about which I'll write shortly) have done something so brilliant, so inventive and so funny, it's hard for me to relate my joy in mere words.

You know the 1986 World Series? The one where Bill Buckner let that infamous ground ball go through his legs, costing the Boston Red Sox game 6 and ultimately allowing the New York Mets to win it all in game 7? I know, I remember it well. It was one of sports' all-time greatest moments.

Well, the aforementioned High-Fivers have recreated the 10th inning of that World Series... in Nintendo RBI Baseball! Genius!

The first image here shows Mookie Wilson, just prior to hitting the Buckner Ball. (Yes, Mookie is black in real life, but we'll let that slide.)

The second image shows Buckner's surprise at having let that ball go right by him. Look at the lines of surprise coming out of his head!

Anyway, do yourself a favor and check it out. It's a little on the long side, but well worth the price of admission (nothing).

LINK

Regarding National High Five Day, I noticed that organization's website address at the end of the video above. I checked it out and I have to say I think they have a good thing going; on par with (and possibly far superior to) National Talk Like a Pirate Day. There is a link to the history of high-fiving and a plce for people to share their high-five stories. My favorite, though, is the following link:

Got pictures of you high fiving ex presidents? Send them to PHOTO OF THE DAY.

Ouch

2006-04-10T14:08:00.000-04:00

The Huffington Post is so brutal with their headline-photo combinations:

Bush: “I Knew Exactly What Was Going To Happen ” In Iraq...

Still Searching for a Liberal Party

2006-04-09T03:00:00.000-04:00

With the recent suicide bombing in Iraq and Bush being tied to leaking information, George W's approval rating is at an all-time low. The man who pledged to restore integrity to the White House has mortgaged it instead. If Bush were a Democrat, you can be sure the Republicans would be rounding up the impeachment posse' by now. (As it is, many Republicans are distancing themselves from Bush).

What are the Democrats doing while the Bush White House is going down in flames? They are conducting a contest to find ten words that define what the Democratic Party stands for. This is to counter the ten words the Republicans say define their values (like "low taxes, traditional family values, and a strong military"). This is an actual contest. I heard one entry that was more of a laundry list. The Democrats are doing this, of course, because the Republicans have killed them with short shots ever since Bush ran against Gore. Gore explained his agenda, which included the environment and a whole lot of things that America needed to pay attention to. Bush responded with "restore integrity to the White House" and repeated it 5,000 times. Americans readily understood the six words of Bush and voted for him. In Round 2, Bush v. Kerry, Bush managed to turn Vietnam into a negative for Kerry by using the same strategy. That's incredible when one considers that Kerry went to Vietnam and served in harm's way, even if you concede that Kerry didn't deserve his medals (and I'm not one to concede that). Bush, of course, did nothing during Vietnam, and possibly went AWOL. But Bush turned Kerry on his head with short, vicious shots that made the points that Kerry didn't deserve his medals, that Kerry didn't have the loyalty of his men, and that Kerry was a traitor for coming back to America and protesting against the war. These attacks managed to get Bush the majority of the military vote despite the salient facts noted above that Bush's "contibutions" during Vietnam were nil, and Kerry served his country. So after six years, the Democrats have decided that it's their turn to define themselves in 10 words or less.

Isn't that profoundly sad? The Democrats, the party of the non-rich need to use Republican tactics in order to define themselves? Are the Democrats so lost that they need punchlines from their supporters? Why not come out with a strategic vision first, and then let that drive how you want to conduct your tactical campaign? Give Americans some credit. Tell them what you stand for, then go fight for it.

The other aspect of this ten-word fiasco worth mentioning is that some issues take longer than 10 words to fully explain. Recently, I heard Senator Joseph Biden (D-Delaware) explain what we needed to do to get out of Iraq and maximize the chances of the region not being destabilized. It entailed a host of things, including involving Iran and other countries in talks designed to ensure that Iraq doesn't erupt into a worse civil war than the one it's already in, and discussing how to minimize the effect that an imploding Iraq would have on the Middle East. Getting out of Iraq is no easy chore--unless we just want to watch the country get taken over by insurgents and used as a launchpad for terrorism--and the manner in which we get out cannot be explored in 10 words or less. Biden also said, interestingly enough, that in discussions he's had with Bush, Biden questioned whether Bush had the necessary information to make the right decision. Bush responded by saying he doesn't need more facts; he goes with his gut when making a decision. That would be like me making a decision about how to fix a car transmission (I don't know anything about transmissions except that when they go, you're going to be spending some money). Some issues require a lot of knowledge in order to make the best decision. Ten words just won't cut it. Aside from Iraq and terrorism, the environment is another example of such an issue, only this administration doesn't care about the environment, so it doesn't even need ten words.

In the face of such ignorance and ineffective leadership on the part of Bush, the Democrats need to stand up and be counted, not look for 10-word solutions. Until the Democrats understand that, we will never have an effective liberal party unless it's a third party.

Come to think of it, what about the Green Party?

Radio Memory Lane and a Short Rant

2006-04-07T18:10:00.000-04:00

There are two colossal, exhiliarating things I love about the Satellite Radio XM channel, The 60's: 1) they play recordings from radio stations of what for me is the greatest era of rock and 2) they play the biggest variety of music from the 60's I've ever heard. (I can't mention this second category without commenting on the state of conventional FM oldies stations. I've heard oldies stations all over America and they play the same songs from the same groups, and to spice things up they are increasingly moving into the 70's and even the 80's. Why do that when they aren't even playing 1% of the songs played on radio back in the 50's and 60's? They also appear to confuse the notion of oldies with songs about oldies. Exhibit A: Bob Seeger's "Old Fashioned Rock and Roll." Here's an idea: Why not play more of the middle/late Beatles? I've never heard anything from The Beatles (commonly referred to as the White Album) played on an oldies station, nor have I heard most of their songs from 1966 on played. Does Revolver ring a bell? Arguably the most important album the Beatles ever cut? Released in 1966, well in the oldies period. One of the songs, Here, There and Everywhere off Revolver is the song Paul McCartney has most often named named as his favorite Beatles song. McCartney also plays lead guitar on Taxman, interesting enough since Harrison wrote and sang the song, and was of course the Beatles' lead guitarist. But you'll never hear Taxman or And Your Bird Can Sing or Tomorrow Never Knows played on an oldies station. So many songs of the Beatles in the 60's that are never played on today's FM oldies stations. And so many other songs from great groups as well. The Who, for instance. Instead we get Bob Seeger. End of rant for now).

Recently, The 60's channel was playing tapes from two Washington, D.C. (my hometown) AM stations, WEAM ("the WEAM Team, 1390 on your analog dial) and WPGC (1580). The patter of the DJ's and the commercials were almost as good as the music. "WPGC, Good Guys Radio" blared at regular intervals as Johnny Dark played requests from the audience. (I'm pretty sure Dark started with WCAO in Baltimore and moved to WPGC). Dark's interaction with the audience is simultaneously a walk down memory lane and hilarious as I listen in 2006. No matter what the caller has to say, Dark finds a way to be incredibly upbeat. Later, Jack Fischer on WEAM is even worse, telling the most atrocious jokes. Some of the callers are calling from pretty far afield--impressive reception of an AM station. One caller, for instance, is calling from the place where emilybee now resides, well north and west of D.C. that's for sure. One guy calls from Silver Spring and refers to himself in third person as "The Pinball Wizard," and this I swear to you is prior to the year that Tommy was released.

The ads are so good they should be packaged and sold (they probably are on eBay). One was for a drive-in on Route 301, and had the longest list of movies playing I've ever heard. I'd forgotten just how many movies drive-ins played back then. (This was back when many drive-ins played movies all night long). Another drive-in, not too far from P.G. Community College, used to show adult films. The problem was that drivers could see the movies from the road and this caused a number of accidents. The drive-in was forced to put up a "wall" to block the free view from the road. (By the way, that progressive state Maryland had the Maryland State Board of Censors back then. The board literally had to view and approve every movie shown in Maryland, and violators ((those who showed movies without submitting them to the board)) were prosecuted. Prior to every movie, viewers would see a screen that read, "Approved by the Maryland State Board of Censors." The U.S. Supreme Court held in favor of Maryland when the board was challenged in 1965).

A few examples of the music played seems appropriate. First, I have to say that the list is what I remember and does not include the truly obscure stuff that I absolutely love. Here goes: "Fire" by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, "Image of a Girl" by Otis Williams and the Charms, "Gee" by The Pixies Three, "I Only Want To Be With You " by the incomparable Dusty Springfield, "You Got What It Takes" by The Dave Clark Five. The last record reminded me of just how insulting towards the distaff gender records could be back then. Lyrics include:

Ow! You don't live in a beautiful place
And you don't dress in the best of taste
Oh! Nature didn't give you such a beautiful face
But baby, you got what it takes, Oh! to satisfy
You got what it takes to set my soul on fire
But oh, oh, whoa-oh, whoa-oh whoa-oh-oh yeah
You got what it takes for me.

Is it me or does this song seem to be saying, "Okay, you're broke and ugly but you put out so I like you a lot?" A kinder interpretation would be that Dave Clark is willing to overlook the superficial and has fallen in love with the essence, the soul of his baby.

As Little Anthony would sing, "Take me back" to the 60's.

The Tenets of Journalism

2006-04-05T10:03:00.000-04:00

Ed Bridges mentioned the tenets of journalism recently. I wrote fairly extensively on the subject when I was studying it in grad school. Here's an excerpt from my thesis, which may or may not make for an interesting read:

The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) has a Code of Ethics, which has four major tenets: Seek Truth and Report It, Minimize Harm, Act Independently, and Be Accountable. These rules provide the basis for most ethical analysis in the field. Within, and as a subheading to, each rule is a section called “Journalists Should.” Following that phrase is a checklist of dos and don’ts which act as guidelines to help a journalist determine whether or not he is abiding by that particular rule. For example, one of the Journalists Should’s under the rule Seek Truth and Report It is, “Test the accuracy of information from all sources and exercise care to avoid inadvertent error. Deliberate distortion is never permissible.” Of note is the fact that Seek Truth and Report It contains 17 Journalists Should’s while none of the others has more than eight. This might be indicative of an implicit lexical ranking that has ‘Seek Truth and Report It’ at the top of the list.

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To seek the truth and report it is perhaps the most important part of being a journalist. It is essential to being a journalist. Journalists by definition report the news, and reporting the news requires reporting the truth, i.e. if one has reported a falsehood, then one has failed to report the news. So, in other words, the news is a report of an event that contains all and only the truth about that event. The simple fact that the news is the truth is not exactly controversial, but what is controversial is determining how best to discover the truth and how to figure out how much of that truth warrants reporting. For most journalists, going about the business of seeking the truth and determining whether or not it’s newsworthy requires what has come to be known to most reporters as the 5 W’s and the H: Who was involved? What happened and what is at issue? When did it happen? Where did it happen? Why did it happen and why is it an issue now? How did it happen and how did we get into this situation?

One way to understand these guidelines is to think of how one person tells another of events that he or she has experienced. One’s interlocutor could care about that information for a variety of reasons: because of who was involved, because of where it happened, because of what happened, etc. People care about different things and everybody has their own reasons for caring. News is just like that except on a larger scale; news organizations take into account what they believe most people care about and why they might want to read about it. Journalists seek these truths, which we care about for some reason or another, and then report them.

This rule is vital to journalism, so much so that many would place it above all of the other principles. According to the 1973 revision of the Code of Ethics, “The public's right to know of events of public importance and interest is the overriding mission of the mass media.” The duty of a journalist is to report the truth. For if he did not do that, he would not be a journalist.

Some would argue that there are many different kinds of journalist, including entertainers and writers of fiction. But for our purposes, journalists will be just as the first rule of journalism would define them: those who seek and report the truth.

There are, too, other professions whose purpose is also to seek truth and report it. Scientists and homicide detectives certainly seek truth and report it. The difference is that the other branches that share that particular qualification of seeking truth and reporting it are usually seeking very specific truths within their own fields; for the scientist it might be searching for the planet just outside of Pluto’s orbit, or, for the policeman it might be identifying a murderer. Reporters, on the other hand, belong only to the field of journalism and report on whatever it is to which they are assigned. They are the conduit for all of the other truths that the world’s professions are seeking.

We are then presented with a difficult task: to determine how much information satisfies the predicate ‘is the truth’ in any given case. This is a question that journalists think about whenever they have to write a story. When a reporter is handed a police bulletin that has just been faxed in, a decision has to be made very quickly regarding how much of it to include in the subsequent news brief. When working on a larger story about which the reporter knows a great deal, decisions have to be made regarding how much gets to stay in the story, even though the reporter thinks that the added information would add depth.

A common way in which a journalist might approach this issue is to classify the available information into three kinds: that which the audience has a right to know, that which the audience needs to know, and that which the audience desires to know. This classification depends on further judgment, namely, who the audience is. A front page story in Shelby, North Carolina might not even make the New York Times, period. Like the example of one person telling another person something of interest, a newspaper or television station must know who its audience is in order to deliver the most appropriate news; this is the concept of newsworthiness.

One way of understanding the relationship between the notions of “news” and “newsworthiness” is to consider some event to be at the core of a circle of information; that which is at the center of the core is central to the event itself and most newsworthy. As you move away from the core you discover facts related to the event. The closer these facts are to the core, the more relevant or important they are to the event itself. For newsworthiness, the difficulty is in determining how to create that circle; which events belong closest to that core and are, hence, most newsworthy.

For example, suppose there is a train accident somewhere. What would stand as the core of facts for most news organizations would be where the accident was, how many were killed, and what was the cause. Some media outlets, though, might also be concerned with how many accidents had occurred in that location before. Some might want to investigate the driver’s history. Some might even want to investigate railroad unions. Depending on what the publication is, how that circle of news is constructed will vary, and what becomes newsworthy is ultimately a judgment call by that publication and its publisher’s interests. The core events will generally be the same for most papers or stations, but as one gets further away from those events, the newsworthiness of related varies.

Furthermore, there is a concept that seems to capture something beyond straightforward news and newsworthiness which we have been here discussing, namely, the ‘big picture.” When we talk of the big picture, we are talking of a way of putting together world events in order to form a view of the state of the world. Beyond what a reporter writes as the news qua news, he can report it in such a way that it moves his readers toward a less conspicuous conclusion, a conclusion that may or may not be readily broken down in terms of how’s, why’s when’s and where’s. This is something worth keeping in mind, as it speaks to the motives of a reporter, and each reporter certainly has a motive for reporting any story; whether it be (for embedded reporters for example) getting the soldiers’ stories out, or informing the public about what it’s really like in the Persian Gulf, or just simply to report what they see.

There's more where this came from, but this seemed like enough for one day.

Newspapers Around the World

2006-03-29T12:13:00.000-05:00

OTL and I have been on a bit of a rant about why the trend for newspapers in America doesn't look good. Circulations and advertising revenues are down and the trend looks like it will get worse before it gets better. Americans are getting up earlier and earlier and working longer and longer hours, so that many Americans simply don't have the energy or inclination to use their precious free time to read a newspaper. At best, they'll catch some quick news off the headlines they see online or on TV and that will have to do. OTL developed the theme further and wrote that he doesn't understand the reading habits of the American public, but would divide Americans into two groups: those who are genuinely interested in reading the news and those who aren't. It is the former group to which this post is directed, though the latter group should check out the website in mentioned in the post here--you might find news to be a lot more fun than you thought.

If you are interested in what makes the news outside of your town, check out the site newseum.org. It carries the front pages of newspapers from cities and towns all over America, and even more interestingly carries "510 front pages from 49 countries." Many of these papers are not in English (it's actually kind of fun to view them in their native languages), but quite a few are. You can read the front page of a given newspaper from the newseum site, and then click on one of two links from there to get a pdf file of the newspaper or go to the newspaper's website. Let's take a quick look around the world; major headlines are listed first, with titles of other articles listed afterwards, and then any comments I have as appropriate:

Namibia, The Namibian: "Crop output in the balance." "Theft, fraud plague University of Namibia."

China, South China Morning Post: "Heat to rise on yuan as China tops FOREX ranks."

South Korea, The Korea Times: "Probe Targets Hyundai-Kia's Slush Funds."

India, The Times of India: "Broke govt's can dismiss workers: SC." And interestingly, "Scarlett Johansson tops list of world's sexiest women." Va-va-voom, India knows its priorities.

Paris, France, La Tribune: Roughly translated, the controversy over the proposed change in career guaranties has put Chirac on the front line.

London, UK, The Guardian: "Detectives to probe Tory loans as honours inquiry widens."

London, UK, The Daily Telegraph has a similar headline to The Guardian, but has more offerings pictured on the front page, such as a color picture of a young woman wearing a tie accompanied by this line: "Get Knotted, Why Ties Look Better on a Woman." Whatever you say!

Go to the site and buzz around for yourself. My interests tend toward the international, but if you want to see what's going on in Rapid City, South Dakota, by all means go for it. When you navigate the site, it helps to have your pop-up blocker off or you won't be able to pull up a full view of the front page of the paper you are interested in. (I turned off every blocker I know of and still had a heck of a time dealing with one stubborn blocker I couldn't locate).

Letter to WJZ

2006-03-24T08:30:00.000-05:00

To: WJZ
From: Over the Line!

Hi --

I have a small gripe about WJZ's lottery coverage. My questions is, why does your station deem it necessary to occupy three-quarters of the television screen whenever lottery numbers need to be picked? In one very large corner you televise the actual drawing of the numbers, while at the same time filling most of the screen with some kind of pastel background filler. All the while the program that has the bad luck to be on at that time gets relegated to whatever's left and then tilted backward at some kind of awkward angle!

Is this a contractual obligation with the Maryland State Lottery Agency? Or is it just "the extra mile" your station is kind enough to go with its lotto broadcast? Regardless, it is SUPREMELY annoying and enough to make me never want to watch WJZ ever again.

I understand the need for live coverage of the numbers being picked, but couldn’t you do some kind of picture-in-picture scheme instead? Or maybe a split screen? The way your station does it now, it's nearly impossible to block out the numbers being picked (for those of us who don’t care about it) and it's ESPECIALLY obnoxious when that charming on-screen display pops up during the LAST 30 SECONDS of a Sweet 16 game in the NCAA Basketball Tournament.

Please let me know what plans you have to rectify this situation in the near future.

Thank you for reading,

OTL

What Are the Odds? The NCAA Tournament

2006-03-24T00:40:00.000-05:00

First a word about last night's games. Incredible! WV showed so much heart against UT. Fantastic game--one that I thought UT would win in a walkover since UT had a +10 advantage in rebounds and WV a -10 this season. Mrs. Adelino must be quite happy. And Duke. Did Coach K's boys screw OTL, Adelino and me or what? Duke was my national champion and they didn't even make it past the Sweet Sixteen. Pathetic for a team with such talent and a coach who's considered the best in the biz (not by me, but by many). Last and certainly not least, did UCLA make a comeback from nowhere against the Zags or what? All in all an amazing night.

Now let's move to the something supremely interesting because it's such a black art. What are the odds of picking all the winners in the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament? Of getting every single game right? Much longer than you ever imagined! We really ought to get Alex working on this. With some of the tournament results so far, you'd think the Chaos Theory was at work.

Here is an excerpt of some rigorous mathematical analyses as reported by Carl Bialik of the Wall Street Journal:

Some big prizes are being offered for anyone who fills out a perfect NCAA men's college basketball tournament bracket. Papa John's is dangling one million pizzas. America Online is offering $1 million. Gambling site Sportsbook.com has put up $10 million, and says it may offer $100 million next year. But it's unlikely anyone will pay out a single penny. A look at the odds of winning shows why companies are willing to risk such valuable loot. Filling out a perfect bracket means predicting the outcome of 63 games. If each game were a true toss-up, that would mean your chance of perfection is a mere one in two to the 63rd power, or one in nine million trillion (yes, million trillion -- there are no tidy terms for numbers this large). Put another way, you are about 60 billion times more likely to win the multistate Powerball lottery.

Of the half-dozen Web sites I contacted, representing millions of entries over the past decade, not one spokesman remembered an entrant coming close to perfection. Through this year's upset-rich first two rounds, every entrant to those sites has already been eliminated from the perfection contests. Most sites' current leaders missed at least three games in the first round.

Of course, you can do better than just flipping a coin for each game. Some teams are better than others. I spoke with a half-dozen statisticians and mathematicians to get their best guesses about how well an informed picker could theoretically do. The most generous estimate for the chance of a perfect bracket: about one in 150 million.

Here are a few methods for getting an estimate of the probability of picking a perfect bracket:
A No. 1 seed has never lost a first-round game to a No. 16 seed, though several came close this year; and No. 2 seeds rarely lose to No. 15 seeds -- just four times in 88 games. So the University of Minnesota's Brad Carlin suggests, as a simple model, assuming those games are locks, and counting the other 55 games as toss-ups. That yields a probability of one in two to the 55th power, or one in 36 million billion. Chuck Newman, director of New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, suggests making the more generous assumption that the top two seeds in each region are better than the rest of the field, so any games they play against lower seeds are locks. Only games between No. 1 and 2 seeds, or amongst the other teams in the rest of the field, are toss-ups in this model. That makes 24 games locks, yielding a probability of one in 550 billion. Prof. Newman also suggests dividing up the bracket between seeds one through four, and then the rest, which makes 32 games locks and yields a probability of one in 2.1 billion. Tournaments never quite play out like this -- at least one lower seed always has scored an upset -- but again, this is a model.

I also asked Gary Lorden, head of the math department at Cal Tech and an advisor to the CBS show "Numbers," to crunch some numbers for me. He created a simulation that assumed the accuracy rate of the person filling out a bracket would vary from game to game, but would generally fall in a narrow range. One simulation, that gave pickers an overall accuracy rate of about 67%, suggested a probability of perfect-picking of one in 240 billion. Running similar simulations with forecaster accuracy of 70% gives a probability of one in 13 billion, while getting a whopping 75% of games right, on average, yields a probability of one in 150 million -- impressive, but not amounting to much for a $1 million prize. "Even if you think you're hot stuff, the expected value of this is almost a penny," Prof. Lorden wryly notes. Dennis DeTurck, professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests using the seed numbers to estimate the probability of the favorite winning each game. In his scheme, the odds of the favorite are arbitrarily set at (higher seed number-lower seed number)/30 + 0.5. So a No. 1 seed playing a No. 16 seed has a probability of (16-1)/30+0.5=1 to win. Extending these odds across the whole tournament yields a probability of one in 150 billion.

My ad hoc advisory committee of mathematicians and statisticians proposed several ways to estimate the odds of picking a perfect bracket, which provide a window into the thinking of probabilists. First, a word on the structure of the single-elimination tournament: It's divided into four regions. In each region, the 16 teams are assigned ranking numbers, or seeds, from one to 16, better to worse, and paired off in first-round games such that the seed numbers add up to 17. Assuming favorites advance, second-round games pit teams whose seeds add to nine; regional semifinals, five; and regional finals, three. The four regional champions play a pair of semifinals, with the winners playing for the championship. Teams with the same seed number from different regions are considered to be roughly equal in strength. The simplest calculation, mentioned earlier, assumes that each team has an equal chance at winning each game. If you assume instead that the favorite -- either by seed number, sports betting lines or various power ratings -- has a two-thirds chance of winning each game, the probability of a perfect bracket rises to two in three to the 63rd power, or one in 124 billion. Mr. Hamman of SCA Promotions, an insurer, says that favorites historically win about 72% of the time, which would yield a probability of perfection of one in 970 million.

To measure the probability for this year's tournament, Jay Emerson, assistant professor of statistics at Yale, suggests using power ratings developed by Ken Pomeroy, a 32-year-old meteorologist from Cheyenne, Wyo. These ratings are based on team's records, margin of victory, strength of schedule and other factors, and are expressed in units of points. For example, through last weekend's games Villanova has a rating of 65.64 and Boston College has a rating of 61.99, so Villanova is expected to beat Boston by about four points -- the difference in their ratings -- when they play Friday.

A forecaster could use the ratings from before the tournament (which Mr. Pomeroy sent to me) to predict who would win each matchup. Mr. Pomeroy says the ratings chose a winner in about 71.3% of games this year before the tournament. "There's so much variation in performance from game to game, that even if you had a perfect system of ranking teams by how good they are, you'd still have significant errors," he told me. Based on Mr. Pomeroy's stats, I computed the probability that teams would win in all 63 matchups -- I don't recommend you try this at home -- and found that if I had relied on power ratings, I would have had a one in 722 billion chance of a perfect bracket. (I'd also have chosen Kansas, a first-round loser, to make the Final Four.)

Of course, none of these models account for forecaster psychology. The great satisfaction of picking an upset, and the lure of picking one's own favorite team to win, combine to make picking all favorites more unpalatable than pizza is palatable. These forces conspired to make me, a writer of both a sports column and numbers column, pick first-round loser Syracuse to win the championship in our office pool. I'm tied for last place.

Newspapers: Hard Times for Hard Copy

2006-03-22T20:49:00.000-05:00

Recent announcements have been made by major newspaper chains that sometime this year they would no longer be printing the stock tables in their newspapers. They cited the fact that most people get their stock quotes online. While that's true, what is also true is that the real reason for cutting out the stock tables is that it is a cost-cutting move that will save them the overhead of paying for 4-6 pages of newsprint per paper. Even the New York Times, that most respected paper of the great city in which Wall Street is located will be making the same cut.

In isolation, the above-noted cut is insignificant, but the fact is that hard times have been here for at least 10 years for newspapers, and they are now making tradeoffs they have not previously had to consider. What hard times? Circulations, with a few bright exceptions, are down. Advertising revenue has been down or flat, with an occasional small bump up. Lower revenues mean tough decisions. It is no fluke that Knight-Ridder, one of the biggest chains of newspapers, is trading at a P/E ratio of less than 10 (and it's dropping further), while Google, even after the big hits they have taken in the past month (its price per share dropped from over $400 to less than $340) has a P/E ratio of over 67. People are looking to advertise online, and investors have noticed in a huge way. The trend is expected to continue, which is why major sites like google and yahoo are trading at huge premiums. Of course, newspapers also reap revenue from online ads placed in their online content, but this begs the question as to whither hard copy.

The answers to the wonderful concluding, transitioning sentence in the last paragraph appear to embrace two major themes: make papers more local and make them appeal to a yonger audience. The days of hiring educated, wise geezers and geezerettes to offer their considered opinions in the editorial page appear to be nearing their end. Instead, we'll have news and opinion that focus on the local and on youth. I guess an orgasm of a headline would be something like "Shelby Youth Wins An Ipod." Moving on, newspapers have surveyed the landscape and found that their readers are largely older. If they want hard copy to survive, they've got to attract younger readers. This sounds analogous to what many churches find themselves doing because their membership is so skewed towards the elderly. Also, I've noticed that in my local paper, more and more younger writers are being hired, despite the fact that their columns contain some of the most vapid content known to mankind. Surveys have also revealed that most people are interested in the local rather than the national or international in their newspapers. Perhaps they get their national and international news from CNN, or perhaps they simply don't care about that part of the world that lies further than six miles from their homes.

Another major advantage of going with local rags is that the large corporations that own them can more easily make the decision to stop the presses for a given newspaper. Let's say you own 350 small-town papers. If Shelby residents appear to be more interested in subscribing than do Gaffney residents, you simply make the decision to do away with the Gaffney paper. It really is that simple.

The halcyon days of multiple-paper cities and newspapers having overseas bureaus have long been gone. And further change is afoot. It's too bad, because even though I regularly read U.S. and foreign newspapers online, what I most enjoy is reading hard copy. (Of course, I'm in the wrong demographic). I really can't blame newspaper corporations for trying to survive and make a profit. But the U.S. trend makes me wonder if the demise of newspapers is at least partially responsible for Americans getting progressively dumber. The country with the highest per capita newspaper readership, Norway, seems to have an enlightened population that doesn't find its government over a trillion in debt and its trade deficit at record numbers. Coincidence?

March Madness Pools

2006-03-22T12:03:00.000-05:00

I should have written this earlier, but here goes. First, let me get something out of the way. There's a lot of controversy about this year's choices of teams, which teams should have gotten in, and the tournament committee's choice of seeds. The Super Conferences are finding out that they screwed themselves by becoming so large, because the committee is only going to let so many teams from a given conference into the tournament. They've got to give teams from other, smaller conferences a chance. (And judging by this year's results, their choice has proven to be wise). From a basketball perspective, the old ACC teams would have been better off sticking with the old ACC, for instance. Ditto for the Big East. Also, those whining teams that were on the bubble and didn't get in should just shut up. Missing the tournament is huge. But you're not going to be a national champion if you're competing for the 60-65th slot in the tournament. The best you can hope for is an upset or two, and then you're out. But the overwhelming odds based on almost three decades of tournaments say you're not even going to pull off an upset.

If you're in a pool, know something about the NCAA tournament and basketball and that it's seeding and how teams match up that determine the winner, you don't need to read this next part. If you know nothing, read on. First, take the #1 seed in every region and put them in the Final Four. Have them win every game until they get to the Final Four, and then choose the winner based on the last poll prediction. This alone will ensure that you won't have the winner of the tournament not making it to the Final Four. A #1 seed has won the championship every year since 1980. That's a lot of history to buck if you decided that your alma mater was going to upset Duke in the first round (this year). If you had followed only that advice, you would now be batting 4 for 4 and have four teams in the Sweet Sixteen, with good things still to come.

If you must choose a big upset, look to the early rounds. For some reason, the #12 seeded teams, with the #13 seeded teams not too far behind tend to be the teams that pull off the big upsets. On the losing end, no #1 seed has ever lost in the first round, so let's put that in the winning-the-lottery catergory and move on. The #2 seeds however, have not done nearly as well as the #1 seeds, and no one has yet come up with an explanation as to why there is such a difference. So pick a #2 to lose in the first or second round if you want to go with a big upset. Keep in mind, though, that historically, the #12 and #13 seeds lose more than they win--by quite a bit--but they have a better chance of pulling off an upset than the #10 and #11 teams for reasons we know not. If you're choosing in the first round and you get to the #8 playing the #9 or the #7 playing the #10, just choose the team that makes you feel good. It really doesn't matter who wins and it's too hard to choose with any odds behind you.

Finally, keep in mind that once you get past the top 16 teams, the #1-4 seeds in each region, you're left with a bunch of teams that have a chance to pull off an upset, but little chance of getting to the Final Four, and almost no chance at all of winning the tournament. People who have their favorite team, say a #10 seed, winning the championship are not going to win the office pool. So choose winners and losers accordingly.

"Brokeback" Humor

2006-03-21T17:51:00.000-05:00

Isn't it time to offically declare jokes about Brokeback Mountain passe'? At first it was all the takeoffs on a line used in the oft-shown trailer, "I wish I could quit you." Then it was jokes that employed cowboy jargon as double entendres. Next was cattle jargon. Then the humor moved on to renaming Brokeback Mountain to Brokeback Something Else (on SNL it was Brokeback Gold Mine with a prospector "striking gold" in Alec Baldwin's crotch) with more double entendres based on the new location.

We get it. We get it to the nth degree. Brokeback anything means it's gay or gay sex.

In a sense, the humor is a compliment to the movie. If the movie hadn't been popular and critically acclaimed, no one would get the jokes. Fair enough. Here's to writer E. Annie Proulx, screenwriter Larry McMurtry (also a famous writer), director Ang Lee and the entire cast and crew of the movie. Their work has been acknowledged and critics and audiences have moved on.

If Brokeback humor were a fashion, young, hip women would now be saying "That is so last season." It's time for us to say the same thing.

Local Weather Humor

2006-03-20T10:47:00.000-05:00

This is one of those you-had-to-be-there stories, but here goes. Last night through 4 a.m. this morning there was bad weather in the region, including hail, severe thunderstorms and a tornado watch. Areas around us got hail up to 3" in diameter, and the local news and weather people were having orgasms over this fortuitous turn of events. A chance to bring Imminent Doom to households for hours, what an opportunity! Over and over with tracing and projecting the multiple fronts that carried the storms. Look at those rings. Guess what they are--possible tornadic activity! Then a weatherman showed a picture of a 3" chunk of hail someone had sent to the TV station, presumably via computer link (the picture, not the actual hail). The hail had been placed on a kitchen counter next to a ruler, and you could see a group of condiments behind it, including a container clearly labeled "garlic salt." The weatherman said, "As you can see, they are getting three inch diameter hail in Hondo, and amazingly it's also hailing garlic salt." Okay, it's not that funny, but if you'd been sitting there listening to all the dire predictions for hours. you would have been as doubled over as me.

Poker

2006-03-19T23:20:00.000-05:00

This explanation of the rules of Omaha, a poker game somewhat similar to Texas Hold 'Em was given on AOL:

Rules of Omaha
Omaha, previously well known as Omaha Hold'em, is a variation of Texas Hold'em that is becoming quite popular. It pays, however, to get a grasp of the concepts in Hold'em before attempting this game. (Note: Texas Hold'em is often simply called Hold'em.)

Players share common cards called the board. The obligation to open the betting is rotated clockwise after each hand. This is accomplished with the use of a dealer button and blinds. A dealer button is a round disk with the word dealer written on it. Blinds are mandatory bets made by the first two players clockwise from the dealer button.

The blinds posted in all limit games are in the amounts of 1/2 of the lower limit for the first player (small blind) and the lower limit for the second player (big blind). The blinds in a $10-$20 game would, therefore, be $5 and $10.

The player with the button is theoretically dealing the hand. A casino employee will deal the first card to the player on the immediate left of the dealer button. The obligation to open the pot is rotated around the table. As the button moves, all players receive the same benefits of position. This position element, the order in which players are required to act, has a strong influence on proper play in all games where buttons are used. Obviously, the player with the privilege of betting last has a significant advantage.

Each player receives four cards face-down as their starting hand. When the hand is over, each player must use EXACTLY two cards from his hand and EXACTLY three from the board. Although these are the only changes from Texas Hold'em, this does not mean that you will easily go from Hold'em to Omaha. These changes create radically different situations.

At first it will be difficult to properly read a nine-card hand using the correct number from both your hand and the board. You may think you have a full house when you don't or a flush when you can't have one. Assessing your hand can be difficult as draw combinations become more complex.

The player to the left of the big blind must call the size of the big blind, raise an amount equal to the size of the bet (the big blind at this time) or fold his hand.

In blind games the money posted for the blinds counts toward the player's bet, and the players posting these blinds have the option to raise even if the big blind has not been raised. An example will clarify this: The big blind, $10 in a $10-$20 limit game, is called by several players but no one raises. After the player with the button acts the small blind calls for $5 more, he already had $5 in for the small blind. The house dealer would now offer an option to the big blind who could then raise his own bet even though he had started the action and not been raised. Alternatively, the big blind can check and the hand will proceed.

The next three cards are called the flop. They are delivered all at once, face-up in the middle of the table and are used by all players. The first player to the left of the button is first to act. This will hold true for all remaining rounds of betting. The player being first may check or bet the limit, still the smaller limit at this point. Other players may check, fold, call, or raise as appropriate.

The next card is called the turn. It is delivered face-up next to the first three in the middle of the table. With the turn the betting goes to the higher limit.

The final, or river card, also called fifth street, is now dealt face-up. Together these cards make a five card board. Again, the betting is the higher limit for the game being played.

Once all the betting has been completed and multiple players remain in the round, the hands are shown and the winning hand is established. Remember, each player must use EXACTLY two cards from his hand and EXACTLY three from the board.

There are possibilities in Omaha that never occur in Hold'em. A favorite example of this concept is when Omaha was new to Las Vegas. A player flopped top set (three of a kind using the highest card on the flop), nut straight (the highest possible straight, which at this point was the best possible hand), and an open ended straight flush draw (four cards to the straight flush with two ways to complete the hand).

Any one of these hands would be cause for great excitement in Hold'em and, in fact, this was quite a strong hand in Omaha as well, but not nearly as strong as it sounds. The deuce of hearts on the fourth card beat that player's top set and nut straight and gave him a small flush, just enough to pay off the winner and gain a new insight into Omaha.

If you are a beginner to Omaha remember these three rules:
(1) You can't have a full house if the board isn't paired
(2) You can't have a flush if there aren't three suited cards on the board
(3) You can't play the board

How ridiculous is that? Ludicrous, in my view. The above explanation covers my main reason for not playing Hold 'Em games. I hate community cards. (I also don't like poker games which border on the gimmicky, such as the example above in which one hand can have multiple, big-time interpretations as to what it is). Give me my own cards, as in a Man's Game, 7-card stud, you take yours, and let's bet or fold accordingly. I like watching what each player has, what cards he or she keeps or folds, and betting the odds as best I can. This business of sharing cards is for the birds. I'm sick of all the Hold 'Em terms, and I don't even play Hold 'Em. Be a Man. Step up to 7-card stud.

If Only We Had A Liberal Party

2006-03-19T14:16:00.000-05:00

One of the things that is repeatedly brought up by the Republicans is that just about all the Democrats who are now so critical of the U.S. presence in Iraq are the same Democrats who voted in favor of the war. (Strictly speaking, what they did was vote for spending bills that funded the war. Congress has not voted to declare war since World War II. Congress prefers voting for spending bills rather than voting to go to war, because this allows them a lot more wiggle room when it comes time to take responsibility for their vote. Senator Kerry, for instance, acknowledged he voted for the key spending bill that initially funded our invasion of Iraq, but went on to state that he voted for the bill because of misinformation and added that he thought the war was going to be conducted in a different manner).

I'm not going to go on yet another tangent about the hypocrisy of the Dems and how they want to have it both ways, though I am going to say, one more time, that the time is long overdue for the Democrats to show some character and gumption rather than continue to try to say the things that please the American voters the most. And unfortunately, Senator Hillary Clinton is Exhibit A. She is the #1 fund raiser, by far, in all of Congress, with over $400,000 per week pouring into her coffers. Considering she is a shoo-in to get reelected as a senator, it's not too hard to guess what all the extra money is going to go toward. As she continues to pick up a stronger scent of the presidential campaign trail, she makes statements that increasingly sound more like they emanate from a Republican rather than from a highly intelligent, "liberal" Democrat. Judging by her statements in the past month, her priorites appear to have shifted from social issues to supporting censorship and security at any cost. Is it possible that such a woman actually graduated at the top of her class at Wellesley and went on to Yale Law School?

If the Dems aren't good at manufacturing excuses, I just don't know who is. According to Gloria Steinem, Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA), voted for the spending bills that have funded the war in Iraq because her legal advisors told her that President Bush had the power to unilaterally conduct a war. I nearly fell out of my lounger when I heard that. If Congresswoman Waters has to rely on her "legal advisors" to inform her what the basic constitutional powers of the president and congress are, that's just sad. A Middle School course in "Civics" or "Government and Economics" (depending on your school district) teaches kids that the power to declare war is vested in Congress. Congress also votes on budgets to fund government programs. (One of the things I was repeatedly reminded of at NSA was the budgetary powers of Congress. If they don't pay for your program, it's dead). If Congresswoman Waters doesn't understand these basics, and worse, if she is representative of others in Congress who don't understand them, we're in big trouble.

The Wicked Pickett

2006-03-18T21:52:00.000-05:00

Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Famer Wilson Pickett died earlier this year on January 19th in Reston, Virginia at age 64. The legendary Soul/R&B singer had a unique style and voice that were stamped all over every song he ever did. His scream was a trademark, but he seemed to sing every song as if determined to blow his entire larynx out. Even those who imitated him--witness the singer in the band and movie The Commitments--couldn't help but max out their vocal chords. Pickett's sound was not polished like many of the Motown singers of the 60's (Eddie Kendricks, Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye being classic examples); "raw" is almost everyone's favorite word for describing his voice.

When I was a teenager, my favorite Pickett songs were In the Midnight Hour and Funky Broadway. I wore out records playing those songs. But Pickett obviously had many other hits, both in the 60's and years later when he revived his recording career. The ones I remember are: Mustang Sally, Engine Number 9, Everybody Needs Somebody to Love, Don't Knock My Love Pt. 1, and Don't Let the Green Grass Fool You, but he did so many more.

Now that I'm at an age that's much closer to Pickett's age when he died than I am to my teenage days, I appreciate some of his covers as much or more than his original hits. He did a version of Hey Jude that knocks me down and kicks the hell out of me it's so good. It has soul, sure--you'd expect no less--but it's sung in that Pickett style that says "I'm a man and I'm lettin' loose." I always appreciate a great R&B singer tackling a Beatles song because the styles are so different. (In fact, when I've gone on, I hope there's a small party of people hovering around my ashes playing R&B covers of Beatle songs before my dust gets thrown to the wind). Yet they always pull it off, as if the Beatles wrote soul songs instead of rock and pop songs. (Tina Turner's slow, soulful--there's no other description--version of Help gives a competely different meaning and feeling to the song). Somehow, miraculously, Pickett does such a great job with Hey Jude that it actually rivals the original, and for me that's saying a lot. (I was reminded of this when I recently heard Pickett's version on--where else--the Radio XM channel, The 60's). It made me wish that Pickett had taken on other Beatles songs; I can't help but think he would have nailed Let It Be, for instance.

If Pickett's version of Hey Jude is "miraculous," then his other covers rival it for the same descriptor. I'm gobsmacked by some of the songs he chose to do. He did Born to Be Wild, a song done by as white a band as recorded in the 60's, Steppenwolf. But the song has an edge to it, you could well argue, so in that sense it's a natural fit. In theory, that's true. But listen to what Pickett does with the song and you'll find as much heart as beat. His other covers? How about You Keep Me Hangin' On? Yes, The Supremes sang it, but Diana Ross has such a sweet voice and the beat keeps it moving. Believe it or not, a slower, psychedelic version of the song was more famous in my circles, done by a group called Vanilla Fudge. Pick either version and it's light years away from Pickett's style, and Pickett does wonders with that song. Finally, and this is the song that OTL will most appreciate*, Pickett actually did a cover of Sugar Sugar by the Archies. Now that's another group competing for the title, Whitest Group Ever, yet again Pickett makes the song his own. You can't ask for more.

*When OTL was younger I took him to see a doctor, and while we were waiting just outside the examination room, an issue concerning a diabetic came up. So when the doctor reached the examination room he began to hum a few notes of Sugar Sugar and OTL finished the line of the song. This doctor got such a kick out of OTL doing that. His gleeful laugh of acknowledgement and appreciation of OTL picking up on his humming and chiming right in still brings a smile to my face.

Mystery Song Revealed

2006-03-17T11:53:00.000-05:00

For the past five or six weeks I have been a man possessed. You see, one morning, while getting my coffee at the local market, I heard a song over the speakers. I had heard it before (it was an oldie), but for some reason it really stuck with me this time. It was SO catchy. As I walked out I decided I MUST have it. Unfortunately, I didn't know what it was called or who it was by. All I could really offer in describing it to someone else was that it included the phrases "good to me" and "make it all right," and featured ladies adding in some doo-wah's during the choruses. But I knew exactly what it sounded like in my head. This was the frustrating part: hearing it but not being able to describe it.

I typed the phrases I believed to be the lyrics into various search engines when I got to work but came up empty. After that initial push I began spitting my garbled version of the mystery song at anyone who would listen. Understandably, no one had any clue what I was talking about.

The other day, though, I decided to give the internet one more try before giving up entirely. For no less than two hours of company time I typed in every possible combination of words and then typed in closely related words, on the chance that I misheard the lyrics. SUCCESS! The song was none other than "Lonely Weekends" by Charlie Rich.

A classic. Catchy, good lyrics and it's got that X-factor that Simon Cowell always talks about on American Idol. I've been listening to it on an endless loop for three days now and have yet to tire of it. Anyone out there with iTunes should buy it RIGHT AWAY. (But be careful, because Charlie's recorded it a few times. Be sure to get the one that's on Million Sellers - Sun's Gold Hits, Vol. 1.)

Okay. That's all.

Interview with Alan Moore

2006-03-16T09:59:00.000-05:00

My new favorite website, YouTube, has a great Alan Moore television interview posted. It's actually the first time I've ever heard the man talk, so, for me, it was really neat. Look for discussions about his work, the movies based thereon [the most recent of which, V for Vendetta, he called "rubbish" in an interview with the New York Times (also a great piece)], and his lifelong hometown of Northampton.

Check it out here.

Gays Need Not Apply

2006-03-15T09:29:00.000-05:00

They say that any given style will come into vogue, go out, and if you wait long enough, come back in. Pleated pants. Cuffs. Long skirts. Miniskirts. Wingtips. Double-breasted suits. Okay, you get the idea. This same idea seems to apply to Bush policies as well. First we heard that unclassified information readily available to the public was quietly being classified. True! Makes you wonder what's going on with the newly classified information, doesn't it? When it comes time to declassify this information, who knows how much history will have been rewritten. This is terribly important, and organizations like the American Library Association should be all over it.

The latest policy change should be titled, "When Will these Fags Ever Learn" because it changes the old policy and affects the ability of gays to get government positions that require clearances. The old policy was that sexual orientation "may not be used as a basis for or a disqualifying factor in determining a person's eligibility for a security clearance." (My emphasis). Pretty strong, pretty clear, huh? That language was removed. Entirely. The new policy is that security clearances cannot be denied "solely on the basis of the sexual orientation of the individual." It doesn't take an attorney or what we used to call a policy "wonk" to discern that all our government has to do to exclude a gay person from getting a position that requires a clearance is find one other thing besides gayness to exclude a homosexual. Just one, and the queer is out of here. Hairstyle. Grandma was a Democrat. Comes from a blue state. Pick a criterion. Astoundingly, the Bush administration is going to Herculean efforts to downplay the change, stating that the intent has no effect on gays. Wow! Either they can't read their own policies (actually, that's a feasible defense for someone as dumb as Bush) or they think we are ready to swallow one huge chunk of bullshit.

The irony to the new policy is that it's not new. The Republicans love to live in the past and this is another classic example of the result. In the "good old days," which of course really weren't so good (no iPods), gays were not given clearances. If you were a homosexual, you could not be cleared. Period. When I was polygraphed at the National Security Agency (NSA) in 1973, I was not only asked if I was gay, I was asked if I was a "faggot," had ever "sucked cock," whether I knew what a "blow job" was, and a number of other extraordinary questions that are so blatantly offensive that they register 36,483 on the Richter scale of the Supremely Fucked Up. Down and dirty terms were used repeatedly by the interrogator. I almost came out of the chair, but wondered if I was being tested for my temper. Later, I realized the obvious, that regardless of the reason, the language was unprofessional to say the least. I complained to Security and they said that similar complaints had been made about that interrogator, and he had been relieved of his duties. I don't know if that was true or not, but I tend to think he was merely moved to another position.

My polygraph experience demonstrates just how highly gays were regarded in 1973. If you were homosexual, you didn't get in. I questioned this and was told that a couple of key defectors were gay, so no gays could be trusted. Later, I was given the rationale that a gay person could easily be blackmailed (the assumption being back then that gays stayed in their closets). I followed up and asked, "What if a gay person is openly gay? The blackmail rationale no longer applies." The response was that gays should nevertheless be excluded because they lacked "moral fiber." I know how patently ridiculous that sounds, but that is exactly what was explained to me. Queers just didn't have the right stuff.

So now that old policy, just like an old fashion, has been brought back by Bush and company. Just one factor besides being homosexual, and gays are out. I wonder if moral fiber is often used as that additional factor.

If They Can Foreclose on Your House...

2006-03-13T01:18:00.000-05:00

A woman in Florida is gathering public support because her homeowner's association (HOA) threatened to fine her for displaying a sign her husband sent her from Iraq. The sign is large and consists of various hues of red, white and blue and reads, "We support our troops." According to a poll, 88% support the woman's protest against her HOA. This is the kind of thing that, again, has me squarely in the minority. This woman and her husband freely chose a community that had an HOA--there are plenty of communities that don't--and signed a binding contract that incorporates the HOA rules. Most importantly, this contract is tied to the deed of their house. That means that not only can the HOA use means such as fines and whatever else they spell out in their document, they can enforce their rules by foreclosure if necessary. So this couple chose the community and signed all the documents. If they didn't want to live in a community with an HOA and restrictions, they should not have bought a house in that community. If they didn't understand what an HOA is, they should have hired an attorney to review the documents of sale. (It amazes me how many people will pay $350,000 for a house, but fail to pay a few hundred bucks for an attorney to review the documents and the deed). How much simpler can it get?

I understand that HOAs are often despised and are routinely referred to as Nazi organizations because of their zeal to enforce pain-in-the-ass rules. You can't change much of anything on your house or property without getting prior approval from an "architectural review committee" (ARC) or similar organization tied to the HOA. Want new landscaping? Better clear it with the ARC first or you're going to be paying a lot of money to put your yard back in place. Want to change the color of your house? Ditto. HOAs and ARCs pay attention to the smallest of details. A friend of mine who lives in Columbia, MD, had to get approval to add a brass door-knocker to his door. Down here in Texas, I had to get approval to install a storm door that was purchased to match the color of the brick on the house. But that's the whole point of moving into such a community. By agreeing to live under such draconian restrictions, you ensure that you will not be living between one neighbor who has a bunch of junked cars and engine parts in his front yard, and another neighbor who has painted her house electric fuchsia. That's exactly why people move into such communities.

Why can't the HOA make a small exception for something reasonable? First, what one person considers "reasonable," another might consider offensive. Second, if the HOA doesn't enforce its rules across the board, it can be accused of "selective enforcement," and this can be used in court as a defense to an HOA action. This would entirely defeat the purpose of having an HOA.

I "support our troops," but I don't support people moving into restricted communities and then whining about the rules.

Selling Your Salvation for $504

2006-03-09T14:44:00.000-05:00

The Wall Street Journal reports that a 23-year-old graduate student put "a chance to save his soul" up for auction on eBay. Part of the deal was that the student, Memant Mehta, would attend church services of the winning bidder at a rate of $10 per service. Mr. Mehta is an atheist, though he was raised in Jainism, an ancient Indian faith whose believers vow to harm no living thing, not even microbes in the air. (The Gobsmacked Editorial Board met and decided that Jainism sounded like a good thing, though we had to admit that we sometimes used Lysol or similar products, and thus probably harmed countless microbes--not the ones in the air so much as the ones clinging to kitchen and bathroom surfaces). Mr. Mehta admires famous atheists, has read some of the Bible, and loves watching televangelists like Benny Hinn and Joel Osteen*. How can you not like Memant Mehta?

When I began reading the article, I thought for sure that some Far Right Christian was going to be the winning bidder. Thankfully, I was wrong. Jim Henderson, a former preacher who is trying to bring sanity to Christianity, won the bid for $504. Mr. Henderson is a liberal Christian, and has a web site, off-the-map.org, whose mission is "Helping Christians be normal." (Geez, no kidding, I wish I'd thought of that). He does not like the proselytizing that evangelical preachers do, and thinks this turns off many people. Another guy I like! (Alas, the success of evangelical churches says that there are a lot of Americans who do like preachers ranting and raving at them).

The deal was changed also--what an uplifting story this is! The $504 goes to a university secular alliance, and Mr. Mehta goes to services and writes his commentary in a blog on Mr. Henderson's web site. For someone like me, who was raised as a Southern Baptist and had his ass in a pew or somewhere in the church at least three times a week, Mr. Mehta's commentary is most entertaining. It ranges from the blunt (he suggests less liturgy and more stories for one church leader) to the thoughtful (one example, in essence, is his questioning of the value of a preacher telling a group of believers how screwed up a group of non-believers is). Much of what he says is exactly, or very close to the same things I've thought over the years as I considered church, sermons and salvation.

If nothing else, this religious exercise may cause people to think rather than blindly follow, and In These Times, that's an exceptionally welcome approach.

*Didn't you get a laugh out of Mrs. Osteen getting her ass thrown off an airplane for getting into it with a flight attendant? She said the whole incident was blown out of proportion. Hmmm. How many times have I or anyone I know been kicked off a plane...

Music: Ulrich Schnauss? Darn Teuton.

2006-03-09T10:11:00.000-05:00

(Please forgive that headline. My only defense is that I read a lot of Variety.)

The late 1980s gave birth to a genre of music called "shoegazing," which was a style of alternative rock generally typified by soft guitar sounds, gentle lyrics, and being all-around boring as hell. Personally, as you may have guessed, I can’t get into it.

HOWEVER, shoegazing has since spawned what many call "nu-gazing," which is essentially the electronic sister of shoegazing and something I CAN get into. Bands like Air and M83 have gained respectable followings with their smooth, relaxing beats and pleasing melodies. Air in particular has become very popular, based in no small part on the supremely enjoyable soundtrack they provided for the movie The Virgin Suicides. Aside from those two groups, though, no musical act in that field really stood out to me. Until I heard Ulrich Schnauss.

Say what you will about his name*, he makes some fantastic, beautiful music. So far, I've only been able to listen to his album "Far Away Trains Passing By," courtesy of SOMEONE ELSE DEFINITELY NOT ME downloading it from Regnyouth, but the six tracks on that album are far and away the best ambient electronica I've heard in a long time.

I highly recommend his stuff. If you get a chance, check it out.

* He does hail from the region that produced Kruder & Dorfmeister after all.

Steroids, Shmeroids.

2006-03-08T14:02:00.000-05:00

I came across this story in Seed Magazine this morning (thanks to a lead from The Water Cooler's own adelino), and I have to say it's a fascinating angle on the steroids debate, which will almost certainly be at the forefront of sports discussions for a while as a result of Sports Illustrated's story on Barry Bonds. The subject of steroid abuse is something that's always bothered me to some extent, and Seed's article sheds some interesting philosophical light on it.

As the writer of the piece wonders, what exactly is the difference between an athlete training at high altitude, where it's harder to breathe, and an athlete who takes a performance-enhancing injection? Regardless of the legality, it's not easy to identify the BASIC difference. After all, they're both just a means of improving performance in sport, right? It's all in the name of one person making him or herself athletically superior to someone else, right?

Wrong. In discussing the matter with my friends, the major difference seems to be the "short cut" aspect of steroids and how they skew the ratio of work done during the training process to the results achieved. A marathon runner who trains in Denver has to work significantly harder on practice runs than those who train in altitudes closer to sea level, and he reaps the reward on race day. A runner who injects himself with some kind of hormone may not have to work as hard and can still achieve at the very least the same results. Likewise, Billy Ripken may have taken batting practice every day of his career, but he was never going to hit the long ball like Barry Bonds, who was apparently on every steroid known to man.

So what does all this mean? As Gobsmacked's EmilyBee said to me this morning (paraphrased), "Who cares? Sports are vastly overemphasized in our society." I couldn’t agree more. But I do think this particular issue has certain implications about the nature of public opinion on sports AS sports. Meaning, I don't think steroids are ever going to become OK in the public eye, but, as the Seed article mentions, the popularity of sports is probably going to remain high no matter what, which indicates that people probably care to a certain extent but in the end they just want to see balls go over the left field wall and heads get busted on the gridiron, myself included.

So, I don't know anymore. Steroids are bad news and any athlete who stoops to using them is a real chump. But in the end I guess it's just a big old whatever. Whine all you want about insulting the integrity of the game and tainting the record books and whatever. You (and me) are still going to watch the next ball game.

Letterman's 2,500th Show on CBS

2006-03-07T01:58:00.000-05:00

David Letterman celebrated his 2,500th show on CBS tonight. He received a really nice basket of fruit, which of course everyone assumed was sent by the network. But the card read, "Dave, May you have 2,500 more shows. Best, Kim Jong-il." Dave thanked Kim for the basket but noted that Kim's brother, Mentally, sent nothing. ("Mentally" is a joke he always uses, but it's funny every time).

And that's why I like Letterman.

Movies, 2005

2006-03-06T23:02:00.000-05:00

Full Disclosure: I did not watch the Oscars because the movie that was easily the film of the year did not get nominated, and also because some of the films that did get nominated did not deserve it. My failure to watch was vindicated further by Crash getting Best Picture. Now a comment from others on the Oscars. They sucked! Surveys taken have identified two resounding themes: 1)The wrong films were nominated and 2) The show itself was "tedious." People are schizo about Jon Stewart's performance. On the one hand, a comprehensive survey showed that he was resoundingly panned, yet the same survey had resoundingly positive results for 7 jokes that he told. The one joke I liked best had the closest vote, probably because it went over the heads of the audience. It was the one about the films of journalists doggedly pursuing stories, determined to get the truth, being period pieces. I realize my comment is elitist, but I do wonder if the Oscar audience knows what a "period piece" is and whether they understood that Stewart was taking a shot at today's journalists.

Update: I just saw Ebert and Roper on The Tonight Show, and they couldn't say enough good things about the Oscar winners, particularly Crash. They also added that Americans could not appreciate good films (I agree, but not because Americans didn't like most of the Oscar nominees this year). Maybe E&R want to stay in Hollywood's good graces; that's the only explanation I can come up with. Ebert did finally say, thankfully, that Amy Adams should have won an Oscar, and that Junebug is a wonderful film.

I noted in a previous post what movies I liked in 2005. I've just been through an entire list of 2005 movies, and have to say that it was the worst year in memory for quality, entertaining movies. With that in mind, I'd like to submit a list of movies from 2005 that is a good mix of movies rather than worry about whether the films are Oscar material.

1. Walk the Line. I said it before, I can't say it enough so I'll say it again, hands down this is the best movie by far of 2005. Nothing comes close to it. Joaquin Phoenix was never one of my favorite actors, but he won me over with this film.
Category: Mainstream (which, as I've noted previously, is a category that usually sounds the death knell for me).

2. Junebug. Couples moving at a real-life pace, which is to say, slo-o-w. Amy Adams won awards outside the Oscars for her brilliant performance.
Category: Character-Driven Indie.

3. Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room. This movie is so powerful it will make the most confirmed capitalist turn socialist. Or at least vote for a Democrat. In retrospect, this movie should have been near the top of my previous list. OTL was really into documentaries at one time, and if he hasn't seen this one, he's in for a treat.
Category: Indie Documentary that is a morality play.

4. Head-On. This Turkish-German film, again in retrospect, is as good as Indies got in 2005. Briefly: Two self-destructive people meet in a mental hospital in Germany and he agrees to marry her to get her away from her horrible family. Brutal, gritty, realistic to a fault. Get ready to wince.
Category: Foreign Indie love story that pulls no punches.

5. Hustle and Flow. How can I not love a guy who's a pimp and a rapper? Joke at Spirit Awards: "He's black. Who would have guessed?" A movie with energy that gets you rooting for someone. Did any Best Picture nominees have these characteristics?
Category: Indie American Dream

6. Millions. Brit film with typical British scenes and humor. Family fare, yet quirky and mystical.
Category: Indie comedy for those who know anything about Brit suburban life.

7. Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Pass the cheese and press the button.
Category: Pure fun.

8. Syriana. Okay, so you don't understand what the hell this movie is about, it's still better than the films nominated for Best Picture. There's a message in that damn film somewhere.
Category: Indie paradox.

9. March of the Penguins. Peguins in -75 degree love narrated by Morgan Freeman. Wonderful cinematography.
Category: Indie deep freeze documentary.

I was also going to compile a list of movies to avoid at all costs--Match Point, for example--but there were so many awful fims in 2005 that the list would have gotten out of hand. I keep reading about the record number of movie scripts that are being written. It makes you wonder if anyone reads them.

One ping only

2006-03-06T14:36:00.000-05:00

Yes, I watched the Oscars, but believe you me I watched the show in protest. You see, just before it came on I noticed that The Hunt for Red October was on at the same time. ACH! What to do?! Watch the Oscars, with all the bad jokes and the endless stream of commercials? Or watch one of the awesomest movies ever?! Sadly, the Oscars won out (even though I did switch back to Red October pretty frequently).

Three things I liked about the Oscars:

1) The montage of old cowboy movies, edited to make them appear gay in theme. I was seriously on the floor, especially after the very last one, which showed a conversation between Charlton Heston, who was laying bed, and Gregory Peck, who was on his way out of the room where Heston was laying:

Heston: I don't know why you thought you had to come say goodbye.
Peck: The goodbye that I have in mind will take a little more room than we have in here.

Hee hee! Youtube has the montage here. Check it out. (I think it was from The Big Country, but feel free to let me know if I'm wrong.)

2) George Clooney's response to one of John Stewart's jibes at him. He laughed heartily with the rest of the crowd for a few seconds and then abruptly stopped and gave a look of, "Wait a second. That was a joke aimed at ME."

3) Nick Park and Steve Box accepting the Academy Award for Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which won in the Animated Feature category. They were wearing standard tuxes with ENORMOUS colored bowties.

So, for the four hours it was on, the Oscars entertained me for approximately three minutes. I wish I'd committed to The Hunt for Red October.

Beatles and Decca--A Different Story

2006-03-03T14:36:00.000-05:00

There's a great story about "the man who turned down the Beatles," Decca's president, Dick Rowe. He did indeed turn down the Beatles for a recording contract, but so did a lot of other recording companies. But Rowe became internationally famous for his horrible judgment--he was the president of the company after all.

After "Please Please Me" hit the top of the charts, the Beatles went from being just another local band trying to make it, to a national phenomenon in a matter of weeks. George Harrison (not even Lennon or McCartney) was asked to judge a talent contest to be held in Liverpool, with the winning band to receive a recording contract with Decca. Rowe and his aides arrived, and Rowe ended up sitting next to Harrison. Rowe was embarassed and told Harrison how much he'd kicked himself for rejecting the Beatles. Harrison responded with water-under-the-bridge comments and laughed it off good-naturedly.

About halfway through the program of bands, Rowe picked Harrison's brain for which talent he thought was best. Harrison responded with a few names he thought were okay, but added that the best band the Beatles had heard lately was the Rolling Stones* down in London. Rowe, not even bothering with goodbyes, immediately got up from his chair, left the talent show, sped back to London on the next train and went to see the band that had captured George's attention.

*The Beatles had seen the Rolling Stones at London's Crawdaddy Club and thought the way that Brian Jones and Keith Richards played off each other was amazing. Later that night, the two bands talked until dawn. Months later, the Rolling Stones opened for the Beatles at the Royal Albert Hall.

The Beatles and Me

2006-03-01T12:21:00.000-05:00

I am fascinated by the story of the Early Beatles, largely because, and I don't mean to sound melodramatic, the Beatles changed my life. Before going into their story, I thought I'd share mine, at least as related to the Beatles, in this first post. John Lennon has said that when he first heard Elvis on Radio Luxembourg singing "Heartbreak Hotel," it changed his life because he'd never heard anything like it previously. Though I'm not an Elvis man, I know exactly what he means. Prior to the Beatles, I had to listen to R&B and a few scattered rock songs to find anything of interest. My other choices could be classified as 1) My parents' music (Lawrence Welk, etc.), which I absolutely hated, 2) Swing, which I never got into, 3) The Sinatra era of singers, including Sammy Davis*, Tony Bennett** and so forth, 4) More current stuff from singers like Frankie Avalon, Fabian, and Bobby Rydell that was so bloody boring but it seemed to keep the girls happy and 5) Elvis, who I considered corny because about the time he became popular he was Las Vegasized and as far as I'm concerned that was the end of him.

Then the Beatles. I had never heard such a combination of beat, harmony and melody previously. As soon as I heard them I knew they were different, and that same comment has been made over and over since 1961. They redefined rock.*** They were amazing. They were electrifying. I could listen to any of their songs all day long and never tire of it. Their 45's were the best bargain out there, so good that people argued over which side was truly the A side and eventually these discussions were settled by referring to A and AA sides. I bought "Meet the Beatles" and played that lp until I had to buy another copy. And it wasn't anything close to what they would later release. Every song they wrote had a distinctive quality to it; nothing seemed old or a reworked version of a previous song they'd done. As far as I was concerned, this was rock and there was no turning back. To this day, "Please Please Me" rocks me like no other song. The harmony, the cut-in of Harrison's guitar, the unique chord changes and the driving beat are as good as it gets. (There's a long, interesting story behind "Please Please Me" that I'll get to in another post some day). Add three more songs out at the same time, "Love Me Do," "From Me to You," and their cover of "Twist and Shout" and I was totally, almost pathetically hooked. You've got a rock solid album with those four songs even if the rest of the songs are nothing but pabulum.

The Beatles on "The Ed Sullivan Show" and the Beatles' concert at Shea Stadium are events that have been shown, in whole or in part, many, many times, so I'm not going to go into the Beatlemania phenomenon. But I remember with great clarity watching the Beatles on "Ed Sullivan" and hearing my father say, "They're just a fad. They'll go out as fast as The Twist." And I didn't bother to argue because I knew--I know this sounds silly given my youth and how early this was in the career of the Beatles--that they were far more than a passing fad. I knew they were something terribly, terribly special, even though I couldn't have defined what "special" meant at the time.

One other memory comes to mind. By the time the Beatles were finally "approved for export" to the U.S., the entire British Invasion had started pouring into the U.S. So I remember sitting in an 8th grade class and seeing a girl read a teen magazine that featured the Beatles and the Dave Clark Five. On the cover of the magazine it asked, "Beatles or Dave Clark Five, Who's Your Favorite?" I read over her shoulder and got a silent laugh over the controversy the magazine was manufacturing. But I got a real shock when I asked the girl who she liked and she replied, "Definitely the Dave Clark Five. Dave Clark is so cute." I asked myself, "Is this even possible," and the quick, resounding answer was "No!"

The Beatles, of course, went on to change everything: music (alternative, psychedelic, theme albums and so forth didn't even exist prior to the Beatles) dress, hair, and questioning and confronting The Establishment, just to rattle off a few well-known revolutions. But it was the hits they kept churning out that were so above and beyond anything I'd heard that made me a True Believer, and I've never turned back.

*Sammy Davis, Jr. would appear on talk shows and variety shows and he was this skinny black guy with this preposterous jewelry and this cornball manner of speaking (though many of his life stories were quite interesting). He'd use words like "groovy" when no one from his generation or mine was using them. But he blew me away with one song. Sammy Davis, Jr., charter member of the Sinatra Brat Pack, was on a talk show and got up to sing a song. I expected a standard from Sammy's own era and one that would appeal to what I considered his fans, his audience. Then I heard the first strains: "I read the news today, oh boy." Knock me down and kick the shit out of me! Is this even possible? "About a lucky man who made the grade." No way! No fucking way! "Nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Lords" and on into the transition to "Woke up, fell out of bed." To this day, SD has my eternal admiration for getting up and taking on "A Day in the Life." Not only is it a song way ahead of what I considered his era, but it's an incredibly challenging song to take on as a solo.

**I think it's more than fair to say that the mother of my children, emilybee and OTL, and I had different tastes in music. She was old school stuff and musicals; she preferred melodies to the hard beat of rock. I was still listening to Hendrix because except for R&B, there was a lot of saccharine stuff coming out. She came home quite excited one day, saying that Tony Bennett was appearing at the Kennedy Center and wouldn't it be great if we could get tickets. I had to ask her who Tony Bennett was (I honestly didn't know). She referenced "I Left My Heart In San Francisco" and "Fly Me to the Moon." I'd heard the former. We went to the concert (great seats), and Bennett sang his material, but never talked to the audience. At all. I later read that this was not something he was comfortable doing, but that he was working on it.

***I recently read this headline: "Rocker Undergoes Surgery." It was an article about Sheryl Crow undergoing breast surgery. I wish Sheryl Crow a speedy, long-lasting recovery. But she's not a rocker. Rock is defined first and foremost by a driving beat and a hook that grab you and won't let you go. "He's a Rebel" by The Crystals, aka Darlene Love is a classic example. From there, it all depends on the artist as to chords, tune, words, inventiveness and so forth, but it all starts with a driving beat and a hook. It really is as simple as that.

A passing notion of life on Earth; ugh

2006-02-27T15:01:00.000-05:00

I just finished reading H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, and, not to get all existential or anything but, it really made me think about the future of humanity and the pointlessness of existence. (Total bummer!)

Early on in The Time Machine, Wells' main character puts forth a theory about why humanity (in the form of the Eloi people he first encounters) has become so childlike and imbecilic; at this point he has yet to meet the Morlocks. His theory is that humans, having conquered all of their problems and triumphed over all of Earth's difficulties, have ceased to use their brains to any extent and have subsequently devolved into simpletons.

Also, after the main character has finished his dealings with the Eloi and the Morlocks, 800,000 years into the future (the bulk of the story), he travels a further 30 million years forward, when the Earth has moved closer to the Sun and now behaves more like the moon does relative to Earth; it no longer spins on its axis and one side exists in a state of permanent high noon. Humans are nowhere to be found and the only visible living things are giant crablike creatures.

The idea of intelligence slowly receding, coupled with a future in which Earth will be gradually swallowed up by the Sun, resonates with me for some reason and, frankly, gives me the heebie-jeebies. When you think in these kinds of terms nothing we do matters in the least. I mean, I wasn't fooling myself before I read this book or anything, but this recent revelation really drove the point home for me that it's not just me that doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things; humanity doesn’t matter much either.

"Lone Star"

2006-02-27T13:07:00.000-05:00

My taste generally runs to the offbeat in movies. Thus, it will come as somewhat of a surprise to those who know me that the movie Lone Star has crashed into my all-time top ten. I never heard of this movie until the past week, when I was channel surfing and saw it listed on HBO's Westerns channel. The Westerns channel normally shows old Westerns or cowboy movies if you will, and most of the fare consists of pretty much the same plot and the same actors (John Wayne being the most obvious example). Hence, I avoid that channel as if it were a reality show, but in this case I happened to notice that Chris Cooper starred in the movie. Chris Cooper is one of my favorite character actors, and I couldn't imagine what he was doing in a cowboy movie, so I tuned in. What a pleasant surprise, and what a bad channel for this wonderful film to be showcased!

Lone Star is not a cowboy film, and it does not take place in the 19th century, but rather, in the late 20th century. It is a straightforward drama that is as rich and rewarding and well-written as they come. Cooper (Sam Deeds) plays the son of a legendary sheriff, Buddy Deeds, of Frontera (Eagle Pass, Texas in real life), a small town in South Texas on the Rio Grande. He has returned there after a divorce, and is now the sheriff himself, but he can never get out from the shadow his father has left. He also has the unenviable task of solving a 40-year old murder after the bones of an unidentified victim are accidentally dug up. Sam has a perspective on the town and on his job like no other, because he saw an awful lot when he was being raised in the town, and now that he's come back, he sees things with fresh, accepting, sometimes sad eyes. When he runs into his old high school sweetheart who is now a history teacher, he makes no attempt to make his job sound important: "I'm just a jailer. I run a 60 room hotel with bars on the windows." When he talks to a wish-we-were-back-in-the-old-days bartender, the dialogue starts like this:
Bartender: Now I'm as liberal as the next guy...
Sam: If the next guy is a redneck, sure.

Written and directed by John Sayles, Lone Star is a movie that strikes many chords, and is therefore somewhat difficult to describe. The stuggle of Hispanics, blacks and whites (whites are called Anglos in South Texas) to live together; the hypocrisy of all three; revisionist history; the cruelty of those who make the rules; the at times brutal optimism of romantic love; and of course, illegals. Interestingly, Sayles has said in interviews that he had Yugoslavia in mind when he wrote the film. This movie manages to pull off that most difficult of tasks, examining very personal relationships while making points on a societal level. During a frank discussion between two friends about an interracial marriage one of them is about to enter, one friend says, "It's always heartwarming to see a prejudice defeated by a deeper prejudice."

But it's not snappy lines that make this movie (thought it certinaly has a few). It is the structure of the film, including the subtle pans, turning present to past and back to present, that really awe. When Sam Deeds takes his investigation briefly to Mexico, he tries to get information from a man. The man sizes up Sam and asks, "Do birds flying south know the lines they cross?" That brilliant metaphorical query is asked in relation to the border between the U.S. and Mexico, how far Sam is willing to push the investigation, and the arbitrariness of the lines that mankind creates. Lone Star is certainly a piercing look at life and death in a Texas border town, but it's also a penetrating examination of the human condition.

Music note: "Since I Left You Baby," a song penned and sung by blues singer Ivory Joe Hunter, and a Spanish cover of the song by Freddie Fender are used to crushingly good effect in the movie.

Lone Star is a near-perfect film.

The White House Better Act Quickly

2006-02-22T09:02:00.000-05:00

As you've probably heard, control of seaports in six major U.S. cities -- including my hometown of Baltimore -- is being handed over to a firm based in the United Arab Emirates, a state-run company called Dubai Ports World (DPW). Previously, the ports had been managed by a British firm called Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation (POSN), but DPW acquired POSN, which allowed them to take charge of the port operations.

Prior to reading about this acquisition and the subsequent hubbub, I really didn’t understand how port operations work. Apparently, in the U.S., private companies manage the daily operations of seaports, but the ports are still under the watch of various state and local governments, most often called the Port Authority.

What this transfer of management means as far as national security goes is a debatable point. On one hand, I actually agree with the Bush administration. This is just business and DPW will only be managing the ports, the various port authorities will still have oversight. And what makes a company from the United Arab Emirates that much different from a company in Britain? On the other hand, I also have to agree with what appears to be most members of congress. Allowing the management duties of major seaports in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Miami and New Orleans over to a country that has ties (of whatever kind) to the terrorist attacks of September 11 is serious business.*

But really, as far as this writer is concerned, those implications aren’t even the issue on the home front. The major issue, as I see it, is appearances, and I really think this is going to be a big problem for the Bush administration. As far as public opinion is concerned -- regardless of any spin the White House can put on it and regardless of what may be the reality of the global political situation -- the whole thing comes off as the handing over of major seaports to Arab interests, plain and simple.

Of all the things to botch, how did Bush manage to botch this?! HE's the one who's been so concerned with security in a post-9/11 world, something he seems to mention in just about every speech! It was like the one thing people could count on, for good or bad; if Bush was going to stand behind something all the way to the grave it would be national security. And now he's defending his decision to OK this deal? It just doesn't make any sense to me.

If the White House machine doesn’t get moving, this thing could blow up BIG. Especially considering that most congressman, from BOTH sides of the aisle, are against the President's decision.

* Politicians should just watch the second season of The Wire if they want to know what REALLY goes down in seaports.

The Art of Demotivation

2006-02-21T14:07:00.000-05:00

For those of you who wish you had a razor on you when you are subjected to a motivational speaker, there's hope. Yes, motivation has become a multi-billion dollar industry, and self-serving at that when you consider that surveys show employee morale at an all-time low. But not only is the book that is the subject of this post out there for your demotivation, there's also a web site that will break you from any notions of self-esteem and sense of potential that you harbor, and bring your narcissistic ass back down to earth. Check out www.despair.com and play the QuickTime videos. I don't want to give everything away, but a few touches I particularly enjoyed are:

**An executive visiting an employee and getting his name wrong, then after shaking hands, making a point of taking out a bottle of anti-bacterial lotion out and using it on his hands. The executive explains that this helps send a message to the employee that there is a world of difference between an average employee and an executive.

**Disservice motto: "We're not satisfied until you're not satisfied."

**Cost of book for sale: Manager $25, Executive $40, Chairman $1,200.

I'm saying nothing about the videos or the site propaganda because I don't want to give any more away than I already have. You have the right to be just as demotivated as those of us who have already been to the web site.

Movies 2005: The Overrated

2006-02-20T23:50:00.000-05:00

My choices are made only from the more popular movies, not the easy targets.

1) "War of the Worlds." Easily the worst, most over-hyped movie of the year, this film managed to reduce Dakota Fanning to series of screams. Not even "Hide and Seek" could do that to her, and it was a horror movie. To make matters worse, the plot makes no sense. Extraterrestrials have the foresight to plant "eggs" on earth over a million years ago, well before man roamed the earth, yet those same ET's lack the foresight to take into account the atmosphere of the earth. I watched the movie fully intending to sit back and enjoy rather than analyze, yet still found the entire film an exercise in the nonsensical. I wonder what the film would have grossed if the names Cruise and
Spielberg had not been associated with it.

2) "Corpse Bride." I kept reading what a fantastic job Tim Burton did with this animated film. How creative. How unusual. How off-the-wall ala "Beetlejuice." No. The movie had none of those qualities. Had I not read so many rave reviews, I wouldn't have lasted through the movie. "This can't be it" was all I could repeat as I sat and watched.

3) "The Longest Yard." A star-studded remake, this movie was neither funny enough to be entertaining, nor credible enough to make me care if success was in the cards for the team. This movie is a disgrace to its 1974 namesake.

4) "Be Cool." Sequel to "Get Shorty." How did Chili Palmer get from movies to records? Yes, I know he becomes disillusioned. But it's not credible. "Get Shorty"makes it clear that he's a total movie buff, and by the end of "GS" he's in movies deeply enough to be producing one and thinking about acting. Aside from the premise of "Be Cool" making no sense, the movie lacked the snappy lines and surprises of "Get Shorty." It also had some anti-gay lines in it; this surprised me, given Travolta's status in Hollywood. "Be Cool"--not cool.

5) "Ocean's Twelve." Technically a 2004 movie, I saw it in 2005. All everyone heard about was how much fun the actors had making the film, and how great the Euro locations were. Apparently no one bothered to check to see if the film was any good.

6) "Mr. and Mrs. Smith." I read that Brad Pitt left the set of this movie to do Ocean's Twelve." I guess that explains how "OT" was released in 2004, and this movie was released in 2005. In any case, Brad should have stayed at home and we would have had two less crappy films.

7) "Forty Year-Old Virgin." Somewhat entertaining, but not that funny.

8) "History of Violence." Based on the graphic novel which I can only assume is much better. Again, entered theater really looking forward to flick; exited feeling mediocrity had hit me squarely in the gut. The plot is well-crafted, but the manner in which the scenes were shot did not leave me feeling surprised. Putting it another way, as each scene passed, I kept telling myself, "I should have felt surprised."

9) "Brokeback Mountain." Yes, it's more than just a "gay cowboy movie," but it is still overrated. As is (gasp!) Jake Gyllenhaal. What's the deal with this guy? I'm just not with the program when it comes to him. He hasn't done anything since "Donnie Darko" that's any good, yet everyone loves him. Get me his sister, Maggie, and give her the same caliber of roles.

10) "Capote." Yeah, Hoffman and Keener are great. Fantastic, in fact. I love them both. And the film is described by one critic as being "the best film ever made about writers and writing." I don't think so. Writers and writing? We get no insight into how Lee Harper writes (she's a very, very private person in reality and probably hasn't shared that). We do get insight into Capote and somewhat into his writing, but the film is almost tunnel-visioned in getting across again and again and again what an insecure, self-centered, self-serving user of people Capote is. After the first 20 minutes, we get the idea, which is then developed to the heavens for the rest of the movie. I like Capote's writing. I've read just about everything he's written. I wish this movie had spent more time with it.

Movies 2005: The Good

2006-02-20T00:13:00.000-05:00

I saw more movies in 2005 than in any year of my life. Not because there were so many good ones (there weren't), but because of being able to get $4.50 tickets to the best theater in town. But I still managed to miss a few I wish I'd seen. Here are my off-the-cuff comments about movies that, with one exception, would be considered mainstream.

1) Cutting right to the chase, the best movie of 2005, by far, for me was "Walk the Line." This is one of the few times in my life that I'd vote with the people as regards the quality of a movie. (Lots of people saw "Walk the Line" as opposed to the movies nominated for Oscars). The single biggest factor that hurts "Walk the Line" is that "Ray" was a hit in 2004 and garnered all kinds of acclaim, so the biopic film for many in the academy had too recently been feted. No need to repeat. As much as I love the music of Ray Charles, and as fascinating as I find his life story, my honest opinion is that "Ray" was boring. It left out many important facts of his life, one entire marriage for instance, yet spent a lot of time trying to get across relatively unimportant details that slowed the film down and robbed it of much-needed energy. By contrast, "Walk the Line" is loaded with energy. I was amazed, astounded at the performance of Joaquin Phoenix. I would never in a million years have guessed he would be cast as Johnny Cash, muchless that he would be so good. A fantastic script, much better than that written for "Ray," didn't hurt either, nor did the performance of Reese Witherspoon. The movie had me on the edge of my seat from beginning to end and makes my desert island list.

2) "March of the Penguins." Documentary narrated by, who else, Morgan Freeman, this film is full of breathtaking footage. I'm a sucker for nature documentaries.

3) "Millions." An British indie about a widowed father and two sons who relocate to a new housing development. When the sons discover "loads o' money," things get complicated. Whimsical. Spiritual. Off-beat. Not to be viewed with a cynical eye.

4) "Thumbsucker." Unusual indie about a high school boy who sucks his thumb. Delves into family dynamics, school hassles, and teenage love issues in a realistic manner as the young man searches for the answers.

5) "Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit." Not as good as I thought it was going to be, but still, how bad can any Wallace and Gromit picture be?

6) "The Squid and the Whale." Based on the true childhood experiences of Noah Baumbach and his brother. A brilliant husband and wife, each with a Ph.D. in English from Columbia, decide that they've had enough and get a divorce. This movie examines, in brutal detail at times, the acting out of the two sons and their emotional struggles. One is devoted and loyal to his egomaniacal father; the other simply wants his shattered life to return to what it was prior to the divorce. All four actors who play the family, Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney, Jesse Eisenberg, and Owen Kline are brilliant. William Baldwin is both funny and annoying as the tennis instructor.

7) "Broken Flowers." Nothing close to "Lost in Translation," but this Bill Murray film has its moments. Murray is a retired, well-off guy who gets an anonymous note stating that he has a son who is coming to visit him. Since Murray doesn't think he has any children, he doesn't know what to make of the note. Murray's neighbor pushes him into going in search of the son, assuming that the letter is not a hoax. Murray puts together a list of old girlfriends from the era the son would have been conceived, and goes off on a pilgramage to visit them. The encounters with the likes of Sharon Stone, Julie Delpy, Tilda Swinton, Frances Conroy (of "Six Feet Under" fame), and Jessica Lange make for some interesting and entertaining moments.

8) "Head-On." A Turkish-German film about a couple that meets in a German mental hospital. Both are destructive and self-destructive to the nth degree, but inch their way back to making a life for themselves. Some amazing moments, but an ending that is not your standard American feel-good conclusion.

9) "Upside of Anger." An okay comedy that is better than it has a right to be by virtue of a wonderful cast.

10) "Wedding Crashers." Enjoyable with another excellent cast, but too much moping by Owen Wilson.

Honorable mention: "Crash." What goes around comes around.

Wish I'd seen: "Match Point," "Shopgirl," and "King Kong."

Get Well, XM and Sirius

2006-02-19T17:12:00.000-05:00

The two major satellite companies, XM and Sirius are not doing well according to their balance sheets. I sincerely hope they don't go under. They have some major things going for them that resonate with me in a big way. Their choices of specialized stations rock the house and the car. They have so many choices that I can't possibly do them justice, but I urge you to check them out. My personal favorites are Oldies, 50's, 60's, DooWop, and British Invasion. But there's a decade and set of artists for you no matter your tastes. And if you don't like music, there's talk and comedy available.

I've been listening (AOL has a deal with XM) as I write this and just heard "I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night" by the Electric Prunes. Great psychedelic song. What are the chances of hearing that on any local FM station down here? None! No, if you tune into the oldies station down here, you're going to hear songs like "My Girl" by the Temptations (yes, it's been described as one of the greatest songs ever written, but it's been overplayed for decades) or something like it. That's if they play an oldie. Most FM oldies stations play so many songs that are not oldies that it's amazing these stations still bother to use the word "oldies" in their name. And get that fucking "Old Fashioned Rock and Rock" by Bob Seger out of here. The fact that a song is about oldies doesn't make it an oldie! An oldie is defined as any rock song from "Rock Around the Clock" to 1972. Without getting into an esoteric discussion about this definition, let me just say that Bill Haley's song is widely recognized as the first rock 'n' roll song, so I'm going with it even though I'm not a big fan of it. As for 1972, that's when the 60's ended.

Three other advantages of satellite radio aside from choice: 1) no commercials, 2) no inane chatter among two or more people laughing like hyenas at their own unfunny jokes, and 3) no stations named after a guy's first name (down here, it's Bob and Frank, so far).

If the satellite radio companies have to go down, I hope they at least last long enough to make a drastic impact on FM radio. Yes, I know I can listen to my own CD's or download songs I like, but I still enjoy listening to radio. It's that element of surprise of hearing a great, underplayed song that I really enjoy.

Tori Amos Chooses "Videos That Rock"

2006-02-19T12:53:00.000-05:00

Since I posted music favorites of Aerosmith's Steven Tyler, I thought I would also include favorite videos of singer-songwriter Tori Amos, as reported by the WSJ. Her selections are given and described, along with a few comments from me, and the sites the videos can be found on are in parenthesis. Apple's QuickTime is pretty much ubiquitous, but if there are any Windows users out there who don't have it, you're going to need it for some of these videos (apple.com/quicktime/download). RealPlayer (my personal favorite) will also be needed. Here goes:

OutKast, "Hey Ya!" (mtv.com). Ms. Amos is not usually a hip-hop listener. But she likes OutKast singer Andre 3000's ability to "transform himself into different characters in this video." She compares him to Cindy Sherman, a photographer who takes on many personas in her work. Me: Totally agree with her on hip-hop and on "Hey Ya." This song moves more like a real song than like what I know as hip-hop. I began watching and listening with a very jaundiced attitude, but ended up thoroughly enjoying the visuals and the song. And now I can say I know who OutKast and Andre 3000 are. Is his father named Andre 2000?

Bjork, "It's Oh So Quiet" (bjork.com/videogallery). Directed by Spike Jonze, a fact that gets my attention. Done in 1995, it pays homage to classic movie musicals, borrowing visual elements from the 1930's films of Busby Berkeley. Me: Bjork. Spike Jonze. Busby Berkeley. This is not your usual Bjork (speaking to her singing style), nor your usual video. As Bjork moves through the video, seemingly ordinary people on the street (and I emphasize "ordinary" and "street") start singing and dancing with her. Speaking generally, Bjork has an impish quality to her that I find most endearing. I'd like to have lunch with her.

Talking Heads, "Road to Nowhere" (YouTube.com). Ms. Amos says David Byrne "was one of the masters." This 1985 video uses the "now-familiar" motif of a couple rapidly going through phases from marriage to old age. Me: What a pick! This short description does not do the video justice, and I say that as a person who despises the very idea of videos. Yes, there is a couple in the video who age dramatically, but there are many other images interspersed that add to the creative effectiveness of the video. I think the larger message of the video is that time passes quickly and you're dead before you know it, so you better make the most of every facet of your life.

Blur, "Coffee & TV" (YouTube.com). In this 1999 video, two milk cartons fall in love. "I've seen variations of that video in marketing campaigns for all kinds of stuff," says Ms. Amos. I assume she's referring to imitation being the sincerest form of flattery and all that. She says she enjoys the video's dry British humor. Me: So do I. You've got a milk carton that starts on a breakfast table and ends up, courtesy a motorcycle ride, in the big city. From there, he travels and sees a lot of the usual, but you have to pay attention to the small. One of the things that's on the street and on the screen for a second is a business card that advertises the services of a woman who will fulfill all your fantasies. These calling cards from prostitutes used to be posted by the tens on every phone box in London, particularly on Fridays. (I don't know where they are posted now, since everyone has a cell phone). The milk carton gets its milk consumed and ends up in milk carton heaven where it meets up with the pink milk carton that struck his fancy, but got squashed by a foot before the two could get together. Very British, indeed. As for Blur, they are described by youtube.com as being a British Weezer, not a compliment in my view. Blur is much more to my taste (based solely on hearing "Coffee & TV"), with the added bonus that in the video they appear to be geeks rather than hip rock stars.

Badly Drawn Boy, "Spitting in the Wind" (guardian.co.uk/badlydrawnboy). This 2001 video, starring Joan Collins got the attention of Ms. Amos because of the unusual casting. "When I hear [the song] now I can picture her in it." Me: Is that a good thing? Moving on, the juxtaposition of Badly Drawn Boy (is he badly drawn because he wears a gawdawful stocking cap?) with Ms. Collins as she takes her bath, performs her ablutions, gets dressed and goes to a party (and proceeds to dump BDB as she moves into her crowd) is unique. But after the first thirty seconds, I wanted to move on to something else. The song is not bad, but it's not one that particularly appeals to me, either. This is the only video (and song) that I can't help but think Ms. Amos could have come up with a better selection.

Favorite movie characters, all-time

2006-02-17T09:08:00.000-05:00

Lester Bangs, Almost Famous: Phillip Seymour Hoffman gives an unbelievable performance in this role and delivers some of the most memorable lines in movie history.

"Don't worry, you'll meet them all again on their long journey to the middle."

"The war is over. They won."

And so many more. It's really kind of silly to type them all out here, because I'm not doing them any justice whatsoever.

Marge Gunderson, Fargo: Do I really need to explain this one? Frances McDormand is so good in this movie (a movie that could very well be my favorite movie ever) that she need not take any other roles ever in her lifetime.Though it just hit me that she was also in Almost Famous...

Ms. Miller, Almost Famous: Even though she's only in a few scenes, playing William's mother, Frances McDormand steals every one of them. From giving Russell Hammond a lecture about the dangers of his "Valhalla of Decadence" to wondering aloud why her kids no longer care about her, she's totally totally brilliant.

Antonio Salieri, Amadeus: This one's a gimme. F. Murray Abraham, in what was basically his only lasting role, gave the performance of a lifetime as a mediocre composer in the time of Mozart.

Jeff Lebowski, The Big Lebowski: For sheer comedic value, can you top Jeff Bridges in this flick? If for nothing else than saying, "You mean... vagina?"

Bernie Bernbaum, Miller's Crossing: "It's a dream! Tommy! I'm praying to you! I can't die! I can't die! Out here in the woods! Like a dumb animal! I can't die! You can't kill me. I'm praying to you! Look in your heart! I'm praying to you! Look in your heart!"

I'm going to stop there, because I could basically go through every character in every Coen brothers movie; H.I. McDunnough, Carl Showalter, Jerry Lundegaard, the P.I. in Blood Simple, W.P. Mayhew... Gah! There are so many!

UN and EU, Meet What Americans Call the First Amendment

2006-02-14T19:54:00.000-05:00

Major news organizations are reporting that the European Union (EU) and a major group of Islamic countries, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), said the other day they would back United Nations action to stop “defamation of religion” after cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad sparked violent protests. The OIC is lobbying for the United Nations to include language against blasphemy in the tenets of a new human rights body, and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said he supported the idea.

Gobsmacked has a question that it puts to the UN and EU:
When did you become so concerned about "defamation of religion" and "blasphemy?" Most European countries have an official state religion, and yes, that religion is funded by the state, but the vast majority of Europeans don't get nearly as worked up over religion as Americans do. In fact, Europe has a much higher percentage of atheists in its population than does America. Many Europeans have the attitude that if you're religious, you must be a moron. So when did Europe become so concerned about religion and insults directed towards religion?

Let's state the answer in the form of a rhetorical question: Would you be so concerned about defamation of religion if Islamic extremists weren't so ready to blow up everything in sight? The fact is that this latest round of rioting and explosions and threats that is taking place after the Danish cartoon depicted Muhammad in an unflattering light is causing mass panic. The entire western world is getting blamed, and no one feels safe. So the EU wants to take the gutless way out and ban the cartoons rather than focus on the source of the problem: The Fucking Muslim extremists, you assholes!

Here in America, we've had ten churches set on fire in the past ten days, and no Southern Baptists (what a position I find myself in, defending the Southern Baptists) are rioting and blowing things up in retaliation against the authorities for having failed to bring the perpetrators to justice. The spokespersons I've heard are showing great restraint and calling on their congregations to have faith. We're talking arson, a felony in America, in this case probably a hate crime. Not cartoons of Jesus. Churches burned to the ground. And we've certainly had characterizations of Jesus (writings, cartoons, movies, and so forth) that many Christians would find offensive, but, again, no one blew anything up. In some cases (The Last Temptation of Christ comes to mind) people (I'm not sure all of them were Christians) demonstrated, but there wasn't wholesale rioting and blowing things.

Why? Because the First Amendment helps us distinguish between depictions, regardless of form, and acts. Despite all the guns we have, despite our propensity for violence, we understand that, with very few exceptions, people have a right to express their opinions, their interpretations, their art, and so forth. We draw the line when freedom of speech, in its broadest sense, risks physical harm to other people (the classic shouting of "Fire!" in a crowded theater) and at physical acts that cause or risk physical harm.

The Muslim extremists have gained so much leverage that the UN is looking into establishing a human rights group to look into violations of defamation of religion, i.e., cartoons, and recommend their censorship. This begs the question as to whose human rights they are out to protect, those of the Muslim extremists, or the rest of the world. It certainly appears to be the former. Rather than engage in attempted censorship, wouldn't this UN "human rights" group better serve the world by looking into those activities that are actually depriving others of their human rights?

Television: Jim Profit Kicks Greg House's Ass

2006-02-14T11:39:00.000-05:00

There has been a spate, yes, a spate I say, of articles about television protagonists in dramas being flawed. The point is then further developed into the conclusion that most of these protagonists are so flawed that they are bad people, and we, as viewers need to recognize that. Dr. Gregory House, of the Fox series, "House," is the poster child for these articles. I like the series, but each episode follows a formula to a Tee, so that with a little medical help I could write an episode. Every episode has nine elements: 1) a patient with a mysterious medical condition who requires treatment by cranky House and his team, 2) "normal" medical protocols being applied to the patient based on the symptoms, 3) failure of these pathetic attempts to cure the patient, 4) further analysis by House and his team, complete with sarcastic remarks by House, 5) House coming up with a seemingly bizarre solution because he never believes what the patient says, and applying it even though if it fails the patient might die, 6) House making sure he hurts as many people's feelings as possible and that they know that he knows he's hurting their feelings, 7) the patient getting better due to House's brilliant diagnosis, 8) House popping pain killers like M&M's and 9) an insight into House that shows he's got actual caring feelings but keeps them deeply buried.

House is an abrasive rebel, and just in case the viewers are really slow, Fox Network has House wearing a Hollywood beard (looks like he hasn't shaved in a couple of days) and refusing to wear anything but street clothes in the hospital because he doesn't intend to interact with any patient unless he absolutely has to. The ultimate objectives of every episode are to get the patient better and more importantly, to show #9 above.

Jim Profit, protagonist of an 8-episode series (including a two-hour pilot) named Profit, shown by Fox in 1996, laughs in House's face. He spits on House's pathetic beard. He doesn't make him wear hospital clothes; he makes him wear a dress and say "I'm a girly man." He makes House his bitch. He takes a broomstick handle and breaks it off after shoving it...Gobsmacked's alert and intelligent readers get the idea.

Jim Profit (played by Adrian Pasdar) is the real deal. He is a psychopath working in a corporation who will stop at nothing to obtain his objective of the moment and move up in the corporation or to defend himself against attack. "What's so interesting about that? He's just an evil guy who does evil things--how predictable" I hear the less alert and intelligent readers saying. Profit is a man who knows how to work people, to twist people, to charm them, to set them up, to take them down, and if that doesn't work, to quietly dispose of them. And how he does it is so cleverly diabolical that you can't help but love the guy and root for him with all your heart. The writers of Profit plots were given more creative latitude than I've ever seen in a fictional network series. When that was recognized by the Fox execs, they cancelled the series.

What really makes the show, though, are Profit's voiceovers, which pervade each episode. An example: Seeing weakness in the marriage of an executive's marriage, he finds innocent ways of bumping into the wife and at times, helping her. He learns all about her in order to turn on a seemingly self-effacing charm and share "common" interests. He's talking to you as he executes the beginning of a long-range plan (that, alas will culminate after the series has been cancelled). When the exec's wife falls for Profit, he says to us, "When you want someone to love you, open your heart. When you want someone obsessed with you, close it." And when we hear Profit, we know his voice must somehow have originated in the lowest circle of Dante's Inferno. It is the coolest, evil voice you will ever hear in this life.

What about Robert McKee's criticism of voiceovers as presented in the movie, Adaptation? Ah, read, his book, Gobsmackers. Read his book and you will find that McKee's criticism of voiceovers only applies to those situations where they are used to attempt to cover a weak plot. But the plots in Profit are a far cry from deus ex machina.

The other thing that makes Profit so amazing is that he never loses his cool. Ever. You see the drama build, you see the incredibly high stakes, but regardless of the outcome, Profit's face reflects the appropriate emotion of the moment. Intense interest. A wry smile. Faux sympathy. Concentration. But never, ever, surprise or despair, no matter how deep a hole he's in. Laughing and genuine enjoyment are also missing from his repertoire no matter how successfully his plan has worked out. We can only guess, as clues come out each episode, whether he has any enjoyment and from what hell it might come.

Surely the man has needs, you say. How does he fulfill them? Doesn't that make him vulnerable? Enter Bobbie Stakowski (played with astounding realism by Lisa Blount, the blonde bad girl in An Officer and a Gentleman), a woman who herself has needs and who demands to be "serviced." A woman who is an exponentially calculated southern bitch determined to get her way. A woman so street-wise and evil she is able to parry and thrust with Profit and, at times, more than get her way. A woman who is..Profit's stepmother. "You and I are two peas in a pod, Jimmy. We only want one thing: More." And despite the fact that "more" has become a cliche by 2006, you find yourself wondering just what it would take to satisfy Profit. And I'm not talking about sex or S&M. Bobbie is the only person who calls Jim Profit, "Jimmy," and it is clear that her demands of him are at times perverse, even if she weren't his stepmother. And you thought network dramas were boring.

The wonderful thing about the Profit plots is that you really and truly never know what's going to happen. My only criticisms are that at times the series borders on employing soap opera techniques, and that, technically speaking, some of the sub-plots would be impossible (or financially not worth it) to pull off. But these are small quibbles, believe me. As I read the above, I see that I might have made the series seem dark, and of course at times, it is. But the amazing thing the short series is able to pull off is that you really do find yourself rooting for Profit to succeed, and that beings in an awful lot of entertaining light.

If you want to read a wonderful account of the pilot episode (Warning: lots of details are given away in the long blow-by-blow account--but it's a highly entertaining read), check this site: http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/story.cgi?show=56&story=8493&page=1&sort=&limit=

Profit. Buy the DVD set. You won't be disappointed. I leave you with his sage advice, almost all of which is the antithesis of his character:

Profit: [voice-over] The key to real success is to take all your fears and put them in a box and lock them away. Of course not every evil can be tied up in a neat little package. But that's the challenge - to face our own personal darkness and to put our demons where they can't hurt us any more, to do what we can to make the world
Jim Profit: [spoken] a better place.

Steven Tyler's Picks for Music Listening

2006-02-13T16:04:00.001-05:00

I'm not a big Aerosmith fan. Not at all. But emilybee is, and since it's her birthday, I thought I'd list the CD's that Steven Tyler recommends according to the WSJ. He prefaces his list by saying that while his taste runs from gospel to jazz, he always returns to "the hard-edged sound of seminal rock acts like the Yardbirds and Jimi Hendrix...It's like going back to the bible."

1) "Smiley Smile" (1967). First Beach Boys' album after "Pet Sounds." Includes "Good Vibrations" and the peculiar "Vegetables." Tyler: "Brian Wilson planted a flag on the moon."

2) "Hard Again" (2004 reissue), Muddy Waters. Tyler: These were the songs that Muddy had done all his life, but he perfected them here."

3) "Take 6" by Take 6 (1988). Quite a range of genres on this album. Tyler: "That album is my Sunday. I put it on and there's God."

4) "The Black Album" (2003) by Jay-Z. The handiwork of Rick Rubin, who produced "Walk This Way," Mr. Tyler particularly likes the track "99 Problems."

5) "Cheap Thrills" (1968) by Big Brother and the Holding Company. Janis Joplin on vocals, of course. Tyler says that despite comparisons of Tyler to Mick Jagger (think the lips have anything to do with it?), Tyler cites Joplin as his major singing influence.

The Wisdom of Nanny 911

2006-02-13T11:07:00.000-05:00

When the show first became a hit on FOX, I have to admit I was a pretty big fan. I loved seeing the struggle of dysfunctional families with four, five, and six kids, families whose parents were nowhere near being in control. It allowed me to sit back in the silence of a household with only pets and think, "That'll teach you. Try birth control next time, you morons."

Yes, I'm talking about Nanny 911, the show that introduces a proper English nanny into the modern American House of Horror: the suburban single family home.

And I'm not ashamed for watching it either. The advice that Nanny Deb, Nanny Stella, and Nanny Yvonne each gives is outstanding, especially concerning the handling of unruly children. The nannies demonstrate this uncanny ability to immediately identify the major malfunction of any family, which, needless to say, is usually a problem with one or both of the parents and a lack of communication (though this one time the problem was that the kids still slept in the same bed with their parents and they were like 10 and 12 years old)(Which is weird and gross).

Nine times out of 10, the nannies recommend listening to out-of-control children. Their misbehavior almost always seems to be acting out due to a feeling of not being heard or understood. One heart-to-heart later and Nanny Deb looks on in pleasure as parents bond with their kids like they never have before. Gets me every time, too.

Anyway, what reminded me of all this is a story on CNN today about the federal government, who, in an effort to curb the recent wave of church arson in Alabama, is trying a new strategy: listening.

"We do think they have a message," said Jim Cavanaugh of the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. "We would like to hear what they would have to say ... We want them to call us. We want to listen."

I'm also reminded of a conversation in Bowling for Columbine with Marilyn Manson, the Sage of Shock Rock and Self-Mutilation, who said almost the same thing about the tragedy of Columbine High School. Something along the lines of, maybe if someone had listened to those kids they might not have acted the way they did.

At the time, I was like, "Oh blow it out your ass, Marilyn. What the fuck do you know?" But maybe he had something, given what I've learned from Nanny 911.*

ON THE OTHER HAND, I am a firm believer in existence preceding essence. Anyone who burns churches can be described as just that: one who burns churches. Fuck listening to that kind of person's bullshit. I don't care why you're doing it; it's wrong and it's illegal and it must stop.

However, if "we're listening" means one less church burned then I guess I, as the federal government, would be willing to try it. I don't know. Part of me really hates the thought of coddling sociopaths, because, like I said, fuck them. But I think in situations like this you have to consider the greater good. And "we're listening" might actually be the best way to do that.

* Jesus God, how sad is it that my two-thirds of my information for this post come from either FOX reality television or Marilyn Manson.

Kinky Friedman In '06

2006-02-12T17:14:00.000-05:00

The man who years ago formed a band called "Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys" is running for governor. Of Texas. Yes, the writer and performer of the song, "They Ain't Makin' Jews Like Jesus Any More" has been livening up the political landscape down here since 2004. Lest you think he's just some hick who smokes pot with Willie Nelson when he can (the two have been friends for years), let me tell you that he's intelligent and a man of substance. He double-majored in Psychology and Plan II Honors at UT-Austin. A friend of mine from NSA who was in the same honors program with Kinky said he was highly intelligent, extremely introverted, and strange. She also said he went on to pursue a Master's in Classics, but I see nothing in his bio about that. He did go on to serve in the Peace Corps.

I guess when you graduate in Psychology, you have to figure out a way to live, and Kinky wanted to have some fun, so he formed his band, wrote a number of songs with country-style titles that were more liberal Jew than country in nature, and then wrote 23 novels, most of them lightweight mysteries with some humor thrown in.

So now he's running for Texas governor. And he's quite serious. He's not only managed to get himself on national television, but he's been traveling all over the state. He has spoken at two seminars for lawyers that I've attended (the seminars were continued legal education seminars, not political seminars), and he loves to make quotable quips. His campaign slogans include, "Why the hell not" and "How hard could it be?" These slogans are a shot at both current Texas office-holders, as well as at the entrenchment of the two major parties (more about that later). He's also managed to get a few bumper stickers circulated, with statements like "My Governor is a Jewish Cowboy", and "He ain't Kinky, he's my Governor" on them.

That's interesting enough, but what are his views on the issues. The ones I'm aware of include:
**The death penalty. He cleverly states that he's not against the death penalty, he's "anti-the-wrong-guy-getting-executed."
**Gay marriage. He supports gay marriage, saying that gays have the right to be as miserable as the rest of us. Don't let the humor fool you; he's quite serious about gay marriage.
**Prayer in schools. He doesn't care what they pray too, but does think time should be set aside. He also adds, "I'm the only person in America who favors both gay marriage and prayer in schools." He's smart enough to know the First Amendment issues, so my personal view is that he's using this as a ploy to get votes.
**Alternative fuels. He's a huge supporter and would like Texas to lead the nation in their development and use. He frequently points out that Willie Nelson's bus runs on biodiesel.
**Education. He favors raises for teachers and vast improvement in the Texas dropout rate.
**He favors programs that will help people develop job skills.

One of the biggest hurdles he faces is the election "process" down here. After the primary and prior to something like 30 days, he has to get thousands of signatures in order to get on the Texas ballot as an independent. And none of the people who sign his petitions can have voted in the primary. It's a nearly impossible task (last independent to win in Texas did so in 1859), deliberately set up that way to keep the GOP and Dems in office. But he's gotten so much publicity that I don't see him failing to qualify to get on the ballot.

What I do see as problems are some of his more controversial views, and the fact that his reputation as going for the outrageous may cause many voters not to take him seriously. I could easily envision the voting to go something like 98% of Austin supporting him, and 15% of the rest of the state. Yet, as Friedman points out, voter turnout is so low, that if he can get even 20% of all eligible voters to vote for him, he's got a good shot at winning.

I wish him well because even if he fails to win, he's going to shake some politicians up and give some of the voters hope that Texas can be something other than the reddest of red states.

RPGs and Taxes

2006-02-10T08:58:00.000-05:00

I heard a pretty fascinating story on NPR this morning about the recent tax implications of role-playing games (RPGs) and specifically online RPGs. As most people know, the way RPGs work is you play in the role of a particular character and as the game progresses your character gradually attains better and better powers and abilities. You get stronger and you are eventually able to beat the game. These days, online RPGs make it possible to buy, sell, and trade those abilities on eBay and other bartering and auction sites, and there are people who buy and sell this stuff full-time! (The guy who was being interviewed said he knows people who are so good at the trading of RPG powers that they are able to pull down six-figure salaries!)

The problem is, there's no concrete ruling from the IRS on how to handle this new type of income. For now, it's being considered very taxable, since it is in fact income. However, that implies that those abilities and powers are worth money, which in turn implies that whenever someone attains one of those abilities while playing a game are now liable for that income! The radio host and his guest were joking that RPGers will now have to keep form 1099s on hand for whenever they beat a stage boss and get a new gem or something. Totally crazy.

Blue and Red

2006-02-09T20:26:00.000-05:00

Here at Gobsmacked, we've recently had intense discussion of certain blue and red states and their laws concerning gay rights, and today a cartoon was posted in The Wall Street Journal that offers a little levity. The cartoon, part of the "Pepper...and Salt" series, depicts a cafe in Paris. An American couple and a French couple are seated at tables near each other. The American couple is saying, "We're Americans, but blue state Americans."

Best Buys in Real Estate Are In Texas

2006-02-08T09:57:00.000-05:00

I logged in to my ISP and noticed one of the blurbs that popped up purported to identify the most overheated real estate markets in the U.S. I took a look. Sure enough, based on surveys of prices and valuations, specific locations were identified. Some were not only over twice their value, but insurance was incredibly high. And, of course, with high-value real estate comes high property taxes, even if the property tax percentage is low. After looking at the list and reading the comments, I didn't see the point of paying 7 digits to live in Naples Florida, only to have to buy insurance at rates that reflect the spate of hurriances that have hit, and also have to pay the inevitably high property taxes. Then I noticed that there was also a "most undervalued" list.

Almost all of the locations on this latter list are in Texas. Number One: McAllen-Edinburgh, 26% undervalued. McAllen is a town at the bottom of Texas that is in an almost perfect location. Close to Mexico, it is not far from South Padre Island and the Gulf of Mexico, but it is far enough to avoid major hurricane damage. It is a medium-sized town with many amenities. It is also ideally situated from a commercial perspective. As America's trade with Mexico continues to increase, and CAFTA approaches, there are all kinds of commerce needs that the area is ideally situated in to support. And, courtesy of the town, it's got indoor tennis courts, which for me says it all. Again speaking personally, the climate suits me. I have advanced asthma, and find that heat and mild winters agree with me a whole lot more than cold, dry air.

And so it went with a number of other towns in Texas. But, hey, this is the state that gave us our president, so how much dumber can it get? I could ask the same of all who voted for Bush. My short answer is that the high number of Hispanics living in Texas tends to dilute the Bubba Factor. My longer answer, which I'll spare you in this post, has to do with the size of Texas, its many regions, its natural beauty (including some amazing migratory birds), and the friendliness of the vast majority of its residents. When I go for cheap eats in San Antonio, the server knocks herself or himself out trying to please. Except for friends of OTL (Hey Doug, Suzanne and I love you man) and emilybee, I can't say the same for friendliness up north. And it's the same with service in many states up north where I came from. (In fact, emilybee states that during a visit to New England she received a flagrant, vicious verbal assault from a total stranger).

Moving on, how about mentioning a city in Texas I might recognize you alert and intelligent readers are asking. Okay, Dallas. Big-time money and commerce in Texas is in Dallas and Houston. And Dallas has it all: jobs, designer-tier shopping, mainstream live acts, On- and Off-Broadway kinds of plays, markets, museums, parks and so forth. 14% undervalued. Ft. Worth and Arlington are near Dallas. I prefer Arlington for a number of reasons. It has a beauty to it I like; there is some nice housing; it has a number of big-time venues like a major league baseball stadium and a Six Flags park and so forth, and commuting to Dallas is not terribly hard. (OTL and I went to a comic book convention in Arlington).

Let's move on to my town, San Antonio. Well over a million residents now. That's more than any other city in Texas except for Houston. It's an hour's drive to another interesting place, Austin. S.A. is 6% undervalued. (It would be more undervalued if it had the kind of professional jobs and commerce that Houston and Dallas do). When I first moved here in 1997, you could get a brand new house built for you in a development for as cheap as $50,000 in an okay area. I'm talking about a house on a foundation, not a glorified trailer. It would include central air and heat, new carpet, washer and dryer, landscaping in the front but not the back, and a host of amenities, some included, some optional. And these houses were perfectly good houses. They are still there, selling for a lot more. After reading the article cited above, I drove around looking at housing prices. You can now get a brand new house in a development located in an okay neighborhood for $80,000. That's right. Brand new. $80,000. What's an "okay" neighborhood? Convenient to shops and to major highway routes and to 410, the inner loop of San Antonio. Why is it only okay? Because it's more on the south side of town, and for reasons that I don't have the space to go into, the north-central area has been the hot area to buy in. If I were moving to San Antonio, I'd take a hard look at many areas on the south side of town if for no other reason than two major employers are establishing themselves there. Toyota is building a pickup truck manufacturing plant on the south side, and already numerous suppliers are buying land and relocating to be close to Toyota. And the infamous National Security Agency is opening a large office towards the south side. Okay, that's the cheaper end, but what's the median price of a house in S.A.? About $135,000-$145,000. And this is a city that has been named as the #1 (or close to #1) city to retire to a number of times by many different groups and publications. And its location in terms of all of its accesses--to South Texas, the coast, and central and northern Texas is unbeatable. The price is right. For now.

There are many regions in Texas where housing is cheap, like the panhandle, which most people would just as soon avoid. But there are some surprisingly good buys on the coast. In many ways, the trend in Texas seems to be that the most desirable places to live (without taking cost into account) are those that are the most undervalued.

Movies: A Romantic Comedy List

2006-02-08T08:46:00.000-05:00

I've always found the choices of intelligent people interesting. Hence, this post, which is taken from the FEB 4-5 Wall Street Journal.

Nora Ephron at the very least wrote "Silkwood," "When Harry Met Sally," and "Sleepless in Seattle" (I haven't checked to find all of her movies). Her view is that 98% of all romantic comedies are derived from two major works: Jane Austin's Pride and Prejudice and Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. (Her theory is worth an entirely separate post on Gobsmacked). As Valentine's Day approaches, she chooses her favorite romantic comedy movies:

1) Manhattan. (I'm surprised she didn't go with Annie Hall, which is not only a love story, but has some of the best lines in it that Woody Allen has ever written). Her comment is that Woody Allen "was a pioneer of a more Freudian obstacle to love, which was the totally self-absorbed leading man's character. What is miraculous about this movie is, you still love Woody." I think she should have been reading some Dave Barry about a decade ago. In many of his columns, not to mention at least one book, he gives much guidance to men as to what they should be doing. His advice to women: "Men are scum." So the whole business about pioneering the "totally self-absorbed leading man" doesn't strike me as particularly "pioneerish." It strikes me as, "That's the way most men (or guys, as Dave Barry would say) are." But Ms. Ephron no doubt believes that Manhattan explores the theme in a much deeper manner. Why else would she choose the film?

2) Pride and Prejudice (2005). Ms. Ephron was in "complete bliss" when she saw this movie, admiring the fact that "it portrayed Elizabeth Bennet as a tomboy," something she'd never seen before. She also likes the BBC version (1995) of the book, starring Colin Firth. It's very hard for me to like movies that are adaptations of classic works of literature that I admire. The best these movies can do is capture the spirit of the books they are scripting from. (Clueless is the choice of many for best capturing the spirit of Jane Austen's Emma). If the movie makers try and go with the plot, they invariably make a hash of it. Also, ever since Keira Knightley, one of the skinniest women in Hollywood or Britain, starred as a most implausible kick-ass bitch in Domino, I've struggled with her credibility. I realize that has nothing to with her role in P and P, but Domino and P and P came out in the same year and that's the way my cinematic mind works.

3) Groundhog Day. When Ms. Ephron saw the trailer, she didn't think the movie was going to work, "And yet, it's a miracle: Every time you see it, it moves one inch forward. You can't believe it." I agree entirely. When I first saw the movie, I was looking for some standard Bill Murray stuff (which is fine by me), and wasn't ready for the movie's concept. As I have viewed it since, I've become a bigger and bigger admirer of the film. As with all (which is actually very few) films I admire, I find a different scene or line to appreciate each time I see it. When I first saw the movie, I thought the bit with Bill Murray giving the newlyweds tickets to "Wrestlemania" in Pittsburgh for their honeymoon, and the couple's over the top excitement was hilarious. Later viewing, same scene, I liked the fact that Bill Murray accepts the thanks of the young groom for giving the bride a bit of a push (the bride had been having cold feet) by saying, "I merely fanned the flames of passion that were already there." Or his comment as he drives down the railroad tracks and a train is approaching, "I'm betting he's going to swerve first." Or the piano teacher's reaction when Bill Murray shows up for his "first" lesson. And finally, during my first viewing, I laughed heartily as Bill Murray, who is staying at a B&B, comes downstairs in his PJ's, unplugs the toaster, takes it to his room, plugs it in, gets in a bathtub of water and drops the toaster. This is the fan in me coming out, but it strikes me that only Bill Murray's face could make that scene as funny as it is. And of course, I would be remiss at this time of the year if I didn't add that only love can save him.

4) The Lady Vanishes (1938). An Alfred Hitchcock thriller. Whoa! Dingdingdingding! Mucho points to Ms. Ephron for choosing this film, an eclectic pick to say the least. Her take: "It's a very classic romantic comedy that happens to have a thriller plot." I haven't seen it, but I'm certainly going to.

So what are your picks?

America: a permanent reminder that George W. Bush exists and is in fact President

2006-02-06T09:16:00.000-05:00

"On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

-- H.L. Mencken

It really is embarrassing to have someone who appears to be so utterly stupid as the President of our country.

I used to be able to at least stomach George W. Bush's State of the Union addresses, just in the interest of taking pride in the ritual and seeing all those people in one room. But these days I can barely see his name in print, much less watch a live feed of him stuttering and stammering his way through scripted, stomach-churning rhetoric, without becoming immediately ashamed of my country.

When I'm in a particular state of mind, as I am now, it makes me tired of being American.

And it almost hurts to write this, because I'm forcing myself to think about someone so irksome that I had hoped I might be able to get through the next three years without acknowledging that we even HAD a President. In my imaginary world all headlines would just say "U.S." in all instances where Bush's name would normally appear, as in "U.S. budget would increase military."

But, while I can’t bear to think about the President himself for very long, it's almost worse to think about everything he's done to hurt this country since taking office in Y2K. (If only the computer scientists has predicted that HE would bring the country to financial ruin instead of a computer glitch; then people might not have gotten mad at them for crying wolf.) From No Child Left Behind and its subsequent underfunding to the war in Iraq to making religion a national sticking place, Bush has basically made every decision the exact opposite way I would have made it, and for exactly the opposite reasons. And all the while he has come across as a gigantic buffoon of a leader, a horse's ass of mythic proportions.

However, part of me wants Bush to continue bringing America further down the spiral. Please, W, bring our country closer to complete spiritual misery and insurmountable debt. One day in the near future, all the oil wells will be dry, all the forests will be seas of concrete, there will be no such thing as fresh water, and Puritanism will be back in business.

Maybe then, the citizens who voted Bush into office will realize just how harmful it is to have a downright moron making all the decisions.

Japander

2006-02-03T09:01:00.000-05:00

There was a great piece on VH1 last night about American celebrities who do commercials in Japan, celebrities who would normally never EVER do commercials in the U.S. I guess the draw is that the paychecks are just as good (if not better) and the celebs don't lose any cred here in the States, since the commercials will never be aired here anyway.

Thankfully, though, there is Japander, an excellent site devoted to this exact phenomenon.

While you’re there, be sure to check out Harrison Ford doing a series of ads for Kirin Beer ("No-no, Kirin Beeru!"). Or see Ben Stiller in a bizarre ad for some kind of energy drink. But my favorite has to be Arnold Schwarzenegger in an ad for another type of energy drink. He makes some vintage Arnold faces in what has to be one of the craziest commercials I've ever seen.

Music: Pandora's Take on "Eleanor Rigby"

2006-02-02T12:35:00.000-05:00

OTL previously posted a description of Pandora on Gobsmacked, and included some of his results. I'm not going to revisit OTL's thorough description of Pandora; I'll just briefly mention that it is a web site whose goal is to answer the question, "Can you (Pandora) help me discover more music that I'll like?" Because I find the objective of Pandora so fascinating, I thought I would give Pandora a hard song to deal with right off the bat, "Eleanor Rigby" by the Beatles, and report my results. I chose "Eleanor Rigby" because I think it is an extremely difficult song to use as a springboard to find songs of similar characteristics and quality. There's a lot going on in "Eleanor Rigby." To find something similar to the theme of loneliness, the specific word pictures in the song which convey the theme, the string harmony, particularly the cellos, and its melodic characteristics strikes me as a unique request to a high degree. A daunting task awaits Pandora.

Pandora first asked me for my song, and I typed in "Eleanor Rigby." Pandora then came back and offered me quite a number of Eleanor Rigbys as performed by other artists. Ray Charles was the only other artist I would consider, but I stuck with my original choice. The first song that came up was "Do You Want Some Smoke" by Forest. Now that is truly an esoteric choice! Based on an internet search, I doubt many people have heard of Forest. Frankly, the song is atonal and dreary. It is missing the melodic quality of "Eleanor Rigby," and I found myself wanting the song to be over as quickly as possible. It was followed by the following songs:

Self Help (G-Force Remix)
Angel, Angel, Down We Go Together (Morrissey)
Road Trippin' (Red Hot Chili Peppers)
Paris 1919 (John Cale)
Can't Take It (The All American Rejects)
You'll Never See My Face Again (Bee Gees)
Black (Sarah McLachlan)
Animated Music_track_8 (a popup kept me from reading the artist)
Foolish Games (Jewel)
Feel So Different (Sinead O'Connor)
Odessa, City of the Black Sea (Bee Gees)
Lady Down on Love (Alabama)

Based solely on these results, I have to say that Pandora is a failure. The songs that I came closest to liking were "Paris 1919" and "You'll Never See My Face Again." I had hopes when I saw Sarah McLachlan, but "Black" was dismally slow and never went anywhere. The songs of Sinead and Jewel (of the artists that Pandora selected, I had the highest hopes for the females) were better selected, but still missed the mark as far as I was concerned.

Is all lost? Is Pandora a complete waste of time? NO! Pandora offers the user the opportunity to provide feedback, and it also lets you click on a button that asks, "Why This Song." You can thus tell Pandora that you like or dislike a song and it will adjust its next selection accordingly. I did not use this feature because I wanted to see what Pandora would come up with on its own. As for "Why This Song," I clicked on it and admired the program's description of the characteristics of "Eleanor Rigby" that it found in the song being played. It was the implementation of finding those characteristics that disappointed me.

The task that Pandora has taken on is daunting, and I thank OTL for bringing the program to my attention. As OTL has observed in discussions with me, everyone is an expert on music because one feels music and loves or hates it accordingly. No one is going to argue someone else into liking a tune that they hate. The best you can hope for is to convince someone else to grudgingly admire a characteristic of the song (like its harmonic complexity), but they are still not going to go from Hate The Song to Love The Song based on your persuasion. So, identifying songs that are going to resonate with someone is quite a task for a human to take on, muchless an automated program. I'm going back to Pandora and put in a less difficult song and give it feedback along the way and see what the results are. I encourage you to do the same!

Pandora

2006-02-01T10:30:00.000-05:00

With a little help from my friend Alex in Minnesota, I discovered the incredible Pandora a little while ago. It's a pretty amazing website that allows you to create your own personalized radio station.

It begins by asking you to enter a favorite band or song. It then provides you with an excellent mix of music based on your entry. For example, I entered in Aphex Twin and it spat out a series of Aphex Twin's best tunes followed by music from some very similar and equally excellent artists like Squarepusher and Wagon Christ. I then tried out The Doors, and Pandora responded with "Blue Sunday" from Morrison Hotel (a good song) and then "Love or Confusion" from Hendrix's Are You Experienced? (an EXCELLENT song). Also in my "The Doors Mix" were Bad Company, Lee Michaels, and the Robert Cray Band.

I tell you, this Pandora site is something else. It was apparently created by something called the Music Genome Project, which, as the website will tell you, consists of a group of music lovers who came together in order to analyze the musical qualities from every kind of genre they can get their hands on. Or something like that.

Anyway check it out. It’s pretty awesome.

Music: For CD's and MP3 Players Only?

2006-01-31T00:10:00.000-05:00

OTL and I have an ongoing, unspoken debate. He is not in favor of songs being used for purposes other than what they were originally recorded for, the listening enjoyment of those who buy the records, CD's or downloads. He admires The Doors for refusing to allow their songs to be used for commercials and movies, for example.

I'm at the other extreme. If a song is used in a movie or TV program to good effect, I'm all for it. In fact, I like good songs in commercials if they are used well. Example: "Revolution" in the Nike commercial (though, as it turns out, Nike got sued for it).

Since OTL and I have simply stated our preferences to each other and never engaged in a debate (let's face it, people feel strongly about music and they're not likely to change their minds, so debating music is usually silly), I thought I'd lay out the rules for such a debate just for kicks. Here goes.

I think in order to be fair, you have to divide the uses of music into categories. Here's how I would divide them:

1) Pure enjoyment, as in the example above. You go to the store, buy "Who's Next" and enjoy every song on the album.

2) As a legitimate part of a drama or comedy. Example, two people are debating the type of music they like and each plays examples of his favorites to try and win the other over. Or, as in a TV series called Freaks and Geeks, a father shows a young man examples of high quality drumming by playing old Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich records. Same series: A high school kid struggling with his sexuality sits alone at home playing different records to see which ones he likes, his logic being that if he leans towards hard rock, he must be hetero, and if he likes disco or musicals, maybe he's gay. Or, people are square dancing and lively country music is playing.

3) Close to #2, but not quite the same thing. In the HBO series Entourage, a group of guys is going to a U2 concert for example, and we see the first two songs of the concert. But it begs the questions: Why U2 and why those two songs? For realism or effect?

4) To support a scene in a realistic manner, but in a different way than in #2 or 3. Example: Police are staking out a place and they have the radio on, and the radio is playing music of the era the movie or TV program takes place in. But the music selected, though from the era, fits in with the mood of the scene. In other words, now we're moving towards augmenting a scene with music, albeit in a realistic way.

4) A hybrid of #3, music is played to augment a scene, but is done so more openly. To call on Freaks and Geeks again, the music in an episode where a group of high schoolers is going to go to a Who concert consists entirely of music of The Who until you get to a sad ending, when the focus is on two teenage girls who decide not to go. At that point, the girls play "Summer Breeze" by Seals and Crofts. (Man, I hate that song). It's an effective tool because the viewer has been cruising along with The Who, and then mellows out with a cornball song that fits one of the girl's personalities to a T. In other episodes of Freaks and Geeks, the music ranges from hard rock to punk to a Dean Martin tune, depending on what's going on, and definitely is intended to heighten the effectiveness of the drama or comedy that's occurring.

5. The all-out use of any kind of music to support a scene in a movie or TV program. Can range from classical to made-for-the-movie to hard rock, all in the same movie. Most movies employ this, so examples abound. The most recent movie I saw, The Matador, used a lot of different music, all for the purpose of giving the viewer an extra rush during an action scene, or to mellow one out during serious dialogue. One of my favorite examples is from The Big Lebowski: The protaganist gets drugged by a bad guy and in MTV/VH1 video style flies along, high in the sky and then so low in a bowling alley he zooms between women's legs, to the Kenny Rogers and the First Edition tune, "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)." I love that segment and that song!

6. Music used in commericals to help sell products or services. Alas, it's usually done poorly. But when it's done right, as in the "Revolution" example above, it can rock the house. The upcoming Superbowl will no doubt include a few commericals with classic examples. I would never have heard of Nick Drake's magnificent song, "Pink Moon" if emilybee hadn't heard it in a VW commercial and sent it to me.

7. (This is a category I should have included in my original post). Music used in videos. Puke. I'm not part of the MTV generation, and I've never seen the point of videos. A song or piece of music should stand on its own, period. But hey, what about the classic videos like "Thriller" or "Born in the USA" where a young Courteney Cox dances on the stage with The Boss or one of the Beastie Boys' creative videos? Trash them all. Show some live concerts or something, but get rid of the videos! When I first heard Phil Spector's girl groups, Gene Chandler's "Duke of Earl," Ray Charles' "I Can't Stop Loving You," the many rockin' songs of Chuck Berry, I heard them on crappy AM radio and still loved them. And later, I heard the British invasion, Motown, the entire Beatle's catalog of music, and on and on with the great music of the 60's and early 70's, all without the "benefit" of videos.

That's it. Where do you draw the line? No point in pushing any perspective since it won't influence yours--or OTL's.

Tanks vs. No Tanks

2006-01-27T14:03:00.000-05:00

Recently Google (company motto: "Don't be evil") announced that it would agree to censor search results in order to get into the Chinese market.

A search for 'Tiananmen' in American Google image search

A search for 'Tiananmen' in Chinese Google image search

Google claims its very raison d'etre is providing information to people; I guess that doesn't include Chinese people? As a librarian, I feel honestly betrayed - I trusted Google and believed in the company, even amidst a constantly-raging debate about whether Google will make my profession obsolete! This valuing of profit over principle goes against everything librarians and libraries stand for. They are providing people with inaccurate and incomplete information on purpose. How flexible is the Google definition of evil, anyway?

Edit: "The core message is simple: Being Googlers means striving toward the highest possible standard of ethical business conduct. This is a matter as much practical as ethical; we hire great people who work hard to build great products, but our most important asset by far is our reputation as a company that warrants our users' faith and trust. That trust is the foundation upon which our success and prosperity rests, and it must be re-earned every day, in every way, by every one of us."

(Emphasis mine)

I mean, again, except Chinese people?

Final note: I got these links from The National Review. Don't hate me; I already hate myself.