It's the Gift That Counts

I Know You Want Me -- Picture courtesy of Acer

by blogSpotter
Dear readers, I’m having my year-end writer’s block along with coming off of colds, flu and vacations. If I can ever get back to my normal, quiet and otherwise healthy existence I may recover the muse of witty and provocative blog-writing.

That being said, we’ll have to make do with a “Christmas memory” retrospective and movie review combo. My mother has become frail in recent years and we don’t do an over-the-top, house-of-lights yuletide festival that we once did at her house. In fact, this year there was nary a Santa candle to be found on any table top. We still had a wonderful family gathering with good food, cheer and gift exchange. In a Dickensian moment, it finally occurred to me that Christmas is not about the gaudy tinsel decor or the towering Scotch pine Christmas tree. It’s not really about the Mississippi mud pie or pecan fudge desserts. No sir, not at all. In the final analysis, Christmas is about the gifts. OK, you can bring baby Jesus into it too if you want. After we did our exchange of cologne, jewelry, candy, gift cards and various DVD’s all was right with the world. Well, almost right.

My Mother’s gift to herself was a purple (Amethyst) Acer Aspire netbook computer. It’s the new model, with 160GB hard drive and Windows 7 Starter edition. She paid about the same as I paid a year ago for a black HP Mini with Windows XP and a seriously smaller hard drive. I don’t know why my mind works as it does, but in the time that I set up her new Aspire, my HP Mini (which now has a dark spot on the middle of the screen) lost pretty much all of its appeal. How can I go thru major electronics as quickly as other people go thru shirts or magazines? I haven’t done anything yet, but an avocado green mini is probably in the near future for me.

We had 10 people and 4 dogs crowded into 1 house, so I had to flee the premises a couple of times to go to the Round Rock Cinemark. I watched “Up In the Air” in which George Clooney portrays a workaholic bachelor who lives out of a suitcase and lays people off for a living. The movie is an eye-opener for some of us who can relate to the main character’s lonely but simultaneously clueless situation. This movie will make the viewer question what success is in any real sense. It ends a little bit sadly and ambiguously – you hope that George’s character, Ryan, has found a key to happiness if not yet happiness itself.

I also caught “Sherlock Holmes” with Robert Downey and Jude Law. This movie was stylish and plush with eye candy for all. With it’s clever plot twists, technical intrigue and fun bro-mance attitude, it reminded me of either “Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid” or maybe “The Sting”. Some of the technical gimmickry reminded me of “Wild, Wild West” where things improbable for 2009 are shown happening in London of 1887. No matter – this movie is certainly not for historical nitpickers. This movie is for anyone who enjoys action, romance, intrigue and plot twists galore – the main ingredients for all great cinema.

In sum, I had a really fun Christmas and very long (6 day) stay in Round Rock. I’m hoping that my future blog entries bring me back to history, science or philosophy but I’ll need to flush all the cold medicine, flu germs, and Christmas candy out of my system. Cheers, and Happy 2010 to all.


© 2009 blogSpotter

The 12 Days of Tiger

Christmas musings -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Apologies to my readers -- the blog has gone nearly two weeks without a new posting. blogSpotter (that's me) was hit with swine flu -- an illness which reduced me to a pile of aches, agues and fever chills. Don't know that I've ever felt so horrible in my life. I'm now into day nine of this nasty contagion and it looks like I'll probably live. There were moments when I wondered... The giant pause that my flu forced in everything also gave me pause to look at some of my recent postings. I figured that now is a good time to do a Holiday Retrospective.

O Holy Seven
I highly praised Windows 7 in Oh Thank Heaven, and am not changing any of that. Windows 7 continues to be a champ, and it will probably help Christmas computer sales – which in turn could even give our economy a much needed goose. I’d be remiss not to mention that my MacBook has had several Wi-Fi connectivity issues since going to Snow Leopard – so has the latest Apple TV software. Both were unusable for various periods last week and my Windows (HP) devices had to come to the rescue. Apple, tell us what’s going on.

Obamacare
The Health Care bill is just doing a number on me. It seems like the Senate comes within a few inches of a compromise measure and then someone blows it all to Hell. Lieberman are you listening? It’s a wonder mankind ever got as far as we did in the social contract. Am starting to agree with Howard Dean, that the compromise deal now being worked will yield something ugly and not to be desired.

Tiger
Poor, poor Tiger Woods. Actually what’s more poor and deluded than Tiger is an athlete-worshipping, celeb-centered culture that turns these people into demigods. During the OJ trial of the 1990’s, I encountered people who were sure OJ was innocent – he’d received a Heisman Trophy after all. Not only are athletes not gods, their outsized egos, libidos and checkbooks probably put them at the front and center of every temptation there is. Tiger is a 33 year old horn dog who thought it was open chick season, forever. Now divorce lawyers will help him to reframe that world view.

I guess these are my only ruminations right now, as I wind down from the flu. My mind and body are still not functioning at 100% -- will see how long it takes to get back. Am hoping to be back at @ 1/week schedule but who knows.


© 2009 blogSpotter

Blue States and Red Devils

Who do you love? -- Picture courtesy of Eagle Vision

by blogSpotter
Today’s article is a bit of a mixed bag -- movie review and political commentary. The two are actually (however remotely) connected, for readers who might think I’m totally stream-of-consciousness in my writing. I just watched Blue State, a small-budget sleeper movie from 2007. In it, Breckin Meyer plays John Logue -- a young, Kerry-Edwards campaigner disillusioned by the 2004 Presidential election loss. He decides to act on a drunken campaign promise and move to Canada since Bush has just been reelected. He takes on a fellow traveler , Chloe (played by Anna Paquin), to share gas and travel expenses and they embark on an adventure of romance and new awakenings.

The movie is billed as a comedy but is dead serious in its exploration of our loyalties, our egos and our sometimes empty political posturing. I have to acknowledge that even as a “damn liberal” Democrat, some of my very best friends are dyed-in-the-wool Republicans, as is much of my family. Blue State makes it very evident how many different shades of red, blue and purple there really are, and how nearly impossible it is to dismiss the different shades. (Spoiler alert) -- the movie brings out the fact that John’s older brother was a casualty in Iraq and it shows John’s stridency (shared by many of us even now) that Iraq is a bad, unnecessary war. The movie doesn’t solve any big political arguments or serve to change anyone’s mind -- it serves rather to show us how deeply mired we are in our family and cultural origins. No amount of Houdini maneuvers can free us from that.

Now speaking of “good” and “bad” wars, much has recently been made of Barack Obama’s decision to send 30,000 troops to Afghanistan with an eye on exiting in 2011. Liberals such as Michael Moore decry the escalation while conservatives decry the pre-announced withdrawal date. To conservatives, I would admonish that no large expenditure of men and money should be without expected benchmarks, targets and yes, time goals. None other than Bush’s man Rumsfeld expounded the idea (although he didn’t act on it). If the pivotal date arrives, and the results aren’t at hand, the date will probably be “slipped” but it’s something that our military will seek to avoid.

To liberals, I would remind them that crazy Arabs flew some airplanes into our buildings eight years ago. We haven’t caught Osama Bin Laden, we haven’t closed any Madrasas schools that teach anti-American hatred, we haven’t laid a finger on Wahabi Arabs that sponsored most of the terrorist activities, we haven’t significantly reduced Taliban influence in Afghanistan or Pakistan and we haven’t done much more than inflame Al Quaeda. Given the sad, sorry, namby-pamby, illogical and politically correct response we’ve given to this over eight years, I would say we should finally, at last, focus American man-power and attention to the people and geographic locale(s) that actually produced 9/11. To do otherwise is to invite a reoccurrence.

In sum, I think Obama gave a reasoned reaction to the events going on. It’s not a blank check or an open-ended engagement. It’s a stated objective and let’s hope for the sake of everyone involved that the objective is met. It would be politically expedient and tidy if it's met by 2011, but it might not make that date. Afghanistan differs from Viet Nam in significant respects, but should it come to develop a resemblence let us have the wisdom and grace to cut our losses and learn from our mistakes.


© 2009 blogSpotter