Strange Fascination

Superprez

2012-01-21T19:00:00.000-08:00

It's a bird, it's a plane! - Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
I’ve been busy moving to a new office at work and repainting 3 rooms of my house – I guess it’s good to stay busy. It’s kept me from my blog though, so there’s some catching up to do… Today’s topic is all political and I’ll start with a brief remark about Rick Perry’s recently ended campaign.

PERRY CAMPAIGN EULOGY
The fourth grader who forgot his lines in “Sleeping Beauty” still dwells deep in my psyche. I froze up, and my teacher, Mrs. Conwoop (on stage right), had to feed me every line for 5 minutes… The horror! The embarrassment! That part of me feels for Rick Perry’s various campaign freeze-ups – he forgot the government agency he’d like to cancel twice. He thought the Supreme Court had 8 justices. His infractions were actually minor and human if not for the fact he was running for POTUS. His positions were actually Neanderthal and poorly spoken – a columnist for Dallas Morning News condensed them as “more conservative than thou”. Turned out more was needed, even with this weak field of GOP candidates.

Perry’s poor performance actually says more about his fellow Texans than it says about Perry… we’ve had him as governor for twelve years. He skated by in a couple of election cycles with nary a debate and very few interviews. Do Texans want to repeat that cycle? We could just as easily send a door stop or a hat rack to the governor’s mansion. How about a suit on a hanger and a pair of cowboy boots? Texas needs to rethink its red meat/red state mentality. Maybe governance needs people who’ve thought through the issues and know how to present their ideas coherently. This is all something to chew on as we proceed to our next political topic…

ANDREW SULLIVAN and SUPERPREZ
Andrew Sullivan is a talented Newsweek columnist who recently kicked a hornet’s nest with his provocative cover story – “Why Are Obama’s Critics So Dumb?” On wonky web sites like realclearpolitics.com, Sullivan’s article prompted a handful of retort articles like “Why Are Obama’s Critics So Smart?” Any article which prompts 5 reply articles merits a read – it got under peoples’ skin….

Andrew Sullivan used to be a contradiction to me. Until Obama came along, he was a conservative, gay Republican. He fell under the “Log Cabin” moniker which strikes me a little like being a black Dixiecrat (were that still possible, thankfully not). He became an “Obamican” in 2007, and in his recent Newsweek article he articulates Obama’s 1st term achievements. Here is but a short list for “Superprez”….

o Rescued GM and Chrysler from bankruptcy
o Passed $787 billion stimulus that probably steered us around a depression
o Added 2.4 million jobs, more than entire W Bush years
o Actually lowered taxes – 1/3 of stimulus was middle class tax cuts
o Enacted Obamacare, an approach which encourages individual responsibility.
o Took out Osama Bin Laden and Khadafy, seriously weakened Al Qaeda
o Ended DADT and ended US pursuit of the “Defense of Marriage Act”
o Ended the Iraq war

These are fairly remarkable achievements – any two of them would be lifetime bragging rights for an aspiring, progressive politico. They're all the more impressive coming from a political novice like Obama... I must confess that I myself was for Hillary back in 2008. Obama seemed like an untested “dark horse” (no racial pun intended :-) ) and I wondered what we were in for. It irked me that Caroline Kennedy and her Uncle Ted were pushing Obama – I blogged tirelessly about the unwarranted adulation in articles like “Obaminable”.

Have to say I was mistaken -- I’m impressed by Obama’s achievements. Sullivan describes him as a “long game, show-don’t-tell” politician. He’s more interested in doing than telling (or bragging). I myself think that the watershed moment was killing Bin Laden. Taking out this elusive, evil cancer was important – probably important enough to explain why the GOP has sent in only their “B” Team (maybe their “C” Team) for 2012. The GOP establishment wants to keep the “A” players primed for 2016.

To people all over, who have a secret envy and dismay over a wunderkind newbie with a middle name of “Hussein” no less, I know whereof you sputter with exasperation… how dare he? Well he dared and he did. And in all fairness, we have to give credit to this remarkable Superprez. What might he pull off in another 4 years?

© 2012 blogSpotter

Vertical Evolution

2012-01-08T17:06:00.000-08:00

DaVinci's Vitruvian Man - Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Who was Gordon Rattray Taylor? He was a little known British journalist who wrote on niche topics such as biotechnology and evolution. As he was dying of cancer in 1981, he put the finishing touches on his magnum opus, The Great Evolution Mystery. The book was a commercial dud when it was published in 1983, but has since been reevaluated and much more appreciated. Taylor doesn’t answer any long-standing questions, but in the book he asks several very worthy questions about evolution.

We have now, as in 1983, two prevailing paradigms to explain the origin of life. In the ivied towers of academia there is the theory of Natural Selection – it basically asserts that life has evolved from an accumulation of beneficial mutations in organic matter. Those mutations are random in nature and have happened over eons. Gordon Rattray Taylor pointed up some problems – particularly with organs of extreme perfection such as the human eye. Such complexity would be unlikely to happen from “happy accidents” – the delicate structure would require special timing and tuning. Taylor’s objections were embraced by the religious community who likened Taylor’s eye concept to the pious William Paley’s watch.

The (Christian) religious community itself believes that a super human intelligence created life in one great instance, in the Garden of Eden. The time is “backed in” by religious scholars using the genealogy of the Old Testament – anywhere from 6,000 BC to 4,000 BC. Even supposing some forbears lived to be 100, this date would be in glaring contradiction to modern geological data. 6,000 BC is recent in geological time and fairly standard techniques have established the earth itself to be nearly 5 billion years old. Life itself probably surfaced over 3 billion years ago. Taylor wasn’t devoutly religious nor was he trying to promote a particular faith – he didn’t adhere to the Bible genealogy idea. Taylor was accepting of basic earth and fossil facts … he just wanted to have all the evolutionary elements fall in place and make sense.

Taylor's book - cover and contents - Pictures courtesy of Secker and Warburg

Taylor was likely on to something. In chapters like “Puzzles and Plans” he notices that evolution seems to follow a winnowing, narrowing process which would almost imply intelligent selectivity. I would join Taylor in posing these kinds of questions. If we go with Darwin’s theory, we must inquire:

- Why have we observed no new species?
- Why have we observed no seriously, naturally mutated species?
- Why is there not one other species of animal that offers competition to humans?

Biology texts of the last 50 years love to point out an English moth which switched from white to black so its wings would be well-camouflaged against factory soot. Another text talked about a species of fish in Africa which changed the color of its scales. In both cases, we’re looking at a minor variation – probably the activation of a preexisting gene. Nowhere have we seen anything sprout horns or wings unexpectedly – unless via deliberate lab tinkering. With due respect to beavers who make dams and ants who build nests, no other species is a master architect. Chimps and gorillas, our closest natural relatives, live in primitive clans. They can poke ant hills with sticks and make grass beds.

WATCHING THE WATCHERS

Taylor suggested, but didn’t say outright, that there might be some other kind of force at work. I myself think that organized religion is partly right – there is a super human intelligence. However it is fallible and it works through evolutionary process. There was no grand concoction in the Garden of Eden.

Here are some speculative answers to the questions above. Let me emphasize that these are my own ideas and not Taylor's…

- Humans are the last major new species. Evolution is intelligently driven and doesn’t reinvent the wheel.
- There are many amazing new mutations – but they are subtle and they happen almost entirely in humans. The greatest debates about physical design have already been won and lost – most mutations are to the soft brain tissue of humans. They are probably too minute for even the most advanced human geneticists or DNA experts to unravel.
- Evolution is efficient, selective and intelligently directed. Once a species has a major “design victory” the intelligence driving other species has some ability to realign itself with a “superior” animal. There is some type of dissociative and mobile property in the driving intelligence.

These ideas would probably be disturbing to conventional theists in several ways. Humans are still "superior" by way of evolutionary selection, but the process isn't as tidy as one would like. We actually are derived from animals and the distinction between adjacent species is murky, somewhat clouded. There is an uncomfortable nearness, even overlap with creatures we'd just as soon consign to a zoo.

This idea might also open other cans of worms – are some human subspecies “selected” over others and if so, which ones. What would be the criteria or the signs to see? We live in a world rife with clues – clues planted by a fallible super (but not supernatural) intelligence. There are biological signs all over the place – the truth is immutably there with much of it spelled out in our DNA and other parts spelled out in rich fossil deposits. If we can get past our own self-centered concerns and petty materialism, we can crack these biological riddles once and for all. In the meantime, we can give credit to Gordon Rattray Taylor for asking the right questions.

© 2011 blogSpotter

Rethinking a Paradise Lost

2011-12-21T11:13:00.000-08:00

Washington creating our Confederation - Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Imagine a USA with no President, no executive agencies, no judiciary and no tax base. In this America, states can send in a suggested amount of tax dollars but there’s no requirement. The Congress must have unanimous buy-in from every state to ratify any treaty or pass any law. Every state is sovereign with regard to its commerce and trade policies… It sounds like the pipe dream of all conservative Republicans, former Dixiecrats and Libertarians everywhere. In some ways it sounds like the current European Union which has foundational cracks and fissures from one rogue member country, Greece, running up a large national debt.

In fact what I’m describing actually did exist – from 1777 until 1789. In 1777, the Articles of Confederation were drafted and sent for approval by the 2nd Continental Congress and were fully ratified by all states in 1781. They were essentially in effect for a dozen years from ratification until replacement with the U.S. Constitution in 1789. They were created at the urging of Thomas Paine, among other prominent colonists, who thought they would give legitimacy to what would otherwise be seen as a scruffy band of rebels. The Articles as written in fact gave us the Confederated States of America – 80 years ahead of the die-hard Southerners who tried to resuscitate it, like Lazarus from the dead, in 1860. The Confederated States could declare war, negotiate treaties, and resolve conflicts between states. For such a noble idea, there were problems…

There was no tax base – tax money was given voluntarily as a “suggested amount”. Not surprisingly, little money came in. Some states wouldn’t even pay off their own Revolutionary War debts. Other states failed to kick in for food and supplies or pay pensions to war veterans. States disbanded their militias as soon as eminent threat went away – laying themselves open to future attack. Sometimes the attack was internal, as with Shay’s Rebellion in 1786 – a group of farmer’s angry at the depressed market struck out at the state government. After the 1783 Treaty of Paris, various countries (primarily Great Britain) declared trade war against the fledgling United States. The United States couldn’t enact any navigation or trade laws to counter the trade threats – when Massachusetts observed a suggested tariff, Connecticut would rake in money by ignoring the same law.

The Confederation was an odd bird in several ways. There was only one house of Congress called “Congress”. The Congress had a President who was more of a figurehead, a Parliamentarian. The most powerful official in this United States was arguably the governor of the most populous, prosperous member state. The Congress itself resolved disputes between states, thereby suspending (on occasion) its legislative duty to serve as a de facto executive branch. A group of Federalists (including George Washington) were starting to see the need for some backbone and order to their bold-but-fledgling Democratic experiment.

By 1787, things were visibly falling apart. States were ripping in to one another with law suits, military veterans were rioting for back pay and Barbary pirates were threatening Americans who refused to fund a US Navy. Trade-wise, foreign governments were playing states against one another and gaining a decided advantage. This dismal state of affairs brought top aide Alexander Hamilton to prominence – he argued successfully that the Articles should be replaced by a U.S. Constitution and that a strong Federal government should be established. Even the most devoted States’ Rights supporters had to admit the Articles were not cutting it... It’s a great statement about our founders that they could admit a mistake and right the situation early on. How many other countries have such a capacity for humble self-correction and redirection? While the USA hatched out a bicameral legislature, France had a Reign of Terror followed by an Emperor.

It’s amazing that Southerners, Dixiecrats and many of the current “Tea Party” look fondly to this questionable Paradise Lost. The European Union of 2011 appears to be held together with Scotch tape and Elmer’s glue … it may suit them to read some American history. To borrow from a 1990’s cliché – we’ve been there and done that. The other very necessary shoe didn’t drop until 124 years after the 1789 Constitution was drafted. In 1913 the Federal Income Tax and Federal Reserve System was put in place to help secure the money supply, protect against panics and fund the Federal government. It may not have served all these purposes as expertly as we'd like, but it has helped immeasurably in strengthening a robust, truly United States that acts as one power when it matters.

© 2011 blogSpotter

The M Word

2011-12-12T11:23:00.000-08:00

Romney at Battle Creek - Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
I haven’t done an election piece for a while. Thought I would weigh in on a few things as 2011 draws to a close. Today’s topic is Mitt Romney but I’d like to address a couple of small “nits” first …

Dallas' NBC 5 and its love affair with Rick Perry

I’ve noticed that NBC 5 and the Dallas Morning News run prominent Rick Perry stories every day now. These are nice, softball pieces that show up in on the front page of DMN or the top of NBC 5’s news hour. I’d like to inform these two news agencies that Rick Perry being from Texas does not mean that all Texans are pulling for him. I felt sorry for Perry when he had his (now historic) brain freeze in one debate, forgetting which federal agencies he’d cancel. But more generally when the man opens his mouth he says something appalling – that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme or ending Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell is a violation of Christian morality. I think that if DMN and NBC 5 want to continue running commercials for Rick Perry they should either (1) charge him standard rates for the coverage or (2) give equal time to other candidates. A Texas upbringing is a minor, negligible factor in which candidate is best.

Mark Davis and his hatred of immigrants

Mark Davis, in his 11/30 DMN editorial railed against illegal Mexican immigrants. He compared an illegal immigrant to a bank robber or other serious felon. Really Mark? You’re going to follow that line of illogic? A poor Mexican father of four is probably doing what any “market actor” does – he looks for the job that offers the best salary and benefits. That’s probably what Mark Davis does when signing on with a news program or talk show. Yes, the immigrant may violate US immigration law – does that make him equivalent to a bank robber? Our (Anglo) forefathers came from Ireland, England and Western Europe for much the same motivations as Mexican immigrants. There was a huge, paranoid outcry at the turn of the last century, much like now. I will close this topic by saying that immigrant contributions far exceed what they might cost in social services. Conservatives need to quit looking for hapless scapegoats when Wall Street is much more the problem with our current economy in the dumps. Pick on someone your own size. And President Obama -- tear down that fence along the Rio Grande.

The Trouble with Mitt

Now that Newt Gingrich has overtaken Romney in all the polls, people are wondering how and why. Newt has been described as an ego-maniacal, grandiose windbag with a short fuse, no less. He’s also said to be charming, brilliant and fascinating – none of these traits preclude each other. The essential verdict from pundits who know Newt is that he’s an amazing man who probably shouldn’t be President due to a non-Presidential temperament. Mitt Romney on the other hand is like the devoted High School valedictorian – he’s a picture of discipline, self-control and temperate thoughts. He’s done all the homework. Romney has also succeeded well in business though he modestly keeps his $200,000,000 net worth out of his “humble” biography.

Magazines and talking head shows have pointed to a couple of main things in analyzing Romney… he’s a flip-flopper on issues, he prevailed over a “socialist” government health care plan (“Romneycare” in Massachusetts), and he’s seen as too liberal by the extreme-right GOP. These things may all be true, but we’ve put other flawed men into office – men with heavy baggage and far less to recommend them (e.g., Nixon’s 2nd term, Bush after the Iraq fiasco). What people (and the media in particular) tip-toe around is the fact that Romney is a devout Mormon. “M” in my title is not Mitt – it’s Mormon. Mainstream deep-south Protestants view the Mormon Church as a cult. This might not be as it should be – how unpleasant is the topic of intolerance. This is what is.

When JFK ran for President in 1960, his Catholicism was an issue – would he be taking orders from the Pope? Political Correctness hadn’t yet put the stranglehold of an overfed boa constrictor on our society. The topic was allowed to be broached and even discussed at length. When discussion was allowed, the silliness of the original proposition was fully apparent. Kennedy made it clear that he would be foremost a U.S. President, for all Americans. What is disturbing in 2011 is that a significant viewpoint probably knocks all the ex-Confederate states out of Romney’s support column. And that viewpoint is a forbidden topic. Conservative Texans, when asked why they don’t like Romney, will pussyfoot all the way around the sagebrush… he’s “too liberal…a Rockefeller Republican”.. Translation …. “There is no way in Hell that I’d ever vote for a Mormon cultist”. This blog’s author sees Christianity and Mormonism as similar types of cults. One simply has more history and infrastructure surrounding it. In 2012, we’ve closed the door on the discussion because it might lead to another discussion about religion. Now is the PC moment for all of us to clear our throats uncomfortably and change the subject.

But let’s just put the 2012 GOP race into perspective. Because of all the weirdness in this year’s candidates it’s indeterminate what will happen. Bachman developed crazy eyes, Rick Perry forgot his lines and Herman Cain had bimbo eruptions. But it’s looking like Mitt will not be the guy either – for a reason that in 2012 “dare not speak its name” – religion and cults.

© 2011 blogSpotter

When Breaking Bad is Good

2011-12-03T19:44:00.000-08:00

A touch of evil? - Picture courtesy of AMC

by blogSpotter
On my Apple TV, I frequently surf over to Netflix and check out what’s new. New on Netflix means new to Netflix. I stumbled upon the 2008 AMC television series Breaking Bad, and was intrigued by the disheveled image of Bryan Cranston on the series publicity poster. How did this humdrum sitcom dad from Malcom in the Middle fetch 3 Emmys as a “broken bad” teacher-turned-meth-cook? I watched the first episode and was hooked.

Let me preface that crime dramas are not my usual thing – I find them usually to be very cliché and the characters struggle to get past two dimensions. Breaking Bad breaks past many of the crime drama limitations in a most pleasing, daring way. The director, Vince Gilligan, is a young “artsy fartsy” film school grad from NY University whose previous writing credits are X Files, Hancock and Home Fries. X Files is probably the unlikely progenitor of Breaking Bad. Breaking Bad isn’t sci-fi but it ties our mundane reality into a surreal landscape of grizzled drug lords, cold-blooded, axe-wielding hit men and mid-air plane explosions.

The stunning, stark beauty of Albuquerque New Mexico provides the backdrop to this series, strongly flavored with Hispanic culture. The stucco buildings and azure, southwest sky offer a strangely precise punctuation to all that happens – every chilling, twist and turn in the life of Walter White – our chemistry teacher turned drug aficionado. I’ve been to New Mexico a few times and long to go back after watching this show (albeit not working in the meth business).

Breaking Bad will challenge your many precepts about right and wrong or good and evil. You find yourself rooting for the meth dealers and seeing law enforcement as plodding, pedantic pains in the ass. In some ways the show is a black comedy and the moral role-reversals call to mind the authority-dinging dialog in a John Waters movie (say, Female Trouble) or a David Lynch miniseries (such as Twin Peaks). The sly, crooked lawyer Saul Goodman is like an archangel who alights just in time, every time to save Jesse and Walt from jail or worse.

Of course every Faustian bargain begets another, larger one and one can’t help but know down at the bottom of it all – selling meth is wrong. Something bad is going to befall these men who are breaking bad; it’s the law of the cinema but also the law of common sense. None the less, you’ll want to climb into Walt’s beat up Pontiac Aztec and go for a criminal joy ride. The acting in this series is both subtle and superb. I can’t single out everyone or each actor’s name. Let’s just say that wife Skyler, son Walter Jr., lawyer Saul and brother-in-law Hank all add very convincingly to the action. I entertain in my head where they might steer the next episode – it’s very witty, fast-paced and intense.

I’m only on Season 3, so am not wanting to see spoilers or delve too far ahead. I know that when the series is done I’ll put everything back into its proper perspective… “Meth is bad. DEA agents are good”… I hear that Walt becomes more maniacal and greedy in future episodes. Power corrupts, and so it probably must be with our main character. I’ll hold on to see what happens – a reported Season 5 (2012) finale will bring it all to a conclusion. If you have AMC or Netflix, tune in to this most amazing series (dubbed by some critics as the best TV drama ever) and you won’t be disappointed.

© 2011 blogSpotter

Sky Riders

2011-11-21T12:57:00.000-08:00

Achieving the Next Level? - Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
If you were around in 1997, you may recall the bizarre headlines in March of that year… 39 members of a “UFO cult” were found dead from asphyxiation, each one peaceably “evacuated” to a higher, Next Level of existence. They were all in restful repose on their beds -- wearing “Team Heaven’s Gate” tees and new, Nike tennis shows. Their suicides were timed for the boarding of a spaceship they believed to be trailing the Hale-Bopp Comet.

The Heaven’s Gate group, formerly known as Total Overcomer’s Anonymous, was a known entity in Rancho Santa Fe, California. Their theology was a curious mix of Christian and science fiction themes. Local papers and magazines had profiled the group which was mostly seen as an innocuous cult that played into New Age trendiness. Heaven’s Gate subscribed to Arthur Clark’s idea of prehistoric visits by advanced aliens as well as channeling of extraterrestrial spirits. In fact its two charismatic leaders, Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, believed themselves to be direct relations to Christ – channeling His spirit to the group.

To understand Heaven’s Gate, one must have at least a short history of its leader and founder, Marshall Applewhite. Up to age 40, Applewhite’s life was a slice of wholesome American pie. A native Texan, Applewhite was the son of a Presbyterian minister in the small town of Spur. He did a brief stint in the Army where he served as a sergeant in Korea. Returning to Texas, he married and had two children in the late 1950’s. He then pursued his chosen avocation – music. He starred in a Houston opera company and taught music at an Episcopal school. Somewhere around 1970, this idyllic life took a different turn. His marriage ended and he was terminated from his teaching job for “emotional issues”.

AND I WILL GIVE POWER UNTO MY TWO WITNESSES...

In 1972, Applewhite placed himself in a psychiatric facility because he was hearing voices. It was here that he met Bonnie Nettles – a nurse who exhibited considerable schizoid qualities herself. An avid astrologist, she convinced Applewhite that he had special stellar signs – both he and she were aliens sent to rescue the world from Armageddon. Tying in Christianity, she was sure that Marshall and she were the witnesses spoken of in Revelations 11:3. From here forward, Marshall and Bonnie embarked on a strange, evangelical mission that led them through all 50 states, across 25 years. Along the way, there were a few setbacks – Applewhite’s 1974 arrest for credit card theft in Harlingen, Texas. Never minding such misdemeanors, Marshall strived to bring people into his “Total Overcomers Anonymous” group and impress upon them that he was truly channeling Jesus. From early on, he embraced the idea that the world would be wiped clean as in the Noah’s Ark story. He wanted to make people know how they could achieve the “Next Level” and avoid drowning with all the sinners.

The group expanded and contracted over the years. People were understandably skeptical when dire events didn’t happen. Where is the flood? In its last incarnation, Total Overcomers’ Anonymous changed its name to Heaven’s Gate and settled into a mansion near San Diego, California. Here, in Rancho Santa Fe, the group paid its bills with internet web services while studying scriptures and preparing for the Next Level. Applewhite commanded his flock to forsake all property and separate from their spouses. Most disturbingly, he convinced his male followers to castrate themselves. As Comet Hale-Bopp approached, Applewhite convinced his group to “evacuate their vehicles” for the Next Level. They were adamantly opposed to suicide but evacuation was laudable. Over 3 days, Heaven’s Gate members took lethal doses of Phenobarbital and covered their heads with plastic bags – a one way ticket to Hale-Bopp.

How great is our gullibility that we follow any Music Man with an overture of happiness and eternal life? And who is that man telling you he's channeling God? He could be God incarnate… or he could be the likes of David Koresh, Charles Manson or Marshall Applewhite. There's a thin line that exists between lunacy and religious epiphany. When the door opens to the other side, what does anyone see? Did Mohammed Atta have access to his 72 virgins? Did Heaven’s Gate board a spaceship? A couple of cult members delayed their suicides several months beyond the mass “evacuation”. They were assigned to spread the Heaven's Gate message, alert the media, and publicize the web site. They accomplished these things and then joined their team for the celestial ride. We Earthlings saw no spaceship, and no flood of epic proportions. Mere facts normally serve as obstructions in such circumstances.

Is there a Next Level? Is there an appointed messenger who can reliably tell us how to get there? Maybe so. But whoever delivers that message should not be asking us to commit acts of self-destruction and violence – castration, self-immolation, poisoning, or terrorism. Our leaps of faith should not be leaps off of a cliff... If there is a victory of the spirit over death, and very possibly there is, we’ll all get there soon enough – comets are optional.

© 2011 blogSpotter

Midnight Movie Mania

2011-11-13T15:23:00.000-08:00

Plan 9 for Weekend Viewing ... - Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter

Miscellany

Today’s blog will bring two movie mini-reviews which were viewed on my fun new toy -- the ROKU 2 streaming video box. It’s similar in appearance to an Apple TV box, but even smaller. I’ll reserve anymore ROKU commentary for a future article, there’s a lot to report on. I also got real and put my VCR in the Good Will giveaway pile. Haven’t watched a video cassette in @ 4 years and that was a pretty grainy, low-res experience. Most of my old video cassettes went into File 13… no big losses there. Enough chit-chat, now let’s cover our movies…

Plan 9 from Outer Space

1959’s sci-fi movie Plan 9 received a lot of publicity when Tim Burton did a biography of its director, Ed Wood, back in the 1990’s. Plan 9 was billed by many as “the worst movie ever made” and it was the punching bag for aspiring film critics everywhere. With its cheesy props, non-sequitur WWII stock film insertions, and loopy dialog it would be difficult to elevate Plan 9 to Oscar level status.

The plot is about outer space aliens who land on Earth and reanimate recently dead Earthlings into zombies (or “ghouls”). The alien goal is to scare humans into discontinuing a new solar technology that could destroy the universe. The aliens look like humans in fast food uniforms. Some of the props (gravestones, spaceship portals) appear to be cardboard and it’s a known fact that the flying saucer itself was a toy suspended by a string. Plan 9 was filmed over 5 days on what must have been a $1000 budget. Leftover footage of the late Bela Lugosi was used as a basis for Plan 9. Lugosi and Vampira were the two “stars” of the movie.

Before writing it off as the worst movie ever, I’d question the director’s overall goal and the effects (intended or otherwise) on the audience. The fact is that the movie now has people rolling on the floor, laughing their asses off. That by itself makes it much better than “worst”. A truly bad movie is one where you click stop after 5 minutes and don’t come back. Some intrepid viewers have even suggested that Plan 9 actually has a good message alluding to nuclear weapons although that’s a stretch.

I actually think Plan 9 could be remade… I would have John Waters direct it and cast people like Mink Stole or Pee Wee Herman. John Goodman could play the role of Tor Johnson. You could put some new spin on the cheesy effects and play it all for laughs – you might need to goose the dialog just a little bit. You could also go a different direction and have David Lynch direct it. You could play up the surreal, nonsensical aspects of it – Lynch is the master of that. I heartily recommend Plan 9 from Outer Space as a movie for anyone studying the film industry or film history. It’s really a gem that should be polished and appreciated.

She Done Him Wrong

I also watched 1933’s She Done Him Wrong with Mae West and Cary Grant as a very young man. I probably haven’t watched a feature-length Mae West film since I was a kid. This movie has her playing Lady Lou, a Gay 90’s dance hall siren who’s wronged her boyfriend by seeing other men while he’s serving time. Mae West is positively magnetic and owns every scene – star power magnified by ten. She sings “Frankie and Johnnie” and "Easy Rider” – numbers that make the movie worthwhile by themselves. Some of her lines I recall ..

“Come up and see me some time” (a classic, said to Cary Grant)
“Honey I was so poor.. at one point I didn’t know where my next husband was coming from”’
“When a woman goes wrong, a man goes right behind her”.

Mae West was fantastic – sort of a smart-aleck spitfire Dolly Parton of yesteryear. She was a prime asset to Hollywood, and a thorn in the side of censors at the time.

So there you have two reviews in one. Both movies make us realize that black-and-white “Midnight movies” of times past can still inform us, amuse us and mesmerize us. You don’t need high tech, car explosions or high definition 3-D to be thoroughly entertained.

© 2011 blogSpotter

Occupying Wall Street

2011-10-29T20:03:00.000-07:00

When the rain comes ... - Picture courtesy of Lionsgate

by blogSpotter
I’m sitting in Starbucks on my 54th birthday...yes, I’m 54 years young. There has been so much weirdness in my life lately, I’ve fallen behind on my blog entries again. Will try to do a system reboot here at Starbucks ….

Quick Update on Android

After 6 months, I lost my LG Optimus V phone. Think it fell off my belt in a 7-11 parking lot on Harry Hines Blvd. To be honest, I wasn’t loving that phone … it had some issues. The 3G was slow and often unavailable. The pop-up keyboard had tiny little keys. The screen had lots of glare and the contrast was poor. Worst of all, the Android operating system has a rigidness to it that I never mastered – I kept exiting an app when I wanted to look at its menu options. Esthetically, Android OS reminds me of the spare Linux Ubuntu compared to the lush and beautiful Mac OS X. It was a prepaid, pay-as-you-go phone so the separation shouldn't be too traumatic. OK, enough about phones, let’s talk about Wall Street Occupation…

Margin Call

I just watched Margin Call with Kevin Spacey and Demi Moore. The movie is loosely based on actual events that transpired on Wall Street in 2008, just prior to the epic meltdown of September 14, 2008. My initial prejudice was that the movie might be wonkie and dull, appealing mainly to bean counters and political science majors. It wasn’t like that at all – it was a gripping, financial thrill ride that moved at a good pace. Nobody in the whole cast of characters is blameless but the shades of moral slippage go from light indiscretion (junior analysts following orders) to pure, vile nastiness (Jeremy Irons as CEO using people as collateral blame objects). A warning – there are aspects of this movie that may remind you of things still on-going. You may walk away feeling like you need to occupy Wall Street yourself. This leads me to me next topic…

Occupying Wall Street

Ann Coulter who is my favorite mean-mouthed conservative wench wrote a hilarious piece recently about the Occupy Wall Street movement. Though I’m from the opposite side of the political aisle from her, I have to agree with Ann. Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is without a leader and is without a manifesto. Its members are all over the map in their opinions – sometimes at odds with each other. Some are staunch pro-Obama liberals and some are libertarians angry about Obamacare. When I saw their profiles in Newsweek, I saw jobs like performance artist, life coach and unemployed actor. These don’t sound like people who would ever be working at anything resembling an office job in the concrete jungle.

I like the idea of OWS in general, but am an overly practical, middle-aged guy. I think OWS should have structure, goals and leadership. I know that rains on the parade of 20-something potheads who are mad at …the men who did … that thing… that was really bad. I totally support their right for civil disobedience – carry on. But do it with some semblance of knowledge and direction. I have my own thoughts about Wall Street and why it’s so discouraging…

Nobody went to jail – The only people who have done time are over-the-top con artists like Bernie Madoff. Where is anyone being held accountable for the largest loss of national net worth in history?

The insiders were recycled back into the Bush/Obama Administrations – What of people like Ben Bernanke, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and Henry Paulson. These men weren’t necessarily directly involved in the 2008 debacle but their fingerprints are all around it. Why do we keep having the foxes watch the hen house? What was clear from the 2008 events (and made clear in Margin Call) is that many people in business and government saw the disaster coming. The insiders’ last 2-3 months were spent with damage control, blame mitigation, and how to break it to the public.

There were already laws on the books – My first impulse in 2008 was to say, “There ought to be a law!”. There were and are a host of laws – there should’ve been 3 layers of protection. But when SEC, Federal Reserve, Attorneys General and so many others turn a collusive blind eye, it doesn’t matter what laws were on the books. Why weren’t the laws enforced?

This is late 2011, and basically nothing has been done to rescue or mend the situation of 2008. The only reason it hasn’t happened again is that the American public has a newly cynical attitude – American’s are actually in a mode of frugality right now, much like Japan in its "lost decade".

I’ll close by saying to Occupy Wall Street – Keep it up! Wall Street needs to be occupied. But academia, the White House and Congress might also need occupy themselves – with a greater sense of what “doing the right thing” means in the aftermath of 2008.

© 2011 blogSpotter

Mind Odyssey

2011-10-19T12:30:00.000-07:00

Exploring the moon and the ultimate meaning of life - Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter

Stanley Kubrick

Before reviewing 2001: A Space Odyssey, I’d like to briefly mention the director, Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick was a cinematic mastermind who left a small, but outstanding legacy of movies in markedly different categories – Lolita, Clockwork Orange, Dr. Strangelove, The Shining. The son of a Jewish doctor in Brooklyn NY, Kubrick was a modest, unpretentious young man and is said to have been a mediocre student grade-wise. In a bio passage similar to other super-accomplished people (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs), Kubrick was restless in school – he quit NY City College after less than one year. He became a well-known photographer and from there he phased into making films. He was known as a stern perfectionist in his later directing career. He would require sometimes 50 takes of one scene – he incurred the ire of many actors due to that. He’s generally considered one of the greatest film directors of all time and many of his movies rank in top indexes for various film institutions and critics. He’s considered one of the lucky, “unfettered” directors who held almost total artistic control of his projects while getting the financial backing of major producing studios. He was also a workaholic who is described by peers as working himself to death at age 70, on Eyes Wide Shut.

2001: A Space Odyssey

I watched 2001 on Apple TV last night. The last time before that was in 1969 at the Air Force Academy Theater when I was 11. I have to admire the fact that I could grasp some of what was happening at age 11 – an adult RTF / Philosophy major might have trouble deciphering the final scenes of the movie.

Act I

The movie was delivered in a quiet tone with little dialog and stunning classical music as a backdrop in several scenes. It basically plays out in 3 “Acts”. In Act One, prehistoric ape men stumble upon an alien monolith – a black rectangular box planted by a superior civilization. They touch it and suddenly acquire the knowledge to make tools, and also war. The first act just covers this one phenomenon but it sets the stage for subsequent appearances of monoliths.

Act II

Act Two is really the main body of the movie and is truly enthralling. What I like is the “near-term” sci-fi it conveys. There aren’t yet any Death Stars or Starship Enterprises. It shows humans making regular space plane flights to a permanent lunar city, Clavius. It shows lunar buses, space meals, interplanetary phone calls and mundane activities as they might really play out in a few decades. The writers ambitiously thought we might have reached this technology point by 2001 – a scant 3 decades from when the movie was made. Humans are way too selfish, self-involved and disorganized to do anything so grand, so soon. We do have iPhone 4 which gives us Facetime – that’s about the closest contrivance we have. Else, 2011 looks depressingly similar to 1968 when the movie was made. In fact, our NASA program is being gutted as we speak. Let’s hope that Richard Branson gets his Virgin Air “space port” up and running some day soon.

But I digress – back to our synopsis. In Act Two it’s revealed that a monolith (identical to what we saw in Act One) has been found on the moon, near Clavius. It’s clearly been planted by an alien intelligence and is sending a strong radio signal to Jupiter. Two young astronauts are sent on a mission to Jupiter to see what’s at the other end of the signal. They’re on an advanced ship which is piloted and monitored by the amazing HAL 9000 supercomputer (called “Hal”). The writers imbued HAL with human motives and emotions – something we are nowhere near at the moment. HAL becomes suspicious that the astronauts intend to unplug him. This is justifiable – they are. They think that HAL is making some wrong calls, technically. HAL preemptively (and vindictively) removes life support for the 3 hibernating astronauts on board. He cuts off oxygen to Astronaut Frank who’s on a space walk. This leaves Astronaut Dave as the sole human survivor, in an outside space pod. Dave outmaneuvers HAL and slips back into an open portal. He summarily disconnects HAL's circuits causing HAL to sound drugged and dying as he sings “Daisy” – a test tune he was initially programmed with. Dave assumes command and successfully guides the ship to Jupiter.

Act III

Act Three is so bizarre, I can synopsize it a little but not a lot. Even Kubrick said that the 3rd act might mean one of several things to the viewer. The space ship encounters another monolith orbiting Jupiter. The monolith directs the spaceship into a “Star gate” or “Worm hole” depending on who does the telling. You see the ship race though a strange series of brightly colored, shifting landscapes. Dave loses consciousness and upon awakening his pod has landed in an elegant, surreal luxury hotel room. Here I’ll recount what I thought I saw … He sees an old version of himself eating at a table, dropping a wineglass on the floor. He appears to merge into this older self, who is aging in a matter of seconds. He’s next lying on a death bed, looking at a monolith that’s appeared before him in the bedroom. A beam connects Dave to the monolith and suddenly Dave is transformed into the “Star Child” – a giant embryo floating in space next to the Earth.

Conclusion

2001 was based on a short story, The Sentinel, by renowned sci-fi writer Arthur C Clark. Clark was a pantheist who thought that what we see as God might in fact be a superior civilization that started out like us and achieved a bodily form of “pure energy” over millions of eons. Kubrick was on a similar page with Clark and favored sci-fi allegories over conventional religious stories. I, the blog author, don’t really understand what is meant by terms such as star child or pure energy. I can’t officially join a bandwagon which bandies what to me is nonsensical jargon. I’m open to new ideas and interpretations – maybe at some future point I’ll become enlightened about Clark’s ideas but maybe not.

2001: A Space Odyssey is considered the absolute best sci-fi movie ever made by many enthusiasts. Acts One and Three will possibly elude you – they may even bore you at points. But Act Two is stunning for the incredibly elaborate, realistic technology props. Some of these were actually custom-created by a British aircraft company. I have to count myself as an avid fan of such a dramatic, thought-provoking movie.

© 2011 blogSpotter

Apple Without Steve

2011-10-06T15:04:00.000-07:00

The misunderstood Newton - Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter

In Memoriam

As a consummate, wild-eyed Mac head you have to know that I’m very sad about Steve Jobs’ passing at age 56. Like Macalope Daily’s author said, I’m not a poet laureate nor am I good at eulogies –wish that I were. I’d like to convey how big a loss we have. I’ve blogged tirelessly about Apple products, have had Apple as a blog sponsor, and probably own no less than 15 Apple devices counting iPods, Apple TV’s, mac mini, etc. My actions and purchases can probably speak as well as anything. The irony was not lost on newscasters that many (most?) people heard of Jobs’ death viewing one of his devices. His pervasive influence easily equals Edison or Ford – we were blessed to have him in our presence.

Apple After Steve?

I actually approached this topic a couple of times previously. See “American Song” or “King of Cupertino”. I opined and still opine that Apple should survive albeit with some sense of melancholy. Let’s ask, “What if Steve Jobs suddenly left Apple?”. Well that actually did happen in 1985 when Jobs lost out in a corporate coup to John Scully. Post Jobs, Apple made some wrong steps to be sure, but also some right steps. Lets cover some of these …

Mac computers – Apple expanded on the Mac computer innovated by Jobs in 1984. Unfortunately in this transitional era, the IBM PC (with its function keys resembling 3270 terminals widely in use) captured the hearts of American business. The Mac was a high-concept graphics maestro in a world that wasn’t yet ready for it. In some ways, it was too beautiful to be. IBM computers (and similar Intel devices) served as a pragmatic bridge between clunky mainframes and the desktop. Apple rested on its lofty laurels long enough that it lost a big part of its graphics advantage when Windows 95 emerged some 10 years after Jobs left Apple. By the mid-90’s America finally “got” the graphic paradigm and in that huge passage of time, so did Microsoft. WinTel got American business; Apple got the arts and design crowd.

1991 Powerbook – Let us not forget that this was a WIN for Apple, squarely in the non-Jobs years. Prior to Powerbook, laptops were huge heavy clunkers like the Osborne. Pre-Powerbook portables were called luggables – they had the heft and bulk of a large bowling ball. They were impractical, ugly and slow. Powerbook innovated the track ball and the slim profile – it made portable computing both practical and esthetically pleasing. Intel makers (Dell, HP, Gateway) took a big page from Apple in making their next generation of laptops.

1993-1998 Newton – The Newton was a handheld device that was sophisticated and really ahead of its time. Yes, the hand-writing recognition was off – SNL and The Simpsons had riotous fun with that. But in fact the Newton was a trail-blazer for all future PDA’s and even really the smart phone of the 2000’s. The term PDA was originated by Apple and the concept of a smart, handheld unit that graphically streamlines your schedule? – that happened with the Newton. By the time it was killed off in 1998, it had solved a lot of its problems.

I guess that my overall point is this – Apple kept its eclectic hipness even during the period of Jobs’ exile from 1985 to 1997. It didn’t grind to a halt nor did it run out of ideas. To be sure, Jobs brought thunder and lightning to a shop that was stultified in its market for desktop and laptop computers. Mac OS X, introduced in 2001, gave a hugely needed overhaul to Mac’s stodgy System 9. By 2001, System 9 compared poorly next to Windows XP. Even with Mac OS X, Jobs was unable (even by 2011) to rescue the office environment from Microsoft or Linux. The earlier inroads made by NT and Win95 were too deep. A man can only work so many miracles. But Jobs gave us a new dichotomy – a Windows workplace and an Apple home life. Thus you pound away on a Dell at work. But you check your emails on an iPad; listen to music on an iPod, talk to your BFF on an iPhone.

And what is the future of Apple? Did Jobs leave a 20 year playbook for Tim Cook and other “Apple scions” to follow? Jobs’ pancreatic cancer played out over 7 years – maybe he left a roadmap when he saw that his hour was drawing to a close. I guess it all remains to be seen. A new generation of Apple fanatics waits with cautious hope – what’s next for the iPhone or Apple TV? Let’s hope that Jobs’ incredible spirit lives on in all our collective energies and imaginations. Nobody wants to go back to beige boxes.

© 2011 blogSpotter

Beyond the Planet of the Apes

2011-09-21T08:54:00.001-07:00

Now entering the Forbidden Zone - Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
This past week I watched a movie which can only be described as a guilty pleasure – Beneath the Planet of the Apes. It’s the 1970 sequel to 1968’s seminal, highly acclaimed Planet of the Apes, based on Pierre Boulle’s 1963 novel. The original movie was well-structured and conveyed some important messages about human arrogance and technology run amok. You might think it should be left alone, intact with its Academy award for ape costumes and all its thought provoking monkey business.

In fact, Apes spawned a business, media empire – 4 sequels, a comic book, a TV show and (very recently) a prequel “reboot” called Rise of the Planet of the Apes. This is a healthy franchise that will live forever; it rivals Star Wars in its staying power. Who knew that such a role reversal would have such a hold on us? There have been various spins placed on Apes … some liken the simian masters to the primal essence of humans (maybe a devolving of humans back into apehood?). In some ways this would hark back to King Kong of the 1930’s, where Kong was symbolic of a masculine, human id. Others have perceived a racist bent in Apes – maybe apes were used as a substitute for a race or nationality. I never really saw that angle myself.

Whatever the case may be, the first sequel, Beneath, is laughable. It involves the discovery of a race of subterranean, mutant humans. They inhabit the ancient Queensboro subway station and worship an undetonated nuclear warhead as God. I won’t give away what happens (does it matter?) but the chief impression I carry away is that the movie’s budget had to be in the thousands, not millions. The special effects are comically crude – fire that looks like orange cellophane and lightening that looks like something a kid might scrawl with a white crayon. Aspects of the movie remind me of Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space. The mutants look like current day Teletubbies and the actors are robbed of all dignity – how many careers must this movie have squelched?

I think that if you must go from the sublime to the ridiculous, you could do better than this. Much in the tradition of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, we should have Beyond the Planet of the Apes. In this sequel, a 3rd space ship lands in the Forbidden Zone. Astronaut Scott Smith strays into ape territory; he’s captured and brought in for observation by Zira the zoologist chimp. But Scott sees something in Zira’s eyes – a soul connection that transcends species. Zira feels the same. Scott and Zira escape (and elope) but not without enraging PETA and the Ape equivalent of Moral Majority. Because of their bestial love, they must run to the Forbidden Zone (double entendre is unavoidable). They stumble into the old subway station at Rockefeller Center. Here they discover a race of ape-humans who are very accepting of alternative lifestyles and who embrace the performing arts. At this point … the author is momentarily out of ideas – he needs a Starbucks refill.

The reader may email me with ideas of how to finish it, or give me guidance in the comment section of this blog. I feel that my Beyond version has as much validity as Beneath. Furthermore, the special effects would be minimal. It could be done for pennies and maybe be up for some musical awards. Will wrap this up by saying I have utmost respect for the original novel and its premise. I’m all the more thankful that we have these fertile imaginations – to take cinematic gold and turn it into unintended comedy gold.

© 2011 blogSpotter

Cosmic Fairy Tales

2011-09-04T18:47:00.000-07:00

The blue fairy as God figure? - Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Author's note -- My wonderful mother passed away at age 78 on August 16th. She was a fun, special lady and seemed younger than her age, always. She was diagnosed with late-stage pancreatic cancer and lived just 3 weeks with home hospice care after diagnosis. I don't know where anyone goes in the afterlife, but she will add to the joy and laughter wherever it is.

Magic Air

I'll tell a tale
of maidens fair
and dragons fierce
and magic air

I'll tell it not with words precise
or thoughts profound
or terms concise

A child can let the tale unfold
with whimsey, rhymes and actions bold
He'll open wide the shuttered door
To something other, something more

Today's blog is one I've touched on before in other articles, it's a personal favorite and well worth revisiting. In high school English class you were probably served topics like symbolism, metaphor and personification. Most teens find these topics about as exciting as cold oatmeal and would much rather be Tweeting or texting the hour away. When the method of delivery is a Percy Shelley poem or Moby Dick, the dry dullness becomes overwhelming. The literary devices mentioned above are far better understood and enjoyed as personal discoveries. Every other song, poem and fictional work in pop culture has some type of message between the lines – the sensitive listener will pick up and enjoy these (certainly when the topic is something about sex).

One area that is rife with symbolism is children's literature. Aesop and Mother Goose have a lot up their sleeves that our parents never imagined. Even when the message is fairly obvious (Emperor's New Clothes, The Tortoise and the Hare), adults are quick to flush it out of their minds – minds far too busy with Important Stuff. That's too bad -- the morals are so much needed in today's world.

Two of my favorite children's stories are Mary Poppins and the Wizard of Oz. Both of these are full of symbolism not the least of which is their God imagery. College freshmen, properly tanked up on beer, can dissect the importance of the Wizard, the yellow brick road and how it all relates to an emerald city. What was Baum really saying? Yet another movie that serves up miraculous metaphors is Pinocchio. This movie was masterfully delivered by Walt Disney in his 1940 animation, but has fallen into a certain level of obscurity.

Let me set forth some of the things that make Pinocchio a truly relevant, nay cosmic fairy tale:

o It offers not just a “God” but a hierarchy of intelligences – a cricket with conscience, a kindly human puppet maker and a blue fairy.
o It shows a physical consequence to lying – a consequence that gives Pinocchio a lengthened nose and turns hoodlums into braying donkeys.
o It shows a transformational experience – a wood puppet transforming into a live boy after demonstrating fortitude and human love.

It's getting late in the evening – I won't delve into the theological and cosmological bee hives the Pinocchio story kicks open. Even if you're set like quick-dry cement in your religious viewpoint you might still see some points to ponder. What is ironic is that children the world over can be delighted by the concepts presented – and Mommy and Daddy are just glad the rug rats are occupied with a DVD in the back seat.

Unless you've walled your children off in a home school with Veggie Tales on permanent replay, they should get a liberal exposure to a variety of ideas just looking at the classics. You can hammer your kids back into compliance at a later date if need be. Or maybe, just maybe let them open up their imaginations and discover a few things on their own. It might help them to be better rounded people and they'll later get high school bonus points for correctly interpreting Ozymandias.

© 2011 blogSpotter

Daring Debutante

2011-08-12T15:15:00.000-07:00

This is a stickup! - Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
I was in my junior year at Lanier High School in February 1974. Watergate was in full throttle and Paul McCartney’s Wings was boring us with “Bland on the Run”. I needed some excitement and finally received my fix when it was reported that 19 year-old newspaper heiress Patty Hearst had been kidnapped by the left-wing guerillas known as Symbionese Liberation Army. That poor, beautiful girl. There she was watching TV with her boyfriend Steve Weed one minute, and the next minute she was being held for ransom by a ruffian named Donald Cinque LeFreeze no less.

To look at her prior life is to look at stuffy, stifling, wealthy, lily white luxuriance. She was raised by her patrician parents in highbrow Hillsborough, California. The 3rd of 5 daughters, she attended the very best schools – Crystal Springs School for Girls and Santa Catalina School in Monterey. Had Patty’s life unfolded the way her preppy, two-dimensional “script” spelled out, she would’ve joined a sorority, majored in Liberal Arts, met a wealthy scion from Dow Chemical and settled into a life of shallow splendor – vacationing in Aruba and shopping for Mercedes automobiles.

But fate had another script in mind. In the hands of Donald Cinque LeFreeze, Patty was transformed into a firebrand of social revolution. LeFreeze used Maoist mind control tactics to convince the impressionable Patty that she was a victim of White Establishment propaganda. He renamed her “Tania” after Che Guevara’s girlfriend. He talked the beautiful coed into joining the SLA in its various activities – issuing dire proclamations to the public and robbing banks. Patty was caught on security camera, barking commands to Hibernia Bank customers while wielding a gun. Ironically, Hibernia Bank was headed by the father of her best friend from childhood. Strange how the circles overlapped.

The SLA was nothing if not socially conscious. The ransom they requested was for Patty’s father to give $70 worth of food to all of California’s needy – a total value of $400 million. When Hearst complied, the SLA considered the food to be of poor quality – ransom unmet. Patty herself was quoted as saying, “My father could have done better”. Alas, the socially aware SLA had a short run. The group, including Patty, was apprehended in September 1975 and brought to justice.

The 1976 trial was a precursor to the 3 Ring Circus OJ-style events we’ve come to know in recent decades. F. Lee Bailey defended Patty but he was no match for prosecution expert Dr. Harry L. Kozol. Kozol smashed the “Stockholm Syndrome” defense by pointing out that Patty (1) still refused to turn evidence on SLA members and (2) failed to ever mention a small closet where police investigators allege that she was raped. In what was seen as a victory for the prosecution, Patty was sentenced to 35 years in Federal prison. Fortunately for Patty, the other powers that be relented. Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence to time served, 22 months in 1979. Bill Clinton gave her a full pardon in 2001.

In 2011, Patty Hearst lives a pleasant, unexciting, unremarkable life as a still attractive middle-aged matron. She married her former bodyguard, Bernard Shaw; they live in Garrison, NY with their two children Gillian and Lydia. In 1974, the antics of the SLA were greeted with weary vexation – we were still coming down from the 60’s. We live now in an unyielding age of over-the-top comedy with comedians like Conan O’Brien and Kathy Griffin. The extreme ironies and titillating details of Patty’s ordeal would never escape the laugh-a-minute laser vision of Comedy Central or Jay Leno in 2011. Details like a captor named “Cinque DeFreeze” cannot be ignored. In point of fact, filmmaker John Waters (of Pink Flamingos fame) did see the zaniness even at the time. Patty’s acting career is mostly comprised of comedic roles in John Waters movies like Cry-Baby. She was also in a couple of other B movies and did cameos for Frasier and Veronica Mars. Patty’s parents probably wish that their daughter’s life had adhered to the debutante script. All the rest of us, as well as popular culture, must feel enriched that Patty’s life took a completely different direction.

© 2011 blogSpotter

Chromophobia

2011-07-26T08:52:00.000-07:00

When color was cool - Picture courtesy of Chrysler Corp.

by blogSpotter
I have pleasant memories of visiting my Thedford grandparents in Waco, Texas. As a little boy, I had no idea that Waco was “unhip”. All I knew is that I loved the Lion’s Club Pool, the Lake Air Mall, Piccadilly Cafeteria and the Methodist Church picnics that served home-made peach ice cream. Most of all I loved my grandparents and their easy-going lifestyle. They were kind and indulgent; on visits they would glut us with home cooking and watch all of our silly TV shows with us (Man from UNCLE, Mayberry RFD).

I also loved their huge, colorful 1955 ranch style house. The hall bath had robin’s egg blue tile. The master bath was fitted in pink tile (matching toilet and sink of course). The guest bath had a seafoam green tile. I loved all the color play and it added to the enjoyment of all bathroom visits. My Grandma once said, “Sometimes the world is a dreary place – I like bright colors to liven it up”. I love her outlook, and Grandma’s house had lots of fun color sense, with orange, red, blue and green coming at you from various places. She wore bright colors and her cars were always pretty colors (mauve, avocado green).

Now, let us flash forward to 2011. Grandma Thedford would need rose colored glasses to greet our jaded, sophisticated world where bright color is often seen as juvenile, naïve, immature or gauche. According to a DuPont survey, the most popular car colors are actually non-colors: white, black, silver and gray. 71% of cars manufactured are those colors. Since the early 90’s, home décor has been in the same cycle of enforced drabness: gray granite kitchens and baths, silver appliances, hemp-colored carpet, off-white walls and brown tile floors. Of course, the home owner can add color with artwork and pillows but the builders’ color-phobia is all too pronounced.

Even clothing, which should be an extension of the unlimited self, has fallen under the pall of muted monotony. That “brown is the new black” should never be a necessary statement… Why is black, the color of funerary sadness, the ultimate color to emulate? Clothing follows much the same rules as house and car colors (particularly for men). Some primary and secondary colors can creep in if they’re sufficiently dampened (eg, squadron blue, olive green). For the most part, especially in business settings, color is a no-no. The ultimate safe measure, even for women, is to follow the solemnity code of safeness in grey, brown or black.

I find it ironic that in a society which has otherwise promoted the “different drummer” ideal, we express ultimate cool by being expressionless. As an Apple fan, I have to say that Apple stores (and products) have promulgated the creeping chromophobia that is everywhere evident. Every retail store in America emulates Apple – they now have bleached wood floors, birch wood tables, white walls and silver/white gizmos for sale.

We Americans need to quit being so intimidated by a color dictum which is alternately macho and corporate. It may just be that the most assertive, kick ass statement yet to be made is that of a “color revolution”. Bring back lemon yellow, passionate purple and kiwi green. Cranberry red and aqua blue should not lag far behind. Throw a Molotov cocktail into the blandified, uptight faces of the chromophobes. Let’s get past prejudices that suggest bright colors are either too silly or too juvenile. Bright colors are a part of the light spectrum which should tantalize our eyes and increase our visual joy. That we allow fear and intimidation to limit such a basic sensory experience is truly unfortunate. Grandma Thedford was right – a world with color is a less dreary place.

© 2011 blogSpotter

Kinky Memorandum

2011-07-16T19:33:00.001-07:00

Found a typo ... - Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
As I write today, we are on about the umpteenth day of furnace-hot, 100+ degree temperatures here in Dallas -- 103 right now. This weather does a complete number on me -- it seems to make me unnaturally sleepy. I’m actually sitting in a KFC on NW Highway while Pep Boys tinkers with my car two doors down. I think my struts are worn and I hope the service advisor didn’t take me for a ride. Am not mechanically gifted so I have to trust in my fellow man.

Before embarking on my latest cinematic discovery, I’d like to comment on Rick Perry’s August public prayer session. Once again, the Tea Party and Religious Right (misnomer) have made a deliberate distortion of things. It seems an atheist group is suing because the prayer session is a violation of church-state separation. Perry’s team says, mistakenly, that the atheist group is against prayer and free expression. The atheist group is totally OK with prayer and free expression. What they dislike is an elected Governor using tax funds to promote and endorse a specific religion, Christianity. It’s not likely that Jews, Buddhists or Hare Krishna’s will be given an equal shake at this event. There is the objection.

THE SECRETARY

Let’s move along to our next, featured topic. I watched a movie on TV this weekend, which let’s face it -- it was kinky. The Secretary came to the Angelica Theater near me way back in 2002. I thought the topic looked intriguing (though I’m not into that kind of thing :-) )… my friends were appalled by it and would not go see it. This nine years later I finally watched it on a late Saturday night with my cousin Lizzie. We very maturely giggled through some of the spank sessions, it’s good to be an adult about it.

The movie features Maggie Gyllenhaal as an emotionally fragile young woman from a dysfunctional family. Her alcoholic father and mousy mother are unable to cope with her self-mutilating, suicidal tendencies and so she spends some time in a mental ward. Upon her release, she takes intensive typing courses and hires into James Spader’s law office where typewriters rule -- computers are not allowed.

Spader comes across as a wee bit prissy, perfectionist and obsessive-compulsive. He’s a lonely bachelor and clearly smitten with Maggie’s character. (Using the actors’ names here out of laziness)… It’s not obvious at the outset that either person is kinky. Rather they are lonely, injured souls who have miraculously made a cosmic connection with each other. Their dalliance begins when Spader (somewhat overzealously) points out Maggie’s spelling errors. The chemistry is sparked and she starts to introduce deliberate errors in hopes of a “reprimand”.

The interaction expands into a full-blown, kinky affair which has an obvious expiration date as far as a practical, functioning law office would be concerned. I won’t replay the exact plot or spoil the ending in case anyone wants to rent this filthy smut. ;-) It has a bit of a surprise, enjoyable ending albeit an ending that seems unrealistic to me.

If you watch this movie, you’ll identify Spader as the dominant and Gyllenhaal as the submissive. What’s interesting is that minus the kinky sex, it resembles many weird, convoluted, real world couplings. The irrational verbal assaults, groveling and rites of humiliation look like something you might see in an overly strict religious household, or any marriage with a domineering spouse. That some people seek after and like this arrangement is amazing to me but I won’t argue with someone else’s formula for success. Whatever blows your dress up, as they say.

If you’re bored some evening, The Secretary will definitely capture your imagination. Just don’t get any ideas. ;-)

© 2011 blogSpotter

Forbidden Planet Revisited

2011-07-03T19:23:00.000-07:00

C57-D Landing on Altair IV - Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
See androids fighting Brad and Janet
Anne Francis stars in Forbidden Planet
At the late night, double feature, picture show
Science Fiction Double Feature, RHPS

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
The Tempest Act 4, scene 1, 148-158

Science Fiction is a hugely popular movie genre here in America… Star Trek and Star Wars are probably the two franchises that people really savor. Every sequel and prequel is endlessly dissected by fans worldwide. As good as they are, my personal favorite sci-fi movie is 1956’s mesmerizing Forbidden Planet. This movie pioneered several things and is considered by many enthusiasts to be the progenitor of those that came after.

Forbidden Planet is about the mystery-shrouded planet Altair IV, 16 light years from Earth. An American space crew aboard starship C57-D are dispatched to find out what happened to a crew that disappeared on Altair 20 years prior. The planet is compatible to Earth life and resembles Arizona with a violet sky. It’s inhabited by Dr. Morbius the lone survivor of the prior mission, his robot Robby and his beautiful daughter Altaira.

It seems that Dr. Morbius discovered and befriended an advanced Altairian civilization, the Krell, and he even mastered much of their advanced technology. The Krell were destroyed by their own inventions and more secrets unfold about Morbius’ own complicity in the events that transpired. The Krell invention is called a “plastic educator” and it can actually transform thoughts (fantasies) into realities. It’s the ultimate King Midas touch with equally amazing albeit disastrous consequences.

Forbidden Planet is said to be a sci-fi version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The Tempest was one of Shakespeare’s last plays and arguably one of the best. The Tempest features a remote island instead of a planet and sorcery in place of advanced technology. Shakespeare probably lifted The Tempest from a Greek play thus giving credence to the late John Lennon’s famous quip, “All songs are plagiarized”.

Forbidden Planet was the first sci-fi movie entirely removed from Earth, featuring a starship. It’s also the first sci-fi movie to have an advanced, electronic musical score. Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek fame says he was directly influenced by Forbidden Planet and even used it as the basis for a couple of episodes. Robby the Robot cost a then unheard-of $125,000 to build. Both Robby and the spectacular sets were reused in other productions such as Invisible Boy and Twilight Zone. Walt Disney loaned out one its best animators to create the subterranean Krell city which even by 21st century standards is spectacular.

A young Leslie Nielson plays the role of Captain John Adams, quite serious and deadpan as a leading man. (No hint of the Naked Gun to come). Anne Francis is beautiful and Walter Pidgeon is unequaled as the complex Dr. Morbius. Forbidden Planet mixes action, adventure, romance and mystery into a potent, sci-fi cocktail. There’s a parable quality to it all, and we have to wince as Altair IV implodes upon itself in the end. We all will likely say the same thing -- we’re potentially the Krell. Do we risk imploding ourselves with technology miracles that become untethered from ethical standards? Do we unleash forces with no forward vision about the human nature that underlies it?

If looking for your next sci-fi thrill, get a copy of this movie. You’ll be enchanted by the purple sky, Morbius’ ultra-modern 50’s Altaira space abode, the Krell super city, the beautiful movie cast, and most of all -- the overriding message that we probably need to conquer ourselves in the process of conquering any new frontier.

© 2011 blogSpotter

Thought Bubbles

2011-06-25T19:51:00.001-07:00

Nobody should be thinking these thoughts - Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter

It’s a balmy evening in late June. We were mercifully blessed with a couple of rain showers and high temperatures in the mid 90’s -- a fantastic break from the 100+ dog days we were having. There is still lingering daylight at 8:55PM -- I love Daylight Saving Time. Could probably enjoy the midnight sun of Alaska; it feels like you’re grabbing back a little of life when the sun lazes a bit longer.

For avid readers (ha!) you may have seen my blog from last week, “The End of Everything Big”. It had a lifespan of 12 hours and then I used my editorial prerogative and deleted it. It wasn’t the worst piece I’ve written by far, but it was alternately boring and sarcastic. Sarcasm is a sublimated form of anger and I don’t want my blog to be a place of sarcasm (at least the extreme variety). Also I bit off a huge topic that the combined staffs of Time and Newsweek might find daunting. Sure, I can dispatch it in four paragraphs! (It was about the next possible, major USA tax-funded projects).

Avid readers might also have noticed that my output has slowed -- I post two or three articles a month now. Back in 2007 I was cranking out five a month. Eugene Robinson and Maureen Dowd don’t write that much. I probably covered pet topics and peccadilloes in the first few years and now I’m on a plateau of a mellow sort of monotony. Have thought about doing “a wrap” on this blog but I’m not quite to that point yet. I occasionally have something fun to kick around.

That all being said, I owe you some content dammit. Who really cares about deleted blog articles? I was browsing iTunes the other day and stumbled upon “Classic Music Videos” from the 1960’s. These were all standard-definition clips from the Ed Sullivan show -- a bit fuzzy but still spectacular in content quality. We have the Lovin’ Spoonful, Animals, Beach Boys, Neil Diamond, Petula Clark, Mamas & Poppas, Sonny & Cher and so much more. The clips range from early 60’s black and white to a spectacular, colorful rendition of Aquarius by the Fifth Dimension; this clip even has astronomical special effects. The genius and power of 60’s music astounds me to this day -- 1967’s worst song was better than 2011’s best. I did have to ponder why a young Neil Diamond had a forward comb-over -- what was going on there? I actually bought Gary Puckett and the Union Gap (“Young Girl”). I was as much fascinated by the seaweed green military outfits as the music itself. 1968 was a stand-out year for band attire.

The innocence of the era also impressed me. At my gym (24 Hour Fitness near SMU campus), young men try to look like gansta thugs. They have dreadlocks, tattoos and ankle-length gym shorts. Can only guess that they have pit bulls for pets at home. In the 1960’s, the aim was to be clever and whimsical -- not mean and menacing. You might’ve been a drug dealer but you weren’t trying to look like one. I suppose my middle age is showing… “Those young whipper-snappers”…. The hippie look of 1968 certainly wasn’t well-received by middle-aged people at the time. I’ll wrap this up before I embarrass myself anymore. Let’s face the fact -- I’m an old codger who delights in reliving the 60’s.

Just stay tuned to Strange Fascination … I’m hoping to do a review of a favorite sc-fi movie very soon. Actually the best sci-fi movie ever but you’ll have to wait and see. For a good non-sci-fi indie movie in the mean time, you can’t go wrong with Cedar Rapids now showing as a new release on iTunes. Ed Helms and John C. Reilly bring pathos, humor and even a great moral to a tale of small town insurance brokers meeting at a convention in Cedar Rapids.

That is all of my thought bubbles for today. Aloha.

© 2011 blogSpotter

Weiners and Supermen

2011-06-11T19:13:00.001-07:00

Men behaving badly, and otherwise - Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Here in Dallas we’re already having the dog days of summer and it’s not even summer yet! The heat has sapped me of all my energy but I’ll do my best to serve up some commentary. I’m in the Knox-Henderson Starbucks and all the cute people just got up and left. What is an old man to do? Hoping it’s nothing I said or did. ;-) It’s a Saturday twilight hour when any young person with “a life” is probably heading off to a date or a party. How well I remember...

But enough about me. Let’s talk about Obama for just a minute. Earlier on (circa 2009) I accused Obama of being tepid, timid and boring. Then he surprised me by: (1) enacting health care (2) repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and (3) taking out Osama Bin Ladin. He did three Herculean feats that several Presidents prior could not approach doing. He did them all in a relatively short period of time -- complimentary caricatures were surfacing with Obama dressed as Superman, and the analogy does spring to mind. Now having praised him, I’d like to ask Obama to please refocus on something else (I know he reads my blog!)…. His fourth feat of Hercules should be to bring unemployment down to the 6% range. A bad economy is what torpedoed George H. W. Bush in 1992, while his Gulf War victory should’ve made him a shoo-in. A similar thing could happen to Obama if he doesn’t quell this Economy from Hell.

Oman, I hate to borrow from the toolkit of Paul Krugman, a humorless crank who happens to be right about economics. Until we “prime the pump” with government enterprises (a la 1930’s WPA), there won’t be a significant goosing of the labor pool. TARP and similar bailouts did nothing but forgive existing debts and put money in the hands of corporate CEO’s -- no obligation to invest in jobs, factories or research. A WPA project would help repair the nation’s infrastructure while putting good people back to work. But don’t listen to us -- Krugman is a sourpuss and I’m not even an economist by trade. We only *know what we’re talking about*. I will say that Obama has pulled a couple of rabbits out of his hat -- let’s see if he can do it again with the economy.

WEINERGATE

I’m perennially single and fairly liberal in my outlook, so my take on Anthony Weiner’s Twitter pics will fall out of the mainstream I’m sure. Obviously, he shouldn’t have done what he did -- it shows a lack of judgment and discretion. That being said, I don’t think it amounts to a crime. It doesn’t really need a Congressional inquiry to fathom the intricacies of boxer briefs being strained by a Congressional member. Today’s news yields this info: Weiner has agreed to seek professional care and rehabilitation for what “must” be an out-of-control sex obsession… PUH-LEEZE. If sexting is a sign of mental illness then easily 25% of America needs to be institutionalized for Twitter Abuse and/or felonious Facebooking. All Weiner is guilty of is sleaziness and horniness -- traits which attach themselves easily to most of the under-age 60 Web-surfing world. I think Weiner should have his district 9 voters decide his fate in the next election. All of the people out there who harbor no sex fantasies or illicit thoughts -- don’t be too discouraged if he makes a comeback.

STARBUCKS TONIGHT

A second shift has strolled into Starbucks, not as A-List as the first crowd. Lots of jogging outfits and Mav’s fan tee shirts. I just happened by at a weird juncture; in two more hours the beautiful date crowd will hit. They’ll need to have lattes and brownies after watching Hangover Part 2. Unfortunately for me, I don’t even have the “virtual” dating life of Representative Weiner -- my big thrill will be a magazine and a couple of recorded TV shows later tonight. More power to the Weiners of the world; have fun while you can. If you’re a Congressman there is one minor suggestion -- learn the difference between a private message and a public post. Also keep it somewhere in the back of your mind that all electronic communications are traceable. ‘Nuff said.

© 2011 blogSpotter

Digesting a Naked Lunch

2011-05-30T16:04:00.000-07:00

Lay off of the bug powder... - Courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter

PREFACE
Before launching into my review of Naked Lunch, I’d like to briefly mention the cultural “phenom” called Jersey Shore. I stumbled across this on MTV yesterday and thought I’d give it a look since it’s garnered so much press. Have to say that it was a total waste of time. It was 30 minutes of overly tanned, tattooed 20-somethings swearing at each other. Ronnie was breaking up with Sammie “Sweetheart”, and his total dialog had to be bleeped as he threw her bed and belongings on to the porch. Sammie crouched and cried dramatically when she saw what he’d done. Rivers of mascara flowed, and mingled with the over-applied lip gloss. Every person on the show is a ham who emotes dramatically to the camera every few minutes, seeking audience approval. Jersey Shore is so very bad that it might almost qualify as camp humor – something to watch and laugh at with friends. I won’t give this show any more coverage because it doesn’t even deserve as much as I just gave it. Let’s proceed to the weightier matter of Naked Lunch…

NAKED LUNCH
Being in my middle age, I’ve seen many strange movies in my day. I didn’t think you could really top the coprophagy of John Waters’ Pink Flamingos or the bizarre blue box antics shown in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Imagine my surprise today, when I happened upon Netflix' offering of Naked Lunch -- David Cronenberg’s ambitious 1991 film adaptation of William Burroughs’ famous 1959 novel. I thought that “psycho-sexual” surreality had to be a byproduct of the 1960’s mind-expansion era. It seems that Burroughs cornered everyone, decades earlier with his bizarre, semi-autobiographical “drugalogue“.

Let me speak to a couple of things right at the outset… The book Naked Lunch is so non-linear, strange and impressionistic there is no sane way to capture its essence in a movie. Some in the literati world even figure Burroughs was schizophrenic -- his “rants” couldn’t translate to celluloid. Cronenberg added a rational, almost “film noire” structure to the story making it flow from beginning to end, and he made it a sort of symbolic telling of Burroughs’ life. The story involves giant, talking insects, a conspiracy of intelligent centipedes, typewriters that can morph into cockroaches, and people who ingest exterminators’ bug powder like cocaine. I won’t try to tie all of this together intelligibly -- as I watched the movie I assumed that much of the weirdness was the hallucination from a drug ingestion in an early scene.

When I looked at Burroughs’ life story, I was totally surprised to find that much of the weirdness was true! Burroughs was something of a spoiled rich boy, who became addicted to drugs in the late 40’s before it was “cool”. Much of his writing was autobiographical in nature. He was also an out-of-the-closet gay man in an era where very few Men of Arts (at least in America) were bold enough to do that. He was friends with two other renegade writers of the time -- Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. In the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction department, Burroughs really did kill a woman in a gun accident. He really did travel to North Africa and other exotic locales in pursuit of drugs. He really did cavort with gay Germans, who were running from the Nazis. He also did work as an insect exterminator very briefly as a young man. If he had committed his history to paper without the insect imagery, it still would’ve been incredibly strange.

What might we make of the book or the film in 2011? The material is so radioactive, that it remains controversial to this day. The movie has very strong sexual imagery -- talking anuses, giant vaginal-looking orifices, and marauding penises. It has S&M scenes as well as centipedes engaged in an act which is a cross between sex and cannibalism (with a human). It twice shows the main character shooting his wife in the forehead (deliberately?, accidentally?). Apparently the movie has actually softened and quieted the sex and violence themes that permeated the pages of the book.

I did an earlier blog about Marquis de Sade -- I concluded that he was a brilliant, albeit very disturbed man. I have to likewise conclude that Burroughs inhabited a bleak, nightmarish landscape. He’s said to have hated insects, which may have much to do with their prevalence in his book. During his drug forays, and even between, he must’ve felt the unholy presence of creepy, crawly things that unsettle the soul. I hope on a more personal (and less literary) note that Naked Lunch was not a final, real summation of Burroughs' complete life.

© 2011 blogSpotter

Just the Robinsons' Affair

2011-05-17T09:08:00.001-07:00

Benjamin, bring me my purse - Courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Last Sunday, I was bored with Netflix’s suggested movies ... think they’ve misread my cinematic tastes – I don’t want to sit through Shakespeare in Love ever again. I decided to explore their different categories and was delighted to see 1967’s The Graduate was available to view. Have seen this movie 3 or 4 times and it seems I never grow tired of it. I actually watched it with my Mom when it came out; I was about 10 years old, pretending to understand nuances that were a little beyond me.

The Graduate is rated 7th on AFI’s list of greatest comedies and it’s easy to see why. Comedy writer Buck Henry (who has a bit part as a hotel clerk), poured all his 60’s-inspired, acidic and laser-accurate humor into the screenplay. The graduate is about a recent Ivy League graduate, Benjamin Braddock, coming back to live with his well-cushioned parents in LA. The handsome young man was editor of the college paper and something of a “phenom” – he must now grapple with the future. Will it be grad school or maybe a career in plastics?

Instead, he stumbles into the web of Mrs. Robinson, the wife of his father’s law partner. Played by the beautiful Anne Bancroft, Mrs. Robinson snares Benjamin in one of the most hilariously acted seductions ever on film. Serious complications arise when he later becomes enchanted with the Robinsons’ daughter, Elaine. I won’t do a detailed account of the movie but would like to discuss it in general. We have 1927’s Jazz Singer as the first movie with sound; we have 1934’s Becky Sharp as the first movie in color. And we have 1967’s The Graduate as the first no-bullshit movie that lays us over the head with people and sexual situations as they actually are.

I think that up until the late 60’s, Hollywood didn’t just avoid reality, it was actually a coconspirator in our stifling, comfortable numbness. In 1950’s movies like Summer Place or Tea and Sympathy, sex is treated as a dark malevolence – keep it contained and speak of it obliquely. Such movies couldn't deal with sexual topics frankly. Neither could they really take on society-at-large. In 1957, the idea that a lot of “successful men” were in fact waspy, materialistic brown nosers would’ve been heretical (albeit true even then). By 1967, it was pretty well established, but not so much on the movie screen. Not until The Graduate came out. The Graduate blew holes through much of our phony-baloney world of trophy wives and cardboard platitudes.

There are many things to love about The Graduate. The songs of Simon and Garfunkel are absolutely spell-binding and now enduring classics. The camera angles are inventive and artful. There are many wry, clever “easter eggs” to borrow from software lingo. As Ben and his father walk downstairs, the camera lingers on a clown picture, inviting you to wonder if that hints at anything or anyone to come. Mrs. Robinson tosses the car keys into Ben’s aquarium, thus starting their dalliance in murky, fishy water. Mr. Braddock gives Ben a scuba outfit which serves as a perfect metaphor – a hot, suffocating enclosure that leaves Ben with labored breathing. The parents are mostly booze-addled careerists who have blinders on – Mr. Robinson keeps identifying Ben as a scotch drinker when Ben has told him at every turn he prefers bourbon. It may not have been any deliberate statement, but Ben and Elaine use a cross (the ultimate symbol of WASP allegiance) to jam the church doors closed. Lastly, and best of all, Ben keeps calling Mrs. Robinson “Mrs. Robinson” despite the fact that they’ve had a summer of intimate trysts.

The Graduate gave us Alice Ghostly and Norman Fell in small but hilarious doses – the casting of this movie was excellent. Interesting side note – Doris Day was initially sought to play Mrs. Robinson. She turned it down, but it would’ve been fascinating to see America’s favorite, blonde sweetheart play against type. The movie gave us phrases like “plastics” and “something.. different” to work into our own conversations when apropos. Roger Ebert praised The Graduate when it came out in 1967 and then dissed it as dated, 60’s tripe when he re-reviewed it 1997. Sorry Ebert, thumbs down to that. The Graduate is a timeless classic, and Buck Henry’s acerbic truths stand as tall now as they did in 1967. See this wonderful, landmark film the next time you get a chance.

© 2011 blogSpotter

Pondering Pakistan

2011-05-07T20:33:00.000-07:00

Pakistanis protest the Ugly American - Courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter

PREFACE

Let me say I'm very happy that Bin Laden was apprehended and dispatched by Navy Seals last week. The skill, the risk-taking and meticulous execution of the “hit” will probably be the stuff of legend – discussed by historians and military buffs for many years to come. This preface is also a segue into our “real” topic du jour …

PAKISTAN IS OUR FRIEND

The reader must have picked up the fact that the subtitle is dripping with sarcasm – Pakistan is not our unqualified friend. I have an instinct to pile on with conservative GOP congressmen who want to withdraw all funding to Pakistan – for the odious fact that Pakistani military intelligence very likely sheltered Osama Bin Laden for 8 years. For the past 5 years, Bin Laden lived in a conspicuous, large modern compound in Abbottabad, near a military camp. For 3 years prior to that, he lived almost as conspicuously in a small town near Abbottabad.

Pakistan's ISI claims they had no idea of Bin Laden's presence. They would have to be lying or grossly incompetent – either situation is somewhat terrible. To flesh out the total picture, it helps to look at two fairly extreme viewpoints ... Salmon Rushdie, the controversial Muslim dissident author, has described Pakistan as an “enemy state”. He stated in a recent interview that Pakistani contacts told him years ago that the ISI was sheltering terrorists. At the other extreme is ex-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. She declared in the last two days (since Bin Laden's death) that Pakistan is our unimpeachable, most valuable ally. Well which is it? Why can't we call it as we see it, and how is it that two fairly respectable people have such divergent views?

It's because Pakistan is a patched-together ethic house of cards. Sixty different languages are spoken and many competing strains of Islam are present. The government is officially secular, but that status is continuously under threat by such groups as the vociferous Pashtuns. This ultra-conservative group comprises 15% of the population and reveres Bin Laden as a hero. The fact that Bin Laden has the blood of @ 5,000 people on his hands (including many Muslims) is dismissed as the collateral damage of jihad. Some US military analysts speculate that if Pakistan had openly ratted out Bin Laden, it would've destabilized an already unstable regime. It's further speculated that last week Pakistan looked the other way when Navy Seal helicopters invaded Pakistani airspace to conduct Operation Geronimo. Hear no evil, speak no evil and certainly – see no evil.

Thus Pakistan was almost neutral in the final tally. They didn't disclose Bin Laden's hiding place, but like Edgar Allen Poe's purloined letter Bin Laden wasn't very much hidden. They didn't “notice” our helicopters but asked us to please not do that again. They didn't protest too much. This takes the spotlight over to another place entirely... Why was Uncle Sam AWOL in all of this for 9 years.

The W. Bush administration was right in publicly claiming Pakistan as an ally. We need the secular arm of the Pakistanis to give access to air space and air bases. We couldn't have conducted the Afghan war without Pakistan's help. But the dreadful reality comes clear -- W. Bush and his immediate advisers must have really thought that Pakistan was our unequivocal ally. They must have thought that this 3rd world nation riven with assassinations and unrest would tell nothing but the truth and always serve the purposes of the USA. I hope that it was colossal naivete because the other alternative would be the dark, disturbing aspect that someone on the USA side was also hoping to shelter the mass killer.

Whatever the case may be, the fault is not Pakistan's. They are a nation in continual identity crisis. That their police and military force would be peppered with Bin Laden sympathizers should have been no great shock to the United States. That we went nine years floating on a myth about caves in Tora Bora is sadly pathetic on our part. Pakistan is what it is – a sometimes-USA-partner in a world crazed by religious extremism. Their every move should be inspected and evaluated, even as we politely smile and nod agreement. Not even Canada or Mexico is totally on board with the USA in its every move – why on earth would we think Pakistan is?

BlogSpotter thinks that there are other shoes that may need to drop out out of this whole affair. Suspicions and alternate theories run rife. For now, I will finish my Starbucks coffee. I will then do like W. Bush – look for some other diversion and hope that none of these awful things could be true.

© 2011 blogSpotter

Rule, Britannia?

2011-04-28T10:16:00.000-07:00

The happy couple - Courtesy of the Windsors

by blogSpotter
What is it about the Royals that gives Americans a total case of Brit Envy? Prince William and commoner Kate Middleton will tie the knot tomorrow, April 29th. There has been a news blitz unlike anything since … well the 1981 marriage of Diana and Charles. While Charles and Di's hitch-up seemed a little bogus and prearranged, Will and Kate seem to have the “real deal” – true love, whatever that actually entails. Kate, like Diana, has Cover Girl looks that any model from the Ford Agency would envy. She could probably buy her clothes at Ross Dress for Less and still look like a million dollars.

That brings me to the next (semi-related) topic – the odd fissures that have occurred between Anglo and American culture over the many years. The fictional Professor Henry Higgins noted our nations' common language, English, while adding … “Americans haven't spoken it for years”. Our original 13 colonies were brought along under England's sometimes protective (sometimes oppressive) wing and yet as American revolutionary upstarts we rejected many of England's other cultural offerings. Where to begin?

Americans do not have a king. It was actually proposed, but by the late 18th century no one was certain how you establish a royal bloodline in anyway that is credible or certifiable. Even in medieval times a regal pedigree was probably questionable but it became very established, protected by the passage of time and tradition. We also do not have a Church of America like the Church of England. It was expressly rejected by Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and the others – we didn't want “blood-soaked soil” as Europe (in the hands of 18th century religious zealots) was described.

We must have hated England with the ferocity that a 14 year old boy hates his old man... We ditched pounds and shillings and created our own monetary system of dollars and cents. We took a page from their Parliament but created a bicameral Congress with no references to Lords or Commoners – see above passage about permanent designations of Royalty or Lordliness. We were so distanced from England that we drove our carriages on the right side of the road and we abandoned High Tea. Also out the window were Shepherd's Pie and other English culinary items.

In point of fact, we have recreated an alternate England with an American twist. Mainstream protestantism is more or less our “Church of America” – it's a social norm that politicians best observe. We don't have royalty from “on high” but you should know that we have an entrenched, wealthy 1% that pulls most of the strings in our society. The Rockefellers and DuPonts could probably buy Windsor Castle and could say “off with your head” in a figurative sense to be sure.

It's a two way street and we've given back to Great Britain as much as we've taken...We've exported Starbucks to England so that their High Tea may face a cultural volley of lattes and cappuccinos. We also gave them Muddy Waters, Elvis and Fifty Cent which has intermingled variously with their own musical forms. Did I mention that we probably helped keep them from oblivion in World War II? We Americans do nurse an affection for a motherland culture which beguiles us with Beef Eaters, double-decker buses, red phone booths and vintage looking taxi cabs. What the hey – we probably also have a cultural debt owing to Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and the Beatles no less.

How do we love England? We love it mightily, so much so that we probably would advise the Founding Fathers if we could – the Red Coats really weren't so bad. We wouldn't want to bring Shillings or shepherd's pie back to America but we have never really cast away the shared history and cultural bonds. Despite the two nations' disparate powers and capacities in the early 21st century, England and America have a tremendous shared reverence. And America, without any princes to speak of, turns back to Britannia for its needed dose of regal fantasies. Congratulations to Will and Kate.

© 2011 blogSpotter

Jabberwocky

2011-04-16T20:04:00.001-07:00

Will it compile? - Courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
I’m a software engineer by day and a widely read blogger by night ;-). Being a little “long in the tooth”, I can recall simpler times for business data processing. Back in the early 80’s COBOL was the “lingua franca” for Fortune 500 companies – with a bit of Pascal, ALGOL, and PL/1 thrown into the mix. Some 4th Generation reporting tools like FOCUS and MARK IV rounded things out. Young people from schools as diverse as Harvard, UT or UCLA would be versed in nearly the same coding standards. A lad working at Chevron could pretty easily segue over to Frito Lay.

With the advent of UNIX platforms and client/server computing in the late 80’s, the options multiplied… The language choices were enriched with C, C++, perl, smalltalk, Visual Basic, Shell scripting (in different UNIX “flavors”) - - leaving off many things here. Each new entrant was hyped for various advantages – rapid development, reusable objects, fast execution, etc. The advent of the Internet in the mid 90’s created a dizzying multiplier effect. We added java, javascript, J2EE, HTML, XML to the list. Suddenly we were also picking “frameworks” like JBoss and Spring. As if these weren’t and aren’t enough, we also have proprietary choices such as SAP and CASE tools to compete for our corporate dollars.

Well, variety is the spice of life; whose life isn’t made richer by more choices? Without multiple options, we would never have the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Every enterprise is like Goldilocks, looking for a fit that is “just right”. I myself supported mainframe legacy (“sunset”) applications during the 90’s and supported an aging C++/PowerBuilder application during the 00’s. Like Rip Van Winkle (another fairy tale) I woke from my 17 year legacy-induced coma to an IT world overrun with java beans, dependency injectors and advisor methods. Computer science used to have mathematical precision and concise meaning in its charter; now it seemed more to resemble pop psychology with complex verbiage and obtuse data structures.

“I’ll get to Scotland before you”

When I look at the resulting databases and graphical interfaces from all these advancements, they don’t seem any more sophisticated than what could be done with something relatively simple – a scripting language or a simple HTML. I can’t help but wonder if the value added (which, undeniably there is some) isn’t countervailed by:

• Expensive contractor fees
• Threat of obsolescence for technologies out of the mainstream
• Forced option of replace, not repair for broken systems
• Forced option of “as written” for opaque, unchangeable systems

I just received an O’Reilly email ad -- O’Reilly is the premier retailer of computing texts. The languages and skills advertised were: GIT, R, Gamification, Arduino, MS Expressions and MS Prism. I have never heard of any of these, much less mastered or excelled in them. I know I’m an old dog, but I do wonder how much branching capacity a young software engineer will need to add GIT and R to his repertoire already weighted with J2EE and Hibernate. Maybe they are different animals (“a graphic arts engineer wouldn’t need to know Hibernate!”). I can’t help but remember what Mac, the 63 year old man nearing retirement told me at my first job… K.I.S.S. Keep It Simple Stupid. (or Silly if you take offense at Stupid).

The proof is always in the pudding. That’s true of economics, engineering and computer programming. If we have a difference of philosophy, you do it your way and I’ll do it my way. You take the high road and I’ll take the low road. If someone is full of grandstanding horse manure it will be established by the competitive results. I can’t help but think that KISS wins the race (and I don’t mean Gene Simmons!).

I’m going to close with a snippet from Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky which has as much clarity as the last advisor method I reviewed:

Twas bryllyg, and ye slythy toves
Did gyre and gymble in ye wabe:
All mimsy were ye borogroves;
And ye mome raths outgrabe

© 2011 blogSpotter

The Day of the Androids

2011-04-06T15:15:00.000-07:00

The green creature is at large - Courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Last weekend, I did a bold and daring thing, Apple fan that I am -- I bought an LG Optimus V Android phone at Target. The phone is a $200 "no contract" pay-as-you-go phone. People who are familiar with my Apple zealotry will think I've surely lost it. Let me explain in a little more detail...

I'm what is sometimes termed a "value shopper". Others might say "cheap bastard" but that's so unseemly. I use coupons, look at sale racks and always, always look for a good deal on whatever I buy. Along the same lines, I don't secure services that I don't need, eg: premium cable, ultra-fast fiber optic line, etc. I'm never uncomfortable and never without nice things but rest assured that I'm not paying a big surplus for what I don't need. When it comes to cell phones, I'm single and not extremely talkative. Where a lady might call and say (open-endedly), "Whatcha thinkin about?" my calls are more purpose-driven. I'll confirm appointments, check on movie times and make dates but I won't do rambling gab sessions that run for an hour or more. This mildly autistic character trait on my part indicates that I don't need a lot of "anytime" minutes. If you talk to me for longer than 15 minutes I might pretend there's somebody at the door. How does this relate to cell phones? Here’s how …

When I looked at the latest iPhone (iOS4) I was indeed smitten by its sturdy form and sleek interface. It's the "Cadillac" of phones in some (actually several) senses of the word. If you throw in basic services and smallest minute allotments, my monthly iPhone bill (with taxes and fees) would be about $90/month. This would be in tandem with a 24 month contract -- my worship of Apple would run me @ $2,160.00 plus the cost of the phone. I was surprised when Verizon's iPhone came out and they offered very much the same (possibly higher) monthly rates. For people like me who have high data usage and low talk time, there's not much to soften the financial impact.

My jail broken 2007 iPhone is T-Mobile pay-as-you-go but it's lagging in many ways now -- I can't update the OS without "bricking" it, can't buy new apps, can't do Outlook Exchange, etc. What's a technophile to do in this sad situation? This technophile found something that's previously not existed ...a smart, no-contract (VirginMobile) Android phone. The LG Optimus V is not as super-slick as an iPhone but it bears a strong resemblance to one and does almost everything an iPhone does. Have found very few apps that aren't available in both the Android Market and the Apple App store.

The Android VirginMobile “no contract” plan gives me:

• $25/month 300 anytime minutes
• Unlimited web surfing
• Unlimited messaging
• Unlimited email

This is all music to my ears (literally, when I listen to the Android DoubleTwist app on my Optimus). It would be a shame for Apple to ultimately lose its market lead based on the poor plan options offered by its telephone partners. Does Apple read my blog? Probably not but here are a couple of suggestions for the next iPhone hardware release anyway ….

The iPhone 3G will be two releases old by Summer of 2011 – a complete dinosaur as smart phones go… Why not keep this one available as a “Go” (No Contract) phone? Some people don’t need the latest bells & whistles. My second option is one I’ve read about on Apple sites but have no verification …. Come out with a smaller, less capable iPhone expressly to sell to people with a smaller budget. Of course, make it available as “No contract”.

There have been other battles of technical virtuosity that were decided on purely practical and monetary grounds … nothing to do with ivory tower engineering arguments. (Consider blu-ray versus HD DVD or Betamax versus VHS). For all I know Studebaker and Packard were good cars – I wasn’t old enough to witness the various marketing angles at the time they went extinct. All I know is that people operating under a budget in tough economic times will probably be more pragmatic and less idealistic. Android phones are practical in the extreme.

© 2011 blogSpotter

Living on Tulsa Time

2011-03-28T14:15:00.001-07:00

Philtower was built in 1928 -- Picture by blogSpotter

by blogSpotter
Last week, I took a computer training class in downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma. Have to confess I’ve never visited Oklahoma even though it’s a close neighbor to North Texas. Have always thought of Oklahoma as an extension of North Texas -- Maybe North North Texas. With its flat, dry bramble-scape and Republican politics I didn’t think it had much to offer beyond what I’ve already seen in Amarillo or McKinney, Texas. Tulsa, with a population of about 490,000 proved me wrong, in a most pleasant way. Northeastern Oklahoma where Tulsa is situated is actually the start of Oklahoma’s “Green Belt”. It has gentle, green hills accentuated by the wide, rushing Arkansas River. The area has quite a few more trees than DFW and they aren’t transplanted trees. The “flat, dry” crown will probably have to go to Dallas after all.

Economically speaking, Tulsa was founded on oil profits. Its most prominent museum, Philbrook, is a 1927 Italianate Villa donated to the city by Waite Phillips of Phillips 66 fame. The city is clean, modern and well maintained. It has some striking new buildings (e.g. the new BOK Sports Arena) but it also has many outstanding examples of Art Deco surviving from the 1920’s and 30’s. Tulsa has nurtured and maintained its treasures where Dallas would surely pummel these into the ground to make room for Krogers, Walgreens or an Office Depot. It’s interesting to note that Tulsa, a city which embraces capitalism, didn’t see a need to sacrifice its architectural integrity on the Altar of Near-term Profits.

Boston Avenue Church, circa 1927 -- Picture by blogSpotter

A coworker who previously lived in Tulsa told me it was a “little Dallas”. I saw some definite parallels … Utica Avenue easily offers as much luxury as Highland Park. Peoria Avenue captures the spirit of our Lower Greenville and the Blue Dome district is a mirror to our hip Deep Ellum area. The Arkansas River Park is a beautiful ribbon of parkland that rivals our White Rock Lake. Nothing is necessarily as big in square blocks or miles, though quality matters as much as quantity -- “little Dallas” actually is a good way of summing it up.

Other things that strike me about Tulsa are its conservatism and slower pace. At prime evening rush hour, there was no rush hour -- I probably counted ten cars poking their way down South Boston Avenue. I easily navigated their freeways in my Ford Focus rental car. The home of Oral Roberts University, Tulsa doesn’t quit on religion. On one city block I counted five churches, probably a record for anywhere I’ve been. If you’re atheist, agnostic or Unitarian Universalist you may be feeling the implied burn of Hades while visiting.

That said, the people are very open and friendly. In some ways Tulsa reminded be of Dallas 30 years ago. Young men were sporting short hair and pastel Polo shirts while some of the women resembled young Delta Burkes with bigger-than-Texas hair. Nobody seemed to have tattoos or piercings, at least not that I noticed. There were a very few homeless people but nobody making me fear for my life or duck into a store entrance. I wouldn’t be surprised if Tulsans leave their doors unlocked and dispense somewhat with security alarms. I visited a Luby’s and found it remarkable that the employees engaged so well with the customers… “I missed you at church last week. How is Suzy doing?” This kind of familiarity and concern wouldn’t even be feigned in Dallas at any establishment I’ve visited.

Tulsa joins Austin, Texas and Santa Fe, New Mexico on my very short list of favored “laid back” cities. Each of these towns have their separate muses for quiet and calm. For Santa Fe, it’s fine arts and American Indian history. For Austin, it’s doobies, liberal politics and progressive country music. For Tulsa, it’s Jesus. Not all of these muses are necessarily my muses but it’s no matter. These are cities where people drive unhurriedly at 35mph, go home from work while it’s still daylight and have long, relaxed weekends in places of geographical beauty. I love the phrase, “Wear the world like a loose garment”. And I love cities like Austin, Santa Fe and Tulsa that encourage you to do just that.

© 2011 blogSpotter

Rebel Rebel

2011-03-09T14:40:00.000-08:00

Notorious son of the South -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Students of American history are well-versed in the details of the 1865 Lincoln assassination. An embittered Confederate sympathizer, actor John Wilkes Booth, shot the president in the back of the head, then jumped to the stage uttering “Sic simper tyrannis” (“Thus always to tyrants”). By most accounts, he broke a leg in his dramatic leap. He fled by horseback into the remote Maryland woods, later crossing the Potomac into Virginia where Union soldiers tracked him down and shot him a few days later. This is the compressed kernel of the Booth saga, and yet it leaves out many compelling details of this deranged Southern scion.

The handsome John Wilkes hailed from a well-heeled Maryland family, the famous Booths – known for several Shakespearean actors in their clan. John’s older brother Edwin introduced him to the theater at the tender age of 17. At first, John played second banana roles in plays such as Richard III and Hamlet until his good looks, athleticism and natural hamminess propelled him to center stage. Edwin conceded that the younger Booth had the looks and star power – he let John start taking more of the lead roles. Booth became a superstar in short order. He soon was earning $20,000/year (big money in 1860). Booth received bags of fan mail from adoring women each day. He headlined in most of the large American cities (North and South) sometimes appearing in as many as 80 plays a year. Booth was dubbed the “handsomest man in America” and even Walt Whitman (himself a literary lion of the era) gushed that John Wilkes Booth had “flashes of real genius”. In what would later be a sad, strange irony, it was revealed that the Lincoln family was also enamored of JWB. Lincoln had already seen Booth in other plays such as The Marble Heart.

Booth had enormous ambitions and appetites – he might have even been slightly bipolar considering his many enthusiastic projects. His large income allowed him to invest in several enterprises – Boston real estate, a music company and even an oil company. His oil company ran into technical issues (an oil well was accidentally destroyed by explosives) and Booth lost $81,000. He became disenchanted with business and placed his focus on the growing Civil War debacle. He laid the blame for his business problems and all his travails at the feet of Abe Lincoln. In fact, Booth became a man obsessed – he was strident in his Confederate sympathies and Union hatred.

Booth’s career started to tank, due to his rants. He was tossed out of an Albany theater when he lambasted the Union from the stage. In St. Louis, he was thrown in the clink for bad-mouthing the president while appearing there. His sister Asia and brother Edwin were both Union sympathizers -- they tried to get their firecracker brother to lower his voice in public. In fact, Edwin finally had to banish his brother from his house until he could be more mannerly. Booth smoldered as events unfolded; he also began to keep company with equally unhinged Dixie zealots -- he never actually returned to a “mannerly” self.

As the Civil War came to its conclusion, Booth clung desperately to a couple of ideas:

• Southern General Joseph E. Johnston still had a regiment fighting, even after Lee’s surrender… to Booth, this meant the war was still ongoing
• The Union government could be “decapitated” by simultaneously taking out the President, Vice President and Secretary of State. A weakened union would then cave to the Confederacy

It’s been suggested that Booth hatched out this delirious plan (2nd bullet, above) with the Confederate Secret Service but nothing was ever proved. The plot was likely confined to maybe a dozen Rebel diehards; considering the incompetence of its execution, it couldn’t be the product of any military masterminds. According to the plan, Booth’s cohort George Atzerodt was to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson and friend Lewis Powell was to kill Secretary of State William Seward. Coconspirator David Herold was to facilitate Booth’s escape from the Ford Theater.

The plot fell apart miserably from the outset– two of the three planned assassinations failed off the bat. Powell stabbed Seward (who was in bed, recovering from a carriage accident) but the wound was only superficial and Seward quickly recovered. It was more of a jab than a stab. Atzerodt chickened out of his role and ducked into a local tavern for drinks. He never made an attempt on Johnson’s life.

Booth succeeded in his effort – he was a star in the Ford Theater and was never questioned anywhere on the premises. He shot Lincoln in the now-familiar scenario, leapt to the stage, and uttered his famous epithet. He also tripped as he crashed to the floor, breaking his leg. He and Dave Herold fled into the theater alley, mounted their horses, and galloped into the dark, swampy terrain of southern Maryland. They stopped at Surratt’s Tavern nine miles along the way, to stock up on guns and supplies -- Mary Surratt was a coconspirator later hanged for her part in the assassination (first woman in the US to be hanged on federal charges). They went from there to the home of Dr. Samuel Mudd, who tended to Booth’s broken leg. Some argue whether the Mudd connection was coincidental but historians have established a year-prior relationship where Booth had purchased a horse and had drinks with Mudd. Mudd got off easy with just a life sentence for his involvement in the events.

From Mudd’s house they traveled to the tobacco farm of Confederate sympathizer Samuel Cox. Cox would only allow them to sleep in his barn, he didn’t want to be implicated. Also, at this point there was a $100,000 bounty on Booth and federal agents were combing the nearby woods.

At length, Booth and Herold ended up at Richard Garrett’s Virginia farm. The Garrett’s were also southern sympathizers but also would only allow the fugitives space in the family’s barn. It was here, getting news updates from the Garretts that Booth must have fallen off of his manic cloud:

• Joseph E, Johnston had surrendered – all war efforts were over
• Both Robert E. Lee and Johnston had strongly condemned the assassination
• Newspapers that had lambasted Lincoln decried his death (Booth thought he’d be welcomed as a savior and hero)
• Southerners in general were fearful about occupation and reconstruction – they feared that Booth’s violent act would bring more vengeance from the North
• Several of Booth’s cohorts were already arrested and Federal agents were hot on his trail

Union Lieutenant Edward Doherty and his scouts found Booth and Herold on April 26th, holed up in the Garrett’s barn. Doherty’s men surrounded the barn and even set fire to it. Herold surrendered, but Booth was defiant. Booth was shot in the neck and paralyzed for 3 hours until he died from the wound. His dying words were, “Tell my mother I died for our country”. He had pictures of 5 young women, including his recent fiancée, Lucy Lambert Hale, in his wallet.

CONCLUSION
John Wilkes Booth, an incredibly handsome, successful, wealthy and beloved stage actor threw it all away for his half-baked scheme to save the Confederacy. The actions he took bespeak an Old South mentality which was arrogance defined – a monstrous hubris which indulged equally monstrous fantasies. These fantasies made deities of plantation owners and chattel of their servants. In hindsight we judge Booth’s actions as those of a crazy man, and yet his level of crazy wasn’t that far removed from the South Carolina politicians who voted to secede five years earlier.

Flim-flam artists quickly took hold of the Booth events; one person authored a book claiming that Booth had escaped and died many years later in Granbury Texas. The idea was even carried into the late 20th century, with 1977’s The Lincoln Conspiracy. In fact, Booth’s body was positively identified by his mother, brother and sister shortly after his death – his body is now interred at the family Green Mount cemetery in Maryland. None of these mere facts discouraged county fairs and traveling shows from displaying the “real, mummified” body of John Wilkes Booth in years that followed.

The real facts surrounding this scion of the South are unusual enough by themselves -- we needn’t add any fiction to the story of this ignoble actor and Presidential assassin.

© 2011 blogSpotter

The Ghosts of Campbell House

2011-02-25T14:52:00.000-08:00

Greetings from Hugh and Hazlett -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
In 2006, a friend and I visited St. Louis Missouri. I had never been to that fabled Gateway and enjoyed my visit thoroughly. We stayed near the downtown area and saw most of the sights including the famous Arch built in 1965 as well as the fashionable Delmar Avenue district. St. Louis is a fusion place for several American traditions. The jazz bars and BBQ joints call to mind the Deep South while gray squirrels and blustery North wind put you back into a Yankee state of mind. With blocks of deteriorating brick mansions and rows of defunct 19th century warehouses, I can’t help but think how an ambitious developer might want to gentrify all of it. Saint Louis is like a fading, but still beautiful dowager queen -- a city that once was the center of American commerce. I would heartily recommend it for someone wanting a substantial slice of American history and culture.

One site is little known or talked about and yet it made the biggest impression of all -- the Campbell House Museum near the downtown district. Campbell house is the meticulously restored mansion that once belonged to 19th century banking tycoon Robert Campbell and his family. The 1851 Federal style house was purchased by the showy Campbells for $18,000 in 1854. 18K was a bundle for that era. Campbell died with a net worth of $2 million and also was known for his dabbling in real estate, gold and the fur trade. He and his wife, Virginia entertained lavishly and even once hosted a dinner party for Ulysses Grant and retired General Sherman.

The house itself at 20 Lucas Place, was state-of-the-art for its time. It had servants’ quarters, a carriage house and (most impressively) indoor plumbing. The kitchen counter was crudely hewn wood and the upstairs toilet was also made of wood. We have to recall that those were once rooms of service and function -- not the luxuriant spaces we have now with granite counters, wine racks and garden baths. The Campbell’s had the house from 1854 until 1938 when the youngest son Hazlett died at age 83. The home was subsequently converted to a public museum and most of the Victorian-era furniture (sold in estate auction) was tracked down and repurchased. Wallpaper, paint and other effects were meticulously restored using photos and letters as reference points. The house now serves as an incredible venture into mid-19th century decadence if you will. With some minor adjustments, you might just love living there now.

But for all the beauty of the building, the human ghosts of Campbell house are by far the most gripping part of the story. From its beginning, the story has an eerie feel. Robert proposed to Virginia and she flat-out turned him down. After Robert pleaded with her in person and via mail (over some months), she finally caved and married him. The very fact that the marriage was conceived in an act of practicality and exasperated “settling” is something that did not bode well for the future…

The Campbells had 13 children -- but here is where their wealth oddly did them no favors. The indoor plumbing drew its water from a common supply that wasn’t treated for contagions. 10 of the 13 children died from various diseases -- cholera, diphtheria and typhoid. Only 3 boys survived to adulthood -- Hugh, James and Hazlett. All 3 boys were tall, athletic and handsome -- they attended Ivy League schools and traveled through Europe in the 1880’s. But the cold wind of fate wasn’t near the end of its course… James caught the flu in his early 20’s and died from that. Hazlett started having mood swings and erratic behavior in his early 20‘s -- later these might be diagnosed as manic depression or schizophrenia. He was actually treated with cocaine (labeled vials were found in his estate) -- cocaine was a legal and approved treatment for “melancholia” in the 19th century. But Hazlett remained unemployable and cloistered the rest of his days, cared for by his older brother Hugh.

Hugh actually survived into old age in a state of good health and mental soundness. In earlier years he entertained, gave to children’s charities and was a congenial, man about town. But Hugh never married or had children. None of the boys did. In his middle age, Hugh became nearly as reclusive as Hazlett -- neighbors observed that only servants and delivery people were ever seen entering or leaving the house. Hugh died in 1931, prearranging Hazlett’s care by paid nurses. Hazlett died in 1938 with no living heirs, thus setting the stage for a Campbell Museum.

Thus you walk through the Campbell’s living room, regaled by stories of civil war generals, amazed at the beautiful Victorian davenport in authentic red fabric. You love the carriage house, replete with a carriage. But then in the dining room, you gaze at the photo of three robust young men in Paris. Whom did they marry, what dragons did they slay? There must be 15 grandchildren and 50 great grandchildren. In so many families that would be imperative. But here, the sad thread, the weird curse of Robert and Virginia Campbell has its final, quiet close. The Campbell House has so many stories to tell, and so many other stories left unspoken.

© 2011 blogSpotter

The Archos 28 Experience

2011-02-12T20:15:00.000-08:00

Surprisingly fun & interesting -- Picture courtesy of Archos

by blogSpotter
As recently promised, I’m doing a review of Archos 28, an internet tablet (a la iPod Touch) sold by the French consumer electronics company, Archos. My larger purpose is to demystify the Android operating system for myself and compare it to other systems, primarily Apple IOS4. I actually like my Archos 28 -- it’s cute, albeit problematic. Below I have a long list of problems discovered followed by some redeeming qualities.

Let me preface this by saying that I got the extremely, cheap, small, entry-level, 4GB Archos 28 model for $98. I didn’t want to squander too much money for my experimental foray. Keep that in mind. Also on this bulleted list, some of these items are closely related so there may be a bit of overlap going on …

ARCHOS 28 -- the problems encountered
o The apps frequently freeze and I have to reboot.
o The unit can be slow, so that buttons (like Back/Return or Home) seem very unresponsive
o On several software installs I get a cryptic “App did not install” with an orange triangle. No further message box or tab to say what is wrong
o Internet connection comes and goes; constantly have to reconnect
o Klondike Solitaire took 15 hours to download, probably because of the above bullet. Other software downloaded promptly.
o Where Apple refactored its displays for each size of screen, Archos didn’t refactor the display for a tiny 2.8” screen. Therefore the program icons are miniscule and I need strong reading glasses to read it.
o Related to above bullet -- the pop-up keyboard is tiny. The unit is supposed to be touch screen (like iPhone) but I had to dig out my Pentopia stylus (purchased in 1998) to type on it.
o This is maddening -- the Touch screen confuses a swipe for a click and vice versa. I have to be careful not to touch any icons when I swipe, else it will open an app I don’t want.
o The Archos 28 is a little bit larger than a Zune and smaller than an iPod Touch. They sacrificed quite a bit of screen area for hardware controls. Sometimes for the vision-impaired or for workout mp3 players you want hardware buttons that can be felt with fingertips. The irony here is that the Archos buttons are flush with the front of the unit so that a blind person couldn’t feel them anyway. Apple’s iPod Touch has a beautiful, large “retina” display -- it uses software buttons that can vanish when needed.
o No reason found for this (yet) -- I downloaded an MP4 of a television episode (Mary Tyler Moore if you must know :-) ). The soundtrack is way ahead of the video image. It’s not just a little out of synch.
o Because Android OS has a one-size fits all approach, you have to be careful what you download. I downloaded some apps (eg YouTube, X-Construct) which were too big for my memory. They either didn’t load or they crashed my unit. Apple’s App Store doesn’t make apps available that don’t scale well to a particular device -- you don’t have this unpleasantness.
o Another unexplained piece of weirdness -- sometimes the “On” button doesn’t work. I have to press it for 2 minutes (and force a reboot) to get the unit to come on. Don’t know if I somehow gracelessly terminated a prior app or what I did.

Archos 28 -- the plus column (including some A+ Google apps)…
o Places -- This app will show you hotels, bars, hot spots etc close to your zip code. This is free, you have to pay good money for it elsewhere
o Navigator -- This is actually a GPS app that would run you $90 elsewhere.
o Flash Player -- this downloads and works like a champ. All those forbidden Flash sites can come to life.
o Android market is way cool. It actually does wireless “air purchase” because Android market remembers whatever handheld you last connected to the market with. You can install purchases from the PC app to your handheld wirelessly. Way cool, almost seems like science fiction.
o Archos 28 has a nice form factor in a beautiful dark magenta, metallic finish. If you only can get one color, that’s a helluva good color.
o Did I mention this one was only $98? $107 with tax?

CONCLUSION
In spite of my whiny laundry list of compaints, this little device is fun and I find myself fiddling with it a lot. I’ve downloaded games and apps (DoubleTwist, Traffic Jam) which fit comfortably in its small memory and work well. Probably the Samsung Galaxy tab would avoid many of the app freezes and download problems mentioned above.

Apple’s approach is admittedly more paternalistic -- they don’t want you getting app freezes and abends. The Android OS is more of a “wild west” approach for people who are willing to risk the difficulties involved for a more liberated environment. Can see the advantages of both sides, I have to admit. I still say, “Advantage Apple” because nearly every cool feature of the Androids (touch screen, accelerometer, app store) is a feature introduced by Apple, probably 2-3 years earlier.

© 2011 blogSpotter

Channeling Elvis

2011-02-06T19:33:00.000-08:00

Elvis is back in the buiding -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
THE WEATHER IS HERE...

Today, DFW is recovering from one of the worst snowstorms we’ve endured in 20 years. It’s ironic, because this was Super Bowl week, when the DFW Metroplex was rolling out the red carpet to basically the entire football-watching world. What the world got was a city frozen to a crawl, and a newly expanded DART rail knocked out of commission. Adding injury to insult were large chunks of ice that slid off the Cowboy Stadium and onto the heads of nearby workers and photographers (6 people injured in all). People be aware this was all freakish in the extreme -- we normally wouldn’t be having Jerry’s Ice Follies. Dallas’ January high is usually @ 57 and normal low is 32. We were topping out at 22 during the worst of our inclement situation. It’s now Super Bowl Sunday and we’ve recovered to a drizzly 48. Not being a football fan, I can’t comment (credibly) on the game in progress. So, on to our blog topic du jour…

ELVIS

This morning I watched 1962’s Kid Galahad with Elvis Presley, Charles Bronson and Gig Young. The movie kept very nobly to the Elvis movie formula. Humble roustabout hires into a reasonable work setting which gives way to perilous complications (Pick: pirates, gangsters, Hells Angels, etc) and one or two pretty girls vying for affection. Throw in some blandly cute songs and you’ve got yourself the Elvis concoction. This morning I was feeling slightly morose -- needed something light and frivolous. Think of it as visual junk food, delivered in HD quality by Netflix.

Several things amaze me as I watch this movie, things that make me want to go back to 1962. Kid Galahad features boxing; the young men featured (including Elvis) all have nice builds but they don’t have six-pack abs, chiseled pecs or 30” waists. Nowadays you wouldn’t be admitted on the set without looking at least as good as Jersey Shore’s Situation. We didn’t used to have a requirement that you live at the gym.

Gig Young and the other older gents wear slacks and cardigan sweaters even in casual situations. Actually so does Elvis for the picnic scene -- he wears slacks and a fitted sport shirt. We’ve gone a different way from that now, where torn jeans, flip-flops and graphic tees can almost be suitable fare in a cushy restaurant. The lazy blog author must also confess to such sartorial laziness BUT -- I respect and admire the days of yore when we used to give a darn. Gig Young looked better drinking and playing pool than I would look going to church.

I also miss the innocent attitude of the movie, a simplicity of life that never existed even then. Kid Galahad was dated even three years after it came out -- a piece of matinee fluff with no discernible challenge to the intellect. No matter to me -- the movie was a visual excursion and a welcome bit of Hollywood hokum with all the loose ends tied. Handsome guy gets pretty girl. Villains are vanquished. Even the “old people” (Gig Young and Lola Albright) hook up -- in marriage of course, this being 1962. End scene, plan for next Elvis flick. In this movie I got to see the lovely Joan Blackman decked out in Kennedy-era fashions and saw a smattering of early 60’s cars (e.g., a ‘60 Pontiac) in brand new condition. It could be without a soundtrack and I’d like the imagery that rolls across the screen.

Alas, nothing is that great -- then or now. Fluff movies were the reflection of a fluff society that chose (until the mid 60's) to ignore, never explore its dark or wild side. Elvis OD’d at 42 and Gig Young offed himself (in a lurid murder suicide) in 1978. The loose ends certainly came untied at the end -- reality didn‘t track very closely to a Hollywood script.

I have to suppose that Kid Galahad has about the significance of a Hallmark greeting card in both its prettiness and its two-dimensionality. But thank you nonetheless, Hollywood. Maybe in some weird sense, “how things look” is a decent indicator of “how things are“ in the given instance. In 1962, Elvis was still King, Gig Young was an Oscar caliber actor and the world was at least in part, a colorful rock-and-roll twist party that can still put a smile on our faces in 2011. I’ll accept and enjoy the Hallmark greeting even if it arrives slightly tattered and torn.

© 2011 blogSpotter

Invasion of the Androids

2011-01-31T14:13:00.001-08:00

Take me to your market leader -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Today’s blog entry approaches a topic for which I’ll admit I lack expertise – it’s just my fledgling experience (in-store test runs) at work. The topic is Android devices, the latest techno-rage in the USA. I mean “devices” to include both phones and tablets although my admittedly few trials have been with tablets only.

I’m a self-described Apple fan, so there’s some partiality to their products up front. Apple is not a religion for me however, and I think I can look at Android devices with sufficient honesty and objectivity. I’ve even committed to this financially – just ordered the Archos 28 tablet on-line. It should be here in a few days and I can have an up-close, lengthy experience (and maybe a follow-up blog article).

MSNBC’s business beat reports that Android has captured 53% of the smart phone market as of January 2011. That market is scattered across many brand names (HTC, Dell, Samsung, ViewSonic, etc). iPhone is still the champ as the single best selling phone brand. Apple’s IOS4 is #1 and 3G is still coming in at #4. These Android phone developments are actually pretty good – the tablet scene (at least now) is probably not looking as lucrative ...

I recently looked at the handful of Android tablets now being offered at Fry’s and Best Buy, here in Dallas. I’d like to preface my review by noting that both stores had broken, non-functioning display models and scant sales people on hand to help or explain. These weren’t mockups – they were real devices which were supposed to be plugged in and functional. The Best Buy at Midway Road (not the Best Buy closest to me which had all dead units) actually had some functioning models – ViewSonic, Velocity Cruze, Archos and Samsung Galaxy. I have some “across-the-board” impressions as well as individualized comments.

If iPad is the benchmark, these devices are woefully small and oddly proportioned. The iPad purposely is dimensioned like a small magazine (say, National Geographic). It’s large enough that you have a magazine-reading experience right off the bat – little eye strain and little training or explaining. Some of the Androids look more like a PS2 controller – small and weirdly-shaped. The displays on most of these models seemed fuzzy and the responses seemed a little slow. I pressed what looked like the “home” button on a couple of units and got no response. The interface appeared to be iPad-inspired and yet the experience was more like Linux. I saw an array of unfamiliar icons and unresponsive buttons. I’m sure operator error was a part of this but iPad never threw any curve balls at me when I was getting familiar with it.

Nowhere is “you get what you pay for” more certain than with Androids. The Samsung Galaxy towers over its Android siblings. It’s larger, with a bright HD display and an iPad ambience. It should be better because it costs way more than the others ($799 without a phone contract versus @$200 for the others). And for all that Samsung shines, it still looks to me like a poor man’s iPad. If you really think about what essential thing iPad lacks, the main thing is flash player. Lack of flash player has only bothered me a few times (e.g., the free version of Hulu). In just about every other way, iPad gets the blue ribbon.

“Customer experience” is the operative phrase here. Android joins Linux and Windows as a platform that suffers next to the seamless ease of Apple's interface. Apple came out with iTunes for Windows in @ 2004 and 7 years later there really isn’t a Linux/Windows answer to iTunes. Apple gives a vibrant, consistent one-stop shop for just about everything. Maybe 3 shops now – iTunes, AppStore and iBook Store. I look at other platforms and am lost in the woods trying to figure out which site or conduit can give me new movies, music, audio books, games etc. You have a mishmash of Amazon, windows media center and the Jumbo software web site. Android does have Android market which is OK but has some big shoes to fill. My little Archos 28 should arrive pretty soon... we’ll see how well it works. Who knows, I might like it. And if I do, a new blog entry will need to address that fact (or at any rate, a comment here)... Stay tuned.

© 2011 blogSpotter

Celebrating Gleekdom

2011-01-23T20:01:00.001-08:00

Sue Sylvester sounds off -- Picture courtesy of FOX

by blogSpotter
When I watched Glee’s first season episodes (2009-2010), I wrote it off as a silly teen soap opera -- an improbable mix of student and staff with a big musical backdrop. Then during season two, I noticed that my Tuesday night channel surfing would always land me on FOX TV, glued to a Sue Slyvester diatribe or a spirited new rendering of an 80’s rock song. When a TV show pulls people in magnetically, whatever their stated preferences may be, that show has great potential. I first viewed Glee as a guilty pleasure, best not shared with the world at large but then my feeling changed …

I asked a close friend who is a self-dubbed TV critic, master of arts and letters (not :-)). He said that they “ruined” Glee in the second season by focusing on celebrity guests (eg. Carol Burnett, John Stamos and Gwyneth Paltrow) and elaborate dance numbers. He thought they should return to the reasoned situations and sincere dialog of season one. OK -- I think season one was a corny, overly dramatic creation still finding its way. There are several ways it could’ve gone from there. Season two is admittedly over-the-top and extremely campy. Sue Sylvester as the Grinch? John Stamos as a dentist who appears in dreams? The Rocky Horror Halloween special? What I have to say is that this show gained tremendous altitude when it decided to push the envelope in every way possible. The wackadoo situations, guest stars and non sequitur dialog are the crux of Glee’s success.

In days of yore, I thought that humor always had to “make sense” and that silverware should always match at a place setting. OMG -- don’t spoil the tone or break into a fantasy sequence. I've since come to realize that maestros can and frequently do break the rules. (I’m not a maestro in any sense -- just saying). Am reminded of Madonna on her Truth or Dare tour telling her choreographers, “Break all the rules”. She added, “If you run out of rules to break, make up some new ones and break those”. She surely had her tongue in cheek, but the point was received. Novices need to observe the rules to learn basic tempo and structure. But people who stay too close to a rule book will give you a bland, vanilla article that fails to inspire anything but a yawn and a click to the next channel. The spirit has to soar beyond the gravity of “what would really happen” or "what would my college film instructor think?".

So is Glee totally insane? Of course it is. How many high schools do you know of that have a Hollywood caliber dance troupe and orchestra that can break into ebullient musical extravaganzas? How many schools have a Sue Sylvester much less a Coach Beiste? I think there is a lot of relevant human communication that shows through all the glibness and gloss. The students’ lives are fraught with all the baggage one might expect in teens -- bullying, sex, sexual identity, fidelity, love, honesty, physical adequacy, etc. There is some “real” dialog after all and it carries a great impact.

I’m not really doing justice to this excellent show and its cast. Matthew Morrison, Jane Lynch and Chris Colfer have been nominated for various Globe, Emmy and SAG awards. Chris Colfer won Best Supporting Actor at the recent Globes -- many other accolades have been given. If you have an hour to give over to joyful escapism, tune in to Glee. It won’t be dark or violent like so many other TV shows, and that’s also a good thing.

© 2011 blogSpotter

The Politically Incorrect Landlord

2011-01-15T19:07:00.000-08:00

You're two months behind -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
I just watched a little-known gem from 1970, The Landlord, starring Beau Bridges, Lee Grant, Pearl Bailey, Lou Gossett Jr and several other notable actors. The movie was Hal Ashby’s directorial debut. It has a gritty, urban, hip attitude that might make you think it’s a much newer movie. Bridges plays Elgar Enders --a rich, spoiled 29 year old “tweener” (before tweener was even a concept) who buys a tenement house in Brooklyn’s Park Slope hood with the intention of gentrifying it.

Before Elgar can repaint and remodel, he must evict an assortment of poor black tenants. He doesn’t remain long on his high horse -- he soon becomes friends with Marge the Psychic and Fanny the beautiful hair burner. I won’t wade too far into the plot line with spoilers… Suffice it to say that Elgar becomes very deeply involved in his new milieu; he also becomes a bit estranged from his conventionally white, elitist family.

The movie was an excellent time slice from 1970 when it was released. The clothing styles have a certain panache that’s lacking now; the background vocals by the Staple Singers give the movie a nearly gospel sensibility in places. What I have to say more than anything is that The Landlord would never be greenlighted in 2011. Political Correctness has made such a pronounced takeover of our society that a plot involving a rich white landlord and black tenants would be deemed inherently racist. (Who exactly is offended? All parties are shown with depth and compassion). This movie makes extensive use of the word “nigger” which has been banished from all 21st century publishing, to be replaced by “N-word”. The people using the word look far more ridiculous than anyone else -- it doesn’t bestow class to anyone saying it.

In this age of Obama, some people (clueless Republicans and white limousine liberals) like to fantasize that racism, sexism and homophobia are all in the past. I need only think of one black coworker who (recently) couldn’t get service at a car dealership until he wore a suit and brought his wife. I need only think of how recently LGBT people had to fight tooth and nail to be admitted to military service and how women are still trying to level the military playing field.

There’s a large, grey nebulous cloud of politically correct “oneness” that hangs over all our heads. We’re not even to broach certain topics or utter the words -- it means that we’re somehow uncool or unenlightened. We’re all assumed to be on some “same page” … and I myself have to ask, “What page is that?” The page that says redlining, redistricting and denial of marriage rights is all OK? Because those things are not OK and they still exist.

What I like about movies and TV from the early 70’s is that they dared to utter the word and ask the question. Butterflies Are Free, All In the Family, Sanford and Son, Harold and Maude, The Landlord … several others too … we pulled up some chairs and had ourselves a meeting. We did some much-needed soul-searching. If you look at our pop culture now in 2011, it’s basically “Don’t Ask, Don’t Discuss” on a much grander scale than ever was done with LGBT’s in the armed forces.

I remember when sitcoms like Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley overtook the socially relevant shows like Good Times in the late 1970’s. Mainstream pop culture basically played into the hands of a palliative, complacent status-quo. Our teachable moment washed away like a chalk picture on a rainy-day sidewalk. Discussion closed. In recent days there has been discussion of taking the word “nigger” out of Huckleberry Finn. I can think of no worse form of cultural castration than to erase our history and remove the touchstones of who we are and who we have been. It opens a Pandora’s Box of “what next?” I know words like faggot, bitch and whore have peppered other works -- do we need to go after those with politically correct White-Out?

I think we need to open the doors to our past unashamedly and ask all the relevant questions. There may be some colorful words and painful expressions in the process. We can do it no other way -- butterflies must remain free.

© 2011 blogSpotter

Iris' Number One Fan

2011-01-07T15:00:00.001-08:00

Jodie Foster as Easy Iris -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Anyone 40 or older probably remembers an urgent news bulletin from March 30, 1981: "Young man tries to assassinate President Ronald in Washington D.C.". The young man was John Hinckley Jr., a deranged 26 year-old. Hinckley was also an aspiring song-writer and vagabond who periodically resided with his wealthy parents in Evergreen, Colorado.

His gunplay didn’t kill anyone although it did plenty of damage. Press Secretary James Brady, policeman Thomas Delahanty and Secret Service man Tim McArthy were all directly struck by the hail of bullets. The President sustained a chest injury from a ricocheted bullet. By far the worst injury was sustained by Brady who was paralyzed for life on the left side of his body. Hinckley didn’t try to run; in fact he viewed the shooting as a photo op. He wanted his "lady love" to view his rageful behavior with a Rohm revolver on TV.

Hinckley was a Texas Tech drop-out who tried however briefly to be a song-writer in Los Angeles in the mid 70’s. When that didn’t pan out, the disturbed young man withdrew into a macabre fantasy world which blurred movie plots, historical assassinations, and other acts of desperate violence into a macho, psychotic “alterverse”.

The movie which so obsessed Hinckley was 1976’s Taxi Driver which portraits an equally psycho (albeit fictional) Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro. De Niro plays a would-be assassin with a bizarre crush on Iris, an under-aged teen prostitute. Hinckley is said to have watched Taxi Driver hundreds of times and somehow imprinted himself with the Bickle character. So thorough was the imprinting, he began stalking Jodie Foster (age 18 in 1981), who portrayed Iris in the actual '76 movie. In the “creepy facts file”, Hinckley actually dropped notes at Foster’s home and talked to her briefly on the phone. In 2010, one must hope that celebrities can be more unreachable and anonymous with regard to wack job stalkers.

Hinckley decided that, like Bickle, he should kill a president to impress Jodie/Iris. He first tracked Jimmy Carter but was arrested on weapons charges in Nashville. His wealthy family managed to get him psychiatric care for what was clearly to them just untreated clinical depression. Shortly thereafter, Hinckley “succeeded” in his bizarre quest – he completed the 1981 violent assault against Reagan and his team. What followed was a slap-on-the-wrist trial where Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity. One cannot dissociate the verdict from other significant circumstances; the Hinckleys were wealthy, staunch Republicans – good friends with V.P. George H. W. Bush. Hinckley’s brother Scott was even scheduled to have dinner with Neil Bush the night of the assassination attempt. Hinckley was remanded to the care of St. Elizabeth’s hospital where he has remained (more or somewhat less) since 1981.

So great was the public outrage over this verdict, several states modified state laws to restrict expert psychiatric testimony. Three states -- Idaho, Montana and Utah did completely away with the insanity defense. This was much ado considering that wealthy citizens frequently can side-step the established writ, no matter how passionately it’s supported by the general public.

For “tough love”, three-strikes advocates you should quit reading now. Hinckley’s incarceration at St. Elizabeth’s has unfolded more like a Club Med vacation stay than any typical inmate story. He summarized his daily routine as:

“See a theapist, answer mail, play guitar, listen to music, play pool, watch TV, eat lousy food and take delicious medication”.

In addition, he’s been granted increasingly long (two week) visits with his family which have given him the liberty of a driver’s license and opportunity to date two women on the outside. He was almost sprung completely in 2007 but public outcry, buttressed by the concerns of Reagan’s family kept him in St. Elizabeth’s where he surely belongs.

There is much to mull over in this tale and much impact to the national psyche..
- The insanity plea was reconsidered and reworked in several states
- Gun laws were strengthened
- Censorship advocates were emboldened by a clear case of copycat behavior
- Public advocates argued about privileged treatment for wealthy people

Reagan himself couched the event humorously in '81: “Honey, I forgot to duck”. He also was surprisingly benign about Hinckley himself saying only that he, “hopes the young man gets help”. In point of fact, Hinckley was given the help of a cushy hospital and lengthy outside visits. It would be hard to assert that his help was corrective or meaningful in any significant way. Whether his outburst was an insane lark or "rational" choice, he needs to be kept away from a world which is an action movie blur in his addled mind.

CINEMATIC ADDENDUM -- 1/8/2011

Today I actually watched Taxi Driver from 1976; the last time I watched it was as a college sophomore in the theater. The movie is a tour de force, easily earning its position on the AFI’s list of all-time great movies. It is Martin Scorsese’s dark vision of Travis Bickle, a disturbed and mentally deteriorating Vietnam Vet. Travis is played by a handsome, lean and then-young Robert De Niro. The cast is a stellar one where even bit roles are played by future luminaries like Harvey Keitel and Albert Brooks. Jodie Foster is amazing as the street-smart Iris and Cybill Shepherd is equally great as Betsy.

It puzzles me that John Hinckley saw Travis as a role model -- the entire screenplay presents Travis as an unhinged loser, living in a violent, adolescent fantasy world. The last three minutes of the movie are controversial -- they suggest that Travis has been received as a hero for “rescuing” Iris and brutally killing Iris’ pimp, bordello bouncer and Mafia john.

This is arguable from a couple of standpoints …
1) The last 3 minutes are gauzy and surreal like something in the dream sequence of a dying man.
2) It wouldn’t make sense factually. The pimp, john and bouncer were unsavory people but they had done nothing to provoke the attack. Bickle would be guilty of 2nd degree homicide if nothing else, he wouldn’t be received as a hero.

However you see the ending, please see this incredible film. The gritty essence of New York’s mean streets have never been more brilliantly shown than in this timeless masterpiece.

© 2011 blogSpotter

Sci Fi Messiah

2010-12-29T20:31:00.000-08:00

Hubbard holding court in 1950 -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
What is it that we love so much about a master story teller? If the story is something like a Jackie Collins novel, we know it’s all a fiction but love it nonetheless. A good friend may thickly embellish a story to make it funny or poignant -- we fully appreciate and forgive (nay, encourage) such excesses. In other cases, a religious luminary may tell us a story as an article of faith. If it’s told in a compelling way, we want it to be true; don’t douse us with cold reality. In yet other situations -- a court of law, a science classroom, the truth must come unadorned. The story teller might be perjuring himself if he regales us from a witness stand.

LaFayette Ron Hubbard was a master story teller. Between 1933 and 1938, the prolific author wrote 138 sci-fi and adventure novels (e.g., Buckskin Brigade and Final Blackout). Hubbard who could write (not just type) at 70 words per minute, was just getting warmed up. If his career had been defined only by his writing, his manic achievements would put him in the publishing stratosphere. But Hubbard created a worldwide Dianetics empire and had a net worth of $600,000,000 at the time of his death. Given his excesses, his giddy heights and his (at one point in 1947) suicidal despair, Hubbard was probably an undiagnosed bipolar but that is just this blog author’s speculation.

Egotist, story teller, messiah -- these names attach themselves to Hubbard. But also liar, felon, con artist and letch, depending on the source. Born in 1911, the red-headed Hubbard was nicknamed “Brick”. As a Navy brat, he got to see exotic places such as the Far East. He was a bright, curious boy who achieved Eagle Scout rank in the Boy Scouts. He also had an early interest in psychiatry and spirituality although those didn’t translate into any great college career -- he was drummed out of Georgetown University after only two years with failing grades. Now you might think his career was stymied but you’d be wrong -- he was just winding up. Hubbard’s life covers such broad expanses I’ll just hit some highlights. An in-depth story would take days to tell.

Hubbard was a highly outgoing man with the gift of self-promotion. His biography is filled with proud assertions readily disputed by various witnesses, friends and scholars. There are also some dents and dings along the way, that aren’t part of the official story. Hubbard claims to have been made a lama priest in Beijing; Jon Atack (former Scientologist) says that Hubbard’s own diary from that time fails to make any such mention. In Naval Training School for WWII, Hubbard claimed to be a nuclear physicist though he’d actually flunked those courses at Georgetown. Hubbard touted his 1953 PhD from Sequoia University (in Dianetics), while soft-pedaling the fact that Sequoia was a discredited degree mill. He later claimed to be a Blackfoot Indian blood brother though tribal spokesmen said that their tribe didn’t do such inductions. He was implicated in a 1945 confidence scheme (“Allied Enterprises”) that resulted in a $2900 court settlement (payment by Hubbard to the other litigant). He was relieved of a naval command post after conducting unauthorized gunnery practice off the Mexican shoreline.

With all these scurrilous details one might think Hubbard was a washed up, braggart blowhard. But in fact he was able to recover credibility by attacking the very prominent Achilles Heel of the nascent psychiatry field. In the 1940’s, psychiatrists were routinely doing lobotomies and electroshock. Whatever folly one might see in Scientology audits, they never involved removal of frontal lobes. In 1950, Hubbard authored a pseudoscientific treatise about Dianeteics, “the scientific method of mental therapy”. Dianetics survived several early setbacks. Contemporary authors and science reviewers described Dianetics as “lunatic” and “cult-like”. His earliest public demo of a “Clear” (healthy mental state from Dianetics) fell on it’s face -- his subject failed to remember any relevant facts. But the bombastic Hubbard pressed forward and founded the Church of Scientology in 1953. He soon had followers throughout Europe and the English speaking world. He added the E-meter, a “biofeedback” auditing device in 1959.

Hubbard started to have IRS problems early on -- his acceptance of salary and emoluments from E-meter sales went beyond the accepted norms for non-profit groups. Scientology also had worldwide credibility issues going forward. They were exiled from Rhodesia for possible economic manipulation. They were expelled from Greece as undesirables. Hubbard was actually convicted of fraud in France, though the fine was never enforced. Hubbard decided to avoid national penalties by putting his headquarters outfit (dubbed Sea Org) on a ship at sea. Hubbard was said to engage in very un-Messiah like behavior -- he had Commodore’s Assistants. These were buxom teenage girls who fixed him drinks and laid out his clothes. The thrice-married Hubbard was also said to be given over to fits of pique and anger. He could swear like a sailor which probably befits his naval background (as well as his probable bipolarity).

Apologies for compressing so much into so little a space. Hubbard’s life sprawled big and far like one of his novels -- so much to cover. Hubbard entertained a fantasy, maybe a self-delusion that he was immortal. He had certainly taken much of the world by storm, he was starting to believe his own mythology. He was involved in a near-fatal motor cycle accident in the 1970’s and Hubbard began to rethink his time usage. He realized that he was a flesh-and-blood person living with the same hourglass that all we mere mortals have. He returned to sci-fi writing in 1977 and wrote Battlefield Earth in 1982 (4 years before his death in 1986 at age 74). He stayed in seclusion the last 6 years of his life, hoping to avoid indictment by a New York grand jury; They were investigating his possible “Fair Game” harassment of a Scientology critic.

Hubbard was certain that he would return to Earth as a reincarnated political leader within our own lifetime. When he actually died in 1986, the Church explained that Hubbard had deliberately discarded his physical body and was conducting spiritual research “one galaxy away”.

Whatever you may think about this man’s credibility, you have to be amazed by his prolific writing and imagination as well as his evangelistic zeal. I was impressed that Marshall Applewhite (of Heaven’s Gate fame) could convince his male followers to castrate themselves. Let’s think about it …A car salesman sells a car and a comedian sells a joke. That L. Ron Hubbard, a sci-fi “philosopher king” could sell a whole reality, a future and a lifetime orientation of audits and e-meters is probably several orders of magnitude more impressive than any salesman, anywhere. In an odd way of looking at it, Hubbard is still alive and well -- his vibrant organization (replete with celebrity “thought leaders”) is thriving today.

© 2010 blogSpotter

News in a Barbie World

2010-12-21T13:14:00.000-08:00

Miles and miles of Miley footage -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
I’m still huffing & puffing to catch up with my blog – work is getting busy (uncomfortably so) just two days before Christmas. Today’s blog is inspired by tabloid overload from this morning’s Today Show – and I can probably present it without too much prep time.

What do Natalee Holloway, Chandra Levy and Amanda Knox have in common? Unless you've been living under sensory deprivation, you’ll know that the first two are beautiful women who disappeared under tragic, mysterious circumstances in Aruba and D.C. respectively. Amanda is a beautiful woman who is implicated in the tragic murder of her beautiful roommate in Italy. What all three of these women have in common is thousands of hours of news coverage. Not just tabloids, but “legitimate” news venues (Time, NBC News) have devoted mountains of pages and film footage to these events.

Not to diminish the sad and sorrowful nature of these happenings, their primacy is weird in a nation that is otherwise challenged with two wars, a great recession, cancer, pollution and probably a thousand topics that are more central to our well-being. That the stories are tragic gives them the aura of “newsworthiness” that can’t be garnered from the titillating exploits of Miley Cyrus, Lindsey Lohan, Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian. The news peddlers' fascination with beautiful women is out of proportion; they know that more ordinary women are gripped with envy and "what-if's?". Men are mostly lured by sex, albeit a glossy, unreal and unseemly aspect of sex. The observations go from the vapid (Paris Hilton sans underwear) to the lurid ("bones of missing woman found in park..."). The common thread here is that the dramatis personae are beautiful, young, generally affluent females. In fact, I’ve worked up a profile – you can compute how tabloid worthy you are...

AM I TABLOID WORTHY?

• Beautiful ...30 points
• Female ...30 points
• Young (under 30) ... 20 points
• White ... 10 points
• Affluent ...10 points

There’s no definite way of scoring this, but I’ll say you need an 80/100 to be on the front page of American Statesman. You need 90/100 for Nancy Grace to feature you obsessively.

Wanda Sykes has a whole comedy routine about the public concern over missing black prostitutes – there is no apparent concern. After a point, a john in the neighborhood might say, “Where’s all our ho’s?” A black woman can be abducted at a car wash, in front of witnesses, directly across the street from the Dallas Morning News. It will barely be a footnote under Metro events, page 7D. The above profile attributes taken together say a lot about our social values. It also has to be a fair damsel in distress, otherwise there is a marked loss of interest; a chinless woman with glasses will fall through the media cracks. Along gender lines, one supposes that men must know better or fend for themselves. There have been occasions where men have been abducted or tortured – it’ll have a better placement than 7D in the paper but not much. It certainly won’t give Greta Van Susteren material for a year’s worth of forensic expert interviews.

The victim doesn’t have to be affluent, but it helps. If the subject isn’t solidly middle class or higher, it may be seen as the necessary consequence of a squalid upbringing. The consequences are sad but not surprising. Advancing age is like masculinity – it confers a certain responsibility on the victim. “She should’ve known better .... she should’ve seen it coming”. If a 45 year old woman was abducted in Aruba people would spin it very differently ... “That old broad, she got in over her head”.

When King Kong scaled the Empire State Building, he didn’t hold a balding 35 year old man, a fat woman or a cleaning lady. He held Fay Wray, a terrified beauty with torn clothes. No detail of Fay Wray could be different – there would be no movie otherwise. Maybe society’s alter ego will someday expand beyond an idealized Blonde Venus and we’ll care about that bald-headed man. But not so much now.

© 2010 blogSpotter

Printers with Attitude

2010-12-15T14:52:00.000-08:00

A new world of print opens up -- Picture courtesy of HP

by blogSpotter
In the hustle-bustle of Christmas, I’ve had trouble getting back to my blog. We’ve been given a major year-end project at my job (delivery date Dec 27th) so I’ve had some trouble finding time. I do have a short blurb I can add here for a technology topic. A piece on L. Ron Hubbard is in the works, but I can’t bang that one out very quickly. Stand by for L. Ron (an interesting man by the way).

Last weekend I bought myself an early Christmas present – an HP Photosmart D110a printer. I purchased it at Sam’s at a reasonable price ($59) – a small discount over what I might pay at Wal-Mart. To look quickly and superficially at this inkjet printer, you might be unimpressed – it’s an all-in-one scanner-copier-printer (now the norm) about the size of a small toaster oven. Suppress your urge to yawn – there is more. It's actually sleek, black and pretty. Another thing you might notice on second glance is the little 2 inch screen on the front. This printer has Wi-Fi and a small processor that lets it function more or less as a computer. It connects to the Internet through your home Wi-Fi and provides numerous print-related apps, as well as a slick graphical interface for print, copy and scan functions.

I might only use about 3 of the built-in apps – coupon printer, crosswords and special forms (e.g., graph paper and ruled paper). Other special apps (Disney print shop, msnbc headlines) seem geared to print a lot of output, that I personally don’t want or need. I clicked on msnbc headlines and with no prompting I got a color-rich two-page print of today’s headlines. I can tell where this would be lucrative to HP. The print quality is very nice by the way. The D110a also has a feature called ePrint where you can print documents to your printer (with HP-assigned email address) by sending the document as an email attachment. Can’t say I’d really use that – my printer is off when I’m away; also I want to be there to inspect results (or fix paper jams) when printing anything at all.

Now there are some great aspects to the D110a. Apple just released iOS4.2 for its iPad, iPod and iPhone family of devices – one of the main iOS4.2 offerings is AirPrint. These devices print effortlessly and beautifully to my printer and no device driver has to be installed. HP is the only company with compatible printers – makes me wonder if Apple and HP are in cahoots, not that I mind terribly. For Mac and Windows computers, you have to install the D110a driver – no problem for me (being a geek and all). I had every Wi-Fi capable device in my house sending prints to my new printer very shortly. Have never before had a printer this centrally available and powerful.

Back in the 90’s, Bluetooth was hyped as the Next Great Thing. These many years later, we do have some Bluetooth penetration primarily in the form of headsets, mice and keyboards. BUT (you knew it was coming) … Bluetooth never lived up to the hype. It’s power hungry and has limited range – no match for the Wi-Fi that makes my devices dance with each other (wirelessly) from opposite ends of the house. I always liked the idea of a networked home printer, but none of the previous solutions had much appeal. There was something expensive or kludgy in every suggested scenario. Now for a mere $59 (+ tax) HP has given us the omnipresent printer. It’s a gabby printer that interacts and works with every damn device in my house. Talk about cross-platform!

I was in a computer class a few weeks ago (Spring Frameworks if you must know). A young lad of 30 wondered why anyone needs a printer. I’m one of a steadfast multitude who likes printed copies of everything. I have all my Quicken reports and copies of my tax returns. I’ve printed many a PDF manual because a dog-eared notebook format is frequently preferable to the arduous routine of booting a computer and Googling a reference. It’s also not a bad idea to keep hard copies of sales receipts and order forms. Let me say – I’ve bought many books and songs in the virtual marketplace and feel a little short-changed that I can’t hold them or see them on a shelf. Anything, be it an important document or favorite movie has more permanence if it’s physical -- more than bits and bytes on a hard drive that might crash at some point. I want a favorite movie on DVD and a tax document printed on quality paper.

Back to the D110a Photosmart printer… Should you get one? If you want a really cool, cross-platform, multitasking print genie the answer is probably “Yes”. Let me say I got the less expensive model – The HP Envy is the top-of-the line product. It’s whisper quiet and looks like an expensive blu-ray player. It's pricey but very slick looking. Whatever model you get, welcome to the new world of printing with W-Fi wizardry.

© 2010 blogSpotter

One-Two Punch

2010-12-09T11:54:00.000-08:00

Obama and Cantor in unholy alliance -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Today’s blog entry might meander a little but there’s actually a couple of underlying themes. One of them is our President who seems to be losing altitude by the minute. I’ve been referring to him as President Feather Duster for a time now. The Faustian bargain he just made with House Republicans concerning tax breaks for the wealthy is maddening … no wonder that the Liberal Dems are looking to body block it. We could use some tax breaks for the little guy – the rich man doesn’t need it.

Now along similar lines, there is talk of reducing the deficit by eliminating the mortgage interest deduction – across the board, for everyone. So what we have friends, is a one-two punch to the middle class. Obama’s devil deal will assure that wealthy people aren’t on line to help out with the deficit via tax. Mortgage interest elimination will assure that the middle (and lower middle) class will be roped in, hogtied and branded for “deficit reduction”. Why is it that politics reminds me of a rowdy game of crack-the-whip? People think they know what they want and vote accordingly. But the result is horrible and bears no resemblance to whatever was offered. It would be like mixing the ingredients for fudge and coming out with lemon tarts.

Now let’s move the discussion along to earmarks and pork barrel spending. Several strident Tea Party candidates lambasted earmarks during the mid-terms and prominent “next generation” Republicans came along for the ride. Representative Eric Cantor made earmarks his campaign centerpiece as did Speaker John Boehner. Now both have suggested Hal Rogers, Kentucky’s notorious Pork Barrel King as the head of the Appropriations committee. Rogers would even like to bring along a Lockheed lobbyist as the committee coordinator. If these guys really care about reducing the deficit, would they be heading their committee with the King of Pork?

And speaking of the Tea Party above, they’ve been cited by Citizens Against Government Waste. It appears that Tea Party candidates have now received over 1 billion dollars in earmarks. Republicans everywhere, did you get what you voted for? It looks like several initiatives are adding to our tax bill and taking away tax revenue. The only people being billed are middle class home owners so far. This has all developed during our lame duck session at yearend 2010. We haven’t even let the dogs out yet.

It turns out (surprise, surprise) that people want what they want, never mind the cheap rhetoric. Politicians of both parties want to fund home district projects and would prefer that someone else pay for it. To be rigorously consistent with any idealistic goal is political suicide – the case of being dead right. What I have to offer is that there are comparatively fair and less painful ways of doing deficit reduction but it involves help from all corners – no one group gets stuck with the tab. Obama shouldn’t cave to Republicans bearing “gifts”. There won’t be a double dip recession here – just a double dose of regrets about who we elected, and who gets saddled with reining in the budget.

© 2010 blogSpotter

The Tenant in 213

2010-11-29T13:32:00.000-08:00

Dahmer mug shot -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
The name “Jeffrey Dahmer” is now one of legend, albeit the horrific, infamous variety. The name is used in moments of overzealous character shading, the same way one might toss out “Hitler” or “Jack the Ripper”. What’s interesting is that Dahmer was actually a soft-spoken slacker in his personal demeanor. His career consisted of stints in the US Army and at a candy factory (ironically the Ambrosia Chocolate Factory), interrupted by stints of unemployable alcoholic stupor.

Dahmer’s parents were Lionel and Joyce – an analytical chemist and a housewife. They were good parents to Jeff and his younger brother David – no Mommie Dearest tales to tell. Jeff spent most of his unremarkable childhood in Bath, Ohio. There were a couple of harbingers of trouble to come, but not so much that anyone spoke of anything like psychotherapy. Jeff was a preteen loner, riding his bike for miles around his neighborhood. Loners are certainly not always killers although a killer is seldom the life of the party. Jeff also had an unseemly fascination with dead animals, going so far as to dismember them and reposition the cadavers in unusual ways (a dog’s head on a stake). When a teenage boy exhibits any fascination with dead bodies it should be a red flag. Even to be overly enthused about hunting, splaying or butchering such creatures as fish or deer would raise my own eyebrows. I worry about someone who can’t see any spark of soul or suffering in animal kind.

Jeff’s pacific childhood did experience a serious bump – his parents divorced when he was 17. Jeff had already developed a problem with alcoholism in his teens; the drinking habit continued into college where he flunked out of his first semester at Ohio State University. His father urged him to join the Army, where Jeff excelled initially but washed out again (within a couple of years) due to his drinking. Jeff moved in with his grandmother in 1982. A grandmother’s love could not overcome Jeff’s bizarre behavior: he kept store mannequins and fire arms in his bedroom. He was arrested more than once for indecent exposure and public lewdness. Probably most alarming were strange foul odors coming from the basement which Jeff said was merely an experiment with a dead squirrel gone awry. He was trying to dissolve it chemically, he said. In fact, at this point Dahmer had already killed @ 5 men, four while staying at his grandmother’s house. That she never investigated the odors is amazing – probably some major denial at work. That she finally kicked his craziness to the curb (in 1988) is to her credit.

The next grisly chapter is the one so frequently played in our pop culture playbook (category “Horror”). Dahmer got a job at the Ambrosia Chocolate Factory and took Apartment 213 at the Oxford Apartments. He went on a 2-year killing binge where he picked up his young male victims at bars. He gave them sedatives or blindsided them with blunt instruments they were little expecting. There was never anything approaching a fair fight. The victims, primarily Asian and black, were summarily dismembered; some body parts were dissolved in acid, some were refrigerated as souvenirs and some were devoured as food. Some, it appears were kept for secret ceremonies using votive candles. The apartment managers and Milwaukee police turned deaf ears and blind eyes to the numerous accumulating clues. Neighbors complained of foul smells and sawing noises, occasional screams. The police believed Dahmer’s story over that of his young, drugged victim when the young man attempted an escape – they returned the boy to Dahmer’s “care”.

Finally in 1991, a young Tracy Edwards fought off Dahmer’s attempt to handcuff and subdue him. Edwards ran to the police (half-clothed and hand-cuffed). He brought them back to Dahmer’s apartment where at length and at last, they found his macabre butchery shop. Dahmer was tried and easily convicted in 15 of the 17 murders. He was given a life sentence at Columbia Correctional prison where he himself was finally murdered at age 34 by a fellow inmate, Christopher Scarver. Scarver was celebrated as a folk hero by some, probably people not knowing that he was a schizoid killer with nearly as many issues as Dahmer. Scarver also killed a bystander when he killed Dahmer, maybe collateral damage – who knows what goes on in any of their minds.

A lot is made of the fact that Dahmer’s father was an evangelical Christian, and that Dahmer himself claimed the status of Born Again Christian in the last year of his life. A Church of Christ minister actually met with Dahmer and baptized him during Dahmer’s incarceration. I can’t claim to know the mind of other men, much less the mind of God. Nevertheless, blogSpotter will humbly guess what God might be thinking (assuming the existence of a God with man-like thought process)... I think that God probably, oddly, forgives just about everything because God himself is the architect of our brains – including our obsessions and all of our misfiring neurons. But – I think the Architect would figure in this case that the human containment was appropriate (minus Dahmer’s brutal murder in a prison lavatory), and that the free will mechanism sometimes goes off the track. That is blogSpotter’s reductionist viewpoint – I’m willing to hear anyone else’s viewpoint for comparing and contrasting.

Jeffrey Dahmer brought the lore of killer-maniacs to chilling new heights of gruesome goriness. The actual man probably doesn’t live up to his monstrous legend, but it doesn’t matter. People tend to embellish a story and this story invites embellishment. The strange details of Apartment 213 are scary enough that the unadorned story can give us all the willies for a lifetime.

© 2010 blogSpotter

Staring at Goats

2010-11-20T19:04:00.001-08:00

I'm not that easily jarred -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter

Today’s blog entry will serve up two movie reviews -- one movie from 2009 and one from 1975. I’m enjoying one of my long, TimeOn weekends (every other Friday off) and have time to play like I’m Roger Ebert. (Okay, a poor man’s Ebert).

GOATS
Men Who Stare at Goats is about a secretive U.S. Army branch that experimented with “psychic warfare” back in the 1970’s and 1980’s. There has in fact been a psychological war unit for many years, which merely engages in war propaganda efforts (nothing supernatural). The film is loosely based on allegedly real events; apparently there was an experimental “New Earth Army” began in 1980, led by an LSD-influenced Viet Vet. This man (Jeff Bridges’ Bill Django in the film) believed that he could use various paranormal capacities -- invisibility, “phasing”, hypnotic psych moves and such to make enemies succumb to him. The movie gets its title from experiments where New Earth Army combatants could supposedly make a goat die of heart attack by intensely staring at it.

The military doesn’t strike me as a reservoir of extreme intellects. They are but a hop and skip from police authorities who’ve been known to hire psychics to locate dead bodies. The movie’s lead character is Lyn Cassady played by George Clooney; Cassady is a New Army veteran who’s been called back for an Iraq mission by Django. I won’t go into extreme plot details -- the movie is done in a type of comedic, documentary style. One might say it’s three scoops of Mash and one scoop of Big Lebowski. If you enjoy military farces you might like this. Men Who Stare at Goats does leave the door open to paranormal activity -- they suggest that Cassady really dispersed clouds in the sky telekinetically and also killed goats with his staring. They suggest that Django and Cassidy ascended into some alternate reality in a helicopter just because the ’copter was never seen again .... That’s the simplest explanation?

It seems to be a human yearning to believe in the paranormal and supernatural. Whether it’s the bending of spoons, talking to aliens or making psychic predictions, these activities are never reproduced in any type of scientifically controlled setting. It’s usually the third-hand accounts from people in the remote Dakotas or the Ozarks where the tales originate. Very interesting that a mainstream movie (and very possibly the US Army) would promulgate these ideas. I the author (Ebert for a day) will leave disappointed paranormal fans with another token to hold on to -- there is an already incredible reality. This universe has a lot that is genuinely weird and counter-intuitive -- we don’t need magic or the supernatural to make it any more interesting.

DOG DAY AFTERNOON
While Goats was (I think) lacking, Dog Day Afternoon was a fantastic blast from 1975. This movie is now rated in the AFI’s top 100 thrillers and Al Pacino’s portrayal of Sonny is rated by the British Film Institute as one of the best acting performances ever, in any film. Sonny is a disheveled, Viet Nam veteran with a family life in turmoil. His friend Sal is a none-to-bright but gentle soul, also down on his luck. Together they hatch a plan to rob a Brooklyn bank -- a very bumbling, stupid plan. They set off alarms immediately (probably by Sonny setting a wastebasket on fire) and are quickly surrounded by the police. What should’ve been a 10 minute heist turns into a twelve hour ordeal in which the bank manager and eight tellers are held hostage. The bravery and basic humanity of the characters is amazing. Sonny himself has a self-effacing manner and humility with hostages which portends that he’d never hurt them. To the crowd outside, he’s a preening, charismatic performer that rouses everyone to shouts of “Attica! Attica!”. The real event took place in August 1972, when Americans were still in a protest mode which would explain some of that.

This movie runs for about 2 hours and 5 minutes -- you’ll be on your edge of the seat through most of it. There is a curve ball halfway through, in which it’s revealed that Sonny is robbing the bank to pay for his lover’s sex change. … Just your ordinary movie. The music, camera angles and edgy filming make Dog Day seem like a much newer movie.

There you have it -- two thought-provoking movies for the weekend. In the next week, I’ll be doing the Thanksgiving ritual in Round Rock, TX. If I don’t get back to this before that, happy turkey day to all my readers.

© 2010 blogSpotter

Tuning in to Google TV

2010-11-07T17:08:00.000-08:00

Living room surf session? -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
It’s only 4 days since my previous post, but something caught my attention -- Google TV being showcased at Best Buy. It’s a visually engaging product, but it reminded me of WebTV and other technical curiosities (Linux) …am feeling the need to comment.

I’ve gone on about techie tools that require humans to change their nature to suit a techie purpose. One major example is Linux (any flavor). Linux really requires the user (or at least someone in the household) to hold a Masters degree in Computer Science. A casual user who wants to do ordinary things (email, web surf, on-line shop, download mp3’s) is going to be met with a wave of technical issues -- how do I unpack a tar file or a package, how do I play mp3’s, where’s iTunes? My techie coworkers would say there are no such issues -- but they hold advanced CS degrees (or equivalent knowledge). For the average user, there needs to be hand-holding -- some helpful agent to integrate the product lines and make it all work seamlessly.

Now we come to Google TV. Before I go there I’d like to briefly discuss my “two rooms” activity scenario as a backdrop... In my study, I do intensive Quicken accounting and business correspondence. In this mode, I am no-nonsense and serious. I have a bright light, a large desk, an upright chair and full keyboard. The chair is a hard, swivel style. I’m not here to have fun -- the office is deliberately set up this way so I’ll get off my duff and accomplish things.

My living room has a fat, overstuffed (not unlike its owner) couch, giant HD TV, and a couple of set top boxes (Apple TV and Sony blu-ray). In this room, I don’t want to think too hard about anything. Don’t want a keyboard or console in two hands -- I want a remote in one hand which frees the other hand to reach for Fritos and Diet DP. What I look at on that screen will fall into the category of 100% entertainment. I don’t want to read cnn.com, balance my budget or really (in my middle-aged case) play computer games. To the extent that I would want to do any of that the iPad works well. (Wham bam, thank you ma'am -- iPad answers my crossword question in 3 strokes).

Now along comes Google TV which allows you to mix the study and living room into maybe a “living study”. Google can make me a time managing maestro... I can read Time and watch 30 Rock at the same time. I can watch Netflix, play games and use my smart phone as a remote -- all at once if so desired. Some of these things are already doable with Wii and Apple TV. Others are things that I’d never want to do; I don’t want to read an internet site on a TV screen across the room. I really don’t want an overly tasked, busy TV screen -- I’d prefer that it display one show at a time, full screen. Between shows it should give me a very simple intuitive menu selection such as as we already get from Time Warner, Tivo, Apple, Netflix and other service providers.

An informative web site (with a lot of verbiage) is necessarily something that I want to peruse on my desktop HP or my iPad. I want to study it up close. Maybe I’m peculiar but I don’t really like my computer screen to be too busy, much less my TV screen. Picture-in-picture is a bold move for me. It still annoys me how a close friend channel surfs across the shows when I visit his house. Decide on one show, and stick with it dammit.

Is Google TV for you? If you’re a young, game-playing, multitasker who doesn’t mind looking at busy, multiple windows from across a room you’ll do fine. The Google TV user probably doesn't demand total regularity in home activity settings (and maybe it's obsessive on my part). Am not going to twist arms or try to argue that my preference is the only way. But I’m personally going to stick with my long-observed room designations; the living room is where I live and the study is where I study.

Could I be wrong about all this? Very possibly -- I once thought the iPod nano would bomb because you can get twice as much memory on the iPod Classic for the same price. I was flat-out wrong about that -- who can read the next trend. We’ll just wait and see I guess. Linux has never gained more than a single digit market penetration after years of being touted as the open systems answer to everyone’s prayers. People are people, always and ever.

© 2010 blogSpotter

Barack at 21 Months

2010-11-02T14:03:00.001-07:00

Obama giving a weekly address -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
This is Election Eve, November 2, 2010. All signs point to a Democratic drubbing – if the Democrats are lucky, they’ll keep a Senate majority, and barely that. They’re almost certain to lose the House as well as several governorships to the GOP. The pundits are working overtime to figure, “How did we get to this point?”. In his piece today, Beware the GOP Coronation, Howard Kurtz provides us with a recent historical contrast. At 100 days, the media was having a slobbering love fest over Obama, painting him as something between FDR and Jesus. Now at 21 months, the tide has turned and many of those same pundits (e.g., Howard Fineman, Jonathon Alter) are more restrained in their glowing Obama tributes. Meanwhile, a lily white Tea Party has energized the GOP rightwing flank; they’ve promised to “take back America” (I have to guess, from socialist people of color?).

I’m in Obama’s corner, I think, but have to wonder at points if Obama is even in Obama’s corner. Let’s consider 3 things that occupy the air waves now:

Afghanistan – Obama authorized a big troop surge but tied it to a near-term withdrawal date. Military analysts everywhere feel like Obama hedged his bet in a coy, duplicitous way. He probably should’ve soft-pedaled the withdrawal date, pending major military milestones. I’m not opposed to Obama’s Afghanistan strategy per se – I think Afghanistan is a quicksand pit that offers little hope of a meaningful Democratic resolution. But his presentation was too equivocal for his conservative audience – he could have framed it better.

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell – Obama has successfully straddled the fence with acrobatic finesse. He at once has said soothing words to the LGBT community while giving senior military officials and homophobic Congressional chairmen the free hand they need to maintain the status quo. In fact, the Federal government (headed by O’Man himself?) is now in the bizarre position of fighting a judicial stay of DADT.

Stimulus – The Tea Party has vilified deficit spending as the ‘poison tonic’ in our current economy. We’ve had one sip of the tonic and now we’re ready to declare it a failure. There hasn’t been an adequate stimulus effort to set any wheels in motion. There is also some question about how it was administered -- TARP funds going to business executives versus federal project funds paid directly to federal employees. Obama needs to give assurance to his own policies and back up his advisors – not timidly withdraw when it meets a first wave of resistance. Is there a confident, committed doctor in the house?

The stimulus shyness is Obama’s biggest stumbling point, and brings me to the “dismal science”, economics. Economics doesn’t have to be dismal – it can be very rational and precise if you’re dealing with logical, fair, level-headed people. The very people who want to scramble the topic as some kind of impenetrable, mysterious fog are rich people who stand to lose if the public gets wise to it all. Obama needs to make it clear what he envisions and (sorry to borrow from Bush) “stay the course”. He’s now more like a disengaged Herbert Hoover circa 1930, serving bland aphorisms when people want action. What we need is an impassioned leader, bringing in the sheaves with some Old Time fervor and vitality. Obama’s collegial, cool style is a quality that American people disdain in a politician, especially in times of crisis.

What of tonight’s election? The American people are acting reactively, emotionally and angrily to a situation they think can right itself with a simple “throw the bums out” gesture. Obama didn’t do anything wrong so much as he did it incompletely and without great resolve. America’s reaction is both spastic and misdirected. The GOP will restore the policies which gave us 2008’s financial crisis and this will yield us a slow trudge further into the mud. Let’s hope that someone projecting strength and clarity can eventually get us out of the mud. Who he is and when he appears is anyone’s guess – it could even be a reinvigorated Obama.

© 2010 blogSpotter

In Search of a Lost Decade

2010-10-23T19:06:00.001-07:00

Japan in better days (1856) -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
For an American looking at 1990’s Japan, it’s a little like looking into a reflective pond, with a few minor details changed. Japan of 1989 was on a massive borrowing binge, fueled by easy credit and a powerful yen. Land speculation pumped Tokyo’s residential prices to thousands per square foot. The Nikkei index broke an all-time record in December 1989, reaching 38,957.44. Stocks and real estate were puffed into an unsustainable bubble that burst, leading to a market crash as well as a credit crisis. Does any of this sound familiar?

The events that followed created what I call a “sloth market” -- neither bull nor bear. It was (and is) more a moss-covered, sleepwalking mammal clinging to a branch. The Finance Ministry bailed out companies “too big to fail”; some of these propped-up enterprises were called “zombies” as they became the walking dead, never to regain profitability. The cautious Japanese also fell into a deflationary liquidity trap caused in part by their own frugality. There was retrenchment all around as businesses and families tightened their budgets. The Finance Ministry tried to finagle a recovery with 0% interest rates, to no avail.

Now we fast-forward to 2010 and what can we say? Japan never really recovered. The Nikkei only reached half its former height in 2007 before being knocked asunder by the same worldwide tsunami that took down Wall Street and most of Europe. As of this writing (and 21 years into Japan’s greed-induced coma), Japan is still laid low by insolvent banks that can’t issue loans while waiting for bad risks to turn around. Insolvent companies hire foreign contractors and fund any paltry improvements from their savings, not from loans.

All of this makes an American wonder if President Obama was right in suggesting that we might be headed to the same place. Japan’s crisis is not precisely a crisis -- their unemployment has never been as high as ours is now. It’s more like an Epstein-Barr virus that has given them (and us) a dull malaise that will neither kill us nor energize us. It will just take us down for an interminable nap time where factories and able-bodied men develop rusty joints and faulty wires.

I find it sad that purely capitalistic systems can only engage forward gear if someone is hitting a financial jackpot. Speaking as an unrepentant, Krugman-loving Keynesian, I can’t help but think that a Works Progress Program (a la FDR) could set us back on the right path. While Dow and Nikkei basically flatline, the Chinese are building airports, bridges and miles of new highway. Is any of China’s output pegged to a financial market index? Does it matter?

We in the USA have a Barnum and Bailey system that’s been based on gluttons who dream of getting rich quickly, be it with blue chip stocks, blue chips on a poker table or a 7-11 lottery ticket. The engine of work and progress is geared towards cranking out plasma TV’s and stainless steel appliances -- the material contrivances of the bored and the terminally uninspired. How tragic, ironic and altogether fitting it will be when somewhere down the road, the Chinese have bridges and plasma TV's to boot.

Can it be that forethought, fairness and sensible assessment might actually give you what you need? Fairness and forethought smack of socialism, it's true. I’m not recommending socialism outright -- it's possible to strike a balance between a command economy and one that's purely capitalistic. Harrah’s Casino is certainly not a model to admire. When the gamblers get wise and realize that probability and house rules don’t work to their advantage, they’ll quit placing bets.

Capitalism sputters and stalls when high rollers switch over to the slot machines. That looks like what happened in 1990's Japan and it bears an eerie resemblence to what we have here.

© 2010 blogSpotter

Retaking Woodstock

2010-10-10T18:25:00.000-07:00

Ode to joy in Bethel, NY -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
I recently had the pleasure of listening to Elliot Tiber’s personal memoir, Taking Woodstock; I then watched Ang Lee’s movie version of it a day later. Elliot Tiber was the 30ish president of the Bethel, New York Chamber of Commerce back in 1969. He helped his parents, two curmudgeonly, Russian Jewish immigrants manage their dilapidated roadside motel, El Monaco. He also did whatever desperate things he could do to attract new business -- art house movie night, swinging singles night, pancake buffets, etc. Elliot also lived a dual existence -- he was a straight-arrow motel manager on weekdays, and a very gay, Manhattan art director/designer on weekends. Batman’s Bruce Wayne would’ve been tested by this frequent change of identity.

Tiber is known for a Holocaust book he wrote, High Street (popular in Europe) but is more broadly known as the brave soul who offered his small town of Bethel to Woodstock Ventures, Inc, for staging of the world-shaking ‘69 rock music festival. He endured racist assaults, nasty graffiti, mob extortion attempts and innumerable spit wads from various angry neighbors and greedy onlookers. He withstood these many trials, and Woodstock went forward.

Tiber actually coordinated things with good friend, neighbor and dairy farmer Max Yasgur two miles down the road from his motel. El Monaco was a cramped, 10 acre swamp; Yasgur’s Farm was hundreds of verdant acres in the natural shape of a sloped amphitheater. Tiber was blessed to have Yasgur on his side -- the rest of Bethel was ready to tar and feather him. I won’t go into the details of Woodstock -- we all know it was a sun-and-rain drenched festival of sex, drugs, music and self-discovery. It was quite possibly (as described in the book) the center of the universe in August 1969. Editorial aside -- Woodstock Ventures repaired all damages and even gave the City of Bethel a 25K donation. 3,000 workers were engaged for the cleanup effort after the landmark event was over. Woodstock put the small town on the map, and Tiber was fully vindicated by the success and handling of the event.

I like to see how a multi-dimensional book gets condensed to a credible, two hour screenplay. Tiber’s book is a detailed autobiography which covers everything from Hebrew schools and sisters’ weddings to gay, coming-of-age stories. Woodstock only occupies the last part of the story and is more the backdrop than the story itself. Ang Lee’s movie starts with Woodstock -- the festival is actually the main focus and Tiber’s family is nearly a side story. Also some colorful characters are compressed into one or two for the sake of brevity. I guess a movie narrative has to pick up the pace where a book can meander all over the place and still maintain the reader’s attention.

There were a couple of passages that caught my attention in the book (and more obliquely) in the movie. This almost made Taking Woodstock worthwhile all by itself… Tiber’s father was an elderly (75ish) Jewish man, tired and spent from a life of grueling labor putting tar on roofs. Tiber’s mother was portrayed unsympathetically as a loud, bossy, money-grubbing nag. You might think that Tiber’s father would be at his wit’s end. Also, just prior to the Woodstock contract the father had been diagnosed with colon cancer. You might think he'd be ready to fold up shop, then and there.

But Tiber Senior was so invigorated by the Woodstock event that he came almost supernaturally alive -- he directed traffic, hired temporary help, cooked mass quantities of food and helped protect the motel from various would-be evil-doers. This stoic, quiet conservative Jewish man became fast friends with Vilma -- a transsexual security guard hired to patrol El Monaco. In fact, he became friends with a host of people he previously might’ve shunned. His mind opened to a whole new world and he was blissfully blown away by it. The colon cancer finally caught up with him a year after Woodstock and he made a special request to Elliot on his death bed… “Bury me in the small cemetery next to Yasgur’s Farm, facing Woodstock. That’s the best time I ever had in my life.”

I don’t know what special epiphany, if any awaits me for my future life -- hopefully something will blow my socks off. Must add, it’s always preferable that doors open when you’re young and healthy, not at death’s door. But it’s somehow encouraging to know that something from the 11th hour of this man’s life gave it way more meaning and joy. His body was old, decrepit and diseased and yet he laughed and danced -- he probably tacked a good, very good eight months to his time left. I think it's possible for us to schlep through a whole life devoid of anything so rewarding -- perish that thought. If you have six hours to devote, you might listen to the (sometimes shocking) audio memoir. For a less jolting experience, you can still “turn on” to the two-hour movie and travel back to 1969’s center of the universe -- Woodstock and the El Monaco motel.

© 2010 blogSpotter

Confessions of a Know-it-all

2010-09-25T18:10:00.001-07:00

Strange Fascination now available as a PDF -- Picture by blogSpotter

by blogSpotter
About a month ago, I was at Starbucks typing away. I was on the blogger.com web site and one of my friends must’ve distracted me. I‘d filtered all my articles by topic and when I clicked to see them all again, they were gone. There was a moment of stark panic and my clothes were soaked with sweat. Had I just killed off 5 years worth of writing -- 415 entries? I knew from previous trials that deleted blogs are next-to-impossible to restore.

It turns out that I simply did a “suppress all” instead of a “view all”. It was still foolhardy of me to trust any single service up to this time with so much vital material – time to back it all up. The next day I went to another site, blog2print, and requested PDF files, as well as printed copies of the blogs. I saved and printed off all the blog articles but then I had to ponder (and still am pondering) … what exactly have I saved?

blogSpotter, aka Robert, is not a sought-after expert on any particular topic. I have a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and a Masters in Business Administration. I’ve tagged my articles by topic and only 34 are tagged as technology. Most of those are product reviews – nothing to do with hash code algorithms or quick sort. A paltry 17 articles are tagged as business. These are primarily aimed as political barbs and not really too concerned with the most-preferred mutual fund or the value of Chinese currency. In essence, I like to run on (and on) :-). 106 articles have been tagged as politics and 56 tagged as cinema. Maybe my real passion is political science or performing arts? But if you look at the topic list on http://strange-fascination.blogspot.com, you’ll notice that my observations are all over the map – even linguistics and health.

The one topic you won't see is sports. For some reason, my creator deemed that Robert – an adult, male Dallasite, should have no interest or involvement in sports whatsoever. And so it is. The only time I’ve ever found sports interesting is when there’s a story-behind-the-story such as with Tiger Woods’ marriage or Lance Armstrong dating Sheryl Crow. Let me add that I sincerely wish I had a sports interest but it’s not something you can fake.

blogSpotter has submitted his articles to publications like Slate a few times, only to be told “not at this time”. When I compare my silly 3-paragraph blurbs to the carefully researched and lengthy articles of George Will or Froma Harrop, I have to admit there’s a Q problem (that is, in the areas of quality and quantity). Great things have been said efficiently before. “Veni, vidi vici,” for instance. But everything is context and I’m not Julius Caesar.

When I first started blogging in 2005, I devoured The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. He made some excellent points which I promptly ignored… “Don’t be wordy and complex when a simple phrase suffices”. Rules are made to be broken and I figured that people need my pregnant, pedagogical paragraphs. As I’ve gone back and reread (and winced at) some entries, I have to admit that we have rules for a reason. Another rule from Style: “Murder your pets”. Don’t use favorite words or idioms to death. (In fact, don’t have favorites).

I have a virtual menagerie of pets that need strangling. Here are some words that have cropped up repeatedly in my blog articles:

Cultural touchstone
Mind-boggling
Postulation
Proposition
Screed
Sepia hues
Speculation

Can I help it that so many movies use subdued colors and “sepia hued” is so descriptive of that? I need to help it if I don’t want to seem like a retread. I’ll make one more remark before wrapping this up – brevity is the soul of wit as well as good communication. I’ve written a few too many “book reports” – carefully researched stories that are devoid of any revelation or personality. They tend to drone on without any stimulus so to speak. I won’t say which, because I want you to read them all… :-). I’ve also written a couple that might be punched up a little and make it to a publisher somewhere. See if you can find the needles in the haystack. And thanks to anyone and everyone who reads Strange Fascination with any regularity. The know-it-all who writes of himself in 3rd person might occasionally know at least something.

© 2010 blogSpotter

Robert's Comedy Pantheon

2010-09-18T20:04:00.001-07:00

It's a Tie -- Pictures courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter

Preface
I had another article all ready for publication (my historical magnum opus on John Wilkes Booth). Then upon reading it, I fell soundly asleep – and I’m the author. I don’t do ‘book reports’ and yet that’s what it was – a bore, a snore and a dismal fact dump. Think I do better sometimes when I “pull it out of my ass” as David Letterman describes Dr. Phil’s advice. You may still get a highly revised John Wilkes Booth story later, but for now, from out of my ass, is Robert’s Comedy Pantheon…...

Comedy Heroes
I love standup comedy and I’ll normally stop what I’m doing to catch a good stand-up act on Leno, Letterman or Comedy Central. I have 6 favorites on my iPod: Kathy Griffin, Patton Oswalt, Jim Gaffigan, Wanda Sykes, Lisa Lampanelli and Lewis Black. I’ve noticed an interesting thing: Some comics I’ll listen to repeatedly and some annoy me after one or two listenings. Herewith, I’ll rate these guys based on originality, delivery, “No fear” factor and a fourth “Je ne sais quoi” catch-all category for miscellaneous things. This is a little out of my usual comfort zone, like when I rated hamburgers (Whataburger was #1); sometimes we have to break out of the mold dammit. Now let’s look at our list of comics …

#1 Kathy Griffin – I already blogged about Kathy. I love her show, My Life on the D List, and here’s a short blurb why. She doesn’t flinch from anything be it her mother drinking a box of wine or Barbara Walters using Astro-glide. She has sacrificed relationships for comedy material – that’s a person dedicated to the cause. She’s nearly fearless, plumbs lots of new material and has a great delivery. She’s dubbed herself an “honorary gay man” and done a trip to Iraq to entertain troops. Last but not least she said, “Jesus can suck it” when getting an Emmy. Christians everywhere, it was a joke meant to shock. Shock it did – I think Jesus is probably over it, I don’t know about everyone else.

#1 (it’s a tie) Patton Oswalt – I’ve also blogged about Patton Oswalt. His near schizo bits about dying in the George Bush Apocalypse, Physics for Poets or Stelladora Breakfast treats but him in the super-brave, uber original category. I truly think he’s brilliant. Much like a poet laureate, he has tremendous command of English (he majored in English) and he fairly spills his guts in talking about various observations and insecurities. He’s comedy gold that everyone should enjoy. He’s played a lovable loser in shows like King of Queens, so he’s someone to enjoy on many levels.

#2 Jim Gaffigan – Jim is a tall, sardonic nearly albino comedy actor and stand-up artist who makes wry, dry observations about everyday life. He doesn’t take on show-biz or political giants as do Kathy and Patton. His comedy is more likely to highlight his wife, coworkers, fans or people he meets on the street. He speaks of the man at K-Mart who was drinking a cup of gravy. He speaks again of sleeping so long he’s tired when he wakes up. He has a running gag on Hot Pocket sandwiches. He’s extremely self-deprecating and makes a lot of jokes about his paleness and perceived lack of sex appeal. He even produced a cartoon short called Pale Force featuring him and Conan O’Brien. Jim is hilarious – he’s been all over TV and movies (Sex and the City, Going the Distance). Check out his stand-up routine on CD if you want to see him up-close and personal.

#3 Wanda Sykes – Wanda is the wry, sarcastic (now recently out) black woman who’s known more as a comedy actress. She plays the sidekick on shows like New Adventures of Old Christine but has also appeared on many shows like those of Chris Rock and Bill Maher. Her stand-up comedy is fairly blue and people who know her from sitcoms might be “shocked and appalled” at things like a detachable vagina and similar stuff. She also riffs on racial themes (“white people commit more crimes but don’t get caught”) which are pretty good in context. Her delivery has a grating, know-it-all aspect to it that starts to annoy me on the second listen. Also, I disagree that Nasa should be canceled – I’m a space nerd that likes that program. Have to say I probably disagree with a couple of her pet issues. She’s not “out there” in the ether of Left Field like Patton, Kathy or Jim so not as entertaining to me.

#4 Lewis Black – There was a time when I thought Lewis Black was so funny, I’ve blogged about him before. Then I realized a couple of things (one which Seth McFarland pointed out on Family Guy)… he yells his punch lines as if the yelling will embellish the humor. It’s novel and funny until it becomes completely annoying. What I also noticed is that he’s kind of a wuss on subject matter. He attacks innocuous things like candy corn and adults who dress up at Halloween. (Yawn). He goes after politicians like George Bush and Rick Santorum long after there are any comedy credits for bravery or astuteness (and after everyone else has already piled on). Otherwise, he’s actually fairly apolitical and to be honest, a little boring.

#5 Lisa Lampanelli – This loudmouth Italian woman is a little too old (48-ish) and big to be categorized as a comedy ho or bimbo. She’s discovered a comedy mother lode by being an equal opportunity offender to every racial and sexual minority. She goes on at length about “gooks, spics and butt pirates” and most of her targets take it in good fun. Her “ticket” if you will is that she craves black men and gay men are her best friends. She’s very self-deprecating so that a self-demolition gives license for an everyone-else-demolition. I think some people will be offended to be honest. I have to admit I laughed by butt off the first time I listened to her Queen of Mean. Then on second listening I realized that she (like Lewis Black) yells her jokes – she also recycles a lot. How many times can you replay black, gay or Asian stereotypes without sounding like a broken record? She’s funny but it’s a one-listen, one-trick pony.

So there you have it – Robert’s Comedy Pantheon. I didn’t include dead people (George Carlin) and I didn’t include people who primarily host (Conan O’Brien) or act (Ben Stiller). The world of funny people is a densely populated one when you consider everyone there is. My list of comics above might seem pretty left field – these guys probably won’t be appearing in Branson, MO anytime soon. blogSpotter would be interested in knowing who else is funny that I might’ve overlooked. The world can be sort of gray and dull at times – let’s hear it for the people who make us laugh.

© 2010 blogSpotter

The Second Incarnation of Apple TV

2010-09-08T12:45:00.000-07:00

Is it a must-have now? -- Picture courtesy of Apple

by blogSpotter
As a consummate Apple fan, I’d be remiss not to comment on Apple’s latest round of product announcements regarding iPod and Apple TV. As regular readers know, I’ve purchased almost (but not quite) every product Apple offers – sometimes in multiple colors and configurations. What’s that you say? Too much time and money on my hands? Maybe so. Let me clarify that I don’t buy everything Apple. Things I’ve bypassed: MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, G4 Cube and the 2009 voice-over shuffle. These things are variously redundant, over-priced, gimmicky or ill-conceived. So there you have it – I draw the line at some things Apple!

Before tackling Apple TV (aka, ATV), I’d like to comment on the new iPod lineup. I knew that iPad might introduce product-line cannibalism earlier this year, and it looks like it did. It created a wave that dipped its way through the high end of the iPod lineup. iPod Touch users gravitated over to the large, splashy iPad. Nano users had already been migrating to iPod Touch – it’s slightly more expensive than Nano with way more features including wi-fi. Apple decided to address these drifts by basically eliminating the Nano as we know it. The new Nano is a small, music-only device the size of a York Peppermint patty. They’ve dumped all TV and movies as well as the video camera. I think that’s a lot of good functionality to dump in one swoop.

The new Nano is for all practical purposes a gussied-up touch screen Shuffle. The basic Shuffle has been restored to its 2008 clip-on style, with no screen. Can’t help thinking that the oblong, bright-colored 2009 video Nano has a reasonable following and market. Maybe in September 2011, they’ll replace the basic Shuffle with what is now the new 2010 Nano. Then bring back the 2009 video Nano – it really has a following believe it or not. blogSpotter hates to admit he owns four of these (in kiwi green, emerald green, blue & purple). One or two will be gifted shortly.

About the Apple TV – I’ve blogged about it a couple of times now, and I own the original 2007 version. My complaint all along has been that ATV is too limited – it mostly restricts you to iTunes offerings (e.g. a standard definition, recently released movie for $3.99 or $4.99 in HD format). I was hoping they’d throw the doors open wide to Boxee, Hulu, Netflix and other non-Apple Internet offerings. In fact, a hacker group provided that capacity in the last couple of years but it was a non-Apple-approved hack. Apple doesn’t treat hackers kindly – the penalty imposed for a hack (be it on the iPhone or ATV) is that hackers must disavow and overwrite the installed hack if they want any future upgrade to the OS.

The 2010 ATV has a few significant changes (albeit less than I expected) ...

• It now includes Netflix (with a beautiful ATV interface)… that was on my wish list above
• It’s a rent-only model – there’s no hard drive and nothing can be purchased.
• TV shows are now rentable at 99 cents per episode
• It’s small enough now to hold in one hand
• The price has been reduced to $99

These features are a mixed bag. The absence of a hard drive will allow the always-on device to stay cool. The current ATV has no on/off button – it goes into a standby mode where it remains hot enough to fry an egg. I’ll look forward to coolness. The small sizing is always good for fitting into a crowded video component shelf. The Netflix saves me from using an HDMI switch to another device like Wii or Samsung blu-ray.

I only rent nowadays, so the rent-only restriction won’t bother me – but still it’s taking away the purchase option that some people might’ve enjoyed using. I’m a little surprised that they didn’t open it up further to other entertainment venues – ATV may get cannibalized by its sibling product, the new Mac Mini which offers an HDMI connection now. With Mac Mini, you could use Front Row and Safari to see anything from iTunes and anything on the Internet (including Adobe Flash apps).

Mac nerd that I am, I might buy ATV for the Netflix convenience and because the prior ATV will no longer receive software upgrades. If you already have a good digital cable service (say, Time Warner or Comcast), you probably already have a good selection of recent-release pay-per-view movies in the $3.99 -$4.99 range. If you have that and Wii, the ATV would be kind of redundant. If you want to open up the whole world of streaming entertainment and have a mac computer too, the Mac Mini might fill the bill. Stand by for later ramblings after I obtain the touch-screen Nano (probably red this time) and yes, the new $99 Apple TV.

© 2010 blogSpotter

Dallas' Weed Garden

2010-08-28T19:59:00.000-07:00

Highway to hell -- Picture by blogSpotter

by blogSpotter
North Central Expressway is a main traffic artery in Dallas, Texas. It connects downtown Dallas to downtown McKinney. It was conceived by Dallas city planner (and visionary) George Kessler as far back as 1911 and officially proposed in 1924 -- the idea was to repurpose the Houston-Texas Central Railroad tracks as a new expressway for cars. The proposal met with political opposition from various interest groups but finally came to fruition; the grand new expressway opened in 1950. The cramped 4-lane highway with tiny on-ramps and egresses was pathetically inadequate for midcentury traffic when it opened.

It didn't extend thru Richardson until 1956, and commuters had to contend with the short-comings of North Central "Distressway" for another 30 years, until a 600 million dollar renovation plan was hatched in the early 1980's. The ambitious plan called for North Central to be replaced with a long trench, using cantilevered access roads to compensate for the still-narrow right-of-way for any new construction. The widening of Central from LBJ northward to Legacy took place from 1986 thru 1990. The widening of Central southward from LBJ to Woodall Rogers took place from 1992 thru 1999 -- on time and within budget.

The completed highway won national kudos for being a distinctive and cutting-edge example of modern highway architecture. North Central was beautiful -- a concrete sculpture of air columns dancing amid articulated earth-toned walls, and clean, sweeping expanses of underpasses accented with beautiful, drought-tolerant Texas landscaping. When the last part was opened in 1999, people would drive on the new expressway just to "ooh" and "aah" at Dallas' classiest new piece of infrastructure. If the highway weren't enough, the expanded overpasses were also "whomped" up with modern sculptures, paver stones, and additional beautiful landscaping -- notably on Caruth, Mockingbird, Monticello and Knox Streets.

Now let us flash forward to today, 2010. If you are driving, as I do, from Monticello southward to the Central entrance ramp, you will be surely aghast at what you see. Here's a tire and a bit of a car bumper. Yonder way is a light pole that was smashed and inadequately replaced -- crumbling cement and tire marks to tell the tale of an intoxicated driver. All along the way, weeds peer thru cracks, seams and crevices -- little botanical pests that could surely be dispatched with a single squirt of Round-up weed killer. Here's a Bud Lite bottle and there is a to-go box from Pei Wei. Along the entire route, you wonder if Dallas drives drunk much of the time. Collision streaks and blackened wall patches belie any concept of a tranquil city.

Drive across the many bridges and you see where someone threw in the maintenance towel. Sculpture balls are smashed and stay in ruins. Landscape (e.g, ground cover vines) were first allowed to grow frenetically past their planter box boundaries, then parched to death in the searing Texas heat. If you look now, the only plant life that survives at all are extremely hardy creatures of the heat and defiant weeds. Some portions of the Expressway look post-apocalyptic -- you might wonder if a neutron bomb went off somewhere and the inhabitants left the area for a safe room somewhere.

This blog author must confess ignorance -- I'm not at all certain which level of city, county or state governance controls the appearance and maintenance of this highway. I'd think that TxDOT has a hand in it. The overpasses have some personalization and influence of the Park Cities, e.g. municipal banners flying -- I'd think cities have some say. The Dallas Morning News ran an article in the last year in which the North Central landscaping was described as a first casualty of Dallas' tax collection shortfall. Such a shame. Here are blogSpotter's recommendation's to overcome our civic shame:

o Remove all debris from vehicular accidents
o Remove all trash
o Repair crumbled sculptures and concrete walls
o Repaint large and near-continuous patches of blackened wall
o Weed-kill the many million weeds
o Remove dead plants. If there is no intention of watering, pave over else replace the dead plants.

Do all of these things on a regular basis, not just when it becomes a public embarrassment and people start asking about it.

When the 2011 Super Bowl comes to the DFW area in February '11, the whole world will be tuning in to our metroplex. Every part of town will be on national, even international TV cameras. Do we want people asking what kind of Trailer Trash mentality has begat North Central? Do we want to rehatch stereotypes of southern cities as tax-and-civic deprived enclaves of arrogance and myopia? blogSpotter suspects not. Let's beautify North Central while there is still time.

© 2010 blogSpotter

The History of Porn

2010-08-18T13:00:00.001-07:00

Selling sex -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Don’t worry, the title is just a teaser – no intentions of giving you a long history of anything. I’m too lazy. But I will talk about pornography (we all know it when we see it) and some of its historical underpinnings. Porn joins capital punishment and meat-eating as a disturbingly gray subject for me. I usually like to give black-and-white pronouncements and some matters defy that. With capital punishment, I wonder if we too often kill an innocent man -- are we killing to show that killing is wrong? In my final analysis, I’m OK with it if there’s overwhelming evidence of a first degree murder. We might even be doing the killer a favor, delivering him from a private Hell of violent, confused thoughts. With our carnivorism, I wonder if the animals don’t suffer diminished lives and horrid slaughterhouse deaths. At the end of the day, I’m a “flexitarian” who eats meat (mostly fish and poultry) along with lots of fruits and vegetables. To assuage my guilt, I give to animal charities and have even given to PETA.

Now as to pornography – it encompasses every shade of gray. Pornography is as old as civilization; some rock art and cave paintings have been interpreted as early porn. It seems our minds have always been in the gutter. Up until the 19th century though, pornography was centered more in the domain of “erotic art” and was enjoyed by privileged groups (e.g., clergy and nobility). Telegraph and railroad trains of the 1800’s brought about mass-marketing where books and magazines became inexpensive and generally available to the public. Photography emerged in this same time, and the world of smut was upon us.

Pornography wasn’t even coined as a word until the mid 19th century. The English Parliament rushed to protect the masses with the Obscene Publications Act of 1857. Victorian archaeologists of the 1860’s were so shocked by the lude Roman artifacts discovered at Pompeii, they were locked away in the “Secret Museum” of Naples, only to be unveiled years later. Many new layers of legal definitions and complexity have been piled on in decades since the 1850’s. If anything, we are probably even more confused as a people regarding things like legal age or what constitutes a sex act or pornography itself.

Pornography did have staying power, and it survived the Victorian instincts to stifle its nature. It could be argued that the stifling engendered more of porn’s popularity – the phenomenon of the forbidden fruit. A federal study of 1970 showed that pornography was a $10 million industry. Similar studies in 2001 put the figure at $4 billion. A more recent study by the Forrester group puts the number at $8-10 billion annually. Porn has ridden every technology wave, starting with the printing press and photography in the distant past. In recent years, pornography has been an industry leader in technical innovation. It was a deciding factor in the VHS-Betamax battle as well as the BluRay-HD DVD battle. Porn has been an active player, not just a sideline observer in all the recent developments: satellite TV, DVD, Internet and wireless communication.

So what can we make of all this -- is pornography friend or foe? Pornography has some entrenched enemies. Politics makes strange bed fellows because the most strident opponents to porn are militant feminists and religious conservatives. Feminists focus on the “subjugation of women” when it fact porn is an equal opportunity offender – it subjugates men, women, animals, sometimes children and even inanimate objects depending on the genre. We can draw lines obviously against bestiality, kiddy porn and snuff movies. But at the other extreme we can throw canvas covers over the photos of Robert Mapplethorpe or the naked Venus de Milo. Somewhere in that murky middle is where the porn-loving populace dwells. They derive tawdry thrills from (generally) young adults who don’t mind doing private things publicly.

As with capital punishment, I see both sides of the issue. Can’t help but think that misguided youths are trashing a future career as President or CIO when they frolic though these videos or photo spreads. On the other hand, I can’t claim to be innocent of seeing these exhibitions at length. There is no black or white delineation – just gray, gray, gray. It’s difficult to assume one strident side of these issues without alternately being seen as insensitive, intolerant, hypocritical, fanatical or unrealistic.

Thus I’ll continue eating poultry, contributing to PETA, feeling safer when an avowed killer is removed from our presence, and viewing or reading adult subject matter if it’s in my face and hard to ignore. A college roommate once said, “If they’re willing to show it, I’m willing to look”. There are too many people who feel that way (unfortunately including me :-)).

© 2010 blogSpotter

Leap Vacation

2010-08-10T06:52:00.001-07:00

A vacation to remember -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
PERSONAL JOURNAL

I'm on the last day of an extremely fun family vacation. We had a family reunion in Corpus Christi, Texas and I may finally get the names straight for my many cousins and second cousins. We had a boat ride through Corpus Christi Bay -- it was very invigorating (and slightly bruising). We also had a couple of cookouts and lots of reminiscing.

My trusty iPad kept me current with all my email. In fact, the iPad did something no other device has done -- it invited an accusation from a relative: "You'd rather sit with your iPad than visit the old neighborhood!". My iPad has become that much of a distraction. We're back in Round Rock tonight, looking at available videos on demand. That brings me to our blog topic ...

MOVIE STUFF

In days of old, I used to read TV Guide, where I'd enjoy the wit of movie critics Judith Crist and Cleveland Amory. I remember Crist in particular described one movie as an enjoyable "trash wallow". She went on further to elaborate that movies do not have to justify themselves...

Paraphrasing Crist, movies do not have to educate or edify. They don't have to send a message or inspire noble thoughts. They certainly don't have to win awards. Trashy movies that immediately spring to mind are "Valley of the Dolls" and "Plan 9 from Outer Space". These movies are entertaining more than anything else -- they've helped forge a new category of movie, one so bad that it's good.

If the movie stimulates belly laughs or provokes any kind of curiosity it has done its main thing -- take the viewer out of humdrum existence and transport him to a new place. Think of it as a virtual, two hour vacation. I love cult movies ("Rocky Horror") and silly movies ("Step Brothers"). It's also hard to go wrong with any of the Ace Ventura movies floating around. Sometimes silly will surprise you with some wisdom or life lessons you didn't expect (sort of like Cocoa Puffs with vitamins added). "Step Brothers" actually had a good message about misplaced priorities.

For the last part of the vacation, my brother and I visited my mother in Round Rock, Texas. We watched two movies -- "Leap Year" and "Hot Tub Time Machine". "Hot Tub Time Machine" was purely juvenile and maybe no redeeming qualities. That being said, it's worth the rental fee if you like a comedic twist on time travel laced with the F word. "Leap Year" is a romantic chick flick which matches a tightly wound, American priss (Amy Adams) against a laid back Irish pub owner (Matthew Goode). Their car trip to Dublin is an odyssey fraught with cows on the loose, car problems, highway robbery, missed trains and other mishaps. All is set against the beautiful backdrop of Ireland -- a green, hilly utopia that I need to visit some day. The movie is a classic formula, served up with terrific nuance and originality. You know how it will end, but enjoy the ride nonetheless.

I feel the need to apologize for not being more current with the blog. I'll be back in Dallas shortly, and have burned through all my vacation -- should be good for a steadier blog schedule as soon as I get back.

© 2010 blogSpotter

Obamanomics in the Great Recession

2010-07-26T12:19:00.000-07:00

Building a Dam -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Pundits have made many comparisons between the Great Recession of 2008-2010 and the Great Depression of the 1930’s. While recent events have been scary and unsettling, 2010 doesn’t even approach the gravity of 1932. From 1929 to 1932, industrial production fell 45%. 5,000 banks folded and 25% of all workers (37% of all nonfarm workers) were unemployed. 2010 is a walk in the park compared to that.

There are similarities – in 2008, the machinery of capitalism did slip into near-neutral. Several major investment banks failed; GM and Chrysler had to be bailed out by Uncle Sam and unemployment flirted with the 10% mark. The Obama administration took a page from Franklin Roosevelt and attempted to right the situation with Keynesian pump-priming – a nearly $1 trillion stimulus package. The results seem middling to poor on recent review; it might be good to take a look back at FDR’s New Deal, particularly its largest agency, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to see how that model worked out.

The WPA was created in 1935 as part of the Emergency Relief Appropriation – enacted overwhelmingly by a House vote of 329 to 78. Across 8 years (1935-1943) WPA provided jobs to 8 million Americans and at one point was the largest employer in America. WPA created bridges, school buildings, utility infrastructure, lodges, libraries, theaters and many other public works throughout the nation. Nearly every town and hamlet in America enjoys the WPA legacy. Some national landmarks (LA’s Griffith Observatory and Oregon’s famous Timberline Lodge) owe their existence to WPA. The University of Texas at Austin has many beautiful Spanish-Mediterranean classroom buildings built by WPA. White Rock Lake here in Dallas has distinctive docks, bridges, gazebos, expanded Lawther Drive and a Bath House all created by either WPA or its companion program, Civiilian Conservation Corps (for teens and young adults).

WPA had limitations built into it. Employees could not work more than 30 hours/week, and only one member of a household could be an employee. Average annual wage was $1,200 (decent money for an otherwise unemployed, depression-era family). Despite these impositions, WPA lifted many people out of poverty and despair. 17% of the national black population was employed by WPA; in Mississippi, 60% of the WPA female employees had no husbands (they were divorced, separated, widowed or deserted); they were helped enormously by WPA.

By 1937, John Keynes’ economic theory had worked much of its magic – production, profit and wages were restored to 1929 levels. The government’s largesse gave dispossessed people spending money and indirectly created demand in the private economy. This pleasant state was oddly short-lived -- there was a Great Recession in 1937 which would compare to our 2010 debacle. Republicans in 1937 were hoping to wield the downturn as a weapon against FDR in the 1940 Presidential Election. Economists felt at the time (and more so since) that Congress was too quick in declaring success – a series of program cuts and tax increases had been implemented @ 1936 to curtail the growing deficit. A recovery was brought about in mid-1938 with farm subsidies and newly funded WPA projects. Full recovery to employment wasn’t achieved until war-time spending of 1941, but that’s not an indictment against FDR or the New Deal. Most of FDR’s programs struggled for Congressional passage and funding following 1936, despite his personal popularity.

WPA was savaged in the 1930’s much as Obama’s Stimulus package is today. WPA was accused of being the ultimate socialistic Pork Barrel spending, a bodacious, out-of-control buying of votes. In the 1930’s it was also seen as entrenching the power of labor unions. The exact same critiques are leveled today, and frequently met with the same Keynesian reply of yesteryear – there’s actually not enough priming of the pump. Noted economist Paul Krugman maintains that the trillion dollar stimulus of 2008-2009 was a decent first volley, but not nearly enough to fix things. A spending retrenchment at this point might send us in precisely the wrong direction.

What to make of the WPA, historically? In general, it did much to restore personal pride and economic balance to our nation. 1920’s Capitalism had failed us utterly, and the only pre-FDR remedies were bread lines and charitable giving. WPA gave a constructive way out of a destructive situation. What’s more, WPA made something very clear – that people are more important than money, things or even hallowed institutions when said institutions are unfathomable failures. Let’s hope that the lucidity of that message stays with us in the 2010 mid-terms. We don’t want to relive the 1930’s.

© 2010 blogSpotter

The Candy Man

2010-07-18T19:08:00.001-07:00

Wonka gives us truth dipped in chocolate -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
When I was very young, I saw two categories of movie -- movies that were on television, and movies that my mother particularly wanted to see. That leaves out a wide swath of movies from the period before I had a driver's license and ticket money. I've recently seen "Wicker Man" and "Butterflies Are Free" from my early teen era, via Netflix. Both were smaller budget movies, very big in their quality and respective messages.

Another movie I finally saw was 1971's "Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory". I have to admit that as a self-conscious 14 year old, I probably would never have sought this movie out. I figured it was a silly musical about a magical chocolate factory and nothing really compelled me towards it. With 40 years' hindsight, "Wonka" was and is a movie well worth seeing. The movie has a very adult sensibility about it -- in places I thought maybe I was watching a Monty Python sketch or a John Waters movie. In fact, children were warned away from a couple of scary sequences which reminded me of "Clockwork Orange" or some other surreality meant mainly for adult eyes.

Wonka has characters (e.g., Oompa Loompas), words and tag phrases that follow us around today, much akin to the witticisms of Oscar Wilde or the characters' remarks from "Alice in Wonderland". My favorite, when the characters were stuck in a narrow hallway Willie says, "Sometimes you have to go backward to go forward".

"Wonka" was based on "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" -- written by Roald Dahl in 1964. Dalh also wrote "James and the Giant Peach" as well as many other works written for all different ages. In "Wonka", five children win golden tickets for a personal tour of the chocolate factory. The children (except for Charlie) are variously bratty, fool-hearty, gluttonous or stupid. I wondered if Dahl was pointing up the Seven Sins of Catholicism but who knows. Each of the naughty children meets with unpleasantness. One gets sent to a fudge boiler for drinking from the chocolate river. Another goes to the berry juicing room to be "dejuiced" after ignoring Wonka's warning about a test piece of chewing gum. Yet a third (bratty rich girl) goes down a garbage chute for bad eggs. A fourth lad gets transduced to a tiny ken-doll size after toying with Wonkavision.

Charlie emerges as the only one who isn't obstinate, bratty or greedy. He also resists temptations to sell Wonka's Gobsmacker factory secret to a rival candy maker Slugworth. For this, he wins Wonka's faith and is made heir to the entire chocolate factory. I've left out many details in this condensing of the tale. Each child has an adult guardian on tour with him, exhibiting the same character defects as the child and meeting the same fate as the respective child. Charlie is accompanied by has kindly grandfather where most of the children have a mother or father.

"Wonka" met with criticism from all directions when it came out. People in the children's literature business were horrified that a children's tale would have so much negativity -- primarily children going to metaphorical if not literal deaths. One boat ride through a tunnel has scary images flashed across the screen, though nothing actually too alarming.

Roald Dahl was originally a screen writer for the movie but was diverted to another project. The final edit was done without Dahl and he was unhappy with the end result, right down to the title. He thought there was too much emphasis on Willie Wonka and not on Charlie, the intended hero. He didn't like a scene where Charlie and his grandfather must belch their ways down from a ceiling (after drinking a test soda pop that makes you float in the air). Dahl was livid enough that he ceased working with the production company and wouldn't allow them to do his sequel, "Charlie and the Glass Elevator".

I thought that "Wonka" was excellent (particularly Gene Wilder in the title role), but have one minor plot quibble. I'm assuming the story is some type of allegory as are many children's stories. The four children who are variously shrunk, boiled, dejuiced and trashed are mostly guilty of impatience and gluttony. When Charlie and his grandfather drink the test soda, they've basically committed the same faux pas with about the same type of motivation. The only difference is maybe one of style -- Charlie isn't as snarky or mean as the other kids. OK, if Willie Wonka is a God-metaphor then maybe we can all take comfort -- you get points for not being snarky or mean.

If you get a chance, "Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" is well worth viewing. The Netflix version was excellent quality. Extra musical bonus -- you'll soon recognize the theme song from a current AT&T commercial and be grooving to the song "Candy Man" (which was also a 1972 Sammy Davis Jr hit song).

© 2010 blogSpotter

Aquarian Afternoon

2010-07-06T13:47:00.000-07:00

Hippie chic -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
I grew up in a transitional time -- a little too young for the '60's hippie movement and too old to really appreciate a lot of today's popular culture (still not into hip hop). As a UT freshman in 1975, I wanted desperately to be a hippie. This was in spite of the fact that the whole movement was mainstream and passé by that point. Also, I had an Air Force retiree dad who couldn't tolerate his youngest son looking like a pot head. So alas, I allowed my hippiedom to be squelched.

What exactly is a hippie? The American incarnation is as recent as 1965 (when the New York Times first used the term hippie in an article), although the concept of peace-loving non-conformity goes as far back as Jesus, Buddha or St. Francis of Assisi. Even here in America, there was a group in the early 1900's known as Der Wandervogel -- a communal group of German immigrants who promoted health food and looked down on crass materialism. The word hippie comes from hipster and that word is only as recent as the 1940's. Just prior to the 1960's, we had the "Beat Generation" of the '50's, championed by maverick poets and writers like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Ginsberg was best known for his poem Howl and Kerouac was known for On the Road written like a personal journal. Both men promoted the concepts of personal and sexual freedom -- dramatic ideas for the fifties.

The full-on hippie movement came to us in the mid 60's and was probably a socially organic response to things like the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War and the dull, programmed sameness of American suburbs like Levittown. We were a pugilistic, materialistic society on the brink -- the hippie movement just might have saved us from our vacuous, vapid and hell-bent selves. Hippies questioned everything -- middle class values, nuclear weapons, polluting industries, eating meat and many other American traditions. Hippies also promoted mind expansion through psycho-active drugs and alternative religions. To a buttoned-down Methodist from Midland, this might all seem shocking but in retrospect it seems much like a cure for what ailed such a blinders-on society. Not to say we should all be hippies, but it might just be that they opened our minds and our eyes to some more constructive ideas.

The implicit idealism of the hippie movement was short-lived. Pragmatism and Idealism can't be dance partners for very long, and pragmatism usually prevails. San Francisco became overrun with homeless people, seeking the "free stores" and handouts that happened mostly in 1967's Summer of Love. A woman was stabbed to death at 1969's Altamont Concert (which featured the Rollins Stones). Students were shot by the National Guard at a 1970 Kent State protest and numerous rock luminaries succumbed to drug overdoses (Rock and Roll Heaven welcomed Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix among many others). Some hippies were being tracked by the FBI's COINTELPRO although as a group, hippies tended toward expression through lifestyle rather than strident political involvement. Still, the movement had lost much of its steam by the early 1970's.

Something else happened too, which is a credit to the hippie movement and a blessing to the world. America listened to the music -- much of the counter culture message was heard and became a part of our mainstream world. Our society became more open-minded. LGBT people have more freedom to live openly and young couples can live together without fear of ostracism. Religious and cultural diversity are more accepted -- diversity is a mantra of most companies and city councils. Health food which was once the domain of liberal fanatics is now a large-scale, profitable business for companies like Whole Foods.

I can imagine some friends and relatives who would pale at the idea of gay, American Buddhists eating Kashi cereal with oats and drinking green tea. I'm hoping that these friends and relatives will someday open their hearts and minds to the Aquarian Age, which is now in its middle age. When students and protestors levitated the Pentagon in 1967, they chanted, "The whole world is watching". I think in some sense they did levitate the Pentagon and the whole world was watching. In spite of what you might think about how the Vietnam War was resolved, it's good that hippies gave us a "none of the above" option for our conduct of foreign policy and conduct of life in general.

© 2010 blogSpotter

iPad, Up Close and Personal

2010-06-26T18:22:00.000-07:00

Jobs holding his greatest creation -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Today's blog is a follow-up to my earlier article (@ January 2010) about the iPad. When it came out, I was fairly optimistic -- I'm an Apple fanboy and will usually give them the benefit of the doubt on anything. In the May timeframe, I decided to buy one; the 3G version was finally available. But it wasn't really available yet -- Apple began shipping to nine other nations about a week after 3G came out. Every model was in short supply and even people ordering on-line were told, "Allow 7-10 days for shipping".

Of course, this made me want it all the more. Who said that I can't fall for the oldest marketing ploy in the book? Across a 5 week period, I kept asking personnel if they had any iPads on-hand. It was like a junky looking for his fix. The Dallas Knox Street Apple store just happened to have 2 Wi-Fi/3G's in stock last week -- a 32GB and a 64GB. The 64GB was exactly what I wanted, and I closed the deal! With taxes, it approached $900, but for a tricked-out Apple gizmo that's a bargain.

I've had it in my hands for about 11 days now. I don't know if it's love or techno-lust, but must say it's probably the most fun I've had with a new toy in ages. "Toy" is a bit of a understatement -- after all, I'm happily creating this blog on the iPad using iWork Pages and a bluetooth keyboard. This iPad is a workhorse when it wants to be. This brings me to a first (and primary) thing I like about iPad -- it's the Rich Little of computing devices. It can be a showy, over-sized iPod Touch when it wants to be. And it can be a highly competent netbook when that's the requirement.

I've been somewhat annoyed at gadget makers who assume that smaller is always better. No handheld device should be smaller than a deck of playing cards. Devices that use finger touch (as opposed to pen or stylus) present a challenge for those of us with middle-aged eyes and stubby fingers too. The iPad is extremely helpful and forgiving about these things. Don't want to necessarily call it an iTouch for old people but if the orthopedic shoe fits, what the hey. :-)

The "iTouch for Old Coots" moniker would actually leave out much of what there is to love. Virtually every iPhone/iTouch built-in app, and easily 25-33% of 3rd-party apps have been reworked for iPad to take advantage of the comparatively big, beautiful screen. As Jason Snell of "Macworld" pointed out, this has created the best of both worlds, almost a Goldilocks solution in some cases. The best example is iTunes, which on the iTouch is a miserly, cramped little app. You can't do much and you have to scroll and tap frequently to do what you can do. iTunes on Mac/PC is another extreme -- a confusing, busy montage of buttons, panels, movie trailers and what-not. A newbie could be lost right away looking at it. The iPad iTunes app is "just right". It gives you what you want, what you actually need and not a lot of excess.

I have an inCase Folio cover for my iPad, which makes it look like an ordinary day planner from across the room. It protects the screen when not in use and provides a terrific stand for blogging and typing (as I'm doing now). The iPad travels with me as easily as a light binder or journal book. It's easy to flip open anywhere, at almost any angle. Doesn't require a lighted desktop for quick correspondence or checking of email.

I'd be remiss not to also mention that I signed up for the less expensive AT&T 3G data plan which gives me 250MB of data streaming/month. I had one minor bump at signup -- there was a 90 minute gap between me entering my credit card data and when the service actually started. During that period I was getting a 3G icon, but being told I was out of bytes for the month. Something could probably be done to make the signup more seamless and painless. That being said, I love the 3G. It is jerky and poor for movies and video but I wouldn't use it for that ordinarily anyway. It gives me internet anywhere, anytime with no blocked sites -- a lot to be said for that and a lot of uses keep coming to mind.

All told, the iPad is a little piece of genius. It's no wonder they sell one every few seconds around the world. With iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad, Apple Inc. keeps showing us that they have the technical and creative prowess to fire all of our imaginations well into the 21st century.

© 2010 blogSpotter

Pogo the Killer Clown

2010-06-17T15:25:00.000-07:00

Gacy dressed as Pogo -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
If you’re 40 or older, you probably recall the grisly details of the John Wayne Gacy murders. He was apprehended in 1978 after the bodies of 26 young men (mostly teens) were found buried in the crawl space of his Norwood Park home in Illinois. Seven others were found variously buried near his garage or dumped into the Des Plaines River (which he used after the crawl space filled up). These ghastly deeds were executed across six years (1972-1978) and Mr. Gacy cheated fate several times – from the missteps of police and potential witnesses.

Gacy was one of three children in a middle class family of Polish descent. People have tried to reason away Gacy’s atrocities as the result of an abusive alcoholic father, possibly an injury caused by a swing striking his head in a childhood accident or an alleged sexual molestation that he suffered at the age of nine. But forensic psychiatrists examined his brain after his execution at age 52 and found no obvious abnormalities.

What surprises one in looking at Gacy’s story is the almost-Horatio Alger success quality that gloms to it, in the early years. Right out of college, he became a department manager for Nunn-Bush shoes in Springfield, Illinois. He married a coworker, Marilynn Myers, and fathered two children – a boy and a girl. He then moved to Waterloo, Iowa where his father-in-law elevated him to district manager of 3 KFC restaurants. Here, his extroverted personality led him to become vice president of the Waterloo Jaycees.

At this juncture, the Horatio Alger story is interrupted. It seems the Jaycees operated a secretive “swingers” club which introduced Gacy to extramarital partners and a world of new kinks. Gacy created his own sex club in the basement of a KFC restaurant and lured his male teenage staff into the “dungeon” where they were plied with alcohol and cigarettes. Two local boys testified that Gacy had molested them; Gacy was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in the Iowa Penitentiary. His wife also divorced him at this point, and he never saw his children again. Gacy was a model prisoner, promoted to Head Cook, and released after only two years in 1970.

If only that were the end, but sadly this is where Gacy’s horrific spree commenced -- when he was paroled and then returned to Illinois. He married a second time, to a friend of his sister, becoming step-father to two young daughters. He also continued, at least outwardly on a journey of career milestones and social success. He established his own construction company, called PDM Contractors (which happened to hire many young males). He became a Democratic precinct captain of the Norwood Park area and was even photographed with Rosalynn Carter. He had a successful sideline career as “Pogo the Clown” who performed at children’s birthday parties. And he even was a prolific artist who created dozens of acrylic paintings (posthumously now seen as creepy and disturbing).

During this period in the 1970’s, Gacy was also abducting, chloroforming, raping, torturing and choking young men to death. This monster in human guise had to be secretive at first and wait for his wife to be out. His wife divorced him after finding gay porn and signs of sexual infidelity – she had no clue about the crawl space. When she left, Gacy was able to let his demons run wild. He was actually careless in several instances, but indifference and incompetence were his allies. Oddly, many of Gacy’s victims were not gay. They were in fact former or potential employees, or hitch-hikers. Most were chloroformed or drugged – taken against their will. Gacy was actually suspected by the parents of his 2nd victim, an ex-employee, but the case was never pursued by police. Gacy sold one victim’s car to a young criminal and the car was impounded. But no follow-thru was done on how Gacy had acquired the car and he cheated justice once more.

One “fortunate” Gacy victim was tortured and raped but not murdered. He was dumped in a park and left for dead. When he filed a complaint with the Chicago Police, they basically dismissed it. (Chicago Police do not shine in this tale). The man, Jeffrey Rignall, did his own sleuthing and pieced together what happened from his drugged stupor. He found Gacy’s house and the police finally issued a search warrant. Simultaneously a last victim was seen talking to Gacy by both a shop keeper and the boy’s Mother, and they specifically identified Gacy. The Killer Clown probably became overconfident in his prowess and let his guard down.

I’ll skip the gory details of what was found – we all know. Gacy spent 16 years on death row after his arrest and never expressed remorse. He said jokingly to an officer, “You know … a clown can get away with murder”. His final words at lethal injection were, “Kiss my ass”. It’s hard to wrap my own mind around the fact that this hideous beast was a father, business owner, community leader and political activist. It makes me want to reexamine the criteria for being human, much less being successful. I don’t think a swing set is to blame for the unconscionable acts so much as a twisted vagary of nature itself.

My father once said, “You can’t blame a rattle snake for being one, but it doesn’t change the fact that he is one”. The Gacy reptile was finally dispensed with as he should have been – it’s too bad it took so long to find that the snake was a snake.

© 2010 blogSpotter

Prickly Heat

2010-06-10T13:38:00.000-07:00

Life begins at 50 -- Picture courtesy of Columbia Pictures

by blogSpotter
I subscribed to Netflix about six weeks ago, not for the DVD mail order but the streaming video service. I've since found the mother lode of forgotten nuggets like The Big Sleep and How to Marry a Millionaire. Some of these are movies that you might easily catch on TBS late at night but Netflix gives you what you want, when you want it. Their streaming is excellent, with no delays and very few interruptions. You can always pause to get a snack or whatever -- truly hard to beat for $10/month.

This past weekend, I rented a terrific movie from 1969, Cactus Flower. Old movies are fun to watch on so many levels. Even if the movie itself is a bomb, it still serves as a time capsule -- a cultural barometer for the times in which it was released. You can relish the music, the styles and the attitudes even if not the plot line. Cactus Flower was in fact not a bomb -- it was a hit based on a long-running Broadway play by the same name.

Cactus Flower stars Walter Matthau as a middle-aged playboy dentist, Dr. Julian Winston, who routinely lies to his lady friends to avoid marriage or commitment. He tells the wide-eyed, innocent Toni (played to blonde perfection by Goldie Hawn) that he’s married with 3 children. He even stands her up on the anniversary of their meeting to show her “who’s boss”. She makes a half-hearted attempt at suicide which prompts the guilt and love-addled Dr. Winston to admit he really loves Toni – he then proposes marriage.

Toni feels bad that she’s being a home wrecker – she wants to meet the ex-Mrs. Winston to clear the air and make things right. There is no Mrs. Winston, so Julian asks his stodgy, prim middle-aged secretary Stephanie (Ingrid Bergman) to pretend she’s his wife. She does so and does it so well that it introduces a slew of new problems and complications. This plot is a formula as old as Shakespeare, a comedy of errors with mistaken identities and lies built upon lies. I’ve actually never seen it done so skillfully as in this movie; Cactus Flower also calls to mind The Bird Cage where comic pretensions unfold and a silly lie becomes the most amazing truth.

Ingrid Bergman shines as Stephanie – she is in fact the “cactus flower” that blooms in mid-life exuberance. It’s a bit of Cinderella for the 50-something set – a concept I think would fly at least as well now (in the baby boomer age) as it did in the late 60’s. All the main actors and even the supporting cast give sterling performances. Speaking of the late 60’s, the sleek suits, tailored dresses and double-breasted blazers of 1969 leave me wondering what happened to fashion in the last 40 years. This movie looks and sounds really good – the music is an eclectic mix including Sarah Vaughn. You might think it’s a much more recent movie based on certain cues (if you weren’t looking at a young Hawn or still handsome 48-year old Matthau).

If you haven’t yet, watch Cactus Flower and be completely entranced as the prickly plant unfolds a beautiful late-in-life blossom. Nobody would ever guess that Bergman could do such excellent deadpan humor, but she could and she did.

NINE TO FIVE

You’re blessed with a two-in-one review today. I also watched 1980’s Nine to Five which I actually saw when it came out. The movie was then a sentimental favorite because it featured two lovely liberal ladies – Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda and introduced the buxom, spirited Dolly Parton in her first film role. The three women play put-upon girls in a male-dominated workplace – dominated by the fun-to-jeer Dabney Coleman (of Mary Hartman fame). This movie makes the women somewhat endearing at the start and also makes some impassioned arguments for things like flex time and equal rights at the end. But the big middle of the movie is a big mess – a mixture of lame plotlines, stale gimmicks and what you would have to describe as childish nonsense. Was the screenplay written by a 5th grader?

Nonetheless, you might just get some jollies watching three great ladies on a jaunt from 30 years ago. My words above apply here – even if the movie is a bomb, it can give you a picture of styles, mores and attitudes of yore. Nine to Five featured some dope-smoking and male-bashing which would probably not make the cut nowadays. Interesting how, as a society, we lighten up in some ways and tighten up in others.

In conclusion: Cactus Flower is a must-see. Nine to Five is a fun-to-see-while-you-pay-bills -- full attention not required but fun if you have 110 minutes to kill.

© 2010 blogSpotter

Black Rhapsody

2010-05-31T17:45:00.000-07:00

Writer Zora Neal Hurston -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural explosion of the flapper era in which black Americans made tremendous strides in music and popular culture. The era extended roughly from 1920-1940, although some would start it as late as 1924, when Journal of Negro Life was published in the mainstream press. Prior to the Harlem Renaissance, black culture was pretty much off the radar of white society. Seen too frequently as the earthy "tripe" of freed slaves and domestics, their writings and music were dismissed by established publishing and entertainment venues.

Then something peculiar happened as the Great Migration brought more black people to northern cities and a black middle class took hold. In 1910, a group of black investors purchased several blocks of Harlem in New York City. Harlem had previously been an affluent white area but was an early example of “white flight”. The investors established bars, theaters, churches, publishers and other venues that catered to black clientele including many “New Negro” sophisticates. These new Harlem ventures showed that not only could black people be literate, they could also be phenomenally creative and cogent.

What followed in Harlem’s next two decades was an incredible flowering of black culture. The list of notables is a mile long but includes writers Langston Hughes and Zora Neal Hurston, poet Ruth Dixon, intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois, and musicians like Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and Count Basie. Several now-famous clubs sprang into existence: the Cotton Club, Apollo Theater and Savoy Ball Room. The Apollo has been opened continuously since 1914 and now hosts the TV program Showtime at the Apollo, which showcases new black talent. A musical byproduct of this era was Harlem Stride, which blended brassy jazz music with strings and piano. Where jazz had previously been seen as a purely ethnic genre, it suddenly was embraced by white society. In fact, white literati were so enamored of the “New Negro” culture that major themes were borrowed for the “lily white” productions of Noel Coward, Cole Porter and the Gershwins.

No major movement is without its critics and the Harlem Renaissance met with fierce criticism from none other than mid-20th-century black activists. There were two or three general objections made against the Renaissance... Some felt that the entire style of the movement was one of “acting white”. In fact, many of the Harlem celebrities were light-skinned (“high yellow”) people with English given names and very nearly Bostonian middle class manners.

Others thought that much of the literary output catered to the prejudices of white people. Writer Zora Neal Hurston was notable for being a successful anthropologist and novelist. But she took flak for using Negro slave dialect in her (now venerated) book, Their Eyes Were Watching God. She also took flak for voting Republican and believing in individual responsibility over welfare. Where many didn’t like the white caste of the Harlem Renaissance others were rightly outraged that it was book-ended by two (then recent) decades when in fact, black music and writing have flourished for decades before.

In 2010 we are now marking the 100th anniversary of the Harlem real estate venture -- and only 4 years away from the centennial of the Apollo Theater. So what of Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington and Zora Neal Hurston? They are squarely back on their pedestals where they belong. Their contributions were in a seminal, somewhat crazy era of American history and there probably could’ve been no other cultural easement than the one that was offered.

We have a black President now, who some accuse of “acting white”. What we might just consider is that black has a thousand shades, just like a thousand shades of pale. Why presume to judge the style of a person, culture or era on such superficial criteria? The strength, beauty and wisdom comes through no matter what. In somewhat of a rebuke to the Harlem Renaissance critics, the 2009 movie Precious received Oscar nominations and rave reviews. It’s very much in a Harlem Renaissance style, updated for the 21st century. Things have come full circle and as in so many things, it’s a great bit of closure. What drives our cultural critique now is not so much anger as thoughtfulness -- and the Harlem Renaissance laid the groundwork for the civil rights movement as well as the sixties cultural revolution. Praise be to that.

© 2010 blogSpotter

Midland's Desert Marigold

2010-05-17T13:57:00.000-07:00

Bush with school children in 2005 -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
I just finished listening to Laura Bush’s memoire, Spoken from the Heart. I’ve always liked Laura, and the plain-spoken, sincere and evocative life story that she delivers here just solidifies that impression. Her background in education and reading shines through – she gives vivid descriptions of her Midland origins. You might feel like you’re there yourself -- enduring a dust storm, spying a horned toad in the garden or counting the stars on a Midland summer night. Her gift of words is a welcome counter-balance to the often ineloquent speech of her husband. In fact, Laura’s story makes the entire family seem more endearing; the Bush’s remind me of many of my own relatives.

Mind you, I wouldn’t want to see any of these relatives as President with their hardened attitudes about race and religion, but they are nonetheless well-meaning people who’ve been exemplary in many other ways. It’s a complicated world – hard to write off every person with whom you have an intellectual quarrel.

Laura was an only child, born in 1946 to a Midland home builder and his wife. The Welch’s were middle class but her father, Harold Welch was a “mover-and-shaker” who did well in his real estate business. He situated the family near the best schools and soon had his shy, bookish Laura enrolled with the scions of oil families. Despite her shyness, Laura was pretty and blue-eyed – she dated several prominent young men. At 17, Laura was in a tragic car accident driving her father’s Impala. She failed to see the other car -- a Corvair driven (ironically) by a former boyfriend. He was killed instantly, causing grief to the entire small town of Midland. Laura was deeply affected and says that she has pangs of guilt and sorrow to this day. Some political enemies later tried to portray it as a cover-up; there was no cover up – just a community moving past a local and unchangeable tragedy.

Laura went to SMU and graduated in 1968 with a degree in education. She added a Masters in Library Science in 1973. She taught at various public schools and libraries in Houston and Austin, finally settling at Austin’s Dawson elementary in 1977. She loved Austin (as does blogSpotter the author) so we share this central Texas affinity. Shy, sweet 31 year-old Laura, who read Russian novels while sunbathing, was about to have her life take a major turn. On a visit to Midland, her friends introduced Laura (the self-dubbed “old maid of Midland”) to George W. Bush, “Midland’s most eligible bachelor”. George was smitten with Laura and they married 3 months later. Some of Midland society was aghast – George married someone from the middle class.

From here, Laura’s story becomes a blur of political races and historical data, peppered with a few personal events. The couple had trouble conceiving a child and were about to adopt when twins Jenna and Barbara were born in 1981. She felt a chill from her mother-in-law Barbara Bush, who closed ranks with immediate family and served tart, judgmental remarks to the young Laura. They later became closer after shared experience as first ladies. George had mixed successes as an oil man and baseball team owner. His fortunes changed for the better when he quit drinking at Laura’s request in 1986. He redirected his focus to helping his father’s campaigns in ’88 and ’92 and then to his own gubernatorial race in ’94. The camera-shy Laura had a national audience when she spoke at the 2000 Republican Convention for George’s Presidential nomination.

This isn’t a George Story so we’ll leave out the (still, I think) sorry details of Dubya’s term in office. For her part, Laura worked on several causes – she wasn’t the Stepford robot that some accused her of being. She supported literacy – the National Book Festival was one of several such programs she started. She worked for women’s health issues – Heart Truth and Susan Komen foundation benefited from her work. Laura also traveled the world and promoted cures for HIV/AIDS as well as malaria awareness. Laura described herself several times as “apolitical”. However, she has come out in several different forums as pro-Choice and pro-gay marriage which put her leftward of Bush and his cronies. She also seems better-spoken and less doctrinaire – is at any wonder that she was voted by Gallup as one of the most popular first ladies in history? Her presence helped to soften the brunt of the Dubya Bush policy debacles.

When push comes to shove, Laura is a staunch defender of her much-maligned husband – you still have to love her for (apologies to both Tammy Wynette and Hillary) standing by her man. She makes some valid observations about the incredibly crass, negative discourse that’s come about in our pop culture. The negativity goes both ways and Obama has been on the receiving end of it more recently.

In all, Laura Bush is a charming woman, whose common-sense approach to life and basic decency come through in all her life’s chapters. If you listen to the book on tape, you’ll get to hear Laura’s Midland accent -- she and George emphasize the sibilant plurals “our heartsss” and “fragrant grassessss”. It’s all good, and if you’re a native Texan, Laura’s story will be in many ways like a trip to a long-forgotten prairie home.

© 2010 blogSpotter

The Facebook Age

2010-05-10T12:41:00.000-07:00

Come network with me ... -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
I probably don’t have to tell anyone what Facebook.com is – it’s the phenomenally successful and hip social networking site that’s handily bypassed MySpace as the place to hang your on-line profile. Facebook is the brainchild of Harvard grad Mark Zuckerberg who was all of 20 years old when he launched his famous app from a dormitory room in 2004.

Zuckerberg is from an affluent family – he attended Philips Exeter Academy prior to Harvard. It was at Philips Academy where he picked up the idea of a “Face Book”. Philips maintained a printed directory with students’ faces and short profiles called a Face Book. Zuckerberg carried the idea considerably further with his on-line version for Harvard. He was hardly twiddling his thumbs prior to Facebook; at @ 17 he created “Synapse” – a music listening precursor to Pandora that memorized the listener’s musical tastes. Microsoft and AOL made bids to purchase Synapse and hire Zuckerberg to develop the app, but he chose Harvard instead.

The success of Facebook was so widespread and intense that Zuckerberg dropped out of college in his sophomore year. He now heads up Facebook in Palo Alto, CA, and has a net worth in excess of 4 billion dollars. The networking app has 400 million users and gets more than a 100 million hits a day. Microsoft did purchase a 1.6% stake in Facebook, for $240 million. This was after they outbid Google Inc. which was also wooing Facebook.

What makes Facebook so special? To be frank and up-front, it’s probably not all that special. Explaining the popularity of web sites is similar to doing the same for drinking establishments or turtle neck sweaters. One variation will languish while the other one takes the world by storm. The scientific merits of one over the other matter very little. Facebook is a very effective hyper-networking tool, where conversations in different social circles overlap. Circles widen as people look at friends’ friends and add them as their own. Due to its powerful connectedness, Facebook is not good as a “hookup” site or dating service. Rude, lewd remarks could easily make the rounds and come back to haunt the sender. To look up old cronies, friends and family members, Facebook is excellent. Facebook has also woven in a few games (Farms and farm animals) and gimmicks (“pokes”) to provide an all-encompassing experience (although I have to say I’m annoyed by farm animals).

In the early 1990’s, it was thought that the OS was the most important factor in a customer’s on-line experience. Then the theater of war became browsers – Netscape versus IE versus Opera versus Firefox. In the 2010’s, “uber-apps” have become the battleground – things like Google’s search engine, iTunes music store and Facebook. (Take note-- Microsoft has no stake or a small stake in any of these).

Alas, my middle-aged take on Facebook doesn’t vary that far from my take on AOL chat when I wrote about that (“Games People Play” Feb 2005). My main critique then was that people tend to lie or exaggerate on profiles (big news! :-)). I’ve since noticed that even the most honest self-appraisals and recent photos fail to capture essential details – you must meet the person in person. And if you want anything but a most superficial “hookup”, you probably need to exchange a lot of emails. You can invest all this effort on what pans out to be a wrong prospect. Personally, I have better ways to spend my time.

I will say that Facebook offers a powerful network reach that brings many people to this particular gateway. Will it be “the one” for all time? It probably won’t even be that for 10 months – I’m amazed at the extreme fickleness of the computer crowd. MySpace is still licking its wounds, as the lover scorned. In conclusion, I’m enjoying Facebook for now and now is all that matters ( according to Sanskrit poetry which I don’t have with me to quote). Which all reminds me, I need to check Facebook and see if I’ve been poked.

© 2010 blogSpotter

At the Late Night Picture Show...

2010-04-29T18:50:00.001-07:00

I want to go there ... -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Caveat: I’m doped up on allergy meds and cannot be held totally accountable for how the nouns and verbs play out below. I’m having the worst allergy attack in recent memory and have had to quell it with a combination of Allegra D and Wal-Phed.

This week, I watched several great old movies via my new service, Netflix. I’ve resisted Netflix for years, because I didn’t like the DVD mail order business model. I want my movies now, not next week. In the last year or so, they’ve added Netflix streaming service (which works with Roku, Xbox, Samsung blu-ray and several other devices). I can pick out my pix online, and for $8.99/month I can watch unlimited movies and TV shows. The one snag is that streaming video gives you older fare and a lot of “B” movies. Nonetheless, I like a lot of what they have and can probably get my nine bucks worth for a least a couple of years to come. Netflix rules -- for now anyway.

LAST PICTURE SHOW

One of my Netflix pics was The Last Picture Show, a gritty, beautifully rendered coming-of-age movie made in 1971. That year, I was 14 and having the same feelings and insecurities as the movie’s adolescent characters. This movie, set in Anarene, Texas 1952 was a perfect reflection of my 1971 angst, despite the distance of 19 years between me and its fictional characters. Last Picture Show was filmed in black and white and it captures the simple, small-town atmosphere of the West Texas town (now a ghost town near Wichita Falls). This movie was directed by Peter Bogdanovich, a 31 year old new-wave wunderkind at the time and based on a 1966 novel by Larry McMurtry (best known for 1985‘s best-seller Lonesome Dove).

Last Picture Show is a perfect storm of writer, director and actors of enormous talent converging on to one project. Several seasoned character actors (Cloris Leachman, Ben Johnson) rounded out a cast of stellar new faces (Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms and Cybill Shepherd) and gave us some of the finest performances ever in cinema history. The movie might be described as darkly comic, although it has tragic human implications and consequences as the characters grope their ways through a veritable Texas dust storm of restlessness, loneliness and yes -- horniness. There is some graphic activity, enough that the Church Lady might label the film as soft-core pornography. Fortunately, the Motion Picture Academy saw things differently and gave the movie 8 Academy nominations -- which it won, for best supporting actor (Johnson) and best supporting actress (Leachman).

I love attentiveness to detail. It always bothered me that on TV shows like Happy Days, set in the 50’s, the characters have 70’s hairstyles and for the most part 70’s fashions. Last Picture Show painstakingly gives us the early 1950’s with appropriate fashions, Zenith TV sets, 1951 Mercuries, and Hank Williams tunes coming out of the juke box. I had to purchase Hank Williams’ Honky Tonkin’ from iTunes after watching the movie -- the moment must live on! The windswept little town of Anarene seems sad and dusty yet all at the same time weirdly inviting, like a cold Dr. Pepper in a vintage bottle.

This movie is actually two trips in the Wayback Machine. It gives us 1952 Texas, but it also shows us what Cybill Shepherd and Jeff Bridges looked like at the start of their careers in the early 70’s. If you love nostalgia as I do, you’ll love this whole package. The National Film Institute rates Last Picture Show as #95 on the top 100 American films ever made. I would rank it higher myself; if you haven’t seen it yet, sign up for Netflix and grab yourself a copy.

© 2010 blogSpotter

Legacy of Hate

2010-04-20T15:49:00.000-07:00

Murrah Building, 1995 -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Who was William Luther Pierce III? If not for a racist diatribe written under his pseudonym, Andrew Macdonald, he would be a crackpot white separatist who faded into oblivion along with his insane organization, “National Alliance”. Pierce was born in Atlanta in 1933, the son of Old South aristocracy – clearly a clan that hadn’t fully accepted the terms of Appomattox in 1865.

Pierce was bright in his schoolwork; he liked model rockets and skipped a grade in school. His first avocation was physics – he completed an undergraduate degree at Rice in 1955 and a physics PhD. from Boulder in 1962. He worked as a physics Associate Instructor until 1965, when his inner demons took hold, and he devoted the balance of his life to such diverse causes as the Nazi party, white supremacy and “Cosmotheism”. His family’s wealth probably afforded him the luxury of quitting an 8-to-5 job and redoubling his racist efforts.

Pierce was a white supremacist who was deeply concerned about interracial marriages and “racial apologists”. He dabbled with both the John Birch Society and the American Nazi party – he even became a leader in the Nazi organization for a brief time. Neither group devoted enough energy to the concept of racial cleansing in Pierce’s view – this prompted him to found his National Alliance (circa 1974), where he could give racial cleansing its “due”. In fact, Pierce was enough of an organizer that he created a mini-media empire; his deep pockets didn’t hurt either. He started a book publishing company, a radio program, American Dissident, and even a church to proselytize his poisonous ideas.

Pierce tried to get tax exempt status for his “Cosmotheist” church but was denied that by the IRS. His Cosmotheism was a sort of pantheism that featured a universal spirit which favored the white race. Neither his religion nor his radio show ever really caught fire. Pierce spent the final years of his life (he died in 2002 at age 68) overseeing his various productions and giving occasional speeches. His death would have been unremarkable in any way if not for the “seed” planted by his toxic tomes – The Turner Diaries (1978) and Hunter (1984).

Turner Diaries is a near-future sci-fi book which predicts race war and describes in detail the terrorist acts that “The Organization” (his fantasized group of white supremacists) perform to battle the Federal government. Hunter is a similar book describing a type of bounty killer that hunts mixed race couples. Both of these books were seized upon by radical right militia groups to give inspiration and even instructions to their members. At least two groups, Silent Brotherhood and The Order, used Turner Diaries as a guide. These groups were convicted of robbery and counterfeiting – acts that fall short of mass murder though reprehensible nevertheless.

When Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people bombing the OKC Murrah Building in 1995, he was found to be a fan of Pierce’s book. McVeigh’s self-defense was a garbled mix of patriotism and religious freedom (he hated the Fed’s handling of Branch Davidians a year or two earlier). Such a confused mind – why would McVeigh use this horrific, demented scrawl of race-ranting as his justification? Why would he even mention it to anyone? It had nothing to do with country love or religious freedom. Probably at the point where he was given a national audience, McVeigh had to change his narrative in hopes of gaining sympathy from the general public.

The irony isn't lost on me – I’m giving exposure to the author and his work with this very blog. It’s in the spirit of remembering the past to avoid reliving it. I give credit to my readers – we can say who, what and where without giving endorsements or “props” as they say now. Pierce was a disturbed man and his ideas were lunatic in nature; his Deep-South deep pockets enabled him to promulgate his lunacies to vulnerable, confused, self-loathing people all over America. Let us hope that if his writings endure at all, they endure as negative examples of racial paranoia gone wildly out of bounds.

© 2010 blogSpotter

Reverend Jim's Traveling Salvation Show

2010-04-11T17:09:00.000-07:00

The final rite in Guyana -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
I must confess to a certain prejudice. When I think of cults or collective insanity, I usually think of right-wing ideologues or crazed Christians-- Nazis, KKK and Heaven’s Gate. I must pause to reflect and mention that sometimes the craziness has a leftward tilt as it did in November 1978. That’s when Reverend Jim Jones, of the Peoples’ Temple bade his 900 member commune to drink cyanide laced grape punch in an act of “revolutionary suicide”. What weird life trajectory would've brought Jones and his followers to this terrible point?

Looking back, the young Jim Warren Jones had an unremarkable middle class childhood in Indiana. He is said to have been an odd child, musing about death and holding funerals for animals. After his parents divorced, he moved with his mother to Richmond, Indiana. He attended Indiana and Butler Universities where he earned a degree in secondary education; his desire was to be a student pastor. Jones chose the Methodist ministry as his first career move, since they were accepting of people with socialist leanings (like Jones) in the McCarthy era. Alas, his dalliance with Methodism was short-lived because at the time they weren’t racially integrated and Jones was pro-integration.

In what was evidence of a dynamic presence, Jones founded his very own church, the People’s Temple Christian Church Full Gospel at the tender age of 22 in the early 1950‘s. Jones was also made director of the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission and presented a strong voice for the NAACP as well as the up-and-coming civil rights movement. His outspokenness brought harassment and vandalism to his Indiana church. In the mid 1960’s, Jones had a “vision” that nuclear holocaust was coming to America in 1967 and the only safe haven would be Redwood, California. He decided to move his church to California where, coincidentally, the liberal California culture would be more accepting of his socialist, mixed-race church.

Jones' church moved briefly to Redwood and then to San Francisco. Upon the move to San Francisco, Jones became a local political celebrity. He continued to raise funds for NAACP and was appointed the head of the San Francisco Housing Authority by Mayor Moscone. During the mid-70’s, Jones hobnobbed with the crème de la crème of liberal society -- Walter Mondale, Rosalynn Carter, Harvey Milk, Willie Brown and even Governor Jerry Brown. Dinners were hosted in Jones’ honor and he was a special guest speaker at a DNC Headquarters grand opening.

After several years of good California vibes, a cloud moved across Jones’ sunny sky -- a cloud that even his dynamic, jovial personality couldn’t disperse. Marshall Kilduff, an “alternative” journalist caught wind of bad things happening in Jones’ church -- physical, emotional and sexual abuse. He was about to publish a large exposé when Jones abruptly decided to move his church to Jonestown, Guyana. There, Jones believed he could at last establish his socialist, multiracial utopia away from the establishment’s prying eyes.

Unfortunately for Jones, the establishment couldn’t be shaken off so easily. A “Concerned Relatives” group wanted to resolve issues of kidnapping and abuse even if it was thousands of miles away in Guyana. A fact-finding mission was dispatched, led by Congressman Leo Ryan in November of 1978. Ryan’s entourage came down for a 3-day junket, which was cut short when they encountered overt hostility. They decided to return and @ 15 Temple refugees came with them. Jones’ “Red Brigade” opened fire on the group has they boarded their planes, killing 5 people including Congressman Ryan.

In quick succession following the air strip shootings, 909 people in the People’s Temple were bade to drink grape Flavor Aid laced with potassium cyanide. Jones exhorted them to participate in family units, as an act of “revolution”. Jones himself was found with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. There was no film recording, but an audiotape of the proceedings (over loudspeaker). The mass suicide is the greatest loss of American civilian life outside of natural disasters or 9/11.

What compelled this paranoid, egomaniacal madman to destroy his whole world? The worst possible outcome of Ryan’s investigation would have paled next to the horrific poisonings that happened in his humid, isolated dystopia. What do you believe and why do you believe it? Are we so fragile of mind that we’ll follow any pied piper that promises a happier reality -- a reality based on thin strands of psychobabble and religious distortions? There are no ready answers -- and there are myriad religions and groups now that exist on the mere edge of sanity. All that recommends them is that as yet, they haven't asked you to drink the Kool-Aid.

© 2010 blogSpotter

Of Idiocracies and Tea Parties

2010-04-03T19:16:00.001-07:00

Don't say how would it be -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Today, I very belatedly watched Idiocracy, Mike Judge’s hilarious speculation about a future in 2505 where humans have devolved somewhat into gross, belching, rutting, fast-food noshing, low-IQ pigs. The world of this future is overrun with mountains of garbage, technology is on the blink and rampant commercialism has taken over. A hick mentality prevails and people who use big words are accused of “talking faggy”.

This blog doesn’t have that many readers, so maybe it’s not such a risk here … If you’re from a suburb of Dallas, quit reading now -- you will surely be offended. That is because Idiocracy is NOW -- it’s evident in the ‘burbs of Mesquite, Garland and Irving. It’s not a speculative (note faggy word) future, it’s the corpulent, lard-choked, material-lusting world that we already have in most of Texas. Of course, Idiocracy pushed things a tad further for satire, but not much.

We don’t water our crops with Brawndo sports drink (yet!). We do mishandle our water resources and subject our future agriculture to the vagaries of feudal Texas-style politics. We don’t routinely drive off of uncompleted freeways or occupy condemned buildings but nothing pointed out seems very far off the now-or-future mark. The blinders-mentality of the idiot future also called to mind the Tea Party of the present.

Our own slice of idiocracy -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

The “Tea Party Movement” began in 2009 as a populist, ant-tax, anti Big Government protest movement. It quickly was hijacked by the likes of Dick Army and the John Birch Society. Then as if peanuts weren’t enough, some cashews, pecans and filberts were added to the nut mix: 9/11 deniers, militia men and birthers (who refuse to believe that Obama was born in Hawaii) all strutted their nut stuff at various tea party events. When Health Care reform came to a vote, these throwbacks were yelling the N- and F- words to members of Congress as they walked to Capitol Hill.

What would it be like if people of low IQ out-reproduced smart people and took over the show? We don’t have to use conditional phrasing, it already happened in much of the world. As the human race stumbles into the future, we occasionally take a step forward thank God. Who knows how the final mix will (or should) look. If we can learn to quit killing each other over religion and money, and if we can emphasize the collective good over individual aggrandizement -- we might have a shot at a non-idiocracy. It all remains to be seen.

© 2010 blogSpotter

The Holy Grail of Progressive Politics

2010-03-27T19:20:00.000-07:00

The Signing Ceremony -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
On March 21, 2010, the US House of Representatives voted (by a razor thin margin of 4 votes) to approve the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – the so-called "health care overhaul”. Democrats also referred to it as the health insurance overhaul to avoid more angry flak, by empasizing the bill's insurance reforms. They shouldn’t have been so modest; the bill was one hundred or more years in the making – way overdue considering that it was an unmet goal for Teddy Roosevelt around the turn of the last century. Just some of the highlights of the bill, which is supported by AARP as well as AMA:

· Insurance companies cannot deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions
· Insurance companies can’t put a yearly cap on coverage
· Every American must have health insurance coverage – aid is available for low earners and insurance exchanges are available for people who can’t find other coverage.
· Dependents can be covered all the way up to age 26.

There are several other stipulations which add up to an amazing piece of legislation. As a left-leaner, I would’ve preferred to have a flat-out single-payer system or a public option. I'm still very glad that the D.C. sausage factory gave something approximating universal health care. The bill that we have leaves most of our present (capitalistic) mechanisms intact – there was very little for the Republicans to really worry about.

The bill is a testament to the “carrot” provided by smooth-talking Obama and the “stick” evidenced by the aggressive Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. Both people overcame amazing obstacles – some people likened the bill’s passage to Jesus’ raising Lazarus from the dead. When Scott Brown was elected as GOP senator in Massachusetts, many people wrote the whole deal off. Pelosi figured out the a way to pass the bill using a process called “reconciliation” where only a simple Senate majority is needed to approve a conciliatory companion bill. Of course, she reached into a GOP bag of tricks to use that approach. We have to pause and acknowledge that it took a black man and a white woman to deliver what no combination of white men has done before. Just a thing worth mentioning (and I’m a white male).

Obama captured a political Holy Grail sought by every Democratic President of the last century. If he twiddled his thumbs for the next 6 or so years, his term would still be of monumental historical significance.

Based on GOP alarm bells, you would’ve thought Godzilla was approaching as the House prepared to vote. The bill has variously been called fascism, socialism, government-takeover and robbery by the Party of “No”. Even before the ink was dry on Obama’s signature, 12+ state attorneys general (including one Democrat) prepared a joint lawsuit claiming that the bill violates “states’ rights”. Just hearing that phrase “states’ rights” gives me the willies – it harks back to the days of Dixiecrats and segregation.

How ugly did it get right after the bill was signed on March 21st? Well several Democratic party state headquarters had bricks tossed through their windows. One Texas legislator, Republican Louie Gohmert made a motion to repeal the 17th Amendment – he feels that the popular vote can’t reliably give us a good group of Senators. GOP talking heads ranted and raved about repealing the bill after the 2010 elections (unlikely to happen). Former candidate Sarah Palin did a PowerPoint of the USA, using crosshairs to show which legislators need to be “taken out” in the next election.

So what are the real, dire consequences that we Americans have to look to? The DOW financial average actually surged for the two days following the bill signing; both Obama and the Health bill’s approval ratings went up too. There will be some legal challenges, and devil is in the details of course. But one of the major, major legislative goals has been achieved – very much like the fabled pot of gold at the end of the political rainbow.

Obama also redeemed himself in the eyes of Democrats who once thought he was too professorial and aloof to move anything along. In truth, Nancy Pelosi was the bulldozer who cleared much of the path -- appeasing the likes of pro-lifer Bart Stupak as well as public option champion Dennis Kucinich to move the bill across. No matter who provided the most push, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is a once-in-a-lifetime achievement. It’s a grand, almost mythic moment which will live in our memories (and history pages) for many years to come.

© 2010 blogSpotter

The Dallas Green Party Rules

2010-03-19T11:52:00.000-07:00

2010 Saint Patrick's on Greenville -- Picture by blogSpotter

by blogSpotter
You might be experiencing deja vu -- it may seem that you've already read this Saint Patrick's blog. Well faith and begorrah, maybe you have. I had it as a blip on last week's Oscar blog, and decided it deserved a blog entry unto itself, along with another photo.

East Dallas' Greenville Avenue, with its eclectic mix of bars, ethnic restaurants, flea markets, old theaters and what-not, is a worthy destination all year-round. On March 13th 2010, we had the perfect convergence of crystal blue sky, 66 degree weather, and 80,000 joyful Irish wanna-bes flooding Greeville Avenue -- making a good thing all that much better. Here briefly is a replay of that event.

---
I have to point out that Dallas has its own Green Party. Nothing to do with the environment -- we’re talking a Saint Patrick’s celebration on Lower Greenville Avenue. No city (except maybe Dublin, Ireland) has a lock on Saint Patrick; many American cities have parades and parties in his honor. For some reason, the Dallas version has exploded into a Green orgy that sprawls across all of East Dallas in a crazed, beer-bust-a-palooza that goes all day and partly into the next.

A line down the block on Goodwin Ave -- Picture by blogSpotter

Being middle-aged and a non-drinker, I’ve harrumphed at it for many years (I live in East Dallas no less). I finally decided that if I can’t beat them, I’ll join them. I went and spent three hours in “the belly of the beast”. I witnessed a man with a green beard and a green dog -- he was nothing compared to another man wearing the green thong from Borat. The overall tone was Halloween with a green theme, intersecting maybe the Dog Parade from Easter at Lee Park.

SECOND BASE

I was groped by one woman lurching thru the crowd, and invited to dine with three ladies (total strangers) at Café Brazil. I would’ve said yes, but had already just chowed down two Cheeseburgers. Later in the evening I accidentally got to second base with an Asian woman. We bumped into each other and she started to fall. I reached to grab her, afraid she would strike the sidewalk. She turned as I grabbed, and I grabbed a whole hand full of boob. I was seriously embarrassed but she was drunk and didn’t appear to notice or care. I hoped nobody saw, but someone yelled, "Get a good feel?” from a car going by. I’ll never live down the shame.

Overall, Saint Patrick’s was a lot of fun and I’ll probably be back. There is too much in the way of beer-induced debauchery, youthful exuberance and green-painted pit bulls for me to stay away any time in the future.

© 2010 blogSpotter

2010 Oscar Marathon

2010-03-13T19:34:00.000-08:00

An Iraq war movie to keep you on edge ... -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
This weekend I watched a lot of movies, couch potato that I am. I watched the much-touted Hurt Locker and didn’t really care much for it. I don’t like the war movie genre, so no disrespect meant to the actors or director. It came to a tedious crawl in places and it overall had a murky, blurred presentation where I can’t follow the action very well. I also have trouble relating to a main character who’d rather do a second tour of bomb-defusing than be back in America with his wife and son.

I also watched Gentlemen Broncos, another offbeat comedy from the people who brought us Napoleon Dynamite. This movie was cute, but clearly no Dynamite -- still funny and easily worth a free viewing when it comes to Lifetime or USA network TV.

A monumental movie -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

Last of all, I watched Precious which I think is, hyperbolically speaking, a monumental piece of movie making. Gabourey Sidibe plays Precious Jones, a girl victimized by poverty, abusive parents and a looks-obsessed, oppressive society-at-large. Her alternative school teacher, Blu Rain and her social worker, Mrs. Weiss can both see something beautiful, creative and potent underneath the disheveled exterior of Precious. They come together to bring her out of her shell and Precious turns her life around -- winning a literacy award and breaking free from her poisonous, destructive mother (played to Oscar winning perfection by Mo’Nique). Precious stands out so well, I honestly see it as a milestone movie that people talk about decades from now. I know that some people objected to the ghetto portrayal of African Americans living on welfare, but the movie was honest in its intentions as well as its delivery. Kudos to Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry for helping bring it to fruition.

© 2010 blogSpotter

Zombies Among us

2010-03-07T13:54:00.000-08:00

A zombie road movie to love -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
This weekend we’re having typical Texas yo-yo weather. Friday was sunny and 70, today is cold and rainy. Perfect weekend for me to catch up on some movies which I did with Zombieland (2009, Columbia Pictures) and a couple of others that were less review-worthy. One thing you can pretty much tell from the Zombieland movie posters and the fact it stars Woody Harrelson -- it’s an over-the-top comedy.

It is an over-the-top, silly comedy which made me fall off the couch a couple of times, with laughter. Note to serious people everywhere: silly is not a bad thing, sometimes it’s a needed prescription for what ails you.

Zombieland starts from a precept which is almost now cliché; a fast-acting virus has attacked the human race and turned 99% of them into slobbering, drooling cannibal zombies. The healthy remaining humans are few and far between -- they must use brutal survival skills (eg, “double tap“) to dispatch the lurching monsters. This gives us a charmingly odd quartet of people who happen into each other (each one named after a city of origin) on a road trip of sorts:

Columbus -- a shy, sweet still-virginal 20 year old college boy (Played by Jessie Eisentstein).
Tallahassee -- a mean, nasty albeit charming, gun-slinging, middle-aged man with a penchant for twinkies and killing zombies for fun (Harrelson, of course)
Wichita -- A beautiful 20-something con woman who thinks nothing of stealing cars and men’s hearts (Emma Stone)
Little Rock -- Wichita’s precocious 12 year old cohort who delivers dome of the movie’s best lines (Abigail Breslin)

This movie has something to offer everyone and it crosses thru several of my favorite genres. Men will love the bloody cartoon violence whereby zombies are decapitated, run over by cars and otherwise taken out of commission. Women will like the budding romance between Columbus and Wichita. I myself love road movies (eg, Paper Moon , It Happened One Night, even Thelma and Louise). There’s no better way to see that the journey often exceeds the destination -- maybe it is the destination.

Zombieland has our travelers going (somewhat randomly) from Garland, Texas to Los Angeles via a black Escalade and then a stolen yellow Hummer (found with only arms clutching the steering wheel -- one must assume that zombies feasted on the rest of the owner’s body). I like any movie with a southwest flavor. Due to the travel trajectory of this movie, we get some Willy Nelson, progressive country music backdrop, Indian casinos and southwest artifacts along the way. (Tragically, some of the artifacts get deliberately smashed to pieces).

Bill Murray has a hilarious cameo midway, and Tallahassee makes it clear that he’s an ultimate Murray fan. Well, I’m a Woody Harrelson fan so we’ve got almost a hat trick going here. Another of my favorite things are “movies within movies” and movies that pay homage to other great movies. Zombieland is a grab bag of movie references (not the least of which is the main characters watching and reenacting Ghostbusters at Bill Murray’s LA mansion). This isn’t a satire (like the Scary Movie series) but rather a clever mixing and matching of motifs for an altogether original and funny picture.

MODERN FAMILY ET AL
I’ve exhausted my creative energy on Zombieland so now I’m becoming a zombie myself. However I must mention that Wednesdays on ABC have become the new must-see television night. With The Middle, Modern Family, Cougar Town and Ugly Betty, there’s an unstoppable comedy train coming through on ABC. Last week’s Modern Family had the adoptive gay fathers being horrified that their infant daughter’s first word is “Mommy”, said to a woman babysitter. “She can tell you have (uhm) breasts and other lady parts. You’re her new mother. (beginning to sob) She‘s made her choice”. Elsewhere on the show, Manny and his step-dad are both afraid to go on the big roller coaster. The mother, totally disgusted that she must ride alone says, “Here is my purse, here is my fluffy hat, and there’s the lady’s room if either of you guys needs to go to the bathroom”. Two laugh out loud moments, one TV show. It’s hard to do but they did it.

The rain has let up a little and it’s near dinner hour, so I’ll sign off now.

© 2010 blogSpotter

A Two-Bit Blog

2010-03-01T15:28:00.001-08:00

Nary a quarter for my thoughts? -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Hello, readers. I’m now contemplating the unsung fifth anniversary of this blog, Strange Fascination. SF’s birthday was January 5th but there was (sadly :-( ) no party thrown for it. Here are but some of the slings and arrows that have befallen our favorite blog:

1. Fewer articles because the author has been absorbed with job and family issues over the last year
2. Reduced hit count and readership due in large part to the previous item
3. Reduced ad revenue due to the economy and the incredible ubiquity of blogs (everybody writes one)

Speaking to the first bullet, blog-writing is a lot of work and I really must have the “free cycles” to devote to it. I just quit doing my “marketing-oriented” blog, Avenue G – it was on a very uninspired autopilot for the last two years and it wasn’t very successful. Time to pull the plug on that one.

Now I’m thinking of Frank Romano (the father on Everybody Loves Raymond) -- he was played by the late and very talented Peter Boyle. In one of the earlier episodes, Frank gets a joke published in Reader’s Digest. He’s so emboldened by that, he decides that he's a witty editorialist and keeps trying to get his son Raymond (a sports writer for the local paper) to show his work to the editor. The editor doesn’t want to publish articles about toilet paper or paint drying (Frank’s milieu) – Raymond has to tell Frank tactfully that he stinks as a writer.

The show is from the mid-1990’s and it’s funny that they approached the whole topic with “old media” (no blogs or Internet) and yet the truth of it certainly persists… Frank Romano is a talentless blow-hard who needs to refrain from writing; sometimes blogSpotter has to wonder if he isn’t another Frank Romano. I did blog about toilets back in 2005.

I’m fairly liberal (both fiscally and socially) and vote as a Democrat. I’m also theistic but theistic outside of organized religion. It’s really ironic that the handful of people who read me regularly are religiously and politically conservative and several are coworkers to boot. Have to say, I haven’t been as forthcoming or “out there” as I could be given the fact that work cohorts and possibly even bosses might read the blog. I used to send out tickler emails to friends and coworkers when I first began with Strange Fascination – that probably served to confine me as things moved along.

A blog idea I keep kicking around is one in which I blow past some of the conventions that constrain me here. In so doing, I’d create another URL and not post it to any direct acquaintances. Hello, total strangers. (Regular readers, feel free to advise me whether this is a good idea or not).

I’m not really to that point yet, and the “muse” would still need to return. Right now, the muse has left the building (hopefully just to stretch its legs) and I’m awaiting his return.

© 2010 blogSpotter

Sports Metaphor

2010-02-21T15:18:00.000-08:00

Nate Longshore prepares to pass -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Have always been sort of amused by how grown men still daydream; they often fantasize about physical endowments and superhuman qualities (e.g. Superman, Iron Man). Tony Stark as Iron Man is particularly intriguing -- he’s an ordinary man who acquires super powers when he dons an iron suit. Grown men have to admit (however reluctantly, deep down in their souls) that there is no Batman, Superman or Iron Man. The fantasy is replaced by a worship of sports heroes -- virile, agile, he-men who exemplify bravery, certitude and quick thinking.

I would venture to say that America’s top sports are football, basketball and baseball. Whenever there is a playoff game, America virtually comes to halt as fans glue themselves to a TV somewhere, anywhere to get the latest score. Draft picks, coaching choices and plays are endlessly discussed in bars and barber chairs across the nation. People like me, who don’t follow sports, may find themselves on the outside looking in.

What strikes me about the “everyman” hero worship is that in point of fact sports heroes are very atypical men. The average height and weight of an NFL linebacker is 6’3” and 290 pounds. A full back is comparatively svelte at an average 6’2” and 240 pounds. The average NBA basketball player is 6’7” in height -- hardly a general height standard. Baseball players don’t reach such extremes although competitive pressure has compelled many of them to artificially strengthen their arms with steroids. What exactly are we celebrating here? These physical extremes are no sign of character -- they are primarily inherited traits that are exploited as sports-worthy by coaches and parents.

Is athletic skill acquired or is it innate? I maintain that a pro athlete “acquires” his skill about the same way that a dolphin learns to swim or a horse learns to run. I think it’s a great likelihood that all the eye-hand coordination and flexibility involved is very innate -- not something that’s given by any coach, practice session or parent (in any way other than parental contribution of DNA). Winning streaks may indicate that a team is “on fire” or indicate nothing at all -- as when A beats B, B beats C and C beats A. Records are tenuous and it’s highly questionable what the ultimate significance is for this heavyweight championship or that football trophy while it’s held, much less after it’s toppled.

Finally, athletic prowess isn’t any predictor of character or moral strength -- think just briefly about the many heroes brought down by gambling, drugs, steroids, marital infidelity and even murder charges. I personally don’t need a sports hero of any sort, least of all a felon. I admire strength of character and bravery but I think it can show up in a young woman who writes incendiary poetry or an 85 year old man who stands his legal ground against City Hall. Strength that matters is in the spinal chord and not the forearm; an ox or a gorilla can show us tendon muscle anytime.

I shouldn't discount bravery or all physicality -- we'd be in a bad way without the brave soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan. There are genuine heroes and even sometimes the "Iron Man" who has great character as well as iron abs. Guess I'm wishing that sports adulation was less cult-like, but that's asking an awful lot. I'll even watch a game here and there myself -- I can't escape from the sports mania that surrounds me. But I doubt that I'll ever be profiled on 60 Minutes as the "ultimate Cowboy Fan" -- life is too short for that.

© 2010 blogSpotter

Remembering the Dream Machine

2010-02-13T15:37:00.000-08:00

1956 DeSoto Firedome -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter

Let me preface this by saying that I love cars from a standpoint of style and culture -- I have absolutely no mechanical knowledge of cars. I know zip about pistons or transmissions. Nevertheless, some of these observations still stand. Pictured above is a 1956 DeSoto Firedome, one of the finest-looking cars ever made in my view. You could get it with A/C and power windows; it also came in 55 color combinations. The sweeping sheet metal, size and stature made the car almost have the eminence of a sculpture or a work of art.

The 1960’s brought a lot of heightened awareness about safety, ecology, fuel efficiency and such. Much of the critique was justified. In fact by the late 60’s and early 70’s we had rallied to the cause with better designed cars that still had style to spare (e.g., Ford LTD and Pontiac Grand Prix).

What happened after that is hard to describe, and differs from your vantage point. Stylistically we started making pimp-mobiles throughout the 1970’s -- ghastly creations with faux Rolls Royce grills and opera windows. We became status-aware and quality ignorant. Cars made it to show rooms with loose molding, runny paint jobs and engines poorly assembled. You’d like to say it was the low point but maybe not.

In the 1980’s we transitioned to square-looking Fairmonts and K cars -- then to jelly bean creations like the 1986 Ford Taurus (copying Audi style but not necessarily quality or engineering) . From the 1990’s thru the current period, cars could aptly be described as “competent boxes”. We improved on quality out of absolute necessity -- Japan was kicking American butt. But the awe-inspiring beauty of a DeSoto never returned. Whether you’re looking at a boxy Ford SUV or a Nissan sedan, you’re looking at a pleasant square carton, blandly painted in a 21st century non-color -- black, white, silver, gray or gold if you want to be daring.

Now it appears with Toyota’s recent recalls, that Japan may have taken exactly the wrong page out of the American auto experience. They've made a sacrifice of quality for sales volume, and still never displayed the pulse or the energy that once made cars (sold or built in America) so great as American cars in the Golden Era. Europe and Asia never glommed on to American style, but at least they inspired us with quality. Let’s hope that someday the twin virtues of beauty and reliability come back to us. It can be as a Dodge or a Toyota as long as it actually is.

If you look at where we're headed, the prospect is dimming for the 50's Dream Machine experience. Mass transit is coming more and more popular and that brings the impersonal presence of light rail cars. Bitsy smart cars and tiny hybrids are also becoming more le mode. It's not at all hard to envision a future where cars are autopiloted and don't even come with a steering wheel. In days to come (admittedly safer and less polluting days) we may fondly look back to a time when we actually commanded our own travel machines, and damn pretty machines they were.

CATCHING UP ON OTHER TOPICS ...

I’m a little behind again on my blogging, so will catch up on a few topics here at the close. All of these merit more than a catch-up sentence, but we do what we can do.

Aloha, Macbook -- When I updated my 2008 MacBook to Snow Leopard OS last October, I thought I was doing a good thing. I’ve been an early adaptor before, and never been bitten like this. The Airport function quit working and I lost my wireless internet connection. Mind you, everything else in my house using wi-fi continues to work fine -- two HP’s, an old mac mini as well as my iPod Touch. I searched the support groups to see an answer to “Invalid IP address” or “Self-assigned IP address”. I got a lot of bum feedback about needing a new router. I have a fairly new 2Wire router and I’m disinclined to throw it out because of one device upgrade gone bad. Hate to say, but after 6 weeks of messing with it I’ve boxed up the MacBook -- life is too short. It was a toy, more than anything else so it won’t be missed a great deal. It will go the way of eBay or be a donation to a relative.

I am Conando! -- I’m very sorry to see the big brouhaha with Conan, Leno and NBC. Sorry to see Conan leave; I knew that his conceptual humor might be a hard sell for early evening, general audiences. He may very well go to FOX (home of The Simpsons and The Cleveland Show), so he should be able to cut loose and really be NC-17 Conan again.

Scott Brown and Massachusetts -- Have to agree with Froma Harrop on this one. Brown’s election is not so much an indictment of Obama or an over-reaching Congress. It is indicative that these New England voters, who already have state health care, were afraid that they’d be double-charged on national health care. Congress should still carry on as they were, and try to hatch out a program for the rest of the nation. I do think that Obama has exhibited a weak, overly cautious leaderhip style that has been off-putting to many of his original supporters. Won't be surprised myself if he's a one-term President.

Samsung no longer the blues -- I was able to get the wireless “dongle” (suppress urge to giggle) even though it’s in short supply -- Samsung didn’t even have it at their warehouse. Best Buy did have a new shipment. I put one on hold and bought it. Have to say that Blockbuster and Pandora are great -- they will give Apple some competition and maybe merit another blog.

OK, all caught up! This is what happens when weather and work take me away from blogging.

© 2010 blogSpotter

The Big Lewinsky

2010-02-02T15:07:00.000-08:00

What blue dress? -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
I was a naïve 40 year old Democrat in 1997, when the first whispers of “Monicagate” hit the political airwaves. There was a lot of rumor and innuendo, but no proof that President Bill Clinton, serving his 2nd term, was having an affair with anyone at all. I was a Clinton supporter, and couldn’t imagine that the rumors had any credibility. Clinton was already confronting the Paula Jones accusations; in a Jones deposition he denied any rumors about the 22 year old intern, Monica Lewinski. That Clinton was willing to settle out of court with Paula for $850,000 should’ve clued me in. That’s a nice chunk of change even for a sitting president and ex-lawyer. To friends and anyone who would listen I’d say, “These accusations are ridiculous! There are cameras and people all around!”. I figured that Paula was just a gold-digger. And diehard Clinton-haters were behind Monica rumors and all the rest of it.

I was surprised and concerned when the Drudge report broke the story on January 17, 1998. Everyone in my Supply Chain class huddled around the TV in the lounge that afternoon, as the story played out on CNN. This was only Day One, and already the snarky jokes had begun. It seems that Monica Lewinsky, a college intern from an affluent California family, had “inappropriate relations” with Clinton from 1995 thru 1996. Lewinsky’s superiors, well aware of the situation, decided to place her at the Pentagon – well away from the President. There, the love-struck girl became friends with the (still) serpentine, evil Linda Tripp – a motherly, middle-aged confidante with book royalties and political intrigue coiled up in her heart. Lewinsky confessed all to Tripp, who dutifully recorded the conversations and handed them over to Ken Starr, the Independent Counsel investigating Paula Jones. Starr gave Lewinsky “transactional immunity” if she would spill the beans on Clinton. Very reluctantly, Monica did just that – otherwise she could’ve been prosecuted for perjury. She even turned over the infamous “blue dress” (kept at Tripp’s suggestion) to help seal the deal.

The blue dress became the watershed evidence – no longer was there any he-said-she-said. Clinton had to come clean (so to speak) and at the very least admit an “improper relationship”. The rabid Republicans in both houses of Congress were champing at the bit for any reason to take the rascally, popular president down. Imagine their delight when it looked like there was just cause. The House voted to issue Articles of Impeachment, and a 21-day trial ensued in the Senate. Clinton was acquitted of all charges and remained in office. His Arkansas law license was suspended from his earlier false testimony to Starr, but that was his only punitive consequence.

AFTERMATH OF A SCANDAL

Monicagate very nearly became the orbital center of our pop culture for the two years that it played out. Moralists decried the fall of American values. Comedians mined it heavily for a mother lode of jokes which produces gems to this day. Middle aged matrons wagged fingers at Monica – “That filthy tramp!” – without pausing to think that the 50-something Leader of the Free World might have had some control over his own situation. Tripp was easily vilified as the ultimate betrayer and portrayed by John Goodman on SNL. Republicans used Monicagate for “Holier Than Thou” posturing until Larry Flynt came calling, bringing down GOP Congressman Robert Livingston, aspiring Speaker of the House, as the sacrifice that comes of hypocrisy. The scandal produced catch-phrases that resonate to this day:

“I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”
“This vast right-wing conspiracy has been conspiring against my husband since he announced for Predident…”
“It depends on what the definition of the word is is”.

Clinton later attributed his indiscretions to stress and pressure. “I cracked, I just cracked”. He since has rebounded admirably as political operative and husband to Hillary who herself has soared as NY Senator and then Secretary of State under Obama. As for Monica, she had a short-lived stint as a C-List celeb after Monicagate, publishing a bio, and attempting a purse line. She has since finished a Masters degree in Psychology from the London School of Economics and otherwise keeps a low profile, away from the glare of publicity. If she never does another noteworthy thing, her contribution to our historical and cultural lore will be inestimable.

ADDENDUM (Feb. 13, 2010)
I'd me remiss not to mention a possibly huge consequence of Monicagate -- the Year 2000 Election. In that election, Al Gore distanced himself from Clinton; Gore even nominated a Democrat running mate, Joe Leiberman, whose main claim to fame was voting to impeach Clinton. Gore ran a pallid, poor campaign by most measures and he delibrately refused any Clinton coat tails because of the "moral turpitude" involved. Clinton made note of this and said he pesonally could've delivered two states to Gore if he'd been allowed on the campaign trail. When one considers the awful travesty of the two W. Bush terms that followed, the seemingly shallow sexual antics of Monicagate had huge consequences indeed.

© 2010 blogSpotter

The iPad has Landed

2010-01-28T12:53:00.000-08:00

Ignore the nattering nabobs... -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Today’s blog is timely “fluff” until I finish some research on another article I’m working on. But of course it’s worth reading like all of my great blog entries. ;-)

After much hype and rumors galore, Steve Jobs finally introduced the iPad to an anxious, Apple-worshipping public. The device is much as trade papers had described -- a magazine-sized flat-panel device that runs Apple software and lets you read “print” media from the comfort of a couch. No need for a level desk surface, or even a steady seat.

The device has been greeted with ferocious criticism from the technoratti and here are just a few of the things found lacking in iPad:

Camera
Flash compatibility
GPS
USB Port
HDMI
Multitasking
Etc (the list goes on).

As if that’s not enough, some feminists are upset by the name “iPad” because they think it calls to mind feminine hygiene products. Give me a break on that – Stridex Pads have been around forever and have nothing to do with women’s monthly matters.

As to the technical complaints, I think a lot of people were expecting a tablet-style MacBook with all the bells and whistles of a Mac. I disagree with a lot of that anti-iPad negativity and here are three major features to recommend iPad:

1) Instant-On – Since it’s using the iPhone OS, I’m figuring it will be instant-on. Every time you turn it on, this should give you back two minutes of your life that would normally be spent watching a white apple emblem on a gray backdrop. I use my iPod touch to do quick checks on mail, weather and even crossword clues. It beats waiting on a computer to boot any day of the week.

2) $499 – Does everybody remember the MacBook Air from two years ago? The price was something like $2K. Early adaptors and tinkerers were immediately discouraged by the grandiose price. iPad (the 16GB wi-fi only version) is priced competitively with netbooks. $499 is pretty doable.

3) 9.7” bright screen display – I’m an Apple fan to be sure; I have a first generation iPhone and also an iTouch. I love them both – I like the Accelerometer and the Multi-touch feature. BUT I have middle aged eyes (see my previous blu-ray blog entry). Even using all the cool stretch and magnify features it can be very annoying to read a USA today article -- even with reading glasses. I’ll welcome a quick easy device where I don’t have to stretch the text – the text is already the right size.

I do have a couple of predictions about iPad – one good and one that will probably make Apple stand watch…

• iPod Touch sales will be cannibalized – I’ll probably ditch the iPod Touch since iPad does everything as well, only bigger and splashier. My iPod Touch never leaves the house – portability isn’t that big a deal. The iPad costs a little bit more and has more accessory options (as well as AT&T 3GS licensing fees later on) so maybe Apple doesn’t mind a little bit of cannibalism there.

• American business can probably make ample use of an iPad form factor – There are myriad tablet-style applications right now that use small monochrome displays w/ limited I/O capacity. (Think Palm handheld). I can pretty easily see iPads being adapted to dental offices and other places where fast boot-up and compact display matter a lot.

In sum – iPad has a lot of potential. Technoratti snobs and N.O.W. will also come around to it once they give it a try. After all, no good deed goes unpunished or unaccompanied by negative reviews.

© 2010 blogSpotter

Samsung Blu-ray Blues

2010-01-17T12:26:00.000-08:00

Do you really want to know?? -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Before launching into blu-ray, I’d like to mention my visit to Borders music the other night. When the store opened in 1996, it was a “happening place”. It featured a café with live music, free massages, reading stations and best of all -- a store overflowing with books, music and magazines. As I looked it over recently, I could see large areas of empty space. Other areas were occupied with greeting cards, toys and iPod accessories. It’s probably a sign of the times -- “dead tree media” (see my previous blog entry) is losing a lot of its panache. I hope that Borders holds on -- I like my fun, alternative reading space. I wonder if people realize what we lose if we close all the libraries and book stores.

On a not-unrelated topic, I’ve noticed that the hit count for my own blog is woefully small these days. When I began this enterprise in 2005, I had high hopes for a big readership, and I felt like I lots to say. I find myself running on a quarter tank now -- low on ideas and inspiration. I’m hoping that something pulls it out of the fire, but otherwise I may go on a long hiatus. I noticed that my facebook page which I barely maintain or modify gets quite a few more hits than my blog. That’s funny in a way, but also another sign of the times. OK -- enough with morose musings, today’s topic is blu-ray.

BLU-RAY

Blu-ray is an optical disc technology which provides 10 times the data storage of a standard definition DVD. A shorter wavelength blue-violet laser is what gives the technology its name. I finally gave in to my curiosity and purchased a Samsung blu-ray device this weekend. I was also drawn to the fact that it offers wireless connectivity to Blockbuster, Netflix, Pandora and YouTube. My experience was pretty terrible, let me count the ways….

NO, NO, NO NET -- My internet experience hit an immediate brick wall. I have high-speed DSL and a wireless router that works with countless other devices in my house. Samsung requires a special Samsung wireless adaptor to connect via USB. That part was omitted from the blurb on the carton. I have a special Ethernet adaptor (called MacSense) which lets you adapt a wireless signal to your Ethernet port. This kept getting ’gateway ping’ error on the network test.

THE EYES DO NOT HAVE IT -- My middle-aged eyes can’t tell any difference between blu-ray and standard definition; they look the same to me. What’s all the hype about?

THOSE DAMN BLACK BANDS -- I *still* get letterbox format with black bands at the bottom and top of my HDTV screen. I hoped at the very least that blu-ray would eliminate that.

HDMI SWITCH -- I purchased a new HDMI switch for hooking multiple HDMI devices to a single TV. It’s extremely flaky and seems to confuse both the Apple TV and the blu-ray box. My only current workaround is restarting or rebooting devices -- hardly a push-button convenience.

MACSENSE-LESS -- Using my MacSense Ethernet adaptor (mentioned above) with the Samsung appears to have messed up the settings on the MacSense --now it doesn’t work with anything else. It took me 2 days to figure out how to program it 1 year ago.

PRICE NOT NICE -- I spent $169 on this box, on Saturday. 12 hours later , Best Buy had a Sunday flyer with the price dropped down to $149. I ran to the store to recover @ $21 -- at least they offer a price protection plan for people vigilant enough to read the Sunday fliers.

In sum -- I went out of my way to spend too much money to get something that didn’t work as I thought, and additionally sabotaged another device that had been working well. It knocked me out of action for most of a weekend day, and as of this writing still doesn’t do much.

There you have it -- a weekend of failing blogs, flailing book stores and Samsung blu-ray that gave me the blues. It’s enough to make me glad that tomorrow’s a work day.
 
© 2010 blogSpotter

"Dead Tree Media" Has Staying Power

2010-01-10T15:16:00.000-08:00

Why magazines should rule -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Much has been said lately about the upcoming demise of the “dead tree media” -- magazines and newspapers. I remember circa 1995 when we were still bandying terms like Prodigy, Lynx, AOL and Mosaic. The Hotwired-reading prophets of the time predicted that magazines would be over and done with by 1996. They were wrong about that to be sure, but in 2010 I’d be remiss not to mention that lots of “dead trees” have really died. I need only look at my local Dallas Morning News which has had to nearly double its subscription rate to $33/year. Yes, some periodicals have ended their periodicity -- but I have hope that some survivors will persist.

Here is why. When I pick up a new copy of GQ or Rollins Stone magazine, I get more than the article content. I get beautiful, printed color lithography -- a tactile experience of paper and a veritable time capsule of ads and articles that speak to the current day. I get a thematically assembled-and-bound album of ideas and art that I might not think to put together myself -- suitable for a keepsake if I so desire. Imagine printing this week’s Newsweek content on your local inkjet and assembling it in any way as portable or pleasing as a printed magazine. OK, I hear the reader saying, “I don’t need assembled keepsakes, all I need is two articles”. You force me to bring up the “positive negatives” of dead tree media:

THE BUS -- If somebody mugs me at the bus stop, all they get is Newsweek. They don’t get an $800 Dell Inspiron with all my financial documents, software and photo memories.

THE BUTTER FINGERS -- If I accidentally throw my Men’s Health into the fireplace, all I’ve lost is $4.50 -- maybe not even that much if I already read it. If I drop my HP Pavilion, I must hope it’s still under warranty. ** See above addendum about photo memories.

THE BEACH -- If I take my Mini notebook to the beach, I risk gunking it up with sand, salt and suntan oil. I might get smears on a magazine but somehow it’s not as traumatic. Magazines were plainly made for the beach

THE BURGER KING -- Burger King will have generous stacks of Green Sheet, Dallas Observer and other freebies at the store entrance. These periodicals are free for the taking and paid for by local advertisers. I have yet to see the store that provides a stack of PC’s for customers who want impromptu browsing material.

THE BATTERY -- Utne Reader has an instant boot and shutdown time. I can read it for endless hours and no battery has been depleted. Don’t need to search for wifi or electrical outlets.

THE BIG GRAPHICS -- Some people will say that Smart phones are so small and simple that they eliminate some of the concerns of dropping or smearing with suntan oil. To that I have to say, this is where technology is limited by human physiology. A hand-held device should not be much smaller than a deck of playing cards -- lest it get easily lost or baffle it’s user with tiny controls. No less is true of a portable reader (be it an iPhone, a netbook or a SONY ebook reader). I have an iPhone and strain to read it even with reading glasses. Vogue on the other hand is bigger-than-life and splashy. A middle-aged person can read much of it without glasses.

Magazines give you fold-outs and cologne samples. When will computers offer fragrances? Magazines are light-weight and made for abuse. You can roll them up and cram them into tiny places (OK, mind out of the gutter). blogSpotter (I, the author) is admittedly old and out of the mainstream. But I truly think that our dead tree experience is something that has staying power. Maybe the next decade will prove me wrong. I wonder if there are any magazines that cover this issue?
 
© 2010 blogSpotter