My unbaked thoughts and self righteous commentary on politics, pop culture or whatever else might slip out of my fingers onto the keyboard. For tech stuff, visit my technology-related blog and for bad poetry and stories, my poetry/story blog. Actually, both of these other blogs are updated much more frequently these days.
ActivStyle is the latest service sprung up to satisfy the incontinence craze sweeping our nation. According to the commercial, your "personal incontinence consultant" will guide you through the maze of bowel and bladder control products on the market today, ensuring your needs are met. Tell me, sir, do you shit your drawers, piss your pants, or both? Or are you just a dribbler? I want to be sure I formulate a plan custom made just for you! When I'm finished, we'll plug those leaky holes of yours so tight that there'll be no need for you to carry that mop and bucket around where ever you go anymore ...
Speaking of mopping up, I'm quite fascinated by the sport of curling and have been since I was a little kid. I grew up about 75 miles south of Vancouver, B.C. back when there was no cable television, so you got whatever channels your rabbit ears could pick up. In addition to the Seattle network affiliates, we got several Canadian stations and it seemed like curling was on one or the other practically 24/7. I'velived in Philadelphia almost 25 years and so don't get the chance to see curling much these days, but the arrival of the Winter Olympics brings a bit of my childhood back home to me once again.
I guess it's curling's strange shuffleboard meets mopping the floor that feeds my interest. Perhaps it's no accident that the sport has become somewhat of a metaphor for my life at sea: I did lots of mopping and sweeping the decks in the Navy and later ventured out on a couple of short pleasure cruises where you could play shuffleboard, if you were so inclined. Curling brings those two disparate experiences together for me, tying them together along with the experience of my younger self so taken with the sport from the great white north as a child.
As much as I "enjoy" curling, I'm even more fascinated by cricket, having been glued to the TV for hours watching it from the hotel whenever I'm in Europe. I think the attraction there is that though I've watched extensively, I'm to this day completely confused by what's going on. I do know they break for tea several times in the ten years it feels like it takes to complete a match. They have bowlers and batsmen, and it's vaguely like baseball mixed with croquet. I'm aware that there's a lot of talk about "overs" and such. Simply magnificent.
But cricket's for another time. It's the Winter Olymics now. Sure, it's great to see Lindsey Vonn come through with the Gold, even with a bum shin. Gold too for mogul chick extraordinaire Hanna Kearney earlier in the week. And Shaun White will do his thing tonight and likely grab the top prize. But me? I recorded CNBC's coverage of curling this afternoon and plan to hunker down this later this evening and transport myself back to those childhood days of yore in front of the tube, digging on this sport of kings (well, sport of kings' housekeepers anyway).
Sweepers, sweepers: man your brooms ... Fellow travelers who are familiar with that siren song understand.
Whatever happened to Mr. Yuk? I recall him clearly from my childhood and he's apparently still out and about, but keeping a mighty low profile since his glory days in the early 70's. Not sure why: there's far more poisons to strike fear into the hearts of parents today (or at least we recognize more of them as such now).
I hadn't had a conscious thought of the poster boy for the dangers of poison since his hey day until earlier this week when I inexplicably dropped his name in a discussion on new process adoption ("old way, bad like Mr. Yuk; new way, good like Mr. Pibb"). Never mind that Mr. Pibb doesn't conger up visions of wonderful, I don't have an explanation of why Mr. Yuk slipped from my lips.
Ahh, is there nothing better than 70's TV Commercials? They just don't make 'em like that anymore.
Though I must admit I'm quite fond of the Halls Refresh Commercial making the rounds, if only for its high octane creep factor taken to a degree I'm sure its makers did not intend. Or maybe they did. Either way, it has an effect. It's certainly nowhere near as creepy as those horrid Charles Schwab commercials (I blame them for the collapse of the financial industry).
This post is obviously going nowhere - at least I'm consistent in that regard. When I was churning this garbage out daily, it didn't matter as much; however, seeing as though I'm only getting around to it on the weekends, I outta try a bit harder. I just don't have the energy.
I'm enjoying the umpteenth viewing of Unforgiven, one of my very favorite flicks. I never liked most of Eastwood's 70's and 80's Dirty Harry-centric action flicks (though they were sort of entertaining in a 'B' movie, guilty pleasure kind of way). His spaghetti western stuff was classic, though not my cup of tea (and his follow-on cowboy movies through the 70's followed suit, albeit without Leone's style or the cheesy dubbing). I love the work he's done over the last twenty years, though. Both in front of but especially behind the camera.
Unforgiven is my top pick of Eastwood's fine 90's/00's litter (fighting neck and neck with Million Dollar Baby and Mystic River). I'm not a big Western aficionado but Unforgiven turns the genre on its head, mocking all the stereotypes with a jaundiced eye biting on a raw nerve. And the music's perfect. If you ever shied away because you don't dig Westerns and/or disliked Eastwood's earlier work, do yourself a favor and give it a go.
But now it's over and that means Bedtime for Bonzo, drifting off to a re-run of Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (my favorite of the Bill flicks, though most who like them at all seem to opt for Vol 2). Not Tarantino's best in my view but entertaining, funny and great tunes all the same. A glorious mess. Volume 3 was recently announced for release around 2014. That's certainly planning ahead (or maybe wishful thinking).
Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day. I won't have to go to work, so that already makes it a step up from every day of the past three weeks. But I probably shouldn't jump the gun on that (I think I thought the same thing each of the past two Friday nights).
And finally ... I'm looking forward to the season finale of Mad Men on Sunday, as well as the final episode of the "Seinfeld" story arc on Curb Your Enthusiasm.
I think I'll hang up my blogging cleats for a few days as I buckle down to other things this week. But before I do, I wanted to circle back on something I only hinted at Saturday: Jesus and his Dinosaurs, as depicted in the Beginner's Biblical Coloring Book.
I came across this gem while googling for angry Jesus images. Why look for a pissed off savior? Well, when I posted about my adventures at the pharmacy Saturday, I needed a couple of pictures to illustrate to you the essence of the Jesus-like soul behind me in line. My pharma Buddy Christ got pretty agitated at one point, thus I was looking for a picture to visualize his wrath.
The picture to the right was apparently part of an actual religious coloring book and it makes me laugh like nothing I've seen in a long while.
It got me to thinking about other Deity / Dinosaur imagery; well, lo and behold, there are plenty of them out there. None, though, have the chuckle factor of our lord strapped to the saddle of a T-Rex. He's not nearly as interesting astride a herbivore.
In the money shot up top, he looks to me like a kind of Nazarene Lone Ranger. A cloud of dust and a mighty hi-ho Silver away! If Silver were an angry Tyrannosaurus.
Or perhaps a biblical variant on the Land of the Lost? The Land of the Lord? The Lord of the Lost? Replace Rick Marshall, Will and Holly with Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Ya got "Grumpy" the T-Rex up there in my fav pic and are only missing a few Sleestaks to round things out.
I'm sure that I'll end up roasting in a hell I don't even believe exists as punishment for this blasphemy. I tend to follow George Costanza's adage that although I don't believe in God (at least not in his traditional biblical incarnation), I nevertheless believe he'll punish me if anything good happens in my life. Or if I make fun of his kid. Really, though, I'm only making fun of the sort of folk who would create such a coloring book (unless they meant it as a joke, in which case it wouldn't be as funny). And I'm not really making fun of them, just of a more naive time (a time that lives on in more than a few minds out there). It's a gentle fun, so perhaps I'll only be sentenced to purgatory.
If I should be punished for anything, it's for incessantly updating posts I should leave well enough alone. Like this one.
And besides, I just can't help myself. This kind of thing just tickles me no end. And apparently you can get the picture at the top of this post on a T-Shirt! I already ordered mine. There are several others to choose from as well (I really like the Jurassic Lord - that's it on the left!)
That's just wrong on so many levels. Ty Cobb or Barry Bonds, yeah: knock yourself out, snowball fights all around. But not Ted Williams, for crying out loud. He was one of the good guys. Come 2195 when they thaw him out and slap a new body underfoot, his first glance in the mirror at the new Ted will be marred by a fucking Starkist tin jutting out of his frontal lobe!
Of course, there may be worries for The Splendid Splinter beyond simply a few dings in the membrane. It seems the boys at Alcor lopped off Ted's head with something like a chain saw, the 'surgery' performed by a crew whose combined medical education consisted of high school biology 101 and a CPR correspondent's course. I imagine the procedure resembled that one scene in DePalma's 1983 Scarface remake (you know the one; if you don't, you don't want to).
Johnson was the Chief Operating Officer of Alcor for several years before turning tail to become a whistle-blower against his former colleagues. He claimed to fear for his safety after allegedly receiving threats of reprisal, penning the expose in hiding for the most part. He goes on to write that families of employees would come in regularly for photo opps with the batting champ. They'd take Ted's head out of storage and toss it around while they took turns snapping pics, sometimes involving Williams' cranium in bazaar and 'unnatural' poses (as if there were 'natural' ones for such an occasion).
I'll certainly be picking the book up when it hits the stands this week.
Johnson's allegations are vehemently denied by Alcor, who attempted unsuccessfully to block publication of the book. I can't imagine why Johnson would fabricate such over-the-top outrages in the detail he did, for such a lengthy period of time, if there wasn't at least a kernel of truth there. Well, I can imagine why: the usual and obvious reasons of money and ego. But there has been more than enough corroboration since he first raised these concerns to tell me something's fishy in cryonics heaven.
Who really cares? I mean really cares, beyond the ghoulish entertainment kind of caring that folks like me indulge in. There are those cryonics believers, of course, and I would think Ted's family might have more than a passing interest. But anyone else?
In the end, I find the whole thing supremely silly given everything else going on in the world. I'd find the whole thing supremely silly even if nothing else was going on in the world. It's a frozen hunk of inanimate matter that'll never be anything but again. Even if we have the technology to reanimate it at some distant future point in time, it's high likely by then we'll be able to transfer the thawed out neurons into a 'fresh' artificial head for him.
In the end, this is nothing more egregious than finding out people were desecrating Archie Bunker's Chair at the Smithsonian. Actually, I'd be far more disturbed to hear of chair abuse allegations (shuttering to think what some museum workers might be up to after hours when they get bored). That's real Americana you're messing with, punk! I'd be calling for congressional investigations and the whole nine yards.
But a dead baseball player's head? What can you say? Chin up, Ted!
I had several folks asking me for further comment on Momar's adventures in New York this week but I'm not sure there's more to say. Gadflydafi's actions speak for themselves, whether he's pitching his usual traveling tent at Trump's place in West Chester or giving a reading of Allen Ginsberg's Howlat the UN Wednesday (at least that's what I think he was doing; there's some question as to the fidelity of his interpretation).
The "king of kings", as he was referred to by one of his lackeys yesterday in introducing him to the assembly, was acting predictably loony but not so much that there's any comic value in mocking him further (he does that just fine on his own).
There are more important things going on in the world.
For instance, Julie Cooper's alter-ego Mackenzie Phillips was apparently screwing her father, or so she says in her just-published tell-all (and, naturally, on Oprah). Also, he introduced her to shooting coke and presumably other such typical father-daughter rites of passage. Papa John, it seems, wasn't the most adept at working the syringe for Mac, missing the vein and numbing her whole arm. I could see Mike Brady attempting to 'fix' Marsha in this manner. Hilarity ensues. Meanwhile, nobody was gettin' fat 'cept Mama Cass (coke does that to ya).
Speaking of dope, what sort of Cristal and Eight Ball bender resulted in the conception and approval of that obnoxious yuppie whiner Charles Schwab ad campaign? Shooting live action celebrities and then animating them in grotesque and unnatural ways ('rotoscope") makes each one all the more jarringly pompous.
It's like someone raking their fingernails down the chalkboard of my psyche whenever one of these abortions flash onto the TV screen, causing a Pavlovian reflex to kick into to the nerves in my right thumb, compelling it to press down hard on the channel changer of the remote. I'd just as soon use my money for toilet paper than give it to the Schwab shit-for-brains. I wouldn't want my cash associating with theirs.
At least some folks have the good sense to bust on this cheapjack shit.
Words as wise as any fortune cookie just waiting to be cracked open and pulled out of my email filters. This truism is just the latest in a long line of tidbits, parables and proverbs I regularly receive from the great spam slicer in the sky. Many are wise in ways the sender likely didn't intend.
Often it's hard to tell exactly what the author's original intent might have been. For example, the sex/television comparison promised in the subject line of the aforementioned email was in fact not provided: neither sex nor TV is mentioned in the message body (from what I can tell, it's an excerpt from a badly written sci-fi short story parsed from somebody's livejournal entry).
That spells disappointment for this television addict, with so many questions unanswered. Better how? Better than Mad Men? Better than Weeds? Better than the mid-90s-era Simpsons?!? What defines a 'good' fuck? Is there a 'bad' variety? Sadly, I got a no-such-address bounce-back when replying with these follow up questions to the originator, one 'Candice Farrell '. Oh well. Pity.
Even as I was pondering all this, a friend let me know that Jim Carroll died on Friday.
The news hit me harder than I would have thought. After all, I hadn't heard from the man regarding new material in quite awhile (to the point where I'd been re-re-reading his earlier work for lack of the fresh stuff). When did he last release an album? A book? I couldn't tell you (though I could look on his Catholic Boy website, had I been of a mind to). And frankly he'd been admittedly living on borrowed time since his first days as a prepubescent junky. Making it to the ripe old age of 60 was quite an achievement, given the appetites he was loath to deny over the long term (he was, as he put it, more inclined toward shadows).
But as I said, Jim's passing hit me hard. I read Basketball Diaries when it was first published in 1978 and it ignited this Seattle boy's love affair with New York City, along with my latent discovery of Mean Streets, Ramones and Velvet Underground that same year.
Jim's prose had an immediacy and sly intelligence to it that spoke to me like nothing I'd read to that point (I hadn't yet discovered Hunter Thompson or Lester Bangs). It was Carroll's 16 year old voice coming at me from those pages, remember. It felt like he was talking to this 16 year old as though 1965 was 1978, instantly obliterating the 13 year gap from pen to publication.
It took Jim's death to bring back my adolescent memories of a lasting epiphany: a realization that words themselves were pure joy when you put them down to paper in interesting ways. Paper might have given way to bits and bytes, but the feeling remains.
Why had Mr. Carroll slipped off my radar in ways that Thompson and Bangs hadn't? I guess the fact that he wasn't the most prolific writer had something to do with it. Working on a novel since at least 1991 (the year he first performed public readings of material from it), it was finally due to roll off the presses this year, at least as reported by Catholic Boy back in Feburary. Boy, that was fast! :-) I'm crossing my fingers that it was truly 'done' enough to be published posthumously. And that's the thing too: this is his first novel. Apart from Basketball Dairies and Forced Entries, Jim's output was pretty much exclusively poetry with maybe the odd short story, while I've tended to prefer the narrative form. But still, he's right there on my literary Mount Rushmore beside Thompson, Bangs and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It took his passing for me to climb back up there and kick the dust off his likeness to recognize the face again.
Oh, yeah - let's not forget: Jim also put out some pretty good music with the Jim Carroll Band. Catholic Boy is still one of my favorite records. When the City Drops Into the Night and the title tune- songs rarely get better than that.
I'm starting to feel 'normal' again after several days of being knocked flat on my back by the flu. I don't wish that shit on anyone. Well, maybe Robert Stigwood, who until this morning I sort of admired, if in a narrow sense.
For you kids, Stigwood was the mastermind behind the worldwide explosion in popularly of disco in the late 1970s. He was more than that, of course, but that was his legacy, his high water mark. He managed/produced the Bee Gees and produced the films and soundtracks for Saturday Night Fever and Grease.
But this morning I happened upon his Waterloo and it suspended me in perplexed animation: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band, The Movie. Oh God, the Horror! I couldn't move, my eyes wouldn't close.
I was lying in bed, half awake. Still coming back from the flu's wrath. I flipped the TV on and there it was. In every way that something can be bad, this is worse. Every frame, each note redefines yet again and takes to new heights the term "that's just wrong." And the sounds! Good God, yall - what is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Edwin Starr unwittingly wrote the first review of this movie about eight years prior to its release
Now I don't hold up the Beatles Pepper album as some 'on high' untouchable beacon of light. There is no thing so holy in my book. Everything and anything is fair game for fucking around with if it produces something of value. And in fact, Sgt. Pepper is close to dead last in my list of favorite Beatles albums (just scrapping up off the basement floor above Magical Mystery Tour). But how much cocaine and booze and hyper inflated shots of ego-booster did it take come up with this shit storm???
The casting of feather maned mannequins the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton was an act for which no punishment seems worthy. Now, I like the Brothers Gibb. I loved the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever. Frampton never 'Came Alive' for me but I had nothing personal against the guy. Until now.
Look, if I want to hear the Beatles tunes done up in such a fashion, all I have to do is play the original mop top album at triple speed and add synthesizers to the mix. While sticking my hands on two lit stove burners and dropping my dick down into the running garbage disposal. Ed Wood himself would have chased these boys from the set and chewed through his angora sweater in disgust over the chips in their acting chops. Elvis at his thespian worst was Olivier doing Hamlet when compared to these pepperheaded choir boys. Thankfully they don't do much more than sing, prance around and mug for the camera; unfortunately, they do a lot of those things.
No amount of 'stunt' cameos can pour enough deodorant over this steaming pile of shit to disguise the stench. And anyway, the flies buzzing overhead would surely give it away. It is an eclectic brew of "special guests" fading in and out too: Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, Earth, Wind and Fire, Steve Martin, all doing a Beatles tune before running for the hills. Billy Preston, who played keyboards for the real Fab Four toward the end of their run, plays Sgt. Pepper himself. Steve Martin is the only one who isn't funny, which should tell you something. The funny ones - all the rest - are funny, sad. Not funny, ha-ha.
"A splendid time is guaranteed for all." That's the tagline. It must have been a misprint. "An excruciating time is guaranteed for all" was likely the correct one. On that, they delivered big.
I really expected more from the director of Car Wash. Then again, I'd have expected more from a random homeless person on the street or that three legged dog up the block with the dented head who's happily lapping up its own diarrhea.
I recommend mandating its viewing for the hard cases in juvie as a sort of "scared straight" cautionary tale of the damage done through unchecked power, excess and "better living" through chemicals. I'm not talking 1960s psychedelics - nothing this vile could possibly emerge from something so tame as a bad acid trip. No, this is more serious.
Look kids - look what people did to themselves in the 70s with cocaine and ego and champagne. And synthesizers.
And the damage continues unabated through the DVD, Cable and digital downloads. Some things are better left on the cutting room floor, sometimes some things are every thing.
There are some benefits to being sick as a dog (no, Michael, I mean 'like a dog' - get outta here with that car battery and waterboard and back down to the Novacare Complex where you belong, they'll be no electrods to the gonads here today).
Where were we? Benefits, yes. Week day television is a big one.
Oh sure, I have them on DVD and can always pop them in. And yeah, I can go to hulu or any number of places on the web and catch them there. But that somehow feels a little less 'genuine' than catching it 'by chance' as I channel surf.
Men of honor, of integrity. Of staccato, monotoned procedural coptalk perfected. Of RIGHT and WRONG and BLACK and WHITE and LEGAL and ILLEGAL. No shades of gray need apply here.
Each with a very particular, very sharp stick jammed all the way up his ass to where if you look really closely you can see the tip jutting from the back of his throat when he talks. When the sticks were inserted at a very young age they must have severed the nerves around their funny bones, rendering them impervious to humor or irony.
They constitute members of a rare breed, a dying breed, alive only perhaps on channel 69 at 3pm on a Wednesday. They lived, ate and breathed black and white, even when filmed in living color, with iron clad rules as stiff as the pole up their backside.
Steve-o and Joe would just as soon drop the hammer on their best friend or family as they would their worst enemy if their com padre crossed the letter of the law. Hell, McGarrett let his sister's infant child die rather than refuse to testify against a quack doctor for a charge that carried a maximum of a thousand lousy bucks fine or one year in jail. He cried over it (in I think his only show of emotion in the series), but he did it nonetheless.
Lt. McGarrett and Sgt. Friday were both at their most entertaining when confronted with their polar opposite, an antagonist bursting to full with emotion, color, and anarchy.
Sure, he was only a Sargent. And yes, he and his partner got booted around to a new department every week, probably 'cause none of the department Captains could handle someone of his unyielding principles square-jawed honesty more than a few times a month. He was Serpico before Serpico and without the filthy, commie hippie trappings - a decent haircut, jacket, white shirt and tie was good enough for his father so it damn well is good enough for him. And his hard work has paid off with a new Dragnet stamp!
"It was Tuesday, it was Warm in Los Angeles, we were working the day shift out of Homicide. The Captain's name is [Insert this week's Captain here], my Partner's Bill Gannon, my name's Friday. It's summertime and with the season, the crowds are out at the parks, beaches and streets. Most of the time it's peaceful and people get along, sometimes when they don't, someone crosses the line. That's when I go to work. I carry a badge. Dum de dum dum."
When I hear that, I get a chill. Justice is served on ice. Monotone only, no voice inflection need apply.
You'll notice I have "My Partner's Bill Gannon" and not "Frank Smith" in the excerpt above. That means, I'm a 60s Dragnet man, though I like the 50s variety too.
But the 50s was too easy, too conservative, too much like Friday himself.
The 60s brought hippies and psychedelics and hard rock and Black Panthers and riots and war protesters. They brought Blue Boy.
McGarrett had "'Book'em Danno". Friday countered with "That's weed, Bill". Followed by quick shots of he and Gannon nodding furiously. Okay, that wasn't exactly his catch phrase, but when he did say it, well - you knew he was onto something.
No not really Ben (rats don't live that long). Rather, his great, great grandchild.
The little rat is only claiming what is rightfully his. I think until now, only Ben and his relatives knew the story that I will share with you here. The cash in the ATM is hush money, meant to keep the little rat silent. Trace those torn up bills the rodent was nesting in and you'll follow the money trail to the heights of Hollywood power and corruption.
This is all, I think, linked to a revelation I had while lying in bed this morning. The TV was still on from the night before when I fell asleep watching some second rate 50s flick I had never heard of before and can't remember now on the Retro Channel. As I wiped the gunk from my eyes around 9:30am and things came into focus, I saw that 'The Wiz' was playing on the tube.
Instead of trying to 'follow the yellow brick road!', they instead were going to 'ease on down, ease on down the rooaad!' Getting into see the Wiz was akin to slipping past the velvet ropes of Studio 54 without appearing on the guest list: a tough sell. A fine, fine flick!
A small revelation was that it was directed by Sidney Lumet. Sidney is much more well known for gritty, realer-than-real, method-acting classics like Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, and Network and completely out of his element in Wiz land.
But the big revelation is that I now know who killed Michael Jackson.
I'm positive.
At first I thought it must be the people who did Michael Jackson's makeup for The Wiz.
Look closely at him here. See that black crap smeared all over his nose?
When did his nose start shrinking?
No need to think, I'll tell you: long about just after the Wiz finished up filming, that's when.
And the rest of the makeup! It's much harder to see it, since it blends into the color of his flesh. Well, to be specific, the color of his flesh circa 1978.
My supposition is that this insidious, toxic pigment-destroying makeup gestated in MJ's DNA, slowly releasing Diprivan into his system, hooking him on the shit, while simultaneously robbing him of color and eventually of his life.
Then it hit me: no, it couldn't be the makeup folks ..
Perhaps the makeup people were merely unwitting accomplices in this grand conspiracy.
But follow the evidence trail: Who supplied the makeup? Who manufactured it? Or maybe the truth(iness) is closer to home: Who had access to it on set? Diana? Nipsey? Pryor?
Or maybe Sidney Lumet?
Yes, yes. Sidney!
Perhaps - oh, I'm sure now, no 'perhaps'! - he had Michael in mind to play the teenage poet/heroin addict Jim Carroll in a screen adaption of his book, 'The Basketball Diaries'.
A real method-actor's writer/director would salivate at such a challenge!
He needed first to turn Michael into a drug addicted and very pale Irish/Catholic kid.
But Michael mustn't know! It had to be 'real'!
Michael needed to 'feel' Jim Carroll, it needed to be a 'natural' transformation.
Sidney, you mad, mad, method genius!
But something went wrong.
Sidney had, in all his meticulous planning, forgotten a basic truth: Michael couldn't act.
It all fell apart at that point.
Michael became the Moonwalker, his nose slowly dissolved away, he vanished into a translucent fog of pigmentation and Neverland fantasies.
Tim Geithner may turn out to be the best Treasury Secretary in American history.
But might appear to be the worst.
I'm watching him on This Week, doing his usual sort of interview, looking vaguely pained, uncomfortable. I recognize the expression. I wear it when I haven't taken a shit in several days. He has it when he has to talk to people.
Most guys that are geniuses with crunching numbers hate having to explain their process.
Unfortunately, cabinet secretaries are first and foremost communicators.
They should know just enough about their area of responsibility so as to not sound completely stupid on the Sunday morning talk circuit, but not a lot more is necessary. They can hire plenty of brilliant technical experts. And have a primary brainiac who acts sort of as their Chief Operating Officer while the secretary does the Chief Executive Officer hand waving that plays well to the shareholder/taxpayer audience, as well as to congress and other layperson decision makers.
I think the roles of CEO and COO are instructive here. The CEO should be all about vision and long term 'strategy' and communications. The COO gets it done.
Now you might say, "But the President is the country's 'CEO' and the cabinet secretaries are his 'COOs'." It's an easy but ultimately false analogy for something as large and diverse as the US government.
Well, not really a false analogy but rather more an incomplete one.
A better take is that of wholly owned subsidiaries, each of which runs a sufficiently large and, more importantly, different line of business. Each deserves its own strategy and vision guy: a CEO.
Generally, for a large company, if you have one person playing both roles, he or she better be of two divergent but brilliant minds or there be wolves, blood and slow death likely lurking in its future.
But back to Geithner. All nerves and jittery gestures and hemming and hawing. I've seen the same mannerisms from those that knew finance and numbers down deep in their bones. Idiot Savants. Of course, I've also seen it from plain Idiots. Does "middle America" know the difference? I'm not sure I do. And there's the rub.
But fuck all that. It's miserable thunder/lightning/rain, the Sunday morning news-talk shows are finito, and I'm grooving to the Retro channel's showing of Car Wash ('workin' at the Car Wash ... workin' at the Car Wash, yeah! mmmmmm Car Wash, yeah!'). I'd forgotten all the great appearances in this cheeseball romp. George Carlin! Ivan Dixon from Hogan's Heroes! Richard Pryor! Otis Day! 'Professor' Irwin Corey!
Shark Week on Discovery Channel's in full swing. No Quint to be had there so it can only be so good in my view. Quint (or rather another of Robert Shaw's variations of Quint) is alive and well and slightly more articulate in the person of Romer Treese in Flix's repeated airings of The Deep, also currently running just down the dial from its aforementioned Sudsy Soulful musical 1970s brethren. One of the first "adult" movies I was allowed to go to as a newly minted teen, I recall digging the Louis Gossett Voodoo witchdoctor riff in the Deep, many years before he'd be brow beating Officer and Gentleman candidate Zack Mayo-nnaise. And of course Jackie Bisset was the bee's knees of slightly older, hot woman at the time.
Anyway, time to shake the 1970s out of my hair and head out for a run: the storm appears to have broken.
I'm watching a "repeat" - the 40th anniversary re-broadcast of the moon mission on the History Channel. Nixon just got through talking to Neil and Buzz from the White house and his insincerity and general sliminess shines through as much today as it did in 1969.
From his disheveled appearance, Nixon must have rushed into the Oval Office just before placing the phone call - probably after doing a quick line with Kissinger in the blue room (I'm guessing, judging from the jittery speech pattern and dilated pupils).
He seems in especially high spirits chatting it up with the moonwalkers. Some might attribute the jovial mood to the occasion of our first walk on an alien world and beating the dirty commies to it but given the hour it's more likely that he had just finished his evening "constitutional" (which in his case usually meant a third world musical snuff film double feature with a shot of smack and a tub of buttered popcorn).
That always put him in a giddy frame of mind. Of course, that's just what I heard.
Tricky Dick is truly timeless, kind of like Jack the Ripper.
I was just shy of 7 years old when the moon walk was originally broadcast live but I don't remember it. I'm sure we were glued to the tube like everyone. I remember catching some of the later missions but not particularly that first one. Perhaps I knew even then that it was all staged on some backlot in Van Nuys.
Nothing Nixon was involved with, even indirectly, could possibly be genuine.
The moonshot was indeed real until he placed that congratulatory call and festered himself into what to that point had been a singular moment in history and after which became cheapened and suspect. In that Nixonian instant, the astronauts were teleported from the lunar surface to some sleazy sound stage in Porn Valley guarded by Liddy, Hunt, Colson and the rest of his plumbers and fixit boys. Phonying up the moon mission was merely a prelude to the CREEP activities to come. This was the minor leagues.
But maybe I'm being too hard on the guy. He did give me Watergate, after all, and I *do* remember watching and growing to love those hearings.
They interrupted the normal afterschool shows and I had no alternative options on the days when the weather made playing outdoors unpalatable (this was Seattle and it was pre-cable, children).
Those hearings instilled in me the political beliefs and principles that have stayed with me to this day. So I gotta say 'thanks' to Milhous for that. Were it not for him, I might have grown up to be a Republican.
Now, on to the weekly misadventures of Nancy Botwin (sweet Mary Louise) ... Alanis Morissette (who appeared memorably as God in Kevin Smith's Dogma) continues a guest run tonight as Nancy's baby doc. Weeds jumped the shark prior to first airing but I love it all the same.
I toil in the murky world of software development and architecture for my supper, a frustrated writer who fell into the technology game quite by chance.
My humor is usually parched and pitch black (if you don't squirm, it's not funny), aimed often at the brilliance and sublime idiocy in politics and pop culture.
Finally, at the end of the day I'm really just a devoted student of life with failing grades who keeps registering for new classes with the fervent hope that he doesn't get expelled this semester.
The opinions expressed here are my own (and they usually don't qualify as that for very long). They are not to be construed as opinions of my employer, my dead dog, the Pope, Richard Nixon's ghost, or Paris Hilton. (Well, maybe on occasion, Paris. I think that - like me - she's student of life at heart.)
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