Geithner's Swimming with Sharks at the Deep End of the Car Wash

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.

Lithium

Interesting flick on IFC from a couple of years ago that I hadn't caught before: Last Days - a Gus Van Sant fictional take on the last days of a Kurt Cobain-like character. Young Samuel from Witness all grown up has a role as one of his friends/bandmates. "This gun-of-the-hand ... Touch not the unclean thing and be ye separate, sayth the Lord. Now go do your chores, Samuel." Love Witness! But I digress. Great scene in Last Days with Young Samuel (Lukas Glover) inviting Mormon missionaries into the house, then offering them booze before pouring a drink himself while he listens to their rap. No movie can be bad with the Velvet Underground's Venus in Furs prominently featured!

Speaking of Cobain, Saturday Morning on Comcast Sports Channel is Infomercial Nirvana!

I learned in short order that Arthritis is a national epidemic threatening to eradicate America's youth and that some $19.95 Vitamin D extract was their only hope. Do you know what Vitamin D does for you?? Everything, apparently!! Do it for the Children! Didn't catch the name of this miracle cure before switching back to Last Days.

But I checked back often.

The Insanity Challenge was next: "We don't want to rip you off - we want to get you ripped."

Followed by "how do you get rid of your unwanted Gold and make some money?" Yes, that's always been a problem of mine. Lately, this seemingly straightforward (and seemingly nonsensical) query can be aptly applied to multiple areas of my life (in at least one area, inadvertently making good sense indeed). CashForGold claims they can help. Not likely in the way I need.

This channel even has regular commercials between the infomercials.

And hey! You can now have a perfectly manicured lawn with the Worx GT trimmer! You'll never have to struggle with setting the trim. Not with the Worx GT and its "double helix line"! And powered by a lithium battery. No more hassling with Gas and oil! Gas gets on your clothes and if you enjoy a fine cigar while working outdoors, no more worry about lighting yourself on fire or blowing you and your household to kingdom come! Say you're an alcoholic landscaper? Aren't you tired of the dangers posed by gas-powered equipment with your high BAC, dangling cigarettes and the ever present possibility of passing out on top of the stuff? Fret no more! And Ladies, you don't have to wait around for the husband to get home to trim up the bush because it's so easy! Still, that sounds kind of dangerous to me.

This beats Saturday morning cartoons all to hell. All that was missing was a Billy Mays tribute block.

Time to head out to the driving range and later taking the bike down to Ridley Creek park. Preparing the body mentally for the pain to follow ...

'The Girl with Kaleidoscope Eyes! ... Sarah in the Sky Wolf Hunting!'

The Guru did some more channeling of the Neocon Nico of the North Wednesday, this time putting the beat into her bewildering tweets.

"From sealife near lush wet rainforests to energy housed under frozen tundra atop permafrost,God most creatively displays His diversity in AK."

Yeah - you say it!

"Great day w/bear management wildlife biologists; much to see in wild territory incl amazing creatures w/mama bears' gutteral raw instinct ..."

Hey, cats! Dig T.J. Kirk's rhythms, jazzing up our Queen Half Baked Alaska's techno-patter, jazzercising through a landscape of stupefyingly incoherent non sequiturs.

Snap. Snap. Snap. Ddddrummm. Yeah!

An overwhelming compulsion drove me back through time to groove on Shatner's greatest hits and those of his Vulcan Hipster friend, Lenny Nimoy. Nimoy was Burroughs to Shatner's Ginsberg. Or maybe Kerouac to his Cassidy.

But they dominated a medium wholly apart from the fringes of the literary world: they were musical giants of a type we'll likely never see again.

'Spaced Out' is in many ways the greatest album ever made.

Simon and Garfunkel, Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, Strummer and Jones, Iggy and Bowie, Leiber and Stoller, Rogers and Hammerstein, Edina and Patsy, The Captain and Tennille, Regis and Kathy Lee, Milli and Vanilli. All unquestionably great musical partnerships, but Nimoy and Shatner tower above them and stand alone.

'Mr Tambourine Man? Mister .. Mister ... Mister Tambourine Man?' Indeed, Bill. Keep looking, you'll find him. And Lenny, what about you? What's that you say? If you had a hammer, you'd hammer every morning, you'd hammer every evening? It's hammer time, Leonard. Live long and prosper.

The Chef, Doktor Murray, Bubbles and the Viking rappin' offspring: it's Bhatti-time!

Boy, the Moonwalker's ghost has got some legs. The dead just won't die. A natural metamorphosis from black to white to translucent to spirit. And now a Norwegian Rapper (!?!) might be Michael's son?

'Gunnhild Jean is not my lover ...' or maybe, 'Isn't it Good? Norwegian Wood ...'

We've got his Doctor Feel Good Conrad Murray and one of Dr Murray's accusers, MJ former private Chef Douglas Jones, continuing to make 'news' while Omer Bhatti (not very Scandinavian sounding) is in the odd position of claiming that he's not Jackson's kid. Neither Hammer nor Chuck D. nor the members of 'A-Ha' were available for comment.

Who claims MJ paternity to this MC Viking then? Jackson's wacko daddy-o, Joe (played with absolute dead-on brilliance by Welcome-back-Kotter's Freddie 'Boom-Boom' Washington in the 1992 tele-bio). Joe probably wants to pawn off MJ's massive debt onto some unsuspecting 'heir'.

'Gunnhild Jean is not my lover ... Dad says I am the one .. the kid (says he) is not my son - eyoo, yoo, yoo.'

Chef Jones probably knows. According to MSNBC, the only one that truly knows is Elizabeth Taylor (Big Mama Taylormade, as she was known to the Jackson inner circle).

Boy, they're really digging into MJ's apparent drug of choice, Diprivan. Sure, he gobbled up Xanax like it was going out of style. And shot up Demerol regularly. But he needed a bit more to "mellow out". He practiced what is known in the with-it crowd as 'going on an anesthesiologist's holiday'.

Ya know, I used to think when Michael wore that surgical mask out in public that he was just being creepy. Now, though, I think he was just being 'sly'. Kind of letting other cool cats who were in the know that he was 'tuned in' (or in his lingo, 'pre-op').

It's very much a burgeoning movement, like the rise of psychedelics in mid 60s just when guys like Lennon and Dylan first latched onto to what was then an 'underground' movement and helped to spread its message worldwide: tune in, turn on and drop out. They took to wearing tinted sunglasses ('tea shades'), facial hair (which wasn't common outside of beatnik circles at that time) and wearing colorful, flowery clothes, flashing the peace sign. All this implied first weed and then acid and other hallucinogens.

Likewise, Michael's surgical mask says, 'Yeah, man - I'm on the operating table - how 'bout you?' Meaning 'I'm on a permanent anesthesiologist's holiday - are you hip? are you pre-op?' Or, bluntly, I shoot Dipravin. It's not 'tune-in, turn-on, and drop-out', it's 'pre-op, shoot up, knock out.' He was the Timothy Leary of General Anesthetics.

Of course, I could be reading too much into all this.

'When I said I was lying, I might have been lying - Never let me hear you say you're not trying' - E. Costello, 1980

I was 'taught' today the difference between fact and truth.

It is an element of the 'curse of knowledge' problem and it never hurts to be reminded of it (your omissions might be due to your perception of some shared understanding that in fact doesn't exist).

It's also a result of local optimization and misaligned organizational structures that result in 'facts' that may be 'true' for a small group but neither facts or truth to the organization at large.

Ironically, the 'teacher' in this case is perhaps simultaneously both the biggest source and victim of this problem. And he doesn't even know it, which is yet another irony.

Seek truth from facts. Yes, grasshopper.

Perhaps our teacher needs a seeing eye horse to help him navigate the truth. I hope he's not using utilization spreadsheets and allocation graphs and charts as his maps for they tend to be by far the biggest perpetrators of facts that lie - abandon all hope ye who enters that deep, dark labyrinth with just those tools.

Get to know those in the trenches and take an interest in what they do occasionally. Talk to them, communicate with them. At least once in a while. As Bobby Zimmerman once said: 'Using Ideas as my Maps.' Like a Rolling Pivot Report? There's something I can't put my finger on that just doesn't ring 'true' with that.

Perhaps Colbert's truthiness will have to suffice if you let it. Do yourself a favor and don't. Make an effort to get at the truth, even if it'll just be followed by instructions to adjust that truth until it "feels true." How does it feel?

And one last thing: beware those that fawn over teacher's 'new clothes'.

To much more important things. TV, of course. The only thing that matters in life, clearly.

Survivorman Less Stroud in the Kalahari Desert on Science Channel. Unfortunately he only did just shy of 20 of these shows and I've seen this one several times (spoiler: he survives).

Click.

In Bruges. A really good comedy with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson. This one flew under the radar when it came out early last year cause I hadn't heard of it until a few months ago when it appeared on cable. It's very dark. Irish hit men cooling their heels in the medieval-style city of Bruges, Belgium. But I've seen it off-and-on quite a bit lately.

Click.

Ahh, Under Siege! A towering achievement! The master thespian, Steven Seagal, in perhaps his greatest triumph as a "Navy SEAL forced to finish his career as a cook" after punching an incompetent officer. He's joined on this merry romp with Erika Eleniak (miss July 1989 playing miss July 1989), Tommy Lee Jones (pre-Oscar/pre-Man in Black), Gary Busey (pre-rehab - well, pre-latest-rehab). Busey: "Where you going?" Jones: "Make Honolulu glow in the dark." Busey: "Outstanding!"

As James Lipton would exclaim, "Brilliant! What a national treasure!"

'Lord See that cat, Yeah I do mean you. See that cat. Yeah I do mean you. She got a TV eye on me.' - I. Pop, 1970

Television: Do I let the channel clicker rest on the second half of Chasing Amy (which I've seen a zillion times but is still very watchable) or catch an (apparently new) episode of NYC Prep.

Gotta go with the Manhattan debs over Holden, Banky and Alyssa.

Bad choice.

After five minutes and still no sign of sex or drugs (or anything else for that matter) I decided it was time to cut bait and flush this turd down the toilet/off my radar. Who'd have thunk rich, spoiled NYC teens and no vice? What's the world coming to?

Maybe the History Channel's 'Life After People'? The WASP Wet Dream (all the people of the Earth disappear but the animals and all man-made structures/everything else is fine). This is an actual series that each week takes a look at how different aspects of mankind's handiwork slowly (or quickly) erodes over time and/or neglect. As exciting as that sounds, it's a dull scene.

The Science Channel has a 'Humanology' marathon. First up: Electric Human. It's about how some guy is unaffected by being exposed to high voltage electricity. How can he absorb all this current? Who cares? Burn that motherfucker down, goes the song. He'll eventually go the way of Frank Grimes. And the show is a snooze. My favorite Science Channel show (which admittedly isn't limited to the Science Channel but rather makes its way around basic cable) is Survivorman. Less Stroud is the outdoor survivalist answer to MacGyver. If MacGyver was Canadian. But strangely, tonight is one of the few that Les isn't to be found on the dial.

So I incessantly scan for something to take my mind off of the insanity of work that threatens to reach up out of my Blackberry. I am often surprised that certain folks manage to figure out how to put their clothes on and drive to work each day. They must stop at each and every button of their shirt, calling and asking what they should do next. 'See that fourth button, the one right below the third button I just had you do? Well, do the same thing with that one. What? Yes, I know the third hole is already filled with the third button - put it in the fourth hole, directly across from it.'

Hey, one of Discovery's Hot 100 Infomercials is on - rocking up the charts.
High Definition Shades. 'Everything just ... Pops!' 'I got Thumbs Up from the Wife so I'll take them!' 'I can see the Blue of the Ocean!' 'Only 19.95? You kiddin' me!? And they're HD?' This is the 21st Century equivalent to Blue Blockers (an infomercial golden oldie).

Anyway, I think the paint is dry now - maybe I can catch what looks to be an exciting CNBC special on NASCAR weathering the down economy (and looks like I missed CNBC's take on the Porn Industry but I'm sure that'll repeat).

Or I can keep it on the TV Land Cosby Show Retrospective.

Or watch some of the Phillies.

Or the breaking news on Michael Jackson's toxicology report - flash! breaking news! And the news? That the toxicology report won't be released until next week! When can we kill the Jackson death? Or at least kill all the rest of the characters in this badly written play? Hey, Heir Doktor Sanjay Gupta is all scrubbed up and in the OR to show how a pre-op patient is put under with MJ's Drug of Choice, Diprivan and requires a machine to breath because the stuff zaps you so hard. The Chief of Anesthesiology tells the good Dr. Gupta that he 'hasn't heard of this being used in a home for legit reasons.' Really?!? Sounds like a fine, mellow high.

Speaking of the dead, here's my ol pal BILLY MAYS! So loud hawking 'Fix It' ('Now this scratch has met it's match!!!') that he can hear himself in ... well, whatever purgatory Infomercial ghosts are condemned to).

Maybe I should just shove my hand into the blender and hit the Frappe, wrap the stump with gauze and go to bed. Maybe after the Daily Show.

Pay Now or Palin

The man that truly defined both Mr. Tambourine Man and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds in the sixties (Dylan/Byrds, who? Lennon, what?), Mr. T.J. Kirk himself Bill Shatner, raised the bar with a beatnik style reading of Sarah Palin's recent Farewell Speech. Palin was obviously channeling Allen Ginsberg's the Howl for her inspiration and Shatner does her proud. The girl with kaleidoscope eyes, indeed.

I can't wait to see what she's up to next! In an entertaining but not a good way!

Seriously, if we let her within 500 yards of either the White House or Capital Hill (and I mean even on a public tour), we will have really jumped the national shark and it'll be time to go live life under a more reasonable leader ... Like Lil' Kim Jong-Il (with my luck, they'll band together: Jong-Il - Palin 2012 bumper stickers are surely being printed as I write this). Or maybe Ted Nugent. Nugent-Palin, bringing Wolf hunting back to the mainstream where it belongs.