The Jack Lord is my Shepherd and I shall not want, but Jack Webb is my God (sorry, Clapton)

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.

In particular, Hawaii Five-O and Dragnet.

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.

So, on to H50 and Dragnet and, more specifically, Steve McGarrett and Joe Friday.

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.

Dragnet's Blue Boy is a prime example.

As is the Hawaii Five-O's Wo Fat.







And I got to 'enjoy' them both this week.


While it may be true that The Jack Lord is my Shepherd ...



... Jack Webb is my God (just ask him)


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.

Let the sparks fly!

By the Don's Early Light

My fever broke this morning and I'm slowly crawling out of this summer bug.

Apart from influenza (in August for chrissake), it's been a good week as they go.

I've learned, for instance, that a certain somebody has been googling 'agile software development' and knows enough about it to be extremely dangerous (for the techno-geeks, the pun is intended) but enough also to be a bit more sympathetic to its aims. Time will tell but signs are mildly encouraging.

And it's been a bright week for wacko 'celeb' YouTubeular happenings, what with the luvfest to Yukon Cornelius's cousin Sarah and The Moonwalker's Doktor Kavorkeeon Feelgood, with his 'Who me? I didn't do it' puzzler. I do have sympathy for needing to stretch professionally beyond your licensed practice into something as interesting as anesthesiology. And the Vegas High Rolling (Prescription) Script Writer had his hands full, his patient being a bit of an 'odd bird' and all. But there is that pesky Hippocratic Oath he's supposedly bound by. It's pretty airtight as I understand it, at least morally and ethically speaking.

Speaking of the gloved one, I hear tell they're finally gonna put him in the ground toward the end of the month, as a 'Birthday Present'. He'll appreciate the peace and quiet, I imagine. And the shade. I would guess he's getting a bit ripe propped up outside his Dad Joe's Discount Car Dealership in Anaheim, balloons in one hand and a 'Summer Sizzling Blowout Deals' sign in the other. It being August and all. But the sale's pretty much done and he's finished his last chore for the old man, so into the Earth ya go, son! Happy Birthday!

Speaking of death (or at least feeling like it), I awoke in a cold sweat around 3 this morning and couldn't get back to sleep. The TV was on and the usual pre-dawn Infomercials were in full swing. Between the usual male enhancement pitches and exercise mind fucks, there was some lame Get-Rich-Quick screed that seemingly went on forever. It was beyond forgettable (in fact, I don't remember it less than 12 hours later), but it did remind me of the King of that genre, Don Lapre. It's like a real bad shithole tavern cover band doing a Beatles tune: you recognize the beat and the melody but nothing else about it is right.

Nobody could touch Don in the Making Money department and he filled many a 1990s evening/early morning with entertainment aplenty for yours truly. I miss ol' Don, bursting onto the scene from his 'tiny one bedroom apartment' imparting wisdom to the masses with a formula whose simplicity and power would fill Einstein himself with pride: 'small ads equal big profits!'

Don would invariably be shown hanging out in Hawaii with the wind blowing off the ocean, chatting there with the multitude of millionaires he'd grown organically from the seeds of his sage advice. You could join him in this Rich Man's Paradise if only you'd just 'buy his package!'

And I did buy his package. Not to make money. God no, nothing that frivolous. I bought it for its philosophy, for its spiritual dimension. The power of his words could not be denied: 'Step 3, get rid of your ugly friends!' He was my L. Ron Hubbard and this was his Dianetics.

I never got to see his follow-up on the 'World's Greatest Vitamin' until recently but it was worth the wait! If Don Lapre stamps his name on it, well - ya get what ya pay for. A vitamin supplement is a vitamin supplement is a vitamin supplement you say? Not if Don says it's not! He's a man of his word, above all else. And he has real live Doctors to vouch for it! Doctors! Well, one Doctor, anyway, and one who definitely didn't kill either Elvis or his former Son In Law!

There are some cruel 'spoofs' of Don out there, so beware. Apparently folks are amused by his enthusiasm, but he's a serious cowboy with an honest vision a mile wide.

Donny, come back - we need ya more than ever! I have faith he'll return stronger and louder and truer.

He'll outlive us all.

Perhaps he'll run in 2012. He'd be perfect on a Sista Sarah ticket if it turns out he's not ready for the big chair. That is, unless she's already settled on R. Kelly. It depends on how important the golden shower demographic is come 2012 - it could be a pretty big block of the electorate by that point.

President Lapre. Has a nice sound to it, eh? And I think he's got a real cure to our nation's financial woes I bet Tim Geithner hasn't thought of: Small ads, big profits.

'Sara, Sara, Whatever made you want to change your mind? Sara, Sara, So easy to look at, so hard to define.' - B. Zimmerman, 1975

She's got a heart as big as the Yukon and an intercontinental ballistic vision.

Now our Star Spangled Wolf Huntress has the tribute she so richly deserves.

R. Kelly provides the soundtrack in what can only be described as a match made in heaven: she's got that beautiful red, blue and white Alaskan snow and he sprays it all with a golden hue.

I mean it - these two have what they call good old fashioned synergy:

She's got Frontier Ice wolfing down her veins
And star spangled skirts with placenta stains
Givin' testament to her Nation Bearing Caring Hips ... la la la la
He's got a fiery inner city "you're in" groove
With a mug full of shots for his every move
Drawing in those Prepubescent Lips ... la la la la










She's got that "don't need no reedin, reyetin, rithmahhtic" English lit.
And punchdrunk wit ... la la la
He's got that statutory snatchatory
Mighty smooth and relieved on it ... la la la

I think The Gawker says it much better than I could, but I wanted to be sure all could enjoy.

Confederacy of Dunces, Indeed

Fascinating flick that's been playing on IFC the past few months. The Confederate States of America. It's a Mockumentary set in the 1960s, ostensibly covering the history of the 'CSA' - an imagining of what the USA might be like 100 years later had the south won the Civil War.

It might be the mid-20th century here in this flick but slavery is alive and well, complete with 'catchy' commercials for different 'brands' of servitude as well as all your various slave-related needs (a QVC style ad touts "The Shackle - keeps 'em in line!" while a young black model shows it off on her wrist). Makes you think twice when a commercial for the new 'automated' dishwasher comes on (the Maytag repairmen need to go to medical school here).

The coverage of the burgeoning anti-slavery movement in this "documentary" along with the narrator's serious-yet-dismissive coverage of the mounting international pressures on the CSA in that direction have a kind of authenticity - and familiarity - that is simultaneously silly and chilling.

Biting satire - fucking big, razor-sharp teeth, it might seem outrageous at times but hits home in unexpected ways. It shows that we're not nearly as removed from this 'civilized' inhumanity as we might like to think we are.

And not at all in some respects.

Mr. Vick, it's on IFC all month, I suggest you catch it - the irony there is heavy enough sink all of us to your level.

It's pretty damn funny in the end. And the point is, it shouldn't be.

Momar better blues

One of my fellow travelers at work tuned me into this vanity fair blurb on everyone's favorite goofball dictator, Momar Qaddafi. Qaddafi is a very weird melding of Calvin Klein, MC Hammer, Dr. No., Saddam Hussein, Lil' Kill Jong Il and Richard Branson. He's definitely not on Mr. Blackwell's Best Dressed List. But he has a certain style, a certain je ne sais qua.

He's got everything you'd want in a tin-horn, cult-of-personality middle eastern megalomaniac strongman, though he comes across more like he'd been filtered through maybe a Tarantino sensibility circa Kill Bill:

• An all-girl icy-hot security force - calling Robert Palmer, he's addicted to love, yepper
• A name that is spelled in twenty different ways regularly to "confuse" his enemies - got it
• Outfits to make Elton John blush in embarrassment - in spades
• A straight-outta-Shaft 70s 'fro - that's a far out affirmative, man
  
• The permanent rank of Colonel, though he rules over all his Generals - yes sir! He is, after all, a man of the people, not some out of touch Flag Officer.
  

Hey Maummer-man, picture it: Colonel Gaddafi's Banghazi Fried Lamb Kabobs. Finger choppin' good. Come on, Muammar, I'll help you get it off the ground, but I wouldn't be surprised if you're already two steps ahead of me. With 64-oz Momar Malts (souvenir cups!). Don't forget the sporks!

I feel as though I know Kadafi personally since I spent a couple years in my early twenties studying his moves intently for a living, mainly with the goal of helping to kill him, as it turned out. Well, not kill him, at least that wasn't the plan as I knew it. Annoy him, was more like it. Demonstrating "freedom of the seas" by moving to the edge of where international waters and airspace ended and Libya's sovereignty began.

The rub was that Momar claimed as his all the air and water 50 miles north of the internationally recognized demarcation. And he didn't like unwelcome neighbors crawling through what he thought was his front yard.

Day after day, I'd sit in the tactical analysis plot, a tiny smoke-filled room (I was probably sucking down a pack a day of the second hand variety) walled off in the center island of the aircraft carrier Eisenhower as we ambled across the Mediterranean Sea. It was 1983 and I was just a 20 year old intelligence analyst with delusions of rebellion, listening to Nina Hagen and the Ramones on the tape deck as I poured over information from a number of sources, classified and not.

[That's me on the right in June '84, along with a hundred of my 'friends'. I'm one of the sailors in the 'I' spelling out IKE - miserably hungover from too much English hard cider the night before, waiting for that clown Reagan to fly over us and 'read' what ship we were while on his way to Normandy to celebrate the 40th anniversary of D-Day. Thinking back, maybe they always did that when Reagan was around - perhaps that was the only way he could tell which ship he was looking at. But that's another story for another time.]

The dirty little secret of the intelligence community was that, at least back then and I can only speak for our little world, about 80% of the best stuff came off the wire from AP/UPI and Reuters and not from some exotic top secret piece of military technology. We'd stamp a bogus classification on the data when briefing to the higher ups in order to give it "credibility" and change a few words here and there but otherwise it was straight off the same news wire that the rest of the world was reading.

A lot of that time was focused on Libya, at least until Beirut literally blew up. Our fighter jets flew their "freedom of the seas" patrols deep within what our man Muammer thought was his private fishing hole, extending nearly half way to Sicily. Momar was fucking with his neighbor Chad (I think they were sweet for the same girl - Ba. dump), funneling money to rebels in that country. It seems our hair-brain in chief Buckaroo Bonzo Reagan didn't much like that, even while he was dispatching Ollie North to collect sacks of cash from Iran bound for the contra rebels in Nicaragua, hypocrisy in full bloom.

So we'd be told to 'buzz Quadafi's tower' and Khadafi'd be all "I'm going to destroy your ship!" should we be so stupid as to cross his "line of death".

Good times.

Meanwhile, back on the boat, we'd attempt to sift through all the info flowing in, trying to pinpoint where the Colonel's submarines were, the location of his MIG fighter jets, and the status and movement of his surface to air weapons.

I like to say we did the "Foxtrot" together: he would send his rusted, creaky, leaky, barely sea-worthy Russian hand-me-down Foxtrot diesel submarines out of their Libyan ports into parts unknown, presumably to hunt for The Great Satan. We'd lose them sometimes and suddenly they'd pop up in Yugoslavia or maybe just disappear for good, down to the floor of the Mediterranean. When I first saw that bad Kelsey Grammer submarine movie, Down Periscope, I thought of Muammer's Foxtrots.

Ahh, Momar - I miss ya, buddy. Good times, indeed. Remember, I was just playin' with ya! I was outa that biz by the time Ronnie and his minions got rough in 1987. But he's long gone and you're still Coloneling around, as stylish as ever (even more so - who are you wearing these days? Nicky Hilton?)

If you want to read about our exploits in 1983, check out this Time Magazine article.

'They beat him up until the teardrops start, but he can't be wounded 'cause he's got no heart' - Feverish Sunday Ruminations

My thoughts are even more scattered than normal this afternoon. Trying to get caught up on work and my brain just refuses to go there. Went out for a run this morning and again this afternoon and now feel like the flu's got me by the gonads for my troubles. Somewhere, Jim Fix is laughing. Flu in August?!?

I gotta feel better by tomorrow, as it is a day of reckoning for yours truly. I'll either be newly committed or on my way out the door. It's all up to you, Stu Iridium.

Anyway, in no particular order ...

Bravo to the Russian punks giving voice to the seemingly nonexistent voice of democracy under the iron rule of Putin. Bush saw a kindred spirit after 'looking into his soul' with those Jesus-powered peepers of his. Given his judge of character (including any self judgments), that shoulda sealed it: Putin must be evil.

Scorsese, Coppola, Lumet, Wilder, Welles, Eastwood, Cohen Brothers - these are my personal filmmaking gods and I put Quentin Tarantino in that company. Perhaps more for his writing than his directing, but he's aces at both. Which is why I'm excited about the release of his latest, 'Inglorious Basterds', at the end of the week. Many of his films have been a mess and in some ways haven't lived up to Pulp Fiction heights of expectation but even when they don't work, they are broken in original and varied ways. An interesting bad film is always better than a ho-hum good one in my book. If I had such a book.

There is also a lotta good buzz around 'District 9' so I may venture out to catch that one as well. Sci-fi as parable on race relations and dignity as a basic human right (even if you happen not to be human). Aliens that are neither malevolent or benevolent (they don't want to conquer us but don't seem to have much advanced technology we can benefit from). All of which would normally be a recipe for a steaming pile of snorefest, tv-movie-grade crap, but I hear tell it's done in a very entertaining and watchable manner, no heavy hands at work here.



I can't believe that apart from his widow's strong rebuff, nothing much more has come from the Billy Mays coke use revelation. I figured his corpse would have checked into rehab to save face, Weekend at Bernie's style. "Hey, Billy, it's time for group - look everyone, Billy's napping again! That's our Billy! Hey, man, you can't sleep through recovery - let's give him a lift ..." There may have been no personal/character closure, but there was sort of a final medical word on the drug cocktail brewing in his system at time of death, most of it courtesy of the pharmaceutical industry. He was truly a man of his time. Orange Glo, indeed.

This weekend saw the most famous hit from a pipe by a mayor since Marion Barry ... Talk about knocking down some Milwaukee's best. In the perpetrator's defense, he lives in Wisconsin.


Looky, looky, Pulp Fiction be playing on IFC - I'm in a feverish state of mind and perhaps some good conversation around Foot Massages, Green Acres and the necessary Intelligence/Cleanliness balance, Tasty Burgers in France, Clitoris Piercing, Heroin and the Pepsi Challenge, The Economics of Five dollar shakes, The Gimp, and Anal Cavity Heirlooms mixed in with
time out of mind sequencing, stylin' violence, and of course The Wolf might be just the medicine I need.

For Sure.

We happy? Vincent? We happy.

A Confederacy of Presentation Tips

Okay, so I'm watching the talking heads this morning, getting an early start with ESPN's Sports Reporters. For some reason, sports analysts have more exaggerated mannerisms than their 'Hard News' cousins around the dial - it's like they're playing charades with us and they all picked 'someone in the throws of an epileptic seizure' as their subject. I guess they're trying to infuse their analysis with the action of the games and athletes they're covering.

Newsies get their mojo going with arm and hand gymnastics as well, though usually a slower, quieter form (think 'doing the 70s Jackson 5 Robot dance' while sitting behind a desk). Unless they are op-ed commentators, and then it's ants-in-the-pants-on-crank time to beat the Sportos at their own 'game'.

I occasionally do presentations at work and the topic is rarely as innately interesting as the wildcat offense or a health care town hall meeting gone awry. (Quick: whatta call an Eagle's Wild Cat? A Dog Killer. Ba dump.)

To add to my deficit, the audience is usually not there of their own accord and I don't generally enjoy it, probably because I'm not very good. So I'm working from a fairly deep hole and need all the help I can get. Then I think to myself, 'what do I do with my hands?' That's why I try and pick up pointers from 'the pros'. I'm not a hand model, after all - not even master of my own domain usually.

There are the obvious no-nos: fingers up the nose or in the ears, jack-off gestures or really any lingering around down in the general crotch area, flipping off the audience, scratching your ass. I get those. Hands in the pockets or straight down at the side unmoving are less egregious but still frowned upon.

What then?

I'm left with the sort of preacher moves - giving the crowd Pope-style blessings as I stalk the stage, punctuated with a double karate chop or hourglass outline (ya know, the hands go head to toe around an imaginary but shapely figure). Finger pointing and air juggling are soon to follow. I get through it but it doesn't feel right ...

... so I end up watching the various round tables and speeches and debates and talk shows just to get some pointers, the dos and definitely don'ts.

Ahh, but they're all crap on some level.

The only ones looking natural are cooking show hosts. Because they have something legitimate to do with their hands.

Maybe next time I have to present something, I'll bring along a cutting board, some spices, meat, and veggies and a knife. 'Today we're going to learn about best practices in exception handling while we whip up a fantastic little dish I like to call Potpourri. Bam!"

Probably not practical.


Maybe I should just take my cue from a literary hero, one Ignatius J. Reilly, late of New Orleans. Now, Ignatius is not a professional speaker, nor is he even in the communications industry, per se.

But he has presence. And style. And command.

Whether leading the worker's rebellion at Levy Pants, hawking hot dogs as a pirate themed street vendor, making beautiful music on his medieval lute or releasing pressure on his valve into Big Chief Writing Tablets, he never waivers in his world view and that radiates out into his 'audiences'.

Our introduction to Ignatius perhaps puts it best:

A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once.

Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black mustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs. In the shadow under the green visor of the cap Ignatius J. Reilly's supercilious blue and yellow eyes looked down upon the other people waiting under the clock at the D. H. Holmes department store, studying the crowd of people for signs of bad taste in dress ...

Ignatius himself was dressed comfortably and sensibly. The hunting cap prevented head colds. The voluminous tweet trousers were durable and permitted unusually free locomotion ...

The outfit was acceptable by any theological and geometrical standards, however abstruse, and suggested a rich inner life.

Enough said.