BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: June 2009
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
MJ's Kids
I'm bored with this story by now, but just because I mentioned it in my earlier post about Michael Jackson's death, here's a follow up.
It's been assumed for years that Prince Michael and Paris are not biologically related to the late star—reports have been floating around since at least 2004, when newspapers worldwide picked up on a tabloid report citing court papers filed by Jackson's ex-wife Debbie Rowe.
The new rumor surfacing, of course, is that the mystery dad now allegedly has a name, face and profession. Us Weekly magazine is claiming he is Arnold Klein, the dermatologist who treated Jackson's reported skin disorder.
So much for my theory that MJ would seek out some (white) guy with exotic skills and talents. His dermatologist? I guess MJ had to feel some loyalty to and trust for a guy who violated all medical ethics to bleach him, but still... was he the best baby daddy available?
We've got a short (supposedly/hopefully) heat wave cooking the Bay Area this weekend, and while talking about it with a friend living in a far distant (and currently much cooler) country, I mentioned how odd the weather is here. It's extremes, in terms of summer heat. The average summertime high here is about 81 for the three hot months (July, August, Sept), and it's sunny and about that warm almost every day. But when we get a heat wave, it's never like, 87, or 90, for a week. It's usually 81 one day, then 102 the next two or three, before one day of cooling as it's 88, and then we're back to 74 for 3 weeks.
It's quite possible that this is just perception/confirmation bias on my part, since I notice when it's 100, but can mostly ignore the discomfort of highs that peak in the upper 80s. But so far this summer, it's been true. There were 2 days of 100+ temps earlier this month (mercifully, they struck and departed while I was in Hawaii), with temps in the 70s for weeks before and after. Since then it's been very nice, mid-70s highs, until suddenly on Saturday it was 102, and still hot today, with a high around 98. It's 86 in my living room right now, almost dark outside as I type this @ 8:49pm. Tomorrow's forecast? 81, with 70s for the rest of the week.
Shortly after talking to my friend about this phenomena I was surfing some weather sites (which I only do in the summer when driven by heat) and saw this map on weather.com, which I liked since it confirmed my unscientific perception. I live right where that 15 is on the left coast.
Admittedly, that sort of large scale map is fairly useless for the precise forecasts required anywhere within 20 miles of the California coast. The Pacific is large and very cold, and as a result temps change radically as you move away from it. Everyone's heard the famous Mark Twain quote about which summer was the coldest winter of his life. Twain was comedically exaggerating, but he had a point; one not demonstrated by the daily high/low temperature reports. San Francisco isn't freakishly cold in the summer; it's the rapid changes that make it crazy. It's often 80+ and sunny in the late afternoon, by dark there's a western wind, clouds are scudding overhead, and by dusk it's 55, damp, and the wind makes it feel 10 degrees colder.
We don't get that kind of change in San Rafael in the North Bay, but I could move 5 miles southwest and see my daily highs drop 10-15 degrees, or move 10 miles northeast and swelter in 90+ every day of the summer.
One benefit of the heat other than growth spurts for my already towering front porch tomato plantation; I'm certainly getting my money's worth out of the blender that was a self gift on my b-day. I've had 4 large glasses of blended fruit liquids so far today, had about 6 yesterday, and haven't done fewer than 2 or 3 any day since the blender came home with me on the 20th. (The usual blended batch makes 2 or 3 glasses full.) This consumption rate will likely hold up until the temperature drops, the novelty wears off, or my lower digestive tract rebels.
Sadly, for the analytical, experimenting aspect of my nature, I've got no recipes to report yet. I blender like I stir fry or make stew/soup; I throw a lot of stuff I like in together and hope for the best, with the proportions changing every time. I have tried to be slightly scientific with the blender recipes, but it's not worked out that well. When I try to just do strawberries/yogurt/milk, or just OJ/pineapple/raspberries, I get something tasty, but too distinctive of individual flavors. The best mixtures contain a bit of everything.
Today's was great. A lot of orange juice, a splash of mango/peach juice, 8 ice cubes, a big glass of frozen strawberries (get the 6 pound bag at Costco), several cubes of frozen pineapple, several more of frozen papaya, a shake of blueberries for color, about 2oz. of gin, and a small dish of pineapple sorbet (mostly for the thickening texture it gives). Blended to a slush. It was more liquid than most, since I wanted to drink, not eat it during the hot afternoon. Still, the second and third glasses of it benefited from their time in the freezer while I sipped the first glass.
I suppose I'll have to do some solid food later tonight, once it cools down enough to contemplate eating, much less cooking. Shrimp quesadillas perhaps. I'm going to the gym as soon as I hit post on this one, and 2 hours of cardio + weights should earn me the right to indulge on whatever I wish for dinner.
I wouldn't have posted about this, since I'm not exactly a news blog and the lives/deaths of washed up pop stars don't rank very high on my personal interest meter. I did find this news item about Michael Jackson's death somewhat curious, though.
LOS ANGELES – Across the country, people reacted in stunned disbelief Thursday as word spread that Michael Jackson had collapsed and died. Within minutes of Jackson's arrival by ambulance at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center people began arriving by the hundreds, the crowd quickly filling a grassy entrance outside the hospital. Overhead, news helicopters whirred noisily and TV trucks clogged streets.
As word spread a few minutes later that Jackson had died, several people burst into tears. Others stood silently, looking pensive, as they waited for official word from the hospital. Still others whipped out cell phones and began calling or texting friends to pump them for information.
A similar scene played out just a couple miles away, in front of Jackson's tony Holmby Hills home, where a Fire Department ambulance had arrived to take him to the hospital.
Okay, sure. You've got to express some shock when someone famous dies at age 50. But is anyone really that surprised that MJ dropped dead? I'm more surprised that he lived this long, given all of his plastic surgeries, anorexia, drug issues, bizarre health habits, mental instabilities, etc. But then again I often underestimate the ability of human beings to survive in the face of almost indescribable self-abuse. That Amy Winehouse and Pete Doughtery remain sentient and functional is a source of great consternation, as well as disappointment, to me.
The official verdict on MJ's death is heart failure, but that's a fairly meaningless description. The question is what brought it on, in a fairly young, non-obese man. I'll be shocked if the autopsy doesn't find enough exotic substances in his blood stream to kill a horse, along with numerous signs of past cardiac events. Like how they say the hearts of cocaine addicts are all scarred and stretched from past abuse.
I was more shocked a month or two ago, when word came that he'd sold out 50 concerts in London in like 5 minutes. I wouldn't have thought he could sell out one show anywhere, at this point. When was his last hit? The 90s? I asked a friend of mine in the UK if MJ remained popular there, and she immediately waxed nostalgic about how much she'd liked his music when she was young, and how she would have bought tickets if she could have. Which was a surprise to me, but then again, I never go to concerts or have any desire to do so. I especially don't get the nostalgia thing that's driving the renewed touring success of every band that was popular in the 70s and 80s. Like most people, I liked a lot of really bad music when I was a kid and teen. But I like to think I've moved on and matured, and the thought of paying top dollar to watch the modern day, aged, washed up version of some band I listened to in 8th grade fills me with horror. Not delight.
That digression aside, I wonder if MJ's death will usher forth fresh geysers of juicy details about his freak show of a personal life. I don't follow tabloid bullshit that much, but I am kind of curious about his kids. MJ was manifestly not their biological father, since the kids are white. (Without requiring the extensive surgery and skin bleaching that dad underwent to achieve his eventual pigmentation.) So who was that baby daddy?
I don't think MJ picked the woman he rented for her womb (and ovaries?) at random, and I'm sure he didn't go that route to find the baby daddy either. It might have been a straight adoption, but if so he did amazingly well at covering his tracks. More likely he had some woman give birth for him, but in that case, where did he get the sperm? I can't see him picking a guy at random, or doing the usual sperm bank dream request, "I want an athletic, six-foot, medical student." Getting the right sperm to create your adopted children is important, and I don't think they saved any samples from John Merrick. Would MJ buy it from someone alive today, who he admired and who could keep a secret? Was MJ a believer in destiny and nature over nurture? Would he want a skilled dancer/singer? I'm fascinated by that question, not for the parentage of the kids who will almost certainly never be heard from again, but for the insight it would give into the weirdness that was MJ's psyche.
And no, I hadn't given that issue or MJ himself more than 10 seconds of thought in the past 10 years, until now. It's true, deaths really do bring people together!
Update: Nothing about that question yet, but there's a nice article from Time about his income and debts. Apparently he was over $300m in debt when he died. How is that even possible? He had a huge income, from his own music catalog and the Beatles catalog he bought the rights to decades ago, so he was able to continuing signing loans for money now, leveraged against his guaranteed future income. The article estimates he could have cleared $100m from the 50 sold out London concerts, and up to 5x more from an ensuing world tour.
There's good news, though, since as another article points out, he'll probably be worth more dead than alive. That's the actual title of the article, lest you think it's just another example of my callousness. It's just conjecture, but they point out that Elvis was worth less than $5m when he died in 1977, and that his estate is now worth nearly $100m annually. So good for "his" kids, I guess. Assuming his will doesn't leave everything to a chimpanzee or something.
The Transformers sequel has opened, and it's doing phenomenal business so far. It's been less successful with the critics, and is getting skewered by pretty much everyone. The average score is 38% on Metacritic, with one 100% (from TV Guide?) and one 0% (from Rolling Stone), and most scores in the 50% to 25% range.
Curious to compare, I looked up the first Transformers film on Metacritic, and was frankly shocked by the results. People liked it? Professional film critics? It got 61% overall, with no 4-star scores, but lots of 3/4 reviews.
A more direct comparison of hate: Transformers 1 has about 40 reviews listed, with 2 of them red (below 40%). Transformers 2 has 30 reviews listed, with 14 of them red. That seems to pretty well sum it up. Most critics thought the first one was good or okay. Most critics think this one is bad or awful. Given that I thought the first film was horrible, I think it's pretty unlikely I'd make it through all 2.5 hours of the sequel. Which is convenient, since I've no plans to see it.
I've got to quote some of Ebert's 1-star review of Transformers 2, since it gave me some lulz. He seems to be recovering from his various near-death medical crises -- he's not only rediscovered his ability to give bad movies bad reviews, but he's regained the ability to be bitingly-funny while doing so.
"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.
The plot is incomprehensible. The dialog of the Autobots®, Decepticons® and Otherbots® is meaningless word flap. Their accents are Brooklyese, British and hip-hop, as befits a race from the distant stars. Their appearance looks like junkyard throw-up. They are dumb as a rock. They share the film with human characters who are much more interesting, and that is very faint praise indeed.
...
Aware that this movie opened in England seven hours before Chicago time and the morning papers would be on the streets, after writing the above I looked up the first reviews as a reality check. I was reassured: "Like watching paint dry while getting hit over the head with a frying pan!" (Bradshaw, Guardian); "Sums up everything that is most tedious, crass and despicable about modern Hollywood!" (Tookey, Daily Mail); "A giant, lumbering idiot of a movie!" (Edwards, Daily Mirror).
You're better off going to see Up again. That's the only summer movie I've thus far seen, and I'm terribly remiss in not writing about it yet, since it was fantastic. Not sure I'd say it was the best Pixar movie yet (I'd have to go with The Incredibles on that one, though I've seen it several times on DVD, so it's an uneven comparison.) but it was a lot of fun, very clever, very funny, and had a great, inspirational plot.
That's not really the message to take from this, but it's certainly a valid "shorter" version of it.
It's a lecture by a Stanford Anthropologist, and it's the most interesting scientific lecture I've heard in recent memory. And I watch/listen to a lot of scientific lectures. Quite often on this very subject. I'm not going to try to summarize the whole thing, since it's impossibly fast moving and informative. Instead I'll comment on a few elements I found most interesting.
The prof's main purpose is to explain the continuation of various reproductively maladaptive traits in human beings, and how those traits have influenced human culture. Chiefly in the creation and maintenance of religions and religious rituals. A variety of mental conditions that are very bad for humans are actually pretty good, if you have them in a limited dose. Sort of half of the condition. The analogy is to various medical conditions; full on sickle cell anemia is deadly, but it also protects against malaria, and it's possible to have partial sickle cell and be improved by it, in certain malaria-rich environments. Tay-Sach's is a fatal genetic disorder, but a related condition seems to provide immunity to tuberculosis. And others.
So can that work with genetically-transmitted mental disorders? Yes. Schizophrenia is a terrible disorder, and it was much more detrimental to leading a healthy life 1000 or 2000 or 5000 years ago than it is today. But people who have a mild type of schizophrenia called schizo-typal disorder tend to have some level of magical thinking, are obsessed with ritual, seem to be in touch with the gods, invent new religious practices, etc. They're ideal medicine men/shamans, since they can be schizophrenic more or less on command, when it's appropriate. Not during the hunt when the mammoth would be scared away, but definitely during a ceremony when the tribe needs a curse lifted or the rain gods called.
OCD, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is another one. People with it full bore are non-functional; washing their hands for 6 hours a day, tapping a certain number of times before they can enter or leave a room, unable to walk on a sidewalk since there are cracks they might step on, etc. Almost everyone with OCD has a few predictable issues. Personal cleanliness is a big one, as are rituals for entering and leaving sacred places, and numbers/counting. Most of us have some lower level of OCD, as demonstrated by the usual human need to sort papers, or stack things neatly on a desk, or use our lucky pen to write an important paper, etc.
So? As the lecturer relates, religions are simply chock full of OCD-like rituals. All of the Kosher food preparation rituals in Judaism. Hindu Brahmins must sleep in proper positions, chant holy phrases a precise number of times, breath a set number of times from each nostril in turn, etc. Catholics have prayer beads which must be a proper number, counted X number of times in the proper sequence, certain prayers must be said X number of times, etc. There's a ton of OCD type stuff in Islam as well, and many rigorous requirements and rituals about how to clean yourself. The prof gives many more examples with thorough documentation, so listen to it yourself.
There's a lot more, but I thought the overall presentation did a fantastic job of discussing common maladies, showing that they have a genetic heritability, and describing how versions of them are just tailor-made to create religions, or religious rituals. And how religious rituals are both created by these sorts of compulsions, and satisfying to humans because we have these compulsions in us, to varying degrees.
The IG and I aren't really hanging out anymore, so I've been engaging in a variety of different recreational activities, both to amuse myself and to fill up the time. One has been an increase in movie watching, and since I still feel inexplicably-compelled to write reviews for almost every book and/or film I consume, and I've got at least 40 or 50 mostly-finished reviews on my notes page, it would probably be wise to expect (Anticipate? Dread?) a fairly regular stream of them coming up in blog posts.
You have been warned.
First up comes this review of Wanted, which I viewed for the first time just yesterday afternoon.
Wanted. A fairly low-rent assassin action film starring Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, and some shlubby white guy you'll forget the moment he steps off the screen.
That said, I kind of enjoyed it. I expected it to be terrible but have some wacky stunts and scenes, and it pretty well lived up to that. It had a bit more story than I expected, and while the "curve the bullet" stuff was absurd, the whole movie is such a cartoon that I could suspend disbelief while watching.
Disclaimer. I watched this the day before my birthday, while I was very drunk and in a giddy mood. I'm fairly sure I wouldn't have enjoyed it nearly as much in my right mind, and I've got no desire to watch it again, sober or not, to find out.
I'm not saying it was any good, but it had some memorably-inventive scenes, and the concept was cool. Cooler than it was good, and better in concept than in execution. The plot is that this average office worker guy is having some Fight Club-like ennui with life, and he's therefore pretty happy to be suddenly recruited into a secret "brotherhood" of assassins. He gets more or less abducted by Angelina Jolie, as she saves him from an evil assassin who defected from the brotherhood. (Yes, there are women in the brotherhood. Angie, at least.)
She tells the guy that his long-lost father was one of their better assassins, and that he was just killed by the defector guy. And that the only one with the natural talent to kill the defector is the new guy. So he learns to shoot and rides around Chicago on the top of the subway, occasionally shooting people. He eventually finds out that their targets are assigned by the "Loom of Fate." Which is where things get ridiculous.
The Loom is just that. A huge, cloth-weaving machine that appears to make an endless length of beige sheeting. They cut little rectangles out of the sheet, examine them with a magnifying glass, assign a 0 or a 1 to places where the weave is irregular, translate the lines into binary code, and those form names. The names are their next targets. None of this is ever questioned or explained.
This movie doesn't exist in some sort of Hellboy or Night Watch universe, with magic and spells and super human creatures. (Though the comic book it's based on certainly does.) It's totally realistic and grounded in reality, aside from some physics-defying shooting (curving bullets and impossibly long sniper shots) and driving stunts. Yet there's this prophetic spinning wheel (the hero does prick his finger on it at one point, but sadly he does not fall into a hundred year sleep) that no one seems to find unusual or even very special.
Personally, if I were the kid that would be the thing that most perplexed me. I could deal with the fact that the father I never met was an assassin, and that I was destined to take his place, that I was being trained by a secret organization, etc. But a loom that spits out names in binary code, and that those people are destined to do great evil if they're not killed immediately? That would shatter the foundations of my world. How did they find out that the loom could do that? Who first started magnifying glass'ing the cloth, counting the threads, and getting names in binary code from it? Furthermore, how is this thing powered? Is there a demon in the machinery? Is it God? A doorway to another universe?
Questions... never discussed, or even mentioned, in the film. Yes, suspension of disbelief is required pretty much as soon as the opening credits start to roll.
Needless to say, the plot takes a few twists. We find out that the brotherhood has been corrupted, that the defector isn't actually who he seems to be, and the hero guy has to decide which side he's going to stand with, etc, etc. There are a million holes in the logic and in the actions of the principles, but it's not a movie to analyze on an intellectual level. I didn't care that it made no sense, and didn't care about the characters or plot developments anyway. And frankly, you won't either, no matter how much (or little) rum, vodka, and/or Goldschlager you've got in you when you watch the movie. Just enjoy the shooting and the stunts and try not to think.
Don't think about sexy time or titties though, since R-rated or not, you won't get any of that. Wanted was directed by the Russian guy who did the visionary Night Watch films, and it's got some similarities to those movies. It's much, much, much toned down and made more conventional, with immeasurably less weirdness and creativity. But its similar in the speed of the events, the way the characters react (very no-nonsense and without introspection), and it's got some fairly inventive violence and action scenes. But there's zero sexiness. Typical American action film, in that regard.
Angelina is basically the only woman in the movie, and she's never sexy. In fact, she's emaciated. Painfully. To the point of being unattractive. I suppose this was filmed while she was in her post-partum starving herself phase, but it would have been nice if they could have CGI'ed some meat on her bones. Or at least dressed her better. She's in cargo style clothing the whole time, with a belt that looks like she's had to punch about 4 more holes as her waist has shrunk. In one early scene she's inexplicably wearing an evening gown, but she's so bony she might as well be a coat hanger holding it up. She never does anything sexy, and she's so thin her cheeks and eyes are hollowed. They don't help that by spraying on the raccoon eyes makeup, making her look unfortunately like an older, brunette Olsen Twin.
There's no romance or love or even affection in the movie, and while they do give us one scene of naked Angelina, it's pointlessly brief. She gets out of a healing tank/bathtub thing, but you only see her once she's already out, and they only show her back, from well above the waist. And all In noticed were the temporary tattoos they added to augment her real ones, and the anatomy class display of ribs tentingthrough her skin.
On the whole, I think this movie was about as good as it could have been. Even though it wasn't very good. Often, I finish an action movie with many thoughts about how much better it could have been with some smarter scenes, better action, character changes, etc. This one isn't like that. It works as well as it could have, with what it had to work with. The ingredients are just too much of a mishmash for it to be improved without reworking it into another film entirely. It is what it is.
A few days ago I had vague plans to get drunk and launch into a melancholy missive, bemoaning my (self-induced) situation and the miserable day I was going to have on this annual June 20th occasion.
Another wasted year, sliding inexorably into the "good shape for my age" range, cock declared legally dead, working mostly on bullshit I don't really care about and not doing a very good job at that, just broke up with my best friend, etc. But then yesterday I got a headstart, at least on the alcohol, and instead of getting maudlin I got really giddy. I was happy and playful, chasing the cats around the apt, and I even enjoyed sitting through a really bad action movie (Wanted). The late afternoon/early evening passed in a flash, and when I got the urge to go shopping at around 8pm, I quickly got dressed and headed out.
I wasn't still drunk; no trouble walking a straight line or anything, but I felt very mood altered. Still quite gleeful and jovial, but with something of a "devil may care" attitude. I probably should have gone to a single's bar (are there still such things?) since I was feeling zero pain, but was mentally sharp; I'd have been as verbally quick and witty as I ever am, which is pretty darn, I must admit. Not that clever repartee has ever landed me female companionship before. (Once I get to know them, yes. But at the start most women seem to much prefer an ordinary, non-interesting, not-that-bright vibe.)
I didn't, I just hit Costco for a case of beer and various birthday fruit treats (pineapple, grapes, blueberries, strawberries), and then picked up a yoga mat at Target and some clearance clothing at Ross. Nothing in my trip was out of the ordinary, but I enjoyed it, in my post-drunken state. I could see how junkies are made; all the stupid minor bullshit that one endures when venturing forth into the real world became utterly meaningless. I didn't care that the cashier at Target stared like the RCA dog when I gave him $40.03 to pay my $28.78 total. I didn't actively root for someone to clothesline the running, shrieking 8 y/o at Ross. Admittedly, the fat wandering white people shoveling down the free samples while they left their carts to clog the aisles at Costco still vexed me a bit, but I just imagined pushing my cart into theirs and racing off to the front of the store while they panted after me, rather than my usual pleasant DIAF visions. On the whole, it was one of the more pleasant shopping excursions I've ever had, and that was entirely because of my mood.
Later in the evening I eschewed any further alcohol, and rather than doing my usual "some work with some wasting time and a lot of self-loathing over not doing more work" I just blew off work entirely and had fun watching another movie, doing some online reading I'd been saving up, playing a few games, etc. And that was a lot of fun too, since I felt no guilt about not writing, or at least doing some website work.
During that time, and now today, I remained in a pretty good mood. Yes, most things suck right now, and yes, it's entirely on me to do things to make them not suck, but at least I've got that choice. It could be worse, and it's quite likely that one day it will be. But for now things aren't so bad, and the only thing holding me back is me.
So here's my birthday song, chosen mostly for the "birthday" in the lyrics, rather than the overall gloomy, intense mood. Which I also appreciate, but in an objective sense, rather than a "being there myself" sense, as was the case for most of the past week or two.
A couple of interesting legal issues in the news today.
The first reports that a jury decided for the RIAA and against a woman who allegedly grabbed (and shared) some pop tunes via Kazaa. Back when people still used Kazaa. The legality of the issue wasn't exactly in doubt, but the award against her is kind of laughable.
MINNEAPOLIS -- A replay of the nation's only file-sharing case to go to trial has ended with the same result — a Minnesota woman was found to have violated music copyrights and must pay huge damages to the recording industry.
A federal jury ruled Thursday that Jammie Thomas-Rasset willfully violated the copyrights on 24 songs, and awarded recording companies $1.92 million, or $80,000 per song.
She's a young mother with four kids who will clearly never earn that much money in her life, so the amount is kind of irrelevant. They might as well hit her up for one billion, kajillion dollars, Dr. Evil style. It's interesting, though. How do you calculate the damages of file sharing or downloading?
If you were actually going to try to calculate the damages from file sharing, not just invent some astronomical number to try and scare people, how would you do it? This woman was fined for like $20 worth of songs, but as I understand it they're not after her for downloading, but since she checked the "share files" box on her Kazaa account, so they're fining her for distributing. (Just like everyone else who ever used that service, or any bit torrent, did/does.) There's no tangible, physical product involved. Record companies and movie studios and other copyright holders argue for the full retail price for everything, plus penalties and fines. And that's what the law states, for the obvious reason that the powerful corporations dictate those laws to the lawmakers. But that's clearly not based in reality, since the vast majority of things people view online are only viewed because they're free. I wouldn't pay a dime to view 99% of the stuff I see online, whether it's a website, blog, music, anime, movies, etc.
I'm not going to get all Swedish and argue against copyright laws and claim that piracy actually increases sales, but I know it does in some cases. I've bought things that I first saw online, including getting some great gift ideas from a series of comic books I read earlier this year. Products I would never have heard of, much less bought, if I hadn't seen them online first.
More generally though, there's no way to investigate, much less prove, that any of the people who downloaded a song or movie or comic book would have actually bought it if they hadn't downloaded it. Most of the time it's just a curiosity click, or intentionally grabbing something the surfer is mildly interested in, but wouldn't pause to consider if he/she saw it in a store. The corporations of course argue that's the same as stealing a copy, but 1) clearly it's not, and 2) even if it were, what % of the full cost would you award, if there were some sliding scale of justice?
Hypothetical examples: Do I owe 90% of the cost of the new Marilyn Manson CD, since I really like his past music and might have bought it, or at least put it on a birthday list? Do I owe 50% of the cost of the new Moby CD, since I kind of like him but would never buy it, unless maybe I saw it used for like $7 at Rasputin's? Do I owe 1% of the cost of a Madonna CD, since I only downloaded it out of idle curiosity, and then deleted it after one listen?
In other news, the dad of some actor (musician? American Idol guy? No idea.) got arrested at a massage parlor in Utah.
A doctor who was renting a building for his practice had sublet some of the suites to what he thought was a legitimate massage business. When he noticed that the masseuse "therapists" were arriving in rather scanty outfits, he asked the cops to check it out.
"After determining that no business license had been issued for whatever was going on in there, I sent in an undercover officer to put eyes on," Det. Sgt. Salazar said. "The next day, five officers, including myself, went in to shut them down." At the time of the raid, only one client was there. "He was just finishing up in suite number one. I sent two of the officers in and the male was on his stomach on the table with a masseuse in lace underwear."
That client was Jeff Archuleta. "We read him his Miranda rights twice. The second time because he said he didn't understand them the first," said Salazar. "During the questioning, he said he'd found the place on Craig's List. He was asked if he'd received any sexual services and he said he had."
Now putting aside the jokes about how it's a "good thing all the real crimes have been solved in Utah" and how dumb dad was to admit to having received a handjob, think about what was done here, and try to construct some logical reason for it being illegal.
It's legal to get a handjob. It's legal to get a massage. It's legal to pay for a massage. But it's illegal to pay for a massage that includes a handjob? If he went to that place for a massage, and halfway through the masseuse stopped, let him jerk off, and then when he was done she finished the massage, that wouldn't be illegal. But if she helps him jerk off, it's illegal? What if she just like, showed him some titty, for visual stimulation? What if his fetish was having his ears rubbed, so she rubbed his ears while he jerked off. Would that be illegal? What if he got so turned on by his ears being rubbed that he was kind of humping the table and came without touching himself. Would that be illegal? How? Who did anything illegal there?
It's just as illogical as porn being legal, but prostitution not. So you can pay people to have sex and film it, and it's legal. You can pay a woman to give you a blog job, but if you're filming it to release as porn, that's legal. Yet if you pay her for the blowjob, but don't film it... that's a crime. So the exact same act changes in legality depending on whether or not you're going to profit by the video recording of it?
I know, it makes no sense. In more general terms, why is prostitution illegal? You can give sex to anyone you want. That's legal. You can sell your services for any amount of money and do virtually anything to another person; massage, personal assisting, body guarding, hair styling, bikini waxing, etc. You can legally have sex with them at any time during those activities. But if you charge them specifically for the sex... it's a felony.
There's no making sense of such laws, since they aren't logical and never were. They're just relics of the olden days when the legal system was more about controlling personal behavior; who you could marry, who you could have sex with, under what circumstances and situations, etc. Most of those laws are gone; homosexuality isn't illegal anymore, miscegenation is no longer prohibited, and puritans don't so much try to control what you can read or watch on a DVD. But we've still got these laws that say sex can only be given, or exchanged in complicated ways, but never straight up, just for itself.
I mentioned this in my under-publicized Twitter account the other day, but I just got another example of it, which reminded me to blog about it.
The key to saving money on any service you use regularly is to quit using it. Or at least threaten to quit using it. I've long noticed this with magazine subscriptions; if you're paying $2 an issue, as soon as you get into the last month or two of your sub you'll start seeing mail entreaties to re-sub, almost always for a lower rate than you've been paying. The offers only increase once you quit, as you get new/re-subscriber discounts that are far cheaper than what you were paying previously. I've always felt sort of retroactively ripped off by those; where were my discount offers when I was a regular user? Why reward the quitters and people who don't even want the magazine?
More specifically, I've had DSL since I moved to this apartment, 2.5 years ago. It was much cheaper than a cable modem at the time: I paid $20/month for the DSL while a CM was $40/month, and I had to get basic cable for another $25/month, which I didn't want since I was sick of watching TV after being regularly subjected to it while living with Malaya. (And Comcast left the basic cable on for free for like 6 months anyway.) There were two drawbacks. My speed was metered to 200k/sec on downloads, and I had to get a landline along with the DSL, for another $10 a month. But still, $30 a month for fairly fast online service wasn't that bad.
Fast forward 2.5 years, and the landline had increased to $20, and the DSL was now $30, and that 200k/sec (and 30k/sec upstream) was really beginning to annoy me. I couldn't upload Diablo 3 movies to the website, and even posting a batch of 6 or 8 big screenshots took 5 minutes. And since the door-to-door Comcast peddlers had recently been by to inform me that they had a special $19/month, cable modem-only offer, I decided to switch.
I called Comcast first and got things set up, and it's so obvious that they have radically different deals. Basically, whatever you know to ask for, they give you. I called and was connected to some "street team" hotline, and the guy was semi-cagey as he asked me, "what deal did you have in mind?" after listing their basic, full price offer. I said that I'd been told of a $19/month for cable modem only, and he was like, "Oh..." After five minutes trying to sell me on bundling phone service, basic cable, non-basic cable, etc, he finally gave in and set up an installation appointment. And two days later, I had a cable modem rolling at about 5x the DSL speed, for $19/month. Of course that only runs for 6 months, and then it becomes $50 a month, or $60 if I get basic cable with it, but I'll worry about that in December. Or quite possible move by then, or perhaps even switch back to DSL.
Why DSL? Since when I called them the day after the cable modem was set up, they were horrified that I was dropping the service, and lavished all sorts of deals upon me. My previously iron clad $20/month land line could suddenly be lowered to $11/month, with limited local calling minutes (I've used about 5 local or long distance calling minutes in 2 years.) My DSL could go down to $20/month for 3 months on a special continuing subscriber reward, and the metered speed could possibly be increased, since it might be due to a hardware problem. Etc.
I had them cancel it anyway, and when I asked about a final bill the woman sort of grudgingly said that they would send me a closing bill, with my charges pro-rated for the amount of time I'd used it this month. In other words, they'd have been happy for me to pay the full bill, which ran through June 28th, but since I'd asked I'd get a bill that only ran through the 12th.
Another similar instance occurred with my credit card. I belatedly realized that I had never gotten a credit card bill this month, so I dug out an old bill and called the customer service number, and they said that yes, I should have gotten it by then, and that it was due in 2 days. It was for pre-Hawaii charges, so it was only about a hundred bucks, but of course they gouge you with penalties and usurious rates if you're even an hour late with the monthly payment. I have a Mastercard with lifetime no annual fee, but they certainly try to make up that annual fee with any little rip offs they can find.
The woman on the phone was clearly one of those "New Dehli tech support" types. Very polite and efficient, and doing all she could to try to hide her Indian accent. She had one of the ridiculously white-bread online names, "Hello this is Deborah. How can I help you today sir?" But she says it like, "De-boood-RAH." An Indian pronunciation of a name that sounds like "Deb-ruh" when a native speaker says it. I kind of laughed, having heard that game played before.
She informed me that my bill was due in 2 days and that there were fees, etc, if I was late. I said I'd never gotten my bill this month and that I'd like a new one sent out. She instantly mentioned the late fee deadline, then instantly segued into my option of paying by check over the phone, which had a one time $15 charge. I countered with "How about just sending me a new bill and waiving the late fee this month?" And she immediately came back with, "I can let you pay over the phone with a check and as a courtesy we will waive the fee."
So that's what I did. The bill had increased to $500 since a bunch of crap I bought in Hawaii (mostly treating the parents to dinners and some presents and such) was going to be on next month's bill, but that was fine. And the net result was me saving $60 or $80 just by calling and insisting on not paying fees. Not that I drove some rock hard bargaining on them, or pulled in special privileges. I just asked a few times and discounts materialized almost effortlessly.
Most people, (me definitely included) hate to call and talk to customer support, and will just swallow overcharges and extra fees rather than spending the time calling and fighting through labyrinthine computerized tech support services. But as my recent experiences have shown, you can save considerable money by doing so. And gain some personal satisfaction at a revenge, no matter how petty or minor, against some of the globonational companies whose wheels of profit are greased by the secretions they regularly wring from us, their hapless customers.
This time of year has always been disappointing for the (ever diminishing) sports fan in me. Basketball season just ended, as did hockey (though that has a vanishingly-small impact on me), and football doesn't start until late August. Baseball is ongoing (and ongoing, and ongoing, with its endless season) but I've never been more than a very casual baseball fan. Even when (especially when) I worked at the stadium in San Diego and attended every home game.
These days, the extent of my baseball interest is to absently root against the Yankees, glance at the standings every couple/few weeks, and idly comment on the unexpectedly (to me, which isn't saying much) good or bad teams. Especially in Pythagorean terms, by comparing their record to their run differential. My old home town team, the Padres, were in first place early on, when they were something like 17-12. I was surprised to see that, but immediately disregarded it, since it was a fluke. They were something like 7-1 in one-run games, and their run differential was negative, despite their winning record. Today's standings inform me that they've since dropped seven games under and back into 4th place, but even that's a considerable illusion, since they've got the 2nd worst run differential in the National League.
Elsewhere, I see that Tampa Bay has won 5 straight, and while they're in 3rd place in the AL East, they've got by far the best run differential in the American League. They'll clearly come on very strong the rest of the way, if they continue to play as they've played thus far and overcome the bad luck that's depressed their win/loss record.
And that's it; I won't read a baseball article or view a scoresheet until oh... July. Ish. I'm actually a bit more plugged into baseball than I've been the past half decade+, since Bill Simmons does regular podcasts with a friend whose a Yankee fan, and those are entertaining enough to listen to while I'm doing housework or cooking. I'll never take the time to read an actual baseball column, but hearing two friends argue about the Yankees and Red Sox is mildly amusing, even though they might as well be discussing European Soccer League teams, for all the knowledge I have about the fortunes of the individual players that comprise them.
I'm not a whole lot more devoted to the NFL or college football, either. I enjoy watching the games, but not enough to actually own a television. Or go anywhere with a television to watch them. I like them too much. Even when I had TV, I tried hard to never watch anything live, since the time sink of commercials so befouled the experience. I'd tape everything I liked to watch it later, when a 3 hour football game could be consumed in 45 minutes. But even then, that made for pretty busy weekends in the fall, with 3 or 4 good college games and 2 or 3 good pro games in 3 days. And I'd always get sucked into watching some bad game live while I was taping the good game on another channel, or I'd get lazy while watching and forget to fast forward between plays, or spend time reading about a game while I was taping it, etc.
The solution, for me, was to cut off the distraction and go without TV. I still follow the games somewhat, but only by looking at box scores or watching highlights online. That takes much less time, and since it's an active pursuit, rather than passive couch potato'ing before the idiot box, I'm aware of the time I spend on it and try to keep it reasonable.
There are 2 factors that have killed my sports appreciation and time involvement. (These are conscious choices. I considered getting into fantasy sports years ago, and decided the same thing I did about ever playing another MMORPG after Ultima Online ate most of a year of my life. That way lies madness, since I knew how much time I would feel compelled to devote to it.)
1) I was born too soon. I loved sports and especially stats when I was in my formative years. I remember spending hours in my tweens and teens, pouring over the box scores and the woeful amount of stats printed in the local paper. They had nothing worth reading in those days; records, points allowed/scored, and sometimes NFL leaders, by points or yards. I still devoured them, all but memorizing the yards on offense/defense for NFL teams, but that's all the info that was available, so I couldn't get that into it.
These days, as the sabermetics revolution churns into its 2nd or 3rd generation, and the lessons learned from number crunching baseball are applied to other sports, I'd be in heaven. If I were 13 and had endless time to kill, with endless sites devoted to statistical analysis of pro sports. I just don't have the time to devote to that now, a lack of time that's largely due to my non-career choice, which leads to point two:
2) The fact that I eschewed a regular career in an office destroys my sports time. The vast majority of fantasy sports involvement is fueled by guys killing time at work, and if I could get paid just for showing up somewhere and doing 3 or 4 hours of work in a typical 8-hour day, I'd probably be following mock drafts and memorizing salary cap exemptions just like most of the white collar world. Since I actually enjoy my work, and since I only get paid for what I produce, rather than just for sitting at my desk and looking busy, I don't need to find time-killing hobbies to fill the hours. Plus, since I enjoy my work and have to concentrate and work hard at it to succeed, and since I'm forever producing less than I'd like to be producing, any time I'm online at my computer and not working (such as while writing overlong blog posts), I feel guilty and feel a time pressure to get back to some real work.
2.1) I think the fact that I don't have kids factors in as well. If I had a 10 y/o son he'd probably be a sports fan, and we'd watch football and basketball together. And his interest would spur me to pay more attention, and do some research online, etc. Plus TVs are useful for families, since you can all sit around together and watch it. It's mentally-vacant, but it's sort of a "togetherness" thing, and sports is a somewhat neutral type of program that can be watched by mutual agreement. Or at least without strong opposition.
2.2) Nor do I have guy friends in real life. I've not had close male friends as an adult, (and haven't sought them) which means that I never just hang out with non-females. Hanging out with women never involves watching sports; and seldom involves TV; I've spent hundreds (thousands?) of hours with the IG over the past couple of years, and of that maybe ten involved watching something on a screen, and those were all movies, mostly in theaters. I can watch movies by myself; when I'm with another person I like to do interactive things, usually conversation. And I don't hang out with people I don't enjoy interacting/talking with. Which brings us full circle in explaining why I don't have a circle of guy friends in real life.
Was there a point to any of that? Not really. Just doing the "thinking aloud" with my fingers thing that makes up much of my blogging output. Or did, in the old days when I used to put a long update here most every day.
In other sports news, the Lakers won the NBA title over the weekend, and had their victory parade today. As always when this sort of thing occurs, I was amazed at the number of people who showed up.
Admittedly, LA is a vast hellhole of a smog basin, with tens of millions of people in the city and surrounding communities, but still... 200,000+ people stand around in the hot sun to wave at buses? Or fill the Coliseum to watch players hold up shiny golden statues and mouth platitudes? I don't see the attraction. I suppose a lot of it is just bored people with nothing better to do; the riots that always break out after a team wins (as happened Sunday night in LA) are much the same; gang members and other disreputable young men taking advantage of the chaos and crowds and excitement to engage in acts of destruction.
Making my disinterest worse is the fact that, in theory, the Lakers are my favorite basketball team. I watched them all through my years in San Diego, since SD has no basketball team and every Lakers game was on local cable. That I wasn't sufficiently motivated to get to a TV to see a single game of their run through the playoffs probably convicts me of being a fairly non-fan, though. As I did last year, when they lost to Boston in the finals, I thought a few times, "If the finals goes to 7 games, I'll suffer a sports bar to watch the last game." Last year they lost in 6. This year they won in 5. There's always next year?
Here are a couple of photos from the LA victory parade and ceremony today. Because they caught my eye in the LA Times slide show.
Over 80,000 people filled the Coliseum to capacity hours before the parade even started.
Let's stand on the hot streets and yell! Yah, gridlock traffic in every direction!
Continuing with my recent string of, "This would make a great blog post if I'd taken the time to research and find supporting links." I'm just going to half-ass it and wave airily towards various portions which we'll pretend have the supporting example links I'm not about to take the time to hunt up. (I promise that I've read numerous posts and seen countless examples of every generalized point I make in this. I just didn't save all the links for eventual regurgitation.)
First, some psychology.
It's basic human nature feel that our rewards are entirely deserved. Everyone wants to feel that they've earned their success, and that they triumphed over uniquely difficult circumstances to achieve it. This tendency is natural and can be quite useful if it's motivating, but it's also easy to hate when unjustly displayed in others. See any of the millions of mentions of "born on third base and thinks he/she hit a triple" as usually ascribed to George Bush, Paris Hilton, privileged children of rich white people, any starlet on an Mtv reality show, etc. And yes, I realize that George Bush and Paris Hilton are specific examples of "privileged children of rich white people."
A related human tendency is to want to feel uniquely put upon and troubled in our suffering or misfortune. This goes all the way up to a cosmological level, with the "everything happens for a reason" consolation so many people embrace, but on a smaller scale, we all like to bitch about their problems, and to feel that we are simply besieged by difficulties we must surmount. Find anyone with a lot on their metaphorical plate and they'll so happily unload the story of their woes that you'll be left thinking how easily they could dig their way out of their troubles, if they only applied as much effort to fixing them as they do to bitching about them.
This is most exemplified by fairly well off people without any really serious problems. You have to be well off and pampered to invent maladies to suffer from. As the joke goes, there aren't any anorexics in Ethopia. Starving, homeless, endangered, desperate people are too busy struggling to stop to bitch about it. They're accustomed to having to really work to get through, and a momentary wave of extra difficulties isn't going to make them complain. It will either kill them or send them into true despair, usually chemically-induced.
As with most states of human emotion, it's primarily change and a state of flux that causes us to feel depressed or elated. A poor person who becomes a millionaire from a lottery win is elated. A person who has been a millionaire all along doesn't think anything of it, but if they lost much of their fortune they'd be utterly crushed and despondent, even if their new net worth was equivalent to or greater than that of 90% of the people around them. It's the change and the shock of readjustment that blows people away; once we've adjusted, almost whatever level we're at, we tend to achieve equilibrium. People in new love soar with happiness. People who just broke up are despondent. Yet both will be much the same, psychologically, in a month or two.
This tendency was beautifully illustrated a number of times recently, by the vociferous complaining of formerly super rich, now just rich, Wall Street traders and investment bankers and others hit hard by the recent implosion of the US and worldwide financial markets. People who were used to earning millions a year by doing no actual work, just moving numbers around on paper, many of which allowed other, even richer people, to pretend to have "earned" money from their investments, were simply stunned to lose their investments and their livelihoods. And lots of them wrote op-eds complaining about the changes to the financial market, and seemed quite surprised when the reply from most people was to offer to pour gasoline over their heads and hand them a book of matches.
"But look at all the money I lost? Look at the great job I used to have before my company cratered!" they said, wallowing in their personal misery of a net worth dropping below 8-figures. And to them, it was a colossal disaster and they had a lot of undirected rage. They certainly weren't going to point at the house of cards financial system that had so enriched them (which everyone else was pointing at) since that would be like blaming themselves. So they frequently blamed the Obama Administration, since that's where the action was going on and the bailouts and new rules were coming from.
The thing that few of them did, at least few of the ones who got into the news, was to realize that they were still richer than 95% of Americans, and that no one in the general public was going to give them any sympathy for having to downsize from their multimillion dollar penthouse and maybe sell off a summer home at a loss, since the housing market was crashing. (As a direct result of their own financial mechanizations.)
Another variation of these psychological traits is currently being exhibited by much of the right wing of the blogosphere, as they reel from one (pretend?) outrage to another, simply wallowing in their shared feeling of victimization. All through the 00s, these same people reveled in their take-no-prisoners style of political dominance, crowing down at progressives and moderates, asserting the onset of a permanent Republican majority, ignoring all calls for moderation and cooperation, wanking to crazed pipe dreams of the Iraq war leading to a magical flowering of pro-American democracy across the Middle East, etc. And now that the tables have, as they're wont, turned, policies they disagree with are uniquely horrible and dangerous, the centrist Obama is a dangerous radical Marxist illegal alien, etc. The overall conceptual issue is worth discussion, but it's way too big a topic for even my meandering blog essays to scratch.
What I do want to mention are a few recent events of especially ripe faux-outrage. The most recent, in fact it's still ongoing, is the "David Letterman told a few off-color jokes about Sarah Palin." It's not that Sarah Palin supporters (yes there are such people, hard though that is to comprehend) are upset that a late night comedy show host made jokes about a joke-rich celebrity. They're allowed to have partisan feelings. The funny part (for an outside observer) is the frenzy of (mock?) outrage and hyperbole that makes up the caterwauling.
A better blog post would run through a bunch of examples. This one will simply point you to this week's Village Voice column by the excellent Roy Edroso, in which he compiles a representative sample of the inferno of outrage Letterman's fairly tame remarks have kindled. If you don't real political blogs, let me assure you that those cited examples are not in any way unusual or cherry-picking. The ones Edroso quotes there are not even a drop in the bucket of the iceberg's tip. Literally the entire right wing of the blogosphere has been caterwauling about that since it happened, spurring each other on to greater and greater heights of outrage.
Another example popped up a couple of weeks ago, when an article went (briefly) online on the Playboy.com website. Yes, that they have words there was news to me to. In it some columnist wrote a rather edgy piece about the sexual desirability of the top 10 female Republican media figures "we love to hate." The article would have gone quietly into the night, except that the author made the mistake of giving each of them a "hate fuck" rating.
I first saw the article mentioned on lefty blogs, most of whom were commenting on the righty bloggers blowing a gasket over it. The obvious and immediate reaction for most was to think, "If this list with identical words were about liberal women, the right bloggers would be cheering it on and telling every offended feminist and leftist to get a sense of humor and stop being so politically correct." But since it was about right wing women, the formerly insensitive, "get back in the kitchen and bake me a pie, Missy!" Bill O'Rly, Andrew Dice Clay, Rush Limbaugh-loving bloggers were deeply, morally offended.
Helpfully for the right bloggers, lots of feminist bloggers (who are 99% liberal, for fairly obvious historical and cultural reasons) felt it was their duty to get all worked up labeling the Playboy article as misogynistic. Which it was, but so is most edgy humor, as well as racist, or homophobic, or other such descriptions that we generally apply to things that are worthy of contempt.
It was hard to find the article for a few days, since Playboy took it down shortly after the blogosphere exploded over it, but thankfully Red State, a right wing attempted answer to the hugely popular left wing Daily Kos community site, posted screenshots. Which is where I read it, and where this link points.
I wouldn't have written the article myself, and I certainly don't agree with the author's rankings, but if you actually read the article... it's not that bad. The main feminist criticism of it is immediately proved to be overblown and hysterical (demonstrating that not only right wing bloggers can act as professional pearl clutching outrage merchants), since there's nothing in the article that directly refers to rape, or non-consensual sex. The author's point, as best I can tell, is that a liberal or moderate man wants to have sex with these women despite himself. It's a "love to hate, hate to love" sort of thing. You'd fuck them, but you'd hate yourself for doing it, and you might hate her while you were doing it. But it's not an incitement to rape, or an approval of rape.
Yes, some of the much-quoted lines are cruel and vulgar, but that's the whole point. Taken out of context and parsed in intentionally-humorless fashion, they're ugly and crude, but so are the funny parts of most fake opinion pieces on say, The Onion. The article is written from a definite PoV, it's consistent and merciless, and it's certainly not to everyone's liking. But it's not some surpassingly sexist rape manifesto, which most of the critics made it out to be. (But did they treat it that way for political gain, or because they sincerely felt that way? A question I've asked in the past, such as after viewing the mission feminist comments on this blog post of my own, from a few years ago.)
Which is my big (and unanswerable) question about this whole flavor of "all outrage, all the time" media/blog coverage. Are any of these people serious?
When I see it from the top dogs, especially on the right side, I assume it's entirely an act. It's just a game to these people, and they're playing it entirely for cynical political advantage. Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter and their second tier clones Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin are actors, as surely as professional wrestlers. None of those people react sincerely to anything, in their professional lives. Everything from a favored Republican is good and pure and noble, everything from a Democrat is evil and vile and wretched, and the world comfortingly Manichean and bifurcated. Right vs. wrong. Good vs. evil. Black vs. white.
Yet while I've got no doubt that the foremost mouthpieces of the right wing media are utterly insincere about their professed beliefs (or are at least overreacting wildly to everything since that's their gimmick to get ratings and energize the faithful, a technique successfully copied from the left by Keith Olbermann), I do wonder about the lower tier media figures. It's the third and fourth tier of media figures; bloggers of the type Edroso quotes in the Village Voice piece, that I'm more curious about.
These guys (and a girl or two) aren't getting paid big bucks. Most of them aren't getting paid at all. Yet they're just as vociferous and hysterical over any new event that they think might give their side some political traction. Is it an act? Are they just following their leaders? Do they think echoing the various ridiculous talking points will win them more readers and page views? Or are some/any/most of them sincere? I find that really hard to believe; there's simply no way that any adult with the ability to write in complete sentences and operate blogging software sincerely believes David Letterman was intentionally making a joke about Sarah Palin's 14 y/o daughter being knocked up during the 7th inning stretch by Alex Rodriguez.
(Besides the obvious issue of the girl's age, it wouldn't be funny or make any sense if Letterman had known the daughter was the 14 y/o. Everyone assumed Letterman was referring to the 18 y/o daughter, since her pregnancy (allegedly) to her high school dropout jock boyfriend, was comedy fodder during the entire election season. So extending the analogy to her getting pregnant from another, much more eligible bachelor athlete, is why it works as humor. Furthermore, the fact that her parents are fundies, and advocates of "abstinence only" sex-non-ed, adds to the humorous seasoning. In the same way that it's funny when anti-gay politicians get caught "cottaging" with their pants around their ankles in a men's public restroom.)
But some of them must be sincere, at least some of the time?
Also, how far down the food chain does that sort of reaction extend? The commentators on the few right wing blogs that allow comments usually seem to be engaged in some kind of virtual recreation of a Nuremberg Rally (had to Godwin myself there). The ones on the Red State cache of the Playboy article are quite tame, since that site is fairly tightly regulated (only allows right wing opinions, but also deletes profanity and the "nuke all the sand niggers" type comments that fill up most such sites. So if the 4th and 5th tier right wing bloggers are putting on an act to incite their handful of readers, are their readers putting on an act to incite each other? Where's the logic in that?
I'm fundamentally opposed to believing that people are really as dumb as they appear in most internet comments (try to read more than a page of comments on any YouTube video, of any subject, and you can literally feel your IQ dropping), but that's mostly about writing ability and depth of thought. With the political blogs it's a different question, since the commenters are able to write coherently; they just say incredibly stupid things, and seem to have no reasonable connection between the severity of the event in question and their emotional reaction to it. I want to believe they're playing a game, since taking them seriously would be too scary?
Finally, I have to say that I know there are left wing blogs and commenters who are just as deranged over different issues. I just don't read any of the really rabble-rousing left wing blogs since that level of discourse and activism doesn't interest me. I read more intellectual, analytical blogs, mostly leftist, and thus I see lots of links to right wing freakouts over various inconsequential issues. I never see links to left wing blogs doing the same thing, which they must. Just none of the more popular ones, which gives a huge contrast to the right wing noise machine, the stars of which are amongst the most hysterical freak out artists of them all.
Interesting short piece by Paul Krugman about the falling fortunes (political and personal) of the ruling party in the UK. It's worth a read, but to recap briefly, a banking crisis of almost the same type that's destroyed the US economy has wrecked the economy in the UK as well. (And most of the rest of the world.)
The difference, for the purpose of his article, is that while the Right was in power in the US and UK in the 1980s, and the left in the 1990s, the Left (Labor) retained power in the UK throughout the 2000s. Tony Blair was not exactly a liberal, and the US is so skewed to the Right that Obama would be economically well to the right in most of the Western World, but Blair was from the Labor party. In the US, of course, the Right took back power on the presidential level in very close and legally contested elections in 2000 and 2004, and for most of the decade the Right had a majority in congress as well.
Surprisingly, unrestrained free market ideologues ran rampant in both parties/countries, which is why the UK (and most of Europe and the rest of the world) followed America's lead in deregulating their financial industries. Which allowed banks to diversify into derivatives, leveraging pyramid schemes, loaning to anyone with a pulse since house prices only went up, etc. Actions that led to the current global recession and formerly unthinkable levels of bank losses and corporate bankruptcies. Etc.
The interesting part is that since the Left remained in power in the UK through the 2000s, they're getting blamed for the recession and are woefully unpopular in the polls, despite the fact that the Tory opposition has just as much nothing to offer in their economic fixes as utterly discredited Republicans have been offering in the US. In the US, Bush was hugely unpopular long before the recession set in last year, and Republicans got murdered in the 2006 congressional elections, so the odds were that a Democrat was going to win the presidency in 2008 anyway. But the beginning of the recession certainly focused public attention on the economy, and the fact that McCain had no strategy to offer beyond the usual Republican "tax cuts for the rich" certainly didn't help his electoral efforts.
So, as Krugman says, while Labor deserves some blame for the state of the UK economy, why do the Tories deserve credit? They'd have done the exact same thing, or created an even bigger mess with their pro-business policies, had they been in power for the last 6 or 8 years. On the other hand, what if Gore had won in 2000, or Kerry in 2004? They'd likely have done much the same as Bush, at least in terms of domestic economic policy, and would have gotten the blame for the current state of the economy.
The key to the whole article is... Canada. I'll quote Krugman on that:
There's no question that this zeal for deregulation set Britain up for a fall. Consider the counterexample of Canada -- a mostly English-speaking country, every bit as much in the American cultural orbit as Britain, but one where Reagan/Thatcher-type financial deregulation never took hold. Sure enough, Canadian banks have been a pillar of stability in the crisis.
Sadly, Canada doesn't have a left/right political break down to continue this theme. There are more than two viable parties in Canada, and in many ways their right wingers are more liberal than Democrats or Labor in the US and UK. As evidenced by their refusing to sip of the deregulation Kool Aid that created the bubbles that so recently and disastrously popped in the US and UK.
Ironically, I bet the Canadian politicians who were in power during the 90s and 00s aren't doing any better now than their US and UK counterparts. Canada's banks aren't all failing, but they're in a recession too, since their main trading partners are hurting.
If there's a moral here, it's unclear. Following conventional wisdom, even "expert" opinion, does nothing to guarantee prosperity. Not on a personal or national level. Political fortunes have as much or more to do with circumstance and chronological chance than the results of the positions you take and the laws you pass. The just are often punished, and the guilty rewarded, and just vs. guilty is largely a matter of opinion.
My recommendation: don't use this one as a good night story for your kids.
Your hero Paulson met with Donaldson and got the rules changed so that Goldman and four other banks no longer had to abide by the old restrictions that forced banks to actually have a dollar or two on hand for every ten or so they lent out. After that, it was party time! Bear Stearns in just a few years had a debt-to-equity ration of 33-1! Lehman’s went to 32-1. By an amazing coincidence, both of these companies exploded just a few years after that meeting, and all of the rest of us, Evan, ended up footing the bill, thanks to a state-sponsored rescue of Bear and a much larger massive bailout of Wall Street in general, necessitated in large part by the damage caused by the chaos surrounding Lehman's collapse.
Meanwhile your own Goldman, Sachs ended up with a 22:1 debt-to-equity ratio a few years following that meeting, a number that would have been much higher if one didn't count the hedges Goldman bought through a company called AIG. Thanks in large part to Paulson's leadership in his last years as head of Goldman, the company was so massively over-leveraged that it would have gone under if AIG -- which owed Goldman billions when it went into its death spiral last September -- had been allowed to collapse. But thanks to Hank Paulson, who heroically stepped in and gave AIG $80 billion the same weekend he allowed one of Goldman's last key competitors, Lehman, to collapse, Goldman didn't have to go without that money; $13 billion of the AIG bailout went straight to Goldman. So I guess we have Paulson to thank for the fact that he used about $13 billion of our taxpayer money to essentially bail out his own fuckups.
It's more a chuckle at the weirdness than LOL at the hilarity sort of site, but I've recently spent a few happy minutes perusing the wares at http://awkwardfamilyphotos.com. It is what it sounds like, and for better of worse the photos are the attraction; whoever's running the site has the lack of words/good sense not to add value/detract from the photos with amusing/annoying captions. A few samples that caught my eye.
Whose idea was this? I like to think the photographer came up with it, instead of one (or more) of the family members. But did the photog mean it as a joke, or at least some sort of ironic commentary?
One of the surprising things to me about these photos is how often one of the celebrants provokes a legitimate, "It's Pat!" moment. I could not make a strong argument as to the gender of the human on the left. I'm leaning male, since there appears to be a downy layer of arm hair, and since the other one is clearly a woman. And she doesn't look dyke-y. On the other hand... sandals. KD Lang hair. And a pot-bellied pig... in a t-shirt?
The funny thing about this photo, which I've seen online for years, is that the dad actually looks the best. He's got a very masculine, Fabio/Bon Jovi vibe going, and an engaging smile. Only the pirate shirt/chest hair argues against him. On the other hand, the mom looks lobotomized, pebble-toothed, and her bangs could spur an international dispute, and not just over hair spray quotas. The child is just tragic, and, one hopes, an amnesiac.
At first glance this one's enough to convince you that Hitler was right, but just on the wrong side of the "white people or not" debate. At a closer look though, they don't appear to be chromosomally-deficient. The girl has a sweet face, and the guy might even be good looking in a baby-faced sort of way, despite sporting perhaps the worst short hair style ever devised for a Caucasian male. I'm a little puzzled as to why his body is orange while his face is pasty white, but I'm guessing a bit too much powder and bad studio lighting.
As for the pose... well, she's got nice skin, and it's only the second stupidest thing this young couple has ever done.
David Carradine, went out to autoerotic-asphyxiation? Fucking Bill? Now there's a plot twist even QT wouldn't have written in. I am speechless...
In Bangkok!
1) How bored do you have to get with regular jerking off to start choking yourself to heighten the sensation? I guess if you're 71 and have been a TV/movie star for 50 years, you've fucked so many women, men, girls, and farm animals that you need to mix in some variety. But christ, must it be lethal?
2) Who the hell goes to Bangkok to jerk off? Isn't the whole point in visiting that city the fact that $20 will get you a line of beautiful small-breasted girls who will eagerly attempt feats even Paris Hilton would balk at?
2.1) No one. Which is why I'll bet he wasn't alone in the hotel room when he died. Remove the "auto" from the cause of death description, please. Not that I'm saying it was murder, just that he, or his assistant, fucked up on the timing and let him dangle a moment too long. At least he went out doing what he loved?
Or less likely, if you'd prefer to bet from that end... I'm speaking, of course, of the 3 "ads" displayed on the megaupload.com file download page seen below, in a screenshot I snapped whilst occupied downloading comic books (because sometimes even I run low on websites to surf while wasting time).
Personally, I think the lesbian porn on YouTube is the most likely. True, there's no actual porn on YouTube, but you an find a fair amount of grainy, non-nude "sexy" videos, mostly of the "pudgy webcam girl in short skirt" variety. I've never checked into it, (Not until I went to find this link, at least.) but I'm sure there are videos of girls kissing, on YouTube. So if that's all you were expecting, you could see it. That said, I'm quite sure the clickable ad/image would have taken me nowhere near a fairly-innocent YouTube makeout video, had I clicked it. (I should have, in the interests of journalistic integrity. I did not, cause I don't care and neither do you.
It's tougher to decide on second place on the "more likely" medal podium, isn't it? Are you more likely to get $173/an hour from Google for posting links? Or to find a girl who looks like that from an online dating site? It's kind of a coin flip, but I'll have to go with the dating site girl. There are some some really hot women on personals sites. Of course they wouldn't date you, and are only interested in rich men and/or celebrities, but they're out there. Not via the click on this ad, but they do exist.
Unlike the third place finisher. Even people who credulously read emails from exiled Nigerian royalty laugh at the idea that anyone ever has or will ever earn 173/hour posting links.
And yes, I typo'ed the password in the screenshot. Bonus points if you noticed that before reading it here.
A murder mystery/thriller/horror novel that fairly well defines "mediocre." It's got a decent plot angle and some slightly non-cardboard characters, but it's never really exciting or thrilling. It's only got a few reviews on Amazon, all of them very short, but most of them fairly positive. They liked it better than I did, anyway. One review gives away the plot twist/murderer's identity, and so don't read them all if you've got any possibility of ever reading this book, since the secret killer is about all it has going for it.
I reveal it below, in my discussion, but at least I put it after a spoiler warning. I'm not really sure why, since I don't recommend you read the book anyway.
Ritual, by William Heffernan, 1989 Plot: 5 Concept: 8 Writing Quality/Flow: 4/5 Characters: 4 Fun Factor: 6 Page Turner: 4 Re-readability: 4 Overall: 5.5
The concept is the best part of this novel. It's set in NYC in the modern day (late 1980s was when the book was written, but it feels contemporary, other than the absence of cell phones). A major museum and art gallery are hosting a joint show about Incan/Mayan culture, especially focusing on their forms of ritual murder/ceremonial sacrifice. As the show is going on, people start getting murdered, killed by ancient obsidian blades, beheaded, and partially-skinned just like the ancients used to do. A pretty young female (of course) museum director is marked as the final victim, and the brave, jaded, but still noble police detective is assigned to the case and is determined to find the killer before the woman dies. Lots of other people keep getting ritually knocked off in the meantime, and the plot thickens (sort of) as most of the apparent suspects fall victim as well, in suitably gory fashion.
The book's gimmick is that most of the murder scenes are presented from the PoV of the murder victims. And they always know the murderer, and their last words are always something along the lines of, "Oh, what a surprise to see you here. Wait.. what are you doing? Arghhhh!" These scenes are kind of cool initially, but soon come to feel very manipulative, since they're written so carefully to keep from giving any hints about who the murderer is. They just feel so artificial, as characters who have been thinking normally as they narrate the events suddenly become robotic. Avoiding all gendered pronouns, not thinking names, places, or things that they obviously would when seeing the mystery murderer who they know quite well, etc. I played along, and the scenes weren't jarringly awful, but they always took me out of the story since the technique was so transparently a gimmick designed to (attempt to) create suspense.
The bigger problem was that I didn't care. None of the characters were very interesting or involving, the overall story had no real thrust or emphasis, I didn't care if they died or lived or solved the crime, I wasn't rooting for the detective or the cops, or feeling protective of the damsel in distress, etc. It was a competently-written book, but one lacking in any real sparkle or engaging characterization. So I read it to find out how it turned out, and to get to the shocking revelation of the mystery killer's identity, but only because I do about an hour of cardio 4-5 times a week at the gym, and I have to read something, and this one had been on my bookshelf for years, since I picked it up at a library giveaway.
It's still there, but now it's in the back row, where the books I've read (and will never read again) get slotted. Mission accomplished?
Spoiler: The murderer? The hero detective.
It's sort of a surprise; as far as I was trying to guess (not very far) I was leaning towards the damsel in distress being the murderer, but I didn't get any kind of "ooh, snap!" moment when the reveal was made, since it's so random and unjustified. The cop knew no one involved in this incident before it began, and he had no connection to the historical weapons or Mayan culture. So there's no reason for him to be doing it now, when he'd been obsessed by murders and the best homicide detective on the force for decades. The explanation is that he's having some kind of split personality psychotic break; he doesn't know he's doing it, and when he's in his right mind he's furiously investigating the crimes.
It could have worked better as something of a psychological thriller; if the detective had started to find clues that implicated himself, and had to grapple with the possibility that he was doing it. Or if there'd been clues for the reader that we were to suspect him. But it's kept secret and then sprung at the end, and it feels more like a carpet being yanked out, rather than a good surprise reveal. The detective has been the main character all along, he's handled most of the narration from a first person PoV, and he's never exhibited any fishy behavior, black outs, etc.
In the end he's given some background history; the wife and daughter who allegedly vanished on him 15 years before were actually his first victims, and he's had them rotting in a trunk in his basement ever since. But he seems not to know that, and has been assiduously searching for his lost daughter ever since. He also doesn't know he's committing any of the crimes, and doesn't seem to ever suspect that he's losing his mind, or blacking out, etc. I'll give the author points for trying to twist the surprise ending, but it worked much better in concept than execution. So to speak.
I finished sorting through the few hundred photos I took in Kauai, and they've now been posted, along with captions that form a running narrative of my time in Kauai. Yes, it's almost as if I'm running actual website here, once in a while. Most of the photos are glorious outdoor scenery type stuff, and while I'm not a photographer and I have an old, battered camera, some of the pictures turned out pretty well.
Here are a few samples with the captions attached. Check the pages for about 90 more, many of them (including all but one excerpted here) are linked to huge, desktop-sized images of the prettiness. Plus there's semi-informative, occasionally snarky bullshit in the captions.
Waimea Canyon is not as gorgeous as the Grand Canyon, in part due to the greenery. The Grand Canyon is gorgeous in large part due to the stark beauty of various colors of exposed rock. The rock on Waimea isn't so varied in color since it's much younger and was all produced fairly quickly by volcanic activity, and in any event, it rains so much that most of the exposed stratification is obscured by greenery. That said, the various scenic overlooks and hiking trails offer breathtaking vistas, even when the skies are overcast and parts of the canyon are obscured by fog.
My best photo of the lot. It's not dramatic angles or trickery to make it look like this tree is growing on the edge of eternity. It actually is.
This is one of the more perfectly photogenic Hawaiian beaches I saw. It's on the Botanical Garden property, and has become a turtle egg-laying location, in recent years.
One of the cooler things in the park were these huge rooting trees. They were amazingly deep and straight, literally more than head height up near the trunk. In some places they were grown into enclosing shapes, like bathtubs. Our host told us that some early egg-hatching scenes in Jurassic Park were shot with these trees as the set. In fact, lots of that movie was filmed on Kauai and around the park.
The starting sign. It does not lie. If anything, it greatly understates the character of the trail.
I loved the trail and scenery, but didn't think that much of my travel time... until I started Googling the trail while writing this page up, and found people's stories about nearly dying on it. The whole trail is about 11 miles of incredibly winding, steep, constant rises and falls. There's no round trip; it's just one long ribbon that ends at an otherwise inaccesible beach (well, you could take a boat). Hardy folk hike out there in one day, stay overnight, and hike back the next. Most people, from the stories I've seen online, take 3 days to get there, stopping at some 2/3 point, or often taking 2 days to get back, they're so exhausted from the walking on day one.
The heat and humidity are obvious factors, but most of the trouble comes from the terrain. It's just fantastically rocky, rough, rooty, jumbled, etc. You don't ever actually need to go on your hands and knees to get up or down anything (some of the boulders might require you to use your hands a bit), but it's basically a stairway, at least 50% of the time. Photos can hardly capture the angle and irregularity of the path, but I tried with a few, using other hikers for scale.
Great and disturbing post on hate watch blog Orcinus about the recent murder of the "abortion" doctor in Kansas.
Tiller was one of the great heroes in the fight for a woman's right to choose safe, legal abortion. Late-term abortions are a terrible business for everyone concerned. Despite anti-abortion distortions to the contrary, they are very rare -- and almost never chosen for anything but the most heartbreaking of reasons, usually having to do with the life of the mother or the viability of the fetus. It's a life-changing choice for everyone concerned, and not one anybody takes lightly.
By all accounts, Tiller dealt with these horrific situations with dignity, compassion, and grace, helping women and their families deal with the loss and grief that always come with being faced with such a traumatic decision. He didn't just tend to their physical condition; he tended to their psychological and spiritual well-being, too. Most of us will be backed into life-or-death corners regarding serious medical conditions (a family member's, or our own) at some point in our lives. In those times, we are fortunate when we can find doctors with that kind of ability to understand the nuances, and help us deal with the ambiguities, and come to terms with the hard decisions we must make. Tiller was, according to his patients, one of those doctors.
As should be fairly obvious, this sort of action is the very definition of "terrorism." It, and other attacks on Planned Parenthood facilities and personnel, are carried out by a loose conspiracy of like minded zealots who are attempting (and succeeding) to use violence and fear to advance their political goals, in direct opposition to established law and the results of democratic elections. If that's not terrorism, how would you define it?
And I'm not even delving into the fundamentalist religious mindset and indoctrination that's so useful at brainwashing people into doing this sort of thing. As the famous quote by Stephen Wineberg goes, "With or without [religion] you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion." But it's different when it's White people. Christians. Americans. Right?
While you're there, check out this post on the recent arrest of the Black Muslims in NYC who were allegedly planning some terrorism. They had no weapons, no explosive, and most of their "plans" were admittedly fed to them by an FBI informant. Yet it made huge national news, especially in the Right Wing media. Meanwhile, as the post cites, there have been numerous far more serious plots and terrorism plans in just the last year, all formulated by White Christian males, all of whom had bombs, guns, bullets, and plenty of operational capacity.
