Tag Archives: Popular Culture

Apple and the PC image

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I saw the actor who plays “PC” in the Mac versus PC commercials in a bit part on a television show. Odd, I thought, that he would be permitted a role outside of his corporate representative commitment.
Apple's popular PC and Mac mascots
Usually mascots like the Maytag repairman, the Dunkin’ Donuts and Frito-Lay guys, even Juan Valdes and Mr. Goodwrench, sign exclusive contracts to prevent them from diluting their brand identity with competing entertainment images. What distinguishes Apple’s PC guy is that he is a defamation of himself. The Mac strategy seems positively libelous.

It could be that since “PC” doesn’t represent an Apple product, whatever other screen time the actor got would matter little to Apple. But let’s not be so naive. More probably Apple has a say over which acting gigs PC can take. As long as PC portrays a feeble, emasculated frump like his Mac versus PC persona, Apple’s campaign is extended beyond its ads, right into the world of television. But is that playing fair? Can you create a straw man to represent your competitor, just to take the Mickey out of him at every opportunity, outside of the scripted ads, even in real life possibly. PC in real life could be painted to be quite the Wally if Apple if so desired.

The brilliance too of Apple’s singular circumstance is that “PC” represents no actual corporate rival. PC is not an IBM anymore, he’s part Windows, part Intel, and part PC clone maker. Microsoft would have to join Dell, HP, Gateway, eMachine, et al, to sue Apple for defamation.

Microsoft is trying some of Apple’s medicine pitting the Zune against the iPod, using representatives cleverly similar to the original actors, but my favorite adaptation of the me-better-than-you genre was Nintendo’s fun with Sony.

Hannibal, Somalia

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NMT- US war planes bombed Hollywood again yesterday in an attempt to kill feared criminal mastermind Hannibal Lector. Human Rights advocates point out that Lector’s guilt has never been established in a court of law. Though his heinous crimes are documented in three blockbuster movies, Lector’s culpability is considered alleged until he has received his day in court. Military strikes meant to assassinate persons suspected of crimes are considered by international legal authorities to be extra-judicial executions. Still others insist that Hannibal is a fictional character played by a Sir Anthony Hopkins who has nothing to do with al-Qaeda, crime or masterminding. Spokesmen for the Defense Department first denied the raids but now admit that Hopkins’ Hannibal was not hit but for the uncounted civilians now dead who were in the way.

Lee Greenwood’s bloody anthem

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Trouble bringing giant Old Glory downI heard the Lee Greenwood anthem today for the last God-damn time.
 
“And I’ll proudly stand up, next to you,
and defend her still today.
‘Cause there ain’t no doubt I love this land.
God bless the USA.”

I’ll put this out to everybody singing along, with a special mention to the war bloggers who have been littering cyberspace with falsehood and cannot own up to it upon being exposed, unnotably Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit, John Hinderaker at Powerline, Dan Curry at Reverse Spin, Bob Owens at Confederate Yankee, Rick Moran at Rightwing Nuthouse, Dan Reihl at ReihlWorldView, Charles at Little Green Footballs, Curt at Flopping Aces, and SeeDubya at Junkyard Blog.

So STAND the fuck UP you jingoist motherfuckers! Get your big dumb asses up NEXT TO our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan and defend this land against the civilians trying to living there. Go kill poor people there to defend our freedom here. Then you can sing this damn anthem. Otherwise shut up. Your bellicosity is distracting you from noticing that we are not singing with you. Scary thought probably, the rest of us are not as dumb-as-fuck ignorant as you.

Rose Bowl Impeach Bush Parade

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As you can see I’ve been reading and writing a lot. So I was on the pacifism tab. Got to the one about the parade in Manitou.
 
Empire rebellion banner in PasadenaOn New Years, somebody at the Tournament of Roses parade was across from the grandstand, where the cameras would be sure to catch it every time a float or band or whatever passed by, holding up a sign made of each letter on a separate square of cloth, I M P E A C H.
I pointed that out to my landlady, who had oohed and ahhed when the Air Force did a flyover with a couple of fighters and a stealth bomber, right after some insipid songfest about how good and nice everybody in America is, and we should all be so very proud of our goodness and nicene….aaaaaarrrrggggggghhhhhhh!

But for a half hour every float that passed by had the impeach sign flying prominently in the background.

Then the marching Storm Troopers, literally, it was a tribute to Star Wars, and the sign was nowhere in the shot. I noticed that they were keeping the shots kind of tight from there on, so I don’t know if the cops made them take down their banner or if the cameramen had specific orders not to show it ever again.

I mentioned this to my landlady and she said Good,! That’s just disrespectful to put politics into a parade where everybody is just out to have a little fun.

I told her that since we are being shut out by every media outlet there is over the peace marches, she said there is a Proper Time for everything, and some bullshit about working within the system….

And not a word of protest about the government sponsored anti-peace demonstrations.

The Borriello Brothers secret ingredient

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The best pizza in Colorado Springs is made by the Borriello Brothers at the foot of General Palmer’s statue, on Platte Avenue between Nevada and Webber, across from Palmer High School.

I followed some fans from a YMCA basketball game and was warned that addiction would ensue. I can report only that they were right, and I have no idea as to the secret ingredient. I think it’s cheese. I felt like a loser not knowing which delicacies to request for the toppings, but I followed the youngsters’ request for plain cheese pizza. Now there’s no turning back, it’s plain cheese for me, and from nobody but the Borriello Brothers.

Now if they could use only non-BGH dairy products and whole grain ground wheat, I could feel good about my new diet.

iPeople

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Imagine the tubes being bright whiteThe iMac, iTunes. These terms are self explanatory aren’t they? The “i” used to denote internet, but Apple somewhere appropriated it for all its signature accouterments: iDock, iChat, iMovie, iPhoto et al. And the iPod has ushered a cascade of third party after-market iProducts: iBlaster, iSpeaker, iToenailClipper, iEtc. Again, all with names quite descriptive of their purpose. Even with the esoteric spin-offs: iDog, iPup, iGuy, iLittlePony.
 
But what is an iPod?

So what of the iPod itself? What does the Pod in iPod mean? Pod of Orcas? Peas in a pod? When I think of Pods in terms of people, I think of Pod People, not unlike the Doctor’s Peppers. I don’t think Apple tries to avoid that suggestion of team spirit. There was a B-movie called Invasion of the Pod People, it was a drive-in knock-off of Invasions of the Body Snatchers. Both concepts featured human replicants grown in vegetable pods. But I think the more recognized example is now from The Matrix, where human beings are grown and kept inside pods their whole lives, tapped of their life energy by the life-less machine world.

Is that where Apple gets the term iPod? People plugged in to the soothing opiate of pop music, wired in, unable to give themselves a free moment to think, to experience their ears for their intended purpose, people undulating complacently, willing to subject themselves to the basest, most soilent, commercial effluent needed to sustain their pod self lives. The veal industry force feeds their calves a mixture of milk and blood because it’s cheaper for us and because the poor boxed animals can’t object, they are wired in.

Have a Holly Jolly Saturnalia

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Me Christian, which simply means that I admit that I am not perfect and therefore can’t get holier than thou and (especially) I am not allowed to punish and certainly not kill anybody else for not being perfect.

Christmas being on the exact date of the end of Saturnalia, in the Roman/slash/suddenly/slash/Christian calendar is not a coincidence, Constantine wanted to ease the transition from bloodthirsty pagan to bloodthirsty Christian amongst his friends and countrymen.

By all the text in the Bible about it, Jesus was born when the lambs were being born. That’s the only time of the year that the shepherd’s have their sheep out of the folds, in the field and “watch their flocks by night”.
Which is in March, or February.

Santa Claus wasn’t going to be invented, as the Ultimate American Corporate Marketing Tool, for another 1850 years more or less.

Jesus was anti-capitalist. Capitalism was the system of Rome, and as the Romans pointed out in the fall of their empire, depends on pillage just to sustain it. Jesus said not to lend money for interest. THE basis for capitalism.

Now we are down to imaginary money. Credit being based on a buying and selling of IOUs.

We are told that we must buy the latest and greatest toys, coincidentally released for sale in LIMITED quantities just before Saturnal… oops Christmas. We must do this so Junior and Sissie don’t lose their childish innocent faith in … Santa?
So we have ridiculous scenes like the people fighting over XBox toys while in the background a carol is playing “…peace on earth, and mercy mild”

And the modern kicker to it, the percentage of retail profits from Christmas shopping is in the double digits, relative to the rest of the year.

So we have a pseudo-patriotic guilt trip laid on us, to keep the pseudo-religious guilt trip company.

If we don’t go out and spend more of our borrowed non-money debt than we will ever be able to repay, it would cripple the American economy.

I can’t speak for Him, but I think Jesus is a little ticked off at this mess…

The real war on Christmas

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Baby Rudolf, Baby Bratz, no Baby Santa 
A rabbi in Seattle wanted to put a menorah in the municipal train station to accompany a display of Christmas trees. Was he thinking the trees were another faith’s religious symbols? Did he mean to ask to juxtapose a dreidel instead?

The train station administrators backed down and removed the trees altogether, a concession I’d argue they needn’t have made, but certainly one that fueled the Christian backlash. A now knee-jerk indignation about a supposed war on Christmas!

I’ve got news for the Christians, there is a war on Christmas, you’re fighting it, amongst yourselves. You fundamentalists are wanting Christmas to mean something religious again, but the materialists among you, by my count, every last one of you minus Jesus, already ceded the holiday to commerce long ago.

“Happy Holidays” is neither religious nor irreligious. “Merry Christmas” does not belie a believer or non-believer. The international holiday as demarcated by what’s believed to have been Jesus of Nazareth’s birthday and New Year’s (for non-Chinese), is called Christmas. It represents a huge surge in retail sales, for some merchants up to 90% of their yearly gross. Retailers of every denomination celebrate Christmas.

Put a menorah next to a manger if you must, but neither of them belong at the North Pole with Santa, Rudolf and Ol’ Tannenbaum. Joyeux Noel, Gud Yule, and Boldog Karácsony everyone!

Borders & Ignoble

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Retail citadelI found myself inside one of these boxes again, waiting for my wife to finish up some mall shopping I had tried to talk her out of. These 2 chains of supposed bookstores are like the Democrats and Republicans almost. Nobody can tell any real difference between the two of them.

Usually, I can pull up a chair, and browse their discount picture books for a bit, but this time they had the music (Christmas oriented for the season) cranked up double the usual volume, and it began to drive me a little crazy. It was really annoying, giving some, I guess, an incentive to buy quick and get out of there. I didn’t have that incentive though. These places aren’t really bookstores so much, and I have a hard time even finding anything much of interest to read inside, let alone for puchase.

What do I mean about Borders and its chain competition not really being bookstores? Well, I happened to come across what B & N describe themselves as being to explain some. Here it is…

“Our mission is to operate the best specialty retail business in America.”

This little pearl of thought sits upon all the computer screens as a screen saver, and also is meant to be personal inspiration for the mechanized robots, I meant customer assistants that work there. Nothing about books about these places really. It’s about specialty retail business.

Still, people who enter are most often confused. They do seem to believe that they are in a real bookstore. Actually, meany of the customers have nere seen an actual bookstore, or at least not close up between the shevles. Or even if they happened to stroll through the shelves of a real bookstore, have never really looked much to see what was on the shelves. So it’s kind of easy to see how so many get confused about thinking that they are inside an actual living breathing bookstore. But they aren’t!

They are inside a specialty retail business, that’s all. A good place to sit at a table with a laptop sipping coffee. A good place to buy some pop music crap for some demented teenager one might know. Or a place to pick up a calendar, or some blank sheets of paper for correspondence or a blank diary perhaps? Sure there are books there, but not so many real ones. Many are dedicated to computer programming, or things like Manja (6 shelves alone for that Japanese cartoon stuff and ‘role playing’).

There are categorized sections of everything, well almost. Theses stores are marked off like a MS windows filing system and give sort of a superficial encyclopedic appearance. But little old stupid me. The category that interest me most is Foreign Literature. But look around? I saw about 55 shelves titled Fiction and Literature, but strangely enough there’s hardly a book of foreign literature in this group! One would think upon browsing there, that only dimwitted American authors were alive today? Oh, and maybe a dimwitted Brit, or two.

Oh sure, maybe I should go over to the Science Fiction (20 shelves), Mystery (14 shelves), or Romance (10 shelves) sections. Nothing. Everybody is an America. Apparently they never write mysteries or SF in Italy or Spain, Brazil or Africa? If they do, certainly you can’t find it at an American specialty retail store, as opposed to a bookstore. Despite their supposed thoroughness, Borders and B & N apparently don’t carry certain stuff. Like foreign fiction. Go figure.

They also don’t carry current affairs (3 stacks) commentary much, unless it is Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, that sort of gag-us quality of thought. One does find 13 stacks of Christian babble, too. 6 stacks of Tarot/ New Age 1 1/2 stacks of ‘Eastern Religions”. I am an atheist myself, so I looked for that stack? If you really want to befuddle employees in these stores, go up to one and ask to be directed to atheist oriented non-fiction. It’s great fun!

Or better yet, tell them that you have found the 10 stacks of Romance novels, but that you are a man and would like to see some male oriented porn instead. In book form. They might direct you to a shelf entitled Erotica (in some stores less regionally influenced by Dobson’s minions)? But then, you will see only gay ‘erotica’ there. Tell the clerk that you are not gay and would rather see their collection of porn books for heterosexual men. “Sorry, Sir, we only have magazines in that genre.” My reply is always, “What? The adult entertainment business is a multi-trillion dollar one, and yet your retail establishment carries not a porn book at all, outside of the gay ones!” And in Colorado Springs, not even much of that. Moo.

So, as an atheist heterosexual porn seeker who loves foreign lit, I am kind of out of luck at these specialty retail establishments. If I was a gay person, ‘spiritually inclined’, and didn’t know that a word was ever written outside US national boundaries, I might be in better shape, it seems. Or, if I could just get more interested in reading romance novels or military history, which is where the multiple stacks are. Yes, these stores don’t really seem to know that history has been passed through, unless it circled on a planet other than USA and has been interpretted by a Republican minded citizen. Not true, you can find some Democrats, too. Like Michael Moore, perhaps? But you’ll be much better off if you like books with names like ‘Semper Fi’, etc.

All in all, these retail establishments are more Americana than a retro Fifties Diner would be. But they are not quite being bookstores by doing that. In short, your prospective reading material is being grossly censored, and that’s why so few are purchasing from the shelves, and more just seem to be sipping their Lattes and Mochas, or talking on their cell phones while inside. Borders and Ignoble seems more like a telephone booth at times, than an actual bookstore.

At this point, one might object to my comments. “‘Erotica’ should be censored by B & N. Go to an ‘adult store’ if you want such filth!” But they don’t carry books there, I will moan. “And as an atheist, go to Hell and get some books by atheists.” Or to the philosophy stacks, as I have been directed by employees. As if all philosophers were automatically atheists, lol. Sorry, I’ll just order my atheist books from the Sceptical Inquirer magazine folk, thank you. And for a good porn book, I’ll just have to write my own, it seems. Though it’ll never get published, let alone make it to the B & N.

And if I might want to know how the French care about life, I will just have to confine myself to Agatha Christie, it seems. That is after I get through with the latest from Ann Coulter I purchased at the specialty retail store. She tells it like it is about the French. And she is informative about the Arab mind, too.

Nobody reads anymore, no publishers publish anymore, and no specialty retail establishments even stock what little is still around. The last time I have seen much of interest in a bookstore/ specialty retainl establishment was in a University of Texas dorm building. They had a little used bookstore that had some used books of African writers that had been published by the African Studies Dept of the UT.

Americans once wrote great literature back before the ’50s. Unfortunately, all those works are out of print and unavailable mainly. The lit was too red, it seems. Efforts to get them reprinted have flopped miserably. We have become a specialty retail people, and not a literate one. Oops, my wife is back from the mall. Got to end my rant. Bless her heart, she bought nothing at all. Or, maybe she did and is just hiding it away from Scrooge?

Princess Diana and the end of civility

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Princess Diana on Dodi Fayed's yacht a week before her deathThe Queen is the first film to be made about the woman who has presided over England for half a century. The story deals with the days following Princess Di’s fatal crash in 1997 and the personal challenge her death might have posed for the monarchy’s public relations. The same period saw Prime Minister Tony Blair’s ascendancy to power. The story gives Blair credit, where the queen appeared to faulter, for recognizing Diana as being the “People’s Princess.” And then some.

Asked about his fawning depiction of Tony Blair as man of the hour, director Stephen Frears thought it “a mark of my incredible maturity” to cast Blair in the light of his glory days, this at a time when Blair and his government have fallen irrecoverably, adding that “it’s preposterous that he’s not in jail.” In the interview Frears also makes light of whether Queen Elizabeth II is possibly really as bright as her character portrayed by Hellen Mirren. The Queen celebrates the resolve of royal blood facing a crisis. Elizabeth is both humanized and lionized, by sticking to the stiff upper lip “the world expects of us.” Frears interweaves real news footage of celebrities and the flowers flooding the Buckingham Palace gates, counting the days from Lady Di’s death to the climax when the queen finally makes her long delayed statement.

That’s when Frears lies. He lays the behind the scenes personal anguish which might have explained the dishonor the royals paid to Diana, leading to the Queen’s famous address, but then rewrites the ending. As if Mighty Casey, his vainglorious ambitions thwarted in the minor leagues, stays true to his character that day in Mudville, and now because we can all feel a little sympathy for the self-centered fella, he swings and DOES NOT strike out!!

We all were there when Queen Elizabeth took to the microphone, and no close-ups of a fictional Tony Blair’s tearing eyes, proud of his stalwart sovereign, are going to recast the disgraceful blue-blooded reaction for what it was.

And what of lingering accusations of the royal family being behind Diana’s death? What of the rape tape which Diana posited with a servant for safe-keeping which tells, it’s conjectured because the British press are forbidden to tell us, of Prince Charles interrupted sodomizing a valet. What of Lady Diana being, not even arguably, by the power of her personality, the most powerful woman in the world? But unlike Oprah or Martha Stewart, Diana was a loose cannon championing the cause of AIDs in Africa, and the fight to ban land mines, both subjects the powers that be, certainly in America, did/do not want highlighted.

The Queen‘s smartest character, Tony Blair’s advisor who supposedly coins the term People’s Princess is let to murmur early on, “It wasn’t the press that killed her.” But the subject is dropped there. Instead Blair and his crew seize upon Diana’s death like Mayor Giuliani to 9/11, being seen offering bedside comfort to a traumatized populace, and reaping the accolades. Except director Frears offers nothing behind such scenes. Blair is shown as the earnest surrogate, standing in for his monarch until she can regrasp the helm.

With the ensuing years having shown us Blair’s true colors, what do you think was the more likely scenario? A self-effacing Danny Kaye Pauper Prince or a Rudy Giuliani? I find Frears’ characterization of Blair even more disingenuous, showing Tony living in a modest flat strewn with children’s messes, taking the dinner plates to do the “washing up,” and keeping watch on world events on a television with a Nintendo game atop it. This coming from a “labor” minister who was leading the conservative counter-revolution to restructure the British economy for the elites. Perhaps Frears’ adopted class.

The Queen owes its entire first act to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911, the music, the build, the black out of the familiar awful moment, and the protracted montage we needed to absorb the tragedy and understand how it’s changed us.

The great disservice that Stephen Frears does to history, and to all of us because we are still living it, is amplified by the fact that he did get Diana’s death right. Princess Di’s sudden death did change the world, perhaps more than did 9/11. The World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 was a comeuppance. If the American people did not see it coming, the world did. That such a terrorist act was bound to happen was attested to the fact that the same people had already tried it and at the very same location.

But Diana’s death marked the end of civility, and people felt it. The third world may have been fit to burst under the weight of its post-colonial oppressors, but a great English civility had prevailed since the days of Ghandi. This was a sense that disagreement could be visceral, but apart from the brutality of the unwashed French or the uncouth Americans, a British sense of decency would rule out. Britain, not long ago the Empire, was where we got the rule of law, our rights, and everyone’s concept of a representational parliament.

The circumstances around Diana’s death would present an incredibly interesting lesson in power usurped from the people; Tony Blair’s arrangement with Rupert Murdoch for starters, instead of showing Blair reacting to the newspapers and coaxing his old queen along. The Queen is a marvelous story of two people facing adversity introspectively. Fine, except those personages were at the center of the unification of global corporate power and could not have been idle participants. As if Frears had made a film about the Titanic and chose to focus on the captain’s preoccupation with feng shui.

The 1990s saw a decline in every aspect of benevolent leadership, and I believe the premature death of Lady Diana was the curtain. It was hard those days after her death to imagine a world without her, and indeed events have proved that we were to face the worst. The turn of the century marked the ascendency of the Neocons, the political face of the globalization overlords. It meant corporate overseers with gloves off, Zionist zealotry unabashed, banks with no limits on their usury, and the world media watchdogs in the hands of the wolves.

The ruling few have their hands bloody in genocides the world over, endless wars, massacres, slavery, epidemics, poverty, famine and reckless abandonment. Before Diana’s death at least I believe they would have been concerned to wash the blood off.

Mel Gibson’s Mickey Mouse Maya porn flick, “Apocoridiculo”

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As if the US bigwig’s Iraq discussions are not pornographic and absurd enough for us all, along comes Mel Gibson’s new porn flick into theaters everywhere. Sasha Borat Cohen fucked Kazakhstan and world Muslims over royal, so that left Mel only with Native Americans to purvey.

I have seen the many US movie reviews that mainly treat Mel with religious adoration, and some have called it a Maya ‘Mad Max’ flick. But from the trailers, it appears to me to be more a pretend-Maya, Silence of the Lambs Chucky horror gorefest. Don’t expect historical and cultural authenticity here. It’s more a drunk Mel with the cops routine again.

“Officer, are you Mayan?”

Best review I came across was titled… Is “Apocalypto” Pornography? My vote is YES! Another Gonzo flick for porno nation, USA.

And what next from Walt Disney Studios? Mickey pumps Minnie you know where? Should be out soon I think.

Female paralysis e-mail warning

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Please take a minute to read this.
This is very scary and COULD HAPPEN TO ANY OF US.

A few days ago a woman received an e-mail. Like many of the e-mails she had opened before, it contained important information about a woman much like herself who fell victim to yet another violent crime.

This woman read the e-mail twice, carefully taking it all in. She thought of the many times she too might have fallen prey had she been at the wrong place at the wrong time. She heeded the warning. She inhaled the life saving advice making sure to store it in the reptilian part of her brain where she could find it quickly if she ever needed it.

The woman then forwarded the e-mail on to her friends. There was nothing else she could do. After all she was helpless. Only a woman. Now incapacitated.

She couldn’t stand up to protest against war that condoned killing. She couldn’t speak out against organizations that blamed women for men’s actions. She couldn’t even lift a finger to turn off the TV when she realized her son was watching the very things she feared – for entertainment purposes.

She had fallen victim to her own paralysis.

But this doesn’t have to happen to you.

Do something about it while you still can. Stand up against systems that tolerate hatred. Rise up against violence and prejudices. Raise kids to be peacemakers. Take back your bodies. Demand the right to walk freely, unharmed instead of being a prisoner in your own world.

Send this to any woman you know that may need to be reminded that the world could be a different place if we just didn’t accept things the way they are.

The new prurience in men’s magazines

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The new non nude nudie mags 
FHM, STUFF, MAXIM, RAZOR, et al.
Porn is back at the 7-11. It’s the resurgence of clean porn to counter the free-for-all no-holes-barred internet, just like Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Magazine put glossy clean brakes on the sexual revolution.

The old gloss coat nudies 
Hef put a gloss coat on the age-old girly magazine and put it unto the coffee table, Guccione dirtied it up with Penthouse and put it back under the mattress and Flynt left no fig leaf unturned with Hustler and put pornography right back in the garage. But after the ugly fin de siecle the puritans are back.

Now we have the nouveau prurient clothed seductresses. Here little flesh is revealed that is not already displayed on every popular magazine cover. Naked media stars, but covered. That’s another story, nudity in fashion magazine magazines.

Today’s men’s magazine’s entice but don’t deliver, they tease, and apparently that’s enough. In the porn heydays of the seventies, the magazines were owned by independent publishers. You could say “I read Playboy for the articles” and it’d be true. Many anti-establishment stories could only see daylight through the independent press. But the magazines today belong to the publishing empires which belong to the advertizing empires which belong to the consumer goods empire. You can’t use sex to sell anything if the boys are getting the sex. Visually at least.

The curious aspect of the today’s bathroom reading for boys is the lack of sexual depth. It’s all surface. It’s curves and titilation without a sense of anything lying beneath, inside, beyond. It’s beads of water, not sweat.

Surface and complexion is all that matters. Breast implants don’t matter because they’ll be under wrap. You’re not going to keep them, you’re not even going to undress them. Knock them against the bathroom door at the nightclub, disrobe them in the darkness at her place, you’ll be gone before it’s light. Only the visual coutour matters.

To whom? The virgin spectator.

First person shooter, nine years old

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A nine year old kid recorded yelling at his mom, while shooting.
Are we breeding our little indiscriminate killers?
 
What you’ll see is a taped gaming session from the perspective of another player, who can overhear the audio of the kid’s microphone and who follows him to eavesdrop as he berates his mother, refuses to turn off the game, and demands chocolate milk not Mountain Dew.
 
It’s eight o’clock, do you know who your children are shooting?

Cell phone dis-servitude

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Dont mind Jeeves right now
Where is the button on my cell phone to tell it
it doesn’t control me?
 
I remember the early adapters who got pagers and quickly learned that they had cut off their escape. At work their bosses could find them whenever they wanted. Leaving your pager at your desk was not an option. Being given a pager was a badge signifying importance that quickly became a shackle of servitude.

A cellphone is supposed to be more than a pager, a means to reach everybody else. It makes me feel like a television with the remote being bandied about who knows where. And too often it’s the remote itself calling in.

I appreciate the many features of my modern cell phone, it is indeed the most unimaginably versatile little gadget I have ever had. But I need it to do more. My phone can take pictures, record memos, and wake me up, along with every conceivable permutation of telephony, except excuse itself. It’s like a randy butler and I have to excuse it. In public, I have to make sure it will not ring inappropriately. In private I have to bear its interruptions when a better class of valet would know when to withdraw.

How should I know ahead of time when I would prefer not to be reminded of missed calls, or awaiting messages, or a waning battery? Certainly these are important matters, but in the quiet of my affairs I don’t need a needy pip-squeak chiming with regular monotony every two minutes.

Maybe the answer is in the manual. Believe me, the last thing I want is to have to learn how to better understand my new high maintenance [uninvited] best bud.

I have a weed problem

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Unsavory charactersI don’t watch the Sopranos so I don’t know whether this kind of thing happens everyday on television. Authority figure / love interest / recurring character / moral compass on the TV show Weeds gets driven summarily into a garage and killed.
 
Sitting in his car outside a drug deal gone awry, he is asked by a girl to roll down his window. She releases the locks and two goons slip in beside him from both sides and turn the car into an awaiting garage. The garage door lowers to the soundtrack “time to die.” Did I mention he was a cop?

The other thing the cop character representated was the show’s least morally compromised character. He was a narc who lapsed in a self-interested act, to protect his lady friend pot dealer, with the hope that she then get out of the business. When she does not, and in fact ramps up her activities to become a grower, he rebels at her decision, ultimately forcing estrangement. Then she betrays him and it gets ugly.

And what happened when loverboy died? Our Miss Dealer, in the midst of a multiple gunpoint drug deal standoff, interrupts to wander, to wax, glassy eyed and aimlessly about the kitchen, repeating “he’s dead?”

That scene captured two incongruous aspects of the show: the heroine’s empathetic innocence, walking around in bemused bewilderment at what happens to her, and two, the comic non-violence (dead copper aside) of the suburban drug world.

To its credit, Weeds teaches nothing of the real world of pot growing, distribution, addiction or law enforcement. In the same way that it is too idyllic, it is also thankfully uninstructional. Pickups are mere social calls, a grow house is tended as neighbors coming in to feed the fish while you’re away. There is no question of unreliability that in real life always marks a Keystone Cops constabulary of pot heads. Dealing is never shown. Our heroine is a “natural” at dealing, we’re told, but we never see what that would be actually. Sort of like we never saw interior design practiced in Designing Women.

We see pot fetishism, even an implied popular support for pot smoking by a suburban majority, and addiction is never shown. Unless you count our heroine’s addiction to the business of easy money and notoriety. The series started with a sudden widow facing an insurmountable suburban house payment, who is dropped into pot dealing as a last resort.

I’ve wanted to address the problem of Weeds. Everyone’s quirky. Because we become familiar with them, we do become empathetic. You could say they are all flawed but real human beings. I’ll assert they are not even. All the characters are opportunists and hedonists and worse than a non moral tale. They tell an immoral tale.

Youth revisited

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(Author’s note: this entry has been revised due to the offense taken at its initial publication. It was not intended to make fun of anyone in particular. This article is about the strange cultural pressure for women to look unnaturally young. Woman have always sought to look youthful, but modern medicine now allows them to try for bloomin’ youth, except of course around the edges. We need to dissuade women from this folly because plastic surgery has yet to sculpt a feature that can age with you.)
 
Tissue wrapped in a corn fieldNicole Richie. What is she selling with this dress? I’m asking because I just attended a society function and this look was everywhere. I don’t mean the unwrap- me-my-body-is-a-gift-to-you look. More the faded- beauty-but-I-feel-fresh-as-a-pop-tart- popped-tart look. What is that?
 
I can imagine these women think that they have to compete with teen porn on the internet. So how’re they doing?

Do they resemble anything in nature? Nicole’s not the gaudiest example, but she’s already flirting with recreating something she is not: in this picture, ripe corn. With her hairline and sallow eye sockets, indian corn would be more like it, and the dress would be the loosely affixed branches and twigs which frame it on your door. A welcoming semblance of bounty, pretty but plainly inedible.

Can any amount of skin cream, Botox and muscle sculpting refashion a woman to her teenage bloom? Surely their mirrors do not deceive them. Do they think that an ersatz bloom-of-youth is anything but monstrous, especially in the spookiness of twilight?

I shouldn’t begrudge Nicole the half-peeled banana look. She’s put a great deal into her physical appearance and she can maximize its exposure. I ran into the same phenomenon at the society fundraiser. A woman there, who it’s said is quite self-effacing about what she’s spent on her boobs, wore a dress which half revealed them. I don’t know if she meant to upstage herself with her breasts, but that was the effect. Very nice to look at certainly, but quite an effort to talk to her.

Perhaps these youth costumes are not intended for men anyway. The creams and oils and aromas and salts may be all about a virtual reality more sensual than a man’s imaginary visual-based surreality. If a woman can wear something that makes her feel like a spring chicken’s bare bottom delivered on a silver platter, who am I to complain? Outside of the privacy of their baths however, I wonder if both men and women are rather more interested in people who inhabit their age.

Revision 11/25
Why do I hold so tenaciously to this argument? Because when I beheld those many augmented women, I could not image what it was like for their husbands. I defy anyone to tell me, as years pass, they look at their spouse and say “my goodness she’s getting old!” She’s the only one thinking that and God Dammit where is that coming from?

A mate can exercise and recover his or her health, to perhaps some notice, but otherwise our eyes grow only fond and familiar. On the other hand, the person you love coming home from a clinic in bandages, to be unveiled as looking like a strange somebody else, could only be shocking, as welcome as a disfiguring accident I think, sad.

No matter how much a surgeon is an artiste, facial reconstruction is at best face-saving. It is no match for what nature gave us, and as we wither, it takes away. We may not all start as beautiful, but of all the physical traits that define beauty, two come with age: kindliness and grace. If you weren’t born with those you can get them.

Best cookie ever

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All your bases are belong to usWhen Consumer Reports Magazine set out to rate commercial chocolate chip cookies against each other, they needed a benchmark. To that end they hired professional bakers to optimize a chocolate chip cookie recipe. Because the cookie itself was a cultural convention, it was perhaps no surprise that reverse engineering backed them into the conventional Tollhouse Cookie recipe. But with a couple twists.

First, the use of dark brown sugar as opposed to regular, second, the addition of vanilla extract, third, unsalted sweet butter, and fourth, particular care in mixing the ingredients.

It wasn’t as simple as throwing everything into the bowl. Each addition would be mixed at slow speed for a specified time with a high speed burst at the end. Texture seemed to make the critical distinction. If you’re going to start now, you’ll have to wait until the butter is room temperature.

What follows is the CONSUMER REPORTS recipe, first published in 1982.

We wanted a cookie with a chewy interior, crunchy edges, well-blended flavor, and a high overall chocolate impact . –Consumer Reports Magazine

2-1/4 Cups Flour
1 level Teaspoon Baking Soda
1 level Teaspoon Salt
3/4 Cup White Sugar
3/4 Cup Packed Dark Brown Sugar
2 sticks (1/2 pound) Sweet Butter, room temperature
1 teaspoon Vanilla Extract
2 Large Eggs
12-ounce Semisweet Chocolate Chips

Preheat oven to 375F.

Mix the flour, baking soda and salt in a bowl and set aside.

Use a stand-type electric mixer to mix the two sugars briefly at low speed.

Add the butter in small gobbets, mixing first at low speed and then at high. Beat the mixture until it’s pale, light, and very fluffy. Add the vanilla at the mixer’s lowest speed, then beat at high speed for a few seconds.

Add the eggs, again at the lowest speed, switching to high speed for the final second or so. The eggs should be well beaten in, and the mix should look creamed, not curdled.

Add the flour mixture, a half cup at a time, mixing at low speed for about one minute, then at high speed for a few seconds.

Scrape down the bowl’s sides with a spatula, add the chocolate chips, and mix at low speed for about 10 seconds. If need be, scrape the bowl’s sides again and mix for a few more seconds.

Put tablespoons of the mix on an ungreased cookie sheet.

Bake until the cookies are pale golden brown (nine minutes in an electric oven, 10 to 11 minutes in a gas one).

Remove and let cool on a rack.

Makes about 30 medium cookies.

A sea salt taste test

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I bought some sea salt the other day. Dead Sea Salt no less. I’d heard a commentary extolling the delicacy that is yuppie salt. Who knew you could spend more on salt?
 
Sea salt costs quit a deal more than ordinary umbrella-girl salt. But consumers spend almost nothing for salt to begin with, probably why working the salt mines is not considered a great job. So the price of gentrified salt is half of a passible bottle of olive oil. Anyway I got the sea salt on sale and I was determined to hold a taste test.

I heard there was a texture difference apparently, and I could see that was going to be true. Sea salt was like so many little crystals compared to refined white sand of table salt. But a taste difference? Malarkey. Salt and pepper is like hot and cold or sweet and sour, absolutes. When something tastes salty it doesn’t taste sea-salty, it’s salty or too salty.

As near as I could recall, mother’s home-ec theory taught that salt was what we added to enhance the taste of a meal. We didn’t taste the salt, we tasted the enhanced food flavor, or we had used too much salt.

But that principle never rang true to me actually. It was like having us kids believe that there was more nutrition in the crust of the bread as opposed to the center. My sisters helped mom bake and noticed that the outer edge of the bread was of the same lump of dough. They called her on it when she insisted they eat the crust. Mom’s salt edict seemed more dictum, this time anti-sodium.

What are we TALKING about, pretending that salt’s a secondary enhancement of flavor?! When we put salt on popcorn, we do it to taste the salt! When we put salt on corn, cornflakes, cabbage or cantaloupe, (I don’t put salt on any of those, I mean when you do) we don’t do it to enhance their flavor, we do it to enhance our eating enjoyment because we enjoy salt.

So let me tell you, when I sprinkled sea salt over steamed spinach like so many croutons, and took a bite, I knew I would never go back. Olive oil and sea salt is all you need to eat anything. I’ll keep table salt to cook the noodles, but I won’t eat it. To eat table salt now, to me it tastes like iodine. Or like drawing a thread up your throat. Or like the second day of an oxygen tube blowing into your nose. Unbearably piercing. Common table salt tastes like poison, and I’m glad to hear people are catching on. No Hellman’s? Forget the sandwich. Or was that Miracle Whip? No matter, imposters all. No sea salt, postpone the meal.

Let the dead bury their dead

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I know it’s Monday and I should be toiling away at my job, thinking about bringing home a large rasher of bacon, double-checking the kids’ Halloween costumes, deciding what to do about the brand new fake fingernails I bit off in a weekend fit of pique.

For some reason I am perseverating on the subject of death, especially the death of a child. I watched an interesting film last year about how Americans handle the dead bodies of their loved ones. I, of course, had never questioned how we do things until I saw this film and realized that we are one of the only cultures that whisks away our corpses, tags ’em, drains ’em, pumps ’em full of some other liquid, gives ’em a bad hairdo, an even worse makeup job, dresses them in their least favorite outfit, sticks them in an incredibly expensive and garish casket and dumps ’em in the ground really really quickly. In short, we turn our dead over to complete strangers, nearly instantaneously, and by the time we lay them to rest, still firmly in the denial phase, they bear no resemblance to the one we’ve known and loved. We give ourselves no real opportunity to grieve, to come to terms, to “give up” the body and take hold of the spirit.

Other cultures allow the deceased to take up residence in the living room. Propped up, perhaps, in their favorite chair, dressed in their normal clothes. Friends, colleagues, family are able to hang around, to view the body, to hold the hand, stroke the hair, feel the pain and the loss. I understand that after a few days, as the cheeks and eyes have become sunken and there is no sense of life whatsoever, those of us left behind are able to make peace with the fact that this body IS NOT our little boy or girl or father or mother or sister or brother. This is, in fact, a shell. An earthly vessel. We have time to grieve the loss, to let go of the body and embrace the spirit.

Of course, the funeral business, just like the wedding business or any of the other “ritual” businesses that are so ingrained in American culture, doesn’t want us to consider anything besides the norm. Five thousand dollar caskets are expected because, after all, we loved Uncle Joe and want only the best for him. What a fucking scam.

Note to anyone who knows and loves me……When I die, please choose a very simple pine casket, perhaps lightly distressed just for effect, dress me in my flannel pajamas, put my hair in pigtails. Give people a few days to come by to look at me, hold my hand, tell me how they’ve loved me, how they’ve hated me, whatever they’d like to say.

When everyone has had enough time to comprehend that the body is not me, that I’m waltzing with Jesus, or dirty dancing with Satan, or whatever people do in the afterlife, dump me in a hole that you’ve all dug together in the back yard. That would make me happy.

Johnny Got His Gun

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by Dalton TrumboJohnny Got His Gun is probably the most horrifying antiwar book ever written. And it is more pertinent today than even when it was written.
 
Still, any American English literature teacher at any US university might risk his/ her position for having it on her/his list of required reads. Here are excerpts from the book Johnny Got His Gun.

Halloween and What Would Doctor Dobson Do?

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I have just been visiting over at the Focus on Family website and am relieved to find that Dr. Dobson approves on allowing children to go Trick or Treating in the neighborhood. As long as they don’t go as black cats, witches, devils, or Satan himself. Nothing occult, he says. And certainly don’t allow your little ones to go in drag.
 
This is a relief to me, since too many of our kids have been finding themselves shuffled off to shopping malls and churches, on what used to be the best kid Holiday of them all. Just finding a neighborhood with Trick or Treating kids on the prowl has become increasingly more difficult for parents with kids. So thank you, Dr. Dobson, for taking this particularly controversial stand. Next we know, you’ll be encouraging parents to play penny ante poker with their kids, and teaching them to dance with the other sex without a Bible in hand. Praise the Lord!

My Fellow Tribesmen

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KILL BUSH? Worry about Karl Rove? Fix Afghanistan? Remove the homeless from public libraries? Wow, you guys have a lot of mental energy! I am starting to feel like maybe I’m not part of the tribe. I’ll agree that the world has a few issues, but nothing like the nightmare occurring at Chez Walden right now.
 
arch.jpgMy resident bachelor and I decided recently to spice up our lives by adding some color to the house. We planned to paint three archways in the living and dining rooms in bold colors. After much cajoling by him (I tend to like beiges and grays) and many hours spent at Sherwin-Williams, we settled on Martha Stewart’s Old Copper Kettle (kind of a turquoisey thing) and Russet Rose. [A little background info….ever since I explained to the bachelor the ins and outs of “insider trading” and how rich people do it all the time and how retarded it is that it’s illegal, he’s been slightly obsessed with Martha. He understands the steep price she’s paid to appease the common man and is grateful for her selflessness.]

So, we got our supplies and taped everything off and yesterday was paint day. Here’s where it starts to get ugly. I was happily painting away, picturing myself in Morocco riding a big sexy camel, when not one but two of my children, at separate times, came up to say, “Cool, Mom. Looks like La Casita.” Eeeeeek! Not at all the look I’m going for! Talk about pinking shears through the heart!

So during my day today, instead of traveling to Washington to kill Dubya as I’d planned, I’ve had to call in my faux finish people, wait for them to arrive and fix the mess that I’ve created. I’m sorry that I’m letting everyone down. I promise, if George W. shows up at my door I’ll give him a good slap, I’ll pull his hair. If I’m feeling really plucky, I’ll give him an Indian burn. But right now I have to call and cancel the rainbow awning. Mea culpa.