Picture Monday: Bad Garbage

Here's what I think about when I see something like this:

-Someone had to create the concept "a trash can shaped like a clown would be great."
-Someone else had to design it. They had to do the research into clown color schemes, materials, and functionality. It probably took a while. That person than created the design.
-At some point it had to be fabricated, picked up from the factory and delivered. Three more people at last.

All for a garbage can that scares me when it should produce joy. I wonder if anyone in that chain of people think about that.

I'm an Entropy Fan, Too

At around 5 p.m. last night, as George Carlin was drawing his last breath in Santa Monica, I was having a debate with a co-worker about the future of the human race. Her contention was technology will save us. My argument was we're pretty well doomed.

I blame George Carlin for that.

Without getting long winded, I've heard every word Carlin said over the air on HBO. I read his books, studied his CDs, saw him live and recited him in front of my grandmother about this time last year. "Back in Town" is the single finest stand up performance I've ever heard (I've said that for years). He was the only artist I know who was rewarded for being uncompromising. I mourn him.

The thing most people who knew Carlin and his seven dirty words (tee hee, dirty) was that he was a fatalist. He believed institutions wrecked us and made fun of them as they gave others comfort. Religion was a target, government and home was a target. One of my favorite quotes to define the man had to do with Harley Davidson once represented "burning schools, raping women and killing policemen, all necessary functions by the way." Yet he didn't hate the teachers in the schools, the women being raped or the men inside the uniforms getting shot. It was the way the world is.

As he said so many times, he was a fan of entropy, of how things ended, which is decidedly unfunny unless you adopt the guise of a pissy old man. But it was the creative young man that seemed to stick in people's minds, the man who challenged authority in a cool "un PC way" that so many people admired. The rebel. Carlin was not a rebel. Carlin was not the "soul voice of reason crying into the wilderness." He enjoyed the heat from the riot and was able to crack a good joke about it.

The end of "Back in Town" sums the man up. He believed in "The Big Electron" but ceded no idea into how anything worked. The planet, he said, is not in danger because it will shake us off like a bad case of fleas. But we're here. For a little while. Entropy dictates systems break down and we will break down but not now. It's not a life affirming "carpe diem" thing. Like everything he did, it was just the way the world is. We're here. Someday we won't be. And he's right.

From a comedy standpoint Carlin changed two things - He pioneered the idea of a special program for comics (along with a few others) in the format we now know as the "HBO Special" and he was an absolute master of momentum, rhythm and, of course, language. If you don't believe, check out his bit on football versus baseball, or the language section from "Back in Town" or his oft copied bit on airlines or basically anything he did since 1989. It takes amazing craft to package his ideas to a mass audience.

But I loved his inane human qualities. I loved his two albums right after his wife died, where he hated everything and spewed bile to a level that left some fans scratching their heads. I loved how he started his shows with something to knock you on your ass. I loved that he gave up on us. He looked around, he saw what was happening, and with all the hope gone, all he could do was laugh at how we still clung to what we thought was important. "Come on Dave, let's go look at the bodies!" Indeed.

If there's one aspect to his death that stings me right now, it's how we'll not have his voice as we go through our times anymore. With Bill Hicks, another comedian who has long since kicked it, I find myself thinking what he would say on certain subject - how he would perceive and tear apart. I have a feeling over the next few months I'll read a lot of things and wonder how GC would have felt. I'm doing that now, as he would have hated his own death. All the bullshit obits like this one. All the analysis from people who didn't know about him...like this one.

One last thought. GC was misquoted more than most. I remember reading a quote attributed to him that said "life isn't about how many breaths we take but about the moments that take our breath away." Don't believe that shit. Don't ever remember GC as someone who loved life or who wished you well with some sort of dime store sentiment. He looked at us and decided to go another direction, not out of hate but out of rationality. That was GC.

And I mourn him.

Picture Monday - Equally Yoked

Hey Cole, this harness sucks.

Yeah.

A question of motivation

Unlike most of my blog posts, I did some research for this one by typing "sexual abstinence programs" into Google and wading through the 13 pages of studies and articles saying abstinence only education DOES NOT WORK until I finally hit on a pro-abstinence only page. It's something called the "Silver Ring Thing" and wouldn't you know it, they had an image gallery from their events. And in that image gallery? The picture of a dude in a Michael Meyer's mask hacking up wood with a chainsaw you see above. No shit. Check it out yourself at http://www.silverringthing.com/.

One would be hard pressed to imagine a scenario in a "concert" promoting sexual abstinence to teenagers where a dude would reenact a butchering from an iconic horror film. This is the best I could come up with:

Youth Leader: OK kids, kids, settle down. Let's imagine this box...OK...this box...is your purity. (kids cheer) Then imagine you let SEX (kids boo)...no, come on kids, let me finish. Imagine you let SEX into your life.

-Man in Michael Meyer mask comes out and chainsaws the shit out of the wooden box-

Youth Leader (over the chainsaw roar): Girls, your hymen will be wrecked for life! Boys, your diddle will rot off from an STD. And even if it doesn't, imagine what GOD will do to you if you have SEX!!!

-kids break into Pentecostal glee, being slain in the spirit, speaking in tongues and praying for God's salvation to come into the gym.

That's the best I could come up with. Sadly, while I can come up with that far fetched scenario, I cannot come up with one that would cause parents to actively lie to their kids, their teachers and themselves to promote something that hurts their kids. Yet, that's exactly what's happening when abstinence only education is pushed by parents, and in some spots in our grand old country, it's pushed really hard.

I received this alert from a board I'm on recently:

"The National Abstinence Education Association, a Washington-based advocacy group, said that it sent e-mails last week to about 30,000 supporters, practitioners and parents to try to recruit participants and plans to e-mail 100,000 this week as part of the first phase of the $1 million campaign. The e-mail is promoting the Parents for Truth campaign, which the group hopes will eventually involve 1 million parents nationwide to lobby local schools to adopt sex education programs focusing on abstinence and to work to elect local, state and national officials who support the approach.

"There are powerful special interest groups who can far outspend what parents can in terms of promoting their agenda. But we recognize that parents more than make up for that by their determination and motivation to protect their own children," said Valerie Huber, the group ' s executive director."

Yes, powerful and evil special interest groups like scientists, those in the medical field and parents with one quantum of common sense. The story goes on:

The campaign comes as Congress is debating whether to authorize about $190 million in federal funding for such programs, which have come under increasing criticism because of a series of reports that concluded they are ineffective. Such criticism has prompted at least 17 states to refuse federal funding for such programs.

The group hopes to counter that trend, in part with a provocative video that asserts that comprehensive sex education encourages sexual activity by teenagers and a Web site that offers advice to parents about sex education.

The three-minute video depicts a mother of a 13-year-old girl becoming alarmed after learning details about sex ed curriculum being used in her school, including suggestions that teenagers can take showers together and give each other condoms.Proponents of comprehensive sex ed condemned the campaign as misleading, noting that the "Be Proud! Be Responsible!" curriculum cited in the video was developed to reduce the spread of the AIDS virus among African American males ages 13 to 19. Showering was cited as an example of a behavior that entailed a low risk of transmitting the virus.

Wow. Just wow.

First, do you believe for a second that, in this culture that values victimization, if parents learned their children are being told to shower together, the video wouldn't be on YouTube and legions of right wing loonies wouldn't be jumping up and down on every street corner in America, pointing at the video as proof their cause is valid. As it turns out, they had to find a video from a sex ed video IN AFRICA that talks, for the briefest of moments, about showering as a way to be intimate without spreading HIV, which kills one in every three goddamned people in that country.

But, when confronted by cold, hard, irrefutable fact that these programs do not work, you'll grab at anything you can. Even if it's a chainsaw.

Old Friends and Bad Transitions

Out of the blue, an old friend e-mailed me this week saying she would be coming through town. Always nice. We got together, ordered green tea lattes and got to chatting, having not seen each other in a year or two.

And an interesting thing happened - before we knew it we were spilling our guts about just about everything. She told me things she hadn't told her mother, lover or best friend yet. I told her things that had been stuck in my head for a long time that had yet to be articulated. We were never compatriots, more like really excellent and in sync acquaintances, but there we were, guts out, suffering the wind and cloudy weather and watching Highway 281.

We talked for about two hours about a multitude of subjects and the conversation came pretty easy. For me, that's nice because I don't have the easiest way with people anymore. I still have mad phone skills, but one on one I'm finding myself more awkward as I go on, which is odd. I'm starting to overthink when I should underthink and vice versa. It goes back a long ways and has culminated in some pretty embarrassing situations over the years, I'm afraid.

But it was a blast having the words come out and be witty and fun without worrying about what was next. It's a rare thing, but it's nice.

Since I'm rambling, ramble some more - One of my chief sins when it came to conversation early on in my adult life involved ranting. I'd take a subject and either beat a subject to death or take a subject and shoe horn it into another subject that I found interesting. What was fun was watching girls who thought I was witty grow into women who didn't find me interesting at all. The change was a harsh one if I remember right, and only after a few trips to the woodshed did I realize my style of conversation pegged me as either a well-meaning, over eager egotist or an egotistical idiot. Alcohol, I later found out, did not help the matter any.

Rejection of ones principal style of talking forces one to move into a professional line of speaking, not my forte. It's still not. But part of me is a good listener and I've found I can stumble through a conversation with most anyone by picking up on what interests them.

Today's conversation wasn't so much like that as two friends who spent a half hour reacquainting, and then spilling for another hour when we realized we probably didn't have a lot of time. It was fun to be carefree about talking for a minute before heading back to the land of too-slow tongues, dangling participles and mixed metaphors.

Picture Monday: In My Way

We're far enough away from the event that I can get away with this.

My child had a "preschool graduation" a couple months ago. It was awfully cute, but I felt like Clark Griswold by the end of it.

First off, you have this - the teacher (a wonderfully lady and dedicated educator) who decided the line of vision between me and my child was exactly where she needed to be for 90 percent of the event. Instead of the kid's face, I get the pink eclipse.

Secondly, the kid got a bleedin' nose (eh) during the middle of the ceremony and we had to run up there with tissues and it got all over her dress. It was a gusher. She left looking like the "last girl" in a horror movie but seemed really happy, bloody diploma and all.

Again, I love my child's teachers and am proud of my child's accomplishments, but it was one of those nights where afterwards you have a glass of wine and rub your head.

Skidoosh is funny, no matter who you are

This has been bugging me.

I frequent Shakespeare's Sister, a progressive feminist blog partially because I've met a fair number of the contributors to the site (thank you B-Fest) and second because it's a pretty awesome sight full of commentary I agree with, by and large. It's one of those places where you can build a community, even though the site has gotten a lot more caddy as of late, and I find myself taking it from the "everyday" list and putting it on the "whenever I get there" list.

I read something on the site that pissed me off a bit, but I can't explain why they're argument is wrong. Maybe that's what's pissing me off - I don't like what's said but can't reconcile it to fit my own beliefs. Here's the quandary:

Editor Melissa McEwan heaped some hate on "Kung-Fu" Panda:

"My second reaction is that this movie also appears to be one long fun-filled adventure in fat hating. Ha ha—the fat panda can't climb the stairs without getting winded. Ha ha—the fat panda is so inflexible and graceless. Ha ha—the fat panda is fat!"

I saw the flick on Friday and absolutely loved it, over the top loved it. From a film geek perspective, it kills because it's to marijuana to the Shaw Brothers Kung Fu flicks is to crack cocaine, in other words a beautiful child appropriate and wonderment filled flick that happens to kick unholy kung-fu ass in a number of ways. The kung-fu is great, if animated and the beats are all classic kung-fu. Hell, Jackie Chan voices the monkey. How much cooler can you get.

I'm also not a big fan of the argument that overweight people (myself included) are widely discriminated against. I agree that the media pushes unrealistic body types and I agree that everyone is pressured to look a certain way to an unhealthy degree and I agree that girls are victimized to a criminal degree by this society's version of beauty and we should all do what we can to fight body image issues wide and small.

But. The central argument among many folks (whom I like and respect) like Melissa and Kate Harding (who's a hell of a writer) is that this media image of beauty and the way it manifests itself constitutes discrimination along the lines of race or sex. We need to not only fight the media on body image issues, but make people aware of the discrimination that the overweight endure. I'm not shut off to this argument, but at this point in my own personal evolution, it seems a bit extreme to contrast weight with gender or ethnicity, even though the symptoms are almost the same. Like I said, my mind's not shut off to the idea, but I'm simply not there.

The diatribe against Kung-Fu Panda gets under my skin, though, because it's a very good natured kids movie and a hell of a lot of fun on just about every other level. It's easily Dreamworks best flick to date and I had an absolute blast at the flick. I'll write a review later, if I get around to it.

Yet, I don't necessarily disagree that the flick makes fun of fat people. Even though the morale is really enlightened (you can't change what you are, but you can shape how you are nurtured), and rooted in eastern mysticism, you cannot get around the fact that the fat jokes are a touch mean spirited. Yet, when watching it, it didn't register with me or the full theater guffawing at the humor and beauty of the film.

Like I said, I have a weak argument because I can't reconcile this issue other to say that the film worked from the first minute to the last and I wouldn't have given this issue another thought had it not been for the post on Shakespeares Sister. And, I would have brought it up there, but the forum community doesn't take kindly to those who disagree with them (or who support Obama, by and large).

If someone can reconcile this without going "what a dumb argument, enjoy the flick," I'd love to hear it.

I loved a movie full of fat jokes and don't feel bad about it. Does that make me a bad person?

I feel the same way about you...friend.

I've been meaning to post this second one for a couple weeks, but between battlings a flooded basement, dodging tornados, playing "Kung-Fu Panda" with the kid and on and on, I'm just now getting around to it.

This first video just hit but is so brilliant I wish I had thought of it:



This second one I found a while ago, and is almost as brilliant.

To The Rescue!

I was in the shower this afternoon after running, when I leaned my head back to put shampoo in my hair, and found motion pretty limited. Why? Near as I can figure, with the threat of death the past few nights due to the severe weather and having an emergency or two at work (now a work emergency, a "get me some help" emergency), I had created a big stress knot in the back of my neck which has yet to subside.

Seems worth it, since I've been kinda sorta heroic lately. Yesterday, before all the severe weather hit, a kid took a tumble on our grounds of the museum where I work as I was walking by. There was a lot of blood, so while someone comforted the kid when I ran back to the office full speed and grabbed the first aid kit, got disinfectants on the scrapes and band-aids on the boo boos. No bigee, but if I hadn't been around it could have been.

That night we went out for dinner and got trapped in the restaurant as the news people read off the current address of the approaching tornado. It missed us, but I had to run, grab the car in a rain that soaked in seconds (losing my glasses in the process), and do some stunt driving to avoid the impromptu lakes that had formed between me and my house. Again, not heroic but definitely exciting. I stayed up half the night watching reports and making sure we weren't going to blow away - guarding the gate, as it were.

Today, another storm hit just in time for Summer School where I work, and a couple of kids got trapped. No one had noticed, so it was over the newly formed lake in my car, up onto the grass and out into the rain to pile kids into my car and onto dryer locations. Again, soaked but useful. And, tonight, our basement flooded, and the wife and I moved fast enough to staunch the soaking our belongings were receiving. Moving furniture at high speed to get to the water shut off valve is better than caffeine.

Yup, that knot aint going anywhere, but it feels kind of good to be legitimately useful, especially when the difference you make is right in front of you.

I'm sick to freaking death of storms.

How Could You Forget?

I've had an "Indiana Jones" post mortem rolling around in my head for the past few days (now that we're a week or so out of the film's release) but I've decided, after a few more days of reflection, that something bigger is happening here.

You don't need to be a detractor to know that "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" was a "meh" at best. Most people are not disappointed they went, but didn't come out of the theater with a big grin on their face. The movie wasn't amazing but wasn't bad. It was meh.

What struck me was how incredible that is - an "Indiana Jones" movie was "meh." That's a pretty amazing thing, the single most iconic theater creation since death played chess with Max Von Sydow made a movie that most people had a passable likeness for. I read a good number of reviews who were heaping praise on the fact the movie didn't "ruin the franchise." Talk about setting the bar low.

The bigger issue here goes back a little ways, but has branched out something fierce. Over the past few years, there has been more anticipation for movies than arguably ever before - it's part of the remake culture to create anticipation. It's like anticipation (and the accompanying first week box office) is the currency in which movies trade, and when you do that, you start to lose respect for the audience. More importantly, you start to lose what made audiences love movies in the first place.

Quickly, there's an easy anti-argument to what I'm about to lay out, and that's "if a beloved movie came out today it wouldn't be so beloved." It's hard to argue that. You know fan boys would be screaming about how the "it's not a torture implement, it's a coat hanger" scene in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" is totally awful and why did he point the bazooka at the ark anyway? And that ending? FAKE! It's hard to argue that point.

But (and excuse me for getting a bit wistful), it feels like older movies were less focused on the BANG that we seem to need in the summertime, and more focused on story and character, things that not only endeared you to a movie but the type of thing that makes a franchise. Nobody went to see Indiana Jones because he survived a nuclear blast in a refrigerator, they went to see a very human guy push the limits of what a human guy can do.

And it's where Spielberg and Lucas lost me. From the moment he puts on the Fedora, IJ is bigger than life and impenetrable. He doesn't die hard, he simply cannot be shaken. We don't love the character because he's Superman, we love him because he's who we want to be. But, they gave us Indiana Jones as Superman. And John McClane as Superman. And countless others. They forgot, or maybe never understood, why most of us connected.

Look no further than Star Wars for proof of that. Everything that sparkled in the original trilogy by and large tanked in the new ones. The effects are weak, the acting is wooden, the fun, dead in favor of...what? If you have an answer, let me know.

The blockbuster is king of sick, it seems, or more accurately, the filmmakers who know how to make blockbusters aren't sure how to make them anymore.

God bless Jon Favreau.

Picture Monday - The Face

In honor of the yahoo who made up an alien peeping Tom and got the entire US media to fall for it, here's a picture of my hamper. Apparently Ben Grimm is crouching down near the light somewhere.

Actually, I thought this was kind of cool when I saw it.