Category: Personal

Even the FCC has taken notice of the South Park Shit episode, in which the bad boys of animation go postal on the commission’s decision over when curse words are acceptable on TV, but this is only brought to light when rich ditz Nicole Richie lets her potty mouth flow on the recent Billboard Music Awards broadcast. “Have you ever tried to get cow [expletive] out of a Prada purse?” Richie said. “It’s not so [expletive] simple.” But apparently Fox wasn’t fast (or concerned) enough to bleep out all the expletives when it was shown live to the East Coast audience. I have to admit to a certain level of distate for such language on television even though I’m quick enough to use the same vocabulary in conversation.

Twisting turning turvsy slipping

Action heroes carry tiny babies

Black curly hair flops over an arm

Wonderful tears dripping down her

Cheek while both mothers argue over

Who will cook the corn and coo at the child

Though mortars explode about 25 feet away.

On the other side of the screen naked

Tree branches sway back from the explosive

Force and a dozen black birds jump into the sky,

Startled by the off-center noise. The babies raised

Their heads up as one and gave the crows an evil eye.

No one says a word as a skinny woman with a

Black rifle creeps into the scene, pulling her arm

Then her a leg, the other arm, then the mothers

Gasped as they realized the gun was melted

On the arm and not held in it, slathered in thick

Red blood. No number of kisses under the mistletoe

Will erase the vision of that particular sugarplum.

“Fly me to the moon

Let me sing among those stars

Let me see what Spring is like

On Jupiter and Mars”

Don’t twist don’t shout don’t turn away

Keep your head inside a camo-covered

Helmet and listen for more than Dragonflies

If you want to cash your next paycheck at home

More than you want to see the tears stream down

Your wife’s cheeks, looking on from above. How many

kisses will it take to erase that sugarplum vision?

Watch where the deeper curves want to

Take the free radicals after listening to a holiday

Guest pass out spiritual gifts. The headaches will

Start when the whistle blows, when the babies scream

No matter what the soldiers do and even though

Resistance tends to bar amazement, even tears cannot

Tear apart the soft electric underbelly that seethes

Under the stag staged confetti grace.

I should have something more interesting to say but staring into the Great Black Abyss last night put me off my game.

Operating System Sucks-Rules-O-Meter

Wow!

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Will Seattle go Humpty Dumpty?

One of the later World War II movies, I suppose, Captain Newman, M.D. was made in 1963 and reflects then-current sensibilities. Gregory Peck (who died earlier this year) plays a psychiatrist towards the end of the war, running a mental ward on an Arizona Air Corps hospital base where soldiers are shipped for up to six weeks of diagnosis and treatment before being sent back to action, discharged or sent for longer term care. His base commander, played by Barney Miller’s James Gregory, barely acknowledges the head shrinker as a fellow physician and his finagler/orderly Tony Curtis believes he can pick up the necessary skills by reading Freud and a few other books.

This film, essentially a series of sketches, sadly marked the beginning of the end for Peck as an actor, or so it seems to me from a perusal of his IMDB page. He was coming off a string of great movies–he won the Oscar for Best Actor for his Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, the film he made just prior to Newman–but afterwards came mosty dreck. And Peck did no one any favors this outing by playing the M.D. with his laconic, nearly invisible emotional style.

Most of the roles are fairly cardboard, the writers seemingly attempting to show that war has more horrors than just death and splintered limbs by putting a variety of neuroses on display; when that wasn’t enough to fill their film budget, a squad of Italian POWs were tossed in for a bit more comic relief. Eddie Albert is a respected mission planner who can’t accept that he’s sent many young men off to their deaths. Robert Duvall is a WASPy husband ashamed into muteness by his fear. Angie Dickinson is the (gorgeous) young nurse who’s behind the great doctor, in contrast to Jane Withers (just saw her on an episode of M*A*S*H too) portraying the ‘plain’, put-upon nurse. We even get Larry Storch, Dick Sargent and Bobby Darin in supporting roles; Darin shows he could really act, or at least as much as anyone in this melodrama, getting nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

Not recommended

Elliot Spitzer, as I’ve said before, is one tough dude: Spitzer Threatens to Sue U.S. Regulator Over Loan Exemption

Voter data, get your voter data here!

Though one wonders if voting will even be meaningful (if it is today) in the future.

Per RemotePatrol, Gen. Wesley Clark drops and gives The Daily Show twenty. Jon Stewart is clearly emerging as one of the smartest political comedians of our times and I imagine this interview will be as insightful as any Clark gives over the next few months.

Seems like something to love: Smart Plug May Banish Cable Clutter

Okay, I may not be the UPI Business and Economics Editor like Martin Hutchinson but his column Analysis: It’s 1973, not 1929 seems to be far too stuck in trying to correlate the past with the present than understanding the differences between 1929, 1973 and 2003.

“Corporations are not people; there is no moral imperative, virtually no social constraints on these ‘virtual people.’ Corporations are corporations … bureaucracies to create profit, plain and simple.” So sayeth Garret Vreeland.

So now we repeat my rant that when the Supreme Court ruled back in the end of the 19th Century that corporations were the legal equivalent of people, they made perhaps the single biggest mistake in their entire corpus. And that includes such whoppers as Dread Scott before the Civil War and the ‘separate but equal’ ruling a few years after this one.

So now we see behavior such as that of Darl McBride and the SCO Gang, with their latest idiocy (because you know they’ll find a way to top themselves by next week at the most) reported by Dan Gillmor, where executives can take nearly any action they like but can hide from the consequences behind the corporate veil and a big directors and officers liability insurance policy.

So now we read many stories in the media about, for instance, the many Wall Street scandals and that the firms involved have paid big fines–huge even–but do the executives involved go to jail? Other than a troubled prosecution in Oklahoma will Ken Lay, clearly responsible for hurting thousands of people and destroying and stealing billions of dollars in the Enron disaster, even be charged with a crime much less sentenced to prison time? And yet less privileged people, convicted of stealing items of much less value, a car for instance, are sent to prison for several years. Which is not to say that these lesser thieves don’t deserve jail time, not hardly.

So now we smell with our own noses the pollution that is spewed by power plants all over the country, generators that we thought were dealt with in Clean Air legislation. But, putting corporate profit above personal good–after all, the executives breath the same air we all do–energy companies lobbied and donated their way to postponement and reduction and finally, in essence, repeal of these rules. Emerging economies, these executives and their mouthpieces shout, don’t have such cumbersome and costly restraints, so why should we?

So now we learn that agricultural and pharmaceutical companies, sometimes using their hired hands in academia, want to grow bioengineered crops in the open air. Bioengineered to produce powerful drugs more easily and more cheaply than current lab chemistry-based processes and, for food plants, to resist pests without pesticides and survive colder temperatures. With minimal protection from an open space ‘moat’, there is little chance that these inventions will not commingle with natural crops and windup somewhere in the human food chain.

So now we understand that people, generally good and intelligent, can be blinded far too easily by power and profit. Most of these men and women graduated from good schools and give generously to charity and community. They can, however, hide their eyes from the truth because executive authority is divorced from personal responsibility for corporate actions. All because of a 120 year old court decision. A precedent that ought to be–no, must be changed.

Successful filmed science fiction requires a plot that moves at a very fast pace with only a few pauses to recover from major dramatic points. Sadly Battlestar Galactica, produced with high hopes and mucho dinero by the SciFi Channel, failed to meet this simple hurdle. Star Trek veteran Ron Moore made some interesting changes from the original series, I even didn’t have a big issue with the humanoid Cylons and the darker more believable characters worked well (he’s also one of the prime movers behind HBO’s Carnivale) but the four hours onscreen could have been edited down to two easily. Or preferably stuffed with more things, like anything that would give us insight into the Cylons. But Michael Rymer, the director, did get to show off his techno-fetish with many lingering shots on the hardware.

The miniseries was also a pilot for a series. Should SciFi go ahead and spend what would certainly be a big pile of cash on it? Honestly, I don’t think so. Too many of the actors were ill-suited to their roles and I think the story as set up won’t work well enough.

Garret explains his Clark over Dean choice.

John Owen, author of Low Carb Holiday Cookbook, was on the Wayne Brady Show this afternoon and gave this tasty instruction set for a low carb substitute for mashed potatos (assuming I transcribed reasonably well, Owen doesn’t give any free recipes on the site):

1 1/2 cup chicken stock total

Start w/ 3/4 cups of stock in a heated pot

6-8 cups of cauliflower, fresh or frozen

Over a medium flame, stir and add stock as cauliflower absorbs it

Transfer to a mixing bowl

Add a few ounces of Blue cheese, crumbled or chopped

Puree with a hand blender or food processor

Add couple of cloves of chopped fresh garlic

A tablespoon of rosemary

Blend a bit more

Put in casserole

Add a few pats of butter on top plus some ground pepper and salt

Bake in oven for 350d for 20 minutes

ZapThink gets nasty on competitor Gartner’s Four-Platform Framework for Web Services. [via BLTS]

In footy news, Liverpool FC manager Gerard Houllier is on the hot seat–his head man wants a place in next season’s Champions League or else; David Beckham hopes next Summer’s marquee signing by his club Real Madrid is Manchester United striker Ruud van Nistlerooy; and, at Beck’s old club, the manuevering for control continues as both Glazer and the Irishmen up their stockholdings.

Every columnist I’ve read so far agrees that the BCS is broken and that USC should be playing in the Sugar Bowl.

The Chinese are discovering a use for cars well-known in the West. Booya!

My vote is for the bricks through windows analogy. One significant distinction between most other forms of advertising and spam like this is that other advertising generally pays for something so I don’t have to–broadcast TV and (at least cheaper) daily newspapers.

I’m still angry about the BCS craptasticness, getting over seeing Part I of the somewhat mindblowing Angels in America and have an HOA board meeting tonight so you’re on your own, bubbas and bubba-ettes.

In the minutes before the final BCS rankings are announced, a Yahoo! Sports poll shows USC is an overwhelming favorite (83% took one of the two options including the Trojans) to play for the national championship in the Sugar Bowl. I’m surely hoping they get in. They did get the number one spot in both major polls heading into the announcement show.

Update: LSU pushed passed us in the rankings via the difference in computer rankings by .16, 5.99 to 6.15!!! The BCS Coordinator, Mike Tranghese, was honest right up front in saying that he has no explanation that will satisfy USC fans. Once again, a team that couldn’t even win its conference championship is going to play for the title. He’s saying that we ought to expect some changes in the BCS system but not until their annual meeting of interested parties in April.

By their own rules, the winner of the BCS title game will be number one in the post-bowl ESPN/USA Today poll but the Trojans can still get a split with a win over Michigan in the Rose Bowl and some love from the AP voters. USC coach Pete Carroll (28-9 as head man) said all the right words as he was interviewed but his body language was nowhere near as serene as his voice; seemed clear to me that he was royally pissed.

With number four Michigan as the opponent, we all know that the Rose Bowl will be the real national title game in the days after New Years!

Extra: I posted my frustration(!) to SpoFi too.

This was the sixth or seventh time I’ve seen Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring though only the second time for the Extended Edition. The previous EE viewing suffered from a severe case of pause, rewind and review at the hands of my host (who will go unnamed but let’s just say drives a real fancy sports car), while this one benefitted from being a lovely new print on a big screen at the Sony Metreon up in San Francisco.

We’ll be up there again next Saturday for the Extended Edition of The Two Towers. This version of FotR is about 30 minutes longer than the original and, if your butt can stand the length, works better for me; not having seen TTTee yet, I’m definitely looking forward to finding out if that has the same quality with its extra 43 minutes. These are complex stories and characters JRR Tolkien gave us and, butt be damned, the extra time allows for more of that to come through.

What I’m really looking forward to is seeing Return of the King in 13 days, if not sooner, and then late next year getting a complete, deluxe, Extended Edition DVD set.