Category: Personal

The last sight I saw was a massive flame

Amazingly bright yellows, oranges, and reds

When all too soon black squeezed in at the edges.

Then there was no more color I could see

Though the sound came louder and louder

Waves crashing in, crowding in, painful.

Heat pushed up against my body, shoving

Making my skin turn and twist

Turn colors I could no longer see for the black.

My friend Paula was standing next to me a moment before

Then she struck me with force that sent us tumbling

Agony running through me as I hit pavement.

Barely heard, she whimpered; barely understood “Goodbye!”

I made to say same to her but my lips

Melted too quickly from the onslaught.

Pain, all that was left to me, no other sense

Than this semblance of touch, undesired

Raging through my body, all that I can feel.

Where did the bright yellows and the crushing sound

And the overwhelming heat and PAIN come from?

GOODBYE GOODBYE goodbye.

Yeah, the work on the new bathroom is coming along nicely. The building inspector was here yesterday early to check over the plumbing and gave a thumbs up; another inspector is scheduled to visit Monday morning to check another aspect of the work. The contractor, Frank, appears to have done well laying in cement to even out the floor under the shower. The new exhaust fan/light fixture is installed in the ceiling and the shower pan and sheetrock walls around the shower are also in place. I had expected there would be more than one worker, with the other person installing the new vanity and related pieces while Frank does the shower and toilet, but I suppose this only makes a difference of a day’s duration in the job. As long as it comes out right. And, at least so far, knock on wood, I haven’t had so much as a peep of the kind of trouble so many people complain about when it comes to remodeling and contractors. “Excellent,” as Mr. Burns says.

I concede that you are not a terrorist

That you are a man of passion

Who happens to enjoy the sight of fireballs.

In the long dark of when it was simply a match

That burned down to the last

You only shook your fingers in the breeze.

When by accident a whole book of them was lit

You smiled and dropped it on a line of ants

Smelling the sweetly acrid whisps of smoke.

School may have taught you maths and geography

History did more than teach of a past

Glorious but lost in the arms of a beast.

A lunch time brought word of rebellion

Arms against the beast and no reply is heard

So a match is sparked within your breast.

Consider the holy words, day after day

Consider the shame of being kept from the true path

Consider the shame of being kept from spreading the Word.

Then the flame inside is fanned, the smell of burning insects

The beast must be burned, let out the word

Let the Word be the burning spear as of old.

All who fail to tremble before you

Must burn in shame and burn to quench your thirst

To once again stand tall as you burn.

I concede that you are not a terrorist

That you are a man of passion

Who happens to enjoy the sight of fireballs.

Do not remind me that the sand slipping

Between your fingers is not the same

Substance beating within your heart.

Not that stars shine steadily and only

Appear to blink when filtered by our atmosphere

Filled with protective gasses.

The Sun shines all the time, not only when

Visible to my eyes–Kena is awake in Perth

When I sleep and she sees it bright.

A woman I knew well for a short while,

A vacation years ago to the other side of the world

A memory that burned bright.

I sleep and dream of your fireballs blossoming

With agony and bloody trails facing away

From Kena, whose back is turned forever.

She no longer sees the Sun while I sleep

No longer writes me beautiful letters

Of the feeling of sand slipping through her fingers.

The main contractor showed up today, on time, and started working on giving me a new bathroom. This is very big for me yet a little unnerving because of all the bad stories one hears about contractors. The day went very well though–the man here ripped out the entire bathroom and the tile flooring. So now there’s a big hole where I used to have a shower, a vanity, towel racks, mirror, and medicine cabinet. He left the toilet because, well, two toilets are always better than one.

  

Tomorrow is prep work mostly, I think, and perhaps a visit from the City of Mountain View building inspector. This will look so good when done!

After days of poorly and not at all disguised negotiations, Detroit Lions CEO Matt Millen came to an agreement with Steve Mariucci on a five year, $25 million deal. Not only does Mooch more than double the salary he would have gotten from the 49ers (although he would have earned it for doing nothing but relaxing), he gets to go home as well. Though he does take over a team that is more or less craptastic, having won only ffive games in the last two seasons.

ESPN is reporting, though, that the new coach will have more say in personnel matters including the hiring of a new personnel director. Which will come in handy when he looks over a roster seriously lacking in star power. Second year QB Joey Harrington and All Pro DE Robert Porcher are terrific but the cast mostly drops off a cliff after them. ESPN’s Pasquarelli suggests they’ll use the second pick in April’s draft to take Michigan State star receiver Charles Rogers and I think he’s quite right to recommend the selection to help fill the seats at brand new Ford Field. Got to start somewhere.

ESPN is also running a front page poll on which of the new coaches (Parcells, Del Rio, Mariucci, and Lewis) will get their team in the playoffs first. Current results show Parcells in front with over 61% and the other three way back. Of course internet polls aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on and I would say that Del Rio’s Jaguars are the closest to getting back in, even though the Cowboys had a couple more wins last year.

Nicholas Kristof’s latest Op-Ed column for the NY Times, ‘A Sea of Fire,’ or Worse?, presents a chilling scenario on how the Korean Crisis might very well proceed. I’m getting the feeling that Iraq, while an important and probably easier target, should not be the Bush Administration’s primary focus any more. How about you? Let the inspectors have more time, Hussein isn’t going to get the bomb any time soon. Whereas North Korea will (a few very soon and dozens within no more than a couple of years) and has missiles to deliver warheads throughout most of the Far East, maybe even to the US before much longer.

garret, I sure hope you never have to say I told you so on this steaming pile of craptastic planning.

This would be me and my son rather than me and my pal’s son:

Just saw a half hour of standup comedy with Carlos Mencia on Comedy Central, an episode of Comedy Central Presents. This guy was excellent but his comedy was so real it almost hurt. A more modern, Latino Geroge Carlin or maybe even towards Lenny Bruce without necessarily needing profanity and obscenity to make his points about society. Amazing to find out that Carlos gave up a career in insurance too. Catch him if you can.

Carlos Rules!

You could look at The Majestic in two very different ways. The easy way is a a straightforward dramatic piece where the protagonist starts high, has a tough break, starts to recover, seems to recover, has it taken away, and then in a daring gamble wins it all back. That would be expected, almost formulaic, in a Hollywood movie. And you don’t get much more Hollywood than a movie produced by Warner Brothers.

Or you could look at this collaboration between writer Michael Sloane and his high school (Hollywood High School, actually) pal, director Frank Darabont (Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile), as an attempt to satirize Hollywood a la The Player but even more so because even the script plays it so straight. But the framing scenes, where we see star Jim Carrey sitting in an office chair and hear the clearly recognizable voices of famous movie directors like Carl and Rob Reiner, Gary Marshall, and Sydney Pollack discussing how to improve the script Carrey’s character (Fred Appleton) is writing, seem to almost mock the remainder of the film as too formulaic, too perfect.

Carrey’s writer faces the archetypical problem of Hollywood players in the early 1950s, when The Majestic takes place, of coming to the attention to the witchhunt of the House Unamerican Activities Committee, Joe McCarthy’s fellow Red haters. His character’s name, sort of, in tribute to Dalton Trumbo, is Trimble. Trumbo was a famous screenwriter whose career and life were nearly ruined by the committee on trumped up charges. If you don’t know what the blacklist was, Google will tell you.

Instead of facing up to this trouble, Appleton gets drunk and decides to take a late night drive up the coast; a few hours later he’s driving off a bridge and barely survives the drop. The next morning a dog finds him knocked out, washed up on some beach. An old man, the dog’s owner, comes to his rescue and takes into a tiny little backwater town. Where he is recognized as the lost (and thought dead) since World War II son of Harry Trimble (Martin Landau, such a good actor). Appleton has amnesia, truly, and has no idea if he is Luke Trimble or Joe Blow. I guess they didn’t think of checking his fingerprints, huh?

Eventually his past catches up to him, his car is found, the committee’s investigators confront him, and he regains his memory. But in the meanwhile Luke’s return has brought life back to a dead town. Joy and the 1000 watt Carrey smile and so this turn is devastating. All of sudden the townsfolk admit to Appleton that they realized long before that he wasn’t Luke but “the town needed Luke.” He returns to Los Angeles but, channeling the real Luke’s spirit, defies history, his own character, and the threat of jail (quite a few people went for so-called contempt of Congress in the real deal) to tell the fascists where they can stick their dastardly behavior.

I guess which of the two ways to look at this film is up to each viewer. I certainly didn’t find any mention of the odder interpretation mentioned elsewhere. But as a Deconstructionist might say, the meaning must be taken from the text and not from the author’s intention; either can be held up.

Recommended

I had reservations about watching Life as a House (2001) but Tivo recorded it and I wanted a distraction this afternoon. Not much to the story and it’s all very obvious, especially the connections between the physical and the spiritual/emotional. Well acted and nicely shot and directed.

George Monroe (Kevin Kline) is sick of his job making architectural models but that’s okay because, as the film opens, his boss fires him after 20 years with no notice. As he leaves the office building, he collapses and is taken to the hospital where he tells a friendly nurse that no one loves him or touches him. At the same time, his son Sam (Hayden Christensen, Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars) makes a pathetic attempt to hang himself and when his remarried mother Robin Kimball (Kristin Scott Thomas) dashes up to see what made the crashing noise finds out, she hardly registers an emotion before turning away. The divorce was ten years ago. In other words, everyone’s dead on the inside already and would be more or less happy if the outside died as well.

But it’s not time for that. George decides to use his few remaining months (cancer) to tear down a piece of crap house he inherited from his own unloving dad and force Sam to spend summer vacation helping him build a replacement. A few days of pouting and stealing Dad’s Vicodin, then a ‘friendly’ non-sexual shower with next door neighbor hottie Alyssa (Jena Malone, who will make an amazing temptress in some movie five years from now) is all Sam needs to start growing up.

Sam starts pitching in and, boy, is that last bit of tearing down the old shack cathartic! Surprising no one, not only does Robin realize she still loves George, Alyssa and Sam get together (crowding out her pimping, drugdealing, spoiled boyfriend), then, just as George is dying, after he’s finally told his ex and son, even Robin’s current (dead on the inside) husband catches the spark and the two begin to makeup. Face it, the story is treacle, trite, predictable. Somehow I wasn’t surprised in the least to find out that the script was by the same person, Mark Andrus, who wrote Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood–a man! As Rotten Tomatoes summed Life as a House up: manipulative tearjerker.

Mildly recommended for the quality of acting

You just hate to see a perfectly good Rolls Royce destroyed. Crushed to nothingness by a dozen other cars. And then explode in a huge fireball when the gas tanks from all of them are lit up. But that’s just one of the many thrills in this totally silly, totally fun little movie that’s basically a chance for Ron Howard to learn his directing chops.

1977’s Grand Theft Auto was Howard’s first feature film directing assignment, made while on a break from Happy Days and a companion piece to his acting stint in Eat My Dust from the year before. They were more or less a package deal Howard made with all-time B movie producing champ Roger Corman. Howard knew he wanted to direct, not act, and Corman was always happy to give nearly anyone a chance to write, direct, or act in one his films–they were made for relative pennies, so why not?

Howard followed GTA (and you have to wonder if this wasn’t some part of the inspiration for the vastly annoying videogame series of the same name) with a trio of TV movies, while he was still stuck in the TV show, but then he got the chance to direct Nightshift and he essentially never acted again. If you’ve seen him on an awards show or interview, you can understand why. He just does not make a good looking bald man!

The film. Essentially a sequence of car chases, car crashes, explosions, and bad puns set off when Howard’s character, Sam Freeman, elopes to Las Vegas with Paula (Nancy Morgan, John Ritter’s ex-wife), daughter of millionaire and gubenatorial candidate Bigby Powers. Daddy is not happy, and neither is snobby rich boy Collins Hedgeworth, who thinks he’s engaged to Paula. They set out after the lovebirds and each starts offering big cash rewards for assistance in stopping them from reaching the wedding chapel. Every idiot and his brother get involved and the chase gets deeper and deeper. Of course Ron finds parts for his brothers Clint and Rance (Rance and Ron even wrote the script).

Not exactly sophisticated humor but a fun way to spend an afternoon.

Recommended

Last week I wrote about preparing for a very interesting job opportunity. Would have been my first time working directly in sales, for a world class company no less. Finally heard back today and, you may have already guessed, the interviewers did not think I met the needs of the position. They are, of course, wrong but the decision is theirs. So I’m still looking. Keep a good thought.

In contrast to the Glamorama review I posted yesterday, some things are simple and straightforward in life. For example, not every person who asks someone s/he knows is entitled to get a reference; the referrer is entitled to choose whether the person requesting meets whatever criteria they have for such a favor. And make no mistake, providing a reference is a personal favor. There are people who have asked me to be available and whenever possible I’ve agreed because I’ve generally been asked by people I respect; when this is not the case I (try to) politely decline.

Some people, apparently, have a different conception of the whole matter. A bunch of right wing religious nuts Christian religious foundation is helping a student at Texas Tech University sue a biology professor there because professor Michael Dini refused to write a reference for medical school. The professor, who posted the criteria for getting letters on his personal web page, requires that students “may not seek a letter of recommendation from him if the student does not truthfully and forthrightly believe in human evolution.”

Uh oh! Oh my god! Literally. So when a student who believes in the Biblical account of creation felt deprived and (what else?) discrimintated against because he disagreed with the professor, he did what any good American would do: he took legal action (Justice Department probes Texas Tech professor’s policy). Backed by a religious freedom organization that calls Dini’s policy “open religious bigotry,” Micah Spradling complained to the Department of Justice that Dini was not allowed to use such a basis for deciding who would get a letter necessary for admission to medical school.

The Texas Tech school newspaper picked up on this battle a few months ago: Evolution, religion conflicting theories.

What a load of hooey! And the school is standing behind him, bravo for them, especially in a state like Texas where disagreement is considered a sin. Personal rights are held in very high esteem there, especially the right to own a gun, but just try and stand up to the religious right for a quick example of how those rights evaporate in certain eyes. One really wonders why the federal government would deem it appropriate to get involved but then, look at who we have for president and where he stands on religious freedom.

In 1998, Bret Easton Ellis (Less Than Zero, American Psycho) published Glamorama. Probably. I read it, I think, but I find certainty difficult. There is something here on the desk next to my PC that looks like a book and has 543 pages bound between the covers. My state of mind, though, says don’t be so sure. In other words, the very model of Post Modernism.

In this book(?), we follow Victor Ward (nee Johnson), model, club proprietor, son of a US Senator, terrorist, actor. But is he doing all that we read or acting in a film? And is he even him, or an actor playing a role, since throughout we encounter other characters who claim to have been in Victor’s presence at times and places Victor has not been. Takes awhile but eventually our protagonist refers to a script and later to a film crew and director with whom he actually talks. The chapters are numbered but,, unlike most books, count backwards, and later sections of the book just move to different points in time and disregard all that has gone before (unless we’re suddenly seeing the other Victor).

A good read, though I had trouble reading more than, say, 20 pages at a time until nearing the end. In this mirror world, in New York City, London, Paris, celebrities and designer brands mingle with high fashion models using their careers as a cover for launching terrorist attacks with no underlying philosophy. The terrorism is as empty as a Calvin Klein underwear ad, in other words. The actors consume mass quantities of alcohol and drugs at party after fashion show after dinner at trendy restaurant, then have sex, or sometimes argue or have their passion frustrated, before heading off to destroy a landmark Paris hotel or sadistically murder someone whose only sin is love. An interesting contrast, stylistically and mileu-wise, from American Psycho.

Recommended if you can take it

Yeah, Hussein has to go. The inspectors had their time and Iraq had the specified chance to comply with 1441. Time’s up.

But the domestic portions of the speech were just sad. As if dividends were the only place government took our money twice. Just a gimme to his patrons. Two sentence mention of his plans to give other patrons whatever they want on the environment. And so much for last year’s promise that any deficits from his tax cut plans would be small and short lived; now we’re looking at $300 million or more per year for over a decade.

And what’s with all the interruptions for applause every other 30 seconds? Isn’t the speech long enough as it is?

Feh!

A quick laugher in the morning business section today. Coca-Cola’s Fountain Division, which handles the company’s interaction with restaurants and such, is exploring the possibility of launching a line of hot coffee to be sold as their sodas are today: as liquid concentrate with (hot) water added when the drink is served. OMG! Puh-lease! I’m not close to being a coffee snob but this would just be sad. Isn’t it enough for Coke to dominate soda, water (Aquafina is their brand), and juices? If you see a brand of coffee called Viaa Cafe you’ll know the execs have gone deep into the madness.

Usually the NFL puts a moratorium on announcement of coaching changes during the week leading up to the Super Bowl. Since that’s over, so is the silence. The Detroit Lions didn’t wait long, just a few hours, to announce that Marty Mornhinweg was not going to get the chance to stick around. Instantly, the Net became full of rumors that recently ex-49ers coach Steve Mariucci would be named to the job.

Matt Millen, team president and himself the subject of termination speculation, said there are “a bunch of candidates that we’ve discussed and we’re comfortable with” but no one name is being given for now. Amusingly, Millen had only weeks ago announced the Mornhinweg (whose previous job was offensive coordinator for the Niners) would indeed return for a third season despite a 5-27 track record. Pressed at the news conference to explain the sudden change, Millen finally stammered that “It’s a process that’s always changing. You always have to look at everything and everybody out there.” So expect a fairly quick announcement in the Motor City.

The other major vacancy is, of course, Mooch’s old job. The 49ers haven’t said much, although they are interviewing at least two minority candidates, but Bill Walsh has denied any interest in coming back at age 71. The two minority candidates are Jets DC Ted Cottrell and Patriots DC Romeo Crennel; other candidates include current Niners DC Jim Mora, Jr., though star defensive lineman Dana Stubblefield said last week that he could not support Mora, and Eagles OC Brad Childress. Walsh though the new man would be introduced by this coming weekend, so we’ll (hopefully) soon find out.

I’m not a hard core MS basher, for sure, but the huge Slammer worm that ran around this weekend (and will possibly reach new levels of disruption tomorrow), which takes advantage of a known SQL Server security hole, is not the only problem facing the Redmond giant this weekend. There must be a problem with their in-house mail servers as well because I’ve gotten over a dozen notification emails for Microsoft Security Bulletin MS02-061. Which is trying to tell subscribers to the Microsoft Product Security Notification Service where to get the (long available) patch for the SQL Server problem. Annoying and laughable, too bad.