THE STOCK MARKET'S FALLING!!

It's 1929 all over again! Everyone panic!! AAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

On Education

From our Department of No Shit, Sherlock comes this article in the Atlanta-Journal Constitution. The schools aren't being adequately funded by the state, counties raise property taxes to keep up, kids can't read or write, but Sonny Perdue can spend millions trying to get a bass fishing tournament to come to Georgia. What's wrong with this picture?

Little gold statues

Ah, the Oscars. The time each year when Hollywood breaks out its Sunday best, stops trying to undermine the American family by having gay sex, and pats itself on the back while handing out gold statuettes to remind itself how great Hollywood is. Thank goodness the ceremonies are over for this year. I got hooked into watching the program this year as I really wanted to see if Little Miss Sunshine won for best picture. It didn’t of course, as the combination of Martin Scorsese and a film with a plot was just too much to overcome. In particular I enjoyed watching the prissing and preening that was the pre-show program, where celebrities were interviewed on the red carpet. At the bottom of the screen with each person interviewed was sort of a news scroll, stating which award and movie they had been nominated for. For the males they added some trivia information about them. For the females they added such important details as who made the dress they were wearing, where the jewelry they were wearing came from. It was like closed captioning for the brain function impaired. As you can tell I’m not in awe of celebrity and I really don’t give a damn who made their clothes.

It was a movie weekend at my house again this past weekend. Typically we watch a movie at least one evening on the weekends, usually on Friday but sometimes on Saturday nights as well. Often my daughter makes the call on what movie we view, which means that the typical fare consists of her movies: Cars, Monsters, Inc., Toy Story, Good Boy, Shrek. But this past weekend was a bit different; she suggested that we watch It Happened One Night. When we went with our current satellite service a couple of years ago, it was the first movie I recorded to our DVR and then transferred to DVD. My daughter loved watching it for a while, then got bored with it. So I was surprised when she said she wanted to watch it again. I just love Frank Capra’s films, to be honest. And to prove that I’m not always the sharpest knife in the drawer, it only occurred to me watching the film this time that the obnoxious, sexist pig of a bus passenger who was Oscar Shapeley was played by Roscoe Karns, who I thought looked damned familiar. He should. His son, Todd Karns, played Harry Bailey in another Capra film, It’s A Wonderful Life.

But every coin has a flip side. Though Saturday night brought a good movie to watch, Sunday brought the Seventh Level of Hell to our living room. When I awoke Sunday morning I found that my daughter was watching The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl. I’ve written about the last time she watched this movie, and this time I got to watch the whole movie, not just the last half hour or so. And guess what? The movie’s a bigger piece of shit in its entirety! I hate this film! Bad acting, bad script, crappy dialogue...I know it’s a kids film but dammit, it’s this type of crap that’s dumbing down our nation. For the sake of humanity, this film, and everyone in it, should be destroyed.

This just in. . .

. . .Anna Nicole Smith is still dead. And according to the info Todd M. has posted on his blog, her remains are not fairing too well these days. While every attention whore who wants their fifteen minutes of infamy and a portion of her estate parades before judges and media cameras, in their selfishness nobody has stopped to realize that the human body does not have the shelf life of a twinkie once basic things like cardiac rhythm and respiration have ceased. Embalming only slows the decomposition process, it does not arrest it. Here's your scary thought for the day: what if, many centuries from now, after mankind has cashed in its chips and no longer exists, some advanced alien civilization comes to what's left of Earth for an archeological expedition and manages to unearth Anna's chestularlogical implants? Mankind's only contribution to the history of the universe would be a pair of artificial breasts. Not exactly an nice epitaph for the human race. But first they have to bury the poor woman. Even c-list celebrities deserve to be buried quickly and respectfully.

The definition of bad timing

I like to think of myself as a musician, though sometimes I question my ability. This past weekend I ran into my good friend and former bandmate Jon at a local university basketball game. He's been working as a crew member on a number of film and television projects the past couple of years, including getting himself a credit on the movie, "Stomp the Yard." We began discussing combining our love of music and films together and working on writing some incidental background music that we could sell to some of the lower budget films he's been working on. I guess he was trying to convince me of the positives of such an undertaking (the prospects of making some extra money already has my attention) when he said, "You play bass. Not everybody can do that." I quickly replied, "Yeah, I'm proof of that." And there it is: good timing is everything, whether you're playing music, cracking jokes, or selling a house.

Bad timing is to be found in my neighborhood this week. I must start off that I live in a nice neighborhood. We have good neighbors (which is why we're looking to build onto our house instead of moving to a larger one), it's quiet, and it's really close to the river. That being said, we've had law enforcement around the neighborhood on more than one occasion since we moved in just over four years ago. The guy who used to live across the street from us was dispossessed from his house and kept coming back, spray painting the house, leaving notes on the property, and at one point cutting the power to the heat pump on the house while the property was under contract to the current owner. We eventually were able to work with the police and have the guy arrested and we haven't seen him since. A couple of weeks ago an escaped jail convict was arrested at a house around the corner from us. I've no idea if the owners were charged with aiding and abetting.

Last Monday evening we were returning from dining out and saw a number of local police and sheriff's cars in front of a house in the neighborhood. As we passed I noticed an unmarked car and a man wearing a dark vest with "GBI" enblazoned on back. Holy crap, I thought to myself. What the hell happened that required the GBI to be on scene? We found out a couple of days later in the local paper. The homeowner, a teacher at an alternative school in a neighboring county, was arrested on a single charge of sexual exploitation of children. I've seen the guy taking walks around the neighborhood; had I known what he allegedly was doing online, I may have introduced him to my front bumper.

Here's the bad timing part: this guy's arrested on Monday on a child pRon charge, on Thursday everyone in the neighborhood gets a postcard from a local realtor announcing that the house next door is up for sale and open house will be this Sunday. Bad enough that the housing market sucks for sellers these days, but having an accused pederast next door doesn't help your selling points. The open house postcard doesn't say as such, but you may want to leave the kids at home.

They're BAAAACK!

Wow...three little words express the way I feel today: holy f*cking sh*t! It's official: The Police are back together and will be touring this summer! I've been waiting for this for over twenty years! To get ready for this summer and what is sure to be an expensive ticket, I will be auctioning off a kidney to the highest bidder. It's also time to dig out my Synchronicity t-shirt, which is somewhere in all my stuff and likely to be eight times too small. If there was a band that was the soundtrack to my high school years, it was The Police. I was in junior high in 1978 when I first heard "Roxanne" and became fan of the band. Regatta de Blanc came out during my freshman year. Zenyatta Mondatta during my sophomore year. Ghost in the Machine came out during my junior year. Synchronicity came out right at the end of my senior year. I hold no expectations that they will make a new album in the future; I just want them to stop fighting long enough to finish this coming tour. But considering these guys are in their 50s and 60s, a world tour may finish them off. Tantric sex will only get you so far, Sting.

Goodbye, Norma Jean, um, I mean Vickie Lynn

Farewell, Anna Nicole, it is time to rest after a full and exemplary life. How you struggled from a life as a Crispy Fried Chicken waitress to become the wife of an oil baron. And we all hoped you would rebound from the unexpected and untimely death of your 90 year old husband. Your aspirations of being the new personification of Marilyn Monroe, and how close you came to succeeding--she dying at age 36 and you at 39. Farewell, Anna Nicole! The world will miss your pearls of wit and wisdom, not to mention your erratic behavior.

They done it again

As I've mentioned a few times over the past year I really like taking digital pictures. Actually, taking pictures is pretty easy; composing an image, that's another story. And I've taken many a digital picture over the past seven years, enough to fill at least a dozen CD-Rs (about 8.5 gigabytes worth of images). While most of my pictures remain unseen, there are a few that I've taken around the building I work in that have seen the light of day either on our website or in departmental or school publications. One picture I've taken has become the identifying image for both our department and school, and was the one used on the cover of the invitations sent out a few years ago when our building was being rededicated following an impressive yet crappy renovation project. Most of the time my pictures are used without a credit for me. That's what happens when you take pictures on company time. But in the past year I've had pictures of mine used for various reasons with my name as the credit. Wow! It's nice to see your name listed in the photographers credits within the magazine your school publishes. It almost makes me feel like I know what I'm doing! But a couple of days ago I was looking through the newly published calendar the campus' public affairs office produced to give to donors only to discover that one of my pictures was in there (with no credit of course). What gets me is that the only place they could've obtained the picture was from our website; hence they went with an undersized, 72 dpi JPG image for use in a four-color process printing job. Maybe I should put some contact info on our website for people on campus who'd like or need images for publications. I don't mind seeing my pictures used in publications whatsoever, but damn, at least give me a credit.

Digital celluloid

Perusing my past blog entries I realized that I haven't reported on any movies that I had seen of late. Maybe that's what spurred me to do some writin' on this particular evening. Or maybe it was the purchase of a DVD collection of Preston Sturges' films this past weekend. Or perhaps even the start of Turner Classic Movies' 31 Days of Oscar programming.

Have I mentioned that I like movies? Gosh, I sure do! My current preference is for older movies, and there are so many out there that supply will never exceed my demand. There are two that I've seen of late that I must write about, one a newer film while the other is an older flick.

A very young and attractive Barbara Stanwyck stars in 1933's Baby Face. The film is about a girl whose father runs a speakeasy in their apartment catering to workers from a nearby factory. Stanwyck plays Lily Powers, who serves up beer and pleasures of the flesh to the customers. A few second shot in the movie, left on the cutting room floor in 1933 but restored by the Library of Congress in 2004, tells us that Lily has been pimped out by her dad since she was 14. Dad dies when his still explodes on him one night, so Lily finds herself out in the big world looking for a job. She finds one in a bank and soon finds that she can sleep her way to the top with each successive boss (she sleeps with the HR guy who does the hiring to get her job in the first place). I can't help but think that this film was the business model for Madonna's career. As she sleeps her way to the top, Lily manages to ruin a few relationships and engagements along the way, and manages to shrug off the suicide of one of her suitors in the film. It's an average movie in terms of quality, but I like Stanwyck's performance in this movie. And while Hollywood did have production codes in place at the time, they were not really enforced. Baby Face is one of the movies, if not the one, that caused Hollywood to crack down and enforce those codes.

Little Miss Sunshine. What to say about this movie? I had heard good things about it and watched to see it for myself. What a great movie. In a nutshell, a dysfunctional family takes a road trip to California so their daughter can compete in a child's beauty pageant. Greg Kinnear is the unlikeable dad who's trying to pitch his 9-step "Be A Winner" self-help plan. Alan Arkin is great in his role of the grandfather who helps Olive (played by Abigail Breslin) choreograph her talent routine for the competition. Steve Carell plays the gay former professor who tries to kill himself after being spurned by one of his graduate students. To the credit of the movie his role is not one of an over the top gay man, but someone coming to terms with rejection and the collapse of his world (a theme that plays out a couple of times in the movie). For me this movie was almost like The Grapes of Wrath meets National Lampoon's Vacation: a family which is in danger of falling apart heads out to California, the land of sunshine, a family member dies along the way. What a great movie. It pokes as much fun at children's beauty pageants as it does the family's adventures getting to California. And the ending is well worth waiting for.