That's All the Time We Have

We got some bad news this week. Miss Daisy Kittycat, eldest of our four feline companions, is suffering kidney failure. She's had some weight loss of late, but we attributed that to an effort to avoid free feeding to cut down her calories.

Last Sunday, however, she started turning down Pounce, which never happens. She's always been motivated by flavor.

We took her to the vet thinking maybe she had some dental pain because she did finally accept soft canned food, but midday we learned he'd tested creatin levels and found them to be at about the worst.

He began some fluid treatments and by Friday the levels were better and her personality was chipper, so she's home for the weekend and sitting on my lap demanding my hand as I type.

Time can bring you down
It's hard to know how long she will retain a decent quality of life, but for the moment she's hanging in. She'll get more treatments next week.

At 10 1/2 it just seemed like we'd have longer with her, as Christine noted tearfully Wednesday night. Cats can often live until 20 or older, and it's Monty, the oldest Tom in the house--besides me--that we've worried about the most.

Time can bend your knees
Daisy came to us as a kitten, first out of the box when she and her litter mates were dropped off by one of Christine's co-workers so that we could choose the one we'd adopt.

We wound up taking her and her brother, Cleo, who was unfortunately killed only a few months later when a neighbor's cat chased him away from our house. Daisy became an inside cat only a short time later, something I've sometimes felt bad about, but theory is that inside cats are safer.

Would it be the same if I saw you in heaven?
The nights she was at the vet reminded me, even with other cats around, what the absence of her "personality" feels like. She's different from the boys, possessed of a sweetness and femininity that makes her unquestionably special and unique.

Robin Williams' Popeye was not a hit but when it was about to be released, there was a Popeye float in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade from which one of the film's song was performed. "Sweet Haven! God must love us..." was the chorus.

I've long substituted by own lyrics:

"Miss Daisy, God must love us. Miss Daisy!"

She dispelled any notions I had early on that cats are aloof, and as I tried to coax her to eat the special diet food the vet sent home for her, I remembered how strong her spirit has always been.

When she was spayed, her body rejected the stitches. I remember watching her eat a few days after surgery, even though she clearly felt terrible, her fur ruffled and ears turned down. The stitches gave way on a Saturday night and we had to call the vet and rush her to the office where plain cotton stitches and rounds of antibiotics were required to spur healing.

That feels like it was like yesterday, just as does the time she slipped through a hole in our fence and got nabbed by animal control, and I had to go bail her out of the pound.

Time can break your heart, have you begging please
She has curled on me most nights to sleep for as long as I can remember, has climbed into every box that's come into the house to claim it, inspect it and sleep in it and has kept the males at bay with a strong will. She forces her head between my palm and the telephone handset if I'm talking to someone and not paying attention to her.

At least this has come with warning, forcing me to slow down and cherish every poke and prod she gives me, demanding attention. My father died from kidney failure as well, but we had some good hours the days he was in hospice as he declined.

My doctor once told me it probably is not good for my lower back to have the Daisy-weight when she sleeps on my spine, but I think I'll try to tolerate it.

Hopefully that will be a good while longer.

Addendum - 2015
Miss Daisy exceeded all expectations for a cat with chronic renal failure. She responded well to care and remained with us until Dec. 4, 2015. She continued to sleep on my legs or at my side most of that time.





She breathed her final breath resting peacefully in her bed between Christine and I at our veterinarian in Orlando where we moved in 2012.

More details on her passing are here.

Doctor Who Tackles Serious Issues

(From Miladysa I learned that today is Bloggers Unite for Human Rights Day. This is my little effort to keep with the cause. I hope it's worthwhile.)

I was not initially enthusiastic to see that the Ood were returning to this year's Doctor Who. The ancillary figures in Season 2's The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit move to center stage in The Planet of the Ood.

Whoopie, I thought. Then I settled in to watch the episode on Sci Fi where the show is airing only a little behind the BBC debut. I discovered in watching what a brilliant and timely metaphor writer Keith Temple had penned.

Subtext has long been a part of the Who universe. Much digital and actual ink was used to discuss the Prime Minister's decision to destroy an already retreating space craft in The Christmas Invasion.

Now the Ood, as we learned in The Impossible Planet, are a servant race, born and sworn to act as sort of universal butlers. In Planet of the Ood they are also standing in metaphorically for slave labor and mistreament everywhere while also indicting consumer apathy--not just in Britian, within other borders as well.

I don't think the production of a major television series could have intentionally been coordinated with the news of slavery conditions in the Asian shrimp industry revealed in an AFL-CIO study, but it certainly resonated when the Doctor and his new companion Donna (Katherine Tate) looked on a group of trapped Ood and had this exchange:

Donna: A great big empire built on slavery.
The Doctor: It's not so different from your time.
Donna: I haven't got slaves!
The Doctor: Who do you think made your clothes?

I don't mean to trivialize in any way the plight of so many around the globe. The strength of a metaphorical message can often have echoes in many ways. If it makes us all more aware consumers I believe that's a good thing. Another exchange in the episode raised relevant points:

Donna: If people back on Earth knew what was going on here…
Solana: Don't be so stupid. Of course they know.
Donna: They know how you treat the Ood?
Solana: They don't ask. Same thing.

I special order fair trade coffee, but I couldn't tell you who made the current shoes or shirts I wear. Christine has begun making an effort to study the origins of products we purchase and use, but that's a bit of a challenge.

With the current tumult in the U.S. economy, consumer awareness is the kind of thing that can quickly slide. "I can't afford to worry about such things," we might say.

Christine passed on a quote to me a long while back that sticks with me. "A purchase is a vote."

We can't afford any longer not to ask who we're voting for.

Six Unremarkable Quirks Meme

Shauna Roberts at For the Love of Words tagged me for the "Six Unremarkable Quirks" meme. These are da rules:

• Link the person who tagged you. (See above)
• Mention the rules in your blog. (These are they)
• Tell about six unspectacular quirks of yours. (See below)
• Tag six bloggers by linking them. (They shall be "it")
• Leave a comment on each of the tagged blogger's blogs letting them know they've been tagged. (OK, that will take a little time.)

And here we go:

1. I drink tea at work, and--as with most things with which I am obsessed--I do not limit myself to one type of tea. If you checked my office right now you would find boxes of about five varieties, more if you take into account that one of those boxes is a sampler with multiple flavors. I do not have any compulsive approach to the drinking of the tea. I select the flavor for the cup of the moment at random.
2. I tend to keep TV on in the room even when I'm reading, though with the volume turned down. This frequently frustrates Christine who does not understand my need for a constant input stream while waking. Usually I am tuned to CNN, and I am frustrated when they cut over to talk shows. I wish there were a "Situation Room" at night, however relevant news is not a requirement for my input. Shopping channels with live programming will suffice and I sometimes flip over to QVC or HSN for a while, but I never order anything.
3. When I become engrossed in something at work it's easy for my co-workers to sneak into my office and startle me. They love to do that.
4. I rub my brow when I'm thinking but before I speak. I'm told it's usually a sign that I'm about to make a pronouncement of some kind.
5. I like to grow heirloom tomatoes. Traditional varieties from a gardening standpoint bore me. Some day, though not this year, I hope to grow one of the varieties that stays green.
6. I have a small figure called a Mum-Ra--a robed mummy with a scary looking staff--that sits atop my computer where I write. I don't ascribe it any value or magic, but I always try to have it there.

Now, the "It" bloggers are:

• Cliff

• Avery

• Wayne

• Miladysa

• Lana

• Leon

If you read your name here before I get a comment posted, well then you've got a head start! Go!

Hillary on SNL Unfiltered

(Sorry, link on this seems to have expired.)

On NBC.com, there's some kind of annoying Flash pop up blocking the view of SNL's cold open from last night in which Amy Poehler parodies Hillary Clinton's mid-week remarks about her support base.

However, the embed code seems unaffected so as a public service for those who couldn't want on NBC.com, here's Hillary.

Adventures in Voting - Tyler, Texas Style

Well I did my civic duty this a.m. With effort. If I'd known it was going to be as much trouble, I would have shaved.

There's a mayor's race in this burg. I'm not really from around here, so it matters less to me than national and state races. There have been two mayors since I've lived here. I've never noticed them doing much, but the polling process is important, and my co-worker was supporting one of the candidates, so I figured I'd go cast a ballot.

OMFG!

We thought we'd drop in and punch the card or pull the lever or touch the screen as the case may be and then get groceries.

It's now about four hours later, and I have voted and picked up groceries, but it involved some heavy lifting. Not at the grocery store.

We should be home by eleven
We live on the cusp of a different school district, which matters in Texas, so we usually get shuffled over to another town to vote. All right usually we "early vote" at the court house. We didn't get a chance this time.

So we get our voter cards, and we go to the polling location where the road was under construction. There was not any real signage that explained how to traverse the gravel mounds and torn up lanes, so we had to drive by about three times before we figured out how to zigzag across the demilitarized zone into the parking lot.

I live in America - help me out
Not surprisingly no one was there except the poll captains.

"You can't vote for our mayor," said one poll captain.

Usually they have machines there with the appropriate ballots for all of the districts regardless of which city they've dragged you from. It looked like he had one machine today.

"I don't want to vote for your mayor," I said. "I want to vote in the city where I live. Usually I have to come here to do it."

After a little back and forth they decided to call the registrar.

"Yeah, we have two people here who want to vote, but they're not from this city. They can't vote for our mayor."

I was ready to say: "I'll stipulate to that point if we can just move on."

The poll captain got involved in a long conversation with someone in which precinct numbers, districts, road signs, and I think tea leaves and animal entrails, were discussed as deciding factors.

Finally he put me on the cell phone with the registrar.

"I'm sorry, sir, but I don't have a place for you to vote," came the voice from the ear piece. "She started rattling off some other verbiage which I interrupted with:

"WHAT?!"

Suddenly I cared more about about voting in the mayor's race than just about anything else. Suddenly it was my raison d'etre.

"I'm feeling a little disenfranchised here," I said.

Didn't we hassle these issues out in this country over the last say 200 YEARS?!

I'm thinking OK I'll have to call the newspaper, the ACLU...there's probably some sort of voter's rights league. I was discovering what I had in common with an elderly Indiana nun.

I had other things planned for today--I was even reading research materials in the car--but you know standing up for the American way of life was starting to look like it would take precedence.

"You didn't let me finish," she said. "If you can come down to the registrar's office we will give you a paper ballot."

So she did have a place for me to vote. Personally, I would have opened with that, but I realize she didn't know she was talking to Lewis Black.

Livin' in America - hit me
So after a good bye in which the poll captain defended his signage, we drove from this other-town-up-the-road back to our house where we picked up a water bill in case there was any question then drove downtown. Not a short journey, especially given our dependency on foreign oil and the consequences. You may have experienced some of that too.

So, at last we go in the courthouse and get hit by snide sarcasm from the guard at the front door. A guy in uniform further making the voting process trying. What did I wake up in a Kafka novel this morning?

Anyway, we traverse that and get up to the office where I apologized for getting worked up on the phone.

They gave us the paper ballots and explained they'd fired up their GPS system and now knew where they should have sent us. Unfortunately they didn't have a call back number for the precinct captain's cell. They also noted that they had discovered a mistake in how about three houses in our neighborhood were designated and had corrected it.

We filled in the dots like the old SRA tests, exchanged pleasantries again and ta da, I'd completed my right and my privilege.

Gee, I hope my friend's candidate wins. I've got a few issues I want to write her about.

So How Long Until the Iron Man Sequel?

As I was watching the excellent new Iron Man flick, I had the realization that I was liking it so well in part because I didn't have his origin story memorized in quite the detail as say Spiderman's, Batman's, Superman's or the Fantastic Four's. That's why I usually hate sitting through origin stories and like things like Superman II--especially the Donner cut--better.



FADE IN
I know that's not true for every viewer, but I really didn't recall all the ins and outs of how Tony Stark became Iron Man and thus didn't know what would happen next.

I had to check Wikipedia when I got home in fact for the reminder that he was in Vietnam in the early '60s as a U.S. advisor.

The story is updated to Afghanistan for the new movie, and it makes it seem immediate and intense, and since we spend the bulk of the movie with Robert Downey Jr. and not the Iron Man suit, it makes the story seem all the more human, a film not a movie, a richly textured graphic novel on celluloid, not just a comic book splashed on the silver screen.

ACTION!
When we get to the action sequences, which are plentiful, they are wonderful exclamation points to a story-driven adventure. Sure there are some obvious markers. Canny viewers will at least suspect the underlying conspiracy and even detect the inevitable mano-a-mano, but that's really OK. It didn't matter that we all knew Spidey and Green Goblin were going to have to kick each other's butts before the final real either.

CUT TO
Speaking of the final mano-a-mano, it of course had to be Iron Man against a bigger and stronger man-tank, right? It works in cool ways and is far more than the model kit vs. model kit extravaganza you might expect.

In summation, Iron Man is a pleasant surprise, the most fun I've had at the movies since the last time I went to a good movie. I saw it in digital with surround sound or some sort of stereo that made everything shake when stuff "blowed up real good" so it was a great theatrical experience, and a great argument for getting out of the house to see a flick.

I didn't wait for the surprise post-credits moment that suggests a mega-cool sequel--though the rumors are true. It is you know who as um hum. I figured that would be online--and it is--and my policy is still get the f out of the theater when people start stepping on my feet, but there was a great teaser for The Spirit, speaking of comic book characters whose origin stories are not as well known.

Addendum
The Slate Cultural Gabfest podcast--which can be downloaded for free--includes a great discussion of Iron Man and other summer movies with some interesting contemplation on the subtext of Tony Stark's weapon's merchant change of heart.

Storm Warning

I had the realization yesterday morning that generally I don't get scared often in adult life. All of the irrational fears such as the dark are behind me, and I have achieved the willing suspension of belief that danger lurks all around, even in the economy.

That occurred to me while I was in the midst of being scared. We got reports that a tornado had touched down one town over and that more were possible in the band of thunderstorms sweeping in our direction.

I heard the weatherman
The weatherman--not the one who interrupted Lost though I'm sure he hated missing the chance to cut in on The View--announced swirling patterns in a small town northeast of us, and the clock ticked on. I IM'd with Wayne a while about the bad rains he was experiencing in Chicago. He was expecting his lights to go out but not a tornado.

Christine and I work down the hall from each other, so shortly we joined our co-workers in the nervous jokes while watching weather online or on a couple the TVs in the office.

Looming disaster came in stereo and people worried about hail damage, then loved ones, their children, their pets.

We all kept joking, but suddenly we were in one of those situations where something bad seemed possible and real.

You can always go da da downtown
Downtown is a couple of miles roughly north of us, and our town has an early-warning system. The grinding alert sound started near the television station, picked up apparently on the TV studio's sound system. Soon it was broadcast from all the TVs and computers and then outside as well.

Around that time security called and told us to take precautions.

My boss had gone earlier to our main building. His office shares an inside wall with the business next door, so we all went into his office, pulled up the live news webcast on his PC and waited.

A lot of people were around the office, so we had a crowd of people on cell phones telling loved ones to get under tables.

Bugs in the software flash the message something's out there
I readied the space under the desk in case a couple of us needed to crawl under there, and others were ready to go under a small meeting table even as we discussed the projectiles my boss's collection of knick nacks might become. I was thinking I'd hate to die with an Anna Nicole head-bobber embedded in my skull. A Darth Maul figure seemed somehow more...dignified.

The air raid sirens continued and we listed to rains and winds a while, and then the weather man started noting a swirling pattern roughly over my house south of town.

I reminded myself that TV news is a little more alarmist than reality, but I worried about our cats and dialed home. I didn't expect them to answer--the answering machine picked up suggesting at least the lights were still on.

In a few more minutes the weather man came on with warnings for the towns south of us and we started filing out of the boss's office and started getting back on track with the rest of the day.

The cats were sleeping when we came home at lunch to check things out, and life was suddenly not London during the blitz any longer.

It was just a few minutes of mild fear, but it made me think both of lands where people live in much more fear at every hour and of the old multiple timelines thought experiment.

Perhaps in another life a different Me is cleaning up debris is this morning, and in another there's a Me that didn't get to carry on.

C'est la vie

Del Toro will direct "The Hobbit"

The word up at the Wired blog is that Guillermo del Toro who directed Hellboy, The Orphanage and Pan's Labyrinth and other cool flicks is going to be a the helm of The Hobbit, produced by Peter Jackson's production company.

That sounds like a good combination to me, and it's nice to hear the film is back on track after legal wrangling between New Line Cinema and Jackson.

In celebration Wired posts an old Leonard Nimoy performance of the Ballad of Bilbo Baggins. Though I know many J.R.R. Tolkien fans disavow it, I've always been fond of the Rankin and Bass animated version of The Hobbit and in particular the main title theme sung by folk great Glen Yarbrough.

Very superstitious

You ever have one of those headlines on a news aggregator that just cries out to be clicked? I can ignore the latest Jamie-Lynn Sigler née DiScala breakup report, but a headline like Penis theft panic hits city calls out, nay, demands to be clicked.

At the very least I felt I needed to know which city. Guy up the road from me ate his girlfriend after all. OK allegedly. Case hasn't gone to trial.

Turns out the penis theft reports are from Kinshasa, which apparently stands alone in datelines at least in the Reuters stylebook. Fortunately I have Wikipedia.

It's in the Congo, where superstition is still strong. Word in that neck of the world has it that witchdoctors are using ¢0¢|<-shortening spells.

The rumor was touched off in the 8-million member city-- :-) OK the population is 8 million. I guess thear are give or take four million members.

So, the the rumor got started and people believed it, and it was DISCUSSED ON RADIO CALL-IN SHOWS. !?

Aliens in the outfield
To me, at first, that seemed kind of a weird juxtaposition. Belief in a strange superstition discussed via the miracle of 20th century technology. I guess even if it were being discussed via podcast that would still be 20th century, right? Because that's when we got the Internet. And radio. Or when did Guglielmo Marconi unveil his work?

Anyway, seemed a little strange, but then again in this country we have Art Bell and we believe that aliens with big heads and large eyes abducted Whitley Strieber.

Superstition persists though it may take on a slightly more scientific form, I suppose. Used to be it was faeiries that would abduct your loved ones and replace them with an exact duplicate. Now it's grey aliens.

I guess we haven't really gone through an age of enlightenment in all circles. I have a friends anecdote to prove it.

Dialing 666
My friend reported a conversation overheard in a restaurant the other day:

Two guys at separate tables started talking about Obama. I'm not sure what sparked the discussion, but one guy revealed to the other guy that he harbored a secret supposition that Barack Obama is the Antichrist. The big one, upper case in the Associated Press Stylebook, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, moon turns to blood.

"I've been thinking that too," said the other guy. "But I thought I was the only one. I want to shake your hand."

How many copies did 88 Reasons the Rapture Will Occur in 1988 sell back in the day?

What's on the iPod? - The Darkest Evening of the Year

A friend with whom I share book suggestions asked the other day if I had read The Darkest Evening of the Year. She had started reading Dean Koontz following my recommendation of Life Expectancy.

Much to my chagrin I've owned the audiobook since, well probably the darkest evening of last year, but I hadn't listened to it yet as of the other day. So, I've set out to rectify that by bumping it to the top of my listening queue. (Now that a new Odd Thomas book is almost due.)

The whole idea of getting an iPod and an audiobook subscription was to get me to the gym so that I can listen while exercising, and Koontz is always a good choice since his tales are ever suspenseful.

An Illustrative Tail (I Meant Tail - That's Not a Mistake Just a Bad Pun)
I've been particularly interested in The Darkest Evening of the Year because he's managed in a non-didactic way to tell a story that spotlights golden retriever rescue.

Koontz, as you probably know, loves golden retrievers and sadly lost his pet and companion, Trixie, before beginning the novel. In his podcast he reported that for a five-week period after her death he could not write, and that delayed his start on Darkest Evening though he ultimately wrote it in a fast burst of inspiration.

What I admire about the novel is that it blends a typically excellent Koontz story with information on a cause about which he is passionate--animal welfare. Koontz further uses the tale to explore the human-animal bond. (Speaking of which, my cat, Miss Daisy, is on my lap--OK make that standing on my keyboard, OK make that trying to contribute--as I write this.)

A lesson for writers
The novel is an admirable use of the fictional form and worthy of examination for all fiction writers who want to add relevance to their words without, say, delving into the roles of rank and position in 19th century Victorian England.

Specifically Darkest Evening tells the tale of Amy Redwing, founder of a retriever rescue who picks up a dog named Nickie in a page-turning opening confrontation that pits her against an abusive head-of-household and prompts her to take his wife and kids under her wing.

Amy eventually runs afoul of a crazed arsonist named Moonglow and her boyfriend and other finely-crafted Koontz villains as well.

All in all it's a fine audiobook and no doubt a great read.

The Quibble
The book on tape is performed by an able reader named Kristen Kairos, but she occasionally offers some of the most creative pronunciations I've heard since Lindsay Crouse's vocalization of Ponchatrain (Pon-CHA-train) in the audio version of Anne Rice's The Witching Hour.

Is this great packaging or what? - The Mad Men DVD

Wow, is the package for the Mad Men DVD inspired, or what? The box for season one of the '60s, Madison Avenue-set drama is shaped like a big cigarette lighter.

Since almost every character smoked constantly in keeping with the era, it's a brilliant effort.

Mad Men, like The Shield and Damages, owes a debt to The Sopranos, which opened the door to programs with complex, amoral protagonists.

Don Draper (Jon Hamm) is an ad executive with a troubled present and a mysterious past, and the firm he works for goes through some interesting campaigns in the series subplots, representing such diverse clients as Nixon and Lucky Strike.

Give it a look if it sounds interesting.

What's On The Reading List - Martin Caidin

This could be subtitled books I should have read in the '70s.

As I've probably mentioned here, I'm a biblioholic. When I'm not pouring over Proust, I am constantly working to read volumes from my vast collection of paperbacks.

The Sword of Damocles
It's a little frightening now that I think about it, looking up at the stacks that ascend from the top of the bookshelf beside my desk. If they tumble I'm a goner.

But I'm gaining on the stacks, and at the moment I'm enjoying some titles acquired many moons ago, works by author Martin Caidin, an aviator turned author best known for creating Steve Austin, Cyborg, who would become the Six Million Dollar Man on TV.

The Bionic Woman remake--which I thought was a bit of all right--didn't really prompt it. I'm not sure what compelled me to pick up the title from my shelf.



My buddy and his book
My buddy had a paperback of Cyborg when The Six Million Dollar Man TV movie debuted on ABC in the '70s. We couldn't get ABC at my house. Did I mention before the local station aired mostly Homer Formby in off hours?

Anyway my buddy had a copy of Cyborg which he read back then. I didn't. Don't know why I didn't borrow it, but we had distinct protocols of ownership as I recall. We both bought the Battle for the Planet of the Apes novelization from T.A.B. the Teen Age Book Club and then raced to see who could read it first.

You couldn't find any book in the universe in those days like you can now. You were limited to what was at the drugstore or the mall or the grocery with the paperback rack where your dad was the butcher, as in my friend's case. So in 1973 I didn't get to read it or see The Six Million Dollar Man except with a lot of snow, and the world marched on.

The Writing Life
Down the road, I read an interview with Martin Caidin in Writer's Digest--the interview mentioned here, in fact--and that put Caidin on my radar. I picked up a copy of Cyborg when I ran across it used and also Wingborn, and I'm reading those books now. Cyborg first.

Wingborn's next and then I probably need to get around to the later books in the Cyborg series, slightly more intense adventures for Steve Austin than he experienced on TV, encountering Bigfoot and aliens and thwarting robberies while dressed as Robin Hood on roller skates. That was the point where I always thought the series jumped the shark. I did eventually get to see reruns.

But anyway I'm reading Martin Caidin's rather fascinating novel that introduced bionics, with an s--it's Latin or something not plural, into contemporary fiction.

A lot of the Cyborg is devoted to the treatment of Austin following his injuries while piloting a test craft, the introduction of artificial limbs and the psychological toll it all takes. Oscar Goldman is on hand to pay the six million dollars to fix Steve up. I can't think of Oscar Goldman without thinking of the scene from The 40-Year-Old Virgin where Seth Rogen looks at Steve Carrel's action figure collection and asks: "Isn't that The Six Million Dollar Man's boss? Why do you have that?"

Oscar is about like he was in the series, I guess. Steve Austin is a little different, though maybe some of the luxury features for the bionics limbs--such as self-contained breathing apparatus--were used in television episodes I missed.

All in all, I like Caidin's writing style, and Cyborg is cool sort of '70s mainstream science fiction.

Tough guy tackles sexism
Wingborn, which I haven't started, is Caidin's '79 novel focusing on Kate Brandon, a skilled pilot who struggles against sexism and other challenges. Looks like it's also a promising page-turner.

After that I may need to look to Book Mooch for more titles for Caidin, who died in 1997. I guess that defeats the purpose of working through my collection, but he was a prolific author and I really want to get around to some other works including his "Messiah Stone" series and a title called Aquarius Mission.

Check out his bibliography here.

What's on The IPod - The Ten Cent Plague

Speaking of horror comics, as I was in the last post, there's a new and really good book about the history of the four-color pages called the Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu. Everyone from Slate to the New York Times has talked about it so I know this is a news flash to all.

It's practically required reading for comics aficionados. I've certainly learned a lot listening to the audio version, authoritatively narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. (Listen to a sample at Audible.)

I first read of Fredrick Wertham and his book Seduction of the Innocent in the introduction to Jules Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes, purchased for its plethora of Golden Age reprints when I was a kid.

My parents--who lived through the '50s but missed out on the comics hoopla, probably focused more on concerns of Communism and atomic war--were appalled by the discussions and the suggestion Batman and Robin and Wonder Woman might have subtext on homosexuality and bondage respectively.

Historic Detail
The Ten Cent Plague offers great details on the history of illustrated narratives with quotes and insights from some of the early creators before it gets around to its examination of Wertham and the gasps about EC style horror comics.

I'm a casual student of comics history, but as I mentioned the book offers up great details and tidbits I'd never encountered, everything from tales early newspaper syndication to facts about Will Eisner, Bob Kane and William Gaines of Mad Magazine fame.

A few things I probably should have picked up before now:

• Eisner's The Spirit--one of my favorites--had a lookalike rival named Midnight. That he had a different name was unique. Rights not being what they are today in the early days of pen and ink storytelling, you might have rival newspapers each running their own version of The Yellow Kid or the later tales of errant immigrant youth The Katzenjammer Kids.
• Wonder Woman's creator William Moulton Marston really did have a thing for bondage and he had a wife and another woman living with him.
  
• M.C. Gaines and his son William didn't get along all that well.

There's much more to learn as Hajdu follows the post war evolution of true crime stories, self-regulating boards and early cries for restraint in a day when everyone, not just kids with broken XBoxes, read funny books.

Free Comics Get the Bump

Updated - see below

Roland turned me on to WOWIO, a site for advertising-sponsored ebooks. It includes quite an array of comics as well as novels and non-fiction.

Basically after you sign up and prove you're you for the advertisers by one verification method or another, they generate .pdf files with a full-page ad up front. I used a permanent e-mail address to qualify myself and that took about a day.

The eproducts are customized with your name, so they know if you passed the book on, kind of like those screener DVDs from the Academy, I suppose. You can download three items a day, by the way.

I was pleasantly surprised by the comics selection. Moonstone even has a few titles in the mix including a couple of its graphic novels featuring The Phantom--the ghost who walks in purple--and an adaptation of the original Kolchak novel/movie.

Bump
My discovery in the mix is a comic book adaptation of a film called Bump. It's apparently in the works with Tobin Bell slated to star. Apparently he's the only one cast so far, but they're working on that according to the official website.

The comic, from The Scream Factory, is a beautifully drawn horrorfest. At first I was thinking, "Well this is another The Hills Have Eyes," but things twist and turn pretty quickly with a scary prologue focusing on a killer reminiscent of the real life Ed Gein who also inspired Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Then we jump ahead 30 years to a group of people who wind up trapped in the killer's farmhouse where he's not dead and neither are his victims.

I suspect reading the book on-screen as a .pdf is a plus especially when you get to the action portions where I got a sense of movement, scrolling upward as large, flashing panels revealed chases and scares.

I was a little dissatisfied with the ending, but all in all a nice--though be warned: gory-- four issues.

I've also snagged a few other titles so far including a Moonstone adaptation of The Mysterious Traveler, a new spin on the old radio series giving the traveler a role more significant than host, and a series called Carnival of Souls that seems to be more than an adaptation of the classic early indy horror flick with waltzing zombies. I should mention there are also some '50s classics in the mix. EC-flavored if not actual EC titles, and some of the artists represented include Jack Kirby and Joe Kubert. You'll also find, I think, the complete run of Clive Barker's Tapping The Vein, comic adaptations.

And I haven't even gotten around to checking out the mystery novels yet.

Addendum
(Posted 4/10/08)
Troy Brownfield from The Scream Factory dropped by to comment earlier in the week that more Bump casting news would be coming soon. He wasn't kidding.

Young Indiana Jones himself Sean Patrick Flanery will be playing Bret and Hellraiser's Ashley Laurence will be Elaine. They are now attached to the film according to The Scream Factory's My Space Blog. They're a troubled couple who get stranded in the horribly haunted house where much of the story takes place.

Chuck is Gone

It seemed like for a while, when I was a kid, just about every movie or every other movie that I wanted to see starred Charlton Heston. Hard to believe he's gone.

He made a lot of science fiction/horror films in the late sixties and early seventies, so there was a steady run of his pictures on television, representing a great artistic contribution to the cinema of the fantastique.

If it wasn't Heston as Taylor in Planet of the Apes, or as The Omega Man, he was a future cop discovering mass deception in Soylent Green--it's people, you know. Or it was Heston dealing with an Earthquake, a sniper, a sunken sub or a killer mummy.

Later he would move to TV work but still turn up in the occasional genre outing including the Lovecraftesque In the Mouth of Madness and as a Nick Fury-like boss for Ah-nahld in True Lies.

Though it's not genre, it has a high cool factor and I also absolutely love Touch of Evil, in which Heston was a stand-up guy, backing Orson Wells as the director when the studio was iffy. His acting turn in that is a bit odd, but it's a great movie with two great scenes -- the uncut opening tracing the path of a bomb and the suspenseful denouement as Heston tracks Wells as the chief baddie with a listening device, struggling to stay in range.

I'd have met him if I met him
I missed out on the opportunity as a reporter to cover him when he came to Louisiana to appear for a religious group in the early '90s, but I did manage a six-degrees-of-separation moment once upon a time.

I interviewed Mariette Hartley upon the release of her autobiography. She had worked with Heston in a film called Skyjacked in which he played the pilot on a flight plagued by a mad bomber.

Somehow he came up in our conversation, and she talked about how warm and friendly he was in spite of his on-screen persona and his role as Hollywood's top conservative.

It's always nice to hear stars are also nice guys, and it is of course, sad to see Chuck go. At least we'll always have those great scenes to remember:

Pushing reporters out of the way in the oft parodied Airport 75.

Stretching a hand up from the crowd in SG: "Soylent Green is people!"

Handing over the vital bottle of his blood to save mankind in Omega.

And of course:

Kneeling in the sand at the base of the statue of liberty in POA shouting: "You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! Damn you all to hell"

Snakes on a Tile

Ironically, I was watching a Samuel L. Jackson movie. It was Freedomland, but you know, six degrees of Kevin Bacon and all that. The movie ended and I got up and looked over at our back doors, a pair of French doors or anyway two doors with windows in them and apparently a microscopic space at floor level.

Protruding from said small space at the base of the doors was a giant anaconda, I mean it was the size of the one that menaced Jennifer Lopez in Anaconda and more recently those actors you'd never heard of in Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid.

OK, maybe I exaggerated a little. I thought at first it was an earthworm. We'd had a long day of rain and the ground was saturated and that tends to drive earthworms to concrete or--in the rare case--ceramic tile.

The only thing that made me wonder about species was that it seemed to have the tiniest hint of a head. Earthworms are pretty much the same on both ends. Not that I could see both ends . The end without the head was still between my doors.

Since it was possibly a snake I decided not to pick it up with my hands and worried my cats might be about to discover it and pounce.

I turned to find those fierce predators were watching me from over the back of the sofa with timid eyes seeming to say: "It's a snake, you deal with it. We've got your back. From over here."

So, I started weighing options, flight not being actually viable.

• Kill it? It didn't seem to have the head of a pit viper meaning it was probably harmless and also beneficial for something. I'm not up on all of the things for which snakes are beneficial, but generally on Animal Planet they indicate you should override those Genesis instincts that man "shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel." Thy being snakes. Also killing it would probably make a mess and it was 10 minutes until the first new Daily Show in a week.
  
• Get a broom handle and try to loop the snake over that, get the door open and hurl broom and all into the night? Too complicated.
  
• Capture? What do you capture a snake in? Drinking glass? Yeah, right! Jar? Mop bucket!

With the cats rooting for me, still from the safety of the sofa, I acquired a broom and mop bucket. I saw them do a similar thing with king cobras once. On TV. Apparently instead of zapping you with neurotoxin cobras would really rather go into a hole.

So I put the mop bucket on the floor in front of the snake, and this tiny little forked tongue flicked out. OK, definitely not an earthworm.

I edged the bucket a little closer while readying the broom handle for a mild poke. The snake seemed to take notice of the bucket. For the first time since apparently slithering through the crack in my door it moved.

OH GOD! IT MOVED! IT'S A CONFIRMED SNAKE AND IT MOVED!

Apparently not wanting a ride in my bucket, it rather quickly turned around and went back through the crack in the door.

I guess they really are as scared of you as you are of them.

Having had enough of a mother#!%$^&*+$ snake in my mother#!%$^&*+$ den, I applied weather stripping in the form of duct tape, fixer of all ills. "Elegant," Christine would say later. She managed to sleep through the entire thing even though the bedroom door was open and I may have exclaimed aloud a few times: "There's a mother#!%$^&*+$ snake in my mother#!%$^&*+$ den."

"I didn't want a hideous pit viper getting in while we were asleep," I countered.

"It was probably a common garden snake."

"It wasn't in the garden."

Although hopefully that's where it is now, and I need to make a trip to Ace Hardware. I probably was ordered to address the weather stripping issue at some point, once upon a time, but I uh may have forgotten. What am I, Ty Pennington?

Lost: Via Domus

Someone got to say it first on at least one message board, but it's a good point. Lost Via Domus, the Ubisoft video game based on the series is a little like the whole Nikki and Paulo story arc.

Like the series of Lost paperbacks, the Exposé episode and those immediately preceding it in Season 3, Via Domus introduces a new character aboard Oceanic Flight 815 who's quickly off on his own adventure, wending his way through the island's familiar landmarks, interaction with the main characters and his own cryptic flashbacks.

That new character is you as you play first person non-shooter, and fairly quickly you discover you're an amnesiac photojournalist with at least one thug on your tail. Your objective is to unlock your memories about a girl who periodically appears Christian Shepherd like--or Kate's horse-like--in the jungle and in your memories.

I didn't think I'd really like the non-canonical story, but for me, it all works pretty well and it has some definite pluses.

Story pace
What is it like, 100 days we've had spread out over 3 1/2 seasons? Much of the familiar plot line material is playing out around you in the game. You're busy wandering in caves or the jungle while the first encounters with the Others are taking place, explosives are being acquired from the Black Rock, the hatch is being opened and Sawyer, Jin and Michael are taking off on a raft.

That peripheral exposure while you're being sent on mystical vision quests by Locke and getting shot at in the jungle, really gives you a feel for how fast everything is supposed to have transpired.

In the midst of your quest, you also have to take a tour of the Swan hatch, a great walkthrough experience because it lets you see how everything's laid out from the computer room where you have to enter the numbers at least once to the kitchen and living quarters. You get to browse the books but not the album collection, but you can't have everything. There are only so many megabytes available, right? (The authenticity of the game with some cool in-game clips is disccused in this IGN video featuring the developers.)



The #$%@&*^%* Spots
I've found two #$%@&*^%* portions of the game so far and I think I'm just past the midsection. A lot of players discussing Via Domus in forums seem to agree with me.

There are the #$%@&*^%* electrical panels in which you have to modify fuses to either reverse electrical flow or disperse it appropriately. I don't know what should be inferred from the fact that Oceanic Flight 815 and the hatch utilize the same basic panels. I solved a couple but went to a walk through for the others because trial-and-erroring fuses had a dangerous level of stop-me-from-playing potential.

The other portion that's a little frustrating is an area where the difficulty is achieved by repeated incursions of the #$%@&*^%* smoke monster. Enough! you want to say after a while.

Still and all for me if not for the Doom generation, Lost: Via Domus is a cool adventure and puzzle game and it's a fun if not required experience for the Lost fan. Hopefully it will tide me over until the return of this season.

Maybe by April 24 I will have managed to get past the #$%@&*^%* smoke monster.

Lost in Space and in Hulu

Hulu.com, the NBC/Fox venture to bring tons of free shows to the web, has been talked about for a while and I discovered last weekend it's live. That was about the last time I was really productive in off hours come to think of it.

I've watched the occasional episode of Lost while sitting at my computer, The Office on Netflix, or NBC.com, but I haven't made the transition to really watching a lot of web TV. The web connection's in the office not the den, and I'd have a guy come out or string a wire in the attic myself or figure out one of those wireless hubs. Anyway...

Hulu with it's friendly interface and limited commercial interruptions makes for pretty good office-swivel-chair viewing for me. Is it the tilting point? Perhaps. Slate suggested recently it may be the future of television and the edge of new social networking. Viewers will be able to collectively vote on the best episode of The Simpsons ever and things of that nature.

It's certainly like we've always heard TV would be some day. A menu of the programs we want, all on demand.

For the genre fan
There are many choices for the science fiction fan and some for the horror fan, as well as those who want to catch up the brilliant satire of American Dad and The Simpsons.

My favorite offering is Lost in Space. I was a Lost in Space kid. When it went into syndication and started airing on our local TV station when I was in first grade, I counted the days until its kickoff and watched every afternoon without much of a discerning eye.

I was a kid so the later, garishly colored and hopelessly goofy episodes didn't really bother me, and in those days generally they seemed to air shows in kind of random order. I was a little surprised one afternoon when something that seemed like a news show came on in the Lost in Space time slot. After a few second it became apparent it was the first episode, introduced in documentary fashion.

Hulu offers the slightly more serious and somber Season 1 including the first full pilot w/out the robot or Dr. Smith. That was later recut to introduce a then-sinister Dr. Smith, foreign agent and stowaway on the Jupiter 2.

If you're not nostalgic, there's still much to be found. Battlestar Gallactica episodes -- new, classic and '80--are available.

There's also Sci Fi's Invisible Man, he of the quicksilver rage; the new and just slightly underrated Bionic Woman featuring the co-star of BBC's stupendous Jekyll as Jamie Sommers; Flash Gordon; The Pretender; I Spy; Chuck and many others.

There are also interesting things to check out. I haven't watched yet, but in addition to Lost in Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is included, and the episodes on Hulu include a Harlan Ellison-penned installment "The Price of Doom." The producers must have changed his original because it's credited to Cordwainer Bird.

Mystery fans can also find much to enjoy including the unbelievable first season of Murder One and on the horror front there's the old Night Gallery though it's not the best package of shows you could hope for from that series that frequently adapted tales from the pulps including Lovecraft's "Pickman's Model."

If you have a speedy web connection check it out.

A few words about promises

I had a longer post here earlier. I'm wearied by some of the back and forth political discussion so I'm capping it all here except for these links.

The next post will get back to the matters like which episode of "Lost in Space" currently on hulu.com is best.

Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by E.F. Schumacher

Living Wealth Better Than Money from Yes Magazine

A Good Song

When I was a reporter, I was apolitical.
I have always been cynical. Even as a young man.
I'm not so young anymore.
I'm not a reporter these days.

I live in a world torn by war.
In the wake of a mortgage crisis fueled by greed.
In a country where corporate lobbyists write laws.

Here's a song I heard somewhere.

Addendum

Will.i.am on why he wrote the song.

Books I Should Have Read in the '80s: Kane by Douglas Borton

Do you have books waiting around for you to read them? Doesn't everybody?

Kane by Douglas Borton has been on my shelf, or actually various shelves in various residences since it came out in 1990, so technically it's not an '80s book but it is part of that '80s horror wave.

I bought it new because I was intrigued by the premise and had liked Borton's Manstopper, but in spite of its great premise I've just kept not getting around to it until now.

But it's a great read. I'm not finished but I trust it will all come together well. It's about a mysterious stranger who wanders from the California dessert into a dying town and decides to speed the process along.

Only about 25 people still live in Tuskett, Calif., once known as Desolation. After a brief pause to get his bearings, the mysterious Kane starts picking off the population. Why was this never made into a movie? Could have been a great, gritty documentary-style chiller.

The novel offers some great characters along with page-turning chills. It's broad, small town cast of characters reminds me of the flavor of Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot.

If it's on your shelf but neglected, pick it up, or look for it and see what you think.

Does my forehead feel a little warm to you?

I think a bout of hypochondria is finally starting to wane for me. I should be back to feeling invincible again sometime soon.

I guess it's a product of getting older and being exposed to information about health screenings, early detection and warning signs. I know it's a good idea to get checked out for things you might have, but it's psychologically hard -- on me at least.

My uncle's, sister's grandfather's cousin had what so you want to do what?
Checking for possibilities is probably a good thing. It's preventive. You'd be surprised how many older doctors hate the word preventative, which at least in online dictionaries is listed as a variant of preventive. I've had them open conversations with it. "If you ever write the word preventive you should do it correctly." Kind of reminds me of this broken record caller we had in the newsroom.

"You people aren't capitalizing the word pope," he told me once.

"We do if it's in front of a name like John Paul. Or Paul. Just not if it's a stand-alone noun," I said. Couple of weeks later about ten of us in the newsroom were sitting around talking because there was no exciting breaking news to cover, and it turned out everyone had the same conversation with the guy.

I don't know if there's a preventative measure for that kind of behavior, but I do work on crossword puzzles when I'm not digressing. I also sometimes use the less-preferred variation on a word just to be rebellious.

People can have heart attacks at any age
Anyway I can't say that avoiding screenings is a good idea, even if you're pretty sure there's nothing wrong with you, but I do think it's important to try and think there's nothing wrong with you.

It makes living in the now easier. Get too caught up in "what you might have" and it discourages long-range planning as well, which also is not a good thing.

What you might have also makes a lot of people say: "Well, anything's possible, but I think it's unlikely you're having a heart attack."

Christine said that once when I was 30 and had had coffee, a Mountain Dew and the notion that "30-year-olds have been known to have heart attacks."

If 30 year olds can have heart attacks, I can imagine a whole lot of things older guys can have and there's this thing called the Internet where you can read about all kinds of diseases.

I Went to the Renaissance Fair and What's on the iPod Because of It

It's been ages since I've been to a Renaissance festival. I was overdue. Huzzah!

We went for the jousting Sunday at The Four Wind Faire and stayed for The Brobingnagian Bards, an Austin-based duo performing Scottish and Irish drinking songs with the period instruments and the upbeat humor you hope for in such venues.



I was happy to discover they had a website, one member has a podcast and they're well represented on iTunes. They're veterans of science fiction conventions as well as festivals so there are Jedi tunes in their repertoire as well as many an Irish tune.

My favorite song, being a cat owner, is Marc Gunn's solo effort Danny Boy, to the tune of Londonderry Air, sung by a cat owner roused in the wee hours by his feline friend.

Reality Check

A pretty good movie called The Night Listener is on cable right now. It stars Robin Williams as a fictionalized version of Armistead Maupin upon whose novel the film is based. In it Williams is plunged into the quest to solve an emotionally wrenching mystery behind a literary hoax.

It's based on a true story involving a book called A Rock and a Hard Place, a purported memoir, that actually saw publication though in the film the book never does.

The revelation last week that another memoir, Love and Consequences, is really a novel should not come as any great surprise, I suppose. It's a new literary tradition and is on the heels of a similar revelation of a few days ago that Misha Defonseca did not really escape Nazis to be raised by wolves as she claimed in the 11-year old memoir Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years.

It would seem the reality craze that has polluted commercial television has spread to publishing and the reading public. One article I read about Love and Consequences noted publishers will look at a memoir quicker than a work of fiction, I suppose because readers are seeking to find the thrill and emotion that they suspect only a true story will bring. The kind of love and emotion they see on say The Bachelor I suppose. I loved it in the defunct, scripted series Studio 60 that Aaron Sorkin had one of his characters call a reality development chief "vice president for illiterate programming."

Ironically, these literary scandals would seem to confirm that fiction can deliver powerful emotional experiences. Editors and initial readers clearly have found rich reading experiences in the hoax narratives mentioned above and those such as A Million Little Pieces. Believing them to be non-fiction, millions have been engaged and enthralled.

Perhaps publishers and readers (some readers) have just forgotten what the novel can do and how it can strike at the heart.

I'm not defending hoaxers but fiction. I believe James Frey did try to sell his book as a novel first. Wasn't it the same story when he started claiming it was true?

I believe truth matters and if a book is claimed to be true it should be. I've had friends who said it didn't matter that A Million Little Pieces was not true, it was still a good read.

If it was a good read the wrenched the heart, why not publish it as fiction? OK, it's about a few dollars more, I know.

What if we could just convince readers to remember that often a novel can deliver more in the way of truth, that it can be richer and engaging with it's portrayal of multiple characters and inner lives and sometimes metaphor can speak more than words.

King Lear was kind of based on a true story, but it's kind of the writer's embellishment and not the movie-of-the-week aspects we hang on to, and I watched The Night Listener with interest, even though it was based on a novel and not a memoir because it explored a perplexing case and gave a potential explanation of the hoaxer's soul.

A good book doesn't have to be non-fiction. It just has to be true.

Addendum

This is a great piece from Slate on this topic.

Lost: Flashes and Tears Before My Eyes

(Spoiler warning: This post reveals information found in the Lost episode "The Constant" and thus spoilers to the mysteries of the show thus far.)
Just a few days after I noted that Christine sometimes thinks I get choked up too easily at TV shows, comes "The Constant," one of the best episodes ever of Lost ever. It was penned by the show's producers, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse.

I've already acknowledged the reunion of Rose and Bernard was a hanky moment, but as the wicked cool Lost Diary that chronicles each episode movement by moment summed up this installment's final seconds:

9:58 -- Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring ...

9:59 -- "Penny?" -- Desmond

10:00 -- If you're not choked up right now, I'm sorry -- we can't ever be friends.

In a mythology-rich episode we discovered some characters such as Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick) are unstuck in time, and we discovered that his long-lost girlfriend Penny is a requirement for his survival-- time-hoppers need a "constant" present in past and future to prevent total meltdowns. Whoa! And Penny's dad was bidding on a ledger from the Black Rock, the ship somehow deposited at the center of the Losties' island.

As his Billy Pilgrim-like escapades began to threaten Desmond's life, we discovered Desmond needed at least voice contact with Penny to survive. "1996 Desmond, get a phone number where you can call Penny in 2004!"

In true Lost "everything happens for a reason" fashion who should be on board the "rescue" freighter where the affected Desmond found himself gradually goin' south but former Republican Guard communications officer Sayid Jarrah--who, by the way, doesn't need a gun, buddy! Sayid was able to fix damaged radio phones and get Des hooked up on a long distance call with none other than Penelope Widmore.

What a fabulous storytelling arc to convey all of the information the writers had to impart. Deep science fiction concepts wrapped in a love story.

So I'm sitting there watching and thinking "Christine's going to chide me if I cry. Christine's going to chide me if a I cry" and then I look over during:

9:58 -- Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring ...

9:59 -- "Penny?" -- Desmond

and tears are streaming down Christine's cheeks.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is writing. Bravo!

Holy Smoke! I'm a low ranking nerd

I don't know which is worse, being a nerd, which I freely admit in my profile, or being a low-ranking nerd.

I have a new PC at work and I was setting up the default search on my Internet Explorer Browser. (Hey, it's what they gave me. I have Firefox as well.)

Setting up the default requires you to do a search for the word TEST. And I ran across a nerd exam, which I promptly had to fill out.

Here's what I got:




There were a lot of questions about the periodic table, which I contend are not necessarily definitive.

But anyway, that's my ranking and it's now official.

What Was the Question Again

Questions can make for interesting challenges in fiction writing. Yeah that's great if the hero wins the throne and takes his place after the battle. But what if he didn't take the throne after he wins the right? That'd be another story...

Questions make interesting challenges for life as well. The Table of Free Voices facilitated via Dropping Knowledge sought to pose 100 important global questions.

Last night Christine pointed me to the Vicki Robin blog, and a post about a new effort to rank the important questions of our day.

Via a Survey Monkey Survey everyone is invited to vote on top questions in order to boil those down to 10 which will be discussed during Conversation Week March 24-30.

Since we live in interesting times, it seems a worthwhile way to spend a few online minutes. Just mulling the questions is a good exercise.

The link to share if you're of a mind to is http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=vZIiOzEV1pL0LV_2f17vLcLQ_3d_3d.

Tearing Up

Christine says I tear up too easily at TV shows and movies. You be the judge. I tear(ed) up when:

• James T. Kirk is stealing the Enterprise to save Spock in Star Trek III and James B. Sikking tells him: "If you proceed with this you'll never sit in a captain's chair again," to which Kirk, without hesitation, responds: "Warp speed, Mr. Sulu." If you're a TOS fan, you know what I'm talking about. Captaining a starship is everything to Kirk but he says f*** it to save his friend.
  
• Jody in Family Affair works tirelessly to save Mr. Osaki's ill bonsai tree because he believes its health will determine whether or not Mr. Osaki survives his journey back to Japan to see his family a final time. Jody pulls the tree through though all hope seemed lost and finally gets a letter with a photograph of Mr. Osaki back home.
• The allied POW team chooses not to stage their planned escape during the soccer game halftime in Victory with Sylvester Stallone, Pele and Michael Caine. Instead they decide to play the Nazi team to the game's fruition in occupied France. They win with some play that includes magnificent moves by some of the world's best soccer players in small roles. The Paris crowd is so thrilled that they rally, shouting "Victorie, victorie, victorie," and tear down the stadium walls, thus facilitating escape for the heroes anyway. (I guess I should have said spoiler warning if you havn't managed to catch that film on cable sometime in the past 25 years.)
  
• The moment I realized in Brother Bear that the mother little Koda is looking forward to seeing again is the same bear Kenai killed. Christine says even Monty the Cat who was at my side as I watched that was teary eyed, though he claimed: "No, no there's just something in my eye."
  
• When Bernard and Rose were reunited in Lost. Christine teared up at that one too.

Those are just a few, but I guess they're illustrative.

Lessons From My Reporting Days - Editors Never Make Mistakes

Once, back when I was a reporter, when Reagan was president, the editors came into a meeting, with a spool of paper. We had long continuous feed rolls that fed into dot matrix printers in those days.

The city editor rolled the spool out along our conference table so that it stretched its full length.

"These are all the mistakes that have been made in the last two weeks," he said.

And by errors, he meant things that were actually wrong i.e. words spelled wrong, but he also meant deviations from AP style.

Sacred Texts
Moses was given the Ten Commandments in one hand and the Associated Press Stylebook in the other, or so it seemed.

The book is like one of many style guides that tells how to do things for the sake of consistency so that everybody isn't doing their own thing as far as a.m. vs am and the like. It would be print anarchy without the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, The Chicago Manual of Style or... ah ah ah AHHHH AHHH ah ah The Associated Press Style Book. (One-nine are spelled out. After 10 you go to digits. STAB are the street names you can abbreviate. St., Ave., Blvd. and so on.)

The spool wouldn't have been nearly so long without AP style errors. AP style was sacrosanct. Except when it wasn't.

"This is a case where our style supersedes AP style," the editors would say, usually when you called them on a point like whether or not to capitalize Antichrist. Did I mention I covered religion? Antichrist came up a time or two.

My first real life lesson in how editors are never wrong came long before that, however. I got in this pie fight, you see.

On the Pie Front Lines
Candidates for city judge and people in the media were pitted against each other on the Fourth of July in a pie eating contest the first year I was a reporter.

Everyone sat at a set of tables, and there were a bunch of pies with really thick cream toppings. I'm sure there was a time limit, but that became irrelevant because there were radio guys there.

The world was a more interesting place when you had local radio guys.

I got hit in the head with a banana cream.

From one direction.

Then I got hit from the other, and I wasn't the only one getting hit. There was pie to left of me, pie to the right of me...the air in front of me was thick with pie.

I gave as good as I got, coconut on a morning news guy, Boston cream on a candidate. When it was over everyone was wearing pie, and I did a half a league, half a league back to the newsroom to write of my adventure. A poet warrior!

They ran the story with a picture of me throwing pie on the front page. On the jump they ran a picture of a couple of candidates. The cutline--we journalist types called them cutlines, you probably thought they were captions--identified candidates.

One was the winner, the only guy who kept eating when everybody else was in battle. The other guy was just sitting there, but the cutline said he participated in the pie fight.

His supporters started calling around noon.

"He did NOT THROW ONE SLICE OF PIE! I was there! He is being falsely accused."

I didn't read the freakin' paper in the morning before work, so I had to find it and see what it said. I didn't remember giving any specifics about who threw what.

"Hmm," I thought, when I found a copy. "Wonder who wrote that?"

It was an editor of course, in an effort to polish my sparkling prose.

"I didn't write that," I told the city editor.

"Let me check on it," he said.

He talked to the editor who'd rewritten the line and came back.

"He said it was in the body of the story."

Now, in the story I noted that the guy who won was the only one who kept eating. I knew that because he won. They gave him a ribbon or something.

I didn't know who else was fighting because I was getting hit in the head with pie from about, let me see, one, two, three...there was that one guy from TV...five..NINE directions.

But because the editor had extrapolated from "ONLY CANDIDATE A KEPT EATING" that everyone else was fighting, it was my fault he changed my cutline and made it wrong.

The Moral of the Story
I didn't get in any real trouble. The falsely accused candidate laughed when we called him about it. It was after all A FREAKIN' PIE FIGHT. Sure it wasted food, but that meringue would've melted long before those pies could have been shipped to anyone hungry.

I walked away from the situation chastised and much wiser.

Think about it when you watch the news or read the paper. Reporters and editors are just humans.

Lisa Kalvelage, "Murder One" and Situation Ethics

I can't help getting a little choked up every time I hear Pete Seeger's "My Name is Lisa Kalvelage." It's a musical transcription of 1966 remarks by the real Lisa Kalvelage, who had been a child in Hitler's Germany. She explained at a rally against the use of napalm that she had come to understand responsibility and "mass guilt."

When asked about Hitler's actions in Germany and where she was and where her parents were when various events occurred, she had no good answer and was initially denied an exit permit from Germany.

She stood at the protest May 25, 1966 that delayed the delivery of napalm and stated she was there because she didn't want to be asked by her children and children's children where she was when key events occurred and what she did about them.

These are certainly points that resonate with me in this, our present. I think about that especially as torture is discussed in so many corners.

I'm no fan of coddling terrorists, but reportedly, and I've only read this in a blog, not the Congressional record, my Congressman said he was OK with torture if it saved lives.

That's situation ethics of course, a classic case of the end justifies the means.

It's a path I don't think we need to go down as a people.

In the old and brilliant legal mystery series Murder One, Stephen Bochco had his lead character Ted Hoffman tell his younger associates: "We don't treat murderers well and give them fair trials for the murderers. We do it because it makes us better people."

As I sit and contemplate it all, I'm compelled to ask, is torture what it takes to feel safe?

Sadly, it's not always only terrorists who get tortured. Sometimes it's just cab drivers like Dilawar, focal figure of Taxi to the Dark Side.

Like Lisa Kalvelage, I've felt "forced to start thinking on this theme."

Dilawar was 22 years old when he died in 2002 in U.S. custody, guilty apparently of picking up a fare, of working at the best job he could find.

When I was 22 I worked as a reporter because it was a job that let me write.

Where was I, and what was I doing December 10, 2002?

I don't remember. But I was safe.

Is my life worth more than Dilawar's?

Bad Karma

Everyone encounters difficult people. I once heard a minister note that the difficult people a minister counsels are difficult everywhere.

They have to:

• go to stores
• to banks
• come by newspaper offices to place announcements about public events
• work somewhere and thus be co-workers.

We used to have a couple of people when I was at the paper who had such hair triggers everyone went on alert when they walked in. And everything they ever needed posted as a free announcement went wrong. No one set out to do it, but everyone tried so hard to please them that something went South. Sometimes even the corrections went wrong.

$#!+#{^0$ I Have Known
I had the realization the other day that I know several people these days who do the same things, and yep, things always get messed up.

Recently I discovered myself smoothing over a rift that was years old, a misunderstanding that came after a blow-up that kept some materials owned by one party out of reach for years that could have been put to good purpose.

At the same time we had another incident that went wrong in a domino-like fashion because allowances had been made for another person whose passive defiance had become legendary. Turned out the rule that was waived to accommodate was there for a reason.

Notes to self:

• Karma is indeed a biatch.
• Don't be a jerk, or things get screwed up for you.
  

I just thought it was funny - Sarah Silverman on Kimmel With Damon

I didn't catch it live on Jimmy Kimmel, but a friend pointed me to it online, and I just thought it was funny. It's bleeped but beware the language and see if you LOL. Frankly I thought Matt Damon's knowing smile was great.