Joke of the Day

From Kristen Schaal:

What’s the difference between a fertilized egg; a corporation; and a woman? (Beat.) One of them isn’t considered a person in Oklahoma! BOOM!!!

Fucking hilarious.

At the Mercado

The closest grocery store to me is a small Mexican place called Azteca. It's a tiny place, maybe six aisles, in a tiny building. And in addition to the produce, the dry goods, the meat, the dairy, a bakery, all the things you'd expect from a grocery store, it has two restaurants, a check-cashing place, a clothing store, a little desert shop, a cell phone kiosk, and a key-maker.

A few years ago, the local Safeway became an Avanza. Now it's a Mercado. When it was a Safeway, it was a grocery store that had a bank and a pharmacy. The bank and pharmacy are gone.

The cart corral has been turned into a hair salon. The niche where the vending machines sat is now a key-maker booth. Back where the pharmacy used to be, that's now separated into a clothing shop on one side and a CD shop on the other. The bank? It's a jewelry store now. Oh, and they have a little kiosk where they sell Mexican sodas and those little orange wheels.

Now I'm not up on all the details and the business arrangements, but I'm pretty sure that all of these little shops and vendors are NOT run by the Azteca and Mercado companies. Azteca and Mercado rent the space out, of course, but these booths and kiosks are operated by the owners.

I doubt there's much money to be made selling duplicate keys or duritos, but at least they're making their own way, and more importantly, have an institution (the store) that gives them the space to do it.

When I was talking the train, I often wondered why RTD didn't engineer space for vendors at every station. I mean, why not? Leasing out space to a vendor would help pay the overhead. The streams of people every fifteen minutes would provide the vendor with lots of selling opportunities. Thirsty riders would definitely buy a cup of coffee or a newspaper. So why not do it this way?

I have no idea. I'd be curious to see if the idea was even considered.

Occupy Uranus

I'm on record as stating that though I share the Occupy people's concerns, I think their methods are crap. I also kind of thought these protests fizzled out last year, but they're still going? (Um...no real surprise there, considering holding signs and yelling at people accomplishes exactly...nothing.)

In this video, I sympathize with the reporter. He's live on TV doing a story that has nothing to do the Occupy protests, but they see the lights and the camera and think "free publicity!" Of course, one of the signs says "Fuck the Police," which --hey, I'm all for fucking the police-- but you really think your "Fuck the Police" sign is going to stay on the air very long?

After they ruin his shot and they're packing up, the main instigator cries, "Woo, yeah! We're making change!" Bullshit. You're making enemies.

If you wanted to make change, get a retail job.

Choosing to Suck

I'm much calmer in my old age, but sometimes I want to grab certain people by the lapels and scream, "Look, you dumb motherfucker."

In this case, I'd like to do that to Salman Rushdie, who's complaining about plans by the Justice Department to break up publishing cartels:

"Anyone who thinks that fair pricing that allows authors to make a living is a cabal or cartel system is deep in the grip of Napsterism."

He goes onto explain that the Napsterism, named after the free music website Napster, is the belief "that it's OK to acquire people's work for almost nothing."

You always hear about this "How can I make a living?" crap. Well, there's the way you chose --ripping people off, basically-- and the other way, which is convincing people to give you money.

I don't know if Rushdie has noticed lately, but nobody reads anymore. Newspapers are dying. Bookstores are closing up. Libraries are being closed. Literature? There's a literature scene, sure, a niche of booknerds geeking out over books. But in the larger culture? If it's not a movie, no one knows about it, and if they know about it, it's going to be made into a movie.

We're a visual and aural culture now, not really a literary one. Maybe you can go back, but I don't know. I think we're going to have to accept that the written word is NOT god. That all this stuff we type and print out and get people to read, in the end...it's just not worth very much money.

Not unless you option it by a studio or get picked for Oprah's book club.

It is okay to get people's work for almost nothing. Almost every book I've ever read has been picked up second-hand for almost nothing. Dime novels. Penny dreadfuls. Pulp fiction. Goddamn newspapers sold on street corners, a nickel. Seats were cheap at the Globe Theater when Hamlet debuted. Monks copying pages of the Bible by hand, every one of them vowing poverty. Bards and poets, passing down the legends by rote.

Do you think Homer got a residual every time someone recited The Odyssey?

As this whole debate goes on, copyrights and literature-as-commercial-product, I've become more and more annoyed at this idea that you deserve to make money from what you write simply by virtue of having written it. I've been writing this blog for years. Every word has been copyrighted. Haven't made a dime. If I tried to package it and sell it to someone, no one would buy it. My blog is literally worthless.

Here's how business works: You want my money? Convince me to give it to you. I like to buy books. Seriously. I rate it up there as one of the great joys of life. But I don't actually have an infinite amount of money to spend. So I must be cautious and careful in my choices. If I spend $10 on your book, not only can I not spend that on another book, but I can't spend that $10 on the light bill, snacks, or toothpaste.

So while I appreciate the need to make a living, maybe you might have to make it from someone else.

But wait, say you drop it down to $5, no...better yet, $1. I might be able to part with that.

What do you think ole Salman Rushdie is going to say? This is what he'd say: "Are you insane? If I charge a dollar for this book, I'll have to charge a dollar for every other book."

Yes, you can tell him. But you'll sell more books.

"I don't want to sell more books," Rushdie will say. "I want to make more per book."

Okay then. If that's the choice you want to make...

And that's the thing, I've come to realize. That it really comes down to choices. Publishers could accept that their bubble has popped. Like the housing market, there's been a drastic revision of value in what they're pumping out. They could accept less profit in exchange for higher sales.

But they don't want to. They want to stay on the gravy train as long as possible, with their cartels and their "fair pricing" and their "making a living" bullshit. (Salman Rushdie is wealthy. Google says he has a net worth of $15 million. If that's "making a living," I'm barely scraping by...)

I see this with the theater chains I work with. They're investing millions of dollars per theater converting them to digital projectors, and almost nothing on the people who run their operations. It's a choice, a business choice, and I think one of the reasons we've had this whole revision of value, this economic catastrophe, these last few years is that a lot of industries have been doing this, choosing to put out an inferior product because it's more profitable.

That's no way to run a culture.

Why Can't They Get Horror Movies Right?

I watched the remake of The Thing this weekend, although it's more of a prequel, and while I enjoyed some of it, I think it's a failure of a film. The interesting thing about the John Carpenter version. which this one attempts to set up, wasn't really the gross and horrible things that the Thing did. It was the characters grinding up against one another, the paranoia, the mistrust.

This one toys with that stuff for a scene or two, but it's more interested in freaking you out with flapping tentacles and chest-mouths. Scenes of the Thing chasing people, you know, they can get boring after a while.

And here's where they messed up. The character of Kate Lloyd, played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead. They made her a scientist, then didn't really give her much to do. Oh, sure she figures it all out, but they're all scientists. Any one of the Norwegians could have figured it out.

In my script, Kate Lloyd is one of the pilots. She and Joel Edgerton's character are flying in some specialists and get stuck at the base because of a storm. The Norwegians dig out the Thing, take it back to the shed. They want to fly it out, but Kate sees the block of ice and freaks out. She refuses to put it on her helicopter. That's when the Thing breaks out, and things proceed pretty much like you have it in the movie...but you know, better.

The Brawl

I think it would have been hilarious to stand about a block away on Colorado Avenue around last call on a rowdy Colorado Springs night.

Reports say:

At 1:40 a.m., witnesses called 911 saying as many as 25 people brawling on the 2400 Colorado Avenue outside an Old Colorado City bar.

I'm thinking there were two opposing groups. The Niners and the Sons, maybe.

Gas Meter Project

Don't ask me why...actually I have an idea...but Xcel Energy is going to be moving my gas meter. And it's apparently a pretty involved process. They're going to have to dig a trench along my house and tear up the street, it looks like.

Now that's an inconvenient trench. They're going to have to dismantle the lame brick walk-way, slice through my poorly-maintained garden bed. (That bed is the reason why I cut down the trees. Can't plant things in the shade of junk trees!)

This is gonna be fun!

Navajo Country

Mountains are sacred all over the world, but for the Navajo they're not just sacred, they form a kind of spiritual boundary around their culture. As long as the Dinetah stay within the four sacred mountains, everything will be alright.

That's a drastic over-simplification, but hey...I'm no expert on Navajo religion. But I do have Google Earth, so I mapped them out. Two of them happen to be in Colorado, Blanca Peak and Mount Hesperus.

Click to embiggen.

My Take on Birth Control Pills

I've lamented over the years the fact that the right wing in this country are as dishonest as they are mean. The Rush Limbaugh-Sandra Fluke incident pretty much sums it up.

Sandra Fluke was the only woman who spoke in front of a Congressional panel called "Lines Crossed: Separation of Church and State. Has the Obama Administration Trampled on Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Conscience?" Republicans invited 10 men from religious institutions to speak and no women. Democrats said, "Hold up," and invited a woman. She couldn't make it, so they got Fluke.

Now for having dared to speak out against this "religious liberty" nonsense, Rush Limbaugh called her a slut. Yeah, you've seen the news, so you don't need me to summarize it.

But,as this execrable op-ed shows, it's not just Rush. I invite you to peruse a piece called "In Defense of Slut-Shaming." (Note: It was written by a woman.)

Check the first paragraph:

Sandra Fluke, an abortion activist masquerading as a law student, spoke before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee on a very important issue: the right for college students to have endless amounts of sex while someone else pays for their birth control.

Now if you're like me and you care about the truth, this kind of shit has got to bug you.

Even if you disagree with Fluke, you're an asshole if you deliberately lie about what she was saying. She wasn't arguing for "the right for college students to have endless amounts of sex while someone else pays for their birth control." She was arguing for birth control coverage to be required in insurance plans.

I know, I know...The wingnut stands on his chair to say, "That's having someone else pay." No, it's not. When your insurance company covers your brain transplant, am I paying for it? Nope, you paid for it yourself with your premium.

Of course, this article gets worse:

Abortion, birth control, and promiscuous sex are the cornerstones of the modern feminist movement.

Oh bullshit. You ask me, the "modern feminist movement" (whatever that is) is motivated by a deep resentment of men and a general fear of penisary contact. (Some feminists can't even handle phallic symbols!) And yet, in this formulation, they can't get enough deep dicking? C'mon, man. Who are you trying to fool? Oh, that's right...the same suckers who thought there were WMD in Iraq, the same dupes who want to see the long form birth certificate.

My take on this whole subject is simple: Denying contraception to people who want it isn't a boon to freedom. It's the opposite of freedom. Including birth control pills in an insurance plan doesn't make them "free." Catholic hospitals and pharmacies are not just religious institutions. Filling prescriptions is not a religious activity. "Religious freedom" doesn't mean you get to bring religion into any context you choose. Indeed, religious freedom means there must be certain contexts in which religious institutions have no say. (All the dumbasses freaking out about Shariah law in Oklahoma could tell you that.)

In short, ALL of the arguments you're hearing from Republicans, Rush Limbaugh, and the legion of slut-shaming assholes who parrot their bullshit are weak.

This Is Why Asians Rule the World

The thieves are so clever they almost get away with it.

Stuff

A) Mitt Romney was hoping you'd be talking about how he clinched the Republican nomination. (He didn't.) Rick Santorum was hoping you'd be talking about he's still in it. (He's not...not really.)

And yet around water coolers across the country, the topic of conversation will be Peyton Manning leaving the Colts. Where's he gonna go? Is he gonna play again?

Super Tuesday, indeed.

B) I got my paws on one of those Martina Cole novels I was musing about after watching The Take. It's amateurish and trashy, but also kind of brilliant in its own way. As she says in the video below, "People either love them or they can't read them. They find them too shocking to read." Well, then, I'll probably love them.


C) Yesterday definitely felt like a Monday. Got woken up by my neighbor's car alarm. Abandoned my purchases at Wal-Mart because the line was too long. (I still need to get milk!) Had to take a miles long detour because of some construction. Got stuck at a non-functioning traffic light that I eventually ran when it wouldn't turn green.

And then, after all this, I had to go to work and coax the know-nothings of America into action. That actually turned out to be the easiest part of the day.

D) Fox canceled Terra Nova and all the nerds cried. They should have saw it coming. I watched the first episode, wasn't hooked, and the specific thought I had was, "Fox is canceling this shit for sure." Fox has this tendency to spend too much money on shows that aren't instant hits, and of course that makes no business sense. Save money, build an audience. F/X does it. Ask them how.

Speaking of saving money and building an audience, I think that's what's been going on with the whole Community going on hiatus thing. I didn't watch the show until it went on hiatus. Then I started hearing about all the Community fans in mourning, and blip-blip, it appeared on my radar. Now I've seen every episode, have the first two seasons on DVD, and am eagerly awaiting their return on March 15th. (I even know the date!) Audience...built.

The saving money part? They have a show with seven principle characters, one of whom is a former movie star. The guy who plays the Dean (Jim Rash) just won an Oscar for writing the Descendants. How do you make sure they don't band together and pull a Friends, start demanding a million bucks per episode a piece?

Put em on hiatus, send them the notice. This cord? It can be cut at any time. Make your show. Just don't spend Terra Nova money and everything will be alright.

Robbery-rama

You know, when I read stories like this, rather than being terrorized, it makes me think, Man, you really could get away with it for a while...

The Worst Sheriff in America

Is at it again...

He's investigating the president's birth certificate, which is dumb for a whole host of reasons, the chief one being that the state which issued it has vouched for its authenticity.

This part is awesome though:

Arpaio has said he took deliberate steps to avoid the appearance that his investigation is politically motivated. Instead of using taxpayer money, the sheriff farmed it out to lawyers and retired police officers who are volunteers in a posse that examines cold cases. Other posses assist deputies in duties that include providing free police protection at malls during the holiday season or transporting people to jail.

He's using volunteer posses instead of state resources and he thinks that will avoid the appearance of a political motive? Bullshit. If this was a valid issue, why not use state resources?

Oh yeah, because that would be a misuse of state resources.

Maricopa County is going to have a big job cleaning up the Sheriff's office when Arpaio is gone. Good luck with that, idiots.

Corrosion of Conformity

It may be too early to comment, but I picked up COC's new record last night and while it's better than I expected, it's no Deliverance. They've been a man down since Pepper Keenan committed to Down, but they brought drummer Reed Mullin back into the mix. Mike Dean's on vocals and Woody still rips out the solos.

But there's something, I don't know, awkward about it. Some of the riffs don't blend. It's plenty heavy, which I'm grateful for, but I still think they should have convinced Pepper to commit a month or two to the project.

Here's a crappy video of The Moneychangers. (Seriously MTV? You gotta muffle it so much?)

Get More: Corrosion of Conformity, The Moneychangers, Music, More Music Videos

Tim Tebow the Great

You know, I don't know if the guy is going to be a great quarterback. And yeah, much of this comes from a naive belief in ancient hokum, but put all that aside...

Tim Tebow devotes a lot of time and energy to hanging out with sick kids he doesn't know. Maybe he needs an ego boost, maybe he gets some kind of charge out being idolized by these kids, but I doubt it. I think it's more likely that he's just a decent, generous person. It's our fault we put him on a pedestal, but at least he's wearing it well.

Rollin' Rollin' Rollin'

I don't pay attention to pro bowling that much, but I have gone bowling the past two Sundays. The notable thing about this vid --besides the weird "Who do you think you are? I am!" outburst-- is the score. I'm thinking my Uncle Henry could go pro. He's rolling 200+ games with some regularity...

Fired

I'm not really surprised, but then I kind of am...but a guy got fired today. I don't feel bad for him. I think he kind of wanted it. I kind of envy him actually.

Before he got the job, he was unemployed for a long time. I have no idea how he was living, but unemployed...briefly employed...and now unemployed again? That's scary to a guy like me with various financial commitments, but man...wouldn't that be liberating?

Granted, the financial commitments actually provide me with some benefit, like a house and a truck and money to spend, but then again, there's a place I gotta be five days a week. I'm not looking at days stretched out in front of me just full of potential like he is. I mean, that's awesome. Who doesn't want that?

The Help

I haven't seen the movie so can't comment on its qualities or lack thereof, but I can say without a doubt that Melissa Harris-Perry's criticism of it has no merit.

Here's the summary:

She said that the "real stories" of black domestic workers were far more compelling than the stories told in "The Help," and involved political activism and resistance --both of which were met with terror.

She accused "The Help" of whitewashing history, saying that, for many black women, the reality of their employment was "much closer to a horror film than a lighthearted drama. Just ask those who found themselves at the mercy of Jim Crow justice, at the end of the lynch mob's rope or a burning torch...for black maids, the threat of rape was always a clear and present danger."

Such an artless, ungenerous critique.

For one, The Help is fiction. It's not history. It's only loyalty is to its characters and its story, and despite the very specific milieu in which its set, it should aim to be universal. It should be the kind of story that, with a few little tweaks, could be about a European countess and her chambermaids, or the Queen Pharaoh and her slaves or the Princess Alluria and her Martian housebots. That's just storytelling, man. The milieu isn't the story. It's the seasoning.

Does Ms. Harris-Perry really think The Help would be a better story if it wallowed in the "real stories" of black maids in the 60s? Maybe, but that would be a different story. If Harris-Perry thinks that story should be told, she should write it herself.

A Leader Speaks

Mitt Romney gave a speech in Detroit the other day. No one cared.

Who's bright idea was it to hold this speech in an almost empty stadium? This crowd would fit in Auditorium 3 at the local multiplex but they said, nah, let's do Ford Field instead. All those empty seats make Mitt's graying temples really pop.

I'd call it an embarrassment, if it wasn't an embarrassment that's so richly deserved.