Miscellaneous Musings: Steven Maginnis's Weblog

Wednesday Night Television

2012-02-01T12:07:00.001-05:00

ABC now has four consecutive sitcoms on Wednesday nights that don't rely on a laugh track. And the newest of the lot, "Suburgatory," may very well be the best new sitcom of the 2011-12 season.

As the title suggests, "Suburagatory" (on at 8:30 PM ET, after "The Middle") sounds like just another piece of entertainment depicting how much the suburbs suck. But it's more than that. The suburbs here are not a Levittown on Long Island or in Bucks County, Pennsylvania but a fictional upper-class Westchester County (New York) enclave. The perspective of this upper-crust suburbia is not that of a cynical punk rock burnout but that of a savvy high school girl wise beyond her years who has lived in Manhattan and knows there's more to life than an upper-class subdivision.

Tessa Altman (played by Jane Levy) is the high school girl, uprooted from New York City by her architect father, George (Jeremy Sisto) who decides to move to Westchester County after finding a box of unopened condoms in Tessa's drawer. The lure of illicit behavior has convinced him to move himself and his daughter to suburbia so that Tessa can have a better life. Actually, Tessa is worse off, cast in a sea of shallow phonies and complacent conformists she has nothing in common with. Her father George is hoping she'll be able to reach maturity in a safer and more comfortable environment, but it turns out he's the one who needs the comfort of the suburbs. He's a single dad who can't relate to his daughter and is learning by experience how to raise a teenager. And, it turns out she's savvier than he is; he's still finding his way in the world, trying to navigate his way around this alien culture Tessa can see right through. He's also having a hard time finding true love; Frasier Crane had better luck with women by comparison.

As Dallas Royce, a seemingly shallow housewife with an absent husband and who only hints to George that a love interest is possible, Cheryl Hines gives a sense of substance and warmth underneath her character's plastic persona. Even more interesting is the friendship between Tessa and Lisa Marie (played by Allie Grant), a nerdy but sweet girl who's embarrassed by her family. The various twists and turns that ensue - along with Tessa's attempts to adapt to or at least cope with her surroundings (with the pain of having to deal with Dallas's glamour queen daughter Dalia) are fascinating.

So, yes, I'm a fan of this show, which replaced "Better Than You" in ABC's 8:30 PM ET time slot. And after several trial-and-error program schedulings, it looks like ABC finally has a solid Wednesday night lineup. This includes "Happy Endings" at 9:30 PM Eastern (after "Modern Family"), a sitcom that's definitely an acquired taste, plus the one-hour drama "Revenge," with Emily VanCamp, at 10 PM Eastern. I haven't seen that, but it appears to have succeeded where at least three ABC dramas in that same time slot have failed in as many years.

I watch the first three shows in ABC's Wednesday night lineup regularly, and that's actually more shows than I watch on NBC for the whole week. I believe I'm not alone in that respect.

(Aside: NBC is debuting a new series produced by Steven Spielberg (who famously graced NBC with the series "Amazing Stories" in the eighties) about staging a Broadway musical, Smash, which, I'm led to understand, is basically a scripted version of talent contest shows. It's about a musical based on the life of Marilyn Monroe and stars Debra Messing - Debra Messing - as one of its writers. Debuting this coming Monday at 10 PM Eastern, it displaces Brian Williams' newsmagazine "Rock Center," which will go against "Modern Family" and "Happy Endings" at 9 PM Eastern on Wednesdays. Next Wednesday: an interview with yet another woman who claimed she was seduced by John F. Kennedy. It's official: NBC is beyond desperate.)

To The Moon?

2012-01-31T13:25:00.001-05:00

The Florida Republican presidential primary is today, and I'll be glad when it's over. Not because it'll bring an end to the sniping and snarling from Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich for awhile - that's going to resume in time for Saturday's Nevada caucuses - but because after Florida, it'll be the last we hear of Newt Gingrich's cockamamie scheme to colonize the moon in eight years' time. He only proposed it in Florida because of all of the jobs there connected to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and even after that, he's still behind in the polls.

Gingrich's 2020 vision of a permanent lunar base is a relic from a time when Americans thought that they could accomplish anything if they banded together (and we did make it to the moon, of course), and when space exploration hinted at a future dramatically different from what existed in the 1950s and the 1960s. It was expected that one day we'd be driving around in flying cars, vacationing on Mars, and eating capsules instead of real food. The only thing that came true is that we don't eat real food anymore.

A permanent lunar base, once entertained by both the Americans and the Soviet-era Russians, is a spectacularly bad idea, because it diverts resources toward establishing an unnecessary habitation project and away from doing things like trying to house people and fight poverty here on earth. I understand that Gingrich is suggesting a scientific base like the one at the South Pole, not a Tomorrowland-style city, but if the goal is to expand knowledge of the sciences, we can do it more efficiently with robotic vehicles on the moon, like the ones we sent to Mars in the nineties.

It's easy to understand Gingrich's obsession with a lunar base, since his politics and policy proposals border on megalomania. Harder to understand is Neil deGrasse Tyson's interest in the proposal. Neil deGrasse Tyson is the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, and he's actually enthusiastic about the idea. His objection to Gingrich's proposal is not to the idea itself but to Gingrich's failure to explain how to do it or why to do it. But Tyson thinks it would be wonderful if we had such an ambitious project like a lunar base that would encourage young people to engage in and study the sciences (and a lunar base would necessitate study of biology, chemistry, physics - pretty much the complete works). Never mind that it's impractical. He laments that we haven't done anything like that in nearly forty years.

Hmm . . . forty years . . . the early seventies. So, what happened in the early seventies that changed our big-picture outlook? How about the Arab oil embargo? The sudden shortage of oil that resulted from American support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War reminded us that limits exist not only in the mind but in the real world. Once we had trouble running our tech-happy civilization on earth, colonizing the moon or Mars and trying to begin a new civilization elsewhere seemed pretty silly. True, we did get some amazing technological breakthroughs from NASA's space exploration programs, such as the Internet and ready-mix foodstuffs, and I am grateful for a computer network that has allowed me to write this blog, but why should I care about Tang?

Besides, the space race with the now-defunct Soviet Union was an extension of the lamebrained Cold War psychosis that led both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. to spend lots of money to demonstrate whose economic system was better. When the Cold War ended, it turned out that neither side won. Both the U.S. and post-Soviet Russia were flat broke.

If we're going to have a massive technological project to expand our capabilities and grow our economy, I'd obviously prefer that we focus on something that can give us real value. I'd prefer we focus on building a national high-speed rail network - and build one that's accessible to everyone by 2020, not build one that's accessible to four out of five Americans by 2035, as President Obama's pathetic piecemeal approach would do. The only problem is that even Obama's modest plan has been repeatedly attacked as a government boondoggle (and Florida's own attempts to build high-speed rail lines keep getting canceled by Republican governors), so if Obama proposed something bolder and more dramatic, opposition to such a program might be even more hostile. And no one seems to be interpreting Newt's moon plans as anything other than the boondoggle it is. Romney has said if he ran a company that did business with NASA and someone came to him with that idea, he'd fire him. Good for him.

But Romney - no big thinker - would as President probably fire a Transportation Secretary who proposed a national high-speed rail network as well.

Flickr In Trouble?

2012-01-29T21:28:00.001-05:00

I was in New York with my friend Clarisel yesterday, and we got to talking about our various media endeavors. She told me that Yahoo, which owns Flickr, is losing money, and so it's possible, however unlikely, that Flickr could be terminated and anyone who posts photos there could lose them. Clarisel has ten times the number of pictures I have, and I have a lot, and she's already considering which ones she hopes to save.

Let me stress and re-assert that neither one of us has any firsthand knowledge of any possible shutdown of Flickr. This is pure conjecture and speculation on our part. And, if not for a technical difficulty in posting of photos I made tonight (January 29) on Flickr, I wouldn't have even considered such a possibility.

I uploaded three pictures, and it took forever for Flickr to process them due to an error on the page. I never got the message saying that it was finished processing; I simply checked my photostream in another window to see if they took. When I saw that they did, I closed the upload page and added descriptions and tags on each individual photo - i.e., the hard way -in the other window. This led me to suspect one of two things: Flickr is struggling all of a sudden and could be in serious trouble, or; something is wrong with my computer. As I depend on Flickr for photo sharing and publicizing my amateur photography, I find myself in the unenviable position of hoping it was my PC.

Okay, not really - my PC is only nine months old. But it would be terrible if Flickr suddenly went away, despite the problems I've had with it of late. (Sometimes the Facebook feed doesn't work.) Be that as it may, Yahoo is trying to do something about it. Yahoo has made a three-month version of its Pro service option, which includes unlimited uploads, for $6.95, with the cost for the two-year version (which I have) reduced to $44.95 from 47.99, in an effort to get more customers who have otherwise balked and longer-term subscriptions. (The one-year subscription remains $24.95, which is much less economical than four three-month subscriptions - do the math.) But with other social network sites gaining popularity for photo sharing, and with Flickr remaining mostly unchanged with few new features added over the years, it's in danger of becoming the photographic equivalent of MySpace.

My experience with Flickr tonight notwithstanding, Flickr has remained fairly solid, and that very staidness may help buy time for Yahoo while it tries to figure out how to keep Flickr relevant . "Flickr is a reliable photo sharing and storage service," writes Tom Warren of The Verge, "but it could offer a lot more, potential that we'd like to see Yahoo invest more in."

I don't mind if Yahoo adds more features to Flickr or not; I'm happy with the way it is. I just hope they can at least get the upload screen to work right again.

Winter: So Far, So Good

2012-01-28T21:23:00.001-05:00

It was fairly warm in the American Northeast today, and it's been mild overall this January. Don't tell me there's no climate change! Seattle had a devastating snowstorm earlier this month, the very kind of storm New York is used to seeing in the winter. We in the Greater New York area have been getting mostly rain, the same kind of winter weather you normally see in . . . Seattle. (Alas, New York hasn't adopted Seattle's grunge rock culture, but that's another post.)

The only snow we Tristaters have gotten this winter so far is the snowfall of last Saturday (January 21), which barely amounted to three inches and melted within almost as many days. So far we've had a manageable winter in the Greater New York area, and while I hope it continues to work out that way, I know the weather could turn nasty and cold any time now.

Meanwhile, the forecast around her calls for temperatures in the mid-forties for the coming week. I'll take it.

Christie's Gambits

2012-01-27T20:33:00.000-05:00

Chris Christie is suddenly looking very foolish. Faced with resurgent Democratic majorities in the New Jersey state legislature, the state's supersized governor is proposing a popular referendum on gay marriage to skirt the issue and keep it off his plate. See, if the New Jersey legislature passes a bill legalizing gay marriage, Christie will feel compelled to veto it to burnish his social conservative credentials for a possible future presidential run, and his veto could be overridden. So he's proposing that it be put to a popular vote, insisting that voters should have the final say on an issue that he says is better left to the people than to the politicians.

Since when did voters - who usually cast ballots out of self-interest, which is why politicians appeal to their self-interest in the first place - ever vote to expand the civil rights of others? New Jersey actually had the extension of suffrage to women on the ballot in 1915, and the all-male electorate soundly defeated it - a result invalidated by the Nineteenth Amendment five years later.

Speaking of self-interest, Christie only wants something put to a popular vote if he thinks it will benefit him. It's all about strategy. Certainly a public referendum on gay marriage will spare him the responsibility of taking a stand on the issue. But having an early Republican presidential primary in the state and opening up the possibility of his candidate, Mitt Romney, faring poorly - nope, can't have any of that. So Christie had the New Jersey presidential primary moved back to the first Tuesday following June 1, in tandem with the primary elections for state and local offices. Genius! Romney was expected to have clinched the Republican presidential nomination by April. So, by moving the presidential primary back to June, Christie could endorse Romney and ensure that he would win New Jersey . . . because by June, Romney was expected to have token or even non-existent opposition for the nomination. Also, Christie could enjoy the same position of a neutral politician when the primary occurred, because Romney would already be the last man standing and Christie would never worry about having to deliver the state to his candidate. He wouldn't have to do any heavy lifting in his own state . . . and Christie, from the looks of things, obviously hates lifting heavy things. It seemed so clever . . . until Newt Gingrich surged in South Carolina and turned Romney's lead in the polls leading up to the Florida primary to a dead heat, turning the whole race upside down.

More recently, Romney has bounced back, and now he's likely to win the Sunshine State's winner-take-all primary. But other battles - including the Nevada caucuses on February 4 - await Romney, and Gingrich doesn't look like he's going to quit the campaign even if he loses Florida. This race could go all the way to May. . .or even June.

Genius!

Music Video Of the Week - January 27, 2012

2012-01-27T10:33:00.000-05:00

"Beauty Queen Sister" by the Indigo Girls (Go to the link in the upper right hand corner.)

"Work It" Out

2012-01-26T10:46:00.000-05:00

You know a TV show is spectacularly bad when it airs on ABC for only one or two episodes, because even NBC, which no one watches, has aired shows that have lasted longer than that. But, as it happens, "Work It," a sitcom about guys who dress as gals to get jobs in a bad economy, was canceled after two episodes, ironically putting everyone involved with that show on unemployment.

An attempt reworking the formula that produced "Bosom Buddies," the cross-dressing sitcom that introduced us to Tom Hanks, "Work It" turned out to be the most offensive sitcom in recent memory, with many critics finding it too broad (no pun intended) and aiming too much for cheap laughs. As someone who remembers "Bosom Buddies," I don't recall that show being either broad or cheap. And in these more sensitive times, the sensitivity and relative subtlety of the earlier show could have come in handy for the producers and writers of "Work It." The show offended homosexual and transgender activists as well as Puerto Ricans, when one Puerto Rican character said that his ethnic background gave him a natural ability to "sell drugs" for a pharmaceutical sales job. It also offended the unemployed by making fun of jobless folks who have to humiliate and degrade themselves just to put food on the table if they're even lucky enough to work.

The funniest thing about "Work It," apparently, was that ABC was promoting it as a "new hit comedy" after its initial airing. So much for truth in advertising - there was nothing accurate about that claim.

ABC attempted to present sitcoms that explored (explored? explored? a pretentious word) men holding on to their masculinity in a feminized America, but the network's efforts with three such shows fell far short of the mark. Tim Allen's "Last Man Standing," according to Star-Ledger TV critic Alan Sepinwall, has morphed into a clone of his earlier (and inoffensive) sitcom "Home Improvement" after it tried to be a latter-day "All In the Family," with Allen's character very misogynistic and mildly racist. But anyone who's seen Tim Allen knows that he has more in common with Archie Andrews than Archie Bunker. "Man Up!" was canceled. (I covered that show already.) And now "Work It" is gone. It all makes sense. Pussy-whipped men are not funny, and the idea of men complaining about being pussy-whipped (especially when they're really not) isn't funny either.

Anyway, ABC, having inexplicably shelved "Cougar Town" despite its solid and solidly loyal audience, is bringing it back and inserting it in the 8:30 PM Eastern time slot on Tuesdays, in place of the two failed sitcoms "Man Up!" and "Work it" and following the now appropriately titled "Last Man Standing," beginning February 14. Meanwhile, it appears that the alphabet network finally has a solid Wednesday night lineup. I'll comment on that in another post.

Union Busting

2012-01-25T11:22:00.000-05:00

I couldn't watch President Obama's third (and maybe last?) State Of the union address last night, but I understand the base of the Democratic party was pleased. That's not necessarily a good thing. The base of either party swoons too easily to partisan presidential rhetoric.

Anyway, the President, as I understand it, demanded that Republicans work with him on restoring fairness to the tax code and have the wealthy pat their fair share, along with urging action on immigration reform, tax credits for companies that invest in factories in America, and clean energy incentives. Republicans responded by saying - angrily, of course - that the President was was just trying to divide people along class lines and stuff big government down our throats.

So what did I miss?

Anyway, Obama hoped to sharpen the definition between what the Democrats stand for (assuming they stand for something) and what the Republicans stand for, and show that the Democratic vision of America is more populistic and more equitable, with the hope of getting people to start debating over just what kind of country we want to live in.

Hmph. I know what kind of country I want to live in, and this ain't it. Because every public amenity I support that makes any country worth living in - public medical insurance, high-quality surface mass transit, world-class public schools, a federal department of artistic and cultural affairs (which Quincy Jones supports), and public broadcasting that's more like the BBC (the Best Broadcasting Corporation) than PBS (Pro-Business Soapbox, Pathetic Broadcasting Service, Pretentious Blowhard Shows) or NPR (Not Particularly Riveting) - isn't likely to become reality any time soon. Nor is any other legislation I support - tougher gun laws, re-introducing the Equal Rights Amendment, overturning Citizens United. I know what I want to United States to be like, and it isn't. And realities that have nothing to do with Democratic politics or Republican politics but, rather, American thinking will continue to prevent my America from materializing.

Goodbye, Gabby

2012-01-23T10:29:00.000-05:00

It should have become apparent to anyone who realized just how badly wounded Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was in the January 2011 shooting in Tucson that she would eventually have to resign her seat. So it was no surprise when Giffords announced that would in fact quit the House of Representatives this week to concentrate on her ongoing recovery. She was able to put the announcement in her own words, literally - she made the announcement in a video release - so the woman who has been an inspiration to many has a very good chance of recovering fully. And she's vowed to remain active in politics regardless.

Alas, she won't be an inspiration to pass meaningful gun control legislation, which has a very good chance of getting defeated in Congress - if anyone has the gall to even bring it up. (Every time a horrendous shooting occurs in this country - which happens frequently enough to feel like an everyday occurrence - Chris Matthews asks the panelists on his Sunday broadcast show if gun control legislation has a chance of even getting considered, and his panelists respond with an imitation of Marcel Marceau in Mel Brooks' Silent Movie - "No!") This isn't so much a partisan condition as it is an American condition - a peculiarly and insufferably American love of firearms.

Am I suggesting that Americans are peculiar and insufferable? You can draw your own conclusion.

On the other hand . . .. Sarah Palin - one of the most peculiar and most insufferable Americans in recent memory - has seen her stature reduced a result of the Giffords shooting. In the 2010 midterm election campaign, Palin posted a map of Democratic House districts targeted by Republicans, depicting the districts with rifle crosshairs over them - one of them was Giffords' district. After the shooting, she gave such a mean-spirited defense of her actions in the wake of charges that she incited violence that her rising star dimmed quickly. So some taste survives here, enough to not only lessen Palin's visibility but to also eliminate the Minnesota Twins (Tim Pawlenty and Michele Bachmann) from the Republican presidential nomination contest early.

Who Won?!?

2012-01-21T23:53:00.000-05:00

Newt won the South Carolina primary?

This cancels out what I said about him a week and a half ago.

And Santorum actually won the Iowa caucuses?

This cancels out everything I've said about Mitt Romney since the year began.

Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy ride.

Countdown To Exiting

2012-01-21T12:36:00.002-05:00

It's about a year from Inauguration Day. Could this be Barack Obama's last year in office?

The campaign for the South Carolina Republican presidential primary, taking place today, has taken numerous twists and turns. Newt Gingrich had turned the tide against Mitt Romney only to face new questions about his fidelity in his previous marriage - and then turned it into an asset by throwing the issue back at CNN's John King during a debate after King brought it up. Mitt Romney still won't release his tax returns, thinking that Republican voters don't care about how much money he makes and confusing that with their interest in how much money he pays. President Obama must be watching this with glee, hoping that the Republicans protract their nomination fight to the point where the eventual nominee is so weakened and bloodied, it will be an easy victory for the Democrats in November.

No, it won't. And the Democrats could still lose. Some pundits have noted that the eventual winner of the Republican presidential nomination could be toughened up enough to take the fight to Obama hard, just as Obama was toughened up by his long fight against Hillary Clinton for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. A more apt comparison might be the internecine warfare between Walter Mondale and Gary Hart in the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination contest that eventually weakened Mondale in his campaign against President Reagan that fall, as both Mondale did and the eventual 2012 Republican presidential nominee will go against an incumbent. But even that comparison has problems. Reagan was overseeing an improvement in the economy and renewed faith in the country's standing in 1984. Obama is currently overseeing little of either, and his mealy-mouthed campaign commercial touting his clean energy initiatives in response to a Koch brothers-funded onslaught is the textbook example of starting off on the wrong foot.

One year from now, the winner of the November election will be sworn in, and don't be surprised if Obama is an outgoing President swearing under his breath. His approval rating is at 44 percent, the economy isn't growing fast enough in 2012, like it was in 1984, the chances of Democrats regaining the House and holding onto the Senate are statistically difficult, and one of these Republican candidates could indeed very well be in a strong position going into the fall campaign. The clearest evidence that Obama could (will?) still lose is that his opponents obviously want to get rid of him more than his supporters (just as obviously) want to keep him.

Music Video Of the Week - January 20, 2012

2012-01-20T10:25:00.000-05:00

"Do It Again" by the Kinks (Go to the link in the upper right hand corner.)

Power To the People

2012-01-19T11:31:00.003-05:00

My, oh my, it's amazing what a little populism can do to the sociopolitical landscape, isn't it?

Yesterday's protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act were more successful than anyone could have imagined. While the latter bill remains on track for a vote in the Senate this coming Tuesday, the demonstrations against the bills - from street protests in Manhattan to blackouts of various Web sites - caused several House members to drop their sponsorship of the Stop Online Piracy Act.

Meanwhile, out in Wisconsin, petitions with a million signatures calling for an election to recall Governor Scott Walker like a defective Pinto were turned in at the state government accounting office in Madison - almost twice the 540,208 signatures required. Walker says he's confident that he can survive a recall election because 80 percent of the state's population didn't sign the petitions. Bear in mind that about a third of the people in Wisconsin who didn't sign the petitions couldn't have signed them, as they were too young to vote. What Walker conveniently forgets is that he got in to office with 1,128,941 votes out of only 2,133,244 votes cast, or 52.25 percent of the vote, between him and his Democratic challenger, Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett. If everyone who signed the petitions votes in the recall election, Walker stands a pretty slim chance of holding on to his office.

Meanwhile, public opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline on environmental grounds - particularly the idea of the pipeline on environmentally sensitive grounds - caused President Obama to cancel the project. The Republicans in Congress wanted a decision on the pipeline, which would originate in Canada and carry dirty tar sand oil to Texas, by February 29. President Obama, having decided that not even an extra day in February allowed enough time for a proper environmental assessment, just said no. Republicans complain that Obama missed out on an opportunity to create more jobs and lessen our dependence on foreign oil (even though tar sand oil from a pipeline would make its way out of Texas to the global petroleum market).

Hey, I have a great idea on how to create jobs and lessen our dependence on foreign oil: Build more mass transit networks, especially high-speed train lines!

Which returns me to the unpleasant topic of Scott Walker. Walker canceled Wisconsin's high-speed rail project and is shifting transportation funding to highways. Yes, he has oil refinery and highway construction interests to repay for funding his gubernatorial campaign in 2010, but it turns out that Walker is not a big fan of mass transit in any circumstance. He's opposed expanding it since he began his political career in the Wisconsin state assembly.

These victories are not the last word on any of these issues. Anti-piracy legislation still has broad support in Congress. Scott Walker hasn't been recalled yet. And TransCanada, the company that wants to build that pipeline, can re-apply for permission to build it. In each case, battles, not wars, were won. But these wins all prove that populist movements can succeed. And you don't have to camp out in a park or dress in a silly costume to make your point - and a lot of Occupy Wall Street protestors did both.

(Note: Occupy Wall Street protestors may sometimes resemble "Let's Make a Deal" contestants, but there's a difference between the two. "Let's Make a Deal" contestants are known to win! :-p )

My Special Announcement

2012-01-18T09:48:00.003-05:00

(This post is an act of protest. I'm showing you what my blog could look like if SOPA or PIPA becomes law. Don't waste your time by coming back to this blog later today for a new post - come back tomorrow!)

SOPA Stopped - PIPA Moving

2012-01-17T13:56:00.000-05:00

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which would fundamentally alter the Internet and the way it is used, has been shelved from consideration by the U.S. House of Representatives. This is good news, but SOPA's sister bill, the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), is up for a vote in the U.S. Senate next Tuesday. Many of the provisions in that bill are similar to SOPA, which is adamantly opposed in the House by Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA), and Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has threatened to filibuster PIPA if it comes up on January 24 as scheduled.

The provisions of PIPA include the right of Internet service providers to voluntarily block sites suspected of even the mildest copyright infringement and punitive action against sites that give Internet users information on how to access blocked sites. Any site can be blocked or shut down by the federal government at whim if it is suspected of copyright infringement of any sort. Essentially, it (like SOPA) advocates Internet censorship. Also, SOPA as written would allow domain name servers to be filtered or blocked, which computer experts say could weaken the global Internet, as the provision would have a long, global reach against all Web sites irrespective of country of origin.

With progressives and Tea Partiers alike opposing these bills (and with Wikipedia's English-language pages going black for tomorrow in protest), the prospects for their eventual defeat are fairly bright. They just got brighter, in fact, with a statement from White House, which said that it could not support "legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet." President Obama, however, hasn't flatly ruled out signing whatever bill comes to his desk.

I myself could be affected by this legislation. If YouTube is shut down for having too many videos infringing on copyrights, I won't be able to continue my Music Video Of the Week feature on my blog. This blog itself could easily shut down by using quotes from other sources, credited or not. And since I use photos on my beautiful women picture blog that are not my own (like I can really use a picture of Reese Witherspoon that I took myself) and come from a variety of sources, every goshdarn picture could be deemed an illegal copyright infringement.

I have a special post on this subject planned for tomorrow. Tune in then to see what is.

The Depth Of Our Idiocy

2012-01-16T20:53:00.000-05:00

I have a dream that when one of our greatest historical figures speaks out for what is important and pertinent in our lives, his quote will not be mangled by abridging it, which is what happened with a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. on a wall at his memorial in Washington. King said, two months to the day before his assassination, "If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter." On the wall of the national Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, only part of the quote was used: "I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness." It makes Dr. King sound like an arrogant braggart. That is, it makes him sound like a Republican.

I have a dream that, if engineers can't find a stone tablet strong enough to include the entire quote, they'll find a similarly suitable one that can be placed on stone tablet in thirty days, as Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has ordered the National Park Service to do. I have a dream that, when we honor someone else with a national memorial, the advisory board will be smart enough to exclude quotes too big for stone tablets and not place on such tablets truncated versions of said quotes taken out of context. Correcting a technical error after the fact is not how you erect a memorial. It's how you blog. :-p

I also have a dream that statues for future national memorials will not, as this one was, be carved in China. Ye gods, now we're outsourcing statues to the Chinese?

I have a dream that one day we'll be able to stand under a large, expertly crafted piece of public art, and join in the old American battle cry, Made In the USA!"

Talkin' 'Bout Our Generations

2012-01-15T20:49:00.002-05:00

Two things happened recently that prompted me to write about something I've been pondering for awhile. The first is that, earlier today, I walked into the kitchen while my mother was watching Follow The Fleet, a 1936 Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie with songs by Irving Berlin, on television. Just before I walked into the room I heard Ginger Rogers singing a song I did not recognize, and, in complete ignorance of who was singing and who wrote the song, thought to myself, "Oh, man, what is that corn?"

The second thing is that rapper-entrepreneur Shawn Carter (Jay-Z to you, ofay!) and his lovely wife Beyoncé Knowles (but please call her by her first name only) just sired a baby girl, whom they named Blue Ivy Carter. Right after the birth, Mr. Carter recorded a new rap song, "Glory," about his baby daughter . . . with little Blue Ivy's cries added to the recording. Going beyond Stevie Wonder's addition of his baby daughter's sounds on his 1976 hit "Isn't She Lovely," Mr. Carter gave a credit to Blue Ivy on the record. "Glory" was quickly released, and five days after the baby's birth, it would debut at number seventy-four on the Billboard hip-hop and R&B charts, making Miss Carter the youngest person to debut on the Billboard charts.

So what do these two events have to do with each other? Simply this: A pop record that sounds contemporary when it's first released may seem dated many years from then. A song from a thirties Hollywood musical sounded antiquated just two decades later, when Elvis burst upon the scene, and Jay-Z's own record will likely sound passé by the time Blue Ivy is old enough to make her own records, assuming she goes into the family business.

Look at the popular music that existed before rock and roll - solo singers backed by large bands, as well as bandleaders who were stars in their own right. All of this music was considered rather hokey by young people in the mid-1950s, and when rock and roll burst upon the scene, it became, or should have become, apparent that the old pop establishment was headed for decline. Irving Berlin had been American popular music's greatest songwriter for decades; then, in 1956, with Elvis Presley on top of the charts, Berlin was faced with a new form he had no ability to write for.

This is something we rock and roll fans, as we watch our favorite musical form slip into irrelevance and possibly extinction, fail to understand. Popular music is an expression of its generation, and whatever music a generation produces or consumes usually has a hard time surviving its generation. No, rock and roll is not the cultural force it used to be, but given that most of it was a product of Depression children like Elvis, Baby Boomers, and Generation X elders, it's astonishing that it's lasted as long as it has. But rock and roll is also mainly the province of white guys with guitars, and there are a lot fewer of both today as the American population gets more diverse and as popular music and the methods in which it is made become more fragmented - and many young white males prefer hip-hop these days anyway. So it's not surprising that rock and roll has lost most of its audience and most of its relevance to rap, never to regain either. We act as if we can prevent it from dying out.

And before you rap fans start chanting, "Hip-hop hurray!", let me put you on notice: Your music has an expiration date as well. Sure, rap is in better shape 33 years after the first big-selling rap record, "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugar Hill Gang, than rock was in 1988, 33 years after Bill Haley and the Comets topped the charts with "Rock Around the Clock" - but the clock is ticking down to the day hip-hop will be as irrelevant as rock.

Let me, if I may, explain what I now call the "Blue Ivy Rule." The greatest figures in English-language popular music were all born at a time when the musical forms they would go on to work in didn't exist; the music that existed at the time they were toddlers wouldn't survive their own influence on pop. When Frank Sinatra was born in 1915, no one listening to "Alabama Jubilee" or "The Old Grey Mare, She Ain't What She Used to Be" on their Victrolas could have imagined the large, brassy big-band sound that Ol' Blue Eyes would personify. When the big jazz and pop bands of the forties dominated the Hit Parade, no one could have imagined rock and roll - or that four little boys in Liverpool, England would grow up to bring such a music to a global audience. Likewise, in the late sixties and early seventies, when rock and roll seemed destined to rule the earth, the babies that would grow up to create and dominate rap were in their cribs - and had different names from the ones they're known by today. (Jay-Z himself was born in 1969, the year of Woodstock and the release of the Beatles' Abbey Road.)

Right now, even as hip-hop is dominant, there are babies being born that will one day create the music that displaces rap. It's a musical form that has not yet been invented, and which we do not yet recognize. And don't be surprised if Blue Ivy Carter is at the forefront of it.

Show Me The Money

2012-01-14T21:41:00.002-05:00

President Obama may be in trouble.

Much has been made of the use of super-PACs in the Republican presidential primary/caucus campaign, in which Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney have confederates to attack each other's campaign and evade personal responsibility for the attacks - all made possible by the Citizens United decision from the Supreme Court. But this is a taste of what Obama can expect in the fall campaign from Republicans. And the President's own campaign may not be as well-equipped to handle it as many believe.

Jim Messina - Obama's campaign manager, not the guy who recorded with Kenny Loggins in the seventies - reports that the Obama campaign raised $42 million for the President and $24 million for the Democratic National Committee - in the last quarter of 2011. But while Messina admits that this is impressive - especially with so much of this $68 million coming from small donors - he says that the campaign has not raised enough to be competitive with the Republicans, who are expected to get a lot of support from super-PACs that are currently raising more money than their Democratic super-PAC counterparts.

The poor economy has also been cited as a possible disincentive to contribute to the Obama campaign. Messina, for his part, notes the oft-reported speculation that Obama is well on the way to raising a billion dollars and so does not need any help.

"Too many Obama supporters," Messina wrote in a fundraising e-mail, "genuinely believe that this campaign doesn't really need their donations, or doesn't need them yet, in order to compete and win. That's wrong. The reason we won in 2008 is that Obama supporters and volunteers viewed their individual role as crucial to the outcome of that election. But there's no secret strategy that we can count on in 2012. This is not a billion-dollar campaign and it's not going to be. We're not taking a dime from Washington lobbyists or special-interest PACs. All of the money that funds this campaign will come from grassroots supporters like you."

You know, after Citizens United, that may not be the wisest of strategies. And, given all of the liberal interest groups who are ticked off at the President for one reason or another, the poor economy may not be the only reason grassroots donors are happy to let Obama work what he already has in the bank.

In his commentary on PBS last night, David Brooks opined that, with hundreds of millions of dollars floating around, the possibility of Obama having a hundred million dollars less than he had in 2008 won't make a difference - especially with the abundance of free media to consider. Maybe he's right. But historically, the moneyed interests usually get the outcome they want in an election because they have more money to promote their agenda. The moneyed interests tend to support the GOP more generously. And until a constitutional amendment expunging the Citizens United decision is ratified, we can expect money to remain an influence in American politics.

Music Video Of the Week - January 13, 2012

2012-01-13T10:39:00.002-05:00

"Drift Away" by Dobie Gray (Go to the link in the upper right hand corner.)

Adventures In Capitalism

2012-01-12T13:29:00.000-05:00

You know the appeal of venture capitalism is losing its bite in America when even Republicans doubt it.

Mitt Romney used his New Hampshire primary win to denigrate the opposition for playing politics with the American capitalist system - not just President Obama but fellow Republicans like Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry. Romney says that both presdiential candidates focus more on the resentment of those who geet laid off in a bad economy rather than come up with a more positive economic message like his own - about how how government can help people become wealthy. Both Gingrich and Perry have attacked Romney for how he made money in his job at Bain Capital - buying companies and firing a lot of people to make them more "competitive." Rather than explain how a venture capital firm works and explain to voters why this is a preferred method for resuscitating companies, Romney instead re-iterated his desire to help everyone become rich and accused his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination of giving the Democrats fodder for the fall campaign while accusing President Obama of wanting to transform America into a European-style social welfare state.

With Romney having moved to the right in his party, Obama is now obliged to defend his own turn from the center of American politics and explain how his leftward drift on economic issues - taxation, health care - is meant to benefit everyone. For the President, the 2012 campaign will be an effort to present the case for more government intervention in the economy even as Romney is already making his case (again, the old adage that our system allows people to work hard and hopefully become wealthy) against it. But fewer people are buying that Horatio Alger message these days. Expect Obama's talking points to reflect the economic speech he gave in Kansas in December.

Obama doesn't have to worry about being called a socialist - he's not even that much of a liberal. But he can point to how he's created more jobs than Mitt Romney. General Motors has been hiring lately. Chrysler's sales were up 26 percent in 2011. Bailing out auto companies with government money did more for capitalism than taking over companies and firing people - or just letting them go bankrupt and possibly out of business, as Romney advocated in his opposition to the auto company bailouts.

Solid As Granite

2012-01-11T10:18:00.000-05:00

Mitt Romney's commanding victory in yesterday's New Hampshire primary - winning 39 percent of the vote - makes him the one to beat . . . for President Obama. It's become obvious that there really is no conservative alternative to a "moderate" Romney; Romney is the conservative alternative to the centrist incumbent President. Romney is opposed to an agenda that would impose a European-style social democratic system on America, but then, so is Obama.

With libertarian Ron Paul finishing a distant second in New Hampshire with 23 percent of the vote, mainstream arch-conservatives like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum hope instead to make inroads in South Carolina, where the unemployment rate and the intolerance for gays are both higher than in New Hampshire. Jon Huntsman's respectable third-place showing at 17 percent gives him reason to carry on. But Romney's ability to do better than expected in the Granite State- even after all of his recent gaffes marking him as a clueless CEO type - puts him on a clear path to the Republican presidential nomination and gives him more of an opportunity to hit the President south of the suspenders.

Romney can thank Florida for this victory, as Florida voted to have its primary on January 31, before the Iowa and New Hampshire contests scheduled for February - forcing both states to move their contests up to early January. Florida thus spared Romney of spending more time campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire and possibly seeing his numbers go down more over a longer period. Now he can spend more time than ever before focusing squarely on Obama and swat away the GOP also-rans like so many mosquitoes.

My advice to the Obama team: Start working on your Romney counterpunch.

Hiring, Firing and Quitting

2012-01-09T21:33:00.004-05:00

Mitt Romney is so convinced that he is going to be the Republican presidential nominee when all is said and done that he's already acting like a general election candidate, taking pot shots at President Obama and striking a more moderate tone in his discourse. Except his efforts to relate to ordinary people haven't helped him; indeed, they've hurt him. Trying to empathize with laid off workers, the noted corporate downsizer for hire said today that, like any worker, he too has had a fear of getting laid off. It is true that investment capitalists like Romney could easily be fired by the boards of their firms for not making enough money, but executives in Romney's position often get golden parachutes with their pink slips. They never have to worry about paying the mortgage on their mansions because they paid for it up front long ago in cash.

But what really got people's ears pricked up was Romney's insistence that health care should remain privatized because of the incentive for health insurance companies to provide quality services. It wasn't because of his failure to understand that many people in high-risk brackets have been unable to get health insurance for so long, at least until the Obama health care law was passed. It was because of his wording of how, under his version of health care, you can dump one insurance company for another: "I like being able to fire people who provide services to me if someone doesn't give me the service I need."

Okay, so maybe Romney was merely expressing a desire to being competition to health insurance. But it sure didn't sound like it. His perceived insensitivity to workers has gotten so obvious that even Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich have assailed him for his remarks, as well as his fellow Latter-Day Saint Jon Huntsman. "What's clear is he likes firing people," Huntsman said. "I like creating jobs."

Tellingly, Rck Santorum - a presidential candidate whose economic policy is pretty much an endorsement of serfdom - didn't take part in the Romney-bashing.

The Romney campaign is trying to present a kinder, gentler Mitt - a "New Romney." Right. New Romney is an English village in Kent.

Meanwhile, President Obama, on the side of the Democrats, has given me another reason to wish for a third presidential candidate to vote for in November rather than hire the President for another four years. On December 31, he signed the National Defense Authorization Act into law, which allows the indefinite military detention of American citizens without trial - a clear violation of the Bill Rights and the an assault to our liberties right up (or down) there with the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 at a time of possible war with Napoleonic France and Franklin Roosevelt's order to round up Japanese-Americans after the Pearl Harbor attack. "Under separate government powers expanded by the PATRIOT Act," Shahid Buttar, executive director of the Bill of Rights Committee, writes, "non-violent dissent is increasingly classified as terrorism." Though President Obama issued a signing statement saying he would neither use nor recognize the bill's detention powers, any future president, Buttar adds, could "use the NDAA’s detention powers as a tool of political repression."

And what about that signing statement? Obama signed a bill with an unconstitutional provision, but then he violated his constitutional obligation to enforce a law that he signed? When you sign a bill as President., it's all or nothing. If Obama objected to the detention clause, as well he should have, he should have sent it back to Congress.

Perhaps that's why William Daley, the President's chief of staff, quit today; he couldn't stand living in the Carrollian Wonderland that is Washington these days. Reports out of Washington suggest that Daley hasn't been able to bring the order and sense of functionality to the White House that he was supposed to being when he arrived at the West Wing a year ago, although he claimed that he wanted to spend more time with his family. President Obama hopes to move forward and present a clear case for his re-election, though I'm increasingly having a hard time figuring out what it is.

Rock Is Dead, They Don't Say

2012-01-08T19:37:00.002-05:00

An article by entertainment writer Shirley Halperin of the Hollywood Reporter caught my eye recently. Halperin noted that overall album sales were up in 2011 for the first time in seven years, with digital album sales up by 20 percent (as opposed to digital sales of individual tracks). Compact disc sales had a smaller sales decline than in previous years - 5 percent - suggesting that the downward spiral for sales of tangible recordings has at least been checked for now.

Halperin noted that this sales surge was largely due to the success of female artists -specifically, Rihanna, Lady Gaga and Adele. They, along with Katy Perry, were credited for putting across strong personas, touring extensively, and/or appearing on television as often as possible, which produced several radio hits that drove sales. Even Jennifer Lopez and Britney Spears - veterans by today's standards - had success. Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, and Nicki Minaj were singled out by Halperin for creating alter egos with their music, which appealed to their mostly female fan bases, while Adele scored with direct realism; both trends suggest a golden age for "girl power."

But here's the thing. What Halperin didn't point out, and quite frankly didn't need to point out, was, with the possible exception of Perry, none of these performers are rockers. They mostly represented soul, disco, and pure pop. Not a Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, or Stevie Nicks among them - and certainly no one who could draw comparisons to Ann or Nancy Wilson of Heart.

I think it's taken for granted that rock and roll, if not extinct, is irrelevant outside the college indie radio station circuit. And such stations, which broadcast at the low end of the FM dial, probably have more megahertz in their frequencies than they have listeners. Halperin's article gave barely a mention of Foster the People, a rock band that got a modicum of attention in 2011 with "Pumped Up Kicks," and albums from bands such as Iron and Wine, the Decemberists, My Morning Jacket, and Florence and the Machine obviously didn't get mentioned at all. If you love these bands and the LPs they put out in 2011, fine. But they're not going to define their generations or any other. Adele is pretty much the only mainstream artist with indie appeal -or is that the other way around? - and she's an exception either way.

So who were the top male artists of 2011? According to Halperin, they were a slew of rappers - Li'l Wayne, Jay-Z, Kanye West, Wiz Khalifa, DJ Khaled, and a Canadian rapper named Drake - all extolling the virtues of making lots of money and spending lots of money, which doesn't exactly jibe with rock's egalitarian, communal, set-my-spirit-free message. Even if white suburban male teenagers can't participate in hip-hop, they still relate to the current crop of rappers more than to whiny leftie guitar groups like the Decemberists, who probably remind them too much of the early-seventies bands their fathers love.

I've heard a lot of talk about retrograde rock bands, groups who try to bring back a sound from the past without realizing how redundant the term "retro rock" is - all rock is retro. And even rock's greatest heroes don't seem to captivate people's imaginations like they once did.

Today is Elvis Presley's birthday anniversary. For decades after his death in 1977, Elvis was like Bogart - someone who remained as relevant a cultural figure in death as he was in life. Does Elvis still matter? Well, I looked in my local TV listings today for any Elvis movies or documentaries that might have been on. I didn't find any. Maybe Elvis fans now spend their time watching their idol on YouTube and communicating on Facebook, but that only shows how the King is no longer a mass media hero. Like rock and roll itself, he's just another cult favorite now. :-(

Music Video Of the Week - January 6, 2012

2012-01-06T10:46:00.001-05:00

"Fox On the Run" by Sweet (Go to the link in the upper right hand corner.)

Ricko The Sicko

2012-01-05T11:12:00.001-05:00

I'm sorry I never got to comment on Newt Gingrich while he was the right-wing white ring's flavor of the month, but fortunately (for the sake of having someone to bash), Richard John Santorum has stepped in to fill the void and is widely expected to by the main conservative alternative to Mitt Romney in the Republican presidential nomination contest.

Before you start thinking that a nice, upstanding family man like Santorum can't possibly be as horrid as Rick Perry or as dumb as Michele Bachmann, here are some things you ought to know about the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania hoping to become the nation's 45th President, some of which I may have mentioned in earlier posts:

Rick Santorum told a crowd at a Christian college, in response to a student's suggestion that maybe God doesn't appreciate the fact that Americans die because they have no health insurance, that he rejected such a suggestion. "People die in America because people die in America. And people make poor decisions with respect to their health and their health care. And they don’t go to the emergency room or they don’t go to the doctor when they need to," he said. "And it’s not the fault of the government for not providing some sort of universal benefit." In fact, a 2009 Harvard Medical School study found that 45,000 deaths in the U.S. are attributed to lack of health insurance every year.

He complained about regulations forcing states like Iowa to sign more people up for Medicaid, which he saw as an expansion of the welfare state. He also added that the last thing he wanted to do was give black people welfare when he wanted to incentivize them to work, as if everyone on welfare were black.

He not only advocates the re-instatement of "Don't ask, don't tell" in the military, he supports a constitutional amendment that would invalidate same-sex marriages. Santorum supports an anti-abortion policy that would throw abortionists in jail for murder. He also likened homosexuality to "man-on-dog" sex.

I didn't want to bring this up again - even though this is primarily why I call him Ricko the Sicko - but he and his wife slept with a dead baby between them. After their son Gabriel was born prematurely and lived only two hours, the Santorums - the Santora? - slept in a hospital bed, separated by the corpse of their infant son. They brought his lifeless body home to present them to their children. Two of their children, Elizabeth and Johnny, held the baby "with so much love and tenderness," Mrs. Santorum later wrote, addressing her deceased son in the second person. "Elizabeth proudly announced to everyone as she cuddled you, 'This is my baby brother, Gabriel; he is an angel.'"

Mitt Romney, as a Mormon, believes in magic underwear, eternal marriage, and, speaking of angels, an angel named Moroni who will announce the return of Christ just before the world ends. Frankly, I don't see him to be nearly as daffy as Santorum.

Single Digits

2012-01-04T22:07:00.001-05:00

So let me get this straight . . .. Out of sixty thousand votes cast between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum at the Iowa caucuses yesterday, Romney won by eight. I'm sure Romney would have preferred to win by more than eight thousand votes. But when I say eight, I don't mean eight thousand. I mean . . . eight.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven . . . eight.

Romney won 30,015 votes in Iowa last night. He would have had to win 36,000 votes to get at least 30 percent and pull out of the 25 percent bracket he'd been in through various opinion polls for months. As it was, he couldn't win 36,000 votes. In fact, compared to his 2008 total in Iowa, Romney was off by six.

Not six thousand. Six. One, two, three, four, five . . . six.

That's right, Romney won six fewer votes in Iowa in 2012 than the 30,021 votes he won in 2008.

So, not only did 75 percent of all Iowa Republicans vote against Romney, those that did vote for him gave him a Pyrrhic victory with a margin in single digits over Santorum. And after all the time and money he spent in Iowa, his vote total was smaller than when he lost the Iowa contest to Mike Huckabee in 2008 - by single digits.

Meanwhile, Michele Bachmann - a woman whose intelligence quotient is likely measured in single digits - dropped out of the race. The number of people who will miss her can be counted with a single digit - 0.

Pardon My French

2012-01-03T13:15:00.000-05:00

Mitt Romney recently tried to compare President Obama tom Marie Antoinette in a pathetic attempt to make the President look elitist. The multimillionaire said of Obama, "When the president's characterization of our economy was, 'It could be worse,' it reminded me of Marie Antoinette: 'Let them eat cake.'"

Yeah, well, when we cried for jobs, Mitt Romney's fellow Republicans in Congress let us have anti-abortion legislation. And when autoworkers cried to have their jobs saved, Romney himself pretty much said, "Let GM and Chrysler go bankrupt."

But that's not why I bring this up. I bring this up because Romney, like most Republicans these days, not only tries to avoid putting on airs to avoid looking elitist himself, he even tries to avoid looking educated - especially when it comes to his bilingualism. When Chris Matthews of MSNBC asked Romney if he could say "Let them eat cake" in French, Romney replied by saying, "I can, but I won't."

Jeez, even George Walker Bush spoke conversational Spanish in public.

Romney not only has to appeal to Republicans who are undereducated - i.e. most of them - he's trying to downplay his experiences in France as a Mormon missionary to appeal to Republicans who are Francophobic - i.e., all of them. I don't get the Republican hatred for all things French. Just what don't they like about the French, the people who invented photography and milk purification? Is it that they dress too prettily? Or maybe, oh, I don't know, enough Republicans bought Renaults and got stuck with a lemon? Is it the fact that the French think a lot? Did all of these Republicans like Catherine Deneuve in those Chanel ads until they found out she was a serious actress who had a brain? Did they go to one of her movies and, I don't know, have trouble reading the subtitles? Or maybe had a hard time wrapping their tiny little minds around the philosophical ramifications of the plot?

By the way, Mitt, you looked silly distancing yourself form all things French while campaigning in a state whose capital and largest city is called "Des Moines."

Hawkeye Piercing

2012-01-02T11:23:00.000-05:00

Are the Iowa caucuses tomorrow? Good, I'm getting sick of hearing about them, and quite frankly, I'm getting sick of hearing about Iowa. Maybe it's only because it's strictly a Republican contest this time, but that's a pretty good reason. Iowa Republicans are an extremely conservative lot (to be fair, Iowa Democrats are just as liberal), and so the caucus campaign is heavily focused on social issues like abortion and family planning, making us Americans look more unsophisticated and heathen-like in the international media than we already are.

Iowa may be seen as irrelevant in the nominating process after this election, especially if Mitt Romney (whom I believe will be the eventual Republican nominee) doesn't win. After all, the state is overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly rural, and the last time that counted for anything was when Barack Obama won the Democratic caucuses there in 2008 and proved that an urban black candidate could win there and thus win anywhere. But the state is nonetheless too homogenous to count as a bellwether in any other circumstances. Besides, the state's economy is based on corn and corn by-products, which are a reason for why so many Americans are so grossly fat. I don't think Iowans are going to be so supportive of the President in November when they figure out that his wife's healthy eating initiative is bad for their business.

I'm sure Iowans have made several worthy contributions to civilization, and when I think of any, I'll list them here. Right now, I can only think of that sculptor who carved a statue of Jesus out of butter. Iowa isn't even politically relevant beyond the caucuses - its only native son to become President was Herbert Hoover, and he left as a young man to attend Stanford (he was in its first graduating class), never to return.

Carteresque?

2012-01-01T11:39:00.001-05:00

Barack Obama in 2012 is nothing like Jimmy Carter in 1980. Just because Obama is the most vulnerable incumbent President running for re-election since 1980 (according to the polls), just because he inherited a sluggish economy that has yet to fully recover, just because Iran is suddenly a bone of contention for him, just because fuel prices could suddenly go up as a a result of an Iran-related crisis, just because it's been difficult if not impossible to borrow money in this country, just because his handling of Afghanistan is an issue, just because some voters personally like him but think he's in over his head, just because he has a million-watt smile . . .

. . . and just because there's a very good chance that Obama could lose the presidential election this year to an intellectually challenged, opportunistic Republican incompetent, that doesn't mean voters could think Obama's effort at changing the country for the better is all . . . peanuts.

But, unlike Carter, at least Obama wasn't frightened by a WHITE RABBIT!

Feed your ego, baby. Happy new year. ;-)

Happy New Year

2011-12-31T10:27:00.001-05:00

Well, it's December 31, another year over. I suppose I should look forward to the new year, and I usually believe that a new year that begins on a Sunday offers the freshest of starts; a new year, a new day, a new month, a new week. But not if it's a leap year. January 1 of leap year falling on a Sunday means that February 29 falls on a Wednesday - giving the bleakest month of the year five hump days - and it means that next December 31 will be a Monday. Who wants to end a year on a Monday?

Be that as it may, I have something to tell my readers. For years, I've been dreaming about traveling overseas, something I've never done. I'd love to go to London; a friend of mine who went there said she noticed my "London envy" when I commented on her pictures of her London vacation on Facebook. I'd also like to see Paris and Munich, and I would like to go with my mother to Italy and see the seaside town on the Adriatic where her father was born. I'd also like to find myself a girlfriend, and I would like to start looking by going on something I've never experienced - my first date. Finally, my mother has been pressing me to go back to school and get a master's degree, preferably in education so I can become a teacher, or take some graduate courses in journalism.

So here's my announcement: I'm not going to do any of those things in 2012, and this time next year, I probably won't have any plans to do these things in 2013 either.

See you next year? Happy holidays.

2011: Winners and Losers

2011-12-30T14:09:00.012-05:00

Well, it's that time of year again, which hasn't been around since . . . last year. And it's my favorite time - to take stock of the winners and the losers of the year gone by.

So many things happened in so many different walks of life this past year, and there are some momentous and monumental events that really don't have a place on this list. The tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan isn't a case of win or lose; it's a tragedy of huge proportions that the Japanese people weathered as best they could. Ditto for Irene, the first hurricane to hit New Jersey since 1903. So there'll be no assigning of winning and losing to people who were affected by such large natural disasters - that's not what I'm after. I will be assigning a loss to a group of people for the way they handled things in the aftermath of a less serious but somewhat freaky natural disaster - see below.

And, incredible as it may seem, there will be no mention of anyone who's associated with "Two And a Half Men" on this list. Charlie Sheen may not be "winning," but he isn't losing either, having secured himself a new show and made a bundle off audiences full of suckers who went to see his stand-up non-comedy routine. And the show itself is still on and enjoying strong ratings, despite earlier reports and rumors of an early cancellation, so I won't be bothering with that either.

You'll also notice that I don't have many politicians on either the winners or losers list. Apart from Mitt Romney, who has survived onslaughts from several more conservative opponents for the Republican presidential nomination, you don't see many politicians who are winners these days. As for losers, you'll see nothing about Michele Bachmann, no nasty comments about Rick Perry, no mention of Herman Cain. I could try to tell you that this is because I don't like to kick people when they're down, but if you've read what I've said before about Democrats, I don't think you'll buy that. I decided to concentrate on only the most egregious political stumbles for this list; if I focused on every political loser of the year, I'd be here until Leap Day. Leap Day 2016.

So here, in no particular order, are my winners for 2011:

Adele. Once, the British pop singer was expected to fizzle in the United States, but she's since conquered her personal demons and since conquered America with just her singing - no pink hair, no kissing Britney Spears, no meat dresses. Sometimes well-behaved women do make history.

Woody Allen. Woody's love letter to the American literature and music of the 1920s was not only received ecstatically by the critics, it's is highest-grossing film in a quarter century.

Zooey Deschanel. It's hard not to love this bubbly actress/singer, and maybe that's why her sitcom "New Girl," about an ebullient young woman who moves in with three guys - is the biggest hit of the 2011-12 season.

the Dallas Mavericks. Pluck and persistence throughout the basketball team's history - and against the Miami Heat - paid off, as the Mavs won their first NBA championship ever.

Mitt Romney. His campaign for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination survived challenges to his right from Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and more recently, Newt Gingrich, and at this writing, he's on his way to winning to the Iowa caucuses . . . and becoming a formidable opponent for President Obama.

David Beckham. American soccer fans finally understand what the fuss over this guy is all about. He helped lead the Los Angeles Galaxy to their first Major League Soccer championship in six years. Bend it!

the Boston Bruins. Thirty-nine years is a long time to wait for your favorite hockey team win the Stanley Cup, but the Bruins, who last won it when Nixon was President, finally brought the cup back to Beantown.

Keith Olbermann. Separated from MSNBC in the wake of the Tea Party's rise to power in January, the left's clown prince of commentary has found a new home on Al Gore's Current TV, where Olbermann is just as irreverent as ever. By saving his career, the Current TV folks are the best persons . . . in the world.

Prince William. One could argue that Kate Middleton had a good year, becoming Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, and positioning herself to become queen consort of Britain one day, but the prince, the future King William V, deserves applause for marrying her. The affable William proved that nice guys sometimes finish first.

Volkswagen. I have a personal bias toward the German automaker, of course, but you can't argue with its recent success in the United States; its U.S. sales are up 24 percent over 2010, the new Tennessee-built Passat won Motor Trend's coveted Car of the Year award for 2012, and the American division is slated to make its first profit in eight years. Now if Volkswagen of America could only improve the Jetta and bring the Polo over . . ..

And now, without any ado, the losers of the year:

Libidinous politicians. Remember when Anthony Wiener was going to be the next mayor of New of New York? Or when Dominique Strauss-Kahn was the next president of France? Well, now you can forget it. And Arnold Schwarzenegger's sexual post opened cans of worms from how he goverened California, tarnishing his reputation.

LeBron James. So, LeBron, let me see if I have this straight . . .. You left the Cleveland Cavaliers and your home state of Ohio to join up with the Heat in sunny Miami in hopes of getting to the NBA championship only for your new team to collapse against the Mavericks for the trophy? Congratulations, big guy, you missed the brass ring and you ticked off people in two cities in the process.

Former Northeastern U.S. governors. Eliot Spitzer, hoping to re-invent himself as a talk show host after a sex scandal forced him out as governor of New York, saw his CNN show canceled. And when former New Jersey governor Jon Corzine tried to re-invent himself by going back to Wall Street and running MF Global, $191.6 million went down the tubes as a result of trading on European government bonds - including billions in customer assets. Ironically, Spitzer might have been a position to keep Corzine from fooling around had he not fooled around in a different way.

Tom Hanks. Hollywood's favorite everyman acted and directed in Larry Crowne, about a middle-aged man who loses his job and go back to college. So what? Critics and audiences said the same thing. The first indication that it wasn't going to work out was that he wrote the screenplay with . . . Nia Vardolos, the answer to a trivia question whose entire career is based on knowing Tom Hanks. You can get in a lot of trouble if you don't pick your friends well.

Jennifer Finnigan. Apparently sensing a decline in the popularity of daytime dramas, the Canadian TV actress must have thought she made a smart move by leaving CBS's "The Bold and the Beautiful" for the ABC sitcom "Better With You." But while "The Bold and the Beautiful" remains on CBS even as ABC daytime dramas are going off the air, "Better With You" was canceled after one season. Her only saving grace? She didn't appear on an NBC show (see below).

Rock and roll. R.E.M. broke up, another contemporary rock station in New York City failed, and the biggest story in rock in 2011 was not Foster the People or the Black Keys but the twentieth anniversary of the release of Nirvana's Nevermind. Small wonder most of the pop performers profiled on "60 Minutes" lately have not been rockers. And all rock has to offer in 2011 is Dawes? A band that retreads the blandest 1970s LA rock clichés? Rock fans may not give in, but they'll keep living in the . . . past.

Jersey Central Power & Light. I lost my power for three days after the freak October snowstorm. As Public Service Electric and Gas customers, my mother and I were lucky; New Jersey's Jersey Central Power and Light took up to three weeks to restore electricity to some of their customers, giving the utility a huge black eye for how they handled a huge blackout.

NBC. The question "Is that still on?" normally applies to TV shows. Never before has it applied to a whole broadcast TV network.

MSNBC. So they start out booting Keith Olbermann in January and moving Ed Schultz to 10 PM Eastern, and Lawrence O'Donnell moves from 10 PM Eastern to 8 PM Eastern, and Cenk Uygur takes over at 6 PM Eastern to host a show without a name. Then Uygur gets thrown out in July and replaced by Al Sharpton, whose show is finally named "PoliticsNation." Meanwhile, Savannah Guthrie leaves "The Daily Rundown" at 9 AM Eastern, to be replaced by Chuck Todd's goatee, and then Alex Wagner gets her own show, while Ed Schultz and Lawrence O'Donnell trade time slots in October and . . .. Ahh, forget it - how do you take seriously a cable news channel whose most consistent star is Chris Matthews?

Pennsylvania State University. The scandal there is too sad for words, or for satire.

The only reason Teri Polo does not appear on this list for appearing in a sitcom expected to be hit only to see it canceled after seven weeks is because it hurts too much for me to include her.

That's it for the winners and losers of 2011. Happy new year.

Christmas Music Video Of the Week - December 30, 2011

2011-12-30T14:01:00.000-05:00

"Winter Wonderland" by Anne Murray (Go to the link in the upper right hand corner.)

Facebook and Blogger - Imperfect Together

2011-12-29T21:10:00.003-05:00

If you're reading this, again, you must have come from Twitter.

I'm back on Facebook - the problems regarding access to my account, caused apparently by malware on my PC and/or hacking of my Facebook account, have been resolved - but now there's a problem that affects every Facebook customer who keeps a blog on Blogger.com. It seems that I cannot post a link to my Blogger.com-based pages, or to any individual posts from those pages, on Facebook. I had a problem with doing this at the same time I started having problems with access to my Facebook account on Sunday, but I thought the linking issue was related to the access problem. When I tried to post another link to my sister blog, Pictures of Beautiful Women, after I was able to get back on Facebook last night and had the same problem, I thought I had another malware/hacking issue! But no, I can still chat and send messages on Facebook, and I can post any link I want . . . except a link to a Blogger-based page. Not without a title or thumbnail picture, anyway. I can post the URL of the blog post, if I'm lucky.

Anyway, I'm hoping that it will soon get resolved, because this is a problem that clearly affects the two sites and all who use both, so it's not a PC issue that I can take care of myself. I won't stop blogging, though, so please be sure to check back tomorrow for my last Christmas Music Video Of the Week for this holiday season and my list of winners and losers for 2011. Happy holidays!

Facebook Disaster

2011-12-26T21:07:00.001-05:00

If you can read this, you came from Twitter.

Late last night, Christmas night, I tried posting something on Facebook, but I couldn't get it to register. I logged out. Then when I tried to log back in, Facebook said my account was "temporarily blocked" because of a virus in my PC.

What?

I ran my antivirus scanner, which found nothing. After confirming on Facebook that I had removed the virus, I was able to log on again - but with limited access. I could click "like" on something, but I could not post, chat or send messages in any way, shape of form. As directed, I tried to contact and ask a question of the Facebook Help Center, which was no help at all. I couldn't even ask a question in the user forum. I was prepared to wait a few days as Facebook instructed, until I started surfing the Internet and found that other Facebook users had the same problem . . . only it got worse, not better, after a few days, with one person even losing the ability to click "like" on anything after waiting longer than that. It may even turn out that someone hacked my account.

Clearly, I had to be pro-active. I ended up calling one of those tech support services that helps with Facebook issues - because Facebook doesn't have tech support of its own. (Writing an e-mail to someone at Facebook is harder than getting a date with Scarlett Johansson.) It turned out that I had viruses my security system somehow missed - and I paid a pretty penny to get this service to remove the threats that were found. I now have to wait until 8:00 PM Wednesday to access my Facebook account again.

I don't even know if that will do the trick. I just have to be patient and wait. It may turn out that I have to go through the whole thing all over again. :-(

In the meantime, I still plan to post my annual winners and losers of the year list on this blog, as well as a final holiday-themed Music Video Of the Week for 2011. I just don't know if any of my Facebook friends will know about it.

Stay tuned.

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-25T21:02:00.002-05:00

'Twas the Night Before Christmas . . .

2011-12-24T22:56:00.000-05:00

. . . and all through the house . . . not much is going on, really. I'm just taking advantage of the fact that it's December 24 and chilling out. I'll be posting somewhat less in the coming week, but I'll still be around. And oh, yes, I have to start working on my winners and losers list for the year. I'm still trying to decide whether or not to put any politicians on either list; I don't know if I can say any of them one is actually a winner, and choosing any of them for the list of losers is like putting a Captain and Tennille album on a worst records list - it's too easy a shot. But I just might figure something out.

I'll be back. Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night. :-)

Christmas Music Video Of the Week - December 23, 2011

2011-12-23T15:21:00.000-05:00

"Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" by Frank Sinatra (Go to the link in the upper right hand corner.)

About Face

2011-12-22T21:21:00.001-05:00

And forward, march . . . until February 29. House Speaker John Boehner succumbed to bipartisan pressure from the Senate and allowed the payroll tax cut to go through for the first two months of the new year. Although it's only a temporary cut, and a one-year extension would be just as temporary (albeit longer) Boehner's attempt to play politics with a tax cut affecting the rapidly shrinking middle class backfired miserably, and he was forced to admit defeat. Good grief, even Mitch McConnell and Scott Brown were flabbergasted with his attempt to nix this deal.

With this victory in hand, President Obama can now try to negotiate for a longer middle-class tax break and perhaps be in a stronger position going forward in an attempt to get congressional Republicans to give up something for a change. It won't be easy. Senate Republicans still have the power of the filibuster, House Republicans remain under the influence of all that tea, and Republicans of all stripes insist on taxing wealth less so workers can pay more of the tax burden as a way of reviving the economy. But Obama has succeeded in reminding people that the Republican party is not the party to trust to fight for the little guy.

Neither is the Democratic party, but that's another story. Don't sell out on the Keystone XL pipeline in the negotiations that come after the holidays, Mr. President! :-O

About Hanukkah and Christmas And All That . . .

2011-12-21T12:26:00.000-05:00

I want to set the record straight. if Hanukkah is the "Jewish Christmas," then Christmas is the Christian Saturnalia. Many people insist that Hanukkah is played up as a Jewish version of Christmas, but it's worth noting that neither Hanukkah nor Christmas are particularly holy days in either faith. Christmas is on December 25 because the early Christians wanted to co-opt the feast of the Roman god Saturn, held between December 17 and 23, and celebrated with food, drink, and gambling. By turning the anniversary of the Nativity into a celebration, it was a good way to get pagans to convert to Christianity. But it's not the holiest day in the Christian calendar - that would be Easter Sunday, the anniversary of the Resurrection - which is the essence of and the reason for the faith. So, Christmas is technically a played-up Saturnalia.

So when you hear evangelical politicians in Washington complain about being forced to work through "the holiest day of Christianity" when they have to work on Christmas Day, don't listen to them. As Christians, they don't know what they're talking about.

As for Hanukkah, Christmas, and Saturnalia happening (or in the case of Saturnalia, having happened) simultaneously, that's no accident. They're all festivals that take advantage of the onset of winter and give people a chance to make merry before the worst of the season sets in. That's a custom pre-dating all of Western civilization. Winter solstice rituals, anyone?

Updates and Whatnot

2011-12-20T22:59:00.000-05:00

Good news: The House of Representatives has cancelled its Stop Online Piracy Act hearing scheduled for tomorrow and has chosen to take it up following the winter recess. This odious bill was expected to pass in a matter of months. It's been nearly a year, and constant public outcries have stopped it up to now. It might just be dead.

Kind of like my electricity earlier this evening. Sure enough, my house has had another power failure, the fourth since power was restored to our house following the freak October snowstorm. This blackout lasted fifteen minutes. I guess that means I have to call the electric company and complain . . ..

Just When You Thought It Was Safe . . .

2011-12-20T14:16:00.001-05:00

It looked like we'd be getting an extension of the payroll tax cut and benefits for the long-term unemployed, but today Republicans opted to send the extension bill passed by the Senate in a bipartisan vote into conference between the two chambers. House Republicans thus avoid the responsibility of voting against the extensions by technically voting for Senate co-operation on a bill they won't vote on without a conference and compromise. Republicans insist that they'd prefer a one-year extension rather than a two-month extension for these cuts and benefits - and bringing this bill up in conference would obviously allow them to dictate their terms for the provisions for a one-year extension. Maybe a one-year extension is better than a two-month extension, but at least a two-month extension of these key incentives would buy some time for Congress. And with 2012 being a leap year, we'd at least get a one-day extension built in before a necessary vote on extending them longer by March 1!

Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) hopes that public pressure against House Republicans wall cause them to cave in and approve the Senate bill. Right. What planet is Schumer living on? House Republicans don't cave - Senate Democrats do!

Oh yeah, the Stop Online Piracy Act is back on the front burner. Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), a key proponent of the legislation, is pushing for a House vote on the bill this week before the holiday break despite earlier indications that it would not happen immediately.

No rest or satisfaction for the good guys. Stay thirsty, my friends.

Occupy Nothing At All

2011-12-18T21:31:00.001-05:00

To divide and conquer is how you defeat your enemy. The Occupy Wall Street movement can now be conquered quite easily, for it has divided itself.

Since many of the round-the-clock encampments have been disbanded, the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators have been fragmented and splintered, according to Amy Westfeldt of the Associated Press. Instead of speaking with one voice, the protesters have had their tongues confounded by being split into different groups and diverted to working on different issues. According to Westfeldt's article, several protesters say the smaller factions are getting in the way of the larger message about reversing the economic inequality that persists in the United States. The movement has become very democratic in addressing concerns about issues but very ineffective in getting anything accomplished.

"Are they all on the same page?" union organizer Mario Rodriguez asks rhetorically. "In terms of strategy and tactics, I don't think they are."

They're roadkill for the right.

And so the Occupy Wall Street movement has ended before it's begun, And life goes on. And no one cares.

The Dimmest Bulbs

2011-12-17T22:09:00.001-05:00

Remember when America was going to usher in a new age of environmental awareness and action? Well, now you can forget it. For the time being, anyway, or maybe longer . . .

I'm not talking about the non-agreement over the non-action on climate change in Durban, South Africa. I'm talking about Congress's passage of a rider to a budget bill designed to avoid a government shutdown that delays by nine months (until someone can delay it for longer) a provision from an energy bill passed in 2007 to require light bulb companies to produce 100-watt halogen light bulbs that produce the same light as a 100-watt incandescent bulb but uses 28 percent less power. The law now goes into effect in October 2012 rather than in January 2012, and it makes the same requirements for 75-watt bulbs in 213 and 60-watt bulbs in 2014.

Texas congressman Joe Barton, a Republican who's opposed to any energy-saving idea that makes sense, hailed the passage of the rider that he says gives Americans the freedom to choose the less expensive incandescent bulbs (the design for which dates back to the first light bulb perfected by Thomas Edison in 1879) over halogen bulbs. Left out of what passes for Barton's reasoning is the fact that halogen bulbs cost less in the long run because they last longer and so need replacement less often. Also left out of the equation is the amount of money that light bulb companies spent to prepare for the law to take effect in January. If Barton gets his way, this law could just as easily be repealed altogether. I imagine that he's working on a plan for its repeal right now.

There are lot of dim bulbs that need to be replaced in Congress. Too bad they keep getting re-elected.

War is Over

2011-12-16T20:33:00.001-05:00

The Iraq War is over for real this time. I was premature - okay, dead wrong - in suggesting over a year ago that the withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraq in August 2010 would effectively end the conflict and begin a mollified period similar to the fragile peace that followed the 1953 Korean armistice. In fact, American troop deaths continued, as did violence in Iraq. But now, it's over. It's really over. A war that began with a huge invasion and a roar of public approval whipped up but Republican hawks ended this week with the sound of muted bass notes played at a slow tempo . . . accompanied by the faint sound of "Taps." The Iraq War cost the lives of 4474 American service personnel, left 32,226 wounded, and cost countless of Iraqi lives. And it got us nothing except a stronger Iranian influence in the Middle East. We went into Iraq under false pretenses - that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and may have had something to do with 9/11 - and the Bush White House had us believing we'd enter as liberators and leave a prosperous, first-world nation behind. The reality could not have been any more different.

The only good thing about this war, aside from the fact that it's over (for us - violence is likely to continue among Iraqis for awhile), is that Iraq veterans are likely to be treated with the dignity and respect that eluded Vietnam veterans. They also have a wealth of real-world experience that will come in handy in the outside world and make our civilian instituions stronger. But their maturity came out of a wasteful exercise that took valuable resources from building up our strength at home. We will not recover from this for a long time.

Alas, neither will Iraq.

Christmas Music Video Of the Week - December 16, 2011

2011-12-16T07:40:00.000-05:00

"Sleigh Ride," John Williams and the Boston Pops Orchestra (Go to the link in the upper right hand corner.)

Internet Censorship Alert

2011-12-15T21:50:00.001-05:00

Right now in Congress are two bad bills that are supposedly aimed at preventing Internet piracy but may actually give the government tools by which to shut down any Web site that big businesses find objectionable. Here's the deal: The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) working its way through the House and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) in the Senate would give the government the right to block foreign or offshore Web sites that show pirated movies and the like, such as video streams coming out of China that allow one to see a movie currently in the theaters online.

This makes sense, until you realize that the bills as written give the feds the right to shut down any Web site for any reason related to copyright laws. Let's say that some kid makes a video of himself singing a song that's copyrighted and posts it on YouTube, similar to what Justin Bieber did. The owner of the copyright could threaten to sue YouTube for allowing the video to be posted and demand that it be removed. YouTube would have so many uploads to monitor to look for similar videos, it would have to shut down rather than try to police itself or let the government shut it down first.

Stopping another Justin Bieber - who, as a Canadian, would technically be a foreign pirate in this case - sounds tempting, but it would also prevent free speech in the form of video or any other content that could suddenly fall under this jurisdiction. Hence you would have an Internet that is nowhere nearly as open and free as it is now. It would be under complete corporate control. And a YouTube-less Internet would mean that I can't offer a Music Video Of the Week here anymore! No wonder both Tea Partiers and progressives - both known for using the Internet to spread their ideas - are against these bills, as is a bipartisan group of members of Congress. But another bipartisan group of lawmakers, including Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, a Democrat known for being a fan of the Grateful Dead - who let fans tape their concerts - is for them, and Leahy is one of PIPA's sponsors.

To demonstrate that free and open exchanges of online content should be allowed, I'm going to put my money where my mouth is. In October 2006, I took this photograph of a 1987 Volkswagen Golf, as part of my hobby in photographing VWs on the streets and in parking lots.

Just recently, I found that someone - likely someone from abroad - had used this very same picture in a YouTube video depicting Golfs throughout the model line's history, and my picture was used to illustrate a Golf from the second generation. My picture appears exactly one minute into the video. Did I complain? Did I threaten to sue? No! I was flattered that this person used my picture for the video, which is why, in the spirit of a free and open Internet, I'm including it in my post.

If Congress wants to stop offshore piracy of blockbuster movies, there are better ways to do so than the bills both houses are currently considering.

Volkswagen Doesn't Do It Again

2011-12-14T11:41:00.000-05:00

For years, I have eagerly awaited the day Volkswagen would finally offer its smallest model, the Polo, here in the United States, which seemed unlikely given the continuing preference Americans have for big cars, particularly SUVs. But recently, with the growing interest in small cars like the Honda Fit and the Toyota Yaris, not to mention the increasing talk in a "green" future of environmental friendliness, it suddenly seemed very possible, and Volkswagen seemed ready to offer it here at last.

It was yet another mirage. Up until last month, I'd been waiting to see if the Polo - now the second smallest VW in the make's lineup - would finally make it, but when it became apparent that nothing seemed to be moving on that front, I bought a new Golf instead. Two weeks after I bought my Golf, Volkswagen of America announced that it was bringing neither of its subcompacts, the Polo or the smaller Up, to North America (the U.S. and Canada) any time soon.

The reasons for not bringing these cars boiled down to costliness and greater priorities for Volkswagen of America. Jonathan Browning, Volkswagen of America's CEO, explained that the profit margins on subcompacts are too thin for VW to import them from Europe and also too risky for VW to build them in Mexico. Right now, VW is only a bit player in the U.S. market and is trying to become once again the major import brand it was back when Lyndon Johnson was President. In order to reach its "8 in 18" goal - 800,000 cars sold per year by 2018 - VW has to spend its money and resources in upgrading its supply chains, training its dealers, and - most importantly - expanding its dealer network. Forty years ago, Volkswagen had over 1200 dealers in the United States, but intense competition from the Japanese halved that number over time. VW says it simply has too much on its plate in North America to try and sell here subcompacts that it fears would lose money when the firm is trying to make money on this continent.

There's one silver lining. The fluctuating price of fuel in the U.S. and Canada could suddenly make subcompacts desirable, and VW could theoretically "bring the Polo here tomorrow" if need be, Volkswagen product planner Rainer Michel told Car and Driver magazine. Adding at least the Polo is still a distinct possibility, but for now, the company has decided that the Golf is small enough for the New World.

I'm skeptical, of course. Back when VW was content to be a niche marketer in the U.S. and Canada, selling inexpensive European cars in North America at a time when no one else did and moving about 300,000 cars a year, the company could have easily sent over the Polo here and limited its availability to avoid having more Polos on the lots than it could sell. There is a market here in America for the Polo (the Up? hard to say), and VW doesn't have to sell a lot of them to satisfy it. How much money could VW lose on them, especially with the Civic/Cobalt/Corolla -inspired Jetta selling like gangbusters? Okay, so maybe I'm wrong. Maybe satisfying a small demand does cut into profitability. (The BMW-built Mini? Never mind that.) But when I hear the latest news from Volkswagen that neither the Polo nor the Up are coming here, only to hear the promise of adding them to the lineup at a later date, I have the same reaction that I have when a new high-speed rail initiative is announced: "I've heard it all before."

My guess is that VW, having tried a subcompact model in America with the Brazilian-built Fox a quarter century ago, is far more cautious after that car - which the late Volkswagen of America executive James Fuller said could "be the appetizer for a lifetime of buying Volkswagens" - turned out to be such a sales disaster. If that's the case, then Volkswagen AG and Volkswagen of America have learned the wrong lesson. The Fox was a crude, antiquated, basic automobile. The Polo is none of those things. Furthermore, the Fox came to this country without an optional automatic transmission, because the parent company told Volkswagen of America that such an option was unnecessary - an assessment that completely missed the traditional American ambivalence toward stick shifts. The Fox was discontinued in 1993, VW's worst sales year ever in America; there hasn't been a subcompact in the American lineup since.

I have to hope that VW knows what it's doing. And in forsaking subcompacts in order to rebuild its North American network, it probably is. Volkswagen may very well have to get back to where it was in America in 1968, the Beetle's best year in the U.S., in order to satisfy smaller demands for smaller cars, and that's important after losing so much U.S. market share over the years to the Asian and domestic automakers. "What an auto company loses in the market today," Volkswagen's then-chairman Heinz Nordhoff said in 1963, "it probably can't recover in the next fifty years." Now how many years separate 2018 from 1968?

In the meantime, here's a picture of the latest iteration of the Polo, the VW we in the New World can't have.

Dude, You're Getting Adele!

2011-12-13T14:59:00.002-05:00

It wasn't supposed to happen like this. This is the twenty-first century, after all. British pop singers do not enjoy success in the United States anymore. Besides, even if you have the best voice among your peers, you need a gimmick to get your music across.

So how does that explain the success of Adele?

When Adele Laurie Blue Adkins released her first album, 19, in the United States in June 2008, few people took notice at the time. But with a little exposure on American television and interest from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences - she won the Best New Artist Grammy in 2009 - more and more people in this country began to listen. The album eventually rose to number ten in America, and her unique contralto voice - delivering honest, heartfelt songs through a set of strong, stylish blue-eyed soul arrangements - established her as a singer to be reckoned with.

Because so much attention has been paid to the highly overrated Lady Gaga - thanks to her unorthodox wardrobe and her obnoxious attitude - it would be impossible for anyone to draw so much notice simply by singing. Yet that's what Adele has done. Consider the statistics of her second album, 21 - nearly five million copies sold in the United States, the most successful digital album of all time in the U.S., only the sixteenth album by a female artist to spend at least nine weeks on top of the Billboard charts, and the first to do so by a British act in 23 years. 21 has also spent a total of thirteen weeks at number one on the Billboard Top Two Hundred, the longest an album has held the top position since 1998. Oh yeah, her singles "Rolling In the Deep" and "Someone Like You," both from 21, are the first two consecutive singles from the same album recorded by a female British recording artist to top the American charts.

This all makes sense once you hear Adele sing. There's not a shred of artifice in her performances, and her devotion to the traditions of British rhythm-and-blues singing are far more honest than many soul recordings to come out of the mother country in the past twenty years. White R&B has always been hard to pull off, and it's even tougher for British performers to make it work. Few have done so. Adele has joined a very elite club that includes veteran performers like Chris Farlowe and the late Dusty Springfield, as well as more recent singers like Joss Stone.

So what's the reason for Adele's success? I'm inclined to guess that Americans had had it with lightweight pop singers being crammed down their throats for so long, and when they found something more substantial, they leapt to embrace it. Adele didn't get off to the best possible start - she had a self-destructive streak that involved drinking and pining for an ex-boyfriend almost cost her a chance to break through in the U.S. - yet ironically, she's been able to pour her emotions into her cathartic singing and songwriting (yes, she's a composer, too) and strike a chord with American audiences . . . as well as with audiences in her homeland. In the United Kingdom, where her success has drawn comparisons to the that of the Beatles, then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown called her a "light at the end of the tunnel." He was referring to the persistent British recession, but he could just as easily have been talking about the state of English-language popular music.

Success speaks for itself. And the proverbial sidewalks she's following (or the pavements she's chasing, as she would put it) are definitely leading somewhere.

Rock and Rap Hall of Fame?

2011-12-10T21:41:00.006-05:00

Music critic Tris McCall of the Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger is not happy with the virtual snub of hip-hop performers among the latest choices for inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and he insists that the hall needs to acknowledge hip-hop if it wants to continue to stay relevant. Arguing that the only way for the hall to remain relevant is to tell the story of the popular music of the most recent decades, McCall argues, "that can't be done without inducting deejays and rappers into the ranks of immortals."

The reasoning behind McCall's argument is clear enough. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has focused primarily on electric guitar groups, and in the past twenty years or so - at least since the release of Nirvana's Nevermind - fewer such acts have been a part of the popular music scene. While hip-hop won't stop, traditional rock and roll has been stopped virtually dead in its tracks. It's not that there aren't a lot of rock bands from the past two decades. I can name several of them at the drop of a hat - Pearl Jam, Collective Soul, the Cranberries, Pulp, Oasis, the White Stripes, Band of Horses, Iron and Wine, the New Pornographers, Belle and Sebastian, Son Volt, 3 Doors Down, Nada Surf, Florence and the Machine, and so on. It's that there aren't a lot of rock bands from the past two decades that have sold as many records as hip-hop performers like Jay-Z and Eminem. If I start editing out those bands who haven't done so out of the cursory list I've just offered, there won't be many left.

And when you consider that one of the biggest-selling bands of the past twenty years is Hootie and the Blowfish, you can understand why rock has been in serious decline.

McCall's argument is not without its merits - rock has lost so much of its audience and influence to rap that any institution attempting to provide an accurate history of popular music can't ignore rap - but should that even be the hall's objective? It's the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, not the Popular Music Hall Of Fame. The Hall of Fame, to its credit, has tried to acknowledge rock-related styles to present a history of rock more inclusive than the kind you'd find on classic rock radio or traditional AOR, but whenever it makes such an attempt, the results have been disastrous more often than not. Sure, Motown acts and early R&B performers who influenced the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were a lead-pipe cinch for induction, as were some of the folk musicians that inspired rock lyricists like Bob Dylan, who started out as a folkie himself. Ditto the Stax-Volt acts of the sixties and many of the funk bands of the seventies. But when the Hall of Fame began inducting the acts like the Bee Gees, Billy Joel, and James Taylor - veering into straight pop that has nothing to do with rock and roll - it lost its way. Then it inducted Madonna and lost its credibility.

As for rappers, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has inducted groups like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and Run-DMC, but it has largely avoided other rap performers on the basis that rap is really not rock (and Madge is??). The hall will induct the Beastie Boys in 2012 in an attempt to appear more broadminded, but choosing this white trio ahead of the black rappers who influenced them makes the hall look rather foolish. McCall has also suggested that the voters on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame board would sooner induct Kiss or Bon Jovi, bands known for heavy metal and light weight, than confront the hip-hop question in any meaningful way. They could even sidestep the issue by focusing on honoring rock bands known for their progressive, artistic leanings, such as Rush or Kraftwerk, McCall says, or even induct Yes. Right - that is so not going to happen. The rock critics on the Hall of Fame board all detested Yes in the seventies, and they spit on the ground at the mention on Jon Anderson's name; they're not about to turn around and suggest that they were wrong about Yes's artistic worth. Of course, they could do what I have suggested and start inducting British bands that never made it in America, such as Status Quo, Lindisfarne, or, I don't know, Family. Right. Kiss is likely to be inducted first.

Look. Honoring rock and roll performers based on record sales, in tandem with artistic merit as defined by the critics (classicism-based rock bands like Yes don't fall in that definition), is a tricky proposition that has already turned the institution into a parody of itself, so here's what I propose. Start a hip-hop hall separate from the rock hall - put it in the South Bronx, where hip-hop was started - and rename the rock hall in Cleveland the Rock and Roll Hall of Recognition, so less successful bands from yesterday's cult British bands to today's indie rockers can get in more on artistic merit than on their notoriety. Clean house at the rock hall - expel Madonna, for a start.

And for Pete's sake, honor Roger Chapman already.

Oh yeah, in addition to the Beastie Boys, the 2012 nominees are Guns 'n' Roses, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Donovan, Laura Nyro, the Faces and the Small Faces (to be inducted as the same band rather than the two separate bands they were), and bluesman Freddie King, as well as impresario Don Kirshner (as a nonperformer) and producers and engineers Glyn Johns, Tom Dowd, and Cosimo Matassa. I'll comment on these choices in a later post, I've gone too long here already.

Cain and Jordan

2011-12-09T21:01:00.001-05:00

News flash: Herman Cain is still a presidential candidate.

Yes, the former pizzeria chain CEO stopped his campaign over charges of an extramarital affair, but if you listened closely he said he was "suspending" his campaign. Suspending your campaign means you've temporarily halted your run for office so you figure out how or whether to go forward. Ending your campaign is withdrawing from the campaign and not going forward at all. Gary Hart, when he was faced with charges of an extramarital affair as his campaign for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination was gearing up in May 1987, suspended his run for the White House on May 7; he then ended his campaign on May 8. (He did re-enter the race seven months later, but that's a different issue.)

So Cain is still assessing his viability as a presidential candidate. The joke is that everyone else has assessed it for him.

Meanwhile, Representative Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican and a leading rightie, expressed pleasure with the fact that President Obama opposes any attempt to attach a rider authorizing an oil pipeline from Canada to Texas on a payroll tax cut extension bill.

"Frankly, Jordan said, "the fact that the president doesn't like it makes me like it even more."

Miracle of miracles! A Republican comes clean! He admits that he supports a bad idea just because the President opposes it!

Jordan is no stranger to expressing his opposition to policies without a lot of rationalized B.S. He also opposes high-speed rail, and remember, he came right out and said it was because he didn't want to see intercity passenger rail to compete with the business of selling cars - not because of wasteful government spending or any crap like that.

So we have one Republican who can't not be a candidate and another who can't not tell the truth. Yeah, those are double negatives. So are Cain and Jordan.

Christmas Music Video Of the Week - December 9, 2011

2011-12-09T10:37:00.000-05:00

"We Need a Little Christmas" by Angela Lansbury with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir (Go to the link in the upper right hand corner.)

Odd "Man" Out

2011-12-08T12:21:00.004-05:00

Ninety percent of all of the programs ever aired on American television, we are told, fail. And, apparently, 94 percent of these failed shows star Teri Polo. :-(

My favorite actress of my own generation appears in another TV series, and it looks like she is about to become associated with yet another flop, even though this series was initially expected to become a breakout hit of the 2011-12 season. "Man Up!," which debuted on Tuesdays on ABC at 8:30 PM Eastern - coincidentally, the same time slot that was once filled by Teri Polo's underappreciated sitcom "I'm With Her" - is a show that tries to find humor in a group of three men who try to hold on to some shred of masculinity in an increasingly feminized world. But these men have no real manliness about them, which their girlfriends or wives are happy to take advantage of.

I watched one episode, and despite a clever idea or two, it didn't make me laugh the way any of ABC's Wednesday night sitcoms do. It didn't make me want to change the channel, either. In fact, apart from making me want to watch Teri Polo, it didn't make me want to do anything. The writing is so-so, the performances are competent, and the execution of the show's premise - indeed, the premise itself - made me shrug at best. I really don't care much about the male characters and I find their feeble expressions of masculinity more static than amusing. In other words, it's as unengaging as "Better With You," an ABC one-season wonder from last season you already know about.

To make a long story short, the reviews have mostly been bad, and it's been struggling in the ratings - so much, that ABC doesn't even mention "Man Up!" in promos for its Tuesday night lineup. Indeed, they're already promoting "Work It," the show that will fill the Tuesday 8:30 PM Eastern time slot in January, pretty much sealing the fate of Teri Polo's latest sitcom and rendering it as her latest sitbomb. It didn't even premiere on ABC until October 18, meaning it will have only lasted two months.

So once again, Teri Polo will be joining the unemployment line, and, once again, her fans will be wondering when the heck a talented and versatile actress like she is finally going to have a hit series. "Sports Night," which first introduced her to television audiences, was a critically acclaimed ABC show that went nowhere with Nielsen families. "I'm With Her," which had male characters more likeable than those in "Man Up!," was a good ABC show that I believe would have been a great one if given the chance, but it was doomed by being broadcast opposite Fox's "American Idol" at a time when that was the hottest show on television. And the less said of Teri's "Wedding Bells" series on Fox, the better. And I'm not counting the two failed pilot shows she did on top of that.

So we Teri Polo fans will enter 2012 with the same frustration that Charlie Brown always felt when his favorite baseball player, Joe Shlabotnik, kept getting sent back to the minor leagues. And Polo herself will enter the new year feeling as though Lucy Van Pelt pulled the football away from her again. For the time being, the 42-year-old actress may have to resign herself to being a doyenne of Lifetime TV movies despite her natural ability to carry a theatrical release. She's better than TV actresses have to be and so deserves more time on the silver screen. In fact, I would insist that she's too good for TV and so should concentrate on films - but Teri, no more "Fockers" movies, please!

Fans will note that most of Polo's broadcast TV work has been with ABC, so if she does stick with the small screen, maybe she can get on a series that airs on another network. Overall, I'm certain that she won't disappear entirely - unless she ends up on an NBC series, of course.

Oh yeah, "Work It." That's a show about men who dress as women to get office jobs because they need the work. If it sounds like a "Bosom Buddies" rip-off, that's because people who have seen it say it is. Something tells me we won't see another Tom Hanks come out of this. Or anyone to draw comparisons to Dustin Hoffman, either.

Blocking Votes

2011-12-07T19:12:00.000-05:00

If President Obama loses his bid for re-election next year, it may not be because of the economy, and it won't really be because of the November 6 curse I wrote about earlier. It will possibly be because of voter suppression nationwide.

Once the Republicans realized that more young people, old people, poor people, and racial and ethnic minorities voted in 2008 and helped elect Obama President, swinging several key states in the Electoral College, it was inevitable that they would exploit the drop-off in interest among many of these traditional Democratic groups (except seniors, who can easily be coaxed into voting Republican on social issues) in the 2010 midterms and win enough state legislatures and governorships to pass voter restriction laws over Democratic opposition (what there is of it) at the state level. Now, in many states, residents must have a photo ID - usually a driver's license - to register to vote, early voting opportunities have been severely limited, and stricter residency requirements have been set into place. This has a disproportionate impact on traditionally Democratic voting blocs - poor people who can't afford a car and thus don't drive, urban residents who don't need a car and thus don't drive, working poor people who can't vote on the first Tuesday after November 1 because they have a job they have to show up for, and those who don't live in any one place for long, including college students. Folks who gave Obama his victory in 2008 likely won't be able to vote in large numbers in 2012.

I was going to suggest, when I planned to write on this subject, that progressive activist groups who register voters work with these laws, even if it means buying more buses to get more people to the polls in a shorter time frame and paying for driving lessons to get people who don't own a car a driver's license, but it turns out that Republicans have also enacted laws designed to curb mass registration by such groups. The nonpartisan League of Women Voters finds the new rules in Florida - which, among other things, reduce the number of early voting days from fourteen to eight - so restrictive that they've ceased voter registrations efforts in the Sunshine State indefinitely.

At the federal level, congressional Republicans are pushing to abolish the Election Assistance Commission, the four-person group created in the wake of the 2000 Bush-Gore and debacle in Florida to keep elections fair and honest through testing voting machines and offers assistance for proofing ballots. Republicans, who are so concerned about voter fraud that they restrict ballot access at the state level, say the commission has served its purpose in cleaning up voting (even though the new state restrictions cry for the commission's input), and that re-absorbing its duties into the Federal Election Commission will save the government $33 million in five years. $33 million in five years . . . in a budget of over a trillion dollars!

If these anti-initiatives are allowed to stand, the Republicans will undeservedly yet effectively ensure themselves as a permanent right-wing governing elite in America, with only a neutered political opposition - which, after 2012, will not be the Democratic party, which I predict will go the way of the Whigs and die a richly deserved death after caving on their principles one time too many.

Occupy Again?

2011-12-05T13:42:00.000-05:00

Last week I wrote that the Occupy Wall Street movement was dead. This week I think my declaration may have been premature, or maybe even dead wrong.

Ed Schultz interviewed members of the Occupy movement, including Scott Olsen, the Iraq War veteran who was severely injured during a run-in with police at an Occupy protest in Oakland. They told Schultz that the movement is just getting started, with new protests planned, and Olsen has said that he will continue to keep demonstrating himself. In fact, there's a massive encampment on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol next month.

Meanwhile, however, the demonstrations at Zuccotti Park in New York seemed to have diminished to nothing, or next to it, in the wake of the dismantling of the encampment. And the mainstream media seem to be paying little or no attention to any protests now. Ed Schultz and other progressive broadcasters seem to be alone in this assessment that the movement will continue.

Ironically, my pessimism was validated by stories the media have covered. CBS's "60 Minutes" has done stories on the explosion of child poverty in America and on the lack of prosecutions against greedy bankers and investors. So how much is being done in response to that? It almost makes me pine for the days when Ronald Reagan was President - because he always wanted to follow up with his aides on Monday mornings about doing something about what he'd seen on "60 Minutes" the previous night.

Outage Outrage

2011-12-04T21:12:00.001-05:00

I should have known this would happen.

Before the October Surprise snowstorm, it looked like our earlier power outage problem had been fixed for good. And until this October 29, it had been. We had no outages (except for a flicker or two in early January) for all of 2011. The three-day outage caused by the storm was understandable. Since the electricity was restored, though, the problem with frequent brownouts and blackouts has returned with a vengeance. With one month to go in 2011, it looks like we could have as many outages for the year as we did in all of 2010 (sixteen). In November 2011, following the electrical restoration, we've had three blackouts (all but one of them momentary), and on November 16, the lights flickered three times.

In all of but one of these instances (that being the blackout that lasted more than a moment, when it was clear out), it was raining outside. It wasn't raining hard any of these times, it wasn't a wind-driven rain or anything like that, it was just . . . raining. Once again, my block is back to a condition where a power outage can go off even with light-to-moderate rainfall. The October 29 snowstorm obviously opened an old wound in the electrical delivery system in my neighborhood.

That does it. It's supposed to rain again Tuesday. The power could go off again even in a drizzle or a passing shower. What is this, 1901? If it goes off even for a second - as it did this past Tuesday - I'm going to complain to Public Service Electric & Gas, our power utility, about it. My only consolation is that we at least don't get our power from Jersey Central Power & Light. After the storm, PSE&G restored our power in three days; some JCP&L customers affected by the storm had to wait up to two weeks.

Incidentally, many trees that were not shorn of limbs or toppled by the October storm still got damaged pretty badly. Several town managers in New Jersey are going to be busy for weeks or months determining the health of these trees. Some of them might lose limbs or fall altogether during the next big storm. And we still have half of a trunk of a tree on town property dangling over our back yard.

My New Car

2011-12-02T14:05:00.002-05:00

After more than eleven years and more than 86,000 miles, it was time to say goodbye to my beloved 2000 Volkswagen Golf. My driver's seat got worn down, the interior plastics were peeling, there was pulsation in the brakes, there was a leak in the transmission, and I handled it all as best I could. But when the glove compartment door broke for the third time, I realized I had to get a new car.

And of course, I got a new Golf - a 2012 model! :-D I picked it up earlier this week. This will be my third Volkswagen, after my 1972 Beetle and my 2000 Golf. (I seem to have a penchant for VWs from leap model years. :-D)

Going to a 2000 Golf from the fourth generation to a 2012 Golf from the sixth generation (the seventh generation model is expected in America as a 2013 or a 2014 model) is not unlike going from a '72 Beetle to an '84 Rabbit GTI would have been. The 2012 Golf's engine has five cylinders (compared to the four-cylinder engine in the 2000 model) and a displacement five deciliters larger (2.5 liters compared to 2.0). The horsepower rating is 170 as opposed to 115 for my old car. The result is a car that goes faster than it feels and has a smooth, steady ride. As my new car is still in the break-in period, I haven't had much experience with its handling, but I'm looking forward to it.

Of course, a new car means improvements all around. My radio is one of those new-fangled car radios that identifies the title and artist of a song being played on the radio station as well as the call letters of the station itself. With the Golf having moved a bit up-market, cruise control - which I've never had - is standard. The noticeable difference in the ride from my old car is welcome. My old car's suspension was so worn from a decade and change of driving that it felt hard and tough. My mother got a pain in her back riding in my 2000 VW when we went to pick up the new car; she was much more comfortable riding in the new one on our way home. We were both amazed at how different it felt.

I'm glad I got this car, and not just because my old one didn't have much more life to it. When the Mark 7 Golf arrives in America, it may come as decontented and as cheapened as the Jetta, which is selling like hotcakes in the States despite its Corolla-like, un-Volkswagen ambience. (The difference between the hard plastics in the Jetta and the soft-touch materials in my car is jaw-dropping.) I may have dodged a bullet, and I hope Golf fans who end up with the next-generation model are as lucky as I am. And, as long as VW sells lots and lots of Jettas (and Passats - the U.S.-spec Passat was just named Motor Trend's Car of the Year for 2012), VW can and hopefully will continue to offer an un-watered-down Golf hatchback as a loss leader.

Oh, I almost forgot - here's a picture of my new car! :-)

Christmas Music Video Of the Week - December 2, 2011

2011-12-02T13:34:00.001-05:00

"Run Rudolph Run" by Brian Setzer (Go to the link in the upper right hand corner.)

A Sequence of Extraordinary Coincidences

2011-12-01T21:49:00.001-05:00

A couple of bizarre coincidences have happened to me recently.

One was actually very sad. My mother returned home from work and told me that the mother of a woman she worked with had died the day after Thanksgiving. I told her that a woman I know lost her mother the same day. It turned out that the two women were sisters, hence their mother was one and the same person. I told my mother about my friend and she told me about her coworker, but we had no idea theory were related. The coincidence was as strange as well as sad. :-(

There were two brighter coincidences that also occurred in the past week. My mother and I went to a concert, and it turned out that two of my friends were there but we never saw them. One of them saw me, and asked me if the woman who was with me was in fact my mother.

The third one necessitates a little name dropping. As many people who read this blog know, I am friends with well-known high-profile fashion models on Facebook. One of them is noted model Maggie Rizer. Yesterday I posted to my beautiful women picture blog a post paying tribute to Maggie Rizer. Then I found out that Ms. Rizer had just given birth to a baby boy exactly one week earlier, and I wasn't even aware she'd been pregnant. I had only connected to her on Facebook just a couple of weeks earlier, through mutual associations, so I had no idea she was expecting. The reason I posted this blog entry devoted to Maggie Rizer was because - honest to goodness - I'd had this entry saved as a draft for months and I simply decided I'd saved it long enough.

Yes, I congratulated her. After all, she's one of my friends now.

What "Parenthood" Looks Like

2011-11-30T12:05:00.000-05:00

It looked like Crosby and Jasmine got back together on "Parenthood" after sleeping with each other in last week's episode (guess that settles the question of the timidity of the producers in showing interracial romance on American television!). But since Jasmine has a boyfriend, Crosby declared that it was a mistake and chose to quietly carry on without her.

It looked like Adam was in hot water indefinitely after failing to fire a secretary who kissed him as if he were her own boyfriend and catching flak over it from Kristina, whom he shouldn't have shared the news of the incident with in the first place. Kristina, having just born a daughter, returned to work after feeling betrayed. But Kristina's anger subsided - after what happened with Max.

It looked like Max, Adam and Kristina's Asperger's-affected son, would get kidnapped or beaten up after he tried to go to a natural history museum in San Francisco on his own when his parents couldn't take him and ended up in Oakland. But he made it home to Berkeley safely, and he, his sisters and his parents all went to the museum together.

It looked like Julia wouldn't adopt the unborn baby of Zoe, the barista girl who works in Julia's law firm, after all, when it turned out that the father of the baby wouldn't sign the adoption release papers without financial compensation. Such a deal is actually illegal in California. But when Zoe's boyfriend (the father) kicked her out, she had nowhere to go . . . but to Julia, who took her in.

It looked like a cash-crunched Amber was moving back in with Sara, until her aunt Kristina gave her a job at the political campaign she just started working for.

It looks like "Parenthood" is going on another December hiatus. There were no previews for the next episode following the one that aired last night. In an earlier episode, Julia admits to not being raised in any particular tradition, so it looks like the Bravermans don't celebrate Christmas.

So it looks like there will never be a Christmas episode of "Parenthood" even if the show lasts a decade. It's on NBC, so it looks like that won't happen.

Occupy Nothing

2011-11-29T14:49:00.002-05:00

The Occupy Wall Street movement is pretty much over. Stick a fork in it, boys, it's done. And the end hasn't come because of the evictions most of the "occupiers" have faced in different cities. It's mostly because no one - least of all the media - pays attention to them anymore.

A lot of Occupy Wall Street groups tried to make a statement about the conspicuous spending on Black Friday; some of them showed up as flash mobs in Wal-Marts expressing solidarity with the exploited and underpaid workers who were forced to work from midnight to 8 A.M. and possibly later that morning. Guess what: Retail sales for the day after Thanksgiving set a new record in 2011 - $11.4 billion. The truth of the matter is, even in a recessionary period like this one, to be against shopping is like being against America.

Also, new polls suggest that while most Americans still approve of Occupy Wall Street's objectives - making the rich pay their fair share - they increasingly disapprove of their methods and tactics, which include camping in public plazas, disrupting traffic in the general area (generated by people trying to get to work) and, presumably, playing bongo drums. (Middle America prefers melody to rhythm.)

Oh yeah, although many of the protesters are unable to find employment, right-wingers like Newt Gingrich are exhorting them to get a job as soon as they've washed up. The joke's on him; they're already washed up. Success in America is defined by hard work and playing by the rules, and conservatives have convinced Americans that the Occupy Wall Street crowd is capable of neither. Democrats, which hoped to catch of some of Occupy Wall Street's energy, are now being warned that an association with OWS could cost them the White House and Congress in 2012.

The Occupy Wall Street protests have become the sociopolitical equivalent of the grunge rock revolt; it's shaken the established order, but has pretty much failed to bring it down . . . and collapsed in the attempt.

Green Stalemate

2011-11-27T22:34:00.001-05:00

An environmental expert recently wrote an editorial in a local community paper in my area about the "victories" environmentalists can be thankful for this Thanksgiving weekend. Specifically, he mentioned the delays on the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to Texas and on the plan to hydraulically fracture land in the Delaware River basin for natural gas.

Since when are delays of environmentally destructive projects that might end up going through anyway considered victories?

He also wrote that these so-called victories come at a time when the national environmental movement continues to have to be on the defensive because of attempts to deny that climate change is real and attempts to abolish (or at least emaciate) the Environmental Protection Agency. So, when you get right down to it, the anti-environmentalist movement within the American right is on the side that's winning.

What Walter Cronkite said of the American war effort in Vietnam in 1968 sounds like what the environmental movement faces today; environmentalists in this country are mired in stalemate, and to say so seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. Anyone who thinks that American environmentalists are winning the battle need only look and see how many of their countrymen now think that maybe climate change is a hoax after all.

Music Video Of the Week - November 25, 2011

2011-11-25T14:15:00.002-05:00

"Homeward Bound" by Simon and Garfunkel (Go to the link in the upper right hand corner.)

Thanksgiving 2011

2011-11-24T17:01:00.000-05:00

More Grayson Matters

2011-11-23T11:09:00.001-05:00

Recently, the Florida Democratic Party invited Alan Grayson to be the keynote speaker at the first meeting of the Democratic Progressive Caucus of Florida. Grayson was voted out of his U.S. House seat in 2010, but he hopes to make a comeback in 2012 by winning one of the two new seats Florida gets in the House starting with the next Congress as a result of reapportionment based on the latest census figures. He drew hundreds of people to this Democratic event. He critiqued the Republican presidential candidates (and Sarah Palin) in his thirty-minute speech, and I have to repeat what he said here. If Grayson doesn't make it back to Washington, he should consider a career as a stand-up comic. :-D

Among his observations:

Sarah Palin: "I was disappointed that Sarah Palin was not running. But I understood why. She realized that she could not fit the Oath of Office on her palm."

On Mitt Romney: "There’s somebody who spends all day trying to figure out whether he should flip or flop."

On Herman Cain: "I hope he gets the nomination because clearly, if both parties nominate African-Americans, every racist in this country will have to commit suicide. . .. What is his business genius? That he paid people $8 an hour to deliver $15 pizzas."

On Rick Perry: "Rick Perry tried to pick a fist fight with Ron Paul on national TV. A 76-year-old man. He doesn’t want to just cut Social Security. He wants to beat up everyone on Social Security."

On Newt Gingrich: "Somebody said to me recently, 'I actually listened to Newt Gingrich, and he sounded really crazy to me.' I said, 'Look, Newt Gingrich has been listening to Newt Gingrich for 68 years. If you listened to Newt Gingrich for 68 years, wouldn’t you be crazy?'"

On Ron Paul: "I’m going to disregard Ron Paul, because everyone else does."

On Michele Bachmann: "I’m not going to say anything about her, because we actually have an agreement between ourselves. The agreement is that if I don’t tell the truth about her, she won’t lie about me."

Happy Thanksgiving. :-D

Not Gun Shy

2011-11-22T14:13:00.001-05:00

I was going to write about how the leadership of the National Rifle Association - not its rank-and-file members, its leadership - is the slimiest set of lobbyists in Washington, but alas, they're not that reputable. It seems that the NRA leadership has endorsed a proposal to make concealed weapon permits in different states valid nationwide by federal law, overriding restrictions in other states. A bill that would in fact override state laws against concealed firearms was passed by the Republican House - with some Democratic support - and it now has to be voted on by the Senate. Already, several Senate Democrats, including New Jersey's Frank Lautenberg, are working to make sure the bill gets defeated, or at least filibustered to death.

New Jersey, in addition to having some of the most dangerous real estate in America, has one of the toughest hidden gun laws in the country. This bill would theoretically make it easier for out-of-staters to come in, possibly to sell illegal drugs, and make life in Newark and Camden even worse than it already is. Some states, like Florida, are so lax in issuing concealed weapon permits that ex-convicts can get them. How many Republicans in New Jersey's House delegation supported this wrong-headed idea? All six of them.

Except that NRA rank-and-file members overwhelmingly oppose this bill, and they've lobbied their own lobby against it. Apparently NRA leaders listen to their members as much as congressman listen to constituents who support taxing millionaires. That is to say ,they don't.

This bill passed the House last week, the same week a man from Idaho fired rounds at the White House in hope of assassinating the President.

Speaking of concealment, I can't conceal my anger over this. That's why I'm posting this on the anniversary of the John F. Kennedy assassination.

A Super Failure

2011-11-21T10:11:00.004-05:00

The deficit reduction super committee created by Congress in the wake of the debt ceiling debate is ready to admit failure in advance of a Wednesday deadline to reach a deficit-cutting mandate without failure as an option. Automatic cuts to everything are to take place beginning in 2013.

Wow, like we couldn't have seen that coming. After all, there are six Democrats and six Republicans on that committee, each side it sticking to its pea shooters - Democrats on entitlements, Republicans on taxes - without enough compromise to break through anything, and Washington is more partisan than at any time since the decade before the Civil War.

I'm sorry we don't have a parliamentary system. If we did, President Obama - who would be a figurehead, kind of like what he is right now - would fire his prime minister and call new legislative elections, and every incumbent in Congress would lose.

And, of course, while Democrats would run a fresh team of challengers and pretend after the election never to have heard of John Kerry, Republicans would still be running the same people over again.

Goodbye, Andy, Mark Two

2011-11-20T20:47:00.000-05:00

Over a month ago, I wrote about Andy Rooney's retirement from "60 Minutes," and I summed up his long and incredible career. I concluded by saying that Rooney is "not retiring from writing, because even at 92 years of age, he's a writer and he always will be, and he thanked viewers for listening to what he had to say for 33 years. He's sure to be around in some capacity after tonight, and I'm sure he'll have something to say about it."

Ironically, those were his last words as a professional writer. Rooney, of course, died on the night of November 4. I regret that I had not acknowledged his death earlier than now. I also regret that I cannot add anything to what I've already said about him . . . except that Rooney imagined himself maintaining some kind of presence as a writer. His goodbye was not meant to be forever. But Rooney's death only a month after his final "60 Minutes" sign-off only shows how fate, whatever we envision for ourselves, has its own plans. R.I.P.

It makes sense that the current producers of "60 Mnutes" haven't thought up a new kind of end piece to he show. What could they possible come up with after more than three decades of Andy?

Corridor Concerns

2011-11-19T21:43:00.000-05:00

With the governors of Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida - three governors who, incidentally, could all be fighting for their political lives will before they're up for re-election in 2014 - having canceled high-speed rail projects in their states, Congress is likely to do the same for the nation at large. President Obama's attempt to make high-speed passenger rail accessible to 80 percent of all Americans by 2035 could be a casualty of the budget-cutting attempts on Capitol Hill. But - and this is an important "but" - that doesn't mean high-speed rail in America is about to be abandoned completely. And I'm not talking about Illinois's "high-speed" Chicago-St. Louis corridor, which will feature six train sets that travel at 110 miles an hour (you call that fast?) or California's bullet train project, with a projected cost off $100 billion that could be hard to sustain economically and politically.

I'm actually talking about the Northeast Corridor. (Yes, we in the Northeast have the Acela, but at 150 mph it hardly compares to the even faster trains enjoyed in France and Germany.) As a Florida Republican, House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee chairman John Mica hardly sounds like an ally of high-speed rail, given the fact that both his governor and his party have said no to it. But Mica not only supports high-speed rail, he thinks that the only way to ensure its success nationwide - even in increasingly crowded California - is to first build it where it's going to get the most use and be most appreciated. For Mica, that means the line between Boston and Washington by way of New York.

"While I want to give California every chance and opportunity to be successful," Mica told a conference of the U.S. High Speed Rail Association in New York on November 8, "I think we have to redirect our efforts to having at least one success in high-speed rail in the nation. And that high-speed rail success needs to be here in the Northeast Corridor."

Mica also reversed himself on privatizing Amtrak. Some Republicans have suggested that privatizing the national passenger railroad and making it susceptible to market forces would encourage high-speed rail to be developed faster. However, Mica, who once agreed with the idea, now rejects the idea, believing that Amtrak is now willing to work with Congress to make something happen.

Meanwhile, Congress is also ready to allocate $15 million as a down payment for engineering work on the proposed Gateway tunnel to connect Secaucus, New Jersey with Penn Station (someday to be named Moynihan Station, after the late U.S. Senator from New York) in Midtown Manhattan. The project looks to be less expensive than the proposed Access to the Region's Core tunnel that New Jersey governor Chris Christie canceled for being too costly, and it will allow thirteen extra New Jersey Transit trains and eight extra Amtrak trains into New York when it is completed in 2020 or 2021. Christie is more receptive to this plan.

As a passenger rail advocate, you take your victories where you can find them . . ..

Music Video Of the Week - November 18, 2011

2011-11-18T11:15:00.000-05:00

"I've Got To Use My Imagination" by Gladys Knight and the Pips (Go to the link in the upper right hand corner.)

More Parenthood Issues

2011-11-17T12:14:00.003-05:00

NBC's "Parenthood" has taken quite an interesting turn in the past couple of weeks. While other NBC shows have been failing simply for being on NBC, "Parenthood" continues to be intriguing . . . though not always for the right reasons. I'll explain shortly.

In the latest plot twist, the two Braverman brothers, Adam and Crosby, have apparently switched personalities; the cautious Adam has become more reckless, and the irresponsible Crosby has become the adult in the room. The two brothers have opened a recording studio together, and when they make an attempt at accommodating neo-soul and hip-hop artist Cee Lo Green (who played himself) for a session, Adam is convinced they can pull everything together in a day or two; Crosby, who knows a thing or two about professional recording, is aware of the logistical difficulties involved and gets impatient with Adam for his naïveté. They manage to pull the Cee Lo Green session off, after more than a few hitches, but the married Adam's self-control unravels to the point where he ends up engaged in a passionate kiss with Rachel, his and Crosby's new secretary. Crosby, whose sexual selfishness destroyed his engagement to Jasmine, manages to avoid such temptations. In the next episode, Adam's wife Kristina finds out about his indiscretion. If the pattern holds, the series will go on hiatus for December, and so a huge cliffhanger is in the offing for next Tuesday.

And while all this is going on, Julia is going to adopt the unborn child of the barista girl at her law firm after all. The unwed mother-to-be didn't want to give her baby to anyone she knew personally . . . until she saw first-hand what great parents Julia and her husband were to their little girl.

Now for a more unwelcome turn. For much of the show's existence so far, interracial relationships have been part of the storylines. As noted, Crosby and Jasmine broke up acrimoniously. But Adam's daughter Hattie suddenly found herself unattached when her black boyfriend Alex felt he had no alternative but to break up with her after being arrested for assault. Although cleared of the charges, he decided that his violent past was too much of an impediment in his and Hattie's relationship. Alex has completely disappeared. Meanwhile, Jasmine has begun dating a pediatrician who, like herself, is black, although Crosby is jealous not because of Jasmine but because of his and Jasmine's son, whom he feels is spending way too much time with her new boyfriend. Oh yeah, there have been recent episodes where Joy Bryant, who plays Jasmine, doesn't show up at all - or she makes an appearance that feels more like a walk-on.

I'm suspecting that, despite the increase in the number of interracial unions in America - and even the President of the United States is a product of one - advertisers are still reluctant to sponsor a show that deals with them. Both NBC and the writers and producers of "Parenthood" must have caved in to outside pressure, as the show seems to be deviating further from this once-vital plot device. I'm pining for the days when Norman Lear could put an interracial couple on one of his shows and make viewers like it, but in an age of growing ethnic paranoia, and at a time when NBC is one Nielsen report away from being liquidated, the pressure to avoid the exploration of such relationships on "Parenthood" must be too great for producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer to withstand. (Remember, this is all speculation; I can't say for sure that this is the case.)

Oh, yeah, few if any of NBC's other current shows are meeting their ridiculously low expectations . . .but that's another post.

Facebook Sneak Attack

2011-11-16T22:25:00.002-05:00

The Internet hacking group Anonymous did not destroy Facebook on November 5 as they - or some of their renegade members - had promised back in August, but other hackers are doing the next best thing. Hackers have been attacking Facebook with a vengeance, posting all sorts of spam on users' profile pages. They've been posting pictures depicting graphic sex and violence, posting links to suspicious videos, and - wait for it - posting links to fabulous deals on products. According to an Associated Press report, clicking on such links took people to a page that asked them to copy and paste a line of malicious JavaScript programming code into the address bar of their Web browser. Pasting such a message would pick up a message or picture from whatever Web site the JavaScript would be posting to. The content would then be posted on the users' Facebook page, usually without their knowledge. It would spread further when their friends then clicked on those links, thinking that the user had posted it deliberately.

It gets worse. Four other Facebook viruses have been detected in recent days. The first virus is a notice of a photo tag, which people are likely to check. The second is a notification that a friend reported you to Facebook for offensive behavior, which is too temptingly intriguing not to check. The third is a video saying that 99 percent of people cannot watch it for more than fifteen seconds, daring one to watch it for longer. The fourth is any message from a friend via the online chat function (as opposed to a Facebook e-mail) urging you to click a link. Any one of these viruses can crash a PC.

I knew I should have gotten a Mac.

I'm paranoid now. After having scanned my computer daily for weeks and feeling I didn't need to scan it anymore for awhile, I've taken to scanning it three times in two days because I had clicked on a comment thread mentioning me that led to one of those links directing me to a fabulous deal on, ironically, an Apple product. Although I didn't click on the link itself, the fact that I was led to it was enough to freak me out. The link was indeed posted to my friend's Facebook page without his knowledge.

I love Facebook; I've been addicted to it, in fact, and it was because of Facebook that I've made so many invaluable connections to people (and I won't bore you with name dropping, because I did that in my August 10 post about, ironically, Anonymous), but with all of these attacks and threats of attacks, I've been worrying more than usual about my PC and the integrity of my antivirus protection.

Facebook says that it's stopped most of the spam attacks, and I assume the viruses have been cleared out as well. Facebook has also sought to re-assure its customers by pointing out that less than four percent of all of the content shared on it is spam. I'm not re-assured. A piece of spam - particularly a piece of spam carrying a virus - is like an atomic bomb. It takes only one of them to ruin your whole day.

Liberate Wall Street?

2011-11-15T20:13:00.000-05:00

The round-the-clock occupation of Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan is over. At one o'clock this morning, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered the park cleared of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators who had been camping out there for nearly two months, citing health and safety hazards that apparently hadn't existed in all the time the protesters were allowed to stay there. Bloomberg also said that the Occupy Wall Street protest can continue at the park - without the sleeping bags or tents. And if this privately-owned park is run like any public park, many of which close at dusk, no one is likely to be able to stay up in the park overnight.

The massive demonstration planned in New York for this Thursday (November 17) is likely to be the high watermark for the Occupy Wall Street crowd. Without the park in Lower Manhattan as a focal point, and with authorities cracking down on overnight occupations elsewhere, the news media are likely to mostly ignore the movement going forward and move on to the scandals and celebrity tidbits that make up the bread and butter of American broadcast journalism. Sure, some protesters have called this merely the beginning of their movement. Yeah, I heard similar statements about causes that were pretty much forgotten in a couple of months. So please forgive me - no, really, please forgive me - if I sound like I think that the Occupy Wall Street movement has had its moment in the sun already. Because I do. Remember the renewed focus on the poor after Katrina? The communitarian spirit after 9/11? The rising numbers of women in Congress after the Clarence Thomas hearings? Get the picture?

I may be wrong, and I hope I am. But the Occupy Wall Street movement, which grew in part out of a dissatisfaction with government after the debt ceiling deal, can't possibly see the focus in Washington on deficit reduction to stave off automatic spending cuts by next Wednesday as a sign that anyone in Congress is listening to them. As for the 2012 elections, I wonder if there's going to be any momentum left by the time the Obama re-election campaign is in full force. You could tell from the energy of the Tea Party rallies long before November 2010 that the right was energized and in control of the debate. Right now, despite sympathy for and solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street protests, I'm not too sure that this movement has enough muscle or edge to muscle out and edge out the status quo. The Tea Party put figures like Pat Toomey and Rand Paul in the U.S. Senate; so far, there's little indication that people like Elizabeth Warren are going to benefit from the Occupy Wall Street crowd.

Yeah, I hear a lot of optimism about the Occupy Wall Street movement. Much of it mirrors the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency in 2008. But then we got the Tea Party instead.

Rock and Roll Over Again

2011-11-14T10:36:00.002-05:00

The radio station I normally listen to in the New York area, the Fordham University-based public music station WFUV-FM, was broadcasting a Fordham sporting event (football or something like that), so I tuned into WRXP-FM, New York's only contemporary rock station, while driving home. I hadn't listened to that station in a long time. Then I heard a tidbit about Beyoncé Knowles's pregnancy, and I realized something was very, very wrong - rock stations don't give a twit about pop divas like Beyoncé Knowles. Sure enough, the station had changed formats and call letters - WRXP-FM was now WEMP-FM, an all-news station. That's right, an all-news FM radio station, which has been tried before in New York (with WNWS in the seventies). And what's worse, its "news" stories were designed to appeal to female listeners, meaning they tended to be chock full of entertainment without so much information. The format change had happened in August, when the station was sold to a different owner.

The new owners explained that the format change was in recognition of the fact that rock music fans tend to get their music from sources other than traditional radio - and WRXP in fact continues to broadcast online - but I knew what the real reason was. New York City is becoming more of a rhythm town; the hip-hop and R&B market is simply much bigger than the rock market in the Big Apple, and anyone who doesn't like hip-hop or R&B tends to listen to "light" music stations that play empty power ballads and antiseptic pop acts. WCBS-FM, an oldies station, and WAXQ-FM, a classic rock station, are pretty much the only commercial stations left in New York that play the kind of music I like - too bad none of it is current.

WRXP-FM was the second or third attempt at a station with a current rock format since WNEW-FM - whose frequency is now the site of a light pop station designed to appeal to, you guessed it, young women - went off the air. WRXP's banishment from terrestrial radio is the clearest sign that today's rock has no home in New York City. If you enjoy current bands like Coldplay, Guster or the Hold Steady - or current solo artists like Ray LaMontagne - you're not going to find them on commercial radio in the Big Apple very much anymore. They're not the kind of performers that sell out arenas, and their records don't go multiplatinum - it would be a big deal if they went platinum once - and without a commercial radio station to promote them, it will be difficult for them to secure concert dates in the Tri-State area with promoters.

Of course, WFUV-FM plays these artists, but WFUV, as noted, doesn't always play music when it's obligated to serve the university it makes its home at by airing its football games and Sunday church services (it's a Catholic school, remember). And because it's a public station, on the lower end of the FM dial, its reach is smaller than any of the big-time commercial stations. Meanwhile, it looks like many New York rock fans will have to change the way they get their music whether they like it or not - as noted, WRXP broadcasts online, so going to the PC will be the only way I can hear it. I don't have and can't afford all of these portable devices that would allow me to listen to Internet radio away from my PC. If there's a way to still listen to WRXP in my car, I don't know about it . . . and it's probably too technologically sophisticated for me to bother with.

It looks like I'll have to listen to WFUV when I can. Fortunately, I can and do listen to it regularly. I've never taken it for granted, and with WRXP gone from the terrestrial airwaves, I'm less likely to do so.

The Penn State Scandal

2011-11-13T20:11:00.001-05:00

The story from Pennsylvania State University is depressing for me to contemplate. Here is one of the most prestigious universities in the nation, a small-time land-grant research college set up in the middle of nowhere that has since become a noted center of serious higher education, embroiled in a child molestation scandal involving its football team. People see the abuse take place but report it only to each other in an apparent effort to cover it up and keep everything look like business as usual on the surface.

But that's just it. It was business as usual. No one in the Penn State athletics department communicated with anyone on the outside and no one challenged each other to report the abuses to the authorities, thanks to a time-honored code of silence. Head coach Joe Paterno could have saved himself a lot of trouble - and his job - if he'd reported Jerry Sandusky's crimes to the police. He could have ignored he fact that he was required to only tell the head of his department and gone over a head or two to do something more about it. He could have been the hero the students who actually rioted in support of him thought he was. A hero, of course, is someone who does the right thing and doesn't give a damn about the consequences. Joe Paterno is neither of those things. Since when is genuine heroism being the one of the "winningest" (I hate that word) football coaches in the history of sports?

Penn State, despite having made the leap from its beginnings as a school for farming and mechanics to being an academic powerhouse, still ties its identity to its football team, so much that school pride revolves more around the team than the scholarship that gives the school its reason to exist. Intercollegiate athletics have always been something of an embarrassment to higher education in America, what with all the scandals involving inflated grades and bribes to ensure that the best athletes made the team, even if they weren't the best students . . . or even if they weren't legitimate students at all. And now this? I'm still trying to understand such a crime involving ten-year-old boys got started on a college campus in the first place.

If most of the students at Penn State are as educated as they should be, they will be contemplating and pondering just how the athletic program at Penn State got so much out of control and will be much less likely be party to the sham of the idea of intercollegiate athletics as a noble extension of any university's goal toward intellectual development. After all, the only thing the Penn State athletic program has extended is a kind of boorish boosterism, a celebration of a mindset that rewards "teamwork" and "success" rather than genuine thought.

Music Video Of the Week - November 11, 2011

2011-11-11T11:29:00.000-05:00

"Born In the U.S.A." by Bruce Springsteen (Go to the link in the upper right hand corner.)

A Matter of "Trust"

2011-11-10T10:14:00.002-05:00

Congress last week got down to the nuts and bolts of governing and overwhelmingly passed a resolution . . . to re-affirm "In God We Trust" as our national motto. Representative Randy Forbes (R-VA) declared that the resolution was necessary to remind President Obama that "In God We Trust," not "E Pluribus Unum," was the nation's official motto (and has been since 1956) after Obama referred to "E Pluribus Unum" as our national motto a recent speech. Forbes and other members of Congress also got angry when "E Pluribus Unum" was inscribed in the U.S. Capitol's new visitors' center, and they demanded that it be corrected. Well, that should provide a couple of temporary jobs for masons.

I am appalled and offended by this story for two reasons. First of all, there was no reason to suspect that the official motto was ever in danger of being undermined by anyone, let alone the President. Second of all, our official national motto is a violation of the separation of church and state and a subtle dismissal of agnosticism, meant at discouraging critical thinking. But then, discouraging critical thinking is what we Americans are best at.

Both mottos have a long history, and both appear on our coinage. As for "In God We Trust," the earliest use of the phrase was in the third verse of "The Star-Spangled Banner" (only the first verse is sung at sporting events), which Francis Scott Key wrote in 1814. U.S. Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase urged the use of "In God We Trust" on American coinage in 1862 as a reaction to the outbreak of the Civil War. Chase insisted that "[no] nation can be strong except in the strength of God, or safe except in His defense. The trust of our people in God should be declared on our national coins." It first appeared on our coinage in 1864.

"In God We Trust" became the national motto in 1956 as a talisman against Soviet Communism at a period when the United States was engaged during a period of smarmy self-righteousness - a period of our history that, despite the end of the Cold War, continues to this day. The move - which added the phase to our paper currency - offended every thinking American with a sophisticated world view, and such Americans were, in the 1950s, in severely short supply. But Paul Fussell - a World War II veteran who fought and almost died for his country in France - was particularly livid. Having found American culture to have "seemed more than ever bellicose, ignorant, selfish and greedy, shot through with quasi-religious fraud and hypocrisy," he declared that the America of the mid-1950s "was the sort of place any decent person would want to leave."

The United States in 2011? Draw your own conclusion. The national government has been hijacked by reactionaries offended by the very idea of a black President and driven to preserve the overwhelmingly Caucasian and Judeo-Christian America of the past, with all of the restrictions on civil liberties that implies - without much regard to repairing the obscene economic inequities that have developed over the past 35 years. And regarding the former point, we shouldn't expect to see "E Pluribus Unum" - Latin for "from many, one" - to ever become the official motto. (In fact, it never has been.) Originally referring to the creation of one nation by the original thirteen states, it could just as easily refer to the increasing racial, ethnic and, yes, religious diversity of the nation today, and that offends Republicans turned off by the idea of a polyglot society. Plus, we can't have a phrase like "E Pluribus Unum" as our national motto; that would require politicians to learn enough Latin to understand it.

As I have indicated in the past, it's not only obscene to have a national motto that violates the separation of church and state, but it's even more obscene to include it on money, a sacrilege pointed out by noted Commie pinko subversive Theodore Roosevelt. But then maybe it's appropriate to do so, in light of an observation an executive for the British Broadcasting Corporation made while working with American commercial broadcasters in a bi-national broadcasting collaboration in the thirties . . . that Americans are somehow able to worship God and Mammon at the same time.

We Americans do trust in God, but everyone else has to put up collateral.

Election Returns - 2011

2011-11-09T23:02:00.000-05:00

The results of yesterday's elections are in, and my faith in the American democratic process is . . . well, if it's not renewed, at least it's not completely and utterly beyond redemption.

In Ohio, a ballot measure that would have restricted collective bargaining rights failed (by a margin of 61 to 39 percent), as did the ballot measure in Mississippi that would have declared a fertilized egg a person. Also, in Maine, a new law to ban same-day voter registration on Election Day was repealed, and Arizona State Senate President Russell Pearce - the author of the state's racist anti-immigrant law - was forced out of office in a recall.

In Kentucky, Democratic Governor Steve Beshear was re-elected by running away from President Obama's policies, while Mississippi elected another Republican - Phil Bryant - to succeed Haley Barbour as governor. Republicans in Virginia gained power in the state legislature, while Democrats kept control of both houses of the New Jersey state legislature. So I guess it was kind of a wash.

And you can hold your comments my post yesterday regarding Louisiana's gubernatorial election, rendered unnecessary by its open primary. I give up, I just can't keep up with Louisiana's procedures for statewide elections. I don't know how they're run, although not very well, obviously.

Election Day 2011 - No Endorsements

2011-11-08T08:39:00.000-05:00

Unlike in years past, where I have made endorsements of various candidates for office in different campaigns across the country, I am not making any endorsements for this year, 2011.

The reasons for this are many. First of all, I was pre-occupied by the recent autumn snowstorm and the cleanup afterwards, along with some other writing projects, so I haven't kept up with any of the major gubernatorial races in Kentucky, Louisiana, or Mississippi, or, for that matter, important ballot questions like the collective bargaining question in Ohio. Secondly, many races this year are so lopsided - the mayoral election in Philadelphia, for example, where the Democrat always wins - that endorsements in those cases are meaningless. Thirdly, it's an off-year electoral cycle - so who gives a twit? Fourthly, I have reached a point where my disgust for the democratic process in America is too great for me to offer any even-handed endorsements of any sort. It would be like a rock critic trying to give a fair review to an album from a band he hates. So I have decided to spare myself the trouble and thus not endorse any candidate or any position. Even to take a stand on the question in Mississippi related to abortion would be to involve myself in an issue Americans should have settled long ago . . . and besides, the very idea of declaring a fertilized egg a person shouldn't even be dignified with an acknowledgement.

I decided to take advice from the late, great American entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr., who famously said during the 1980 presidential campaign, "The only thing I'm endorsing this year is checks." :-p

After The Storm

2011-11-07T10:25:00.002-05:00

So you're probably wondering just what happened to me as a result of the freak snowstorm that hit the northeastern United States October 29. Ughh, where do I begin?

A couple of days before the "October Surprise" shocked us Northeasterners, it was expected to be a typical October snowfall (not unheard of in this part of America), a light coating to a couple of inches with some rain mixed in. No big deal. A winter weather advisory was issued for the part of New Jersey that I live in. Nothing as devastating as, say, a hurricane. At one point, in fact, this storm was supposed to miss us altogether.

It all turned out very differently. What happened was that the rain changed to snow earlier than expected and the snow came down harder than expected. The weather advisory for my area was upgraded to a storm warning at virtually the last minute. Some parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania got warnings without the customary watches preceding them. Cold air was funneled in from Canada at the very moment the storm, having formed off the coast of North Carolina from different rain bands, began racing up the coast. Once the snow did start falling, it weighed down the branches and limbs of trees, many of which still had their leaves and thus could not take the strain of the heavy white stuff. My house briefly lost electricity twice before it went off a third time . . . and stayed off for three days. The cable service briefly went out once, then again for just as long.

Because this storm took everyone by surprise - unlike Hurricane Irene, which everyone expected - few people in the greater New York area prepared for it. For Hurricane Irene, I stocked up on batteries, put everything outside (lawn chairs, hoses, et al.) away, and made lots and lots of ice. This time, I was only able to buy enough batteries for my portable radio and quickly compose drafts for my blogs that I could still post from a PC at the local library later in case I lost power at home. But the more important preparations - getting ice for perishable food and the like - proved to be impossible given the short notice we had about the storm's intensity.

One thing I did manage to do the day before the storm hit was remove some tree branches from the overhead wires connected to my house and clear a few branches from another tree (both red maples, by coincidence) growing into the main wires along the street. Removing the branches over my wires prevented them from being brought down, which would have meant my mother and I might have been without power longer. But removing branches growing into the main wires was a useless gesture. No branches from our property collapsed onto the main wires, but a limb from our neighbor's oak did . . . and it took down most of the wires plus the insulator supporting the top wire. It wasn't until the wires were re-attached the Tuesday after the storm (November 1) that my mother and I got our electricity and our cable service. In between losing and regaining both services, we had to deal without heat at night, conserve what little hot water was left (I had to shower in the local community center at least once), and make calls on our cell phones. My mother and I constantly checked the hourly outage reports on WCBS-AM, the local news station, and as we heard the number of outages in our service area drop, we got increasingly annoyed that we were still in that number.

Wednesday went along without incident, but the power went off again for three hours on Thursday morning. So, after returning from the library, I went out and bought some ice. I got home and opened the door to being the ice in, and the power was still off. I went back to the car, I got the ice, and when I went back in the house, the power was back on. It was that kind of week.

Anyway, I'm glad that's all over. But there's still a lot of damage to the trees in my neighborhood and everywhere else. So many treetops and limbs got destroyed that the area looks like Hiroshima after the bomb. Halloween celebrations on Monday had to be cut back or postponed all together, most trick-or-treaters going out the following Friday. The streets and avenues are littered with so much debris everywhere, and the cleanup (which started in my town today, fortunately on my street first) could take weeks. It could take until April or May in most towns to inspect the trees that bore the brunt of the storm to check for additional damage. I myself spent several days afterward cleaning up the mess around my house, which was light in comparison to what our neighbors had to deal with. Our biggest problem was a tree from a vacant wooded lot owned by the township we live in that cracked in two and collapsed into our back yard. The remains of it are still there, and the township says we're responsible for the part of the tree that fell on our property (i.e., most of it).

But at least the all of the snow has pretty much melted. :-D Now we can get back to autumn. And I hope the only things that fall from the trees from here on are the leaves.

Music Video Of the Week - November 4, 2011

2011-11-04T11:30:00.001-04:00

"Rock and Roll" by Led Zeppelin (Go to the link in the upper right hand corner.)

Weekend Hiatus

2011-11-04T10:52:00.001-04:00

It's already November 4, and I've done nothing on this blog this month so far but report that I'm back online, I'm back offline, and I'm, as of now, back online again. Power was restored to my house yet again after a second blackout struck yesterday morning.

I suppose I should get back up to speed and comment on Herman Cain's campaign follies, everything Congress is not doing to help the economy, and all that rot. The truth is, I'm pretty much emotionally and physically spent after the events of the week just passed, so, since tomorrow is my birthday, I'm going to take the weekend off from blogging. I'll give everyone the gory details of what happened during the storm in a post on Monday, then I'll try to catch up to commenting on the news. But for now, I need a break.

In the meantime, enjoy my latest Music Video Of the Week.

Another November Surprise

2011-11-03T11:05:00.000-04:00

Our electricity went off a second time, after being on for just under two days. And the previous power outage - no, blackout - lasted a little over three days.

When the electricity came back on in my house the other night, I was convinced that the worst was behind me and my mother. Not only did that guess turn out to be premature, it turned out to be dead wrong.

As in "the power's gone dead" wrong.

I have to go on another hiatus, then. I was going to write about how my mother and I got through the aftermath of the storm, but it's still not over yet for us, apparently. I might still be able to post tomorrow a new music video for the upcoming week - if I can think of one I've already seen, because the library computer I'm currently on obviously doesn't have any audio, so I can't check out one I haven't seen - but apart from that, don't expect me to post here on a regular basis until my electricity is back . . . on a regular basis. But please continue to check back here for updates.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to buy more airtime for my cell phone. >:-(

November Surprise

2011-11-02T23:02:00.002-04:00

My power came on last night (November 1), sooner than I expected it to, and my cable service - Internet, telephone, television - was restored shortly thereafter. I have a lot to talk about with regard to the storm, but I think I'll save that for later. I'll be back shortly with a more substantial post. It's been difficult to get back into the rhythm of posting on my blog as a result of the snowstorm I call the "October Surprise."

October Surprise

2011-10-31T15:58:00.002-04:00

To all my blog followers, and to anyone else who cares, I had my power knocked out by the October Surprise snowstorm that tore through the American Northeast unexpectedly, and my neighborhood looks like a war zone. A tree limb took down several power lines in front of the house of one of my next-door neighbors. I'm posting this entry from my local public library. So I don't think I'll be posting any more entries here any time soon. Please check back periodically; I'll be back when my electricity is. Happy Halloween.

Family - Fearless (1971)

2011-10-29T14:05:00.000-04:00

Forty years ago today, the British rock band Family released their landmark album Fearless, and to recognize that anniversary, I offer here my review of the album from my Family page. I originally wrote this in October 2002. :-)

This album, released in October 1971, is the masterpiece, the best album Family ever made. My opinion is admittedly biased, as this was the first Family album I ever got (on vinyl, no less), but I stand by it. Everything the group had become known for over the previous three years - curious arrangements, abrupt tempo changes, imaginatively abstract lyricism, stellar musicianship - clicked together here like a well-made combination lock. The group's quest for innovation paid off handsomely on Fearless, with the band offering its tightest, most cohesive performances and an adventurous sampling of different rock styles. Like A Song For Me, Fearless is superb from beginning to end, but Fearless is better - albeit only slightly better - for two reasons. One is Fearless's superior production, owing to the band's greatly improved command of technical skills in the recording studio. The other factor was the result of their latest personnel change.
In June 1971, John Weider, having grown tired of playing the bass as his principal instrument, left the group. He was quickly replaced by an ambitious 22-year-old musician named John Wetton, whose steady, economical pacing anchored the music with great subtlety. Also, Wetton was an accomplished singer in his own right, offering a magnificent, unencumbered voice that stood out on its own and blended wonderfully with Roger Chapman's voice - no small achievement - in harmony arrangements. Chapman remained the center of attention, though, as his primitive bleating and the undeniably powerful passion that fueled it continued to make for decidedly uneasy (but still intriguing) listening.

Fearless documents Family boldly blazing through treacherous terrain. In addition to Wetton's bass and his and Chapman's vocals, Charlie Whitney's guitar navigates twisting (and twisted) chords, Rob Townsend's drumming eases the band through slow tempos and propels them through rapid ones, and Poli Palmer contributes complex piano performances along with intricate vibraphone playing. (Plus, for the first time on a Family LP, synthesizers.) Family wastes no time in setting their course, as demonstrated on the opening cut, "Between Blue And Me." The gentle riff from a solitary guitar pulls you in as Chapman's intially gentle and earnest voice sings of longing for a lost friend. As the sound slowly builds, with a bass and bongos slipping into the mix, images of a vast, empty sea swell in the lyrics and the music. Then the unexpected happens - a searing electric riff breaks the receding calm, and a cacophonous rhythm conjures up stormy, churning waters. The lyrics - now delivered by Chapman in a hideous screech - speak of betrayal and abandonment with tension that could snap at any moment - but doesn't. It is oddly exhilarating and terrifying at once - powerful, chilling music that slowly grabs you and doesn't let go.
Having thrown down the gauntlet, Family take the opportunity to display an earthy sensibility in a variety of unorthodox fashions throughout. "Sat'd'y Barfly" is a stunted ragtime romp in which Chapman, doing a good imitation of Rod Stewart, sings with bravado of visiting a seedy bar on the wrong side of town, getting drunk, and picking up a woman; the muted brass and sly maracas help add to the intrigue. By contrast, "Save Some For Thee," a song about enjoying the "living for free," finds Chapman and Wetton sharing lead vocals along a piano riff that starts strong, slows down, then starts up again - pop style without the pop sound. (It ends, curiously, with a marching-band brass and drum ensemble!) Palmer gets to sing his own composition "Larf and Sing," delivering lyrics about aging and isolation brilliantly against a Latin-tinged guitar and his own dexterous flute. It all leads up to a hilarious group harmony on the choruses, offsetting the fatality of the verses.
Family really let loose, though, on the incomprehensible "Take Your Partners" - a backward drum intro ushers in a tight jam, with Whitney and Wetton playing a smoldering blues riff in perfect synchronization, while a strange synthesizer line fades in and out of the background. Finally, the band steps aside and allows Chapman to scream out what is all but a declaration of war: "God knows I'm hip, but I ain't yours or his - everybody's ass is up for kicks!" Subsequent lines make less sense - Chapman's admonition "Here, boy, have a snake / That's where you're sleeping and I'll wake / But don't strut me and my way" has defied explanation for years. On the other hand, Chappo can sing "Can you lend me thirty quid for petrol?" and make it sound like great rock and roll, so who am I to wonder what the hell he's talking about?
While Family has a lighter side on Fearless, it is by no means soft. The bewitchingly terrifying "Spanish Tide" is ostensibly a folk rocker, but don't expect James Taylor. A haunting harpsichord introduces the song, the acoustic guitars dissolve into melancholia, and Wetton's bass digs a trench for the rhythm to move through, complemented by Wetton's desparate vocal. By contrast, "Children," a pleasant ballad, is more optimistic, and Chapman shows unexpected gentleness in his delivery, but the halting rhythm undercuts the sweetness of the words. Family puts other so-called "progressive" rock bands to shame as well with Poli Palmer's "Crinkly Grin," a jazz instrumental led by Palmer's vibraphone. It doesn't go off into the wilderness like the classical workouts of, say, Emerson, Lake and (Carl) Palmer do; it lasts 65 seconds before fading out. You're left wanting more of it, not less.
The culmination of Family's intense experimentation on Fearless comes in the two final tracks. "Blind" rushes out with plodding, slashing meld of guitars and bass while the drums swing from left to right. As the arrangement - if it can be called that - picks up steam, Chapman roars in, screeching out lyrics warning the blind and the deaf of all the pain and suffering they'd be witness to if they could see or hear. As the band continues its assault, Chapman offers a warning to those in power responsible for the world's ills that their time is going to come. The closing song, "Burning Bridges," presents a creeping guitar line with a slow Gothic overtone, and Chapman's voice eerily resembles that of Peter Gabriel as he sings of being taunted by spirits even as anonymous holy men exploit his faith in God. The song says as much about organized religion as all of Jethro Tull's morality-play songs put together. Small wonder that Tull leader Ian Anderson himself, like many others, considered Family criminally underrated.
Fearless is a challenging and demanding work that lives up to its title; Family was not afraid to go where other bands dared not tread, even as the group remained true to its rhythm-and-blues roots. In short, it's a re-affirmation of everything rock and roll is meant to be. The sleeve was no less innovative; it featured computer-generated portraits of the band members along the edge of a page diagonally cut in serpentine fashion, with four layered and similarly cut pages visible underneath showing the pictures melding into a blur. (Of course, Castle Music was unable to replicate this with the CD edition.) The album not only peaked at number fourteen in the U.K., it even made a dent on the Billboard charts in the U.S. After the first Family LPs issued in America by United Artists, A Song For Me and Anyway, failed to chart, Fearless bubbled at the bottom of the Top Two Hundred album listings (peaking at number 177) and got radio airplay from intrigued DJs. Finally, Americans - albeit a handful of them - were beginning to listen.

(The original die-cut sleeve for the Fearless album on vinyl, opened out.)

It's Beginning To Look a Lot Like . . . Halloween?

2011-10-28T21:31:00.000-04:00

I can't believe it - a snowstorm in October? Not just a dusting, either - northwestern New Jersey is expected to get anywhere from six to ten inches of snow, and even the urban areas closer to New York City - and the city itself! - could get enough snow to measure with a ruler.

To add insult to injury, it's going to be heavy wet snow - the kind that can bring down tree limbs, and with many trees in the Northeast still bearing their leaves, limbs that would survive wet snow accumulations in January and February, or even early spring snowfalls, might go down this time. Terrific - we have a red maple with a branch right over the power lines on the street. Fortunately, I got one limb down with a long-handled saw, and I pruned some limbs from another tree hanging over the line feeding our house. But that renegade branch I mentioned is still going to worry me.

And then there's that big oak in our backyard . . ..

Don't be surprised if you don't hear from me in the near future. This storm may not be a hurricane, but given the odd circumstances - for one thing, it's coming out of Tennessee - this is a nor'easter that could be powerful enough to qualify as Irene Mark Two. My mother and I got through that storm unscathed only two months ago, but we likely won't be lucky twice.

Great, I forgot to buy fresh batteries for my portable radio . . ..

If there's one good thing that may come out of this storm, it's that Occupy Wall Street now faces its first test of winter weather in New York, and if they can get through it, they're ready to take on any nasty weather. The Occupy Wall Street crowd is already comparing this to the Valley Forge encampment.

And, as in that famous Bugs Bunny cartoon about American Revolutionary history, they'll shiver in their electric blankets. I just hope they don't take their misery out on the ice cream man.

:-D

Music Video Of the Week - October 28, 2011

2011-10-28T10:51:00.002-04:00

"The Witch's Promise" by Jethro Tull (Go to the link in the upper right hand corner.)

The Biggest Loser

2011-10-27T11:24:00.004-04:00

When the 2011-12 television season began, NBC, having been in last place seven years, realistically expected its ratings in the new season to suck. Unfortunately, they haven't been doing that well. Ratings for its overall lineup for the first four weeks of the season is down 9.3 percent compared to the first four weeks of the 2010-11 season. While a couple of the network's new sitcoms, like comedian Whitney Cummings's new show, have generated some buzz, they haven't generated much in the way of ratings. The lineup includes yet another sitcom starring Christina Applegate ("Up All Night"), who hasn't been able to make people forget her many years as Kelly Bundy. And "The Playboy Club" generated a lot of buzz and controversy - for all the wrong reasons. NBC's bosses have made people aware of the once-proud Peacock Network, all right, but awareness doesn't determine relevance. If it did, people would still be taking Nancy Pelosi seriously.

Most of the shows that debuted on NBC this fall were developed just as Robert Greenblatt was brought in by new owner Comcast to take over. Comcast sees this as a golden opportunity to take a struggling media commodity and turn it around, and Greenblatt will likely make radical changes to the lineup for the 2012-13 season to shake things up. That could mean cancellations of over ninety percent of everything NBC airs right now.

For now, "Parenthood" - the only show I watch on NBC anymore - is actually holding its own respectably, steadily gaining viewers. So there's some good news. But it's probably not wise for the few viewers NBC has to become too attached to much of the network's fare right now. Even "The Biggest Loser," a once-reliable reality show, is slipping in the Nielsens. When a company is as bad off as NBC is now, a major housecleaning is more than necessary, and no one is safe.

Come Fly With Me

2011-10-26T11:58:00.004-04:00

I finally got around to seeing "Pan Am," the new ABC series ripping off "Mad Men" with its ironically nostalgic look back on the early 1960s, and I hope "Mad Men" producer Matthew Weiner loves being ripped off. Because "Pan Am" is a pretty good ripoff. (I think now I'm being ironic.)

As noted, "Pan Am" involves a group of stewardesses and a couple of cocky pilots working for the now-defunct airline of that name, and how in the early sixties - 1963, to be precise - a stewardess position was one of the very few ways women could make a career for themselves and those who did become stewardesses made the most and the best of it. This show pretty much depicts their female protagonists in a sympathetic light. (One stewardess character is even a CIA operative, to take advantage of the Cold War mentality of the time.) And star Christina Ricci, as purser Maggie Ryan, doesn't come across as a movie star denigrating herself by appearing on the small screen; she's as dignified here on American television as Judi Dench was in playing a sitcom role (Jean in "As Time Goes By") on British television.

Sadly, none of this pre-feminist subtext is likely to matter to viewers. As with "Mad Men," which causes viwers to be nostalgic without irony by showing twentysomethings occupying career-oriented entry-level jobs in the 1960s (while twentysomethings occupy Wall Street today), "Pan Am" will likely cause viewers to pine for those earlier times, before airline deregulation in 1978. Like, wow - airline travel used to be elegant and refined? Coach class seats were comfortable? Blankets were available on overnight trips? Stewardesses actually paid attention to you - and served you edible meals? Passengers could actually enter the cockpit? And, when you boarded a plane, you didn't have to take off your shoes?? Sadly, 9/11 changed a lot of that, as well as deregulation, but at least today women can be pilots. They can't be navigators, though - the three-man crew shown in "Pan Am" is also a thing of the past, the navigator's job rendered obsolete by computers in the same way that Pan Am itself was rendered obsolete by competition and mergers.

As a series, "Pan Am" is likely to be the best historical drama you'll see on broadcast television, though NBC's "Parenthood," set in the present, is still the best drama on broadcast TV overall. (Not that it matters to a network - NBC - having entered its eighth season in last place.)

MSNBC Switch

2011-10-25T13:12:00.002-04:00

It suddenly occurred to MSNBC producers and schedule planners that calling Lawrence O'Donnell's show "The Last Word" and giving Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz additional words in the time slots that follow seemed kind of silly, so starting this week, Schultz and O'Donnell have switched time slots. Lawrence O'Donnell has returned to the 10 PM Eastern slot he started out in, and Ed Schultz is now in the 8 PM Eastern time slot O'Donnell has vacated. This allows Schultz, a populist with working-calls appeal, to be on for five weeknights a week, with the more polished, buttoned-down O'Donnell on for four weeknights a week, in recognition of the fact the MSNBC begins its laughable weekend documentaries Friday nights at 10 PM Eastern.

This makes sense for MSNBC's viewers, who will be more able to tune into Ed Schultz at an earlier hour. And by putting him on earlier, MSNBC has acknowledged that his meat-and-potatoes-message rings strongly with a wider audience in this new Occupy Wall Street age. And O'Donnell, whose commentary has gotten more passionate but has remained as polished as he is, is a strong closer for all of MSNBC's commentators. But MSNBC's ongoing game of musical chairs with its hosts suggests that, while they're aware of what their mission is, they seem less sure on how to convey it . . . or on who should be conveying it.

Who Really Won In Connecticut?

2011-10-23T20:58:00.000-04:00

Chris Matthews has often pointed out that Republicans run for office repeatedly before finally getting elected or giving up on their own, while Democrats see to it that those in their party who lose one chance of getting elected to office are not allowed a second. Matthews was referring to presidential elections, but, as I've often pointed out, these standards apply to other offices as well, particularly with regards to U.S. Senate seats. Republican Senate candidates who lose a bid for one Senate seat in any given state eventually make a bid for the other, and they mostly win that second bid. Losing Democratic Senate candidates simply disappear into some party-sponsored witness protection program. Anyway, you can read my earlier, more detailed post on the subject here.

I bring this up because noted violence peddler Linda McMahon, having failed to win the Senate seat vacated by Chris Dodd in Connecticut, has announced her bid for Connecticut's other Senate seat, which is being vacated by Joseph Lieberman in 2012. McMahon, who made name for herself - her husband's - running World Wrestling Entertainment, had a realistic shot of winning Dodd's seat last year when her Democratic opponent, state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, was plagued by inconsistencies over his military service record, but even though she lost, she was widely expected to run again if Lieberman retired. She has since lived down to expectations, making her the latest Republican to run again for a Senate seat after she was denied one in a previous attempt. Hey, not taking no for answer is a Grand Old Party tradition. (Giving no for an answer also is.) Had Blumenthal lost in Connecticut last year, he would have been rendered politically dead.

Or is he? Once Blumenthal was sworn in as a senator, he was pretty much forgotten by the mainstream media. Although Blumenthal was the only freshman Senate Democrat elected to a full six-year term last year, I kept seeing Delaware's Chris Coons and West Virginia's Joe Manchin - both elected in 2010 to complete unexpired Senate terms - on MSNBC instead. When Chris Matthews led a discussion on his show about Senate Democrats in early 2011, stock footage of sitting Democratic senators - Charles Schumer, Harry Reid, Richard Durbin, Chris Dodd - was shown. Wait - Chris Dodd? Wasn't he already gone from the Senate? Didn't Blumenthal take his place? What was up with that? It was as if MSNBC didn't want to acknowledge Blumenthal's existence, especially after the uncharitable things Matthews said about how the Connecticut Democrat handled his military record in the 2010 campaign.

Then this past May, Chris Jansing reported a news story about a bill pending in the Senate and had Blumenthal on for an interview. MSNBC had finally realized that he was Connecticut's new senator.

Perhaps I'm being unfair. Unlike a right-wing Republican senator like South Carolina's Jim DeMint, who attempted to leave his mark on the Senate from the day he set foot in the chamber, Senator Blumenthal has likely been easing himself into the job, as freshman senators are supposed to. Or maybe his pet cause - fighting for consumer rights and protections - gives him few opportunities for visibility in a Congress where Republicans have successfully kept the issue from coming up, much less coming to a vote. But even though she lost last year, Linda McMahon created a lot of buzz and got a lot of media publicity for the WWE - and, coincidentally, herself - and has thus won the promise of more interest and coverage when she launches her candidacy for Lieberman's seat in 2012.

And God help Connecticut and the Senate if she wins this time.

Middle East Jubilation

2011-10-21T16:13:00.000-04:00

Qaddafi is dead, and American involvement in Iraq is over!

The latter headline is the big news. While there will still be American advisers in Iraq to try to help the fledgling government, all 39,000 troops will be coming home, as hoped, with the expiration of the U.S-Iraqi agreement signed in December 2008 to keep troops there for three years. Reports have circulated that President Obama is only pulling American troops out because he could not get an agreement for an extended stay, but if he really thought it was worth staying, he would have tried to get such an agreement.

The Iraq War didn't really end for the United States despite the pullout of combat troops in August 2010. At the time, I likened it to the cease-fire ending the Korean War, but American soldiers and Marines in Iraq, unlike in Korea after July 1953, continued to be killed after the combat troops left . . . meaning that firing had not ceased there. There's no indication that Iraq is completely ready to take control of its own affairs, and there's the spectre of Iran hoping to expand its dominance in the Middle Eastern region. But Iraq is somewhat more stable now than when Saddam Hussein fell, and Obama seems to be confident he can steer Iraq in the right direction without using the military.

Hey, look how he handled Libya.

Music Video Of the Week - October 21, 2011

2011-10-21T10:23:00.000-04:00

"Between Blue And Me" by Family (Go to the link in the upper right hand corner.)

Here and There

2011-10-20T11:18:00.001-04:00

Some updates . . .

Yesterday I mentioned that Herman Cain's "9-9-9" plan - which he mentions so much while talking about the economy I feel like I'm listening to the White Album ("industrial output . . . financial imbalance . . . ") - would cost middle-income taxpayers more. How could an across-the-board tax do that? Because Cain's nine percent sales tax would mostly affect people who spend much of their money on food, clothing and shelter - middle-income and lower-income people. While he would eliminate the payroll tax (causing a loss of $100 million in revenue) he would eliminate d the estate, gift and capital gains taxes (and cause and $800 million revenue loss ) that would benefit the wealthy. The combined $900 million loss of revenue is the the "9" that Cain does not bring up.

More breaking news - Muammar el-Qaddafi has reportedly been killed by Libyan revolutionaries. No confirmation on this yet, as far as I know . . ..

Ha Ha Herman!

2011-10-19T19:53:00.003-04:00

That Herman Cain - what a sense of humor. He somehow managed to become the rarest of birds - a black front runner for the Republican presidential nomination - and now he's joking about putting up an electric fence on the Mexican border to discourage and possibly electrocute illegal immigrants. Here's a man whose father who worked at three jobs to own his own house and whose mother was a cleaning woman, and he's telling the unemployed and underemployed Wall Street occupiers that it's their fault, not the fault of greedy banks, if they're not well-off or gainfully employed. Even Ron Paul was aghast at Cain's remarks. (Cain is a former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Missouri, something you don't hear about because the media keep playing up the fact that he was the chairman of a pizza parlor chain.)

Cain has shot up to the top of the Republican field for the same reason Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry did - he's seen as a "conservative" alternative to the likely nominee, Mitt Romney, who's seen as more "moderate" (until you look at his record). His "9-9-9 plan" - a nine percent national sales tax, a nine percent flat tax, and a nine percent business flat tax - seems reasonable enough until you realize that it will raise taxes on 95 percent of Americans making an average of 35,000 a year while lowering taxes on those with an a average annual income of $350,000.

But he's sure to do some damage to the body politic while he's around. Cain is getting the bulk of his economic ideas from the greedy Koch brothers, who hope to turn America into one big strip mine, and his effect could force Romney, as the nominee, to move so far to the right that the Tea Party will be able to write the entire 2012 Republican platform.

Oh yeah, I didn't want to bring it up, but Cain was instrumental in sabotaging President Bill Clinton's 1993 health care reform plan when he challenged the President at a town hall meeting in Kansas City. Cain told Clinton that a proposed employer mandate would hurt small businesses, and that subsidies to help such businesses guarantee health insurance to workers were inaccurately calculated. Cain, according to Bob Cohn of Newsweek, "transformed the debate" on health care reform, which went down in flames for Clinton in 1994 and was never revisited in the remainder of his Presidency.

So how much do Republican voters like Cain? They love him. At a Republican debate, they applauded his assertion that the unemployed have only themselves to blame for their plight, just as they cheered Rick Perry's executions in Texas and booed at a gay soldier in earlier debates.

No Country For Old "Men?"

2011-10-17T11:01:00.002-04:00

CBS is boasting about how its aging sitcom "Two And a Half Men," inexplicably in its ninth season, is the most watched show on American broadcast television. I've always disliked this show, but I could never find the right words to explain my dislike for it . . . until television critic Alan Sepinwall of the Newark Star-Ledger offered up the following adjectives to describe it - "skeevy," "misogynistic," and "lazily crude." Perfect - that sums it up! And that's the reason Sepinwall makes the big money.

CBS's boasting is likely based on the nearly 29 million viewers "Two And a Half Men" pulled in for the 2011-12 season premiere - i.e., the debut of Ashton Kutcher, who's an actor like Ashlee Simpson is a live performer. Kutcher's character, Walden Schmidt, is a wealthy but dimwitted man-child who buys Charlie Harper's house after Charlie (played by guess-who) is killed in a freak accident. Charlie's brother Alan (Jon Cryer) asks to stay on for awhile, with the audience understanding that he isn't going to leave any time soon. And, if you believe CBS's hype, none of these characters are going anywhere.

But maybe they are. My mother is a fan of the show - don't ask me why, please don't - and she saw Kutcher's debut on the show. (I didn't.) She doesn't think it's going to work out in the long run, and she thinks the show will go down the tubes. She can't understand the appeal of Walden, who lazily and stupidly falls into one lucky break after another - especially when it comes to attracting women. And, if I understand my mother correctly, Walden makes Alan's idiot son Jake look like Aristotle.

Sometimes a cast member change on a television show can re-invigorate the show. "M*A*S*H," which once occupied the time slot on CBS that "Two And a Half Men" now occupies, was already a good show when Wayne Rogers and McLean Stevenson both left in 1975, but their replacements, Mike Farrell and Harry Morgan, turned a good sitcom into a great one. But while "M*A*S*H" was a deep human comedy with a stellar ensemble cast, "Two And a Half Men" is a shallow, cheap-laugh show that revolves around two and a half actors (Ashton Kutcher is the half actor here). Charlie Sheen's departure couldn't ruin the show, because it started out ruined. The initial curiosity the show is benefiting from right now with regards to how Kutcher fits in will likely fade as the season progresses. Bear this in mind too - this is the third of the three seasons "Two and A Half Men" was renewed for in advance back in 2009. The network and the producers had to go ahead with it one way or another - even without Sheen (who already has CBS executive Leslie Moonves' money, dude), there was a lot of dough involved here. If the ratings trail off by May, there really won't be any need to renew it for a tenth season.

But that might happen. Yes, the show may be skeevy, misogynistic, and lazily crude, but if there's one thing I've noticed about Americans' TV viewing habits, there's a big market for skeeviness, woman-hating, and lazy crudity. Just don't tell my mother I said that. ;-)