My Tribute to Michael Jackson

I'm sure I'm not the only one who wondered how I would look with Michael Jackson's nose and mouth.

Veterans' Day Parade

Click on the photos to see the large versions.

Amy and Iris, in front of the comic book store.


Because of budget cuts, the band can no longer spell the entire name of the school. Sad.


They're happy it's not raining. The crowd this year was bigger than last year. It didn't rain last year either, but it was wicked cold.



Here's the memorial horse from the police equestrian unit. Instead of a "pooper scooper" behind them, they had a "stool pigeon," some luckless volunteer in a cartoon jailhouse costume.


This truck was bringing up the rear. As it sat there on the street, burning fuel and going nowhere fast, it was hard to avoid seeing it as a symbol, but not the kind the driver intended (probably).

American Gangster

Saturday we went to see American Gangster, the Ridley Scott movie that stars Denzel Washington (the titular character) and Russell Crowe.

I mostly enjoyed it while I was watching it -- despited getting a little peeved that they show him working a hand-held electronic calculator in 1968 -- and it had its exciting moments and wild '70s-era costuming, etc. But it was a disappointment. Yesterday Amy and I waited for the Veterans' Day Parade to begin and talked about the movie, and I ended up liking it a lot less.

My complaint after seeing it was that we don't actually get to know much about the "american gangster" it pretends to be about. You never find out how Denzel's character went so swiftly from driver to crime boss -- sure, he has a direct connection in Thailand for heroin, but he gets that because he has boxes of cash already. And they make a big point out of how the streets are chaos and need order, but they never show you how he managed to get that order.

Instead of getting to know the main gangster, we get to know the white cop, and guess what? He's so dedicated to his job he's a lousy husband and father, and he's an outsider among the cops because he's TOO honest. Hey, wait... I think I've seen this before!

Mostly Denzel goes around scowling and occasionally spitting out that famous Denzel smile, but that's about it. Russell, bless his heart, looks so average-joe you actually start thinking "okay, enough reality -- if we're going to have a by-the-numbers New York cop drama, how about some eye candy?"

Of course, the nude girls who work in the heroin room are all buff and slim.

Women may as well not be in these NYC cop movies. All they do is cry or look worried and pained, maybe spit out an angry "I CAN'T LIVE LIKE THIS!" speech or two. In this movie there's thirty minutes of film wasted on Crowe's boring divorce story.

It's well made, sure... and has all six of the black actors Americans recognize in the movies. It's gritty. There's an exciting scene where the cops raid a drug room. If you want to really ponder it longer than necessary, you can make something out of the way the movie seems to be saying the real bad guys aren't the murderers and drug dealers, the real bad guys are the corrupt cops. Oh, and the US military -- or enterprising soldiers -- are complicit in the drug trade. So all law enforcement (but for Crowe) is behind all the badness. The american gangsters, however, are honorable men who believe in family and community. That's a theme about as fresh as the rest of this hundred million dollar teevee show.

Who2 Almanac

Just the basics.

Oh, That Than Thao Market!

Some of the nice things you can find up at the local Vietnamese grocery.

Humbled in Hollywood

Yesterday it was sunny, but I couldn't find my sunglasses when I went to buy coffee, so I walked up the street blinded, shading my watery eyes with my hand. A block away from the coffee place, I couldn't quite see but I could tell some other pedestrians were coming my way on the sidewalk. I quickly stepped to the side to make way, and I walked right into a telephone pole. I banged up my new glasses and my old forehead. Way to smooth!

Har!

From a program on The History Channel about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.:

“The FBI was very concerned that the FBI or someone connected to the FBI may have had something to do with King’s death. But an investigation by the FBI found no evidence of involvement.”

Iris PSA

Is This Suspicious or What?

I have a video camera on the front porch with a monitor in my office. I know this unnerves some people, even though the camera is in plain sight and it's not exactly a secret. I can understand their discomfort, but in the end I'm very glad to be able to see who's knocking on my door.

Or who isnt.

This afternoon I noticed some teenage boy on my front porch, just standing there by the door. Not knocking. Just standing there. School's not out for another half hour or so, and I'm just about to go investigate when he finally knocks on the door. So he's there without knocking for at least 50 or 60 seconds, I don't know, but it seemed a little weird.

I walked around the side door and asked what was up. He said, "do you know what time it is?"

I said, "You came to my house to ask what time it is?" He nodded yes.

I almost told him it was 8 a.m., but instead told the truth: "I don't know, it's two or two-thirty, maybe, I don't know."

He didn't seem in a big hurry to leave so I prompted him with a "get going" and a dismissive wave of the hand. I watched him walk down the street, which took FOREVER. I took note that there were other kids all over the place he could have asked.

The more I thought about it, the more suspicious it seemed.

Muscle Boy

Most people didn't realize how tuff I looked underneath my jammies and jumpsuits. That age is so tough on your body image, but I was one of the lucky ones.

Animation Experiment #354

A Classic

I'm really only trying out the feature on here that allows you to post movies NOT on YouTube.

Me 'n' Birdbrain

On Torture

I feel like I'm missing something in the debate over the confirmation of Alberto Gonzales's replacement. The debate about whether the U.S. should torture people, and more specifically about whether waterboarding is torture.

Today things got even murkier for me after skimming the op-ed piece in the paper by David Reinhard, The Oregonian's lone voice in support of all things Bush. His piece today tries to argue that waterboarding isn't all that bad -- that's it's not really torture, while at the same time arguing that it's bad enough (apparently) that it makes terrorists give up valuable information. He uses the well-worn example of our lives hanging in the balance and the only way to safety is through torturing a suspect.

Of course, it seems to me if our entire security apparatus comes down to that, we're hurtin' gators. I have a hard time going along with this fantasy scenario. Especially since it comes from the so-called "values" crowd. In effect they are saying we NEED to go against our values to preserve the state. So there's "do the right thing" and then there's "well, it would be NICE to do the right thing, but we can't always do the right thing." If anyone else suggested this approach, they would be charged with "moral relativism," which used to be a bad thing, but now I have learned that, appropriately enough, moral relativism is only bad sometimes!

Here's my favorite snippet from Reinhard:

"But is any and all waterboarding torture and therefore illegal? I don't think so. First, if all waterboarding is torture, why does the U.S. government waterboard its own folks in survival training programs? It doesn't gouge out trainees' eyes or rip out fingernails to get them ready to withstand the horrors of capture. Is it because waterboarding is safe and painless?"

It's confusing, and you'll have to take my word for it that it wouldn't make any more sense if I included the whole piece. It sounds as though he's saying we use waterboarding to train our men to "withstand the horrors of capture" -- but if that's the case, he's saying waterboarding is, in fact, a "horror" of capture. That sure sounds like a definition of torture.

I don't really get it.

The other part of the debate that confounds me is U.S. senators (pro-Bush, pro-torture) who say "well, the nominee for the AG's office can't really say it's a crime because then he'd have to prosecute the people who did it." Um... YEAH, that's right! "We can't really call murder a crime because then we'd have to punish murderers." Does that sound any better?

Spray Paint Rules

A new city ordinance goes into effect today that will put a damper on my spray paint joy. No, I'm not a tagger, but I do buy probably a dozen or more cans of spray paint a year. It's useful and fun. Now when I go to buy some I will have to get assistance from the shopkeeper, and the shopkeeper must "keep [my] information on file" for two years. Oh, I'm sure it will all be worth the hassle six months from now, when we've finally won the War on Graffiti.

I noticed in the newspaper that 11-13% of tagging is deemed "gang-related" (whatever that means, really), and "the rest is political or hate speech."

Heh! here is a photo I took recently: Chief Wiggum from The Simpsons, on a boxcar that was parked out by Smith and Bybee Lakes last week. I'm not sure which gang associates with Chief Wiggum. Or perhaps this is hate speech?

Here's a copy of the new rules:

Horror Shopping

Several weeks ago we decided we should probably rent THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT to round out the kids' pop culture education. You know, it's in the canon. Like Willa Cather or Twizzlers.

But we didn't (read: I didn't) get around to adding it to our Netflix queueueueueueueue. And then Halloween came along and it seeemed more and more like we should watch it. Some of this comes from The Office -- there's a small part of that show that alludes to Blair Witch.

In the last week I've been to five different places that specialize in selling DVDs, and none of them have The Blair Witch Project.

It's a sign o' the times that I find it odd and vexing that I can't go buy whatever movie I want.

Newsmakers

After years of researching and writing about famous people, I have concluded that so-called "newsmakers" are the least interesting people to research. The celebrities and politicians and athletes you see in the news all the time... those guys have pretty uninteresting stories, a lot of 'em.

Mostly because so many of them have spent their entire lives wanting to be in the news. So their life experience prior to becoming famous is often a series of steps to becoming famous. There are exceptions, of course. But celebrities of the modern variety, from Britney Spears to Rudy Giuliani, often seem to have the same basic storyline. They went to the right places and made friends with the right people along the way and were determined to become famous and so... that's what happened.

I find more twists and turns when I research historical figures.

I'm not making any kind of judgement about it, really. There have been plenty of times when I read about some historical figure and it dawns on me that they were just like one of these people you see on VH-1 or E! They maybe go down in history as a great man or woman, but in fact they were basically showboaters and spotlight hogs as much as some of the flashy celebs seen on today's "red carpet."

I could write an entire new post on why I think Red Carpet should become our 51st state. Since we now formulate national policy on non-state entities such as "terrorism," I think there's a legal case for a 51st state being the stretches of red carpets famous for those celebrity forced marches prior to awards shows, screening, etc.

Photo of the Day

Mr. Holznagel sent this to me, but didn't exactly say why. The statue is supposed to be of Vincent Price (write to Who2 and ask them to profile Mr. Price).