I don’t even know where to begin this essay. Anna Nicole Smith’s body is decaying and the vultures and parasites are fighting over the remains. There are three men (at least) who claim to be the father of her child. One was with her, one used to be her lover, and the third is a fame whore who may or may not have had a relationship with her at the time of the child’s conception.

The estranged mother is blaming drugs and the boyfriend for her daughter’s estrangement from her, the boyfriend for the drug abuse. The ex-lover is blaming the boyfriend and drugs for his loss of his ex-girlfriend. The boyfriend/lawyer is just lamenting his loss and trying to bury her next to her son, and keeping his(?) daughter safe. Which is not to say that I believe him, have sympathy for him or find him to be less of an opportunistic leech than the rest of the parties involved.

And then we have this article, which talks about how so many Playboy Playmates have died tragically young. From murder or drug overdose primarily, it seems. Toss in a few car wrecks and plane crashes and you have quite the list. But the people quoted are all like: Oh, the tragedy of being beautiful.

Oh, the tragedy of being objectified, I say. Would Dorothy Stratton have been murdered by her jealous ex if she weren’t the centerfold? Another questionable source claims that ANS wanted her tiny little baby to be slightly underfed so that she would be “sexy”. At three months old.

Which brings us back to her own mother, she who is blaming the world for the estrangement, drugs, etc. of her daughter’s short and overblown life. Well, sweetiedarlings, we can all ask nature or nurture and we can ask it all we like, but there has to be some sort of responsibility somewhere from the cradle to point at which she left home.

Honestly, I don’t know where to end this essay, either. It all seems to me to be a terrible indictment of American pop culture, American values, the ridiculous scramble after money and the obscene desire for fame above all.* Fame without merit. Paris Hilton kind of fame, not Chuck Yeager kind of fame.

Finally, though, in the middle of all this circus, there is one person with whom I am personally familiar. This morning’s Miami Herald announced that the court-appointed attorney for the infant Danielynn is Richard Millstein. Richard was the lawyer for the Antichrist when we got divorced. He flayed my lawyer. He left me with little, he managed for me (the poor artist) to split my art collection with the rich lawyer I was divorcing, and even give my old car to the same rich lawyer so he could give it to his new girlfriend’s kid. And even though I will never forgive the Antichrist, Richard was just doing his job.

Richard and I sat on the board of the local AIDS organization together a few years later, and I can, in all honesty, say that I have never met a more sincere and caring gentleman. He is, year after year, the top fund raiser for CareResource. He is courteous and mild mannered (outside of the courtroom). In all of this mess, I know in my heart that Richard will see past the bullshit and make sure that the best of all possible outcomes is secured for this little girl.

At least until she goes home to live with one or another of the people who made her mother what she was.

* My dear dead Grandma used to say that fool’s names and fool’s faces oft appear in public places. She also used to refer to persons who were “all dressed up like Astor’s pet horse.”  Which is amusing enough, but Grandma lived in Newport back in the day and so probably actually SAW Mrs. Astor’s pet horse decked out in its finery.

It is a fact that loonies are drawn to me like moths to a flame, and like a flame, I can burn them to a crisp. I usually don’t because even loonies deserve, uh… ok, I usually do flame them, but not always. Yesterday, in fact…

I was sitting on the bench at the MetroRail station, twiddling with my earphones and minding my own business as I waited for the south-bound to take me home. There were women on either side of me. I was wearing a very conservative denim dress, almost ankle-length, long-sleeved and with a deep, but modest v-neck. And a pair of killer, spike-heeled, pointy-toed mules.

Along came a spider loonie, dressed in camo and a tee, with spiked hair with bleached tips. He could have been anywhere from 18 to 25, a little hard-ridden, possibly homeless. He had that look in his eyes, of not being quite all together (but then, who among us is?) I kept my head down and twiddled with my earphones.

He came right up in front of me, dropped into a squat, and very, very gently, like the merest hint of a thought of a touch, caressed my instep. To get my attention or because he’s got some weird foot thing, who knows. I looked up and he very clearly said “You are so beautiful.” Uh-huh, right and old enough to be your mother, I think, and no, I’m not giving you money. I just look at him and pretend I can’t understand or hear. He repeats it and then asked me if I was married. “Yes, very” I replied, and looked back at my lap. Then he got up, looked back at me, told me one more time that he thought I was so beautiful. I touched my fingertips to my heart and said thanks, and then disappeared back into myself and he wandered off into the crowd.

The women on my left just stared at me with saucer-like eyes, and tried to engage me in conversation about what had happened, but by then, I had cranked up the i-pod as loud as I could handle it, and the train was coming and I escaped another conversation.

Once on the train, I spotted RJ in the same car, so I went up to tell her the story, but she was embedded in her own version of the loonie conversation. The woman with her was a Seinfeld-worthy low talker, and carried on a monologue at us for the entire trip, allowing nothing more than an uh-huh or a nod from us. I have no idea what she was on about, because I couldn’t hear a word. RJ kept rolling her eyes at me and wagging her eyebrows, so it must have been deadly.

...

Monday, as I mentioned, I went to hear Christopher Moore. The audience was slow to warm to him, and then a cell phone rang, and he made a joke about the only thing cell phones are useful for is to train dogs to salivate. The only people in the crowd to laugh were me, the RLA, and the couple in front of us. The female (with a beautiful set of tattooed angel wings on her back—or at least the tops and tips that I could see were beautiful) joked that the only dog owners in the room were the four of us who laughed. Then Christopher said that, well, he was sorry and that he hadn’t meant to speak in a foreign language. To which I sang out, “Yeah. Well, you are speaking English.” and that broke up the entire room. Take me with you Chris, and I’ll do warm up.

...

Finally, will someone explain to me why a white trash, ex-Playboy skank deserves all this ink over the fold, and the report that the pre-war intelligence was cooked, immoral, but probably not illegal gets buried? I’m trying to figure out some way to blame her death (and the increasingly suspicious deaths of everyone connected to her) on the Bush family, a la Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedys. Maybe it was Jeb, he’s not doing anything much these days, and she was in Florida.

 

I grew up in a Very Small Town in the south of Florida. My (extended) family was the entire Jewish population of said small town, and had my grandparent's house burned down in about 1956, the entire shtetl would have been eliminated, since we all lived in that same house.

Christmas time would come, and we would decorate our store (AFTER Thanksgiving, thankewverymuch) for same. We would drive down to Miami to the display wholesaler and pick up garlands, and bells and snowflakes and order our supplies of wrapping paper and ribbons. (Actually, this would happen way before Thanksgiving, the ordering and shopping for decorations.)

By Thanksgiving, my GirlCousin and I were making boxes, and curling ribbons, in preparation for the Christmas rush. Boxes. Hundreds and hundreds of shirt boxes and dress boxes and thousands of curled ribbon balls, neatly ordered like green and red checkerboards inside the tops of said boxes. All of them neatly stored under the display counters. The wrapping table would get set up. We would race each other to see who could wrap a box faster, tighter, and with the least number of pieces of tape. I think the record was 3 pieces of tape and under 30 seconds. Everyone in the store answered the phone by saying "Merry Christmas, Stuart Department Store."

My parents would pile my brother and me into the car and we would drive around town to look at the Christmas lights in other people's yards. Nothing says Christmas like a lit-up coconut palm, and don't try to tell me different. One good hard frost and the oranges would sweeten up on the trees, too.

For some reason, however, my whole life, my Christian friends thought that I "had no Christmas" and took it upon themselves to give me one. I have probably decorated as many or more Christmas trees than any Southern Baptist. I would get an invitation to one friend's home and then another. Come for eggnog and decorating the tree! Come for hot cocoa and tree decorating! Come and help us put up the tree! OK. Sure.

The Sistergirlfriendgirl and her family had Tiggywinkle ornaments. Those were the little hedgehogs from Beatrix Potter books. I LOVED the Tiggywinkles. Flash's family had delicate old glass balls from her grandparents. Another friend made popcorn strings. One year when I lived in New York, Bean and her mom decided that decorating the tree wasn't enough Christmas for a nice Jewish girl, and they took me out in a snowstorm to pick their tree out from a lot on Sixth Avenue, and then Bean and I then had to drag the damn monster all the way across the Village to their WestBeth apartment. Brilliant. One of my favorite Christmases, ever.

On Christmas Day, I always made sure that I had an invitation to the most Southern of my Southern friends' homes, because that meant a slice of left-over ham, pan fried and served up with red-eye gravy and grits with enough butter and tobasco sauce to choke the original pig. Or me. Yummmy. Red eye gravy.

Those are great memories. Thank the baby Jesus that nobody had become so brow-beaten into political correctness that I didn't get to have them. I was not, and my parents were not, hell, even my GRANDPARENTS were not offended that I was asked to be part of someone's Christmas celebration. Nobody thought that my friends were trying to convert me. Especially since I returned the favor by teaching them the freakin' dreidle song, and handing out chocolate Chanukkah gelt.

There was no breast-beating and fretting over whether or not we should say Merry Christmas to our customers. Well, in all honesty, probably because we knew for certain that we were the only Jews in town and so a Merry Christmas would not be unwelcome, but also because in those dark days, it was considered polite to express recognition of another's beliefs rather than trying to pretend that we all worship the same nebulous concept of holiness in some non-specific way that could offend nobody and everybody.

I am growing tired of political correctness, can you tell? I think we need a new definition of it. I think that political correctness should be me telling my Christian friends Happy Channukah and them telling me Merry Christmas and we all smile and say "YESH!" Does it matter? The bottom line is that we are wishing each other peace and joy.

Namaste. The god in me recognizes the god in you. We are all one. Merry Christmas to all, unless you prefer Happy Channukah. Or a bountiful Kwaanza. Or whatever.

Namaste.

I was surfing around on the internets just now, and as usual, ended up on Go Fug Yourself, because those girls are a stitch, and I can never get enough of snark about celebutards. They have advertising on GFY, and I don't mind, in fact, now and then I click through to cute clothes or stuff. Today, though, the top ad is from PETA and it's some claptrap about the "horrendous cruelty in the Australian wool industry."

You know what? Fuck 'em. Fuck every one of those PETA assholes. I mean, what? Shearing sheep is cruel? Is it cruel to cut your own hair? Granted, sheep generaly don't go into the whole shearing process voluntarily, but horrendously cruel? Uh, no.
I am so over PETA. I am over people who think it's OK and desirable to ruin a perfectly good fur coat by tossing paint on strangers. Assault is OK? I don't care if it's assault by cream pie or assault with a deadly weapon, assault is assault is assault. Matters of degree don't matter to me.

I am over people who believe that they have the right to dictate how I live, how I dress, how I eat. It's still, although just barely, America, people. That means I have the right to wear a shearling coat and you have the right to be appalled. You do NOT have the right to make it illegal for me to wear it, nor do you have the right to damage it because you don't like it.

If only that were true, there would be a lot of women on the Metrorail with their makeup bags torn from their hands, their capri-pants-with-spike-heels ripped off their bodies and their weaves snatched from their heads. Not to mention the veritable rainfall of cell phones that I would single handedly cause. But I digress.

If I want to eat fois gras, I should be able to plunk down a thick wad of cash at Chef Norman's and dine on a tender morsel of delicately seared fatted goose liver, by G-d and Ben Franklin, I should be able to. Fuck PETA and their isms. Go chew on your own granola, assholes. I'm with Tony Bourdain on this one. There is something fundamentally wrong with people who don't enjoy food.

And yeah, yeah, yeah. I know that it's really bad for me to wear fur, as much as I love the stuff. Maybe that's why I live in Florida, so I can't give in to temptation. Although, in my own defense, the only fur I own is older than me and came to me from my husband's maternal grandmother. It's a lovely black Persian lamb car coat with (on me) 3/4 length sleeves trimmed in black mink. Or maybe black unsheared beaver. Soft. Thick. Furry. Warm. And, hello? economically speaking, a hell of a lot more efficient than a woven cloth coat. It has lasted 60-some years. It is still in pristine condition and doing a good job of keeping me warm. Find me a down vest with those credentials. Oh. Right. Down is probably cruel, too. So if down is bad, and wool (where the animal fucking lives after its resources are harvested, hello?) is bad, and fur is bad, what are we furless humans supposed to wear to keep warm in the winter? Should we crank up the heat on our non-renewable resource gas or oil or coal heaters? Should we use electricity from the same non-renewable, corporate whore-owned sources? Should we just hibernate?

Just believe and live the way you want, and stay the fuck out of my pantry and my closet. And my bedroom. And my womb. And my liquor cabinet. And my face.

And just so you know? Leather is lovely and pleather is just nasty.

Once in a while, the universe does its thing, justice is dispensed, and you get the satisfaction of hearing about it without having had to lift so much as an eyebrow in bringing it about. To quote one of my favorite lines, ever, from one of my favorite movies, ever:

Conan, what is good? TO CRUSH YOUR ENEMIES, TO DRIVE THEM BEFORE YOU, AND TO HEAR THE LAMENTATIONS OF THEIR WOMEN.
You may ask, so Miz Shoes, who was crushed? And I will answer, the old Pointy Haired Boss.

This guy here. The one sleeping at his desk.

And what was the straw that finally broke the camel's hump? The Pointy Haired Boss, the master of the Jackson Memorial Hospital web site, the manager who took my job, o he of little brain, he called the IT help desk and asked what, exactly is an ISS?

You know, if the fucking moron had just paid attention when I tried to teach him how to write a search string in Google, instead of relying on Ask Jeeves, maybe he'd still be there, fucking up.

Conan, what is good?

Item the first: Not all cars have automatic transmissions. Some of us old farts (and gear heads) drive something called a manual transmission or a "stick shift". If you've gone to movies like "The Fast and the Furious", any Bond movie, "Bourne Identity" or any film featuring race cars, you have seen the stick in action. It requires the use of a clutch and a gear stick to manually change the gear ratios in your engine, making use of said ratios to gain or reduce speed. With me? What this means in practical terms is that when we are all driving up a spiral ramp in a parking garage, I have nothing slower than first gear, unless you want to count rolling backwards. DO NOT, repeat, do not pound your brakes on the top of the spiral when you are driving in front of me. Although I keep a respectful distance from your rear fender, there is really nothing else I can do except stick it in neutral and play heel toe with the clutch and the brake and pray that I do NOT roll backward into the jackass who has his front grill stuck to my back bumper like I'm going to...
to do what? We are all in a line on a spiral parking ramp. What the fuck does he think I'm going to do? Pass the car in front of me, and thereby win the very last space in the lot?

Item the second: An elevator is fairly old technology by now. It should not be beyond the average person to understand how it works. However, this morning I learned that is not the case. So in an effort to help those recently deposited in the 21st century by a time/space worm hole, I will explain.

The elevator button only needs to be pressed once. If it is lit, it has already been pressed, and pounding on it will not make the elevator switch directions or arrive faster.

If the big arrow over the elevator door is lit up in green and pointing up, that means the elevator is going to go up. If the big arrow over the elevator door is lit up in red and pointing down, that means the elevator is going to go down. There are no other choices. It isn't trying to fuck with you by pointing up and then going down.

Once the doors open for you, you should enter the elevator and move to the back. Or to the side, if you are the first one in, and there is nobody else there. It is helpful to all the other people trying to get on the elevator to hold. the. door. open. Or you can press the button on the control panel that says "Door Open" and it will hold the door open for others. It actually speeds things up when the doors aren't shutting on people. Also? Moving to the rear of the compartment also speeds up the loading process because people don't have to shove around your fat ass to get into the elevator. The elevator is a public transit device and as such is designed to hold many people, not just you.

While I'm on the subject of packing people into small moving spaces, let's try the same concept out on busses and trains. If there is a door, go through it and keep moving. To the middle of the car. Standing in a doorway prevents others from getting on or off, slows things up, is discourteous and generally just lame.

Thank you. This ends today's lesson in modern technology.

Thanks to I Blame the Patriarchy, I have discovered that I don't need to diet or exercise to look good in photos. Nope. HP now offers this: a digital "slimming effect" on certain of its camera models.

Check it out, but prepare to be outraged.

This is entry infinity in the roll call of things you should not be doing in public.

Within moments of uncorking her nail shellac, everyone in a 6-seat radius started coughing, hacking, sneezing, rolling eyes and generally being uncomfortable.

Do you think this selfish ho noticed? Of course not. Needless to say, but I will anyway, this application was the end of her morning beauty regimen, all of which was conducted on the train. I didn't bother with the make-up application photo, because really, how many of them do I need to take.

Unless...I decide to do an ironic (remember after 9/11 when everyone predicted the end of irony?) photo installation somewhere, of images of nothing but women putting on their make up in public. Which, now that I think about it, might be good gallery fodder. I'll put that on my list of art to make.

Anyway, I was sitting practically in her lap, and when I pulled out my camera, stuck it in her face and took not one, but two photos, complete with flash, she didn't even glance up. She was totally in her own world. The rest of us were merely inconvenient intruders in her personal space.

Having a sick hubby has shortened my already somewhat truncated fuse. So this morning, when the woman pushed past me to get on the train first, and then took the seat next to me and started applying her make up (of course) I said to the woman across from me who was rolling her eyes at the sight, "Well, at least she's not picking her face, I've seen that, too."

We both snickered and then the make-up applying woman got all offended and asked me if I had something I wanted to say directly to her. I did. And I did. I said: "If you need to wear make up to appear in public, shouldn't you have it on BEFORE you appear in public?"

She said that EVERYBODY does it. (Boy howdee, I haven't heard that argument from anyone older than 15 in forever.) I just gave her a supercilious sneer and said that, yes, and everybody picks their nose, too, but that doesn't make it right or nice.

Snap.

I've been staying away from this issue, but the Girl Cousin sent this to me, and I felt the need to pass it along:

"If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence.

If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel."

That, in a nutshell, is the truth of the situation. And I am soooo fucking tired of hearing about the death of "civilians" in the Arab states, and the death of "Israelis" in Israel. The implication is that all Israelis are... what, exactly? All soldiers? Not innocents? Deserving of their deaths in a school bus, or a pizza parlor or a shopping mall? Because those places don't sound like military targets to me. But to hear the world press yammer on about it, they aren't civilian targets.

I am sick of the Hammas and the Hezbolah hiding behind the shields of women and children and then claiming that Israel (politically correct phrase that really means "The Jews") are guilty of brutality and wholesale slaughter of innocents.

I am sickened by the whole Mel Gibson story. The arms-length intellectualism of analysis of his "alcoholism" and "non-anti-Semitism". Bullshit. The man, to quote my SisterFriendGirlFriend, "drank the bad Kool-Aid" and needs to be treated.

I am tired of the creeping tide of anti-semitism that is rising across the world. I am tired of the attitude that says just ignore it, it isn't that bad, it's only a few people, it's blown out of proportion, it can't happen here.

Oh, it is happening here. And there. And everywhere. And I am tired of it all.

This is wrong. On so many levels.

I do not want to be subjected to this first thing in the morning. Once and for all, if you need makeup to appear in public, you should have it on BEFORE you appear in public.

This, my dear, glaring girl, is why. That is just disgusting. That's why I was staring at you, watching you put your face on. Why you felt that you had the right to be giving me the stink eye for watching a public display of crassness, I do not know.

Here's the whole thing.

Every time I fill my prescriptions, the pharmacist asks me if I have any questions about my medications, and every time I reply "Yes. Why don't we put Prozac in the water like Flouride?"

I'm thinking that it might be time to double up on the meds, though, at least today, when Microsoft Word and I are having a major battle of wills about formatting and how auto-format prints. I don't think it needs to be highlighted, and Word does. This is new on Word's part, since it has never highlighted things like printer's quotes and elipses before.
I've done all the usual things: closed and reopened my program, rebooted my computer, deleted and recreated text, turn auto-formatting off (in any number of locations and permutations) and still... three periods converts to an elipsis and the elipsis prints with a highlight.

All of this is on a POS Dell running POS Windoze. Of course. This shit never happens on a Mac.

This is on top of any number of other aggrevations I am dealing with today: I have had to tell the IT/Web Guy for at least the fifth time that he needs to unlock AND unprotect all the files I send him in order to copy and paste text. But, no. He gets a file and rather than type in the password (7 letters), he sends me an e-mail to complain that even though he put in the password, he still is locked out. DUDE!

Open with password. Unprotect file with password. Done and fucking done. Or, open with password. Open e-mail. Type a whiny complaint to me. Wait for me to respond (same way I always do, "No. I am not going to unlock the file for you and resend it, unlock it your own lazy-ass self.). Rinse and repeat.

Next aggrevation: searching for all the zip codes for every county in every state where the company does business. I can only do 50 searches a day before the server kicks me off and asks me to pay big money for the use of the search engine. Then, I have to cross reference the zip codes because zip codes can cross county lines. Then I have to cross reference the zip codes to the individual offices because catchment areas can overlap. Then I have to go home and drink.

As my people are known to ask: Why is this night different?

Where do I begin?

With the US government spying illegally on its citizens and then trying to spin it like "O, we are only collecting data on who you call, we aren't actually listening in on your conversations" but in the next breath rationalizing this illegal, unconstitutional, covert and terrifying activity by saying that not only will it help them capture terrorists (yeah. right. and I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I can let go cheap) but also child pornographers. Uh, if you aren't listening in, how would just a phone number let you know you are on the path of pedophiles? Just asking.

The whole thing is so disingenuous it makes me want to heave more than I usually do when I look at that smirking chimp and his band of devil-may-care draft dodgers, thieves, criminals, cold-hearted bastards and jack-booted thugs.
This particular cabal of evil doers (aka the Bush White House) is so fluent in double speak that George Orwell his own self could use them to write the play book for Big Brother.

I am not afraid. I will not be made to be afraid.

I will take this fight to the polling booth and despite the best efforts of the corporations who have bought this administration, I will attempt to vote all of them out of office. I will write my spineless, Republican hand-puppet representatives and demand impeachment, or at least a dog and pony show of an investigation.

While I'm ranting about the ugly and the evil, can I just say, once and for all, that I am sick and tired and disgusted with you people? You people (women) who seem to think that MetroRail is the appropriate place to pluck your facial hair and apply your pancake makeup? Look. It is really very simple.

If you need to wear makeup to appear in public, it should be applied BEFORE you appear in public. And let me define public, since that also appears to be a concept far beyond your limited capacity: Public is anyplace outside of your house. That means your car, too. Any form of transportation referred to as PUBLIC, i.e.: buses, trains, els, elevators, trams, trollies, jitneys, taxis, tuk-tuks, car-pools, camel caravans, rikshaws. All of these and anything I may have left out, are public transportation and you should shut the fuck up on your damned cell phones, stop plucking your chin hair, and curling your eye lashes and applying foundation.

And still I'm not done with the ugly and the evil, because I haven't even started on ANTM and Darth Jader. She has to be the ugliest, nastiest, stupidest, annoyingest, delusionalest (that's Darth Jader-speak for most delusioned) hamster this series has ever foisted on us. And that is saying something, since we have had girls with she-nises and Adam's apples, girls who thought all birds are blind, Camille and Ya-Ya.

She looks like a pointy, wet, pissed-off cat and acts much like one, only without the endearing quality of being cute and fuzzy when dried off. Even when the judges say they see her being soft, I only see sallow skin, squinty mean eys and an infinite abyss of stupidity.

Yet, still, I watch. I want to see her fall. I want to see her fail. I want her humbled and brought down. Is that so very wrong?

Today's sociology lesson came from some random asshat on the train. I should know better than to change my routine, because it never works out very well.

Instead of getting off the train at Brickell and taking the shuttle to Bayfront, I got off at Government Center. Once downstairs and on the shuttle, there was a ten minute delay. But, luckily for all those on board, we had a vocal lunatic on hand to give us a running commentary on the state of America with side notes about American history, the curse of poverty and the origins of certain ethnic slurs.

Unluckily for those of us on board, the guy was a raving idiot, and possibly a Tourrette's sufferer too, because he Never Shut Up. He had a sidekick, to whom he addressed his lecture.
Allow me to paint you a picture, if you will.

The doors are open, and a young male who appears to be Anglo (fair, light eyes, tall) comes in and holds the door for his friend, a not-so-young black male in a wheelchair. The guy in the wheelchair has some sort of twisty-writhing thing going on, so that every time I glance over at him, he's in a different position, including, at one point, (I kid you not) upside down, with his head on the foot rest, facing in.

None of these contortions phase his buddy in the least, if, in fact, he is even aware that his friend is wiggling around. The fair-haired boy is wearing a pair of baggy (of course) denim shorts complete with large logo on one leg, and a styled denim jacket in a very now acid wash, fully buttoned to the throat, where he has tied on a grey bandana, old west style, like a bandit about to pull it up over his face just before the bank robbery. Clean sneakers, no baseball cap. And then he opens up his pie-hole and does not stop. He talks like a seriously "gangsta" inner-city thug. Reminds me of Jamie Kennedy in Malibu's Most Wanted. A lot.

It is a rant about how all these people are going to work in offices where they are going to talk on their cell phones and sit on their asses and make piles of money whereas he is a poor working guy who does construction and gets laughed at by the stiffs in their Chryslers. America is doomed to crash. America deserves to crash. But he and his friend will be OK, because they are the poor and the downtrodden and they have better survival skills.

When the power goes out, and OH IT WILL, all of us will be down, and he will be on top and he'll know what to do then, oh, YES HE WILL and we will all be working with our hands and suffering because the (and I quote) SPICS and the NIGGAS will be on top. The working peeps who know what it's like to blahblahblahblah. Then there was a slight digression as he explained where the term spic came from... except I don't think the last letter began with a C...or a K. Anyway.

But America is going to CRASH and it'll be worse than the Great Depression in his granddaddy's day. (HUH? This asshat knows about the Great Depression? I'll be damned.) OH YES IT WILL. And he's got the popcorn ready.

OK. You get the gist. Repeat with variations ad nauseum for the ten minutes we are stuck at the station (although while he was on the people in the towers with their cell phones portion, there was a general fleeing of the ship by the rats in question), followed by more variations on a theme for another ten to fifteen minutes while we creep along the el to my stop. He was still going on when I left.

But, and here's the thing, for all his anti-Capitalist Pig, anarchy in UK posturing, the kid is wearing new clothes, in new styles with highly visible branding. And while I have no way of knowing his level of education, he at least was awake long enough to learn about the Great Depression and even able to place it in the correct time frame... which is more than I can say for a lot of high school graduates.
He is bragging that he's got his popcorn ready when America falls (never mind that Gill Scott Heron said that the revolution will not be televised), which would indicate that he has a home, and the money to pay the electric bills and fork over the buck fifty for a bag of Jiffy Pop. He talked about his job, working hard with his hands. So, anarchy boy? Aren't you just more of the same as me? Job. Rent. Food. Clothes. Mass Transit. TV. Electric bills.

Sucks being the man, don't it?

I have a number of things on my mind today which I would like to share.

1. Again with the back pack strapped to the chest. No. No. No. Also, to quote the lovely POTES, if it's cold enough for a zipped-up, mock turtle neck jacket, it's probably cold enough for pants.



2. When entering a train, or bus, or other transportation device, one should move on to the center of the car, or take a seat or do something other than STAND IN THE FUCKING DOORWAY! Christ, people, it is not rocket science. It's barely more than breathing. Diagram to follow.

3. ANTM. Jade wins a challenge by kissing a giant Madagascar Hissing Cockroach. Is anyone surprised? It looks like her brother. She also tortured the gently bewildered and speech impedimented Gina with the roach. And you guys got your knickers in a twist when Lisa peed in a diaper? Head shaking is all I can do.

4. Finally, who wants a t-shirt or a coffee mug? I'm thinking, what with my ability to master new things (Pandemonium Midnight Uploading podcasts are available on i-tunes, remember?) that maybe what this site needs is a Cafe Press offering.