The Dreaded Undertoad

A few years back, Mark Evanier got his car towed. I was reading about that today (Evanier's blog is one of the few that isn't blocked out by my job's new firewall, so I've been catching up on a lot of his archives lately) and it brought to mind the following:

I have, in my life, had two memorable experiences with tow trucks. One was recent, and is mostly vicarious. A week or so ago, SuperWife and I were pulling out of our driveway as we do most weekday mornings, with two kids in the back seat, on our way to drop offs at two different schools and then downtown to two different office jobs. On this occasion, that process was interrupted by an act of no doubt drunken idiocy; to wit, sometime the night before, some no doubt drunken idiot had parked their car next to our driveway, in such a way that their vehicle was canted 30 degrees away from the curb, and, more to the point of our topic, jutting out about three feet across our right of way.

This necessitated SuperWife cutting the wheel to the right and backing our car out across the strip of verge grass and curb in order to get into the street. We were pissed, as you can imagine, but week day mornings are always high velocity experiences for us and we had no time to do more than mildly curse ('mildly' as there was a 7 year old in the back seat) whichever drunken idiot had inconvenienced us while going about our business.

It never would have occurred to me that that very same vehicle might still be in exactly the same position when we returned from work and school pick up (for the 7 year old; our 17 year old makes her own way home from school in the afternoon), and yet, there it was, 11 hours after we'd last seen it, parked in exactly the same place and at exactly the same 30 degree slant from the curb. Obviously, whoever had parked it there hadn't been back all day long; to add annoyance on top of annoyance, that entire side of the street was now empty -- had the erring driver bothered to check their vehicle at any time during the day prior to our return, they would have had their choice of valid parking spots to move their car into, and wouldn't have still been closing off a third of our access to our own driveway.

But clearly they hadn't troubled to do that. Having no idea who the car belonged to, and being more than a little pissed off now at having had to drive across the grassy verge strip twice in one day to use our own driveway, SuperWife and I decided to call the local police substation and see what could be done.

What could be done was that a cop rolled up within fifteen minutes, put a ticket on the car, then knocked on our door to explain to us at great and tedious length that the car might get towed sometime within the next 48 hours, or it might not, as it was considered a low priority item. He didn't seem apologetic, but actually, rather resentful of and irritated by the necessity of advising us of this. I myself was rather bemused; we live in a pretty high class, high income neighborhood, but we ourselves are at best very lower middle class. We snuck into this neighborhood by renting an apartment owned and managed by a former employer of SuperWife's; without her connections, we'd be living in some much less pleasant neighborhood and the cops would be pretty much ignoring any complaints we might make short of a home invasion. Still, I don't mind being mistaken for prosperous and potentially influential if it gets us official attention when we want it.

So after explaining all this, the cop went away, and I got ready to go out for some take out with Nate, as SuperWife didn't feel like cooking that night. A few minutes later, as Nate and I were heading out the back door, SuperWife called me to the front of the apartment in a very excited tone. I looked out the window where she was indicating, and saw a tow truck hooking up the offending vehicle. Guess it was a slow night for whoever had the city contract, which was, of course, fine with us.

So Nate and I went off to DQ for a couple of bags of anti-health food, and when we got back forty minutes later, SuperWife advised us that the owner of the offending vehicle had showed up knocking on our door five minutes after the tow truck departed with her car. Yeah, it was a her. According to SuperWife, it was a young woman, not un-pretty, with beautifully styled hair, reeking of Old Milwaukee, who insisted, in turn, that (a) the car had not been parked illegally or in any way that would inconvenience any reasonable person and (b) that she had just moved to the city and couldn't afford anything like this and (c) her grandmother was dying RIGHT THIS VERY MINUTE.

Then she asked SuperWife if there was anyone living in the building that she could do some work cleaning or something for to pay for the tow charge. Now, of course, what you want more than anything else in the world is for the inebriated dumbass who left her car parked at an angle across your driveway for an entire day and who then showed up five minutes after you had the car towed away spouting bullshit rationalizations and self justifications and outright lies, to actually come into your house and have access to all your stuff under the pretense that she is going to do some sort of 'work' for you.

Despite the obvious attractiveness of this proposition, SuperWife demurred, at which point, according to SuperWife's account, this fine woman became profanely abusive. Now, I myself would not become profanely abusive with SuperWife no matter how intoxicated I might be; the amount of alcohol I would have to imbibe to become that brave would put me into a stupor or flat out kill me first. And before I'd start throwing profanities around at SuperWife in front of SuperAdorable Kid, I suspect I'd just take some kind of fast acting poison, at least that way, my demise would be relatively quick.

SuperWife did not admit to any violence, but she did say that after this, the young woman departed our premises very quickly, and if she had one or both of SuperWife's bootprints on her ass when she did it, I would not in any way be surprised.

I will note here with some bemusement that this woman did not trouble herself about her vehicle for at a period of at least 12 hours, probably longer, after she parked it on a street in a neighborhood which she herself insisted she had only recently moved into... but she showed up like a summoned efreet within minutes of said vehicle being towed away by the city wreckers.

I guess everybody has their priorities.

Anyway, that's one brush I've had with tow trucks. My next anecdote regarding such is much, much longer --

I'm going to guess this took place in the summer of 1985. That was the summer I got out of Army Basic Training, which would fit, because in the course of this anecdote, me and three other people end up hiking from one side of Syracuse to the other, and that's not something I could have easily done at any other point in my life besides while I was still in the fabulous (never to be equalled) physical condition I enjoyed briefly after Basic, before falling back into rack and ruin from, you know, continuing to eat a lot of crap while not exercising. Also, one of the people involved, a woman I'll call Amy, was near to graduating from college when this happened, and a date of 1985 would fit that time frame, too. Besides all that, my relationships with most of my college era friends didn't long survive the watershed life event that Basic Training turned out to be for me, so, again, summer of 85 sounds just about right.

Actually, given that Amy was living in Lawrinson Hall when this occurred, but the weather was nice (that I do remember) it was probably autumn of 85 rather than summer. But whatever. It was a long, long time ago, yet, despite that, most of the salient details are still burned into my brain over twenty years later.

What had happened was this: my old buddy Slappy, for some reason, decided to swing through Syracuse for a quick visit. I imagine it was in some way work related, and I think by 85 he was writing professionally and more or less regularly for both Marvel and DC. (My memory blurs that far back. Slappy would have graduated around 1982, I believe, and then he was gone from Syracuse for a year or so, living in New York City, and then he returned to Syracuse for another year or so, when he lived on Dell Street and wrote a lot of POWER MAN/IRON FIST scripts and introduced me and a few other guys we knew to the Champions superhero roleplaying system, after which, he moved away again... so... yeah, call it the fall of 1985 and be done with it; it's not like anyone is going to contradict me anyway.)

Anyway, Slappy had borrowed his mother's car (I think) for the trip. He planned to come in and pick up me and Jeff Webb (who was Great, but not yet Late, at that time) and we'd go out and get something to eat and reminisce and maybe play some Illuminati (the portable version with the little cards you can't find anywhere any more that predated the current, boxed up, tabletop version Steve Jackson Games put out several years later). At the last minute, somebody suggested adding Amy to the roster, as she was the only other member of our college clique still around at the time. This meant Slappy had to pick me and Jeff up at our off campus digs, and then swing over to campus to get Amy, who was still living in Lawrinson Hall at the time. (Amy lived in Lawrinson Hall the entire time she attended Syracuse University; I'm pretty sure she was in her last year at this time, although it may have been her fifth year, as she changed majors at least once.)

Now, back then (and I doubt this has changed, but I don't really know) you could not legally park on campus without a parking sticker, and those parking stickers were among the most zealously guarded perks Syracuse University had -- students found it nearly impossible to get them; in fact, many faculty members had a difficult time procuring them. Slappy certainly didn't have one, and even if he had, it wouldn't have been on his mother's car, and it was very well known that if you parked your car on campus without a sticker, campus security would descend like winged velociraptors and have your car towed within seconds. (Campus security was notorious for taking their sweet time responding to pretty much any other kind of complaint, but unauthorized parking got their attention fast, most likely because it generated money for the University to have cars towed, and I'd imagine that somehow or other some of that money stuck to the security department itself.)

Whatever the case, Slappy knew better than to try to park an unauthorized car anywhere on campus, including in the Lawrinson Hall parking garage. So, we needed someplace we could park that was within an easy walk of Lawrinson, and Slappy eventually decided to use the parking lot of a nearby, very small, enclosed mall we'd frequently cut through on our way downtown to buy comics at Dream Days, back when we were all living on campus in Lawrinson Hall. (Dream Days, owned and operated by the always colorful Mike Sagert, switched locations several times while I was in Syracuse and finally went under sometime in the early 90s, leaving me to the tender mercies of more predatory comics shops like Twilight Book and Games. Since I've moved out of Syracuse, Twilight has also gone under, which leaves me to think that the Syracuse I once knew and loved must be pretty much as dead as the dinosaurs... which is just as well, since I'm happy in River City.)

So Slappy parked his mom's car in the lot and all three of us got out and walked the four blocks or so up to Lawrinson Hall, where we met up with Amy and all four of us walked back, chattering amiably back and forth about various the kind of stuff that is only ever important to you when you're young and geeky and you're still under the impression that not only are you never going to age or die, but you're also just a few years away from complete success and fame and wealth in whatever field it is you'd like most to achieve same in -- said amiable chatter which cut off as if shot by a rifle as we reached the southeast corner of the mall parking lot just in time to see Slappy's mom's car heading out the northeast corner at a pretty good clip, attached to the back of a red and white painted tow truck.

At which point, for perhaps the very first time ever, we all noticed the pretty prominent sign stating that this parking lot was for mall patrons only and any others parking there would be towed.

Buh buh buh BUMmer.

Slappy sprang into action immediately, turning to all of us and advising us that we had parked, gone into the mall, and had been shopping. He rattled off quickly which stores we had gone to and specifically told us that we'd decided not to buy anything and upon coming back out to the parking lot, had been horrified to see our car being towed away.

Having gotten our collective lies firmly set in our minds, Slappy then led us inside. Inquiries took us to the mall office, where a long haired fellow with a walkie talkie barely listened to the beginnings of Slappy's schtick before chuckling, shaking his head, and leading us all back outside again into the parking lot.

Lifting his walkie talkie, he depressed his send button and said "Hey, Luke, gimme a wave". At which point, another long haired guy who was sitting on a car at the corner of the lot (whom we had walked right by, coming and going, to and from the lot, without paying any attention to him at all), waved laconically at us.

After Luke waved, and at no point up until that point, I noticed he also had a walkie talkie. It was right there in his lap and I'm still willing to bet twenty two years after the events that it was right there in his lap both times our party had walked right by him. We just hadn't even noticed him, or it.

"He watches everyone park," Longhaired Guy standing with us said, his voice nearly toneless, but his eyes unmistakably sparkling with the unabashed pleasure nearly any of us would get at proving a bullshit artist to be a bullshit artist with irrefutable evidence right to his bullshitting face. "If you park and then leave the lot without going into the mall, he walks over to your car and gives me a shout on the box and I write down the plate number and call for a truck."

He paused, then, looking at Slappy invitingly, no doubt waiting to see if Slappy would renew his protestations of injured innocence. Slappy remained silent for several seconds, although his face was just about as beet red as I have ever seen a human visage turn. Finally, he more or less squeaked (obviously forcing his voice through a glottal wall of choked outrage at the enormous injustice of a universe where there were actual consequences for one's acts that a man of enormous innate charm and charisma could not immediately bluster, bully, and bullshit his way out of) "So how do I get the car back?"

Long-hair whipped out a badly beat up, rather dirty business card and handed it to Slappy. "That's the address," he said. "You go there and it's" -- here he named some figure for the tow and an additional figure for storage per day (or part of a day); I can't remember what it was, but I remember being stunned by the amount, although back in 1985 or so, when I would have been paying a rent of something like $225 a month and living off around $130 a week, anything north of $100 or so would have struck me as being exorbitantly expensive.

Longhair also gave us directions; as it turned out, we would have to go through central Syracuse (downtown) and then head on out to the west side; a walk of a few miles, at the very least. But it was lovely weather and we didn't have any other wheels and it wasn't like Slappy was going to go back to Boston and tell his mom her car was stuck on an impound lot in Syracuse, so off we went.

As we went, Slappy fulminated furiously on the rank injustice of the situation we were in, bitching endlessly about how unfair it was that people would actually have a 'racket' like this where by just because somebody parked illegally in a clearly marked private lot, they might actually get towed and have to pay to get their vehicle back. It was outrageous. It was ridiculous. It should be illegal.

I finally got tired of listening to him and told him (probably rather shrilly; 22 years ago, I didn't have much sense of humor about such things) that he was just embarrassed, first at getting his mother's car towed, and then, because he'd tried to bullshit his way out of it and been completely and totally busted doing it. That set him off into another long tirade about how he wasn't embarrassed at all, he was just indignant that people would take advantage of others this way and a civilized society shouldn't allow this kind of victimization etc, etc, etc.

I have to admit something here -- while I was as inconvenienced as anyone except Slappy (who was going to have to actually foot the bill to get his mom's car out of hock), and wasn't at all thrilled to find myself walking three or four miles across Syracuse into a not particularly great neighborhood on a day when I'd planned to be sitting in Hungry Charlie's drinking Pepsi and playing Illuminati with some old buddies, still, I was also digging on Slappy's humiliation. Digging on it in a BIG way. I say this with no illusions; it was small of me then and it's small of me now, but, still, I was totally into it. He was my friend (or so I genuinely believed at the time) and I was sorry for him, but, more than I was sorry for him, I was wildly exultant at seeing him finally, irrefutably, objectively and completely unfuckingdeniably, lose a goddam argument with someone.

You have to understand (well, you don't have to, but I'll try to get you there anyway if you'll hang in with me a little bit longer) that at this point, I had been reasonably close friends (or whatever it was it turned out we actually were) with Slappy for six or seven years. I'd lived in the dorm room next to his for two semesters, shared a house with him for a year, collaborated with him on many, many stories, precis', plots, and scripts, DMed him in countless roleplaying sessions, played in several RPGs he'd DMed, and played alongside him in many, many others DMed by other people. I'd written letters to comics with him, read comics with him, had classes with him, typed papers and POWER MAN/IRON FIST scripts for him, ghost written MARVEL UNIVERSE pages for him, and I'd even stayed at his family's house with him for a week over winter break back in January of 1980, when he and I and several others had gone to First Night in Boston together, among many, many other occasions I'd shared with him. I'd stayed up late bullshitting with him, shared hundreds of meals with him, gone grocery shopping with him, watched movies with him, gone on long walks with him, talked to him endlessly on every conceivable subject, been there for him when girls had dumped him, and he'd been there for me in similar circumstances.

And, throughout all of that, I'd argued with him endlessly about everything, and in all that time, I'd only ever won one argument with him. It had been when he and I were brainstorming supporting characters for some superhero concept we were working on together. I'd created a private investigator I wanted to call David Gallery, and Slappy had looked at me, snorted derisively, and said "You've been reading too many Don MacGregor comics; real people don't have names like Gallery."

So I'd gone and gotten a phone book and opened it up to the Gs and after flipping a couple of pages, pointed silently to three entire columns of people named 'Gallery' in the Syracuse metropolitan area. And he'd glanced at it, then flipped the phone book shut and changed the subject, and I had no idea he actually considered that I had won that argument until nearly a year later, when I was bitching about how he thought he was completely infallible and nobody could ever, ever win an argument with him, at which point, he refuted my point by mentioning how I'd won the previous argument about David Gallery. Which encompasses an enormous irony (Slappy won an argument with me about how he never lost arguments by admitting he'd lost an argument to me that he hadn't ever previously admitted I'd won) and also pretty much summarizes my entire experience being friends with Slappy (he was never wrong and I was never right, unless me being right and him being wrong at some point in the past would actually mean that yet again I was totally wrong and he was really right in the present).

Mind you, it wasn't just me. Slappy never lost arguments with anyone in all the time I knew him... not because he was always, or even often,, actually correct in his views and/or opinions, but because he could and would bullshit, bluster, browbeat and/or bully anyone into believing anything, or, at least, into saying they did, if only to shut him the hell up. To Slappy there was no agreeing to disagree and there was never any chance he might learn something from someone that he hadn't known before and, well, as I said, the only time in my life I ever heard him say he'd been wrong about something was when admitting that he'd been wrong about something allowed him to win an entirely separate argument.

Slappy, more than anyone else I have ever met, absolutely embodied the inability to admit to error. He could not bring himself to say that he was wrong about anything, and I don't think he was capable of emotionally grasping that some things were not objective, some issues had no absolutely correct answer, and some disagreements simply weren't worth arguing about. With Slappy, any discussion on any subject was all out war, there were no rules (for him; he would, however, insist that whoever he was arguing with follow an entire array of arcane debating requirements, like never ever interrupting him, always qualifying their statements as to whether they were fact or opinion, and always requiring opposing statements to be fully supported with citations of unimpeachable source material, none of said requirements which he ever felt any inclination to adhere to himself) and he was going to beat down the opposition no matter how much or how long it took him to do it.

And if you wanted to stay friends with him, or even on anything like amicable speaking terms with him, eventually, you just learned to give in to him.

And I have to tell you, seeing him balked for the first time -- seeing him forced to back down, seeing him have to swallow his own bullshit, seeing him confront someone and actually lose, seeing him objectively proved to be in the wrong in a manner that was entirely irrefutable -- well, like I said, I was digging that shit in a big, BIG way.

That may have been why we stopped being friends, although, as I say, Amy was also present, and those few of you who are actually reading this thing all the way through have probably already figured out that Amy was indeed the mutual college friend of mine and Slappy's who eventually, a few years later, ended up becoming Mrs. Slappy.

Whatever the case may be, it has been my experience, born out by both of these occurrences (recent and long ago) and now, by reading Mark Evanier's description of his own run in with a towing company, that this is one of those instances where there is simply no possibility of compromise or empathy or sympathy across the divide between two entirely opposing viewpoints.

If you are a person who is being inconvenienced by an illegally parked vehicle, then you call the tow trucks and are entirely satisfied when the fucker who parked across your driveway or in your private lot taking up valuable parking space without paying for it is towed away. It seems entirely just and correct and right to you that said person should be so inconvenienced and have to pay to get their vehicle back, because they damned well shouldn't have parked where they did and then gone off and left their vehicle there and they knew it and you know they knew it. So fuck 'em, they got what they deserved and that's just how that goes, baby.

On the other hand, if it's your car that is getting towed away and you're the one who is going to have to find some way to get to a lot halfway across the city and shell out some big wad of cash to get the car back, and this is totally going to fuck with all your plans for the evening or maybe even the next several, then it does not matter if the place you parked in was clearly marked as private or it was illegal to park there or you were making it difficult or impossible for other people to get legitimate access to their own driveways or parking spaces or homes or businesses. None of this means a thing to you; whoever called the tow company is a bastard and a prick and a motherfucker and you had no idea and you're sure you weren't really parked blocking anything and you were only there for a little while anyway and this is a travesty and it's terrible and it's wrong and it's unfair and it should be illegal and it's ridiculous and it shouldn't be tolerated and it's an outrage.

I get that, and I'm willing to admit, if I'd parked somewhere I probably shouldn't have and then left my car there for longer than I really should have and I got back just in time to see my car heading off down the road on the back of a tow truck, I'd be pretty pissed, too.

Here's what I wouldn't do, though -- I wouldn't immediately turn to three buddies of mine and start rehearsing the lies I wanted them to tell to get me out of it. Maybe I'd go in and try to lie myself, but I don't think I'd immediately try to implicate my friends in a conspiracy to defraud, especially when I knew damn well I wasn't supposed to be parking where I was parking in the first place. (In fact, I doubt after the car was already towed I'd bother trying to lie at all. I might go up and try to say whatever I felt I had to to keep a tow truck in the process of hooking up my car from completing the process, but once the car's gone, it's gone. At that point, I'd just be looking to get the situation resolved as quickly and as cheaply as I could.)

I also wouldn't go out to the street where I'd illegally parked my car and start pounding on doors asking if anyone knew anything about where it had gotten to. Or if I did because I genuinely had no idea (and given how quickly the drunken idiot got out there after her car was towed, I have to assume she either looked out her window and saw it happening, or was tipped by a friend or neighbor who had seen it happening), I certainly wouldn't have started screaming profane abuse at the person who advised me that my car had been parked blocking her driveway for over 12 hours, in front of her 7 year old child.

And I certainly wouldn't write a 3,351 word blog post fuming about how the homeowner's association that posted their street private are 'master villains', how the laws and regulations that allow it are at fault, how the tow truck service that hauled my car off from a street that had been posted private was 'crooked' and how they have 'a lovely racket here', or how terrible it would be if some doctor got an emergency call and came out to find his car towed, and sum it all up with 'it's a real sleazy way to earn money'. I especially wouldn't write such a blog post after I'd taken hours out of my life to call up various different cops and other 'law enforcement officials' to confirm that, yes, indeed, this 'scam' is actually legal and the cops can't do anything about it.

Why wouldn't I do any of this? Because, well, it seems to me that the best way to avoid having your car towed is, you know, to not park anywhere you're not supposed to park in the first place, and if you absolutely have to do it, well, get your business done as fast as you possibly can and get your ass back to your car and get your car the hell out of that dubious parking spot.

If you don't do any of that and your car ends up getting towed, well, okay. Maybe you didn't see the sign saying that this perfectly normal looking street was actually private and had restricted parking and violators would be towed. That's a legitimate excuse to bitch about your shitty luck, but at some point, it seems to me, a reasonable person who is spending several thousand words bitching about having his car towed in public to a presumably sympathetic audience might want to own the fact that they made a mistake, they paid a fee, and now their life is moving on. (I have no idea how much money Mark Evanier makes, but I'm reasonably sure that $125 is to him roughly the equivalent of what I'd spend on a this month's issue of BIRDS OF PREY, if I were still buying BIRDS OF PREY.) And if instead you spend 3,351 words endlessly raving about how every single other factor involved in the situation is at fault, sleazy, criminal, immoral, stupid, mean, or flat out wrong except you, the doofus who parked your car on a private street in the first place, well, I think you're kind of being a jack ass.

You're also being an ass (jack or jill, as the case may be) if, after parking your car in a drunken haze and staggering away to sleep it off and ignoring your illegally parked car for 12 hours or more, you see the car being towed out your window, hastily throw some pants and a shirt on, run out on the street and start pounding on doors, and upon finding the person whose driveway you were blocking all day and who therefore had your car towed away, you start screaming abuse at them in front of their 7 year old child.

Finally, you're being an ass if, upon seeing your car heading on down the road attached to a tow truck, you immediately embroil your friends in a conspiracy to deceive, and when that conspiracy fails, you then spend the next hour whining about how unfair it all is, and if one of your friends tells you to man the fuck up and quit bitching, you start screaming at him about how you're really a victim, here.

Yet, again... this doesn't seem to be uncommon behavior. Many, many people seem to respond with absolute screaming outrage when their car is towed (or, for that matter, when their car is in any way interfered with without their express permission) regardless of the circumstances, enough so that I have to suspect that it just goes back to the insane, near-worshipful devotion and awe that contemporary humans regard their motor vehicles with.

Even Adam Arkin's WEST WING character once admitted that if there was any one law he could break with impunity, he'd "park anywhere (he) want(ed)". So maybe it's simply that, at base, most people will not admit that on a deep primordial level beyond all sense or reason, they absolutely believe that they should be allowed to do anything they want with their vehicle no matter what, and anything that interferes with that absolute natural right is hateful, vile, and intolerable.

I don't know. What I do know is, when you mess with someone's ride, even the most reasonable people (like Mark Evanier generally seems to be, or, at least, as Mark Evanier generally portrays himself to be in his own writing) get really, REALLY pissy about it.

I think if I were a crooked tow truck driver, or even a legit one, I'd carry a gun.

Spruce almighty

So this Boy Scout, couldn't have been older than eleven, is holding up this kinda chubby looking Scotch Pine. It was.... ehhhh... okay. "I kinda like it," I offered. It wasn't as tall as I was yearning for in my heart of hearts, but it was well rounded and had good needles and wasn't all dried out yet. At around 6' tall, it would have fit nicely into our living room and posed no challenge to angel topping. It did not exactly make the strings of my heart go zing!, but...

It would do.

"It's a cool tree," the eleven year old Boy Scout said, tasting a sale, eyes as bright as a school of piranha flashing through the sunlit shallows towards a blissfully unmindful back-floating koala.

"I like it," Nate opined. Bear in mind, Nate was raised as a Jehovah's Witness, and his entire experience with Christmas trees had begun seven minutes prior to that statement when he stepped onto this Boy Scout Christmas tree fundraising lot for the first time. "It's a good tree."

"Yeah, yeah," I allowed. "Okay, I guess we'll... GREAT JUMPING JUPITER! LOOK AT THAT BEAUTY!!!"

'That beauty' being a glorious nine foot blue spruce of such transcendent power and awe inspiring glory that I was helpless before its puissant visage. The blistering aura of its savage piney beauty grabbed me in an illegal full nelson, hurled me to the ground like a bag of old rags, knocked the wind out of me, and sat on my chest beaming in triumph.

I was stunned and speechless. The neckerchief clad gamin, sensing a sale, gulped gamely and grabbed for its mighty trunk. He struggled valiantly to get it away from the fence it was leaning on and standing upright so I could take a good long gander at it, but he clearly was not equal to such a Herculean task. Another plucky urchin hurled himself into the fray and between the two of them, they wrestled the forest giant upright for me to inspect.

This was no mere scrub pine, no piddling little Xmas tree. This was a tremendous tree, a tree titan, an Ur-Tree, a veritable Ent of the Modern Saturnalia. If Yggdrasil, the World Tree of Norse legend, were a blue spruce, it could hardly outstrip this tree. This was a tree of legend, an Atlas of trees, a Brobdignagian tree, a veritable woodlands colossus.

"How much?" I inquired reverently, yet doubtfully, expecting an answer somewhere north of $60. Mind you, for such a tree I would have been prepared to pay nearly any price, but Superwife had instructed me firmly that I could not spend $60 on a Christmas tree. Of course, I could have advised her that it was not, in fact, a Christmas tree, but was in actuality a fully functional ballistic missile shield, and I would hardly have been lying... give that tree a kitchen knife and send it to Iraq and I have no doubt it would win the war by New Years single-handedly... or branchedly, as the case may be. Still, one does not defy SuperWife in matters of the pocketbook; so I braced myself for the answer that would turn me regretfully away from the Monarch of All Christmas Trees, and prepared to move on.

"$42," said the jocular adult who had sidled up whilst I was admiring That Beauty.

"Sold," I gasped.

So they gave it a fresh cut and roped it to the roof of Nate's car and off we went home with it, where we dragged it inside and attempted to stand it up.

For two hours.

Only to discover that the wonderfully sturdy and amazingly strong all-metal Christmas tree stand we had employed with excellent results for the past three Christmases had by some arcane alchemy been transmuted into cellophane and chewing gum wrappers. We would lower in the tree and screw in the screws and tentatively relax our grips on the trunk and the tree would sway to the left, or to the right, deforming the metal of the Christmas tree stand, bending and twisting it all out of true, as if it were no more than cheap aluminum foil, or perhaps, some sort of medieval sealing wax.

"We need... ANOTHER Christmas tree stand," I opined, grimly. "A better one. Better... faster... stronger."

So off Nate and I went to Lowes, humming the theme song from THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN (She's breaking up... I can't hold her! seemed especially appropos to our situation). There, we inquired after Christmas tree stands, and a fellow advised us, in badly broken English, that there was "unny wun Kreesmas tree stan leff, ova deah, on de sheff." So we went ova deah, and on de sheff, dere was indeed wun Kreesmas tree stan leff, which I purchased with alacrity, before speeding victoriously home.

Upon entering, I brandished said Christmas tree stand at SuperWife and said, in my best SCARFACE tones, "Say hello to my leetle fren'".

SuperWife's eyes bugged out of her head as she beheld a Galaxy Class Christmas tree stand, a Christmas tree stand that might have been designed by Tony Stark to send blasting at high velocity straight through the helmeted head of the Titanium Man, a Christmas tree stand that looked much as if our old Christmas tree stand had shouted "Shazam!" and been magically transformed into Treestand Marvel. This was a Christmas tree stand of supreme power, a Christmas tree stand such as God might have handed down to Moses on the mountaintop, constructed from the indestructible mithril bones of a fallen archangel, flash-welded in the heart of a nuclear holocaust, clobbered by gamma rays and bitten by a radioactive spider. This was the Last Christmas Tree Stand From Doomed Krypton. Such a Christmas tree stand as this, when first spotted by Han Solo or Princess Lea, might well have surprised a squeaked "That's no moon!" from their stunned, awestruck lips.



"Okay," SuperWife said, "that looks like it will work."

And it did.

So, our Christmas tree is up.

UPDATE: And now, it's decorated! Photos as digital photography apparatus presents itself. But I did find a graphic of the Norse God of Christmas Tree Stands, see above.

Crawlin'

Everybody is excused from commenting on this one. Hell, you're all excused from READing it. There are few things more boring than watching other people roleplay, but one of those things is doubtless reading about it.

Okay. Because the greeks don't want no geeks... or... something... Dungeon Run Blogging --

I've been running my World of Empire campaign again sporadically since Nate moved down here, for a very small family party that always consists of Nate and SuperWife's characters (Gory and T'Cheyne, the last is pronounced like 'machine' if you sub in a 't' for the 'm'), and that often or even usually includes one or sometimes both of the older two SuperKids' characters (whose names I cannot remember right now -- well, Super Dependable Teen's is something unpronouncable like S'Keeaaa, and she's on this kick of sleeping with every male NPC she runs across because she knows it aggravates her mother, so the rest of the party all just call her 'Skank', and Super Drama Teen's is something like 'Gara', but as the other PCs are members of a very dark skinned race known as Northarks, and Gara is a very paleskinned Sothark, she's mostly known as 'Token' -- hey, we're all SOUTH PARK fans around here, deal with it and move on).

I tried to set up a 'get your feet wet' scenario that would be simple and straightforward, without the choking layers of political intrigue and behind-the- scenes machinations I normally plaster every adventure liberally with, all of which is usually pointless anyway, because none of my players ever pay any attention to any of it. To that end, I contrived a way for the party to come into possession of an old stone tablet that supposedly contained a vital clue to a centuries old, long hidden pirate horde.

The gimmick was, the stone tablet was actually magically preserved by a stasis spell, and inside it, there was a scrap of vellum on which was written a detailed map. The party had to (a) figure out there was a stasis on the tablet, and then (b) get it removed, after which they would have to (c) figure out that there was something hidden inside the tablet and get it out. (With the stasis off, that last could be accomplished as easily as dropping the tablet onto a hard surface from a few feet in the air.) Then they'd have a treasure map, which would lead to a big horde of goodies guarded by a fairly low level monster (for my campaign, anyway; basically, a giant worm, called, in a fit of brilliant dungeon master originality, a wurm).

As always, nothing went as planned, but eventually, the gang managed to access the map and with some backing from the Temple of Silver and Gold (in exchange for a 50% cut of any eventual loot) they headed out of Sottli Ban to a nearby city/military base called Safeharbor. Now, Sottli Ban is a pretty wide open town, at least, in the outer area where the foreigners all live it is. (The inner area, known as the Secret City, is something quite different, but only high caste Sottles get to go there, so it doesn't much matter to the vast majority of player characters.)

The Sottle Merchant's Council handles all interactions between the Sottle race and non-Sottles; they prefer to hire a crew of non Sottle mercenaries to handle the dirty work of actually patrolling the outer city streets and keeping the thievery, arson, rape, assault, and murder to a reasonable minimum (mostly because thievery, arson, rape, assault, and murder tend to interfere with the orderly collection of tax revenues and trade tariffs). To be honest, I'd have to check my notebooks to see who the current mercenary captain "King" of Sottli Ban is, but it didn't matter, as the player characters didn't interact with anyone on that social level.

The thing of it is, is, this basically boils down to one law in Sottli Ban -- don't fuck with a Sottle under any circumstances, and don't fuck with anyone who has more money than you if there's a chance you might get caught doing it.

After the freewheeling near-chaos of Sottli Ban, the players found the rather more disciplined atmosphere of Safeharbor (which is, essentially, a military outpost of the very lawful Kingdom of Ona-Tengu) to be a real buzz-kill. Having to be rigorously questioned by Tengish Knights before they could even enter the City Gates was a bummer for the PC gang after the 'anything goes as long as you've got bribe money handy' ambiance of their previous base of operations. Once inside the city, the party's search for a ship that would take them to the little island in Lake Safeharbor where the hidden pirate horde lay ran into a snag when T'Cheyne stopped a very well dressed Sottle and his equally well dressed male offspring to ask for directions.

Sottles are a race of prickly bastards under the best circumstances. Short, fat, hairless, and possessed of bright yellow, always oily looking skin, Sottles know full well that they are the laughingstock of the River, even if few are foolhardy enough to ridicule one of them to his or her face. T'Cheyne, however, had little experience in my RPG, and wasn't up on the niceties of social intercourse with the annoying, but generally very powerful, little butterballs. Plus, she completely ignored my wise DM cautionary advise about taking the negative attribute Smart Ass ("you'll die if you do"), all of which led to the following exchange on the Safeharbor waterfront:

T'CHEYNE: Say, can you tell me how to get to the local Temple of Silver and Gold?
SOTTLE: Certainly. My price for that assistance will be ten pieces of gold.
T'CHEYNE: WHAT? Ten GOLD?? Are you and your monkey going to carry us there on your backs?

The 'your monkey' reference accompanied by a hand gesture indicating the Sottle's son, of course.

Now... well, where do I start? Sottles think of themselves, with no irony or sense of humor at all, as 'the Great Race', because for all their inborn physical inferiority to every other human subrace, they tend to be extremely intelligent, intuitive, and strong willed, which they think is more important than simple brute force. In addition, Sottles are all born with the otherwise expensive Magical Talent attribute, meaning they all have at least some measure of natural ability as mages. This makes them bad people to offend, although, as noted, every other race on the River laughs at them relentlessly behind their fat greasy yellow asses.

In addition to this, Sottles feel they themselves are 'the brains' of the human race, and as such, are above all physical labor -- such tedium is for the lesser races, of course. So, you know, in addition to the sheer effrontery of daring to talk back to a member of the Great Race, T'Cheyne had also added in (a) a direct racial insult (the monkey reference) and (b) the implied insult that this Sottle would stoop to do manual labor, as a non-Sottle's beast of burden.

Naturally, this Sottle immediately tried to blast T'Cheyne (and everyone around her) into carbonized fragments with a pretty impressive fireball; fortunately, doing spells quickly in my magic system increases the difficulty significantly, and takes its toll in other ways, as well. The Sottle fumbled the spell, and then failed his succeeding pain roll, collapsing to his knees.... which gave the party time to hastily beat feet. (Nate was very nearly paralyzed with laughter, having never in his life seen a player character hand such a grievous insult to a Sottle, but he managed to sputter out instructions to the effect that he was running away with the rest of the party, so I let him retreat with the gang.)

Of course, the Sottle remembered where they had asked for directions to, and by the time the group finally made their way to the Safeharbor Temple of Silver and Gold, there was a pretty big party of heavily armed mercenary retainers waiting for them outside. Fortunately, the Temple wanted to protect its investment to date in the loot-recovery mission, so some priests snuck the PCs in through a secret tunnel.

Then the politics started. Sottles have their own weird religion, precluding worship of any of the 'pagan' gods (like the Goddess of Silver and Gold) which was a break for the PCs, since the Temple would not have been inclined to turn worshippers (the PCs are all baptized to the Goddess of Silver and Gold, natch) over to heathens. However, the Temple of Silver and Gold does a lot of business in Sottli Ban, and they like money a lot (go figure), and T'Cheyne's brazen insult had started attracting high level pressure from the Sottle Merchants Council. So, first the priesthood of Silver and Gold offered the party the opportunity to become martyrs to the Goddess, guaranteeing them very high, very cushy spots in heaven. Astonishingly, the party turned this opportunity down, after which, the Temple hired a boat to take them off to the treasure island, and smuggled them on board it.... while noting that all of these additional expenses would have to be taken off the top of any loot recovery, before it was divided into shares.

Thus and so, hi ho, hi ho, it's off the party goes to Wurm Island.

Where, after various misadventures and malfeasances, they managed to get into the underground loot chamber and fill their backpacks with goodies and get back out again without ever laying eyes on the big guardian monster itself. (Figures.) Eventually, they made their way back to the Temple of Silver and Gold in Sottli Ban (there were other complications intended to make this difficult, like a rival mercenary group working for the Temple of War waiting out in the bay on a ship of their own, but the PCs used up one of the major magical items they found in the horde to bypass all that crap -- again, it figures) where after expenses and the Temple taking its share, each party member ended up with around 50 silver pieces ($500,000) and one fairly powerful magical item each.

T'Cheyne also discovered she had a 25 silver piece bounty on her head, while the rest of the party had 15 silver apiece on theirs, simply for standing there and watching a Sottle be grievously insulted. As someone or other once noted, it's hard to live with a death mark, but, fortunately, the Temple of Time needed a group of idiots to go on a mission several thousand years into the past, to straighten out some kind of temporal disruption that was threatening to wipe out all of reality. The player characters were advised that if they would undertake this little errand, well, the Temple of Time would be happy to clear up their misunderstanding with the Sottle Merchants Council. Otherwise, they were on their own. Since nobody much liked the idea of being hunted to the ends of the earth by every bounty hunter in existence, they decided to do the time travel thing.

After a mad 72 hours of shopping, during which Gory pissed off, and then slaughtered, about half a dozen local Ulvane (a feral, somewhat wolflike human subrace), the party strolled up the street to the Temple of Time. On the way, several more Ulvane, along with their pet wolves, ambushed the party, and got killed for their trouble just like their friends. In the battle, Skank's dog, whose name I can't remember, but everyone called him 'Meat Snack', ran off, never to be seen again.

After all this, the PCs, accompanied by an NPC Priest of Temporos (who would have no clerical powers in the past, for reasons too complicated to go into here) all got sent hurtling back several millenia into the heyday of the Second Kingdom, sometimes known as the Age of Antiquities. Here they were promptly captured by the Council of Hierarchs (a religious predecessor to the modern day Merchants Council). Being powerful mages, the Council had detected some kind of disruption in the fabric of time and had assumed it must be the player characters (in fact, it wasn't; it was the time traveling Priests of the Samaqel that the party had come back in time to stop). Being unsure just what effect it would have on the pattern of space/time if they killed temporal travelers from the distant future millenia before they were born, the Council decided to put the entire party into stasis. After which, the time traveling Priests of the Samaqel went ahead with their plan, which involved using various stolen necromantic magic items to, basically, kill every living being in the entire campaign area. One particular Priest of the Samaqel escaped death by putting himself into stasis immediately after initiating the mass destruction effect.

Thousands of years in the future, the Samaqel (a huge, godlike, and very dislikeable dragon-creature) discovered the PC party, and one of its Priests, preserved in stasis, amongst the otherwise vast, lifeless wasteland that was the entire River area, and brought them all to an audience with It, to find out what the hell was up with them. Once out of stasis, the Priest claimed that he had orchestrated the entire holocaust, thousands of years in the past, because otherwise, the Samaqel would have been killed through the machinations of other player characters. Said event which is a large part of the relatively recent history of my campaign area, and this isn't the first scenario I've done where aggravating Priests of the Samaqel have tried to alter time in such a way as to prevent the big goddam lizard's death. They're always trying to pull some shit like that... although this was the first time I depicted one actually pulling it off.

The Samaqel found the priest's tale... well... dubious... but sure as shit, something had happened a few thousand years ago that had sucked the life force out of every other living creature in the entire Ancient Lands, so It opened up a wormhole through time in order to observe first hand this Priest in action.

At this point, for reasons as yet unknown to the party, they woke up from their own stasis, and promptly jumped down the wormhole leading thousands of years into the past to the very crucial actions/moments they had originally been sent back in time to prevent. Which they did, and in so doing, they erased the entire future timeline in which they had been put in stasis and the Priests had wiped out all life on the River resulting in them being taken before the Samaqel, thus restoring the original history in which the Samaqel had died. (Whew.)

With that wrapped up, the PCs had fully expected they would pop back into their present day (thousands of years in the future) -- the Temple of Time had indicated that according to their calculations, this should happen, or was likely to happen, if the original historical disruption was undone.

However, this did not occur. The PCs remained in the Second Kingdom, thousands of years before they were born. Even more interestingly, T'Cheyne discovered she seemed to have two sets of memories... one of a present day existence under the name 'Zara', and another of her future life as T'Cheyne. And her current incarnation seemed to be a pretty historically significant personage, as there was a well known 'Zara' who was a legendary Northark Queen from the Second Kingdom. (The Priest of Time NPC helpfully advised the party of this; he was chosen for the mission due to his comprehensive scholarly knowledge of the First and Second Kingdoms.)

After this, the PCs used up another powerful magic item escaping from some murderous vines in a ruined city, traveling by supernatural means to the Second Kingdom's Sottli Ban, which they found to be very different from the city they remembered in the far future. Wandering around aimlessly, gaping at the sights, they encountered a member of the High Guard, a sort of magical city patrol that flies around ancient Sottli Ban on mystical metal discs seeking out lawbreakers and other public nuisances.

Detecting an 'unauthorized' magic item on Gory, this High Guard rotter promptly confiscated Gory's glow-wood torch (a relic of the far future). At that point I made the players all roll dice to see if the Guard wanted to scan any of them for magic items (if he had, he'd have most likely set off every magic detection alarm in the city) and Super Drama Teen rolled very badly. She would almost certainly have had all her magic goodies confiscated (or, alternatively, the party would have had to fight a High Guard, which they did not want to do), so instead, she burned most of her luck points altering the result of the dice roll just enough to avoid a pat down. (The very real panic on Super Drama Teen's face when she rolled poorly and realized she might be on the verge of losing all her stuff was absolutely hilarious, although I realize it's very much a 'you had to be there' kind of thing. In fact, I suspect this entire entry could be described that way... but... anyway...)

The PCs had already realized that in this bizarrely and unpleasantly structured historical era, simply walking around on the streets in armor with weapons was enough to draw unwelcome attention from the Watch. Now, discovering that magic items were closely regulated and that any 'unauthorized' ones were subject to confiscation, they became pretty desperate to find some place they could lay low and make plans. So they ended up in a fairly crappy section of town, staying in a sordid little dive, trying to figure out what they were going to do next.

The PCs had also previously realized that in this historical era, most of their money wasn't worth very much (silver coins are muy valuable in my present day campaign area; not so much in the Second Kingdom, where silver is much more commonly circulated as coinage since most of it isn't being used for weaponry to fight Undead).

So I decided to help everybody out with another fairly simple mission -- if they'd rob a local warehouse at the behest of their new innkeeper, he'd let them keep anything they got other than a few specific items that he wanted. I figured this was fairly foolproof, as the warehouse didn't have a lot of security on it,and would probably lead to further adventures, since the loot in the warehouse belonged to the local equivalent of the Thieves Guild (known as the Eighth Guild in the Second Kingdom, although in the future/present day campaign area, the same outfit calls itself The Kinship).

For reasons that still perplex me, the group decided to trail around behind a couple of Eighth Guild enforcers who were out with a cart collecting protection money from all the local businesses. I think the PCs had some vague plan of trying to bribe or seduce one or both of these guys to get information on the warehouse's security. Whatever the plan was, it all went spectacularly pear shaped when the insanely overconfident Gory (DM Tip #2 when setting up characters in the World of Empire -- the Negative Attribute Overconfident will also kill you, don't take it) decided to walk up to these guys, and...

Well, here's how it went:

GORY: Hi. I'm from the 9th Guild. I'm collecting tribute. Pay up.
8TH GUILD GUYS: ::staring at the raving lunatic in amused disbelief:: WTF?
GORY: Okay, then. ::quickdrawing weapon, cutting a giant chunk of meat out of one goon's upper thigh::
CUT GOON: AAAAAAAAUUUUUHHHH HOLY FUCK HOLY FUCK AAAAAAUUUUUUUHHHHHHH ::falls to ground rolling around trying frantically to staunch the geyser of blood fountaining from his femoral artery::
OTHER GOON: WTF!?! ::unable to believe anyone is this fucking insane::
GORY: Right! ::slashing again, cutting a huge gash across the other goon's chest::
OTHER GOON: GYAAAAHHHHHH MotherFUCKER AAARRRGGGGHHHHH ::falling to ground bleeding profusely while screaming in pain::

All this, while the other three player characters, whose players had been under the impression only seconds prior to this that Gory's vaguely described plan of action had been something, you know, less completely fucking demented and/or retarded, stood there staring in appalled incredulity.

So then Gory drags both goons and their cart full of loot off into an alley. Apparently he was planning to torture the thugs for information, after which, he was going to run off with all the loot. The rest of the PCs were all standing around wringing their hands and going "Dude, what the hell are you DOing, you're going to get us all KILLED", at which point, an Eighth Guild archer on an adjoining rooftop shot Gory twice, once in the thigh, and once in the face.

This prompted the entire party to run like hell down the alley (well, Gorey was limping like hell, but, still, he was moving as fast as he could) where they emerged into a large open area behind several adjoining buildings... each of which has a currently undetermined number of Eighth Guild archers on it, ready to make a very dead example of my dumb ass player characters.

Which was where I said "To Be Continued" and ended the roleplaying for the evening.

Things aren't necessarily as bad as they look. A lot of how this comes out will depend on dice rolls. I've drawn a map and there are six rooftops, each of which has 1 to 3 Eighth Guild archers on it; the exact number on each will be determined by dice rolls. If the party manages to roll very low, well, there could be as few as six archers shooting at them. (Not likely, but, still, there's a chance.) After we determine the number of archers, then the PCs will start making Luck rolls to see which of them each archer is shooting at. (I don't assume that a group of NPCs possesses some ant-like collective consciousness; chances are, however many archers there may be, they're going to be picking their targets individually. Which could mean every player character gets a few arrows shot at them, or, one PC doesn't get any arrows shot at him/her at all, or one particularly luckless PC ends up attracting ALL the arrows. It's just how the bones roll.)

I've also set up a table to randomly generate the skill level of each archer, and what size bows each archer has, all of which will very much factor into the outcome. (If you have to get shot at, it's best if the guy shooting at you is using a short bow and isn't very good with it. On the other hand, you roll up a master archer using a recurve longbow, well, you'd better hope he's shooting at someone else.)

Personally, I think if the PCs just put their heads down and run like hell straight through it, nearly any of them have a measurable chance of surviving.

Well... maybe not Gory.

Off the hook

Yeah, okay, so apparently it's futile to even hope for comments on this blog these days. A stauncher fellow would keep on soldiering, ignoring the near infinitude of inferior blogs whose comment threads oft times stretch into three digits. A more resolute individual would reflect that SuperWife has hit a similar comments drought on her blog, and she's a better blogger than I am, that Mike Norton has lately had no one commenting on either of his blogs but me or SuperWife, and his blogs are excellent when he troubles to update them. A better man might well simply shrug and say that the act of blogging is something one does primarily for oneself, anyway, so who cares if anyone else notices?

But you come through your 46th birthday and nobody out there in the vast blogospheric echo chamber much seems to even care. You send out links to your work to other bloggers you like and your statcounter reflects that they actually showed up and checked out your blog... for all of 17 seconds. And, speaking of statcounters, yes, this blog gets very few hits, but, still, it's getting some, from some interesting places, by people who are sticking around for minutes or even hours... long enough to read stuff, but... still not bothering to leave comments.

It just makes it all seem very futile. And with the holidays coming on, and SuperWife down with some bug, and a crappy crappy job whose daily humiliations and exasperations could only be further exacerbated by their abrupt and total cessation (something I slog into work every weekday with no assurance won't occur on any given second of every minute I spend there)... you know what? I have enough shit on my plate without dealing with whoever the fuck YOU are, dropping by to read this without in any way acknowledging the time and effort it takes me to write and post it.

I'm not talking to my very few friends and family members, now. I'm talking to YOU, you gutless lurking bitch. Whoever you may be.

I may be back here sometime in 2008. Or, you know, not.

I'll see you in hell, Banzai.

Later: Nrrrrm.

As Bill Murray might say in this context: "Don't blog angry. Don't blog angry."

I'd take down the genuinely embarrassing display of petulant self pity above, but, well, then I'd lose the comments (which I appreciate), plus, well, the above is an accurate reflection of how I am, sometimes. Thankfully, not all the time, but, still, sometimes.

Self pity is never fun to look at, and it's especially stupid in me these days, given how lucky I am as regards my personal life. But... you know... we all live for attention, and I think I'm a pretty decent writer and a pretty entertaining guy, and it just aggravates the crap out of me sometimes that I can't even get an intelligent conversation going, when so many other inferior bloggers have...

Well, I said all that already.

I love my personal life, I really do. But there are so many subjects I'd like to discuss... not simply voice an opinion on, but have some sort of intelligent, or at least, interesting, discussion in regard to. I don't want to argue, I don't want to shout or scream, I don't want to hurl invective or bellow insults into the cyberwind... and I certainly don't want to have a bunch of sycophants lining up to kiss my ass, as seems to inevitably happen to any other blogger who attains the remotest scrap of real world success.

I'd just like to know there are people out there reading my stuff, and that maybe it provokes a an interesting response from them.

So, I guess I will not be stopping. But I may lay back for a while, if for no other reason than that I'm a little embarrassed at making such an ass of myself at the moment.

The dead hands of the past

Out of the hideous darkness that was 1975, comes the bowels-loosening auditory terror-bombing that is Leon Russell's "Lady Blue".

Prior to two days ago, the human psyche's near-divine healing powers of self inflicted traumatic amnesia had erased all knowledge of this sonic blight from my conscious mind. On the way to work Thursday morning, though, the car radio station was set to a local campus program where the kids behind the microphones are notorious for digging out and throwing onto a turntable pretty much ANYthing that somebody might have found in an attic, cellar, crawlspace, or Lovecraftian nether dimension and then donated to the studio. I usually like the random eclectisism of this station's mix, but whenever you listen, you're rolling the dice. You can win big, or you can take a bad, bad beating.

Thursday morning, I shot snake eyes.

There are no words adequate to describe the sludgy, slithering, slime-dripping suckitude that is Leon Russell's voice. Oozing eel-like out of the speakers over, under, and around the pervasive mindnumbing 70s electronique disco/soul fusion background tracks, Russell's well oiled larynx slides like a Biblical serpent through such scintillating lyrics as Cause I've been in love before, And I love you a whole lot more and So if you want it to be real good to you When I'm layin' here makin' love to you Listen real close to me baby I want to get it straight right now oh baby 'Cause I love you more and more and more Lady blue. With every progressive note one takes in, one can feel more and more of one's powers of reason slipping away; to listen to this gibbering horror all the way through to the end is to wind up reduced to little more than a whimpering ball of drool.

Within seconds my repressed memories returned. My fingers twitched with the ingrained response of a veteran "Lady Blue" survivor; my nervous system knew, even if my brain had not yet fully processed the information -- I had to change the channel, lest my mind be permanently lost somewhere in the festering bowels of some of the most banal lyrics sung by one of the slickest, most greasy voices in human history.

In 1975, at the age of 13, I would have howled like a damned soul and leapt across the room clawing desperately for the radio tuning dial. Two days ago, in the car, I merely shuddered as the opening bars began insinuating their slow, rhythmic, crooning toxins once more into my psyche, muttered "Okay, that's enough of THAT" and hit the button to get the hell away. Even so, though, I was obviously too late, as the loathsome strains of "Lady Blue" have been reverberating in my mind off and on ever since.

The only solution? A quick trip to You Tube for a little BOC --



But these Englishman live that I might die... True or not, certainly, this American lives that "Lady Blue" might.

And if you still need something to wash all that Russell out of your brain, let's try some Perfect Water --



And what the hell, here's one more, for those of you who are sincerely Reddy 2 Rock:



That ought to do it.

Oh, yeah...

...and if I don't start getting some goddam comments pfq, I will start posting pictures like this:





LOTS of 'em.

Don't test me.

Holiday Horrors, (Part 1, maybe)

#1 in what may or may not be a continuing series of the Very Worst Things About The Christmas Season (depending on whether or not I'm near a computer when the next one manifests itself to me):

Idiot Goddam Co-Workers Who Bring Cutesy Singing Christmas Shit To Work.

There has been at least one of these annoying fucking pod people at every single place I have ever worked (at the call center in Florida, nearly my entire team was composed of these fucktards) and now I find that my latest job is no exception. I've already written about the woman in question in a previous post (she's the one who had the 'full immersion experience with the Holy Spirit') and this morning I discover that because nobody had the good sense to turn a firehose on this dim twat's parents thirty odd years prior to this, I will spend every weekday morning from now through Christmas being regaled by a dancing animatronic Santa Claus doing a lyrically mangled holiday version of "Shout".

You think you can imagine how horrible that is, but trust me when I say, you cannot.

If we had no gun control laws, people wouldn't fucking DARE inflict shit like this on the rest of us. (In addition, the people who manufacture this trash would die in a bloody hail of bullets, which would curtail manufacturing any more of such trash in the future.)

Ah, well. 29 days...

Missing links

Here's something I don't like, and, more, I don't think works well: writing your blog posts in such a way that people have to hit a link (that you've generally buried in the post itself) to figure out what the fuck you're talking about. A lot of the more popular poli-blogs do this sort of thing all the time -- "Rudy Guilians steps on his johnson again... and this time, it's personal." And if you want to find out what the christ they're actually talking about, you have to hit those links.

First, it's annoying to me to have to travel to some entirely different web page so I can understand a crucial reference, without which comprehension, the rest of the blog post makes little or no sense.

Second, a great many times, whatever link you may have posted will stop working at some point after you originally posted it. Which is well beyond annoying, if you've written the original post under the presumption that people will hit your stupid links and go read the original source material you're referring to, because now they can't, so they will find it impossible to understand what you're actually blithering in regard to.

So here's what I say -- linking to original source material is fine, but, please, for the love of Bast, don't rely on the link alone. Take a second to block, copy, and paste the relevant sections of the source text into your own blog post, so even if your link doesn't work, your readers can still figure out what in the name of sweet undulating Cthulhu you're referring to.

Okay?

Arrr arrr aagggghhh ::thud::

Or, Pirates vs. Ninjas: The Final Chapter

Everywhere I go, some jackass is bringing up this fucking 'pirates vs ninjas' thing. Which is retarded, because, like, if ninjas fought pirates, the pirates would be dead from poisoned goddam grog or something before they could even unlimber a cutlass or wheel out a 12 pound gun. But the entire argument is idiotic, and I will hereby resolve it once and for all by saying, Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos would kill every single motherfucking pirate and/or ninja who has ever lived in the history of the universe with their eyebrows while falling down drunk on a 72 hour pass in downtown Brussels, for the sweet love of baby jesus, so, for Christ's sake, everybody shut the fuck up about it.

That should be the final goddam word on the subject.

Now, if you want to get into an interesting (if equally retarded) debate, try the 'astronauts vs. cavemen' one I first encountered while watching the fifth (which is to say, the only truly non-suckass) season of ANGEL. And yes, that particular debate is just as stupid as the pirates vs. ninjas thing, because with or without weapons, the astronauts win this one every single time, hands down, one foot trapped in a half empty 24 can cube of Pepsi, unless, of course, you feel 10,000 years of social evolution are completely meaningless, in which case, you ain't part of the solution, buddy.

Stupid or not, though, it's a more interesting debate to have, as you're talking about, basically, ideas and concepts (like, civilization vs. savagery, intelligence vs. instinct, and teamwork vs. sheer raw brutal power) as opposed to what you're arguing about with pirates vs. ninjas -- dipshit stuff like fighting styles (swinging down on a lanyard with a cutlass in your teeth vs sneaking around flicking poisoned shuriken everywhere), weaponry (stupid fucking swords vs, you know, cool poisoned shuriken) and wardrobe choices (nifty black robes with nifty black hoods vs, you know, old pants, boots with holes in them, and a belt across your flabby, concave piratical motherfucking chest).

Also, I suspect a team of astronauts could probably take down Sgt. Rock and the Howling Commandos, too, as long as the astronauts weren't stuck with that crazy broad in the diapers on their team.

The workaround

When you've lived a life of few (read that as 'no' if you must) accomplishments, you take what you can get. Right now, I've managed to solve an annoying little quandary that's been plaguing me these last two days, and I'm very smugly pleased with myself.

See, there's this website I found that has been a perfect time-waster at work. The corporate firewall that keeps me out of all my webmail accounts and off anything that has the word 'blog', or 'games', or, you know, anything remotely like 'fun', in its URL, doesn't seem to mind this particular site. The site itself is one I mentioned a few entries down; the blogger is an excellent, funny, entertaining writer, his chosen subject matter is stuff I'm mostly interested in (I tend to skim pretty fast past his entries on baseball and/or getting really really hammered and going to sporting events, but that's at most 30% of his material), and he's got extensive archives going back to 2003, so, I figured as long as I had access to his site, I wouldn't run out of reading material I could safely tuck into a corner of my computer screen to kill time between calls with for weeks or months.

However, yesterday his site was unavailable; apparently, he's having a server issue. This was a bummer to me all day long, as I kept going punching in his URL in hopes that the problem had been resolved, and, well, no soap. That lack of soap has continued unto this very day, which is very aggravating.

However, while looking around to see if another one time favorite blogger, Billmon, has started up blogging again anywhere (he hasn't) I came across a reference to this wonderful thing called The Wayback Machine, which, basically, archives the entire frickin Internet.

So, I went over there and punched in this guy's URL and... yep... they've got extensive archives of his archives.

So, I have time killing material in the corner of my computer screen once again.

I understand, working through to this solution doesn't exactly qualify me for MENSA, but, hey, self actualization sometimes comes in very small packages.

UPDATE: Annoyingly, the firewall at work seems to have a learning curve, as some of the sites that originally were not blocked by it when I first started this assignment are coming up blocked by it now. Eventually this will probably happen to not only this particular blog (assuming the server ever comes back online) but to the Wayback Machine, as well... which is just frickin' ANNOYING. But sufficient unto the day the evil thereof, etc, etc.

Print is(n't) dead

In other news, I've finished Dave Duncan's THE GREAT GAME trilogy. My plan had been to then start rereading THE GOLDEN COMPASS in time for the movie's debut on December 7, but Super Dependable Teen has snatched up my copy to do her own movie prep with. I can't in any way be sad when any of my girls tries to read something more challenging than a STAR WARS novel or STRANGERS IN PARADISE, so I'm fine with this development, but it leaves me at loose ends in regard to my own reading material. Fortunately, I've got a thick SHOWCASE edition of black and white LEGION reprints to make my way through, and another Marvel Masterworks FANTASTIC FOUR collection to peruse after that, and in between, there's the second hand copy of Marvel's THE SUPERHERO WOMEN I was delighted to receive as a spontaneous gift from SuperWife the other day. (I doubt there's a single good story in the whole compilation, but, hey, any volume that reprints CLAWS OF THE CAT #1 is a joy to behold as far as I'm concerned. Throw in reprints of old Spider-Man stories where Spidey fights Medusa and the Black Widow (separately, alas) and some obscure Shanna the She-Devil schlock and I'm in serious Silver Age fanboy heaven.

All this, and I still haven't finished that b&w reprint volume of WEREWOLF BY NIGHT I got last Christmas... where does the time go?

As to THE GREAT GAME itself -- I enjoyed it, but am still not sure what I thought of the ending. I intensely dislike that Duncan doesn't spell his resolution entirely out, leaving things somewhat ambiguous with his final sentence -- although at the same time, I can admire the adroit double punt fake he pulls off, making everyone believe that we've had a tragic ending, and then, holding out the possibility that we really got a 'happily ever after' after all. (If you look back at various indicators Duncan inserted in his previous narrative, I'm willing to believe that the happy ending is quite likely, but it annoys me that Duncan couldn't type one more goddam sentence and make that probability into a certainty.) I was definitely disappointed that after all that build up, Duncan never showed us the actual confrontation between D'Ward and Zath, but as a writer myself, I can understand why he eventually took the way out that he did -- given all the anticipation, there's no way he could have done it justice. I'm not sure Roger Zelazney could have (although he did all right with all the psionic back and forth in LORD OF LIGHT, so, yeah, maybe he could have... but Duncan, godz love him, ain't no Roger Zelazney... although, really, nobody else ever will be, so that's hardly a knock).

The Miss

WARNING: This is a review of the new movie THE MIST. It will reveal essential plot details. If you do not wish to have the experience of seeing this movie in utter ignorance ruined, you should not read this review. On the other hand, if you at all enjoyed the original Stephen King novella that this movie is based on and you do not want to have slightly over two hours of your life spoiled by watching this truly crappy adaptation of same, then you can read this review, but you should certainly and by all means avoid watching the crappy crappy film itself.

As part of my birthday celebration last night, a bunch of us went out to see The Mist.

Pretty much everything written by Stephen King -- well, everything good, anyway -- lends itself beautifully to cinematic adaptation, most likely because King is such a naturally visual writer. His novella THE MIST is a story I've long thought would be very easy to film, because the characters are pretty basic, the plot is very straightforward, and all the action is extremely cinematic.

Basically, something weird goes down -- King's first person narrator and protagonist never does more than vaguely speculate as to what -- and an eerie fog rolls in -- a fog packed with more flesh-eating horrors than an H.P. Lovecraft collected set. An endless ululating horde of giant carnivorous insects, weird dinosaur-monsters, multi-tentacled acid-exuding nether entities, all with a voracious (if chemically dubious) appetite for human flesh, trap a random assemblage of small town residents in a modest local supermarket. As the story grinds on, more and more of these luckless saps get turned into monster chow, while the survivors huddle hopelessly behind hastily erected barricades of 50lb puppy chow sacks, and try not to completely freak out.

In King's original, our protagonist and a few friends manage to escape the supermarket where pretty much everyone else has already gone homicidally bonkers, scrambling into the hero's four wheel drive and speeding off to search for some kind of sanctuary, where, you know, nobody is trying to sacrifice them all to Baal or something. As the story ends, they are holed up in an abandoned motel for the night, with only the barest glimmer of hope -- a distant voice they may or may not have really heard on the vehicle's radio, saying the name of a city a few hundred miles away.

I knew going into the movie that there was little chance such an uncertain ending would be allowed to stand by any major mainstream Hollywood studio. For one thing, movie audiences like their stories to have definite resolutions, so simply leaving it at "well, maybe they all got eaten, or maybe they somehow survived" wasn't going to fly. And even more than audiences like certain resolutions, they like happy ones. So, while I was hoping against hope that maybe they'd leave the original ending intact, I was fearing the worst -- not only would they rewrite the story to have a definite resolution, but that resolution would be something along the lines of "suddenly the 82nd Airborne parachutes in, blows up all the ugly critters, and everybody lives happily ever after, except for Norm The Bagboy, who got et by the acid spewing tentacles twenty minutes into the first reel".

Which would, to my mind, have been a complete fucking travesty.

I feared that ending, all the way through the movie. I feared it, yet, with the bitter cynicism of someone who has been watching Hollywood studios make my favorite stories into utter garbage for forty years now, I expected it, too.

As it turns out, I underestimated them. Not only did they change the ending to the story to exactly what I figured they probably would, they managed to make it an order of magnitude worse than I was dreading along the way.

It's the ending that really poisoned the film for me. Up until then, it was steadily mediocre-to-almost good -- the plot mostly stuck to the source material, a lot of the dialogue was straight out of the book, and while some of the casting was problematic (Thomas Jane as protagonist David Drayton was a truly appalling mistake, and giving Andre Braugher the role of the Asshole Neighbor was pretty much as bad a move as letting Morgan Freeman play "Red" in SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION), other characters were very well evoked indeed (the actor who played Ollie Weeks looked exactly like Ollie Weeks should have).

Occasional diversions from the source material irritated the shit out of me, as they seemed completely unnecessary, other than for purposes of observing moronic horror film conventions (in the book, protagonist David Drayton gets jiggy with fellow survivor Amanda Dunphies; in the film, two new characters are created for no apparent purpose except to have sex together shortly before both of them die horribly gruesome deaths).

Still, the gist of the book made it into the final film treatment, and the overall presentation was always just good enough to make me believe that any second now, the movie might cross some nebulous threshhold and suddenly become really good, or even exceptional.

But it never happened. So much of the essential characterizations from the original novella got dropped or condensed that even Andre Braugher couldn't make the terse, tightly wrapped, overly complex relationship between his asshole neighbor role and the story's protagonist work, and as for Thomas Jane, well, he was swingin' wild in the weeds from start to finish, chewing through his dialogue like a rat trapped in the world's biggest box of Wheaties. (Conversely, Marcia Gay Harden did a great job evoking the sheer raw craziness of that psycho bitch Mrs. Carmody, taking a stock character type that King has been recycling since Carrie White's mom and making her seem as close to three dimensional as anyone could want in a popcorn gobbler like this one.)

Maybe the whole thing was meant to be deliberately lame; certainly, the consistently cheesy special effects, in a time of relatively cheap CGI, had to be calculated to evoke earlier eras of drive in monster flicks with shoestring FX budgets, populated by crappy claymation creatures that looked like some high school chemistry nerd constructed them out of whatever he or she found in the bottles underneath their sink.

Purposefully cheesy or not, the ending's final twist is so cruel as to be nearly sadistic -- the Army does indeed come rolling through to save the day -- mere minutes after Drayton uses the last four bullets in his gun to kill his own child and his three other companions, to spare them being devoured by the monsters in the mist.

Which is pretty stupid, when you think about it. I mean, if they'd just waited another ten minutes before going all Jonestown in a Jeep, they'd have been fine. What was so urgent about getting their brains blown out right that second? Other than it being necessary to the plot, not a goddam thing.

So that's a two-fer... not just a needlessly sick, sadistically cruel twist ending, but an unbelievably pointless one, too.

As a final note, SuperWife points me to Tony Collett's blog, where I see Tony has noted that apparently, King likes the new MIST ending so much that he has asserted that if he'd thought of it when he was writing the novella, that's the ending he would have used.

All of which leads me to say, with utmost respect -- put down the crack pipe, Mr. King. I mean, it's all very well to have the Army roll in with tanks and flamethrowers to blast the living shit out of a bunch of hyperthyroid spiders and albino pterodactyls and even some gigantic unearthly squid with acid-spewing tentacles lolly-gagging around behind the Super Duper waiting for someone to feed it more idiot bagboys, but how, pray tell, did they deal with this:

A shadow loomed out of the mist, staining it dark. It was as tall as a cliff and coming right at us... something came. That is all I can say for sure. It may have been the fact that the mist only allowed us to glimpse things briefly, but I think it just as likely that there are certain things that your brain simply disallows... things of such darkness and horror that they will not fit through the puny human doors of perception.

It was six legged, I know that... it passed directly over us. One of its gray, wrinkled legs smashed down right beside my window, and Mrs. Reppler said later that she could not see the underside of its body, although she craned her neck up to look. She saw only two Cyclopean legs going up and up into the mist like living towers until they were lost to sight...

For the moment it was over the Scout I had an impression of something so big that it might have made a blue whale look the size of a trout -- in other words, something so big that it defied the imagination... it left tracks in the cement of the Interstate, tracks so deep I could not see the bottoms. Each single track was nearly big enough to drop the Scout into.

If THE MIST has any kind of point at all -- and I don't insist that my fiction have any kind of point at all, other than to be entertaining -- certainly it was the notion that mankind is, in the cosmic scheme of things, a very insignificant speck indeed, and we really shouldn't screw around with shit we don't understand. In Jack Nicholson's immortal words, we can't handle the truth. And the very idea that the Army, or, for that matter, any human agency, could somehow successfully resolve the unimaginable horror unleashed on Earth in THE MIST is utterly contrary to the palpable sense of utter futility, helplessness, and despair that suffuses the entire original story like, well, a mist. That the trapped remnants of humanity must continue to struggle for survival to the very bitter end is extremely human, and we cannot help but be fascinated as we observe this process from afar, but that their battle for survival is ultimately futile against the otherworldly legions of mindless predators that have been unleashed by humanity's own hubris is implicit in every word of King's story. (And, in fact, emblematic of all mortality. Nobody gets out of here alive.)

Tacking on a happy ending to a story like this is ridiculous; providing us with a 'happy ending' in which a protagonist we have come to admire loses his mind because it turns out he killed his child and his friends for no reason is appallingly mean spirited and sadistically cruel, a harkening back to the trollish, ghoulish King who clearly cackled in malevolent glee as he heaped gruesome fates on an entire small town of two dimensional characters in NEEDFUL THINGS.

I didn't like that Stephen King and I'd hoped, once he kicked his various vices, that that nasty, unpleasant bastard had gone for good. Guess not. Well, thank God that novelists, unlike George Lucas, can't keep going back and revising their previous works with every new DVD edition. Otherwise, I'm sure we'd have an expanded, rewritten version of THE MIST on the shelves next year, with film director Frank Darabonte's horrible ending pasted on over the original, regardless of just how poorly it fit with the rest of the story.

Just because, apparently, Stephen King never created a character he didn't want to torture in some horrible, horrible fashion.

A day that will live in infamy

Or, today's my birthday. Say it loud, say it proud.

My mom and stepdad sent me a couple of electronic cards last night. Tony and Kathy Collett sent me one of those cards that plays music; it's a Batman themed card that plays the Danny Elfman theme from the first BATMAN movie. This is cool, however, I must say, I would have found it cooler if it had played the theme from the 60s TV show. But some say I'm weird.

SuperWife has some amazing and magnificent present for me that I will not receive for a while yet, for reasons that are entirely beyond her control, but she also collected together this awesome set of Disney princess porn for me, too, which is waaaaaaay cool. How many wives will do THAT for hubby on his special day, eh? Just the one, and she's all mine, so back off, you hosers.

I have to go help out in the kitchen now. What with Turkey Day being tomorrow and my birthday being today, SuperWife has had way too much stress this last week, so I'm off to lend a hand.

Update: Add a card with a $50 Great Escape gift certificate from Nate to the loot pile. Also, late Thanksgiving afternoon, my in-laws sent me over a sweater and some underpants. And SuperWife has revealed that the great big fabulous present she got for me is a digital camera, which will indeed be a great big fabulous present, once it is fully functional and in my hands. I am, once again, in awe of her thoughtfulness, as a digital camera is something I've wanted for years, and that we'll get a lot of use out of once I have it.

Ballin'

In terms of games I did not (could not) watch, it's been a perfect weekend of football -- the Bucs won (BIG, actually; I don't require big, but it's nice when it happens) and all their division rivals -- New Orleans, Carolina, and Atlanta -- lost badly. (The Falcons lost to the Bucs, which is even sweeter.)

If my childhood favorite Buffalo Bills could somehow eke out a triumph over those shitbird Patriots, this would be a Perfect Football Sunday for me. But, well, we're ten minutes into the first quarter and the Pats are up by two touchdowns and the Bills just got called for a false start -- rrrg. Well, hey, on the bright side, the game is on NBC's Sunday Night Football, so at least I get to watch it.

And, of course, it's a short work week ending in my birthday, and I have SuperWife and the SuperKids, so, honestly, what have I got to complain about? Nuttin', dats what.

Hey, the Bills scored a touchdown. Okay, I guess I better watch this game...

Okay. 6:33 left in the first half, New England is up by 3 touchdowns (28 to 7) and I'm thinking I can probably stop watching now. Ah, well.

"New England is turning every other team in the NFL into the Washington Generals this season."

Maybe someone needs to give the Washington Generals some guns.

Back and froth

IOZ sez:

It may well be that if a state of war or conflict didn't exist between Iraq (or elements in Iraq) and the United States, then people would react with relative indifference to news of a crew of Americans massacring a lot of innocent Iraqis, but I think it's wrong to believe that there would be no outrage. In the absence of state sanction, such actions would rightly be seen as murder and condemned. In fact, we can see the operations of this very dynamic in the developing case of the Blackwater mercenaries. As the impression that their actions were sanctioned in war diminishes and the idea that they were acting outside of the violence permitted by our state grows, the domestic American reaction has increasingly been one of shock, horror, dismay, and disapproval--as if they had, indeed, committed murder. We might pause to note the sad supporting evidence that every day American troops, American pilots, American actions do kill dozens of innocents and otherwise violate their basic rights, and these actions are met with indifference or approval because they are state-sanctioned. And of course, it's worth noting that the very conditions which allowed the Blackwater guards to conduct themselves as they did--right or wrong--were 100% dependent on American state actions.

I respond:

People are tribal -- the proper sociological term is probably 'xenophobic', but in this case that seems an incorrect connotation, as we're talking specifically about an apathy towards atrocities committed by members of our tribe against outsiders, so, 'tribal' probably works better.

That's essentially what it comes down to -- we do not live in our heads, but in our hearts, and in our hearts, we can only bring ourselves to care about things that occur to members of our tribe. This is why we're more outraged about American disaster victims than Mexican, and, largely, why black Americans are more outraged at what Katrina did to NOLA than white Americans. Tribes within tribes within tribes, unfortunately.

Your insistence that the state controls our outrage by either sanctioning or withdrawing sanction from atrocity done to non-tribe members rings false to me, as does your assertion that more and more people are becoming outraged and infuriated at Blackwater as state authority to commit violence against non-tribe members erodes. It is not that at all.

Most people still don't much care that Blackwater mercs have been shooting some towelheads, and if Blackwater really wanted to defuse the situation, they would simply have to run a few ads identifying the involved mercenaries as American tribe members -- Here, for example, is a blond boy from Illinois, a former Marine who did two combat tours and then joined up with Blackwater to feed his wife and two children back home. There we have a young black man from Alabama, a one time Airborne Ranger, who goes to church every Sunday and has a dependent grandmother. And over here, a winsomely smiling Hispanic fellow name Jorge who comes from West Texas, and whose father and grandfather before him both served in the U.S. Army, and who himself has wanted to be in the Army since he was three years old.

Show folks such as this waving to the camera, American flag patches on their shoulders, while Sam Elliott or Phillip Bochco pontificates sadly as to the inhuman stress of war and who are WE to judge such as they, poor lost lambs, surrounded by vicious enemies in a land not their own, and Blackwater will be forgiven all.

The only reason outrage is growing against Blackwater now is not that the government has, vaguely, cluelessly, and incoherently, begun to withdraw some tattered blanket of authority from Blackwater's shoulders. It is, again, tribalism; being Little People is to be part of a tribe, and all we Little People know in our hearts that Big Corporations are not of us.

We have been allowed by our media to regard these murderous mercenaries as being members of the Evil Big Corporation tribe (although, to be fair, our media does its best to convince us that we are all part of the Big Corporation tribe, and so far we seem to have for the most part successfully resisted that particular indoctrination) and so, we don't much like them. Like them or not, though, as long as all they do is kill towelheads, we really won't much mind, either. We won't cheer them on because, you know, they aren't Our Boys, but neither will we trouble ourselves to get up out of our recliners over their nonsense. They are members of the Big Corporation tribe, and therefore Not-Us (and, probably, evil, but, you know, we pretty much take that for granted these days) and the Iraqis they are slaughtering are members of the Islamoterrorist Raghead tribe, and, therefore, Not-Us. It's pretty much a wash, as far as the average American is concerned.

And when people we DO regard as tribe members -- Our-Boys, Our-Boys (give me a red) -- slaughter dune coons with mad abandon for no discernibly good reason, well, if we do not stand up and cheer, it's only because there's something more interesting on VH1 right now, and we'll stand up and cheer later, after today's BEAUTY AND THE GEEK marathon concludes.

The State certainly encourages tribalism, and manipulates it to its own advantage, and I will even countenance arguments that the State grows out of tribalism like a particularly virulent, mutant weed grows out of the poisoned soil of a toxic waste dump. But our concern for fellow creatures we regard as tribe members, and our apathy towards, or fear/hatred of, non tribe members, has nothing to do with State authority and/or sanction. It's just who we are.

And in response, one of the Usual Suspects says the usual shit:

hahaha. I've never read so little of something before deciding that I didn't need to read the rest. I literally made it to "proper sociological term" and realized that in no way could it benefit me to read on.

Translation: this fella has a microscopic attention span, and somehow, that's MY fault. Heh. If I had a nickel for every time some 'net cretin has told me that...

Release the robotic Richard Simmons

A Perfectly Cromulent Blog is my latest little 'stumble upon' Internet treasure. The blogger, a guy named Pete Van something or other, is a much better writer than I am, although he makes up for that by being outrageously (and usually hilariously) dead wrong on whatever subject he's blathering about, about a third to half of the time.

Still, even when I completely disagree with every single word I may be reading there at any given moment, I am nearly always vastly entertained regardless. Such is this fellow's talent with words that he can drive me from one emotional extreme to the other within a span of seconds, as with the following entry from July 10th of this year:

Two unrelated musical thoughts:

1. She Who Shall Not Be Named sometimes falls asleep in the car when I'm driving her home in the afternoon. To facilitate nap time, I'll occasionally switch to the easy listening station on Sirius (Movin EZ). Today, I caught Olivia Newton-John's "Please Mister Please," and I had occasion once again to thank the Great Old Ones I didn't spend my formative years in the 1970s. I don't know how anybody survived that shit.

I mean, I delude myself into thinking that - were I a '70s teen - I'd be really into the Stooges, Ramones, the Clash, and Big Star, but I know I'd be sporting the white boy afro and listening to Kansas and Styx in Peenman's Good Times Van, and I hate myself for it.

2. Also today, and possibly on the same station, I heard that John Mayer song "Waiting on the World to Change." With insipid lines like, "It's not that we don't care/We just know that the fight ain't fair" to justify his inaction, I was reminded Of that equally lame Jesus Jones song, "Right Here, Right Now."

You see what he's like? I mean, I was a 70's teen, and I'm reading through that and the whole first bullet point is, like, "Dude, that's so fucking HARSH". I mean, my fingers are itching for a chair to bust over his no doubt smarmy little grin as I take in THAT action. But then I get to Number 2, and, well, how can I stay mad at someone who feels EXACTLY the way I do about the self indulgent whiney gutless moral laziness embodied in the very title "Waiting For The World To Change"? I just can't. Although that whole "better writer than I am" thing really DOES piss me off, but, you know, that's just because I'm a very small and petty human being in some ways.

Anyway, the archives go back to 2003 and you can pick pretty much any entry at random and most likely find something that will either make you laugh, snarl, think hard... or, sometimes, all three at once, which is, admittedly, harder on the nervous system than many of you may be looking for.

The material there covers a vast range of subject matter, all of it pop culture derived in some way or another. Not all of it is anything I find appealing; when he writes about getting really really drunk, or playing hockey, or watching baseball, or local Houston politics, my eyes glaze over pretty fast and I'm moving the mouse pointer over to the scroll bar with style and panache. But when he's on about the STAR WARS prequels or shitty TV shows on cable or people saying mean things about Mr. Rogers or a lot of other shit I find vaguely interesting, well, he's a fun way to kill a few minutes at work when I'm probably supposed to be, you know, working.

If you film it, they will hurl

So SuperWife and I were exchanging emails at work last week and she happened to make a sideways reference to FIELD OF DREAMS, a movie she knows I absolutely loathe, to a point where I am completely incapable of keeping quiet about my loathing of, whenever the subject comes up. Here's what I sent back to her:

It is an appallingly bad film which makes no sense whatsoever. If dead baseball players (who were all notorious cheaters while alive, anyway) are haunting your cornfield, here is what you do -- you fricking pack your shit and GIT. You certainly do not hot top over the cornfield so you can create a big baseball field because the voices in your head tell you that if you do this, MORE dead baseball players (who were notorious cheaters while alive) will show up and haunt you. I mean, seriously, WTF?

To this, I will only add the following anecdote -- long ago, when I was briefly a member of an Amateur Press Alliance, the subject of this dreadful celluloid abomination arose, and a very cheerful, pleasant, well intentioned fellow allowed as to how FIELD OF DREAMS was "very Capraesque".

Now, I have no doubt that he ventured this opinion because he had read it and/or heard it many other places prior to that occasion -- he was that kind of fellow; intelligent enough, certainly, but, well, if he'd ever had an original thought in his life, it would doubtless have immediately come into contact with the vast archival storage array of banality, bromides, platitudes, and cliches that made up most of his conscious mind, causing a sort of intellectual matter/antimatter detonation that would almost certainly have leveled most of America west of Chicago -- but, well, the fact that you read some deranged and doltlike horseshit somewhere does not encumber you to repeat it as if it were veritable Holy Scripture at every future opportunity, and in this case, the oft repeated aphorism that FIELD OF DREAMS is in some way "Capraesque" is, indeed, deranged and doltlike horseshit of the purest ray serene.

Unless, of course, we are intended to take the coinage "Capraesque" as meaning "Say, that's the most absolutely wretched and utterly worthless piece of garbage anyone has ever wasted several thousand feet of film stock on", in which case, well, sure, it's Capraesque indeed, but, oddly, anything and everything that has ever actually been directed by Frank Capra is anything and everything but.

To me, "Capraesque" would essentially mean a story centering around the basic theme that a single individual can indeed make a very significant difference to the world around them, but, ironically, that one person can only do so by inspiring some positive modification in many other people's social behavior. In other words, everybody matters to some extent or another, and anyone can matter a great deal. The gears and levers of history may need thousands or millions working together to set them in motion, but one person in the right place at the right time is all it takes to get all those other folks moving with a purpose.

This happens in pretty much every Frank Capra movie I can think of; Jimmy Stewart or Gary Cooper or some other charismatic actor portraying an eccentric but highly moral protagonist spends the first 3/4s of the film setting a wonderful example for everyone else all around them, and as a result of their own noble (and generally rather naive) selflessness, are nearly destroyed by the uncaring, monolithic forces of entrenched human selfishness and greed; in the end, however, our cinematic stalwart finds his salvation at the hands of all those good, decent common folks who have learned from his shining example and rallied round to save the day just before the final credits roll.

Now, if someone wants to point out to me how this particular formula can in any way apply to the tale of an imbecilic madman who, through no particular virtue of his own, ends up being haunted by the undead revenants of dishonored professional athletes and, harried to the point of mental breakdown by said gruesome spectres, decides to defy all reason as well as local law, throw away the livelihood that has been supporting his family, and build an amateur sports arena where said ghostly cheaters can escape their well deserved unending damnation with a few eternal innings of phantasmal stickball, well... I don't know. I'll take it under advisement, but you're going to have to come pretty hard at me, because I just can't see it right now.

Maybe it's that everyone says he's crazy, and then, in the end, after he does this crazy thing anyway despite everyone trying to bring him to his senses, he's proven to be right after all -- the undead cheaters really DO show up to play baseball in his cornfield, thus vindicating him in front of everyone who tried to gainsay his demented plan in the first place. But Capra's movies are not about anything as selfish as individual vindication. Yes, Capra's heroes all end up being right in the end, but none of them start out there, as can be most clearly seen in perhaps the most Capraesque of all Capra's movies, IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, the protagonist of which, George Bailey, spends most of his life in a state of frustration, self pity, and repressed anger, only realizing just how much good he's really done for everyone around him, and how well off he really is, after direct intervention from on high.

But this is typical; I've rarely heard the phrase "Capraesque" invoked over anything that was actually remotely reminiscent of Frank Capra's corny, small town-with-a-big heart kind of populism, and certainly, trying to attach the label to FIELD OF DREAMS is misguided from the start.

Unless, of course, you simply mean "this plot doesn't make any sense at all", in which case, well, I can't argue with you, since if George Bailey had never been born, Mary Hatch would have married that hee-hawing jackass Sam Wainwright and ended up as the richest woman in Bedford Falls, not some mousy little town librarian. (I grant you she'd have been pretty miserable, as Sam would have been cheating on her with every other skank in Bedford Falls, from Violet Bix right up through George's mom and her buxom Negro housemaid Annie, perhaps all three at once, with Nick from Martini's Bar picking up a little extra cash running the Rervere Miniature Movie Camera while he did so. But it would have been a very different kind of misery than that depicted in the film.)

We need a montage

It's driving me bugshit trying to figure out exactly why I enjoy BOOGIE NIGHTS so much, and yet, can't stand Paul Thomas' Anderson's next movie, MAGNOLIA.

I know what you're thinking, but it's not true. It's not just the sex.

No.

It isn't.

See, I want to say that BOOGIE NIGHTS has likeable characters in it, where MAGNOLIA really doesn't. That notion kinda gets a quarter of the way up the flagpole for me, but, then, the pulley-wheel starts to squeak like a motherfucker and the pull rope starts to bind up on me and then the whole thing jams solid and just looking at it I know I'm going to need a chainsaw or a blowtorch to fix that mess, because... BOOGIE NIGHTS? Likeable characters? Point to them for me, please. Amber? Jack? Rollergirl? Reed Rothchild? Good ol' Dirk Diggler? Okay, maybe Little Bill, a little... and Buck and Jessie are cool, yes they are. Yet every character in this movie is such a goddam dimbulb, and I myself am such an elitist prick about the innate value of intelligence as a human attribute, that I still find it hard to admit to actually liking any of the slope browed, slack jawed dimbulbs in BOOGIE NIGHTS. I mean, you know, if by 'like' we mean, 'could even remotely tolerate hanging out with for longer than five minutes', then... noooooo. Nobody in BOOGIE NIGHTS remotely makes that list for me.

Still, maybe there's something to that. BOOGIE NIGHTS is populated wall to wall, floor to ceiling with amiable, affable fucktards. MAGNOLIA, on the other hand, seems to generally concern itself with characters who are at least somewhat mentally sharper than those in BOOGIE NIGHTS... yet nearly the entire cast of MAGNOLIA's characters (most of whom are played by the same talented actors as appear in BOOGIE NIGHTS) are unpleasant to the point of being repellent (at least, to me).

Maybe it's just that the overall tone of BOOGIE NIGHTS so successfully avoids moral judgment, while MAGNOLIA somehow seems stiff with it. BOOGIE NIGHTS seems to say, yeah, all these people are brainless oversexed bimbos with huge streaks of self destructiveness, but what the hell, they're pretty much harmless to everyone except themselves and they're fun to watch. These guys in MAGNOLIA, well, I don't know... somehow, where director Anderson seems to be gently chuckling over the antic misadventures of Dirk and Reed in BN, he seems to be rather more sharply disapproving of the narcissistic, cruel, or just degenerately desperate behavior on display in MAGNOLIA.

Or maybe I'm imagining all that.

I'd really like to say it's because BOOGIE NIGHTS has a central character who holds the narrative together through the force of his own often vacuous personality, while MAGNOLIA just walks the Earth like Caine in KUNG FU, often aimlessly and pointlessly. And that one got very nearly to the top of my personal flagpole until I realized that... whups... no, CRASH doesn't have any kind of central viewpoint character, either, and often seems to meander as much if not more than MAGNOLIA does. But I like CRASH and I don't like MAGNOLIA, so... why?

Hmmm. So I like BOOGIE NIGHTS, and I like CRASH, and I don't like MAGNOLIA.... it can't be anything as simple as Don Cheadle, can it?

Well, I like Don Cheadle...

BOOGIE NIGHTS had Luis Guzman in it, too. I really like Luis Guzman.

Maybe it's like that one section of PULP FICTION that ruins the whole movie for me... you know, the one where John Travolta takes Uma Thurman out to that really scary 50s themed restaurant and they end up at his drug dealer buddy's house jamming a hypo full of adrenaline directly into Uma's chest. I would enjoy PULP FICTION a great deal more, and perhaps even own a copy of the fucker, if that entire section of the movie just never existed. I mean, what's the point? Hey, look, that cool Rocky Dennis guy from MASK can play a shitbag if he wants to? Oh, and we've managed to make Roseanna Arquette visually repulsive, too, isn't that awesome? Nooooooo THANK you.

But the real reason I hate that entire subplot in PULP FICTION is that I just can't stand any of those characters, which is to say, I cannot even remotely empathize with a single fictional person portrayed in that entire lengthy section of the film. And you've got to work hard to create a male character who badly wants to ball Uma Thurman that I cannot empathize in any way with, but, well, it's not like John Travolta had to do all the heavy lifting there himself. Given how monstrously odious Uma's character in PULP FICTION is, well, it would have been more difficult for Travolta to make me actually empathize with someone who wanted to sleep with that abrasive cunt than otherwise.

I suspect I feel the same way about MAGNOLIA, especially as opposed to BOOGIE NIGHTS. Compare, for example, William H. Macy's character in each film. In the one, he's Little Bill, a cameraman on porn movies who has the misfortune to have married an x rated actress who constantly cheats on him, often in public with multiple partners. He's a miserably sad sack of a dude, a highly skilled tradesman at a sleazy, disrespectable trade, whose final frenzied act of despair actually makes you like him even more, despite the fact that it's a murder/suicide which signals the end of the movie's 'innocence'... for lack of a better word.

And then there's the character Macy gives us in MAGNOLIA, who is such an addled, incomprehensible emotional muddle I have no idea how to articulately describe him.

Both characters are losers, but the guy in BOOGIE NIGHTS is likeable with it, almost even loveable. You can dig him; you can honestly feel his pain. You can understand why he eventually grabs a gun and uses it; you may not approve, but you get what's going through his heart and his head, just prior to that final bullet.

The guy in MAGNOLIA, that poor crazy motherfucker who is robbing his ex-employer so he can get money for expensive dental appliances he doesn't need because he's in love with a bartender who has braces... I have no sympathy for that dude. Frankly, he freaks me out a little. If he went crazy with a hand gun and wound up blowing his brains out, well, it wouldn't make me like him, but I'd breathe a very deep sigh of relief, nonetheless.

So, in the end, I guess I would have to say that it does come down to the characters. The ones in BOOGIE NIGHTS I like despite their dumbass behavior, while the ones in MAGNOLIA I pretty much find bewildering, obnoxious, boring, or, on occasion, all three at once.

Hey, how about that. It wasn't just the sex, after all.

Libs, Corps, and Unies

Apparently there's a writer's strike going on out in Hollywood, which has brought all the usual suspects out to grumble on their various blogs about, you know, the usual stuff -- strikes suck, unions blow, corporations are evil, the free market should rule over all, writers make too much money as it is and are spoiled and lazy, etc, etc, etc.

John Rogers has some pretty good posts on it over at his blog, Kung Fu Monkey. In his comment threads, the libertarians are beating him up for being a union guy, when, in fact, they feel that unions are evil and every writer should be empowered to negotiate the best deal they can get for their work. Rogers disagrees, and has had to school a few people in his threads. Liberatarians tend to make me break out in hives, so I recently had this to say over there:

Libertarianism 101: Give any man/woman a 10,000 acre ranch in the mountains somewhere (maybe Mars, or Procyon IV, yeah, that would be excellent), a working fusion generator, a functional force field generator, and one of those molecular re-arranger things that turns empty tin cans into t-bone steak (or, y'know, just gold coins, that's fine, too, because of course there's going to be a free market where gold is incredibly valuable, oh yes we're sure that's how it will work) and then EVERYTHING WILL BE ALL RIGHT.

Well, maybe you'd want just a few cobalt warhead tipped missiles, just in case one of your neighbors on an adjoining continent/asteroid/planet gets uppity. But that's a LAST RESORT, buddy. Just don't mess with anyone, and you'll be okay.

Now here's Corporatism 101: Your 'fusion' reactor needs new power cells every six months and there are only five companies that sell them and, oddly, all of their prices are within a percentage point of each other. Your force field projector and matter re-arranger all run off the fusion reactor, so, you know, see you every six months. Prices are subject to change without notice.

Union 101: If you want to design fusion reactor power cells in THIS town, you need to join the union. We'll get you higher wages, better benefits, and a guaranteed higher royalty on every power cell you design, assuming, of course, that your dues are paid up and you've made enough power cells in the last quarterly period to continue to qualify for benefits.

In the end, corporations of all kinds suck hard, libertarians are infants, and unions are most likely the lesser of many, many real world evils. That doesn't make unions cool by any means, and strikes pretty much always end up hurting everyone involved, and, unfortunately, the corporations one is striking against end up being the ones hurt the least -- but if you can't hurt these guys at least a little bit every once in a while, well, you never ever get any ice cream.

And life without ice cream is a bummer, man.

This is vastly, vastly oversimplified, of course -- corporations exist for a reason and do contribute value to our culture, although I'm not at all sure that that outweighs or even counter balances the very real evil they do as well.

Unions also exist for a reason, and they do some evil too -- in this case, however, I tend to believe that the very real good they also do probably does outweigh the crap they make their members eat on a regular basis.

Libertarians -- glah. What can you say? I'd like to live utterly independent of everyone else, too, with every transaction that occurs between myself and others being an entirely volitional one in which I have full bargaining power. But the real world has never worked like that and never will, and libertarianism will always remain an adolescent fantasy due to this. Also, libertarianism isn't even a fantasy about everyone being equally empowered; when you get a libertarian drunk and therefore honest, you will always discover than in their hearts of hearts, they always want to go into every negotiation with superior firepower.