The Dorkiest, Geekiest, Lamest (Yet Shamefully Coolest) .Gif I've Seen This Year

A couple of somethings to spin the propellors of your inner beanies:

Happy Feet

In an effort to get caught up with the massive backlog of DVDs and DVD-Rs stacking up in a silently mocking fashion in the office and on the shelves downstairs, I am attempting to start watching one movie a night for as long as is feasible and writing about the ones I feel are worth passing along. Perhaps this way I'll keep myself writing and hopefully lose this nagging feeling that I am unwittingly turning this condo into a museum full of pretty silver discs. I'll also try to keep the spoilers to a minimum. Promise.

I'm not sure if computer animation has "jumped the shark" just yet, so to speak, but there has definitely been a real glut of "product" out there lately, and if I can't even be bothered to even look at Madagascar and Shark Tale (among others), I'll have to conclude that the bloom is indeed off of the rose.

One of a long, storied line of animated characters who was literally born abnormal (possibly the result of clumsy prenatal care by his inexplicably Elvis-like father, Hugh Jackman), an Emperor Penguin named Mumble (Elijah Wood) never seems able to grasp the art of singing, which apparently forms the basis of his entire tribe's culture. However, he can tap dance like freakin' Fred Astaire, which of course leads to all sorts of problems fitting in and being accepted by his peers (and their parents). Sounds familiar already? It should: this particular story of the sympathetic outcast who ends up teaching everyone else a valuable lesson has been done so many times and in so many better films, that it grounds this movie right from the start. In effect, you know exactly what is going to happen: it's just a matter of seeing it through in whatever style the director brings to the picture.

This isn't to call Happy Feet a disaster: there are a few entertaining points where this digital March Of The Penguins-with-a-beat comes oh-so-close to earning a recommendation. Yet every time I reach that point, along comes another squirm-inducing mega-choreographed musical number (or one of a dozen clichéd plot developments that one can see coming over the horizon well before they happen) that squandered whatever good will had been built up to that point. Then there is the third act of the film, which takes a sharp left turn away from being a happy dancy children's frolic and becomes instead a rather grim environmental screed with ghostly live-action actors superimposed over the animated goings-on. While this sudden shift in tone and setting certainly allows the well-known sensibilities of director George Miller free reign, the movie never completely regains it's, uh, feet, and kind of staggers to a (typically) crowd pleasing ending.

That said, beautiful character renderings, breathtaking scenery and involving animation sequences can go a long way towards making up for reheated stories and overly cute dialogue, and Happy Feet certainly packs some breathtaking set pieces for the eye-candy lover in you. I also found myself wishing to see more of the background characters after a while since they at least seemed more interesting and less been-there done-that than the leads (the bickering flock of skuas, and a mincing, yet fearsome leopard seal were a sinister hoot). Also making a valiant effort to save the movie single handedly by playing two roles is Robin Williams (who really should stick to voice acting as this is what he is undeniably best at). While I didn't much care for Williams' Lothario-with-Soul schtick playing Lovelace (and what the hell kind of name is that for a penguin?), he lands nearly all of the funniest lines in the movie as as Ramon, one of Mumble's posse of Adèlie penguin pals.

Rating: 3/5

Catching Up, Part 2: The Return Of Drama

NEW YEARS EVE/DAY (a.k.a. The Return Of Chuck)

At some point around Thanksgiving, maybe a bit beforehand, I'd started to slide back into bad old habits, and my food and drink intake went to hell in a hand basket. A few months with absolutely no follow-through from my late-May drama had me feeling young, invincible and, as it turns out, pretty stupid.

We had spent the evening at my parents house playing a newfangled DVD game and generally having a relaxing time, and it wasn't until we got back home that I started feeling what I thought was a nasty gas bubble forming in my lower gut. A couple of hours passed, and the discomfort gradually morphed into waves of searing pain. I made a run to Walgreens at a bit past 5 A.M. on New Year's Day, but the procured pills did absolutely nothing to cure what felt like a cartoonishly distending abdomen. That is when I knew that this was no gas bubble: about six weeks of eating absolute crap and washing said bilge down with little but carbonated beverages apparently was enough to get my kidneys royally pissed off for a second time, and my already-forgotten old friend Chuck had decided to pay me a New Year's Eve visit.

This time, things went a bit differently than they did last May, but not differently enough. Despite my best efforts to tough it out and try to get the damned thing(s) to pass over an endless 12-hour period, I still wound up in the emergency room. This time, we headed to Hillcrest Hospital in Mayfield, which is a longer drive from here than LakeWest, but was also a far different experience all the way around: if you wipe away the fact that I was crumpled up in a ball of suffering, it was a much more pleasant atmosphere than the rather cold and aloof feeling I had in Willoughby last May.

Thankfully, my stay at Hillcrest was also much shorter than at LakeWest (I was walking out of there about 2 hours after being admitted), which, of course, didn't change the final bill tally all that much. $3600, said the bill, of which a whopping $2600 (!!) was for being CAT-scanned twice (which, if memory serves, was about 5 times more than it cost for me to be wheeled into a similarly gargantuan Donut Of Doom at LakeWest). Yeeeeahhh. We'll be discussing that on the phone a bit with whoever is in charge of accounts receivable very shortly ...

So, true Drama has returned to my existence with a grand entrance: but this time not as a result of random shit luck, but largely because I was an utter clod. This was a very expensive lesson.

JANUARY

A bit more drama at work, but it's hard to tell as of now if it's for us or for the industry as a whole. At a month and change into 2007, the music industry is already down a terrifying amount from last year's pace: enough so that the chances of everybody catching up over the next 3 months (let alone 6) are looking rather daunting, to say the least. Ouch. The possibility of the deficit vanishing is made even bleaker by dint of a truly weak new release schedule that will pervade into March, and the fact that nothing from the truly godawful 2006 fourth quarter slate has shown any kind of staying power whatsoever.

That said, it is with a bit of trepidation that I announce that our sales are down a slight bit as well, but only by a ~5% margin instead of the industry-wide 15%. This dubious good news prompted the amusingly optimistic assessment of "so, you mean we are up 10%?" from Greg earlier this month. I suppose that is the best way to look at it, eh?

On the horizon, there are still a few developments that will have to be addressed before The Drama dies down to its usual background dull roar: I have to get the car successfully E-checked sometime between now and the middle of June (a task that you might remember caused me no end of heartache and fury the last time I had to tackle it), suddenly it seems that every damn thing I eat gives me heartburn (or "acid reflux" or whatever they call it these days), Inspector Scene is still unhappy enough with our bathroom electrical outlet that he has been here twice and still wants it fixed to his satisfaction (this has our landlord pretty pissed off, as does another sticking point concerning a leaky water shut-off valve behind the half-bathroom), at some point I'm going to need to visit my dentist, and an unusually complicated (and expensive) tax-time for me has arrived at last. Wheee!

Money will be tight for a bit no matter what happens: I've decided that I'm going to pay off my new hospital bill off piecemeal at my own pace (hopefully after Hillcrest and I reach some kind of compromise on the total, if that is possible). This will certainly pinch for a while, but I'm looking at this process more as penance for being a moron and getting myself back into this mess when I should have learned my lesson the first damned time. The rest of the above will be addressed as time permits ... the line is getting a bit long to handle them all at once, you know?

"THE GOOD PART"

Finally, I will end this lengthy update with some upbeat news: I've been completely cold turkey from the smokes since December 31, and I'm hoping to have finally kicked this thing in the ass once and for all. Seriously.

Yes, I've been here before (a glance at this post brings back the last time I attempted this feat), but never before with a law to keep me honest: this past Election Day saw the passage of a statewide measure that bans smoking indoors in all public areas effective back around December 7 of last year. For about a month, we smokers cheated at work by moving the ashtray to the bathroom and doing our puffing out of the sight of customers, but I knew eventually that I would have to take the next step, and New Year's Eve (as always) seemed a great time to try again, with the reappearance of Chuck that very night making my resolution quite a bit easier to make.

By now, the physical cravings are largely gone, though I'll still feel The Jones at odd times (like after eating a Jersey Mike's Club Sub), and that is easily dealt with by chewing a stick of sugarless gum. No sweat. What is a bit weirder is that I dream of smoking nearly every night now, and the dreams are so realistic that I actually the old not-quite-lightheaded relaxed sigh after sucking on my discorporeal cig. Luckily, I wake up from these dreams with no urge to have a drag, so I guess I can't complain that I'm being a very bad boy while asleep.

Aside from the willpower, another factor that keeps me clean is the math. I was a Marlboro man, and at four bucks and change a pack, I figure that I've already saved over 200 dollars, which is money I am setting aside specifically for Hillcrest bill payments (might as well put this new wealth to good use, eh?). At this rate, assuming I stay clean, I will have saved nearly a grand and a half by next New Year's Eve. Not too shabby.

Dual Dystopia

In an effort to get caught up with the massive backlog of DVDs and DVD-Rs stacking up in a silently mocking fashion in the office and on the shelves downstairs, I am attempting to start watching one movie a night for as long as is feasible and writing about the ones I feel are worth passing along. Perhaps this way I'll keep myself writing and hopefully lose this nagging feeling that I am unwittingly turning this condo into a museum full of pretty silver discs. I'll also try to keep the spoilers to a minimum. Promise.

Starting off our home film festival are two visions of the future of our world: neither of them particularly hopeful for the improvement of our species (like, say, 2001: A Space Odyssey) or even very technologically advanced (like, say, Minority Report or Blade Runner). While both of these movies foresee a pretty rough time ahead for the human race, one at least was leavened a bit by some viciously-deployed lowbrow humor. The other was just plain bleak, though very powerful.

Idiocracy is one of those films that was doomed to obscurity by a corporation who had no idea what to do with it. Apparently completed in 2004, Mike Judge's follow-up to the classic Office Space was shelved for two years by 20th Century Fox, and finally dumped into a handful of secondary markets for a few weeks around Labor Day 2006 (The Dead Zone of the movie release schedule, for those who don't know) with no promotion or marketing whatsoever (hell, there wasn't even a website for it). Even more interestingly, Judge will not (or, more likely, is not allowed to) speak about the movie, and Fox has been evasive in their dealings with the media over it, so there is an air of mystery surrounding Idiocracy that adds to the viewing experience, though an awful lot of questions are raised in the end as well.

Considering what incredibly shoddy treatment was accorded this film, the appearance of Idiocracy on DVD might be construed as a minor miracle until one cynically realizes that this would likely be the only way for 20th Century Fox to ever recoup their investment in the project. So, a multi-billion dollar corporation so apparently disenchanted with their multi-million dollar product decides to release it anyway in the hopes of scraping up a few bucks (possibly to finance another Garfield sequel)? Heh. Typical.

Problem is, Idiocracy doesn't suck, which makes all the above even more puzzling.

The central idea of Idiocracy is that humanity, blessed with technology that helps extend and enhance the quality of life and untroubled by natural predators, has become so dominant that the old idea of the survival of the fittest no longer applies. In fact, the opposite starts to happen as the 21st Century gets under way: as the most intelligent people put off having children (and have much smaller families, if any families at all, as a result), while the trailer parks and Mayberry citizens of the world wildly procreate and change the direction of humanity until, by the 26th Century, the entire population of the Earth comes off like some unholy fusion of Billy Madison, Al Bundy and Larry The Cable Guy (I'll add here that it's best to not ask yourself too many questions as to exactly how this world works when the population is so incredibly stupid that they can't even spell it: this movie has enough problems as it is).

Thrust into this future hell (as a result of an present-day Army experiment gone forgotten ... didn't this also happen in Futurama?) is dead-average slacker Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson), who instantly finds himself the smartest man on Earth by leaps and bounds, and who quite understandably wants nothing more than to find a way, any way, back to the present.

Sarah and I watched Idiocracy the other night, and a couple of things stuck with me after it was over:

• It is obvious that something was done to Idiocracy (apparently a year after its initial completion), to make it more "saleable" to a mass audience (who would ironically never see it in a theater anyway). Some of the scenes seem to be buying time, as if someone decided for budgetary reasons to cut corners and replace an idea with another return to the "where is that time machine at" subplot. Perhaps the most glaring example of this apparent meddling is the narration which runs throughout the movie: something about it feels weirdly out-of-sync with the rest of the film, and there is a bit too much explaining done as we move onwards, which suggests many planned scenes were either snipped from the final cut or never shot at all. Of course, neither 20th Century Fox or Judge is talking, so it might be years, if ever, before we know exactly what happened behind the scenes here.


• Idiocracy is an angry, vicious screed against modern culture, particularly the championing of ignorance and the rampant, uncontested corporate takeover of every niche of our existence. Stripped of all the (deliberately) lowbrow jokes that get us laughing as well as driving the point home at just how far along we are to realizing this future reality, Idiocracy would be impossible to enjoy, so palpable is Judge's disgust for the dumbing-down of our society at all levels (I guess what I'm trying to say is that this is hardly the kind of film you can show commercials for alongside Norbit).

While this is not the surprise gut-buster that Office Space was, there are several parts of Idiocracy that had me laughing aloud (the circular argument in Washington D.C. over how to properly grow crops, the guy on the hospital P.A. attempting to alert doctors to phone calls/patient appointments, the enhanced role of dinosaurs in political history, and the preferred popular source of 26th Century news were a few favorite bits), while other sequences (like the very formulaic final 20-25 minutes of the film) left me wondering if scenes were cut out or added in by Judge or the studio based on budget restraints or executive meddling.

Nowhere near as amusing, but far better overall, is Alfonso Cuarón's Children Of Men, which drops us just a mere twenty years into the future. You'll probably wish it was 500 years, though: in 2027, there have been no new children for nearly two decades (in fact, the youngest man on Earth has just died under tragic circumstances), and the world has gone completely to hell as a result. We are never told what exactly happened, or why, or how, just that women haven't been conceiving (either that or men have not been doing their part very well), and that everyone who is not busy being blown up, shot, or deported is simply going through the motions of life and waiting for The End Of Times: as one spray-painted sign memorably reads: THE LAST ONE TO DIE, PLEASE REMEMBER TO TURN OUT THE LIGHT.

As it happens, some parts of the world are far better off than others: we are shown early on from TV imagery that the only functioning government left on the planet is that of the United Kingdom, and as a result everyone from everywhere else in the world wants in, while everyone already living in England wants them out. Political schisms have developed throughout society as "terrorist" human rights groups resort to violence to get their point across while the government and military utilize authoritarian methods to resolve the problem of rampant illegal immigration.
In the midst of this roiling chaos, Theo (Clive Owen) simply tries to keep his head down by working at the Ministry Of Energy and spending his free time with his retired political cartoonist friend Jasper (Michael Caine). What little of Theo's regular life we are shown is suddenly shattered when he is kidnapped and asked by a "terrorist" group led by his ex-wife Julian (Julianne Moore) to secure transit papers from high-up for an illegal immigrant named Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey) under mysterious circumstances. Theo reluctantly agrees, secures the needed papers from his brother Nigel (Danny Huston) who apparently lives in Battersea Power Station (and must be a huge Pink Floyd fan), and starts off on the remarkably-realized journey that makes up the rest of this movie.

I don't want to get into what happens after this point, since the relentless forward momentum of this film after Theo meets Ke is best experienced unspoiled for full shocking effect. And I do mean "shocking" since Children Of Men is not for the faint of heart: Cuaron pulls no punches in showing us the broken down, desperate remnants of English society. We hardly ever feel safe or that the characters can rest since situations we are watching become unexpectedly complicated by sudden violence that happens right before our eyes. Unforeseen developments keep us off-balance as well, and we're never sure which characters we can trust.

I'll be curious to hear what you think of these movies as they both made me think. Idiocracy is worth a view, though ultimately you'll likely wonder at what might have been. Children Of Men, on the other hand, will probably leave you as haunted and drained: this is one of the most thought-provoking and chilling films I have seen in some time and I definitely regret missing it on the big screen. I hope you'll feel the same.

Idiocracy rating: 3/5
Children Of Men rating: 5/5

'Midwinter' Addendum

Figures. I decide to write one toss-off post admitting that winter weather ain't so bad sometimes and all Hell breaks loose a week and change later. Sheesh.

We were hit by the biggest storm of the season yesterday and today (about a foot of snow, though it's impossible to know for sure thanks to all the attendant wind), and we have more snow on the ground and drifted up against everything in sight than I have seen in years. Looking out the front bay window of the condo, I am faced with a snow drift that reaches as high as my chest, fer cryin' out loud.

All of this started sometime Tuesday morning: the roads were already pretty iffy when I got to work. As it turned out, showing up at all was ultimately a waste of time as it was pretty much a morgue in that place from the moment I got there until the moment Greg called at 7:00 PM and gave me the green light to shut everything down and go home early. The rather terrible sales figures from that day and the next took a nice chunk out of our once-blazing pace, and now the month of February is looking a bit up in the air unless we can make up the lost ground (and considering that this month is shaping up to be remarkably weak on the new release front, we aren't holding our breath) and have a few days in a row when it doesn't, you know, snow.

Driving home that night was a blend of the worst parts of dealing with winter traffic along with the best: none of the roads had been plowed yet, and Mentor Avenue in particular was an utter clusterfuck as none of the lanes were moving, and the vehicles that were in motion were being piloted by suicidal cockmops. Simply getting out of Mentor was what ate up most of my 30 minute drive home as a desperate attempt to access westbound Mentor Ave. by cutting over to Route 306 (by way of a few deserted side streets) put me in the exact same traffic situation, with people making up new and exciting traffic lanes as we went along. Sigh.

By the time I'd gone through Willoughby and down Vine Street, I'd had enough of dealing with street traffic and decided to cut over onto the freeway for the rest of the way home. This was probably not the brightest idea I ever had as far as safety was concerned: the exit ramp, also unplowed, was invisible under a blanket of white, and Route 2 really wasn't much better. That said, at least there were only about two cars in my field of vision heading westbound with me, which took a lot of the worry and stress out of driving (once you realize you can't hit someone else, worries about such things as traction and skidding magically vanish!). It was also odd looking down the limitless deserted expanse of westbound Route 2 before me, while on the other side of the concrete barrier, the eastbound lanes were bumper to bumper as far as the eye could see.


There were a few tense seconds spent aiming my car at the exit ramp when I finally reached Willowick, but once I had slowed to a complete stop a quarter mile later, all was fine (parking in a freaking snowdrift in our unplowed parking lot exempted) and a nice, warm, early evening at home was had by all. I think we need to do these more often.

The next day, as blindingly white and cold as it was, felt like a bit of a drag as it seemed pretty much everyone in Northeast Ohio scored a snow day, save for us hapless retail pukes. Blah.

NP James Brown Star Time

Catching Up, Part 1: The End Of 2006

Unannounced posting sabbaticals are a bitch, especially when they are unannounced to me as well as anyone else out there in Internets Land who has been wondering where the hell I've vanished off to over the last five months.

To sum up, I'll start with The Short Version: life was actually Good (and thus largely unremarkable) until the very end of last year, at which point came The Return Of Drama. Goody goody. A few weeks later, here I am banging away on the keyboard at 2 AM, posting new missives into this forum for the first time in eons. Maybe I need some drama to get the writing glands working again, eh?

Anyway, a belated Happy 2007, everyone. It's been a while, so let's do some catching up on current events, eh? We'll start way back where we left off ...

DVD-RW/EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE(S)

Even considering the amount of data CD-Rs I keep behind me, I'd been battling with data storage issues for most of 2006. By the middle of summer, my copious use of various bit-torrent sites was beginning to outpace my ability to keep up with the backing up of data. This situation is made trickier by the fact that in order to keep a decent share ratio going (and thus your account) on said bit-torrent site, you have to let your downloaded goodies sit on the hard drive for a while (say, a week) so that others can nibble data off of you until you have given back roughly what you have taken. The problem here is that when you are starting to grab a lot of full-res DVDs (4+ gigs a shot), you start to run out of space on a 60 gig internal hard drive really damn fast.

It was while leafing through electronics circulars at my parents' house one weekend that a solution appeared before my eyes in the form of a Western Digital External Hard Drive. Sarah then gave me one as a birthday present a short while later, and suddenly I had what felt like a limitless ocean of 250 gigabytes in storage at my fingertips. Ahhh, much better.

Of course, time and circumstance rapidly changes that perception: I clearly remember a 5 gig hard drive on my computer at the end of 1998 felt like a hell of a lot of space, too. In order to keep things relatively open on this new external HD, I finally upgraded from a CD-RW to a DVD-RW drive, and promptly started planning on eventually shrinking down my collection of 700 burned data CD-Rs to about 100 or so DVD-RWs (which would also require a couple of additional external hard drives to amass the data before re-archiving and oh Christ what a colossal headache this is going to be ...).

NEW COMPUTER

For about a month and change, this new setup your read about above was fine and dandy (especially when combined with my new flat screen monitor ... I now hate CRTs and wonder why I waited so damn long to upgrade), but a few issues with the new DVD player started to bother me in short order. Firstly, the thing never seemed to play things back in suitable fashion, with audio and video jitters plaguing the experience right from the start. It was also very difficult to burn DVDs without errors while working on something else at the same time, and the amount of memory left on my computer while this rigorous task was going for an hour and change finally started me thinking seriously about a new computer.

It had been about 4-5 years (?) since my last upgrade and aside from the DVD issues, it was becoming clearer over the course of the last couple of years that it was time to play some catch-up ball. Making this decision a bit easier was that I was a bit flush with cash at the time (this was about a month in the wake of settling up my medical bills at the time), so I felt that a snazzy new gadget would be a nice way to celebrate Life being Good again.

It was on the last Monday in September that I made the trek down Route 91 to the MicroCenter location in Mayfield Heights on the advice of Dave M., a longtime friend, ex co-worker, and local computer guru (he built the first two PCs I ever called my own). If you've never been to one of these stores, I certainly recommend stopping by, though you might want to leave your credit cards at home as a preventative measure: it's hard for me to imagine a more drool-inducing toy store for grownups.

Walking into MicroCenter that night was kind of like what walking into Toys R Us was like when I was a kid. Temptation was everywhere and it never looked so good. But, I was on a mission, and I had a couple of predetermined machines to check out and compare and ultimately make a decision on. After a half hour of thinking and looking each choice over carefully, I opted for the guy you see above and to the right: a PowerSpec 6650: Pentium 4 HT processor, 1 GB of memory, 200 GB internal hard drive, and a dual layer DVD-R/RW drive (which immediately relegated my recently purchased Sony to storage).

A couple of days followed in which everything of vital importance on my old PC was copied over to the external HD for installation into the PowerSpec, and it took two full installs to work out the tics/"bugs" in the new system and get used to the way this thing worked in comparison to the old PC (whose dessicated husk was unceremoniously junked a week or so later). Since then, save for the usual perplexing behavioral quirks that PCs develop when running various programs in tandem from a dozen different designers and companies, it's been smooth sailing.

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA

Brian has been onto me for about two years to get with the program and watch Sci-Fi Network's Battlestar Galactica show, and I had been fiercely resistant to the idea, largely out of the considerable sentiment I have for the original 1979 ABC TV series. I won't lie and say I was never interested: when the idea was first announced, I wondered if this was the long-talked-about return of the show initiated by original series lead Richard Hatch back in the mid 1990s. When I found out instead that the Sci-Fi Network's new series had nothing to do with Hatch's continuation of the original series and was instead a completely "reloaded" take on the concept, I was pretty taken aback. Things weren't helped when I learned of the switching of my favorite character on the old series (Lt. Starbuck) from a man to a woman role and that the new Cylons looked like they walked off the cover of last month's Cosmopolitan, I lost interest in a hurry and let the show pass me by.

Brian kept up the attack on me to just give the show a chance anyway, and it wasn't until a copy of Season One landed in the used bin at work that I decided to do just that. I finally got around to watching it around the middle of last month for the first time and was immediately drawn into the show, to my considerable surprise. (I might even say that I was blown off my feet, except that I was sitting in this very chair watching all of it, heh heh)

Christmas intervened with my introduction, and I am still midway through Season One as of this writing. I'm feeling the massive temptation to start it over again and have Sarah watch the miniseries premiere at least and see if she wants to continue onwards, though she has her hands full staying caught up with House, Rome and Good Eats (hosted by Beaker's loquacious offspring Alton Brown). So, with or without accompaniment, I will likely re-view the first half of Season 1, and then move onwards (I have all of season 2 awaiting me on DVD and what has been broadcast of season 3 so far sitting on an external hard drive). More discussion to come later.

Q4

Considering this was quite possibly the lamest release slate in the music industry in the last two
decades (during this Christmas season, it seemed like every "hot" item was a repackage or re-imagining of something previously available), we managed to nail our numbers at the store and finished off 2006 with a flourish: the best December in our current location to date, not to mention 2 or 3 new best one-day sales totals, best yearly total, et cetera. Good times.

MORE FUN WITH INSPECTOR SCENE

If there is one thing I have come to dread with the onset of fall, it's our annual dealings with the City Of Willowick and their insanely exacting Buildings Code. Unlike last year's tag-team blitzkreig inspection that was over in about 1 minute, this year's was a much more leisurely poking around by a lone Inspector Scene that wound up injecting the first tiny amount of drama back into my existence (if you count nearly a dozen minor building "issues" to be dealt with as "drama," anyway).

In a fit of pique, we had delayed dealing with any of these "issues" until the last couple of weeks (i.e., when he'd finally had enough of waiting around and called the landlord to ask what the hell was taking so long). The landlord came by Monday evening and we managed to get the entire list taken care of, though apparently not to Inspector Scene's satisfaction: the reinspection this past Thursday left a couple of "issues" still unresolved: one I can probably fix with a single half-twist of a freakin' wrench, the other with a visit from an electrician and some new bathroom tile.

CHRISTMAS

Judging from the media coverage of Christmas at the retail level this past season, I'm pretty sure that I was not the only person who wasn't in the mood for it this year.

Mostly thanks to the incredibly and unseasonably warm weather which parked over Northeast Ohio around early December (and lasted until about two weeks ago), it just didn't ever feel like Christmas this year. As a result I didn't even start my shopping in earnest until the middle of the month as far as online goes, and on the 19th as far as actually walking-into-stores was concerned.

Making matters even weirder was that this was by some stretch the easiest Chistmas season I have ever worked. In effect, the entire pre-Christmas surge as we used to know it was compressed into about 3, maybe 4 days before the holiday (a couple of Saturdays early on, and then the last Friday and Saturday before the holiday itself). The rest of the time (including Christmas Eve), it felt almost like any other month of work in a business sense, though what made the difference is that everyone in the store was actually buying something instead of poking around and leaving empty-handed.

With this weird non-frenzy that characterized most of December at work combined with my late start shopping, I remember quite clearly feeling like this Christmas had just flown on by while I wasn't looking. I'm not saying this was a crappy Christmas by any stretch, because it wasn't ... but it certainly wasn't my ideal kind of holiday season, you know?

All of the above also meant that I could barely be arsed to put up lights this year, yet alone wage my dreaded annual battle for Christmas Tree supremacy with Moe. I think it was on December 20 that I finally gave in and set up the tree, while picking up a couple of new fiber-optic light fixtures (on clearance sale, too ... sometimes it's good to wait 'til the last second, eh?) for Sarah to put in the front window in lieu of standing the tree in front of it as has been our custom in year's past.

The reason for these new fixtures was strategic: I had a plan to keep Moe from getting into the damned tree this year, and for the first time since he joined this household, I can claim total victory in this department. Instead of filling the bay window with holiday cheer, the tree was placed in the corner of the living room and the entire underside was blocked off with a couple of overlapping Scat Mats. The curtains next to the tree were then pinned to the wall to block off any access from the window ledge, and what do you know: these two moves actually kept Moe out of the tree for the entirety of the season! Yeee-ha! Victory at last!

Due to the work schedules of the second-tier store staff (and the inexorable bouncing of the holiday into regular week days), Christmas was not the same two-day holiday I'd enjoyed in 2005 and 2006, but a sole island of relaxation in a long and busy work schedule. Ah well, those were nice while they lasted. This was also a very green yule, right smack in the middle of what felt like was going to be a green winter. Aside from the incredibly glum outdoor setting, it was still a very relaxing holiday, which saw me carting home some new pairs of my favorite wool socks ever, some gift cards, new books and DVDs, and a couple of supposedly-reversible fleece crewneck sweaters from justsweatshirts.com (which are remarkably warm, whether the tags come off or not).

I clearly remember one point during that afternoon sitting in my parents' kitchen, doing some residual Amazon.com shopping on my mom's laptop while the rest of the house napped, exhausted from previous late nights and today's early morning. I was filling in some blanks, basically, cleaning up the wish list a bit and picking up a few items on sale and a few others that had been on my list for a couple of years that I'd decided to move on before they vanished. It was a very pleasant time: quiet and thoughtful and now tinged with a bit of regret as this kind of carefree indulgence is something I currently wish I hadn't done (though the amount I spent wouldn't have made much of a difference in the end, anyway). We'll tackle why in my next post ...


NP Various Artists The Complete Stax/Volt Singles, Volume 1

In The Bleak Midwinter

I am a bit distracted in typing up these rather long life-update posts right now, as the heaviest snowfall of the season is softly blanketing the area outside.

Those who know me well also know my feelings on winter (and all cold weather in general if we define "cold" as "anywhere south of sixty degrees"), which can be a bit contradictory at times, I suppose. I generally am ill-suited to the cold and I always dread dealing with it year after year, yet at the same time I have no problem whatsoever with snow on the ground during the holidays ... it's just that it can basically piss off for the other 50 weeks of the year for all I care. :)

I can make adjustments in my loathing, however, if a significant snowfall should arrive on a day when I am off work (like today) and provide a kind of mellowing, beautiful counterpart to a relaxing, cozy afternoon and evening. There is something quietly hypnotic and serene in a thick, billowing storm of fluffy white that has always soothed me even when I'm stuck in the middle of a 40 MPH conga line on Route 2. The peaceful, striking sight somehow makes dealing with the stuff tolerable as it's coming down, but always ready to become a grating nuisance the instant it stops.

Heading downstairs now to take in some more of the sight. More updating later.

P.S. - Of course, as our lake effect snow warning appears to be extending into the work week as I type this, I fully expect these warm happy fuzzy feelings to quickly vanish the instant I rise for work on Tuesday morning. Such is life.


NP David Axelrod Song Of Innocence

What $1.2 Trillon Can Buy

(The following article was shamelessly swiped from the online edition of The New York Times.)

What $1.2 Trillion Can Buy

By David Leonhardt
Published: January 17, 2007

The human mind isn’t very well equipped to make sense of a figure like $1.2 trillion. We don’t deal with a trillion of anything in our daily lives, and so when we come across such a big number, it is hard to distinguish it from any other big number. Millions, billions, a trillion — they all start to sound the same.

The way to come to grips with $1.2 trillion is to forget about the number itself and think instead about what you could buy with the money. When you do that, a trillion stops sounding anything like millions or billions.

For starters, $1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign — a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives.

Combined, the cost of running those programs for a decade wouldn’t use up even half our money pot. So we could then turn to poverty and education, starting with universal preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old child across the country. The city of New Orleans could also receive a huge increase in reconstruction funds.

The final big chunk of the money could go to national security. The recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that have not been put in place — better baggage and cargo screening, stronger measures against nuclear proliferation — could be enacted. Financing for the war in Afghanistan could be increased to beat back the Taliban’s recent gains, and a peacekeeping force could put a stop to the genocide in Darfur.

All that would be one way to spend $1.2 trillion. Here would be another:

The war in Iraq.

In the days before the war almost five years ago, the Pentagon estimated that it would cost about $50 billion. Democratic staff members in Congress largely agreed. Lawrence Lindsey, a White House economic adviser, was a bit more realistic, predicting that the cost could go as high as $200 billion, but President Bush fired him in part for saying so.

These estimates probably would have turned out to be too optimistic even if the war had gone well. Throughout history, people have typically underestimated the cost of war, as William Nordhaus, a Yale economist, has pointed out.

But the deteriorating situation in Iraq has caused the initial predictions to be off the mark by a scale that is difficult to fathom. The operation itself — the helicopters, the tanks, the fuel needed to run them, the combat pay for enlisted troops, the salaries of reservists and contractors, the rebuilding of Iraq — is costing more than $300 million a day, estimates Scott Wallsten, an economist in Washington.

That translates into a couple of billion dollars a week and, over the full course of the war, an eventual total of $700 billion in direct spending.

The two best-known analyses of the war’s costs agree on this figure, but they diverge from there. Linda Bilmes, at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and former Clinton administration adviser, put a total price tag of more than $2 trillion on the war. They include a number of indirect costs, like the economic stimulus that the war funds would have provided if they had been spent in this country.

Mr. Wallsten, who worked with Katrina Kosec, another economist, argues for a figure closer to $1 trillion in today’s dollars. My own estimate falls on the conservative side, largely because it focuses on the actual money that Americans would have been able to spend in the absence of a war. I didn’t even attempt to put a monetary value on the more than 3,000 American deaths in the war.

Besides the direct military spending, I’m including the gas tax that the war has effectively imposed on American families (to the benefit of oil-producing countries like Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia). At the start of 2003, a barrel of oil was selling for $30. Since then, the average price has been about $50. Attributing even $5 of this difference to the conflict adds another $150 billion to the war’s price tag, Ms. Bilmes and Mr. Stiglitz say.

The war has also guaranteed some big future expenses. Replacing the hardware used in Iraq and otherwise getting the United States military back into its prewar fighting shape could cost $100 billion. And if this war’s veterans receive disability payments and medical care at the same rate as veterans of the first gulf war, their health costs will add up to $250 billion. If the disability rate matches Vietnam’s, the number climbs higher. Either way, Ms. Bilmes says, “It’s like a miniature Medicare.”

In economic terms, you can think of these medical costs as the difference between how productive the soldiers would have been as, say, computer programmers or firefighters and how productive they will be as wounded veterans. In human terms, you can think of soldiers like Jason Poole, a young corporal profiled in The New York Times last year. Before the war, he had planned to be a teacher. After being hit by a roadside bomb in 2004, he spent hundreds of hours learning to walk and talk again, and he now splits his time between a community college and a hospital in Northern California.

Whatever number you use for the war’s total cost, it will tower over costs that normally seem prohibitive. Right now, including everything, the war is costing about $200 billion a year.
Treating heart disease and diabetes, by contrast, would probably cost about $50 billion a year. The remaining 9/11 Commission recommendations — held up in Congress partly because of their cost — might cost somewhat less. Universal preschool would be $35 billion. In Afghanistan, $10 billion could make a real difference. At the National Cancer Institute, annual budget is about $6 billion.

“This war has skewed our thinking about resources,” said Mr. Wallsten, a senior fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a conservative-leaning research group. “In the context of the war, $20 billion is nothing.”

As it happens, $20 billion is not a bad ballpark estimate for the added cost of Mr. Bush’s planned surge in troops. By itself, of course, that price tag doesn’t mean the surge is a bad idea. If it offers the best chance to stabilize Iraq, then it may well be the right option.

But the standard shouldn’t simply be whether a surge is better than the most popular alternative — a far-less-expensive political strategy that includes getting tough with the Iraqi government. The standard should be whether the surge would be better than the political strategy plus whatever else might be accomplished with the $20 billion.

This time, it would be nice to have that discussion before the troops reach Iraq.

(Youtube): "Ya Gotta Respect The Ice, Georgie"

We haven't really had to deal with winter yet, though it appears some people on the West Coast are having one hell of a lousy time with it.

Here is some footage of a few people who can't seem to maneuver their SUV's very well on a very icy hill in Oregon the other day.

Watch the tail lights: one guys rides his brakes all the way down the damn hill. Derrrr.

Amazing. Not to mention more than a little sad.

Record Den Top 100 Sellers Of 2006

1. DAVID GILMOUR On An Island


2. TOOL 10,000 Days


3. RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS Stadium Arcadium


4. THE BEATLES Love


5. THE RACONTEURS Broken Boy Soldiers


6. WOLFMOTHER Wolfmother


7. MUSHROOMHEAD Savior Sorrow


8. NEIL YOUNG Living With War


9. PEARL JAM Pearl Jam


10. PHIL SPECTOR Back To Mono


11. IRON MAIDEN A Matter Of Life And Death


12. THOM YORKE The Eraser


13. THE KILLERS Sam's Town


14. NEIL YOUNG Greatest Hits


15. NEIL YOUNG & CRAZY HORSE Live At The Fillmore East


16. THE BLACK KEYS Magic Potion


17. BOB SEGER Face The Promise


18. BLUE OCTOBER Foiled


19. BUCKCHERRY 15


20. PINK FLOYD The Dark Side Of The Moon

21. DONALD FAGEN Morph The Cat
22. BOB DYLAN Modern Times
23. SHAGGY 2 DOPE Fuck The Fuck Off!
24. PINK FLOYD Wish You Were Here
25. AUDIOSLAVE Revelations
26. GODSMACK IV
27. GEORGE HARRISON Living In The Material World
28. TOM PETTY Highway Companion
29. THE DIXIE CHICKS Taking The Long Way
30. BEYONCE Bday
31. QUEENSRYCHE Operation Mindcrime II
32. INCUBUS Light Grenades
33. A.F.I. Decemberunderground
34. GNARLS BARKLEY St. Elsewhere
35. THE FLAMING LIPS At War With The Mystics
36. EVANESCENCE The Open Door
37. THE NEW CARS It's Alive
38. THE BEATLES The Capitol Albums, Volume 2
39. T.I. King
40. THE STROKES First Impressions Of Earth
41. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE The Black Parade
42. SLAYER Christ Illusion
43. MUSE Black Holes And Revelations
44. KEANE Under The Iron Sea
45. BECK The Information
46. ANGELS AND AIRWAVES We Don't Have To Whisper
47. MADROX Phatso
48. JAMES BLUNT Back To Bedlam
49. PINK FLOYD Animals
50. DEFTONES Saturday Night Wrist
51. LAMB OF GOD Sacrament
52. MORRISSEY Ringleader Of The Tormentors
53. RAY DAVIES Other People's Lives
54. JOHNNY CASH I Walk The Line
55. JET Shine On
56. THE MARS VOLTA Amputechture
57. HINDER Extreme Behavior
58. TOM WAITS Orphans
59. MATISYAHU Youth
60. NICKELBACK All The Right Reasons
61. VAN MORRISON The Best Of Van Morrison
62. TODD RUNDGREN Something/Anything
63. TEDDY GEIGER Underage Thinking
64. SHE WANTS REVENGE She Wants Revenge
65. THE KILLERS Hot Fuss
66. THE PRETENDERS The Pretenders
67. SNOW PATROL Eyes Open
68. TAKING BACK SUNDAY Louder Now
69. ROB ZOMBIE Educated Horses
70. DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE Plans
71. OASIS Stop The Clocks
72. SUFJAN STEVENS Songs For Christmas
73. THE WHO Endless Wire
74. TWISTED SISTER Twisted Christmas
75. LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM Under The Skin
76. JOHN MAYER Continuum
77. BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions
78. JOE SATRIANI Super Colossal
79. ARCTIC MONKEYS Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I Am
80. 30 SECONDS TO MARS A Beautiful Lie
81. MICHAEL STANLEY BAND Right Back At Ya
82. THE BEATLES Abbey Road
83. THE BLACK KEYS Chulahoma
84. MATTHEW SWEET & SUSANNA HOFFS Under The Covers Vol. 1
85. EMINEM Curtain Call: The Hits
86. BOB SEGER Greatest Hits
87. THE CARS Greatest Hits
88. VARIOUS ARTISTS Eminem Presents: The Re-Up
89. MICHAEL STANLEY The Farrago Sessions
90. R.E.M. The Best Of The IRS Years: 1982-1987
91. JOHNNY CASH American V: A Hundred Highways
92. THREE DAYS GRACE One-X
93. LES CLAYPOOL Of Whales And Woe
94. PEEPING TOM Peeping Tom
95. PRINCE 3121
96. THE PRETENDERS Pirate Radio
97. FALL OUT BOY From Under The Cork Tree
98. RUSH The Spirit Of Radio
99. MICHAEL STANLEY BAND Stagepass
100. PINK FLOYD Meddle

The Hole In The Ground

Following another day of the same sanctimonious and empty gestures from our Fearless Leader, Keith Olbermann did it again. He's been on fire lately this season as the anti-Democrat/pro-fear rhetoric has ratcheted up yet again, and this is quite possibly the best special commentary he has done since his classic post-Katrina piece excoriating the government's clueless response to that epic disaster.

The full transcript of his words follows this paragraph, but I highly reccommend watching the video of this seething commentary (posted here) to get the full effect.

Half a lifetime ago, I worked in this now-empty space. And for 40 days after the attacks, I worked here again, trying to make sense of what happened, and was yet to happen, as a reporter.

All the time, I knew that the very air I breathed contained the remains of thousands of people, including four of my friends, two in the planes and -- as I discovered from those "missing posters" seared still into my soul -- two more in the Towers.

And I knew too, that this was the pyre for hundreds of New York policemen and firemen, of whom my family can claim half a dozen or more, as our ancestors.

I belabor this to emphasize that, for me this was, and is, and always shall be, personal.

And anyone who claims that I and others like me are "soft,"or have "forgotten" the lessons of what happened here is at best a grasping, opportunistic, dilettante and at worst, an idiot whether he is a commentator, or a Vice President, or a President.

However, of all the things those of us who were here five years ago could have forecast -- of all the nightmares that unfolded before our eyes, and the others that unfolded only in our minds -- none of us could have predicted this.

Five years later this space is still empty.

Five years later there is no memorial to the dead.

Five years later there is no building rising to show with proud defiance that we would not have our America wrung from us, by cowards and criminals.

Five years later this country's wound is still open.

Five years later this country's mass grave is still unmarked.

Five years later this is still just a background for a photo-op.

It is beyond shameful.

At the dedication of the Gettysburg Memorial -- barely four months after the last soldier staggered from another Pennsylvania field -- Mr. Lincoln said, "we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract."

Lincoln used those words to immortalize their sacrifice.

Today our leaders could use those same words to rationalize their reprehensible inaction. "We cannot dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground." So we won't.

Instead they bicker and buck pass. They thwart private efforts, and jostle to claim credit for initiatives that go nowhere. They spend the money on irrelevant wars, and elaborate self-congratulations, and buying off columnists to write how good a job they're doing instead of doing any job at all.

Five years later, Mr. Bush, we are still fighting the terrorists on these streets. And look carefully, sir, on these 16 empty acres. The terrorists are clearly, still winning.

And, in a crime against every victim here and every patriotic sentiment you mouthed but did not enact, you have done nothing about it.

And there is something worse still than this vast gaping hole in this city, and in the fabric of our nation. There is its symbolism of the promise unfulfilled, the urgent oath, reduced to lazy execution.

The only positive on 9/11 and the days and weeks that so slowly and painfully followed it was the unanimous humanity, here, and throughout the country. The government, the President in particular, was given every possible measure of support.

Those who did not belong to his party -- tabled that.

Those who doubted the mechanics of his election -- ignored that.

Those who wondered of his qualifications -- forgot that.

History teaches us that nearly unanimous support of a government cannot be taken away from that government by its critics. It can only be squandered by those who use it not to heal a nation's wounds, but to take political advantage.

Terrorists did not come and steal our newly-regained sense of being American first, and political, fiftieth. Nor did the Democrats. Nor did the media. Nor did the people.

The President -- and those around him -- did that.

They promised bi-partisanship, and then showed that to them, "bi-partisanship" meant that their party would rule and the rest would have to follow, or be branded, with ever-escalating hysteria, as morally or intellectually confused, as appeasers, as those who, in the Vice President's words yesterday, "validate the strategy of the terrorists."

They promised protection, and then showed that to them "protection" meant going to war against a despot whose hand they had once shaken, a despot who we now learn from our own Senate Intelligence Committee, hated al-Qaida as much as we did.

The polite phrase for how so many of us were duped into supporting a war, on the false premise that it had 'something to do' with 9/11 is "lying by implication."

The impolite phrase is "impeachable offense."

Not once in now five years has this President ever offered to assume responsibility for the failures that led to this empty space, and to this, the current, curdled, version of our beloved country.

Still, there is a last snapping flame from a final candle of respect and fairness: even his most virulent critics have never suggested he alone bears the full brunt of the blame for 9/11.

Half the time, in fact, this President has been so gently treated, that he has seemed not even to be the man most responsible for anything in his own administration.

Yet what is happening this very night?

A mini-series, created, influenced -- possibly financed by -- the most radical and cold of domestic political Machiavellis, continues to be televised into our homes.

The documented truths of the last fifteen years are replaced by bald-faced lies; the talking points of the current regime parroted; the whole sorry story blurred, by spin, to make the party out of office seem vacillating and impotent, and the party in office, seem like the only option.

How dare you, Mr. President, after taking cynical advantage of the unanimity and love, and transmuting it into fraudulent war and needless death, after monstrously transforming it into fear and suspicion and turning that fear into the campaign slogan of three elections? How dare you -- or those around you -- ever "spin" 9/11?

Just as the terrorists have succeeded -- are still succeeding -- as long as there is no memorial and no construction here at Ground Zero.

So, too, have they succeeded, and are still succeeding as long as this government uses 9/11 as a wedge to pit Americans against Americans.

This is an odd point to cite a television program, especially one from March of 1960. But as Disney's continuing sell-out of the truth (and this country) suggests, even television programs can be powerful things.

And long ago, a series called "The Twilight Zone" broadcast a riveting episode entitled "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street."

In brief: a meteor sparks rumors of an invasion by extra-terrestrials disguised as humans. The electricity goes out. A neighbor pleads for calm. Suddenly his car -- and only his car -- starts. Someone suggests he must be the alien. Then another man's lights go on. As charges and suspicion and panic overtake the street, guns are inevitably produced. An "alien" is shot -- but he turns out to be just another neighbor, returning from going for help. The camera pulls back to a near-by hill, where two extra-terrestrials are seen manipulating a small device that can jam electricity. The veteran tells his novice that there's no need to actually attack, that you just turn off a few of the human machines and then, "they pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it's themselves."

And then, in perhaps his finest piece of writing, Rod Serling sums it up with words of remarkable prescience, given where we find ourselves tonight: "The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men.

"For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own -- for the children, and the children yet unborn."

When those who dissent are told time and time again -- as we will be, if not tonight by the President, then tomorrow by his portable public chorus -- that he is preserving our freedom, but that if we use any of it, we are somehow un-American...When we are scolded, that if we merely question, we have "forgotten the lessons of 9/11"... look into this empty space behind me and the bi-partisanship upon which this administration also did not build, and tell me:

Who has left this hole in the ground?

We have not forgotten, Mr. President.

You have.

May this country forgive you.

Moving Ahead, Guardedly

(the following is reprinted sans permission from latimes.com)

MOVING AHEAD, GUARDEDLY
9/11 Has Changed Few Lives
Surprisingly, the mind-sets of most Americans haven't been greatly altered.
By Stephanie Simon, Times Staff Writer
September 11, 2006

Airport trash cans overflow with toothpaste and deodorant.

Thousands of college students bend their heads over Arabic texts.

In Minneapolis, networks of sensors continually sample air for anthrax, smallpox and bubonic plague. In Nebraska, Gov. Dave Heineman is alerted when cars with out-of-state license plates are spotted cruising cattle feedlots.

On a gravel road in rural Indiana, the Amish Country Popcorn factory makes the federal list of potential terrorist targets — a list of 77,069.

Five years after Sept. 11, this is the new normal.

Nearly 3,000 Americans died when terrorists hijacked four planes, crashing two into the World Trade Center's twin towers, one into the Pentagon and another into a field in Pennsylvania.

Documentary filmmaker Ric Burns calls the attack "as seismic as an event can be …. Rarely does the future announce itself so vividly and horrifyingly."

Residents of New York and Washington remain edgy. And those who lost loved ones, or have relatives or friends serving in the military abroad, can't help but be reminded all too often of Sept. 11.

Remarkably, though, the day-to-day lives of most Americans have changed very little. We have found it easy, perhaps startlingly easy, to stick to routines and habits and mind-sets forged before we could have conceived of planes as missiles. Last month, the Pew Research Center polled about 1,500 adults across the country. More than 40% said the terrorist attacks had not changed their personal lives at all. And 36% said their lives had been altered "only a little bit."

Sept. 11 is often compared to another day of infamy, Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Historians, however, see no comparison. World War II demanded personal sacrifice from every American family. The global war on terrorism has touched only a few directly, even as the threat level bounces from orange to yellow to orange to red.

"Many of the predictions made five years ago by cultural pundits about positive long-term changes on our behavior, on our attitudes, even on the art we make, have proved largely untrue," says novelist Julia Glass, who won a National Book Award for Three Junes.

She finds the lack of transformation depressing, a moment missed. "You could say it's because human beings are so good at adapting," Glass suggests. "Or because we tend toward a certain set point of selfishness and complacency."

That capacity for moving on, for getting back to normal, infuriated Army Staff Sgt. Jay White when he was home last summer between tours of duty in Iraq. "It used to drive him nuts when we were standing in line and somebody was complaining about their Frappuccino," recalls his wife, Jessica.

Jessica feels that same frustration at the high school in Cromwell, Conn., where she teaches history.

"It's a feeling of isolation and loneliness and confusion," she says. Her husband left on his most recent deployment less than three weeks after their wedding. "You hear about the dramas of the 16-year-old girls all the time, and I want to go: 'You don't even know what people are going through. What your own teacher's going through,' " she says.

Though most Americans have seen little change in their lives, many do recognize the effect Sept. 11 had on their neighbors and on society as a whole. In the Pew poll, 51% said their country had changed "in a major way."

Those changes are not exactly what the pundits predicted in the days after Sept. 11.

Back then, President Bush publicly wrapped the top Democrat in the Senate, Tom Daschle, in a bear hug; unity in the face of adversity seemed the only possible course. But fighting terrorism proved a sharply partisan issue — and all too susceptible to fear-mongering.

"National security has become just another political weapon to beat each other up with," says Leon E. Panetta, White House chief of staff under President Clinton.

It has also become a top priority for many voters, a noted change from decades past.

"Generally speaking, you could almost [always] gauge the outcome of elections by the economy," says Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a likely candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. "Now that issue has been trumped by the war on terror … and understandably. We received a national shock on 9/11."

Immediately after the terrorist strikes, 64% of Americans said they trusted their government to do the right thing all or most of the time. By the summer of 2002, the figure had dropped to 39%.

These days, the paradigm has shifted so dramatically that 36% of Americans say it's at least somewhat likely the federal government was complicit in the attacks, according to a recent Scripps-Howard poll.

Tens of thousands of people have viewed an online film that asserts the government plotted to bring down the twin towers and blow up the Pentagon — and then pin the blame on Arab hijackers as a pretext to invade the Middle East. In the weeks after the attacks, when American flags seemed to fly from nearly every home, when nearly every marquee proclaimed "God Bless America," it would have been impossible to imagine such a dark conspiracy theory gaining such traction.

In those days, many pundits predicted Americans would turn to God in their moment of stress, and, for a time, church attendance shot up. Polls showed Americans grappling with big questions about God and salvation.

The revival lasted three months.

By January, church attendance was back to normal. The Barna Group, a polling firm for religious groups, found no movement in standard measures of faith, such as Bible reading. "Spiritually speaking, it's as if nothing significant ever happened," says David Kinnaman, a Barna vice president.

So what, then, has changed since Sept. 11?

The American Civil Liberties Union has devoted vast amounts to fighting Bush administration policies such as eavesdropping without a warrant on certain phone calls and imprisoning American citizens indefinitely without charges or access to a lawyer. Those efforts have clearly resonated: ACLU membership has grown more than 80%, revenue has jumped 34%, and the group has nearly doubled the size of its national staff.

Other civil liberties groups have been equally charged. At New York's Center for Constitutional Rights, Legal Director Bill Goodman has handled cases brought by terrorist suspects imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay and by U.S. soldiers forced to serve beyond their terms of enlistment. He has sued on behalf of immigrants detained after Sept. 11 and foreigners who allege they were tortured by American agents.

The center's caseload has "been taken over by post-9/11 litigation," Goodman says.

The government, too, has been consumed by its new focus on terrorism. The FBI's budget has doubled. Federal spending on air security has quadrupled. The Department of Homeland Security has checked 2.7 million truckers against a terrorist watch list.

In Los Angeles, Edina Lekovic, a Muslim, senses Sept. 11 fallout when she leaves the house in her head scarf. Strangers stop her in the supermarket to ask if her father forces her to cover her hair. They wonder aloud if she's oppressed. Then they grill her about jihad.

"Life has gotten a lot more complicated," says Lekovic, communications director for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, a national policy group. "To be a Muslim in this day and age is to be in a pressure cooker, 24/7. You have to constantly explain your faith…. [We] went from private citizens to public ambassadors."

For Chris Simcox, the new normal means a new vigilance — and long nights pacing the Mexican border with a gun. Long disturbed by illegal immigration, Simcox says he had an epiphany after Sept. 11: "The next terrorists are not going to come in on visas." So he moved to Phoenix and founded the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps to help guard his country.

Simcox says he has signed up 8,000 volunteer Minutemen. His themes are also seeping into election-year politics. Randy Graf, an Arizona Republican running for a U.S. House seat, explains his call for a crackdown on illegal immigration this way: "We all remember what happened on Sept. 11."

"I tell you," Simcox says, triumphant, "the sleeping giant has awakened."

The fallout from Sept. 11 has affected the world of culture as well.

Musicians have channeled sorrow, rage and fear into anthems to that indelible day. Classical composer John Adams gave us a haunting elegy with "On the Transmigration of Souls." Country singer Toby Keith served up a lusty cry for vengeance with "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)." And Bruce Springsteen poured out his empathy for terrorism's victims — and its perpetrators — in his 2002 album, The Rising.

With his novel A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, Ken Kalfus brought black comedy to the age of terror. He sets his satire about a divorcing couple in Manhattan in 2001; at one point, husband and wife each think the other has died in the World Trade Center — and each is secretly delighted. It's a deliberate effort, Kalfus says, to disprove what "we were told after 9/11, that irony was dead."

For her part, New York writer Martha McPhee, a former National Book Award finalist, had one of the main characters in her cross-cultural love story, L'America, die in the collapse of the north tower.

"It's not surprising that novelists want to try" to take on Sept. 11, McPhee says, "because what a novel tries to do is make sense out of something that makes no sense."

That's what Americans have tried to do as well these last five years: make sense of the senseless. Shock waves from Sept. 11 reverberate still, but carrying on with the familiar humdrum of our lives lets us feel stable, even as radiation detectors are installed at the Super Bowl and security guards at the airport order us to toss our bottled water.

"Probably no American life is totally unaffected by 9/11, but very few people are immobilized or totally preoccupied with it," says Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School.

Lifton studies the psychology of survival, and he says we as a nation have not fully come to terms with the fear, the anger — or the humiliation — 9/11 evoked. We have learned to live with the new normal, yes. But that doesn't mean we've moved past that bright September day of unthinkable horror.

"It's a powerful event which has not been fully absorbed," Lifton says, "and in many ways floats in and out of our psyches."

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stephanie.simon@latimes.com

Times staff writers Richard Fausset, Janet Hook, Jenny Jarvie, Lynn Marshall, Scott Martelle, Charles McNulty, Ann Powers, Maria Russo, Mark Swed, David L. Ulin, Henry Weinstein and Robert W. Welkos contributed to this report.

The End Of Drama: Floods, Bills, & The Stupidity Trifecta

A few weeks back, I wrote a post whining about how it felt like we were living on Waterworld, and lemme tell you, that was peanuts compared to the Biblical deluge of this past week.



You may have heard that Mother Nature went ballistic on Northeast Ohio last Thursday, dumping 9" of rain over most of Lake County in about 24 hours, and flooding the living shit out of Painesville, Fairport Harbor, Eastlake, Mentor and Willowick.

Don't worry: we're untouched and, as it turns out, damned lucky: the worst we had to cope with (aside from the hellish driving conditions exacerbated by most major roads being shut down) was a wet stretch of carpet and linoleum from rain pushed underneath the door and into our little foyer. The folks on Bayridge Road (a few hundred feet away from here) weren't so lucky, however, as water piled up in their basements to a depth of 3 feet, resulting in a tons of ruined carpeting and furniture being piled up on treelawns up and down that street over the last couple of days.

Now that the waters have receded and getting around town is no longer a challenge in coming up with alternate routes on back roads, I can attend to more pressing matters in the form of my medical bill situation, which I am extremely pleased to report is now largely a non-issue, save for a few small issues to be picked over tomorrow. To my surprise, The City Of Willowick wrote off the $460 ambulance bill, which was a relief, but nowhere near as much as being able to tap into some money my Dad had squirrelled away in a mutual fund for me years ago, which will cover the balance of the remaining bills.

As expected, I apparently make too much money for the feds to write off the charges incurred by Chuck's visit. This is kinda sad, really: I earn well below what is popularly considered "the poverty line" and I can only imagine what unbearable financial one must live at for the State will absolve you of being in debt up to your eyeballs from medical expenses. However, I was also informed that the astronomical (and still non-itemized) figure I was mailed a few weeks ago has been cut in half as long as I can pay it off in one lump sum, which I will be taking care of as soon as my check arrives. Said check will cover the remaining amount, as well as the two other bills that are not covered by these financial help people (and it would have been nice to know this over a month ago so I might have started to pay them off by now). The only drawback to this good news is that I am going to feel some sting from this withdrawal come April 15 of next year, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

It wasn't all good news this past week in the money department, however: the cherry on the sundae of this life update is that I managed to snap my record 8-year streak of good traffic behavior in pretty spectacular fashion last Wednesday night (just as The Deluge From Hell was starting to get going). Realizing that I had forgotten some work that needed to be done, I headed back to the store at 2 AM to retrieve a new release order book that had to be taken care first thing Thursday morning. Upon leaving the store, I neglected to turn on my headlights (something I am always prone to do when the roads are wet) and was pulled over a few moments later on Route 306 thanks to that and the fact that I was speeding through a very popular downhill speed trap underneath a railroad bridge. You see, this section of Route 306 is a 25mph zone and I was clocked going 41. Oops.

Making matters worse, the policeman returned to my car after writing the ticket and asked me if I knew that my driver's license had expired. "That's incorrect, sir" I said, looking at the card in his hand with some irritation, "it doesn't expire until two thousand and...six..." Oops again. So, I was handed a ticket for 41 in a 25 and an expired license, and was pretty steamed at this development, but at the same time thankful that I was allowed to drive home instead having my car towed on the spot (which he was certainly in his right to do as I had just nailed The Stupidity Trifecta) and thus forcing me to get a ride in the middle of a downpour at 2 AM.

The license problem was taken care of the next morning, and (depending on the waivable price of the ticket) I will either pay that off sometime this week or decide to show up in court a couple of Wednesdays from now in an attempt to get the costs knocked down a bit. After that, all of this wonderful endless summer drama will at last be over. Here's to a peaceful August.


NP: The Go-Betweens 1978-1990

Ultraman Revisited

Months after posting in a nostalgic sense about the wonderful world of Ultraman, the powers that be have elected at last to release the original series on DVD ... well, the first twenty episodes, at least.

Let's get the technical stuff out of the way first: the presentation is fairly good throughout, especially with the factors of time and storage considered, though there are some issues with the sound, in particular the dubbed English dialogue switching irritatingly to Japanese at the drop of a hat without automatically triggering the subtitling (I had to manually activate this function on a few occasions). The extras, sadly, are largely inconsequential: a dull, amateur-quality recording of a conversation with the three principal voice actors who dubbed the series for English television, a more informative (though very dry) slideshow walk-through introducing of the monsters featured during this batch of episodes, and finally the English-language opening credits for the show.

As was the case during my marathon week of Johnny Sokko And His Flying Robot on a home-made DVD compilation a few months ago, watching Ultraman Vol. 1 over the last few nights was a rather illuminating experience, as many newer impressions of the show have surfaced since the last time I watched it (which was somewhere around 25 or more years ago). It was also impossible not to contrast the two series as the series wound onwards, and I am pleased to report that Ultraman quickly overpowered Sokko in nearly all fields of comparison.

The most immediate impression I got from watching these DVDs was what a weirdly schizoid show Ultraman could be as it occasionally blended goofball slapstick humor with surprisingly heavy existential plot developments, not to mention an unexpected, not-quite-psychedelic-but-definitely-mid-1960s surreal twist noticeable in the style of the later episodes.

Despite some genuinely creepy monsters and set-pieces scattered around the first 20 shows, Ultraman comes off as a lot more overtly kid-aimed than I'd remembered. I realize that this isn't exactly an amazing observation concerning a show that features stunt performers in silly rubber monster suits getting their asses kicked on a weekly basis by another guy in a skin tight silver getup, but bear with me a bit. Unlike Johnny Sokko, whose characters were taciturn and businesslike with only rare occasions where they engaged in comedy, there are times watching Ultraman when you wonder exactly who selects agents for Science Patrol duty, especially if such clods as Ito (an electronics whiz who comes off like a Japanese version of Jerry Lewis), Irashi (a hot-headed dolt who wants to blast everything in sight with his two-handled ray gun), and the obligatory "troublemaking kid character" Hoshino somehow made the grade.

Then again, the whole reason I watched this show as a kid was the monsters, and watching these epic battles between Ultraman and his foes is a massive giggle not altogether different from a pro wrestling match (with some good ol' fashioned sumo moves here and there for color). While Johnny Sokko's Giant Robot fought in pretty much the same clunky way you'd expect a robot to fight, Ultraman was a nimble, graceful, sometimes playful figure in the ring who floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee. I will also add that the carnage is often spread equally by the battling titans, as Ultraman also seems to cause just as much damage to balsawood Nipponese infrastructure as his nemesis in any given battle. It was also surprising to note how quickly most of these fights were resolved: Ultraman was able to dispatch many of his assailants by simply utilizing his badass Specium Ray after a few moments of spirited leaping about and a few strategically-placed karate chops.

Another thing that struck me was that the production values on Ultraman seemed much higher than those of Johnny Sokko in nearly all areas, from the music to the use of location shooting and generally more creative monster design (not only were many of Sokko's adversaries rather cheesy in comparison, but the show's creators gleefully re-used their monsters two and three times over during the show's run).

I'll conclude with what is for me the most interesting difference between the two series: the tone of the shows as a whole. The U.N.I.C.O.R.N. organization were effectively at war with the Gargoyle Gang throughout the run of Johnny Sokko as every single foe faced by the Giant Robot was a stooge of the bad guys. With Ultraman, the enemies are spawned by nuclear accidents, radiation exposure, or just happen across the Earth from the depths of space and time, and not all of them had what could be construed as "evil" intentions. Thus, there are a few episodes of Ultraman that end on a surprisingly melancholy note as the defeated monsters are given a mournful musical sendoff rather than a rousing fanfare of victory.

Roger Keith "Syd" Barrett: 1946-2006

Largely thanks to the remarkable talents of Syd Barrett falling dormant to rampant hallucinogenic abuse (which in turn triggered a crippling bout of schizophrenia) almost before I was born, this feels kind of like writing an obituary about 35 years too late, but here goes ...

The music of Syd Barrett, for years, remained the one and only part of the history of Pink Floyd that I never "got." While I now regard 1967's The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn as a true psychedelic classic on a par with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, my first impressions when hearing this record in late 1987 were more bemused than amazed as it sounded absolutely nothing at all like the Pink Floyd I had been obsessed with for months. Instead of the large scaled (and sour-eyed) ruminations on the human condition common to Roger Waters, Barrett's Pink Floyd dealt with house cats, rascally transvestites, simple love songs, fanciful gnomes, and passages from the I Ching. At times almost mincingly fey (I hate to admit that I often thought of Spinal Tap's "Listen To The Flower People"), at other times bordering on semi-chaotic, Piper struck me as more akin to The Monkees on acid than anything as fascinating as, say, The Dark Side Of The Moon.


Over the years, however, sporadic airings of that album (or the wonderful period singles as "Arnold Layne" and "See Emily Play" on sundry Floyd compilation albums) gradually brought me around on Barrett's unique and indisputable talent ... at least in regards to the music of Pink Floyd. Following that qualifier, I regret to add that, thus far, the appeal of much of his solo work continues to elude me: most of it I find far too raw and harrowing to be truly "enjoyable." That said, amongst all of his fractured missives from the other side of sanity, there are a few odd diamonds-in-the-rough that have gradually wormed their way into my subconscious like "Octopus," "Dominoes," "Golden Hair," and the nursery rhyme-like "Effervescing Elephant."

Since, like so many others my age, I discovered Pink Floyd by working backwards from their mid-1970s peak, it took me a few extra years to fully appreciate the band's evolution. Therefore, nearly all of what I'd learned about the band's formative years was gleaned from an supply of books and articles on the band I'd collected over the last two decades. While I'd slowly started to grow an appreciation for the sunny innocence of his work on its own merits, my respect for Barrett's time in the band also increased exponentially as I became more familiar with Pink Floyd's history and gradually came to realize just how much of a shadow that Syd's short-lived brilliance cast over music that came years, even decades later.

Pink Floyd, as I would discover, could not have existed after 1967 with Syd Barrett in the lineup, yet of course they also couldn't have existed without him: for in the beginning, it was all his baby. Roger Waters may have become the band's second frontman and through sheer force of will a couple of years down the road, but in the beginning Syd's natural charisma made him a natural (and magnetic) focal point on stage, at least until his psychological meltdown began to manifest itself on the eve of the band's U.S. tour (which, unsurprisingly, quickly became an unmitigated disaster). When Barrett's exasperated bandmates had finally had enough of his unpredictable behavior in early 1968 and bounced him from the lineup, it seemed to me like a simple pragmatic survival move (as if the band's attitude had been "Jesus, get this nutcase out of the band, already ... we need to get cracking on Dark Side Of The Moon!"), but I came to realize just how dangerous and risky this move was in retrospect. Imagine The Rolling Stones sans Mick Jagger, U2 minus Bono or The Smiths minus Morrissey and this is exactly the kind of place Pink Floyd found themselves in the spring of 1968.

Instead of rising up and conquering the world immediately after losing whom I'd considered their fifth wheel, Pink Floyd initially floundered in Barrett's wake, nearly capsizing over the next few years as they flailed about madly in search of something, anything, to keep the band solvent and relevant. Of course, against impossible odds, that did eventually come to pass. Interestingly, in his role as the band's chief lyricist, Waters seemingly could not avoid invoking Barrett (passingly or otherwise) in song as the band's profile grew. From what may or may not have been an offhand mention in the couplet Fearlessly the idiot faced the crowd / Smiling on 1971's Meddle, to the entirety of the song "Brain Damage" on The Dark Side Of The Moon, Barrett seemed to be lurking around in the back of the band's consciousness.

That "lurking about" flowered into a tribute album of sorts with 1975's Wish You Were Here, an album that many (including myself) consider the peak of the band's output. Unlike in past Pink Floyd albums, Wish You Were Here addressed Barrett in no uncertain terms throughout, in tones ranging from aching ("Shine On You Crazy Diamond") and sarcastic ("Have A Cigar") to resigned ("Welcome To The Machine" and the ubiquitous title cut). It's also fair to assume that memories of the ex-Floyd leader's mental collapse were referenced at various points during 1979's The Wall as well (certainly moreso during the 1982 movie), particularly during the track "Nobody Home."

Since then, it's nearly impossible to attend any Pink Floyd-related show without seeing or hearing at least one reference to Barrett. The David Gilmour-led lineup of Pink Floyd performed "Astronomy Domine" on their 1994 tour (you can see the 1994 version here) and screened an affecting, allegorical film during performances of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond," while Roger Waters screened the whimsical videoclip for "Arnold Layne" during his 1987 outings, and later showed slides from the film during his more recent excusions. Gilmour's recent solo tour also featured "Arnold Layne" (one night in London even featured special guest David Bowie on vocals, which can be seen here), as well as the solo Barrett track "Dominoes."

It's a shame that, for many people, Barrett's work and the shadow he cast over some of the most popular rock music in history remains nearly unknown, while tales of his erratic touring behavior (and Herculean drug intake) are legion. There is an old cliche that reads "the flame that burns twice as bright lasts half as long," and for a very short time, Barrett's flame was as bright as a magnesium flare. His was a vital, fragile, and totally original talent ... you know, the kind we just don't see too often anymore.


For a far more entertaining (and coherent) look at the life and music of Syd Barrett, I highly recommend USD's The Pink Floyd & Syd Barrett Story DVD, and you could do a lot worse than to check out Pink Floyd's classic debut album The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn or the Syd Barrett solo collection Wouldn't You Miss Me: The Best Of Syd Barrett.