A First

My counter tells me that, amid all the Ron DeFeo searches, someone was looking for Jim+Snowden+The+Ice+Age. I'm flattered. Most of the people looking for Jim Snowden are hunting for an offensive lineman from the 1970s and come here by accident. Someone seeking me out... It's not as cool as the fan mail bitterspice got, but it makes me feel slightly warmer and fuzzier nonethless.

Well, mystery searcher, if you're pining for THE ICE AGE, you might want to find something else to do for a while. I'm hunting for an agent for the beast right now and all indications point to a lengthy search. Call me back in a year or three.

You Really Needn't Have Put Yourself Out, George

George Lucas reports that he had to "force himself" to write STAR WARS EPISODE III. It won't be nearly as painful as when I have to force myself to watch it, I'm sure.

Oh, there was a post on Yglesias called "Relativism Watch" that touches lightly on this topic:

"Julian Sanchez reports that just as Benedict XVI fears, Star Wars: Episode Three, will reveal that the Sith have a plot to institute a dictatorship of relativism and bring down the Old Republic."

The quote Sanchez uses brings to mind this exchange between Luke and Obi-Wan in RETURN OF THE JEDI:

Luke: Why didn't you tell me? You told me Vader betrayed and murdered my father.
Obi-Wan: Your father was seduced by the dark side of the Force. He ceased to be Anakin Skywalker and became Darth Vader. When that happened, the good man who was your father was destroyed. So I was right, from a certain point of wiew.
Luke: From a certain point of wiew!
Obi-Wan: Luke, you're going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.

Relativism, relativism everywhere in the galaxy far, far away. In a conflict between dark and light relativism, whither an absolutist Pope?

That Darned Staffer

Enjoy the wacky adventures of Tom Tomorrow's Overzealous Republican Staffer. He's such a scamp!

His present is pretty weird too...

Man Who Put Mom In Freezer Had Odd History.

Okay, Jim, only 49 more years to go

Hiroshi Kashiwagi publishes his first book at the age of 82.

All True

Neil Hayes writes this column in praise of outgoing Raider quarterback Rich Gannon. He is right, of course. If any other NFC team had gone to the Super Bowl in 2002, Gannon would have owned them and become Super Bowl MVP. He's the best Raider quarterback since Plunkett, and certainly deserves the same level of admiration as Lamonica and Stabler. We may not see his like again for many years. Collins might become more consistent. Tui may yet overtake him, and if Walter recovers fully from his shoulder injury he could be a star. But Rich Gannon is not only one of the best Raider quarterbacks I've ever seen, he's one of the best quarterbacks I've ever seen. He duelled with the best of his time: Favre, Manning, McNair, Brady, and beat them as often as not--sometimes, as in his comeback win over Manning's Colts in 2000, in spectacular fashion. I'll never forget his brilliance in the Monday night game against Denver in 2002, where he completed twenty straight passes to blow out the Broncos in a crucial game that saved the Raiders' season.

Gannon's Career Stats:

Completions: 1,533; Attempts: 2,448; Completion Percentage: 62.6; Yards: 17,585; TD: 148; INT: 50

Gannon leads all Raider quarterbacks in Completions and Completion percentage. He's #2 behind Ken Stabler in total yardage. His touchdown/interception ratio is the best by far of any Raider QB (I know. Differnent rules in the 1970s. Still, check out the list sometime. It's stunning.) And given the brevity of his tenure it's amazing how many TD passes he threw.

There are two reasons I've dumped on Kerry Collins as much as I have. First, I resented the ingratitude so many sportswriters and fans showed for Rich Gannon when Collins came to Oakland. The coaches knew better than they did, and Gannon started last season. Still, it was disgusting to watch them denegrate the man's accomplishments in favor of a clear inferior. The second reason is that, after so many years of Gannon, it's unsettling to watch a man play like an average quarterback again. I'd become accustomed to greatness, and the fall to the fair-to-middling has been painful.

It's the same way some people feel about Sean Connery as James Bond. They never recovered when Connery hung up his tux, and while I have never run down George Lazenby, Roger Moore, or Pierce Brosnan, true Connery fans feel a need to. Rich Gannon is my Connery, and I don't know if any QB the Raiders will have from now on will quite measure up. Gannon did more than Tim Brown, Jerry Rice, or any other player to make my team relevant again. I'll miss him.

Deserve a ceremony? A statue and his name on the stadium would be more like it.

Draft Day Two

Three More Picks, all in the sixth round:

Anttaj Hawthorne DT, Wisconsin
Ryan Riddle, DE/LB, Cal
Pete McMahon, OT, Iowa

Anttaj Hawthorne was projected as a late 1st/early 2nd round pick by most analysts. When he slipped as far as the 6th round, the Raiders traded up to get a hold of him. He looks a bit like Ted Washington, Jr, only with a bigger initial burst. Word is that his recent penchant for weed is the reason he slipped. Now, honestly, I don't care if a player likes to smoke ten pounds of weed and fuck twenty prostitutes a night as long as he's ready to destroy the opposition on Sunday; but I don't want any four game suspensions from this guy. Fortunately, he'll be getting sixth round money. If he fails, it won't cost us much; if he succeeds, it'll be another great late round pick from the team that brought us Rod Coleman and Ronald Curry.

Ryan Riddle is a late blooming prospect with a lot of talent. In college he had mixed feelings about football, and for a while persued a film major, but his junior college coach coaxed him onto the field and he impressed enough to earn a scholarship to Cal. There, he was impressive, showing good tackling skills and an ability to work in space. This should make him valuable in 3-4 setups and in 4-3 zone blitz packages. Here's hoping Davis can keep him away from the William Morris Agency.

Pete McMahon is our second tackle acquisition from Iowa in as many years. While I doubt he'll ever achieve what Robert Gallery will, one never really knows about these things. He should be able to contribute on special teams and, possibly, move inside to guard when the need arises.

It's in the late rounds of the NFL draft that a team's scouts really make their money. It's easy to draft highly touted early round talent. It's down here where a smart team can find the great player no one else knows about. The Raiders in particular tend to love their first rounders (whether acquired through the draft or through free agency), but in recent years they've gotten great production from players who were drafted much lower and with much less fanfare. Consider that the best Raider quarterback in the last twenty years was a 4th round pick of the New England Patriots. Stuart Schweigert, picked in the 3rd round last year, will most likely start at free safety this year, and Courtney Anderson, a 7th Round Raider pick, will compete for a starting job at tight end this season.

Recapping the Raiders Draft

The picks:

Round One: Fabian Washington, CB Nebraska
Round Two: Stanford Routt, CB Houston
Round Three (1): Andrew Walker, QB, Arizona State
Round Three (2): Kirk Morrison, ILB, San Diego State

The Judgement:

Hmm. Only one linebacker in four picks. I guess we won't see much of the 3-4 next year. Fabian Washington is one of the fastest players in this year's draft class. Davis loves speed, and Washington should combine it with enough technique to push for a starting role this season. Stanford Routt is another matter. Even if the Raiders were in love with him, they could have waited a round or two (or three) for him. He has the speed, I'm told, but not as much experience or skill at the position. I'd have preferred a LB pick here, but I don't make the big money.

Andrew Walker is a prototypical pocket passer of the sort that Norv Turner prefers. After looking over his strengths and weaknesses, I have to say that he has a lot of Collins's advantages, and several of Collins's problems. We'll see if the Raiders' quarterbacks coach can burn that out of him. I doubt he'll push Collins or Tui this year, but he's an intriguing guy and the Raiders needed a #3 quarterback. Kirk Morrison is an interesting prospect. He's a smart player who tackles well, but is a little undersized and an unspectacular athlete. With luck, he'll develop into a Teddy Bruschi type.

Frankly, I'd hoped for more this year, but in a way I already got it. Our 1st Round 7th Overall pick was, after all, Randy Moss.

Raiders Trade Philip Buchanon

We got 2nd and 3rd round picks from the Houston Texans for him, which seems like pretty good value. No one would have given us a first round selection. He simply hadn't produced enough to justify such extravagance.

It's possible the Raiders will try to package some picks to get into the first round again, if there's a player Davis has his heart set on. I won't guess. The mock drafts I've seen do suggest that the Raiders will have a very young defense next year.

Here's how I see the starting line-up:

4-3 alignment

Bobby Hamilton LDE
Warren Sapp DT
Tommy Kelly DT
Tyler Brayton DE

SAM Draft Pick #1
MIKE Danny Clark
WILLIE Sam Williams

LCB Charles Woodson
RCB Nnamdi Asamugha

SS Derrick Gibson
FS Stuart Schweigert

Average age (assuming our draft pick at SAM is 22 years old); 26.5

This will mean a lot of pressure on the few veterans we have to provide leadership. I'm talking to you Charles. You're the old man in the secondary now (provided we don't trade you by draft day).

I'd like to think so, but...

I have my doubts that Kevin Drum is right when he says that a Democratic victory is likely in 2008. My skepticism stems partly from last year's failure. That George W. Bush could win re-election after having failed in so many, many ways struck me as inconceivable. (Vizzini echoes in my head even now.) Kerry's defeat indicated to me that something very bad had happened to the electorate, the media, and our political life. If we could not defeat Bush in 2004, then who can we beat?

The essence of Drum's argument is that things haven't gotten bad enough yet. Sooner or later, sooner he thinks, the stench will rise so high that no one will be able to stand it and voters will go for Democrats in huge numbers. Forces of political nature, tidal gravity and so on, will usher Dems into the White House and Congress.

Let's leave aside for a moment that the horrible economic conditions Drum expects (and I'm not knocking his thinking there) would be incredibly bad for me. I'm already without health insurance, in hock, and scraping by. I can't afford for things to get worse than they are right now. And if that's what it'll take to put a Democrat in the White House, I say to hell with it. But we'll leave that aside for the moment.

The real problem here is that it's a bad idea to rely on tidal gravity to produce your political victories, just as it was bad for the Communists to rely on historical inevitablity to produce theirs. The pendulum theory, that things will swing back to the left once they've gone far enough to the right is an interesting one, but I have to ask why, if the pendulum's backswing results when a party has gone too far, George W. Bush still has a job. He already went too far. He shifted the tax burden from the wealthy to the working to a degree that no one else would have dared. He lied us into a war against a nation that posed no threat to us in the name of defeating terrorism. His administration has tortured. It has jailed people without giving them recourse to the courts. It has given away billions to big pharma in the name of reform. We're already so far past too far that the light from too far will take millions of years to reach us.

Now in the long term, it's likely that the American public will tire of their government treating them in this way, and it's possible that this is already taking place (given the slippage in Bush's approval ratings). But Bush's approval ratings were crummy last year too, and he's still here. People like Rove are very skilled at playing the anxieties and bigotries of the American people to ruin the prospects of any Democrat who faces them. It's hard to believe that crap like the Swiftboat vets works, but it does. These guys have a hideous gift for campaigning, and geniuses like Bill Clinton don't come along every four years. (I think what really pissed the right off about Clinton wasn't his policies, but his maddening ability to escape their most carefully constructed death traps. Think of Newt Gingrich as Ernst Stavro Blofeld and you'll get the idea.) Bush's minions will tell any lie, distort any fact, concoct any fantasy to put their man in office and keep their party in charge of the boodle.

The Democrats, if they're to have any chance at all, have to change the nature of political discussion in this country so that the Republicans' tactics no longer function. Otherwise, they may not win a Presidential election until the Bills win the Super Bowl. And once a Democrat takes the presidency, the right will whip up the same shitstorm that consumed much of Bill Clinton's time in office. The media will say the President is crippled, his policies will founder, and in a few years we'll hand the country back to another right winger who will promise to "change the tone".

Changing the way we conduct our political dialog so that it is more rational and intellectually honest seems to me a decades long project. We've damaged ourselves badly, not just in the last four years, but really in the last thirty, and recovery looks like it'll be a generational affair. I don't know that it'll work out at all. I do know that if it doesn't work out, the United States may one day, like the Soviet Union, fall from one of the world's most powerful to one of the world's most pitiable nations. A nation can only lie to itself for so long before the truth, like a barbarian, pounds at its gates. I'd rather not test our limits, but this nation does a lot of things I'd rather not do.

In the shorter term, though, the Democrats need to start winning political battles, not necessarily at the Federal level where victories will be mostly in stopping Bush from doing this or that thing, but at the state level. It is there where we can do something to prove that liberalism's greatest virtue is that it gives people the freedom to live safer, more secure, more prosperous, and generally more congenial lives than faith in the Laffer curve and George Bush can offer.

Long story short: it is not enough for the Republicans to fail; the Democrats must succeed.

New Pope

It doesn't look like it'll be a fun papacy for leftists of a Catholic bent. Inasmuch as he sounds like a very right wing guy, he'll lend political legitimacy to causes with which I have no sympathy. But amid all the bad news in this country and the world, it strikes me as fairly minor. American Catholics have been listening only selectively to the Pope for years on social issues, and I doubt that will change with Benedict XVI.

Andrew Sullivan, the gay conservative Catholic, is dismayed though. What to tell him? I've never thought much of his political opinions, but I'm sure a man of his intelligence knows that people who join institutions hostile to them set themselves up for a lot of grief. How he stands it I don't know.

Hail Partisanship

I just wanted to mention something. A commenter on bitterspice suggested that I wouldn't enjoy England because of all the partisanship there--a brand of partisanship she suggested is much harsher and more adversarial than our own. To that I say "Good". Politics should be a tough partisan enterprise. Politicians represent varied interests that naturally conflict: labor and management, wealthy and poor, urban and rural. Add to that a mixture of ethnicities and you have a recipe for serious political combat. Politics without conflict would be like the NFL without tackling. Indeed, we should be nervous when there's too much consensus in the power structure, just as I'm sure Russian citizens (at least those with sense) trembled when the Politburo started reporting that all of its decisions were unanimous.

What bothers me about the current debate in the U.S. is not really its rancor, but the nature of the schism between the opponents. In England, politicians can get nasty, but they at least seem to be arguing over a common set of facts and share a general agreement on how facts are established. They may try to kill each other over what should be done about this or that fact, but that's okay. All such hits are legal. In the U.S., however, we have one political party that trusts in reason and experience as its means of establishing the truth (or as close an approximation as can be managed), and another political party that labors under the notion that reality is whatever its members prefer it to be. This debate can also become rancorous, but is an unhealthy one to have. Because once a political party divorces itself from reality and gives itself a messianic mission to remake the world as it chooses, it no longer has opponents who simply have different ideas or agendas; it has enemies who are clearly wicked and in need of either reform or removal. Ten years ago Newt Gingrich declared that the Democrats were "The enemy of normal Americans." Since that time his party's rhetoric has only grown more toxic, despite President Bush's stated wish to "change the tone". President Bush's agents police his events to see to it that taxpayers who may bring into view unwelcome thoughts (as dangerous as cholera, apparently, given their reported vigilence) are shown the appropriate exit. A Presidential advisor mocks the "reality based community" and says that this administration will redraw the human map and bring forth, I suppose, the era of the New Republican Man. The Republican party seeks the power to jail without due process, to torture with impunity, to rescind heretical court orders, to threaten any judge with impeachment or worse for daring to disagree, to fire officials whose data don't support the already established policy (or that show that said policy is, in fact, unsupportable), and to impose its own zealous religious orthodoxy on the mind of man. Contemporary Republican office holders are not committed to small government or the extension of personal liberty. Their committment is to power unrestrained by law or logic. They have no wish to debate their opponents; they wish to crush their enemies.

The debate of our times seems to me to be less over policy than over the fundamental question of whether we're going to preserve our democracy, or become a democracy in name only--like North Korea (the Democratic People's Republic)--complete with nationalistic drum beating, personality cults, and a history that suits our faith in the way things ought to have been. Debates of this sort have seldom turned out to the benefit of humanity; from the fall of the Roman Republic to the rise of the Third Reich and the Stalinist Russia they have proven disasterous. I hope the U.S. doesn't slouch any more in that direction, but my hope is a strained and increasingly desperate one. George Kennan once described totalitarianism as a disease that can grip any nation at any time, and I fear the tickle in our throat will have us coughing soon.

Given that, would I prefer a knock down, drag out fight between the Tories and Labour over how to improve the National Health Service, with lots of insults and sneering? You bet. Indeed, we might be better off adopting some of their methods. Imagine if, instead of a set State of the Union TV moment, the President had to go to Capitol Hill and take questions from lawmakers, including his potential opponents in the next election, for three hours per week on live TV. Sure, there'd be a lot of nastiness and loaded questions and embarrassing half-baked responses, but there'd be a lot of other advantages. Democracy as a brawl strikes me as a major improvement over government by chorus (especially when the chorus is at gunpoint). Every time I see an insult hurled at Tony Blair or a fist thrown at a Japanese parlimenatrian, I say: "Ah, partisanship! Ah humanity!"

A Little Debunking

This article in the San Francisco Chronicle might have done with some fact checking:

"This much is fact: The three-story, six-bedroom Dutch Colony-style house was at 112 Ocean Ave. in the village of Amityville on Long Island. At the end of the paved driveway was a small sign: "High Hopes." On Nov. 13, 1974, at 3: 15 a.m., 23-year-old Ronald DeFeo Jr. shot to death all the members of his family: his father, Ronald; his mother, Louise; his sisters Dawn and Allison; and his brothers, Mark and John. No one in the neighborhood ever reported hearing the rifle shots. Defeo claimed that he had heard voices urging him to commit the murders and that a "shadow ghost" had been beside him as he pulled the trigger. He was sentenced to life -- and remains in prison today. The next owners of the house -- George and Kathy Lutz and their three children - - moved in on Dec. 18, 1975. Oddly, George Lutz resembled DeFeo in the way that his hair, mustache and beard were shaped. The couple fled from the house 28 days later, leaving all their possessions behind."

No one heard rifle shots because it was 3am and the houses on that block aren't all that close together. Someone was shot in my neighborhood once. It was 2am, and I heard seven quick pops from what turned out to be an AK-47. The pops sounded like they might have been shots, but I wasn't sure until the next day when a KING 5 cameraman told me what all the police activity was about. If I'd been asleep, I doubt the shots would have stirred me.

DeFeo's story actually changed several times during the investigation. His first story had him awake between 2 and 4am, watching a movie on TV. He heard his brother in the bathroom around four. He showered and got ready for work. He arrived at his father's car dealership around 6am, unusally early for DeFeo, who never took work seriously. At noon, he left to fart around with his friends. They mall-walked and drank. During the day, DeFeo, or Butch as he was known, called home several times, expressing worry about what happened to his family. That evening, Butch ran into a bar, screaming that his family had been killed. He told police that a mob-connected family associate named Falini might have committed the crime sometime during the afternoon in furtherance of theft.

This story unravelled quickly. Butch had successfully disposed of the murder weapon and shell casings by depositing them in a storm drain, but the shipping box for the .35 Marlin rifle was still in his room. Also, the police quickly realized that because the entire family died in their beds still wearing their bed clothes, it was unlikely that Butch's story of a late-morning or afternoon killing was true.

Butch quickly changed his story, claiming that Falini and another man whom Butch couldn't describe woke him up at 3am and took him from room to room and made him watch them shoot his family. After Falini left, Butch disposed of the rifle and shell casings. This story had a some obvious problems. Why would the killers leave Butch alive? Why would the killers bother taking him from room to room instead of shooting him along with the others? Why would people intent on mass murder arrive at the house unarmed? How did they know Butch DeFeo owned a weapon? And, even more problematic: why would Butch Defeo, having just witnessed the murder of his family and having just been left alone, do the killers the favor of concealing the rifle and shell casings?

Butch's final story, that voices told him to kill, was part of an unsuccessful insanity defense--unsuccessful largely because of DeFeo's poor acting ability. This had been a problem for him before.

Butch DeFeo and his father had long had a violent relationship, and Butch had threatened to kill the old man several times. Butch, in his early twenties, lived off an allowance his father gave him. (His father also bought him a car and a speedboat.) He didn't feel he was getting enough, however, so he concocted a scheme to augment his bank account. He was sometimes trusted with depositing the money from his father's dealership in the bank. A couple of weeks before the murders, Butch was handed $21,000 in cash and checks for deposit. Butch arranged to have a friend pretend to rob him, then they spent the next couple of hours divvying up the proceeds. Neither the cops nor Butch's father bought the story. After all, why would a man who'd been mugged and lost thousands of dollars wait two hours to call the police? Butch's father confronted Butch with the story. Butch's response was almost boilerplate in the family, "I'm gonna kill you."

And so he did. No ghosts or goblins. No hokey gates to hell or flying pigs. All we have here is a greedy, psychopathic young man who murdered his family for the money.

As for the Lutzs, well, guess how scared they were of this supposedly evil house. Three days after George Lutz abandoned the house from hell, he returned to hold a garage sale on the property. Several families have lived in the house in the thirty years since the murders. None of them have suffered from anything worse than having idiot tourists banging on their door in search of demons. Lutz's story has turned out to be utter balderdash, though it's still good for a sweeps week ratings goose for "20/20" or "History's Mysteries". While the Lutzs may have been creeped out by living in the murder house, the real scare came in the form of bills. They'd overextended themselves buying the huge Dutch Colonial. The heating system worked poorly and needed to be replaced. (This explains the cold spots they reported.) And New York State property taxes had forced others to sell the property over the years. Essentially, the Lutzs gave the house back to the bank.

You can read all about the DeFeo crime here.

You can read about the Amityville Horror Hoax here.

Michael Bay Continues to Crappify The World

Stephanie Zacharek hurls stones at "The Amityville Horror", a Micahel Bay production, in a really, really wonderful way:

"'The Amityville Horror' marks the first time I've ever walked out of a movie I've been assigned to review. It's a badly made movie, but face it: We all see plenty of those (and we even enjoy some of them). But even if "The Amityville Horror" will be completely forgotten in a year's time, I think, as part of the cycle of carelessly but often expensively made pictures that Hollywood studios are increasingly putting before us, it's still significant. I wasn't shocked by "The Amityville Horror," or outraged by it: I felt nothing but disdain. As a symbol of what some filmmakers and some studios think the public will buy, it's a horrific piece of work. How dare anyone put this piece of crap in front of me. How dare anyone put it in front of you."

Give him another hit in the head, Stef. And another! And another!

Oh, to be in England

I'm not English, but given the way this country is going, there are many days when I'd like to be. Anyway, with the Brits preparing to decide Tony Blair's fate in a few weeks, there's a quiz where you can determine who you'd vote for.

Who should I vote for?

Your expected outcome:

Liberal Democrat

Your actual outcome:

Labour -3
Conservative -29
	Liberal Democrat 44
UK Independence Party -3
	Green 14

"You should vote: Liberal Democrat"

"The LibDems take a strong stand against tax cuts and a strong one in favour of public services: they would make long-term residential care for the elderly free across the UK, and scrap university tuition fees. They are in favour of a ban on smoking in public places, but would relax laws on cannabis. They propose to change vehicle taxation to be based on usage rather than ownership."

"Take the test at Who Should You Vote For"

Now there were some issues in there--transportation taxation and such--that I claimed neutrality on. My lack of Englishness leaves me unfamiliar with the particulars of those issues, so I might be more Tory or more Labour than the poll suggests.

Matt Yglesias pointed me to the poll. Within the post he also makes the argument that the invasion of Iraq, while not in the U.S.'s interests, was in the interests of Britain. It's an interesting notion. My trouble with it is that I'm not sure what British interest the Iraq invasion served exactly. Absent the U.S., I doubt the British would have tried to summon up a coalition of the willing to strike Iraq, so I suppose the answer is the maintenance of political intimacy with the U.S. My question is whether the Iraq invasion actually served that goal, or whether the concordance of Tony Blair with George W. Bush (a man widely despised in England--a charm of the country surpassed only by its red omnibuses) was enough to make the British public question the wisdom of the "special relationship". Clearly the Brits are unhappy with the idea of being Bush's, or America's, poodle. If the French and Germans can walk away from the U.S., why not the U.K.? Surely that's a question the voters of Britain will be asking, not only over the next few weeks, but also over the next few years. Should the Brits decide to blow us off, or at least, side more with the Continent than with us, it wouldn't be the first time that a politician's policies did the opposite of what he wanted.

What makes all of this sad for Tony Blair is that the reaction of the British public was easy to predict. The British public was against the invasion long before U.S. voters started to notice its stench. I'll never forget the scene where Tony Blair got the slow clap, a devastating signal of contempt, from some middle aged housewives after a television Q&A on Iraq. Still, he never listened to his electorate. Instead, he swallowed every morsel of Bush's nonsense, passed the lies unmediated to the British public, and committed his country to a failure. He'll probably eke out a victory on May 5th, but it will be with a greatly reduced margin in the House. His party will blame him, as they should; and Gordon Brown will become Prime Minister sometime in 2006. How might Mencken have put it? "He came into life a hero, a Galahad, in bright and shining armor. He was passing out a poor mountebank."

Mitch Albom Caught Lying Again

You can read about it over at King Kaufman. (Though you have to watch that stupid "Revelations" commercial. Fuck. The apocalypse had a fucking end, but do shows about the apocalypse end? Nooooo. Though, now that this show is spending millions to turn ordinary objects into crosses and outlines of the Virgin Mary on TV, will the blowhards who claim to speak for the red states finally clam up about how Hollywood never reflects their values? Ha. Ha. Silly me. Give up a tool that shakes down the rednecks? I'll gladly bite my tongue, Mr. Van Impe, thanks.) Apparently, Albom made up a story about a couple of college players at the NCAA tournament getting together to share kitchy memories of their college careers. This is obviously a naughty thing to do in journalism and shame on him. Still, I'll leave it to those in his profession to give him the heavy pistol whipping he deserves for this crime.

I prefer to beat him up for his incursions into my domain. I don't usually pummel bestselling authors, primarily because it opens me to charges of sour grapes. Beyond that I recognize that developing a commericially viable, freshly familiar piece of fiction for the airplane and beach set is a skill that merits its share of respect. This is especially true of someone who is able to do it over and over. These are the people who keep the publishing industry running for would-be midlisters like me, and I give them grudging props for it.

Still...

What Albom writes is codswollop. Pure, 100%, dyed-in-the-wool crap. "Tuesdays with Morrie" and "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" cheaply sentimentalize the deaths of old people in ways so gooey that the words should have been poured over pancakes instead of paper. To Albom, apparently, death is kind of like the last pages of a math book, the place where all of life's answers reside. (If not for you, then at least for the people who show up once a week to hang out with you to absorb your wonderful social conscience even as they cross picket lines. If the character in TWM had crossed picket lines, the book would have contained a useful irony to cut the treacle, but no. It was Mitch Albom, not his alter ego, who crossed.) This he combines, much like talking-to-corpses huckster John Edward, with the idea that the dead are happy to be dead, that they've learned their lives were good, that their feelings of regret lack justification, and that where they thought they were foolish they were in fact wise. So not only is death the last pages of a math book, it's the last pages of a math book where we turn out to be right, even with the problems we weren't sure about at the time. This is, to me, one of the worst cliches in all of fiction. It eliminates from fiction the central tension needed for fiction to work--the possibility that the character might fail, might be wrong.

What's at stake for an Albom character, really? If he's old, he's pretty much guaranteed to die somewhere in the text, and he's pretty much guaranteed to be enobled in the process. It works commercially because we're all going to die and we all desperately want to believe that all the confusions and contradictions we've suffered during our breathing period will be resolved to our satisfaction in the end. Still, if that's how life works out, what exactly are the risks? What's the difference between dying in an attempt to save a child from an amusement park accident at 83 and croaking from a massive heart attack while snorkeling in the Bahamas at the age of 46? We're all working from the same math book, so we'll all get the same answers. And, once again, we're always right, even when we think we're wrong. If everybody's right and good and moral and noble and ultimately without reason for doubt, what's the point?

In writing what he does, Albom betrays the very heart of what makes fiction a meaningful art form, and chooses to do so in the name of fiction. Instead of lying in the service of truth, he lies in order to convince us of bigger lies. His fiction aims to tell us that there are no problems, that all is well, and that we are all good in more or less the same way. If these things were true, there would be no need for fiction, or for art.

To wrap this I offer the words of a much finer artist: Tom Stoppard (from "Arcadia"):

"It's all trivial--your grouse, my hermit, Bernard's Byron. Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise, we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final."

Charles and Camilla

I don't usually think much about the problems in the Windsor House. The tribulations of people who go on vacation for a living don't interest me. But isn't it about time everyone laid off Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles? I realize that the gods are currently realigning the stars to give Diana a constellation of her own, but she was never the woman Charles liked. Theirs was a PR marriage, meant to burnish the Windsors' image and avoid a stupid Protestant/Catholic controversy. (Buck House is probably the last household in England where such things matter a damn.) Charles had always wanted Camilla, and his eyes never wandered from her, even as he married and they both aged. Now that Charles is in his fifties, he's gone ahead and married the older woman who has loved him for thirty years. Why is this so bad? It's not like the man is catting around with Lindsey Lohan or Paris Hilton. Camilla shares his tastes, hobbies and interests, and has long been devoted to him.

Rich guy marries longtime companion. It's not a storybook ending; it's much better.

Google Maps

Yes, we have George Bush, Osama, Delay, medocrity in music, and "Revelations" on TV. (When did Jack Van Impe and his daft wife get a development deal with NBC?) The world is turning to shit, but there are places to have fun. Try Google Maps. They show satellite photos of the locations you type in. I've seen not only my current house from there, but my grandmother's old place, and two childhood residences. Thanks to Google Maps, I need never return to Tooele again. That makes it all worth it, doesn't it? Doesn't it?

Frankly, no. But it's still pretty cool.

Confusion Reigns

Ah, rumors...the facts of the entertainment world.

Yesterday the rumor was that Daniel Craig had been offered the role of James Bond. This rumor started in the British tabloid _The Sun_, made it as far as BBC News and, as recently as five minutes ago, NWCN News (my local cable news channel). There's just one problem, well two really, Craig and his agent have denied the report. EON will neither confirm, deny, nor discuss. Much of the British press has returned to speculating that Pierce Brosnan will return as 007 when _Casino Royale _ starts filming in October.

_The Sun_ apparently received a leak from EON productions, and though I'm not averse to the idea that _The Sun_ made things up, it's more likely that this was information from someone who thought he knew more than he did, or it was a tactical leak designed to influence negotiations with another actor and keep the press in suspense. Daniel Craig might be a bit miffed, but considering that this is the most publicity he's received on this side of the Atlantic, he should be pleased. (My first reaction was "Who the hell is Daniel Craig?")

I do have one real piece of information to cheer about. Sean Connery will be James Bond in the next Electronic Arts 007 video game. He and his (younger) likeness will appear in an adaptation of _From Russia With Love_.

Delay's Future

I haven't written much about Delay because others are doing such a good job tracking his fall. Still, I wonder...If Tom Delay is forced from the House and indicted, how long before he becomes a senior official in the Bush White House?

Sin City Review

Majikthise and Yglesias went on about the movie long enough that, when the opportunity arose this afternoon to check it out, I did just that. It was a matinee show at a Cineplex over in Bellevue, and the crowd was a fairly sparse collection of comic book guys. (When they travelled in pairs, I thought of Jack Sprat and his wife.)

The movie, directed by Robert Rodriguez is structured in the same, linked story manner that Tarantino favors. (Tarantino directed one of the segments but I wasn't sure which one). Like "Pulp Fiction" the first and last "Sin City" stories follow a single narrative thread, while characters who appear briefly in either of them take over for the second and third parts. What follows is a lurid, pulpy tale of big city corruption where you separate good and evil characters not so much by their willingness to spill blood as by the way they regard women. (This raises a question about Josh Harnett's character in the vignettes that bookend the movie. I won't say what the question is. Go watch the movie if you want to know.)

That said, the connections between the vignettes was weaker here than they were in "Pulp Fiction". All of Pulp Fiction's episodes revolved around Marcellus Wallace and his crime empire, so the stories tended to be either about what life was like inside Marcellus Wallace's world, or the hope of characters to find a place beyond his influence. While the corrupt Senator played by Powers Boothe had the potential to become such a villain here, he didn't present his credentials in the story until the middle of Story #4. Until then, we heard about him, but we didn't know how much of a role he played in events. And the events of story #3 seemed so distant from #1 and #4 that in retrospect I'm not sure why they were in the same movie. #3 did have its moments, of course. The guy who gets the arrow with the message on it reminded me (probably deliberately) of a similar scene in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail". I laughed at that. Indeed, all the stories are fun, but I felt at the end more like I'd taken a tour of this world than experienced a full satisfying narrative in it.

The production design of "Sin City" is one reason to go watch it. Most comic book adaptations fail to incorporate the visual style of the comic books into their designs. "Sin City" is different. Frank Miller's images seem to come to life. The movie looks like a series of animated panels from his books. The credits say Rodriguez shot the movie in Austin but I'll be damned if I saw anything resembling Austin, Texas anywhere on the screen. This movie was filmed on location in Frank Miller's mind's eye, and I was glad to be there for a while.

Book Meme

I read about this on Majikthise. Nobody passed it to me, but I thought I'd play anyway. (I'm so lonely.)

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to save?

John Gardner's "Art of Fiction" (Ayn Rand wrote a book with the same title. You might want to read her fiction before entertaining her advice. Or, for a similar and less costly experience, you might want to stare directly into the sun until your retinas fry.) or Kafka's "Amerika", whichever one fits best in my secret hiding place.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Yeah, Elizabeth Bennett really got to me. What does she see in that Darcy guy? For a sweet, savage time I was hot for Fermina Daza in "Love In the Time of Cholera". I also lusted after Dido from The Aneiad and Circe from The Odyssey. As you can see I, like the women Strom Thurmand (Dana Carvey) described in the SNL-Clarence-Thomas-hearings sketch, prefer stories with costumes that transport me to another place and time.

The last book you bought is?

I've been poor lately so I haven't purchased much. The last book I received as a gift was Julian Barnes's collection of short stories "The Lemon Table".

What are you currently reading?

Right now I'm rereading George Kennan's "American Diplomacy".

Five books you would take to a deserted island.

1. The Boy Scout Manual (Good first aid and outdoor living tips. I can use the rest for kindling).
2. "Moby Dick"
3. Kafka's "Der Schloss"
4. "Lenin: A Biography" by Robert Service
5. "The Ice Age" by Me (There's always more revising to do.)

Will Bitterspice pick it up from here? I don't know anyone one else who maintains a blog, so I can't pass it further. (Remember how I said I'm so lonely.) Anyway, we'll have to wait and see.

Brosnan is Back?

IMDB reports that Pierce Brosnan is probably going to return as James Bond after all. You can check out details (or rather rumored details) here. Apparently, Sony, the Broccolis, and Brosnan are going through the same dance that the Broccolis and Roger Moore went through before "For Your Eyes Only". Indeed, this moment in Bond history is remarably similar to that last one. 1979s "Moonraker" was a special effects action spectacular just like "Die Another Day". Like "Die Another Day", "Moonraker" received tepid notices but earned a spectacular amount of money. Roger Moore was 51 when "Moonraker" came out. Pierce Brosnan was 50 when "Die Another Day" premiered. In both cases the producers said after their films' premieres that the Bond series had gone too far with their big budget action sequences and that the next film would show us a less gadget driven, more realistic 007.

Brosnan probably hopes there will be one last similarity. The Broccolis paid Roger Moore astrobucks to return as James Bond, and he made them sweat over the subsequent contracts for "Octopussy" and "A View To A Kill". He made enough to go into semi-retirement.

Here's hoping Brosnan does as well. I'd like to see him back, and for all he's done to revitalize the series I'd like to see him bleed Sony for every nickel they've got.

Bush Finds a New Corpse To Ride

The Pope should give him a more comfortable trip than Schiavo did. A few wet words and grim frowns at the funeral and Rove figures he can bag an three to five point pop for his guy in the polls (higher among the Catholic groups Rove has long coveted). For an administration committed to "the culture of life", it's strange that they're at their most focused when somebody dies. It's kind of Damien Thornish of them, really. Still, from Bush's point of view, better a dead Pope than a live one who needles him about Iraq and Abu Ghraib.

So, add the Pope to the list of Bush's steeds:

JP II
Schiavo
1,500+ U.S. Troops
Uncounted Thousands of Iraqis
150 Texas Death Row Prisoners
Whoever died in Vietnam so he could run campaigns and snort coke in Alabama.

No wonder Bush needs a ranch.

My Friday Random Ten

Mine is different from Majikthise's because I include spoken word stuff in my iTunes Party Shuffle.

1. "Blacks Aren't Crazy"...Chris Rock, Born Suspect
2. "Burning Hell"...R.E.M., Dead Letter Office
3. "Dogs"...Pink Floyd, Animals (subject of one of my favorite WKRP bits)
4. "Good Times" Aretha Franklin, I Never Loved A Man the Way that I Love You
5. "Pigs on the Wing (Part Two)"...Pink Floyd, Animals
6. "Zeke the Freak"...Isaac Hayes, The Best of Isaac Hayes: the Polydor Years
7. "Fresh Tendrils"...Soundgarden, Superunknown
8. "Mack the Knife"...Louis Armstrong, The Great Chicago Concert
9. "Piano Concerto in C"...Mozart, Great Composers: Mozart (Disc B)
10. "Old Man Kensey"...R.E.M., Fables of the Reconstruction

Just Curious

In most sports, the emphasis is on the championship round of the playoffs or the tournament. We have the Super Bowl. The World Series. The Wimbledon/U.S. Open/French Open Championships, the NBA Finals, the Stanley Cup and so on. Why is it that College Basketball emphasizes the semifinal round--the Final Four--instead of the NCAA Championship game? All the pre-tournament hype is about "The Road to the Final Four". I'm not complaining. It just always struck me odd. Can someone out there explain what the deal is?

Worst of the Oughts

I did a best of some time ago. Now for the flip side. These are the ten worst movies of the last four years and change. Though they have caused me less pain than the Bush administration has, I can't imagine who they'd brag to about it.

In no particular order:

Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones
Glitter
Battlefield Earth
Pearl Harbor
3000 Miles to Graceland
Freddy Got Fingered
The Beach
Gigli
Crossroads
Tomcats

Have I seen all these movies from beginning to end? Of course not. But I have seen enough of all of them to know that they pushed me to limits I didn't want to know I had. (It took me three tries just to get through parts of "Battlefield Earth". The first time I watched it I fell asleep during the opening credits and awoke as the closing credits ended. They say that in such situations, the body is kind.) I've seen most of Glitter, getting off the bus only when Carey, Dice and her friends begin their debate on the impact Brown v. Board of Education had on subsequent interpretations of the 14th Amendment--oh, wait, sorry, I meant their debate about which of them sucked the most. They all won. I got through two hours of Pearl Harbor, but when the movie insisted I expend energy to insert side two, I thought of things I'd like to insert into Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer instead. (I'll start with a pair of railroad ties heated to 2,500 degrees fahrenheit...) Did I really have to sit for another fucking ninety minutes to find out that Josh Hartnett would give his life so that Ben Affleck might live because Ben Affleck's name is the one above the title? If Michael Bay had directed the production of Romeo and Juliet in "Shakespeare in Love", Romeo would have died saving the life of Mercutio during the epic exploding grenade duel and Hummer chase, after which Mercutio would marry Juliet and they'd name their first child Romeo while waving the American flag and staring into a glorious sunset. Mostly I remember getting really into dusting and paying bills while "The Beach" was on TV. I saw all of "Star Wars Episode II". (Sigh)

Note. "From Justin To Kelly" would probably bump "Crossroads" off the list if I could summon up the will to watch it. I can't do it though, kiddies. I'd hate to see what my Netflix recommendations would look like if I stuck that pile of offal in my queue.

Spider Man 2

I've been laboring to figure out why I wasn't as fond of "Spider Man 2" as I probably should be. The movie benefitted from a will-written script. The actors played their parts well. The direction, the music, the special effects, they were, as Henry Rollins is wont to say, striking. Why, then, did it leave me cold?

Now I could be glib about it and say simply that Peter Parker faces the same dilemma that Superman faced in "Superman II", but faces it in a less interesting way, but that doesn't quite cover it. What makes his dilemma less interesting?. He's a superhero, so is Superman. I pondered and pondered, for many sleepless minutes, when help from an unexpected source rescued me.

"Kill Bill, Volume 2". Bill's discourse on Superman, late in the film:

"An essential characteristic of the superhero mythology is, there's the superhero, and there's the alter ego. Batman is actually Bruce Wayne, Spider-Man is actually Peter Parker. When he wakes up in the morning, he's Peter Parker. He has to put on a costume to become Spider-Man. And it is in that characteristic that Superman stands alone. Superman did not become Superman, Superman was born Superman. When Superman wakes up in the morning, he's Superman. His alter ego is Clark Kent. His outfit with the big red "S", that's the blanket he was wrapped in as a baby when the Kents found him. Those are his clothes. What Kent wears, the glasses, the business suit, that's the costume. That's the costume Superman wears to blend in with us. Clark Kent is how Superman views us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent? He's weak, he's unsure of himself... he's a coward. Clark Kent is Superman's critique on the whole human race."

It is this distinction that to me made the difference. Peter Parker's unwillingness to include Mary Jane in his risky, web-slinging hero-life struck me as unnecessary and even a little patronizing. Surely M.J. knows how much risk she's willing to take on for her friendly neighborhood lover-man. Why not give her the chance to beg off instead of making the decision for her? Parker's main problem really is that he doesn't have a problem; he only thinks he does. Now this is true of a lot of people roaming the planet, but because the solution to the problem is for Parker to say to himself, "Could you stop being a dork for five seconds and recognize that when a woman who looks like Kirsten Dunst wants you, and there is no real reason to say no, you should stop trying to think of a reason to balk and kiss her?" I kept saying to the screen. "You don't have to give up your powers, Parker. You just have to cut the shit."

Contrawise, in order to be with Lois Lane in "Superman 2", Superman has to give up being Superman and transform himself, forever, into Clark Kent. To follow Bill's reasoning, Superman needs to become the character he'd assumed as a critique of a weak, cowardly, unsure human race in order to marry Lois Lane. Consider for a moment how huge that is--a man willing to become what he's mocked for a lover. The length of Superman's fall becomes clear to him shortly after he renounces his powers, when a bully in a diner beats poor Clark Kent to a pulp. He sees his blood for the first time, and jokes they should hire a bodyguard. Lois says to him "I don't want a bodyguard. I want the man I love." Clark Kent replies, "I know, Lois. I wish he were here."

Now that's irony. Big buttery slabs of irony. Superman became Clark Kent so that he could be with Lois, yet in doing so he parted with the identity that Lois fell for. The joke is on Superman, and how painful it must be for him (in every way) to endure the punch line.

So there it is. Thanks, Bill, for clearing it up.