Stupid, the Universal Solvent

Couldn’t resist hitting this one. Leona “Only the little people pay taxes” Helmsley finally did us all a favor and stopped being an oxygen thief a few weeks ago. (Am I the only one that thinks she looks like The Joker from Batman? That face is gonna give me nightmares.) Alas, her idiocy shall live in short perpetuity. She left her dog 12 million bucks. That’s some expensive kibble. Leona probably wanted to extend some professional courtesy to a fellow bitch for not biting her.

The real shame is that her chauffer only got a hundred grand. Who cares that only two of the four grandkids got 5 million? All they did to be on the payroll was get involuntarily enrolled in the gene pool. The chauffer, however, probably swallowed Olympic-sized buckets of shit from that woman down through the years. He’s gonna have to spend all that money on therapy and anger management. If I was him, I’d be volunteering to take that dog for a walk.

Ares

Unreality TV

I spent a nearly worthless evening doing something I don’t do very much: Watching fiction on network television. Not quite sure what moved me to throw time down that particular hole tonight. Maybe I was just too lazy to reach for the remote. Anyway, my two selections on this eve were CSI: Miami and The China Syndrome.

Prior to this evening I had not sat through more than 5 consecutive minutes of a CSI episode. Now I know why. I’ve seen bits and pieces of the other CSI franchises: New York and Las Vegas. David Caruso fronts the Miami flavor, which is part of the problem. William Petersen and Gary Sinise front the other two. Petersen has genuine talent (great example of this is the original version of Red Dragon, called Manhunter) and Sinise is unpretty enough to look like a cop. Caruso comes off as a game show host with really bad lines. Some carrot-topped cracker more wooden and stiff than a chest of drawers, floundering his way through a script so slick it doesn’t stick to anything.

My real reason for detesting CSI: Miami isn’t Mr. Freckles. First, the older I get the more I object to the continued selling of homicide as entertainment. In between the scenes we get drive-by overhead money shots of glamorous Miami, false advertising at its finest. Second, when the crime happens a 20-something with 8% body fat shows up in a Hummer to test for epithelial cells and DNA, which is slung back to the lab for a complete return (with color photographs of the perp) within an hour or two. Apparently David Caruso yelling “Dammit, I need that right away!” tends to negate the laws of chemistry. In real life you get a chain-smoking, pot-bellied guy in an 8 year old Crown Victoria bitching the whole way through about getting yanked out of bed. Ah, but Ares, it’s just television, you say. Yes, I know that and you, the four readers of this blog, know that. But the mouth-breathing, front half of the intelligence bell curve, mental midgets that inhabit the larger portions of our world have a difficult time distinguishing between the two dimensional and the three dimensional worlds. Somehow, that notion tapers my entertainment gradient significantly. Damn I’m getting old.

The nugget that followed was The China Syndrome. I must have been really, really lazy to not reach for the remote when a Jane Fonda movie came on. My justification was that it got a bunch of Oscar nominations, I’d never seen it before, and I wanted to see just how much of a boogey man they made the power industry. Gotta love any movie where there are murderous goons at the beck and call of corporate white guys. Some of the freeway scenes were a little déjà vu, made me think I was watching CHiPS. Best part for me was when the fire department was at the scene of the car accident: It was Engine 51 and Squad 51. (“Dix, we’re gonna need and IV with ringers lactate.”) Then when the SWAT team arrives at the power plant it’s the same stinking van from the series. It was a prop-vehicle reunion.

According to Wikipedia, the movie came out twelve days before the Three Mile Island incident. In a shocking move that will never be replicated, the movie was actually pulled from some theaters because they didn’t want to look like they were profiting from it. If a similar movie were made today, and a melt down occurred two weeks later, there would be producers lined up out the door of the closest church, hitting their knees to thank god and slip big fat thank-you checks into the collection plate. Still, the movie must have had some effect. In 1979 we’d just gotten the economic crap kicked out of us by OPEC, yet we embraced the more expensive alternative. No reactors have been built since. Even knowing the plot devices were bogus I still got sucked into the movie a bit. There’s something about all things nuclear that is hard-wired (forgive me) into our fear centers. The movie reminded me of another one I saw as a kid called Special Bulletin. That movie scared the shit out of me. Mom, in case you’re reading this, I was probably too young to watch that one. It gave me cold sweat, toss-and-turn nightmares for months. I hope David Caruso doesn’t do the same thing.

Ares

Sick Mainstream

Again yesterday I was trapped at a Secure Undisclosed Location where CNN was being involuntarily beamed forth. The particular fetish of the day was their upcoming interview with John Mark Karr. (Why is it when you’re in the media’s sights you suddenly get three names? John Mark Karr, George W. Bush, Lee Harvey Oswald, et al.) We can’t begin to catalogue all the things that are wrong with this. First and foremost, he’s just creepy. If his head fit his body he’d probably look a little more mainstream. But the big issue here is why are they giving uninterrupted face time to a child molester? What’s the possible commercial gain? The laugh-out-loud part of the CNN teasers was the anchor reading viewer e-mails about the segment. I’ll reduce and paraphrase the e-mails for you: “You suck! STFU! Get that sick F*** off the air!” I call this the domestic violence model of journalism. “They must love us because they beat us.”

As for Mr. Karr, got a little question for you. What exactly where you doing Thailand when you suddenly volunteered to be a suspect in the Original Dead White Girl case? Why do single white men go to Thailand? Was it to volunteer at the Wee Tikes Playground and Boarding House? And why did you pick that particular time to remember you were a suspect? Spend all your money on Ring Pops and Ferris Wheel rides for your new best friends and needed a lift home?

Ares

(ps. If you missed it, look at the left side of the picture & you’ll see why it fits.)

The Merely Obvious Will Do

I don’t want to sound like a one-track guy, but this is such low hanging fruit that I can’t resist hitting it. Seems CBS News (an oxymoron if ever there was one) threw up a little article about the hurricane that’s whirling around Hawaii. We’ll ignore the banner “Category 4 Hurricane Heads Toward Hawaii” headline. This is easy to ignore if you read the body of the article, which contradictorily states that the storm will pass Hawaii and probably only inflict heavy surf. No, the part of this article that really caught my attention was the graphic at the top of the article. There’s what appears to be a weather sat shot of a hurricane. Underneath the picture is the caption “Hurricane Flossie strengthened to a Category 3 story early August 11, 2007, as it headed toward the waters south of Hawaii.” All well and good, but the picture is of a hurricane in the Atlantic. If you look at the picture you can make out Cube in the lower left corner, the Bahamas in the left center, and the east coast of the U.S. on the left side. I guess Flossie wasn’t photogenic enough from space to go with truth in graphics.

In another bit of non-shocking CBS news we peruse this article. Seems Hezbollah (due to the disparities in Arabic translation it can also be spelled Hizbulla, Hillsbella, and HellsBells) took out some ad space on a billboard in Windsor, Canada. As you can see, big as life at the bottom of the billboard, is the CBS logo. Way to work in that product placement. You know why we have advertising executives in this world? Because there are some things prostitutes just won’t do. Not quite sure exactly what they were trying to accomplish by buying a billboard in Canada, but fools and their money rarely consummate for too long. One nice, interesting theory that’s been hatched in the Ares and Athena think tank is that Windsor is across the river from Detroit. Greater Detroit is home to the largest concentration of Arab Muslims in the U.S. Do the math and insert your own 10 cent theory from that starting point. Little side note to Hassan Nasrallah, the beard boy in the middle with the funny hat: You get further in the West by using small furry animals or babies in your advertising.

Ares

The First Robin of Autumn

Much like the first robin you see in winter is a harbinger of spring; I’ve found the first harbinger of autumn. On the shelves of my local grocer I found a cool, gleaming six-pack of Samuel Adams Octoberfest. And it couldn’t have come at a better time. It’s been uglier than an inbred possum the last few weeks. I think the temperature is being measured in Kelvin and the air quality is being referred to as chunky. It’s been so hot the kudzu won’t grow, the day laborers won’t loiter, and the crack heads have switched to dry ice. Atlanta in the summer: Who’d have thought an entire city could smell like rotting dumpster, except where it smells like urine?

A little bit of Sammy helps wash away the mental stink of summer. Not with alcoholic diffusion but with sensory recall. Octoberfest beer fast forwards me to that time of long sleeves, heavy comforters, and god-like slumber. Everyone seems to catch their breath and revise their view of the world in October, whether they know it or not. It’s that final pause before the whirlwind idiocy of the holidays, followed by the mildly hollow letdown of the post-New Year winter. For my money, there are few better things than the smell of a neighborhood full of fireplaces in effect on a frigid night. All of these things are imminent, says that little half-full bottle on my desk. Thank you Jim, I needed that.

Ares

The Long, Slow Burn

As stated previously in this space, apologies for the stagnation. The dog days of summer are taking their toll. Everything seems a bit overcooked, overworked, and overused. The days at work are simply a sweat-based endurance trial with no finish line. After a few days in a row on the clock I feel like the bastard son of Kafka and Henry Rollins.

This summer has left me on an island all by myself. My mind goes its own way, usually to the streets of my hometown. Summer becomes a jail, a ship run aground, a ladder to nowhere. The summer animal, I can never outrun or hide from it. The summer bores me out, turns me into a hollow carcass. Fueled by insomnia and a thirst for everything. I turn into boneless limbo man caught in the middle. My skin turns to leather, I turn inside in. I seal off. Underneath this leather exterior I scream, twist, convulse, and burn silently. I wonder to myself wouldn’t I be better off far from anything that bears the least resemblance to this? You can change the scenery that surrounds you. You can run from the fists that pound you, but you cannot escape your feelings. I’ve crawled every sewer from here to there and I’ve never done it. And I burn silently.

The streets lie, the sidewalks lie. You can try to read it but you’re gonna get it wrong. The summer evenings burn and melt and the nights glitter, but they lie. Underneath the streets there’s a river that moves like a snake. It moves with smooth, undulating, crippling muscle power. It chokes and drowns and trips and strangles and lures and says “Come here, stay with me,” and it lies.

Thanks Henry, I needed that. Stay cool.

Ares