Along Came a Spider...

Considering how much it costs to make a movie, providing a script that has some logic to it isn't in the expense account. This is an old movie, I know, but I watched Along Came A Spider with Morgan Freeman. Freeman is always good, but seems miscast as the forensic psychologist, Alex Cross. Freeman, who turned 71 a couple of months ago, was in his early 60s when he made this movie, so he provided a calm character in line with his maturity, but I'm not sure that under the circumstances presented by the plot he'd be so calm.


As I read critiques of the film I noticed there were several who commented on how it was cobbled together with familiar scenes. The kidnapper making him run from pay phone to pay phone was an example. I saw it for the first time in Dirty Harry in 1971. I've seen it since. The cell phone, even in 2001 when Along Came A Spider was released, was everywhere. Why not give us an update? Have the kidnapper tell Dr. Cross, "You've got 20 minutes to get to the train station. I'm going to call your cell number and you have to prove it." The kidnapper could write some graffiti ahead of time that Freeman would have to read back to him to prove he's reached the spot. Anyway, I yawned through that running-around scene.

Besides that familiar schtick, the whole plot was contrived. The kidnapper, Mr. Soneji--and I had to check my closed captioning to see the spelling of that name--was a man in disguise. He worked at an exclusive school for a couple of years, setting up the kidnapping of a senator's daughter, while wearing fake whiskers, make-up, a wig and appliances to change his face. I noticed it the first time they showed him. Howcum the folks in the school didn't? It's what Roger Ebert calls an "idiot plot," where to advance the plot the characters have to be idiots not to see something the audience can clearly see.

One bright spot was Monica Potter, an actress I hadn't seen before. If I had I hadn't noticed her. Sorry, Monica. I think she was chosen not only because she's pretty and a good actress, but because of a superficial resemblance to Julia Roberts.

C'mon. Tell me it doesn't hurt to remind an audience of someone else. The bright spot got tarnished because we were forced to make a 90-degree turn with her character, Jezzie, and see her become something unexpected. I thought next to the disguised kidnapper, the Jezzie character was the next most illogical aspect of the story. I sure did enjoy looking at Monica, though.

Like most thrillers, most of the money that goes on the screen is spent on an A-list actor, in this case Freeman, a setting, special effects, and the last thing considered is, "When the audience walks out of the theater or turns off the DVD player, will be start picking away at the holes in the plot?" That's sure what happened here.

"Hand me the gun, hon."

Recently in my local area a carload of gangstas unloaded some bullets on a rival gangsta, but they ended up instead killing a 7-year-old girl. The gun that did the killing was handed to the shooter by a 16-year-old girl who said she was "tired of being disrespected." Get out the shootin' arn, Ma...I'm bein' disrespected!" If disrespect is grounds for murder then we'll all be dead sooner or later. Who hasn't disrespected someone else?

In such a culture, where lack of respect gets the death penalty, it's not hard to believe that these youngsters are ready to kill, and to die, for something as trivial as the way people have treated each other since the first ape dissed that second ape. In the old days people fought duels over insults, now the "duels" are fought from the open windows of cars.

...and about cars, and before gun owners start writing me about being anti-gun, which I'm not (I'm anti-murder), there has always been this argument that gun owners make: "If guns kill people and you ban guns, cars also kill people so ban cars!" That would be difficult to do, because we depend on cars in a way we don't depend on guns, and also we rate things by their utility. Cars, baseball bats, hammers, kitchen knives, et al., can be used to kill, but that isn't why they were designed. On the other hand, except for shooting targets, animals and people, it's hard to think of another use for a gun. Their main purpose of existence is to kill. If the 16-year-old girl in the gangsta car had handed the murderer a baseball bat or a kitchen knife or a hammer, knowing he was going to kill somebody with it, then yes, she's also guilty of murder. If she'd handed him a baseball bat and said, "Knock that ball over the fence!" or a hammer and said, "Put another nail in the fence; that board is coming off," and he used the object to kill someone then that would be a whole different matter.

Years ago in the context of the then-current Columbine High shootings I wrote a letter to the editor of my local newspaper saying just those things. I added, "No one has ever driven into a school in a car and deliberately tried to run people down and kill them." Ah, never say never. I got an anonymous letter containing a photocopy marked FYI, of an incident just as I described as having never happened. The photocopy of the news story told how a person took his car onto a school playground and deliberately tried to kill some kids. The person who sent the photocopy missed the point of my letter, which was that the car wasn't designed to kill people, even though it could be used that way. It's a good thing, too, because cars are frightening enough, especially on the freeway in the morning, heading into work. It's scary watching people talk on their cell phones, put on makeup or read their newspapers while driving 70 mph. I want to holler bloody murder when I see it, and it's probably lucky I don't carry a gun or I might just start blasting away at such clods. That would be justifiable homicide, wouldn't it? People acting so cavalierly about driving at high speeds is surely disrespect of their fellow humans at some level.

Faking it

In the early 1990s I worked with a secretary in her forties, Brenda, who told me she had cancer in her leg, and that she would have to go on a medical leave. I found out later the cancer from her leg had been taken care of, but now she had a brain tumor. She told people in the office she had three months to live. This put everyone into a blue funk of despair. Cancer takes far too many people; a horrible disease.

The three months she had to live would have been up in August, and yet by Christmas she was still alive and it seemed to her friends, well. She then told them a miracle had occurred. The brain tumor had shrunk away and disappeared. We all thought, now that is a miracle.

Sometime later, five years or so, I was talking with her former coworker, Cathy, about Brenda. I remarked that it was a miracle how she survived brain cancer. She didn't have brain cancer, said Cathy. Say what? said I. She never had cancer at all, said Cathy.

Fast forward to today, and I was talking with another secretary, who was talking about yet another person who had cancer, a coworker of ours, Ann-Marine. Ann-Marie* was off work for several months fighting cancer, then came back to work. The problem was, as it later came out, she'd never had cancer. She just told everyone she did.

What gives? Why would someone say they have cancer when they don't? It came out in bits and pieces later that the two women, Brenda and Ann-Marie, had so-called "nervous breakdowns." I'm not sure what qualifies as a nervous breakdown. I've thought at times I might be having one, but I couldn't quantify it. What is a nervous breakdown, anyway? My guess is that it's when things get too much for a person, the stress level is so high they can't function. Or at least that's what I thought I was going through. But if that's what they are going through, then why claim cancer? My guess is that the stigma of something wrong mentally is greater than having cancer. Seems odd, but there are still a lot of people who have old-fashioned ideas about mental disorders, even of the temporary kind.

By claiming cancer, these folks are diminishing those who really struggle with that disease. My friend has had stepmothers and friends die of cancer. My wife's mother died of breast cancer in 1964 when she was 44 years old. A coworker of mine died of Non-Hodgkins lymphoma when he was 21, and several people I work with now and in the past have gone through the disease with whatever dignity they could muster. Some made it through, some didn't. But at least they had cancer; they weren't faking it in order to disguise another problem.

I'm not a shrink, so I don't know what such people who do such faking are called, but I'm sure it's a syndrome known to psychiatrists.

When I gave sympathy to Brenda because I thought she was fighting cancer and found out she'd been lying to everyone I felt angry, duped. Why would I trust anything Brenda said? If she'd owned up to her problem, "I have a problem with depression and I can't get out of bed," or "I feel like I'm dying all the time," I could understand it because I've been through it. But I'd rather tell people I'm depressed than lie to them about having cancer.


*Ann-Marie was an hourly employee, so she took the time off as a drop, no pay. If she'd been a contract employee, like me, she would have had to have a doctor's note saying she had cancer in order for her to receive disability from our employer. When she came back to work and her boss found out she had been lying about the cancer she tried to fire her, but Ann-Marie got a lawyer. The school district had no choice: under the Americans with Disabilities Act Ann-Marie could not be fired for having mental problems. I really have no problem with protecting the rights of people, but right now, a few years after her breakdown, Ann-Marie still comes to her job, just does little or no work. According to the lady who told me the story, Ann-Marie's current coworkers ignore her.

Time for beanie...

This image, which came from Pappy's Golden Age Comics, brought back memories of my first day of college. I was seriously out of place at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah, but my dad was a grad, circa 1942, and was determined I get my diploma from his old alma mater. I reported to school on Day One of my freshman year with absolutely no idea of what was going on. All I had was a list of classes to attend and a stack of textbooks. That was when I found out that freshmen were "required" to wear a ridiculous beanie for the first day. You know what a beanie is, don't you...they don't make them anymore, except as jokes, but they were a little skull cap, like the knife-wielding upperclassman is wearing in the picture above. Sometimes beanies had propellers, which is why eggheads are sometimes called "propeller heads." They were reputed to have worn these things as a nerdish fashion statement. I hope it was a lie.

Anyway, my experience in a beanie lasted about 10 minutes. I hated the idea, but dutifully put it on. I joined a group of other freshmen. We were accosted by a couple of grinning upperclassmen, who corralled us and told us we were going to learn the Westminister College school song. Luckily I was in the back of the group, so while they were learning the song I slipped off, found the nearest trash can and dumped my beanie. I wandered around finding my classes. The sophs, juniors and seniors had to notice I was a lost 18-year-old, but I wasn't wearing a freshman beanie, so thank god I was spared further torture.

There are other associations with the word beanie. There are Beanee Weenies, a "food" product I've never eaten, and the name probably put me off. Anything with the name "weenie" just doesn't sound appetizing to me. It doesn't help that a friend of mine used that term for people he didn't like: "That guy is a real beanee weenie!" He didn't swear, and I told him to start learning some real curse words because if he's mad at someone and calls them a beanee weenie they might just laugh him out of the place, if not put him on the ground.

There were those damn Beanie Babies. This is "Pugsley." I mean, they're cute, but c'mon...some people turned them into a cult. Are they still around and being collected?

There are the ubiquitous jelly beans, usually found on cubicle counters in the work place come Easter. I'll bet I've lost at least a couple of teeth to jelly beans.

Finally, there was the TV show, Time For Beany. The little boy character, Beany, actually wore a propeller beanie! Beany and Cecil was later a cartoon show that baby boomers remember, especially for the theme song, where animator/producer/director Bob Clampett insinuated himself into the catchy tune. Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent sang, "...in a Bob Clampett cartoo-oooon!" his voice going up in pitch.This is from the original puppet incarnation, before the cartoon show. It's early TV, folks! It's from YouTube, episode 50, originally shown in 1949. Beany is voiced by Daws Butler, Cecil by Stan Freberg.

Part-time polygamous wives found!

My search for a part-time polygamous wife to take care of me is ended. You can read about my search in these past postings from Paranoia strikes deep: here, here, and here.

Not only did I find one part-time polygamous wife, I found two! Sisters Rotunda and Globella Roundy of Hooten Holler, Arkansas, come as a pair. They'll join me shortly, when "we get Pa's old 1965 International Harvester pickup truck a'runnin.'" And as they put it to me in that same e-mail, "we-all'll be taking care of you-all like you-all should be taken care of by us'n." Well. I like that. They sound like a couple of nice gals. From their picture it looks like there is a Victoria's Secret in Hooten Holler. I can't wait to meet them.

In the meantime, wife #1, Sally, continues to spend her nights sleeping with the dogs. She's in an area called Olympus Cove right now, with a mountain in the back yard. Since the house where she is staying is in the foothills on a steep road, here's a picture she took from the back deck.

Sally has also taken pictures of the Salt Lake Valley. Here's a sunset with the California wildfires affecting our skies.

Next up for Sally, sitting for the daughter of her longtime friend. The woman has three rescue dogs, a couple of cats, and a miniature goat. I haven't heard of a miniature goat, but I'm sure Rotunda and Globella have some goats in Hooten Holler, because as they put it, they spend a lot of time, "a'feedin' the critters, like we'll be a'feedin' you." Sally says the miniature goat is known to butt the dogs. Maybe they should call him Butthead!

As you can see by this picture of my brother and me--I'm the shorter fellow on the right and my brother is the taller, slim gentleman on the left--I don't need to be fed, really, but I'm sure my brother could use some good ol' country cookin'. Biscuits and gravy, collard greens, fried chicken...yum. Bring it on, gals. I'm sure once they get their daddy's '65 IH pickup running they'll have their GPS set to all of the KFCs between Arkansas and Utah.

...an unregulated militia...

On February 12, 2007, armed with a Remington 870 shotgun and a .38 revolver, Sulejman Talovic, an 18-year-old Bosnian refugeee, entered the Trolley Square shopping mall in Salt Lake City, Utah. He killed five people and wounded four others before being killed by Salt Lake Police sergeant Andrew Oblad.

Recently the Supreme Court ruled that every American has the right to a gun. That well-worn amendment, “the right to bear arms,” “a well-regulated militia,” amendment has been interpreted by the highest court in the land to mean that we can all start packing.

Even if I was rabidly anti-gun I’d have to go along, just from the sheer weight of numbers. There are something like 50,000,000 guns out there. Enough that someone, somewhere, with relatively little trouble can get his hands on a gun. You’d have as much luck stopping a tsunami with your hand as stopping the flood of guns in this country. Talovic got his weapons with relative ease.

Off-duty Ogden City Police officer Kenneth Hammond was in a Trolley Square restaurant with his wife when he heard gunshots. His wife is a 911 dispatcher, so she called 911 and said there was shooting, that her husband was in the mall in civilian clothes, but he had a gun and was going after the shooter. When SLC police arrived at the mall he was shouting that he was an off-duty police officer. If he hadn’t police could have seen him with a gun and at the least ordered him onto the ground, at worst shot and killed him.

Utah citizens are permitted, after passing some requirements, to have a concealed weapons permit. Several of my coworkers have permits. Whether they carry guns or not I don’t know. They’re concealed! But any citizen, without any requirements at all, can carry a gun outside his clothing. He just can’t have a loaded gun. I wonder how many people who carry like that—and there aren’t many—live with that restriction. Of course gun-carrying civilians are met with suspicion and even fear by people they encounter. One gun-totin’ man was in front of a city council complaining that police were hassling him because he wears his gun outside. Well, they might do that because they wonder why the guy is wearing a gun in the first place.

I think some of these folks imagine themselves as heroes in the Kenneth Hammond mode. Maybe the Trolley Square killings brought dreams of glory to some of our local gun carriers. The Trolley Square killings are usually mentioned when defending the right to carry a gun: “If a citizen had a gun Talovic would have been stopped in his tracks.” It could also be that people who carry guns might be targets of people carrying concealed weapons out to commit a crime. Rather than being a deterrent, maybe a bad guy could see the weapon, then come up from behind the holstered person and shoot him, then go about his robbery business without the threat from that person.

A couple of weeks ago a man with a concealed weapons permit, George R. Harrison, killed a mentally ill man who was waving a backpack and acting out. Mr. Harrison said he thought the man was going for a gun in his backpack, so he shot and killed him. There was no weapon. Police questioned Harrison but let him go. It’s hard to tell right now if any charges will be filed against him. The law says you have to feel you are in imminent danger, fear of your life or great bodily harm before you can shoot someone. Lots of police have gotten off on the charge of shooting a suspect because they thought there was a weapon.

Some communities with tight gun laws, like Washington D.C., are upset because of the Supreme Court decision. We’ve had mixed results with our gun laws in Utah. I don’t think they’ve been effect long enough to know whether they’re doing any real good or not. Maybe it’s just the absence of harm that is enough.

Maybe someday I’ll be in one of the high schools I service and someone will start shooting. Maybe someone with a carry permit will jump in and take out the shooter. But the shooting itself would be extremely rare—it has never happened in the 102-year history of my school district—but someone jumping in to save me would be even more rare.

I have two pistols. Don’t tell any bad guys, because I don’t have any bullets. I guess I could wave them at a robber who entered my house, but then he could shoot me for pulling a gun on him.

Reasonable expectations

My brother-in-law, Jim, and I were talking last night about movies. He said the kind he doesn't like are movies that jump around in time. I'm sure a lot of people--maybe most movie-goers--might agree. The best example of this would be Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, which was told in a circuitous way. When I first saw it in a theater I was surprised and discombobulated by seeing the John Travolta character killed, then alive in a subsequent scene. I figured it out, though, and enjoyed the unusual way of telling a story.

What Jim says makes a lot of sense if you consider the way people view movies, or what their reasonable expectations are while watching them. If a story is told in a series of flashbacks or flash forwards it risks confusing and/or enraging the audience, who have come to an understanding of how movies are constructed. We go into the theater expecting a beginning, middle and end. If we get end, middle, beginning, or middle, end, beginning, or any other combination it can cause us to distrust the storyline, maybe even give up trying to follow it.

While I might like an unusual approach to storytelling, I'm also a believer in not pissing off or confusing the audience. If a filmmaker has a good story then tricking it up doesn't make it better, it just gives it a gimmick. About the only gimmick Pulp Fiction didn't have was 3-D. The order of the scenes was a gimmick; it also had the mysterious glowing contents of the suitcase, the fake background in Bruce Willis' taxi scene, and Samuel L. Jackson's Jheri Curls. Any one of those would be enough to either engage an audience or make them leave the theater wondering what the filmmaker was thinking.

Tarantino wasn't the first to make movies in an altered time format. Over 50 years ago Stanley Kubrick's film, The Killing, starring Sterling Hayden, was constructed in a way that it jumped around in time. The studio got nervous and dumped it on the bottom of a double bill in 1956 with Bandido starring Robert Mitchum. Since then it has taken on a classic status.

I have a coworker who gets confused by movies, and that's because she doesn't know what to pay attention to. She gets flustered by MacGuffins. For those of you who know Alfred Hitchcock's work, a MacGuffin is how he described the thing that the characters are interested in that means nothing to the audience. It's a plot device to move the story along. The MacGuffin would be the blueprints the spies are after, the stolen jewels the crooks are fighting over, etc. If you start worrying about the MacGuffin then you lose sight of the bigger story. I wouldn't know how to train my coworker to look at movies, because I thought we'd all learned how to watch them. They have a language, and we've learned to speak that language. If you're watching a film and it starts out in English and then switches to Swahili without explanation you're bound to be upset. Filmmakers should try to be less tricky about how they make their films, and just concentrate on the really important stuff, like swearing, nudity and hot sex. No, I'm kidding. I just wanted to see if you were following my own non-linear thinking.

Through being cool

When did I realize I was through being cool? It was about 1981, and I realized, looking around me, that the world had grown cooler, and yet I had stayed in the same place as I had been in 1968. I was cool then. Oh, so cool. I dug the sounds, the vibes, the what's-hap'nin'-now-brutha, the scent of herb in the air, the indelible experience of the psychedelic experience.

But in 1981 I was just another uncool, a former cool, no longer cool. I hung my head at the loss of coolness, the attitude of coolitude, but resolved, if I am not cool, if I am a--choke!--dork, or worse, a nerd, then let me be the coolest dork or nerd there is! but now, yes, now, I am still a dork, a nerd, but have achieved another level of coolness for that fact. Dorks and nerds have been become the new cool!

Devo, bless them and their devolved descendents, showed me the way, showed me the truth. I am through being cool. I will not be cool. I will run from, walk from, swim from cool. I will be uncool again. I will grow my hair to uncool lengths, wear the uncoolest of the uncool threads, the uncoolest shoes. I will devolve myself to 1968 again, and by that kind of cool, I will be totally--and finally--through being cool.

Taken for Granted

I'm not one for chick flicks--gotta keep my testosterone levels from dipping--but Sally and I watched a DVD of Music and Lyrics with Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore, and I was as caught up in it as she was. Maybe for a different reason, though. I wasn't as taken by the romance as I was by the recreation of an era, the 1980s pop music scene. Grant's fictional character was one of the two leads of the band, PoP, which had a hit single, "Pop Goes My Heart," brilliantly recreated in an eye-poppingly accurate music video, which looks straight out of 1984. Not since This Is Spinal Tap has a sound or image been done so well as pastiche.

I believe that Hugh Grant, like another Grant, Cary, is an underappreciated actor. It seems that actors who star in lightweight films like Hugh Grant usually end up in don't get the accolades and credits they deserve. The audience genuinely likes Hugh Grant, he is a charming and witty fellow, and the camera loves him also, but the folks who vote for Academy Awards just must not see what he does as acting.

Music and Lyrics might have come about because of the success of the real-life band, Wham! featuring George Michael. Michael went off into solo stardom, but what happened to his co-Whammer? Do you know that guy's name? I don't, and that's somewhat Hugh Grant's problem in this film. How does the "other guy", the one who didn't become a star, do after his initial success?

While Grant is doing his droll, charming, witty dialogue and patented stuttering, Drew Barrymore isn't quite as appealing as his love interest. I'm just not a big fan of Barrymore's, but that's a matter of personal taste. Lots of actors are very popular without having any appeal to me whatsoever.

Grant proved what a charismatic person he is in 1995 when he got caught with a prostitute, went to jail, then went on Jay Leno's show to give his mea culpa. The movie he was in at the time, Nine Months, could not have bought the publicity he brought to it. It was a hit, and Grant was forgiven by the public.

Something I much appreciated about Music and Lyrics is that the actors did their own singing; both Sally and I thought the vocals had to be dubbed by professional singers, but in a documentary included on the DVD we found out the songs were done by the actors. It turns out that Grant actually has a very pleasant singing voice. You can hear it in both these songs from the movie. The first is the "1984" song, "Pop Goes My Heart," and the second is a solo he does at the piano during a concert.

Yes, that's Kristin Johnston, playing Drew Barrymore's sister. Johnston is a big (and I mean that literally) favorite of mine since her "Third Rock From The Sun" days. The whole cast--with the possible exception of Barrymore, just my opinion--was terrific.

Push comes to shove...and worse

What's a drug dealer to do? He's got a really crappy clientele, lacking in serious brain functions, and the wholesalers he goes through for product could just as soon kill him as look at him. Paranoia is a part of his every day life, when he could get caught by police or killed by his rivals at any time.

The Pusher Trilogy DVD details the criminal activities of the Copenhagen underworld. It isn't any place you'd want to be. Copenhagen, yes. The drug dealers' world, no.

Pusher was an international hit in 1996. It cemented the reputation of writer/director Nicholas Winding Refn. A few years later Refn was facing bankruptcy so he and his partner made Pusher II and Pusher III, both superb films. Hopefully they put the production company back in the black.

In Pusher, Frank Jensen is a regular guy, except that he sells dope (and the characters do refer to their product as dope, one of many English words other languages have co-opted). He runs with a partner, Tonny (pronounced Tony), an impulsive type guy who brags about sexual conquests in very graphic terms. Tonny has the English word RESPECT tattooed to his scalp, but he gets little of it. Frank gets a request from a customer to make a large buy, brown heroin, but it has to be by tomorrow. Jensen goes to an underworld big shot, Milo (pronounced Mee-lo), a Balkan man who runs a restaurant, cooks and bakes. Milo promises him the product but warns Frank that he already owes Milo 50,000 kroner, and this will run his tab to 230,000 kroner. At today's rates that's about US$50,000. In one of those situations that happen, the cops show up as the transaction is going down, Frank runs, jumps into the shallow part of a lake and dumps the heroin. The cops hold him for 24 hours but have to let him go. In the meantime they show him a statement that they've gotten out of Tonny. Frank gets out, finds Tonny at a bar and beats him with a baseball bat.

The rest of Pusher is Frank's attempts to pay Milo what he owes him without getting killed by Milo or his chief henchman, Radovan.

If I thought that movie was nightmarish, Pusher II compounded it. Tonny, now with some brain damage from the beating inflicted on him by Frank, gets out of prison. He goes back to his father, the Duke, who runs a hot car ring. Next to the drug dealers, these guys are pussycats, but they're still criminals and still deadly when protecting their enterprises. Tonny can't do anything right. He steals a Ferrari, thinking it will please the Duke, only to enrage his dad because they only steal a car like that to order. The rest of the movie is one long slide for Tonny, as he screws up and incurs the wrath and derision of everyone around him. Finally he explodes in violence. It is something that has been coming on, but he has been repressing it until the moment. Like Popeye, "It's all I can stands, I can't stands no more!" Tonny goes after the man who is disrespecting him the most. The last we see of Tonny, he is heading out of town on a train, carrying a baby boy a prostitute claims is his.

When I was describing the movie to my wife, who wouldn't have watched it because of the subject matter, I told her that so many drugs were ingested in this movie I felt stoned when the end credits rolled.

Pusher III goes back to Milo, the underworld kingpin. Milo seems like an easygoing guy. Until someone messes with him. In this final entry in the trilogy Milo is trying to transact drug deals while cooking for his daughter's wedding. The story takes place during one day. Situations, going from bad to worse to even worse, pile up on Milo until his easygoing goes hard. He shows that like everyone else in the trilogy, when pushed he comes back with more than a shove. The last scenes, where he and his former top henchman, Radovan, whom he recruits out of retirement for this one last task, do the preparations for disposing of two bodies, is one of the most graphic and gory scenes I've ever watched in any movie. By the time it was assaulting my eyeballs I'd gone so far that I felt obliged to stick it out. It taxed my tolerance for the sight of viscera and gore, and was over the line, an indulgence by the writer/director. Still, the movie itself was so good I thought with a few cuts (and there are more than enough "cuts" of the gruesome kind in this movie) it could be made acceptable to a wider audience.

The trilogy is unrated, and there are scenes that could earn it the dreaded NC-17 rating if it were submitted to the MPAA ratings board. The acting in all three films is by actors I haven't seen before, and is universally superb. I was totally convinced I was watching real people doing real things. In many ways it reminded me, in spirit if not in fact, of The Godfather trilogy. It's set on a much smaller scale, rather than the epic proportions of the Mafia saga. But criminals are criminals when they're going after something. Whether they're bigtime crooks or smalltime, American or Danish, these are people you don't want to meet or do business with.

If you've got a strong stomach I'm recommending these films. Otherwise, don't chance them. I might mention I got my trilogy on loan from the county library. I'm not sure they know the content of these films.

Putting your best feet forward

While on my mail delivery route Friday I stopped at a bakery for a scone and coffee. I was the only customer except for a teenage girl sitting at a table, eating a pastry, drinking coffee, and talking to the teenage clerk behind the counter.

The counter girl had to make the coffee for me, and as she was preparing the coffeemaker a steady stream of customers came in. Most them were women, almost all young, but a couple of matures. I noticed that each of them, without exception, were wearing sandals, and with the exception of a couple, flip-flop sandals. When I was the Army we called flip-flops shower shoes because we wore them when taking a shower, so as not to get athlete’s foot or some other kind of noxious fungus. I never thought they were very practical; they might’ve been OK for the reason the Army gave, but not for everyday wear. There’s just no support.

Still, it gives a guy like me who likes to look at pretty feet a chance to gawk a little. Most people aren’t very stirred up by feet, no matter how pretty. I always wonder, why then do women go to the trouble and expense to paint their toenails, or to have a pedicure? Since the bakery was in the middle of an affluent neighborhood, most of the women in their flip flops had pedicures.

A man and his wife, who appeared to be in my age group, gave their order and then stood to the side so other customers could order. The teenage girl who was the sole customer in the store when I came in stood up and turned her back to look at something. She was wearing a sweatshirt that was printed on the back:

Sex

Crazed

Underwater

Bad

Ass

An acronym for SCUBA. The mature man and his wife saw the shirt. The girl sat down again. The man looked at me with an expression that seemed to say, “These young people nowadays…”

“Yep,” was a look I gave back.

If the girl had been in school she would have been ordered to remove the shirt, but she could wear it all she wanted outside of school. I wonder if her mom knows she left the house in that shirt? She was blonde, slim, very pretty, real all-American, and yes, she had a pedicure and pretty feet. The message and its tone of sexuality and badness on the back didn’t match the girl from the front.

Warped rotors and rubber lips

It's been a hectic week, and it's only Wednesday. Yesterday I had the rotors on my 2005 Ford Escape machined because the fronts were warped. When I braked I got a vibration. No, Brian Wilson, it wasn't a good vibration, either.

After plunking down $420 for rotor grinding, new brake pads all around and a 4-wheel alignment I headed in my now no-vibration car for the dentist. I had his fingers and drill in my mouth for the better part of an hour. I was too disheartened to ask what all of that cost. It's been heavy on the wallet the last few weeks. Hey, Bush, where the hell is that $1200 check you promised me? Did you forget to put a stamp on it?

On the way home I had some coffee, but had the foresight to bring a straw along because the left side of my mouth was numbed. Nothing like trying to drink hot coffee and not be able to feel your lips or tongue. You get more coffee on your shirt than in your mouth.

Later when I went to bed I fell asleep not counting sheep, but the $$$ I'd spent that day. For a guy who wants to save his money and retire within the next year it isn't easy to watch those hundred dollar bills flying away. I have the wallet snapped shut today. Let's see if it stays closed.

*******On another subject, right now in rotation on my car stereo is the CD Under the Covers Vol. 1 by Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs. They do cover versions of old songs, some of them once very, very popular ("Monday, Monday," "Different Drum," shown in a live version below), and some obscure but fine songs. It's like someone took my musical tastes of the 1960s and translated them to this CD. Speaking of otherwise obscure, I especially enjoy "I See The Rain" by The Marmalade (1967) and "Alone Again Or" by Love, which blew me away when I heard it. I had the Love album in 1966 and loved it to death. Get it? I loved Love? Oh well, maybe you had to be there.

Really great versions of "And Your Bird Can Sing" and "Cinnamon Girl," too. Hey, Matthew and Susanna, since the name of this blog is Paranoia Strikes Deep, have you guys been inside my head, picking my brain for song choices? If you have, c'mon back. I've got a whole bunch for your next CD.

Different Drum, live



Cinnamon Girl, live

Uncivil discourse

Is civil discourse dead? Of course not. Even in this most heated political season the candidates seem to be trying to hold on to some civility.

George Carlin died, and civil discourse wasn't his schtick. It was more like uncivil ranting. Curmudgeon, cranky George made a living by getting on stage and complaining about things in the most hostile tones possible. He also made us laugh our collective asses off.

I thought about Carlin when I found these three cards. A friend who worked in a print shop gave them to me many years ago. They made me laugh, and nowadays I can hear them being spoken in George Carlin's voice. I wouldn't want to get one of these cards,. It would ruin my day. But there are people I encounter every day I'd love to present with one. George Carlin wouldn't have needed the cards. He'd have gotten on stage, said what they say, and we'd all have busted a gut laughing.

Transamerica

Sally orders Netflix movies online. She has such interesting taste in movies. She is always looking for something beyond the big hits. The other day we received Transamerica, starring Felicity Huffman as Bree, a man in the midst of transgender reorientation; trying to talk in the voice of a woman, trying to act like a woman, while still hauling around a penis. She bails her son out of jail in New York City. A son she didn't know she had, conceived during a moment with a woman she knew in college. It's a road trip movie, as they make their way from NYC to LA, hence the punning title, Transamerica.

Bree's son, Toby, played by Kevin Zegers, is a jerk. He's a street hustler, druggy, who has sex with men for money. It's the son's "goal" to be in porno movies. Toward the end of Transamerica he's shown "acting" in a gay porn movie.*

We find during their time together that despite her life choices Bree is a very conservative person who doesn't approve of Toby's choices. It was billed in theaters as a comedy. There are some funny situations growing out of the story, but it's not a comedy in the sense of the Adam Sandler-definition. I found out about deep stealth, which is when transgendered people hide in their new roles, not letting the world know they are going through sexual reassignment. Because of her conservatism Bree is extremely paranoid she'll be outed. She is, when the boy sees her penis while she's urinating, and also in a restaurant when an intuitive 8-year-old points her out.

All of the actors in this film are excellent, but Huffman has to carry the movie. It's her credibility that is at stake. If we don't accept that she is a man trying to become a woman then the movie would just be a joke, a caricature. Huffman is a fine actor and I bought in completely.

There are some nude scenes. I thought the nude scenes of young men seemed on the verge of porn themselves, a near-fantasy of two young guys swimming nude while Bree looks on. The porn movie sequence, and a scene where the boy sees Huffman's penis. It's shown at a distance but it must've given the actress a giggle to wear such an appliance. Huffman also appears completely nude in a bathtub scene, after her operation, where she touches her new vagina. These scenes aren't gratuitous, but are an integral part of the plot. They earned the film an R-rating, but I don't think the movie would have been as powerful without them.

I was not surprised Huffman was nominated for an Oscar in 2005 for her role in Transamerica.


*He doesn't have an erection so a young man, a fluffer, is sent in to help him prepare. A fluffer is someone who has the duty of keeping the porn star erect through "oral stimulation." Thanks to Viagra they aren't much needed anymore. I imagine there came a point when fluffers had to go look for new jobs.

What is the job description of this position, and also what would a fluffer do when applying for a new job, answering questions on a written application?

Former job: Fluffer in movies

Describe your duties: Performed oral sex on male porn actors

Salary or hourly rate of pay: Are you kidding? I was supposed to be paid?

Do you feel you did your job well? You said a mouthful!

Some things never change

In the early '80s when both music videos and VCRs were new, I used to tape some of the music video programs that played on late night broadcast TV. They featured music I wasn't hearing on my normal radio stations. I remember this song, "Black Stations, White Stations," because--ahem--I liked the girl doing the singing. I liked her slim body and how she moved it when she was dancing.

I went on YouTube to find this video and after a few keystrokes found it not under the group name I remembered, M & M, but under Martha & the Muffins. This is an obscure video for an obscure song by an obscure '80s Canadian techno-pop group. I still like the girl, I still like her slim body, I still like her dancing. Musical styles change, but some things never do.

Happy Dad's Day

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Warren piece

Going through an old filing cabinet of mine I found this clipping from a 1992 newspaper. It's about my former coworker, Warren, and the suspicion police put on him after the disappearance of his wife.

I've told this story before, but here's the short course: I worked with Warren and his wife, Margo, in the 1980s. Warren was married with a baby daughter when he met Margo. They fell in love and he divorced his wife, marrying Margo, moving in with her and her two teenaged sons.

Warren had quit the school district where we worked and gone to work on the loading dock of a trucking company. Margo had gotten a job as head custodian at a junior high school. Warren was ass-over-teakettle in love with his wife, and because he did shift work would visit her at work quite often (irking the staff, too). One day in February, 1992, Margo disappeared, a search was mounted, but she wasn't found. A few months later a father and son, hunting in the desert west of Salt Lake City, found some human remains, all that was left of Margo.

During the time of the search and afterward Warren was the main "person of interest" to the police. A couple of years later a man confessed to killing Margo and two teenage girls, who he had buried on his uncle's pig farm.

Here's what bothers me about this case, and it's an object lesson for us all: if your spouse disappears, better make sure you have a rock solid alibi. Better make sure you have a half dozen witnesses who can testify to your whereabouts, or are seen on a surveillance camera somewhere to prove you were somewhere else when the spouse went missing. Better make sure you don't make any cell phone calls that can be interpreted as hiring a hit man. Some of this I learned on CSI, Forensic Files and Law and Order, but a lot of it I realized after closely following the Warren and Margo case. When the cops lock onto someone they think is guilty, they shake him like a dog shakes a rat. This blog ain't called Paranoia Strikes Deep for nothing. The way cops think will make you paranoid.

That a couple of teenaged girls had gone missing the same time as Margo didn't seem pertinent to the police. What the killer later confessed was that he had gone into the junior high school on that February morning looking for a junior high girl to kidnap and kill. Margo, who was a petite, pretty blonde woman, fit the size requirements.

Warren had a lot of flaws to his character. We fellow workers thought he was immature, a blowhard and braggart, an adulterer, and he was also a liar. "Liar" describes most of the rest of us, too. We've all lied to keep ourselves out of trouble. Warren passed two lie detector tests, yet the cops still thought he was their man. We others knew when Warren lied he was so bad at it he always got caught. He just wasn't that smart. So if he got caught lying about something minor he'd done at work and couldn't get away with it, how could be get away with lying about his wife's disappearance and murder?

Margo's killer spent years in the court system, was sentenced to death but beat the lethal injection by dying of a bowel obstruction. He was eating his court papers. He would have gone free forever had he not come forward and confessed, because the cops were so sure Warren did in his wife they were blinded to any other possibilities.

In the still of the night this boy is leaving on that midnight train to Georgia

The Five Satins were one of those vanguard groups of rock music, coming along with a doo-wop classic, "In the Still of the Night." Check out the movements. They'd segue into the Beatles, doing their own ballad, "This Boy." Crammed together, no moving around, but close vocal harmony. Can anyone ever believe how versatile the Beatles were? John Lennon went from this to "A Day In The Life," in just a couple of years.

Finally, the sublime Gladys Knight, and her famous Pips, show what slickness there was in the Motown hit factory. While the Five Satins look a little restrained, the Pips show the stuff that made them famous! Love that woo-woo! The total package. Gladys Knight joined the Mormon church and her bishop once said, "We're the only Mormon ward with 'Midnight Train to Georgia' in our hymnbook."

In The Still of The Night

 

This Boy 

 

 Midnight Train To Georgia

 

Big rat

My wife, Sally, has been in Pennsylvania since last Wednesday, staying with our son, David and his family. I mean extended family. David is one male along with six females, with the addition of his mother. Two of the females are his daughters. He must feel overwhelmed. Sally has been keep me updated on the goings-on. Our granddaughters are Bella, age 3 ½, and Gabby, almost two.

David and I took the girls to Chuck E Cheese last night for dinner. They were really excited until Chuck E Cheese showed up....this great big rat walking around waving at the kids, etc. All of a sudden when he headed toward us both girls started shrieking and Bella started climbing up me. It was so funny! He could see they were afraid, so he didn't come near again, but from a distance, he waved at them, and the shrieking started again! I guess if I was a little girl and a big rat all of a sudden was standing in front of me, I'd shriek, too! Bella showed a lot of dexterity when it came to playing a miniature air hockey game. She was surprisingly good and kept beating both David and I. When she got the puck in the hole, she'd jump up and down and we'd praise her. It was so cute! Now Gabby, on the other hand, was content just trying to pick up the puck and place it in the hole and retrieve it. That was the only game they liked. Later we walked down to the end of the mall and there was a really cool play area for young children. The girls liked the little playhouse the best, where Bella washed her hands, gave Gabby a bath and baked cookies.

Love, Sally

p.s. I've attached a few cute pix of the girls. Some are from our visit to the zoo.
We saw a family of Amish and tried to secretly take some pictures. That was interesting! One of the guys wasn't only Amish, but a dwarf, too! (if that's the politically right word to describe him) He really stood out!

*******

Yesterday I went to Wal-Mart for an oil change. For my car, not me. Yuk-yuk.

As I waited for the oil change I looked around a little bit to see what new goods our Chinese brethren were making us for 75¢ an hour. I went to the in-store office of my credit union, where I withdrew some cash. Finally, to kill even more time I went to the in-store McDonald's where I had a cup of coffee.

As I waited in line for my order I noticed people glancing over at me. As I walked to a table a young Mexican woman, sitting with her two children, smiled at me. I thought, ah, I've still got the old charm (operative word being "old".) Later as I sipped my coffee I noticed the same young woman at the counter, talking to a friend who worked behind the counter. They were speaking in Spanish, and they looked at me, then quickly looked away when they saw that I'd seen them. To tell the truth, I didn't think a lot of it. I got paged to go pick up my car, and that was a whole other adventure, since the clerk couldn't figure out where the Debit button was on the cash register. He had to go find help, leaving me with the store greeter, the old man who says, "Welcome to Wal-Mart," who proceeded to tell me how dumb all of the employees in that shop are. It all got figured out eventually and I went home.

Later on I was in the bathroom and looked in the mirror. I saw that my t-shirt was on inside out. My label was sticking out for all the world to see. I was exposing my Fruit Of The Loom! Good lord…no wonder everyone was looking. Too late to crawl under a rock and be ashamed, so I just put the shirt on the right way and went out into my yard to mow the lawn. C'est la vie.

Old School American Idols

This morning I'm home. I turned on the Today Show to hear Scott McClellan, former White House Press Secretary, explain why he is dissing his old boss--like that's hard--and I also saw the American Idols, Archuleta and Cook.

All three of those guys can sing! Well, McClellan sang only in a manner of speaking, but the two young Davids actually have good voices, good for the material they choose.

But if you want to talk about good voices, you go back over 50 years to The Platters. I used to listen to this music on the radio, but it was all over the place and I couldn't appreciate it like I can now. You look at the presence this group had, their harmonies, the outstanding lead vocal. This is Old School music at its best, great doo wop, great ballads.

Iron Sky

My friend Karswell sent me this video teaser for a new Internet movie that is coming to a computer monitor near you.



Intriguing teaser, wot? It is nothing like, but reminds me of a novel, Vengeance 10 by Joe Poyer, published in 1980. Americans land on the moon only to find a Nazi rocket of the V-class, crashed on the moon with a man inside.

Not only do we have Vengeance 10, we have Space Western, a comic from 1953 featuring Spurs Jackson, a cowpoke on Mars, battling Nazis who escaped to the Red Planet after the war.

Considering we got into space using the work of scientists who had been working for the Nazis during World War II it seems only natural to be entertained by stories like these.

R-A-G-G-M-O-P-P

Like more than a few other people I watched the finale this week of American Idol, the only actual time I've watched the program from beginning to end. I fed into the hype and I guess it's what passes for entertainment in 2008.

In 1953 The Treniers, led by twin brothers Claude and Cliff Trenier, appeared on national TV with their jump and jive, r&b, and pre-rock era rock 'n' roll. My dad used to sing their song "Ragg Mopp" to us while we'd be in his car (no radio, so Dad filled in). I can't help but wonder how a group like this would do today. They wouldn't be on American Idol because only solo acts are featured there, but how would a group like this be presented today? Watch how they throw it to each other in the first video, "Rockin' Is Our Bizness," and watch the great dancing in "Ragg Mopp." Don't mind the nonsense lyrics. This is entertainment, any era.

Saying goodbye

Yesterday, a clear spring day, we said our final goodbyes to our mom. My brother and I both spoke; it was a short service, conducted at the grave site.

Since our mother was the last surviving family member of her generation I was happy for those who attended. Mom had outlived just about everybody. As my cousin Carolyn put it, "She was the last leaf on the tree."

Mom is under the beautiful mountains, including Mt. Olympus, overlooking Salt Lake Valley.


It was a good day to say goodbye.

Mom with my son David in 1978.

My mother's death

Mom at the Acropolis in Greece, 1969.

My brother called me just after noon yesterday, telling me that the nursing home had called him: Mom was in distress, trouble breathing, time was short and that we'd want to be with her. She'd been ill with flu over Mother's Day. There was also a problem with blood loss from another condition. As her doctor told us, her blood was so low it wasn't carrying enough oxygen to her lungs.

When I got there Mom was very pale. Options with staff were discussed, and most discarded. If they did a transfusion we'd be back next month in the same situation. The only real option was a hysterectomy and at age 86, Mom just wasn't a candidate. She was too frail and as her doctor put it, "it would kill her."

So we sat down to watch Mom die. The doctor told us that she could last up to 48 hours, maybe 24. Mom resisted having an oxygen mask. She was like that, she would get claustrophobic. At the doctor's orders, the nurses administered morphine and Ativan for Mom's anxiety, which was very high.

Within 25 minutes, not hours, Mom died. She just stopped breathing. My brother and I stopped breathing too. We waited for the gasp to show she was still alive. We watched her for a few minutes and I went to get the nurse. "I think my mother has died," I said. Sure enough, that was it. My brother said, "That is so like Mom," referring to her famous impatience. "Let's get going!" Mom, who was probably in much worse shape than could be observed by the doctor or nurses, defied their timetable and got going early.

Mom had been in the Alzheimer's nursing facility for four years, since she broke her hip during a hospital visit for a blood clot in her leg. None of us thought she'd survive past the first month or so, but she not only survived, she thrived. She liked being around people, and she loved just sitting in her wheelchair while the activity went on around her. They took great care of her, but the person who is the most heroic in all this is my brother, Rob, who visited her every day, and attended to everything she needed. There aren't many people in the world who are like Rob. I'm counting myself amongst those who couldn't do what he did. He quipped, "This place is my social life." There will be a sense of loss for Rob. It was obvious to me that for him it wasn't an obligation, but something he liked to do; not just duty, but a purpose.

Mom hadn't spoken coherently in a few years. You could see that the words were trying to come out, but only once in a great while could very short sentences be understood. I had not heard her say my name in years, at least since she had been in the facility. Yesterday afternoon when I walked into her room and she saw me, she looked at me and said my name. As simple a thing as it may seem, it was astounding to me, and I will carry that memory with me.

Mom in 2006.

Send Grover right over!

Normally I wouldn't discuss something so personal, but we're all friends here, right?

Yesterday I went to a new dermatologist. I try to visit my dermatologist once a year and have him give me the once over, make sure I don’t have anything cancerous on my skin. I'm in the sun a lot. My regular doc had a stroke a couple of years ago. I went to a new dermatologist last summer, and she was such a babe I told my wife I wasn't going back. It's too intimidating having a beautiful woman looking at my zits, warts and moles. At a friend's recommendation I switched to Dr. W., who is male. Among other things my friend--who is a woman--said, "He's really funny and he's short." I don't know what that has to do with anything, but it's the way people describe other people.

Besides wanting to get checked out for skin cancer I recently developed a rash on my shoulders and lower back. I tried various over-the-counter products but nothing worked. My new dermatologist stepped into the examining room, and not only is he not short, he towers over me. No problem having him look at my scalp, which he did just by looking down. The rash he took one look at and said, "It's transient acantholytic dermatosis. It occurs mainly in men over 55." I remembered my friend describing him as funny, but that didn't sound funny to me. He gave me a prescription for a steroid cream and was out of the office like he was running a marathon. Considering how many people were in his office and how fast he was getting through them maybe every day is like a footrace for Dr. W.

I came home to a phone call from Sally telling me she had landed safely in Portland, Oregon, and she and her friends were off to lunch and to have some fun. I told her my story and added, "Dr. W. is as handsome a young guy as Dr. S. is a beautiful woman." That was because she'd given me a hard time after I told her why I didn't want to go back to the pretty lady doc.

When I came home I checked out the condition on the Internet and found out it's also called Grover's Disease. Grover's! Holy crap, that took me back to my son's childhood and his love for his furry blue Grover doll. He carried it everywhere he went. I'm guessing the Sesame Street connection might be why the doc didn't call it that. From the articles I read I found the condition goes away--after a year or two!--if not treated, but is easily treated with topical steroids. Whew. I found out the condition is brought on by sweating, which I do a lot of. In the winter it's worse, because I'm trapped in a coat, with sweatshirt over a t-shirt. There's nowhere for my sweat to go; it can't evaporate. The article told me to use baby talc.

So now I'm a talcum-powdered Grover!

(Thanks to David Miller for giving me the "blues" in this photo!)