Category Archives: television

BP: Bitchslap these ClusterFucking Punks.


CAUTION: These post is rated PG-13 for profanity and naked truth-telling. Consider yourself forewarned.

So. I know that BP stands for British Petroleum, but really – no, really – don’t you think if any random poll were taken lately, your average human being who HASN’T been living under a rock would vote for a name change?

I’ve got some ideas.

Bumbling Pinheads” or “Bastards of Pollution” (although that sounds almost too cool, like a band) or hey: let’s even change it to an acronym:

“Bitchslap these Punks.”

Here’s the thing: this fucking oil spill needs to be called something besides “an oil spill.” In fact, words fail me – and any reader of this blog knows: words rarely fail me.

I often wish my father were still alive, but I especially wish he were here today, because he had a fabulous way of making cussing sound charming and funny (he was a Marine; Semper Fi, Do or Die; the difficult we do immediately – the impossible takes a little longer.)

Daddy would be able to come up with some creative and apt phrases for this clusterfuck in the Gulf.  For cluster-fuck it is, no beating around the bush. Personally, I’m just sick and tired of all the sound bites and who should be apologizing to whom, and who should be paying for what.

The whole thing is simply and clearly a clusterfuck of the highest order, and why we aren’t seeing shiny, plastic-haired newscasters proclaiming things like:

Today’s update on BP’s clusterfuck in the Gulf…

Even snooty NPR should be naming it a “clusterfuck” in their calm, “we’re so fucking unruffled we don’t ever even raise our voices and we know you just turn us on to sound cool to your girlfriend, betcha didn’t even GET that last joke we told about Heidegger, ha ha ha…

I mean, HELL! This disaster should have people CRYING, for sweet Samson’s sake, but instead, as I’m perusing the Web for specific details, I see an actual report on a NY Times blog reporting a rig worker, Tyrone Benton, reported leaks in the Deepwater Horizon, the underwater drilling station that “mysteriously” exploded and caused this clusterfuck in the first damn place.

Benton TOLD his bosses. There are over 50,000 pages of e-mails and documents proving it. Like WAY too many people in charge, they put their hands on their ears and went “La-la-la-la-la-la I can’t HEAR you…” because it would have –

—  wait – cost BP money to fix.

They would have had to – OH… shut down. Fix the leak. THEN start back up again.

I SO want to sit down and play some poker with these assholes. Please, please, somebody set up a table and let me play some Texas Hold’Em with these jackasses. They are BAAAD betters.

I have two questions.

QUESTION THE FIRST:

Have these greedy motherfuckers NEVER seen a movie in their lives? I mean, come ON. Is it NOT the case, in every movie EVER made, that when some poor schmoe on the factory line sends a memo upstairs to the effect:

“Dear Boss Man: There is a leak in this very big, very dangerous explosive <insert nuclear power plant/enormous dam/evil death ray/weapon of ultimate destruction/oil rig capable of destroying all marine and human life within a mind-bogglingly large distance> which you might possibly wish to be made aware of, because so very much life is at stake.”

… That EVERY Boss Man turns out to be That Stupid and Greedy FuckHead Who Says To Himself and to The Equally Greedy FuckHeads on the Equally Evil and Greedy Board of Evil and Greedy Directors (while they all sit around, chuckling evilly and greedily, twirling their evil and greedy handlebar moustaches): “Ah, let it go, boys! I’m sure it’ll be all right! There’s MONEY to be made! We CAN’T stop PRODUCTION!

I mean, JESUS. As if this clusterfuck wasn’t bad enough. It’s also a fucking cliché.

QUESTION THE SECOND:

This is the one that scares me.

If Benton let the fuckheads upstairs know, and they ignored it, WHY did they?

IS IT BECAUSE THIS HAPPENS ALL THE TIME? HOW MANY FUCKING LEAKS ARE THERE IN THESE RIGS, ANYWAY?

That’s what keeps ME awake at night. That’s the argument I’d put in front of the judge that won’t let Obama shut down the damn drilling.

“Your Honor,” I’d say, if I were President, “You know what? These fuckheads KNEW, and were completely cool, calm and chilly-mostest about their pipes having holes in them like Swiss cheese. Now, Your Honor, what does that tell YOU? Do I NEED to paint you a fucking PICTURE?”

If Hizzoner did NOT see things my way, I think I might just have to take matters into my own hands.

And you know what? The very Constitution of Our United States, if y’all will recall, actually PROVIDES US PERMISSION for REVOLUTION.

If we’re not too covered with tar and feathers to take action by then, that is.

Want an idea of just how much crap is oozing out of the water, really?

Myanmar, Cuba, Iraq and Syria are the only markets in the world where Coca-Cola isn’t sold*; there are 1.2 billion 8-ounce servings consumed every single day across the entire globe. No surprise, really, right? Coke, although we don’t know it, in all probability secretly runs the world as a semi-benevolent dictatorship (but that’s another blog post.)

Y’all have no problem imagining that amount of fizzy sweetness in the world’s hands, right? Sucking down that carbonated, sugary zippiness, those multi-lingual belches, that dark brown, icy-cold satisfaction that only comes in a red bottle or can? We can all picture that because we all KNOW Coke is everywhere from the sandiest desert to the iciest tundra.

Now: imagine all that Coke is crude oil. 1.2 billion 8-ounce servings, all together now, Hallelujah, testify.

THAT is a CONSERVATIVE estimate of how much gunk is gushing out of the Gulf of Mexico. So far.

In truth, according to the NY Times, it might be twice as much as that.

I shit you not; it took me a solid thirty minutes to come up with that comparison, and I triple checked my math. In reality, Coke falls short of the crude oil by a scant bit, but it helps to give you a way to get your mind around the vast numbers.

You know what? BP has already proved itself completely useless.

They deserve nothing less than to be bankrupted, stripped of existence as a company, any remaining assets to be redistributed towards reparation. The entire oil business needs to be re-examined, restructured, and rebuilt from the ground up – or dismantled, if need be.

We all need to stop dicking around and get responsible. These are grownups acting like helpless children. Screw politeness, politics and petroleum-based products. I’ll walk, instead.

Sound impossible?

Then you just might have to call in the Marines.

# # #

* Source: Forbes.com

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Celebrities are NOT your friends. Stop caring.


(Full disclosure: I don’t know how to turn on or off my own TV.)

A very popular guy, I guess.

A very popular guy, I guess.

Is it just me? Or am I the only one who wasn’t friends with Ed McMahon, isn’t friends with Jon and Kate plus eight, the Olsen twins, and that Perez guy who, for the longest time, I thought was the Paris girl* and everyone was just misspelling his – I mean her – name?

I remember a couple of years ago, when that really blonde, sort of beefy-but-attractive-to-geriatric-gazillionaires, apparently, had a baby, and at every cash register, headlines loomed: “Who’s the father?” Even my oldest, wondered aloud to me: “Who do YOU think is the father?” My daughter even knew the woman’s name, which escapes me now, for the same reason I gave my daughter then:

“She’s not my friend,” I said to my daughter, “therefore, I don’t care, honey.”

“Mean!” my daughter said.

celebs“NOT mean,” I tried to explain. “PR machine. I don’t know this person. YOU don’t know this person. Probably only a handful of people really know this person. Why DO you care who the father of her baby is, anyway? Because you’ve heard of her? Just because she’s famous? Is that REALLY a good reason? Do you care who the father of THAT woman’s baby is?” I pointed to another pregnant woman in Eckerd.

My daughter, as usual, rolled her eyes, as she predicted another rant coming on, so I stopped.

Give me one reason to care about Ed McMahon. He’s dead. I’m sure his family is very sad, as they count their inheritance from all the cheesy-ass commercials he shilled for: Publisher’s Clearing House, that stupid rip-off “Cash For Gold” scheme, and other “your premium will never go up no matter how old you get” life insurance scams.

I’m not sad. I probably would be, if I’d known him. Maybe he was nice; maybe he did all that crappy shit and gave all the money to the poor.

I don’t KNOW, because HE WAS NOT MY FRIEND.

Another set I don’t care about? Jon and Kate. Or their eight. I mean, as humans, and regarding their basic humanity, I care. As soon-to-be children of divorce, my heart goes out to them.

That’s it, though; I’m done caring now.

The Olsen twins? I don’t even like them on reruns of Full House when my kids have it on; they’re annoying as tots, and they’re even more annoying now. Have a sandwich, and then please go away; I haven’t seen you in a decent movie … let me think… ever.

If your work becomes good, I might go see it, but otherwise, I don’t give a rat’s ass about your personal life. Call me up for advice, or to vent your issues; my public number is on my Twitter profile page. Intrude on me and MAKE me know you. Then, in pity, I might care. Otherwise? Fail.

I’m STILL not sure what the difference is between Paris Hilton and Perez Hilton; as far as I can tell, they both irritate and bother to distraction everyone I know equally, so I’m pleased to remain as ignorant as possible.

Neither Hilton produces any work of any kind as far as I can tell. They write no good books, they make no good movies or television, they don’t even perform synchronized swim routines. They seem relatively worthless, as far as I’m concerned, although presumably, their friends value them – if, indeed, they have any who care about them as people, and not for their popularity.

I am NOT a friend to either of them, so… I don’t care.

Do I sound jealous? I’m not. I have well-known friends, whom, out of respect, I will not mention here. Being famous is not all it’s cracked up to be.

I myself am relatively famous, actually, but only if you’re about five or six. (See InklessTales.com) I’m a former newspaper columnist, and now a performer – I give concerts all over – but I seriously enjoy my privacy. As, I’m sure, do most famous people.

Ever notice I’ve NEVER mentioned my kids by name here?

I get the feeling it must SUCK OUT LOUD to be a celebrity on the vast scale. Who, going through a divorce, or having just had a baby, or hell – just having made a movie – done their job, after all – wants the indignity of no longer being able to enter a drugstore, a mall, a regular street, without being hassled, subjected to stupid, inaccurate headlines, freakish curiosity on a circus sideshow scale, and otherwise normal human beings completely losing their minds at the mere sight of them?

You think YOU’RE embarrassed on a bad hair day? Imagine if there were twenty photographers outside your door, eagerly salivating to get pictures of your bad hair? What about the day after you polished off that Ben and Jerry’s, and you’re using the ponytail holder to keep your jeans shut? You REALLY want the whole world watching?

How would YOU like to be professionally THIN? AND have the whole world thinking they have the “right to know” your weight?

Remember, people: if a celebrity is not your friend – THEY’RE NOT YOUR FRIEND.

Just because someone appears on your TELEVISION in your living room every week, it doesn’t mean they are ACTUALLY IN YOUR LIVING ROOM every week.

Having personally experienced the odd, off-putting feeling of having people recognize and greet you whom YOU DON’T KNOW, let me tell you: the first couple of times, it IS kinda cool.

After that: it gets a little weird.

I can only imagine what it does to you when it starts locking you in your house, and forcing you to interact only with other celebrities, also locked in that world of weirdness.

Maybe we should just leave them the hell alone – and start paying attention to our real, live friends.

::-::-::-::

* Speaking of weirdness on a vast scale, the first Google result for Paris Hilton that came up was the EARTH-SHATTERING news that the woman had switched her Blackberry for an Ericsson phone. If you Google me, you get almost 10 pages, but in none of them will you find news of when I myself switched my Blackberry for my indestructible G’Zone phone. You know why?

Because from the looks of it, this is the biggest accomplishment this poor wretch of a girl has managed recently. Sad, really. So very sad.

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Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose. Duh.



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The evolution of... us.   

 

 

 

The evolution of... us.

Naturally, when I can hear Panic! At the Disco as clearly out of my daughter’s headphones as I can as if it were coming out of the CD player speakers, I turn around and nudge her –

All right, rewind (hey, rewind – that suits our topic – back to that later) since this IS a blog about reality, I’ll tell you “the reality.

First, I will hopelessly raise my voice, even though the “any reasonable person” test would fail. Duh. Why would I even think she could hear me?

Then, despite oncoming traffic, and my meager driving skills, (having spent WAY too much time in NYC, where a car is actually a burden, unless you’re my grandmother, and you have a summer place AND a suburban house – oh, wait, she had drivers, too, scratch that – back to the fact that I SUCK at driving)  I will turn around and raise my voice again, in the incredibly stupid hope that the louder I am, the better she will be able to read my lips.

This is fruitless, because she is not only rocking out, but also poring over the densely-packed Panic! At the Disco lyrics I printed out for her from the Internet before we left, so she’s bobbing her downturned head.

Is her little sister helping me out, with a nudge, or a shove? No. She is observing, amused, because SHE is intelligent enough to see the futility of my behavior, but not the danger — until I turn back to face the windshield and turn the wheel back so that we’re back on OUR side of the highway, thank you very much.

“Mom!” they join in chorus as the van whips them both suddenly sideways.

“Ah,” I say smugly. NOW I have their attention. And: enough with the volume. Turn it down or go deaf.

Personally? I feel completely hypocritical.

I myself blasted music in my own ears as a kid.

No headphones in MY house, though. Headphones were inherently rude. Want to sequester yourself from the family? You’ve got a room for that, dear.

So I’d go. I’d face the speakers toward each other, with room just enough for my head, lie down between them, play my music as loudly as possible without disturbing everyone else in the house, and achieve maximum eardrum damage at the same time.

When CDs first came out, I remember hearing someone tell someone else in our house: “I’M not going to replace my record collection. These compact discs are just going to be fad, like 8-Tracks or Betamaxes.” (Always a lurking observer; like “Harriet the Spy,” I was always listening, and if I was not heard, I was seldom seen, even in plain sight.)

A comment all but forgotten until I stumbled upon a very old cassette (it was Junk Week in our neighborhood) of Jesus Christ Superstar. Thinking my daughter, who is obsessed with Andrew Lloyd Webber (why, heaven only knows; I really have to turn her on to Puccini, from whom the man steals everything), would be interested, I scrounged up a cassette player somewhere and pressed PLAY.

What a tremendous drag, having to rewind and fast-forward to the spot you want to hear!

My youngest was baffled at the clunkiness of the technology, repeatedly asking me: “What… what are you DOING, Mom? Can’t you just FIND it?”

As if she didn’t remember me having to rewind all her “Big Comfy Couch” VCR tapes.

Change is frightening when it comes barging rudely into our lives. We, in this age of technology, are constantly being thrown new ideas, and having to catch them or feel bypassed.

Even TV commercials mock us: “26 million people just Twittered this. Another 26 million don’t know what that means.”

My daughter begged me for an EnV phone, with a keyboard for texting. At the time, I thought it was a ridiculous splurge. Now she texts me so often I want one myself, just to keep up. People text me more than they talk to me.

“Google” is now a verb. MS Word has destroyed my spelling skills, because my brain works like this: if I don’t HAVE to store it, it gets dumped, to make room. Now I know I can Google something, or have Word spell it for me, or my little calculator do math for me.

When my Internet goes out, I’m lost.

But when I first got online, I couldn’t imagine what I’d ever do with it.

Now I can’t live without it. Well, okay, I could. But I sure would miss it.

Still, as different as all this seems: what’s really different?

I use Google the same way I used to call the reference desk at my local library.

I use MS Word the same way I used to use my College dictionary.

I use Twitter the same way I use the world: I’m gregarious to the point of ridiculous; I can hardly leave the house without making a friend, and my house is usually full of people to the point where I wonder sometimes if I’m a magnet and they’re all iron filings.

In a good way.

The French have a saying. (Actually, practically the entire language is sayings; it’s mostly the reason they’d just rather speak your damn English.)

Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Hmmm….

But things DO change. And if you’re looking for a very good, commonsense approach to dealing with change, here’s an excellent article on The Huffington Post from a correspondent/acquaintance of mine: Tom V. Morris – from Twitter, of course.

But remember: they stay the same, too. So relax. 

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Heroes: the Soap Opera



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My kids are into vampires. This, I believe, is mostly because of the extremely lengthy but otherwise compelling Twilight books by Stephanie Meyer, which portray these creatures of the night as good guys with super-powers, able to run really really fast, dodge bullets, leap tall buildings in a single bound…

You get the picture.

They want to BE vampires. They, of course, would never EVER feast upon the blood of mortals, like EVERY OTHER VAMPIRE story has it. MY kids would be TWILIGHT vampires.

In other words, they’d be superheroes.

Just like we ALL wanted to be when we were kids.

supermanlogo1Isn’t that still a favorite question – even as adults? “What would YOUR superpower be?” Because, of course, no fair hogging all the superpowers. There’s only ONE Superman, and he gets them all. Every OTHER superhero just gets ONE big superpower: The Flash is fast; the Green Lantern gets that ring thing he can do tricks with; Batman has brains, a good personal trainer and a giant bankroll; and Marvel plays it coolest of all: they have the Mutants, each of whom has some genetic fluke that gives them one and only one way-out cool thing they can do – and that thing almost always comes with a drawback, just to keep it real.

Rogue, of the X-Men, from Marvel Comics

Rogue, of the X-Men, from Marvel Comics

 

 

Rogue, of the X-Men, for instance: all she has to do is touch you and she’ll suck the life out of you. Try and mug HER in a back alley. The drawback? She can’t feel the touch of another human, or they’ll die on her. That’s gotta suck.

So when NBC came up with a series idea of a bunch of everyday mortal human beings suddenly springing into action with super-powers (one each, they played fair, although why it all happened at the same time they never DID explain), the little kid in me got as excited as I used to get when December came and all those stop-motion cartoons lined up the programming schedule. (“I wanna be a dentist…”)

Heroes. Whoa. How cool. Maybe it could STILL happen to me. I can still remember the night our family went to see the Michael Keaton Batman movie, and my sister’s boyfriend and I stayed up, jazzed, for hours that night, planning how we could do it – we really could, it was possible…

What a freakin’ disappointment this show is turning out to be.

They should be showing it during the day, instead, and calling it “As the Heroes Turn,” or “One Hero to Live,” or “General Heroes.” It’s become QUITE the soap opera. You hang on for a whole hour, watching them cast maudlin, moody glances, full of portent, at each other, then just as something is about to happen:

To Be Continued.

You can tell he's flying, see, because the buildings are so far away? See?

You can tell he's flying, because the buildings are so far away? See?

They must have laid off the special effects crew due to the hard times we’re all facing. Because even The Flying Senator? All we ever see of him now is him landing from a distance, with a sort of a swooshing sound.

 

It’s all Evil Plot now, to corral the innocent people who have superpowers, by sticking Hannibal Lechter-ish gas masks on them, orange jail jumpsuits, and put them Who-Knows-Where? We don’t know, because of course they always escape.

They scatter. They come together, cast moody glances at each other at temporary safe houses, then scatter again, to find another place to cast moody glances at each other.

The most common lines now are: “We’re stronger together than we are apart,” and “We must keep this a secret.” 

Okay: let’s see some strength. Let’s see you kick some bad guys.

But who are the bad guys, now? Even the superguy they started out with, who they wrote up REALLY scary in the first season, named Sylar, is iffy, now that we’re getting to know him. Sylar is the scariest because he’s unfair: all he has to do is come NEAR a superguy, and he absorbs their power: FOREVER. Wait: that’s more than one superpower.

Not fair. And scary. So he has EVERYBODY’s powers. And, I, having gotten annoyed, and missed a few episodes, observe now he’s a “shape-shifter,” which means he has that 1970s “Bionic Woman/Fill In Your Action Show of Choice” power of magically looking – and somehow SOUNDING (how they manipulate their larynx, too, these shape-shifters, is amazing) – like anyone else. Height, weight, shoe size, and everything.

I guess the Laws of Conservation of Mass go out the window in TV Land. Unless, maybe, if Sylar turns into a really short guy, he becomes as dense as kryptonite.

But what I really like about Sylar is his power to make his hair look really stupid.

Sylar, all glam, and Sylar, with silly hair.

Sylar, all glam, and Sylar, with silly hair.

Wonder Twin Powers, Unite!

Wonder Twin Powers, Unite!

Some of these superpowers, though, I never did understand. Like this woman, whose name I forget. She started out with a double in the mirror: super-strong – and evil. Then, somehow, this double came out of the mirror, and I’m not sure if her twin became good or evil, or merged back into her or not. Either way, it reminded me eerily of “Wonder Twin Powers: Unite!” Only without the plastic cereal bowl ring.

 

Ando - Hiro's sidekick, now superhero - hence the fist, I guess.

Ando - Hiro's sidekick, now superhero - hence the fist, I guess.

Hiro – ha, ha, hilarious name choice – and Ando, though – the two Japanese heroes – I love. Hiro has this extremely stubborn sense of honor, while Ando is just this regular guy, looking to get laid if possible, although Hiro can usually bring him around from the dark side. Somehow, though, during the period I missed, Hiro lost his power to stop time – which was one of the cooler powers – and Ando now has gained SOME power which I can’t for the life of me understand.

 

Looking SO much cooler than the nerd he is.  

 

Looking SO much cooler than the nerd he is.

 

And, to top it all off, they’re toting some SuperBaby, which belongs to yet another reluctant mind-reading hero, which they just delivered (no pun intended.) This mind-reading hero has taken on another power – and they made THIS fair – because the guy that HAD this power died, SO SOMEBODY needs to be able to have his eyes turn white and draw cartoons of the future.

He apparently sucks at it, though, because in the episodes I’ve seen, he JUST finishes his drawing – as in – “Wait – that’s us, getting arrested!” and the police barge in. So he really needs to work on his timing.

The problem with all this?

I’ll keep watching. Because after all, if I can’t BE a superhero, I’m still a sucker for any show about them. Especially flying. Because if you ask me? THAT’S what I want my superpower to be.

 

Think we can pull this off? Are you serious?

Think we can pull this off? Are you serious?

 

OK, NOW we're deadly serious. But for some reason, this cheerleader has a new team?

OK, NOW we're deadly serious. But for some reason, this cheerleader has a new team?

 

 

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