Bob hates reality TV. What he really hates is the elimination at the end of so many reality shows, where someone is ritually exiled from the group, their torch is put out, the supermodel tells them they’re ‘out’, they are fired, or they are told to pack their knives and go. Which may explain part of the appeal of the show that has snagged Bob. Folding laundry one night, searching the TV for something to distract him, he came across The Real Housewives of Orange County. And now he’s a fan.

The Real Housewives follows six white, upper-class straight women who live in Orange County. They depict the Orange County lifestyle, which according to the show is gated communities of McMansions, Republicanism, rampant materialism and boob jobs. Cameras follow them around to catch them at their most entertaining worst. We are there when one of them goes to a consultation with a plastic surgeon to get her breast implants removed because her doctor says her DD’s are the cause of her back issues and her husband complains that he doesn’t want her to go too small.

Part of it is the unsparing but uninsightful eye of the camera. We see what the women do and what they say, but other than superficial commentary from the women themselves, we never get any real insight into why, for example, Vicki is so driven and controlling in her business and with her children, or why she drinks so hard at parties. (“They say I did a ‘woo-woo’ shot with the bartender,” she says, “but I don’t remember it.” A pause. “I don’t!” And then we see her on film, doing a shot with the bartender and shrieking ‘woo-woo!’ with him.) There is an old saying that people who marry for money earn every dime. The same might be said for these women, who may not have married for money, per se, but who certainly pay a price for their devotion to what they call ‘the OC lifestyle.’ Many have been married a couple of times, several have difficult issues with children, all of them have issues with their bodies. Read More »

Dramatis Personae: Me and Emily the Dog. Place: our sunroom, where my favorite arm chair for working is located. Local temperature: 54 degrees. I am sitting in the arm chair (squishy brown leather, able to hold two adults, tightly, or one adult and one child, or two children, or one human and one dog).

Me (shivering): Brrrrr.

Emily (moseying into the room): Hey, let’s cuddle. (Lopes up into chair, shoulders her way into 3/4 of the space) That’s better.

Me: Hey, I was sitting here. Share.

Emily (expanding more than a 40 pound dog could reasonably be expected to do): This is sharing.

I push back. Skirmish ensues, at the end of which we are each in possession of roughly half the chair. Resigned to temporary sharing, Emily noses her head under my left arm and begins to radiate warmth. I can feel my fingers begin to loosen up. I write for a while, check email. Occasionally Emily sighs gustily; with each sigh she expands slightly. At the end of an hour I realize that she is now in possession of something like 3/4 of the chair, and my right hip, jammed into the arm of the chair, is beginning to go numb.

Me: Shove over, Em.

Emily: Urgghhh. (This is a sound roughly resembling that of Lurch on The Addams Family when asked to do something.) Read More »

From IGN:

20th Century Fox and Apple have launched an iPhone tie-in site for the forthcoming sci-fi adventure film Jumper. In the Doug Liman-directed film, opening February 14th, a genetic anomaly allows a young man to teleport himself anywhere.

And later in the same article:

The Jumper iPhone site is formatted specifically for iPhones, allowing the user to experience the “jumper” phenomenon by redirecting them — “jumping” — to other cool iPhone sites. Just punch JumperTheMovie.com/iPhone/ into an iPhone browser and you’ll “jump” to a custom iPhone site.

Furthermore, the Jumper iPhone site offers a Jumper graphic novel (an iPhone first), wallpapers, trailers, character bios, and more.

It sounds like pretty much the same info and stuff that’s available on the regular web site but I can’t really tell. I don’t have an iPhone. If you punch that into a regular browser you’ll get redirected to the web version.

Some more over at Apple

Anyone gonna see that new movie JUMPER? You know the one where Darth Vader can ski and teleport? But look out Anakin, Mace Windu has a new hair cut and he’s gonna kill you!

As you know, I was an addictions counselor for about seventeen years, on and off. I genuinely liked almost all of my clients. It helped if they liked me back, because it made the work go easier. But even if they didn’t like me, we still had work to do. And it was their work more than mine. Often, the hardest sessions were the most productive in the long run. Sometimes it could go something like this:

:

Good afternoon, Michael. I see you have a new bucket with you.

Hi, Mr. Harper. You like the Hello Kitty on the side?

Very much.
…….
So, what would you like to talk about today, Michael?

Nothing much happening. Same old, same old, you know.

How’s your program going?

Um, work was pretty busy. I did a meeting on Thursday.

I think you told me last time that you might have found a new sponsor.

Yeah, he’s a good guy. Been clean three years now. You gotta respect that.

Yes.

It’s hard, you know. Sometimes I think about the old days. Back when I was all crazy. I’m a lot better now, but —

But what, Michael?

It’s like… I dunno… I just don’t feel… happy hardly ever any more.

That’s the brain changes, Michael. Everybody struggles with it. When you give up your bad habit, and all the intensity that goes with it, it takes time for your brain to adjust. It’s okay to not be happy while you’re working through it. You have to honor your loss, and learn to move onward. It takes time.

Yeah, I know… I just… Is this all there is? Just making it from day to day? Is this any way to live?

You’re still not sure it was worth it.

Yeah.

You’d probably be in the ground, Michael.

Sometimes I don’t remember so good, but I was wild and… and free, you know? Going balls to the wall like nothing else mattered. On a terminal buzz twenty-four seven.

I understand. You’re having euphoric recall. You’re remembering the good parts, but not the bad ones.

It was so great!

What about your family?

That part was great, too!…. Oh, shit. That’s awful, isn’t it?

You killed and ate them.

: Read More »

I haven’t settled on a candidate for President yet (but btw, today was T minus One Year and Counting! Thank God! … ahem). If anyone, I lean toward Edwards. He speaks truth and takes no prisoners.

But I must say that—pace Caroline (and frankly, I can’t find fault with anyone disgusted with any politician; our system is so broken that in order to succeed you have to be, at least in some small measure, broken by normal people’s standards)—I think Susan Faludi may be onto something with this article about Hillary Clinton:

American society characterizes women as caregivers based on their young years as mothers. And when the American media demand emotion and warmth from Clinton, they are voicing the demand of a child to its mother (a demand not made equally to its father).

But there’s an entirely separate realm of female caretaking that is, in fact, more relevant to national leadership and to Clinton’s candidacy. Daughters shoulder the overwhelming burden of the care of our elderly parents. This too is a sphere of women’s experience, far more familiar to the women in the middle-to-older age bracket who supported Clinton most fervently, but its precepts are very different.

The woman caring for her aging parent isn’t being asked to bolster a juvenile ego with the necessary dollops of cooing, mirroring and inspirational atta-boys. The availability that a child asks from a young mother is not the quality most required in a middle-aged woman caring for a mature parent — or a mature nation. Competence is. If that competence is backed by the humanizing force of tears, that is lovely and appreciated. But as those women at Kaiser knew, the moment called most of all for practical solutions and a reliable problem-solver.

The greatest show of nurturance those women could possibly evince was steeling themselves to stand in that line all over again and make that hectoring phone call to yet another doctor, even if they were perceived as a “bitch” by the receptionist on the other end.

In their appraisals of Hillary Clinton, the pollsters and pundits who have not gotten beyond that mommy/ball-buster teeter-totter narrative of American womanhood also have not begun to diagnose gender dynamics beyond the perspective of the little boy and his mom. A lot of female voters, however, may be factoring in a whole other kind of female archetype, whose wet eyes do not signal weakness and whose flashes of anger do not signal coldness, only pragmatic perseverance.

I think she has a point. I have never had the aversion to Clinton that many have had. I have issues with some of her policies, but I read her as hard headed, level headed, and competent. Who knows? Maybe that’s what her supporters see.

Anyway, read the whole thing.

It’s been a rotten weather week here deep in the heart of Texas. I’ve been out on my bike under gun-metal gray skies for most of it, getting wet and cold and deeply aware of my mortality in the rain.

Somebody, and I’m sure that you’ll tell me who, once said that all great art is about love and death. In this crummy weather, my thoughts have not turned toward warm buttery love.

Here’s Willie Nelson doing a stark meditation on the subject, in Dave Matthews’ ‘Gravedigger’. I can’t imagine anyone who might have a better face or voice for this video.

:

:

Of course, we also have Dave’s vision. It’s a lot more Grand Guignol than Willie’s.

:

:

Two very different artistic takes on the subject, and they both work well this week, for me. I even recognize that both are also about love.

Today’s better, but I’m still cold, and the blood is flowing sluggishly.

And, yeah, despite my determined attempt to go non-political, and tend only my own garden, I find it hard to avoid glancingly reflecting upon all the unnecessary holes in the dark ground that the Bush mis-administration has caused to be excavated during its brief and artless time upon the stage.

Time for another cup of coffee, I think.

:

A trailer for the Jumper game.

FLA_Medic of the Avian Flu Diary announces a new, incredibly useful resource, Get Pandemic Ready.

This issue isn’t getting much news play, but public health officials remain very worried about bird flu. Pandemics happen at the rate of about 3 per century, and we are overdue for one. The 1918 Spanish Flu killed at least 50 million people, and some estimates put it at 100-150 million — 2-5% of the world’s population, iow, with 20% infected. At that death rate, with almost 7 billion people on the planet, avian flu would kill as many as 350 million people, in a 12-18 month period. That’s the equivalent of the US population. Imagine the global impact. 1.5B would be infected.

H5N1 is still out there. Right now it’s killing 60% of the people who contract it, and it is slowly spreading and evolving to be a better match to our upper respiratory tract. Researchers are looking for solutions, and they’ve made some progress in developing means to detect and vaccinate against the disease. But huge obstacles remain with regard to production and distribution of vaccine and medications to fight it.

A pandemic will last a year or more. At even moderate rates of infection, as much as 20-30% of the work force will fall ill. Food distribution, utilities, even hospitals will shut down for extended periods. Therefore, experts recommend people stockpile now, before the pandemic hits.

 

The hallmark of Get Pandemic Ready is that households should stockpile three months of food, water (or purification capability), medications, and basic supplies.

I’ve already done this for myself and my family. Consider: if it doesn’t happen and you have prepared, you simply have some extra supplies you can use. If it does happen and you aren’t prepared, things will be much worse than they have to be for you and your family.

As FLA_Medic puts it:

Once a pandemic erupts, there will be a mad scramble to prepare. Millions (likely billions) of people will be caught flat footed and will all be trying to acquire the goods they will need to survive, all at the same time. Most will find they waited too long, and won’t be able to get everything they will need.

The time to prepare is now, before a crisis begins.

Just take it a step at a time. But don’t wait. Nobody knows when the pandemic will hit. Everything you do now will be one less thing you have to do then.

Doug Liman, director of Swingers and The Bourne Identity and an executive producer of The O.C., is the latest Hollywood talent to start a digital production company. Launching with an agreement to use striking writers from the WGA, the company, called Jackson Bites, will create content for the Internet, set-top boxes, mobile phones and other non-traditional methods, according to an emailed press release.

“If the last strike is best remembered for the studios attempting to show they could create programming without writers, this could be the strike where the writers show they can do it without the studios,” Liman said in the release, which stated that he would “not direct or produce any of the content in the new company,” but did not explain why. The company’s investment is from unnamed “new media and business investors.”

Link.

So, this one relates to Brad’s post on Unions, my thousands of posts on the Jumper movie (since Doug Liman is directing it) and Mauren’s post on dogs.

How dogs? Jackson Bites is named after Liman’s 11 year-old sheep dog.

One of these things is not like the other. I’m the one who isn’t upright.

That makes me, I guess, downwrong.

Right after graduating from high school in the spring of 1976, I went to work at Beech Aircraft Corporation (now Hawker Beechcraft) in Wichita, Kansas. My father was a Beechcrafter, a factory-line sheet-metal worker – and he had learned that the company had a policy of hiring college-bound kids of employees for summer work. So there was really no question of whether or not I would do it. I needed cash for school, and no other summer job would pay as well.

This is how I became a member, for three consecutive summers, of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (the IAMAW, or simply IAM).

I remember the hire-on procedure quite well, especially the first time: I filled out a long application form, then sat at a desk across from a necktied Company representative who scowled at the form and asked me the same questions to which I had already written answers. Then, once the Company man verified that I was the son of a twenty-year factory employee and that I wasn’t a goddamn hippie drug addict (yes, he asked, although not quite in those words), I was told that I was hired . . . and sent around a corner to the Union desk.

Read More »

Erin O’Brien has a regular gig with the Cleveland Free Times, a column called Rainy Day Woman, and this week she writes about rejection.

This is what it says:

Dear Writer,

Unfortunately this submission does not meet our current needs. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to read it and good luck.

- The Editorial Staff.

But you’re certain it says this:

Dear Fuckhead,

Thanks for sending this piece of shit submission. We laughed our asses off over it! Greggers thought the crap about the broad knitting booties for the dead baby was so funny, he highlighted it and tacked the page on the break room bulletin board. Trudy laughed so hard at the blood scene that Diet Pepsi squirted out her nose.

Publish it? Yeah, right. Maybe in our “Greatest Shits” issue. Ha!

Read the rest here.

To those of you who might have already read my posts about getting a dog in my blog, my apologies. But you know, I’m kinda excited and preoccupied, so:

We’re getting a new dog. We’re getting a rescue from a local Golden Retriever Rescue group. Our son is grown and out of the house. We have some disposable income. This whole exercise is clearly some sort of surrogate adoption experience.

It started with the adoption procedures. (That’s what the rescue group refers to it as, ‘adoption.’ Giving them a dog is called a ‘surrender.’) I filed an application and paid a fee. That was followed by a phone interview. And then a house visit, where we wre again interviewed and our home was inspected for suitability. We discussed what kind of food we would give the dog, where the dog would sleep, and promised to repair a couple of places in our fence.

Then we got a call asking us if we would foster a dog with option to adopt. That’s Hudson, the doofus pictured above. He’s 2 years old and was found running alongside the highway. The woman who rescued him has a child under two and another on the way and although Hudson is really good with her child, well, he’s a dog. And he is more than she can handle. Could we take him? Absolutely.

Yesterday I got the stuff for the nursery ready for him to come and live with us. Because we already have the world’s most annoying mini dachshund, we put up the old giant dog crate in our bedroom where Hudson could retreat to safety. But he needed a mat for the crate, of course. So I went and bought a mice comfy foam mat with a cover that fits in his crate. And he needed a new leash, and Shelly’s food is for Senior dogs and he’s not senior…well, you get the idea.

We’ll pick Hudson up on Friday.

At least there’s no baby shower in the offing.

…from my brother and sister-in-law.

Just sayin’.

Now and Zen Productions