Category Archives: Popular culture

Happy Birthday, John. Oh, give it a rest, Paul…

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A friend shares this today:

LONDON (AP) — A hint of autumnal Beatlemania was in the air Sunday as Paul McCartney — for the second time in his improbable life — climbed the steps of Old Marylebone Town Hall to get married.

True, thousands of heartbroken female fans crowded the venerable registry office in 1969 when he married Linda Eastman and only a few hundred showed up Sunday as he wed American Nancy Shevell. But the feeling this time was not regret at the loss of a bachelor heartthrob. Instead there was joy that McCartney, regarded as a national treasure, seemed happy again…

Oh, give it a rest, Paul. Still getting married, when it’s past time for him to be spending his time bouncing Vera, Chuck and Dave on his knee.

You know, at least he could have waited a day. Today is John Lennon’s birthday (his 71st). And Paul is gallivanting about with his new bride (here’s a picture) and his dyed hair, while poor John is moldering in his grave. Or would be, had Yoko not had him cremated.

John would pose the question, how does he sleep? The answer, of course, would be, not alone…

Seriously, I wish the old guy all the best. The happiest Beatle should continue doing his best to enjoy life. But honestly, my first reaction actually was, “Oh, give it a rest.” Then I realized what today was.

Finally got into the Hatch, and here’s all I found

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Yeah, I know this is stupid, but I was struck by this drain I saw in a public restroom this morning.

It reminded me of a logo I’d seen a lot recently.

Yep, I’ve been watching “Lost” on Netflix.

When I saw this drain, I felt like maybe I was supposed to stay there and push the button every 108 minutes. But I didn’t. So if really bad stuff happens today, you know whom to blame.

Sorry, ladies: ‘Moneyball’ makes the Top 5 list

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After I did my “All-Time, Desert-Island Top 5 Baseball Movies” list recently, I got congratulations from several readers — readers of the female persuasion — for my good judgment in putting “A League of Their Own” on the list. And it was, I believe, a good choice.

Unfortunately, it just got sent down.

I saw “Moneyball” yesterday. Definitely Top Five material. I saw it with my Dad. He said it was the best film he’d seen in awhile, and the best thing Brad Pitt has ever done. I don’t know if I’d agree with that last part, being a fan of both “Fight Club” and “Snatch,” but the film overall is definitely one of the best baseball movies ever. (And the best acting in it, as usual, is done by Phillip Seymour Hoffman — although I thought Billy Beane’s front office staff was impressive, too.)

In fact, I’m going to put it at number four. Actually, technically — as an example of filmmaking — it should probably be at No. 2 and giving “The Natural” a run for its money. But while it is unquestionably all about baseball, it’s about other things, too. Communicating the essence of baseball is not quite its mission the way it is with the top three. It is also about change, and modernity, and the never-ending struggle between statistics and intuition. The top three are more about answering the question, “Why do I love baseball?” “Moneyball” is about that, too — but not entirely.

Hence my new Top Five:

  1. The Natural – American myth-making on the grand scale. If you wanted to put a movie on a spacecraft to explain to aliens what the game means, you’d choose this one. It’s perfect.
  2. Major League — Silly, yes, but a good complement to the reverential seriousness of “The Natural.” Hits all the buttons in explaining why the game is fun.
  3. The Sandlot — Maybe because it’s set in the days when I was a kid, and also spending hours on a sandlot — without uniforms, without adult supervision, just being kids — this really resonates as a depiction of the ball-playing experience of those of us who will never play in the majors.
  4. Moneyball — Just an incredibly well-made film, independently of being about baseball — perhaps the best on the list in that regard. While it’s about the triumph of Bill James‘ statistical method, there’s plenty here for us intuitive types to cheer for.
  5. Eight Men Out — A masterly, credible evocation of how the game’s blackest scandal came about, told in a way that you can understand motives. Say it ain’t so, Joe.

Now that I look at it without the Tom Hanks one, I’m starting to wonder about “Eight Men Out.” I’m not sure this list is final. I think maybe I’ll refer this to the blog’s Ad Hoc Committee on Baseball Movies. The committee will be assigned to watch both of those again to decide conclusively which should be in fifth place.

Until then, “A League of Their Own” is sixth on the list.

All-Time, Desert-Island Top 5 Baseball Movies

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All right, let’s lighten things up a bit.

Our conversation about “Moneyball” yesterday was starting to turn in this direction, and I see the movie has inspired others to compile such lists — such as here and here and here — so here are my All-Time Top Five Baseball Movies:

  1. The Natural — American myth-making on the grand scale. If you wanted to put a movie on a spacecraft to explain to aliens what the game means, you’d choose this one. It’s perfect.
  2. Major League — Silly, yes, but a good complement to the reverential seriousness of “The Natural.” Hits all the buttons in explaining why the game is fun.
  3. The Sandlot — Maybe because it’s set in the days when I was a kid, and also spending hours on a sandlot — without uniforms, without adult supervision, just being kids — this really resonates as a depiction of the ball-playing experience of those of us who will never play in the majors.
  4. Eight Men Out — A masterly, credible evocation of how the game’s blackest scandal came about, told in a way that you can understand motives. Say it ain’t so, Joe.
  5. A League of their Own — This one’s about a lot of stuff other than baseball, but a great period piece with great characters. It would make the list if there were nothing in it but “There’s no crying in baseball!”

 

 

 

 

 

Actually, to be honest, I would have been happier with a Top Three list. There’s a drop-off for me after the first three. (But in keeping with the Hornby principle, I disciplined myself to come up with five.)

“Field of Dreams” almost edged out “A League of their Own.” But while it is emotionally affecting, and certainly invokes the love of baseball well, I find it hard to ignore its flaws. I’d read the book, and while it was awfully weird for the writer character to be J.D. Salinger, it was jarring when it was changed in the movie. And Ray Liotta as Shoeless Joe (the title character of the book) was really disappointing, particularly as I’m such a fan of Liotta. It’s like he phoned it in, and it’s hard to believe the director let that happen. D.B. Sweeney’s characterization in “Eight Men Out” was much more persuasive. You actually believed in him as a conflicted illiterate from South Carolina.

As for the other Kevin Costner baseball movies — I never liked “Bull Durham.” It had a moment or two — a conference on the mound, the bit about “The rose goes in the front, big guy” — but beyond that it left me cold. Then, far less noticeable, there’s “For the Love of the Game.” All that has to recommend it is a pretty good evocation of what it’s like for a pitcher who realizes late that he’s pitching a perfect game. The rest of it I could do without.

There’s wonderful acting in it, but I never really got into “Bang the Drum Slowly.” And I should like “Pride of the Yankees” more than I do. Perhaps I should see if I can get it on Netflix, and try again.

The end (almost) of violence

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In my previous post, I referred to the “peaceful times” in which we live. That’s counterintuitive for many people, for two reasons: First, modern communications make them aware of far more, and more widely spread, instances of violence than they would have known of in previous eras. And second, those things grab our attention — indeed, they are reported in the first place — because they stand out as exceptions to the peaceful rule.

There’s a very good piece in The Wall Street Journal today (there are always so many wonderful pieces in that paper on Saturdays — the only day I take now, after my subscription price more than doubled) taking the long view, and explaining why “we may be living in the most peaceable era in human existence.” None of what it says is surprising or new — except perhaps for the statistics — but it’s nice when someone takes a moment and pulls it all together.

In “Violence Vanquished,” Steven Pinker describes six major declines in violence through human history. The first is one that our friends who believe that government is the worst plague ever visited upon mankind should contemplate:

The first was a process of pacification: the transition from the anarchy of the hunting, gathering and horticultural societies in which our species spent most of its evolutionary history to the first agricultural civilizations, with cities and governments, starting about 5,000 years ago.

For centuries, social theorists like Hobbes and Rousseau speculated from their armchairs about what life was like in a “state of nature.” Nowadays we can do better. Forensic archeology—a kind of “CSI: Paleolithic”—can estimate rates of violence from the proportion of skeletons in ancient sites with bashed-in skulls, decapitations or arrowheads embedded in bones. And ethnographers can tally the causes of death in tribal peoples that have recently lived outside of state control.

These investigations show that, on average, about 15% of people in prestate eras died violently, compared to about 3% of the citizens of the earliest states. Tribal violence commonly subsides when a state or empire imposes control over a territory, leading to the various “paxes” (Romana, Islamica, Brittanica and so on) that are familiar to readers of history…

Since those days, violent death has shrunk to less than 1 percent, even if you factor in war-caused disease and famine. Oh, and we’re not just talking about good or benevolent government. Even the plunder economy of the Romans had its positive effect:

It’s not that the first kings had a benevolent interest in the welfare of their citizens. Just as a farmer tries to prevent his livestock from killing one another, so a ruler will try to keep his subjects from cycles of raiding and feuding. From his point of view, such squabbling is a dead loss—forgone opportunities to extract taxes, tributes, soldiers and slaves…

And this is not just about pointing out how wrong the Tea Party is (although deeply wrong it certainly is). Some of our other friends on the left view commerce as though the taking of profit itself were inherently evil and destructive to mankind. Quite  the contrary; it is a civilizing force just as is a well-ordered government (which is why the haters of government and the socialists are both wrong):

Another pacifying force has been commerce, a game in which everybody can win. As technological progress allows the exchange of goods and ideas over longer distances and among larger groups of trading partners, other people become more valuable alive than dead. They switch from being targets of demonization and dehumanization to potential partners in reciprocal altruism.

Finally, back to that matter of perception. If you wish to be simplistic, you can say it’s “the media’s fault,” for always telling you about the bad things rather than the good. If you ever spent, say, a month having to make decisions for a media outlet, you would realize how foolish that is. Even when times were flush, a newspaper’s or television station’s resources, and claim on your time, were finite. If you’re a town crier, your job is to tell people about the one house that’s on fire, so they can rise up and do something about it. You are useless if you instead say, “99.9 percent of the houses in the village are fine.”

That’s not to say I don’t decry the effect. In the grand scheme, media have had a devastating effect on society simply by playing their rightful role as government watchdogs. Over time, readers have come to the shockingly erroneous conclusion that government is nothing but crooks and waste, and the ability of government to be that civilizing force has been seriously weakened. As for violence — one of the most distressing developments of recent years in media is the rise of 24/7 TV news, which creates unlimited time that has to be filled. Consequently, violent crimes that would have been purely local stories 30 years ago are now thrown in the faces of the world constantly. There’s always something bad happening somewhere. This type of coverage creates the impression that it’s happening everywhere all the time.

If you can gain access to the full piece, it’s worth reading. So might be Mr. Pinker’s book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

The intelligent hype around “MoneyBall”

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I had never heard about “MoneyBall” until I heard a story about it on NPR yesterday morning.

Then last night, I heard Terry Gross interview Brad Pitt about it. OK, they talked a lot about “Fight Club,” with Ms. Gross asking the star how many people come up to him and say, “The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club.” Not that many, actually. But the bottom line message of his being there was, “See ‘MoneyBall.”

Then this morning, I hear a review, also on NPR, from Kenneth Turan. Again, the message is to see the movie.

Also this morning, the teaser across the top of The Wall Street Journal (you know, the space devoted to football, year-round, in The State), was all about “MoneyBall.” It referred you to a big story headlined, “Baseball After Moneyball,” and a review by Joe Morgenstern, which says this film “…renews your belief in the power of movies.”

Then, in my email this morning, I get a link to the Roger Ebert review:

In the 2002 season, the nation’s lowest-salaried Major League Baseball team put together a 20-game winning streak, setting a new American League record. The team began that same season with 11 losses in row. What happened between is the stuff of “Moneyball,” a smart, intense and moving film that isn’t so much about sports as about the war between intuition and statistics.

OK, I get the message: I want to see this movie. Not only because I like good baseball movies, but because I’m very interested, as readers here will know, in “the war between intuition and statistics.”

But I have to say, I’m also quite impressed by the hype. Not just the volume of it, but the quality.

Note this isn’t your usual slam-bam action movie kind of promotion, that washes over you like a tidal wave and either pulls you into the theater or makes you run, screaming, for higher ground. The kind with lots of stuff blowing up. The kind that would never concern itself with “the war between intuition and statistics.”

This is targeted. This is more subtle. And it grabs people who are into baseball as a Thinking Man’s Game. Grabs them every which way.

Nice job by whoever was handling the media relations on this. I mean, everything they did was rather obvious, but I don’t remember the last time I saw these particular venues flooded this way for one movie. The buildup, from my perspective, was last-minute, but compete, and effective.

I may even shell out money to go see it in the theater. Which for me would be remarkable.

Madness has taken hold of Netflix

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Did you get an email this morning from Reed Hastings, head honcho at Netflix? I did. Here’s an extended version of it on a Netflix blog. I am spared the trouble of writing a full response, because an NPR blog has spoken for me:

Netflix has figured out that people are very upset about its decision to split streaming video and DVD delivery — a decision that got it in huge hot water earlier this year. Customers who had previously gotten both streaming and DVDs for a single price would now have to pay separately. If you only use one or the other, you could pay less, but if you still wanted both, you’d pay more.

The Netflix response? Separate the businesses even more. In a new blog post, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings explains that for some reason, he has concluded that separating the businesses completely is going to help people understand what’s going on. Thus, Netflix will not send DVDs at all anymore but will only provide streaming, while the company’s DVD business will happen under the new “Qwikster” brand.

Hastings seems to be operating under the premise that customers don’t really understand what’s going on; that they are angry because they think that a single business has increased its price when in fact it has merely split into two businesses that charge separately. Presumably, the idea is that making the split more definitive will make people slap their foreheads and say, “Oh, now I see. Netflix actually lowered its prices, as long as I don’t buy Qwikster! And new Qwikster is cheaper than old Netflix! I’m coming out ahead, sort of, if I don’t want all the services I used to get!”

The only problems with this approach are that its underlying assumptions are almost certainly wrong, and that it ignores major inefficiencies that will be introduced for customers who do, indeed, want to continue to use both streaming and DVDs. Now, if you want both, you have to go to two different sites with two different queues, you have to pay two different charges to two different entities, and in general, you have to have two different memberships. That’s not psychologically better for consumers. That’s buying two things which are both less helpful than the single thing you could get before.

It’s like a shoe company deciding to sell right shoes and left shoes for 12 dollars each where pairs of shoes used to be 20 dollars and thinking that consumers will notice the lower 12-dollar price but not the fact that it buys only one shoe….

Good response, and I hope NPR will forgive me for quoting it so extensively (please go to NPR and fully experience its services).

Lemme ‘splain somethin’ to you, Mr. Hastings: Neither your DVD service nor your streaming service stands alone; they are complementary. OK, so maybe the DVD service is complete in its way, as a fine service if this were the year 2001. But you and I know (or think we know) that Web streaming is the way the business is going to go, so if you are survive you have to get into that business big. Which you have done.

But here’s the critical point you’re missing: Your streaming business (which you laughably call “instant”) does NOT stand alone. It is not complete. Perhaps you’ve noticed that you are unable to get permission to stream most popular, recent titles. Therefore if your customers want a full service that will provide them with a full selection of the movies and TV shows they want to see, they have to supplement their streaming with DVDs. Which you seemed to get until, quite suddenly, recently.

If I weren’t so dependent on you, I’d drop your service now. But I got rid of my cable (or all of it except local stations, which almost amounts to the same thing), so almost all of the video content I ever watch now comes from you. It’s not the added cost, although that’s not pleasant (I dropped the cable because you were such an economical alternative). It’s the way you’ve done this.

I used to think that Netflix was a company that knew what its customers wanted. Not so much now.

Ideal local TV interview: “Foom! Foom! Foom!”

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Power Lines Fall on Crashed Vehicle, Driver Trapped: MyFoxPHOENIX.com

This morning, Jack Kuenzie of WIS brings my attention to this. This guy is being billed on The Daily What as the “Second Coming of Chris Farley,” and I can see that.

I also see a little of Hurley, the guy from “Lost,” even though this guy isn’t nearly as big as either of them. Know what I mean, dude?

The situation was extremely serious — as KSAZ in Phoenix described, “The driver of an SUV was trapped Thursday afternoon when he lost control of his vehicle and it rolled over and struck a utility pole.” But the entertainment value in this description is undeniable.

The MB strip is still the MB strip…

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Last weekend, I took my eldest granddaughter (the one you last saw in England) with me to see Ocean Boulevard in Myrtle Beach. I knew she had seen “Shag, the Movie,” and I thought she might want to see the real thing — within limits, of course. She had had a hard day. She had suffered multiple jellyfish stings earlier that day, which was pretty traumatic, but she seemed largely recovered, so we drove up to check it out. (She’s OK.)

I had expected not to find much, since they tore down the Pavilion several years back. But except for that former landmark (and the amusement park across the street) being replaced by a gaping hole in the night, things were pretty much the way they had been back in the day. The people in the cars crawling slowly up and down the strip were full of people who were more like tourists than the Surging Youth of Shag, or American Graffiti, but at least for a block or so there, it all felt about the same. More henna tattoo and piercing stands than I had remembered, but it was all in the tacky spirit of the thing.

Pushing our way through the throngs on the sidewalks, I said, “Kinda like London, huh?” She was too kind to say, “Not a bit, you old fool.”

We stopped on the street to get cotton candy, and there it took awhile, because there was just this one guy working behind the window. One big, hulking guy with a shaved head, a gold chain, and a Fu Manchu mustache. And a T-shirt, which you can see above. A guy standing in line outside made catty remarks about the man in the booth, but was careful to do so outside of his hearing.

I thought that image kind of captured the spirit of the place, so I share it with you.

A few words about football fashion

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Most mornings, I read both The State and The Wall Street Journal over breakfast. This morning, I was struck by a certain contrast.

The WSJ had, teased from the front and filling most of a section front, a feature on the coming fashion season.

The State had a fashion spread, too. But it was football fashion. That says a lot about who we are, don’t you think? The fashion thing may have seemed odd to old-time readers of the Journal, but the football stuff looked right at home in the hometown paper.

Here’s a thought: The new Maryland unis looked pretty good. They’re sharp, innovative, and yet invoke tradition, really telling you where they’re from.

Wouldn’t it be great (and I’m bracing myself as I say this, at the height of Garnet and Black Fever time) if the Gamecocks wore solid indigo blue uniforms with white lettering, and the Palmetto tree (in white) on one shoulder and the crescent moon on the other? That would say so much about this being the University of SOUTH CAROLINA.

It would also, politically, position the school as THE flagship university in an indelible manner.

And it would look really, really sharp.

But I’m not holding my breath for that to happen.

What? They got a FASHION season, too?

Some videos that are more in the UnParty mode

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Ran across the above awesome video of a classic moment, and thought I’d share it with you. That was sort of Leon’s big moment in the limelight. I had the album, and that was my favorite part of it — even more so than Harrison and Clapton both playing lead on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”

Then, when I was getting into that, YouTube brought my attention to the item below, and others like it — which blew my mind to another place entirely.

I had heard about him being on Shindig, but I not seen video. Leon Russell’s moment had not yet arrived in 1964, but he was ready for it. Even though he hadn’t settled on The Look.

Anyway, I thought I’d share these with you as a sort of sorbet — something more in the UnParty taste, to cleanse the palate after those Republican and Democratic videos yesterday.

The new normal: This is what a complete network TV crew looks like today

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The other day, I was at the presser at which Jon Huntsman announced that Attorney General Alan Wilson was supporting him (which I still intend to write a post about, but haven’t had time to go back through all my notes), and at one point I happened to look around and think how very, very young most of the media people were.

When I stood in that same place two years ago representing The New York Post, in front of that same (I think) lectern, listening to Mark Sanford tell about his surprise vacation in Argentina, I didn’t think that. I saw mostly usual suspects I had known for years. (Although I did notice in photos of the gaggle later that I had the grayest hair in the bunch. It was one of those “Who’s that old guy? … oh!” moments.)

But the biggest difference between this group and the media mob scenes I experienced when I was as young as these kids were was that the TV crews are so much smaller. As I saw Ali Weinberg of NBC packing up her stuff after, I mentioned to her that back in the day, her network would have a four-person crew covering a presidential candidate: the talent, (at this point she started saying it along with me), the camera guy, the sound guy (and back then those two jobs usually were filled by guys), and the field producer. Now, it’s just her. And she’s in front of the camera, behind the camera, carrying the equipment, handling her own arrangements, Tweeting, and I don’t know what all.

Of course, it’s been this way for several years now. I remember Peter Hamby and others doing the same thing four years ago.

But seeing someone as petite as Ali getting ready to carry all that stuff kind of dramatized the situation. Yes, Ali agreed with me, all told it probably did weigh as much as she does. And no, she didn’t need any help.

Her affiliation reminds me of the NBC crew I kept running across in Iowa in 1980 when I was following Howard Baker, who was running in the caucuses that year. I rode with Jim and Flash (the sound and camera guys, respectively) through an ice storm in a four-seater plane between Des Moines and Dubuque. Just the two of them, the pilot and me. The pilot kept squirting alcohol on the outside of his windshield to make a clear space in the ice about the size of his hand to see through to fly. When we got out on the tarmac — which was covered in ice — I went to put my overcoat back on, and the wind caught it and I started gliding across the runway like a ship on the sea. (I only realized later — after the crash of Air Florida Flight 90 into the Potomac in 1982 — how dangerous that trip was.)

On another occasion, the producer of that crew — a pretty young woman who reminded me of the actress Paula Prentiss — overheard my photographer, Mark, and me discussing where we were going to stay the night and holding open our wallets to see what was left inside. She offered to put us up if we were in a bind. Producers had that kind of cash to throw around in those days. Like Ali today, we said no, thanks.

Those days are long gone.

Before the storm: “Irene!”

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Thursday, Friday and Saturday, as different parts of the East Coast anticipated the coming battle against the elements, and I heard the code word over and over and over, before anything had happened in the area where the name was coming from, I kept thinking of the above.

The relevant part is all in the first 27 seconds of the clip. Excuse the language. These are soldiers, heading into battle (and to sudden death, in the case of one of the men saying it), and their mothers aren’t around.

Why did USC build the Greek Village, anyway?

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Yes, I can think of some reasons, but since all of the ones I think of are… unpersuasive… I continue to wonder whether there are any defensible reasons for having devoted that choice real estate to such a purpose (not to mention putting the Strom Taj Mahal workout center in a location that only the Greeks could walk to conveniently and safely).

If you know of any, share them.

Here’s the thing about this sudden discovery by the university that fraternities tend to encourage unseemly behavior (“USC officials, Greeks debate hospital trips, strippers,” The State) — I’ve never understood why their presence is in any way encouraged at public institutions of higher learning.

At all of our colleges and universities today, administrators know that one of the most serious problems they face is binge drinking, and other activities that most of us associate with… well, Greek life. It astounds me that, in the 21st century, we even allow these organizations onto campuses, much less do anything to make them feel welcome. Not that we independents haven’t been known to chug a brew or two in college, but most of us didn’t join societies that, to the larger world, are essentially seen as drinking clubs.

I could see it if these associations had a salutary effect — say, if they militated against such irresponsible behavior. But I’m not seeing much indication of that.

Of course, I’m prejudiced. I went through college in the early 70s, which is actually the time that the cultural phenomena we associate with the 60s kicked in across most of the country. In my day, there were Greeks, but they seemed terribly anachronistic. It was something my Dad did (Pi Kappa Alpha), but not cool people in my generation. By the 70s — or at least by 1978 — they were associated with a benighted past, an object for satire. It was like, if you were in a frat, what century (or at least, what decade) were you living in? I understood that some people had their arms twisted by their parents into joining their frats and sororities, but what was the motivation beyond that? (There was this one guy who kept calling to invite me to check out his frat, and he only did it because he was bugged by his Dad, who worked with my Dad. I always came up with excuses to be elsewhere.)

The fact that people actually attached importance to this presumed bond — which is a perfect illustration of a granfalloon — has always puzzled me, and even caused me to think a little less of the human race. (While different, it’s distantly related to the way I feel about political parties.) To share another anecdote…

Once, when I was a student at Memphis State, a bunch of us were playing basketball on an outdoor court next to my dorm. Some guy got mad about something stupid and pointless, and put on a disgusting display of petulance, quickly convincing everyone that he was a total jerk. Finally, he decided to walk away, pouting. The attitude of every guy present was, Good Riddance. Every guy but one, who had to chase after him and try to… I don’t know, console him or commiserate or whatever. “We all said, what the hell, man? The guy’s a complete d__k! Come back and play.” There was some reason that his departure mattered to us, I forget what that reason was. Maybe he was taking the ball with him. Otherwise, we probably would have said Good Riddance to him as well.

Anyway, he said he had no choice but to run after that guy, because… he was his fraternity brother. We all looked on in disgust at this display of completely misplaced loyalty based on nothing more substantial than that.

But I’m sure some of you have a different perspective. Please, help me understand the ways that frats contribute to institutions of higher education.

Clue me in as to why those brick palaces, in the core of our community, add to our community.

Saw “The Help” last night…

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I don’t get to the actual movie theater anymore. Even though I’ve largely cut off the firehose flow of entertainment into my house, between Netflix and the DVDs I own (most recent acquisition: a Blu-Ray of “True Grit”), I’ve got more movies to watch than I really have time for — without paying those ridiculous ticket and concession prices.

But I have seen five movies this summer, which is unusual for me. Here they are, in order:

  1. “Thor“
  2. “X-Men: First Class“
  3. “Green Lantern“
  4. “Captain America“
  5. “The Help“

Oops, did I give you whiplash there? Did you think you knew where you were going and then, WANG!, a sudden change of direction.

Well, I went to the first four with my son, because of our shared interests in comic books, and the last one was my wife’s idea. We went to see it for our anniversary last night.

I went thinking, “This is my anniversary present, because this is a chick flick,” but I enjoyed it. And not just because of the views of that social outcast “Celia.” It was just a well-told, real-life story about people. Of course, I guess a lot of things would look like that after the other four movies I saw before it. (Best of the bunch? “Captain America.” But I expected that. The one that most exceeded my expectations? “Thor.”)

Something that struck me at the end, though: During the credits, I got up and looked around, and noticed two things. Most of the audience was female, which I had expected. And most of the audience was white. I found myself wanting to interview the audience, to get their impressions, and ask how it spoke to them and their lives. Did it match their memories? How do they think life has changed since then, and how stay the same?

More than that, I wanted to ask black folks who weren’t there: Why not? I can guess some reasons why not, but I’d probably be off-base. Then again, this audience, while numerous, may not have been representative. This was out at Harbison. Demographics would have been different somewhere else. Probably.

But I didn’t bother anybody with questions. It was our anniversary.

Last anniversary, we went to a bourbon tasting at the Capital City Club. That is to say, we went out to dinner at the club for our anniversary, and before that there was this bourbon tasting that was free to members (I think I’m remembering that right), so I managed to talk my wife into attending. It was fascinating. The speaker was a great-grandon of Jim Beam, and a very colorful and knowledgeable guy.

This year, we decided on a more low-key celebration. And “The Help” served the purpose well. It was particularly meaningful because the central character has the same last name as my wife’s maiden name. OK, that’s just a coincidence, of no interest to you, but we found it interesting… sort of like the family in “Driving Miss Daisy” being named “Werthan.”

This ultimate libertarian fantasy could make super-gory Reality TV — IF they’d allow the cameras

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I'm picturing sawed-off shotguns -- but no federal marshals like Sean Connery to stop you from using them as you like!

Bart had to know he was going to set me off on a laugh-fest when he shared this:

Pay Pal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel has given $1.25 million to an initiative to create floating libertarian countries in international waters, according to a profile of the billionaire in Details magazine.

Thiel has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties. The idea is for these countries to start from scratch–free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place. Details says the experiment would be “a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons.”

Wowee. If you want to read the whole story, here’s where Bart got it. And here’s where they got it.

the part that really cracked me up about this particular libertarian fantasy is where they envision “looser building codes.”

You’re going to be living on, essentially, an oil platform — an extremely physically limited space — in the middle of the ocean? You’d better have the strictest building codes in the history of the world. In fact, while you’ve got me going — “building”? Really? You’re saying that these Überflakes would be able to take it into their heads to build new structures, according to the whims of each Ayn Randian individual, in a shared space that exists on the oceanic equivalent of the head of a pin?!?!?

For the engineering even to be feasible, you’d have to design the whole sovereign city-state all in advance, on shore. I’m talking physics here, not political philosophy. Sure, you could allow for expansion, but only within the context of the original design, or the whole thing would become untenable. A desert island, maybe — if it’s really huge, so these cranky individualists can spread out and not get on each others’ nerves. But on one of these tiny things? Really? You mean, somebody thought about this for more than five seconds, and is still considering it? And this guy gave them a million and a quarter?

But yeah, let’s roll with this! Go ahead and eliminate building restrictions entirely! Stick planks out over the edge like on a pirate ship and put condominiums on them! Who’s to stop you?

Combine that with the “few restrictions on weapons,” and these few individuals should be able to make a lot of money in the Reality TV market by putting cameras in every nook and cranny (if they can suppress their strong libertarian prejudices against such things — which I think they could for enough moolah, which libertarians crave). As entertainment, it would rival anything the Roman Colosseum ever dreamed up. And it would be perfectly legal! No one could say thee nay?

Imagine it, those of you who have actually been paying attention to the way humans behave in reality. Surely we’ve all encountered the phenomenon of neighbors suing each other over minor infractions of the neighborhood covenant. The ill will gets to bad that people move away from their dream homes. Imagine the tensions in this super-tight space — no rolling lawns to act as a buffer — with “looser building codes” and everyone packing an arsenal!

Sawed-off shotguns. That would be my weapon of choice in such tight quarters.

Anybody ever see “Outland,” with Sean Connery? It’s “High Noon” transferred to a mining colony on one of the moons of Jupiter. No ray guns, but sawed-off shotguns. (That was the touch that made the movie.) Awesome.

That’s what a Seastead would be like, as envisioned. Only without the federal marshal, which was Sean Connery’s role (and don’t ask me how a Scot got to be a federal marshal — it’s the future!). I suspect Thiel knew all this when he gave them the money. It’s pocket change to him, and maybe he thinks it would be fun to watch.

Live at Walmart! With its business threatened, the megastore tries something new

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I’d never seen this before, but I certainly saw it tonight. I was wandering through the men’s clothing section (did you know you can’t find plain white boxers at Walmart any more? this was the fourth one I’d tried), and I started hearing something that could only be live music. So I flipped on the video on my phone and kept approaching, and above is what I saw.

I’d heard Walmart was troubled. Remember, I put this WSJ story on my Virtual Front Page last night:

Wal-Mart Loses Edge

Perception That Retailer No Longer Has Best Prices Undercuts Sales Turnaround

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is losing its longstanding reputation for offering consumers the lowest prices, complicating its efforts to end a two-year sales slump in the U.S.

The Bentonville, Ark., retail colossus became the world’s largest store chain by avoiding sales gimmicks through “every day low prices” on everything from food to sporting goods under one roof.

But surveys by retail consultants, analysts and brand experts now find that Wal-Mart’s aura of price leadership has faded since the recession, because customers who searched for better deals sometimes found them at competitors such as Dollar General Corp., Aldi Inc. and Amazon.com Inc….

It certainly didn’t look troubled tonight. Based on my difficulty in finding a checkout line that was neither too long (the “express” lanes”) nor featuring people with more than one filled cart. (I wrote on Twitter while waiting, “Waiting in crazy lines at Walmart. Apparently, a lot of people are simultaneously planning polar expeditions…”)

Not  that I’ll mourn if Walmart suffers a bit. Walmart is just one of a bunch of factors that killed the newspaper business. You’ll recall a time when grocery stores were a huge newspaper advertiser, along with department stores. Well, Walmart threatened and undercut them both with a strategy that did not require regular local advertising: With “Everyday Low Prices,” you don’t need to advertise any specials. You just have to let the word get around town, and you’re permanently set. And a lot of traditional newspaper advertisers were permanently shafted.

But the live music makes it all worthwhile, right?

I receive a welcome Elvis Day invitation

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One of the doughnuts Chris left me back when some of the King's loyal subjects still worked at newspapers.

This rubble used to be the Krispy Kreme Chris went to in Tuscaloosa. Took a direct hit...

When we worked together at The State, Chris Roberts used to bring me a jelly doughnut every Aug. 16 in honor of the King.

He’s not in a position to do that now — he’s in Alabama — but he did show he was thinking of me by sending this:

He went on to say that he would have tried to get a doughnut to me, but the local Krispy Kreme got knocked down by a tornado back in April.

So I sent him a picture of one.

Chris knows how special this day is to me, because I was one of the first people in the world to hear the awful news in 1977:

MY GOOD FRIEND Les Seago was the man who told the world that the King was dead. But before he told the world, he told me.
I’ve always appreciated that, even though it didn’t do me much practical good at the time.
On Aug. 16, 1977, Les was the chief Memphis correspondent for The Associated Press. I was the slot man on the copy desk of The Jackson Sun, which meant I had been at work since 5:30 a.m. By early afternoon, the paper was on its way to readers. I had also been a stringer for Les for years, and I was used to his calls to see what was going on in our area. But he didn’t have time for that this day.
Was it too late to get something in? he demanded. Well, yeah, it was, just barely, but why…?
It looks like Elvis is dead, he said, explaining quickly that he had a source, an ambulance driver from Baptist Hospital, who told him he had just brought Elvis in, and he was pretty sure that his passenger had been beyond help. Gotta go now, ‘bye.
He must have broken all speed records getting it confirmed, because I had just begun to tell my co-workers when the “bulletin” bell went off on the wire machine as it hammered out the news.

Les himself was found dead at his home two years ago [this column ran on this day in 2006], at age 61. Though his career had spanned many years and he had covered Martin Luther King’s assassination, The Associated Press identified him in his obituaryas the man “who filed the bulletin on the death of Elvis Presley.” His ex-wife Nancy said “He wasn’t wild about Elvis, but he was glad that he did break the story.” That was Les…

Long live the King.

Video: Sanford takes his “apology” tour national

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Here’s video of Mark Sanford with Piers Morgan, tossing him touchy-feely softballs.

It was the usual act that we’ve seen and heard at Rotaries and in other venues across the state, only now it’s going national.

It’s all a bit hard to take, hearing stuff like this: “There’s something sacred about the family unit; I have four boys.” This from the guy who ditched his family, his security detail, his job and the people of South Carolina to spend Father’s Day weekend with his mistress in Argentina. Yes, that’s within the context of expressing regret. But manohman, am I sick of him taking his rather bland and superficial regret public.

Why can’t he shut up about it already? The simple explanation is unavoidable: Mark Sanford is not done inflicting himself on us. He sees this as a stage on his way back. Could I — and all the others who are saying it — be wrong about that? Could it just be his usual narcissism, with no actual political end in sight? I’d love to think so…

(By the way, I would apologize for the fact that both this video and the YouTube version seem to cut off in the middle. But I think you should regard that as a merciful blessing.)

Sanford takes next step on comeback trail tonight

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In case you missed it, Mark Sanford is making his second appearance on the comeback trail — not to be confused with that other trail — tonight at 9 p.m. by appearing on CNN live with Piers Morgan:

LIVE: Former Governor Mark Sanford

Mark SanfordIn an in-depth interview, the former Governor of South Carolina opens up about the scandal that caused him to leave office & more.

This is 11 days after his appearance with Sean Hannity on the network where he is most at home. (In case you forget, he appeared on Fox News 46 times during the stimulus fight, before Argentina.)

And what’s all this about? Well, we’d all heard in the past about the possibility that he’d run against Lindsey Graham. But today I heard on the street — or reasonably close to the street — another scary possibility: He wants to be governor again.

Imagine the psychodrama. After the apology tour that seemed like it would never end, but finally did, he’s going to make us prove to him that we really DO forgive him by re-electing him. And the really, really scary part is that we’re highly likely to do that if he demands it of us. Because, let’s face it: We’re pretty messed up, too. We, the South Carolina electorate, have issues.

Anyway, now that he’s on this trail, I for the first time feel truly glad that I gave up cable. I don’t get those channels anymore! I can’t even record it! No one can expect me to watch it! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-haaaaahhhhh!…