Category Archives: Popular culture

Zogby finds that a lot of y’all are LOSERS

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Hot on the heels of the "whom do you hate most" poll, Zogby makes us doubt whether we want to know what his respondents think, reporting this pathetic result:

It won’t make you dinner or rub your feet, but nearly one in four Americans say that the Internet can serve as a substitute for a significant other for some period of time, according to a new poll released today by 463 Communications and Zogby International.

Even though it’s only one in four, that’s sad, people. And that’s without even asking whether we’re talking porn sites here.

Further, the poll found that while maybe we aren’t loser nobodies, a lot of us are willing to become nobodies if the money is right:

What’s in a Name? And while there are well-documented fears about identity theft, many Americans would gladly give up their name for a cash windfall. If they were offered $100,000 by someone who wanted to adopt their name, more than one in five Americans said they would change their name to something completely different. Thirty-four percent of 18 to 24 year olds were prepared to take the offer.

I wonder how much higher the numbers would have been if the money was a little better. Think about it — most of us couldn’t even pay off our house notes and credit card bills with 100 Gs, much less launch a new life.

The good news is that only 11 percent of us are willing to have our brains wired to receive the Internet direct, without need of exterior devices. Unsurprisingly, more than twice as many men as women would opt for this "convenience." Me, I wouldn’t go for it unless the display in my head was really high-quality.

Open up your mouth and feed it

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This morning, I heard Michael Jackson‘s "Beat It" on the radio for the first time in a long, long time. (Steve FM says they play anything they want, and they apparently mean it.)

Anyway, here’s what struck me about it: It wasn’t nearly as interesting, or as enjoyable as a listening experience, as Weird Al Yankovic’s "Eat It." Yeah, the music and arrangement might be Michael Jackson’s, but his original lyrics are eminently forgettable. Only with Weird Al do you get the whole package. I mean, who’s going to remember…

You better run, you better do what you can

Don’t wanna see no blood, don’t be a macho man…

… when you’ve heard…

How come you’re always such a fussy young man?
Don’t want no Captain Crunch, don’t want no Raisin Bran…

Well, maybe you would, but I wouldn’t.

Um… who’s gonna tell the Maharishi what this looks like?

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Do you sometimes get e-mail that makes you think somebody is sending you up? I certainly do, and I’m not just talking about the stuff I get from the S.C. Democratic and Republican parties….

Today’s prize-winner is in a category of its own. What do you say about a developer who wants to put up a "Tower of Invincibility" — I am not making this up! — in downtown Washington, D.C.?

Oh, wait, I’m not finished. What do you further say when the design of the building tempts you to say such things as "Is that the design or are you just glad to see me?" and "What — the Washington monument wasn’t phallic enough for you?"

I’m just getting warmed up… the developer says he got the idea to build the tower from the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Really. If the Maharishi dreamed this up, maybe there was something to those rumors about Mia Farrow.

Finally, the developer is asking the public to tell him where he should put his tower. Honestly — you can’t make up stuff like this. I can’t, anyway.

Maharishi, what have you done?

Hessians: This Year’s Model

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Reading an editorial for tomorrow about Blackwater, I wonder that we haven’t heard an appropriate lyrical allusion from bill on the subject. Well, I guess I’ll just have to do it myself:

 Don’t you know I got the bully boys out/
changing someone’s facial design…

Come to think of it, why not just use the whole song?

Hand In Hand
No, don’t ask me to apologise.
I won’t ask you to forgive me.
If I’m gonna go down,
you’re gonna come with me

You say ‘Why don’t you be a man about it,
like they do in the grown-up movies?’
But when it comes to the other way around,
you say you just wanna use me. Oh,
you sit and you wonder whether
it’s gonna be syndicated.
You sit with your knees together.
All the time your breath is baited.

Hand in Hand.
No, don’t ask me to apologise.
I won’t ask you to forgive me.
If I’m gonna go down,
you’re gonna come with me

Don’t you know I got the bully boys out
changing someone’s facial design,
sitting with my toy room lout,
polishing my precious china
Don’t you know I’m an animal?
But don’t you know I can’t stand up steady?
But you can’t show me any kind of hell
that I don’t know already.

Hand in Hand.
No, don’t ask me to apologise.
I won’t ask you to forgive me.
If I’m gonna go down,
you’re gonna come with me
Hand in hand, hand in hand, hand in hand…

Now, for serious commentary on the subject, you’ll have to read tomorrow’s editorial page. In the meantime, I’ll say the performance of these rent-a-commandos are about as perfect an example of the problem with privatizing the natural functions of government as you’re ever likely to find.

Having shrunk the segment of government with this responsibility (the military), although thankfully not quite enough to drown it in a bathtub, we have generated a private-sector demand that is sufficiently lucrative so as to make it unbelievably tempting to some of our best warriors to go private. That weakens the U.S. military at a time we can ill afford it, and turns these exemplary soldiers into "weapons-free" mercenaries who are unconstrained by the military’s rules of engagement.

So we find ourselves, at a time when we’re painstakingly working to win hearts and minds to the counterinsurgency cause (the Petraeus strategy), with these hyperagressive private Rambos running around giving our country (and our allies’ countries, for that matter) an increasing worse name with the local indigenous population.

Privatization might work in some areas (although far, far fewer that the libertarians fantasize), but there’s one area where we must have political accountability: War-making.

Feliz Nueve de Juan Lennon

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bill reminds us what today is. I thought of it earlier today, but hadn’t gotten around to acknowledging it yet.

Yes, boys and girls, it’s John Lennon’s birthday. I don’t know what days the other Beatles were born on, but I never forget this one, for two reasons. First, it’s just a few days after my own birthday, and I feel a vague-and-completely-irrational kinship with fellow Libras.

More relevantly, I had an excellent mnemonic device drilled into my head at an early age. From 1962-1965, when I was in the fifth and sixth grades (after having completed the 4th grade with a tutor to catch up with the difference in school years), I lived in Guayaquil, Ecuador.

Nueve de Octubre was the biggest deal on the school calendar. We got a whole week off for that, and only a day and a half for Christmas. It was sometime later that I read that that John Lennon was born on Guayaquil Independence Day, and the association stuck.

‘Historic Myrtle Beach’

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One of the pitfalls of being attention-span-deprived (and also one of the blessings, since it makes life so much more entertaining), is that the smallest thing can cause me to miss entirely the "important" parts of a message or document or presentation or whatever. I’m always too busy digging the one little thing that grabbed my attention.

Today, when I read this from the S.C. Republican Party…

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE   CONTACT: ROB GODFREY
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2007

2008 South Carolina Republican Party Presidential Candidates Debate media credential request form released
COLUMBIA, S.C. – The South Carolina Republican Party today released the 2008 South Carolina Republican Party Presidential Candidates Debate media credential request form…
    “We are extremely excited to extend a warm South Carolina welcome to journalists from across the country and the world to our historic event,” said South Carolina Republican Party Chairman Katon Dawson.  “Last May, our debate attracted hundreds of members of the media worldwide, but this next debate will attract even more.  Journalists understand the significance of having a debate just nine days before our primary election, and they know the 2008 presidential election could be decided on our stage that night.”
    In August, the South Carolina Republican Party announced that it had partnered with FOX News Channel to present a live, nationally-televised Republican Party presidential candidates debate on Thursday, January 10, 2008, in historic Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.  The debate will be held at the Myrtle Beach Convention Center….

… the only thing I got out of it was "historic Myrtle Beach."

What an odd modifier to choose. "Historic Charleston," sure. "Historic Beaufort," certainly. Maybe even "historic Columbia," although that’s a stretch.

But Myrtle Beach? Historic? There are other modifiers I could think of, both complimentary and un-, but that one wouldn’t crowd out the others on the mad rush to the tip of my tongue.

And yet, when I think about it (which I can’t help doing, such is my curse and blessing), I realize that in terms of history that is truly relevant to my life, the moniker sort of works — if you think of "history" as the changes that come with passage through time.

Charleston is what it was when I lived there as a baby. "Historic," but in a static way — sort of frozen in time, like a museum exhibit. Yes, Joe Riley has done a lot to make it better, but a lot of what he’s done has been to revitalize what was once there — essentially, to make the museum livable, vibrant and dynamic.

But Myrtle Beach has been like America — a rowdy, hand-over-fist, unruly thing growing and changing like a weed and just as ugly, but always with an eye to what the people want right NOW. (And yes, the America I love is many other things as well, but this is a facet of America.)

I remember when there was the Pavilion amusement park and arcade, Chapin’s department store, and ONE hamburger joint, as far as what I took notice of…

It was the place kids growing up in South Carolina wanted to go, a la "Shag: The Movie." A generation before the time when that movie was set, the place we think of essentially didn’t exist. Then, it was the center of this youth culture, the one place in South Carolina that reflected the Southern California car culture of "American Graffiti." It was also a low-rent but picturesque resort of homey, idiosyncratic hotels and shacks and bungalows — a far more warm, inviting place than what it became after Hugo, with nine identical "houses" on stilts jammed together on a lot that previously would have held one battered low-slung getaway.

In the early 80s, the growth started to metastasize, the scrubby foliage that once surrounded beach homes giving way to condos by the thousand. And the equally scrubby stuff that gave the place its charm started disappearing. For me, the greatest blow came when the little family-oriented amusement park down in Surfside gave way to a high-rise Days Inn, but for most of us the ultimate crash didn’t hit until after the turn of the century, with the demolition of the Pavilion at the heart of the city itself.

It’s history that has certain visual styles to accompany each phase of my life, old pictures you can dig through like archaeologists  digging through strata of an abandoned aboriginal village.

So yeah, I guess "historic" works.

 

How does ‘The War’ measure up?

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Something occurred to me this morning. I was thinking about something I needed to get done, and thought I might try to get it done tonight, and then I thought, "No, you can’t: You have to watch ‘The War.’"

At that moment it struck me that I’m watching the program as much out of a sense of duty as fascination, and that surprised me.

"The Civil War" was riveting; I could hardly wait to see the next installment. The images, the words, the music all stuck in my head for a long time. All of that was so even though I have never been overly interested in that period of history.

Meanwhile, all of my life, I have been fascinated by the Second World War. I’ve never been able to get enough of films, books, what-have-you on the subject. I consider "Band of Brothers" to be the finest program ever made for television.

And indeed, I’m enjoying this program. But mostly, it’s a matter of going over familiar ground, just this time through yet another set of individual stories. It’s well done; it holds my attention. There’s no question that it is vastly superior to anything else I might watch on broadcast or cable television. (Of course, that’s not such a high standard in my view, since I consider about 99 percent of TV programming to be trash. I basically keep a TV set in order to watch DVDs.)

But after two installments, it doesn’t have the force as a cultural phenomenon that the series that made Ken Burns famous did. Maybe it’s because I learned a lot from The Civil War since, unlike so many of my fellow South Carolinians, I’ve never been one to obsess about it.

I don’t know. Thoughts?

Here are two froods who really know where their towels are

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This is wonderful. These two guys have come up with a way to unify our fractured country, and everybody can take part:

    It seemed to them that the nation was more divided than ever over the war and politics, not to mention immigration, race and abortion. So the two of them — Bruce Johnson, a former disc jockey who delivers local fruit and vegetables, and John Maielli, who has a silk-screening and painting business — came up with a wildly ambitious plan for national reconciliation.
    What the country needs, they thought, was a unifying, rally-like event that would be free from politics and in which everyone could participate. Waving a towel seemed perfect…. "A certain amount of energy is released when you wave a towel," explains Mr. Johnson. It’s democratic. It doesn’t require skill or money. Wavers feel kinship with fellow wavers.
    As the event was envisioned, millions of Americans across the country would participate in a National Wave, simultaneously twirling above their heads a red, white and blue towel called the "Official Uniting Towel of America." Organizers picked Friday, July 4, 2008, when people are more inclined to feel patriotic. It would take place at 9 p.m. Eastern time, before most local fireworks go off on the East Coast and at a decent hour in the West. To give enough time for stragglers to join in, the National Wave would last 15 minutes.

It’s simple, to the point that one could easily call it stupid. But its very simplicity, its utter lack of inherent meaning, makes it a blank slate upon which we can all write our hopes and dreams for the country, and most of all express our desire for brotherhood in spite of all our bitter differences.

I’ve got my towel, and I know where it is, and I’m more than ready to use it as a means of reuniting my country. With your help, I hope to keep track of this growing movement, and promote it as the chance arises.

Bruce Johnson and John Maielli — now there’s a couple of froods who really know where their towels are.

Hillary Uber Alles — on video, that is

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Can I call ’em or can I call ’em? P.T. Barnum’s got nothing on me when it comes to knowing what the public wants. On Aug. 25, I predicted the following:

But wait — my Hillary’s Heckler video is moving up at an unprecedented
speed, having passed 6,000 views in only 3 weeks. (What’s faster than Blitzkrieg?)
I’m thinking that within a month, that clip of Mrs. Clinton and her
detractor at the recent College Democrats’ confab will outpace
everything, and put the Nazis in its shadow.

And here we are on September 19th, and my heckler video, shot during the College Democrats’ confab at the end of July, is now my most-watched video clip ever. It’s also the first ever to surpass the 8,000-view threshold — and it shows no signs of slowing down. (Yesterday, it was in third place.)

This is a good sign for the public’s tastes, as it finally eclipsed the previous favorite, which shows a Nazi leader talking about the Confederate flag on our State House steps. (OK, maybe a heckler isn’t the height of good taste, but it’s an improvement.) I’m also proud that my critically acclaimed "Who Resurrected the Electric Car?" — probably my finest use ever of my celebrated voice-over technique, not to mention its social relevance — is holding firm at third place. Indeed, until the heckler’s last-minute surge since yesterday, it was in second place.

Yeah, I know — nobody cares about this except me. But it takes a lot of work to produce these babies, and so I care a lot. That is, I care enough to bring you once again my Top Five Most-Watched Videos:

  1. "Hillary’s Heckler," only 6 weeks old, zooming at Ludicrous Speed to 8,059.
  2. "Nazi Presidential Candidate Defends Confederate Flag"
    — 5 months old, with 7,906, this was the fastest-riser
    ever before Hillary.
  3. "Who Resurrected the Electric Car?"
    — 6 months old, still probably my masterpiece in terms of sheer
    artistry (the YouTube critics give it 5 stars). 7,810 views and also rising quickly. This is the feel-good hit of my repertoire.
  4. "The Alpha and Beta of Thomas Ravenel"
    — 11 months old, with 6,996 views, and falling farther behind as the scandal fades into the background. T-Rav is no longer box office magic.
  5. "Nazis Defend Confederate Flag II." My shameless exploitative sequel, shot and released the same day as the first hit, a la LOTR. 5,269 views.

Scooped by the newsroom

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Yesterday, Zeke Stokes sent me the above video, with the following terse comment:

Just when you think we’re making progress.

Once again, this was Zeke Stokes, not some guy who gets his jollies making fun of the S.C. public education system.

I looked at it and thought, "the poor kid," yet resolved to put it up on the blog as inherently interesting — but only after I put up several other things that had more substance. I didn’t get around to posting those things yesterday, and since Jon Ozmint is coming in in a few minutes to talk about all this, and we still have pages to produce, I’m probably not going to get to those things today, either.

Meanwhile, the blasted newsroom scooped me on this. They even blogged about it. Ah, well.

What it WAS, was a warning…

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Survival would be impossible in this doggy-dog world without friends to give us a heads-up when danger approaches. Here’s one I got today:

I have eight tickets for
this Saturday’s football game –  and we are making them available for members
of Senior Staff to purchase if any of you are interested.
 
First come, first served. 
Email me back.  The tickets are $35 each. 
 
Thanks.
 
Kathy

Of course, as a veteran of 20 years of this craziness, I knew just what to do. I immediately scribbled,

(note to self: Don’t try to come in to work this
Saturday)

Without such an early-warning system, things could get ugly…

Nazi Blitzkrieg rolls over Ravenel; Hillary’s Heckler in hot pursuit

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Thomas Ravenel’s notoriety is fading on YouTube.

My most popular (among fascists, who seem to be a fairly large constituency on the Web) video of Nazis defending the Confederate flag on our State House grounds has now taken the number-one slot among my most-watched clips. Disturbing, isn’t it? Of course, there was a certain car-wreck rubbernecking quality to the fame of the Ravenel video, so it didn’t exactly put the human race (or the master race, either) in a flattering light.

But wait — my Hillary’s Heckler video is moving up at an unprecedented speed, having passed 6,000 views in only 3 weeks. (What’s faster than Blitzkrieg?) I’m thinking that within a month, that clip of Mrs. Clinton and her detractor at the recent College Democrats’ confab will outpace everything, and put the Nazis in its shadow.

In any case, here’s where things stand:

  1. "Nazi Presidential Candidate Defends Confederate Flag"
    — 3 months old, with 6,862, this was the fastest-riser
    ever before Hillary. It’s resuming the number-one spot it held just before the Ravenel scandal broke.
  2. "The Alpha and Beta of Thomas Ravenel"
    — 10 months old, with 6,850 views.
  3. "Hillary’s Heckler," only 3 weeks old, coming up at Ludicrous Speed, at 6,235.
  4. "Who Resurrected the Electric Car?"
    — 4 months old, still probably my masterpiece in terms of sheer
    artistry (the YouTube critics give it 5 stars), with my first effective
    use of the voiceover technique. 6,054 views and also rising quickly. This is the feel-good hit of my repertoire.
  5. "Nazis Defend Confederate Flag II." My shameless exploitative sequel, shot and released the same day as the first hit, a la LOTR. 4,416 views.

I don’t know how to break it to you, but you got scooped on this one

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Just got an op-ed submission,  and the e-mail containing it had this heading: "Timely op-ed on Diana’s death."

That would be Diana Spencer, who used to be married to the royal Brit with the ears. The proffered piece was titled,"What I learned from the Death of Princess Diana and the Life of Mother Teresa," and was authored by one Les T. Csorba.

Gosh, Lester, you got scooped by about 10 years. The competition totally spanked you on this one. Maybe you should drop the "timely" bit. Sorry, pal.

Well, not all that sorry. I’ve about had it with my e-mail slot being overwhelmed with unsolicited pooge.

Isn’t being Irish Catholic considered an extenuating circumstance?

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Torn from the pages of a Caddyshack script, we have this item of sad celebrity news:

By KARL RITTER    
Associated Press Writer

STOCKHOLM,
Sweden (AP) – Bill Murray could face a drunken driving charge after
cruising through downtown Stockholm in a golf cart and refusing to take
a breath test, citing U.S. law.Murraybill
    Police officers spotted the
"Caddyshack" star early Monday in the slow-moving vehicle and noticed
he smelled of alcohol when they pulled him over, said
Detective-Inspector Christer Holmlund of the Stockholm police.
    "He
refused to blow in the (breath test) instrument, citing American
legislation," Holmlund told The Associated Press on Wednesday. "So we
applied the old method — a blood test. It will take 14 days before the
results are in."
    Murray, who had been at a golf tournament in
Sweden, signed a document admitting that he was driving under the
influence, and agreed to let a police officer plead guilty for him if
the case goes to court, Holmlund said.
    "Then he was let go. My guess is he went back to America," Holmlund said…

Here’s another way to test how much he’d had — if he did his character from "Caddyshack" when stopped, they should throw the book at him. I’m a huge Bill Murray fan, but that was his one bit that I never could abide.

Hillary bumps Biden, quickly makes my Top Five list

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My Top Five Videos, that is. She’s not on my Top Five Candidates list. That doesn’t mean she won’t be; I just haven’t composed that one yet.

But in just two weeks of boffo box-office, she has muscled her way to No. 3 among my most-watched video clips on YouTube. Well, she didn’t do it herself. Some credit goes to the star of the clip — the woman who heckled her at the College Democrats meeting in Columbia — and to her cinematographer, moi.

The title ("Hillary’s Heckler") probably helped. Alliteration is a powerful thing. Also boosting it was the fact that there was a CNN clip of the same incident. Still, that one — shot with a better camera and from a somewhat more advantageous vantage point — only got 2,232 hits, while mine had received 5,639.

How could that happen? Well, I’m going to credit the rough style of mine. First, I used the Steven Spielberg/"Saving Private Ryan" hand-held-no-steadicam style, rather than the stodgy, omniscient-viewer, fixed-position technique of the network. This really puts you in the action.

It’s shot from a combatants’ viewpoint. This is what a rapt young Democrat, fascinated by everything Mrs. Clinton had to say, would have seen and heard. The camera stays on Hillary, then there are murmurs and cries of "No!" and you don’t know what’s happening at first. Is the crowd turning against Hillary? Do they not like what she’s saying? But wait! The camera swings in the direction of the sounds, and here’s this nutty lady yelling at her, and (unlike in the CNN clip) you can hear what she’s saying — not that it makes sense, but you can’t have everything.

The jostling, the confusion, the lack of explanation of what just happened, Hillary’s smooth slide back into her speech — all add to a dynamic viewing experience.

That’s my interpretation, anyway.

Whatever the explanation, no video of mine has ever topped 5,000 in less than two weeks. And it makes poor Joe Biden — whose frenetic Rotary performance topped the chart for a time — even more of a footnote. Show biz is hell.

Here’s the list as it stands now:

So we see what sells, don’t we? Cars, cocaine, controversy and Nazis. At least I haven’t stooped to luring y’all in with sex. But that’s just because Ségolène Royal‘s agent has been completely unreasonable.

Now we know how debates can be stupider

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Dems1

    "I think this is a ridiculous exercise."
            — Joe Biden

Amen.

If the frontiersmen who trashed the White House after Andrew Jackson’s inaugural had had YouTube, it would have looked like what we saw out of Charleston Monday night.

No, I take that back. The yahoos who had to be lured back out of the mansion with ice cream in 1829 were not this insipid. They were real; they were who they were, and I shouldn’t malign them by comparing them to the "Ain’t I cute" questioners on the "YouTube debate."

Gail Collins has it exactly right on today’s op-ed page, as I’ve said before (sorry; can’t show it to you — you know how the NYT is. You can’t have a serious debate with five or six or — come on, eight? — candidates on the stage. But there are worse things than the debates we had seen up to now — people who would occupy the most important job in the world being subjected to "Reality TV," and having to be deeply respectful of this abuse. (Certainly I think it’s a very important question," said Chris Dodd to the first one. It wasn’t.)

Joe Biden was only answering one of the questions that came out of this process in the quote above, but it easily applied to the evening — or most of it. Some of the questions were questions that should have been asked. But they would have been better asked by people who did not see themselves and the message. And they say politicians are narcissistic.

I like YouTube. I love YouTube. It can be fun. It can be useful. But unless it is applied much better than it was in this case, it cannot bring intelligence or coherence to a format that is far too fragmented and distracting already — the free-for-all debate among anyone and everyone who says he or she wants the nomination.

If you wish to learn what was said — and I certainly don’t blame you if you didn’t watch it — without the distractions of the posturing, mugging, simpering and snideness of the the questioners hitting you full in the face — here’s a transcript. But it doesn’t help much.

Did I get anything out of this debate? Yes. I saw once again that behind all the "I want to get out of Iraq faster than Cindy Sheehan does" posturing by this crowd seeking the affections of the angry base, serious people know that it’s not that simple. Obama: "At this point, I think we can be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in." Of course, he went on to promise a quick retreat, but I think he knows better (at this point, I’ll grasp at any straw for hope that someone who might be president might have a clue). Biden: "You know we can’t just pull out now." Of course, he then quickly proposes a pullout, but at least he has a coherent plan. I think it’s an extraordinarily dangerous plan (creating an independent Kurdistan on Turkey’s border?), but it’s a plan.

I could go into other "issues," such as Chris Dodd’s white hair, or Anderson What’s-His-Name’s white hair, or whether John Edwards is better for women than Hillary Clinton (his wife says so, but let’s not go there), or how black Barack Obama is. But I think it’s safe to say that we’ll hear more about such things as the months grind slowly on.

Bottom line: We didn’t learn anything more from this than the middle-school slam-book stuff we had known before: Hillary projects presidential; Obama is smart and charismatic; Biden and Richardson are experienced, Gravel is certifiable, Kucinich is irritating, Edwards is a demagogue, and Dodd is uninteresting.

But hey; I can pander to the masses as much as the next guy: What did you think?

Democrats2

The coward that roared

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We should always be on guard against harboring inaccurate stereotypes — not because it’s unPC, but because it interferes with our ability to perceive things as they are.

For instance: A blog tends to draw a lot of people who post outrageous statements, angry provocations and a whole lot of Big Talk under pseudonyms. Lacking other information, you tend to picture people who are either jerks all the time — and I don’t want to think that of them — or they are these Caspar Milquetoast types who get frustrated all day saying "Yes, sir; no, sir" to the world, or being bossed around by their wives, or whatever, and this is their dirty little outlet.

I’m picturing someone who, in "Brad Warthen’s Blog: The Movie," would best be played by someone like the late character actor John Fiedler. You don’t know the name, but you might recognize the photo, or remember him from some of his roles. (I didn’t know his name either; I had to figure out who played timid, squeaky-voiced Juror #2 in "12 Angry Men.")

But either the stereotype is completely wrong, or there are some fascinating departures from the type. Turns out that even brash, openly obnoxious, Big Shot CEOs like to hide behind fake names. This story is priceless:

UNRAVELING RAHODEB
A Grocer’s Brash Style
Takes Unhealthy Turn
Were Posts by Mackey,
CEO of Whole Foods,
A Case of Ethics, or Ego?
By DAVID KESMODEL and JONATHAN EIG
July 20, 2007; Page A1
    John Mackey has never needed the anonymity of the Internet to speak bluntly.
    "I’m going to destroy you," the co-founder and chief executive of Whole Foods Market Inc. shouted at Perry Odak, CEO of Wild Oats Markets Inc., the first time the two men met six years ago at a retailing conference in Manhattan, according to Mr. Odak.
    At that time, Mr. Mackey had already established a reputation as a maverick, whose growing chain of upscale natural-foods stores was shaking up the way traditional grocers did business. Officials at Whole Foods say Mr. Mackey tells a different version of the story — with milder language — but the confrontation has nonetheless become part of his food-industry legend. Mr. Mackey’s combativeness became even more widely known with the revelation last week that he used an alias for nearly eight years to post messages on Yahoo Finance message boards, bashing competitors and praising everything from his company’s quarterly financial performance to his own haircut…

Get your mind right, Luke

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Assuming I wanted to make a movie about the S.C. prison system, even if I had a sort of magical, all-time, dead-or-alive set of actors to choose from, I don’t think I would have thought of the late Strother Martin to play Corrections chief Jon Ozmint.

But there’s an eerie similarity between what Mr. Ozmint had to say about denying food to rule-breakers…

"Our rule is simple … any inmate is allowed to decline the opportunity (to eat, exercise, shower or have visitors) by failure to comply with our reasonable requirements," Ozmint wrote in the e-mail. "Eating is a voluntary activity and any inmate may refuse to eat."

… and what the legendary character actor said as the "Captain" in "Cool Hand Luke:"

"What we’ve got here is… failure to communicate. Some men you just
can’t reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he
wants it… well, he gets it. I don’t like it any more than you men."

You see, as the Captain so clearly explained, Luke didn’t have his mind right. He could have followed the rules, but he chose to spend the night in the box and wear those chains and get whupped up ‘side the head. He chose all that when he back-sassed a free man (the Captain himself, no less) and when he kept gettin’ rabbit in his blood.

If you don’t understand that, then you don’t got your mind right, and maybe you’d best start gettin’ all of your dirt off Boss Godfrey’s yard, boy.

‘love me some fred’

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Don’t get me wrong; I’ve got nothing against Fred Thompson. I like that ol’ Tennessee boy just fine. But I can’t help marveling at the extent to which others get excited about him.

Sometimes, they achieve a sort of frenzy that positively cracks me up.

Compared to a staid forum such as, say, an editorial page, the comments on this blog may seem wild and woolly to some — despite my occasional attempts to encourage decorum. But when it comes to sheer intellectual rigor, this is the Algonquin Round Table set against some other places out there on the ‘net.

Such a place is the comments feature on YouTube. I glanced today at one of the video clips I had posted of Sen. Thompson earlier this week, having noticed that it had already joined my top ten most-watched videos. (It had even bumped my least-watched Thomas Ravenel clip, so Mr. Ravenel now occupies only four of the top ten slots.)

There were only three comments so far, but one respondent had gushed:

For Gods sake Fred!!! Please annouce your candicacy!! We are all ready to support you anyway we can. I’d go along with that flat tax too igloo54! GO Fred GO!!!!!!

My absolute favorite, though, was the one before it:


Love me some fred

That’s it. No punctuation. This literary innovation allowed the beholder multiple interpretations. I assumed it meant, "Love me some, Fred!" A colleague took it as saying, essentially, I’m really loving that Fred! Either way, the tension created by its very sparseness, the fact that this writer is excited beyond the ability to articulate, is what strikes me: Don’t have to make sense! Doesn’t matter! I’m just so excited!

Increasing my enjoyment was a movie that I watched as much of as I could stand last night: "Idiocracy," starring Luke Wilson. I had rented it just because Mike Judge was behind it, and I really loved "Office Space."

It was, after a while, hard to take. But the premise was hilarious, and painfully true-to-life. It was based in the idea that in this generation, we have started reversing the evolutionary principle of the fittest surviving, at least in intellectual terms. With high-I.Q., educated people making a fetish of delaying having children, often until it’s too late, and everybody else fully attuned to a culture that increasingly spurs them to copulate like rabbits, the species is bound to get dumber and dumber.

So it is that Owen Wilson, as average a guy as you could find, wakes up from a frozen state 500 years in a post-literate future, and finds himself easily the smartest man in the world. In that new world, "Love me some fred" would pass as Shakespeare.

Unfortunately, "stupid" jokes do get old very quickly. And… well… some of the hyperbole wasn’t all that far beyond today’s reality — especially today’s reality TV. That made it it sort of painfully close to home. Is a show called "Oh, my Balls!," consisting entirely of some poor schmuck getting hit repeatedly in the yarbles, all that much dumber than today’s fare? I fear not.

Ravenel topples the classics

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Here’s what a little news can do to your box-office.

Last time I mentioned my most popular blog videos, this Thomas Ravenel clip — last seen at 662 views had fallen off my Top Five most-watched on YouTube. But the classic of Grady Patterson talking about Ravenel, which for the first few months it was up had been my all-time most popular, was still hanging on.

Well, now that cocky pup Ravenel has bumped Grady again. First he took his job; now he’s taken his place in screen history. Both still trail the Nazis, though, and I’m gratified to see that my critically-acclaimed "Electric Car" video has climbed to second place. Still, my first Nazi video is far ahead, approaching 4,000 — remarkable in such a low-budget vehicle.

Nothing like a little publicity. Ravenel’s sudden notoriety has zipped him up to over 1,500 views, placing him solidly at the number five position. And with Biden’s presidential hopes pretty too small to measure, I expect "The Alpha and Beta" to be in fourth place before long. Grady is still stuck in triple-digits.

Anyway, here are the latest tallies:

  1. "Nazi Presidential Candidate Defends Confederate Flag" — 3,961 views
  2. "Who Resurrected the Electric Car?" — 2,283
  3. Nazis Defend Confederate Flag II — 2,137
  4. Joe Biden at Rotary — 1,926 views.
  5. The Alpha and Beta of Thomas Ravenel — 1,590

Is there a serious point in any of this? Yes, in a way. As I suggested yesterday, and at least one first-time viewer mentioned to me today, looking back at Ravenel’s breezy cockiness during the campaign has an extra punch for the viewer now. It’s hard to say exactly why; it just does.