It's the End of the World as We Know it . . . Part 52.

Saturday at 6 PM Eastern Standard Time on May 21st has long since come and gone, along with the end of the world which didn't happen and the general ennui of the public which did once they checked the floor under their feet and found it mostly intact.

We can credit an old preacher by the name of Harold Camping for this particular Chicken Little exercise, but let's be fair . . . It's not the first time the world has failed to end on schedule as interpreted by a man of some cloth (and even more cheek), and hardly the first time the person whose been wrong came up with an excuse. What ticks me off grandly is the one he's chosen.

This one's a beauty. While we were waiting, we've all been judged silently. Which means the judgement part of our final exam is over, but the death, destruction, earthquakes and other stuff he warned us about will happen during the next end of the world on October 21st. In essence, without so much as blinking, he's told us "Oops, did I say May? I meant October . . . Let's just reschedule."

I'm here to tell you exactly what my perception of the problem is, ladies and gentlemen, and you're welcome to comment as you please, agree and disagree, visit the advertisers and stay for a while to give me a piece of your mind. Just not too much of a piece, especially since that's the problem in the first place.

As a species we can conceive of the idea of God, listen to the words we've had attributed to his prophets and believe that following the varied good laws of life handed down through the ages will bring us the rewards outlined in each of the many religions that have been created as a delivery system for those laws . . . But we're too stupid to understand the word of God.

The IQ just isn't there yet, fellow travelers, and we're not just stupid, but as deaf as a bag of bricks at the bottom of the sea. The fact we don't know this is the problem. We feign knowledge of the grand design and ultimate plan while we muck around here on our pretty little blue planet, fighting over who's right making interpretations two people of the same religion on different sides of the planet couldn't completely agree on under penalty of death. Some of the most brilliant minds on the planet can believe in multiple dimensions of time and space and don't believe one of them could be heaven. There are times you wonder who could blame them as there are inconsistencies to every last argument we advance on either side of the story, and if we can't get past that, how do we expect a being who can encapsulate the entire cosmos in his mind (or hers, to be fair to those who believe in a Great Mother) to do anything less than shake the head containing said mind when we try to get a grip on things and miss not only badly, but with such great certainty that we were right in the first place. Seeing us, I have faith there's a greater intelligence to the universe. The thought we're anywhere near the apex of thought is just too damned depressing to deal with.

Let's even consider the value in limiting things for a second. I want you to imagine it's last Saturday at God Inc. when the Earth's divisional head goes running through the halls of heaven to check Godsoft Outlook and see if he's got an End-of-the-World event scheduled for 6PM EST.

"6PM Eastern Standard . . . Midnight in Jerusalem? On Sunday I'm supposed to destroy a planet? Apocalypse? Now?"

So the world will end someday. So what? Nothing is forever except forever. I get that. I'm not going to even hazard a guess as to when it'll happen, but I surely hope we've matured enough as a people by that time to not make such a damnable mess of the run-up to the event.

An old saying goes "Take care of the little things, and the big things will take care of themselves." I suggest we take it to heart, keep our little hamster cage Earth nice and clean and take care of ourselves and our neighbors without worrying about things like Judgement Day which are best left in more capable hands.

Oprahpalooza

Reality to Earth . . . If a talk show falls in the forest and everyone's around to hear it, does it mean it was more than a talk show?

The Oprah "I'll See You 'til I See You" World Tour comes to an end this week, ladies and gentlemen, leaving a one hour scheduling abyss in syndicated markets across the country* and at least three other talk show spinoffs in its wake . . . Along with a roar of trumpets which would have make the blast which took down Jericho's walls sound like a jazz quartet's last set at 3 AM.

Hyped much? The final shows, no matter what happens during them, couldn't possibly live up to the over one year roll-up which preceded them, even if they needed Chicago's United Center to film two of the three. Being sort of an aficionado of the art of television last calls**, I find myself curious at what's going to be going on in this final week, but I don't expect life to stop on this somewhat busy little sphere because one host decided to move on with her life.

If we got over Johnny Carson retiring in favor of Jay Leno, America, we'll get through this.

Don't get me wrong. A lot of interesting television went on in the 25 years Oprah Winfrey held court in her studio (And beside that, it wouldn't be smart for any writer to gnash teeth at someone who A. Puts literacy high on her list of priorities and B. You'd probably consider choosing from a selected list of felonies to do work for), but it's a bit much. Especially when you consider that when the fallout settles from this telenuke, I expect we'll see the lady coming back to the airwaves in some way, shape or form.

I preach patience Oprah fans, for Oprah II is out there somewhere in your future. The truly creative never completely leave the stage, they just recharge their batteries and find new ways to dazzle you the next time they pop-up . . . Especially those creative people with a brand-spanking new cable network at their disposal.


*New York's Channel 7 seems to just be shaking its head and filling the space with an extra hour of news. Normally I'd pan them for their lack of creativity, but as their network, in the past month, ash-canned two hours of daytime soap programming (Both of which have been automatic programming plug-ins for over forty years apiece!) in favor of a new cooking show and a new reality show, they get a pass to grab a mop and bucket and clean up in the aftermath.

**Someday, if the silly season in this country slackens for a few days, I might walk you through a tour of a few personal favorite, or somewhat infamous, last calls. These include both a literal middle finger to the network which cancelled a show and a somewhat cute figurative one given in another case.

The Confusinator

Reality to Earth . . . We've heard of this miraculous invention called zippers. Do any of you people keep them closed anymore?

The one problem you run into about talking about things which make you tilt your head in confusion is sometimes, well, they're confusing.

I thought that among the list of answers for the question "What do you give the man who has everything?" the answer would almost never be a child, especially if the man is married to someone else at the time and they're perfectly capable of having children of their own. Four times over, in fact.

There's plenty of blame to go around here if one wants to get into that, but I'm not even sure why anyone should care about blame at this point. We know about celebrities like the Governator and the people who float around them, living within their somewhat unstable auras, and as a result, things are invariably going to happen which they're going to have to try and shake off like water on a wet dog.

People get hurt though. Real people with real feelings get hurt, and just because someone with a big, er . . . Ego thought it was perfectly alright to play 'Upstairs, Downstairs' (Both at the same time) doesn't mean he had the right to do it. There was a consummate lack of common sense involved on the part of both Ahhhnold and what is to be referred to in any future divorce actions as 'the correspondent'.

George Carlin, in his monologue "I Used to be an Irish-Catholic" referred to what constituted a sin as " . . . Wanna. Ya gotta wanna. Hell . . . Wanna is a sin all by itself." The idea of sin notwithstanding, wanna, in this case, made people who didn't do anything to deserve it sad, left a wife hurt, (If not confused for long, given the legal reaction) and it left a lot of people shaking their heads, confused again. Most of us will shake off the confusion, but there are kids who are going to have to live with the results of the adults in their lives going through the usual motions of dealing with unthinking behavior after the fact. This includes one who probably found out all of the details the hard way in one large lump and has to deal with it.

This is one thing The Eraser can't erase. He can only pick up the pieces and make things as right as is humanly possible. Maybe someone will learn a lesson before the next time, or maybe the idea of someone learning a lesson is just my way of dealing with the confusion.

I think I'm going to look for something truly silly for the next time I make contact, fellow travelers. Funny ha-ha beats funny strange any day.

IMF - Uh . . . That's NOT What Those Initials Stand For

Reality to Earth . . . Indiscretions Are One Thing, Raving Lunacy Another

There are certain things you expect from the rich and/or powerful, and in certain instances they rarely disappoint you. You expect an overdrive of hungers for the best things in life, to the point where they spend money on things that make you ask if you'd do something similarly crazy if you had the money. You expect marriages by the dozen, divorces by the truckload and news articles following the merry-go-round of their lives arriving by oil tanker. You expect the indiscreet; with leanings towards the sensational.

Rich men chasing maids down the hallway? Possibly, if it's in one of those fluffy post-Victorian class comedies where everything comes out alright when one is actually caught and marriage to the rich fool is in the offing.

That's not what the director of the International Monetary Fund, a man with the nickname "The Great Seducer" is accused of. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was thought to be a contender for the presidency of France, when finding a maid entering his suite in the early afternoon, is said to have chased her through the suite naked and forced himself on her. He then hit the bricks in what has been described as a big hurry, to the point where NY-NJ Port Authority Police had to pull him out of his first class flight home and drag him off to "La Bastille Americain."

Having had an affair with an IMF staffer previously, and in admitting it apologized for an error in judgement, I wonder what sort of response he's going to make for (excuse the pun) a boner like this.

I also find myself wondering just what state of mind you have to be in to act like that. At the base of this, I see a rich man in New York who wants something, and either isn't halfway smart enough or just too damned lazy to go out and get it in a way which doesn't involve committing a felony. (A misdemeanor possibly, but not a felony.) A hotel maid, or any other woman in any other profession, has the right to go to work and not assume some twit playing master of the manor is going to think he can get away with whatever he pleases just because . . . Well, it pleases him. And at the top of this, the behavior is coming from one of the men in charge of a major part of this planet's monetary policy.

On the up side, if he's guilty as charged and convicted of the crime, not any more he isn't. If he isn't smart enough to stay out of trouble on multiple occasions in the pursuit of getting his rocks off, France and the rest of the world doesn't need him in charge of anything more important than his own pocket change.

Mamma Mia!

Reality to Earth . . . I Think the Mother of the Year Award is Sewn Up

At the start of any endeavor, it’s rare when we suddenly find ourselves standing at the top of a mountain looking down. It’s hard to imagine finding a place which crystallizes a purpose in one perfect jewel of an idea. It’s like starting a marathon one hundred feet from the finish line. It’s the feeling the character Max Bialystock in the movie “The Producers” has when he’s looking to find the worst play of all time and opens the first page of a disaster called “Springtime for Hitler.”

You want to see a full break with reality? I’m here to deliver a beauty for you, dear readers. I give you a San Francisco woman named Kerry C. and her eight year old daughter, Brittany.

Brittany is a lively looking, round faced little girl who’ll do anything mommy asks, happily involved in the wild, self-image warping world of child beauty pageants. (And yes, I’ll call them beauty pageants as I don’t want to waste a single iota of written sarcastic sentiment on the term ‘scholarship pageant’, especially in this case.)

Brittany will also lie down on a bed while mommy injects Botox into her face to keep her little dimpled face from showing wrinkles. That’s Botox . . . A muscle-paralyzing agent which is known popularly to be dispensed by plastic surgeons for wrinkles, but also has a series of beneficial uses including treatment of migraines, forms of muscle stiffness and axillary hyperhydrosis. That’s Botox . . . A derivative of botulinum toxin. (That’s the tox part, folks.)

Where do I start with this? Let’s go with the practical elements. First, if not particularly foremost, this is a prescription drug and the mother isn’t a medical professional . . . If she were; any state board in the country would yank her license for an act of this nature so fast they’d take half her arm with it. Second, in the interview which introduced me to this story, she’s visibly reluctant to supply information about who supplied her with the Botox, which screams procurement by illegal means, either on her part or that of her supplier; perhaps both. Third . . .

The HELL with it! She’s a PARENT introducing a TOXIN to the growing, mostly unformed body of an EIGHT YEAR OLD to prevent WRINKLES to win a CONTEST. Never mind the short term stupidity of the act itself; no one knows what this will do to the child in the long run . . . The mother doesn’t seem to care, she just wants her little Sardonicus* to have her face frozen wrinkle-free for pageant purposes. The professionals who use this on stuff on adults agree it shouldn’t be used on a minor. Read the label, which is available through the producer . . . As with most prescription medicines, this one comes with a list of warnings which would make most people seriously weigh the options.

The child, who shouldn’t be weighing the options required in making this kind of decision, informed, misinformed or otherwise, is dutifully doing as she’s told because she doesn’t “think wrinkles are nice on a little girl.”

That’s coming on a direct feed from the mother’s mouth, of course. At eight, even on the most precocious of children, opinions of this type have been shaped within the confines of the environments provided by the parents.** Without a load of therapy, I would bet this kid is going to have a fear of the natural aging process and self-image problems for the rest of her life, especially when her supply of face-freezing botulinum is taken from her which, as I write this, is a process which the city of San Francisco’s health services department is gearing up for.

Don’t spare the horses on a slam-dunk like this one, ladies and gents. From the horrific failures of varied child service agencies I’ve had to watch cross my newspapers and TV screens in the past forty or so years due to mishandled abuse cases, I’ll admit there were times when you weren’t my favorite people on the planet. I’M rooting for you, so that maybe in a few years; at least one child will still be able to smile as a result.



*Look up the image, ye of the strong-stomached. It was a nasty make-up job in a b-movie about a noble whose face froze in a death's-head when he grave-robbed a winning lottery ticket. Cheesy as it may have been, it made me jump as a kid.

** Take it from someone who’s been through the process twice. Once they take your base attempts at development at a young age and launch themselves whole cloth into independent thought later on, anything can happen. :)

The Veruca Salt Driving School

Reality to Earth . . . Watch out before you kill someone . . . Me, for one.

In the past week I would like to thank whatever arm of providence has seen fit to allow the reflexes I had as a teenager to suddenly and miraculously make a few guest appearances, not only by the ability to cut the speed of my car in a timely manner, but also by practically mind-merging me with my steering system to keep us both intact in our factory-original pieces.

I would also like to offer warnings to certain outside agents, like the driver of the black car in the center lane the other night who cut across my lane to get to an exit at over 60 miles per hour and missed my front bumper by all of six inches . . . Like the nimrod in another black car who ran a red light in New Rochelle, New York last Friday going the wrong way on a one way street. (I was quicker on that one. He missed me by a foot) . . . To my two "friends" on Sunday who thought a road full of mid-Mother's Day traffic somehow resembled the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and shot past me from right to left, changing lanes without signaling at about 80.

Once again . . . Six inches.

And they were only three examples. I could go on further, but the point is made. Outside of the racer boys, who need to find a track where throwing a ton and a half of steel and plastic around a high speeds can be a diversion best kept to themselves, I find myself thinking of one Veruca Salt, or at least an image of the child actress in the red dress playing her. I can see her, having made it to the age of driving, howling at her father/driving instructor "But I want to get there NOW, Daddy!"*

Getting there now involves getting there. In one piece. Intact.

I drive at a pretty good rate of speed, staying with, ahead of, or out of the way of the flow of traffic, depending on which tactic the situation requires. I'm not the guy doing forty in the fifty-five zone, not by a long shot. To be fair, they can drive me almost as nutty as the guy who passes me and cuts across three lanes of traffic right-to-left at eighty.

It's crazy out there, ladies and gents. Gas is expensive, but lives are a lot more precious. Listen to a traffic report on your local news station almost any day and you'll be amazed at what's going on. Example - A cluster of accidents occurred in near-comic sequence inside of only a five-mile span and completely screwed up traffic in most of the state of Connecticut for a time this past weekend. To my knowledge, no one was carried away from them under a sheet, but almost 33000 people last year weren't that lucky.

Maybe it's possible we're heading for the right track; that was the lowest number in 60 years, but it's still a sobering figure which can be dropped a lot lower. The crackdown on driving drunk helps. Let's really go for it by eliminating driving stupid.


*For those of you into the trivia, Julie Dawn Cole, the original Veruca Salt from the 1971 "Willy Wonka" movie, grew up to be a distinctly, pleasantly non-bratty looking actress who currently teaches children her craft in England. (In beautiful downtown Blog-World, you check things like this out sometimes to make sure specific people haven't had bad experiences with the things you're talking about.)

In Sports: The People in Charge of Fun . . . Aren't

Reality to Earth . . . Check with management. There's a screw loose somewhere . . .

If you're a hockey fan, there are certain constants you learn to live with in the game. On Hockey Night in Canada, Don Cherry is going to wear a jacket that looks like a Sherwin-Williams factory threw up on a J.C. Penney store. Detroit fans are going to celebrate their team's prowess with a certain piece of seafood. Fans of the New York Rangers are going to continue their tradition of berating a ghost of Islanders past, chanting 'Potvin Sucks' three to five times a game, just because. In Vancouver, you don't want to take a penalty against the home team unless you want to spend time with Sully and Force . . .

Who are Sully and Force? Think Blue Man Group, only in green; two young guys in body-covering Lycra who are posted to seats near-by, getting the fans stirred up and pulling some fairly crazy stunts involving props, including cutouts among other things, one a life-sized Carrie Underwood cutout which was adorned in a Vancouver Canucks jersey when her husband came to town in the playoffs.

Then the space-time continuum bent a hair to the off-side, readers. The Canucks passed on an edict from the NHL for them to tone down their antics. No more touching the glass, 'engaging players verbally' or doing handstands to distract the opposition.

To tell the truth, it's kind of a silly act; but so what? Is it any sillier than the NHL going so far as to try and get the city of Detroit to make it illegal to throw octopi on the ice, a local tradition since 1952 signifying the eight-victory sequence once required to earn a Stanley Cup? I find it amazing the league office considers such things a threat to the game worthy of their immediate attention (Or in the case of the flying octopi, continued attention) while it took a concussion to league poster boy Sidney Crosby for them to consider legislating hits to the head, such as the flying elbow-leads which have been thrown by players and shortening careers for decades.

It's two guys in a green suit. If you don't think it's funny, fine, turn your head and move on. The last thing you want if you're the NHL is your fans thinking you're against their having fun at the game. Just consider what the average hockey fan sees (Or in the case of some small-market franchises being propped up by profitable teams and the league office, isn't getting an audience for) in the course of a year which would go higher on the list of importance.

I'm not saying the NHL needs to hire Ringling Brothers' Barnum and Bailey to generate fan interest, far from it, but they do need to get a clue as to what their problems and failures have been with selling what is, in its essence, an exciting sport (With the exception of games in which The New Jersey Devils run their trap defense). They need the fans to come to the game and have fun there, green Spandex notwithstanding. They need their players to stay healthy, even if it means someone might have to use their one less weapon in their arsenal of marginal talents or be suspended for forgetting the rules. (Speaking of rules, I'll stay away from the refereeing arguments and the impression of 'ice-tilt' many fans get watching the game. It can either raise blood pressure or be an eye of the beholder sort of thing.)

I do have some hope for hockey. The Annual Winter Classic is an interesting nod to the roots of the game, and is attended by crowds upwards of 70,000. The All-Star Game this year showed flashes of life and entertainment. An ex-player who joined the brigade of suits in the NHL offices took on the job of arranging the whole thing, and did a fairly good job . . . Wait . . . Hey, there's a concept. Someone who knows why hockey is considered fun is in a place where he could actually affect league doctrine.

There you go, guys . . . Not a bad idea, is it? See what happens when you keep your eye on the puck?

They Don't Get It . . . Until They Get It

Reality to Earth . . . Bear with me folks, this takes time to explain . . .

They don’t get it. They never do. And why is that? Cause and effect have been displayed for them over and over again; the people who think this nation, in its quest for peace, won’t hit back when hit first.

Even if war came with a bit of an assist from the mainstream media, as represented by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, the incident involving the USS Maine put us into a war with Spain over their treatment of Cuba during the revolt in the island nation. President McKinley didn’t want us involved there and the final cause of the shipboard explosion, even after a century, has never been fully confirmed, but the effect was clear after the death of over 250 American sailors in a Cuban harbor . . . We did go to war with Spain and came away with most of their colonial land in the process.

The Lusitania was the domino at the front of the line in World War I. The interception of a German diplomatic attempt to put the war in our backyard through Mexico’s entry into a war of distraction with us was the final domino sending us into the fray. We were perfectly happy to stay out of the European playground, full of mustard gas and the sort of cannon fodder infantry which inhabited the trenches Erich Maria Remarque described in “All Quiet on The Western Front”. Germany proved they not only couldn’t understand the Napoleonic lessons about not fighting a two front war, but why it’s unwise inviting players who don’t want to play the game. They didn’t get it until they got it.

One of our enemies, who seemed to get it before the end (If too late) was Admiral Yamamoto of the Japanese Fleet. After December 7th, 1941 and Pearl Harbor he'd been quoted apocryphally as saying “I feel we have awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.” (This is not believed to be the actual quote. Similar words were attributed to him before his plane was shot down near a former Australian outpost in 1943.) It leads people to believe he fully understood the consequences of his actions before the final curtain rang down at the behest of a cluster of US naval air warriors.

Other wars had followed these, with all of the causes and effects we've grown weary of, but then we come another day in our history; a day which the mention of can only bring one image to mind for anyone in this country . . . Huge piles of debris where giants once stood.

Almost ten years have passed, with the lesson served in the manner in which we’ve come to expect it, with war and bloody retribution. The number one target we had in mind through all the battles fought took time, but the message was finally delivered by Seal Team 6 in two helicopters on May 1st, at one in the morning local time, deposited directly over a fuzzy left eyebrow.

10 years of waiting. The methods of gathering intelligence and the practice of war honed to a razor edge in the mean time and implemented. One dead murderer delivered to the gates of hell.

What do they not get? Every time this nation is prodded out of peacetime and into a warlike stance, we get progressively better at it. The modern American soldier currently has at his disposal the greatest weapons tech the world has ever seen, some of which thirty years ago might have well been considered science fiction. (Can you say laser guided smart bombs and remote-controlled Predator drones, boys and girls?)

And one thing the Osama Bin Laden’s of this world recognize least seems to be the lesson of cause and effect. Pre 9/11, I would have never believed my eyes if there had been such an outpouring of emotion celebrating the death of a villain on the streets of this country. Sure you would have heard a lot of individual statements of this, but not a spontaneous group display, such as you might see in the nations which found our discomforts a reason to celebrate.

The reality of the situation is this . . . By the spilling of innocent blood, the cause; we are a harder people now, vigilant to the point of paranoia and somewhat irritable about the situation. You don’t always see it in us, but the evidence is out there. That is directly opposite of the effect our late friend from Al-Qaeda wished to see, and it’s the brightest signal I could possibly point out to all of you boys and girls with bad intentions that it is time to stop now. We cursed the man and today he’s gone. If you don’t get a hold of a history book and read through it, you’ll follow the wrong example into history yourself, and I guarantee you’ll be cursing him for not realizing what he’s done to you.