iCame, iSaw, iLeft in on the Shelf

       It's all a matter of taste, iSuppose. iJust didn't feel the need to run out of the house and wait on line overnight because the folks at Apple decided it was time to reveal the new and improved member of its little electronic family, iPhone 5.
       You, Frank? Once one of the people other people used to come to at the place you worked begging you to help them make their spotty, brand new tech work like it did on the commercials?
       Yes. Let's first of all realize one small, but important fact. I'm not going to be left so horrifically behind the times because iDidn't rush out to get this latest bauble. If iWanted (BIG if, by the way) to get wrapped up in the world of Apple, I only have to wait a little while before iPhone 6 arrives, a piece of technology which you can damned well be sure is already at least six months in the development channel, sitting next to buddy the new New iPad and the other new and improved buddies in the iTech aisle designed to maintain Apple's position as a highly profitable entity.
       While browsing the aisles at the local "Buy More" electronics shop a few month ago, iHappened on a display of the '4', which was being pored over wide-eyed by this young lady and her family. iWas standing next to my wife and happened to remark to her, in my best smart-ass (I do speak Smart-ass, stewardess, as well as Jive) that the countdown towards iPhone 5 was going to start any day.
       You would have thought iShot Bambi in front of her . . . While telling her Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and leprechauns didn't exist. She was sure there was no way a new phone was going to come out so close to the release of the other one.
       Nice lady. Not a history major. But she knows not of Apple's Way . . . The way of introducing new products which make the old products almost immediately drop in value . . . The way of producing new software and operating systems which don't have upgrades, and instead must be bought as completely new in order to have their 'new, improved, advanced' options made available . . . And heaven help you if you have an older machine, because it probably won't be able to work on one of 'those'. (By the way . . . There have been 3 iPad models, right? . . . Why are they getting ready to release their 6th Operating System?)
       iFinished. See you soon. Same iTime, same iChannel. To be iFair, however . . .                                 

Hypocrisy in Sports or 'Just Another Olympics'

Reality to Earth - Rule 40 prohibits an athlete from partaking in any promotions during the course of the Olympic Games . . . That's The Olympic Games, which is probably the largest promotional event anywhere on the planet.

Down in the pool, an American man-child who just happens to swim like Flipper and has taken home the most medals ever . . .

Read that again. Most. Medals. EVER.

There's a rumbling somewhere below the surface that in his off time during the Olympic games, Michael Phelps took part in a Louis Vuitton advertising campaign, having photos taken for a promotion to be released after the Olympics . . .

I don't mean to be picky, but read THAT again. To be released. AFTER. The Olympics.

And thanks to the fact someone LEAKED the photos during the game, UNOFFICIALLY, there's word they want to take back the medals which make Phelps the top Olympic gold-miner of all time owing to RULE 40, which is a NEW rule to help prevent anyone who hasn't bought in as an official sponsor to get a taste of the billions of dollars being passed around the table. (Is it serve from the right, pick up from the left? I'm always getting confused.)

Somewhere in between the dreams of Baron Pierre de Coubertin in creating an Olympic committee for the modern amateur games and today, more than a few cogs have been slipped in the administration of this event. It is rife with questionable bidding wars for sites, more promotional product tie-ins than one could reasonably shake a stick at, and professional athletes of every form finding a place to ply their individual trades.

Tennis, anyone? That's just an example, but check the starting line-up at the US Open and match it against the opening seedings for the Olympics competition. No one seemed to mind the star power there, did they?

It's always the athlete whose gone that extra mile in training to do his or her best who'll have someone throw the flag (or red card) in their face. Now the person, clean of any other possible infractions, they've practically anointed the best of the best for his work IN THE POOL, is possibly going to get his hand slapped for something which happened OUT OF THE POOL.

Once upon a time readers, there was a track and field athlete who was considered the greatest of his day. He won the decathlon and pentathlon in the same games, but because he played Carolina League Baseball for a pittance for a few summers, he was stripped of any medals and statuary he'd been given. This was in 1912, and the athlete was Jim Thorpe, who, as time passed, became one of the first members of an organization originally known as the APFA, which is now known as the NFL. In 1983, thirty years after he passed on, the medals were reinstated, (Despite the previous objections of those such as his former teammate and IOC President Avery Brundage) but the fact we're still discussing stripping an athlete of the medal he's won for non-sports related reasons a century after the fact shows there's still a massive hypocrisy involved in the structure and rulings of this so-called amateur event.

It's a sports competition. Let the fair play on the field decide who gets to keep their medals.(And for crying out loud, can I not be made to look at so much as the shadow of a synchronized swimmer or rhythm gymnast for the next four years? Just asking.)

Looking Through the Glass

Reality to Earth - Falling off the horse is always easier than getting back on. Saddle up.

And welcome back to the dusty corners of a writer's mind in the midsummer of an election year. Let's see, what's sitting on the back burner?

- The donkeys and the elephants are in full swing, each trying to prove their hot mess is better than the other sides hot mess, with the donkeys' hot mess currently in charge of a hot potato he's dropped so many times it's mashed. (Guys . . . A Chicago politician? Really? And all this surprised you?)

- Major movie events have joined the ranks of 'Things Crazy People Interrupt With Obscene Violence", thanks to some red-hair-dyed nut case in Colorado. I'm not sure if gun control is the answer, because it's the illegal guns which cause too much of the violence and people have the right to protect themselves, but I do think when someone orders a veritable shitload of ammunition, maybe a red flag should be thrown up somewhere. How about it?

- Prices are rising in all areas, yet the Consumer Price Index, which for as long as I can remember had been dragged to the front page and held up like a dead mouse by a proud cat every time it went up on someone else's watch, goes virtually unspoken on the nightly news. (Here's a clue - It's up, but let's not tell all of those nasty old curmudgeons on Social Security, they might actually want some more of the money they paid into that insurance system back to make up for the changes.)

- In sports - Part 1 - An Olympics has come and gone with the usual mix of feel good stories, overt over-marketing and accusations of cheating. BMX biking is in while baseball and softball are out, synchronized swimming is just as silly as ever, but on the plus side, gymnasts are looking more like athletes and less like candidates for 'Toddlers and Tiaras'.

- In sports - Part 2 - The NBA had one of the ugliest partial seasons you'd ever want to see, with games stacked end to end following a labor mess which could have been avoided, and the NHL, which had possibly one of the better season and post-seasons in recent memory, is about to do them one better by crashing a part or their whole 2013-14 season because the job they did seven years ago doesn't allow them to keep losing franchises in cities which can't support them. (Note to the commissioner - Shutting the doors four times in one term isn't anyone's idea of how to do your job properly. Figure it out or resign.)

- I'd still rather watch USA Network than NBC. Someone out there doesn't get it.

- Nice pictures from Loch Ness. Still doesn't tell us what's down there, but the unidentified swimming object in the new pictures is a lot nicer looking than the unidentifiable swimming object in the last pictures.

- On a personal note - It should take less than two years to decide 'yes' or 'no' on publishing a book, shouldn't it? Just venting, kids . . . The Business of Writing is less fun than the process of creation. By a lot.

Now that we've gotten some housecleaning out of the way, the next trick is to look over the field and see which target deserves a good harpooning. Maybe I'll add an unidentifiable picture of it.

April Fools Day (And Halloween) Must Be Early This Year

Reality to Earth . . . Did I just hear you right? You're bringing back WHAT?

I know things are going badly over at NBC (The president of entertainment at the network as much as said so to reporters on Friday), but when you hear something like this one brainstorm you wonder if somebody's leg was being pulled right out of its socket in the meeting during which this idea came up.

Then you do a little research and realize they're taking it seriously and seem to be suggesting  you might want to do so as well. The NBC network is reaching back into television's spoof-laden past to come up with . . . Drumroll please . . . A "visually spectacular reinvention" of "The Munsters" as an hour long drama. (I believe, given the fact it's being woven together by Brian Fuller (!), the same character who worked on the late, lamented "Pushing Daisies", and Bryan Singer (!!), who led the X-Men onto the screen, a dramedy with a bit of action is a more likely outcome.)

That's "The Munsters", folks. If you have any connection to a place where syndicated TV shows filled part of your childhood, you probably remember them. The show had two singularly goofy seasons on CBS in the 60's, along with a few movies and telemovies, and a late 80's syndicated reboot to its name. This came with the aid of a rather genial group of actors in classic movie monster make-up, interacting blithely with the 'normal' societies they were wrapped up in.

Sometimes lately I watch television with the same fascination some people watch auto races; to see when things go spectacularly wrong. NBC as of late qualifies as an auto race in which the track is littered with wreckage while some of the pit teams seem to have been diverting ideas from the main grid and saving the entertaining stuff for USA Network, where the short-season programming and the odd fun concepts NBCUniversal are generating seem to be doing a hell of a lot better than what's being splashed out onto the senior circuit. Perhaps they should be getting this one instead of the network, or it should be sent to one of their other wings, SyFy, as it would be the only way to assure the show would last long enough into the slash-and-burn festival NBC calls a television season to find out what they've gotten themselves into.

Are the networks running out of ideas? It's a good question without a definitive answer, but "Grandpa" Al Lewis standing down in his dungeon and mixing various potions might never have reached for an ingredient like this to throw into the mix. In any event, stay tuned ladies and gentlemen. Whether it makes sense or not, it's happening. I only shudder to think what's next.

Is it Over Yet? A Holiday Primer

Happy New Year, all. It's January 3rd, ladies and gentlemen. The hangovers of the world, both liquor-driven and holiday-prompted, should have faded by now enough to get back to whatever it is you do best, whether student or office drone; outdoors, indoors or behind closed doors.

In the world of commerce, it's been a better year for the shopkeeper, most especially if he or she is working at a distance from the consumers they've been courting. More people have been using the internet as an option, and while many use it as a convenience, I find there's a considerably larger reason for using the shipping departments of the world to handle Holiday Shopping; a reason which, had it existed in the 1840's, would have scared Ebeneezer Scrooge out of his mind in a way the three ghosts of Christmas never could have . . . And probably for the worse.

The opening of the shopping season has been, for the past few years, the scene of cavalry charges at the openings of stores which make "The Valley of Death" the "600" rode into look like Sunday afternoon on a merry-go-round. When people start talking about injuries and death tolls, something's wrong here, folks. There have been instances in the past few years where some loose end was carrying, and I don't mean boxes and bows, and someone was shot as a result. K-Mart has had to change its way of doing business since one of their people died in a stampede (Humans, not cattle) in 2008.

The latest example of this holiday spirit involved $180 sneakers, the Air Jordan XI's, where fights broke out in at least ten states where the footwear went on sale, with subsequent E-Bay resales tripling the price.

Seeing the holidays the way they're currently run, I have no doubt the old man would have sent Tiny Tim a check via Paypal, his family a turkey via Peapod and other gifts via Amazon, e-mailed Cratchit his promotion and raise with a request he run the office, and then crawled under the comforter on his four-post bed to await the ghost of Christmas yet to come. If he made it through to New Year's Eve, he would have needed to keep off the roads on Amateur Night, when most of those who drive shouldn't, especially drunk.

As is to be expected, most of us live to tell the tales of Christmas and New Year's, both good and ill. Let's get back to whatever it is we do well with the understanding that this year, maybe we'll do it a little better. It's quite possible . . . Even in a election year.

Happy Purple Finger Day, Egypt

See it in your mind as I see it in mine. It's just after 9PM in Cairo, and a curious ten year old child, for these purposes we'll call him Abdul, is being settled into bed and is staring at his parents' index fingers, or more accurately, at the indelible purple ink which will be staining those fingers until it finally washes off completely . . .

Happy Purple Finger Day. With smiles on their faces, as you could judge by the camera images broadcast around the world, Egyptians are working slowly through the process of choosing a new government for themselves, a government they earned the right to choose by standing up and requesting it at the top of their lungs until the government in place read the writing on the wall and gave up the ghost of their regime. It wasn't easy, and as anyone on this side of the Atlantic will be glad to tell you, it isn't going to be easy. Down the road in Iraq, another group of smiling, purple fingered citizens could tell them that just as easily . . . Although the threat of being locked in a cellar with a reasonably psychotic gentleman with various painful implements for putting an "X" in the wrong place is no longer an issue.

They're taking there time with the process; watching it closely to make sure there's no cheating and telling the rest of the world it should take until mid-January until things run their course and a Parliament is chosen. It sounds like a plan to me, and someday, when little Abdul starts turning his finger purple on a regular basis, they'll probably be able to do it faster, all things progressing as the people want it to.

The boy is looking to his mother and father, and asking about the what the purple fingers mean. What they might be able to tell him is that the idea is simple. The image of Egypt is not to be what Pharaoh decrees, or the King demands, or what the current corrupt head of state arranges to have happen while he strips huge chunks of the country's riches from it. It is to be what they decide it will be. Everyone with a purple finger.

I Have Seen the Enemy, and He is Us

I've spent a little time away from the land of opinion the past few months while life was going on. It's good to see you again, although under these circumstances I might have just been better off alternately shaking my head and burying it in the sand. Somehow, WMAM (White Middle-Aged Male . . . Ooh boy children, ain't that scary!) that I am, I seem to be the enemy of most everyone on the planet . . . And I'm not even one of the ones with money.

Walt Kelly, the cartoonist who created a strip called "Pogo" used the intentionally grammatically incorrect statement which titles this peace to make a point over forty years ago, and I find it no more and no less accurate than it can be seen today, in our land of the pointed finger. Put a "Tea Party" member in the room with an "Occupy Wall Street" member and though both of them see massive problems with the current system, want things to change and are protesting against the status quo, there's a good chance you'll need a WWE referee, the National Guard and at least one particular photogenic 'gentleman' from the UC Davis area to separate them.

Neither side is happy. Neither am I. Anyone who has tried to navigate the island of Manhattan in the past months knows what I mean (Hey! Is your getting around and people making it to their jobs on time more important than our message?), and anyone who sees the headaches some of the more extreme forms conservatism can engender in a society knows what I mean. (Can't you see what's happened to our world? Our anti-establishment is better than their anti-establishment any day! Those naughty Democrats!)

One of the more interesting parts of living in a free society is the right to express an opinion in a public forum (Like this one). Keeping people from getting to work to get on with their life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, or suggesting business executive pledge not to hire anyone until the supposed 'war against business' ends, is another.

One of the little sidelights in my life in acting, and locally I had a chance to take part in a production of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible", which is often held up as not only a dramatization of early American witch hunting, but of the later ills of the McCarthy era in hunting Communists. If you think we've grown out of this sort of thing, look around. I see a lot of hands out with their fingers pointed in dozens of different directions, and they are crying 'witch' again everywhere they point.

You are pointing at us, we are pointing at you, and everyone needs to put their fingers down, pick up their shovels and start digging their way out of this shit. It's an old school kind of solution, but it has been known to work.