"You want it to be one way. But it's the other way."
Unless our current Bush gets the Supreme Court to throw out the 22nd Amendment — he’s the president, and he ought to have whatever he wants, right? — he’s got three years left in office as of noon EST today (12 minutes from now, if you’re counting). Unless the impeachers get him, of course.
Technorati Tags: bush, impeachment
There’s a story to this. You could guess. You’re welcome to, in fact. I’ll give my version later. I will say this much, though: This was one of my happiest bicycling moments ever.
Redoubtable Chicagoan (or is that redundant?) MK points out a Slate feature on “24.” It’s an interview with one of the show’s writers on the many TV story-telling envelopes the series is pushing. All fine. The show’s central conceit, that the story is taking place in real time during the course of a single day (divided into two dozen advertiser-friendly weekly episodes) is unique. But that’s not news. What is noteworthy, Slate writer James Surowiecki suggests, is the staying power of “24” long after the audience has gotten used to the show’s terrorist spectaculars and remorselessly pounding clock. The explanation, Surowiecki says, lies in factors like the “political and even moral depth” that world events have lent the production. And of course we shouldn’t overlook “Kiefer Sutherland’s exceptional work as Jack Bauer.”
It’s perplexing. On one hand, you wonder if Surowiecki’s ever watched the show. If he has, where did he spot all the excellent acting and writing he’s talking about? But he has watched the show — the interview he conducts comes off as the work of a “24” junkie. He asks the writer Michael Loceff, with an apparently straight face, “How much work do you put into making the show realistic? There seem to be times when realism and drama inevitably come into conflict.”
There seem to be times? Yes, whenever a character says or does just anything more complex than start a car. The only reason I can imagine that anyone would suggest that “24” has anything serious to say about the world we live in is that produces high ratings. But the Nielsen numbers don’t make the show deep or serious any more than Bush getting re-elected transforms him smart or wise.
As for Kiefer Sutherland’s “exceptional” acting — if you’re looking for an unregenerate hard-ass, I’ll take R. Lee Ermey any day — here’s a Jack Bauer drinking game (don’t blame me for the cirrhosis): Down a shot (whatever you prefer to guzzle) every time Jack screams, “No-o-o-o-o!” A shot every time he shouts. “Do it!” or some variation on that. A shot every time he threatens to rough up someone who’s not fully cooperatng with him; a double-shot every time he follows through on the threat.
Technorati Tags: 24
Here’s the trouble you can get into idly flipping through the channels. The Playboy Channel? A “South Park” marathon? A Howard Stern-dubbed replay of the Alito hearings? No. More frightening still, you might see this: Jerry Falwell, in all his glory, holding forth on his own cable outlet, the Liberty Channel (“Enjoy liberty’s greatest gift — the freedom to think just like me!”)
Actually, when I tuned in, he was sermonizing benignly on the Psalms. He’s got a nice reading voice.
“24” is back. Despite past seasons of carping about it, I spent two hours in front of the tube tonight watching (well, less than two since we recorded it and blasted through the commercials). No less august a chronicler of important stuff than The New York Times saw fit to run three — three! — features on the new season since Friday. (The considerably less august San Francisco Chronicle had a big season-opener on Friday. The reviewer, TV critic Tim Goodman, botched one detail. He suggested episode one took 10 minutes before it headed off into unhinged crisis mode; in fact, it took much less time: The opening credits were still rolling when the first high-profile character — “former President David Palmer” — was dispatched by an assassin.)
The Times ran a piece today on Carlos Bernard (aka north suburban Chicagoland native Carlos Bernard Papierski), who plays Tony Almeida, the durable and always-dependable sidekick to Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer. What he’s loved for best in these parts, of course, is his display of a Cubs mug every season; he even drank beer out of it last season to dramatize how depressed he was with life as a disgraced counterterrorism agent. The mug showed up tonight in his very first scene in episode one, an hour that was kind of rough on him (13 minutes into the new season, mere minutes after brandishing the Cubs mug, his wife was killed by a car bomb. Tony/Carlos was badly injured in the blast).
(Carlos Bernard/Tony Almeida in intimate Cubs mug moment.)
In other “24” news, the bad guys got things rolling in a big way. As usual, they’re omnipotent. As usual, they love L.A. The terrorist scenario this year involves some pissed-off Russians who look to be staging a Beslan-style hostage incident at the airport in Ontario. It’ll get really ridiculous soon — maybe even during the second two episodes, to be aired Monday. Thank goodness for the Cubs mug.
Technorati Tags: 24
From the sharp-eyed Kate, off of Craigslist:
FREE TEETH CLEANING
Reply to: anon-125119271@craigslist.org
Date: 2006-01-13, 2:19PMYou: A kind-hearted person who hasn’t had their teeth cleaned in over 5 years and is willing to take a free trip to O’ahu, Hawaii to help me take my State Board Dental Hygiene test. Persons with cavities, crowns, bridges are not appropriate for this test. Lots of tartar build-up is a must! Smokers ok. We will leave Feb 21st (Tuesday), the test is Feb 22nd, and you may stay for as long as you like. Air-fare and hotel (for 2-3 days) will be covered. Free full set of x-rays included.
Me: A Registered Dental Hygienist that needs your help!If you think you fit the criteria, and need a tan as desperately as I do, call me at (707)888-4765
Thanks! April
Doing some research on RSS readers — applications that let you compile feeds from blogs and news sites and any other online source that cares to one up — I came across a site I had long ago noted and then forgotten about: Our Daily Dead. Wow. It’s a sort of super-blog that traffics in notable obituaries and sometimes the miscellaneous arcana of death.
In looking at the site just now, I came across the following literary obit, published last week in the Los Angeles Times:
Sanora Babb, 98; Writer Whose Masterpiece Rivaled Steinbeck’s
If there were lessons to be learned from Sanora Babb’s hardscrabble years as a child on the Colorado frontier, one of them must have been perseverance.
Babb waited 65 years in the shadow of a literary giant for her first completed novel to be published. Upstaged in 1939 by John Steinbeck’s bestselling “The Grapes of Wrath,” Babb’s tale about the travails of a Depression-era farm family was shelved by the venerable Random House, which feared that the market would not support two novels on the same theme. Bitterly disappointed, Babb stuck her manuscript in a drawer, and there it remained until 2004, when it was rescued by the University of Oklahoma Press.
At 97, Babb earned long-overdue praise for the novel, “Whose Names Are Unknown,” an acutely observed chronicle of one family’s flight from the drought and dust storms of the high plains to the migrant camps of California during the 1930s.
Reviewers called it a “long-forgotten masterpiece” and “an American classic both literary and historical,” as compelling as Steinbeck’s epic work and in some ways more authentic.
The widow of Oscar-winning cinematographer James Wong Howe, whom she dated in the 1940s in defiance of California’s anti-miscegenation laws, Babb died of natural causes Dec. 31 at her Hollywood Hills home, said Joanne Dearcopp, her longtime agent and literary executor. She was 98.
The obit goes on to note that Babb’s editor at Random House, the legendary Bennett Cerf, both praised “Whose Names Are Unknown” to the heavens and declared it couldn’t be published. “What rotten luck,” the obit quotes him as writing to Babb in reference to “The Grapes of Wrath.” “Obviously, another book at this time about exactly the same subject would be a sad anticlimax!”
The obit is a wonderful read. I want the book in my hands right now.
The Honda rat is in the news again. The jumbo inflate-a-rodent was installed at a Berkeley street corner as a mascot by union mechanics thrown out of their jobs by the new owner of the local Honda dealership. Then, as recounted by Richard Brenneman, the Jack London of the Berkeley police beat — happy 130th birthday, by the way, Jack — the usually buoyant rat was slashed and deflated by an unknown assailant.
One of San Francisco TV stations, ABC 7, has gotten wind of the rat saga and did a news report on it earlier this week. In the station’s semi-intelligible Web version of the story, the dealership’s general manager complains that the rat stretches the legal tolerance for free speech a little too far: “They’re able to take what probably should be a temporary use permit and turned it into a perpetual opportunity,” he says.
Sure, it’s a nuisance when people you’ve fired don’t have the manners to thank you and leave without a fuss. But look on the rat’s good side: It keeps regular hours — 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., apparently. It’s not known to gnaw or scrabble where it’s not wanted. It’s totally plague-free and hypoallergenic. It’s seasonally festive if not abundantly tasteful. It presents no choking hazard to kids and won’t crawl up your leg. I’m sure the Honda guy will get to love it.
I search for the word “Iraq” on Technorati, the blog-content indexing and search service. I view the results in Technorati’s “Mini” applet, a neat little pop-up window, updated every 60 seconds, showing the latest blog posts related to Iraq. At the bottom of the Mini window is a perky little ad that’s supposed to be relevant to my search:
Visiting Iraq?
Find cheap flights and hotel rates for Iraq from over 100
top travel sites at Kayak.com. Book direct and save.
www.kayak.com
Clicking on that link takes you to a Kayak page that invites you to choose one of seven Baghdad hotels for your upcoming trip. Top of the list: The Ishtar, on Saadoun Street. Amenities include free parking, car rental, a multilingual staff, an outdoor pool, and jogging (with all that going for it, the joint still rates only 5.0 out of 10 based on 32 Kayak users).
When you try to book a week at the Ishtar, though, Kayak returns a screen saying that if you want a reservation at any of the listed Baghdad hotels, you need to call them. If you try to book a flight, you hit another roadblock: a browser window pops up saying that no one Kayak does business with is flying to Baghdad. Just out of curiosity, I checked two other big online travel agents, Orbitz and Expedia, and they won’t get you to Baghdad, either. Curious, eventually I found the booking site for Iraqi Airways, which flies three round trips a week between Baghdad and Dubai in United Arab Emirates for 1600 AED (Emirati dirham), about $450.
Monday evening, just about to cross the last little pass on westbound Interstate 80 into the town of Vallejo. From the top of the pass — it’s a pass, though I don’t know its name — you catch your first glimpse of bay water. At the end of a 500-mile trip back from western Oregon, or a much shorter one into the Central Valley, the sight says you’re almost home.
It was about 5 o’clock as I drove up this long incline out of the westernmost edge of the valley. The sun, just the other side of that ridge to the right, shockingly brilliant. Just a hint of green coming out across the hills after our foot of rain. The traffic was backed up for miles and miles going the other way, partly because of rush hour, partly because of an accident of some sort down the hill to the east. The volume of traffic on I-80 is always impressive and has been for years and years. I wrote a short editorial for The Examiner in the summer of 1991 describing a Friday night drive from Berkeley up across Donner Pass. It felt like being carried along in the surge of a river, a flow so powerful it bore everyone up-country all the way to the top of the mountains and beyond.
So seeing masses of cars, especially at going-home time: Not a surprise, but always a reminder of how crowded this place has become and how we live amid all this beauty.