Gone With The Wind? The Lady Eve? Citizen Kane? ... sorry, they're ALL amateurs ... THIS is REAL cinema

If you like drunken, foul-mouthed, evil clowns hell-bent on having a good time.

Art. No more need be said.

I've been inspired and am turning over a new leaf

The Big 3 auto auto makers have inspired me. My employers have inspired me. I've become cash conscious. No more money guzzling for me, no siree. In the future, when I travel around the country on assignment, no more of those fancy SouthWest jets. This is my new method of transportation - 450,000 mpc (miles per dilithium crystal).

Screw the Big Three!

OK. The price of cars compels me to say something about this. The bastards in their SUV’s that think they own the road while they SUCK gasoline out of the planet COMPEL me to speak…

Screw the Big 3. They’re on the Hill today whining to Congress about how they want some of what their Big Brother Bankers got. Screw them too.

Why do I offer this volatile opinion? One, nobody reads this blog anyway, so I really don’t care if I offend anyone (besides I’ve reached that cranky stage in life where I’m supposed to sit in the corner and mumble to myself incoherently, which I do). And two, I heard more bullshit on the news today that further toasted my tortillas, which is what this rant is about. And if you are that one person that reads my crap, you’ll notice I usually focus on humor as I hate dealing with this crap. On with the crap:

Remember when the bastards from GM, Ford and Chrysler flew to appear before the Big Wigs in Washington? – Flew in private jets to ask for 25 gazillion dollars of your and my money so THEY (poor paupers) wouldn’t go broke (BASTARDS!)? And then when they got there, Congress asked them a simple, logical question, what are you going to do with the money? They hadn’t a clue. THAT should have told Congress something right there. But no, Congress gave them what every spoiled, undeserving child wants, the coveted “do-over”. Go home boys, actually THINK this time, make up some shit, put it on paper so when we give you the money we won’t look quite so stupid. OK? So off they scurried, back to Detroit.

Well, they caught a lot of crap about the private jet thing. Their perception of the public must be pretty bad if they think they can fly in on a private, $5-million Lear jet, with a stocked bar, movies, fine dining, etc. and think nobody’s going to pay any attention to the fact that they say they’re “hurting for money”. Duh.

Last week, one of them, I don’t remember which, filed papers with the FAA allowing them to NOT make their flight plans public. Hmmm. No deception there, huh. That helps us trust you already untrustworthy jerks.

So.

Today, a week later, they all drove hybrids to Washington. Yep. Well, that’s what we wanted them to do, right?

Ever heard of Greyhound a**holes? Now THAT’S the way folks that are barely hanging on and are needing to borrow $25 gazillion dollars SHOULD travel. Or why don’t all three of you Hybrid share? I’d love to see all three of their tubby asses stuffed in that Hybrid, smelly feet on the dash, Burger King bags on the floor. GM snoring in the back seat. Chrysler at the wheel because he won't let anyone else drive and Ford trying to get everyone else to join in on "Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall". That would do my heart so much GOOD!!! It does my heart good just visualizing it.

I wanna puke. I mean seriously. How f**king transparent can they be? How stupid can we be?

Have you ever seen the movie Mystery Men? GREAT film! Super heroes with dubious super-powers like the Spleen (Paul Ruebens) who’s power is the ability to fart and empty a room; Mr. Furious (Ben Stiller) has the uncanny ability to throw temper tantrums, often on tabletops or the hood of vehicles, usually to no avail.

And then we have Invisible Boy (played by Kel Mitchell). His talents are as listed: Powers/Abilities: Able to turn invisible, but only when no one is looking at him and when he is naked.

These jokers from Detroit remind me of Invisible Boy. While you’re watching them, it’s quite clear what they’re up to. When you’re NOT watching them, they’re running amok.

For God’s sake. Do they really think anyone on this planet actually thinks they’re going to get back in the hybrids to RETURN to Detroit once the sheep (baaaaaah) in Congress give them their gazillion dollars. Oh hell no.

Do the letters AIG strike any chords with anyone? Different industry, same invisible, naked guys.

I’m done. Going back to my corner to mumble. And pay my f**king taxes.

I want sheven BLT'sh pleash

Thanks, Mandy, I'd forgotten about the BLT story.

Ah-hem ... the BLT Story.

I used to drink. A lot. I don't drink anymore. This is just one of the million reasons why:

My wife and I were on a cruise. It was the middle of the night. She was sick, so I'd tucked her in to bed and had ventured out on my own like the song goes "the ruler of the night". Well not really, but it sounds cool. Do they really say, "Wrapped up like a douche, you know the ruler of the night?" I don't listen to lyrics very well.

Anyway. Alone. Drinking. Gambling. Hungry. 4 bad states for me to be in. By about 4:30 in the morning, I'm predictably wrecked. The boat is swaying, but I'm right in tune as I'm swaying in time to it. I stagger back to the room.

And I climb into the upper bunk being careful to not awaken my wife. Yes, I'm a cheap shit, bunk beds.

Then the thought hits me, must have BLT's.

So I climbed back down to use the phone, how I managed to not wake her or break my neck is a mystery.

If you've never been on a cruise ship, I'll tell you now, one of the COOLEST things about a cruise is that you can eat 24 hours a day for free. Room service is free. And they'll bring you anything they have and as much as you want as long as you tip them. So the person on the other end of the room service line never faltered when I ordered seven BLT's. Why seven? Hell, I don't know. I was hungry. They were free. And I'd just finished gambling (though I NEVER bet on 7).

So I climb BACK up the ladder to the bunk. And promptly pass out.

Knock at the door. OH, SHIT! DON'T WAKE UP MY WIFE! I clamber back down the ladder not killing myself again. Open the door and there stands the room service guy with a large mistake on my part. I hadn't visualized how much food seven BLT's actually was. The guy glances past me (he could see the entire room it was so small) sees just my wife sound asleep, sees my drunken ass, looks at the HUGE tray of BLT's and I'd love to know what he was thinking.

I hand him a tip. And off I go with food in hand. I slide the tray, which more resembles the hood of a 57 Chrysler onto the top bunk, I scramble up the ladder, nestle in next to the tray and prepare for my feast.

The next morning, I don't feel too good. My head is doing the boingy-boingy thing and I can't remember a whole lot about last night. And there's this god-awful smell. As my eyes open, "Ahhhh!" I'm face-to-face with an alien shape. It's a BLT. I bolt upright. Now my head REALLY hurts and is screaming at me, "MOVE SLOWLY DUMBASS!". As my eyes adjust, I discover I'm surrounded by a posse of seven BLT's and only one of them has a single bite taken out of it. I hadn't eaten any of them before I passed out, but I had managed to thrash about in them as I fitfully slept, so they were scattered everywhere. I hadn't eaten them, I was wearing them.

I give up. You got me.

At least I got a bite out of one of ya'.

Explain this then would you

OK. You're driving your car down the street at 45 miles per hour and a tree jumps out in front of you - hey, it happens - if you're NOT wearing a seat belt, you're toast (you might be toast even if you ARE wearing a seat belt). Almost everything in your car IS toast as it slams into you, the dash or anything that stops it from its headlong forward rush.

Almost everything that is.

Why don't you see flies smashed on the windshields of car wrecks in junk yards? Do flies not only fly fast, but also think fast enough to say to themselves in flyeeze, "Oh, shit, that tree's jumping in front of us, FLY BACKWARD, FLY BACKWARD!" WHAMMMMM! "Whew. That was a close one. Hey, what's everybody doing smooshed against the windshield?"

Go on. Go to the junk yard and look at the wrecked cars. And if the guy with "Bob" on his shirt asks you just what in the "heck yur doin'," I dare you to tell him. Oh please, please, please, please tell him. And then let me know what he does or says.

Do normal people think about things like this?

The Halloween Snowball from Hell

Our guests in their clever 1940's costumes enjoy a little radio-active cake. Notice the matching, atomic hat? Cool.


First, let me explain I am appalled that we are the only country to have actually dropped atomic weapons on another country. Two, not just one. I wasn't around back then so, of course, don't understand the sentiment involved. It's just wrong.

But on to my Halloween atomic bomb story.

It was Halloween, otherwise, it would just be your plain old atomic bomb story. We knew how to throw Halloween parties. We had an actual hearse in the front yard, a coffin hanging from the hearse, etc. None of this cardboard cutout stuff, mind you, the real deal death wagon and box.

Really cool costumes too. The friends we hung with were almost all into science fiction conventions and costuming. Not the Spock ear crap, but intricate, medieval weapons, armor, or fantasy boots, clothing, etc. Good costumes. Weird stuff, but good costumes. Made even better after about 2 or 30 drinks.

And as with most of my pre-recovery parties, there was far more booze than pretzels.

A friend of ours had invented a strange Halloween concoction he called "Strange Brew" after the infamous Cream song. And strange it was. It had ALL the white liquors in it. Pineapple juice, lime sherbet, Sprite and the crowning glory - chunks of dry ice. And as Engineer Scott used to say, "It's green, Captain!"

Now, if you swallow a big chunk of it, dry ice will PROBABLY screw you up, if not kill you. The Brew Master was pretty careful with it though. He would put it in one tennis ball size chunk at a time for a couple of hours before the party. He prepared the "Brew" in a 5 gallon industrial paint can festooned with biohazard symbols and warnings. But what made Strange Brew a legacy throughout sci-fi-dom in the Midwest was the constant stream of steam it put off that trailed over the lip of the can on all sides, down the can and across the floor. Like a scene from Swamp Thing. When we made Brew in our room at sci-fi conventions, there was no need to advertise the fact that we were having a party, the steam trailing into and down the hotel hall was advertising enough. The fans POURED into our room. They loved us.

But this particular evening, we're in my house on Chippewa. The lights are low. The Brew is flowing. The costumes are great. The neighbors are pissed. And oh yeah, forgot to tell you one important thing, this particular batch of Brew has been prepared in a large cast iron witch's cauldron in the middle of my living room. Hey, we broke tradition ONE time for the sake of authenticity.

So anyway, the party is in FULL swing, and the Brew-Master discovers we have a 10 pound block of dry ice left, but not much Brew. So we decide to WOW the crowd with home-made pyrotechnics.

It is at this point that I MUST insert the obligatory - DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS AT HOME. WHAT YOU'RE ABOUT TO READ WAS DONE BY UNPROFESSIONAL DUMB ASSES AND YOU COULD GET HURT OR DIE AS YOU'LL SEE - READ ON. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED!

I boil a couple gallons of water.

He puts the 10 pound block of dry ice in the cauldron.

We call all the guests around to watch as the Halloween Ice Follies begin. The anticipation builds. Ooooooo ...!!!

We didn't plan on what happened.

When the boiling water hit the giant, 10 pound Snowball from Hell, it got pissed. REAL pissed.

Have you ever seen any of those Discovery Channel films where they show atomic explosions? The blast starts as a vertical column, goes straight up, but rises faster on the inside of the column than the outside so it curls under creating the infamous mushroom cloud? It did that. Ours was ceiling height, 8 foot tall, by about 12 feet in diameter. And with all the weird lighting we had in the house anyway, it was spectacular. It rose in a vertical column, curled over on itself and made an incredible mushroom cloud!

We stood there stunned. Actually friggin' stunned. It was the COOLEST thing I'd ever seen. Well not really, but pretty damn close. Silence. Utter silence. No one expected it to be that incredible. We're talking Hollywood shit! Then we all started clapping (those guests wearing fur animal hands began thumping).

But the Snowball from Hell wasn't done.

Next, it went into exact reverse.

Silence again as we watched.

The mushroom cloud sucked back in on itself and collapsed back into the cauldron. Then it spilled across the floor in all directions.

And that's when all the coughing and dizziness started.

Every guest in the house RAN gagging from the approaching cloud like a scene from the movie The Fog. We HAD to get outside because the mushroom cloud had sucked the oxygen out of the house. We were passing out. Serves us right.

So there we stood in the front yard, bloody nurses, ghouls, warriors, pirates, all coughing and hacking next to a hearse. My wife, the Brew-Master and I waited a bit, aired out the house and we allowed everyone to return. But the party just didn't have the same zing as it did during the explosion.

At least we didn't get arrested. Interesting considering the Mayor was my next door neighbor. Once again, true story.

Oops.

Metamorphosis 3

Sorry, I just can't leave this alone.

NICE TOUCH, Pixar! Heh, heh, heh ...

Metamorphosis 2

Asian Museum San Francisco

A little film I put together from my trip to the museum.

Metamorphosis

Something Smells Funny (subtitled - Oh, Fiddlesticks!)

The first time I saw the film, National Lampoon’s Vacation, actually ANY of the Vacation films they produced, I laughed of course, but it twanged one of my memory chords and reminded me that truth really CAN be stranger than fiction.

It all started out as a simple family trip to Chicago. We left our driveway and the trip disintegrated from there.

We spent a really fun evening with a life-long family friend in Joliet, a suburb of Chicago. My first wife, our daughters and I really enjoyed our visit with Mary and Jim. They offered to let us spend the night, but we’d already made plans and had booked a room at a local motel - a hostelry of the sort where you park your car outside your door. Like a two-story building of laboratory rat cubicles. Only these were painted in those god-awful hotel colors, dusty-green, camelhair-tan and mauve. Actually, I say it was mauve, but does ANYBODY really know what color mauve is? Do you? I’m an artist and haven’t a clue. I think it’s a color invented by Crayola mixing all the different leftover colors of wax they had laying around - “What are we going to call it?” “How about Mauve?” “Mauve? What the hell’s Mauve?” “Does it matter?” “No.” So mauve it is.

Back to the hotel from hell. Fortunately, we would be sleeping most of our time in this decorator’s nightmare. The plan was to get up in the morning, do our morning things, catch a bite to eat somewhere and go to the train station where we would catch our train and begin our family frolic into the Windy City. Woo-woo!

Life has a way of changing your plans.

Rather than waking to the sound of an alarm clock, I stirred from my sleep because of a Hollywood-like dream. In the dream, there was a helicopter outside our door circling our building. And from it, a loud speaker was announcing “THIS IS THE POLICE. EVERYONE NEEDS TO EVACUATE THE PREMISES IMMEDIATELY. THERE HAS BEEN A TOXIC SPILL AND A DANGEROUS CHEMICAL CLOUD IS APPROACHING!” The dream must have come from my childhood remembrance of a movie in which giant brains with tentacles in them floated around a ski-resort in the Swiss Alps killing everyone in sight. (No, I’m not making that up. It’s a real movie.) Parents used to let their children watch that kind of thing back when I was a kid. And you wonder why the Baby Boomers are so screwed-up?

Anyway, the dream became annoying as I wanted to sleep, not evade toxic clouds occupied by meat-craving brains, but the dream was relentless, the helicopter kept circling and the bullhorn kept blasting.

And then the realization hit me. I wasn’t asleep. The brains probably weren’t on the prowl, but there certainly WAS someone making announcements from a circling helicopter outside our hotel. Oh, shit.

I’ve noticed, a lot of my essays contain the phrase, “Oh, shit.” I don’t say that to be gross. I don’t say it to make you think I’m tougher than I actually am (which I’m not). I use those words because they’re appropriate and accurate. I’ll try to watch my language from here on, but can’t guarantee anything. When you get to THOSE words, just put your fingers in your ears as you read them. Be sure to take a picture of yourself doing so and send it to me. Please. I’d LOVE to see that.

Anyway, back to the airborne cops. They were yelling basically to get out. Leave. Depart. Quickly.

So, still in our nightclothes, my wife and I grabbed the kids, ran them to the car and while she strapped them in, I returned to the room to get our luggage. And as I got to the car, I got a whiff of really strong bleach. Bleach from hell. Once again, oh, shit.

As fate would have it, a tanker truck carrying chlorine gas, a HIGHLY toxic, kill-your-ass-gas had been t-boned at the intersection next to our hotel room, releasing a toxic cloud that was casually wafting through the neighborhood seeking victims. Just like my dream. Only no brains.

We drove. Quickly. And made our escape. Whew.

Life wasn’t done playing with us yet.

We made it to the train station, still in our sleeping clothes. I guess folks in Chicago are used to seeing that sort of thing because no one looked at us oddly when we changed out clothes, brushed our teeth and did our morning things in our respective Grand Central Station restrooms (or whatever they call the Joliet train station).

Then we boarded the train. On to Chicago at last! OH, THIS IS GOING TO BE FUN!

An odd fellow sat down in front of us and promptly turned around. He began talking. He didn’t shut up for the next 75 minutes. As a matter of fact, he was enthralled by our daughters. Enthralled in a creepy-raise-Dad’s-antennae sort of way. He wasn’t asking my wife and I questions, just our kids. I began to fidget. He was being pleasant enough, but just really strange. Isn’t it sad that in our society someone being pleasant with children raises our suspicions about their intent? My suspicions were at Defcon 1, or is that Defcon 4? Whichever’s the one that closest to mushroom-cloud time.

The guy never said anything that would cause me to remove his head with blunt force. But I spent the entire trip a nervous bundle of overprotective father just WAITING to nuke this guy.

But as the train pulled into our stop, I breathed a sigh or relief. And then he got off the train WITH us. Grrrr…

I’d like to use another word to reenact my thoughts at that exact moment, but I don’t want you piercing your eardrums with your fingers. So let’s just assume I said, “Oh, fiddlesticks.” I don’t know what a fiddlestick is. Don’t want to. And this is the first time I’ve ever uttered or typed the word (actually, I used it in the subhead, catchy, huh?). There, your eardrums and sensibility are saved.

So the guy starts following us. My Dad Antennae have now become twin destructive laser beam devices poised to attack this guy if he so much as blinks at us.

For the next hour, we couldn’t shake the schmuck. And I’m too passive a fellow to say, “GET THE FIDDLESTICKS OUT OF HERE!” Yes, make the word substitution for accuracy if you’d like.

But I DO come up with fairly intelligent plans at times. This was one of those lucky times, I caught him in the old, “Which way are you going?” ploy. When he indicated he was headed left, I pointed out that it had been a REAL pleasure listening to him blab the whole way from Joliet to Chicago, but we were headed to the RIGHT!

Believe it or not, it worked. Lost him at last. On with the vacation.

Uh, life wasn’t done rearranging things yet. Even after a chemical spill evacuation and creepy-guy.

The internet was still in it’s infancy back then. I was one of those pioneers and had an internet connection. But it was $8 an hour to connect. And the speed was 28.8kbps. For those of you that are electronically challenged like me, 28k means SLOW. Oil-based paint dries much faster than the internet moved back then. So I hadn’t fully explored the parameters of this trip. That’s a really LONG way of saying that when we finally GOT to the Chicago Museum of Art, one of the greatest art museums in the world, we discovered it was only open for another 45 minutes - today was the only day of the week that it closed early.

Remember me mentioning National Lampoons Vacation series of films? In European Vacation, the Griswold’s are forced to tour the Louvre in Paris in about the same amount of time afforded us at the Chicago Museum. There’s a funny scene in which Clark and his family spend about 2 seconds looking at each famous painting before side-stepping to the next. I don’t think that scene’s so funny anymore.

But, we DID get a REALLY quick tour of the museum.

And a couple of months ago, I asked one of our daughters if she remembered the creepy guy on the train. She doesn’t remember him. Or the chemical spill. But she DOES remember going to Chicago.

So although life may be fiddlesticked-up at times, all is well.

If this makes sense … you’re in trouble

Have you ever had a conversation with someone that never happened?

I don’t mean the kind where you’re talking to the little blue people that visited your bedside last night (I’ve had those too), but the kind where you’ve had a conversation with a real person, but you really never had that conversation? —At least NOT according to the other person?

My great grandfather used to do that – he’d just sit there in a world of his own and suddenly burst into conversation about something no one was discussing. He wasn’t senile. He just didn’t wish to participate in this world. Apparently, it’s hereditary.

It’s kind of like an old film movie that breaks in the middle of the show, then the projectionist fixes it, but threads in a different movie. And the audience doesn’t notice that the actors and plot have changed.

But the popcorn’s good.

How to get my wife's attention