Attention, World: I am still able to beat Super Mario Bros. and Contra on the original 8-bit Nintendo system. You may now bask in my glory and realize how much I friggin’ rule.
Okay, so it’s not the most constructive use of my time, but when you’re an insomniac and you’re still awake at 1am and it’s going to be a long day tomorrow, you want something fun to do to waste away the wee hours of the morning.
In other news, I’m fairly relieved to see that things in this country seem to be returning to some sense of something close to what passes for some kind of normal. Basically, my signal for things getting better is that humor is starting to rear its head again, because when people can laugh about things, it means things will be okay. And it appears that people are starting to laugh a little about Hurricane Katrina, as evidenced by things like this picture.
I would want to be famous if only for the fringe benefit that I might be invited to appear as a guest on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
Those of you who have been watching The Daily Show so far this week know that they are doing a weeklong discussion on evolution vs. creationism, or, as the kids are wont to refer to it, “intelligent design.” While I’m getting a lot of mileage out of laughing at the idiots who are being completely serious as they face the camera and proclaim God is responsible for everything and the evolutionists seek to destroy God, it also scares the bejesus out of me that these are the people who I call my countrymen, and yet I understand how Bush was elected (at least by the popular vote in ‘04).
Let me put it plainly: Faith and religion do not mix with government and education. We should not be teaching religion and religious ideas in schools. We should not be enforcing religious beliefs in courtrooms.
And for those of you who still want to put faith in our president based on your own faith, let me offer this snippet from Christopher Dickey’s commentary in Newsweek this week:
If President Bush looks lost in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (and the rest of us feel that way), it’s because he has no one to blame for this catastrophe. The apocalypse was brought on not by the forces of evil, but of nature, aided and abetted by the incompetence of Bush’s own administration. As a bitter reader from Fairview, N.J. wrote to us this week: “If we are to believe that President Bush and the Christian Right have been talking directly to God these past six years, then it follows that this is God’s answer to their agenda.”
So there. And I can’t believe that it actually came from someone in Jersey, of all places. Maybe the apocalypse really is nigh—when someone from Jersey is making a clear, lucid and intelligent argument…
My day started out well enough—I wasn’t awake enough to see the wall moving in front of me as I stumbled out of bed and towards the kitchen, so I walked into it.
Then I got to work, and I found the new firewall software our IT department installed prevents outgoing connections to particular ports on servers… including the one I use to access my Webmail. I have to ask permission from my boss to have IT authorize my access to my server. Wheeee.
Then we lost power for over half an hour in the Great Los Angeles Blackout of ‘05™. And I still find it incredibly ironic that for an organization that’s at the center of the radio industry, none of us could find a battery-powered radio so we could find out what was going on. I had to call someone outside of the affected area to find out what was happening. And of course when I came home, I had to do the clock-setting dance. I didn’t realize how many clocks I have in my apartment. And we have the other social commentary on how work completely ground to a halt during the time we had no power… and we’d were a little wary of spending 20 minutes tromping down 41 flights of stairs to get out of the building.
Yeah. Anyone got a good joke they can share?
So, the weekend began with Real Time with Bill Maher. I was kind of surprised at how left-leaning George Carlin was, but I shouldn’t be. And, of course, they had the requisite conservative Republican, and believe me, this one was drinking the Kool-Aid. Please enjoy this exchange:
Liberal Who Was Not George Carlin: The 82nd Airborne say they can be anywhere in the world in 18 hours. How come they couldn’t get to New Orleans quickly?
Requisite Conservative Republican Who Was A Little Whacko: C’mon, during the first couple of days, it’s the local and national authorities’ responsibilites to handle things. And I didn’t see the National Guard in those areas at all. Where were they?
Me, Muttering To My Friend Seated Next To Me: In Iraq, because our idiot leader sent them there.
From there, it was on to the Sunset Strip to see The Redwalls and OK Go, where I ran into a friend/former co-worker who I haven’t seen in a year and who I thought was in Boston. OK Go even did ”the dance”! It was a good, good night.
Saturday night was the Los Angeles Greek Festival, where I ate a metric ton of delicious food, although I have no idea why they brought in a salsa band to play at a Greek festival. And then I ate even more today at the House of Blues’ Gospel Brunch, and I made it out without bursting into flames, the Jew that I am. So suffice it to say that I’m not going to eat again until Wednesday.
Meanwhile, I’m appalled at this kind of behavior:
6 Arrested in Olive Garden Fight (link blatantly pilfered from Heather)
Personally, I thought the Olive Garden was a place for family and delicious, delicious breadsticks, not brawling and Taser discharge.
Have a Monday. Right-click and save as.
Edwyn Collins - “A Girl Like You”
Forget for a moment the smog, the plastic people (both in body parts and personality), the earthquakes, the elitism, the “scene,” Ryan Seacrest, the traffic, the rampant porn industry (oh wait… that’s a good thing), the high prices, the absolute glut of SUVs so people can traverse the urban wilds to make it safely to Starbucks and back, the light pollution, the $9 cocktails, the open season for hunting on the freeways…
Okay, forget all those things and more about what might be horrible about Los Angeles. There are just some times when it rules to be here. Like Friday night, when I’ll head over to CBS-TV’s studios for a live broadcast of Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, during the course of which he’ll have George Carlin and Kurt Vonnegut on the show.
Brace yo’self, foo’. Oh, and right-click and save as.
Thoughts currently permeating my still-half-asleep brain:
- So I’ve been seeing all these commercials for this new movie The Exorcism of Emily Rose. And the response that I keep coming up with is… God must really hate Catholics. There’s no other possible explanation why there’s no other stories about anyone from any other religions become possessed by the Devil. Either that, or all those claims about the stories being absolutely true aren’t correct and Hollywood’s just making this stuff up because The Exorcism of Sanjay just doesn’t sound like it would bring in hordes of moviegoers.
- But you know what really scares me? The fact that Whoopi Goldberg doesn’t have any eyebrows… and no one seems to notice.
- I am ready for some football! Go Pats! Wooooooooooooooo!
- According to a recent poll, 37% of Americans think that the federal government did a “great” or “good” job responding to Hurricane Katrina. To the people who responded that way, I ask you this: Where did you score the stellar drugs that would allow you to believe that, and how do I get my hands on some?
Here’s something for your Thursday. Don’t spend it all in one place. Right-click and save as.
Touch and Go - “Would You...?”
I promised you a story, and here it is. It’s a first-hand account of a radio guy who stayed behind in New Orleans to keep WWL-AM on the air during and after the storm, and it was transcribed from an interview one of my co-workers did with him last Friday.
Before you pooh-pooh the role he and his co-workers played, know that WWL is still the only source of information and communication in the city of New Orleans and has been during the entire course of this ordeal. With TV stations off the air and no power available to the city, people listening on battery-powered radios were still able to listen to WWL for information, and some were even able to to call into the station. He and his co-workers were the lifeline for the city in the post-hurricane mess, communicating information to the residents who were left behind and taking calls from the survivors and those in need of help—he literally took phone calls from people in dire need of medical attention who were calling the radio station because they couldn’t get through to 911. How would you respond in a situation like that? On top of everything, he was evacuated under National Guard protection and literally walked twice through the horde of people outside the Superdome, where he literally felt his life was in danger from the crowd.
I really don’t know what else to say, so I’ll let him do the talking.
I’ve become a bit of a MySpace addict. Quite frankly, I’m not all that happy about it. This is mainly due to three reasons:
1. Apparently, the computers I use both at home and work don’t like complicated MySpace profiles with lots of pictures and interactive games and music videos embedded in the profiles, and those are apparently popular with the kids. But it makes the computers explode. I’ll be halfway through a nice romp through MySpace, click on someone’s profile, and suddenly I’ll get the spinning beachball on my Powerbook or a nice “Sorry, this program will now close and make the computer eat itself” dialog box on the Dell I use at work.
2. The IM program never seems to work. If you’re one of my friends on MySpace, I’ve probably tried to IM you. But the program never connects up, and I’ll sit there waiting… waiting… waiting… for the other person to connect, and then I finally get some message about the person probably being offline.
3. The stupid people. Oh, how I loathe the reactions from the stupid people. Thankfully, it’s mostly limited to dumb guys reacting to pictures of hot women. Do these guys really think that they’ll get somewhere by leaving comments on some random woman’s pictures that say “YOU ARE HOTTTTT!!!” (with the rarely used multiple-t spelling, of course) or flat out asking them to meet them at some bar so they can show this pictured person a good time and then take her home and show her an even better one? If I were doing a doctoral thesis, I’d probably want to do one on the online behaviors of MySpace users just to be able to find out if these kind of lame pickup lines actually worked. (Then again, I wonder if they work in realtime? But how do you invoke the multiple-t spelling of “HOTTTTT!!” without sounding like you have a stutter?)
Having said that, won’t you be my friend?
Memo
TO: Powers-That-Be
FROM: Keith
RE: Piss off, I got the hint
Okay, so it’s not enough that I’m painfully single and haven’t had “female companionship” in a while—I had to be reminded of it all weekend? First, there was the surprise birthday party for a friend that I attended last night where I and the birthday girl were the only single people there. (Before you start making suggestions, she’s an old friend and it’s not going to happen.) I had to keep jumping from group to group because everyone’s discussions were about marriage and children, and I eventually spent a good chunk of the night hitting on a hot married mom since there was no one else there to talk to and entertain myself with.
Then I was woken up at 3:30am this morning by my upstairs neighbors having conjugal relations. Loud conjugal relations. [sigh]
I wish I’d gotten to see New Orleans before it was destroyed and then subsequently descended into anarchy and chaos. I never thought I’d see the day when such lawlessness and despair was occurring within the boundaries of the United States.
Have yourselves a merry little Labor Day weekend. Right-click and save as.
Better Than Ezra - “King of New Orleans”
UPDATE: I heard the most amazing story today from one of the survivors, someone who runs Entercom’s rock radio station in New Orleans and stayed through Katrina as well as its aftermath to keep WWL-AM—at present, the only source of news and information still available to New Orleans—on the air during and after the storm. He is now safe in Houston, but got out late Wednesday after seeing and literally walking through the worst of it, as he was evacuated by the National Guard and had to walk through the crowd outside the Superdome while being protected by Guardsmen. One of my co-workers is transcribing the tape we have of his story, and I should be able to post it Tuesday.
There are some times when my job rules. Like today, when my office was graced by the presence of none other than Pat Boone. And he brought some tasty pastries with him. But I mean, Pat Friggin’ Boone! In my office!
Then there are the times when my job isn’t so wonderful. Like today, when all the hurricane relief stories kept pouring in, and I was forced to face up to the harsh reality of the absolute devastation down there in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. And the worst part about it? There was nothing we could do to stop it. There was no lapse in CIA intelligence or stupid president or bad foreign policy or lax airline security that I can blame for what happened. Yet the effects of what happened this week sound like they will be as far-reaching and powerful as 9/11. And before you get all huffy and start yelling at me about how the people in New York died senselessly and without cause and at someone else’s fanatical hand, know that I’m talking about the infrastructure of our daily lives as Americans in addition to the number of people who have already died and who will die as a result of the hurricane. We will all be affected by this, even if we don’t directly realize it.
It’s also not a matter of people being trapped in a burning building vs. people having enough warning to flee the city. 30% of New Orleans’ former residents live below the poverty line. Without the money to afford a car (or, given gas prices these days, the cash to fuel it) or a plane or train or bus ticket, how could they get out of the city? Many were forced to stay either in their homes or in makeshift shelters because they had no other choice. Also, as a former New Orleans resident said on the radio station I was listening to today, the city had a great public transportation system, and half of the city’s population used it and didn’t have cars because they didn’t need to. If you told New Yorkers to evacuate because there was a natural destructive force headed towards the city, you’d have the same problem—too many people don’t have cars and rely on public transportation, and that public transportation will only take you so far outside the city limits. And for those who actually could make it out of New Orleans, many left literally everything behind. A friend at a radio station in Dallas said that a newlywed couple called into his show this morning, telling the story of how all they have are three days’ worth of clothes, a pillow and their cat. They were forced to hurriedly leave everything else, including all of their wedding presents, their new house (which they’re not sure is still standing and, if it is, how damaged it is) and all of their other belongings.
Quite frankly, having never been to New Orleans and not being there now, I don’t have the proper words to describe the situation. However, this message that was passed along from a reporter currently down there says it a hell of a lot better than I can, and he explains the far-reaching implications of what occurred this week. I have not altered it at all except to conceal his identity at his request. These are definitely some thoughts to keep in mind as we head into this holiday weekend that is supposed to be a celebration of the end of summer.
George W. Bush, if you really want to do some good and not squander more of that 40-some-odd percent approval rating right now, it’s time to do the best you can to make things better here on the homefront.