THIS is Entertainment!

Warning: Distasteful subject ahead.

So the E! channel is going to hire actors to recreate actual scenes from the Trial of Michael Jackson. The scenes will be taken from court transcripts. They’ve got a Michael Jackson impersonator and people to play the judge, lawyers, etc., and they have a set designed to look just like the actual courtroom in Santa Maria. I don’t know if they’re planning to recreate the jury, or what the ethics of that would be. Ha – did I say “ethics?”

They have to do this because

  1. There is nothing more important happening in the entire universe for the next six months than this child molestation trial, and
  2. Cameras are not allowed in the courtroom.

But now that we’ve been conditioned for the past couple of years to accept “reality TV” as an acceptable “art” form (I’m sorry, I can’t stop using quotation marks in this post), who needs cameras in the courtroom? A reenactment could be better than the real thing.

Like, if the transcript indicates that the accused stood and said “Not guilty, Your Honor,” the reenactment could depict maybe a spin move and a hand to the crotch. Who’s to say it didn’t happen that way? Heck, even if somebody did say it didn’t happen that way, who cares? This could open up a whole new world of television. I’d like to see a reenactment of Bush’s closed door meeting with Putin. Does he call him Vladimir to his face? Or how about the Pope arguing in private with his doctors about the morality of pulling the plug on someone in a permanent vegetative state?

But can E! find actors who can memorize a script that fast? I mean, if they’re going to be timely about this, they are going to have to show courtroom drama on the day it happens. This means they’ll have to get those transcripts promptly when court adjourns, which probably means buttering up a court reporter at the very least, up to and including bribery, which I think is legal in this type of case. Then they have to convert them to some sort of working script, which will involve one or two rewrites (remember, this will be based on court transcripts. There may be some “artistic” license taken.) and finally the actors will have to shoot the show. They can’t be reading or stumbling over lines, and the “news” orientation will make it mandatory that things get done quickly, or at least before the next days’ proceedings begin. This could be the career challenge of a lifetime for them.

I don’t know if Jackson did anything criminal or immoral. I hope not. But I can’t help wondering if the Michael Jackson of today would molest that cute little Michael of 1970. Tune in to “witness” every exciting development.

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Snubbed on Oscar Night

My mojo has no effect.

I didn’t really expect Gwyneth to invite me to escort her to this year’s Academy Awards show, although I did dust off the tux. Imagine how the paparazzi would have reacted. But she could have called, if only to say Hey, I’m in town, just wanted to say hi, let’s get together some time. I mean, what would that have cost her? Am I asking too much, people?

You have my number, babe.

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The Relationship Issue, Part 3

Who’s got the Power?
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

I made the mistake of telling someone, a woman, one who says she is shy, one whom I do not know in person (you know who you are), that when it comes to the man/woman thing (relationships, dating, hooking up), that she has all the power. Not content merely to stick my foot in my mouth, I went further and counseled her to “use it for good,” thus making it seem that I knew exactly what I was talking about.

Now, I think I’m right, or I wouldn’t have said anything. I mean, if you leave out the serial rapist and the brutal numbskull, and include only normal guys who harbor the wish to love and be loved, and to do right, whether they are aware of this wish or not, within this group — and I believe this is by far the largest group of males in the world, so large that a woman might go through her entire life meeting only this type of man — you would find it safe to say that men have ceded control to women in matters of the heart. Personal experience and long observation make me pretty sure I am right about this. Someone’s in charge of these matters, and it ain’t the boys.

Sadly, though, The Power is is elusive and magical, and I don’t have the authority to confer it on anyone. I feel now like the Wizard of Oz, the old fraud, caught behind the curtain, manipulating the levers and dials of a cheap illusion, and forced to admit that I am no more a wizard than you, or you. One thing I promise, though: I won’t hand you a diploma or a pocket watch and try to con you with some kind of power-of-positive-thinking baloney, because we all know that no matter how positive we feel, sometimes the real world doesn’t go along.

The Power I spoke of is not a force that is controllable — you see a guy and you want him, so you turn on your Power and he is inexorably drawn to you, unable to resist. You wouldn’t want that kind of power anyway. I have known women who wanted it, or thought they had it. Eventually they discovered that it didn’t always work, which meant maybe it never had worked, and inevitably they became fixated on the man who did not respond to it, even if they didn’t really want him. They would try more and more ploys, makeup and perfume until bitterness set in, and in their disappointment they would become cynical and unable to see the great guys all around who were naturally attracted to them, without any secret weapon having to be deployed. And yet…

And yet there is a power at work when we mate, whether for a night or a lifetime. I don’t know what it is that makes one woman look different to me than the others, one laugh so infectious, one body in the crowd so irresistible. And maybe she doesn’t, either, but when I fall under her influence I see her face everywhere, I smell her hair, I hear her voice and I long for her touch. Sometimes I feel like I am under a spell, delerious and bipolar. I’m up when she favors me, down when she looks away.

I’m sorry — you can’t use this Power to have any man you want. The Power doesn’t work that way. Not only that, but there is no one Mister Right for you. That’s the bad news. The good news is that there are millions of them. The Power probably lies in being receptive, but not passive. Give yourself a little credit, and go after what you want — you may be surprised to find that he wants you, too. If he doesn’t, please trust me on this, somebody does. And not just some low-grade slightly irregular second choice, but someone fully ready and able to rock your world. You’ll have to take this from me on faith: Somebody does. Really.

He can’t stop thinking about you. He wants to impress you. He’s waiting for a sign from you, maybe a smile. He’ll do anything you ask. And if you look at him with an open heart, he’ll get cuter.

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We Shoot to Kill

Because the darts wouldn’t have stopped him.

A 500-pound tiger somehow got loose last week and wandered around in Ventura County, just north of Los Angeles, for four or five days. At first there were just mysterious seven-inch wide paw prints, but this morning (Wednesday) there was a sighting. So far nobody knows who lost the tiger. There are no native tigers in Ventura County, so it is assumed this one was being kept by someone.

Anyway, authorities were called. They could have used tranquilizer darts, but said later they were “concerned for the safety of residents and motorists.” So they shot him dead.

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The Deluge

Pray for Los Angeles.

We are slipping into the sea. We have now received twice as much rain this season (32 inches) as the fine, rainy city of Seattle. The difference, of course, is that we have built our homes of straw, and on hillsides of soft dirt and boulders, and — look out! — here they come sliding down!The Hollywood Freeway was closed tonight. A 10-foot wall of mud filled a couple of condos in Hacienda Heights. Houses are sliding off their moorings in Culver City, Anaheim Hills and several other cities. A guy in Woodland Hills was buried in mud. Another guy died when he fell into a 30-foot deep sinkhole. Parts of the commuter train system have been shut down. There have been power outages throughout Southern California. A boulder crashed into a second-floor apartment and killed a 16-year-old girl as she worked at her computer. And the rain keeps coming, on its way to a hundred-year record.

We are always at least a little dramatic here, and now we are pretty sure this is the end of the world. And if it ends this way, in darkness and thunder, a wound on the left side bleeding our foolish fantasies like mud into the ocean, draining our dreams down the flood channels, the city of eternal wishing and hoping finally beached and lifeless, well, it’s got to end some way.

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Lisa’s Legs

I’m trying to blog, make coffee, watch a movie and find my tax documents.

All these activities have to take place in different rooms. So I go in to where the big TV is hooked up to the digital cable box, and there is Clockwatchers, a sad, funny movie about four young women killing time as temps in a huge office. Also, there are the papers I have been sorting through for half of this dreary day, looking for my tax stuff. This stuff has been piling up for months. It has now been separated into three piles: The biggest pile is recycling – mainly flyers from local grocery stores. I don’t know why I didn’t chuck them the moment I saw them. Then there is shredding – the endless junk mail I get that has my real name and address on it. Blank checks I (or anyone who finds them) can write against my credit accounts, subscription renewals that just might tell someone too much about me – have you noticed how personal, how targeted junk mail is becoming? The third pile is stuff I’m pretty sure I have to save, but I don’t know why or where.

So I go to the kitchen to get a paper bag for the recycling and there is the coffeemaker. I am a coffee freak. I buy roasted coffee beans at health food stores (!), organically grown, and unsprayed with poison. Coffee is the most chemically treated crop in the world, you know, so if you’re going to drink as much of it as I do (don’t ask) you don’t want a pesticide cocktail along with it. I mix at least two different varieties of coffee most of the time, and grind the beans one pot at a time. I have been using a glass Melitta stove-top cone-type coffee pot since the Spanish American War, until last Christmas, when someone tried to bring me into the 21st Century by giving me an electric coffeemaker. I had told this person many times that I liked the ritual of the stove-top model – the measuring of the water, the boiling of the water in a separate vessel, “surprising” the coffee with that first brief squirt of hot water, refilling the cone a couple of times until the perfect pot of coffee was there, visible in its’ gorgeous mahogany glory in my glass pot. But I got the electric coffeemaker anyway. “Look,” he said, “it’s a Melitta, and it uses a cone!”

So for a few months a good part of the coffee ritual was gone from my life. Water in this hole, coffee down here, press the button and walk away. Might as well walk away, because the carafe is stainless steel, so you not only don’t have to do anything, but you can’t even see if anything is happening. Also, you can never tell for sure if the pot is clean, because you can’t see through it.

But some of the ritual element is returning, because the electronic mechanism that detects when there is no more water and the coffee is ready has gone haywire, and now the coffeemaker stops brewing at random times during the process, sometimes after only a cup has gone through, sometimes in the middle or near the end. When that happens you have to push the button again to make it start. Lately it has been stopping three or four times before finishing a pot of coffee, each time necessitating a manual restart. It’s not exactly a mystical ritual, but it’s all I have left. When this thing breaks down completely, I’m going back to my ancient glass rig.

But why am I standing in the kitchen with this paper bag in my hand? Oh yes, the recycling, which is on the floor in front of the TV. I leave the coffeemaker and go out to gather up the papers from the floor, and now I am back watching the movie. The four temps are amazed and disgusted that some new girl has been hired on a permanent basis to do a job that any one of them can do easily. There is no justice.

After bagging up the papers to be recycled, I get smart and pick up the papers to be shredded, so my walk back to the kitchen can have a dual purpose. I take the shreddables into where the shredder is, which is also where the computer is, which reminds me that I have a bunch of blogs open in tabs, and these obsessive bloggers will be looking at their site statistics and trying to figure out who was reading their blogs for six hours. So I try to read (and close) a few of my faves while I stuff paper into the shredder, hoping that sorting this stuff while watching Lisa Kudrow’s long, long legs in a short, short skirt hasn’t made me put my tax documents in this pile by mistake, because, hey, it’s too late now. Then I think Well, maybe I’ll type a few notes myself, and I start to do that but then I remember that I want some coffee.

I go in the kitchen, and sure enough, the coffeemaker has stopped. So I restart it and go back to type some more, but while I’m at it I realize the movie will be ending soon and I’ve never actually seen the ending. Do you do that in this era of cable movies? Watch parts of movies here and there, now and then, out of sequence, until you’ve seen the whole thing?

But I have missed the ending, my stuff that must be saved is still sitting on the coffee table and… Coffee table! Coffee!

Back in the kitchen, the coffeemaker needs another restart, and now I can’t find the bag of recycling. Shit, it’s in by the shredder, next to the computer, where the blogs are waiting to be read and written.

I haven’t found the papers I was looking for, and I haven’t had my coffee. But I have filled up a trash can with shredded paper, read some and blogged some, and that’s something.

Oh yeah: And I had a brief video relationship with Lisa’s legs.

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Sex in the Back Yard

Right here in the Big City.

I heard a loud ka-thunk in the backyard the other morning, and I went out to investigate. Using my Holmesian powers of deduction, I pieced together what had happened:

A couple of possums (yes, I know they are really opossums, but I just can’t say it – or type it – that way) had been engaged in some hanky panky on top of a six-foot cinderblock wall. They had become transported by their amorous activities and lost their balance, slipping off the wall as one possum and crashing together into the top of a 5o-gallon plastic trash can. This caused the ka-thunk. They must have immediately rolled off onto the ground.

At this point, Ms. Possum evidently decided she’d had enough and it was time to call it a night (this was at 7:00 AM, people). She had managed to wriggle about ten feet from their original landing point. That’s where they were when I came upon them.

As you can see from the picture, the boyfriend (or BF) was not finished with her. They were not cuddling in this picture. They were coupling. About five seconds after this picture was taken, Ms. Possum (the one in the lower right portion of the frame) broke free and the two of them scrambled away into the nearby bushes. I felt bad enough for getting this compromising shot and I didn’t pursue them. For all I know they continued their debauchery in the bushes for the rest of the day.

I like possums. They are the only North American marsupial. They are quite successful. That is, their population is not threatened, because despite their slowness and what sometimes seems stupidity, they apparently have figured out how to get what they need to survive side-by-side with man. Some think they look like giant rats (the two pictured here were probably ten pounds each), but I think they are kind of cute, like an AMC Pacer. This is, of course, in the eye of the beholder. But I’m glad these little guys are in my neighborhood, and I wish them well as they start their family.

I told you I’d be getting back to writing about sex. And there’s more where that came from.

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Pollyanna Politics

Getting a little political here at revision99.

This was originally intended to be mainly a political blog, but I got sidetracked somehow. I guess I realized early on that since I didn’t have a real news organization behind me, I couldn’t get inside information. I couldn’t get invited to press conferences by the President or anyone else, and I didn’t have a staff to research anything. In the absence of those capabilities, I have nothing but my opinions, which, it turns out, are a dime a dozen, and of no compelling interest.

Thus freed from having to rant about the government and its insane policies, I was able to turn to more mundane – and fun – topics, like sex, bondage, animals and technology. Some day, however, I intend to make good on my promise to post something that tries to make sense out of the current political climate in the United States in light of the apparent shift to the Right that has manifested itself recently. Some day. In the mean time I need to do a short follow-up on yesterday’s post. This is more politics, folks. Turn it off now if you were looking for sex.

Yesterday I was thinking about the army. The troops, as they are usually called these days, on bumper stickers and in Congress. I don’t support them.

There. I said it. I don’t support The Troops. Oh, I love them like my own brothers and sisters, and my heart goes out to them, and I don’t want any of them to get hurt or killed, and I want them to come home and be with their families, or get back to their jobs or farms or drug habits, whatever it is they want. I wish they weren’t in some far-away desert country where they don’t speak the language, the food is rotten and everybody they see might be sizing them up for a suicide bomb attack. Most of all I weep for the ones who lose their arms and legs, or their minds.

But God damnit, when they do their military jobs, when they drive their armored vehicles, read their radar screens, fire their weapons, conduct their house-to-house searches, when they are soldiering, they are doing the work of the devil. Our troops are in somebody else’s country, somebody who was not a threat to this country, and there are a hundred thousand dead Iraqis because of this. Can we stipulate that this is just wrong?

You might be thinking that our army is merely following orders, and you can’t blame them for that. In light of the monstrous horrors of the 20th century committed by people following orders, do you really want to use that argument again?

Look, I’m not trying to say that any of this mess is the fault of any individual soldier. But when you sign up for an organization that wears armor and carries machine guns as part of its dress code, you have to know that somebody is going to get shot. Maybe you don’t expect that a loco presidente is going to take you adventuring to exciting foreign ports o’ call, but if your training involves the killing of human beings, well, you just gotta figure there might be some killing in store.

Maybe you’ve seen the bumper sticker that asks “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” I know life is much more complicated than that, but I still ask myself, what if…? What if people just didn’t participate in these wars we keep having? After all, it’s just Joe Sixpack shooting Mohammed Hookah Bowl. Guys like George Bush and Saddam Hussein don’t take any chances with their asses, so why should we be so eager to enlist?

At this point it would be pretty easy to bury me in arguments about why we need an army, why everyone needs an army, how freedom isn’t free, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, we can be pacifists, but what if the other guy wants to fight? etc. I’m not claiming I have practical answers to these points. I’m just sadly looking at a world that is increasingly armed and dangerous, and wondering if there’s anything at all we can do to make it better.

OK. That’s all the politics for now. Next week I’ll get back to sex.

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Lines

On the playground we were all warriors.

We played many games, all of them designed to replicate real wars. Move the ball, score on the opponent. Victory and defeat. Triumph or humiliation. Attack and defend.

Sometimes we played Capture the Flag, a game that almost exactly mirrors the activities of war: stealth, death, deceit, guard duty, all the highlights. The entire play area is divided into two territories, and two teams, who each hide a flag or an icon of some sort in the farthest reaches of their territory. The object is to find and steal the flag of the other team, and bring it back to your own territory. Along the way you can be captured and imprisoned, or killed, and if you catch the other team on your ground, you can kill them instead.

Sometimes things would escalate beyond gaming. Someone would get pushed too hard, and get too serious about the offense. The undercurrent was always there. At these times you would try to defuse the situation. The parties involved could not back down, and any intervention could lead to greater tensions, and punches could be thrown, shoves administered. Would-be peacekeepers could get bloody noses.

Eventually someone would draw a line. Step over it, and I’ll break your head. Take it any way you want. There it is. A line. You could go for it, if you were tough enough, or if you thought you had no credible choice. You could ridicule the concept as a way of not ignoring it but not having to brave the possible consequences. Some of your playmates might see it your way, and not think you a hopeless chicken.

But one thing was sure: When it got to that point, when the line was drawn, it was too late for intervention. It was past the point of no return. Someone was going to get hurt, physically or psychologically.

What were we doing, with our lines and our threats, and our posturing? Readying ourselves, instinctively, for the Game of Life that we were headed for, a game where the winners take what they want and to hell with everyone else, where you draw a line around your territory and warn all who pass, step over this at your peril, where you penetrate the territory of others, steal their stuff and race with your spoils back to your homeland. Welcome to the Big Game of deception, betrayal and death.

Like children, power mad and run amok, we have marked the whole world with lines, an elaborate system of borders, and we have warned each other in the harshest possible ways do not step over our line. We no longer remember why the lines are there, but we will kill the trespasser, and the killers shall wear medals, and we will honor them and they shall be known as heroes.

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