Conservatives are in a blue funk mood after the debate

 As I said I rewatched some of the clips from the debate on YouTube and thought Trump did well despite the pets.  It has been officially declareth however that he lost the debate.  Mine must be some weird minority opinion.  Welcome to Stranded the place of weird minority opinions.  You might find a few.

A commenter at a conservative blog opined that God intervened in the assassination attempt for a reason and so not to despair.  If you're a religiously-minded person that is not an invalid view imo.  To date not much has come from the FBI's investigation as to motivation.  Kind of odd.  Usually by now you'd hear from some neighbor that Crooks looked up at the nighttime constellations for political messages at 3 in the morning or something.  That he was able to put a ladder up against the side of the building to scale the roof is really something.   The Home Depot - how doers get more done.

For me one debate sufficeth.  If there's another one my biased newsfeeds will declare by sunrise the next morning that he lost that one too.  Regarding the cats and dogs one of my first reactions was there needs to be some serious research on this instead of the usual superficial snoping.  There's feral cats all over the place.  It's not out of the realm.  On the other hand Trump pronounces things in a Shakespearian manner like there's some pet apocalypse going on.  Maybe fodder for the next Stephen King novel.

Conservatives need to pop a Prozac.

For a man who refused anesthesia for a colonoscopy

I don't understand his vacillation over the proposed debate with Kamala Harris slated for Sept. 10 hosted by ABC News.  According to the new book I'll Take Your Questions Now by Stephanie Grisham Trump's former WH press secretary then President Trump made a visit in 2019 to Walter Reed Medical Center for a routine colonoscopy but refused being put under so as not to give temporary power to VP Mike Pence.  WOW.  I mean a lot can happen in 20-30 minutes a war could start or something .  FF to now and I still don't know if there will be a debate.  It's on again off again on again off again.  He would still prefer Fox News to host the debate I guess with Sean Hannity as moderator.  He still wants to campaign against Joe Biden, he's stuck in a reverie about it and can't seem to adjust to new circumstances.  He had his nursing home jokes all lined up.  This whole thing makes him look weak and shows his campaign is still dangerously off course.  Meanwhile JD Vance continues to defend his cat lady comments like give it up already.

I wish I didn't have to write this stuff.

Medical apps and insomnia, sometimes just technically wrong

The Web MD and Home Remedies apps both have a variation on the same official formula when it comes to insomnia. WebMD says if you don't fall asleep by 20 minutes get up and perform a quiet task (??) and Home Remedies advises if you don't fall asleep within 30 minutes go in another room and start reading but keep the tv off (maybe the book Stephen King's Insomnia?) Traditionally and down through the ages we've always defined "falling asleep" as that sharp and definitive moment when the curtain magically drops and you lose consciousness and awareness. For practical purposes that definition is fine and works most of the time but many times it doesn't work that way. The best starting point for managing your insomnia is to simply lie in bed the whole night with your eyes closed. It's a scientific fact which the apps somehow neglect to mention that if you do this you will have brief periods of sleep which you're unaware of hence the feeling of being awake all night. You'll make it through the next day adequately as opposed to following their advice and getting up every 20 minutes performing quiet tasks and going in the next room and picking up a copy of William Manchester's The Arms of Krupp. It helps if you have or cultivate good dream recall because during such torturous nights you can often remember brief dreams you've had and you can use this as a kind of yardstick. The other thing which I've never understood is the official medical line mandating that everyone needs 8 HOURS OF SLEEP A NIGHT otherwise bad medical things are gonna happen like maybe five years from now they'll have to remove a couple of diabetic toes. At this point you're working on your sleep and doing the best you can and you don't need this added pressure. Chuck it and while we're on the subject I've been wondering what else the medical apps which are so popular these days are wrong about. TIPS - Next time you have trouble sleeping count all the names of the Republican presidential contenders over and over again in your head. Charlie Rose also works for me or maybe you can DVR a late Sunday afternoon golf game:)

Radical Islam explained (sort of)

The best analysis I ever came across is from Pat Buchanan's book Where the Right Went Wrong (Thomas Dunne 2004) in the chapter "Is Islam the Enemy?" This short and very readable chapter (without footnotes thank God) gives a quick history of Islam from the Prophet Muhammed to the various caliphs which followed his death, the Crusades and the Ottoman Empire. Minority view on the Crusades here: they were originally the Catholic Church's response to the original aggressive and conquering behaviour of Islamic warriors (e.g. retaking Jerusalem from them). That's the history here's the theology. Islam along with Judaism and Christianity is a monotheistic and Abrahamanic faith system. Muhammed greatly revered Jesus as a great prophet and held in high regard His mother Mary but Islam fundamentally rejects Trinitarianism (big deal you say) so at first glance this presents a major puzzlement as to the radical Islamists' hostility to Christians in general as shown in that recent mass beheading of those 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians. Buchanan sheds light on this. Early in their history both Islam and Christianity were gaining millions of followers and so it wasn't the minor religions that presented the greatest threat to Islam's hopefully worldwide influence and dominance but Christianity. This is like a theological business model if you will where one major brand hates the competition and attempts to drive it out and would certainly explain why they focus on the Pope and Rome so much. Lest this become too long a dissertation we'll save everything else for the Comments section.

What's up with the Ferguson PD?

If you were a troglodyte the past week and just popped on the tube you'd swear there was a major terrorist attack in the community of Ferguson MO. OK so let's rap about race and the police again. Despite my recent post re the NYPD for me Eric Garner is not Sean Bell is not Michael Brown is not Amadou Diallo and why don't we throw in Tawana Brawley while we're at it. I approach these cases on a purely individual basis and you can make the case that maybe Sean Bell or his friend was driving his SUV towards the cops OR that yes maybe teen Michael Brown was tussling with a police officer in his squad car and went for his gun after strong-arming a convenience store. Look I get it but put these other cases together and start comparing and they all highlight even more at least for me that the Eric Garner case is the weakest in terms of the NYPD POV & PR. He wasn't running down the street half-naked waving a machete, he didn't have a gun or a device that resembled a gun or even took out a black wallet the way Amadou Diallo did in the Soundview section of the Bronx when four officers shot him to death. So for parts of the right-wing like the New York Post to unreservedly support the cops as a general rule is a huge socio/political mistake imo if the GOP wants to get serious about attracting the Black Vote and no Bo Dietl doesn't know more than the NYC ME. Missouri - well at least conservatives are starting to wake the hell up by criticizing the increasing militarization of our nation's police forces what with all that surplus army stuff the federal gov't doled out to them in years past. Actually you know something? conservatives all conservatives should start reading Twelve Years a Slave if they haven't already and watch the movie as it's obvious they have no interest in or never got the whole Black Experience. Lastly conservatives waste far too much time talking about Al Sharpton:)

Maybe it's not so much the NSA, maybe it's Google

Slow day at work so we got to discussing Google. A woman thinks Google+ is a good idea but I said I wasn't comfortable. That's a public profile so if you're not big on privacy folks can get to see that you downloaded The Advanced Guide to Rimjobs let's say or a self-help book regarding substance abuse. I was reading an app review for Yonkers PD Tips and there's an actual guy's name who commented and I clicked something and got to see his literal movie, book and music library on whatever devices Mike has. Now they make conservatives out to be nosy people poking around in folks' business but I really don't care to know all this. Google Maps and the Street View, guy at work told me how they get those images. They have a team who drive these white cars around with yellow things on top that take the pictures and they do this every six months. Hey BB there's a job for ya. Of course out in CA Google is test-driving driverless cars and then there's all the Glassholes out there. It's ALL OUT THERE but it ain't all good imo. Dunno, maybe the Snowden rage is misplaced or could be divvied up more. Mommy there's a Google monster under my bed.

Is a Sebelius book in the works?

She's now being kinda more blunt and candid on the talk show circuit about the whole health care debacle. Yeah yeah I know she voluntarily resigned but in my book the president still threw her under the bus. Makes ya wonder why Jay Carney is still sticking it through when it would probably be better for the both of them to work on the same book and rake in the dough. Smaller networks of doctors and higher premiums, the federal government deciding what treatments you get - what's not to like? They say in particular cancer patients are gonna be screwed bigtime under ObamaCare. I don't think though the Sebelius resignation is gonna swing the midterms in a more positive direction for the Democrats if that's the strategy here, I mean it's not like she's the Frankenstein who created the thing in the first place.

Faith & Politics

OR leave your Bible at home.  Been wondering though are liberal politicians ever motivated by their faith? and if so is this invalid too as when us Christian fundiecons do it and why is it never pointed out?  Gay marriage, equal pay for equal work, social justice, reproductive rights, low-income housing (desegregation), immigration reform, health care and the liberal list goes on but can laws or legislation to pass these things have a religious underpinning and do liberal politicians ever get motivated by their very own personal liberal understanding of faith to take action politically on these and other important matters?  So far nobody's sayin'  Sure there's politics in the Catholic Church but is Nancy Pelosi ever inspired in her House actions by her Catholic faith?  Certainly Martin Luther King Jr. was openly motivated by his faith and talked about it in marching for civil rights so that was a good thing but if a pro-lifer......well you get the picture.  Bibles, Korans, Torahs I don't care put it on the table and while we're on the subject does that old fragment of a papyrus paper show Jesus had a wife perhaps Mary Magdalene? and oh btw why do atheists use God's name in vain from time to time say when they're stuck in traffic?  Some new pro-Islam ads just went up in the NYC subways in some cases right next to the controversial ones about Support Israel and be against the savage.  This is the RIGHT way to handle speech you don't like - GET IN THERE!  I'm kinda tired of Tim Tebow wearing his celibacy on his sleeve, you can brag about your sluttery or your chastity and it's all the same to me and some woman's gonna seduce him and my other thing is if he's only the backup QB for the Jets why is he getting far more presstime than Mark Sanchez?  These and other matters feel free, coffee's perkin':) 

The Hunger Games

I bought the DVD at a FYE store yesterday and wasn't sure I'd even like the movie due to its overly dark and disturbing material, kind of reminds me of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery and then there was the matter of protagonist Katniss Everdeen, how can you make a heroine out of someone who participates in the madness and kills other people?  Once I started watching The Hunger Games though my views slowly changed.  It became obvious that those teens Katniss killed were at the root evil to begin with and she had to defend herself.  The Hunger Games based on the first book in a trilogy by American YA writer Suzanne Collins is a kind of prophetic hybrid of Lord of the Flies and 1984 with a healthy dose of Serling.  I've often thought of why don't we have literary classics anymore but with the themes here that hearken back to elements in those earlier works I can see the potential for a classic itself here, a future item on a high-schooler's reading list.  So what is the interpretation?  First off I agree with Beth who blogged about this once and I hope she takes time out to join the discussion here and so I do see it as a kind of cautionary tale against Big Government and in the comments section I'll delve more into that.  Yes of course it's a kind of satire of the reality TV craze and all.  When things in the 74th annual Hunger Games get a little boring for the viewers at home the staff at the central control panels first add a blazing forest fire to get Katniss closer to her adversaries and later on noontime eerily turns into nightfall and three large black and frightening attack dogs that look like a cross between a pitbull and a panther are added to the mix, so much for playing fair.  The president of Panem played by Donald Sutherland says to one of the younger bosses, not sure what his role is exactly and they all look weird but he says to him early on to watch this Katniss character as she represents hope and hope is stronger than fear and it may be a spark now but to contain it.  The Hunger Games as well can be Glenn Beck's worst nightmares come to fruition.  There is also the theme of the star-crossed lovers Katniss and Peeta the other teen chosen from her District 12 and the two are willing to die at the end by eating the poisonous nightberries until a Voice comes from the sky telling them to stop the Games are over and they're the victors.  Then there's the central enigma of the movie, WHY do the 24 teens chosen HAVE TO kill each other?  Did the Powers-That-Be mandate this?  I didn't catch that.  Of course they could have all just teemed together to survive so there's some powerful philosophical and theological observations going on here about human nature itself, about the nature of Good and Evil and you could say maybe it was all just one big vast social experiment besides being a form of perverse entertainment.  I have to say this is really a great and thought-provoking movie well-suited for the action/adventure format and there's so many political angles to this thing so let's get started...... 

50 Shades of Crap

It's kind of a slow blogging cycle at least for me, nothing I could latch onto of late.  I mean yeah Sandra Fluke introduced Obama at some political function, he still seems to be milking that one and I was reading in my Catholic New York that he and Romney are gonna speak at the annual Al Smith Dinner in NY and...but hey wait a minute didn't his HHS Dept. and Sebelius just cause endless grief for the RC Church and other religious institutions? yeah a few lame jokes will smooth that over.  Maybe he'll even tell a birth-control joke or two, who knows?  Then I see the guy I'm actually gonna vote for, Romney, is actually a murderer according to some Super-PAC and this is just the longest hottest most horrible miserable summer for me in a while.  Getting attacked by mosquitoes practically on a daily basis even in my sleep and then there's the Fishbowl of Work to deal with.  Look folks are bored at work, I get it and maybe you have a temporary health issue or whatever and it makes for fodder and no it's not your paranoid vibe at work again, they really are talking about you and everybody else for that matter.  If I were in charge I'd make sure everybody has enough work to do.  New manager has a habit of sometimes leaving old food in the showcase like pulled pork so I talked about it with a co-worker and his attitude was give the guy a chance (the fruit of liberalism?), didn't seem to get my point like I was being a meanie.  Now I'm all for giving people chances, God knows I wouldn't be perfect in that role either and I'm not a prick but at what point is giving somebody a chance a lowering of standards, defining deviancy down?  I see Costco won't carry Joan Rivers' new book so she chained herself to a shopping cart and bellowed into a bullhorn.  Kristen Stewart/Rob Pattinson...you see the material I got to work with? but I'll be honest I kinda follow this stuff and I'm definitely on his side.  There was a new massacre at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, they're not Muslims but they look like them and their faith system is very googleable.  I checked my e-mail just now and see I got like a hundred fresh comments, dunno what everyone is talkin' about I gotta go see.  Time for a fresh post, carry it on over here if you like.  I'll put the coffee on and get the crullers rockin'.  Had a couple of Jamaican beef patties last night, they're good and all but left a kind of slight aftereffect.  It's definitely time to plan the next vacation:)

The real problem with Higher Education

Sometimes conservatives overly misdiagnose the Problem.  For instance you'd think there was a veritable epidemic of bad teachers in the NYC public schools system and for this reason teacher ratings and evaluations need to be made public not tomorrow but NOW.  Conservatives love this particular bandwagon but I say it's the kids, home-training.  With Higher Education, colleges and universities conservatives say the problem is liberal bias.  Well yeah there's some of that, having two years of college under my belt you could sense it from time to time but I really don't care, whatever floats your boat.  You have a political leaning well if the students know where you're coming from I don't see the problem but the real problem in a nutshell is that colleges and universities make you take courses you're never gonna use in Life.  Went to that Catholic institution for two years and they made us take an advanced math class so this older white-haired priest is writing calculus equations on the board, really breezing along with his chalk and I'm like what in hell? I'm never gonna use this in my day-to-day.  Then we had to go to the college bookstore on the corner of course and buy our own textbooks which cost a small fortune and I remember thinking back then in high school the class that just made it to the next grade just passed their books down to the next generation of students gratis.  What a racket!  One of my younger male managers going back a few years said after high school he just wanted to dive right into the workforce, make money and so he went with chefing and avoided the whole higher education experience.  Practical skills you learn by actually doing, how to make money, interacting with people and customers and learning new trades on the spot.  Better for the economy.  I'm glad to see a few conservatives like Maggie Gallagher more or less put down the whole college experience as a serious waste of time, you're gonna spend years paying back that student loan and what exactly are you gonna do with that advanced art or history degree anyway?  Education is one of the most controversial issues in this country, everyone has an opinion.  I say kids don't need to be taught how to masturbate just how to make the dinars:)

Thuganomics and the psychology of organized crime

With the passing at 69 of mob turncoat Henry Hill there have been some positive things to say about the fellow from people who should know better.  His main claim to fame/celebrityhood is that he was the main inspiration for the mob classic Goodfellas and the Ray Liotta character yada yada and the eulogies go on.  Hill was a drug trafficker among other things and was involved in the infamous Lufthansa heist at JFK.  You know the rest and I think it's a fair social comment to make that we've romanticized, glorified the life of the gangster and this probably goes back to Mario Puzo and The Godfather book and movie.  By all accounts The Godfather (Parts I and II, forget the 3rd) is a superb film from a cinematic standpoint but my friend had a rather oblique take when he said how many lives taken is the movie responsible for? by which he meant how many joined the Club because the life portrayed in the movie inspired them to?  Actually this may not be that far off the mark as a key member of the now defunct young gangsters known as the Tanglewood Boys in Yonkers admitted to the late NY Daily News columnist Mike McAlary that they watched Goodfellas a number of times and it was sort of their inspiration.  Here's the deal for me though, take any level gangster or thug and let's say he led an independent life of crime, killings, robberies, general mayhem Society would level at him that he's a bad dude, a psycho, a criminal, a mutant, a deviant and needs to be taken off the streets pronto and go to the Big House for a long long time BUT take the same psycho and have him working as part of a GROUP operating in concert for some unified ends, a hierarchy, a criminal bureaucracy so to speak and it's somehow respectable, even glamorous.  Read two cases in the paper recently of a Mafia member putting out a hit on an average non-criminal man for the sole reason of going out with or marrying the mobster's ex-wife, this was two separate situations and let's say he wasn't a member of Cosa Nostra and did the same thing he'd be universally condemned as an obsessed psycho, a stalker yada yada but because he's a member of organized crime there really isn't the usual social and reportorial commentary you'd expect in such a case because hey that's what gangsters do.  Organized psychos is another way of putting it and the usual psycho/anti-social labels are dropped because it's an organization, a group, a conspiracy, a secret society and so it's somehow rational, none of the member's self-esteem will suffer because we're in this thing together and hey we're selective, we ain't bumping off old ladies crossing the street.  Serial killers and rapists bad, gangsters good, that's our social mindset/collective moral philosophy and we simply don't know Right from Wrong anymore, never really did.  The media wants to keep the theme going though with more books from former mob wives down the pike and some new tv shows with mob themes even though it's a passe genre by now, bloodsuckers is where it's at.  We love the desperado but hate the psycho even though they may be one and the same:)

Last Tuesday's recall vote in Wisconsin

I didn't blog about it at the time the goings on in Wisconsin when Republican Governor Scott Walker was ripping public-sector unions a new one, I like to go my own way when I blog but as you all know by now Walker won last Tuesday's recall vote 53% to Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett's 46% this despite practically every major union in the country making an all-out effort there to mete out justice and if you read the fine print about 1/3 of Walker's support came from union households.  His sins? he pretty much put the kabosh on collective-bargaining and public-employee workers now have to chip in more towards their pensions and health care and no more automatic deductions for union dues.  Before all this the recall of the GOP-controlled Senate also failed as did the effort to get rid of a conservative State Supreme Court justice and that was just a warmup for the Walker treatment.  So does this spell the death knell for unions? if there's enough Governors out there like Walker probably but I don't think the country is in as much of a union state of mind as back in the day.  For some reason when I think of unions I think of Jimmy Hoffa.

Over the past several years I worked with at least two young managers both men and it was quite obvious from their remarks they hated unions this despite our jobs in the food industry being heavily unionized.  So what was their #1 complaint?  I know when you talk about labor and politics the subject gets complicated but it was no more complex than when you have a union you can't FIRE somebody and let's face it in most workplaces there are definitely at least a couple of people who need to be shown the door at least this is the way the free market is supposed to work, better for everyone.  I can come up with at least two names myself right off the bat and so this is the #1 complaint even over and above fiscal concerns.  Good God have you been reading about the sexual goings-on between some HS teachers and their students in NYC? that's not even the point, sexuality has always been somewhat warped to begin with but it's existentially difficult to fire the tenured ones because...it gets complicated here.  There's a section on it in Glenn Beck's book Arguing with Idiots and ya gotta collect and collate your evidence first, get your witnesses and present your charges of course to this board or body or that and then all that has to finally go to an arbitrator at least some point down the road into the not-so-foreseeable future and even then the arbitrator for some strange reason often has a soft spot for the more pervy ones.  NYC Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott would like the sole power to fire the truly bad ones but he has to lobby Albany first, that takes time and you know how that goes and the United Federation of Teachers likes the system the way it is after all they fought for it.  I don't recall this going on when I went to school as a young'en but then again we had nuns who'd crack a ruler over a student's knuckles so unless you were seriously into some S&M or a little clothespin action......

Pretty much in my place the only straight up reason you can fire somebody is if they steal something:)

In a weird way I kinda agree w/Obama

Conservatives have said the President is "threatening" the Supreme Court on health-care reform but Obama is saying here in effect why are the courts the most powerful branch of the US government? Now I oppose ObamaCare myself especially the part about the individual mandate but I'm confused by conservatives' newfound love for the SCOTUS. I mean weren't tons of books written and speeches given on the Supremes having too much power over the will of the people on the various contentious social and political issues of the day Roe being the classic example of course but also affirmative action and so on down the line? When I went to the Mount in the Bronx and I always remember this in History class we learned and it was right there in the textbook that we have or are supposed to have 3 co-equal branches of the Government - legislative to pass the laws, executive to enforce the laws and judicial to interpret those laws, a kind of checks-and-balances system. I don't like the health-care but I find myself kinda agreeing with the President philosophically here. Apparently I'm in the minority though as usual:)

GOP Has-Beens

The subject of has-beens interests me. One day Rocky and Blaine are one of the biggest things in the NYC radio market, the next day they're frying chicken at some Popeye's off the Interstate. These days the GOP has-beens are Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, that pizza godfather guy and maybe, make that probably Newt who can already feel the powerful vortex of the has-been hole sucking him in. IMO the architect of 1994's "Contract with America" deserves more respect than he's getting but that's just me. Michele Bachmann, too many brain farts and maybe the last straw was her mistaking Elvis' birthday for his deathday. I know it's not a big thing but taken as a whole you don't want her trying to reset Russian relations or pondering ending the embargo against Cuba. I want to devote the bulk of this blog though to Sarah Palin. Now when her star was early rising in the political sky (it didn't hurt that most men would've done her) early conservative commentary focused on such things as a family that hunts together stays together but the Gander Mountain voting bloc is only so big. Many many people have a mild distaste for the sport of hunting not through some elaborate theory of critter rights but Sarah and her family having a fine bowl of Moose Nose Stew on a snowy winter's night doesn't exactly impress them. Those be all-American values, heartland stuff to be sure but maybe not to a Manhattanite. So what makes a has-been or who has has-been potential? Could simply be just the inexorable Passage of Time, I mean Danny Bonaduce had to beat up a tranny to get back on the radar screen but in Palin's case and this is a biggie it was her overall Lack of Knowledge especially on the foreign affairs scene. You don't want this chick going up against Bashar al-Assad or negotatating some Arab/Israeli peace deal. I think the final nail in the coffin though, no it wasn't Tina Fey but Back in the Day some 8' giant black man who played the hoops plowed her. Sure it was back in the day but it's still a shock to the evangelical mind, yeah I know she's for the smaller gov't and pro-life and all so we can forgive her her youthful dalliances, her sex'chal 'perimentation but we kinda can't forget it either. Thanks Joe McGuiness! Oh yes Herman Cain and that's the really painful part of being a has-been nobody talks about you anymore. You know gimme someone who quietly has staying power through the years. Um I hate to say this but you can kinda say that about Romney. I hope to never become a blogging has-been btw, please lemme know:)

WORK

Most people seem to accept IT and it's the reason why I've not been online that much of late. WORK - it's not that I'm for it or against it but as Beth once said a long time ago she doubts if when we're on our deathbeds and we look back we'll be happy with all those hours we put in. This social commentator handyman who used to come in, one day he says to me "ever wish you were fired?" and I go "yeah, maybe then you can finish that book you always wanted to read." Unless you're in business for yourself or doing your own entrepreneurial thing you're really not in control of your own life, the master of your own ship like today I have to go in late and some days you can't go for that long walk you planned or go up the line to Walmart. I'd like to hear libertarians who are all for Maximum Freedom explain this. Libertarianism is a pipe dream in so many ways and the fact that most folks have to get up at some ungodly hour and go in with their lunchpails means others are in control of us, we're working on their terms and again it's not a good or a bad thing, it is what it is but Maximum Freedom it ain't. WHO invented Work and why can't we change or shift the paradigm a little so as to have more leisure time to cultivate, oh I don't know Family Values which conservatives are so big on? My brother doesn't complain that much about work, his philosophy is work is supposed to suck that's why they call it work and if you want to get all theological about it you can blame Adam and Eve our first parents. I'm in a work frame of mind today, it's an old old topic around here so why not let it riff?

McDonaldizing the gangster

It's soon to be in production but John Travolta is gonna star in a new biopic about the late John Gotti. I'm kind of past this stage in my life, for me the genre of the mobster peaked with The Godfather trilogy. I'm so into other stuff and on a really slow Friday nite (showing my age since I'm not clubbing) I'll dig Sam and Dean on Supernatural even though I have no idea what the hell is going on. Heh, Simon showing his human side on The X Factor last night by apologizing to a contestant he just booted and bringing her back into the fold. He's losing his edge, he's been McDonaldized too. Flicks glamorize a life of crime, Burger King could have soda cups with Gotti et al on 'em and Moms would buy 'em for their kids. We've lost our moral compass. Few months back there was a major and I mean major federal roundup of some major mobsters and folks were writing letters to the New York Post all angry at the feds, leave the guys alone! I really don't do gangster blogs since, who knows a gangster might be reading this right now but it's how I feel. Been rereading parts of Maury Terry's Ultimate Evil since updated and some weird shit went down in Yonkers in the '70s and '80s. Seems some Satanic cult had regular meetings in Untermyer Park on North Broadway and killed some German Sheperds and left 'em on the Aqueduct, Berkowitz may have been involved. Personally know of stories of hospital workers at St. John's seeing the torches and hearing the chanting on some evenings, 'magine you're a patient who just had some major work done and you're recuperating and you lurch towards the window by the River and see some stuff. Been kinda sporadically blogging of late more like a hobby, the old work schedule again. Went to the biggest bookstore I've ever been in my life yesterday, the two-decker job with escalators Barnes & Noble in Poughkeepsie on Rte. 9, didn't buy anything but it was an experience. Is it just my imagination but are stores getting bigger? maybe I can do my walk there. Going home now to enjoy some fine African Rooibos Red Tea, good for the allergies:)

Steve Jobs and a philosophical question that pops up

Would you rather be astoundingly wealthy, a gazillion or have your health? You can live in a mansion and die fairly young or you can sit on your patio in all your middle-class stature on a fine autumn afternoon and enjoy feeding your cats or your dogs or if you don't have them just reading a book. Though I'm a strong capitalist by nature I don't envy the superrich, that societal trend has always irritated me. While I don't want to punish them like Obama I am philosophically balanced, they don't bother me but I don't want to be one of them. Personally I'd rather have my health.

Steve Jobs, Apple Founder and Tech Genius -- 1955-2011, RIP

Once you go black sometimes you go back - Sarah Palin's jungle fever

Joe McGuiness has written a new one, The Rogue, a kind of unauthorized bio of Sarah Palin. Now every book has to have what they call a hook these days to sell, in Barbara Walters' case it was her affair not that I care and so in this case we learn of Sarah Palin's past coke use (presumably we're not talking about the classic American carbonated beverage here) but even bigger is (brace yourself all you racist teabaggers out there, got a chair? sit down)......seems when she was a junior in her college days she had a one-night stand with some 6'10" black basketball player by the name of Glen Rice (he's trending right now as we speak). Now as a husband you don't want to hear this stuff, your spouse's past episodes of high sluttery when they do come out are bad enough but Sarah back then was 5'4" or 5'5" or something and the African-American gentlemen was 6'10" so you know some really freaky stuff went down. Sure that was back in the day but that toxic crap really gets in your psyche I don't care what you say, it's lurking in your mental attic somewhere in some cobwebbed corner with the baseball mitts and the Flexible Flyer (permanently emblazoned images of your beloved churchgoing wife guzzling it down like a milk shake, getting bopped in the head with IT). The other thing is some of today's biggest conservative women moralizers have been yesterday's biggest cat-bitches in heat (e.g. Dr. Laura) so maybe they should be the first to get this stuff out, just sayin' but what I think Mr. McGuiness is doing here and he's known to not like Republicans but he's masturbating the Tea Partier's mind which he sees as most liberals do as lurking in the racist fever swamps, some gap-toothed old red-headed farmer who sneaks into his daughter's room at night telling his wife hey get a load of this, Sarah Palin once fucked some big black buck. He's niggerizing the debate, agitating the political discourse never that high to begin with and maybe somebody should start writing unauthorized biographies of all the unauthorized biographers out there. Start with him, Kitty Kelley......but damn I just thought of something, what if there's a Sex Tape out there? Michele Bachmann dear, I hoped you lived a fairly clean life:)

9/11 - the most historic event in recent history

I had thought when I went to work Monday morning some folks would have a different perspective in light of the preceding day's solemn and extremely moving events, don't worry about stupid stuff......uhm, no. We don't discuss current events much, I'm always the one to bring up the topic but then again I never married my job. It's been years since I read the late Claire Sterling's seminal work The Terror Network published in 1981 and what's changed is that then terrorism was mainly political whereas today's it's largely inspired by a warped vision of God. Sure Hamas and Hezbollah are still political but it's a weird development, after the Cold War never dreamed we'd be at war with radical Islam. You don't believe in Allah and we'll kill you, when did that happen? Saw Frontline's "Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero" the other night which while superbly produced and asked legitimate questions somehow left me uninspired and empty. Doesn't anyone ponder this puzzle that God chose to give us the gift of free will and that means the freedom to choose evil in many cases, to make bad decisions and that all too often those bad choices negatively, even tragically impact and impose themselves on others, the good, the innocent, the virtuous? Put another way if God forced you to be faithful to your spouse it wouldn't mean anything so I'm a little more on God's side here and also if you never had Evil could you really appreciate the Good? If the world was always and forever a perpetual Eden with no tears and sorrow, no suffering and no death would we even know what the Good is? How horrible those people died on that day and your immediate thought is there but for the grace of God. To make that terrible terrible decision to die in overwhelming fire or to jump 80 or even 100 stories hand in hand with a complete stranger in some cases. My own mother many months before this even happened was sitting on the couch one day and said she had a very bad feeling. She felt cold she said and then said she felt something very terrible was gonna happen to the World Trade Center and it's always struck me to this day. I've heard others say similar things so I do believe in a kind of psychic reality. 9/11 unified us as never before and how could it not? I'm sure those people who chose to jump sometimes again with that complete stranger were not contemplating their political differences or the stupid stuff that went on at work last week and that's one of the great lessons here. The other is this tragic event so mind-boggling in the magnitude of its sheer evil, this existentially surreal Happening brought out the worst but more importantly the best in Humanity. We also went from the sublime to Rachel Uchitel becoming one of Tiger Woods' bevy of mistresses so the poetic always somehow becomes mixed with the tabloid culture but that's to be expected. Then there was my lady boss who yesterday was doing her work as usual and asked me what date it is and I'm thinking but didn't say it just how uninformed are you? I mean I'm not a nerd or anything but when you go home what do you do? Do you at least pop on the News for 10 or 15 minutes before going to bed? Again an extremely moving and poignant day and make no mistake, we live in a post 9/11-centric world. It imbues all our thoughts, our very psyche and it did affect my sleep that night. Though it was an adequate sleep it was a kind of somber and fitful slumber and my dreams and thoughts drifted back to this tragic framework brought on by the day's events. What are your thoughts?