WildeBoomerz - Adventures in Pop/Culture

Re-Stuffing the American Dream: Losing So That Others May Gain

2010-12-28T14:51:00.000-05:00

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In a column published on Christmas Day 2010, Dick Cavett wrote: "It’s sad to think how cozy our Midwestern family Christmases were when we were young, and how odiously I now view the allegedly jolly season, with its trampling crowds and extorted gifts. But let that pass. Back then, in that far-off happier time, Christmas was magical when it finally arrived with excruciating slowness."

Extorted gifts!

That's it right there, isn't it? The reason that Christmas gradually but steadily transforms over the years from a magical "most wonderful time of the year" to a season of dread and disappointment?

When we were little, our families listened to us through the year as we babbled about desired toys like Ralphie babbles in A Christmas Story, daydreaming about his Red Ryder BB gun. They listened, and then they got to play Santa by fulfilling our wishes and making magic happen.

Way back in the day, before electronics and before credit cards, there weren't that many things to put on a wish list. A couple of well-picked presents under the tree, a get-together with aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, some singing and eating and laughing, and that one day felt like the only time of year when a whole week could be squeezed into a 12-hour period.

Then came credit cards, and then came electronics, and a new chapter was added to the American Dream: buying so much stuff that it threatened to take over your whole house.

Some people found the stuff too precious to part with, and did allow it to control their lives; they now star on the A&E series, Hoarders. Others agreed that the stuff was too valuable to discard, but they still wanted a place to sleep, eat, watch TV, take a shower. They needed a both/and solution to the dilemma.

Enter the Storage Unit.

The American landscape was transformed almost overnight into a sea of cheap metal sheds where stuff could be kept for a monthly fee. Problem solved: all stuff could be kept indefinitely, as long as that fee was paid.

And then came the Great Recession. Millions of people lost their livelihoods and their homes, and storage units across the land fell into foreclosure just like the houses of their tenants. With no jobs, no incomes, and no homes, an army of people who'd once valued the attainment of stuff for its own sake quickly realized that the stuff was actually worthless when basic food and shelter became primary needs. In response, they simply walked away from the stuff.

Now, this is where the American Dream starts to get all fucked up. According to the official story line, you arrive with little, work hard and make good choices, get lots of money, buy lots of stuff, and live contentedly. There's no room in that storyline for Wall Street bankers actively plotting to assassinate the entire middle class by burning their savings and pensions, evicting them from their homes, and dissolving their jobs. If you start to follow that angle, you'd have to start seeing the American Dream as a crock of shit, and no one wants to do that.

So A&E steps forward to rescue the narrative with a series called Storage Wars. Here, the people who've put their stuff into the units have just somehow chosen to stop paying rent. "If you don't pay your bills, they'll take your stuff," says the ad copy right there on the show's main web page. There's no speculation about why someone would stop paying their bills, no admission of a wrecked economy, no mention that these units don't belong to the wealthiest 2% of Americans who recently got an extension of their $1 trillion tax cut from their Republican protection squad. The narrative is back on track: the people who've lost their stuff to the auctioneer have lost it because they're shiftless and lazy. They haven't worked hard enough to hang on to what they've got. They let their stuff get repossessed. They didn't fight to keep it. They deserve their fate, because they caused it.

But the clincher for restoring the American Dream narrative is that the vultures who circle around the auctions, waiting to swoop in and buy the stuff, could be buying it for pennies on the dollar — "as little as ten dollars for items valued in the millions," in the words of the ad copy. These are the true Americans, dedicating their time and efforts, their brawn and their brains, to finding the mother lode of stored stuff and striking it rich. Not just any putz can do this; it takes perseverance and know-how. Half the fun is watching the pros make token bids just to lure the amateurs into overbidding on units that clearly have nothing of value. The amateurs, like the poor schmucks who've had their stuff repossessed, deserve what they get.

One imagines, at Christmastime, the possibility of just one episode of Storage Wars that provides the back story behind the repossession. And then the buyers at auction, after learning that back story, telling the family who've lost everything that their stuff will remain in storage, and that the bill's been paid through 2013 with the money that was bid. That's what Dickens would do.

But instead, A&E spent Christmas day running ads for a Storage Wars marathon — a whole season of avarice and greed, in the name of a restored American Dream narrative, to enjoy in one day. The ads were interspersed with others for major retailers offering HUGE after-Christmas sales the next day: SAVINGS OF UP TO 70% on stuff that hadn't been bought during the other HUGE sales prior to the holiday. Sales at which even more stuff could be bought for eventual storage.

Ralphie in A Christmas Story had one Red Ryder BB gun (and one pink bunny suit). His father had one tacky plastic leg lamp. Not much need for storage there. But it's a long time passed since the era in which A Christmas Story is set, and now that Christmas means "trampling crowds and extorted gifts," it's not jolly or magical. It's just a Day of Stuff.

Buy stuff, give stuff, get stuff, store stuff, and have the stuff repossessed and auctioned away, so that others can sell the stuff at profit. For A&E, it's the perfect continuation of the American Dream cycle, and a perfectly logical sequel to Christmas Day.

Whoa!

2010-12-15T23:57:00.003-05:00

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It seems that while we weren't looking during the past twelve months, about 9,000 people were looking at us! This is pretty remarkable for a blog that's allegedly closed... so we're thinking of reopening for 2011.

Thinking about it.

Considering it.

Pondering it.

Meanwhile we're just coming up with synonyms, because it's fun.

Stay tuned... and thanks for stopping by!

Happy Christmas, Merry Holidays, Good Night, and Good Luck.

2009-12-23T00:06:00.003-05:00

And now, the end is near, and so I face the final curtain....

If you recognize that line and can attach it to the song and the person who made the song famous — and if you know the name of the buxom woman getting intimate with a happy snowman at left — then congrats, you really are a pop culture trivia hound like the staff of WB.

But now, the founding staff of 78rpm and Litchik have some very big fish to fry in another area, so Wildeboomerz needs to go into cold storage for a bit.

Toward the end here, you've surely noticed that the original emphasis on pop culture was fading away and being replaced by more pressing social and political issues. The Copenhagen climate summit, for instance, and while it's true that pop culture did both reflect and shape public consciousness with the movie The Day After Tomorrow, 78rpm, for one, has lost enthusiasm for pop culture even so. Copenhagen was a stunning failure, and half of Americans have no idea where Copenhagen even is let alone what never happened there this month. But by God, they all know who Jon and Kate are.

And while we are saddened by the death of Brittany Murphy, we're more upset about the demise of civility, intellect, accountability, ethics, integrity, honor, discretion, modesty, humility, and a few dozen other formerly bright flowers on the pathway of life.

And so, because of all of this along with a desperate lack of time, after 20,000 very welcome visits by faithful readers, Wildeboomerz is halting its production run for the time being.

For all of you who've visited this blog over the past year and a half, thanks, and have a wonderful and/or blessed holiday.

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The Motown Sound — of screaming wallets

2009-12-20T16:30:00.010-05:00

WB has been electrically shocked to discover two things in a recent Forbes article about the most expensive American cities to live in. First was the mention of Detroit, where houses sell for $100 — surely that doesn't count as "expensive" cost of living? Second was the explanation:

"[The] Motor City grabs a spot on our list in large part because of the high cost of utilities. Residents pay, on average, $243.56 per month for electricity."

Um... what? Even in winter when days are short and nights are endless, WB's Motown-area total utility bill is about $150 — and that includes natural gas for heat! The electric charge hovers around $80 a month year-round. So, what the hell are those Detroiters doing to get slammed with bills four times larger?

Please understand, you can't run a pop-culture and general rant blog without having lots of computers, TVs, and radios running. And you can't write without drinking plenty of fluids from three refrigerators. And you can't see the controls on the remotes without having a lot of lights on. But —

— you can be smart about all of those. You can stuff the walls and attic and basement rafters full of insulation so that the electric motor on the furnace rarely kicks on. You can check the labels on fridges and computers to make sure they're Energy Star rated. You can replace every lightbulb in the joint with CFLs and LEDs. And then you can plug every cluster of appliances into a power strip with its own on/off switch. Appliances not in use = power strip off.

And... well, that's about it, really. WB headquarters has only done the few things that President Obama started mentioning before he was President: winterize houses and change watt-sucking habits. We did it because we didn't want to pay $243.56 electric bills each month (even though we never came anywhere close to that number before all the changes).

Yep, the CFLs sometimes start out really dim and gradually warm up. Pretty quickly, it stops being a frustrating inconvenience and becomes a harmless quirk. Yep, LEDs cost more — but they're also bright more. Way more. And yeah, all of that insulation can be an itchy mess to install. But a quick shower will take care of that. Sure, it takes time to train yourself to shut off the power strip before walking away from the TV, DVD, Cable Box, Audio Receiver, Playstation, and Wii cabinet, but once trained, it's second nature.

And the net result is, based on the Forbes article, a net savings of $164 each month. Maybe all of the Fox-heads who mocked the President's "green" ideas, and the teabaggers who want government to stay out of their private lives and stop legislating stuff like light bulbs, have that kind of extra money to burn. Around here, we'd rather save it up and use it for something more memorable. But hey, we're just a couple of bumpkins with a blog.

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Copenhagen Climate Update: a big "FU!" from North America

2009-12-14T12:02:00.004-05:00

Here's a Google Map showing the number of votes that have come in from citizens demanding strong, binding agreements from the "leaders" currently butting heads in Copenhagen.

From Europe, which has experienced killer heat waves: nearly 60,000 people.

From Africa, in the process of being scorched to death: 125,000 people.

From Asia, where coastal nations are likely to become memories: over a million people.

From Australia, in perpetual drought and at risk of becoming a deserted continent: 25,000 people.

From South America, with its glaciers disappearing and many nations having no other water source: 13,000 people.

And from North America, where Fox News reigns in the United States, and where Canadians still see snow out their windows, and where Mexico just wants the drug murders to stop: 7,600 people.

That's roughly the population of New York City back when the United States was being founded.

And that's really all there is to say about this. Climate news is reduced to soundbites, because it's (a) scientific, (b) statistical, and (c) depressing. Therefore, North Americans, currently enjoying all the water they want (unless they live in Vegas, Phoenix, or California), tune out or rant about how Al Gore is behind all this so that he can become fabulously wealthy.

But OMG, have you heard about Tiger Woods? The number of women he's slept with on the side? The color of undies he liked his women to wear? The size of his penis? Hell, there's over a thousand comments about that last detail alone. Run the story for seven days, you've got the same number as the people in North America who give a damn about what's (not) happening in Copenhagen.

Pathetic.
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"...and decrease the surplus population"

2009-12-10T23:54:00.003-05:00

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The Internet, by some arguments, is a wonderful thing — truly a forum for Vox populi, the voice of the people. With everything open to comment, and every comment open to ratings (or metacomments), the pulse of the population can be taken at any moment. Or at least, the pulse of the population that comments and rates.

The Internet is also a place where much more than mere commentary can be found. Whole books are just a search-term away, like Charles Dickens' holiday classic, A Christmas Carol, available here and here and here and here (for starters). It is in this book that we find the classic line where, when told that many thousands of destitute people will die without food and shelter, Ebenezer Scrooge replies: "Then perhaps they should do it, and decrease the surplus population."

Let those words sink in for a moment, before we go back to the Internet.

Okay. Now let's consider a place called Bangladesh, a nation whose poverty was so dire 40 years ago that George Harrison organized a Live Aid-type benefit concert to raise not just money, but also awareness of the people's plight. Harrison also wrote a song about the country:

My friend came to me/With sadness in his eyes/Told me that he wanted help/Before his country dies/Although I couldn't feel the pain/I knew I had to try/Now I'm asking all of you/To help us save some lives

"Relieve the people of Bangladesh," the chorus went. Five simple words that reveal the compassion and decency of their author.

The other day, MSNBC ran a story about Bangladesh sinking into the sea, about its drinking water turning to salt as ocean water seeps into wells, and about massive humanitarian crisis as crops fail, shelters collapse, diseases spread, and the nation of Bangladesh disappears from history as the first victim of climate disaster. And in response, the first vox populi commenter, Linda from Nebraska, wrote this:

Carbon emissions are not responsible. This man caused [sic] global warming is not founded in science, it is simply a money grab where the few take resouces [sic] from the many.

The second commenter, Douglas from Detroit, added this: "Global warming" is a scientific and academic scam being used by politicians to try to redistribute the wealth of nations. What is going on in Bangladesh is the well known process of economic developement [sic]. But what is going on at the UN is devious, dishonest, deceptive and destructive.

Wave after wave of kindness and compassion followed:

Utter and complete nonsense.... I am sure this country will demand monies form [sic] the wealthy countries, because of sourse [sic] its [sic] our fault....

These folks and their government want money form [sic] America and other leading countries, sad thing is they will get it, where's the supporting science. Unbelievable.

And this one:

These poor people are just contributing to the problem by breathing and using up all the worlds [sic] resources.

Yes, someone actually wrote that. His name is Mike Williams; for some reason, he doesn't give a location. But Gary Roy of Lakeland, Florida, does, and adds this:

The land will not support us and our 36 children, who is coming to save us? The first thing these people need to learn is when you find yourselves in a hole, stop digging. They are reproducing like rodents in a place that is already wall to wall with poeple [sic].

This is what the Internet, and its giving everyone the ability to comment on everything, has created. Ebenezer Scrooge, heartless, greedy, and amoral, is now everywhere. When the story is about dying people, his comments focus on money. He compares the children to rats. And he says, These poor people are just contributing to the problem by breathing and using up all the world's resources —

— in other words: They should die, and decrease the surplus population.

Scrooge's heartlessness, his murderous apathy, seeps out of every crevice at YouTube as well. A video simply titled "Katrina Victims" receives this: The problem here is these people will never stop murdering and selling crack. So blame the taxpayer who is paying their way.

The money issue, again.

Another video from a 9/11 documentary, showing a businessman in the World Trade Center desperately clinging to a rope from his office window and then losing his grip and falling to his death, is followed by this:

lol that's what the fatass deserves for eating at mcdonalds everyday lol

There should be numerous "[sic]" notations there. But more importantly, the entire comment is sick.

If you want to see the Internet at its worst, search for the stories about the most terrible, heartbreaking events. Chances are, you'll find this statement at the end of the story: "Comments for this item have been disabled."

It's not because the huge outpouring of grief and sympathy has overwhelmed the system.

It's because the sheer evil of the comments has overwhelmed the moderators.

Yule Log - the Director's Cut

2009-12-06T20:37:00.003-05:00

WB is busy with ~~some~~ lots of end-of-semester stuff, so enjoy this special feature-laden version of the cherished Yule Log holiday movie, with commentary from the film's director. Back soon!

Because they didn't make enough from those hit shows

2009-11-30T21:48:00.003-05:00

Jason Alexander, aka George on Seinfeld, and Fran Drescher, aka The Nanny, got paid $3 million to host the wedding of someone they'd never met, a 66-year-old Australian doctor marrying a 26-year-old woman... oh, and there was that thing about him hiring a hit man to kill one of his patients, but hey, that was 20 years ago, so forgive and forget — which is what Alexander and Drescher were very happy to do for a price.

Dr. Phil was in on it, too.

This is the kind of thing that makes WB ask itself, more and more, and we like pop culture why?

Maybe because this ain't really pop culture; it's just crass whoring.

As we were saying the other day...

2009-11-26T00:51:00.000-05:00

Extreme times call for extreme communications.

390 going once, going twice - sold!

2009-11-23T18:45:00.008-05:00

Last week, Great Britain experienced the heaviest amount of rainfall in a single day ever recorded. By all accounts, the flooding and carnage was terrifying. In fact, the word "biblical" got thrown around, because people were convinced that only Noah would survive.

According to the Associated Press, carbon dioxide levels have now reached 385 parts per million (ppm) — the highest concentrations of the greenhouse gas that Earth has experienced in a million years. And according to CNN, world leaders from 191 nations, who are scheduled to meet in Copenhagen very shortly, have announced that there is "no hope of a major breakthrough over climate change by year's end."

They were supposed to meet and agree to replace the failed Kyoto Accords with a global policy that would bring CO2 levels down quickly and dramatically. Instead, now they say they're "endorsing a new two-step process that aims to use Copenhagen as a stepping stone for a bigger accord down the road."

Uh-huh. Just like they were all prepared for Copenhagen, twelve years after failing to get anything done at Kyoto. Twelve years after having had twelve years to get their acts together and act responsibly and intelligently.

The truth is, world leaders will never, ever, be able to agree on any global policy. Ever. CO2 concentrations are expected to be 450 ppm within 30 years — roughly two and a half Kyoto-to-Copenhagen time spans — but elected officials and dictators will do nothing to try to combat that increase. And as their lakes, rivers, and glaciers dry up, and their people run out of water and die of mass dehydration, they'll say hey, maybe we should've done something about this back in '09 when things were good and we were only at 390 ppm.

Meanwhile, here comes Black Friday as a global day of insane consumption. Happy shopping.
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Counting down to the big non-event!

2009-11-20T18:41:00.000-05:00

Next Friday, the world has a chance to demonstrate to economics professors, banking executives, retail corporations, government leaders, and especially themselves that "Black Friday" is one big ideological bog of quicksand. Rather than a day of "incredible savings for our customers," as the big-box stores would have us believe, Black Friday is actually a tribute to that dear symbol of the holiday season: Ebenezer Scrooge.

Yes, Scrooge, who is taken to the open-air market by the ghost of Christmas present, sees sellers raking in money, and says with a greedy smile: "There's a lot of buying going on, isn't there?"

WB has been boycotting Black Friday for at least a decade now, and has found it to be one of the most peaceful, restful days of the year. We encourage others to discover how that can be the case for them, too. November 27 is Buy Nothing Day in the U.S., with the rest of the world celebrating on the 28th.

Let the non-shopping begin. The savings (to soul and sanity) will be incredible.

Music with the Masters

2009-11-16T16:07:00.015-05:00

Note: this is a massive post that took a long time to write, so it'll be our only one this week because now we have to do all of the other work we ignored while writing this massive post.

Bob Dylan, Fox Theater, Detroit MI: Nov. 6, 2009

Metallica, Van Andel Arena, Grand Rapids MI: Nov. 9, 2009

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, The Palace, Auburn Hills MI: Nov. 13, 2009

Last week, the WB ministry of culture had the incredibly good fortune to see three legendary rock performers in the space of nine days. And although each show was radically different from the other two, all three were overshadowed by a nagging sense that this might be the last time any of these acts would be on tour. Rock is a joyful noise, but because of the possibility of "never again," each of these shows was enveloped in an unspoken sadness.

First, Bob Dylan. The folk maestro from the 1960s and musical chameleon through every decade afterward portrayed himself as a member of the band and nothing more. Tucking himself far back at stage right, leaving his lead guitarist to play front center, Dylan slurred and mumbled his way through some terrific reworkings of his greatest hits including "Desolation Row," "All Along the Watchtower," and "Like a Rolling Stone." The new versions of these songs were so different from their originals that some had gone on for several minutes before audience members began turning to each other and asking, "Is this what I think it is?" (Since lyrics were mostly unintelligible, it was the faint hints of familiar chord structures that eventually triggered the a-ha moments.)

The band was tight and followed its cues flawlessly, and Dylan's harmonica playing was energetic, but he only picked up a guitar (electric) for one song, and for most of the night he hid behind a keyboard that stayed mixed too low throughout the show and was easily drowned out by the other instruments - three guitars (including slide, which like the keyboards could barely be heard), bass, and drums. There was no interaction with the audience, who felt like voyeurs watching a private rehearsal from outside a window, and combined with Dylan's well-known refusal to enunciate, the whole show felt cold. This was only reinforced when, precisely at the two-hour mark — almost to the second — the 68-year old murmured deggoomavenns (thank you, my friends) and walked offstage with his band. House lights came up, curtains opened, a swarm of stage hands appeared, and the trucks backed up to the suddenly visible loading dock.

"I guess it's over," one man said a few rows back, but actually, it was pretty clear that for Bob Dylan, the show had been over for several years already.

After taking a couple of days off to rest and prepare, we headed to Grand Rapids, Michigan, the wholesome headquarters of Amway and home of the Gerald R. Ford Presidental Museum, to catch the biggest band in the world — again. WB began 2009 with a Metallica show in Detroit and thought it only fitting to catch another one on the other side of the state, at year's end. Our review of the Detroit show captures most of what Grand Rapids offered as well, with some key differences:

First, while big scary Detroit allowed fans to enter the arena through any of dozens of doors, the Van Andel Arena in little safe Grand Rapids forced fans to line up for four city blocks in order to be patted down by security guards and then let in through one entrance door. Maybe this is what makes a little safe town stay safe, but it also forced 80% of the crowd to completely miss the opening act, the Danish band Volbeat. This was unfortunate since the overriding theme of sidewalk conversation during the four-block crawl tended toward "I'd like to see that band from Denmark, but I couldn't care less about seeing Lamb of God."

Lamb of God was the second warm-up act. Grrr-metal act Machine Head had served as the opening comedy routine for January's show, and the Lambsters brought a similar version of Grrr to the stage, except that their lead vocalist also poured beer on his head so that he could swing his wet hair at the audience while alternately growling, roaring, and screaming random noises that, as with Bob Dylan, sometimes were almost decipherable. Each song sounded just like the one before it, all three guitarists made the same hair-flipping moves they'd already made, and the hardcore metalheads throwing horns (and each other) in the pitifully thin mosh circle had a great time.

Then it was time for the big boys. Metallica's lighting crew have been busy over the past year making the tools of their trade do new stuff, more stuff, and awesome stuff, and the alignment between effects and song notes was matched to the millisecond. James Hetfield's stage patter continues to be profanity-free (it's a shock now to hear the band's 1990s live stuff with James swearing a blue streak between each song) and filled with warm fuzzies about mutual love between band and its "family" of fans. The between-song repertoire is polished to the point where you won't hear an extra word added from one show to the next (trust us, we've got the Metallica iPhone app), although James is careful to call out the city's name whenever he can.

As had happened during a Quebec show just days before (thanks, iPhone app), Kirk Hammet's guitar melted down during "One," but whereas the Canadians had been treated to an all-James, all-rhythm version of the song featuring harmony notes instead of lead, Grand Rapids got one of the sloppiest renditions of the song imaginable. With Kirk hunched over at the far end of the stage so that his guitar tech could fiddle with the transmitter box at his hip, James missed several drum cues and had to play catch-up as Kirk's lead finally returned, most of the time, to the mix. And the thing is, no one in attendance cared about the glitches.

That's because you don't really go to see Metallica for the music. You go for the experience, to be one of tens of thousands experiencing an Event that defies easy explanation. You don't see the house lights suddenly plunge the arena into darkness at start time; you feel it. You don't hear the opening notes of Ennio Morricone's "Ecstasy of Gold" — you feel them. You don't applaud the sudden appearance of the Four Horsemen; you savor it. Because that's what big huge monster bands like this one do; they transcend sound and vision to become internalized by millions around the world.

They do it through many ways, but here's one: Whereas Dylan couldn't care less if his fans saw all of the show mechanisms immediately after he vanished from the stage, Metallica stays on stage after the show, while the house lights are at full brightness and roadies are beginning the teardown. All four members engage with the crowd, dispensing guitar picks and drumsticks, gathering up home-made banners that fans have brought, displaying the banners over the drums and flashpots. And then, one by one, they stand at one of the remaining microphones to say goodbye to the people still in the arena. These guys are all millionaires, and they know they're musical giants just as Bob Dylan is, and they don't have to do any of the after-show interaction — but they do it anyway. It makes a difference.

Coming off of the high of the Metallica show, we had three days to rest up and get ready for a night with yet another Rock Hall of Fame act. The Palace of Auburn Hills is a fitting venue for rock royalty like Bruce Springsteen and the E. Street Band, but after standing for the entire two-plus hour Metallica show (one does not sit at a Metallica concert), we were exhausted just thinking about standing through Bruce’s standard three-hour set. But Springsteen’s infectious energy and charismatic performance style makes it pretty near impossible to resist jumping to your feet and dancing, which half of us did.

Greeting his audience with a big “Hello, Ohio!” Springsteen launched directly into his new song “Wrecking Ball,” written to commemorate the demolition of Meadowlands in New Jersey. Perhaps the crowd thought the Boss was just fooling around with that Ohio crack, but as the new song unfolded with lyrics custom-fitted for, well, an Ohio crowd, it became clear that the "front man’s worst nightmare," as the Boss himself called it, had come true. Little Stevie Van Zandt finally got Springsteen’s attention by whacking him on the side of the head, and a red-faced Bruce ably turned his gaffe into a running Where am I? DETROIT! call and response joke with the audience for the rest of the evening. (To his credit, all arenas do pretty much look alike, the band had just played Ohio the night before, and to cap it all off it was Friday the 13th.)

The centerpiece of the show was a performance of the complete Born to Run album, in the order that the songs appear there. From the opening bars of “Thunder Road” to the closing notes of “Jungleland,” the band delivered a rock masterpiece, and not just because there isn’t a bad song on that album. It’s been nearly 35 years since Bruce wrote the lines “Darling you know just what I'm here for/So you're scared and you're thinking/That maybe we ain't that young anymore/Show a little faith there's magic in the night" — and hearing him sing these words at age 60 created a mass swoon for the audience, most of whom were not that young anymore, either. Each song in the album set moved seamlessly into the next, creating a symphonic effect further enhanced with lush arrangements and instrumentation. As brilliant as the original album is, it’s better live, now. And if only the crowd hadn’t insisted on singing along, they’d have heard that.

Springsteen continued to seek absolution for his blunder during his mid-set "stump-the-band/take requests" component that became a mainstay of his live shows in 2009, paying tribute to local rock legends with Bob Seger’s “Ramblin’ Gamblin Man” and a Mitch Ryder “Detroit Medley” ("Devil With a Blue Dress/Good Golly Miss Molly/Jenny Take a Ride/CC Rider") that the E Streeters once featured regularly in concert encores. Incredibly, the Boss even crowd-surfed for several long (and scary) minutes.

After making it safely back to the stage, he continued to ramp up the show until he and the audience were utterly spent. Springsteen and the E. Street Band have long been known for putting on peerless live shows, and they are still in top form. Even not-really-fans can’t help but be blown away by the sheer energy and extraordinary musicianship this band brings every time.

Dylan, okay, we saw him and now we can say that we did. But Metallica and Springsteen, well, we'd really like to see them come back around just once (or twice, or three times) more before they hang up their guitars for good. Meanwhile, we've got a ton of CDs — and an iPhone app.
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Opting out of doubletalk

2009-11-14T19:13:00.008-05:00

The statement for last month's credit card bill was almost filed away in the WB records drawer when we noticed something different on the page. In the middle of the reverse side, nestled among the minuscule 4-point legalese, was a box. And in the box, a bunch of slightly larger words in screaming caps.

Clearly, it was important (how had it been overlooked the first time?), and so we read:

IMPORTANT NOTICE OF CHANGES IN ACCOUNT TERMS: WE ARE CHANGING ACCOUNT TERMS, INCLUDING INCREASING THE PURCHASE AND CASH ADVANCE FEE, AND HOW WE CHANGE THE TERMS OF YOUR AGREEMENT WITH US. PLEASE READ THIS CHANGE IN TERMS.

Got that so far? Change in terms: we are changing our terms including how we change our terms... so read the information you are reading about our changing terms.

Damn! This wins some kind of Corporate Bullshit of the Year award for executing a linguistic three-point double flip reverse loop.

Whatever that would be. Now, let's go on:

YOU CAN OPT OUT OF SOME OF THE CHANGES LISTED ABOVE, INCLUDING THE ANNUAL PERCENTAGE RATE AND FEE INCREASES BY CALLING US TO OPT OUT. HOWEVER, YOU WILL NO LONGER BE ABLE TO USE YOUR ACCOUNT FOR PURCHASES OR CASH ADVANCES, BECAUSE YOUR ACCOUNT WILL BE CLOSED WHEN YOU OPT OUT.

Translation: You can opt out by opting out, but if you opt out, we'll cancel your card.

Translation of translation: You fucking peasants, we've got you by the balls.

Of course, no annual percentage rates have been mentioned "above" — because they've been buried in the 4-point font part of the statement, not in this screaming-caps box.

And what is that new rate going to be?

31% monthly.

It's worth mentioning here that Mafia "loan sharks" typically charge 10% to 20% of the weekly balance (40% to 80% per month), meaning that U.S. banks, with the full blessing of the United States Congress, are now only nine percentage points away from qualifying as hoodlums on the FBI's organized crime watch list.

But we digress.

Cross them off

2009-11-09T00:25:00.000-05:00

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Not long ago, someone on a radio talk show suggested that the current gaggle of Republicans in Washington who vote NO on every proposal, yet have nothing to show as an alternative bill, should get out of their elephant suits and call themselves what they really are: The Christian Party.

The logic appears to hold up at first: if the rabid anti-abortionists, school prayer zealots, and homophobes who now make up the Republican Party were to break off and start their own club, there'd be maybe five or six politicians left behind to rebuild a party with a conservative platform based on low taxes, limited government, and a thriving business base. Nothing else, no bullshit — all of the other smokescreens could be taken up by the defectors. To go along with the current elephant and the donkey political party symbols, the new party could add a crucifix.

But there's a problem with that. While "Christian" became synonymous with lunatic thanks to two terms of Bush and eight years of tyranny in the Name of Our Lord, that definition is neither fair nor reasonable. As we've mentioned before, it's just lazy thinking, an easy sweep-'em-all-into-the-same-dustbin lack of mental effort.

Here's why:

Blessed are the poor, the meek, the broken-hearted, the hungry, the homeless. And blessed are the merciful, the pure at heart, the peacemakers, and those who are persecuted for any of these blessings. Feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, clothe the poor, comfort the sick, and befriend the imprisoned.

Those are directions straight out of the New Testament, the field manual for Christianity, words spoken by the Christ who the belief system is named for. And they sure as hell don't sound anything like traumatize the pregnant, persecute the gay, pontificate and proselytize in the name of God until you make unbelievers of those who currently believe. And while you're at it, make a fat, deaf, drug-addicted failed sportscaster, a squinting egomaniacal liar, and an anorexic stick-legged Hitler wannabe your holy trinity — not Father Son and Holy Ghost, but Rush and Sean and Ann.*
* Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter.

No, those aren't in the Christian playbook. If anything, they're orders of the anti-Christ:

Exploit the poor, ridicule the meek, mock the broken-hearted, banish the hungry and the homeless — but care for the wealthy. And blessed are the merciless, the corrupt at heart, the warmongers, and those who are rewarded for being morally bankrupt. Ignore the hungry, evict the homeless, tax the poor, kill the sick, and increase the imprisoned.

So okay, no; not the Christian Party. The vermin who recite this creed are as far removed from Christianity as Anton LaVay and his Church of Satan. Call them the Anti-Abortion Party, sure. Or the No Gays Party. Or the School Prayer Party. Any of these will do — hell, split 'em up into separate camps, and help the millions of single-cause voters in Amurca line up with the one topic that lets them ignore the other one hundred problems going on during any election.

It might even allow the five or six Republicans left behind to propose some ways to enhance the... you know, the Republic... without ever mentioning religious beliefs at all. There could be actual, spirited, intelligent debate about real issues! Instead of just voting NO, and instead of feeding their followers bullshit like "the people don't want health care" as their rationale for doing their corporate masters' bidding while offering no viable alternative, the newly liberated elephant people would be free to propose genuine plans and join the process of leading and shaping a nation, rather than just keep collecting corporate donations and building stone walls in the middle of every road to the nation's progress.

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Mixed results from a small budget

2009-11-07T09:48:00.003-05:00

Editor's note: WB contributor Nighthand returns from the land of finals, commencement, and job applications!

By now most people have heard of the new movie, Paranormal Activity. If not, here’s the low-down: a girl has been haunted, off and on, by something undefined since she was eight. Her boyfriend, with whom she now lives, knows about this, and a few recent incidents of noises in the night have prompted him to purchase an expensive video camera, microphone, and other detection gear to watch all the time so he can find the root of the problem. Girl is less than enthused with the situation and doesn’t want him to antagonize the spirit. Guy is full of bravado and skepticism, antagonizing the spirit.

But now: what’s up with their house? They have a television larger than the screens of some theaters showing the movie, more rooms than they know what to do with, and an apparently endless supply of free time.

Now, see, this isn’t your typical gore-porn horror film. It’s an honest-to-deity psychological scare. It starts out tame. A door moving slightly in the night. A thud and a moving chandelier. It grows more intense as Guy tries to call "it" out. Antics with an Ouija board ensue. Escalation. Climax. Without spoiling the ending, we’ll just say this: you probably know already.

So what’s the point? Haven’t we all seen this movie before? Not exactly, because Paranormal Activity does a few things interestingly. For one thing, it’s small, by which we mean definitely not large in its resources, filming, production, or cast. There are only four characters: Guy, Girl, Girl’s Friend, Psychic, and the latter appears just twice in the film. The entire story takes place in an opulent house, with the exception of the opening scene in the driveway. Yet, there’s still much to explore. The house is large enough that you never see everything, and two whole spare rooms are left virtually unseen through the majority of the film.

The presentation is impressive. There's no opening, no pre-film credits displaying actor names and production houses. A simple black screen with white text is shown to the audience prior to the actual start. Same with the ending; only an ominous few lines of text and a black screen, no credits. (This was the wrong project for any film crew members who live for seeing their names on the screen.)

But beyond that, Paranormal Activity is pretty much a home-movie styled portrayal of creepy stuff happening, all culminating with a classic horror-style vibe. The various events and their build-up are all basically par for the horror-film course. Every one of them is telegraphed by a thrumming bass noise, almost like an old furnace blowing through the vents, something all of us have at home to remind us of the scary bits.

Ultimately, we think of PA like Cloverfield or Blair Witch meets… well, Blair Witch. Oh look; there are time-codes in the corner counting down to morning, while a gray-blue evening camera lens is accompanied by the thuds of footsteps on the stairs!

Really guys, you should have kept the bedroom door closed. The unknown "it" even closed it for you.

Congress is obstructed — anyone got an enema?

2009-11-04T00:36:00.002-05:00

With the Copenhagen world climate conference coming up next month, a bill to initiate cap-and-trade programs in the U.S. to combat climate change continues to crawl its way through the Senate, which can only work on one issue at a time, apparently. After Congress is done shredding all sane proposals for national health care and presenting the American people a turd wrapped in gold foil and calling it "reform," the same group of people is fully expected to throw climate legislation into the same brick wall and piss on it.

According to MSNBC, "Republicans... have characterized the "cap-and-trade" approach as tantamount to a massive energy tax because it would make energy from fossil fuels, especially electricity produced from burning coal, more expensive." And Democrats aren't exactly lining up to take up the let's-stay-alive cause, either. And while the U.S. Chamber of Commerce denies that anything needs to be done at all, the corporations — yes, corporations! — who make up that Chamber have been resigning in protest of its money-first, life-last policies.

Unfortunately, the CEOs of those corporations aren't members of Congress. And so, to the dunderheads who are there, WB offers this review of the basics:

You say that climate change can't and shouldn't be fought because carbon would become more expensive. But you see, that's the point. When things are cheap, people consume them without thinking because there's no need to think. Consider the plastic disposable razor, one of the most wasteful and unnecessary products ever invented. As long as those things work out to about 19 cents a shave, no one's going to stop to ponder what happens to that little chunk of plastic when it's "disposed" of, going to the landfill (or to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch) to join millions of other chunks of plastic that will take hundreds of thousands of years to break down into toxic subparticles.

Raise that razor's price to two or three bucks a pop, and people start to think: Can I skip this shave? Can I reuse the blade one more time, even though it's starting to rip the whiskers instead of shave them? Could I... find some way to keep the handle and replace just the blade?

And bingo, there we are: back at the non-disposable razor.

The one that makes sense.

Why do manufacturers make disposable razors? Because they can. Why do consumers buy them? Because no one stops them. Why do people keep all the lights on in the house? Why do they buy TV sets that suck up five times the electricity of the old set that's still working just fine?

You Congressional climate legislation obstructionists aren't lining up to block climate change initiatives because you're concerned about the well-being of your constituents. You're doing it at the beck and call of your corporate owners who produce all of the products we don't need and the energy we waste to run them.

The good news is, that kind of thinking — and behavior — just can't last. When gasoline prices shot up to $4 per gallon, the world stopped driving. And when the price fell back to $2, our cars stayed parked. Clearly the people know something that you narrow-minded obstructionist legislators never will: living on this planet is about much more than desperately clinging to a job. It's about clinging to life.
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Fairly dangerous

2009-11-02T00:07:00.001-05:00

We started to notice it the other day while accidentally landing on the main Fox News page during a search for actual news: Rush "Windbag" Limbaugh, the failed sportscaster and drug addict whose interest in buying an NFL team nearly caused a player's strike, had his photo up in the right top corner of the home page over a headline: "Limbaugh Predicts..." (we forget what it was he was predicting; something utterly predictable, though, like a military loss in Iraq or a socialistic takeover of Amurka through health care).

And then today, Fox gave Mr. Assbag 30 minutes of nearly uninterrupted talk time to slam President Obama, just to show that Fox truly is "fair and balanced," in contrast to what the White House has been saying about the network. Rush, of course, is qualified to speak ~~derisively~~ critically about the President because he received a "Defender of the Constitution" award at a conservative convention earlier this year. And he's a big proponent of the notion that Americans (i.e. his five million listeners, not the 295 million other people) need to "take the country back."

The question is, take the nation back from what? From government with a vision? From an Attorney General who's not afraid to say that torture is torture? From actual programs to help citizens, instead of just empty plans for programs that never materialize?

As best we can tell, Rush Limbaugh wants the nation to be "taken back" to a population of helpless victims being "led" by a gang of homicidal religious extremists — i.e. Republicans — working themselves ragged to rape and pillage in the name of Wall Street and the Almighty while distracting the population by pointing at other religious zealots and going to war with them even if it means that American soldiers will get caught in the same shitstorm that's mired every other great nation that ever tried to raise hell in Afghanistan. And this is what the that fat deranged lunatic got a Defender of the Constitution Award for. This is why Fox gives him headlines on the "news" page and 30 minutes on the Sunday "news" show.

This is why the White House has qualified Fox News as not only unfair, but also unbalanced — as in unhinged. As in dangerous to democracy and sanity. See, there really is a place for conservatism as a political philosophy, and for the idea of limiting government to its roles and duties as the Constitution defined them. Of course, times change, so those roles and duties are going to change by necessity, but conservatism can still operate fairly and logically, and can legislate wisely and collaboratively with other parties — and be respected for all of it.

The problem lies in the very large difference between conservatism as a philosophy and Republicanism as a goal unto itself.

Just don't ask Rush to explain.

Halloween video countdown: #1

2009-10-31T00:18:00.001-04:00

Halloween video countdown: #2

2009-10-30T11:06:00.000-04:00

Halloween video countdown: #3 (NSFW)

2009-10-29T00:08:00.002-04:00

Halloween video countdown: #4

2009-10-28T12:01:00.002-04:00

Halloween video countdown: #5 (NSFW)

2009-10-27T00:04:00.000-04:00

In General: The Dangerous Problem with ‘Everyone All the Time’ Thinking (Part Two)

2009-10-23T23:05:00.009-04:00

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A week ago, a story broke about parents in Nigeria — encouraged by their church pastors — accusing their children of witchcraft and torturing them. Some of the tortured victims have died of their injuries. Forum comments, of course, immediately painted "Christianity" as the source of this evil, and "Christians" as the evil people driving it. Even when Nigerians themselves pointed out that the "pastors" behind the witch-hysteria were just demented privateers using the job title as a way to collect exorcism fees from deluded parents, and that Nigerian culture itself has been dangerously superstitious for decades, and that poverty, not religion, was the driving factor in these atrocities against children, the "Christianity did it" generalizing continued. What should have been a protect the children outpouring became an attack the Christians movement instead — leaving the children twice as damaged, twice as neglected. First by the torture itself, and then by the misplaced attention in response to it.

Thus the subtitle of this post: the dangerous problem with generalized thinking.

The famed linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf made popular the concept of language shaping thought, and so shaping reality. “The dog is by the back door,” for example, is neutral; we might find that statement written on a friendly family note asking us to feed the household pets. In contrast, “the huge, dangerous dog is lurking by the back door” brings a whole new world of reality along with it. And so does “the dead dog is lying by the back door.”

Pretty obvious, right? Now consider these statements, which move from a generalized everyone all the time thought pattern to some very precise and specific revisions of that original thought. Keep track of the italics:

1. Christians are judgmental hypocrites with ridiculous beliefs.

2. Christians tend to be judgmental hypocrites with fundamentalist beliefs.

3. Some Christians are judgmental and hypocritical, and certain denominations within Christianity are more fundamentalist than others, but not all Christians have fundamental beliefs in the Bible as a literal collection of God’s words..

4. Some demented individuals calling themselves "Christians" carry hateful signs at military funerals, and some homicidal Nigerians calling themselves "pastors" advocate the torture of children for a fee. All of these lunatics should be dropped into the middle of a desert to cannibalize each other.*

*(This one doesn't really fit the thought-progression pattern, but we just had to put it out there.)

5. Some Christians, unfortunately, are judgmental and hypocritical fundamentalists—but others fit none of those definitions and instead strive to be like Jesus: tolerant, forgiving, helpful, and hopeful.

6. "Red letter" Christians follow the teachings (highlighted in red text in many Bibles) of Jesus, just as a Buddhist follows the teachings of Siddhārtha Gautama. And they ignore all of the other stuff, because Jesus didn't say it.

7. Christians, like atheists, can be both judgmental and hypocritical, and atheists can be just as vocal about their belief system.

What? Atheists? In a discussion of Christianity?

Well, sure — who do you think it is that gets the most value out of calling Christian belief “ridiculous”? We mentioned Sam Harris earlier. Let's add the names Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher, too. Harris authored The End of Faith, Dawkins wrote The God Delusion, and Maher, thinking for a moment that his name was Moore (as in Michael), made a "documentary" called Religulous. Harris, in person, seems a nice enough guy, and Dawkins is charming. Maher, on the other hand, presents himself as a happy funster in his film, but comes across as a condescending, officious, egomaniacal schmuck on his HBO show, Real Time.

All three men should be smart enough to avoid generalized thinking. But all three slip into it in their arguments, bigtime. Harris, in his zeal to slam Islam and Muslims (all of them), makes sure to slam Christianity and Christians, too (all of them). Dawkins pits Christianity — all of it — as the foil of science (and all scientists), and Maher, whom we've written about before here at WB, is just an asshole whose zealotry is the opposite of Harris's. Out to roast Christianity, Maher throws Islam into the "ridiculous" mix out of fairness.

And it's not just men. Hanna Rosin, on Slate, writes about "evangelicals" and "Christians," too — all of them. And the one time she's careful to qualify, it's in the phrase "most non-Christians."

South Park, probably the most brilliant cultural critic the world will ever see, has done several takes on the Christians (all of them) vs. Atheists (all of them) wars. In one episode, Mickey Mouse derides Christians (all of them) for delusional thinking (all of it) — but does it over a PA system for everyone to hear:

Oops, end of the magical world of Disney — because some atheists (in this case, those in mouse ears) come across as haters.

In an earlier, two-part episode featuring Richard Dawkins, the boys' fundamentalist Christian teacher, Mrs. Garrison, slams evolution as a theory that makes modern humans "the retarded offspring of five monkeys having butt sex with a fish-squirrel." But Dawkins, the brilliant evolutionist, is too stupid to realize that the "Mrs." Garrison he falls in love with was once Mr. Garrison — pretty much looking the same as Mrs. but without the breasts. South Park skewers everyone equally, of course, but the skewering (and one of the boys' moral lectures at every episode's end) always points to the fact that there are exceptions to any "everyone all the time" rule.

But didn't the Christ himself speak in generalities? It depends on how you use the comma here:

GENERAL: Do not pray like the Pharisees, who pray loudly in the temples where everyone can see them.

SPECIFIC: Do not pray like the Pharisees who pray loudly in the temples where everyone can see them.

In the first version, "who" sets off a descriptive clause attached to its preceding noun — all Pharisees. In the second version, there are some Pharisees who do not pray that way, making them exempt from the example Jesus is giving. The syntax structure is the same as Don't hire painters who use red paint. The ones who use yellow or blue, on the other hand, are no problem.

Coincidentally, the example* continues with Jesus saying, essentially, to leave the "look at me" Pharisees alone, because they've got the reward they want: attention. They're not interested in an afterlife among the angels, so let them be. Elsewhere, of course, the same Jesus says that those who aren't "born again" (into faith) won't see heaven. But here, he acknowledges that quite a few folks simply won't care. And the way to deal with this is to love them and tolerate them and not emulate them — and to be at peace with it all.

*(Yes, the whole Pharisees passage is paraphrased; let's not get distracted by translation issues.)

The murderous, deluded Christians who led the Inquisition and the Crusades — atheists' favorite examples of faith gone wild — neglected to follow the directions spelled out by the Christ they allegedly served. The Crusades to control "holy land" were about territory, not faith, as foolish and misguided as Hamburger Hill was in Vietnam. And the Inquisitors followed Thomas Aquinas, a logician who served the Catholic Church, which was a world power. And how did world powers maintain their authority back in the day? (Hint: not with diplomacy or financial aid.)

A church is not a deity; it's a building. A collection of churches? Still not a deity. It's an organization. Inquisitors killing "in the name of God" found a handy slogan to justify their organizationally sanctioned, socially destructive actions toward preserving political power. (We see a similar dynamic today when Republicans vote against giving rape victims full legal rights, or against protecting gay citizens from violent hate crimes.)

To invoke John Lennon, imagine what life on earth could be like if fundamentalist Christians could stop condemning nonbelievers, evangelists could stop insisting on converting the unchurched, atheists could stop attacking Christians for their "superstitions" and illogic, and everyone could collaborate on getting important social-good work accomplished in this life, on this world.

Christians (all of them) could enjoy that as service to God, and atheists (all of them) could enjoy it as service to fellow people. Either way, it's a break from isolated, selfish, paranoid name-calling that gets nothing done.

Unfortunately, no one cares about any of this anymore. Everyone just keeps doing what they've been doing, and nothing will ever change.

But those last two sentences, of course, are generalized crap.

When language reflects tolerance through careful exception and clear understanding, social practice can follow. It all just takes a hell of a lot of work.

Let the retraining in re-thinking begin.
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In General: The Dangerous Problem with ‘Everyone All the Time’ Thinking (Part One)

2009-10-21T09:09:00.007-04:00

“Liberals want to see the country destroyed.”

“Socialized medicine doesn’t work.”

“Capitalism is evil.”

All of these should sound familiar, because each one has been “ripped from the headlines.” They represent the way far too many of us think now, which is to say, they represent shortcut thinking. It’s a lot easier to say “liberals” than to say “a certain segment of far-left activists,” isn't it? And it's easier to simply use the word we than to say “far too many of us," which is still abstract — but more precise.

The problem is, we means we all. One hundred percent; no exceptions. And logic dictates that in a society of three hundred million people or a world of nearly seven billion people, at least one person will not be part of that hundred-percent group.

Fringe haters and Sam Harris want to argue that “Muslims are dangerous.” Al-Qaeda leaders want to counter that “Americans believe everything their President tells them.” The kid with the bent bicycle rim complains that “Chinese bikes are junk,” and the white tourist who sees one tribal representative leaning unsteadily against a wall decides that “Indians are drunks.”

It’s not just that all of these are dangerous—and, for sensitive readers, uncomfortable—ways of thinking, but also that none of them is logical. Or, if you don’t care too much about logic, then none of them is realistic. Granted, some people don’t care about reality, either, but most do, and if it could be proven that you prefer to exist in a fantasyland where everything comes in a neat, convenient package, you’d want to prove otherwise, right?

Luckily, it doesn’t take money to mount a strong defense against charges of dangerous, illogical, unrealistic thinking. But it does take time. And it takes… well, more thought to correct old thought with new thought. We'll pick that point up in Part Two.

Since we did so well with the first "new world"....

2009-10-19T18:24:00.007-04:00

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According to NPR and the BBC, there's a flurry of activity and excitement this week over the discovery of nearly three dozen new planets ("new" in the sense that we've never seen them before, not that they never existed before). Enthusiasm levels have been building for quite a while over this kind of stuff, and not just by Trekkers (a.k.a. Trekkies) — NASA itself has predicted that it's only a matter of time before humans on Earth discover life somewhere else. In fact, NASA has created a list of "five holy grails" that will need to be found, and after that, we're all set.

But all set for... what, exactly? To boldy venture forth into uncharted seas and discover new lands where we can thrive? Just like, oh, that time we left Europe, overcrowded and filthy, and piled onto boats to come to America — where we immediately began to turn that (largely) untouched wilderness into overcrowded filth, too?

All of the telescopes and rockets and unmanned probes on the planet, together, might be able to find the next Earth. But they'll never be able to change the basic mindset that turned life on the original Earth into an unsustainable mess.

That part, we gotta do ourselves. Here, on this planet.

Kirk out.

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Energy policies

2009-10-16T11:00:00.007-04:00

While perusing the DVD shelves at a local video store the other day, WB glanced at a disposable fin du monde movie about the death of all humankind. The title was obvious and instantly forgettable, but the tagline stuck: Extinction is inevitable.

These days, with the History Channel stuck in a one-note chant of doom and disaster, online discussion boards filled with cynical optimism that an extinction-level event will happen sooner rather than later, and hordes of jaded 14-year-olds announcing to parents and teachers that they're looking forward to the world's ending, one question needs to be asked:

What the hell is wrong with everyone?

Tell someone that their car will be stolen, and they'll park under a light and lock the doors. Tell them that their house will burn down, and they'll install alarms and replace frayed wiring. Tell them their hard drive will crash, and they'll run a backup. But tell them that wildlife are going extinct at an alarming rate, water supplies are drying up, and weather patterns have gone wonky, and they'll invest billions of dollars in tacky straight-to-DVD movies chronicling the end of days, TV shows focused on computer-animated disaster footage and crumbled civilization, and stronger antidepressants to cope with it all.

Even Discovery's Animal Planet tells kids that "extinction is inevitable," while little stories saying the exact opposite are tucked away on niche publications (our apologies to Wired for labeling it that way). Not to be too obvious, but what if all the money going into ad campaigns for shows like After People were redirected to publicizing something like How To Bring The Bees Back? What if the DVD shelves were filled with titles like Preventing Overfishing? What if Discovery and History invested millions not into CGI disaster footage, but into informative programming that told kids how species can be protected rather than wiped out? What if all the money Sony has put into its upcoming disaster movie, 2012, had been put into public service announcements informing the public that the whole 2012 "the end" scenario is utter bullshit?

You know the answer. And it's not pleasant. At heart, humankind prefers suicide over redemption, darkness to light, ignorance over intellect. Becoming informed is boring. Becoming jaded and hopeless is entertaining. Doom sells.

WB would fall into the same trap if we said that nothing will ever change, and that the masses are marching happily off the cliff, having been entertained to death by a pop culture obsessed with death and destruction. But it doesn't have to go that way. Investing the same energy into fighting disaster as goes into celebrating it would be all it takes to start backing away from that dark precipice.

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No rush for Rush

2009-10-13T00:40:00.001-04:00

Update: The investment group interested in buying the Rams has announced that Rush Limbaugh is no longer one of its investors. This decision was taken in order to prevent unwanted negative attention....

Rush Limbaugh, the failed sportscaster and admitted drug addict who's been appointed by the Republican Party to be its leader, wants to buy a football team. And the football team doesn't want anything to do with him.

Referring to Limbaugh's frequent racist comments about football players, military generals, and U.S. Presidents, the NFL Players Union has appealed to the league commissioner to keep divisive right-wingnut politics out of football, saying: "[S]port in America is at its best when it unifies, gives all of us reason to cheer, and when it transcends. Our sport does exactly that when it overcomes division and rejects discrimination and hatred."

Taking the protest even further, several key players on the St. Louis Rams team have announced that they won't play for the team if Limbaugh buys it, and other players on other teams have spoken out against the "jerk" who rules the conservative radio waves and the GOP.

WB might ask, "Can't we all just get along?" — but that question was made famous by someone Rush wouldn't respect. So, players: keep piling on.

Pity the trillionaires

2009-10-11T00:28:00.000-04:00

Saudi Arabia wants financial aid when (if) the world succeeds in burning less oil to reduce CO2 emissions.

No, really. Saudi Arabia, the nation that has made trillions of dollars since the 1930s from the sale of its oil, and that will make trillions more before the oil dance is done, has apparently saved none of its money, and now wants to get in line with Bangladesh, the Maldives, and other dirt-poor nations who'll need some financial help moving into a clean-energy economy.

Maybe if it knocked off building mile-high supertall skyscrapers at a cost of $5 billion a pop, just for the sake of having a bigger... er, tower than those punks in Dubai, we might feel some sympathy. But until then: shameless.
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Leading by example

2009-10-09T06:25:00.001-04:00

Two good things happened this week: first, frustrated with Congress's inability to think about more than one issue at a time (and even then, unable to deal thoroughly with the single issue), President Obama ordered the Federal government to reduce its carbon output, i.e. greenhouse gases.

Quick history: At the first global climate treaty talks, in Kyoto, Japan, Bill Clinton promised to join the rest of the world in setting targets for CO2 output reductions. Then George Bush II scrapped the agreement, because it had been made by liberal socialist anti-business Democrats. And the rest of the world said, "WTF?"

Now, we finally have a chance to rejoin the planet at the next climate talks, in Copenhagen in December, and the U.S. President said this: "As the largest consumer of energy in the U.S. economy, the federal government can and should lead by example when it comes to creating innovative ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions."

Nice.

But even nicer — because this is America, powered by capitalism and governed by an ideology of "let the free market solve all problems," Apple announced that it was resigning from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because of that organization's interference with needed changes to combat climate disaster. (Click on the image below to read Apple's official letter of resignation and protest.) This, even though we've all seen the dumbass commercials now, sponsored by the oil industry, that tell us how wonderful CO2 really is:

And the company isn't alone on leaving the CoC; even Pacific Gas & Electric — a coal-burning, CO2-emitting energy utility — has quit the Chamber over its refusal to acknowledge a warming world that's hurtling toward hell. Slow down and let this one sink in: a power company is saying we need regulations and restrictions and motivations to find a better, cleaner way of turning on the lights.

As Craig Ferguson says: It's a good day for America, everybody.

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Bust a nut

2009-10-07T10:33:00.004-04:00

The pistachio industry in the U.S. hit some hard times after a huge recall earlier this year when some shipments were tainted with salmonella bacteria. The recall was big news, and bad for business; to stage a comeback, pistachios had to have a radical image makeover: from killer to cool.

Enter Levi "Baby Daddy" Johnston, the kid from Alaska who knocked up Sarah Palin's daughter, Bristol, and who is the father of her now ten-month-old child.

Yes, you too can become a paid celebrity nut-buster if you just go out and impregnate an underage girl (which Bristol was, at the time that Levi busted his nut with her). Of course, it helps if the underage girl is the daughter of a right-wing lunatic mayor of a one-horse ~~town~~ intersection who resigns from her first term as governor but thinks this will qualify her to become the President of Amurka. And if "Every Sperm Is Sacred" is the family song. And if, on your own MySpace page, you once wrote:

"I’m a fuckin’ redneck who likes to snowboard and ride dirt bikes, but I live to play hockey. I like to go camping and hang out with the boys, do some fishing, shoot some shit and just fuckin’ chillin’ I guess. Ya fuck with me I’ll kick your a$$."

Because then you can walk away from the baby you daddied and go on to bust your nut on TV with a clever slogan, "Levi Johnston now does it with protection."

Levi, as in button fly;

Johnston, as in one letter removed from a synonym for schlong;

protection, as in condom.

LOLOMGROFLMAO - who thinks of these clever things, anyway?

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Capitalism: Of the people, for the people, by the people

2009-10-04T13:39:00.009-04:00

This weekend WB caught the new Michael Moore documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story. A couple of days before going, we had a spirited discussion with a young college philosophy student about Moore's heavy reliance on emotional appeals in all of his films to make his case. Are emotional appeals effective means of persuasion, or just cheap gimmicks intended to clobber audiences over the ~~head~~ heart and prevent them from thinking through the issue's complexities?

Having seen each of Moore's films and owning them all in the WB DVD library, we can confidently say that the answer is: that's really not the question. Some emotional appeals are extremely effective, but no argument should be made exclusively of appeals to the heart. Rational appeals have to be in there, too, and this is why Moore will always include standard info-only scenes of bar graphs, timelines, pie charts, factual headlines, and all of the other "don't dwell on this too long or you'll lose the audience" statistical backups. And when it really comes down to it, even a bar graph is going to trigger a certain emotional response. Consider:

Now, if you're realizing that the little blue rectangle is you, and that the number 99 is much, much larger than the number 1, and that the bars are completely illogical given the sizes of the numbers, then you're not just thinking it, you're also feeling it. You have to, because the numbers and the bars are just wrong, in a moral sense — they carry not just illogicality (rational appeal) but also criminality and injustice (emotional appeal).

And what will the 1% tell you if you use the "i" word there? Why, that you've been deluded and hoodwinked by socialists, and that you, too, can become Bill Gates or Donald Trump if you just work hard enough. (Emotional appeal.) What they prefer you to whisk right past is the statistical (rational) evidence in that claim — that Gates and Trump, on a different bar graph where the colors are reversed, will be the little blue rectangle in a category of "Americans who have become wealthy" and you become the big black rectangle in a category of "Americans who never will."

That said, there are flaws in Moore's latest movie. But none of them has to do with the central argument, that capitalism willfully and intentionally destroys families and communities and cities and the nation itself. That argument is proven by an in-house memo from Citibank to its wealthiest clients, and by a three-page proposal, written by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, that was the basis for what Congress passed as "the $700 billion bailout" of U.S. banks. Both documents are factual, rational evidence, and the statements in them are outrageous and infuriating, thus triggering emotional responses. But they're not enough to carry the argument on their own. For that, Moore has to tug at heartstrings — especially since the people most damaged by capitalism are not the ones who have disposable income to spend on movie tickets. The audience members watching this film are the lucky ones, and so they need to feel the pain of the people below them who cannot attend.

Unfortunately, an opening scene, a home video showing something going on, doesn't make clear what that something is until far too much time has passed. Several minutes of audience members thinking what the hell am I looking at here isn't an effective way to start. In fact, the way the home video is presented, it's not even clear until much too late whether audiences should cheer the people in it or condemn them.

Likewise, a scene of a former Wal-mart employee and his family reading letters to a deceased wife and mother goes on too long. The outrage has already been established, factually and rationally, so a bereaved family's suffering over it is a totally unnecessary sledgehammer to an already battered viewer's brain. Ditto a scene with Moore taking his elderly father, a former GM worker in the 1950s, to tour the demolished site of his former factory. "I remember we would come and pick you up here," Michael tells his dad. "We would watch you coming down the ramp." To which his father replies, "Yup." Rationally dissected, this scene is pointless; we all know that industry in the U.S. was gutted during the Reagan 80s when corporate mergers and acquisitions and downsizing in the name of profits — and only profits — became the new American Way.

Luckily, Moore offsets this needless exchange with his aged dad by documenting a factory takeover by Chicago employees of a window and door manufacturer that has closed up shop. They don't want to save their jobs; they know those are gone forever. They just want to be paid for them, since their former employer's bank has announced that it won't disperse their last payroll. What transpires during the takeover, as community members, fellow union workers, and even the Catholic church come together to support the workers, is the real message that Moore wants to send with Capitalism. The damning facts about Wall Street greed and the illegal hocus-pocus of "derivatives" are being handled ably by Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi, in exposés published in March, July, and this week. Likewise, the New Yorker is on the case too, most recently in a huge article titled "Eight Days" that documents the minute-by-minute movements of the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department, and Wall Street executives as they collaborated to create the $700 billion robbery of American citizens, all with no legal justification or precedent. Leaving the investigations to the investigators, then, Michael Moore is free to go in a different direction, and to show how the number 99 really is bigger than the number 1, and that the tiny number's hold on power will last only as long as the huge number allows it to. When the consent ends, the party's over.

Sadly, one figure who gets implicated in the sordid story, although never by name, is... Barack Obama. Moore uses footage of thrilling and emotional pre-election rallies, attended by millions, where the new kid promised sweeping change. Change. Hope. Yes We Can. That guy — who then went on to keep all of the key players of the 2008 Wall Street Swindle in their same positions of power, and to appoint previous players to new positions. Here, the message isn't that Obama's a crook, but that he's a powerless pawn to the real chessmasters of American politics: the bankers.

To offset that sad realization, one politician in the film roars with a loud and angry voice about the wrongness of it all. She is Ohio Rep. Marcy Kaptur, and she shows what might someday be possible if truth and justice ever really do become the American way. WB has no idea if Rep. Kaptur has any Presidential aspirations, but we're seriously thinking about starting a "Draft Marcy" movement right now.

So, are there cheap emotional appeals in Capitalism: A Love Story? Yep, a couple of real screamers. How much damage do they do to the larger message? On a scale of 1-100, about a three. Capitalism is ultimately as far from a "Look at all the bad guys and see how it's all their fault" story as Michael Moore has ever told, and his message is wrapped in kindness, compassion, and even love for the people whom his films serve. The final scene is classic Moore comedy-with-teeth, but the one before that — news footage of a drowned New Orleans after Katrina — is exactly what's needed to illustrate Capitalism's bottom line message. Are we, the people, going to sit obediently by and wait to be rescued by the wealthy and powerful who would literally prefer that we drop dead so they can profit? Or will we get up and move?

"I can't do this anymore," Michael Moore says in the closing minute of the film. "I need you people in the theater to help me. And please, do it soon." As unemployment and homelessness rates climb higher and safety nets disappear, that "soon" is going to happen even sooner than he thinks.

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Murdoch the Messiah?

2009-09-30T00:09:00.002-04:00

Word of the week: Eco-angst.

It's contributed and defined by Daniel Goldman at the New York Times blog, Happy Days*. It means, according to Goldman, "the moment a new bit of unpleasant ecological information about some product or other plunges us into a moment (or more) of despair at the planet’s condition and the fragility of our place on it."

WB agrees with most of that, having experienced it on a daily basis while consuming products, but thinks the definition ought to go a little further to include living in a perpetual state of anxiety, not over what's happening to the planet, but what's not happening to it. Namely, carrying on as if warnings of climate change were not first issued in the 1930s — that's right, eighty years ago — and as if a U.S. president were not warned, in 1965, that the climate would be dangerously screwed up if we kept spewing carbon into the air.

Eco-angst, for us, comes from knowing that leaders of government and industry and business and education and media should all be working in concert, right now, to put the runaway bus into reverse. But they're not, and this is where pop culture, WB's domain, comes into play.

Fox News is a consortium of lunatics (except for Shepard Smith) who foster fear, hate, suspicion, rage, paranoia, and ignorance by packaging it all up in spinning graphics and cool whooshing sounds. The network is owned by Rupert Murdoch, a board member of the Clinton Global Initiative on climate change who has chosen his son, a progressive environmentalist, to succeed him when Rupert inevitably shuffles off this mortal coil. The same Rupert Murdoch who ordered that his News Corp. operations become carbon neutral, and whose conversion to climate action came when he realized the fate of his native Australia (shown in the dust storm photo above), most likely to become the first abandoned nation/continent as heat and drought turn it into an uninhabitable desert. The Rupert Murdoch who announced in March that "climate change poses clear, catastrophic threats."

Yep, that Rupert Murdoch. The good one.

So, what exactly is Mr. Murdoch doing by letting Hannity, Beck, Caputo, and their endless parade of misinformation-spreading guests encourage millions of Fox minions and all of the Republicans in Congress to disbelieve the facts, ignore the evidence, alter the truth, and fight every move that would keep their grandchildren from living in an inferno? Does Murdoch realize what kind of messiah he could be if his personal beliefs and convictions became those of his most powerful media outlet?

Of course he does. And yet he hasn't done it.

And that puts permanent knots in our stomachs as we live in a daily state of eco-angst.

The same goes for the Travel Channel, the Food Network, Discovery, History, Speed — all of whom have the opportunity to inform viewers about the environmental impact of the hotels, yachts, exotic dishes, tourism trends, trade shows, races, and Ice Road Crackers on the TV screen. It doesn't diminish the show, it enhances the show's value by widening its scope. But in general, they say nothing.

Yeah, it's important to become informed consumers and to "precycle" by refusing to buy products that have done environmental damage even before they get thrown into the trash to do more. But it's also important to ask questions of the culture machine and encourage it to help save its consumers. After all, if a network broadcasts sounds and images, but there's no one out there to turn on the TV, then what's the point?

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*About Happy Days:

The severe economic downturn has forced many people to reassess their values and the ways they act on them in their daily lives. For some, the pursuit of happiness, sanity, or even survival, has been transformed. Happy Days is a discussion about the search for contentment in its many forms — economic, emotional, physical, spiritual — and the stories of those striving to come to terms with the lives they lead.
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The tyranny of employment: not child's play

2009-09-26T14:49:00.009-04:00

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Okay, at first glance the chant in the video up there becomes monotonous pretty quickly, and it's definitely been delivered by better and more interesting performers. But that's not important, because here comes another WB lesson in cultstudcrit (cultural studies critique) 101.

Far from being "just a kiddie chant," the Hello my name is Joe routine is a study in form being integral to content. Repetition and monotony? Absolutely — just like poor working-class Joe's job at the button factory, where he toils to support his working-class existence, feed his family and dog, and pay the mortgage. And those things too, are part of the drudgery in Joe's life; they're how he defines himself, over and over and over again. Given multiple chances to present himself as more — to tell us his interests, his goals, his values, the last vacation he enjoyed — he repeats: I've got a dog, a house, and a family. Those are the four corners of his life experience. He punches the time clock, goes to his post, makes buttons, punches the time clock, goes to his house, feeds the dog, dines with his family, sleeps, punches the time clock.... Repetition of chant reflects the repetition of Joe's stagnant and unchanging life patterns.

And then there's the job. Already busy making buttons, Joe is asked one day by his supervisor, "Are you busy?" Welcome to the tyranny of employment as blackmail. If Joe says yes, by extension refusing to take on additional work, then the supervisor can write him up for being a poor team player, and for being unwilling to pitch in a little extra effort for the good of the company. Once written up enough times, not even Joe's labor union — if he's lucky enough to belong to one — will be able to save his job, and he'll be unceremoniously "let go." And that'll be the end of the dog, the house, and maybe even the family if Joe's wife decides to take the kids and leave this foolish man who didn't know enough not to anger the boss. Didn't Joe know how fortunate he was to have a job at all? What was he thinking?

And that's just if he answers yes. If he answers no when asked "are you busy," then he runs the risk of inadvertently admitting that his position is redundant and unnecessary, and he could be let go for that, too. The only safe answer, really, is no answer at all — but that would get him written up for insubordination. And so, no matter which way he turns, Joe is essentially screwed. As we said: the tyranny of employment.

Hoping to appear helpful and agreeable, Joe chooses to answer no, hoping that it'll be received as an offer to do more than just what his job description requires, and not an admission that his job doesn't require much. Fortunately — at least as Joe, grounded in his ideology of

job = pay = dogfood+groceries+mortgage = contented existence

sees it — the supervisor does hear the answer as an offer, and immediately orders Joe to take on even more physical labor. This, Joe finds acceptable, and continues singing his monotony song without any changes.

But then, over the years, the company sends the supervisor five more times to see Joe and trap him in the same no-win "are you busy" dilemma. Each time, jobs have become more scarce, groceries have become more expensive, family expenses have become more numerous, and even basic home maintenance costs more. And Joe has grown a little older. He can't lose his position; he might not ever be seen as employable again, other than as a greeter at Wal-mart earning subminimum wage.

And so, since no was taken as a voluntary "team player" offer the first time, Joe repeats it each time the boss asks if he's busy, and in every case, the boss piles on more physical labor. Eventually, there's nothing left; Joe is physically unable to do more, his body used up and worn out, his spirit broken. But one important thing changes in his life narrative of repetition and submission: he finally gathers the courage to shout Yes! at his supervisor — and to stop working.

And that's the end of the chant.

Now, do you want a more perfect allegory for, say, the Flint GM Sit-Down Strike that gave birth to the United Auto Workers union? The lines sped up; the workers produced more cars; the company collected more profits; the workers' pay stayed the same; their bodies wore out faster; the company expected more for less; the workers shouted Enough! and stopped working.

Contrary to current anti-union rhetoric, it wasn't a burning desire to become communist that began the labor movement in the United States, nor a fantasy about being able to earn a full day's wages for half a day's work. It was the exploitation of bodies and the relentless wearing down of souls that infused American workers with enough remaining energy to organize and fight for employment justice.

Today, union membership stands at around 12% in the U.S., and is shrinking every year. And rather than negotiate fair labor practices and wages, and especially rather than allow employees to organize, American employers have taken the easy route of simply shutting off the lights, locking the doors, and letting foreign workers do the jobs that American workers complained about. Because, you know, complaining isn't team playing, so what obligation does an employer have to continue sponsoring and funding a whiny, greedy team at all?

For Joe the former button maker, there is now one choice. With the plant closed and the paycheck gone, he has to save every penny possible, which means buying the cheapest products, which means a big "Made In China" label on the box. A team player all his life, Joe made the mistake of fighting for a last chance to preserve his dignity and keep from becoming a complete automaton. That mistake couldn't be left unpunished.

A simple children's routine? Far from it. It's the story of American labor, from birth to death — of the movement, and of the workers, and of their jobs.

And through it all, the audience smiles and giggles.

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Stupid times call for smart messages

2009-09-22T23:58:00.003-04:00

Strip away the Fox Noise/Repuglicant "socialist" spin and the phony "town hall" protests and "tea parties" sponsored by... well, Fox Noise and the Repuglicants, and this is the message we'd hear:

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell

Superstitious astrophysicist nomenclatures and lost seats

2009-09-20T00:12:00.002-04:00

People who enjoy going to live concerts used to have a wide range of outlets to choose from in buying their tickets for the events. They could go to the venue's box office, visit a local music peddler, stop by the service desk of a local department store, even drive over to the offices of the radio station sponsoring the event. But that was a long time ago.

Now, there are two choices: Ticketmaster in connection with Live Nation, or Live Nation in connection with Ticketmaster.

Don't worry, we're not here to rant about being forced to choose between two versions of the same monopoly. And there's no use screaming about the "convenience charge" added to each ticket price, or the "processing fee" on top of that, yielding this basic equation:

$50 ticket + $18 convenience charge + $6.50 processing fee = yes, that's right, $74.50 for the $50 ticket.

Magic!

Outrageous magic? Forget it. Even Pearl Jam gave up the fight, after waging a long and valiant but ultimately self-defeating battle against this kind of economic voodoo.

(And didn't this kind of usury once qualify as... well, usury? Wasn't it a crime, right up there with loansharking, where thugs would loan people money at 31% interest — just like credit card companies do today? But we digress.)

No, the biggest problem with TicketnationLivemaster is the part where you log on as soon as the "box office" opens, click the band's name, go to another page, click more stuff, load a few more pages, and finally get to click "Buy Tickets" — at which point another page opens with a box that says:

Type the words appearing above.

You know, the stupid system many web sites have now so you can allegedly prove to their computer that you're not a computer trying to spam their computer. Not only does their computer challenge you to read and understand the words on the screen, but it also presents the words as an acid trip-inducing spiral graphic, so that if you were a computer trying to spam their computer, you wouldn't even recognize it as text in the first place.

Once in a while, those words are along the lines of "red duck." Easy to read, easy to type, and moving you only 60 rows back from the seats you could have had while you type the seven letters and other people around the country grab the good tickets.

But more often, you see something like this:

Introspective flatulent meditation device

By the time you type that last "e," you're at the top of the balcony. And if you're foolish enough to think that clicking the "Search for Better Seats" button will get you anything different, well, you're half right. The seats will be exactly the same, but before you get back to them, you'll have to type "Superstitious astrophysicist nomenclatures" first.

As the British band Status Quo once sang, "Is there a better way?"

But then again, their name was Status Quo.

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Facebook: The Movie. No, really.

2009-09-18T00:04:00.000-04:00

Word's been out for a few days about the big blockbuster-to-come, written by Aaron Sorkin of West Wing fame, about the invention of... Facebook.

There's not a lot to say about this, other than that the movie's being made because the book it'll be based on, The Accidental Billionaires, was a best-seller. And of course, if one demographic (people who read books) found the story compelling, then a completely separate demographic (people who buy movie tickets) will be totally engaged, too.

SEE! Two guys sitting around talking about starting a web site where people can connect.

SEE! As they come up with the term "social networking" to describe what the site will do.

SEE! As they sit at their computer screens and type HTML code.

SEE! A montage of college students signing up for the new service.

SEE! A fade-out and then a caption: "Two years later...."

Oh, we can barely contain our excitement. This is the most thrilling news since we heard that MTV would be creating a show about graphic design.

Gee, don't we have a blog post somewhere in here that could be turned into a movie? Maybe something about people sitting and watching a TV show? Or buying stuff at a store? You know, the thrills-and-chills action that is popular culture?

Meanwhile, we're advance-ordering our Facebook Movie tickets on Fandango! right now. See you in the popcorn line.
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Mass hysteria at eBay!!!!!! Everything is GREAT!!!!!!

2009-09-16T00:06:00.001-04:00

Anyone who's done any buying of stuff on eBay knows that, if you pay for what you've won within a couple of days of winning it, you automatically qualify as a

FANTASTIC BUYER!!!!
with
LIGHTNING FAST PAYMENT!!!!!

This is how 90% of eBay sellers rate their customers after a successful — maybe "uneventful" would be more accurate — sale of an item. Everything is in CAPS and dozens of exclamation points.

Imagine if this was standard operating procedure at, say, Sears. You go to buy a dishwasher, or a wrench, or a pack of socks. You take the item (except for the dishwasher) to the cash register. The clerk reads the total price that you can plainly see on the register's digital display. You hand over a check, or a plastic card, or even actual money.

"OMG THANK YOU SOOOOO MUCH!!!!!
FANTASTIC BUYER HERE, EVERYONE!!!!
A++++++++++++++++ RATING!!!!!
NO PROBLEMS AT ALL WITH THIS ONE!!!!!!!!!
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!!!!!!!!
PLEASE COME BACK AND SEE OUR OTHER ITEMS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
WONDERFUL DOING BUSINESS WITH YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In the real world, you would run out of Sears in terror, and you'd never go back because the clerks there are all insane. But on eBay, screaming hysterics are... normal.

Interestingly, buyers tend not to rate sellers this way. Buyers calmly write rational things like, "Item arrived in great shape and was packaged well" or "Thanks, I am happy with this purchase." (Okay, most ratings actually read more like "itm arivde in grate shap & was pckged wel" and "tks, i m hapy w/this perchus.") Then they give the seller five stars — and immediately duck and cover, because they know that a barrage of exclamation points and screaming caps will be raining down on them any second after the seller sees the positive rating.

Maybe eBay would like to give each of its sellers a free copy of Strunk and White's Elements of Style, with a particular page marked that reads:

Do not attempt to emphasize simple statements by using a mark of exclamation.

And notice how that rule ends: with a period.

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Patrick Swayze, 1952-2009

2009-09-14T21:58:00.003-04:00

Red Dawn. Dirty Dancing. Point Break. Ghost. Roadhouse.

There was cheese in the resume, but somehow it was good cheese. (Even Esquire magazine this month has a sincere tribute to Roadhouse.) And even though he played bad guys from time to time, we always knew it was just an act.

RIP.

Highs and Lows of the 2009 VMAs

2009-09-13T20:18:00.009-04:00

The MTV Video Music Awards are always sure to bring uncivilized entertainment along with crazy celebrity antics and jaw-dropping moments. Then throw in a Michael Jackson tribute, Kanye West, and a "New Moon" preview and you have one crazy night.

The show opened with Madonna, several dancers, and Janet Jackson in a tribute to Michael Jackson. The tribute was shorter than expected, considering that Jackson was a pioneer in the music video industry. And with Madonna continually saying, "We turned our backs on him," we can't help but feel like she was blaming the whole world for his life and death. Yet she also managed to throw around the word "creature" a few times. We can't honestly disagree, but that just wasn't very nice.

Moving on, Kanye West made his appearance. As always, drama ensued. Clearly not learning anything from the controversy caused by his comment made during a Hurricane Katrina benefit, he appeared on stage to make a comment that wasn't exactly welcomed. While Taylor Swift accepted her award for Best Female Video, Kanye took the microphone from her hands and declared that Beyonce, not Swift, had one of the best videos of the year.* (Seriously, Kanye, someone else already put a ring on it. You can stop trying to show off now.)

Lady GaGa's performance of "Paparazzi" scared us from start to finish. First, because it began with the sound of breaking glass, we assumed that Kanye was back. But the performance was even more strange than should be expected from Lady GaGa. After a few of what seemed like the longest minutes ever, the performance ended in lots of blood and a presumed suicide. The ending left us unable to categorize this part of the show as a high or low. Maybe a thrilling disaster?

Adding to the list of lows, the extended trailer for the film New Moon aired for the first time. We're sure many viewers enjoyed it, but to us, this avalanche of vampire stuff really sucks. Add Lady GaGa's multiple wardrobe changes, including lace covering her face up to the brim of a straw hat worn like a lion's mane, and it made us decide that everyone on MTV is crazy, even people who aren't vampires or Kanye West.

But, although they were hardly noticeable among the madness, there were a few moments that were definite highs this year. First, Beyonce gave Taylor Swift a chance to come on stage and finish her speech when Beyonce won for Music Video of the Year. It was just nice to see this act of compassion. But by far the highest high came when there was audible disapproval when Kanye's name was mentioned, and the fact that he didn't win any of the awards he'd been nominated for.

By the end of it all, our eyes were permanently rolled back, our ears hurt, and millions of brain cells had fallen out of a our heads. Even this won't keep us away next year, but it sure would be nice if someone at MTV could at least accidentally forget to put Kanye on the 2010 guest list.

*We'd post video, but YouTube has gone totally corporate and pulls any "Viacom property" as soon as it goes up there.

Many species of small furry animals gathered together in a cave and grooving

2009-09-09T10:36:00.010-04:00

Anyone looking at this post title and asking "WTF?" is most likely not that into music. But those who see it and instantly think Pink Floyd are true rock historians.

And Pink Floyd, as a band name, is right up there with other groups of the same obscure-rationale band naming era — Spooky Tooth, Wishbone Ash, Foghat, String Driven Thing, Crack the Sky, Deep Purple, and a lot of others with similar monikers. Usually two words, usually no context for them being put together, usually a pretty cool sound when saying them aloud.

But now we have... animals.

Mastodon. Grizzly Bear. Band of Horses. Wolfmother. Deerhoof and Deer Tick. Modest Mouse. Arctic Monkeys. Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse. Eels. Crocodiles. Crystal Antlers. The menagerie gets bigger every week.

Writing this from the state that gave you the Tigers, Lions, and Pistons (whose logo, for some reason, is a horse), WB has no problem thinking of groups of people as herds of animals. But the new bands following this musical trend still seem a bit sheeplike, and trying to theorize a reason for the trend's origin makes us dog tired.

At least they didn't name themselves Nickelback.

Labor Day in the USA

2009-09-07T15:02:00.003-04:00

Although organized labor has decreased to about 12% of the workforce in the United States, thanks to the success of anti-union (some would say anti-worker) and pro-business ideology, the nation still sets one day a year aside to acknowledge its labor force — and force most of it to work their non-unionized retail jobs during one of the Biggest Sales of The Year.

Some, if they're lucky, will be paid time and a half for working the holiday. But most won't. So in honor of them, WB reproduces the famous Capitalist System diagram created by the I.W.W. early in the last century (click to enlarge):

Happy Labor Day, to all the workers.

Stretching: The truth

2009-09-03T00:03:00.000-04:00

By now everyone's heard about Demi Moore using Twitter to announce to the world that she has "excess skin & stretch marks!" WB can only add this:

Why?

Not why would she do this (she's a self-obsessed celeb, after all), but why the hell would anyone care?

Okay, maybe Ashton cares — and then again, maybe he doesn't. But the rest of us, we have quite a few other, much more important things to pay attention to, and "mrskutcher" is not one of them.

So why did even the Huffington Post make Demi's battered baby belly a headline on its main page? Why hasn't this been relegated to, like, page 83 of every entertainment rag, and the last 15 seconds of every show? Demi claims that she's standing up for women everywhere who are held up to impossible standards. But she's also claiming — vehemently — that she has never had any kind of cosmetic surgery:

"I’ve never had it done. I would never judge those who have—if it's the best thing for them then I don't see a problem. But I don't like the idea of having an operation to hold up the aging process—it's a way to combat your neurosis."

Umm... okaaaaay — but she'd better hope that no one ever goes to Metacafe to compare nude scenes from her early films, like About Last Night, to her later work like Striptease. Because if they do, the Twitter wars are gonna start all over again about the particular work she, er, "hasn't" had done.

Not that we care. Just saying.
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Goofy for YUMs

2009-09-01T00:46:00.007-04:00

How much is a Young Unmated Male (YUM) worth in 2009 dollars? About $4 billion — the price Disney is offering for Marvel Comics and its stable of heroes and monsters. According to Reuters, this price is 37 times Marvel's actual value, but Disney was feeling the pressure to rein in more YUM consumers and the potential billions of dollars in tie-in possibilities.

Axe: Spider Man Edition (Catch the chicks in your web of scent!)
Maxim: Special Double Issue Featuring Dead Girl and Invisible Woman, Mostly Nude (Completely nude, in the case of Invisible Woman — who's gonna prove otherwise?)
Red Bull: Hulk-ing Energy Formula (You really don't want to see yourself mad.)

And on and on. 37 times the actual value. Like, if WB could sell its 2001 pickup — worth about $6,000 — for $222,000. That would be sweet!

And insane. But hey, it's not like anything more important than attracting YUMs is going on in the world right now. Everyone's healthy, happy, and fully employed, and the climate's doing great. Bring on the scantily clad superheroines and princesses.

Tweet this

2009-08-30T00:16:00.002-04:00

We tried, we really did.

For several months, we had a "Follow Us On Twitter!" link over there on the right side of your screen. And for about three weeks after we created that link, we strived valiantly to tweet stuff several times a day. Externally, it looked like we were keeping you updated on pop culture news and our mini-opinions about it. Internally, we were using Twitter as a clipboard to hold topic notes.

And then we got bored.

Granted, Twitter is still popular — although not at the insanely intense rate it was earlier this year — with millions of wired people. But frankly, there are limits to our wiredness; we had already begun to rebel against the idea of tweeting when we wrote this and this. And besides, we get our information from the same sources you do (with the addition of a few dozen obscure newspapers and magazines that you've likely never heard of), so it made no sense to try and report breaking news as it happened. By the time we heard about Michael Jackson's death, for example, the Rev. Al Sharpton had already assembled a gospel choir in front of the Apollo Theater to eulogize the fallen former pop star. Tweeting "OMG Michael Jackson is DEAD and we are already formulating theories about the media response to it" would've been silly. And besides, by then we hadn't tweeted in so long, the alert would've scared people grown used to the silence.

Hmm, we thought. Maybe we should tweet when there's a new blog post. But there's a "follow" feature for the blog, and a quick load of our URL would also show if the post is new or not. So this would be like announcing that the newspaper's been printed as the rolled-up paper hits you in the forehead. The only logical response would be: No shit.

We stared at the "Follow Us On Twitter" link, and we thought, and we stared, and we thought, and then we pulled out the shotgun and blasted the cute little bluebird full of #8 pellets.

We probably should have tweeted that we were going to do that. It would have been nicely ironic.

Microsoft: Not Very PC

2009-08-28T00:23:00.001-04:00

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This is a Mac:

And apparently, this is a PC:

Microsoft's advertising woes just hit an ugly and embarrassing new low: the company changed the race of a man in one of its ads on the company website. Quick synopsis: the ad originally featured a black man but the grand wizards of Microsoft's ad team replaced him with a white man. Of course, not that the situation could get any worse, but the "geniuses" behind the Photoshop switcheroo only swapped out the head; look closely and you can see that the white man pictured has a black hand.

Why the switch? Some reports are rushing in to "fix" the situation, explaining that Poland, where the ad is featured, is an ethnically homogeneous country. Hmmmmm, that's interesting: last time we checked, Microsoft was an American company, one that seemingly embraced a diverse consumer base, regardless of where the consumers lived. And isn't one of the other people in the ad... Asian? Why'd they leave that one un(re)touched?

This pathetic attempt at a normalizing narrative doesn't begin to wash the stench of racism from the ad. Let's say that the "ethnically homogeneous" excuse really is the actual reason for the photo tinkering; this means that Microsoft didn't want to offend or alienate or anger any Poles by subjecting them to the horror of having to look at a Black man's face. It means that Microsoft understood the "need" to "protect" Polish sensibilities from the vulgarity of Blackness. And it means that Microsoft will gladly participate in apartheid if it means selling a few extra copies of Windows.

Expect heads to roll in the company's web-design department, just enough to make a show of outrage and apology. And then, back to business as usual.

Clone me baby one more time

2009-08-26T07:00:00.000-04:00

Heidi Montag Pratt, known mostly for being annoying, can now add musician and Britney Spears wannabe to her list of "accomplishments" no one cares about.

Someone from the 2009 Miss Universe pageant, who should probably be fired before 2010, allowed her to perform her new single, "Body Language," live at the pageant. Their fateful decision quickly turned into the worst live TV performance since Ashlee Simpson did an Irish jig on Saturday Night Live.

Looking a little confused and frightened, Pratt channeled Spears through the entire performance. From the dancing (though we'll play nice and say Spears is a whole lot better at that), lip-syncing, and even wearing a semi see-through and nude-colored outfit under a black jacket that she ripped off in the middle of the performance, the entire act was a copycat of Spears' performance at the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards.

While the performance itself made our ears and eyes sore for a few days, we'll admit it wasn't all terrible. Thanks to intelligent producers, a sideshow full of contestants' photographs ran during the performance and took up a lot of screen time that would have otherwise let Pratt torture the world even more. And let's not forget the most important thing; it totally gave us a new reason to make fun of her.

So keep lip-syncing your way to the top, ~~Britney~~ Heidi. Not that we ever want to watch you perform again, but we're pretty curious about what you'll look like bald.

BRB

2009-08-17T13:27:00.005-04:00

New semester starting, 70% of the editorial staff missing, and garden harvest gearing up... must be Hiatus Time at WB again.

Meanwhile, some random keywords to drive the Googlebots a little nuts:

Michael Jackson, Rush Limbaugh, Rachel Maddow, Brad Pitt, World War Z movie, electric cars, aliens, Boondock Saints, barbecue recipes, Steven Tyler, Harley Davidson, Clint Eastwood, healthcare reform, Amelia Earhart.

Les Paul, 1915-2009

2009-08-13T12:48:00.003-04:00

Without him, the top 500 most memorable rock songs would be the top 37.

RIP - and thank you, Les.

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How not to report how not to fly

2009-08-11T00:41:00.005-04:00

It was just a short time ago that Chesley B. Sullenberger III became a national hero for landing a full-sized airliner in New York's Hudson River, with no loss of life.

Captain Sully's skills were sorely needed on Saturday when a private plane, with an apparently blind pilot (although also apparently a great guy) at the controls, flew straight into a tourist helicopter over the very same Hudson River, killing everyone on both aircraft and horrifying thousands of witnesses on shore who watched the machines fall from the sky.

But that's not the story here. There's only so much detail to report about this kind of tragedy — two craft, two pilots, many passengers, 100% fatalities — and so reporting, for reporters and their media outlets, isn't quite as important as "scooping" other journalists and getting the details out first... even if they're the same details that other outlets have already gotten out.

When a "scoop" isn't possible unless someone else has scooped first, then welcome to the age of journalistic piracy. In the rush to get stories out, in this story of the tragedy on the Hudson River, journalists have been throwing a long list of previous Code of Conduct items out the window. Verify witness accounts? No time. Check facts? Ditto. Attribute quotes? Only if possible. Credit sources? Um, shhhhhhh.

According to Jerry DeMarco in the New Jersey Crime Examiner (see, we are crediting sources), journalism is now engaged in the equivalent to plagiarism in college English, or bootleg downloading in popular music. The few big outfits that still have money and staff to get stories, get them, and everyone else who's laid off 80% of their work (writing) force just "picks the bones" (DeMarco's words) from the big guys... without credit. Without attribution. Without payment.

Some day, WB will post its full theory of how the entertainment industry is going right back to its lowly roots with traveling minstrels, touring actors, and unpaid town criers. For now, we'll leave you to ponder the ways that it's happening. Let's just say that even Captain Sully won't be able to change this trajectory.

Rotten Apple

2009-08-03T15:14:00.004-04:00

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Editor's Note: WB has had a brief stretch without updated posts due to staff vacations. We're back to the grind now.
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Editorial disclosure: We own iPhones and are locked in to AT&T service. But this post is only partially a personal rant; mostly it's a warning to a company whose products have been very good to us.

Apple Computer, now known as just Apple, should have learned its lesson the first time. After becoming the leading computer brand by placing its machines in classrooms across America, the company stubbornly refused to let other companies make hardware to run the Macintosh operating system. Meanwhile, MS-DOS, and then Windows, were running on dozens of brands of hardware. By the time Apple permitted — and then quickly retracted — "clones" of the Mac, it was too late. The once-dominant market share it had originally held had shriveled to an embarrassing two to five percent.

The climb back up since then has been slow but steady, and today the company has returned to a double-digit market share. This is largely due to a string of products that start with the letter "I" — iTunes, iLife, iPod, and iPhone. The level of desire Apple has created in consumers for these products is off the charts.

So, what did Apple do with that incredible amount of goodwill and buyer lust? It chose AT&T, the oldest, stodgiest, most Scrooge-like brand of cell carrier service possible, as its exclusive iPhone service provider. Instantly, this decision prevented millions of people from buying the iPhone, because they weren't willing to trade superior service from Verizon just to have the flashy phone.

And now, Apple is bowing to AT&T's corporate wishes to prevent Google — an Apple ally! — from running voice apps on the iPhone. Once again, Apple is foolishly, stubbornly, refusing to catch up with the times, refusing to face the realities of the market, and refusing to give its customers what they want. Just as it did in the 1990s when the brand took its first nose dive.

Rumors are flying that the iPhone will finally be coming to Verizon in 2010. But 2010, at the time of this writing, is still five months away. In the world of brand loyalty and product innovation, five months may as well be five centuries. Apple has everything to lose, and nothing to gain, by continuing to ban Google voice apps from the iPhone, and by continuing to be a tool of AT&T. It will ruin its relationship with Google, destroy its goodwill with current iPhone owners, and erase the desire of those who would like to own an iPhone when it finally sheds the exclusivity agreement with AT&T. From having a clear majority portion of the "smart phone" market share, Apple is in danger of watching that share shrivel and die just as the Mac did 20 years ago.
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"Independent" independents? Depends.

2009-07-27T21:54:00.004-04:00

WB caught a quiet little weekend story on NPR the other day about a new business called 15th Ave. Coffee and Tea opening in Seattle. Reading this, you might think, what kind of coffee shop startup would be foolish enough to try and compete in Seattle, Washington — the home of Starbuck's?

Good question. The new store hopes to succeed by having a different decor, different menu, different servers, and a different name than the company that owns it: Starbuck's.

Yes, Starbuck's is going "local" — just like Wal-Mart and shopping malls are hoping to feel "local" as they keep repeating the word over and over to consumers. But unlike Wal-Mart and Sears and JC Penny and Foot Locker, Starbuck's is going further with the "local" idea by intentionally distancing itself from itself.

15th Avenue Coffee and Tea has no plans to expand — yet. That comes later, after it succeeds at seeming like a locally-owned neighborhood place, you know, a real neighborhood place, not like Applebee's that only wants you to think you're "eating good in the neighborhood."

Jean Baudrillard is smiling in his grave at this intricate simulation and simulacra show, brought to us by one of the biggest corporations in the world and one that has acted as a steamroller to flatten the genuine local-coffeeshop scene in many cities. There's no irony in any of this, there are only layers of simulation, and if we prefer some 15th Avenue coffee because it seems more genuinely local, then that's really all that matters... to Starbuck's.
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The economic cost of Economics ideology

2009-07-25T00:30:00.000-04:00

From our friends at Adbusters magazine:

The .jpeg or .pdf file can be downloaded here.
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A tale of two numbers

2009-07-23T00:24:00.002-04:00

Pardon us while we toss another gearhead topic out there, but this one really drives us nuts.

There are these two 1970 Dodge Chargers for sale, and one of them is rotting in a back yard with a non-running 426 Hemi engine, a busted 4-speed transmission, a ton of rust, shredded bucket seats, a cracked and faded dashboard, and even a couple of missing windows. It appears to have been painted green at one time.

The other one is immaculate, not a speck of rust, no tears or fade spots on the interior, no sign of wear on the bucket seats, a screamingly powerful 426 Hemi engine with working 4-speed, and an utter joy to drive. This one, too, is painted green.

One of these classic Mopars sells for $47,000. The other sells for $12,800. Wanna take a guess about which one is which?

See, the immaculate lime-green Charger* R/T 426 was never a lime-green R/T 426. It came off the assembly line as a docile maroon grocery grabber with a six-cylinder engine, bench seat, and automatic transmission. Then it went into storage, was bought by a Charger fan, and became an R/T 426 through the magic of correctly and carefully placed body emblems, patiently procured and perfectly installed interior components, and a huge race engine delivered in a crate from Chrysler. It is a Charger R/T 426 to every smallest detail — there is nothing on this car that differs, in any way, from the factory specs in 1970. Even the decals on the battery, radiator, and tire jack are authentic. So is the owner's manual in the glove box.

But the car's VIN number — its factory-designated Vehicle Identification code — tells the story: regardless of what your eyes, ears, and body are telling you, this is, in fact, a six-cylinder maroon grocery grabber with a bench seat and automatic transmission. It doesn't matter that everything — EVERYTHING — else about the car is authentically restored and correctly placed. There's one number on a little metal plaque riveted to the dash, and reprinted on the car's title, that matters more.

The rotting car, as you've probably figured out by now, is a "numbers matching" prize; its engine and transmission, even though they're worthless hulls, are the ones that were on the car when it went onto the delivery truck in 1970. And the bucket seats, although in tatters, are the original equipment. And the VIN shows that this was, in fact, an original R/T 426.

Will the engine and transmission require massive overhaul, using all new parts during the rebuild? Yes. And the seats — any hope that anything other than the basic metal frames can be salvaged? Nope. Everything from the metal up will be restoration materials. Carpet? Paint? Windows? Fenders and doors, which the rust of decades has eaten away? Those will be replacements, too.

But the VIN will be correct: this was, in fact, an R/T 426. The other car, the one in perfect condition, was a six-cylinder maroon grocery grabber.

This whole scenario, to us, defies all basic logic. People are willing to fork over tens of thousands of dollars — and then many additional thousands for the restoration — over the price of another perfect classic car, only so that the VIN will say "true" about a rolling junk heap instead of "false" about a gleaming race machine?

The insanity only increases when car nuts act like pro baseball statisticians: "This was one of only seven R/T models to have a black shifter knob and chrome trim on the wheels." Ooooh, well, that's certainly worth ten or twenty grand. "Only 23 R/Ts had this color green with an AM/FM radio." Hot damn, that's worth a small fortune!

Of course, WB loves to see the power of ideology in action, and the classic car scene, as a case study, is as good as it gets. Meanwhile, if we ever have a chance to own a black Camaro SS 396, or a green Mustang Boss 302, we're going for it — especially because, since they won't be "real" SS or Boss models, we'll actually be able to afford them. A metal plate with a number embossed on it is just one more part on a car made up of many parts — and a damned insignificant one, at that.

* The immaculate lime green Charger in the photo is only an example of an immaculate lime green Charger! We do not mean to cast any doubt on its authentic numbers, if it has them.

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The "local" Wal-Mart is NOT local.

2009-07-20T13:47:00.004-04:00

There are plenty of reasons to buy local, as The Sustainable Table lists and explains here. People in or near communities lucky enough to have a farmer's market can buy meat, eggs, produce, flowers, even fresh-made condiments (i.e. with only three items on the ingredients label, none of them starting with "partially hydrogenated"), knowing that everything on the display table has been trucked in from only a couple of counties away at most, and when an item goes out of season, it'll also be out of stock. You learn how to eat realistically when you buy local — there are no Michigan strawberries in winter, no Chilean grapes in summer, and no Kiwis ever unless you live in New Zealand.

"Buy Local" has caught on to such an extent that many people have taken the philosophy even further, translating the motto as "boycott corporate chains." Some of us at WB, for instance, make it a goal to dine only at independently owned restaurants, and especially those that list the geographical origins of their ingredients on their menus. Yeah, those babyback ribs at Applebee's are tasty, and the soup at Panera is delicious, but too bad. They're corporate. Their supplies arrive via corporate truck, from wherever their headquarters or distribution points are. And a chunk of their profits go to HQ, not to the community.

Knowing that "buy local" is expanding into "buy independent," corporate America is quickly mounting a misinformation campaign. According to MNN, Wal-Mart is hanging signs that say "LOCAL" over its produce, even if the term is defined as "grown in the Western Hemisphere" or "grown in the Americas; i.e. in Argentina." With no official legal definition of "local," the massive machine from Arkansas can get away with its one-word banner. But Wal-Mart isn't alone in this, because shopping malls, too, are — surprise! — also angling to position themselves as "local." And of course, they are local; the mall is "in town" (or more likely at the outskirts of it, near the freeway entrance). They just hope no one notices the "Made in Vietnam/ Indonesia/ China/ Guatemala" label on the clothes/ tools/ luggage/ eyeglass frames/ everything.

The sad thing is, there may be two or three people who work for Wal-Mart or the International Council of Shopping Centers who know that buying local is a great practice, and that the days of "jet fresh catch" in the seafood department should have ended long ago. But those people won't say anything. Profit is king, and community is just a location for making it. And environment: that's only what produces the raw materials for the stuff that makes the profit.

It's a tiny, myopic world view. It's utterly destructive. But it will sure as hell succeed in persuading millions of consumers to wrongly believe that their nearby corporate chain outlet is also their local one.
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The King is dead; long live the King

2009-07-18T00:47:00.002-04:00

Being without Michael Jackson has caused a world-wide meltdown. People are still crying, fans have killed themselves, and the King of Pop's album sales have exploded since his death as fans attempt to console themselves with sonic tonic. In an effort to save us all from an irreversible depression, WB has set out to crown a new King of Pop. After narrowing it down to four candidates, we eventually chose a winner. Here's our journey.

Usher: While he, like all other candidates, probably wishes he was Michael Jackson, he's not really that close. He definitely doesn't seem to have an impact on the music industry like Jackson, which is pretty important when being crowned the King of Pop. Not to mention that his popularity seems to be declining a bit, as his newest album sales didn't even come close to matching his previous sales. But, in the opposite perspective, his music is in the same genre, he's a decent singer, and he's a pretty good dancer. Usher is definitely a pop artist like Jackson, but we're still left wondering if someone whose career seems to be fading could ever be as good as Michael Jackson. And since he's had only a small impact on the music industry, it's hard to know if he could fulfill the duties of such a prestigious crowning.

Justin Timberlake: Although his Michael Jackson crotch grabs are pretty lame (see photo), Justin is a leader in the competition. From the time he left the boy-band 'N Sync to embark on a solo career, WB has noticed the similarities to Jackson. With the exception of wearing one glove, Timberlake's high-pitched singing and dancing has always been a dead giveaway. He has also sold his fair share of albums, is friends with A-list celebrities, helps other musicians on their albums, is involved in charities, has appeared in movies, and has even made a name for himself as a returning guest on Saturday Night Live. And though he may never top Jackson's success in holding the record for most album sales, Justin has made women go crazy, just as they did for Jackson. All of this experience in the entertainment world makes him seem like a pretty good candidate for the King of Pop, but we're not sure if Timberlake appeals to as wide of an audience as a King of Pop should. Because he has kept many fans from his boy-band days, it is not quite obvious if Justin has male and female fans of all ages, races, and backgrounds, or if teenage girls still make up a majority of his fan base.

Jamie Foxx: We don't really have much to say about Foxx. We always knew him to be an actor and comedian until he appeared in Kanye West's hit song, "Gold Digger." He had made music before that, but the Kanye collaboration, combined with his portrayal of Ray Charles in the film Ray, thrust Foxx into the music industry. He has continuted to make music and even appeared as a musical mentor on American Idol. Still, we're just not sure if we can see him fitting into the MJ crown. Sure, Jamie can sing and dance a bit, but his music is nowhere near as popular as it should be for a King of Pop. If he continues to make music for many years to come, he may be able to gain a few more fans. But, we're still worried that even with more fans and album sales, he is not as influential as our other candiates.

Chris Brown: Also a leader in the competition, Brown is a young R&B artist. His songs usually involve fast beats or romantic lyrics, which is quite similar to Jackson's lyrics. Many songs are also dance-like, another deciding factor when it comes to being at all like Jackson. Brown is well known as being a dancer and has even appeared in a commercial showcasing his dancing. However, the commercial was pulled from television after Brown landed himself in court for allegedly abusing his girlfriend. Though Browns' arrest was not at all similar to Jackson 's troubles in 1993 and 2004, they did share the same lawyer. Before his troubles with the law, Brown performed "Thriller," one of Jackson's biggest hits, at the World Music Awards in 2006, just one year after bursting onto the music scene. Although Brown seems to share a resemblance with Jackson and would most likely make a wonderful King of Pop eventually, we're a little concerned that his inexperience would make him a better prince first.

So the winner is... Justin Timberlake. To be a the King of Pop (according to us), one must not only possess a desire to be like Michael Jackson, but must also sell millions of records, be an important figure in the music industry, be able to make girls cry and faint, and of course have enough experience to be crowned as a King. Out of all our candidates, we believe Timberlake has the most experience, the most fans, and has done the most for popular music. And, after all, he did bring sexy back.

Another sad celebrity ending

2009-07-16T00:36:00.007-04:00

WB recently discovered yet another Hollywood death this year. While we managed to get over the initial shock in about five seconds, we still can't shake the fact that we didn't see it coming. Although the disease had been slowly worsening for years, it never really hit us that death was imminent until the cold evidence of it saturated our TV screens.

It began innocently enough with toothpaste commercial. But in just four short years, it progressed quickly, transforming itself into multiple commercials, disguised as clothing, milk, towels, and eventually, as the end was near, more toothpaste, cars, sunscreen, and even a prescription eyelash enhancer.

Yes, Brooke Shields' career is officially dead, and we are in mourning. Not because we'll miss it, but because it means we will most likely be suffering through even more of her omnipresent commercials in the future. We can handle the car ads, but we really don't care that she sunburns easily, has germs in her mouth, and can't grow her own eyelashes. In fact, we're a little embarrassed for her.

Celebrities suddenly appearing in several commercials in just a few years is always a sure sign that their careers are headed steadily to the has-been file. True, in Brooke's defense you could counter she has always been in commercials, and when she appeared in a new one in 2000, it had been many years since her last one, so there was no worry. But then came one more in '03, and another in '04, then '06, then '07, and then two in '08 and three in '09, and we knew this was more than the normal, tolerable, unremarkable celeb-in-an-ad pattern. We were witnessing the end of an acting career.

Now all we can do is remember what used to be and hope we're not the only ones breaking this obituary. For Brooke's sake, we hope someone else can deliver the message, maybe someone like Tom Cruise, who has always known more about Brooke than she knows about herself, and can let her down gently.

Lars Ulrich - plotting a course for post-Metallica retirement?

2009-07-14T00:09:00.000-04:00

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First there was the troubling news that Lars Ulrich wasn't just the drummer for Metallica; he was also a multi-millionaire collector of world-class art. The semiotic train wreck here still hasn't been sorted out, as Mr. Millions is currently out on tour banging the skins, shirtless and sweating and far from any kind of image of a wealthy art collector.

Now, Lars is also branching into playing host to art film retrospectives, introducing audiences to the work of fellow Danes and filmmakers Lars Von Trier and Jørgen Leth. Can the diminutive Danish drummer refrain from dropping F-bombs long enough to get through an introduction? That's probably part of the appeal of pairing him up with art-house films.

It'll be interesting to see what the Four Horsemen all decide to do after they fold the Metallica tent for the final time. Unless they're gunning to out-roll the Rolling Stones, who are still out there rocking in their encroaching 70s (drummer Charlie Watts is 68), the Met boys will probably not be touring this time in 2019. They reached the summit with the Black Album, fell off the mountain hard with their next several releases, and finally climbed back up there with Death Magnetic. Going out at the top of the game is a good thing. And the idea of Lars Ulrich as host of a radically updated Masterpiece Theater is oddly, and kind of perversely, appealing.
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We repeat: Every sperm is not sacred

2009-07-12T00:04:00.000-04:00

As we have ~~ranted~~ said here and here, WB is unimpressed by babies in multiples. Twins are cool (and cute, especially if they're the boys of a favorite WB associate), but when the numbers start sliding upwards to four and above, and those numbers are due to fertility treatments run amok, then we roll our eyes. When Monty Python sang "Every Sperm Is Sacred" in The Meaning of Life, they were joking. It was commentary — the visual element of the song, with two miserable parents and a hundred dirty, starving kids, was a big clue about the Pythons' intended meaning.

And still.

Today, college students everywhere taking Art Appreciation 101 are shown slides of the Venus of Willendorf, the stone goddess of fertility with pregnant belly and ample bosom for nursing and nurturing. Likewise, Isis was famed and revered as a fertility goddess, especially since she gave birth to gods. The reverence for fertility wasn't just an aspect of ancient pagan cultures; it crossed over into Christianity with the story of old, barren Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, and then to Mary, Mother of Jesus of Nazareth — a particularly complex narrative wherein God miraculously impregnates a virgin to give birth to His Son, Who is also His Father, and thus is God giving birth to Himself — a stunning display of showmanship as a way of saying Hey, pay attention here.

Two thousand years later, both Mary and Elizabeth have their praises sung on Sundays by millions around the world, and their stories are recited in creeds of faith. Which leads WB to wonder, what might anthropologists in the year 4009 say about our culture and its continuing reverence for and obsession with miraculously, wonderfully, overly fertile women?

Behold, the woman was named Kate, and she did bring forth into the world eight children, and so great was her power that it was broadcast into the whole world, and even into the entire galaxy, on magical electron beams. And Kate did herald the arrival of Octomom, whose powers of fertility were the mightiest in all the land. Octomom was at first worshipped, then reviled in a great backlash, but still the Keepers of the Electrons did offer her a reality show so that her powers could be shown to the galaxy, like Kate's.

And there were lesser Goddesses, too, like Joan Lunden of the Electron Keeper called ABC, and she did produce four children but only as two sets of twins, and so she was cast down from the pantheon of Greater Goddesses and became the spokesmom for Oral B, promoting good dental care for children.

And lo, there was even an organization called MOST — Mothers of Super Twins — dedicated to the celebration, care, and preservation of women whose wombs did produce triplets, quadruplets, quintuplets, sextuplets, and even seventuplets. (Beyond seven, even MOST understood that overkill was involved.) Understanding the meaning of Monty Python's Meaning, MOST did also set up a charity seeking donations of wealth so that the Super Twins and their exhausted, impoverished parents could purchase the implements necessary for good dental hygiene, so that the Goddess Joan would be well pleased.

Or maybe not. Maybe scientists in 4009 will only shake their heads sadly and say, "Look, even after thousands of years, these people remained primitive and stupid. Their planet was dying, crushed under the weight of fourteen billion feet, and still they went gaga over multiple googoos."

Oh, the insanity of humanity.
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CO2 as a controlled cash cow

2009-07-10T00:05:00.000-04:00

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As we do from time to time, WB is ~~stealing~~ borrowing from its sister blog because topics have overlapped nicely....

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi is a master of The Rant — and the clear successor to the late Dr. Hunter S. Thompson in the "gonzo journalism" department. But his latest eruption of molten opinion, "The Great American Bubble Machine," in the current issue of RS has some major blind spots.

The piece is lengthy attack on Goldman Sachs, and on Barack Obama for staffing the White House with a number of key Goldman characters who, according to Taibbi, are manipulating this President just as they manipulated the last one, engineering legislation that, while claiming to be good for the country and good for the world, will first and foremost be good for Goldman Sachs. Everyone else comes fifth — and gets screwed in the process.

It's at the end of the attack, when Taibbi addresses Goldman's role in "helping" to combat climate change through supporting cap and trade limits on carbon emissions, that he goes blind, writing:

"If cap and trade succeeds, won't we all be saved from the catastrophe of global warming? Maybe — but cap and trade, as envisioned by Goldman Sachs, is really just a carbon tax structured so that private interests collect the revenues. Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap and trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private tax collection scheme."

WB hates to take the side of "swine" in any argument, but in this case, we need to face facts. First, the "unclean energy producers" are... well, us. The consumers of electricity and gasoline and natural gas (methane) and propane and firewood and charcoal and all of the other things that burn and release CO2. (We won't even get into our culture's maniacal consumption of things that consume energy.) The way the United States and its proud and avowed capitalist system works is that producers produce what consumers demand. Nobody does anything that doesn't make money. There is no altruism involved, unless it's a good guise for generating more revenue. This is not an attack, nor even a critique; it's just an explanation of fact.

And: if the U.S. government were to "simply impos[e] a fixed levy" (i.e. tax) on carbon, as Taibbi advocates, then this is what would happen: four years after signing the legislation, the President would be voted out of office, along with all of the members of Congress who supported it with him. A new crew would come in, all of them wearing "GOP" patches on their sleeves, and repeal the tax in the name of "freedom from big government."

That is why, in a capitalist system, you use capitalism to get things done. Not altruism, not ethics, not intellectualism, not legislation or the balance of powers. You let the bankers and their clients get rich, and since their clients include the owners and shareholders of the energy producers having CO2 limits imposed upon them, everyone's happy. If the companies don't scream, and the shareholders don't lose money (and instead gain it), and Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have no Democrats or "liberals" to attack because it wasn't they who were demanding climate sanity, it was the financial system and the corporate world it supports, then we all win by losing.

It's a strange and demented way of doing things, but a society so tightly encapsulated in an unbreakable ideology of money über alles has to take what it can get. It's Progress through Profit and Prosperity, Carbon Control through Cash and Currency — and who know, maybe someone can copyright those slogans and get rich selling bumper stickers and T-shirts.
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Because being a millionaire just doesn't buy what it used to

2009-07-08T00:18:00.001-04:00

Our favorite group of middle-aged millionaire metalheads will soon be appearing on fans' feet everywhere. Converse, the company that used to make its shoes in the United States, but now is a subsidiary of Nike and making them overseas, rolls out the Metallica line of Chuck Taylor All-Stars this month. Now fans not only can stand and headbang for several hours while seeing the band's shows, but also stand and headbang for all that time in flat shoes with zero arch or ankle support.

That said, WB will totally be getting the black ones with the orange Pushead skull on the side.

United we cough

2009-07-06T00:01:00.003-04:00

We don't normally comment on graphic design, even though it's a huge part of branding and commodity peddling. But the other day President Obama dropped a message into our inbox asking for stories about health care misadventures, very similarly to what Michael Moore did in preparing material for his last documentary, Sicko. We've been feeling pretty good for quite a while and so had no horror stories to share, but before deleting the message we happened to catch this:

Whoever Obama's got on the team making graphics, s/he's a genius deserving a very large raise in pay. Just look at all the stuff going on in this little blue box — starting with the brilliant reworking of the famous "O" logo that incorporated a shimmering flag, a glowing sunrise, an exquisite blue sky, and... well, a big O. That "O" now has sprouted a gorgeous luminescent blue eagle atop the Medicine logo that grows from the sunrise in the original O, while yet another sunrise — much bigger and grander than the original — shines above the expanded logo and even includes stars — night is literally turned to day, darkness to light. And who does the double-sunrise shine over? All Americans, standing from the rocky Atlantic to the calm Pacific on an ocean of absolute calm.

Everything's going to be fine. Let yourself float into the blueness. Of course, socialized medicine isn't all beauty and grace, being administered by bureaucrats, but hey, this isn't about reality. This is about image. After all, didn't SNL used to say something about it being better to look good than to feel good?
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Culture of (dubious) achievements

2009-07-04T00:06:00.004-04:00

We live in a culture of Achievements. At least, we young people do.

Every game that ships for the Xbox 360 these days has "Achievements." What are they? By completing objectives in the game, your profile gets a badge that says you completed the event, and your “gamerscore” goes up by whatever the achievement was deigned to be worth. “Gamerscore,” by the way, is the Xbox 360’s way of telling the world how much time you sink into games.

The trouble is, more and more these days the achievements fall into a few categories. Walk-throughs, Multiplayer, and Absurdly Difficult are the three most common.

Walk-through achievements seem to reward doing what you’re already doing. They usually have a few small achievements and one large one, representing the narrative flow of the game. Every chapter comes to a close with the little sound effect, letting you know the game appreciates your effort and here’s 10G, enjoy it. Then comes the climactic boss fight, where try after try leaves you on the verge of a rage-quit, when suddenly the monster falls! You can hardly believe you’ve done it, but then that sound effect plays again, and bam! 50G, cold hard points, tacked on to your score. 50G that proves to the world you don’t quit what you start.

The trouble with walkthrough achievements is that they rarely prove anything. It’s just a way for companies to hook OCD players into making sure they play every minute. What does that 100 or 150 gamerscore say besides ‘I spent $50 and 10 hours on this game and all I got was this lousy achievement?’

Multiplayer achievements reward tenacity and time, more than anything else. More often than not, you’ll find achievements for every weapon in the game, only rewarding you once you’ve killed an arbitrary number of people with that weapon.

What happens then? Players who have Xbox live, first off, have the advantage. Those who don’t often can’t even get the full gamerscore available from their games. This means they aren’t playing the game to its full potential, which in turn makes them want to buy subscriptions to Live. Those who do have Live and try to earn the achievements, find hours of their lives spent with weapons they don’t like. Sure, it’s an incentive to get better at using those weapons, to develop different skills and tactics for each situation presented. More often, though, it ends up being an excuse for everyone to use the same weapon for a while. This doesn’t even take into account the scenarios where you buy a game a year later than everyone else, and either no one is playing the multiplayer, or everyone is so good you never get the chance to get the kills you need.

Absurdly Difficult achievements are exactly that; absurdly difficult. Things like “find all 100 of these well-hidden items we didn’t give you hints as to where they are,” or “kill everything in this game using only the weakest weapon,” or our personal favorite, “get the perfect score on everything this game has to offer.” These are all in the spirit of achievements: they reward skill, talent, tenacity, and otherwise dogged determination.

Unfortunately, more and more these achievements are getting arbitrary. Some of them are flat-out impossible for anyone but the best. Included there are the Absurdly Difficult Multiplayer Achievements. Things like “obtain #1 rank on worldwide leader boards” and “submit user content and have the developers praise it.” Who will get those? Only the players with the most time on their hands and the best connections.

Open-world games like Oblivion and Fallout 3 have achievements that guide their gameplay. Oblivion rewards you for completing each quest chain, but has no mention of the sidequests and subplots available. To the online community, there’s no different they can see to someone who spent 30 hours doing the guild quests and unlocking every achievement, and someone who spent 130 hours doing every sidequest, hunting every rare item, and leveling up to max. Fallout 3, on the other hand, rewards multiple playthroughs. With a good-neutral-evil Karma system in place, and achievements for hitting different levels at different ranks, it’s almost impossible to get all the achievements without playing through at least twice.

All of this just stacks up to more time spent playing games, more fanatical grinding and collecting, and less good old-fashioned exploratory fun. Sure, games have had achievements long before this, but never before has there been the social pressure to achieve. Not in games, anyways. There’s a certain arrogance that comes with obtaining every achievement. Even more so, the multiplayer achievements, which serve as a warning; this player is either very good, or very bored.

Are achievements ever going to go away? Probably not. Are they a good addition to gaming culture? We don’t know. We’re still too busy trying to get that last collectable.

Finding FOUND

2009-07-02T01:00:00.002-04:00

Millions of Americans are obsessed with reality, or at least what they perceive as real. They think The Real World could never be scripted and Heidi and Spencer Pratt really were tortured and have a right to be overly dramatic. And come September, there will be a movie that attempts to takes away the invisible line between simulation and reality.

But there is one person (and hopefully a few others) who accepts real instead of creating it. Four years before Frank Warren convinced people to reveal their deepest secrets via postcards, Davy Rothbart realized our obsession with reality and began collecting trash that consisted of letters, pictures, song lyrics, and many other random artifacts.

It all started with FOUND, a magazine he published in 2001. The magazine showcased many of the discarded items he found over the years. The popularity of the magazine then led to publishing two books, one of which was a best seller. There are also two websites, one for FOUND, and one for DIRTY FOUND, a place for all the "adult" trash.

Many of these lost or discarded items are a fascinating look into the real lives of Americans. Among the few that Rothbart shared in an appearance on ABC's 20/20 was a monthly budget list of a man who set aside more money for crack and liquor than for food and a letter from a woman breaking up with a man because she found out they were related.

While readers may find these letters fascinating, it still seems like fake reality is sweeping the nation more than real reality. We're not even going to try to explain why people are fascinated with simulations of reality (Truman Burbank could probably explain it better anyway), but, we are going to say that we're at least pleased with the way Rothbart's trash collecting has turned out.

With a mixture of pure human emotion and voyeurism, Rothbart has taken reality to an entire different level and turned it into a fascinating look not just into the lives of people, but into our entire culture. Television and movies certainly try to show us what reality is, but the odds of us being stuck in a jungle with television cameras following us, or having a choice of dozens of potential mates, is pretty slim. Sure, the key characters are not actors (okay, maybe they are), but that doesn't make it reality. Rothbart collecting trash from unsuspecting litterers is the reality of human nature.

Next time you're looking for something real, WB recommends staying away from Hollywood and instead finding cheaper entertainment by simply opening your mind to the real lives of the everyday people all around us.

The highly anticipated and long delayed Dead Celeb post

2009-06-29T15:17:00.010-04:00

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All right, we were just as stunned by the rapid-fire falling of pop-cult Icons in the last week and a half as anyone else. Ed McMahon, the top rated "best sidekick ever" for his decades with Johnny Carson, was an expected loss because the man had been sick for a while. And Farrah Fawcett, since she had decided to film her last days for a TV documentary, was an expected loss too. Because each one was killed by the malevolent and sadistic plague called cancer, we were sad for both of them; instant, quiet, easy death is always preferable for people as likable as Farrah and Ed.

But then instant death came for Michael Jackson, which was totally unexpected, and then quiet death came for Billy Mays, of all people. Smiling, lovable BILLY MAYS THE SHOUTING PITCHMAN with the magnificent beard. And both of these guys were only 50. Members of the WB staff are 50. We were freaking out a little bit — okay, a lot — and being very careful about pretty much anything we were doing. And we hoped that, when we go, our families won't instantly break out the Twitter phones like Billy Mays's did to announce his demise to the world. Some things just shouldn't be tweeted.

Questions began coming our way after the Double Death Day that claimed Michael and Farrah: Where is the WB tribute post? Where is the Michael Jackson retrospective? Where's the post about Charlie's Sweetest Angel? And the short answer is, the post couldn't be written yet, because we were too busy being fascinated by the ultrahype machine that was kicking into supersonic speed.

Michael Jackson died around 5:00 pm New York time. Just four hours later, NBC had a two-hour tribute ready to air, one hour for Michael and the other for Farrah. The host of the schlockfest, the Today show's Anne Curry, put her anchorwoman voice through all kinds of Full Emo contortions while whispering and sighing some words, moaning and even sing-songing others.

See, we're sliding into anti-hype eye-rolling already. So before we fall completely into that mode: It is somehow wonderful and fitting that Farrah Fawcett, the best-selling pinup model of all time with over 12 million posters sold, died on the same day as Michael Jackson, the best-selling music performer of all time with over 100 million copies of his Thriller album sold. And both were trailblazers: Farrah brought erect nipples into the mainstream, and Michael brought videos of African American musicians into rotation on MTV.

Before Farrah, suggestions of female nipples were tolerated (men's, of course, could be displayed full frontal on church bulletins), but because the former beauty queen and star of TV commercials was blessed with such a... er, prominent set of them, and because anyone accused of admiring her for that particular body feature could always claim to adore her perfectly straight and brilliantly white teeth instead, there they suddenly were. Her show, Charlie's Angels, helped to usher in the era of "jiggle shows" where smart female characters were screenwritten into fewer and fewer clothes with less and less fabric, and dumb ones were put into towels.

Michael Jackson was the Jackie Robinson of MTV. Music Television, which really did start out playing music videos, was enforcing a pop-music apartheid where songs/videos by black performers just didn't get played. Then Thriller exploded, and MTV wanted to cash in on the phenomenon, and Michael said fine, but you racist bastards are gonna play my 14-minute video for the title song in its entirety. MTV caved, the video went into the heaviest of heavy rotations, and the rest is history: six years after Michael kicked down the door, MTV coughed up Yo! MTV Raps! and today we have Li'l Wayne, Li'l Jon, and Li'l Kim.

Okay. But now, let's think about these "accomplishments" — perky pokies and a long-form dance video to herald the arrival of hip hop's unbroken 20-year domination of the music industry. And then let's define "artist" status for each of the Double Death Day Deceased. Michael went on to officially insist that MTV refer to him as the "King of Pop" whenever it mentioned his name. He took little boys to music awards ceremonies, and then to bed. He had his face sawn apart nearly 40 times, to the point where his ear was being cannibalized to rebuild his nose. His relevance and importance decreased with each new album release, his money bled out steadily, and he lost his playground house. He had become, at the time he died, a circus freak show. A novelty act; a curiosity; a Trivial Pursuit answer. And of course, he had also become a white woman.

"Poor man-boy," the eulogizers eulogized, "his father Joe was a prick son of a bitch who called young sensitive Michael 'Big Nose' and scarred him for life. All of his surgeries and nose rebuilds were because of Joe."

But as a WB associate suggested over the weekend: "There are other ways to deal with your dad calling you Big Nose. For starters, you can call him an asshole."

While Michael Jackson was riding the fame roller coaster up over the 8-minute mark, Farrah Fawcett was doing the exact opposite. Michael went from respected, formidable performer to joke bubblebrain, and Farrah went from joke bubblebrain to respected, formidable performer. Tossed all kinds of fluff movie scripts, she learned to be patient and wait for the good ones; then she learned to insist on them. Extremities, The Burning Bed, Small Sacrifices, and The Apostle resulted.

But what about the dying-in-a-TV-documentary decision, that the eulogizers have called brave and selfless and noble? It's hard to suggest that another possibility might be a fading celebrity who didn't want the world to forget her. Michael Jackson hated the publicity he received; Farrah created hers. But, putting her accomplishments on the scale of importance and service to others, the end-stage documentary definitely wins over the early-stage pinup poster. If we were her, we'd have gone the documentary route, too.

With these two giants grabbing most of the Dead Celebrity news attention, the sad end for Ed "Hiyo!" McMahon, bankrupt and terminally ill, and the shocking end for Billy Mays, healthy and apparently done in by a tragic accidental bump to the head a la Natasha Richardson earlier this year, are bookends to a bizarre period of pop culture history. The past several days have made us question the ways we lionize celebrities and their accomplishments, and the methods we use to determine whose death gets 24-hour news coverage (Michael Jackson) and whose (Ed McMahon) gets a brief scrawl at the bottom of the TV screen once per hour. That's why we held off on the eulogies and starry-eyed funeral orations. Sometimes, mountains just implode rather than fall, and it takes a little time to figure out the difference.

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Fred and Kate: please evaporate.

2009-06-25T13:51:00.004-04:00

While we gather energy (and information) to post about important stuff, let us chime in on the Bob (Jack? Joe? Bill?) and Kate Plus Eight melodrama: We don't care. We've said plenty of times here at WB that babies are not toys, babies are not collector's items (Madonna, Angelina, we're talking about you), and babies are not fashion accessories. They're people — and in the case of Frank and Kate's brood of eight, they're gonna be screwed-up people in therapy because their parents threw them in front of TV cameras and then went off to play with other people not their spouses, and then announced an impending divorce.

Okay, so we do care — about the kids. They didn't ask to have publicity whores for parents. And six of them would have gladly let the first two be the end of things, but there's a sad and demented idea in some women's heads that if one baby is good, ten are better.

We do care. But once TV and fame came along to replace their kids on the priority list, Ted and Kate stopped caring. That sucks, and so do they. But think of the melodrama potential for the evolving show: Tony and Kate Plus the Two New "Special Friends" the Kids All Hate.

Short break...

2009-06-22T22:20:00.001-04:00

While our semester winds down. Back in 24-48!

Still alive and well (in a way)

2009-06-19T11:27:00.003-04:00

Johnny Winter
The Ark, Ann Arbor
June 17, 2009

Way back in the early 1970s, Johnny Winter put out an album titled Still Alive and Well as an answer to all of the fans and critics who'd speculated that his heroin addiction had ruined him. Back then he was still Handsome Johnny, an imposing and spectacular stage presence with flowing albino white hair and long, elegant fingers that appeared to be extensions of the electric blues-rock guitar riffs and solos that blew his audiences away. A cover of Dylan's "Highway 61" became his signature song, much more so than "Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo," and it (like all of his songs) was delivered in a deep growl, a voice wrapped just as fiercely around lyrics as those fingers were around the guitar neck.

That was then.

Today, Johnny Winter is 65 years old, still alive but no longer well, his health gone beyond "failing" to "failed." The Woodstock-era legend can barely walk, he is almost completely blind, and he performs sitting down. But damn, can that boy play guitar!

If you close your eyes and just listen, Johnny Winter live in concert treats you to a 70-minute extended guitar solo — a feat that would set the fingertips of younger musicians bleeding. And the notes you hear are precise, intentional, organic; there's no Yngwie Malmsteen speed just for the sake of a chromatic onslaught at the expense of musicality. Johnny has played these songs ten thousand times, and he never looks down at the fretboard; each of his fingers finds each of its notes effortlessly and naturally, supported by the steady and capable backing of Vito Liuzzi on drums, Paul Nelson on second guitar, and Scott Spray on bass.

Johnny Winter in the 1970s

Which, basically, is the problem. Without any kind of stage presence now, the frail white-haired man with the faded tattoos (that look disturbingly like bruises now) is only a long-fingered hand on a fretboard. His voice can no longer growl, and every song is sung in a high, thin, airy style that's the exact opposite of what fans of the old hits like "Red House" and "Bony Maronie" remember hearing. And so what happens is, the show actually starts to become sort of... boring. It feels disloyal and mean — this is a rock and blues legend on the stage! — but there's no other word to describe it. The only member of the band with any actual stage presence is bassist Spray, using the long neck of his instrument as a symphony conductor's baton and gesturing with real admiration toward the seated musician after each song, encouraging the audience to show its appreciation.

Who knows, maybe the growing, unwelcome, and uncomfortable sense of boredom is why, almost exactly at the 60-minute mark, Johnny suddenly stands up, shuffles off to the side of the stage, and stands for a minute while the audience realizes that... the show has just ended, and it's time to demand an encore. Johnny is right there, still clearly on stage, but at the edge, and you realize something else: he's there because it would be just too physically taxing for him to walk all the way back to the dressing room and wait for the audience to build up a genuine desire for an encore. So, this strange and sad charade will have to do, and less than a minute later the man is back on his chair, where a new guitar is delivered to him and the guitarist slips a silver metal tube over his little finger.

The audience knows what this means. The place erupts with wild applause even before the feeble voice says "Time for a little 'Highway 61.'" The performance is blazing — reedy vocals don't matter, this one's all about the guitar — and it ends with a building crescendo of high notes and thundering bass, Scott Spray lifting his instrument toward the ceiling, playing the electric as an upright, and Johnny's slide moving up the guitar neck higher and higher until there's nowhere else to go.

Any sense of boredom is forgotten; the encore has kicked the audience's ass and made its ears bleed a little, in a really good and satisfying way. And with that, an elderly albino bluesman who was once a strapping and fit young guitar hero leans forward to the mic, says "Thank you, goodnight," and exits the stage for real.

A comment about "comments"

2009-06-17T14:10:00.003-04:00

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We've got quite a few readers here at WB, but very few of them leave comments. And you know, it's probably better that way.

The state of civil discourse is officially in tatters, thanks to the Internet and the "democratization" of online information. Not only has Google News killed journalism by scraping/gutting the professional journalism outlets for free content, but those outlets having invited any anonymous lunatic and loser to "comment" about the journalism has led to a free-for-all of the worst kind of moronic tripe ever to be wrapped in tortured ~~language~~ alphabet letters.

Consider: An article in the Science section of the New York Times describes an awesome mini-golf course in Queens called Rocket Park. It's called that because the holes and hazards on the golf course are made of... actual rockets. Like, ten stories high, the kind that have gone to space. And along with mini-golfing, which admittedly became sort of lame a long time ago, kids learn about gravity, about black holes, about the overall science of astrophysics. It's the kind of education that many parents would mortgage their souls for if it meant their kids could have such an awesome hands-on learning experience.

In short, it's a topic that really warrants and invites intelligent, thoughtful conversation about the state of education, about motivating kids to become intellectually curious, about this golf park being a first step in American students' steady climb out of the pit of scientific ignorance. Who knows, such a conversation might accidentally lead to another idea as cool as the Rocket Park.

Dream on.

Here's how the actual "conversation" of online "comments" begins after the Times piece appears as an NYT share on Facebook (names have been changed to protect the imbecilic):

Allison S: coolz

Adam W: No one 1st?

Tom A: Adam stink

Randy B: so cool

Frank R: ....

Neil T: Yea

Jonas C: 2nd?

Andy L: oh snap lol

James H: wow that's cool

Dave F: MINNESTOA (sic) ROCKSSSSS!!!!

60 or 70 more of these mindless inanities follow, and then this scintillating "conversation" turns to... religion. Yes, someone uses the public forum to drop in a handy Bible verse (because this is a very effective way to appeal to the unchurched) that's totally unrelated to the topic — as if the "conversation" above it had anything to do with anything — and the anti-religious trash the religious and the religious trash other religions, and someone finally interjects the lyrics to a Spanish salsa tune.

This is the state of civil discourse in not just America, but the world. This is why nothing will ever get done about any problems of substance — because if we can't even talk intelligently about mini-golf as an aid to children wanting to learn science, then there's no hope for actual conversation about gigantic issues like corruption or poverty or climate disaster.

Coolz, yea, oh snap.

We are so screwed.

lol
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Microsoft finally gets an ad right

2009-06-15T15:25:00.003-04:00

Let's face it, Microsoft's ads have never been great. Remember the series of print ads for Office where businesspeople had dinosaur heads? And let's not even mention the abominable ad for the unintentionally hilarious software known as Songsmith.

But now, as the monster from Redmond marches into the Tokyo of search apps to do battle with Godzilla Google, its advertisements for the new Bing search engines are... brilliant. Seriously.

If you haven't already seen this TV commercial, then think about how search works. You enter a term, and then you scan the 15-word "abstracts" in the results. And after the first three or four results, a lot of those abstracts can contain information you don't need and didn't want. (To be fair to Google, if you enter good search terms, you can get hundreds of great results before the questionable connections start to appear. Other search engines have also improved a lot over the years. But junk still shows up.)

Fans of trivia don't mind this at all, but for hardcore searchers who want things fast and streamlined to "maximize workflow," clutter is crap — which brings us to Microsoft's great ad for Bing:

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Verse, bridge, chorus, verse, bridge, chorus, chorus, chorus, chorus, chorus....

2009-06-12T00:04:00.001-04:00

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This isn't one of those grumpy-old-blog complaints about how much better things used to be. This is a plea for our sanity, sent out to basically every recording artist writing music today:

START WRITING SONGS, AND STOP COPYING AND PASTING WORDS.

Yes, we here at WB Music Labs have studied the issue for a long time, mostly while listening to cookie-cutter FM stations (and satellite radio too; it's far from an improvement over FM) while doing other work, and we've arrived at a conclusion: nearly every band out right now has taken to writing one or two verses, a bridge, and a chorus, and then mindlessly copy/pasting the pieces over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.

Exhibit A: Shinedown's "Second Chance," with two extremely thin verses, two bridge repetitions, and three pastes of the chorus, including two back to back.

Exhibit B: Metric's "Help I'm Alive," which doesn't appear to have any verses but an array of three different choruses used interchangeably, randomly — and, of course, repetitiously.

Exhibit C: Chris Cornell's "Part Of Me," with three verses and 24 repetitions of a single-line chorus. And Cornell — former Soundgarden frontman, Audioslave vocalist, and masterful re-interpreter of Michael Jackson's "Billy Jean" — really ought to know better.

We know that for many listeners, lyrics are just sounds and vocal tracks are only another instrument in the mix. Some people's brains work like that, and that's fine (although a little sad). But the other half of us actually hear the words, and lyrics like the ones here are the equivalent of Chinese water torture, a steady tapping of the forehead until we become quietly, and then desperately, insane.

It doesn't help that both FM and satellite radio prefer to play their computer-generated playlists in the same order every day, with "heavy rotation" songs (think Green Day's "Know Your Enemy," which we are already sick of only two weeks after its release) playing at least once each hour. But if we boycott radio and just stick with our iPods, we'll miss hearing new music that the iPods need on them. On the other hand, by the time we hear the new music, we'll have heard it so often, and its lyrics will be so brain-numbingly simple and formulaic, that it won't matter.

It's an ugly situation. Songwriters, we're begging you: Write songs. Get off the computer, leave those Copy and Paste commands alone, and think about what else you could put there, what other words might enhance the message. Otherwise, you'll just give millions of people headaches that are beating like a hammer, beating like a hammer, beating like a hammer, beating like a hammer.

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She dreamed a dream that became a nightmare

2009-06-10T00:09:00.000-04:00

After suffering an emotional collapse and being admitted to a psychiatric hospital following her second-place finish on Britain's Got Talent, Susan Boyle, or "SuBo" as hardcore fans like to call her, is ready to make a comeback. According to NBC's Today show, the "somewhat quirky" 48-year-old has hired U2's manager (!!!) and a physician to travel with her on the concert trail.

We don't know how Xanax will affect her vocal range, but if Susan starts wearing rose-tinted shades and campaigning on behalf of bankrupt third-world countries, we're outta there.

Whatever happened to Joel Whatshisname?

2009-06-07T23:29:00.006-04:00

Joel McHale from E's The Soup is branching into movies, TV sitcoms, and stand-up comedy. We have two words for him: Craig Kilborn.

Years after David Caruso left a hugely successful role on NYPD Blue to pursue a career in movies — a career with a trajectory that maps out just like a trap door over an alligator pit — Kilborn left a somewhat successful gig as host of the Late Late Show to do exactly the same thing: start a career in movies. He got tiny and forgettable parts in three or four mainstream Hollywood vehicles, and now he stars in that mundane saga on the Trivial Pursuit Network, known as Whatever Happened to Whatshisname?

Caruso is back, finally, as Horatio Caine on CSI Miami, best known for his bizarre line readings, humongous ego, and two body movements: shades on/shades off, and hands on hips/hands off hips. He's so awful, he's mesmerizing. McHale is doing great stuff on The Soup, but we get the sense that, unlike Caruso, if he tanks in the film/sitcom/standup expansion, the only comeback role he'll be able to get will be starring in the Craig Kilborn Story. Careful, Joel. Don't buy the house in Malibu just yet; rent it and see what happens.

"Time for you to leave"

2009-06-04T14:21:00.004-04:00

David Carradine is dead at 72, apparently from suicide by ~~hanging~~ kinky masturbation in a Thailand hotel room.

Aging is difficult, but we're sad that the inner calm and wisdom of Caine in Kung-Fu couldn't translate into real life for the often troubled actor who played him.

The pebble has been snatched from the hand. Time to leave.

We originally posted a nice, gentle tribute to Mr. Carradine, who we thought had been troubled by the same despondency over aging that caused Hunter S. Thompson to kill himself.

But then the facts came out, and we really had to update this post. Our new commentary:

Ewwwwww, gross!
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Something we hate about the number 8

2009-06-03T10:30:00.003-04:00

.If you haven't heard about Jon and Kate getting ready to divorce and strand their eight kids in the swamp of split custody and suitcase weekends, then you're most likely not reading this post either. Ditto for news that Octomom was being courted with proposals for a reality show of her own, where her cute eight-ettes will grow up like an army of Trumans on the flat screen.

WB just wants to say that there is nothing special or significant about having eight kids, much less about shoving them in front of TV cameras. Both moves are just pathetic grabs for attention — although the more pathetic part is the networks clamoring to make kids into ratings and ratings into ad revenue, made possible by the most pathetic element of all: viewers who get sucked into the cheap melodrama.

Jon and Kate, your lives changed after you had all of those kids, and then changed again after your home became a TV studio? You lost focus on each other, and your affections drifted? Octomom, you never wanted all of the media scrutiny that you and your bonehead doctor generated by your explosion of tiny humans? You actually share a gene with Greta Garbo?

Well then, we just want to know: what the hell is wrong with you people?

They're not fashion accessories; they're people. And maybe you haven't heard, but the planet is already crippled by a massive and unsustainable overload of those. Get off the TV, and get into therapy. You're a plague on all our houses.

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This year's winner -- and that blond thing grafted to his hip....

2009-06-01T00:07:00.003-04:00

Although American Idol alum Adam Lambert has yet to reveal his sexual orientation, he believes speculation about him preferring the same sex may have cost him the win. But according to Simon Cowell, and more importantly, millions of women across the globe, heterosexual marriage isn't that great either.

This year's winner, Kris Allen, got hitched just a few months before auditioning for the show. He immediately showed off his new wife to the cameras and gushed over how much he loved her. He fell under a little criticism when Cowell told him in March that he should have kept his "cute wife under wraps for a few more weeks." Not heeding the advice, AI producers continued showing her in the audience during every performance and giving viewers ridiculously corny home videos to watch.

At first, we thought it was pretty cute that Kris loves his wife enough to show her off (and wear matching aprons on television). So, lost in a world where idols not only sing, but are romantic too, we managed to forget she sounded a little uncaring when she said "I think" before telling an interviewer what month they were married. And we ignored the fact that she had to be with her husband while he tried to do an interview with Ryan Seacrest, and that she talked about as much as Kris did. We even pretended not to notice how Kris couldn't even enjoy the hometown hero spotlight alone since his wife was sitting next to him in a convertible with his name on it during his welcome home parade, waving at his fans.

AI fever has now worn off and we can finally see (okay, maybe we saw it before) that having a wife isn't exactly appealing when the majority of the votes that led to the victory were based on looks, charisma, and a guitar. All we're left with now is an idol whose wife seems to be everywhere and a bunch of women too lost in fantasy to realize they pretty much have no shot with him, but truly believing he'll know how they voted and fall in love with them anyway.

If Kris hadn't already showed (and showed and showed) us his wife, it'd probably be safe to say we'd go back to the time when managers preferred to keep the marriages of celebrities secret so they could appear single to the female fan base. The Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein, made John Lennon keep his marriage to Cynthia Powell a secret in 1962, and it was rumored that many artists from Elvis to Donny Osmond were ordered to keep their marriages quiet as well. Recently, magician Criss Angel's ex-wife, Joanna Sarantakos, claimed he "forced her to keep their marriage a secret as to not turn off his female fans." The Jonas Brothers have gone even further, wearing "purity rings" so they can always pretend to be waiting for the right girl.

We think it's great that Kris Allen was bold (or ignorant) enough to admit to having a wife, and we're glad it didn't keep him from winning. However, while it probably won't hurt record sales, we have a feeling it may keep him from being the newest hunk on the block and most likely prevent him from being a poster on every teenager girl's bedroom wall.

So, Kris, although your marriage has already been revealed and your poster status diminished, we'd like to offer some words of advice to help you stay married, and more importantly for your career, secure your female fans from here on. Always continue to love your wife without telling the entire world, and make sure photos like this don't surface very often, since women will think they might be able to get you if you're willing to flirt with other girls. Keep her away when you're meeting screaming 'tweens, always hug your fans, kiss them on the cheek if need be, and stay grateful for the ones who wish you'd get a divorce, as those will be the ones buying everything your face is plastered on. Don't let her talk at your interviews, verify that she knows when you got married, and politely inform her that the screaming girls are waving at you, not her. And while you're doing all that, tell her not to take it too personally if the fans surrounding your car only wave at her with one finger.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO... US!

2009-05-30T00:01:00.012-04:00

WildeBoomerz is one year old today!

It was May 30, 2008, when this lowly little playlist narrative went out to some president whose name we forget. And from there... well, here we are, a couple of hundred posts and eleven thousand readers later. Who knew?

Over the past year, what started as a procrastination destination for a tiny group of half a dozen people has gone international. While the US, UK, Canada, and India bring in our primary audiences, we've also drawn readers from all of these corners of the globe:

Australia
Brazil
Bulgaria
Belgium
Colombia
China
Dominican Republic
Estonia
Finland
France
Greece
Germany
Hong Kong
Indonesia
Israel
Ireland
Italy
Mexico
Netherlands
Nigeria
New Zealand
Norway
Philippines
Portugal
Poland
Russia
Romania
Serbia
Spain
Switzerland
South Africa
Slovenia
Sweden
Turkey
Taiwan
Venezuela

The most-read post in the past year was a rant against a stupid game show, followed closely by a discussion of Extenze, a topic that saw WB staff brainstorming di... er, anatomy puns for a couple of hours via IM. President Obama's iPod-or-Zune preferences were important to lots of people, but classic toys were, too — interesting to see the search terms that brought readers in looking for Jarts, Creepy Crawlers, and the rest. Rating a little site called Rate My Professors comes in as the fifth most popular topic, and random rantings about voicemail and the pronunciation of Iraq finished up the top six.

In the browser wars, Microsoft has the biggest user base (surprise) at 41% — but Firefox, Safari, and Opera outranked that at a combined 53%, and Google's Chrome browser managed to grab one percent for its startup self. (Note to those 0.48% still using Netscape: it's time to let go.)

Similarly, Microsoft Windows is the dominant OS for readers at 61%, but Mac OS X showed a respectable 23% and Linux users stopped by three percent of the time. (Anonymous systems made up the rest, as with browsers.) The biggest not-surprise: Windows Vista is running on only 11% of the PCs, with XP and Windows 2000 on the other 89%. Given the fact that Vista-based machines we've used at work have taken up to nine minutes to boot up fully, we totally understand the reluctance of our readers to install it.

The past year saw some great guest-written features (the Rothbury review is up in the top ten most read posts), and also brought in a couple of regularly contributing writers in Pinkmingo and Nighthand. Both of those contributors experienced school transitions in May, though, with Pinkmingo transferring to the big university down the road and Nighthand graduating to enter the scary and depressing "we have no positions, sorry" world of work. We hope they'll continue to write when they can.

Oh, and to clear up one burning question: Since we're named after a brand of guitar strings that are named after a guitar player, the blog is pronounced wild-boomers, not will-da-boomers. Meanwhile, we're very glad that you've chosen to stop by our pop-cult playground for a few minutes, because if a blog falls in the forest but there's no one there to read, it definitely makes no sound.

Twit TV

2009-05-28T00:07:00.004-04:00

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Look, it's not like we've got anything personal against Twitter — seven million people tweeting in unison surely outnumber a few cranky cultural critics — but really, sometimes enough is just too much.

There's already TwitterTV Live and TwitterTalkTV: Twitter for Business, where capitalist penguins go marching off in search of ways to make money from tweeting. (This is why, when WB started its own Twitter feed, our first dozen "followers" were... advertisers.) But those are online-only shows, and to be honest, there are probably worse things to waste time watching. We gave Twitter a try, and the staff unanimously voted, with its immediate absence, against doing much more than trying. Now it's mostly out of sight, out of mind; we could use it to announce new posts, but you know, that's what web browsers are for.

Now comes word that Hollywood power players are working on some kind of network reality show based on Twitter. The concept is extremely vague at the moment, but speculation includes contestants following 140-character tweets as their clues. Ooooh, fun!

Okay, enough with the sarcasm: the idea is insipid, inane, and vacuous. And even the Twitter community itself is against it. So that's all the ingredients needed, right there, for a successful show. Stupidity and animosity. Yay.

Frankly, we're looking forward to GPS TV, hosted by Molly the Satellite Voice. Contestants will go north 150 yards, turn right, arrive at their destination. Much mirth and mayhem will ensue. And it will be so much better than Twitter TV. After all, Twitter requires two people, a tweeter and a reader. GPS is us and the machine — one step closer to the end of evolution. Ones and zeroes: turn left, turn right, start, stop. No ambiguities or nuances to cause confusion. Yes or no. True or false. If/then; else/not. Of course, Us and the Machine isn't without problems; already we've heard about people obediently following their GPS directions off highways and onto forest horse trails that become mud, or up snow-covered mountains, or even onto the railroad tracks to be rammed by a train.

But these people, frankly, are idiots. Twitter TV will be smart. It will enhance the human condition. It will make life worth living. It will be a good thing.

In fact, we can whittle this post down to the last five sentences. That's probably less than 140 characters, right there. No need for anythi

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Before we are 'post-racial' - a poet's living history

2009-05-26T00:04:00.001-04:00

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With the election of Barack Obama, the media began to sling the term "post racial" as if a miracle had occurred and racism had suddenly died with the birth of the first black President. They were partly right — based on surveys of young voters, the issue of race counted for approximately zilch. But for older voters... well, does anyone remember Fox News publicizing the vile song parody, "Barack the Magic Negro," under the guise of fair and balanced reporting?

"If we must die," wrote the black poet Claude McKay in 1919, "O let us nobly die, so that our precious blood may not be shed in vain. Then even the monsters we defy shall be constrained to honor us though dead!" It'll be a long time before Fox News comes around to honor anyone who's not white — quick, name two famous FNC news anchors or hosts who are African American — and the network's penchant for subtle and overt racism has been well documented, and since that network is the official mouthpiece of the Republican Party in America, it seems that the idea of a "post racial" culture in the U.S. is premature.

Dr. Tolbert Small, a physician and poet in Oakland, California, is living memory of a time when things were much worse, but also a living witness to the fact that things aren't always too much better. In the 1970s, Dr. Small worked with the Black Panther Party in the fight to gain funding for research to combat sickle cell anemia, and he traveled with the BPP to China where the Panthers, listed by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI as a dire threat to America, were received with open arms as guests of the Chinese government. Returning to the U.S., Dr. Small saw the BPP leaders picked off one by one to assassination and incarceration, and he witnessed the party's implosion after its infiltration by the FBI's COINTELPRO operations.

Today, Oakland is still troubled and far from "post racial." On New Year's Day 2009, a 22-year-old black man named Oscar Grant was shot by a white transit officer, leading to widespread rioting in the city. Three months later, an African American named Lovelle Mixon, wanted for violating parole, killed four white Oakland police officers after being pulled over for a minor traffic infraction. There was no rioting this time, but the underlying tension as everyone in the city — and the nation — tried not to discuss race in connection with the crime made it clear that "post racial" still had quite a way to go before becoming reality.

In the midst of all of this long history, Tolbert Small remains an optimist at heart, and his poetry shows this hopeful outlook. Born in Mississippi and raised in the "Black Bottom" of Detroit, one of the poorest parts of the city, he made his way into medical school at Wayne State University, and then to California where history awaited him. "As long as the sun arises from the darkness of night," he wrote upon the election of Barack Obama, "the dream will arise." But having seen first hand, through his experience with the Black Panthers, how quickly dreams can dissolve, he cautions that "a dream neglected will shrivel on the vine of despair."

That's not only a challenge for the new President, but a challenge for anyone who wants to see the idea of a "post racial" society become reality.
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In Memorium

2009-05-22T13:14:00.004-04:00

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Here in the United States, a three-day — or with luck a four-day — weekend has begun. Retailers do their best to suture the four days to ideas of backyard barbecues and summer sales, tourist havens prefer that we think of campgrounds or lakeside motels, and gas stations make a big push for long road trips. All of these are packaged, ideally, in a flourish of patriotic music and endless American flags.

It's patriotic to barbecue. It's a display of national pride to drive 500 miles to a campground, or even better, to the weekend cottage. It's the best form of American citizenship to go shopping on Monday and buy Chinese-made plastic chairs for the back yard. (They'll go well with the American flags, also made in China.)

But WB remembers, through all of the consumerist fog, that the "memorial" in Memorial Day looks like this:

Yeah, there are corny emails going around that remind us to remember those who fight for our freedom to buy and cook and camp. But those messages are just more fog, putting emphasis on the "buy cook camp" and smothering the "those" left far behind at the start of the sentence.

Being professional cynics and skeptics, we're not normally ones to get all teary-eyed at cheap and garish sentiment, but when sentiment arrives quietly and with dignity, no problem. We recall attending a crowded church service one Memorial Day a few years back when the minister asked, one American war at a time, for the veterans in the audience to stand. Frail and elderly men stood for World War II, old men for Korea, aging men for Vietnam, more vital men and women for Grenada, Panama, Kuwait, Somalia, Iraq. There was no music, no applause, no flag waving, no pathos-drenched appeals for gratitude. There was only quiet honor and respect. Even the conscientious objectors to Vietnam were called to stand, because they served, too.

So it's really not about barbecues and beaches made possible by those who wore military uniforms. It's about those who wore the uniforms, venerated by a series of days when we put down work to rest and play — and remember.
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"Missing Link" puzzle solved!

2009-05-21T00:03:00.001-04:00

By now most of the televised and wired world knows about "Ida," the cat-sized, lemur-like, 47 million year-old primate fossil that had its grand unveiling on Tuesday. Google celebrated the event on Wednesday with a special logo, and then the story behind the hyped headline unfolded:

Found 25 years ago in a volcanic crater outside Frankfurt, Germany, the little fossil was at first thought to be... a little fossil. No big deal. But after being bought and sold a few times, it was then "studied in secret" by the University of Oslo. Finally, the "scientific community" was ready to make its grand pronouncement.

But even at TED blog, where science-minded eggheads hang out after watching highbrow lectures to discuss them in intelligent detail, the story's been met as a lot of hype and possible hooey. Why? Because the details are skimpy. The fossil indicates that the critter had opposable thumbs and forward-facing eyes, and that it walked upright. But if it walks like a lemur and talks like a lemur... well, WB has never met any human being who looks like a lemur, with the possible exception of actor John Malkovich.

And frankly, when we first saw the photo of little fossilized Ida, we thought we detected something familiar about the posture, the curved spine, the long fingers, the outstretched hands. Launching our own "study in secret," we quickly came to a conclusion. Ida the fossilized lemur isn't the mother of the whole human race, but she is the grandmother of Nosferatu, the vampire.

(We were going to say Sylvester the cat from the cartoons, or Wile E. Coyote, but everyone knows that those are make-believe characters, and this is science we're talking about, to be treated with respect.)