Catch-up Time!

It's really easy to get into or out of the habit of writing in a blog. I've never done it daily, but I was trying to be at least semi-regular about it. Guess I didn't do so well.

So here it is, 2006. Time flies, doesn't it? It surely doesn't seem like it was over six years ago that the whole world was in a tizzy over the impending "sky is falling" doom of Y2K. For my part, I spent this New Year's Eve out partying and having a great time, then got on a plane -- hungover, mind you -- the next morning and flew to Las Vegas. From there, I rented a car and drove through the Mojave Desert, along with 100,000 other people who were heading back to the L.A. area after spending New Year's Eve in Vegas. Yeah, that was certainly a fun drive. Anyway, I stayed with my uncle and his wife in Yucca Valley, and got to spend a good part of the next day hiking in Joshua Tree National Park. What a fascinating place.

After that, I drove back to Vegas (much easier this time) and spent the next three days there just having a blast. Met new people, hung out with old friends, went clubbing, ate at some great restaurants, even managed to do a little gambling! I'm going back next month for my birthday, too. Should be another great time.

More exciting though, is that I'm finally planning a return trip to Bali, my favorite place in the world. One of my friends in Vegas is going to go with me... we're planning on meeting in L.A., then setting out across the Pacific together from there. Even though the trip is over three months away, I'm already feverishly excited about it! I have been there twice before, but it's been a little over two years since my last visit, and I've been anxious to return. I just love the people and the culture, and the physical beauty of the island is also just breathtaking.

There's more, I'm sure, but I don't want to prattle on about my personal life. I'll just wait for someone in Hollywood or the White House to do something stupid (shouldn't take long), then roast them about in in my next entry.

Everwood: The Best Show You're Probably Not Watching

I don't watch a great deal of television. I consciously avoid "reality TV" -- have never seen even a part of an episode of Survivor or The Apprentice or any of that nonsense. So I guess I tend to be a little picky about what I watch. There are a number of shows that I will watch if I happen to be at home when they're on and nothing else is really demanding my attention. I have two shows, however, that for me, are appointment TV. One is Fox's brilliantly written and acted series, House, M.D. Definitely a show to see.

However, the unquestionable #1 series on TV right now, at least in my opinion, is the WB's drama Everwood. It's critically acclaimed, and does alright in the ratings, but doesn't get nearly the attention it so richly deserves. Its underdog status might also contribute to its appeal, but far beyond that, it's just so incredibly well-written. The ensemble cast of actors at the core of the show could scarcely be any better (more on some of those cast members later).

At the heart of the series is the tumultuous relationship between a father and his teenage son. As the series opens, Dr. Andrew Brown (Treat Williams) is a world-famous neurosurgeon, gifted beyond compare. He, his wife, and two kids live in Manhattan, and to call Andy an absent father would be an understatement. He always works, puts every patient ahead of his family, and misses nearly every important event in his household. His 15-year-old son, Ephram (Gregory Smith), is a piano virtuoso, but mostly just sulks and hates his dad. Julia (Brenda Strong) is Andy's long-suffering wife who constantly makes excuses for her husband and tries to mend the growing rift between her son and his father. Rounding out the family is 9-year-old Delia (Vivien Cardone), a bit of a tomboy, and still very much of the mind that her father is the greatest man alive.

On a rainy New York night, Andy stays very late at work once again, missing Ephram's piano recital that he promised he'd attend. Julia goes alone, and is involved in a car wreck en route which claims her life. This opens the story.

Reeling with pain, grief, and guilt, Andy recalls a promise Julia had him make years ago, that, if anything were to ever happen to her, that he would take the kids and move to this little town in Colorado called Everwood. She passed through there once as a girl, she told Andy in a flashback, and thought it the most beautiful, magical place she had ever seen. If she died, she said, Everwood is where Andy could go to find her again. And so it was.

Predictable, but very well-written and acted, shouting matches ensue between Andy and Ephram upon this abrupt move to a small Colorado town. Andy didn't tell Ephram and Delia that it was their late mother's wish that they move there; he just uprooted them and off they went. The growth and change in the relationship between father and son forms the heart of the series, but it's far from the only engaging part of it.

Meet the Abbotts. For many viewers of Everwood, this family is the real reason to watch, and is truly one of the most realistically portrayed families on television. Harold Abbott (Tom Amandes) is the only doctor in town until Andy arrives and sets up shop as a general practitioner who gives his services away for no charge. As you can imagine, these two do not get off on the right foot at all, and watching them grow from near-enemies to the closest of friends over the last 3+ years has just been wonderful. Harold's wife, Rose (Merrilyn Gann), is the mayor of Everwood and is featured only in guest appearances during the first season. She has since become a mainstay of the primary cast and adds so much to the show. The two kids, Amy (Emily VanCamp) and Bright (Chris Pratt), are teenagers. Ephram immediately falls for Amy, and Bright, who starts out as a bullying jerk, evolves over a couple of seasons into a wonderful character and a real favorite of the viewers. There are other cast members as well, and their personalities and storylines are woven so beautifully into the story, it's truly a joy to watch any primary cast member this show throws up on the screen at any time. They're all that good.

The two biggest standouts on this show, however, have consistently been Emily VanCamp and her TV dad, Tom Amandes. They are absolutely gifted actors, and convey so much through facial expressions, voice inflections, body language. Shades of subtlety and richly layered nuances of their characters just shine through every time they're onscreen. Emily is just radiant, and honestly one of the best young actresses I've seen. She is completely deserving of an Emmy for her work on this show, but will likely never get one because it's on the WB. Similarly, Tom Amandes brings so many layers of complexity and depth to his character. He's another Emmy contender who will probably not be rewarded for his amazing work.

Critics all over the country have heaped praise on Everwood, calling it the best show on TV, etc. Only the Season 1 DVDs are available at this time, but as the series had an absolutely brilliant inaugural season, it's a great opportunity for people unfamiliar with the show to get involved. Everwood recently began its fourth season and moved from Mondays to Thursdays.

Do yourself a favor and watch. It really is the cream of the television crop.

Of Turkeys, Turkey Basters, and Turkey Flu

Let's talk turkey...

Although my last entry was somewhat different and introspective, let us return to my favorite sport that doesn't involve a pigskin and pair of goalposts: Bush-bashing.

In yet another stunning confirmation of the notion that he just doesn't get it, Bush is holding a big, fat press conference tonight to once again try to convince everyone that Iraq and terrorism are joined at the hip. Well, they certainly are now! Since his little war toppled that country's quasi-government, Iraq has become a fertile breeding ground for upstart terrorists. If fledgling terrorists are a new strain of bacteria, Iraq is now an enormous Petri dish. Bush has genuinely led us into another Vietnam-esque conflict. We shouldn't be there, should never have gone, but we certainly can't leave now, and we can't undo the damage we've done. And there's honestly no end in sight.

Clearly, Bush hasn't learned a damn thing from the lessons of Katrina. His loathsome practice of putting completely unqualified friends and benefactors into lofty positions of serious importance came back to bite him on the ass when his clueless buddy, "Brownie," resigned in disgrace as the director of FEMA. You'd think Bush would have learned. It was bad enough that he promoted Condoleeza Rice to Secretary of State after she fumbled every single opportunity to excel as National Security Adviser, failing to drive any sense of urgency despite an avalanche of red flags in the run-up to 9/11, and then acting as Bush's enabling stooge in the ill-advised push to invade Iraq. It was also bad enough that he plunked his former aide and speechwriter, Karen Hughes, into the position of Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, an arena in which the Bush administration has failed miserably. We all know about Michael Brown and his epic bungling of the post-Katrina efforts. But has Bush learned the lesson? HELL no.

Now he wants to appoint his good buddy and personal lawyer to the position of Supreme Court Justice! This move is enraging his conservative base because they say she's not right-wingy enough, but really, is that the worst of it? No. This woman has absolutely zero time as a judge. She's never served in a judiciary sense. Never sat on a bench (at least not one that's in a court of law). She says she's "honored and humbled" by Bush's appointment. Well, what fucking mid-grade personal attorney wouldn't be honored and humbled to receive a promotion to the best job in the entire legal profession: an interminable seat on the highest court in the land? Bush's arrogance knows no bounds. How he can think that appointing a woman with absolutely no judiciary experience whatsoever to the Supreme Court would just be okay with everyone because he said so... well, it just defies all logic. But then, so does the bulk of his Presidency. After all, Bush isn't at all qualified to be President, so by that sort of math, you can figure you don't need any qualifications to be a Supreme Court justice, a Secretary of State, or a FEMA Director. You just need to be buddies with Bush.

And I see Tom Cruise is back in the news again, having supposedly impregnated his young victim. I'm not going to play too much into whether this is or isn't still a total sham, but I'll say this much: If Katie Holmes really is pregnant, it's my guess there was a turkey baster involved at some point. This whole sorry epic just smacks of a press junket.

Oh, and Nick and Jessica are heading for divorce again and this time, they ... snorrrrrrrre. Who bloody cares??! Good grief. And then for those two knuckleheads to even spit out a single word about wanting to have the press leave them alone and give them their privacy, blah blah blah... my thought is that if you want your married life to be private, don't make it the basis of a tell-all, show-all MTV series for two damn years! Morons!! Gah! Why is our society so obsessed with the mundane details of these toolbelts' lives? I don't need to hear about Britney Spears' latest trailer-trash escapade or her newest designer fragrance (Eau de Truck Stop Diesel Fumes?). And I certainly don't care about TomKat being pregnant (expecting a kitten, perhaps?) -- big deal, she's knocked up. Like nobody in the world has ever done that before. Lord.

Moving on, I see that the latest poster child for hype and hysteria is this avian flu thing. It's been on every major news magazine cover from Time to National Geographic. (And no, US Weekly doesn't count as a major news magazine, sorry.) So far, I think there have been six unconfirmed deaths in Indonesia which may or may not have been a result of avian flu. But according to all the hype, it's going to be the next great circle-the-world pandemic, killing millions. Better start panicking now, folks, and avoid the holiday rush! Anyone remember SARS? Remember the nonstop hooey about that? Anyone remember the great Y2K global meltdown fears? Yawn.

Stop the insanity. Go hug a goose.

Inexorable

That's an interesting word, isn't it? "Inexorable." At its most basic level, it simply means "unstoppable." But it evokes much more than that, at least to me. It's the unflagging, ceaseless, indefatigable procession of an event, and seems to be used most frequently with the concept of the passage of time. A song by Anna Nalick has a line, "Life's like an hourglass glued to the table." What a great lyric. The grains of sand keep trickling down, and you can't invert the hourglass. She continues, "No one can find the rewind button now." Inexorable.

It's long since been clear to me that there are three, and only three, possibilities of what happens to us when we die. One possibility is that there is an afterlife, whether it's heaven, hell, purgatory, the second ring of Saturn, whatever. Our physical body dies, our spirit continues living. A second prospect is that of reincarnation, the rebirth of our soul. The remaining choice is that death is final; that our time in this world is finite and this life is not a test, not a proving ground, not a preparation for bigger and better things, but that this is indeed it.

That final possibility is one that's been intriguing me of late. What if the time we spend here on Earth is truly all we get? It definitely makes sense that, if there is no God, no afterlife, no greater good, that we'd create the concepts in our minds and collective culture. It's very comforting. To think that this life is our only shot is a frightening prospect. Indeed, most of the world's religions are based upon one of the other two possibilities of what happens when we die. But any objective person will surely concede that the third option, that death is final in every sense of the word, must be considered as a distinct possibility.

Beyond being a somewhat disquieting thought, the notion that we have no destiny beyond the time we spend here can also be profoundly liberating. Think about it -- we all know we're going to die, even if we don't embrace or even genuinely accept it. It's utterly inescapable. Human beings are supposedly the only living creatures that have the foreknowledge, even from a young age, that life is finite and that each of us, all of us will one day perish. Death is truly the great equalizer. But for almost everyone, the notion of our own death is so abstract, it's almost a paradox. "I'll die one day," we think, "eventually." In our minds, "one day" is a far-off, unnamed day in the distant future.

So what if you knew in advance the actual day of your own death? What if you knew you had exactly 5,229 days left to live? It's not a short time, but it's not that long in the grand scheme of things, either, just a bit over 14 years. That's probably still far enough off in the future to be pretty hard to grasp, though. It's less than half the time most of us pay on our mortgages. But would you live your life differently if you had a countdown? Maybe, maybe not.

But what if that number were substantially reduced? What if the date of your death was 351 days from now? Just under a year. One more Christmas. Your next birthday would be your last. Each season that passed would be the last one you would live to see. Would you change your day-to-day mode of living? Of course you would. Most of us would quit our jobs, certainly. Travel. Spend time with loved ones. Make a difference in our community or in the world at large. Help propel humanity to be even just a little better. Really live our lives. We would, as Thoreau wrote, live deliberately and suck all the marrow out of life. We'd make each and every day truly count.

So the prospect of death can be frightening... but it can also be liberating.

In the face of the inexorable march of time, the death sentence to which every one of us will fall prey... we can fear death or we can embrace life. While they sound as if they could be complementary, they're almost inevitably going to be mutually exclusive. It's an interesting way to think.

Bush Takes Responsibility, Nation Faints

I think it's a first... Bush has actually spoken the words (undoubtedly having had to be cajoled into doing so by his "handlers"), saying "I take responsibility," for his administration's failures in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. He's really on a roll now, trying to scramble for anything he can grab in the specter of plummeting approval ratings. It's almost amusing to behold, but I really wish it hadn't come to this. As personally gratifying as it is to see Bush fulfill his destiny as a complete presidential failure, the reality is that his incompetence is costing this country dearly, so I'd rather see him succeed than not. Unfortunately, I just don't think that's in the cards.

I read an interesting article the other day expressing a desire for our gas prices to stay where they are and even steadily climb over the next few years. It actually made a pretty valid point, which is this: sustained high gas prices are really the only thing that's going to wean this country off its well-nigh unslakable thirst for oil, thus decreasing our level of dependence on foreign oil, much of it from countries with whom the U.S. has tenuous, if not outright antagonistic, relations.

Let's play this out in a little scenario. Gas prices hover around the $2.80-3.00 mark for the next year or so, then start climbing. Perhaps the government even imposes a tax... say, 20¢ a gallon. God knows we'll need something to pay down the astronomical deficit Bush is going to leave this country holding. Meanwhile, the government is also simultaneously holding car makers to an ever-increasing standard of fuel economy. By 2010, the average price for a gallon of gas is running about $5.25. A few things will happen:

• Offensively, ridiculously, needlessly large SUVs will be about as prevalent as the black-footed ferret. Smaller SUVs will remain, and their fuel efficiency will be in the 25-30 mpg range, perhaps higher.
• The street value for a 2004 Ford Excursion will be about $355.00.
• There will be a nationwide renaissance in mass transit.
• Suburban sprawl, and the newly-hatched "exurbs," will slow, or stop their rampant expansion. Who will want to drive 130 miles a day roundtrip to work if gas is over $5 a gallon?
• More work-from-home opportunities.
• Demand for fossil fuels will drop... not precipitously, mind you, but the reason consumption isn't so insane in European countries is because those governments tax the hell out of gasoline. $6 a gallon will curb almost anyone's desire to do a ton of driving, won't it?
• As demand for oil drops, and as federal standards for fuel efficiency increase, auto manufacturers will continue to develop and exploit existing technology and develop new technology, both from the gentle coercion of lawmakers, and from the driving force of consumer demand.

So if all of these admittedly good things can come from high-priced gasoline, why were we paying less than a dollar per gallon just a few short years ago? For some reason, Americans (and I'm not excluded from this assessment) seem to think it's our constitutional right to have cheap oil. I have a small to midsize SUV which gets a whopping 16 mpg in city driving, so I'm as distraught by the prospect of $60 fillups as anyone. However, that vehicle sits in my garage undriven about 90% of the time. It's used only when the roads are snowpacked or I specifically need to haul something that won't fit into my little 2-seater sports car, which gets a much more palatable 29-30 mpg. Again, although it hurts me and many others in the short term, the continuing message I see is that expensive gasoline is ultimately good for the country.

Don't get me wrong... this isn't something that will happen in a year, or even in a decade. The oil-thirsty infrastructure in this country has been built over many decades, and it current estimates are that even if a flood of 40 mpg hybrid cars were snapped up by consumers, it will take about 15 years to effectively "turn over" the inventory that's on the roads today. So the shift will be very, very gradual. The reality is, this isn't something we're doing for ourselves; it's a move we need to make for the future generations of Americans. If a domestic hurricane can create such havoc on our oil supply, imagine the effect if a couple of OPEC nations, emboldened by the exponentially increasing Chinese demand for oil, decide to effectively "cut off" their supply to the U.S. Now is the time to start taking those first steps to reduce -- not eliminate, because that's not really possible -- our overwhelming dependence on foreign oil. Katrina may have exposed this need far more effectively than any politician or statistician could have ever done.

Two Cents

No, not my two cents' worth... which is what I usually spew forth in here. But check this out:

Since Katrina hit and gas prices spiked dramatically, crude oil priced have decreased steadily. "Plunged" is actually the way several media outlets have phrased it. At its peak, a barrel of light crude was up over $70. It's trading today at $64.20. Gasoline futures have dropped below $2 a gallon. The stock market is rallying tremendously in the wake of these indicators.

So have prices at the pump dropped accordingly? Of course not.

Even though they seem to have no problem ratcheting up gas prices 50-60¢ a gallon overnight (forgetting that the gas they have in their tanks onsite has already been paid for at a much lower price), gas stations never really drop their prices nearly as quickly or as significantly as they raise them.

In the wake of a week of plummeting oil prices, the most substantial drop in pump price I've seen has been two lousy cents a gallon. Most stations haven't dropped their prices at all. If this isn't taking advantage of a situation, I don't know what is. Given that the largest component of the cost of a gallon of gas is the price of crude oil, the gas we're paying $3 a gallon for should really be costing us about $2.75 or so (based on the 9% drop in crude oil cost in the last week).

In other news, it turns out Bush staffed FEMA largely with his buddies and people to whom he owed favors. Experience and legitimate qualifications were purely secondary criteria. As bad luck would have it, many of them had neither. The Bush-appointed head of FEMA, in fact, had virtually no emergency management experience, and it looks like some of his credentials were falsified altogether. Amazing, isn't it?

White House Spin Cycle in Full Operation

It's open season on George Bush.

I don't think anyone is surprised, at this point, that the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will doubtlessly turn into a partisan slugfest. Everyone is trying to deflect blame when, in truth, there's more than enough of it to go around. Likely thousands dead over a four-state trail of destruction will almost always provide fertile ground for finger-pointing. Democrats are finally emerging from cowering in silence in the shadow of 9/11, and they're going after Bush like rabid pit bulls. As much as White House Spokesman Scott McClellan, who is just such a little namby-pamby fucking stooge that I can't even articulate it politely, wants to whine about this not being the time to point fingers, and that this president is more interested in helping people in need than assigning blame, blah, blah, snorrrre... well, folks, the reality here is that the Bush administration is very much to blame for a great deal of this mess, and Bush probably isn't nearly as interested in truly helping people as he is in counting the days until his next vacation.

Bush's presidency is really amassing a troubling body count, isn't it? God only knows how many thousands and thousands of people have been killed as a direct result of his blundering, stupid invasion of Iraq. Now, as a direct result of his refusal to give more than 2% of the Department of Homeland Security's budget to FEMA, and as a direct result of him ignoring repeated requests for funds to strengthen New Orleans' levees (in 2004, the Army Corps of Engineers' budget called for $22 million and Bush ponied up $3.9 million, effectively cutting almost 82% of their funding), we're about to heap a few more thousand corpses onto Bush's narrow little monkey shoulders. Additionally, there were surely plenty more people who died in the five days between the time the hurricane hit and five days later, when the first of any meaningful Federal aid arrived. And still, as you can tell by watching and listening to Bush speak, he just doesn't get it.

Quite contrary to Truman's famous saying that, "The buck stops here," Bush is so enmeshed in his world of fantasy, so completely detached and insulated from the world that the rest of us inhabit, that he has no issues at all not really passing the buck, but rather just ignoring it altogether. After all, this is the president who waited two days (on vacation, mind you) before remotely publicly addressing the devastation wrought by Katrina. I've been wondering where our arrogant bastard of a vice-president has been throughout all this; now I see he's been dispatched to the Gulf Coast to "assess relief efforts." Frankly, given Cheney's track record of assessing terrorist threats and the WMD situation in Iraq, I'm not entirely sure he can be trusted worth a damn to accurately assess and report on anything, particularly something that could be very damaging to the Bush administration. It should come as a shock to no one that Cheney says relief efforts are, "very impressive."

Continuing on, in a stunning repeat of their desire to censor and sanitize the consequences of their administration's actions (or inactions), Bush's people are disallowing any footage or pictures to be taken of the dead as recovery efforts get underway. Requests for journalists to accompany recovery teams have been rejected. The theory? If we don't show the endless parade of coffins coming back from Iraq, and if we don't show the hundreds of dead bodies floating in the putrid waters in New Orleans, it's almost like it didn't happen at all!

Finally, is anyone else just laughing at the prospect of Bush himself heading up the inquiry into what went wrong in the Katrina aftermath? Does that strike anyone as just completely preposterous? Wouldn't that be like Clinton presiding over the inquiry into his own Whitewater affairs? Here, Bush is the top dog, the ultimate symbol of culpability in this whole mess. For him to preside over any sort of formal inquiry is inappropriate in the extreme.

Naturally, Corporate America is as ready and willing as ever to coddle and protect Bush. NBC not only cut the live feed as soon as Kayne West said, "George Bush doesn't care about black people," on a Katrina victims benefit show, but they didn't air any of his speech at all to West Coast viewers, who got to see a recorded and censored version of the show. The NFL is warning all of its musical performers for opening games not to say anything disparaging about Bush, and is implementing a 10-second delay to ensure nothing negative is said. FOX--who really should just go on ahead and change their name to "GOP"--refused to air a paid political ad for a Democrat in New York because they say it's "disrespectful" to George Bush. What kind of a country are we turning into here? Because it's sounding more and more like a totalitarian dictatorship, in spite of Bush prattling on and on about democracy and freedom being so fucking wonderful that he'll start a war to foist it onto other nations. I guess my thought is that if freedom is so great, we should at least occasionally practice it here at home. Instead, George Bush heads up inquiries into the failures of... George Bush. Media outlets censor with impunity. Corporate giants tell people what they can and cannot say. TV stations refuse to air negative commentary about Bush.

Hope you're all paying attention... especially the knuckleheads who voted this orangutan back into the White House.