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Okay, my people, I'm headed off for my glorious week-long vacation in...lovely Wichita. Although I have other obligations, my goal is to turn this into a writing vacation. Or, failing, that, a lying around doing nothing vacation.
I don't remember who, but someone recommended the film Dead Man's Shoes to me. I like Paddy Considine, so I put it on my Netflix queue. He not only stars in it, but he wrote and directed it. I was disappointed, for a number of reasons, none of which have to do with the utterly unoriginal story line. You'll recognize it: older brother returns to town from prison/army/a life of crime, to avenge the murder/death of his brother.
I can forgive that. Hell, there are only a few dozen stories anyway and we just keep retelling them. Or I could forgive that if anything in that over-used story line were believable. There's some great acting, from Paddy as brother Richard, and from the lovely Toby Kebbel as retarded brother, Tony. It can't save this film.
Ultimately, the retarded brother's death is revealed to be a suicide, with the suggestion that the drugs and emotional torment meted out to him by some local thugs brought it about. The cause of death isn't revealed until the last fifteen minutes of the film, and it's just one more nail in the coffin. The suicide seems completely improbable, not just based on what we know of the emotional life of the character, but based on the melodramatic set up of the physics of the suicide. Really? We're to believe the retarded brother found a rope, tied a noose, and strung it up in a rather inconvenient location, where it's difficult to tell how he even would have managed to hang himself.
The last five minutes were even worse as they featured what was touted in some reviews as a "truly surprising twist." Yeah, well, so the dead brother riding back from Hell on a unicorn would have been a "truly surprising twist." What wasn't exactly surprising or all that twisty is that the last of the local thugs on Paddy's to-kill list turns out to be a nice chap and in the flashbacks is the only one who tries to put a stop to the alleged torments faced by the retarded brother. So Paddy is overcome with guilt at the "monster he's become" and to wit: instead of murdering the last of the men who were present at his brother's death, Paddy forces the guy to kill him. Yes, the last witness to the retarded brother's death is forced to stab Paddy in the gut. Which for the record is not a very easy and quick way to die, although he seems to drop off quite quickly.
As a cherry on top, the film has the very same weakness that every other film of its ilk has: no explanation of how the older brother has turned himself into some sort of merciless death-dealing ninja. Unless that's just standard training in the British military.
So, I don't recommend Dead Man's Shoes. Instead, what you should put on your queue is the Special Edition DVD of Get Carter. No, no, no, don't even think of the Sylvester Stallone remake. Don't sully your mind with that cinematic craptasm. Go back to 1971 and watch Michael Caine do his thing. At 38, he was all squinty-eyed and dangerous sexy. Despite the girly way he runs, you believe he's capable of doing some bad shit. Plus, it's just more fun to watch, especially the bizarre, oyeuristic* phone sex scene.
*So, what is the auditory equivalent of voyeurism?
Ever since Congress passed the FISA Amendment Act of 2008, I've been trying to figure out what I want to say about it. Several times over the last few days, I've opened a new post and stared at the white space without typing a word. Normally, I'm not short on things to say, but thinking about the changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, I find I can't come up with anything that adequately expresses my dueling sense of horror, betrayal, rage, and defeat. Or at any rate, it's hard to transcribe the inarticulate cries of moral indignation that were my first reaction to the passage of the bill.
FISA has always existed in a bit of a grey space, allowing retroactive warrants to be issued for wiretapping, but this new amendment pushes it out of the grey and into some place much darker.
Let us look first at our humble Fourth Amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
It says only that we have the right to privacy, unless a well-documented reason exists to suspect that we are breaking the law. Only when that reason exists and is properly attested to by officers of the court, will our homes, belongings, and personal communications be searched or scrutinized. See how beautiful that little amendment is? To paraphrase it takes me almost as many words as the amendment itself. Economy of language and sentiment.
The new FISA amendment essentially does an end-run around the Bill of Rights. Everyone is angry over the retroactive immunity the bill offers to telecommunication companies who have helped or will help the government engage in illegal data-gathering, but that's hardly news. The government has always been in a position to protect companies that helped it break the law. More troubling is that the new FISA allows the government to conduct these searches--both of physical property and of personal communications--without keeping records. It allows emergency warrantless wiretapping to last as long as seven days, and it guts the portion of the Fourth Amendment that requires the "particular" description of places to be searched and the persons or things (including data) to be seized. In short, the new FISA gives the government permission to engage in fishing expeditions.
After all, theoretically, we're all potential criminals, potential terrorists, so all of our personal communications could potentially contain incriminating information. If the government no longer has to specify what data they're looking for, couldn't they just say they need to have access to all the personal communications of every citizen.
It happened in East Germany, where the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit infiltrated the private lives of its citizens so completely that by the time the Berlin Wall fell, it was estimated that a full 30% of East Germany's citizens were actually spying for the Stasi. Remember Operation TIPS? People made a big fuss, and the Bush Administration backed down. They didn't stay down, and this time there doesn't seem to be much complaint about the new FISA.
Of course, it all reminds me of when we lost habeas corpus, and I waxed indignant about how much vitriol gets spent on defending the Second Amendment, even though we never use our guns to protect our other rights. It holds true here. Guns are physical things, and if the government passed a law requiring people to turn them in, you'd have a fight on your hands. Take away our intangible rights, the ones we can't see well enough to know when they disappear, and people don't take up arms against the government. We blink stupidly, like a fat raccoon startled in the garden, but we don't do much more than hiss and grumble before we scurry away.
After the last two weeks I feel like I need to be wearing safety gear at all times. Like a crash helmet, a raccoon-proof vest, a mega-absorbent maxi pad, a pair of steel mesh shark diver gauntlets, and some sort of protective cup to go over my ego. Just to be sure.
All I know is, I made it out the other side to Friday. I'm alive, I got paid, and the dental hygienist says, "Your teeth are really white for someone your age." Thanks, little girl.
How are you all doing?
You bet your ass I do. Loud and clear. Especially if the tree falls with the "help" of a giant scoop loader.
It's true. They killed my little tree with the same scoop loader they used to rip up the road next to it. Like some malevolent mechanical giraffe, rending it limb from limb.
I refer to it as my tree because no one else really cares about it. Plenty of people have expressed sadness that the tree was killed, but nobody loved that tree the way I did. It stood right outside my window and every day I admired it--how it was tall and elegant and framed my beautiful view. The people who made the decision to kill it probably looked at it a handful of times, and it never occurred to them that someone might care.
The lesson in all of this is not a happy one. The things you care about? No one loves them the way you do. The same goes for the people you love. After you're dead, no one will ever love them the way you did. That will be gone forever. And the people who love you? After they're dead, no one's going to love you the way they did. Everything and everyone is transient. You're going to lose them. They're going to lose you. It's hard to remember that. People invented religion so they wouldn't have to accept that, but you need to. It's good for you to look at the people and things around you and remember that you're going to lose them.
Hubbicula and I agreed that he'd probably lost his hand to some very voracious man-eating tree. Now he spends his days as an itinerant scoop loader operator, seeking revenge on all of tree-kind.
Today, I hate everybody.
Construction up the block woke me up early this morning. For days and days (all last week), they didn't work on the 19th Street project, but this morning, they started at 6 am? Drilling near the water main, so every pipe in the house rattled.
I left my breakfast sitting on the kitchen counter--my fault. So I walked up to the Union for some croissants and some coffee to cheer me up. No croissants. The kid in the bakery just shrugged when I asked him why. There are chunks of burned milk in my cafe au lait. Not my fault.
Outside my office, they're tearing up the road behind the building...and they're getting ready to rip out the little tree outside my window. The lovely little tree that provides me shade in the summer and a place for birds and skwerls to hang out. Where will Stumpy come to get my apple cores when the tree is gone? And it's not like I can complain--they're ripping out the tree to put in a new handicap entrance to the building, which is desperately needed.
Also, there are people who need to communicate with me who aren't. Who just aren't saying anything important that needs to be said.
Of course, it could be worse. I could be unemployed or homeless or in need of a handicap entrance or starving in Somalia or chained by the neck in a Columbian jungle or or or. It could be a lot worse, but that doesn't make me hate everybody less. It makes me hate everybody more.
Are you fucking KIDDING me?
After all my adventures last night, I get up this morning, and go out on the screen porch to enjoy my coffee. From the window well I hear an all too familiar dry leaf rustling sound. I look and over, yes, there's a teeny bun in the window well. Only I know it ain't my teeny bun, because he's still in the bathtub, enjoying his breakfast in bed:
Please meet Not-So-Teeny Bun. He's more like Teenage Bun and just as wily. Capturing him to remove from the window well was a bit more exciting, because he actually jumped in the window and ran around the basement.
Oy. Now I've got to figure out what to do with them, because if I just put them back outside, I envision having to fish them out of the window well every other day. Suggestions?
You'll notice that this was posted at the bizarre hour of 4:00 am. Normally I would be asleep at this hour, but about 30 minutes ago, I was woken by a strange thumping noise. I rolled over, felt around myself and found both the cats sleeping. Not a cat. I got up and checked on Teeny Bun. To my relief I found him asleep, having eaten his fill of the Redzilla Guest House Salad Bar--fresh picked dandelion greens, clover, and lettuce. So I walked the house for a while until I heard a suspicious scuttling, scraping sound outside my office window.
Suddenly I remembered a possible source for the thumping: the brick I had placed on top of the sump pump well cover to block the raccoon-made hole and to weight it down. I grabbed a flashlight and ran outside. Around back, at the east* sump pump, what did I find?
A fucking raccoon, trying to get the cover off the sump pump well. Yes, a raccoon who wanted to make the eleven foot fall to NOTHING but the bottom of a pit. Grendel's mother? Another daredevil moron? Or the same? No way to know.
At any rate, I yelled at her and after a few moments of hesitation, she darted up the stairwell roof, over the garage, and away. I put the cover more firmly on the sump well and piled two big limestone rocks on top of it.
Jumping Christ on a Pogo Stick, what the fuck do those raccoons think is in the bottom of my sump well? There is, as far as I know, and according to my plumber, nothing at the bottom of the well except mud, a ceramic tile, a brand new sump pump, and about three inches of water. Did Grendel's grandpa leave a treasure map showing where all the loot from his days of banditry is buried and it's under my sump well? Did Grendel's mother accidentally drop her wedding ring down there? Does the sump well contain an entrance to Raccoon Paradise?
All I know is--I'm done. This weekend I am building an elaborate, heavy, critter-proof cover for my sump pump wells, possibly with a raccoon trap/alarm/deterrent that is not a rudely awakened me, shouting and waving a flashlight. Because I've had it with that shit. Another raccoon falls into my sump pump well and I'm going to go all Tony Montana on his ass.
Late Breaking Stupidity!!
Just as I was trying to go back to sleep, my phone rang, incoming text message. There was an off-chance it was Hubbicula, so I got up and checked it. It was an official "Campus Alert" from the university, telling me to use caution on campus, because a university student had been found dead...off campus. It also gave the name of the suspect in the case: Adolfo Garcia. Because that's the kind of shit I want to be notified of at 4:30 in the morning, after I've been out frolicking around fighting evil raccoons. Plus, I'm sorry, but this has all gone toooo far. Sure, in the case of the Virginia Tech shootings, where shootings were reported on campus, these cell phone alert systems are good.
They're not good when they're used to report on a single murder that happened off campus. They're not good when used to panic people at 4:30 in the morning. Hello! I was already using caution by trying to be safely asleep in bed! Really, what could possibly be the benefit of this particular alert? Thousands of university students, faculty, and staff woken from sleep to what purpose? Lie awake and worry? Check that their guns are loaded? (Ha! Not in cuddly, liberal Lawrence.) Check that their doors are locked?
There's no indication this is anything but a single murder. No suggestion that this guy is on a killing spree. Certainly no likelihood that he's on campus menacing students, who aren't even on campus at 4:30 in the morning, on a freaking national holiday. So, there you have it: university administrators as stupid as my raccoons.
Or, the Dumbest Little Bunny in Kansas. Yup, guess who was in my window well when I got home from work. Not Angelina Jolie.
Teeny Bun strikes again. The good news: I'm getting better at wrangling him into a cardboard box. The bad news: I am tired of this shit.
Yet another report from the Department of Symbolism Means More Than Action.
The U.S. Mint, in honor of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Louis Braille, is issuing a silver dollar with Braille on it. Ooooh! Aaaaah! "This is going to put Braille in front of people in a very dramatic way," according to Chris Danielson, a spokesman for the National Federation of the Blind.
No offense, Mr. Danielson, but how? This is a silver dollar and as such, it will only be purchased by coin collectors who are NEVER GOING TO TOUCH IT. It's not going to put Braille in front of anyone but numismatic nerds.
According to Associated Press: On the back of the coin, the Braille code for the word Braille -- or "Brl" -- is inscribed, above a depiction of a school-age boy reading a Braille book with a cane resting on his arm. Behind him is a bookshelf bearing the word "Independence."
"It really expresses the hopes, the dreams and the independent spirit," NFB Executive Director Mark Riccobono said of the design.
I want to have a feel good moment like these guys are having, but this is just symbolism masquerading as something meaningful.What would put Braille and the concerns of the blind in front of the American public is an actual dollar coin in circulation with Braille on it. Oh, and how about changing all the fricking paper money so that the bills are readily distinguishable by a blind person? All the spiffy colors and patterns, guess what? No help to a blind person.
To help the blind gain more independence, America could do what most countries do and manufacture bills of different sizes to allow the sightless to tell which bill is which. That way they don't have to depend on someone else to tell them--truthfully, one hopes--that this is a twenty, this is a ten, this is a five.
