Friday, March 12, 2010

You may have a drinking problem if. . . .

An Omaha man may have made a slight strategic mistake when he showed up for sentencing on second-offense aggravated drunken-driving charges.

HE HAD a few -- OK, a lot of -- pre-sentencing drinks before showing up at the courthouse in Papillion, Neb.. The Sarpy County authorities didn't take it so well, according to KETV television:
Authorities said a drunken driver showed up for his sentencing hearing drunk again.

Jason Botos, 30, was driven to court by his father and investigators said he was so drunk that he had to be helped inside and wasn't able to make his court appearance.

"He was unable to get himself out of the vehicle, he was so intoxicated," said deputy Sarpy County attorney Ben Perlman.

Investigators said Botos' father asked deputies to help carry his son inside the courthouse.

Botos was scheduled to be sentenced for a drunken driving offense in September 2009. He was driving near Highway 75 and Cornhusker Road when his car jumped a curb and smashed into five other vehicles, critically injuring three people.

"Because he failed to appear for his court appearance, a warrant was issued," said Perlman.

Deputies arrested Botos in the parking lot.
TO GET this story in all it's bizarre glory, make sure you watch the video at KETV.

I'm no chemical-dependency counselor, bu I think it's possible Botos has a drinking problem. I could be wrong . . . but probably not.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

The downtown drugstore


Summer 1981.

Downtown Baton Rouge.

A college student with a Yashica twin-lens reflex camera, filling rolls of 120 black-and-white film with images for a photojournalism class.

Here is the caption he -- I -- put on the above picture in a photo essay documenting that place . . . that time in a middling Southern state capital. Some 29 years later, I don't know whether it says more about downtown Baton Rouge or more about the experience and assumptions of the 20-year-old writing it:
THE PAUSE THAT REFRESHES . . . Liggett Drugs, at the corner of Riverside Mall and Florida Street, remains a downtown landmark with its vintage Coca-Cola neon sign and one of the few remaining lunch counters in Baton Rouge. Though a reminder of the Capital City's past, the store's customers generally consist of Baton Rouge's poorest residents -- a victim of the decline of downtown as a commercial area.
THE KID needed an editor. Sloppy writing. Introductory clauses that have not a bloody thing to do with what follows, except perhaps the concluding clause, which makes little sense whatsoever.

What a moron. I'll bet he thought he was hot s***, too.

I hate punks like that.

Still, the nearly 49-year-old me is oddly fascinated. I wonder what Mr. Wonderful had to say about the picture at left?
GIMME A HAMBURGER AND A ORDER OF FRIES . . . ["A order of fries"? God Almighty. OK, keep going. Jeez.] Something [?????? !] never change, like this drug store lunch counter, which pretty much looks the same as drug store counters used to look. [Scintillating insights . . . not. Idiot. Well? I've suffered this much, you just as well deliver the coup de grace. Continue with these semiliterate bleatings.] A great place to cool off on a hot Baton Rouge summer day.
WELL, at least I wasn't disappointed. Gaaaaack!

To give Joe College his due, the pictures aren't awful and -- lo, these many years later -- they do document Baton Rouge the way it used to be, as well as an establishment fewer and fewer there remember.

All right . . . photo on the right. Dare I ask what young, dumb and overconfident me wrote on that one?

Oh, what the hell. Hit me, Smiley!

SHOPPING DAY IN THE CITY . . . This family is decked out in its Sunday finest on a Saturday afternoon to do the shopping. [All RIGHT! Way to make a completely unsupported assumption about what the hell they were doing. Especially given the lack of shopping bags. Oh . . . but wait! They're just WINDOW shopping, being that "Baton Rouge's poorest residents" don't actually have enough money to BUY anything. Moron. Go on. . . .] While the city's major stores have deserted the downtown area, many smaller shops hang on, and one can still find [Way to throw a socket wrench in the gears of that compound verb, Gomer!] assorted goods at Mc Crory's five and dime.
I THINK we can say there was at least one thing more bedraggled than downtown Baton Rouge in 1981. My mad caption-writing skillz. That's a little slang that wouldn't come along for another 20 years.

Bedraggled. . . .

Interesting concept, isn't it? Surely, downtown Baton Rouge had seen better days by 1981. It is seeing better days now -- at least judging by the last time I was home for a visit.

(My writing skills, however, were as well gud gude good as they had ever gotten ever had gotten in '81. Ouch.)

Yet. . . .

Yet, if people back there are anything like me, now far away in Omaha, I'll bet they feel a certain nostalgia for the old bedraggled downtown Baton Rouge. For a weathered drugstore with a lunch counter. For a working riverfront, as opposed to a touristy, gambling riverfront.

For a place where just plain folk could hang out without a bunch of yuppies trying to out-pretentious one another amid the nightspots and trendy restaurants.

Don't get me wrong. The emerging new downtown Baton Rouge has a lot on the old, frayed-at-the-seams one. It's prettier, and nicer, and there's stuff to do.

But sometimes, when you're at the end of a hard day's night, you crave the comfortable old shoe. The frayed robe. The soft, loose (and ratty) sweats.

I GUESS THAT'S just like the realm of memory -- the comfort of looking back on what was amid the extreme uncertainty of what is yet to come. It's the realm of home. And tattered robes and old, comfortable shoes.

Which you probably bought at McCrory's, right down the street from Liggett Drugs.



OH, ALL RIGHT. What did Mr. Wonderful -- the college kid with the journalism-school camera -- have to say about this photograph? Be still my heart. . . .

IT SURE AIN'T Mc DONALD'S . . . Though business isn't what it used to be, people still stop by Willis Liggett's Rexall drug store just for its lunch counter. One of the few remaining of a dying breed, it is still a place where one can get out of the summer heat (or winter cold) and grab a coke [How about "grab a Coke"? Gee, kid, you must be on coke.] and a hamburger.

BRILLIANT! Sheer brilliance.

The kid probably will have a blog someday.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

The Sex Pistols were right


If EMI couldn't promote the Sex Pistols back when record labels were record labels, music was music and no one knew what "downloading" was, except that it sounded vaguely dirty, is it any surprise the company didn't know what to do with the latest OK Go video?

Back in 1977, the Sex Pistols
had the last laugh on EMI, and now OK Go is ready to do a little giggling itself. All the way to the bank, now that the group gets to keep all the profits.

YOU HEARD it first on NPR and All Things Considered:
Since the advent of streaming Internet video outlets such as YouTube, bands and record labels have repeatedly been at odds over how to address the issue that, when a user watches a video online, no money is generated for the label or the band. In an interview with All Things Considered host Robert Siegel, OK Go singer-songwriter-guitarist Damian Kulash says that he — and the rest of the band — view videos not as a potential source of income, but rather as another creative outlet.

"This is all sort of part of the creative project for us," he says. "I mean, the animating passion for us is to get up and chase down our craziest ideas, and sometimes those are filmic, and sometimes they're purely sounds."

The band's label, EMI, didn't see things the same way. In an effort to maintain some control over the dissemination of the music video, EMI denied listeners the ability to embed it on their own Web sites and blogs. After receiving a deluge of complaints, the band eventually persuaded EMI to enable embedding. Soon afterward, however, OK Go parted ways with EMI to start its own record label, Paracadute.

WHAT ESCAPES bloated corporate collections of shortsighted moneygrubbers like EMI is this: The OK Go video isn't a revenue stream, it's free advertising.

The cost for putting it on YouTube? Zero.

The cost of producing it for the band? I'll bet it wasn't much, considering they got State Farm to sponsor it.

The promotional dividends from having it embedded on websites and blogs (like this one) everywhere? Limitless.

YOU WANT to know what's priceless, though? From now on, OK Go doesn't have to get nickeled-and-dimed by a record label that didn't know what to do with the Sex Pistols back in the day, and hasn't learned a damned thing in the intervening 33 years.



P.S.: One more thing. . . . Because of the promotional value of the video and the All Things Considered piece, I'm going to iTunes and buying the album. And the only credit EMI can take for that is indirectly, via the law of unintended consequences.

Terrible news in the blogosphere


The Internet Monk always has been a blog I greatly admire.

Its proprietor, Michael Spencer, possesses the great gift of being able to write gracefully while making great sense.

TUESDAY, however, brought terrible news about this brother in Christ, who has been struggling with cancer. His wife, Denise, writes:
It is with a heavy heart that I bring my latest update on Michael. We have learned that his cancer is too advanced and too aggressive to expect any sort of remission. Our oncologist estimates that with continued treatment Michael most likely has somewhere between six months and a year to live. This is not really a surprise to us, though it is certainly horrible news. From the very beginning, both of us have suspected that this would prove to be an extremely bad situation. I don’t know why; perhaps God was preparing us for the worst all along by giving us that intuition.

The combination of the cancer and the chemotherapy is keeping Michael in a very weakened state. He is in bed all day, getting up once or twice only to eat a “meal.” His meals consist mostly of Ensure, with occasional mugs of soup, dishes of ice cream and milkshakes. He’s still taking fluids well, currently preferring Sprite and ginger ale. His tastes do change slightly from time to time, and I try to be ready to jump in whatever direction they seem to be moving. He is in no pain at all, for which I am unspeakably grateful.
NEWS LIKE THIS always renders me with no good words with which to petition the Lord. I literally am reduced, without fail, to "Lord, have mercy."

Upon further reflection, it seems to me this isn't a bad prayer at all. God has His reasons for what he does and does not permit to befall any of us -- when he will and won't directly intervene in this fallen world's fallen workings.

We cannot understand the mind of God. As Flannery O'Connor once wrote:
Whatever you do anyway, remember that these things are mysteries and that if they were such that we could understand them, they wouldn’t be worth understanding. A God you understood would be less than yourself.
WHICH LEAVES ME with but my simple prayer for Michael Spencer and the rest of us, too.

Lord, have mercy.

'Social justice' rears its ugly head

I guess if you're Glenn Beck or one of his disciples, you'll look at this dispatch from India and wonder why these commie-pinko protesters weren't just shot in the street.

That's right,
according to the Zenit news agency, the dreaded social-justice conspiracy has set its sights on subverting The Way Things Work in the world's second-largest country:
Numerous religious, including three bishops, were arrested for taking part in a demonstration near Chennai in defense of the rights of Christian and Muslim "untouchables."

The police detained hundreds of people on Friday including priests, nuns, Archbishop Malayappan Chinnappa of Madras and Mylapore, Archbishop Peter Fernando of Madurai, and bishop Anthonisamy Neethinathan of Chinglepet, UCANews reported.

Friday's manifestation was the culmination of a month-long demonstration in favor of the lowest social caste, known as the dalits or untouchables.

The objective was to make the population and the state authorities more aware of the marginalization suffered by members of this class of society.

Thousands of people participated in a march that spanned some 310 miles, beginning a month earlier in the southern city of Kanyakumari.
HELL, IF YOU'RE the crew-cutted one, you're probably wondering -- in between crying jags -- not only why the noble Indian authorities didn't shoot the Catholic bishops, but why they didn't drive a stake through their hearts as well.

It's tough being Glenn Beck. If only enough people could see . . . it's all so clear once you're actually inside the funhouse mirror.

Tuesday, March 09, 2010

The devil has a crew cut


It's no secret that Glenn Beck is a cynical buffoon whose stock-in-trade is scaring the crap out of people even more ignorant and crazy than himself.

It also is no secret that Beck's boss at the Fox News Channel, Roger Ailes -- as well as his bosses at
Premiere Radio Networks -- just might be the most cynical people in America. That's saying something.

But cynically ginning up outrage and paranoia among ignorant (and perhaps unstable) people is nothing new in American politics and public discourse. Dangerous, yes. Destructive of the commonweal, yes.

But, alas, nothing new. This is the tired and hoary work of minor demons inhabiting middling rings of the inferno.

CONVINCING GULLIBLE and paranoid Yankee Doodle whack jobs that "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land" is pure, uncut communism -- evil incarnate under the guise of "social justice" . . . collectivist subversion of freedom and democracy -- that, on the other hand, is the work of Lucifer himself.

The devil is on Fox News weekday afternoons at 5 -- 4 Central. His stage name is Glenn Beck.

And the devil -- er, "Beck" -- is a master at getting mere mortals to mistake good for evil and evil for a public-policy prescription.

"Blessed are you who are now hungry, for you will be satisfied"? Socialist redistribution of wealth!

"Blessed are you who are now hungry, for you will be satisfied"? Commie-libs are out to destroy individual initiative . . . by confiscating your income!

"Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation"? Implicit threat of violence against hard-working American achievers from totalitarian agitators in the highest ranks!

Woe to you who are filled now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will grieve and weep? If you remember your history, this sounds awfully like what Stalin did when he collectivized agriculture in the Ukraine! Communists want you to starve while they redistribute your food!

CALL IT biblical exegesis, as seen on Glenn Beck's TV. And heard on his radio.

Glenn Beck thinks that if you go to a church that believes that Jesus Christ meant what he said in the Beatitudes, you are in deep borscht, Comrade.

And Glenn Beck says red-blooded, market-oriented American lovers of freedom had better get out of any church that believes in that "social justice" crapola.
No, really:
I recently received word through a new friend that The New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good captured audio of Fox News’ Glenn Beck encouraging listeners to leave their church if it proclaims a concern for social justice on his March 2nd radio broadcast. Here’s the quote from Beck:

"I'm begging you, your right to religion and freedom to exercise religion and read all of the passages of the Bible as you want to read them and as your church wants to preach them . . . are going to come under the ropes in the next year. If it lasts that long it will be the next year. I beg you, look for the words 'social justice' or 'economic justice' on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!"
NO, PEOPLE, this is no everyday, happens-every-couple-or-three-decades, run of the mill American political and cultural crackpottery.

What we have here is a crew-cut, whackadoodle Mormon-convert antichrist who has been given free reign by his radio and cable-TV masters to preach apostasy to millions of lost sheep. This isn't Christopher Hitchens going on TV to tell a bemused reporter that there is no God, and believers are full of beans.

Instead, this is one of the most popular hosts on the most popular cable-"news" channel, telling his viewers that Jesus preached evil, historical Christianity is a bunch of socialist agitprop and they should flee any church that believes in such things, because that church is a clear and present danger to the republic.

It's kind of like Lenin through the looking glass, actually.

A pretty neat trick, if you can pull it off. And we know just the malevolent entity for the job, don't we?

Monday, March 08, 2010

The road to hell


If there is indeed such a thing as a real hell on earth -- as opposed to pedestrian, rhetorical hells on earth -- Juarez, Mexico, might be a finalist for the designation.

And when you get right down to it, Juarez became hellish due to a lot of factors you can see, to a lesser degree, in my own Louisiana hometown, Baton Rouge. And in things closer to home here in Nebraska -- like, for example, the growth of "concierge medicine."

This hit me like a thunderbolt as I listened to All Things Considered this afternoon. In the NPR program's feature on the plight of Juarez, one part hit me between the eyes with a journalistic two-by-four.


IT WAS this segment in the report:
In March 2009, Calderon put the Mexican army in charge of the Juarez police department after one of the local drug cartels ordered the police chief to quit.

Calderon now concedes that military muscle alone isn't going to end the violence. "We need to tackle this social plan, because the problems in Juarez have deep roots in the structure of this city," Calderon told a group of local business and community leaders.

Young people lack opportunities, he said. Juarez doesn't have enough schools, hospitals or soccer fields. Only half the roads are paved. Murder, extortion and kidnapping go unpunished.

Calderon said the social fabric and rule of law need to be re-established in Juarez. He received one of his biggest rounds of applause when he declared that motorists should be accountable and people should no longer be allowed to drive around without license plates.

Calderon pledged tens of millions of additional dollars for social programs in Juarez, but he also said he will not pull the Mexican army out of the streets.

The double punch of the global economic downturn and the gruesome drug war has battered the border city across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. The maquiladoras, or assembly plants, in Juarez have cut more than 100,000 jobs since 2008. The owners of thousands of restaurants, bars, corner stores and other small businesses have shut their doors rather than pay "protection money" to local gangs. Many professionals have moved to El Paso.

Alvador Gonzalez Ayala, a civil engineer who works in Texas, has chosen to keep his home in Juarez. "And I want to remain here," he says. "I want my children to remain here."

He says one of the biggest problems facing the industrial city is the huge disparity in wealth.

Gonzalez says much of the blame rests with the local elite, which he says is "a privileged and influential minority that's totally indifferent to the great mass of poor people [who] live in the area."
[Emphasis mine -- R21]

He adds that the city has been neglected for decades. Young people who see the opulence in Juarez and just across the border fence in Texas are attracted to the quick money of the drug trade, he says. Workers in the maquiladoras earn $60 to $70 a week. Drug runners can earn that or much more in a day.

Gonzalez is involved in several civic groups, and he recalls going recently to talk to a group of preteens in one of Juarez's poorer neighborhoods.

"We were promoting education and science and math. And we were asking them, what do you want to do when you grow up? Many of them told us, 'I want to be a sicario.' That's striking. A sicario is a paid assassin," he says.


THE PART about tolerating cars driving around without license plates reminded me -- in the sense of a concept being carried to its logical conclusion -- of the great Gallic shrug Louisiana gives the larger concept of civic responsibility and good behavior. As did the part about indifferent elites.

It was the indifference of elites that also reminded me of life here in Omaha, home of one of the nation's poorest African-American communities -- one with only the tiniest of middle classes. The indifference doesn't, in my opinion, reach Louisiana (and certainly not Mexican) levels, but it there.

It's there whenever people can tout "concierge medicine" in the face of high infant mortality rates, astronomical levels of sexually transmitted disease, endemic street violence and disenfranchised people whose greatest deprivation is that of hope for a better life.

There are only two things that can lead to such tone deafness and rank selfishness. One is abject malevolence. The other is abject indifference. I don't know, frankly, which is worse.

But the end of the road, if the better angels of our nature do not eventually prevail upon us, is Juarez.

Medi¢ine the$e day$


Breathe deeply while you still can for free.

Soon enough, someone will find a way to make you pay a premium for clean air. And if you can't afford the good stuff, America . . . well, you can just kindly remove yourself to the back of the bus, where the "free market" makes "those people" sit.

Every day and in every way, the ranks of "those people" are swelling.

Take health care, for example. If you'd like some, it will cost you. If you'd like the good stuff, it will cost you a lot -- though you really can't afford the good stuff.

AND KNOW that to the extent the well-off opt for the "good stuff -- something we're coming to know as "concierge" care, where the doctor actually gives you the time of day . . . and his phone number -- what's left for the rest of us likely will come to resemble the scraps from the rich man's table.

According to Sunday's Omaha World-Herald, you can just call the vast majority of us Lazarus
:
Imagine opening a letter like this from your doctor:

“I'd love to keep you as a patient, but to stay with me you'll have to pay an extra annual fee of $2,500.

“Please let my office know if you will be paying the fee. If not, we'll help you find another primary care doctor.”

Although it might be worded more politely, that's the gist of the letter you could receive if your doctor adopts a style of primary health care known as concierge medicine.

Its backers say the concept can attract and retain more primary care doctors by improving their lives and enabling them to practice medicine the way they want, rather than under the time-constrained demands of the typical doctor's office.

But the concept also raises philosophical and ethical issues. Concierge physicians limit the number of patients they see by charging annual fees, which wealthy people can more easily afford. Also, this kind of medicine could reduce the number of primary care doctors at a time when demand already exceeds supply.

Nationally, the practice of concierge medicine is still small — perhaps 400 primary care physicians out of about 250,000 nationally — but in some regions it is firmly established.

The largest concierge company, MDVIP, has more than 300 doctors nationwide and recently was purchased by Procter & Gamble. It's been more than 12 years since the first such practice opened in Seattle. There's even a cable TV program, “Royal Pains,” about concierge medicine.

But the approach has only recently arrived here. Nebraska's first, a two-doctor practice, opened last month near 90th Street and West Dodge Road in Omaha after a three-year trial at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

It's affiliated with a new Omaha management company, Members.MD, whose chairman is former Burger King franchise owner and cancer survivor Mike Simmonds.

“Primary care is broken,” said Dr. Joel Bessmer, who is medical director of Members.MD and who opened the new practice with partner Dr. Robert Schwab. “It allows us to step off the treadmill and spend time with patients. This is a different world of trying to provide primary care.”

Physicians get to know patients thoroughly and become their health partners, he said. The doctor's office becomes the patients' comfortable, easily accessible medical home, instead of a hurried place full of other sick people and doctors who have no time to spare.

But Dr. John Goodson of Harvard Medical School said concierge medicine could worsen a system that to some degree already dispenses care based on whether people can afford insurance.

“Do we as physicians hang together and maintain our commitment to access?” he said. “That really ought to be a fundamental principle of medicine. We're there to help people, and we're not going to discriminate against people because of their economics.”
Goodson said primary care doctors should supervise their patients' hospital stays as part of normal care, not for an extra fee. Members.MD offers hospital supervision only with its upper level of care.

Eliminating people from a medical practice by charging a fee is “abandonment,” he said. Even if a patient's records transfer, the new doctor doesn't know all the information that the first doctor learned about the patient.

Yet the rise of concierge care, he said, shows that as a profession, primary care “is on the ropes and dying fast. It's like the polar ice cap, starting to fracture. It ought to be a wake-up call to everybody.”

He said that the start of a practice in Omaha indicates the concierge model, although marginal in most regions, isn't going away. “It makes me sad as a professional that my colleagues are doing this sort of charging.”
WE NOW LIVE in a country where one's bank account determines one's worth in life. You are what you make. Human dignity has become a commodity.

"Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"? Formerly available for free from one's Creator, they now are available only with purchase of the America Plus premium package.

If you don't want to die before the next operator is available to schedule your appointment with a Proletarian Partners physician's assistant, it's going to cost you. And you'd better hope your insurance plan allows diagnostic stethoscope use.

But that's not important now. What's important is that "concierge medicine" is the talk of the town -- the part of town that matters, that is:

Simmonds, who was inducted in the Omaha Business Hall of Fame last year for his success in the fast-food business, said the concept is “sort of the talk of the town, at least in my circles.”

Simmonds said he heard about Bessmer's practice from a fellow airplane traveler, called Bessmer the next morning, interviewed him over lunch at Charleston's and “hired him” as his doctor. Simmonds' former primary care doctor was good and even a friend, but Simmonds couldn't call or e-mail him whenever he wanted.

“When I don't feel good, I like to talk to somebody right now,” he said. “Joel spoiled me,” including supervising his care when he was hospitalized and providing other care over the past year and a half. He was diagnosed with cancer several years ago.
IF YOU BELIEVE it's a self-evident truth that "all men are created equal," you should be offended as hell right now. Some folk think their money makes their well-being more important than yours. They think that rationing isn't rationing if they slap a "free market" label on it and have enough cash to game the system in their favor.

There's a four-letter word for that kind of thinking: E-V-I-L.

And I think the Bolshevik Revolution happened for a reason. I hope people like Mike Simmonds have another think coming before finding out exactly what that reason was.

Sunday, March 07, 2010

Us in 1929


When I arrived in North Platte, Neb., during the last gasps of winter in 1983, something struck me about the place -- especially as a native of the Deep South.

There weren't any black people to speak of. I mean, the place was as white as the snow on the ground.

AS IT turns out, there were reasons for that. I'd wager that something close to being chief among those reasons would be what happened Saturday, July 13, 1929. ("Darkies"? A newspaper in Prescott, Ariz., thought it respectable to use the word "darkies" in a headline -- or anywhere else? Really?)

The North Platte incident was especially eerie in light of what happened here in Omaha a decade earlier, on Sept. 28, 1919.


DON'T THINK we're much more civilized these days, and don't think there aren't groups out there ready and willing to play with fire in these "interesting times."

Saturday, March 06, 2010

3 Chords & the Truth: Boogie wonderland


Enter dancing.

With the first signs of maybe there being a spring later this year, that's how we choose to enter this week's episode of 3 Chords & the Truth -- dancing. Stepping lively.

Getting down to the sounds.

Boogying, as it were.

AND WE GO
from there on the Big Show. Personally, I think it's rather infectious. I bet you will, too.

Well, that's about all there is to say. If our musical excursion this week doesn't have your toe tapping and a smile on your face . . . you just may be John Mayer in a roomful of angry Jessica Simpsons. Or something like that.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, yall. Be there. Aloha.

Friday, March 05, 2010

Neo-nazi junk rebels against 'clean' Mayer


John Mayer, freshly tired of being an "a**hole," tells anybody who'll listen -- and folks had better, being that they paid, like, a bazillion dollars for the privilege -- that "It's a clean me now, people, clean me."

That well may be.

David Duke's c***, on the other hand, was spotted gettin' down and dirty at an Omaha strip club Wednesday night, a day before his show at the Qwest Center. Josefina Loza's story in this morning's Omaha World-Herald, however, didn't say whether Mayer knew where his neo-Nazi junk was hangin' all night:
Mayer — or someone who looks just like him — kicked it at The 20’s, an exotic dance club in midtown. He performed at the Qwest Center on Thursday.

Terry O’Halloran, longtime owner of Omaha bars — but not The 20’s — tipped me off in an e-mail: “Did you hear Mayer was allegedly at The 20’s last night? Not quite sure what to make of that guy.”

The 20’s dancers typically wear a mixture of bikinis and fantasy lingerie outfits. Guess Mayer — or his doppelgänger — was there to discover many wonderlands — more to tell Playboy.

Several sources at the club who wanted to remain anonymous confirmed that the pop-blues star was there — and was a generous tipper.
BACK IN THE DARK AGES, when my home away from home was a newspaper newsroom, one particular city editor was fond of saying someone had been "thinking with his little head and not his big one." True, that happens all the time.

John Mayer, on the other hand, may be the first person ever to have his little head -- in a fit of pique born of sexual frustration and boredom with the Sackcloth & Ashes '10 World Tour -- declare absolute autonomy from the "clean me" and head off to a titty bar . . . alone.

Wednesday night in Omaha wasn't the first time.

IN FACT, no sooner than Mayer had proclaimed himself the "clean me" at New York's Madison Square Garden a week ago, David Duke's c*** ran screaming into a nightclub and started
talking dirty to all the ladies. At least that's what the Daily News says:
Mayer [The newspaper was confused because David Duke's c*** bears an uncanny resemblance to its former host, Mayer -- R21] spent the weekend partying at NoLita hot spot La Esquina - which is near the 2,500-square-foot SoHo apartment he owns - and acting, well, less-than-gentlemanly.

"He was drinking and saying vulgar things to the girls at the bar," says a spy. "He was hitting on one pretty brunette in particular, but she found him slimy because he was being so over-the-top."

We hear women aren't the only challenge the crooner can't seem to navigate: Friends say that even before the Playboy fiasco, he was having a love-hate relationship with the media.

"After every interview he gave, John would agonize over it and mentally kick himself over everything he said," says an insider. "He would swear it would be the last time, but it never was, and it became a never-ending cycle."
POOR JOHN. He goes to the trouble of apologizing and apologizing -- not to mention proclaiming his new "clean me" and letting 11-year-olds up on stage to play guitar with him for a number -- and look what happens. Done in by adolescent rebellion on the part of David Duke's c***.

As Uncle Jed used to say about Jethro on The Beverly Hillbillies, Mayer is "gonna have to have a looooong talk with that boy."



P.S.:
I don't know about these things, so could someone tell me whether The '20s features an all-white crew of exotic dancers?

There yesterday, gone today


The old North Platte (Neb.) High School building, 1930-2003.

Thursday, March 04, 2010

NBC's Don't See TV


The award for The Best Thing Written About the Conan-Leno Affair goes to. . . .

Envelope, please. (Where's that damn letter opener when you need it?)

One moment, please.

AHEM. The award for The Best Thing Written About the Conan-Leno Affair goes to . . . Christopher Lawrence of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Roll the videotape:
If you've ever been screwed over at work, don't watch "The Tonight Show." Conan O'Brien passed up lucrative offers, waited five years and moved, along with his staff, across the country to take over "The Tonight Show," but NBC never really gave it to him. By putting Leno on in prime time, with more fanfare and better guests -- not to mention giving viewers who just wanted to watch any talk show the chance to do that and get a decent night's sleep -- NBC set Conan up to fail from the start.

If you have any business sense whatsoever, don't watch "The Tonight Show." During his last two weeks on the air, Conan stopped being intimidated by "The Tonight Show" and started making captivating television. While Leno's ratings ticked up slightly, Conan's surged. Then there was the "Evita"-style scene with hundreds of Conan fans rallying for hours in the driving rain outside his studio. By contrast, Leno played The Mirage two days earlier, only doing one show instead of his customary two, and the venue had to offer half-price tickets. And NBC still dumped its newly minted folk hero in favor of the weasel with whom only 4 percent of Oprah's audience, some of the most forgiving viewers in the world, sided.

If you've ever been bullied, don't watch "The Tonight Show." Between slamming Conan in the press when he's contractually forbidden to respond and the tacky "Get back to where you once belonged" commercials for Leno, NBC's behavior has bordered on the shameless.

If you've ever actually been fired, don't watch "The Tonight Show." For someone who considers himself a man of the people, Leno's whining about how NBC "fired" him twice has been surprisingly tone deaf. Especially considering he doesn't even need the job, as he boasts of living solely off his stand-up money. Millions of Americans, including Conan, have genuinely lost their jobs over the past two years; Leno had his start time moved forward, then back, by 95 minutes.

Wednesday, March 03, 2010

The economy has gone to s***

Found this flier in the mailbox today.

Imagine, for a mere $7 a week, EntreMANURE K-9 Waste Removal will pick up the "leavings" of Molly the Dog and Scout.

They even have a slogan: "Your dog poops, our shovel scoops!"

Seems to me a reasonable price, and one I'm sure many yard-conscious Omahans would be willing to pay. I, however, am not one of those yard-conscious Omahans.

THE FIRM also will mow, weed and fertilize your yard. But here's the deal, at least from my perspective as the neighborhood lawn reprobate: Leave the poop, and you don't have to fertilize.

Because, you see, I have a slogan, too. But I can't say it here.

Oh, what the hell. Parents, take your kids away from the computer screen.

Here's my slogan, which has worked surprisingly well for me the past 21 years. Ready? Kids safely dispatched?

OK.

"My dog s***s, and there it sits."

Go ahead, call the neighborhood association. I wouldn't blame you.

Tell them to watch their step, though, when they come to take me away.

Us.


Here's the problem with trying to do what I'm kind of trying to do here -- basically, trying to shine a light through a glass darkly.

The problem is
the medium is the message. The medium affects our behavior. And some media just demand that we sit there and worship . . . them. (Surely you're not watching NBC prime time because you really, really, really like staring at morbidly obese people in sports bras and muscle shirts.)

And the problem of trying to point out the absurdities of life through an utterly absurd medium -- utterly absurd media -- is kind of like a Catholic priest going to the savages, dressing up in his clerical finest . . . then presiding over a human sacrifice, all the while explaining to the primitives how in this sacrifice of the virgin Ubonga lies a shadow of Jesus' Paschal sacrifice which takes away the sins of the world.

Just so you know.

Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Almost as good as nekkid blackmail pics

You'd almost think the Omaha cop union has nekkid pictures of somebody at city hall.

How else to explain the sweetheart deals the city's police officers get whenever contract time rolls around. Great deals when Omaha's municipal coffers are flush, outstanding deals whenever they're not.

Take the last time the city was flirting with red ink. That time, in exchange for a temporary pay concessions, Omaha cops came away with a contract allowing them to base pension benefits on their highest-paid year.

The result? The specter of "public servants" working every possible hour of overtime right before they retire at age 47 and start pulling down $100,000 a year -- or something in a nearby neighborhood.

This year -- with the city flat broke and the pension fund headed for insolvency -- Mayor Jim Suttle's administration has negotiated an austerity contract with the cops. This, of course, means Omaha taxpayers should buy soap on a rope from now on.

BECAUSE, OF COURSE,
officers contributing equally to the pension fund (or retiring on "retirement" levels of compensation) would be
a bridge too far for the police union, the Omaha World-Herald reported last week:
Officer Aaron Hanson, union president, said a new contract would be a tough sell with his members, “given the extremely difficult discussion and vote that we already went through.”

If the city and the union reach an impasse on new contract terms, the decision would fall to the Nebraska Commission of Industrial Relations.

Festersen, Stothert and Thompson say they hope to work with Suttle and the union on a new version of the police contract. They say the pension provisions are still too generous.

“I don't think it's enough to say no,” Festersen said. “I hope to work with the mayor and my colleagues on some of these issues, to resolve them expediently.”

Stothert and Thompson said officers need to do more than give up spiking to help the troubled pension system.

The proposed contract requires police to take benefit cuts, including the end of “spiking” overtime and other pay to boost pensions before retirement. Spiking has allowed some officers to retire with pensions that are much higher than their regular pay on the job.

Spiking was never intended to be a benefit, Stothert and Thompson said. Police should instead absorb the cost of spiking and give up more to boost their share of contributions into the pension fund.

Hanson said the idea of using an officer's highest-paid year to determine pension benefits was indeed a benefit.

“That's been a benefit in the pension plan for years,” he said. “Now we are eliminating that concept.”

Under the proposed contract, a career average of pay would be used to determine pensions, a change that some council members say could still allow officers to retire with pensions equal to or more than their salaries.

Thompson said Suttle should have demanded that officers contribute more into the fund.

Instead, he said, the city would be saddled with a nearly 34 percent contribution rate that would be financed in the form of a new garbage collection fee, property tax hike or city sales tax increase. Police would contribute nearly 15 percent.
OMAHANS are not amused. In fact, a KETV Channel 7 news crew came up empty looking for backers of the pact among the general public:
The opponents' message was that they're taxed high enough and paying their fair share. They want the council to send the contract back to the bargaining table.

"It is absolutely obscene that somebody could retire in their mid-40s with a pension that exceeds his base salary and then expect the taxpayers to pay for that," said University of Nebraska-Omaha criminal justice professor Dr. Sam Walker.

Hanson said the new contract increases retirement age to 50, adding that officers face a penalty for retiring before 55 years of age.

"It's not surprising that some people are emotional about this issue," Hanson said. "But at the end of the day, it's not going to be emotion that's going to solve this problem. It's going to be finding the solution that complies with the law and achieves the savings necessary to balance."

Radio host Tom Becka, broadcasting live from City Hall, said police have gotten away with fat pensions in the past but now people are paying attention.

"You're seeing a lot of people with attitudes today, respecting police, respecting the firemen, but not respecting the contracts or the deals that have been made behind closed doors," Becka said.
SAM WALKER, the UNO professor, had better mind his 'P's and "Q's. In Omaha, it can be a dangerous thing to point out the obvious -- like, for example, very few among those paying cops' salaries have such a sweetheart deal as Omaha's finest.

The police union, you see, doesn't take to criticism, and it likes to play dirty.

Look what it did to a couple of now-former city councilmen who got on Aaron Hanson's bad side. Jim Vokal ran for mayor, only to have to cop union blanket the city with mailers portraying him as pedophiles' BFF at city hall.

It's not nekkid pictures, but it's almost as good. The fliers may not have been the reason Vokal didn't make the runoff, but they sure didn't help his cause.

Message delivered.

The bottom line in Omaha politics -- especially at the mayoral level -- is that nobody wants to piss off the police union. The union plays rough.

The union is highly political.

The union holds a grudge.

And the union will accuse an Omaha pol of being "soft on crime" faster than Glenn Beck will start blubbering in front of a TV camera.

VOTERS AIN'T EINSTEIN. For years, that has meant the Omaha electorate has been complicit in its own shakedown.

Hard times, though, can be a clarifying thing. As the fog of police-union mau-mauing begins to burn off under the burden of its own hot air, maybe the voters -- and the pols who answer to them -- are finally beginning to see the light.

Mutually assured deconstruction


Context.

Without context, it's easy to think just once about things that have another think coming.

Apparently, the lack of context has a whole lot of Ugly Americans -- your Mighty Favog included to some extent -- either ridiculing mercilessly (many YouTube commenters) or chuckling bemusedly (me) at one Edward Anatolevich Hill, Soviet-era singing sensation . . . and star of the video in the previous post.

Upon further review (and a trip down Google Lane), the man doesn't deserve it. And come to think of it, maybe the godless commissars were doing a lot better job with Soviet culture than the "free" market is doing with ours right about now.

OK,
Comrade Hill was a little awkward-looking in that 1976 video from Soviet TV. So was Bruce Springsteen at last year's Super Bowl and The Who at this year's.

But there's a bunch to like in this 1966 performance on state television (above). Besides, I just saw Ludacris' "performance" Monday night on Letterman, and I'd give a farting chorus of Soviet collective-farm managers five stars by comparison.

Look at it this way. Ronald Reagan won the Cold War to make the world safe for hip-hop imperialists spewing cultural toxins into the global ecosystem? All while stereotypical "hos" shimmy in the background?

Where is Nikita Khrushchev when the world finally does need him to "bury" us -- preferably in Soviet-era music videos?


HERE'S SOME of that context I was mentioning about Comrade Hill's "vokaliz" performance, via Justin E.H. Smith's blog:

The song he is interpreting, "I Am So Happy to Finally Be Back Home," is an Ostrovskii composition, and it is meant to be sung in the vokaliz style, that is to say sung, but without words. I have seen a number of comments online, ever since a flurry of interest in Hill began just a few days ago, to the effect that this routine must have been meant as a critique of Soviet censorship, but in fact vokaliz was a well established genre, one that seems close in certain respects to pantomime.

Recent interest in Hill has to do with the perceived strangeness, the uncanniness, the surreal character of this performance. There is indeed something uncanny about a lip-synch to a song with no words, and his waxed face and hair helmet certainly do not carry over well. But once one does a bit of research, one learns that the number was not conceived out of some desire to cater to the so-bad-it's-good tastes of the Western YouTube generation, but in fact was meant to please --to genuinely please-- Soviet audiences who were capable of placing this routine, this man, and this song into a familiar context. The audiences would recognize, for example, that the same number had been performed by the Azerbaidzhani singer Muslim Magomaev in a film from the early 1960s, The Blue Spark:


One thing to notice is that, in spite of the absence of text, and of the fact that he is clearly lip-synching, there is nothing at all uncanny about Magomaev's version. It is a perfectly standard musical number from that era. So whatever it is that makes Hill so remarkable has to lie elsewhere than in what he has inherited from Ostrovskii and Magomaev, and what Soviet audiences would recognize as linking him to them. These other elements are the hair, the eyebrows, the elbows (I first decided to learn Russian when I became frustrated with the number of times the translator of my edition of War and Peace resorted to the phrase 'arms akimbo': surely, I thought, Russia can't really be a place where people so regularly resort to so special a posture). Still other elements are the set, the lighting, the quality of the color film: musical productions from the early 1960s still look charming and comforting; the same songs interpreted 15 years later often seem like perversions of the original. Hill's version seems nothing if not perverse, but what a bit of contextualization helps us to see is that this is not at all the result of his own innate weirdness, or of the innate absurdity of the song he has undertaken to sing.

THE POINT I think Smith is making here is that it was the '70s everywhere, even behind the Iron Curtain. The Brady Bunch Hour could happen anywhere . . . and did.


OR, AS ONE
commenter put it, "It's easy to laugh at this bull****. But the Russians can just post clips of Lawrence Welk and we are owned. "

You mean, like this "modern spiritual by Gale and Dale"?

Monday, March 01, 2010

We're screwed.


Rod Dreher wonders sarcastically how the Soviet Union collapsed with cultural ammunition such as this.

I wonder seriously how, with cultural ammunition such as 50-Cent, we cannot.

Then there's this cultural linchpin of American greatness:


ALL THINGS being equal, I've developed a soft spot in my cultural heart for Soviets with bad suits and worse haircuts singing songs that, for sure, won't land you in a Siberian labor camp. And after this long, long winter on the snowy, frozen Plains, all I have to say is "YOOOOOOOOI, YOOOI YO-YOOOOOI! YOI YOI YOIIII, YOIIII YOI YOI!"

Oh, that and one more thing: Hold me closer, Tiny Dancer!



Why am I not surprised?

Choice is a dead-end proposition in America.

Whenever we talk about being "pro-choice," we're never referring to a mother thumbing her nose at the doomsayers predicting all manner of horrible outcomes -- both for her life and the baby's -- if she doesn't make a bold choice for death.

Whenever we talk about being "pro-choice," we don't mean women having the right to choose life -- an abundant life -- for their unborn children. As we conceive it, "choice" never leads anywhere but straight to Nihilism Street.


We "choose" in favor of ourselves, our fears, our desperation, our convenience.

WE "CHOOSE" against a being we've already chosen to regard as less than human, despite the biology of the matter. That is, unless the fetus is "wanted."

We're never envisioning a society that mobilizes its time, talent and treasure -- and I'm talking public as well as private treasure -- behind the idea of "no child left behind" . . . and no parent, either.

As it turns out, living life like Alice through the looking glass takes a toll on a society. It takes a toll on how we see things. Sooner or later, the funhouse-mirror view of things becomes normative, and reality seems monstrous.

AND SOONER OR LATER, we begin to regard our dying children (the ones we "chose" to let out of the womb alive) much as we do our dying pets. We're eager to "put the poor thing out of its misery."

Its misery.

There's been a study made, and The Associated Press wrote about it:
It's a situation too agonizing to contemplate — a child dying and in pain. Now a small but provocative study suggests that doctors may be giving fatal morphine doses to a few children dying of cancer, to end their suffering at their parents' request.

A handful of parents told researchers that they had asked doctors to hasten their children's deaths — and that doctors complied, using high doses of the powerful painkiller.

The lead author of the study and several other physicians said they doubt doctors are engaged in active mercy killing. Instead, they speculate the parents interviewed for the study mistakenly believed that doctors had followed their wishes.

A more likely scenario is that doctors increased morphine doses to ease pain, and that the children's subsequent deaths were only coincidental, said lead author Dr. Joanne Wolfe, a palliative pain specialist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Children's Hospital in Boston.

The American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics and most other mainstream doctor groups oppose mercy-killing but say withholding life-prolonging treatment for dying patients can be ethical.

Dr. Douglas Diekema, a medical ethicist at Seattle Children's Hospital, said the study results are not surprising.

"I have no doubt that in a small number of cases, some physicians might cooperate with a parent's desire to see a child's suffering ended. This might include giving a drug for sedation or pain control that also suppresses the drive to breathe.

"Most physicians don't intentionally push that drug to the point of stopping a child's breathing, but some may be comfortable not intervening if a child stops breathing in the course of treating him or her for discomfort," Diekema said.

The study was published Monday in the March edition of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. It was based on interviews with parents of 141 children who had died of cancer and were treated at three hospitals, in Boston and Minnesota.

Among parents studied, one in eight, or 13 percent, said they had considered asking about ending their child's life, and 9 percent said they had that discussion with caregivers. Parents of five children said they had explicitly requested euthanasia for their dying children, and parents of three said it had been carried out, with morphine.

"If there was absolutely no other option, and the patient is suffering, then why wouldn't you" hasten death? said David Reilly, a Boston-area man whose 5-year-old son died of cancer 11 years ago.
THERE ARE REASONS -- more than 5,000 years' worth, in fact -- why children of Abraham ought look at one another differently than we do Spot, no matter how beloved Spot might be.

I suggest we begin to reacquaint ourselves on what those reasons are.