An iPod Test Post

Am I the only who was not upset by Aretha's hat yesterday? Actually it
looked kind of warm and comfortable to me.

Sent from my iPod

I am a free man!

Alright just to please RunningMom. Apparently the the previous video of the Boy Wonder was offensive to some, so I have decided to move on and add more posts so that it will eventually disappear.

I had intended to write something about Ricardo Montalban and Patrick McGoohan, both of which passed away this week, or this weekend when we celebrate the birth of Martin Luther King Jr. with a day of service and welcome the the first African American President as he takes office on Tuesday. I would something like a week in review. But there isn't much more that I could say that you haven't thought of or couldn't find out and read for yourselves. So just a note.

Most people will remember Mr. Montalban as Mr. Roarke, the nattily dressed host and may I say Architect of Hidden Dreams on the show Fantasy Island, or as one of the old MGM actors they called in when they needed a latin type and Cesar Romero wasn't available. But I have and always will remember him as one of the best science fiction villains that has ever graced the silver screen and the man who is probably responsible for the success of the most successful science fiction franchises ever, Khan. Without him there would never have been a 3rd or 4th or 9th Star Trek movie.

"He tasks me. He tasks me. I will chase him 'round de mooons of the Antares Nebula..." Which really isn't a direct or even correct quote from Khan on Star Trek II - The Wrath Of Khan, but it's what I remember and it's what I think of and sometimes spit out when I get into that trekkie kind of mood and I'm surrounded by the right people, trek people. With all the sex and danger that he exhibited at age 61 when he did the movie, he has kept me going if only in the hope that maybe one day, some day I could be as smooth real life as he was on screen.

I think I was under 10 when I first saw The Prisoner and I didn't understand it then. Truth be told, when I saw the series being repeated on PBS about 10 years ago, I still didn't understand it. But at the show's opening, which is posted below, Patrick McGoohan runs around trying not to give up information about something and not willing to accept himself as just a number but instead claimed that he was a "free man." This also is something that I strive for, although it's kind of hard to try to do as in a few weeks from now I will be sending in my personal information on tax forms about how I live and what I do and get to be able to live that way and all with a big fat social security number on top.

Speaking of a free man or freedom itself, MLK, 'nuff said.

It can also be said that an Obama in the White House will be will be a direct result of the efforts for freedom that the good reverend Dr. King gave his life for, as did so many others from the march from slavery to the March on Washington DC and beyond. And this is the part where you come in. This is the part where I realize that there is nothing I can say or do that will lift this moment any higher or greater than it already is. This is the part that I will leave to the poets and the historians and to you to record and honor, this moment and this time.

On the way to DC

Video Quickie

Did you ever wonder why health insurance rates are so high?

Alright so I'm a facist, but he has no shame. Who among us is perfect?

And the award goes to...

“What this country needs is a good 5¢ cigar,” somebody’s vice-president said at the beginning of the last century.

That is a quote that you can look up on Google to find who said it, but I think you would be hard pressed to find who it was who may have said or decided that what the entertainment industry needed was one more award show. Yes it’s that time of year again.

From the People’s Award to the Oscars, from the Grammys to the World Music Awards, from Essence Magazine Awards to I don’t know, People Magazine’s sexiest man alive award, this nation is rife with award giving shows where everyone pats themselves on the back and congratulates one another for having survived the previous year with work or some other attribute being recognized for being above and beyond that of others.

The only award show that I ever really watch has been the Oscars and that is only because I grew up watching movies, the classics on TV so there is some sort of affinity there that I can’t really explain. Although the last Oscar show, I should call it the Academy Award Show, that I actually appreciated was when John Wayne left his sick bed to present the Best Picture award wearing a tuxedo and hairpiece that were both much too big for him and kept slipping; he had lost a lot of weight at the time. Then he died like two weeks later. But that’s show business and I loved him for it.

I think the best appreciation for an award was done by George C. Scott for his award winning performance in Patton. He not only did not show up for his award but he told them what they could do with it. He was only interested in his work and not the petty politics that go with movie industry that he thought had burned him, as I'm sure petty politics burn other people in other industries or companies. As far as I know that Oscar is still sitting on a shelf in the back of a warehouse somewhere waiting for someone to claim it.

I guess what I’m really trying to say is that awards are fine and everything, but it is the work that is really what it’s about and trying to do the work even more so. The fact that one piece may seem to be better than other pieces to certain people at a certain time is really arbitrary and unimportant in the long run. It’s the work that counts and so I would like to thank the…

Actually I was working up to what this piece was going to be about, but this has already gone on much too long as is that there will have to be a Part II to this, or a So & So Returns to finish up the arc.

By the way, am I only the only person in the world who thinks that Viola Davis who was on screen all of 5 minutes in the movie “Doubt” should get more than just a paycheck for her performance? For a black woman to come up and knock Meryl Streep on her ass when they were together and send her back to acting school, and you know I love me some Meryl, is an achievement worth seeing and experiencing.

Winter Lights on Broad St.

This isn’t a piece on marketing but if I can remember correctly, there are four or five types of people who are responsible for new technology or the diffusion of a new product into the market place.

There are the Innovators who will go out and buy the latest gadget at no matter what the cost because they need to be the first on the block to have it. They are daring and will be the ones who will buy a flat screen TV for $12,000 and think of it as money well spent, mainly because they have it like that or are at least willing to make others think they have it like that.

Then there are the Early Adopters who are eager to explore new options and embrace new technology but will wait a little for the price to drop and for others to experience whatever problems there are with the product. Then only after the manufacturer has ironed out most of the kinks, an Early Adopter will make his or her purchase.

After that there is the Early Majority who will obtain items when they believe everyone else is buying them and the Late Majority who will buy it once it’s reached the clearance shelf because a newer and better model has come out. There are of course the Laggards who really have no interest in new technology for one reason or another and only make a purchase only because they have to.

I fall on the border between Early Adopter and Early Majority. I like to have the newest little electronic gadget with as many bells and whistles on it as possible but I don’t want to put up the first born for adoption in order to pay for it; that is if I had a first born. So if, like Bob Barker used to say, the price is right I’ll be there with money in hand and a childish glee in my eye. If not, I will wait until the regular price has dropped to as low as possible and get it or add $50 and get the newer and improved version. This is what I did to get my new pocket high definition camcorder.

I had lost my regular digital point and shoot camera that I shot short videos with the day after Labor Day and I replaced it with an SLR (single lens reflex) camera that only shot stills. Thus I needed to get a camcorder but a good one would cost over $800 and even more for the even better ones, although they’ve dropped to $600 now. But Cecil B. DeMille is not my middle name; there would be no grand sweeping epics on screen done by me. I couldn’t justify spending that much money for something that I would hardly use and when I did it would be for, let’s face it, shit shots.

So I found the Vado HD that fellow Blogger Alfii purchased last month and after he posted a video that he had shot. I thought well that’s not bad a looking video for under $200, and in fact it really isn’t. It’s not true HD, the pixels are too low, and there is no image stabilizer so you will never see anything you shoot on Public TV getting some sort of prize or award. But it’s good enough for YouTube and other video online sites where you want to show what happend at aunt Berth's last barbeque.

Here is my first test video that I shot last night. True I copied the theme from someone else, but like I said, I’m not Cecil B. DeMille and this ain’t The Ten Commandments. Come to think of it even the title is a misnomer, because these lights have been up since the middle of summer. Oh well, like I said it's just a test, it is only a test.

Feeling Kind of Blue

It was either yesterday or the day before that I first read one or two blogs about Larry Flynt and the guy that does Girls Gone Wild, the one that was in for tax evasion I believe, decided that they were going to approach the Government and ask for some of that Troubles Assets Relief Program (TARP) money, or what used to be known as the "bailout."

I didn’t believe it of course until I saw the same story was being reported by CNN and MSNBC and I thought what kind of nonsense are they playing at now? Apparently because of the economy, sales of porn DVDs and other forms of blue entertainment have fallen 22% and they will be asking Congress for $5 billion to tide them over and help them through the dark days of this recession.

I wasn’t going to comment on this because I take care of my porn needs over the net with a few free sites especially on those nights when I can’t fall asleep easily and I need a little…incentive shall we say. Also I know, and I hazard a guess that you know too, that they don’t have a snowball’s chance of seeing anyone on the Hill about it and that the story would be over by the end of the week. But then I thought, supposing Larry’s not really looking at getting money from Congress, but what if he is instead looking to be turned down so that he could sue them in the courts for, I don’t know discrimination against a legal industry, the adult entertainment industry. After all if banks can get money for being careless with their loans and investments, and the auto industry can get money to build cars that no one is buying, then why can’t the porn industry get money to keep the nation happy?

If you’ve seen the movie The People vs. Larry Flynt, then you know there is nothing that would please my boy more than to be able to get up in court and state that the right for easily affordable, cheap and sleazy sex is being taken away by the government and that he wouldn’t mind being the one to put that right.

…And justice for all? If not, then I can't wait for the show that's going to come.

Remember M*A*S*H?

I mean to respond to something mentioned that was brought to my attention by RunningMom, but later on this week.

West Philly is not really my hang out. It’s just some place I used to work in and then live in when I was involved with someone. I still get my haircut there even though it’s now completely out of my way and occasionally I will catch a movie outside of the University of Pennsylvania. They have a terrific theatre, but it’s become popular with the locals and so depending on the film, you will see many of the wrong sorts of people; don’t pretend to be shocked, you know I’m a snob when it comes to film and if you’re reading this you probably are one too.

I remember I would sometimes go to a speakeasy in West Philly after the regular bars would close. It was on Sansom St and in someone’s basement. You would have to line up outside and they would let you in small group by small group as they figured out how much room they had left inside. The place was always packed with people, well actually men trying to get their "last chance" groove on for the night one way or the other. Some nights it was so crowded and filled with smoke, I would start to cry because my eyes burned so badly, and I smoke. How I miss those days.

I had an Ex who would criticize me for sometimes slipping into a West Philly accent or speech pattern and he may or may not have been right, I don’t know. But what I do know is that sometimes I will subconsciously mimic the way people speak in order for to fit in wherever I am. In other words there is a little piece of Philadelphia in me and I am sure then, that there was a little piece of Philadelphia in John Pryor.

A few months ago I wrote something about the piece ABC News had done on Killadelphia. That was the term they had used to explain how doctors were using techniques that they were learning in Philadelphia to save lives from gunshot wounds and other traumas and taking those skills to the Middle East to do the same there. Dr. John Pryor was one of those physicians from (HUP) the Hospital University of Pennsylvania who saved lives in West Philly and then saved them in Iraq. Dr. Pryor lost his life on Christmas Day 2008 in Mosul during a mortar attack in a safe zone.

The year before, Pryor had written something for the Washington Post:

“In Iraq, ironically, I found myself drawing on my experience as a civilian trauma surgeon each time ‘mascals,’ or ‘mass casualty situations,’ would overrun the combat hospital…As nine or 10 patients from a firefight rolled in, I sometimes caught myself saying, ‘Just like another Friday night in West Philadelphia,'...”

I am sure that Philadelphia will miss John Pryor in many more ways than one. But I also wonder, how many more people will die in Iraq and how many more will die in West Philly because he is no longer there to save them.

This monstrosity of a war must stop.

And Now A Resolution

I don’t actually believe in New Year Resolutions. I think they are just something that you set up for yourself so that later on in the year or the week, you can look back on yourself as a failure or as someone without determination or will power.

When I was quitting smoking I would feel that way. I would stub out my last cigarette on New Year’s Eve, walk about free and clear on New Year’s Day and then go into a store on the 2nd and without even thinking, buy a pack and light up as soon as I walked out of the door. Can you say loser?

Loser!

I believe that if there is something that you really want to do then you wouldn’t have to set a certain date in the year for it to start happening, you’d just do it. However, this year I may have found something that I might be able to get my teeth into.

A few years ago, I bought a book by Ernest Hemingway called Garden of Eden. If I can remember correctly, it was about an author, his wife and a girlfriend that Hemingway started writing in the 40’s. Then Hemingway put the book down and picked it up again 10 or 20 years later to finish it. I guess he must have filled his time with big-game hunting, bar hopping or electro shock treatments. Anyway, so I get to about a third to halfway through the book and it changes suddenly. I don’t mean it evolved into a wonderfully new and welcomed direction. I mean that the entire flow and style of his prose had just for no reason changed. It was the same story and I didn’t like it.

I figured that this must have been the point that Hemingway picked up his story again. And recently I thought, that’s how I write but without the excuse of a 20 year vacation. You see, I have never really been proud of anything that I’ve written. I’ve been pleased with one or two pieces, but I will always go back and think there may have been a better way to have approached something, to have made it even better.

Also, I don’t often edit my stuff once I’ve written it, and to tell you the truth there isn’t much of a proofread either. I may change a word here or there once it’s published because I’ve noticed I’ve either missed something or misspelled something else. Nevertheless I’m usually just so glad to be done with it; I will just throw it out there as is. It’s like sex for me, it may not come out to be the best that I’ve ever had but the sheer joy of ejaculation will more than override the fact that I didn’t suck on this titty here or grab a hold of that butt cheek there. But like Hemingway’s novel, I'll drop ideas midstream and not head anywhere, and that probably isn’t good enough.

So this is it. This will be my resolution for the year. Even though I know that writing for the computer is different from writing for print, I will start to edit my pieces more. I will try not to bring up ideas that are dropped halfway through a paragraph or sentence. I will try to develop a steady flow through my work that will go from beginning to end. The spelling thing, I’m going to let go, if Word can’t fix it before it’s published then you’ll have no chance of me catching it.

So there it is, my first and only resolution for 2009: To try to write gooder.

Happy New Year!!!!

How much is too much Information?

I don’t get it, I really don’t. Maybe it’s a generation thing. Maybe it’s something like certain dance movements that you only do when you are in early 20’s because to do them when you are older would throw your spine so far out of alignment you’d have to walk with a cane for the rest of your life. I don’t understand why the need to share what we are doing every minute of the day with friends or even complete strangers. Now I’m not talking about people with small children who really do need to know where the kids are and that they are safe, or people who do that for security reasons. I’m referring to those of us who sign on to certain websites and log every minute detail of our lives no matter how dreary and obsequious those details may be.

About 2 or 3 months ago I signed up with Facebook because a friend asked me to. But apart from him and an organization that asked to become a friend, I have no one else listed as a friend. It is not because I want to remain reclusive or set apart from everyone else, but because I don’t really know anyone else who belongs to Facebook, so I mainly keep some junk on it that will be easy for me to find in the future and prevent me from cluttering up my computer. It’s another resource for me.

I should also mention that I belong to 4 or 5 groups that have pages on Facebook, one of which is my gym. Out of the 5000 members that belong to my gym there are about 144 of us who also signed up for this group and except for the trainers; I haven’t seen a single person that I know. But it is a source that I can use to learn things about different events going on, or schedules that I might not be aware of. Also, Facebook is an icon featured on my iPod so it’s all linked.

Recently I noticed that I had not filled out the profile part of the webpage for Facebook and that there was also a section where you could tell people what you were doing exactly at that moment. There was a field for about 30 or 60 characters or words where you could say what you were doing at that moment. You could tell people that you were heading over to the movies, or having a cup of coffee with Jill or soaking in the tub with Bob. These blurbs about your life would then be instantly sent out to your friends’ email bins, websites or sent out as a text message to their cell phones and I thought this must be how Twitter works.

But then I asked myself, why would I want to let people know about every minute of my hum drum life, it’s tedious enough just living it. And worse than that, why on earth would I want to know about someone else’s life minute by minute? So you felt a little ill after lunch, do I really need to know right away? That shit can wait, no pun intended.

Take for example I gave a homeless guy a dollar after he held the door for me at a convenience store this evening. Should I have let the world know right away? I don't think so. If it’s really that important to you we can talk and reflect about it at the end of the day over the telephone if I haven’t turned it off and if I know that’s what the conversation will be about it probably will be off.

I know that there are many people who have signed up for Twitter and I guess similar programs and I don’t mean to point fingers at anyone because it’s not about them, or even you, it’s about me. I like to be up on gadgets and trends and stuff, but this one… I don’t get. It's funny that I’ll show you a picture of my behind and maybe more in a heartbeat as long as the picture looks good, but Twitter somehow seems like it’s too much of an invasion of my privacy and that just doesn’t sit well with me.

Am I wrong?