Mel Hunter has to be on guard every moment and he is never safe. His very existence is one of the greatest, and most closely guarded secrets in the history of of counter espionage. Things that most people don’t notice could mean death for him!
This is legit and it is a precursor to what became one of the coolest openings for a TV show ever. In a television movie that predates the show, Steve Austin becomes more than the man he was, as Dusty Springfield compels us to catch him, beat him, and love him; if we can. Six Million Dollar Man is swinging. He’s THE MAN!
My next door neighbor Scott Kerman and I were pretty good friends growing up and he was the only grandchild of rich grandparents, so he had all of the great action figures and their accessories. Before Star Wars the action dolls for boys like GI Joe were all twelve inches tall. I never had any of these kinds of toys growing up but my favorite one that Scott had was the Evel Knievel stunt cyle, Scott had the Steve Austin that you could actually see through the bionic eye with. Scott also has the Oscar Goldman doll with the exploding briefcase that is featured in the next clip.
Bethany, who was breastfed until she was five, thinks her mother’s milk is better than anything in the world, even mango! She calls her mothers breast Milk Eeyore, and she would rather taste her mothers breast milk than eat a million melons! Weird and wild stuff that has to be experienced to be completely realized.
This is something that I found that is too cool. More people need to check it out. Cliche action movie dialog is layered with killer classic rock in a way that creates a compelling narrative. This one is a wicked bit of agitprop that is possibly in violation of a multiplicity of copyrights. Attorney / lobbyist / character actor / United States Senator, Fred Thompson features prominently all over this thing.
Bush’s eight years as President really kicked into high gear after 9/11’s big boom and this little dillio does the same. Bullshit braggdocio promises of vengence like the kind that comprise Mr. Bush’s legacy assure us that the bad guys are going down and then…..it’s on! I was all wtf as I sat there for two and half well spent minutes, and then again to make sure. It is true! This joint is rawkin’!
“And it don’t know who’s problem it is, but somebody needs to get their ass on the plane and figure this out!” -Some dude interviewed in New Orleans during the chaos that followed Hurricane Katrina.
Let’s not forget that when FEMA finally began figuring the situation out it was three days later, and all hell had broken loose throughout The Big Easy. Michael Brown, the head of FEMA at the time, betrayed his own ignorance of the situation’s gravity, live on CNN. Of course maybe those complainers down at the convention center who chanted, “we need help”, wouldn’t have been so quick to bitch, if they knew the kind help they were going to get.
Trailers eventually provided by FEMA for the families displaced by Katrina’s in discriminant wrath actually turn out to be toxic. It’s true, the plywood in the trailers gives off toxic levels of formaldehyde gas and that is no good for the people who are trying to live inside. It makes them sick. I digress.
“This kind of government knows how to help business to encourage it.” -Indicted. Enron CEO Ken Lay
Royals and the Uber rich know about the the pill and, how at the last minute you can take it to prevent your world from being snatched away. Officially the death certificate says that Ken Lay died from a heart attack, but it is likely that he took his own life, the one he grown accustomed to, to prevent a hostile takeover.
I imagine Ken popping a tiny latch on the locket contained in his signet ring to reveal the pill inside, before he throws his head back and tosses it down his gullet. There would be no more long weekends in Aspen, and no more expense account lunches, but it was on his terms and not theirs.
“This will not be an age of tyranny.” -GWB
Why anyone would want to be President I am not sure. In GW’s case his motivation most likely involved a choice between resistance and a lack there of. In three weeks someone else is going to get the job that makes a President age rapidly in increments proportionate with the perils they are forced to contend with. Regardless of who wins, I hope that the future, former President is right, and that it will not be an “age of tyranny”, the last eight years of that kind of crap was enough.
The house in Wallingford was a scene, with guys coming by starting at about nine in the morning until midnight on working days, and intermittently here and there on the other days, but they never saw me or knew that I lived there. Frankly the furtive existence did not suit me or the ginormous personality I carry around with me and that is my curse. My arrival in Seattle to be the houseboy and live in lover for the woman who owned the house and coordinated the whole operation, turned out out to be less fun than I had anticipated.
Two girls and I lived in the house that, like many in Seattle, is built into a hill, but there were at least ten or so others who worked out of the place. It had a finished basement with two massage rooms and, in a third larger room that was once the garage, a hot tub platform where most people park their car at night. We lived upstairs and all of the business went on down in the basement of the house that is situatuated at the intersection of two pretty mellow residential streets. The house was purchased specifically because of it’s easy access to 99, a main thoroughfare, and because it’s corner spot simplified the process of directing clients there.
My relationship with the woman ended badly and there was a lot of mutual hostility between us but she was crazy and controlling and that didn’t work so well for me. Later I learned that after I left she finally went through with her plan to completely outfit the house with white security bars and beaming spotlights that illuminated the entire place with the intensity of the sun all night long. Of course with the amount of illegitmate traffic that came and then went everyday, and enhanced security measures that made the house stand out like a sore thumb in the neighborhood, it din’t take the po po very long until they also paid a call.
Tammy, the girl who also lived in that house with us, filled me in on the details of the bust one night when I randomly encountered her at a bar downtown. She was on her way to San Francisco with her boyfriend. I was drunk when we saw one another so I cannot remember if she told me that she was still living at the house when it all went down. Tammy and I laughed as we recounted the desperation of that house, behavior we witnessed together as a result of fate’s simple twist.
This guy that I know recently lined up a pay to play situation with a woman that he found on craigslist and when the dough came up out of his pocket, the vice squad busted in and arrested him for solicitation. He had done this sort of thing before and there hadn’t been any trouble but this time, like on Dateline To Catch A Predator, the police used the internet to get their sting on. He has to pay a bunch of money and do a ton of community service hours, but he doesn’t have to register as a sex offender because, unlike on Dateline To Catch A Predator, he is was not trying to get his freak on with a minor.
Like the war on drugs, the idea that sex for pay can be abolished or even discouraged, by enforcing laws that really should be determined by an individual’s personal moral code, is absurd. Sex is money. So long as humanity endures, the sacred prostitute, like death and taxes, will continually remain. Sex is a demand that is genetically programmed into all of the animals including humans and it is a hunger that does not diminish. Money is empowering because provides opportunities for those who have it.
Continually attempting to eliminate an irrefutable constant of human existence is akin to trying to murder a shadow, it just is not going to happen. Only when the governments of the earth declare that they will no longer be collecting a portion of their citizenry’s income will paid sex become an outdated concept. If the unlikely day ever arrives that money stops being exchanged for sex, it will certainly be heralded with bold headlines in newspapers around the globe. For sure, if that day should come, the other big news will undoubtedly be that science has found the way to immortality.
I heard an 18 year old porn star interviewed this morning on the Stern Show. Generally this is the kind of guest who is par for the course on Howard’s Show, but Summer Verona was not only introduced to the porn game by her step father, he also serves as her manager, and in this capacity, the step father is on set to supervise her escapades. We also learned that her step father is the one who takes it upon himself to make sure that her mons pubis is appropriately shorn for action and that he does the waxing himself. Now I am about as open minded as it gets and have very little problem with things that many would cringe at, but a step daddy shopping his wife’s barely grown daughter around to porn producers seems just a little inappropriate. Surely a step father grooming the genitalia of his wife’s daughter is over the invisible line that seperates icky from o.k..
This weekend in the New York Times there was an article about how some of the soldiers that left for Iraq and Afghanistan confident, capable, and mentally stable are returning rattled, broken, and in some cases, as a menace to society. Of course when individuals are forced to confront the horror and devastation that a war machine and it’s weapons can inflict, it can wreak havoc inside a persons mind and things that were formerly considered reasonable can distort, and become entirely new perceptions and sensations. It starts when you enlist, and the concepts of diplomacy and tolerance are forsaken on behalf of force and power. We teach our children not to raise their fists to one another, yet as adults we solve our most vexing problems through strength and violence, bending others to our agenda or else, as Reagan joked about The USSR, the bombing will begin in five minutes. The maxim is simple; a knife beats a club, a gun beats a knife, a bomb beats a gun, and a nuclear bomb is the trump card. You can check out the entire article at this link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/us/13vets.html?scp=1&sq=veteran+%2B+murder
Back in 1989 when I was serving onboard the U.S.S. IOWA (BB-61), I was primerman for the center gun in turret number one on the day that Brian Gendron, the Primerman for center gun in turret number two was obliterated along with 46 other guys. Some of the victims that day were blown apart into tiny unrecognizable bits, and others who could surely could see their demise coming by the position of their lifeless bodies, were only strangled to death by the thick, acrid smoke, that accompanied the fire. Like myself, Brian Gendron had joined the Navy to earn college money, and to say he eagerly awaited his discharge is an understatement of the highest order because he loathed the Navy, and as it turns out, rightfully so.
The eleven hours that I spent in that hell retrieving the bodies of those guys, completely changed my life, and I can honestly say that I have never thought about anything the same way ever since. They offered us counseling and made psychiatrists available to anyone who wanted to talk to them, but the culture in the military is big on machismo and rugged individualism, so most of us chose not to speak with someone who might have helped us to make sense of the whole goddamned mess. When all of this happened I wasn’t even twenty years old yet and frankly I really had no idea how important it could be to talk about something so traumatic. The bottom line is the military had a responsibility to force treatment upon me and everyone else who was there that day, especially those of us who went into that turret to retrieve the fallen. To this day I have never sat down with anyone to sort through the dark cloud of emotions that were aroused by the events of that day and I wonder how my life might have been diferent had I not been there that day at all. At least I remain to consider such thoughts, of the four of us that sat together at breakfast on the morning of April 19, 1989, I was the only one left alive by dinner time that night.
After I was finished with The Navy I asked my Dad why he did not talk me out of enlisting and his answer was that he did not talk me into it. Sometimes, what seems like the right decision turns out to be not so much, while at other times, choices may seem entirely appropriate to an individual while society at large looks on with disdain. Life can be tricky, and it’s truths will always be elusive, but there are two certainties generally accepted by most people; Veterans deserve treatment for PTSD, and parents should never take up the cause of hair removal on their childrens genetalia. Have a great day everyone. Oh yeah, one more thing; Rest In Peace Brian.
Watching the holiday cooking segment this morning with Regis, Kelly, and her kids as they were flinging sugar onto each other and making a big mess of the set, I couldn’t help but think that the scene would definitely not have played out in my own childhood. Of course they were playing things up for the cameras, but I could easily imagine holiday baking at Kelly’s house with those precocious kids being such a cavalier affair, she is rich after all, and can afford to be playful, and no doubt has the domestic staff to clean up after such carefree dalliances.
My Mom was probably playful once but parenthood and life had changed that, and she was the one who would have been cleaning up the mess as she had been all along, so she wasn’t so inclined to goof around. Mom was the girl in a patriarchal household and she was the one who had the “responsibility” to maintain the house that was home to me, my brother, and my Dad. I cannot begrudge the woman for not tossing sugar all around the kitchen willy nil, because there was not a snowballs chance in hell that we boys would be around later to help make sense of the fray.
My Dad doesn’t understand the concept of playfulness to this day and he is 66, but back then he was so tight that the man undoubtedly had to unlace his asshole to take a shit in the morning. I used to sneak out of the house as a teenager by going out of my bedroom window and my Dad would be more angry that I used the window instead of the door than he would that I snuck out in the first place because teenagers sneaking out is to be expected, but using the window showed a lack of respect for what he had worked so hard to achieve.
Sonya invited me to go and spend Xmas with her and her parents this year and I can’t help but compare the idea to the most overplayed of all Xmas fables, Dickens’ holiday classic. We dated for over four years and spoke of the possibility of a marriage, but it was the same old story, woman wants more than the man is willing or able to give. Having her invite me to come and be with her and her family at this most familial of times is like being visited by the ghost of Christmas that never was. Of course being much less masochistic than I was as a younger man, I readily declined her invite preferring, this holiday season, to remain as I came into the world and as I will go out of this world, alone.
You could call me a Grinch but that would be a misnomer because the green fiend is merely indicative of a particular season, (despite what the 1977 Emmy nominated Halloween television special on CBS would try and have us believe), I on the other hand am cynical, angry, bitter, and pissed off all year round. There are no dead trees in my home decorated with ornaments or anything else, and no one is going to show up in the middle of the night to give me anything other than some drunken kisses and an STD.
My boss went to pick her girlfriend up at work the other day and while she was waiting in the lobby noticed there was a crèche on display. Upon closer inspection she noticed that the only men in the scene were Joseph an unwed father, and the shepherds, all of whom were decidedly unwise guys. The three who reportedly followed a star from lands far off had not gotten there yet it would seem. Upon inquiry the business owner who had assembled the incomplete nativity revealed that he had left them out on purpose, because they were astrologers.
Holiday once meant Holy Day, nowadays it means spend and buy and then spend some more, and because I have no money the relevance of the whole occasion is lost to me. There is no “war on Christmas”, except for the actual war that is being waged somewhere far away on Christmas day and the other 364 non Christmas days of the year as well. The presumed holiness of the day is long gone much like the three missing men in the crèche, and we have instead allowed consumerism to become the reason for the season. Give til hurts this year people, and then take until it doesn’t hurt so much anymore.
