I coalesce the vapors of human experience into a viable and meaningful comprehension.

Happy birthday to Mel Brooks!

In celebration of 84 years of the master here's a little AMC behind the scenes video of the making of Young Frankentein..

Success, fame, and fortune, they're all illusions. All there is that is real is the friendship that two can share.

What a sad day yesterday was. A couple of generational icons lost in a matter of few hours. In their own ways both Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson defined the decades in which they exploded into the American psyche.

I found myself oddly reflective last night about the death of Jackson. More than Farrah (I was a Heather Thomas pink bikini poster guy) he was the star that you really couldn't escape when I was a teenager in the 80s. I was not a fan. I should say: I tried not to be a fan. The guy was so talented he made that prospect difficult as hell.

A flood of memories of growing up in the 80s elbowed their way into my consciousness last night.

------------------------

I was with some buddies at the "Rhoddies." The Rhoddies are Portland's Rhododendron Garden located next to a golf course in Southeast Portland. The Rhoddies were a popular place for teenagers to drink and hang out for impromptu parties if you didn't have anything better to do on the weekend.

Somewhere a boom box was blaring what I'd like to think in this memory is "Beat It," although it could have just as well been Madonna or Culture Club. Everybody has fluffy 80's hair. I'm wearing by dark grey Miami Vice jacket with the sleeves rolled up.

At some point I broke away from my buddies and and was standing on a foot bridge by myself sipping a Bartles and James. It's an absolutely beautiful summer night. Bats were swooping down on the bugs by the lake. I remember thinking to myself: "goddammit, it's good to be alive."

--------------------

We're out at my grandparent's farm on the 4th of July. Besides shooting off illegal fireworks and stealing shots of grandpa's homemade cherry wine, we also spend a good portion of the day tearing around the property on my little red go cart and playing pick up football.

Practically everybody I love at that moment is in that one place.

-------------------

I'm sitting in my old, red Volkswagon Rabbit in the parking lot of McDonalds waiting for my girlfriend to get off her shift. I'm listening to the radio and as sure as I write this it's "Billie Jean."

When my she finally gets in the car there's some perfunctory discussion about where we're going to go. A movie? Grab something to eat? It's all bullshit. We know we're going to wind up parked on a dark street somewhere for some serious snogging and heavy petting.

She apologizes to me because she smells like french fries. I lie and tell her I can't smell the fries. The truth is she does, but I don't care. I like french fries.

--------------------

It's Halloween and "Thriller" is playing in the other room while I'm getting Frankenstein makeup applied to my face. I'm going to be the climax of this particular dance. The late, great Mark Zimmerman who was the King of Halloween has planned this dance as his Magnum Opus.

Mark has rigged a scaffolding in the middle of the dance floor going forty feet up to the ceiling of the gymnasium. To this he's affixed a pulley system. In my Frankenstein costume I'm going to be lying on a gurney under a sheet, wheeled out at the right moment to the song "Weird Science" and actually cranked up to the ceiling of the gym where Mark has placed strobe lights near the skylights to simulate lightning. All of this for a high school dance.

Because it was dangerous I asked some guys I could trust to actually wheel me out and run the pulley system. I couldn't see anything under the sheet as they pushed me into the gym and the other kids started cheering but I vividly remember my best buddy Jeff leaning over the sheet near my face, stinking of beer and whispering "have a nice trip, Frankie" just before he socked me in the nuts.

I was going to die.

Of course it went without a hitch and as soon they lowered me back down and as Oingo Boingo blurted "it's alive!" I hopped up and did my own version of Jack's zombie dance.

------------------------------

I'm in my high school history class and Mr. Sprinkle is rushing through his lesson so he can tell us "war stories" in the last 10 minutes of class. Mr. Sprinkle was in Vietnam and decided at some point that the best lesson he could give his students wasn't out of books. He could tell us stories from his own life about how horribly stupid war is.

Today he's telling us a horrible story about how American troops sometimes slept behind idling tanks to stay warm, even though ordered not to and how once a month a soldier would be killed when the tank backed over them.

In part because of Mr. Sprinkle I have a lifelong love of history, a deep distrust of authority and a wicked sense of humor.

-----------------------------

I'm on a date heading to a party and we're lost. Ahead of us smack dab in the middle of the street is a GIANT puddle. My date and I are arguing about whether my Rabbit can make it across. I say it can, she doesn't think there's a chance in hell.

I hit the gas and the car stalls right in the middle of the puddle. We both have to wade through a foot of water to shore so I can call a tow truck. That was my first and last date with that girl.

----------------------------

I'm sad about Michael Jackson passing. There was so much talent and potential in that guy and he just went off the rails. It's depressing that he was obviously so uncomfortable in his own skin. I kept hoping he'd get it turned around. He could hae been the elder statesman of pop music.

But truth be told was really brought tears to my eyes yesterday was all these memories from the time when Jackson really was the King of Pop. I thought about goofing around with my friends and family, being young and in love, dancing, and being so damned alive and sooooo damned stupid at the same time. Jackson's death makes all of that wonderful stuff seem so very far away.

It makes me feel so... old.

You are disturbing the peaceful mood I'm in. You are destroying the frame of mind I'm in.

They're shooting the show "Leverage" downstairs which made it fun getting into the office this morning. I'm a little bummed because Will Wheaton has been in Portland guest starring on that show and shooting all week but his stint ended before today. I would love to meet him.

Despite that I'm going to sneak out at some point and see if I can spot Timothy Hutton.

Also - if you don't regularly visit Kung Fu Monkey you should check it out. The blog's owner is the creator/ producer of "Leverage" and a fairly liberal guy who has written some GREAT essays against the use of force in Iraq, etc.

The world is divided into two kinds of people, those who have friends and those who are lonely like poor Tuco.

No blogging today as I'll be hiking along the Appalachian Trail for some "Me Time."

The new phone books are here!

Hooray! The Great Orange Satan recognized me! I've been retweeted by the King of All Liberals himself.

There is no such thing as a bad boy.

In the name of the holy Flying Spaghetti Monster what the hell are the editors of the print edition of the Oregonian thinking? The headline to this article on parents who murdered their fifteen-month-old daughter by treating her pneumonia with faith healing reads: "When Secular and Spiritual Laws Collide."

Hey Big-O! This country is not Iran. Our legal system is not built around Sharia law. There is no such thing in this country as "spiritual law." None. Zippo. Nada.

You might as well headline the article "When Secular Law and Tinkerbell Collide." It would be just as grounded in reality.

The laws of the United States, of which the last time I checked Oregon was a participating state, are secular. Period.

I'm hoping those secular laws run over these parents doing about 75 mph then back up and make sure they're finished just for good measure.

The purpose of our suffering is only more suffering.

I keep getting sucked into stuff at home and at work that's monopolizing my time but don't want to shut this blog down. I'm just going to post less frequently for a while. I assume at some point I'll get back to daily posting or something thereabouts.

In the post before last I mentioned that I thought the ignoring politics approach many of my blogger friends were taking was the sane approach to things. I just can't bring myself to do so. I've been a political junkie since I was was fifteen-years old and started reading the paper. It's as coded into my system as drinking coffee.

So I'm a hamster on the wheel.

It really is frustrating. The democrats, including Obama, suck. Sure- they don't suck anywhere near as bad as the GOP. Obama is a light years better president than the chimp who last sat in the Oval Office. But it's not nearly good enough.

Thirty years of conservative rule including a slavish devotion to the Free Market Fairies have taken their toll on this country. Now is not the time for baby steps walking that crap back. Yet baby steps are all Obama is giving us.

Take the health care debate as an example. I think we need a single payer solution. I would go so far as to say we will have a single payer solution at some point and the only question is how much pain we're going to have to work through between then and now to get to that point as the regressive forces in our society including big insurance companies fight such changes tooth and nail.

Yet single payer isn't on the table in Washington as health care reform is discussed. Instead Obama and the democrats punked themselves once again by making concessions before the debate even began in earnest and beginning with the centrist public option solution.

Because the rules that our elites work under insist we always consider the views of the whargarrbbbll right, regardless of what the voters say about those views we're going to get some sort of health care "reform" that's somewhere between the centrist public option and a regressive plan that actually forces the uninsured to by insurance from the crappy private insurers that are slowly choking the country to death. In short: no reform at all.

How are voters going to treat democrats if they not only fail to actually reform health care but make it worse with a market based approach? My guess is that it will be something along the lines of an electoral roundhouse kick to the nuts. A well deserved one at that.

Incidentally; this is why I don't care much about the Franken fight other than the fact he seems to send the Michelle Malkins of the world into a frothing fury. Even with a supermajority in the senate the democrats will be losers.

Steve Benen sums it up well...

After all, American voters gave Democrats a big majority in the House, a big majority in the Senate, and 365 electoral votes to the Democratic president. Obama has a 60% approval rating, and support for Republicans has plummeted.

It's tempting, then, to remind Democratic policymakers, as they negotiate with the shrinking minority party and back down on key priorities, "You won."

All true, but truth be told what really keeps me banging my head on my desk isn't the idea that we have to consider the ideas of republicans in legislation. Just belonging to a political party doesn't automatically make one wrong on the issues. No, what really sets me off is the the GOP as it's currently constituted is functionally batshiat insane. They bring nothing to the table these days besides their raving lunacy.

Why should the country be forced to entertain their angry, incoherent babbling?

What usually happens when people without guns stand up to people with guns.

Pretty obsessed these last couple of days with the news coming out of Iran. For one thing it's caused me to rethink my feelings about Twitter (Change_for_Iran and PersianKiwi) and reinforced my belief that the traditional media are useless.

I'm getting the same feelings from watching this as I got as Eastern Europe freed itself from totalitarian communism or watching those brave protesters in Tienanmen square face down provincial elements of the Chinese army. It's a strange mixture of hope along with fear for the lives of the protestors.

I sat the kids down and went through what's going on. Showed them some of the images coming out of Iran.

In a very real sense this revolution is being led by women. 60% of the students at the university's that are leading these protests are women. They seem to be suffering the bulk of the anger being brought upon the protesters by the regime's forces.

Besides many, many deaths I just read that five female students were killed AT THEIR DORMS last night. Fuck.




Thus far the army has kept on the sideline but the word is they're moving on the city. I hope that's not true.

Good? He is not good, he's terrible, he's the worst.. there is not any man like him anywhere in the world!

Poor conservatives. It's almost like the universe has it out for them. Jindal says volcano monitoring is a waste and a big ol' volcano erupts right in the middle of the republicanist state with the republicanist governor in the country. DHS releases a report warning that right wing violence may ensue out of frustration at the election, the righty talking heads go apeshit and just a few months later a wave of right wing terrorism sweeps the land.

They just can't catch a break. Reality keeps tieng them up, stuffing a gimp ball in their mouth and shoving them roughly into a chest.

Yet, like happy little troopers they aren't going to let the fact that they live in a world built wholly of delusion constructed out of the combined imagination of people like Malkin, Beck, Rand (*) or Goldberg. They're the energizer bunnies of bullshit.

Triumph of the Will indeed.

The current Champions of Asshattery have to be Sarah Palin and her legions of mouth-breathing followers who are taking the art of manufactured outrage to 11.

It's clear to any sentient being (and most of the non-sentient elements listed on the periodic table for that matter) that David Letterman's joke about Palin's daughter was aimed at Bristol Palin, not the 14-year old nobody outside of Eastern Crazy Wingnutia has ever heard of. This is the same adult Bristol Palin that's spent the last few months dancing around on my teevee babbling about not engaging in any acts of depravity before you were ready. Once you're old enough; deprave away! I know I like to deprave every chance I get.

Just a few remarks culled from the legions of Big Thinkers defending Palin-

Palin is dead-on. Letterman is expired. NBC is garbage. This backsliding American culture keeps lowering the morality bar lower and lower. Palin and others who stand up to the fall should be praised. - American

CBS should fire lettermen, i will avoid there sponsors,criminal action should be taken and letterman should be listed as a child porn person.he should have to register as a sex offender. - Chad

Letterman is a moronic pig. No matter what I think about Palin, Letterman is pathetic and will do anything for attention. The disgusting thing is that democrats just love him and as long as he's spitting over the fence, they don't care who he offends. - Richard

I know, I know. You're probably reading those comments and thinking to yourselves the same thing I'm thinking - "I'm hungry. I wonder how long that sandwich has been in the fridge at work and will my coworker miss it if I snag the the thing?"

You also might be having some of the other same things going through your mind as I did after regarding those comments. Why does the mainstream media cover this nonsense? Who are the pond scum that are on Letterman's case and why am I developing that eye tic that's making me look like Clouseau's Chief Inspector Dreyfus?

When you were young did you ever play a board game with a friend that didn't like losing so they just made up new rules as the game went along? Didn't it make YOU feel crazy? That's how I feel when I turn on the television or read the newspaper these days.

You know who the sanest among us are? People like liberality or Fran who pretty much dropped blogging about politics. They've made a wise, healthy decision not to abide crazy.

Good on 'em.

She sips nitro... with Phase 4 heads! 600 horsepower through the wheels! She's meanness set to music and the bitch is born to run!

Forgive me if I'm less than excited that the "Cash For Clunkers" bill passed the House.

The bill awards cash vouchers of $3500-$4500 for those willing to trade in a vehicle rated at an EPA estimated 18 mpg or less for a vehicle rated at a marginally better MPG.

If you can hear my cynicism bleeding through this writing then that would be because I consider this bill poor social engineering if you're trying to get more fuel efficient cars on the road. A better use of these limited federal funds would be to renew now defunct tax credits for the purchase of the most popular Toyota and Honda hybrids.

It seems to me that the environment would be better served by getting more city folks from marginally good MPG cars into excellent MPG hybrids than it would getting rural folks from sucky MPG trucks or SUVs into slightly less sucky MPG trucks or SUVS.

I realize that a big part of the push behind this bill has nothing to do with the environment. The idea is to give the U.S. auto industry a boost by moving some of the surplus sitting on lots as soon as possible. Great.

But if you REALLY wanted to help the U.S. auto industry long term then wouldn't this 4.5 billion be better spent on developing a hybrid or electric car that's affordable (i.e NOT a $40k Chevy Volt?)

Take a loss on the crap sitting on lots at the moment by drastically discounting it and selling it. Then start actually working to position itself for the rest of this century by focusing on inexpensive, environmentally sound cars.

But then I'm just some poor schlub blogging on the internet and not a politician. What do I know?