When The Dead Refuse To Die.

Go figure.....


Item 1) New Moon, the sequel to Twilight, has set a record for an opening day box office -- $72.7 million.  While I haven't seen it, longtime movie critic Roger Ebert, whom I trust, reports the movie seriously sucks.  Apparently people don't care that it sucks, as even here in Redlands, people camped out days before the movie opened to insure they'd be the first to see a sucky sequel to a sucky pop-culture phenomenon.  Lines stretched all the way from the theater to Redlands Blvd. and on down the block.

Item 2) Going Rogue, Sarah Palin's autobiography, has sold 300,000 copies on its day of release, and the initial print order of 1.5 million copies has been upped by an additional million. The one-day sale exceeds Hillary Clinton's book by fifty percent.

Is there something I'm not getting here?  A vampire drama swamps the theaters -- and the vampire is a vegetarian?  That Sarah Palin is still in the news, despite often looking like an idiot during her vice-presidential run, and subsequently quitting the governorship of Alaska?

Is it that a vampire and a folksy politician are both too cute to lay down and die, metaphorically?  One movie, and one election, are one too many for both.

An Apple A Day...

...sends the dentist my way.

Friday, a nice crisp apple separated one of my front teeth from its home of half a century.

 Shit...

I've never liked my teeth. My teeth have never liked me.  I'd rather go into battle in Afghanistan, armed with nothing more than a BB gun, than visit a dentist.  The only way I'll go is if a) the dentist hands over a double dose of Ativan, a tiny little pill which knocks me cleanly on my ass for 18 hours, and b) provides me a heavy mixture of Nitrous, which I will huff like a twelve year old trying to get high on airplane glue.

Once sedated, I will resist the temptation to kick and scream like a little girl, and instead surrender to the mind-expanding power of the chemicals swirling about in my brain.  Hours pass quickly, and I will find myself outside trying to remember the brilliant insights I'd had under the spell of the drugs. I do suspect, however, the last dentist I visited has not yet been able to remove the claw marks from the arms of his chair while I waited for the good stuff to kick in.

Once home, I will sleep like the dead for a solid 12 hours, and remember nothing at all from the experience, or the entire previous day, for that matter.  This can be something of a problem at work if you're required to, say, know what you did before you headed for the exam.

Perhaps I'll just look for work in Hollywood as a character actor.  It is, after all, about time for a remake of Deliverance, and what with my missing tooth, I can play hillbilly #3. Cue the banjos, please....

Dave vs. Dobbs -- My Ongoing War With The Redlands Daily Facts

My wife cringes when I sit down each evening to read The Facts, our little community newspaper here in Redlands.

She cringes because she knows that on any given night, I will find something that will turn me into a raging, vein-popping, bug-eyed, up-close-and-personal local version of Lewis Black.

It's not that there's no news in The Facts. I'm accustomed to that; I resigned myself to the new realities of community journalism a long time ago. What stirs me up like a turbocharged Oster blender set on warp drive are the typos, pagination errors, style absurdities, and just plain amateurism I find on a routine basis.

When it really gets to me, I grab the paper and head for the computer. My wife will go "uh-oh" and ask to see what I write to Facts editor Jennifer Dobbs. I suspect she wants to know if she should be dialing the phone for a defense attorney.

I felt compelled to fire off one of my famous Nastygrams again just a few hours ago. It seems that they have hired a reporter who, I suspect, never finished middle school, much less journalism school. I have never seen an article printed in any newspaper (even The Facts!) with such poor sentence structure, misspelled words, or bad grammar. I'd give you examples, but I'm trying hard to keep my blood pressure below flash point.

I practically demanded that editor Dobbs email a reply, and she did. Here's what it said:

I looked at the piece after receiving your e-mail and agree it should not have run and it wasn't scheduled to run. I need to talk to staff and find out why that happened.

Thank you for bringing it to my attention.

I'm glad that the article should not have run, but it begs the question: Why was Ms. Dobbs not aware of the story until I alerted her to it?

I just don't have it in me to ask.

Small steps, David. Small steps...

Now I Know Where The Term "Finish Line" Comes From

This is amazing video. These Finns make anybody, in any American motorsport, look like a bunch of pansies. And did I mention the spectators? I can almost see them holding scorecards, ala Dancing With The Stars, each time a car crashes in a ditch, flips three times, mows down a telephone pole and half a dozen pine trees: "8!" "9!" "8!" Golf claps all around, please.

Now, mind you, these cars all look like stockers with roll bars added. Look at the bottoms of the cars, and you'll see no shiny race bits, just stock exhausts with mufflers and skinny tires. So, in all probability, these cars have seen a decade's worth of road use (and road salt, this being Finland) so they're probably rusty as all get out. Perfect for bending around Aspens.

While this is a compilation of lots of races, there's at least one sequence where not two, not three or four, but at least 10 cars crash at the same spot in the same race. Remind me never to get in a bar fight with a Finnish rally driver -- these guys are tough.

Click the link!

Crazy Finns Crashing - with pure crashing sounds

If you think that's fun, check 'em out in the snow...

Rally crash compilation special snow rally

There's dozens more rally videos on You Tube from all over Europe, but I think the Finns have the market cornered on Crazy. Enjoy!

Obama and the Afghanistan Decision.

The President has been taking a lot of time making up his mind about what to do about the level of troop deployment in Afghanistan. His leading general tells him he needs 40,000 more people to make progress, and by progress he means securing the villages from attack, not wiping out the opposition. Others close to the President, so the leaks/rumors have it, are telling him to send 20,000 guys and just blow the hell out of anything that moves.

The recent elections were a farce and it revealed the true face of the current Afghan leadership, which is to say their isn't any, at least in the democratic sense. Karzai looks like he tried to steal the election, and it's been well publicized that Karzai's own brother is a crook, and apparently on the take from the CIA as well. Not a really good endorsement of our efforts so far, wouldn't you say?

So, here's my two bits on the topic. I think Obama is stalling because he wants to see if Karzai can get his shit together. If he can't, Obama is going to pull the plug on the whole mess and walk away, saying "we did what we could", to the extent that the coalition will let him/us get away with it. I think that would just be fine, though Hillary would cough up a hairball.

Not a bad solution, since Al Qaeda and Bin Laden are well holed up in Pakistan, not Afghanistan anymore, and the Pakis have their own problems that ultimately are more far reaching than their own region -- I'm talking about their stockpile of nukes, which a whole bunch of terrorists would love to get their hands on.

I hope the CIA has done their homework on that one. Oh, and did I mention the mess in Iran?