Wednesday, April 16, 2008

A Few Blasts From The Past

Desiderata Update
you are a fluke of the Universe
you have no right to be here
whether you know it or not
the Universe is laughing behind your back
AirAlan # Friday, March 24, 2006

When Textbooks Writers Don't Have a Clue
I pulled out a copy of my wife's new high school history text. It explains the witch hunts of 17th century Salem, Massachussets, as a manfestation of male hatred for women accompanied by fear of their sexuality. I hate to be the one to have to clue in a textbook writer but men don't fear female sexuality. They crave it. They fantasize about it. They spend hours dreaming up ways to get more of it. Anyway, haven't the authors ever noted that it was a group of teenage girls who accused the old women witchcraft? Were they all motivated by fear and hated of women too?
AirAlan # Wednesday, March 23, 2005

How Brown Was My Grass
I was standing in my kitchen sipping coffee and idly staring out the picture window when a big expensive dog walked onto my lawn, squatted down and took a big dump on the grass. "Hey," I said, heading for the door. But before I could do anything, a big Mercedes came pulling up, the door flew open, the dog jumped in and away they went. I was astounded. I'd never seen anything so brazen. A clear case of shit-and-run.
AirAlan # Monday, February 21, 2005

The Global (Homeless) Village
There was a homeless man standing in the parking lot of the local supermarket this afternoon. He was a husky young guy with a shopping cart filled up with bundles of clothes and apparently everything else he owned. As I walked past him, I heard him say, "I'll get you, I swear. If it kills me I'll get you." He was talking into a cell phone.
AirAlan # Saturday, December 04, 2004

Weather Reporting a Pack of Cliches
Half the stories I read about Hurricane Ivan said it was "packing" 140 or 150 mph winds. Why is it hurricanes "pack" winds? A hurricane doesn't pack winds. It is wind. They should have said hurricane-force winds struck Mobile, or hit Mobile, or swept Mobile, raked Mobile--anything but "packed." Why not: "a hurricane hit Mobile with 140 mph winds." It knocked down trees and streetlights and blew out candles in the exeutive dining room of the Picayunne Bugle-Trumpet-Clarion-Guardian-Times.
AirAlan # Friday, September 17, 2004

Empty Minds and Anchormen
Smog season is on us. TV anchormen talk about "another great weekend". Hot and sunny, as if we have nothing better to do than lie on the beach and get skin cancer. Lying on the beach is great for about five minutes. After that, anyone with any gumption in life wants to try something else.
AirAlan # Monday, August 23, 2004

Why Girls Wear Pink and Boys Wear Blue
I was thinking recently, why is it that pink is for girl babies and blue is for boys? Such things don’t come about arbitrarily. I’m wondering if perhaps it doesn’t have to do with the color of their genitalia. Females are pink inside their labia. The glans penis in a rock hard erection has a bluish hue. Since the sex organs are the essence of the difference between boys and girls, people over time began dressing girls in pink and boys in blue.Another question. All over the world women wear skirts and men wear pants. That couldn’t be just arbitrary either. Otherwise there would be societies where the women were pants and the men wear skirts. I’m guessing the reason is ease of urination. If women could pee with their pants on they would wear pants too. In the olden days before there were such things as public toilets women just spread their skirts, squatted on the ground and peed. I remember reading that in Victorian times when men and women used to promenade in London Parks, it was not uncommon for a woman to get out of her carriage, in her big hooped gown, squat down and relieve herself. Men, of course, having a flexible extension, could just unloose a few buttons and walk behind the nearest tree.Nowadays, of course, with public restrooms nearly everywhere, no one has to pee in the grass. As a result women increasingly wear pants, the same as men.Postscript: In rural Vietnam where both men and women wear loose fitting black pajamas I once saw a teenage girl pee by standing on one leg while she held her other leg at a 30 degree angle. The girl just peed down the inside of her pajama leg between the (loose fitting) material and the inside of her leg. She did it quite deftly, apparently wetting neither her pajamas nor her leg. They she put her foot down and walked away, leaving nothing but a little puddle in her wake.
AirAlan # Tuesday, January 06, 2004

Watching the Rose Bowl From the Parking Lot
Late in the afternoon on December 31st, I pedaled over to the Rose Bowl to look at the floats (I never go to the parade itself, not wanting to put up the crowds, the cold and lack of sleep). The ballfields and picnic grounds south of the stadium were filled with campers and trailers parked cheeck by jowl under the trees and on the grass. Kids were throwing footballs. Lots of people were drinking beer, warming themselves around portable fireplaces (sort of oversize screensided grills), cooking hamburgers and hotdogs and, surprising of all to me, watching TV. Many people had TVs mounted on stands ourside their RVs and connected to satellite dishes on the roofs. They were sitting there on lawn chairs watching TV as if they were in their living rooms. One person even had two large size TVs, placed side by side against his TV. That was strage I thought. Why haul two TVs with you to watch the game when you were at the game (or would be) the following afternoon. And then it dawned on me. Lots of people weren't going to the game after all. They'd drive all the way from Michigan in some cases to watch their team play USC. But they either didn't care to walk the final 300 yards to see the game in person (they hadn't been able to get tickets). Still they didn't want to miss out on all the excitement. The roar of the crowds. The electricity in the air. So they bought along their TVs so they could sit under a tree next to their RV a few hundred yards from the Rose Bowl and watch the game on TV.
AirAlan # Sunday, January 04, 2004

Growing Old in Los Angeles
The last time I flew back to western Pennsylvania from Los Angeles to visit my mom, I took my camera and eight rolls of film and the morning after I arrived I went out the field across the road from my mother’s house and started taking pictures. It was a spectacular morning. It had rained heavily for the four days prior to my arrival. But this morning was clear and bright with a deep blue sky, puffy white clouds and big (spectacularly green) towering trees and sunlight dappled grass. It was cheerful and welcoming that when I got back home to Los Angeles I scanned one of the pictures and made it into my computer’s opening screen "wallpaper." Now when I turn on my computer in the morning, the first thing I see is this sunny brightly-lit image of my old family home where I spent most of the first 18 years of my life, running through the fields, riding bikes, sleds, scooters, climbing trees, building snowmen, catching fireflies, eating dinner on the back porch, watching the stars come out on the front, and generally doing all the hundreds of things that young kids do when they’ve been lucky enough to grow up in the Pennsylvania countryside.I also realized for the first time clearly something I’d been increasingly aware of in recent years. Notwithstanding Los Angeles’s reputation as a this wonderful, sun-bathed, cutting-edge city where so many trends that later sweep across America get their start, the quality of life in Los Angeles (even the sophistication) is in many ways decidedly inferior to that of western Pennsylvania. I first had this thought last year when I kept flying back to my parent’s home to visit my dying father. Shopping one day in the big Giant Eagle near my mom’s house (about two miles west of Greensburg just off Route 30), it suddenly dawned on me. "Hey, for a supermarket, this place is really nice." It was easily twice as big (and clean) as the supermarkets I patronize here in Los Angeles. There were wider aisles, bigger, more attractive produce displays, tile floors. The staff all spoke English and there were no pan-handlers outside the door and the parking lots were litter free.It’s not that people don’t litter in western Pennsylvania (walking through a weed-covered field near Route 30 I once found a rusted .32 caliber revolver that someone had tossed out a car window decades before), but I think they realize that at the very least that tossing one’s trash out the window is a sin. Here in Los Angeles, where over half the population is foreign born (oftentimes in countries such as Mexico where littering is so far down on the list of public offenses it doesn’t even register), littering is out of control. I live in a nice middle class residential neighborhood where people take care of their homes, immediately remove all graffiti and drive nice cars (I count two Mercedes, a Porsche and Jaguar just on my book). But because my house is on a corner lot and I have a high redwood fence and a couple of tall trees running along one side of my house, people sometimes think they’re in the high Sierras. They toss wax mega-sized wax coated soft drink cups on my yard and sidewalk, beer cans, condoms, panties, the contents of their ashtrays and Styrofoam containers with the remains of fried rice and re-fried bean dinners. Although the city of Los Angeles provides a free bulky-item pickup service for things that won’t fit in a normal trash container, apparently a lot of people haven’t been residents long enough to know of the service (or they don’t want to pay a fee to drop it off themselves at the city dump). Driving around town it’s not unusual to find discarded hot water heaters or rusting kitchen sinks abandoned up against chain link fences. Last year I woke up to discover someone had left an easy chair on the sidewalk next to my house. Not long after that, I gave a ride home to one of my son’s friends and discovered, a block from his house, that someone had apparently put a old inflatable swimming pool in the back of his pickup truck, filled it with pieces of broken concrete from some construction job, and then instead of dumping it, backed up to a corner fire hydrant, draped one end of the plastic pool over the top and drove away, leaving a stretched-out, concrete filled, plastic pool half-blocking the intersection.People always talk about the joys of big city life, the cultural advantages, the coffee shops, concerts, "the plays.’ Well, I’ve lived in the northeastern corner of Los Angeles (between Glendale and Pasadena) now for the past 16 years and in all that time I haven’t gone to more than a 12 plays (and that includes the four that my sons were in). I like all the coffee shops that are blossoming all over the place, including half-a-dozen here in Eagle Rock, but the layout of the Glendale Barnes and Noble is almost precisely the same as that of the one I used to visit near my father’s convalescent hospital in Greensburg so that at times I wasn’t sure which one I was really in.People talk about the great weather here in Los Angeles and it’s true we never have sleet or snow and (at least this year) hardly any rain either. But hazy hot sunshine every day for months on end isn’t my idea of great weather. I know that snow and sleet or even just plain mud is no fun either but unrelenting sunshine is no great improvement either. On the Friday night news you can hear the local TV weatherman enthusing about the sun, saying the same thing they said the previous week and the week before that: "Looks like another great weekend folks. Sunny skies. Warm temperatures. A great day for the beach." They assume that all everyone wants is sunny skies every day and there’s nothing better in life than tanning yourself on the beach. But after a full quarter century in Los Angeles it’s more than clear to me that sunny skies (especially hot hazy summer skies) is not a consummation devoutly to be wished. It’s like having fried liver and onions for dinner five nights a week. The first night be fine. The second time is tolerable. The rest of the time it’s simply depressing. Human beings thrive on change, not the same (allegedly great) weather day after day. The writer Tom Boyle once complained that he never could get used to the weather in Los Angeles. To write, he said, what you need is rain pounding against the windows. I read somewhere else that the human mind is most productive when the outside air temperature is 46 degrees. I hope that’s not true for it only gets down to 46 degrees here for a few weeks a year at 3 am in February.The director Orson Welles once said something that always struck me as unusually profound--you sit down in an easy chair in Los Angeles as a young man and when you get up you’re 75. A lot of people thought he was making a joke, but there’s a lot to that and much of it has to do with the weather, the relentless sunshine and virtual lack of seasons. Winter here is almost a joke. The leaves don’t change color here till mid-or late November. They finally fall off the trees around Christmas. There may or may not be a cold rain in January and by the beginning of February all the apricot trees down on Colorado Boulevard are in full bloom. Once when I was talking a Los Angeles psychologist I mentioned how much I missed the seasons and she dismissed it out of hand, saying what I was really missing was nostalgia for my vanished youth. Well no, actually, it was the seasons, the sense of time passing, the daily reminder from snow, rain, blossoms and falling leaves that the earth was once more making its great circuit around the sun and that things did not go on forever, that this life was not a dress rehearsal and if there was something you wanted to do with your life you’d better do it now because life didn’t give you a second chance.
AirAlan # Thursday, January 01, 2004

A couple of great quotes from the Liberty Forum
"What is a useless man? A man fit neither to command nor obey." Goethe This reminds me of what Ted Turner once said: "Lead, follow or get out of the way.""I don't trust a man who consults God before he consults me." William Gladstone Sounds like Gladstone (1) has a tremendous ego and (2) knows that people who put their trust in god and not in man can be saints or fanatics. In either case, they do what they want to do and don't let their judgment be clouded (or some would say, guided) by the opinions of other men.
AirAlan # Saturday, December 27, 2003

I just read a story about a woman who was chased for three miles by the park police as she floated down a Colorado river on an inner tube, drinking Margaritas and cheerfully taunting the cops. When she finally pulled out at the municipal dock, they arrested her for (1) not having an approved flotation device, though if you ask me I don’t know what more of a flotation device one could want than an inner tube and (2) for not carrying identification (she was in a bathing suit). And that brings up something I’ve wondered about all my life. I know I almost never carry my wallet when I go jogging or bike riding (and certainly not when I go swimming). So if the cops ever stop me I wouldn't have identification either. Does that mean I could be arrested? That’s a hell of a note. How is one supposed to carry identification in a pair of jogging shorts or in a swimming suit? Besides, what’s wrong with not carrying identification? Don’t the thought police in this country have anything better to do than arrest swimmers for not carrying their photo IDs?
AirAlan # Saturday, December 27, 2003

Voice of America: "The US Navy has stopped and seized a boat carrying drugs in the Persian Gulf, and officials say some of the crew members may have ties to the al-Qaida terrorist network."Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the Queen of England has ties to Prince Charles who has ties to the gay underground who has ties "Angels in America," a character in which once worked for Joe McCarthy who once dated John F. Kennedy's sister who had ties to Marilyn Monroe who had ties to Joe DiMaggio who had ties to Mrs. Robinson.
AirAlan # Friday, December 19, 2003

What do I Care if You're a "Nice" Mortgage CompanyListening to ads on talk radio while making breakfast this morning reminded me again how radio advertisements reveal our secret fears and desires. There was an ad by a credit company ("Bad credit? No problem.") that ended with the remark, "And guess what? We're nice people too."My first thought: "I sincerely doubt that." But even if it were true, so what? If I came to you to refinance my house, I wouldn’t care how nice you were. What would concern me was how professionally you did your job. (And I'm sure when it comes to lending me money, you couldn't care less what a nice person I am.) Are people so desperate for human relationships here in Los Angeles that they actually care whether or not their refinance company is made up of "nice people"?There’s a clothing company that advertises on Dennis Prager. The final line in their ad: "We treat you nice."There’s a car dealership that ends their ad, apropos of nothing at all, "The value is in the friendship." Well, who wants to be friends with their auto dealer? How often do you see him? Once ever five years, and that’s assuming you go back to the same dealership. What do you care if he’s your friend or not. What you want is someone who will sell you a good car at a decent price and stand behind the warranty. Whether you become lifelong friends in the process doesn’t seem especially important one way or the other.So what’s going on? Are we Los Angelinos so desperate for human contact we make friends out our bankers and car dealers? I read that 60% of the people who live in Los Angeles were born somewhere else, either another state or, increasingly, another country. Maybe the people who write radio ads know something we don’t. People really are so fragmented and lonely here that they’d much rather buy a car from someone who treats them like an old friend than from a professional who merely gives them a good deal at a fair price.
AirAlan # Thursday, December 11, 2003

The Petty Fucking PressI can't believe how petty the press has become these days. They jumped all over Bush when one of his aides said that a British Airways pilot had radioed Bush's plane in flight, saying, "Did I just see Air Force One?" The aide, who apparently wasn't familiar with air traffic proceedures, got it slightly twisted. The pilot who made the remark wasn't talking to Air Force One. He was talking to Air Traffic Control. And it wasn't a British Airways pilot. It was the pilot of another plane in the vicinity that was overheard by Air Force One.To me those are such minor mistakes that they aren't even even worth mentioning. In any case, I certainly don't see how they add or detract from Bush's trip one way or the other. So why even mention them? Yet the press was overjoyed to have caught a Bush spokesman in what they clearly regarded as another blantant soul-searing lie. One reporter even asked about morality of lying to Air Traffic Control. As if it would have been better to tell the truth, alert the terrorists and risk getting the president's plane shot down. Or, better yet, given that the president had to lie to make the trip safely, maybe he ought not to have gone at all (which is what the reporters clearly preferred, since they knew it was a big hit with the public).Same thing with "Turkey-gate." When Bush flew to Baghdad, he picked up a tray with a roasted turkey and bunches of grapes. Apparently it wasn't part of the plan. Bush saw the turkey, knew it would make a good photo-op--the modest caring president serving his troops. Then he put down the tray and went behind the steam counter and actually did serve the troops turkey on their metal trays. But this huge outcry went up when the press discovered that this turkey was simply for display, not for eating. One would think they'd caught Bush sodomizing the bird, not just holding it.Most recently the press is all over a politician again. This time it's John Kerry. Drudge is trumpeting that he unleased "a foul mouthed attack" on Bush. Bascially in an interview with Rolling Stone he used the f-word--once. He said, "I don't give a fuck." I mean, come on? You're talking to a reporter in your living room, knocking back a few. And after two or three hours you let it slip that you don't "give a fuck" about one or another of Bush's policies. So what if Kerry said, "I don't give a fuck." We're supposed to shit or go blind?No wonder people complain they can't trust the press. Reporters are supposed to help us understand the major issues of the day so we can vote and otherwise intelligently exercise our rights as citizens. And then we turn on the TV and all we see are news bulletins on Turkey-Gate.
AirAlan # Monday, December 08, 2003

The "Arabrein" SolutionRadio talk show host Dennis Prager talks more about evil more than anyone I know. Saddam is "evil." Islam is "evil." The Palistinians are "evil." The reason, of course, for all this evil talk is to obscure our own culpability. If our enemies attack us because they are evil and not because of anything we did to them then we don’t have to change our behavior. We are blameless, spotless, little white lambs who never hurt anyone. Yet, our innocence not withstanding, our evil enemies rose up and smote us. Given our blamelessness, anything we choose to do to them is fully justified, including cut down all the Arab's olive trees, humilate them a checkpoints, drive them all out of the West Bank and Gaza and shoot the ones who won't leave (the "Arabrein" solution).
AirAlan # Monday, December 01, 2003

When (Racist) Hard Drives Rear Their Ugly Heads"LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) -- Los Angeles officials have asked that manufacturers, suppliers and contractors stop using the terms "master" and "slave" on computer equipment, saying such terms are unacceptable and offensive. "The request -- which has some suppliers furious and others busy re-labeling components -- came after an unidentified worker spotted a videotape machine carrying devices labeled "master" and "slave" and filed a discrimination complaint with the county's Office of Affirmative Action Compliance. "The article didn't suggest any alternatives to these deeply offensive "master and slave" drives, so in the spirit of greater racial harmony let me suggest a few.What about chief and indian drives?czar and serf?boss and hireling?mandarin and coolie?nabob and cipher?primary (though not superior) and secondary (though by no means inferior) drives?
AirAlan # Wednesday, November 26, 2003

Electronic Pacifiers, With 500 Free Weekend MinutesI went down to UCLA earlier this year, parked my car on the top floor of a parking garage and started down the stairs to the street. Three of the first four people ahead of me, as soon as they got outside, whipped out cell phones and began making calls. I went to Trader Joe’s last week to buy a loaf of seven-grain bread. A woman walked in the store, stopped her shopping cart right in front of the bread rack and began making a call. Today in Ralph’s a young Asian woman with a baby, stopped in front of the frozen turkeys, took out a small gray cell phone and began making a call. Later I was passing the canned vegetable aisle when I heard a voice, looked up and found a man making a call.What do all these callers have in common?I used to think that perhaps the people on their cell phones wanted assistance in making a selection. But I don’t think that’s it. Women don’t call men to ask their opinion on 2% milkfat in cottage cheese. Humans are a profoundly social species. Modern life makes it hard for people to always do things together so more and more people compensate with technology. It's reassuring for most people to have someone to talk to at all times. Cell phones have become our new adult pacifiers (better than a martini). They calm us down, soothe away anxieties, and reduce our existential terror that we really are alone in the universe.Now I know there are people who use cell phones as status symbols or to demonstrate that, despite appearances, they really do have friends. Once I was in a supermarket when a crude heavyset young woman with a loud voice came strolling down the aisle telling a joke over the phone. She delivered the punchline, laughed uproariously and then she told the punchline two more times, laughing again on each occasion. The woman knew all of us could hear her. She was on stage. The cell phone was her microphone. And what she was saying was this: "I might be fat, I might be loud, I might have the bone structure of a moose, but I too have friends the same as everyone else."
AirAlan # Tuesday, November 25, 2003

Bare Boobs and Fast FoodUnder pressure from a threatened "nurse-in," the Burger King chain recently announced that from here on out any woman who wanted to breast feed her infant in any of their stores was more than welcome to unsnap, unbutton and let the kid chow down. And for my part, I say "bravo!" My only complaint is that their policy doesn't go near far enough. How come only nursing moms get to pull their blouses up? What about all those perky high school and college girls who, when they go to buy a burger, have to keep their talent under wraps? Why can't they show their breasts in public too? If I were running Burger King, I'd announce a new policy of "all tits all the time," then make it mandatory (and retroactive) for any woman under 25.
AirAlan # Sunday, November 23, 2003

Rape's Fine LineReading so much about the Kobe Bryant case has made me wonder when consensual intercourse ends and rape begins. It’s easy to define rape when the man punches the woman in the stomach, slaps her five or six times, then throws her down, rips off her clothes, forces her legs apart and rams it home while she screams, "no, no, no!" Feminists say that if a man doesn’t pull out the instant a woman says no, he’s guilty of rape. But what if he says "okay," but then thrusts in her three more times over the next five seconds. Is that rape? What if he stops thrusting and slowly pulls out so slowly he’s not completely out for ten seconds? Since many feminists would still call that rape, I'm sure, what if he's out in five seconds? Two seconds? Is one second too long?What if the word "no" never comes up at all.What if the man and woman are having a tepid love affair that isn’t going anywhere and one Sunday afternoon he proposes what he thinks is a great idea. She’s bored, she’s tired but she can’t think of any good reason to say no.Half through the act of coitus, it dawns on her that he doesn’t excite her at all anymore. He grunts, he sweats. He seems so little aware of her feelings at times she wonders if he wouldn’t be just as happy making love to a hole in the mattress."You know," she says, "I don’t think I want to do this any more.""Huh?" "I said I don’t think I want to do this any more."They guy doesn’t say anything, he’s too busy gasping and pounding away."Did you hear me?" says the woman."Wha....," says the guy."Well?""One second. . . ," he says, ". . unhhh, unhhh, unhhh, aaaahhhhh." He stops pumping and slumps over her exhausted."Did you just cum?" she says, with an incredulous tone in her voice."Big time," he says, rolling off to one side, tired but happy."You are such a jerk," says the woman, sitting up and reaching for a cigarette. She inhales deeply, then blows out the smoke in an angry rush."Let me have a puff," says the guy, borrowing her cigarette and taking a big draw.He blows out the smoke dreamily and holds out the cigarette for her to take back. "Just keep it," she says, wrapping her arms around her knees and staring out the window. "Jeez," says the man, getting out of bed. "What's gotten into you?"Well, there you have it. Is it rape or is it Memorex?
AirAlan # Saturday, November 22, 2003

The Michael Jackson Mugshot on DrudgeIn his photo Jackson looks both surprisingly prissy-lipped in a way reminiscent of my junior high school English teacher and also as if he's on the verge of tears (which he undoubtedly is). I wonder if he's guilty. God knows kids lie. They did in Salem, Massachusetts, 300 years ago. And they did 15 years ago in the McMartin Pre-School case. Maybe, the kid was just embarrassed because the other kids at school teased him after he did that interview with British TV (assuming of course that's the boy in question). I tell you all this stress couldn't be good if the goal is to keep his cancer in remission.And now the next thing we're going to hear. Reporters are going to go out interviewing fans, friends and business associates of Jackson and they're all going to say the same thing: "Innocent till proven guilty," as if we have no right to form an opinion until a jury of Jackson's peers tells us what to think.
AirAlan # Thursday, November 20, 2003

"Linked to" Means Nothing When You're Talking Terror TiesI just read a newspaper headline that said that Saddam was "linked to" Al Qaeda, which is a totally useless bit of information. Saying someone is linked to a known terrorist is so loose a connection it doesn't mean dogsquat. Franklin Roosevelt was linked to Adolf Hitler during the thirties (by mutual ambassadors, among other things) but that doesn't mean that that Roosevelt was also behind Hitler's crimes. If a reporter can't come up with any stronger tie than to assert that someone is "linked to" someone else, he might as well stay at the gym playing raquetball. Either that or just omninously note up front that the party in question and certain terrorist organizations "are known to live on the same planet!"
AirAlan # Tuesday, November 18, 2003


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About Me

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Eagle Rock (Los Angeles), California, United States
I write articles, columns, books, very occasional screenplays and make amateur videos. I also maintain a dozen or so blog sites, some better than others.