"The Most"!

I got home early enough to catch the end of Alison Stewart's show on MSNBC called "The Most". I blogged on this silly trend at the beginning of the year...
http://amend1.blogspot.com/2006/01/most-e-mailed-most-viewed-most-banal.html
Why am I not surprised a whole one-hour "news" show would be devoted to what stories are the most viewed and/or e-mailed? Methinks the compounding of the herd mentality, the constant seeking of what others think is interesting or important, must surely make us all more discriminating consumers of the available information product. RIGHT!
We are now all reporters... a definitive way to predict the future remains elusive, a definitive way to report the past can no longer be located.

Found on the sidewalk...

While walking back from the TV station I saw a pile of stuff on the sidewalk. As I got closer I was slowing down, looking around, was it bait for a trap? Was there someone behind that bush waiting for a hapless fellow traveler to reach down to pick whatever it was up and ZAP them with a stun gun? I calmed my mind as I approached the stuff. It was a bouquet of flowers wrapped in tinted plastic, bent out of shape as if stepped on. A nice arrangement and fairly fresh as the blossoms were not very wilted. Next to that crushed pile of stems and petals was a bundle of hair weaves in a dark color... putting these two pieces of evidence together I had a flash of two scenarios... #1, a guy gives his girl some flowers in a weak effort to get back into her good graces, a fight ensues and she stomps on the gift and he pulls the weave off of her head in anger. #2, two girls run into each other and the one says, "Hey, look at what so-and-so gave me!" The others eyes narrow, she begins to hyperventilate and stomps the gift into the sidewalk cement before having her weave ripped off of her head. Either way it reminded me of a scene out of a "novella" on UniVision...

Father's Day

So there I was in a suburban multiplex sitting next to Dear Old Dad. Bellies full of Mexican food, the flick was his idea. The very prospect of sitting in the dark with him in silence for two hours was not my idea of a good time, but his choice of title was a surprise, "The Fast & The Furious: Tokyo Drift"!
http://www.thefastandthefurious3.com/
I warned him there might be riced-out teens living a high-speed fantasy, but as it was the Saturday night before Father's Day, there were a few father-son teams munching on pop corn to the beat of hip-hop, the squeel of Toyo and Yokohama tyres and the banal dialogue of what passes for exposition.
The surprise ending includes a redux by Vin Diesel, who got his start as an orderly in the Robin Williams maudlin "Awakenings" and in a NYC gay cruiser flick titled, "Strays"...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0149171/
Not that there's anything wrong with that!
After the movie I explained to dad that "drifting" was indeed sprung from the "mountain people" of Japan, bored in the snows of winter driving downhill, kicking out the back ends of their Skyline GTR's... a one-page article on the nascent drift subculture appeared in an issue of Car & Driver like 4+ years ago...
http://www.caranddriver.com/features/1921/car-surfing.html
They called it "car surfing"...!

On vacation... (again)

Again while watching TV in Florida, this time at the Grand Bohemian in Orlando, we had access to HBO. Specifically the program "Big Love" about polygamists, those radical domestic religious extremists we need to utterly defeat before we dare go overseas to take on the foreign variety! Maybe we need de-programming centers set up so we can re-integrate these brainwashed simpletons back into "normal" society, or just lobotomize them!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Love
I realized the show is a form of negation in the mass media against the rabid fear of the destruction of the sanctity of marriage by same-sex couples... oy vey! I sure hope we can get Amerika's most wanted whacko Warren Steed Jeffs before he does the right thing and ends his own petty existance, like OJ should have done in the back of the white Ford Bronco.

Books on the shelf...

So we were on Memorial Day week vacation in Florida and as we watched Jamie McIntyre on CNN reporting the Haditha massacre story, there on the bookshelf behind him were, well... BOOKS! And two in particular off of his shoulder, titles in fonts along the spine larger than those nearby. I'm the better vision-wise (target shooter) so I read them out loud to her beside me...
"Rumsfeld's War" and "Dereliction of Duty"!
Well! I never... harrumph!
We laughed then stopped laughing.