The WWE is a fraud. Kaiju Big Battel is real.

Leap year is really special, because it means one extra day of Black History Month. What will you do with your extra day?

Songs In the Key of Springfield

"Hey who left all this garbage on the steps of Congress?"

"I'm not garbage. I'm an amendment to be, yes an amendment to be and I'm hoping that they'll ratify me. There's a lot of [gay people] who have got too much freedom. I want to make it legal for policemen to beat 'em 'cause there's limits to our liberties. At least, I hope and pray that there are, 'cause those liberal freaks go to far."

"But why can't we just make a law against [gay marriage]?"

"Because that law would be unconstitutional. But if we change the Constitution..."

"Then we can make all sorts of crazy laws!"

"Now you're catching on!"

This is just stupid. This whole business of blowing up the infamous Steve Bartman baseball from the NLCS--indescribable stupidity. Forget about the fact that over $100,000 was paid to acquire the ball and nevermind the cavalcade of cameras and personalities that will attend the hideous spectacle. I don't understand why people are willing to believe, or at least behave as if they believed that a mystical force can affect the fortune of a baseball team and that this power can be "exorcised" by destroying a particular fetish object. What is this? Are people over the goat now? After all the "goat curse" has been lifted about 40 times. Will a baseball have to be destroyed every year now? Or maybe next year it will be a corked bat, or perhaps a hypodermic needle.

I'm debating whether or not to attend Ash Wednesday services in the morning. First of all, it would require getting up at 7am, when I could otherwise sleep until 9. Second, I am certain the cross that would be marked on my forehead with the ashes of burned palms will appear to be just a dark smudge by midday.

Sometimes, all it is from the outset is a smudge because the priest is either unable or unwilling to make an articulate cross upon the forehead of the parishioner. The thumb, opposable though it may be, is not necessarily the best tool for the job. The index finger is typically more dexterous and capable of making a more defined line. Perhaps that will be my litmus test. I'll attend the service, but if I see the thumb of the clergy and the uninterpretable symbols it makes, I'll simply walk away.

Alright, so I didn't make it to the library this weekend, but I did manage to actually leave the house. I even got to use some conversational Spanish.

I have a habit of getting myself lost even when I know where I'm going. I grabbed the el from the Music Box, rode it to Fullerton and needed to walk to Ashland. I started walking west, but after a couple of blocks I stopped, turned around and went the wrong way. I also have a problem with remembering the order of streets. I should know very well that Ashland is west of Halsted and yet, I ventured east.

After a few blocks, I had concluded that I needed to turn around and go back from whence I came, but I stopped in a McDonald's to receive confirmation. I asked the woman at the counter, "Which way is Ashland?"--blank stare--"Donde esta Ashland?"
"Quien?"
"No, la calle Ashland."
"La calle? Oh, I don't know."

What had just transpired was the most productive use of my years of formal training in a foreign language that I had ever engaged in.
And yet it got me nowhere.
Nevertheless, I did proceed westward to Ashland wherein I discovered that I had actually gotten off at the wrong El stop.

And so yes I ventured to the aforementioned and linked Music Box to see The Fog of War: 11 Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara. I found it to be quite compelling, although it should not be mistaken for a history lesson. I'll say more about it later.

The Grey Zone

I'm listening to the "Grey Album". A DJ who calls himself Danger Mouse remixed Jay-Z's The Black Album with samples from The Beatles' "White Album."

Some of it is really good, which gives me pause because I dislike what Jay-Z seems to stand for. I find him to be shallow and conceited which does not make him unique, but it does make me disinterested. I have not heard The Black Album, but I suppose I'll have to listen to it now to find out what the record sounds like without The Beatles as a backing band.

Well hopefully, I will have a productive Saturday. I seem to have quite a bit planned for tomorrow, but my Saturday plans have a tendancy to dissolve in a hypnagogic state. If nothing else, I must make a trip to the library.

I got a great parking spot yesterday and yet no one was around to witness my glory.

Memory is a strange thing, isn't it. Or at least my memory is. I am expected to know by rote 41 job methods for work. It is someone's occupation this week to test me and others on this knowledge. Knowing the 41 methods means memorizing 101 lines of text. Of course, many of these lines contain redundant concepts that are worded in eight different ways and some of them just don't make sense at all. To my complete surprise I was able to recite 100 of 101 from memory--99% effective.

I can't remember what I was doing 5 minutes ago, but I can remember 100 lines of text that I memorized 6 months ago. Now the problem is, it's an all or nothing test--pass/fail--you get 100% or you take it again. Knowing that my previous feat of memory was a freak event, I'm essentially refusing to retake the test. So, we'll see what happens.

But, I do remember when Gary Barnett was the football coach at NU. Frankly, he was a distraction. He was a man, he was a man and he was terrible, just awful.

Passion

Ok really, no really I was going to write about this last week, but I didn't so I'm doing it now.

I don't have an overwhelming interest in seeing Mel Gibson's The Passion of The Christ. I've seen Jesus of Nazareth several times (it was shown to us every year around Easter in grade school), I've read the gospels and I played Jesus in a high school musical, so I'm familiar with the story.

But I suppose, Gibson is trying to bring a level of verisimilitude to the story that had not been previously achieved. That alone may make the film worth seeing.

Now, what about this controversy? Well, why would Jews care if people think they killed Jesus? After all, they killed Jesus. (They also killed Kenny.) Somebody has to kill Jesus. Was Pontius Pilate going to do it? No, he was trying to wimp out. If it hadn't been for the steadfast hypocrisy of a handful of zealous Judeans, there would be no Christianity. So everybody chill out. Everything worked out the way it was supposed to, right?

Zealous Judean: "Oh, was that you're savior? Sorry about that, we thought he was just a hippie troublemaker."
Modern Christian: "No prob. Turns out, you did us a huge favor."

There are two Jesus related movies that I would recommend because they each made me consider the life of Jesus from a new perspective:

The Last Temptation of Christ, Martin Scorcese's uber-controversial film. That movie made me realize how much greater it is for a Man, not simply to accept death, but to sacrifice the life he could have in order to fulfill a divine mission.

And

Jesus of Montreal. This movie discusses Jesus from a strictly historical perspective. Roger Ebert is right when he says in his review that in a sense, it's a movie about the theater, not religion. Nevertheless, it reminds me how the qualities that made Jesus the man special, are qualities we can still emulate in the modern world: leadership, integrity and above all love.

I also recommend Life of Brian. But for different reasons.
"Always look on the bright side of life..."

Crash

Actually, I think I prefer "Speakerboxxx."

But meanwhile,

The Daytona 500 pre-show is on, and I'd like to see a contest held to determine once and for all who is the lispiest man in professional "sports:"
NASCAR's Michael Waltrip or the NFL's Jeff Garcia?

At the moment, they're talking about some of the worst crashes at the 500 in recent years. Which speaks to the real reason I think people watch NASCAR. It's not because they like to see cars go around in circles, it's the constant possibility of a deadly or at least spectacular crash that people find compelling.

Speaking of which, have you ever seen the movie Crash?

Elias Koteas: creepiest performance ever.

The Love Below

I just wanted to point out, in the spirit of the "holiday," that diamonds are so plentiful that they're practically worthless; and the linking of diamonds with romantic love is one of the greatest unqualified advertising successes in human history.

The DeBeers company, which fled South Africa after the fall of apartheid, has managed to collude the diamond market for over a hundred years to keep prices rising, in spite of the fact that several tons of diamonds are extracted from mines each year.

Here's an article to that effect.

A Few Small Repairs

Hey!
Let's all get scared! Shall we?

Dizz Knee Land

OK. I have... 10, 20 30... $50 bucks!
I think I'll buy Disney.

I haven't really given the issue much consideration really, but
this article that says the media got the story about GW's National Guard service wrong, leaves me with a number of fundamental questions:

Why did GW go to Alabama anyway?
Was he granted a leave from the Texas Air National Guard that neant he was not obligated to serve anywhere in any capacity while he was in Alabama?
Did he attend drills in Alabama even though they were not compulsory?
Was he getting paid while he was in Alabama?
If so, for service to whom--the Texas Guard or the Alabama Guard?

Maybe the answers are out there for me to discover with a little research. But hell, I'm not a journalist. Why should I have to do all of the work?

Alright so at around 3am a commercial is on Tv for this product--a handheld mini sewing machine.

Now, typical of such ads it shows melodramatically frustrated archetypes attempting to use the traditional product (in this case, an ordinary sewing machine) with no success, followed by an image of the new product being used with grace and speed.

The voice over says: "You couldn't sew drapes with an ordinary sewing machine!" Here a grandmotherly woman is shown holding in the air a full size sewing machine, turning it sideways and attempting to sew the edge of the drapes that are hanging on the window. Of course, this procedure is made much easier by the "Handy Stitch" but wouldn't it be even easier to just take the drapes down before sewing them?

This grotesquely exaggerated anecdote is intended to be an extension of the uses previously suggested in the commercial; for instance, "Sew your pants while still wearing them!" Which I suppose could be useful, but still why would anyone sew their drapes while they're still hanging on the window? I might as well sew my blanket while sleeping under it.

Blair Hull makes me itchy. He's a candidate for the Democratic Senate nomination and he's already spent $12 million of his own money on the race.

What troubles me is how some of that money is paying for banners on the Sun-Times website that magically appear with campaign news stories.

It's a good advertising strategy because it furtively positions Blair Hull in the mind of the voter as the most "newsworthy" candidate. But the best advertising is almost always evil.

And so how did Blair Hull make his money? Well, he's a former professional Black Jack player turned Day Trader.
Quick, somebody get me a ballot!

I'm officially endorsing Barak Obama for Senate.

Errata

Here's a little tip for all you young web designers out there-- don't put your lovely little page out into the world without testing it on multiple platforms.
Of course, any real web designer knows this, but I only discovered by accident that Internet Explorer displayed part of this page in a disruptive pink color.

The color of the main section, for those of you who were wondering, is #ffcc66. But for the "menu" strip on the right, I wrote #ffccc66. For some reason, Safari and Netscape displayed it as intended, but IE didn't.

The page also got smushed together and out of whack if you weren't viewing it through a wide enough window. It's better now. See? Play with your window! Smaller... Bigger... Smaller...

When I have a bit more time, somewhere between midnight tonight and Sunday morning, I'll actually write something of substance.

Ringmaster

This past weekend This American Life did a segment on the political career of Jerry Springer. It is a compelling, and I think, tragic story. There's even a website dedicated to getting Springer back into political life.

So perhaps we should re-consider Jerry Springer the man, the politician and suggest him as a V.P. candidate.

One year ago today, in a crowded computer lab, alpha charlie bravo was born.

Over the course of a year alpha charlie bravo has evolved and improved, gotten worse, changed, improved again, expanded, taken a step back, spun itself around in circles and moved confidently forward.

Some of this blog's accomplishments include:

• Becoming a candidate for Viceroy of Iraq


• Inventing new words


• Inventing alpha charlie bravo bonds


• Maintaining the site using public library computers


• Uttering a political statement no one could disagree with


• Filling some empty space

I never would have expected that this blog would be as vital and meaningful to me still as it is today. It certainly would not be if I were typing into a vacuum. So, alpha charlie bravo would like to thank the Academy and everyone who has visited and participated in this site.

Monday

Today is Monday.