History is written in stone
Several articles have been in the news recently about a certain "Jap Road" in rural Texas and the name-change debate it's at the center of.
It was named Jap Road sometime in the 1900s after a Japanese family that lived there and brought rice farming to the area. Activist groups have been trying to change the name for over a decade, and the issue finally came to a head recently.
Alternate possibilities included "Mayumi Road", the name of the Japanese family this whole thing started over. Many residents didn't want to change the name from Jap Road, saying that it was originally meant to honor the Mayumis living there, and it's part of history.
Personally, I agree. If it's part of the history of the region, why change it? It wasn't considered politically incorrect at the time. Leave Jap Road up there, leave those Stars and Bars over the state capitol. I wouldn't touch those burned-out crosses on the front lawn, either. Leave that fourteen-year-old negro boy swinging from the tree; it's part of history and it'll just help us better understand our past. Ah, the good old days of racist bastards getting their way. I'll always remember those times of intolerance and hatred with a fond place in my heart... I especially want to pass those feelings on to my children. Way to go.
Too bad we have to lose this vital bit of history forever.
Forced to come up with an alternative, The 170 residents who live on the road voted to change the name not to Mayumi Road, but Boondocks Road, after the Boondocks fried catfish restaurant that closed down 10 years ago. Their reason?
Mayumi is too hard to pronounce.
Perhaps as an alternative to Boondocks road, they might consider something even easier to spell and comprehend, such as "Dirt Road", "Dumbass Lane" or "Third-grade Reading Level Way".
Hell, why not just "The Road"? Keep it simple. If these residents remember the name of a fried catfish shack that closed 10 years ago, I'd wager the farthest they'll ever travel is probably to the county courthouse for that next DUI hearing. "The Road" will probably be identifiable enough.
Wayne Wright, one of the more outspoken residents of Public Education Road, had a few parting comments:
"They (Japanese Americans) pounded on us for 11 years. I hope they learned something from it. There's no winners in this."
You sure showed them! "Boondocks" really sticks it to 'em! I bet those Japanese-Americans are just reeling from that severe blow. As we speak, they're probably rowing back to their homeland, preparing to seppuku themselves in shame as soon as they hit the beaches.
There are winners, Wayne. They won. They beat you. They got you into the national news, flaunting an education that my five-year-old neighbor would be embarrassed of. The entire country now sees that your flummoxed cranium is so overworked in the daily chores of eating, breathing and pinching a loaf that you can't figger where that pesky i at the end of Mayumi gets its sound from.
They learned something from it all right, Wayne. If they're patient, you handle the ridicule all on your own.
posted by Scotty 2-shots at 12:53 AM
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I wish gritty realism was like this
So I figured I'd rent True Crime: Streets of LA. Hey, I live there, maybe I could drive by my apartment and shoot at it or something.
I played Grand Theft Auto, so it only seemed natural to play this next step in the crime game evolution.
Okay, sure, you're a cop who's almost kicked off the force for being too hardcore, your dad was a cop, there's an FBI guy who tries to take over and just screws everything up, and they kidnap your brother. Your partner doesn't like you; you're a lone wolf.
Great, whatever. The Russians are involved, yeah. Basically a story ripped off from every cop movie or television show ever made. Well, ever made by humans.
Even with all that, it was a solid game. Driving, shooting, sub-plots, optional crimes you can solve or ignore, even a good cop / bad cop thing. Kind of neat. I was having a pretty good time playing along. As cheeseball as the story was, I didn't care, cause I got to be the guy who was actually nailing those bad guys!
But honestly, I should have seen it coming. I kind of thought the thugs in that dungeon looked a little like zombies. I should have seen my descent into the underworld. I missed it right up until the appearance of the 300-year-old chinese sage who wrangles the Force like my mom wrangles a yard sale.
And then appear the flaming demon heads.
They shriek that easily-identifiable T-Rex trumpet from Jurassic Park, and then lapse into the most simplistic big-boss pattern-attack since I last played Contra in 1980-whenever. It was a simultaneous dissolution of story and gameplay. If I wanted a boss pattern-attack game, I'd pick up Super Mario World. At least that game realizes what genre it's in.
Fortunately, my LAPD-issue .38 revolvers seem to work just fine on these flaming demon heads. Good thing, too, cause I hadn't yet collected the Proto-Pack Supernatural Entity Weapon upgrade.
I simply must ask-- were flaming demon heads really necessary? Is it so difficult to come up with a cop story that gamers will buy that you have to whip out the humungoid fire-breathing dragon? Especially in a game that touted its gritty street realism. Was there absolutely no other resolution possible to the dramatic quandries they wrote themselves into?
"I was kind of thinking the same thing, but you know, I just wasn't sure if gamers are ready for such a drama-heavy plot twist. Will they be able to handle it?"
The Cop Movie and Cop TV Show are staples of the entertainment industry. Hollywood knows that as long as you have a pretty cast, decent action, and pepper the screen with ass every twenty minutes, you'll make your money back.
Those hundreds of films successfully conclude themselves, yet still manage to remain in the realm of mortals. Especially as Hollywood's involvement in video games increases every year, I would expect perhaps a *little* of that might have rubbed off.
perfectly acceptable in a police-themed video game.
suspension of disbelief may have gone too far.
De Niro would have been less intimidating with a sidekick.
I did manage to find some a rare behind-the-scenes photograph from the set of Heat, though.
director Michael Mann sets up a shot with Al Pacino and the Hellspawn Dragon puppet.
I might even have been okay with the devil-dragon if it had provided the least bit of challenge, as the rest of the game did. But no. Rise, breathe fire, swing tail. Fly around. Rise, breathe fire, swing tail. Fly around. Repeat for thirty minutes.
But you know, gamers might be willing to look past the biblical cameos if they have movie stars reading the dialogue to them. Like Christopher Walken, whose performance sounded like he was sitting comfortably in a recording booth reading lines on a sheet of paper sitting on a music stand in front of him. Oh wait.
But you know, gamers might be willing to look past the biblical cameos if they have movie stars reading the dialogue to them. Like Christopher Walken, whose performance sounded like he was sitting comfortably in a recording booth reading lines on a sheet of paper sitting on a music stand in front of him. Oh wait.
posted by Scotty 2-shots at 4:00 PM
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Water Drips Down My Shame
So the U.S. Olympic Synchronized Swimming Team was on David Letterman the other night.
They did a demo performance. About four minutes long, set to music from Fantasia.
And there I am, lounging on my couch in my boxers and my socks, 1 am (because it's recorded on Tivo), and I'd never seen an Olympic synchronized swimming team before, so I watched.
As most Olympians are, they were firm-bodied, confident, quite attractive. Swimming suits, in a pool. The recorded orchestra picks up, I'm enjoying their performance, perfectly matched to the music.
And on a particularly nice closeup of taught, toned thighs fleshing themselves just above the water's surface, I notice a music edit.
A cut in the music track; it jumps from one part of the composition to another.
I rewound it to hear it again, and yes, it was a music edit. Not a particularly good one, either. Fifteen seconds later there was another. About twenty seconds later there was another.
There I am! Single guy, underwear only, late at night, no roommate. Scores of ridiculously fit women flaunting their bodies, their athleticism, their tight swimsuits, and they're dripping wet! They thrust, they heave, they twirl, they present their legs, their shoulders, their chests, their posteriors for me to observe. Gaze at me, they cry, become mildly aroused by our beauty in motion.
Again the music jumped. Infuriating. The tempo changed, the rhythm skewed, instruments disappearing and reappearing unnaturally. I sighed in exasperation.
Why in the name of Christ am I listening to the music edits? Nobody knows. Twelve people in the world probably noticed the cuts. Eleven of them didn't give a crap. Who cares? It's for the Late Show! It's a swimming routine! There is absolutely no reason for those music edits to be decent. None. Why can't I look past it? Why can't I ignore it?
I completely lost track of the female women dancing about my television. As the music and the choreography crescendoed and climaxed, my eyes were glazed, seeing nothing. I was listening for the music to jump, and shaking my head, teeth clenched, breathing labored, silently chastising the amateur audio engineer who made those shoddy edits.
Lord knows the many sins I should have been committing amidst such a flagrant beautification of the female body. But I did none of them. My geekdom overcame me.
I am not a man.
posted by Scotty 2-shots at 1:50 AM
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Makum America Better
"We want to finish the job of bringing democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan. You give me four more years so that America can become more secure, stronger and better," commented President Bush.
Give him four more!
posted by Scotty 2-shots at 3:26 PM
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the Vagaries of Governing Governments
Another great page I've recently been introduced to:
http://www.upalliance.org/
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this.
Great! Sweet! Nobody is ever deprived of their self-evident human rights again! What a wonderful world! We'd all better go join up!
What I think is great is that the Bill of Rights she proposes (which is never actually spelled out) is pretty much exactly like the one in the Constitution. So we're obviously not getting anything new here. The great new concept is that instead of only applying these Rights to the denizens of any one nation, they want to apply them to everyone in the world.
Here's the cool part. What none of them seem to realize is that all these machinations are already in place. There's a UN that's trying to call everybody's bluffs. There's a World Court that's trying to keep everybody in line.
If they'd had the forethought to look around the world a little, they'd see that everything they propose already exists. People (of course) have already come up with these ideas and are desperately trying to get them to work. Only, you know, it's a little tough to get TWENTY BILLION people to all agree on anything, so they're having a rough go of it. So a few people came up with the most ambiguous name they could, Universal Planetary Alliance, and after watching Enemy of the State and Conspiracy Theory, decided that national governments are just all evil and bent on power, and they have to go. They don't care about human rights. We've got to create a group that keeps these governments in line!
But then wait... they say they don't want One World Government? Cause that would have too much power, and EEWW!! 1984! (cause really, who gets tired of referencing that book? Nobody!) One World government would have too much control over everybody!
"Individuals, defending their own individual rights, are the only assurance against various forms of Coercive Collectivism..." But what happens when you get a ton of individuals together to form a group that ensures the safety of all people within a given geographical area? That's the very definition of a government... you hacks.
That's right, I busted out the personal slams. Hacks!!
So instead of One World Government, instead of putting our shoulders down and making all these constitutions work the way they should, let's instead create an organization that goes around the entire globe and has power over all those governments. Cause I'm sure we can get all the nations of the world to agree to be policed by this one group based in the mountains of Colorado. One World Government would have too much centralized power, but ours won't. We promise. Cause we're based in the mountains of Colorado.
Instead of fixing what we have, we'll just create another agency to monitor.
And their mystical opponents... "Various Anti-Liberty People." They've reared their ugly heads again! Many people may not know this, but Various Anti-Liberty People are really behind all of the world's evils. They're so secret that they cannot be referred to in any speech or statement except by that vague title!
Who hates Liberty? Are there any Anti-Liberty groups anywhere? Has anyone ever met a person who publishes flyers that say stuff like "I really need an oppressor! I want someone to restrict my thoughts! I want somebody to tell me what I can and can't do! I want to be thrown in jail for no reason!" Nobody says that shit. Whenever a person or a group can't figure out what the problem is, they blame it on people who hate freedom or who are professed Anti-Liberty activists.
They post a couple of quotes on the page: one great one is from George W. Bush- "There ought to be limits to freedom."
I'm sure that's all he said! I have no doubt that this sentence wasn't ripped from the middle of a speech and taken completely out of context! I'm sure that he just jumped out of the chopper, saddled on up to the nearest reporter, poked a finger in his eye and drooled out "There ought to be limits to freedom!" It's interesting that all the quotes they have bashing freedom are one sentence long, while all the quotes they have upholding their cause are a paragraph or more. Gee, why's that?
They also have a great quote of Thomas Jefferson's they incorrectly attribute to Thomas Paine. I think, though, it's very revealing that their explanation of what "Rightful Rights" are is just a giant page full of quotes.
It's a very bold document, their Mission Statement- prominently lost amid all the other text.
1.) Definition and Advocacy of Primary Inalienable Sacrosanct Individual Human Rights.
Let's see how many adjectives we can put before the word "Rights." And let's see how many we can get that mean the same thing. Great that their first priority is defining those human rights, which they never do in their whole document.
2.) The "Grass-Roots" Planetary Intelligence Processing Network.
I sure hope they mean true Grass-Roots intelligence. These massive computer networks we have are way too easy to skew and corrupt. The power of the Individual is paramount here! I'm talking about a giant web of millions of people on telephones with notepads! It's BRILLIANT! I just love it when people use terms like "grass-roots" without really thinking about what they mean. As a note, when I follow the Intelligence Processing Network link, I reach a little paragraph that says,
"The UPA is here to help, whether you seek our counsel personally, or our help is needed by entire groups of people, or even nations."
We're going to come in whether you like it or not. But not if you seek our counsel personally:
"Marcie, take a letter. Dear UPA: As Presidente of Mexico, I would like to invite your committee to judge conditions here in my sovereign nation. I fear that my administration has dealt with illegal narcotics traffickers, oppressed people and illegally jailed others. I fear that many of my citizens are not given a say in their own government as a result of my actions. Please come to Mexico and aid in my ouster from power. Love, Vicente Fox. Thanks, Marcie. I like that blouse you have on today."
(By the way, the title of that html page is "type document title here.")
3.) Liberty, Justice, Population Reduction, and an Intelligence Network for Problem Solving.
I'm sure Fascists all over the world love those priorities. I'm not trying to suggest that this may be a fascist group bent on world domination, no. I'm just trying to say that everybody who's starting any kind of group ever uses exactly those same goals. Everybody wants equality, everybody wants peace and justice. I have to admit, though, that population reduction is pretty uniquely fascist. I dunno what's up with that. Well, no, it makes sense, cause we don't want to overpopulate the planet, right? But man... do I have the right to have children, or not? My rights! My riiiiiiiights!
And then they quote Ayn Rand! They MUST know what they're talking about if they quote Ayn Rand! Atlas Shrugged and 1984 are two of the literary works people throw down when they want to feel elite and enlightened. Everybody's read them. They're not fringe, they're not undiscovered by the dumb teeming masses. Read the books, they're good ones. But everyone who quotes them plays it like a secret treehouse club where every member is up at the Mahatma Gandhi level. Basing your elite image of yourself on the massive accomplishment of discovering Atlas Shrugged doesn't get you anywhere. Well, it probably gets you up to the Al Sharpton level.
The only thing (cause there's only one confusing thing on this web page) that confuses me is that they don't want to become a 1984-style (GASP!) Big Brother group, but they want to force true liberty and justice for all. So then how are you going to exert global control over all nations without becoming the Big Brother that you just said you hated? Woohoo!
Idealism is great. Idealism changes the world, really. So what am I really knocking them for, then? Having ideas? Certainly not. Imagining a world that's better for everyone? That's a great concept!
No, I'm knocking them for being half-assed idealists. For being lazy idealists. For birthing their free humanity concept and then developing it by going through the supreme effort of publishing a single web page with blue text and a white background. And basing the "organization" in the mountains of Colorado, conveniently close to where they already are! But I guess when you think about it, Colorado might actually be the perfect place for their group, if only for the reason that their entire membership lives within an hour's drive of their proposed base-camp. I'm sure that's why the League of Nations failed, really. If only they could have figured out a better city to put the bunk beds in, we could have had world peace by now.
I'm bashing them for coming up with these great ideas that everyone in the history of mankind has already come up with and then not bothering to think past a few Thomas Jefferson quotes. I'm not bashing them for thinking that a few idealist friends in Nowhere, USA can't make a difference - because they can - I'm bashing them for thinking that they can do it by parking a few trailers together and saying that the way to keep the governments of the world from dominating the people is to great a giant organization that dominates the governments. Way to go.
But none of us really have anything to worry about. So far, their organization has only progressed to the point that nobody knows they exist except other hacks on the internet writing about them in their weblogs. What's ironic is that by writing this, I'll probably create more traffic to their site than if I'd just kept my ass shut. Their main page counter is at 245. I think that's including me.
posted by Scotty 2-shots at 4:53 PM
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Always somebody else
I saw today surveillance footage of some of the 9/11 hijackers going through security at Dulles.
Then I read an AP report that some of the survivors' families are suing the airlines and security sub-contractors because they were negligent.
http://apnews1.iwon.com//article/20040722/D83VI8K80.html
I witnessed this same occurrence before over the years when the Columbine High shootings were slowly blowing over. Several parents of kids killed in the shooting, led by one boy's father, were blaming the police and emergency responders, not indirectly as many others did, but directly: this father alleged vehemently that one of the deputies to trade shots with Klebold and Harris had shot his son instead. The ballistics were all wrong, there was no real evidence to uphold it, and after dragging this deputy through dirt for about a year and a half, he finally pulled his allegations and admitted he was wrong.
He was desperate, as a lot of parents were, to blame somebody for what happened- but they couldn't blame the shooters; they were dead. The only people left are the cops and the school administrators.
When the shit hits the fan, people desperately need something to blame. And 9/11 was so ahorrently huge that there's a giant mob running around with torches pulling people out of their houses and drowning them in the lake.
"Even after setting off these alarms, the airlines and security screeners failed to examine the hijackers' baggage, as required by federal regulations and industry mandated standards, or discover the weapons they would use in their attack."
I know a couple of things about security screening, and the first is that when a person sets off the walk-through metal detector, their bags are not required to be searched. Never have been, aren't now. The weapons they used? The dude working the x-ray machine saw those box-cutters. But just like the thousands of Swiss Army Knives he saw, he let them go because they weren't prohibited. Every bag is x-rayed. And they did their job exactly as they were told to in letting those box-cutters through.
Even if their bags had been opened and tossed, those box-cutters still would have gone on the plane. Nobody prohibited box-cutters back then. It was decided that they, along with swiss army knives, fingernail clippers and the like, were not dangerous enough to be prohibited.
This conglomeration of survivors' families didn't see it coming, either. They didn't have enough forethought to realize that oh, hell, anything that has a sharp edge can be used as a weapon! There was no giant movement to tighten airline security before 9/11. There was no huge advocacy group screaming at the government to keep tennis rackets and razor blades out of the passenger cabin.
When it comes down to it, you can hijack a plane with a bottle of wine. You can hijack a plane with a ballpoint pen, if you're determined enough. The 9/11 hijackers didn't need those box-cutters. They could have used the metal butter knives that were already in First Class. They just had to scare the passengers.
People care about security for about two weeks after a crazy disaster. Then most people go right back to getting pissed when they have to spend a whole minute taking their shoes off. They whine about losing their silver-plated engraved penknife, and they can't stand being asked to hold still for thirty-five seconds while the dude in the uniform waves a magic wand around them.
And you have to find somebody to blame. The more people, the better, cause you can feel like you're doing something productive.
I know many screeners now who want the screening to be tighter. Nobody can see the holes in the system more than the screeners who do it every day. But they're bound and restricted by policy. There are some items more deadly than box-cutters allowed on board- knitting needles, for instance- why? Because the AARP has so much lobbying power in Washington that there's no way little old ladies will be kept from their crocheting.
Then one of the family members said that "she was surprised at how relaxed security was, given that the airlines had received three warnings... that American interests may be the target of a terrorist threat from extremist groups." What we saw on the videotape is as strict as security was ever allowed to get before 9/11. Every time it got tighter, passengers complained about how long the lines were, how long they had to wait to be checked, and why do I have to take my laptop out of my suitcase? In the airport, it's a balance of security against convenience. When you're suing the government, of course the priority is on security. But when it's them in the line, and the plane is about to leave cause you left thirty minutes late, then it's convenience.
The reason those hijackers were allowed on board those planes with the objects they would later use as weapons is because all of us can't be troubled to arrive at the airport early like we're supposed to and subject ourselves to the same screening that everyone else gets. The only way to check everyone is to check everyone, and nobody wants to volunteer because we already know that we're not the terrorist.
Easy to blame the security screeners. Faceless uniforms. But they were just doing what they were told. Blame the airlines, then? Giant corporations, obviously just bent on profit. But were they were just adhering to government-dictated policy? Aha! Blame the government, that evil, power-hungry monster who steals chunks from our paychecks. They're the ones that made the policy, right? So who does the government bow to? We dictate that policy. We're the ones telling our Senators that we can't stand having our underwear and our hidden KY Jelly exposed to everyone in the terminal.
But nobody can bear to blame themselves.
EDIT (7/22): Saw a headline of a paper this morning: TOTAL FAILURE. Technically, this is true, but I know they didn't mean it as they should have. The security didn't fail. It did exactly as it could. Had they been able to take those box-cutters, they would have. But policy told them not to. Just now they're toying with the idea of allowing non-passengers back to airline gates, just as they did before 9/11. It's happening already. People are forgetting and lapsing back into "HEYYY!!! I want to be let in there to kiss Aunt Margie good-bye!" And the restrictions that lobbying groups put on security is what's going to get us into airline security trouble again.
posted by Scotty 2-shots at 7:42 PM
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Better Titles Later
Heh. Lame-duck "Hey this is my first post to see if this blog works"?
Nope.
I rant. I love to rant. I love to be that guy that you have to bang on the ceiling to shut up. My friends love it when I rant. They love to set me off. Not because my rants contain any sort of wit or cleverness; though I pretend. No, it's my unmitigated frustration. The pacing, reckless gesticulation, the long, slowly growing decibel curve. The gross over- and mis-use of repulsively long symonyms.
It's funny to see somebody get so pissed about something as insignificant as the defrost button on his microwave that lets you quick-defrost "frank, in bun". Who the hell freezes a hot dog in the bun? Are there so many potential microwave purchasers who bring back from the store separate packages of franks and buns, open them, assemble the ready-to-eat hot dogs, then freeze them as to merit a one-touch defrost button on the microwave console?
"You know, if I just put these things together now, I won't have to waste time placing the actual frank in the bun later. I can just defrost them, and then instantly have a ready-to-eat hot dog!"
See, there he is. You just saw normal, mild-mannered, ruggedly attractive Scott-
-become short-fused ANGRY Scott.
He's not to be trusted.
But you can't wail in a blog. You can't wave your arms about, nor punctuate your sentences by ceasing to pace, then puctuate them again by restarting. Readers cannot hear your voice return to pre-pubescent spontaneous octave-jumping.
But I'm obsessive. I love to obsess. I love to be that obsessive guy. When you reveal to someone that you loved the idea of the gravity-powered ceiling fan in Mosquito Coast and sat up in bed all night until you figured out how to build one yourself, most people will kind of sit back and utter a "whoa" or two, happy they aren't you. Obsession may help my blogging. At least up the entertainment.
I also have too much time on my hands. I don't like being that guy that has too much time on his hands, so the obsessive guy takes over. I see my buddy on IM with a happy, calming avatar of Wayne Newton:
I have nothing to do for the next two hours. Can I leave Wayne alone? Nope.
Wayne's got to go.
And my buddy's reaction when he saw it, "oh SHITE!", made it all worth it.
So no banal posts about daily routines here. Not to knock them at all, but the menial details of my life are boring enough to me. I don't want to force anyone else to relive them. Actually, it has nothing to do with anyone else, I'm just also too lazy to input that I like the Brown Sugar ham over the Smoked ham unless I think there's going to be some sort of payoff.
The other thing about ranters is that they'll go on forever unless somebody stops them, or they happen to glance at the scroll bar and see that they don't know how many pages they've written, but it's more than two.
posted by Scotty 2-shots at 11:00 PM
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The CocBlog