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Fri. Jun 19, 2009

Ten Quick Questions

Jim started this, in case blame needs to be assigned.

Who are you?
Who’s askin’?

I am a beachball on the river of life.

I am the “fun” in “malfunction.”

I am the puff of wind in your ear just before some Willie inserts a wet finger.

I am the last bubble on top of the best mug of coffee you’ll ever have.

I am obviously not going to really answer the above question, but I can do this all day.

Zombies – undead monstrosity or the next logical step in human evolution?
From Reid’s Point of View, zombies are merely further proof everything is distributed 80/20. In this case, 20% of movies about zombies are entertaining, and 80% are awful.

Young Elvis or Fat Elvis?
Tort Elvis (I actually did this whole quiz just so I could give that linked answer)

If you were a superhero, what would your name be?
Whatever, Man

Yes, you would have to include the comma.

You are the last man on earth, and it is your job to perpetuate the human race, whether you like it or not. Your choice of potential mates is between Wonder Woman, the Bionic Woman or Super Girl. Which one do you choose?
Gosh. Can I maybe have a choice that might not break me in the process of trying to procreate? I mean, what’s the goal here?

What was your first car?
1970 Volkswagen Beetle, handed down to me by my parents, who bought it brand new for $1,995. When I sold it a dozen years later for $300, I feared going on the test drive at the used car place, because the passenger floor had rusted out so bad you could see the road going by in places.

Last seen about three weeks after I sold it, broken down on the side of the road in Warner Robins, Georgia.

If you were going to show me around your city/town, where’s the first place you would take me?
Centennial Park. The Atlanta skyline surrounds you, the Georgia Aquarium is on the north edge of the park, and on the south edge, CNN. In between I could show you the brick I bought to help build the park (has my name on it) and then we could douse ourselves in the Olympic Rings fountain.

What’s the last album you bought?
Prince, Lotusflow3r/mplsound

Do you have an arch enemy? Would you like one?
No, and no. I have more than enough problems, thank you very much.

What’s the title of the movie they are going to make about your teenage years?
Why is the last question always the hardest? How about … “Generic 1970’s Disaster Movie”?

Fri. Jun 12, 2009

The Release of Michael Vick

A couple of weeks back the federal prison system released Michael Vick into their halfway house program. However, the program is so full that Vick had to be released to his own 4500 square foot home with an ankle bracelet. And the question became, will he get a second chance? Not at freedom, that’s a given. I mean a second chance to earn millions as an NFL player.

When I wrote about ridiculous claims back in April, I included this one:

The Atlanta Falcons claim they are going to trade Michael Vick. The thing is, in the NFL, you are actually trading a contract with a player, not so much the player himself. And in 2004, Vick signed a 10-year, $130 million contract with the Falcons. Now, how many NFL teams do you think are willing to swallow about $13 million per year for the next five seasons, just to take a chance on a convicted felon fresh out of jail? Shortly after June 1, you’ll see the Falcons release Vick and take the salary cap hit (about $7 million for 2009 alone), because they will have no trade takers.

Well, here we are shortly after June 1, and the Atlanta Falcons have indeed released Michael Vick: “We spent a significant amount of time this off-season trying to trade him to another NFL club, and we had some conversations with a few teams, but nothing materialized.” What a surprise!

And so a sometimes ugly era comes to an end. Mark Bradley at the AJC writes about some of Vick’s “brief shining moments“ (“He was the biggest athlete this city has ever seen.”). But over at atlantafalcons.com, J.Mike writes:

Dimitroff and Head Coach Mike Smith were not around when the team drafted Vick or during the turbulent events of 2007 sparked by his federal indictment. Less than a dozen Falcons on the current roster played with the quarterback.

That can’t be said for others in the organization, some in their second or third decade with the team. We’ve all witnessed part of history and grown from the frustration, hurt and confusion.

But this isn’t a time of reflection.

This is a time of closure.

The Falcons are a playoff football team again with a new quarterback and a new blood as bright as the team’s red jerseys.

The Michael Vick book remained open through all the re-building and success, but got pushed to the far corner of the desk.

Now it’s closed.

It was really closed a long time ago, because, as Jeff Schultz points out, team owner Arthur Blank was never going to allow Vick back: “Blank writes his office e-mails in red. The man who writes in red e-mails was lied to — and he doesn’t like being lied to. Blank also knew that for every dollar he made if he brought Vick back by selling jerseys and season tickets to Vick fans, he would lose far more dollars because of the fans who would leave and the corporate sponsorships that would go away. And did I mention he was lied to?”

When I wrote my concluding piece about Vick nearly two years ago, it was titled Michael Vick is a Lying Dog Murdering Team Betraying Anti Role Model. I detailed each of those charges. I’m not sure how many of those things are or aren’t still true. I doubt we’ll see another arrest on that particular charge, he could prove loyal to a new team, and could again become a decent example for kids of how one can rise from your mistakes. One has to wonder, though, particularly about the lying.

But that’s an issue for others. There is no doubt that Michael Vick has served his time, paid his debt to society as determined by our judicial system, and deserves a second chance at freedom. Whether Michael Vick deserves a second chance at his chosen career, well, that seems a separate matter, and one that is up to the NFL Commissioner and 31 other NFL teams.

Here in Atlanta, he’s done. Right down to the final paperwork.

Fri. Apr 10, 2009

Vice Presidential Lies and Exaggerations

In the ongoing slapfest between members of the former administration and members of the current administration, our latest offering comes from former propaganda minister Karl Rove. Speaking of VP Biden, he said:

“He’s a serial exaggerator. If I was being unkind I would say he’s a liar, but it’s a habit he ought to drop,” Rove said on FOX News. “You should not exaggerate and lie like this when you are the vice president of the United States.”

With that last line, Rove has played Bud Abbott to every Lou Costello with a blog. Shall we peruse but a few quotes from the VP of the last eight years?

“Well, you’re going to get into a debate here about — talking about several years, several hundred thousand troops for several years. I think that’s a non-starter. I don’t think we have any plan to do that, Tim. I don’t think it’s necessary to do that.” Vice President Dick Cheney 3/16/03

“And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr. ElBaradei, frankly, is wrong. And I think if you look at the track record of the International Atomic Energy Agency and this kind of issue, especially where Iraq is concerned, they have consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing.” Vice President Dick Cheney 3/16/03

“In Iraq, a ruthless dictator cultivated weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them. He gave support to terrorists, had an established relationship with al Qaeda, and his regime is no more.” Vice President Dick Cheney, Nov. 7, 2003

“I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.” Vice President Dick Cheney, June 20, 2005

These are found in minutes via a simple search for Cheney quotes. The results are pages filled with lies and exaggerations, not stirring quotes of a historic nature. Because that is the legacy he left.

In fact, David Letterman recently did a bit called “The Dick Cheney Lie Count.” In other words, the lies and exaggerations of Cheney are so much a part of our mainstream culture that our comedians use it to make us laugh.

So, Karl … go stick your head in your undisclosed location. You sound like Jeffrey Dahmer telling someone they really shouldn’t eat veal because it’s cruel.

Wed. Apr 08, 2009

Legislature and Governor Tell MARTA To Take A Train To Hell

The Georgia State Legislature has gone home for the year, and left Atlanta’s mass transit system dead in the water. Addressing this critical issue would not have cost a dime of state funding. MARTA has never taken state funding. All they had to do was pass one measly bill.

Services have already been cutback in many areas, and MARTA has said that a fare hike of 25 cents (total price, $2) is all but guaranteed. But there’s another more complex problem, one the legislature could have easily fixed. More than half of MARTA’s revenue comes from a 1% sales tax levied in Fulton and Dekalb Counties. And across the nation, sales tax revenues have plummeted, leaving MARTA with about a $20 million budget shortage.

Long ago when this tax was put in place, it had a restriction: 50% of the funds could be used for operating expenses, and 50% had to be used for capital improvements. At a time when the heavy rail system was still being planned and built out, this probably made good sense. 25 to 30 years later, not so much.

Thus, MARTA is faced with the conundrum of having about $65 million in the bank for expanding a system that is facing a $20 million annual shortfall in operating expenses, at its current size. It cannot touch that $65 million without a change in the law.

Our state legislature was too busy with their petty transportation feuds to even bring this bill to a vote. Now MARTA is faced with cutting service to the tune of $20 million. Since weekend service has already been slashed in previous cutbacks, they now say they may have to shut down on Fridays.

Imagine a Friday afternoon in late September. Friday afternoon rush hour, traditionally the worst of the week in Atlanta, is massively amplified by the fact all who normally take the train or bus must now drive on Friday. Or simply not go at all. College students at Georgia State University, Spelman, Emory, Morehouse and Georgia Tech. Employees who work in midtown and downtown. How many people are we talking about? Well, “For fiscal year 2006, the average weekday ridership was 451,064.” Furthermore, “More than half of all MARTA users say they use the system to commute to work.”

Now, add this. The Braves, still in the pennant race (hey, I’m a hopeful guy), have a big Friday afternoon game. 55,000 fans, the majority of whom normally take MARTA to the game, must now drive, or forfeit their ticket (the same thing will happen in 2 days to 60,000 Falcons fans). Suddenly you’ve thrown over a half million new car commuters into the Friday afternoon traffic jam (and I haven’t even mentioned the fact Atlanta is a convention town, and most of them start on Friday)

At which point business owners in Atlanta will roar about the sorry sacks of crap that show up to represent us in Georgia each year, and how they can’t even do the simplest thing in a down economy to help people get to work. At zero cost to them.

Now, some say we’ll have to call them back for a special session to deal with this. But Governor Sonny Perdue, the man who could order that, wants to avoid special session on MARTA: “The governor mentioned several times that MARTA made no effort to get him involved in passing legislation that would have freed up funding for the system.”

I see. The governor did not get a gold plated invitation to help the citizens of Georgia with a clear problem that has been in the news for weeks.

Gosh, I hope if a hurricane hits the coast this summer, someone thinks to call him, or else they may get told “they made no effort to get him involved,” and thus, will get no help.

Update: State Rep. Ralph Long, D-Atlanta reports:

On Wednesday, April 1st, two days before the end of the General Assembly’s 2009 session, the Fulton and DeKalb County delegations called a special meeting for the sole purpose of discussing MARTA. At that meeting, the Republican leadership approached the two counties with what they said was a deal. According to the Republican leader, they needed 20 votes to pass S.R. 1, an unpopular bill related to property valuation freezes.

We were told that we must support S.R. 1 in order to give the Republicans the votes they needed. In return, the MARTA bill would pass. If S.R 1 did not pass, we were told that the MARTA bill would die in committee and not be brought up for consideration before the end of sine die. The Republican leader said that he lives closer to Disney World than any MARTA train station, and that he only occasionally rides MARTA to ball games.

Rep. Long says he may be stripped of his committee positions for reporting this backroom news, but he doesn’t care. He thinks we have a right to know the petty partisan shenanigans that got us to this place.

Sorry sacks of crap, indeed.

Mon. Apr 06, 2009

Ridiculous Claims

Recently it seems to me the world has been filled with ridiculous claims.

The Atlanta Falcons claim they are going to trade Michael Vick. The thing is, in the NFL, you are actually trading a contract with a player, not so much the player himself. And in 2004, Vick signed a 10-year, $130 million contract with the Falcons. Now, how many NFL teams do you think are willing to swallow about $13 million per year for the next five seasons, just to take a chance on a convicted felon fresh out of jail? Shortly after June 1, you’ll see the Falcons release Vick and take the salary cap hit (about $7 million for 2009 alone), because they will have no trade takers.

Michael Vick claims in bankruptcy court that he expects to return to the NFL, earn $10 million per year, and play for another 10 to 12 years. He’s 28 years old. The average length of career in the NFL is less than 4 years … which he has already exceeded, prior to his jail term. Look around the NFL, and see how many 38 to 40 year old quarterbacks there are earning $10 million a year. He’s going to be very lucky if [a] NFL Commissioner Goodell decides to allow him to play, [b] some desperate team is willing to take the PR hit from animal loving fans, then maybe he might get a salary a bit above league minimum for a one year contract with lots of incentive pay. No guarantees, no signing bonus, he’ll have to earn every dollar by performance.

Elsewhere, a Pakistani Taliban leader claims the Binghamton attack was their doing. Um, the attack appears to have been done by an angry Vietnamese immigrant. Which seems a bit “outside the jurisdiction” of the Pakistan Taliban.

In Pittsburgh, a man claimed the government was going to take all our guns away, among other things. After killing three police officers, they did indeed take his guns away, but not for the reasons he’d claimed they would.

Ev Williams claims twitter is worth more than $1 billion.

The weatherman claims it is going to snow in Atlanta in April.

And a local blogger claims he’s going to try and post to his site daily. Well, weekly. Um, how about “more.”

But I wouldn’t believe any of these ridiculous claims.

Wed. Mar 25, 2009

The Worst Days Of Our Lives, Or The Most Amazing?

Has it really been a month and a half since I posted here? I’d like to tell you that it’s due to twitter. If I have a passing thought I think is worth sharing, rather than flesh it out into a blog post, it gets edited to 140 characters or less. But twitter is only partially the cause.

Anything of note in the news lately has been too depressing or mad-making to bother writing about. As if you or anyone really needs my input anyway, when our media cup runneth over.

If you spend your time watching Fox News or CNN or MSNBC or CNBC or any of those other alarmist acronyms, well, you’d be hard pressed not to be depressed. When you have to fill 80% of the 1,440 minutes in each day with something that will make them watch the other 20%, well, you tell them “your nest egg is at immediate risk from sources you do not yet know … more after these commercials!” Or, “these are indeed the worst days of our lives … find out why after this break!”

As someone I know said on twitter, “Wife says that watching an entire family addicted to Heroin on Oprah is better than the news.”

The purveyors of gloom and doom are plentiful. And collecting a salary for it, as well. Keep in mind, that is their primary motivation. Not informing you. The goal is selling commercials, filling the remaining airtime with something sensational to hold those eyeballs, and collecting a check.

Tangentially, this is a very real reason we should all be worried about the fate of the newspaper industry. Because if we have to rely on the “cable journalists” to neutrally inform us of news events that impact our lives, and explain them in some detail, we are so very totally screwed.

But back to the economy. Now, don’t get me wrong. I know things truly are bad in many ways. I know people who’ve been laid off from their jobs due to the shrinking economy. I’m married to one. We’re both working freelance now, and I’ve watched my freelance business suffer some dips and swings over the past six months.

But let there be no doubt there are those who would profit from your fear, by magnifying it. And there are others simply grasping at straws, like Peggy Noonan, who thinks “There’s No Pill for This Kind of Depression.”

She thinks “the economy isn’t the only reason for our unease. There’s more to it. People sense something slipping away, a world receding, not only an economic one but a world of old structures, old ways and assumptions. People don’t talk about this much because it’s too big…”

Peggy, you need to go watch comedian Louie CK’s appearance on Conan O’Brien’s show. It’s well worth watching all 4:12 of it, but here’s a quick rough transcription of a couple of parts of it, so you get the flavor:

Everything is amazing right now, and nobody is happy. The changes in my lifetime in the world have been incredible. When I was a kid we had a rotary phone, you had to stand right next to it to call someone, and it was so primitive, you dial it and you’re making sparks … If someone called and you weren’t home, it would just ring.

If you needed money, you had to go into the bank. You had to stand in line and write a check to yourself, like an idiot, and when you ran out of money, you’d go, well, I guess I can’t do any more things now. I’m out of money.

I was on an airplane the other day, and there was high speed internet, the newest thing there is, and it’s great, I’m surfing the web, watching YouTube videos, it’s amazing. And then it breaks down, and they apologize. And the guy next to me says, “this is bullshit.” Like, how quickly the world owes him something that he just found out about ten seconds ago.

Go watch the whole thing. Very funny. And all good humor has an underlying nugget of truth.

We forget how good we’ve got it. My grandfather was born into a world with no airplanes, very few automobiles, and electricity in your home was talked about the way we talk about flying cars. As a child, during the tail end of the depression, my Dad flipped the first light switch in their home. Later, he took produce into town driving a donkey and cart on a dirt path that is today a four lane highway. Then there’s me; I telecommute. I drive a desktop, a laptop, and an iPhone. Were my grandfather still alive, he would understand none of these things, yet we are only two generations apart.

We live in the most amazing times.

This thought flashed in my mind just the other day, as I performed what is now a simple and regular act. I was doing a photo for a client, and had received an email with some requested changes. I went back to the set, and then realized I’d forgotten one thing. So I went back to my computer, and grabbed the flash memory card.

As I did, it flashed across my mind, I’d just picked up a piece of plastic less than one inch square, which contained 4.7 times more memory than the entire hard drive on my first computer (a 4GB card versus an 850MB hard drive). Furthermore, a mere ten years ago, my simple task would have been so much more complex and time consuming.

I would have had to shoot with a 4×5 view camera for the resolution needed, which means loading film in holders, exposing them, taking them to the lab, waiting two hours for them to be processed … and then you could deliver it to the client. Physically delivered, that is, not digitally shipped like today. Emailed directions for changes? Forget it, you had to shoot a Polaroid that another human had to physically hold to view, and direct changes.

That boost in productivity in a mere decade is amazing. Conservatively, I estimate it would take me three times as long to complete the shot (i.e., earn the same amount of money) doing it “Ye Olde Way.” I haven’t set foot in a darkroom in six years. If I had to go back to Ye Olde Way, frankly, it would be pretty depressing.

What’s that on the floor, a straw to grasp? Go for it, Peggy:

The sale of antidepressants and antianxiety drugs is widespread. In New York their use became common after 9/11. It continued through and, I hypothesize, may have contributed to, the high-flying, wildly imprudent Wall Street of the ’00s. We look for reasons for the crash and there are many, but I wonder if Xanax, Zoloft and Klonopin, when taken by investment bankers, lessened what might have been normal, prudent anxiety, or helped confuse prudent anxiety with baseless, free-floating fear. Maybe Wall Street was high as a kite and didn’t notice. Maybe that would explain Bear Stearns, and Merrill, and Citi.

While I will be the first to agree that we never ever should have allowed pharmaceutical companies to advertise their wares on TV, I have to say, when it comes to grasping at straws, this one is so insignificant you need an electron microscope to grasp it.

Yeah, it was the drugs. Perhaps as a part of the stimulus package, we can include a dirt-cheap recycled “Just Say No” campaign to make things better.

Now, why are some people depressed? “I feel utterly powerless to do anything about the fellow in the Oval Office who combines infantile leftism and adolescent grandiosity in roughly equal measures. It seems to me that every day he is responsible for assaults on the freedom and well being of the American people. I can’t keep up and I can’t stand to pay attention.”

This sounds like an echo with a four year delay. If you replaced “infantile leftism” with, say, “neocon idiocy,” then you’d have an archive from DailyKos, circa spring 2005.

I understand political disappointment, but how does one explain the literal blubbering mess Glenn Beck has become? David Frum asks WHAT IS GOING ON AT FOX NEWS?, and then quotes another of Beck’s tirades:

We are a country that is headed towards socialism, totalitarianism, beyond your wildest dreams. I have to tell you: I’m doing a story tonight that I wanted to debunk — these FEMA camps — I’m tired of hearing about them — you know about them? I wanted to debunk them. We’ve now for several days done research on them. I can’t debunk them!

Oh, Good Lord, it’s the old FEMA Camps story. Listen, if someone told me the Girl Scouts of America were going to be running detention camps, I’d be worried. Because they are an organization capable of delivering a box of Thin Mints or Do-Si-Dos to every home in America.

But FEMA? C’mon! The only way I’d be afraid of them is if they were trying to deliver help to me when I really needed it. I’d be scared to death.

This FEMA camps rumor has been around perhaps a couple of years, and was most recently brought up to me last September … as a device Obama would be using when he was elected President. I was forced to ask, “why would the Bush administration be building these camps today for Obama to use next year?” There’s zero logic behind the rumor, just fear. So it gets repeated by those who wish to use that.

Then there are those shipping sarcasm Obama’s way because he
allegedly mispronounced Cassiopeia (in a country where I would wager 85% of adults do not even know what Cassiopeia is), the same people who gladly stood up for a man whose mangled syntax was nonpareil.

Because that kind of stuff is important, you know.

Two months in, we’ve seen Obama called a socialist, even a communist and a fascist, in fact, some even bring up Hitler (ignoring Godwin’s Law). Some say “We’ve got trash in the White House.” Frankly, it’s as if some people have lost their minds (and their memory).

I know it has likely been more than 20 years since we’ve had a President that the opposing party didn’t try to tear down. But to get to “Hitler” and “trash” in two months? What have we become?

A nation that cannot agree on a solution. Ever. To anything.

So, that’s why it’s been some time since I felt like commenting on any of this. Because while there are Real World things to be upset about, there is so much more that seems ginned up, or perhaps some kind of political genetics (symptom: uncontrollable knee-jerking), or simply irrelevant (mispronouncing star names?). And even if you could come up with a solution that would place “a chicken in every pot,” there would be those who say that chicken is a poisonous attempt to subvert us all for shadowy political reasons.

Listen, I know people are worried that some as yet unseen catastrophic financial event is going to take them out. But this is true every day of your life.

Or every night, as the case may be. About two months ago, I was preparing to go to bed about 3am (yes, I’m a nightowl), and when I turned off the sound making electronics, I heard a faint beeping sound. I tracked it down, and it turned out it was the fire alarm in the condo below me. With no one answering the door, I had to call 911 and pray the fire department got there in time. Which they did, but I had enough time to think about “catastrophic financial event” from a whole other perspective.

Tangent: this is another example of twitter killing blogs. What normally might have been a somewhat entertaining blog post from me was instead spun out (starting at 4:10am) as … a … series … of … twitters.

Now, Susan and I did spend some time worrying … what if this guy does it again, and we’re not so lucky? It’s easy to think about the consequences, but literally impossible to prevent them. And at some point, you have to let go of it. It’s beyond your control, at that point in time.

I hate to close by getting all Zen on you, but, for frak’s sake, be here now. If you spend your time worrying about the investments you should/shouldn’t have made, that day you turned down the job you now wish you had, or other events in the past, you are expending precious mental energy on something you cannot change: the past.

If you spend your energy worrying about the choices you may (or may not) have to make next week or next month, it’s the same thing; you cannot do anything about that unknown future at this moment.

But by worrying about the past or the future, you can sure as hell ruin today. Today is all we have. Tomorrow may bring a storm, or sunshine. Tonight there maybe a fire, or 8 hours of uninterrupted peace. We cannot know.

Oh, sure, there’s lots who will be glad to make a prediction for you … right after this commercial break! But, for your own sake, ignore them. Do the best you can do each day. And do your best to enjoy each day.

You only get so many.