Bees

Here's a pick-up line for the apiary convention: "How are your bees, honey?" And, if you want to be a bit more dangerous: "Where do you put the wax?"

Mother

My mother and I don't always see eye-to-eye, mostly because I am a foot taller than her.

Television Derision

Sometime folks at work will ask me if I saw a particular TV show. My response is simple: "I don't have TV." Their response is complex: confusion, fear, distrust. Suddenly, I am only one scuzzy beard away turning into Ted Kacszinsky; one trunk of fertilizer short of national headlines; one pair of white Nikes shy of making that final galactic stroll.

When I say I don't have TV, I mean I don't have live TV - cable, satellite or digital antenna. My set pulls in exactly zero channels, but I watch plenty - what I actively decide to watch - on the DVD player. I reap plenty of video fodder from the library, the kind folks at Netflix and generous friends.

I also listen to the radio, almost always public radio. KCRW is a favorite because it has varied programming. The advantage of radio is that I can engage and disengage at my will - get things done, listen a bit, then go back to my business. Radio doesn't seem to encumber one with the all-encompassing mind fuck of Television. And radio is so much more varied, grass-roots, edgy and worldly. It doesn't require millions of dollars to make a radio show. Radio programmers can engage in a bit of risk taking. They can try something once...hence the varied part.

The most baffling response ever from a co-worker was,"how do you listen to music if you don't have TV?" You can't make this stuff up! But it certainly demonstrates the power of the electronic udder. TV provides media that is easily consumed and it convinces consumers that there are no other media to be consumed.

I don't recommend that you kill your television, but you may want to snip your cable.

Television Davidian

Mark Trail And Storytelling

Dramatic Irony is a narrative device which allows the reader or viewer to have information that is not available to the protagonist e.g. there is something lurking in the shadows. The audience understands the danger/conflict/stakes before the protagonist and, therefore, it heightens their sense of dread. In the latest Mark Trail, Jack Elrod takes dramatic irony one step further. He baits the reader with information that the antagonist doesn't know. Critical information which will foil the antagonist's plan. Therefore, logic dictates, that the audience may foretell the story's conclusion. In another ironic twist, Elrod draws out the obvious story for an additional four weeks. I call this Dramatic Pain.

If Elvis is alive...he'd be dead by now.

Bake Your Booty

It may be trite to speak of the weather, but sometimes it just feels right. After a month under the coastal clouds - fog, marine layer, cold and a windy Catalina eddy - I now find myself in Riverside burning up in the heat. Two straight days of 100 degree weather and more to come. I believe the technical meteorological term is "super-fucking hot."

My recipe for survival is cold soup, climate control and inertia. I may throw a bit of beer into that mix as well.

Nicholas Sparks would never write a novel "Under the Riverside Sun." Nope, it would be more like "Fuck It's Hot and Nobody Gets Horny When They are Sweaty."

Reptilian Davidian.

Ain't no pancake so thin it ain't got two sides.

H.I. McDunnough

Post-Independence Day Post

This photo was taken last spring in Crystal Cove State Park, behind El Morro where I used to live. The ridge doubled as a Guantanamo Bay location in the film A Few Good Men. A silhouette of the ridge opens the film. There are also scenes of Tom Cruise riding in a jeep, getting a tour of what is supposed to be the Cuban base. In the above image, the ridge sports a fleeting springtime hue. The mustard only blooms a few weeks a year. I believe the film - which depicts the faux Guantanamo as a bit more brown and dusty -was shot in the drier months of fall.

The politics of the film, in which Jack Nicholson griped "you can't handle the truth," seem somehow displaced in the age of Guantanamo Bay detainees. The base is no longer a forgotten outpost or a Cold War relic, it is front and center in our politics. Military officials may have once positioned G-bay as being too close to home to ignore - a fundamental part of American soil. Now Guantanamo seems to exist because it is not part of American soil. It is, according to some, the only safe place to keep that what makes us unsafe.

As for the ridge itself, homes have now been built behind it and it could no longer double as Guantanamo. Future film scouts will only consider the location as a transitional space on the edge of our suburban sprawl. To this end, the neighboring ridge (with homes) was featured in the opening montage for The OC. I'm not smart enough to know what this all means. I do know that there are times when I would prefer not to handle the truth or even absorb it.

Reality TV Dinner

T-Shirt of the Week
(click to enlarge)

Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.

Chimamanda Adichie


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg&feature=player_embedded#!


I found this link via Lisa Alvarez's excellent "The Mark on The Wall" blog.