Chicago celebrated gay pride over the weekend with a parade, a “queer prom,” and enough inordinate self-esteem and alternative lifestyles to choke a Clydesdale. You go, gay people! I absolutely adore what you’ve done with the Bravo network, and your secret invasion of the Republican party these last few years has been faaaaaaabulous! Unfortunately, there was a party pooper in your midst on Saturday afternoon at the corner of Halsted and Addison, a man wearing a sandwich-board sign bearing the slogan PRIDE LEADS TO SHAME. But what does Evelyn “Champagne” King’s “Shame” lead to on my iPod if I press play and then use the shuffle option? “The Fool on the Hill,” by the Beatles.* (I love the shuffle option. It’s the Magic 8-Ball of the 21st century.)

Now, pride is one of the seven deadly sins, and if God would get off His duff and revise His original list, I’m sure He’d add a space for homosexuality at number eight, as fundamentalist Christians have requested via prayer and daytime talk shows for years now. (In a recent e-mail God told me, “Rob, I got paperwork that stretches back to the 1400s — and I’m talking B.C., my friend — so don’t expect any amendments or late additions anytime soon. Also, you should probably get that mole on your neck checked out.” I don’t like when He calls me Rob, but He’s God, so I let it slide. And it’s a skin tag, not a mole.) But until that day it’ll have to remain a nonfatal sin, and if something like a gay pride parade offends you, just call it a “double whammy” parade and see if that suits you better. We’re never going to be able to make everybody get along with everybody else, but as long as we can find nonviolent ways to help each other ignore the people we can’t tolerate, then that should be good enough.

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Popularity: 4% [?]

“I’m not afraid of insects taking over the world, and you know why? It would take about a billion ants just to aim a gun at me, let alone fire it. And you know what I’m doing while they’re aiming it at me? I just sort of slip off to the side, and then suddenly run up and kick the gun out of their hands.”

- Jack Handey from “Deep Thoughts”

Years ago, a good friend of mine was living in an apartment complex with his wife.  It was one of those huge apartment complexes with maps prominently displaying arrows with the words “You Are Here” to help lost visitors navigate through a maze of buildings that looked identical. It was easy to get lost in that place, and if you weren’t sure what building number the person you knew lived in, you could easily get lost since each of the individual units had letters on the doors instead of numbers.  So, for example, my friend lived in building 2250, apartment A. If I went to the building next to his – say it was building 2255 – there was an apartment A there as well. The layout of complex was such that one could easily confuse the buildings because the exteriors and the entrances to the apartments were pretty much the same.

Early one morning – after the bars closed – my friend awoke to the sound of some guy pounding on his door demanding to be let in ‘cause he was going to “Beat the shit out you, Lisa.” My friend’s name is Matt and his wife is Casey.  Obviously, the drunken idiot had the wrong apartment. Matt called the cops to say there was a guy trying to break in.  The police dispatcher said, “Sir, are you properly armed?”  My friend said he didn’t own a gun, and the dispatcher said in a disappointed manner, “Oooh, um…well, we’ll get there when we can.” The drunky guy went away after my friend told him (by yelling at him from behind the closed front door) that he had the wrong place.  The cops showed up about five minutes after the incident to take a report and search the complex. (more…)

Popularity: 5% [?]

The seven words you can’t say on TV. There. The thing that every blobit (blog + obit = blobit) is going to focus on is out of the way and we can get to what George Carlin really was on about. It wasn’t curse words. It wasn’t drugs. It was freedom.

From his early exposure as the hippy-dippy mailman on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In to his most recent and venomous HBO comedy specials, from his ill-fated sitcom and recurring role on Thomas the Tank Engine to Bill & Ted and a handful of sardonic, sarcastic, and sometimes sacrilegious best-selling books, Carlin was a guy who wanted to say whatever he damn well felt like saying, regardless of whose fragile sensibilities would be crushed in the blowback. The essence of the man was his love of the language, both the sacred and the profane. His classic skit about hair, for instance:

I’m aware some stare at my hair.
In fact, to be fair,
Some really despair of my hair.
But I don’t care,
Cause they’re not aware,
Nor are they debonair.
In fact, they’re just square.

They see hair down to there,
Say, “Beware” and go off on a tear!
I say, “No fair!”
A head that’s bare is really nowhere.
So be like a bear, be fair with your hair!
Show it you care.
Wear it to there.
Or to there.
Or to there, if you dare!

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Popularity: 7% [?]

Earlier this month New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo reported that he had sent his staff to 1,000 pharmacies across the state in March, April, and May and found more than 250 that were selling expired milk, eggs, baby formula, and over-the-counter medication. The two biggest culprits were the CVS and Rite Aid chains. So what else have these drugstores not been telling consumers?

1. CVS-brand sparkling water gets its sparkle from Darfurian children’s tears. (White Lion, “When the Children Cry” [download])

2. That lawn chair you bought in the “seasonal” aisle? Someone had sex on it. (The Band, “Rockin’ Chair” [download])

3. Whenever you bought an impulse item at the front counter in 2000 and 2004, your name was added to a GOP database of potential swing voters most likely to vote for George W. Bush. (Everything But the Girl, “Politics Aside” [download])

4. Expired baby formula mixed with expired teeth whitener will totally get you high. (Glen Phillips, “I Want a New Drug” [download])

5. The security camera adds 25 pounds. (Joe Henry, “Fat” [download])

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Popularity: 7% [?]

“If I had to label myself in some way, I would describe myself as a kind of traditionalist, I suppose, in terms of cinema. Clearly, I’m a victim of the films I saw as a child — which were not so much art films as pop entertainment. I’ve never been a chic director in the sense of art movies, if you will, or an auteur type of director — an innovative director like an Altman, or someone who’s more responsive to the totality, like Francis Coppola. My work is generally in the middle area of popular entertainment — large-budget commercial Hollywood films with stars, which were essentially the kinds of films I saw when I was a kid.”

–Sydney Pollack, from Judith Crist’s Take 22: Moviemakers on Moviemaking (1984)

I was 17 when The Firm came out in the summer of 1993. My girlfriend wanted to see it because she was a Tom Cruise fan and had read the John Grisham novel. I had neither of those things going for me, but I figured director Sydney Pollack’s adaptation might be somewhat entertaining. I was wrong. The Firm was enormously entertaining.

First of all, there’s the cast — sturdy, reliable veterans like Gene Hackman and Hal Holbrook, applying just the right mix of paternal guidance and intimidation to Cruise’s character; Holly Hunter, Ed Harris, and David Strathairn giving funny, memorable supporting performances; Wilford Brimley as a heavy, which is perfect casting in my opinion since the “World’s Scariest Grandpa” coffee mug was made for guys like him; and Gary Busey in a caffeinated five-minute cameo that takes full advantage of his offbeat talent. Pollack plays to his actors’ strengths, even bringing out the best in Cruise by hammering home his character’s no-way-out dilemma. The Firm also boasts a crackerjack score by Dave Grusin, a longtime Pollack collaborator (Three Days of the Condor, Tootsie, Random Hearts), that uses only one instrument — the piano — a rarity in big-budget Hollywood films. Though The Firm is a little too long at two and a half hours (Pollack said in 1995 that he wished he’d had more time to edit it before it was released), the energy of the performances, the music, and Fredric and William Steinkamp’s editing, as well as the changes that Pollack and the film’s writers — David Rabe, Robert Towne, and David Rayfiel — made to Grisham’s story to condense it for the big screen, add up to a terrific suspense thriller.

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If you’ve watched the TV news carefully this week, you may have noticed that somewhere amidst the all-Russert-all-the-time lovefest there were other events taking place – some of which might have benefited from some Russertian analysis.

There are, of course, massive floods up and down the Mississippi River – a “500-year flood” that has taken out levees up and down the Iowa-Illinois border, according to the Army Corps of Engineers. The enormous damage to homes and lives has often taken a backseat to worries about the damage to the Midwest corn crop. (Less ethanol next winter! More food riots in Africa!)

There is the Bush-McCain pas de deux on oil drilling, with both men suddenly insisting that Congress open the waters off our shores to “exploration and exploitation” (as McCain put it) for the first time in 28 years. Failing to do so, one of them said (I can’t remember which – it’s hard to tell them apart), would doom our nation to many more years of gas prices like we’re seeing now ($4.63 at the local Chevron this afternoon).

And then there is the re-emergence of Rudy Giuliani to shore up McCain’s dipping foreign-policy numbers and to rationalize his slipping appreciation for American values. In the wake of last week’s Supreme Court decision restoring some measure of habeas corpus rights to Gitmo detainees – and with his 9/11 blinders enabling him to ignore the resurgent violence in Iraq and Afghanistan – Rudy trotted out an oldie but goodie, accusing Barack Obama of…wait for it…reverting to a “September 10 mindset” when it comes to applying the (god forbid) Constitution to our treatment of “enemy combatants.”

The media has treated these three developments separately, but to me they’re all part of the same story. Simply put, our nation’s disastrous energy policy is breaking us financially – and when it’s not busy doing that it’s getting us killed around the world, or avoiding the middleman and ravaging us at home via the type of extreme weather that just might portend a climate-change apocalypse. Out-of-control oil prices, Middle East instability and global warming are related problems that require a unified solution. It inevitably will be the task of the next president, even if it’s John McCain, to begin the long-delayed process of weaning this nation (and eventually the world) off of oil and other fossil fuels. (more…)

Popularity: 8% [?]

This was a tough weekend for political junkies – particularly those whose televisions generally find themselves tuned to NBC-related channels. Tim Russert’s death on Friday at the far-too-young age of 58 was nothing less than a cataclysm in this riveting campaign season. He was not just a fixture among the TV commentariat – he was the unquestioned Lord God King of on-air political analysis, the most credible voice on a Tuesday election night as well as the most reliable among all the Sunday-morning quizzers of politicians and pundits.

The weekend was a wall-to-wall weepfest on MSNBC, starting with the raw emotions of Friday evening (when Keith Olbermann’s makeup people couldn’t keep enough pancake on his cheeks to hide the tears, and the pain showed through even on Andrea Mitchell’s surgically improved and/or heavily Botoxed face). By Saturday, an hourlong tribute hosted by Tom Brokaw was running on a loop, and on Sunday Brokaw moved over to the mothership to serve as ringmaster for a televised wake on Meet the Press.

Even after all that catharsis, a huge hole remains evident in the “political culture” that this column aims to explore. Don’t worry, I’m not going to pursue the general hagiography of Russert, what a great guy he was and what a wonderful son; you can find that elsewhere (and besides, I’ve seen enough of “Big Russ” this weekend to last me my whole life). What concerns me is the fact that Russert was such a uniquely talented inquisitor and commentator, that his words and deeds had such an impact on the political scene – and that there is no one currently in the TV-journo profession who stands even a ghost of a chance of filling his shoes.

Russert, quite simply, was the definitive voice of this political age – from his dressing-down of David Duke in 1992 to the whiteboard reading “Florida, Florida, Florida” on election night 2000, and straight on to his dramatic pronouncement after last month’s North Carolina primary that “we now know who the Democratic nominee is going to be, and no one’s going to dispute it.” Hillary Clinton didn’t like that last proclamation, nor did she abide by it, but she was practically the only one who didn’t; though she went through the motions for four more weeks and racked up $20 million of debt, Russert’s was the last word on the campaign for many millions of Americans. (more…)

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Yesterday afternoon I was shopping around for a new mattress for my son’s bedroom, and I happened upon a brand-new America’s Mattress outlet in my town with a flashy “Grand Opening” sign out front. Business wasn’t exactly brisk on a Wednesday afternoon, so the store manager, whose name badge read Sue-Z (no kidding), happily took her time showing me the “plush-but-not-pricey” mattresses I had asked to see.

Sue-Z had some nice things to show me, was quick to whip out a calculator and engage in some on-the-spot price slashing when she felt me hesitate, and she cheerfully offered to give me her business card when I said I needed to think things over (i.e., compare her prices with other stores). We headed to her desk — and there, on a table, was a big ol’ stack of Bibles.

Now, I’ve become accustomed to seeing Bibles for sale in the book department at Target; I’ve spent a bit of time in Christian bookstores (mostly as a teenager, if I remember correctly, because one such store was on my paper route); and it’s not unusual to see the occasional Judeo-Christian trinket (not to mention a Buddha or any number of feng-shui fountains) in a boutique or tchotchke shop. And I’ve heard about the trend toward businesses that wear their religion on their sleeves, from realtors to banks to hair salons. (There was even an article about such businesses in Time a few years back.) But this was a new one for me: Bibles being given away in an otherwise seemingly non-religious store, much less a mattress shop.

My first response was a mental leap to the place where one usually finds a Bible next to the bed – and thinking of hotel rooms and Gideon’s Bibles always sends me into a couple of sung-to-myself verses of “Rocky Raccoon.” But I must admit that I was put off by that stack of religious literature – so much so that I gave serious consideration to not returning to the store, even though its prices were extremely competitive and Sue-Z (I can’t stop writing her name!) was even offering free delivery.

I am an agnostic. That’s an unfashionable term these days, I know; in addition to the scorn and/or proselytizing it traditionally provokes from believers, agnosticism has recently come in for derision from trendy atheists as well, who demand that agnostics get off the fence and call us cowards for refusing to admit that God doesn’t exist. In my case, I find it impossible to rule out the existence of some kind of guiding force in the universe. What I have definitively ruled out is devotion to any particular set of religious principles, or attachment to any creed that excludes or rejects the beliefs or devotion of any other creed. I firmly believe – despite the good works performed by countless people and institutions in the name of their faiths – that organized religion is divisive, delusional bullshit. But that doesn’t mean I reject the possibility of God. (more…)

Popularity: 9% [?]

I’m sure if you took a “No duh” poll on taxes in the U.S., you would find an overwhelming majority of us don’t like paying them. Sure, you can find data on whether people think taxes are too high, or if they feel like they are paying too much, but the question of actually enjoying the process of writing a check to the federal or state government (or in some cases, a city government), I’m pretty sure there would be a paucity of good vibes — +/- 3%.

Like I said, it’s a “No duh” poll. But the attitude toward taxes in the U.S. is one that is wrapped up in distrust toward the people spending the money. There’s a certain disconnect between “us” and “them” when it comes to an individual’s connection to the government; and that disconnect is quite pronounced when it comes to taxation.

The 30th anniversary of Prop 13 in California can be seen as something uniquely Californian, but it’s not. Prop 13 (enacted in 1978) was a voter/tax payer initiated grassroots movement of pissed off residents in the Golden State who saw their property tax rates go through the roof as the price of real estate increased. Ah, but if it was just the paying of taxes that was at issue in the drive to make Prop 13 part of the California Constitution. No, when there’s money involved in government, who gets what, and how much, and for what reason is fueled by the clashes of class. Issues of class (and even race) are not really addressed when Prop 13 is discussed. Rather, the usual story of elderly residents losing their homes because of rising property taxes becomes the narrative frame of the history of Prop 13. That’s not to say that wasn’t an issue, it’s just that divorced from the historical forces of the early ‘70s, Prop 13 can seem like populist revolt that only had to do with money.

The scheme prior to Prop 13 was fairly simple: property taxes levied by a county were used to fund public schools in the ZIP codes where the money came from. The state government really didn’t get too involved in the system of funding, since its contribution was less than 40%. It doesn’t take a hell of a lot of logical reasoning to see that under this scheme, the per-pupil spending in school districts around the state showed great variations. Sure, the state provided a minimum of funding for all districts, but the nice “extras” districts flush with money got, were, by and large, confined to ZIP codes where incomes were high. (more…)

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A couple weeks ago, my colleague Jon Cummings posted his opinions on Keith Olbermann’s current Bizarro-world rantings, exhibiting a vehemence seldom seen from the supposed liberal left. Jon rightly claimed that Olbermann’s spasms were frighteningly right-like and as over-the-top as Bill O’Reilly. At the same time, he said that the underlying sentiment of anger at President Bush, his penchant for being so out of touch with the very country he runs, and his patronizing stabs at letting the little folk think know he commiserates are dead on. I have to disagree.

When I talk to my friends and co-workers, the folks “down here” on the totem pole, I don’t get a sense of anger, certainly not the eye-bulging, vein-throbbing anger of a certain MSNBC commentator. I get despair, and lots of it. I have written in the past about the shell game that is the Economic Stimulus Rebate, saying that our ever-mounting bills, still faltering job market and ever increasing debt-load, would render the whole thing null and void. As we roll into summer (and yes, 2008 is almost half over!) few families can afford that trip to a sunny destination and many are wondering if they can even afford to take the whole family to the movies a couple times this year. Gas prices are shattering records and that 1970s inflation curve economists have been ameliorating us with (”If you do the math, we’re still paying less than we did in ‘73! Boo-Yah!”) is rapidly breaking apart. Under the weight of all this, I find those around me are too depressed to be pissed, too burdened to rage. If the true plan from the upper 10% of America was to drive the lower 50% into a suicidal funk, it’s starting to work.

So even though it is oddly cathartic to see Olbermann bitching, ostensibly for our benefit, it is hardly about capturing the national mood. See, America used to be the land of dreams, many unrealized, but it was okay to believe better times were ahead, our lives could turn for the better just like that, and that the much vaunted ‘good life’ could be ours. It doesn’t seem like dreaming is allowed anymore. There are too many gatekeepers to pass, too many toll-takers to pay, not enough air to breathe. We can’t even go for a Sunday drive without fearing the financial backlash on Monday morning. My brother Dan has been in a band, Core Device, for more than a decade and they’re good. As a matter of fact, as metal bands go they’re actually great, and that’s not nepotism. Yet, with a small family of his own to support and a job market that could never provide what he needs, Core Device has been pushed farther and farther into the margins. My friend Tom died a couple years ago. Well, died is a soft-shoe term because he actually killed himself. His business went under, his wife was sick, his bills kept mounting and hope seemed like a fool’s game. My uncle had to take on loans to save his home and now, in a period of his life when he was hoping to retire with minimal debts, is working as a janitor where his boss condescendingly calls him “Pops.” (more…)

Popularity: 10% [?]