Civil Disobedience,...with a SMILE!

Yet another little bit of Photoshop Phun!

Appropriate, I think,.... NYUK! NYUK!

People have GENITALS,...get OVER IT!

Boy, oh boy, oh boy did this one get my knickers in a twist,....From the Dallas Morning news coming outta Frisco, Texas! Yeeeeeeee-Haaaaaaaaaah!

FRISCO : A veteran Frisco art teacher says school administrators have retaliated against her because a student reportedly saw a nude sculpture during a field trip to the Dallas Museum of Art.
District officials say they are supporting a principal who reprimanded Sydney McGee over the field trip and other performance issues.
At Ms. McGee's request, the situation was aired in public during a school board meeting Monday.
The school board rejected a request that would have allowed Ms. McGee to transfer to another school.
Ms. McGee told the board that the principal of Fisher Elementary School criticized her performance and threatened her job after a parent complained about the April field trip.
Ms. McGee's attorney, Daniel Ortiz, said she didn't receive any negative reports until shortly after the field trip.
"This case is about censorship. ... It's about retaliation front and center," Mr. Ortiz told the board.
Ms. McGee, who has taught in various Texas districts for 28 years, said she visited the museum and spoke with museum staffers before the trip to ensure that it was appropriate for the fifth-grade class. Ms. McGee said she does not know which piece of art offended the parent, and the district did not identify it.
Ms. McGee said principal Nancy Lawson called her into a meeting the day after the trip to admonish her about the parent's complaint. Shortly thereafter, she received a negative review and a series of directives about displaying student artwork and creating lesson plans.
"You have to start somewhere when you've seen things you don't believe are in the best interest of the students," Superintendent Rick Reedy said.
In a memo to Ms. McGee, Ms. Lawson wrote that students were exposed to nude statues and other nude art representations during the trip. Ms. Lawson said she received complaints from parents and other teachers about the trip.
Ms. McGee said Monday that she was afraid of being fired. Ms. Lawson told the board that she planned to have Ms. McGee return to Fisher this fall.
Ms. McGee said she sought to resolve the issue by requesting a transfer.
"There was such hostility, I didn't feel like that was a good environment," she said.
That grievance and another transfer request were rejected by administrators. The school board unanimously upheld those decisions Monday night.
Some board members said it appeared that Ms. Lawson was trying to improve the art teacher's performance and should be allowed to do so.
"It is a principal's job and their duty and responsibility to give directives to the people who work for them, and I don't want to circumvent that process," board president Buddy Minett said.
Board members said there were other performance issues in question beyond the trip complaint.
But Ms. McGee and her attorney said there is a clear connection.
"She made a great effort to see to it that the April 26 field trip was in fact a big success," Mr. Ortiz said. "Apparently one parent complained, and that changed Sydney's work."

So,...after I read this, my head cracked open like and egg and let out a shriek from the depths of my soul and as the wailing cry rang like a clarion through my condo-complex I'm sure the old lady at the corner jolted up from her dropped egg on toast and said, "What the Hell was that?"

So,...let me get this straight,....even though the teacher has been actively employed for twenty eight years, all of a sudden,.....now her performance is a problem. It wasn't before the field trip,(which, I assume all children's parents had to sign a permission slip for), but miraculously, after the field trip, the ten-gallon hat wearing school board has an issue with her performance.

All because an intelligent woman, (and we all know it had to have been a woman because women, after all, are responsible for all sin! Curse of Eve and all that), tried to bring a little culture and art history to their little shit-kicking, hick, future neo-cons.

And let's be clear,....it was the parents who complained, not, (if we're to believe this article), the child. These idiot parents, who should probably never have reproduced in the first place, have an issue with classical art that has been celebrated and moreover, displayed in public for thousands of years.

Was the child really that traumatized by catching a glimpse of David's package sans the fig leaf? Or perhaps the voluptuous exposed breasts of The birth of Venus? I'm betting no fifth-grader in that place was anything but delighted and this parent is treating it like the teacher brought them to a revival screening of Deep Throat.

And the supreme act of cowardice on the part of the school board as they will neither reveal the parents, nor the offending piece of art. How cowardly is that? You can be accused but are not allowed to face your accuser nor refute the claim to said person, (if that is, indeed, still the story).

So, the teacher cannot address the party, cannot refute the claim and they will not allow her to transfer.

Can you say, "getting railroaded", boys and girls? I knew you could!

And big, fat hairy, red-state surprise, it came out of TEXAS! Good old God-fearing gun-toting thank-you-so-much-for-the-bush-crime-family, fattest people pre capita, super-sized oil loving TEXAS!

I hate these stories with every fiber of my being,....This type of parent, this abomination, this misguided broken thing,....if it was the mother, (and I bet you 99% it was, if not I'll be surprised), I picture this uptight, coiffed "proper" woman. The kind of woman who cannot appreciate a good ol' fashioned dose of "blue humor". The kind of woman who wants to censor classic cartoons, "for the children".

The kind of woman who reads the Bible and thinks she understands it, the kind of woman who only has sex "the normal way", with no deviation, even on "special occasions", like her anniversary. A woman wound so tight and so afraid of herself and everything else she feels the need to insulate her children from the projected evils of this world she so greatly fears.

Evils like sex, or,.....sex,......or even sex,....but especially SEX!

The type of woman who can't even swear when she whacks her thumb with a hammer or stubs her toe on a loose flagstone. She'll blurt out, "H-E-DOUBLE HOCKEY-STICKS!", or the perennial favorite, "SUGAR-HONEY-ICED-TEA!"

This woman doesn't own a vibrator, she has no idea where her G-spot is and she thinks a clitoris is a German car.

If it's the father, I picture a God-fearing Christian that doesn't go in for all that evolution bunk, the kind of guy who knows for a fact that the world is only six-thousand years old and that dinosaur bones are a trick of the devil.

He knows masturbation is a sin and though he may "sin" on a daily basis, he goes to confession and says ten Hail Marys so it all comes out in the wash, (with All temper-cheer with bleach).

This is a man who believes in peace and brotherhood but wants to "kill the Muslims!" The type of guy who will condemn sex out of wedlock and then go to a hooker for all of the services his wife will not perform, (she is, after all, the mother of his children,...she aint' no whore!).

This guy doesn't support stem-cell research, or gay rights. He thinks AIDS is a curse from God and that someday, JAY-ZUS will come and take him and his perfect family away in the rapture and as he rises gracefully from this new Sodom and Gomorrah he will laugh with righteous splendor as "the queers" and liberals all burn and scream skyward with envy and remorse as the pious ones are whisked away to a Heavenly country club where they can play golf and booze all day and most definitely, no minorities are allowed.

A bit histrionic? Perhaps a wee bit over-exaggerated? Maybe.

But I don't think anyone can debate that this poor teacher is a victim of a small minded person's fear of Sex. And that's what it boils down to.

"The naughty bits", and all the damage the Bible tells you they cause because as you know,....Jesus never thought about sex,...Hell! He didn't even have a penis! He's the Biblical equivalent of a Ken doll.

An androgynous smiling blonde haired blue eyed Nazarenen Brad Pitt who never had a human urge in his entire life,....who never thought about love, or perhaps contemplated marriage.

Who never looked at a woman, or thought about a woman and for the love of GOD,...never, ever, ever, looked on with eyebrows raised as he may have glimpsed Mary Magdalen leaning down over the rocks to wash her hair in the river, with water running down her shoulders in rivulets as her eyes flashed and reflected the lazy afternoon sunlight, sitting there perched on the banks and letting her hair dry in the gentle desert breeze while they lazily sipped wine and spoke of the depths of the spirit and the eternal nature of the soul.

These are the type of idiots who have let the modern Christian churches demonize sex and make it "a dirty thing".

So they kick up a stink and everyone else pays. The world of classical art, the community, the children.

I blame the school board, the cowardly principal, but most of all,....I blame the parents for being complete and total, holier-than-thou, closed minded flaming dipshits with no ability to think beyond their own narrow microcosm.

If there is a Karmic balance, the child of this parent will become the most successful porn star of the 21st centruy.

Or maybe just an artist who paints a lot of nude portraits.

Photoshop Phun

There's nothing like a little good old fashioned civil disobedience on your lunch hour.

I did this while enjoying a turkey sammich at work.

Heh!

Never been so horrified,.....

.....at a movie trailer as I am at this one.

They say the radical Muslims are bad?

We got it right here at home.

I have no pithy comments or witty reparte' to offer up regarding this. Simply watch for yourself and witness the impending future.

Jesus Christ.

Literally.

http://www.apple.com/trailers/magnolia/jesuscamp/trailer/

Well welcome aboard, Mister late-to-the-party

So,... Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez stood before the United Nations today and called Ol' King George the Devil and here is the quote,...."The devil came here yesterday," (he said, referring to Mr Bush's speech on Tuesday), "It still smells of sulphur today."

And I'm thinking, as I quote Bruce Willis in Die Hard,... "WELCOME TO THE PARTY PAL!!!"

Yah Hugo, we pretty much knew that.

Maybe it was lying to the American Public about the war, maybe it's the illegal wire taps on home soil, or it could even be the fact that he keeps saying the law doesn't apply to him because he's, "A wartime president", or it could be the pesky little matter of trying to retro-actively absolve himself of prisoner torture as the shadow of the impending congressional mid-term elections looms near.

Or it could be the way he completely dances around The Geneva Convention by claiming the defenition of human rights that prevents torture of prisoners is "too vague"

It could be the fact that he's allowed big business to privatize every aspcet of the Government and business, or the way he allows the oil companies to manufacture an energy crisis and artificially inflate prices at the pump.

It could also be the secret prisons we know know they have, or little things like, "You're doin' a heck of a job, Brownie", while Katrina blew New Orleans away, or not giving the troops the proper equipment and bait and switching their tours of duty.

It could be no exit strategy, or it could be Darth Cheney, or Tom Delay, Donald Rumsfeld Condaleeza Rice and Karl Rove. Or his cowardly ignoring of Cindy Sheehan when she only has one simple question, ("what did my son die for?"), or it could be one of a thousand other things including actively trying to wipe out the American middle class as he advances some globalist Project-for-a-new-American-Century right-wing Neo-Conservative Christian fascist armageddon while he pisses on the Constitution.

Pick any of those and run with it.

If the administration is, indeed being run by the Devil, (and every other demon from Hell that is actively employed by it), then America is truly possessed.

And we all know what happens when you're possessed,......you need an exorcism.

Mid-term elections are coming inNovember and if there is a God in Heaven, or if the founding fathers can take a moment from rolling in their graves and exact some positive influence over this poor, sick country, then the Democrats will take the house, get subpoena power back and faster than you can say, "I CAST YOU OUT, UNCLEAN SPIRIT!", inquiry and impeachment proceedings will begin.

And maybe the country will shake and convulse, spit up pea soup, spin it's head around, levitate off the bed and finally give up the ghost.

And as the dust clears and the first rays of sunshine cut like a knife through the darkness of that bad night, the little midget lady from Poltergeist will climb up on a stack of phonebooks in front of the capitol building, delicately moving a lock of hair out of her face in a Southern lady-like fashion and demurely proclaim,...

"This house is clean."

Until then, I cross my fingers and pray to anyone who will listen.

Dishonoring a dead woman

On the morning of January 15th 1947, a woman named Betty Bersinger was out walking with her three year old daughter when she stumbled upon what she at first believed to be a discarded mannequin dumped at the edge of a vacant lot in downtown Los Angeles.

It didn't take long for the horrifying realization to hit home. Terrified, Betty covered her child's eyes and hurried off to sound the alarm, leaving the bisected body of poor Elizabeth Short in the dewy grass of that early overcast morning and ushering in an auspicious beginning to the legend of The Black Dahlia, the most notorious and unsolved murder in the history of LA county.

It's not easy to pinpoint why this particular murder has become such a magnet for grim fascination over the years. Perhaps it was the brutality of the injuries inflicted on the poor, hauntingly beautiful girl. Perhaps it was the media circus that was being perpetuated by the ever-growing tabloid-style journalism rampant in the papers of the time. Perhaps it was the fact that so many people, (all disproven and disregarded), stepped forward to claim that they were Betty Short's killer. Perhaps, more than anything, it is because the murder was, (and largely is to this day), unsolved.

Whatever the reason, one thing is indisputably clear and it's the fact that nobody had seen such brutality or such a media frenzy until the incident.

Those two things combined became un unstoppable force in galvanizing the image of this beautiful girl in the minds of the public who's beauty only served to make her end more horrifying.

Though many of the details were initially kept out of the paper, it was eventually learned that Elizabeth Short had been tortured before she was killed. Cutting the woman in half was the least of the atrocities. Short's mouth had been slit from ear to ear giving her a grotesque "clown grin", both of her legs had been broken and there was head trauma. Various contusions and bruises, (as well as rope burns), showed an obvious sign of struggle and there were patches of skin removed along with all of her major organs.

There are other details which I will refrain from relaying but if you want more of the story it can be found here,....

http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/famous/dahlia/index_1.html

As well as here,.....

http://www.bethshort.com/the-murder.php

(Note: follow these links at your own discretion. The crime scene photos are bad enough but the morgue photos will haunt you till the day you die).

Because of the horrific nature of this crime, I thought the new movie, The Black Dahlia, directed by Brian DePalma and based on a novel by LA Confidential author James Ellroy, would be a movie that would posthumously honor, (as best as one could considering the subject matter), and pay tribute to this fallen star from Hyde Park, Massachusetts.

Boy was I ever wrong.

To call this movie convoluted would be an understatement. Now,...before anyone starts screaming about inaccuracies and artistic license, I know it was based on a novel about the case, okay? I know all about interpretation and suspension of disbelief and spicing things up for the movies but you don't just go and make shit up!

The story centers around a pair of semi-corrupt LA detectives, (who used to be semi-corrupt boxers), who stumble upon Elizabeth Short's body after a botched stakeout operation.

From that point on, Beth Short's murder becomes, at best, a sidebar and her presence, (both dead or alive in flashbacks but played nicely by Mia Kirshner), becomes so sporadic, you find yourself asking, "Wasn't this movie about The Black Dahlia murder?"

What you get instead is Aaaron eckhart throwing fits, a maudlin Josh Hartnett looking like a sedated Basset hound, Scarlett Johanssen filling out period sweaters and smoking, and Hilary Swank vamping so over the top that she makes Elizabeth Berkley's performance in Showgirls seem dull by comparison.

There's double-crossing double-dealing and living in sin as a sort of threesome but without sex and a bank heist that you sorta maybe might remember them referencing about twenty minutes back and there's a pimp, and maybe someone's dead sister that's referenced for some reason, a lesbian nightclub, (all the rage in 40's LA, I hear), as well as Hartnett's crazy German father who spends his screen time plugging pigeons with a BB gun from his tenement window, (arguably the best part of the film. I was bummed when he left).

At some point you expect the detectives to turn to one another and say,...

"Weren't we supposed to be doing something?"
"You mean that Black Dahlia thing?"
"RIGHT! Right! Yeah. That's it. So,......wanna go get a cuppa mud?"

When we do get to Elizabeth's story, it's purely speculative crap. There's haunting screen tests, (no evidence she ever did any), where she breaks down, and tells the camera vulnerable secret things as Hartnett does his best to frown smartly and squint as he watches them. There's lesbian stag films, (again,...no evidence), where, Betty Short, yet again, looks sad as Eckhart flails around like a bee-stung bear and smashes things in protest, and a bullshit scene as Elizabeth is murdered under the careless eye of the Hollywood sign as if DePalma wants you to know,....

'Twas Hollywood that do'd it!

All of it is topped off by a climax that attempts to tie up so many lose ends in such rapid-fire succession that it only succeeds in tying itself up in knots.

While the audience sits there scratching it's head.

I know DePalma's not huge on historical accuracy, as we can all attest to after seeing Kevin Costner throw Frank Nitti off of a building in The Untouchables, (even though Nitti went on to run Capone's operations while Al was in prison but who's askin'?), but at some point you have to give a nod to the actual facts.

Unfortunately, with all it's beautiful cinematography and haunting score, all this film succeeds in doing is painting an even more tragic and lascivious picture of this already tragic figure.

Perhaps with the passing of this film, Elizabeth Short as well as The Black Dahlia may finally rest in peace.

They say if you put a hundred monkeys with type writers in a room...

That they would eventually type out Shakespeare.

This is the case when it comes to me and "programming" HTML.

Something I never remotely anticipated with this blog but it seems that computer programming has caught up with me after all these years on the lam.

Now I will in no way claim that my programming skills are as prolific as Macbeth or as romantically tragic as Romeo and Juliet or as comedic as A Midsummer Night's Dream but believe me when I say,.....figuring out how to crack the HTML in the sidebar section of this blog in order to post links was a major accomplishment for me.

I remeber struggling back in junior high in a very basic computer class. I mean,...they gave you the answers and I still screwed it up.

All I remeber is a bunch of "if x=y then" and "If this = that then goto line 5" type of thing and while everyone else was beaming proudly at their little basic calculators they had programmed, more often than not, I was sitting there going through lines of code trying to figure out where the heck I had gone wrong and lamenting the fact that I couldn't wish my way into the cornfield and be rid of all this numbers madness.

The weird thing is,....over the years,.....I became, well,....."computer-competent" without knowing it. They say that necessity is the mother of invention and while I wasn't looking, I learned things like Photoshop and Pinnacle Studio and a bevy of other programs that today i wonder what I ever did without them.

I started low level designing my message boards with color schemes and borders and sidebars and I started talking to my parents over the phone saying things like, "Well what's the error message say?" and "Did you try rebooting?" and "Well try running it in safe mode."

I'm adding graphics and images and pictures and links to my online messages and I'm using words like RAM and Terabyte and Broadband and what's more, I actually understand them.

I use "hot keys" and "shortcuts" and I can make "jpegs" and "mpegs" and "wave files".

There are times when I step back and I say to myself, "who is this person?"

Even the simple act of typing has increased ten-fold in people. My mother used to do medical transcription and I remember hearing her speed typing at an alarming rate and while I'm nowhere near that,....I'm amazed at the speed with which I DO type.

The reality is,....people learn by doing. They learn by repetition and all those e-mails we send out every day, all those times we upload software and download applications, all those times we pull anything off of a camera or a disk,...all of that stuff, is truning the average person into a basic level computer expert.

And that's pretty amazing.

To think that I've gone from gnashing my teeth over a screwed up calculator program in seveth grade to using a multi-layerd video editing program and outputting it as a jpeg for the web is simply astonishing to me.

If I had to sit down and learn that,...it would be a struggle worthy of Atlas shouldering the earth to me but having learned it over time on my own only serves to show me how much presentation can present a mental roadblock.

If I have to learn it,....it's a chore.

if I want to learn it,....it's a hobby.

And we all know that hobbies are fun.

I wish I could learn to look at everything I hate to do as a hobby.

I think I'd get a lot more done.

Addiction, to be sure,....but to WHAT is the question?

I was never into the coffee culture all that much. In fact, I remember distinctly as a child wondering how in the Hell adults could swig this poison with such regularity as they did

The age old cliche', "Not before my morning coffee", (or some varying equivalent), was heard more than once in my young life and on the rare occasion I sipped my grandmother or mother's coffee I remember the taste damn near turning my face inside out.

All except for one occasion and it was in,....I wanna say Kindergarten,....yeah,...let's go with that.

Kindergarten.

I got a lemon drop lodged in my throat. Not enough to cut off my air but enough to cause me obvious distress. I spent the remainder of that school day perched on the teacher's lap like some cherubic ventriloquist dummy as she poured her coffee down my throat in a pretty clever on the spot attempt to melt the candy.

Very MacGyver of her and kudos to the woman. I hope wherever she is, she's well because she was a great and kind teacher.

I didn't mind the coffee that day.

And now, I am an adult, (well, in theory), and truth be told, I cannot remember when I started drinking coffee on a regular basis, least of all when or how I developed the ability to discern good coffee from bad coffee.

But here it is. A hidden talent that perhaps most people have but like a weird sort of sensory puberty,....it doesn't hit till a certain point, (though I DO know kids drink coffee quite a bit more than when I was younger).

Now,...it's easy and even in some cases, trendy to claim addiction to one thing or another. Almost as if some people wear the addiction on their sleeves as some tragic badge of honor or conversation piece, which I think undercuts people with legitimate addictions.

"I'm sooooooo addicted to Redbull, y'know?"

So I am hesitant to say I am addicted to coffee.

The Oxford American Dictionary describes addiction thusly:

Addiction: ( a-dik-shon) n. 1. doing or using something as habit or compulsively. 2. devoted to something as a hobby or interest.

Well shit! Addiction I'm not partial to but I can sure a s Hell do interest!

I'm not addicted to coffee,....I'm interested in it!

It's a hobby.

It's printed right there in black and white so, A.) It must be true, and B.) It doesn't matter cause it's in print. :)

Seriously though,...if I had to guess,.....it's the feeling it invokes. There's an almost ritual to it's preparation. The filling of the pot, sliding the filter into place, spooning out the grounds, (grinding them if you're really hard core). It's become a prelude to the day. A period of reflection while you wrap your hands around the warm cup and let the aroma fill your nose in the same way it fills your house as it's brewing, drifting through the air like a delicate spirit with it's fragile bouquet.

For me,.....the taste,...the taste of a particular brand of coffee conjures an immediate sense memory. I actually have Dunkin' Donuts brand coffee shipped to me here in California. First of all, it's simply due to the fact that it's Goddam good coffee.

That's the first thing.

Second is, simply,...it reminds me of home. It brings forth images of people getting out of their cars early in the morning, while the sky is still dark and their breath comes out in a dense fog swirling around their heads as these people, women in heavy coats and blue-collar men in flannel and work boots all converge at the altar of the morning with the pink and orange sign calling them like a beacon.

I don't eat the donuts but the smell is fantastic. You step up to the counter and a woman, (generally), with a hard Boston accent, (always), says, "Who's next?", or "What can I get foreyah?", or other times simply point at you and say, "Yah?"

And you say, "Large, (Laaaage), regular." and they put the half and half and sugar in, pop the plastic top on that styrofoam cup and you're on your way,...pushing out past the line of people waiting for their magic elixer as you trudge to your car, a little warmer now against the freezing New England wind and most assuredly, ready to face the day.

There's also a sort of weird brotherhood between D&D coffee drinkers. I've seen total strangers pass one another, each holding a cup and raise it like a toast, giving a little nod to eachother as if they're silently saying, "Hey buddy, we're smarter, (smahtah), than the rest of em' aint we?"

Weird, the little things that draw us together.

There really must be a "home memory" over taste factor to it because my friend Elaine has Tim Hortons coffee shipped in from Canada and she swears by it,.....while conversely, it nearly killed my parents while traveling through Canada recently.

The second they hit the Maine border they went straight to a "Dunkies" like it was an oasis in the Gobi desert, (except with crullers).

Though whether you like your local version of "joe" or Chock full-o-nuts I think we can all agree that this whole Starbucks thing is bullshit.

If I want bitter tasting swamp water that looks like motor-oil strained through a sweat sock I'll do it myself,....and I certainly won't charge myself five bucks for the privilege.

I also don't want to have to learn how to speak Italian to order a coffee.

Every time I've been in there ordering I feel like a dim slow child trying to read Green Eggs and Ham for the first time. You read very slowly and move your lips a s lot.

"I'd like a ,......mocha-latti-ssimo-chai....kakka-chino.....some..thing-iatto?"

And their sizes?

Tall, (small), Grande, (still small), and Venti!,(Dunkin' Donuts small).

And you're not a barrista, okay? YOU POUR COFFEE.

And they have a school for this when they hire you? Are you kidding me? You go to electrician school, or plumbers school or carpentry school or computer school. I don't need to go to coffee school. I think I can figure out how to sell you $7 coffee, (whipped cream and caramel drizzle, sir?), and fleece you for a biscotti.

And the clientele'? Do I really wanna sit there next to some Hollywood poser with his iBook and listen to the little clown talk way too loudly into his cell phone about his screenplay?

Nobody wants to see Gremlins 5, jack-hole.

It's enough to put you off the coffee experience completely!

So I continue to observe my coffee ritual in the quiet of my own home, or my office.

So there it is. Drinking coffee is a psychological extension of home which reminds me of a safer time when I felt more secure. Coffee=Home=safe therefore we can extrapolate from this equation that coffee=safe!

See?

Or maybe I'm just addicted.

Sean

Yet ANOTHER book recommendation!? The HELL you say!

Now,....it's not that I think you are all a bunch of mouth-breathing knuckle-dragging miscreants who are in need of a literary education,....I just seem to be on a book kick lately.

I was walking out of Barnes and Nobel last night, (freshly raped after paying $45 for season two of Dead Like Me), and I stopped at the true crime section.

The shame of this is that I must reveal I was looking for the new book on The Black Dahlia murder. With the new film out I have been consumed with re-acquainting myself with the fate of poor Elizabeth Short, but I digress.

What I did find,....the little gem that was there,...was the fantastic book by Nicholas Pileggi entitled Wiseguy.

The story of life in a Mafia family and boy-howdy is it ever. In case you may not know or have not yet guessed, this is the real-life account of mid level mobster and pop-culture anti-hero Henry Hill and the (very tight) basis for one of the greatest films ever to hit the silver screen,...Martin Scorcese's Magnum Opus, GOODFELLAS in which Ray Liotta plays Henry with maniac yet subtle brilliance.

The book itself is an unintentional valentine to life in the mob yet is nowhere near as romanticized as Mario Puzo's The Godfather, (also another one of the greatest films of all time).

aficionados of the film will not be disappointed as much of the dialogue as well as Hill's narration were lifted almost word for word from the pages of the text. There's also a lot of stuff in the book not explored in the film, (due, I'm sure, to time constraints as well as story relevance), such as Henry's stint in the Army and a few other things.

Overall I cannot persuade you enough to treat yourself to this book. It's a fast read and you won't be surprised when you go back to it again and again.

Personally, I was delighted because I've been searching for it for years after I lost my copy and I had feared it out of print.

On a side note,....I find it astonishing that Henry Hill is not dead yet. Between his chronic alcoholism and drug use but moreso from his shocking regularity of public appearances.

From his frequent drunken appearances on The Howard Stern Show, (the last in which he could be heard slurringly accosting news reporter Lisa G. for "a caramel macchiato" which she mistook for something far nastier), to his website goodfellahenry where he's hawking his tomato sauce, (Ginzo or "Sunday" Gravy), it's not exactly like you don't know where to find him.

I'm surprised nobody's walked right up to him, said, "You're a f**king RAT, Henry!" and ventilated his skull with a .45.

Perhaps he's just seen as too tragic a figure.

Like shooting fish in a barrel or moreover,....maybe his detractors see it as a more fitting punishment for him to rot away slowly from alcohol and spiritual poisoning.

Maybe dying quick is too good for this Goodfella.

Whatever the case may be,.....Henry Hill and his story, (what you can believe of it), have become a pop culture Mafia version of Cinderella and will forever be in the hearts and minds of film lovers everywhere.

The book Wiseguy is no exception.

Open some red wine, (gimme the white too), cook up some pasta, and give it a good read.

But remember,....keep stirring it, and don't put too many onions in the sauce.

Sean

Disproportionate pride.

Disproportionate pride is what occurs when you are as proud at an event or a thing that is as if you accomplished it yourself yet it is not your own!

I have a few of those floating around my sphere right now but none so profound as this little sweetie right here.

My friend Sarah published a NOVEL.

Yah. Pretty much.

Now it's one thing to have a group of friends that you almost suspect was pre-ordained before your actual birth, it's another to have an almost supernatural bond to a group of people where, no matter how much time passes, no matter how long the daily grind of life gets in the way, you seem to grow closer. That odd phenomenon wherein you don't speak to somebody for three years and when you do you feel like,..."Didn't we just talk on Monday?"

But it's quite another thing when your group grows up and starts doing "adult things" that were, when you formed your little pubescent bond, seemingly unattainable or seemed like Herculean feats that only adults could accomplish.

Well,....Sarah is foremost among my group of particular mutants, (although none of us has yet developed claws and super-healing powers but hope springs eternal. We are nothing, if not optimists).

Sarah and I , as well as having the spooky ability to read eachothers thoughts with disturbing regularity, also have a juggernaut of a work ethic so when she told me she was going to self-publish a novel,......I simply said, "Cool!" and waited.

Of course, it took some time,....motherhood, (a key component in the novel and brilliantly illustrated), is a full time job and God bless my buddy Pete,...the ever dutiful husband, fellow mutant and MOTH, (man of the house), for holding down the fort while Sarah retreated to, "The writing cave".

I have the extreme honor of having read several drafts of this as it was a work in progress and it was such a joy watching this come along.

So here it is,....."What happens when love won't take a time out"?

You get Stay at Home,...a new work of fiction, (Goddam brilliant fiction), by Sarah Phelan.

It's a great book,......Sara's turn of phrase and handling of dialogue is reminiscent of the descriptiveness of Stephen King with rapid-fire witty exchanges worth of Vince Vaughn delivering them.

The plot twists are varied, and tragically human. Through the laughs and chuckles and playful scenarios is the underlying spectre of things not achieved, forbidden attraction and the unavoidable yearning for excitement, (forbidden or otherwise), that is sometimes, (oddly so), a side-effect of a good safe suburban existence.

The characters, (especially the main character Janie), are very real, and though one may rush to judgment that they are sometimes bad people,....they are in fact, good people making bad, (and very relateable, and again very human), decisions.

Everytime I look at the book on my nightstand, I get a swell of pride that, as I said,...is as if it were my book, and I wouldn't say this if I didn't feel it either.

You can get the book here,.....

http://www.billysmitts.com

You can also get it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Borders Books and Music.

Go buy it or I'll punch you in the kidneys.

Well,...not really. But go buy it.

Seriously.

Sean

I'm an individual,....Just like everybody else

Everybody and their kid sister seems to have a blog these days and I suppose I can avoid it no longer.

Truth be told,.....I'm not sure I'm going to be able to maintain this whole "blog thing".

In a world of blogs, livejournals, message boards and the like, I suppose it was inevitable that I land one of these sooner or later.
I DO have a livejournal account somewhere that I've allowed to languish in much the same way a young child may forget his hamster cage he left on a broiling windowsill in the dead of a Georgia summer.

Thus,....my old account, like said hamster,....lies a dried up old husk somewhere on the windowsill of the internet. Perhaps I will fare better with this new pet. ;)

It seems everywhere I go and almost everyone I talk to these days asks if I have either a blog
or a myspace account so now when faced with such a question I can answer a resounding "yes!" To what ends this will achieve, I have no idea but the fact of the matter is,.....

I am intrigued by the possibility of eliciting lively conversation, fostering debate and carrying on an overall lively discourse with people outside of my normal sphere of existence.

I actually run a couple of message boards, (dedicated to prop-replica building and hobby model-building), and despite the fact that there is an "off-topic" forum, the conversations inevitably always turns back to hobby-talk.

Yet I, like all of us,...Am a multi-sided creature,.....much like Shrek expounded to a puzzled Donkey in their first movie,...

"Ogre's have layers."

And so do I,.....so here I will rant and rave about politics, pop culture, the paranormal as well as things that start with letters other than "P".

The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step,......

Here we go,....one step at a time.....

Sean