The Rants of Anaximenes

Why Europe Fails

2010-05-16T17:06:00.579-05:00

A lot has been written of late about how the current administration is enamored with European-style systems of government, health care, social reform and the like. Last week, Obama named Donald Berwick as his nominee for the newly created health care bureaucratic head of the Center of Medicare and Medicaid Services. Like his Supreme Court justice nomination Elena Kagan, here is another Harvard academic egghead with no real world experience and a decidedly socialist view of government, which is why no one but Harvard would employ them. Berkwick is quoted in a 2008 speech to the UK National Health Service as saying the US health care system is "immoral" and that the UK "did it right." Of course, that was not long after Great Briton's Health Secretary was forced to apologize in Parliament for the death of 90 patients in two southern England hospitals because nurses didn't exercise proper infection control by washing their hands.

And then, we all will remember how Obama had to go to Berlin to deliver a speech during his bid for the presidency, the only US presidential candidate to have campaigned oversees. Apparently he overlooked the fact that Germans are not a part of the US electorate. Obama grandstanded for the media in front of an audience that largely doesn't speak our language, and those that do called it a speech full of dubious metaphors and soggy logic. If nothing else, it exhibited for all those who would carefully listen just how naive about foreign affairs he really is.

Our centralized power loving, nanny state admiring, re-distributionist, true-believing liberal ideologues, like Obama and his puppets in Congress, have been unashamedly honest about their love of the European model. But I have to ask, what the fuck is so great about Europe?

The European Union is slowly unraveling. It’s been eleven years since the Euro replaced the francs, marks, drachmas and pesetas of the original twelve members of the “Eurozone”, and the current world financial crisis was its first major test. It very nearly flunked it, for two reasons. One, was the unmanageable debts of countries that should never have joined in the first place, like Greece. The other was the sheer lack of political institutions strong enough to protect the currency in a crisis.

Greece has taught the world what happens when a nanny state's indebtedness reaches 102% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP), adding 13% of GDP to its debt every year. On the verge of economic collapse with riots in the street, it took the Germans to bail them out by backing their debt.

German fury at paying for Greek extravagance is turning into outright anger against the EU and the Euro, which has lost 16% of its value in the past six months and is at a four year low to the American dollar. Germany's citizens should well be alarmed. With the Greek bail out, their country now owns a total of $704 billion of debt issued by not only Greece, but also Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Ireland, a sum that equals a staggering 25% of the German GDP.

Although it only unofficially accepts the Euro, Great Britain also suffers from an annual budget deficit that equals 12% of its GDP, due in no small part to a broken socialized health system, one which we seemingly wish to emulate. In a mere twelve months, Britain's total indebtedness will rise from 60% of GDP to 71%, thereby putting that country on a fast track to become as bloated, sick, and disoriented as its Aegean neighbor.

Spain's debt-to-GDP ratio is 114%, putting them as the indisputable Numero Uno in any list that speculates about the "Next Greece." Awash in an invasion with a ten-year 800% increase in immigrants now living in Spain, the country's unemployment rate is an astounding 20% and youth unemployment is a catastrophic 42%.

France owns $511 billion of Italy's $1.4 trillion debt, an amount that represents a stunning 25% of France's GDP. If Italy ever defaults on its debt and cannot make its interest payments, the whole EU house of cards could come tumbling down.

Thanks to the current administration's unsound fiscal policies and a European-style, over-developed sense of "social responsibility" at any cost, the US will double its national debt following in the footsteps of the EU within the next ten years. I therefore thought it best to shed a little light on Europe, and why it fails so fucking hard.

Transition of Leaders

The American voters change their leader every eight years, or four if they are wholly incompetent boobs. Until recently, no despot has every ascended to the Presidency. The American people can be fooled once but not twice, so mark down this prediction: Obama is another liberal Democrat who won't pick up a second term in the Oval Office. Americans like leaders who kick ass and don't bow down with bended knee to pricks like Saudi King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz. We're embarrassed over shit like that.

Europe has been overrun by more despots than you can shake a stick at. Not that anyone in Europe actually would, because they're all weak willed and ill-equipped to deal with political bullies. European people look to the state to serve their every need and they're equally gullible when anyone promises it. Occasionally, the US has to go over there to kick somebody's ass after they've been in power for fifteen years wreaking havoc on the rest of us.

Military Supremacy

We invented nuclear weaponry and if an American president hadn't had the balls to use it, half the planet might very well be under a totalitarian imperialistic regime speaking Japanese. We've bailed out country after country because they were too pussified to fight their own battles. Sure, we've made mistakes, but how many countries are free from totalitarianism because of us? Not that anyone appreciates what we do for them, which leads me to want to say, "fuck 'em," fight your own battles.

The EU has no common military except for the pussies at the UN. The UK and France have their own nuclear arsenal. But the Netherlands, Italy and Belgian were given US nuclear weapons under a NATO agreement struck during the Cold War. None of them have the balls to use them, however, and if any country in Europe is ever invaded, we'll have to go over there and rescue their asses - again.

Soviet Occupation

This is what America's largest city looked like after WWII. The Russian army has never set foot on American soil. Japan is the only country that had the cojones to attack us, and well, you saw what became of them. The only other attack on American soil came from a bunch of unsophisticated Muslim Jihadists who could hijack and fly planes into buildings. And well, you saw what happened to the country that harbored their sorry asses. The misinformed, arrogant and largely misguided European youth think the US are bullies. But we're only a bully when provoked - a bully, by the way, that any other country would ask to help them in a heartbeat if they found themselves on the wrong side of unilateral military aggression.

This is what Germany's largest city looked like after WWII, and the allies carved up the country into itty-bittty pieces. Unfortunately, the Russians overstayed their welcome and permanently occupied half the country for more than forty years. If it hadn't been for the US military occupation of half of Berlin, the free sector of that city sustained through the Cold War would have also ceased to exist. The Germans had little to do with the reunification of their own country. It took the resolve of the US to bring about the collapse of the USSR, including its puppet country of East Germany, otherwise known as the German Democratic Republic, which was anything but.

Military Discipline

The US Marines in full military dress command respect and evoke a certain air of "don't fuck with us." I guarantee you that after Katrina hit New Orleans, it wasn't the New Orleans police who restored order in the storm's aftermath with roving bands of looters and armed gangs who had the remaining city denizens by their throats and fearful for their lives. It was the goddamn Marines. Bush deployed them from Camp Pendleton, an act as Commander-in-Chief for which he never received credit. By the way, many of the New Orleans police themselves participated in looting or outright abandoned the city. I also guarantee you, any that did were never in the US Marines.

The Grecian Army military dress uniform includes a skirt. Spartans might have been some tough sonsofbitches, but at least they didn't wear skirts. No wonder why, the world over, when someone uses the colloquial expression for anal sex, they call it "going Greek." The Grecian military has not participated in any armed conflict since the Germans kicked the shit out of them in WWII. Ironic, then, that it was the Germans who bailed them out of economic disaster earlier this month.

Space Exploration

NASA was founded in 1958 and just eleven years later, landed two Americans on the moon, a feat it repeated five more times. Three years later, we were the first country to successfully park a probe in orbit around Mars, and have landed probes on the surface of that planet six times. A year after orbiting Mars, we were the first nation to create a space station, Skylab. The NASA space shuttle program, the first of its kind to re-use spacecraft, has completed 130 orbital missions. US space craft Voyager I & II are the only interplanetary spacecraft to have achieved solar escape velocity, meaning that their trajectory will not return them to this solar system.

The European Space Agency (ESA) was founded in 1975 and has yet to break the gravitational bonds of Earth. In fact, the ESA can do little without partnering with other space agencies, notably NASA and its Japanese counterpart, JAXA. This includes the International Space Station which has been disproportionately subsidized by American taxpayers. It has been a US space shuttle or a Russian Soyuz rocket that transports all astronauts to and from the "International" Space Station. And now that the US is out of the shuttle business, thanks to President Obama, the Russians will be the Europeans' only taxi driver. The prediction here is that the International Space Station is doomed because of a lack of European know-how and American money.

Internet Development

Americans conceived of and created the Internet, which was first brought online in 1969 under a contract led by the Advanced Research Projects Agency. It initially connected four major computers at universities in the southwestern US. By 1971, other universities, NASA, and the Rand Corporation plugged in, and users have increased exponentially ever since. The explosion of computer technology, PCs and laptops, Ethernet connectivity, Internet Service Providers, the World Wide Web, WiFi and search engine compatibilities have all been led by US corporations.

Europeans coined the phrase "Information Superhighway." That's pretty much it. That's pretty much their entire fucking contribution to the development of the Internet. The European Laboratory for Particle Physics proposed a new protocol for information distribution, which became the basis for the World Wide Web in 1991. The proposal was to create hypertext, a system of embedding links in text as links to other text. But it was the development in 1993 of the graphical browser developed by the US National Center For Supercomputing Applications that gave the protocol its first practical and commercial application. Netscape Corporation produced the most successful graphical browser to that time called, Mosaic. It's a distant memory now, after Microsoft declared war and launched its Internet Explorer in 1995. But the point is, Europe's contribution to the founding of the Internet is so absent, I couldn't even find a decent avatar for this section.

Financial Institutions

Along with NASDAQ, the New York Stock Exchange is, hands down, the most powerful financial engine on the planet with almost five billion transactions annually and market capitalization of over $152 trillion. Yes, that trillion with a 'T'. That is more money than the capitalization of exchanges in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland and the whole of Europe combined. When the Dow Jones Industrial Average has a bad day, so do all other European indexes, including the German DAX, the Italian MIB and the UK FTSE, otherwise known as the "footsie." Leave it to the Britons to name their primarily stock market indicator after a body part fetish.

The Euronext is a pan-European stock exchange based in Paris. It boasts that with a market capitalization rate of $29 trillion, it is the fifth largest stock exchange on the planet. This is a little exercise in mathematics and marketing where you can look much better than you really are. While indeed they are fifth largest, they also have a market capitalization rate 1/5 the size of the NYSE. No matter. The NYSE merged with the Euronex in 2008, so in fact, we fucking own you.

Gasoline (Petrol) Prices

The price of gasoline in the US is considerably cheaper than Europe. It's bouncing around $2.75 a gallon right now. In the Netherlands, where petrol prices are highest, it's running $6.48 per gallon. In the UK, it's $5.79 a gallon. The US imports about 60% of its oil from other countries, a third of which comes from Canada and Mexico. We're not as dependent on oil from the Middle East as you are led to believe; only 17% of our imported oil comes from Saudi Arabia, and 5% from Iraq. The US oil reserves are estimated to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 210 billion barrels, which is more than Iraq and Iran combined.

Europe as a whole imports 80% of its oil, a stunning 38% of which come from OPEC, making the EU far more dependent on Middle Eastern supplies. Moreover, Europe imports 33% of its oil from Russia. Europe oil reserves are estimated at less than 25 billion barrels. The main reason for the high price of European gasoline, however, are taxes. While the US gas tax per gallon averages at 45 cents, around 16% of the total cost, it is far, far higher in Europe: almost 70% in the UK, 66% in the Netherlands and 63% in Italy. You people are getting hosed at the pump hose.

Pop Culture

Founded in 1970, Aerosmith is still going strong today. Nominated for 63 awards, the band has received 31 of them, including 4 Grammy's and the MTV Europe Music Award. They have had 21 singles chart in the Billboard Top 40. The Beatles disbanded in 1970 and the best thing that any of them ever did was The Beatles. They had 30 Billboard Top 40 hits, but now, two of them are dead and the band will never play together again.

Debuted in 1994, Friends ran for ten years. It was nominated for 63 prime time Emmy awards and was exported to 32 countries, including the UK where it ran for eight seasons. Debuted in 1994, The Vicar of Dibley ran for thirteen years and no one in America has ever fucking heard of it. What the hell is a "vicar," anyway?

Denise Richards is what an American former fashion model and movie actress looks like at thirty-five years of age, still pretty much a smokin' hot babe. She's had a beleaguered personal life, married once with two children. Saffron Burrows is what a British former fashion model and movie actress looks like at thirty five years of age: more collagen than a vat of Jell-o. She supports socialism, has never been married and is a lesbian romantically linked with Fiona Shaw, a 51 year old Irish actress.

George Carlin blazed the trails of comedic genius back when people in Europe actually thought circus clowns were some funny shit. George won five Grammy Awards for his comedy albums, published seven books, and was seen on 14 HBO specials and in 16 films. But the Brits think that wearing stupid costumes while running around in circles in fast-motion camera is funny. Benny Hill did the same shit for 20 years. His well known theme song, Yakety-Sax, was a Kentucky-born Boots Randolf recording. Both George and Benny are dead. And while the world will remember George, it's trying hard to forget Benny.

The imagination and creativity of Gene Roddenberry spawned generations of worldwide fans with six TV series and eleven major motion pictures. So recognized, I don't even have to mention the name of the series or the character represented in the avatar for this paragraph. Dr. Who, on the other hand.... Yes, precisely. Dr. Who? A guy who teleports through dimensions in a fucking phone booth? How lame and embarrassing. It was exported to PBS in the early seventies for a couple of years, but never caught on, mostly because Americans demand more depth and imagination than this pathetic example of science fiction had to offer. Its revival attempt with a 1996 made-for-TV movie was an abysmal failure, capturing a prime time audience on Fox of less than 10-million. And current rumor is that a motion picture is in the works. Prediction: that, too, will be a failure.

When Americans make a movie about Italians, they become international blockbusting sensations. This one spawned two sequels and a whole genre of Mafia films. All three Godfather installments won Oscars for Best Picture and the franchise won a total of 16 Academy Awards. By contrast, when Italians make a movie about Italians, no one even knows what the fuck they're talking about. The Cannes Film Festival gave Fellini a "Technical Grand Prize," for Roma, but did anyone besides Fellini really give a shit?

Yes, Europe fails on so many levels. Go ahead and cry. Cry for the cameras, girlie-man. The US laughs at you.

The Way Things Were Supposed To Be

2010-03-28T11:11:00.479-05:00

What the hell happened? Remember the way things were supposed to be by the time we got to 2010?

We were supposed to have zero gravity toilets in routine commercial Pan-Am flights to the moon, a place we had colonized several decades earlier. We were supposed to have manned missions to Jupiter with talking computers possessing advanced voice recognition interfaces and highly developed cognitive skills. And instead of cell phones, we were supposed to have access to readily available inexpensive public video-phones so we could see who we were talking to.

But wait a minute! Those were things that were supposed to have happened almost a decade ago according to the Arthur Clarke story, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Written in 1968, it seems Clarke slightly overestimated the achievements of mankind in the short span of thirty-three years. About the only thing he got right is that today, we have Skype. But since Congress has pulled funding for the NASA Constellation program, we won't be going back to the moon any time soon.

Clarke wasn't the only futurist to get it all wrong. Even TV shows in the past about the future recounting a history that hadn't come to fruition mostly got it all wrong. According to one episode of the original Star Trek television series broadcast in early 1967, we should at this point be fourteen years past a six-year global war, called the Eugenics War. I don't know what "eugenics" are, but if it means oil, then they sort-of got that one right.

In just fifty-two years, according to The Jetsons cartoon series broadcast in 1962-63, we will all be living on asteroids; possess robotic housekeepers with bad attitudes; and we'll get to and from work in jet-propelled spacecraft that can morph into a briefcase, miraculously shedding 99.8% of its atomic weight so it can be carried into the office. Unfortunately, we also will all be speaking with New York accents and apparently will have forgotten any notion of telecommuting. Somehow, I think Hanna-Barbara overshot the mark a little. I don't think we'll get there by 2062.

According to another past production about the future recounting a past that has now actually become the past, this October 16th would mark the thirteenth anniversary of the launch of the Jupiter II, which would have been man's inaugural voyage to explore and colonize deep space (never mind the moon or even this solar system). Unfortunately, the crew was to never have been heard from again, pretty much like the cast of the 1965-68 television show, Lost in Space. This vision of the future also was a bit of over-zealousness on the part of its Hollywood soothsayers, although Hollywood's social mores have certainly evolved. Dr. Smith could now be openly gay, join NAMBLA and do a few things with Will Robinson besides hang around with a goofy robot and tempt fate every week. His weekly catch phrase, "Oh, the pain; the pain," would certainly take on a very different meaning. So would the robot's, "Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!"

Not everything was predicted to be so rosy in the future, however, and some of it might even be spot-on. Twelve years from now, the population of New York City will be 40-million people living in dilapidated and filthy conditions after an economic calamity and social upheaval, according to the 1973 movie Soylent Green. Following the passage of Obamacare last week, which will add ten trillion dollars to the national debt by then, the bleak, dystopian future depicted in the film might not be far from where things are headed. The movie, interestingly enough, portrays good ol' American capitalism as having found a way to solve the food shortage represented in the story. It was the Soylent Corporation that created the process to reduce human corpses to a food product that everyone could enjoy. But in real life, we all know this would be government regulated, and the FDA nutrition labels would have been very burdensome.

In another close-to-reality foretelling of the future, the movie 1984, released in 1984, from a book written by George Orwell in 1949, called Nineteen Eighty-Four, predicted the world in a perpetual state of war, pervasive government surveillance, public mind control, and the voiding of citizens' rights. The story coined the now omnipresent dictum, "Big Brother is watching you," and featured something called a "thought crime." Actually, Orwell wasn't far off on his predictions. In the intervening time since the book was written, we have engaged in twenty-three armed military conflicts; the Department of Homeland Security can now see you naked; we have 24-hour propaganda channels on cable, otherwise known as MS-NBC and CNN; and all hate-crime legislation is predicated on what the perpetrator is thinking at the time a minority or special interest group member is victimized. George was brilliant and pretty much hit the nail on the head.

But other portrayals of the future weren't so accurate. In fact, some were downright silly. We would be looking up at a moonless night sky forevermore if the past had become the future from the syndicated British TV series of 1975-77, Space 1999. According to the premise of the series, nuclear waste from Earth stored on the moon explodes in a catastrophic accident on September 13 1999, knocking the moon out of its orbit and sending it and its inhabitants of "Moonbase Alpha" hurtling uncontrollably into outer space. Never mind the scientific implausibility of the premise, it starred Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, who up until then hadn't been able to find acting jobs after leaving Mission: Impossible in 1969. In due course, people soon remembered that Martin Landau and Barbara Bain couldn't really act, and since no network would pick up the series, it was canceled after two seasons. We all know that Al Gore would never allow nuclear waste to be stored on the lunar surface, anyway. He wants it kept in the salt domes of Utah where it bloody-well belongs.

In the 1973 movie, Westworld, we were all looking forward to one day traveling to adult Disneyland adventures and living out period fantasies with lifelike robots. In addition to Westworld, you could also take a hovercraft over to Medievalworld or Romanworld. I'm betting the latter would have made a more interesting movie, but Yul Brenner couldn't find a job because western movies and musicals were pretty much passé by then. So, Yul ends up playing a caricature of himself as a robotic wild west gunslinger who goes amok and starts killing people for real. Today, of course, we don't have anything like that, except for the shooting sprees we enjoy every so often, like Columbine, Virginia Tech and Fort Hood. So, I guess this one kinda hit the mark in a glum, morose sort of way.

From Back to the Future II, here's what we're not going to see happen in 2015, the year this movie is set. Jaws XII isn't going to come out in movie theaters unless Stephen Spielberg decides to franchise eight more installments in the next five years. We won't be able to control the weather. A DeLorean won't fly any better than it drives. There still will be no flux-capacitor. And Michael J. Fox won't turn his pockets inside-out before traversing the streets on a "hoverboard.". He will instead be shitting in diapers and rolling around in wheelchair. It was all portended to be downhill when Universal Parks replaced its Back to the Future: The Ride with The Simpson Ride in 2007.

Fifteen years ago, according to the 1971 movie, A Clockwork Orange, the British at least would be living in a totalitarian society that uses behavioral psychology and psychological conditioning as weapons to impose vast controls on ruthless criminals and turn them into little more than robots. Frankly, this is one prediction of the future that I'm pretty unhappy hasn't come to fruition. Fewer criminals fucking the rest of us around and more government-controlled robotic drones besides the ones we already have running Congress would be a good thing.

Finally, in 1984, MGM decided on a completely unnecessary sequel to 2001 called 2010: The Year We Make Contact. Now, just guessing here, but I don't think this is the year we're going to be introduced to an enigmatic monolith representing an omnipotent being capable of starting the nuclear furnace of a star and generating life on another celestial body in our solar system. The producers of this abysmal film had to have known in 1984 that their 1968 predictions in the original film were in no way going to come true within the next sixteen years. Voice recognition cognitive artificial intelligent computers? Ha! The best we had then was an IBM-286 operating on a DOS platform. The second manned space journey to Jupiter? Ha! Our space program had been relegated to orbital missions only, and it had been twelve years since man set foot on the moon, let alone figure out how to get to a planet a half-billion miles from Earth. Pioneer and Voyager spacecrafts had only a couple of years earlier flown by Jupiter letting us know that it was every bit as inhospitable a place as we thought it was. Even today, a manned attempt to Mars seems hopelessly far away. Despite this, the producers gave us fantastic futuristic science fiction that we would do well to replicate in the next century. But their biggest miss of all? The Cold War. According to the movie, the Americans and Soviets will be on the brink of WWIII in just a couple of months. Uh, I doubt it.

Well, the Obama presidency is still young. There's time yet.

God: I'd Like to Apply for the Job

2010-03-07T19:03:00.034-05:00

I know this will sound just as egotistical as all hell, and to the God believers it will be blasphemous in the extreme, but I think I could be a better god than God is. I mean it's not like I'm having delusions of grandeur or anything, really, I think a lot of people could be a better god than God is. If you're omnipotent, just how hard could it be? Surely one of us could create a better reality than the one he supposedly gave all of us.

The problem is that our human existence has forever tried to explain itself through a story that just doesn't make any fucking sense. If God loved us as much as all the gospels allege, he wouldn't have screwed it all up with a convoluted concept like free will. After all, that's what got us all banished from the Garden of Eden and started all of this bullshit, isn't it?

If God really was as forgiving as all the disciples said, he would have given Adam a break for eating that damned apple in the first place, wouldn't he? I mean, does it make any sense whatsoever that God would heap upon us misery, war, famine, disease, poverty, evil, suffering and pain just because Adam ate a fucking apple? How draconian is that?

God instead supposedly gave us this reality and said we all have to follow a bunch of rules to prove ourselves before we "get saved" and get to go to back to Eden - rules, by the way, that change from region to region and from religion to religion. He relegated us to lives of varying levels of despair, misery, desolation, hopelessness, anguish, unhappiness, wretchedness and woe. We have to know sadness, sorrow and grief. We have to deal with failure, disappointment and betrayal. We have to live with hate, abuse, neglect, abhorrence, revulsion and death. We have to witness the senselessness of serial killers, child molesters and animal abusers. We have to overcome greed, gluttony, avarice, covetousness and materialism. In this world that God gave us, children get cancer. Parents get divorced. Friends betray friends. Pets die.

The latest rage among the religious right is "intelligent design," which is just another euphemism for God. Was there an intelligent force at work that created the Universe? If so, he, she or it didn't think things through very carefully. It seems to me that the Universe is an incomprehensibly inhospitable place, with gamma bursts and supernova, galactic cannibalism and gravity waves, quasars and quarks, dark matter and black holes; not to mention that the very fabric of space-time and distance between the galaxies is unfathomably large and we can never go there.

Even our world itself is relentless. Tornadoes and hurricanes destroy on a mammoth scale. Volcanoes, floods and earthquakes change the very geography in which we live, obliterating homes and disbanding families. Wild animals can attack and will eat you. Insects will steal your blood. Bacteria and viruses can invade and transform your internal organs to a gelatinous mass of worthless goo.

And somehow, we're supposed to believe all of this came about because God gave us free choice and banished us from some better place. We're supposed to believe in him and that he became human, and then, we'll be "saved" and get to go be with him and know peace and joy and everlasting love.

Well, sorry. I think all of that is just a load of crap. And even if it were true, I don't think I want to spend an eternity with a vengeful, demanding, angry, ego-centric god, thank you just the same.

I could have done a hell of a lot better and wouldn't be nearly so needy. I could have come up with a blueprint for creation that would have worked a lot better than this shit. Someone needs to ask for God's resignation and I'd like to interview for the job.

I'm not too sure who would actually interview me for the position of god, though, or who would give him the authority to make that decision. That's a bit of circuitous reasoning that I don't care to explain. But let's just say that every 15-billion years or so, the position of god comes available, sort of like members of Congress have to run for re-election. But unlike the voters of Nevada who send the same pitiful fucking career politician back to his Senate seat time after time, the position of god has term limits and it's time for a change.

I fancy that the entity that might interview me for the position would look something like the host of that 1999-2001 Game Show Network's The Inquizition. He was a caustic, foreboding figure. You never saw his face as he upturned an hourglass and rapid-fired questions at contestants who had but three seconds to lock in their answers:

I will have more time than three seconds to answer The Inquizator's questions. After all, this is an interview, not a game show, and not for just any job; this is an interview for the most awesome goddamn job in The Universe.

As a matter of fact, this would have made a great Twilight Zone script and might have gone something like this:

PROLOGUE

FADE ON:

EXT. SKY - NIGHT

Shot of the sky...the various nebulae, and planet bodies stand out in sharp sparking relief, as the CAMERA begins a SLOW PAN across the heavens -

ROD SERLING VOICE (o.s.)

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow; between science and superstition; and it lies between the pit of man's fears and summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call ...

PAN DOWN PAST HORIZON
FLUSH ON OPENING SHOT:

INT.- CONFERENCE ROOM - DAY OR NIGHT

This is a vast, unadorned room, so vast that it is surrounded not by walls, but by shadows; covered not by a ceiling, but by a darker region that eventually leads to a ceiling too high to be seen. Focal point in the room is a large, rectangular CONFERENCE TABLE of black, polished polymer, with twelve unoccupied high-tech, ergonomic chairs. Pencil spotlights above from an unknown source shine circles of light onto the surface of the empty table.

A man with long gray hair in a dark monochromatic suit shirt and tie, THE INQUIZITOR, unknown age, enters the room from a DOORWAY at one end of the room across from the conference table. The doorway appears as it opens and disappears as it closes behind him. He is talking on a black CELL PHONE, and has a gleaming white luminescent FILE FOLDER in the other hand as he walks toward the head of the conference table.

INQUIZITOR (CONT'D)

(annoyed)

....matter of fact, he didn't say anything about it when we talked three million years ago. He was distracted - busy with an ice age or something like that. He should have....

PAN IN:

The Inquizitor has been interrupted by whoever or whatever is on the other end of the call as he takes a seat at the head of the conference table, placing the FILE FOLDER in front of him. As he opens the folder, its luminosity increases and the light reflects off of the pale, weathered skin of his face. He leafs through the file's contents while nodding and listening to the other caller.

INQUIZITOR

Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I agree. Well, we'll just accept his resignation ... even if he didn't have the courtesy to give us the usual 200 million-year notice. His term would have been up in a half-billion years anyway, so we were already lining up candidates.

CUT TO CLOSE-UP:

INQUIZITOR

(impatiently)

Yes, that's right, I know. Right. Uh-huh. Okay, I'll let you know. Okay. Right. Good-bye.

The Inquizitor turns off the cell phone and adjusts his ERGONOMIC CHAIR to a height that seemingly suits him. A white SPEAKER PHONE has appeared on the conference table in front of him. He presses the button on top of the phone.

INQUIZITOR

Sentinel!

SPEAKER PHONE VOICE

Yes, sir?

INQUIZITOR

Anaximenes, candidate for Supreme Being, is he here yet?

SPEAKER PHONE VOICE

Yes, Inquizitor. He's waiting.

INQUIZITOR

Send him in.

SPEAKER PHONE VOICE

Yes, sir!

PAN AWAY:

The speaker phone disappears. Another DOORWAY opposite The Inquizitor appears as it opens, several feet away from the opposing side of the conference table. ANAXIMENES, age 55, stands in the doorway. He is dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and a bright multicolored polka-dot tie, wearing glasses and with an arched right eyebrow on his expression.

MOVING SHOT
WITH ANAXIMENES:

The DOORWAY disappears as it closes and Anaximenes enters the room. His posture is erect and confident. He walks toward the CONFERENCE TABLE. As he does, stationary SPOTLIGHTS from an unknown source above shine cones of light before him, fading up as he enters each cone of light and fading out as he passes through them, until he reaches the conference table opposite The Inquizitor.

SERLING (o.s.)

(over Anaximenes' entrance)

Submitted for your approval, a room that leads to the future. Not a future that will be, but a future that might be. A future perhaps so far removed from even the last vestiges of familiarity with our physical existence that we cannot possibly fathom its reality.

Anaximenes takes a seat at the opposite end of the conference table where The Inquizitor is seated. He adjusts the ERGONOMIC CHAIR'S height to suit him. He makes a slight adjustments of his TIE, and confidently places his FOLDED HANDS on the table in front of him.

WHIP PAN:

ROD SERLING, 43, dressed in a dark, 1960-style, thin lapel Botany-500 suit, white tab collar shirt and a black, slim-Jim tie is FACE ON to the camera, standing in the center of the room at the middle of the CONFERENCE TABLE.

SERLING

This is the beginning of a transition. It is not yet a new world but presently an extension of the old one, the one that in just a few moments may cease to even exist. And not just that familiar blue, third planet from a rather average yellow star in a quiet corner of the Milky Way galaxy, but for the entire Universe as we know it - all galaxies, and planets and stars everywhere, and the very fabric of space and time that lies within it. In just a few minutes, the fate of the known Universe will rest in the outcome of a certain job interview; an interview in this room and at this table for the omnipotent position of Supreme Being, and an interview that could only happen ... in the Twilight Zone.

FADE TO BLACK:
END PROLOGUE
FIRST COMMERCIAL
OPENING BILLBOARD

ACT I

FADE ON:

THE INQUIZITOR and ANAXIMENES are seated at opposite ends of the black, gleaming polymer CONFERENCE TABLE. The pencil SPOTLIGHTS highlighting the table surface before them have become more luminescent. The Inquizitor continues to leaf through material in the glowing luminescent white FILE FOLDER in front of him, the only item on the table except for Anaximenes' folded hands. After moments, The Inquizitor closes the file folder. As he does, its luminosity decreases and for the first time, he makes eye contact with Anaximenes.

CUT TO:

INQUIZITOR

So, you want to be God?

INTER-CUT:

ANAXIMENES,

I want omnipotence. I don't care what you call me.

INQUIZITOR

(incredulous, taken aback)

Oh, really?

ANAXIMENES

(a tad defiantly)

Yes, really. Why should I care what I'm called? I have no intention of being the object of worship or the reason for which people devote all their attentions. I don't want people to beatify some concept of me; in fact, I don't want people to even be vaguely aware that I exist at all.

CLOSE SHOT - INQUIZITOR:

INQUIZITOR

(perturbed, emphatic)

But what about the great religions of the world? What will all those people do without God? Whom will they worship? And what about the clergy? What will they do then?

CLOSE SHOT - ANAXIMENES:

ANAXIMENES

(gesturing outward)

Maybe they'll all go out and get a real job, pay some taxes and help improve the economy.

(he leans forward)

You needn't worry. I can handle the minutia. Let me give you some broad-brush concepts that I have about eternity ... or, at least the next fifteen billion years until this omnipotent term would expire. I think then you'll perhaps see where I'm coming from.

CUT TO INQUIZITOR
PAN OUT:

The Inquizitor appears impressed that this mortal knows about the omnipotent Supreme Being's term of fifteen billion years. The Inquizitor is all too aware that the present god has resigned a half-billion years early, since the existing Universe in only fourteen-and-a-half billion years old. He had to begin his search for a new god earlier than usual. He leans back in this CHAIR and places his hands in front of him, with his fingers in a steeple pose.

INQUIZITOR

(resigned, but a bit

skeptical)

By all means, Mr. Anaximenes, please continue.

CUT TO CLOSE-UP:

ANAXIMENES

(pleased at hearing The

Inquizitor mention his name

for the first time)

Alright, Inquizitor, let's start with the way things ought to be. You see, I think God really messed up when he put the notion in everybody's head that he existed. His existence demanded acknowledgment. Acknowledgment demanded protocol. Protocol demanded belief systems, and belief systems demanded religion. That screwed everything up. God made people competitive as a survival strategy. People compete with people all the time, so naturally, religions compete with religions for God's favor. It's made for a disaster down there. Surely, you've noticed.

CUT TO LONG SHOT
OF BOTH CHARACTERS:

INQUIZITOR

Actually, I hadn't really noticed. I'm concerned with a little more than God's dealings on one planet. The Universe is a big place. And I am not God's boss. God is his own boss. I'm just here to make sure the next omnipotent being for fifteen billion years has been properly vetted. It's a chicken and egg thing I can't really explain.

ANAXIMENES

(quizzical)

Oh, I didn't know that. How many gods have there been?

CLOSE UP - INQUIZITOR:

INQUIZITOR

(contemplating the answer

for a moment before

speaking)

Hmmm. No one really knows. A lot. Maybe infinity. This is sort of how the whole thing works. It's like a circle with no beginning. We vet the best candidates for god, and god keeps going. But there is no god of God. Each new god decides in his omnipotence whether to keep things rolling along this way or not. All of them have done so, of course. I suppose it's my job to correctly choose the kind of god that will favorably make that decision.

CUT TO CLOSE-UP:

ANAXIMENES

And if you choose incorrectly?

DIFFERENT ANGLE - INQUIZITOR
PAN OUT:

The Inquizitor drops his eyes and slowly pushes his chair away from the table. There is the the first subtle suggestion of stress in his expression; that this decision must weigh heavily on him, the awesome weight of responsibility for the perpetuation of a Universe that he alone must bear. He stands up and walks away from the conference table a few paces with his back to Anaximenes.

INQUIZITOR

(somberly)

I said the circle had no beginning, but it most certainly has an end. If I choose incorrectly, Mr. Anaximenes ... if I choose incorrectly and the next god decides not to re-engage my services when his fifteen billion year term has expired, all creation will cease to exist. Everything, everywhere. Anything, anywhere. Over. Done. Gone. Ka-put.

(turning around)

Do you understand, Mr. Anaximenes? Either the next god ensures a perpetuation of the system, or the system simply ceases to exist.

CUT TO:

ANAXIMENES

Yes, I understand. Hm-mm. Well, at any rate ...

(trying to make the

mood a little less

somber)

... and that sounds like a great concept of perpetuation, by the way. I can definitely buy into that.

CLOSE UP - INQUIZITOR:

The Inquizitor gives an approving nod at Anaximenes' saying he would allow the system to continue, and sits back in his chair.

CUT TO:

ANAXIMENES

(continuing)

It's the interim fifteen billion years that I want to focus on, the reality with which the Universe has to contend, and specifically, the reality on Earth. I'm sure there are a lot of other planets and life forms to deal with, but I don't know that, yet. That's one of the problems God created. No disclosure. We really don't understand very much about the Universe at all. Our understanding of physics and the laws of nature are only very recent. We have to claw our way over millions of generations just to be able to produce fire, and millions more to produce a light bulb. The whole evolution thing was really a bad idea. And not only that, but because God has such a big ego, half the people on this planet don't even think evolution is real. They think Satan placed dinosaur bones on Earth to deceive mankind. They don't believe the Earth is four and a half billion years old. It's remarkable, really ... that God allows such ignorance to exist in his name. That's one of things I would change.

INTER-CUT:

INQUIZITOR

Satan?

ANAXIMENES

(perplexed)

Yes, Satan.

INQUIZITOR

Who is Satan?

PAN OUT TO SCENE
BOTH CHARACTERS IN VIEW:

Anaximenes slumps back into his chair in a posture of complete incredulity. The Inquizitor's lack of awareness of Satan has clearly befuddled him.

ANAXIMENES

You mean, you don't know who Satan is? I thought you were in charge of this thing?

INQUIZITOR

(frustrated, voice raised)

No, no, no! You don't understand, Mr. Anaximenes. I only make sure that reality has a god. He is omnipotent. Everything else flows from him. Including this - what's his name? Satan?

CLOSE UP - ANAXIMENES:

ANAXIMENES

Yes, Satan. No, I get that. I get that God makes it all happen. I just assumed that since you're vetting the omnipotent Supreme Being, you also might have had something to say about his arch-enemy, the spiritual personification of evil on Earth. The Father of Lies. Satan. You know, Beelzebub. Mephistopheles? Old Nick? You know, the Devil! A lot of people on Earth are obsessed with him.

CUT TO:

INQUIZITOR

If Satan exists, it's because God allows him to exist, same as gravity, ice cream cones, the speed of light, and the clouds in the sky. It's all his doing.

CUT TO:

ANAXIMENES

I understand. But ...

(chuckling)

... wow. Well, this just makes my point. God, the omnipotent being, capable of defining the very concept and perimeters of good and evil, actually created evil, right? He made it, yes? He allows it to exist to make things pretty crappy a lot of the time for a lot of people, when he could just as easily have made everything great all of the time for all people everywhere.. I'm sorry, I don't mean any disrespect, but where did you find this guy?

DIFFERENT ANGLE - INQUIZITOR:

The Inquizitor rearranges his position in his chair and leans in toward the table. He makes eye contact with Anaximenes, wishing to bring the interview back in his control.

INQUIZITOR

I can't tell you where he came from, or anything about the last cycle. It's forbidden.

(leans back)

Now, let's get back to the interview, shall we?

PAN OUT
BOTH CHARACTERS IN VIEW:

ANAXIMENES

(contritely)

Forbidden by God, I suppose. Yes, of course, I didn't mean to get us off track.

The Inquizitor opens the file folder and looks at one of the papers inside. As the file folder is opened, it's luminescence increases.

INQUIZITOR

Now, what is your chief qualification for this position?

ANAXIMENES

I'm human.

INQUIZITOR

(looking up)

I'm sorry, did you say "I'm human?" How does that qualify you to be omnipotent?

ANAXIMENES

It doesn't. But it qualifies me to know what is wrong with the current reality. I was going to tell you in a broad-brush way, what my concept is for the next fifteen billion years. Might I continue with that?

INQUIZITOR

(closes file as
the luminescence fades)

Yes.

CLOSE UP - ANAXIMENES:

Anaximenes checks his CUFF LINKS and straightens his TIE. He sits up straight in his chair and returns his hands to the top of the table, folded, as before, leaning forward.

ANAXIMENES

Very well. Let's continue with the notion of good and evil. It has to do with a larger concept of duality. God created a reality that has duality. There is no singularity, except perhaps in very extreme cases, like black holes where the laws of physics break down, which is another problem. In every other circumstance, there is duality. Good and evil. Hot and cold. Matter and anti-matter. Light and darkness. It doesn't have to be this way. The fact that he made black holes where the laws of physics break down into a singularity is a glaring paradox we're still trying to figure out. You really shouldn't have it both ways, but it does make my point about duality.

INQUIZITOR (o.s.)

Go on.

ANAXIMENES

So, I would change duality. Let's just stay focused on the positive, or at least change all the default settings. And no paradoxes. In fact, no mysteries of the Universe. Let's go with full disclosure of how everything works and changing the default settings on duality.

CUT TO:

INQUIZITOR

And by changing all the default settings, you mean ...?

CLOSE-UP - ANAXIMENES:

ANAXIMENES

I mean change the default settings from the negative to the positive. Either eliminate the negative altogether and create a different reality without duality, or change the default settings. The natural state of anything is usually negative, so I'm saying change that.

DIFFERENT ANGLE
BOTH CHARACTERS IN VIEW:

INQUIZITOR

Can you give me some examples?

ANAXIMENES

Sure.

(enumerating the examples by

gesturing with the right

index finger touching

fingers of his left hand)

Without light influencing the natural state of anywhere, darkness is the default. Change that. Without a source for heat, the natural state of anywhere is cold. Change that. In terms of human behavior, without laws and civil systems, the natural state of man is a brutal, if not a bloodthirsty animal. Change that. Eliminate government and the need for any governing system. Get rid of that and don't wait for man to evolve to some higher sentient being. Just change that and give it to him on the front-end. Give man a high intellect from the get-go. Allow him to be born with answers, not questions. Give him knowledge, not a brain that has to be engaged with information learned over the course of a lifetime, or one that must evolve over millions of years to comprehend the way things are - laws of nature, the manner of physics or the mysteries of the Universe. I'm saying give all this knowledge to him on the front-end, don't make him earn it. Earning is a bad concept, too.

INQUIZITOR

What do you mean by that, Mr. Anaximenes?

ANAXIMENES

God has put into motion an earning-based reality. We earn the right to go to heaven if we behave a certain way. We earn the ability to comprehend higher concepts of physics and chemistry and algebra and geometry and calculus and the all the immutable bylaws of mathematics by first, evolving for millions of years to develop a brain complex enough to understand it, and secondly only with an entire lifetime of study and dedication to get there. It's maddening. Only a handful of people can actually get there - that is, to know very much of anything, and that's generally only about one subject because it takes a whole lifetime. The most brilliant people on our plant are only brilliant about one subject at a time. Earning is just an investment in time that we shouldn't have to make, primarily because God - who gets fifteen billion years to play around with - gives us so very little time, which is another change I would make. And that is also a part of the duality issue. Old and young. Then, you have smart and dumb; talented and untalented. Left brained, right brained. The whole way it works is just, well, it needs a serious overhaul.

PAN OUT
MOVING SHOT - INQUIZITOR:

A moment of silence befalls the room as The Inquizitor pushes away from the table. He stands slowly and as he does, the pencil SPOT LIGHTS and their luminescent circles of light shining on the TABLE TOP slowly dim. As The Inquizitor walks away from the table and toward the shadows of the room wall, an incredibly large PROJECTION SCREEN materializes into view. The screen is so large that it is difficult to discern its true height and width. As the lights dim, the scene on the projection screen begins to come into focus. The view is a stunning vista of the entire Universe. Strewn about over billions of light years is a Universe that exhibits masses and clusters of whole galaxies, trillions of stars and solar systems. It becomes apparent that this is a vantage point and viewer - a WINDOW, if you will - to see the entire VISIBLE UNIVERSE.

CUT TO LONG SHOT
OF THE VIEWER
OVER ANAXIMENES' SHOULDER:

INQUIZITOR

(almost amused at
Anaximenes' naiveté)

A serious overhaul, Mr. Anaximenes? Tell me....the Universe is a very big place....

CUT TO
TIGHT CLOSE-UP - INQUIZITOR:

INQUIZITOR (CONT'D)

(gesturing with both
arms panning outward
toward the viewing
screen)

...tell me exactly what you would do? Here are 29 billion light years of Universe - only what you can see, mind you. The whole Universe is infinitely larger with multiple dimensions! What exactly are you going to change?

ANAXIMENES (o.s.)

(incredulously)

What exactly, Inquizitor?

CUT TO
TIGHT CLOSE-UP - ANAXIMENES

ANAXIMENES (CONT'D)

(smiling a knowing smile)

Why, everything. I intend to change everything.

PAN OUT
MOVING SHOT - INQUIZITOR:

The Inquizitor walks quickly back to the CONFERENCE TABLE from the PROJECTION SCREEN. As he approaches, the pencil spot lights fade up on the surface of the table and the SPEAKER PHONE materializes once again. He pushes the button on top of it.

INQUIZITOR

Sentinel!

SPEAKER PHONE VOICE

Yes, sir?

INQUIZITOR

Prepare the Euclidean!

(releases button and turns
toward Anaximenes)

We're going out there, Mr. Anaximenes.

CUT TO LONG SHOT
BOTH CHARACTERS IN FRAME:

ANAXIMENES

Out ... there?

INQUIZITOR

(pointing toward the
projection screen)

Yes! The Euclidean is my star ship, Mr. Anaximenes. We're going out there. After all, a god must have his Universe!

CAMERA DOLLY PAST INQUIZITOR
TOWARD THE VIEWING SCREEN
FADE TO BLACK:
END ACT I
SECOND COMMERCIAL

ACT II

FADE ON:

INT. - SPACE SHIP - NEITHER DAY NOR NIGHT

This is the large BRIDGE of a massive star ship, the EUCLIDEAN, traveling at a fantastic speed. The Bridge is semi-dark so that the VIEWING SCREEN toward the front of the Bridge can be better observed. In the foreground, there is a large, slanted INSTRUMENT PANEL, which is the HELM, at a height for which the intended users would stand. On it are many complicated instruments, knobs, dials, buttons and indicator lights. Some lights on the instrument panel are lit, some not, and still others are blinking. The VIEWING SCREEN in the background of the scene at the front of the Bridge depicts the exact same image as was observed in the previous conference room, a vantage point from which to see the entire, observable Universe. The Inquizitor and Anaximenes are standing in front of the Helm. BRIDGE NOISES are prevalent. These are electronic beeps and bleeps that indicate to the audience that the characters are aboard a sophisticated space traveling machine.

EXTREME CLOSE-UP - HELM:

Both of the Inquizitor's HANDS are in view on the HELM'S INSTRUMENT PANEL, pushing buttons, adjusting knobs. Bridge noises react to each action the Inquizitor takes, changing pitch and tone.

INQUIZITOR (o.s.)

Just a few more adjustments here ... and here.

(pausing)

There we are. That should do it.

CUT TO LONG SHOT OF
ANAXIMENES AND INQUIZITOR WITH
VIEWING SCREEN IN BACKGROUND:

INQUIZITOR

(gesturing outward)

So, what do you think of my ship, the Euclidean?

ANAXIMENES

It's quite impressive. So, we're traveling at the speed of light?

INQUIZITOR

No.

ANAXIMENES

Slower?

INQUIZITOR

No.

ANAXIMENES

Well, you can't travel faster than the speed of light.

INQUIZITOR

Who says?

PAN IN TO
TIGHTER CLOSE-UP - BOTH
CHARACTERS IN FRAME:

ANAXIMENES

God. Your god did, apparently, according to a physicist named Albert Einstein.

INQUIZITOR

That would be his law. They don't necessarily apply here. We're not traveling, really, not in the sense you mean.

(pause and thinking,
as if searching for
the right words)

Let me put it this way. We're traveling at the speed of thought.

ANAXIMENES

(perplexed)

The speed of ... thought?

INQUIZITOR

When you use your imagination, Mr. Anaximenes, and imagine yourself in, say, Barcelona or Cairo. Do you spend anytime thinking about how you got there?

ANAXIMENES

Well ... I suppose not. If I imagine myself in Barcelona or Cairo, I simply imagine myself there.

INQUIZITOR

Precisely. Same concept here. We can go anywhere in the Euclidean, travel anywhere in the Universe, with no account for space and time.

CUT TO:

ANAXIMENES

Well, why do we need this ship, then, the Euclidean? I mean, why were you adjusting all those buttons and dials?

CLOSE-UP - INQUIZITOR:

INQUIZITOR

Because I like the way they sound.

(chuckles)

Well, we don't really need this ship, but you are in an ethereal plane, shall we say, and in order for us to relate in some common reality, we have to make up these props. So, I don't necessarily need this ship, Mr. Anaximenes. You do.

PAN OUT
BOTH CHARACTERS STAY IN FRAME
VIEWING SCREEN IN BACKGROUND:

ANAXIMENES

I see. Well, let's just move forward then, and let's get some place close to a black hole.

(looking toward
the viewing screen
and pointing)

There's probably one in the center of that cluster of galaxies in front of us.

CUT TO CLOSE-UP
SHOT OF VIEWING SCREEN:

The VIEWING SCREEN depicts rapid movement of the Euclidean from it's current position toward a cluster of points of light in the center of the screen. As the points of light become larger, it is apparent that they are whole galaxies. Within seconds, the view begins to center on one of these galaxies. It becomes larger and larger on the screen until the entire screen is focused on its center. Within the great spirals of stars surrounding the brightly lit center of the galaxy it becomes apparent that the precise center is completely black - a black hole - with millions of stars in procession around it.

PAN OUT
BOTH CHARACTERS STAY IN FRAME
VIEWING SCREEN IN BACKGROUND:

ANAXIMENES

(pointing at the black hole)

You see? There! That's exactly what I'm talking about. It's a huge inconsistency. It's that duality and singularity thing I'm talking about. The laws of physics apply everywhere, so far as we know, but not here. A black hole is where gravity is so dense that even light cannot escape it. And if light cannot escape it, where does all that energy go? Into a singularity, as the physicists explain it, but they cannot explain it further. Where does the singularity go and where does it end? In other words, the laws of physics - which so well explain all other mechanics of the Universe - simply break down here, and no longer apply. Why? Or more to the point, why the big mystery? No disclosure. God simply created a debacle. No one but him knows what the hell is going on, yet million of people spend their entire lives thinking about stuff like this, when I contend there might be loftier pursuits with which they should occupy their minds.

INQUIZITOR

Loftier than trying to learn the mysteries of the Universe?

ANAXIMENES

That's just my point, Inquizitor. There shouldn't be any mysteries of the Universe. The fact that God put in our minds insatiable curiosity about such things, I think, was to take our minds off of just how badly we're getting screwed down on Earth.

CUT TO CLOSE-UP
SHOT OF INQUIZITOR:

INQUIZITOR

You're saying that black holes are the bane of your existence, Mr. Anaximenes?

CUT TO CLOSE-UP
SHOT OF ANAXIMENES:

ANAXIMENES

(shaking head in the negative)

No, I'm saying that duality is the bane of our existence. The black hole is physical proof that duality isn't necessary. It is possible to have singularities and absolutes. God just couldn't figure a way to have duality everywhere else but here. If you eliminate duality, then a singularity becomes the norm everywhere. The law of physics will be in parity in every corner of the Universe.

CUT TO
EXTREME CLOSE-UP - HELM:

Both of the Inquizitor's HANDS are again in view on the HELM'S INSTRUMENT PANEL, pushing buttons and adjusting knobs. Bridge noises again react to each action the Inquizitor takes, changing pitch and tone.

INQUIZITOR (o.s)

Very well. I understand your position on this matter, Mr. Anaximenes. Now...

CUT TO LONG SHOT
OF INQUIZITOR AND ANAXIMENES
WITH VIEW SCREEN IN BACKGROUND:

INQUIZITOR (CONT'D)

...speaking of Earth, I think we need to take the Euclidean over to your home planet, Mr. Anaximenes. I have a few questions more for you before we conclude this interview.

The VIEWING SCREEN indicates rapid movement of the Euclidean to a SPIRAL GALAXY in a remote region of the Universe and then to a solar system familiar to us. First, the planet JUPITER comes into view, then SATURN; then the viewing screen exhibits the space ship assuming orbit around that most familiar blue planet, the third from the Sun, EARTH.

INQUIZITOR

Here we are! This should look familiar to you, Mr. Anaximenes. Let's take a look at its inhabitants, and I'd like you to elaborate on the things you might change here, were we to bestow upon you the omnipotent title of Supreme Being. Any particular city in mind?

CUT TO CLOSE-UP
SHOT OF VIEWING SCREEN:

As EARTH comes into view, the VIEWING SCREEN begins to exhibit a slow dolly pan inward toward the surface of the planet where the continents of NORTH AND SOUTH AMERICA comes into view. The inward motion of the view continues into the upper atmosphere, through the clouds and focuses on the familiar UNITED STATES region of the North American continent.

PAN OUT TO LONG SHOT
OF BOTH CHARACTERS WITH
VIEWING SCREEN IN THE BACKGROUND:

ANAXIMENES

(pointing toward the screen)

How about Chicago?

INQUIZITOR

Very well, Chicago.

CUT TO CLOSE-UP
SHOT OF VIEWING SCREEN:

The viewer screen exhibits further visual refinement and focus of the land below, bringing the GREAT LAKES into view, then LAKE MICHIGAN. As the rapid pan-in toward the ground continues, the city of CHICAGO is observed in sharp aerial relief against the dark mono-color of the lake. Slowly, familiar Chicago landmarks come into view, like the SEARS TOWER. Finally, the viewer stops on a street scene with cabs and cars hustling along MICHIGAN AVENUE with pedestrians scurrying about busily, walking past, entering and exiting the various buildings.

ANAXIMENES (o.s.)

Let's focus on that guy on the corner. Do you see him?

The screen focuses on one street corner where there is a PANHANDLER. He is dirty, unkempt, unshaven and shabbily dressed, holding a SIGN that reads: "OUT OF WORK. PLEASE HELP." He looks cold, hungry and desperate. Everywhere people pass by him as if he were not actually there.

CUT TO CLOSE-UP FACE-ON
SHOT OF INQUIZITOR:

INQUIZITOR

(eyes on the screen)

You mean him?

CUT TO CLOSE-UP FACE-ON
SHOT OF ANAXIMENES:

ANAXIMENES

(eyes on the screen)

Yes, him. Perfect. He's everything that I would change on Planet Earth.

PAN OUT TO FACE-ON
SHOT OF BOTH ANAXIMENES
AND INQUIZITOR:

INQUIZITOR

(turns and looks at
Anaximenes, incredulously)

Giving homes to the homeless? Is that your big plan as the new god?

ANAXIMENES

(chuckles)

No. Hardly.

CUT TO LONG SHOT
BOTH CHARACTERS IN VIEW WITH
HELM AND VIEWING SCREEN IN BACKGROUND:

ANAXIMENES

(gesturing toward the screen)

You see this guy is supposedly one of God's creatures. But he's been screwed. Everywhere other people have it a lot better than him. But everywhere people are walking past him. Why?

INQUIZITOR

I do not know, Mr. Anaximenes. Do you?

DIFFERENT ANGLE
BOTH CHARACTERS IN VIEW:

ANAXIMENES

Yes, I do. Because people basically don't give a shit about anyone but themselves. They're wrapped up in their own survival. Life is hard on Earth. Over half of its inhabitants are living life under a tyranny. Many more are practically starving. What kind of reality is that to bestow on a group of lifeforms that God supposedly put here? For what purpose? So a handful of them get to experience something purportedly sublime after they die?

INQUIZITOR

I think I see your point. You would take better care of these minions, Mr. Anaximenes?

ANAXIMENES

I would give them a different reality. Or more to the point, they could have whatever reality they wanted.

CUT TO
CLOSE-UP OF INQUIZITOR:

INQUIZITOR

It sounds like you want to give them omnipotence.

CUT TO
CLOSE-UP OF ANAXIMENES:

ANAXIMENES

Only for themselves.

(nodding and smiling)

Only for themselves.

CAMERA DOLLY PAST ANAXIMENES
TOWARD THE VIEWING SCREEN
FADE TO BLACK:
END ACT II
THIRD COMMERCIAL

EPILOGUE

FADE ON:

INT.- CONFERENCE ROOM - DAY OR NIGHT

The INQUIZITOR and ANAXIMENES have returned to the CONFERENCE ROOM, seated as before. Anaximenes has a stack of papers in front of him on the CONFERENCE TABLE, which he is busily reading and stopping occasionally to sign a page here and there. The INQUIZITOR has only his single luminescent file folder in front of him as before, opened, and reading from one of the pages while talking on his cell phone.

CUT TO
CLOSE-UP OF INQUIZITOR:

INQUIZITOR

Yes, that's A-N-A-X-I-M-E-N-E-S. We're going thought the paperwork now.

(pauses and chuckles)

No, I think we're done here. Just a few more details before we confer the title and transfer omnipotence. Right. I'll call you later. Bye.

PAN OUT
BOTH CHARACTERS IN VIEW:

INQUIZITOR

You realize all those people that God sent to heaven these past millennium are going to be pretty upset about you getting rid of the place.

ANAXIMENES

(without looking up)

Yes, well, God didn't worry about making everyone happy. I figure it will all balance out some way. The people he sent to hell these past millennium are going to be ecstatic.

SLOW PAN UPWARD
PAST HORIZON AND INTO THE HEAVENS:

ROD SERLING VOICE (o.s.)

Now, the question that might come to mind is where is this place and when is it? And the answer is....it really doesn't matter. Who's to say that the reality we know today is any more or less real than another that might be conjured by your average omnipotent being, who, for the moment, is engaged in a bit of new hire paperwork before changing, well, everything.... including....the Twilight Zone.

SLOW FADE TO BLACK
THE END
FINAL COMMERCIAL
CLOSING BILLBOARD

Five Really Preposterous Things

2009-11-30T10:37:00.018-05:00

There are things on this planet and in our country that truly perplex me. There are customs, beliefs and generally held notions that just astound me, not for just their stupidity or senselessness, but for the sheer numbers of people who revel in their own folly by believing shit that just isn't true.

Fifty-four percent of Americans, for example, believe in psychic healing. Fifty-percent of people in the U.S. believe that ESP is real and 41% believe that possession by the devil is a fact of life. Twenty-eight percent of people in this country read their horoscope daily not as a muse, but to actually plan their lives around the movement of celestial bodies located trillions of miles away.

In an age where access to information has never been easier or more prolific, it seems like we're just getting dumber as a species. The problem is that as information becomes more available, one must examine it carefully with greater skepticism, and be ever vigilant and mindful of its source. Distortion is everywhere. It's as if one could almost assume everything reported in the news is a fabrication, and it must be the opposite that is really true. This has created some preposterous circumstances, driven by the very people who believe in ghosts, witches and the lost city of Atlantis. These are people that have a vote, by the way, which explains a lot about why these preposterous things have become so preposterous.

Preposterous Item #1 - The Senate voted to open the debate on the health care "reform" bill.

Yes, that is what was reported in the news. The Senate mustered 60 votes to open debate on the health care bill. But that is not the whole story. The Senate could have begun debating without the procedural vote, and did not need a super majority to do so. What really happened was that the Senate rules for any potential filibuster were suspended for which the Democrats did need a super majority vote. Now, the only tool that the minority opposition had to defeat this abomination of legislation has been taken away, and the health care bill can now be passed by a simple majority of 51 votes. If anyone doesn't think that the socialist extremists haven't hijacked the will of the people, think again.

In order to win over a final hold-out on the super majority vote, an eleventh hour amendment was inserted into this already onerous bill providing $300-million in additional aid to the New Orleans victims of Katrina. This "persuaded" Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu to fall in behind her party bosses and cast her vote for the resolution. This is procedural graft. Had it come from a lobbyist rather than from the Senate Minority Leader, it would have been illegal as bribery.

While preposterous in itself, it is more preposterous still that no one seems to mind this big-city, good ol' boy, Tammany Hall bullshit politics. The vacillating Rasmussen poll speaks to the lack of clear thinking on the part of the American people over this so-called health care reform bill. Two weeks ago, only 42% favored it. Today, it is forty-seven percent. On September 12th, it was 51%. Intensity is still stronger, however, among those who oppose the push to change the nation’s health care system: 25% Strongly Favor the plan while 39% are Strongly Opposed. The reason for this strong opposition, despite the propaganda that is being largely reported in the press, is that 85% of the American people who have health care insurance benefits are satisfied with them.

Additionally and perhaps more importantly, the number of uninsured in this country goes habitually over-reported at 40-million people, which includes 8-million illegal aliens. The real number of uninsured is closer to something like 18-million, which is merely 6% of the total population, not including illegal aliens who should never have been taken into account in the first place.

And those big, bad insurance companies that are supposedly fucking the American people while stuffing obscene profits into the pockets of their investors? Someone go read their annual stockholder reports. The profit margin of the five largest health care insurance providers was on average 3.3%. Aetna, the nation's largest, was 3.4% last year.

Oh, and speaking of illegal aliens: Surprise!! They really will be covered by this legislation if it passes in its present form. Representative Joe Wilson was right when he yelled, "You lie!" at the President during a speech to Congress in September. Is anyone really surprised? And what happened to Joe for his honesty? He gets censured by the House. What happened to Obama for his lie? It doesn't even get reported in the media. It's no longer preposterous when the President lies. It's more preposterous to think that anything he says might be the truth.

This bill is more than preposterous; it's a disaster. It will socialize one-sixth of the nation's economy. Already teetering on insolvency, private insurance companies will go out of business and the government will be running the system. There will no longer be any profit in advancing medical technology, so medical progress will stagnate. The best and brightest people, as few of them as there are, will seek other pursuits besides medicine, leaving mediocrity to rise to the surface as all medical practitioners become government employees. As computed by the Senate's own Congressional Budget Office, the cost of health care will substantially increase. This will drive the need to ration medicine and medical treatment while the price tag to the country becomes unsustainable, layered on top of a national debt that today is already the highest since World War II.

One need only look at the state of Medicare, Medicaid and the VA Hospital system to see what will happen to health care once the Washington bureaucrats are in control of it. One need only look at Canada and the UK to see what a government-run health care system will be like twenty years from now. And what escapes most people's attention is that this bill doesn't even go into effect until Obama reaches the safety of his presumed second term. What does that tell you?

Damn near half of the American people are too stupid to see what a bunch of rich, legislative elitists and socialist ideologues are doing to the rest of us. Too bad horoscopes aren't real, or 28% of the American public who believe in them might be able to better warn these other dunderheads what is about to happen if this preposterous bill makes it into law.

Preposterous Item #2 - No one has put a stop to the Somalia pirates.

A bunch of snot-nosed, odoriferous, hubristic, testosterone-laden criminals from a shit-hole country like Somalia are raiding ships on the high seas, and we haven't blown their piss-ant little asses out of the goddamn water. This really makes me want to vomit.

The liberal media is painting this story like these outlaws are somehow just protecting themselves from other countries that are fishing or offloading their toxic waste onto the African continental shelf in Somalia's sovereign waters. From an Associated Press report:

They were ordinary Somali fishermen who, at first, took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a “tax” on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coast Guard of Somalia. One of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, explains that their motive is “to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters. . . . We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish, and dump waste, and carry weapons in our seas.” Author Johann Hari notes that, while none of this makes hostage-taking justifiable, the “pirates” have the overwhelming support of the local population for a reason. The independent Somalia news site WardherNews conducted the best research we have on what ordinary Somalis are thinking. It found that 70 percent “strongly support the piracy as a form of national defense of the country’s territorial waters.” One country's pirates are another country's Coast Guard.

You gotta be fucking kidding me. Is anyone buying this crap? This Islamic country is full of people too stupid, too primitive, and too barbaric to govern themselves. It has been in a state of civil war or complete anarchy since the British left there in 1960. Ruled by warlords and renegade militia since 1991, there was no official government in Somalia until 2004. This so-called government just appealed to the UN for intervention admitting that it was on the verge of collapse. Mind you, this is a country with fewer square miles than the state of Texas and fewer inhabitants than the population of New York City. If it wanted to, Rhode Island could probably beat the crap out of it in a war.

You'll recall that in April, an American cargo ship captain was held hostage by pirates in a lifeboat off the coast of Somalia before U.S. Navy commandos freed him in an operation that resulted in the deaths of three of his captors.

Subsequently, Obama said the United States "remains resolved to halt the rise of piracy in the region." And he vowed "to work with America's allies to prevent future attacks, go after the pirates when they do occur, and make sure those responsible are held accountable for their crimes." That very same U.S.-flagged cargo ship held hostage last April was attacked again two weeks ago.

Somalia-based pirates are currently holding 13 vessels and crew hostage for ransom. Spain just paid $3.6-million to have 36 hostages released. Somalia pirates are also holding a retired British couple, kidnapped from their sail boat last month. And just yesterday, Somalia pirates captured a 300,000 ton oil taker taking a crew of 28 aboard hostage. The tanker was bound for the U.S. and was flying the Grecian flag. Last I heard, Greece, Spain and Britain were allies. We're attacked a second time and we do nothing. Did we "go after the pirates"? Have we "[made] sure those responsible are being held accountable for their crimes"?

Nope. It was just more bullshit from our fucking head of state; just another speech and just another sound bite for the six-o'clock news. This is embarrassing, and nauseatingly preposterous.

Preposterous Item #3 - 9/11 suspects will plead "not guilty."

I'm not sure with whom I am most angry: the shitheads that perpetrated the deadliest attack on American soil, or Attorney General Eric Holder for announcing his decision to award five September 11th conspirators, including alleged master-mind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, full rights of American citizens at a federal trial.

Holder's performance at his November 13th press conference was embarrassing:

Q: What would happen if the terrorists were acquitted?
A: “Failure is not an option.”
Editorial comment: You fucking moron. You can't predict what a jury will or won't do. You have placed these animals in a system of presumed innocence until guilt can be proved. You are asking federal prosecutors in New York to make the case against five conspirators, in a circus atmosphere, with an uncertain chain of evidence gathered on a battlefield, under a cloud of torture allegations. Acquittal is absolutely a possibility.

Q: Can you point to a single case in U.S. history in which an enemy combatant caught on the battlefield was tried in civilian court?
A: “I'll have to look at that.”
Editorial comment: In other words, you hadn't looked at that before you made your fucking decision. You stupid son of a bitch, this was a matter of "Jihad" - Holy War - by the admission of the very people who perpetrated this act of of violence. This matter belongs in a military tribunal, not in a civil process that might be applied to the trial of a mafia kingpin.

Q:Would Osama bin Laden, if caught, need to be read his Miranda rights by U.S. soldiers?
A:“...it would depend....”
Editorial comment: On what? How the fuck does a Saudi national on foreign soil possibly - in the name of Christ - qualify for protection under the Fifth and Sixth Amendments of the United States Constitution? What fucking law school did you go to, anyway?

Holder's performance was not only embarrassing, but also offensive. As it turns out, Holder actually never consulted with his boss (that would be the President) or the Secretary of Defense (who oversees military justice) before he made his decision. This is hubris in the extreme, and also a testament to the weakness of Obama's leadership in keeping his team members in check - or even in selecting people qualified to hold the position for which they are selected.

Preposterous Item #4 - "Islam is a peaceful religion."

While shouting the Muslim declaration “Allahu Akbar” (God is great), Maj. Nidal Hasan executed twelve fellow soldiers and a civilian, and wounded thirty more people at a Ft. Hood shooting rampage on November 5th.

Obama decided to caution the American people "against jumping to conclusions until we have all the facts,” in precisely the same way that he did when he said that Cambridge police "acted stupidly" in arresting a black Harvard professor last summer. Obama's comment was as hypocritical as it was preposterous.

As it turns out, Hasan had been under surveillance for exchanging email with a Muslim cleric on the terror watch list. Anwar al-Awlaki, who now lives in Yemen and called Hasan "a hero" on his website, was the spiritual leader of a Virginia mosque that Hasan attended. Awkaki knew three of the 9/11 hijackers, and Hasan recently exchanged e-mails with him.

In the mean time, on November 12th - the same day that Hasan is formerly charged with thirteen counts of premeditated murder - Federal prosecutors moved to seize several U.S. assets controlled by entities linked to an Iranian bank that has been identified as a key financier of Tehran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs, and possibly acts of terrorism. The seized assets include a mosque and Islamic school in Maryland.

Like the old saying, "where there's smoke, there's fire," if a religious affiliation continuously manifests itself as violent, then it is violent, and Muslim violence is everywhere. Never mind the 17,000 people who have died as a result of suicide bombings in Iraq alone since 2003, Muslim violence routinely hits the news, particularly by Muslim men against their daughters, far away from the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq:

A 20 year-old woman was strangled with a boot lace, stuffed into a suitcase and buried in a back garden of a London suburb. Her father was found guilty of ordering his daughter slain for falling in love with the wrong man in a so-called "honor killing," one of more than 100 homicides under investigation in Britain, home to 1.8 million Muslims.

A 21 year-old woman was shot to death in St. Petersberg by hit men hired by the girl's Muslim father for wearing mini-skirts instead of traditional Muslim attire for women.

A 25 year-old Georgia women was strangled to death by her Muslim father because she was about to disgrace her family by wanting out of her arranged marriage and asking for a divorce. He told investigators that he killed her as a "matter of honor."

In Dallas, two sisters, ages 17 and 18, were shot to death by their Muslim cab-driving father because he was upset over their dating activities.

A Saudi Arabian man cut out the tongue of his 17 year-old daughter and burned her to death after finding out that she had converted to Christianity. He was not prosecuted for his crime.

A Muslim father in Iraq strangled his 17 year-old daughter after he learned that she had fallen in love with a British solider. Her brothers helped him kill her. He was released from police custody.

A 20-year woman and her boyfriend's mother were run over by a car driven by her Muslim father for being "too westernized" and not living "according to Iraqi values." The attack occurred in Peoria, Arizona.

Violence in families is nothing new, but these cases are borne of a dogmatic belief system rooted in the Islamic faith. At least the Christians stopped doing this kind of shit sometime around the Renaissance. Muslims continue to rage war against all those who would oppose their values, ideals and beliefs, including, it seems, teenage girls.

It's a secret question that is so radioactive, most in government and the press dare not even pose it, let alone answer: Is Islam inherently violent? In the days following 9/11, President Bush assured America and the world that Islam was a "religion of peace" and that the violent followers of Osama Bin Laden had twisted the true Muslim faith. Acting on this belief, President Bush and other Western leaders sent troops to the Middle East.

This "understanding" of Islam is based not on fact, but instead on equal parts wishful thinking and Islamic deceit. Islam is a not a great faith inherently peaceful. It is a form of totalitarianism, a belief system that orders its adherents not to baptize all nations, but to conquer and subdue them. Islam is a violent, expansionary ideology that seeks the subjugation and destruction of other faiths, cultures and systems of government.

Westerners have been indoctrinated to believe it is only the Jihadists that are extremists. They are not. They are the mainstream. Our misguided sense of political correctness keeps us from asking the question, let alone engaging in the debate. The more tolerant we are of the kind of violence that Islam brings with it, the more preposterous the situation becomes. And the less surprised I'll be when the suicide bombers start walking into American cafes and shopping centers, far away from Tel Aviv and Baghdad.

Preposterous Item #5 - "Go green."

I spent considerable time laying out the case for this sham called Global Warming in my April 14, 2007 blog Global Warming (And It's All Your Fucking Fault), so I won't restate my case except to say that we are now in our tenth year of cooler Arctic temperatures, and it is colder there today than it was in the 1940s. The Greenland ice sheet actually thickened by 2 inches per year in the decade 1993 - 2003.

We are in a cooling trend, not a warming trend, and the further in time we go from An Inconvenient Truth, the more evidence there will be that Al Gore is full of shit.

But have you noticed that the language of "Global Warming" has now become "Climate Change," and we hear more about "going green" and "saving the planet?" How utterly preposterous it is that the issue of climate control - or lack of it - has become a political issue. It isn't. It's a scientific issue and anytime politicians start professing to understand the science behind the data, it's time to start questioning their motives.

Global warming - when it exists - is not due to human contribution of carbon dioxide (CO2). CO2 is not a pollutant, but a trace gas representing 1/2 of one-percent of the total atmosphere. Humans are responsible for only 5% of CO2 output on this planet. Scientists know that temperature impacts CO2 levels, not the other way around. CO2 levels do not drive temperature change. Oscillations in temperatures are not anything close to catastrophic given the Earth's climatological history.

Global Warming is in fact the greatest deception in the history of science since the days when people were put to death for professing the Earth revolves around the Sun. We are wasting time and trillions of dollars while creating unnecessary fear and consternation over an issue with no scientific justification, in the same way we believed, 30 years ago, that global cooling was the biggest threat:

"It is a cold fact: the Global Cooling presents humankind with the most important social, political, and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for ten thousand years. Your stake in the decisions we make concerning it is of ultimate importance; the survival of ourselves, our children, our species...." - Lowell Ponte, The Cooling, 1976

Global Cooling was bullshit then just as Global Warming is bullshit now. And belief in this preposterous idea is expensive:

According to Money Magazine, building a home as "green" as you can go would add between 20%-30% to total construction costs and would take more than ten years to provide any return on the additional investment. The average homeowner flips their house every seven years. Do the math.

For two years, the city of Durango, Colorado, bought electricity for all its government buildings from wind farms. The City Council ended that program this year, reverting to electricity derived from coal-burning plants and saving the cash-strapped city about $45,000.

A wind energy project in California received four separate $10 million state tax credits even though it will generate less electricity than projects getting one-tenth the $40 million subsidy.

September of 2009, Grail Research Poll of 600 consumers found that 93% said that a company being perceived as green was important to their purchasing decision, but 85% didn't buy green products because they cost more than their conventional counterparts.

Well, if climate change, going green and saving the planet won't work in the free marketplace, that can only mean one thing: more government intervention, as if the government and its preposterous environmental laws haven't already done enough damage. This country hasn't built a refinery since Jimmy Carter was president. No new orders for nuclear power plants have been approved by the government since the 1970s. The last nuclear plant to be completed went on line in 1996.

Yet, the United States has become ever more dependent upon imported or foreign oil. A mere thirty years ago, 28% of the oil consumed in the United States was imported. Today nearly 60% of the oil utilized and consumed in the United States is imported from other countries, as is 10% of our gasoline. Coal fired energy accounts for 50% of the nation's electrical power, but if the environmentalist have their way, coal fired electrical plants will become a thing of the past because of this bullshit concept of a "carbon footprint," and we'll start importing our electricity as well.

This is all a preposterous set of circumstances. "Go green" is all about "Getting fucked." Don't think for a minute this is about saving the planet. It's about controlling your pocketbook, and a preposterous, monstrous lie.

Folks' Folly VIII

2009-11-15T11:35:00.067-05:00

Welcome to Anaximenes' One Hundredth Posted Essay!

Folks' Folly is a regular rant feature of The Rants of Anaximenes with commentary on and over the galactic stupidity of most people on this planet.

Time for another installment of Folks' Folly to comment on the continued exhibition of the lame-brained, obtuse, dim-witted, simple-minded, thick-headed morons, idiots and imbeciles who never leave me with a shortage of material to write about. Homer Simpson continues to have Einstein-esque intelligence compared to some of the dunderheads on this planet, and will forever remain my avatar for each edition of Folks' Folly.

As usual during tough economic times, the criminal element of our society tends to go into hyper-drive as unemployment increases and consumer spending decreases. I'm not too sure why, since most of these losers had no intention of getting a job in the first place. But then again, none of these mental giants can really figure out how to be good criminals, let alone good citizens. A few cases worthy of mention in this edition of Folks' Folly:

Two burglary suspects who drew ‘masks’ on their faces with a permanent marker pen have been arrested in Carroll, Iowa. A witness told police that two men with painted disguises were trying to break into an apartment. The police easily identified the two, Matthew Allan McNelly, 23, and Joey Lee Miller, 20, who were arrested and charged with attempted second-degree burglary. McNelly was also charged with driving while intoxicated. One hoped the sitting justice would have sentenced both idiots to life imprisonment for nothing other than utter and complete stupidity.

Grocery store cameras in Baton Rouge caught a woman taking a 24-can case of beer from a cooler, placing the 20-pound case between her thighs by pulling up her house dress, and waddling out of the store. Lisa Newsome, 42, of Baker, Louisiana plead guilty to a charge of petty theft and was booked into the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison to serve a ninety day sentence. One wishes she might stay there indefinitely.

Officers charged Sean David Hartman, 18, with breaking into a Cape Coral, Florida McDonald’s and trying to pour himself a milk shake. He's also charged with stealing a six-pack of Dr. Pepper and a four-pack of Yoo-Hoo chocolate drink from a Publix grocery store. He confessed to breaking into the McDonald’s by throwing a handful of rocks to break the storefront glass. Hartman was booked into the Lee County Jail, where he's being held in lieu of $4,000 bail on burglary and petty theft charges. The district attorney should also be considering castration so Hartman can never procreate.

Andrew J. Burwitz, 20, was charged with four counts of first-degree reckless endangerment, four counts of endangering safety by reckless use of a firearm, disorderly conduct and criminal damage to property after firing four rounds into the Appleton Wisconsin home of his former girlfriend. Sheriffs were led to Burwitz after they found shards of glass in the street and traced him to a local auto glass repair shop where he replaced his window after filing an insurance claim. It seems this idiot forgot to roll down the window of his car before taking his potshots in a drive-by shooting. His ex-girlfriend should receive a commendation for exercising good judgment by dropping this loser like a hot potato.

Frank James Singleton, 21, was just released from a Palm Beach jail when he decided to break the law again ... inside the jail's parking lot. A woman parked her sports car in the jail's visitor’s parking when Singleton demanded her car. Police say he then dragged the victim out of the car and took her keys. He started the vehicle but could not flee because he did not know how to drive a stick-shift. A deputy came to assist and arrested Singleton. When the deputy asked him why he did it, he uttered, "I didn't feel like walking." He should be serving life without parole for being such a complete and total loser.

But stupidity isn't limited to the criminal element. It seems ordinary people everywhere are so dumb, they're dying in droves. It's probably a good thing, just to keep the human genome pool at least at some semblance of a minimum species survival level.

"Just think of how stupid the average person is and then realize that half of them are even stupider!" - George Carlin

Man falls to death from I-95 bridge
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
April 13, 2008

FORT LAUDERDALE - A 30-year-old man fell to his death Saturday night from Interstate 95 just north of State Road 84, according to police.

According to witnesses, Shawn Paul Montero, of Hallandale Beach, was a passenger in a vehicle that was stopped on I-95 due to an unrelated crash. Montero told others in the vehicle that he had to relieve himself. He got out and jumped over the cement wall of I-95. It is believed that Montero did not realize there was more than a 65-foot drop beyond the wall.

"The death is under investigation however the incident appears to be an unfortunate accident at this time.," according to Fort Lauderdale Detective Katherine Collins.

Thus, the old adage, "Look before you leak."

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein

Woman avoiding trooper dies after apparently jumping into flooded creek
Greensboro News & Record
Thursday, June 4, 2009

GREENSBORO — A woman attempting to avoid a state trooper drowned Wednesday night after apparently jumping into a rain-swollen creek near Northeast Middle School, officials said.

As a thunderstorm pounded the area, a trooper was stopping traffic in the 6700 block of McLeansville Road to keep vehicles off the flooded road.

About 7 p.m., a woman zoomed past the trooper on a moped, lost control and went into the creek, said Col. Randy Powers of the Guilford County Sheriff’s Office.

The trooper, who has not been identified, retrieved a rope from his vehicle and pulled the woman out of the water.

As he was interviewing her, the trooper suspected the woman had been consuming alcohol, Powers said.

He went to retrieve something from his vehicle, and the woman jumped into the creek a second time.

“The trooper attempted to rescue her again, but she was gone,” Powers said.

About 8:30 p.m., the woman’s body was recovered about 300 yards from where she jumped into the creek, authorities said. Her identity was not available late Wednesday.

Thus, the old adage: "If at first you don't succeed, try to die again."

"The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity." - Harlan Ellison

Palm Bay family killed in power line accident
Orlando Sentinel
October 13, 2009

A mother, father and 15-year-old son died Monday night after being electrocuted while putting up a ham radio antenna in Palm Bay, according to police.

Their names were not released late Monday.

Rescue crews responded to a 911 call about the electrocution shortly after 8:30 p.m. on Alaska Avenue, west of Interstate 95 in south Brevard County.

Authorities say the family was attempting to raise the antenna when they lost control of the pole and it struck an overhead power line.

The impact sent 13,000 volts of electricity through the pole the three were holding, police said.

"It happened in an instant," Palm Bay Fire Marshal Mike Couture said in a statement.

When paramedics arrived, they found all three on the ground not breathing. Rescue crews immediately tried to resuscitate them. The 50-year-old woman was pronounced dead at the scene.

The 50-year-old father and the son were taken to a local hospital, where they were later pronounced dead. The teenager attended Southwest Middle School, where grief counselors will be available today.

Florida Power & Light Co. crews responded to the scene and shut off power in the area while authorities collected evidence and documented the scene, police said.

"It is an unfortunate set of circumstances that led to the most tragic result," Couture said in the statement.

Thus, the old adage: "What are you, fucking crazy? Stay the hell away from the high tension power lines. Electricity is some scary shit. It can turn you off, man."

Well, maybe that's not so much an adage. But it's damn good advice that sadly this family never heard. I feel sorry for the poor kid, but he was clearly doomed from the start to have parents as stupid as this.

"I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me." - Noel Coward

Speaking of annoying people, here is the Anaximenes list of Ten Most Annoying People in 2009, just in time for the holidays:

Top Ten Most Annoying People of 2009

Rachael Ray - Everything that is wrong with Rachael Ray is what's wrong with America. She has no experience as a certified culinarian, nor has she ever been trained as a chef (her culinary experience was relegated to a sandwich shop). Yet, she has made a fortune as a cookbook author and Food Network TV star, revered by millions despite her complete vacuity over the very subject matter she is allegedly an expert in. In short, her meteoric rise to fame and fortune sounds just like that of our fucking president. Uncanny. And utterly annoying.
Dr. Zahi Hawass - As Egypt's Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, he has the final say in whether any TV journalist is allowed to conduct research or film a documentary in or around any of the ancient Egyptian ruins. This hubristic archeologist only grants such rights if he is given camera time. Thus, one cannot watch any television show about the wonders and glory of what was our planet's first civilization without seeing a self-serving interview of this arrogant motherfucker mispronouncing the word "pidimid." What an egotistical, conceited, supercilious douche-bag.
Martin Lawrence - This loudmouth so-not-funny prick has made thirteen movies since 2002, for Christ's sake. No wonder you can't scroll through the cable channels without seeing his ugly, fat-lipped, wide-eyed face sayin' sompin' stupid fo de cam-ra. Divorced with two bastard children, Lawrence has been sued for sexual harassment, has had violent outbursts on the set after taking psychotropic drugs, and has been arrested twice for brandishing firearms in public places. In other words, he is the epitome of just more sick, egocentric, self-indulgent Hollywood bullshit and I'm just tired of having to be reminded that he hasn't self-destructed yet.
Senator Barbara Boxer - the Democrat U.S. Senator from California is dumber than a box of rocks, not to mention incredibly arrogant in demanding a decorated Army General address her as "senator" and not as "ma'am." What a bitch!

"Those who survived the San Francisco earthquake said, 'Thank God, I'm still alive.' But, of course, those who died, their lives will never be the same again."
Well, no shit, Babs. Aside from being a bitch, you're also an idiot, just like the seven million cretins who put you in office. The people of California deserve what they're getting: a state budget crisis, a 10% increase in the tax withholding rate, a housing value meltdown and so many people leaving the state that it could lose one or more Congressional seats for the first time in history once the 2010 Census is taken.
The Free Credit Report Dot Com Band - One look at these losers, and it's easy to see the target market that Free Credit Report Dot Com is going after, namely, people who probably have something to worry about. Here we have a bunch of grungy-looking guys that all need baths, haircuts, and in the case of the lead singer at least, dental work, attempting to sing (badly) for a stupid "service" that by law credit reporting agencies are required to show you in the first place. The service is a fucking sham and without a doubt, has the most annoying jingle on television.
Joan Rivers - If there were ever a poster child for Hollywood plastic surgery gone wrong, Michael Jackson would be it. But Joan Rivers would be a close runner-up. Calling Angelina Jolie "beautiful but stupid" for no apparent reason other than to get attention, Rivers was a pot calling the kettle black....well, almost....Rivers has never been beautiful, not even close. She is a vulgar, loud mouthed, offensive, washed-up, late-night-talk-show-host has-been, and her contribution to the literary world, Men Are Stupid...And They Like Big Boobs: A Woman's Guide to Beauty Through Plastic Surgery is a little bit like Rudolph Hess writing a Jewish cookbook. Bad form. Really bad form.
The Broom in the Swiffer "Love Stinks" Commercials - Personifying an inanimate object as inconsequential as a household cleaning instrument is the lowest form of product endorsement. I mean, there is no talent to recruit, there are no actors to pay, and no agents to represent them. In fact, the Screen Actors Guild won't even represent them to demand they be paid union scale wages. And these ads are sexist. In one episode, the woman steps out on her patio and the broom is in the hot tub with candles everywhere, like a typical pussy-whipped man, begging for her back, which is the underlying message of these ads to begin with. Women are powerful and have choices (if only they would do what the commercial is telling them to do), while men are stupid, dirty and fucked-up. Modern kitchen appliances make far better mates.
Jay Leno - He was wholly irrelevant when he was on the Tonight Show, even though his Bush bashing monologues made "news" on an almost weekly basis. Now that he's made the move to prime time, I'm happy to see his ratings have dropped 53% since his September debut, despite Time Magazine hypebolically declaring him "the future of television." For if that were true, we would all be in a lot of trouble. Jay Leno is what happens when some self-inflated, over-paid, self-indulgent Hollywood cocksucker begins to believe his own press, and thinks that he somehow matters and what he thinks, what he says and what opinion he has matters. One truly misses the humility of the trail-blazers of the late night talk-show. When Jack Paar and Johnny Carson left the Tonight Show, they had the good sense to go quietly into the good night, rarely to be heard from again. In short, they had class, something Leno wouldn't know if it walked up and bit him on his great big fat ass.
Flo, the Progressive Insurance Lady - As an answer to all insurance cavemen, geckos and piles of cash with googly eyeballs, they can’t hold a candle to Flo for sheer annoyability. As I watch her shuck her wares with such jaunty perfection, with her banged hairdo and stylish headband keeping that semi-flaccid beehive of hers so immaculately in place, I just can’t help but wonder what she’d look like dressed up as a pirate. No doubt headed for the same fame of "Madge, the Palmolive Dishwashing Liquid Soap Lady" and "Rosie, the Bounty Paper Towel Quicker-Picker-Upper Lady," Flo is quickly leaving her mark (or is it a stain?) on pop culture, actually acquiring a cult following. Where intellectually challenged, culturally starved and star obsessed Americans are concerned, that is no big surprise.
Larry the Cable Guy - Not since PeeWee Herman has there come on the scene an actor playing a character who plays other characters. Just like no one knew PeeWee Herman was really actor Paul Reubens, which was helpful when he was arrested for soliciting sex from other patrons in a porn shop video booth, few people know that Larry the Cable Guy is really Daniel Lawrence Whitney, and he has never actually worked for the cable company. In fact, if anyone from my cable company sent me anyone like Larry to work in or near my dwelling, I would be moving my viewing entertainment venue from cable to satellite faster than goose shit through a greased funnel, which sorta sounds like something Larry would say, doncha think? Whitney's shtick is tiresome in the extreme. He is actually from Nebraska and he's doing nothing more than faking a Southern accent, stereotyping Southerners as uncouth, illiterate and stupid. And he's funny only to the extent that farts and other bodily secretions and noises are funny. Go home, Larry. Go back to Lincoln. You've outlived your fifteen minutes. Way outlived them.

Twenty Scariest Movie Moments - Part II

2009-10-30T15:46:00.022-05:00

And so, the final list of films in the Twenty Scariest Movie Moments continues in this Part II series, which would actually make this posting the Ten Scariest Movie Moments, wouldn't it?

As much as what you see listed, it might be what you don't see listed that disturbs you. For example, many lists of "top scary movies" include The Shining. Mine doesn't. I frankly laughed my ass off at that movie. There is just nothing Jack Nicholson can do to be scary. The guy is hilarious. For example, Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance had this exchange with Shelley Duvall as his wife, Wendy:

Wendy: [crying] Stay away from me.
Jack: Why?
Wendy: I just wanna go back to my room!
Jack: Why?
Wendy: Well, I'm very confused, and I just need time to think things over!
Jack: You've had your whole fucking life to think things over, what good's a few minutes more gonna do you now?
Wendy: Please! Don't hurt me!
Jack: I'm not gonna hurt you.
Wendy: Stay away from me!
Jack: Wendy? Darling? Light, of my life. I'm not gonna hurt ya. You didn't let me finish my sentence. I said, I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just going to bash your brains in.
[Wendy gasps]
Jack: Gonna bash 'em right the fuck in! ha ha ha
Wendy: Stay away from me! Don't hurt me!
Jack: [sarcastically] I'm not gonna hurt ya...

This actually had me rolling in the aisle! Nicholson is just damn funny, and Duval has a countenance that, indeed, one would like to "bash right the fuck in!" Oh, and the famous "Here's Johnny!" scene? Sheer comedy.

Or how about The Sixth Sense? A lot of people might put that flick on their list of scary movies. Well, I'm sorry, but a little kid saying he sees dead people while looking at Bruce Willis, who pretty much is dead as an actor, just didn't tighten my sphincter.

Amityville Horror is another flick some people will put on their list of scariest movies. Frankly, I didn't find the fact that James Brolin was unable to keep track of a roll of hundred dollar bills, and a nauseous Rod Steiger all that scary. The demonic voice screeching, "Get out!" could just as easily have been Brolin's wife, Barbara Streisand, who come to think of it, is pretty fucking scary.

And you'll see no "slasher flicks" here. I generally have found myself more annoyed than scared at watching prom night debutantes walk willingly to their death. They deserve to get punctured, and not in a good way.

No, this list of the final ten scariest movie moments is borne of real film making, great acting, good story telling and with special effects that augment the story, but they're not the reason for the story.

And so....

#10 - The Howling

Year made: 1981

Notable cast: Dee Wallace, Patrick Macnee, Christopher Stone, Robert Picardo

Basic plot: A television investigative reporter, Karen White (Dee Wallace), is on the trail of a serial killer, Eddie Quist (Robert Picardo), a.k.a. "Eddie the Mangler," who has an obsession with Karen and wants to meet her to give her his story. Under police surveillance, she meets the killer at a porn video store where she encounters him in a video booth. As Karen talks with Eddie, she sits with her back to him and he does not allow her to turn around and look at him. His sexual obsession with her becomes clear when something about Eddie's voice seems to change. He tells Karen to turn around and she sees something that terrifies her. As she breaks away from Eddie, police arrive and fire rounds into the video booth, killing Eddie. Karen can remember nothing afterward, traumatized and thoroughly confused by the meeting, she suffers blackouts and recurring nightmares. Her therapist, Dr. George Waggner (Patrick Macnee), persuades her to take a vacation at his retreat in the country where he sends patients for treatment, called The Colony. She decides to go along with her husband, Bill (Christopher Stone).

But all is not well once there. There are strange howls in the night, animals being slaughtered, and some very odd behavior by the other patients. Soon, Karen’s husband is being seduced by Eddie’s mysterious sister, and Karen begins to believe that she is living among a colony of werewolves. A fellow reporter who comes to help Karen is killed, and so is her husband, who bites Karen before he dies. Thus, she is now affected with the werewolf curse. In a final act, she uses her TV news broadcast to warn people about the danger by turning into a werewolf on camera before being shot with a silver bullet by a colleague who knows the truth. The world is left to wonder whether the transformation and shooting really happened or if it was the work of special effects.

The scariest scene: We learn that since the police didn't use silver bullets, Eddie didn't really die back in that video booth. Karen is confronted by Eddie in Dr. Waggner's office and as she watches in terror, he transforms into a werewolf. It was an amazing and horrifying transformation, in graphic detail. Karen escapes by finding a beaker of acid that was inexplicably laying around the good doctor's office, and throwing it in Eddie's face.

A sphincter tightening moment: After telling Karen he's going to "give her a piece of his mind," Eddie pulls a piece of his brain out of one of the bullet holes in his head.

What made this movie so scary? In 1981, there was something of a werewolf revival to the cinema screen not seen since the 1940's. An American Werewolf in London was also released the same year as The Howling, but the latter was far more entertaining and had a better cinematographer's translation of transforming the human form into a werewolf. While both were dark comedies, The Howling had darker humor, with bit parts played by notable character actors Kevin McCarthy, Slim Pickins, and John Carradine, adding to the tongue-in-cheek quality of this flick. The wolf transformation scenes were extremely well done, cutting edge for their time, without the aid of computer generated graphics.

Fun facts: Adding to the farcical nature of this film, there were several puns thrown in almost imperceptibly assuring the audience this movie was not taking itself too seriously. Among them: nine characters in the movie were actually named after directors of werewolf movies, including the name of George Waggner who directed the 1941 Universal hit, The Wolfman; in Dr. Waggner's office, we see a picture of Lon Chaney Jr. on the wall, star of the same movie; on a TV set in the background of one scene, we see the Disney cartoon of the Three Little Pigs with the Big Bad Wolf about to blow their house down; there is a book placed near a phone during one scene, Allen Ginsberg's Howl; the book Bill is reading in bed is You Can't Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe; a picture of a wolf attacking a flock of sheep can be seen above Karen and Bill's bed in their room at The Colony; at one point, one of the characters is seen eating from a can of Wolf brand chili.

#9 - The Exorcist III

Year made: 1990

Notable cast: George C. Scott, Brad Dourif, Ed Flanders, Jason Miller, Nicol Williamson, Mary Jackson

Basic plot: In one of the few sequels (and the only one on my list) that bears justice to its original , written and directed by William Peter Blatty who was the author of the original story, Lieutenant William F. Kinderman (George C. Scott) investigates a series of brutal, ritualistic murders in Washington D.C.'s upscale Georgetown district that bear a resemblance to the Gemini Killer, James Venamon (Brad Dourif). Although the killer was executed 15 years earlier, a young boy is horribly mutilated and the ailing Father Dyer (Ed Flanders) is drained of blood in his hospital bed, leaving the unmistakable trademark of the killer that was never reported in the press, and known only to Kinderman. The lieutenant is convinced that the key to the killings lies in an amnesiac mental patient who looks exactly like the dead Father Karras (Jason Miller) from the original episode of the exorcist of a young Gerogetown girl fifteen years earlier. It appears that Venamon was executed at the exact moment that Father Karras became possessed by a demon and was hurtled from her bedroom window down a long set of outdoor stairs at the end of the first film.

Kinderman slowly comes to accept that Karras has been possessed by the soul of Venamon and enlists an exorcist, Father Morning (Nicol Williamson), to free Karras' soul and stop the murders. But the trick is to catch Venamon while he is possessing Karras because he has developed the ability to inhabit various other souls, admitting to Kinderman, "Catatonics are so easy to possess." One of these catatonics, the aging Mrs. Clelia (Mary Jackson), has the demonic ability to defy gravity and crawl along the ceiling like an insect.

The scariest scene: At night in a hospital, long camera shots and empty corridors suggest to the audience that something is about to happen. Even though you're prepared for it, it still comes out of nowhere as a ghostly image with a pair of surgical amputating sheers stealthily overtakes a nurse on duty, and you know she is about to lose her head.

A sphincter tightening moment: The Gemini Killer in the body of Father Karras telling Kinderman: "I like plays. The good ones... Shakespeare... I like Titus Andronicus the best; it's sweet. Incidentally, did you know that you are talking to an artist? I sometimes do special things to my victims: things that are creative. Of course, it takes knowledge, pride in your work... For example, a decapitated head can continue to see for approximately twenty seconds. So when I have one that's gawking, I always hold it up so that it can see its body. It's a little extra I throw in for no added charge. I must admit it makes me chuckle every time. Life is fun. It's a wonderful life, in fact... for some."

What makes this movie so scary? Convincing acting of an incredulous plot and good film production make this movie very scary, but it is intellectual freight. There are few ah-ha moments, and little gore or special effects, save for the somewhat cheesy exorcism at the end that Blatty was forced to add by the studio execs. The movie was originally titled after Blatty's book Legion, and was not written as a sequel to the first film. But studio execs believed that producing the movie as a sequel to The Exorcist (completely ignoring Exorcist II - The Heretic) was essential to the success of its release. Blatty had to re-write parts of the script to create the tie-back to Karras, adding the exorcism to the final scenes. This explains some of the awkwardness of the editing and confusing dialog that critics levy on this vastly underrated horror film, but for my money, I think the movie is so well acted that even dialog between characters merely describing a murder is a scary scene in itself. And a creepier than usual Brad Dourif is brilliant in his portrayal of the disembodied Gemini Killer.

Fun fact: This was real-life serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer's favorite film. Who says life doesn't imitate art?

#8 - Frenzy

Year made: 1972

Notable cast: Jon Finch, Barry Foster, Barbara Leigh-Hunt, Anna Massey, Alec McCowen

Basic plot: A serial killer known as the "Necktie Murderer" is on the loose in London and all the clues are pointing towards decidedly seedy ex-Squadron Leader Richard Blaney (Jon Finch). His ex-wife, Brenda Blaney (Barbara Leigh-Hunt), is brutally raped and murdered and he is seen by her secretary leaving the premises. Unable to prove his innocence, he goes on the run with his trusting girlfriend Babs (Anna Massey), and enlists the help of his old friend, Bob Rusk (Barry Foster), who we have already learned is also the Necktie Murderer. After Babs is also killed, Inspector Oxford (Alex McCowen) is convinced of Blaney's guilt until he begins to notice, while eating his wife's appalling attempts at gourmet cooking, that things don't quite add up. Blaney very nearly goes to the gallows until the Inspector cracks the case. As he pieces together clues that Rusk is the murderer, he confronts him in the final scene, saying: "Why, Mr. Rusk - you're not wearing your tie...."

The scariest scene: With movie sensors of the 1960s out of Hitchcock's way, he did for the necktie murder scene of Blaney's wife what he probably really wanted to do with the infamous shower scene in Psycho. The scene is protracted, presented in real-time without music, and it is horribly realistic, at moments almost unwatchable. Brenda is a powerless victim being brutally raped by a psychotic killer. The sheer horror of her plight is pitiable as she desperately recites the 23rd Psalm and attempts to cover her breasts after the killer has ripped her clothes. But like a roller coaster ride with a second incline, and after Hitchcock makes us endure the horror of rape, he jumps into hyper-drive as Brenda suddenly realizes that being raped is not the end of her ordeal. Rusk slowly removes his tie, and she knows then she is about to be another of his victims. Hitchcock is not subtle in presenting a horrifyingly realistic scene of a cruel and viscous murder.

A sphincter tightening moment: Brenda: "My God, the tie! [screams as Rusk wraps the tie around her throat] Dear Jesus, help me. Help me!"

What makes this movie so scary? This is classic Hitchcock who had the uncanny knack for making the audience an unwilling, silent member of the cast, knowing what is happening or suspecting what is about to happen when, in reality, we're all tricked into thinking only what Hitchcock wanted us to think. We know who the Necktie Murderer is almost from the start of the movie, and yet, we're powerless to warn any of his victims what is about to happen. In trademarked Hitchcock fashion after witnessing the gruesomeness of the murder of Brenda, he never has to show the details again. As Rusk is about to kill Babs, and begins his all too familiar ritual of removing his tiepin and tie, the murder takes place off the screen as the camera slowly backs away from the room in which the crime is occurring, down the stairs, through the front door and then across the street to join the crowd milling indifferently on the pavement. Only we, the audience, know what is really happening just so many feet away.

Fun fact: Hitchcock's daughter Patricia Hitchcock found this film so disturbing that she would not allow her children to see it for many years.

#7 - Jaws

Year made: 1975

Notable cast: Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dryfuss

Basic plot: The Massachusetts summer beach town of Amity and its police chief, Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), are confronted with the deaths or disappearance of several people who have dubiously been attacked by a shark. Being overly sensitive to how this might impact summer tourism business, however, this information is slow to be released to the unsuspecting public, and the coroner waffles on whether or not one or more of these deaths was a shark attack or a boating accident. A visiting marine biologist, Matt Hooper (Richard Dryfuss), correctly deduces that these deaths were not only caused by a shark, but by a Great White shark, the largest, meanest, badest and apparently hungriest of the species. After a final round of attacks by the Great White that very nearly claim the life of Brody's own son, Brody charters a somewhat dilapidated fishing vessel, the Orca, and its eccentric pilot, Quint (Robert Shaw), to hunt down and kill the shark.

The scariest scene: In what one might suppose are two college students either on vacation or home for the summer, Chrissy and Cassidy leave a nighttime beach party campfire together to go skinny dipping. Cassidy is too drunk to get off his clothes despite the enticement of Chrissy undressing and jumping into the surf first, encouraging him to hurry up and come join the fun. In what should have been a lighthearted moment every adolescent male might dream about - moonlight, sand, surf and a naked girl - suddenly and without warning turns into terror as Chrissy is not only pulled under the surf, but experiences repeated attacks, being dragged across the water while held in the jaws of, well, Jaws. No part of this scene is shot underwater after the first attack occurs. The horror is sudden, staccato, sharp, and very realistically portrayed. As the audience, we are along side of Chrissy as she first tries to understand what is happening to her, and then knowing the reality that she is about to be eaten alive, we can only wonder what last thoughts she has before she is finally dragged under the water's surface. This sets the tone for the whole movie, and no blood, guts or gore was in the scene at all.

The filmmaker masterfully lets the audience down from this horror juxtaposed to a bit of comic relief by Cassidy, who is still drunk on the beach, and oblivious to what just happened. When the scene first started, the audience is moved to think what an incredibly stupid bastard this guy is for being too drunk to follow a naked girl in the water. But in the end, the audience is moved to think what an incredibly lucky bastard this guy is for being too drunk to follow a naked girl in the water.

The sphincter tightening moment: In Steven Spielberg's first summer blockbuster movie, he did artfully use a bit of realistic gore that could have easily gone over the top, but didn't. Just as Hitchcock handled the gore of blood in the infamous shower scene of Psycho in a tastefully-done, non-gory way, so did Spielberg. But no one could deny the sphincter tightening moment of when the shark has attacked the Orca, and Quint, losing his grip from the helping hand of Chief Brody, slides down the inclined deck of the boat directly into the waiting jaws of the Great White. Kicking and screaming, Quint is taken in the massive maw of the fish and when it bites down to secure its prey, we experience the horror of that moment as Quint spits blood while being severed in mid-thorax. Earlier in the movie Quint prophesied what this might be like: "This shark, swallow you whole. Little shakin', little tenderizin', an' down you go."

What made the movie so scary? Aside from the masterfully done musical score for the movie by John Williams, which does an awful lot to set the mood, cadence and suspense of the film, we weren't dealing with monsters or psychos none of us actually believed we would ever really meet. We were dealing with a real-life creature that any of us could actually meet, and could meet with a similar fate as Chrissy - that is, if we are ever in the ocean. After the movie was released, many dive shops and beachfront resorts around the country saw a forty percent drop in business. I personally haven't set foot in any of the seven seas since 1975.

Fun fact: The Great White shark in the movie was actually one of three full scale models used during the making of Jaws and all were affectionately named by the film crew, "Bruce."

#6 - The Exorcist

Year made: 1973

Notable cast: Ellen Burstyn, Max von Sydow, Lee J. Cobb, Jason Miller, Linda Blair

Basic Plot: Residing in Washington D.C.'s upscale Georgetown neighborhood, a successful actress, Chris McNeil (Ellen Burstyn), begins experiencing strange phenomena. Chris lives with her twelve-year-old daughter, Regan (Linda Blair), and there are mysterious, unexplained sounds in the attic as Regan slowly begins to exhibit strange behavioral changes. Chris has a party at her home with a number of guests. Regan appears happy and social, but she reappears after being sent to bed, dressed in her nightgown and urinates on the carpet in front of the guests while making an ominous statement to a prominent astronaut, "You're gonna die up there...." After the guests leave, Chris bathes Regan and puts her to bed, but is startled by a loud sound from Regan's bedroom. She rushes back down the hall and discovers Regan's bed shaking violently, rising up off the floor with Regan on it. Chris jumps on the bed but it still levitates.

Chris seeks medical help and visiting doctors attend to Regan suffering from what appears to be a seizure but moving in a way that seems impossible for a human being. When they try to sedate her, she hurls them across the room with abnormal strength, speaking to them in a demonic male voice at a moment we know Regan has become fully inhabited by the demon Pazuzu: "Keep away! The sow is mine!" Local policeman Lt. William F. Kinderman (Lee J. Cobb) enters the picture after Chris' movie director dies by either falling out of or being pushed out of Regan's second story bedroom window and down a long set of outside stairs to the street below. Two Catholic priests, Father Lancaster Merrin (Max von Sydow) and Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller), are ultimately joined together to conduct a series of exorcisms to drive the demon out of Regan and reclaim her soul.

An aging Fr. Merrin with a weak heart does not survive the ordeal. Upon discovering Fr. Merrin's death and in a fit of rage, Fr. Karras manhandles the demonic body of Regan while demanding it leave the child and come into him, "Take me. Come into me. God damn you! Take me. Take me!" Pazuzu obliges and briefly inhabits Karras' body as Karras hurls himself through Regan's bedroom window to the street stairs below. Kinderman arrives at the McNeil home just as these events occur, holding the hand of Fr. Karras as he dies after the fall (or so we think). Regan survives without any memory of the ordeal.

The scariest scene: Take your pick. This whole damn movie is scary as hell and there are many tense moments, each of them ratcheted up and layered upon the previous one. The scariest scene for my money is after Pazuzu has clearly inhabited Regan, and Chris comes into her room to find her violently masturbating with a crucifix yelling blasphemies, "Let Jesus fuck you, let Jesus fuck you. Let him fuck you!" When Chris attempts to take the crucifix away, the demon hits her with it, dispatching her to the floor. Before household members can reach Chris to help her, the demon telekinetically slams Regan's bedroom door shut, and a large chest of drawers moves to block the door from being opened. At that moment, Regan's head does its infamous 180 degree turn backwards to look at Chris, and the demon asks the haunting question, referring to the death of and in the voice of Chris' director, "Do you know what she did, your cunting daughter?"

A sphincter tightening moment: When Father Karras agrees to meet Regan for the first time, he enters her room to find all furniture has been wrapped in paper and foam to keep her from hurting herself, and Regan, now horribly scarred, discolored and deformed is restrained in her bed. The room is abnormally cold.

Demon: What an excellent day for an exorcism.
Father Karras: You would like that?
Demon: Intensely.
Father Karras: But wouldn't that drive you out of Regan?
Demon: It would bring us together.
Father Karras: You and Regan?
Demon: You and us.

The demon then forcefully projects a putrid, bilious vomit that hits Fr. Karras in the face.

What makes this movie so scary? It's not a question you have to ask, really, but demonic possession is made into a believable story here, and the superb acting of Eleen Burstyn makes it all the more real. She hit the mark acting like any mother would when confronted with such a horrible set of circumstances with her child. In a defining moment of despair directed toward clueless doctors as to what they should do next that any of us as a parent might say, "You show me Regan's double, same face, same voice, everything. And I'd know it wasn't Regan. I'd know in my gut. Now, I want you to tell me that you know for a fact that there's nothing wrong with my daughter, except in her mind. You tell me for a fact that an exorcism wouldn't do any good. You tell me that!" The demonic possession of Regan was never over the top, but it was always damn close, and disturbing to say the least.

Fun facts: In 1950, author of The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty, won $10,000 on the Groucho Marx show You Bet Your Life. When Groucho asked what he planned to do with the money, he said he planned to take some time off to "work on a novel." This story was the result. If adjusted for inflation, this movie would be the top grossing R-rated film of all time.

#5 - Se7en

Year made: 1995

Notable cast: Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, Gwyneth Paltrow; Kevin Spacey

Basic plot: A salty, retiring homicide police detective, Lieutenant William Somerset (Morgan Freeman), and his new partner, Detective David Mills (Brad Pitt), investigate a series of bizarre murders that are patterned after the Seven Deadly Sins: gluttony, greed, pride, envy, lust, wrath and sloth. Each victim of a serial killer is made to endure a death by the very sin of which the killer has deemed them guilty. Their first homicide scene is examining the body of a huge, morbidly obese man who was apparently forced at gun point to gorge on spaghetti until his stomach burst. The detective's second crime scene is the murder of a rich attorney with GREED written in his blood on the floor. Soon after, Somerset returns to the first crime scene and finds GLUTTONY written behind the obese man's fridge and theorizes that a serial killer is basing his crimes on the Seven Deadly Sins, with five more to go. By searching for someone who has taken out books from the library on the Seven Deadly Sins, Somerset and Mills are able to track down the location of the mysterious and deranged, "John Doe" (Kevin Spacey), but he gets away and continues killing with subsequent murders of the sins sloth, pride, and lust. Along the way, we're introduced to Mills' wife, Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow) and learn she is pregnant, but afraid to tell David and to raise her child in such a depressing city.

The detectives eventually catch up with Doe, with someone else's blood on his shirt, and his hands bleeding from having removed the skin of his fingertips to avoid identification. He talks to his lawyer and agrees that if he can take Somerset and Mills to two more bodies, he will confess to the murders. Wanting a confession, the detectives agree and drive to the outskirts of the city. While in route, Doe tells Mills that he has been envious of him and of his wife. A delivery truck catches up with the entourage and delivers a package. Somerset discovers that Tracey's head is in the package and Mills learns that she had been pregnant, and that Doe had killed her. As Mills is unable to contain his rage, we realize that he has been the victim of envy and Doe now becomes the victim of wrath at the hands of Mills, who executes him on the spot for his crime.

The scariest moment: While trying to find Doe's location, Somerset and Mills enter the seedy apartment location of the victim of sloth. Made to remain permanently strapped to his bed to waste away for exactly a year while being kept alive with intravenous antibiotics and minimal sustenance, an emaciated body is examined by the detectives in a dimly lit room with ceilings covered in hanging air fresheners to hide the stench of the withered, rotting corpse. Or so we think it's a corpse. In a surprising and terror-soaked moment, it is revealed that the victim is actually alive and attempts to scream despite the fact that he had chewed off his own tongue long ago.

A sphincter tightening moment: As the ending unfolds, we learn through Somerset what is in the box that has been delivered, and Doe tells Mills how he murdered his wife:

John Doe: [about Tracy to Mills] I visited your home this morning after you'd left. I tried to play husband. I tried to taste the life of a simple man. It didn't work out, so I took a souvenir... her pretty head....she begged for her life...
William Somerset: Shut up!
John Doe: She begged for her life and...
William Somerset: Shut up!
John Doe: She begged for her life and the life of the baby inside her. [Somerset punches him]
John Doe: [Reading Mills' expression] Oh.... he didn't know.

What makes this movie so scary? The movie is very dark, both in spirit and in lighting. Every scene outside except the ending is shown raining, and the colors throughout the movie are dark and drab, setting the tone. The intellectual and pensive Somerset is offset by the spirited, hotheadedness of his partner, and the acting overall is well done. The psychological premise is intriguing and every murder is a horror story in itself. Yet, despite the fact that John Doe is arguably one of the most horrifying and sadistic killers in cinematic history, he isn't seen killing anyone on the screen. Each murder is either merely described or witnessed after the fact, making for a feeling of dread and suspense throughout the story as told only from the perspective of the two detectives. Occasional humor nicely offsets this dark mood, like this line from Detective Mills to John Doe: "I've been trying to figure something in my head, and maybe you can help me out, yeah? When a person is insane, as you clearly are, do you know that you're insane? Maybe you're just sitting around, reading Guns and Ammo, masturbating in your own feces, do you just stop and go, "Wow! It is amazing how fucking crazy I really am!"? Yeah. Do you guys do that?"

Fun facts: The producers intended that Kevin Spacey should receive top billing at the start of the movie but he insisted that his name not appear in the opening credits, so as to surprise the audience with the identity of the killer. To compensate, he is listed first in the closing credits. Se7en was voted the eighth scariest film of all time by the readers of Entertainment Weekly.

#4 - Alien

Year made: 1979

Notable Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Ian Holm, John Hurt

Basic plot: The seven-person crew of the United States commercial mining starship, Nostromo, are awakened from their cryogenic sleep on their journey back to earth because "Mother," the ship's computer, has intercepted a universal SOS signal on a moribund planet. Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt), Executive Officer Kane (John Hurt), Science Office Ash (Ian Holm) and Warrant Officer Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) all agree to investigate. A landing party headed up by Kane finds a crashed alien ship on the planet carrying a fossilized alien pilot and cargo of what appear to be eggs in a climate controlled chamber. Having lost radio contact with the landing party, continued analysis of the signal intercepted by Mother lead Ripley and Ash to the conclusion that it was not an SOS signal, but a warning to stay away. Ash talks Ripley out of donning on her space suit to go find and warn the crew. In the process of investigating the alien wreckage, Kane is attacked by something from inside one of the eggs that eats its way through his space helmet and attaches itself onto his face. Back on the Nostromo, and despite attempts to remove the hideous face hugging life-form, it eventually comes off on its own, and Kane appears to have returned to normal. But during a subsequent meal with the assembled crew, Kane dies a violent death as a large worm-like parasite punctures its way through Kane's abdomen, having been placed there by the face-hugging organism.

We later learn that Ash is really an android that has been placed on board by the mining company that owns the ship, and that they knew of the existence of these alien creatures wanting to capture one, perhaps as a potential weapon. One by one, members of the crew are attacked by the alien now running loose on board. Only Ripley and the crew's cat, Jones, survive after she decompresses her escape pod and blasts the creature into the vacuum of space.

Scariest moment: In one of the few moments of real guts and gore that I have elected to list in my Twenty Scariest Movie Moments, the titular Alien's "birth" from inside Kane's body is horrifying not only because the audience, like the crew and Kane himself, don't understand what is happening when his painful convulsions commence, but are incredulous that the organism has gestated there, discarding this host body in such a brutal and terrifying way. In an instant, we learn why the face-hugging organism was the face-hugging organism. What a diabolical life cycle! And Kane's death is not through quick, thoughtful incisions by the alien escaping from inside him, but by violently bursting forth in four or five battering-ram attempts to get through Kane's internal organs, bones and skin. It's a lousy way to die and portends what happens to the rest of the crew when the worm-like creature quickly matures to a nine-foot high menacing, unstoppable, carnivorous, hermaphroditic, demonic beast.

A sphincter tightening moment: Ash attacks Ripley after she learns of the company's "Special Order", but two members of the crew, Parker and Lambert, arrive before he can kill her. When Ash's head is dislodged with a fire extinguisher, one expects his body to drop quickly with a lot of blood, but Ash instead goes into wild convulsions, vomiting a milky white substance with a partially attached head while flailing about the room. We learn along with the crew that Ash is really an android. Ripley and her crew-mates eventually subdue and disable him, and then reattach Ash's speech and logic centers to learn more about the "Special Order." Ash's disembodied head comes back to life:

Ripley: Ash, can you hear me? Ash?
Ash: Yes, I can hear you.
Ripley: What was your "Special Order?"
Ash: You read it. I thought it was clear.
Ripley: What was it?
Ash: Bring back life form. Priority One. All other priorities rescinded.
Parker: The damn company. What about our lives, you son of a bitch?
Ash: I repeat, all other priorities are rescinded.
Ripley: How do we kill it Ash? There's gotta be a way of killing it, how, how do we do it?
Ash: You can't.
Parker: That's bullshit.
Ash: You still don't understand what you're dealing with, do you? Perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.
Lambert: You admire it?
Ash: I admire its purity. A survivor... unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.
Parker: Look, I am - I've heard enough of this, and I'm asking you to pull the plug.
Ash: [Ripley goes to disconnect Ash, who interrupts] Last word?
Ripley: What?
Ash: I can't lie to you about your chances, but... you have my sympathies.

What makes this movie so scary? This movie was an extremely suspenseful, space science-fiction horror film about a grisly, carnivorous killing machine. The movie's mood is grimy, dark and claustrophobic, without a lot of dialogue and contains some very high tension-filled moments, visceral thrills and shocks, and well-done special and visual effects. A murderer on the loose chasing an ensemble cast has been recreated over and over in the cinema through many stories, but this was a new sci-fi slant that spawned several sequels and dozens of knock-offs.

Fun fact: The blue laser lights that were used in the alien ship's egg chamber were borrowed from The Who. The band was testing out the lasers for their upcoming concert tour in the sound-stage next door.

#3 - The Wolfman

Year made: 1941

Notable cast: Claude Rains, Lon Chaney Jr., Maria Ouspenskaya, Evelyn Ankers, Fay Helm, Bela Lagosi

Basic plot: If any, very few werewolf movies have been so successful in winning audience sympathy for the monster. Following an eighteen-year absence from his homeland, Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney, Jr.) returns to Wales and rejoins his father, Sir John Talbot (Claude Rains), after the death of his brother. Larry escorts two of the local damsels, Gwen (Evelyn Ankers) with whom he is smitten, and her friend, Jenny (Fay Helm), to a palm reading fortune-telling session at the local gypsy camp outside the village where Castle Talbot reigns. In the scene where Larry and Gwen first meet, Larry purchases a silver, wolf-headed cane that would ultimately seal his destiny. During the fortune telling session, Jenny is told by the palm reader, Bela (Bela Lagosi), to leave the tent and run for her life. Bela is a werewolf and by the pentagram that appears only to his eyes on the palm of his next victim, he realizes that Jenny is preordained to be attacked next. Jenny obliges as the full moon rises and runs through the countryside when the werewolf approaches and attacks. Hearing her screams, Larry attempts to rescue her and while successful in killing the werewolf with the silver handle of his cane, he is bitten and Jenny does not survive.

The next day, local village officials are concerned that the body of Bela is found near Jenny and disbelieve Larry's accounting of the night's events, made all the more incredulous as Larry's bite marks from the wolf attack have mysteriously healed. The effects of the bite later prove more disastrous. Although the old Gypsy woman, Maleva (Maria Ouspenskaya) tries to warn him, "Even a man who is pure at heart and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms, and the moon is full and bright." Larry takes no heed until that night's full moon rises again. In the cinema's first human shape-shifting episode, Larry undergoes a frightening transformation to the Wolfman. After terrorizing the countryside, he is ultimately killed by his father using the very same silver handled cane that Larry first used on Bela.

The scariest scene: Hands down, Larry's first and most original on-camera transformation to a werewolf was truly terrifying. One sees only his feet making the alteration, after which we are introduced to the face of the Wolfman stalking his prey in the forest, snarling and growling. The make-up was horrifying. The Wolfman scared the absolute crap out of me!

A sphincter tightening moment: When the Wolfman is stalking Gwen, he steps into a bear trap left by the villagers to capture him. But the gypsy women, Maleva, comes upon him and recites an incantation that returns Larry to his human state. Here we see for the first time the facial transfiguration of Larry, but in reverse, as the studio censors would not allow a facial close-up of a man-to-wolf transformation.

What makes this movie so scary? Larry was both monster and victim. Through no fault of his own, and indeed because he had engaged in a valiant act to help save Jenny, he is nonetheless infected with the lycanthropic curse that causes him to transform from a moral, civil and gentle man into a brutal, vicious, savage, murderous beast, unable to stop his impulse to maim and kill. Add that to some awesome make-up that was cutting edge in 1941, and frankly, pretty damn scary still in 2009, and you have yourself a classic horror flick, the gold standard by which all future werewolf movies would be judged.

Fun fact: The "wolf" with whom Larry Talbot fights while attempting to save Jenny was Lon Chaney Jr.'s own German Shepherd.

#2 - The Silence of the Lambs

Year made: 1991

Notable cast: Jodie Foster; Anthony Hopkins, Ted Lavine

Basic plot: A brilliant psychiatrist, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a.k.a. "Hannibal the Cannibal" (Anthony Hopkins), is also a brutal serial killer who ate parts of his victims after sadistically killing them. He has been tried, convicted and is virtually entombed in a subterranean prison for the criminally insane run by a warden with a special interest in Lecter who routinely torments him. At the behest of the FBI, agent-in-training Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) approaches Lecter, requesting his insights into the identity and methods of a current serial killer on the loose, nicknamed by the press as "Buffalo Bill" (Ted Levine). It seems Bill has a fancy for young, size 14+ girls whom he kills and surgically removes a good portion of their epidermis while inserting a rare moth cocoon into their throats before disposing of the bodies. In exchange for helping Starling, Lecter demands the right to penetrate Starling's painful childhood memories, the most notable of which were her efforts as a little girl to save lambs being taken to the slaughter on her family's farm after her father's death. Lecter provides Starling with valuable information about the killer, including his theory that Bill may be a transsexual, and the moth cocoon represents change.

But after a U.S. Senator's daughter is kidnapped by Buffalo Bill, Lecter uses this to his advantage in bargaining for a trip to Memphis to meet the Senator in person before revealing any further information about the killer, including his possible identity as a former patient of Lecter's. After a horrifyingly clever escape from the highly fortified makeshift prison in Memphis, Starling is left alone to figure out the case, and now, Lecter is on the loose. From the clues that Lecter leaves behind for Starling before his escape, she stumbles upon the killer's home. We learn that Buffalo Bill is really Jame Gumb, who was a former tailor and costume designer, and he is using the skins of his murdered victims to make a "suit," helping him achieve the illusion of sex reassignment which had been denied him by various medical institutions because of his psychological instability. In tense, concluding moments, the film finishes with Starling getting the jump on Gumb, killing him and saving the Senator's daughter whom Bill had stored away in a dry well for a time when he needed more "fabric."

In the meantime, Lecter remains on the loose, and is now free to exact his revenge on the prison warden that had incarcerated and tormented him, slowly shadowing him on a Caribbean island where the warden is vacationing. In a final phone call to Clarice, Lecter says, "I'm having an old friend for dinner."

The scariest scene: In his makeshift prison at the Memphis Civil War Museum, Lecter picks the lock of his handcuffs while the guards are serving his dinner of rare lamb chops (ordered in honor of Clarice's childhood memories). Overtaking both guards, he creates the ultimate bait and switch leaving police reinforcements to believe that he had escaped. When the guards fail to answer radio calls, a SWAT team storms the area and they come upon a grisly scene. One guard has been disemboweled and mounted on the cell wall in an angelic-like pose. It appears that the other guard is barely hanging onto life after his face had been horribly mutilated. In reality, that guard is Lecter. He had surgically removed the face of one of the guards with a pocket knife, switched uniforms, disposed of the body down an elevator shaft, and placed the severed skin over his own face to conceal his identity, thus creating the illusion that he was one of the guards, mortally wounded. As the ambulance speeds off, Lecter removes the eviscerated skin from his face and rises from the ambulance gurney to kill all members of the EMS team trying to save him. Despite all the grisliness, the blood and gore was kept at a distance. It was artistically done, well acted and perfectly edited for an unbelievably scary movie segment, not to mention this film won the top five Academy award categories, only the third to ever do so. Lecter's infamous escape scene placed 7th on Bravo TV's 100 Scariest Movie Moments of all time.

A sphincter tightening moment: Lecter: "A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti."

What makes this movie so scary? Anthony Hopkins. Period.

Fun facts: A Bon Appetit magazine can be seen in Hannibal Lecter's temporary cell.

#1 - Psycho

Year made: 1960

Notable cast: Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, Anthony Hopkins, John Gavin, Martin Balsam

Basic plot: Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) and her out-of-town lover, Sam Loomis (John Gavin), have a disagreement about their future because Sam is in debt up to his eyeballs. When Marion goes back to her office, she is charged with getting $40,000 dollars in a cash from a real estate transaction to the bank for her employer. Only, Marion doesn't go to the bank. Packing a bag, she hightails it out of town, on her way to meet Sam with the money. Along the way, Marion makes the big mistake of getting a room for the night at the Bates Motel where she meets Norman (Anthohy Perkins). After a strange conversation, a shared sandwich and looking at spooky stuffed birds in the back office, Marion goes to her room to take a shower while Bates observes her getting undressed through a peephole. As Marion steps into the shower, a shadowy figure steps into the bathroom, pulls back the curtain and with an 8-inch bladed butcher's knife, begins to hack and slice away. Norman's mother, it seems, is not happy that an attractive blonde aroused her son. Norman, on the other hand, isn't about to turn his mother over to the police, so he dutifully cleans up the murder scene.

Meanwhile, Marion's sister, Lila Crane (Vera Miles) and Sam realize that Marion is missing and start a search for her through a private detective, Milton Arbogast (Martin Balsam). Mother Bates kills him too. Eventually Lila and Sam arrive at the Bates Motel and start snooping around, only to find Mother Bates is a preserved corps in the root cellar along with the family's canned peaches and dill pickles, and Norman has assumed the murderous identity of his mother. In other words, he's a psycho.

The scariest scene: The shower scene in which Marion is killed is considered one of the most stunning and horrifying scenes of all time. It has long been studied in film classes as a preeminent example of masterful editing. The scene is highly unique, as the camera becomes the knife. The decision to shoot the scene in close-up from the point of view of the knife itself both limited the gore and made the scene much more personal to the audience than most on-screen attacks. Filming the shower scene took seven days and more than 70 separate camera angles. Janet Leigh actually played the role of Marion for the duration of the shower scene, although a stand-in was used for the next sequence, when Norman wraps Marion’s body in the shower curtain for disposal. However, Anthony Perkins did not perform that scene. He was in New York rehearsing for a play, and a body double was used for Mother. Hitchcock would have kept Mother's face darkened in any event, so as to not spoil the punchline of the story.

A sphincter tightening moment: That damn screaming string music when the shower curtain is pulled back. In fact, the entire musical score for the movie was performed by a string ensemble; there were no brass or percussion instruments used at all.

What makes this movie so scary? We're at our most vulnerable when we're naked in the shower.

Fun fact: Anthony Perkins was paid $40,000 for his role as Norman Bates, the exact same amount of money that Marion stole from her employer.

Twenty Scariest Movie Moments - Part I

2009-10-18T12:47:00.078-05:00

With Halloween approaching, nearly all of the movie channels on cable are predictably showcasing their seasonal lineup of scary movies. Making the circuit, as one might expect, are the usual selections of the modern genre of horror films that have become the current standard bill of fare from Hollywood, like Saw (times five), Texas Chainsaw Massacre (times six), Nightmare on Elm Street (times seven), Halloween (times nine), Friday the Thirteenth (times twelve).

Do you see a pattern emerging here? No originality.

These are movies with the same basic theme: essentially innocent people being chased, pursued, hunted, followed, trailed, tracked, and/or captured, confined, restricted, restrained or detained by evil psychos, weirdos, wackos, nut-jobs and loons (that possibly possess some supernatural powers) who then get stabbed, slashed, sliced, cut, whacked, hacked, severed, incised, gashed, slit, ripped, lacerated - and in short, killed - in the most excruciatingly painful methods imaginable, all presented in the most graphically detailed and horrific ways. The formula rarely changes, so much so, that film makers are giving up on new characters and creative concepts in favor of just continuing the storyline of the first film with countless sequels. This theme has gotten so ridiculous that the antagonist from the movie Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy Krueger, meets the antagonist from the movie Halloween, Jason Voorhees, for a showdown in the aptly if unimaginatively named Freddy versus Jason. And oh by the way, get ready to pick a number here too because, believe it or not, a sequel is on its way.

Horror has, unfortunately, become synonymous with gore. A scary movie today isn't about suspense and terror as much as it is about fear and revulsion. Truly scary movies, on the other hand, come from a position of anticipation and surprise, in the believability of the characters, and in the vulnerability of the afflicted. They also come with quality script writing, good directing and decent acting; not from special effects depicting the most creatively unique ways in which you can watch someone get eviscerated.

Consider the movie that really changed the genre of scary movies in 1960, arguably the first spark in the genesis of slasher-flicks, Psycho, directed by that master of suspense and horror, Alfred Hitchcock.

Hitchcock used Psycho to play the ultimate dirty trick on his audience. The first part of the movie was a complete red herring. He killed off his lead actress, Janet Leigh, halfway through the movie, and he did it with such unspeakable out-of-nowhere savagery that he seemed to be pulling the rug, the floor, and the earth right out from under the audience. He opened an abyss, exposing moviegoers to a dark side that few could ever have dared to imagine at the time. But he did so without one camera shot graphically showing the 8-inch knife blade penetrating an ounce of skin or severing a single limb. He photographed in black and white specifically to soften this pivotal, bloody scene. Even though by today's cinematographic standards the shower scene in Psycho is benign in terms of gore, it is powerful in its delivery, and no one who watches this movie for the first time is unaffected by the surprise and horror of the scene. This was true horror, without gore, even though Hitchcock was in fact recreating a very gory homicide.

The shower scene in Psycho is Number One on my list of the Top Twenty Scariest Movie Moments, and here below is my complete list. It is by no means a definitive list, but it is my list. Watch any of these movies and indeed these scenes, and you will understand the difference between horror borne of suspense, good storytelling and movie making, versus revulsion and fear based on gore and guts.

#20 - The Tingler

Year made: 1959

Notable cast: Vincent Price, Philip Coolidge, Judith Evelyn

Basic plot: You simply cannot have a list of scary movies without a 1950's B-List flick starring Vincent Price. In this case, a coroner and pathologist, Dr. Warren Chapin (Vincent Price), is researching causes and effects of human fear. He discovers that people have a large insect-like alien creature, called "the Tingler," living and growing on their spinal cords. Living off of fear itself, the creature attacks when people are frightened and it is only incapacitated when the host emits a primal scream.

Chapin meets Ollie Higgins (Philip Coolidge), who wishes to kill his deaf-mute wife, Martha (Judith Evelyn). Learning of the existence of the Tingler from Chapin, Higgins goes about devising a plan to kill Martha by staging a series of frightening chain events that culminate in her death. Since she cannot scream, her Tingler kills her. Chapin removes her Tingler in an autopsy. The Tingler eventually escapes into a crowded movie theater. The film was meant to be interactive at this point with the quintessential Price as Chapin yelling to the audience (both the film audience and the audience in the theater showing the film), "Ladies and Gentlemen: Please do not panic, but scream for your lives. The Tingler is loose in this theater. If you don't scream, it can kill you! Scream! Scream for your lives!"

The scariest scene: The staged events that Martha endures before she is literally scared to death culminate in her being confronted by a bathtub of blood. When a disembodied arm reaches up from under the blood and tries to grab her, Martha dies of fright. This was a black and white film, but the audience is given quite a jolt when the bathtub of blood appears in vivid crimson and the arm reaching out from under the surface is in living color.

A sphincter tightening moment: From behind a surgery curtain, and thus only seen in silhouette, Chapin pulls out the Tingler from the spine of the murdered Martha. Alive and writhing as it is lifted out of the lifeless corpse, it resembles a giant earwig, complete with tail pincers. At a half-inch long, earwigs freak me out, so seeing one that is three feet long is a tense moment.

What made the movie so scary? It's a laugh a minute to watch these days and although I was too young to have seen this movie when first released, I did see it sometime in the early 1960s at a movie theater. Color TV was barely in the market at this time, so watching movies in black and white was more the norm. To see a sudden flash of red in the bathtub of blood on the screen was shocking. One cannot help draw a corollary between this B-List movie and the classic Psycho. Both motion pictures had pivotal scenes in the bathroom. Hitchcock wanted to film in black and white specifically to soften the horror of blood on the screen. In The Tingler, director William Castle wanted to film in black and white specifically to present the contrast of a bathtub of blood in color.

Fun facts: Originally when the movie came out, Castle had certain theater seats in select cities rigged with small Army surplus devices that would deliver a vibration to the movie seats in hopes of inducing terrified screams. Castle also planted audience members who would scream and faint. The house lights would go up, the film would stop and ushers would carry the unconscious person out of the theater.

#19 - What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Year made: 1962

Notable cast: Joan Crawford, Bette Davis

Basic plot: A grotesque former Vaudeville child star, Baby Jane Hudson (Bette Davis), lives in virtual isolation with her sister Blanche (Joan Crawford), a movie queen forced into retirement after a crippling automobile accident leaves her paralyzed. During the downward spiral of Jane's progressive derangement, we learn that Blanche's accident was no accident after all. Jane was responsible for the incident that had disabled Blanche. She had intended to kill her sister to avenge herself for the years of humiliation she spent in the shadow of a more successful sister who became a beloved movie star. This is a story about the sin of covetousness personified in the extreme.

The scariest scene: Being held in virtual captivity and dependent on Jane for everything, Blanche is served her former pet bird for "din-din." Then, Blanche struggles to get downstairs to the phone before Jane gets home. Of course, she doesn't make it and Jane, furious, slaps and kicks her and drags her back to her room.

A sphincter tightening moment: In a defining and helpless moment, Blanche says, "You wouldn't be able to do these awful things to me if I weren't still in this chair" to which Blanche replies, "But 'cha are, Blanche! Ya are in that chair!" The reality of Blanche's hopelessness is overwhelming. As a side note, it is indeed a testament to her acting ability where one can actually feel sorry for Joan Crawford. Before this movie, I didn't think that was possible.

What made the movie so scary? Bette Davis is flawless in her depiction of a deranged sadist showing no mercy as she cruelly torments and literally starves Blanche almost to her death. A haggard and helpless Blanche is a believable character with whom the audience sympathizes, hoping for assistance of any kind. Any one of us could jump in and kick the crap out of Jane and that would be that. But the audience squirms in their chairs, scene after scene, with a vantage point as helpless as Blanche herself.

Fun facts: It is a well documented fact that Joan Crawford and Bette Davis had a lifelong hatred for one another. During the aforementioned kicking scene, Bette Davis kicked Joan Crawford in the head, and the resulting wound required stitches. In retaliation, Crawford put weights in her pockets so that when Davis had to drag Crawford's near-lifeless body, she strained her back.

#18 - Marathon Man

Year made: 1976

Notable cast: Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Olivier, Roy Scheider

Basic plot: Dr. Christian Szell (Lawrence Olivier), a Nazi war criminal, loosely based on a real Nazi fugitive, Josef Mengele, comes out of his jungle hiding place and travels to New York City to retrieve his stashed-away fortune of diamonds when he becomes entangled with the brother, Thomas Levy (Dustin Hoffman), of a secret government agent, "Doc" Levy (Roy Scheider), who had been collaborating with the former Nazi for information to hunt down other Nazis in hiding. Szell kills Doc and then goes after Thomas, believing that either one or both of them intended to rob him of his diamonds. Thomas ultimately gets free of being held prisoner and tortured by Szell for information that he never really had. Thomas confronts Szell in the end but Szell dies at his own hand, falling on a six inch switch blade he had hidden up his sleeve.

The scariest scene: After kidnapping Thomas, Szell confronts him to ask, "Is it safe?" Levy has no idea why he is being asked this question and no matter his answer, he is not spared the terror and agony of Szell's interrogation technique as a trained dentist that would make water-boarding look like a neck rub.

A sphincter tightening moment: Szell: "Oh, don't worry. I'm not going into that cavity. That nerve's already dying. A live, freshly-cut nerve is infinitely more sensitive. So I'll just drill into a healthy tooth until I reach the pulp. That is unless, of course, you can tell me that it's safe."

What made it so scary? Who could argue with the horrific impact of a diabolical Laurence Olivier as the personification of Nazi evil ripping into the healthy tooth of what we know is an innocent man, caught up in a series of events being at the wrong place in the wrong time, through no fault of his own? Who didn't cringe when the sound of a high-speed drill ripped into the dentin of Hoffman with no hope that he could lessen his anguish by answering the esoteric, nonsensical question, "Is it safe?" This was classic suspense and horror, and no blood was ever shown; the gore was merely implied along with some damn fine acting. In fact, the torture scene was edited down and shortened by the director after several members of a preview audience were taken ill.

Fun fact: The title Marathon Man refers to the main character, Thomas Levy. It is only incidental to the story that he is a marathon runner, other than he is able to escape from his captors on foot after being captured and brutalized. Hoffman lost 15 pounds and ran up to four miles a day to get in shape for playing the part. He would not come into a scene and fake heavy breathing. According to producer Robert Evans, Hoffman "would run, just for a take. He would run for a half-mile so when he came into the scene, he'd actually be out of breath."

#17 - Play Misty For Me

Year made: 1971

Notable cast: Clint Eastwood, Jessica Walter, Donna Mills

Basic plot: Before there was Fatal Attraction, there was Play Misty For Me. In fact, Fatal Attraction was almost a plot-line-for-plot-line copy of Play Misty For Me, right down to the part where the antagonist slits her wrists in a manipulative sympathy play for the person with whom she is obsessed. Dave Garver (Clint Eastwood) is a hip, late-night disk jokey for a radio station where a female caller frequently requests him to play the famous Errol Garner jazz ballad, Misty. Evelyn Drapper (Jessica Walter), is picked up by Garver in a bar who later learns that she is the lady that has been calling the radio station, and just as quickly learns she is an obsessed fan with a bi-polar disorder switching from jealousy rage fits to maudlin tenderness.

The situation escalates in intensity as Dave attempts to revive an old love affair with Tobie Williams (Donna Mills). Dave tries to tell Evelyn the affair is over, and she reacts by sneaking into his house, tearing up his clothes and attacking his housekeeper. After the attack, the police take Evelyn into custody. Dave and Tobie reunite happily with Dave returning to his radio show and Tobie getting a new room mate, who turns out to be - Evelyn! In a knife-wielding ending, Dave is attacked and wounded by Evelyn before he punches her in the jaw, sending her through the balcony to the rocky ocean shore below.

The scariest scene: Dave is awakened in the middle of the night in his bedroom to the sounds of Misty being played. Evelyn, now a possessive, obsessive, murderous psychotic, appears above him with a butcher knife ready to stab him. He evades her, saving his life, but she escapes.

A sphincter tightening moment: Dave nearly has a national DJ deal signed in a meeting with an elderly female radio network producer in a restaurant when Evelyn crashes the lunch with insane jealousy. Evelyn says, "A little old for you, isn't she?" Then, she creates a public and humiliating scene in the middle of the dining room. As Dave is dragging her out of the restaurant, she screams: “She couldn’t get laid in a lumberyard!” When Dave returns to his table, the producer is gone and the deal is dead. I know this isn't an especially scary scene unless you've ever been in business and just missed signing "the big deal" by a fraction.

What made the movie so scary? Who hasn't been in some sort of possessive, manipulative relationship with a person you wished you had said "no" to from the beginning? Few of us have life altering or near death experiences with psychos like Evelyn, but some of us have come close. The fact that this model screenplay for a scary move is replicated in Fatal Attraction, and to some extent Basic Instinct, tells you that it strikes a common chord almost everyone can relate to.

Fun fact: This movie was made in-between Eastwood's spaghetti-western days after The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, but before his San Francisco cop days as Inspector Harry Callahan. When the movie Dirty Harry debuted later that year in 1971, the opening sequence shows a scene where Eastwood as Callahan walks in front of and past a theater marquee advertising the movie, Play Misty For Me.

#16 - Misery

Year made: 1990

Notable Cast: James Caan, Kathy Bates

Basic plot: I very nearly left this one off of my list because I never really thought this movie was all that original. If you take the dominion of a psycho over a helpless invalid (à la What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?), and combine it with the obsession of a psychotic female over an unsuspecting male (à la Play Misty For Me), Misery might be the plot you would come up with. But I did include it in my Twenty Scariest Movie Moments list and gave it slightly higher marks if only for its superb casting, outstanding acting and needless to say, its scariest scene.

Kathy Bates is totally believable as the antagonist in this movie, with flawless execution as the deranged nurse who inflicts much misery upon her non-ambulatory house guest. Misery is a double-entendre besides being the title for the movie. It is also the title character of a series of novels written by famous author Paul Sheldon (James Caan), who decides to end the character's life in a final novel, the just-completed manuscript of which he is delivering to his publisher. After a car accident on a remote mountain road, he is rescued by Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates) who returns him to her isolated cabin. Paul is bed-ridden from his injuries sustained in the accident and quickly learns that Annie is off her rocker when she burns his manuscript and demands that he bring Misery back to life by writing another novel. Like Evelyn in Play Misty For Me, Annie's dichotomous personality goes from effusively sentimental to uncontrollably angry and violent. After numerous thwarted or failed attempts to escape or incapacitate Annie, Sheldon finally wins by killing her with an iron doorstop in the shape of a pig. I'm sure there is a metaphor in there somewhere.

The scariest scene: Annie quietly and matter-of-factly explains to Sheldon about the process of "hobbling," an old-world technique used by diamond minors to keep their slave workers from running away by crippling them. As she is calmly describing this to Sheldon, she places a four-by-four wooden block between his legs just above his ankles. As Sheldon begs Annie not to do what she is about to do, Annie uses a sledgehammer to break both his ankles; first the left one, to which she says "Almost over..." and then the other.

A sphincter tightening moment: As Sheldon screams in agony and then passes out from the pain, Annie says, "God, I love you." While there was no gore, we do see the impact of the sledgehammer turning one ankle at a 90-degree angle to the wooden block while hearing the unmistakable sound of bones crushing and breaking, not to mention Sheldon's blood-curdling screams. The director was kind enough not to show the sledgehammer impact on the second ankle.

What made the movie so scary? Not unlike What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, we sit as an audience, powerless to jump in and help Sheldon. We're right there with the poor bastard, wishing every inch of the way that he is able to overtake this bitch and take her down, and not just take her down, but pay her back for her unbelievable cruelty. In the end, Sheldon does that in a very gratifying way.

Fun facts: The main character role, Paul Sheldon, was offered to William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Michael Douglas, Harrison Ford, Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Richard Dreyfuss, Gene Hackman, Robert Redford, and Warren Beatty, all of whom declined. Before declining, Beatty commented that the hobbling scene made Paul Sheldon "a loser for the rest of the film." Beatty has never been right about a lot of things.

#15 - The Omen

Year made: 1976

Notable cast: Gregory Peck, Lee Remick, Harvey Stephens, Billie Whitelaw

Basic plot: Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) is a U.S. Ambassador, married to Katherine (Lee Remick), and they are having their first child. But Katherine's baby is stillborn, a fact that is concealed from her when Robert is approached by a priest in the hospital offering to replace his dead child with another newborn whose mother had died in childbirth that same morning. Thorn agrees to accept the changeling, a secret he keeps from his wife. The child is named Damien (Harvey Stephens).

Five years later, a lot of strange events start taking place, including Damien's nanny publicly hanging herself at his fifth birthday party. Damien's new nanny, Mrs. Blaylock (Billie Whitelaw) joins the Thorn family and we learn very quickly that she has a preordained relationship with the child, as if she had been sent to watch over and protect him. Thorn is confronted with several people possessing several facts that ultimately lead him to the conclusion that something is terribly wrong with Damien; that he is in fact not human and something far more sinister. Thorn's discovery of a birthmark on Damien's scalp in the shape of the number 666 removes any remaining doubt.

Mrs. Blaylock kills Katherine to protect Damien, and Thorn kills Mrs. Blacklock in order to take Damien to "sacred ground" where only by using the "Seven Daggers of Meggido" can Thorn put an end to the life of the Antichrist. Dragging Damien kicking and screaming to the alter of a nearby church, Thorn is set to plunge the first dagger when the police shoot and kill him, and the child's life is spared. It is at the end of the movie that we learn Thorne's brother is the President of the United States, who is holding Damien's hand at the funeral of Robert and Katherine Thorn. Thus, the prophesy of the Antichrist is coming to fruition.

The scariest scene: Katherine becomes pregnant again and Thorn is warned that Satan will not tolerate any competition for his son's birthright to the Thorn fortune, that the unborn child is in danger. As Katherine stands on a ladder in the second floor atrium hallway of their home, Damien "innocently" rides his tricycle through the house. There is malice on Damien’s face as he rounds the corners of the hall headed toward the attempt on his mother’s life that will be completely explainable as normal play-time. The evil and malice along with the powerlessness to prove that anything is amiss makes this scene suspenseful and terrifying. Damien's tricycle runs into the ladder, sending Katherine to the floor below. Although she survives the ordeal, she loses the baby, and the warning that Thorn had been given comes to pass.

A sphincter tightening moment: On his quest to learn the truth about Damien, Thorn returns to the hospital where his son was born and that leads him to the burial location of Damien's real mother. In a classic horror scene of an overgrown graveyard on a cloudy and foreboding night, Thorn learns the truth that the mother of Damien is a jackal, the devil's beast, and the skeletal remains of his real son reveal he did not die stillborn, but was murdered after birth. In something of a recurring theme throughout this movie, a pack of Rottweilers guarding the devil's secrets circles up to attack Thorn and his accomplice within the graveyard's wrought iron fence. The two barely escape, but not unscathed as the vicious animals rip and tear at them as they make their way back over the fence to safety.

What made the movie so scary? The "mark of the beast" and the number six-hundred-sixty-six are taken from a passage in the Book of Revelations portending the end of days and the rise and reign of the Antichrist.

"Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast; for it is the number of a man; and his number is 666." -Book of Revelation, Chapter 13 Verse 18

Not since Psycho has music played such an important part of the mood and cadence of a movie. An unbelievable musical score created by Jerry Goldsmith, and the title song, Ave Satani (Latin for "Hail Satan"), actually made the movie scarier than it otherwise might have been had Goldsmith not been involved in the project. Additionally, the casting of child actor Harvey Stephens was spot-on. This was a spooky-looking kid and his final sinister smile at the end of the movie was nothing short of bone chilling.

Fun fact: Harvey Stephens was actually blond. The director felt that dyeing his hair brunette would make him look more ominous and menacing. Boy, was he right.

#14 - Rosemary's Baby

Year made: 1968

Notable cast: Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, Sidney Blackmer, Ralph Belemy

Basic Plot: Before there was The Omen there was Rosemary's Baby in another tale of the arrival of the Antichrist on earth. Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse (Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes) are a young married couple who rent an apartment in a Gothic building in Manhattan called "The Bramford," despite it being rumored to have been occupied by Satanists and witches. These rumors included a rather unsavory character, Adrian Marcato, who created a scandal in the late nineteenth century by claiming to have conjured "The Living Devil."

Rosemary and Guy are befriended by a strange couple, Roman and Minnie Castevet (Sidney Blackmer and Ruth Gordon) who rent the apartment next door. Soon, Rosemary finds that Minnie and Roman are, increasingly and unsubtly, becoming surrogate parents for her and Guy, and she doesn't like it. Other troubling events occur, like Guy's sudden and inexplicable success as a playwright. Rosemary becomes pregnant and is introduced to Dr. Abraham Sapirstein (Ralph Bellamy) when things begin to go horribly wrong. He gives her strange herbs and potions to drink, and as a result, Rosemary is in pain, loses weight and looks sick and emaciated.

After learning that Roman Castevet is an anagram for the aforementioned Steven Marcato, Rosemary slowly comes to the realization that all of those around her, including her husband, are a part of a witches coven's plot to take her baby away from her, and to sacrifice it in one of their rituals. Only at the end does Rosemary learn that the plot was not to sacrifice the child, but that her baby was really the offspring of Satan, and that indeed, her nightmare was only beginning.

The scariest scene: After being drugged by Minnie, Rosemary has a dream sequence that becomes a nightmare. Two figures tie her to a bed and something that looks and feels inhuman brutally rapes her. "This is not a dream!" she cries, "This is really happening!" When she wakes up, Rosemary is sore and scratched. Guy halfheartedly apologizes for having had her while she was out, leading her to believe she had too much to drink the night before and passed out.

A sphincter tightening moment: After giving birth, Rosemary is told the baby died, but she believes instead that the baby was taken away after delivery by the witches coven. Stealing into Roman's and Minnie's apartment, Rosemary observes that all of the witches in the coven are assembled and all are tenants of The Bramford. Rosemary sees a black crib in the room and walks over to it, where she's horrified to see that the baby's eyes are not human. Rosemary screams and Roman tells her that "Satan is his father, not Guy" as cries of "hail Satan" fill the room. As the baby starts to cry, one of the assembled witches rocks the crib too quickly. Rosemary walks over and rocks it gently, as she slowly begins to accept the situation. She is the child's mother, after all.

What made the movie so scary? Guy sacrificed his wife for his career and allowed her to be brutally raped by the devil. What could be worse than realizing the person with whom you are married has such disregard for your life and well-being, and betrays your trust by participating in a conspiratorial plot to bring the Antichrist into the world?

Fun facts: (well maybe, not so fun) - This movie was directed by Roman Polanski, whose pregnant wife actress, Sharon Tate, was murdered in 1969 by Charles Manson and his followers, who titled their death spree "Helter Skelter" after the 1968 song by The Beatles. The Gothic apartment building in which the movie was filmed, named "The Bramford," was in reality the Dakota Building, where ex-Beatles member John Lennon would one day live and be murdered in 1980.

#13 - Frankenstein

Year made: 1931

Notable cast: Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, Dwight Frye

Editorial comment: This true horror classic has been around so long, created, re-created and then parodied in so many ways, it has almost become a caricature of itself. Hell, there is even a kid's breakfast cereal based on the central character. We therefore sometimes don't think of it as being a truly frightening film. But a largely rural, unsophisticated movie-going public in 1931 didn't have ready access to audio-visual entertainment, and would scream and run out of the theaters at the sight of Mary Shelly's creation come to life on the silver screen.

The movie was so popular in the 1930's and early '40's that it was reincarnated (no pun intended) several more times with some big stars behind the credits, like Basil Rathbone in Son of Frankenstein, Elsa Lanchester and Bela Lagosi in Bride of Frankenstein, and John Carradine in House of Frankenstein. This was the face that catapulted Boris Karloff's career who appeared in all four films, although he returned to the screen in the fourth installment not as the Monster, but as the lead doctor antagonist. As is often the case in a movie franchise, the original flick is the best adaptation because it was done to bring something new to the screen. Everything thereafter is about a perpetuation of ringing the cash register.

The Frankenstein Monster has been recreated possibly more than any other motion picture icon. In fact, the very first adaptation of Frankenstein in 1910 was also the very first motion picture to ever be released. It has gone through numerous versions, iterations and re-makes since then, even as late as 1994 when the monster was played by Robert De Niro in what is perhaps the closest adaptation of Shelly's novel from where this gruesome and lonely tale first originated in 1818, Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus.

Basic plot: Convinced he can reanimate lifeless human tissue and cheat death, Dr. Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive), employs the services of his strange assistant, Fritz (Dwight Frye), to exhume a corpse from the village graveyard. When they realize the head and the brain of the body are severely damaged, they decide to steal a brain from Dr. Frankenstein's former teacher. Fritz finds two brains when he steals into the teacher's dissecting room. One of the brains is normal, labeled "Cerebrum - Normal Brain." He grabs its glass jar and begins to rush out, but inadvertently drops it when startled. In order not to disappoint Dr. Frankenstein, however, the dim-witted Fritz grabs the other glass jar labeled "Dysfunctio Cerebri - Abnormal Brain."

Back at Frankenstein's lab using electricity from a passing thunderstorm, the good doctor is successful in bringing the reassembled corpse to life. At that moment, one of the longest running, most popular scary characters in modern film was created. Although the Monster (Boris Karloff) is allegedly destroyed at the end of this film by vigilante villagers in a burning windmill, he returns again and again for many more sequels before we knew enough to call them sequels.

The scariest scene: The door slowly swings open, revealing a dark, lumpish silhouette in the doorway. The hulking figure lurches clumsily into the room with halting steps, gradually revealing a bulky head and broad back. The Monster awkwardly moves into the room by backing in and then slowly turns around, providing a shadowy profile in our first chilling close-up of his blankly expressionless, elongated face. A jagged surgical scar around the jaw appears. There is a prominent electrode that gleams into view on the side of the figure's neck. A series of camera jump cuts provide increasingly tighter close-ups of the hideous visage of the cadaverous creature. The monstrous face is placid and gaunt. The creature has a square-shaped cranium with a boxy forehead, hooded eyelids over deep-set, sunken eyes, electrical connectors on his neck, jagged surgical scars, a matted wig and a large surgical staple that binds his scalp and forehead together.

A sphincter tightening moment: Henry Frankenstein: "Look! It's moving. It's alive. It's alive....It's alive, it's moving, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive! Oh, in the name of God. Now, I know what it feels like to be God!"

What made the movie so scary? It was the first of its kind. The make-up was unbelievable. The story, classic. Think of seeing this in a theater in 1931 for the very first time.

Fun facts: After bringing the monster to life, Dr. Frankenstein uttered the famous line, "Now, I know what it's like to be God!" The movie was originally released with this line of dialogue, but when it was re-released in the late '30s, censors demanded the last three words be removed. I guess this says something about changing social mores of the time after a decade-long economic depression. A loud clap of thunder was substituted on the soundtrack and all subsequent releases of the film no longer contained the censored part of Henry's sentence that, quite frankly, was central to the theme of the entire story. Restoration has now completely brought back this line of missing dialog after a clean recording of the missing dialog was found on a Vitaphone disc. Modern audio technology was used to insert it back into the film without any detectable change in the audio quality, and the censored dialog has been returned to the soundtrack in DVD "restored version" releases.

#12 - The Birds

Year made: 1963

Notable cast: Rod Taylor, Tippi Hedren; Jessica Tandy; Suzanne Pleshette; Veronica Cartwright

Basic plot: Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) meets Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) at a San Francisco pet store and as a flirtatious joke, decides to deliver a pair of love birds to the Brenner family home in the California coastal town of Bodega Bay. Melanie learns from the town school teacher, Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette), that Mitch has a young sister and tomorrow is her birthday. Melanie establishes a shaky, but kindred friendship with Annie who also had been Mitch's girlfriend once. Melanie decides to use Annie as her cover story for coming to Bodega Bay, and the girl's birthday as an excuse for delivering the birds.

While in the process of carrying out her plan in a rented boat, Melanie is attacked by a sea gull that swoops down and slashes her forehead for no apparent reason. Thereafter, Melanie meets Mitch's mother, Lydia and sister, Cathy (Jessica Tandy and Veronica Cartwright). Lydia gives a guarded and very cool reception while Cathy falls in love with Melanie for bringing her the love birds. A series of progressively aggressive and frenzied bird attacks occur, wreaking havoc on the town of Bodega Bay. A gas station is attacked, resulting in an explosion and fire; children are attacked as they leave the school house; Cathy's birthday party ends in chaos with yet another assault; Annie is killed in the aftermath of an attack where she saves Cathy, but at the cost of her own life. Hitchcock ratchets up the suspense and terror with each episode until Melanie, Mitch, Cathy and Lydia all drive off against a landscape that is filled with hundreds of thousands of birds.

Docile as the birds are when the car slowly rolls off into the distance, one can't help wondering when or where the next bird attack will occur, but Hitchcock surprises the audience by ending the movie there, and never answers the most important question, why? This wasn't answered in Hitchcock's movie any more than it was answered in the 1952 novelette by Daphne Du Maurier upon which the premise was based. By the way, Hitchcock's film and the original story share no characters and little resemblance, save for the bay-side town setting and the birds' inexplicable tendency to launch frenzied attacks.

Editorial comment: Ah, but unlike De Maurier, Hitchcock did answer the question, why? This becomes clear when you realize the birds and their attacks are a metaphor for the jealousy and rage of an over-protective mother in Lydia who will have nothing to do with another woman taking Mitch away from her. This is why Melanie is the first to be attacked, and why both Melanie and Annie are jointly and then separately assaulted. After Melanie's confrontation with the birds, she is left wounded and in a state of shock, while Annie dies a gruesome death. Even Mitch's sister is attacked as it is clear she and Mitch share a special bond that excludes Lydia, and because Cathy liked Melanie from the beginning.

Lydia is the only female character that isn't specifically attacked. She is, however, forced to confront her own inner rage and petty jealousy when she observes a nearby neighbor dead in the aftermath of a bird attack in a horrific scene where his eyes have been picked out of their sockets. This scene was one of the few times that Hitchcock resorted to real film-screen gore, and it is only after this scene that Lydia admits to Melanie that her biggest fear is Mitch abandoning her. Thousands of people really hate this movie because they believe it has no ending. They're wrong. It does. It ended quite nicely if you understand the subtle underpinning and symbolism of Hitchcock's story.

Scariest scene: Melanie waits for Annie to finish the school day so she can take Cathy back to the Brenner home. As she quietly sits on a park bench outside the school house, she hears the children singing a sad, roundelay-type sing-song tune with the reprise: "Ristle-te, rostle-te, now, now, now..." We watch her casually light up and smoke a cigarette, oblivious to a growing gaggle of ravens amassing on the playground jungle-gym behind her. In classic Hitchcock style, the audience is aware of the inevitable danger and pending disaster while the character on the screen goes about her mundane business, unobservant and unaware. Eventually, Melanie and Annie are aware of what now has become a huge horde of birds, and while quietly trying to usher the children to safety, the birds viciously attack.

A sphincter tightening moment: During the full-scale flock assault on the gas station, Melanie runs for cover to the safety of a phone booth. As birds bang on and smash into the glass of the booth all around her, one of the less fortunate members of the crowd suffering this attack blindly and wildly bangs on the glass, screaming in agony for help as many large birds covering him are biting and picking at his face and eyes with their sharp talons and beaks.

What made this movie so scary? Aside from being a unique tale based on a premise that seemingly could really happen, we're completely a part of the movie, not mere spectators. In every scene, we relate to the characters and immediately understand what it would be like if wildlife suddenly developed the intellect and organizational skills to wage war on mankind. There would be no defense, and we would be just as helpless as Melanie and Annie.

Fun fact: Melanie wears the same green suit throughout the movie, so Tippi Hedren was provided with six identical green suits for the shoot.

#11 - The Changeling

Year made: 1980

Notable cast: George C. Scott, Trish Van Devere, Melvyn Douglas

Basic plot: John Russell (George C. Scott), is a distinguished composer who moves to Seattle following the tragic death of his wife and daughter. Living out of a hotel, he is offered by Claire Norman (Trish Van Devere) the chance to stay in an old mansion in the fictitious Chessman Park neighbor of Seattle, which is owned and maintained by the local historical society. John takes the offer, feeling that it would be the perfect place to compose a few more masterpieces. But it doesn't take long for him to realize that something is wrong. From the loud banging noise that fills the house every morning at six, to the faucets randomly turning themselves on, it clearly becomes obvious that something is living in the house with him. But is it trying to drive him away, or communicate and ask for help?

Through research and with the help of an extremely well-acted seance scene, John and Claire learn that the house is haunted by the ghost of a murdered boy, true heir to the Carmichael name, original owners of the house. His tragic history unfolds: because the boy was born a cripple, he had been relegated to secluded living quarters in the attic of the house and therefore had little contact with the outside world. In creating a cover story that he is taking his son to Europe to be "cured," the boy's father murders his helpless child, and a changeling takes his place who ultimately inherits the Carmichael fortune. He grows up to become a powerful U.S. Senator. Russell confronts the aging Sen. Joseph Carmichael (Melvyn Douglas) who must now face the reality of his life and the monster that his father really was.

The scariest scene: There is generally a solid build-up to the scares; there are very few, if any, jump scares. Instead, the movie creates that constant feeling of creepiness in setting a mood where the sight of a wheelchair or a rubber ball descending from a staircase can send chills up your spine. The scariest (and most heart wrenching) scene is in the historical recreation of the child's murder wherein his father grabs his son's paralyzed legs while the boy is in the bathtub, lifting them up out of the water and forcing the child's head under the surface. As he cruelly holds the boy under water until he drowns, the horrified boy bangs his fists on the side of the tub as he unsuccessfully struggles to stay alive. At that point, we learn the source of that loud banging noise that fills the house every morning at six.

A sphincter tightening moment: The opening scene in which John, making a call from a roadside phone booth, watches in horror as an eighteen-wheeler crashes head on into his parked car in which his wife and son are waiting. The impact of watching them die while John helplessly looks on sets the tone for the whole movie, even though there is no real connection to or resolution of the event relative to the rest of the story.

What makes this movie so scary? The creepy quality and somber tone of the storyline, as well as Scott's superb acting with a well-written plot that is hard to fathom or predict until you're slowly given the facts, make this one of the best haunted house movies of all time. The Shining can't even come close.

Fun fact: The movie is based on events which supposedly took place at a house in Denver, Colorado in the 1960s. The fictitious "Chessman Park" neighborhood in which the Seattle home is located in the movie is a reference to the real-life Cheesman Park in Denver, where the original haunting supposedly transpired.

To be continued in Twenty Scariest Movie Moments - Part II

The Race Chase

2009-10-04T00:27:00.046-05:00

When all else fails in unresolved disputations among people of different ethnicity, and the truth cannot be rebutted with logic, reason, or the facts, it is an unfortunate and now increasingly repetitive tactic to resort to an ad hominem attack that the argument is based on racial bias, a behavior that Caucasian Americans suffering from collective white guilt continually reinforce by backing down and keeping their mouths shut.

Well, I'm not keeping my mouth shut. I intend to protest. Loudly.

How dare the likes of Jimmy Fucking Carter, and even more appalling that NBC News gave him a platform, to declare:

"...an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African-American."

Carter was an embarrassment to this country when he was president, the only Democrat who failed to win a re-elected second term since Harry Truman, but that pales in comparison to the embarrassment he continues to cause with wild accusations and outrageous behavior in what should be his quiet, emeritus years. This wouldn't be the first time that Carter pandered hate by categorically stereotyping entire classes of peoples. He said during his failed re-election campaign against Ronald Reagan, "Republicans are men of narrow vision, who are afraid of the future." During the Reagan debates, he stated that "a Reagan presidency would set black against white, rich against poor, and young against old."

Oh really? Jimmy is not only a fear-monger, but also a damn poor soothsayer.

Since retiring from his disgraceful, single-term presidency, Carter has cozied up to Fidel Castro, calling for an end to the U.S. embargo against a ruthless dictator with arguably the worst record of human rights violations in this hemisphere. And thanks to Carter certifying a bogus recall election of Hugo Chavez, Venezuela won't be seeing a true democracy anytime soon.

And now with senility knocking on his 83 year-old door, Carter stokes up the race chase with a white guilt message that the liberal press ate up with a spoon, when they should have ignored him with nothing more than a footnote.

"...[this animosity toward Obama] bubbled up to the surface because of belief among many white people — not just in the South but around the country — that African-Americans are not qualified to lead this great country...."

Excuse me? Obama won the largest share of white support of any Democrat in a two-man race since Carter in 1976. Carter is as much an idiot as the people who voted for him.

Since Obama's election, a number of politicians have used race to dismiss criticisms of the nation's first black president and it is growing very tiresome.

New York Rep. Charles Rangel was among the first to claim that bias and prejudice are the driving forces behind opposition to Obama's health care reform proposals. Rengel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, hyperbolicly compared the battle over health care to the civil rights movement.

"Why do we have to wait for the right to vote? Why can't we get what God has given us? That is the right to live as human beings and not negotiate with white Southerners and not count the votes."
Uh, pardon me, Charlie, but just what in the hell are you talking about? And by the way, your comment about "white Southerners" sounds pretty fucking racist to me. Why didn't anyone get upset about that? Can you imagine what would happen if Trent Lott asked, "Why do we have to negotiate with black New Yorkers?" I swear, the U.S. Congress is the only institution in America that would keep a 79 year-old fool like Rengel on its payroll. Rengel may single-handedly be the reason why Congress has an approval rating of a mere 16%, according to the Rasmussen poll. By the way, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a non-partisan government watchdog group, has included Rangel on its list of the most corrupt members of Congress. Rengel is an asshole. The fact that he is a black asshole is incidental.
New York Gov. David Paterson said in a radio interview that the media have exploited racial stereotypes in covering him and other black elected officials.

"We're not in the post-racial period. The reality is the next victim on the list -- and you can see it coming -- is President Barack Obama, who did nothing more than trying [sic] to reform a health care system."
You bet we're not in the post-racial era, Dave, because you and other liberal blacks like you have the need to perpetuate the notion that people who don't like you or your politics, don't like you or your politics because you're black. I suppose it hasn't occurred to you that maybe they don't like you or your politics, not because you're black, but because you're an asshole. And by the way, 96% of all blacks voted for Obama. Doesn't that indicate that most blacks voted for Obama precisely because he is black? Isn't that by definition racist?
Al Sharpton, that king of race-baiting, called for a February boycott of the New York Post because he incorrectly inferred that a cartoon of a bullet ridden monkey was meant to portray Obama, when it was really a slam against the idiots that wrote the stimulus bill with the current-event relevancy of the shooting of a rampaging chimpanzee in Stamford Connecticut days before.

"This will be the first of many days to raise the outrage, and the unrepentant attitude of the New York Post has only increased that outrage at the insensitive and clearly racist cartoon that ran yesterday."
Well, Al, where were you in defense of Condoleezza Rice when the Los Angeles Times drew her as as an Ebonics-speaking, big-lipped, black mammy who just loves her "massa"? You, sir, are a hypocrite. The fact that you are a black hypocrite is incidental. This cartoon isn't "clearly racist" and the monkey isn't depicted as Obama. And oh, by the way, your stupid, fucking little protest didn't really pan out did it? Here is it October, and no one gives a shit anymore. Pretty much the same way that we don't give a shit about you. And we don't give a shit about you, not because you're black, but because you're an asshole.
The mayor of a small Southern California city resigned after being criticized for sharing an e-mail picture depicting the White House lawn planted with watermelons under the title "No Easter egg hunt this year." Los Alamitos Mayor Dean Grose came under fire for sending the picture to what he called "a small group of friends." One of the recipients, Keyanus Price, a local businesswoman and city volunteer who is black, publicly scolded the mayor for his actions in an interview with the Associated Press.

"I have had plenty of my share of chicken and watermelon and all those kinds of jokes. I honestly don't even understand where he was coming from, sending this to me. As a black person receiving something like this from the city-freakin'-mayor -- come on."
Well, I guess now we can fully understand the meaning of that stupid first name you have, Keyanus. Someone help me understand what is racist about a watermelon; or chicken for that matter? Is it because black people allegedly like to eat them? Excuse me, but lots of people eat watermelon and lots of people eat chicken. What if Obama wasn't black, but Irish? Would it have been racist to have a cartoon with a cabbage patch and potatoes on the White House lawn? Of course not. Your sensibilities are sorely misplaced. You're also an asshole.
During the summer, Obama caused a racial firestorm when he criticized a white police officer for arresting a black Harvard professor who had forced his way into his home after his front door got stuck, prompting a call to police from a neighbor. Obama said:

"I think it's fair to say, No. 1, any of us would be pretty angry; No. 2, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and, No. 3 ... that there's a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately."
The issue dominated news coverage for a week and ending only after professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. James Crowley joined Mr. Obama for a beer in the White House Rose Garden. But what if the professor had been white? Would he have been arrested had he been a belligerent, uncooperative white guy dishing out insults to the “mama” of the cop at the scene? Given that the black officer at the scene has fully supported the actions of the arresting officer, undoubtedly. Professor Gates wasn't arrested because he was black. He was arrested because he was an asshole.
In February, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. declared the American people "essentially a nation of cowards" for skirting the issue of race in their private lives during a Black History Month event at the Justice Department. It was his first major speech after being confirmed, and it should have been his last. First of all, fuck Eric H. Holder. Where does he come off as the chief law and order officer in this country telling us we're a nation of cowards? Secondly, fuck Eric H. Holder not because he's black, but because he's an asshole.
In May, reacting to comments by Obama's Supreme Court nominee that a "wise Latina" would be a better judge than a white man, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called Judge Sonia Sotomayor a "racist" and said she should withdraw her nomination. Under a hailstorm of criticism, he withdrew his remark, and she is now on the bench. You see, it's only racism when white people are accused of being racist.

And now, we have the brilliance and hypocrisy of Janeane Garofalo explaining to all of us why that is.

It's obvious to anybody who has eyes in this country that tea-baggers, the 9-12ers, these separatist groups that pretend that it's about policy – they are clearly white-identity movements. They're clearly white power movements. What they don't like about the President is that he's black – or half black (applause) – and they, what also is shocking is that people keep pretending that that's not really the case with these people.

I'm not talking about people that do have problems with his policies, that's fine. But these people, who are also being led by the Glenn Becks, the Michelle Bachmans, the Rush Limbows [sic], whomever, they are no different than any other white identify movement that's part of our history. This has been going on since the founding of this country that white power movements have tried to establish themselves and hold onto power.

"It's so obvious to anybody" that actual evidence to support her assertions is unnecessary. Conservative Republicans were equally opposed to liberal policies promoted by Democratic presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, both white Southern males, so the fundamental basis of Garofalo's argument is self-evidently unsound and patently absurd.

She claims she is "not talking about people that do have problems with [Obama's] policies," yet nowhere does she offer genuine evidence that anything other than policy disagreements inspire Beck, Bachmann or Limbaugh to oppose Obama. And exactly where does Garofalo derive her psychic mind-reading insight about the motives of people she's never met? Ha! The mere fact that you would ask such a question can only mean one thing....

And what of race? To deny there are differences in race beyond the obvious differences in physical characteristics is to deny reality. Despite billions of dollars and after years of Affirmative Action, racial quotas, the "war on poverty," food stamps, welfare, and the Great Society:

The birth mortality rate among blacks is 23.3 per 100,000 deliveries compared to 5.5 for whites, and birth weights among whites are likely to be .77 pound higher on average;
44% of black children live in low-income families compared to 18% of whites and only half of them live with parents who have had at least some college education, compared to 73% among white children;
You're 2.3 times more likely to grow up in a single parent home if you're black;
63% of blacks age 25 or older have a high school diploma, compared to 78% among whites;
You're more likely to smoke cigarettes it you're black and less likely to quit, and less likely to be successful if you try to quit;
You're twice as likely to drop out of high school by the time you're sixteen if you're black;
Teenage blacks are two and half times more likely to become pregnant than white teenagers by their 20th birthday, and 51% do, which means black teenagers are actually more likely than not to become pregnant before their 20th birthday;
Only 43% of all blacks who enter college complete their education, twenty percentage points below white students;
Homicide victimization rates are 6 times higher and offending rates are 7 times higher for blacks than the rates for whites;
You're 6.4 times more likely to go to prison if you're black.

Using Garofolo's logic, I could say that the reason why blacks in this country are so behind the curve is that their brains are smaller, their evolutionary track is slower and their synapses just aren't firing right. But I won't. That would be racist.

It's Been a Crappy Summer

2009-08-25T11:20:00.016-05:00

It's just been a crappy summer, that's all. I'm glad it's almost over. I'm tired of the hot weather, mosquitoes, weeds and the health care "debate." August is a crappy month. It's the only month in the whole year that doesn't have a holiday in it. And no, I don't count Ramadan as a holiday. The stock market is still open, the mail still gets delivered, and Muslims are still killing one another, just like any other day. So, if it's to be considered a holiday, just be advised that it's a crappy holiday.

The only good thing that happened this summer is that a few Hollywood dunderheads finally died. Like, Michael Jackson.

"Oh, but he was so talented...." Yeah? Well, big deal. A lot of people can sing and dance, and most of them can do so without grabbing their crotch on stage. And what did he do with his talent? He turned it into incredible wealth so he could surgically make himself to look like a fucking clown, build a personal amusement park and lure little kids into bed with him.

And what do we do with talented, singing, dancing, pedophiles who die in this country? We give them a nationally televised state funeral and sell tickets to a star-obsessed, intellectually shallow public. He was a bizarre, self-indulgent, morally bankrupt freak, and I'm glad he's fucking dead. It moved the needle in an otherwise crappy summer.

In fact, a lot of dunderhead Hollywood types kicked the bucket this year, which were certainly high points in a crappy summer. David Carradine, for example, finally freed himself of these earthly bonds by tying himself up and having a heart attack undergoing self-induced strangulation while masturbating. Since he was best known for his 1970's TV role as a moralistic Kung Fu monk who shunned earthly pleasures, that's nothing short of ironic.

Seems like there was a bit of irony in several Hollywood deaths this summer:

Billy Mays gave his last sales pitch after dying of a heart attack subsequent to snorting cocaine. That would explain a lot about the man's exuberance for laundry detergent.
Ed McMahon died at age 86 of complications from bone cancer. He was destitute and penniless, after making millions as a pitchman for Budweiser and as Johnny Carson's sidekick for over thirty years. And just think of all those millions he gave away for the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. More irony.
Seventies porn star Marlyn Chambers died at age 56 of a cerebral hemorrhage. She was addicted to Vicodin because of chronic back and neck pain. The irony in that is so thick you could cut it with a knife.
Farrah Fawcett died at 62 of anal cancer. Having been married to Lee Majors, I won't even comment on the irony of that.
Walter Cronkite died of natural causes at age 92, prompting a barrage of eulogistic drivel from the slobbering media about the demise of the patriarch of evening news. No real irony here, but it was just annoying. What's so great about a guy who can sit in front of a camera reading a teleprompter night after night? Hell, even our President can do that.

Yes, all in all, it's been a crappy summer. There weren't even any summertime blockbuster movies like there usually are; just a parade of tired, warmed-over crappy sequels:

Yet another X-Man sequel about that guy with steel claws and a wolfman haircut.
Star Trek. Again! Albeit a quality remake of the entire franchise with some clever casting and an intriguing storyline, I was pissed that Spock and Uhura were getting it on. Everybody knows that it should have been Nurse Chapel. It was always Nurse Chapel.
Angels & Demons, a manic and confusing sequel to The DaVinci Code. This time you get to see not one, but two Roman Catholic priests immolated, and more importantly, Tom Hanks had gotten a haircut.
Another Transformers sequel with hot women possessing unlikely academic knowledge, and overweight African-Americans used for comic relief. This isn't even a movie franchise based on a story, for god's sake. It's based on a fucking toy.
Harry Potter And The Whatever Whatever. It may be the highest grossing movie franchise of all time, but the illusion of now 19 year-old Emma Watson as a prepubescent sorcerer is stretching all credulity mighty thin.
Hollywood movie moguls figured if Transformers could make a movie franchise out of a toy, they could surely do it again with G.I. Joe. Likely the dumbest movie of the season, it is therefore qualified to be on next summer's sequel list.

This summer was so crappy, we didn't even have any good hurricanes to watch. In late August, we've only gotten to the the letter 'B' and as hopeful as I was that it would cause some really good devastation in Barney Frank's home state, Hurricane Bill was downgraded, and all the hurricane warnings along the Massachusetts coast were called off. Crap.

The news generally was pretty boring, and thus pretty crappy this summer. Bill Clinton went to Korea doing what Hillary couldn't, and Hillary went to Africa, then got pissed-off at a question about Bill. Anytime you still have to read in the news about Bill and Hillary's marital angst, you know it's a slow news time adding to the enrichment of a totally crappy summer.

Protests in Iran? Who cares? Riots in China? Does that mean we'll have fewer lead paint toys recalled this fall? And of course during August's congressional recess, all the town hall disruptions by angry conservative protesters has been only mildly amusing in that the liberals are finally getting a taste of their own medicine, with time-honored ACORN tactics.

In fact, the most exciting news stories this summer didn't even happen this summer. All the news channels were awash in historical recounts of the 1969 lunar landing and the Woodstock concert. The fact that both were considered equivalent events deserving the same media attention is a testament to the idiocy of the national press corps. One was an enormous scientific achievement of incredible human endeavor and ingenuity arguably unparalleled to this day; the other was a disorganized, poorly planned, over-crowded rock concert and drug fest.

Oh, there was one exciting news bit this summer. It only took our Commander-in-Chief just seven months to pull the race card after taking the oath of office, beating all Las Vegas odds. It was about time that the President of the United States reminded us white folks why we need to feel guilty about how black folks continue to suffer at the hands of racial-profiling white cops, even ones with impeccable credentials who teach cultural sensitivity classes to fellow white cops. But alas, a few beers on the White House lawn, and now everyone's happy again.

Television, too, was its usual crappy self this summer. In an effort to get past the customary re-run syndrome of typical summertime television, studio producers tried a few new shows this season:

More to Love: Yet another bachelor/bachelorette TV reality show, but this one is with size 14+ women who piss and moan because they're fat and unmarried. Go figure.
The Next Food Network Star: Remember when the Food Network used real chefs who had been vetted in the real world of the culinary arts and created trendy restaurants with exciting new concepts? Well, now all they have to do is win a TV game show.
Secret Life of the American Teenager: Someone dies, someone gets pregnant and someone loses their virginity. Notice this isn't the secret life of an American teenager, it's billed as the secret life of the American teenager, like this is some normal shit for most kids.
Dating in the Dark: Three single men and three single women move in together but are sequestered from the opposite sex. Boys and girls can only meet and date one another in the dark. Presumably, boys and boys, and girls and girls could meet and date in the light of day, the way God intended.
HGTV Design Star: A knock off of The Next Food Network Star, except fewer people in a smaller viewing audience giving less of a damn.
The Great American Road Trip: It follows seven families in RVs, pitting them in simplistic challenges as they have the daunting task of driving down Route 66. File this under "F" for fucking forgettable.

The only good thing that happened on television this summer is that Katherine Zeta Jones returned to T-Mobile advertisements as their celebrity spokesperson. Where the hell has she been, anyway?

Naturally, the crappy state of affairs in the world generally remained unchanged this summer. Some items that would qualify for the Crappy Summertime Awards would be:

Michael Vick gets out of jail for unspeakable cruelty to animals and is promptly reinstated to the NFL. Someone tell me why Don Imus hasn't gotten his job back at ABC for calling a bunch of basketball players "nappy headed hos."
A man responsible for bombing a Pan-Am jet and killing 270 people is let out of prison to return to a hero's welcome in his native Libya. Everyone is understandably pissed off about that, but I think we should thank the Scottish taxpayers for harboring this motherfucker all these years and sending him on his way with a terminal illness. By the way, his cancer is probably only terminal because of the shitty state of medical technology in the UK, a healthcare condition to which we all seemingly aspire.
Standing on a chair with his arms raised as if he were being crucified, ousted Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich opened the Second City comedy show recently in Chicago lampooning the rise and fall of his own political career. The show is a takeoff of the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar and portrays Blagojevich as greedy, tactless and hair-obsessed politician, which he pretty much was, so I'm not sure I understand the parody. Whatever happened to the notion of disgraced, impeached politicians contritely going on the David Frost show and asking for forgiveness?
South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford ran an op-ed apology in several newspapers. Sanford said God would change him so he "emerges a more humble and effective leader." I just love how politicians, once they're caught with their hand in the cookie jar, or on another woman's ass as the case may be, always evoke God to help them reestablish their public hubris via feigned humility.
Last year John Edwards ran for President and denied having an affair with a campaign worker. So, he goes on television and tells ABC that he lied while running for office, and that yes, he did have an affair with a campaign worker, but didn't father her child or pay her any "hush money." Of course, ABC News didn't challenge him or do any investigative reporting of their own. They dutifully broadcast it all at face value. This summer, it took the good ol' National Enquirer to ferret out the story that, golly gee, the child is his after all, and, [in the voice of Charles Laughton from Witness for the Prosecution]: "The question is, Herr Edwards, were you lying then, or are you lying now, or are you not, in fact, a chronic and habitual LIAR?"

Yes, indeed. It was a truly crappy summer. I can't wait for the Congressional recess to be over, school to be back in session and President Obama to return from Martha's Vineyard so we can all see what he brings next in the way of hope and change. I'll look forward to seeing a criminal investigation of the very people who kept us from a second or even a third terrorist attack because the media is more obsessed with the rights of terrorists than it is about how bad Congress is fucking over the American people with a nine-trillion dollar debt, and continuing to blame it all on Bush.

Maybe we'll all have a crappy Fall, too.

Exposé: Go Away, Rachael Ray

2009-06-30T06:13:00.036-05:00

The Food Network was launched in 1993 and found its way onto my TV remote control's "favorites" line-up somewhere around 1995. Always interested in food (both eating and cooking, but mainly eating), and having been around culinary professionals a good deal of my early career, I was a regular viewer of the Food Network, watching memorable cooking and food related travel shows like Two Fat Ladies, A Cook's Tour with Anthony Bourdain, and License to Grill, the latter two of which have since moved on to other networks. While photogenic personalities of the hosts was important up to a point, it wasn't the point. It was instead the food and the recipes that were the stars of each show in the earliest days of Food Network's programming. You actually could learn a recipe or two, or pick up a technique or two from these talented culinary professionals, and adopt them as part of your own repertoire.

The early Food Network also brought back some of the trailblazing cooking shows that started the whole concept of combining food preparation with television as an instructional learning experience, like Julia Child's Cooking Classics and The Galloping Gourmet. For those of us that grew up watching these original, saintly cooking shows on public television in the 1960s, the nostalgia alone was a welcomed, innovative touch to network programming.

During the genesis of the Food Network, a whole host of bona fide chefs and restaurateurs were recruited to teach us new cooking techniques with inventive, original recipes. These were successful culinarians who had put their money where our mouths were. They were engaging as on-air instructors because food was their life, quite literally. Their skill as chefs and their business schmaltz as restaurateurs told us we were getting the real deal. All of them were well educated if not also recipients of advanced degrees, and all were trained in renowned educational institutions of the classic culinary arts.

These early chef cooking shows included:

Michael's Place with Michael Lomonaco, who was the executive chef of two world famous Manhattan restaurants, The 21 Club and Windows on the World, the latter of which atop the World Trade Center was the highest grossing restaurant in America and sadly was destroyed in the 9/11 attacks. Many of the culinary staff that worked for Lomonaco prepping for lunch that day died. Lomonaco is also a part-time instructor of the culinary arts at City University of New York, the Culinary Institute of America and the Institute of Culinary Education in Manhattan;
Molto Mario starring chef and co-owner of Manhattan's Po restaurant, Mario Batalli. In addition to having attended the world famous culinary institution, Cordon Bleu, Mario also earned a degree in economics from Rutgers University;
Cooking Live hosted by Sara Moulton, the executive chef of Gourmet magazine’s executive dining room and food editor of ABC-TV’s Good Morning America. She received an undergraduate degree in history from the University of Michigan, and graduated cum laude from the prestigious Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park NY, winning a scholarship from Les Dames D’Escoffier in the process;
East Meets West with Ming Tsai, owner-chef of Blue Ginger Restaurant in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Ming speaks four languages, graduated from Yale with a degree in mechanical engineering, and received his master's degree in hospitality management from Cornell University;
How to Boil Water with Emeril Lagasse, who succeeded Paul Prudhomme as executive chef of one of the more famous New Orleans' restaurants, Commander's Palace, before opening his own restaurants, Emeril's in 1990 and NOLA in 1992, both of which became famous in their own right. Lagasse attended Julliard School of Music and turned down a full scholarship to New England Conservatory of Music to instead graduate with a degree in culinary arts from Johnson & Wales University. Lagasse recently had bestowed upon him an honorary doctorate from his alma mater;
Grillin' & Chillin' with Bobby Flay and Jack McDavid. Flay owned the popular and successful Mesa Grille and Bar Americaine in Manhattan. Although he dropped out of high school at 17, Flay received a degree in culinary arts and was a member of the first graduating class of the French Culinary Institute in New York. McDavid opened two restaurants in Philadelphia after serving as executive chef of the world-renowned Philly restaurant, Le Bec-Fin;
Taste with David Rosengarten, who was a contributing editor to Gourmet Magazine and holds a doctorate in dramatic literature from Cornell University with notable credentials in the culinary arts.

Not every talented culinarian made the grade during the first go-round, of course. Wolfgang Puck failed to capture an audience twice with Wolfgang Puck's Cooking Class and Wolfgang Puck's Master Class, as if we needed more goat cheese recipes from this arrogant, Hollywood ass-kisser.

Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken failed twice, too, with Too Hot Tamales and Tamales World Tour. In spite of being successful California restaurateurs and caterers, they lacked the je ne sais quoi to capture a loyal viewership.

Dean Fearing was the so-called father of southwest fusion cuisine and executive chef of the five-star Mansion On Turtle Creek in Dallas. He could not entice a loyal viewer following with his East Kentucky accent using peppers no one ever heard of in Entertaining at Home with Dean Fearing.

And, of course, Three Dog Bakery failed miserably after it completely confused the viewership as to why a show about dog food was even on this network, when it was clearly more suited for Animal Planet.

These misfires notwithstanding, the Food Network was generally finding that highly successful, well-educated chefs, restaurateurs and food editors weren't getting the ratings they needed to command hefty advertising rates, and so they began the evolutionary process of dumbing-down this new, intelligent network. They went from a platform of culinary education to one of culinary entertainment by creating whole new genres of shows, the first among them being the Food-Oriented-Game-Show.

Ready, Set, Cook aired in 1995 featuring two chefs along with two members of the studio audience competing as teams to prepare the best meal. One was called "Red Tomatoes", the other "Green Peppers." The contestants were then each given $10.00 to spend on ingredients for the chefs to prepare a meal.

The teams had 20 minutes to make a meal using the ingredients they bought plus the usual items found in a kitchen pantry. The host would meanwhile move back and forth between the teams to ask stupid questions about the meals being produced.

When time ran out, each team explained the dish they had prepared, after which the audience would vote by holding cards to show which team's meal they liked best. The team with the higher number of votes won the game, with both contestants winning exciting gifts and prizes, like kitchen appliances and cookware.

Of course, this game overlooked one critical element to the success of any recipe: taste. The audience never actually tasted the meals on which they voted, making this one of the most inane games shows of all time.

As Food Network executives continued to dumb-down their programming to appeal to larger and broader audiences, another genre of show was created, the Goofy-Host-Food-Explorer-Show. These included programs like:

Ham on the Street, where host George Duran engaged in such food hijinks as turkey bowling, and finding out if an ostrich egg can be cooked sunny side up;
The Surreal Gourmet, where chef-wanna-be and cookbook author, Bob Blumer, traveled the country with an Airstream trailer in tow, modified to look like a giant toaster, and engages unsuspecting travelers to sample such culinary delicacies as salmon cooked in a dishwasher, and fish prepared on the hood of a car;
The Secret Life of..., where actor Jim O'Connor (with acting credentials that have landed him in such theater blockbusters as Mystic Pizza and Undercover Brother) follows a food item throughout its history of creation to mass manufacturing, featuring everything you wanted to know in thirty minutes about such riveting food subjects as cookies, coffee and popcorn.

As Food Network began to increase market share by following this path of insipid banality, the more cerebral instructional cooking shows began to evolve into formats that were more entertainment than educational. It was beginning to appear as if cooking food was merely incidental. The format became the emphasis, not the food. The bona fide culinarians that survived the first round of instructional cooking shows were re-formatted and re-packaged to appeal to these broader audiences:

Emiril Lagasse had already moved from How to Boil Water to The Essence of Emeril in which he was still giving stand-up instructional cooking lessons to the camera on a closed set, but was now being allowed in this new format to express a bit more of his buffoonery on the air. So then, the Food Network programming department decided it was time to let him do it in front of a live television studio audience.

Emeril Live first aired in 1997 and became the anchor for Food Network's prime time line-up for ten years. Audience members got to sit at the counter and taste food that Emeril would prepare during the show. D-listed entertainers like Pat Benitar and Patti LaBelle would occasionally drop in. The show reeked more of The Tonight Show than a cooking show, with live music and a studio audience trained to applause on cue whenever Emeril said the words "gah-lick" or "bam!"

In ten years, his shtick never changed. Viewers were inexplicably captivated with never-changing catch-phrases, used over and over ad nauseum such as "pork fat rules," and "we ain't buildin' no rocket ships," and "oh, yeah, babe," and the trademarked, "kick it up a notch." Emeril jumped the shark in 2001 when NBC aired eight episodes of a situation comedy with the very original title, Emeril, which starred Emeril Lagasse playing, well, Emeril Lagasse. It was so bad, two episodes were produced that were never aired before the show was canceled. Thus ended Emeril's cross-over ambitions.

If a live studio audience show format worked for Emeril, then it must also work for Mario. The format for Molto Mario had already changed from Mario talking to the camera, to Mario talking to three alleged "friends," sitting on bar stools at Mario's kitchen counter in front of the camera. Each would get portions of the dishes that Mario prepared during the show, as long as they nodded approvingly and made 'mmmm" sounds. They were also allowed to occasionally ask poignant, if not scripted questions. Beyond that, they were more or less live props to make Mario seem not so boring. That said, Molto Mario was probably the most intelligent cooking show on the network, and took the viewer through a vast realm of new, exciting foods from Italy, light years beyond that which most Americans even understood as Italian food. All the more reason Food Network programming executives felt the need to change it.

With the live studio audience theme afoot at the network's programming think-tank, Mario's format was again changed. Mario was given a live audience, a new set and a larger geographical culinary area to explore, with a really huge map as the set's backdrop. Mediterranean Mario debuted in 1998, and Mario would pontificate about the origins and history of each dish, showing the audience where these recipes were created or discovered by walking to this ceiling-to-floor map behind him and giving us all a little geography lesson. It was then that we all got to see Mario walking away from the camera, which was a horrid sight. Mario was fat, had balding red hair in a pony tail, and had a penchant for wearing orange shorts and red clogs. Mediterranean Mario was a miserable flop and was canceled after one season. Cooking talent, after all, was no substitute for theatrics and good taste.

Bobby Flay got rid of his country-bumpkin sidekick from Grillin' and Chillin' and again, Food Network execs wanted to put one of their notable culinarians in front of a live audience. This time, however, they did not want to recreate another flop like they had with Mediterranean Mario. So, they put Bobby in a trendy New York loft apartment, with perhaps twenty hip-looking audience members all seated in a living room environment on the show Hot Off the Grill, which debuted in 1999. Sensing that Bobby just wasn't all that interesting by himself, they added a stand-up comic and TV host, Jacquie Malouf, as a newer, sexier sidekick.

The show was mildly successful, but it solidified Bobby's status as a viable Food Network earner. Malouf's contract was expiring, however, and re-runs were not allowed. Food Network quickly repackaged Bobby as a grilling expert and put him in front of a camera without a studio audience, even though they originally knew Bobby didn't test well without someone to offset his high school, drop-out, West Side Story, bad boy attitude. Boy Meets Grill was Bobby's next show and it was a flop, although I frankly gleaned two or three really great recipes from it. From that point on, though, Food Network programmers would never allow Bobby to appear solo on any show. To this day, he is rarely alone on camera, always paired with other partners to add balance to his brash, off-putting personality.

Sara Moulton was already doing a live broadcast show, only not with a studio audience, but instead with viewer call-in questions on Cooking Live. Of course, it was taped and re-broadcast over and over, so you never really knew when Sara was actually live on the air or when you were watching a re-run. So, Food Network executives decided to gamble on the format as a lead-in prime time anchor to Emeril Live. In 1999, Cooking Live Prime Time was created with a beefed-up set, and a nightly live broadcast format. As something of a cross between Vanna White and Betty Crocker, Sara's show didn't stick. The Food Network execs couldn't figure out what to do with Sara after this show failed, so they re-packaged her again and she went on to do Sara's Secrets, the main secret being that Food Network wasn't going to renew her contract for a fourth show.

Food Network went on to create yet another genre in its quest for lower standards and higher ratings, which was the Former-Stand-Up-Cooking-Show-Host-Gobbling-His-Way-Through-a-Country-or-City-or-State-Show. Certified chefs that weren't cast in live studio audience formats started getting travel assignments. This was also a way to coyly get the failing chefs out of Food Network's New York offices and lower overall production costs. Road shows required no expensive studio sets, and a skeleton crew of 4-5 roadies could handle all the video taping, gladly staying overnight at Super-8 lodges along Interstate highways. These shows included:

Ciao America With Mario Batali featured Mario eating his way across America at every Italian restaurant and pizza joint that he could find. If you thought Mario was fat before, think again, and still with the orange shorts and red clogs! Not surprisingly, the show failed.

Food Nation With Bobby Flay was put together after Bobby's flop with Boy Meets Grill. Bobby would visit a particular city, doing all the things that tourists might do, except that all venues were food related. In one episode, for example, Bobby visits a winery, hunts for chantarelle mushrooms, eats barbecue and visits an olive processing plant. Riveting stuff, indeed. Amazingly, the show lasted four years and produced 106 location shows. This solidified Bobby as a Food Network heavyweight, but having recently married toward the end of the show's run, Bobby said he had had enough traveling, and wanted to come home to the network studios.

If the first Former-Stand-Up-Cooking-Show-Host-Gobbling-His-Way-Through-a-Country-or-City-or-State-Show didn't work, let's try another one! Mario Eats Italy was pretty much the same thing as Ciao America, only now Mario was eating at every Italian restaurant in Italy. But viewers couldn't take the sight of a still fatter Mario shoveling food in his face on camera night after night, even with guests like Gwyneth Paltrow. That show failed, too.

Ming's Quest with Ming Tsai - Food Network programming wizards did not envision Ming improving very much in front of a live studio audience, having tested him as a guest chef several times on Emeril's show. And so, they decided to have Ming travel the globe and cook outdoors in exotic destinations. The show didn't carry the Food Network audience but by this time, Scripps Networks, the parent company of Food Network, had created the Fine Living Channel, which was quickly becoming the graveyard for canceled Food Network shows that had either overstayed their welcome or failed, like this one.

It was about this time that the Food Network clearly embarked on a change in programming strategy, pushing out show after show into one of four distinct segments which were hybrids or extensions of those earlier genres. This is the programming strategy that is still in place today: (1) Stand-up Cooking Shows with Un-credentialed or Off-the-Wall Bobblehead Hosts; (2) Re-Tread Hosted Traveling Shows About Food But Not About Cooking; (3) Strange Shows that Try to Blend Science with Food, Manufacturing with Food or Other Weird Shit With Food; (4) Cooking Competitions with Pretentious Objectives & Idiot Judges.

Let's examine each of these, shall we? ...and embellish a few examples:

Stand-up Cooking Shows with Un-credentialed or Off-the-Wall Bobblehead Hosts: These are formatted off of the more traditional talk-to-the-camera stand-up cooking shows of the early days of Food Network, but now absent are the educated culinarians, successful restaurateurs and qualified food editors. No longer would we learn about real cooking techniques and restaurant quality culinary fare from men and women who not only knew how to cook; they knew how to create, and how to turn the culinary experience into an art form. Now, a pretty face wearing a tight blouse with a scooping neckline and nice cleavage would do.

These shows feature unqualified recipe writers with a specific shtick, like cook fast, cook cheap, cook easy, cook healthy, or cook ethnic, but definitely don't cook anything too difficult, because the audience now is just dumb as shit. And if the host isn't a pretty face wearing a tight blouse with a scooping neckline and nice cleavage, he or she is gay, ethnic, or a pseudo-freak.

Thirty Minute Meals - As the reader may have surmised by now, Rachael Ray is not so much the subject for this blog posting as she is a metaphor for all that's gone awry with the Food Network. The not-so-subtle dismissing of the big-ticket chef's guard is complete, now that Emeril has been relegated to re-runs on the Fine Living Channel.

Rachael represents the new guard, most of whom have had no formal culinary training, and never had to pay their dues in the real world of restaurant competition, sweating through grueling late night hours in tough commercial kitchens, scraping together a marginal profit in an industry that has a 90-percent failure rate, while attempting to differentiate their product from so much culinary mediocrity in a crowded marketplace. Rachael's show, like all the others of her peer group, is about style over substance, trying not too hard to convince us that mediocrity is good enough. They all got there too easy with a gimmick or a shtick that convinces viewers they're worth watching and that they know what the hell they're doing. And that's the irony of the success of this segment of Food Network's programming. We all know that they don't know what the hell they're doing, yet we cannot stop ourselves from watching the awfulness unfold before us every half-hour.

In Rachael's case, her shtick consists of over-rehearsed cuteness, with hands and arms flailing about in gesticulating synchronization to ear-shattering meaningless diatribe, while she tells us in a coy way that she really can't cook. We all knew that, and that's why viewers like her. Instead of real cooking, we get hamburgers made 47 different ways after watching Rachael defy gravity by getting all her ingredients in one felled swoop from overcrowded arms safely to the kitchen counter next to her omnipresent garbage bowl, with gravity and physics causing any particular ingredient to splatter all over the floor of the set carefully edited out of the final broadcast. Viewers are mesmerized with horrifying affectations and bastardizations of English that include "sammies," "delish," and "yum-o," while being required to silently answer Rachel's oft repeated rhetorical question, "How cool is that?"

All of this, of course is why Rachael Ray is worth millions with a cross-over daytime talk show, her own magazine, and celebrity endorsements for Dunkin' Donuts, Ritz Crackers and Triscuits.

Never mind that her life's opus to date also includes scantily clad images in suggestive poses on the pages of FHM Magazine, which is sort of a British man's version of Cosmopolitan. I am personally shocked that the Food Network doesn't make Rachael wear tube tops and short-shorts during her thirty-minute romps through the Betty Crocker cookbook. On second thought, though, we should all be grateful they don't. Rachael's ass has been spreading in those bluejeans of late faster than her own product line, which now includes her very own brand of olive oil, naturally called E.V.O.O., as well as the customized, and unbelievably ridiculous, Rachael Ray Garbage Bowl for only $19.95 plus handling and shipping.

The sales copy for the Rachael Ray Garbage Bowl proclaims:

"Stop running back and forth to the garbage can! Save time in the kitchen by tossing your food scraps, wrappers and other waste in Rachael Ray's handy Garbage Bowl. Keep it next to your cutting board while you chop and you'll be sitting down to eat in no time!"
I never knew I was wasting so much time in the kitchen tossing scraps into the garbage disposal sitting a mere three feet away from my favorite location in the kitchen I use as a prep station. Think of all the time I could be saving! The only thing more idiotic than this product, which after all, is nothing more than a fucking salad bowl, are the idiots who buy them. How embarrassed I am for all of them, and how proud I am of Rachael for having the gumption to sell them, grinning all the way to the bank, with a smile looking none too unlike Jack Nicholson's portrayal of The Joker.
Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee - As another stand-up cooking show Bobblehead host, sheer mediocrity and an even greater elevation of style over substance is never more demonstrably apparent than with Sandra's show, which sports an ever-changing studio set decorated in colors to match her on-camera outfits. Her apparel is generally not so revealing as it is accentuating. Sandra has big tits and she wants you to know it.

The formula for her show is always the same, divided into three segments. First, the food segment, where Sandra throws together recipes that one might have already read on the back of a Waverly Wafer cracker box, or pulled out of a spiral-bound woman's church group fund-raising recipe cookbook. Then, it's time for the cocktail segment. Sandra promotes another disgusting recipe disguised as a legitimate cocktail, usually with such awkward combinations as guava nectar and beer, or peach schnapps and Kool-Aide. Never mind the palatability of the ingredients, of course, all that matters is that the color of the beverage match Sandra's outfit du jour. And as Sandra continues to accentuate certain words that begin with the letter 'L' using an annoying Valley Girl lisp more and more frequently as time passes in each show, one wonders if she hasn't already been nipping from the pomegranate liqueur bottle since her 4 a.m. make-up call, well before shooting on the set began.

Next, it's time for the third segment. Sandra gives us a dissertation on what she did to make this episode's "table-scape," which is a made-up word used to describe Martha Stewart-esque table decorations you don't really need to eat a meal. Nonetheless, you may require them to take your mind off of the nauseatingly bad fare that Sandra is about to perpetrate upon your place setting of flea-market bought dishes and adornments made of wicker, bamboo and construction paper.

Anthony Bourdain, who hosted one of the original Food Network shows, A Cook's Tour and was one of the first to be relegated to another Scripp's network, is an outspoken critic of Sandra Lee:

"Pure evil. This frightening Hell Spawn of Kathie Lee and Betty Crocker seems on a mission to kill her fans, one meal at a time. She Must Be Stopped. Her death-dealing can-opening ways will cut a swath of destruction through the world if not contained. I would likely be arrested if I suggested on television that any children watching should promptly go to a wooded area with a gun and harm themselves. What’s the difference between that and Sandra suggesting we fill our mouths with Ritz Crackers, jam a can of Cheez Wiz in after and press hard? None that I can see. This is simply irresponsible programming. Its only possible use might be as a psychological warfare strategy against the resurgent Taliban--or dangerous insurgent groups. A large-racked blonde repeatedly urging Afghans and angry Iraqis to stuff themselves with fatty, processed American foods might be just the weapon we need to win the war on terror."
Everyday Italian - Giada De Laurentiis unquestioningly has the physically largest head of the stand-up Bobbleheads, and absolutely perfect teeth, compliments, no doubt, of a Beverly Hills orthodontist and old money. Giada took her mother's surname so that she could cash in on her random chance genetic affiliation with her famous grandfather and Hollywood director, Dino De Laurentiis. Unlike the other Bobbleheads, however, Giada attended Cordon Bleu with aspirations of becoming a pastry chef, but she never graduated. Also, unlike the other Bobbleheads, Giada can actually cook interesting recipes you just might really want to eat.

Unfortunately, however, The Food Network can't let a culinarian be a culinarian without a dumbed-down gimmick, and Giada's show is no exception. In spite of the fact Giada was born in Rome, she grew up in Beverly Hills, and speaks perfectly Americanized English, if not slightly peppered with Californian Valley Girl pretentiousness. All the more puzzling, therefore, that she has to pronounce every word of Italian origin with an over-exaggerated Italian accent that goes one step beyond simply annoying. While perhaps using the native accent is warranted with unfamiliar recipe terms like "zuppa di pesce" (pronounced: ZOOpadeePESH), it is utterly irritating to have to hear the same Italian accentuation for English-adopted words of Italian origin like spaghetti, parmesan and mozzarella (Giada pronunciation: MOZZARELLAHHH).

If that weren't distracting enough and if her culinary talent were not enough, the Food Network wardrobe department and camera crew have clearly conspired to show as much of Giada's cleavage as possible on every show. There is no Sandra Lee modesty here. Giada has big tits and not only does she want you to know it, she wants you to see them and experience all of their jiggly goodness. Sadly, this refocuses the viewer's attention elsewhere on the screen, rather than on possibly learning some new culinary technique from a not so bad Bobblehead chef. Surely this is a Food Network strategy to acquire the 17-24 year-old male demographic group as regular viewers. There are, in fact, scores of You Tube segments of Giada jiggling for the camera, with everything else but the waggle edited out for the sake of jiggling continuity.

Her young, largely male audience is probably the reason why De Laurentiis isn’t as popular as Rachel Ray. Despite the fact that Giada is every bit as cute as Rachael, makes better dishes and her recipes are much more sophisticated, she’s better looking than Rachael with jiggling breasts oft revealed from camera angles aloft as she vigorously chops, dices and grates. That alone would be enough to intimidate most female viewers, and so there will be no crossover opportunities for Giada to host a daytime woman's talk show or sell Garbage Bowls on the Internet.

Meanwhile, Giada's youthful male audience can only hope for an upcoming show featuring presentations of paillards of veal, chicken and beef. Paillards are thin slices of meat, which are pounded repeatedly with a wooden mallet until very thin. The jiggling at this point might very well be violent and acute, or in the parlance of Emeril Lagasse, "kicked up a notch."

Paula's Home Cooking - It was only a matter of time before Food Network executives were to add a cooking show that featured southern fare, and needed a host with a genuine southern drawl and a penchant for cooking with butter. And if that host could be a fat, gray-haired, cackling, sixty-something trailer park Georgia hick with a penchant for cooking with butter, so much the better.

None of that EVOO here, although it is rumored that Paula would really rather return to her Albany GA culinary roots and cook with lard. But trans-fatty acids being as politically incorrect as they are, Food Network culinary advisers insisted Paula upgrade to a fat molecule at least most Americans can find at their neighborhood grocery store, offering the potential for product placement fees on Paula's show. This did not dissuade her, however, from frequently cooking with bacon fat.

Allegedly and dubiously being a self-diagnosed, self-cured agoraphobic, Paula has no education beyond high school, culinary or otherwise. She started a catering business from her own kitchen and later opened a restaurant in Savannah Georgia called, The Lady & Sons. One can't help wonder if her agoraphobic story wasn't embellished a little bit as something of a sales pitch to help get a federally backed minority business loan to fund her restaurant. Nevertheless, in this one sense, Paula stands above the other Bobbleheaded cooking show hosts, having lived the day-to-day stress and strain of serving bitchy customers, dealing with the illegal alien status of your line cooks and dishwashers, and keeping your buffet temperatures high enough to kill salmonella bacteria, but not so high as to harden and discolor your sausage gravy and creamed corn.

And that's pretty much what you get at The Lady & Sons: a large "southern" buffet with sweet potatoes, macaroni and cheese, deep-fried Twinkies, fried chicken, cheesy meatloaf, collard greens, beans and ham hocks, and garlic cheese biscuits; all delicious fare to be sure, but hardly a feat of delicate ingredients, culinary creativity and savoir faire.

Savannah natives of old-moneyed southern snobbery avoid the restaurant, considering it more of a tourist trap as opposed to holding a legitimate place among Savannah's trendy southern, low-country fusion cuisine restaurants. The truth is, many in Savannah really can’t stand Paula Deen. They consider her to be a demeaning caricature of all things southern, and are literally embarrassed by her. Many residents have even taken to Craig's List to complain about Paula, and to let the world know that people in the south aren’t uneducated loons who begin every sentence with “y'all.” Consider this posting from an anonymous Savannah resident:

Old Savannah’s landed gentry, blue-bloods, gentle society, however you wish to call us: none of us will ever invite the Deen clan into our midst. Can you see Paula Deen farting around The Oglethorpe Club? I don’t think so. Paula’s not a member of any church that we know of nor was she ever a member of the Junior League. None of the Deen clan are Savannah society. They are wannabes, climbers but sorry, this ladder does not admit them. If anything, the Deens’ corn-pone antics make for good laughs among the debut and cocktail party set. The way it is and always will be in Savannah: money does not buy your way in to old Savannah’s closed society. Lack of money does not keep you out. What admits you into Savannah society is good breeding and class, the very qualifications lacking among the Deen and Hiers clan.
Ouch. That's gotta hurt.

The Food Network programming department, looking desperately to replace Emeril Live, have given Paula her own live studio audience show, Paula's Party. More recently, the show shed its studio set in favor of remote locations with Paula's Party On the Road. Paula may have at last jumped the shark, however, when, in something of a pilot for this latest (and hopefully last) iteration of this annoyingly southern redneck slob, Paula actually lost her pants and mooned a Miami audience during taping of a cooking demonstration at the South Beach Wine and Food Festival.

As horrified and embarrassed onlookers witnessed the costuming faux pas, Paula was none too discrete when hollering:

"Wait! Mah breeches are fallin' dow-yon. Look at they-yum. Oh mah god. Did y'all see much?"
Why, yes, Paula. Yes, we did. We saw enough. At least Mario Batali had the good graces to keep his fat ass covered up.
The list of these Stand-up Cooking Shows with Un-credentialed or Off-the-Wall Bobblehead Hosts goes on almost without end, prompting this reporter to consider brevity in any further embellishment:
- Barefoot Contessa with Ina Garten - another fat-ass, sixty something, self-taught recipe writer with zero personality and no formal culinary experience, boring us to death with the same goddamn recipes over and over. She has to continually remind us that she lives in East Hampton, which is her way of over-compensating for having a great big fat ass and low self-esteem.
- Ask Aida, with Aida Mollenkamp, who used her B.S. in hospitality management from Cornell University to be a hotel and restaurant consultant for Earnst & Young. This is little more than a re-tread of Cooking Live with a far less qualified host, fielding stupid food questions from the internet by her stuffy gay sidekick friend with his laptop. In a word: awful.
- Guy's Big Bite with Guy Fieri, has little more than a B.S. in hospitality management from University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and changed his last name from "Ferry," so we would all think he has some Italian lineage. He doesn't. Although co-owner of two mid-scale restaurants in California, he has no formal culinary training, and it shows. In the all-time shtick of shticks, Guy's outlandish looks include hair that has been doused in peroxide and styling gel, while always wearing wrist bans for no apparent reason, and sun glasses on the back of his head. The refrigerator on his set has a racing stripe on it, for god's sake. Someone please tell this 41 year old yokel he's no longer in a college fraternity house, and to shave off the ugly, spindly, two-toned goatee before shedding any more beard hair into his latest of 237 pasta recipes.
- Down Home With the Neeleys - An overbearing fat-ass African American wife and her gay husband, neither of whom can cook. They're owners of a Tennessee barbecue joint, awkwardly making sexual innuendos while trying their hands at world class cuisine, acting like none of us have ever heard of lettuce wraps before. This is thirty minutes of sheer terror.
- Party Line with the Hearty Boys - Thankfully discontinued, this was the result of the Food Network's first season run at a ridiculous show that continues to this day, The Next Food Network Star. These guys were the fucking winners. Self-evident of the banality and futility of the Food Network execs preordaining who will or won't be a hit with the viewers, Party Line was so bad it was discontinued after the taping of only six episodes.
  
  And, if I may editorialize a moment, failing to reach Food Network stardom might have had less to do with these two fruit-loops winning a stupid reality TV competition, and more to do with the fact that we don't really want to watch two gay "partners" in real-life, who were New York actors and dancers by profession, give us entertaining tips and ridiculous recipes for stand-up cocktail parties, like three-cheese spaghetti pie. No one eats spaghetti at a goddamn stand-up cocktail party! How difficult is that to understand? Lousy recipes aside, we were all further nauseated whenever these two tasted their own food by looking at each other as if they were going to exchange blow jobs in the dressing room trailer after the show. And, no shit, they actually wrote a cookbook together, Talking With Your Mouth Full. I swear to god.

Traveling Shows about Food, but Not About Cooking: Apparently, the bench strength is a little lacking at the Food Network these days, because almost every one of the aforementioned Uncredentialed or Off the Wall Bobblehead hosts also doubles as a traveling food editor, pretending to know what the hell they're talking about as they sample local restaurant fare. With no culinary skill of their own, it's easy for them to wander into an unsuspecting commercial kitchen, letting others who do know how to cook provide them with ample opportunities to smack their lips, roll their eyes at the camera and make yummy "mmmm" sounds for us to all wonder what it must be like to have such an easy, meaningless, do-nothing, no-contribution, dumb-ass job. These shows include:

Diner's Drive-ins and Dives - As if we all can't get enough of Guy Fieri's hideous mug and on-camera buffoonery from Guy's Big Bite, we have to watch some poor dumb bastard in a run down kitchen of a local greasy spoon teach Guy how they make the house specialty, while Guy stands to the side offering unqualified praises and nods of approval, appearing like he's check-marking the ingredients against some vast culinary knowledge that he actually never achieved outside of a three hour food lab at UNLV.

Next, we have to watch Guy take the obligatory taste test, while the poor dumb bastard looks on, hoping for Guy's sanctimonious approval. Guy, of course, rolls his eyes and makes the yummy "mmmmm" sound, and if really impressed, he'll say something hip and cool with his mouth chock full of food, like, "That's real money there, I'll tell ya that right now."

One can only hope that as the available inventory of diners, drive-ins and dives dwindles to ones that barely come in under the radar of local health officials, Guy contracts ptomaine poisoning for consuming an underdone pork roast, and crawls into a fetal position under his show's borrowed 1967 red Camero convertible, then dies a slow death while wallowing in his own crapulence.

Giada's Weekend Getaways - Basically, this was a re-tread of Bobby Flay's Food Nation, but with a better looking host and a more gentile attitude. Each show begins Friday afternoon as Giada arrives at her destination. She may begin with a light dinner and a cocktail. The bulk of the show happens on Saturday, beginning with a breakfast, some sight-seeing or other activity, lunch, followed by another round of activities, and finishes off with dinner, in which she goes all out, dresses up and has a night on the town. The show wraps up on Sunday with brunch and one last activity. Of course, Giada gives the obligatory closed eye, yummy, orgasmic response after each bite of food she tries at breakfast, lunch and dinner. One never tires of that, right?

But what's really so special about this show? You guessed, it. Giada's tits again. This time, you get to see them jiggle in a variety of different plunging neckline outfits in each thirty minute segment, and if you're lucky, one of Giada's Saturday outings will be to the beach and Giada will be wearing a bikini.

$40 a Day and Rachael's Tasty Travels - We just can't get enough of the Food Network's little darling, can we? It's not enough to see Rachael in her Danskin blouses and fat-ass bluejeans, giggling at her own tired diatribe with arms flailing about in her kitchen every night, making another "yum-o" hamburger recipe in thirty minutes of sheer horror. No, now we have to watch her in restaurants across the country ordering food on a made-up budget, like this is the way she really travels, or as if to say, hey, you poor, cheap motherfuckers out there, let me show you how stiffing a waitress and ordering ice water will help you enjoy the good life. It's a god-awful tired formula: (a) Send host to empty restaurant. (b) Watch them make crappy food for her. (c) Have her take a few lonely, awkward stabs at the plate, then (d) feign enjoyment with appropriately orgasmic eye-closing and moaning, before (e) spitting it out and rushing to the trailer dressing room.

Anyone care to see two minutes and forty-five seconds of Rachael doing (d)?

Strange Shows that Try to Blend Science with Food, Manufacturing with Food or Other Weird Shit with Food: There are some shows on the Food Network that defy any rationale for their existence at all, except to fill another thirty minutes of programming time while allegedly informing us about certain characteristics of pseudo scientific or manufacturing processes that are food related. The three most notable are:

Good Eats with Alton Brown. Okay, this show is not too horrible. Alton is at least intelligent and qualified, having a degree in both drama from the University of Georgia, and in the culinary arts from the New England Culinary Institute. The show is a hokey blend of science and cooking that thoroughly explores a single recipe or ingredient, like coffee or berries or biscuits. Alton is a geek, alright, but a geek who doesn't take himself too seriously. On the air since 1999, Good Eats now rivals Emeril Live as the longest running franchise on the Food Network.

My only complaint with Alton is that his recipes are overly complicated, and his cooking techniques are anally retentive with too many steps created, it seems, just to fill the full twenty-six minute broadcast. In ten years that I've been watching him, I only have been interested in producing just two of his recipes. One, oven-prepared baby back ribs, was a total disaster, leaving me to believe that portions of the recipe were left on the editing room floor. The other, a pan seared Long Island duck recipe, came out perfect and has become a staple in my recipe repertoire. That said, one recipe in ten years, or roundly 260 hours of television viewing time, is a pretty poor return on investment.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Alton also had to do his obligatory travel food show, Feasting on Asphalt, which wasn't all that bad. Unlike the tired formula perpetuated by Rachael and Giada, Alton took a unique approach and literally drove a motorcycle coast-to-coast on back roads and off-beat highways, taking his film crew into unsuspecting non-branded, non-franchised eateries along the way. Unlike the contrived formula for Diners, Drive-ins and Dives, Alton was never too sure what he might find, and the show had a certain real-time, unedited, genuine quality to it. Falling off his motorcycle and breaking his collarbone along the way was just plain good television. Besides all that, Alton deliberately avoids the eye-rolling, lip-smacking, orgasmic "mmmm" response whenever he tastes anything, for which we are all exceedingly grateful.

Unwrapped with Mark Summers - Mark's claim to fame was hosting the TV game show, Double Dare with a studio full of prepubescent children over at Nickelodeon. So he was obviously the perfect choice to host this show, which is a re-tread from the Discovery Channel's How It's Made. Only instead of being about making canoes or grandfather clocks, this show is about manufacturing food and food products, like popcorn or chicken soup. Sometimes it's interesting, but you have to accept the gimmick of Mark Summers acting like a customer in a fictitious diner, complete with actors on the set pretending to be other customers or waiters, talking, eating and serving food. Mark introduces each segment with a poorly written script peppered with stupid puns, followed by a two-second pause for the camera while holding a stupid, fake grin on his face, smiling like a possum eating shit. Thanks, Mark, but at least when Giada gives us one of those, we get to see her jiggle.

Food Detectives - This show is hosted by Ted Allen, the same guy who was the wine and food connoisseur in the show Queer Eye For the Straight Guy on the gay-themed NBC-owned Bravo Channel. Other than being a snooty little cocksucker with a New York attitude, Ted has absolutely no qualifications whatsoever to be involved in the Food Network in any way. He graduated with a BS in psychology from Purdue and a masters in Journalism from New York University. It was while he was working as a struggling reporter in Chicago for Lerner Newspapers, a chain of cheap-ass community weekly newspapers mainly aimed at the student, counter-culture and GLBT market segments, that he took a spot on the editorial staff as a restaurant critic. You know what they say: "Those that can't do, teach. Those that can't teach, become critics." And this is the Curriculum Vitae that made him a perfect choice for the Food Network recruiting department.

This show is just awful, trying desperately to find an audience, any audience, who really cares if garlic makes your sweat smell bad. And to find out, we had to watch grown adults, called "Food Tekkies" consume enough raw garlic to wipe out the entire country of Transylvania. Then we watched in horror as the Tekkies awkwardly participated in calisthenics until they work up a really good sweat. Finally, a professional smeller - yes, a person with an acute sense of smell who manages to earn a living working for perfume companies - takes a big whiff of each Tekkie's oozing bodily fluids to ascertain if the odor of garlic is present or not. Fighting a wave of disgust and uncontrollable nausea, I did not linger on the channel to find out.

Cooking Competitions with Pretentious Objectives & Idiot Judges: It's no longer enough to prepare food for the camera. Now, we have to prepare food for the camera with some arbitrary time limit under made-up stress conditions, and accept humiliating comments from people even less qualified to judge food quality than the contestants themselves are to prepare it. One looks at these kinds of programs and isn't sure if they're watching the Food Network or the Game Show Network. Or is there any real difference anymore? Some of the former bona fide chefs and restaurateurs that started the Food Network have been sadly relegated to this segment, which includes such shows as:

Iron Chef - This is the master circus of all that's wrong with the Food Network. Ripped off from a competitive-obsessed Japanese television program, Iron Chef America was licensed to the Food Network with a specific format that was not allowed to be altered. This includes the opening sequence where some stupid Asian guy called the "Chairman" holds a yellow bell pepper, and screams the secret ingredient at bewildered contestants while the music crescendos and the lighting becomes more intense, like we're all supposed to be shocked, surprised or impressed that tonight's secret ingredient is watermelon, or squid, or kumquats.

It is here that wanna-be Iron Chef contestants challenge the likes of Bobby Flay, Mario Batali, and some chick we've never heard of, named Cat Cora, to defend their worthless title. We're supposed to think that the Iron Chef title is something to be truly coveted, and being un-seated would be a humiliating public event, worthy of being exiled to some distant land or of committing hari kari on the air outright. It's the kind of thing that competitive-obsessed Japanese audiences love, and Americans quite frankly couldn't give a shit about.

Pretending that all existing Iron Chefs are prepared for the contest at the beginning of each show, they have obviously all been told to stand up straight for the camera, looking stern and stoic, exhibiting no emotion, ready to do battle to the bitter end. It's laughable, really, particularly when the challenger feigns making a last minute selection on the air, and declares the Iron Chef with whom he or she will do battle. And no matter which Iron Chef the challenger selects, the Chairman always says the same thing, "wise choice." Alton Brown uses his game show talent to narrate the entire competition, ostensibly adding drama to the spectacle.

This is a truly sad program that combines real culinary cooking skills against the clock in a made-up competition that affords the winner nothing more than bragging rights. If you beat the Iron Chef, it is in the collective opinion of a totally unqualified panel of idiot judges.

Indeed, this is Mario Batali's swan song, his last and dying set of appearances on the Food Network, working out his contract and trying hard to not look humiliated while having to prove the value of his culinary creations to judges like Mo Rocca and Ted Allen. God help us. Will this series ever end?

Chopped - Ted Allen comes out again (no pun intended) as the moderator for another cooking competition in which three contestants have to make a multi-course dinner using ingredients delivered to them in a picnic basket. The catch is that one ingredient is something particularly off the wall, like a bottle of cola, or a bag of Easter Peeps.

The contestants are given mere minutes to prepare and plate up their dish, while yet another panel of unqualified judges makes snide remarks on the sideline. The judging panel's personnel seems to change, but generally consists of (1) a young hipster who apparently has some level of culinary experience, however dubious; (2) a middle-aged recipe writing cunt with a nasty, condescending attitude; and (3) either a male or female judge with a benign temperament, who seems to hold the panel together and counter-balances the criticisms of the other two chowder-heads with friendly and non-judgmental remarks. After the contestants present their dishes to this distinguished panel, the judges decide which contestant will not return for the second and third rounds.

At least this show gives the winner a check for $10,000, and keeps Ted from really saying much of anything beyond the scripted role of moderator.

Throwdown with Bobby Flay - This show always follows the same manufactured sequence of events:
- First, various poor dumb bastards we've never heard of get continually duped into believing that they are making a Food Network TV pilot because of their alleged acumen in preparing some specialty, like lasagna, or chili, or clam chowder. That alone should make you suspect of their general intelligence level.
- Next, Bobby goes through a ridiculously contrived opening sequence, reminiscent of Mission Impossible, where he is given a Secret Dossier in a clandestine way by a furtive character. The Secret Dossier contains invaluable information about the poor dumb bastard's specialty, which becomes the target of tonight's throwdown.
- Then, we switch off to the Food Network test kitchens, where Bobby and two chicks, allegedly his assistant and/or sous chefs, work on establishing a recipe to compete with the original specialty that Bobby will have to use in a made-up contest over which the poor dumb bastard is allegedly unaware.
- The unsuspecting poor dumb bastard is always inexplicably surrounded by a lot of people while the Food Network TV cameras are ostensibly taping the pilot.
- Bobby lurks in the back of the crowd and comes forward at the proper moment to challenge the unsuspecting poor dumb bastard to a throwdown. Incredibly, no one ever seems to be pissed off that the Food Network had no intention of ever really taping a pilot, and the poor dumb bastard now will never have a shot at being a Food Network TV star.
- The contest builds and invariably there is some near cataclysmic event that almost destroys Bobby's plan. Luckily, he always comes through these moments of contrived tension and suspense.
- Everybody gets to eat some of both recipes, one from Bobby, and the other from the unsuspecting poor dumb bastard, who now will never have a shot at being a Food Network TV star. Balanced interviews are given from people in the crowd. Some like Bobby's recipe. Some like the poor dumb bastard's, who now will never have a shot at being a Food Network TV star.
- Two local "experts" arrive on the scene to judge both recipes in a blind tasting.
- Bobby's recipe loses, each and every time, because the judges always like the recipe of the poor dumb bastard, who now really, really will never have a shot at being a Food Network TV star.
It just seems to me that the Food Network is trying to humiliate Bobby into leaving the network altogether.

The Food Network, when launched sixteen years ago was innovative, creative and a welcomed respite from other specialty programming in a crowded cable television line-up looking for niche audiences. For those of us who enjoy cooking as a hobby, it was a repository of inspiration and imagination. It taught me how to dice an onion so I wouldn't cry; how to butcher a duck, and pan sear it to mahogany goodness; how to combine offbeat ingredients like pancake batter and wild mushrooms into delicious savory appetizers. It taught me what truffle oil was and where to get it. It inspired me to create recipes using polenta and couscous. It guided me when I needed to know how to cook Chilean sea bass, or create a salmon recipe using phyllo dough. The Two Fat Ladies taught me what "Bubble and Squeak" was. Emeril taught me how to make a roux. George Stella taught me how to cook low carb. I miss them all, now. I miss them all terribly much.

And I wish Rachael Ray would go away.

Folks Folly VII

2009-05-31T13:06:00.019-05:00

Folks' Folly is a regular rant feature of The Rants of Anaximenes with commentary on and over the galactic stupidity of most people on this planet.

Time for another installment of Folks' Folly to comment on the continued exhibition of the lame-brained, obtuse, dim-witted, simple-minded, thick-headed morons, idiots and imbeciles who never leave me with a shortage of material to write about. Homer Simpson continues to have Einstein-esque intelligence compared to some of the dunderheads on this planet, and will forever remain my avatar for each edition of Folks' Folly.

Now that we're ending another school year, let's take a look at just how well a policy of lowering standards has contributed to the overall improvement of education in our nation's second most populated state and ninth most populated city, where the high school drop out rate exceeds one in four:

New Grading Policies Roil Dallas Parents, Teachers
Scores, Deadlines Are Eased in Plan To Limit Dropouts

By Jeffrey Ball
Wall Street Journal
August 20, 2008

DALLAS -- As students prepare to return to school here Monday, teachers and parents criticized the relaxation of the district's grading policies in a state that helped trigger national testing requirements.

The Dallas Independent School District's new policies give students who do poorly more chances to improve their grades. Among the changes: High-school students who fail major tests can retake them within five school days, and only the higher scores count.

School officials say the changes are designed to reduce one of the highest dropout rates in the state. According to the Texas Education Agency, 25.8% of students in the Dallas district who enrolled as ninth-graders in 2003 dropped out before their class's scheduled 2007 graduation.

But the policies have sparked criticism since the Dallas Morning News reported them last week, with angry parents and teachers contending that the district is watering down educational standards for its more than 160,000 students.

"These kids have already gone too far in not being held accountable," says Tracy Dotie-Hill, who has one daughter in Dallas's W.E. Greiner Middle School and another who just graduated from the district's Skyline High School. "When you go into the work force, if you don't meet the standards or deadlines, you have to reap the consequences."

Teachers say the policy undermines their authority. "It's micromanaging and not trusting the fact that we are professionals," says Diane Birdwell, who teaches 10th-grade world history in a Dallas high school and is executive vice president of the Dallas chapter of the National Education Association, a teachers' union.

Dallas school administrators say they aren't lowering standards -- they are giving students additional chances to meet existing requirements.

"Chief among the reasons children drop out of school is because they are failing their course work," says Denise Collier, the Dallas district's chief academic officer. "We don't want to give them a pass, but at the same time we don't want to pass them over."

The Dallas policies appear to fly in the face of a national trend toward tougher grading standards, according to Dan Goldhaber, a research professor at the University of Washington's Center on Reinventing Public Education.

More than a decade ago, loose standards by local districts led several states -- including Texas -- to exercise tougher control over their public schools. Later, the federal government raised its oversight, implementing the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act. That law has itself come under some criticism for emphasizing standardized-test scores.

"This is the reason we've gotten to this place," Mr. Goldhaber says, referring to the new Dallas grading policies. "It really does look like the lowering of standards."

The new Dallas policies stipulate that students must be given at least one chance to make up work they don't turn in on time, with any penalty to be determined by the school, and that high-school students enrolled in regular courses can be assigned no more than ten hours of homework a week.

In addition, no student can receive a final score lower than 50 out of 100 on a report card -- a policy the district says has existed in the past.

Among large school districts in Texas, Dallas's dropout rate is second only to San Antonio's, and it is higher than the 22.1% rate in Houston, the state's largest school district. Almost two-thirds of the students in Dallas's 225 schools are Hispanic, while 29% are African American and 5% are non-Hispanic white.

Some Dallas parents say the changes are necessary. "We're going to have to come up with some concepts [to keep] a child in school," says Ola Allen, president of the parent-teacher association at Skyline High School.

But the move could hurt students overall, says David Figlio, a professor of education and economics at Northwestern University. "It wouldn't surprise me at all if it helps on the margin with the dropout problem but ends up reducing the incentive for students to do well," he says. "This is a case in which there's no free lunch."

Well, let's see if the Dallas ISD's decision helped at all:

Dallas' average 2009 SAT score was 850, the lowest in the entire state
Dallas' average 2009 SAT score was 141 points below the state's average SAT score of 991
Dallas' average 2009 SAT score was less than 85% of the national average SAT score of 1012
Dallas' high school drop out rate is seventh worst in the nation.

Uh, nope. Looks like lowering academic standards and not holding students accountable didn't help things much. Wow, that's quite a surprise, huh? And this from a city whose County Commissioners demanded an apology over use of the term "black hole," believing somehow that this was a racially insensitive remark.

Dallas County Officials Spar Over 'Black Hole' Comment
by Kevin Krause
July 7, 2008
The Dallas Morning News

A special meeting about Dallas County traffic tickets turned tense and bizarre this afternoon.

County commissioners were discussing problems with the central collections office that is used to process traffic ticket payments and handle other paperwork normally done by the JP Courts.

Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, who is white, said it seemed that central collections "has become a black hole" because paperwork reportedly has become lost in the office.

Commissioner John Wiley Price, who is black, interrupted him with a loud "Excuse me!" He then corrected his colleague, saying the office has become a "white hole."

That prompted Judge Thomas Jones, who is black, to demand an apology from Mayfield for his racially insensitive analogy.

Mayfield shot back that it was a figure of speech and a science term. A black hole, according to Webster's, is perhaps "the invisible remains of a collapsed star, with an intense gravitational field from which neither light nor matter can escape."

Other county officials quickly interceded to break it up and get the meeting back on track. TV news cameras were rolling, after all.

I suppose the sensibilities of Dallas County Commissioners Thomas Jones and John Wiley Price would be further riled at the equally racially provocative terms of "black mark," "black sheep," "dark matter," and "pot calling the kettle 'black.'"

Or how about "stupid fucking Black morons?" I'm appalled and aghast at idiotic behavior like this and I don't care from what race the idiot comes. This is racial sensitivity, stupidity and political correctness writ lunacy! Under their standard, we should eliminate the word "black" from the English language if it connotes something malevolent because that somehow reflects on the attributes of a race that is also characterized as "Black." Hmmm. Sounds an awful lot like the heretical thinking of the Roman Catholic church during the Dark Ages.

Oops. I said "dark."

Besides, I thought it wasn't cool to call Black people "Black" anymore. I thought we were all supposed to use the more politically correct if not geographically chauvinistic "African American" term? He didn't say anything about an "African American hole." And even if he did, that would be more pornographic than racist.

Are you sort of getting the idea that the denizens of Dallas have elected completely inept individuals to their governing positions, devoid of logical, rational reasoning? Could it be that the voters in Dallas are as stupid as their high school children?

Well, maybe/maybe not. The residents of the city of Dallas are but 1.6 million of the 6.5 million that live in the Dallas-Ft. Worth "Metroplex." The smarter ones, it seems, have actually moved away from Dallas proper into surrounding communities like Plano and Lewisville. Both of these school districts, by the way, had 2009 SAT averages well above the national score by margins of 13.5% and 7.4% respectively. Yes, it seems the smarter folks have all moved away from Dallas.

Speaking of moving, how about moving your ass a little sometime before you looked down at the scales and saw you weighed something over 1,000 pounds? I have some empathy for people who struggle, as I do, with those 25-50 pounds they keep losing and gaining and losing and gaining. But even I have an upper limit beyond which I won't go. It seems to me that there would be more than a few milestones along the way to weighing a half-ton that might suggest you need to lay off the cheeseburgers and hit the treadmill every now and then.

Moreover, why are these people, pathetic and pitiful as they are, exploited by a television network as some kind of electronic age freak carnival sideshow? Why is The Learning Channel airing all of these shows about abnormally, morbidly, and dare I say disgustingly fat people?

Half-Ton Mom, Renee Williams, weighing in at 900 pounds, convinced doctors to perform a gastric bypass on her, even though she was the largest person at the time to have had that procedure. Typically, surgeons require a patient to lose weight first to make the operation and recovery odds better. Ms. Williams felt her situation was too dire to wait, so she proceeded with the operation. She had a heart attack and died 12 days later. Now, that's what I call TV drama and a dual whammy. She was both fat and stupid.

The Half-Ton Teen, Billy Robbins, lives with his mother who is definitely the enabler, if not the promoter of his weight, exceeding 1,000 pounds. Billy’s mom shoveled food into him to the tune of 8,000 calories a day. He chose to be home-schooled because the kids were making fun of his weight. An update on Billy is that he has slimmed down to around 550 pounds and has decided to move away from his mother, whenever he can actually get through the front door.

The Half Ton Man, formerly 1,072-pound Patrick Deuel, has slimmed down to a svelte 542 pounds three years after he underwent bariatric surgery, losing the equivalent of two NFL defensive linemen. His ultimate goal is to weigh 240 pounds or less. On the one hand, Deuel’s story is inspiring. But on the other hand, he smokes a pack of cigarettes a day, and part of his motivation to lose weight is to gain the mobility to drive to a McDonald’s to get an Egg McMuffin.

I'm sorry, but this is some stupid shit. These people have destroyed their lives as living incarnations of gluttony run amok, and some goddamn television network, allegedly dedicated to "learning," has turned their pathetic lives into entertainment venues, while the rest of us look on in disgust.

Or not. I pretty much change the channel when one of these programs airs. That goes for all the fucking midget shows I've been seeing lately, as well as these other gems from TLC:

99 Most Bizarre Medical Mistakes 99 Most Bizarre Self-Inflicted Injuries 101 More Things Removed from the Human Body The 160 Pound Tumor 627-Pound Woman: Jackie's Story Addicted To Food The Baby Who Changed Colors Born A Boy, Brought Up A Girl Born With Two Heads Born Without a Face Boy Whose Skin Fell Off Boy With A New Head Can't Stop Growing Dead Tenants The Dwarf Family The Girl Who Never Grew Half Man, Half Tree I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant I Eat 33,000 Calories a Day I Woke Up In The Morgue I'd Kill For a Baby Inside the Brookhaven Obesity Clinic It's Not Easy Being Wolf-boy Joined For Life Kids By the Dozen Living With Half A Body Man Whose Arms Exploded Mermaid Girl My Big Foot Paralyzed and Pregnant Pregnant For 46 Years Real Wolf Kids Sex-Change Capital of the World Shrinking The World's Heaviest Man The Sickest Patient In The Hospital When Surgical Tools Get Left Behind Wild Child: The Story of Feral Children Woman With Giant Legs The Woman With Half a Body The Woman With The Giant Lump World's Fattest Kids World's Heaviest Man Gets Married World's Tallest Woman

The Learning Channel needs to step down off of their lofty pedestal, change their name, and take a big whiff of truthfulness. The Exploitative Channel or The Freak People Channel would both probably work nicely.

Speaking of freaks, one of the more inane actors-turned-annoying-environmental-activists is Ed Begley. So what does our television entertainment industry do with someone like that? They make a fucking weekly television show out of him, of course.

Discovery Channel likes to stratify its content to appeal to various market segments. In addition to the parent network, other Discovery networks include The (aforementioned) Learning Channel, Animal Planet, Science Channel, Military Channel, Discovery Health, and now, it's latest incarnation to cash in on the Al Gore global warming hysteria, Planet Green. This network includes such riveting shows as:

Emeril Green, in which the defunct Food Network chef "bams" and "gah-licks" his way through Whole Foods Markets doing his cooking schtick with unsuspecting shoppers;
Focus Earth where liberal author and Washington Post icon Bob Woodward gives further credence to the environmental movement with bullshit studio-based round table discussions about global warming, environmental regulations and a perspective on why we're all assholes for creating a hotter planet and how we need more governmental interference in our lives;
Greenovate, which shows viewers how they can purchase and install "energy efficient" green technologies around their home, further driving up the stock prices of Al Gore's companies that invest in crap like this;
G-Word, a pseudo-news show with a variety of stories on creating the illusion of a "green lifestyle," brought to you by a former improvisational comedic actress, with such stories like why you should eat insects for their high protein value and "low environmental impact;"
Go For the Green, in which former MTV shock comedian Tom Green manically challenges members of his studio audience to prove how "green" they are. By the end of the show, two finalists will face off to win the grand prize — a "fantastic green weekend getaway.”

I guess that means they get to camp out in a compost heap in Ed Begley's back yard, because this exciting TV line-up on Green Planet also includes his new show, Living With Ed.

Ed's big claim to fame was playing a regular cast role in the early 1980s television show, St. Elsewhere, and aside from occasionally guest starring in such shows as Scrubs, Boston Legal, and Star Trek: Voyager, Ed hasn't distinguished himself very much or very recently as an actor. That's because Ed can't act. He can only act like Ed. And, well, Ed just isn't all that damned interesting.

Clearly suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder, Begley has lived off of his marginal success as an actor to pursue a life of environmental activism. He is actually in a contest with another environmental activist, Bill Nye, to see who can leave the lowest carbon footprint. Ed could actually win that contest if he would only go blow his brains out sometime real soon.

Ed is a so-called vegan, lives in a 1,585 square-foot home, utilizes solar power and wind power, and has a picket fence made from plastic milk jugs. He has a solar powered oven (that doesn't work when cloudy) and has an electricity-generating bicycle used to toast bread. Only in California would this merit a TV show. Anywhere else, Ed would be dismissed as a fucking nut, or as the neighborhood eccentric at the very least.

Speaking of eccentric TV personalities, annoying TV huckster Vince Offer, whom Anaximenes wrote about in Folks' Folly VI, is back in the limelight for getting arrested on a battery charge for beating up a hooker in his Miami Beach hotel room.

ShamWow Guy Arrested After Hooker Fight
By Newser
March 28, 2009

MIAMI – He may seem like a nice man with a magical towel, but Vince Offer, whose real name is Vince Shlomi, better known as the ShamWow guy, was arrested for punching a prostitute. Shlomi, 44, told police he took 26-year-old Sasha Harris back to his hotel room and paid her $1,000 for sex, according to the arrest affidavit. Then things went sour.

Shlomi says that when he went in for the kiss, Harris bit his tongue and wouldn’t let go. Shlomi, naturally, punched her repeatedly until she surrendered his tongue. The bleeding Shlomi then ran to the lobby, and security called the police. When they arrived, Harris refused to go quietly. Both sported bruises and lacerations and stunk of alcohol. Both were arrested for aggravated battery, but prosecutors have declined to file formal charges against either.

Do you think Vince used his super absorbent ShamWow towel to clean his wounds and wipe off all his dried blood? As far as we know, ShamWow isn't dropping Vince as their spokesperson, which leads us to believe that they may use this incident to promote their super absorbent towel.

That commercial might go something like this [for full effect, read this aloud with Vince's annoying New Jersey accent]:

Hey, dis is Vince Offah heah wid anoder offah for da ShamWow, so absahbent, you'll be sayin Wow!

Look-a-dis...da ShamWom sucks up dried, caked-on blood like a Miami hookah can suck the chrome offah trailah hitch. Speaking of sucking, dats wad I tawt I was gonna git from dat chick dat I had to slap around, ya know? Jeeze, wad a bitch she was to do da Hannibal Lecter numbah on my tongue.

Bud, da ShamWow came to my rescue. Saliva, blood, sweat...no mattah wad bodily fluid you can prahduce, da ShamWow will handle it all!

Look-a-dis. We gonna do dis in real time. Watch as I slit my wrist right heah on de ayah. Ah you followin me camera guy?

See da blood spurtin from mah ahtery? Budda ShamWow will start moppin dis up like dat Miami hookah can suck a golf ball true a gahden hose.

Woah! I'm stahtin to feel a little dizzy heah. Are you followin me camera guy? If so, will you stop followin me camera guy and go get de doctor guy? I tink I'm gonna pass out, now.

So, if you call right now, cause we can't do dis all day, and can't stand heah and bleed all day, we'll give you two moah ShamWows sos we can move somma dis crappy product oudda da warehouse.

You need one fada boat, da cah, da campah, and to clean up crime scenes in cheap Miami Beach hotel rooms.

So - call now - foda ShamWow - heah's how [faints and falls off camera].

Hopefully, that would be last commercial in which we would have to put up with Vince Fucking Shlomi.

And Billy Mays is next!

A Shameful Lack of Shame

2009-05-04T01:53:00.013-05:00

This is a society that has forgotten how to be ashamed.

Behavior is getting more bizarre, outlandish and outrageous, yet no one is really surprised anymore. Nothing much shocks us. Like bees pollinating fields of flowers, we buzz from one news story to the next, reading about behavior in which no one would have engaged thirty years ago, remaining oblivious, unconcerned, unmoved and unashamed.

In April two years ago on a Monday morning, an individual previously adjudicated as mentally unsound, walked into the Engineering Science and Mechanics building at Virginia Tech and perpetrated the deadliest peacetime shooting incident by a single gunman in US history, killing 32 people and wounding 25 others before committing suicide. That same week on Friday, the nation's interest had focused its attention on Alec Baldwin yelling at his daughter in a voice mail. Our lack of shame knows no bounds. We just buzz on to the next news story.

Consider six members of the US House of Representatives (who also have to further segment their demographics into something known as the National Black Caucus) flying to Cuba last month, not to interrogate prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, but to meet with Raul and Fidel Castro in Cuba, compliments of the American taxpayers. Our slobbering press reported this as a great historic event in Obama's new environment of change.

The same liberals who feigned outrage at the military tactic of water boarding were "endeared" to the a dictator and his brother who have imprisoned a nation, killed thousands of men, women and children, and brutalized many others with tactics far worse than water boarding. The shame we might otherwise feel in this behavior should only be eclipsed by our anger over amateur statesman-wannabes cozying up to one of the worst remaining communist dictators in world history. What a bunch of fucking idiots. What a shameful bunch of fucking idiots who, unfortunately, are all members of the Congress elected there by a shamefully ignorant and race-obsessed constituency. They have no shame, but I am ashamed of them.

The mainstream media continues to portray Castro's monstrous regime as a bastion of hope and freedom, supported by its citizens. Before Castro's intestinal surgery and turning over the reigns of power to his brother Raul last year, the New York Times reported that Cubans were keeping up "a brave face." The Associated Press, in reporting on Castro's weakened condition, asked Cuban restaurant waiters their opinions. "He'll get better, without a doubt," Agustin Lopez told the AP. "There are really good doctors here, and he's extremely strong." AP took Lopez's comments at face value, completely ignoring the fact that Lopez is a citizen of a country that would quickly lock him up if he expressed any joy at Castro's fall.

It is a blot on America's moral record that Fidel Castro will probably die a natural death. We are at least partially to answer for a failure to free Cuba. Half-hearted attempts to depose Castro only strengthened his grip on power. The leftist desire to treat Castro as a friend only magnified Castro's presumed legitimacy. Our lack of shame in this is truly astounding, as is the Hollywood view of him, portrayed as a sort of old-school hero, standing against Western aggression.

Consider Oliver Stone's sycophantic documentary Looking For Fidel:

"Castro is isolated in the hemisphere, and for those reasons I admire him because he's a fighter. He stood alone, and in a sense he's Don Quixote, the last revolutionary, tilting at this windmill of keeping the island in a state of, I suppose, egalitarianism, where everyone would get the break, everyone gets the education, and everyone gets good water."

Stone's comments are as shameful as they are ridiculous. Government rationing of protein, beans and grain per household in Cuba today is less than is was for slaves on that island in 1842. The average Cuban worker earns $17 a month. Twenty-percent of the cash that is sent to Cuban nationals by relatives who live in this country is taken by the Cuban government in exchange fees. And now, Obama's administration has eased restrictions that had limited money transfers by Cuban-Americans to their relatives on that imprisoned island, which will only further prop up a regime that suppresses human rights and treats its citizens like slaves.

How shameful is it that the Hollywood leftists continually harped on George Bush's supposedly illegitimate assumption of the Presidency, despite Constitutional oversight by the Supreme Court, while continuing to cozy up to a communist dictator who assumed power with a bloodbath wrought in military brute force; in essence, a criminal who came to be the boss because he killed all his adversaries.

In a society with shame, a world leader guilty of mass murder and torture, a man who managed to outdo the Nazi pre-war murder and incarceration rate during his first 100 days in power, would not be feted. Fidel Castro is proof that we have no shame. Despite the fact that Castro is responsible for one of the bloodiest and most repressive regimes on the planet, he is hailed as a kind and sensitive man.

Hollywood, the mainstream media and America's leftists love him. Many even grovel at his feet, chanting hymns of praise for this hemisphere's most blood soaked mass murderer. To them Fidel Castro is a liberator, a champion of liberal values who has made Cuba a paradise.

Just listen to them unashamedly gush:

"Castro is the most honest and courageous politician I've ever met." - Jesse Jackson

"Meeting Fidel Castro were the eight most important hours of my life." - Steven Spielberg.

"Very selfless and moral. One of the world's wisest men." - Oliver Stone

"Cuba's Elvis." - Dan Rather

"A dream come true." - Naomi Campbell

"Socialism works. I think Cuba can prove that." - Chevy Chase

"It was an experience of a lifetime to sit only a few feet away from him and watch him relive an experience he lived as a very young man." - Kevin Costner

"He is a genius." - Jack Nicholson

"Castro is an extraordinary man. He is warm and understanding and seems extremely humane." - Gina Lollobrigida

The only thing more shameful than these misguided, surrealistic views of a ruthless, brutal tyrant is in not having the very man they laud throw every last one of them into one of his labor camps with their genitalia hooked up to Firestone automobile batteries.

Forbes magazine estimated Castro's fortune at 900 million dollars. The Cuban dictator runs Cuba as if it was his own farm and the 11 million Cubans as his slaves. And now, we not only have Tinseltown idiots and a leftist press singing praises for this barbaric mass murderer, we also have officials of the US government and members of the Obama administration wanting to normalize relations with him.

"He looked directly into my eyes," said Rep. Laura Richardson (D-Calif.), during her Cuban excursion last month,"and then he asked: 'How can we help President Obama?' [Fidel Castro] really wants President Obama to succeed."

How naïve and stupid can you be? All you succeeded in doing was further legitimizing Castro's power and continued demoralizing Cuba's imprisoned citizens.

Until or unless we work to remove the Castro brothers from power militarily, either covertly or overtly, there will be no normalized relations with that dictatorial government. Relaxing the trade embargo and allowing tourism from the US to return to Cuba would only serve to increase Castro's income and power. The biggest mistake Kennedy made during the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis was agreeing never to invade Cuba in exchange for having the Russian missile removed. And that, too, was a shame.

Our lack of shame manifests itself not only in the administration's pursuit of foreign policy by a bunch of amateurs who have no fucking clue what they're doing, but also is prominently exhibited throughout our culture. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the things we are ashamed of are merely those things the liberals want us to feel guilty about in support of their own political agendas.

What led people in the 1950s and early 60s to hang their heads - divorce, blatant homosexuality, children born out of wedlock, failure to pay off debts - has given way to shame of a different nature: wearing furs, smoking in public, eating red meat and failing to recycle plastic water bottles. Anyone speaking out against the current administration, or organizing to protest against bigger government and higher taxes are branded as racist. Anyone who disagrees with being forced to recognize homosexuals as an oppressed demographic group are branded as homophobes. Anyone challenging the veracity of the global warming theory and believes the "green movement" is a load of bullshit are branded as right wing extremists. People who wish to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights under the Constitution are called Gun Nuts.

All of these tactics and labels are designed to redirect shame to support a leftist political agenda, which in itself is shameful and deeply disturbing. Those with children born out of wedlock receive government subsidies. Those who can't pay their debts hide behind unprecedented personal declarations of court protected bankruptcy. Homosexuals run militant political campaigns, ensuring the election of candidates that actually have to have a specific platform that supports the interests of gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and trans-gendered people. And someone, please tell me when the fuck trans-gendered people became a goddamn demographic group? If some nut wants to cut off his genitals and dress like a girl, why does that somehow entitle him/her to something beyond an already bestowed Constitutional right of "equal protection under the law?" With all the illness and physical maladies in the world, I find it shameful and repugnant that medical science has produced an industry for "sex reassignment."

Shamelessness is also opportunistic.

Consider a March broadcast of the Dr. Phil show in which Matthew and Laura Eaton from San Marcos California, admitted they shoplift for a living, earning $120,000 a year, and use their children to help them. Dr. Phil's spin: "As the nation suffers through an economic meltdown, many Americans resort to drastic measures to keep their families afloat."

My spin on this story: Who has less shame, the parents who admit conducting a criminal enterprise on the air, while teaching their children to also engage in larceny, or Dr. Phil for exploiting such a story for the sake of his show's ratings?

Get a big dose of contemporary culture without shame:

On the Denise Richard's reality show It's Complicated, a woman boasts about seducing her sister’s husband.
On the reality show, Survivor, a man confided his plan to humiliate an unsuspecting teammate and "knife him in the back."
Rapper Pharoahe Monch in his Internal Affairs album presents an opus called "woman screams" about raping, sodomizing, then killing a woman and disposing of her body parts, then spares her life and carves up her face instead. Then he gets pissed off that she testifies against him in court.
JFK: Reloaded is an "edutainment" first-person shooter video game that recreates the John F. Kennedy assassination. It puts the player in the role of Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. The player is then scored on how closely one's version of the assassination matches the report of the Warren Commission.

We need only conjure images of Madonna, Howard Stern and Paris Hilton to realize that a lack of shame is a cultural phenomenon born of ego-driven self-promoting sociopaths. These and others who repeatedly act shamelessly in public become the people our society reveres and emulates. The more bizarre the behavior and shameless the actions, the more mainstream this behaviors becomes.

Shamelessness breads hypocrisy and the left is rife with it:

Janeane Garafalo said in 2006 “How is it that this debate has been twisted on its head, that somehow those that advocate peace and diplomacy are anti-American?" But last month in an MSNBC interview she argued that Americans who attended a Tea Party rally on April 15th protesting big government and higher taxes were "a bunch of tea-bagging rednecks," adding "this is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up." What a shameful thing to say. What a shameless fucking cunt.
Tim Geithner, Tom Daschle, Bill Richardson, Ron Kirk, Hilda Solis, Nancy Kelleher, and Kathleen Sebelius have all been Cabinet nominees who have supported Obama's plans to raise taxes while failing to pay their own. At least a few of them had enough shame to withdraw their nominations. Geither, of course, did not. How shameful is it to have as tax dodger as the Secretary of the US Treasury?
Michael Moore made a ton of money demonizing America’s privatized medical system, ridiculously and shamelessly claiming that Cuba’s socialized medicine was better; yet when his fat ass needed heart surgery, he elected to go to Cleveland rather than Havana. Too bad he lived.
Obama steadfastly refuses to entertain tax vouchers supporting the archaic status quo public school system and the powerful liberal NEA teacher's union that controls it, yet sends his kids to private school to the tune of $29,000 per year for each of them.

One cannot carry shame and be a hypocrite. Unfortunately, we have a lot more hypocrisy than we do shame. Shamelessness is everywhere:

Rep. William Jefferson, the Louisiana Democrat who's facing an ongoing federal corruption probe, sits on the Homeland Security Committee;
Pummeled by shareholders at a recent GM stockholder's meeting, CEO Jeffrey Immelt could not defend the liberal bias of MSNBC, which shamelessly serves as a propaganda machine for the Obama administration, and cut off the microphones of those who challenged him;
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi spends a half-million dollars of the taxpayer's money every time she jets to and from San Francisco, while Governor Sarah Palin was mercilessly criticized for the cost of her campaign wardrobe;
Al Gore travels about the world in his private Gulfstream jet, lecturing us on gas consumption of our SUVs, while his Tennessee home consumes twenty times the national average in energy

And so it goes. No shame. But plenty to be ashamed about.

"The only shame is to have none,” wrote the philosopher Blaise Pascal centuries ago. We ought to keep his words in mind.

April Fool 2009 - Blarney Barney

2009-04-01T00:01:00.021-05:00

For those of you who may not know, "blarney" is a real word. When used as a noun, it means deceptive or misleading talk, nonsense or hooey; as in: "He gave me a lot of blarney about why he was late." In other words, blarney means bullshit.

When used as a verb, it means to flatter or wheedle; as in: "He blarneys his boss with shameless compliments." In other words, more bullshit.

As far as I know, I am first to use blarney as an adjective. While the word still mostly means bullshit, I would like to impose a micro definition specifically for the purpose of this blog posting, which would be "slobbering, annoying, liberal, Massachusetts cocksucker." Hence, Blarney Barney.

I know. I know, that's hardly politically correct and certainly offensive. While colloquially expressed, however, it is essentially correct. I mean, have you ever seen this idiot speak? Barney Frank sounds like Daffy Duck, spewing his hair-lipped saliva all over the microphones behind which he frequently sits. He is clearly annoying and unabashedly liberal. He represents the 4th Congressional District of Massachusetts and in 1989, he was rebuked by his colleagues for having sex with an 18 year-old male prostitute. He is openly gay and presently lives with his 39 year-old boyfriend in Newton, MA. So, my definition of blarney in this case, as a slobbering, annoying, liberal, Massachusetts cocksucker, as offensive as it may be, is accurate, exact and truthful. And Anaximenes is never one to worry about offending. Besides, it's my blog; my definition. I wouldn't be doing my job if I weren't offending someone somewhere.

I actually was going to name the entire population of the state of Massachusetts this year as my annual April Fools. After all, this miserable bastion of extreme northeastern hubris has been exporting their moronic stupidity to the rest of the nation for decades. Massachusetts in its present iteration bears little likeness to the original colony and first commonwealth that brought forth such political notables in American history as John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Daniel Webster and Henry Cabot Lodge.

Line that column up with more recent exports like Michael Dukakis, John Kerry, Teddy Kennedy and, of course, Barney Frank and you should see my point. What the hell happened to this once great state that helped forge a nation after declaring us free and independent? John Hancock, also a notable historical figure hailing from Massachusetts, is arguably the only name on the Declaration of Independence that any above-average American would remember. I say "above-average" because your average American doesn't even know what the Declaration of Independence is or who wrote it, let alone who signed it or what it meant for the birth of our nation. To them, Independence Day is just the name of a Will Smith movie or an excuse to swill beer, eat hot dogs and shoot fireworks.

No, Massachusetts has declined sharply from its rich history of great leaders and great thinkers, and its population has rolled over to rich white guys who honestly wouldn't be able to get a job if it weren't for our fucking political system. And thanks to the fact that we can't get term limits imposed on career politicians, stupid voters like those in Massachusetts keep sending idiots like Barney Frank back to the Capitol election after election.

Without question, Massachusetts is the most liberal state in the U.S. It is the only state that has same-sex marriage. The city of Northampton's claim to fame is that it is known as the "lesbian capital of the world." It is the only state where it is a crime, with a mandatory prison sentence of at least one year, to transport a lawfully owned gun for a lawful purpose in an automobile without a special permit. Out-of-state drivers traveling to hunting or gun competitions in the Northeast have to choose between going hours out of their way to avoid Massachusetts, or spending hours attempting to obtain a permit. Incidentally, the city of Boston has twice the national average for violent crimes and auto theft, so that would answer the question, "How are those gun laws working out for ya?"

Fortunately, the state is getting what it deserves. Massachusetts is the only state estimated to have lost population since 2003, and its decline continued to the point of causing a collapse in its housing market even before the current financial crisis that earned the state the nickname "Crashachusetts." Unfortunately, however, Massachusetts politicians like Barney Frank are not getting what they deserve and the rest of us are getting fucked as a result.

"The private sector got us into this mess. The government has to get us out of it."

Spoken like a true northeastern liberal malcontent! Big business is bad and only the government can save us! But that's Barney's position, alright. He's not going to let anything like facts get in the way of his argument. As Frank has explained it, the current financial crisis is the spawn of the free market run amok, while the political class is guilty only of failing to rein in the capitalists. According to Blarney Barney, the Wall Street meltdown was caused by:

"...bad decisions that were made by people in the private sector. [The country is in dire straits today]...thanks to a conservative philosophy that says the market knows best, [and that philosophy]...goes back to Ronald Reagan, when at his inauguration he said, 'Government is not the answer to our problems; government is the problem.'"

In fact, that is out of context and isn't what Reagan said. His actual words were:

"In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."

Were he president today, Reagan would be saying much the same thing. While the mortgage crisis convulsing Wall Street has its share of private-sector culprits, they weren't the ones who "got us into this mess." Barney Frank's talking points notwithstanding, mortgage lenders didn't wake up one day deciding to jettison long-held standards of creditworthiness in order to make ill-advised loans to unqualified borrowers. It would be closer to the truth to say they woke up to find the government twisting their arms and demanding that they do so, or else.

The roots of this crisis do not go back to Reagan, but in fact to the Carter administration. That was when government officials, egged on by left-wing activists, began accusing mortgage lenders of racism and "redlining" because urban blacks were being denied mortgages at a higher rate than suburban whites.

The pressure was on for financial institutions to make more loans to minorities, and never mind that they might be borrowers with weak credit histories. Liberals, including Barney Frank and his congressional counterparts, became relentless in this pursuit. Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act, empowering regulators to punish banks that failed to "meet the credit needs" of "low-income, minority, and distressed neighborhoods." Lenders responded by loosening their underwriting standards and making increasingly shoddy loans. The two government-chartered mortgage finance firms, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, encouraged this sub-prime lending by authorizing ever more "flexible" criteria by which high-risk borrowers could be qualified for home loans, and then buying up the questionable mortgages that ensued.

All this was justified as a means of increasing home ownership among minorities and the poor. Government affirmative-action policies were the trump card over sound business practices. A manual issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston advised mortgage lenders to disregard financial common sense. "Lack of credit history should not be seen as a negative factor," the Fed's guidelines instructed. Lenders were directed to accept welfare payments and unemployment benefits as "valid income sources" to qualify for a mortgage. Failure to comply meant a lawsuit.

For sixteen years, reformers in Congress tried to improve oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and prevent the government-chartered companies from putting the housing market and the whole economy at risk. All that time, Frank was involved in efforts to block those attempts, and in the last eight years he was a leader of those efforts, especially so since 2007 as Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. Five years ago after accounting irregularities were uncovered at both companies, Frank said:

“I do not think we are facing any kind of a crisis.”

But there was a crisis, thanks in large part to Frank and his liberal cohorts on the leash of these companies. Never mind that Frank received the third highest campaign contribution of anyone in Congress from Fannie Mae. He also made sure there was no additional oversight of either Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, no additional limit on executive behavior and compensation, and no further restraint on the growth of the companies’ mortgage-backed-securities portfolios. And he had the audacity to chastize the CEO of AIG for their bonus payouts saying that AIG was "rewarding incompetence." What a fucking hypocrite.

Time and time again, Frank insisted that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were in good shape. When the Bush White House warned of "systemic risk for our financial system" unless the mortgage giants were curbed, Frank complained that the administration was more concerned about financial safety than about housing.

Yeah, so? You're goddamn right about that, Barney. We should be more concerned about financial safety than about housing for the poor, or else there are going to be a whole lot more poor people down the road, thanks to you.

As long as housing prices kept rising, the illusion that all this was good public policy could be sustained. But it didn't take a financial wizard to recognize that a day of reckoning would come.

Now that the bubble has burst and the "systemic risk" is apparent to all, Frank blithely declares: "The private sector got us into this mess." Well, I'll give the congressman points for unmitigated gall. Wall Street and private lenders have plenty to answer for, but it was Washington, the political elite and Boston liberalism, all led by Blarney Barney Fucking Frank, that derailed this train. Of course, no one, and most especially not the press, holds this cocksucker accountable, and no one has called him on the carpet for lying to the American public when he steadfastly defended Mae and Mac and that they were not in danger of a financial crisis.

If Frank is looking for a culprit to blame for our present crisis, he need only look into a mirror and we need only look at him. We now have another liberal policy and another liberal failure led by another liberal slime ball. And now we must all pay for it while Barney goes on in his role as Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. We should be screaming for this asshole to be relieved of his post at the very least.

April Fool, Blarney Barney. After twenty-five years in Congress, you're living up to your ten percent approval rating. If you had a shred of decency, you would resign as Chairman, return your salary and leave the House with your head down in shame. But of course, you won't. You have no shame. And the people of Mass-a-fucking-chussets? They have no brains. They will, no doubt, return Barney to Congress for a 14th time in 2010.

A Deflated Whoopi Cushion

2009-02-22T07:49:00.052-05:00

I like it when so-called "celebrities" spout off in public because it highlights how utterly uninformed and completely fucking stupid they really are. I like to go off on a rant about them when they do it, however, because it's fun, and it makes me feel good. This is a true win-win scenario.

It's been awhile since I've paid enough attention to anyone in Hollywood to want to waste a literary effort on them, but it seems I'm good for about one rant a year for the more bilious, inane members of the entertainment industry who have come to believe that their craft has imbued them with some special worldly insight to which the rest of us are not privy. Of course, we only hear what they say because the media gives these dimwits a platform to espouse their bullshit seemingly at the very apex of their moronity. I suppose there are just as many annoying plumbers, draftsmen, or computer programmers, but the press doesn't give them the same attention as they do with the more intellectually challenged Hollywood elite. Unfortunately, the American public, by and large, is too stupid to do its own thinking, and so these thespian fools find silent audiences that enthusiastically and mindlessly clap at the most of ridiculous statements, like so many of those cymbal-holding battery-operated toy monkeys from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

I have previously lambasted the most worthy of these Hollywood dumb-asses, including Sean Penn in Be Gone Sean (2008), Tom Cruise in This star will self destruct in five seconds... (2007), George Clooney in Clooney the Looney (2006), and Rosie O'Donnell in Rosie Obese-ty (2006). Today, it's time for Anaximenes to set his sites on another ignorant, ill-bred, uneducated, vulgar piece of impertinent, idiotic Hollywood discharge, Whoopi Goldberg.

I’ve never liked Whoopi Goldberg. For starters, I don't get the name. She was born Caryn Johnson, which in itself is pretty fucking stupid because most people spell Karen with a 'k' and an 'e'. Actually, I guess that's more a testament to the stupidity of her mother. Regardless, Caryn chose the pseudonym of a staple in any novelty-shop inventory and then, she fucking misspelled that name, too. The Whoopee Cushion was introduced to the world by the Jem Rubber Company in 1930. It's a classic gag that humors pre-adolescent boys who think the sound of a reverberating sphincter is some funny shit. Yeah, Whoopi has real brains, alright. And class! It takes real class to name yourself after something that was designed to resemble the sound of indiscriminate human flatulence. After all, farts are funny, right?

Whoopi also chose a Jewish last name having brilliantly said that "Goldberg's a part of my family somewhere." Well, a number of the black Hollywood elite, like Oprah Winfrey, Chris Rock and Tina Turner, including Whoopi Goldberg, had their DNA tested by African Ancestry, Inc. as part of a 2006 PBS documentary tracing African-American genealogy. Whoopi's test results traced her ancestry to the Papel and Bayote peoples of modern-day Guinea-Bissau. Her racial admixture test was 92 percent sub-Saharan African and 8 percent European. So, it's unlikely some Jewish guy banged a Negro slave somewhere along the transit line, but even if one did, Whoopi wouldn't know his name. Actually, if you think about it, choosing a Jewish name and her cavalier comment about it was pretty racist; not that anyone in Hollywood would challenge the motives of an African-American female from New York who attended parochial school and was raised a Catholic.

The earliest I remember Whoopi was in the movie Ghost and that was before she thought anyone gave a shit about her political views. I wasn't that impressed, though. I guess I’ve been wrong in thinking for so long that actually having talent was necessary for someone to succeed in show business, or that being funny was germane to success as a comic. Although Whoopi has received Academy, Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Awards, I'm still unimpressed given today's state of the entertainment industry. Receiving any of these so-called awards are certainly not indicative of talent and neither are they in honor of intelligence. If anything, they are more an endorsement of that which Hollywood deems to be politically correct. How else can you explain Academy award nominations for films like Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth or Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, both of which advance popular liberal themes of completely erroneous, fabricated and distorted information?

I think Whoopi is fucking terrible as a actress and sucks as a comedian, and frankly, I think she is hideous to even look at.

What is this shit with her long dreadlocks and rose-colored glasses? She looks like she needs to round out her stylish ensemble with a top-hat so she can complete that Gary Oldman Dracula look.

Speaking of Dracula, I used to like Frank Langella until I found out he had a five year live-in relationship with Whoopi. And that's the strange thing about the Whoopster. She really digs white guys. All three of her ex-husbands are white guys. So is Timothy Dalton, who was banging Whoopi for a couple of years. Ted Danson also thought having sex with Whoopi was a good idea. Danson was married at the time and caring for his wife, who had survived a stroke while giving birth to their child. Typical Hollywood shit.

Whoopi dropped out of high school two weeks into her freshman year and got married at eighteen, giving birth to her only child shortly thereafter. She subsequently failed as a bank teller, a bricklayer, and a mortuary cosmetologist. I believe her only real claim to fame is having been the least talented center square on Hollywood Squares. At least Paul Lynde resurrected his pathetic career as the center Hollywood Square. Whoopi practically ended hers in it.

Fortunately for us, Whoopi has announced her retirement from acting, and has been relegated to that most inconsequential of television daytime shows designed for unemployed shut-ins with seventh grade educations and a predilection for irrelevancy, The View. This show has the kind of audience comprised of people who, if they can read at all, think the National Enquirer is a finely written journalistic periodical with high literary standards for integrity and veracity. These are also people who routinely spell the work "inquire" as "enquire" if, in fact, they even know what the word means or how to use it.

I saw The View once while at home convalescing from abdominal surgery a couple of years ago. In my defense, I was coming off of a five-day hospital stay hooked up to a intravenous morphine drip and once home, was heavily stoked up with hydrocodone tablets. Even through my heavy drug-induced euphoria, however, I recall being particularly irritated at the sound of four shrill female voices arguing over such riveting topics such as forgetting to vote, being too lazy to exercise, hating skinny models, admiring Hollywood's latest hunk and what to do about children who pee on the floor. I've never watched the show since, but You Tube is a wonderful place to see the inanity of daytime television in palatable two-minute clips, including Whoopi Goldberg's newfound forum for showing the world just how fucking stupid she really is. I don't pay a lot of attention to Whoopi, but I was trying to comprehend John McCain's presidential campaign strategy by prostituting himself when he appeared on The View in the following clip.

What a fucking fool!

"Do I have to worry about becoming a slave again?"

No, you fucking idiot. In the first place you've never been a slave. In the second place, if you had ever actually read the Constitution before you dropped out of high school, you would know that the 13th Amendment specifically forbids it.

"...because certain things happened in the Constitution that you had to change."

No, you dim-witted twit! There were necessary additions to the Constitution, called Amendments, that were added according to the process allowed by the Constitution because the original text was mute on some issues: things like the freedom of speech and freedom of the press that allow you to vomit your stupidity all over the living rooms of 3.1 million viewers every goddamn weekday.

"Whew. I was scared I was gonna have to start runnin'..."

Yes, we all dearly wish you would, right smack-dab into the path of fully loaded eighteen-wheeler.

Aside from being incredibly ill-informed and stupid, you might recall that in the 2004 Presidential campaign at a high-stakes fund raiser for John Kerry at Radio City Music Hall, Whoopi also distinguished herself for being demonstrably vulgar when she pointed to her crotch and said, "We should keep Bush where he belongs, and not in the White House." In addition to bringing the presidential candidate many unwanted headlines, Slim-Fast promptly dropped her as their spokesperson. Too bad, because from the looks of her, Whoopi still has a great big fat ass that could use the free supply of Slim-Fast she was getting as part of their advertising campaign. Never one to learn from her mistakes, Whoopi is still talking publicly about her pubic hair, recently complaining on The View that her "carpet is turning gray." Damn you, Whoopi, for making me conjure such a visual.

Whoopi's stupidity simply knows no boundaries.

On Constitutional Law:

“Do you know that we are the only people in the United States who have to have their voting rights okayed every couple of years? Did you know that they have to vote on the Voting Rights Bill for black folks? Can we just, can one of you candidates—can we just take care of that so I don’t have to worry every year, my God am I not?”
The 15th Amendment of the Constitution prohibits racial discrimination in voting and it does not expire. Whoopi was obviously confused about the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which reinforces the Constitution. It doesn't expire either, except for a few sections with limited time provisions containing extraordinary remedies applied in certain areas of the nation for a limited time, which were renewed by Congressional action in 2006. Whoopi's comments are not only blatantly and ridiculously false, but patently irresponsible.
On Economics:

"I find it extraordinary as I listen to folks talk about the free-market system that they don't recognize that the free-market system is truly broken and beyond repair so that we have to start all over again. It was explained to me; I don't think I could explain it to you righteously [sic], but it made sense when I heard the explanation. Basically, the bank is sitting because they're not below what their paperwork should say and they're not above what their paperwork should say - they're right at their paperwork mark and they don't want to move from that."
Uh, yeah. That must be it. The banks are "right at their paperwork mark" and that's why the free-market system is broken. I don't know if The View audience applauded this one, but if Whoopi had said this as a line in a situation comedy, there damn sure would have been a laugh track because that is the stupidest thing I've ever heard.

By the way, you moron, the word you wanted to use when you could not coherently express yourself was to say you could not explain it to me "correctly," meaning accurately or without error, not "righteously," meaning observant of morality or arising from the perception of injustice. However, it would be correct for me to say that you are righteously obtuse. Look it up.
On Michael Vick:

Goldberg: "One of the things I haven't heard anybody say is . .this is not an unusual thing from where [Michael Vick] comes from. It's like cockfighting -- cockfighting in Puerto Rico. . . . There are certain things that are indicative to certain parts of our country. He's from the South. Dogfighting is a lot...."

Joy Behar: "How about dog torturing and dog murdering?"

Goldberg: "Unfortunately, it's part of the thing. For a lot of people, dogs are sport. So I just thought it was interesting because it seemed like a light went off in [Vick's] head when he realized that this was something that the entire country really didn't appreciate or like. I thought, if it had been somebody from New York City, my feelings would be very different."
What?! Are you fucking kidding me? Whoopi grew up in New York City and has lived her entire fucking life in Los Angeles. What the hell would she know about culture in the deep South, other than perpetuating a stereotype that people from the South, which in Whoopi's fucked-up geography really means anyone not from New York, are uneducated barbaric inbred morons who like watching dogs fight to the death. Dog fighting is not a part of any fucking culture in the South. Vick's co-defendants testified that Vick was present when eight dogs were hanged. He watched as they struggled to free themselves from the nooses, and when three didn't die from slow suffocation, they were drowned. Whoopi's willingness to apply a double standard to this sadistic motherfucker simply because he's black and not from New York City shows just how racist and fucked-up she really is. Sort of like if I said, "Whoopi likes fried chicken and watermelon because, you know, it a Negro cultural thing...." Where are the PC Police when you really need them?

And by the way, speaking of uneducated, it's "indicative of" or "indigenous to", not "indicative to", you fucking moron. They would have taught you that the third week into your freshman year in high school if you hadn't gotten knocked-up and dropped out.
On Sarah Palin:

"I just found [Palin's speech] sad and very musty and very much like a Bund rally, but maybe that was just me. I also thought that this idea of America first coming from her was kind of strange because she was one of the people who wanted to succeed [sic] from the United States. She was part of a campaign to succeed [sic] Alaska from the United States of America. This is a very dangerous woman, because I believe for her intents and purposes, she’s okay if everybody lives a certain way, that is to say, the way God ordained men and women to be. Well, already she’s breaking that because she’s the daddy. She’s going to run the country and the husband is going to take care of the kids."
I can scarcely contain my irritation at stupidity of this magnitude.

First of all, a "Bund rally"? Do you even know what that word means? How are Sarah Palin's public speeches anything like a German-American Pro-Nazi rally? Oh, you mean the way Obama's rallies in sports stadiums with a mesmerizing oratory style are sort of like Adolf Hitler's?

Secondly, "succeed from the United States"? Good lord, you idiot, the word you want is "secede", meaning to break away or separate from, not "succeed" meaning to be successful or to accomplish something, pretty much the way you haven't yet been successful in cultivating a vocabulary above a seventh grade level.

Thirdly, where the fuck would you get the idea that Sarah Palin was part of any campaign to secede from the Union? Because an organization called the Alaskan Independent Party has a platform of succession? Palin has never been a member of it and to say otherwise is a bold-faced, outright lie, as in a falsehood, a fib, or an untruth. Either that, or you're simply misinformed, having received the bulk of your understanding of current events, I suspect, from the National Enquirer.

Finally, "she's the daddy?" What kind of fucking feminist are you? Are you hypocritical, as in two-faced, deceitful and phony? Or maybe, you're just one really stupid, fucked-up spiteful, hateful bitch? That's "bitch," as in a temperamental, nasty, ill-mannered cunt.
On Gay Marriage:

"The battle for same sex marriage continues. And one of the movement’s motto’s is 'gay is the new black.' At least that’s what some people are saying. That’s what’s on the cover of The Advocate this week. And some people don’t agree with comparing this to black suffrage [sic]. I don’t even know if I understand what that word is, 'suffrage', but I’ll leave it alone, black suffrage."
Well, at least this time, you're admitting your ignorance, and if you had really left it alone, The View audience wouldn't have caught it. You ignoramus, "suffrage" means the right to vote, not to feel pain or distress.

Stupid, stupid, Whoopi. She is pathetic and painful to even watch. Even her very name brings about a feeling of irritation and discomfort. How in the hell someone as ignorant as she gets applause from adoring crowds is as unfathomable to me as it is scary to know that there are that many more stupid, ignorant people out there listening to her.