I have to admit that I've always kinda admired ultraliberal Bill Moyers if just because he was the epitome of the type of character that I have always found interesting -- the henchman who goes from being a yes-man to being a power broker himself. The fact that Moyers had some pretty strong political ambitions himself is a matter of public record though not something that is usually brought up in the fawning portraits that paint him as the last of the good, old fashioned, liberal idealists; a Texas-accented Edward R. Murrow without the politically incorrect cigarettes. In 1988, Moyers gave some public consideration to running for President himself. He didn't and his flirtation with the office was quickly forgotten but it was an early sign of the thinking that would eventually give birth to the monster that was Ross Perot and the Reform Party.

Anyway, Moyers is retiring and Lowell Ponte has written a retrospective of the man's career that is worth reading. It can be read here.  ¶ 8:18 AM (0) comments

  Sometimes, it's easy to see why it's easier not to have any firmly held beliefs. Yesterday, the Scott Peterson jury recommended that he sentenced to death for murdering his pregnant wife Laci. This is one of those disgusting, macabre cases that I've followed from the beginning, searching for some sort of clue as to how anyone could possibly be so evil. I haven't found any answers but I was still glad to see Scott convicted.

And I don't think it'll be any great loss to live in a world without Scott Peterson.

Unfortunately, I'm also opposed to the death penalty. Which means that as much as I think Scott deserves to die, I'm opposed to killing him.

That's the problem with being against the Death Penalty, isn't it? It's all great when you're concerning yourself with some guy whose been wrong convicted, who has done nothing to deserve to be killed. And you can feel mighty proud of yourself when you're pointing out that death sentences are often given to people based more on their own ethnic heritage or less than charming personalities than on the circumstances of the crime. But then someone like Scott Peterson gets convicted and sentenced to die and you're forced to deal with the fact that if you're opposed to the death penalty, you're not just advocating for the wrongly convicted or the unfairly sentenced. You're advocating for people you hate as well, for people you'd kill yourself if it was allowed.

Like I said, sometimes it's a lot more comforting to have no beliefs.  ¶ 2:32 AM (0) comments

  Well, I am excited and very happy to announce that I got my very first hate e-mail this morning. Actually, the hater in question sent it on the 8th but I was late in checking my hotmail account.

Now, I should be honest and admit that I have actually gotten hateful, pissed off, indignant e-mail in the past but this is the first one that I can say was actually inspired by one of my published pieces of writing. The piece in question is Jeffrey's Spoken. Honestly, it is not my favorite of everything I've written but it is the story that always seems to get the most response from readers. That response has been overwhelmingly popular. Until the 8th, when that feared literary critic known as ubbermonkey@aol.com decided that he (or she) had to make his feelings known.

Now, it is unethical and perhaps illegal to directly quote someone's e-mail without getting their permission. So, I'll just change a phrase or two to keep it from being a direct quote. Ubbermonkey@aol.com's constitutional rights are very important and certainly I don't mean to suggest that he or she should be deprived of those rights for being a dumbass.

Here we go:

"way to get things wrong and contradict yourself in your Jeremy story. i don't even believe you were there. i hope you stop writing or stop lying. adios from michigan."

Well, first off -- I was there. Second off, what is is that some people have against capitlization? What -- you're in cyberspace so suddenly you don't have to take the effort to push down the shift key? Third, I'd love to know just what exactly I got wrong.

But anyway, I'll recap the message I sent back to ubbermonkey@aol.com. I made every effort to be polite as I'm sure that, being the product of two first cousins fucking, ubbermonkey@aol.com has enough to deal with already. My response went as follows:

"Okay, can you give me any examples of what I got wrong or would that require too much extra effort? Thanks for writing. I always appreciate any response I get from the double chromosome crowd. It's okay that you don't think I was actually there because I don't, for a minute, believe that you're actually from Michigan. Nor do I think you're a monkey.

Good luck mastering capitilization."

Anyway, I have yet to get a response in what is destined to become a battle of the wits that will someday, no doubt, be compared to the celebrated debates between William F. Buckley and John Kenneth Galbraith on Firing Line. If you're reading this ubbermonkey@aol.com, please respond and let me know what I can do to make your reading experience a more pleasurable one.

I live to please.  ¶ 1:31 PM (0) comments

  The other night, I caught the premiere of The Life and Death of Peter Sellers on HBO. Peter Sellers, of course, was the English actor who was best known for creating Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films but whose probably should have been better known for his roles in films like Lolita, Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Being There, and a handful of English films from the late '50s and early '60s that all remain unfairly neglected over here in the states. He came close to dying of various heart ailments at several moments throughout his life and finally did have a fatal heart attack in 1980 at the age of 54. In the biopic, Sellers is played by Geoffrey Rush who does indeed do a brilliant job of capturing Sellers and recreating his more famous roles.

The main theme of both the film and the book it was based on seemed to be that Peter Sellers was a thoroughly repellent, self-centered human being who could easily being to life fiction because there was no reality. He was an empty vessell, a child with no personality of his own. A real pleasant prospect to spend two hours with, eh? This, of course, was the problem with both the film and the book. Once you've discovered just how shallow Sellers was, there really wasn't anything else left to say. And since shallowness is not that complex or difficult a trait to understand, most reasonably intelligent people should be able to make that discovery within the first five minutes, leaving 115 minutes of nodding and saying, "Yep, Peter Sellers sure was shallow."

That said, it was a brilliantly acted film. Though Rush is in every scene and easily dominates the film, several supporting players do manage to get a word in edgewise. John Lithgow, playing Blake Edwards, epitomizes a shallowness of a more benign sort than Sellers' self-destructive brand. Charlize Theron manages to make Britt Ekland into something that Ekland herself could never do; an actual human being. Miriam Margoyles is both endearing and terrifying as Sellers' mother. Stanley Tucci (Is it just me or did it seem like he kinda vanished for a while there?) plays Stanley Kubrick as if he were Machiavelli recreated as an aesthete while it is impossible, for me at least, not to be totally in love with Emily Watson after seeing her performance as Sellers' much abused, much loved first wife.  ¶ 11:20 AM (0) comments

  So, where were you when Ken Jennings finally lost a game of Jeopardy?

Well, I'm not sure where I was when the game was actually played but I do know where I was when his final game was televised on Tuesday. Down here in Richardson, Jeopardy comes on channel 8 at 3:30 in the afternoon. I used to be an addict of the show. Like just about every fan, I will go to my grave claiming that if I could have gotten on the show, I would have been one of those legendary champions who got rich off their knowledge of Roman History, Biblical Trivia, and words starting with "O". Most probably, that's evidence of selective memory on my part but I still always felt that I was pretty good at the game.

However, it had been a while since I actually sat down and watched the show. In fact, I started to get burned out around the 100th time that Ken Jennings won. I had nothing against Ken. He seemed a decent enough guy and, even if he did start to get a little bit too cocky for his own good after a while, at least he never became a raging egomaniac like John Turturro in Quiz Show. Of course, that's to the best of my knowledge. I suppose he could have been cussing out Alex Trebek during the commercial breaks and giving the finger to the other contestants when he was off camera but I have a hard time picturing it.

But still, I did end up getting sick of seeing Ken win time after time. I think this was probably because, as selective as my memory may have been, I knew there was no way I'd ever be able to beat him. I knew that Ken Jennings was a guy who was just plain smarter than me and always would be. And now, he's a whole helluva lot richer. And truthfully, who wants to watch a reality program (which is what Jeopardy had become) where the real person makes you feel bad about your own life? We watch reality programs to be reassured that, no matter how bad we may be, there are worst people out there. I may be a graying, near-sighted, chainsmoker working a dead end job and deluding myself with fantasies of grandeur but at least I'm not the twin from Big Brother who didn't understand what karma was. But, Ken -- this was a guy who was obviously a hundred times better than me and who wants to deal with that day after day.

So, it was just be some odd chance that I actually had the show on yesterday and to be honest, I wasn't really paying attention to it until Final jeopardy. At approx. 3:53 pm on Tuesday, I was upstairs, lying on my bed, and trying to read Homicide Special (a brilliant true crime book by Miles Corwin) while my cat, Hidey, savagely clawed my hand in an effort to make me understand that he felt he'd waited long enough to be fed. Even though the TV was on, the volume was muted because I was listening to the song Mad World from the Donnie Darko soundtrack. Just happening to look up in time to see the final questions about to be revealed, I paused the soundtrack and unmuted the TV.

Just in time to see Ken Jennings lose.

For future trivia reference, the correct question was "What is H&R Block?"

Ken's answer was "What is FedEx?"

I don't know the name of the woman he lost too but I do know that the audience gasped when Ken's answer came up. Audiences gasp quite frequently on live studio audience shows but those gasps almost always sound fake because they really are, the product of some stage hand holding up directions on a piece of cardboard. But this gasp was real. The gasp was followed by a standing ovation which Alex Trebek was quick to say was meant to honor Ken as well as the new champion. The fact that Alex was lying was obvious to everyone. That standing ovation was a celebration -- Ken Jennings was gone and finally, the audience could stop feeling insecure about their own ignorance of early Native American pottery.

Ken, I might add, didn't look all that shocked or disappointed to lose. At first, with my Quiz Show-infested mind, I thought maybe Ken had thrown the game just like Ralph Fiennes did in the movie. But actually, I can very easily accept the idea that the man was relieved that it was over. He had to know that everyone -- even people who wouldn't be caught dead watching the show -- were just waiting for him to lose. He had to know that every contestant that challenged him was no longer just there to win some cash and get on TV. They were there to specifically take him down. They were there to draw his blood, to win their 15 minutes of fame as the person who was smarter than Ken Jennings.

Afterall, Ken Jennings had already won over two million dollars and set a record that'll probably never be broken. The only reason for him to be on the show was just to keep winning long after the contest no longer carried any real significance. Ken Jennings had become nothing less than the Shootist of the American game show.

Call him the Nerdist.

And be happy that he won all he won and did all that he did.

And most of all, be glad that he's gone.

As for this new woman -- I predict she'll be gone by the end of the next show. Why? Well, she's good but she's clearly no Ken Jennings. In fact, if they put me on that show tomorrow, I could beat her easily...  ¶ 1:20 AM (0) comments