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April 17, 2014

Walking a mile in Ernie Pyle’s moccasins

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: , , , — Bob Patterson @ 6:44 pm

Listening to an old man in a tavern in Paris claim that, as a child, he had sat on Hemingway’s lap in the same bar and heard the world famous author tell interesting stories was an experience that epitomized our concept of what it’s like to be a columnist.  For a middle class kid the possibilities to travel the world, meet celebrities, see the iconic sights, and have fun doing it, seemed like a formidable challenge.  Our efforts to find a way to achieve that goal indicated that columnists were proxies for the middle class who were assigned to do those exact things and then write up a brief report on the experience for workers who craved a vicarious taste of the world outside their hometown.

A torn and tattered copy of Ernie Pyle’s “Brave Men” hinted that journalists, columnists, and war correspondents had a front row seat for some of the most dangerous facets of life in the fast lane.  April 18th has been selected by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists to be the annual day of celebration honoring the art and craft of column writing because it was on that date in 1945 that war correspondent Pyle was killed in action on the island of Ie Shima in the Pacific Theater in WWII.

The World’s Laziest Journalist tries to mark Columnists’ Day in a different way every year.  We’re not going to do a column that recaps what Ernie Pyle did and why he was honored every year because that would become too predictable.  It may seem a bit arrogant and presumptuous to make the annual National Society of Newspaper Columnists’ Day effort heavily autobiographical but this year it seemed that it was the best way to accurately tell the back story of why someone would want to become a columnist.

Some folks select a particularly exotic slice of contemporary living and specialize in a lifetime of examining something like auto racing for a specialized audience but for a kid in Scranton, Pa., embracing the “variety is the spice of life” philosophy, becoming a columnist seemed to be the best solution to the challenge.

Three of our heroes Hemingway, HST, and Jack Kerouac, wanted to be world famous writers.  They got what they wanted and it made them miserable.  (Two of the three were columnists.  Weren’t two, briefly, Berkeley residents?)  Berkeley writer Philip K. Dick wrote a book predicting that a world famous writer would live the life of a recluse in Colorado.  Nobody agrees with the World’s Laziest Journalist’s interpretation that “Man in the High Castle” was about Hunter S. Thompson’s career.

We think that B. Traven, Thomas Pynchon, and J. D. Salinger would endorse the idea that being an anonymous columnist living out his childhood dreams ain’t a bad way to go.

Young people at the Hostel in Fremantle who suggested that we should go to Kalgoorlie may have intended the suggestion as an elaborate practical joke because a good many travelers might not think it was worth the effort.  We had the last laugh because of our fascination with gold panning.  Travel writers are obliged to make the places they write about seem irresistible for every reader but a columnist can be brutally honest and say that if you don’t know who Fred C. Dobbs was and relish the prospect of a visit to the Prospectors’ Hall of Fame, then you better consider a different destination.

If a movie review columnist works for a corporate conglomerate that owns the TV network that broadcasts his verdict about a new flick also owns the film company that made the new release, then he might be required to announce it was a “must see” example for everyone to see.  It is rare that a movie is a valid example of the “one size fits all” philosophy.  So too, it is with travel destinations.

Being a columnist means that when the book by a teacher at Annapolis, John Beckman, titled “American Fun Four Centuries of Joyous Revolt” catches your attention in City Lights book store, there are two reasons for buying it:  1.  the fun of reading it and 2.  the chance to get an item for the next column.  Sometimes it seems that being a columnist means being an advanced scout for fun in all areas of culture.

What’s not to like about feeling a compulsion to discover esoteric topics such as snapshot collecting (See accompanying photo)  or finding out what “slack liners” do?  Being a columnist means taking a last nostalgic look at San Francisco’s art installation titled “Defenestration,” which is scheduled to be dismantled and the host building will be demolished.

Being required to go out and have fun is a great assignment.  It’s too bad that the contracting newspaper industry doesn’t offer J-school grads many prospects for snagging that plum assignment.  The odds of a newspaper writer getting subsidized to experience such antics are slim and none.

The old fellow in Harry’s New York Bar in Paris explained that the place had been owned by his father and he had inherited it.  He had spent many hours there as a kid when one of the regulars was a rookie writer named Hemingway.

If a columnist wanted to do a column about having a sarsaparilla at that place and others such as Hurley’s in New York City, Heinold’s in Oakland, and the Blue Fox in Tijuanna, then it might be a good idea to also visit Skimpy’s in Kalgoorlie.  Does the columnist reviewer Joe Sixpack ever get to go on assignment outside the Philadelphia area?

If a columnist writes for websites devoted to political punditry, then bits of arcane, esoteric information and obscure bits of history have to be strung together with items that have not saturated the mainstream media.

On the morning of Sunday April 13, 2014, while listening to KCBS radio for the nine a.m. network news we heard the In Depth program which delved into the topic of rents.  A guest casually mentioned that “we” want to revisit the question:  “Is Rent Control Unconstitutional?”  Since the US Supreme Court ruled on that earlier in the Obama era, we will have to check further into this story (and hope the NY Times assignment desk doesn’t read this column) before we do the fact checking and write our take on the topic.

When the Internet was in the formative stage, site owners and publishers were desperate to find “a unique voice” but as the corporatization of the web becomes ubiquitous, the trend is to prefer homogenized content providers.  (Think of Peggy Lee’s song “Is that all there is?”)  This week both Thom Hartmann and cartoonist Tom Tomorrow proclaimed that “we longer have a functioning democracy in America.”

If a political pundit working in the USA dares to suggest an unorthodox idea, he is immediately ostracized for being a conspiracy theory loon.  In a few short years, the political atmosphere in America has gone from JEB Bush being a pariah to the contention recently that JEB is the de facto frontrunner.  Is it a conspiracy theory for a columnist to irreverently ask: “Where is the ‘Democracy in action’ aspect of that transition?”?

With Democracy DOA and another war immanent we wonder on National Columnists’ Day, if we could have done something to avoid this mess.  Recently a comment was posted indicating that the World’s Laziest Journalist needs to put more work into the columns.  We know that if we took more time the end results would be greatly improved and with that in mind we’ll ask the site’ owner and publisher:  “Should we ask for a raise (to inspire the extra work) or should we adopt the philosophy of Frank Sinatra who, when told that the director of “Ocean’s 11” wanted to re-shoot a scene, responded by saying:  “That was good enough!”?

For the closing quote will use Hunter S. Thompson’s maxim:  “Buy the ticket; take the ride.”

Now the disk jockey will play Edith Piaf’s “Non, Je ne regretted rein,” Waylon Jenning’s “I may be used (but baby I ain’t used up),” and Dooley Wilson’s “As time goes by.”  We have to celebrate the day with an extra ration of A&W diet root beer.  Have a “specialize in having fun” type week.

April 11, 2014

Tanks, cars, and books

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: , , , — Bob Patterson @ 12:27 pm

 

Napoleon learned the hard way that waging war during winter in Russia is a brutal ordeal.  Hitler disregarded his military advisors advice and dawdled for a few weeks before implementing their strategy.  The postponement caused the German army to relearn Napoleon’s military lesson that was readily available in the history books.

American news reporters and political pundits apparently aren’t aware that Vladimir Putin would be much more versed in Russian history than they are and led their audiences to think that after the winter games were concluded the Russian leader would immediately make a military move in the Ukraine.  The American journalists’ eager anticipation of doing voiceovers for dramatic video of new hostilities in that region is getting bogged down in the spring thaw mud.

If the newsies would read up on military history they could sound authoritative and knowledgeable if they advised their audience to expect any military movement in late spring or very early summer.  Televised news thrives on expediency and so they disregard practical considerations and emphasis that Putin could send troops into the Ukraine any minute rather than taking the spring thaw into account.

[For a different perspective on Putin try reading Christian Neef’s commentary “It’s time to stop romanticizing Russian” in the English language section of Der Spiegel’s web site.]

Some folks think that a guy who was community organizer will not be pushed around by a former KGB agent who was born in Leningrad.  This columnist is prepared to bet otherwise.

While we are waiting for the news readers’ time schedule for life-and-death drama to unfold on dry ground, we seized an opportunity to see the exhibition of French Impressionist paintings at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco while simultaneously reading Christopher Moore’s speculative fiction novel “Sacré Bleu” about the same group of famous artists.

The San Francisco show may lure some French Impressionist enthusiasts from “shakey town” up to the Bay area just to see that particular exhibition and we don’t think they will be disappointed by the effort.  It is closer and cheaper than a trip to Paris, eh?

Since Christopher Moore is publicizing his newest book, “Serpent of Venice,” and he is coming to the Bay area to do a book signing event at 7 p.m., at Books Inc. on April 22 later this month, we sent him a suggestion that he might like to see the show at the Legion of Honor and we are attempting to perhaps interview him while he is in Frisco, so that we can get some exclusive information which will give us another chance to plug his newest novel again in a future column.

While sensation seeking journalists eagerly anticipate Putin’s next move, for columnists, April is a smorgasbord of topics.  The Titanic, the century old run-up to WWI, the similarity of events in the late Thirties to the show down in the Ukraine, and yet another chance to write about National Columnists’ Day (April 18) and see if we can enlist the aid once again of Jim Romenesko, who runs an “inside baseball” website for journalists, to help us in our annual effort to raise awareness of the date which marks the day when famed columnist Ernie Pyle was killed in action during WWII.

Meanwhile car enthusiasts are busy preparing to celebrate the Ford Mustang’s 50th birthday.

Since coast to coast journeys always get our attention, we will plug the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company’s Beer Camp effort to promote a celebration of hand crafted beer even though we haven’t had a brew in several decades.  Do they need a designated driver/columnist?

Willie Nelson is famous for playing musical gigs at American Honkey Tonk bars and since he will be playing two shows at UCB’s Greek Theater this weekend, we will henceforth be tempted to think of the local world famous learning establishment as being “Honky Tonk U.”

The Ambush Review is holding a poetry reading at the Beat Museum in San Francisco on the night when this column will be posted and so we may feel obligated to cover the event in the hopes that it will become a milestone in literary history similar to another one  that happened in that same city many years ago.

This month we intend to do some fact checking on the pop culture beat to learn more about “the Spleen” from the Mystery Men.  It seems the fellow’s super abilities are unleashed when he gets a positive response to his signature challenge:  “Pull my finger!”

NBC has caused a sensation this week by starting a search for new sit-com talent by issuing an opportunity to make an online pitch.  (Google hint:  NBCComedyPlayground dot com)

War usually gets such bad publicity that we were very glad to see that the premise for the new book “The Love-charm of Bombs,” by Lara Feigel is that the Battle of Britain provided an exciting and romantic backdrop for Great Britain’s social elite to have extra-marital love affairs.  Wasn’t it called the “live life to the hilt” approach to contending with impending doom?

If American news media stations assign some correspondents to go to Perth to monitor the MH 370 search efforts, does that mean that they will, during the wait, be expected to start filing feature stories about the charms and tourist attractions available in the W. A.?  The million square mile state known as Western Australia is called “the W. A.” by locals.

Maybe some of the visiting journalists will note that a large number of local vehicles feature snorkels and that indicates a high likelihood for some freelance assignments from America’s 4wd publications?  What journalist doesn’t love the prospect of some extra loot via a bit of freelancing done on the side?

Speaking of “appropriate setting,” Kalgoorlie is the perfect place for an American to hear Bobby Bare’s “Five Hundred Miles” song.

Fans of the film “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” might want to read about the Prospectors’ Hall of Fame which is located in (relatively speaking) nearby Kalgoorlie.

[Note from the columnist:  We have been posting a column almost every week for 15 years but due to some temperamental vintage computer equipment, we might be forced to go AWAL one of these weeks.  We’ll start taking preventative measures, but there are no guarantees in life, eh?]

[Note from the photo editor:  We illustrated the 50th birthday for the Ford Mustang by running a file photo taken a few years back at the Los Angeles Shelby American Auto Club’s annual car show.]

In “hip: the history,” by John Leland, readers are informed that George W. S. Trow wrote:  “To wear a fedora, I must first torture it out of shape so that it can be cleaned of the embarrassment in it.”

The disk jockey will play Wilson’ Pickett’s “Mustang Sally,” the theme music from “Un Homme et une Femme,” and Marianne Faithful’s “Ballad of Lucy Jordan.”  We have to go inquire about how to get a press pass to cover this year’s Le Mans 24 hour race.  Have a “why do we do this, Buzz?,” type week.

April 4, 2014

Trash news for America

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: , , , — Bob Patterson @ 12:24 pm

The Pravda Syndrome, according to a reliable source, refers to the condition that developed in Russia when people automatically doubted the state sanctioned version of the news.  A news story would immediately generate a belief that the exact opposite must be true.  The USA, he warned, is beginning to show symptoms of an impending epidemic of that malady.  (Starting with Fox?)

Will the Gulf of Tonkin resolution be fifty years old this year?  If so will the free press take a critical look at how the American voters got fooled?

Will the news stories about the century anniversary of the start of WWI tell Americans about how a little lie about the cargo on the Lucitania got them into a war thousands of miles away from the homeland?

How credible were the reassurances that the troops who took part in nuclear testing in the desert had no worries about long term effects?

A controversial topic can always be exempted from debate by labeling the issue a conspiracy theory and then all dissent must halt immediately.

The ecological damage done by Fukushima, any possible explanation of what happened to MH 370, and secret negotiations with Russia to avoid WWIII are all “off-limits” topics for journalists and so pseudo news is becoming a viable industry so that Americans can see something that can be extolled for providing an example of freedom of the press, which is always one of the defining examples used to motivate the poor and middle class to send their children off to war in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

In a country that wants voters to be fully informed so that they can make well-informed decisions, giving controversies an automatic exemption from debate defies logic but since it is an American tradition, if you don’t like it . . . go jump in the lake just like the fellow did in “The Manchurian Candidate.”

Greenpeace has been asserting that the oceans of the world are littered with trash and the more false alarms that satellite photos generate for the people searching for the remains of the missing MH 370 airliner the higher the likelihood that rubes in flyover country will eventually come to the conclusion that the forecasts of impending ecological disaster could generate a preemptive response.

Part of the standard Conservative response to Liberals (including the “save the whales” faction) is to question their sanity.

Conservatives expect Americans to assume that the Oceans are pristine pure and that any time any satellite photo shows some flotsam and jetsam, people must automatically exclaim:  “That must be from MH 370!”

The Greenpeace movement has been dismissed by Conservatives as a bunch of whacko altruists who make absurd claims about seeing an island of trash in the middle of various Oceans.  If there are too many examples of false alarms in the search for the missing airliner then there may come a time when the Greenpeace assertions become uncontestable.

Shouldn’t a Greenpeace spokesperson be getting face time on the Network News to show satellite photos of the Island of Trash and predict that the debris from MH 370 may never be found?  Would a humorous “we tried to warn ya” be copasetic?  (Isn’t that a Sixties word?)

If the Conservative News Nabobs aren’t vigilant in their mass mind control duties, the curious incident of the transponder that didn’t bark may wind up being the biggest factor in a gigantic spike in the performance graph for the ubiquitous Greenpeace fundraisers who solicit funds from High Street in Fremantle to Shattuck Ave. in Berkeley CA and beyond.

The fact that the nightly exercises of excellence in propaganda (AKA the Evening News) are not mentioning the Greenpeace explanation for the false sightings indicates only two possible explanations:  incompetence or deliberate planning.

If all of the nightly propaganda programs miss the obvious through incompetence, the prognosis for democracy is grim.  If the error is premeditated, then expecting voluntary preventive ecological measures is irrational.

When the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory disaster occurred, business owners raised economic objections to installing fire escapes.  Expecting modern capitalists to increase production costs just for (hypothetical?) extreme long range goals is unrealistic.  Greed will always trump altruism in a capitalistic society.

Isn’t the Supreme Court going to take another look at the American tradition that lets team owners grow richer by exploiting athletes while being exempt from many regulations about workers’ rights?  Don’t the corporations known as colleges have the same rights as wealthy team owners?

A past TV report (BBC?) indicated that manmade trash is washing up on the beaches on Wake Island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Many years ago, media in the USA carried reports that beachcombers on the southern tip of Mexico’s Baja peninsula were finding some very intriguing debris.  Specialists were sent and it was determined that the curious detritus was actually trash from the Battle of the Coral Sea.  It had taken approximately 20 years to make an Eastward crossing of the Pacific Ocean.

Would it cause a big sensation if the search for MH 370 produced some wreckage from Amelia Earhart’s missing airplane?

We wonder if any of the talking point readers who are “covering” the search for the missing MH 370 airplane on temporary assignment in Perth will on their days off go down to Fremantle and the beach at Cottesloe (we understand there is a “free” beach just North of that world famous beach) and if they will sample the local music scene.  (Google hint:  who is playing at Mojo’s this weekend?)

Abandoning the search and adopting the nihilistic “Such is life” philosophy may seem crass and coldhearted but in the Golden Age of Austerity the search can’t go on forever.

Will the Fox faithful ever get to hear a feature story about the Pravda Syndrome?

Was it inevitable that shooting rampages would become routine news and hence slip out of the “hysterical obsession” category of news stories on the 24/7 cable news networks?  It seems that historical milestone was reached this week.

The 36th annual St. Stupid’s Day festivities were held in San Francisco this week.  Rumors are rampant in Frisco that the media in-crowd in New York are asking if San Francisco is the new New York.  If they have to ask that question, that means they already know the answer and they won’t have to wait until they see it in Pravda to believe it.

[Note from the Photo Editor:  Sixties icon Wavy Gravy participated in the St. Stupid’s Day parade in San Francisco on Tuesday and we got some photos of him.  What’s not to love about a Sixties flashback?]

It wouldn’t be prudent to use a notorious excerpt from Lenny Bruce’s comedy (?) track titled “Non Skeddo Flies Again” as the wrap it up quote and so we will note that back in the day before 140 word limits were considered cool, Lafcadio Hearn, at the beginning of “Midsummer Trip to the Tropics” went on and on about just how blue the ocean would be where he was going.  We’ll use a self-imposed limit of one sentence and for the closing quote use just this one:  “The painter who should try to paint it would be denounced as a lunatic . .  . .”  (The journalist who tries to report the news [especially the countdown to JEB’s Inauguration] accurately will be denounced as a lunatic.)

Now the disk jockey will play Charles Trenet’s “La Mer,” Slim Dusty’s “I can still har dad swearing,” and Judy Collins’ “Send in the Clowns.”  We have to go finish reading Pete Hamill’s “Why Sinatra Matters.”  Have a “don’t bother; they’re here” type week.

 

March 28, 2014

Fear and Loathing in Oakland

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: , , , — Bob Patterson @ 12:28 pm

Anarchists’ Book Fair in Oakland

On the day after Scott Olsen was awarded $4.5 million for injuries incurred during an Occupy Oakland protest, the folks who believe that the police are out of control held a book fair in Oakland.

A group called Copwatch was in existence before the first Occupy Oakland protester brought a tent to Frank Ogawa plaza.  The Occupy movement produced many examples of conduct that Copwatch wants to eliminate.  The protesters allege that the wealthy are being given priority treatment in a society that preaches all men are created equal.

Access to public restrooms was severely restricted during the Occupy time period.  The police then alleged that the protesters were uncivilized creations who didn’t use bathrooms and soiled themselves.

People (including the corporations known as “people”) who don’t pay taxes couldn’t care less how much Scott Olsen received as a settlement because it is the average citizen who will foot the bill for the cash awarded to the injured protester.  The fact that the richest pay no taxes and this law suit settlement will be paid for with funds provided by the middle class and poor taxpayers and not the rich seems to be an example of achieving perpetual motion.

When the Scott Olsen incident happened news reports indicate he had been hit by a teargas canister but when the cash award settlement was made, it was described as injuries received when he was hit with a beanbag.  Doesn’t that sound like a much more benevolent way to be injured for life?  Getting hit by a canister sounds barbaric but getting knocked out by a beanbag sounds like some high spirited schoolboy rowdiness  got a bit out of hand.

We wondered if there would be a large amount of coverage of the Anarchists’ Book Fair, on the day after the settlement was announced on Friday, March 21, 2014 or if we would pretty much have the Saturday story for our own.  Berkeley journalist/blogger Ken Knabb had a table at the event, and we were interviewed by a reporter for KALW radio but we did not see any evidence that would support a contention that the even received much additional coverage.

We thought the event would provide us with a blank check for some clever word play such as “we had a blast covering it” and “we’ll take a shot at describing it.”

Most folks think that anarchy is a synonym for bedlam and pandemonium but the anarchists say that it is a bit more of a less government form of political philosophy.  Take a closer look and it sounds like a mirror image of the Republican teabagers’ agenda.

The rich fuckers who think that the solution of the homeless problem is to tell them:  “Go home!” see no irony in the fact that many of them are in that condition because banks foreclosed them out of their domicile.  It’s kinda like telling an alcoholic to have a drink, eh?

Dump then out of their homes, put them in the streets and then tell them “go home!”  Who says they don’t have sense of humor that produces kneeslaper jokes?

Are the capitalists who want people to work for minimum wage, buy their goods at the company store, and pay big tax bills the root cause of society’s unrest or is it the anti-social(ist) rabble who cause the winter of our discontent?

Bob Calhoun was there promoting his book “Shattering Conventions,” which is a journal of his exploration of the world of expos and conventions.  Wouldn’t that make an intriguing shtick for use as a weekly feature by a outlet in the mainstream media?  What’s not to love about the idea of a fellow covering a new gathering every week?  (Isn’t that just the kind of thing USA Today would publish?)

Endless Canvas is a website that features news and photos of interest to graffiti artists and their fans in the San Francisco area known as “the East Bay.”  Two of the local celebrities in that realm are Gatz and Broke.  We bought a copy of “More Beer Less Work #4” done by Broke and it seems to be numbered and signed.

We could probably churn out a column about the 100 best anarchy songs of all time, and maybe sometime in the future we will.

As it turned out we were working on a column about anarchy at the same time that the fellow who runs the Cinesthesia dot blogspot website asked for our opinion of the “Grand Hotel Budapest” movie.  It seemed to us (subjective opinion alert!) to be like “The Sound of Music” without the tunes and politics so we told him:  “It is the greatest film tribute to fascism since ‘Triumph of the Will!’”  If a fellow expects a flick to be a big disappointment and it is; does that mean it wasn’t?

Is the fact that an elite bunch of hackers can keep track of every phone call in a foreign country for an entire month but they can’t find a missing airliner an indication that Americans are more gullible than previously assumed?

Recently we read two history books (such as “The Deserters” by Charles Glass) that indicate there was more anarchy in Paris during the Liberation by the American troops than there was during the Nazi’s Occupy Paris period.  Does that mean American exceptionalism is a valid concept?  Just because a Prussian cavalry officer can ride a horse doesn’t mean he automatically qualifies as a “cowboy,” eh?

A bumper sticker that advises “You don’t want to be associated with those nutcases” is much easier to digest than a book that presents some in-depth analysis of the idea that since a capitalist makes a fortune on the work done by his serfs, it might be reasonable to let the laborers share in the bounty.  WTF?  Shutup and get back to work!  Reading all of Albert Camus’ “The Rebel” would be more like work than relaxation.

Who can’t breeze through “Anarcho-Syndicalism Theory and Practice,” by Rudolf Rocker, in a single eveing?

If the capitalists can get the police, media, and members of the clergy to pall parrot the bumpersticker ideology, then maybe the capitalist will have some chump change to donate to his favorite politician’s re-election fund.

The general public stays away from events such as last weekend’s Anarchist’s Book Fair (“Good boy!  Want a doggie treat?”) because they have been trained to think it would be a bit like attending a convention of biker gang members.  The crowds were well behaved.  Some T-shirt vendors must make out like bandits at events such as this one.

We had wondered if there would be Anarchist books for kids.  We scored a copy of Woodie Guthrie’s “New Baby Train” for $3 and were relieved to learn that there was not a gap in the realm of pop culture that we would feel obligated to fill.  Whew!  That was close.

[Note from the Photo Editor:  Didn’t someone from Oakland once say:  “A convention is a convention is a convention. . .”?  Photo of last week’s Anarchists’ Book Fair looks a lot like a generic image.  Frank Sinatra was famous for telling movie directors that the first take that had just been shot got a “That’s good enough” rating and we have adopted that as the official motto of the World’s Laziest Journalist Industries.]

Leona Helmsley summed up the irony of the middle class and poor Oakland taxpayers paying for the damage that the Oakland Police Department inflicted on someone protesting an unfair taxation program that favors the rich, when she said:  “We don’t pay taxes.  Only the little people do.”

Now the decisions of the disk jockey (“What?  Me fascist?”) are final and he doesn’t want any quibbling about his choice for the three best anarchy songs of all time:  GWAR’s version of “Get into my Car,”  Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the name . . .”  and the best anarchy song of them all “Helter Skelter.”  We have to go to Chopshicks in Oakland to cover the Saturday slap art show.  Have a “getcha a case of beer for that” type week.

March 21, 2014

March Madness eclipses real news

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: , , , — Bob Patterson @ 12:23 pm

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee 

CBS Evening News, on Sunday March 18, 2014, spent almost as much time covering the voting for the fate of the Crimea area in the Ukraine as it did in assessing the prospects presented by the basketball schedule for March Madness and that brought up the question of news value.  Back in 1939, were newspaper readers anxious for facts about the first NCAA basketball tournament or were the front pages filled with details elaborating the esoteric aspects of America’s foreign policy?

Most news broadcasts lately mention that a Soviet Naval base with great strategic importance is located in the province that includes the city of Sevastopol.  We did not hear much background information and had to look it up.  The Germans captured Sevastopol in WWII.  It was retaken by the Soviet Army.  The city was leveled during the fighting.  A half a million Russians died in the struggle to control the region including the nearby city of Stalingrad.

To understand just how offensive Russians find Obama’s medaling think how upset Americans would be if Putin told the American President that the battle field at Gettysburg could be improved starting with an urban development plan.

Putin’s heavy handed manipulation of the region is inappropriate but it sure won’t help matters if President Obama talks tough and gets into a “pissing match” with Russia.  President Obama’s greatest gift to the Republicans may be a revival of the Cold war but they will still hate him.

Since CBS will be broadcasting some of the games to determine the NCAA basketball champions and since Americans don’t care much about what the ultimate consequences of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (which was signed in 1939) will be; the coverage of the relative entertainment value of this year’s sporting event might, in retrospect, seem like a good news judgment call.

Unfortunately, in 1939, the management at CBS assigned their star reporter, Edward R. Murrow, to cover international developments in Europe and not the history making first installment of the NCAA basketball championship which was won by Coach Howard Hobson’s team from Oregon, when they beat Ohio State.

It doesn’t seem likely that 75 years from now, extensive coverage of this year’s March Madness will seem like a better news judgment call than some in-depth reporting about the history of Russia would provide but almost no one alive today will be able to live to see what is considered important old news in 2089.

Since all the speculation about what might have happened to the missing airliner seems amateurish and inept, we asked for and where granted an interview with a fellow who is on the board of directors at the Amalgamated Conspiracy Theory Factory.

When we asked him what really happened, he noted that the plane was presumed to have gone west into the Indian Ocean.  “Is there a terrorist friendly destination in that direction?”  We answered “Somalia.”  “If the radio and transponder were turned off, would the airplane crew have missed something if they strayed into restricted air space and were challenged?”  We asked:  “How could there be restricted air space in the middle of the Indian Ocean?”  He smiled, shrugged, and said:  “Just suppose that there was for the sake of this conversation.”  The columnist pantomimed shooting at something in the sky.  Our expert witness paused for a moment or two and then asked:  “If it was in restricted air space, would they let searchers and the press into the area under the restricted air space where the debris would fall?”  We frowned and growled “Not bloody well likely.” After another shrug and smile, he said:  “Maybe they made it to Somalia and were given a safe haven for hijackers.”  Neither scenario would get much more than scant news coverage in the USA.

While most of the United States continued to suffer from a long hard winter, the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in San Francisco was held while the Bay Area experienced balmy shirtsleeve weather.  Would conservative TV networks want to run a feature story that implies global warming is a fête accompli or would they rather focus their audience’s attention on the apparent contradiction a harsh winter presents?

The contrast aspect of the warm weather in San Francisco while cities back east struggled with snow removal problems was virtually stonewalled by the news media.

Isn’t it curious that in the land that venerates a Free Press, criticism of journalism has virtually disappeared?  Would A. J. Liebling find that amusing?

American news media seems perfectly content to ignore the Fukushima clean up and any concomitant impact that disaster has had on the environment.

The third week in March of 2014 may be used by future historians to designate when the America’s Free Press went flat line and marked the end of an era.

Substituting amusing and interesting information in place of fact filled political analysis might draw bigger ratings and consequently please network executives and it will take years before historians and media critics can produce any definitive conclusions about the results such a development might produce.

The best that the World’s Laziest Journalist can try to achieve is to spend time gathering innocuous information that proves the old maxim:  If you are having fun doing it; it isn’t work.

George Clayton Johnson who wrote several scripts for the Twilight Zone also wrote the first episode of Star Trek (not to be confused with the pilot episode) on a typewriter.  He has a page on Facebook and that makes us wonder if George will send a friend request to George Takei or will it be vice versa?  Will they have a friendly competition to see who gets the most Facebook friends?

Early this week, we read an online report that says that authorities in Cuba are starting efforts to refurbish Ernest Hemingway’s home Finca Vega in hopes of increasing the tourist attraction value of the location.  The World’s Laziest Journalist has a visit to that very place on his bucket list and the prospects for getting there are slim and none, but isn’t there a song from Man of La Mancha that can serve as a musical inspiration for such an attempt?

Just this week, we snagged a bargain copy of Thomas Wolfe’s “You Can’t Go Home Again” and were surprised to find that it contained a section that rhapsodized about finding love while soaking up the invigorating atmosphere at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.

Did you know that those games were televised?  They were filmed and the processing of the film caused a slight delay (about a minute) so that it could not be called “live” coverage.

[Note from the photo editor:  While many mayors in the USA were worried about snow removal, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee was participating in a St. Patrick’s Day parade that was blessed with sunshine and temperatures in the mid Sixties and hence provided an image that graphically demonstrated the contrast aspect of the big country’s weather for that particular day.]

Near the end of chapter 16, of the aforementioned novel, Thomas Wolfe wrote:  “Was not this world of fashion and of privilege the deadliest enemy of art and truth?”

Now the disk jockey will play Marty Robbins’ “Beyond the Reef,” Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza’s duet “Bali Hai,” and the Andrew Sisters’ “(How’d ya like to spend) Christmas on Christmas Island?”  Since the New York Times probably won’t cover it, we figure we best go cover the 19th annual Anarchist Book Fair at the Crucible in Oakland on Saturday.  Have an “enemy of art and truth” type week.

February 28, 2014

Beer and Loafing: On the Campaign Trail ’16

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: , , , — Bob Patterson @ 1:22 pm

Protest in Berkeley 2014

A spontaneous chance to cover a political protest in Berkeley on the morning of Sunday February 23, 2014 provided a photo-op and an opportunity to learn about a political dispute that hasn’t suffered from overanalyzes on the network TV newscasts.  The Dalai Lama had given a speech and the protesters were trying to draw coverage of the suppression of the Shugden sect.  The splinter group is brining a Sunni vs. Shiite style dispute to Buddhism.

The serendipity discovery of the religious feud was an opportunity to write a column about the allegations that the Chinese government was funding the rebel religious group for political reasons and that the Shugden believers were responding with accusations that the Dalai Lama was guilty of bigotry and religious suppression.

Initially our inclination, since access to the event was very limited, was to dash off a column about how restricting coverage to news events is an initial step towards managed news and de facto censorship.

We were bothered by the fact that devoting a full column to one particular topic in a week when a smorgasbord of issues begs for attention does a disservice to the other problems.

Has anyone noted that the Arizona veto story was a perfect example of a wedge issue taking up valuable air time on talk radio while the war in Afghanistan crumbles into another example of why quagmires aren’t popular with taxpayers?

Did a brief blip on the news radar, about the possibility that American sailors may have been exposed to a dangerous amount of radiation while providing a propaganda photo op moment at Fukushima, unleash a discussion about Veterans’ benefits?  If it did, we missed that.

When Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced the plans to reduce the Military to the 1940 level, we thought about doing a column questioning that ploy which might have the unintended consequence of causing a member of the Axis of Evil to become more belligerent.  Then we wondered if it was a variation of the rope-a-dope strategy meant to goad some more aggressive response to American foreign policy.

Then the media started reporting some ominous activity on the Ukraine border with the Soviet Union and we were reminded that after giving Syria an “or else” ultimatum, President Obama backed off on his threats to that country.  When Secretary of State John Kerry issued a similar sounding “or else” message, it brought back echoes of the preliminary stages of the Cuban Missile Crises and we wondered if President Obama was ready for a similarly tense confrontation.

After buying a bargain copy of Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing:  The Campaign Trail ’73,” we noticed that much of the material could be written this week with only a few name changes being necessary.

Thompson’s description of the scene when George McGovern is asked if he would support Ed Muskie if he got the nomination and gave a “Yes, I’m inclined to that position” made us think that most likely Vice President Joseph Biden will back Hilary after she gets the nomination in the summer of 2016.

When Thompson castigates the Air Force for the results of the bombs they dropped, it sounded very much like the current disapproval some are expressing about the drone strikes.

Hunter marvels that McGovern had the Democratic nomination wrapped up by April.  The New York Times this week ran a story that makes it look like Hilary has a lock on the nomination and the only horse race for the press to cover is over in the Republican Party.

The Thompson book skips over the second rate burglary at the Watergate.  All most all journalists dismiss the question “what did the buglers get at the Watergate?” and ignore the crimes’ immediate impact on American History.  How did Thompson handle that thorny issue when it was a current event?

Unfortunately the book doesn’t have an Index and we started flipping pages and skim reading to get to the Gonzo assessment of the burglary in the context of the 1972 Presidential Election.

There was some iconoclastic name calling, a lot of name dropping, and the self promotion aspect of the book was, in retrospect, annoying.  Hemingway had to fight a perpetual battle with the bull known as a blank white sheet of paper.  Hunter S. Thompson fought a myth of Sisyphus battle with deadlines.  That was before the advent of cable news networks.

At the Amalgamated Conspiracy Theory Factory many of the employees with a great deal of seniority believe that the Watergate burglars went looking for skeletons in the Democratic closet and that they found what they wanted.  Among the material they took were copies of Thomas Eagleton’s medical records.  After he got the Vice Presidential nomination and the conventioneer went home, somebody leaked the damning information to the press.  The McGovern campaign was tripped up and never regained their footing thus assuring Richard Nixon of re-election.

There is an old journalism adage:  “When you can’t cover the story, cover the coverage.”  That accurately describes the essence of the Gonzo account of the McGovern Presidential campaign.

Doug Brew, who parlayed an assignment to cover the 1980 Ronald Reagan campaign for Time magazine into the coveted White House correspondent slot, once summarized the attitude of the big league journalists:  “Monkey see; monkey do.”

The hell with Thomas Eagleton’s medical records and the fact that they were the keystone story for Nixon’s reelection; on the morning of Friday February 28, 2014, we had a 10 a.m. reservation for a computer and at 7 a.m. the Perils of Pauline question was could we pump out the necessary keystrokes, transfer the column to the thumb drive, and get to the computer appointment without getting soaked in the much needed rain storm that was helping to break the drought in California and then get it posted on time?

Our efforts to get press credentials for the 1968 Democratic National Convention had failed.  Our attempt to get a press pass to cover this weekend’s Oscar pageant had been unsuccessful.  A word to the wise is sufficient.  Our efforts to secure a Press Pass to the 2016 Republican National Convention will begin this weekend.

Isn’t the decision about where to hold that event being made this weekend?  Isn’t Cleveland the front runner?

As New Jersey’s governor Chris Christy’s Presidential hopes are nibbled away by the piranha-icle mainstream media, the question now for political pundits (resorting to sports clichés) will be who is going to be the next Republican party bum-of-the-month?  Our prediction is that the man who gets the nomination will sit out the primaries and then listen to a committee begging him to break a deadlock.  (Hint:  His initials are J. E. B.)

[Note from the photo editor:  Photos of a protest in Berkeley have been popular for almost fifty years.  The tradition continued last Sunday when members of the Shugden sect protest of  a speaking appearance by the Dalai Lama drew extensive news coverage.]

Hunter, on page 300 of the Campaign ’72 book, writes:  “Later that night, at a party on the roof of the Doral, a McGovern staffer asked me who I would have chosen for the VP  . . . and finally, after long brooding, I said I would have chosen Ron Dellums, the black congressman from Berkeley.”

Now the dick jockey will play Ted Nugent’s “Journey to the Center of the Mind,” Rattlife’s “Great White Buffalo,” and As I Lay Dying’s song “Nothing Left.”  We have to go check out the San Francisco History Expo being held this weekend at the Old Mint.  Have a “when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro” type week.

February 21, 2014

Liberal Journalism MIA in Berkeley?

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: , , , — Bob Patterson @ 1:23 pm

Dorothea Lange, then a Berkeley resident, took the Thirties era photo of a farmer’s wife (the image is called “Migrant Mother”) that became the “go to” image for depicting America in the Depression.  Mario Savio delivered the speech that some historians credit as the real start of the Sixties from on top of a police car in Spraul Plaza at UC Berkeley.  Morris Dickstein wrote:  “The History of the Sixties was written as much in the Berkeley Barb as in the New York Times.”  It seemed only natural to expect that in the Bush era journalists would be clogging both Shattuck and Telegraph Avenues to relay stories and photos of the famous variations of Main Street to the rest of the world.

Wolf pack coverage of the latest installment of bad times still hasn’t arrived in the university town a few miles east of San Francisco and so the question must be asked:  Has Berkeley become passé or has America’s Free Press screwed up again?

The Berkeley campus has a student newspaper and a school of journalism and the fact that the J-students aren’t covering the city’s homeless as relentlessly as the paparazzi dog actors in Hollywood may actually be the story.

Ninja Kitty, a denizen of Shattuck Avenue, finds it curious that the local politicians ignore the homeless at the same time that tourists from around come to the city wanting to take photos of hippies.  Do the tourists contribute to the politicians’ reelection campaigns?

He may have provided a Rosetta stone clue when he noted that the dynamic duo on the Armstrong and Getty radio show distort their audience’s perception of the homeless by focusing attention on the fringe element of the contingent of Bay Area vagabonds and concentrate on warping their observations and generalizations by focusing on the panhandlers in San Francisco who are shunned by the majority of the homeless community.  Why would anyone want to provide such inept attempts at journalism?

Is focusing on a group’s radical extremists an example of fair and balanced journalism?  What if a Liberal radio show asserted that the Republicans Party was populated by people brandishing guns as a way of standing their ground to protect their right to handle rattlesnakes in a religious ceremony?  “You’ll take my rattlesnake from my cold dead hands!”

The World’s Laziest Journalist has listened to Armstrong and Getty and noticed that their basic knowledge of the homeless milieu is inaccurate.  The homeless in Berkeley regularly use the access they have for taking a shower.  The homeless, who often sleep in the open, keep dogs with them as a means of having a burglary alarm system while they sleep.  Any homeless person can verify the accuracy of the folk wisdom:  “The rich rob from the poor; and the poor rob from each other.”

The hippies became known as “freaks” in the late Sixties and since Diane Arbus was known for photographing unusual people, we often marvel that she didn’t document the vagabonds in the Sixties who hitchhiked into and out of Berkeley.

Richard Avedon was hired (by Rolling Stone Magazine) to set up a portable studio at the 1976 Democratic National Convention and take portraits of all the most prominent politicians.  We’ve often wondered why he didn’t cover the anti-war protesters in Berkeley earlier in his career.

If the mainstream media ignores the Berkeley angle now in a complete contradiction of how, hypothetically, Dorothea Lang would have responded to the opportunity, we can chalk it up to unknown factors, but the nagging question remains:  If students at UCB in the Sixties used their local Berkeley angle to gain entry to the exclusive mainstream media In-crowd of the New York publishing world, why then, aren’t the Berkeley panhandlers of today in need of a press agent to handle interview requests?

If you have ever closely watched a human and a dog walk together, the dog frequently makes an effort to get his stealth cues from the human’s face and body language.  They often check to see if the Homo sapiens are emitting subconscious (to the human) clues about how the canine should react.  Is the approach of a stranger a bad thing (grrrr) or a good (wag the tail)?

Could it be that the (Sixties cliché alert!) sell out to the Establishment by Journalists in the USA has become so complete and pervasive that J-schools project the “do not offend the media owners” attitude so thoroughly that the students in Berkeley don’t bother to send query letters to New York based editors about counter culture stories?  Many of the Sixties students were eager to tell their stories in underground newspapers and the trend morphed into a farm club system of developing talent for the In-crowd in New York City (see the book “Smoking Typewriters” by John McMillian) but these days in the Fox era, it seems that the method is to make absolutely sure that Journalism students know from the start that unorthodox methods and stories are off limits and a binary choice about the capitalistic society has to be made.  “Are you in or are you out?”

Speaking of higher minimum wage rates, we are investigating a rumor that makes the assertion that some affluent college students are offering prestigious firms substantial sums of cash to land an internship gig which will give them some material to list on their resumes.

A scholar from Boston, who is in Berkeley to audit a class in philosophy, has told us that he is interested in making some suggestions to the city council regarding urban development and since that topic has a cusp area that overlaps with the needs and wants of the homeless, a greater interest in affordable housing may soon become a relevant factor in an area where tenants rights is impacting the subject of affordable housing.

Since the overall Conservative strategy has long been “divide and conquer,” circumstances, which cause a uniting of the assorted activists working on the challenges of renters’ rights, the long term consequences of home foreclosures, and the problems of the homeless, could , if they all joined forces, become a worse nightmare scenario for the champions of capitalism in action.

The World’s Laziest Journalist believes that the One Percent does not want a permanent solution to the homeless problem and consequently that topic will be revisited in future columns for years to come.

Since many of the political pundits with national audiences have pointed out that the Republican Party seems to be simultaneously alienating women, Chicanos, labor, abortion rightists, pacifists, and the advocates of legalized pot; it seems that there is only one possible strategy available to the Republicans to win the contest.

Brad Friedman, the leading Internet voice for criticism (Google hint:  Bradblog) of the electronic voting machines, with no verifiable results, has been labeled a conspiracy theorist, and so the only response to the aforementioned challenge may require a reference to the W. C. Fields quote:  “If a thing’s worth having; it’s worth cheating for.”

Stoned munchies?  Cities in the San Francisco Bay Area (Berkeley?) are finding that there is a noticeable increase in the sales of Girl Scout cookies at the locations that are in close proximity to the dispensaries for medicinal marijuana.

[Note from the Photo Editor:  A portrait of a fellow who is trying hard to cope with the new hard times will be used to illustrate this column.  Isn’t a poor attempt to imitate the photojournalism of Dorothea Lange, better than none at all?]

In “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” (on page 67), Hunter S. Thompson wrote:  “History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of ‘history’ it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time – and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.”

Now the disk jockey will play Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson,” the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man,” and the Searchers’ “Needles and pins.”  We have to go look for a news story about the new Tonight Show host, Jimmy Falon, which mentions that one of his predecessors was Al “Jazzbo” Collins.  Have a “we don’t gotta show you no stinkin’ badges” type week.

February 14, 2014

Old soldiers tell excellent stories

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: , , , — Bob Patterson @ 1:26 pm

When two members of the United States Marine Corps, getting away temporarily from the rigors of combat on Guadalcanal, were put in a jail cell in New Zealand and told to sleep it off, they couldn’t shut off the adrenaline flow and so they spent most of the night telling each other their life stories.  Norm W. was impressed by the other guy’s determination to tell his story in a book that would be written “after the war.”  In the mid-Fifties, Norm noticed the publicity about the release of the film “Battle Cry” and headed straight for the nearest theater showing it.  He just had to see the new flick because the back story of the life of the author Leon Uris was the same information he had been told in New Zealand .

Norm told many wonderful stories about his experiences.  Once when a group of Marines wanted to have a sing-a-long in a New Zealand tavern, they were temporarily stymied by the fact that the place didn’t have a piano.  Luckily a near by gin-mill did have one so the Marines “borrowed” it and proceeded to have an impromptu songfest.  Norm’s stepson recorded one of his tales and just like in the movie “Big Fish” only regretted the fact that he hadn’t recorded more after Norm passed away.

Alan Lomax went around the USA recording and transcribing folk songs and earned a place in the Pop Culture Hall of Fame.  Why then doesn’t an enterprising film school student tape the every shrinking supply of World War II vets telling their stories?  There are plenty of excellent stories lurking inside some old infantry men who are very anxious to pass their stories on to future generations.  We don’t mean interviews such as featured in the Ken Burns films that discuss the overall strategy for WWII.  Where are the interviews that record for posterity the day to day events that get told at various reunions?

For example, once, many moons ago, the World’s Laziest Journalist was in the stacks at the Santa Monica Public Library trying to do some fact checking on WWII.  An old guy asked us why we were looking at the books in one particular section.

The 109 Regiment from the 28th Division, from our hometown of Scranton Pa., had been involved in the Battle of the Bulge.  The old guy pointed to the group of books on that particular topic and told us about the time he had seen a quiet empty café and (despite the fact it was against regulations) he parked his tractor trailer and had a quiet, memorable lunch.  He spoke enough French to get his food and pay the bill.  The village seemed to be a ghost town.  The next day he learned that Bastogne, where he had stopped for the meal, was in German held Territory.

One neighbor in Scranton told a story about talking to a German POW and discovering that the Kraut knew most of the popular bars in the North Eastern Pennsylvania town.

When we were young, we were strongly cautioned to realize that the slapstick comedy of the Three Stooges was not to be imitated or taken seriously because it was unrealistic.  We were told that an uncle in the Seabees had been attacked (on Guadalcanal) by an enemy soldier and had defended himself by killing the guy by hitting him on the head with an empty bucket.

Last year, on December 7, we heard news reports that the number of people who had survived the attack on Pearl Harbor had fallen to such a low number that the annual reunions in Hawaii were too impractical to continue.

While living in the Hollywood area, if we had collected a nickel for every time we heard the offer “we’ll write the script together and split the payoff,” we’d have enough today to buy a very fancy coffee latte.

We had a co-worker in Santa Monica who had a neighbor who had been one of the “Red tailed devils” (i.e. a Tuskegee airman).

Didn’t Tonight show host Jack Paar tell a story about the captain of a U. S. Navy ship that hid his girlfriend as a stowaway in the captain’s quarters for an entire deployment?

In Paar’s era, late night talk shows featured some fine examples of storytelling, but when the bean counters discovered that talk shows could be used to hawk Hollywood’s latest films, the talk show format became a series of disguised sales pitches which we call “promobabble.”

A once sentence synopsis of a plot for a potential movie is called a “pitch” in tinseltown parlance and Bo Zenga, who was the King of the Pitch became a movie director, so he would be a great potential audience for one particular WWII nurse’s story.  She was captured, became a P. O. W., escaped and made the journey to a neutral country and spent the rest of the war in that location.  It was “the Great Escape” with a woman protagonist.  Yeah, we know where Zenga’s office is.  Should we send him a query letter asking if we can “pitch” the old pitcher or what?  Should we contact a member of the Writer’s Guild and offer him half the proceeds if he can get his agent to make the pitch successfully?

Has the life story of combat photographer Dickey Chapelle ever been told in a movie?

Once, on a flight from Los Angeles to NYC, we expected the woman next to us to display snapshots of he world’s greatest grandchildren for our approval.  When we questioned her she said that she had spent WWII working in Washington D. C. as a secretary for a member of the government bureaucracy named William Donovan.  Wait just a darn minute!  We had heard Wild Bill Donovan, the founder of the group that became the CIA, called many things, but we had never heard him be labeled as a member of the government bureaucracy.  We often wonder if she ever got around to writing her autobiography.

Obviously not all tales from WWII have commercial movie potential but with all the film schools turning out all the next generation’s award winning documentary film makers, why aren’t those youngsters doing the Leadbellly act and interviewing on camera the continuously diminishing supply of WWII veterans?

In the past, we did some online fact checking and found that in the San Francisco Bay Area there are some storytelling competitions.  When we went back to recheck that fact for this column we learned that there is an annual storytelling event which will be held

Recently Coach John Madden told KCBS listeners that golf tournaments that get rained out are the best because the golfers get to hand out in the clubhouse and tell their best stories (again).

There are a bunch of Irish bars in the San Francisco Bay Area and one, the Starry Plough,  offers Irish dancing and songs, but there doesn’t seem to be one fooking bar where an open mike is available for a real storytelling opportunity and/or competition.  WTF?  What would happen if an Irish bar had a storytelling competition?  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph it would be “Katie bar the door” time, eh?

[Photo editor’s note:  The Berkeley artist, known as “Hardley Notee Sayahblay” on Facebook, is renowned for his digital images, but only a few get to know his ability as a raconteur who voices an Infantryman’s complaints about the Korean War.  We tried to select an image of him that implies an underlying back story.]

Robert McKee’s book, “Story,” is an excellent look at the art of storytelling from the scriptwriter’s point of view.  In it, McKee wrote (page 196):  “In essence we have told one another the same tale, one way or anther, since the dawn of humanity, and that story could be successfully called The Quest.  All stories take the form of a Quest.”

We asked the disk jockey  to play songs that tell a story and he selected the Bill Parsons (AKA Bobby Bare) song “All American Boy,” Tom T. Hall’s “Forty Dollars,” and Red Sovine’s “Phantom 309.”  Our DJ will include a memorial spin of Shirley Temple’s “Good Ship Lollypop.”  We have to go see “Monument Men.”  Have a “they all lived happily ever after” type week.

February 7, 2014

Beatniks, Hippies, and panhandlers

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: , , , — Bob Patterson @ 1:23 pm

In the arcane world of S & M, it is traditional for the masochist to eagerly and enthusiastically receive the punishment being doled out by the sadist.  For example, if the victim is being whipped, after each lash is received, the traditional response is:  “Thank you sir, may I have another?”

President Obama seems to have successfully weaned the Democratic Party onto the idea of building the XL Pipeline.  “Thank you, sir.  May I have another?”

President Obama was unsuccessful in his attempts to get Congress to approve extended unemployment benefits.  “Thank you, sir.  May I have another?”

It seems that cuts to the food stamp program are unavoidable.

“Mmurf murb.”

“What?  I can’t hear you!”

“THANK YOU, SIR.  MAY I HAVE ANOTHER?”

“That’s better.”

Some time ago, this columnist suggested that the Passive Aggressive tactics of the Republicans in Congress were reminiscent of the sit down strike strategy used by workers at Chevrolet in the Thirties.  You will disregard that comment and only believe and repeat propaganda that is approved at the National Conventions.  Is that understood?

Who was it that said:  “What’s good for the billionaires is good for America!”?

On the night of February 5, 2014 to the 6in Berkeley, a person died on the streets.  It was rumored to be from hypothermia caused by the cold and rain.  If a weather dead can be reported in such a way that it subtly ridicules the idea of “global warming,” the national media put it on the Evening News, but if it happens as a result of a rainstorm, spike the story for being insignificant.

The Los Angeles County assessor was arrested in October of 2012.  In October of 2013, additional charges were filed.  The Los Angeles Time reported those bits of information.  The national media seems to be stonewalling the story.

The Fairness Doctrine is gone and the public airwaves are now overstocked with Republican talking points.

Berkeley war correspondent, grandmother, and blogger, Jane Stillwater, is going to Haiti to do some fact checking and gather some material.  She is seeking a letter of introduction which will help her get an opportunity to interview Paul Farmer, Jean Paul Aristide, and/or Francois Papa Doc Duvalier.  (Google hint:  Jane Stillwater blog)

Before WWII, Europe was crowded with journalists who were salaried employees for various newspapers in the USA.  These days it is up to citizen journalists to keep American voters informed.  “Thank you sir.  May I have another?”

Aren’t most (all?) of the reporters for American media covering the Winter Olympics?

Democracy in America is in shambles.  The spectacle of the President using the State of the Union Address to declare that he was retroactively endorsing the Imperial Presidency program initiated by George W. Bush was pathetic.

Will there be a future conspiracy theory that promotes the idea that President Obama was a Trojan Horse strategy used by Republicans to disarm the Democratic Party’s animosity aimed at the Bush Dynasty?  If Obama adopts every one of George W. Bush’s policies, what’s the use of continuing the snide remarks about the Bush Dynasty?

If the Dynasty resentment vanishes, what’s to prevent a JEB bandwagon in 2016?

What good does it do for the World’s Laziest Journalist to do all the grumbling?

One particular website has been an example of American Cultural Imperialism.  Did a column critical of that elitist attitude cause a change?  We noticed recently that they ran an ad proclaiming that they were now a portal to the radio stations of the World.  Does that mean that folks who are tired of Republican talking points can use that site to listen to Triple J, Skyrock, and/or Radio Caroline?  Maybe we can do some extensive fact checking and write an entire column about this new widow of opportunity for radio fans.

Isn’t there a goodly number of trucking music fans in America who might get some enjoyment out of hearing Australian trucking songs?

Is it ironical (or just an example of poignancy?) that while Republican ideology has become dominant on radio, Democratic Party programs (such as Gay Marriage and Medicinal marijuana) are proliferating at a rapid rate on the state level?

If capitalism works like the conservatives say it does, how long will it take before Top Forty music radio programming makes a comeback?

What if Casey Kasem’s Top Forty countdown becomes more popular online than Uncle Rushbo?   Won’t radio programmer wunderkinds want to play what sells?

Has any online source for radio programming registered the XERB.com domain name?  How hard can it be to find a gravely voiced disk jockey to become Wolfman 2.0?  World wide access would make “coast to coast, border to border, wall to wall and treetop tall” seem chintzy in comparison.

With just a skosh under three years to go, folks are going to get more than a wee bit fed up with “Thank you sir. May I have another?” fanatical enthusiasm for Obama and his capitalist masters.

While reading “Counter Culture through the Ages from Abraham to Acid House” (by Ken Goffman [AKA R. U. Serius] and Dan Joy) we noticed that while the conservatives have been exerting their influence on the media, the lack of news coverage of any current counter culture trend is rather unsettling.  Where is the counterculture action happening these days?  How many times in a Western movie did the statement “I don’t hear anything” evoke a “That’s what worries me!” response?

Back in the Sixties, boys and girls, the reporters for main stream media used to sneak hippie sentiments into back of the book trend spotting stories.  This fellow Hunter S. Thompson shaved his head while running for sheriff and then called his opponent with a G. I. haircut “the guy with the long hair.”

Is it still the case that “we don’t grow our hair long and shaggy, like the hippies out in San Francisco do”?  Can we get back to you next week on that question?  Does the Haight attract more tourists than North Beach?  Would today’s kids rather be a hippie or a beatnik?

Recently the New York Times ran a front page story that made the assertion that franchise restaurants across the USA were struggling, but that posh upscale eateries were thriving.

If Mario Savio were attending UCB this year would he be driving a flashy Ferrari?

In 1965 weren’t the students protesting rising tuition costs?  Didn’t Prop 13 use a claim that homeowners would save hundreds of tax dollars to get them to pass a measure which saved businesses thousands (ultimately millions?) of dollars?  Didn’t Prop 13 pave the way for bankers to reap massive profits from student loans?

[Note from the Photo editor:  Is it sadistic to run a photo of a very exotic Ferrari with a column about how tough times are?]

The aforementioned history of the Counterculture informs readers (on page 232) that:  “Seeing no hope for positive change, the hipster had no desire to confront the repressive political apparatus and was barely even interested in offending ‘straight’ conformists.”

Now the disk jockey will play Lord Buckley’s “The Nazz,” Stan Freberg’s “Green Christmas,” and Jeff Bridges and the Abiders’ song “She Lay her whip down.”  We have to go find a used copy of a book called “Screw the Roses.”  Have a “needles and pins” type week.

January 31, 2014

Super Bowl, Olympics, and the Imperial Presidency (2.0)

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: , , , — Bob Patterson @ 2:29 pm

The entertainment industry’s awards season has shifted into high gear, football fans are eagerly awaiting the Superbowl this weekend, and the TV news anchors obsessed on the traffic problems caused by ice in Georgia this week.  Automobile enthusiasts learned that a museum for the “inventor” of the Ford Cobra, Carroll Shelby, is in the seeking funding stage of development.  The Winter Olympics will be next week’s big diversionary news gambit from the media.

Thanks to cable news’ need for new sensations syndrome, criticism and analysis of the State of the Union speech was (reluctantly?) given priority for one day.  Did anyone see a Libertarian spokesperson get network airtime to respond to the President’s speech?

The elation of the Democrats in response to the President’s State of the Union speech may have been a bit premature because, upon reflection, what Obama did by resorting to the strategy of using executive orders as a way around a recalcitrant Congress is to grant the Democratic Party’s retroactive approval of George W. Bush’s concept of the Imperial Presidency.

Since there was no particularly gruesome news story to report on Wednesday of this week, the political propaganda factory (AKA the news media) was forced to focus the public’s attention on a macho dynamic Republican who may have subtly been employing the macho hombre attitude of “Let’s see if Hilary can do this!” to confront a reporter with a chance to become a nationally known personality because of a failed attempt for a gottcha moment.

Senator Ted Cruz responded to the President’s State of the Union speech with an opinion piece for Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal that was very critical of the Imperial Presidency of Barack H. Obama.  Democrats who do not appreciate high quality hypocrisy will never understand what makes Republicans tick.

The President’s Year of Action may be the start of the Golden Age of Hypocrisy because this do-si-do maneuver now has the Democrats spouting old talking points that the Republicans used to defend the tactic when it was used by George W. Bush and the Republicans are recycling old Democratic criticism against Dubya to make citizens think ill of Obama.

This couldn’t have worked out better for the old Dubya cadre if they had meticulously planned it while they were occupying the White House.  Some conspiracy theory minded cynics make the bold assertion that the Bush junta used some very devious methods to engineer the Obama win in 2008 and then left the fellow in the White House no other option to salvage his legacy but to carry on Bush’s Forever War just as the Texas petroleum prodigy posse intended.

A large number of folks who will tune in to the Superbowl are mostly interested in seeing the commercials which makes us wonder: since the football fans get meticulous scrutiny of the play they just saw, why doesn’t a cable channel provide in-depth analysis of the Superbowl ads right after they air?  Heck if the casual viewer cares more about the sales pitches, why doesn’t some obscure cable channel have experts explain the hidden persuaders angle to the day’s biggest attraction and ignore the game completely?

Since Australia wants to promote tourism, why don’t they (with a little help from their friends at Qantas?) pay for a live commercial during the Superbowl featuring an attractive lass in a bikini reporting live from Bondi Beach or Cottesloe inviting the Americans struggling through the coldest winter of the Global Warming era to “come on down” and work on their tan?

Speaking of “Think Big!,” a friend in Kansas is going to get a passport and immediately head for Mexico.  Me thinks we should send her a “Best of Edith Piaf” album for her birthday.  Did Piaf do a cover of “April in Paris”?  What is Paris’ official theme song?

Speaking of Paris and Poughkeepsie (Didn’t famed model/photographer/war correspondent Lee Miller call both bergs “home”?) a gal pal in that area of New York wanted to lure the World’s Laziest Journalist into a screenwriting project.  Since we have seen two of our ideas appear on the TV screen and got nada for our efforts, we are inclined to send her a copy of Syd Field’s bible for rookie screenwriters and wish her the best of luck.  If we had a nickel for every time in L. A. that we heard “we’ll write it together and you will get half of the money!;” we’d have enough to buy a latte at a trendy coffee emporium.

How many folks would tune in if CBS reran the Ed Sullivan show featuring the first live American performance by the Beatles?  Replay the whole damn thing.  Commercials and all.  (“I want my Maypo!”)

The prospects for progressive pundits for the next three years are very grim.  In cold weather when a car won’t start a driver will often persist in trying and wear the batter down and thus insure that a call to Triple A for road assistance will be necessary.

The progressive pundits will spend the next three years trying to reassure the male voters that a woman Commander-in-chief for Bush’s continuing Forever War won’t be so bad.

Won’t Ann Coulter have such fun asserting that she was just joking when she was goading liberal men to boldly assert that:  “The old broad is the lesser of two evils.”?

Is it true that Karl Rove is saying:  “If they give the nomination to Hilary, we should pick Barbara Bush.”?

According to the hottest radio show on the West Coast, this week, in Sacramento, for the first time, a woman is the courtside announcer for an NBA team.

If the World’s Laziest Journalist were to be the only pundit to mention that Obama is using the “turnabout is fair play” philosophy and adopting the Bush Imperial Presidency methodology would all the paid commentators ignore the scoop or would they be ordered to not give the idea any chance of “going viral” via any publicity?

[Bike and pedestrian accidents are trending higher in San Francisco and the photo editor thought that a recent spot news photo could be used to illustrate a column that strongly hints that the President is throwing the Democratic Party under the bus.]

Annie Jacobsen, in her book “Area 51,” wrote (page 62):  “When the press disseminates false information that helps keep classified information a secret, the CIA sits back and smiles.”

Now the disk jockey will play Pete Seeger’s “Where have all the flowers gone?,”  “Die Antwoord’s “I Fink U Freaky,” and a Waylon Jennings song, which we recently just heard for the first time, “Must you throw dirt in my face?”  We have to go buy the new copy of Ukulele magazine.  Have a “Just kidding, dude!” type week.

January 24, 2014

Gonzo punditry from a sidecar

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: , , , — Bob Patterson @ 1:33 pm

 

“My Man Godfrey” starring William Powell and Carole Lombard from 1936 was selected to be the first film in the Pacific Film Archives new Funny Ha-Ha series and was shown on Thursday January 16, 2014.  Since the film is a screwball comedy about efforts to rehabilitate a homeless guy, we made an attempt to try to get one of Berkeley’s panhandlers to be our guest at the nostalgic look back at a Depression era depiction of the life of a pauper.  The film confirmed the cynical view that the more things change the more they don/t.

While walking back to our base of operations, we chanced upon a new addition to the Berkeley business scene and opted for a nosh and a late night coffee.  We were operating in the guise of a Herb Caen wannabe searching for column items that would be interesting, amusing, and informative.

Did you know that football injuries are not a new topic?  One of the clerks at Pacific Cookie Company on Telegraph Avenue informed us that the subject had caused her grandfather,  Dave Meggyesy, to quite his job as a professional football player and write a book on the subject.  He was given the opportunity to go on the Dick Cavett TV show to promote his book (isn’t such video content called “promobabble”?).  It turned out, according to the clerk, that a fellow guest that night was Janice Joplin and the singer, we were told, came on to the author.  We then had the chance to view an excerpt from that episode that was available on the Youtube website.  The St. Paul moment when Meggyesy heard a bone snap sounded familiar.  Seeing the snippet of the show made us realize that we had seen that particular installment of the Dick Cavett Show when it was originally broadcast.  Is it time for a paperback publisher to reissue Meggyesy’s  book, “Out of their league”?

Extreme Pizza on Shattuck Ave. seemed like a logical place to look for a new entry in our attempts to find the best pizza in Berkeley.  What we weren’t expecting was a chance to cross an item off our Bucket List.  While returning to the Amalgamated Conspiracy Theory Factory at its secret location in the vicinity of the UCB campus, we noticed a motorcycle with a sidecar attached.  It was in front of the pizza parlor and a nearby panhandler informed us that the owner worked inside the pizzeria.  We have done a story about the replicas of a 1939 BMW motorcycle (Google Imz-ural) but a ride in a motorcycle sidecar was an item that still lurked on our Bucket List.  We learned that the cycle’s owner was connected to the Shattuck Ave. source for a pizza fix.  Since he did not have a spare helmet with him, he offered the chance for the World’s Laziest Journalist to return on Saturday for a ride in a sidecar.  We have ridden in a biplane and the view from the sidecar is better because it isn’t restricted by wings and a fuselage.

What does a whimsical description of a trip through Berkeley in a motorcycle sidecar have to do with insightful and perceptive political commentary?  Americans are avid advocates of the idea that the free press in the United States delivers the important information to the citizens that permits them to make informed decisions about which political candidates are the best choice.

Unfortunately the poor saps don’t get any news about the situation at Fukushima and the most likely scenario for the attempt to contain the damage.  The suckers don’t get much specific information about the Target hack or where it originated.  For complex political reasons, it is best if the free press just totally ignores the end results produced by the George W. Bush military adventure in Iraq.  The cost effectiveness of the money being spent to support American military operations in Afghanistan is too complex for the listeners of Patriot radio.

Soap opera news that gets viewers all choked up watching a video clip that is the TV version of a classic Dorothea Lang still photo of a Depression era woman looking all forlorn and bedraggled, is now considered the modern equivalent of “This is London calling” journalism.

Journalism in the United States today might best be compared to the experience of asking a buddy about the hundred dollars he owes you and in response getting the question:  “Did your mom get out of the hospital yet?”

The Pacific Film Archives retrospective of classic American Comedy moves, on Sunday January 19, 2014, featured the 1933 Marx brothers “Duck Soup,” which tells the story of how a rich woman was able to coerce the fictional country of Freedonia into accepting Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho) as the country’s Prime Minister.  He promptly starts a war.  The film seems to be a prescient parable prediction of the Presidency of George W. Bush and that idea could be expanded into a complete column.

Would a column about poor officiating and bad sportsmanship in a football game be a suitable topic for use in the realm of progressive punditry?

In the Golden Age of skim reading and the short attention span, the challenge for someone who is expected to produce a steady stream of attempts to refute the Republican strategy of disparaging Hillary by providing sexist humor (where were the sexist Republicans when Sarah Palin was in the spotlight?) that questions the wisdom of giving the vote to (to use Frank Sinatra  terminology) frails, the challenge will be enormous because you can’t refute a funny one liner with a classroom lecture on liberal values.

The only valid way to fight a humorous attack is to “top” the one liner.  For example, when a woman said to Prime Minister Winston Churchill that if he were her husband, she would put poison in his coffee, he replied that if he were her husband, he’d drink it.

If the Republicans want to make Hillary the butt of their jokes for the next two and a half years, then the Democrats need to respond with ridicule for the Republican candidates.

The Brad Friedman’s Bardblog website pointed out a marvelous bit of Chris Christie humor by showing members of his audience a duet done by Jimmy Kimmel and Bruce Springsteen.  (Google hint:  Jimmy Kimmel Born to Run Spoof)

The Republican strategy for the Presidential Election seems to be a repeat of 2012.  They will let the media grind a series of Republican front runners into mincemeat and then at the last minute provide an unsullied “savior” candidate who has been waiting in the wings.  Our prediction for the last minute reluctant Republican candidate is JEB Bush.

We will annoy the snot out of a good conservative friend and ask if he can sees truth in this question:  Is the quality of journalism on Fox similar to the level of excellence rating given to the security provided for the audience at the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont?

Would skepticism about Global Warming cause biased media to ignore San Francisco’s January “heat wave”?

Political issues are a lot like the weather.  Everyone talks about them, but neither party actually does anything to solve the problems.

As Janis Joplin once said; “Tomorrow never comes.  It’s all the same fucking da-a-a-y, man.”

Now the disk jockey will play Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get you outta my head,” Brad Buckland’s “Boomaroo Flyer,” and Slim Dusty’s “Lights on the hill.”  We have to go find a good Australia Day party to crash.  Have a “Get it while you can” type week.

January 17, 2014

Same as it ever was

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: , , , — Bob Patterson @ 1:31 pm

[<B>Note:  This column is an example of Gonzo commentary and is therefore exempt from the fact checking process.</B>]

Jack London’s “The People of the Abyss” paints such a grim picture of people who are doomed to an abysmal existence of constant sorrow that will inevitably lead to an early grave but it does offer a possible view of the world that some political recidivists want to revive for America in the near future.  Was London’s tale of picaresque adventures titled “The Road,” a precursor of beat literature?  Was London’s “The Iron Heel” an inspiration for “It can’t happen here” or just a book that would hardly ever be compared to “The Canticle of Leibowitz”?  Did London’s “John Barleycorn” inspire “The Lost Weekend”?

After skimming through a copy of a Jack London biography we encountered in the Berkeley Public Library, we hightailed it off to the world famous Moe’s Books on Telegraph Avenue to see if they had an affordable used copy of the Library of America’s book containing those five of London ‘s social novels.  They did and so we paid cash for it (are charge cards the new century’s version of eight track tapes?) and started reading.

London was a socialist and so if he were still alive today he would probably do an appearance on Jon Stewart’s TV show to lament the status of the unemployment benefits that were recently terminated by the Simon Legree Republicans in Congress.  No one in their right mind really expects them to be reinstated, but the liberals are expected to play the game and urge the recalcitrant Republicans to recant and approve the resumption of the checks that prevent despair in the ranks of the job seekers.  The challenge for the Republicans is to find the rhetoric that will make their hard hearted response seem to be a logical extension of their compassionate Christian conservative philosophy.  Quibbling over parliamentary procedures is, of course, the perfect example of how Jesus Christ would answer the question:  “Do you want to restart the checks or not?”

London might be sarcastic about the free press’ feigned outrage, which is supposed to make the Democratic “attempts” to perform a resurrection on the social program that has flat lined look genuine, but is, instead, designed to divert attention from other topics where some back room manipulation is needed.

When the Target security breech was first announced, the hottest show on the West Coast made the assertion that the source of the hack was in Vietnam.  Have you seen any news stories about the source of the mischief?  Why is that information about the specifics of the source of the hack being ignored in the American media?

Are the doubts about the potability of water in some areas of West Virginia coming from the same whack jobs who say they can “prove” global warming is occurring (i.e. “the Scientists?  [Doesn’t that sound like the name for a Goth band?])  Aren’t those two ideas equally ludicrous?  Who would decline a drink of smelly blue water just because one of the global warming posse said it was “dangerous!”?

Is Fox or the New York Times presenting better and more coverage of events in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon?

While we were reconnoitering the Jack London cabin (made with material from London’s Yukon cabin) we encountered some transplants from Boston who were exploring their new hometown area and gave them some recommendations about how to most fully enjoy (one of London’s recurring themes in life) their new local area.  Get a guide book, lest you obliviously sail past an obscure location that features an arcane attraction that would amuse and fascinate newbies and long time residents alike.  That conversation could easily be expanded into a full length column about the delights of living in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Heinolds’ First and Last Chance (bar/saloon) in Oakland has always been synonymous with the name Jack London and so on Sunday January 12, 2014, we went to that city to have a look-see.  Was London really one of their “regulars” back in the day?  They have a photo of a young London reading a dictionary in that very building (the owner gave the lad the book as a present) for Doubting Thomases and fact checking columnists.  The unique bar, which tilts because of effects from the famous 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, can best be described by the word “über-funky.”

While we where at that gin mill (the First and Last got its name because it was the closest tavern to where oyster fishermen “clocked in” and “clocked out” for their jobs), we had to order a diet Coke™ because hey didn’t have Sarsaparilla. (Taking photos of Jack London’s cabin and Heinold’s saloon in Oakland CA,for this column seemed like the most likely solution for this week’s challenge for the photo editor.)

While savoring our drink we chatted up the bar tender and realized that we could easily write a column about the great bars of the world, where we have had a libation.  (We missed the real Quinn’s in Tahiti [the one that’s there now isn’t the legendary original according to what we have read].)

We could also do a column just limited to the famous bars that were a “home away from home” for great writers.  Didn’t Jason Miller, who wrote “The Championship Season” (Go 49ers!), used to drink at the Dinner Bell in Dunmore Pa.?

In the spirit of “ripped from today’s headlines,” we noticed that in the “People of the Abyss,” the homeless were kept out of London’s parks at night and that the police roused anyone attempting to sleep in public at night.  Sounds like the same complaints we heard recently, while visiting residents of Berkeley’s People’s Park.

We have suggested to one of Berkeley’s most noticeable panhandlers, known by the street handle of Ninja Kitty, that he run for Congress on a “I’ll get rid of the homeless in Berkeley” platform.  The conservatives would expect him to implement a “Getting a job (i.e. work) will set you free” style program and the Berkeley liberals would expect him to help expand the under funded social programs to help the homeless and also vote for him.  He’d be elected in a landslide.  Hit the pause button for that idea, he told us he is too young to be a Congressional candidate.  Maybe he can just help collect signatures for councilman Kris Worthington’s petition?  Ninja Kitty does, however, have a facebook page.  (https://www.facebook.com/sherpaj.theninjacat?fref=ts)

Originally we had intended to write a column for this week that compares and contrasts the movies “Wolf of Wall Street” and “American Hustle.”  The two are simultaneously both similar and quite different.  It’s like one baseball game that’s a no-hitter pitched by Nolan Ryan, and another contest between Boston and New York that, after the lead chances several times, ends 13 to 12, with a bottom of the ninth inning walkoff grand slam (for the Yankees, naturally).

London, if he were still alive, would probably be able to take diverse bits of information, such as the annual traffic fiasco, that inevitably accompanies the Forth of July fireworks display in the Marina del Rey area, the recent resignation of L. A. Sheriff Lee Baca, and the political headaches for New Jersey Governor Chris Cristie, and combine them into one coherent column, but we’ll have to check with the Marina Tenants Association for the background story and get back to you on that challenge.

In Chapter 27 of Martin Eden, London wrote:  “When he starved, his thoughts had dwelt often upon the thousands he knew were starving the world over, but now that he was feasted full, the fact of the thousands starving was no longer pregnant in his brain.”  Does that explain why Republicans prefer to discuss the homeless while enjoying a good meal?

Now the disk jockey will play Boston’s “Don’t look back” album, Chicago’s “Greatest Hits” album, and John Denver’s “Rockey Mountain High” song (has that become the official anthem of the Legalize Pot movement?).  We have to go see if the record high temperature for San Francisco in January will be set today.  Have an “over the lips, and through the gums; look out ribs here it comes!” type week.

[After a clerk at the Pacific Cookie Company on Telegraph Ave. bragged that Janice Joplin had “come on” to her grandfather on a national TV talk show and then went online to prove it, we knew we had a great item for next week’s column.  Tune in next week at the same bat time, same bat channel for the full story.]

January 10, 2014

Doublethink becomes ubiquitous

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: , , , — Bob Patterson @ 1:31 pm

The quaint old days when political disputes could be a topic for a lively conversation are long gone because these days folks are living in a binary choice world. The question isn’t about how to describe a glass that is filled to 50% capacity with water. Either the glass is full or it is empty. Did President Obama trip and spill the glass on the carpet? Wasn’t the Bush legacy a full glass?

The journalists operating in Washington D. C. can only hope to curry favor with their “sources” by running propaganda information which will (theoretically) win some genuine scoops in return for the favor. In fact, isn’t all that it gets the gullible player, an invitation to the next exclusive party and another chance to choose which propaganda to run? Pundits out in the boondocks don’t even have the chance to score a scoop on good propaganda material. All the rubes can do is to try to get off a good one liner or make an intuitive guess about a taboo topic.

Hitler said in “Mein Kampf” that true believers shouldn’t ever (not even one time) admit that there was a grain of truth in the argumentation offered by the opposite team. With that advice in mind during 2014, the public discussions of items in dispute will closely resemble the images of the “no man’s land” in WWI era trench warfare. There won’t be any common ground. There won’t be any truce on Christmas Day. With that set up, the liberal pundits will never make a single point with the compassionate, conservative, Christian Republicans all they can do is to ridicule Uncle Rushbo and his clones.

Should liberal pundits preach to the choir or try to goad trolls into posting “your mother wears combat boots” assertions in the comments section?

Fox is either the only sane source for information of a political nature or it is a one sided farce of lies, opinions and propaganda which would make Joseph Goebbles weep with envy.

No gray scales ever! Life has become a series of coin flip judgments. No middle ground. Binary choices only from here on out. History has become gelatinous and if you are not inclined to do extensive research at the local library, you might just as well flip a coin when pondering events that outrage liberals and amuse and reassure compassionate, Christian conservatives.

If women and children get killed while machine guns are used to control striking (pro Communist?) workers, that’s a regrettable example of collateral damage before that bit of spin terminology was created. Will conservative owned media side with the workers when it comes time to run stories about the 100th anniversary of the Ludlow Massacre?

If drones were not available to bomb Mexico after a diplomatic slight of Uncle Sam, then naval bombardment just had to do. It’s not bloody well likely that the media will take a 100 years look back at the Tampic Affair and have any more sympathy for the civilians killed by collateral damage there than they do for the collateral damage that might accompany a modern day drone strike.

If American parents felt a smug superiority about being safe, a century ago, from a conflict on the opposite side of the Atlantic Ocean over an assassination in a place called Sarajevo, the feeling would only last until the bankers and capitalists saw an opportunity for war profiteering. If massive profits were available, then the inspiring patriotic sloganeering at the decisive moment would magically appear and then it was time to sing; “we won’t be back ’til it’s over, over there.”

Hitler lavished praise on short slogans and catchy phrases, because when he was writing about a verbal knockout punch; bumper stickers had not become ubiquitous.

After a large number of Australian troops were slaughtered because of the assassination of a fellow at Sarajevo, the leaders of Australia declined the opportunity to send troops that far from home again in WWII. They informed the British Prime Minister that the Australian troops would only be used to defend Australia. American politicians didn’t learn that lesson.  (Our photo illustration for this week is a file photo of the WWI memorial statue in Kalgoorlie Western Australia.)

 

When America became involved in World War II, the Republicans immediately made the political moves to revoke the overtime pay laws because they didn’t want it to seem like workers were guilty of war profiteering with the massive amounts of extra pay that would be necessary during WWIL. They did not, however, say anything about the need for charging for cost overruns. It was assumed that thee would be a need to exceed the budgeted amounts that were part of the fight for the Four Freedoms (Can you name all four?) in the free world. If a defense Industry had cost overruns should capitalists eat the shortfall or should the taxpayers (who were being drafted) pick up the tab? Don’t taxpayers usually get treated like the fellow in the song that says “Six rounds were bought and I bought five!”?

Isn’t there an old political maxim that says a capitalist is always right and that workers can always be assumed to have Communist sympathies?

Will American troops be sent back to Iraq? Will American troops be sent into South Sedan? When will American troops be sent to bring Democracy to Syria?

Len Dighton in a non-fiction book about the follies of war, titled “Blood, Tears, and Folly,” described how the troops in WWI were motivated to charge into the machine gun fire of the troops defending the German line. He said that a fiendishly clever method called the “creeping barrage” was used. According to Dighton, the British Artillery would start a bombardment in back of the British lines and slowly walk it up to the British trenches. The occupants were free to choose to stay there or join with their comrades (can we change that word to “mates”?) in running into the hail of machine gun bullets being sent their way.

The folks back home didn’t get the particulars about the creeping barrage. They were only given the stories about the brave lads who were fearless while charging at the German lines.

Did General Douglas MacArthur get the nick name “Dugout Doug” in WWI?

General MacArthur was ordered to depart from the Philippine Islands by President Roosevelt in early 1942. He followed orders and left 78,000 members of the American military behind. He got the Medal of Honor. The others were left to contend with the rigors of the Death March. During his stay in Australia, he became known as “Dugout Doug.”

Republicans have one version of the events at Ludlow, Veracruz, and WWI. Democrats have a very different interpretation of the same episodes. You can find both versions online.

The diametrically opposed assertions “The glass is empty!” vs. “It’s full!” mean that fair and balanced journalism methods will soon be applied to the study of history and it won’t be necessary to read either version. Voters will know what version they will believe will be based on their political philosophy and so political debate will be unnecessary and irrelevant during 2014.

Apparently, the World’s Laziest Journalist will have to settle for finding non controversial information and facts that are amusing and entertaining and let the election results speak for them selves in 2014 and again in 2016.

Wouldn’t columns featuring information such as the fact that silent era comedian Charlie Chaplin was the director of a 1967 movie starring Marlon Brando (The Countess from Hong Kong) be non controversial and of equal interest to both Republicans and Democrats with curious minds?

Edward Grey when assessing the outbreak of WWI, said: “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

Now the disk jockey will play Hank Williams Jr.’s “I got rights,” the Beatles “Run for your life,” and “Snoopy and the Red Barron.” We have to go see if corporatocracy is a legitimate word. Have a “how you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm” type week.

December 27, 2013

The homeless, panhandlers, and mug shots

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: , , , — Bob Patterson @ 1:26 pm

Berkeley’s beloved Hate Man 

Approximately forty years ago, Esquire Magazine commissioned a commercial photographer in New York City to select some bums from the Bowery, take mug shtos of them, then spruce them up, put them in fashionable clothes and take their portraits a second time.  The pairs of portraits made a very effective statement about the absurdity of lookism, which is the philosophy that everything, particularly people, should be judged on how attractive and stylish they look.

When we first arrived in Berkeley CA, we recalled the Esquire Magazine effort and considered doing a localized version of that approach to the controversial subject of the local homeless.

Things have changed (a bit) since the Sixties and these days people are up tight about having their photo taken and so the project was slowed down by an attempt, which had to come first, to win the confidence of some of the panhandlers.

Richard Avedon had a unique lighting style that made his portraits distinctive and eventually we figured out (“imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”) how to duplicate it.  It would take some expensive strobe lighting and a huge studio and, over the years, we (photo pun alert!) developed a low budget way to try to imitate the master’s distinctive style.  A plain white wall with Northern lighting would be a cheap way to get the flat lighting and plain background.

Francesco Scavullo came to our attention as the end of the last century drew neigh.  Scavullo usually had a hair dresser, a make up artist and a wardrobe wrangler on his staff and he could make anyone look like a movie star and made movie stars look like living legends.  If he selected a hippie, a panhandler, or a homeless person as a subject they would end up looking drop dead gorgeous in the finished print.  The photo critics eloquently praised Scavullo’s ability to see the inner human dignity of the subject.

Armstrong and Getty, who have the hottest (radio) show on the West Coast, are rather relentless in their harsh criticism of the homeless, the panhandlers, and the hippie connoisseurs of tobacco and home rolled cigarettes.  Lookism reigns supreme in the ranks of the Republicans.

The radio duo will, for example, describe in lurid detail just how unsanitary some panhandlers seem to be but they will not acknowledge that often businesses in San Francisco or Berkeley will deny the homeless access to public toilets.

During the series of Occupy protests in the San Francisco Bay Area, the World’s Laziest Journalist had to cope with the same challenge.  If, for example, there is a hotel with public toilets in the area, and if they deny access to those facilities during a time period when a big political protest is being conducted nearby, that could be construed as stacking the deck against the activists in the hopes that they would have to soil themselves and their clothing and thus provide grist for conservative propaganda.

Could that sly attack on freedom of speech happen in a country that had thousands of men die defending the Four Freedoms (can you name all four?) in World War II?

Wouldn’t such cynical manipulation of the protesters be a stealth way of contradicting the need for those men who fought and died in WWII, to give the ultimate sacrifice?  Or would it reduce the Conservatives’ lavish praise or patriotism to the level of being an egregious example of their addiction to hypocrisy?  What’s not to love about crass and callous hypocrisy?  Don’t Republicans want to be on the billionaires’ team rather than spend additional tax dollars on the casualties of war?

What would Armstorng and Getty have to say if, hypothetically, Francesco Scavullo were able to round up a contingent of Bay Area panhandlers, get them out of their dirty clothes (there is at least one Laundromat in Berkeley that offers the homeless a free night when they can wash most of their clothes.  [What’s not to love about a guy in his skivvies washing all the rest of his wardrobe?]), take an impressive portrait, and turn them into matinee idols and starlets?  Berkeley even offers the homeless a chance to shower and shampoo their hair, twice a week.

If Scavullo were still alive and transforming the homeless in the San Francisco Bay area into potential movie stars (there’s one guy on Shattuck who reminds us of Lee van Cleef [Does anyone still make spaghetti Westerns?]) we would expect Armstrong and Getty to ignore the results and continue to demean the victims of the current class warfare.

Since radioland will soon be turned into all conservative propaganda all the time, don’t expect sympathetic media coverage of the panhandlers any time soon.

Several years ago (could it have been twenty years ago?) the World’s Laziest Journalist occasionally bought lunch for a fellow who “owned” the begging rights to the 405 off-ramp at National Blvd in the Mar Vista Section of Los Angeles.  He had no reason to lie to us and so we take what he said at face value.  We asked him why he didn’t use some of his “offerings” to get a haircut and buy some nicer threads.  He bluntly told us that if he did that, he wouldn’t bring in half as much money.  The people, he said, wanted to have a full experience of being a “have” who was giving to a “have not.”  In Los Angeles, which is the home of the movie industry, an elaboration of the “you have to look the part” philosophy was not necessary.

Things were much better economically back then, and we had no reason to doubt him when he said his earnings were enabling him to put his two children back East through college.  He blithely told us that his annual income was $38,000.  Based on what he told us, it is easy to see why a panhandler would not want, back then, to get a “makeover” from Scavullo and his team and thereby sabotage his way of earning a livelihood.

In our photo archives, we have a good portrait of Berkeley’s beloved Hate Man.  We had to do a re-shoot when we couldn’t find the j-peg files of his portrait.  We used Northern Lighting with a white door as background to get a shot with the look we wanted.

The East Bay Guardian did an award winning feature story profile of Hate Man (http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/hate-man/Content?oid=2491949 ) and we could not hope to do better with a measly 1,000 word column.   If readers do a Google Image search for Hate Man, one of the top suggestions is a portrait of Hate Man earlier in life and we offer that photo as conclusive proof that we do not harbor a condescending attitude regarding Hate Man because fifty years ago, he had already achieved a level of journalism success that we can still only envy today.

If (subjunctive mood alert!), the World’s Laziest Journalist were teaching a course in Journalism at a world famous University that is close to People’s Park, which is where Hate Man’s World Headquarters is located, we would beg him for the opportunity to be  a guest lecturer in an outdoor meeting of the class.  Hell, they should pay him to teach a class there every semester.

As it is, most folks take a quick look at Hate Man and revert to Lookism to make their assessment of the fellow.  Getty and Armstrong would score a coup if they could talk to him and listen to what he has to say.  Come to think of it, maybe even Uncle Rushbo would love to hear a person proselytizing on the idea that people shouldn’t suppress hate.

If the Republicans want an eloquent exposition on the idea that hate should be expressed enthusiastically, they couldn’t find a better spokesperson.  Since Hate Man lives in one of the most Liberal congressional districts in the USA, maybe the Republicans might take pride in Hate Man if they elected him to be the local Congressional delegate, but it is our opinion that Hate Man would get claustrophobic sitting in a Congressman’s office and decline the opportunity.

Recently in London, photographer Rosie Holtum caused a sensation with a photo exhibition that was based on the same premise that Esquire used so many moons ago.  Conservative media owners will probably be very quick to squelch this graphic evidence which proves a liberal contention.

What would happen if, instead of giving families a home makeover on a reality TV show, the production company started doing a weekly program that gave homeless people a makeover?  Conservative media owners won’t let that idea be expressed in any pitch session, eh?

While writing this week’s column, we saw the new Walter Mitty movie which features repeated recitations of the mission statement for LIFE magazine which provides us with an appropriate end of the column quote: “To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, to draw closer, to find each other and to feel. That is the purpose of Life.”

Now the disk jockey will play Madonna’s “Vogue,” Frank Sinatra’s “Nancy (with the laughing face),” and the Cowsills’ “All I really want to be is me.”  We have to go buy a DVD copy of “Funny Face.”  Have a “say ‘cheese!’” type week.

December 20, 2013

Another week for the History books

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: , , , — Bob Patterson @ 1:26 pm

Did History happen at San Francisco City Hall on Thursday?

Workers at the Santa Monica Outlook were used to the feeling that the building was shaking.  Each day, when the presses started to roll, the building would rumble just a bit.  When a small earthquake would occur, as happened periodically in that area of seismic instability, the building would gyrate in place (twerk?), but on one particular day about thirty years ago, when the building started vibrating, the World’s Laziest Journalist yelled:  “this is history happening” and ran out into the parking lot on the South side of the building to see the last time a railroad freight train would be used inside Santa Monica’s city limits.

We were reminded of that spine tingling feeling of realizing that something with historic significance was happening, earlier this week while we were listening to David Lazarus work as a substitute host on the Norman Goldman radio talk show.  The radio landscape in the San Francisco Bay Area will change radically when the political liberals are banished from the local airwaves and we knew that was going to happen; but listening to the Los Angeles Times writer do some verbal jousting with a conservative troll, we had that old “history is happening” feeling again.

A classic bit of Americana is about to go belly up.  Folks who don’t have online access to progressive radio programming in the San Francisco area will never again get to hear the classic bit of Americana wherein a troll calls a progressive talk radio program and asks “What if there had been a good guy with a gun there when the bad guy walked into that Connecticut school?”

The last weekend round-up column before Christmas of 2013 arrives is the perfect opportunity to become all sentimental and nostalgic.  The Lone Ranger, Lux Radio Theater, Fiber McGee and Molly, are gone and now the classic bit of Americana concerning “what if there had been a good guy with a bad gun there?” will join those other hallowed memories rusting in the Radio Hall of Fame.

Yes, there will always be archived material to bring back the treasured memories, but is listening to a recording of Abbott and Costello talk about the baseball team’s lineup the same as hearing it live?  Isn’t “doing it live” another American tradition that is fading into oblivion?

William L. Shirer, who was no stranger to radio history, wrote several books about his experiences of being a journalist working in Europe as WWII approached and became unavoidable.  In one of them (probably “Berlin Diary The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934 – 1941,”) he described the deleterious effect living in the midst of a relentless stream of propaganda had on the journalists whose job it was to refute that same series of lies.  If Murrow’s Boys weren’t immune to it, expecting average Americans to avoid becoming indoctrinated by a one sided debate might prove to be a bit overly optimistic, Think of the effect more like “shaving points” in a basketball game, rather than being an example of “taking a dive” in a boxing match.

Journalism presents news consumers with a smorgasbord of information that the individual can customize for his or her own tastes.  Some guys turn first to a newspaper’s Sports Section, other skim the front page before going to the comics.

On Thursday, December 19, 2013, a wedding ceremony was held at City Hall in San Francisco that drew a large contingent of journalists, but no satellite TV trucks.  The bride and groom started out clothed on the steps (Sheriff’s Department jurisdiction), were ordered to relocate to the sidewalk (SFPD jurisdiction), and were nude when the minister performed the wedding ceremony.  The wedding may have been a historic first for San Francisco.  If so, photos of the event will be used sporadically for years to come.  No TV trucks means it’s not a big news story and there won’t be any video available to use on the Evening News.  The story ran on the front page of the Bay Area section of the San Francisco Chronicle’s December 20, 2013 edition.

The bride, Gypsy Taub, is very adept at drawing news coverage and so we may write a column comparing her expertise at manipulating journalists to the way that politicians play the newsies as if they were from a paid Public Relations firm.

Newsworthiness and historical importance don’t always coincide.  In a week when some showbiz maneuvering for the cable TV show “Duck Dynasty,” the death of Al Goldstein and several movie actors, and a shooting at a Colorado school, were current event topics, stories about the use of gas in Syria were not getting good play.  The obscure stories about events in Syria may, in the future, wind up being of much greater interest to historians than this week’s celebrity gossip items.

Lamenting the fact that celebrity gossip is replacing hard news in the journalism world is itself a topic that won’t attract a big audience.

We know that is traditional for liberals to use Christmas time to spout platitudes about “Peace on Earth,” but for a patriotic pundit living in a country still deeply involved in George W. Bush’s “Forever War” that sounds suspiciously like a cowardly surrender attitude if not actual treason.

December is a time when journalists knock out the annual best of material, the top news stories recaps, and columns full of whimsy and nostalgia.

O.K.  Here goes:  When we were getting religious training during our grade school phase of life, a nun related an bit of information about the Roman treatment of the Christians.

The people who were going to be sacrificed in the arena for the amusement of the citizens were often taunted by some of the people who were watching the victims being walked through the streets to the place where they would draw their last breath.  Some of the sadistic instigators would walk along with the intended victims right up to the entrance to the Coliseum.  At least once, the sadistic guards let the vocal agitators past the entrance and into the “blue room.”  When they closed and locked the entrance doors, the people who were doing the taunting turned to the guards and explained a mistake has occurred and that they didn’t belong there.  The guards responded:  “that’s all we ever hear.”

It seems to us that eventually some of the conservative talk show listeners will someday change their mind about the way things are going and start to object to being told that the jobs will start to reappear when more tax breaks for the rich are enacted.

A massive tax cut for billionaires is a great idea if you are a billionaire.  If you are a member of the middle class who has been searching for work for an extended period, tax cuts for the billionaires should be a topic that gets a “we don’t have a dog in this fight” type answer.

Fooling people into blundering into participation in a gladiators’ contest and getting desperate voters to approve of tax cuts that probably aren’t going to generate the creation of just one job, are both fine examples of sadism in action.  The guards thought what they did was funny.  The billionaires think duping the working class into approving tax cuts that will only benefit the super rich is funny.  In both cases the only relevant question is:  “Whose side are you on?”

In a year when liberal talk radio is being drastically reduce to almost zero in the radio marketplace and no one, least of all any Conservative, is lamenting the disappearance of the last vestige of free speech, it seems to the World’s Laziest Journalist that it is time to forget about the possibility of time travel and scratch “Visiting Berlin at Christmas time in 1938” off the bucket list.  We don’t need to go there; we’re already there.

The closing quote for the Christmas 2013 column will be the words of Hunter S. Thompson:  “Big darkness soon come.”

Now the disk jockey will play Tom T. Hall’s song The Cowboy and the Philosopher (it contains an excellent Christmas wish list), “Christmas with the Chipmunks,” and Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.”  We have to go see “American Hustle.”  Have a “just what I always wanted!” type week.

December 13, 2013

Have Nikon; Will Travel

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: , , , — Bob Patterson @ 1:23 pm

This visual oxymoron seems appropriate for a column lamenting the fact that there will not be an outlet for liberal philosophy in the San Francisco radio market.

During the historic week which included a handshake, a Presidential selfie, and a prank, and Mike Malloy directing his audience to Fair.org for the back story (which was being ignored by the mainstream media) of the arrest Nelson Mandela a half century ago; the World’s Laziest Journalist became involved with a friend in a debate about Fox’s claim to be fair and balanced.

The sources for an impartial adjudication of the dispute, in turn, provide another source for more rancor.  It got to the point where we wondered if it would be possible to get a judgment on the question from the Columbia Journalism Review but then we scrapped the idea because their credentials for making such a call would probably be challenged by our debating opponent.

When Edward R. Murrow was appointed to be the in charge of news for the Voice of America he caused a dispute when he announced that he would include unfavorable as well as flattering information in the broadcasts.

How much criticism of George W. Bush had Fox ever broadcast?  Did they ever have anything to say about President Obama that was not negative?  Could it be that tolerance for information that was less than “very flattering” was the hallmark of excellence which distinguishes reporting from propaganda?  One man’s derogatory remark is another man’s example of fair and balanced.  It seems that the dispute is destined for perpetual stalemate status.

As the week progressed, we tried to contend with the challenge of providing publicity for the Mother Laura Gertrude Seland Foundation (there is a page on Facebook for this organization) to bolster their fund raising efforts.

We started collecting a list of movies of, for, about, or featuring a Cadillac car for a friend, Frank Nicodemus, who is a specialist in restoring that famous brand of cars.

We have endorsed the efforts of the Armstrong and Getty Show is continuing their criticism of the bullet train that does not earn favorable approval numbers in the polls.  Thursday their program publicized a story done by Los Angeles Times reporter George Skelton on the expensive project which seems to contradict the concept of budget cuts because of the need for austerity measures.  One man’s boondoggle is another man’s “necessary path to the future.”

Armstrong and Getty have been critical of the homeless and we have wondered how receptive they would be to a suggestion that they interview an intelligent and eloquent panhandler or would they insist on doing a variation of the concept of a stacked deck and only extend an invitation to a guest who was not articulate?

During the week, we called the Norman Goldman radio show to castigate him for never showing any appreciation for the quality of Republican hypocrisy.  We were unable to suggest that he establish a Hypocrisy Hall of Fame.  Later we learned that the concept has already been used online.

The roster of liberal talk shows available in the San Francisco Bay area on radio is being reconfigured.  Isn’t it a strange paradox for folks to realize that liberal talk shows will be without a media outlet in the American city that is famous world wide for the tolerant philosophy of its citizens?

The fact that conservatives aren’t lamenting the evaporation of the supply of liberal voices in the marketplace is an indication that they will be content to let the sources for the philosophy of the Left be reduced to such a small size that it can be drowned in a bathtub.  When freedom of speech becomes extinct, do you think the conservatives will miss it?

The dwindling supply of liberal talk radio reminds us of the concept of the death of a thousand cuts.  No one cut is a mortal wound, but a large number of cuts can have a fatal cumulative effect.  The same thing seems to be happening to Freedom of Speech.

The World’s Laziest Journalist prefers to implement the three dot journalism style of a rapid steam of small items.  We assume that we could put a lot of time and fact finding into an effort to examine the topic of homelessness, but the fact that material is usually skimmed when it is published online, makes the prospect of doing all the necessary work seem like an exercise in futility.

If making the effort to gather content is going to be the only reward, and if people are going to only give it a quick glance, we are aware that of the Zen concept of “monkey mind” (attention deficit?) and that using the Herb Caen formula of selecting an assortment of diverse items is a matter of “form follows function.”

Occasionally being an insignificant member of the online pundit patrol has its own advantages.  A happy go lucky columnist can goad readers into considering some points that the major league pundits can’t touch with a ten foot pole.

For example, could it be that the Republicans don’t really care about Benghazi but they know that these days a President has to be accompanied by a communications specialist from the military (wasn’t that also true when Slick Willie was out cavorting with whatzername?) and that the claim that his whereabouts were unknown can never be a truthful statement.  If they have reliable gossip about where he really was when he supposedly disappeared, they are able to make his temporary location seem important, and they might figuratively speaking catch him with his pants down and embarrass him.  The actual event could just be a red herring to make him uncomfortable.  If they get a lucky break they could possibly make it necessary for someone to divulge where he was and what he (most likely) was doing at that particular time.

Heck, he ain’t going to run in 2016 so the Republicans might just make an issue of his whereabouts that particular night just to have some malicious fun.

Speaking of three dot journalism and unique bits of punditry from the peanut gallery, we have a question that seems timely.  Do the Republicans hate Obama so much that getting funding to purchase land or draw up architectural plans for the Obama Presidential Library will have to be postponed until at least after it becomes apparent if the results from the 2014 mid-term elections make that expenditure seem feasible by a (hypothetically speaking) Democratic majority Congress?

If gathering material is going to be a columnist’s only reward, then he might just as well consider himself to be the journalistic equivalent of a knight errant and extend the geographical boundaries for his beat to places that he has always wanted to see, or as in the case of the annual concert of the Western Australia Symphony Orchestra Holiday Concert in Perth, see again.

Due to austerity budget measures, the columnist will also be simultaneously assigned to carry a Nikon Coolpix with him so that he will be positioned to provide photos to accompany the aforementioned examples of thee dot journalism in action.

In The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler wrote:  “Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on and some very long and convenient hair.”

Now, the disk jockey will play “Lady Godiva,” the Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin,” and Sleepy LeBEEF’s “Sure beats the heck out of settllin’ down.”  We have to go rescue a lady in distress.  Have a “nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy” type week.

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