One More Day Before the Storm

As Macbeth said, "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow..."  

But I do believe that tomorrow, Monday, December 19th, will in fact signify something.

The future, which occurs after the present

I've had this super-weird confluence of personal, professional, and political timing, which all seem to be coming to a frothy head tomorrow. So, when I woke up today (Sunday, December 18th) and Facebook was offering up Fb memories of our three-years-ago trip to Hong Kong Disney, I decided this image of me at Tomorrowland says something important.

Tomorrow means hope. It's not all gloom and doom creeping in at a petty pace, Macbeth. Now, Macbeth is my boy (i.e. favorite Shakespeare tragedy) and he certainly has it right that there are fools and poor players all around us strutting and fretting (ahem TheDnldWTFTrumpface ahem). But the very notion of tomorrow brings hope, as one of my OTHER favorite plays of all time reminds us. So, so, so much hope for the wretches whom Macbeth might call "walking shadows" as they contemplate revolution in Les Misérables:

"There's a new world for the winning/Do you hear the people sing?"

When the Electoral College meets tomorrow, will they hear? Will they do the right thing, the moral thing, the Constitutional thing, and use their best judgment to cast their votes, which means casting them so that TheDnldWTFTrumpface does not ascend to the presidency?

While that's happening politically, I also personally have a huge and emotional development tomorrow in my professional life. (No, the electors aren't going to elect me...that I know of!) One era is coming to an end, due in large part to reduction-in-force layoffs that came slamming into one of my gigs, but not entirely due to that, as I have seized upon a blessing-in-disguise opportunity to do some stuff when this particular new little era of mine dawns. AND, just to compound the personal/professional/tomorrow timing of it all, the last month and a half has been a whirlwind, a mighty and fierce whirlwind, of me working two and a half jobs, laying groundwork, and figuring out lots of big stuff, and all this has been happening since Monday, November 7, the first "One Day More," which led us to the horrible Tuesday, November 8 election day or more accurately the horrible Wednesday, November 9 Day After. So for one month and a half I have been in this intense stirring up of life and time (working every day, sometimes two jobs, plus other events, with no time to think but just go go go with eyes on the prize), with big developments, and meanwhile this parallel thing happening of Trumpface and the end of the world and the burgeoning fight for the #ElectoralCollegeExMachina moment we all need and then after a particularly intense last burst of the 36 hours from 11 a.m. Friday through 11 p.m. Saturday where I was just everywhere serving three or more masters and just go go go went went went I came home and rested.

Sleeping deeply.

And waking up today to Facebook memories of Tomorrowland and the imminence of tomorrow, December 19, when one big thing ends in my personal life, AND there is one superbig chance for the whole world in political life.

Sing it, Les Misérables:

"Tomorrow is the judgment day
Tomorrow we'll discover what our god in heaven has in store
One more dawn
One more day
One day more."

Real "America" and the media the media the media the media the media

SO then. Here we are. Forty-seven percent of U.S.A. voters cast their precious ballots and made it so that with a popular vote loss but 290 electoral college votes to 228 (and still counting some states) TheDnldUGHTrump will occupy the White House and deprive Hillary Clinton of that opportunity. 

I mean, don't get me wrong: I'm pretty sure that 47% of all y'all out there make terrible choices on any given and every given day, so why should election day be any different? 

But today we are here specifically to address this idea that MrTrumpface somehow spoke to the concerns of "real Americans" with whom the media was out of touch.  

"The media" is an incredibly vague and fairly useless phrase, so I'll narrow it down at least a little to the talking head anchors and roundtable sitters on network news programs who spent the last year pretending Hillary Clinton's "widespread unpopularity" which they harped on excessively until it finally started growing -- sort of beating life into it --  was a news story, rather than any of the bazillion policy issues, policy statements, political issues, social issues, current events, tragedies, hopeful outcomes, etc. happening all around us in the nation that Hillary addressed month after month after month. Those media squawking heads salivated breathlessly as they manufactured dislike for Hillary Clinton and offered up freely their interest in non-issue email invented "scandals" and pretended the Drumpfster was a legitimate option for the presidency and then acted stunned and shocked on election night. That was stupid of them, and they were one of the top two targets of my election night (Facebook) wrath, along with the delusional/bamboozled people who actually cast votes for DT. 

But. 

As the Chicago Tribune's Steve Chapman points out here, the media "failure" is yet another story we are telling ourselves as some especially loud voices insist that "real Americans" have spoken. (If anything, the nation "has spoken" via popular vote for Hillary -- the electoral college, which hasn't yet spoken, may be called upon to speak for Drump.) What's worse, though, is the idea that some residents of the U.S.A. are "real" and some are not. AND, that if for some reason there WERE some who were real and some who were not, that the minority, the far far far smaller number, would be the real ones because they live somewhere where they have to drive a gas-guzzling car to get anywhere instead of being able to hop on public transportation. 

I mean, that's just silly.

It doesn't stop people from posting memes, though, with maps of the U.S. colored in red and blue by county vote, and it doesn't stop people from saying when they post those memes: "This is the people taking their country back!" Here's an example from The New York Times' presidential election results:  

When I pointed out to one poster of memes (of oh so many pro-Drumpf memes) that the "more red" areas consist also of more open space, highways, and cattle, while the blue areas are where there are more people, she helpfully reminded me that "I don't think the cows were voting! It was people!" 

Uh - my point exactly, lady. More people = blue areas. Fewer people = red areas. 

But who's "out of touch with the real" United Statesians? 

The media bashers like to say there are just a few liberal elite, a minority sitting in their elite New York penthouses and Malibu villas, making movies and hobnobbing with one another. 

Actually, there are tens of millions of people who live in cities. And tens of millions of people who voted blue in this particular election. And we are real. Who are you to say only Plains state farmland plowers are real? That's absurd. 

Imagine if you had a dozen people over to your house for a Super Bowl party (can't get more "real American" than that, now can you?) and realized at the last minute there was no soda pop so someone dashes out to get a 12-pack. He asks, should I get Coke or Pepsi? Yes, there are some people who don't drink soda and won't have either, but that's not his question. Coke or Pepsi? Let's say you take a vote. People are milling about, but at this moment three are sprawled on the couch in the giant living room watching pre-game jabber, and nine are standing clustered around the snack table in the small dining alcove because the snack food is interesting as is the conversation there. Two couch people vote for Pepsi and one for Coke. Living room, 2-1, Pepsi. Seven snack table people vote for Coke and two for Pepsi. Snack table, 7-2, Coke.  Total, 8-4 Coke vs. Pepsi. But the host says, well, the living room is bigger and takes up more area so in order to get the "real" vote we'll give them more say. Pepsi it is. 

Gross! (For those of us who don't care for Pepsi and can't beat the real thing.) But that's the argument I keep hearing put forward about why and how the electoral college represents rural areas' interests, and it's just as nonsensical as saying the people who take up more empty space are "real" while the people clustered together in a smaller physical space are not. 

Reading the News That Someone Saw Fit to Print

​You have a very important duty right now. It's a simple act, but a vital one. Please do this one thing, before it is too late. 

I refer of course, to this: you should get a newspaper subscription. 

Immediately. 

You should have got one long ago, but many of you have not done so. Many of you haven't touched newsprint since you were a small child paging through the paper your parents subscribed to, looking for the comics or Dear Abby or movie listings or maybe not even those because maybe you didn't start going to movies until Moviefone already existed. 

Lest you think this is a screed against millennials, though, I know there are a whole lot of Gen X-ers and Boomers out there, too, not bothering to subscribe to any newspaper anymore. 

Let's fix this. 

Commentator David Frum of The Atlantic spoke well about this on the most recent episode of Bill Maher's show. It's become so trendy, somehow, to bash "The Media" and reject all institutions. But really, that generalization betrays your ignorance and is a terrible idea. Rejecting institutions leads to a vacuum, which nature abhors, and which nature or TV then fills with DonaldWTFTrump. David Frum argued that young people's rejection of all institutions ("it's all corrupt!" "the mainstream media" "sick of all politics" etc.) have directly resulted in this debacle in which the malicious, manifestly unfit Trumpface is being considered a legitimate candidate for president of the U.S. 

I would hasten to add that a lot of people have been using the words "media" and "journalists" over the last few months when what they actually mean is "cable news networks breathlessly trying to outdo one another in a quest for the most salacious and shocking story that will draw ratings."

Newspapers, on the other hand, can calm down a little bit. And you can calm down a little bit when you read them. 

If you conflate TV newscasts, especially the "surrogate-from-the-right-plus-surrogate-from-the-left" or "fair and balanced" variety, with dogged newspaper journalism, you need to run right out to your local library and pick up a copy of Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, followed by a few Marshall McLuhan books.

And then you need to come home, read those books, and subscribe to a newspaper.

Reading the newspaper each morning, or each evening, is a nice habit. 

Reading your local paper will put you in touch with your community in ways you might not have imagined. It will do the same thing for news of the nation and of the world. 

But, you say, you do read articles published by the newspaper, on its website. Well. Besides the fact that you are offering no part of your finances whatsoever to said publisher, you are also picking and choosing from links or, more likely, from among what got shared the most that day on social media. 

Reading the actual newspaper, divided into sections, laid out by editors -- by professionals, that is -- gives you perspective that you don't get on your smartphone. 

If anyone out there wants to try the whole "But I'm saving trees by not reading a newspaper!" argument, let's just stop that nonsense right here and now. 

First of all, no, I do not for one second believe that's why you don't subscribe to a newspaper. But secondly, for all two of you out there who do legitimately use that reason, and for all the rest of you who have replaced paper news with electronic news for your convenience, you need to seriously come to an understanding of the toll your electronic devices take on the environment. 

I mean for one thing, they require electricity to run AT ALL. Electricity means trees die. Constant electricity. I would love it if we lived in a world full of solar, wind, and other renewable energy power. We don't. We live in a world where coal mining decimates entire mountaintops. Trust me, forests, animal species, and more are dying for you to use all your electricity. 

Not to mention the planned obsolescence - your tablets, laptops, and smartphones are designed to become obsolete as soon as possible so that you'll buy another smartphone. Not only are we wasting tons of resources and energy making the things in factories, but we have actively set up a system that they are not meant to last after expending all those resources, and emitting all that factory pollution -- so we get to deplete more resources and pollute even more within just a year or two. And everyone will happily rush out to "update" their products. 

But you won't buy newspaper, which is one of the easiest things to recycle and which is often printed on recycled paper as well? 

Everyone knows that after this election, you will need something. Mr. Frum and I would like you to consider that the something you need is a newspaper subscription. 

Call now. 

(Or just order it online.) 

And order one for a friend, too. Call it an early holiday president. 

#NewspaperGiftSubscription

Make the world a better place, in this one tiny way. 

What Hath Humanity Wrought

"And if I
am not
who you thought
Well, hello it's nice to meet you..."
       --"Willing to Wait" - Melissa Ferrick
             
Here's my point. It's not so much that I've run out of energy to weep/wail/gnash my teeth/post on Facebook during this long dark election of our souls, but that I have basically been noncommittal regarding said weeping and wailing and gnashing from the beginning. Foremost, the very notion that Trumpface is a legitimate contender is absurd and it's an insult to Hillary, not to mention Jill Stein and Gary Johnson, that we have to go through the charade of these "debates" and campaign rallies and 24-hour news nonsense. Furthermore, though, I know so many people who are frightened by the Trump voters, shocked to have discovered that they have friends, neighbors, co-workers, family members, and Facebook friends they haven't talked to since eighth grade all defending the despicable idea of voting for Trump. "They scare me!" "What's wrong with these people?" "I'm frightened." etc. Are the Trump-lovers frightening? Well, yes, yes they are. And is it frightening to have to live with the utterly depressing knowledge that you work with, live next door to, socialize with, and are related to these people? Yes, yes it is. But I don't understand how you could possibly not have known this already.

You seem to have had so much faith in humanity. Why? There has long been ample evidence demonstrating that humanity is a horrid, scary, downright hideous group of folks. Here is a little list of some things that helped me to know this already:

war
honor killings
slavery
rape
the Draize rabbit eye test
"Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!"
swimming with dolphins in captivity

hijackings 

kidnappings
pet birds in cages
pet rabbits in cages
pet hamsters in cages
pet anything in cages
fucking keeping living things confined in cages! ugh! wtf?!
cr*sh films
sn*ff films
serial killers
the Sandy Hook shooting
the My Lai massacre
torture of prisoners
testing cosmetics/shampoo/poisons/god knows what on animals

I could go on.

See, I don't even have to get into so-called "political issues" at all to know that humans are a seriously damaged, depraved, horrifying lot who routinely do terrible things to one another and to whatever animals they can get their hands on AND who find no real alternative but to live complacently, knowing that their fellow humans do these things, but unable to change the situation for the better.

Trump is psychotic. His admirers are delusional. Voting for him is ridiculous. Campaigning for the presidency of a nation by belligerently and maliciously insulting anyone and everyone in one's path? A hideous way to live one's life.

But he is far, far from my first indication that humans are fucking scary.

Word #1 Word #2 Word #3

I'm back!

Yeah, it's been a while. The good ol' U.S.A. sure hasn't done itself any favors in the not-being-a-total-disaster department in the interim, now has it?

I hardly know where to begin, but they always say, well, start where you are, eh? So, sitting here at my laptop trying to make sense of everything happening this week in these United [sic] States, I took a picture of my shirt. Here it is:

Well, I didn't say it was a flattering picture, did I?

And I would like you to take a look at this shirt with its (cheeky? feisty? rebellious? assertive? feminist? empowering? simple? nuanced? you make the call!) slogan and consider the following questions.

Whether you are familiar with the shirt or have zero context, you can think about what its message is. You can ask yourself, does it mean that girls don't play anywhere else but here, that for example they don't play over there? Does it mean that playing is the only activity they engage in here? That they never dance, talk, sing, laugh, fight, breathe, meditate, or whatever else when they are "here," wherever "here" is, literally or metaphorically? Does it mean that boys don't play here? Or there? Or anywhere? In a box or with a fox? For god's sake OBVIOUSLY NO IT DOESN'T MEAN THESE THINGS. So why the !@#$%* is everyone so damn confused about #BlackLivesMatter all the time?

I can't understand why people interpret #BlackLivesMatter the insipid ways that they choose to interpret it. I can't understand why they read "only" in a sentence where "only" doesn't exist, or why they add "and therefore police lives don't" when that is not only clearly not said and not meant but also utterly nonsensical (for example, what if there's a black police officer? Is he just caught in a paradox of both mattering and not mattering for eternity?), or why they DON'T see the implicit preamble of "Whereas a lot of people, institutions, and systemic societal forces have been disregarding black lives, up to and including the murder of innocent black people, we're going to mention here that..."

But hey, guess what? Girls play here. And black lives matter.

Breaking Point

Yesterday, I was on a little errand at the airport that led to me standing in a waiting area for a few minutes, subjected to CNN. I'd nearly forgotten what watching CNN is like. We don't get that channel in our house, and I apparently became spoiled by those several blissful years abroad watching CNN International, which isn't anywhere near as inane or sensationalist. Anyway, there I was, and Wolf Blitzer alerted me to some "breaking news": that in their latest poll, Donald Trump led by more points than ever, and soon he would be holding a rally, for which CNN was "standing by."

Breaking news?  As the kids say, Wolf, I don't think those words mean what you think they mean.

Breaking news refers to an ongoing situation, a story that is developing even as it is being covered. It is not -- I repeat, NOT -- a synonym for "a new story." They are not the same thing. That's what we have the word "news" for. Adding "breaking" is adding another element. Journalists are not reporting "breaking news" when they report "something exciting." The results of a poll, any poll, are in no way on this or any other planet "breaking news." They are in fact the very opposite: poll results are planned, anticipated, and in fact in the case of this CNN-conducted poll, manufactured by the very entity that then "reports" on it. Neither, by the way, is a campaign rally that is about to start breaking news.

Essentially, this ridiculous use of the term made me want to throw things at the TV. Instead, I'm going to throw some actual examples of breaking news out there to help people understand the difference. (Are you reading this, CNN producers??) Let's take a look at some of the recent winners of the Pulitzer Prize in the Breaking News category:

Most recently, the staff of The Seattle Times won the Breaking News Reporting Pulitzer for, and I'm quoting the official Pulitzer web site here, "its digital account of a landslide that killed 43 people and the impressive follow-up reporting that explored whether the calamity could have been avoided."

Contrast that with the most recent winners in other categories, such as Explanatory Reporting (Bloomberg News' Zachary Mider's "clear and entertaining" explanations of how corporations dodge taxes) and Investigative Reporting (shared by The New York Times' Eric Lipton on how lobbyists sway legislators and attorneys general and The Wall Street Journal for their "Medicare Unmasked" project). 

Previous Breaking News Reporting winners include: 

• The Boston Globe, for its "exhaustive and empathetic coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing"
• The Denver Post for coverage of the Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooting, "using journalistic tools, from Twitter and Facebook to video and written reports, both to capture a breaking story and provide context"
• The Tuscaloosa News,  for "enterprising coverage of a deadly tornado" even when power interruptions forced them to publish at a plant 50 miles away
• The Washington Post, for "telling the developing story" of the Virginia Tech shooting in print and online
• The Times-Picayune of New Orleans for Hurricane Katrina coverage, "overcoming desperate conditions facing the city and the newspaper"

Does this help, CNN, et.al.? Do you see what happens in breaking news coverage?  

If not, could you maybe try reading a few more newspapers until you figure it out?

Come on, even the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is excited about journalism these days, having bestowed the Best Picture Oscar on Spotlight the other day. Journalism is great! Get your vocabulary right, everybody.

Forced to Awaken to Star Wars: The Force Awakens

So, I had it all figured out. At some point in the first few weeks of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, it came to me; rather than seeing the flick first, what I clearly needed/wanted out of life was to be the last to see it. I'm not the type to buy movie tickets two months in advance -- I don't even plan things out two DAYS in advance, or sometimes two hours. So, I realized, for me it would be fun to see the movie last -- I would see it on that last Thursday night show on its last week in whatever Chicago theater continued to run it the longest. What a funny plan, was how I saw it.

Then, it got nominated for five Oscars. And now I was, as they say, on the horns of a dilemma. Two months is a good long time for a movie to have its first run, but from the looks of it, I thought, a month in, it could easily stay in theaters beyond Oscar weekend. And then I'd have to make a choice between seeing it before the Oscars ceremony and my silly plan of seeing it last.

Which was more important? This newfound plan I had hit upon, to see last the film that everyone else wanted to see first, or my oldfound plan to see as many Oscar-nominated films as humanly possible before the night of the Academy Awards?

Well, I told myself, maybe, just maybe, its last week in the theatres will conveniently also be the last week before the Oscars and then everything will work out? And so I've kept my eye on the showtimes and checked mid-week to see what's changing each upcoming weekend and...here we are.

The Oscars are this weekend, but Star Wars: The Force Awakens is still playing in theatres during the movie-run week that starts tomorrow, Friday the 26th. Which of course means that I cannot both see it in its last showtime AND see it before the Oscars.

And so my choice was made.

I went to see it. (Shout-out to my mom, who had generously gifted me with an AMC gift card!)

I've seen a very good amount of the nominated flicks. Just missing three of the foreign films (two of which will be coming to theaters in Chicago in the next month or two, after the Oscars), three of the documentary Shorts (which are HBO docs and going to air on HBO this year), and three of the Original Song nominees, one of which I am going to help myself to this weekend via Netflix (Racing Extinction), one of which will be on DVD in a couple weeks (Spectre) and one of which is the ONLY nominee I have no plans to see (Fifty Shades of Grey). So I'm in excellent shape this year.

Oh, what did I think of Star Wars? It was fun! I enjoyed it!

And now we know who wins in the battle between my contrarian quirks and my obsessive quirks. Glad we could put that question to rest.

A Scalia Footnote

I'm not entirely sure I should blog about this, for fear that people searching for the term I'm going to have to mention end up here; I don't want those kind of people reading my blog or, being anywhere near me, or, you know existing -- but exist they do. So hey, those kind of people, if you're reading this: seek help! 'K?

So anyway, I was reading an article about Antonin (it feels weirdly unnecessary typing his first name) Scalia's funeral etc. that went on for many paragraphs about his defense of free speech over the years. The article reminded us about the stances he took defending free speech of all kinds -- speech is speech, man. Expressing a video game is no different from expressing a masterful painting or writing a novel. Stuff like that.

This article also reminded me of something else along these lines that ol' Justice Scalia and a whole lot of the rest of you out there have got very, very wrong, and it pisses me right off every time I think about it. The unfortunate topic is the so called "films" in which animals are crushed; these films are made because there are some sick, twisted f*ckwads out there who find this exciting/a source of pleasure. (Hi f*ckwads, if you're reading this.)

Well, so some people with their heads on straight were trying to do something about this murder and torture and the ensuing legal case made its way to the Supreme Court where our nine robed overlords said they had no way/reason to ban these atrocious things because free speech.  As the article I read today reminded me, Scalia wrote about how this may be offensive and stupid and bloody and depraved but so are slasher horror flicks and they're protected, aren't they?

Well, hey brain dead Scalia and all y'all defending the cr-sh films! You miss the point so grievously. It's not the f*cking depiction that is the problem. In said stupid bloody mindless depraved slasher horror flicks, the blood, stabbing, and hiding in the basement are faked. But if some f*ckwads are filming another f*ckwad stepping on and smashing and torturing and murdering small animals so another f*ckwad can get his jollies, it's the actual stepping on and smashing and torturing and murdering we want to stop. What the hell is so hard to see about this? The f*ckwads who make these films should not be allowed to make them because they should NOT BE ALLOWED TO MURDER. What the duh fucking hell is wrong with humanity?

Not that you were necessarily looking for a reason to be pissed off at Scalia, because he offered plenty throughout his life, but there's one, just in case you need it.