We'll start with a low. That way, we only have room to improve. Kinda reminds me of a time when I was 8 years old. I was sitting in the kitchen of our house in Long Beach, Calif., and my mother asked me, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" I didn't hesitate—I'd been waiting for this question, been pondering it for at least a couple of years, and I was comfortable and committed when I answered.

"I want," I said, "to be the old mean guy on the block who comes out of his house in a scratchy woolen robe and yells at the kids who are playing on his lawn and drives them off."

She was speechless, as I recall, yet when I spoke those words they had the ring of truth and they felt right. I could have said, "fireman," or "astronaut," but they didn't seem appropriate. And the best thing about having a goal like this one is that every day, you get one step closer. It's doable and all you have to do is survive to get there.

So far, so good.

Aim Low

For this story, I'm going to hit you with a whole article. It's from the Associated Press, but I couldn't find any logical way to truncate it. So here it is:

Boy's party held at dump

Los Angeles—When 6-year-old Michael Wong-Sasso grows up, he wants to be a trash collector.
So naturally, he wanted to have his birthday party at the local dump.
About 40 children and their parents gathered Saturday at the Sunshine Canyon Landfill to celebrate Michael's seventh birthday.
"I like the big trucks," he said. "I like putting trash where it belongs. I like making the world cleaner."
For safety and sanitary reasons, the party was held in a small valley on the landfill's outskirts, away from bulldozers and strange smells. The partgoers were surrounded by scores of potted trees, which are used to landscape the landfill.
The children fashioned flour-dough animals with the help of recycled materials such as cardboard and colored paper and rollicked on a big pile of "clean" dirt, playing with toy backhoes and earthmovers.
"We don't know where this interest in trash came from," said Michael's mother Sophia Wong. "He's been this way since he was 2."
Having a party at a dump is "definitely different," said Scott Krause, who brought his 6-year-old son, Trevor.
"It's not like you're saying, 'Oh no, not another birthday at the landfill,'" Krause said. "I mean, how many times can you go to Chuck E. Cheese's?"

Entry Portal: Negative

I see here that Chicago's Cook County Hospital, the place that inspired "ER" and is hypothetically set there, is due to close tomorrow. As hospitals go, this one has had a great reputation:

Ask any Chicago cop where they'd want to be taken if shot and the answer will invariably be "County." In fact, 98 percent of patients who arrive alive at the trauma center survive.

The Higher Ground

We're finally at the highs, which in this case means "high on dope." Didja ever wonder how it is that the Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, John P. Walters, is officially known as the "Drug Czar"?

Shown here at right—way right—with George W., this man is directing the War on Drugs and showing a total lack of sense as he tilts at that formidable windmill. According to Razorwire:

As Deputy Director of ONDCP during the previous Bush administration, Walters favored incarceration over drug treatment and education. He has lobbied Congress for stiffer penalties for nonviolent drug law violators and opposed state laws exempting medical marijuana users from criminal penalties.

I'm bringing this up because the Ravenatrix was wondering this morning over a story about him, "Why is he called a 'Czar'? Why not 'Drug Sultan,' or 'Drug Pharoah'?" Anybody got a line on this?

8:08:47 PM       

On the Today show this morning, I see their musical guest is Mariah Carey, one of the worst things to happen to music since Slim Whitman. Right now I can hear her in the background, sounding like a chipmuck being slowly squashed by a jackboot. Yet she's the top-selling female "artist" of all time, eclipsed only by Elvis and the Beatles. How do you explain something like that? Well, she's accessible, one supposes—non-threatening and she doesn't make you think too hard. Oohhh, oohhh, woo-ooh-ooh baby, bay-yay-by, bay-yay-yay-by... Blech.

Illegal Music

Over at the East Bay Express, this week's feature is on the renegade label Tigerbeat6, run by indie impressario Miguel Depedro. Great reading here.

Depedro's lineup includes albums by Peaches, Sagan, Blevin Blectum, and Kid606, for example, and while these acts aren't punk per se, they aren't collectively electoclash either.

"Punk rock is supposed to make you squirm," says Alternative Tentacles' Baker. "It's not supposed to make you feel good. It's supposed to scare the shit out of you."

Maybe Stephan's Noize Creator is moving toward a solution. This is the techno side of the equation, but it isn't Kraftwerk, and it's not Chemical Brothers. Here's a review that tries to capture it, which mentions "Per Thousand," the cut linked to above:

The philosophy underlying the hyperkinetic Broken Bar, the android/industrial ballet of Hate Cops, the devastating wall of noise of Per Thousand, the terrifying bombing of Deferred Media, the grotesque symphonic grandeur of NBK is one of sheer violence and loss of psychic control. Each track is detonated by a rational form of manic sabotage.

Illegal Labor

The alternative press is so much fun to read because they tackle topics too dangerous for the big chains, and they cover them in more depth, often from unusual angles. Like this story on the effort to organize illegal alien labor in Phoenix. Because California's border fence and aggressive patrolling has been highly effective in curtailing unwanted border crossings, Phoenix is catching a lot more traffic in migrant workers.

The illegal day laborer scene, in case you haven't seen it, tends to work this way: Workers (or jornaleros) show up at a location known to employers—often in a warehouse or industrial district. Dozens, maybe hundreds congregate by sunrise. Trucks from construction sites start to show up, and foremen jump out and make their picks. Get lucky, you work for the day and make $50 to $100 in cash. This keeps you under the IRS screen, and the employer saves a huge bundle on insurance and payroll taxes.

The problem in Phoenix is that you don't have a couple dozen guys hanging around for the morning pickup, you have thousands. The linked story is framed through two perspectives, a furious American (Fendler) who wants to prevent the construction of a center that will organize the workers and cut down on crime, and the Mexican labor representative (Hector) who's trying to better conditions for his people.

Lately, there have been many days when Hector and Fendler follow similar routines. Both roll out of bed at roughly the same time, and both often head to where the day laborers are.

But while Hector parks himself on the sidewalk waiting for a job, Fendler parks his alt-fuel SUV near a pocket of day laborers and waits for employers to come so he can report them to the INS, the IRS, Social Security, whomever will listen.

Illegal Criticism

Maybe not illegal, but independent. In this case we're talking movies. Yet a third reason to scan the alternative press is that you can almost always trust the reviews. In most cases, the critic isn't shilling for the industry, and calls it like it is. Ran into a great example right here. Consider the box-office bomb Extreme Ops. If you were inexplicably considering renting this one, you might have been tempted by the SF Gate review:

The story is ridiculous. At other times, it's just plain good: There are ski and snowboarding scenes, plenty of them, that are beautifully filmed and exhilarating to behold...But "Extreme Ops" also has a zany panache that's appealing and, at its best, it makes viewers feel as if they're being brought into a select world of crazy young people who enjoy going to the edge—and laughing their heads off once they get there.

The average Mentos advertisement is Citizen Kane compared to Extreme Ops, a mostly European-run production for Paramount Pictures that absolutely, positively has to be the dumbest—and I mean the dumbest—movie to make it to theaters this year.

Two brine shrimp fighting over a fleck of pond scum have more brain cells to rub together than the idiots who thought up this movie, and a pair of frostbitten toddlers bawling at the bottom of the bunny slope are ten times as extreme as 90 percent of the paradoxically big-budget but low-rent ski action that barely keeps this poxy dog of a ski-ploitation flick licking its leprous genitals for a mind-numbing hour and 33 minutes.

11:18:36 AM