Plum Crazy

It Came From the Spa!

Just when you thought it was safe to go out on the streets again, this horrifying thriller will keep you inside! Yes, It Came From the Spa. What is this monstrous thing turning normal women into green-faced monsters? Watch as these women terrorize your neighborhood! Cringe while they brandish their toxic nail polish! Scream as they steam unsuspecting victims' pores to death! Shiver while they pour hot wax on their lips, eyebrows, and more sensitive parts! Coming next Halloween to a theatre near you!

A Day of Thanks

A day late, but better late than ever.

First, I'd like to thank my family for being my family. We've got our ups and downs, like any family, but they're always there when I need them. So thanks!

Second, I'd like to thank my friends for much the same thing.

I'd like to thank the company I work for for still being a great company. I'm almost there 10 years now, and I still really like working there. As big companies go, it treats its employees well. Good benefits (their tuition reimbursement package is amazing and allowed me to get my MBA from NYU), less politics than most major corporations, and some of the nicest people I've ever worked with. And the paycheck really comes in handy.

I'd also like to thank Cam Edwards for having me on his morning radio show this morning to sing part of my politically correct Christmas song. I think I now got my Andy Warhol Fifteen Minutes of Fame^TM. Well, at least 3 of the 15 minutes, but it's 3 more than I ever had before. So thanks, Cam! I will be getting an mp3 of the performance, which I will probably post here for all you suckers fine folks who are brave enough to listen to me sing.

Lastly, an update to the Contest! We've got a winner! Congrats to Just John for the correct answer. Yes, the real name of the person who wrote (and performed) "The Witch Doctor" was Ross Bagdasarian, better known as David Seville of Alvin and the Chipmunks. Bagdasarian, along with his cousin William Saroyan, previously had written a number one hit for Rosemary Clooney, one of my favorite swing songs, "Come On A My House". What made the connection for me was that at the end of every episode of "Alvin and the Chipmunks", they would say it was a "Ross Bagdasarian Production" (as it turns out, that was actually his son, Ross Bagdasarian, Jr., but still, the name isn't particularly common). I remembered the name from the song "Come On A My House", did a little research, and there you have it. Ross Bagdasarian was the real name of David Seville. What I had not known, but John did, was that Bagdasarian had a bit part in the Hitchcock movie "Rear Window".

Hey Look!

NBC is premiering The Short-Fingered Vulgarian Hour*. Guess the real estate business must be kind of slow for the Donald, if he's branching out into reality TV. It can't be that he simply craves the limelight, because he is, essentially, a modest man*. No, really. He once said so.

*Spy Magazine always used to refer to Trump as the short-fingered vulgarian, and I thought it a highly descriptive phrase. Some day I'll see if I can find the piece I wrote when Trump referred to himself as "essentially a modest man".

Contest!

Okay, I lost a bet to a friend. The loser of the bet was to buy dinner for two at the restaurant of my choice. Sadly for my friend, he never specified which two people the loser was to buy dinner for. So in the spirit of fun (and he agrees this would be fun), I am going to buy dinner for two for the first person to correctly answer a two-part trivia question I'm going to pose, provided that person has a valid PayPal account I can send $75 to. Since I will almost certainly not know a restaurant in the winner's area, I will forego choosing the restaurant, instead opting for the $75 limit.

The question is: What is the real name of the person who wrote the song "The Witch Doctor", and what was the name this person was better known as?

Remember, in order to win, you must correctly answer both parts of the question and have a valid PayPal account. Once I identify the winner in the comments, that person should e-mail me his/her PayPal account information to collect his/her winnings. I'm kind of trusting people not to use Google or another search engine to figure it out, cause it wouldn't be as fun, but obviously I can't really stop you.

Go for it!

Musical Menu: Indian

I've decided to start a little feature showcasing music from around the world, as I suspect most Americans are only familiar with primarily American and British music. There's a whole lot of other music out there, and I thought it would be neat to feature some. In order not to break any copyrights, I am only going to be posting clips from songs, not entire songs.

Tonight's music selection, a tasty morsel named "Sona Sona Roop Hai", comes from India. Enjoy.

Sona Sona Roop Hai

Ho Ho Hold-up

He's making a list. He's checking it twice. He's gonna find out who's naughty or nice. Santa Claus' helpers are robbing a post office in town.

Well, unsuccessfully. The failed thieves escaped on bicycles. This took place in the Netherlands. I wonder what it's like, living in a country where criminals can easily escape on bicycles. There must be a huge level of trust. Might be cool.

I'm Dreaming of a Color-Blind Winter Holiday

Michele has issued a challenge to envision a completely politically correct holiday season. My contributions, thus far:

The title of this post.

How the Grinch Redistributed to the Poor the Holiday Season.

New lyrics to the song "Winter Wonderland"

Sleigh bells ring, are you listening,
In the lane, snow is glistening
A beautiful, but this is not to imply that a lane without snow would also not be beautiful, sight,
We're happy tonight.
Traversing through a winter wonderland.

Gone away is the non-color-specific-bird,
Here to stay is a new bird
He or she sings a love song,
As we go along,
Traversing through a winter wonderland.

In the meadow we can build a snowperson,
Then pretend that he or she is a member of the clergy from the religion of your choice or, if you prefer, a justice of the peace.

He or she'll say: Are you married?
We'll say: No person,
Because marriage is a paternalistic construct
Designed to suppress women

Later on, we'll conspire,
As we dream by the fire
To face unafraid,
The plans that we've made,
Traversing through a winter wonderland.

In the meadow we can build a snowperson,
And pretend that he or she's a circus clown
We'll have lots of fun with Mr./Ms./Miss/Mrs. Snowperson,
Until the alligators knock him or her down.

When it snows, ain't it thrilling,
Though your nose gets a chilling
We'll frolic and play, the Arctic Native American way,
Traversing through a winter wonderland.

Traversing through a winter wonderland,
Traversing through a winter wonderland.

If you have any of your own, go leave them.

My One Boy Cuddly Toy?

This is truly excellent. Brandon Cruz, who played Eddie in "The Courtship of Eddie's Father" is now a punk singer currently performing as the lead vocalist for The Dead Kennedys. He also released a solo album called "Eddie Is a Punk" with four different versions of the show's theme song.

In other news, it appears that a new version of the TV series was being made, and he appeared as a character in it. Apparently, though, the WB didn't pick it up for their fall schedule.

Tino!

A banner day. The budget review meeting is finally over and went well, and my favorite baseball player has been traded to an American League team! Now I will be able to go to ogle see him play at Yankee Stadium again. I wonder if the Yankees sell a season ticket package just for games against the Devil Rays...

Clap Hands

So on this other forum I participate in, a discussion was started regarding spirituality in the workplace. At some point in the discussion, one of the members responded to someone who said that it is fellow Christians who are the biggest challenge to his beliefs by saying

If you're a Christian, you believe in Christ. You don't believe in Christians.

But I believe in Christians! I'm sure they exist. I've met them.

Do you believe in Christians? Say quickly that you believe! If you believe, clap your hands! Maybe then the Christians won't die.

Racy!

Michele points out an amusing new thing, a Google Race. The Google Race searches for the most references per presidential candidate for any term you type in.

I was curious, so I typed in the word "schmuck". Wesley Clark wins the schmuck race, followed by Al Sharpton, George Bush, Joe Lieberman, John Edwards, and John Kerry. Howard Dean came up with no results. I think he's just so white-bread that no one can conceive of using a term like schmuck to describe him. He does win the "bastard" race, though.

Putting Things in Proportion

I'm excerpting a bit I wrote in response to a discussion going on in another forum. My involvement in the discussion started when someone made the ludicrous and thoroughly insupportable claim that the Democrats were blocking the nominations of Janice Rogers Brown and Miguel Estrada out of racist motives. The theory was that the Democrats can't bear to allow a Republican president to appoint minority judges because it will sap away the Democratic minority voting base. Democrats can be the only ones to appoint minority judges.

Well, at least, that was the claim until I pointed out the following statistics.

The breakdown of Bush's judicial nominees that were confirmed is as follows:

Blacks - 10 men, 2 women
Hispanics - 10 men, 4 women
Arabs - 2 men
Asians - 1 man

The remainder were all white men and women.

It is clear that the Democrats are not stopping the Republican Bush from appointing minority judges. So then the claim became that Democrats are racists because those numbers are not proportionately representative of minorities in this country. Now the last part of that statement is actually true. However he lays the full blame for this at the feet of the Democrats, ignoring completely the obvious fact that Democrats can't vote to confirm people who haven't been nominated, and Bush hasn't nominated a lot more minorities than that. The only two minority candidates the Democrats have threatened to block are Rogers Brown and Estrada, and those two fall in with four white candidates. The similarity all six share? Ideology.

He also completely ignored the fact that those numbers represent only the minority candidates nominated by Bush and confirmed by the Senate. A more thorough look at the demographic breakdown of the currently serving Federal judiciary follows.

88 Blacks, or 9.58%
52 Hispanics, or 5.66%
8 Asians, or 0.87%
0 Native Americans
3 Arabs, or 0.3%

Of those numbers the following were the numbers nominated by President.

Blacks - Carter 6, Reagan 3, Bush I 7, Clinton 60, Bush II 12
Hispanics - Johnson 1, Carter 2, Reagan 5, Bush I 7, Clinton 23, Bush II 14
Arabs - Clinton 1, Bush II 2
Asians - Reagan 1, Bush I 1, Clinton 5, Bush II 1

Still not proportionately representative. I was, however, quite amused to see a Republican, and a staunch conservative one at that, advocating proportional representation. Will wonders never cease? So finally we get to the actual point of all of this. My excerpt about proportional representation.

In a truly non-racist society, one would expect to see proportional representation as a matter of course. There is nothing objectively cultural that causes members of one ethnic group to seek careers in law more than others. Certainly if you look at origin countries, they have lawyers and judges, which means that members of that culture seek careers in those venues. And it's not like Israel has only lawyers, doctors, financiers, and entertainment moguls. There are specific historical reasons why Western Jews tended to primarily work in the first three sectors which are unrelated to some objective cultural attraction towards those pursuits, but are in fact highly correlated to discrimination. Similar factors also relate to reasons members of other cultures haven't sought careers in those sectors outside of their origin countries. Differences like that might take generations to work themselves out, but given enough time in a non-discriminatory society, eventually they would. The problem is people tend to draw their conclusions about different groups based on the result of hundreds of years of discrimination, never giving thought to how that is skewed by why the result came about in the first place.

But you can't really judge the impact of discrimination on a society solely by looking at the upper levels anyway. Promotions to the top level are distorted by what goes on at the levels beneath. For example, even with the best intentions in the world, it would be virtually impossible to have 50% of all corporate CEOs be female next year. Simply because 50% of the pool from which you would pick CEOs is not female. Neither is 50% of the level right beneath that. As you go further down the chain, however, you will see that as you near the bottom, it is, in fact, proportionately representative of gender, but that a thinning out goes on as you move up. The higher up you move, the more pronounced the thinning out becomes. It is at those lower levels that you need to begin your understanding of what factors are at work and address them. The same analysis does need to occur at all levels, including the top ones, but the first place you need to look is where the thinning out begins and understand that. Then you work your way up.

What does all that mean? Proportional representation should not be an end unto itself. Proportional representation should be the by-product of our real end goal - a non-discriminatory society. If we work on that, proportional representation will naturally follow.

Punctuation Envy

A spammer asks the age-old question - "Do you suffer from small ???"

Hmm. Let's take a look. ???

My word, I do! Oh, the shame. Sure, sure, I know that readers all say that size doesn't matter, but do they really believe it?

Budget Heck

Budget season hasn't been quite the same little slice of hell it usually is. In some part thanks to fabby technology. My laptop, wireless broadband connection, and a VPN have enabled me to work on the budget until the wee hours from the comfort of my very own couch. What more could a budget queen ask for?

Sadly, though, the lessening of budget hell to budget heck has dampened my inspiration to write budget haiku this year. All my budget haiku fans (I'm sure there's got to be one somewhere) will simply have to make do with last year's.

My Very First Troll

Dear wdyc,

If you wish to come to my place and mention you would like to have a gun to shoot "jackasses" like me for disagreeing with you politically, don't expect to be welcome. I don't maintain a website for your amusement and pleasure. Buh-bye.

A Picture

A photograph my father took of a war buddy of his in Korea.

In Flanders Field

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, saw dawn, felt sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up your quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

by John McCrae

To all the veterans who fought to preserve our freedoms - Thank you.

I'm Back

My friend is out of the hospital and recuperating as well as can be expected. I'm back home now, after having spent the entire weekend in NYC, which Ihave grown to dread. I left all the traffic behind, or so I thought.

Now for my 10-second review of Matrix Revolutions - It sucked.

Hmm, I guess that wasn't even 10 seconds. Okay, let me be a little bit more elaborate. Here thar be spoilers, so enter at your own risk.

Neo has got to be the stupidest man in the world. Bane is calling him "Mr. Anderson" in that monotone for like 10 minutes before he finally figures out that Bane's been possessed by Agent Smith. Well, actually, that isn't even what got him to figure it out. No, Neo had to "see" Agent Smith, unlike the entire audience, who copped to it really early on from all the mega-obvious clues.

Trinity's death scene - I was screaming in my mind "Would you just die already!"

The kid at the end running around telling everyone that the war was over - Could he have been more like Tiny Tim from "A Christmas Carol"? Only had he gone around saying in that preternaturally cheerful voice "God bless us all, everyone." I kept waiting for him to utter those very words.

The Wachowski brothers seem to have mistaken a quantity of Agent Smith for quality. Sure, there were tons of Agents Smith running around, but they weren't saying nearly enough. When you have a great villain like that, use him!

The same goes for the Merovingian, but they could have improved what little he did say too. For example, was it necessary to have him hit us over the head with the "not coincidence, but consequence" schtick? I think not.

A better explanation for why the Oracle looked different in this film would have been "I was bored with my old outfit, so I bought a new one." Short, simple, not vague.

Well, that's about it. To quote the Oracle "Everything that has a beginning, has an end", which was the best thing you could say about this film.

More For Your Viewing Pleasure

Today's artistic selection is a colored pencil painting my father did entitled "Tulips".

For Your Viewing Pleasure

This is not the best week for me to blog, as a very good friend of mine had a colostomy on Monday and I have been spending my days at work and my evenings visiting him in the hospital (all of his family is in California). So I am going to leave you today with a photograph my father took. I love this one, and have a print in my office.

A Victory for Party Politics

But a loss for those of us who feel our two-party system needs an overhaul. The quote that best sums up why I think our current system needs some major changes.

Democrat Norma Hart, a 73-year-old retired schools psychiatrist, said, "Some people think the party system is evil, but I don't. If there are no primaries, how would we know who was good?"

Yes, that's right, in what signals a death knell for critical thinking all over New York City, apparently we need to be told who's good. Heaven forfend we should have to actually research candidates' stances on issues and their backgrounds and, gasp, come to a decision for ourselves. It's so much easier when someone else can tell you who's good.

The trust in the parties to tell us who is good is naive, at best. Most primaries are reflections of who the power brokers in the parties want to see in office for their own reasons, not who is the best candidate.

It's seldom that I agree with Mikey on anything, but I'm right behind him on this one. The stranglehold that the two major parties have on this country is detrimental to it. They have become voices for special interest groups, bought by whomever can offer them the best deal. They'll sell out their base if they believe that another group can get them elected. These are not people out to represent our best interests, but to represent their own best interests. Doing away with party affiliations would be one way to at least make politics accessible to people who otherwise don't have a hope of getting on the ballot, because no party will support them.

Media Fatigue

It's one year before the next Presidential election, and I'm already tired of it. How astonishing that a war and the economy are big issues with the American public. I'm sure most of us thought that whether or not Britney Spears will be cast as John McCane's daughter, Lucy, in the upcoming Die Hard IV was the hot-button issue.

"It's still a 50-50 nation politically, and it's clear that Bush's sagging ratings on the war are just as big a problem for him as the economy," said Andrew Kohut, director of the independent Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

Thanks, Andrew. It's also clear that the election is ONE YEAR AWAY, and a lot can happen in a year. Isn't a little early to be worrying about this? With a war, a weak economy showing some signs of recovery, North Korea making noises of compromise, and all sorts of other things going on, doesn't the media have enough to report on? News just ain't that slow these days.

The NR-A List

I must confess that I don't see the big deal about this alleged NRA "black list". It's just a list of organizations and famous people who support gun-control legislation. I don't think it's a black list per se. It's not much of a secret that many of those celebs are pro-gun-control, so if anyone who was predisposed to boycott celebrity activities due to their gun-control stance wanted to do so, the information is fairly readily available in other formats. I do find it amusing that people seem to be clamoring to get on it, though.

BTW, if you like, you can sign up to be on the NRA "white list".

I was also amused at how the NRA characterized a pro-drug-legalization stance as one of the "extreme causes with which many Americans don't agree". (Roughly 62% of Americans oppose legalizing drugs). Since polls indicate that the majority of Americans in fact favor some form of gun control (approx. 57%), couldn't one accuse the NRA of supporting an extreme cause with which many Americans don't agree?

Just for the record, I am pro-drug-legalization and anti-gun control, so I'm batting 1.000 on supporting extreme causes that many Americans don't agree with. Go me.

Show Me the Horror

I finally screwed up the nerve to watch "The Omen". I went into it figuring I'd be scared out of my wits and jumping at shadows afterwards. As I was watching it, I kept waiting for it to start to be scary. Yeah, the nanny hung herself. The priest was impaled with a spike. The photographer was decapitated by a pane of glass. All gruesome. None scary.

The music was good. It kept me figuring eventually something truly horrifying would happen. But it never did. Someone's going to have to tell me just what was so scary about "The Omen", because I can't figure it out. I spent most of the movie thinking about how absurd it would be if the father succeeded in killing Damien (which I knew he wouldn't, as there were two sequels) and had to explain it in a court of law. "Well, Your Honor, the child wasn't human. No, really, he was the Antichrist. He had this birthmark on his scalp. A 666. And he was born on June 6th at 6 am. Look, his mother was a jackal. Oh yeah, and there's this poem."

All About the 80s