2008: The Year of the Reprieve

I'm not willing to say this was the year "change" and "hope" swept in to save us (or at least make us feel better), so I will dub the past 12 months "The Year of the Reprieve."
• We endured a grueling political campaign season full of pandering, race-baiting, name-calling and empty rhetoric until Nov. 4 put the presidential race to bed, pacifying partisans on both sides of the aisle.
• Speaking of which, half of us shook in our boots at the prospect of Vice President Sarah Palin. Now that possibility is extinguished, that same faction looks forward to worrying in 2009 about Vice President Joe Biden.
• We struggled to pay the mortgage until the federal government decided they'd help pay to lower our rates.
• We paid upward of $3 per gallon for gasoline until the price of crude fell out with the rest of the global economy.
• We worried if our respective banks would go out of business until Hank Paulson and the Treasury Department propped them up long enough for the credit markets to thaw a little.
• We worried that the Beijing Summer Olympics would end in a mess of protests, pollution and Communist subversion. Thanks, Michael Phelps, for reminding the world that America is Numero Uno, never minding the fact the Chinese won more gold medals.
• We worried about the health of America's finances until the government passed countless bailouts, rescue packages and other economic goodies for Big Business (though some of us are still quite worried, and with good reason).
• We secretly wondered if a new Cold War with Russia was brewing after the struggle in Georgia until bigger news stories made the issue slowly disappear.
• We all fretted about al-Qaida and other Muslim extremists would gain more ground in Pakistan and Afghanistan until our political leadership decided to start the Afghanistan surge early.
• A few of us expected Hillary Clinton to turn into the Incredible Hulk after losing the primary election, rampaging through most the major cities until she got enough super-delegates (remember them?) to throw the Democratic primary into complete chaos. Instead, Barack Obama helped pay down her campaign debt and found a plum position for her at the State Department.

Here's to all the problems we're carrying over into the new year and all the myriad ways we'll try (and sometimes fail) to fix them.

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Dear People of Los Angeles

I recently learned of a change in a custodial agreement made in your fair city.
Jamie Spears, father of former pop princess and current burnout Britney Spears, is now to be paid $75 an hour to handle her affairs.
Ladies and gentleman, I will gladly enlist the help of two colleagues. Together, you will have a trio of trouble-shooters who feel no familial attachment to Ms. Spears. Additionally, we'd gladly split a $50-an-hour salary.
On top of this, we will see to it Ms. Spears never produces another comeback album for music critics to waste time panning and people with no taste to waste their money on.
Sure, this may cause a problem for the music industry, but we can always take brief vacations in which Ms. Spears is assured to raise enough hell to sell enough tabloids and magazines at grocery and retailer checkout lanes to more than make up for it.
In lieu of a $1,200 monthly payment to maintain an office, how about $600 to lease and fuel two mid-range vehicles to keep tabs on Ms. Spears?
I'm not good with math, but I have to imagine this scenario would be cheaper than the $16,000 being shelled out by you good people to corral and promote a washed-up pop star who would do well to find the phone number of a producer willing to make Ms. Spears center square on a new incarnation of "Hollywood Squares."
I await your response, Los Angeles.

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Cinema Paradiso

For at least the past eight years, I've tried my best to keep track of the films I've seen thus far in my life with a spreadsheet ranking them according to various rationales, litmuses, etc. Over time the list has been revised, amended and edited hundreds of times.

Earlier this week I realized I had not touched the list in almost a year, mostly due to the fact I had not seen more than six new films in theater in the same period of time. Now that I've seen the list fall into such antiquity, I have no choice but to try and update it.

Therein lies my problem. I don't know where to start, and I'm rediscovering the problems I had with it the last time my thoughts dwelled on it. For example:

• Can I really decide whether "Dr. Strangelove" is better than "Lawrence of Arabia"?
• Does a Wes Anderson film truly belong in my top five?
• Am I comfortable enough to admit that "The Godfather" is much better than "The Godfather Part II" despite popular wisdom suggesting otherwise?
• Is it wrong to have "Schindler's List" and "The Producers" next to each other?
• How do I decide between half a dozen great Coen Brothers film, and how does one reconcile that their only Best Picture winner ("No Country For Old Men") may not even rank among my top five Coen flicks?

It's gotten so bad that I've listed the director of each film next to the title so I can go through the rankings and create a new list: My Favorite Films, by director. What have I learned from this exercise?

• Steven Spielberg has made A LOT of movies better than "The Lost World."
• "Blues Brothers 2000" shouldn't have been made.
• Stanley Kubrick could have died before making "Eyes Wide Shut" and seem a helluva lot cooler.
• Quentin Tarantino isn't nearly as prolific as most college-age males are led to believe.
• Frank Darabont and M. Night Shyamalan are in career free-fall, having peaked in the 1990s and stooping as low as being most notable these days for cameos on "Entourage."

This is my hell. For the next few weeks (or months, who knows?), I'll be pondering in my free time whether "Silent Hill" is truly one of the worst films I've ever seen, or if I'm just quietly lamenting the reality that I haven't seen a film by a French director that I truly liked since "Delicatessen" (and even that one loses points over time because it was directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who was responsible for another of my least-liked films, "Amelie").

So say a short prayer for all the titles muddling through the middle of my list, left to chance whether they meteorically rise or fall: "Labyrinth," "Scarface," "Gross Pointe Blank" and "Million Dollar Baby." They can use all the help they can get.

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You Play To Win The Game

For those of you interested in Powerball, hold onto your freaking hats... the winds of change are blowing in lottery land.
Starting Jan. 4, 2009, more white-ball numbers will be added to "make the jackpots bigger," while at the same time some red-ball integers will be going away "to create more winners."
The Powerball Powers That Be say this will result in more than 3.5 million more winning tickets each year at the same level of sales.
Bigger jackpots and more winners... Sounds awesome, right?
The starting jackpot is getting a $5-million bump from $15 million to $20 million... so when you inevitably take the lump-sum payment right away, you'll be left with maybe $70,000 more after taxes come next year.... that's enough to pay a good accountant to handle your finances, or a bad lawyer to sift through all the lawsuits you'll be getting from people who claim they're owed a share of your winnings.

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Enjoy (if you can)

Courtesy of Al Crancer, who sent this cartoon to the Sentinel offices with what I'm sure were good intentions.

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Holiday cheer

A quick thanks to whichever member of the Aurora Police Department decided it would be nice to play Christmas music over the radio after 9:15 tonight. Quite honestly, I would be OK if they stopped airing emergency alerts altogether and put on some nice holiday songs from now until Jan. 1, 2009.

Any chance the criminals in Aurora could take a few weeks off to enjoy the holidays while the police scanner gets turned into a yuletide jukebox? That's my Christmas wish — sort of an indirect way of asking for peace on Earth and goodwill toward men.

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Michelle Obama and The Bomb

There are two* things on my nerves as of late:

1. The sound of the AMBER Alert. This sounds eerily like the nuclear bomb siren on Sid Meier's Civilization II, except now it emanates from television sets, the stereo in my car and anywhere else with a screen and a speaker. It's my own little red scare every so often, even though I know if there was an impending nuclear attack, there'd probably be precious little time to be occupied with worrying as the missiles head toward their eventual targets. We'll meet again / don't know where, don't know when...


2. "First Lady-elect." I know a lot of you took a long, hard look at your ballot to see where to mark your vote for Michelle Obama, but alas, she was not an official candidate during the 2008 elections. It's even a bit tenuous to suggest the first lady is anything more than an unofficial ambassador for the country, even though an entire branch of the Executive Office of the President is devoted to helping the spouse of the president play host to all sorts of foreign leaders and dignitaries. Still, no first lady has ever been elected to that post. Nothing is officially expected or demanded of the first lady in our Constitution. Admire her (and question her fashion choices) as much as you will, but for now can she just be "Michelle" and let us do away with the ridiculous (and wrong) "First Lady-elect"?

* - There are only two I care to share with you at this present time, on this blog. Dare I say, the number of things bothering me right now is far too high to expound upon without taking a few days off to detail them properly. Ain't I a cheerful fella?

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