Playing Catch Up ...

May 18, 2011: Oh, ho-oh! ... Where does the time go?

What I want to know is why I still only have 20 Followers when I know there are at least 23 of you out there reading this thing. Are you uncomfortable being labeled a "Follower?" Would you feel better if it said "Supplicant?"

There's so much to speak of, and yet it's so hard for me to move beyond talking about television. And I'm not even talking about new television, which I guess is what most people want to talk about -- reality shows and the like. I'm talking about "All In The Family," and the first 3 seasons I just got on DVD. My god, but that show is brilliant. And it's been exciting having the chance to introduce it to my children, except I have to explain a lot of the racist jokes. ("Why's that so funny?" my son will ask. "Well," I explain, "the Polish people have traditionally blah-blah-blah ...") I consider myself fortunate to have grown up in a time when we were taught that all these stereotypes are wrong, and yet we were still exposed to them in great excess. Pity my poor children -- and yours -- who are growing up without a solid foundation in these precarious treasures troves of comedy, like bigotry, racism, homophobia, and mysogyny (which I can NEVER spell).

Speaking of comedy, I heard something at work today -- Thanks Gwen! -- about this Arnold Schwarznegger situation (and I guess I'm spelling that as well as it needs to be spelled for our purposes). I recall meeting him briefly in L.A. a few years back, and I was struck both by how short he was (certainly compared to the goliath heights he'd achieved in my imagination) and by how old he looked -- his hair looking so poorly dyed up-close, his rock-quarry features caving in on themselves amidst raucous wrinkles and -- I know now -- the derailing stress of dual fatherhood (or is it duel fatherhood). Anyway, he was at least polite, and now looking back I have to wonder if he didn't simply want to get me in bed too. Well, say what you might about his philandering shenanigans, I still think he made many great movies, starting with Last Action Hero, Sixth Day, Total Recall, and perhaps culminating with Predator, although they weren't even made in that order. As an actor he consistently showed a level of versatility that you wouldn't ordinarily find in an Austrian, certainly not since the Great War.

It's been raining a lot this week, and that's another topic worth exploring. I have a theory that certain factions of our totalitarian world government are hard at work trying to control the weather. Obviously they're not having any success, but I'm glad, because I love the rain, and if it were up to those people it would only rain at night, and we don't even need it then. I think you see my point. But if you don't, I don't care, unless you're one of my Supplicants ... I mean Followers.