WTF, first Mel, now Kramer?!

Wow, we all hate hecklers, but this was a little over the top, no?

And the even more awkward apology on The Late Show.



Here's the thing that apologists never get around
to talking about and that's the fact that we all
know racists of varying stripes and background. I
cannot condone this tirade nor can I condemn Michael
Richards for the rest of his life. I see what he did
on stage as a bad move but not as some kind of
ultimate revelation of his true nature.

First off, I've known some truly hateful people
and they are very skilled at hiding their true nature.
It's usually the people who aren't that bad that end up
hanging themselves like this.

Second, as a performer or artist who tries to tap into
his stream of consciousness, this looks to me like a man
who said the wrong thing and then tried to defuse it by
blowing it out of proportion. It's a classic digging your
way out of a hole tactic and it never works.

Third, are most people really shocked by this behavior?
There are people laughing on both videos way after it
appears to be inappropriate. If it weren't for the use
of one word, the act would have gone on unabated. This
N-Word shit is ridiculous. The word is used constantly
in rap and film and it's put out there as some kind of
power trip as if to say, here is a word we can use, but
God help you if you even say it within the context of
talking about the word itself. I'm compelled to type the word
"N-Word" when talking about the use of the word "nigger."
That's ridiculous especially since I'm not trying to insult
anyone.

It gets even more ridiculous when I watch a show like
"Mind of Mencia" and Carlos Mencia does a video in
which he calls Kanye West a "crazy nigger." No uproar
and I saw that one on YouTube as well. So now I'm guessing
that it's OK to say the N-Word if you're Hispanic, but
not if you're Jewish?

So how's this gonna line up? Asians can't, but Pacific
Islanders can. Indians can't, but American Indians can,
but only if they live on a reservation. And what if you
are a mixed breed? Oh my God. What if you are half black
and half white? I bet it's OK for Denzel to say it, though
he never would. But I bet Mariah Carey and Nicole Ritchie
would still get their asses beat for saying it.

I think there is a deeper question to be put forward here
and that is if the word itself is bad why don't we take one of
these two approaches, but not both. Either we all stop using
the N-Word because it is bad or we take all power from it.

There is a solution and I think it's in recognizing the
context of these things. A friend of mine calls me a
big, Indian bastard. Now, I know he would never call me that
in anger, he does so out of love. It's his way of recognizing
what I am and appreciating it. It's OK because there is love there.
Just as there is when black guys call each other "my nigga."
Granted, Sidney Poitier probably never calls Harry Belafonte that.
A lot of younger dudes, black and white, will do this and not
get offended. Older folks will say it isn't right for a
white high school boy to say this to his black best friend
even though there is no hint of hatred in it, but I think
they are on to something. They have managed to take a
word full of hate and defuse it by making it synonymous
with "my friend" or "my man" or "my brother." And that's
not a bad thing.

On Further Inspection: Lifetime Movies Suck: The Post About How Lifetime Movies Suck

Meredith Baxter Birney

Have you ever noticed how all Lifetime movies have more than one title?
Titles like "Hidden in the Open: Guilty of Love: The Sally Baker Story." I
made that one up totally on my own before going to the Lifetime Movie
listings to pick the, following plums: "Moment of Truth: Justice for Annie"
was on this morning. "Lies of the Heart: The Story of Laurie Kellogg" is
on Wednesday and "Moment of Truth: Cradle of Conspiracy," "Homeless
to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story," "Playing to Win: A Moment of Truth
Movie" are ALL on Thanksgiving Day and "Moment of Truth: Why My
Daughter?" and "Desperate Rescue: The Cathy Mahone Story" round
out the melodramatic week.

No man with a soupcon of testosterone in his body can watch this channel
for more than a few moments without officially switching teams. It isn't that
the movies are bad. They ARE bad, no doubt, it's that they are SO FUCKING
UNBELIEVABLY MELODRAMATIC. It's one thing to tell the story of a
woman who overcomes an abusive husband to improve her lot in life. It's quite
another to make sure we all get the idea of just how hideous this guy is by
making sure that not only does he hit the woman as part of the story, he does
it in front of his mistress and the children from both unions in the middle of
a dinner party just because our hero asked him he'd like any more champagne
to celebrate their 25th anniversary. Oh and he gives her herpes, too.

It's too much. Even if all of it were rooted in fact, the presentation is so lame
it doesn't matter because it just looks like really bad fiction. These movies
are just some lame-ass female revenge fantasy without even a hint of
irony in them. At least Spike (the TV channel supposedly for men) seems
to know just how stupid they really are.

The real question is how does Lifetime or Lifetime Movies do anything
remotely positive for women? At least Oxygen takes a broad approach (no
pun intended) to women's issues. The closest Lifetime comes to covering
something as important as women's health is when they did "The Rapist
Gave Me Cancer: The Veronica Hale Story: A Women's Health Issue Movie."
I made that one up, but you probably couldn't tell.

Lest I forget, so-called "men's TV" is pretty freaking horrible as well. It's so
bad, you would think the programmer's at Lifetime were honestly trying to
give men what they think men want. It's so bad, you'd think men hadn't
come up with such things as mathematics, painting, music, the space
program and philosophy. In fact, watching Spike, it's hard to believe men
don't just roll around in their own feces all day looking at boobies. But that's
another rant.

What the fuck is this shit?

Law & Order

Dixie Shanahan at her trial (left), a photo from the trial showing Dixie Shanahan's abuse (center) and Scott Shanahan (right).

A couple of years ago, I covered a murder trial. That sounds
pretty exciting, but truth be told, even the best murder
trials are incredibly boring procedures that lend themselves
more to dry moralization than high drama. The murder trial
I covered was that of Dixie Shanahan and it was like a "Law & Order"
episode written by William Faulkner.

The basic facts of the Shanahan murder case are that
Dixie was married to a reprobate named Scott Shanahan who
beat her seriously and regularly. One day, Scott disappeared
and was never heard from again. At first, no one was concerned.
Over a year later, it started to look really suspicious. It turns
out that Dixie had shot her husband while he was asleep in their
bed, covered him over, blocked off the room and never went back
inside. Scott Shanahan's corpse weighed under 50 pounds when
it was found by the Shelby County Sheriff's department.

Now, I was at the trial and there was not one person who came
forward to say that Scott Shanahan didn't get exactly what he
deserved. In fact, there were a couple of people who made it fairly
clear that he was a piece of shit and if ANYBODY deserved to get
put out of his and our collective misery, it was wife beater and all-
around asshole, Scott Shanahan.

But this is where things get complicated.

Laws don't exist jut to make things easy for us. Laws exist to give
us some incentive to do what's right when doing what's wrong seems
preferable or easier. Laws exist primarily for cases just like this one.
The law is meant to prevent us from acting on our feelings. It exists
so we DON'T think it's OK to kill someone just because they are bad.
Was Scott a prick? Yes. Was he asking for it? Certainly. Would I have
like to have beat his balls off with a baseball bat my damn self? Hell
yeah. But the question isn't did Dixie feel the same way, the question
is did Dixie have a choice? You better believe it.

If you've got an abusive sleeping asshole in one room and a door to
freedom on the other side, you better take the door every single time.
And know this: had there been one single excuse I could have used to
give Dixie a moral walk, I'd've done it. If she had killed him during
any of his actual attacks on her, I would have said, let's throw her
a parade and dump this asshole in the creek. Dixie waited until her
husband was asleep, shot him, hid his body for over a year, continued
to live in the same house as the corpse and, perhaps most suspiciously,
continued to spend the rest of the dead guys $150,000 inheritance.

No one said life or the law would be easy to put up with.

My Huffington Post Post

I just posted a comment here on Huffington Post. It wasn't so much in response to the original post which was by a soldier who was encouraging other soldiers to be in parades and let the American people say thanks. Many responders just wanted to say thanks. My response was to one of the other responses in which someone encouraged this soldier to ignore those who do not pay respect. You will get the gist of what's going on by reading my response but the entire thing is here. My resp0nse is below.



I certainly do respect our men and women in the Armed Forces and give you my thanks as well. I do wonder when other posters say things like, "Please pay little heed to those who show no respect, because it says more about themselves than it does about you."

What does that mean? Are there not enough Americans with magnetic ribbons reading "Support Our Troops" on their cars? Are there not enough people giving their thanks? Are not enough people stepping up to show their respect or are we talking about ANY acts of actual DIS-respect? Because I'm not seeing any of that.

I believe that it is quite often a great person who offers to put themselves in harm's way for the greater good, but there is a great responsibility to make sure our sons and daughters understand that there is a real difference between sacrificing for the greater good and sacrificing themselves for a corrupt administration.

I support our troops but I won't put a magnetic ribbon on my car saying as much because I don't want it misconstrued as approval for this current war. And let's be clear, those "Support Our Troops" ribbons ARE taken to be support for the president and this misguided war in Iraq.

Right after 9/11, a lot of people signed up because they wanted to do some good. They were sorely used and that is a great shame on us all, but maybe just a little bit more so on those in our society that were all so gung ho to get our war on and denounce anyone who said, "hmmm, maybe Iraq isn't the best place to go to fight terrorism."

Again, thanks for your sacrifice and for that of the fallen.

By: gjerrett on November 17, 2006 at 06:36pm

Coffeehouse of Blues

This is another play I wrote, called "Coffeehouse of Blues."
It had one staged reading at The Maintenance Shop at Iowa State
University in Ames, Iowa in 2001 as part of The ISU Playwright's
Workshop showcase, "The Penis Project." It is not as slick and worked
over as "Last Chance," but then that was my opus. And if you don't
like it, maybe you can show me YOUR play some time, @$HOLE!
This started out to be a 10-minute play and turned into something
just slightly longer. It doesn't have a lot of action but it does
feature that which I do almost exclusively: dialog. Enjoy!

Below are some pics of the Maintenance Shop, but not the play itself.

Things going bump in the night (Saturday, October 04, 2003[?])

I want to just keep on saying this every day until Thanksgiving. You'd think by age, 57 and a half, it wouldn't come as such a surprise any more that the days get shorter and shorter as winter approaches, but every year ... "I can't believe how dark it is already."

I also can't believe how Halloween seems to get started earlier and earlier every year now, too, like it's Christmas. That starts unreasonably early every year as well, but at least with Christmas there are great fat gobs of cash to be made. If there's one thing I know about human beings it's that we will do anything for cash or - as the kids are calling it this month - "cheese" or "cheddar."

But is there really that much cheddar cheese to be made with Halloween? Sure, it's a bump for the economy, but there are only so many costumes, bags of miniature candy bars and plastic skulls one can buy unless one happens to be Rob Zombie.

Even Loan City on 35th and W. Broadway seems to have gotten into the spirit of Halloween, and I must admit I can't wait to see what they do for Christmas that will liven up our city's entranceway.

You can only do so much for Halloween a full month in advance of the actual holiday, because it is a very time-specific holiday. The spirits don't even start THINKING about getting out of the house until after the 5 o'clock news.

Halloween is definitely one of my top three favorite holidays of the year. The other two are Boxing Day and Ascension Sunday.

Halloween is the last of the great pagan brouhahas that still has any notion of "getting a little worked up" left in it. Not that long ago, Christmas was the biggest night to raise hell. I'm not even kidding about that.

Today, all of our holy days are boring. They are just becoming days when we repress our emotions even more than the rest of year. Thank God we can still have a good family argument at Thanksgiving. "Eating and crying ... you're like a crazy person! What's wrong with you? Have some more gravy and stop that!"

Ah gravy, is there nothing you cannot cure?

Halloween is one of those holidays where we do all sorts of stuff for reasons that completely baffle us if we bother to think about it. The answers are pretty interesting, too, I must say.

First off, Halloween is not really a dark or evil custom. It comes from the Celtic feast of Samhain (pronounced SOW-win or SOW-ween and definitely not SAM-hane), according to Peg Aloi, associate editor of Obsidian Magazine and an expert on pagan customs. Oct. 31 is right between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice. It is a conceptual, celestial tug o'war. Most of our ancestors really paid attention to astrology because they lived off the land and in compliance with the seasons. Also because indoor plumbing, heated office buildings and TV had not yet been invented.

It was a time to "commune with the dead," a practice that was viewed with particular suspicion by the Church, but was probably no more bizarre than our practice of leaving cookies out for Santa Claus or flowers on graves. In fact, leaving food out for deceased ancestors or inviting them to dinner was just part of the spirit of the holiday.

Because the veil between the worlds was thin, fortune-telling was also big at this time of year. Bobbing for apples is traditionally a way of telling if someone would have good fortune or not. It stands to reason since having a big mouth has always been a pretty good indication of one's BS-ing skills.

And talk about fun ... check out this speed-reasoning:

Squash make for good lanterns. They are plentiful, cheap, last a reasonably long time and taste great baked. Spirits in Irish folklore were often given names such as Jack of the Green, John O'Dreams, Jack in the Pulpit. A flame that flickers on Samhain night is supposedly one that is being touched by a spirit. According to Aloi, "Jack-O-Lantern" or "Jack of the Lantern" is an old Irish folktale about a man who is unable to enter heaven or hell and so is condemned to wander the night with only a candle in a turnip by which to see. So by extension, one might carve a pumpkin and put a candle in it just to see if those ancestors have dropped by or not.

Breathe!

Dressing up like ghosts was seen as a way to lead spirits back out of town once you were done with them, and many cultures have begged for candy and other treats for a variety of reasons. There really isn't any mystery there. Bribing people not to vandalize your house? Same thing, only it used to be much bigger at Christmas time.

This is a fine time of the year, though. Even with all our streetlights and modern, food-storing appliances, it's easy to see how our ancestors could get all riled up and spiritual at this time of year. As the days grow shorter and the nights get longer, the mind - conditioned by eons of instinct - cannot help but offer forth its darkest thoughts.

So, if you've gotten this far, I want you to call or write me with your ghost stories. The good stuff. The real southwest Iowa, swear-to-God-it's-true stories of ghosts and other bizarre happenings of the season. Then, I will write about them. Sound good? You bet it does.

- Greg Jerrett is a Nonpareil staff writer.

Read my play or fear my wrath

If you're a friend of mine and you've never read my
play, Last Chance, you will have about 24 hours to
do so before I start asking you if you have yet and
then start pouting when you say, "No, I haven't
had time."

We both know that's a lie.

I just put the play here for your convenience, so now
you have no excuse. Below are some photos from
one of the performances.


Ben Godar as Craig.


Patrick Gouran as Buddy and Darci Horton as Becky.


Godar and Gouran right before their big love scene.
Just kidding. There was almost no gay sex in this play.

The World According to Forever Knight

How could life be so bad that you would give it up
for an eternity of, possibly, oblivion? It's an intriguing
question and one that has occasionally occurred to me
since I heard it asked in the final episode of the hit
Canadian vampire/cop show, "Forever Knight."

I don't care the source, the question is a good one. No
one really knows what's next. At best, they are just hoping
for some sweet reward, a cushy cloud, the Happy Hunting
Grounds, Nirvana or maybe even Pearl Jam featuring Jimi Hendrix.

Let's be honest, it is that fear in the back of everyone's head
that this life might just be all there is that keeps everyone
kicking no matter how bad things are.

Observations on how the Nordic national model of capitalism is superior to what we've got here in America by Princeton professor of politics, Jonas Pontusson from a blog post by Jeff Madrick on The Huffington Post.

• Examining all the rich nations, he finds no evidence that inequality of incomes is associated with higher rates of economic growth or that nations with greater wage equality are a hindrance to growth.
• He finds no conclusive evidence that countries with large welfare states have grown more slowly than those with smaller ones.
• Despite policies that support wages, Denmark, Norway and Sweden have a higher proportion of the working-age population employed than do other industrialized nations.
• Despite higher taxes and government spending levels, four Nordic countries are ranked among the ten most competitive nations in the world by the World Economic Forum.
• The Nordic nations spend a very high percentage of GDP on education, and the quality of education is rather equal. This may well contribute to economic growth.
• Nordic nations also promote gender equality and polices that encourage women to work during child bearing. These may enable the nations to more fully utilize and develop their human capital.